Today’s comic by Matt Bors is offline and chill:
If Donald Trump manages to stay in office for his entire term, he has another 1,154 days of potential golfing before leaving the White House. |
• Building a wall that can’t be seen:
“President Trump’s vision of a ‘big, beautiful’ wall along the Mexican border may never be realized, and almost certainly not as a 2,000-mile physical structure spanning sea to sea.”
“But in a systematic and less visible way, his administration is following a blueprint to reduce the number of foreigners living in the United States — those who are undocumented and those here legally — and overhaul the U.S. immigration system for generations to come.”
“Across agencies and programs, federal officials are wielding executive authority to assemble a bureaucratic wall that could be more effective than any concrete and metal one. While some actions have drawn widespread attention, others have been put in place more quietly.”
Winners of 2017 Epson International Pano Awards for best panoramic photos announced: Here is one of the 24 to be found at the link:
• Public housing authority is pondering community solar for NYC rooftops:
They could be ripe for solar panels, but the overwhelming majority of residents and business owners inside are renters with no control over those sunny patches of real estate. [...]
In January, the authority will start reviewing bids for phase one of a project to increase the amount of solar power generated in the city. It's a small step, but one could that could help grow the market for urban solar power. The goal is to install 25 megawatts of solar panels atop the city's public housing buildings, enough capacity to power 6,600 households, as part of New York City's 100 percent renewable commitment.
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• Paul Pillar blasts what he calls misuse of terrorist lists:
President Trump’s placement of North Korea on the official U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism continues a manipulation, by several administrations, of this list for reasons other than terrorism. Neither an earlier removal of North Korea from this list (by the George W. Bush administration in 2008) nor Trump’s return of North Korea to the list this week had anything to do with any changes in North Korea’s conduct as far as terrorism is concerned. [...]
Other administrations’ misuse of the state sponsor list has been a sloppy way of expressing disapproval of regimes they didn’t like. The sloppiness hides how such regimes may exhibit multiple forms of objectionable conduct, each posing its own problems and each of which can be addressed through different means. Blurring everything together into a miasma of undifferentiated rogue-state behavior undermines the possibility of using diplomacy and carefully crafted incentives to ameliorate any one form of objectionable conduct, be it terrorism or weapons proliferation or something else, even if the United States can’t solve every problem it has with a regime.
• Is the answer to an end of net neutrality building our own locally owned internet? Jason Koebler writes:
Net neutrality as a principle of the federal government will soon be dead, but the protections are wildly popular among the American people and are integral to the internet as we know it. Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors, net neutrality must be protected by a populist revolution in the ownership of internet infrastructure and networks.
In short, we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States.
• Serbian slaughterer Ratko Mladić sentenced to life for genocide and war crimes:
More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Mladic was found guilty at the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague of 10 offences involving extermination, murder and persecution of civilian populations. [...]
The verdict was disrupted for more than half an hour when he asked the judges for a bathroom break. After he returned, defence lawyers requested that proceedings be halted or shortened because of his high blood pressure. The judges denied the request. Mladić then stood up shouting “this is all lies” and “I’ll fuck your mother”. He was forcibly removed from the courtroom. The verdicts were read in his absence.
• Wired: “Tech as we know it would not exist without immigrants”:
Innovation is bred when diverse viewpoints intersect, and that only happens if you can get all of those diverse ideas in the room. As Silicon Valley has emerged as a beacon for the most groundbreaking companies, its ability retain its ordination is reliant on attracting a steady supply of the best ideas—regardless of their country of origin.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Hmm. Roy Moore. That reminds me, isn’t there a big name in DC who’s also a serial sexual harasser? Greg Dworkin remembers who it is, then shares top picks for big issue long reads for the holiday. Some of these Trump “populists” are serious weirdos, man.