Faisal’s Web Site
Tuesday, 19 November 2024
Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics
the Onion: “The American people are sending a strong message here: We don’t like the implications of this law, and we will not rest until it has been reversed in the courts.”
Saturday, 16 November 2024
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Do Almost Limitless Harm
Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times: “Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday.”
See also: “Yet in the face of these problems that are fundamentally collective, we are now confronted with perhaps the most deliberate dismantling of public health since its inception.”
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic: “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Wednesday, 13 November 2024
To Avoid Another Munich, Europe Must Act to Secure Ukraine
Prof. Sir Hew Strachan, et al.: “The means to victory do not require sign-off at the level of the 32-country NATO alliance but can be provided by a coalition of willing powers, including all those committed to Ukraine’s recovery of its currently occupied territory and then to providing Kyiv with real security guarantees.”
Tuesday, 5 November 2024
Letter: US election presents Ukraine and its allies with a vital dilemma
Air Marshal (retd) Edward Stringer and others, Financial Times: “Second, there is no credible plan for European security after any ‘ceasefire’.”
Sunday, 3 November 2024
Donald Trump and the failures of the American legal and political systems
Paul Campos, Lawyers, Guns & Money: “If Kamala Harris gets elected president on Tuesday, there is a 98.44% probability that the New York Times will run an op-ed by some Very Serious Person sometime between November 6th and January 20th, imploring her to pardon Donald Trump for all his federal crimes.”
Thursday, 31 October 2024
A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks
The Economist: “Politics could yet wreck the foundations of America’s prosperity.”
Monday, 28 October 2024
‘The guardrails are gone’: Full throttle as Europe tries to Trump-proof itself
Louise Nordstrom, France 24: “‘You don’t have to pull out of the Alliance [to make it inefficient],’ Winberg said. ‘It’s enough for Trump to openly say that he’s not going to honour the commitment anymore. In practice, that’s the same thing as pulling out, and as president he would have authority to do that.’”
Sunday, 27 October 2024
Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline
Darren Orf: “Unfortunately, even if the sponges are wrong, there’s mounting evidence that we are in the process of crossing that 1.5 degree threshold as we speak.”
Saturday, 26 October 2024
On political endorsement
William Lewis, The Washington Post: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”
Also: Post columnists respond
UPDATE:
- Refusing to endorse a candidate, The Post wounds itself
- The Post endorses no one for president
- For The Post, the wrong choice at the worst possible time
- It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president
UPDATE 2:
Michael Sainato, The Guardian: “‘Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do – and then met with the Blue Origin people,’ Kagan told the Daily Beast on Saturday. ‘Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.’”