Jacobin Magazine: Populist Billionaires

The paradox at the heart of these populist right-wing movements is that while they are products of popular anger — and appear a rejection of the globalized, hyperconnected world extolled by the elite — it’s also segments of this elite that are helping power these movements.

These aren’t outliers. A study last year found that just ten wealthy donors made up more than half the donations for EU referendum campaigns, with pro-Brexit donors making up six of those ten. One of these donors was Peter Hargreaves, the founder of a financial services company, who donated £3.2 million to the Leave.EU campaign. [...]

This isn’t limited to the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, the largest donor to Geert Wilders’ far right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an American organization that funds various conservative and Islamophobic outlets, including Jihad Watch. The center gave the PVV €108,244 in 2015, the largest individual contribution in the Dutch political system in a single year, though it’s donated to the party over the course of a number of years, as well as paying for Wilders’s trips to the United States. [...]

All this at first seems counter-intuitive. After all, it’s generally assumed that xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes are the domain of the white working class, which goes to explain the success of Trump and Brexit among such voters. But data analyses like this one from Vox paint a more complicated picture. It suggests that the most active elite donors have significantly harsher anti-immigration and authoritarian views than others, including other wealthy people who aren’t political donors. 

None of this is to say that these movements and ideas are simply astroturfed. They’re not. Nor is it to say that the far right would be unsuccessful without the backing of big donors. A party founded by actual Nazis nearly won the Austrian elections despite the country’s public funding of elections, and Marine Le Pen had tremendous success despite the strict restrictions on French campaign finance laws (though she, too, comes from less than humble beginnings).

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Haaretz: Israeli Leftist Politics as Therapy

There are other arguments and considerations, very relevant ones, that can and should be made against this argument. But in the heat of debate, we tend not to notice that the human rights argument is inherently problematic even before being confronted by other arguments. And that’s because ending the occupation cannot be expected to lead to any improvement in the area of human rights. Just the opposite. The probable alternative – Hamas, or even the Palestinian Authority – would evidently be even worse for the Palestinians than Israeli military rule. So whoever wishes to make the case solely on the basis of human rights could easily end up substantiating the idea of perpetuating the occupation rather than ending it. Having already brought this conundrum up on occasion, mostly to the sort of people who strive to repress it, I’m familiar with the next step in the debate. But, they say to me, what the Palestinians do to the Palestinians is their business. If others end up committing even greater injustices, that doesn’t sanction the injustices we’re committing. We are responsible for our own actions, not for the actions of others, they say. [...]

Forgive me for returning to the same word again, but it truly seems the most apt: narcissism. Because the concerns of these people are limited to themselves and their consciences. For them, politics is basically a form of therapy. It’s all about the self and not others, about the self-portrait reflected in the mirror, not about responsibility toward other human beings, not about reality. It’s a decorative ornament bestowed by a “clear” conscience. In reality, it’s the manifestation of a yearning to be free from the political, from this complicated and unclean world, for the sake of personal purity. And the more attractive it strives to paint itself, the uglier it is. [...]

People who seek to cleanse their consciences at the expense of others’ suffering do not inspire respect. Especially when they adopt a pose of feeling sorry for those whom they’re quite prepared to sacrifice.

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Politico: When Nazis filled Madison Square Garden

Anxious to find precedents for the frightening and ultimately deadly white nationalist, “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, some media outlets have likened the images of the recent mayhem in Virginia to the chilling ones of the German-American Bundrally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis. [...]

“I don’t see much of a difference, quite frankly, between the Bund and these groups, in their public presence,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of “Swastika Nation,” a history of the German American Bund. “The Bund had its storefronts in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles — today’s groups are also hanging out in the public space, but in this case, they’re on the internet and anyone can access their ‘storefronts,’ or websites, and their philosophy, if you can call it that, is essentially the same.”

For the Bund, the unnerving 1939 Madison Square Garden rally was at once the organization’s high point and—as a result of the shock and revulsion it caused—its death knell. It’s too soon to know exactly what effect Charlottesville—which was smaller, but more violent than the Bund’s 1939 demonstration—will have on white nationalists or how the American public, which is still processing the horrific event, will ultimately respond to it. Will Charlottesville be the beginning of the end of this reborn generation of American Nazis? To foretell where we could be headed, you need to know how the Bund’s version of it all played out 78 years ago — and how this time is different. [...]

One year ahead of the outbreak of World War II, Berlin still hoped for good relations with Washington. The Reich refused to give Kuhn’s organization either financial or verbal support, lest it further alienate the Roosevelt administration, which had already made clear its extreme distaste for the Nazi ideology. Berlin went so far as to forbid German nationals in the United States from joining the German American Bund.

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CityLab: Charting the Planet's Path to 100% Renewable Energy

Drawing on earlier analyses, the researchers estimate how much energy storage capacity each nation would need to meet fluctuating supply and demand. To move to 100 percent renewable by 2050 (and 80 percent by 2030, the study’s other benchmark), no energy mix is quite the same: Sudan might rely heavily on rooftop solar panels, while Switzerland would depend on hydroelectric. The U.S. would lean on wind power. If these plans were fully deployed, 58 percent of the world’s energy would come from solar, 37 percent from wind, and the rest from hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal, and wave energy. Worldwide, all households, businesses, and governments would switch to electric appliances and heating systems—plus cars, trains, boats, planes, and heavy-duty vehicles.

That level of transformation sounds daunting, and incredibly costly: Jacobson and co-authors peg the upfront cost of installing nearly 50 terawatts’ worth of wind, water, and solar technologies around the world at an astounding $125 trillion.

But that’s cheap, considering the alternatives, they write. A massive transition among the 139 nations that ratified the Paris agreement may be the only way of meeting the ambitious goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. By 2050, decarbonized grids could also prevent nearly 5 million deaths to air pollution every year, estimate Jacobson et al., and save an annual $28 trillion from a changing climate’s catastrophic impacts to coastlines, fisheries, and agriculture, and deaths caused by heat, famine, drought, wildfires, and severe weather.

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The Conversation: Introducing ‘dark DNA’ – the phenomenon that could change how we think about evolution

But in some cases we’re faced with a mystery. Some animal genomes seem to be missing certain genes, ones that appear in other similar species and must be present to keep the animals alive. These apparently missing genes have been dubbed “dark DNA”. And its existence could change the way we think about evolution. [...]

The first clue was that, in several of the sand rat’s body tissues, we found the chemical products that the instructions from the “missing” genes would create. This would only be possible if the genes were present somewhere in the genome, indicating that they weren’t really missing but just hidden. [...]

This kind of dark DNA has previously been found in birds. Scientists have found that 274 genes are “missing” from currently sequenced bird genomes. These include the gene for leptin (a hormone that regulates energy balance), which scientists have been unable to find for many years. Once again, these genes have a very high GC content and their products are found in the birds’ body tissues, even though the genes appear to be missing from the genome sequences. [...]

So far, dark DNA seems to be present in two very diverse and distinct types of animal. But it’s still not clear how widespread it could be. Could all animal genomes contain dark DNA and, if not, what makes gerbils and birds so unique? The most exciting puzzle to solve will be working out what effect dark DNA has had on animal evolution.

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America Magazine: Making sense of the tension and contradictions in Kenya and Rwanda's elections

When the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and his party (the Jubilee Party of Kenya) won the election with 54 percent of the vote, the leader of the opposition National Super Alliance, Raila Odinga, cried foul, claiming electronic “voter theft.” Protests followed and turned violent in Odinga-supporting areas. Mr. Odinga has decided to take the results to the Kenyan Supreme Court, despite the local and international observers’ conclusion that the election was basically free and fair.

In contrast, the elections in Rwanda on Aug. 4 passed almost without incident. The incumbent, Paul Kagame, was re-elected for a third seven-year term with a somewhat astonishing 98.8 percent against two other candidates. There was no electoral violence, no public disputing of the outcome and no overt signs of electoral fraud. Apart, that is, from one candidate for presidency, Diana Rwigara, having nude photos of herself leaked onto the internet, probably to discredit her. [...]

While many see the result as a sign of repression, supporters of Kagame see it as a sign that his no-nonsense approach to rebuilding a country that was devastated by the mid-1990s genocide has grassroots support. There may be truth in that: Under Kagame’s authoritarian rule, the country’s economy has boomed. Described as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, Rwanda has had a GDP growth rate of around 8 percent, has reduced poverty levels, invested in infrastructure and technology, and is rated by the World Bank as the second best country to do business in in Africa (56th in the world). It is also rated by Transparency International as the third least corrupt country on the continent, ranking 50th out of 176 countries worldwide in 2016. [...]

However this should offer no consolation to the deeply fragile, though perhaps more democratic, Kenya. The political chaos that marks Kenyan elections and the corruption of the country’s political process does no one any good, least of all the economy. Kenyans need to take the positive aspects of Kagame’s success—anticorruption measures and economic growth—to heart. If they do, it is likely that it will afford Kenya a more certain and long-term stability and prosperity.

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Scientific American: People Furthest Apart on Climate Views Are Often the Most Educated

Looking at a nationally representative survey of views on stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution, nanotechnology, genetically modified views and climate change, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that respondents with the most education and the highest scores on scientific literacy tests had the most polarized beliefs.

On climate change, the researchers found that political identity was a more important signal of where respondents stood than their academic acumen or scientific sophistication. [...]

This is a manifestation of what researchers call motivated reasoning: a phenomenon where people evaluate facts and figures with a goal in mind, often signaling allegiance to a political group. [...]

To bridge the divide on climate change, he explained, disentangling the issue from its political trappings and focusing on tangible economic concerns—like dealing with sea-level rise—would give public officials a means to tackle the issue without jeopardizing their bona fides among their constituents.

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The Washington Post: The imaginary immigrant (and Muslim) takeover

This chart comes from the 2013 Transatlantic Trends survey conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Survey respondents were asked to estimate the percentage of the population in their country that was born abroad. The light blue bars reflects these guesses. The dark blue bars, on the other hand, reflect the actual percent of each country’s population that was born abroad, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Perhaps reflecting our nickname as a “nation of immigrants,” Americans mistakenly thought that 42 percent of people in this country had been born abroad. The actual share was less than a third that size, at 13 percent. That put us roughly in line with Great Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, though respondents in none of those other countries overestimated their immigrant population share as much as we did. [...]

In 2015, the Ipsos MORI Perils of Perception survey asked a similar question and found similar results: Nearly everywhere, people overestimated the share of immigrants walking among them. U.S. citizens’ guesstimate for the immigrant share was lower in this survey, though, at “only” 33 percent. [...]

That includes the United States, where respondents said they thought about 17 percent of the country was Muslim, whereas only about 1 percent actually is. The fact that Americans thought a sixth of the country practices Islam is especially striking when you consider that about half of Americans say they do not personally know a single Muslim person.

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Political Critique: V4 residents are confused about the EU and their place in it – and we have the data to prove it

In recent weeks, several polling institutes released their data on attitudes towards the EU in the V4 states. We collected some of them in an attempt to find common patterns and draw some conclusions – whether with success or not, judge for yourself.First, let’s have a look at the Eurobarometer data, collected several times a year by the EU itself. In general, respondents expressed trust in the EU: two separate surveys reported a rate of approval of between 46-30% and 57-35%. According to the first survey however, even the most EU-enthusiastic Hungarians are more anti rather than pro – but the region overall is nevertheless more optimistic about the union’s future than not. [...]

Back to Eurobarometer. Comparing the optimistic outlooks for the future to the respondents’ trust in their own governments seemingly confirms the slight dominance of EU-enthusiasm: the less a country trusts their government, the more they tend to trust the EU. Except the Czechs, who trust no one.

True though, that “trust” is pretty vague – and the surveys do enquire about attitudes more specifically, too. For example, the V4’s vast majority would support a common EU foreign policy (except for the Czechs, who are only mildly intrigued), and the support for a common security and defence policy is even stronger. [...]

So here’s a disappointingly banal conclusion: People are confused. The stark differences between polls attest to how unstable the political discourse – on the future of the EU, on refugees, etc. – is in the region. Domestic events, such as the mind-numbing hostility and ubiquity of anti-EU and anti-Soros propaganda in Hungary, or the sweeping wave of nation-wide anti-government protests in Poland, are also showing limited results.

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