Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘The Clearing’
After the failure of Cop26, there’s only one last hope for our survival
George Monbiot writes: Now it’s a straight fight for survival. The Glasgow Climate Pact, for all its restrained and diplomatic language, looks like a suicide pact. After so many squandered years of denial, distraction and delay, it’s too late for incremental change. A fair chance of preventing more than 1.5C of heating means cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about 7% every year: faster than they fell in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. What we needed at the Cop26…
COP26 negotiators do little to cut emissions, but allow oil and gas executives to rest easy
Inside Climate News reports: As the debate continues over whether the global climate summit in Scotland will significantly move the needle on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, one thing is clear: The oil and gas industry still holds its grip on the world’s economic and political systems. Many climate advocates and vulnerable nations entered this year’s conference hoping to address an enduring failure of the Paris Agreement, which said nothing about fossil fuels. But a draft agreement released on Saturday included…
Fossil fuel companies owe reparations to countries they are destroying
Mark Hertsgaard writes: Mohammed Nasheed made global headlines in 2009 by convening the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting. As president of the Maldives, a nation of 1,138 low-lying islands south-west of India, Nasheed donned scuba gear and descended beneath the waves with 13 government ministers. The officials used waterproof pencils to sign a document urging the world to slash carbon dioxide emissions so the Maldives would not disappear beneath rising seas. “If the Maldives cannot be saved today, we do…
Steve Bannon knows exactly what he’s doing
David Frum writes: Does anyone still remember the Chicago Seven? They were a disparate group of radicals—some who knew each other, some who didn’t—who went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to spark trouble. Trouble did indeed erupt, although maybe not the exact trouble they had wanted. They were indicted and prosecuted. And then things went terribly wrong for the government. The prosecution thought it was running a trial, a legal proceeding governed by rules. The defendants decided…
GOP roars back to life in Trump-resistant Pennsylvania suburbs
Politico reports: The Philadelphia suburbs buried Donald Trump in 2020. One year later, after enabling Joe Biden to flip one of the nation’s most critical swing states, their lurch in the opposite direction is a cause for alarm among Democrats. Largely overlooked amid the party’s dismal suburban results in Virginia and New Jersey last week, Republicans regained ground in the vote-rich Philly suburbs after years of losses under Trump. The GOP flipped multiple row offices in populous Bucks County, carried…
Emerson didn’t practice the self-reliance he preached
Mark Greif writes: In the lead-up to the bicentennial of American independence in 1976, a graduate student sent a proposal to an editor at a trade publisher in New York. Would he consider taking on a book about the Minutemen and their “shot heard round the world,” set painstakingly in a history of Concord, Massachusetts, the town where the North Bridge fight broke out? In 1977, that book—which was also the student’s dissertation—won a Bancroft Prize, the highest honor in…
Why did modern humans take so long to settle in Europe?
Robin McKie writes: Modern humans made several failed attempts to settle in Europe before eventually taking over the continent. This is the stark conclusion of scientists who have been studying the course of Homo sapiens’s exodus from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Researchers have recently pinpointed sites in Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic where our ancestors’ remains have been dated as being between 40,000 to 50,000 years old. However, bone analyses have produced genetic profiles that have…
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Ready Wednesday’
Belarus’s ruler has used asylum seekers to destabilize the EU
Anne Applebaum writes: A small Kurdish boy is sitting on the ground in a damp Polish forest, a few miles from the eastern border with Belarus. The air is heavy with cold and fog. The boy is crying. Around the boy, sitting in a circle, are his parents, uncles, and cousins, all from the same village near Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan. There are 16 of them, among them seven children, including a four-month-old infant and an elderly woman who can…
Threats of violence have become commonplace among Republicans
The New York Times reports: At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question. In Ohio, the leading candidate in the Republican primary for Senate…
Christie’s calculus: Trump is ‘in the rearview mirror’
Politico reports: He doesn’t actually say the name Donald Trump when he lays out what’s wrong with the Republican Party. But it’s obvious who Chris Christie is talking about in recent speeches, interviews and in a new book that’s set for release next week. The former New Jersey governor has launched what amounts to a de facto exploratory bid for president, and it’s already put him on a collision course with his longtime political ally. While Christie’s criticism of the…
These maps show how Republicans are blatantly rigging elections
The Guardian reports: It’s the foundational concept of US democracy: voters choose the politicians they want to represent them. Yet the reality in 2021 is much more depressing. As politicians undertake the once-a-decade process of redrawing political districts across the country, they are essentially rigging the system by deciding among themselves exactly which voters in which areas they want to represent. It’s a process called gerrymandering that allows them to virtually choose their voters and guarantee their re-election. The United…
Covid cases are surging in Europe. America is in denial about what lies in store for it
Eric Topol writes: It’s deja vu, yet again. The pandemic first hit Europe in March 2020, and Americans were in denial, thinking it wouldn’t happen here. Then, later in the year, the Alpha variant wave took hold in the United Kingdom and the United States was unprepared. This recurred with Delta in the summer of 2021. Now, in the fall of 2021, Europe is the outlier continent on the rise with Covid, with approximately 350 cases per 100,000 people and…
How the U.S. hid an airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria
The New York Times reports: In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank. Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped…
Sikh ethics sees self-centeredness as the source of human evil
Keshav Singh writes: According to the Sikh worldview, the whole is prior to its parts. The level of reality at which we are all individuals is a less fundamental reality than the level at which we are all One. This is a different worldview from that of most philosophers in the Western canon, who have usually posited the individual as fundamental. Western philosophers tend to think of the parts (us) as prior to the whole (if any whole even exists)….