#technology news wall street journal

[simply-ivanka]

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government

Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, we’ll reverse a decades long executive power grab.

By Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

Wall Street Journal

November 20, 2024

Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.

This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.

President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.

When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited. Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.

Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for “reductions in force” that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to “prescribe rules governing the competitive service.” That power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held—in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they did so. With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of “rules governing the competitive service” that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.

Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers. Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken. Many federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would yield significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.

With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Greg Sargent at TNR:

There are still nearly two months to go before Donald Trump assumes the presidency again, but Republicans or GOP-adjacent industries have already begun to admit out loud that some of his most important policy promises could prove disastrous in their parts of the country. These folks don’t say this too directly, out of fear of offending the MAGA God King. Instead, they suggest gingerly that a slight rethink might be in order. But unpack what they’re saying, and you’ll see that they’re in effect acknowledging that some of Trump’s biggest campaign promises were basically scams.

In Georgia, for instance, some local Republicans are openly worried about Trump’s threat to roll back President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into incentives for the manufacture and purchase of green energy technologies, from electric vehicles to batteries to solar power. Trump endlessly derided this as the “green new scam” and pledged to repeal all uncommitted funds. But now The New York Times reports that Trump supporters like state Representative Beth Camp fear that repeal could destroy jobs related to new investments in green manufacturing plants in the state. Camp worries that this could leave factories in Georgia “sitting empty.” You heard that right: This Republican is declaring that Trump’s threatened actions could leave factories sitting empty. 

[...]

Something similar is also already happening with Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Reuters reports that agriculture interests, which are heavily concentrated in GOP areas, are urging the incoming Trump administration to refrain from removing untold numbers of migrants working throughout the food supply chain, including in farming, dairy, and meatpacking. 

Notably, GOP Representative John Duarte, who just lost his seat in the elections, explicitly tells Reuters that farming interests in his California district depend on undocumented immigrants—and that Trump should exempt many from removal. Duarte and industry representatives want more avenues created for migrants to work here legally—the precise opposite of what Trump promised. Now over to Texas. NPR reports that various industries there fear that mass deportations could cripple them, particularly in construction, where nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants toiled as of 2022. Those workers enable the state to keep growing despite a native population that isn’t supplying a large enough workforce. Local analysts and executives want Trump to refrain from removing all these people or create new ways for them to work here legally. Even the Republican mayor of McKinney, Texas, is loudly sounding the alarm.

Meanwhile, back in Georgia, Trump’s threat of mass deportations is awakening new awareness that undocumented immigrants drive industries like construction, landscaping, and agriculture, reports The Wall Street Journal. In Dalton, a town that backed Trump, fear is spreading that removals could “upend its economy and workforce.” At this point, someone will argue that all this confirms Trump’s arguments—that these industries and their representatives merely fear losing cheap migrant labor that enables them to avoid paying Americans higher wages. When JD Vance and Trump pushed their lie about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Vance insisted that he opposed the Haitian influx into Midwestern towns because they’re undercutting U.S. workers. But all these disparate examples of Republicans and GOP areas lamenting coming mass deportations suggest an alternate story, one detailed well by the Times’ Lydia DePillis. In the MAGA worldview, a large reserve of untapped native-born Americans in prime working age are languishing in joblessness throughout Trump country—and will stream into all these industries once migrants are removed en masse, boosting wages.  

But DePillis documents that things like poor health and disability are more important drivers of unemployment among this subset of non-college working-age men. Besides, migrants living and working here don’t just perform labor that Americans will not. They also consume and boost demand, creating more jobs. As Paul Krugman puts it, in all these ways, migrant laborers are “complements” to U.S. workers. Importantly, that’s the argument that these Republicans and industries in GOP areas are really making when they lament mass deportations: Migrant labor isn’t displacing U.S. workers; it’s helping drive our post-Covid recovery and growth. This directly challenges Trump’s zero-sum worldview.

[...] Here’s another possibility: In the end, Trump’s deportation forces may selectively spare certain localities and industries from mass removals. Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, suggests this won’t happen. But a hallmark of MAGA is corruptly selective governance in the interests of MAGA nation and expressly against those who are designated MAGA’s enemies, U.S. citizens included. One can see mass deportations becoming a selective tool, in which blue localities are targeted for high-profile raids—even as Trump triumphantly rants that they are cesspools of “migrant crime” that he is pacifying with military-style force—while GOP-connected industries and Trump-allied Republicans tacitly secure some forbearance.

Donald Trump’s threats to green energy initiatives and resistance to his mass deportation proposals are facing headwinds against him, even from local Republicans who fear losses of jobs in their communities.

Even if Trump does get to implement his mass deportation policy, he’ll likely create several exemption carveouts (mainly for industries likely to favor him) and use selective enforcement (light touch for red states, heavy and punitive for blue states).

[tomorrowusa]

Elon Musk, Donald Trump's chief pompom boy, has been secretly communicating with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for the last few years.

A report that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been in regular contact over the past few years with President Vladimir Putin will not come as much of a surprise to officials in Ukraine—or to the frontline troops fighting a brutal war of attrition with Russian forces. In the few months after Putin’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the South African-born billionaire was hailed a hero by the country’s defenders as they used Musk’s Starlink satellite terminals to coordinate their military operations. Freely provided by Musk in a gesture of solidarity, the terminals gave Ukrainians a crucial battleground edge against the numerically superior Russian forces. Since then, however, relations between Musk and Ukrainian leaders have deteriorated significantly. The Wall Street Journal report on the regular contact between Musk and the Kremlin—the newspaper says Putin even asked Musk not to activate Starlink over Taiwan as a favor to China’s Xi Jinping—will only confirm suspicions in Ukraine that, if not yet a full-blown Russian asset, Musk is becoming a Russian ally. And Starlink is the key. The portable satellite terminals, allowing reliable and secure internet access, remain the backbone of Ukraine’s frontline communications—although the bill is now picked up by the Pentagon rather than Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX. Increasingly, however, the Russians are using them too. Ukrainian officials say Russian forces are deploying thousands of the terminals in captured Ukrainian territory, closing the technology gap and enabling their grindingly slow and brutal offensive in the Donetsk region. Because of international sanctions, Starlink cannot sell its hardware in Russia and its satellite do not cover Russian territory. But the Russians appear to have a reliable supply of smuggled Starlink terminals through a third country, which its forces can then use in Ukraine.

Well, now we know how Putin obtained those Starlink terminals.

While Russia illicitly using Starlink in communications networks and drones is an alarming sign that they can access American technology to make their drones better, they might not become commonplace. Russian forces on the ground are in desperate need of stable communications and the military might prioritize giving them Starlink access over putting the hardware in a drone that will more than likely be shot down after a single use. Even if Starlink is put in some Shahed variants, it’s unlikely that every single one of the dozens of drones launched per month would have it. Even so, Russia’s use of Starlink to coordinate its forces and drones create new worries for Ukraine and SpaceX alike.

It's deeply troubling that somebody with close ties to America's space program should be playing footsie with one of America's enemies.

With Election Day 10 days away, what are YOU doing in real life to defeat the Trump-Musk-Putin Axis? You can inform low information voters, you can help people vote, and you can shoot down bullshit you hear being publicly spewed by MAGA cultists.

If you don't have a bone spur or something, see how you can help in the final stretch of the campaign.

Volunteer | Kamala Harris for President

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

@Wuerker

* * * * *

THE ELMO & VIVEK SHOW

TCinLA

Nov 24, 2024

Looking for something to give a pair of rich dorks who he wants to keep around f or their money, last week Trump appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead the “Department” of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). The appointment makes them official DOGEBAGS.

The real name of this meme masquerading as a “government department” is The Department Of Breaking Shit We Don’t Understand.

Last Wednesday, the two dildos spelled out their plans in a long article in The Wall Street Journal that revealed them as pair of idiots who consider themselves geniuses despite the fact neither has a clue how government actually works.

They claimed they will “serve as outside volunteers” - which means neither has to face a background check they couldn’t pass or has to divest themselves of their money-making operations. They will be making recommendations that allow the Trump administration to “cut the federal government down to size.” Their primary focus is on cutting down the total number of federal agencies, which they view as wasteful and “antidemocratic.”

“Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats,” write the two unelected self-proclaimed geniuses. This demonstrates their ignorance of the Adminitrative Procedures Act, in which Congress delegates the power to administer a law to the agency tasked with carrying that out. Admittedly, all this may change as the result of the Unsupreme Court overthrowing the Chevron Rules in the recent Loper Bright v. Raimondo and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency cases - in which the court suggested that many current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law - but it’s an important marker that these two have no real clue what they’re talking about.

Musk and Ramaswamy say they’ll hire “a lean team of small-government crusaders” to work with the Trump administration and the White House Office of Management and Budget, working with Chief Sledghammer Wielder Russell Vought, who is returning as Director of the OMB.

According to the pair of dimbulbs, DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply the new rulings to federal regulations. DOGE will present this list of regulations to be done away with to President Trump, who can, by executive order, immediately pause enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.

What they fail to realize that that they have been put in charge of a non-existent “department” that can make recommendations which would be entirely dependent on members of Congress—who will think twice about cutting $2 trillion dollars from programs that directly impact their constituents.

Muck & Vivek see Trump cutting “thousands” of federal regulations that will allow for “mass head-count reductions” of government employees. DOGE will try to determine the “minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.” This will almost certainly hamstring many government agencies, which enforce everything from environmental protections to healthcare standards.

The two “experts” also suggest that Trump can require federal employees to return to their offices five days a week, which could bring about “voluntary terminations.” “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.”

The two specifically list federal expenditures they want to put on the chopping block, including “$535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting” and “$1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”

In truth, the Elmo & Vivek Show reveals they are a pair of 12-year-old boys who know nothing about the world but are confident that they can make that world bend to their will because they are 12-year-old boys who don’t fucking know better.

They claim they will be able to “eliminate the need” for DOGE’s existence by July 4th, 2026. Since that’s about the time the mid-term election campaign will be heating up, their decision to make themselves scarce will be welcomed by those Republican congress critters who who represent “competitive” districts.

That idea that DOGE will have accomplished its goals in 18 months also reveals that these two idiots not only have no clue, but no fucking clue, about what will happen with their recommendations. Those that don’t get dropped for pissing off people Trump can’t afford to piss off will immediately land in court, where the legal process will hang them up through the mid-term elections, after which Trump will definitely be a “lame duck,” and hopefully a lame duck who has to deal with a Democratic majority in both houses of congress - the result of Democrats benefiting from an election map as favorable to them in 2026 as the 2024 map was to Republicans.

Topping off the Elmo & Vivk Shitshow is the news they will “work closely” with Marjorie Traitor Goon, who House Oversight Committee Chairman Comer the Gomer has appointed to chair the DOGE Subcommittee on Governmental Efficiency.

What we’re looking at is a pair of arrogant dipshits who have no idea how government works, working with the Dumbest Bimbo in Congress, who has no idea how anything works. Does anyone really think nothing can go wrong with this?

As AOC put it, “This is good, actually. She barely shows up and doesn’t do the reading. To borrow a phrase I saw elsewhere, it’s like giving someone an unplugged controller. Absolutely dying at those two now getting assigned the ‘privilege’ of ‘working’ with MTG. That is actually hilarious. Enjoy, fellas! Very prestigious post you have there.”

[TCinLA]

[darkmaga-returns]

Starshield satellites can operate as a swarm in low orbits, offering the most pervasive real-time surveillance of human beings in history. These ‘low orbit satellite swarms’ are what we call drones.

Karen Kingston

Dec 27, 2024

December 27, 2024: With the recent news buzz about the unverified drones hovering over towns and military bases throughout the United States, I believe this March 2024 Kingston Report on Elon Musk’s Starshield Global Surveillance drone system may present an alternative hypothesis as to what the drones are, and who they belong to.

March 18, 2024: On December 19, 2017, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitle, “How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life.” The article details how the Chinese government turned Xianjing, China into a, “…remote laboratory for its high-tech social controls. Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks...”

Not only are China’s 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week (24/7) surveillance policies and technologies highly invasive, many western nations consider the use of these surveillance systems as a violation of human rights. In August of 2022, a U.N. High Commissioner for human rights found that China’s policies on religion, biometric surveillance (i.e. public facial recognition cameras), DNA surveillance (human identification kits), criminal medical experimentation, and the overall 24/7 police surveillance of Xiangjiang residents were human rights violations, and in some cases, crimes against humanity.

Unfortunately for global citizens, a highly-advanced 24/7 surveillance system is currently being deployed on civilians in the United States of America and in other nations around the globe.

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

The groups noted that in Nov., Alexandra Orbuch, a writer for The Princeton Tory, a conservative student publication, was assaulted by a male member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) while filming a protest the group held on campus. The man allegedly followed Orbuch to obstruct her efforts, eventually stepping on her foot and pushing her. When Orbuch complained to a nearby public safety officer, the officer told her that she had “incited something.”

Despite the gendered nature of the assault —an issue Princeton has dedicated an entire office to dealing with — the university granted the male student a no-contact oder against Orbuch, explaining that any reporting she published which alluded to him would be considered a violation of the order and result in disciplinary charges. A similar incident occurred in 2022, when Tory reporter Danielle Shapiro attempted to report on the Princeton Committee on Palestine. After being notified of the order, Shapiro was told refer to a “Sexual Misconduct & Title IX” webpage, according to a guest column she wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

“This is at least the second time in the last two years that a Tory student journalist has been silence by a no-contact order at the behest of community members offended by his or her pro-Israel journalism,” Thursday’s letter continued. “This systematic weaponization of no-contact orders to silence pro-Israel journalism — or any journalism — cannot stand.”

The incidents involving Orbuch and Shapiro are two of numerous examples of universities subjecting conservative and pro-Israel campus community members to reputational smearing and denying them the same rights and protections as progressives and pro-Palestinian advocates. The issue has drawn attention from Congress, whose House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce is investigating whether universities such as Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) employed a self-serving interpretation of the US Constitution to avoid punishing students who committed antisemitic discrimination and harassment.

[soon-palestine]

@RBatniji is one of the most respected entrepreneurs in Silicon valley. He lost 37 members of his family on 18th Nov by an Israeli airstrike. He recently met with Secretary Blinken and here is what he shared,

"I am Rajaie Batniji. I take no pride and no honor in being here.

I was born in Gaza and immigrated to California as a young child. I am Rajaie Batniji. I take no pride and no honor in being here. Many of my fellow Palestinian Americans discouraged me from speaking with you today, concerned that this discussion was solely performative. I share their concern.

I come here out of a sense of duty, to try – as futile as it may be – to save my family in Gaza from being killed. I was born in Gaza and immigrated to California as a young child. I grew up visiting Gaza often, and those visits shaped me in many ways. I personally experienced some of the violence of occupation.

I studied the history of the region at Stanford, completed my doctorate in international relations at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar – honoring the legacy of one of your predecessors in this office – and became a physician focused on the health of those that have the least privilege. I’m an entrepreneur who builds teams and technologies that improve American health care.

I would rather not be here today. Mr. Secretary, you have provided the weapons and the political cover that enabled the murder of 65 members of my family, mostly women and children, over the past four months. In strikes in mid-November, three generations of my family were killed by missiles as they sought shelter and safety. I carry their memories with me. I see their crushed bodies when I close my eyes.

The survivors in my family are homeless. Some 70% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, along with almost all the schools, all the universities, many of the hospitals, the mosques, the churches, the historical sites and the public records.

My paternal grandparents’ home in Shejaiya had been among the last homes of my family still standing. This is the home where I was born. It collapsed in a “controlled demolition” just before the new year.

According to our own US intelligence agencies, Israel used 29,000 air-to-ground munitions during the first two months of its assault on Gaza. That’s more than were used in the years of the Iraq War – and Gaza is less than one thousandth the size.

No one I know in Gaza has a home, or possessions beyond what they carried as they fled Israeli bombardment.

My family may be better off than most in Gaza and they are still hungry. I spoke with my mom’s brother this week, and he told me he has lost almost 20 kilograms (44 pounds). Despite your promises, food aid has not been able to reach Gaza to come anywhere near meeting the need. It is blocked at every opportunity, including by Israeli protestors at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, and by Israeli inspections and within Gaza by the Israeli military. According to the United Nations, 4 out of 5 of the hungriest people anywhere in the world are in Gaza. You know that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, provides food for most Gazans and critical infrastructure for other aid organizations. Yet, after Israel made unverified allegations that a handful of UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 attacks, you cut the funding for UNRWA in what I can understand only as an act of collective punishment. I fear this makes you, and me – as an American – party to the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

My cousins in Gaza, who are physicians like me, have no place to practice medicine. Their hospitals have been destroyed or incapacitated. After moving from Shifa to al-Aqsa hospital, only to be evacuated from each by the Israeli military after seeing patients and colleagues killed, they are now living in tents in Rafah and al-Mawasi, using their surgical skills to repair leaks in their tents while the bodies of wounded Palestinians go untreated, and often unretrieved.

I have worked extensively in global health and wrote a series of research papers in 2009 on what we thought then was a Palestinian health crisis. We could never, though, have imagined this – the complete destruction of Gaza’s health care system is unprecedented.

Even the dead among my family were not spared. Satellite images show that Israeli bulldozers and tanks desecrated the graveyards where my grandparents and great grandparents were resting. I hope to bury their remains again one day.

What do you wish to be your legacy, Secretary Blinken? You cannot say you didn’t know. You cannot say that you did not knowingly and materially support these deaths, which a US federal court and the International Court of Justice have both determined plausibly constitute genocide. I am the father of three young children in San Francisco. As adults, I am certain they will reflect on this “genocide” with horror. It will be taught in our classrooms and remembered in our museums as we vow never to repeat it.

I ask you to use the full power of your office and every bit of leverage the US has to allow aid to reach all of Gaza, including in the north, where hundreds of thousands of people remain in desperation. And, to resume the funding for UNRWA, which will be essential to the distribution of any aid. I ask you to uphold a rules-based order – which serves our long-term interests – by calling Israel’s indiscriminate bombing that has largely killed women and children, the attacks on health care and the use of starvation as a weapon of war as the war crimes you and I know they are. Your words matter, Mr. Secretary.

I feel indignity sitting before you in this comfortable conference room while my family desperately awaits word about a ceasefire, in the dark, hungry, and in tents in fear that the Israeli military will kill them at any moment.

In a dignified world, I would be asking for justice, not mercy. That day will come.

I hope that you, and this administration, can act quickly to bring our nation to the right side of history before it is far too late.I ask you to uphold a rules-based order – which serves our long-term interests – by calling Israel’s indiscriminate bombing that has largely killed women and children, the attacks on health care and the use of starvation as a weapon of war as the war crimes you and I know they are. Your words matter, Mr. Secretary.

I feel indignity sitting before you in this comfortable conference room while my family desperately awaits word about a ceasefire, in the dark, hungry, and in tents in fear that the Israeli military will kill them at any moment.

In a dignified world, I would be asking for justice, not mercy. That day will come.

I hope that you, and this administration, can act quickly to bring our nation to the right side of history before it is far too late.

[xtruss]

Evelyn Berezin in 1976 at the Long Island office of her company Redactron. She developed one of the earliest word processors and helped usher in a technological revolution. Evelyn Berezin said her word processor would help secretaries become more efficient at their jobs. Photo By Barton Silverman/New York Times.

Evelyn Berezin, “Godmother of the Word Processor!” The Woman That Made Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Possible

Evelyn Berezin (1925-2018) was born in the Bronx to poor Russian-Jewish immigrants. Growing up, she loved reading science fiction and wished to study physics. She excelled at school and graduated two years early. Berezin had to wear make-up and fake her age to get a job at a research lab. She ended up studying economics because it was a more “fitting” subject for women at the time. During World War II, she finally received a scholarship to study physics at New York University. Berezin studied at night, while working full time at the International Printing Company during the day. She continued doing graduate work at New York University, with a fellowship from the US Atomic Energy Commission. In 1951, she joined the Electronic Computer Corporation, designing some of the world’s very first computers. At the time, computers were massive machines that could only do several specific functions.

Evelyn Berezin, “Godmother of the Word Processor.” Born: April 12, 1925, The Bronx, New York City, NY — Died: December 8, 2018, ArchCare at Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home & Rehabilitation Center, New York, NY

Berezin headed the Logic Design Department, and came up with a computer to manage the distribution of magazines, and to calculate firing distances for US Army artillery. In 1957, Berezin transferred to work at Teleregister, where she designed the first banking computer and the first computerized airline reservation system (linking computers in 60 cities, and never failing once in the 11 years that it ran). Her most famous feat was in 1968 when she created the world’s first personal word processor to ease the plight of secretaries (then making up 6% of the workforce).

“Without Ms. Berezin There Would Be No Bill Gates, No Steve Jobs, No Internet, No Word Processors, No Spreadsheets; Nothing That Remotely Connects Business With The 21st Century.” — The Times of Israel (12 December 2018)

The following year, she founded her own company, Redactron Corporation, and built a mini-fridge-sized word processor, the “Data Secretary”, with a keyboard and printer, cassette tapes for memory storage, and no screen. With the ability to go back and edit text, cut and paste, and print multiple copies at once, Berezin’s computer freed the world “from the shackles of the typewriter”. The machine was an in instant hit, selling thousands of units around the world. Berezin’s word processor not only set the stage for future word processing software, like Microsoft Word, but for compact personal computers in general. It is credited with being the world’s first office computer. Not surprisingly, it has been said that without Evelyn Berezin “there would have been no Bill Gates, and no Steve Jobs”.

Evelyn Berezin Pioneered Word Processors and Butted Heads With Men! A ‘loud woman,’ she studied physics and found that to get to the top she had to start her own company. Evelyn Berezin later became a mentor to entrepreneurs, venture capitalist and director of companies. Photo: Berezin Family. Wall Street Journal

“Why Is This Woman Not Famous?” British Writer Gwyn Headley Wrote In A 2010 Blog Post. — The Times of Israel

Redactron grew to a public company with over 500 employees. As president, she was the only woman heading a corporation in the US at the time, and was described as the “Most Senior Businesswoman in the United States”. Redactron was eventually bought out by Burroughs Corporation, where Berezin worked for several more years. In 1980, she moved on to head a venture capital group investing in new technologies. Berezin served on the boards of a number of organizations, including Stony Brook University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and was a sought-after consultant for the world’s biggest tech companies.

She was a key part of the American Women’s Economic Development Corporation for 25 years, training thousands of women in how to start businesses of their own, with a success rate of over 60%. In honour of her parents, she established the Sam and Rose Berezin Endowed Scholarship, paying tuition in full for an undergraduate science student each year. Sadly, Berezin passed away earlier this month. She left her estate to fund a new professorship or research centre at Stony Brook University. Berezin won multiple awards and honourary degrees, and was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.

[marta-bee]

I put together my Christmas wish list for family, which this year included a lot of history and politics books I've been wanting to read. It actually felt good, a low risk way to tell family this is what I stand for. But it's also a good round-up of vaguely liberal if not outright progressive titles that caught my interest, which is a rec list in its own way, so I thought I'd share.

Non-Fiction/RL-ish Books

Built from the Fire: The Epic story fo Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street (Victor Luckerson)

Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days That Changed America's Politics (Chris Wallace)

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Ann Fessler)

The Message (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson)

The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust (Francis S. Collins)

War (Bob Woodward)

White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (William J. Barber)

And the more fannish ones:

The Fall of Numenor: And Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth (J.R.R. Tolkien)

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18 (Joseph Loconte)

The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science fiction, and Fantasy (Ursula K. LeGuin)

Norse Mythology (Neil gaiman)

A Place Called District 12: Appalachian Geography and Music in the Hunger Games (Thomas W. Paradis)

The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (Tom Shippey)

A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages (Ed. Dimitra Fimi)

Star Trek: Open a CHannel: A Woman's Trek by Nana Visitor

Tolkien and the Modernists: Literary Responses to the Dark New Days of the 20th Century (Theresa Freda Nicolay)

And finally, some charity groups I suggested family and friends donate to, all of which are doing work near to my heart:

Carolinas Care Partnership [an LGBT support group around here, particularly focused on housing access, health care and therapy access, especially for people affected by HIV/AIDS but not exclusively]

Life After Hate [supporting people leaving far-right and white nationalist groups]

NC Immigrant Solidarity Fund [they do financial grants for families facing deportation, also legal and social support for all kinds of recent immigrants]

Pro Publica [doing important independent investigative journalism, and boy is their work vital]

Promising Pages [you've heard of food banks? that, but for books]

Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom [doing good work to build Jewish-Muslim solidarity, The Kid and I particularly like that they're woman-centric and spotlight some lesser-known voices]

Sojourners [a good general left-leaning evangelical group, good at producing journalism and educational resources for *cough* less progressive evangelicals, they're good at speaking that community's language]

[rjzimmerman]

The Solar Breakthrough That Could Help the U.S. Compete With China. (Wall Street Journal)

The biggest investor in U.S. solar manufacturing is embracing a new technology that reduces the cost of producing the panels, potentially bolstering efforts to build a supply chain outside of China for an industry crucial to the energy transition. 

The new technology comes from an Israeli startup that promises to simplify one of the most cumbersome steps in solar manufacturing and cut costs by reducing the amount of silver needed to capture sunlight on the panels.

The startup, called Lumet, is the brainchild of Benny Landa, who founded the company that developed the first digital printing press. That company was sold to HP for $830 million in the early 2000s. Lumet is working with Bank of America to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming months, Landa said.

South Korea’s Hanwha Group says it will be the first company to use Lumet’s technology. Hanwha’s Qcells unit, one of the biggest solar-panel makers outside China, is building a multibillion-dollar solar supply chain in Georgia. The company expects the financial savings and performance gains to help it compete with low-cost products from the world’s biggest producer. 

Qcells is expected to be one of the biggest potential beneficiaries from incentives in the 2022 U.S. climate law and a recently announced tariff increase on Chinese solar cells. The company said recently it is closing its only factory in China.

Chinese solar panels can be half the price of panels made elsewhere, industry analysts say, putting pressure on companies to cut costs. “We know we can’t depend on trade barriers or subsidies to make us competitive,” Danielle Merfeld, global chief technology officer at Qcells, said in an interview. “We have to keep innovating.”

Plummeting costs have made solar power one of the cheapest and fastest-growing sources of energy globally. Further advances can reduce the need for fossil fuels to meet rising demand for electricity and help limit climate change. 

Solar panels account for a small portion of overall project costs, but bigger contributors like labor, permitting and financing expenses are less flexible.

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: AI and advertising

Bubble Trouble (about AIs trained on AI output and the impending model collapse) (Ed Zitron, Mar 2024)

A Wall Street Journal piece from this week has sounded the alarm that some believe AI models will run out of "high-quality text-based data" within the next two years in what an AI researcher called "a frontier research problem."  Modern AI models are trained by feeding them "publicly-available" text from the internet, scraped from billions of websites (everything from Wikipedia to Tumblr, to Reddit), which the model then uses to discern patterns and, in turn, answer questions based on the probability of an answer being correct. Theoretically, the more training data that these models receive, the more accurate their responses will be, or at least that's what the major AI companies would have you believe. Yet AI researcher Pablo Villalobos told the Journal that he believes that GPT-5 (OpenAI's next model) will require at least five times the training data of GPT-4. In layman's terms, these machines require tons of information to discern what the "right" answer to a prompt is, and "rightness" can only be derived from seeing lots of examples of what "right" looks like. ... One (very) funny idea posed by the Journal's piece is that AI companies are creating their own "synthetic" data to train their models, a "computer-science version of inbreeding" that Jathan Sadowski calls Habsburg AI.  This is, of course, a terrible idea. A research paper from last year found that feeding model-generated data to models creates "model collapse" — a "degenerative learning process where models start forgetting improbable events over time as the model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality."

...

The AI boom has driven global stock markets to their best first quarter in 5 years, yet I fear that said boom is driven by a terrifyingly specious and unstable hype cycle. The companies benefitting from AI aren't the ones integrating it or even selling it, but those powering the means to use it — and while "demand" is allegedly up for cloud-based AI services, every major cloud provider is building out massive data center efforts to capture further demand for a technology yet to prove its necessity, all while saying that AI isn't actually contributing much revenue at all. Amazon is spending nearly $150 billion in the next 15 years on data centers to, and I quote Bloomberg, "handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications" as it tells its salespeople to temper their expectations of what AI can actually do.  I feel like a crazy person every time I read glossy pieces about AI "shaking up" industries only for the substance of the story to be "we use a coding copilot and our HR team uses it to generate emails." I feel like I'm going insane when I read about the billions of dollars being sunk into data centers, or another headline about how AI will change everything that is mostly made up of the reporter guessing what it could do.

They're Looting the Internet (Ed Zitron, Apr 2024)

An investigation from late last year found that a third of advertisements on Facebook Marketplace in the UK were scams, and earlier in the year UK financial services authorities said it had banned more than 10,000 illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok in 2022 — a 1,500% increase over the previous year. Last week, Meta revealed that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period . Even the giants haven’t resisted the temptation to screw their users. CNN, one of the most influential news publications in the world, hosts both its own journalism and spammy content from "chum box" companies that make hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from scams to outright disinformation. And you'll find them on CNN, NBC and other major news outlets, which by proxy endorse stories like "2 Steps To Tell When A Slot Is Close To Hitting The Jackpot."  These “chum box” companies are ubiquitous because they pay well, making them an attractive proposition for cash-strapped media entities that have seen their fortunes decline as print revenues evaporated. But they’re just so incredibly awful. In 2018, the (late, great) podcast Reply All had an episode that centered around a widower whose wife’s death had been hijacked by one of these chum box advertisers to push content that, using stolen family photos, heavily implied she had been unfaithful to him. The title of the episode — An Ad for the Worst Day of your Life — was fitting, and it was only until a massively popular podcast intervened did these networks ban the advert.  These networks are harmful to the user experience, and they’re arguably harmful to the news brands that host them. If I was working for a major news company, I’d be humiliated to see my work juxtaposed with specious celebrity bilge, diet scams, and get-rich-quick schemes.

...

While OpenAI, Google and Meta would like to claim that these are "publicly-available" works that they are "training on," the actual word for what they're doing is "stealing." These models are not "learning" or, let's be honest, "training" on this data, because that's not how they work — they're using mathematics to plagiarize it based on the likelihood that somebody else's answer is the correct one. If we did this as a human being — authoritatively quoting somebody else's figures without quoting them — this would be considered plagiarism, especially if we represented the information as our own. Generative AI allows you to generate lots of stuff from a prompt, allowing you to pretend to do the research much like LLMs pretend to know stuff. It's good for cheating at papers, or generating lots of mediocre stuff LLMs also tend to hallucinate, a virtually-unsolvable problem where they authoritatively make incorrect statements that creates horrifying results in generative art and renders them too unreliable for any kind of mission critical work. Like I’ve said previously, this is a feature, not a bug. These models don’t know anything — they’re guessing, based on mathematical calculations, as to the right answer. And that means they’ll present something that feels right, even though it has no basis in reality. LLMs are the poster child for Stephen Colbert’s concept of truthiness.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos:

President Joe Biden isn’t accepting the idea that he’s a lame duck president. He continues to build on his already impressive record with actions and ideas to help the American people. He’s also setting up Kamala Harris for potential presidential success, which could end up being the most profound part of his legacy. The most recent incredible success from Biden and his team is securing the release of two Americans detained in Russia, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan. Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Washington Post opinions contributor, are also being released as part of the deal. Gershkovich and Whelan had been convicted of bogus espionage charges by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime. Bringing them home was a promise Biden made in his Oval Office speech explaining his decision to end his reelection campaign.

[...]

At home, Biden is committed to seeing through his student loan debt relief plans. The administration sent out emails to borrowers Wednesday, letting them know that some—or in some cases, all—of their debt will be canceled this fall when his executive order is fully implemented, and explaining how they can benefit. That’s relief for about 30 million borrowers, according to the White House. “Despite attempts led by Republican elected officials to block our efforts, we won’t stop fighting to provide relief to student loan borrowers, fix the broken student loan system, and help borrowers get out from under the burden of student debt,” Biden said. 

Biden also developed a sweeping plan for combatting housing costs and out-of-control rent inflation. It’s an ambitious proposal, giving corporate landlords a choice: “either cap rent increases on existing units at 5% or risk losing current valuable federal tax breaks.” That last part would take Congress’s help. The action he can, and is, taking on his own is ordering agencies to inventory federal lands that can be repurposed “to build tens of thousands of affordable homes.”  Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development just announced $325 million in Choice Neighborhoods grants, which will be used to “build over 6,500 units of new housing, support small businesses, build childcare centers and new parks, and will be used to leverage more than $2.65 billion in additional public and private investments in these neighborhoods.” Choice Neighborhoods is a HUD initiative to revitalize struggling neighborhoods into mixed-income housing.  In another family-friendly action, Biden is fighting to keep airlines from price-gouging families. He’s proposing a ban on the extra fees airlines charge parents to sit with their children.

[...] Biden is also looking to future-proof against the potential dangers of AI technology with an order directing every federal agency and department that could be affected to create standards and regulations overseeing AI—that’s everything from health care to housing to national security. [...] The Biden administration is also galvanized to step up the fight against fentanyl, with Biden on Wednesday directing all related federal agencies to coordinate actions to stop the flow of the drug.

President Joe Biden is still fighting for Americans, even after he passed the torch to Kamala Harris. #JoeBiden

[mariacallous]

Oil may be the lifeblood of many Middle Eastern economies, but some of the region’s biggest players are now setting their sights on another booming energy sector: critical minerals. 

Minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earths power the world’s clean energy technologies and electric vehicle batteries. As these resources take center stage with the clean energy transition, oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also ramping up investment in critical minerals supply chains in a bid to diversify their economic portfolios and carve out a stake in the growing industry.

“This is not about replacing the bedrock of their economic engine away from oil to minerals,” said Ahmed Mehdi, managing director at Renaissance Energy and a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. “This is more about making sure that they have a seat at the table in the energy transition, especially given how geopolitically charged this industry is.” 

Rising geopolitical tensions have cast a new spotlight on these minerals and the countries that wield outsized influence over their supply and production. China, in particular, dominates the processing of many of these resources, which has heightened fears of strategic vulnerabilities and catalyzed efforts to secure alternative supply chains. And in the Middle East, where fears of fossil fuel revenue over-dependence run high, many governments refuse to be left out of this new race. 

“Saudi and the UAE are coming out as big players in the critical minerals space,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “These are oil-dependent countries who realize that the clean energy transition and electric vehicles are going to reduce global demand for oil, so if they are going to economically grow, it’s not going to be purely on continuing an oil-only model.”

“They are the new big kids in town,” she said.

Take Riyadh, which has outlined big ambitions in the mining sector. The country highlighted the importance of mining in Vision 2030, the government’s big plan to overhaul Saudi Arabia’s economy and slash its dependence on fossil fuel revenues. It has also set aside some $182 million for a mineral exploration incentive program. Saudi Arabia is home to some $2.5 trillion in untapped mineral reserves, according to government estimates, and in 2021, it launched its own annual mining conference, the Future Minerals Forum.

“Saudi Arabia is being transformed. Through this transformation we want to be an economic powerhouse,” Khalid al-Mudaifer, Saudi Arabia’s vice minister for mining, told Semafor. “To be an industrial [power], we need minerals. To build projects, we need minerals. Therefore, mining of Saudi Arabia [is] the first step, bringing minerals from outside is the second step, third step is to build Saudi Arabia as a hub.”

To execute this vision, Riyadh has focused on securing new partnerships, including by signing memorandums of understanding focused on mining with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Russia, the United States, and Morocco. Washington and Riyadh were reportedly in talks to purchase mining stakes in several African countries, the Wall Street Journal reported last year; Saudi Arabia is also weighing investments in Brazil and has dispatched a delegation to Argentina to discuss that country’s lithium wealth.

The UAE is also ramping up efforts to carve out a stake in the sector, including by inking a $1.9 billion mining partnership in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and securing new agreements in copper-rich Zambia. The UAE and Australia are reportedly also in talks for a free trade agreement that could see Abu Dhabi invest in Canberra’s critical minerals sector. And in nearby Qatar, Doha has taken its own initial steps by signing mining agreements with Nigeria and underscoring the importance of cooperation in the critical minerals space during talks with Washington.

Baskaran said that Abu Dhabi and Riyadh both have the means of financing their ambitions. “Both of these countries have a lot of capital to deploy in the sector,” she said. “So at a time when most Western companies are pulling back on their drilling and exploration because lithium, nickel, cobalt prices are low, these Middle Eastern countries are like, ‘I have capital to play.’”

Still, experts caution that regulatory, environmental, and investment challenges loom ahead. 

“Attracting substantial international investments requires competitive fiscal terms and predictable regulations to incentivize the participation of private companies,” Hamid Pouran, a critical minerals expert at the University of Wolverhampton, wrote for the Middle East Institute. “Strict environmental and social safeguards need to be implemented to ensure ethical and sustainable mining, and enhancing energy efficiency will be critical for the energy-intensive processes involved in refining minerals and metals.”

Yet powers like Saudi Arabia also have one key advantage: their ability to work with everybody, said Bryan Bille, a policy analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. 

“They’ve got more wiggle room than other players, so they can do business with Russia, China, and the U.S. at the same time,” he said. “For them, that’s a major asset.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

House Republicans launch multiple investigations into college protests

Four GOP committee chairs are probing pro-Palestinian campus activism.

+

New GOP move: discredit and defund the nation's major research universities and move funds to private, religious schools like Liberty University and Hillsdale, the new GOP models for higher education.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 2, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 03, 2024

More than 2,000 people have been arrested at protests on college and university campuses around the country opposing Israel’s military strikes on Gaza since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, and the subsequent humanitarian crisis there. It is unclear how many of the protesters are students, as many of those arrested have not been affiliated with the universities, or how many of the arrests will result in charges—sometimes arrests at protests are designed simply to clear an area.

The roots of today’s protests lie in an investigation by the Republican-dominated House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The committee announced the investigation on December 7, two days after its members spent more than five hours grilling then-president of Harvard University Claudine Gay, then-president of University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill, and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sally Kornbluth on how their universities were handling student protests against Israel over its military response to Hamas’s attack of October 7.

Led by Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Republicans on the committee insisted that the universities were not protecting Jewish students. The university presidents responded that they deplored antisemitism, that students had the right to free speech, and that they took action against those who violated policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation. But in their defense of free speech, they admitted both that hate speech against Jews and others is sometimes protected and that they had sometimes made bad calls.  

The Republicans’ interest in protecting Jewish students on campus overlapped with their opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that they associate with Democrats. Burgess Owens (R-UT) said DEI initiatives protect Black students at the expense of others. “I just remember a couple of years ago when we were dealing with Black Lives Matter,” he said. “Try to talk about Blue Lives Matter, Jew Lives Matter, Arab Lives Matter—they call it racist. It’s time for us to focus on what’s happening on your campuses.”

Stefanik called the testimony “pathetic” and, along with 74 other members of Congress, demanded that Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resign. On January 2, following accusations she had plagiarized scholarly work, she did. Her resignation followed that of Liz Magill. “TWO DOWN,” Stefanik wrote on social media. 

Two days after the university presidents’ testimony, Stefanik announced that the House Education and Workforce Committee would be investigating universities. “We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage,” she said.

On February 12 the committee informed Columbia it was next up. Columbia University president Nemat "Minouche" Shafik had been unable to testify with the other presidents in December and gave her testimony to the committee on April 17, along with co-chairs of the Board of Trustees Claire Shipman and David Greenwald and former dean David Schizer over the university's response to antisemitism. 

In an April 16 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Shafik wrote that “antisemitism and calls for genocide have no place at a university…but that leaves plenty of room for robust disagreement and debate.” She said she prioritizes “the safety and security of our community” and that while the attack of October 7 had a "deep personal impact" on the Jewish and Israeli communities, there was also a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza, and the war was "part of a larger story of Palestinian displacement." She explained that Columbia had defined a space for protests to enable those they upset to avoid them. 

Opening the hearing, committee chair Foxx said: “Since October 7, this Committee and the nation have watched in horror as so many of our college campuses, particularly the most expensive, so-called elite schools, have erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate.” Stefanik called out tenured professor Joseph Massad of the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department, who called the October 7 attack a “stunning victory.” 

Shafik responded by condemning the professor’s statements. “Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months…. We do not, and will not, tolerate antisemitic threats, images, and other violations…. We have enforced, and we will continue to enforce, our policies against such actions,” she said. 

Ilhan Omar (D-MN) questioned Shafik about discrimination against pro-Palestinian protesters. She noted that Israel-born assistant professor Shai Davidai was accused of harassing pro-Palestinian students; Shafik said they have had more than 50 complaints about him and he is under investigation. 

On April 17, the same day the Columbia officials testified, pro-Palestinian protesters organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a self-described “coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation”), Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace set up a camp at the university. It garnered little attention; the April 18 New York Times did not mention it. According to Sharif, the school warned protesters they would be suspended if the encampment was not removed. They stayed. On April 18, according to New York mayor Eric Adams, Columbia officials called in New York City police to disband the protest. They arrested more than 100 people, including Representative Omar’s daughter, a Columbia student. The arrests were peaceful.  

University faculty and community members were shocked by the resort to law enforcement at a place known both for learning and debate and for its history. In April 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, a week of protests after students learned of Columbia’s support for weapons research and its plan to construct a seemingly segregated gym in a nearby community had led New York City police to crush the demonstrations with violence.  

In the days after the current arrests, nearly a dozen student and faculty groups released statements or open letters objecting to the police presence on campus and supporting students’ rights to free speech and peaceful protest. The protest encampment sprang back up. 

At the same time, Jewish leaders warned that antisemitism was increasing. Rabbi Elie Buechler, of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel and Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, urged Jewish students to return home for Passover, which began April 22, and to stay there for their own safety.

In the next weeks, protests sprang up around the country, with protesters generally demanding that university administrators divest from investments in Israel or in companies that sell weapons, technology, or construction equipment to Israel, and cut ties to Israeli universities. They have tended to turn their anger against President Joe Biden and his administration, whom they blame for what they call a genocide in Gaza. Universities have responded in a variety of ways, from discussion to armed law enforcement officers.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have insisted that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas and have continued to provide Israel with military defenses, whose importance in stopping the war from spreading showed on April 14, when those defenses shot down virtually all of the weapons Iran launched at Israel. They are working hard for a ceasefire, with Blinken currently in the Middle East and a proposal on the table that Israel has accepted but Hamas has not. 

The administration has also stood against the initial policy of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration to cordon off Gaza without food, water, or electricity, and has pressured Israel into permitting humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has also firmly opposed Israeli plans to attack Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter, and has stood firmly in favor of a Palestinian state, which the protesters have not indicated they endorse.

On April 24, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) visited Columbia, where he called for Shafik  to resign. On Monday, April 29, he and Republican leadership met to discuss how they might reenergize the party and gain traction now that their impeachment effort against Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has flopped, the conference is bitterly split, their control of the House of Representatives has resulted in one of the least productive congresses in American history, and their presumptive presidential nominee is being tried for election interference that involved paying off women with whom he had extramarital sex. They settled on campus antisemitism—although Trump’s open embrace of white nationalists makes this problematic—and the campus protests as a sign that Democrats are the party of disorder.

On that same day, 21 House Democrats wrote a letter to Columbia’s trustees demanding they “act decisively, disband the encampment, and ensure the safety and security of all of its students.” That night, protesters took control of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where they broke windows and vandalized furniture. About twenty hours later, police in riot gear arrested them. Arrests across the country climbed.

Yesterday, Representative Foxx announced that her committee’s antisemitism investigation will expand into a Congress-wide crackdown on colleges. In a press conference, she said she had a clear message for “mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders. Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of duty to your Jewish students. American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back.” 

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that right-wing politicians jumped on the Kent State shootings of May 1970 to defund colleges and universities, while a “law and order” backlash helped to give Republican president Richard M. Nixon a landslide reelection in 1972. 

Today, President Biden addressed the protests, saying they “test two fundamental American principles. The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.” 

Biden called for lawful, peaceful protests and warned: “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations—none of this is a peaceful protest…. Dissent is essential to democracy,” he said, “But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education…. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

When asked, he told reporters he did not think the National Guard should be involved in suppressing the protests. 

Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu of the New York Times reported today that Russia, China, and Iran are amplifying the protests “to score geopolitical points abroad and stoke tensions within the United States,” as well as to “undermine President Biden’s reelection prospects.” 

It is unclear if the protests will continue during the summer, when fewer students will be on campus.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mitigatedchaos]

Facebook's metaverse crashing and burning was a forecast flop for some of the online right, who projected during the pandemic that everyone would be forced to use it. Instead of, y'know, Zoom.

It might end up looking more prescient in 20-40 years, with enough generational turnover for even higher norms of safety to be internalized, in combination with changes to somatic capital factors that reduce the hypocrisy of the ruling class's publicly stated ideology. But without some pretty hardcore longevity technology, it's probably a dead end.

Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, told the Wall Street Journal that, "Most of us who have a comfortable existence in our real bodies in the real world are still going to prefer that. Virtual worlds are a choice."

As someone who created content on, and in a sense lived within, Second Life about a decade ago, the idea of a virtual world where I'm acting under my real name, real identity, and real image - what's even the point of that?

A significant part of the point of virtual space, as an extremely lightweight, low-dimensionality construct, is that because it's so light and airy, it's easy to change. It offers tremendous mobility, with the ability to form new pseudonyms and experiment, to partition off social spaces according to different roles, to think ideas that you didn't even know you could think.