….so…yeah…swings & roundabouts

Far-right Republicans tried their hand at governing this week, cutting a government funding deal with center-right lawmakers in hopes of breaking a logjam of their own making as Congress lurches toward a potential shutdown on Sept. 30.

House Republicans released the bill Sunday night, aiming to corral enough GOP support to pass in a floor vote, but in a twist several rank-and-file ultraconservative lawmakers blasted the deal as too weak. Now, it’s at risk of falling apart.

…they call it a twist…but…when the SOP of these assholes is to employ corkscrew logic…it feels like it shouldn’t be a surprise

The irony isn’t lost on mainstream Republicans, who have repeatedly watched the the far-right Freedom Caucus try to impose its will through implausible demands and shoot down compromises designed to keep the government funded and functioning.
[…]
Even if the bill were to pass the House, where Republicans control a thin majority, it would die in the Democratic-led Senate, said Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who called it a “slapdash and reckless” measure that resembles a “Freedom Caucus wish list.”

…so…the people tanking it?

Still, rank-and-file right-wing members like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., Dan Bishop, R-N.C., Eli Crane, R-Ariz., and others said they’ll reject the deal, holding to their red line of refusing to support stopgap bills that fall short of their goals.
[…]
With a Sept. 30 deadline on the horizon, fears of a government shutdown are rising among senior Republicans.

“They can ill afford to fumble or else they’re going to have to rely on the left to come get those votes,” Womack said. “I question whether or not we can’t even get a rule passed on it. And that means that we’re going to fool around here another week accomplish absolutely nothing. All the while, the country is headed toward shutdown.”

The leaders of the House GOP’s ultraconservative wing who negotiated the deal are frustrated that other ultraconservatives say the bill is too weak and want to kill it. [NBC]

…but…we do seem to have a problem with the lowest common denominator

“First they’re like, ‘where’s the police report?’ You don’t have a police report.’ I show the police report. Then they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a fake police report,’” she said. “Then they’re like ‘Show us the hospital records. You don’t have hospital records.’ I show them the hospital records. ‘It’s fake hospital records.’”

“The goal posts will never be met,” she said.

…sound familiar?

Examples of this dynamic are pervasive. Rapper Tory Lanez was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison last month for shooting rapper Megan Thee Stallion in the foot in 2020. Throughout the trial, online agitators repeatedly accused Megan Thee Stallion of lying or wanting to ruin the career of a successful Black man. More than three decades ago, similar accusations were hurled at Anita Hill when she accused Clarence Thomas, then a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, of sexual harassment.

Black men pulling stuff from a Black woman’s social media they claim show she didn’t “deserve” protection when a Black man smashed her face with a brick for not giving him her number.

Same thing white supremacists do after cops murder Black people to claim they deserved to die.

— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 4, 2023

“There’s a generation of Black men who, particularly in the post-Obama years, have not had the kind of life and professional successes that they want,” Neal said. “And sometimes they see Black women promoted in certain kinds of ways. They’re really in their feelings that as Black men they’re being left behind.” This disaffected bloc of Black men may feel less convicted to stand up for Black women, Neal said.

Osman called the reactions to her case, however, displays of Black male fragility.

“I am an independent, strong, educated, successful Black woman,” she said. “That makes a lot of them just infuriated by my existence alone.”

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, come on. Tell me what you did to him. What did you do? Did you taunt him?” she said. “It’s so ironic to me that they’re like, ‘I can’t believe somebody would do something that violent for no reason.’ But then you’re online being violent for no reason.”
[…]
To some Black women, though, silence after a public call-out can be disheartening, especially considering the disproportionate rates of domestic violence they face. 2020 data from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence shows that 45.1% of Black women have experienced intimate partner violence and that an estimated 51.3% of Black women homicides are related to intimate partner violence.

A woman’s claim of injury from a brick spurs an age-old social media debate between Black women and men [NBC]

…& speaking of the lowest common denominator

When comedian-turned-conservative-influencer Russell Brand preemptively denied sexual assault allegations on Friday, he flicked at a conspiracy theory that quickly found traction among his supporters and other far-right voices: That the media had ulterior motives for publishing the stories about him.

…motherfucker talking about ulterior motives when he switched lanes from a dimestore cult of personality based on being a two-dimensional “bad boy” more addicted to his own gratification that he ever was to the smack that leaned on equal parts puerile interpretations of left wing thinking & “woo”…to the right-wing online paranoid demographic…I mean…the dude has a channel on rumble, which is like gab for video…he’s andrew tate for people who think they know better…since…oh…about the time me too gathered serious momentum

“Is there another agenda at play?” he asked in his pre-emptive video response to the investigation published Saturday by The Times and Channel 4, which documented four sexual assault allegations brought against him.

…yes, you malevolently misogynist motherfucker…yours…you self-serving waste of oxygen…you knew this shit was coming the same way you know you deserve to get hung up to dry until what’s left of you blows away in the wind…& you did your best to adopt a posture from which to defend yourself when the indefensible nature of your behavior became more widely understood…not unlike…oh, you know…birds of a feather

Deep skepticism of the media has become foundational for many conservatives over the last decade and Brand’s invocation of that skepticism quickly found support from members of his online conservative cohort, most notably Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson.
[…]
Conservative internet figures have followed Brand’s lead, using conspiracy theories to attack the allegations, and have found a largely friendly audience on platforms that have backed away from content moderation.

X owner, Elon Musk, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson quickly defended to Brand, implying that the allegations were made because of Brand’s critiques of the media.
[…]
Neither Carlson nor Musk discussed the allegations in detail. The Times reported that the four women who made sexual assault allegations against Brand in their investigative report did not know each other previously. The reporters spent multiple years interviewing hundreds of people, the report also said.
[…]
Brand, once a popular mainstream comedian who had starring roles in movies including “Get Him to the Greek” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” has emerged in recent years as a popular figure in conservative circles for his straight-to-camera videos in which he takes aim at many targets of the far right. Brand has 6.6 million subscribers on YouTube, where he has peddled conspiracy theories about issues like Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine; 11.2 million followers on X, formerly Twitter; and 1.4 million on Rumble, where his is among the most-followed accounts.

Brand has made criticism of the media a core part of his messaging, noting in his response video that he sets out to “critique, attack, and undermine the news.”

Those critiques have resonated on X, particularly among Musk and his allies, who have also been ardent critics of the media. Musk tweeted at least three times in support of Brand since Friday, posting on Sunday night: “I support Russell Brand. That man is not evil.”

…uh huh…& neither is mitch mcconnell…or…karl rove…or those despots you wanna be buddies with, huh?

…damn it…I had other things to be mad about today

X’s view count metrics, which have been the subject of some skepticism, showed that many of the efforts to cast doubt on the allegations have gained significant traction. The Times’ own thread on X[itter] about the investigation received 15.5 million views, according to the platform — a fourth of the views that Brand’s pre-emptive video accrued.

A search for “Russell Brand” — still a trending topic Monday — surfaced posts that cast doubt on the allegations. None of the first 20 posts in the search results included links to any reporting about the new allegations.

Instead, the top search results for “Russell Brand” on X suggested Brand is “‘being attacked’” for his views about Covid-19 and Ukraine. Many of the posts also criticize the mainstream and legacy media at large, claiming that the media has referred to Brand as “guilty” and provided no evidence for the allegations against him.

Brand quickly found support by harnessing a deep skepticism of the media. [NBC]

…they say “quickly”…but…this shit didn’t happen overnight

The allegations against Brand – which he denies – once again leave the British media industry reeling from claims that a prominent man was able to misuse his position for sexual pleasure.

What’s different from previous cases is that the prominent man has already largely stopped working with the big media institutions. Instead, Brand largely exists in a parallel world where his income comes from podcasting, YouTube advertising revenue, and selling membership of his online community to become one of Russell Brand’s “awakened wonders”; fans gain access to interviews with the likes of the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and anti-vaccine US Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy.

As a result, although he has been dropped by his agents and could find it a challenge to attract mainstream advertisers, the damage to Brand’s current career may be limited by his decision to spend recent years building a fanbase based around rightwing talking points and Covid vaccine scepticism. Brand’s own denial suggested “there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices” – implying that he is being targeted for getting close to the truth.
[…]

Yet there are still questions for mainstream British broadcasters to answer, even if Brand has not appeared on their programmes in recent years. The BBC and Channel 4, who employed Brand at the peak of his fame in the 2000s, have said they do not have records of complaints against Brand during that era or have failed to answer questions, citing privacy concerns. They also say they now have much improved processes for reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.

At the same time, the Sunday Times reports that staff who worked with Brand in that period claimed that his sexual behaviour was well known – less an open secret and more just open. Hypersexualisation and graphic descriptions of sexual desire were part of his public persona – which is not illegal, but may have been considered red flags by those hiring him to present shows.
[…]
Brand was clearly aware of the power he had in the media at the height of his fame. During Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary, there is a clip of the comedian telling Lorraine Kelly: “If you’re in a position of some success, people will let you be a nutter as long as they’re making money out of it.”
[…]
According to the Sunday Times, their initial inquiries began almost five years ago, while some of the staff who worked on the Dispatches part of the investigation moved on to other careers because of the time it took to finish the show. The public appetite for the reporting is there: the Dispatches documentary was watched live by 1.8 million people on Saturday night, a large audience for Channel 4 in this era.

Now we’ll see how many bought Brand’s anti-‘mainstream media’ shtick [Guardian]

…it’s not that you somehow didn’t notice picking up a hammer…there really are a bunch of pin-headed pricks everyplace you look serving to drive this point home

When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.
[…]
Legions of Twitter users, most of whom days prior had no idea who I was or what my job entailed, began a campaign of online harassment that lasted months, calling for me to be fired, jailed or killed. The volume of Twitter notifications crashed my phone. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years expressed their concern. On Instagram, old vacation photos and pictures of my dog were flooded with threatening comments and insults. (A few commenters, wildly misreading the moment, used the opportunity to try to flirt with me.)

I was embarrassed and scared. Up to that moment, no one outside of a few fairly niche circles had any idea who I was. Academics studying social media call this “context collapse”: things we post on social media with one audience in mind might end up circulating to a very different audience, with unexpected and destructive results. In practice, it feels like your entire world has collapsed.

The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. Academic studies have repeatedly pushed back on claims that Silicon Valley platforms are biased against conservatives. But the success of a strategy aimed at forcing social media companies to reconsider their choices may not require demonstrating actual wrongdoing. As the former Republican Party chair Rich Bond once described, maybe you just need to “work the refs”: repeatedly pressure companies into thinking twice before taking actions that could provoke a negative reaction. What happened to me was part of a calculated effort to make Twitter reluctant to moderate Mr. Trump in the future and to dissuade other companies from taking similar steps.
[…]
Similar tactics are being deployed around the world to influence platforms’ trust and safety efforts. In India, the police visited two of our offices in 2021 when we fact-checked posts from a politician from the ruling party, and the police showed up at an employee’s home after the government asked us to block accounts involved in a series of protests. The harassment again paid off: Twitter executives decided any potentially sensitive actions in India would require top-level approval, a unique level of escalation of otherwise routine decisions.

And when we wanted to disclose a propaganda campaign operated by a branch of the Indian military, our legal team warned us that our India-based employees could be charged with sedition — and face the death penalty if convicted. So Twitter only disclosed the campaign over a year later, without fingering the Indian government as the perpetrator.

In 2021, ahead of Russian legislative elections, officials of a state security service went to the home of a top Google executive in Moscow to demand the removal of an app that was used to protest Vladimir Putin. Officers threatened her with imprisonment if the company failed to comply within 24 hours. Both Apple and Google removed the app from their respective stores, restoring it after elections had concluded.

In each of these cases, the targeted staffers lacked the ability to do what was being asked of them by the government officials in charge, as the underlying decisions were made thousands of miles away in California. But because local employees had the misfortune of residing within the jurisdiction of the authorities, they were nevertheless the targets of coercive campaigns, pitting companies’ sense of duty to their employees against whatever values, principles or policies might cause them to resist local demands. Inspired, India and a number of other countries started passing “hostage-taking” laws to ensure social-media companies employ locally based staff.

In the United States, we’ve seen these forms of coercion carried out not by judges and police officers, but by grass-roots organizations, mobs on social media, cable news talking heads and — in Twitter’s case — by the company’s new owner.
[…]
Academia has become the latest target of these campaigns to undermine online safety efforts. Researchers working to understand and address the spread of online misinformation have increasingly become subjects of partisan attacks; the universities they’re affiliated with have become embroiled in lawsuits, burdensome public record requests and congressional proceedings. Facing seven-figure legal bills, even some of the largest and best-funded university labs have said they may have to abandon ship. Others targeted have elected to change their research focus based on the volume of harassment.
[…]
Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opinion/trump-elon-musk-twitter.html

…rinse…repeat

Let’s start with the end. If you know anything about the state of artificial intelligence, it’s that many of the people advancing the technology are gravely concerned about the technology they’re advancing. Two statements stand out. The first was a petition, following the March release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, calling for a six-month pause on any AI system exceeding GPT’s capabilities. The signatories — a loose association of AI geniuses (Turing Award-winner Yoshua Bengio), tech barons (Elon Musk) and moths to a flame (Andrew Yang) — asked: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

The second statement, issued in May, was an escalation of both stakes and prestige — a Met Gala of doom. Signed by nearly all the major AI company CEOs and most of the top AI research scientists, this statement was just 22 words long. Which really helped the ‘E’ word pop: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

…AI could be a lot of things…& will be many of them by the looks of it…but…it’s those lowest common denominators that are killing us

The doomers and Utopians both speak a little too insistently. It might have something to do with the money at stake — as much as $4.4 trillion in estimated annual corporate benefit from generative AI alone, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. This is not the Manhattan Project or the space race, when the big brains wore government badges. Many of the best AI scientists hold university chairs while also cashing checks from the world’s largest tech companies. Now multiply those potential competing interests by the restless mind of Mark Zuckerberg.

When Zuck open-sources Meta’s Llama 2 chatbot — inviting anyone to play with its innards — is he an optimist democratizing AI (“Let’s get building!”)? Or does he know the fastest way to catch up to ChatGPT is for people to hack away on his platform for free, even if some of them get Llama 2 to cough up recipes for nukes? When OpenAI’s Sam Altman puts his name on the 22-word extinction statement and pleads for government intervention, is he concerned about bad actors? Or is he hoping for a regulatory oil slick to spray at companies in hot pursuit? And what better way for everyone to inflate the AI investment balloon than by hyping tech so powerful it could supercharge progress — or destroy humanity? You know, in the other guys’ hands.

The impulse to sit this one out is strong. Climate change, covid, extremism — most people aren’t in the market for more existential uncertainty. Now, factor in that AI is stampeding ahead thanks to some of the same companies whose reckless social media products helped drain the national reserves of trust and reason — things that might be handy right now. It can feel like a Silicon Valley conspiracy to (a) dictate the future and (b) rob everyone of even a moment’s peace while they do. No wonder polling shows that 82 percent of voters don’t trust tech execs to self-regulate AI.

…they don’t? …I can’t imagine why

There is always pressure in Silicon Valley to conflate inevitable with instantaneous. People at OpenAI speak of ChatGPT as their “iPhone moment.” I bet it feels that way. OpenAI is a young company full of young people. Their product launch made jaws drop. “Netscape moment” is a reference that predates most of them and flatters them less, but it seems more apt. The tech is moving fast, but its impact will arrive in waves. We’ve already seen slight dips in ChatGPT usage. That hardly means chatbots are doomed or AI is a fad. Only that it’s early. It will take time to understand how people adapt to these new tools. And vice versa.

That time should not be wasted. The processors will keep processing — and we need to get ready. That means planning for everything from basic privacy and IP regulations to topsy-turvy labor markets and even “Fury Road.” Because however far-fetched the idea of an artificial general intelligence — meaning an autonomous system that one day surpasses human abilities and might deem us, er, dispensable — it’s not impossible. We can also look out for the many ways AI tools can help us fix the hard problems humanity simply hasn’t been able to crack. We’re spoiled for choice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/10/ai-future-power-imperfection-technology/

…&…well…that’s not just a distraction

The Google antitrust trial, which began last week, is ostensibly focused on the past — on a series of deals that Google made with other companies over the past two decades. The prosecution in the case, U.S. et al. v. Google, contends that Google illegally spent billions of dollars paying off Samsung and Apple to prevent anyone else from gaining a foothold in the market for online search.

But the true focus of the trial, like that of the Federal Trade Commission’s coming trial of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on monopolization charges, is on the future. For the verdict will effectively establish the rules governing tech competition for the next decade, including the battle over commercialized artificial intelligence, as well as newer technologies we cannot yet envision.

The history of antitrust prosecutions shows this again and again: Loosening the grip of a controlling monopolist may not always solve the problem at hand (here, an online search monopoly). But it can open up closed markets, shake up the industry and spark innovation in unexpected areas. If Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who is presiding over the trial without a jury, decides this case correctly, he’ll be helping the entire tech world and the American economy more broadly.
[…]
The story of Google’s own creation is another good example. Google began as a small start-up with a great product, but it was also a beneficiary of federal government intervention. Google began its operations reliant on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which had a roughly 95 percent market share in the early 2000s. And Microsoft was running its own search engine on Internet Explorer, then called MSN Search (later renamed Bing). Fortunately for Google, Microsoft had just been put through the wringer by the Justice Department, whose antitrust lawsuit nearly led to a breakup of the company. In the end, Google beat Bing in part because it had a better product — but also because it wasn’t facing the nasty Microsoft of the 1990s, but rather a weakened and chastened Microsoft operating under federal oversight.

Today Google is both interested in and threatened by the large language model technology of companies like OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT. Google has spent many billions of dollars on A.I. research, including developing its own chatbot, Bard, and recently rushed to incorporate dozens of A.I. features into its products. But as a giant, entrenched company, Google has the disadvantage of needing to protect its existing revenue streams and keep its investors, customers and advertisers happy. It has a strong incentive to make sure that A.I. doesn’t turn into something that disrupts or destroys its current business.

At the trial in Washington last week, the prosecution (which includes the federal as well as state governments) made clear that Google leveraged its money and power over the past decade to stifle competition, paying companies like Apple and Samsung billions of dollars to make Google the default search setting for their phones. Apple also agreed to stay out of Google’s business: handling search queries.
[…]
The cases against Google and Meta are, in effect, a distinctively American form of industrial policy. Many countries choose to subsidize their tech monopolists, but the United States has shown that undermining a monopolist’s dominance can be a better alternative. Doing so also serves to check what is perhaps the least accountable form of power in the United States, a power that at times feels like a threat to the idea of rule by the people. These are some of the reasons that the Biden administration, for which I worked for two years on tech competition policy, has made a robust effort to rein in the power of big tech.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opinion/contributors/google-antitrust-trial.html

…& it’s not like it’s a slow news day

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/18/credible-evidence-india-behind-killing-of-canadian-sikh-leader-says-trudeau

…nor do they seem to have stopped adding rings to the circus

The Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.

The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).

Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.
[…]
Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.
[…]
But conspiracy and party have an even longer history, one that stretches back to the frenzied and unbounded politics of the early Republic. In the 1790s, the emergent parties of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans fell into personalized strife, but possessed neither the legitimacy nor the machinery to channel and stabilize the conflict. The organizers of new party activity on both sides were, to a one, avowedly antiparty politicians, and so they conceived of their efforts as a temporary expediency — emergency measures necessary to combat the nefarious conspiracies threatening to undermine the Constitution.

In an era in which personal reputation was still inextricable from conflict over public matters, politicians refused to accept their opponents as legitimate, let alone as constituting a loyal opposition.
[…]
Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.
[…]
To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.

The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket [NYT]

…same as it ever was?

Donald Trump has long attacked Joe Biden, his likely opponent at the polls next year, as “Sleepy Joe”, portraying the 80-year-old president as too old and too mentally fogged to occupy the Oval Office. As recently as Friday, the former president attacked his successor for being unfit to deal with Russia and the threat of nuclear war.

…or…misremembered?

But Trump’s tactics rebounded when he said Biden threatened to lead the US into “world war two” – and suggested that he, Trump, thought he had beaten Barack Obama for the presidency back in 2016.

There have been two world wars. The first ended in 1918, the second in 1945. The cold war, the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union that often threatened a third world war, ended with the fall of the communist regime in Moscow in 1991.

Obama was president, and Biden vice-president, from 2009 to 2017. In the 2016 election, Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

Mockery of Trump’s stumbles was immediate and sustained. But it also pointed to an increasingly stark issue on both sides of the aisle: the advanced age of many American leaders, and polling that shows most voters want generational change.
[…]
Democrats protest that disproportionate attention is paid to Biden’s age than that of Trump. Last week, Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, told CBS News: “Joe Biden is getting older, we all know that. But the other guy he’s probably going to be running against is getting older, too. And in the focus groups that I’m doing, old and steady still beats old and crazy.”
[…]
Ninety-one criminal charges and assorted civil lawsuits notwithstanding, Trump leads Republican polling by wide margins. His challengers have made age and cognitive ability an issue but such is Trump’s dominance, they have mostly directed their fire at Biden.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/18/trump-biden-age-election-2024

…when it comes to patterns…using things that are past their expiry date to achieve sketchy ends by illegitimate means under a flag of convenience…surprising nobody…is a recipe for disaster

The Pablo was part of a growing fleet of shadow tankers, transporting sanctioned oil with little regard for industry regulations. Hidden behind shell companies, shadow vessels are characterised by their repeated change of flag carriers and owners – and crucially – often operate without insurance. When a ship is abandoned beyond repair, the insurer becomes its owner and takes responsibility for its scrapping. Without a listed insurer, the Pablo remains where it is.

Experts warn that such ships pose a serious threat to the environment, as well as the lives of those they come into contact with. But the shadow trade of ships like the Pablo is only growing in size and scale – taking journeys that thread their way through the world’s geopolitical hotspots; from the oilfields of Iran, to the factories of China, all the way to the frontline of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Five years ago the Pablo was set to be sold as scrap. At 21 years old, it was well past the age at which most oil tankers would be retired due to wear and tear. Then known as Olympic Spirit II, its demolition was cancelled due to a sudden surge in demand for older – and cheaper – oil tankers.

In 2018 Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, which had seen Tehran curb its nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions. As the US reimposed sanctions, Iran’s oil sales were throttled, with Washington threatening to sanction any company or country that purchased Iranian oil.

Iran has one of the largest oil reserves in the world and the export of that oil is vital to the country’s economy. With that trade under threat, a fleet of shadow vessels – willing to defy international sanctions – stepped in to ship millions of barrels of oil around the world, often selling it at a discount price.

Since then the shadow fleet has only grown bigger. In December 2022, the G7, the European Union and Australia agreed to a price cap on Russian oil in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Under the terms of the deal, insurers are prohibited from covering vessels which sell oil above the maximum price set by those western powers.

In their 2023 safety and shipping review, insurer Allianz noted that the growing list of sanctions against Russia mean that the number of shadow tankers could now number“more than 600, or roughly a fifth of the overall global crude oil tanker fleet”.

…&…frustratingly…we know this

According to Claire Jungman, chief of staff for US watchdog group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), the Pablo was one such vessel that posed a threat.

“It was one of our repeat offenders. We have a list of 50 tankers that routinely shuttle Iranian oil and Pablo was one of them,” she says.

Jungman routinely tracks up to 300 sanction-busting tankers all around the world. Once a vessel is identified by her team they often inform flag carriers – the country that the tanker is sailing under – in the hope that they will withdraw their flag.

In June 2021, the Pablo was known as Adisa, and was sailing under the flag of Cameroon. After UANI informed the country of the ship’s activity, that flag was withdrawn. Just a few months later it was sailing under a new name – Helios – with a new flag – the Cook Islands. But after UANI provided evidence of sanctioned trades, that flag also was withdrawn.

By 2022 it was known as Mockingbird and registered to Tanzania, who also withdrew their flag after being contacted by UANI.

On 4 April, UANI contacted the Gabonese authorities who had now registered the ship under the name of the Pablo. While promising to continue to monitor the vessel, the country’s department of maritime affairs also said that it had carried out due diligence and had taken a letter of understanding from the ship’s owners that it would comply with all US, UN and EU sanctions.

However, the fact that the Pablo was sailing under the flag of Gabon, alarmed Jan Stockbruegger, a maritime security expert from Copenhagen University. “If you want to wait for Gabon to do something you’ll wait a long time. They are not known to be a flag state that takes responsibility for the vessels they’re flagging.”
[…]
Jungman says that the revolving list of names and flags that adorned the Pablo aren’t unusual. She says it’s this process of flag hopping that helped the vessel transfer an estimated 15.9m barrels, or over 1,000 Olympic sized swimming pools’ worth of Iranian oil since 2018.

Using satellite imagery and other datasets, UANI is able to estimate Iran’s monthly oil exports and track the vessels that move them. Despite the tough sanctions, the organisation calculates that thanks to the shadow fleet, Iranian monthly oil exports hit a five-year-high in August of this year.

In recent years, south-east Asia has emerged as a transport hub for this sanctioned oil. Tankers carrying oil from Iran, Russia or Venezuela will meet up with other vessels close to the region’s busy shipping lanes and perform ship-to-ship-transfers. The oil in the new vessel will then be rebadged as coming from a legitimate source and be sent off to be sold elsewhere.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/18/how-a-burnt-out-abandoned-ship-reveals-the-secrets-of-a-shadow-tanker-network

…it isn’t easy…old dogs…new tricks…yadda yadda…but…maybe when it all seems like greek to us…we ought to be breaking out the phrasebook

Over the past decade, psychologists have become increasingly interested in using such mental metamorphoses. Besides altering the quality of our memories, switching between languages can influence people’s financial decision-making and their appraisal of moral dilemmas. By speaking a second language, we can even become more rational, more open-minded and better equipped to deal with uncertainty. This phenomenon is known as the “foreign language effect” and the benefits may be an inspiration for anyone who would like to enrich their mind with the words of another tongue.

The foreign language effect should not be confused with the older concept of “linguistic determinism”, which proposes that the specific words and grammar of a language can change the way we perceive the world. In this view, people’s colour perception should change according to the terms that we use to divide the rainbow, while people’s perception of time may be influenced by the grammatical tenses they use.
[…]
In a preliminary experiment, Keysar’s team asked participants who had learned Spanish as a second language to consider [the trolley problem] in either their native or adopted tongue. As he had hypothesised, they were far more likely to make the utilitarian choice when they used Spanish compared with English. The effect was so big that Keysar delayed publishing the results. “I just didn’t believe the data,” he says. A later collaboration with Albert Costa at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, however, documented the same results across diverse participants from the US, Europe and Asia. In one sample, participants were twice as likely to choose the utilitarian option when speaking a second language.
[…]
In the meantime, Keysar had turned his attention to the classic cognitive biases such as “myopic loss aversion”. Previous experiments showed that people are unwilling to risk losing a small amount of money for the chance of winning a bigger sum, even if the odds are tipped in their favour. If you give people a 50% chance of winning £2.50, for example, or offer them the opportunity to take £1 for sure, most people go for the guaranteed money. This may pay off in the short term, but when you have made many such decisions, it severely limits your profits.

Myopic loss aversion is a serious problem for investors, but Keysar found that this tendency was much less pronounced when the bets were presented in a foreign language. “People just hate the prospect of losing,” says Keysar. “But they hate it less in a foreign language.” Further experiments have shown that speaking a foreign language can also reduce the framing effect, which is our tendency to be swayed by the particular phrasing of information, and the sunk cost effect, which is our reluctance to leave a failing endeavour.

One of the most intriguing recent studies tested the “bias blind spot” – the expectation that we are less susceptible to error than the average person. “We believe that other people are stupid, and we are not,” explains Michał Białek, an associate professor at the University of Wrocław, Poland. In line with Keysar’s findings, he found that speaking a foreign language punctures this egotistical way of thinking.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/17/how-learning-thinking-in-a-foreign-language-improves-decision-making

…maybe I’m, just salty because this was barely late before a sequence that started with the device I was trying to get it over the line with spontaneously rebooted…& the next one I turned to decided it couldn’t see the mouse it usually latches onto the moment the two notice one another…& so on & so forth for long enough to reboot, update, reboot again & finally wind up back where I started on the first one…so…bias alert, I guess…but…just maybe…you actually could solve the trolley problem by derailing the whole train of thought

…it sounds like a cheap facetious & superficial answer…but…given the profusion of those available for comparison…it looks a little different when you start to consider it

…anyhow…if the machines really do take over maybe I can get a side-gig in just standing near them until they inexplicably malfunction…apparently that’s my superpower?