Music: Stuart McCallum — ‘La Cigale’
The bank that props up Trump’s shaky finances
David Enrich writes: One Day in early 2017, Mike Offit went to the Yale Club in Manhattan for a lunch hosted by a group called Business Executives for National Security. Offit, who has a craggy face and shoulder-length hair, had spent much of his career in banking, but that had ended nearly two decades earlier. Since then, he had puttered around the outskirts of finance, dabbled in journalism and even published a novel about a pair of murders at a…
Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse
Margaret Sullivan writes: Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Twitter. As it became obvious late Monday night that a technical glitch would dramatically hold up the results of the long-anticipated Iowa caucuses, social media exploded with dark ideas about what had happened. The hashtag “MayorCheat” was trending, a nasty shot at Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg promoted by Mike Cernovich, the rabble-rousing pro-Trump media personality, who tweeted out his conspiracy theory in the early hours Tuesday about connections between the…
The Democratic Party’s crisis of legitimacy may be just beginning
Jonathan Chait writes: We are living in an era of what political scientists describe as “strong partisanship and weak parties” — or, alternatively, as “negative partisanship.” The electorate is polarized into opposing camps, but their emotional impetus is driven by hostility to the other party rather than trust in their own. The Republican Party’s solution to this predicament has been to fashion itself as a cult of personality devoted to Donald Trump. The Democratic Party’s solution has been a series…
The only election safe for democracy is a low-tech election
Kevin Roose writes: After Monday’s Iowa caucus debacle, I’ve decided that Americans should vote by etching our preferred candidate’s name into a stone tablet with a hammer and chisel. Or maybe by dropping pebbles into a series of urns, as the ancient Greeks did. Or possibly just by voting the way we voted for much of the 20th century, on punch-card machines that spit out paper ballots to be hand-counted by election workers, with zero iPhones in sight. Basically, we…
Once again, why fossil fuels are on the wrong side of history
Jim Cramer writes: Tesla plus 80, Exxon Mobil minus a dollar and a half. On a huge up day, doesn’t that say it all? I’ve gotten a lot of blowback about my stand on fossil fuels. It’s been roundly criticized by many even as so many others are grateful for my new stand. The funny thing is that the stance itself is often poorly described by others so let’s unpack my comments. First, I have spent a great deal of…
Congress has lost its power over Trump
Kim Wehle writes: If the nation’s Founders didn’t want to constrain the president’s power, they wouldn’t have put impeachment in the Constitution. “They gave us the tools to do the job,” Representative Adam Schiff declared yesterday in his closing argument in Donald Trump’s trial. The president’s camp, meanwhile, insists that the legislative branch still has several levers of power against Trump. The defense attorney Patrick Philbin argued last week, “Congress has numerous political tools it can use in battles with…
How much does our language determine behavior?
David Shariatmadari writes: It’s easier to prove or disprove a hypothesis in a well-defined area of experience that can be readily compared across languages. That’s why a lot of scholars interested in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ideas focused their research on color. Because color is a physical property, determined by the wavelengths of light that are reflected or absorbed by an object, you might assume that all languages have just as many words for colors as there are colors in the…
Music: Stuart McCallum — ‘Inhale’
Climate models used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time
Bloomberg reports: There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations. Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as…
Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
The Associated Press reports: Two lawmakers in Sweden have nominated Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling, who are both members of Sweden’s Left Party, said Monday that Thunberg “has worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis” and “action for reducing our emissions and complying with the Paris Agreement is therefore also an act of making peace.” The 2015 landmark Paris climate deal asks both…
I can never forget the Bosnian genocide. But others are trying to rewrite history
Janine di Giovanni writes: I covered the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and I know what I saw. I traveled to besieged Sarajevo and to ethnically cleansed regions in eastern and central Bosnia where I interviewed victims of rape camps and bombing campaigns, mothers whose children were killed building snowmen, and the relatives of the elderly who were shot by snipers chopping wood to keep warm in the deep Balkan chill. It left a painful scar that I can…
With acquittal certain, Trump plots revenge on Bolton and impeachment enemies
Gabriel Sherman writes: With Senate Republicans on track to acquit Donald Trump on Wednesday, Washington is bracing for what an unshackled Trump does next. Republicans briefed on Trump’s thinking believe that the president is out for revenge against his adversaries. “It’s payback time,” a prominent Republican told me last week. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day,” another source said. Names that came up in my conversations with Republicans included Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Mitt Romney,…
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation rejects Trump ‘peace plan’
Al Jazeera reports: The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has said it rejects US President Donald Trump ‘s recently unveiled Middle East plan. The 57-member body, which held a summit on Monday to discuss the plan in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah, said in a statement that it “calls on all member states not to engage with this plan or to cooperate with the US administration in implementing it in any form”. Requested by the Palestinian leadership, the meeting of the body…
Jacob Rees-Mogg says it could take 50 years to reap the benefits of Brexit
HuffPost reports: A leading Brexiteer has suggested it could take 50 years to judge whether Brexit has been an economic success amid fears quitting the European Union will lead to a downturn. The influential Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who chairs the European Research Group of backbench Tories, was pressed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News about whether he would quit if the “economy does take a hit next year” when Brexit happens. Rees-Mogg insisted the full impact will not…
How trees find their form
By Rachel Ehrenberg, January 31, 2020 There’s a place in West Virginia where trees grow upside-down. Branches sprout from their trunks in the ordinary fashion, but then they do an about-face, curving toward the soil. On a chilly December day, the confused trees’ bare branches bob and weave in the breeze like slender snakes straining to touch the ground. “It’s really kind of mind-boggling,” says plant molecular biologist Chris Dardick, waving toward the bizarro plum trees. “They’re completely messed up.”…