Music: Lars Danielsson with Grégory Privat, John Parricelli & Magnus Öström — ‘Dawn Dreamer’
Sen. Warren: The Supreme Court is ‘actively undermining’ democracy
The Hill reports: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Sunday that the Supreme Court is “actively undermining” democracy in the U.S. Warren said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that she and her colleagues are working to put together reform measures for the Supreme Court, including looking at term limits and adding more justices to the bench. She echoed President Biden’s comments calling for reforms to the Supreme Court in his last six months of office. “Here’s a man who has…
Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance
The Washington Post reports: In the weeks before former president Donald Trump announced his vice-presidential pick, some of tech’s biggest names launched a quiet campaign to push for one of their own: Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The former president fielded repeated calls from tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Vance’s former employer and mentor, imploring him to add the one-time Silicon Valley investor to the ticket, according to three people familiar with…
Will Elon Musk ban himself from X after he clearly violated policy on deepfakes?
Mashable reports: Amid a surge of political misinformation across the internet, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has taken to his own platform to share a manipulated video of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign video. The Tesla founder and billionaire reposted the video Friday afternoon featuring an AI voice of Vice President Harris calling herself the “ultimate diversity hire.” The video, a “parody” created by right-wing YouTuber Mr. Reagan, is a re-edited version of Harris’ “We Choose Freedom” campaign video. In…
Trump campaign and candidate divided on promotion of unity
The Washington Post reports: Democratic lawmakers and Vice President Harris’s campaign joined a chorus of online critics in calling out remarks Donald Trump aimed at a Christian audience on Friday, arguing that the former president and current Republican presidential nominee had implied he would end elections in the United States if he won a second term. At the conclusion of his speech at the Believers Summit in West Palm Beach, Fla., Trump said, “Christians, get out and vote, just this…
How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza
Dan Owen writes: The scale of horror that Israel has inflicted upon Gaza over the last nine months is almost impossible to comprehend. The Israeli army’s decision from the start of the war to significantly expand its authorization for bombing non-military targets and causing harm to civilians has resulted in the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and has left the Gaza Strip unrecognizable. The surviving population faces mass hunger and displacement as a result of intentional Israeli policies, which are in violation of international laws…
Food as you know it is about to change
David Wallace-Wells writes: From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay. But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system…
How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths
BBC News reports: Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal…
Music: Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Edgar Meyer ft. Rakesh Chaurasia — ‘As We Speak’
Kamala Harris: We can’t look away from Palestinian suffering
The Guardian reports: Progressive US representative Pramila Jayapal has said Kamala Harris is “listening” to young people’s concerns about Israel’s war in Gaza as the newly elevated presumptive Democratic nominee rides an “undeniable” wave of momentum. In the days since Joe Biden ended his presidential re-election campaign and endorsed the vice-president for November’s race against Republican nominee Donald Trump, gen Z supporters have flooded social media with coconut tree video cuts and “brat summer” memes – a reflection of…
How Trump and Vance went from a ‘threat to democracy’ to ‘weird’
Politico reports: In the days since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the campaign against former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, Democrats are leaning into a new attack line against the Republican ticket: that they’re just really weird. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz , a potential Harris running mate who’s been using this description for months, said it during his first viral TV appearance of the week, and then in others. The Democratic Governors Association, which…
Kamala Harris has brought joy to politics
Paul Waldman writes: “I call her laughing Kamala,” Donald Trump recently said about his new opponent. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh — she’s crazy, she’s nuts.” He’s right about one thing: You can indeed tell a lot by a laugh. And you can also tell a lot by how people react to a laugh. Perhaps Trump will choose “Laughing Kamala” as his go-to nickname for Vice President Harris,…
Harris’ Zoom-fueled campaign triggers a dormant Democratic base
Politico reports: When a group of Black women political organizers assembled for a regular Zoom call on Sunday, they suddenly had a new mission. A mere hours earlier, President Joe Biden had ended his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. Interest in the call had skyrocketed, and some 40,000 attendees logged on. The Win With Black Women collective, nervous that Harris would be facing competition, ferociously pushed back on the idea of an open primary…
Why did progressive Democrats support Joe Biden?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes: After weeks of debate about the viability of President Joe Biden’s run for reëlection, the mounting pressure for him to leave the race finally overwhelmed his own efforts to stay. In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s historic decision to end his campaign, the enthusiasm that coalesced around Vice-President Kamala Harris as his replacement seemed to be as much a reflection of relief about Biden as it was excitement about Harris herself. Since Biden’s revealing performance in the…
How the U.S. became the world’s biggest fossil fuel producing state
The Guardian reports: To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana. Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas (or LNG) plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo…
Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. So have these students’ dreams
Sondos Fayoumi writes: Around 88,000 higher education students in Gaza were supposed to sit for their exams last month. Many looked forward to completing their final assessments and celebrating their hard-earned graduation. Thanks to Israel’s genocidal war, though, nobody wore their caps and gowns. Instead, young people are enduring devastation of unparalleled magnitude. Every university in Gaza has been obliterated. Libraries have been burned to the ground. And the aspirations of Palestinian graduates lie in tatters. In addition to the…