What I do know is that Yang’s big ideas are demonstrably wrong. Shouldn’t that be cause for concern? Yang’s claim to fame is his argument that we’re facing social and economic crises because rapid automation is destroying good jobs and that the solution is universal basic income, a monthly check of $1,000 to every American adult. Many people find that argument persuasive, and one can imagine a world in which both Yang’s diagnosis and his prescription would be right.
The violent, anti-democratic attack on the Capitol doesn’t fit the technical definition of a coup even though the president incited and encouraged it. That matters, experts say, because different actions are required to prevent this type of attack from harming democracy. A coup is an illegal attempt to take power through force or the threat of force, usually involving at least a faction of the military or formal security forces, though sometimes they are backed by paramilitaries or other armed groups. That’s not what happened in Washington yesterday.
Republicans spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a runaway pandemic; now they’re rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss. What do these rejections have in common? In each case, one of America’s two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didn’t like. Notice, by the way, that I’m not including qualifiers, like saying “some” Republicans. We’re talking about most of the party here.
Huge percentages of voters support government-sponsored health care, more state intervention in the economy, and more government support for clean energy. We have, of course, just learned some important lessons about the limitations of public opinion polling, but these majorities are too large to be completely dismissed as mere polling errors. That Democrats cannot translate robust support for their central policies into consistent electoral victories suggests that something is amiss in the democratic accountability feedback loop.
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is now part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was what my friend—a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened were I to identify him more precisely—really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.
New Cato national survey finds that self‐censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds—62%—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive. The share of Americans who self‐censor has risen several points since 2017 when 58% of Americans agreed with this statement. These fears cross partisan lines.
“Trump’s been saying what’s happened to the Senate is all my fault, because of what we did in 2013. But you have to remember what was going on at the time. Obama was President. We had the majority, but we didn’t have enough to break filibusters. And the Republicans were filibustering everything. For the first time in history, they filibustered the nomination of a Secretary of Defense, and let’s keep in mind that it was Chuck Hagel, a Republican. They filibustered all the sub-Cabinet positions, all of his judges.
The United States is not “full.” In fact, it is empty. Right now, the country has about 93 people per square mile. Many, many countries are far denser than this. South Korea has 1,337 people per square mile, and Belgium has 976. If you tripled the population of the United States, adding the new Americans only to the Lower 48 and leaving Alaska and Hawaii intact and unchanged, the main part of America would be only about as dense as France and less than half as dense as Germany.
We were both on the sidewalk. I motioned to ask whether she’d take a few steps back into her driveway so I could pass while preserving social distance. My alternative was to step into traffic on a curved street. She rolled her eyes, sighed, and walked wearily into her driveway, making a little room. what I experienced was a white person being ticked off by my black presence in front of her house, and exercising her privilege to make her annoyance known
A big reason President Trump prevailed in 2016 was his massive margins in what are called the “Middle Suburbs,” largely blue-collar counties heavily concentrated in the industrial Midwest.
Yet another “Karen” video has emerged on social media, this time showing a woman harassing a Black man for the simple act of sitting in car in front of his own house.
Spreading rock dust on farmland could pull enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to remove about half of the amount of that greenhouse gas currently produced by Europe And if China, the United States and India — the three countries that emit the most CO2 — adopted the practice on a large scale, they could collectively clear about 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air
what the welfare state has done, in my opinion, is incentivize Black women to marry the government, and allow men to abandon their financial and moral responsibilities to their families. We've gone from 25 percent of Black kids born outside wedlock in 1965 to nearly 70 percent now. You cannot attribute that to Jim Crow and racism. It has to do with bad government policy."
The differences between Baby Boomers and today’s young people are easy enough to see. Younger generations now are far more diverse: White people made up four-fifths of the Baby Boom (defined as those born between 1946 and 1964), but represent only three-fifths of Millennials (born 1981 through 1996) and only a little more than half of Gen Z (tentatively defined as those born from 1997 through 2014).
All over Europe, 5G telephone towers are being set on fire. At least 16 masts in the Netherlands have gone up in flames. There have been attacks on 5G equipment in Italy, Ireland, Belgium and Cyprus.
he merely proposed lowering the existing Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60 . Biden’s response to those young people demanding a better health policy is to offer a policy that won’t help any of them for decades. And to understand just how pitifully stingy this “concession” is, remember that dozens of Democratic senators, including plenty of “moderates”, have already endorsed lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55.
