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Embracing God to Own the Libs [Shadi Hamid, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
February 8, 2023
225 views
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• Andrew Tate was the most googled person in the US in 2022, and had a massive following online, especially among young men and the far-right.
• He was arrested in Romania on sex-trafficking charges, but had previously converted to Islam.
• Muslim reaction to his conversion was split, reflecting the growing divide between “woke” and “anti-woke” Muslims.
• Tate’s conversion is an example of a growing phenomenon called “political conversions”, where people are drawn to a religion for its political associations rather than its spiritual beliefs.
• This is especially true of evangelical Christians, who are increasingly drawn to the GOP, and of Muslims, who are drawn to Islam for its resistance to progressive norms.
• Religion is never just about religion, and the decoupling of politics and faith is an invention of the modern West.
• The all-consuming political divide in America today is less about politics than culture, and religion shapes our habits, norms, and attitudes.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit Popular Information to read Judd Legum’s original post This book is considered pornography in Ron DeSantis’ Florida

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The History Behind the Chinese Spy Balloon [Garrett M. Graff, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 8, 2023
266 views
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• Balloons have been used for spying and bombing since World War I, and German zeppelins regularly crossed the English Channel to drop hand grenades or small bombs on London.
• During World War II, Japan lofted about 9,000 balloon bombs toward the West Coast in 1944 and 1945, hoping to spread fear, ignite forest fires, and bring the war to America’s homeland.
• At the end of World War II, the arrival of the nuclear bomb meant that an entire city could be vaporized by a lone attacker arriving out of the blue sky.
• In 1947, reports of a mysterious flight of objects over the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest touched off a summer of excited, panicked UFO sightings.
• In 1952, the Air Force’s UFO-investigation program, Project Blue Book, figured out that Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a World War II pilot, had most likely been chasing a Navy weather balloon when he crashed.
• In the postwar era, balloons represented cutting-edge military technology, and the U.S. had multiple secret balloon projects under way.
• Today, sophisticated surveillance systems have failed to spot the forays of other Chinese balloons, and the U.S. military deployed an F-22 to shoot down the modern version of the first aerial weapon the country ever faced.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Garrett M. Graff’s original post The History Behind the Chinese Spy Balloon

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Don’t ‘Buy American’ [Derek Thompson, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 8, 2023
236 views
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• The U.S. is embracing a new economic theory of “Buy American” to ensure that the U.S. doesn’t rely on flimsy supply chains for key materials, especially those that pass through our adversaries’ borders.
• This policy can have advantages such as funneling money to domestic businesses in important industries, theoretically raising the wages of workers in those sectors, and letting the government support the development of crucial technology and infrastructure.
• However, Buy American policies can have several downsides such as raising costs, making key supply chains less resilient, hurting innovation, and damaging global alliances.
• The article suggests that the U.S. should be explicit about the trade-offs that come from explicitly protectionist policies and should focus on delivering political and human outcomes such as plentiful, cheap, low-emission electricity produced by more clean-energy infrastructure in an economy with full unemployment and rising real wages.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Derek Thompson’s original post Don’t ‘Buy American’

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How Biden Successfully Baited Congressional Republicans [David Frum, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 8, 2023
276 views
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• In 2009, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” during President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress, shocking viewers.
• More than a decade later, Republicans heckled and shouted during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
• Biden used the interruptions to reinforce his message, accusing “some” Republicans of plotting to sunset Social Security and Medicare.
• Biden’s speech was based on shrewd and unapologetic hyper-partisanship, pushing Republicans on pain point after pain point.
• Biden also bid against Republicans on economic nationalism, equating imports with job losses and exports with job gains.
• Biden’s speech was less a plan of action and more a plan of attack for the next election, as he hopes to contest it.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read David Frum’s original post How Biden Successfully Baited Congressional Republicans

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The Ray Allen Story [Freddie deBoer, Freddie deBoer’s Substack]

By Spencer Chen
In Freddie deBoer
February 7, 2023
279 views
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• The author and his then-girlfriend went to see The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007.
• NBA star Ray Allen and two other women joined them in the theater.
• Allen asked the author what he had missed in the movie.
• Allen’s wife and the other woman started chatting, leaving Allen feeling lonely.
• Allen dropped his Blackberry and the author got down to help him look for it.
• The author found himself wedged between a movie theater seat and Allen’s torso.
• Allen eventually found his Blackberry and the group left as soon as the credits started to roll.
• The author and his girlfriend almost broke up that night.
• The author will never forget the surreal experience.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit Freddie deBoer’s Substack to read Freddie deBoer’s original post The Ray Allen Story

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‘The Last of Us’ Reveals the Best of Us [Rob Henderson, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
February 7, 2023
276 views
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• The Last of Us is an HBO series about a global pandemic that has echoes of real life.
• The show follows the story of Bill and Frank, two men who form a relationship in the midst of an apocalypse.
• The show highlights the need for humans to rely on and trust one another in order to survive.
• In modern society, people are less reliant on their communities for help and support.
• In developing countries, social capital is still high and people rely on each other for support.
• In the US, trust in institutions and people has declined, leading to feelings of alienation and isolation.
• The Last of Us hints at the possibility of a world where people can overcome these feelings.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Free Press to read Rob Henderson’s original post ‘The Last of Us’ Reveals the Best of Us

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Big Tech Wants to Tell You Who Counts as Your Family [Cory Doctorow, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 7, 2023
267 views
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• Netflix recently unveiled a new password-sharing policy, which allows members of the same “household” to share an account.
• This policy is more of an anti-password-sharing policy, and assumes that there is a universal meaning of “household” and that software can determine who is and is not a member of a household.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation was involved in a forum created by the industry consortium Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) to limit video sharing to a single household.
• The forum rejected the suggestion of a family based in Manila, whose dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor, whose daughter works as a nanny in California, and whose son does construction work in the United Arab Emirates as an “edge case.”
• After 9/11, people had to perform the bureaucratic rite of standardizing their name for recognition by machines with their database schema.
• Netflix is part of the “enshittification” cycle, in which the platform company first allocates surpluses to its users, lures them in, and then reallocates surpluses to businesses.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Cory Doctorow’s original post Big Tech Wants to Tell You Who Counts as Your Family

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The Persistent Racism of Policing [Eve Fairbanks, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 7, 2023
176 views
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• Tyre Nichols’s killing has sparked a conversation about racism and police brutality in America.
• Kgadi, a South African soldier, grew up under apartheid and was inspired to join the military partly because he wanted to be like the white-led police force that had killed his brother.
• South Africa has gone from strict segregation to a place where people of color fill the president’s cabinet, dominate Parliament, set school curricula, run universities, and write the news.
• Post-apartheid South African police officers kill more civilians per capita than the American police do.
• Under South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, Black-liberation leaders had expected great change, but Mandela asserted his commitment to the status quo.
• Black South Africans felt a pressure to perform and do the job in a way that their predecessors would approve of or recognize.
• Malaika, a “born free”, observed that some Black people in her formerly white neighborhood went overboard building ostentatious security walls and refused to answer when Black handymen rang their doorbell.
• A life coach wrote a blog post advising Black women to act like white madams for their maids to respect them.
• South African Black people often felt they were treated worse by Black authorities than by white people.
• Black service providers were sometimes accused of having a double standard when it came to treating wealthier Black customers.
• The Black-liberation movement’s goal was to dismantle the world white South Africans created, or just to move more freely within it.
• Kuseni Dlamini, the second Black CEO of Anglo American South Africa, chose to join the top ranks of an institution from which he had long been barred.
• Some Black leaders developed the same kind of loathing for poorer Black people that apartheid-era white leaders had evinced.
• Police brutality and racism are intimately linked in South Africa, as in America.
• Black South African police officers often look back at apartheid with nostalgia, as a time when police had more absolute power to use force.
• Complex, inherited ideas about power and internalized racism can lead Black cops to kill a Black man.
• Traditions we have attempted to discard after discerning their injustice will likely be heritable and persistent.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Eve Fairbanks’s original post The Persistent Racism of Policing

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The Real Obstacle to Nuclear Power [Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 7, 2023
309 views
T

• Kairos Power is building a test facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to simulate a new kind of nuclear reactor.
• The reactor is small and safe, and could be used to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few linked together to power a city.
• John Muratore, a former NASA and SpaceX engineer, is running the test operation.
• Nuclear power is essential to replace fossil fuels, but has consistently flopped as a commercial proposition.
• Environmentalists are coming around to the idea of nuclear power, as it is carbon-free, fantastically safe, and has a small footprint.
• The U.S. has two big commercial reactors under construction in Georgia, but the licensing process began in 2008 and the projected cost has mushroomed to $30 billion.
• The industry has not seen fundamental innovation since the 1960s, with plants becoming increasingly expensive and public hostility growing.
• A new generation of nuclear entrepreneurs are looking to revolutionize the industry, taking inspiration from SpaceX and Tesla.
• Companies like Kairos Power, NuScale Power, Ultra Safe Nuclear, and X-energy are all working on small, advanced nuclear reactors, with the goal of mass production.
• The biggest challenge is modernizing the slow-moving federal regulatory apparatus, as well as finding risk-friendly investors and customers.
• The fight against global warming and continued reliance on oil and gas has motivated the reinvention of the nuclear industry.
• China and Russia are in the race to perfect advanced, unconventional technologies.
• Kairos Power is conducting a simulation experiment in Albuquerque to test their salt-cooled reactor.
• The company is devising a business technology to make the project faster, simpler, more efficient, and cheaper.
• Davis Libbey, a recent recruit from SpaceX, is the test director.
• Elizabeth Muller and her father founded a company, Deep Isolation, to address the nuclear waste problem by using computer-assisted directional drilling.
• Deep Isolation has won customer contracts in multiple countries and is an example of how the Big Nuclear mindset is cracking.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Jonathan Rauch’s original post The Real Obstacle to Nuclear Power

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Trumpism Without Trump [David A. Graham, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 7, 2023
183 views
T

• Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pompeo are all reportedly on the verge of announcing a run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, much to the fury of Donald Trump.
• Trump has accused DeSantis of being “very disloyal” and has alleged that he tearfully “begged” Trump for his endorsement in his first run for governor in 2018.
• Trump has remade the GOP in his own image, yet his personal appeal to its voters appears to be waning.
• Candidates who have tried to run as Trumpists in competitive elections have largely struggled.
• Despite this, the would-be nominees are constructing a Trumpism without Trump, based on exploiting cultural resentment.
• Trump’s grip on the GOP is still strong, and many leaders of his party have never left his side.
• Trump is now threatening to make a third-party bid if he doesn’t win the Republican nomination and doesn’t approve of the Republican nominee.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read David A. Graham’s original post Trumpism Without Trump

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