April 28, 2022

Democrats Need to Stand Up for Themselves

Humans are drawn to narratives, but too many politicians struggle to use storytelling to find common ground.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/democrats-storytelling-connecting-with-voters/629681/



By Molly Jong-Fast

It’s unusual for a one-off political speech to make someone famous. This is especially the case in today’s toxic fog of disinformation and apathy. But last week a Democratic state senator named Mallory McMorrow from Royal Oak, Michigan, somehow broke through when she stood up on the floor of the Michigan Senate and defended herself against smears from another state senator, Lana Theis, who wrote in a fundraising email that Democrats like McMorrow “are outraged they can’t teach can’t groom and sexualize kindergartners or that 8-year-olds are responsible for slavery.”

https://twitter.com/mallorymcmorrow/status/1516453738403143681
McMorrow laid out the absurd charges against her, and she did so on personal terms—telling a story about her own childhood before describing the obligation she feels to call out the tactics of politicians like Theis. “I am a straight, white, Christian, married suburban mom … I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white, and Christian. We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives. And I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.”

Conor Friedersdorf: That’s not what grooming means

McMorrow’s remarks were memorable because she was tenacious in her delivery, but also because Democrats tend not to defend themselves in this way. More often, they ignore scurrilous attacks. They take the high road, whatever that means, with very mixed results. Think of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which helped derail John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, or the conspiracy theories about the Benghazi embassy attack, which hurt Hillary Clinton’s popularity. McMorrow did two stunning things: She defended herself, and she did so in a way that came across as wholly authentic. She wasn’t afraid to be emotional, or even enraged.

Over the past few weeks, Republicans have taken to accusing supporters of LGBTQ rights of being “groomers.” This hyperaggressive smear tactic is straight out of the QAnon playbook, but it can be traced to the early days of American politics. Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1964 of the “paranoid style” that “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.” In 1977, the singer Anita Bryant successfully drew a connection between homosexuality and child sexual predation with her demented “Save Our Children” campaign, which promoted harmful lies about gay people as a way to overturn a law that would ban discrimination against them. Everything old is new again, including, it turns out, allegations of pedophilia. Democrats have puzzled over how to deal with allegations so obviously false. Some argue that rebutting such absurdities amounts to stooping to the GOP’s level, and risks inadvertently elevating the claims. But McMorrow proved that rebuttal can be done effectively—and she succeeded because her rebuke rested on a personal narrative. This is a lesson that resonated with me immediately.

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April 28, 2022

Just Call Trump a Loser: His record is clear. Some nervy Republican challenger should say so.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/04/gop-strategy-against-trump-2024-election/629687/



Let’s assume Donald Trump runs again for president in 2024. Yes, I know, caveats, caveats. Republicans say it’s too early to discuss ’24. A lot can change between now and then. Maybe Trump won’t actually run. Maybe he’s just teasing the possibility to milk the attention. Apparently, he likes attention. But if Trump does decide to inflict himself on another race, he will enter as the clear Republican favorite, enjoying a presumption of invincibility inside the GOP. This has engendered a belief that anyone who challenges Trump must tread lightly, or end up like the roadkill that his primary opponents became in 2016. That notion is outdated.

Trump’s bizarre and enduring hold over his party has made it verboten for many Republicans to even utter publicly the unpleasant fact of his defeat—something they will readily acknowledge in private. I caught up recently with several Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president who argued this restraint should end. The best way for a Republican to depose Trump in 2024, they said, will be to call Trump a loser, as early and as brutally as possible—and keep pointing out the absurdity of treating a one-term, twice-impeached, 75-year-old former president like a kingmaker and heir apparent. In other words, don’t worry about hurting Special Boy’s feelings.

“Why on earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House, and so on?” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime political consultant and former Republican congresswoman from Virginia. “For Republicans, whether they embrace the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on him.”

Trump’s wasn’t an ordinary election defeat, either. Some nervy Republican challenger needs to remind everyone how rare it is for an incumbent president to lose reelection, and also that Trump was perhaps the most graceless loser and insufferable whiner in presidential history—the first outgoing commander in chief in 152 years to skip his successor’s swearing-in. And that he dragged a lot of Republicans down with him. As Comstock hinted, Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over his party’s loss of the House, Senate, and White House in a single term. Said nervy Republican challenger could even (just for fun) remind the former president that he once called the person he lost to “the worst presidential candidate in the history of presidential politics.”

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April 28, 2022

There's No Scenario in Which 2050 Is 'Normal'

The two paths to avoid the worst of climate change would still dramatically change the world as we know it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/ipcc-report-climate-change-2050/629691/

https://archive.ph/MSfEI



Earlier this month, the United Nations–led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the latest volume of its current “synthesis report,” its omnibus summary of what humanity knows about the climate. As I wrote at the time, while the other volumes focus on the impacts of climate change, this newest report narrows in on how to prevent it. One of the main tools that the volume uses to estimate how we might avert climate catastrophe is so-called energy-system models. These are complicated computer programs that simulate the global economy’s use of energy in all its guises—coal, natural gas, wind, solar—and what the greenhouse-gas footprint of that energy use will be. A single model might encompass natural-gas demand in Mongolia, highway usage in Scotland, electric-vehicle purchases in New Jersey, and thousands of other numbers before spitting out a certain year’s carbon emissions.

These models are useful because they produce scenarios: story lines that show how the world can meet its energy needs while gradually zeroing out its carbon pollution. They can help us understand how current—and future— energy policy will affect the trajectory of emissions. (By feeding the output of energy-system models into climate models, which project how the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will alter temperature, precipitation, and much else, you can then see how those emissions will drive climate change.) The models can tell us, for instance, that based on the commitments countries initially made under the Paris Agreement, the world’s average temperature is set to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial level, violating the very goal of that treaty.

Of course, that has long been clear. But the energy-system models used in the most recent IPCC report tell us something else too: The path to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change requires something impossible. Well, not actually impossible, but exceptionally difficult to imagine. Of the hundreds of scenarios that the IPCC analyzed, all fell into one of three buckets. In the first bucket, every scenario forecasts that the world will soon be removing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Carbon removal is still a bit of a dream. Not only is it technologically unproven at scale; it is extremely energy intensive. But the IPCC report implies that within the lifetime of children alive today, the world might be spending more than a third of its total energy production removing carbon from the atmosphere, according to Zeke Hausfather, an IPCC author.

The world won’t derive any immediate economic gain from this waste-management exercise; it won’t turn that carbon into something useful. It will simply need to spend what could equal trillions of dollars a year on carbon removal to help rein in climatic upheaval. What’s more, this mass removal will need to happen while the world does everything else that decarbonizing entails, such as building wind and solar farms, expanding public transit, and switching to electric vehicles. Every climate plan, every climate policy you’ve ever heard about will need to happen while tens of gigatons of carbon removal revs up in the background.

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April 27, 2022

Coincidence? I think not.

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson



Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin



Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen



Estonian Prime Minster Kaja Kallas



Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir



Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė




Come on Norway and Latvia, step up to the plate and elect a social democratic female PM!

April 27, 2022

The Loudest Voices in the Room

What happens when schools are no longer the central business of school boards?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/04/parents-partisan-school-board-meeting-covid/629669/

https://archive.ph/xC23F



It should have been an unremarkable community gathering. At first, it looked as though it might be. On October 25, a cold wind whipped against the cars filing into the East Middle School parking lot in Grand Blanc, Michigan, for a school-board meeting. The audience piled into the six-feet-apart, gray folding chairs in the cafetorium. A group of unmasked community members slid their chairs closer together; a few women stepped to the side to pray.

The meeting began with a single bang of a gavel. The board and its constituents stood in unison to pledge their allegiance to the flag before observing a customary moment of silence. Then things deviated from the standard script. “The board of education is gathered here tonight to conduct school business,” the president of the board, Susan Kish, said, reading aloud from a prepared statement. “Please keep the board’s need to conduct school business in mind as you observe our meeting tonight.” If the audience could not abide by the board’s rules, she said, the room would be cleared for a recess. If there were additional interruptions, the meeting would be adjourned.

School-board meetings do not have a reputation for excitement. But since the early days of the pandemic, school boards have become the center of some of the most explosive fights in American life—over book bans, mask and vaccine requirements, and how and whether the history of racism is taught. The cost of these fights is immense: The basic functioning of one of the workhorses of the American system—an institution whose thankless and typically invisible work powers the country’s schools—is impossible when it is swept up in the nation’s divisive politics.

Read: Red parent, blue parent

Grand Blanc’s experience has been no different. Though nothing particularly divisive was on this agenda, recent meetings had featured verbal disputes between board members and jeers from the audience, as well as raucous public-comment periods when masking policies, “critical race theory,” and vaccines were discussed, and when audience members trained their ire on others in the crowd as much as on elected officials. The acrimony had spilled out beyond the board meetings as well. One woman in Grand Blanc was arrested in August for threatening the county’s health director, who had issued a mask mandate for students in kindergarten through the sixth grade.

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April 27, 2022

'Luzifer' Review: Finding the Devil in Everything

A son must save his ailing mother in this disturbing, ambitious religious thriller.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/movies/luzifer-review.html



In Peter Brunner’s “Luzifer,” a mother and her adult son, Maria and Johannes, live isolated from society in a remote alpine cabin. Maria (Susanne Jensen) is a recovering alcoholic who turned to religion to escape her vices, and imparts the lessons of a pious existence onto Johannes (Franz Rogowski), who functions on the developmental level of a child. The two spend their days subsistence farming, or engaged in deep prayer and sacred rituals.

When a developer arrives in the area to build a ski lift for tourists, the pastoral life of this family is threatened. Maria receives angry calls about selling her land, but when she refuses, the developers’ tactics become violently aggressive. She falls ill, ostensibly from the emotional turmoil, and Johannes must save her.



“Luzifer” conjures palpable unease, rattling the nervous system. The cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg renders this world with an icy aura. The entire film feels enveloped in a cold fog, and at times, haunting images, like a mutilated corpse in a nearby lake, flash by. Tim Hecker’s spectral score pierces the drama throughout, immersing us in a disturbing, transfixing universe.

This thriller is ambitious, contemplating the sinister and possessive grip of religious fanaticism; the dangers of capitalist greed; the reverberations of Oedipal desire; familial trauma and abuse, among other themes. But its intellectual aspiration produces an ideologically crowded film, where each philosophical meditation struggles to receive the attention and depth it deserves. Perhaps that is the point: Brunner seems to want to leave us with more questions than answers — or at least, compel us to search for the devil in everything.

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April 27, 2022

One-Pot Braised Chard With Gnocchi, Peas and Leeks

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1022150-one-pot-braised-chard-with-gnocchi-peas-and-leeks



YIELD 4 to 6 servings
TIME 45 minutes

Adding a package of prepared potato gnocchi to a pot of braised greens turns a side dish into a vibrant one-pot meal fit for weeknights. The chard stems, leeks and peas are nubby and colorful next to the pillowy gnocchi, while a combination of butter and white wine makes the sauce rich and tangy. For extra creaminess, serve this with dollops of fresh ricotta stirred in at the last minute.





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April 27, 2022

This Resort Is Giving Nurses Free Vacations to Their Choice of 100 Destinations

Selina is giving nurses the opportunity to get away for National Nurses Week and beyond.

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/selina-nurses-free-vacation-giveaway



The nightly applause and deluge of free food may have subsided since the height of the pandemic, but there are still companies (and individuals!) out there showing their appreciation for the hard work that nurses do daily. It is work that is too often thankless, and hopefully, that changes some during Nurse Appreciation Week in May.

One big perk nurses will find is the opportunity to win a vacation with Selina, a company that pairs travellers with unique stays and experiences around the world. It is giving away 20 trips that can be used at more than 100 locations in 25 countries, depending on the kind of getaway that the winning nurses need right now.

Selina is making the giveaway available exclusively to nurses. Two will win a 30-night stay at any Selina location. Eight will win a seven-night stay, and 10 others will win a two-night stay. It's a great way to start the summer, even if you don't use the free stay until later in the year. Though, nurses should be aware that travel expenses are not covered. The stay is on the house, but the flight will have to be purchased. Or not if you're lucky and looking for a staycation. A representative tells Thrillist that there are seven Selina properties inside the US.

Nurses must show proof of employment as a nurse if they win, and they can win by filling out the application here before May 16.

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April 27, 2022

Climate leadership needs more women

Women face the greatest risks from environmental crises and have been shown to deliver better environmental policy results.

https://socialeurope.eu/climate-leadership-needs-more-women



‘The higher you go; the fewer women there are.’ This observation, by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and environmental trailblazer Wangari Maathai, reflects a reality familiar to all women who have aspired to leadership positions, and it has gained a new meaning for me as the climate crisis has intensified. Though it is already clear that women and girls will face higher risks and greater burdens because of climate change, they remain significantly under-represented in climate and environmental negotiations.

In 2019, the United Nations Gender Composition Report noted that the number of women represented in UN Framework Convention on Climate Change bodies was not in line with efforts to create gender balance. In response, member states adopted a gender action plan at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in 2019. The plan recognised that ‘full, meaningful, and equal participation and leadership of women in all aspects of the UNFCCC process and in national- and local-level climate policy and action is vital for achieving long-term climate goals’.

And yet, by the time COP26 rolled around two years later, little had changed. The United Kingdom’s COP26 presidency was predominantly male-led and just 11 of the 74 African national representatives were women. Moreover, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity appears to be exhibiting a similar tendency, with male negotiators outnumbering women negotiators by around 60.

Short-sighted at best

The failure to ensure equal representation and women’s participation in efforts to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss is short-sighted at best and potentially reckless. The problem is also increasingly urgent. Last month, delegates from around the world gathered in Geneva for one of the final rounds of negotiations to conclude the new UN Global Biodiversity Framework. With the aim of accelerating action to halt further species loss and tackle climate change, these gatherings will shape the global response to both crises for years to come.

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April 27, 2022

'Gas might be expensive, but freedom is priceless.'

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas



https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1518955435033776128