Category: Recommended

An Air Force Combat Veteran Breached the Senate and Descended on Nancy Pelosi’s Office Suite | The New Yorker

An Air Force Combat Veteran Breached the Senate

The Texas-based pilot was with a group that descended on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-air-force-combat-veteran-breached-the-senate

As insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol this week, a few figures stood out. One man, clad in a combat helmet, body armor, and other tactical gear, was among the group that made it to the inner reaches of the building. Carrying zip-tie handcuffs, he was captured in photographs and videos on the Senate floor and with a group that descended on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite. In a video shot by ITV News, he is seen standing against a wall adjacent to Pelosi’s office, his face covered by a bandana. At another point, he appears to exit the suite, face exposed, pushing his way through the crowds of demonstrators.

January 9, 2021
Mob Rule in the Capitol | The New Yorker

Mob Rule in the Capitol

Five years after the Trump era began, a physical assault on America’s basic symbols of democracy feels both shocking and inevitable.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/mob-rule-in-the-capitol

Two hours into the siege of the U.S. Capitol, as another puff of tear gas wafted over the melee with police, Sharon Krahn, a grandmother from Dallas, looked on approvingly. “Our congressmen should be shitting their pants. They need to fear, because they’re too posh,” she said.“Their jobs are too cush, and their personal gain has taken priority over their sense of duty. Maybe they all started off with a good heart, you know, but power corrupts. Our government is proof positive of that.”

January 7, 2021
Opinion | Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech? – The New York Times

Opinion | Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech? (Published 2021)

A debate has broken out over whether the once-sacrosanct constitutional protection of the First Amendment has become a threat to democracy.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/trump-lies-free-speech.html

Free speech theorists have lots to be anxious about these days as we grapple with abiding faith in the many virtues of free expression while coping with the undeniable reality that it can — irony runs deep — undermine free expression itself.

January 6, 2021
How the Insurgent and MAGA Right are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington D.C. – bellingcat

How the Insurgent and MAGA Right are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington D.C. – bellingcat

Recent rallies in Washington D.C. have become networking opportunities for the far-right.

via bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/05/how-the-insurgent-and-maga-right-are-being-welded-together-on-the-streets-of-washington-d-c/

Yet these rallies are not just excuses for extreme elements to get into street fights. They are also networking opportunities for the far-right. On livestreams and speeches before crowds, attendees have shouted out and shared details of“free speech”-focused social media apps like Phoenix Social Network, Parler and Spreely where they can further engage and share ideas once they head home. On these apps and others, there have been repeated calls for armed violence and the execution of elected political leaders over recent months. Perhaps more troubling was evidence that formerly disconnected chunks of the right wing and fascist media ecosystems have started to coalesce in more cohesive ways.

January 5, 2021
His House

January 3, 2021
Targeted Killings Are Terrorizing Afghans. And No One Is Claiming Them. – The New York Times

Targeted Killings Are Terrorizing Afghans. And No One Is Claiming Them. (Published 2021)

Most officials believe the Taliban are behind the attacks on civil leaders, but others fear that factions are using chaos as a cover to settle scores, in an echo of Afghanistan’s past civil war.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/asia/afghanistan-targeted-killings.html

KABUL, Afghanistan — A military prosecutor who thought upholding the law was the highest honor, a doctor who inspired her family to study medicine, a journalist who wanted to hold those in power to account and a human-rights activist who sought to combat poverty in her home province: all murdered within weeks by unknown attackers as winter settled over Afghanistan.

January 3, 2021
Opinion | Horrified by the Blackwater Pardons – The New York Times

Opinion | Horrified by the Blackwater Pardons (Published 2021)

The F.B.I. agent who led the Blackwater investigation and two other letter writers are appalled by the pardon of men who killed innocent civilians.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/opinion/letters/blackwater-pardons.html

I was the F.B.I. case agent who led the investigation of the Blackwater massacre in Baghdad. We originally went to Iraq thinking this shooting was some form of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire between Blackwater guards and insurgents. After only one week, we determined that this incident was not as presented by Blackwater personnel and their State Department lackeys, but it was a massacre along the lines of My Lai in Vietnam. Three of the guards were convicted of manslaughter and one of murder.

January 3, 2021
The Forty-Year-Old Version

January 2, 2021
How Trump Tried, but Largely Failed, to Derail America’s Top Climate Report – The New York Times

How Trump Tried, but Largely Failed, to Derail America’s Top Climate Report (Published 2021)

The White House repeatedly attempted to thwart the country’s premier climate science document, one meant to steer policy for years. Scientists got in the way.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/climate/trump-national-climate-assessment.html

President Trump, asked about the assessment’s findings that global warming could devastate the economy, responded, “I don’t believe it.” His press secretary at the time, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said the assessment was “not based on facts.” Ryan Zinke, who was secretary of the interior at the time, said that its findings emphasized “the worst scenarios.”

January 1, 2021
Skate

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pADoLZS3Z9Q

January 1, 2021
Inside Trump and Barr’s Last-Minute Killing Spree — ProPublica

Inside Trump and Barr’s Last-Minute Killing Spree

Private executioners paid in cash. Middle-of-the-night killings. False or incomplete justifications. ProPublica obtained court records showing how the outgoing administration is using its final days to execute the most federal prisoners since World War II

via ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-trump-and-barrs-last-minute-killing-spree

Officials gave public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that misstated key facts from the cases. They moved ahead with executions in the middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the gurney while lawyers worked to remove a court order. They executed a second prisoner while an appeal was still pending, leaving the court to then dismiss the appeal as “moot” because the man was already dead. They bought drugs from a secret pharmacy that failed a quality test. They hired private executioners and paid them in cash.

December 30, 2020
Opinion | Vaccines are Safe, No Matter What Bobby Kennedy Says – The New York Times

Opinion | Vaccines Are Safe, No Matter What Robert Kennedy Jr. Says (Published 2020)

I love my uncle. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/opinion/covid-vaccine-bobby-kennedy.html

What’s more, a 2019 study found that the over half of Facebook advertisements spreading misinformation about vaccines were funded by two anti-vaccine groups, including the World Mercury Project, which was founded by my uncle Bobby. The organization has since changed its name to Children’s Health Defense, and Bobby is chairman. For its part, Facebook is no longer allowing anti-vaccination ads on its platform.

December 30, 2020
How Heather Cox Richardson Became a Breakout Star on Substack – The New York Times

Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working. (Published 2020)

She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html

“If you start doing things for the money, they stop being authentic,” she said, adding that she knew that was both a privilege of her tenured professorship and “an old Puritan way of looking at things.”

December 28, 2020
A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning – The New York Times

A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning (Published 2020)

A white high school student withdrew from her chosen college after a three-second video caused an uproar online. The classmate who shared it publicly has no regrets.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-galligan-racial-slurs.html

December 27, 2020
The Death of Vivek Oji

Link: https://schema.org/Book

December 25, 2020
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women

Link: https://schema.org/Book

December 25, 2020
Inside India’s booming dark data economy – Rest of World

Inside India’s booming dark data economy

Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale.

via Rest of World: https://restofworld.org/2020/all-the-data-fit-to-sell/

As the men settled in the living room, her husband said he had something he wanted them to hear. He took out his mobile phone and pressed “play.” The audio was loud and clear: private conversations between Sahu and her friends and family, which had been recorded without her permission. And it wasn’t only audio: “call logs, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, each photo and video, recordings of my video calls — he claimed to have accessed everything,” Sahu said. That was when she realized that her husband had, for months, been spying on her.

December 24, 2020
My Mommies and Me

My Mommies and Me

Searching for the soul of America in Mormon mommy blogger Instagram

via Jewish Currents: https://jewishcurrents.org/my-mommies-and-me/

On 9/11, a mommy posts a picture of two people jumping from the Twin Towers and captions it this photo right here is why I’m willing to speak out against the synagogue of Satan. Are the lizards in control, I wonder, or is the synagogue of Satan? Is there some relationship between the two? The mommies sell essential oils, get hair extensions, hold large indoor parties where they fete their one-year-olds. They post gender reveals and they pray the end of Roe v. Wade is near. October 17th comes and goes; JFK Jr. is nowhere to be seen. The year is winding down, but what is a year anymore? Time is a bowl of mush. One of my mommies puts up her Christmas tree the day before Halloween and posts a time-lapse of her children trimming its branches with tinsel. Some of my friends start their sentences, As soon as there’s a vaccine. The mommies start theirs, As soon as Jesus comes back. Election day comes and goes. The Saturday after, at 11:27 am, Brooklyn is one happy shout. But my mommies warn me that ten days of darkness are coming, that this has all been scripted, that the Texas Rangers are about to take Sleepy Joe into custody. We are entering a period of spiritual warfare, they say. We are coming to the end of everything.

December 24, 2020
The Journalist and the Pharma Bro

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro

Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?

via ELLE: https://www.elle.com/life-love/a35021224/martin-shkreli-christie-smythe-pharma-bro-journalist/

Soon after quitting Bloomberg, Smythe visited Shkreli again, fuming about the book industry’s rejection of him—and her. “I was so angry at the establishment, and people who wouldn’t let me tell my story in the book: publishers, Bloomberg, everybody,” she says. Without her job or her marriage “that totally eroded any defenses I had left.” Before, she had tamped down the sparks between her and Shkreli, but now, she gave them air. She thought about when he’d teased her about being a nerd in an old photo he glimpsed, and how she felt when he added her to his visitors’ list (he’s not a big fan of visitors, but wanted her to come). A realization hit her. In the visitors’ room, “I told Martin I loved him,” Smythe says. “And he told me he loved me, too.” She asked if she could kiss him, and he said yes. The room smelled of chicken wings, she remembers.

December 22, 2020
How Ammon Bundy Helped Foment an Anti-Masker Rebellion in Idaho | The New Yorker

How Ammon Bundy Helped Foment an Anti-Masker Rebellion in Idaho

The COVID-19 pandemic has pitted establishment Republicans, who defer to public-health officials’ expertise, against hard-right libertarians.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/how-ammon-bundy-helped-foment-an-anti-masker-rebellion-in-idaho

By the time of the August spectacle at the state capitol, Bundy and the health-freedom activists had spent four months staging increasingly bold protests. Inside the chamber that week, several legislators embraced the activists’ world view. “This emergency declaration created the situation that we’re in, not the virus,” Representative Vito Barbieri said. Barbieri represents a district just outside Coeur d’Alene, which, with a population of fifty-two thousand, is the largest city in the anti-government stronghold of the Idaho Panhandle. Two months before President Trump took the myth mainstream, Barbieri accused hospitals of “making up statistics” about covid-19 for profit. “N95 masks are of no value,” he added. The former representative Tim Remington, a pastor who represented the same district, suggested that the virus was not as contagious as reported. “I’ve actually laid hands on people that have covid and prayed for them. I never got covid,” he said.

December 21, 2020