…a long, long time ago [DOT 23/5/23]

…it’s déjà vu all over again

On 22 October 1985, the treasury secretary, James A Baker III, told congressional leaders that if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling by the end of the month, the Reagan administration would pay the nation’s bills by taking back treasury securities in which social security had invested.
[…]
If Congress still didn’t raise the debt ceiling, the administration would borrow from the railroad retirement and military retirement trust funds.

If the impasse continued, it would begin selling gold from the US gold reserve “even though that could undercut confidence here and abroad based on the widespread belief that the gold reserve is the foundation of our financial system”, said Baker.
[…]
The comptroller general of the United States later found Baker’s raid on social security technically illegal but concluded nonetheless that Baker “did not act unreasonably” under the circumstances.
[…]
First, showdowns over the debt ceiling have been going on for a long time.

Second, they have often been fueled by soaring national debts due to Republican tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations.

The 1985 standoff involved a refusal by Senate Democrats to support a balanced budget, even though it was Reagan’s mammoth spending on the military and huge tax cut that had doubled the national debt in less than five years.

Finally, they have required Treasury secretaries to do extraordinary things to keep paying the nation’s bills notwithstanding, sometimes technically illegal.

Hence, there have never been “X-dates” at which time the treasury runs dry. There are just ever more extreme government bookkeeping measures.

But here’s the difference this time. Previous standoffs have been carefully crafted dramas in which both sides demonstrate their commitments to their position, knowing full well how the play will end – with the debt ceiling lifted.

This time, though, gonzo lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and nihilists like the current Republican frontrunner for president have considerable influence.
[…]
Their only commitment is to power – gaining dominance over, and submission from, Democrats, progressives, putative “coastal elites” and so-called “deep state” bureaucrats.

For them, this is not play-acting. It’s not for show. It’s for real. If they don’t get their way, they’re prepared to blow up the economy.

…I dunno if robert reich has the right of it…but his particular approach suggests denying the right their default by, if necessary, cooking the books & letting them take the government to court to make their case for bankrupting the state

If Kevin McCarthy and his band of radicals don’t like this, let them take the Biden administration to court.

Let House Republicans argue in the courts that the 1917 act establishing the debt ceiling has precedence over section 4 of the 14th amendment, which requires that the “the validity of the public debt …. shall not be questioned.”

Let them claim that the debt-ceiling act takes precedence over other acts of Congress that require the president, for example, to pay interest on the federal debt, distribute social security benefits, and pay bills from defense contractors and everyone else who has relied on the full faith and credit of the United States.

Let McCarthy and House Republicans make the case before the courts that they have standing to sue Biden for paying the government’s debts as they come due.

Finally, let McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the other loonies demand openly and publicly in court that Biden not honor the full faith and credit of the United States – with the predictable results that the cost of borrowing soars, bond markets crash, the stock market plummets, the global economy is in turmoil, the dollar’s status as the world’s major currency is up for grabs, America is plunged into a deep recession, and millions of jobs are lost.

In other words, leave it to McCarthy and House Republicans to seek to enforce their dangerous nonsense about the debt ceiling – so Americans can see clearly what they’re up to.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/22/republicans-debt-ceiling-marjorie-taylor-greene-economy

…the rest of us…could do worse than listen to the voices of experience, I guess

“Negotiation isn’t some arcane, esoteric art,” he says. “It’s everyday communication: how we communicate with ourselves, first of all – but also with our friends, our family, our colleagues and our community.” In fact, he estimates that, in any given crisis, as much as 80% of his time and energy is spent negotiating with the client (often the hostage’s family or employer).

“Dealing with the kidnappers is easy,” he says; I laugh, despite myself. “It is!” Walker insists. “It becomes a transaction: they have something we want, and we have something they want – it’s just getting to the point where we can safely exchange that.” Contrast that with shadowy, unspoken family dynamics or the clashing egos and hidden agendas on an executive leadership team, and the “so-called ‘bad guys’” start to seem relatively straightforward to wrangle.
[…]
“It was then that I realised that how to get people onside is a learnable skill,” says Walker. It comes down to “emotional self-regulation”: learning to manage one’s ego and emotional responses so as to counter the deleterious effects of stress, communicate more effectively – and secure a better outcome.

For this reason, even through a live crisis like a hostage situation, Walker would encourage clients and colleagues alike to prioritise their wellbeing with rest, nutrition and movement. He would even remind the kidnappers to sleep and drink water if they seem to be struggling to function. Walker calls this entering your “battle rhythm”, whereby you prepare your mind and body for a tense, lengthy negotiation. “It’s taking control of what you can, and not worrying about the rest,” he says.

Mindfulness exercises such as box-breathing and visualising a successful outcome can also help boost resilience in the face of conflict. The chemical, bodily reaction to an emotion such as fear or anger can pass in fewer than 90 seconds, Walker says – if you choose not to feed it. “It is that ability to know, ‘I’m being hit by a tsunami of emotion here’ – and to feel it,” he says. “Don’t shy away from it, or pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Much of Walker’s advice wouldn’t feel out of place on Headspace, the beloved mindfulness app. But that’s just proof of the universality of mindset training, he says. “I’m not pretending that I’ve created some brand-new way of doing things … it’s been with us thousands of years.” Everyone from Tibetan monks to ultra-marathon runners have benefited from techniques to control the ego and quieten the mind. If it seems like a particular challenge today, Walker suggests, it may be because the times are just so noisy and reactive. He points to the polarity on social media. “Heaven knows the world needs better conversations right now … Everybody’s shouting, no one’s listening.”
[…]
With practice, he suggests, it’s possible to create a calm, balanced and objective state of mind that you can readily assume whenever you find yourself under pressure. He likens it to creating your own internal “red centre”, or crisis comms HQ, to which you can mentally retreat when faced with an unpleasant or unexpected situation, and have faith in your decision-making.

…I’ll come back to that…but as far as that part goes…certainly no shortage of people who could do with something along those lines

On Monday morning, a verified Twitter account called Bloomberg Feed shared an ominous tweet. Beneath the words, “Large Explosion near The Pentagon Complex in Washington, D.C. – Initial Report,” it showed an image of a huge plume of black smoke next to a vaguely Pentagon-like building.

On closer inspection, the image was a fake, likely generated by artificial intelligence, and the report of an explosion was quickly debunked — though not before it was picked up by large accounts, including the Russian state media organ Russia Today. The tweet may have also briefly moved the stock market, as the Dow Jones Industrial Index dropped 85 points within four minutes, then rebounded just as quickly.
[…]
“Just looking at the image itself, that’s not the Pentagon,” said Nate Hiner, a captain with the fire department in Arlington, Va., where the Pentagon is located. “I have no idea what that building is. There’s no building that looks like that in Arlington.”

Yet the mechanisms involved, from the image’s amplification by large propaganda accounts to the almost instantaneous response from the stock market, suggest the potential for more such mischief if AI tools continue to make inroads in fields such as social media moderation, news writing and stock trading.

And Twitter is looking like an increasingly likely vector, as new owner Elon Musk has gutted its human workforce, laid off a team that used to fact-check viral trends, and changed account verification from a manual authentication process to one that’s largely automated and pay-for-play. The signature blue badges once indicated authority for public figures, large organizations, celebrities and others at risk of impersonation. Now, Twitter awards them to any one willing to pay $8 a month and confirm their phone number.
[…]
“This isn’t an AI issue, per se,” said Renée DiResta, research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory and an expert on how misinformation circulates. “Anyone with Photoshop experience could have made that image — ironically, could probably have done it better. But it’s a look at how signals that help people decide whether information about breaking news is trustworthy on Twitter have been rendered useless, just as the capacity to create high-resolution unreality has been made available to everyone.”

…not per se, maybe…but if AI is a synonym for “can be output at scale for negligible effort”…the last thing we need is a bigger bullshit firehose…they done flooded the zone already…I don’t know what it looks like if nothing breaks the surface tension to draw a breath…but I can’t imagine it’d be better than what we got…& what we got…ain’t that great?

One of the first accounts to post about the fake event was a verified account called OSINTdefender, which tweeted the report of the explosion, along with the bogus image, to its 336,000 followers at 10:04 a.m. The building in the photograph looks little like the Pentagon, but it bears some the hallmarks of being AI-generated. The tweet has been deleted.

Reached via Twitter, the owner of the OSINTDefender account said they had first heard the report on the social platform Discord a few minutes earlier from a user who goes by the handle “Walter Bloomberg.” They said the image came from the Facebook page, since deleted, of a person who claimed to work in Arlington.

In the next few minutes, other large accounts posted similarly worded false reports on Twitter, including Walter Bloomberg, who goes by the same handle on both platforms. His 10:06 a.m. tweet garnered at least 730,000 views.

Many of the accounts that reshared it pose as aggregators of financial news, including a 386,000-follower account with the handle @financialjuice, named “Breaking Market News,” and another account called “Bloomberg Feed” that is unrelated to the real Bloomberg.

Some of the accounts had blue “verified” check marks, while legitimate organizations that shared the truth did not. The official account for the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, which polices the Pentagon, doesn’t pay for a blue check mark, and Twitter has not given it a gray check mark indicating it’s a verified institution. The agency retweeted a local law-enforcement message saying there was “NO explosion” at 10:27 a.m.; the tweet had only 78,000 views as of 4 p.m.

…in some respects the people you’d expect to know about this sort of thing aren’t among the targets of opportunity for your big lie

Hiner, the Arlington Fire captain who handles the Northern Virginia department’s emergency communications, said it took about five minutes for him to realize the reports on Twitter were fake.
[…]
“There were no medical calls, no fire calls, no incidents whatsoever,” he said.

That’s when he finally pulled up social media himself, expecting to see some eyewitness accounts on Twitter. But again, there was nothing. All he saw was the doctored photo of the explosion.

At that point, he reached out to spokesmen at the Defense Department and at the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. By 10:27 a.m., he’d posted on Arlington Fire’s Twitter account that the reports were false.
[…]
Hiner said that he sometimes receives odd inquiries from Arlington residents after seeing a firetruck in their neighborhood or gets misguided calls based on scanner traffic. But he cannot recall another time, he said, “in which an emergency incident was being reported on social media that was just 100 percent inaccurate.”
[…]
For the most part, mainstream media outlets have successfully refuted the misinformation, and the world has marched on as before. Still, some hoaxes have wrought chaos, to varying degrees. In 2013, a fake tweet about an attack on the White House touched off a quick drop in financial markets.
[…]
Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey (D) said local governments like Arlington’s face an increasingly steep challenge in responding to misinformation as AI makes it easier to rapidly generate plausible fakes. He said officials try to guide residents to follow local authorities on Twitter and turn to them for reliable information rather than “some random Twitter handle.” Arlington County, and its police and fire/EMS departments are all verified with a “silver check” on Twitter, indicating that they’re government-run accounts.
[…]
“Our number of followers pales in comparison to some of the most popular social media accounts out there. You always run the risk that they’re not going to penetrate as deeply,” Dorsey said. But “absent any magic bullet, where these platforms ensure only the best truthful information is relayed, I think it’s the best we can do.”

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/22/pentagon-explosion-ai-image-hoax/

…meanwhile…some things maybe ought to be able to move the needle

Climate litigation poses a financial risk to fossil fuel companies because it lowers the share price of big polluters, research has found.
[…]
The study [to be published on Tuesday by LSE’s Grantham Research Institute], which is currently being peer reviewed, analysed 108 climate crisis lawsuits around the world between 2005 and 2021 against 98 companies listed in the US and Europe. It found that the filing of a new case or a court decision against a company reduced its expected value by an average of 0.41%.
[…]
The stock market responded most strongly in the days after cases against carbon majors, which include the world’s largest energy, utility and materials firms, cutting the relative value of those companies by an average of 0.57% after a case was filed and by 1.5% after an unfavourable judgment.
[…]
“We didn’t know before if the markets cared about climate litigation,” said Misato Sato, lead author of the study. “It’s the first evidence supporting what was suspected before; that polluting firms and especially carbon majors now face litigation risk, in addition to transition and physical risk.”

Researchers also found share prices fell more in reaction to novel cases involving a new form of legal argument or filed in a new jurisdiction.
[…]
Another important case with a more complex picture was brought against Shell by the Dutch NGO Milieudefensie, which argued that the company had an obligation to reduce carbon emissions from its global operations,

Shell’s relative value actually rose by 1.9% when the lawsuit was filed in April 2019. But two years later, when a court at The Hague ordered Shell to cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of 2030 compared with 2019 levels, it fell by 3.8%. Shell is appealing against the decision, but is supposed to comply in the meantime.
[…]
There has been a surge in climate litigation against fossil fuel firms and other polluting industries in recent years, with many cases challenging corporate inaction on the climate crisis and attempts to spread misinformation, and companies are increasingly recognising it as a risk.
[…]
According to BP’s climate-related financial disclosures, published alongside its annual report in April, changes in law and regulation, as well as shifting social attitudes, could have “adverse impacts” on its business by making it more likely to lose court cases and exposing it to greater environmental and legal liabilities. Legal proceedings, it warns, “could reduce our financial liquidity and our credit ratings”.
[…]
BP, for example, has been the subject of numerous climate-related claims, including those brought against the fossil fuel industry by towns, states and municipalities across the US, which are inching towards hearings in state court.

According to BP’s climate-related financial disclosures, published alongside its annual report in April, changes in law and regulation, as well as shifting social attitudes, could have “adverse impacts” on its business by making it more likely to lose court cases and exposing it to greater environmental and legal liabilities. Legal proceedings, it warns, “could reduce our financial liquidity and our credit ratings”.
[…]
Sato said it was too early to say if litigation was driving substantial changes in climate action among big polluters, but evidence that lawsuits affected share price or credit ratings could help influence corporate behaviour.

Andrew Coburn, the chief executive of the climate risk company Risilience, noted that defending a major lawsuit was rarely perceived well by the market, with expensive payouts and reputation damage causing short-term valuations to take a significant hit. “Risilience’s analysis suggests that damages could amount to 5% or more of a company’s revenue in the event of climate litigation.”

Coburn added that the increasing willingness of regulators across the UK and Europe to clamp down on perceived greenwashing “demonstrates additional financial risks for firms failing to present credible, ambitious and realistic climate-transition plans underpinned by transparent data”.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/22/big-polluters-share-prices-fall-climate-lawsuits-fossil-fuels-study

…it…ain’t nothing

BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company and Chevron are among the largest 21 polluters responsible for $5.4tn (£4.3tn) in drought, wildfires, sea level rise, and melting glaciers among other climate catastrophes expected between 2025 and 2050, according to groundbreaking analysis published in the journal One Earth.

It is the first time researchers have quantified the economic burden caused by individual companies that have extracted – and continue to extract – wealth from planetheating fossil fuels.

Amid growing debate about who should bear the economic cost of the climate crisis, the paper, titled Time to Pay the Piper, presents a moral case for the carbon corporations most responsible for the climate breakdown to use some of their “tainted wealth” to compensate victims.

The study considers this to be a substantial yet conservative price tag, as the methodology excludes the economic value of lost lives and livelihoods, species extinction and other biodiversity loss, as well as other wellbeing components not captured in GDP.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg of long-term climate damages, mitigation, and adaptation costs,” said co-author Richard Heede, co-founder and director of Climate Accountability Institute.

The study builds on the carbon majors database, which records the emissions of individual oil, gas and coal companies since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established and industry claims of scientific uncertainty about the climate crisis became untenable.
[…]
“As increasingly devastating storms, floods and sea level rise bring misery to millions of people every day, questions around reparations have come to the fore,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, a group of almost 2,000 civil society groups across 130 countries.
[…]
Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a climate and energy thinktank based in Kenya, said: “The case is clear for oil and gas companies to pay reparations for the harm their fossil fuels have caused. Not only has their dirty energy wrecked the climate, they have [in many cases] spent millions of dollars on lobbying and misinformation to prevent climate action.”
[…]
Overall, global economic damages to be expected from the climate crisis are estimated at $99tn between 2025 and 2050 – of which fossil fuel emissions are responsible for $69.6tn, according to more than 700 climate economists.

The study conservatively attributes one-third of these future climate costs to the global fossil fuel industry, and one-third each to governments and consumers.

This means the global fossil fuel industry is held to be to blame for at least $23.2tn of the climate-related economic losses expected over the next 25 years, or $893bn annually.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/19/fossil-fuel-firms-owe-climate-reparations-of-209bn-a-year-says-study

…but…while we’re on the roundabout…the swings go up & down

For almost 30 years, much of what went on at the secretive-sounding International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica was unreported and scarcely noticed. Whatever was said by delegations from its 168 member countries in its cavernous assembly hall – all mustard chairs, in-ear live interpreters, UN-style country place cards and views out to the Caribbean Sea – was seemingly of interest to only a smattering of environmental NGO types and a handful of representatives from vague-sounding international businesses.

Over the past 18 months, however, more attention has been turning towards the negotiations taking place inside the ISA’s brutalist HQ on the Kingston coast, where the authority has, since 1994, been tasked with deciding if and how mining the deep sea for metals and minerals – once the preserve of science fiction, now edging ever closer to reality – might start to take place n in international waters on the ocean floor.

There have been allegations of secrecy and interference against its governing body and of legal loopholes being exploited. After discussions chugged along quietly for decades, a growing community of campaigners, scientists and now governments are raising an urgent alarm about what’s happening within these walls. They argue that unless immediate action is taken, it might be too late to halt the devastating environmental and ecological impact of mining the global high seas. Their warning is simple: humanity’s insatiable appetite to plunder the planet for profit might mean some of the Earth’s most untouched corners are exploited before we even understand what it is we risk losing. As Louisa Casson, who is leading Greenpeace’s global campaign to stop deep-sea mining, puts it: “It’s a threat, continental in scale, that until recently nobody was even talking about.”
[…]
Regardless, due to a quirk in an ageing international treaty, deep-sea mining might happen in a matter of months after the pulling of a legal lever by a Canadian-owned company and the government of Nauru. Some believe the ISA’s members have been delivered a legitimate ultimatum: either agree the regulations for mining within two years or allow it to go ahead regardless. Others argue this is a worrying misinterpretation of the body’s ruling text. Either way, the clock runs out this July. There’s every reason to be concerned. That said, on my first morning at the ISA’s 28th session on a bright Tuesday in March there’s little sign of an impending emergency. The debates are anything but fevered. Suited diplomats potter quietly; a merch rail sells ISA-branded T-shirts outside the main assembly room.

Inside, discussions are being held on agenda item 10, Fourth Meeting of the Informal Working Group on the Protection and Preservation of the Marine Environment: Continued Negotiations on the Facilitator’s Further Revised text. It’s slow and tedious. One by one, state delegations lay out their positions. Russia, the UK and Korea discuss the use of the word “synergistic”. Australia wants to tweak a sentence. Norway asks how paragraph five relates to paragraph three. It’s only at the end of each scheduled topic that discussions take on a more pressing tone. In these gaps, those sitting in the galleries above – environmental groups, scientists, conservationists and indigenous activists – make interventions in an effort to shift the focus away from the granular detail and back to the fundamental question of whether deep-sea mining should be allowed to start.
[…]
Dr Diva Amon is a Trinidad and Tobago-based deep-sea biologist who has attended these meetings since 2017.[…]

Still, she lays out the basics. Since the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994, nation states have had the right to exploit and explore natural resources, such as wind and wave energy in waters up to 200 nautical miles off their respective coastlines. This international treaty saw countries establish the ISA. What happens on the sea bed beyond these ocean borders was left for ISA members to decide. “That’s 40% of the entire planet’s surface it’s responsible for,” explains Amon. “Because of the vast depths of these oceans, that equates to 90% of the habitable space where animals can live.”

Deep-sea mining exploration and research has been ongoing since the 1960s, but nothing on an industrial scale has yet begun. Much of the technology it would require remains in development, or it’s privately owned and commercially sensitive, and out of the public domain. Regulations for mining are yet to be agreed upon. There’s a vagueness, therefore, to some of the specifics of how mining might occur for various metals and minerals: nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, gold, silver and platinum.

Mining’s major proponents, notably a small collection of European and North American companies, say these materials are needed for renewable technology, in particular car batteries. It’s not just scientists and environmentalists who take issue with this suggestion (“It’s like smoking to ease stress,” says Amon, “a short-term fix that does far more long-term harm”), but car manufacturers, too. BMW, Volvo, Volkswagen and Renault have all called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, saying they won’t use these materials in their products. Regardless, miners hope to drill into hydrothermal vents (those iconic deep-sea chimneys), and also extract metals from mountains protruding from the seabed. Most commonly explored, however, and likely to be the first mining undertaken, are what’s known as polymetallic nodules: lumps of metals and minerals mixed with all sorts of sediment which sit on the ocean floor.

This mining will see hordes of large mining machines moving along the seafloor like bulldozing combine harvesters, scooping up nodules and whatever else is in their path. “Everything around them will be disturbed,” says Amon. “The top 10cm for certain, home to the majority of life on the seafloor. That means huge amounts of habitat and animals will be lost.” Out the back, water, sediment and shredded wildlife will be pumped out, wreaking havoc. Everything else collected will be pumped through a network of pipes up to a ship on the surface. “Here the nodules will be separated from other materials like water, sediment and likely crumbled pieces of metal that will be spewed out into the ocean as waste.”

For scientists like Amon, it’s of huge concern. “If the technology being discussed is used, we know all this will be affected. What’s unknown is the extent.”
[…]
Uncle Sol Kaho’ohalahala is one of them. A seventh-generation resident of Lanai, an island of Hawaii, his relationship with the ocean is profound. Through the 1950s and 60s, he was part of an indigenous group that fought the US army using the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe as a bombing range, and he’s spent 40 years traversing the Pacific as crew on a traditional canoe. For indigenous Hawaiians, a relationship with the ocean can be traced back to humankind’s creation. “The Kumulipo is our genealogy,” he says, “our chant of creation. It tells us the first creature was the coral polyp. And from that, all creatures follow.” To Uncle Sol and his community, therefore, deep-sea mining isn’t only a scientific and environmental issue, it would be an act of cultural vandalism, too. “Our responsibility as native Hawaiians is to honour our elders and ancestors,” he says. “And our oldest ancestor is in the ocean. At some point, it was decided the ocean belongs to nobody. I challenge that. It belongs to us – people here need to know this is my country they are about to do irreparable damage to.”

Another indigenous activist, Jonathan Mesulam, shares stories of fighting deep-sea mining for a decade in his home country of Papua New Guinea. “It’s common knowledge that any industry on this scale will cause damage to the environment,” he explains one afternoon over lunch. “We’ve seen it on our land, with logging and mining; we had no doubt the same devastation would be caused by mining at sea.” A teacher by profession, he started to campaign on behalf of his coastal community. “The sea is our home. We’ve survived for generations from marine resources. What’ll happen to us if this goes ahead? Fisheries support the local and national economy. Our traditional practices rely on our waters. This would disturb it all.”
[…]
Despite the best efforts of those desperately trying to change the tide of the debate, the ISA meeting mostly remains on course. At evening and lunchtime events, attempts are made by campaigners to lobby delegates. But the ISA’s secretariat, its administrative body, shows little interest in entertaining the question of pressing pause. Frustration has already begun to bubble up. At the start of this meeting, a German minister wrote to the ISA’s secretary general, British lawyer Michael Lodge, implying he had abandoned neutrality and was interfering with decisions being made. Lodge responded, rejecting the allegations.

When I meet Greenpeace’s Louisa Casson at the end of my week at the ISA, she argues this is symptomatic of a deeper problem. “The ISA has never turned down a licence to explore for mining,” she says, “and it benefits from every application – around $500,000 for each one, and they’re paid regular fees by the contractors. People are questioning how they can be a regulator when they have such a financial interest.” Lodge has also sometimes appeared to downplay environmental concerns – he once told an interviewer: “Turtles with straws up their noses and dolphins are very, very easy to get public sympathy.” He even appeared in a promotional video for a mining company. In a film made by DeepGreen Metals, Lodge appeared on a ship alongside its executives who were promoting deep-sea mining. In a statement, an ISA spokesperson reiterated its commitment to “protecting the environment as a prerequisite for any mining activity”, and said that the footage of Lodge, who was on an official visit, was used without the organisation’s consent.

“The law of the sea says you can only start deep-sea mining if you can ensure there won’t be harm to the marine environment,” explains Casson, “and that it will benefit humankind. Right now, neither of those conditions can be met.” Not a single scientist I speak to makes the case that it’s sensible and safe to start mining now. “And how on earth could this be considered for the good of humankind,” Casson asks, “when the industry is so concentrated in privately owned companies?”

…feels like there might be a larger lesson lurking in there…forest…trees…kelp…metaphors can get mixed…but that doesn’t automatically make them bad or wrong?

It’s why, she argues, this controversial two-year rule has been tugged. “It stinks of desperation. The only people actively making the case for mining starting now are the companies themselves. For many, it’s their entire business model. But as deep-sea mining gains a public profile, more and more governments turn against it. Earlier this year, we signed a global oceans treaty: it makes no sense to now undermine this with a new destructive industry.”

There are certainly signs that it might be possible to stop deep-sea mining before it even starts. Protecting a part of the planet so untouched and unspoiled? It’s the rarest of opportunities. There are positive signs. Weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the industry’s longest-running and biggest player, recently sold off its seabed mining interests. Just last week, major Danish shipping giant Maersk, dropped its investment in a deep-sea mining company, too.

…speaking of signs

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/22/colorado-river-water-conservation-deal-states/

When the ISA was established, little was known about what lived deep in our oceans, or how important these environments were. We now know so much more. No conclusion was come to at the end of this most recent ISA meeting. The can was kicked down the road. Delegations will return this July, with no more room for delay. As a complicated legal battle unfolds, politicians will be faced with a simple question. “And that,” says Casson, “is should the world be bullied into destroying our oceans because a few businesses want to get rich quick based on an outdated rule? Or should global governments wrestle back control? The answer is really obvious.”

www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/21/is-it-too-late-to-halt-deep-sea-mining-the-activists-trying-to-save-the-seabed

…so…yeah…about them obvious answers…better red than dead?

 […] I’ve tried the sensible ways of doing something about the climate crisis. I’ve written letters to politicians, carried placards and had endless conversations. At best, I just put people’s backs up. So I’ve decided to shut up and wrap myself in a red sheet instead.

Two years before this, on the morning of 9 September 2020, I woke in my home in Berkeley, California, to a Plutonian twilight. Smoke from the latest wildfire had mixed with the fog in a blanket that shorter wavelengths of light couldn’t penetrate. I tried to explain away the darkness to my kids but I felt like a parent in biblical Egypt, claiming everything was fine while frogs rained from the sky. My husband and I had worried about California’s escalating drought and wildfires for years, but after Orange Skies Day we decided we’d had enough. Time to move back to my native UK. (Unlike millions displaced by the climate crisis, we were privileged to have this option.)

Once we got here, people wondered why on earth we’d leave sunny California. I told the truth: “Because of the climate apocalypse.” After politely ascertaining that wildfires hadn’t actually burned our house down, people couldn’t change the topic fast enough. But I didn’t take the hint. Since nearly everything we do has a carbon cost, every conversation led to the climate crisis. When my parents posted pictures of themselves basking in the Spanish heatwave on the family WhatsApp chat, I responded: “The world’s getting hotter fast. Who wants to join me at the next climate protest?” Awkward silence ensued. In his book Don’t Even Think About It, about why we ignore climate breakdown, George Marshall says that when he brings it up “the words collapse, sink and die in mid-air, and the conversation suddenly changes course. It is like an invisible force field.” Yep.
[…]
I hope the emotion that people tap into will drive them to act. Other forms of activism are valuable, but as a Red, I can see the effect I’m having on people’s faces. Talking to people about the climate crisis made me feel hopeless. Striking a mute pose of despair? Remarkably uplifting.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/22/climate-emergency-silent-red-rebel-brigade

…uplifting sounds good…but rising tides come in a number of varieties…& some waters run deeper than others…so…before taking a dip you might want to check for flags…also red, as it goes

This week, London played host to the National Conservatism conference, an orgy of rightwing anxieties about threats to the west and the future of Conservatism. The lineup saw an eclectic coalition of rightwing firebrands raising the alarm about the left’s purported plans for world domination via a “woke revolution”.

The fascistic undertones of this conspiratory narrative – which effectively calls on conservatives to save their country from an insidious alliance between progressives and minorities – sounded particularly pronounced during a speech by Tory MP Miriam Cates. Describing falling birthrates as “the one overarching threat to British conservatism, and to the whole of western society”, she laid blame for Britain’s woes at a surprise foe: “a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls”.

What is cultural Marxism? The term, which emerged in the 1990s in the US with clear antisemitic origins, imagines that an anti-western ideology was concocted by Jewish intellectuals after the second world war. The conspiracy taps into confected panics about political correctness and wokeness that first started in the US. Only in more recent years has it captured the minds of Conservatives in Britain as well.

In March 2019, Suella Braverman declared that “we are engaged in a battle against cultural Marxism”, tying the threat to Jeremy Corbyn. In November 2020, 22 Conservative MPs and peers then signed a letter criticising “cultural Marxist dogma”. Each utterance brings fresh calls from Jewish groups and leaders to stop the usage and exploitation of the term. But for the Tories the allure of a phantom threat destroying Britain from the inside – exonerating the party for its dismal 13 years in government – is too good to turn down.

It’s tempting to frame the Conservatives’ flirtations with conspiratorial thinking as an aberration. But the truth is that the party has always contained darker, apocalyptic undercurrents. These are usually repressed and marginalised in the interests of electability – politeness, levelheadedness and respectability are essential to the party’s brand – but at times of crisis, when Conservatives fear for the future and feel threatened by social trends evolving beyond their control, they often rise to the surface.

In many ways, the foundational challenge for the Conservative party has been how to harness the most reactionary forces of society while also keeping the party’s moderate reputation untarnished by them. This balancing act – embracing the far right with one arm, keeping them at a distance with the other – has caused all kinds of contortions in the party’s past: from Margaret Thatcher dismissing the National Front as a “socialist front” at the same time as it accused her of stealing its rhetoric and policies, to David Cameron mocking Ukip as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” and then surrendering to its main demand for an in/out referendum. However much they might not like it, Conservatives know that their winning coalition usually requires keeping those “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” on side.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/22/tories-conspiracy-theories-cultural-marxism-party

…after a while…it’s hard to pick between the “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” & “the money” when it comes to who exactly is the hostage taker in our current scenario…& it’s tempting to get a tad “why not both?” about it all…but…to finally get back around to the crisis negotiator’s opinion about what works

Often, Walker says, the feelings provoked in us by other people are telling us something about ourselves. “Everybody wants to blame the other person for quote-unquote ‘triggering’ them – but actually it’s a mirror.” Knowing this can be a useful tool for developing greater self-awareness, he adds: “Why’s this showing up for me? Why am I so incensed?”

But, just as vital as keeping your own emotions in check is cultivating empathy for the other side, he adds. His second rule for negotiation success is: “It’s not about you.” To get someone to see your point of view, first you must seek, in earnest, to understand theirs. This sets up a relationship that makes it possible to meet halfway.

…gonna go ahead & assume that’s a metaphorical halfway…not the kind that cedes the field halfway from sanity to self-destructive insanity…because the underlying principle seems pretty sound to me

Good relationships can be fostered through active listening, and asking better questions, says Walker. Often we can be too quick to share our own experience or push for resolution, leading the other side to feel manipulated or dismissed. “A negotiator knows that the person is not going to open up until they feel seen, heard and understood.”

But sometimes, he adds, “walking away from a negotiation is the right thing to do”. Other times, the real reward may register at first as a loss. “You might have made the uncomfortable decision to move out, or find a new job – but actually it could end up being the best thing that ever happened. It is about that willingness to withstand uncertainty.”

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/22/dealing-with-kidnappers-is-easy-a-hostage-negotiator-reveals-the-secrets-that-can-transform-your-life

…that some things take too long…is inarguable…but…that doesn’t mean they’ll never come to pass

Speaking to CNN on Saturday, attorney Timothy Parlatore, who recently left the Trump legal team, blamed infighting and one fellow lawyer in particular for his departure. And he seemed to warn of the problems that that lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, is creating for Trump’s defense. Meanwhile, former top Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb went so far as to predict that Trump “will go to jail” in the classified-documents case, while also citing the Trump team’s poor handling of it.
[…]
“The real reason is because there are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be,” Parlatore said. “In particular, there is one individual who works for him, Boris Epshteyn, who had really done everything he could to try to block us — to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.”

He said Ephsteyn “served as kind of a filter to prevent us from getting information to the client.”

“In my opinion, he was not very honest with us or with the client on certain things,” Parlatore added. “There were certain things like the searches that he had attempted to interfere with.”
[…]
All of these comments point to a lack of order within Trump’s legal team and would seem to help explain why Trump’s cast of lawyers has long been a revolving door.

Cobb, meanwhile, also seemed to point to the Trump team’s shoddy handling of the classified-documents case — he noted that they had asserted all such documents had been found, when in fact they had not — while predicting Trump would “go to jail.”

“And the many other misrepresentations that he and others have made on his behalf with regard to his possession of classified documents,” Cobb said on CNN. “So, I think this is — I think this obstruction case is a tight case. And, yes, I do think he’ll go to jail on it.”

Similarly, Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr, has said the Justice Department probably has enough evidence to “legitimately” indict Trump.

“He had no claim to those documents, especially the classified documents,” Barr added last month. “They belong to the government. And so I think he was jerking the government around, and they subpoenaed it, and they tried to jawbone them into delivering the documents.”

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/22/trump-legal-team/

…there’s also a reason a certain sort of client likes the sort of lawyers that don’t take notes

The previously unreported warning conveyed to Trump by his lawyer Evan Corcoran could be significant in the criminal investigation surrounding Trump’s handling of classified materials given it shows he knew about his subpoena obligations.

Last June, Corcoran found roughly 40 classified documents in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago and told the justice department that no further materials remained at the property. That was later shown to be untrue, after the FBI later returned with a warrant and seized 101 additional classified documents.

The federal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith has recently focused on why the subpoena was not compiled with, notably whether Trump arranged for boxes of classified documents to be moved out of the storage room so he could illegally retain them.
[…]
The warning was one of several key moments that Corcoran preserved in roughly 50 pages of dictated notes described to the Guardian over several weeks by three people with knowledge of their contents, which prosecutors have viewed in recent months as central to the criminal investigation.
[…]
The notes revealed how Trump and Nauta had unusually detailed knowledge of the botched subpoena response, including where Corcoran intended to search and not search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as when Corcoran was actually doing his search.

Although ordinarily off limits to prosecutors, the notes ended up before the grand jury in Washington hearing evidence in the case after a US appeals court allowed attorney-client privilege to be pierced because judges believed Trump might have used Corcoran’s legal advice in furtherance of a crime.
[…]
In addition to his exchange with Trump, Corcoran described Trump’s facial expressions and reactions whenever they discussed the subpoena. The unusually detailed nature of his notes is said to have irritated Trump, who only learned about them after the notes themselves were subpoenaed.

The notes did not address why Corcoran only looked in the storage room, though he separately testified to the grand jury that while Trump did not mislead him about where to search, he did not say where to search either. The New York Times earlier reported a summary of his testimony.
[…]
To resolve the issue about the gaps in the surveillance footage, the special counsel most recently subpoenaed Matthew Calamari Sr, the Trump Organization’s security chief who became its chief operating officer, and his son Matthew Calamari Jr, the director of corporate security.

Both Calamaris testified to the grand jury earlier this month, the Guardian previously reported, and were questioned in part on a text message that Nauta had sent asking Calamari Sr to call him back about the justice department’s request for the tapes last year.

The justice department interviewed Nauta several times last year until prosecutors grew concerned that he failed to provide them with a complete and accurate account of his role in moving boxes that contained classified documents, according to two people familiar with the situation.

To force his cooperation, prosecutors threatened to charge him with lying to the FBI after he gave differing accounts over several interviews. But that incensed Nauta’s lawyer, who told the justice department his client would not talk again unless he was charged or offered an immunity deal.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/22/trump-warning-classified-documents-mar-a-lago

…still…truth is…the truth hurts…sometimes a lot

www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/22/global-heating-human-climate-niche

…& finding “the best obtainable version” isn’t exactly a cake-walk, come to that

The credo of Watergate is still relevant: find the best obtainable version of the truth. But doing so is only getting more complicated [Guardian]

…that last one is somewhat of a long read…but pretty fascinating…& at least some of it was news to me, at least…but…as ever…there’s a lot more that was news to me than I’m gonna manage to get to before this is due up…so…I’ll lay off…well…except for some tunes at some point…& this one that I figure I’d reserve judgement on the big-deal-ness of until @brightersideoflife has a chance to weigh in?

Beneath 1,350 square miles of dense jungle in northern Guatemala, scientists have discovered 417 cities that date back to circa 1,000 B.C. and that are connected by nearly 110 miles of “superhighways” — a network of what researchers called “the first freeway system in the world.”

Scientist say this extensive road-and-city network, along with sophisticated ceremonial complexes, hydraulic systems and agricultural infrastructure, suggests that the ancient Maya civilization, which stretched through what is now Central America, was far more advanced than previously thought.
[…]
The discovery is sparking a rethinking of the accepted idea that the people of the mid- to late-Preclassic Maya civilization (1,000 B.C. to A.D. 250) would have been only hunter-gatherers,“roving bands of nomads, planting corn,” says Richard Hansen, the lead author of a study about the finding that was published in January and an affiliate research professor of archaeology at the University of Idaho.

“We now know that the Preclassic period was one of extraordinary complexity and architectural sophistication, with some of the largest buildings in world history being constructed during this time,” says Hansen, president of the Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies, a nonprofit scientific research institution that focuses on ancient Maya history.

These findings in the El Mirador jungle region are a “game changer” in thinking about the history of the Americas, Hansen said. The lidar findings have unveiled “a whole volume of human history that we’ve never known” because of the scarcity of artifacts from that period, which were probably buried by later construction by the Maya and then covered by jungle.
[…]
When scientists digitally removed ceiba and sapodilla trees that cloak the area, the lidar images revealed ancient dams, reservoirs, pyramids and ball courts. El Mirador has long been considered the “cradle of the Maya civilization,” but the proof of a complex society already being in place circa 1,000 B.C. suggests “a whole volume of human history that we’ve never known before,” the study says.
[…]
Among the multistory temples, buildings and roads, images of Balamnal, one of the Preclassic civilization’s crucial hubs, were revealed for the first time. It dates back to 1,000 or possibly 2,000 years before the most famous, and well-excavated, Maya site of Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which was constructed in the early A.D. 400s.

Excavations around Balamnal in 2009 “failed to recognize the incredible sophistication and size of the city, all of which was immediately evident with lidar technology,” Hansen says. Lidar showed the site to be among the largest in El Mirador, with causeways “radiating to other smaller sites suggest[ing] its administrative, economic and political importance in the Preclassic periods.”

The lidar images raise questions about how “one society living in a tropical jungle in Central America became one of the greatest ancient civilizations in the world [while] another society living in Borneo is still hunting and gathering in the exact same environment,” Hansen says.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/20/mayan-civilization-pyramid-discoveries-guatemala/