Новости за 04.12.2015

Fifty miles southeast of Las Vegas, at the edge of the California-Nevada border in the Mojave, the Ivanpah Solar Facility takes in the full measure of the desert sun. Instead of photovoltaic solar panels, the project uses 173,500 heliostats, each with two mirrors, arranged in concentric circles that follow the sun, beaming its heat up to four “Power Towers.” The heat is then used to boil water and create steam, which is then run through a turbine. The plant is a 2.2 billion venture backed by the Department of Energy... Читать дальше...

In an otherwise sensible column about the limitations and possible consequences of dubbing Donald Trump a fascist, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggests that one of “the legitimate reasons” Trump’s campaign has endured so long is that conservative voters share a “reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration.” 

The climate change conference in Paris is the closest the world has ever come to reaching an agreement that covers 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, but conservatives in the United States are focused on other matters. For example, President Barack Obama’s indifference to time limits. Addressing the world leaders assembled in Paris on Monday, he went over his allotted time by 11 minutes, ignoring multiple buzzers along the way. It caught the attention of the Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, and the Drudge Report. Читать дальше...

Artists are commonly supposed to work by inspiration rather than by the conscious use of their intelligence. It is not always profitable to refute this insulting assumption, for the subtleties of a creative process are hard to communicate; and the tendency of the ignorant to surround the arts with the dignity of mystery has its advantages. But if it were necessary to prove that occasionally artists use their brains one could always produce Leonardo da Vinci and Walt Disney. The man Leonardo was an adventurous mind... Читать дальше...

The Paris climate summit has come too late for Ioane Teitiota from the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, who made history when his case for asylum in New Zealand was rejected in September.

In the coming days, a Sri Lankan woman is to be led to an outdoor pit in Saudi Arabia. Her arms and hands will be tightly bound, her body buried up to her breasts. Saudi men will then surround her and begin to hurl rocks at her head to kill her slowly. 

She said, I have a dirty little secret to share
with you, and it will explain
everything. And then 

Laura Donaldson rides a courtesy bus to her church each Sunday for weekly services. When it pulls onto the Dan Ryan Expressway, she sees the swelling encampments under the on-ramp, where some of the more than 125,000 Chicagoans who are currently homeless seek shelter under the concrete overpass. Mattresses, shopping carts, and furniture grow in number each week. Donaldson knows about housing insecurity: she is living in a shelter herself.

Late one September night in Atlanta, Killer Mike picked me up from my hotel in a black Chevy Silverado. He’s a heavyset man with a dense beard, a little over six feet tall, thick and stocky and built like an offensive lineman. “For all my proclivities for thuggery, I am a typical middle-class dad,” he said. “I’m a gangsta rap suburban father!”

The life and death of a philosopher should have a more than personal significance. When Hannah Arendt died December 4, many people mourned a friend and a teacher, but some also knew that a shattered culture had lost one of its very last and finest voices. Now there is no one left who can speak about and out of the depth of the experience of German Jewry. She was one of the last survivors of a spiritual republic whose social history was as terrible and brief as it was intellectually radiant and enduring. Читать дальше...

LE BOURGET, France—There’s no better place to sit and gloom longingly about the world than in a Parisian café, especially if that café is six miles north of the city in a glass-and-steel warehouse at the climate change conference.

In the end, a successful climate change accord all comes down to money. Financial commitments from richer nations historically responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are important to the outcome of the talks, because they serve as carrots for poorer nations to cut back on their reliance on coal. The problem is, rich nations just don’t have enough of an appetite to foot the full bill on adaptation and clean energy, and the U.S. wants to ask large developing nations like China to help.