Music: Theo Croker — ‘The Right Time’
Tree planting ‘has mind-blowing potential’ to tackle climate crisis
The Guardian reports: Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that…
Forget the tanks. Trump’s violation of the Lincoln Memorial is the real offense
Philip Kennicott writes: The Mall is a place of public reconciliation. Although originally conceived as a wide avenue in Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the city, the Mall and its surrounding parks were configured in the early 20th century as a grand symbol of national reunification, centered on a monument to Abraham Lincoln, the man who led the country through civil war. From the Lincoln Memorial, one looks down the long expanse of the Mall to the Capitol, at the…
Anchorage has never reached 90 degrees. That could change this week
The New York Times reports: In more than 100 years of Anchorage history, weather stations have never recorded a single 90-degree reading. If current forecasts hold, it could happen multiple times in the coming days. With the combined forces of climate change that has disrupted temperature trends around the state, a remarkable dearth of ice in the Bering Sea and weather patterns generating a general heat wave, Alaska is facing a Fourth of July unlike any before. Anchorage has canceled…
Justin Amash: Our politics is in a partisan death spiral. That’s why I’m leaving the GOP
Rep. Justin Amash writes: When my dad was 16, America welcomed him as a Palestinian refugee. It wasn’t easy moving to a new country, but it was the greatest blessing of his life. Throughout my childhood, my dad would remind my brothers and me of the challenges he faced before coming here and how fortunate we were to be Americans. In this country, he told us, everyone has an opportunity to succeed regardless of background. Growing up, I thought a…
Trump administration officials shelved proposed census change, then unshelved it, then admitted they had no idea what’s going on
Jay Michaelson writes: This is what it’s like working for a madman: Suppose you’re a lawyer at the Department of Justice. You’ve worked there for 16 years, serving Democrats and Republicans alike. And, in a contentious lawsuit about the census, you tell the judge that, following last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision, the government has abandoned its plans to change the census to ask about citizenship and is printing the forms without the question now. Everyone verifies this is true:…
Americans caught in poverty traps harbor unrealistic expectations
The New York Times reports: A widening income gap and sagging social mobility have left dents in the American dream. But the belief that anyone with enough gumption and grit can clamber to the top remains central to the nation’s self-image. And that could complicate Democratic efforts to frame the 2020 presidential election as a referendum on a broken economic system. Americans, who tend to link rewards to individual effort, routinely overestimate the ease of moving up the income ranks,…
NRA meltdown has Trump campaign sweating
Politico reports: The National Rifle Association aired an avalanche of TV ads and pushed its 5 million-plus members to the polls for Donald Trump in 2016, propelling him in the Rust Belt states that delivered him the presidency. Now, the gun rights group is in total meltdown — and senior Republicans and Trump 2020 officials are alarmed. In recent weeks, the NRA has seen everything from a failed coup attempt to the departure of its longtime political architect to embarrassing…
Music: Joan Chamorro Jazz Band with Scott Hamilton ft. Carla Motis — ‘Everything Happens to Me’
Attack on democracy: Tech giants use our data not only to predict our behavior but to change it
Shoshana Zuboff writes: In a BBC interview last week, Facebook’s vice-president, Nick Clegg, surprised viewers by calling for new “rules of the road” on privacy, data collection and other company practices that have attracted heavy criticism during the past year. “It’s not for private companies … to come up with those rules,” he insisted. “It is for democratic politicians in the democratic world to do so.” Facebook’s response would be to adopt a “mature role”, not “shunning” but “advocating” the…
Trump campaign Facebook ads use fake supporters
The Associated Press reports: A series of Facebook video ads for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign shows what appears to be a young woman strolling on a beach in Florida, a Hispanic man on a city street in Texas and a bearded hipster in a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., all making glowing, voice-over endorsements of the president. “I could not ask for a better president,” intones the voice during slow-motion footage of the smiling blonde called “Tracey from Florida.”…
Elizabeth Warren starts winning begrudging respect on Wall Street
Bloomberg reports: There’s a new whisper on Wall Street — maybe Elizabeth Warren isn’t so bad. The Democratic senator, who rose to national prominence by calling for tough regulation after the financial crisis, is winning respect from a small but growing circle of senior bankers and hedge fund managers. As the presidential candidate from Massachusetts takes aim at the “rich and powerful” with a slew of tax-raising policy proposals, some financial types who fit that description say she’s proven capable…
The Trump administration’s use of cruelty to deter immigration is a crime by any name
Adam Serwer writes: The horrors detailed in the press were hard to believe. Detainees described overcrowding so severe that “it was difficult to move in any direction without jostling and being jostled.” The water provided them was foul, “of a dark color, and an ordinary glass would collect a thick sediment.” The “authorities never removed any filth.” A detainee wrote that the “only shelter from the sun and rain and night dews, was what we could make by stretching over…
If Trump’s July 4 parade turns into a political rally it may be illegal
Dahlia Lithwick writes: President Donald Trump is throwing himself a parade this week, complete with a flyover by the Navy’s Blue Angels and Air Force One, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines standing by his side, and tanks that the District of Columbia emphatically does not want, although recent reporting suggests they will be parked and stationary, in an attempt to not destroy the roadways, as was originally planned. While historically, any Fourth of July celebration…
U.S. ambassador swings a sledgehammer to support Israeli effort to marginalize Palestinians in East Jerusalem
The New York Times reports: For years, Palestinians in the crowded East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan have complained that the walls of their homes were settling and cracking, disturbed by an underground archaeological dig led by a right-wing Jewish settler group. On Sunday, when that dig was officially unveiled, not with a ribbon-cutting but with the ceremonial smashing of a brick wall, it was President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, who swung the first sledgehammer. The reverberations were…
Why did octopuses become so smart?
Ed Yong writes: A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills. Once released, it moves to protect itself—it grabs discarded seashells and swiftly arranges them into a defensive dome. Thanks to acts like these, cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—have become renowned for…