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Vermont Floods Show Limits of America’s Efforts to Adapt to Climate Change (Maria)
The authors write, “This week’s flooding in Vermont, in which heavy rainfall caused destruction even miles from any river, is evidence of an especially dangerous climate threat: Catastrophic flooding can increasingly happen anywhere, with almost no warning. And the United States, experts warn, is nowhere close to ready for that threat.”
How the Supreme Court’s Idea of Religious Freedom Could Resegregate the Country (DonkeyHotey)
From The New Republic: “The John Roberts court has had no problem treating cases dealing with religion like hand grenades: Pull the pin, throw it out the door, and let it immediately become someone else’s problem. In Dobbs, the court’s conservative majority ended the right to abortion, and now women are being told they must wait out in the car until they nearly bleed to death before the ‘life of the mother exception’ kicks in. As this havoc doesn’t affect the court, they consider it none of their business.”
The One Thing That Should Scare Trump at a Debate: The Man He Nearly Killed With COVID (Reader Jim)
The author writes, “As Donald Trump continues threatening to skip the Republican Party’s planned presidential primary debates, one of his rivals is making it clear why the former president may want to stay clear of him: Trump’s onetime debate coach and now unsparing critic, Chris Christie.”
Catastrophic Climate ‘Doom Loops’ Could Start In Just 15 Years (Sean)
The author writes, “Earth’s ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet’s warming climate has warned. According to the research, more than a fifth of the world’s potentially catastrophic tipping points — such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and the sudden transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna — could occur as soon as 2038.”
No Discipline for Texas Judge Who Used Racial Slur to Describe Latino Defendants (Reader Steve)
From the Houston Chronicle: “The complaint stems from a conversation [Emily] Miller had with Judge Allen Amos, who was at the time overseeing cases of people arrested on state criminal charges under Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s border crackdown, Operation Lone Star. The initiative targets migrants suspected of crossing the border illegally. The judge and the defense attorney had run into each other one day in court and were having a casual conversation during which Amos told Miller that the defendants coming through his court were not ‘your regular wetbacks.’”
Here Are 10 Shockingly Radical Things the Founding Fathers Said (Laura)
From The Intercept: “The Founding Fathers were mindlessly venerated for hundreds of years, until Americans who weren’t rich white men gained some input on this subject. They remain mindlessly venerated on the U.S. right, which loves them in the same way the U.S. right loves Jesus: i.e., without bothering to pay attention to what they actually said. This doesn’t mean the Founding Fathers were like Jesus, and indeed, many of them were standard-issue grotesques. But some of them did make startlingly progressive and even radical statements that later became inconvenient and hence have largely dropped out of history.”
