Music: Chick Corea & Gary Burton — ‘Armando’s Rumba’
This is an active video — even if the pre-play image seems to suggest otherwise: Chick Corea 1941-2021
Making peace with nature
UN Environment Programme: The world can transform its relationship with nature and tackle the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises together to secure a sustainable future and prevent future pandemics, according to a new report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) that offers a comprehensive blueprint for addressing our triple planetary emergency. The report, Making Peace with Nature, lays out the gravity of these three environmental crises by drawing on global assessments, including those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
U.S. life expectancy falls by a year in pandemic, most since WWII
The Associated Press reports: Life expectancy in the United States dropped a staggering one year during the first half of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials are reporting. Minorities suffered the biggest impact, with Black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics, nearly two years, according to preliminary estimates Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC….
Biden to announce U.S. will donate $4 billion for COVID-19 vaccines for poor countries
ABC News reports: President Joe Biden plans to announce on Friday that the United States will contribute $2 billion to a U.N.-backed program seeking to distribute COVID-19 vaccine doses to people in the poorest countries in the world, according to senior Biden administration officials. Congress had already allocated the money in December for the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide to Gavi, an international vaccine distribution alliance. Congress provided a total of $4 billion and the officials said that…
Texas officials didn’t heed warnings before winter storm power outages
The Texas Tribune reports: Millions of Texans have gone days without power or heat in subfreezing temperatures brought on by snow and ice storms. Limited regulations on companies that generate power and a history of isolating Texas from federal oversight help explain the crisis, energy and policy experts told The Texas Tribune. While Texas Republicans were quick to pounce on renewable energy and to blame frozen wind turbines, the natural gas, nuclear and coal plants that provide most of the…
The Supreme Court is still sitting on Trump’s tax returns, and justices aren’t saying why
CNN reports: Lawsuits involving Donald Trump tore apart the Supreme Court while he was president, and the justices apparently remain riven by him. For nearly four months, the court has refused to act on emergency filings related to a Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena of Trump tax returns, effectively thwarting part of the investigation. The Supreme Court’s inaction marks an extraordinary departure from its usual practice of timely responses when the justices are asked to block a lower court decision on…
The Christian prophets who say Trump is coming again
Julia Duin writes: Perched on a cream-colored armchair, Johnny Enlow, a 61-year-old, California-based Pentecostal pastor with short-cropped gray hair, a trim beard and Tom Selleck-style mustache, looked into the camera and prophesied that Donald Trump would become president again. Not in 2024. In 2021. “The January 20 inauguration date doesn’t really mean anything,” Enlow said in the January 29 video, which has gotten north of 100,000 views on YouTube. According to Enlow, more than 100 other “credible” Christian prophets around…
Trump can still be the Republican Party’s future. Just look to Arizona
BuzzFeed News reports: State Republican parties throughout the country reshaped themselves during Trump’s presidency — which might prove one of his most significant legacies. In the past several weeks, a number of state parties have stepped in to punish Trump’s critics in his stead. The Wyoming Republican Party censured Rep. Liz Cheney, the third highest-ranking House Republican, for her January vote to impeach Trump, and the Louisiana and North Carolina state parties censured their Republican senators who voted to convict…
Music: Tom Misch — ‘Movie’
The coronavirus is here to stay — here’s what that means
Nature reports: For much of the past year, life in Western Australia has been coronavirus-free. Friends gathered in pubs; people kissed and hugged their relatives; children went to school without temperature checks or wearing masks. The state maintained this enviable position only by placing heavy restrictions on travel and imposing lockdowns — some regions entered a snap lockdown at the beginning of the year after a security guard at a hotel where visitors were quarantined tested positive for the virus….
Blaming the wind for the mess in Texas is ridiculous
Wind turbines in Antarctica. Spoiler: they work in the cold. pic.twitter.com/Ws2nItJLhF — ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) February 17, 2021 Bill McKibben writes: Sometimes, all you need is a map. In the wake of this week’s power failures in Texas, which have left millions without heat in subfreezing conditions, right-wing politicians and news networks decided that the emergency was down to “frozen wind turbines,” a phrase that has now been repeated ad infinitum on all the various ganglia that make up the…
Texas mayor tells residents to fend for themselves during power outage: ‘Only the strong will survive’
The Washington Post reports: By Tuesday morning, the residents of Colorado City, Tex., were getting anxious. More than 24 hours had passed since a deadly Arctic blast knocked out power across the state, leaving them without heat or electricity in below-freezing temperatures. To make matters worse, many also lacked running water, forcing them to haul in heavy buckets of snow each time they needed to flush their toilets. Residents turned to a community Facebook group to ask whether the small…
The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty
Karen Hao writes: Miriam was only 21 when she met Nick. She was a photographer, fresh out of college, waiting tables. He was 16 years her senior and a local business owner who had worked in finance. He was charming and charismatic; he took her out on fancy dates and paid for everything. She quickly fell into his orbit. It began with one credit card. At the time, it was the only one she had. Nick would max it out…
46,218 news transcripts show ideologically extreme politicians get more airtime
Joshua Darr, Jeremy Padgett, and Johanna Dunaway, write: Committee assignments are normally a blessing for new House members. But some of today’s newer members, like freshmen Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, seem to be more interested in punditry than policy. When Greene was stripped of her committee assignments on Feb. 4 for a series of past statements that included threats directed against her Democratic colleagues, she replied by tweeting that she woke up “literally laughing” that “a…
Rush Limbaugh taught Republicans to love an angry, racist bully
Jonathan Chait writes: Donald Trump’s connection to the conservative movement to this day remains a subject of acrimonious dispute among the right-wing intelligentsia — some have embraced the 45th president as the movement’s authentic leader, while others regard him warily as an interloper, a New York Democrat who captured the party from the outside. Nobody on the right ever disowned Rush Limbaugh. Throughout his career, they agreed he was a pure representative of conservative thought. George Bush courted him with…
Bitcoin is now worth $50,000 — and it’s ruining the planet faster than ever
Eric Holthaus writes: You might have already heard, but Bitcoin hit $50,000 this week. A lot of anarcho-nerds are very rich right now. What you might not have heard – and what I wrote about a couple of times (1, 2) the last time Bitcoin’s price surged three years ago – is that the massive computer network that created and maintains the Bitcoin system uses an incredibly huge amount of energy. Nothing fundamental has really changed since then. In fact,…