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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 1 year ago

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“By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn’t shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn—whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred—has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology—and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence—deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine.

Last year, I resigned as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a policy-coordination body that the Biden administration let founder amid criticism mostly from the right. In subsequent months, at least three artificially generated videos that appear to show me engaging in sex acts were uploaded to websites specializing in deepfake porn. The images don’t look much like me; the generative-AI models that spat them out seem to have been trained on my official U.S. government portrait, taken when I was six months pregnant. Whoever created the videos likely used a free “face swap” tool, essentially pasting my photo onto an existing porn video. In some moments, the original performer’s mouth is visible while the deepfake Frankenstein moves and my face flickers. But these videos aren’t meant to be convincing—all of the websites and the individual videos they host are clearly labeled as fakes. Although they may provide cheap thrills for the viewer, their deeper purpose is to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out. I am somewhat inured to this abuse, after researching and writing about it for years. But for other women, especially those in more conservative or patriarchal environments, appearing in a deepfake-porn video could be profoundly stigmatizing, even career- or life-threatening.

As if to underscore video makers’ compulsion to punish women who speak out, one of the videos to which Google alerted me depicts me with Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg. Because of their global celebrity, deepfakes of the former presidential candidate and the climate-change activist are far more numerous and more graphic than those of me. Users can also easily find deepfake-porn videos of the singer Taylor Swift, the actress Emma Watson, and the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly; Democratic officials such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the Republicans Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik; and countless other prominent women. By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women. The reasons for this disproportion are interconnected, and are both technical and motivational: The people making these videos are presumably heterosexual men who value their own gratification more than they value women’s personhood. And because AI systems are trained on an internet that abounds with images of women’s bodies, much of the nonconsensual porn that those systems generate is more believable than, say, computer-generated clips of cute animals playing would be.

As I looked into the provenance of the videos in which I appear—I’m a disinformation researcher, after all—I stumbled upon deepfake-porn forums where users are remarkably nonchalant about the invasion of privacy they are perpetrating. Some seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images—that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody. Others apparently think that simply by labeling their videos and images as fake, they can avoid any legal consequences for their actions. These purveyors assert that their videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. But by using that description for videos of well-known women being “humiliated” or “pounded”—as the titles of some clips put it—these men reveal a lot about what they find pleasurable and informative.

Ironically, some creators who post in deepfake forums show great concern for their own safety and privacy—in one forum thread that I found, a man is ridiculed for having signed up with a face-swapping app that does not protect user data—but insist that the women they depict do not have those same rights, because they have chosen public career paths. The most chilling page I found lists women who are turning 18 this year; they are removed on their birthdays from “blacklists” that deepfake-forum hosts maintain so they don’t run afoul of laws against child pornography.

Effective laws are exactly what the victims of deepfake porn need. Several states—including Virginia and California—have outlawed the distribution of deepfake porn. But for victims living outside these jurisdictions or seeking justice against perpetrators based elsewhere, these laws have little effect. In my own case, finding out who created these videos is probably not worth the time and money. I could attempt to subpoena platforms for information about the users who uploaded the videos, but even if the sites had those details and shared them with me, if my abusers live out of state—or in a different country—there is little I could do to bring them to justice.

Representative Joseph Morelle of New York is attempting to reduce this jurisdictional loophole by reintroducing the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, a proposed amendment to the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Morelle’s bill would impose a nationwide ban on the distribution of deepfakes without the explicit consent of the people depicted in the image or video. The measure would also provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.

In the absence of strong federal legislation, the avenues available to me to mitigate the harm caused by the deepfakes of me are not all that encouraging. I can request that Google delist the web addresses of the videos in its search results and—though the legal basis for any demand would be shaky—have my attorneys ask online platforms to take down the videos altogether. But even if those websites comply, the likelihood that the videos will crop up somewhere else is extremely high. Women targeted by deepfake porn are caught in an exhausting, expensive, endless game of whack-a-troll.

The Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act won’t solve the deepfake problem; the internet is forever, and deepfake technology is only becoming more ubiquitous and its output more convincing. Yet especially because AI grows more powerful by the month, adapting the law to an emergent category of misogynistic abuse is all the more essential to protect women’s privacy and safety. As policy makers worry whether AI will destroy the world, I beg them: Let’s first stop the men who are using it to discredit and humiliate women.

Nina Jankowicz is a disinformation expert and the author of How to Be a Woman Online and How to Lose the Information War.

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argyrocratie · 11 months ago

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"When I first went to Jamaica in 2012 as a graduate student studying the environmental politics of the Maroons, an Afro-Indigenous community who freed themselves from enslavement in the 18th century and established an autonomous society in the mountainous interior of the island, Chinese overseas development policy seemed irrelevant to my work. Yet as my field research progressed over the following eight years, first as a doctoral student in African diaspora studies and then as a post-doctoral researcher, the impact of Chinese infrastructural development and extractive industry on the Jamaican people and environment became increasingly apparent.

The timing of my field work overlapped with an unprecedented surge in Chinese economic and diplomatic engagement with Jamaica and the Caribbean as a whole.

(...)

It is beyond the scope of this article to detail the political economic dynamics and immense social impact of debt in Jamaica over the last 40 years.4 Suffice it to say that the island became a byword for structural adjustment during this period, with every new loan from the World Bank, or default on payments thereof, coming with International Monetary Fund-mandated austerity.

Health and education were notable casualties of this socio-economic assault. By the start of my field research, Jamaican child mortality had almost doubled over the span of a single decade while completion of primary school dropped from 97% to 73% in the same period. This despite the fact that Jamaica had already repaid more money than it had been lent, with continuing debt servicing accounting for a 106% debt-to-GDP ratio according to the latest World Bank figures.

All this is only a small snapshot of the catastrophic outcomes of debt wielded as a tool of neocolonialism.

With the island’s status as one of the most indebted countries on the planet, Chinese infrastructural development was received with fanfare from Jamaican elites, a possible economic lifeline out of the debt trap.

(...)

Jamaican elites may appreciate that they can pay back debts with land, and that China does not directly require broad policy changes like the structural adjustment conditions of IMF and World Bank loans.

However, even with the above and the fact that the Jamaican debt to China is small compared to that claimed by Western IFIs and private firms, Jamaican politicians are growing increasingly wary of the costs of doing business with China. In November 2019, Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced that Jamaica would no longer borrow from China, a scant seven months after formally joining the BRI.

As usual, most Jamaicans are not privy to the inter-governmental discussions and deals driving these decisions, but their government’s newfound reticence in engaging with China reflects deeper concerns among BRI partners that the initiative is a debt trap.

(...)

Almost two decades of Chinese loans and infrastructure-led development have left Jamaican workers and farmers as precarious and dispossessed as ever. The hard-fought and generational struggle for Jamaican workers’ power (trade unions were instrumental to Jamaica’s independence struggle) has been curtailed and rolled back by China’s transposed sovereignty.

Furthermore, Chinese mining interests appear poised to pick up where their Western counterparts left off in terms of irreversible ecological destruction and threats to indigenous survival. Certainly, Jamaica cannot bear another 50 years of capitalist exploitation and extractive industry.

If there is any hope in turning this dire situation into revolutionary momentum, it will be in Jamaicans making common cause with the Chinese laborers imported to the country. According to China Labor Watch, Chinese workers on overseas BRI projects are often subject to “deceptive job ads, passport retention, wage withholding, physical violence and lack of contracts” to the extent of constituting forced labor and human trafficking.

In fact, at least one Chinese worker in Jamaica has already blown the whistle on such conditions. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing this article, there appears to be no organized effort to make solidaristic alliances among Jamaican workers, Chinese workers, and Maroons. The Maroons are organized as an indigenous community seeking land and sovereign rights, rather than workers seeking class emancipation, and remain locked in a fractious political battle with the Jamaican state toward those ends.

Furthermore, the cultural and language barriers between Jamaicans and imported Chinese workers are significant. Yet both countries have rich revolutionary traditions. If Jamaican labor militancy and Maroon struggle were able to reconcile and align their interests, while cultivating strategic allies among the heavily exploited Chinese workers, a powerful relationship of international solidarity from below could be forged."

...

#jamaica #Belt and Road Initiative

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu made headlines in April after coasting to a second term in office by nearly 12 percentage points. Imamoglu, who has served at the city’s helm since 2019, is seen as a major political threat to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). The latest win in Istanbul cemented Imamoglu’s continued popularity among the Turkish public.

But Imamoglu is only the most prominent face of a broader opposition, led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP). In March’s municipal elections, the CHP secured its most crushing victory over the AKP in decades. Possibly more notable than Imamoglu’s reelection was the newly elected class of women executives of provinces and districts across the country.

One of these women—Sinem Dedetas—may hold the keys to the future of Turkey’s opposition. Imamoglu is currently battling slander charges in the country’s high court, in addition to a slew of other cases that could eventually ban him from politics, even as he is the favorite to run for the CHP in Turkey’s 2028 presidential election. No matter how those fortunes play out, Dedetas promises to be central to the party’s strategy in a post-Erdogan Turkey.

Istanbul is the only city in the world to straddle two continents. Uskudar, a seaside constituency on the Anatolian side, lacks many of the bars and clubs across the water in the European districts. Instead, the conservative area is known for its historical mosques. It is also one of Istanbul’s key transportation hubs, home to a confluence of ferries, rail, metro, and bus lines. Millions of people from all over the city—and world—pass through Uskudar every day.

In April’s elections, Dedetas, a 43-year-old engineer, made history as the first woman to ever win the Uskudar municipality mayorship, a position similar to that of a New York borough president. She also flipped the district from the AKP to CHP rule.

Dedetas moved to Uskudar from her native Eskisehir, a city in northwest Turkey, for college in 1999. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in naval engineering from Istanbul Technical University, she got her first job in the district as an engineer. In 2014, she went on to work as a marine engineer at the Halic Shipyards, the oldest continuously operating dockyard in the world. Over the centuries, the facility has produced vessels from sail boats to steamships and submarines to electrical passenger taxis.

Dedetas’s career has featured many firsts. In 2014, she became the first chairwoman of the Turkish Chamber of Naval Engineers. While she was in that position, Istanbul’s AKP mayor tried to privatize the public harbor and turn it into a terminal full of restaurants and shops. Dedetas protested the project and was barred by the government from entering the shipyard.

She continued to oppose the new real estate development, concerned that the city’s ferries—an indelible part of Istanbul’s social history, skyline, and soundscape—would grind to a halt without the vital maintenance work done at the docks. “We fought to keep [it] from being lost,” Dedetas later said after her success in blocking the project.

Then Imamoglu became mayor of the city, bringing Istanbul back under CHP rule. “The privatization processes of the shipyard were being carried out,” Dedetas told Turkish media. “If [the mayorship] had not changed hands in the 2019 elections, there would be no shipyard left.”

One of the new mayor’s first orders of business was to appoint Dedetas as manager of Istanbul’s maritime public transportation system; she was the first woman in the role. Over the last quarter century, the city’s water transport fell into disarray as Istanbul’s population swelled and moved further inland, contributing to congestion and gridlock on road and rail. Yet municipal-run ferries predate the first Bosporus bridge and remain one of the city’s fastest options to cross continents.

Dedetas proved herself to be a masterful administrator, overhauling the entire water transit system. She opened 11 new ferry lines and launched a 24-hour weekend ferry that connected the European and Asian sides of the city. She also doubled the patronage of public water transport, in part by restoring the iconic white and orange vapur ferry ships. And she launched an electric sea taxi service, providing a personal, environmentally friendly option to traverse the Bosporus Strait and the Marmara Sea.

Through the effective management of maritime transportation, Dedetas gained national attention. She set her eyes on her home district, Uskudar—the Istanbul neighborhood with the longest Bosporus shoreline—ahead of the 2024 municipal elections. “Uskudar is the first gate for people who arrive from Anatolia, and for Istanbul, it is the gate to the rest of the country,” said Onur Cingil, an Uskudar native and CHP member.

The borough had been an AKP stronghold for as long as Cingil and most others could remember. It is even home to Erdogan’s private villa. Cingil said he saw local government officials claim eminent domain and exaggerate concerns about earthquake vulnerability to demolish buildings and hand over lucrative sites to construction companies, religious associations, and other party loyalists. “This happened … to my own student dormitory, and many other places,” Cingil said.

Cingil was one of the many CHP candidates vying to be the nominee for Uskudar’s mayorship in March’s elections, but the CHP leadership eventually selected Dedetas to run due to her reputation for being a technocratic consensus builder.

“Normally, I wouldn’t expect such a profile to be nominated for Uskudar,” said Burak Bilgehan Ozpek, a professor of political science at TOBB University of Economics and Technology. He described Dedetas’s young, professional, and secular profile as going against the grain in the district. The CHP typically nominated old-school, male party insiders for such roles, Ozpek said, adding with a laugh that they always lost the race. “This was a radical change,” he added.

Dedetas took a pro-people approach to her campaign against the AKP incumbent Hilmi Turkmen, who had been a mainstay in Uskudar’s politics for decades. She canvassed the district neighborhood by neighborhood, underlining her accomplishments governing the city’s maritime transit system, which has a budget the same size as Uskudar’s.

Dedetas vowed to redress the AKP’s neglect of women’s issues on both the district and federal levels. She promised to prioritize women’s employment and noted that, during her time helming Istanbul’s maritime transit system, she nearly tripled the number of women working there. She also proposed the creation of a free HPV vaccine program to protect against some forms of cervical cancer. (The cost of the vaccine has become nearly equivalent to Turkey’s monthly minimum wage.)

The candidate pledged to create child nurseries in every neighborhood in Uskudar. “This will enable women to work,” especially residents with low incomes, said Rumeysa Camdereli, an activist and member of Havle Women’s Association, the first Muslim feminist organization in Turkey.

Dedetas promised to expand welfare initiatives, and called for additional municipally subsidized cafeterias in Uskudar. Imamoglu created these during his first term for residents to get a healthy meal for just over a dollar, and his AKP competitor Murat Kurum mocked them on the campaign trail. “We are tired and bored of the rhetoric that tries to deceive the people by … giving half a tea glass of water or milk as if it is a service,” said Kurum. He also made fun of Imamoglu’s background as a kofte vendor.

Kurum’s gaffe turned off blue collar voters. Istanbul’s public eateries fill up every day for lunch and are vital in a country enduring a cost-of-living crisis amid annual inflation of nearly 70 percent.

“Local elections are less ideological and always more focused on services,” said Emine Ucak, the program director for social policy at the Reform Institute, an Istanbul-based policy center, who researches women in Turkish politics. “Women always think about their children, and they had stopped seeing a future for them.”

The campaign also focused on securing areas most vulnerable to earthquakes, a national concern after the devastating February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey’s southeast. Many locals fear that the slate block flats populating the hills above Uskudar’s wharf are in imminent danger in case of an earthquake. In response to their concerns, Dedetas is establishing a natural disaster directorate to help the district become prepared for earthquakes and other catastrophes.

On election night, Dedetas triumphed, beating Turkmen by more than seven percentage points. In doing so, she tore apart the long-held myth that Uskudar was an AKP stronghold.

“It’s a district with a lot of conservative families,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at Brookings Institution. “For an uncovered woman to win is a real testament to her political appeal.” Unlike past CHP candidates, Dedetas shied away from the hardline, sometimes alienating secularism her party is known for. Pragmatism and empathy won the day.

Dedetas was not the only victorious woman on election day. Altogether, voters tripled the number of women mayors across Turkey. While only four female mayors had been elected in the previous municipal elections in 2019, 11 provinces and 64 municipalities are now governed by women, the vast majority of them representing opposition parties. Together, they won, on average, 53 percent of votes.

Female political representation is a welcome change after what many in the country see as backsliding on women’s rights under Erdogan. In 2021, Turkey exited the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty to combat gender-based violence that was drafted in the city a decade earlier. The Turkish president had urged women to have at least three children, claiming that those who reject motherhood are “deficient” and “incomplete.”

Although Turkey has a highly centralized political system, mayors remain key to managing districts and municipalities. They are where citizens first access the country’s welfare systems, and where businesses are registered, among other duties.

Following March’s elections, Dedetas and other mayors in the Turkish opposition now have their best chance in decades to govern with less interference from Ankara. She has wasted no time in initiating programs that address locals’ needs, such as grocery subsidies of up to $150 for retired residents. The district also plans to provide elderly residents free shuttle services to food markets. (Pensioners, who compose more than 10 percent of Turkey’s national population, receive roughly $293 per month from the state, an impossible wage to live on in Istanbul.)

Uskudar’s new mayor is also working to counteract the AKP’s neoliberal strategies, which many accuse of benefiting political patrons through shady backroom dealings all while poverty has deepened. To help promote transparency, Dedetas has begun to broadcast all municipal council meetings live online.

Figen Kucuksezer, an optometrist and Uskudar resident, is very excited by these changes. They’ve already helped preserve Uskudar’s Validebag Grove, one of the last wild green spaces in Istanbul. The area, which Kucuksezer volunteers to protect, is home to 400-year-old trees and migratory birds.

“The former mayor always wanted to make changes to the grove,” she said, referring to the AKP’s plans to develop the area by adding parking lots and food stalls and removing some native flora. But Kucuksezer and other local activists filed a lawsuit and have fought for years for Validebag to be left alone. “We had to block the Caterpillar [equipment] from entering in,” she said.

Since being elected, Dedetas has promised to protect it as a green space for all residents. In May, the local court annulled the previous government’s construction plan. “It is a breath of fresh air,” Kucuksezer added.

There is a saying in Turkish politics that whoever wins Istanbul will one day win Turkey. It was the case for Erdogan, who previously served as mayor of Istanbul before leading the country for the past two decades.

After years in the political wilderness, the CHP is now trying to repeat its success in the next national election, which should be the first without Erdogan in nearly 30 years. The challenge for Dedetas is to help Imamoglu triumph so that she can be his successor in Istanbul as he runs for the presidency.

So far, her stances have mirrored those of Imamoglu; Dedetas regularly highlights their work together on social media. But she has also bolstered her own profile by engaging in key culture war debates—including by opposing controversial legislation that will kill beloved stray dogs on the streets to rooting for the women’s national volleyball team at the Paris 2024 Olympics, a squad that has been vilified by the conservative right. Imamoglu’s and Dedetas’s fortunes are now intertwined.

“And this is just the start of her office,” said Cingil, Dedetas’s one-time party rival. “There are already rumors that she will be the next candidate for Istanbul mayor.” That would be another first.

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justinspoliticalcorner · 7 months ago

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Judd Legum at Popular Information:

In 2024, reliable access to high-speed internet is no longer a luxury; it is a basic necessity. From job applications to managing personal finances and completing school work, internet access is an essential part of daily life. Without an internet connection, individuals are effectively cut off from basic societal activities.

But the reality is that many people — particularly those living around the poverty line — can not afford internet access. Without internet access, the difficult task of working your way from the American economy's bottom rung becomes virtually impossible. On November 21, 2021, President Biden signed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The new law included the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided up to $30 per month to individuals or families with income up to 200% of the federal poverty line to help pay for high-speed internet. (For a family of four, the poverty line is currently $31,200.) On Tribal lands, where internet access is generally more expensive, the ACP offers subsidies up to $75 per month. The concept started during the Trump administration. The last budget enacted by Trump included $3.2 billion to help families afford internet access. The FCC made the money available as a subsidy to low-income individuals and families through a program known as the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program. The legislation signed by Biden extended and formalized the program. It has been a smashing success.

Today, the ACP is "helping 23 million households – 1 in 6 households across America." The program has particularly benefited "rural communities, veterans, and older Americans where the lack of affordable, reliable high-speed internet contributes to significant economic, health and other disparities." According to an FCC survey, two-thirds of beneficiaries "reported they had inconsistent internet service or no internet service at all prior to ACP." These households report using their high-speed internet to "schedule or attend healthcare appointments (72%), apply for jobs or complete work (48%), do schoolwork (75% for ACP subscribers 18-24 years old)." Tomorrow, the program will abruptly end. In October 2023, the White House sent a supplemental budget request to Congress, which included $6 billion to extend the program through the end of 2024. There is also a bipartisan bill, the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act, which would extend the program with $7 billion in funding. The benefits of the program have shown to be far greater than the costs. An academic study published in February 2024 found that "for every dollar spent on the ACP, the nation’s GDP increases by $3.89." The program will lapse tomorrow because��Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring either the bill (or the supplemental funding request) to a vote. The Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act has 225 co-sponsors which means that, if Johnson held a vote, it would pass.

[...]

The Republican attack on affordable internet

Why will Johnson not even allow a vote to extend the ACP? He is not commenting. But there are hints in the federal budget produced by the Republican Study Committee (RSC). The RSC is the "conservative caucus" of the House GOP, and counts 179 of the 217 Republicans in the House as members. Johnson served as the chair of the RSC in 2019 and 2020. He is currently a member of the group's executive committee. The RSC's latest budget says it "stands against" the ACP and labels it a "government handout[] that disincentivize[s] prosperity." The RSC claims the program is unnecessary because "80 percent" of beneficiaries had internet access before the program went into effect. For that statistic, the RSC cites a report from a right-wing think tank, the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), which opposes the ACP. EPIC, in turn, cites an FCC survey to support its contention that 80% of ACP beneficiaries already had internet access. The survey actually found that "over two-thirds of survey respondents (68%) reported they had inconsistent internet service or no internet service at all prior to ACP."

[...] The RSC also falsely claims that funding for the precursor to the ACP, the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBB), "was signed into law at the end of President Biden’s first year in office." This is false. Former President Trump signed the funding into law in December 2020. The RSC's position is not popular. A December 2023 poll found that 79% of voters support "continuing the ACP, including 62% of Republicans, 78% of Independents, and 96% of Democrats."

In 2024, access to the internet is a necessity and not just a luxury, and the Republicans are set to end the Affordable Connectivity Program if no action is taken. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) provided subsidies to low-income people and families to obtain internet access.

#Internet #Internet Access #Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act #Affordable Connectivity Program #Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act #IIJA #Emergency Broadband Benefit Program #Republican Study Committee #Economic Policy Innovation Center

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darkmaga-returns · 9 days ago

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11/13/2024•Mises Wire•Daniel Lacalle

The insane neo-Keynesian policies implemented by the Biden-Harris administration have created persistent inflation and record levels of debt with two objectives: to bloat Gross Domestic Product and jobs with public spending and government jobs.

The United States’ insane inflation is solely due to out-of-control spending and currency printing. Corporations, wars, or supply chains cannot cause aggregate prices to rise, nor can they consolidate the increase even at a slower pace. Although this can have an impact on individual prices, the only factor that causes aggregate prices to rise year after year is the decline in the value of the US dollar that the government issues.

Over 20.5% accumulated inflation over the past four years, government deficit spending has reached nearly $2 trillion annually despite record tax receipts and a growing economy, public debt has reached almost $36 trillion, and the monthly job figure includes an astonishing 43,000 new government jobs each month. In 2023, nearly 25% of all job gains were government ones, and the entirety of the growth of the labor force in the past four years came from foreign workers. The latest jobs figure is so poor it seems disingenuous to blame it on hurricanes and strikes, as if economists and forecasters had not considered those two factors in their estimates. Furthermore, the only factor that continued to increase uncontrollably was the number of government jobs, adding 40,000 new positions to an overall total of just 12,000 jobs. No wonder the labor participation rate and employment-to-population ratios remain below 2019 levels. Furthermore, in the latest GDP figure, government spending accounted for 30% of the annualized growth, while investment was basically stagnant. In the past nine quarters, government spending has been one of the top drivers of GDP growth, and its contribution to GDP in the third quarter of 2024 was the largest in a year.

This is upside-down economics in full swing. Private sector investment weakness, higher taxes for the productive economy and government spending and debt driving the economy. Of course, this never ends well.

The Harris-Biden administration arrived in January 2021, when the economy was bouncing back strongly. Instead of allowing the private sector to thrive, it embarked on a strategy of out-of-control spending and tax increases with two objectives: increase the size of government in the economy so much that the next administration would be unable to reduce it enough in four years. The second objective was to bloat growth and job figures so aggressively that the next administration will see a recession if it reduces public sector growth. You may ask yourself why they would do it if Harris intended to win the elections. If Kamala Harris wins, she will continue to expand the size of government, inflate prices through spending and printing, and blame companies and stores for these actions.

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kdramaxoxo · 10 months ago

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Can you recommend like a fun, silly, summery drama? I'm looking for similar vibes as Cheer Up or Age of Youth (female friendships are a plus). It's hard to find something without melodrama.

First off, I LOVE your user icon! (- ‿◦ )

And I definitely want to help you find something silly and easy to watch, especially as we enter the depths of winter! Some of these are a little less slice of life but still fun. Also I know you already watched/mentioned a couple of these but I'm adding them to the list for everyone else who might be game!

Light Hearted Fun K-dramas (little or no melo)

Soundtrack #1 (slice of life/romance) Best friends for almost 20 years, the two leads start having feelings for one another while working on a project. This drama only has a few episodes which is a shame because it's really cute! As a Park Hyung Sik Stan (sorry but Happiness broke me), he's great in this one and he hasn't lost all of his military weight yet which I LOVE :D

Fanletter Please! (slice of life/ romance) A sick child writes fan letters to her favorite star, an actress who for kdrama reasons is afraid of fan letters. This was a super sweet, short drama - I really liked it so much!

Into The Ring (workplace/romcom): The perfect slice-of-life rom com! Goo Se Ra has trouble holding down a job due to her passionate personality so after she loses her latest job working for the ML, she decides to run for a small government office position because it pays a salary. Literally she does it for the money which is just *chef’s kiss.* The show is about her dealing with local politics and it’s SO FUNNY and smart and the OTP is the best!

King The Land (rom/com): A cold chaebol hotel owner meets his match (literally and figuratively) who is a top notch employee. There's a lot of push pull and the ML (MY BIAS!) Lee Junho's character falls hard and fast. It does have slow moments but if you literally want to watch a happy couple be happy (plus the skinship is chef's kiss and there is so much of it) you'll enjoy this one.

Melo Is My Nature (slice of life): This drama is by far my favorite slice-of-life drama of 2019. Found family, strong and complex characters, I laughed, I cried. Plus a gay character that’s an actual character, with the gay as a casual side note (classy k-drama!!) It was just a perfect show for me. There’s romance, but all of the stories are super interesting.

Top Management (slice of life) I know this show is mainly on Youtube Premium BUT I just got an email from Youtube basically saying “hey we know you never want to pay to watch our shows so we’re just going to let you ok?” so that’s something… Adorable mini drama about a girl who can see the future and becomes the rookie manager for a kpop band. Fun and easy.

Business Proposal (rom/com) Seriously this drama is almost the exact same plot as The Secret Life of My Secretary. It's really fun and cute (just like the latter) and if you like one, you'll like the other ;-)

True To Love / Bo Rah Deborah (rom/com) Bo Rah is a relationship expert publishing her book. She works with a man who is her total opposite making it a cute enemies to lovers. Yoo in Ah is literally so adorable I love watching her! (If I'm honest I can't remember a TON about this drama but I do remember it being an easy watch).

Her Private Life (romcom): Park Min Young really knows how to pick dramas. I loved this one about a museum curator who is secretly a fangirl obsessed with an idol. It’s fun and fluffy but does have a very mild childhood trauma thing with his mother but I mean, 99% of dramas like this do? If you like this one, Touch Your Heart and Why Secretary Kim are by the same person and have similar vibes.

Touch Your Heart (rom/com) A sweet, silly and very mild rom com about a serious boss and his hallyu star secretary. This show was an obvious response to the chemistry that Lee Dong Wook and Yoo In Na had in Goblin so it was nice to see them together again. Yoo In Na is such a fun person to watch!

Fight for My Way (slice of life/romcom): I love this drama! Always a fave for me, this drama is funny and heartwarming! The leading lady is a strong female which I LOVE, and Park Seo Joon plays her really cute down to earth best friend. It’s a childhood friends to lovers trope with a group of regular people (no rich heirs in this show!) and has a happy ending and a lot of cute flirting, cuddling and kissing. Argh I love these two!

Age of Youth 1 (slice of life): Age of Youth/ Hello My Twenties is one of the best k-dramas that centers around strong female friendships. A group of wildly different girls find themselves rooming together in an apartment. Lots of romance too, but the girl’s lives and friendships are the primary focus.

Shopping King Louie (romcom): Ridiculously fun and lighthearted romp following a spoiled and useless chaebol with amnesia who is being taken care of by a country bumpkin in the city. Very low stakes, super adorable couple, and as many tropes as you can fit in your bag, this one is one of my favorites to recommend.

Eulachacha Waikiki / Laughter In Waikiki (slice of life comedy, romance) I hope you’re ready for a crazy amount of unlikely situations and nutty hijinks because this show is probably one the most silly ones I’ve ever watched. It follows a group of friends who own a hostel so it’s a slice of life drama. At certain points I was like “this is TOO silly” but I’m glad I stuck with it cause it was so hilarious. Plus, the baby is a star!

Wok of Love (rom/com) Despite the fact that the show was shortened by two episodes because of sports, this drama is a funny and quirky show worth watching. Many people dropped it because it was SO crazy for the first couple of episodes (it has a talking horse people!), but it does settle into a really sweet and fun story about a chef, a gangster and a rich girl and her family. If you love food, this show is for YOU!

And finally, if you don't mind a bit of melo, I highly recommend Run On!

Enjoy <3

#kdrama recommendations #kdrama recs #kdrama #king the land #i wrote this list right before bed and im not really awake #so how many typos will there be?#lee junho #on the list twice as he should be #soundtrack no 1 #fanletter place #true to love #i love a list

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jazzhandsmcleg · 4 months ago

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tomorrow is my last day at my current job, which was only ever a three-year contracted position. I don't yet have anything else lined up to replace it, and it's not for lack of trying. in fact, I'm waiting to hear from one place to see if they want to interview me, and waiting to hear from another place who said they'd make a decision this week. but I don't know what's coming next. if not one of those two places -- and in fact even if it is the second place; it doesn't pay a whole lot and I have a shiny new car loan to pay off -- I'm going to have to go out and get a retail job or two while I wait for my professional prospects to improve. story of my generation, right?

I've done that before. I don't really want to do it again, but I'll do it if I have to and it'll be fine.

work the last few days have been odd. I've been trying to wrap up one last project, and the deadline of "Friday" has really put me in the zone. I blink and ninety minutes have gone by. blink again and it's lunch time. lunch today was odd, too. my boss ordered in pizza and a salad and all of us commandeered the lunchroom and shot the shit for almost an hour, aka almost twice as long as our government-mandated lunch breaks. I often get weird about eating with people and COVID is always more or less a concern, so I've never actually eaten with any of my coworkers before. they gave me a card, cleverly done up to look like a governmental record. even the people I've seldom interacted with, even the lady who I suspect doesn't really like me very much, added a nice thing or two to it.

tomorrow I'm taking a cake and some popcorn for everyone to eat, as a little reciprocal goodbye gift. if it weren't for that and for the project I have to finish tomorrow (and, well, for the eight hours of vacation pay transferred to cash I'd be giving up), I'd be tempted to just call out tomorrow and go out without any awkward goodbyes. but it'd be kind of rude to do that to my coworkers, who are a pretty good bunch of people. but I'm not ready to leave. but I've been ready to leave for at least a year and a half at this point. but I've known when I was going to be leaving, at the absolute latest, since the day I was hired.

you know a place after three years, you know? it matters in the way all things do after three years. it's weird to think, I will likely never see these people again. it's a bit of a relief. it's a bit sad. after three years, it's mostly just weird.

I'm so tired. I'm a little glad I evidently don't have anything lined up, because it means I get to take next week to "do nothing"...by which I mean I will clean and apply for retail jobs that I hope will hire me even though I haven't done customer service since 2019 and tackle some home projects I've been putting off and cook and. life goes on.

I'm so tired. I drove home today in an exhausted fugue, my mind stretched out and my back sore from craning over papers all day. I sat down to do my budget before I make the cake, and found myself dissatisfied with all my music. I made a new station on Pandora -- well, technically pianobar -- that spun off from The War on Drugs, and got Under the Pressure, eight and a half minutes of serious, dreamy guitar and solo tenor vocals, with a little brass on the side.

under the pressure indeed.

I opened up realtor.com instead of my budget spreadsheet and started looking at pictures of pretty houses in my area. they're all still out of my price range for the foreseeable future, and it's odd because today I can't even imagine myself living in any of those houses. all of my problems would just be there with me instead of here. is that realization maturity?

life sure does go on.

#Jazz notes #food mention #I'm kind of in the headspace one normally gets to by napping from 1pm to 6pm #that soft fuzzy sense of confusion without urgency and with only a little displeasure even though you can tell you should be feeling more #so here's some train of thought prosetry for you all I guess

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unicorrrrrn · 1 year ago

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what are your fav kdramas?

Yay! An ask on my main tumblr!! I have SO many favorite k-dramas that I love for different reasons but these are the ones that come to mind that I think about a lot.

Most of My favorite K-dramas:

Extraordinary You/ A Day Found By Chance (fantasy/romance): This magical k-drama has my heart. It plays with all of the predictable tropes and then just goes crazy! While not perfect towards the end, I give this show bonus points for being super creative AND inspiring me to read a LOT of fan fic. I think about this drama more than any other.

Fight for My Way (romcom) I love this drama! The couple is one of my OTPs and it’s really funny and a mostly lighthearted story of a group of friends. It’s down to earth and adorable - I’ve never had anyone complain about this one!

Just Between Lovers (romance/melo): Slice of Life romance between poor trauma babies just trying to live! The OTP is one of my favorite couples EVER and even as the years go on, very few couples have matched their love in my opinion. There’s a lot of comfort/healing themes with for me is just *chef’s kiss.* Lee Junho became my bias wrecker because of that drama.

The Eighth Sense (bl queer romance): This is the only 2023 drama to make this list! It's super atmospheric and has so much more character development than any korean bl I've ever seen. I loved it so much!

Run On: (rom com) This show follows four people in their daily lives: An athletic, a translator, a CEO and an artist. Soft soft couples!! Y'all know I love this slice of life rom com for so many reasons, but you might not know that Kang Tae Oh’s character (the himbo painter) is like one of my dream boys. BLORBO FROM MY SHOWS. Also there is so much bi nuance and an ace character, just saying!

The Best Hit / Hit The Top (romcom): A famous 90′s boyband dude travels into the future and meets up with his family and friends in this really cute drama featuring Yoon Shi Yoon. I LOVE Yoon Shi Yoon in pretty much everything but this role was made for him - he is hilarious. It’s a slice of life but features the k-pop music industry so the setting is unique.

Flower of Evil: A psychological thriller centered around a jewelry maker who is running from his past, and his cop wife (power couple alert!) who doesn’t know his original identity. The chemistry of the couple is amazing and all of the characters are nuanced and interesting. I was on the edge of my seat, AND sobbing! I’m going to be rewatching this in 2021 for sure.

The Smile Has Left Your Eyes (psychological thriller): This drama has a lot of psychological thriller-y aspects but the style of filming is really interesting and the leads could not be more angsty (especially the guy). It takes them a while to get together and while not entirely pleasant, this show is one of my faves.

Healer: Everyone knows healer will always have my heart and it’s a super popular k-drama. Healer is played by Ji Chang Wook (swoon) and he gets involved with a feisty reporter played by Park Min Young (also swoon). It’s an action adventure with some very classic tropes: Rich people scandals, murders and hidden pasts. But it also has some of my favorite tropes: Beta Male Lead, childhood friends to lovers and traumatic pasts.

Cheating because it's a jdrama: Cherry Magic! (30-sai made Dotei Da to Mahotsukai ni Nareru rashii): I know this is a Jdrama but it’s the only drama that got a perfect score from me in 2020! If you’ve never felt like trying a jdrama, Cherry Magic is the one! Every episode was so endearing and sweet, and it even has ace representation, and does it well! I basically smiled the whole time and loved every second. Soft Romance and the best couple!

#i love a list #kdrama recommendations #my top #i know i'm missing at least 10 #lol #ask #dylan-rodrigues

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago

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This day in history

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!

#20yrsago VLC will play iTunes Music Store tracks https://memex.craphound.com/2004/03/25/vlc-will-play-itunes-music-store-tracks/

#15yrsago British local governments deploy anti-teenager pink lights designed to make kids ashamed of their appearance http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2009/03/26/anti-teenager-pink-lights-to-show-up-acne/

#15yrsago Congress considers inventory of spectrum use in America https://memex.craphound.com/2009/03/25/congress-considers-inventory-of-spectrum-use-in-america/

#15yrsago Live notes and streams from the FTC’s hearing on DRM in Seattle https://web.archive.org/web/20090329200416/https://teleread.org/2009/03/25/ftc-drm-town-hall-meeting-now-in-session/

#15yrsago Ankle weights save tippy strollers from forgetful parents (like me) https://web.archive.org/web/20090327143337/http://www.parenthacks.com/2009/03/add-ankle-weights-to-umbrella-strollers-to-keep-them-from-tipping.html

#10yrsago Oh No Ross and Carrie: podcasting investigative journalists join cults, try woo, and get prodded — for science! https://memex.craphound.com/2014/03/25/oh-no-ross-and-carrie-podcasting-investigative-journalists-join-cults-try-woo-and-get-prodded-for-science/

#10yrsago Judge tells porno copyright troll that an IP address does not identify a person https://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-person-140324/

#10yrsago AT&T to Netflix: if you don’t bribe us to do our job, you’re asking for a “free lunch” https://memex.craphound.com/2014/03/25/att-to-netflix-if-you-dont-bribe-us-to-do-our-job-youre-asking-for-a-free-lunch/

#10yrsago LAPD says every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation https://gizmodo.com/los-angeles-cops-argue-all-cars-in-l-a-are-under-inves-1547411605

#10yrsago Big Data Hubris: Google Flu versus reality https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/0314policyforumff.pdf

#10yrsago James Kochalka’s “The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza” https://memex.craphound.com/2014/03/25/james-kochalkas-the-glorkian-warrior-delivers-a-pizza/

#5yrsago Chinese censors incinerate entire run of a kickstarted Call of Cthulhu RPG sourcebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Urosc-JEY

#5yrsago London developer makes last-minute changes to lock poor kids out of “communal” playground https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/25/too-poor-to-play-children-in-social-housing-blocked-from-communal-playground

#5yrsago Peak Indifference: are we reaching climate’s denial/nihilism tipping point? https://www.wired.com/story/peak-indifference-on-climate-change/

#5yrsago Rebooting UUCP to redecentralize the net https://web.archive.org/web/20190324140104/https://uucp.dataforge.tk/

#5yrsago The Vessel: a perfect symbol for the grifter capitalism of New York City’s privatized Hudson Yards “neighborhood” https://thebaffler.com/latest/fuck-the-vessel-wagner

#1yrago The Golden Rule (them what has the gold makes the rules) https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/25/consequentialism/#dotards-in-robes

#pluralistic

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vasyas-tie-clip · 7 months ago

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Arestovych's involvement with the HUR and Budanov

Arestovych is frequently depicted, including by Ukrainian government speakers, as an irrelevant pro-Russian blogger hack inflating his importance. There is actually a lot of evidence that this is not true.

There's enough to talk about here that I'm going to split it into several posts, each focusing on a different area of his involvement. While I've touched on some of the topics in past posts, this will be more of a narrow-scope deep dive into one topic at a time, and incorporate the latest available information. In this case: his genuine history with the HUR and its current head Budanov. The post will be split into the pre-full scale invasion and post-full scale invasion timespans. The former will go into both Arestovych's claims, and the public evidence available to support his claims, as of April 2024. The latter runs into the issues of the far more limited information available in the middle of full-scale war, as well as the intense politicization that's occurred around Arestovych in the past two years, but there's a few interesting items worth presenting.

Pre-full scale invasion

Arestovych's account

Pieced together from various interviews:

Arestovych served 1999-2005 in Ukrainian military intel, hinting that he ultimately quit because he was given what he considered destructive orders after the Orange Revolution. Among his specialties at that time was "information counteraction", which he described as "to bring public opinion to certain indicators on a certain issue in a particular region." In other words, public info ops on behalf of the military.

During his stint in the HUR, he befriended Roman Mashovets, a fellow young officer who would go on to become a deputy head of the Office of the President. In addition, he says he's known Kyrylo Budanov for "many, many years" due to their HUR connection, since before war broke out in 2014, and calls him a "comrade in arms" whom he worked with in the Donbas in 2018, when Budanov was a HUR special ops officer and Arestovych was a Ground Forces intel officer. When Budanov became head of the HUR in the midst of the Wagnergate scandal involving his predecessor, he asked for Arestovych's help in managing the public reaction.

The available evidence

We'll start with the documentation Arestovych himself has presented, before moving on to external sources.

While you could perhaps argue that documents could be forged, I find this possibility highly unlikely, given any journalist could easily request confirmation from the Ministry of Defense (and indeed they've done so, and published the results, on other occasions, such as when they took a misheard quip from one of his livestreams to mean he was claiming he was a colonel and obtained official confirmation he wasn't.) Given no one has been able to find irregularities in his formal records and awards despite several years of such intense public scrutiny, I think it's safe to conclude they're legitimate.

This is certification from 2020, showing that he was in the military from August 1994 to April 2005, and from September 2018 to September 2019:

(It's worth noting that this timespan overlaps with his infamous appearance at a conference with Dugin, which he's said was part of his intel work.)

In his early days as a public figure, he also presented a certificate of merit from the HUR dated September 2003 (original on left, machine translation on right, though note that the machine translation inaccurately parses the handwritten date as 2002 instead of 2003), evidence that he was specifically in the HUR and that he wasn't too shabby at his job.

After war broke out in the Donbas, Arestovych fought as a volunteer and a Ground Forces intel officer (more on that in other posts), but he doesn't seem to have formally returned to the HUR. However, there's evidence that Arestovych continued to be informally involved, in the form of a HUR departmental award that he first posted a picture of in August 2014. While the award has no date on it, the one who signed the award, a Yu. A. Pavlov (the machine translation slightly fudges the hand-written initials), was director of the HUR from March 2014 to July 2015.

There's not much in the way of outside evidence of Arestovych's connection with Roman Mashovets, who keeps a relatively low public profile. But there's an interesting tidbit from Mariana Bezuhla, an MP who, though known for social media drama and a bitter grudge against Zaluzhnyi, is nonetheless Deputy Chairman of the Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, with considerable insider knowledge. She accused Arestovych and Mashovets of having been the ones to recommend Zaluzhnyi, at the time a dark horse candidate with numerous other generals above him in seniority, to the Office of the President for the position of Commander-in-Chief.

But the most interesting piece of evidence for Arestovych's status within the HUR, and his relationship with Budanov, is this 15-minute video (in Ukrainian, with manual English subtitles) from August 2020, the time of Wagnergate:

youtube

At this time, the young and then-relatively-obscure Budanov had just been made head of the HUR, and he gave an unprecedented first "interview" not to any journalist or news outlet, but to Arestovych, who at the time held no official position and was supposedly just a milblogger, putting forth the case that Wagnergate was a Russian false flag.

I put "interview" in quotes, because, if you watch it, it feels less like any normal interview and more like a creative collaboration between two people pretending they don't know each other as well as they actually do. Budanov gives Arestovych a surprising amount of leeway in steering the conversation:

A: Mister Kyrylo, thank you for agreeing to give us an interview regarding the scandalous situation that arose around the allegedly detained mercenaries in Belorus, and released. First, I would like to share the probable actual event that took place and the informational version, which is now being actively discussed in Ukraine and around it. I am interested in, first of all, as a person who comments on military-political events, the informational version that was given to us. In my opinion, it [version] contains a number of logical inconsistencies that are difficult to explain. I would like to ask you as a professional to go through these logical inconsistencies. The first thing I am interested in, if you will allow me, is that personally I do not have a very high opinion of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Could there be a situation when during a year and a half, a year or half a year, or even a month, some person is collecting information about professional mercenaries who have fought and are "under Mueller's cap" and allows them to go to the territory of the union and still of another state in an organised group of 33 people? To what extent is this possible from the point of view of the Russian special services, that they didn’t know anything about it, and the Belarusian too? B: (dryly) First, good afternoon. [They both chuckle.]

Budanov offhandedly confirms that Arestovych served in the HUR:

A: Tell me, you are the Chief of the DIU [short for Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, another name for the HUR], can operations be planned with so many logical errors? From my point of view, as a former DIU officer-- B: I know. A: --this is terribly unprofessional.

And at the end, as if realizing how odd it looks for the head of national military intel to be interviewing with a glorified blogger (there won't be any other similar situations until well after the full-scale invasion, and Arestovych was indeed questioned about this by a journalist in one of his later interviews), Arestovych asks Budanov his reasons for the interview. Budanov explains that, in addition to the needs of the situation, he has considerable regard for Arestovych himself:

A: In my memory, you are almost the first Chief of the Military Intelligence of Ukraine who generally gives interviews to the press, and to a blogger - a representative of unofficial media - you are the first. What allowed you to take such a step? This is an unprecedented event. B: Firstly, the event is unprecedented, and secondly, I have great respect for you, you can be said to be my colleague. This is basic.

So I think the evidence is quite strong that Arestovych indeed served in the HUR, and he was considered trustworthy enough and good enough at informational work that, more than a decade after he officially quit, despite his already quite controversial public reputation, he had the head of the HUR declaring his "great respect" and specifically choosing him for his one media appearance for cleaning up the Wagnergate scandal.

During the full-scale invasion

There's understandably not a lot publicly known in a time of full-scale war, and a time when Arestovych has become enormously famous, (at least partially deliberately) controversial, and politically inconvenient to many, but there's a few interesting items worth mentioning:

In December 2022, Budanov was asked if Arestovych really worked in the HUR in an interview, and he answered "as far as I remember, yes."

In June 2023, Arestovych was asked about rumors that Budanov had been heavily wounded in a strike on HUR headquarters, and he answered that he knows the HQ building well, the strike was nowhere near Budanov's office, and he'd spoken to Budanov after the alleged incident and he'd looked perfectly fine. Presumably this was through a video call, if we can believe the most interesting and problematic source we have:

In February 2024, the investigative outlet NGL.media published an article claiming that Arestovych was able to leave Ukraine the previous fall, despite the borders normally being closed to men of military age, because he had a letter from the HUR. The publication reached out to Arestovych, the HUR, and the State Border Services for comment before the article came out, but got no response from the first two and a refusal to comment from the last.

The timing of the article is suspicious--toward the end of Zaluzhnyi's time as commander-in-chief, while rumors were swirling that Budanov was a candidate for his replacement. Given the byzantine nature of Ukrainian internal politics and the degree to which it controls domestic media, the article may well have been an attempt to discredit Budanov at a sensitive juncture, as a pretext to bring up an earlier case of a suspected corrupt official leaving the country with a letter from the HUR, as well for tying him to Arestovych, who at the time had a roughly 80% distrust rating in surveys, and whose court cases the article gives accounts of in a misleading fashion.

Indeed, the HUR's social media channels came out with a denial only hours later. The quickness of the denial is also unusual, notably faster than the HUR's come out with denials of other seemingly more major information attacks, including rumors of their own head's injury or capture.

And instead of accepting the official HUR answer, the publication doubled down, directly publishing the list of Arestovych's borders crossings that it had obtained from its source, with what it considered sensitive information redacted, and declaring it would sue the border service to force it to release copies of the documents Arestovych had used to leave. (The State Border Service later issued a denial as well, though the comments are mostly disbelieving, given the quite low regard the organization is held in.)

When asked about the article a few days later, Arestovych responded by criticizing everyone involved: the HUR press services for responding to rumors, the media for obsessing over the personal details of a supposed irrelevant blogger instead of paying mind to the real issues they were facing. But he didn't confirm or deny anything about himself.

Given all this, it's hard to say how trustworthy the list of crossings is. The HUR and border service have issued denials, but they'd have reason to issue denials regardless if Arestovych was secretly working for the HUR. NGL.media certainly seems confident that their source is legit, but we don't know how exactly they know, and we don't know what they chose to edit out. Keeping in mind the above complications, however, the table is worth a look:

There are some irregularities in the "reason for departure" column, such as the use of Russian words instead of the Ukrainian counterpart at some points, but this might be an artifact of the publication's redactions or the work of individual Russophone border guards.

While some of Arestovych's nine trips abroad weren't known to the public, others sets of dates do match up remarkably well with appearances abroad that were previously known (though usually not publicly announced, some trackable by an outsider only through diligently keeping tabs on mentions of Arestovych online in multiple languages) with photo and video documentation. For example:

His May-June 2023 trip, during which he appeared in Europe and Israel

His March 2023 trip, during which he appeared at a conference in Lithuania

His February 2022 trip, during which he gave an interview in Italy

His December 2022 trip, where he appeared at a conference in Poland

His November 2022 trip, where he gave an interview in Lithuania

His September 2022 trip, during which he gave a talk in Lithuania

And his current extended stay goes without saying. Interestingly, the dates of the earliest trip on that list corresponds with the dates of the Istanbul negotiations, suggesting he was there in person.

It's worth noting that, in addition to his current trip, his May-June 2023 trip is attributed to a letter from the HUR as well, and he would've been on this HUR-related trip at the time he said he had recently (presumably long-distance) been in touch with Budanov.

In summary, Arestovych officially worked for the HUR in his younger days, he's definitely informally cooperated with Budanov and the HUR in the past, and the evidence around his continued involvement with them since 2022 is problematic, but intriguing. Most likely some answers will only be available after the war, if then.

#oleksiy arestovych

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beardedmrbean · 1 year ago

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Pre-election polls suggested that Swiss voters had three main concerns: Rising fees for the obligatory, free market-based health insurance system; climate change, which has eroded Switzerland’s many glaciers; and worries about migrants and immigration.

The final tally late Sunday showed the people's party, known as SVP by its German-language acronym, gained nine seats compared to the last vote in 2019, and climbed to 62 seats overall in parliament's 200-member lower house. The Socialists, in second, added two seats to reach 41 in that chamber, known as the National Council.

It marked the latest sign of a rightward turn in Europe, after victories or electoral gains by conservative parties in places like Greece, Sweden and Italy over the last year, even if voters in Poland rejected their national conservative government last week.

A new political alliance calling itself The Center, born of the 2021 fusion of the center-right Christian Democrat and Bourgeois Democrat parties, made its parliamentary election debut and took third place – with 29 seats, eclipsing the free-market Liberal party, which lost a seat and now will have 27.

Environmentally minded factions were the biggest losers: The Greens shed five seats and will now have 23, while the more centrist Liberal-Greens lost six, and now will have 10.

Political analyst Pascal Sciarini of the University of Geneva said Monday that the result was largely a “swing of the pendulum” and that support for the Greens was diluted in part because many voters felt they had already taken a big step toward protecting the environment by overwhelmingly approving a climate bill in June that will curb Switzerland's greenhouse gas emissions.

“At first glance, it’s a bit surprising because the climate crisis is even more present than it was four years ago – when climate worries were the dominant issue among the population,” he said.

He suggested that the bounce back for the SVP was a sign that rising insurance premiums and concerns about growing migration into Switzerland captured many voters’ minds this time.

“It’s perhaps that there was a sort of competition among concerns – and that made the job harder for the Greens to make climate concerns the dominant theme in the media,” Sciarini said.

Overall, the vote isn’t likely to have significant impact on Swiss foreign policy, he said. The country’s executive branch operates like a permanent government of national unity, where no single faction has total sway – what’s known among the Swiss as their “magic formula” of democracy to ensure balance and moderation, and ensure that personalities don’t dominate politics.

Even with their electoral victory, the SVP only holds just over 30% of seats in the lower house. The composition of the legislature, which is elected every four years, ultimately shapes the composition of the executive branch, which is called the Federal Council and includes President Alain Berset, who plans to leave government at the end of the year.

But the legislative vote result won’t significantly alter the composition of the Federal Council, where the SVP already has two seats – as do the Socialists, the free-market Liberals, while the Center has one.

The Center party, by outscoring the Liberals, may make a bid to swipe one of their two seats, and the Socialists will have to choose a successor for Berset; Those are the only likely changes to the Federal Council.

The Swiss president is essentially “first among equals” in the seven-member council, where each of the members hold portfolios as government ministers and take turns each year holding the top job – which is essentially a ceremonial one to represent Switzerland abroad. Berset will be succeeded next year by centrist Viola Amherd.

In Switzerland, voters also participate directly in government decision making. Voters regularly go to the polls – usually four times a year – to vote on any number of policy decisions. Those referendum results require parliament to respond.

More broadly, Switzerland has found itself straddling two core elements to its psyche: Western democratic principles like those in the European Union – which Switzerland has refused to join – and its much vaunted “neutrality” in world affairs.

A long-running and intractable standoff over more than 100 bilateral Swiss-EU agreements on issues like police cooperation, trade, tax and farm policy, has soured relations between Brussels and Bern – key trading partners.

The Swiss did line up with the EU in imposing sanctions against Russia over its war in Ukraine. The Federal Council is considering whether to join the EU and the United States in labeling Hamas a terror organization. Switzerland has joined the United Nations in labeling al-Qaida and Islamic State group as terrorists.

Switzerland, with only about 8.5 million people, ranks 20th in world economic output, according to the International Monetary Fund, and it’s the global hub of wealth management: where the world’s rich park much of their money, to benefit from low taxes and a discreet environment.

#nunyas news

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bopinion · 11 months ago

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2023 / 50

Aperçu of the Week:

"Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling."

(Edna Ferber, US-American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner)

Bad News of the Week:

It's happening now: international aid for Ukraine is faltering. Western governments are increasingly calling for a negotiated peace and would like to reinvest in national interests, as elections are soon to be held. After almost two years of reporting on the war, the Western media are showing a certain tiredness of the topic that could probably only be revived by Taylor Swift. Western populations are increasingly realizing that sanctions and military aid are good for morale but bad for the wallet. And then attention and compassion - to put it insensitively - have been strongly rivaled by the Gaza war.

Vladimir Putin has the resources on his side. The Russian ruler has a productive weapons industry, immense manpower that can be mobilized, no scruples, secure state revenues, no opposition or free media, strategic partners and above all: time. On the other hand, the USA is facing the end of its military aid due to Republican power games. Something Europe cannot compensate for. And Europe is facing a blockade of civilian aid funds (guess what? That's right: Viktor Orbán). Something the USA does not want to compensate for.

Both were foreseeable. At the latest when it became clear that the hopeful summer offensive by the Ukrainian armed forces could not actually achieve anything. In fact, it is about defending our values. Yes, the Western world ignored Libya. Abandoned Afghanistan. Looked the other way on Yemen for years until it began to hurt its own trade. But we can't just sit back and accept that a geostrategic war of aggression is being waged on the European continent. When a bully terrorizes kids in the playground, you hope that the others will stick together and stand up to him. Is that asking too much?

Good News of the Week:

The real Donald is back. I'm not talking about the beloved Disney character but about the Polish Prime Minister. The new and the old - since Donald Tusk already hold office from 2007 to 2014. After a long wait, since the Polish President - from PiS, what a surprise! - first tasked the supposed election winner PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość / Law and Justice) with forming the government, even though it has no coalition partner, the will of the people was respected and the opposition took over. With Donald Tusk as Prime Minister.

It cannot have been a coincidence that his first official act was to attend the EU summit. Tusk is very familiar with its procedures. After all, he was President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019 - the number one job on this continent. And for years he was accused of putting European interests above Polish ones. Which is a paradox in itself. After all, if any nation can draw on its history to realize that it can flourish in Europe, then it is Poland.

The history of our neighboring country to the east is very complex. With many tragically dark, but also hopefully bright chapters. One thing is clear: both countries benefit from good neighborly relations. That's why it was unpleasant for us to be used as a pawn in the election campaign. In one election campaign commercial, the PiS party leader Jarosław Aleksander Kaczyński shouted into the phone that it was time to stop being dictated to by Berlin (there was also a version with Brussels). A cheap attempt by the populists to sell their right-wing nationalism as a defense of patriotic independence. Even a law (officially in order to protect elections) was passed to prevent the opposition from winning the election. And despite the lack of a parliamentary majority, the PiS was tasked with forming a government (which was doomed to failure in the foreseeable future).

It didn't help, as hundreds of thousands on the streets and ultimately the majority of the Polish electorate demanded: away from xenophobia, media surveillance and obstruction of justice. Towards democracy, freedom and Europe. Now everyone wins. The European Union is happy about a strong and self-confident, but open and cooperative Poland. And Poland is finally (back) where it belongs: in the middle of Europe.

Personal happy moment of the week:

Last Friday I was invited to a student party. Officially by my daughter's student council (political science at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University), which is an honor that otherwise only a few professors and hand-picked alumni are entitled to. So that I could have a drink, I naturally traveled by bike and public transport. And took the penultimate regional train - just to be sure. So I was sitting on the train with Moby on my headphones when I noticed at an intermediate station that quite a few passengers had somehow got off. Then a train attendant speaks to me: "It's always the same with the headphone wearers. You have to get out of here!".

I realize that the part of the train I'm sitting in is being unhooked and parked here. I rush out of the carriage and forward to the section of the train that continues to my station. But the door no longer opens and the train starts moving. Fuck! It flashes through my mind that I now have to wait for the last train. For an hour. In sub-zero temperatures at two in the morning. At a station in the middle of nowhere, where there is neither a kiosk nor a waiting room, just a draughty platform. But after a meter the train stops, the button to open the door lights up green and I can board. The train driver has obviously seen me in the rear-view mirror. And decided that he has a soft spot for headphone wearers. Thank you very much, you made me happy.

I couldn't care less...

...about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He has been blocking important decisions in the European Union for years because it won't let him do everything he wants - such as disempowering the judiciary, disregarding human rights or controlling the media. He does not fit the image of a European at all. Although hardly any other EU country is as dependent on European funds as his. He would like to keep it that way. And not share financial resources with others, especially not with Ukraine. He is using his veto for this, as many decisions at European level require unanimity according to the statute. But even he will not be able to prevent Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia from seeing their future in Europe. Even if he has to leave the room even more often for important votes: Destiny is destiny.

As I write this...

...the German military ends its mission in Mali. The Bundeswehr is a so-called "parliamentary army" that may only be deployed by resolution of the Bundestag and only for defense purposes. Since the Yugoslavian wars, it has also been deployed internationally to defend civilians and democracy, for example as part of United Nations blue helmet missions. Mali is a failed state in West Africa that has been continously in armed battles since its independence from the colonial power France in 1960. The UN mission was supposed to ensure a peace process.

A decade, many deaths and billions later, the foreign military forces are withdrawing. And leave the country in just as desolate a state as they found it. Memories of Afghanistan come to mind. Perhaps we should think about the method of "creating peace without weapons" ("Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen"). I am very sure that the establishment of a permanent school and healthcare system, for example, would have done more for the population than temporary military bases.

Post Scriptum

This year's world climate conference COP28 in Dubai is over. Doubts had already been raised in the run-up to the conference as to whether the event management by one of the most important producers of fossil fuels, of all people, could ensure a targeted phase-out of precisely these forms of energy. And these doubts proved to be justified. The final communiqué, which was ratified by all participating states, contains a soft formulation that calls for a long-term phase-out of oil and gas, but does not create any obligations. Which reminds me of my son promising for the umpteenth time to tidy up his room. Because he realizes it in theory. And then nothing happens in practice.

At the same time, more and more ambitious climate protection measures are being scaled back or at least called into question. Because the hope of some technological miracle in the future (keyword "carbon capture and storage") feels so much better than giving up the comfort we are used to. Humanity has the knowledge, skills and abilities to prevent the worst. But it simply shows far too little willingness to do what is necessary. Out of laziness and convenience. Like my son. I am so tired...

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mariacallous · 7 months ago

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Not so long ago, the UK government could brag about its climate credentials. In 2019, Prime Minister Theresa May pledged the country to reach net zero by 2050—the first major economy to legally commit to eradicating its emissions. The UK’s early embrace of renewables also saw it cut emissions more quickly and rapidly than other major economies, and it has now slashed its emissions in half compared with 1990 levels.

But as of late, the UK’s bragging rights are looking shaky. Under current prime minister Rishi Sunak, the government has signaled a willingness to roll back green pledges and drag climate policy into the culture wars. In its latest report to Parliament, the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on climate policy, warned that the UK was in danger of losing its position as a climate leader.

For six years, Chris Stark has been CEO of the Climate Change Committee and the UK’s top adviser on climate change. As he steps down from the role, he spoke to WIRED about the UK’s shift away from climate leadership, his fears about the polarization around climate change, and the role he thinks oil and gas companies might play in a net zero future.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Matt Reynolds: In the six years you’ve been CEO of the Climate Change Committee, the UK has had four different prime ministers. How much does the person in charge matter when it comes to climate change policy?

Chris Stark: It’s massively important, though it’s often not the explicit leadership that matters. To tackle climate change we’ve got to have something that spreads right across all the arms of the government. If you know that the person at the top of government wants that policy to be focused on climate, everything just gets a bit easier. I imagine this as a set of strings held by the person at the top. It’s much easier if they’re pulling them up.

So if you’re working on housing policy and there’s something at the margins about whether you do something that helps emissions, or you do something that helps one of the other priorities, then knowing that the boss wants progress on climate really matters.

Has government enthusiasm for bold climate policy waned since your early days in the job?

Over my six years I think we’ve made a huge amount of progress, but I feel we’ve lost the excitement at the top to do good climate policy. In the first half of my time with the CCC we were producing, I think, really interesting insights on what a net zero future looks like, which were easily swallowed by a government that was interested in carving a more positive future.

Today it’s much more of a culture war, and net zero is presented—including by the prime minister—as a cost more than an opportunity. All the things we said before are still true, even more so than six years ago, but we find ourselves having to make the same arguments with one hand tied behind our back.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels like a really pivotal moment in this narrative. In the autumn of 2022, energy prices in the UK were skyrocketing, and yet the response of Liz Truss, prime minister at the time, was to double down on oil and gas exploration and refuse to ask people to cut down their energy usage. It was the absolute opposite approach to many European nations facing the same problem.

At the time [the invasion] happened, it was obviously a genuine crisis and I thought climate was going to come down the priority list. But in my technocratic mind, I was also thinking this was going to create the incentive to get off high-carbon fuels—if you want to know what the world looks like with a high carbon price, we’re about to find out.

What I didn’t expect is that the green arguments were too late out of the blocks because the fossil arguments stepped in immediately to say, “This is why we need a domestic fossil fuel supply.” That really important argument, to act on this because fossil fuels are so price-volatile and so expensive, was slightly missed in the political ether at the time, and we jumped to a different narrative of what the country needed to do.

The irony of that whole period is we’re running out of oil and gas. So it’s not going to be a credible strategy in the long run to try and pump prime oil and gas licenses in the North Sea.

A year later, Truss’ successor, Rishi Sunak, made a big speech rolling back key climate policies, most notably pushing back the 2030 deadline banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

If you look at it purely as a policy speech, there was more pro-climate policy than there was delayed climate policy. It was the one where he talks about accelerating green investment, for example. And the electric vehicle thing [pushing back the 2030 deadline] wasn’t that much of a shift, since we were already allowing hybrids until 2035.

But what did the country hear? They heard, “Don’t worry, now’s not the time to switch to electric vehicles.” It’s hard to tie anything back to a single speech, but if you look at the share of electric vehicles being sold in the UK, it has flatlined since September. I’m sure there are other factors here, but there will be people who thought, “Oh well, maybe I don’t need to get that electric car right now.”

It seems that this government has decided to make appealing to motorists a key campaigning strategy. In July 2023, the Labour Party narrowly lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, and a lot of commentators thought that the Conservative candidate won that election because of his opposition to the Ultra Low Emission Zone.

What happened there was interesting. The Labour Party also accepted the narrative that ULEZ was why they didn’t win that constituency. Inevitably, in any election there are a host of issues at play, but if all parties think it’s about environmental policies, it’s no surprise that that becomes one of the dominant themes in politics after that.

My regret is that we’ve allowed that to color the whole of climate policymaking and politics, but it’s important to make that distinction between politics and policy because the government is still producing lots and lots of climate policies, but now it’s quite unsure how to pitch them.

Electric vehicles are a good example of an area where the UK could have moved really early and made itself a real hub for this technology. Instead, we have a situation where China is really dominating that market and reaping a lot of the benefits of that green transition.

You go right back to the Beijing Olympics—right back at that point, they were already planning as an autocratic state for a full supply chain of electric vehicles, and they weren’t interested in fossil fuels, it was solely about electric vehicles. They could see the trajectory for cost falls in batteries, see the opportunity for being the dominant player in that market, and see that the production line itself is cheaper for an electric vehicle.

We could have done that in the West. Instead we had a whole King Canute-style strategy of holding back from electric vehicles, and we’re about to see the first wave of much, much cheaper electric vehicles from China. It’s going to be difficult to hold that back, so you’ve got a real challenge now.

You don’t need to be an autocratic state to be successful in this transition. I wish we were better at accepting that technology falls down that cost curve.

In February the government announced that the UK is the first major economy to have halved its emissions, compared with 1990 levels. The transition really has been huge, but the CCC has shown that the vast majority of that reduction has come from decarbonizing the power sector. Progress on transport, buildings, industry, and so on has been much slower.

This is the source of some tension between us and the government. I think it’s remarkable what we’ve pulled off with the power sector in this country. It is genuine emissions reduction, there’s been a hell of a lot of big policy to allow that to happen, and a whole energy sector that’s been dragged along with that.

However, while I understand the government’s desire to give retrospective arguments for this, it doesn’t matter in terms of climate. What climate cares about is what you do next, and that’s where I’ve seen the biggest gap. I’m interested now in the set of other stories that go alongside the power system.

We’ve got to change our transport system, change the way industrial production takes place; we’ve got to do things in farming, and heat homes differently. These are the next set of stories and we’re slow on them.

We are not really reducing emissions outside of the power sector at the same rate as inside it. We have to see a very significant increase in decarbonization outside the power sector if we want to hit the goals we’ve set for 2030 and beyond.

One area the UK has been trying to get ahead is with capturing carbon and storing it in the North Sea, the same place where companies are currently drilling for oil and gas.

It’s a controversial thing for us, because obviously I’d prefer that we didn’t continue to use fossil fuels.

But the role of carbon capture is really important in achieving net zero. It helps you reduce emissions on the journey to net zero, and if you’ve got the facility to capture carbon and store it, it also opens this brand-new industry of greenhouse gas removals, which I think the world will need on its journey to tackling climate change.

Without carbon capture and storage it is a very difficult journey to net zero, if not impossible. Without it, it is a very difficult journey. And the key thing is that it’s not an alternative to decarbonizing.

The UK government has awarded 21 carbon storage licenses, most of them going to the oil and gas industry. It’s jarring that the same companies that dug carbon out of the ground, sparking off this whole crisis, stand to benefit by putting that carbon back under the sea.

It jars with me as well, but I also care about pace and tech and ability. You will not find the ability to do this outside of the oil and gas sector. If you want to try and exclude the oil and gas sector from this then you will fail on this.

We cannot be too binary about who we deal with. It is a transition. Oil and gas do have a role, whether we like it or not, over the next 30 years. I’d far rather have an oil and gas sector that is properly invested in technologies that will help the transition to net zero. If we make them pariahs then they’ll stick to their knitting, as we’ve seen in Scotland.

In an interview with the BBC you said that climate campaigners have been unhelpful in the discussion around climate change. I’m sure a lot of people will be disappointed to hear that from the UK’s leading climate adviser.

Yeah, I’m sure they’d be disappointed. I have no issue with campaigners themselves. My observation is more about the impact that campaigning has had and how that’s changed over the time I’ve done this job.

I would contrast the early part of my job—as we were gearing up to do the early work on net zero, where there was just a positive campaign to act on climate change that made it quite easy for us to do the analysis and present that to a government that was ready for it—with the recent discussion, which I think has been more polarized by some of the more extreme activism.

I’m not judging at all. I understand entirely why activists feel as strongly as they do about climate change. I also feel that strongly. But I do think the politics has soured partly because of what the activist groups have done recently. I don’t know whether that’s right or wrong, except to say that I think it’s objectively what we’re seeing in British politics at the moment.

When you say activism, are you thinking about Just Stop Oil, blocking motorways, and so on?

I don’t think it’s just Just Stop Oil, but yeah, those more radical protests. It’s an easy target now for the populist voices to say, “This is what happens if we try and tackle climate change.”

I know there are activists that are keen to return to that more positive framing. My own view is that the more we keep the arguments for climate change positive, the better that progress will be.

Right, but I suppose another way to look at it is that without those climate activists, it gives others the license to ease off on the transition because there isn’t that pressure.

It may well be right. But my point is that I don’t think we need to dial up the risk now. I think people see it. Climate change is definitely with us and people are worried about it—in a sense, the climate is doing that job for us.

The despair comes in when you are worried about climate change, you’re seeing it playing out, and you’re not seeing a response from industry. My worry is that’s where we’ll end up.

You’re right that the positive framing needs to be complemented by a genuine sense of the risks, but I tend to think that people already see that. Not everyone wakes up like I do and thinks about climate change, but everyone is touched by it now. I don’t have any trouble making the arguments that climate change is happening now—that feels like a shift over the past six years.

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