…’tis the season [DOT 30/10/22]

…good job it’s sunday…for a start this will likely go up late…because I don’t even know where to start…I’m not what you’d call big on halloween…but there’s no shortage of things out there going bump in the night

According to data provided by the United States Capitol Police, a law enforcement agency charged with protecting members of Congress, cases related to “concerning statements and threats” jumped from 3,939 in 2017 to 9,625 in 2021.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/threats-attacks-members-congress-2022-10-28/

…& a general tendency for a lot more tricks than treats?

Northern Ireland is on course for a snap election after a recall of the Stormont assembly failed to elect a speaker and break political deadlock.
[…]
If power sharing is not revived before Friday, by law, caretaker ministers must step down to be replaced by civil servants, and there must be an assembly election within 12 weeks.
[…]
The UK government had hoped the spectre of an election would compel the DUP to end its boycott but the party does not fear a poll. Its unyielding stance has proven popular with supporters.

Sinn Féin seems equally confident of matching or exceeding its result in May, when it became the largest party, a landmark result that made O’Neill the putative first minister. Such outcomes would squeeze the more moderate UUP and SDLP, while Alliance would be expected to win support from people fed up with Stormont’s endless crises.

The assembly has not functioned for four of the past six years, leaving civil servants to run government departments and public services in a form of autopilot. Business leaders said the political vacuum was deterring investment and costing jobs.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/oct/27/northern-ireland-set-for-snap-election-after-stormont-fails-to-elect-speaker

…it feels hyperbolic to trot out phrases like “democracy under seige”

“We have plexi on the counter downstairs for Covid but that won’t stop a person. It’s literally just clamped to the counters,” the county clerk and registrar said. For about $50,000, the office could secure the front, limiting access to upstairs offices, she estimated. Another county put bulletproof glass in their lobby years earlier, she knew, something officials there at one point considered removing, though not any more.
[…]
Following Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Allen says the once low-profile job of non-partisan local election official has transformed in counties like hers. A culture of misinformation has sown doubt in the US election system and subjected officials from Nevada to Michigan to harassment and threats. The FBI has received more than 1,000 reports of threats against election workers in the past year alone.
[…]
Residents in Shasta county have tried to intimidate election workers while acting as observers, crowding around Allen during a tense election night confrontation in June, and visiting voters’ homes while claiming to be a part of an “official taskforce”. In north-eastern California’s Nevada county, the registrar-elect had to take out a restraining order against residents who harassed her and pushed their way into her office, assaulting a staffer, she said.
[…]
The anger coalesced into an anti-establishment movement, backed with unprecedented outside funding from a Connecticut millionaire and supported by the area’s militia groups, that led to the recall of a longtime county supervisor in February. Behavior seen during that election prompted Allen’s office to make security changes, including tracking everyone who enters the facility.

During the primaries in June, when the school superintendent, district attorney and sheriff were on the ballot, a crowd of observers tried to intimidate county staff, Allen said, and someone installed a trail camera outside the office, seemingly intending to monitor election workers. The sheriff stationed deputies outside the office. After four of the candidates backed by the anti-establishment group lost outright – Allen beat her opponent and was re-elected to her fifth-term – the candidates requested a hand recount.
[…]
If there are problems around elections, she said, she would rely on the actual experts she knows who have worked in the field for decades and share information for free: “I guarantee you, they’re not gonna charge people 20 bucks a head at a church in Redding, California, to tell the story. That’s making you a dollar, that’s not trying to make anything better.”
[…]
“This is not what anybody signed up for,” she said. “I’ve had people tell me I should have private security. It’s not right. But it’s the world we live in right now.”
[…]
Across the US the climate has grown so tense that one in five election workers has said they are unlikely to remain in their positions through the next presidential election, according to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice. About one in six say they have been personally threatened.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/27/us-midterms-rural-california-voters-election-officials-fear-for-safety

…& arguably in poor taste when you consider the wider context

Russia has said it will pull out of a UN-brokered grain export deal after a dramatic attack by Ukrainian airborne and underwater drones on its Black Sea naval base of Sevastopol in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Social media showed footage of explosions both near and in the Crimean harbour, and Russia’s defence ministry said there had been an attack by “nine unmanned aerial vehicles and seven autonomous sea drones” that began at 4.20am.
[…]
Sevastopol’s Russian governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said the raid on the port was the biggest mounted by Ukraine on the naval base in the war so far, and that all civilian CCTV should be turned off so as not to reveal the position of the city’s air defences.
[…]
Russia also said Britain had helped Ukraine carry out the attack, accusing a Royal Navy specialist unit based in Ochakiv, in the south of the country, of giving guidance. No evidence was offered to support the claim.
[…]
“Representatives of this unit of the British Navy took part in the planning, provision and implementation of a terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea on 26 September this year, blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines,” it said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/29/russia-suspends-ukraine-grain-deal-after-attack-on-sevastopol-naval-base

…wait…what? …I know accusing the other guy of the shit you pull is…like…more russian than vodka…albeit super-popular with the right in some ostensibly english-speaking parts of the world…but…if that crack about the pipeline thing is L’esprit de l’escalier…that’s a long-ass staircase vlad’s been making his way down for…what…a month? …still…maybe he had other things on his mind?

The government has been urged to launch an urgent investigation after reports that Liz Truss’s phone was hacked.

The breach was discovered when Truss, then the foreign secretary, was running for the Tory leadership in the summer, but details were suppressed by the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, the Mail on Sunday reported.

Spies suspected of working for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, gained access to sensitive information, including discussions about the Ukraine war with foreign officials, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/29/government-urged-to-investigate-report-liz-truss-phone-was-hacked

…either way…color me not-at-all-reassurred that taking a month to consider has resulted in calmer minds prevailing

The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has told protesters that Saturday will be their last day of taking to the streets, in a sign that security forces may intensify their crackdown on unrest sweeping the country.
[…]
The Revolutionary Guards, which report directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have not been deployed since demonstrations began on 16 September. They are an elite force with a track record of crushing dissent.

Rights groups have said at least 250 people have been killed and thousands arrested across Iran in the protests, which have turned into a popular revolt involving all layers of society.
[…]
The country’s intelligence ministry and the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guards have accused spy agencies from the US, the UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia of having orchestrated the unrest to destabilise the Islamic republic.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/29/iran-protests-mahsa-amini-hossein-salami-last-day

…I don’t know…one person’s “no rest for the wicked” is another’s “once more into the breach”…which between truss’ phone & the reason for her brief stint in cabinet limbo…is a phrase with a certain amount of irony where suella is concerned…oh, & if you can’t hear her name without thinking of a villian with a penchant for dappled monochrome fur coats…you should probably stick with your gut feelings about the lady

Almost all the media reported a scripted comment by the newly reinstated home secretary, Suella Braverman, about the “tofu-eating wokerati”. Astonishingly, scarcely any of them reported what she was doing at the time. She was pushing through the House of Commons the most repressive legislation of the modern era.

Under the public order bill, anyone who has protested in the previous five years, or has encouraged other people to protest, can be forced to “submit to … being fitted with, or the installation of, any necessary apparatus” to monitor their movements. In other words, if you attend or support any protest in which “serious disruption to two or more individuals or to an organisation” occurs, you can be forced to wear an electronic tag. “Serious disruption” was redefined by the 2022 Police Act to include noise.

This is just one of a series of astounding measures in the bill, which has been hardly remarked upon in public life as it passes through Britain’s legislature. What we see here is two losses in one moment: the final erasure of the right to protest, and political journalism’s mutation from reporting substance to reporting spectacle. These are just the latest of our losses.
[…]
While Rishi Sunak was chancellor, the government repeatedly delayed its manifesto promise to ban no-fault evictions. Landlords are ruthlessly exploiting this power to throw their tenants on to the street or use the threat to force them to accept outrageous rent rises and dismal conditions. Had Sunak’s “help to buy” mortgage scheme succeeded (it was a dismal flop), it would have raised house prices, increasing rents and making ownership less accessible: the opposite of its stated aim. But this, as with all such schemes, was surely its true purpose: to inflate the assets of existing owners, the Conservative party’s base.

Public services are collapsing at breathtaking speed. Headteachers warn that 90% of schools in England could run out of money next year. NHS dentistry is on the verge of total collapse. Untold numbers are now living in constant pain and, in some cases, extracting their own teeth. The suspicion that the NHS is being deliberately dismembered, its core services allowed to fail so that we cease to defend it against privatisation, rises ever higher in the mind.
[…]
Corruption is embedded in public life. Fraud is scarcely prosecuted. Organised crime has been so widely facilitated, through the destruction of the state’s capacity to regulate everything from money laundering to waste dumping, that you could almost believe it was deliberate. Our rivers have been reduced to sewers, our soil is washing off the land, the planning system is being dismantled, and hundreds of environmental laws are now under threat. We hurtle towards Earth systems oblivion, while frenetically talking about anything but.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/26/rishi-sunak-britain-general-election-protest

…so…along with telling some gammon-faced anachronism of a colleague a bunch of stuff she shouldn’t have about one of the far right’s pet wedge issues

Home Office officials raised concerns over a series of secretive meetings Suella Braverman held with an influential rightwing backbench MP weeks before she was forced to resign over leaking sensitive information to him, the Observer has been told.

In addition, sources have claimed that the home secretary appears to have instructed officials to look at potentially implementing hardline proposals cooked up by a rightwing thinktank that would in effect prohibit “genuine refugees” from settling in the UK, a move that threatens an even more uncompromising approach to asylum seekers.

Senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say even before she was forced to quit there was already significant disquiet over Braverman’s dealings with Sir John Hayes, leader of the “anti-woke” Common Sense Group of rightwing MPs.

…she also tasked civil servants with looking at an expansion of the whole ship-’em-to-rwanda school of “asylum policy”…meanwhile, when it comes to people actually inducted into that system under her watch

In another development, Braverman has been accused of failing to act on legal advice that the government was illegally detaining asylum seekers at a processing centre and not signing off on providing accommodation for them.
[…]
Asylum seekers are meant to be held at the facility, which opened in January, for 24 hours while they undergo checks before being moved into immigration detention centres or asylum accommodation, currently hotels.

Officials have confirmed about 3,000 people are being held there on a site designed for 1,000 with a maximum of 1,600. This number is larger than any prison or immigration detention facility in the UK.

The Home Office has not denied that the legal advice stated that the law had been broken at Manston but told the Sunday Times suggestions that Braverman had “deliberately ignored” it were “completely baseless”.
[…]
Sunak has resisted demands to launch an inquiry into her breaking of the ministerial code.
[…]
Braverman has so far refused to appear before MPs to explain what happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/29/suella-braverman-secretive-meetings-antiwoke-mp-officials

…so…why would a fledgling PM risk rolling the dice on having her on the inside pissing out?

Her return is not an oddity, not a pantomime joke, but proves how deeply Rishi Sunak is in hock to the hard right, like every Tory leader from John Major onwards. The party will rewrite the past week’s knife-edge drama as a smooth and inevitable coronation of its princeling, but his frantic scramble for the wrong votes tells another story. Restoring Braverman to the Home Office and boasting of party “unity” unites him with the obnoxious wing that drove the Tories to this post-Brexit dead end. The Express, closest to that faction, reveals that in the last hours battling with Boris Johnson, Sunak was so needy for rightwing support that he called Braverman no fewer than six times begging for her backing and that of the wing she represents; Keir Starmer called that out in PMQs as “a grubby deal”. The first heady days are a leader’s moment of maximum power with every job in their gift – and yet Sunak emerges as another Tory PM too weak to face down those old wrecking “bastards”.
[…]
Her blunder exposed more than her failure to follow security rules. She attempted to send a confidential document to, among others, Sir John Hayes: known as her mentor, a rather less fascinating svengali. His Common Sense Group, launched two years ago in the wake of Black Lives Matter with about 40 MPs and reviving the old Cornerstone Group (faith, flag and family), inhabits the shifting sands of rightwing diehards. “Common Sense” is a useful catchphrase suggesting anything less than hard right is nonsense, just as canvassers recognise that when someone says “I’m not political”, they usually vote Tory: any other politics is abnormal.

If she regularly sent policy for approval from the Hayes faction, it’s worth knowing who he is: he was knighted along with Sir John Redwood and Sir Edward Leigh in Theresa May’s frantic wooing of troublesome rightwingers against her Brexit deal. Here are his views, unpopulist as none of them are very popular these days: a Brexiter, he has voted to restrict access to abortion, and is against equal marriage and onshore wind turbines. He’s for standing up in football stadiums and capital punishment. One of his outside jobs is as strategic adviser to BB Energy, a global energy trader. In the middle of the summer heatwave, Hayes condemned “a cowardly new world where we live in a country where we are frightened of the heat. It is not surprising in snowflake Britain.”

Braverman ran wild at the Tory conference, declaring that “a plane taking off to Rwanda … That’s my dream. That’s my obsession.” Her glee at longer prison terms for peaceful climate protesters is repugnant: “We’ll keep putting you behind bars,” she says. If Sunak cuts benefits yet again, he has an ally; she said this month: “I want to cut welfare spending. We have far too many people in this country who are fit to work, who are able to work … the benefit street culture is a feature of modern Britain”, needing “a bit more stick” to get people back to work.

But she will be blamed for the near collapse of the Home Office: from passport chaos to police recruitment in England and Wales that is still 7,000 below the number of officers cut since 2010. The more she promises impossibly few asylum-seekers and refugees, the more glaring are Home Office failures, processing virtually none of the rising numbers, with the shameful squalor of their living conditions revealed by a chief inspector who said he was left “speechless”.
[…]
ConservativeHome’s assistant editor, William Atkinson, suggests there’s political method in the danger of this appointment. Culture wars whipped up by Braverman and her allies will hide the new austerity. Sunak will stand by as they let rip on immigration, on the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the online safety bill and the green wokerati. He hopes their foghorns on statues, colonialism, museums and immigration will drown out everything else. But people feeling the pain of a 17% rise in food prices, doubling energy bills and soaring mortgages and rents are not easily distracted. As for Braverman’s “obsession” with immigration, that now sits just eighth on the Ipsos list of public concerns.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/27/suella-braverman-rishi-sunak-hard-right-labour

…so before I go getting distracted by some mop-haired bullshit

Johnson’s involvement would be seen as both an implicit criticism of Sunak for not going and an attempt to maintain and bolster his profile just a week after he abandoned his own attempts at a dramatic comeback to No 10. Several sources close to Johnson did not deny that he was set to go.
[…]
It is understood senior officials in government have been aware for some time that Johnson intends to attend the event in Sharm el-Sheikh, which is taking place from 6-17 November.

It remained unclear on Saturday night whether Johnson was planning to go as part of the official UK government delegation, which includes several MPs; as a guest of the incoming Egyptian Cop presidency; or as a guest of a non-governmental organisation or other national delegation.

The new prime minister’s decision not to attend has already provoked huge criticism from the environmental lobby and caused dismay in other governments.
[…]
Suggestions that Sunak urged King Charles not to attend the summit when he was keen to do so were denied by Buckingham Palace last night.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/29/no-10-alarm-as-boris-johnson-plans-to-attend-cop27-climate-summit

…if we go back to the whole seige thing

First, let us be clear that it was not the recent collapse of confidence in the financial markets that threatened the Conservative party’s reputation for economic competence. That reputation was destroyed not by Truss and Kwarteng, but by the ill-judged decision to hold a referendum on our membership of the EU, and the calamitous consequences.

As Stryker McGuire, the former London bureau chief of Newsweek, has written: “Virtually all the economic arguments in favour of Brexit looked specious at best and cynically misleading at worst.” He added: “Brexit is a kind of original sin that sits at the heart of today’s UK economy.”

The markets gave their vote on Brexit and the Tories’ reputation for economic competence by beginning the long decline in the pound immediately after the referendum result. The Truss-Kwarteng growth plan was the reductio ad absurdum. Sovereignty regained? Oh no it wasn’t. The Brexiters were not sovereign: the financial markets were.

…same as it ever was

The markets forced the 1967 devaluation of the pound under prime minister Harold Wilson, and the 1976 recourse to the International Monetary Fund under prime minister James Callaghan and chancellor Dennis Healey. They also forced the pound’s ignominious exit from the exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday in 1992.

…well…maybe some stuff is new

And what is really inhibiting growth and fiscal flexibility? Why, it is none other than the Brexit that has knocked 4% off productivity (per the Office for Budget Responsibility) or up to 5.5% (per the National Institute of Economic and Social Research) with serious repercussions on tax revenues, and some 15% off overseas trade.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/30/taking-back-control-its-the-markets-that-are-sovereign-over-brexit-britain

…if there are lies, damn lies & statistics…I’m thinking I should have paid more attention in math…because I can see a lot of things adding up

Global carbon emissions from energy will peak in 2025 thanks to massively increased government spending on clean fuels in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to analysis by the world’s leading energy organisation.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said that government spending on clean energy in response to the crisis would mark a “historic turning point” in the transition away from fossil fuels, in its annual report on global energy.
[…]
The IEA analysis showed that current government policies would still lead to global temperatures rising by 2.5C, which would have catastrophic climate impacts. That would be far above the target of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The 1.5C target, agreed at the Paris climate conference, would prevent the worst effects of climate breakdown.

The analysis adds to a consensus among scientists that governments are not doing enough to prevent climate disaster. A separate UN study, published on Wednesday, also found that government pledges so far to cut emissions will lead to 2.5C of heating.

The wave of clean energy investment will also cost Russia $1tn in lost fossil fuel revenues by 2030 compared with before the invasion, Birol said. Russia, previously the world’s largest exporter of fossil fuels, would have a “much diminished role in international energy affairs” as the world’s reliance on burning methane gas for power falls, he added.
[…]
Birol said the crisis had not changed the IEA’s assessment, first published last year, that all new fossil fuel projects should stop immediately in order for the world to hit net zero emissions by 2050. New oil and gas extraction projects “will jeopardise our climate goals”, he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/carbon-emissions-to-peak-in-2025-in-historic-turning-point-says-iea

…& a perplexing amount of division…or multiplication

These particular papers were write-ups of medical research, with many including photographs of biological samples, like tissue. One picture caught my eye. Was there something familiar about it? Curious, I quickly scrolled back through other papers by the same authors, checking their images against each other.

There it was. A section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments.

What’s more, the authors seemed to be deliberately covering their tracks. Although the photos were of the same sample, one appeared to have been flipped back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.

Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or — much worse — fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results.
[…]
By day I went to my job in a lab at Stanford University, but I was soon spending every evening and most weekends looking for suspicious images. In 2016, I published an analysis of 20,621 peer-reviewed papers, discovering problematic images in no fewer than one in 25. Half of these appeared to have been manipulated deliberately — rotated, flipped, stretched or otherwise photoshopped. With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.

Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I’ve reported 2,500 of these to their journals’ editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public.

While some of this research may be relatively unimportant, not all of it is. Earlier this year, Science magazine asked me to comment on apparently manipulated photos appearing in influential Alzheimer’s disease research conducted at the University of Minnesota. The paper claimed to demonstrate a unique piece of evidence about the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s.
[…]
Other researchers have been unable to reproduce the University of Minnesota’s famous study. Now that images in these papers have shown signs of deliberate manipulation, it raises questions about an entire line of research, which means potentially millions of dollars of wasted grant money and years of false hope for patients. All may not be entirely lost, though; the pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai recently said that an anti-amyloid drug they are developing for Alzheimer’s disease is showing promise.
[…]
Just last month, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Gregg Semenza had to retract four of his papers following the revelation that they contain images that appear to have been manipulated or duplicated. The prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had published the retracted articles. The pseudonymous Clare Francis, a “science detective” like me, made the discovery.
[…]
Most of my fellow detectives remain anonymous, operating under pseudonyms such as Smut Clyde or Cheshire. Criticizing other scientists’ work is often not well received, and concerns about negative career consequences can prevent scientists from speaking out. Image problems I have reported under my full name have resulted in hateful messages, angry videos on social media sites and two lawsuit threats.
[…]
Several things could lead researchers to cheat. For a start, most scientists feel the pressure to publish. Publications are essential to a scientist’s career and crucial to earning academic tenure. Employers might demand a quota of published articles over time, pay bonuses or promote staff members upon publication. In general, studies reporting successful outcomes have a higher chance of getting published than those failing to confirm a hypothesis. So when a scientist’s research shows a negative result, cheating can be tempting. Or perhaps a scientist has received praise and attention in the past for a notable discovery but has entered a fallow stretch of research. In those cases, they may be tempted to “adjust” their findings to make them look more compelling. And some labs are run by overly demanding — perhaps even bullying — professors. As a result, to get a letter of recommendation that will enable them to escape to a new position, young researchers may become desperate to please.

Before scientific papers are published, they undergo peer review, a process in which two or three independent scientists judge an article for scientific rigor and correct analysis. But peer review is unpaid and undervalued, and the system is based on a trusting, non-adversarial relationship. Peer review is not set up to detect fraud.

Often, problems with data — tables, statistical tests, charts and photos — are not caught until after publication, when a much wider audience reads the study. Minor errors can be addressed with a correction. But a paper should be retracted if critics can demonstrate scientific misconduct such as photoshopping or faked data. After retraction, it will still be available to read or download but will be marked as untrustworthy.
[…]
Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.

Science needs to get serious about research fraud. Journals should be much faster at retracting papers containing photoshopped images or manipulated data — and should not publish them in the first place. Scientists who find flaws in published results should not be threatened with lawsuits in an attempt to silence criticism.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/science-fraud-image-manipulation-photoshop.html

…not seeing some of the subtraction that seems to be called for on a few fronts, though

An oil pipeline under construction in east Africa will produce vast amounts of carbon dioxide, according to new analysis. The project will result in 379m tonnes of climate-heating pollution, according to an expert assessment, more than 25 times the combined annual emissions of Uganda and Tanzania, the host nations.

The East African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) will transport oil drilled in a biodiverse national park in Uganda more than 870 miles to a port in Tanzania for export. The main backers of the multibillion dollar project are the French oil company TotalEnergies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).
[…]
[Richard] Heede [at CAI] described EACOP as a “mid-sized carbon bomb”. In May, the Guardian revealed that world’s biggest fossil fuel firms were quietly planning scores of carbon bomb oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits, with catastrophic global impacts.
[…]
Africa’s fossil fuels, and the question of whether and how countries can exploit them, is likely to be a flashpoint at November’s Cop27 UN climate summit.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/east-african-crude-oil-pipeline-carbon

…but either it all adds up wrong…or I’m just bad at math

Europe is clearly on the frontline and Shell, the largest oil and gas firm in Europe, highlights in its latest quarterly profits how the entire energy sector’s bottom line is booming.

A profit of more than $9bn (£7.8bn) in the last quarter takes the surplus this year to a record $30bn.

Britain has a windfall tax and yet Shell, despite declaring swimming pools full of extra cash to the government, has not paid a penny.

Rishi Sunak invented the UK version of a windfall tax that applies an extra 25% to the standard North Sea corporation tax rate, but offers a 91% allowance for investment.
[…]
Without loopholes, a windfall tax that is applied across the energy industry could easily fill the estimated £40bn hole in the government’s finances. At the moment, with full use of Sunak’s tax break, it will generate just £5bn.

…no prizes for guessing which well-heeled & freshly-minted PM gets a substantial amount of donations from fossil fuel interests

Much of continental Europe lives with a similar fear. France’s energy company TotalEnergies filed profits over the first nine months of the year of $17.3bn, more than the $16bn it posted for the whole of last year.
[…]
The European Union hatched a temporary windfall tax on profits, that is by many measures even weaker than the UK’s, partly due to the French president’s opposition. Yet it has stirred up intense opposition from some oil companies.
[…]
However, the price charged to consumers is based on hedged contracts already in place at much higher prices.
[…]
An energy price cap across the UK of £4,357.65 in January will only fall to £3,610.38 by the end of next year, says Lowrey, meaning the government promise of a six-month subsidy to keep it at £2,500 needs to be extended if it wants to avoid real hardship.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/27/windfall-tax-on-oil-and-gas-firms-profits-could-go-to-those-in-greatest-need

…there’s a lot of people struggling to cover their bills…& there’s some others who are raking it in like nobody’s business

Exxon’s $19.7bn profit for the third quarter outstripped the record $17.9bn it reported for the previous quarter, as it became the latest fossil fuel producer to enjoy soaring earnings, a day after Shell announced global profits of $9.5bn between July and September.

The results came as another US oil company, Chevron, reported a quarterly profit of $11.2bn, its second-highest ever, as it also stormed past analysts’ estimates. This was slightly lower than the previous quarter, but almost double the $6.1bn profit the company made during the same period a year earlier.
[…]
Oil companies have raked in record profits in recent months, thanks to the surge in the price of oil and natural gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, causing soaring energy bills for consumers and businesses.
[…]
The oil company said its profits, double those made by Shell during the same period, were the result of “strong volume performance, including record refining volumes, rigorous cost control and higher natural gas realisations”. It said this more than offset lower crude oil prices and weaker industry refining margins.
[…]
Meanwhile, Exxon’s record profits were helped by its much-criticised decision to pin its future hopes on fossil fuels, even at a time when its European competitors have shifted their attention to more renewables.

The company said it had spent $5.7bn on new oil and gas projects over the past quarter, a 24% increase on a year earlier, and it remained on track to hit its investment target of between $21bn and $24bn this year.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/28/exxonmobil-reports-record-near-20bn-profit-almost-matching-apple

…there might maybe be a name for that sort of thing

The world’s biggest tech companies reported their latest earnings last week and, for most, the news was bad. Meta (formerly Facebook), Alphabet (formerly Google) and Microsoft saw billions wiped off their values as investors began to worry that the best days of the tech titans were behind them. As investors made for the exit, the five biggest tech stocks crashed by a combined $950bn (£820m) at their lowest point. The slide also hit the fortunes of their creators.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune plunged by $11bn on Wednesday after Meta Platforms reported a second straight quarter of disappointing earnings. Shares in the company dropped by a fifth – a sharp depreciation that has brought Zuckerberg’s overall decline in wealth this year to more than $87bn. The numbers may be no more than arithmetically diverting – Zuckerberg, 38, is still worth about $38bn, according to Bloomberg – but that is a striking drop on the $142bn he could count on in September 2021. Almost all of his wealth is tied up in Meta stock; he holds more than 350m shares. As of Thursday, Zuckerberg ranked 28th on the Bloomberg list, a 25-place drop from his previous third-place positioning.

Meta’s 71% fall in value this year is due to many things, including advert-tracking controls instituted by Apple, a softening in digital ad spending, the challenge to Facebook-owned Instagram by TikTok, and Meta’s multibillion-dollar investment in the metaverse – the virtual world it is throwing money at despite a less-than-warm reception, even from its own staff.
[…]
Zuckerberg is not alone. According to Forbes, the tech billionaires have lost a collective $315bn since last year.

On Thursday, Amazon reported that this Christmas season would be less jolly than analysts had expected and that consumer spending was in “uncharted waters”, triggering a 20% fall in its share price. The decline hit Amazon founder Jeff Bezos by as much as $4.7bn on the day. Bezos had already lost nearly $60bn in 2022, still leaving him with a net worth of about $134bn.

A day earlier, Microsoft’s earnings report showed that the dependable cloud-computing earnings growth at its Azure division was slowing, triggering a nearly 8% decline in the company’s valuation. That will hit Bill Gates, whose fortune has declined this year by close to $30bn to about $109bn.

Even Tesla founder Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and now the owner of Twitter, has not been immune to the downturn. Shares in Tesla, the electric vehicle maker, have fallen 43.7% in the year to date. That’s reduced the would-be Mars coloniser’s fortune by $58.6bn over the past 12 months to a still astronomical $212bn.

But despite the week’s stock market bloodshed, 56 of the 65 tech billionaires on Forbes magazine’s list – one that includes Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer – are still wealthier than they were three years ago.
[…]
“The gains were so extraordinary in the two years of the pandemic, it was almost pornographic,” [Chuck Collins, the director at the Institute for Policy Studies thinktank who directs its programme on inequality] said. “The billionaires essentially disconnected from the real world and the real economy. Even if their wealth is now adjusting down, who else had a 51% gain in their assets in the past two years?”

The billionaires are not the real victims. Tech companies have come to dominate US stock markets and their decline is dragging down the wider market, and with it the pensions and savings of Americans who are also struggling with rising interest rates and a 40-year high in inflation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/29/will-plunging-shares-end-big-techs-era-of-pornographic-profits

…but then when the numbers get big enough that historic fines are a barely-felt slap on the wrist

Facebook parent company Meta has been ordered to pay $10.5 million in legal fees to Washington state atop a nearly $25 million fine for repeated and intentional violations of campaign finance disclosure laws.

King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North issued the legal-fee order Friday, two days after he hit the social media giant with what is believed to be the largest campaign finance fine in U.S. history, The Seattle Times reported.
[…]
North imposed the maximum fine allowed for more than 800 violations of Washington’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, passed by voters in 1972 and later strengthened by the Legislature. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson argued that the maximum was appropriate considering his office previously sued Facebook in 2018 for violating the same law.
[…]
Washington’s transparency law requires ad sellers such as Meta to keep and make public the names and addresses of those who buy political ads, the target of such ads, how the ads were paid for and the total number of views of each ad. Ad sellers must provide the information to anyone who requests it. Television stations and newspapers have complied with the law for decades.

But Meta has repeatedly objected to the requirements, arguing unsuccessfully in court that the law is unconstitutional because it “unduly burdens political speech” and is “virtually impossible to fully comply with.” While Facebook does keep an archive of political ads that run on the platform, the archive does not disclose all the information required under Washington’s law.

In 2018, following Ferguson’s first lawsuit, Facebook agreed to pay $238,000 and committed to transparency in campaign finance and political advertising. It subsequently said it would stop selling political ads in the state rather than comply with the requirements.

Nevertheless, the company continued selling political ads, and Ferguson sued again in 2020.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-orders-meta-pay-105m-legal-fees-washington

…it’s all just business-as-usual, right?

The Tech Transparency Project said in its report that it found 173 ads that it believes violate the apps’ ad policies by searching the apps’ online ad library over two weeks in August. 

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, prohibits ads that “promote the sale or use of weapons, ammunition or explosives,” according to the company’s online rulebook. The prohibition also covers “weapon modification accessories,” such as gun sights. 
[…]
While the ads represent a small fraction of all the ads that ran on Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. during that period, the Tech Transparency Project said that its search wasn’t exhaustive and that the fact that the ads made it through a review process at all demonstrates that the system is flawed. 
[…]
Most of the ads are no longer online, because Meta’s ad library shows ads only if they’re currently running or are about politics, a practice that Paul said limits transparency. Meta has also sometimes tried to shut down outside research on its ad system that the company has said it sees as a data and privacy risk.
[…]
[Katie A. Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project] said that if Meta can’t catch more potentially rule-breaking ads, it should hire more people rather than rely on journalists and nonprofit groups to find them. 

“What other things are slipping through the cracks?” she said. “Is their machine learning as good as they say, or are they pulling the veil over the eyes of the public and Congress again?” 
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebooks-rules-ban-promoting-weapons-gun-sellers-are-running-ads-anyway

…speaking of slipping through the cracks

In recent weeks, Ben Silbermann, a co-founder of the digital pinboard service Pinterest, resigned as chief executive; Joe Gebbia, a co-founder of the home rental company Airbnb, announced his departure from the company’s leadership; and Apoorva Mehta, the founder of the grocery delivery app Instacart, said he would end his run as executive chairman when the company went public, as soon as this year.

The resignations signify the end of an era at these companies, which are among the most valuable and well-known to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past decade, and of the era they represent. In recent years, investors have dumped increasingly large sums of money into a group of highly valued start-ups known as unicorns, worth $1 billion or more, and their founders have been treated as visionary heroes. Those founders fought for special ownership rights that kept them in control of their companies — a change from the past, when entrepreneurs were often replaced by more experienced executives or pressured to sell.

…status, you say?

Mr. Musk has exploited the opportunities emerging in a rapidly disintegrating regulatory state apparatus and acquired a small army of investors and a fleet of lobbyists, lawyers and fanboys (known as Musketeers). He has sought to position himself as a tech genius who can break the rules, exploit and excise those who work for him, ridicule those who stand in his way and do as he wishes with his wealth because it benefits humanity. He’ll rescue the planet with his electric cars and save Ukraine with his satellite systems — but he must be freed of government interference to do these good deeds.

…weird how that sounds positively…well…british

Key figures on Britain’s far right who were previously banned from Twitter have been able to open new accounts, apparently without restrictions, after the platform’s takeover by Elon Musk.

Britain First, an extreme group whose leader has spent time in jail for hate crimes against Muslims, rejoined the social media network on Friday. It had been banned in 2017 under Twitter’s hate speech rules after posting inflammatory anti-Muslim videos. Some videos posted by its then deputy leader were retweeted by US president Donald Trump.

Twitter has mechanisms to detect when banned users set up accounts, and the new Britain First account quickly had its features limited after being found to violate rules. But it was later restored to full functionality, according to screenshots shared with members in a group for Britain First supporters. The account was still live on Saturday evening.

In a post on the messaging app Telegram celebrating its return, Britain First said it would “usually be suspended immediately”, adding: “This is new.”
[…]
Britain First – whose leader, Paul Golding, was jailed in 2018 for hate crimes against Muslims – denies being racist and says it “rejects racial hatred in all its forms”.
[…]
The apparent return of far-right figures raises questions about where Twitter’s new owner will draw the line on content moderation and who will be permitted on the app. Musk, the Tesla billionaire who bought Twitter for $44bn, has been critical of its moderation decisions in the past and called for a greater emphasis on what he says is “free speech”. In the hours after his takeover of the platform, some users flooded it with racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs in an apparent attempt to test the response.
[…]
However, Musk then said on Twitter that a “better idea” than the council might be to separate the platform into different strands. “Being able to select which version of Twitter you want is probably better, much as it would be for a movie maturity rating,” he wrote, adding that that rating of a user’s tweet could be self-selected and then “modified by user feedback”.
[…]
He also indicated he would examine the case of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and author, who was suspended from Twitter after violating the platform’s policies with a tweet about transgender actor Elliot Page. “Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail,” Musk wrote.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/29/banned-british-far-right-figures-return-to-twitter-within-hours-of-takeover

…minor & dubious reasons…motherfucker, what?

…the good guys…strange bedfellows…you pays your money & you takes your pick, I guess

…remind me…is it the game we hate…or the players?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/27/trump-lawyers-subpoena-capitol-attack-january-6

…either way…it’d be nice if once in a while the barren online landscape got to bloom a little

Unusual winter rainfall has produced a floral bloom and explosion of colour on the barren plains of the Atacama desert, prompting Chile’s government to move to protect the area.

This month, the new president, Gabriel Boric, announced that the area would be made into a national park – the highest protected status the country bestows – to safeguard the flowering desert, a rare phenomenon which occurs every few years.
[…]
Every few years, more than 200 species of plants bloom, producing a spectacular carpet of purple, pink and yellow flowers on the desert floor. Many of the species are endemic to the area, including nolanas, huillis, and añañucas.

The plants are geophytes, meaning that their bulbs lie dormant underground over the dry period and, when the winter rains finally arrive, surface the following spring. Lizards, mammals and insects flock to the area when the flowers emerge, with desert foxes, rodents and guanacos joined by grasshoppers and butterflies.

The phenomenon usually follows El Niño, the warm phase of a weather system in the tropical waters of the Pacific ocean which prompts rainfall in coastal areas of the Atacama desert.

However, this year is La Niña, the cycle’s cold spell, making this bloom highly unusual. The last major bloom occurred in 2017, and scientists believe that the phenomenon could last into late November this year.

“All extreme biological systems are right on the edge of survival – that’s why it’s so important to protect them,” said Dr Cristian Atala, a professor at Valparaíso Catholic University’s institute of biology, who welcomed the government’s decision to declare the national park.
[…]
“Although you don’t always see it, there is huge biodiversity in the desert, and there are many unique and endemic species,” said Cristina Dorador, a microbiologist from the port city of Antofagasta in northern Chile.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/29/desert-bloomed-in-chile-atacama-driest-place-on-earth