Tag Archives: News

‘Love to Afghanistan’ Vigils to Demand Return of $7 Billion Stolen by US

February 17, 2022 Creative Commons

“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States,” said an Afghan protest organizer in Kabul over the weekend.

With the people of Afghanistan facing one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world, U.S.-based peace activists—who largely blame the policies of their own government for inflicting pain on millions of innocent Afghans—are using Valentine’s Day on Monday to demand the Biden administration return billions of dollars of seized assets to the war-torn country before more lasting harm and “cruelty” is done.

Under the banner of “Love to Afghanistan,” nationwide actions were scheduled for the weekend and localized vigils organized set for Monday (Feb. 14) by Peace Action, World Beyond War, and other humanitarian groups who argue that $7 billion frozen by the U.S. government and subsequently seized by an executive order issued Friday by President Joe Biden rightfully belongs to the Afghan people, who without it face an economy on the brink of collapse and a healthcare system and federal infrastructure without adequate support amid the Covid-19 pandemic and a worsening food crisis.

Thus far vigils for Valentine’s Day are taking place in Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, New York, and other states.

The Biden plan to confiscate $7 Billion of the Afghan people’s assets is unjust. Afghans need food & a functioning economy. Urge #Congress to reverse this policy.#LoveToAfghanistan #UnFreezeAfghanistan
Call Congress from Congress Square Park . Noon. Portland, ME. Valentine's Day! pic.twitter.com/9tXwxrmKOe
— Peace Action Maine (@me_action) February 13, 2022

According to a call to action by organizers:

After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Peace Action welcomed the withdrawal of troops from the country and an end to the war.
Yet when the United States military pulled out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration also responded by choking off assets to Afghan banks and the economy by freezing the reserves of the Afghan Central Bank held in the U.S. They also imposed sanctions on those doing business with Afghanistan and cut aid. Jobs and income disappeared, people cannot afford to buy food and mass starvation is now occurring.
The Afghan people are suffering now more than ever. Hunger could kill more now than in two decades of war. This humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is in the words of the International Red Cross a “human-made catastrophe.” “Human-made” largely by coercive U.S. economic policies.

In Decemebr, 46 members of Congress wrote a letter demanding the U.S. unfreeze assets that had been locked following the U.S. military withdrawal earlier in 2021. But instead of heeding that call, Biden on Friday took the step of more permanently seizing the funds that otherwise would be under control of Afghanistan’s central bank, the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which now operates under the authority of the Taliban government.

Biden’s executive order includes setting aside half of the funds, $3.5 billion, for possible settlement claims by families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks of 2001, but critics have said the Afghan people—who had nothing to do with the crimes of that day twenty years ago—should not be punished for the acts of Al Qaeda jihadists, most them Saudis and Egyptians.

Millions of Afghans are starving, due to US crimes, and now instead of getting back what is their’s, their money is being used as reparations for a crime they never committed & have been punished for for 20 years.

The cruelty is always the point. pic.twitter.com/rrzhnHXlXM
— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) February 11, 2022

Promoting the “Love to Afghanistan” events in an op-ed for Common Dreamslast week, peace activist Jean Athey, coordinator of the Montgomery County Peace Action group in Maryland, said the economic war against the Afghan has the potential to be just as deadly as the 20 years of war and occupation they have just endured. Explaining the current situation and the “liquidity crisis” gripping the country, she wrote:

The government has almost no money and cannot pay workers, who cannot buy food for their families. Most have received no payment for months. In addition, Afghans have limited access to their own funds in banks. International commerce has halted.
Given U.S. sanctions and the liquidity crisis, even international humanitarian relief organizations have great difficulty operating in Afghanistan, despite U.S. government assurances. Relief efforts designed to stave off starvation—although critically important right now—cannot endure for long since no one is willing to provide assistance indefinitely to a country of almost 40 million people. The country needs a functioning government and economy, and needs access to the international financial system.

“Political backbone” is now required of the Biden administration, argued Athey, who said the president should not be scared of predictable GOP attacks or media hit pieces about somehow appeasing the Taliban by giving the everyday people back money the money that rightfully belongs to them. “The lives of one million children are more important than a negative headline in a tabloid. The U.S. should unfreeze Afghan government assets and lift sanctions hindering the recovery of the Afghan economy and humanitarian relief efforts. We must end the U.S. economic war on Afghanistan.”

On Saturday, the DAB demanded the funds ostensibly stolen by the U.S. government be returned and called the move by Biden an “injustice against the people of Afghanistan.”

Also in Saturday, protests in Kabul decried the theft of the money.

“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States. This is the right of Afghans,” Abdul Rahman, a civil society activist and the demonstration’s organizer, told the Dawn newsaper.

A spokesperson for the Taliban government, Mohammad Naeem, also decriedthe move in a post on social media Saturday.

“The theft and seizure of money held by the United States of the Afghan people represent the lowest level of human and moral decay of a country and a nation,” Naeem tweeted, added that while victory and defeat are evident throughout history, “the greatest and most shameful defeat is when moral defeat combines with military defeat.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

Climate Crisis Has Made Western US Megadrought Worst in 1,200 Years

February 17, 2022 Creative Commons

“Climate change is here and now,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. “If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn’t enough to make people realize that, I don’t know what is.”

The megadrought which has gripped western U.S. states including California and Arizona over the past two decades has been made substantially worse by the human-caused climate crisis, new research shows, resulting in the region’s driest period in about 1,200 years.

Scientists at University of California-Los Angeles, NASA, and Columbia University found that extreme heat and dryness in the West over the past two years have pushed the drought that began in 2000 past the conditions seen during a megadrought in the late 1500s.

“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years.”

The authors of the new study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, followed up on research they had conducted in 2020, when they found the current drought was the second-worst on record in the region after the one that lasted for several years in the 16th century.

Since that study was published, the American West has seen a heatwave so extreme it sparked dozens of wildfires and killed hundreds of people and droughtconditions which affected more than 90% of the area as of last summer, pushing the region’s conditions past “that extreme mark,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The scientists examined wood cores extracted from thousands of trees at about 1,600 sites across the West, using the data from growth rings in ancient trees to determine soil moisture levels going back to the 800s.

They then compared current conditions to seven other megadroughts—which are defined as droughts that are both severe and generally last a number of decades—that happened between the 800s and 1500s.

The researchers estimated that the extreme dry conditions facing tens of millions of people across the western U.S. have been made about 42% more severe by the climate crisis being driven by fossil fuel extraction and emissions.

“The results are really concerning, because it’s showing that the drought conditions we are facing now are substantially worse because of climate change,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA and the study’s lead author, told the Los Angeles Times.

In the region Williams and his colleagues examined, the average temperature since the drought began in 2000 was 1.6° Fahrenheit warmer than the average in the previous 50 years. Without the climate crisis driving global temperatures up, the West would still have faced drought conditions, but based on climate models studied by the researchers, there would have been a reprieve from the drought in 2005 and 2006.

“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s, or 1100s.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said the new research must push the U.S. Congress to take far-reaching action to mitigate the climate crisis, as legislation containing measures to shift away from fossil fuel extraction and toward renewable energy is stalled largely due to objections from Republicans and right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“It’s time for Congress to act by making meaningful investments into climate action—before it’s too late,” she said.

Climate change is here and now.

If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn't enough to make people realize that, I don't know what is. It's time for Congress to act by making meaningful investments into climate action — before it's too late.https://t.co/jExzMKUXxr
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) February 14, 2022

The drought has had a variety of effects on the West, including declining water supplies in the largest reservoirs of the Colorado River—Lake Mead and Lake Powell— as well as reservoirs across California and the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 96% of the Western U.S. is now “abnormally dry” and 88% of the region is in a drought.

“We’re experiencing this variability now within this long-term aridification due to anthropogenic climate change, which is going to make the events more severe,” Isla Simpson, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the study released Monday, told the Los Angeles Times.

The researchers also created simulations of other droughts they examined between 800 and 1500, superimposing the same amount of drying driven by climate change. In 94% of the simulations, the drought persisted for at least 23 years, and in 75% of the simulations, it lasted for at least three decades—suggesting that the current drought will continue for a number of years.

Williams said it is “extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year.”

“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years,” Samantha Stevenson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times.

Originally published on Common Dreams by JULIA CONLEY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Business, News, Observation, Politics

Economists Warn Against the Fed Raising Rates at Worst Possible Time

Video February 12, 2022 Creative Commons

Above: Photo / Collage / Lynxotic / Adobe Stock

“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”

As the U.S. Federal Reserve mulls hiking interest rates in the coming weeks in an effort to curb inflation, progressive economists are warning against such a move—arguing that it will hurt workers and fail to address the real source of rising prices: unmitigated corporate power.

“The last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further.”

“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and Columbia University professor, wrote Monday in Project Syndicate. “We should not attack a supply-side problem by lowering demand and increasing unemployment. That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”

Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, echoed Stiglitz’s message, writing Monday: “The inflation spike of 2021 has been bad for typical families and is a real policy challenge. But it remains the case that an overreaction to it could end up causing the most damage of all.”

Stiglitz and Bivens’ essays came three days after Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, made a similar warning.

According to Reich:

Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices—and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.
It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.

Although Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell “has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices,” Reich wrote, “there’s no ‘wage-price spiral.'”

“To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation,” he added. “Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases—making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.”

click to watch

Reich conceded that “wage-price spirals used to be a problem” but argued that’s no longer the case “because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.”

Declining union membership and corporations’ increased mobility—both key pillars in the ruling class’ highly effective assault on workers that has been carried out on a bipartisan basis for more than four decades—”have shifted power from labor to capital,” wrote Reich. “Increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages… ended wage-price spirals.”

It is “totally wrong” to contend that inflation is being fueled by rising wages stemming from a so-called “tight” labor market, Reich argued. He continued:

The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the U.S. population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.
Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6% in December, the first decrease since last February.

“Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further,” Reich added. “The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.”

When it comes to what is causing inflation, Reich blamed “continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.”

Corporate greed has played a large role in why people are paying higher prices for food and gas, as Common Dreams has reported and a majority of the public appears to understand, based on recent polling. Amid a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of more than 900,000 people in the U.S. and 5.7 million people globally, price-gouging corporations are enjoying mega-profits not seen since 1950.

While pandemic profiteering is evident, the question remains as to what made global supply chains so fragile to disruption in the first place—leading to prolonged shortages of key inputs and increased shipping costs that have been accompanied by price hikes.

According to Rakken Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, the answer lies in offshoring, financialization, deregulation, just-in-time logistics, and other profit-maximizing policies associated with neoliberalization and globalization.

Mabud made that case last week when testifying at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. She and David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, expanded on that argument in a recent essay introducing a new series on the supply chain crisis.

As a number of economists have warned recently, policymakers on the verge of making life-altering decisions with respect to interest rates may be doing so based on faulty data or misconceptions.

“Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing),” Reich cautioned. “This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ ‘seasonal adjustment,’ cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as ‘adding lots of jobs.'”

Stiglitz, meanwhile, noted that “the inflation rate has been volatile. Last month, the media made a big deal out of the 7% annual inflation rate in the United States, while failing to note that the December rate was little more than half that of the October rate.”

“Moreover, given that a large proportion of today’s inflation stems from global issues—like chip shortages and the behavior of oil cartels—it is a gross exaggeration to blame inflation on excessive fiscal support in the U.S.,” Stiglitz continued.

While “the U.S. has slightly higher inflation than Europe,” he added, “it also has enjoyed stronger growth. U.S. policies prevented a massive increase in poverty that might have occurred otherwise. Recognizing that the cost of doing too little would be huge, U.S. policymakers did the right thing.”

Stiglitz wrote that his “biggest concern is that central banks will overreact, raising interest rates excessively and hampering the nascent recovery. As always, those at the bottom of the income scale would suffer the most in this scenario.”

“What we need instead,” he argued, “are targeted structural and fiscal policies aimed at unblocking supply bottlenecks and helping people confront today’s realities.”

For instance, wrote Stiglitz, “food stamps for the needy should be indexed to the price of food, and energy (fuel) subsidies to the price of energy.”

“Beyond that, a one-time ‘inflation adjustment’ tax cut for lower- and middle-income households would help them through the post-pandemic transition,” he added. “It could be financed by taxing the monopoly rents of the oil, technology, pharmaceutical, and other corporate giants that made a killing from the crisis.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Breaking News, History, News, Observation

Beijing Olympics may get points for boosting China’s international reputation, but Games are definitely gold for Xi Jinping’s standing at home

February 4, 2022 Creative Commons

Above: Photo / collage / Lynxotic / unsplash / Adobe Stock

The 2022 Winter Games in Beijing provide many benefits for China, and really don’t have any downsides for the country.

For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the most important result of the Games will likely be their impact on his domestic audience, as Chinese media coverage of the Games will be highly nationalistic and laudatory, aimed at impressing the Chinese people. To this home audience, the spectacle of the Games reinforces government propaganda about China’s success and progress toward achieving the “Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

But I don’t predict the 2022 Games will have the same effect, either domestically or internationally, that the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics had, partially because the Winter Olympics are smaller and the weather is harsher, and partially because 2008 was the first time China hosted the Olympics.

In 2008, stunning opening ceremonies including 5,000 syncopated dancers telling a stylized story of 5,000 years of Chinese history astonished the international audience. The power of that first time cannot be repeated. https://www.youtube.com/embed/T9PmD3K1eJc?wmode=transparent&start=0 CCTV+, a China state video news agency, issued video of rehearsals for the 2022 Olympics opening ceremony on Jan. 25, 2021.

Nonetheless, China has spared no expense to prepare, with a report from Insider pegging the total cost “in excess of US$38.5 billion, 24 times the country’s initial budget of $1.6 billion.” As with everything China does, when it wants to occupy the center stage internationally, it will put on a big show.

The domestic payoff of the Olympics matters because China will face a trying year in 2022. Xi is seeking an unprecedented third term as general-secretary of the Communist Party. The nation’s economy is slowing. International opposition to China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and to its aggressive foreign policy is growing. Xi is hoping that the “bread and circuses” diversionary aspect of the Games will help him overcome the stresses of this year and advance his political standing.

Domestic standing is crucial focus

Chinese leaders care about improving the nation’s international status, but they’re already working from a position of relative strength. China’s rise internationally, especially since 2008, is undeniable. Its status as the number two power in the world is almost universally acknowledged.

As a scholar of Chinese politics and foreign policy, I believe that Xi wants the Games to impress the world.

But that is less important to him than the domestic effect of the Games.

China is not traditionally strong in winter sports. But the country has invested heavily in preparing increasingly competitive teams for these Games. The success of Chinese athletes at the Games will enhance China’s reputation and thus Chinese citizens’ sense of pride. In turn, this will mute competition from Xi’s opposition within the Chinese Communist Party.

FreeSki world champion Eileen Gu chose to compete for China – her mother is Chinese – and not the U.S., where she was born and is a citizen. Her choice may yield golds in areas where China is not a strong competitor.

Her decision also reverberates with Xi’s call on all ethnic Chinese worldwide to aid China’s development. Chinese domestic propaganda will highlight how she chose China over the U.S., and implicitly urge others to do the same.

Burying dissent

In the run-up to the August 2008 Summer Games, China faced widespread human rights criticism for its support for the Sudanese government’s crimes against humanity in Darfur and its suppression of massive protests by Tibetans.

The breathtaking opening ceremonies and the successful Games muted the criticisms. When the global financial crisis erupted the next month, the Games were taken by the Chinese people as a symbol of China’s ascendence, and the financial crisis as a sign of the United States’ decline.

Similarly, in the run-up to 2022, China’s human rights practices are under heavy fire, especially for its mass incarcerations in Xinjiang and suppression of basic rights in Hong Kong.

The Winter Games may not have the symbolic power of the 2008 Olympics. But human rights will likely not receive much attention despite full-page advertisements in The New York Times condemning China’s human rights record and urging U.S. companies to not buy ads on NBC, the television network carrying the Olympics in the U.S.

Among the elements which help Xi achieve the propaganda and political goals he wants: the threat from COVID-19.

No spectators from the general public will attend the events. Athletes, officials and journalists will be kept in a small geographic bubble to ensure that they will not bring COVID-19 to China nor spread it once there. Journalists will neither have the ability to interview ordinary Chinese people, nor any chance to investigate any non-Olympics-related news stories.

There may be individual acts of protest by some non-Chinese athletes against Chinese human rights practices. But those protests will not be shown on Chinese television, and the protesters will likely be forced to leave China. The Washington Post reported that in late January, Yang Shu, a member of China’s Olympic Organizing Committee, said in a press conference that “Any expression that is in line with the Olympic spirit I’m sure will be protected … Any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment.”

With no spectators and a highly controlled environment for the athletes and foreign observers, there is little chance for significant demonstrations to break out.

What’s the payoff?

China spent billions to construct the sites for the events and it will use untold millions of gallons of water to manufacture artificial snow for the skiing competitions. Winter is the dry season in Beijing, and snowfall is rare despite the very cold temperatures.

The costs may produce some grumbling by environmentally and fiscally concerned Chinese which will quickly be suppressed. And if the Chinese team performs well, these complaints may be seen as unpatriotic.

For Xi Jinping and the rest of Chinese leadership, the gains of the Olympics are immediate, and the costs are diffuse and longer-term. In the end they will – through propaganda and the suppression of dissent – tell a story of triumph to their domestic audience, which makes holding the Olympic Games useful for their political purposes.

David Bachman, Henry M. Jackson Professor of International Studies, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Climate Solutions, News, Observation

Why a warming climate can bring bigger snowstorms

Video February 4, 2022 Creative Commons

The blizzard that buried Boston under nearly 2 feet of snow in January 2022 was historic, but not a surprise. Over a century of reliable weather records show many of the Northeast’s heaviest snowfalls have occurred since 1990 – including seven of the top 10 in both Boston and New York.

At the same time, winters in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast have warmed by approximately 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.2 C) since the late 1800s.

How can the spate of big snowstorms be reconciled with our warming climate? I’m an atmospheric scientist. Let’s look at an important law of physics and some theories that can help explain the changes.

Warmer air, more moisture

First, warmer air can hold more moisture than cold air.

Think of the atmosphere like a sponge. Air holds about 4% more water vapor for each additional degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature (that’s about 7% per degree Celsius). The physical law that explains this relationship is known as the Clausius-Clapyron relation.

This increased atmospheric moisture is helping to intensify the water cycle. The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have become wetter – not just in winter, but in spring, summer and fall, too. In addition to more total precipitation over a season and year, the additional moisture also fuels extreme events, like more intense hurricanes and flooding rains. The Northeast has seen an increase of more than 50% in the heaviest precipitation events in recent decades, the largest increase of any region of the U.S.

In the early 1900s, winters across the Northeast typically averaged around 22 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, 26 degrees is the official new “normal” temperature, defined as the average over 1991-2020. A few recent winters have been over 30.

In the Northeast, then, we have an environment that has warmed yet is often still below freezing. Put another way, regions of the world that are cold enough for snow have warmed enough to now be visited by storms capable of holding and dropping more moisture. Rather than intense downpours like Louisiana has been seeing lately, the region gets heavy snow.

The warming ocean plays a role

The January blizzard was fueled by ocean waters in the western Atlantic that are warmer than normal. That’s also part of a consistent pattern.

The oceans have been absorbing more than 90% of the additional heat attributable to rising atmospheric greenhouse gases from human activities, particularly burning fossil fuels. The oceans now contain more heat energy than any time since measurements began six decades ago.

Scientists are studying whether global warming may be driving a slowing of the ocean conveyor belt of currents that transport water around the globe. Satellite imagery and ocean measurements show that warmer waters have “piled up” along the East Coast, a possible indication of a slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

Moisture evaporated from ocean water provides much of the energy for both tropical and mid-latitude extra-tropical cyclones, known commonly as nor’easters.

The Arctic influences the snow pattern, too

While tropical storm systems are fueled primarily by warm water, nor’easters gain energy from sharp temperature gradients where cold and warm air masses meet. The frequency of cold air outbreaks is another aspect of climate change that may be contributing to recent increases in extreme snowfall events.

Recent research has suggested that a warming Arctic, including declines in Arctic sea ice and snow cover, is influencing behavior of the polar vortex, a band of strong westerly winds that forms in the stratosphere between about 10 and 30 miles above the Arctic every winter. The winds enclose a large pool of extremely cold air.

When the Arctic is relatively warm, the polar vortex tends to be weaker and more easily elongates or “stretches,” allowing extremely cold air to dip south. Episodes of polar-vortex stretching have markedly increased in the past few decades, leading, at times, to more severe winter weather in some places.

Scientists Are Very Worried About Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier:

watch Video

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

What is the polar vortex? NASA explains.

Arctic amplification, the enhanced warming to our north, may, paradoxically, be helping to shuttle cold air to the Eastern Seaboard during polar vortex disruptions, where the cold air can interact with warmer, moisture-laden air from the warmer-than-normal western Atlantic Ocean. The most recent stretched polar vortex event helped to bring together key ingredients for the historic blizzard.

What’s ahead?

Global climate models project an increase in the most extreme snowfall events across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere with future warming. In some other parts of the world, like Western Europe, intensification of the hydrological cycle will mean more winter rain than snow as temperatures rise.

For the east coast of North America, as well as Northern Asia, winter temperatures are expected to still be cold enough for storms to bring heavy snow – at least through mid-century. Climate models suggest that extreme snowfalls will become rarer, but not necessarily less intense, in the second half of the century, as more storms produce rain.

The sharp increase in high-impact Northeast winter storms is an expected manifestation of a warming climate. It’s another risk the U.S. will have to prepare for as extreme events become more common with climate change.

Michael A. Rawlins, Associate Director, Climate System Research Center, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation by Michael A. Rawlins, UMass Amherst under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Find books on Climate Science and Sustainable Energy Solutions and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

News, Observation, Politics

Tax-Dodging Billionaire Dynasties Could Cost US $8.4 Trillion: Report

Video February 4, 2022 Creative Commons

Above: Photo / collage / Lynxotic / various

The wealth-hoarding by ultrarich families would be equivalent to over four Build Back Better plans

Over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.

“We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system… or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”

watch video

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

The Americans for Tax Fairness report—entitled Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation—urges Congress to fix the federal tax code to address dynastic wealth.

The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the “ultrawealthy” and thereby accelerate the “accumulation of dynastic wealth.”

“Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes,” the report explains.

Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.

The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren’t planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:

The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.

The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn’t reached President Joe Biden’s desk—said Tuesday that it is “dead.”

However, Americans for Tax Fairness still uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.

“The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place,” the report states. “That’s the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years.”

The report adds that “about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year.”

There's no denying our economy and democracy are rigged in favor of the ultra-wealthy.

When the richest 100 Americans have 60,000 times more political power than the bottom 90% of people— it's time to get dynastic wealth under control. https://t.co/U1s6HmY1XC
— Patriotic Millionaires (@PatrioticMills) February 2, 2022

“This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable,” declared the report’s principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.

“The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America’s wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax,” he asserted. “Effective reforms have already been developed—all that’s needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now.”

The group’s new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wednesday’s report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.

“As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years,” the report says, “the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small.”

Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would “curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts.” Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket “on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals.”

Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to “impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust’s holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion.”

“The choice is clear,” according to the report. “We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America’s wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”

“Fortunately, we know what needs to be done,” the report concludes. “The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Find books on Political Recommendations and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Business, News, Observation, Politics, Stock Market

Starbucks Profits Soar by 31%—But It’s Raising Prices Anyway

Video February 3, 2022 Creative Commons

One critic said the company’s explanation for the coming price hikes amounts to “word salad to hide corporate greed.”‘

Above: Photo collage Lynxotic /Pexels / Adobe Stock

Starbucks on Tuesday reported a 31% increase in profits during the final three months of 2021, but the massive Seattle-based coffee chain nevertheless announced plans to further hike prices this year, drawing outrage from critics who say the company is pushing higher costs onto consumers to pad its bottom line.

“Corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson—who saw his compensation soar by 39% to $20.4 million in 2021—told investors during the company’s earnings call Tuesday that “supply-chain disruptions” and rising labor costs are to blame for the coming price increases, of which he suggested there will be several.

“We have additional pricing actions planned through the balance of this year, which play an important role to mitigate cost pressures including inflation,” said Johnson, who also touted the company’s “strong revenue growth” in the quarter.

Starbucks’ revenue grew to $8.1 billion at the tail-end of 2021, a 19% jump compared to the previous year.

To progressive observers, Starbucks’ announcement of price hikes fits a pattern of U.S. corporations—in sectors across the economy—raising costs for consumers while raking in record profits, boosting executive pay, and squeezing regular employees. Starbucks employees nationwide are increasingly fighting back against their low wages and poor working conditions by launching union drives.

Historian Andy Lewis argued that Starbucks’ explanation for the impending price increases amounts to nothing more than “word salad to hide corporate greed.”

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, for its part, responded with outrage to Starbucks increasing prices for customers after giving its CEO a nearly 40% raise last year.

Are you kidding me? pic.twitter.com/8AYfCIqu1i
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) February 2, 2022

During testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, Rakeen Mabud of the Groundwork Collaborative noted that “in sector after sector, in company after company, corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”

“We see that in Kimberly-Clark taking advantage of the pandemic to raise prices on masks,” the economist said. “We see Proctor & Gamble using the fact that they sell essential goods that families depend on like diapers to raise prices in this moment of crisis. And we even see companies like McDonald’s raising prices on consumers even as they enjoy massive increases in sales.”

“So in short,” Mabud added, “this is a really broad-based problem—it’s unfortunately not limited to a specific sector of the economy.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Political Recommendations and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Branding, News, Observation, Tech

Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising?

Video February 3, 2022 Creative Commons

Data-driven personalized ads are the lifeblood of the internet. To a growing number of lawmakers, they’re also nefarious

Earlier this month, the European Union Parliament passed sweeping new rules aimed at limiting how companies and websites can track people online to target them with advertisements.

Targeted advertising based on people’s online behavior has long been the business model that underwrites the internet. It allows advertisers to use the mass of personal data collected by Meta, Google, and other tech companies as people browse the web to serve ads to users by sorting them into tens of thousands of hyperspecific categories.

But behavioral advertising is also controversial. Critics argue that the practice enables discrimination, potentially only offering certain groups of people economic opportunities. They also say serving people ads based on what big tech companies assume they’re interested in potentially leaves people vulnerable to scams, fraud, and disinformation. Notoriously, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used personal data gleaned from Facebook profiles to target certain Americans with pro-Trump messages and certain Britons with pro-Brexit ads.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote, according to Jan Penfrat, a senior policy adviser at European digital rights group EDRi, were “wake-up calls” to the Europe Union to crack down. Lawmakers in the U.S. are also looking into ways to regulate behavioral advertising.

What Will the European Parliament’s New Regulations Do?

There’s been a long back and forth about how much to crack down on targeted advertising in the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s big legislative package aimed at regulating Big Tech.

Everything from a total ban on behavioral advertising to more modest changes around ad transparency has at some point been on the table.

On Jan. 19, the Parliament approved its final position on the bill. Included is a ban on targeted advertising to minors, a ban on tracking sensitive categories like religion, political affiliation, or sexual orientation, and a requirement for websites to provide “other fair and reasonable options” for access if users opt out of their data being tracked for targeted advertising.

The bill also includes a ban on so-called dark patterns —“design choices that steer people into decisions they may not have made under normal conditions—such as the endless clicks it takes to opt out of being tracked by cookies on many websites.”

watch video

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

That measure is critical, according to Alexandre de Streel, the academic director of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe, because of how tech companies responded to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s 2016 tech regulation.

In a study on online advertising for the Parliament’s crucial Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, de Streel and nearly a dozen other experts documented how “dark patterns” had become a major tool used by websites and platforms to persuade users to provide consent for sharing their data. Their recommendations for the DSA—which included more robust enforcement of the GDPR, stricter rules about obtaining consent, and the dark patterns ban—were included in the final bill.

“We are going in the right direction if we better enforce the GDPR and add these amendments on ‘dark patterns,’ ” De Streel told The Markup.

German member of European Parliament Patrick Breyer joined with more than 20 other MEPs and more than 50 public and private organizations last year to form the Tracking Free Ads Coalition. Though its push for a total ban on targeted advertising failed, the coalition was behind many of the more stringent restrictions. Breyer told The Markup the new rules were “a major achievement.”

“The Parliament stopped short of prohibiting surveillance advertising, but giving people a true choice [of whether to be targeted] is a major step forward, and I think the vast majority of people will use this option,” he said.

The EU will address digital political advertising in a separate bill that could potentially be more stringent around targeting and using personal data.

Despite passing the European Parliament, the DSA is far from settled. Due to the EU’s unique law-making process, the legislation must now be negotiated with the European Commission and the bloc’s 27 countries. The member states, as represented by the European Council, have adopted an official position considerably less aggressive—opting for only improved transparency on targeted advertising—and, according to Breyer, are “traditionally very open to [industry] lobbying.”

Whether the DSA’s wins against targeted advertising survive this process “will depend to a large degree on public pressure,” said Breyer.

How Has Big Tech Responded?

So far, Big Tech companies have publicly tread lightly in response to the European push to limit targeted advertising.

In response to The Markup’s request for comment, Google spokesperson Karl Ryan said that Google supports the DSA and that it shares “the goal of MEPs to continue to make the internet safer for everyone….”

“We will now take some time to analyze the final Parliament text to understand how it could impact us and our different users,” he said.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

But privately, over the last two years, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have ramped up lobbying efforts in Brussels, spending more than $20 million in 2020.

The advertising industry, meanwhile, has been public in its opposition. In a statement on the recent vote, Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe director of public policy Greg Mroczkowski urged policymakers to reconsider.

“The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”

On Wednesday, the Belgian Data Protection Authority found IAB Europe–which developed and administered the system for companies to obtain consent for behavioral advertising while complying with GDPR—in violation of that law. In particular, the authority found that the pop-ups that ask for people’s consent to process their data as they visit websites failed to meet GDPR’s standards for transparency and consent. The pop-up posed “great risks to the fundamental rights” of Europeans, the ruling said. The authority ordered IAB to delete data collected under its Transparency and Consent Framework and has six months to comply.

“This decision is momentous,” Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told The Markup. “It means that digital rights are real. And there is a significance for the United States, too, because the IAB has introduced the same consent spam for the CCPA and CPRA [California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act].”

In a statement to Tech Crunch, IAB Europe said it “reject[s] the finding that we are a data controller” in the context of its consent framework and is “considering all options with respect to a legal challenge.” Further, it said it is working on an “action plan to be executed within the prescribed six months” to bring it within GDPR compliance.

Google and Meta may be preparing for whichever way the wind is blowing.

Google is developing a supposedly less-invasive targeted advertising system, which stores general topics of interest in a user’s browser while excluding sensitive categories like race. Meta is testing a protocol to target users without using tracking cookies.

A handful of European companies like internet security company Avast, search engine DuckDuckGo (which is a contributor to The Markup), and publisher Axel Springer see tighter rules around data privacy as a means to push the industry toward contextual ads or tech that matches ads based on a website’s content, and to therefore break the Google-Meta duopoly over online advertising.

What’s Happening in the U.S.?

On Jan. 18, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation to Congress to prohibit advertisers from using personal data to target advertisements—particularly using data about a person’s race, gender, and religion. Exceptions would be made for “broad” location information and contextual advertising.

“The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence,” Booker said in a statement announcing the bill in January.

While there is bipartisan desire to rein in Big Tech, there is no consensus on how to do it. The bill most likely to pass the divided Congress is designed to stop Amazon, Apple, Google, and other tech giants from privileging their own products. Congressional action on targeted advertising does not appear likely.

Still, it is possible the Federal Trade Commission will take action.

Last summer, President Biden issued an executive order directing the FTC to use its rulemaking authority to curtail “unfair data collection and surveillance practices.” In December, the FTC sought public comment for a petition by nonprofit Accountable Tech to develop new data privacy rules.

Meanwhile, many U.S. digital rights activists, such as nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, are hopeful that new rules in Europe will force changes globally, as occurred after the GDPR. “The EU Parliament’s position, if it becomes law, could change the rules of the game for all platforms,” wrote EFF’s international policy director Christopher Schmon.

It’s still early days, but many see the tide turning against targeted advertising. These types of conversations, according to Penfrat at EDRi, were unthinkable a few years ago.

“The fact that a ban on surveillance-based advertising has been brought into the mainstream is a huge success,” he said.

This article was originally published on The Markup By: Harrison Jacobs and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

News, Observation, Politics

New Legal Filing Reveals Startling Details of Possible Fraud by Trump Organization

Video January 30, 2022 Creative Commons

watch video

A new legal filing by New York’s attorney general this week accused former President Donald Trump’s company of misleading lenders about the financial health of its landmark downtown Manhattan skyscraper, 40 Wall Street, while seeking to renew the building’s mortgage.

Though the Trump Organization called 40 Wall Street “one of the great success stories post 2008,” lender Capital One found the company’s estimates of the building’s worth so unbelievable that the bank declined to refinance the tower’s loan in 2015, the filing alleges.

“Capital One harbored great skepticism regarding the Trump Organization’s valuations,” says the filing, which was submitted by Attorney General Letitia James in response to Trump’s efforts to block her from questioning him and his children as part of an ongoing investigation by her office.

The new accusations offer startling details about possible financial fraud involving 40 Wall Street — one of the subjects of a 2019 ProPublica story that highlighted conflicting financial documents the Trump Organization had filed for the building.

ProPublica’s story documented how income, expense and occupancy numbers cited in the eventual refinance for 40 Wall Street and another Manhattan building sometimes didn’t match those the company had filed with city tax authorities. A lower valuation for the city would produce a lower tax bill, while a higher valuation for lenders would make it easier to get a new mortgage.

One expert said it appeared like the Trump Organization was keeping “two sets of books.”

“It feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University, at the time.

In her filing, James asserts that Trump Organization employees, including Trump’s children, took part in a pattern of deception in which they misled lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service by vastly overstating values for 40 Wall Street and a host of other Trump properties, including golf courses in Scotland, Los Angeles and Westchester and his buildings on Fifth and Park avenues.

watch video

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

The Trump Organization on Thursday lashed out at James, a Democrat, via a statement emailed by a spokesperson, saying, “The only one misleading the public is Letitia James.

“She defrauded New Yorkers by basing her entire candidacy on a promise to get Trump at all costs without having seen a shred of evidence and in violation of every conceivable ethical rule,” the organization’s statement said. It asserted that James “has no case” and that the “allegations are baseless and will be vigorously defended.”

Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, also criticized James, accusing her of making “repeated threats to target the Trump family” and ignoring legal protections for “the very people she is investigating.”

James is seeking to compel testimony and obtain documents from Trump, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who she said have not cooperated with her investigation.

The filing says that property valuations formed the heart of statements of financial condition that the Trump Organization used to demonstrate its net worth. The statements, which James said contained inaccuracies, were compiled by an outside accounting agency from a data spreadsheet and backup material provided by the Trump Organization.

Trump’s personal guarantees to some banks and insurers required him to certify that his financial statements were correct, according to James’ filing. The documents say her office has evidence Trump was “personally involved in reviewing and approving” the statements.

If the company or its employees are found to have deliberately provided misleading valuations, they could face civil or criminal penalties. The company is under investigation by both James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

With its classic Gothic Revival style and signature green spire, 40 Wall Street gave Trump a presence in the most famous financial district in the world. His company doesn’t own it, but rather purchased in 1995 the right to act as the landlord for its office and retail space. Finding tenants for that space, however, particularly in the building’s narrow tower, proved a challenge, especially after 9/11, when occupancy sagged and the entire financial district struggled, the ProPublica investigation found.

James’ filing says that as early as 2009, Capital One, which held the mortgage on the property, “raised substantial concerns about cash flow” at 40 Wall Street, prompting in-person meetings with Trump, longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and others. Donald Trump Jr. was also involved in the discussions, the filing says.

The conversations led to a loan modification in 2010, with bank personnel harboring doubts about the Trump Organization’s representations of the building’s financial standing. During those discussions, the Trump Organization provided the bank with profit numbers for 2010 of $12.3 million, which bank personnel described as “very optimistic.”

More startling were the differences between valuations that appeared on Trump’s statements of financial condition and those prepared by appraisers for Capital One. The Trump Organization set the value of the building at $601.8 million in 2010, while the appraisals for Capital One done by Cushman & Wakefield set it at just less than one-third of that, $200 million.

Weisselberg shared one of the company’s higher valuations for the building with the bank in early 2015, boasting of “considerable capital investment” and “a much improved cash flow.” He wanted Capital One to restructure its loan and waive a principal payment of $5 million due in November.

But Capital One declined to refinance the mortgage, referencing its own internal estimate that the building was only worth $257 million a few months before.

That year, 40 Wall Street’s $160 million mortgage was a thorn in Trump’s side, representing his then-largest single debt as he launched his campaign for the presidency.

After Capital One’s rejection, the Trump Organization turned to Ladder Capital Finance, where Weisselberg’s son Jack was a director. Ladder commissioned its own appraisal. Though Ladder used the same Cushman & Wakefield team that had estimated the building was worth $220 million in 2012, the team this time more than doubled the value to $540 million, legal filings said. Ladder approved the refinance.

James’ filing said that evidence her office obtained suggests the 2015 Cushman valuation “appears to have used demonstrably incorrect facts and aggressive assumptions” to arrive at the higher estimate, which the document said “did not reflect a good faith assessment of value.”

On Thursday, Cushman & Wakefield defended its practices, saying it took “great issue with mischaracterizations concerning the work performed and believe they are not supported by the evidence.

“The referenced Cushman & Wakefield appraisals were undertaken and completed in good faith based upon the material information made available,” the company said in a statement emailed by a spokesperson. “We stand behind the appraisers and the referenced appraisals which reflect fair valuations based upon the underlying facts and market dynamics.”

In 2015, the Trump Organization’s statement of financial condition listed the value of the building as $735.4 million.

Ladder Capital and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. Allen Weisselberg and Jack Weisselberg could not immediately be reached.

ProPublica’s 2019 story found several instances of the Trump Organization reporting much lower expenses to its lender, Ladder Capital, than to city tax authorities — including 40 Wall Street’s insurance costs and ground lease. Jack Weisselberg declined to comment at the time on Ladder’s loans or his relationship with the Trump Organization. Executives with Ladder also declined to be quoted for the story then.

In 2019, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that the Trump Organization inflated valuations at times to appear more profitable and deflated them to achieve a lower real estate tax bill.

Originally published on ProPublica by Heather Vogell and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.Series: Trump, Inc. Exploring the Business of Trump

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Breaking News, News, Politics

5 things to know about why Russia might invade Ukraine – and why the US is involved

Video January 30, 2022 Creative Commons

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Jan. 19, 2022, that he thinks Russia will invade Ukraine, and cautioned Russian president Vladimir Putin that he “will regret having done it,” following months of building tension.

Russia has amassed an estimated 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine over the past several months.

In mid-January, Russia began moving troops into Belarus, a country bordering both Russia and Ukraine, in preparation for joint military exercises in February.

Putin has issued various security demands to the U.S. before he draws his military forces back. Putin’s list includes a ban on Ukraine from entering NATO, and agreement that NATO will remove troops and weapons across much of Eastern Europe.

There’s precedent for taking the threat seriously: Putin already annexed the Crimea portion of Ukraine in 2014.

Ukraine’s layered history offers a window into the complex nation it is today — and why it is continuously under threat. As an Eastern Europe expert, I highlight five key points to keep in mind.

What should we know about Ukrainians’ relationship with Russia?

Ukraine gained independence 30 years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has since struggled to combat corruption and bridge deep internal divisions.

Ukraine’s western region generally supported integration with Western Europe. The country’s eastern side, meanwhile, favored closer ties with Russia.

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine peaked in February 2014, when violent protesters ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in what is now known as the Revolution of Dignity.

watch video

Around the same time, Russia forcibly annexed Crimea. Ukraine was in a vulnerable position for self-defense, with a temporary government and unprepared military.

Putin immediately moved to strike in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The armed conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed over 14,000 people.

Unlike its response to Crimea, Russia continues to officially deny its involvement in the Donbas conflict.

What do Ukrainians want?

Russia’s military aggression in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea have galvanized public support for Ukraine’s Western leanings.

Ukraine’s government has said it will apply for European Union membership in 2024, and also has ambitions to join NATO.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who came to power in 2019, campaigned on a platform of anti-corruption, economic renewal and peace in the Donbas region.

In September 2021, 81% of Ukrainians said they have a negative attitude about Putin, according to the Ukrainian news site RBC-Ukraine. Just 15% of surveyed Ukrainians reported a positive attitude towards the Russian leader.

Why is Putin threatening to invade Ukraine?

Putin’s decision to engage in a military buildup along Ukraine is connected to a sense of impunity. Putin also has experience dealing with Western politicians who champion Russian interests and become engaged with Russian companies once they leave office.

Western countries have imposed mostly symbolic sanctions against Russia over interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections and a huge cyberattack against about 18,000 people who work for companies and the U.S. government, among other transgressions.

Without repercussions, Putin has backed Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on mass protests in the capital city, Minsk.

In several instances, Putin has seen that some leading Western politicians align with Russia. These alliances can prevent Western countries from forging a unified front to Putin.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, for example, advocated for strategic cooperation between Europe and Russia while he was in office. He later joined Russian oil company Rosneft as chairman in 2017.

Other senior European politicians promoting a soft position toward Russia while in office include former French Prime Minister François Fillon and former Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl. Both joined the boards of Russian state-owned companies after leaving office.

What is Putin’s end game?

Putin views Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence” – a territory, rather than an independent state. This sense of ownership has driven the Kremlin to try to block Ukraine from joining the EU and NATO.

In January 2021, Russia experienced one of its largest anti-government demonstrations in years. Tens of thousands of Russians protested in support of political opposition leader Alexei Navalny, following his detention in Russia. Navalny had recently returned from Germany, where he was treated for being poisoned by the Russian government.

Putin is also using Ukraine as leverage for Western powers lifting their sanctions. Currently, the U.S. has various political and financial sanctions in place against Russia, as well as potential allies and business partners to Russia.

A Russian attack on Ukraine could prompt more diplomatic conversations that could lead to concessions on these sanctions.

The costs to Russia of attacking Ukraine would significantly outweigh the benefits.

While a full scale invasion of Ukraine is unlikely, Putin might renew fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Why would the US want to get involved in this conflict?

With its annexation of Crimea and support for the Donbas conflict, Russia has violated the Budapest Memorandum Security Assurances for Ukraine, a 1994 agreement between the U.S., United Kingdom and Russia that aims to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for its commitment to give up its nuclear arsenal.

Putin’s threats against Ukraine occur as he is moving Russian forces into Belarus, which also raises questions about the Kremlin’s plans for invading other neighboring countries.

Military support for Ukraine and political and economic sanctions are ways the U.S. can make clear to Moscow that there will be consequences for its encroachment on an independent country. The risk, otherwise, is that the Kremlin might undertake other military and political actions that would further threaten European security and stability.

Tatsiana Kulakevich, Assistant Professor of instruction at School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, affiliate professor at the Institute on Russia, University of South Florida

Originally published on The Conversation by Tatsiana Kulakevich, University of South Florida and republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Climate Solutions, News, Observation

It Is ‘Strange,’ Says Greta Thunberg, That Biden Is Seen as a Climate Leader

Video January 18, 2022 Creative Commons

Greta Thunberg’s passions erupt at cop26’s global greenwashing Fest

“The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said in a new interview.

In an interview published in The Washington Post Magazine on Monday, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said it is “strange” that some consider U.S. President Joe Biden a climate leader even as his administration fails to take the ambitious steps necessary to tackle the intensifying planetary crisis.

When asked whether she is “inspired” by Biden or other world leaders, Thunberg pointed out that “the U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure” under the current administration.

“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things.”

“Why is the U.S. doing that?” she asked. “It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.”

“People ask us, ‘What do you want?’ ‘What do you want politicians to do?'” added Thunberg, who helped spark a global, youth-led climate protest movement with a solo strike outside of the Swedish Parliament building in 2018. “And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency.”

“We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand,” she continued. “For example, in Sweden, we ignore—we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative.”

While Biden has touted his decision to bring the U.S. back into the Paris agreement, his pledge to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and other initiatives as a show of leadership in the face of an existential threat to humanity, his administration has also approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than former President Donald Trump’s did.

During Biden’s presidency, according to a report released earlier this month by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved an average of 333 oil and gas drilling permits per month this year alone—40% more than it did over the first three years of Trump’s White House tenure.

“When it comes to climate change policy, President Biden is saying the right things. But we need more than just promises,” Alan Zibel, the lead author of the report, said in a statement. “The reality is that in the battle between the oil industry and Biden, the industry is winning. Despite Biden’s campaign commitments to stop drilling on public lands and waters, the industry still has the upper hand. Without aggressive government action, the fossil fuel industry will continue creating enormous amounts of climate-destroying pollution exploiting lands owned by the public.”

Thunberg’s interview with the Post came at the end of a year that saw planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels as the U.S. and other major nations continued to burn fossil fuels at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

As Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research noted Tuesday, “2021 saw the second-biggest absolute increase in fossil CO2 emissions ever recorded.”

Despite the failure of world leaders to act with sufficient urgency as the climate crisis fuels devastating extreme weather events across the globe, Thunberg said she is “more hopeful now” than she was when she kicked off her lonely school strike in 2018.

“In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah,” said Thunberg. “But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together.”

“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things,” she added. “That we can treat a crisis like a crisis.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Crypto, Cutting Edge, Tech

From metaverse to DAOs, a guide to 2021’s tech buzzwords

Video January 18, 2022 Creative Commons

From ‘metaverse’ to ‘NFT’ – here’s a wrap-up of the key buzzwords that shaped 2021 in the tech industry.
These subjects were the talk of the town in 2021, as the tech industry transitions into a new age.
A DAO tried to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution, whilst NFTs took the art world by storm.

This year, tech CEOs drew inspiration from a 1990s sci-fi novel, Reddit investors’ lexicon seeped into the mainstream as “diamond hands” and “apes” shook Wall Street, and something called a DAO tried to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution.

If you’re still drawing a blank as 2021 wraps up, here’s a short glossary:

Metaverse

The metaverse broadly refers to shared, immersive digital environments which people can move between and may access via virtual reality or augmented reality headsets or computer screens. read more

Some tech CEOs are betting it will be the successor to the mobile internet. The term was coined in the dystopian novel “Snow Crash” three decades ago. This year CEOs of tech companies from Microsoft to Match Group have discussed their roles in building the metaverse. In October, Facebook renamed itself Meta to reflect its new metaverse focus.

Web3

Web3 is used to describe a potential next phase of the internet: a decentralized internet run on the record-keeping technology blockchain.

This model, where users would have ownership stakes in platforms and applications, would differ from today’s internet, known as Web2, where a few major tech giants like Facebook and Alphabet’s Google control the platforms.

Tech companies waxed lyrical this year about tools for live audio conversations, rushing to release features after the buzzy, once invite-only app Clubhouse saw an initial surge amid COVID-19 lockdowns. read more

NFT

Non-fungible tokens, which exploded in popularity this year, are a type of digital asset that exists on a blockchain, a record of transactions kept on networked computers. read more

In March, a work by American artist Beeple sold for nearly $70 million at Christie’s, the first ever sale by a major auction house of art that does not exist in physical form.

Decentralization

Decentralizing, or the transfer of power and operations from central authorities like companies or governments to the hands of users, emerged as a key theme in the tech industry.

Such shifts could affect everything from how industries and markets are organized to functions like content moderation of platforms. Twitter, for example, is investing in a project to build a decentralized common standard for social networks, dubbed Bluesky.

DAO

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is generally an internet community owned by its members and run on blockchain technology. DAOs use smart contracts, pieces of code that establish the group’s rules and automatically execute decisions.

In recent months, crowd-funded crypto-group ConstitutionDAO tried and failed to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution in an auction held by Sotheby’s.

Stonks

This deliberate misspelling of “stocks,” which originated with an internet meme, made headlines as online traders congregating in forums like Reddit’s WallStreetBets drove up stocks including GameStop and AMC. The lingo of these traders, calling themselves “apes” or praising the “diamond hands” who held positions during big market swings, became mainstream.

GameFi

GameFi is a broad term referring to the trend of gamers earning cryptocurrency through playing video games, where players can make money through mechanisms like getting financial tokens for winning battles in the popular game Axie Infinity.

Altcoin

The term covers all cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin, ranging from ethereum, which aims to be the backbone of a future financial system, to Dogecoin, a digital currency originally created as a joke and popularized by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

FSD BETA

Tesla released a test version of its upgraded Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, a system of driving-assistance features – like automatically changing lanes and make turns – to the wider public this year.

The name of the much-scrutinized software has itself been contentious, with regulators and users saying it misrepresents its capabilities as it still requires driver attention.

Fabs

“Fabs,” short for a semiconductor fabrication plant, entered the mainstream lexicon this year as a shortage of chips from fabs were blamed for the global shortage of everything from cars to gadgets.

Net zero

A term, popularized this year thanks to the COP26 U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, for saying a country, company, or product does not contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s usually accomplished by cutting emissions, such as use of fossil fuels, and balancing any remaining emissions with efforts to soak up carbon, like planting trees. Critics say any emissions are unacceptable.

Originally published on World Economic Forum and republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License.

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Sci-Fi, VR and The Metaverse and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

Top US Banks and Investors Responsible for Nearly as Much Emissions as Russia, Report Finds

December 16, 2021 Creative Commons

Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo by Unsplash

“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk.”

Fueling fresh calls for swift, sweeping action by President Joe Biden and financial regulators, a report published Tuesday reveals that if the planet-heating pollution of the 18 largest U.S. asset managers and banks is compared to that of high-emissions countries, Wall Street is a top-five emitter.

“Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”

The new report—entitled Wall Street’s Carbon Bubble: The global emissions of the U.S. financial sector—was released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Sierra Club. The analysis was done by South Pole, which replicated an approach it used earlier this year for a U.K.-focused effort commissioned by Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Though likely a “gross underestimate,” as Sierra Club put it, because the analysis relies on public disclosures that exclude key data, the researchers found that “just the portions of the portfolios of the eight banks and 10 asset managers studied in this report financed an estimated total of 1.968 billion tons CO2e based on year-end disclosures from 2020.”

Putting that CO2e—or carbon dioxide equivalent, which is used to compare emissions from various greenhouse gases—figure into context, the report notes:

If the financial institutions (FIs) in this study were a country, they would have the fifth largest emissions in the world, falling just short of Russia;
Financed emissions from the 18 institutions covered in this report are equivalent to 432 million passenger vehicles driven for one year;
Financed emissions from the eight banks studied in this report are equivalent to 80 million homes’ energy use for one year; and
Financed emissions from the 10 asset managers studied in this report are equivalent to three billion barrels of oil consumed.

The banks analyzed are Bank of America, Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and Wells Fargo.

The asset managers included are BNY Mellon Investment Management, BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JPMorgan Asset Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, PIMCO, State Street Global Advisors, and the Vanguard Group.

When Wall Street is factored into the list of the world’s top 10 countries responsible for the most annual greenhouse gas emissions, it falls after China, the United States, India, and Russia but ranks ahead of Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Iran, and Germany, according to Climate Watch data.

As the new publication warns:

The findings of this report make clear that the U.S. financial sector is a major contributor to climate change. Given that the indirect emissions of the U.S. financial sector are just below the total emissions of Russia, it should be considered a high-carbon sector and treated as such. Therefore, if President Biden and his administration do not put in place measures to mitigate U.S.-financed emissions, the United States will almost certainly fall far short of its targets to achieve a 50% to 52% reduction from 2005 levels in 2030 and net-zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.
The implications of falling short would be dire. Continued unfettered emissions supported by the financial industry would mean that the deadly wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events that Americans and communities around the world are already experiencing will only become worse, and efforts to mitigate emissions will only become more challenging and costly.

Representatives from the groups behind the report echoed its call to action in a statement Tuesday.

“Climate change poses a large systemic risk to the world economy. If left unaddressed, climate change could lead to a financial crisis larger than any in living memory,” said Andres Vinelli, vice president of economic policy at CAP. “The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”

Vinelli added that “because the industry has proven itself to be unwilling to govern itself,” regulators including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency “must urgently develop a framework to reduce banks’ contributions to climate change.”

🚨 New @amprog & @sierraclub report reveals Wall Street's massive climate impact.

If the top US banks & asset managers were a country, they'd be the world's 5th largest emitter—and that's likely a huge underestimate.

US financial regulators must act now: https://t.co/JSz82voOMc pic.twitter.com/1AW0ZnFEC8
— Ben Cushing (@bmcushing) December 14, 2021

Ben Cushing, Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign manager, agreed that “regulators can no longer ignore Wall Street’s staggering contribution to the climate crisis.”

“The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”

“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk,” he said. “Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”

The report comes as financial institutions worldwide face mounting criticism for their contributions to the climate emergency—including at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland last month—and as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing model legislation that opposes fossil fuel divestment.

More than three dozen climate advocacy groups argued Monday that “what ALEC claims to be discriminatory action”—referring to divestment from major polluters—”is instead prudent action to ensure the stability of our financial system and economy.”

“We know from the Great Recession that the financial sector won’t take responsibility,” the organizations noted. “It’s up to regulators to protect people from the impact on climate and financial risk of fossil fuel investment.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

News, Observation, Politics

Know This, Trump’s Attempted Coup on Jan. 6 Was Just Practice

Video December 16, 2021 Creative Commons

Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photos by various

What are the institutions—public and civic—that could roll back this fast-approaching U.S.-style fascism with the snarling visage of serial criminal and constitutional violator, Donald J. Trump?

“Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun…” is the title of an article in the Atlantic, just out, by Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of many groundbreaking exposés. He describes the various maneuvers that Trump-driven Republican operatives and state legislators are developing to overturn elections whose voters elected Democrats from states with Republican governors and state legislatures. Georgia fit that profile in 2020—electing two Democratic senators in a state with a Republican legislature and governor.

Tragically, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices—three selected by Trump—has no problem with his usurpation of the American Republic.

Getting ready for 2024, the Georgia GOP legislature has stripped the election-certifying Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, of his authority to oversee future election certifications. The legislature has also given itself the unbridled authority to fire county election officials. With Trump howling his lies and backing his minion candidates, they created a climate that is intimidating scores of terrified election-precinct volunteers to quit.

Added to this are GOP-passed voter suppression laws and selectively drawn election districts that discriminate against minorities—both before the vote (purges, arbitrary disqualifications), during the vote (diminishing absentee voting, and narrowing dates for their delivery), and after the election in miscounting and falsely declaring fraud.

The ultimate lethal blow to democratic elections, should the GOP lose, is simply to have the partisan GOP majority legislators benefiting from demonically-drawn gerrymandered electoral districts, declare by fiat the elections a fraud, and replace the Democratic Party’s voter chosen electors with GOP chosen electors in the legislature.

Now take this as a pattern demolishing majority voters’ choice to 14 other GOP-controlled states, greased by Trumpian lies and routing money to his chosen candidate’s intent on overturning majority rule, add Fox News bullhorns and talk radio Trumpsters and you have the apparatus for fascistic takeovers. Tragically, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices—three selected by Trump—has no problem with his usurpation of the American Republic. All this and more micro-repression is broadcast by zillions of ugly, vicious, and anonymous rants over the Internet enabled by the profiteering social media corporations like Facebook.

Anonymous, vicious, violent email and Twitter traffic is the most underreported cause of anxiety, fear, and dread undermining honest Americans working, mostly as volunteers, the machinery of local, state, and national elections, with dedicated public servants. These people are not allowed to know the names behind the anonymous cowardly, vitriol slamming against them, their families, and children.

What are the institutions—public and civic—that could roll back this fast-approaching U.S.-style fascism with the snarling visage of serial criminal and constitutional violator, Donald J. Trump?

1. First is the Congress. Democrats impeached Trump over the Ukraine extortion but left on the table eleven other impeachable counts, including those with kitchen-table impacts (See Congressional Record, December 18, 2019).

All that is going on to deal with Trump’s abuses in any focused way on Capitol Hill, controlled by Democrats, is the House’s January 6th investigation. So far as is known, this Select Committee is NOT going to subpoena the star witnesses—Donald Trump and Mike Pence. So far, the Congress is feeble, not a Rock of Gibraltar thwarting the Trumpian dictators.

2. The federal courts? Apart from their terminal delays, it’s Trump’s Supreme Court and his nominees fill many chairs in the federal circuit courts of appeals. The federal judiciary—historically the last resort for constitutional justice—is now lost to such causes.

3. The Democratic Party? We’re still waiting for a grand strategy, with sufficient staff, to counter, at every intersection, the GOP. The Dems do moan and groan well. But where is their big-time ground game for getting out the non-voters in the swing states? Are they provoking recall campaigns of despotic GOP state legislators in GOP states having such citizen-voter power? Why aren’t they adopting the litigation arguments of Harvard Law School’s constitutional expert, Professor Larry Tribe? Where are their messages to appeal to the majority of eligible American voters who believe that the majority rules in elections? Why aren’t they urgently reminding voters of the crimes and other criminogenic behavior by the well-funded Trump and his political terrorists?

Bear in mind, the Democrats are well-funded too.

4. The Legal Profession and their Bar Associations. Aren’t they supposed to represent the rule of law, protect the integrity of elections, and insist on peaceful transitions of power? They are after all, not just private citizens; they are “officers of the court.” Forget it. There are few exceptions, but don’t expect the American Bar Association and its state bar counterparts to be the sentinels and watchdogs against sinister coup d’états under cover of delusional strongarming ideologies.

5. Well, how about the Universities, the faculties, and the students? Weren’t they the hotbeds of action against past illegal wars and violations of civil rights in the Sixties and Seventies? Sure. But that was before the Draft was eliminated, before the non-stop gazing at screens, and before the focus on identity politics absorbed the energy that fueled mobilizations about fundamental pursuits of peace, justice, and equality.

6. How about some enlightened corporate executives of influential companies? Having been given large tax reductions, sleepy law enforcement regulators, and a corporatist-minded federal judiciary, while the war contracts and taxpayer bailouts proliferate, why should they make waves to save the Republic? The union of plutocratic big business with the autocratic government is one classical definition of fascism.

7. The Mass Media. Taken together, they’ve done a much better job exposing Trumpism than has the Congress or litigation and the judiciary. However, their digging up the dirt does not come with the obvious follow-ups from their reporting and editorializing.

Covering the Ukraine impeachment, but not covering at least eleven other documented impeachable offenses, handed to them by credible voices, left them with digging hard but never hitting pay dirt. Trump has escaped all their muckraking as he has escaped all attempts by law enforcers who have their own unexplained hesitancies. If reporters do not dig intensely into just how Trump and his chief cohorts have escaped jail time and other penalties, their usual revelations of wrongdoings appear banal, eliciting “what else is new?” yawns by their public.

What’s left to trust and rely upon? Unorganized people organizing. What else! That’s what the farmers did peacefully in western Massachusetts in 1774 (See: The Revolution Came Early—1774—to the Berkshires) against the tyrant King George III and his Boston-based Redcoats? By foot or by horse, they showed up together in huge numbers at key places. These farmers collectively stopped the takeover of local governments and courts by King George’s wealthier Tories. Their actions can teach us the awesome lessons of moral, democratic, and tactical grit—all the while having to deal with nature and their endangered crops.

What are our excuses?

Originally published on Common Dreams by RALPH NADER and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Apple, Apple Car, Apple Watch, iOS 15, M1 Max, macOS 12 Monterey, OS Software

Apple 2022 is looming larger than ever after a hyperactive 2021

Video December 5, 2021 Danny Leeds

Lots of talk about the future is right on cue, but the next phase may lurch in an unexpected direction

Though always surrounded by haters and skeptics filed with F.U.D. – Apple escapes, along with Tesla, the level of derision reserved for Facebook (Meta!?@#), Google (Alphabet@?@!) and Amazon (Bezos?), for a simple obvious reason – Apple creates products; hardware, software and services that are not the reason for the criminal level of failure that is the Web2 business model, soon (ok, eventually) to be replaced by Web3.

watch now

Buying an Apple product or service in the future, using Bitcoin, Ether, Shiba or what have you, will not be a problematic transition. And I suspect that Web3 and the metaverse, if and when they gain momentum will get more of that juice from Apple products and features than from the three companies featuring a clown-car user-as-a-victim business model mentioned above.

The next phase of integration between the innovations already evolving in the vast ecosystem, tracing back to Steve Jobs visions, will remove any doubt that the future needs more power to get where its going, and at this time, only Apple can provide that kind of propulsion.

It’s less about hit products and pleasing purchasers, though that is always in play, and more about a roadmap to a higher functionality.

Lynxotic on YouTube

watch now

Hiding in Plain Site: the long game of endless iteration until ‘suddenly’ the future is here

With so many things that are dominating a public conversation of short-sighted voices and consensus herds, the biggest ‘breaking news’ stories in tech and innovation are, in reality, years, even decades in the making. Apple has literally dozens of these stories and the entire company is like one big moon-shot with Steve Jobs guiding us all toward the impossible, from above. Yet still seen as “boring”.

Mundane yet real and really amazing. How long was Apple silicon in development before it hit like a tsunami this year? Even “failure” is just a temporary setback if core principals are observed: iCloud, which started life as “mobile-me” is still imperfect and was nearly un-usable until 2019-2020, but is now beginning to bear fruit, hell, an orchard of fruit, as interconnected apps and app actions are updated and enhanced via cloud communication, machine learning and AI (a term Apple never uses since it carries with it Elon Musk’s famous warning label).

Look at the simplest and longest living apps, like “photos” – as with all other apps not anymore for iPhone or for mac, it is just photos everywhere. And the internal capabilities are growing while we sleep – incrementally in an almost scary way, more faces are being recognized and analyzed for search, objects and animals are not far behind.

Text is instantly read and cached for access not only in static photos but live. And these functions, and soon many more, can be accessed from other ecosystem apps, like, mail, messages, notes, contacts and so on.

Even with all the glitches there’s a clear path toward something…more.

Eventually the interactive multiplication of possible functions could be as mind bending as the percentage gains of the Shiba Inu coin (not the dog, sorry) in this year of insane crypto-awareness-expansion. And that is just and example, or a wild stab of an attempt to get to the heart of the insane growth curve.

While everyone is focused on circa. 2006 based concepts like a “killer app” or feature, the existing functions that we were all bored with in 2011 are coming-to like like a frankensteins monster of self animation, one that is ‘here to help’.

And it’s all just barely starting. The examples are so numerous that this would have to be a 500 page book to even begin to list them, however, and by the time page 423 would be written, it would be necessary to start at the beginning again, since everything would have already completely changed by then.

Tiny, minuscule case in point, but huge if you are a mac/ iPhone dual user (who isn’t?) – on the iPhone 13 Pro with iOS 15.2 (and soon on likely almost any iPhone with iOS15 updated to the current version) many of the web sites I have been trying to use for years (with Safari) but could not and had to switch to a laptop / desktop, such as for banking, business, media (WordPress and many others) are now unable to tell that I am on an iPhone (the request desktop site finally works on a critical mass of important sites) and landscape mode is becoming universal in more apps and functions.

watch now

Nothing works until everything does

Sounds like nothing? Try sitting in an airline seat and getting a text telling you that you need to do a bank transaction, or schedule a freight pickup, or publish a post on a professional app, and then imagine the stress of digging out your laptop or having to postpone that urgent task hours until landing? Or just grab the phone (in your pocket) and let it emulate your laptop until you are back on land, or until you feel like switching.

This may also all just seem like fan-boying, I know, and on a level it is. Perhaps getting let down by everything that Web2 promised, and facing a world of corrupt a-holes in-charge and little else across the vast tech landscape, makes even a touch of fairness and honest ingenuity turn nearly anyone into an over-night acolyte.

And reducing technical breakthroughs that we may all be depending on to solve doomsday-level extinction-threatening problems (and the 2022 edition of those is about to be revealed, stay tuned) to a commercial contest of bells & whistles is maddening to the nth degree.

We need optimism, a crazy dude like Elon Musk taking on Big Oil with S3XY electric cars, and Apple, hopefully, can join in that conversation. And all those upgrades are desperately needed. So if fan-boy energy is required, then so be it.

This year is the first year, ever, that upgrades feel like real, serious, upgrades. And the majority of them are “free”, with the only caveat being that they work waaaayyy better on the newest machine versions. Ok, yes, that’s a criticism and a “gotcha” from Apple, but the level of improvement or outright magical new functionality is so high it’s hard to beef on it.

It will take all of 2022 to absorb a fraction of the changes and upgrades that have already happened

And while that is going on an even bigger boatload of changes are in the pipeline. Not just the progress on nutzoid stuff like a self-driving Apple car with no steering wheel, or the rumored AR glasses with a mac level engine somehow hidden in the arms, but the repercussions of better faster machines with ever-evolving integration and interactive uses that push the whole digital content marketplace forward at an ever faster pace.

YouTube shorts (and of course TikTok) are already seeing million hit posts using cinematic mode aesthetics – oddly, since a pro-DSLR was capable for many years to enable this. It’s not the tech, it’s the ubiquity, the awareness that “cinematic” is a thing at all.

Who, outside of pro photographers, ever heard of a macro photograph or lens until every iPhone 13 pro owner had one in their pocket. And what of the fact that it might be used for do-it-yourself surgical evaluation (don’t try this at home!) and probably many other not yet known creative hacks?

https://lynxotic.com/iphone-13-pro-max-how-to-shoot-in-macro-mode-hint-steve-jobs-would-be-proud/

Since this article in it’s breathless adjective filled ranting, with only scant details, is clearly inadequate, please keep up with Lynxotic, Madison Santel, Wiley Simms and the whole gang as we try to get the facts, tips, tricks, hacks and inside dope out as fast as it changes (or as fast as we can, at least).

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Sustainable Energy Solutions and Climate Science and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

News, Observation, Politics

How Steve Bannon Has Exploited Google Ads to Monetize Extremism

Video December 3, 2021 Creative Commons

by Craig Silverman and Isaac Arnsdorf

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Almost a year ago, Google took a major step to ensure that its ubiquitous online ad network didn’t put money in the pocket of Steve Bannon, the indicted former adviser to Donald Trump. The company kicked Bannon off YouTube, which Google owns, after he called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci and urged Trump supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to overturn the presidential election results.

Google also confirmed to ProPublica that it has at times blocked ads from appearing on Bannon’s War Room website alongside individual articles that violate Google’s rules.

But Bannon found a loophole in Google’s policies that let him keep earning ad money on his site’s homepage.

Until Monday, the home page automatically played innocuous stock content, such as tips on how to protect your phone in winter weather or how to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile.

The content likely had no interest for War Room visitors, especially since it was interrupted every few seconds by ads. But the ads, supplied through Google’s network, came from such prominent brands as Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and even Harvard University.

Right below that video player was another that featured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which routinely portrays participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as patriots and airs false claims about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The video player running Google ads amid innocuous clips disappeared from Bannon’s website on Monday, after ProPublica inquired with Google, Bannon and advertisers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the player did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s policies were effective in preventing ads from ending up on sites with “harmful content.”

“We have strict policies that explicitly prohibit publishers from both promoting harmful content and providing inaccurate information about their properties, misrepresenting their identity, or sending unauthorized ad requests,” Aciman said. “These policies exist to protect both users and advertisers from abuse, fraud or disruptive ad experiences, and we enforce them through a mix of automated tools and human review. When we find publishers that violate these policies we stop ads from serving on their site.”

A spokesperson for Bannon, who was indicted this month for stonewalling Congress’ bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, declined to answer questions for this article.

Zach Edwards, the founder of Victory Medium, a consulting firm that advises companies on online advertising, said the digital ad industry, including Google, is rife with loopholes and bad behavior, and its complexity prevents advertisers from understanding what they’re funding. “A lot of times ad buyers just shrug their shoulders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.

Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acquiescence to it, Edwards added, “Nothing about this is aboveboard.”

The vast majority of online ads aren’t purchased through direct relationships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use automated ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auctions to automatically place ads in front of people who fit a brand’s target audience. As long as Google keeps the War Room website in its network, and as long as brands don’t specifically block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep collecting money. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 million visits a month, according to traffic tracker SimilarWeb.

And Google takes a cut of each dollar from ads it places on the War Room site.

“For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,” said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.”

Companies contacted by ProPublica said they didn’t intend to advertise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appearing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Harry Pierre, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, said the school is working with its ad buyer to update its list of unwanted websites. Adobe said its ad was a violation of its brand safety guidelines. “We worked with the ad partner to remove the ads from the site,” a spokesperson said.

DoorDash also blamed a third-party vendor. “DoorDash’s mission is to empower local communities and provide access to opportunity for all, and we stand against the spread of disinformation that undermines those principles,” the company said in a statement.

Spokespeople for Volvo did not respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, Google may have banned a different site affiliated with Bannon. Until recently, the site Populist Press earned money via Google’s ad network. The site, styled to imitate the Drudge Report, was prominently linked on the War Room homepage and draws roughly 5 million visits a month, according to SimilarWeb.

According to an online disclosure from a former advertising partner, Populist Press is affiliated with August Partners, a Colorado company registered to Amanda Shea, whose husband, Tim Shea, was a partner of Bannon’s in We Build the Wall initiative. Bannon and allies used We Build the Wall to solicit money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors accused Bannon, Tim Shea and other associates of misusing the money, and Trump pardoned Bannon before leaving office. An attorney for Tim Shea, who is awaiting trial, declined to comment, and Amanda Shea did not respond to a request for comment.

At some point during the week of Nov. 15, Populist Press stopped showing Google ads — and it stopped being promoted on the War Room homepage. Aciman, the Google spokesperson, declined to comment on whether Google had banned Populist Press, but said that the site “is not monetizing using our services.”

Bannon’s “War Room” podcast draws a massive audience, with more than 100 million total downloads across more than 1,000 episodes, available on platforms including Apple’s. A sort of far-right “Meet the Press,” it’s the go-to talk show for pro-Trump influencers and Republican hopefuls. Frequently using violent imagery, Bannon and his guests promote new ways of trying to overturn the election, such as demanding “audits” of the 2020 ballots. Since February, Bannon has inspired thousands to take over local-level Republican Party committees, unlocking influence over how elections are run from the ground up.

On his podcast in 2020, Bannon called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI director Chris Wray. On the eve of Jan. 6, Bannon said, “We’re on the point of attack” and “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” Bannon was also reportedly involved in the Trump team’s command center on the day of the riot, which is part of congressional investigators’ interest in his testimony and records. Since the insurrection, Bannon has taken up the cause of people held on charges related to the Capitol riot.

In addition to his podcast, Bannon has spun a complex web of political and business ventures. He co-founded a training academy for right-wing nationalists that got mired in a legal dispute with the Italian government over control of a medieval monastery near Rome. A media company he launched with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Bannon was arrested in 2020, was part of a $539 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September for illegally marketing digital currency. Before advising Trump, Bannon had a wide-ranging career in finance and movies, and his pardon from Trump lifted a $1.75 million lien against his house in Laguna Beach, California.

Bannon’s megaphone is not just influential. It’s also lucrative. His show and website have promoted fellow election fraud evangelist Mike Lindell’s MyPillow business, as well as a cryptocurrency investing newsletter called TheCryptoCapitalist. (The marketers of an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Bannon promoted were sued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in April. The chiropractor behind the treatment denies the government’s accusations.) The War Room site also contains ads from MGID, a network that places content ads that look like links to related articles and sometimes promote dubious health or financial products.

It’s not clear how much money Bannon makes from online ads. But industry data shows that the links placed by MGID are much less profitable than the video ads facilitated by Google. (MGID did not respond to a request for comment.)

The issue is that major brands likely have no idea that they’re advertising on the site of one of the biggest perpetrators of bogus election fraud claims. That disconnect between brands and where their ads and money end up is a failure of digital advertising and a concern for consumers, according to industry experts.

“Over the past few years, consumers have become really vocal about buying from brands that are aligned with their values,” said Jammi of Check My Ads. “When they find out a brand is funding toxic content, that matters to them.”

A similar scenario has played out with ads that aired during Bannon’s podcast airing on a right-wing website called Real America’s Voice. In March, for instance, an ad for prescription coupon company GoodRx appeared on Bannon’s show.

“We take the trust and reputation of our brand very seriously and have strict advertising standards in place, which include not participating in heavily editorialized news programming,” the company said in an emailed statement to ProPublica. “This placement was an error in the media buying policies.”

Bannon’s show also airs on Pluto TV, a streaming service owned by ViacomCBS that is available on Roku and other devices. This month, the show on Pluto featured ads for such major companies as Men’s Wearhouse, Lexus and Procter & Gamble, according to monitoring by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. As with the Google video ads on the War Room website, these ads are not placed directly, and companies were at a loss to explain why they had appeared on Bannon’s show. (Bannon’s podcast is available in the Google Podcasts app, but the company does not place ads in it.) A Lexus spokesperson said the company’s ad was briefly on Bannon’s site and taken down. A spokesperson for Procter & Gamble did not respond to a request for comment.

“Our marketing spend follows targeted customers, rather than choosing specific programs we want to appear alongside,” said Mike Stefanov, a spokesperson for Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse. “The team continually refines the criteria used, but the appearance of advertising on a specific program does not necessarily mean the company agrees with or endorses the views espoused.”

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Breaking News, Hot-Lynx

Breaking: All 3 men guilty of murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery

November 24, 2021 Eric Cho

A jury has found all three men charged in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery guilty of murder. Arbery was a 25- year old Black man killed last year while jogging in Brunswick, Georgia, and the murder sparked a heated national debate.

Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and Willian Bryan Jr. had all been charged. All three men had pleaded not guilty and and faced charges in addition to murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.

All men faced varying felony counts for Arbery’s murder. Gregory McMichael and Willian Bryan Jr. were found guilty on felony murder, while only Travis McMichael was found guilty on all charges, Travis being the man pulling the trigger.

“They’re Lying”: Lots of Climate Misinformation Detected During Testimony of Big Oil CEOs

Video November 20, 2021 Creative Commons

“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable.”

Fossil fuel executives who testified Thursday at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing focused on decades of coordinated industry misinformation refused to pledge that their companies will stop lobbying against efforts to combat the climate emergency driven largely by their businesses.

That joint refusal came in response to a challenge from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform—who at the end of the hearing announced subpoenas for documents the fossil fuel companies have failed to provide.

Earlier in the hearing, Maloney had asked if the Big Oil CEOs would affirm that their organizations “will no longer spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change.”

Big Oil CEOs unanimously refuse to pledge to Congress to "no longer spend any money directly or indirectly to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change".

What happened to being "committed to being part of the solution"? (Exxon CEO, 10 mins prior) #SlipperySix pic.twitter.com/nKBZNnnl1E
— Geoffrey Supran (@GeoffreySupran) October 28, 2021

Advocates for climate action pointed to the moment as yet another example of major polluters impeding planet-saving policy.

“The silence, non-answers, and repeated deflections from Big Oil’s Slippery Six exposed once and for all that the fossil fuel industry won’t back off its commitment to spreading climate disinformation and lobbying against climate action in order to protect their bottom line,” Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement.

Responding to @RepMaloney, none of today's witnesses unequivocally pledge to stop spending money, directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce global warming emissions #SlipperySix #ClimateDisinformation https://t.co/qeWMur9Xm3
— Kathy Mulvey (@kathy_mulvey) October 28, 2021

“For the first time ever, fossil fuel executives were confronted under oath with the evidence of their industry’s decadeslong efforts to deceive the American people about climate change,” Wiles continued. “They not only refused to accept responsibility for lying about the catastrophic effects of their fossil fuels—they refused to stop funding efforts to spread disinformation and oppose climate action.”

“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable,” he added. “Today’s hearing and the committee’s ongoing investigation are important steps in those efforts.”

The only real backdrop to today's hearing with Big Oil CEOS is:
These companies knew all about climate change in the 1980s and chose to lie about it systematically for decades, which is why we're in our current hideous political fix.
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) October 28, 2021

Maloney and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on the Environment, had threatened to subpoena the industry leaders—collectively dubbed the #SlipperySix—if they declined to join the hearing, entitled, “Fueling the Climate Crisis: Exposing Big Oil’s Disinformation Campaign to Prevent Climate Action.”

The historic event included testimony from four industry executives—ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell Oil president Gretchen Watkins—and leaders from industry trade groups: American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark.

Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, warned that “lawmakers should be wary of testimony from executives who have consistently put their industry’s bottom line over the health of the climate and the American people, no matter their rhetoric.”

Yep. We are seeing the fossil fuel savior framework all over the place. We need them, we have always needed them, and we will always need them. https://t.co/SltC52FPoy
— NaomiOreskes (@NaomiOreskes) October 28, 2021

Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, a pair of climate misinformation scholars at Harvard University, have warned of a “fossil fuel savior frame” that “downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in, and individualizes responsibility.”

Both Oreskes and Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn observed the presence of such framing during the hearing. Henn said that “it’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage-takers: ‘You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.”

It’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage takers: “You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.” #SlipperySix pic.twitter.com/mT8bPZJu8j
— Jamie Henn (@jamieclimate) October 28, 2021

The fossil fuel witnesses’ initial remarks and responses to lawmakers’ questions were full of industry talking points. They advocated for “market-based solutions” like carbon taxes while failing to offer specifics. They also highlighted carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology and hydrogen—both of which progressive green groups have denounced as “false solutions”—as key to reaching a “lower-carbon future.”

FACT CHECK: Exxon's CEO just said the International Energy Agency says the world will continue relying on fossil fuels.

That is false.

Earlier this year, the IEA said: "There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway."
— Clean Creatives (@cleancreatives) October 28, 2021

While suggesting a long-term need for oil and gas, the executives claimed to believe in anthropogenic climate change and said fossil fuel emissions “contribute” to global heating. Some critics called them out for using that term, rather than “cause” or “drive.”

First misleading ExxonMobil statement: GHG "can contribute to climate change." No, not "can contribute." They DRIVE climate change, and they come primarily from @exxonmobil 's primary product: oil and gas.https://t.co/BO6oAofbeA
— NaomiOreskes (@NaomiOreskes) October 28, 2021

Using the the word “contribute” rather than cause, saidHuffPost environment reporter Chris D’Angelo, “downplays/dismisses the science, which shows they are the primary driver… Frankly, it’s climate denial—the very topic of this hearing.”

After inquiring about how long all four executives had been in their current roles, the panel’s ranking member, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), asked whether they had ever signed off on a climate disinformation campaign. They all said no—which experts and activists promptly disputed.

There it is. https://t.co/dgvKk1W63b
— Geoffrey Supran (@GeoffreySupran) October 28, 2021

While progressives on the panel grilled the executives, Republicans repeatedly apologized to the CEOs for Democrats’ supposed “intimidation” efforts. Blasting the GOP lawmakers’ actions as “pathetic,” Henn said that “they really do see themselves as servants to Big Oil.”

.@RepGarretGraves (R-$759,995 oil and gas)
literally explains that his state of Louisiana is completely screwed by fossil-fueled global warming but he can't and won't do anything about it because oil & gas is so profitable. "Why would we stop?"#SlipperySix pic.twitter.com/uXzf23E3a9
— Brad Johnson SUBSCRIBE TO HILLHEAT.NEWS (@climatebrad) October 28, 2021

The panel’s GOP members also tried to redirect attention to planet-heating activities of other countries, particularly China, and complained about President Joe Biden’s move to block the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, even inviting Neal Crabtree, a welder who lost his job when the project was canceled, to testify.

Republicans trotting out as a political prop a witness who supposedly lost his job due to climate policy, as if they or Big Oil ever cared about workers.
Meanwhile real labor voices are speaking the truth, thank you @steelworkers: https://t.co/Fz0pk6q3wr
— Zorka Milin (@ZorkaMilin) October 28, 2021

“The GOP’s strategy at this hearing is clear: It will not attempt to claim Big Oil *didn’t* mislead on climate,” tweeted climate reporter Emily Atkin of the HEATED newsletter. “Instead, the GOP is claiming Democrats are wasting time by focusing on climate change, and that it isn’t important to ‘everyday Americans.'”

Thanking Atkin for spotlighting the Republicans’ strategy, ClimateVoice noted that new polling shows the U.S. public does care about the issue. According to survey results released this week, a majority of Americans see climate as a problem of high importance to them and support Congress passing legislation to increase reliance on clean electricity sources.

Maloney, in her closing remarks Thursday, lamented that the hearing featured “much of the denial and deflection” seen in recent decades. She also called out the companies for not turning over requested documents, refusing to “take responsibility” for their contributions to the climate crisis, and continuing to fund groups like API. The chair vowed that her committee will continue its investigation.

Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Sustainable Energy Solutions and Climate Science and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Apps, News, Observation, Politics, Tech

Leaked Facebook Documents Reveal How Company Failed on Election Promise

November 20, 2021 Creative Commons

CEO Mark Zuckerberg had repeatedly promised to stop recommending political groups to users to squelch the spread of misinformation

Leaked internal Facebook documents show that a combination of technical miscommunications and high-level decisions led to one of the social media giant’s biggest broken promises of the 2020 election—that it would stop recommending political groups to users.

The Markup first revealed on Jan. 19 that Facebook was continuing to recommend political groups—including some in which users advocated violence and storming the U.S. Capitol—in spite of multiple promises not to do so, including one made under oath to Congress.

The day the article ran, a Facebook team started investigating the “leakage,” according to documents provided by Frances Haugen to Congress and shared with The Markup, and the problem was escalated to the highest level to be “reviewed by Mark.” Over the course of the next week, Facebook employees identified several causes for the broken promise.

The company, according to work log entries in the leaked documents, was updating its list of designated political groups, which it refers to as civic groups, in real time. But the systems that recommend groups to users were cached on servers and users’ devices and only updated every 24 to 48 hours in some cases. The lag resulted in users receiving recommendations for groups that had recently been designated political, according to the logs.

That technical oversight was compounded by a decision Facebook officials made about how to determine whether or not a particular group was political in nature.

When The Markup examined group recommendations using data from our Citizen Browser project—a paid, nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically supply us data from their Facebook feeds—we designated groups as political or not based on their names, about pages, rules, and posted content. We found 12 political groups among the top 100 groups most frequently recommended to our panelists.

Facebook chose to define groups as political in a different way—by looking at the last seven days’ worth of content in a given group.

“Civic filter uses last 7 day content that is created/viewed in the group to determine if the group is civic or not,” according to a summary of the problem written by a Facebook employee working to solve the issue.

As a result, the company was seeing a “12% churn” in its list of groups designated as political. If a group went seven days without posting content the company’s algorithms deemed political, it would be taken off the blacklist and could once again be recommended to users.

Almost 90 percent of the impressions—the number of times a recommendation was seen—on political groups that Facebook tallied while trying to solve the recommendation problem were a result of the day-to-day turnover on the civic group blacklist, according to the documents.

Facebook did not directly respond to questions for this story.

“We learned that some civic groups were recommended to users, and we looked into it,” Facebook spokesperson Leonard Lam wrote in an email to The Markup. “The issue stemmed from the filtering process after designation that allowed some Groups to remain in the recommendation pool and be visible to a small number of people when they should not have been. Since becoming aware of the issue, we worked quickly to update our processes, and we continue this work to improve our designation and filtering processes to make them as accurate and effective as possible.”

Social networking and misinformation researchers say that the company’s decision to classify groups as political based on seven days’ worth of content was always likely to fall short.

“They’re definitely going to be missing signals with that because groups are extremely dynamic,” said Jane Lytvynenko, a research fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Looking at the last seven days, rather than groups as a whole and the stated intent of groups, is going to give you different results. It seems like maybe what they were trying to do is not cast too wide of a net with political groups.”

Many of the groups Facebook recommended to Citizen Browser users had overtly political names.

More than 19 percent of Citizen Browser panelists who voted for Donald Trump received recommendations for a group called Candace Owens for POTUS, 2024, for example. While Joe Biden voters were less likely to be nudged toward political groups, some received recommendations for groups like Lincoln Project Americans Protecting Democracy.

The internal Facebook investigation into the political recommendations confirmed these problems. By Jan. 25, six days after The Markup’s original article, a Facebook employee declared that the problem was “mitigated,” although root causes were still under investigation.

On Feb. 10, Facebook blamed the problem on “technical issues” in a letter it sent to U.S. senator Ed Markey, who had demanded an explanation.

In the early days after the company’s internal investigation, the issue appeared to have been resolved. Both Citizen Browser and Facebook’s internal data showed that recommendations for political groups had virtually disappeared.

But when The Markup reexamined Facebook’s recommendations in June, we discovered that the platform was once again nudging Citizen Browser users toward political groups, including some in which members explicitly advocated violence.

From February to June, just under one-third of Citizen Browser’s 2,315 panelists received recommendations to join a political group. That included groups with names like Progressive Democrats of Nevada, Michigan Republicans, Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders for President, 2020.

This article was originally published on The Markup By: Todd Feathers and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Big Tech and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Climate Solutions, Coronavirus, News, Observation

Climate Emergency, Vaccine Monopolies, and Fiscal Blindness: The Fight Against Inequality Is the Only Way Out

Video November 19, 2021 Creative Commons

Above: Photo Credit: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

If we are failing to meet our commitments, it is because of a handful of the richest people on the planet refuse to pay their taxes.

2021 will perhaps be remembered as the year when the great powers demonstrated their inability to assume their responsibilities to prevent the world from sinking into the abyss. I am thinking of course of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. After having used up the available atmospheric space to develop, the industrialized countries reaffirmed their refusal to honour this climate debt, even though global warming has become an existential issue.

And this is not all. I also refer to the calamitous management of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rich countries have monopolized and hoarded vaccines, and then locked themselves in surreal debates about third doses or the comparative merits of this or that vaccine. This strategy sows death and hinders economic recovery in vaccine-deprived countries, while making them fabulous playgrounds for the proliferation of more contagious, more deadly and more resistant variants that do not care about borders.

If we add the tax evasion of the ultra-rich using tax havens, we arrive at a total loss of US $483 billion.

Finally, I also want to talk about another agreement imposed by the Northern capitals, apparently more technical, but which symbolizes their selfishness and blindness: the one on the taxation of multinationals. Concluded in October, it is a gigantic undertaking, the first reform of the international tax system born in the 1920s, totally obsolete in a globalized economy. Thanks to its loopholes, multinationals cause States to lose some US $312 billion in tax revenue each year, according to the “State of Tax Justice in 2021” just published by the Tax Justice Network, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and Public Services International.

If we add the tax evasion of the ultra-rich using tax havens, we arrive at a total loss of US $483 billion. This is enough, the report reminds us, to cover more than three times the cost of a complete vaccination programme against Covid-19 for the entire world population. In absolute terms, rich countries lose the most tax resources. But this loss of revenue weighs more heavily on the accounts of the less privileged: it represents 10% of the annual health budget in industrialized countries, compared to 48% in developing ones. And make no mistake, the people responsible for this plundering are not the tropical islands lined with palm trees. They are mostly in Europe, first and foremost in the United Kingdom, which, with its network of overseas territories and “Crown Dependencies”, is responsible for 39% of global losses.

In this context, the agreement signed in October is a missed opportunity. Rich countries, convinced that complying with the demands of their multinationals was the best way to serve the national interest, put themselves behind the adoption of a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. The objective, in theory, is to put an end to the devastating tax competition between countries. Multinationals would no longer have an interest in declaring their profits in tax havens, since they would have to pay the difference with the global minimum tax.

In reality, at 15%, the rate is so low that a reform aimed at forcing multinationals to pay their fair share of taxes risks having the opposite effect, by forcing developing countries, where tax levels are higher, to lower them to match the rest of the world, causing a further drop in their revenues. It is no coincidence that Ireland, the European tax haven par excellence, has graciously complied with this new regulation.

Taxation is the very expression of solidarity. In this case, the absence of solidarity. A global tax of 15% on the profits of multinationals will only generate US $150 billion, which, according to the distribution criteria adopted, will go, as a priority, to rich countries. If ambition had prevailed, with a rate of 21% for example, we would have obtained an increase in tax revenues of US $250 billion. With a rate of 25%, tax revenues would have jumped by US $500 billion, as recommended by ICRICT, the Independent Commission on the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, of which I am a member, along with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman and Jayati Ghosh.

Making multinationals pay their fair share of taxes, fighting climate change, dealing with Covid-19 and future pandemics: in reality, everything is linked. While the virus is on the rise again with the arrival of winter in the northern hemisphere, the boomerang effect of the vaccine monopolies no longer needs to be shown or explained. As for the climate emergency, we know from a recent study by the World Inequality Lab that the map of carbon pollution is perfectly in line with that of economic disparities. The richest 10% of the world’s population emit nearly 48% of the world’s emissions—the richest 1% produce 17% of the total!—while the poorest half of the world’s population is responsible for only 12%.

This gap is obvious between countries, but also within them. In the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, the emissions levels of the poorest half of the population are already approaching the per capita targets for 2030. If we are failing to meet our commitments, it is because of a handful of the richest people, the same people who do not pay their taxes. It is time for our elites to realize that fighting inequality on all fronts—health, climate and tax—is our only way out. Otherwise, there is no salvation for humanity—and it is no longer a hyperbole.

Originally published on Common Dreams by EVA JOLY and republished under under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Apps, News, Observation, Politics, Social Media, Tech

Facebook Isn’t Telling You How Popular Right-Wing Content Is on the Platform

November 18, 2021 Creative Commons

Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns

In early November, Facebook published its Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report, the second in a series meant to rebut critics who said that its algorithms were boosting extremist and sensational content. The report declared that, among other things, the most popular informational content on Facebook came from sources like UNICEF, ABC News, or the CDC.

But data collected by The Markup suggests that, on the contrary, sensationalist news or viral content with little original reporting performs just as well as—and often better than—many mainstream sources when it comes to how often it’s seen by platform users.

Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample.

Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.

To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.

By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.

These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.

“They are very good at dancing with data,” Haugen told British lawmakers during a European tour.

When presented with The Markup’s findings and asked whether its own report’s statistics might be misleading or incomplete, Ariana Anthony, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an emailed statement, “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently. That said, we will continue to refine and improve these reports as we engage with academics, civil society groups, and researchers to identify the parts of these reports they find most valuable, which metrics need more context, and how we can best support greater understanding of content distribution on Facebook moving forward.”

Anthony did not directly respond to questions from The Markup on whether the company would release data on the total number of link views or the content that was seen most frequently on the platform.

The Battle Over Data

There are many ways to measure popularity on Facebook, and each tells a different story about the platform and what kind of content its algorithms favor.

For years, the startup CrowdTangle’s “engagement” metric—essentially measuring a combination of how many likes, comments, and other interactions any domain’s posts garner—has been the most publicly visible way of measuring popularity. Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016 and, according to reporting in The New York Times, has since largely tried to downplay data showing that ultra-conservative commentators like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro produce the most engaged-with content on the platform.

Shortly after the end of the second quarter of this year, Facebook came out with its first transparency report, framed in the introduction as a way to “provide clarity” on “the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.” (More accurately, the Q2 report was the first publicly released transparency report, after a Q1 report was, The New York Times reported, suppressed for making the company look bad and only released later after details emerged.)

For the Q2 and Q3 reports, Facebook turned to a specific metric, known as “reach,” to quantify most-viewed domains. For any given domain, say youtube.com or twitter.com, reach represents the number of unique Facebook accounts that had at least one post containing a link to a tweet or a YouTube video in their news feeds during the quarter. On that basis, Facebook found that those domains, and other mainstream staples like Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok, had wide reach.

When applying this metric, The Markup found similar results in our Citizen Browser data, as detailed in depth in our methodology. But this calculation ignores a reality for a lot of Facebook users: bombardment with content from the same site.

Citizen Browser data shows, for instance, that from July through September of this year, articles from far-right news site Newsmax appeared in the feed of a 58-year-old woman in New Mexico 1,065 times—but under Facebook’s calculation of reach, this would count as one single unit. Similarly, a 37-year-old man in New Hampshire was shown 245 unique links to satirical posts from The Onion, which appeared in his feed more than 500 times—but again, he would have been counted just once by Facebook’s method.

When The Markup instead counted each appearance of a domain on a user’s feed during Q3—e.g., Newsmax as 1,065 instead of 1—we found that polarizing, partisan content jumped in the performance rankings. Indeed, the same trend is true of the domains in Facebook’s Q2 report, for which analysis can be found in our data repository on GitHub.

We found that outlets like The Daily Wire, BuzzFeed’s viral content arm, Fox News, and Yahoo News jumped in the popularity rankings when we used the impressions metric. Most striking, The Western Journal—which, similarly to The Daily Wire, does little original reporting and instead repackages stories to fit with right-wing narratives—improved its ranking by almost 200 places.

“To me these findings raise a number of questions,” said Jane Lytvynenko, senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center.

“Was Facebook’s research genuine, or was it part of an attempt to change the narrative around top 10 lists that were previously put out? It matters a lot whether a person sees a link one time or if they see it 20 times, and to not account for that in a report, to me, is misleading,” Lytvynenko said.

Using a narrow range of data to gauge popularity is suspect, said Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

“It just goes against everything we teach and know about advertising to focus on one [metric] rather than the other,” she said.

In fact, when it comes to the core business model of selling space to advertisers, Facebook encourages them to consider yet another metric, “frequency”—how many times to show a post to each user on average—when trying to optimize brand messaging.

Data from Citizen Browser shows that domains seen with high frequency in the Facebook news feed are mostly news domains, since news websites tend to publish multiple articles over the course of a day or week. But Facebook’s own content report does not take this data into account.

“[This] clarifies the point that what we need is independent access for researchers to check the math,” said Justin Hendrix, co-author of a report on social media and polarization and editor at Tech Policy Press, after reviewing The Markup’s data.

This article was originally published on The Markup By: Corin Faife and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Elon Musk, News, Observation, Politics, Tech

‘Inappropriate Giveaway of Galactic Proportions’: Outrage Over $10 Billion Taxpayer Gift to Bezos Space Obsession

Video November 18, 2021 Creative Commons

“No,” said Sen Bernie Sanders. “Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.”

Progressives on Wednesday slammed what they called a proposed $10 billion handout to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world’s first multi-centibillionaire—in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act as a “giveaway of galactic proportions” in the face of growing wealth inequality and the inability of U.S. lawmakers to pass a sweeping social and climate spending package.

“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands.”

According to Defense News, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to merge the $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA)—aimed largely at countering the rise of China—with next year’s NDAA, which would authorize up to $778 billion in military spending. That’s $37 billion more than former President Donald Trump’s final defense budget and $25 billion more than requested by President Joe Biden. The NDAA includes a $10 billion subsidy to Bezos’ Blue Origin space exploration company.

“Providing Jeff Bezos with $10 billion of taxpayer money would be an inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), said in a statement Wednesday.

STATEMENT on Blue Origin subsidy in #NDAA: “Until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects” –@sappelbaum https://t.co/LOppvCfXdc pic.twitter.com/t30afGKQzc
— RWDSU (@RWDSU) November 17, 2021

“Jeff Bezos shouldn’t receive taxpayer subsidies for his personal projects—period,” he continued. “In at least two recent years, one of the richest people on the planet paid no income tax; yet he then demands billions in taxpayer funds for a project that’s already been awarded to another company. This is the height of hubris.”

“Rather than waste $10 billion on a redundant space contract for Bezos, that money could be used to adequately fund Social Security Disability, Medicare and Medicaid, and the food stamps that many of his own employees at Amazon and elsewhere have to rely on to make ends meet,” Appelbaum said.

“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands,” he added. “Furthermore, until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects.”

No. Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) November 16, 2021

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has condemned the NDAA for containing $52 billion in “corporate welfare” for Big Tech. Explaining why he would vote against the NDAA, Sanders said Tuesday that “combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion—with very little scrutiny.”

“Meanwhile,” he added, “the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet. As a nation, we need to get our priorities right.”

Originally published in Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States,” said an Afghan protest organizer in Kabul over the weekend.

Related Articles:

“Climate change is here and now,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. “If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn’t enough to make people realize that, I don’t know what is.”

Related Articles:

“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”

Related Articles:

Domestic standing is crucial focus

Burying dissent

What’s the payoff?

Related Articles:

Warmer air, more moisture

The warming ocean plays a role

The Arctic influences the snow pattern, too

What’s ahead?

The wealth-hoarding by ultrarich families would be equivalent to over four Build Back Better plans

Related Articles:

One critic said the company’s explanation for the coming price hikes amounts to “word salad to hide corporate greed.”‘

Related Articles:

Data-driven personalized ads are the lifeblood of the internet. To a growing number of lawmakers, they’re also nefarious

What Will the European Parliament’s New Regulations Do?

How Has Big Tech Responded?

What’s Happening in the U.S.?

Related Articles:

Related Articles:

What should we know about Ukrainians’ relationship with Russia?

What do Ukrainians want?

Why is Putin threatening to invade Ukraine?

What is Putin’s end game?

Why would the US want to get involved in this conflict?

Related Articles:

“The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said in a new interview.

Related Articles:

Metaverse

Web3

Social audio

NFT

Decentralization

DAO

Stonks

GameFi

Altcoin

FSD BETA

Fabs

Net zero

Related Articles:

“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk.”

Related Articles:

What are the institutions—public and civic—that could roll back this fast-approaching U.S.-style fascism with the snarling visage of serial criminal and constitutional violator, Donald J. Trump?

Lots of talk about the future is right on cue, but the next phase may lurch in an unexpected direction

Hiding in Plain Site: the long game of endless iteration until ‘suddenly’ the future is here

Sometimes what sounds like nothing is a really big something, like the elephant looking for the blind men

Nothing works until everything does

It will take all of 2022 to absorb a fraction of the changes and upgrades that have already happened

Related Articles:

“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable.”

Related Articles:

CEO Mark Zuckerberg had repeatedly promised to stop recommending political groups to users to squelch the spread of misinformation

Related Articles:

If we are failing to meet our commitments, it is because of a handful of the richest people on the planet refuse to pay their taxes.

Related Articles:

Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns

The Battle Over Data

Related Articles:

“No,” said Sen Bernie Sanders. “Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.”

Related Articles:

News: Climate Solutions, AI, Books, Entertainment and more