…when you say [DOT 11/10/22]

what you're saying...

…he obviously wasn’t going to be happy about it

Russia has launched a massive wave of strikes targeting cities across Ukraine, including key civilian infrastructure, in what the Kremlin said was a response to an attack on the Kerch bridge linking Russia and Crimea.

…so it might seem pointless to quibble about definitions…but

“Let there be no doubt,” Putin said in televised comments addressed to his security council, “if attempts at terrorist attacks continue, the response from Russia will be severe.”

…one man’s terrorist…yadda, yadda…& I’m guessing a deceptive amount of consideration went into the choice of that “severe” part…but on the one hand he was quoted as claiming the “terrorism” thing was on account of the blast being “aimed at destroying critically important civilian infrastructure“…as though his bridge(s) served no military purpose & had only civilian value…while that severe response of his

Many of the locations hit by cruise missiles and kamikaze drones in the midst of the morning rush hour appeared to be solely civilian sites or key pieces of infrastructure, including the country’s electric grid, apparently chosen to terrorise Ukrainians.
[…]
Explosions also rocked the cities of Lviv, Ternópil and Dnipro after overnight strikes on the southern city of Zaporizhzhia for a third night in a row. In the 24 hours preceding the attacks, there had been a marked increase in reports of Russian aircraft, including strategic bombers.
[…]
Russia’s defence ministry said it had hit “all designated targets”.

The attacks follow several months in which the Ukrainian capital was not targeted, leading to a relative return to normality in the city. The last attack on Kyiv was in June. But unlike previous attacks that mostly hit Kyiv’s outskirts, Monday’s strikes targeted several locations in the very centre of the city.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/10/explosions-kyiv-ukraine-war-russia-crimea-putin-bridge

…the war on terror, ladies & gentlemen…who knew declaring war on an abstract concept with a wildly variable & almost entirely subjective definition would propel us to such an edifying time to be alive?

Websites for more than a dozen US airports were temporarily brought offline by cyberattacks on Monday morning, with Russian-speaking hackers claiming responsibility for the disruption.

About 14 public-facing websites for a number of sizable airports, including LaGuardia airport in New York City, were targeted and inaccessible to the public. Most have since been brought back online.
[…]
The hack has been attributed to a group known as Killnet, Russian hacktivists who support the Kremlin but are not thought to directly be government actors, according to CNN. The group favors distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which work by flooding computer servers with traffic to render them non-functional.

…that may or may not be terrorism…but apparently only rises to the level of “an inconvenience”…not sure that’s the word the germans used, though

A similar attack also targeted communication networks in Germany’s railway systems, causing massive service disruptions in the northern part of the country.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/10/cyberattacks-disrupt-us-airport-websites

…but one thing’s for sure…while the relationship between rhetoric & reality may not be reliable…you can learn a lot from how the message is couched

Princeton researchers reviewing more than 100,000 campaign emails from December 2019 to June 2020 found they rose from a peak of about 600 a day in December to twice that in June – and that didn’t include text messages.

But, despite the annoying nature of the communications, they seem to work, perhaps because they are so meticulously crafted. Toby Fallsgraff, email director for the Obama 2012 campaign, explained to NPR how the campaign would test up to 18 versions of a message on certain subscribers before sending it out widely. Emails brought in roughly $500m for the campaign. A few years later, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign asked for money 50 different ways in one month.
[…]
For the GOP, it’s all about unswerving loyalty to the party – and to the great overlord, the chosen one, he who alone can fix it. He is not running for office this year, but his party seems unaware.

Text messages from the Republican National Committee dangle a wide range of perks[…] Failing that, you can become a Trump Social Media Founding Supporter or get on the Trump Life Membership List (the messages do not specify what it would mean to be a lifetime member of Trump). Gifs of the ex-president often adorn the bottom of emails.

And if none of these clubs are for you, beware the RNC’s wrath. “Don’t you care?” asked a message on 30 June. “Our records show your Trump Advisory Board membership status is STILL PENDING ACTIVATION!”
[…]
Later, things got passive-aggressive. “Do we need to talk, friend?” the party wondered. A few weeks after that, in May: “We’re not mad, we’re just asking. Why haven’t you pledged to follow Pres. Trump on Truth Social [his social media platform]?”

All of these, it should be noted, were positively gentle compared with an apparently genuine message that made the rounds on Twitter and in the media a year ago, in line with New York Times reporting in April 2021, describing a “defector” list supposedly maintained by the GOP:

Clearly, the party’s marketing team believes donors are motivated by accusations of insufficient loyalty. In a March email describing the invasion of Ukraine, the party said a poll had found most Democrats would flee the country if the US found itself in a similar position. “So we must ask: Would you fight for your country if it was under attack? Researchers need your response by midnight tonight. If you do not respond in time, we will assume you side with the Democrats who wouldn’t fight for America.”

…meanwhile

The opposing party is equally inclined to hyperbole, though it often takes a very different tone – one of vulnerability and occasional self-flagellation. “We’re downright BEGGING you,” wailed the subject line from a late September Democratic email. “Election day is 64 days away and we’re getting nervous,” warned a text early last month.

It’s really upsetting to have to send multiple texts and emails every day: “This isn’t easy for me,” wrote Joe Biden in April. A few months later: “I hate to ask.” (If Republicans’ word choice was occasionally odd, Democrats made mistakes of their own – this particular message suggested I “take a moment to read this email, and then chip in $0 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee”, which I did.)

…maybe it’s just me…but where I live the chances of getting hit with a missile today…or broadly any day…are slim to at-that-point-we’re-all-fucked-anyway…so with the rubric on offer I confess I’m unclear if my contributing $0 to the democratic congressional campaign committee equates to siding with the democrats who wouldn’t fight for america, would fight for america, are fighting for america, think maybe fighting is an unhelpful metaphor for the political struggles of the land of the free & the home of the brave…or just a general all-purpose skepticism about the relative value of a dollar in my pocket over one spent on the promise of a politician

…I’m sure that’s a me problem, though…I can’t help feeling like a lot of religions seem to have a lot of nice ideas…& a lot of churches seem to cause some pretty terrible things…so it’s not that big of a surprise that I might find politics throws up its share of nice-sounding ideas while parties produce some god-awful results…still & all…at some point you’ve got to appeal to voters…even the likes of me

Republicans’ emails weren’t entirely free from vulnerability in messages such as, “If we fall even a dollar short, we will lose the House to Pelosi FOREVER,” which would be pretty remarkable even for Pelosi, a known mortal. But such warnings were still underscored by a sense of menace, while Democrats seem content to appear pitiful: “we’re PLEADING”, “we might miss our goal”, “throwing in the towel”.

As for the more complex language involved in Democratic messages, [George] Lakoff [distinguished professor emeritus in cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley] says, “Democrats tend to assume what I call Cartesian rationality: that is that you should be able to reason things out. And they give you reasons for things and then it takes some reasoning to get there. The Republicans tend to just say, ‘This is how it is.’”
[…]
Along with weaponizing guilt, both parties make use of what might be described as trickery. The 2020 Princeton study found manipulative tactics in emails were widespread – including “devious” techniques such as formatting emails so they look like they’re part of actual conversations between you and a campaign. Many of the emails I received, seemingly from Democrats in particular, had subject lines that contained “re:”, even though I’d never written to them.

Even more deceptively, I received Republican emails with subject lines such as “Your flight is CANCELED”, with no indication that they were political emails until you opened them – the sender was labeled as “urgent notice”. (In this case, it turned out the email was warning me that I was about to lose access to a proffered dinner with Donald Trump.)

And while definitions of left and right can fluctuate, says Justin Gross, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, there’s one thing that clearly unites each party: “a distaste for what the other side is doing”. As the pollster and political strategist John Zogby put it in an email: “They both need to hear from me because the sky is falling.”

That fear, Gross says, is “enormously motivating”. “When we feel that anxiety that’s kind of accumulated from a bunch of sources” – the rolling ball of political worries that seems to get bigger every day – “we feel like we don’t know what to do about it”, Gross says. When parties ask for donations, “it’s kind of a channeling of: well, at least you can do this.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/09/republican-democrat-political-fundraising-emails

…oh…& google thinks they need a hand with that because they’re finding it too hard to get through to you at the minute

Emails from certain federal candidates, parties and political action committees will soon be allowed to bypass the spam filters on Gmail and go straight into your inbox. To banish them, you’ll need to click a new unsubscribe button on each and every sender. […]

Google says it’s a pilot program — so far, not being used by any other email providers — to surface campaign emails that some people might want to see. But this plan is outrageously hostile to the majority of us, who could be forced to dig through a lot more political spam. Who even asked for this? Why, politicians, of course.

Democracy depends on a free flow of information. But in our inboxes and on our phones, democracy is becoming annoying — and dangerous. We the users don’t want to be overwhelmed by unwanted political emails, text messages and robocalls — nor do we want to be targeted with misinformation and misleading fundraising appeals.

Google is offering politicians an end run around one of our last refuges online: the spam filters that protect Gmail’s 1.5 billion users from unwanted junk, scams and malware.
[…]
You’ll only see the unsubscribe box the first time you open one of these messages — and it will only show up on the Gmail app or website, not on other popular mail apps like Apple’s Mail for iPhones.

…call me cynical…but that sounds like arguably its biggest selling point to google in a not-a-bug-it’s-a-feature sort of a way…anyway

But come on, Google: Spam filters are extremely popular, and for good reason. Roughly half of all the email traffic on the internet is of unwanted messages. No other email sender (not even Google itself) is exempt from the Gmail spam filter. That’s because Google’s new policy isn’t rooted in better product design — it’s rooted in politics.

Republican lawmakers have been hammering the tech giant about alleged political bias in its products and this year seized on a study from North Carolina State University to suggest Gmail’s spam filter is biased against Republican emails, making it harder for them to raise money. Never mind that the authors of the study said their work was being misrepresented.
[…]
The core problem with political communication online is that there’s little accountability. The few existing rules for spam, robocalls and personal data expressly don’t apply to politicians. Even clicking “Unsubscribe” often doesn’t do anything but generate more unwanted messages.

We ought to be able to say no. “We certainly could have better rules on giving people the option of unsubscribing — and doing so in a way that doesn’t require 47 steps or require inputting more information about yourself,” Weintraub said.
[…]
Google’s new program does have a good idea buried inside its larger terrible one. Gmail plans to start policing whether participants in its pilot actually complete unsubscribe requests within 24 hours. Google also says it will punish senders who get flagged as spam by more than 5 percent of users.

Then there’s an even bigger problem: How did they get your email or phone number in the first place? Today, campaigns commonly buy voter registration lists and then sell or trade databases, allowing your information to pass to even more hands without your consent. Every new election season becomes a game of whack-a-mole.

The core issue is that politicians have zero qualms about invading our privacy when it comes to helping themselves. When I went on a hunt for what campaigns knew about me ahead of the 2020 election, I uncovered data troves with intimate information about my income, debt, family, religion and gun ownership. The Republican National Committee boasted that it had more than 3,000 data points on every voter.

Campaigns say political speech should be given special protection — and include gathering and selling data about us as a kind of speech. “This is a minefield of First Amendment law,” says Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University — and, unfortunately, current court precedent isn’t in our favor.
[…]
Even more than the volume of spam, what worries election experts is how political emails and text messages can spread misinformation. Using modern microtargeting tools and AI, politicians can send messages designed to hit each voter’s hot buttons. Or worse, they can tailor a lie for every voter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/05/stop-political-spam-gmail/

…first world problems, right?

Taiwan’s president has called for domestic political unity to combat Chinese disinformation and cyberwarfare destabilising society before next month’s local elections.
[…]
Beijing has sworn to annex Taiwan, which it claims is a province of China, and its threats have increased in recent years. As well as increased military action towards Taiwan, China has also been accused of waging cyberwarfare.

Chinese disinformation efforts often increase during Taiwanese election periods, and local elections, scheduled for late November, are often seen as a precursor to presidential elections, which follow about a year later.

“Taiwan is one of the countries most targeted by information warfare, a non-traditional security threat that persistently interferes with the functioning of our democratic system,” said [Taiwan’s president] Tsai [Ing-wen].
[…]
“We absolutely cannot ignore the challenge that these military expansions pose to the free and democratic world order … The destruction of Taiwan’s democracy and freedom would be a grave defeat for the world’s democracies,” she said, praising local Taiwanese enthusiasm for civilian defence training. She said it was the best example of being “all in this together”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/10/taiwan-president-calls-for-unity-to-tackle-chinese-disinformation-ahead-of-elections

…gotta keep those in perspective, I guess

Over the past few weeks, hundreds of protests have erupted in the streets of Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini. She was a healthy 22-year-old woman who, while visiting Tehran with her family, was stopped by the morality police for wearing her hijab in an “improper” manner. Amini was taken to a detention centre, and died three days later in suspicious circumstances while in police custody.

Bravely standing in solidarity with Amini, women across Iran – and the world – have been cutting their hair, ripping off their headscarves, burning their hijabs and organising demonstrations. While the Iranian government has shut down internet access, videos circulating on social media have been documenting one of the most significant revolutions to happen for women in modern times. These videos also reveal the terrifying violence, panic and fear inflicted on protesters.

The heroism is astonishing. An unnamed protester speaking on CNN proclaimed: “We are not scared. We are outraged. People think that we are the previous generation – that if they do this we’re going to just stop. We are not going to stop. This is a one-way road for us. They will take even more people into custody, torture them, rape them. This is not the end.”
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/oct/10/veils-banned-iran-mahsa-amini-shirin-neshat-rebellious-silence

…& at the end of the day I’m not entirely convinced the first world is quite all it’s cracked up to be

Over the last three decades, the Navajo Nation – the largest Indigenous nation in the US – has felt the impacts of a warming planet much earlier and more dramatically than other communities in the south-west that have well-developed municipal infrastructure and abundant financial resources. Although people living in the reservation border towns of Flagstaff or Winslow have taken steps to cope with climate crisis by converting their yard to desert landscaping and installing air conditioning, Mendez and many other Navajo families are in a full-on struggle to protect their livelihoods and traditional connections to their homeland.

During Covid, the Navajo reservation made headlines for its lack of indoor plumbing and how non-profit organizations and government agencies were coming to the nation’s aid. But on the ground, little has changed for Mendez and the thousands of others who are left to mostly fend for themselves as impacts from drought have worsened over the last several years.
[…]
When the US government established the Navajo Nation in 1868, portions of the people’s homeland that were deemed valuable for natural resources were roped off and turned over to European colonizers. This included the Colorado River, which now supplies water to 40 million people, but excludes the Navajo Nation.
[…]
According to a multi-year study published in the journal Science last year, Indigenous nations have lost nearly 99% of their historical land base since Europeans arrived on the continent. Most of the homeland that tribes were allowed to retain are places that not only lack natural resources but that are most vulnerable to climate crisis, the study notes. Indigenous people in Alaska and the Pacific north-west are being displaced by rising sea levels. But in the south-west, it is the increasing desertification of already arid areas making life for the Navajo and other nations especially hard.

“When we think about how to address climate change, we sometimes forget that past US policies and actions have led to conditions in which some groups are burdened more by climate change than others,” said Justin Farrell, a Yale professor and the study’s lead author, to National Public Radio.

…speaking of NPR…according to this piece “farmers, in Imperial County, currently draw more water from the Colorado River than all of Arizona and Nevada combined”…right the way out in california…so…it’s chinatown, I suppose

The Navajo Nation is largely rural with few developed towns and a population density of six people within a square mile, compared with the US average of 345 people. Approximately one-third of Navajo homes lack piped water and few are connected to a power grid. Bringing utilities to dozens of small communities connected by spiderwebs of unmaintained dirt roads has long been cost prohibitive for the Navajo government. And even though the Biden administration has approved millions of dollars in funding for water infrastructure on drought-stricken reservations, Tulley-Cordova says it is just a “drop in the bucket” toward the $4bn the nation’s department of water resources estimates it will take to bring “universal access to clean water” to the entire Navajo Nation.

“When the Colorado River compact was established a century ago, tribes were not signatories because we weren’t considered to be citizens of the United States,” said [Crystal] Tulley-Cordova [a principal hydrologist for the Navajo Nation]. “We need to be part of that conversation now.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/09/the-us-dammed-us-up-how-drought-is-threatening-navajo-ties-to-ancestral-lands

…it was a different time…right?

This should be an open-and-shut case. The Black community represents almost one-third of Alabama’s population, yet the state’s congressional maps contain only one majority-Black district out of seven. State lawmakers have weaponized redistricting by redrawing congressional maps after the 2020 census to spread some Black communities across multiple districts and combine others into one district, denying Black Alabamians fair representation in government. A three-judge federal court has already deemed this effort unlawful and unanimously struck down the maps in January. But Alabama, of course, appealed to the Supreme Court.

In its appeal, the state launched a direct attack on Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the federal law protecting the right of voters of color to elect candidates that represent their communities. In its brief, Alabama audaciously attacked the three-part Gingles test, which has been used for decades to establish whether maps deny communities of color fair representation. But even Justice Samuel Alito seemed to question whether Alabama’s argument was “at war with” Gingles.

Furthermore, Alabama’s arguments against Section 2 are clearly grounded in white supremacy — as evidenced when the state’s solicitor general admitted to Justice Sonia Sotomayor that white Alabamians on the Gulf Coast were the “community of interest” that deserved protection and not Black Alabamians in the Black Belt. Alabama refers to this as “traditional redistricting criteria.” By explicitly prioritizing the interests of white residents, Alabama refuses to acknowledge the historical discrimination that Black communities have faced.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/alabama-oral-arguments-voting-supreme-court-case-white-supremacy

Hurricane Ian’s wrath had barely subsided in Florida when advertisements for day laborers started popping up on phones across New York through online platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp.

The Spanish-language messages appeared to target recently arrived immigrants and asylum seekers who were desperate for work and had nowhere else to turn.
[…]
“This looks and smells like human trafficking,” said Ariadna Phillips, a New York community organizer with South Bronx Mutual Aid.

“They recruit them with these very flashy photographs, saying, ‘You’re going to make a bunch of money’ and ‘We’re going to give you this great apartment to live in,'” Phillips added.
[…]
Less than two weeks after Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida and devastated dozens of communities, Phillips said she has already heard from several laborers whose wages have been docked to pay for their room and board. They told her that was not part of their agreement with the company.

Some of the people who were recruited had been in the United States for only a week, she said.
[…]
On Tuesday, DeSantis said at a news conference that three of four people arrested last week for “ransacking” communities following Hurricane Ian were illegal immigrants who should be immediately deported.
[…]
Experts say immigrants are much more likely to be victims of labor exploitation or suffer disproportionate economic devastation following a natural disaster.

“Not only are migrants the first to be affected by these extreme weather events, but they tend to be the first who try to rebuild,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute.

Immigrant workers from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala historically comprise the backbone of the recovery workforce that flocks to regions hit by natural disasters, he added. They helped to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Houston after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
[…]
“Promises are often not kept to these workers,” said Saket Soni, executive director of Resilience Workforce, a New Orleans group that advocates for and monitors migrant workers following natural disasters. “I am concerned they are being recruited through fraud.”

In the days following Ian, Resilience Workforce deployed staff members to Florida to observe work conditions on the ground. They were in contact with hundreds of laborers who had made their own way to places like Fort Myers, which bore the brunt of Ian’s lashing, and waited outside Walmart and Home Depot in search of work.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/immigrant-workers-face-wage-theft-unsafe-conditions-rebuild-florida

…remind me again who’s supposedly fighting for america?

The natural resources that Indigenous peoples depend on are inextricably linked to their identities, cultures and livelihoods. Even relatively small changes in temperature or rainfall can make their lands more susceptible to rising sea levels, droughts and forest fires. As the climate crisis escalates, activists fighting to protect what remain of the world’s forests are at risk of being persecuted by their governments — and even at risk of death.

For decades Indigenous activists have been sounding the alarm. But their warnings have too often been ignored. So, they organized.

Indigenous peoples and communities, working in the Americas, Indonesia and Africa joined forces and together became the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities. They work to protect their rights and territories, amounting to nearly 3.5 million square miles of land across the planet.
[…]
Working across multiple languages and political and legal systems, the alliance settled on five priorities: land rights, free prior and informed consent before any intervention into their territories, direct access to climate funding, protection of people from violence and prosecution, and the recognition of traditional knowledge in the fight to defend the planet.

In September, members of the alliance and their allies visited New York to meet with policymakers and donors during Climate Week, which brings together international leaders to push for global climate action.

They harnessed the power of speaking as a united voice, describing promises made by governments and international bodies that have failed to materialize into action. They explained how even though money to fight climate change so often doesn’t reach them, they have managed to develop programs that are helping communities mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. Imagine what could be possible with more funding and support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/opinion/climate-change-indigenous-activists.html

…funding & support…I know we had some of that around just the other day…where did they leave it?

Billions of dollars of new subsidies for such carbon capture technology are a signature component of the $370 billion climate package President Biden signed into law in August, with the administration and lawmakers across party lines promising it will help America meet its climate goals.

Yet after years of underwhelming results in carbon capture experimentation, this surge of cash strikes many climate scholars as predominantly a gift to fossil fuel, chemical and industrial agriculture companies seeking a lucrative route to rebrand as “green.” The vastly increased tax credit, which lobbyists of every major oil company pursued, will propel a technology that has failed to deliver in several prominent trials.

The incentives are already driving forward large oil and gas projects that threaten a heavy carbon footprint, with companies including ExxonMobil, Sempra and Occidental Petroleum positioned for big payouts.
[…]
The irony of carbon capture is that the place it has proven most successful is getting more oil out of the ground. All but one major project built in the United States to date is geared toward fossil fuel companies taking the trapped carbon and injecting it into underground wells to extract crude. A Wyoming project from Exxon was designed for oil extraction but has since been rebranded as a key component of the company’s decarbonization strategy, with Exxon boasting it has captured more CO2 than any facility in the world.

Occidental Petroleum would be able to use tens — and possibly hundreds — of millions of dollars of the subsidies in Texas for its plan to trap carbon that will then be injected into wells to extract what it calls “net-zero oil,” branding critics call brazenly misleading.

In the United States, there are at least 29 oil, gas and petrochemical facilities that are currently proposing new carbon capture projects potentially eligible for large tax credits baked into the Inflation Reduction Act, according to Oil and Gas Watch, a nonprofit that tracks permit applications.
[…]
Such carbon capture operations have a questionable track record. During the Obama era, the Department of Energy spent $1.1 billion to help launch 11 demonstration projects. Only two of them are operational today. An Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis study of 13 of the world’s biggest projects, accounting for more than half the global carbon capture capacity, found that 10 of them are either underperforming by large margins — trapping as little as half the CO2 promised — or have shut down.
[…]
The Task Force points to developments like Project Bison in Wyoming, where giant air capture machines aim to vacuum from the atmosphere and then permanently store the equivalent annual emissions of 1 million gas-powered cars. Such projects are now eligible for a tax credit of as much as $180 per metric ton, positioning Project Bison for an annual subsidy in the hundreds of millions of dollars at build out.

But owners of such projects can still claim most of that amount even if the CO2 sequestered is ultimately used for oil extraction.

The Inflation Reduction Act also boosts by 70 percent the tax credit for the troubled legacy carbon capture technologies oil and gas companies have traditionally used to get more oil out of the ground, increasing it to $60 per ton.

As these billions of dollars in expanded subsidies are set to flow in large part to oil, gas, biofuel and petrochemical companies, some of their signature projects are posting lackluster results.

The most notable is the Gorgon Project in northwest Australia, which Chevron is leading with Shell and Exxon. It is one of the largest natural gas extraction facilities in the world. The companies promised to divert 40 percent of the gas extraction operation’s CO2 emissions into a reservoir more than a mile deep.

But it is not working right. Only about half the promised greenhouse gases have been captured and stored from the $3 billion project that went online in 2019, forcing the oil companies to purchase large volumes of carbon offsets from elsewhere.
[…]
There is another problem researchers see at Gorgon and other operations like it, including ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek project in Wyoming, the 36-year-old natural gas extraction project the company boasts has captured more C02 than any place else.

The subsidies give companies lucrative incentives to drill for gas in the most climate-unfriendly sites, where the concentration of C02 in the fuel is especially high. The CO2, a potent greenhouse gas, is useless for making fuel, but the tax credits are awarded based on how many tons of it companies trap.
[…]
There is no cap on the number of tax credits such projects can be awarded. The Exxon project is only one of more than two dozen in development, suggesting the cost to taxpayers will dwarf the congressional estimate of just $3.2 billion over a decade.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/09/carbon-capture-oil-gas/

…maybe we just need a different perspective

The astronaut who wants to help save Earth [NBC]

…or just to turn the whole business over to a different concern

What scientists are most excited about is the prospect of other planets’ civilizations being able to create the same “telltale chemical and electromagnetic signs,” or, as they are now called, “technosignatures.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/podcasts/the-daily/extraterrestrials-technosignatures.html

…either way…I’d best get with the program & dig out a tune or two or the day might pass me by…who was it who said “life is what happens while you’re making other plans”?

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13 Comments

  1. Other issues with the Diné and water on the Navajo Nation’s land, is the amount of Uranium & Arsenic in it,

    https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/473547227/for-the-navajo-nation-uranium-minings-deadly-legacy-lingers

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/27/human-rights-group-uranium-contamination-navajo-nation

    Adding more doom & gloom, on the carbon-capture thing, is the fact that the more Peat bogs around the world warm up, the less CO2 they can hold, and the more they give off🙃

    https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/10/10/digging-into-minnesotas-peat-an-underappreciated-climate-superhero

     

  2. The good part of the NY Times — skeptical investigative reporters — have produced this writeup of Zuckerberg’s disastrous efforts to rebrand Facebook.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/technology/meta-zuckerberg-metaverse.html

    As the pressure grows, Mr. Zuckerberg has sent a clear message to Meta employees: Get on board or get out. In a June meeting first reported by Reuters, the 38-year-old billionaire noted that “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here” and that he’d be “turning up the heat” on expectations and goals, according to copies of his comments that were shared with The Times. Since then, the company has frozen most hiring, reduced budgets and Mr. Zuckerberg asked managers to start identifying low-performing employees.

    Oh yeah, Mark, the problem is people who point out you’re blowing it, not you. Sure, that’ll fix Facebook.

  3. Terror bombing never made people want to surrender.  It made them mad and hardened their resolve.

    Same applies to the bombing campaigns of WW2 on BOTH sides.

    The Battle of Britain changed when the RAF bombed Berlin and Hitler screamed for retaliation.  Until that point, the RAF Fighter Command’s airfields were getting pounded by Luftwaffe strikes. Once the Luftwaffe was ordered to attack British cities, it took the pressure off the RAF and allowed them to focus on attacking German bomber formations instead of defending their own bases.

    Bombing works when it targets specific critical infrastructure not out of pure spite.

    The Ukrainians should be thankful for someone as militarily incompetent as Pootin.

        • Poor Pras Michel. He’s the one standing trial but the real news is OMG Leonardo DiCaprio is going to testify!!!! And of course the shady Malaysian is living it up in China. He’s probably considered a Hero of the People’s Republic for singlehandedly bankrupting  one of China’s fellow Asian states.

    • Yes, but bombing tech in the 1940’s was…not precise.  Hell, even when they tried to hit specific things, they tended to miss their targets by miles.  Were there deliberate bombings of civilian areas?  Yes.  But so-called “precision” bombing was a joke, too.

      It also didn’t help when nations were deliberately placing military facilities right smack dab in the middle of civilian areas to use their own people as human shields.

      • I read an interesting thing about Tokyo recently. They had a huge earthquake in 1923, were bombed incessantly during WWII, and then in the postwar years tore down what little was left to make everything bigger and more modern. Pretty much nothing more than a century old or looks more than a century old (aside from other temples and the Royal Palace) is left except for this one neighborhood which consists of a lot of temples and cemeteries. After the earthquake the temples were rebuilt. During WWII the bombers tried to avoid the temples, sometimes unsuccessfully, and the cemeteries acted as firebreaks. Then in the postwar era the neighborhood was left alone while the rest of the city went through “urban renewal” that would have made Robert Moses look like a member of the New York Historic Preservation Society.

  4. We’ve all been there, Diana. We all have good days and bad days.

    In that role [Brooklyn Deputy Borough President, a more useless role can scarcely be imagined except as one of the hundreds of patronage mills that flourish in the NYC public sector], [Richardson] allegedly cursed out staffers, violated COVID-19 protocols, stored a bottle of vodka in her office and nearly fought the head of an anti-violence program [they had to be pulled apart], multiple sources aware of the situation told the Daily News.

    Sources said she kept a bottle of Absolut vodka in her office and struggled with simple tasks like emails and scheduling, but would berate borough hall staffers, according to the Daily News.

    I don’t know how much Di is (was) pulling in but her predecessor got paid the princely sum of $172,900 per annum.

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