“Twitter is, in many ways, a platform of the elite. While it can sometimes elevate the voices of ordinary people who don’t command massive followings on the platform, it’s most powerful as a communication tool for already prominent and influential people.
Though it has about 200 million daily users, Twitter has had an outsized role in shaping politics, particularly in the US as the former platform of choice for Trump until the end of his presidency, when he was permanently suspended for tweeting in support of the January 6 Capitol riot.”
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“Twitter is distinct from Facebook and Google in that the financial markets don’t truly reflect its full power, which is why Musk can entertain the idea of buying the entire company with a fraction of his total estimated net worth of over $220 billion.”
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“In its new era, Twitter has begun balancing its commitment to letting people say what they want and minimizing the harms that people can do using its platform. For Musk, there’s value in being the person who sets those terms, and he has made it clear that he will err on the side of allowing as much controversial speech as possible.”
“Broader legal and social acceptance for trans people has been a force for good, allowing them to live freely and authentically. And Thomas has been brave in the face of significant vitriol for competing in a sport where the ruling body has declared her eligible. But unlike areas such as respectful pronoun use, availability of gender-neutral bathrooms, and recognition of transition on legal documents, sports at the elite level are zero-sum. Thomas’ success is causing a crisis of confidence in women’s sports, which have long been a source of pride for elite female athletes despite the fact that they knew they couldn’t compete on equal footing with men.”
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“”It is a pathetic and misguided state that any argument against Thomas’ participation is immediately deemed to be an indication of transphobia.” By protecting one athlete out of fear of backlash, many other athletes have been denied a real shot at the top spot on the podium. There are roughly 15,000 female collegiate swimmers in the U.S., but only 1.8 percent of them even qualify for the elite NCAA Division I championships, let alone compete in the finals (limited to 8 lanes) or stand on the winner’s podium (top 3 performers).”
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“”We didn’t create separate leagues to reinforce the special feminine identity of female athletes; if anything, women’s athletics was supposed to break down such divisions. The separation is a nod to biology.” The very existence of women’s sports is tied to the fact that, by biological design, women cannot hold their own while competing with men. By separating female athletes from their male counterparts, women had the chance to display their own extraordinary talent on a more even playing field (or swimming pool).”
“two consecutive presidents, first Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, wedded to economic nationalism. “When we use taxpayers’ dollars to rebuild America, we are going to do it by buying American: buy American products, support American jobs,” Biden vowed in the recent State of the Union address. He’s unlikely to get much pushback from the public; while support for free trade rose under Trump it has since declined, according to Gallup. More Americans (61 percent) see trade as good for economic growth than see it as a threat (35 percent), but the numbers swing more as a matter of partisan politics than according to principled commitment.
That’s a shame because free-trade advocates are correct. While a strong case can be made that free trade is a basic human right involving consensual relations among individuals, it’s also a miraculous cure for misery. Over the last half-century or so, economists have rediscovered comparative advantage and that “trade openness is a necessary—even if not sufficient—condition for economic growth and reducing poverty,” as Pierre Lemieux wrote for the Cato Institute’s Regulation in 2020.”
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“Economic and financial sanctions may cause Russia pain and add to the cost of invading Ukraine. But as governments around the world raise barriers and try to insulate themselves from future uses of weaponized trade and finance, the result is certain to be a world that is poorer and less free.”
“The New York Times published a story that quotes emails from a laptop that Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware. The messages reinforce the impression that Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that reportedly paid the younger Biden $50,000 a month to serve on its board, expected him to use his influence with his father for the company’s benefit”
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“None of this necessarily means that Joe Biden himself did anything improper or illegal. While Trump alleged that Biden was doing Burisma’s bidding when he demanded the dismissal of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, for example, Biden plausibly maintained that the motivation was widely shared concerns about Shokin’s corruption.
Nor does Hunter Biden’s unseemly relationship with Burisma mean that Trump was justified in seeking to discredit the Democrat he expected to face in the presidential election by pressuring the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of the matter. But it surely was a legitimate issue to raise during the presidential campaign, as Guthrie and other journalists unconnected to the Post recognized. The question is why the Times did not, and the answer clearly has more to do with partisan sympathies than the journalistic standards the paper claimed to be defending.”
“for millions of Americans, many of whom have chronic conditions or disabilities that make them especially vulnerable to Covid-19, the pandemic is far from over.”
“The original deal was reached during Barack Obama’s presidency, after years of talks among Iran, the United States and other leading countries, including Russia and China. It lifted an array of nuclear sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe curbs on its atomic program. The deal had limits, however, including provisions that would expire over time, technically starting within the next three years. (Supporters of restoring the deal argue that the most important provisions won’t expire for several more years and some elements last in perpetuity.)”
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“the original Iran nuclear deal involves the Russians taking special roles in helping Iran implement the agreement, such as shipping out Iran’s excess enriched uranium. If Russia refuses to play that role, the deal is once again undermined.”
““The oil and gas industry has millions of acres leased … they could be drilling right now, yesterday, last week, last year,” Biden said last week. “They are not using them for production now. That’s their decision.”
For its part, industry has not leapt to expand drilling.
The major public oil and gas companies that drive much of the United States’ activity are holding themselves back with uncharacteristically miserly capital expense plans, returning cash to investors instead of drilling new wells. Officials with some companies say they are also facing bottlenecks for equipment, rigs and labor.
When it comes to public lands and waters, though, oil and gas companies have accused the White House of not truly supporting their industry and aiming to curb production.
Ryan McConnaughey, spokesperson for the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, said the Biden administration has a “playbook” for federal development: “delay, distract and deflect.”
“It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the Biden Administration’s approval of APDs [applications for permit to drill] has plummeted,” he said.
Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, said the political focus on the drilling permits and leases already held by industry is a red herring from the White House.
“Just because Acme O&G isn’t using a permit right away doesn’t mean that ABC O&G doesn’t need one for a well it’s planning to drill now,” she said. “If the federal permitting situation weren’t so inefficient and fraught with political interference, companies wouldn’t need to request a large inventory even years in advance.”
If the White House wants drilling to increase, they could ease regulatory requirements and speed up permitting, she said.
The permitting showdown is the latest of many disagreements over the federal oil program under Biden. When Biden came into office last year, he paused oil and gas leasing on federal lands and last fall published a report criticizing the program as antiquated and deferential to industry.
The leasing moratorium was overturned by a federal judge, but leasing has been slow to resume — and bogged down in continued legal wrangling. The outlook for new leasing in 2022 remains in limbo as Interior has said it will be difficult to move forward after a Louisiana federal judge blocked the use of an interim climate metric.
Meanwhile, Interior is developing regulations on oil and gas that will increase royalty rates and bonding requirements on federal leases, as well as impose new methane rules.
But the administration has also taken heat from environmental groups for focusing on these regulatory reforms rather than aggressively working to retire the oil and gas program.
Fossil fuels developed on federal lands, including coal, are responsible for as much as a quarter of the country’s downstream carbon dioxide emissions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, a statistic that’s underscored criticism of continued drilling from environmental groups and climate activists.
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the environmental group Center for Western Priorities, said the Biden administration has continued to “rubber stamp” drilling approvals.
“Even under Biden, 96 percent are getting approved versus 98 percent under Trump,” he said.
Weiss downplayed the impact of the permitting slowdown on industry, arguing that the number of permits issued doesn’t have an immediate correlation to industry’s ability to drill and that companies frequently allow permits to expire without being used. His organization counted 8,000 permits that oil companies had not used or had allowed to forfeit between 2016 and 2021.
“A slight dip in approvals makes no difference at all because APDs and available leases have never been a bottleneck,” he said.
With oil and gas companies exercising “fiscal discipline” to please investors, that’s even more the case, he said.”
“Way back in May 2020, three researchers at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) published an op-ed in Nature arguing that with respect to developing universal coronavirus vaccines “the time to start is now.” As it turns out, the time to start for the NIAID was 15 months later when the agency got around to awarding three academic institutions a little over $36 million to research pan-coronavirus vaccines in September 2021.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed could serve as a much better model for incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to greatly speed up the development and deployment of the candidate pan-coronavirus vaccines on which some are currently working. In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, two immunologists point out that the global cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is an estimated $16 trillion, compared to the cost of developing a typical vaccine at $1 billion. They note that even a $10 billion vaccine is minuscule compared with the pandemic’s toll.
Among the promising pan-coronavirus candidate vaccines are the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research’s spike ferritin nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine; Osivax’s nucleocapsid vaccine targeting a protein widely prevalent among coronaviruses that is unlikely to mutate; and Inovio’s DNA vaccine encoding variant sequences of the spike proteins the virus uses to invade cells.”
“He likes, and is liked by, both of his immediate predecessors, Bill de Blasio and Mike Bloomberg, two former mayors who happen to repel one another. He was a victim of police brutality as a teenager who then became a cop, who then became a critic of the department’s treatment of Black cops, who then became the most pro-cop candidate in the 2021 mayor’s race. He has made crime his top priority, while also keeping at least some social justice and progressive allies by his side. He has said he will meet with anybody, however unsavory the character, but rejects the idea that he might be unsavory by association. He does not identify as a technocrat or an ideologue. His aides describe his goal as reversing inequality citywide — but his agenda is best understood as a desire to restore something more ephemeral to his hometown: a feeling, a sense of confidence. He wants, simply stated, “to reenergize the spirit of New York.”
In a city of weird people and weird mayors, Adams is maybe the most idiosyncratic figure to ever hold the office. And yet he has presented himself as a national model, a new brand of politics for others to emulate, built on the notion that you can be two or more things at once. If this is a good model for his party, torn in an existential crisis about what it means to be progressive or a moderate, establishment or anti-establishment, it’s a hard one to replicate. He is telling politicians they don’t have to choose. They can, in fact, be everything, assuming they want to be. Adams has called himself the new “face of the Democratic Party,” and it’s one of the few labels he is willing to embrace, but there’s no easy way to nail down what it will mean today, tomorrow, or the day after that. It’s an instruction manual where all the parts fit in all the sockets. By his own description, Adams is “perfectly imperfect,” embracing his many facets as a feature rather than a bug — and thus leaving open the possibility for … well, anything.”
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“Adams has spent his early days in office trying to restore public safety. Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and raised in South Jamaica, Queens, he was arrested and beaten by NYPD officers at the age of 15, after he and his brother stole from a prostitute who had failed to pay Adams back for errands he’d run for her while she was injured, according a retelling of the story in the Atlantic. “He has lived a lot of regular life experiences — unfortunate ones,” said Adam Clayton Powell IV, a friend and former state assemblymember, “but ones that have built his character and have made him who he is.” Crime, and his own history with it, was the centerpiece of the Adams campaign, and it was enough to set him apart from a field of dozen rivals. But the mayor has national ambitions, too, though they are not as easily defined as, say, a presidential run, or an ideological crusade. Instead, he wants the party to free itself of litmus tests, lanes and labels.
“Politics is about reaching inside somebody and telling them something about themselves,” said Evan Thies, a senior campaign adviser who still helps manage Adams’ politics. “And the way Eric is doing that is by saying, ‘Look, I’m unapologetic about who I am — and who I am is multitudes. Who you are is multitudes.’ You don’t have to be a narrow version of yourself. By pushing back when anyone tells him he can’t be that person, he makes people feel comfortable about themselves.”
During the campaign, it didn’t take long for Adams to notice that while he restated a simple message tied to his own story — “public safety is a prerequisite to prosperity” — the other candidates were, in his estimation, trying to be “heard” rather than “felt” on policy and politics. “Look at the people I ran against. They were scholars. They were extremely bright. Maya Wiley, Shaun Donovan. Uh, for God sakes, Ray McGuire! I sat down in a restaurant with Ray McGuire, and he ordered a complete meal, speaking French. I’m like, ‘Damn,’” he says. “But Democrats need to start wanting to be felt. You go into these meetings and people start saying, ‘I passed bill HR such-and-such,’ and, ‘Do you know the Child Safety Act?’ It’s just not resonating with people.””