Days of torrential rain have spawned massive flooding in eastern Australia, forcing the evacuation of some 40,000 people. In the country's arid central section, it has sent waterfalls down the side of the country's majestic Uluru rocks.
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Australia Floods: 40,000 Evacuated, At Least 2 Dead : NPR - 0 views
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Barely a year after devastating bushfires burned through tens of millions of acres in Australia, the country is grappling with one of its worst-ever floods after weather systems converged over Queensland and New South Wales, dumping more than 20 inches of rain in a single day in one area north of Brisbane. Meanwhile, one area of New South Wales received nearly 40 inches in a week — which Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said had already exceeded the average autumn rainfall less than a month into the season.
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The floods, which have submerged houses, stranded cattle and cut off towns, have inundated vast areas along the east coast from roughly Mackay, located about 600 miles north of Brisbane in Queensland, to Bega in New South Wales, some 260 miles south of Sydney.The premier of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, said Wednesday that residents in Sydney's western regions are under new evacuation orders.
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On Wednesday, the bodies of two men were recovered from flooded vehicles. One man, 25, died when his car was submerged in northwest Sydney. He reached an emergency operator and was on the line for 44 minutes until contact was lost,
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Near Alice Springs in central Australia, tourists have flocked to Uluru, also known Ayers Rock, to catch a rare glimpse of cascading waterfalls at the reddish-orange rock formation. Park officials say 46 millimeters (1.8 inches) of rain fell there over the weekend – about a sixth of the average annual rainfall in the region. While the event isn't unprecedented, it is uncommon.
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Although rivers were expected to crest on Wednesday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned that the flooding, which has been concentrated along the eastern seaboard, would not remain "just a coastal event."The Warragamba Dam, located on the western outskirts of Sydney, has been spilling the equivalent of the city's famous harbor in water each day. It's expected to continue its overflow for at least another week, threatening highly populated areas, Morrison said. "We advise that the rain and flood situation does remain dynamic and extremely complex," he said.
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Darren Osmotherly, who owns the Paradise Café Pizzeria in Portland, NSW, west of Sydney, told Reuters that damage to his restaurant would likely top a half-million Australian dollars (US$380,000).
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Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot - The New York Times - 0 views
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The iconography of the American far right was on display on Jan 6. during the violence at the Capitol. The dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images was, to many Americans, a striking aspect of the unrest, revealing an alternate political universe where violent extremists, outright racists and conspiracy theorists march side by side with evangelical Christians, suburban Trump supporters and young men who revel in making memes to “own the libs.”
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Uniting them is a loyalty to Mr. Trump and a firm belief in his false and discredited insistence that the election was stolen.
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Out in force were right-wing militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, whose symbol, the Roman numeral III, could be seen on patches and flags. Both groups are anti-government, pro-guns and, nowadays, devoted to Mr. Trump.
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The Boogaloos marked themselves by wearing their signature Hawaiian shirts. A group of Proud Boys showed up in orange hats.
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Alongside the violent, the overtly racist and the paranoid were thousands of devoted Trump supporters, some of whom even brought young children. The crowd was filled with people in MAGA regalia, and Trump flags were everywhere. Most just said “Trump”; others were a bit more outlandish.
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Opinion | Is Kevin Cooper an Innocent Man? - The New York Times - 0 views
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The horrifying murder of a beautiful white family in Chino Hills, Calif., created enormous public pressure on the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office to solve the crime. Although Josh had indicated that the attack was committed by several white men, the sheriff announced just four days after the bodies were found that the sole suspect was Kevin Cooper, a young Black man with a long criminal record who had recently walked away from a minimum-security prison and then hid in an empty house near the Ryens’.
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It’s up to Newsom, who has imposed a moratorium on executions, to resolve what appears to be a horrendous injustice.
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The DNA degraded over the decades while California authorities blocked the testing that Cooper had pleaded for, letting officials run out the clock. Likewise, hairs found clutched in the victims’ hands weren’t Cooper’s (no hairs from an African-American were found at the crime scene) but didn’t lead to a match with a suspect, either.
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It yielded a full DNA profile, and it’s not Cooper’s or any of the victims’ — but it hasn’t been matched to anyone else. Match that DNA, and we may quickly solve these murders.
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Lee came to the attention of the authorities during the investigation after his girlfriend, Diana Roper, fingered him as the killer: She reported that he had returned home late on the night of the killings wearing bloody coveralls, in a car that resembled the Ryens’ station wagon
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The DNA on the orange towel is not Lee’s, and he has denied to me that he was involved in the Ryen murders. It’s important not to try to free one innocent man by rushing to judgment about another. Still, the DNA testing and these witnesses add to the evidence that Cooper is an innocent man on death row.
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The deans of four law schools and a former president of the American Bar Association have expressed concerns about the case. An excellent book, “Scapegoat,” has been written about it, and a documentary is in the works. Kim Kardashian visited Cooper in 2019 and has embraced his cause.
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The D.A.’s office notes, for example, that Cooper’s blood was found on that tan T-shirt apparently worn by the murderer. That’s true: Testing years ago confirmed that it is Cooper’s blood — but also suggests that sheriff’s deputies spilled the blood on the shirt to frame him.
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Cooper’s blood on that shirt had elevated EDTA in it; in other words, it seemed to have come not from his body directly, but from a test tube.
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Relatives of the victims are convinced that Cooper is guilty, and San Bernardino authorities argue that there is plenty of forensic evidence against him — a bloodstain, shoe prints, cigarette butts, and so on. If you trust the sheriff’s office, it’s compelling.
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So as he mounted this attack, Cooper was juggling three or four weapons? Pausing in midassault to change shirts? And how could a 155-pound man like Cooper enter the house, with the Ryens’ dogs presumably sounding an alarm, and then overpower both Doug Ryen, a former military policeman, and Peggy Ryen, strong and athletic — each of whom had a loaded gun by the side of the bed?
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Yet California for almost 38 years has prepared to ignore all this and execute a Black man who is probably innocent. Democratic and Republican politicians alike have mostly averted their eyes, presumably in part for fear of offending voters who might be upset at the exoneration of a Black man convicted of a brutal crime against a white family.
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Conservative law enforcement officials in San Bernardino County blocked comprehensive DNA testing for years, but so did Democratic politicians like Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris when they were attorneys general of California.
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'What Is Going to Happen to Us?' Inside ISIS Prison, Children Ask Their Fate - The New ... - 0 views
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NORTHEASTERN SYRIA — The prisoners cover the floor like a carpet of human despair. Many are missing eyes or limbs, some are bone-thin from sickness, and most wear orange jumpsuits
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Their parents brought them to Syria and ended up dead or detained. The children have been here for months and have no idea where their relatives are or what the future holds.
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As the Islamic State's self-declared caliphate collapsed in Syria, tens of thousands of men, women and children who had lived in it ended up in squalid camps and crowded prisons run by the Kurdish-led militia that had partnered with the United States to defeat the jihadists.
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But now that a military incursion by Turkey against Kurdish forces has set off a new wave of violence and weakened their control over the area, uncertainty has grown over the fate of the huge population of people who survived the toppling of the Islamic State and have been warehoused since then in prisons and detention camps.
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their governments have instead chosen to leave them in the custody of a Kurdish-led force that lacks the resources to house, feed and protect them, much less to investigate the adults and provide the children with education and rehabilitation.
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The detention crisis in northeastern Syria is a bleak byproduct of the war against the Islamic State.
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Mr. Polat’s prison is a converted industrial institute that now holds more than 5,000 people. One-quarter of them are Syrians, the rest hailing from 29 other countries, including Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, the Netherlands and the United States.
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Most of the 400 men in a vast medical ward wore them. Many of them were sick or wounded. Men with metal braces holding broken bones in place lay on thin mattresses, while others shuffled to the bathroom on crutches or dragged their legs on the ground behind them. A few were so emaciated that their cheekbones stuck out and their legs were as thin as arms. When one man made the call to prayer, many of the prisoners prayed sitting down because they were too injured or ill to stand.
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The Kurdish guards assumed that most of the men had been fighters and still followed the Islamic State’s ideology, but the prisoners themselves played down their roles in the world’s most fearsome terrorist organization.A Palestinian man with a broken leg said he had come to Syria because he “wanted to help.” A mechanic from Trinidad said he had not fought because he had been too busy fixing cars. A tall, muscular Russian said he had been a cook — in an elementary school.In dozens of interviews in two prisons, no one admitted to being a fighter.
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The boys in prison said they received almost no services.“The situation is pretty bad here, so if they could hurry up and decide,” said a 16-year-old boy from Mauritius. “Months like this without knowing what is going to happen, people could start going crazy. They could say these guys were terrorists before with ISIS, but they are still human.”
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California's primary could be another big night for female candidates - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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In their quest to win the 23 seats that would give them control of the House of Representatives, Democrats are targeting the seven Republican-held districts in California that were won by Hillary Clinton in 2016. There are high-profile female Democrats in several of those districts, all hoping the trend will carry them over the finish line Tuesday night.
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In the wild race for retiring Rep. Ed Royce's district in California-39, the attention has focused on the slugfest between Gil Cisneros and Andy Thorburn — who are competing against two Republicans for the No. 2 slot. But pediatrician Mai Khanh Tran got the backing of EMILY's list and could draw a significant share of the vote.
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"There are so many young people who are excited to see someone who looks like them," Jacobs says. Her youth and gender have also brought valuable financial support for Jacobs in this highly competitive district, which covers portions of Orange and San Diego counties. The super PAC for EMILY's List, Women Vote!, has spent $2.4 million to support her campaign. (Jacobs' grandfather, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, has given more than a $1 million to Women Vote! this campaign cycle).
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The midterm electorate typically tends to be more male, white and conservative than in presidential years. But door-knocking this cycle, Jacobs said she has met many women who don't normally vote in midterm elections but answer the door eager to talk about the possibility of increasing female representation in Congress."They have done their research; they know who the candidates are," she said during an interview at a picnic table on Moonlight Beach. "They are excited to be voting for female candidates," she said, noting her focus on issues like affordable childcare, the link between gun violence and domestic violence, and the challenges confronting both women in the military in this veteran-heavy district.
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Voters have also approached her after debates dispensing advice about her appearance, her hairstyle and demeanor -- telling her, for example, that she needs to speak slower or that her voice is too high. ("I get that one a lot," she says)."I think that's partially because I'm young, partially because I'm a woman, people do feel more comfortable coming up and giving me that type of feedback," Jacobs said. "It's also that the subconscious image of a leader in people's minds is a very specific thing. In some cases my voice sounds too high to them, because it's not a male voice. And I don't look like a leader to them. So part of it is explaining to them -- it feels weird because you haven't seen it before."
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There has been little reliable public polling in California-49. A number of internal polls have shown Jacobs, environmental advocate Mike Levin, and Applegate, an attorney and retired Marine colonel, bunched together in second place. Several California strategists said they believe Paul Kerr, a small business owner and US Navy veteran who has sent several negative mailers about Jacobs' credentials, appears to be trailing that pack.
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"She's been so supportive of us as this grassroots movement, and us as women," Shaewitz said. "She's so young, and some people see that as a negative. I look it as a positive. I asked her the other day 'How are you not tired?' and she said 'Youth.' She said, 'It's my generation that is being affected by these policies,'" Shaewitz recalled."Look at this tough race that she's in; people have asked her to get out of it for the sake of the Democratic Party, and she won't," Shaewitz said. "I have so much respect for that. She's 29. She could be doing anything."
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There are eight Republicans on the ballot in the 49th, but Republican support appears to have consolidated behind Diane Harkey, who was endorsed by Issa.
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A revolution in Africa's relations with France is afoot | Financial Times - 0 views
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You could call it west Africa’s Brexit. In what amounts to be the biggest shift in the region’s relations with France since independence, eight west African countries will in 2020 ditch the CFA franc in favour of a new currency to be called the eco. It cannot be long before the six central African states, members of a separate CFA franc union, follow suit.
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The symbolism is important, though the changes go beyond that. It is no small matter for eight nations, seven of them former French colonies, to rid themselves of a currency whose acronym originally stood for Colonies françaises d’Afrique, or “French colonies in Africa”.
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s if to underline the message, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, chose the day he announced the end of the currency to declare French colonialism in Africa a “profound mistake”. The first French leader born after African independence, Mr Macron had already, during the 2017 election campaign, deemed France’s activities in Algeria a “crime against humanity”.
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Alassane Ouattara, president of Ivory Coast and a former central banker himself, was a strong supporter of the CFA franc, ritually praising its stability and solidity. For a certain class of entrepreneur, the currency has indeed been excellent news. Large French companies — such as Bolloré, EDF, Orange, Total and Veolia — could invest knowing that they were protected against devaluation by the French state. For the African elites that did business with them, the overvalued CFA franc in their pocket could easily pay for imported luxuries.
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Like the CFA franc, French soldiers breed resentment. Some argue they help bring stability, others that they foster the very resentment they have been sent to quell. If the special relationship is over, more people could start asking what they are doing there.
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Asian-American Voters Can Help Decide Elections. But for Which Party? - The New York Times - 0 views
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They turned out in record numbers. In Georgia, the increase in Asian-American voters was so significant in the general election that they could play a decisive role in the two Senate runoff races this week.
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Demographics alone are not destiny. Asian-American voters and Latino voters made clear that while they generally support Democrats, they do not do so at the same rate as Black voters, and remain very much up for grabs by either party.
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but with Asian-Americans making up less than 6 percent of the U.S. population, concentrated mostly in traditionally safe blue and red states like California, New York and Texas, they were seldom part of a presidential campaign’s calculus.
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With the Senate runoffs approaching on Tuesday, Asian-American political operatives from across the country have joined local groups in Georgia to try to ensure that the tens of thousands of Asian-Americans who voted for the first time in the general election will vote again this week.
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Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the virus, among other things, made progressive organizers and Democratic candidates optimistic that Asian-American voters would flock to them. In some cases, it did motivate people.
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At the presidential level, Asian-Americans cast a record number of ballots in battleground states where Joseph R. Biden Jr. notched narrow victories. But a New York Times analysis showed that in immigrant neighborhoods across the country, Asian-American and Latino voters shifted to the right
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Now, as Mr. Biden forms his administration, Asian-American congressional leaders and many of their colleagues are already chafing at what could be a cabinet without a single Asian-American secretary for the first time in decades.
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Over the last two decades, as their numbers grew, Asian-Americans as a whole moved left politically and slowly amassed enough power to help decide some tightly contested House races in districts where they had clustered
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For the first time, three Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders sought a major party’s nomination for president. One, Ms. Harris, is set to be vice president; another, the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, has been privately telling New York City leaders that he intends to run for mayor this year.
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When analysts get a complete picture of the 2020 electorate, he said, the data will probably show that the total number of ballots cast by Asian-Americans nearly doubled.
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Despite the modest increase in support for Mr. Trump, roughly two-thirds of Asian-American voters backed Mr. Biden — a fact often cited by the Asian-American officials who have urged the president-elect to pick a cabinet secretary from their community.
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Roughly 30 percent of Asian-American voters do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans, and many are settling in the suburban swing districts that are the focus of both parties.It is a demographic and political reality that has been playing out in parts of Southern California for years. Randall Avila, the executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County, said he had found that many Asian-American voters — and potential candidates he had worked to recruit — approached Republican ideas with an open mind.
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The real victory, experts on the Latino and Asian-American vote agreed, would be for voters of color to be pursued with the same vigor as white voters, who are routinely grouped into subcategories based on where they live, or their income or education level.“Democrats need to stop obsessing about white rural voters and white suburban moms,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.
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One place they may demonstrate their growing political power is in Georgia this week. Neil Makhija leads an Indian-American political organization that is running a $2.5 million campaign to turn out A.A.P.I. voters in the state’s Senate runoffs. He sees the significant increase in Asian-American voter participation in November as a success — and a lesson.“What we’re going to try to do is take some of what we’ve learned,” he said, “and really go all in.”
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U.S. Rings In New Year With Subdued Celebrations : NPR - 0 views
www.npr.org/...year-with-subdued-celebrations
Covid19 US Pandemic Politics Lockdown Restrictions New Years
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In the days leading up to New Year's Eve, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged people to find an alternative option for celebrating the holiday — with an aim to avoid large crowds and indoor gatherings
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Many cities made it easy for residents to stay home by implementing lockdown measures. The restrictions left the normally bustling Times Square in New York City and the Las Vegas Strip nearly empty.
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But this year just a few invited frontline health workers gathered in socially distanced pods. The city closed Times Square to the public and police patrolled the area to prevent any revelers from entering.
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"The restricted access decision was made out of an abundance of caution to protect the health and safety of our guests, employees and community," the Freemont Street Experience webpage read.
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Meanwhile, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced the city's existing midnight curfew would be extended to 1 a.m. on New Year's Eve, giving revelers the opportunity to visit bars and restaurants a bit later.
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Event coordinator Corky Dozier told the paper: "No fireworks, nothing, not this year, which would have been our 35th anniversary. The orange even went up even after 9/11, but we just can't take the chance."
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Senate Overrides Trump's Veto of Defense Bill, Dealing a Legislative Blow - The New Yor... - 0 views
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The Senate on Friday voted overwhelmingly to override President Trump’s veto of the annual military policy bill as most Republicans joined Democrats to rebuke Mr. Trump in the final days of his presidency.
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The vote ended a devastating legislative week for Mr. Trump, effectively denying him two of the last demands of his presidency. Senate Republican leaders on Wednesday had declared that there was “no realistic path” for a vote on increasing stimulus checks to $2,000 from the current $600, a measure Mr. Trump had pressed lawmakers to take up.
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He called the legislation “a tremendous opportunity to direct our national security priorities to reflect the resolve of the American people.”
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“This year especially so, in light of all of the disruptions and problems that we’ve had,” Mr. Inhofe said.
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He also demanded that the bill include the repeal of what is known as Section 230, a legal shield for social media companies that he has tangled with. Republicans and Democrats alike have said that the repeal, a significant legislative change, is irrelevant to a bill that dictates military policy.
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Those objections, registered late in the legislative process, infuriated lawmakers, who had labored for months to put together a bipartisan bill
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Republicans have also divided over supporting the president’s determination to make one last and futile attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in Congress next week.
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Lawmakers over the past four years tried but failed to override Mr. Trump’s vetoes of legislation cutting off arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations, and to overturn his emergency declaration at the southwestern border.
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But his attempt to derail the widely popular defense bill, seen by lawmakers in both parties as an opportunity to secure wins for their communities and support the military, proved to be a bridge too far.
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Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, tried on Friday to take up Mr. Trump’s demand to increase the size of pandemic relief checks to $2,000.
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The bill contains a 3 percent increase in pay for service members and a boost in hazardous duty incentive pay, new benefits for tens of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and a landmark provision aimed at preventing the use of shell companies to evade anti-money-laundering rules.
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The last time Congress overrode a presidential veto was in 2016, the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, after he vetoed legislation allowing families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to sue the government of Saudi Arabia.
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Opinion | When Good People Don't Act, Evil Reigns - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ivism-trump-masks-climate.html
evil triumph activism good cooperation crisis response people politics history
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I have often wondered how major world tragedies and horrors were allowed to unfold. Where were all the good people, those who objected or should have? How did life simply go on with a horror in their midst?
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There is, of course, nearly always an explanation. Often it is official policy; often it is driven by propaganda. But I’m more concerned with how people in the society considered these events at the time, and how any semblance of normalcy could be maintained while events unfolded.
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As I write this, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died — many of them needlessly — from Covid-19, in large part because the Trump administration has refused to sufficiently address the crisis, be honest with the American people and urge caution.
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This is how these catastrophes happen — in full sight — and people with full knowledge don’t revolt. People sometimes think that the issue is far away, or if it’s not, that it’s too big and they are too powerless.
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We have a climate crisis that continues to worsen. Storms are getting stronger. Droughts are severe. Rivers are flooding. The sea level is rising. And yet, we don’t do nearly enough to stop it and may not do enough before it’s too late to do anything.
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Right now much of the West Coast is ablaze with hellish scenes of orange skies, and yet too many of us entertain climate change deniers, or, perhaps worse, know well the gravity and precariousness of the situation and still haven’t changed our habits or voted for the candidates with the boldest visions to save the planet.
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We are, in many states, back to restaurants and bars, schools and churches, gyms and spas. It’s not as if we don’t know that there is a deadly virus being transmitted through the air, but it seems as though many Americans, weary of restrictions, have simply made their peace with it.
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They think provincially, or even parochially, concerned with their own house, their own street, their own community.
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the result is that evil — as a person or system — rampages, unchecked, taking your personal laissez-faire as public license.
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But this mustn’t be. Stop thinking of yourself as weak or helpless. Stop thinking that things will simply work themselves out. Stop thinking that evil will stop at the gate and not trample your own garden.
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Gather the energy. Gather your neighbor. Fight, vote, email, post. Do all you can to stand up for the vulnerable, for the oppressed, for the planet itself
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As Edmund Burke wrote in his 1770 “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents”: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
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nother of Burke’s quotes: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
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How H-E-B Helped Texans After the Winter Storm - The New York Times - 0 views
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AUSTIN, Texas — The past week had been a nightmare. A winter storm, one of the worst to hit Texas in a generation, robbed Lanita Generous of power, heat and water in her home. The food she had stored in her refrigerator and freezer had spoiled. She was down to her final five bottles of water.
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The storm and its devastation have tested a notion of independence that is deeply ingrained in Texas, a sense that Texans and their businesses can handle things on their own without the intrusion of outsiders or the shackles of regulation.
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But for many Texans, H-E-B reflected the ways the state’s maverick spirit can flourish: reliable for routine visits but particularly in a time of disaster, and a belief that the family-owned chain — with the vast majority of its more than 340 locations inside state lines — has made a conscious choice to stay rooted to the idea of being a good neighbor.
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H-E-B issued a statement on Sunday saying that its focus was still on operations after the storm, noting that the weather had been “incredibly difficult” on its employees as well as the rest of the state.
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Allegiances to brands are often about more than just the product; they can be a proxy for consumers to telegraph their stances on political or social issues. Yet H-E-B reflects another kind of virtue signaling, one that often supersedes race, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation: a display of Texan identity.H-E-B falls into a class of companies that Texans instantly identify with their state in a way that transcends commerce, particularly for expatriates outside state lines. There is Whataburger, the fast food chain; Blue Bell ice cream; and Buc-ee’s supersized convenience stores. Many a Texan in New York City has spotted an orange-striped bag from Junior’s Cheesecake and thought someone stepped on the E train with a Whataburger.
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“That’s what we’ve come to expect of H-E-B,” Professor McAlister added. “It’s from the heart and they’re good at logistics. If their Texans need water, they can get it to them, because it’s their Texans who are thirsty.”
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The shelves in many stores were light on inventory, if not entirely bare, especially for water. In a store packed with customers in the Las Palmas neighborhood of San Antonio, notices warned people could only take two gallons of water. “Limits are temporary and necessary for you and your neighbors to find the products you need,” a sign said.
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Opinion | I Hope This Is Not Another Lie About the Republican Party - The New York Times - 0 views
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I spent decades working to elect Republicans, including Mr. Romney and four other presidential candidates, and I am here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the party became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Donald Trump up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today’s Republican Party.
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I saw the warning signs but ignored them and chose to believe what I wanted to believe: The party wasn’t just a white grievance party; there was still a big tent; the others guys were worse. Many of us in the party saw this dark side and told ourselves it was a recessive gene. We were wrong. It turned out to be the dominant gene.
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In the Richard Nixon White House, Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips wrote a re-election campaign memo headed “Dividing the Democrats” in which they outlined what would come to be known as the Southern Strategy. It assumes there is little Republicans can do to attract Black Americans and details a two-pronged strategy: Utilize Black support of Democrats to alienate white voters while trying to decrease that support by sowing dissension within the Democratic Party.
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Racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. While many Republicans today like to mourn the absence of an intellectual voice like William Buckley, it is often overlooked that Mr. Buckley began his career as a racist defending segregation.
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That strategy has worked so well that it was copied by the Russians in their 2016 efforts to help elect Mr. Trump.
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In the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, on which I worked, we acknowledged the failures of Republicans to attract significant nonwhite support. When Mr. Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative,” some on the right attacked him, calling it an admission that conservatism had not been compassionate. That was true; it had not been. Many of us believed we could steer the party to that “kinder, gentler” place his father described. We were wrong.
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There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent. My j’accuse is against us all, not a few individuals who were the most egregious.
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How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.
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This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.
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I’ve given up hope that there are any lines of decency or normalcy that once crossed would move Republican leaders to act as if they took their oath of office more seriously than their allegiance to party
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I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that would be a lie and there have been too many lies for too long.
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Bond Fire Erupts Outside Los Angeles, Forcing Thousands to Evacuate - The New York Times - 0 views
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Exacerbated by wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and extremely dry conditions, a fast-moving wildfire spread to more than 6,000 acres in Southern California on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of 25,000 residents, officials said.
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Fire officials attributed the spread of the Bond fire to the winds.The blaze began as a house fire in Silverado, about 50 miles from Los Angeles, and quickly spread to the surrounding area, fire officials said. The cause was under investigation.
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Chief Fennessy said that more than 500 firefighters were battling the flames and that more than 30 agencies were involved in the effort, which included fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.
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At the same news conference, Sheriff Don Barnes of Orange County warned residents that they should have their medications and other necessities ready to go in case they had to evacuate.“When you need to go, it’s go then,” Sheriff Barnes said.
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“They can’t walk, they cannot drive,” she said of residents. “People can’t get anything. Besides Covid-19, this adds on top of it.”Ms. Sadollahi said she had lost five days of business because of the Silverado fire in October, which had compounded the economic effects of the pandemic.
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He said he was unfazed by the latest wildfire.“For us, this is routine, every 10 years,” he said. “It’s kind of like, if you live in California, you expect earthquakes and fires. I think Covid is affecting the area more, to be honest.”
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Vladimir Putin's 20-Year March to War in Ukraine-and How the West Mishandled It - WSJ - 0 views
www.wsj.com/...west-mishandled-it-11648826461
putin war ukraine west politics history crisis policy analysis
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For nearly two decades, the U.S. and the European Union vacillated over how to deal with the Russian leader as he resorted to increasingly aggressive steps to reassert Moscow’s dominion over Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.
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A look back at the history of the Russian-Western tensions, based on interviews with more than 30 past and present policy makers in the U.S., EU, Ukraine and Russia, shows how Western security policies angered Moscow without deterring it.
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t also shows how Mr. Putin consistently viewed Ukraine as existential for his project of restoring Russian greatness.
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization made a statement in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join, and over nearly 14 years never followed through on membership. The EU drew up a trade deal with Ukraine without factoring in Russia’s strong-arm response. Western policies didn’t change decisively in reaction to limited Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, encouraging Mr. Putin to believe that a full-blown campaign to conquer Ukraine wouldn’t meet with determined resistance—either internationally or in Ukraine, a country whose independence he said repeatedly was a regrettable accident of history.
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The roots of the war lie in Russia’s deep ambivalence about its place in the world after the end of the Soviet Union
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Viewed from elsewhere in Europe, NATO’s eastward enlargement didn’t threaten Russia’s security. NATO membership is at core a promise to collectively defend a member that comes under attack. The alliance agreed in 1997 not to permanently station substantial combat forces in its new eastern members that were capable of threatening Russian territory. Russia retained a massive nuclear arsenal and the biggest conventional forces in Europe.
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Mr. Putin thought of Russian security interests more broadly, linking the preservation of Moscow’s influence in adjacent countries with his goals of reviving Russia’s global power and cementing his authoritarian rule at home.
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U.S. intelligence learned in 2005 that Mr. Putin’s government had carried out a broad review of Russian policy in the “near abroad,” as the Kremlin termed former Soviet republics. From now on, Russia would take a more assertive approach and vigorously contest perceived U.S. influence.
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Mr. Bush asked Mr. Putin why he thought the end of the Soviet Union had been the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Surely the deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens in World War II was worse, Mr. Bush said. Mr. Putin replied that the USSR’s demise was worse because it had left 25 million Russians outside the Russian Federation, according to Ms. Rice, who was present.
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Perceptions changed in January 2007, when Mr. Putin vented his growing frustrations about the West at the annual Munich Security Conference. In a long and icy speech, he denounced the U.S. for trying to rule a unipolar world by force, accused NATO of breaking promises by expanding into Europe’s east, and called the West hypocritical for lecturing Russia about democracy. A chill descended on the audience of Western diplomats and politicians at the luxury Hotel Bayerischer Hof, participants recalled.
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“We didn’t take the speech as seriously as we should have,” said Mr. Ischinger. “It takes two to tango, and Mr. Putin didn’t want to tango any more.
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“I need a MAP. We need to give the Ukrainian people a strategic focus on the way ahead. We really need this,” Mr. Yushchenko said, Ms. Rice recalled. Ms. Rice, who was initially uncertain about having Ukraine in NATO, gave a noncommittal answer. When the request was debated in the National Security Council, Mr. Bush said NATO should be open to all countries that qualify and want to join.
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Try as it might, the White House couldn’t overcome German and French resistance to offering a MAP to Ukraine and Georgia.
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Berlin and Paris pointed to unsolved territorial conflicts in Georgia, low public support for NATO in Ukraine, and the weakness of democracy and the rule of law in both.
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Ms. Merkel, remembering Mr. Putin’s speech in Munich, believed he would see NATO invitations as a direct and deliberate threat to him, according to Christoph Heusgen, her chief diplomatic adviser at the time. She was also convinced Ukraine and Georgia would bring NATO no benefits as members, Mr. Heusgen said.
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Ms. Rice, a Soviet and Russia expert, said Mr. Putin wanted to use Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia to rebuild Russia’s global power, and that extending the shield of NATO membership could be the last chance to stop him. German and French officials were skeptical, believing Russia’s economy was too weak and dependent on Western technology to become a serious threat again.
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In the final session, Ms. Merkel debated in a corner of the room with leaders from Poland and other eastern members of NATO, who advocated strenuously on behalf of Ukraine and Georgia. Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus strongly criticized Ms. Merkel’s stance, warning that a failure to stop Russia’s resurgence would eventually threaten the eastern flank of the alliance.
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“We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” it read. But it didn’t say when. And there was no MAP.
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Many of Ukraine’s supporters were heartened. But some officials in Bucharest feared it was the worst of both worlds. NATO had just painted a target on the backs of Ukraine and Georgia without giving them any protection.
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Mr. Putin joined the summit the next day. He spoke behind closed doors and made clear his disdain for NATO’s move, describing Ukraine as a “made-up” country.
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“He then became a fervent nationalist,” said Mr. Heusgen. “His great anxiety was that Ukraine could become economically and politically successful and that the Russians would eventually ask themselves ‘Why are our brothers doing so well, while our situation remains dire?’ ”
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Mr. Putin’s show of military force backfired politically. He had won control of Crimea and part of Donbas, but he was losing Ukraine.
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divisions manifested themselves during Ukraine’s bitterly fought elections and during the Orange and Maidan revolutions. But they receded after 2014. Many Russophone Ukrainians fled from repression and economic collapse in separatist-run Donbas. Even eastern Ukraine came to fear Russian influence. Mr. Putin was doing what Ukrainian politicians had struggled with: uniting a nation.
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Mr. Putin never tried to implement the Minsk accords, said Mr. Heusgen, the German chancellery aide, because their full implementation would have resolved the conflict and allowed Ukraine to move on.
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At a conversation at the Hilton Hotel in Brisbane, Australia, during a G-20 summit in late 2014, Ms. Merkel realized that Mr. Putin had entered a state of mind that would never allow for reconciliation with the West, according to a former aide.
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The conversation was about Ukraine, but Mr. Putin launched into a tirade against the decadence of democracies, whose decay of values, he said, was exemplified by the spread of “gay culture.”
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The Russian warned Ms. Merkel earnestly that gay culture was corrupting Germany’s youth. Russia’s values were superior and diametrically opposed to Western decadence, he said
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He expressed disdain for politicians beholden to public opinion. Western politicians were unable to be strong leaders because they were hobbled by electoral pressures and aggressive media, he told Ms. Merkel.
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Ms. Merkel’s policy reflected a consensus in Berlin that mutually beneficial trade with the EU would tame Russian geopolitical ambitions.
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The U.S. and some NATO allies, meanwhile, began a multiyear program to train and equip Ukraine’s armed forces, which had proved no match for Russia’s in Donbas.
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The level of military support was limited because the Obama administration figured that Russia would retain a considerable military advantage over Ukraine and it didn’t want to provoke Moscow.
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President Trump expanded the aid to include Javelin antitank missiles, but delayed it in 2019 while he pressed Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to look for information the White House hoped to use against Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden and Mr. Biden’s son, an act for which he was impeached.
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in telephone conversations from 2020 onward, Mr. Macron noticed changes in Mr. Putin. The Russian leader was rigorously isolating himself during the Covid-19 pandemic, requiring even close aides to quarantine themselves before they could meet him.
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The man on the phone with Mr. Macron was different from the one he had hosted in Paris and the Riviera. “He tended to talk in circles, rewriting history,” recalled an aide to Mr. Macron.
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The U.S. no longer saw Europe as a primary focus. Mr. Biden wanted neither a “reset” of relations with Mr. Putin, like President Obama had declared in 2009, nor to roll back Russia’s power. The NSC cast the aim as a “stable, predictable relationship.” It was a modest goal that would soon be tested by Mr. Putin’s bid to rewrite the ending of the Cold War.
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In early 2021, Mr. Biden became the latest U.S. president who wanted to focus his foreign policy on the strategic competition with China, only to become entangled in events elsewhere.
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When Mr. Zelensky met with Mr. Biden in Washington in September, the U.S. finally announced the $60 million in military support, which included Javelins, small arms and ammunition. The aid was in line with the modest assistance the Obama and Trump administrations had supplied over the years, which provided Ukraine with lethal weaponry but didn’t include air defense, antiship missiles, tanks, fighter aircraft or drones that could carry out attacks.
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U.S. national security officials discussed the highly classified intelligence at a meeting in the White House on Oct. 27. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned that Russian forces could be ready to attack by the end of January 2022.
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On Nov. 17, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, urged the U.S. to send air defense systems and additional antitank weapons and ammunition during a meeting at the Pentagon, although he thought the initial Russian attacks might be limited.
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Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Mr. Reznikov that Ukraine could be facing a massive invasion.
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Work began that month on a new $200 million package in military assistance from U.S. stocks. The White House, however, initially held off authorizing it, angering some lawmakers. Administration officials calculated arms shipments wouldn’t be enough to deter Mr. Putin from invading if his mind was made up, and might even provoke him to attack.
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The cautious White House approach was consistent with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s thinking. He favored a low-profile, gradual approach to assisting Ukraine’s forces and fortifying NATO’s defenses that would grow stronger in line with U.S. intelligence indications about Russia’s intent to attack.
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A paramount goal was to avoid a direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces—what Mr. Austin called his “North Star.”
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On Dec. 27, Mr. Biden gave the go-ahead to begin sending more military assistance for Ukraine, including Javelin antitank missiles, mortars, grenade launchers, small arms and ammunition.
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Three days later, Mr. Biden spoke on the phone with Mr. Putin and said the U.S. had no plan to station offensive missiles in Ukraine and urged Russia to de-escalate. The two leaders were on different wavelengths. Mr. Biden was talking about confidence-building measures. Mr. Putin was talking about effectively rolling back the West.
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Gen. Mingus had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, been wounded and earned a Purple Heart, and he spoke frankly about the challenges Russian forces would face. Invading a territory was one thing, but holding it was another, and the intervention could turn into a yearslong quagmire, he said. The Russians showed no reaction.
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Mr. Macron found Mr. Putin even more difficult to talk to than previously, according to French officials. The six-hour conversation went round in circles as Mr. Putin gave long lectures about the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine and the West’s record of hypocrisy, while the French president tried to bring the conversation back to the present day and how to avoid a war.
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Mr. Scholz argued that the international order rested on the recognition of existing borders, no matter how and when they had been created. The West would never accept unraveling established borders in Europe, he warned. Sanctions would be swift and harsh, and the close economic cooperation between Germany and Russia would end. Public pressure on European leaders to sever all links to Russia would be immense, he said.
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Mr. Putin then repeated his disdain for weak Western leaders who were susceptible to public pressure.
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Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. His answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading. Aides to Mr. Scholz believed Mr. Putin would maintain his military pressure on Ukraine’s borders to strangle its economy and then eventually move to occupy the country.
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Mr. Putin said he had decided to recognize the independence of separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine. He said fascists had seized power in Kyiv, while NATO hadn’t responded to his security concerns and was planning to deploy nuclear missiles in Ukraine.
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“We are not going to see each other for a while, but I really appreciate the frankness of our discussions,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Macron. “I hope we can talk again one day.”
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Pink Covid Masks? No Thanks, Say Some Italian Police Officers - The New York Times - 0 views
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When Inspector Luca Sita picked up two new N95 masks at his police station in Ferrara in central Italy on Thursday, he was thrown for a loop: One mask was white, and the other was pink.
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The pink in itself was not offensive, he said: A mask of any color other than white, black or blue, which match the national police uniform, would have been just as unacceptable.“Green, orange — any lively color would have been unwearable,” he said.
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The letter cited a 2019 memo from the police chief of the time that exhorted officers to “avoid wearing noncompliant garments that could prejudice the decorum of the institution.”
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The office of the commissioner for the coronavirus emergency, which supplies and distributes medical and personal protection devices, declined to comment.
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“I hope that after we raised our concerns there will be an attempt to distribute more sober colors,” Mr. Paoloni said.
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Teresa Bellanova, the deputy infrastructure minister, said on Twitter that she saw nothing wrong with having officers wearing colored masks. “The respect for uniforms is not given by colors,” she said, “but by how the men and women who wear those uniforms behave and work.”
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Rodolfo Hernández is Colombia's Trump and He May Be Headed for the Presidenti... - 0 views
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The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.
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For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’
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Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.
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But it also remade the political calculus for Mr. Petro. Now, it is Mr. Petro who is billing himself as the safe change, and Mr. Hernández as the dangerous leap into the void.
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“There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro said at a campaign event on Sunday night, “they are suicides.”
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The story line was: left versus right, change versus continuity, the elite versus the rest of the country.
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Still, Colombia’s right-wing establishment has begun lining up behind him, bringing many of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro look like an uphill climb.
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“The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” said Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”
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At 77, Mr. Hernández built much of his support on TikTok, once slapped a city councilman on camera and recently told The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” effect on his supporters, who he compared to the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11.
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Until just a few days ago, Colombia’s political narrative seemed simple: For generations, politics had been dominated by a few wealthy families, and more recently, by a hard-line conservatism known as Uribismo, founded by the country’s powerful political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.
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But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, along with a growing acceptance of the left following the country’s 2016 peace process with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seemed to shift the dynamic.
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Mr. Hernández, who won 28 percent of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters eager for change who could never get on board with Mr. Petro.
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Mr. Hernández, with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s approach to politics, has also attracted voters who say they want someone with Trumpian ambition, and are not troubled if he is prone to tactlessness. (Years after saying he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Hernández clarified that he meant to say he was a follower of Albert Einstein.)
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Two of the country’s biggest issues are poverty and lack of opportunity, and Mr. Hernández appeals to people who say he can help them escape both.
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“Political people steal shamelessly,” said Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a solar energy company in Cali.
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He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, precisely because of his lack of political experience.
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If Mr. Hernández can walk that difficult line — courting the establishment’s votes without tarnishing his image — it could be difficult for Mr. Petro to beat him.
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As the results became clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his campaign headquarters on one of the main avenues in Bogotá, the capital.
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Many wore bright yellow campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they said they’d bought themselves instead of being handed out free by the campaign, in keeping with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting principles.
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Dawn Staley: Investing in women's basketball from North Philly to South Carolina - CNN - 0 views
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(CNN)At the top of Dawn Staley's stacked trophy case is an orange and white basketball. The University of South Carolina women's basketball head coach said the ball was signed by every Olympic coach, and she finally added her own signature last month. It also serves as a reminder of just how much the game has given her.
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On Friday at 7 p.m. ET, Staley will try to get one step closer to another national championship when she coaches her No. 1 seeded South Carolina team through their Sweet Sixteen game against No. 5 North Carolina. The Gamecocks dominated in the first two rounds of the tournament, beating Howard 79-21 and Miami 49-33. However, once again, Staley recognizes this tournament is about more than just winning.
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"Those young ladies -- I saw on social media in their press conference -- they're like: 'You know, we're happy to be here. This is where Dawn Staley coaches. This is where they play their actual games.'
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After winning the 2017 national championship, Columbia, South Carolina's mayor named a street near the Colonial Life Arena 'Dawn Staley Way.' In January 2021, the university installed a statue of A'ja Wilson for her accomplishments with that championship team. Just nine months later, on October 15, 2021, the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees approved a seven-year, $22.4 million contract extension, making Staley the highest paid Black coach in women's basketball and one of the highest paid in the country.
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Staley feels that South Carolina has grown the game and women's sport as a whole, especially when it comes to equal pay. She wants to see the rest of the country make the same commitment to women's basketball that South Carolina has. Staley believes the passion for women's basketball is already there; players, coaches and fans are all locked into the game, the only thing that's missing is investment.
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For now, while she waits for others to invest in women's basketball, Staley invests in her players and helps them reach their own aspirations. The goals players set for themselves are far and beyond what Staley imagined at their age; she even heard one player say she wants to be a millionaire by the time she graduates college."I want them to get everything they can get out of the sport," she said. "I've introduced my entire team to agents all over the country so they can get their brands in order, so they can get the wealth that they deserve."
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"I know my impact in Philly. I know my impact here in South Carolina. I'm beginning to find myself and my impact across the country because I hear it from other people," Staley said."So I choose people because of the impact they can make in their neighborhoods. If those neighborhoods can get fixed because of someone that came back and they're giving back and they're pouring into them, we're going to have better neighborhoods."
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Growing up in the projects of North Philadelphia, Staley said she learned so many lessons and wouldn't trade her childhood for another in suburbia: "North Philly raised me, and I take it everywhere I go."Her mother, Estelle Staley, was a disciplinarian and Staley freely admits she was scared of her mom, but the way she raised Staley and her siblings was integral to all her accomplishments in basketball. As time goes on, Staley sees more and more of her mother in herself. She said she's her mother's child through and through, in the way she coaches, mentors and treats those around her.
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"Honestly, I just want to be known as an odds-beater. Like just simply beat the odds because no one from North Philly -- no one from the projects in North Philly -- gave me a shot at any of this, like really none of this."I had a praying mother. She made sure we went to church, and all of this is divine intervention because you could not have dreamt of this happening to just one individual."
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Sam Altman, the ChatGPT King, Is Pretty Sure It's All Going to Be OK - The New York Times - 0 views
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He believed A.G.I. would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.
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This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”
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As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.
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To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be
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Many industry leaders, A.I. researchers and pundits see ChatGPT as a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the creation of the web browser or the iPhone. But few can agree on the future of this technology.
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Some believe it will deliver a utopia where everyone has all the time and money ever needed. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Still others spend much of their time arguing that the technology is never as powerful as everyone says it is, insisting that neither nirvana nor doomsday is as close as it might seem.
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he is often criticized from all directions. But those closest to him believe this is as it should be. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” said OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman.
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“The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he told me on a recent afternoon. There is time, he said, to better understand how these systems will ultimately change the world.
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in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said
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His life has been a fairly steady climb toward greater prosperity and wealth, driven by an effective set of personal skills — not to mention some luck. It makes sense that he believes that the good thing will happen rather than the bad.
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He said his company was building technology that would “solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.”
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He was not exactly sure what problems it will solve, but he argued that ChatGPT showed the first signs of what is possible. Then, with his next breath, he worried that the same technology could cause serious harm if it wound up in the hands of some authoritarian government.
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Kelly Sims, a partner with the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Mr. Altman as a board adviser to OpenAI, said it was like he was constantly arguing with himself.
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“Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.”
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he is also the product of a strange, sprawling online community that began to worry, around the same time Mr. Altman came to the Valley, that artificial intelligence would one day destroy the world. Called rationalists or effective altruists, members of this movement were instrumental in the creation of OpenAI.
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Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in diaster? Mr. Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.
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He takes pride in recognizing when a technology is about to reach exponential growth — and then riding that curve into the future.
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“He has a natural ability to talk people into things,” Mr. Graham said. “If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.
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In March, Mr. Altman tweeted out a selfie, bathed by a pale orange flash, that showed him smiling between a blond woman giving a peace sign and a bearded guy wearing a fedora.
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He believed, according to his younger brother Max, that he was one of the few people who could meaningfully change the world through A.I. research, as opposed to the many people who could do so through politics.
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In 2019, just as OpenAI’s research was taking off, Mr. Altman grabbed the reins, stepping down as president of Y Combinator to concentrate on a company with fewer than 100 employees that was unsure how it would pay its bills.
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Within a year, he had transformed OpenAI into a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. That way he could pursue the money it would need to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.
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Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. “He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,” Mr. Brockman told me. “That is the algorithm he uses over and over.”
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Mr. Yudkowsky and his writings played key roles in the creation of both OpenAI and DeepMind, another lab intent on building artificial general intelligence.
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“These are people who have left an indelible mark on the fabric of the tech industry and maybe the fabric of the world,” he said. “I think Sam is going to be one of those people.”
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The trouble is, unlike the days when Apple, Microsoft and Meta were getting started, people are well aware of how technology can transform the world — and how dangerous it can be.
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Mr. Scott of Microsoft believes that Mr. Altman will ultimately be discussed in the same breath as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
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The woman was the Canadian singer Grimes, Mr. Musk’s former partner, and the hat guy was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-described A.I. researcher who believes, perhaps more than anyone, that artificial intelligence could one day destroy humanity.
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The selfie — snapped by Mr. Altman at a party his company was hosting — shows how close he is to this way of thinking. But he has his own views on the dangers of artificial intelligence.
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It showed him “how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,” he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. “It’s a great game.”
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He also helped spawn the vast online community of rationalists and effective altruists who are convinced that A.I. is an existential risk. This surprisingly influential group is represented by researchers inside many of the top A.I. labs, including OpenAI.
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They don’t see this as hypocrisy: Many of them believe that because they understand the dangers clearer than anyone else, they are in the best position to build this technology.
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Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.
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As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.
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Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation.
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Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.
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When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.
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His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.
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If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.
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Most-read 2022: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under easter... - 0 views
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I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing
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Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.
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The obsession with the penis is obvious – more so, now we have the benefit of hindsight provided by Karahan Tepe and the other sites. Very few representations of women have emerged from the Tas Tepeler so far; there is one obscene caricature of a woman perhaps giving birth. Whatever inspired these temple-towns it was a not a benign matriarchal culture. Quite the opposite, maybe.
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Karahan Tepe, and its penis chamber, and everything that inexplicably surrounds the chamber – shrines, cells, altars, megaliths, audience halls et al – is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible.
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After all, hunter gatherers – cavemen with flint arrowheads – without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.
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Taken together with its age, complexity, sophistication, and its deep, resonant mysteriousness, and its many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’ – these carved, ochre-red rocks, so silent, brooding, and watchful in the hard whirring breezes of the semi-desert, constitute what might just be the greatest archaeological revelation in the history of humankind.
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The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made an irreversibly profound discovery – which would eventually lead to the penis pillars of Karahan Tepe, and an archaeological anomaly which challenges, time and again, everything we know of human prehistory.
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in late 1994 the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe to begin his slow, diligent excavations of its multiple, peculiar, enormous T-stones, which are generally arranged in circles – like the standing stones of Avebury or Stonehenge. Unlike European standing stones, however, the older Turkish megaliths are often intricately carved: with images of local fauna. Sometimes the stones depict cranes, boars, or wildfowl: creatures of the hunt. There are also plenty of leopards, foxes, and vultures. Occasionally these animals are depicted next to human heads.
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over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’
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Urfa man now has a silent hall of his own in one of Turkey’s greatest archaeological galleries. More importantly, we can now see that Urfa man has the same body stance of the T-shaped man-pillars at Gobekli (and in many of the Tas Tepeler): his arms are in front of him, protecting his penis
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‘Gobekli Tepe upends our view of human history. We always thought that agriculture came first, then civilisation: farming, pottery, social hierarchies. But here it is reversed, it seems the ritual centre came first, then when enough hunter gathering people collected to worship – or so I believe – they realised they had to feed people. Which means farming.’ He waved at the surrounding hills, ‘It is no coincidence that in these same hills in the Fertile Crescent men and women first domesticated the local wild einkorn grass, becoming wheat, and they also first domesticated pigs, cows and sheep. This is the place where Homo sapiens went from plucking the fruit from the tree, to toiling and sowing the ground.’
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People were already speculating that – if you see the Garden of Eden mythos as an allegory of the Neolithic Revolution: i.e. our fall from the relative ease of hunter-gathering to the relative hardships of farming (and life did get harder when we first started farming, as we worked longer hours, and caught diseases from domesticated animals), then Gobekli Tepe and its environs is probably the place where this happened
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‘I believe Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden’. It’s a quote I reused, to some controversy, because people took Klaus literally. But he did not mean it literally. He meant it allegorically.
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‘We have found no homes, no human remains. Where is everyone, did they gather for festivals, then disperse? As for their religion, I have no real idea, perhaps Gobekli Tepe was a place of excarnation, for exposing the bones of the dead to be consumed by vultures, so the bodies have all gone
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I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’
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These days Gobekli Tepe is not just a famous archaeological site, it is a Unesco World-Heritage-listed tourist honeypot which can generate a million visitors a year. It is all enclosed by a futuristic hi-tech steel-and-plastic marquee (no casual wandering around taking photos of the stones and workers
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Necmi shows me the gleaming museum built to house the greatest finds from the region: including a 11,000 year old statue, retrieved from beneath the centre of Sanliurfa itself, and perhaps the world’s oldest life size carved human figure
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This number is so large it is hard to take in. For comparison the Great Pyramid at Giza is 4,500 years old. Stonehenge is 5,000 years old. The Cairn de Barnenez tomb-complex in Brittany, perhaps the oldest standing structure in Europe, could be up to 7,000 years old.
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Aslan tells me how archaeologists at Gobekli have also, more recently, found tantalising evidence of alcohol: huge troughs with the chemical residue of fermentation, indicating mighty ritual feasts, maybe.
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he explains how scientists at Karahan Tepe, as well as Gobekli Tepe, have now found evidence of homes.
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The builders lived here. They ate their roasted game here. They slept here. And they used, it seems, a primitive but poetic form of pottery, shaped from polished stone. They possibly did elaborate manhood rituals in the Karahan Tepe penis chambe
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Yet still we have no sign at all of contemporary agriculture; they were, it still appears, hunter gatherers, but of unnerving sophistication.
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Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe?
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Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘We have dug up maybe 1 per cent of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones – might be buried here. He casually points at a rectangular rock peering above the dry grass. ‘That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably thousands more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’
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Karahan too was definitely and purposely buried. That is the reason Necmi and his team were able to unearth the penis pillars so quickly, all they had to do was scoop away the backfill, exposing the phallic pillars, sculpted from living rock.
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the most remarkable answer of all, and it is this: archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.