Новости за 02.06.2021

Last week, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined San Francisco–based radio station KQED’s Political Breakdown to talk about the task of running the Department of Energy at this critical juncture in the climate crisis. The conversation was a perfectly pleasant one. To a casual listener, it would have seemed like little was amiss, which was in all likelihood Granholm’s intention. The problem is, it’s time to stop coddling the casual listener.

Let’s say you’re a hacker who wants to extort money from a big corporation. A decade or two ago, you might have hacked into their systems, stolen some data, and sold it for pennies on the dark web or demanded money for its return. But how to get paid? No bank would accept such a wire transfer. The cinematic version—a bag of nonsequential bills dropped off in a public park or handed to a passing courier—is too risky. The key part of the plan, actually getting money, is the toughest to pull off.

Like many of us, Charlie Brown and his not entirely devoted dog, Snoopy, were always looking for ways out of the difficult and sometimes ugly world they lived in, through fantasies of sports stardom (such as actually winning, for once, a Little League game) and World War I dogfights with the Red Baron conducted from the top of a bullet-riddled kennel. As Blake Scott Ball argues in his perceptive survey of the longest-running individually drawn and written comic strip of all time, the success of... Читать дальше...

Republican governor and former MAGA acolyte Ron DeSantis has focused more on climate during his first term than would be expected of most right-wingers of his ilk. It’s not because he wants to—in fact, talking openly about the climate crisis could hurt his 2024 presidential ambitions with the Republican base—but because he has no other choice. Climate will be a key “issue” in the 2022 Florida gubernatorial campaign and could offer a preview of how politicians nationwide will handle the crisis going forward. Читать дальше...

Two bad omens for American democracy appeared in Texas over the Memorial Day weekend. One of them involved Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, retired general, and active MAGA conspiracy theorist. At a QAnon-flavored event in Dallas, an audience member asked Flynn why “what happened in [Myanmar] couldn’t happen here,” referring approvingly to a military coup in that country in February. “No reason,” Flynn told the cheering audience. “I mean, it should happen here.”

Michael Flynn, the retired general who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser before being fired for lying about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador, spent Memorial Day weekend advocating for the U.S. military to overthrow the government. A keynote speaker at the For God & Country Patriot Roundup in Dallas—a conference popular with QAnon believers—he was asked on Sunday by an attendee, “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here.” Flynn replied, “No reason. Читать дальше...