DL Open Thread: Thursday, September 14, 2023

Ho-kay.

Meet Jack Smith’s Deputy. Proof, I guess, that not everybody who attends Notre Dame sucks:

According to one former law school classmate, Cooney’s path to public service began with his upbringing in a “very Irish Catholic family.” Cooney’s father, Joseph Cooney, who passed away last year, didn’t just pass his name and a love of the New York Yankees onto his son. He also instilled in Cooney, who grew up in Northern Virginia’s D.C. suburbs, what the classmate described as a “sense of duty.”

The younger Cooney followed his father’s footsteps to Notre Dame University and to the legal profession. At Notre Dame in the late 1990’s, Cooney displayed both an interest in government and early ambition. Archives of the school newspaper show that Cooney was a writer and a political columnist. He wrote about his frustration with “classic Washington power-politics at work” and campaign finance “corruption.” While he criticized both parties, Cooney made his own allegiances clear in a 1997 column where he suggested the country needed a new “progressivism.”

“The American people lie in wait for an attractive and appealing political movement which they can grab hold of,” Cooney wrote. “The answer lies in a new Left.”

During college, Cooney tutored local children as part of a “neighborhood study help program.” He would later credit the experience with helping hone presentation schools he used at trial.

Could Taylor Swift Be Democrats’ Secret Weapon?  I think it’s possible:

MSNBC’s Ari Melber and Democratic strategist Chai Komanduri looked at how Taylor Swift’s involvement in politics could teach a key lesson ahead of the 2024 election.

The host, who argued that Swift is “reaching people in a way that is far broader than any other artist in earlier digital eras,” began his segment on Swift Wednesday with a clip from her 2020 documentary “Miss Americana.”

The clip showed Swift in 2018 standing by her decision to speak out against Republican Marsha Blackburn, who was running for Senate, adding “these aren’t your dad’s celebrities and these aren’t your dad’s Republicans.”

It was Swift’s first time speaking out about politics, leading to later posts like one in which she shared a photo of “Biden Harris” cookies ahead of the 2020 election.

“Taylor Swift has a lot of Republican fans and it was a risk for her to stick her neck out and say what she believed and say who she supported, there was a risk involved, but there was courage and people respond to courage,” said Komanduri, noting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) courage also appeals to young Americans.

Swift is at least as ubiquitous as Donald Trump.  I think she will have a large impact on 2024.

Eat Less Meat.  Eat Less Dairy.  Help Save The Planet.  We’ve all kinda known this.  But here’s one more reason why the demand for meat and dairy drives environmental degradation:

Cows are often described as climate change criminals because of how much planet-warming methane they burp. But there’s another problem with livestock farming that’s even worse for the climate and easier to overlook: To feed the world’s growing appetite for meat, corporations and ranchers are chopping down more forests and trampling more carbon-sequestering grasslands to make room for pastures and fields of hay. Ruminants, like cattle, sheep, and goats, need space to graze, and animal feed needs space to grow. The greenhouse gases unleashed by this deforestation and land degradation mean food systems account for one-third of the world’s human-generated climate pollution. 

Climate policies and investment focus heavily on fossil fuels and the energy sector, but slashing agricultural emissions is also crucial to keeping planetary warming below catastrophic levels, said Lini Wollenberg, the study’s co-author.

“There’s enough evidence to show that if we don’t shift our diets, then we will not meet the 1.5 degree Celsius target by 2100,” said Wollenberg, who researches climate change and food systems at CGIAR and the University of Vermont. “Agriculture has to be addressed.”

Texas Is 2022’s Book-Banning Champ:

Texas made the most attempts to ban or restrict books in 2022, according to a new report from the American Library Association (ALA).

Last year, there were 1,269 documented censorship attempts to restrict 2,571 unique titles – the highest number ever recorded by ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom and double the 729 book challenges made in 2021.

Texas made 93 attempts to restrict access to over 2,300 books.

The book ban movement, has been gaining speed in recent years across the US, particularly in Republican-led states, and is becoming a central theme in religious-political activism. Often the books contain issues related to LGBTQ+ communities or race.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison was the most challenged book in the state, on grounds it contained sexually explicit content. Other challenged books include Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, and other books with LGBTQ+ or anti-racism themes.

This is as good a time as any to mention that the Arden Library Gild will hold a Banned Books Month in October, and that it will feature a (non-) dramatic reading of a very funny children’s book that some parents somewhere have seen fit to ban.  Oh, the Guest Reader?:

https://dameunderstudy.com/

I’ll have more as we get closer to the event.  No charge for kids, suggested $5 donation for adults.

What do you want to talk about?