…well…damn…sure I might be out of practice…but…today is looking like a lot to contend with

Fox News aired the first GOP debate of the 2024 election cycle from Milwaukee on Wednesday night, featuring eight candidates. Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact-checked, but following is a list of 10 suspicious claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates. These claims are examined in the order in which they were uttered.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/24/fact-checking-first-republican-primary-debate/

…& there are many things we need to be buckling down to engaging with

This was not another report of melting icecaps, rising oceans, blistering heat or unusual tornadoes somewhere far away; this was a horizon-to-horizon pall over us, rising from infernos across the great Canadian north that had been ignited by record temperatures, record drought and ceaseless lightning storms. Nothing like it had ever happened before — these wildfires began far earlier and spread far faster than usual, and they have burned far more boreal forest than any fire in Canada’s modern history.

As of this writing, 5,881 wildfires have consumed 15.3 million hectares, about 59,000 square miles, dwarfing the 10-year average of 2.6 million hectares per summer. That’s like all New York State incinerated, and the fires are burning still. One environmentalist told me that “unprecedented” has been used so often that it has lost any meaning against the uniqueness and horror of what is happening.

With the melting Arctic to their north and the immensity of their northern wilderness, Canadians are not strangers to climate anxiety. But as The Globe and Mail reported, “Canada’s summer of fire and smoke” has still come as a profound shock to the nation, “materially and psychologically, as people across the country report a sense of dread about the disaster unfolding just out of sight, and what it portends for the future.”

And as the summer unfolded, it became evident that it’s not just smoke, and not just Canada. This has been the summer from climate hell all across Earth, when it ceased being possible to escape or deny what we have done to our planet and ourselves. “Even I am surprised by this year,” said Michael Flannigan, a professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, who has been studying the interaction of fire and climate for over 35 years. “Temperatures are rising at the rate we thought they would, but the effects are more severe, more frequent, more critical. It’s crazy and getting crazier.”

The planet had its hottest week ever in July and, is entering “uncharted territory,” the World Meteorological Organization declared. Maui, the loveliest of Hawaii islands, was savaged by a wildfire that killed more than 100 people and destroyed the picturesque town of Lahaina. Floods battered New England; a reading of 101.1 degrees F. (the ideal temperature for a hot tub) was recorded in the waters of Manatee Bay in South Florida. China had its heaviest rains in 140 years; record wildfires devastated Greek islands, and the list goes on. None of it is normal.

The extreme weather conditions around the world are interconnected and insidiously self-accelerating, Professor Flannigan explained. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, altering the fast-flowing air currents high above the planet known as jet streams, which then cause wild fluctuations of temperature and precipitation.

In northern Canada, the ensuing drought and heat primed the fuel and sent more hot air into the upper atmosphere to generate ever more lightning storms, which ignited the dry forest and the peat beneath it to release more carbon and more smoke to further intensify climate change around the world. And it’s going to get much worse, Professor Flannigan said, especially with the onset of El Niño, the periodic rise in the temperatures of the eastern and central Pacific Ocean. “There will be more droughts, more floods, more extreme weather, more records broken.”

And there will be consequences that we cannot yet imagine: If a forest burns too often, for example, trees cease being able to propagate and eventually give way to grasses, which could lead to a fundamental change of the Canadian north and its wildlife. In its latest report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that fire-inducing temperatures in southern Europe will increase by 14 percent if the planet heats by 2.5 degrees Celsius, toward which the Earth is headed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/opinion/canada-wildfires-climate-change.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/23/volcanoes-and-wildfires-offset-20-of-global-heating-over-eight-years

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/23/tropical-forest-face-massive-leaf-death-global-heating-unable-conduct-photosynthesis-study

…but

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/opinion/columnists/what-can-replace-china-as-a-global-economic-engine.html

…there’s certainly a lot else going on

The fates of two men key to Putin’s war are now both in question. [NYT]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/23/brics-summit-putin-xi-russia

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/23/huawei-accused-building-secret-microchip-semiconductor-factories-us-sanctions

How Oklahoma’s schools superintendent became the state’s top culture warrior [NBC]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/23/chandrayaan-3-india-moon-landing

…along with all manner of distractions

How a Christie’s website revealed where people kept their art [WaPo]

“When she first came to me, I didn’t know anything about the family,” Dumont Beghi told me when I visited her this past winter at her office in Paris. To my left, a bronze bust of a panther stared from a pedestal at eye level. Behind her glass desk hung a print of a leopard prowling in a tree. Dumont Beghi is also the personal attorney for President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who is widely considered a strongman, and often describes herself as a lone warrior woman in a jungle of male adversaries. She had never heard of the Wildenstein dynasty of art dealers. In fact, outside elite niches of the art world, few had, which was how Daniel wanted it. Dumont Beghi was about to find out why.

First, she drew up a list of known assets, which soon zigzagged into a chart of far-flung bank accounts, trusts and shell corporations. Over the course of several years, she would fly around the world to tax havens and free ports, prying open the armored vaults and anonymous accounts that mask many of the high-end transactions in the $68 billion global art market. Multimillion-dollar paintings can anonymously trade hands without, for example, any of the requisite titles or deeds of real estate transactions or the public disclosures required on Wall Street. She would learn that the inscrutability of the trade has made it a leading conduit for sanction-evading oligarchs and other billionaires looking to launder excess capital. The Wildensteins were not just masters of this system — they helped pioneer it.

Over 150 years, the family has amassed an art collection estimated to be worth billions by quietly buying up troves of European masterpieces that would be at home in the Louvre or the Vatican, holding their stock for generations and never revealing what they own. When Sylvia realized the magnitude of her stepsons’ deception, she devoted the rest of her life to unraveling the family’s financial machinations, and even left a will asking that Dumont Beghi continue her fight from beyond the grave.

Sylvia and her lawyer were never able to win the settlement they thought she deserved while she was alive. From the start, in 2004, a judge rejected Dumont Beghi’s attempt to cancel Sylvia’s renunciation of the inheritance; a few years later, a court rejected a subsequent claim that she was entitled to €450 million worth of art and assets, a figure the judge called “pharaonic.” The representative for Guy notes that, early on, Sylvia was awarded approximately €15 million, based on the value of Daniel’s French estate. “Dumont Beghi continued to litigate for several years, seeking to have certain trusts settled by Daniel Wildenstein included in the estate,” the representative says. “During this protracted litigation, Dumont Beghi made numerous, unsubstantiated allegations, but the court ultimately ruled against her client.”

Now, more than a decade after Sylvia’s death, their efforts have landed the Wildensteins before France’s highest court. The evidence she and Dumont Beghi brought forth has persuaded prosecutors that the Wildensteins are a criminal enterprise, responsible for operating, as a prosecutor for the state once put it, “the longest and the most sophisticated tax fraud” in modern French history.

A trial this September will determine if the family and their associates owe a gargantuan tax bill. The last time prosecutors went after the Wildensteins, several years ago, they sought €866 million — €616 million in back taxes and a €250 million fine, as well as jail time for Guy. The consequences could do more than topple the family’s art empire. The case has provided an unusual view of how the ultrawealthy use the art market to evade taxes, and sometimes worse. Agents raiding Wildenstein vaults have turned up artworks long reported as missing, which fueled speculation that the family may have owned Nazi-looted or otherwise stolen art, and spurred a number of other lawsuits against the family in recent years. Financial distortions have saved the family hundreds of millions of dollars, prosecutors allege, but their treatment of Sylvia could cost them far more — and perhaps lead to the unraveling of their dynasty.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/magazine/wildensteins-inheritance-case-art.html

…as ever

It was understood from the initial allegations that Trump had allegedly sought to prevent the government from knowing about or taking possession of a number of documents he’d taken with him when he left the White House in January 2021. The new charge, though, offered a detailed allegation of one way in which that coverup manifested, with a minute-by-minute depiction of how Trump staffers allegedly sought to delete surveillance footage that the government had subpoenaed.

In a court filing released Tuesday, the reason for the new charge became clear. After the initial indictment, the staffer in charge of technology at Mar-a-Lago dropped the attorney Trump was providing him. After doing so, his sworn testimony changed, implicating Trump and other Trump staffers.

The filing presented by Smith’s office is a response to a nuanced legal fight over the use of a D.C. grand jury in relation to charges brought in Florida. The evolution of the technology staffer’s testimony is meant, in part, to demonstrate why that grand jury was employed: It’s where the staffer’s original, allegedly false testimony was offered.
[…]
Over the course of the government’s investigation into Trump’s retention of documents (a probe that largely preceded Smith’s involvement), investigators obtained evidence indicating that Walt Nauta, a Trump aide who moved from the White House to Florida with him, and Carlos De Oliveira, a Mar-a-Lago employee, had sought to delete the surveillance footage the government was demanding in a June 2022 subpoena.

Taveras and De Oliveira offered testimony before the D.C. grand jury denying that they had discussed deleting any footage or claiming not to remember details of any such conversation. According to the filing, the government knew that this testimony was false.

Here’s where the problem arose. Taveras and De Oliveira were represented by the same attorney, Stanley Woodward, whose fees were being paid by Trump’s political action committee. When the government informed Taveras through Woodward in June that he was the target of a perjury probe, Woodward had a conflict. If he let Taveras reverse his testimony, his other client, De Oliveira, would be implicated. If he didn’t, Taveras would remain at legal risk.
[…]
For every $10 spent by Trump’s Save America PAC this year, $7 has gone to legal costs. Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission indicate that the PAC has spent north of $21 million on legal costs in 2023.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/23/trump-legal-documents-charges/

…if you start the day wondering “what’s in The Papers today?”…which used not to be considered unhealthy…but…well…the dietary shifts haven’t necessarily been in the interests of good mental nutrition for about as long as I can remember…so…I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not my fault

Money is the economy’s unit of account, the yardstick we use to calculate profit and loss, make contracts, specify debts and more. It’s problematic when that yardstick keeps changing length, when you have to worry about how much stuff a dollar will buy in the future.

Nonetheless, the Federal Reserve, like all major central banks these days, doesn’t aim for complete price stability, or in other words, for 0 percent inflation. Why? Mainly because an economy with modest inflation will normally have somewhat higher interest rates than one with zero inflation — a phenomenon known as the Fisher effect. And this means that low but positive inflation gives the Fed more room to cut rates in the face of a recession.

Back in the 1990s, policymakers and economists converged on the view that a 2 percent target achieved more or less the right trade-off between these competing objectives: low enough that people wouldn’t have to think too much about the future value of money, high enough that the economy would rarely hit the zero lower bound, that is, a situation in which cutting interest rates even all the way to zero wouldn’t be enough to restore full employment.

But they were wrong. In 1999, an influential Fed paper estimated that with a 2 percent inflation target, the economy would be at the zero lower bound only 5 percent of the time. Since that paper was released, we have in fact been at near-zero interest rates more than a third of the time:

As a result, many economists now believe that the 2 percent target was a mistake, that it should have been 3 or even 4 percent. For what it’s worth, economists of a certain age remember Ronald Reagan’s second term, when inflation averaged around 4 percent, and few thought of it as a terrible problem
[…]
OK, I’ve been in meetings with current and former central bankers, and the reaction you get if you suggest accepting current inflation and revising the target accordingly is more or less the reaction I imagine you’d get if you waved a Pride flag at a DeSantis rally (although you’re less likely to get beaten up or shot). Why?

The main answer seems to be concerns that accepting somewhat higher inflation — even if the economics suggest that the conventional target is too low — would damage central banks’ credibility. That’s not an entirely foolish concern, although monetary credibility probably matters much less for real-world inflation than central bankers tend to imagine.

On the other hand, should policy be permanently locked into a target that now looks wrong out of fear that changing it will make policymakers look weak?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/opinion/inflation-target-fed-economy.html

…plus ça change

Warnings of scientific ‘suicide’ as US-China research collaboration hangs in balance [Guardian]

…& all that sort of thing

Facebook groups exposed to hundreds of hoax posts, study shows Guardian]

Traffic on Meta’s Threads is declining as company adds features [Wapo]

…I mean…it’s not like I tried to cram three weeks of what I’ve been reading into this along with finding time (& space) to weave in a guide to which bits I think what about…after all…that would take too long in several senses

https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2023/aug/23/super-intelligent-aliens-are-going-to-destroy-humanity-whatever

…besides…I need to find some tunes to go down here

…did I mention that I missed you folks?

…even with coffee though…you know I must have left more out of that than went in…not least since it looks like I’m done before my deadline…for a wonder…how the hell are you lot?