Weekend Reads 7/27/19

Send back the Statue of Liberty

She has never contributed anything to our economy. In all these years, she has never held a job. She never paid taxes. In fact, she is homeless and has never had a roof over her head. U.S. citizens have spent hundreds of millions of dollars for her upkeep.

She is unmarried and doesn’t go to church. With a name like “Liberty,” she is obviously a woman of loose morals.

‘We’ve come to cash a check’

And so, again and again, we hear the bit about “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners” sitting “together at the table of brotherhood.” And we get the bit about King’s children one day living “in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” — only without the tenuously conditional qualifier “one day.” And we get that lovely bit about how “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” but with King’s future-tense vision of possibility twisted into a complacent lie of present-tense reality.

Safari tourist snaps could produce useful conservation data

The different methods all produced different ranges of population density estimates, but importantly, the estimate ranges from the tourist photos overlapped with the ranges from traditional methods, suggesting that the tourist picture results were comparable. The tourist method was the only one to even spot any cheetah within the study area—although there weren't enough individuals to calculate a density estimate.

Frank Luntz, the GOP’s message master, calls for climate action

Luntz played a role in turning the environment into a partisan battlefield. During President George W. Bush’s first term, his infamous memo warned Republican party leaders that they were losing “the environmental communications battle,” an issue on which Bush was “most vulnerable.” He advised them to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around climate change and drop “global warming” for the less scary-sounding “climate change.”