Why Republican Voters Say There’s ‘No Way in Hell’ Trump Lost ; Former CIA Director Whitewashes History in Self-Serving Memoir ; and More Picks 11/24
Why Republican Voters Say There’s ‘No Way in Hell’ Trump Lost (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “In Reuters interviews with 50 Trump voters, all said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate. Of those, 20 said they would consider accepting Biden as their president, but only in light of proof that the election was conducted fairly. Most repeated debunked conspiracy theories espoused by Trump, Republican officials and conservative media claiming that millions of votes were dishonestly switched to Biden in key states by biased poll workers and hacked voting machines. … The widespread rejection of the election result among Republicans reflects a new and dangerous dynamic in American politics: the normalization of false and increasingly extreme conspiracy theories among tens of millions of mainstream voters, according to government scholars, analysts and some lawmakers on both sides of the political divide.”
80 Percent of Those Who Died of COVID-19 in Texas County Jails Were Never Convicted of a Crime (Dana)
The author writes, “Over 230 people have died from Covid-19 in Texas’s correctional facilities — and in county jails, nearly 80 percent of them were in pretrial detention and hadn’t even been convicted of a crime, according to a new report. A team of researchers … found that at least 231 people have died of Covid-19 in the state’s correctional facilities between March and October. This report only looked at state-operated prisons and county-operated jails, as researchers were focused on how Texas’s Covid-19 prison policies had fared. The 231 figure is likely to be a conservative count.”
SpaceX Mars City: Werner Herzog Issues a Stark Warning to Elon Musk (Dan)
From Inverse: “Elon Musk wants to build a city on Mars, but Werner Herzog says the plan is unequivocally a ‘mistake.’ SpaceX CEO Musk has a plan to send the first humans to Mars in the mid-2020s, using the under-development Starship rocket. Once they get there, Musk wants to build out a self-sustaining, million-strong city on Mars by 2050. But famed film director Herzog tells Inverse there is a massive flaw in the latter half of Musk’s plan. In a blistering criticism, Herzog describes the idea as ‘an obscenity,’ and says humans should ‘not be like the locusts.’”
Former CIA Director John Brennan Whitewashes History in Shameless Self-Serving Memoir (Russ)
From CovertAction Magazine: “During the Vietnam War era, peace activists compared American war planners like Robert S. McNamara and Henry Kissinger to Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of War Production and Armaments who stood out for his lack of ideological zeal in supporting the Nazi cause. What motivated Speer, rather, was a cold and calculating careerism which was combined with a lack of regard for his country’s victims. Former CIA Director (2013-2017) John Brennan’s new memoir … reveals a man who displays some of the same qualities as Speer—and other American contemporaries. Particularly striking is the pride that he takes in helping to coordinate better bureaucratic procedure for carrying out drone strikes, which terrorized whole communities.”
Blue Whales Return to Sub-Antarctic Island of South Georgia After Near Local Extinction (Peg)
The author writes, “An international research team led by UK scientists has revealed the return of critically endangered Antarctic blue whales to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, 50 years after whaling all but wiped them out. The new study follows recent research that humpback whales are also returning to the region. The discovery, based on analysis of 30 years’ worth of sightings, photographs and underwater sound recordings, is crucial evidence in learning how the species is recovering following a ban on commercial whaling in the 1960s.”
The Past Stunk. As Part of a New Project, Scientists Are Resurrecting Its Smells (Dana)
The author writes, “Many paintings and books have illustrated the Battle of Waterloo, but what, exactly, did it smell like as an anxious Napoleon Bonaparte and his army retreated? An international team of researchers hopes to archive the olfactory experience of that pivotal historical moment as part of an ambitious new initiative to discover key scents of old Europe, from the perfumed to the putrid, and bring them to modern-day nostrils. Odeuropa’s goal is ‘to show that critically engaging our sense of smell and our scent heritage is an important and viable means for connecting and promoting Europe’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage,’ according to a description of the project, which just received a $3.3 million grant from a research and innovation arm of the European Union.”
