While destructive winds are blown by the current administration, one notices alternative crosswinds rising in news outlets other than the circus news outlets. Here are a few examples:
Big businesses want lower taxes. Cities—and many of the people who live in them—want lower rates of homelessness. Lately, the compatibility of these two desires is being tested, as local governments across the U.S. float a new strategy to help the growing number of unsheltered people on their streets: Asking businesses to pay a greater share in funding aid. [Sarah Holder, citylab.com]
Solicitor Andre Davis, Baltimore, joined a growing movement of cities suing Big Oil over their contributions to climate change. It’s following in the footsteps of 12 other cities, including New York and San Francisco—but it’s naming significantly more companies and offenses in the case for climate reparations. [Atlantic]
The President’s ire with and dissing of US intelligence is for good personal reasons. The intelligence community has been watching Donald for many years because of his foreign associations and his foreign investment practices. Donald knows they know . . .
Speaking of intelligence services, the United States is the premier practitioner of cyber war and has been at it since the cold war. It is only in recent years that other nations are becoming good enough to hack US practices which they turn around and use on the US. This makes the nation vulnerable to actual cyber warfare – better than a bullet war in that not too many will die intentionally. However, knocking out banking systems, electricity, major manufacturing centers and water utilities is easy to do and has devastating effects; one doesn’t need 2,000 bombers and fighter planes to bomb a manufacturing center as we did against Germany in the Second World War.
In his new book, The Perfect Weapon, David Sanger points to ‘Operation Olympic Games’, where Sanger credits George W and Obama with overseeing the operation which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. The North Koreans could only suspect American cyber war was behind the excessive failure of their missile testing program. Despite Donald’s simplistic understanding of power, American cyber capability, still the stealthiest and most powerful in the world, can eliminate everything from a nation’s economy to Putin’s net worth. But cyber warfare, because it is easy and not physically destructive like bullet wars, is a one-up game: If nation A does this, then nation B will retaliate by raising the stakes. Not really a big deal to pull off. Cyber war is more like poker than it is like football.
A woman who worked in a restaurant a little more than a year ago has won a primary against a ten-term democratic Representative. She’s a firecracker! Keep track of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. [Politico.com]
Finally, for an entertaining (or frightful) view of the coming elections, do not watch circus news – watch fivethirtyeight.com or politico.com or read the Atlantic magazine or the New Yorker magazine or simply watch balanced news from PBS. All these sources are rational, factual and restore one’s faith in real news.
Ancient Mariner