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Michael Bloomberg’s ego is an agent of socialist change

Michael Bloomberg’s ego is an agent of socialist change

Eric Levitz writes: These are anxious days for Democrats who favor gated communities and unfettered trade. Americans who believe in a woman’s right to choose and private equity’s right to loot, now need a Klonopin with their morning news. Elizabeth Warren — the slayer of Summers, stumper of Stumpf, and all around bane of (finance) capital — boasts comfortable leads in Iowa and New Hampshire. In at least one of those states, a Trotskyist fellow traveler is her closest competitor….

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An uprising in Iraq is the broadest in decades. It’s posing an alarming threat to Baghdad and Tehran

An uprising in Iraq is the broadest in decades. It’s posing an alarming threat to Baghdad and Tehran

The Washington Post reports: From Baghdad to the Shiite Muslim shrine city of Karbala and farther south, Iraqis are pushing for a revolution. They fill central squares to sing and dance from daybreak, and face down riot police when night falls. Iraq’s streets are no stranger to power struggles. They’ve been a stage for sectarian conflict and for the Islamic State’s emergence. But the crowds are different this time, and so is the threat now posed by the largest grass-roots…

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A lack of realism among foreign policy realists in their advocacy of restraint

A lack of realism among foreign policy realists in their advocacy of restraint

Peter D. Feaver and Will Inboden write: The news of the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during a raid by U.S. special operations forces on Oct. 27 capped a dizzying three weeks in the Trump administration’s Syria policy. The turmoil began on Oct. 6, with President Donald Trump’s peremptory decision to pull back about 100 U.S. soldiers from their positions embedded with Kurdish forces in northern Syria. A few days later, he ordered the withdrawal from the…

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We learn more by trusting than by not trusting

We learn more by trusting than by not trusting

By Hugo Mercier We all know people who have suffered by trusting too much: scammed customers, jilted lovers, shunned friends. Indeed, most of us have been burned by misplaced trust. These personal and vicarious experiences lead us to believe that people are too trusting, often verging on gullibility. In fact, we don’t trust enough. Take data about trust in the United States (the same would be true in most wealthy democratic countries at least). Interpersonal trust, a measure of whether…

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Republicans have to choose between Trump and democracy

Republicans have to choose between Trump and democracy

Fred Kaplan writes: The House impeachment probe has reached a point where continuing to defend President Donald Trump requires a prodigious capacity for denial or self-delusion. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump’s denialist in chief, summed up the situation on Tuesday when asked about Gordon Sondland’s revision to his testimony before the committees three weeks earlier. Originally, the hotel tycoon–turned–ambassador couldn’t remember much about a quid pro quo. But now that his memory had been refreshed by other witnesses’ depositions (which may…

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Republican subservience to Trump is based in fear, says former defense secretary, William Cohen

Republican subservience to Trump is based in fear, says former defense secretary, William Cohen

Jennifer Rubin writes: “I think it’s either fear or complicity.” That is how former Maine Republican senator and secretary of defense William S. Cohen tries to explain Republicans’ subservience to President Trump and willful disregard for replete evidence of corruption. “It’s predominantly fear. He will target them,” Cohen tells me in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. He points to Trump’s public declaration that four congresswomen of color should “fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”…

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State Department officials warned Trump not to revoke protections for immigrants

State Department officials warned Trump not to revoke protections for immigrants

Vox reports: Senior State Department officials and career diplomats repeatedly warned the Trump administration that taking away legal protections for immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti would put national security, foreign relations, and the immigrants’ American-born children at risk, according to internal State Department documents. But Trump did it anyway — and concerns about the 2020 election appear to have helped determine the timeline for requiring immigrants to leave, according to the documents, which will be released in a…

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Paris accord pledges are ‘totally insufficient’ to meet critical climate targets, scientists warn

Paris accord pledges are ‘totally insufficient’ to meet critical climate targets, scientists warn

Inside Climate News reports: While nearly all of the world’s countries have pledged to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, the reductions they’re planning in the short term—over the next 10 years—aren’t nearly enough, leading scientists warn in a new report. Nearly two-thirds of the pledges under the Paris climate agreement are “totally insufficient” to meet critical climate targets, the report by scientists who have been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found. To keep global warming under…

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A judge said police can search the DNA of one million Americans without their consent. What’s next?

A judge said police can search the DNA of one million Americans without their consent. What’s next?

Science reports: For the first time, a state judge has forced a public genealogy site, GEDmatch, to allow police to search its entire database of DNA profiles. A detective wanted to find distant relatives of a serial rapist in hopes that their family trees could help him home in on a suspect—even though most of the 1.3 million people who have shared their DNA data with the site haven’t agreed to such a search. The search warrant, reported this week…

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Our fate turns on retiring our dualist view of nature

Our fate turns on retiring our dualist view of nature

Philip Goff writes: Since 1980, the temperature of the planet has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius, resulting in unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the acidification of oceans. In 2015, 175 million more people were exposed to heat waves compared with the average for 1986 to 2008, and the number of weather-related disasters from 2007 to 2016 was up by 46 percent compared with the average from 1990 to 1999. This is nothing in comparison to the horrors…

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The elephant-human relationship dates back into prehistory

The elephant-human relationship dates back into prehistory

Tim Flannery writes: In January 1962, on my sixth birthday, I was taken to Melbourne Zoo, where I rode an elephant. We children climbed a scaffold and perched on rough wooden benches atop the elephant’s back, where my fingers furtively reached for a feel of its wrinkled skin. A few months later, elephant rides were discontinued, for safety reasons, at most zoos in Australia, Europe, and the US. I was dimly aware of the danger involved in mounting such an…

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What we could learn from our cave-dwelling ancestors

What we could learn from our cave-dwelling ancestors

Barbara Ehrenreich writes: In 1940, four teenage boys stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic Age. As the story goes, and there are many versions of it, they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog accompanying them suddenly disappeared. A quick search revealed that their animal companion had fallen into a hole in the ground, so—in the spirit of Tintin, with whom they were probably familiar—the boys made the…

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We are running out of unpolluted air

We are running out of unpolluted air

The Atlantic reports: Officials have implored the people of New Delhi to stay inside, indefinitely. Five million children in India’s capital have been handed face masks. Everyone is to keep windows closed. Contrary to the most fundamental medical advice, the city’s chief minister urged residents this week to “avoid outdoor physical activities.” News images seem cut from an apocalyptic outbreak film. One of India’s holiest rivers is covered in toxic foam that looks like white cotton candy. Midday visibility is…

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Brazil ignores dire climate impact in holding oil auction

Brazil ignores dire climate impact in holding oil auction

Reuters reports: Brazil is overlooking potentially dire climate change consequences by moving ahead with its biggest auction ever of oil exploration blocs that could release millions of tonnes of carbon emissions, according to environmental activists. The country’s oil regulator ANP estimates that the blocs up for sale on Wednesday in the offshore pre-salt oil area could contain up to 15 billion barrels of oil. Consuming that oil would release up to 8.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the standard…

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