…welcome to tuesday, folks

“This morning, the Kyiv regime launched a terrorist drone attack on targets in the city of Moscow,” the defence ministry said. “Three of them were suppressed by electronic warfare, lost control and deviated from their intended targets. Another five drones were shot down by the Pantsir-S surface-to-air missile system in the Moscow region.”

The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, said the the attack on Tuesday morning caused minor damage to several buildings. “All the city’s emergency services are on the scene … No one has been seriously injured so far,” Sobyanin said.

Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region, said several drones were shot down on their approach to the city.

Moscow, located more than 620 miles from Ukraine, has only rarely been targeted by drone attacks since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, even though such attacks have become more common elsewhere in Russia. In early May, two drones were shot down over the Kremlin in an attack blamed on Ukraine.
[…]
The rare attack on the Russian capital came as Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, faced its third air raid in 24 hours.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/30/moscow-drone-attack-mayor-reports-minor-damage-to-buildings

…so there’s a lot of “unprecedented” doing the rounds

The Cabinet Office could take unprecedented action to prevent Boris Johnson’s unredacted diaries and WhatsApp messages being handed over to the official Covid inquiry, the Guardian had been told.

Officials are preparing to issue a response to the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, by 4pm on Tuesday. Sources said they were likely to resist her demand for a cache of documents relating to the former prime minister’s time in No 10.
[…]
Lady Hallett has demanded the full cache of messages and diaries be handed over to her inquiry two weeks before the first public evidence sessions, but the government is refusing to comply.

Lawyers for the Cabinet Office are said to have advised that the Covid inquiry does not have the powers to request access to all documents, raising the prospect of legal arbitration and a potential judicial review.
[…]
In a ruling issued last week, however, Hallett said: “The entire contents of the documents that are required to be produced are of potential relevance to the lines of investigation that I am pursuing.”

Given that the terms of reference for her inquiry are so wide and were set by the government, she believes it is entitled to request such a vast trove of documents.
[…]
It emerged last week that the Cabinet Office passed new allegations of Johnson’s wrongdoing to the police. They did so after seeing diary entries about guests who had visited Chequers during the pandemic, which Johnson handed to lawyers representing him as part of the Covid inquiry.

Johnson has denied that the diaries show wrongdoing, and his allies have claimed he is the victim of a politically motivated stitch-up. No 10 has stressed that Sunak had no involvement in the decision to hand over Johnson’s pandemic diaries.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/29/cabinet-office-may-take-legal-action-to-deny-covid-inquiry-lady-hallett-boris-johnson-material

…I guess it’s a fine line between needing to be able to communicate candidly while in office &…you know…the whole accountable for your actions thing…but…given the consistent elision of releasing the things they actually said & certain people claiming the request to do so is a politically-motivated attack…it’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that they know their own statements condemn them…call it a matter of interpretation?

Giraffes will eat courgettes if they have to, but they really prefer carrots. A team of researchers from Spain and Germany recently took advantage of this preference to investigate whether the animals are capable of statistical reasoning. In the experiment, a giraffe was shown two transparent containers holding a mixture of carrot and courgette slices. One container held mostly carrots, the other mostly courgettes. A researcher then took one slice from each container and offered them to the giraffe with closed hands, so it couldn’t see which vegetable had been selected.

In repeated trials, the four test giraffes reliably chose the hand that had reached into the container with more carrots, showing they understood that the more carrots were in the container, the more likely it was that a carrot had been picked. Monkeys have passed similar tests, and human babies can do it at 12 months old. But giraffes’ brains are much smaller than primates’ relative to body size, so it was notable to see how well they grasped the concept.

Such discoveries are becoming less surprising every year, however, as a flood of new research overturns longstanding assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of. A recent wave of popular books on animal cognition argue that skills long assumed to be humanity’s prerogative, from planning for the future to a sense of fairness, actually exist throughout the animal kingdom – and not just in primates or other mammals, but in birds, octopuses and beyond. In 2018, for instance, a team at the University of Buenos Aires found evidence that zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have dreams. Monitors attached to the birds’ throats found that when they were asleep, their muscles sometimes moved in exactly the same pattern as when they were singing out loud; in other words, they seemed to be dreaming about singing.

In the 21st century, findings such as these are helping to drive a major shift in the way human beings think about animals – and about ourselves. Humanity has traditionally justified its supremacy over all other animals – the fact that we breed them and keep them in cages, rather than vice versa – by our intellectual superiority. According to Aristotle, humans are distinguished from other living things because only we possess a rational soul. We know our species as Homo sapiens, “wise man”.

Yet at a time when humanity’s self-image is largely shaped by fears of environmental devastation and nuclear war, combined with memories of historical atrocity, it is no longer so easy to say, with Hamlet, that man is “the paragon of animals” – the ideal that other creatures would imitate, if only they could. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”, but creatures whose weapons are teeth and claws can only kill each other one at a time. Only humans commit atrocities such as war, genocide and slavery – and what allows us to conceive and carry out such crimes is the very power of reason that we boast about.

In his 2022 book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg, a specialist in dolphin communication, takes this mistrust of human reason to an extreme. The book’s title encapsulates Gregg’s argument: if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born a narwhal instead of a German philosopher, he would have been much better off, and given his intellectual influence on fascism, so would the world. By extension, the same is true of our whole species. “The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect,” Gregg writes. “We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/may/30/can-humans-ever-understand-how-animals-think

…that one’s on the longer side if people are a bit much for you this morning…but…when it comes to behavioral analysis…there’s arguably an unpalatable amount of overlap

It was 12 December 2019; the first winter general election in Britain since 1923. Faiza Shaheen walked into Waltham Forest town hall in north-east London. The academic, economist, self-described inequality geek and Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green was about to find out if she had pulled off a feat so close to impossible that the odds were one in 10m. Had she – a working-class, Muslim, British-Pakistani-Fijian daughter of a car mechanic – toppled the former leader of the Conservative party, Iain Duncan Smith, in a seat that he had held for 27 years? A seat in which Tory values were so enshrined, it was previously held – albeit the boundaries had changed over the years – by Norman Tebbit and Winston Churchill. It was the perfect David versus Goliath battle. And then David lost.

“It was crushing,” says Shaheen. “One of those out-of-body experiences. They show you the results just before you go on stage and I was like: ‘Oh my God, we’ve lost.’ I could see my party, all these young people with so much hope on their faces, and I couldn’t look at them. When I saw Iain Duncan Smith go up, I just thought: ‘How can this be the outcome?’”

In her new book, Know Your Place, in which she analyses the social inequality she has experienced first-hand, she writes that as she watched Smith give his victory speech, all she could say, over and over again, was: “There is no justice.”
[…]
We meet at the Guardian’s London office on a warm spring afternoon. Shaheen is articulate but wary, and not as outspoken as I expected from reading her book and watching her campaigning. Her cautiousness, however, is less a reflection of the politician’s tendency to deflect and more to do with the level of abuse she has encountered – from left and right – since entering politics. The first words of Know Your Place are “terrorist sympathiser”, which two men shouted at her as she ran into the polling station to put a cross beside her own name. During the 2019 campaign, she was called the Chingford Corbynite, a nod to Tebbit’s 1970s nickname, the Chingford skinhead. When I ask whether she has more or less faith in Labour now than she did in 2019 – because, yes, despite the odds, Shaheen is running again – the longest pause of the interview ensues.

“I think any kind of wholesale faith in a political party is a bad idea,” she says eventually. “But what I can say is that I think people like me could push them on things in a way that we cannot right now with a Conservative government. We have to work with what we have. It’s worth going all in at this point.”
[…]
Losing in 2019 was, in the end, instructive. Shaheen lost by just 1,262 votes and Chingford and Woodford Green was one of only six seats in the country to see a swing to Labour. In the days, weeks and months that followed, she started to reassess what had happened. She found that while the odds of going to Oxford University – which she did – and then on to become an MP were one in 10m for her, they were closer to one in 10,000 for David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The question was less why she had lost, and more why she had ever thought she could win.

Out of all this has come Know Your Place, a powerful interrogation of social mobility or, as successive prime ministers on both sides have called it over the decades, trickle-down economics, meritocracy, levelling up. Using examples, statistics and her own experiences, Shaheen argues that the pervasive idea that “anyone can make it with hard work” results in the precise opposite: everyone’s failure except the rich and powerful. She analyses factors including race, class, education, housing and income to reveal how Britain has become less mobile over generations. It is a damning indictment of our system and is guaranteed to enrage all but those at the very top, whom it will enrage for different reasons. As for the shining examples of the one black judge or the self-made millionaire routinely held up as proof of social mobility, these are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. “Social mobility is a fairytale,” Shaheen concludes. “In simple statistical terms, it is a lie.”
[…]
Shaheen got into Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), did a PhD in applied economics and became the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, a leftwing thinktank originating in the trade union movement. She is now a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and one of her recent policy reports was launched by the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern. “So often people say to me, ‘You did it, so others can do it,’” she says. “I’m invited all the time to local schools where parents will ask me to speak to their daughters. We hold up exceptions to show that everyone can do it. It’s a false story. We live in a society where most people stay in their place.”

What Oxford did give her was a class education. “I heard what they think of us when they’re drunk,” she says. “It was atrocious. Like the way they would treat my friends when they came up, and not sit next to us, especially if they were black. A friend of mine put on a play about Stephen Lawrence and a guy put his hand up afterwards and said: ‘But isn’t it true that black people cause crime?’ I just thought, oh my God, these people are going to have so much power. If I’ve been so lucky to have this privileged education, I need to use it to counter some of this.”

She is particularly good on the rightwing weaponisation of the white working class as a separate racial category. “Since when did the working class become white? It’s a mythology. It’s as if you’re not allowed to be working class if you’re brown or black … because in this country, the working class is at once pathologised and seen as a badge of honour. There’s been a clear effort to divide these groups, though the material reality, and how you’re judged by society, is in a lot of ways very similar. We need to tell these stories of solidarity and convergence of experience. Otherwise, it’s just going to be more division.”

She is regularly asked to comment on what the increase in racial diversity in the Conservative party represents. That Rishi Sunak – the richest British PM in history, who followed the standard route of elite private school, Oxbridge then parliament that more than half our prime ministers have taken – is venerated as a symbol of social mobility enrages her. “Rishi Sunak is an example of the ability of class and wealth to propel people to the top, and to override race,” she says. “He proves my point about the fiction of social mobility. This is the problem when you separate race and class. What I would say about the Conservative party is that they’ve been very clever about using identity politics, the thing they’re always blaming the left for doing. You will never see the Conservative frontbench without women and people of colour, even more than Labour, unfortunately. But it’s superficial. The message is: ‘We’ll let you in, but only if you play by our rules,’ It’s no coincidence that none of them are even vague proponents of anti-racism. Quite the opposite.”

[…]“The book is called Know Your Place,” she says, “but what I want people to do with that knowledge is get angry and collectively say: ‘We are not going to be put in our place any more.’

“When I started writing it, I didn’t think I would run again,” Shaheen says. By the time she finished it, she had changed her mind. Why? “It’s not something I can give up on,” she says. “I just couldn’t let it go. I don’t know if it’s hope or a sense that we don’t have any choice. We either accept this world or we try to do something.” She laughs mirthlessly. “And how can you accept this?”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/29/social-mobility-is-a-fairytale-faiza-shaheen-on-fighting-for-labour-and-hating-oxford

…full disclosure…I know more than one person who attended oxford…& I can point in most cases to decades, plural, of evidence that they are not the people she’s talking about in terms of attitude…even the ones that went to private school…but…on the other hand…I went to one of those schools myself…&…well…she is spot on about way more of the people I went to school with than anyone ought to feel comfortable about…gotta wonder what narwhal nietzsche would make of that kind of thing…though I might have a thought or two

“We’ve been hiding in plain sight all along,” Tarren Bragdon said of his 12-year-old nonprofit group, the Foundation for Government Accountability.

The Naples, Florida-based think tank has been among the conservative groups publicly cheerleading GOP efforts to tighten work requirements for safety net programs long before debt ceiling negotiators in Washington agreed to expand those rules for food stamp recipients late Saturday night.

While the White House and Republicans now turn to selling their pact to lawmakers in both parties, low-income people in many states already face narrowing access to key benefits programs regardless of how the high-wire debt limit fight unfolds in Congress. That is partly because of the state-level strategy with which the FGA has been quietly racking up wins, despite lacking the clout or funding of major conservative K Street institutions that also support shrinking the federal safety net.

While the White House and Republicans now turn to selling their pact to lawmakers in both parties, low-income people in many states already face narrowing access to key benefits programs regardless of how the high-wire debt limit fight unfolds in Congress. That is partly because of the state-level strategy with which the FGA has been quietly racking up wins, despite lacking the clout or funding of major conservative K Street institutions that also support shrinking the federal safety net.
[…]
More than 42.5 million people were enrolled in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as of February, the latest data available, receiving an estimated $6 per day for help buying groceries. That tally was up 3.2% from a year earlier but reflects the month before enhanced pandemic-era benefits expired for millions.

Bragdon, a former state representative from Maine who has served as the foundation’s CEO and president since launching it, estimates only about 20% of the FGA’s policy work addresses welfare and unemployment. But the think tank and its lobbying arm have been a driving force on those issues — often serving as the sole providers of research presented in state legislatures to support the idea that tighter access to safety net programs spurs more people to work.

www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/foundation-government-accountability-debt-ceiling-food-stamps-snap

…your odds of reporting a resounding success certainly increase if you only make a noise about it in an echo chamber…which I must live in…since I’d never so much as heard of this guy

David Pakman can’t remember the last time he lost his cool.

That’s pretty rare for someone who makes a living talking about politics online, which Pakman has done for more than 13 years. Look across YouTube or TikTok and you’ll find videos of him forcefully but calmly making the case for progressive politics, sometimes in digital venues where those politics are not particularly popular.

That’s given Pakman, 39, a peculiar profile. He’s one of the few liberal pundits who is more likely to get name-checked by Steve Bannon than Rachel Maddow. He’s a more familiar figure to fans of Joe Rogan than Ezra Klein.

…hard as it is to get my head around steve bannon citing you & being worth listening to…I’d admit to being curious

“I don’t get into the shouting matches or the screaming matches,” he said in a recent video interview from his home, part of which also doubles as the studio where he records “The David Pakman Show.” “I don’t really consider that I’m playing a character when I do what I do. It’s really just my genuine demeanor. But it’s also calculated in the sense that I don’t think the audience is well served if I get into those shouting matches.”

…that sort of thinking is hard to find fault with…at least as far as it goes?

Instead, he’s made his mark in places where liberal commentators have either struggled to gain traction or hesitate to go. Many are podcasts or web shows that aren’t household names but have dedicated fan bases that skew young and male. An incomplete list of his most notable appearances: Joe Rogan’s podcast (twice), the Lex Fridman Podcast, the Pomp Podcast, Modern Wisdom and PBD Podcast.
[…]
Pakman said he is not on a crusade to reach people who might not otherwise encounter progressive politics, although he does hope to do just that. Rather, Pakman said he built an audience outside the mainstream, partly as a function of his style, which provides some relief to people who have grown tired of the toxicity of internet-based political discourse. He wrote a guide available for free called “Building Arguments Without Burning Bridges.”

Which is not to say Pakman pulls his punches or is above a little snark. Many of his videos focus on Republicans and conservative media with a certain measured snark. In a recent video about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential announcement on Twitter, he called the event a “global humiliation” alongside a few wry chuckles.

Pakman’s home base is YouTube, where he has 1.7 million subscribers, followed by TikTok, with more than 485,000 followers. [Yes, he’s on Twitter (where he has 254,000 followers)]

…thing is…& possibly I’m just deluded enough to flatter myself…but I feel like the only thing I have going for me echo-chamber-wise is that I try to limit the bricks I add to the dome…so hopefully some gaps remain through which some of the echoes might escape & perchance I might glimpse the odd bit of the landscape that isn’t my immediate surroundings…doesn’t sound like a grand boast…but…when there are building blocks in sufficient profusion

And like the radio world, there’s a political imbalance, with conservative and right-wing commentators finding much more success than their liberal counterparts. The subscriber numbers of Pakman and most other lefty online commentators are dwarfed by those of Ben Shapiro (2.3 million YouTube subscribers), Steven Crowder (5.9 million YouTube subscribers), Candace Owens (3.7 million Twitter followers), Matt Walsh (2.5 million YouTube subscribers) and others. It’s a digital media world so lucrative Shapiro and Crowder recently engaged in a public feud over a contract offered to Crowder worth $50 million.

The conservative part of that world is also far more interconnected than its liberal equivalent, both in terms of behind-the-scenes support from conservative donors and with more mainstream media like Fox News, according to Reece Peck, an associate professor in the department of media culture at the City University of New York. That’s something creators like Pakman can’t bank on.
[…]
Pakman said he sees his primary audience in three groups: die-hard fans who may support him vocally online and possibly financially, then more casual consumers of politics and news content who sometimes encounter him in places where he receives vehement opposition, and, lastly, people who completely disagree with him.

The audience for online news has continued to grow, particularly among young people, many of whom list YouTube and TikTok as parts of their media diet. That audience has become more lucrative as social media platforms became more commercialized, said Becca Lewis, an academic who has studied digital political subcultures.
[…]
“Some of these figures, I would say someone like Ben Shapiro or Joe Rogan, they’ve kind of become household names in a certain sense,” Lewis said. “But a lot of people who are really popular and do have massive viewership, that really devoted viewership, don’t always get that household name recognition. It’s a different variety of fame, in a way.”

Like many internet-based content creators, Pakman has a few income streams that he said are relatively even: direct sales to advertisers, ads on platforms like YouTube and subscription memberships sold through his website, which are $5 per month.
[…]
“To be totally honest, 10 years ago, using this show to become a regular guest on some network to maybe eventually become a guest host to maybe eventually get a show would have seemed like a reasonable path,” he said. “At my current level of success, it’s no longer appealing.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/liberal-commentator-goes-calmly-others-dare-not-bridged-internets-toxic-divide

…success is…relative

The dangerous, idiotic debt ceiling ritual lurches toward conclusion [WaPo]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/29/us-debt-ceiling-deal-explainer-biden-mccarthy

This low-profile committee could sink or save the Biden-McCarthy deal [WaPo]

The full legislative text of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s agreement in principle with President Biden to suspend the nation’s borrowing limit revealed new and important details about the deal, which House lawmakers are expected to vote on this week.
[…]
In exchange for suspending the limit, Republicans demanded a range of policy concessions from Mr. Biden. Chief among them are limits on the growth of federal discretionary spending over the next two years. Mr. Biden also agreed to some new work requirements for certain recipients of food stamps and the Temporary Aid for Needy Families program.

Both sides agreed to modest efforts meant to accelerate the permitting of some energy projects — and, in a surprise move, a fast track to construction for a new natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia that has been championed by Republican lawmakers and a key centrist Democrat.

…surprise my ass…manchin better pony up for that horseshit…I’d go on but…you know…broken record & all

Under the new legislation, the debt limit will be set at whatever level it has reached when the suspension ends. For political reasons, Republicans tend to prefer suspending the debt limit rather than raising it, because it allows them to say they did not technically green-light a higher debt limit.
[…]
The bill cuts so-called nondefense discretionary, which includes domestic law enforcement, forest management, scientific research and more — for the 2024 fiscal year. It would limit all discretionary spending to 1 percent growth in 2025, which is effectively a budget cut, because that is projected to be slower than the rate of inflation.

The legislative text and White House officials tell different stories about how big those cuts actually are.[…]
Legislative text suggests nondefense discretionary outside of veterans’ programs would shrink in 2024 to about last year’s spending levels. But White House officials say a series of side deals with Republicans, including one related to funding for the Internal Revenue Service, will allow actual funding to be closer to this year’s levels.

Although Republicans had initially called for 10 years of spending caps, this legislation includes just 2 years of caps and then switches to spending targets that are not bound by law — essentially, just suggestions.
[…]
A New York Times analysis of the proposal — using White House estimates of the actual funding levels in the agreement, not just the levels in the legislative text — suggests it would reduce federal spending by about $55 billion next year, compared with Congressional Budget Office forecasts, and by another $81 billion in 2025. If spending then returned to growing as the budget office forecasts, the total savings over a decade would be about $860 billion.
[…]
Democrats included $80 billion to help the I.R.S. hire thousands more employees and update its antiquated technology in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The debt limit agreement would immediately rescind $1.38 billion from the I.R.S. and ultimately repurpose another $20 billion from the $80 billion it received through the Inflation Reduction Act.

Administration officials said on Sunday that they had agreed to reprogram $10 billion of extra I.R.S. money in each of the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, in order to maintain funding for some nondefense discretionary programs.

The clawback will eat into the tax collection agency’s efforts to crack down on rich tax cheats. It is also a political win for Republicans, who have been outraged by the prospect of a beefed up I.R.S. and approved legislation in the House to rescind the entire $80 billion.

Still, because of the leeway that the I.R.S. has over how and when it spends the money, the clawback might not affect the agency’s plans in the next few years. Officials said in a background call with reporters that they expected no disruptions whatsoever from the loss of that money in the short term.

That’s likely because all of the $80 billion from the 2022 law was appropriated at once, but the agency planned to spend it over eight years. Officials suggested the I.R.S. might simply pull forward some of the money earmarked for later years, then return to Congress later to ask for more money.

…makes you wonder why the whole rigmarole has to be built entirely out of swings & roundabouts…or snakes & ladders if you prefer…which, incidentally, will forever be the way I think you say the name of that boardgame…sorrynotsorry

The bill imposes new work requirements for food stamps on adults ages 50 to 54 who don’t have children living in their home. Under current law, those work requirements only apply to people age 18 to 49. The age limit will be phased in over three years, beginning in fiscal year 2023. And it includes a technical change to the T.A.N.F. funding formula that could cause some states to divert dollars from the program.

The bill would also exempt veterans, the homeless and people who were children in foster care from food-stamp work requirements — a move White House officials say will offset the program’s new requirements, and leave roughly the same number of Americans eligible for nutrition assistance moving forward.

…swing

The agreement includes new measures to get energy projects approved more quickly by creating a lead agency to oversee reviews and require that they are completed in one to two years.

…meet roundabout

The legislation also includes a win for Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democratic centrist, by approving permitting requests for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas project in West Virginia. The $6.6 billion project is intended to carry gas about 300 miles from the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia across nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands before ending in Virginia.
[…]
Mr. Manchin said on Twitter that he is proud to have secured the bipartisan support necessary to “get it across the finish line.” Republican members of the West Virginia delegation also claimed credit.

…I’m not trying to suggest that the innocent-until-proven-guilty voters of west virginia don’t deserve to catch a break when it comes to being able to make ends meet…but…to the extent that sort of thing is a side-effect of the racket whose skids that joe has been greasing since he was a squirt dreaming of retiring as a big ol’ slick…it’s literally every other aspect of this kind of mealy-mouthed “& the band played on” bullshit that sticks in my throat, I find

The bill officially puts an end to Mr. Biden’s freeze on student loan repayments by the end of August and restricts his ability to reinstate such a moratorium.

…which…as that thing from just the other day made pretty clear…is bullshit built out of more bullshit…or bullshit all the way down, if you prefer…but some asshole once pointed out that a good compromise is one that leaves all parties equally dissatisfied

The agreement between Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy attempts to prod Congress to pass all its spending bills and avoid a shutdown, by threatening to reduce spending that is important to both parties. If lawmakers have not approved all 12 regular funding bills by the end of the year, the agreement tightens its spending caps. Nondefense discretionary spending would be set at one percent below current year levels, and it is possible that the I.R.S. would not see its $10 billion in funding for next year repurposed for other programs.
[…]
The final agreement includes far less reduction in future debt than either side proposed.

Republicans wanted much deeper spending cuts and stricter work requirements. They also wanted to repeal of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives signed by Mr. Biden to accelerate the transition to lower-emission energy sources and fight climate change. Mr. Biden wanted to raise taxes on corporations and high earners, and to take new steps to reduce Medicare’s spending on prescription drugs. None of those made it into the deal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/29/business/debt-ceiling-agreement.html

…so…yeah

Is it a good deal? Who will bear the burden? Should it have ever gotten to this point? Did Biden blow it?

These questions will be debated endlessly over the next weeks and perhaps months, but one of them is relevant right now.

The only relevant question is whether Republican McCarthy and Democrat Biden, the US president, along with House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic congressman from New York, can cobble together a majority to pass it before 5 June.

[…] most House Democrats will go along with the deal because they believe in government, and they don’t want the US to default – with potentially cataclysmic consequences domestically and internationally.

Many in the House Maga crowd, on the other hand, will see this vote as an opportunity to show their supporters that they’re willing to blow up the system, because they were voted in on their promise to blow up the system.

Whether the deal is good or bad is irrelevant. It’s the only deal. The alternative is chaos.

Republicans have succeeded in holding the nation hostage, and now we must pay the ransom that’s been negotiated.

What happens from here depends on how many members of the House prefer governing to chaos.

The debt ceiling deal isn’t perfect but it’s the only one – and it must pass [Guardian]

…sure…when you put it like that

[…] this much-ballyhooed “deal” doesn’t seem terribly different from whatever budget agreement would have materialized anyway later this year, during the usual annual appropriations process, under divided government. To President Biden’s credit, the most objectionable ransoms that Republicans had been demanding are all gone. For example, there are no longer sharp cuts to safety-net programs, nor measures to effectively block all agency regulations nor new work requirements for Medicaid.

The proposed legislation might not be great, but it’s probably fine. Certainly it’s preferable to some alternatives many of us feared.

…though…the whole song & dance itself is pretty much exactly as dumb a move as it ever was

Yes, we have (fingers crossed) avoided a dreaded default. Which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Meanwhile, the U.S. government, prodded by House Republicans, has spent the past few months beclowning itself before the rest of the world.

China and Russia have benefited from our obvious fiscal dysfunction, portraying the United States as an unstable democracy and unreliable economic partner. Discussions at the Group of Seven meetings were hijacked by concerns over the global fallout of a possible U.S. default. Biden had to cut short his diplomatic trip to Asia so he could prevent Republicans from throwing a temper tantrum, further undermining U.S. efforts to repair relations with our allies.

The U.S. government also might have already incurred higher borrowing costs, of as-yet-unknown amounts, as markets fretted in recent weeks over whether Uncle Sam might stiff any creditors. Delays in raising the debt limit in 2011 led to an increase in the Treasury Department’s borrowing costs of about $1.3 billion that fiscal year alone, a Government Accountability Office analysis found at the time.

There also might be longer-term reputational and financial costs thanks to this episode, particularly if we’ve now set ourselves up for another hostage crisis two years hence. (This is precisely what happened after the 2011 showdown was “resolved.”)

And to what end? To get minimal changes to fiscal policies that probably would have happened anyway?

This not-quite-cataclysmic-but-still-corrosive outcome assumes, of course, that the Biden-McCarthy agreement actually passes and the U.S. government doesn’t beclown itself further.

With this debt limit deal, Congress has beclowned itself [WaPo]

…I mean…I could follow what hillary had to say the other day about the calculus that demanded the lesser evil had to be keeping feinstein in post because otherwise it lets the opposition block further judicial appointments…& it can hardly be argued that the judicial leg of the trifecta doesn’t need shoring up to make up for the rot…but…in terms of the systemic context in which that logic is sound…the term dysfunctional is all but doing a little dance in a spot-lit center stage while everything else acts like set-dressing…it’s weird, too…because most of the people making these problems worse find it helps them when they blame those problems on the people who have them

There were 582,500 people counted as being homeless in the national one-night head count in January 2022, which [Paul] Boden [who] [served as the director of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness, a non-profit organization fighting to empower those without homes, for 16 years, and now serves as the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (Wrap), which works to eliminate the root causes of homelessness and demand protection of human right] says counts only the most obvious cases of homelessness and misses many others. Across the US, only 33 affordable homes are available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.
[…]
The federal department that we now call Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was created in 1937 in response to massive homelessness (following the Great Depression). The enabling legislation said the government has the responsibility to ensure that all of its citizens have a clean, safe, decent place to live that they can afford.

But in 1998, the legislation was changed to say the federal government cannot be held accountable to ensure that even a majority of its citizens have a place to live. The federal government said: “Oh, no, no, we’re not responsible. We’ve relieved ourselves of this responsibility.”

In 1994 and 95, the Hope VI program under Bill Clinton that aimed to rebuild public housing tore down a lot of public housing and made it mixed income.

California senator and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation that overturned the law that said that if the government destroys a unit of federal housing, it is legally required to replace that unit.

…oh, the irony…it is to laugh…or possibly weep?

Then, in the late 90s came welfare reform, imposing all kinds of caps and limits [on aid to poor families]. Three hundred thousand people were cut off from social security benefits in a single day because they were labeled as “dual diagnosed” (having mental illness coupled with drug dependency). And you could no longer get social security if part of your disability was a drug addiction.

So it was the dismantling of all these different systems: your housing system, your welfare system, your disability systems. At the time we were also wiping out halfway houses and lodges for mentally ill people. Then you wonder why all of these different folks, whose main thing in common is living in poverty, ended up out on your streets.

…I mean…I do wonder…that’s true…but a lot of that wondering tends to take the form of mulling over what appear to be a bunch of assumptions that seem as reasonable as they are unpleasant to contemplate…which is to say extremely

In the 1980s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency started funding emergency shelters. These were supposed to be temporary facilities at the time of a crisis. The mantra at the time was basically: we’re in a recession and times are tough for everybody, so people are homeless, but as soon as the recession is over, they’re all gonna go back home. The reality was, there were no homes for them to go back to.

We’ve never gone back to a safety-net program structure or a housing program structure. Today we have program after program, sweep after sweep, security ambassadors, business improvement districts, all of these efforts to mitigate the presence of homelessness without doing a damn thing about what caused the advent of contemporary homelessness in the early 1980s.
[…]
The old system wasn’t perfect by any means. But when it existed, you didn’t have millions of people living out in your streets.

Instead, they chose the cheapest way that they could show a pretense of caring at all about the human beings that are living out in the street.

…& can you say NIMBY?

Yes, there are low-income housing vouchers that are privatizing accommodation of affordable housing, so that a private landlord can make a profit off of it. That basically means you have an incredibly poor person who’s homeless and you’re sending them out into the open market to find private landlords that will accept a HUD voucher, and all the bureaucracy that comes with it. If you’ve got a disability, if you’re a person of color, well then good luck! You think racism and classism don’t exist in America anymore, just because someone has a voucher?
[…]
In the 40 years I’ve been doing this in 13 cities that we work in, I have never seen so much vitriol coming from neighborhood associations, business groups, civic groups and tech groups, saying these people need to go. Those groups are saying: “we’ve been looking at this homelessness for 40 years, and we’re sick of it. We don’t want to see it anymore.”

We’ve had non-profits telling us that they’re gonna fix it. We’ve had people running for mayor saying they’re gonna make it disappear. And we have a federal government that says you can’t hold us accountable for the fact that it homelessness even exists anymore.

People seem to be saying: “if I don’t see poor people, then I don’t have to worry that there’s too much poverty in America. If I don’t see homeless people, I don’t have to worry that we have a homeless problem. Because if I don’t see it, it’s not a problem.”
[…]
The number of people who are homeless has gone up, yes. But the real change is that the longevity of homelessness and the difficulty of getting through the system is off the hook.

In the early 80s, when senior citizens would come to me, it might take me two weeks to find them a place to live. Now it’s next to impossible. It might take five years. Now you have to be finger imaged to get into the shelter system. You have to call a hotline number and get on a waiting list that has 1,400 names on it.

And then local officials turn around and argue that the homeless people are “service resistant”.

It’s unconscionable. After 40 years, it’s so hard to get our leaders to even admit that what they’ve been doing is never gonna work.
[…]
First, taking a single-room occupancy hotel off the open market and converting it to a homeless program is not creating anything. It’s changing who’s able to live in the hotel. And it’s changing the management of the hotel. They rob Peter to pay Paul. But it’s a lot cheaper than actually building housing.

And mostly, when you hear about new affordable housing that’s being built, if you look at the affordability requirements to live there … it can be people with incomes of like $90,000.

What would you propose as a good way to actually provide deeply subsidized housing?

I would go back to the original legislation from 1937. And I would say the federal government needs to be held accountable to find affordable housing for the poorest people in this country. No waiting list, no intakes. We don’t care where you were born. We don’t care if you’ve ever gone to jail. We don’t care who lives in your house – you’re eligible! You’ve just gotta fund it.

The idea is to create units that are mixed income that are spread across the city that are habitable and that poor people can afford to live in.
[…]
Yeah, it’s a tall order. It’s a restructuring of a society that has gone so far off kilter. That the idea that people even merit a decent place to live regardless of their income is more foreign to us now than it was in 1937.

It’s like, you’re still trying to rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and you hit the iceberg 40 years ago.

www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/29/paul-boden-america-homelessness-crisis

…& the band plays on

If China’s economy is to withstand a military conflict with Taiwan, and the inevitable sanctions that such an attack would trigger, it needs to ensure a stable supply of energy. That means fuel for the economy, as well as for the citizens who power it.

Ensuring that China’s population has enough food has plagued every leader since the imperial dynasties. The country is home to one-fifth of the world’s population but only 7% of its arable land and as the population has urbanised, diets have shifted and the number of farmers has declined.

That has left China increasingly reliant on imports to fill its 1.4 billion stomachs. If, in the event of a conflict with Taiwan, China enters a wartime economy, then ensuring a stable food supply will be vital for China’s leaders.

Beijing is already trying to reduce its reliance on strategic rivals. Chinese orders for US corn in 2022-2023 are down 70% on the previous year, according to the US department of agriculture.

Instead, China is relying on friendlier countries such as Brazil, which delivered its first vessel of corn to China’s shores in January. Last year China agreed to waive some pest and disease checks in order to expedite the Brazilian imports.

A bigger challenge lies in boosting China’s domestic productivity; excessive fertiliser use has reduced the fertility of large swathes of farmland, meaning that some crops cost twice as much to harvest in China than the US, with significantly lower yields. A lack of genetically modified seeds, which are widely used in the US, adds to the problem.

The government sees genetically modified seeds – dubbed “the chips of agriculture” – as an important piece of the puzzle. A cultural aversion to GM seeds has slowed their adoption, but Beijing is expected to permit the planting of GM corn for the first time in the near future.
[…]
While many analysts believe – or perhaps hope – that western countries would not weaponise hunger against China in the event of a conflict with Taiwan, the war in Ukraine has shown that energy is highly likely to be hit with sanctions. And unlike Russia, with its vast reserves of natural gas, China is dependent on other countries for much of its energy.

More than 80% of China’s energy comes from coal, oil and gas. Coal makes up the lion’s share of that mix, and most of that is produced domestically. Although China has pledged to reduce its reliance on coal, in the first three months of this year local governments approved more new coal power than in the whole of 2021. Last year, China permitted the equivalent of two new plants a week.

But oil and gas are crucial to the country’s economy, in areas such as transport. Around three-quarters of China’s crude oil is imported, mainly from friendly countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. While these countries are unlikely to comply with potential sanctions on Beijing, much of their crude oil is transported via seaborne tankers, which are vulnerable to interception.

A similar risk applies to gas. About 40% of it is imported, but mindful of the risks that come with seaborne deliveries, China has drastically ramped up domestic production and overland pipeline imports. Last year China’s seaborne imports of LNG fell by 20%, compared with 2021 (this fall was also driven by Covid restrictions), while domestic production increased by 6% and pipeline imports by 9%.
[…]
Building enough pipelines to fulfil China’s gas demands would be a huge infrastructural challenge. When Xi visited Moscow in March, he and Vladimir Putin signed a number of agreements, but failed to make progress on Power of Siberia 2, a new gas pipeline that would deliver 50bn cubic metres of Russian gas to China via Mongolia.

In the meantime, China remains addicted to coal. Xi has pledged to phase down consumption from 2026, but if a conflict with Taiwan is indeed on the horizon by then, as many US officials expect, coal is likely to remain vital to China’s ambitions.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/chinas-war-chest-beijing-seeks-to-remedy-its-vulnerability-to-food-and-energy-embargoes

…& I won’t go off on a whole spree with enough quotes to double the length of this post just culled from the pages of the FT…but

https://www.ft.com/reports/europe-climate-leaders

…they called a supplement today a “special report”…& only yesterday ran a piece on the subject of green hydrogen

https://www.ft.com/reports/hydrogen

…which included the term “staggering costs” in the headline…but…given some of the stuff we use that for includes producing industrial quantities of precursors to…not to put to fine a point on it…food…& the green sort certainly beats the grey sort in terms of fucking up less shit in the process…you’d think we might be more preoccupied by that sort of thing that whether predictive text has got so good that we can ask for a conversation between bill gates & socrates & think there’s something meaningful about the result

…ironically…fan as he was of the dialectic approach…old so-crates would probably approve…if someone hadn’t added a rider to a must-pass bill that required anyone advocating that sort of dangerous notion be put on a hemlock-only diet plan…it all depends on what scares you

Experts warn of increased risk of US terror attacks by rightwing ‘lone wolf’ actors [Guardian]

Rumman Chowdhury often has trouble sleeping, but, to her, this is not a problem that requires solving. She has what she calls “2am brain”, a different sort of brain from her day-to-day brain, and the one she relies on for especially urgent or difficult problems. Ideas, even small-scale ones, require care and attention, she says, along with a kind of alchemic intuition. “It’s just like baking,” she says. “You can’t force it, you can’t turn the temperature up, you can’t make it go faster. It will take however long it takes. And when it’s done baking, it will present itself.”

It was Chowdhury’s 2am brain that first coined the phrase “moral outsourcing” for a concept that now, as one of the leading thinkers on artificial intelligence, has become a key point in how she considers accountability and governance when it comes to the potentially revolutionary impact of AI.

Moral outsourcing, she says, applies the logic of sentience and choice to AI, allowing technologists to effectively reallocate responsibility for the products they build onto the products themselves – technical advancement becomes predestined growth, and bias becomes intractable.

“You would never say ‘my racist toaster’ or ‘my sexist laptop’,” she said in a Ted Talk from 2018. “And yet we use these modifiers in our language about artificial intelligence. And in doing so we’re not taking responsibility for the products that we build.” Writing ourselves out of the equation produces systematic ambivalence on par with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” – the wilful and cooperative ignorance that enabled the Holocaust. “It wasn’t just about electing someone into power that had the intent of killing so many people,” she says. “But it’s that entire nations of people also took jobs and positions and did these horrible things.”
[…]
A data scientist by trade, she has always worked in a slightly undefinable, messy realm, traversing the realms of social science, law, philosophy and technology, as she consults with companies and lawmakers in shaping policy and best practices. Around AI, her approach to regulation is unique in its staunch middle-ness – both welcoming of progress and firm in the assertion that “mechanisms of accountability” should exist.
[…]
Early on, when she first started working in tech, she realized that “technologists don’t always understand people, and people don’t always understand technology”, and sought to bridge that gap. In its broadest interpretation, she tells me, her work deals with understanding humans through data. “At the core of technology is this idea that, like, humanity is flawed and that technology can save us,” she says, noting language like “body hacks” that implies a kind of optimization unique to this particular age of technology. There is an aspect of it that kind of wishes we were “divorced from humanity”.

Chowdhury has always been drawn to humans, their messiness and cloudiness and unpredictability. As an undergrad at MIT, she studied political science, and, later, after a disillusioning few months in non-profits in which she “knew we could use models and data more effectively, but nobody was”, she went to Columbia for a master’s degree in quantitative methods.
[…]
At its core, what she prescribes is a relatively simple dictum: listen, communicate, collaborate. And yet, even as Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, testifies before Congress that he’s committed to preventing AI harms, she still sees familiar tactics at play. When an industry experiences heightened scrutiny, barring off prohibitive regulation often means taking control of a narrative – ie calling for regulation, while simultaneously spending millions in lobbying to prevent the passing of regulatory laws.

The problem, she says, is a lack of accountability. Internal risk analysis is often distorted within a company because risk management doesn’t often employ morals. “There is simply risk and then your willingness to take that risk,” she tells me. When the risk of failure or reputational harm becomes too great, it moves to an arena where the rules are bent in a particular direction. In other words: “Let’s play a game where I can win because I have all of the money.”

But people, unlike machines, have indefinite priorities and motivations. “There are very few fundamentally good or bad actors in the world,” she says. “People just operate on incentive structures.” Which in turn means that the only way to drive change is to make use of those structures, ebbing them away from any one power source. Certain issues can only be tackled at scale, with cooperation and compromise from many different vectors of power, and AI is one of them.

Though, she readily attests that there are limits. Points where compromise is not an option. The rise of surveillance capitalism, she says, is hugely concerning to her. It is a use of technology that, at its core, is unequivocally racist and therefore should not be entertained. “We cannot put lipstick on a pig,” she said at a recent talk on the future of AI at New York University’s School of Social Sciences. “I do not think ethical surveillance can exist.”

…you get the government(s) you deserve, I seem to remember being told a time or two

Chowdhury recently wrote an op-ed for Wired in which she detailed her vision for a global governance board. Whether it be surveillance capitalism or job disruption or nuclear misinformation, only an external board of people can be trusted to govern the technology – one made up of people like her, not tied to any one institution, and one that is globally representative. On Twitter, a few users called her framework idealistic, referring to it as “blue sky thinking” or “not viable”. It’s funny, she tells me, given that these people are “literally trying to build sentient machines”.

She’s familiar with the dissonance. “It makes sense,” she says. We’re drawn to hero narratives, the assumption that one person is and should be in charge at any given time. Even as she organizes the Def Con event, she tells me, people find it difficult to understand that there is a team of people working together every step of the way. “We’re getting all this media attention,” she says, “and everybody is kind of like, ‘Who’s in charge?’ And then we all kind of look at each other and we’re like, ‘Um. Everyone?’”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/29/rumman-chowdhury-interview-artificial-intelligence-accountability

…but…when it comes to some stuff…in the words of animal farm…some are more equal than others

But to Doug Rushkoff – a leading digital age theorist, early cyberpunk and professor at City University of New York – the triple whammy of rough events represented some timely corrective justice for the tech barons of Silicon Valley. And more may be to come as new developments in tech come ever thicker and faster.

“They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see. They’re afraid that their little AIs are going to come for them. They’re apocalyptic, and so existential, because they have no connection to real life and how things work. They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us,” Rushkoff told the Guardian in an interview.

In his most recent book, last year’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff strung together a series of observations about the tech elite, often gleaned from his many encounters at conferences and private lectures with them.

Rushkoff said that he believes that the tech billionaires are in escape mode – planning missions to Mars, creating island bunkers or moving to higher ground – in the event of “The Event”( code for catastrophic climate collapse) and by creating a virtual “metaverse”, fulfilling the prophecy that the tech revolution was always about preparing us for a world in which it was no longer possible to go outside.

He’s called this “The Mindset” – an analysis of the way Silicon Valley technocrats think. “For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us,” he wrote in the book’s opening pages. “They’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding an escape hatch.”
[…]
The problem with this behavior, Rushkoff points out, is that it does not and will not work.

“They’re not getting off the planet, they’re not going to live forever. They’re just living out their fantasies. They are eugenicists. There’s a reason why they got along with Jeffrey Epstein and Richard Dawkins – people who say genes are the only things that matter, we live in an entirely material universe, there is no soul, humans can be auto-tuned and anything between the ones and zeros is just noise,” he said.

Rushkoff continued: “It’s a pure form of the same sort of sociopathic capitalism that we saw from the British East India Company or [Thomas] Hobbes talking about Native Americans. But now they have a technology that amplifies sociopathic tendencies.”
[…]
“What happened to the cigarette companies will eventually happen to the social media companies,” he predicts. “They’ve had all the research for 20 years, and they’ve been knowingly saying this stuff is not harmful when they know it to be harmful.”
[…]
Elon Musk’s decision to platform Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Twitter, notwithstanding the glitches, was significant in confirming Musk’s alignment with Republicans. The direction of political travel for the tech lords was apparent four years ago when Zuckerberg and Thiel had dinner at the White House with Donald Trump.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/28/artificial-intelligence-doug-rushkoff-tech-billionaires-escape-mode

…still & all…at this point I must surely have thrown out enough tangents to have reached escape velocity from this post…I’ll try to circle back to drop off some tunes…assuming my orbital trajectory doesn’t wobble too much for that sort of thing?