Новости за 15.01.2021

In 2014, the late Senator John McCain quietly slid a dagger into the backside of the Arizona tribal nations he was ostensibly elected to represent. Deep in an appropriations package for military funding, McCain tacked on a rider, known as Section 3003. The rider accomplished what the Arizona Republican had been trying to do through standalone legislation since 2005—hand over 2,400 acres of sacred Apache lands to the mining company Rio Tinto, which has long eyed an area known in the English tongue... Читать дальше...

The Republican Party is in rough shape. Under President Donald Trump, the GOP has now lost the House, the Senate, and the presidency in just four years—a feat unmatched in American politics since Herbert Hoover’s defeat in 1932. Trump, the party’s leader, now faces a Senate impeachment trial where he could be permanently barred from public office for inciting an insurrection against Congress. As it enters the Biden years, the GOP is effectively rudderless.

The first sign that something may have been a bit amiss about last week’s MAGA insurrection at the Capitol arrived in a viral video on Twitter, amid the unfolding chaos. A distressed, red-eyed woman identifying herself as Elizabeth from Knoxville, Tennessee, cried to Yahoo News reporter Hunter Walker that she had just been maced inside the Capitol. “I got maced, yeah, I made it like a foot inside, and they pushed me out, and they maced me,” she complained in the video, while wiping her face with a towel. Читать дальше...

In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the late David Graeber laments the proliferation of meaningless sectors and jobs that are not productive but seem to exist solely to keep people working. Plenty of jobs have been automated out of existence, he argues, but rather than allowing us more leisure time, the fear of unemployment and threat to the Great American Work Ethic has led to the explosion of useless work. 

“We’re not looking backward, we’re looking forward” was 10 days ago. Remember? That was Hakeem Jeffries, the fifth-highest-ranking Democrat in House leadership and a potential future Speaker, should Nancy Pelosi ever step down or lose a leadership election.

In the aftermath of the pro-Trump riots that left five dead at the United States Capitol, Republicans have focused on the real problem: cancel culture. Citing the president’s removal from just about every social media app in existence and the scores of companies announcing they would no longer do business with Donald Trump or his family, Eric Trump blamed the left. “We live in the age of cancel culture, but this isn’t something that started this week,” he said. “It is something that they have... Читать дальше...