Новости за 14.10.2021

Senator Joe Manchin has insisted for months that he won’t support President Biden’s Build Back Better Act unless it subsidizes a largely unproven and expensive climate technology. Democrats are now bending to the conservative Democrat from West Virginia: The multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill being debated in the Senate is likely to include generous tax credits for coal, oil, gas, and other industrial companies to capture their massive greenhouse gas emissions and bury them underground.

The good news about Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to take a stab at banning all Covid-19 vaccine mandates in his state is that it’s unlikely to work—at least not particularly well. Abbott may have issued an executive order that seeks to block any “entity” in Texas from making vaccination a condition of employment—a response to an executive order from President Biden requiring companies with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination—but large corporations in the state, such as IBM and Southwest Airlines... Читать дальше...

Even the worst vultures on Wall Street want you to think they’ve grown a conscience, realizing fossil fuel investments no longer make for good P.R. Private equity giants have been eager to tout their increasing support for sustainability, like embattled asset manager KKR’s $1.3 billion Global Impact Fund.

On Wednesday, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol subpoenaed Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Division of the Justice Department in the Trump administration’s waning days. The subpoena was the latest one of 19 subpoenas targeting former Trump administration officials by the congressional investigative panel. It was also the result of a report from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which said Clark was instrumental... Читать дальше...

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people who are going to see Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation of Dune, which will finally be in theaters next week following a grueling pandemic-driven delay: general audiences looking for an epic sci-fi blockbuster, and fans of the classic 1965 Frank Herbert novel, on which the film is based. This dichotomy also extends to reviews of the film; how a critic feels about Dune will depend significantly on how familiar they are with the source material. As... Читать дальше...

In March 2007, the Spectator, the London weekly magazine, published a truly remarkable column. “Prepare yourself for a veritable carpet-bombing of name-dropping,” its author said, and he wasn’t kidding. Andrew Roberts had published a new book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, a continuation of, and homage to, Sir Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Now Roberts was following in his hero’s footsteps to America, for an author tour like no other.

Here’s a sad Zen riddle. If your work wins the Nobel and you’re no longer alive when the prize is awarded, are you a laureate? The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences doesn’t award Nobel Prizes posthumously, so the economics prize given this year to Berkeley’s David Card, MIT’s Joshua D. Angrist, and Stanford’s Guido W. Imbens was not given also to the co-author of Card’s most important paper, on the minimum wage. That would be Princeton’s Alan Krueger, who took his own life in March 2019 at the age of 58. Читать дальше...

The Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., a gaudy monument to presidential corruption and misgovernment, is about to be sold by the former president to new buyers. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the Trump Organization is in “advanced discussions” to sell the 60-year lease on the government-owned property to a Miami-based investment firm, less than a decade after acquiring it. Donald Trump’s once-prized acquisition was five years old and is survived by the corrosive... Читать дальше...