Friday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

We in the Boston area are finally getting a taste of the extreme heat that much of the rest of the country has been experiencing. Yesterday and today, there were heat emergencies declared, and many schools sent kids home early because of the heat and no air conditioning. Obviously, we aren’t used to 100 degree heat indexes in September in this part of the country. I don’t know how Dakinikat has survived months of this heat. Republicans need to wake up and realize that their children and grandchildren are going to suffer from climate change, whether their ancestors believed in it or not.

From Scientific American: Half the World’s Population Faced Extreme Heat for at Least 30 Days This Summer.

It has been a grueling summer, with relentless heat breaking multiple records in many places around the world. In fact, June through August was the planet’s hottest documented three-month period, with July ranking as the hottest month ever recorded. A new analysis by the nonprofit organization Climate Central finds that more than 3.8 billion people were exposed to extreme heat that was worsened by human-caused climate change from June through August, and at least 1.5 billion experienced such heat every day of that period. Nearly every person on Earth saw high temperatures that were made at least twice as likely by global warming.

People cool off in fountains in Rome to deal with the heat.

It has been a grueling summer, with relentless heat breaking multiple records in many places around the world. In fact, June through August was the planet’s hottest documented three-month period, with July ranking as the hottest month ever recorded. A new analysis by the nonprofit organization Climate Central finds that more than 3.8 billion people were exposed to extreme heat that was worsened by human-caused climate change from June through August, and at least 1.5 billion experienced such heat every day of that period. Nearly every person on Earth saw high temperatures that were made at least twice as likely by global warming.

“It really is everywhere,” says Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science. “On a single day, the fact that more than half the people on the planet were experiencing climate-altered heat—that’s just really, really remarkable to me.”

More frequent, longer-lasting and more intense heat waves are among the clearest outcomes of rising global temperatures driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Numerous studies have found the fingerprints of climate change in heat waves from the Pacific Northwest to Europe. A study released by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) research group in July had already found that the heat waves in North America, Europe and China that month were made hotter—and many times more likely—by climate change. In fact, the North American and European events likely would not have occurred without climate change.

The new analysis was produced using Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI) attribution system, which estimates how much climate change has shifted the local odds of events such as extreme heat. The system, which is based on peer-reviewed science, scores global warming’s influence using the ratio of how often a given temperature occurs in the current climate, compared with a world without climate change. A CSI of 1 means there is a discernable influence from climate change, and CSIs between 2 and 5 mean it made those conditions two to five times more likely.

The organization’s worldwide temperature analysis during this year’s Northern Hemisphere summer found 48 percent of the world’s population experienced at least 30 days of extreme heat that was made at least three times more likely by climate change, and at least 1.5 billion people experienced heat at that level or higher for the entire summer. Many of those people were in areas closer to the equator, such as the Caribbean, northern Africa and Southeast Asia.

Read more at the link.

That asshole Greg Abbott won a temporary stay on his murderous barriers. CNN: Federal appeals court says Texas’ floating barriers can remain in Rio Grande for now.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay Thursday night allowing the state of Texas to keep floating barriers in the Rio Grande.

A lower court judge had ordered Texas to take down the barriers by September 15 at its own expense. The panel’s decision Thursday puts that order on hold while the appeals court considers the case. It means that Texas does not have to start the process of removing the barriers, for now.

A worker helps deploy a string of large buoys to be used as a border barrier at the center of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

The swift ruling by the 5th Circuit comes a day after US District Judge David Ezra wrote that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott needed permission to install the barriers, as dictated by law – a win for the Biden administration.

“Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier. Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters,” Ezra wrote in his ruling. The judge also found Texas’ self-defense argument – that the barriers have been placed in the face of invasion – “unconvincing.”

The controversial border buoys were deployed in the Rio Grande as part Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s border security initiative. In July, the Justice Department sued the state of Texas claiming that the buoys were installed unlawfully and asking the judge to force the state to remove them.

Let’s hope the stay is just so the judges can get up to speed on the issues. Those barriers are utterly monstrous and inhumane.

The report from the Fulton County, Georgia special grand jury has been released. This was the jury that was just investigative. They recommended people who should be charged, and the official grand jury issued final indictments.

CNN reports: Fulton County special grand jury recommended charges against Lindsey Graham, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

The special grand jury in Fulton County investigating the 2020 presidential election in Georgia recommended charges against Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, according to the special counsel grand jury report released Friday.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did not charge the lawmakers when she returned an indictment last month against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants in the sprawling racketeering case. It was up to the district attorney to decide how closely to stick to the special grand jury’s recommendations….

Graham, who appeared before the special grand jury last year after a court battle over his testimony, spoke with Georgia election officials after the 2020 election. His phone calls with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his staff related to the possibility of finding enough fraud in the state that it could’ve tipped the election to Trump.

Raffensperger testified to the House January 6 committee thahis phone call with Graham made him “uncomfortable” because some of Graham’s suggestions could have led to “disenfranchising voters.”

Graham repeatedly prodded Raffensperger and his colleagues on the phone about the signature-matching of ballots in the Atlanta area. Raffensperger told CNN in November 2020 that he believed Graham “implied” that he should try to “throw out” some ballots in the heavily Democratic county….

Perdue, who lost his Senate run-off election in January 2021 while Trump was pushing his false claims of fraud, personally urged Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to help Trump’s quest to overturn the election. Loeffler, who also lost her runoff election in January 2021, was also at the meeting….

Special grand juries in Georgia cannot issue indictments and instead serve as an investigative tool. This special grand jury began hearing evidence in June 2022, and Willis used it to investigate efforts to overturn the 2020 election, an investigation sparked by Trump’s January 2021 phone call with Raffensperger where Trump asked him to “find” the votes he needed to win the state. The panel ultimately heard from 75 witnesses.

News has broken about Elon Musk’s interference in Ukraine, based on a new biography by Walter Isaacson.

CNN Exclusive: ‘How am I in this war?’: New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma.

Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”

As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.

Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson, whose new book is set to be released by Simon & Schuster on September 12.

Musk’s concerns over a “mini-Pearl Harbor” as he put it, did not come to pass in Crimea. But the episode reveals the unique position Musk found himself in as the war in Ukraine unfolded. Whether intended or not, he had become a power broker US officials couldn’t ignore.

Why is this monster still getting government money?

“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter that he owns. Sevastopol is a port city in Crimea. “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” [….]

A Ukrainian soldier disconnects a Starlink satellite dish near Kreminna, Ukraine. Credit…Clodagh KilcoyneReuters

After Russia disrupted Ukraine’s communications systems just before its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Musk agreed to provide Ukraine with millions of dollars of SpaceX-made Starlink satellite terminals, which became crucial to Ukraine’s military operations. Even as cellular phone and internet networks had been destroyed, the Starlink terminals allowed Ukraine to fight and stay connected.

But once Ukraine began to use Starlink terminals for offensive attacks against Russia, Musk started to second-guess that decision.

“How am I in this war?” Musk asks Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

Musk was soon on the phone with President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, and the Russian ambassador to the US to address anxieties from Washington, DC, to Moscow, writes Isaacson.

Meanwhile, Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister of Ukraine, was pleading with Musk to restore connectivity for the submarine drones by telling Musk about their capabilities in a text message, according to Isaacson. “I just want you—the person who is changing the world through technology—to know this,” Fedorov told Musk.

Read more at CNN.

The New York Times: Elon Musk Acknowledges Withholding Satellite Service to Thwart Ukrainian Attack.

A top adviser to Ukraine’s president accused Elon Musk of enabling Russian aggression, after the billionaire entrepreneur acknowledged denying satellite internet service in order to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet last year.

The Starlink satellite internet service, which is operated by Mr. Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, has been a digital lifeline in Ukraine since the early days of the war for both civilians and soldiers in areas where digital infrastructure has been wiped out.

On Thursday, CNN reported on an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography “Elon Musk,” later published by The Washington Post, that said the billionaire had ordered the deactivation of Starlink satellite service near the coast of Crimea last September to thwart the Ukrainian attack. The excerpt said that Mr. Musk had conversations with a Russian official that led him to worry that an attack on Crimea could spiral into a nuclear conflict.

I remember when Musk claimed he had spoken directly with Putin.

Later on Thursday, Mr. Musk responded on his social media platform to say that he hadn’t disabled the service but had rather refused to comply with an emergency request from Ukrainian officials to enable Starlink connections to Sevastopol on the occupied Crimean peninsula. That was in effect an acknowledgment that he had made the decision to prevent a Ukrainian attack.

“The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

That drew an angry response from Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Musk’s “interference,” he said, had allowed Russia’s naval fleet to continue firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.

“As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego,” he wrote on X.

Elon Musk and Walter Isaacson

The account in the biography further confirms the ways in which Mr. Musk’s control over Starlink appears to be affecting Ukraine’s military. In July, The New York Times reported on Mr. Musk’s refusal to allow the service to work near Crimea, and the broader challenges Ukrainian officials were facing because of the country’s huge dependence on Starlink.

The more than 42,000 Starlink terminals are also in use by hospitals, businesses and aid organizations across Ukraine.

But Mr. Musk has repeatedly stoked controversy around access to Starlink, saying last October that he could not “indefinitely” finance Ukraine’s use of Starlink, then abruptly reversing course. The near-total control that he wields over connectivity in the war zone has prompted concern about his influence.

In February, Ukrainian officials were angered after a SpaceX executive said that Starlink had taken steps to curtail the Ukrainian military’s use of the technology to control drones, a week after Mr. Musk said the company was “not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes.” SpaceX has also used a process called geofencing to restrict where Starlink is available on the front lines.

Because Starlink is a commercial product rather than a traditional defense contractor, Mr. Musk is able to make decisions that may not be aligned with U.S. interests, analysts have said.

One more and then I’ll wrap this up. It appears that the IRS is actually going after superrich people.

The New York Times: I.R.S. Deploys Artificial Intelligence to Target Rich Partnerships.

The Internal Revenue Service has started using artificial intelligence to investigate tax evasion at multibillion-dollar partnerships as it looks for ways to better police hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and large law firms.

The announcement on Friday demonstrated how a more muscular I.R.S. is using some of the $80 billion allocated through last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to target the wealthiest Americans and tackle the kinds of cases that had become too complex and cumbersome for the beleaguered agency to handle.

The agency’s new funding is intended to help the I.R.S. raise more federal revenue by cracking down on tax cheats and others who use sophisticated accounting maneuvers to avoid paying what they owe. But the allocation has been politically contentious, with Republicans claiming that the I.R.S. will use the funding to harass small businesses and middle-class taxpayers. Earlier this year, Republicans succeeded in clawing back $20 billion as part of an agreement to raise the nation’s borrowing cap.

That political fight has put the onus on Democrats and the Biden administration to show that the funding is primarily enabling the I.R.S. to target the rich.

“These are complex cases for I.R.S. teams to unpack,” Daniel Werfel, the I.R.S. commissioner, said in a briefing with reporters. “The I.R.S. has simply not had enough resources or staffing to address partnerships; in a real sense, we’ve been overwhelmed in this area for years.”

Mr. Werfel explained that artificial intelligence is helping the I.R.S. identify patterns and trends, giving the agency greater confidence that it can find where larger partnerships are shielding income. That is leading to the kinds of major audits that the I.R.S. might not have previously tackled.

The agency said it would open examinations of 75 of the nation’s largest partnerships, which were identified with the help of artificial intelligence, by the end of the month. The partnerships all have more than $10 billion in assets and will receive audit notices in the coming weeks.

Sounds good to me.

That’s all I have today. Have a great weekend everyone!!