First Thoughts: Why Immigration Reform Has A Better Chance Than Guns

Crazy Eddie's Motie News - what happens when the land runs out? Earthbound Misfit - the country next door to you run by an empire-seeking imperialist? Homeless on the High Desert - Montana Supreme Court sides with students on climate; Miss Cellania - a Christmas Venn diagram; The Rude Pundit - the immigrant "invasion" is just WMDs all over again. send tips to MBRU@crooksandliars.com read more

Far-right activist Cameron Macgregor explained the Republican Party hauntingly in a fifteen-second span. "The right is two things: It is Christian nationalism and white nationalism," Macgregor explained. "Blending those two things together is the project that we are engaged upon right now." Via Perplexity: MacGregor is also described as an entrepreneur, investor, and CEO of Ad Actum, a company focused on scaling platforms that fight censorship and protect free speech.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy. In the final months of his presidency, Joe Biden visited Angola.

On a long flight in the mid-aughts, I decided to read The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz. I thought of it like giving myself an assignment, the kind of thing I tended do when I was younger. I wanted to understand an argument I expected to disagree with. But this proved to be a mistake.

On Wednesday, California became the first state to issue a declaration of emergency regarding the avian flu (H5N1). That same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first severe case of the flu in a human on US soil and outbreaks in cow herds were detected in Southern California. Still, the threat to humans is low according to the CDC.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate change in isolation—without regard for other pressing issues like a decline in biodiversity, the contamination of freshwater sources, and the pollution of agricultural soils.  A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water.