End the Globalization Gravy Train

https://americanmind.org/memo/end-the-globalization-gravy-train/

Take another example: we have known for some time that members of unions are less likely to drink and more likely to maintain their familial commitments. We have also learned that these benefits appear independent of the (obviously important) wage benefits of union membership. Social capital, and the mediating institutions that cultivate it, really are useful. But in virtually every major campaign of recent decades, the donors have demanded the denouncement of unions and their pernicious commercial effects. And so denounce them we have.

 

The secret garden

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17770988/google-earth-mount-lico-discovery-secret-mozambique-rainforest-expedition

How Google Earth led a team of scientists to discover an untouched mountaintop rainforest

The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/magazine/marie-gluesenkamp-perez.html

When Gluesenkamp Perez arrived on Capitol Hill, she tried to find commonalities with her new colleagues. She didn’t have much success. “I’m like: ‘Oh, your bio says you’re a small-business owner. What’s your business?’” she told Politico at the time. “They’re like, ‘Oh, we have a family real estate brokerage firm.’” One of the few friendships she did strike up was with Jared Golden, a third-term Democratic representative from Maine. Golden was first elected in 2018 — part of the anti-Trump wave in which 31 Democrats won in districts that Trump carried just two years earlier. But by 2023, Golden was one of only five Democrats still in Congress who represented Trump districts. He had a little more company in the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, but just barely. At its peak in 2010, the Blue Dogs had 54 members, but after the 2022 elections, only 14 remained. Then half of them left in a dispute over the group’s direction. With the coalition having dwindled to seven members, Golden was asked to lead it.

In his short time in Congress, Golden, a millennial Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had established himself as one of its most independent-minded members. Representing Maine’s almost entirely rural Second Congressional District, he was one of only four Democrats who deviated from the party during the vote on Trump’s first impeachment (two of them subsequently became Republicans) and the only Democrat to vote against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion Build Back Better Act (over a tax break for the wealthy); at the same time, he voted for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and Biden’s $700 billion Inflation Reduction Act. “The Republican Party spends millions of dollars telling people I’m a progressive,” Golden told me. “The Progressive Caucus spends time telling people I’m a conservative. A lot of people, especially the media, like to call me a moderate. I would say I’m none of these things and I’m all of these things. And my constituents are too.”

I Filmed Plants For 15 years | Time-lapse Compilation

What it took to reopen one of the nation’s busiest ports: Transcript

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/07/02/baltimore-port-ship-francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse

78 days after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after it was struck by a cargo ship, the Port of Baltimore is back in business.

The cleanup involved more than 2,000 people, 18 barges, 13 floating cranes, 10 excavators and 22 tugboats.

Today, On Point: What it took to reopen one of the nation’s busiest ports.