Music: Tom Misch — ‘Sunshine’
Humanity consumes Earth’s resources in ever greater destructive volumes
The Guardian reports: Humanity is devouring our planet’s resources in increasingly destructive volumes, according to a new study that reveals we have consumed a year’s worth of carbon, food, water, fibre, land and timber in a record 212 days. As a result, the Earth Overshoot Day – which marks the point at which consumption exceeds the capacity of nature to regenerate – has moved forward two days to 1 August, the earliest date ever recorded. To maintain our current appetite…
Trump to seek repeal of California’s smog-fighting power
Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration will seek to revoke California’s authority to regulate automobile greenhouse gas emissions — including its mandate for electric-car sales — in a proposed revision of Obama-era standards, according to three people familiar with the plan. The proposal, expected to be released this week, amounts to a frontal assault on one of former President Barack Obama’s signature regulatory programs to curb emissions that contribute to climate change. It also sets up a high-stakes battle over California’s…
The political backlash that grew out of Eastern Europe’s imitation of the West
Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes write: In Mary Shelley’s 1818 horror story Frankenstein, an inventor driven by Promethean ambition creates a monster by assembling body parts drawn from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house” and even “the unhallowed damps of the grave” into a humanoid creature. Yet the experimenter, Victor Frankenstein, soon comes to regret his overambitious attempt to construct a facsimile of his own species. The monster, bitterly envious of its creator’s happiness and feeling doomed to loneliness and…
Music: Tom Misch — ‘It Runs Through Me / I Wish / Movie’
A theory of reality as more than the sum of its parts
Natalie Wolchover writes: In his 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet to illustrate what makes conscious beings so different from the particles that make them up. “Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they,” James wrote. “But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite…
Stephen Wolfram: Is mathematics invented or discovered?
George Soros’s embattled cause of an open society
Michael Steinberger writes: On a clammy Tuesday morning in Paris at the end of May, George Soros, the world’s second-most-vilified New York billionaire (but worth many billions more than the other one), addressed the European Council on Foreign Relations, an organization he helped found a decade ago. Described by the woman who introduced him as a “European at heart,” the Hungarian-born Soros, who made his fortune running a hedge fund and is now a full-time philanthropist, political activist and freelance…
Putin is not our friend, no matter what Trump says
David J Kramer writes: Russian prosecutors last week released a list of Americans they want to question in connection with their bogus criminal case against Hermitage Capital founder William Browder. I was one of a number of current and former U.S. officials on that list, which has become known as “Putin’s enemies list.” Browder, American born but a British citizen, used to be the largest portfolio investor in Russia until he crossed wires with the Kremlin. His visa was revoked…
Koch brothers back grassroots effort to support immigration
Time reports: As the son of Mexican migrant workers and a veteran of the George W. Bush Administration, Daniel Garza has been frustrated by President Donald Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration. To push back on it, he’s revving up a grassroots effort to lobby Congress, backed by the billion brothers Charles and David Koch. As head of the conservative mega-donors’ LIBRE Initiative aimed at Hispanics, Garza will be organizing five public rallies in the next week aimed at shaking loose…
The peculiar numbers that could underlie the laws of nature
Natalie Wolchover writes: In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, named Cohl Furey rented a car and drove six hours south to Pennsylvania State University, eager to talk to a physics professor there named Murat Günaydin. Furey had figured out how to build on a finding of Günaydin’s from 40 years earlier — a largely forgotten result that supported a powerful suspicion about fundamental physics and its relationship to pure math. The suspicion, harbored by…
Music: Mangal, Darehan & Shayan — ‘Naseebaya’
Inside Bannon’s plan to hijack Europe for the far-right
The Daily Beast reports: Steve Bannon plans to go toe-to-toe with George Soros and spark a right-wing revolution in Europe. Trump’s former White House chief advisor told The Daily Beast that he is setting up a foundation in Europe called The Movement which he hopes will lead a right-wing populist revolt across the continent starting with the European Parliament elections next spring. The non-profit will be a central source of polling, advice on messaging, data targeting, and think-tank research for…
In private, Trump vents frustration over lack of progress on North Korea
The Washington Post reports: When he emerged from his summit with Kim Jong Un last month, President Trump triumphantly declared that North Korea no longer posed a nuclear threat and that one of the world’s most intractable geopolitical crises had been “largely solved.” But in the days and weeks since then, U.S. negotiators have faced stiff resistance from a North Korean team practiced in the art of delay and obfuscation. Diplomats say the North Koreans have canceled follow-up meetings, demanded…
If this is not treason, then what is it?
Daniel W. Drezner writes: Last year, I speculated that Trump would engage in “omnibalancing”: “My fear is that the Trump White House will choose to tighten its relationship with foreign adversaries because they are viewed as less immediately threatening than either Congress or the special prosecutor.” Twelve months later, Congress has become very docile, but the special prosecutor has not. Equally important, many Trump supporters have made the same call: better to side with the Russians than with fellow Americans…
The Sierra Club declared war on Scott Pruitt — and won
Aaron Mak reports: Of Scott Pruitt’s many bad weeks of press, the first week of June may have been his worst. Pruitt had been under scrutiny since his appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency for his close ties to the industries he was supposed to regulate. He had done little to quiet his skeptics. For the past few months, news stories had detailed his questionable interactions with energy lobbyists and exorbitant spending on air travel and security. By…