#Conference Grants 2022

[9jacompass]

The Association Of Commonwealth Universities Early Career Conference Grants 2023-Apply Now

The Association Of Commonwealth Universities Early Career Conference Grants 2023-Apply Now

Commonwealth Universities -Applications are invited from emerging academics taking part in conferences to apply for the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) Early Career Conference Grants which will enable them to share research, learn about latest developments and build valuable professional networks. The ACU Early Career Conference Grants help to ensure that more emerging researchers…

[reasonsforhope]

Holy crap, I didn't think Biden would be able to get the Climate Corps established without Congress. This is SUCH fantastic news.

--

"After being thwarted by Congress, President Joe Biden will use his executive authority to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps that will serve as a major green jobs training program.

In an announcement Wednesday, the White House said the program will employ more than 20,000 young adults who will build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and do other work to boost conservation and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.

The climate corps had been proposed in early versions of the sweeping climate law approved last year but was jettisoned amid strong opposition from Republicans and concerns about cost.

Democrats and environmental advocacy groups never gave up on the plan and pushed Biden in recent weeks to issue an executive order authorizing what the White House now calls the American Climate Corps.

“After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that has led the push for a climate corps.

With the new corps “and the historic climate investments won by our broader movement, the path towards a Green New Deal is beginning to become visible,” Prakash said...

...Environmental activists hailed the new jobs program, which is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, as part of the New Deal...

Lawmakers Weigh In

More than 50 Democratic lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had also encouraged Biden to create a climate corps, saying in a letter on Monday that “the climate crisis demands a whole-of-government response at an unprecedented scale.”

The lawmakers cited deadly heat waves in the Southwest and across the nation, as well as dangerous floods in New England and devastating wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, among recent examples of climate-related disasters.

Democrats called creation of the climate corps “historic” and the first step toward fulfilling the vision of the Green New Deal.

“Today President Biden listened to the (environmental) movement, and he delivered with an American Climate Corps,” a beaming Markey said at a celebratory news conference outside the Capitol.

“We are starting to turn the green dream into a green reality,” added Ocasio-Cortez, who co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation with Markey four years ago.

“You all are changing the world,” she told young activists.

Program Details and Grant Deadlines

The initiative will provide job training and service opportunities to work on a wide range of projects, including restoring coastal wetlands to protect communities from storm surges and flooding; clean energy projects such as wind and solar power; managing forests to prevent catastrophic wildfires; and energy efficient solutions to cut energy bills for consumers, the White House said.

Creation of the climate corps comes as the Environmental Protection Agency launches a $4.6 billion grant competition for states, municipalities and tribes to cut climate pollution and advance environmental justice. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants are funded by the 2022 climate law and are intended to drive community-driven solutions to slow climate change.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the grants will help “communities so they can chart their own paths toward the clean energy future.”

The deadline for states and municipalities to apply is April 1, with grants expected in late 2024. Tribes and territories must apply by May 1, with grants expected by early 2025."

-via Boston.com, September 21, 2023

[fangirl-dot-com]

Is That Subway Surfers? - 1k Special

GUYS WE ARE OVER 1K FOLLOWERS! I NEVER EXPECTED THIS TO HAPPEN OH MY WORD

It's only been, what, two months since I started "To Do is to Dare"? That's crazy!!

So for celebration, here is a little backstory on how Arthur and Reader met and a little look into her early Dams days with him and Ollie!

TAG LIST IS CLOSED!

Thanks for all the love!!

December 2022

You hung your head as Vito went over the details one more time. 

“Ok, kid. Dams wants to sign you for your last year. And you’ll be partnering with Arthur Leclerc. You know him?” You manager questioned as he held his iPad. 

You only rolled your eyes. “I know of him. Isn’t his brother the Ferrari driver? Uh, Charles?” 

Vito nodded at your limited knowledge. “Bingo. Dams thinks that the two of you have similar driving styles and that he’ll push you to win the championship.” 

You looked down at your iPad that was in your hands. Arthur’s smiley face stared back at you. A list of his credentials were to the left of the picture. You looked back up at your manager. You were thankful for another chance, but you were skeptical. 

“Prema didn’t want to keep me for one more year?” You let out a scoff at the end for a good measure. The team that helped you through Formula 3 and your first two years of Formula 2 suddenly dropped you after a few mistakes: mistakes that honestly shouldn’t have happened. 

Vito’s hand dropped on your shoulder and he crouched down to eyelevel. He gave you a sympathetic smile. He knew you were nervous of the unknown and he wished Lorenzo could have been here for you. But, he was trying his best. 

“Kid.” You locked eyes with him, tears in your lash line. “I know it’s scary, but give the team a chance. This could be it.” 

It meaning your last chance to win the championship and maybe get a foot in the door for a future Formula 1 seat. Your next best bet would be to get a test driver seat for McLaren or even Red Bull. But your chances were slim as most of the top teams already had who they wanted with several year contracts in place. 

You put the iPad down and took multiple breaths. If you were to give the ok, you’d be meeting your future teammate very quickly. 

A trying smile formed on your face. “I think I’ll miss Ollie though. He was a cool kid.”

Vito granted you with another eyeroll. “You speak as if you’re like 5 years older than him.”

Realistically speaking, you were almost two years older than the British driver. But, his “childish” antics made you feel as though you really had to watch out for him. 

Vito continued, “And that kid loves you to death. You just need to get over your thoughts of you being unlovable.” 

Your head swayed back and forth and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s go meet this, uh, French dude?”

“He’s Monégasque.”

You clicked your tongue. “Ah.” 

Vito packed up his bag and the iPads and led you out of your small Nice apartment. The drive to the headquarters wasn’t a long one. You just spent the majority of it watching small raindrops fall down your window, hoping that the smaller one would win the imaginary race that was going on in your head. 

“Kid, we her-…” 

“DANG IT YOU SHOULD HAVE WON!” Your fist hit the door. You suddenly froze and turned to look at Vito, who was already staring at you. The two of you then suddenly burst into laughter. It took you two a while to calm down, but you eventually made your way into the large building. 

The hallways were a bit confusing, but you and Vito finally made it to the conference room. Sadly though, the two of you were the last ones there. A blond boy was sitting in one of the plush chairs, looking intently at his phone. 

You guessed he didn’t hear you come in, as you were able to take a seat right next to him. Your eyes barely glanced over, before you saw him playing your favorite mobile game. 

“Is that Subway Surfers?” you whispered as you watched Vito introduce himself to the other adults in the room. 

Arthur practically jumped out of his chair at the new voice right in his ear. His wide green eyes were met with you, trying not to laugh too hard. 

He stuttered out in broken French, “Je – je suis vraiment desole. Je ne savais pas que tu etais la et j’aurais du faire attention, et oh mon dieu, tu es vraiment jolie et maintenant je divague...” 

(I – I am so sorry. I didn’t know you were there and I should have been paying attention, and oh my gosh you’re really pretty and now I’m rambling…)

You only stared as he was falling over his words. You put a hand on his leg and he shut up quickly. 

“First off, I legit didn’t understand a word you said. And second, whatever it is, it’s fine! I shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that.” You flashed a bright smile at him.

Arthur tried once again, in English with a heavy accent, “I, uh, am sorry. I should have been paying attention. I’m Arthur.” 

He held out his hand for you to take. Your hand grasped his and you shook it. 

“Hi Arthur, I’m Y/n. It’s nice to meet my teammate for this season.” 

He flashed you an even larger smile. In your mind, you thought he was adorable. He let out a small laugh as he turned off his phone. 

“It was Subway Surfers. I love the game.” 

“So do I! It’s so much fun.” 

“Are you two done flirting already or can we begin to talk contracts?” Vito’s voice pulled the two of you from your little bubble. With sheepish smiles from both of you, you turned your attention to the CEO. 

The meeting was a few hours long, and by the end of it, you were starving. As you were leaving, Arthur grasped your hand, which made you stop. Vito just calmly said that he’d be waiting in the car. 

“Yes?” You cocked your head as you looked up at the taller boy. 

He had a shy smile as he looked down at you. “Would you like to join me and my friend for dinner? We’re just going to a local restaurant and it’s not too far.” 

As your brain was trying to come up with an excuse, Vito yelled from where he was standing by the vehicle. “She would love to! Just have her give you her address. Have fun kid!” 

And with that, he got into the car and drove away. All while you were standing next to Arthur with your mouth open. You quickly closed it to not look like a loser. 

“Uh, I guess I’ll come with?” It came out more like a question, but Arthur just went with it. He led you to his car and you were surprised it wasn’t a decked out Ferrari. 

You only smirked. “Not a Ferrari guy?” 

Arthur rolled his eyes as he got in the driver side. “That would unfortunately be my brother. I might be part of the academy, but we don’t get any fancy treatment.”

You snorted at that. “Yeah, I’ve never actually been a test driver for any team. I have my own management and everything.” 

Arthur raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask anything else. 

The ride to the restaurant was fairly quiet and not awkward. Around halfway through, he had finally turned on the radio. 

And although Arthur didn’t drive a fancy car, he was not above valet parking. 

“Hold on,” he told you as he quickly got out and skirted around the front to open your door. You looked up at him with a shy smile. 

“What a gentleman.” He hand firmly but gently grasped yours as he led you through the doorway. 

“My maman would have my head. Ah, there’s my friend.” Arthur pointed to a table near the back. 

But to your surprise, you definitely recognized the brunet that looked bored to death.

“Ollie!” you called out. 

The Brit’s head whipped up at the sound of your voice. A giant smile formed on his face as he stood up. You quickly brought him into a hug. 

“I didn’t know you knew Arthur?” He questioned as the three of you sat down. Arthur called the waiter over so that you could get a drink. 

You looked over at the green-eyed driver. “Hmmm, just met today actually.” 

Arthur sipped his water. “We’re teammates for this year.” 

Ollie looked back and forth, ideas forming in his mind. But, he wouldn’t be telling the ideas to you any time soon. 

“What is that smirk for,” you questioned. 

“You totally scared him when you met him. Didn’t you?” 

“You scared him too?” 

Oh, boy were you screwed for the next years. 

(What you didn’t know was that these boys would become two of you very best friends. And maybe one of them would become something more.)  

y/n.89 has posted

y/n.89 am I interrupting something? tagged: olliebearman and arthur_leclerc

liked by y/n_nation, y/n-fan, y/n_is_on_top, and 10,839 others

olliebearman no comment?

prema_y/n ahaha prema racers back together

y/n_fan well, until prema dropped her... y/nxarthur well, now we get ollie AND arthur content so I'm not complaining

arthur_leclerc btw I wiped it right off

olliebearman YOU TAKE THAT BACK y/n.89 girls, girls, girls, let's not fight

prema_trio your honor, I love them

best_rookie_y/n anyone else here from 2024 and is here to see how little y/n was

olliebearman has posted

olliebearman who's the third-wheel now hmmmm? tagged: y/n.89 and arthur_leclerc

liked by premaracing, olliebear2, y/n_lover29, and 15,983 others

y/n.89 still you?

y/n&friends they are so hot

ollie_is_my_guy I could take them (but not in a fight)

olliebearman he is not THAT funny

arthur_leclerc yes I am y/n.89 ollie is a certified Arthur haterrrrr olliebearman then you'd be a certified Arthur loverrrrrr y/n.89 shut UP

y/n_nation our girl and her boys :D

arthur_leclerc has posted

arthur_leclerc why are we always at restaurants? tagged: y/n.89 and olliebearman

liked by y/n.89, olliebearman, charles_leclerc, and 58,284 others

y/n.89 because we like food (and none of us can actually cook)

charles_leclerc felt arthur_leclerc go away

thur_thur_92 I wonder who won

olliebearman me arthur_leclerc me y/n.89 wrong, it was me

best_trio_2023 they all give chaotic gen z energy and I am here for it!

y/n_loves_ME its the fact that Arthur is technically the oldest cause he's 22 right now while y/n is 19 and Ollie just turned 18

y/n.89 yet he still acts like a child

rb_y/n we need this trio to get back together in 2024 ASAP

y/n.89 has posted

y/n.89 they watch kung-fu panda ONCE tagged: olliebearman and arthur_leclerc

liked by y/n_nation, f2_fanatic, prema_trio22, and 19,274 others

y/n_updates BAHAHAHAHA cause this is so true for everyone

arthur_leclerc I am the Dragon Warrior

olliebearman um, no, you're more of a Master Oogway y/n.89 I am definitely the dragon warrior, ollie you can be the goose y/n's-favorite HELLO?

f2-fanatic I'm going to miss this group in a few months since y/n has to leave after the championship, and I don't know if Arthur is confirmed for next year :(

f2-trio SHHHHHH WE DON'T SPEAK OF THAT

y/n.89 I look amazing for once

y/n_nation ONE MORE RACE AND YOU GET THAT CHAMPIONSHIP GIRL!!

y/n.89 with olliebearman and arthur_leclerc has posted

y/n.89 wherever we go, we'll somehow end up back together

liked by damsracing, fredderikvasti, y/n_nation and 11,783 others

y.n_ON-TOP I'm going to miss this

olliebearman this was actually sweet?

arthur_lecerlc yeah, weird. are you feeling ok? y/n.89 no, this is more like I feel threatened? you both follow me everywhere

rookie_y/n I know she's done in f2, but where will she go after?

y/n'sfavperson as of right now, we don't know. basically all doors for f1 are closed y/n_updates well, she was wanting to possibly be a testing driver for McLaren but rumor has it that they just side Bianca Bustemante

vito_official can't say that I'll 100 percent miss the three of you annoying me all the time, but I will miss the three of you

olliebearman I KNEW YOU LIKED US arthur_leclerc LETS GO vito_official I take it back? y/n.89 no

y/n4f1 we just need a miracle right now - for her to somehow get into f1

f1_news GUYS DID YOU JUST SEE??? CHECO JUST ANNOUNCED HIS RETIREMENT

TAG LIST: @fionaschicken @glitterquadricorn @laura-naruto-fan1998 @treehouse-mouse @sam-is-lost @kagatinkita @fangirl125reader @megatrilss1885 @myxticmoon @angsthology @cmleitora @agent-curt-mega @graciewrote @ashy-kit @slutofmultifandom @aexitizen @sugarvibez @vellicora @thatgirlthatreadswattpad @cashtons-wife @aeh2 @hoetel-manager @xcharlottemikaelsonx @jayda12 @cassie0sstuff @ilove-tswizzle @justme2042 @itsjustkhaos @nikfigueiredo @stopeatread @cha-hot @sadg3 @iloveyou3000morgan @s4turnsl0ver @alessioayla @torchbearerkyle @leptitlu @awekbachira @shreks-sugar-daddy @v1naco @stan-josie @mellowarcadefun @badassturtle13 @beskardroids @callisposts @poppyalice2001 @juniper-july19

[opencommunion]

"My analysis challenges a number of ideas, some mentioned above, common in many Western feminist writings:

Gender categories are universal and timeless and have been present in every society at all times. This idea is often expressed in a biblical tone, as if to suggest that 'in the beginning there was gender.'

Gender is a fundamental organizing principle in all societies and is therefore always salient. In any given society, gender is everywhere.

There is an essential, universal category 'woman' that is characterized by the social uniformity of its members.

The subordination of women is a universal.

The category 'woman' is precultural, fixed in historical time and cultural space in antithesis to another fixed category—'man.'

... Merely by analyzing a particular society with gender constructs, scholars create gender categories. To put this another way: by writing about any society through a gendered perspective, scholars necessarily write gender into that society. Gender, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. The idea that in dealing with gender constructs one necessarily contributes to their creation is apparent in Judith Lorber's claim that 'the prime paradox of gender is that in order to dismantle the institution, you must first make it very visible.' In actuality, the process of making gender visible is also a process of creating gender. Thus, scholarship is implicated in the process of gender-formation."

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) ~

"Feminist anthropologists of racialized peoples in the Americas tend not to think about the concept of gender when they use the term as a classificatory instrument, they take its meaning for granted. This, I claim, is an example of a colonial methodology. Though the claim that gender, the concept, applies universally is not explicitly stated, it is implied. In both group and conference conversations I have heard the claim that 'gender is everywhere,' meaning, technically, that sexual difference is socialized everywhere. The claim, implied or explicit, is that all societies organize dimorphic sexuality, reproductive sexuality, in terms of dichotomous roles that are hierarchically arranged and normatively enforced. That is, gender is the normative social conceptualization of sex, the biological fact of the matter. ... The critique of the binary has not been accompanied by an unveiling of the relation between colonization, race, and gender, nor by an analysis of gender as a colonial introduction of control of the humanity of the colonized, nor by an understanding that gender obscures rather than uncovers the organization of life among the colonized. The critique has favored thinking of more sexes and genders than two, yet it has not abandoned the universality of gender arrangements. ... Understanding the group with gender on one’s mind, one would see gender everywhere, imposing an order of relations uncritically as if coloniality had been completely successful both in erasing other meanings and people had totally assimilated, or as if they had always had the socio-political-economic structure that constitutes and is constituted by what Butler calls the gender norm inscribed in the organization of their relations. Thus, the claim 'There is gender everywhere' is false ... since for a colonized, non-Western people to have their socio-political-economic relations regulated by gender would mean that the conceptual and structural framework of their society fits the conceptual and structural framework of colonial or neocolonial and imperialist societies. ... Why does anyone want to insist on finding gender among all the peoples of our planet? What is good about the concept that we would want to keep it at the center of our 'liberation'?" María Lugones, "Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology," in Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (2022)

[mariacallous]

The European Union today agreed on the details of the AI Act, a far-reaching set of rules for the people building and using artificial intelligence. It’s a milestone law that, lawmakers hope, will create a blueprint for the rest of the world.

After months of debate about how to regulate companies like OpenAI, lawmakers from the EU’s three branches of government—the Parliament, Council, and Commission—spent more than 36 hours in total thrashing out the new legislation between Wednesday afternoon and Friday evening. Lawmakers were under pressure to strike a deal before the EU parliament election campaign starts in the new year.

“The EU AI Act is a global first,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on X. “[It is] a unique legal framework for the development of AI you can trust. And for the safety and fundamental rights of people and businesses.”

The law itself is not a world-first; China’s new rules for generative AI went into effect in August. But the EU AI Act is the most sweeping rulebook of its kind for the technology. It includes bans on biometric systems that identify people using sensitive characteristics such as sexual orientation and race, and the indiscriminate scraping of faces from the internet. Lawmakers also agreed that law enforcement should be able to use biometric identification systems in public spaces for certain crimes.

New transparency requirements for all general purpose AI models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT, and stronger rules for “very powerful” models were also included. “The AI Act sets rules for large, powerful AI models, ensuring they do not present systemic risks to the Union,” says Dragos Tudorache, member of the European Parliament and one of two co-rapporteurs leading the negotiations.

Companies that don’t comply with the rules can be fined up to 7 percent of their global turnover. The bans on prohibited AI will take effect in six months, the transparency requirements in 12 months, and the full set of rules in around two years.

Measures designed to make it easier to protect copyright holders from generative AI and require general purpose AI systems to be more transparent about their energy use were also included.

“Europe has positioned itself as a pioneer, understanding the importance of its role as a global standard setter,” said European Commissioner Thierry Breton in a press conference on Friday night.

Over the two years lawmakers have been negotiating the rules agreed today, AI technology and the leading concerns about it have dramatically changed. When the AI Act was conceived in April 2021, policymakers were worried about opaque algorithms deciding who would get a job, be granted refugee status or receive social benefits. By 2022, there were examples that AI was actively harming people. In a Dutch scandal, decisions made by algorithms were linked to families being forcibly separated from their children, while students studying remotely alleged that AI systems discriminated against them based on the color of their skin.

Then, in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, dramatically shifting the debate. The leap in AI’s flexibility and popularity triggered alarm in some AI experts, who drew hyperbolic comparisons between AI and nuclear weapons.

That discussion manifested in the AI Act negotiations in Brussels in the form of a debate about whether makers of so-called foundation models such as the one behind ChatGPT, like OpenAI and Google, should be considered as the root of potential problems and regulated accordingly—or whether new rules should instead focus on companies using those foundational models to build new AI-powered applications, such as chatbots or image generators.

Representatives of Europe’s generative AI industry expressed caution about regulating foundation models, saying it could hamper innovation among the bloc’s AI startups. “We cannot regulate an engine devoid of usage,” Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI company Mistral, said last month. “We don’t regulate the C [programming] language because one can use it to develop malware. Instead, we ban malware.” Mistral’s foundation model 7B would be exempt under the rules agreed today because the company is still in the research and development phase, Carme Artigas, Spain's Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, said in the press conference.

The major point of disagreement during the final discussions that ran late into the night twice this week was whether law enforcement should be allowed to use facial recognition or other types of biometrics to identify people either in real time or retrospectively. “Both destroy anonymity in public spaces,” says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at digital rights group Access Now. Real-time biometric identification can identify a person standing in a train station right now using live security camera feeds, he explains, while “post” or retrospective biometric identification can figure out that the same person also visited the train station, a bank, and a supermarket yesterday, using previously banked images or video.

Leufer said he was disappointed by the “loopholes” for law enforcement that appeared to have been built into the version of the act finalized today.

European regulators’ slow response to the emergence of social media era loomed over discussions. Almost 20 years elapsed between Facebook's launch and the passage of the Digital Services Act—the EU rulebook designed to protect human rights online—taking effect this year. In that time, the bloc was forced to deal with the problems created by US platforms, while being unable to foster their smaller European challengers. “Maybe we could have prevented [the problems] better by earlier regulation,” Brando Benifei, one of two lead negotiators for the European Parliament, told WIRED in July. AI technology is moving fast. But it will still be many years until it’s possible to say whether the AI Act is more successful in containing the downsides of Silicon Valley’s latest export.

[zinniajones]

These "expert" pediatricians were paid by a far-right legal group to come up with evidence to attack the WPATH transgender standards of care

What this is: Leaked documents show the anti-LGBT legal group Alliance Defending Freedom paying manufactured experts to attack WPATH’s transgender standards of care, asking them to find evidence for harmful anti-trans myths that they knew were baseless and unsubstantiated. This is an original finding and report by Zinnia Jones (she/her), a transgender Florida resident of 11 years whose access to HRT is now jeopardized by the enactment of state law and policy based on work from these same experts.

Detailed summary: From 2019 onward, states across the US have been faced with an intensely active wave of reused anti-trans experts, recurring characters who keep repeating the same spurious arguments against gender-affirming care in court cases, legislatures, and other policy bodies. Where did they come from, and why did this start happening?

Due to the Florida-based anti-LGBT hate group American College of Pediatricians choosing to set one of their Google Drive folders to be publicly viewable by anyone, files were released this month showing the contents of their staff’s communications and other working notes over several years.

These documents included records of the Alliance Defending Freedom - another hate group who are also responsible for bringing the mifepristone case with ACP as a plaintiff - approaching ACP's leaders in 2018 and 2019 to offer them a grant of $10,000 or more. The ADF wanted the pediatricians “to draft a white paper that refutes the WPATH Standards of Care”, “for use in litigation and should also benefit many other allies at State and Federal Level”.

ACP’s president Quentin Van Meter and executive director Michelle Cretella promptly got to work on this “Special Project”, and the ADF hosted expert witness workshops at ACP's conferences. ACP members including Van Meter went on to present anti-trans testimony in several ADF-litigated cases and ADF-involved trans youth care bans.

In May 2022, Van Meter authored a sham report for Florida Medicaid to justify their trans coverage exclusion, mostly drawing from previous ACP position statements; court filings later revealed Michelle Cretella was recommended by the Florida governor’s office, and she pointed the way to all the other anti-trans experts hired by Florida in 2022 to support the Medicaid exclusion of transition care.

One notable document found in the ACP’s drive contains “Transgender Research Requests”, with the ADF asking Cretella and other ACP leaders to “substantiate” now-commonplace anti-trans talking points. These included bizarre claims by the ADF such as “it is normal during adolescence for children to go through a phase when they identify (to some degree) with the opposite sex”, and “For those who have undergone hormone therapy and genital change surgery, a paper that says they are no happier (and perhaps worse off if the research supports it)”.

The ADF was asking this anti-trans group to come up with anything that could support the arguments they were already planning to make.

This appears to be one of the very sites where those baseless myths about suicide, social contagion and other supposed harms, now regularly repeated in court cases and testimony and uncritically accepted by the mainstream right wing, were conceived and gestated.

These same experts then substantially reused these work products in their reports for Florida Medicaid, a public health agency whose accepted standards determination process is supposed to be a transparent and open-ended evaluation of peer-reviewed medical evidence.

Altogether, these documents appear to demonstrate a paid smear by a hate group and right-wing law firm against a leading professional transgender healthcare organization following the best available evidence and medical practices, as well as misconduct on the part of ACP experts who reused this work in their reports for a Florida public health agency.

(asks are open)

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

In a First, Brazilian City Grants Legal Rights to Waves

The city of Linhares, Brazil, has granted legal personhood to the waves at the mouth of the Dolce River, the first instance in which a government has conferred rights upon part of the ocean.

The city is aiming to protect the coastal waters, which were reshaped by the 2015 failure of a dam that held more than 10 billion gallons of mining waste at an iron mine upstream. With the collapse, a wave of sludge poured into the Doce River, and over time it built up at the mouth of the waterway, weakening the waves that had long drawn surfers to Linhares. The waves were only restored in 2022 after a flood cleared out the buildup.

In June of this year, the city approved a bill declaring that its waves have the right to continue breaking perfectly at the mouth of the Doce River, and in August it codified the measure, Hakai reports. The new law requires Linhares to protect the natural flow of the river and to guard it from pollution. It must also safeguard connected waters.

Continue reading.

[madamlaydebug]

 

In 1979, Revolutionary Assata Shakur escaped from U.S prison later received asylum in Cuba.

“I saw this as a necessary step, not only because I was innocent..but because I knew that in the racist legal system of the United States I would receive no justice”

Who is Assata Shakur?

Assata Shakur, also known as Joanne Chesimard, was a black activist, a member of the Black Liberation Army & the Black Panthers. She is the godmother of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur.

On May 2nd, 1973, she was unfairly convicted of shooting and murdering State Trooper Werner Foester in New Jersey.

On that fateful morning, Assata and her fellow Black Liberation Army (BLA) members Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Malik Shakur were stopped by NJ state troopers for a broken taillight, that ended in a shootout.

Later after they pulled over, both Zayd Malik Shakur & Trooper Foerster were dead, and Assata and Trooper Harper were shot and wounded.

Assata and Sundiata ended up arrested and sentenced with murdering a state trooper.

An all-white jury convicted Shakur of shooting the state trooper.

There was evidence that Assata’s hands were raised in the air, but she received a sentence of life plus 33 years in prison, served 2 years in solitary confinement, then escaped.

In 1978 the National Conference of Black Lawyers & its allies sent a petition to the UN that noted Shakur’s case was one of the worst examples of “a class of victims of FBI misconduct… who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions.”

After her escape from prison in 1979, she fled to Cuba and was granted political asylum till today.

The FBI’s attempted to extradite her back to the U.S in 1998, when they asked the Pope to use a visit to Cuba to order her into the hands of the US government.

In response to the state’s letter to the Pope, she wrote her own open letter to the Pope.

40 years later, on May 2, 2013, the FBI and state of New Jersey have offered a $2million reward offered for her capture

Sundiata, after being denied parole since 1993 & 49 years in jail, was finally granted parole in May 2022.

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants

NYTimes Aug 17, 2024:

The former president’s vision of using the military to enforce the law domestically would carry profound implications for civil liberties.

During the turbulent summer of 2020, President Donald J. Trump raged at his military and legal advisers, calling them “losers” for objecting to his idea of using federal troops to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

It wasn’t the only time Mr. Trump was talked out of using the military for domestic law enforcement — a practice that would carry profound implications for civil liberties and for the traditional constraints on federal power. He repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states, and even proposed shooting both violent protesters and undocumented migrants in the legs, former aides have said.

In his first term in office, Mr. Trump never realized his expansive vision of using troops to enforce the law on U.S. soil. But as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats.

“In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order — and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops,” Mr. Trump said at a conservative conference in Dallas in August 2022, shortly before announcing that he was running to be that next president.

During his time out of power, allies of Mr. Trump have worked on policy papers to provide legal justifications for the former president’s intent to use the military to enforce the law domestically. In public, they have talked about this in the context of border states and undocumented immigrants. But an internal email from a group closely aligned with Mr. Trump, obtained by The Times, shows that, privately, the group was also exploring using troops to “stop riots” by protesters.

While governors have latitude to use their states’ National Guards to respond to civil disorder or major disasters, a post-Civil War law called the Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime to use regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.

However, an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban. It grants presidents the emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore law and order when they believe a situation warrants it. Those federal troops could either be regular active-duty military or state National Guard soldiers the federal government has assumed control over.

The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent troops to help suppress riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers who had been videotaped beating a Black motorist, Rodney King. In that case, however, the governor of California, Pete Wilson, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, had asked for federal assistance to restore order.

But parts of the Insurrection Act also allow presidents to send in troops without requiring the consent of a governor. Presidents last invoked the act to deploy troops without the consent of state authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the civil rights movement, when some governors in the South resisted court-ordered school desegregation.

Mr. Trump has boasted that, if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch forces without any request for intervention by local authorities. At a campaign rally in Iowa last year, for example, he vowed to unilaterally use federal forces to “get crime out of our cities,” specifically naming New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco as “crime dens” he pointedly noted were run by Democrats.

“You look at what is happening to our country — we cannot let it happen any longer,” Mr. Trump said. “And one of the other things I’ll do — because you are not supposed to be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I am not waiting.”

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that, as part of his group’s contingency planning for how to resist what it sees as potential risks from any second Trump administration, it is drafting lawsuits to challenge invocations of the Insurrection Act against protesters. He said the group sees it as likely that Mr. Trump would be drawn to the authoritarian “theatrics” of sending troops into Democratic cities.

“It’s very likely that you will have the Trump administration trying to shut down mass protests — which I think are inevitable if they were to win — and to specifically pick fights in jurisdictions with blue-state governors and blue-state mayors,” he said. “There’s talk that he would try to rely on the Insurrection Act as a way to shut down lawful protests that get a little messy. But isolated instances of violence or lawlessness are not enough to use federal troops.”

In a statement, a Trump spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said, “As President Trump has always said, you can’t have a country without law and order and without borders. In the event where an American community is being ravaged by violence, President Trump will use all federal law enforcement assets and work with local governments to protect law-abiding Americans.” She added that he was committed to “using every available resource to seal the border and stop the invasion of millions of illegal aliens into our country.”

Mr. Trump has long been attracted to the strongman move of using military force to impose and maintain domestic political control. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he spoke admiringly about the Chinese Communist Party for displaying the “power of strength” a year earlier when it used troops and tanks to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Many years later, at a 2016 Republican primary debate, he claimed that his comments in that old interview did not mean he actually endorsed the crackdown. But then, as he continued talking, he described the Tiananmen Square demonstration as a riot: “I said that was a strong, powerful government. They kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing.”

Seeking a Show of Strength

In 2020, the videotaped killing of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, sparked racial justice protests. Peaceful demonstrations sometimes descended into rioting — especially when anarchists hijacked some of the protests as an opportunity to set fires, smash store windows and take other destructive actions. This was especially visible in Portland, Ore., where the Department of Homeland Security flooded the streets with hundreds of federal officers, many not wearing any identifying insignia.

During a stormy protest in Washington, D.C., centered in Lafayette Square outside the White House, protesters knocked over barricades. The Secret Service whisked Mr. Trump away to take shelter in a bunker underneath the White House. Attorney General William P. Barr later wrote in his memoir that Mr. Trump was enraged — in part by the violence but “especially the news reports that he was taken to the bunker.” He wanted to make a show of strength as the world watched.

Because D.C. is a federal enclave, not a state, it has no governor, and its National Guard always reports to the Pentagon. The secretary of defense, Mark Esper, sent National Guard forces to support the Park Police and other civilian agencies protecting federal buildings — and, to particular controversy, National Guard helicopters swooped frighteningly low over crowds of people.

But civilians remained in control of the response in the nation’s capital. Mr. Trump wanted to instead put the military directly in charge of suppressing violent protesters — and to use regular, active-duty troops to do it. Members of his legal team drew up an order invoking the Insurrection Act in case it became necessary, according to a person with direct knowledge of what took place. But senior aides opposed such a move, and he never signed it.

Mr. Barr later wrote that he and the acting Homeland Security secretary had thought using regular troops was unnecessary, and that Mr. Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had “recoiled at the idea, expressing the view that regular military forces should not be used except as a last resort, and that, absent a real insurrection, the military should not be in charge but should provide support to civilian agencies.”

As Mr. Trump nevertheless publicly threatened to put the regular military in the streets across the country, General Milley issued a memo on June 2, 2020, to top military leaders saying that every member of the military swears an oath to uphold the Constitution and its values, including the freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly.

The next day, on June 3, Mr. Esper contradicted Mr. Trump from the Pentagon podium, saying: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Mr. Trump was outraged, seeing this as an act of defiance. He fired Mr. Esper that November.

In a comment for this article before President Biden dropped out of the 2024 campaign, Mr. Esper pointed to his earlier remarks, adding, “I think the same standard applies going forward, whether it is a second term for Biden, Trump or for any other future president.”

Back in 2020, the protests or riots eventually ebbed, without any use of regular troops or Mr. Trump’s federalizing a state’s National Guard. But on the 2024 campaign trail, Mr. Trump has rewritten that history, falsely bragging that he personally sent troops into the streets of Minneapolis, who quelled violence there.

In reality, it was Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — now the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president — who ordered his state’s National Guard to briefly deploy in Minneapolis. Mr. Trump did not direct and was not responsible for the operation.

In a 2021 interview, Mr. Walz recalled consulting with General Milley and Mr. Esper about his decision to use the state’s National Guard at a time when they were resisting Mr. Trump’s desire to send in federal troops — a step that Mr. Walz said would have made the situation worse by exacerbating the anger of people protesting a police murder.

“It was critically important that civilian leadership was seen as leading this, and that the face forward needed to look like your state, it needed to be the National Guard, it needed to be those local folk,” he told the authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.

However, Mr. Walz has faced criticism from some quarters for moving slowly to deploy the guard when some protests in Minneapolis became riots.

Troops at the Border

Mr. Trump has broken with his former subordinates who raised objections to his desire to use federal troops that summer. Those who have stuck with Mr. Trump are working to ensure that a second administration would not contain politically appointed officials or lawyers who would be inclined to see it as their duty to constrain his impulses and desires — one of several reasons a second Trump presidency is likely to shatter even more norms and precedents than the first.

Indeed, even by the standards of various norm-busting plans Mr. Trump and his advisers have developed, the idea of using American troops against Americans on domestic soil stands apart. It has engendered quiet discomfort even among some of his allies on other issues.

Most of the open discussion of it by people other than Mr. Trump has focused on the prospect of using troops in border states — not against American rioters or criminals, but to arrest suspected undocumented migrants and better secure the border against illegal crossings.

In recent years, administrations of both parties — including Mr. Biden’s — have sometimes used the military at the border when surges of migrants have threatened to overwhelm the civilian agents. But the troops have helped by taking over back-office administration and support functions, freeing up more ICE and Border Patrol agents to go into the field.

The idea Mr. Trump and his advisers are playing with is to go beyond that by using regular troops to patrol the border and arrest people.

In an interview with The New York Times last fall, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, said Mr. Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration included invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops as immigration agents.

And, in its 900-page policy book, Project 2025 — a consortium of conservative think-tanks that is working together to develop policy proposals and personnel lists to offer Mr. Trump should he win the election — has a brief line saying regular troops “could” be used at the Southwest border for arrest operations in the context of tackling drug cartels.

But the book has no further analysis or discussion of the idea, and Project 2025 is not substantively engaging with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act in any context, according to multiple people with knowledge of the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

‘Insurrection — Stop Riots ** — Day 1, Easy’

Regular troops are generally trained to operate in combat situations, not as domestic law enforcement, which heightens the risk of serious and, at times, even fatal mistakes — as happened when a Marine on an antidrug surveillance team assisting the Border Patrol shot and killed an American teenager near the border in 1997.

For that reason, the idea of using regular troops to enforce the law on domestic soil — especially away from the border — crosses a line that gives even some in the conservative think-tank world pause. Policy development work on using the Insurrection Act has joined a small number of other policy ideas circulating in Mr. Trump’s orbit, like disengaging with NATO, that are too radioactive to gain a consensus among the conservatives involved in Project 2025.

Instead, legal and policy development work on ideas that are too radical even for Project 2025 are being handled elsewhere, including at a Trump-aligned think tank called the Center for Renewing America that is run by Russell Vought, who was Mr. Trump’s White House budget chief.

An early 2023 email from a member of the center’s staff listed 10 agenda topics for papers that the center planned to write on legal and policy frameworks. An introduction to the email said the goal was to “help us build the case and achieve consensus leading into 2025.” The email went on to circulate more broadly, and The Times reviewed a copy.

The email placed each topic into one of three categories. One set involved Congress. A second involved “broader legal” issues — including “Christian nationalism” and “nullification,” the pre-Civil War idea that states should be able to negate federal laws they don’t like. The third category was “day one” ideas, meaning those whose legal frameworks were already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally.

No. 4 on the list: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

The Center for Renewing America has since published papers about several other agenda items on its list, including arguing that a 1974 law banning presidents from impounding funds — or refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for things the White House dislikes — is unconstitutional (No. 1 on the list) and advocating for the elimination of the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from the White House (No. 5).

The center has not published any paper on invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops to suppress violent protests. But earlier this year, it published a paper on a closely related topic: invoking that law to use troops in Southwest border states to enforce immigration law. The paper was co-written by Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration.

While the paper focuses on border security, most of its legal analysis applies to any situation in which a president deems the use of troops necessary to suppress lawlessness. It laid out extensive arguments for why the Insurrection Act provides “enormous” leeway for the president to use regular troops directly to make arrests and enforce the law.

It also cited a sweeping Justice Department memorandum written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by John Yoo, a Bush administration lawyer with an idiosyncratically broad view of presidential power. Mr. Yoo had argued that the Posse Comitatus Act could not stop a presidential decision to use the armed forces domestically to combat terrorist activities.

In a statement responding to The Times’s reporting, Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Center for Renewing America, said, “Thank you for confirming that we have made it a priority to articulate that the president has the legal authority to use the military to secure the border.”

While the center’s statement — like its paper — framed the prospect of using troops on domestic soil in the context of securing the border, not suppressing anti-Trump protests, Mr. Vought was more expansive in a hidden-camera video released last week by a British journalism nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, which spoke with him while deceptively posing as relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

“George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he said. “We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.”

Blurry Lines

Mr. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups, saying that only policy proposals endorsed by the campaign count. Ms. Leavitt said, “As President Trump and our campaign has repeatedly stated, outside groups do NOT speak for him. The ONLY official second-term policies are those that come directly from President Trump himself.”

Still, as a matter of substance, the lines between Project 2025’s work, the materials being developed separately by the Center for Renewing America and the Trump campaign can be blurry.

For example, Mr. Vought has also been in charge of one of the most important components of Project 2025: drafting executive orders and other unilateral actions Mr. Trump could take over the first six months in office. Mr. Vought also remains personally close to Mr. Trump. And the Republican National Committee, which Mr. Trump controls through allies, including his senior campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, put Mr. Vought in charge of the committee that developed the party’s platform.

That platform calls for “moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our own southern border” to secure it against migrants.

At the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought has also hired Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration who was indicted in Georgia for working with Mr. Trump to help overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Clark wrote the center’s paper laying out a legal framework for why the president can take direct control of Justice Department investigations and prosecutions, and was also appointed to co-lead Project 2025’s Justice Department policy efforts.

The federal indictment of Mr. Trump, which deems Mr. Clark an unindicted co-conspirator, recounts how a White House lawyer told Mr. Clark that there had not been outcome-changing election fraud — and warned that if Mr. Trump nonetheless remained in office, there would be riots in every major city in the United States.

“Well,” Mr. Clark responded, according to the indictment, “that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 18, 2024 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Vision For the Border: Send In Troops. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Donald Trump, American Civil Liberties Union

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇲 US Senator Bob Menendez, D-NJ and his wife Nadine have been Indicted on Felony Bribery Charges

US Prosecutors revealed on Friday US Senator Robert Menendez (69), D-NJ and his wife Nadine have been Indicted on Federal Felony charges of Conspiracy to Commit Bribery, Conspiracy to Commit Honest Services Fraud, and Conspiracy to Commit Extortion Under Color of Official Right.

The indictment alleges New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and his wife accepted bribes including cash, gold bars, payments on a home mortgage, compensation for a no-show job (guess his last name isn't Biden), luxury vehicles and other forms of payment.

Prosecutors say they executed a Search Warrant of Senator Menendez and his wife's home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey back in June, 2022. While searching the couple's home, Prosecutors say they found more than $480'000 cash, most of it stuffed away in envelopes, hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe. The indictment also alleges cash was found in the Senator's closet in jackets with his name embroidered on it, as well as $70'000 cash in a safe deposit box owned by the Senator's wife.

Also discovered during the execution of the Search Warrant was a Mercedes Benz convertible valued at over $60'000, given to Senator Menendez's wife by two New Jersey Businessmen, Wael Hana and Jose Uribe, allegedly in return for the Senator's interference in a criminal case involving an associate of the businessmen.

Also found by Federal Agents were gold bars valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars also given by the businessman Hana and another associate, Fred Daibes. All three businessmen were also charged by Federal Prosecutors.

Senator Bob Menendez is also accused of having "provided sensitive US Government information and took other steps that secretly aided the Government of Egypt."

Another accusation in the indictment includes pressuring a US Department of Agriculture official for the purpose of protecting a business monopoly granted by Egypt to the businessman Wael Hana.

The indictment also alleges Senator Menendez "promised to and did use his influence and power and breach his official duty to recommend that the President nominate an individual for US Attorney for the District of New Jersey who Menendez believed" he could influence.

The charges against Senator Menendez and his wife were announced by Damien Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York at a news conference on Friday.

Previously, Senator Menendez faced indictment in 2015 for allegedly accepting favors from an influential Florida eye doctor, but the case was dismissed after the jury split and was unable to reach a verdict.

Today's new charges filed against Senator Menendez and his wife were the culmination of a year-long Corruption investigation led by US Attorney Damien Williams for Southern District of New York.

[allthingslinguistic]

All Things Linguistic - 2022 Highlights

2022 was a year of opening up again and laying foundations for future projects. I spent the final 3 months of it on an extended trip to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a delightful reason to have a delay in writing this year in review post. 

Interesting new projects this year included my first piece in The Atlantic, why we have so much confusion on writing the short form of "usual" and 103 languages reading project: inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia. 

Continuations of existing projects: 

Return of LingComm Grants

A survey for those using Because Internet for teaching

10 year Blogiversary of All Things Linguistic: highlights from the past year and highlights from the past decade

6 years of Lingthusiasm

Conferences/Talks

LSA 2022 and judging Five Minute Linguist

I was on panels about swearing in SFF and the Steerswoman books at a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation

I was on panels at WorldCon (ChiCon 8) in Chicago: Ask A Scientist, That's Not How That Works!, and Using SFF for Science Communication

I was a contestant for the second time in Webster's War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.

I attended the Australian Linguistics Society annual meeting in Melbourne and the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, where I gave a talk co-authored with Lauren Gawne called Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics

Lingthusiasm

In our sixth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did a redesign of how the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are layed out in a chart, in order to correspond more closely with the principle that the location of a symbol is a key to how it's articulated. This involved much digging into the history of IPA layouts and back-and-forths with our artist, Lucy Maddox, and we were very pleased to make our aesthetic IPA design available on a special one-time edition of lens cloths for patrons as well as our general range of posters, tote bags, notebooks, and other all-time merch. 

We also did our first Lingthusiasm audience survey and Spotify for some reason gave us end-of-year stats only in French, which I guess is on brand, but we were pleased to see notebooks, and Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify's top 50 Science podcastsF/href.li/?https:/www.redbubble.com%2Fi%2Fmouse-pad%2FAesthetic-IPA-Chart-Square-by-Lingthusiasm%2F129215087.G1FH6&t=OTkxYjYxYjNmMzA1M2VhNGViOGIxZWIxOGI0NDRjYjE2YTIzYTE2NCw2YTgzNDQyZTM3MzY0YjRkNjc3NGJkNzhhYzJhMzk3ZjA2Y2NkYzIz&ts=1684794278">other all-time merch!

Main episodes from this year

Making speech visible with spectrograms

Knowledge is power, copulas are fun.

Word order, we love 

What it means for a language to be official

Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

What we can, must, and should say about modals

Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

Various vocal fold vibes

What If Linguistics

The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory

Who questions the questions?

Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

Bonus Episodes

We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more

Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference

Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics

Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular

What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫&

There’s like, so much to like about “like”

Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda

Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science

Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox

Linguistics and science communication - Interview with Liz McCullough

103 ways for kids to learn languages

Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

Selected Tweets

Linguistics Fun

aunt and niece languages

Swedish chef captions

IPA wordle

wordle vs kiki

creative use of emoji and space

resume glottal stop

dialects in a trenchcoat

which of these starter Pokemon is bouba and which is kiki

(for no author would use, because of the known rendolence of onions, onions)

acoustic bike

An extremely charming study by Bill Labov featuring a rabbit named Vincent

Rabbit Meme

Cheering on linguistics effects (Stroup and Kiki/Bouba) in a vote on the cutest scientific effect name

Old English Hrickroll

The word you get assigned with your linguistics degree

Sanskrit two-dimensional alphabet

Cognate Objects

Linguist Meetup in Linguaglossa?

baɪ ði eɪdʒ ʌv θɚti

j- prefixing

"But clerk, I am Bill Labov" (pagliacci meme)

Usual winner

Because Internet Tumblr vernacular

Linguist "Human" Costume

Cursed kiki/bouba

dot ellipsis vs comma ellipsis

intersection of signed languages and synesthesia?

Antipodean linguistic milestone

Selected Blog Posts:

Linguistic Jobs

Online Linguistics Teacher

Impact Lead

Customer Success Manager

Hawaiian and Tahitian language Instructor, Translator & Radio Host

Language Engineer

Data Manager & Digital Archivist

Linguistics fun

xkcd: neoteny recapitulated phylogeny

Eeyore Linguistic Facts

Lingthusiasm HQ: Frown Thing!

xkcd is making a vowel hypertrapezoid

Title: Ships and Ice Picks: An Ethnographic Excavation of alt.goncharov

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

[reasonsforhope]

"International climate negotiations have long been haunted by a broken promise.

In the wake of collapsed negotiations at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, wealthy nations, led by the United States, pledged to provide developing countries with $100 billion in climate-related aid annually by 2020.

The money was meant in part to ease tensions between the rich countries that had contributed the most to climate change historically and the poorer nations that disproportionately suffer the effects of a warming planet.

But rich countries fell short of the target in both 2020 and 2021, deepening mistrust and stymying progress during the annual United Nations climate conferences, which are known by the abbreviation COP.

A new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, confirms what the international organization began to suspect just before last year’s COP28: that wealthy nations finally surpassed the $100 billion goal in 2022.

And while they were two years late delivering on their promise, rich countries partially compensated for their earlier shortfalls, contributing nearly $116 billion in climate aid to developing countries in 2022, according to the latest data available.

That additional funding helps fill the roughly $27 billion gap resulting from rich countries’ failure to meet the $100 billion threshold in each of the two years prior.

“If you underachieved in the first two years, overachieving in the rest of the period is a good way to make up for that, to make amends,” said Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S.-based environmental nonprofit.

Even $100 billion, however, is far lower than the developing world’s estimated need. United Nations-backed research projects that developing countries (excluding China) will need an eye-popping $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 to transition away from fossil fuels and adapt to climate change.

Serious questions also remain about the quality and accounting of the existing funding. According to the OECD report, more than two-thirds of the public finance in 2022 was provided in the form of loans rather than no-strings-attached grants.

That means developing countries are required to pay the money back, often with interest at market rates...

Such findings are likely to inform talks next week [the last week of June, 2024], as climate negotiators meet in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the end of the year. Negotiators need to agree on a new collective goal for climate aid to developing countries this year.

So far, different countries have submitted a range of proposals, with some nations floating $1 trillion annually as an appropriate number. Wealthy countries also want to expand their ranks so that some relatively rich countries that are technically classified as “developing,” like the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, can contribute funds toward the goal. Historically, only countries that the United Nations designated as “developed” in the 1990s have been on the hook...

If countries continue to provide a similar level of funding for the next few years, they could make up for the shortfall. “Making up for 2020 and 2021, meeting the goal in those two years, could help rebuild a bit of trust,” Thwaites added...

The report indicated specific progress on funding for adaptation measures like sea walls and disaster-resilient infrastructure, an oft-overlooked area of climate finance. In 2021, countries pledged to double adaptation finance from the $19 billion provided in 2019 to $38 billion by 2025. According to the OECD report, adaptation funding had already risen to $32.4 billion one year after the pledge."

-via GoodGoodGood, June 20, 2024

[thepastisalreadywritten]

5 February 2024

The King is being treated for cancer, Buckingham Palace has announced.

It has not said what type of cancer the 75-year-old has but confirmed that it was not prostate cancer. The King was recently treated for prostate enlargement.

King Charles III was crowned at Westminster Abbey in May 2023 alongside his wife, Queen Camilla.

How will the King's duties change while he is treated for cancer?

Buckingham Palace said:

"Regrettably, a number of the King's forthcoming public engagements will have to be rearranged or postponed.

His Majesty would like to apologise to all those who may be disappointed or inconvenienced as a consequence."

It said that he was receiving expert care and "looks forward to returning to full public duty as soon as possible."

While the King is recovering, the Queen is expected to continue attending engagements.

"Her Majesty will continue with a full programme of public duties," Buckingham Palace said.

Despite stepping back from public events, the King will continue with paperwork and private meetings as head of state.

What does the King do?

The King is the UK head of state, but his powers are largely symbolic and ceremonial, and he remains politically neutral.

He receives daily dispatches from the government in a red leather box, including briefings ahead of important meetings, or documents needing his signature.

The prime minister normally meets the King on a Wednesday at Buckingham Palace.

These meetings are completely private, and no official records are kept of what is said.

The King also has a number of official parliamentary roles:

Appointing a government — the leader of the party that wins a general election is usually called to Buckingham Palace, where they are invited to form a government. The King also formally dissolves Parliament before a general election

State Opening and the King's Speech — the King begins the parliamentary year with the State Opening ceremony, where he sets out the government's plans in a speech delivered from the throne in the House of Lords

Royal Assent — when a piece of legislation is passed through Parliament, it must be formally approved by the King in order to become law. The last time Royal Assent was refused was in 1708

In addition, the monarch leads the annual Remembrance event in November at the Cenotaph in London.

The King also hosts visiting heads of state, and regularly meets foreign ambassadors and high commissioners.

For his first state visit, Charles visited Germany, where he became the first British monarch to address the country's parliament, speaking in English and German.

The King then travelled to France for a three-day state visit in September and to Kenya for a four-day state visit in October, where he acknowledged the "abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans during their independence struggle."

He also delivered the opening address at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai in December, where he said: "The Earth does not belong to us."

Charles is also head of the Commonwealth, an association of 56 independent countries spanning 2.5 billion people.

He is head of state for 14 of these, known as the Commonwealth realms, as well as the Crown dependencies - the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

The Queen supports the King in carrying out his work and undertakes her own public engagements on behalf of the 90 charities she supports.

Where does the Royal Family get its money?

The Royal Family receives an annual payment from the taxpayer, known as the Sovereign Grant, which is used to pay for official expenses, such as the upkeep of properties and staff costs.

The amount is based on a proportion of the profits of the Crown Estate, a property business owned by the monarch but run independently.

It had assets worth £16.5bn in 2022.

The Sovereign Grant was worth £86.3m in 2022-2023, the same as in 2021-2022.

But total spending for the year was £107.5m, a 5% increase on the £102.4m spent the previous year, with more than £20m drawn from financial reserves to cover the shortfall.

The King also receives money from a private estate called the Duchy of Lancaster, which is passed down from monarch to monarch.

It covers more than 18,000 hectares of land, including property in central London.

Worth £654m, it generates about £20m a year in profits.

The Duke of Cornwall (currently William, Prince of Wales) benefits from the Duchy of Cornwall, which mainly owns land in the south-west of England.

Worth £1bn, it generated a net surplus of £24m in 2022-23.

The King and Prince William receive the profits from the duchies personally, and can spend the money as they wish.

Both voluntarily pay income tax on the proceeds.

In addition, some other Royal Family members have private art, jewellery and stamp collections, which they can sell or use to generate income as they wish.

NOTE: Edited

[rapeculturerealities]

California Is Officially the First Sanctuary State for Trans Youth | Them



OAKLAND, CA - FEBRUARY 9: Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference on Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022, in Oakland, Calif. Newsom signed legislation to extend COVID-19 supplemental paid sick leave for workers and bolster Californias support for small businesses. (Aric Crabb/MediaNews Group/East Bay Times via Getty Images)MediaNews Group/East Bay Times via Getty Images

We all need some good news to close out the week, and here it is: California is now the first sanctuary state for transgender youth in the U.S.

On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is currently running for reelection against Republican challenger Brian Dahle, signed into law SB 107, blocking states with anti-trans laws from prosecuting families who seek gender-affirming care in California. The law, which was introduced by state senator Scott Wiener in April, takes several measures to protect families of trans youth who flee their home states due to legal threats or investigations in states including Florida and Texas.

Under the new legislation, no subpoenas based on out-of-state laws that “interfere with a person’s right to allow a child to receive gender-affirming health care” will be honored or issued; doctors are no longer compelled to disclose a trans child’s medical information if the request is made in relation to a law prohibiting gender-affirming care; and state courts are now granted emergency jurisdiction over child custody cases in the event that the child or family is fleeing such a law or investigation.

[lightandwinged]

Mean Girls in a Small Town

My stupid small town is in an uproar right now. This is not fiction. And this is why local politics matter so much, even and perhaps especially in liberal states like Massachusetts, where this story takes place, where I live.

We regularly host this conference in the high school about various progressive topics--diversity, intersectionality, self esteem, etc. It used to be pretty small but has grown much larger, and this year, the school hosted upwards of 700 students from all across the state, which is an impressive feat for a town with a graduating class of around 80. It should be something that brings the entire town pride, and as far as I know, up until this year, it was.

But this year, things changed.

This year, someone got a drag queen to present.

As I understand it from the perspective of one of the administration members, because the conference arguably falls under the purview of mitigating the negative impacts of cellphone usage and social media for teenagers, some money from a grant rewarded to the high school for exactly that purpose was used to pay a trans actress to be the closing speaker for the conference. This got a bee in the bonnet of one school committee member, who threatened to sue the state if they agreed that the money could be used for that purpose (which--it's their determination because it's their money, so that would be a waste of everyone's time, but I digress). And that should have been the most exciting and talked about situation from the April 1 school committee meeting, which was--like most school committee meetings--about as interesting as watching paint dry.

(I should know; I watched all three hours of it. Sped up, of course, because I don't hate myself that much. There were a lot of numbers, and someone got weirdly cross about hiring another physical therapist for the special ed department)

But the meeting, as all of them do, started with public comment. You must be a resident of our town to comment, so that much can be said for this particular provocateur. She was not a plant from outside the town. She gave her address and is vaguely known to people within the town.

Her children are all grown, so she shouldn't have much to say about the schools, and yet, she did. She described the drag presentation in a way that I can only assume was intentionally inaccurate and willfully ignorant. She said the drag queen in question (I'm not naming him because he's honestly been piled on so fucking much lately) started his presentation by talking about his breasts being cold and then did a performance that purposefully exposed the attendants to his "lacy white underwear" (her words, not mine). Her question was something along the lines of "who is allowing this filth???" and presumably, if she had pearls, she would have clutched them.

The performance, incidentally, was a tribute to Karen Smith from Mean Girls, the one who can forecast the weather with her boobs. The drag queen's costume took obvious inspiration from the film: short pink skirt, pink jacket, white shirt with a mouse on it ("a mouse, duh"). He wore white dance bloomers underneath, as a good performer does.

This should have been a non-issue, because it is a non-issue. This conference was not an official school event. The school was closed that day, and nobody was forced to attend. The presentation itself was one of 45 presentations happening at the same time (remember: 700 students attended this thing), so nobody was there who didn't want to be. The school didn't even pay the drag queen; he presented for free.

And it likely would have gone ignored, if not for Chaya Raichik, a.k.a., Libs of TikTok.

For the uninitiated, LoT is a collection of accounts that serve as vile provocateurs, spreading misinformation, incomplete information, and outright disinformation that targets the LGBTQIA+ community, especially the trans community. The biggest boost to the account's notoriety came in the summer of 2022, when it claimed that Boston Children's Hospital and Children's National Hospital were performing gender confirmation surgeries on minors. Following this rancid bullshit (because it had about as much in common with the truth as LoT fans have with being good people), both hospitals--CHILDREN'S hospitals, I should add--received numerous bomb threats and other threats of violence.

At the extreme end of things, this is their MO: pure stochastic terrorism. LoT will never outright call for violence against the LGBTQIA+ community, but they will call them evil and child abusers and groomers and whatever else, and then act very surprised Pikachu when their followers take that at face value and do a violence.

But it's the quieter end of things that worries me more, because it's the quieter end of things that's happening in my town.

LoT got ahold of a clip from that three hour meeting I mentioned and shared it around Twitter with exactly zero of the context I mentioned, save for a few lines suggesting that the school had paid $2500 for the drag queen to perform for the entire school.

You know, lies.

Someone posted it on the town's unofficial Facebook page. Our town, a farming community with sensibilities more comfortable in the 18th century than the 21st and a population that screeches loudly when someone installs a new traffic light, uses the unofficial page for information far more than the official page. The unofficial page is run by a religious conservative who's fond of getting delete happy when her agenda isn't being pushed properly.

So when this dropped on the town's Facebook page, it was pure Bedlam.

Because everyone was so angry, it took ages for the actual facts of the situation to emerge. So many conservative voices were screaming that facts didn't matter because "drag queens shouldn't be within a million miles of schools because they are inherently sexual" (not my words; theirs) so those of us looking for the facts of the situation had an uphill climb. The facts confirmed what a lot of us thought: that (a) the performance was not nearly as sexual as it was made out to be, (b) it was not even remotely mandatory, and (c) it was not paid for by the school.

But "facts don't matter," and the group has been screaming about it for, at this point, four days straight.

The screaming doesn't matter much to me. They did that back in October-ish when we got an influx of refugees at our local scummy inn (before the refugees arrived, the conservatives hated it because it housed homeless people; but then the refugees arrived, and suddenly, it became, "what about American homeless people?"). Those of us with hearts and brains shrugged, whipped up a bunch of donations for our refugees, and continued to give to them until they found permanent housing in a nearby town.

No, what matters to me is the battle cry that's started to arise: that they need to fill the school committee with like-minded individuals by recalling anyone who they don't like (including the superintendent and principal, which is not how this works, but okay) and putting forth their own candidates. And this, I believe, was the real aim of LoT in targeting us.

We're a small town with a lot of conservatives... but we went to Biden by one vote in 2020, you see.

It's clear that we're a battleground town where it wouldn't necessarily be that hard to push us straight into fascism, junior, as much as a town can be in Massachusetts. Get the wrong voices on the school committee, and suddenly, things have gone from irritating to downright ugly. And while things are ugly, they can chip away at actual education (the committee member I mentioned above was also trying to reduce the number of teachers in both the middle and high school "for budget reasons") and create a new crop of uninformed voters.

We're fortunate right now because (a) we're in Massachusetts, so it's unlikely they can do the same amount of harm they could in states that have been drowned in a sea of red (which is less of a slight and more a statement that they've put in decades of effort in other places, so this sort of situation there is catastrophic instead of just an uphill battle); and (b) a decent number of us are prepared to stand in their way however we can.

But man. It's a heavy burden. I'm angry. I'm sad. I'm tired. I'm in a lot of physical pain because stress gives me flares. I want to do more--to run for a vacant seat, to hit the pavement and whip up votes, to yell--but my body keeps getting in my way. And I'm afraid that if I don't do it, no one will.

[mariacallous]

If average global temperature rises are to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement), climate finance globally will need to increase to about $9 trillion a year globally by 2030, up from just under $1.3 trillion in 2021-22.

According to the International Energy Agency, 30 percent of climate finance globally needed—around $2.7 trillion—will have to come from the public sector, with the remaining 70 percent coming from the private sector.

This is the scale of the world’s climate finance needs. However, when viewed in the context of governments’ other spending priorities, $2.7 trillion in public money is achievable. Indeed, in 2022 governments spent $7 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies alone.

A large portion of that $2.7 trillion must flow to developing countries in the form of grants and concessional loans. Official development assistance (ODA), provided by traditional donors in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), will not get us there alone. ODA hit a record high of $287 billion in 2022 but only because developed countries shifted resources to aid in Ukraine’s defense; in previous years, it hovered around just $236 billion. A surge of right-wing politics in the United States and Europe has forced budgets down, and even Emmanuel Macron’s liberal government in France has reneged on previous aid commitments.

For all but a few emerging economies, developing countries’ greatest climate challenge is not solely a lack of private finance for mitigation projects but a lack of low- or no-cost public finance for adaptation and loss and damage efforts. Despite their social returns, adaptation projects such as infrastructure upgrades and sea walls do not deliver immediate financial returns to investors and are notoriously difficult to scale for the private sector.

Both developed and developing countries have been vocal about the need for new forms of public climate finance beyond ODA, and they are considering different options under the rubric of “innovative finance.” The recognition has been particularly important in discussions on the newly created Loss and Damage Fund. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai, or COP28, countries pledged around $700 million to capitalize the fund—including an unexpected $100 million from the United Arab Emirates—but it will need billions of dollars to respond to more than one country crisis. This is why the fund’s bylaws encourage its capitalization through a “wide variety of sources, including innovative sources” inside and outside the Paris Agreement.

There is no single agreed definition of innovative finance, but it generally refers to any financing mechanism or arrangement that mobilizes, governs, or distributes resources beyond ODA. Most innovative finance mechanisms, such as “blue bonds” or the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights, still depend on loans and the largesse of rich countries, whose leaders also face tough inflation and consequential elections. These are just two reasons why such initiatives have stalled or failed to live up to expectations.

On the resource mobilization side, many countries have come out in favor of new global taxes to fund climate needs in developing countries. Here, as in other areas of climate, small island states and low-income countries are providing essential leadership. They are also finding allies in the global north. Taxes on shipping, fossil fuel production and subsidies, air travel, financial transactions, and extreme wealth feature prominently in agendas to reform the international financial architecture, such as Barbados’s Bridgetown 2.0 and African leaders’ Nairobi Declaration, and in the recent Paris Pact for People and the Planet. These calls have been taken up by a new International Tax Task Force, launched by France and Kenya at COP28, to deliver a verdict on the options available.

Beautiful ideas and big numbers abound, but the real challenge is more direct: Who pays? Industries will always pass the tax on to the consumer—but which consumers, where? There is also a question of equity and justice: Why should consumers in developing countries be taxed to pay for a problem they did not create?

It’s possible to create taxes that incorporate such concerns. Founded in 2006 by Brazil, Chile, France, Norway, and the United Kingdom and hosted by the World Health Organization, Unitaid is a successful global health program for low- and middle-income countries that receives over half its funding from air passenger levies. The levies—introduced as low as 1 euro for economy seats on flights within Europe and up to 40 euros for business seats on long-haul flights—are collected and earmarked for Unitaid by governments in 10 developed and developing countries. By 2012, the levies were raising between 162 million and 175 million euros per year, totaling 1 billion euros since its creation. According to an assessment by the French government in 2009, “The introduction of the levy had no apparent effect on the volume of air traffic passing through French airports nor on the volume of air traffic affecting France.”

But finding examples of similar financing success is hard, especially on a global scale. Many options have been proposed, such as taxes on shipping, aviation, fossil fuel production or exchange, financial transactions, and extreme wealth, but only shipping has made serious institutional progress. Last year, countries in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) agreed on a decarbonization strategy for the shipping industry that depends on the introduction of a global tax. This would make a tax on shipping, responsible for 3-4 percent of global emissions, the first global carbon tax. According to estimates from the World Bank, such a tax could raise $40 billion to $60 billion per year.

That is the upside. The downside is that the shipping industry and many countries with shipping interests are willing to agree chiefly because they expect the revenues to flow back into the shipping industry to fund their push for ships and ports running on accessible, but still expensive, hydrogen and ammonia fuels. It is difficult to achieve a global tax; it is more difficult still to retain the revenues. As of the last IMO meeting in March, a proposal spearheaded by a group of Pacific small island developing states that would allocate the majority of the revenue to broader climate objectives is one of several options being considered as the economic measure to deliver the decarbonization strategy.

A number of countries have expressed interest in establishing international climate solidarity levies, or ICSLs, to pay for addressing loss and damage, but the campaign is still waiting for a developed-country champion. Should one emerge, ICSLs at the national or city level could raise substantial and predictable additional revenues for the Loss and Damage Fund. Oxford Climate Policy’s Benito Müller, a leader in the current campaign for ICSLs, estimates that a 5 euro air levy on all air tickets across the European Union would have raised around 1 billion euros in 2019, while—following the proposal by the IMO’s Emission Reduction Scheme—a levy of 10 euros per maritime container across the same jurisdictions would in 2021 have generated 924 million euros.

In the end, taxes and levies are a question not of economy per se but of political economy. This is the challenge before the International Tax Task Force: to evaluate and advance proposals based on political feasibility as well as projected impact.

Consider one prominent idea, for a global tax on extreme wealth where billionaires are charged some small portion of their net worth every year. Gabriel Zucman, a top French economist, has championed the idea, as has French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who said in April: “This is exactly what we did with minimum taxation on corporate tax. … It would be the same on the international taxation for the wealthiest individuals.”

Just days after Le Maire’s endorsement, finance ministers from Brazil, Germany, South Africa, and Spain endorsed the idea of a 2 percent minimum global tax on billionaires. In a co-written Guardian article, the ministers declared that such a tax would “boost social justice and increase trust” as well as generate more than $250 billion in revenues for governments to invest in public goods. The ministers also urged the G-20 to take up the idea on its agenda at its July meeting, in Brazil. While this is encouraging, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen dismissed the “notion of some common global arrangement for taxing billionaires with proceeds redistributed in some way. … That’s something we can’t sign on to.” The wealth tax may move forward despite Washington’s concerns, but it is unlike to involve any formal mechanism for redistributing revenues across countries.

Innovative finance is not a silver bullet, nor is it a substitute for developed countries’ existing climate and development obligations. The majority of public funding for climate finance will still have to come from direct government outlays. This requires strong and empowered public sectors in developed and developing countries alike. Recent gains in international tax reform suggest a way forward. More than 140 countries have agreed to impose a minimum effective rate of 15% on corporate profits, a policy launched by OECD countries in 2021. Tax reform efforts in the UN have also picked up speed. Following a historic breakthrough at the UN General Assembly in November 2023, the UN has started the negotiation of the terms of reference for a new Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

Despite the obstacles, we are at an inflection point in the long battle for new global taxes for climate. In addition to the leadership of developed-country and emerging-economy first movers, the continued leadership of small island states is essential. Small island states are champions of ambition by necessity. They sounded the alarm early and led the campaigns for adaptation and loss and damage finance, including in ambitious, practical, and yes, innovative, forms. Today, the world is closer than it has ever been to implementing a global carbon tax—thanks not to the great powers but to the small island states that found a way forward.