…so it’s tuesday again…& it’s not exactly smooth sailing out there

The Ukrainian government has accused Russia of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, and called for people living downstream to evacuate in the face of catastrophic flooding.

As aerial footage circulated on social media, showing most of the dam wall washed away and a massive surge of water heading downstream, the army’s Southern Operational Command put up a Facebook post, accusing “Russian occupation troops” of blowing up the hydroelectric dam.
[…]
“The purpose is obvious: to create insurmountable obstacles on the way of the advancing [Ukrainian army] … to slow down the fair final of the war,” a Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mikhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter. “On a vast territory, all life will be destroyed; many settlements will be ruined; colossal damage will be done to the environment.”

Local Russian authorities in the town of Nova Kakhovka initially denied that anything had happened to the dam, then blamed the collapse on Ukrainian shelling. Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed official from the Kherson emergency services as saying that the dam had collapsed from structural weakness under water pressure.
[…]
Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson region, posted a video to Telegram in which he said that as a result of the damage to the Nova Kahhovka dam, “water will reach a critical level in 5 hours” and that evacuations have begun. Russia’s state media news agency Tass cited emergency services saying 80 settlements could be affected.

A Russian military blogger, Rybar, said 11 out of 28 spans in the dam were destroyed after explosions at 2am, though this could not immediately be verified. Another blogger said there were no reported missile attacks on the dam prior to the breach, while videos circulated on Russian channels were said to be of civilians evacuating.

Nova Kakhovka dam before and afterhttps://t.co/tI7XRsVjHG pic.twitter.com/9vqub3CIuz

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) June 6, 2023

Last month, it was reported that water levels in the reservoir had reached a 30-year high, as the Russian occupiers had only kept relatively few sluice gates open, according to experts.
[…]
The areas most under threat of flooding are the islands along the course of the Dnipro downstream of Nova Kakhovka and much of the Russian-held left bank in southern Kherson. Earlier modelling of such a disaster suggested Kherson city would not take the brunt of the flood, but the harbour, the docklands and an island in the south of the city are likely to be inundated. It is unclear how many people would lose their homes.

There could be two further dramatic side effects, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant upstream could lose access to water for cooling as the reservoir drains away, and the water supply to Crimea could also be severely affected.

Four of the six reactors at the nuclear plant are completely shut down, and two are on “hot shutdown”, producing a small amount of energy for the plant itself and the neighbouring town.
[…]
The dam, a Soviet power project, was completed in 1956 and was 30 meters high, holding back a vast reservoir of 18m cubic metres of water. It sits about 20 miles upstream from Ukrainian held Kherson, but modelling suggests if it collapsed flooding was away most of the islands in the Dnipro River delta and low lying land on Russian held southern bank.

Zelenskiy warned last November that Russia was plotting to blow up the two mile structure and that doing so would cause “a large-scale disaster” affecting people living downstream.

Blowing up a dam can be considered a war crime, the Geneva conventions say, if it “may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population,” and the effects of a large release of water on people and homes remains for now dangerous but uncertain.

Ukrainian military intelligence also warned in November that Russia had conducted the main mining works as long ago as April 2022, but warned that the floodgates and supports of the dam were further primed in November as Ukraine’s forces closed in on Kherson. “Now everyone in the world must act powerfully and quickly to prevent a new Russian terrorist attack,” Zelenskiy said at the time.

The country’s military intelligence also said in November that “dozens of Ukrainian settlements, including Kherson” could be affected by a breach and that “the scale of the ecological disaster will go far beyond the borders of Ukraine and affect the entire Black Sea region”.

The bridge over the dam was one of only two crossing points over the Dnipro south of Zaporizhzia city before the war. The other, the Antonivksy road bridge at Kherson, was destroyed in November by the retreating Russians, and Russian snipers target anybody lingering on the waterside near the remaining bridge span.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/ukraine-accuses-russia-of-blowing-up-nova-kakhovka-dam-near-kherson

…pretty much nothing good about any of that, really…even in the cliff notes version

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/nova-kakhovka-dam-everything-you-need-to-know-about-ukraines-strategically-important-reservoir

…mind you…the cliff notes aren’t gonna make sense of a lot of that shit…for the truth is stranger than fiction

pic.twitter.com/DovvXEXOSj

— Winston Слава Україні! Smith (@6079_WSmith) June 5, 2023

…even when that fiction is that death of stalin movie

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group of mercenaries has captured a Russian commander, as the notorious leader further escalates his feud with the regular army.

In a video posted on Prigozhin’s social media channels, Lt Col Roman Venevitin, the commander of Russia’s 72nd Brigade, tells an interrogator that, while drunk, he had ordered his troops to fire on a Wagner convoy.
[…]
Last week, Prigozhin accused the Russian army of trying to blow up his men as they were pulling back from the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut.

The businessman, who is best known as “Putin’s chef” because of his catering contracts with the Kremlin, also claimed his men had discovered explosives, which he said were planted on purpose by defence ministry officials.
[…]
“Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose subordinates posted a video in which they mock a senior officer and an entire brigade commander … is allowed to do whatever he wants. He is considered as the highest caste!” Igor Strelkov, a retired Russian special operations officer and popular military blogger, wrote on his Telegram channel.
[…]
Last week, Prigozhin received rare public criticism when two close allies of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, described him as a “hysterical blogger” who undermined Russia’s war effort.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/05/wagner-group-release-video-of-captured-russian-commander

…&…the whole open source intelligence thing is/has been sort of fascinating…but…I’m not entirely sold that more keyboard warriors is the way we want to go…still…can’t deny it’s sort of a big deal

Ukraine may not have formally declared its counteroffensive has begun, but the attacks being reported on Russian lines overnight and into Monday morning look like the first steps of what is likely to be a tough military campaign.

Kyiv is of course mindful of the need for surprise, releasing a video on Sunday of its soldiers holding fingers to their lips, but the volume of reports from the Russian side tells its own story, with Moscow’s ministry of defence (MoD) reporting a two-brigade assault on the Donetsk end of the southern front.

The Kremlin was quick to declare the attack repulsed, but several in Russia’s community of ultra-nationalist military bloggers were more sceptical. Relying on their own sources, they suggested Ukraine had made some initial gains.

Igor Girkin, perhaps the best known, said the Russian MoD’s statements were “not quite true”, that “the enemy managed to cut into our position”, and argued that it looked likely the counteroffensive had finally begun.

War Gonzo, run by the war correspondent Semyon Pegov, was more specific. The blog suggested Ukraine had penetrated 2km into Russian-held positions before Novodonetske, between Velyka Novosilka and Vuhledar. Kyiv’s forces were using western mechanised vehicles to bring up reserves, the blog added.

Individual reports should be viewed sceptically but taken together they can build up a picture. What is clear is that there is not an all-out assault, but also that the level of forces being committed are non-trivial. These are not exploratory raids, but most likely probing attacks, searching for local Russian weaknesses.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/05/ukraine-counter-attack-looks-imminent-as-troops-search-for-russian-weaknesses

…wherever you land in the spectrum of threat assessment…it’s hard to deny that fuckery abounds

Populations can’t be divided into camps of voters who favor democracy and voters who favor autocracy, as convenient and clarifying as that would be. Liberal democracy is a system of government that can work when there is a certain degree of trust between political factions. When that trust erodes, some nondemocratic form of government is the default alternative, even if the overwhelming majority of citizens would prefer democracy in the abstract.

A high-quality study published recently in the journal Nature Human Behaviour helps illustrate this paradox. The authors — academics from the University of California at Berkeley and MIT — presented Republicans and Democrats with seven scenarios to measure their commitment to democratic norms. The scenarios included “banning rallies,” “ignoring controversial court rulings” and “freezing the social media accounts of journalists” to favor their party.

Republican respondents said they were willing to subvert democratic norms in an average of 1.2 scenarios out of seven; for Democrats, that figure was 1.5.

But when partisans were asked how the other party would behave in each scenario, they gave much higher figures. Republicans thought most Democrats would subvert democracy in 5.0 of seven scenarios, while Democrats thought Republicans would do the same, on average, in 5.2 scenarios.

…I’ll be damned if I really know by what methodology they derived their figures…haven’t had time to get to that part…but…I guess I might if only to find out to what extent respondents were aware that they were agreeing to “subvert democratic norms”…what exactly counted as such…& what the alternative course of action was that they rejected in favor of the subverting thing…because…on the one hand storming the capitol to delay what is an almost vestigial bit of procedural pomp & ceremony undeniably fulfills that brief…but potentially so does “or we could defy this bit of procedural nonsense that’s not formally codified anywhere but has been wielded like a cudgel by the GOP in order to routinely obstruct the business of government”…& those two things are anything but equal to me…so…color me wary on the extrapolations here…but all the same

The authors identify “a strong linear relationship between perceptions of the other side’s willingness to subvert democracy and partisans’ own willingness to do so.” In other words, Republicans might countenance authoritarian behavior because they expect such behavior from Democrats, and vice versa.

In another experiment, the researchers told people how members of the other party actually responded to the scenarios. That is, they showed Democrats and Republicans that self-reported intentions to subvert democracy by members of the opposing party were relatively low. That informational “intervention” reduced Democrats’ and Republicans’ own self-reported willingness to subvert democratic norms by 29 percent. The average number of scenarios in which respondents said they would “never” subvert democratic norms rose to 4.7 out of seven from 3.5.

For the authors, this is cause for optimism. It suggests that the threat to American democracy arises, at least in part, from bad information: People overestimate the threat to democracy from the other tribe and are more willing to defensively subvert democratic norms as a result. Think of a run on a bank: Investors who think others are about to withdraw deposits will also be more likely to withdraw their own.

…but I guess this is where I get a tad despondent…on the one hand it’s arguably true that for the average armchair quarterback/general/political analyst there are pearls of wisdom to be found in the online midden…but on the other…vectors of viral disinformation in the model of “flood the zone with bullshit” combined with heapings of cognitive dissonance & an unexamined acceptance of the algorithmic echo-chamber…have not filled me with optimism about the idea we can be saved by reaching the folks who respond to being shown the facts support a different view

How could these insights play out in real politics? The authors give an example: “The rhetoric from Democrats and third-party observers has understandably focused on the risk posed to democracy by illiberal components of the Republican Party, especially with Trump formally running in the 2024 election. Our work suggests an additional and counterintuitive strategy: focus on convincing everyday Republicans of Democrats’ unwavering commitment to democracy. Doing so would probably require a concerted messaging campaign and credible demonstrations of this commitment, such as third-party guarantees or costly signals of good faith.”

…I mean…call me a cynic…but…if that was a winning strategy wouldn’t they have had a harder time negating the voting rights stuff to enable sweeping models of disenfranchisement?

That would be a massive undertaking, especially because the parties’ definitions of democracy are so wildly at odds. Democrats might think that racially gerrymandered congressional districts are necessary to ensure representation for minorities, while some Republicans think such classifications are anathema to democratic principles. Many Democrats believe that blocking “misinformation” makes democratic choice possible, while Republicans believe Democrats want to censor ideas for political advantage.

…uh-huh…I was thinking more the other way around…because that “anathema to democratic principles” thing sure don’t appear to be any kind of a barrier when it comes to creatively diluting the electoral effect of racially delineated blocs of voters…but…that’s probably just me being obtuse…not the post

All this helps show why the “democracy vs. autocracy” framing that has become popular among American elites doesn’t reflect the actual challenge to self-government in the 21st century. People who champion democracy can easily persuade themselves to undermine it if they think the other side is prepared to do the same. To the extent that there is a risk of authoritarianism in the United States, it doesn’t come from hostility to democracy. It comes from Americans’ deepening attachment to democracy and their growing fear that it will be taken away.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/04/democracy-autocracy-republican-democrat-study/

…so…might be more inclined to agree in principle than practice there…but…I do think it hints at something similar to the thing I have to sometimes remind myself about the chump change messiah…he’s so obviously multiply guilty of criminal misconduct before, during & after his time squatting in the white house that it’s hard to curb my impatience or to curtail my appetite for swift & terrible consequences

When CNN reported on Wednesday night that special counsel Jack Smith has a recording of former president Donald Trump boasting at his Bedminster, N.J., club in 2021 that he had a highly classified multipage document relating to war plans against Iran, months of punditry that Trump would never be indicted went out the window. (The reported sounds of paper rustling suggest Trump might have had a document in hand.) According to news reports, he shared the substance of the document with others in the room, including biographers with no security clearance.

This evidence effectively destroys whatever defense Trump was trying to concoct (he didn’t know there were classified documents, he declassified them, he thought they were not classified). Trump holds the presumption of innocence and has not been indicted. However, the last time such a damning piece of evidence (a “smoking gun”) came to light, Richard M. Nixon’s presidency was effectively over. (He left office less than a week later.)

News reports now indicate the federal grand jury hearing the documents case will meet this week. An indictment, if there is one, could come within days.

…I find it helps to ask myself…if the person being accused were actually innocent, would this be okay or are we getting out over our skis on account of believing the ends justified the means?

Trump’s own words could provide damning evidence of a willful violation of the Espionage Act and of obstruction — and help fix venue in D.C., where the Justice Department almost certainly wants to try the case. Andrew Weissmann, the former lead prosecutor for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, summed up the take of many career prosecutors: “I’m trying not to use hyperbole, but this is game over. … If this story is accurate, there will be an indictment, and it’s hard to see how there will not be a conviction.” (A complete analysis from nine former prosecutors on the strength of the the special counsel’s case — even before the tape recording was reported — can be found at Just Security.)

When coupled with reports that a Trump lawyer was “waved off” searching the former president’s office, a damning case of wrongful retention of highly sensitive (and likely classified documents) appears to have come together. Trump seems to have confessed that he knew the classification rules, didn’t declassify documents before leaving office and knew that retaining them was illegal.

Moreover, his alleged dissemination of material to others (including allegedly verbally discussing this document with others) can solidify a separate part of the law: the prohibition against sharing and distributing confidential documents. A case of dissemination of classified documents would be so serious as to virtually ensure an indictment.

We don’t know precisely what Trump said or what document if any he had taken, but, in a sense, it does not matter. Let’s say the specific document he is alleged to have possessed didn’t say what Trump said it did. It nevertheless confirms that Trump knew he hadn’t declassified documents and was not supposed to keep any. This obliterates the “declassified in his mind” hooey he and his supporters have claimed. Sharing it with others makes prosecution all the more likely.
[…]
The case for trying the case in Washington — where the alleged crime began — gets exponentially stronger with the newly revealed recording.

Strictly speaking, prosecutors don’t have to prove motive in a criminal case, although it certainly helps juries reach the conclusion the crime was willful. But here, too, the smoking-gun recording might be powerful.

The CNN report explained: “The meeting in which Trump discussed the Iran document with others happened shortly after the New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A.] Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern. The story infuriated Trump.” The new developments suggest he was keeping the documents to burnish his image, debunk critics and/or show off to others. (Here’s this classified document I have!)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/04/trump-smoking-gun-tape/

…it’s sort of analogous to the way I try to temper my expectations…& indeed my temper…when it comes to other clearly culpable parties continuing to fend off attempts to mitigate their harms lest it interfere with their profit margins

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/3m-lawsuit-water-contamination-pfas-toxic-chemicals

On Sept. 7, Indian tax authorities simultaneously raided three seemingly unrelated nonprofit organizations without issuing a public statement, confounding many in Indian academia and politics. But one little-known thread connected the three groups: Each was seen by the government to be a critic of Gautam Adani, one of India’s richest men and a political ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

And each was seen to be standing in the way of a particularly contentious project: an Adani-operated coal mine in a lush forest in central India called Hasdeo Arand.

The story of the Hasdeo mine and the crackdown on its critics, which was pieced together by The Washington Post through interviews and public and confidential government documents, is a case study in how the Modi government uses state power to push through its economic policies and to aid Adani, a major operator of coal power plants and mines.

At a time when the Biden administration embraces Modi as a key partner in its geopolitical struggle against China, the saga also offers a glimpse into the Modi government’s distrust of Western nongovernmental organizations and governments.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/05/india-coal-adani-modi-crackdown/

…eat your heart out, joe manchin…assuming it hasn’t already achieved the consistency of the crud that makes him an actual gob-shite…anyway

With gas prices stagnant and oil markets relatively flat, the coalition of oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia on Sunday opted to extend cuts to oil production through 2024.
[…]
The decision to hold down oil production came at a meeting in Vienna of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners, called OPEC Plus. In a news release, OPEC said the move sought “to provide long-term guidance for the market” and described it as “in line with the successful approach of being … proactive, and preemptive.”

It followed the group’s surprise decision two months ago to cut production by 1 million barrels per day.

At the time, some analysts said the reduction threatened to send prices at the pump jolting upward and the cost of a barrel of oil past $100. But oil prices continued to drop, with the price of Brent crude hovering at $76 over the weekend. The cost of a gallon of regular unleaded gas is a few cents lower than it was a month ago, and $1.27 cheaper than it was this time last year, according to AAA.

…I forget where but I read something that claimed the target point for this particular bout of price manipulation was the $80 mark…for whatever that’s worth

“Macroeconomic head winds are putting significant downward pressure on oil markets in recent weeks, despite the voluntary cuts” that OPEC Plus made earlier, said an email from Jorge León, senior vice president of oil market research at Rystad Energy.
[…]
“High oil prices would fuel inflation in the West right when central banks are starting to see inflation gradually recede,” he wrote. “This could prompt central banks to continue increasing interest rates, a detrimental move for the global economy and oil demand.”

The decision Sunday comes amid some tension inside OPEC Plus. While Saudi Arabia, the dominant member, sought cuts to production in the hope of pushing the cost of a barrel of Brent past $80, smaller countries such as the United Arab Emirates have been eager to boost production, according to a research note from Capital Economics.

Saudi Arabia announced at the close of the gathering it would unilaterally cut production by 1 million barrels a day to support oil prices, according to media covering the meeting. That news pushed up oil futures Sunday, with Brent crude rising more than 2 percent.

It is also unclear whether Russia has even complied with the earlier cuts OPEC Plus announced this year, the firm noted. Oil tanker tracking data suggests Russia is flouting those agreements, according to Capital Economics.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/04/opec-gas-oil/

…they do say actions speak louder than words

The world is at a “tipping point” in the climate crisis that requires all countries to put aside their national interests to fight for the common good, the UN’s top climate official has warned.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, pointed to recent findings from scientists that temperatures were likely to exceed the threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels within the next five years.

“Climate change is accelerating, and we are lagging behind in our actions to stem it,” he warned. “Remember the best available science, which doesn’t arbitrate on who needs to do what or who is responsible for what. The science tells us where we are and highlights the scale of response which is required.”

Stiell was addressing representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered in Bonn, the UN’s climate headquarters, to discuss how to forge a “course correction” that would put the world on track to meet the aspirations of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and limit global heating to 1.5C.
[…]
The Guardian understands that the EU and many developing countries wanted an agenda item to discuss the “mitigation work programme”, which deals with countries’ commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions, while China fought for a mandate to discuss countries’ plans for adapting to the impacts of the climate crisis.

Other key sources of contention included a resolution to phase out fossil fuels, the role of renewable energy, the issue of loss and damage, which refers to funds to help rescue and rehabilitate poor countries struck by climate disaster, and the global stocktake, which is an assessment of how far off track governments are in meeting their Paris pledges.

Stiell did not name these issues directly, but urged governments to find common ground. “There is at times tension between national interest and the global common good. I urge delegates to be brave, to see that by prioritising the common good, you also serve your national interests – and act accordingly,” he said.
[…]
Alden Meyer, the senior associate at the thinktank E3G, told the Guardian that avoiding a permanent rise in temperatures to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels was still possible. “New agreements and commitments by governments and businesses can bring about a transformational roadmap to modernise economies and put global climate action back on track this decade,” he said.
[…]
Another pressing concern for Stiell, who took the reins at the UNFCCC last year, is the budget for the UNFCCC secretariat. It is already regarded as inadequate for the expanded work that is required in running the annual Cop summits and administering the 2015 Paris climate agreement, but many countries want the UN to do more to provide practical help. Stiell warned of a “massive funding gap”, and urged delegates to agree a budget increase, and for governments to pay what they already owed.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/countries-must-put-aside-national-interests-for-climate-crisis-un-says

…& that’s before we start tearing up the ocean floor to strip it like we’re yanking copper wire out of some derelict building that’s been condemned…but…I won’t dive into those waters right now

www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/04/why-we-need-to-respect-earths-last-great-wilderness-the-ocean

…or, indeed, the funding thing

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/climate-change-carbon-budget-emissions-payment-usa-uk-germany

…but when it comes to a disparity between the talking & walking

Rich nations are undermining work to protect poor and vulnerable countries from the impacts of the climate crisis, by providing loans instead of grants, siphoning off money from other aid projects or mislabelling cash, new research suggests.
[…]
Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam’s international climate change policy lead, said this was inadequate given the scale of the problem. “Don’t be fooled into thinking $11.5bn is anywhere near enough for low- and middle-income countries to help their people with more and bigger floods, hurricanes, firestorms, droughts and other terrible harms brought about by climate change,” she said. “People in the US spend four times that each year feeding their cats and dogs.”

Under a promise made by the developed world in 2009, developing countries should have been receiving $100bn a year in climate finance from 2020, made up of funds to help countries adapt to climate impacts and to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But that pledge has so far gone unmet, with only $83bn provided in 2020.

Estimates suggest that the $100bn figure should be exceeded this year, but Oxfam said standard estimates overstated the true amounts. That is because some of the money has been taken from existing overseas aid budgets, and some of what is counted as climate finance includes funds primarily allocated to development projects such as health and education, with only tangential benefits to the climate.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/climate-crisis-rich-nations-undermining-work-to-help-poor-countries-research-suggests

…first world problems

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that’s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, kept “just in case”. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our biggest competitor is apathy.”

Globally, only 17.4% of electronic waste is recycled. Between 7% and 20% is exported, 8% thrown into landfills and incinerators in the global north, and the rest is unaccounted for. Yet Weee is, by weight, among the most precious waste there is. One piece of electronic equipment can contain 60 elements, from copper and aluminium to rarer metals such as cobalt and tantalum, used in everything from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. A typical iPhone, for example, contains 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and a tiny fraction of platinum. Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices and the impact is vast: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces more cobalt than the country’s mines each year. The materials in our e-waste – including up to 7% of the world’s gold reserves – are worth £50.9bn a year.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/03/i-spot-brand-new-tvs-here-to-be-shredded-the-truth-about-our-electronic-waste

…out of sight, out of mind?

Between 2017 and 2021, roughly 94 American football fields worth of data centers were built in this area, and more are on their way. In late 2021 two developers put a proposal before the county board for a hub of data centers that would cover 27m sq ft, known as the “Digital Gateway”.
[…]
Some locals, especially those who sold their land to the data center developers, welcome the proposal, saying it could bring jobs and boost the county’s economy. It could bring in an estimated $470m in annual tax revenue.

Others are staunchly against it, saying the hub would come too close to the Manassas battlefield and threaten areas where some believe there are unmarked graves from the civil war era. Two developers, Compass and QTS, plan to build close to the battlefield park itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/05/virginia-historic-preservation-data-center-development

…guess it depends on who you listen to…or who they listen to…if anyone

A decade ago, Ivanka Trump offered her Twitter followers a bit of wisdom from one of the world’s favorite geniuses to impress her legions of Twitter followers. “If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts. — Albert Einstein.”

There was one problem: Einstein never said that.

Few noticed the tweet, let alone the mistake. That is until Einstein himself returned from the dead to correct her, in a comment on the post.

I know this story because I am Albert Einstein — at least on social media, where, these days, he has more than 20 million followers. As a journalist obsessed with Einstein, I was constantly writing articles about him. My office is filled with Einstein art and Einstein bobbleheads. I even named one of my chickens after him. Eventually, the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University got wind of my enthusiasm and hired me to manage his accounts.

It is a weighty responsibility to speak for Albert Einstein, to protect his legacy and to use my perch to gently nudge others to understand that there is such a thing as universal knowledge and truths, and that they matter. In no small part that’s because the very idea of who a publicly venerated intellectual and expert is has radically changed since his death in 1955.
[…]
By 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany, two strains of falsehoods smeared Einstein far more publicly, and widely: One asserted (incorrectly) that his relativity theory was outright wrong, a threat, as Mr. Stanley put it, “to the very foundations of human knowledge.” The other doubled down on the antisemitism he had experienced early on; this whisper campaign accused Einstein of having stolen the idea from non-Jewish German and Austrian scientists. Like other prominent Jews, Einstein was targeted as an enemy of the state, and a bounty was rumored to have been placed on his head. But by then he wasn’t in Germany, having left to spend time at Caltech in December 1932. Though he returned to Europe in 1933, he left the continent entirely in October 1933.
[…]
Consensus around central figures — like that of an intellectual genius — has withered since Einstein’s death. No longer do we gather around the television in the evening to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the news, nor do all new parents have a copy of Dr. Spock’s baby manual on their bedside tables; today we are drawn to echo chambers where news is bifurcated and TikTok influencers give us health advice. These days you might find skeptics of the sort Einstein first encountered congregating in the same Facebook group, or on Twitter — but now instead of one lowly local meeting, their fake news spirals at warp speed.

Even outside of conspiracy theorists, there’s a segment of society today that questions the very need for experts when Google’s vast servers can store information for us. We no longer need to memorize the numerical value of pi or the capital of North Dakota.

This sense of our own intellectual infallibility has led to an extreme lack of humility in all sorts of people, from politicians to celebrities to social media influencers. Asked during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election whom he turns to for advice on foreign affairs, Donald Trump cited himself.

Einstein taught that time is relative depending on your frame of reference. Is it possible that truth itself has also become relative?
[…]
What would Einstein, who was driven by a lifelong curiosity to discover truths about our universe, think of the disinformation crisis social media has helped stoke? I can’t imagine he would be comfortable with the deluge of false news and incendiary tweets, nor of the elevation of everyone as an expert, a genius in his or her own mind.

I’d like to think Einstein, famous for his bons mots, would post a pithy tweet in response to the science deniers, flat-earthers and Ivanka Trump. “The search for truth and knowledge is one of the finest attributes of man,” Einstein once said. “Though often it is most loudly voiced by those who strive for it the least.”

And, yes, Einstein did actually say that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/opinion/einstein-disinformation.html

…sure…the scale of the shift we need to make to address the bigger picture in terms of there continuing to be a goldilocks zone in which to parade all of our anthropocentric bullshit about like it’s going out of style…or what some folks like to call “a habitable zone” or a “livable environment” or something equally quaint…often before lurching swiftly into parochial recalcitrance…but…humans are fucking ingenious

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/05/ultimate-eco-building-salt-sunflowers-recycled-urine-atelier-luma-architecture

…so…I wouldn’t say it’s entirely that we can’t do the things we’d need to…but when it comes to picking our battles…we surely do seem to fall for a lot of sucker punches?

Republicans, right-wing judges and MAGA activists have set out to trample on free speech and individual rights in the name of battling “wokeism.” If they don’t like what teachers say about history, gag them. If they don’t like certain books, ban them. If they don’t like a corporation defending LGBTQ rights, retaliate against it. Their crusade has become an expression of not only white Christian nationalism but of contempt for the Constitution and the First Amendment.

But last week, U.S. District Judge Thomas L. Parker, appointed by President Donald Trump, stood up to the thought police and the MAGA bullies in striking down the so-called drag queen ban (the Adult Entertainment Act) in Tennessee.

Parker began with an ode to the First Amendment: “Freedom of speech is not just about speech. It is also about the right to debate with fellow citizens on self-government, to discover the truth in the marketplace of ideas, to express one’s identity, and to realize self-fulfillment in a free society.” He continued, “That freedom is of first importance to many Americans such that the United States Supreme Court has relaxed procedural requirements for citizens to vindicate their right to freedom of speech, while making it harder for the government to regulate it.” And the Tennessee statute impermissibly tried to regulate free speech, he found.

Parker ruled that the law was “both unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad” because of the prohibition on displays “harmful to minors,” whatever that means. The law “fails to provide fair notice of what is prohibited, and it encourages discriminatory enforcement,” especially because the ban applies wherever a minor could be present.

Parker noted that the Supreme Court does not protect obscenity but certainly does protect speech that is unpopular. “Simply put, no majority of the Supreme Court has held that sexually explicit — but not obscene — speech receives less protection than political, artistic, or scientific speech. … The AEA’s regulation of ‘adult-oriented performances that are harmful to minors under § 39-17-901′ does target protected speech, despite Defendant claims to the contrary.” In a retort to Republicans seeking to rid libraries, classrooms and performance venues of anything they find offensive, Parker wrote, “Whether some of us may like it or not, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First [Amendment] as protecting speech that is indecent but not obscene.”

And Parker also found the law “targets the viewpoint of gender identity — particularly those who wish to impersonate a gender that is different from the one with which they are born.” This is prohibited “content-based, viewpoint-based regulation on speech.” Republicans insist there is no such thing as gender identity other than gender determined at birth. That’s not a fact, as the MAGA censors insist; that’s a viewpoint. And it is impermissible to ban other viewpoints. That, Parker underscores, is what a free society is all about.
[…]
Frankly, this isn’t a close case. The Tennessee statute, like so many unconstitutional abominations, patently violates First Amendment rights. Governors and lawmakers — who took an oath to uphold the Constitution — should know better, but either their constitutional literacy has atrophied or they simply don’t care to abide by the Constitution. In wreaking havoc on a core democratic principle, they violate their oaths of office. No governor or lawmaker faithful to the Constitution should have anything to do with such legislation.

Anti-woke Republicans trafficking in authoritarian abridgment of speech would do well to read the opinion from a judge who cannot be written off as a progressive crank. Parker’s sound constitutional reasoning, defense of the First Amendment and determination to set aside any partisan loyalties should be a reassuring sign that, at least below the Supreme Court, the federal judiciary’s fidelity to the Constitution — not to MAGA patrons — remains intact.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/06/republicans-woke-court/

…what time is it?

you see these inquiries going on for years and the most damning possible stuff getting aired and yet obtaining compensation will be fought tooth and nail over a decade plus nobody! is! in! jail!

— iucounu (@iucounu) June 4, 2023

…don’t mind me…just looking for some coffee to add to this whiskey…& maybe a little something to drown out all that noise in the distance?