Новости за 09.02.2017

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump rose to the top by needling his opponents with crude but effective nicknames: Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low-Energy Jeb, and Crooked Hillary. His stage persona resembled a blustery, bullying stand-up comedian. “Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest,” New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum recently wrote. “He was the insult comic, the stadium act, the ratings-obsessed headliner who shouted down hecklers. His rallies boiled with rage and laughter... Читать дальше...

By conventional understanding, a collaborator is one who assists an enemy, helping groups to which he does not belong threaten groups to which he does belong. But this definition, it seems to me, is too restrictive. It presumes that a group is a discrete whole, that once in it, we can’t get out of it or have competing affiliations. Collaborators, however, cannot be so neatly bound. Some do not entirely belong to the group they betray; others, like the French fascists of Vichy, have a deep affinity for the enemy they aid. Читать дальше...

Octopuses—those rascally, shape-shifting, skin-changing, critters of the sea—are, like all forms of life, unique. Watch them—as they scamper across the sea-floor, open a jar from within, change the color of their flesh in a heartbeat (of which they have three) through a startling range of colors and patterns, wield coconut shells or seashells as tools, or ensnare an unlucky target in an elegant tangle of tentacles—and you behold a creature seemingly extraterrestrial in its form, yet somehow familiar in its mental faculties. Читать дальше...

On July 20, 2008, Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and a longtime denizen of Silicon Valley’s intellectual elite, dialed in to a conference call hosted by Christopher Edley Jr., a senior policy adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Joining them on the line were some of the world’s top experts in crowdsourcing and online engagement, including Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mitchell Baker, the chairman of Mozilla. Drawing on Kapor’s influence, Edley had... Читать дальше...

Because most Republicans didn’t expect Donald Trump to win the presidency, they had to cobble together a governing strategy on very short notice, but it was obvious many months before the election that if Trump were to win, party leaders would ignore his racism, corruption, volatility, and ignorance to whatever extent was necessary to enact a meaningful legislative agenda.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at Congress or the White House, but the GOP isn’t in complete lockstep when it comes to climate change denial. The deniers just happen to be the ones who hold all the political power within the party. They drown out the other side—the conservatives who are urging their party to actually do something about global warming.