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Category: History/Archeology

People were already wrecking the climate 140 years ago — we just lacked the know-how to spot it

People were already wrecking the climate 140 years ago — we just lacked the know-how to spot it

Nature reports: How early in Earth’s history would scientists have been able to detect human-caused climate change if they’d had the proper technology? That’s the subject of a thought experiment published by researchers today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. he answer: “As early as 1885,” says study co-author Benjamin Santer, an independent climate scientist based in Los Angeles, California. That’s when researchers could have “confidently disentangled” a human-caused signal of climate change from natural variations, or noise,…

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‘Who controls the present controls the past’: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ explains about the twisting of history to control the public

‘Who controls the present controls the past’: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ explains about the twisting of history to control the public

George Orwell’s ‘1984’ has some lessons for 2025. NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images By Laura Beers, American University When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign. It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power. It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past. In his second…

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Will Netanyahu drag the U.S. directly into his war against Iran?

Will Netanyahu drag the U.S. directly into his war against Iran?

David Hearst writes: When a delegation from Hamas arrived in Moscow after the 7 October attacks, Putin passed a message of thanks for this “birthday gift”, my sources tell me. Putin was born on the same day in 1952. Would Russia allow Israel, supplied by the US, to topple Iran after the loss of Bashar al-Assad in Syria? It’s a question that Netanyahu and Trump should consider. Trump had a 50-minute talk with Putin over the weekend. Netanyahu should also…

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The man who got the Diggers digging

The man who got the Diggers digging

Rowan Wilson writes: In April 1649, the earth of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disturbed. A group of men and women calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’, known to history as the ‘Diggers’, had taken to the ‘wast[e] ground’ in the parish of Walton to protest enclosure, the process by which common land was parcelled into units of private property, stripping commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage. The land was bad – ‘nothing but a bare…

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America is on the brink of becoming a failed democracy

America is on the brink of becoming a failed democracy

Jonathan Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Britain, writes: As an observer of democracies and a constitutional lawyer in Britain, I have watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies. They may not yet be like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, Turkey or Russia. But these countries show what can happen when a democracy dies with a whimper, not with a bang. There may not be tanks on the lawns or mobs in the…

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Autocrats don’t act like Hitler or Stalin anymore − instead of governing with violence, they use manipulation

Autocrats don’t act like Hitler or Stalin anymore − instead of governing with violence, they use manipulation

Autocrats today tend to govern by manipulation of the public, among other tactics, rather than solely using violence. Nanzeeba Ibnat/iStock/Getty Images Plus By Daniel Treisman, University of California, Los Angeles President Donald Trump’s critics often accuse him of harboring authoritarian ambitions. Journalists and scholars have drawn parallels between his leadership style and that of strongmen abroad. Some Democrats warn that the U.S. is sliding toward autocracy – a system in which one leader holds unchecked power. Others counter that labeling…

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J. D. Vance warns the federal courts to get in line

J. D. Vance warns the federal courts to get in line

Ruth Marcus writes: Vice-President J. D. Vance offered some unsolicited advice to Chief Justice John Roberts the other day: the federal courts need to be more deferential to Presidential authority, and the Supreme Court must do a better job of keeping lower-court judges in line. Vance was speaking to the New York Times’ Ross Douthat about the Trump Administration’s nearly unbroken string of court losses in immigration-related cases. These setbacks, in Vance’s telling, represent an undemocratic project by some federal…

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Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny

In a commencement address given to graduates from U. Cal. Berkeley’s School of Education earlier this week, Robert Reich said: Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. America’s founders knew this. They saw how easily emperors and kings could mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the new nation required a public…

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How Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream

How Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream

Natasha Roth-Rowland writes: At the end of January, Israel’s ambassador to the United States arrived in Washington to take up his new role. In some ways, Yechiel Leiter’s resume is typical for someone appointed to perhaps the most prestigious diplomatic posting on offer: A U.S.-born immigrant to Israel, Leiter served in numerous senior government roles, including as chief of staff to then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, before working as a senior fellow at the right-wing Kohelet Policy Forum, and then moving…

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Kremlin cites past wars as it threatens long conflict in Ukraine

Kremlin cites past wars as it threatens long conflict in Ukraine

Pjotr Sauer writes: Peter the Great’s long war against Sweden – a grinding conflict that claimed countless Russian lives – is rarely held up as a model for modern diplomacy. Yet behind closed doors on Friday, during the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in three years, Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, cited it as an explicit warning: Moscow was prepared to fight for as long as it took. Just like when Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the…

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Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

J. Michael Luttig writes: The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law,…

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Trump seems to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past

Trump seems to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past

Derek Thompson writes: China may well come to dominate the next century—because President Donald Trump is taking a page from the most famous Chinese leader of the previous one. The United States remains the world’s preeminent soft power. It’s a financial and cultural juggernaut, whose entertainment and celebrities bestride the planet. But as an industrial power, the U.S. is not so much at risk of falling behind as it is objectively behind already. A recent essay in the journal Foreign…

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Are we heading for World War III – or has it already started?

Are we heading for World War III – or has it already started?

Patrick Wintour writes: In a week in which former allies in a redividing globe separately commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war, the sense of a runaway descent towards a third world war draws ever closer. The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness to resort to unbridled state-sponsored violence and the irrelevance of the institutions of the rules-based order have all been on brutal display this week. From Kashmir to…

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Habeas corpus: A thousand-year-old legal principle for defending rights that’s under the Trump administration

Habeas corpus: A thousand-year-old legal principle for defending rights that’s under the Trump administration

Two Latin words – ‘habeas corpus’ – protect any person, whether citizen or not, from being illegally confined. deepblue4you, iStock / Getty Images Plus By Andrea Seielstad, University of Dayton In some parts of the world, a person may be secreted away or imprisoned by the government without any advanced notification of wrongdoing or chance to make a defense. This has not been lawful in the United States from its very inception, or in many other countries where the rule…

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Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, the far right and ‘End Times fascism’

Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, the far right and ‘End Times fascism’

  ‘The rise of end times fascism‘ by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor was published in The Guardian on April 13. The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med…

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