Music: João Gilberto — ‘Eu Vim da Bahia’
João Gilberto 1931-2019
In Trump’s American story, immigrants are the enemy
Masha Gessen writes: Last year, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services dropped the phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement. That phrase, like most foundational myths and more than some, obscures much of the country’s history: the first immigrants would more accurately be described as settler colonialists, who brought Africans here as slaves. But this was not why the Trump Administration deleted the phrase. Trump has retired the myth of America as a nation of immigrants because he…
Tim Wu explains why Facebook should be broken up
Nicholas Thompson interviewed Tim Wu: Nicholas Thompson: What I’m going to do here is present the arguments that Mark Zuckerberg gave on antitrust yesterday in the fairest way I can, and then, Tim, I want you to respond. So it’ll be a bit like Tim being on stage yesterday. Mark made two arguments, and the company often makes a third. Number one, if you break the large platforms into smaller companies, they will not compete on the stuff you want….
Google’s onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare
Politico reports: When Google needed government sign-off on a 2007 acquisition that would tighten its grip on the digital advertising market, the company turned to antitrust attorney and lobbyist Makan Delrahim to help get the job done. Now, as the Justice Department’s top antitrust enforcer, Delrahim could be the one to undo it all. As U.S. competition enforcers cast a more critical eye on the nation’s biggest technology companies, Delrahim would play the leading role in any DOJ lawsuit accusing…
Amazon asserts its contribution to climate change is a trade secret
The Register reports: Amazon has refused to publish data about the energy consumption and carbon emissions of its business in Australia, including vast server farms, claiming its contribution to climate change is a trade secret. The company has asked the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) – the country’s agency tasked with regulating carbon emissions and encouraging clean energy use – to keep its data from publication, arguing that this involves proprietary information on reducing energy use. Amazon’s cloudy offspring AWS landed…
Greta Thunberg welcomes OPEC chief’s ‘greatest threat’ label
The Guardian reports: Greta Thunberg and other climate activists have said it is a badge of honour that the head of the world’s most powerful oil cartel believes their campaign may be the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry. The criticism of striking students by the trillion-dollar Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) highlights the growing reputational concerns of oil companies as public protests intensify along with extreme weather. Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of Opec, said there…
How TV fuels ignorance and serves populists
Yascha Mounk writes: Until the late 1970s, Italian television was an earnest affair. The only national channels were run by RAI, the state broadcaster. On average, RAI only broadcast for about 10 hours a day. Nearly two-thirds of its content consisted of serious news or educational programming. Even advertising had to meet high moral standards; ads for pet food, for example, were not allowed to show moving images of cats or dogs. Apparently the bosses at RAI thought it was…
Searching for hope in hell
Henry Freedland writes: As climate change extremified wildfires raging through the American West and my native California, and as geoscientists realized the world’s oceans were retaining 60 percent more heat each year than previously thought, I flashed to Hesiod’s view of Tartarus: The fertile earth Being burned, roared out, the voiceless forest cried And crackled with the fire; the whole earth boiled And ocean’s streams, and the unfruitful sea. As lies intensified and accrued, as doublespeak and toxic truthlessness were…
Music: Theo Croker — ‘Wide Open’
Evangelical Christians, convinced Trump is God’s man, would rather see America destroyed than see him fall
Peter Wehner writes: The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing developments of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades—and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency—insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of…
Justice Dept struggles to contrive new rationale for census citizenship question as Trump may have just undercut their effort
The New York Times reports: Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge on Friday that they would press ahead in their efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, but indicated they did not know yet what kind of rationale they would put forward. The assertion capped a chaotic week in which administration officials first promised to abide by a Supreme Court order that effectively blocked the question from next year’s head count, then reversed themselves after President…
Where John Roberts is taking the Supreme Court
Garrett Epps writes: Last year’s Supreme Court term ended with a vivid display of willed gullibility by Chief Justice John Roberts. In Hawaii v. Trump, the “travel ban” case, Roberts announced he would pay no attention to that Islamophobia behind the curtain and instead treat the ban as a “facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.” This year’s term ended with the same man stating in Department of Commerce v. New York, the census case, that…
Valuing the work of women of color
Elizabeth Warren writes: Our society and our economy demand so much of women — but they place a particular burden on Black, Latina, Native American, Asian, and other women of color. More than 70% of Black mothers and more than 40% of Latina mothers are their families’ sole breadwinners — compared to less than a quarter of white mothers. Black women participate in the labor force at higher rates than white women, and Latinas’ share of the labor force has…
An entrenched and inept elite has led Britain into chaos
Gary Younge writes: Last week Boris Johnson delivered a speech to a Royal Horticultural Society audience in Wisley, Surrey, before heading to the affluent village of Oxshott to buy some fennel and tarragon sausages and have a cup of tea in the Munch and Wiggles cafe. In a series of interviews later that day, he was unwilling to reveal the provenance of the staged photograph of him and his partner, Carrie Symonds. He was, however, able to insist that Britain…
Venezuela forces killed thousands, then covered it up, UN says
The New York Times reports: Venezuelan special forces have carried out thousands of extrajudicial killings in the past 18 months and then manipulated crime scenes to make it look as if the victims had been resisting arrest, the United Nations said on Thursday in a report detailing wide-ranging government abuses targeting political opponents. Special Action Forces described by witnesses as “death squads” killed 5,287 people in 2018 and another 1,569 by mid-May of this year, in what are officially termed…
How our brain sculpts experience in line with our expectations
Daniel Yon writes: The Book of Days (1864) by the Scottish author Robert Chambers reports a curious legal case: in 1457 in the town of Lavegny, a sow and her piglets were charged and tried for the murder of a partially eaten small child. After much deliberation, the court condemned the sow to death for her part in the act, but acquitted the naive piglets who were too young to appreciate the gravity of their crimes. Subjecting a pig to…