Keiko
A must-watch video on how Obama’s climate policy efforts will be his most valuable legacy and why we must act on climate now.
Bill McKibben in the New Yorker on the Standing Rock Sioux pipeline fight:
The events at Standing Rock also allow Americans to realize who some of the nation’s most important leaders really are. The fight for environmental sanity—against pipelines and coal ports and other fossil-fuel infrastructure—has increasingly been led by Native Americans, many of whom are in that Dakota camp today. They speak with real authority—no one else has lived on this continent for the longterm. They see the nation’s history more clearly than anyone else, and its possible future as well. For once, after all these centuries, it’s time to look through their eyes. History offers us no chances to completely erase our mistakes. Occasionally, though, we do get a chance to show we learned something.
Word.
Many Northwest tribes have made the journey to North Dakota to join the Standing Rock Sioux. The Lummi Totem Pole journey also stopped at Standing Rock.
Check out this “extremely cool” art installation in Seattle’s Pioneer Square today.
And finally, a girl eating cotton candy at a recent Mariner’s game goes viral—another local hero.
Dan
The title says it all: “Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine.” Now go share it on Facebook!
You might share this story from The New York Times Magazine, wondering aloud to your friends whether our democracy has been fundamentally altered by this publishing-and-advertising platform of unprecedented scale. Or you might just relax and find some memes to share from one of countless pages that will let you air your political id. But for the page operators, the question is irrelevant to the task at hand. Facebook’s primacy is a foregone conclusion, and the question of Facebook’s relationship to political discourse is absurd — they’re one and the same. As Rafael Rivero put it to me, “Facebook is where it’s all happening.”
John
Democracy Now covered the politics and substance around a new push for Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.
John Abbotts is a former Sightline research consultant who occasionally submits material to Weekend Reading.
