…lest we forget [DOT 19/10/21]

…there’s a lot you could say about colin powell…& if you feel like it you can probably find just about all of it must have been said in the pile of coverage there’s been about his death…so I’ll leave it at this

Powell, who was 84, received his second Pfizer shot in February but was immunocompromised as a result of his cancer and suffered from Parkinson’s disease, Cifrino said in an interview. Multiple myeloma is a blood cancer that severely impairs the immune system, lowering the effectiveness of vaccines.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/10/18/powell-covid-vaccine-immunocompromised-cancer/

…because while there might be a lot of things it’s worth remembering about colin powell that one seems like it’s worth keeping near the front just now…but I could be wrong…I guess it might be that I was thinking about what somebody said yesterday…but while that seems like the sort of thing it might be worth more people bearing in mind than seem likely to in the present moment…that slew of in memoriam articles of one sort or another are presumably going to come up pretty high in future searches for information about the man…& if you take a less short-term view about what he had a hand in that might be important to remember…some things are maybe more important than others

Last week, NBC News obtained a recording revealing that a top administrator in a Texas school district instructed teachers to use books offering “opposing” perspectives on the Holocaust. The appalling notion of excusing or justifying genocide rightly sparked condemnations from politicians and human rights leaders.
[…]
In the U.S., we have monuments to Nazi collaborators in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, among other states. In Europe, it’s worse. Parades honoring Holocaust perpetrators are held in European capitals, where veterans of Nazi divisions that exterminated Jews and Roma are feted as heroes. In countries like Hungary and Lithuania, the war on Holocaust history is already being waged across school curriculums, literature and museums and in the courts. Book bans are becoming increasingly prevalent. Poland and Ukraine already have laws making it illegal to rebut distortion over Holocaust participation; another is being developed in Lithuania.

This goes beyond forgetting the Holocaust; it’s about raising entire generations to view perpetrators as heroes.
[…]
But these American examples pale in comparison to the Holocaust revisionism happening across the Atlantic. Under authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, Hungary has embraced the cult of Hitler ally Miklós Horthy, as well as virulently antisemitic poets. Croatia is furiously whitewashing the Ustashe fascists who systematically slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Muslims. Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine openly celebrate their countries’ divisions in the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party responsible for the Holocaust, among other war crimes.

How is all this justified? It turns out presenting an “opposing” perspective of the Holocaust, to quote the Texas administrator, is remarkably simple. One has to recast the perpetrators into something more palatable: victims and freedom fighters. That’s easily accomplished with a little cynicism, such as the kind demonstrated by then-President Donald Trump, who, in response to the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, insisted that there were fine people on both sides.

Texas’ Holocaust both-sides-ing debacle is scary. Worse? It’s already happening. [NBC]

…one way or another

The Biden administration has asked the supreme court to block Texas’ extreme abortion ban as a battle over its constitutionality plays out in the courts.
[…]
“The question now is whether Texas’ nullification of this court’s precedents should be allowed to continue while the courts consider the United States’ suit. As the district court recognized, it should not,” the justice department wrote.
[…]
The administration said the court could short-circuit the usual process and rule on the law’s constitutionality this term, even though lower courts have yet to do so.
[…]
In this case, the administration said, Texas’ attempt to evade federal court review of its law and the possibility that other states could adopt similar measures justify the court’s early involvement.
[…]
It’s not clear whether the administration will prevail at a supreme court with a conservative majority that has been fortified by three appointees of Donald Trump. The supreme court has already agreed to hear a major challenge to abortion rights in a Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case from Mississippi that is considered the most direct threat to women’s reproductive rights in nearly five decades.
[…]
The court has already declined once to block the law from taking effect, acknowledging in an unsigned order that there were “serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law” but also “complex and novel” procedural questions about whom to sue and whether federal courts had the power to stop the law from being enforced.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/18/biden-supreme-court-texas-abortion-ban-latest

…it seems like when you start out to say it doesn’t count when some people do shit nobody should have done

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police officers in two cases should be shielded from lawsuits claiming their conduct killed one man and injured another.

The rulings, in cases from California and Oklahoma, are a further sign that the court is unwilling to second-guess police officers responding to emergency calls. Both cases resulted in brief, unsigned opinions with no noted dissents.
[…]
In both cases, the Supreme Court said the officers were entitled to the form of legal protection known as qualified immunity. That judicial doctrine shields officers from lawsuits unless it can be shown that their conduct violated a clearly established right under the Constitution or the law.

As applied by the courts, it requires a lawsuit to show that an officer’s action was virtually the same as conduct ruled impermissible in a similar lawsuit, a difficult legal standard to meet given the complexity of law enforcement encounters.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-rules-police-two-lawsuits-claiming-excessive-force

The rulings signaled that the Supreme Court is not retreating from its support of a doctrine it created in the 1960s, which provides broad protections to officers accused of violating civil rights, legal experts said.
[…]
Joanna Schwartz, a qualified-immunity expert and researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the “two decisions taken together send a message that the Supreme Court is not interested in participating in the regulation of police.”

The court overturned the lower-court decisions without ordering full briefing and argument, a sign it did not see them as close calls. There were no dissents.

For advocates taking aim at qualified immunity, the pair of unsigned rulings sent another strong message: The most likely path to changing the doctrine is through legislation, not the courts.
[…]
So far, though, those political efforts have been largely fruitless, as bipartisan talks in Congress have broken down over efforts to reduce qualified-immunity protections for police and dozens of state-level bills have died under heavy pressure from police unions.
[…]
Advocates argue that the doctrine creates a Catch-22, because it requires a previous ruling but denies plaintiffs an opportunity to set a precedent for the next victim. Monday’s court rulings uphold and reinforce that conundrum, opponents said.
[…]
A recent Washington Post analysis showed that since Floyd’s death, seven state qualified-immunity bills have been enacted. Colorado is the only state that has completely barred the legal defense of qualified immunity for officers. Four states passed bills that restrict the use of qualified immunity in the most egregious cases. And two states — Iowa and Arkansas — strengthened the qualified-immunity rights of its officers.

Four state bills are still pending. Dozens of others have died under lobbying pressure from law enforcement organizations.

As many state legislatures prepare to come back in January, legal experts said lawmakers could pursue new avenues to end or limit qualified immunity, including by creating statewide use-of-force policies for police. Most police agencies largely set their own policies, which has left courts to evaluate civil rights violations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-qualified-immunity-police/2021/10/18/story.html

…does at least seem to correlate pretty strongly with getting shit twisted

Police in Wisconsin “deputized” armed vigilantes during protests against police violence last year, including Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two people and wounded another person, the man who was wounded alleges in a federal lawsuit.

In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, who was shot in his right arm by Rittenhouse, alleges that Kenosha officials enabled a “band of white nationalist vigilantes” during a protest in Kenosha on Aug. 25, 2020.
[…]
Named as defendants are the city of Kenosha, Kenosha County, Kenosha police and the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department. Rittenhouse is not named as a defendant.

“Defendants invited, deputized, authorized, conspired with, and ratified the actions of Rittenhouse, a child illegally in possession of an assault rifle, who roamed the street in violation of an emergency curfew order, threatening protesters with his weapon of war, and shooting innocent civilians, killing two, seriously injuring a third, and narrowly missing a fourth,” the lawsuit says.
[…]
“For example, at 9:57 p.m., a Kenosha Police Sergeant sent a message to all officers through the Department’s internal messaging system noting the presence of armed individuals patrolling the streets in violation of the curfew order,” the lawsuit claims.

“Rather than take any steps to detain, dissuade, or disarm these individuals, a KPD Sergeant made clear that they were not to be detained, dissuaded, or disarmed, calling the armed individuals in blatant violation of the curfew order ‘very friendly,'” it says.

Police “deliberately orchestrated these circumstances,” the lawsuit says. “A clear message was sent that anti-police brutality demonstrators were required to disperse, while armed individuals who supported law enforcement could roam free and assist the officers.”
[…]
It is indicative of police culture that the defendants’ reply to the lawsuit was not to deny that “Rittenhouse was working with them” but to imply that Rittenhouse was “justified” in shooting Grosskreutz, he said.

The lawsuit filed by Gaige Grosskreutz, who was shot by Rittenhouse, said police enforced a curfew against protesters but not against armed white people. [NBC]

…maybe I shouldn’t be surprised

“When we issue an opinion, we are aware that every word that we write can have consequences, sometimes enormous consequences,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said last month. “So we have to be careful about every single thing that we say.”

A fascinating new study of the extraordinary impact of a tiny typographical error in a Supreme Court opinion almost a century ago illustrates the point.

[…]what seemed like a sweeping statement about the constitutional stature of property rights: “The right of the trustee to devote its land to any legitimate use is property within the protection of the Constitution.” [except] the author of the opinion, Justice Pierce Butler, had not meant to write “property.” He meant to say “properly.”
[…]
Though the opinion was amended, the court did not draw attention to the change and the correction went unnoticed in much of the legal world.

The wrong version of the statement has appeared in at least 14 court decisions, the most recent of which was issued last year; in at least 11 appellate briefs; in a Supreme Court argument; and in books and articles.

A Century-Long ‘Reign of Error’ for a Supreme Court Typo [NYT]

…we’re in the middle of a dismayingly big chunk of populations in places where the actual facts about how a literally viral & literally lethal pathology functions giving every appearance of being actively opposed to acknowledging – much less accepting – anything at all about how that works

Expectations were low when President Biden appointed an ideologically diverse commission to consider reforms to the Supreme Court. Inherent in a commission composed of legal scholars is the desire to reach consensus and to avoid worsening partisan rancor. Ideally, we would have gotten recommendations such as “Justices should not go to partisan settings to deny they are hacks,” or “Nominees should not accuse an entire party of a conspiracy to prevent his confirmation.”

That is not to be. And, in fact, what is clear from the commission’s release of a draft report is that institutional changes cannot spare us from hyperpartisan appointees who lack self-awareness and honesty about their innate partisan biases.

[…] Unfortunately, Biden on Friday blithely dismissed the idea of term limits, undercutting his own commission and demonstrating a lack of urgency about court reform that continues to frustrate his base.

While it might seem like a small matter, the commission takes seriously the criticisms of the court’s “shadow docket” — referring to the emergency orders and summary decisions that the court issues without oral arguments. It recommends changes to how the court issues these orders, including steps to provide additional transparency (identifying how justices voted, providing explanations for the decision) and to limit candor from justices on why they elect to recuse themselves in a given case or not.
[…]
The court’s problems are not easily solved by structural reform. They are a function of the rise of a highly authoritarian right-wing that seeks to impose its will by any means possible — including by confirming partisan judges who lack the restraint required for responsible adjudication. When an entire political movement no longer values norms, comity or compromise, our institutions decay and lose credibility. The court’s fundamental disconnect from the American people is inevitable when justices are appointed by presidents elected by a minority of the electorate (via the anti-democratic electoral college) and confirmed by a Senate in which red states with small populations exercise disproportionate power.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/17/what-supreme-court-commission-does-does-not-do/

[…though, in fairness…”Overall, Biden is outpacing every other president since Richard Nixon in confirming circuit court judges, who have the last word in most federal cases.“]

…so is it really surprising that some of the ideas people are prepared to swallow about the concept of immunity are seemingly designed to miss the point?

Former President Donald Trump has sued to block any handover of documents sought from the National Archives by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.

The suit names both the committee and the National Archives as defendants. It says the committee’s subpoena is invalid because the committee has no power of investigation. And it says the material should be protected by executive privilege.
[…]
President Joe Biden, however, concluded that the privilege should not apply. The White House counsel, Dana Remus, said the documents “shed light on events within the White House on and about January 6 and bear on the Select Committee’s need to understand the facts underlying the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal government since the Civil War.”
[…]
The lawsuit also said the committee’s request for documents is far too broad, describing it as “almost limitless in scope” and in many aspects “with no reasonable connection to the events of that day.” It argued, as did several Trump lawsuits when he was in office, that Congress can obtain information only for the purpose of legislating, because it has no general power of investigation.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-sues-jan-6-committee-national-archives-seeking-block-handover-of-documents

…& not to be cynical…but let’s say for the sake of argument that in that particular case the intention is essentially exactly that…& it’ll last just as long as it can drag the process out & delay that material…which is liable to be this side of it hitting the discovery process…something that seems to be anathema to quite a lot of the arguments he somehow still finds lawyers (among other people) willing to present to a court

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol sent Stephen K. Bannon’s lawyer a stern letter Friday informing him that the panel rejected his arguments for failing to cooperate — and would probably proceed to vote on holding the adviser to former president Donald Trump in contempt of Congress.
[…]
The emphatic tone of the letter and legal arguments it lays out underscore the committee’s desire to move quickly and aggressively to combat any attempts to slow down or scuttle its investigation. The panel is scheduled to meet Tuesday evening to vote on the contempt charge against Bannon, which it is expected to approve, and it is possible the vote could be taken up by the full House as early as this week. The matter would then go to the Justice Department.
[…]
The committee’s move to hold Bannon in criminal contempt has already sparked a debate among legal experts about whether its aggressive posture will result in the speedy results panel members said are critical to the success of their inquiry.

Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor criminal offense that can result in up to one year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. Criminal contempt can be pursued only by the Justice Department, setting up potential bureaucratic and legal hurdles. The committee can pursue civil contempt charges without the involvement of the Justice Department, but that has historically produced substantial delays.
[…]
Unlike Bannon, committee staffers have said, the others have “engaged” with the panel, and their deadlines for providing information were extended.
[…]
In an Oct. 8 letter to Costello, he noted that the subpoena requests information that concerns “Bannon’s actions as a private citizen” regarding topics that are not protected by executive privilege. “Even if your client had been a senior aide to the President during the time period covered by the contemplated testimony, which he was most assuredly not, he is not permitted by law to the type of immunity you suggest that Mr. Trump has requested he assert,” Thompson wrote.
[…]
“It’s not going to shorten the process. If anything, it’s going to go a long game,” said Stanley Brand, a former House general counsel. “There’s a lot of ways that he goes to trial and he forces the committee or the Department of Justice to prove each and every element of a congressional contempt beyond a reasonable doubt.” Others noted the panel is facing the potential political deadline of the 2022 midterm elections, after which Democrats could lose control of the House.
[…]
Bannon is considered a key witness for the committee because he had conversations with Trump in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 and held a meeting with Trump allies on Jan. 5 at the Willard Hotel. That day, Bannon said on his podcast that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”

Trump has mentioned executive privilege in comments to reporters but formally asserted it and other privileges only this month in attempting to block the National Archives from releasing 45 specific documents requested by the committee.

Jan. 6 committee lays out legal arguments against Bannon’s subpoena defiance in private letter to his attorney [WaPo]

…then think of all the fundraising required just to keep paying all the lawyers on all the lawsuits

Former President Donald Trump has been ordered to answer questions under oath in a lawsuit Monday, and his attorneys could soon set a date for a deposition in another case, as well.

At least 10 civil cases are pending against Trump, whose ability to delay them has been curtailed since he left office in January. Trump had argued in some of the cases that as a sitting president he was immune from civil lawsuits. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment on the cases.

Trump faces a pile of civil lawsuits as depositions begin [NBC]

…& skip past the size of the debts he needs to service or otherwise stave off right to the part where his biggest source of revenue is whatever he can siphon out of putatively political fundraising…it does start to seem like some people are better innoculated against the consequences of their actions than those actions would suggest they deserve

The gap between reckless Brexit promises and reality will soon be too big to ignore [Guardian]

…& somehow an incredible number of people seem willing to buy what they’re selling

The world’s activists and delegates soon on their way to Glasgow have reason to be anxious. After all, they are gathering for a climate summit with exceptionally high stakes. Known as COP26 and running from Oct. 31 to Nov. 12, the conference is perhaps one of the world’s last chances to keep the average global temperature from rising less than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels — and to avert planetary heating on a terrifying scale.

This apprehensive mood seems not to affect Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, the leader of the host nation. With bombastic optimism, Mr. Johnson appears confident that countries will step up climate action: The conference, he said in September, will be “a turning point for humanity.” And he has positioned Britain as boldly leading the way.
[…]
Yet Britain is far from a climate hero. The country is committed to fossil fuels and private corporations, opposed to stringent regulation and unwilling to recognize its historical responsibility to the Global South. Even the lauded net zero by 2050 target relies on unreliable carbon offsets and is too distant to bring about decarbonization soon enough. Mr. Johnson may claim the country leads the world on climate action, but we shouldn’t fall for the trick.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/opinion/britain-cop26-johnson.html

…which does seem to have a few common denominators

President Biden’s policy agenda is hanging by a thread. And the reason can be summarized in two words: Joe Manchin. (Well, also Kyrsten Sinema, but does anyone know what’s going on with her?)
[…]
You might be tempted to view this impasse as an indictment of America’s wildly unrepresentative political system, which effectively allows the interests of a small state — West Virginia has substantially fewer residents than the borough of Brooklyn — to dominate national concerns. But it’s actually worse than that: Manchin appears ready to veto policies that would be in the interests of his own constituents.
[…]
So what is Joe Manchin thinking? Some people say we should just follow the money — the large campaign contributions he gets from the fossil fuel industry, his personal financial stake in the coal industry.

But the most cynical takes on politicians’ behavior aren’t always right. I’d like to hope that Manchin is sincere — that he actually believes that he’s protecting his state’s interests.

The problem is that he seems to have a decades-out-of-date vision of what his state needs. And that distorted vision is now endangering America’s future.

Joe Manchin Versus West Virginia [NYT]

The Build Back Better Act has already shrunk: the Biden administration initially proposed $3.5tn in social spending, which in negotiation has dwindled dramatically to $2.2tn. The cuts already mean that Biden will likely fail to meet some of his campaign promises, a prospect that spells bad news for the Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.

But for Manchin – and other conservative Democrats who agree with him – that’s still too much money. Instead, Manchin wants to spend a mere $1.5tn – at most. The danger, Manchin says, is that if the Biden agenda is passed in full, America will become an “entitlement society”.

At issue for Manchin is the BBBA’s funding for programs designed to help working women and their families. Conceived of as a way to ease the economic burden of childrearing on private households and to support working mothers, the bill offers an array of options that would put money in families’ pockets and help the parents of young children to remain in the workforce while their kids are small. There is an extension of the popular child tax credit, the monthly checks for up to $300 per child that are already going to most American families. There is funding for paid family leave, which would allow the United States to join its peer countries in mandating that employees receive paid time off after becoming parents, or when caring for a sick relative. And there is funding for early childhood programs, including for two years of universal pre-K and subsidies for childcare. Surveying this robust investment in families, Manchin has decided it’s too much, reportedly telling Democrats that he won’t vote for a bill that includes all the programs. He wants them to pick just one.

This is a horrible idea. To suggest that only one of these vital programs should be invested in betrays a misunderstanding of – or maybe an indifference to – the crisis of care that is facing working families.
[…]
These are not discrete problems that can be solved one at a time: they are interconnected catastrophes linked to decades of underinvestment in working families, and a habitual misunderstanding of the role that childcare and early childhood education play in the nation’s economic prosperity. It may be easier for aging male senators to declare that these investments are bloated and unnecessary, or to chide progressives for being too generous. But to working mothers, whose lives and careers have been especially devastated by the pandemic, these government investments are not decadent luxuries. They are tardy responses to a long-unfurling emergency. As the sociologist Joanna Pepin told the New York Times: “Picking just one policy is akin to putting a fire out in one room of a house engulfed in flames and then stopping.”

Further, the conservative assessment that these policies will cost too much money to implement seems shortsighted and myopic – especially in the context of how much it is costing Americans not to have them. A study by the University of New Hampshire found that more than a quarter of families with young children have difficulty meeting the cost – a proportion that has probably increased as pandemic closures and financial strains on daycare centers drive supply down and prices up. The cost of childcare does not include the estimated $35bn a year that parents lose in wages and work opportunities when their childcare responsibilities push them out of work. Even now, as the pandemic drags into its third year, one in four women who are unemployed say that caregiving responsibilities are part of why.

Biden’s budget could transform life for working women. Don’t let Manchin gut it [Guardian]

…divergent interests sure can be a bitch when it turns out you elected to be represented by someone who DGAF about yours

In a series of public appearances and statements over the last week, Mr. Trump has signaled not only that he plans to work against Republicans he deems disloyal, but also that his meritless claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the White House in 2020 will be his litmus test, going so far as to threaten that his voters will sit out future elections.
[…]
And top party strategists said they expected the former president to remain front and center in the Republicans’ campaign to retake control of the House. “He’s the leader of the party,” said Corry Bliss, a consultant to Republicans on congressional races. “The more energized and engaged he is, the better we’ll do.”

But party officials believe Mr. Trump’s threat about his supporters staying home en masse is real. And the potency of his false claims about 2020 caught even some of his staunchest allies in the party off guard.
[…]
[An] informal internal survey found that roughly 10 percent of Republican voters expressed a serious lack of confidence in the security of Georgia’s elections, with 4 percent saying they did not think elections were secure in Georgia and would not vote in future elections, and 6 percent saying they were unsure whether their votes would be counted.

The possibility that roughly 10 percent of Republicans would sit out any election or question whether their votes would be accurately counted — even in a solidly red district like the one held by Ms. Taylor Greene — was something Republican strategists said they found alarming.

Since Mr. Trump left office, polls have repeatedly shown that large majorities of Republican voters want him to run in 2024. And roughly 40 percent of Republicans say they consider themselves to be primarily his supporters rather than supporters of the party — about the same share who said so last November, according to the political research firm Echelon Insights.

Many Republicans don’t seem to want to hear anything critical about him. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, for instance, highlighted the lack of an appetite for much dissent. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans, Pew found, said their party should not be accepting of elected officials who criticize Mr. Trump.
[…]
Mr. Trump’s allies did not deny that he was content to see Republicans pay the ultimate political price for what he and a significant portion of his voters saw as disloyalty.

“President Trump is saying: ‘Hey, I’m putting you guys on notice. My people aren’t coming out,’” said Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief White House strategist, who has been using his podcast to further amplify Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. “There could not be a bigger shot across the establishment bow.”

But the harder Mr. Trump’s allies push their election fraud claims, the harder it becomes to satisfy their most hard-core followers. Even Ms. Taylor Greene, who is as far-right and pro-Trump as they come in the Republican Party, cannot seem to always please the fringe. Lately, she has been feuding online with L. Lin Wood, an Atlanta attorney who helped Mr. Trump sow doubts over his loss in Georgia, over which of them truly represents the Trump movement. Mr. Wood has accused her of not doing enough to uncover instances of voter fraud. She has said that Mr. Wood is “not one of us.”

As Trump Thunders About Last Election, Republicans Worry About the Next One [NYT]

…still…here & there even the behemoths of the landscape go down with something from time to time

Sinclair Broadcast Group was the target of a ransomware attack that disrupted operations this weekend at several television stations, the company said Monday in a regulatory filing.

The Hunt Valley, Md.-based company disclosed the breach in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing after the Record, an online publication owned by the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, reported that a number of its television stations had been affected.
[…]
The company, which has 185 television stations in 86 markets, did not address questions regarding how widespread the service disruptions were, but at least a half-dozen of its stations used social media to inform audiences of the outages. They include KHQA (Channel 7) in Hannibal, Miss.; KOMO News in Seattle; WLUK Fox 11 in Wisconsin; CBS (Channel 6) in Albany, N.Y.; and KATU (Channel 2) in Portland, Ore.
[…]
Since the cyberattacks on the Colonial Pipeline in May and on meat supplier JBS weeks later, the U.S. government has stepped up efforts to combat them. Last week, the Biden administration ­concluded a two-day meeting on ransomware with more than 30 nations recognizing it for the first time as a global security threat and agreeing to work together to fight it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/18/sinclair-broadcasting-ransomware-attack/

..though as yet we don’t seem to have found a gamechanger that actually improves our odds of things turning out better than currently expected

Harnessing fusion energy into something commercially viable — and maybe, ultimately, a clean source of power that replaces fossil fuels for centuries to come — has long been considered by some as the ultimate moonshot.
[…]
No one knows when fusion energy will become commercially viable, but driving the private investments is a rising alarm about global warming.

Nuclear Fusion Edges Toward the Mainstream [NYT]

…but then who the hell knows how it’s going to look in the long run?

A darkened planet circling the feeble remnant of a burned-out star about 6,000 light-years from Earth shows what our own solar system will look like at the end of its existence, according to astronomers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/how-will-solar-our-system-end-distant-planet-offers-hints

[…as it turns out…the long run is going to be the only way to know how this post turns out…since for whatever reason everything from my internet connection to this laptop seems to be dragging its feet this morning…so this is going up part-done…& I’ll try to get it finished up just as soon as my day feels like co-operating?]