• Some things do stay the same – corporate whitewashing now extends to greenwashing, as petrochemical dollars are spent to slow electrification and obfuscate efforts to do so, all while trumpeting purported efforts to reduce emissions.
• House Oversight Committee Document release
• CNN on Big Oil disinformation
• Reuters on how old lobby teams up with fishing industry to fight offshore wind farms
• And a big culprit – the “Texas Public Policy Foundation“
• Thomas Edsall has a good essay in the NYT, where he wonders what it would take to remove the hold DJT apparently has on so many. Edsall’s last paragraph sums up my question nicely:
“Which gets to the larger question that supersedes all the ins and outs of the maneuvering over the Republican presidential nomination and the future of the party: How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point at which there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills, a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward and who, without remorse, continuously undermines American democracy?”
• A great podcast from Ezra Klein where he interviews Maryanne Wolf about how our current digital reading media and habits are adversely impacting our ability to focus deeply on what we are reading.
• The Washington Post’s editorial board has written a very good summary of the clouded origins of SARS-C0V2 here. It’s worth a read.
• This is wickedly but painfully funny; from Michael de Adder of the Washington Post:
• From an interview with the eminent historian in Balls and Strikes, Eric Foner on Originalism: “I am not a believer in originalism and do not want to operate on terrain constructed by the conservative justices. Originalism is intellectually indefensible.” It’s worth a read.
| • In the some good news, anyway, category: German Lopez writes in the NYT The Morning newsletter that the long standing massive discrepancy in racial incarceration rates in the U.S. is finally declining:
“Slowly, the American criminal justice system has become more equitable. The racial gap among inmates in state prisons has fallen 40 percent since 2000, fueled by a large decrease in Black imprisonment rates, according to a new report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank. Finding the right balance between public safety and human dignity animated many of the criminal justice policies enacted in the U.S. over the past couple of decades. The decline in racial disparities is a remarkable reversal of policies now widely seen as unfairly punishing Black people. “It’s a tremendous drop,” said Thaddeus Johnson, one of the report’s authors.” |
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• Another worthwhile Morning newsletter from David Leonhardt of the NYT, riffing on how some therapies for Covid-19 are being underutilized, especially in certain populations. Improving usage and access might improve the persistent mortality of this disease, still averaging almost 400 deaths a day in the U.S. David L. is on leave for a few months; I’ll miss him! A revealing excerpt:
• Michael Grunwald, writing in the Atlantic, opines on the fantasy that promotes building and living in coastal Florida.
• Heather Cox Richardson, writing in her September 27 newsletter, puts the issue in perspective:
“More to the point, it is a myth that Republican-dominated border states are bearing the brunt of migrants seeking asylum. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post asked the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC) to figure out where the asylum seekers in the U.S. are.
From court records, TRAC calculated that 750,000 people are awaiting asylum hearings. More than 125,000 of them are in California. More than 110,000 are in New York. About 98,000 are scheduled for hearings in Florida, while about 75,000 are waiting in Texas. Most of the rest are scheduled for court hearings in Democratic-dominated states, such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland.”
