…first things first [DOT 8/6/23]

…welcome to thursday, I guess

Sens. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) on Wednesday will introduce a bill that would lay the groundwork for America’s first carbon border tax, according to legislative text shared with The Washington Post before its broader release. The senators’ goal is to impose fees on iron, steel and other imports from countries that are not significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The bipartisan bill, dubbed the Prove It Act, would take a crucial first step toward this goal. It would require the Energy Department to study the emissions intensity of certain products — including aluminum, cement, crude oil, fertilizer, iron, steel and plastic — that are produced in the United States and in certain countries.
[…]
Cramer said Republicans are increasingly interested in a carbon border tax as a way to counter China and protect U.S. businesses.

“China’s sort of an easy target,” Cramer said. “They are the ones producing cheap stuff. But there are other players besides China that are dirty producers taking advantage of our system.”
[…]
The measure comes after the European Union in April approved the world’s first tax on carbon-intensive imports. The decision will require importers to start paying the tax in 2026, although they will have to start accounting for the carbon emissions associated with their products in October.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/07/carbon-border-tax/

…skipping past the whole protectionism thing…which ain’t nothing…but I for one don’t have time for today…those “dirty producers”…they aren’t solely foreign…& they don’t all hail from the fiefdom of joe manchin

As America rushes to generate more renewable electricity, it has become fashionable to fret that solar and wind farms use too much land. But America is also racing to produce more renewable fuels, and they use much, much more land to displace much, much less fossil fuel.

It’s fairly well-known that farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel accelerate food inflation and global hunger, but they’re also a disaster for the climate and the environment. And that’s mainly because they’re inefficient land hogs. It takes about 100 acres worth of biofuels to generate as much energy as a single acre of solar panels; worldwide, a land mass larger than California was used to grow under 4 percent of transportation fuel in 2020.

That’s a huge waste of precious land the world needs to store carbon that can stabilize our warming climate and grow crops that can help feed the growing population. The Environmental Protection Agency could help rein in that waste when it updates America’s sweeping mandate encouraging biofuel production later this month. It probably won’t, though, because in Washington, where cornethanolism is one of the last truly bipartisan ideologies, nearly everyone loves to pretend biofuels are green.

America is no longer an agrarian nation, but it remains an article of faith among its political elites that agrarian interests in the heartland require constant handouts. Government support for blending biofuels into U.S. gasoline is often rationalized on the wink-wink-nudge-nudge grounds of reducing reliance on foreign oil or saving the climate, but it’s mainly a way to suck up to farmers and enrich agribusinesses. Like direct payments, countercyclical payments, loan deficiency payments and other U.S. farm programs, biofuel subsidies redistribute tax dollars from the 99 percent of Americans who don’t farm to the roughly 1 percent who do.

What makes corn-based ethanol distinct from most of our other wasteful agricultural giveaways is that it diverts crops from bellies to fuel tanks and uses almost as much fossil fuel — from fertilizers made of natural gas to diesel tractors, industrial refineries and other sources — as the ethanol replaces.

But the more damaging effect of biofuels, first revealed in a 2008 paper in the journal Science, is that they increase greenhouse gas emissions through the conversion of carbon-rich forests, wetlands and grasslands into farmland, expanding our agricultural footprint while shrinking nature’s. That was tragic back when biofuels seemed like the only plausible alternative to planet-broiling gasoline, but it’s inexcusable now that electric vehicles have become better, cleaner and more economical. Biofuels are like a return to the horse-and-buggy era, when farmers had to grow millions of acres of oats and hay for transportation fuel, except now the crops are processed through ethanol plants instead of animals.

By 2050, the world will need to grow an additional 7.4 quadrillion calories every year to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, while ending deforestation and other wilderness destruction to meet the emissions targets in the Paris climate accord. Biofuels make both jobs much harder.
[…]
But his most important decision is still to come: What to do about the Renewable Fuel Standard that has kept the industry afloat since the mid-2000s.

The current standard requires 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol to be blended into U.S. gasoline every year. Since ethanol doesn’t make sense economically without the standard’s lucrative credits, America currently blends about 15 billion gallons a year. The standard was also supposed to mandate 21 billion gallons of so-called advanced biofuels brewed from grasses by 2022, farm wastes and other noncrop materials. But since they are hard to make economical even with the standard’s lucrative credits, only about a quarter of the quota was met in 2022.

The main exception has been 2 billion gallons of soy biodiesel, which Congress designated an advanced biofuel even though it’s made from crops, because Congress courts soybean farmers as slavishly as it does corn farmers. In fact, they’re mostly the same farmers.

But the rules and volumes that Congress created for the Renewable Fuel Standard only extended through 2022, and Mr. Biden’s E.P.A. could easily revise them to advance his climate goals. The agency could limit the standard to biofuels made from leftover restaurant grease, crop residues or other waste products that don’t use farmland. It could create a stricter cap on crop-based biofuels, as Europe has done. Or it could at least tweak its own approach to take land use more seriously in its emissions analyses. Crossing the farm lobby is never easy, but it can be done: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas chose not to kowtow to ethanol producers in the 2016 presidential campaign, and he still won the Iowa Republican caucus.

For now, the E.P.A.’s proposed rule would actually expand soy biodiesel, which is even more land-intensive than corn ethanol. And even though corn ethanol is basically moonshine, an ancient libation with a century-long history as a fuel, a bipartisan group of House members has also introduced a bill to reclassify corn ethanol as an advanced biofuel so it could finally blow past the 15 billion gallon threshold.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/climate-change-biofuels-corn-ethanol.html

…whoever it was that noted the devil is in the detail certainly seems to have had a point

The list of plastic substitutes seems to be growing longer by the day as companies come up with novel products such as cling wrap made from potato waste, seaweed-based food wrappers and cassava starch bags.
[…]
Yet, the world’s plastic pollution problem has continued to worsen.

Work is underway to create the first global treaty to reduce plastic pollution. But experts say achieving that goal will probably involve, in part, developing better substitutes — a challenge that has appeared to vex many environmentalists and sustainability researchers.

That’s because it hasn’t been easy to replace plastic, a ubiquitous material that’s inexpensive, robust and versatile.

…they say misery loves company…& I’m not a massive fan of consistently seeming to be keen to fulfill that brief…but at the risk of being the messenger that winds up getting shot…here’s a couple of things the post offers as you scroll through this one

There are 21,000 pieces of plastic in the ocean for each person on Earth

The little-known unintended consequence of recycling plastics

…so…once again…we know we need to figure out a way to not keep using the stuff derived from those fossil fuels…but…steering & stopping are not the things oil tankers are great at…inertia…momentum…yadda yadda

Conventional plastics are made from fossil fuels. But the problem with plastics, Shaver said, is less about the material and more about what is done with them at end of life.

“We haven’t treated them with care,” he said. “The lack of waste management of those materials is what creates the problem.”

…which is conveniently the sort of guilt frequently implied to lie at the feet of individuals

Much of the plastic that is produced does not get recycled. “That’s not because people aren’t putting the right thing in their bins,” said Melissa Valliant, communications director for the Beyond Plastics advocacy organization. “It’s because so much of our plastic products just cannot be recycled.”

In the United States, recycling facilities typically can effectively process only No. 1 and 2 plastic. One peer-reviewed study of a recycling facility in the United Kingdom also found that 6 to 13 percent of the plastic processed there could end up being released into water or the air as microplastics.
[…]
However, other packaging materials can also come with recycling challenges, and some have disadvantages when compared to plastic.

“It’s not that any of those solutions is bad, but there’s not a panacea,” Shaver said. “There’s not a single solution which works for everywhere.”

[…] glass is heavy, so moving it over long distances can drive up transportation costs, said Muhammad Rabnawaz, an associate professor in the School of Packaging at Michigan State University. The material can also be more prone to breaking than plastic, aluminum and paper.

And making and recycling glass are both energy-intensive processes, experts say. “Until we can couple that glass recycling to renewable energy, we’re at a risk of trading a waste problem for an energy problem,” Shaver said.
[…]
“Aluminum is very difficult to make from the raw materials, so you must recycle it; otherwise there is no benefit,” Rabnawaz said. Recycling of aluminum cans, for example, is estimated to save 95 percent of the energy required to make the same amount of aluminum from its virgin source.

But aluminum recycling, which involves melting down the material, can have its complications. Like glass, it can be recycled many times and still maintain its integrity, but aluminum cans are typically manufactured with a thin plastic coating on the inside that acts as a protective lining, Shaver said.

“What happens to that is that when you melt the aluminum down, it gets burned, so we’re actually burning the plastic bit and then we’re recycling the container,” he said.

[…] recycling paper is an extremely environmentally damaging process, Horvath said. “It requires a lot of chemicals, it requires a lot of energy, a lot of water,” he added. Similar to plastic, it can be challenging to maintain the quality of paper after it’s been recycled, Shaver said.
[…]
It’s also difficult to recycle paper-based beverage containers, Rabnawaz added.

[…] Using the label “bioplastic” or “biopolymer” typically indicates a material’s source is something biological, which can include food products, food waste or agricultural waste, Shaver said.
[…]
For consumers, it can also be hard to tell whether products marketed as biodegradable or compostable really are, he said.

“Many things are industrially biodegradable or industrially compostable, not biodegradable in the environment or in the ocean or home composting,” he said. And because there can be different accreditations for products, that increases the risk of greenwashing, he added.
[…]
“It does not matter if something is recyclable if it’s not recycled,” he said. “It does not matter if something is biodegradable if it is not biodegraded. It does not matter if something is reusable if it is not reused.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/06/07/plastic-alternatives-glass-aluminum-paper/

…so

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/30/administration-seeks-more-relaxed-approach-reducing-plastics/

…there’s serious people getting serious about that…right?

• The number of cases focused on the climate crisis around the world has doubled since 2015, bringing the total number to over 2,000, according to a report last year led by European researchers.
• […]
• The first constitutional climate lawsuit in the US goes to trial on Monday next week (12 June) in Helena, Montana, based on a legal challenge by 16 young plaintiffs, ranging in age from five to 22, against the state’s pro-fossil fuel policies.
• A federal judge ruled last week that a federal constitutional climate lawsuit, also brought by youth, can go to trial.
• More than two dozen US cities and states are suing big oil alleging the fossil fuel industry knew for decades about the dangers of burning coal, oil and gas, and actively hid that information from consumers and investors.
• The supreme court cleared the way for these cases to advance with rulings in April and May that denied oil companies’ bids to move the venue of such lawsuits from state courts to federal courts.
• Hoboken, New Jersey, last month added racketeering charges against oil majors to its 2020 climate lawsuit, becoming the first case to employ the approach in a state court and following a federal lawsuit filed by Puerto Rico last November.

[…]
Research also continues to unearth more about the fossil fuel industry’s knowledge of climate change. A January study revealed that Exxon had made “breathtakingly” accurate climate predictions in the 1970s.

The vast majority of climate-focused cases in the US have previously focused on the regulation of specific infrastructure projects, such as individual pipelines or highways, said Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

But the new forms of climate litigation are different, as they grapple not with particular projects’ emissions, but on responsibility for the climate crisis itself. Sokol, who dubbed these new suits “climate accountability litigation”, says though they will not alone lower emissions, they could help reshape climate plans.
[…]
Another set of lawsuits in the US allege that the fossil fuel industry has for decades known about the dangers of burning coal, oil and gas, and actively hid that information from consumers and investors. Since 2017, seven states, 35 municipalities, the District of Columbia, and one industry trade association have sued major fossil fuel corporations and lobbying groups on these grounds.

Unlike the youth plaintiffs’ constitutional cases, the disinformation lawsuits ask for monetary damages based on destruction wrought by the climate crisis.
[…]
The oil industry has long requested to have these cases heard in federal courts instead of the state courts where they were filed, which are seen as more favorable to the challengers – “an intentional strategy by the oil industry designed to kill the cases”, said Carroll Muffett, CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. But the supreme court recently cleared this hurdle.
[…]
Theodore J Boutrous, counsel for Chevron, called the lawsuits “wasteful”, saying the climate crisis “requires a coordinated and thoughtful federal policy response, not a disjointed patchwork of lawsuits in state courts across multiple states”.

But Sam Sankar, senior vice-president for programs at Earthjustice, said the lawsuits aren’t attempting to set policy. “They’re attempting to recover the costs of climate change from the industries that were instrumental in creating the crisis,” he said.
[…]
Todd Spitler, an ExxonMobil spokesperson, said his company will “continue to fight these suits, which are a waste of time”. A spokesperson for the lobbying group American Petroleum Institute, which is a defendant in some of the suits, said the industry has substantially cut emissions over the past two decades.

Experts say that because companies are still expanding fossil fuels, their actions don’t come close to heeding the warnings of top scientists.

There is already abundant evidence of the fossil fuel sector’s history of misinformation, thanks to reporting, research and congressional investigations. That means lawyers can be highly targeted in the discovery process, potentially providing fodder for future litigation, Muffett said.
[…]
Coming litigation might also target financial institutions like banks and asset managers that back fossil fuel expansion, as well as companies involved in the production of energy, food and plastics – strategies already seen in other countries.
[…]
A study last month examined litigation against fossil fuel majors and found that the filing of a new case or a court decision against a corporation took a slight toll on their finances. Novel developments – including a groundbreaking 2021 Netherlands court ruling ordering Shell to substantially slash its carbon emissions, and an unprecedented transnational claim filed in 2012 by a Peruvian farmer against a German energy company – yielded bigger blows.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/climate-crisis-big-oil-lawsuits-constitution

…right?

3) The conservatives blocked the House from even beginning debate on the gas stove legislation yesterday – a GOP priority.

“We have a lot of conversations to have,” said one senior House Republican source to Fox. “We are still having conversations.”

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 7, 2023

A two-day stalemate between hard-right Republicans and GOP leaders has effectively frozen the House from considering any legislation for the foreseeable future, as both groups failed to find a resolution to the standoff that would allow the majority to vote on bills.

Just past 6 p.m. Wednesday, after GOP leaders gave up on resolving the impasse this week and canceled the remaining votes for the week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) addressed reporters and explained that part of the ongoing frustration is the hard-line faction’s inability to articulate their demands.

“This is the difficult thing,” he said. “Some of these members, they don’t know what to ask for.”

…can’t speak for the rest of you…but if my job…that I volunteered myself for…resulted in materially different outcomes for vital things for hundreds of thousands to millions of people…I’d probably take it more seriously…but…since in my case it doesn’t…scrubbing the rest of my week on a wednesday because I’m sick of people not letting me have everything my own way…does in fairness sometimes seem like an appealing option…but…if, say, you’re part of the aforementioned workforce with the greater responsibility…particularly if you happen to be on the record as disapproving of unions, collective bargaining & strikes…work stoppages like that seem like the sort of thing you’d be happy to criminalize when it’s your voters pulling that shit…so…can I maybe ask on behalf of the latter for the former to be graced with a crushing sense of self-awareness?

McCarthy admitted Wednesday he had been “blindsided” by Tuesday’s blocked vote, which became the first House rule vote to fail since November 2002. But he insisted that the Republican conference would emerge stronger, in similar fashion to when the same group of lawmakers challenged his bid to becoming speaker.
[…]
The surprise rebuke underscored the anger that several members of the Freedom Caucus and other hard-right conservatives still harbored toward Republican leadership over their willingness to allow Democrats to vote in support of the debt bill and override their concerns before sending it to the Senate, where it also passed in bipartisan fashion. President Biden signed the deal over the weekend, barely skirting a catastrophic default that had been projected for Monday.
[…]
At the center of the far-right’s concern is an argument that McCarthy violated an agreement several of them struck in January in exchange for supporting his speakership bid. No list of those promises made exists publicly, so it’s unclear exactly what lawmakers and McCarthy agreed to. But several members of the Freedom Caucus have claimed he violated three main components of the agreement: Supporting legislation that reduces spending back to 2022 appropriation levels; putting legislation on the floor that is not passed overwhelmingly by Democrats; and not taking up bills that don’t have unanimous support from Republicans on the House Rules Committee.
[…]
Throughout Wednesday morning, the group of disrupters met and spoke with McCarthy and his team. Leadership remains unclear what exactly the group of 11 Republicans want, and different members want different things, making it more difficult to address their concerns, according to four people close to leadership who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

…I’m familiar with the saying that it’s better to have them on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in…but when they’re in the business of pissing into the wind…I dunno

Holdouts are pushing for immediate consideration of a bill proposed by Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) regarding pistol braces. Clyde accused Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) of threatening to hold the bill from consideration in the full House if Clyde voted against the debt deal. Scalise has denied the accusation, saying he only informed Clyde that his bill couldn’t be brought onto the floor until it had enough GOP support.

Another bill being discussed would permanently codify the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used for abortion services, with some exceptions. The bill was on a list Scalise had proposed would be on the floor the first two weeks of January, but it has been shelved because there are not enough votes to pass it through the Republicans’ slim majority.
[…]
While Republican leaders were trying to negotiate with members of the Freedom Caucus, an equally important discussion about the House’s future was taking place in Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s (R-Minn.) office. Emmer and his chief deputy, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.), met a dozen moderate lawmakers who represent swing districts to discuss what legislation they would like to see be considered on the House floor, according to six people familiar with the meeting.

Though the meeting was not called in response to the standoff with the hard-right members, lawmakers discussed the need to vote on measures that would help voters understand that a Republican majority is passing bills that help their pocketbook. Most lawmakers were critical that what they would like to see passed could possibly be blocked if the Freedom Caucus forbids votes on bipartisan bills.
[…]
“This is, in my opinion, political incontinence on our part. We are wetting ourselves and can’t do anything about. This is insane,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said. “This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave. And frankly, I think there’ll be a political cost to it.”

…from your lips, as the saying goes

“You got the tail wagging the dog. You got a small group of people who are pissed off that are keeping the house of representatives from functioning today, and I think the American people are not going to take too kindly to that,” he added.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/07/house-republicans-mccarthy-freedom-caucus/

…pretty sure they wouldn’t be alone in not taking it kindly…but…sure would be nice if that seemed like it might improve the chances of something being done the fuck about it…instead of the other sort of recycling

Chemical industry used big tobacco’s tactics to conceal evidence of PFAS risks [Guardian]

…for such a well-established playbook…there seems to be a conspicuous shortage of means to avoid falling for it…somehow

UN climate talks this year might skirt the vital question of whether and how to phase out fossil fuels, as nations have not yet agreed to discuss the issue, one of the top officials hosting the talks has said.

…probably just one of them coincidences…just…comes with the territory

Majid Al Suwaidi, director-general of the Cop28 climate talks for its host nation, the United Arab Emirates, said governments were not in agreement over whether the phaseout of fossil fuels should be on the agenda for the conference, which begins in November.
[…]
Al Suwaidi has attended many conferences of the party (Cop) meetings under the UN framework convention on climate change. The UAE has come under fire for its choice of Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the country’s national oil company, Adnoc, as president of Cop28.

Adnoc is planning major increases in its oil and gas production capacity. On Thursday, civil society groups in Bonn will protest against “conflicts of interest” over Al Jaber’s dual role in the negotiations. A preparatory session for Cop28, is being held this week in Bonn.

Al Suwaidi said fossil fuels would form a key part of the discussions at Cop28, but whether a phaseout would be discussed as part of the official agenda of the talks was still up for grabs. “Our presidency is here for whatever the parties’ consensus is. The parties’ consensus is to have a discussion around fossil fuels. And we will support having a discussion around fossil fuels. It’s really up to the parties decide what they want to have on the agenda as part of this process,” he told the Guardian.

“That’s what we as a presidency are focused on: finding the solutions that will allow everyone to go away feeling that they made significant progress and feel that it was worth the discussion.”

…gotta be honest…I couldn’t care less about whether or not it feels like progress to them…or whether the result of their talks is worth it to people who profit from not getting this act together…what I want is for it to actually qualify as progress…in a palatable direction

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its latest comprehensive report on climate science, noted that there could be a small role for oil and gas, if used alongside technologies to remove carbon dioxide, even in 2050, when the world must reach net zero.
[…]
But several prominent climate scientists, including IPCC authors, told the Guardian they were concerned about the IPCC findings being taken in this way. Although there could be a small amount of fossil fuel used while achieving this net zero, this should be minimal and not taken as a licence for fossil fuel producers to continue their operations, the scientists warned.

Al Jaber, who will attend the Bonn talks on Thursday, met the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and several top EU officials on Wednesday. In a statement emerging from that meeting, they did not mention the phaseout of fossil fuels, but referred instead to pursuing “energy systems free of unabated fossil fuels”.

The word unabated usually refers to the use of technology to capture and store carbon dioxide (CCS). Al Suwaidi also defended the use of CCS, which he said could be used to help avoid breaching the 1.5C limit.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/un-climate-talks-might-avoid-fossil-fuel-phase-out-says-cop28-official

…unabated?

A much-feared moment — a summer in which the Arctic Ocean features almost entirely open water — could be coming even sooner than expected and has the possibility to become a regular event within most of our lifetimes, according to a new study.

Experts have long feared at least an occasional dwindling of floating Arctic ice down to minimal levels by 2050, with a greater risk as humans emit more greenhouse gases. The new research, though, suggests that even in a fairly low-emissions scenario that holds the planet’s warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, regular years without summer Arctic sea ice could occur in the 2050s.

The trend gets worse as the emissions levels increase. In the worst-case scenario, the study said, there is a possibility that the Arctic could have Septembers with no ice as soon as the 2030s, a decade earlier than previous research indicated.

“We do seem to be destined to see ice-free summers in the Arctic. That seems to be baked in at this point,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., who was not associated with the study. “The question has always been when.”

Arctic sea ice follows an annual cycle, peaking in the unbroken darkness of winter and then dwindling in the equally constant glare of summer. Even if ice does dip below 1 million square kilometers in area at the summer low in September — a threshold deemed to represent a basically ice-free ocean — that does not mean it won’t rebound quickly in the winter or persist through summer the next year. Much depends on weather. But the warming of the Earth makes it easier for the ice to melt and harder for it to rebound.

The impacts will be far-reaching, threatening communities, harming ecosystems and exacerbating global warming, scientists said.

“The impacts are already upon us, and they are growing. You could still have a fair bit of sea ice out there in summer and have very important or tremendous impacts on fish species, phytoplankton blooms on the people of the north,” Serreze said.

Without sea ice, the Arctic will also warm faster. Arctic ice sends solar radiation back to space, because bright ice reflects more than the dark ocean. If the ice melts, additional solar energy will be added to the region, increasing planetary warming.

“Disappearing sea ice will add an enormous amount of additional solar energy to the Arctic,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the University of California at San Diego.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/06/arctic-sea-ice-melting/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2022/global-warming-1-5-celsius-scenarios/

‘Absolute scandal’: UAE state oil firm able to read Cop28 climate summit emails [Guardian]

…you want to talk about “unabated”?

The destruction of a major dam and hydroelectric power plant on the front lines of the war in Ukraine may dry up the rich agricultural region of southern Ukraine, sweep pollutants into waterways and upend ecosystems that had developed around the massive reservoir whose waters are now rapidly flooding downstream, although the full impact could take months or even years to understand, officials and experts said.

The escape of the huge store of water from the reservoir will reshape Ukraine’s map, its habitats and its livelihood, endangering communities that depend on the water for drinking and growing crops, forcing farmers out of business, pushing towns to relocate and unsettling delicate ecological balances. Ukrainian officials warned that at least 150 tons of oil stored inside the hydroelectric power plant in the dam were washed into the waterway. Water from the reservoir also fed the cooling ponds of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, in Zaporizhzhia, although nuclear experts said there was no immediate threat.
[…]
The biggest and most immediate impact is likely to be to residents of southern Ukraine who depended on water from the reservoir for daily needs, as well as the farming that is the source of much of the country’s significant agricultural exports. Water from the reservoir irrigated the thirsty farming region of southern Ukraine, which has grown to depend on canals fed by the water in the decades since the dam was built in the 1950s. And although it’s possible that Ukraine can pump water out of the ground to make up part of the loss from the reservoir, it may quickly deplete it, said Doug Weir, research and policy director at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a British organization that has been tracking the environmental impact of the war in Ukraine.
[…]
It will take weeks until the full consequences of such a massive and sudden shock to the river ecosystem will be clear, experts said.

The flooding will come more quickly than that, crossing some of Ukraine’s prized environmental sites, including the Oleshky Sands National Nature Park and the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve at the littoral area where the Dnieper flows into the Black Sea, which is home to wild horses and protected snakes and falcons. Some fish breeding grounds inside the shallow parts of the reservoir will also disappear.

“People will not have drinking water or cooking water,” said Anna Ackermann, a board member of Ecoaction, one of Ukraine’s leading environmental civic organizations, who added that she was concerned above all else about the human impact of the dam’s destruction. “There will be no water to grow fields.”

…but go on & tell me again why some fuckwit with his panties in a bunch about “pistol braces” should be in a position to upset the entire legislative applecart of the allegedly US of freakin’ A as though there’s nothing of more vital importance than…fuck it…do I even need to type the rest of it out?

Ackermann said there could even be some radiation risk leftover from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster if contamination was trapped in sediments that had accumulated at the bottom of the reservoir that is now being washed away.

…call it a downstream effect

“You have lots of different debris that will flow into the flooding, including from all the factories and workshops that are producing and using chemicals and different toxic things,” said Mohammad Heidarzadeh, an assistant professor of architecture and civil engineering at the University of Bath.

“Dam breaks like this ultimately can release every hazardous material you can imagine. Everything gets washed away by the floodwater,” he said.

He noted that Brazil is still struggling to assess the impacts of similarly large dam breaks that took place years ago.

And since the Dnieper River has been a front line in the conflict, a sudden flood could hold other dangers, experts said, including sweeping away anti-personnel mines that had been placed on embankments and moving them to other, unexpected locations.
[…]
A group of Swedish engineers had in October modeled the potential fallout in the event that Russia were to use explosives to destroy the dam.

The modeling, by the firm Damningsverket, predicted a wave of water 13 to 16 feet high would hit Kherson within 19 hours. The model predicted water gushing from the reservoir faster than water pours out of Niagara Falls, and cautioned that riverside towns would be overwhelmed.

One of the authors of that study, Henrik Olander-Hjalmarsson, said in a statement that the actual event will probably cause more damage.

“It appears the real-world scenario is worse than the one I modeled since the water levels in the reservoir were significantly higher than in the model,” he wrote in an email to journalists.

Ukrainian officials have also warned of a large release of oil — potentially more than 150 tons — that was stored inside the hydroelectric power plant inside the dam. That oil could have a significant impact, depending on how it behaves inside the massive rush of water, Ackermann said, although she said the implications were not yet clear.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/06/ukraine-dam-environment-destruction/

…the ones that do seem clear don’t seem great…which…could beg a few questions for some people

“Nones” — the term of art for those who say they have no particular religious affiliation — is an unsatisfying label. I’m not the first to notice that it sounds like “nuns” when said aloud, and that, as a result, it can confuse people who aren’t steeped in sociological jargon. But more crucially, “nones” obscures the diversity of backgrounds and beliefs among the millions of Americans who fall into this very broad category.

Perhaps the blankness of the term comes from the fact that it attempts to describe a group that has grown significantly in the past half-century (by some measures, nones are around 30 percent of the population). Previously, nones had been defined by what they aren’t — adherents to a religious tradition — rather than who they are or what they believe.

In an effort to better differentiate the ways we relate (or don’t) to religion, some scholars, like David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman and John Green in their book “Secular Surge,” have come up with new language to distinguish Americans by their beliefs, sorting us into four groupings: religionists, non-religionists, secularists and religious secularists.

When I spoke to Campbell, a professor at Notre Dame, he told me he thinks of religionists, intuitively, as people who are “highly religious and don’t have much secularism in their lives.” Non-religionists aren’t affirmatively secular, they just don’t have much of a religious worldview. “They haven’t really thought about truth, meaning, etc.,” he said. Secularists “have determined that they find truth in philosophy and science and sources like that, and not from religious texts.” And religious secularists “see the world through a secular lens, but they also have a foot in a religious community.” They have “found a way to accommodate both ways of seeing the world.”

Compared to “nones,” those four categories are useful, but they still don’t quite capture the range of experience when it comes to summing up many of the stories of the 7,000-plus readers who responded to my question, in April, about why they had moved away from organized religion.
[…]
When I followed up with these readers, three trends emerged. Several had switched religious affiliation more than once; I’ll call them seekers. Others had an abrupt break from church in their youth, after which they became atheists or agnostics; I’ll call them skeptics. And there were others who drifted away from religion fairly late in life; I’ll call them slow faders, because their religious evolutions took time.
[…]
Though the current data suggests that a very small percentage of Americans become nones after 50 — just 2 percent according to P.R.R.I. — quite a few readers who responded to my initial call-out found themselves losing faith in their 60s, 70s and even 80s. When I relayed this to sociologists who study religion, more than one suggested that I might be onto something new. More older people may just finally feel comfortable admitting to doubts now that society has become less religious as a whole.

Taken together, many of these people felt that their religiosity was so ingrained in them as part of their family and community culture, they couldn’t voice their long-simmering doubts until a major life change occurred, whether that was retirement, the death of a loved one or a big political shift.

Why Do People Lose Their Religion? More Than 7,000 Readers Shared Their Stories. [NYT]

…probably depends on what you consider to be “the core”

At an underwater mountain in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, scientists have drilled nearly a mile beneath the ocean floor and pulled up an unprecedented scientific bounty — pieces of Earth’s rocky mantle.

The record-breaking achievement has electrified geoscientists, who for decades have dreamed of punching through miles of Earth’s crust to sample the mysterious realm that makes up most of the planet. The heat-driven churn of the mantle is what fuels plate tectonics in the crust, giving rise to mountains, volcanoes and earthquakes.

The new expedition, by an ocean drilling vessel called the JOIDES Resolution, did not technically drill into the mantle, and the hole isn’t the deepest ever drilled beneath the ocean floor. Instead, researchers cruised to a special “tectonic window” in the North Atlantic where drills don’t have to tunnel as far to strike pay dirt. Here, the rocks of the mantle have been pushed close to the surface as the ocean floor slowly pulls apart at the nearby Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

On May 1, they began drilling the hole, known as U1601C. Andrew McCaig, the expedition’s co-chief scientist, expected to make a shallow “pinprick” because the record for drilling in mantle rock, set in the 1990s, was a mere tenth of a mile. The researchers hoped to recover enough samples to help elucidate how chemical reactions between mantle rocks and water could have given rise to life on our planet. But ocean drilling can be an uncertain enterprise — drills get stuck, or the long cores of rock being recovered may be only partial samples.

“It just kept going deeper, deeper and deeper. Then everyone in the science party said, ‘Hey, this is what we wanted all along. Since 1960, we wanted to get a hole this deep in mantle rock,’” McCaig said, speaking from the JOIDES Resolution minutes before another long section of dark rock was pulled on board. When the team stopped drilling on June 2, the team had taken rock samples from as deep as 4,157 feet below the seafloor.

“We’ve achieved an ambition that’s been feeding the science community for many decades,” McCaig said.

Scientists on land have been eagerly keeping tabs on the expedition, anticipating a jackpot of data that will open a new window into the deep Earth and fuel years of research.

In a geologic triumph, scientists drill a window into Earth’s mantle [WaPo]

…one thing is certain…when you crack the surface layer of some things & go looking at the things that lurk out of sight…some of it is ugly…so you might want to skip this one altogether

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/07/meta-instagram-child-porn

…though…if you think your constitution can bear it…this one is an archived version of a WSJ piece

Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network – WSJ

…to an algorithm…one interest is no different to another…it’s what you do with it that makes the difference

Companies want to use AI tracking to make you better at your job [WaPo]

…better at your job, huh?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/edward-snowden-10-years-surveillance-revelations

Snowden’s revelations sparked outrage and anger. Bulk interception was being done without a democratic mandate and with few real safeguards. When the scope of this surveillance came to light, officials claimed most of the information was not “read” and therefore its collection did not violate privacy. This was disingenuous; the data could reveal an intimate picture of someone’s life – a fact that was upheld in later legal challenges, which proved the surveillance violated privacy and human rights law.

After the leaks, three reviews took place in the UK. The first was done by parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC). It did little to interrogate what the spies were actually up to, even while acknowledging that new legislation was required. A review by David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, was more circumspect and suggested a series of improvements. Finally, the Home Office convened a panel (of which I was a part, alongside an ex minister, former security chiefs and Martha Lane Fox) that produced a report and a series of recommendations.

These three reports eventually led to the 2016 passage of the Investigatory Powers Act, which clarified what types of state surveillance were allowed and how these needed to be authorised. The act allowed bulk interception – much to the dismay of many privacy campaigners – but changed the process governing how this interception was authorised. This meant that while a secretary of state could sign off a warrant justifying the most intrusive powers, that warrant must also be approved by an independent judicial commissioner.

The legacy of Snowden’s leaks is mixed. Bulk interception and surveillance hasn’t stopped, despite there now being greater transparency and more oversight. “There are a few more safeguards, but mostly it continues,” Caroline Wilson Palow, the legal director at Privacy International (PI), told me. The greatest legacy of Snowden’s leaks are the legal challenges they have made possible. Until these revelations, it was nearly impossible to bring a legal case challenging state surveillance. There have now been several successful lawsuits.

…bulk interception…web crawling…scraping…analytics…poh-tate-oh, poh-taht-toe…round & around we go…where we stop…nobody knows?

As technology evolves, so too does surveillance. States have found new ways to spy on citizens, particularly using the mobile phones we all carry around. Intrusive spyware such as Pegasus, sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, can turn a person’s phone into a 24-hour surveillance machine. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian and other media organisations showed how activists, journalists and lawyers had been targeted by malware bought by countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary and India.

Too often, security services conflate protection of those in power with protection of the public. Politicians have long used their security services and surveillance powers to stifle protest and dissent by targeting anyone who might legitimately challenge (or even question) their hold on power. This is why the interests of the security services so often come at the expense of the public. Even so, the rallying cry of protecting the public is often used to justify such invasive surveillance.

We can see something similar happening with the UK’s online safety bill. Discussions about this have conflated the public’s legitimate concern about bad online behaviour with the security services’ agenda of breaking end-to-end encryption. Gaining a backdoor to encrypted chat has been on spies’ wishlist almost since the internet was invented. But there is no guarantee this will make the internet safer or free from harm.

In its current form, the bill would effectively deputise spying activities to technology companies, which could scan users’ messages and social media posts for evidence of harms that they could then report to the authorities. Understandably, there’s huge demand for more accountability online, where bad and dangerous behaviour often goes unchecked. But the proposed bill will allow intelligence agencies to spy on ordinary citizens via technology platforms.

The fact is, the majority of online abuse isn’t happening in secret. It’s in plain sight and still nothing is done about it. Bad behaviour online has few consequences. Women face rape and death threats simply for daring to speak out online. Any teenager can access radicalising messages from racists and misogynists or watch extreme pornography showing physically violent, hostile depictions of sex. They don’t need cryptography to view such things.

This raises the elephant in the room around any discussion about online safety: the business model of big tech. It, too, relies on mass surveillance but of a different kind, where users’ behaviour is watched by machines in order to build algorithms, so that social media can serve up posts they think we’ll engage with. The monetisation of users’ attention has incentivised tech companies to create algorithms that tend toward extreme, radicalising content as that is the kind that draws the most engagement. Breaking encryption does nothing to solve this problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/edward-snowden-state-surveillance-uk-online-safety-bill

…so…a lot of button-pushing noise about a thing they want to do that might be worth it if it granted the ability to do something substantive about a exigent circumstance…which…it doesn’t…though it does do a fine job of tying up anyone that could in a bunch of procedural knots…which a cynic might consider to clear the bar for compounding the problem…some days

It must be an interesting position to be in – Altman, 38, is the daddy of AI chatbot ChatGPT, after all, and is leading the charge to create “artificial general intelligence”, or AGI, an AI system capable of tackling any task a human can achieve. Where “AI” is bandied about to describe anything more complex than a Tamagotchi, AGI is the real thing: the human-level intelligence of stories such as Her, Star Trek, Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Battlestar Galactica.

[…seriously? …”the daddy”? …WTF the guardian…you’re supposed to be better than that…damn it…anyway…where was I?]

It is a gruelling few weeks. On the day I meet him, he woke up in Paris having met with Emmanuel Macron the night before. A Eurostar trip to London and a quick hop to Oxford later, he is giving a talk to the Oxford Guild, a business-focused student society, before a few more meetings, then off to Number 10 for a sit down with Rishi Sunak. Later he boards a flight to Warsaw before heading to Munich the following morning. His PR team is rotating in and out, but Altman’s in it for a five-week stint.
[…]
Altman, a classic dropout founder in the Mark Zuckerberg mould – he quit Stanford university in his third year to launch a social network called Loopt – seems in full politician mode as he tries to find middle ground. “I think a race towards AGI is a bad thing,” Altman says, “and I think not making safety progress is a bad thing.” But, he tells the protester, the only way to get safety is with “capability progress” – building stronger AI systems, the better to prod them and understand how they work.

[…] “One thing I’ve been talking a lot about on this trip is what a global regulatory framework for superintelligence looks like.” The day before we meet, Altman and his colleagues published a note outlining their vision for that regulation: an international body modelled on the International Atomic Energy Agency, to coordinate between research labs, impose safety standards, track computing power devoted to training systems and eventually even restrict certain approaches altogether.

…I’ll admit…I do go back & forth on this when I think about it…say AGI is achievable…for the sake of argument…& skip the whole skynet problem & that basilisk thought experiment from the other day…let’s assume a benevolent deal like that iain m banks Culture that elon so abysmally misconstrues…that’s pretty much the techno-utopian get-outta-jail-free card, right there…but…that stuff we skipped past to get to it…well, it probably does deserve to be considered in a similar light to the nuclear weapons thing…so…if sam is the man with the plan to be the digital oppenheimer…how do you think that lands when you don’t need a centrifuge or fissile material to build out these models in the cloud…or on junked bitcoin-mining rigs…how do you maintain ubiquitous access to the perceived benefits of all things online while imposing meaningful controls on the potential harms available to those prepared to misuse & abuse the tools they can build?

But that distinction, between the near and the long-term, has earned Altman no shortage of criticism on his tour. It’s in OpenAI’s interest, after all, to focus regulatory attention on the existential risk if it distracts governments from addressing the potential harm the company’s products are already capable of causing. The company has already clashed with Italy over ChatGPT’s data protection, while Altman started his trip with a visit to Washington DC to spend several hours being harangued by US senators over everything from misinformation to copyright violations.

“It’s funny,” Altman says, “the same people will accuse us of not caring about the short-term stuff, and also of trying to go for regulatory capture” – the idea that, if onerous regulations are put in place, only OpenAI and a few other market leaders will have the resources to comply. “I think it’s all important. There’s different timescales, but we’ve got to address each of these challenges.” He reels off a few concerns: “There’s a very serious one coming about, I think, sophisticated disinformation; another one a little bit after that, maybe about cybersecurity. These are very important, but our particular mission is about AGI. And so I think it’s very reasonable that we talk about that more, even though we also work on the other stuff.”

He bristles slightly when I suggest that the company’s motivations might be driven by profit. “We don’t need to win everything. We’re an unusual company: we want to push this revolution into the world, figure out how to make it safe and wildly beneficial. But I don’t think about things in the same way I think you do on these topics.”

…hard agree, I guess

OpenAI is indeed unusual. The organisation was founded in 2015 as a non-profit with a $1bn endowment from backers including Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Altman initially acted as co-chair alongside Musk, with a goal “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”. But that changed in 2019, when the organisation reshaped itself around a “capped profit” model. Altman became CEO, and the organisation began taking external investment, with the proviso that no investor could make more than 100 times their initial input.

The rationale was simple: working on the cutting edge of AI research was a lot more expensive than it had first seemed. “There is no way of staying at the cutting edge of AI research, let alone building AGI, without us massively increasing our compute investment,” OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said at the time. Altman, already independently wealthy – he made his first fortune with Loopt, and his second as the president of startup accelerator Y Combinator – didn’t take any equity in the new company. If AI does end up reshaping the world, he won’t benefit any more than the rest of us.

That’s important, he says, because while Altman is convinced that the arc bends towards the reshaping being broadly positive, where he’s less certain is who wins. “I don’t want to say I’m sure. I’m sure it will lift up the standard of living for everybody, and, honestly, if the choice is lift up the standard of living for everybody but keep inequality, I would still take that. And I think we can probably agree that if [safe AGI] is built, it can do that. But it may be a very equalising force. Some technologies are and some aren’t, and some do both in different ways. But I think you can see a bunch of ways, where, if everybody on the Earth got a way better education, way better healthcare, a life that’s just not possible because of the current price of cognitive labour – that is an equalising force in a way that can be powerful.”

…of course it will…it’s a fucking magic wand if you accept the premise…but…quite apart from the question of whether these are the people it seems smart to grandfather in to any & every actual control surface of that nebulous shape…you know…what with their form thus far on adverse effects pertaining to the emergent properties of what they consider to be progress

Ultimately, it all comes back to the goal of creating a world where superintelligence works for us, rather than against us. Once, Altman says, his vision of the future was what we’d recognise from science fiction. “The way that I used to think about heading towards superintelligence is we were going to build this one extremely capable system. There were a bunch of safety challenges with that, and it was a world that was going to feel quite unstable.” If OpenAI turns on its latest version of ChatGPT and finds it’s smarter than all of humanity combined, then it’s easy to start charting a fairly nihilistic set of outcomes: whoever manages to seize control of the system could use it to seize control of the world, and would be hard to unseat by anyone but the system itself.

Now, though, Altman is seeing a more stable course present itself: “We now see a path where we build these tools that get more and more powerful. And, there’s billions, or trillions, of copies being used in the world, helping individual people be way more effective, capable of doing way more. The amount of output that one person can have can dramatically increase, and where the superintelligence emerges is not just the capability of our biggest single neural network, but all of the new science we’re discovering, all of the new things we’re creating.

“It’s not that it’s not stoppable,” he says. If governments around the world decided to act in concert to limit AI development, as they have in other fields, such as human cloning or bioweapon research, they may be able to. But that would be to give up all that is possible. “I think this will be the most tremendous leap forward in quality of life for people that we’ve had, and I think that somehow gets lost from the discussion.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/07/what-should-the-limits-be-the-father-of-chatgpt-on-whether-ai-will-save-humanity-or-destroy-it

…a lot of people seem very eager to speak to sam…& sam says they should be…because sam says we need to talk about this now…& somewhere down the line he thinks we’re gonna need to talk about “sophisticated disinformation“…& at some point…cybersecurity

This is starting to get a little too familiar for 2023: A company discovers a vulnerability in a popular piece of software or a tech tool. A hacking group looks poised to exploit it in a widespread way. Organizations begin to announce they’re among the victims.

This time around, a file-transfer tool known as MOVEit Transfer is at the center of everything. The ransomware gang in question appears to be Clop, a repeat player in this kind of story (some researchers are blaming the group, which is apparently also claiming credit). And the affected organizations whose information has been taken include the likes of British Airways, BBC, the government of Nova Scotia and a university in New York state.

www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/moveit-transfer-vulnerability

#Cl0p re: #MOVEit. #clop #ransomware pic.twitter.com/TswaCw4BjA

— Brett Callow (@BrettCallow) June 6, 2023

The MOVEit vulnerability follows on some other noteworthy attacks with some parallels this year:

• Apparent cybercriminals exploited a flaw in VMware software in February to hit more than 3,000 organizations with low-level ransom demands. They targeted publicly facing servers that are often the first line of defense to compromise.
• Clop — there’s that name again! — hit big-name victims like Procter & Gamble via a (wait for it) popular file-transfer tool, Fortra’s GoAnywhere. The victim total was smaller, but it caused more trouble for those affected.
• April also brought a second somewhat-similar incident, but without the ransomware angle. Alleged North Korean hackers attacked voice-over IP software provider 3CX to go after its customers. The victim total is unknown, although it could have affected hundreds of thousands of businesses. A coordinated industry and government response appeared to curtail the damage before it got anywhere near that far.

So far, prominent companies affected include a number of U.K. organizations, via compromised payroll services provider Zellis. In North America, victims include the government of Nova Scotia and the University of Rochester.

Around a dozen federal agencies appear to have active U.S. government contracts that mention MOVEit.

Microsoft are attributing the #moveIT attacks to cl0p ransomware.

I’ve been tracking this – there are a double digit number of orgs who had data stolen, that includes multiple US Government and banking orgs. https://t.co/OJF5XnQO9c

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) June 5, 2023

MoveIT Transfer is used across the US Government as a recommended solution and all of them were vulnerable (and in many cases still are as many orgs haven’t patched yet).

The vendor has done a really good job responding to this btw.

It’s probably going to get spicy. pic.twitter.com/bGO4BqiU50

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) June 5, 2023

Condon explained what makes file-transfer tools juicy targets for hackers. (Clop notably went after them in the 2021 Accellion breach.)

• “They share sensitive information,” she said of such tools. “They’re common with large businesses who are often shipping sensitive data back and forth.”
• “It’s just a shortcut,” Condon said. “Why would you go through 10 steps to gain initial access to some environment and then pivot to another … active directory or whatever it is you’re targeting, to get data, when you can exploit a file-transfer application within hours or days to exfiltrate gigabytes and gigabytes of sensitive data and then back out?”

Another cyber company said it noticed something else interesting about the kind of attack the hackers used. The basic part is known as SQL injection, which involves putting malicious statements into an application to interfere with queries it makes to its database.

But Huntress said Monday that in the case of the MOVEit attack, SQL injection opens the door to potential remote code execution, allowing attackers to make changes to a target device no matter where it’s located. That’s “the crown jewel” allowing attackers to “own the access,” said Huntress’s senior security researcher John Hammond.

But it’s not clear why the attackers didn’t use that access to drop ransomware into victim networks, Hammond told me, although some ransomware gangs have been focusing more on stealing data to hold for ransom and skipping the encryption part because it’s faster and easier. Condon also told me the industry hasn’t seen the attackers move around inside victim systems, which decreases their chances of getting discovered.

…so…there’s your cybersecurity concerns…which don’t seem further down the road than fucking AGI to me…& how about that disinformation bullshit?

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and his congressional allies are demanding documents from and meetings with disinformation experts that have been frequent targets of right-wing activists, our colleagues Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn report.

The meetings are putting pressure on the group of academics. Jordan and his allies have accused them of colluding with U.S. officials to suppress conservative views.

• Jordan and other Republican committee members previously claimed that tech companies have worked with the government to suppress free speech and remove certain content on their platforms.

Naomi and Joseph write: “Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with … University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events.”

“The pressure has forced some researchers to change their approach or step back, even as disinformation is rising ahead of the 2024 election,” they add. “As artificial intelligence makes deception easier and platforms relax their rules on political hoaxes, industry veterans say they fear that young scholars will avoid studying disinformation.”

• “The political part is intimidating — to have people with a lot of power in this world making false claims, false accusations about our work,” Starbird, who has significantly cut back on public engagement, told our colleagues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/07/cyberdefenders-respond-hack-file-transfer-tool/

…but big boys go home to sulk when they don’t get to talk enough about keeping gas stoves & the importance of fucking pistol braces…good to know we’re all clear about the priorities when it comes to what we all need…& what the fuck these assholes’ job descriptions are supposed to cover

The Grand Canyon, a Cathedral to Time, Is Losing Its River [NYT]

…for the people, anybody?

The High Cost of Bad Credit [NYT]

…business as usual

McKinsey’s little-known role in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank [WaPo]

…&…as usual…feels like I barely scratched the surface…but I’m out of time…& I owe the usual musical penance…so I’m going to pour another coffee & see about getting to that little act of atonement