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Category: Politics

How the oil and gas industry rigs the system to keep winning

How the oil and gas industry rigs the system to keep winning

Naomi Oreskes and Jeff Nesbit write: Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America’s two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this in part by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest…

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Why most Americans say the economy is in rough shape

Why most Americans say the economy is in rough shape

David Leonhardt writes: Offices remain eerily empty. Airlines have canceled thousands of flights. Subways and buses are running less often. Schools sometimes call off entire days of class. Consumers waste time waiting in store lines. Annual inflation has reached its highest level in three decades. Does this sound like a healthy economy to you? In recent weeks, economists and pundits have been asking why Americans feel grouchy about the economy when many indicators — like G.D.P. growth, stock prices and…

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Some say QAnon is losing its power. But I see the opposite

Some say QAnon is losing its power. But I see the opposite

Jitarth Jadeja told Anastasiia Carrier: I left QAnon back in 2019, but I don’t seem to be able to walk away. I talk about my experience a lot — to the Washington Post, CNN and Rolling Stone magazine among many others. I even apologized to Anderson Cooper on his show for having once thought that he ate babies. I’m one of the few former followers willing to go on the record with their story, which means I’m a source for…

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The secret history of the U.S. diplomatic failure in Afghanistan

The secret history of the U.S. diplomatic failure in Afghanistan

Steve Coll and Adam Entous write: Biden welcomed Ghani and his top aides to the Oval Office on the afternoon of June 25th. “We’re not walking away,” Biden told Ghani. He pulled from his shirt pocket a schedule card on which he’d written the number of American lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and showed it to Ghani. “I appreciate the American sacrifices,” Ghani said. Then he explained, “Our goal for the next six months is to stabilize…

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Enes Kanter Freedom: Why I became an American

Enes Kanter Freedom: Why I became an American

Enes Kanter Freedom writes: When I first arrived in the United States, I had to adjust to a new language, new norms, and new traditions. But I was perhaps most stunned by a simple comment a teammate made. He criticized President Barack Obama, which I feared could have landed him in prison. He smiled and said: “This isn’t Turkey, brother. You have the freedom to say whatever you want.” Americans might find the thought absurd, but the threat of prison…

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Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from county election boards

Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from county election boards

Reuters reports: Protesters filled the meeting room of the Spalding County Board of Elections in October, upset that the board had disallowed early voting on Sundays for the Nov. 2 municipal election. A year ago, Sunday voting had been instrumental in boosting turnout of Black voters. But this was an entirely different five-member board than had overseen the last election. The Democratic majority of three Black women was gone. So was the Black elections supervisor. Now a faction of three…

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How cryptocurrency revolutionized the white supremacist movement

How cryptocurrency revolutionized the white supremacist movement

Southern Poverty Law Center reports: White supremacists embraced cryptocurrency early in its development, and in some cases produced million-dollar profits through the technology, reshaping the racist right in radical ways, a Hatewatch analysis found. Hatewatch identified and compiled over 600 cryptocurrency addresses associated with white supremacists and other prominent far-right extremists for this essay and then probed their transaction histories through blockchain analysis software. What we found is striking: White supremacists such as Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, race pseudoscience pundit…

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Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 ‘agent provocateur’ is a huge Tucker fan

Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 ‘agent provocateur’ is a huge Tucker fan

HuffPost reports: Viewers of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show were presented this week with a very explosive charge: that a man in red face paint and a “Keep America Great” hat at the front lines of the U.S. Capitol attack is “clearly a law enforcement officer” and an “agent provocateur” who infiltrated the Jan. 6 mob to make Donald Trump’s supporters look bad. “Let’s put his picture back on the screen,” Carlson said Monday on his show as an image…

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A promise by big law firms to punish Republicans who voted to overthrow democracy, didn’t last long

A promise by big law firms to punish Republicans who voted to overthrow democracy, didn’t last long

Rolling Stone reports: In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of the country’s biggest law firms joined blue-chip corporations and other industry trade groups by halting all political donations and rethinking their giving strategy altogether. In a few cases, law firms vowed they wouldn’t give money to any of the 147 Republican officeholders who had voted against certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, riding the wave of good publicity by coming out strongly against the politicians who’d…

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The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

Rachel Gutman writes: Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a new variant…

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Birds Aren’t Real: ‘Fighting lunacy with lunacy’

Birds Aren’t Real: ‘Fighting lunacy with lunacy’

The New York Times reports: In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.” On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo. The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits…

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The world is unprepared for the next pandemic, report says

The world is unprepared for the next pandemic, report says

The New York Times reports: Nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, the world remains “dangerously unprepared” for the next major outbreak, according to a new report. The 2021 Global Health Security Index, released on Wednesday, ranks 195 countries according to their capacity to respond to epidemics and pandemics. The inaugural version of the index, published just months before the first Covid-19 cases were detected, concluded that no nation was ready for such a crisis. Overall, the world is not…

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Falsifying Russia’s history is a step toward more violence

Falsifying Russia’s history is a step toward more violence

Anne Applebaum writes: One night in October, a group of masked men burst into the Moscow offices of Memorial, the celebrated Russian historical society and civil-rights organization, and disrupted a screening of Mr. Jones, a film about the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. They shouted, gesticulated, and chanted “fascists” and “foreign agents” at the audience. Police were called, but they allowed the masked men to escape. Instead of chasing the intruders, officers barred the doors of the building and interrogated members…

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Russian state TV drops deranged love letter to its darling ‘Trumpushka’

Russian state TV drops deranged love letter to its darling ‘Trumpushka’

Julia Davis writes: The shadow of former President Donald J. Trump hovered over talks between the United States and Russia. On Tuesday, as the summit was about to begin, Skabeeva alleged that Trump’s approval ratings were much higher than Biden’s. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that the special channel used for the video exchange between the presidents was created during Trump’s tenure: “This is a secure channel. It was created according to decisions that were made by previous administrations….

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It’s getting dire in Afghanistan. Biden can’t walk away

It’s getting dire in Afghanistan. Biden can’t walk away

Saad Mohseni writes: In Afghanistan, young babies are now starving to death. Those parents who fear this fate are selling off their children to survive themselves. More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people do not have enough to eat and are “marching to starvation,” in the haunting words of the World Food Program. By next year, the United Nations warns, 95 percent of the country could be plunged into poverty. Two months after the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan is reeling…

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The prospect of democratic collapse is not remote

The prospect of democratic collapse is not remote

Barton Gellman writes: Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect. The prospect of this…

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