Imagination: It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do

Imagination: It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do

Philip Ball writes: ‘To me,’ wrote William Blake in 1799, ‘this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.’ The imagination, he later added, ‘is not a state: it is the human existence itself.’ Blake, a painter as well as a poet, created images that acquire their power not only from a certain naive artistic technique, but because they are striving to transcend it – to convey a vision of the world beyond superficial appearances, which only imagination…

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Biden says Russia, China ‘didn’t show up’ on climate change commitments

Biden says Russia, China ‘didn’t show up’ on climate change commitments

Politico reports: U.S. President Joe Biden on Sunday blamed Russia and China for any disappointment over the level of commitment by G20 leaders to fight climate change. “With regard to the disappointment, the disappointment relates to the fact that … not only Russia but China basically didn’t show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change,” Biden said at his news conference at the end of the two-day leaders’ summit in Rome. “And there’s a reason why…

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Democracy dies in silence

Democracy dies in silence

Adam Serwer writes: The state of Florida is silencing those opposing its efforts to disenfranchise its own citizens. A lawsuit filed by a coalition of civil-rights groups contends that Florida’s Republican-controlled government has repeatedly attempted to restrict the franchise, including curtailing third-party registration campaigns, cutting early voting, and imposing an onerous poll tax on formerly incarcerated Floridians after the state voted overwhelmingly to restore their rights. The more recent restrictions involve a series of “measures that prohibit or restrict access…

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CIA abuse was ‘closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history,’ says military jury

CIA abuse was ‘closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history,’ says military jury

The New York Times reports: Seven senior U.S. military officers who sentenced a terrorist to 26 years in prison last week after hearing graphic descriptions of his torture by the C.I.A. wrote a letter calling his treatment “a stain on the moral fiber of America.” The rebuke of the U.S. government’s treatment of Majid Khan, a suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Qaeda courier, was contained in a two-page handwritten letter urging the senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court…

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Why many police traffic stops turn deadly

Why many police traffic stops turn deadly

The New York Times reports: “Open the door now, you are going to get shot!” an officer in Rock Falls, Ill., shouted at Nathaniel Edwards after a car chase. “Hands out the window now or you will be shot!” yelled a patrolman in Bakersfield, Calif., as Marvin Urbina wrestled with inflated airbags after a pursuit ended in a crash. “I am going to shoot you — what part of that don’t you understand?” threatened an officer in Little Rock, Ark.,…

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How American racism inspired Hitler

How American racism inspired Hitler

In 2018, Alex Ross wrote: Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger,…

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Vaccine confers better protection than natural immunity, CDC finds

Vaccine confers better protection than natural immunity, CDC finds

Yahoo News reports: Earlier this month, the conservative radio host Dennis Prager announced he had contracted the coronavirus. This was, as far as he was concerned, good news. The unvaccinated Prager had hoped to protect himself against COVID-19 the old-fashioned way: by getting sick. “It is infinitely preferable to have natural immunity than vaccine immunity,” Prager said, echoing an anti-vaccine argument echoed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other pro-Trump figures who have turned coronavirus vaccination into a culture war…

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Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

George Monbiot writes: There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter. When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise…

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Big oil CEOs just lied before Congress. It’s time they’re held accountable

Big oil CEOs just lied before Congress. It’s time they’re held accountable

Jamie Henn writes: For the first time ever, the executives from four major oil companies and two of the industry’s most powerful front groups testified before Congress about their decades-long effort to spread climate disinformation and block legislation that would reduce US dependence on fossil fuels. Republicans vehemently opposed the premise of Thursday’s House oversight hearing. Yet within the first round of GOP questioning, led by one of the industry’s staunchest defenders, ranking committee member James Comer of Kentucky, the…

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Trump lawyer, John Eastman, blamed Pence for violence as rioters stormed Capitol

Trump lawyer, John Eastman, blamed Pence for violence as rioters stormed Capitol

The New York Times reports: As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” a lawyer who plotted with President Donald J. Trump and his allies to try to overturn the 2020 election sent a hostile message to the vice president’s top lawyer, blaming Mr. Pence for the violence. The email, reported by The Washington Post and confirmed by a person briefed on its contents, shows the extent to which Mr. Trump and his advisers sought to pressure…

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Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Jaron Lanier writes: [W]hat we need to talk about is the dominant business model. This model spews out horrible incentives to make people meaner and crazier. Incentives run the world more than laws, regulations, critiques or the ideas of researchers. The current incentives are to “engage” people as much as possible, which means triggering the “lizard brain” and fight-or-flight responses. People have always been a little paranoid, xenophobic, racist, neurotically vain, irritable, selfish and afraid. And yet putting people under…

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Trump’s real-estate empire pays the price for poisonous politics

Trump’s real-estate empire pays the price for poisonous politics

Reuters reports: Former U.S. president Donald Trump’s slashing rhetorical style and divisive politics allowed him to essentially take over the Republican Party. His supporters are so devoted that most believe his false claim that he lost the 2020 election because of voter fraud. But the same tactics that have inspired fierce political loyalty have undermined Trump’s business, built around real-estate development and branding deals that have allowed him to make millions by licensing his name. Trump’s business brand was once…

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Detainee ‘was raped at the hands of the U.S. government,’ court is told

Detainee ‘was raped at the hands of the U.S. government,’ court is told

The New York Times reports: A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Al Qaeda courier, speaking to a military jury for the first time, gave a detailed account this week of the brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse he endured during his 2003 to 2006 detention in the C.I.A.’s overseas prison network. Appearing in open court, Majid Khan, 41, became the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the violent and…

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The search for people who never get Covid

The search for people who never get Covid

Nature reports: Imagine being born naturally resistant to SARS-CoV-2, and never having to worry about contracting COVID-19 or spreading the virus. If you have this superpower, researchers want to meet you, to enrol you in their study. As described in a paper in Nature Immunology this month, an international team of scientists has launched a global hunt for people who are genetically resistant to infection with the pandemic virus. The team hopes that identifying the genes protecting these individuals could…

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