…who says? [DOT 19/8/21]

…I’m a little all over the place today…& I don’t know as this will particularly make sense…but here goes

When government officials claim that national security demands a particular action, few interrogate how national security is defined. Is it the territorial integrity of the nation? The physical safety of its people? Or something less tangible, such as the preservation of constitutional rights, economic prosperity, or the institutions of democracy?

Absent a clear definition, the “national security” label is often affixed in ways that seem arbitrary, inconsistent, or politically driven. And yet the invocation automatically elevates the issue’s priority of the issue, triggering increased government attention and resources regardless of any objective measure of the threat’s magnitude.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/17/9-11-terrorism-us-national-security

[…that’s actually an interesting read…& that might not be the most representative quote in that regard…but it seemed like a place to start]

…so…while we all watch with varying degrees of horror as the dust seems to do anything but settle in afghanistan

Both the Trump and Biden administrations were warned by US intelligence that the Afghan army’s resistance to the Taliban could collapse “within days” after an over-hasty withdrawal, according to a former CIA counter-terrorism chief.
[…]
Douglas London, the CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief for south and south-west Asia, said the president was being “misleading at best”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/massive-policy-fail-cia-warned-taliban-takeover

…not that it’s easy to do the math on this stuff

Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers are likely to face a rapidly developing financial crisis, with foreign currency reserves largely unreachable and western aid donors – who fund the country’s institutions by about 75% – already cutting off or threatening to cut payments.

While the hardline Islamist group has moved in recent years to become more independent of outside financial supporters including Iran, Pakistan and wealthy donors in the Gulf, its financial flows – amounting to $1.6bn (£1.2bn) last year – are far short of what it will require to govern.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/taliban-face-financial-crisis-without-access-to-foreign-reserves

Most of the Afghan central bank’s reserves are frozen at the Federal Reserve. And the International Monetary Fund will block more than $400 million in aid.

U.S. and I.M.F. Apply a Financial Squeeze on the Taliban [NYT]

How exactly the Taliban plan to keep all systems running, in one of the poorest countries of the world that depends on more than $4 billion a year in official aid and where foreign donors have been covering 75 percent of government spending, is an urgent question. The state’s bankruptcy has tempted some Western donors into thinking that financial pressure — in the form of threats to withhold humanitarian and development funding — could be brought to bear on the new rulers of Afghanistan. Germany already warned it would cut off financial support to the country if the Taliban “introduce Shariah law.”

[…spoiler alert…they’re going with shariah law…& the taliban version of it, at that]

But those hopes are misplaced. Even before their blitz into the capital over the weekend, the Taliban had claimed the country’s real economic prize: the trade routes — comprising highways, bridges and footpaths — that serve as strategic choke points for trade across South Asia. With their hands on these highly profitable revenue sources and with neighboring countries, like China and Pakistan, willing to do business, the Taliban are surprisingly insulated from the decisions of international donors. What comes next in the country is uncertain — but it’s likely to unfold without a meaningful exertion of Western power.

One reason foreign donors inflate their own importance in Afghanistan is that they do not understand the informal economy, and the vast amounts of hidden money in the war zone. Trafficking in opium, hashish, methamphetamines and other narcotics is not the biggest kind of trade that happens off the books: The real money comes from the illegal movement of ordinary goods, like fuel and consumer imports. In size and sum, the informal economy dwarfs international aid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/opinion/taliban-afghanistan-economy.html

For a group that espouses ancient moral codes, the Afghan Taliban has used strikingly sophisticated social media tactics to build political momentum and, now that they’re in power, to make a public case that they’re ready to lead a modern nation state after nearly 20 years of war.

In accounts swelling across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — and in group chats on apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram — the messaging from Taliban supporters typically challenges the West’s dominant image of the group as intolerant, vicious and bent on revenge, while staying within the evolving boundaries of taste and content that tech companies use to police user behavior.

The tactics overall show such a high degree of skill that analysts believe at least one public relations firm is advising the Taliban on how to push key themes, amplify messages across platforms and create potentially viral images and video snippets — much like corporate and political campaigns do across the world.
[…]
Wide distribution of such propaganda imagery would have been almost impossible for an insurgent movement there a generation ago, before the arrival of smartphones, Internet connections and free social media services brought unprecedented online reach to Afghanistan. The nation lags the world in Internet connectivity but it has grown sharply over the past decade amid a gush of international investment.

But the audience for much — and perhaps most — of what Taliban supporters push on social media is clearly international. That includes Afghans living in other countries, potential supporters abroad and even the profoundly skeptical Western powers that have poured trillions of dollars into attempting to create a durable, Western-style democracy in Afghanistan since a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban in 2001. The official Afghan Taliban website offers versions in Pashto, Dari, Arabic, Urdu and English. Only the first two are widely spoken in most of Afghanistan.

Today’s Taliban uses sophisticated social media practices that rarely violate the rules [WaPo]

Almost as soon as the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other large internet companies confronted an uncomfortable decision: What should they do about online accounts that the Taliban began to use to spread their message and establish their legitimacy?

The choice boils down to whether the online companies recognize the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan or isolate it because of the group’s history of violence and repression. International governments themselves are also grappling with this.

I want us to stop and sit with the discomfort of internet powers that are functioning like largely unaccountable state departments. They don’t do this entirely alone, and they don’t really have a choice. It’s still wild that a handful of unelected tech executives play a role in high-stakes global affairs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/technology/facebook-twitter-taliban.html

The Taliban’s assurance of a “safe passage” to the Kabul airport, where thousands have thronged in a desperate bid to be taken out of the country, has been undermined by a report and photographs by a Los Angeles Times reporter.

In one of the graphic images, a woman and child are seen with blood on their faces and apparently unconscious.
[…]
These reports contrast with a new, more modern image that the Taliban have tried to paint in their first press conference since their takeover of Kabul Tuesday night. Their officials deny their fighters have been involved in this sort of violence, blaming the injuries on men impersonating the Taliban.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/images-bloodied-afghans-contradict-taliban-s-claims-moderation

…with all that going on…it’s a little hard to bring into focus where other kinds of threat land in terms of risk to which we’re collectively exposed

Exxon has been extracting oil from Liza 1, an ultra-deepwater drilling operation, since 2019 – part of an expansive project spanning more than 6m acres off the coast of Guyana that includes 17 additional prospects in the exploration and preparatory phases.

By 2025, the company expects to produce 800,000 barrels of oil a day, surpassing estimates for its entire oil and natural gas production in the south-western US Permian basin by 100,000 barrels that year. Guyana would then represent Exxon’s largest single source of fossil fuel production anywhere in the world.

But experts claim that Exxon in Guyana appears to be taking advantage of an unprepared government in one of the lowest-income nations in South America, allowing the company to skirt necessary oversight. Worse, they also believe the company’s safety plans are inadequate and dangerous.

A top engineer who studies oil industry disasters, as well as a former government regulator, have leveled criticisms at Exxon. They say workers’ lives, public health and Guyana’s oceans and fisheries – which locals rely on heavily– are all at stake.
[…]
Moreover, Exxon flares, or burns, its excess gas. In the first 15 months of production alone, that flaring contributed nearly 770,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions – the equivalent of driving 167,000 cars for one year.
[…]
Exxon’s interest in Guyana is straightforward, according to Palzor Shenga, vice-president of analysis at Rystad Energy. The costs per barrel of oil produced in Guyana are a full $5 to $10 cheaper than the global average, making it, in Shenga’s words, a “cash cow”. This helps explain why Exxon began producing oil approximately twice as fast as “the industry average for projects of this size”, as Exxon boasted in its 2020 annual report.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/17/exxon-oil-drilling-guyana-disaster-risk

…we’re all increasingly familiar with the ways in which the environment going to hell is the sort of risk that has consequences all over

Sweden’s only remaining mountaintop glacier, which until 2019 was also its highest peak, lost another two metres in height in the past year due to rising air temperatures driven by climate change, Stockholm University says.

In 2019, the south peak of the Kebnekaise massif was demoted to second in the rankings of Swedish mountains after a third of its glacier melted. Kebnekaise’s north peak, where there is no glacier, is now the highest in the Nordic country.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/swedish-mountain-shrinks-by-two-metres-in-a-year-as-glacier-melts

…even as it still seems as though there’s more talking about than there is doing much to stop it…take bernie in the guardian

The latest International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is clear and foreboding. If the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions, the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage. The world that we will be leaving our children and future generations will be increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable.
[…]
In the past, these disasters might have seemed like an absurd plot in some apocalypse movie. Unfortunately, this is now reality, and it will only get much worse in years to come if we do not act boldly – now.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/18/planet-peril-congress-reconciliation-climate-bill

…& it’s not like people all over the place aren’t on board with a lot of that rhetoric

Three-quarters of people in the world’s wealthiest nations believe humanity is pushing the planet towards a dangerous tipping point and support a shift of priorities away from economic profit, according to a global survey.
[…]
The lead author of the report, Owen Gaffney of the GCA, said the results showed strong global support for urgent, decisive action on the climate and nature crises.

“The world is not sleepwalking towards catastrophe. People know we are taking colossal risks, they want to do more and they want their governments to do more,” he said.
[…]
Among G20 nations, 73% of people believed human activity had pushed the Earth close to tipping points. Awareness of these risks was markedly higher in the less wealthy countries – Indonesia (86%), Turkey (85%), Brazil (83%), Mexico (78%) and South Africa (76%) – than the richest countries – United States (60%), Japan (63%), Great Britain (65%) and Australia (66%).

Overall, more than half (59%) of respondents believed nature was already too damaged to continue meeting human needs in the long term.
[…]
As has been the case for most of the last half-century, moves to strengthen planetary ecosystems are likely to meet resistance by vested political and economic interests. The survey showed there was strong support among the global public to overcome those hurdles.
[…]
Awareness of the science of climate change is greater than awareness of its broader implications. Most people (62%) acknowledged there was a scientific consensus on the need for change, but only 8% knew there was also a consensus on the need for major economic and social transformation.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/16/three-quarters-g20-earth-close-to-tipping-point-global-survey-climate-crisis

…& yet…do we think the odds of the legislation bernie’s talking up actually getting passed are good?

…probably not…which is the kind of stuff that makes me wonder if I’ve always been upside down about what the phrase “no brainer” actually means

A federal judge in Alaska on Wednesday blocked construction permits for an expansive oil drilling project on the state’s North Slope that was designed to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day for the next 30 years.

The multibillion-dollar plan, known as Willow, by the oil giant ConocoPhillips had been approved by the Trump administration and legally backed by the Biden administration. Environmental groups sued, arguing that the federal government had failed to take into account the effects that drilling would have on wildlife and that the burning of the oil would have on global warming.

A federal judge has agreed.

In her opinion, Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for Alaska wrote that when the Trump administration permitted the project, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management’s exclusion of greenhouse gas emissions in its analysis of the environmental effects of the project was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Court Blocks a Vast Alaskan Drilling Project, Citing Climate Dangers [NYT]

…but even the talking about stuff isn’t without some risks…particularly when people buy into notions that speak to them in ways which don’t seem to do anyone much good

The term “involuntary celibate”, or incel for short, used to describe somebody who isn’t having sex but would like to be, was first coined by a young woman named Alana in the mid-1990s. The small, supportive, mixed-sex community she created online is a world apart from the extremist, hate-fuelled ideology it has transformed into in the many years since she left those online spaces behind. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she later told the Guardian.

Today’s incels are not a clearly defined, organised group, but rather a sprawling, disparate community of men across a network of blogs, forums, websites, private members groups, chatrooms and social media channels. Several of the forums have memberships in the tens of thousands, with around a 25% increase in membership in the two years I have been researching them. And these figures don’t take into account the number of people visiting and being influenced by these sites without necessarily signing up.

Incels subscribe to a transnational ideology characterised by white male supremacy, oppression of women and the glorification and encouragement of male violence. Seeing themselves as perpetual victims oppressed by a “feminist gynocracy”, they believe that sex is their inherent birthright as men, and that rape and murder are appropriate punishments for a society they perceive as withholding sex from them.

The transformation of Alana’s benign self-help community to today’s extremist ideology is in part a result of the environment in which those forums were created. The early Usenet forums were dominated by white men, who grew uncomfortable with the third wave feminist movement. More recently, social media algorithms have led young men to encounter increasingly extreme content. Concepts such as evil women controlling men’s lives or rape being the natural end product of “depriving” men of sex are filtered through viral YouTube videos and memes, appearing across the sites that wallpaper young people’s online environments.
[…]
Today’s incels are also experts at finding and recruiting young men online. They do not depend on boys coming to them: indeed, many young men I meet whose ideas reflect this ideology have never actually heard of the term “incels”. They are groomed over computer headsets, in gaming strategy chatrooms, via viral videos and funny memes. They are targeted on bodybuilding forums, where extremists know they will find a self-selecting group of boys already anxious about societal notions of tough, traditional masculinity. They find boys where they are most ripe for exploitation, and unless we recognise this for the radicalisation it is, we will not be able to tackle it effectively.
[…]
This is not just about how we respond when acts of mass violence occur. It is about whether we are prepared to continue to allow a movement dedicated to violent hatred to flourish in our society. As long as we fail to recognise it as a form of extremism, women and girl’s lives will continue to be affected. Perhaps in numbers far greater than we realise.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/17/incel-movement-extremism-internet-community-misogyny

…misinforming people is something of a boom industry these days…although when you look at tabacco or the fossil fuel industries it’s not hard to argue it’s been big business for a long time…but it sure is easier if the ground it’s trying to gain traction on has been cultivated to make it easier

Don’t blame Russian trolls for America’s anti-vaxx problem. Our misinformation is homegrown [Guardian]

…& although some of those efforts are likewise nothing new…it’s getting harder not to believe that some of them are approaching some sort of endgame

The lobbying and media drive is aiming to spend tens of millions of dollars and is led by well funded conservative and dark money groups, some of whom are also pressing Congress to block Democratic-backed bills to protect voting rights nationally, say watchdogs and election law experts.

The right’s state and congressional blitzes to curtail voting rights, which have been stoked by Donald Trump’s repeated false claims about rampant fraud in last year’s elections, are misleadingly touted as improving “election integrity”. They have led to tighter voting laws in Georgia, Florida, Iowa and elsewhere. Similar measures are now being pushed in Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and other states.

The state lobbying efforts feature deep pocketed conservative bastions such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), Heritage Action, FreedomWorks and the State Policy Network, a loose-knit group of rightwing thinktanks, a number of which have received grants from the donor network led by the billionaire oilman Charles Koch and the Bradley Foundation.
[…]
Evidence is palpable that the right’s crusade to curtail voting rights, which its proponents say is aimed at limiting voting fraud – even though there is little evidence of it in the US – is now expanding, via more coordination among many groups.
[…]
American Oversight, a watchdog group, has “unearthed evidence that shows the fingerprints of these groups on policymaking”, said Austin Evers, the group’s executive director. “They are orchestrating a state-by-state drive to restrict the freedom to vote and they are doing so successfully.”

Evers stressed that “Trump’s big lie disinformation campaign is breathing new life into longstanding efforts to curate the electorate for partisan ends, and dark money forces are making the most of the moment”.
[…]
On the national congressional front, Heritage Action and FreedomWorks seem to be lobbying to block Democrats from passing bills to offset the state measures, which Republicans seem to be banking on to help win back control of both houses.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/18/rightwing-lobbies-dark-money-assaults-voting-rights

…off on a different tangent…it always bugs me a little when people talk about “the one percent”…because I think often people tend to skip over the part where the lower reaches of that percentile aren’t as far removed as they think from “regular people”…at least in global terms, given that the median income in some parts of the world would qualify you to be up there in others…so it often feels like it’s missing the point…or is just flat out misleading…after all there are lies, damned lies & statistics…but having said that some statistics seem like they might be illustrative…& I don’t know about you but honestly I find these ones to have some threatening overtones?

Last week, the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan thinktank, released a report on the increasing pay gap between chief executives and workers. This research tells a familiar story with updated figures. When taking into account stocks, which now make up more than 80% of the average CEO’s compensation package, the report found that chief-executive pay has risen by an astounding 1,322% since 1978. That’s more than six times more than the top 0.1% of wage earners and more than 73 times higher than the growth of the typical worker’s pay, which grew by only 18% in the same time period. Most remarkable, however, is the 18.9% increase in CEO compensation between 2019 and 2020 alone.

CEO compensation outpacing that of the 0.1% is a clear indication that this growth is not the product of a competitive race for skills or increased productivity, the EPI report explains, so much as the “power of CEOs to extract concessions. Consequently, if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on the economy’s output or on employment,” the report concludes.
[…]
Today in the US, the CEO-to-worker pay gap stands at a staggering 351 to one, an unacceptable increase from 15 to one in 1965. In other words, the average CEO makes nearly nine times what the average person will earn over a lifetime in just one year.
[…]
When Biden came into office, Trump had cut corporate tax rates from 35% to 21% and lowered rates on the ultra-wealthy to such an extent that the richest 400 people in the US paid a lower tax rate than any other group in the country – including the minimum wage workers who are rightly refusing to return to the same conditions they withstood before the pandemic. Investopedia called Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act the “largest overhaul of the tax code in three decades”.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/17/american-chief-executive-pay-wages-workers

…which can make some things seem beyond the pale

Suits against the company and the Sacklers, including from several states, have been paused since Purdue filed for bankruptcy nearly two years ago. If the reorganization is approved as it is, it would freeze those suits forever. Sackler family members are also seeking protections from future lawsuits over opioids and any actions involving Purdue, even those that had nothing to do with the drugs.

The deal would not protect Sackler family members from any criminal charges. None have been announced against family members.
[…]
But a report commissioned by a group of state attorneys general said that because most of the payments come years from now, family members could use investment returns and interest to build even greater wealth while they make the payments. The family’s collective wealth is estimated at nearly $11bn, with much of that built on sales from OxyContin.

Sackler family won’t settle unless off the hook from opioid suits, court told [Guardian]

…but a good deal of that might arguably come down to perspective, too…so on the one hand this might sound like a good idea

The US government said on Wednesday it plans to make Covid-19 vaccine booster shots widely available to all Americans starting on 20 September as infections rise from the Delta variant of the coronavirus.

The White House is prepared to offer a third booster shot starting on that date to all Americans who completed their initial inoculation at least eight months ago, the US Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

The booster shots initially will be given primarily to healthcare workers, nursing home residents and older people, all of whom were among the first groups to be vaccinated in late 2020 and early 2021, the department said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/18/covid-vaccine-booster-shots-us-september

…but to some it might sound like something else entirely

The World Health Organization has condemned the rush by wealthy countries to provide Covid-19 vaccine booster shots while millions of people around the world have yet to receive a single dose.

Providing them while so many people were still waiting to be immunised was immoral, they argued.
[…]
Earlier this month, the WHO called for a moratorium on Covid vaccine booster shots to help ease the drastic inequity in dose distribution between wealthy and poor countries. That has not stopped a number of countries moving forward with plans to add a third jab, as they struggle to contain the Delta variant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/who-condemns-rush-by-wealth-nations-to-give-covid-vaccine-booster

…still…it could be worse?

The ozone-wrecking chemicals once commonly used in refrigerators would have driven 2.5C of extra global heating by the end of the century if they had not been banned, research has found.
[…]
The modelling by teams in the UK, US and New Zealand was based on a theoretical rise in CFC use of 3% a year from 1987.

It found ongoing depletion of ozone – the gas that protects the planet from harmful levels of ultra violet radiation (UV) – would have massively undermined the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

The world would already be experiencing the worst-case scenario levels of global warming that are predicted if international leaders fail to meet their net zero CO2 commitments.
[…]
Without the CFC ban, there would have been 580bn fewer tonnes of carbon stored in forests, vegetation and soil by 2100, the researchers found.

There would be an additional 165-215 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere – based on projected fossil fuel emissions – compared with present-day levels of 420 parts per million, or a jump of 40% to 50%.

This additional CO2 would have contributed an additional 0.8C of warming, the researchers said, leaving the goals of the Paris Agreement in tatters.
[…]
If their use had continued unchecked, by the end of the century they would have boosted global warming by another 1.7C – meaning temperatures would have risen 2.5C overall just from their use.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/19/saving-ozone-layer-has-given-humans-a-chance-in-climate-crisis-study

…okay…that’s gonna have to do…& once I’ve had another cup of coffee I’ll figure out some tunes to leave here at the bottom

…I’m starting to think I might need a new formula for these tunes