George Carlin's daughter says documentary shows comedian's evolution

By Fred Topel

MAY 19, 2022 

George Carlin poses in one of his own photos.

 Photo courtesy of George Carlin's estate and HBO

LOS ANGELES, May 19 (UPI) -- George Carlin's daughter, Kelly, said her father's work was always about personal growth, as much as artistic growth, an evolution depicted in the documentary George Carlin's American Dream, premiering Friday on HBO.

"He was aware of that evolution," Kelly said in a recent Television Critics Association Zoom panel.

The two-part documentary, directed by Michael Bonfiglio and produced by Judd Apatow, chronicles the late George Carlin's comedy career. He began as half of a duo with Jack Burns and then performed clean bits on TV variety shows in the '60s.

In the '70s, Carlin evolved into the raunchy standup who'd talk about the seven words you cannot say on television. His material frequently addressed religion and political issues like abortion.

"He went from a very mainstream, clean comic, to the counterculture guy, to sort of his final incarnation in the late '80s until he died of heart failure in 2008," Bonfiglio said. "That evolution as an artist and as a human being is really a lot of what comprises the film."

Carlin's evolution encompassed drug use and family discord. American Dream explores his addiction to cocaine, and his wife, Brenda Carlin's, alcoholism. She died in 1997 of liver cancer.

"He was trying to be a good father and a good husband during the '70s when things were pretty out of control," Apatow said. "It really is a story of someone who's trying to keep their comedy evolving while trying to be a good person."

Kelly Carlin wrote about growing up with her parents in her book, A Carlin Home Companion. She said American Dream addresses some of her experiences, too.

"He was a guy who was on the road a lot," Kelly Carlin said. "He missed a lot of my recitals and a lot of my events, but we were very close emotionally."

She said her father kept her and her mother out of his act, noting that the personal side of her father will be the most surprising material in American Dream.

"Unless you happen to read my book or my dad's autobiography, and not a lot of people have, this is going to be the big stage for this man," Kelly Carlin said. "I'm thrilled to bring the human George Carlin forward through this project."

George Carlin died of heart failure in 2008 at age 71.

The comedian's history encompasses much of America's political history, as he addressed ongoing issues onstage. American Dream points out that his targets were frequently authority figures like the church or politicians.

"He never believed in punching down," Kelly Carlin said. "He always fought for the underdog and tried to lift the underdog up -- or anyone else who was oppressed by the system."

In some cases, he got ahead of major issues. The filmmakers said he was talking about pharmaceutical companies and the environmental crisis in the '70s, long before they were mainstream issues.

"It's really shocking how many subjects he has the best routine about and the best insight about," Apatow said. "Even though some of this material is decades old, it really applies to all of the divisions and the problems that we're seeing right now."

American Dream also includes much of George Carlin's story in his own voice. Apatow said the comic had recorded 23 hours of his autobiography. The print edition, Last Words, was published posthumously in 2009.

The documentary also includes studio footage of George Carlin talking directly to the camera. Apatow also had access to personal archival material.

"There's notebooks and Post-it notes with all these phrases and ideas, and we show a lot of it in the film," Apatow said.

"What we try to explore is the type of personality that loves language and loves words, and he really worked harder than, I think, any comedian in the history of comedy at writing and crafting."

Famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s unknown letters to be auctioned in Jerusalem



By JERUSALEM POST STAFF - Yesterday 
© (photo credit: KEDEM AUCTION HOUSE)


A unique collection of 62 handwritten and typewritten letters by famed psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung that have never been printed or published before are set to be auctioned at the Kedem Auction House in Jerusalem on May 24th.

Among renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud's finest pupils – Freud regarded him as his natural successor – Carl Gustav Jung is known as the father of analytical psychology and the theorist who gave rise to the concept of "collective unconscious."

The letters were primarily addressed to fellow psychoanalyst Dr. Rivkah Schärf Kluger – who was Jewish. While most of the letters discussed issues regarding psychiatry, Jung appeared to be intrigued by the Hebrew language and Jewish texts in some of the letters.

In a letter dated May 24, 1944, he thanks Schärf Kluger for sending him a particular kabbalistic composition, writing "This (composition) strongly reinforces my own feelings and experiences. I was very impressed by it. In the darkest hours of my illness, every night I found myself in something of a ‘pomegranate orchard’” — Likely a reference to the book by Rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero titled “Pardes Rimonim” (Pomegranate Orchard).


Previously-unpublished letters by Carl Jung. (credit: KEDEM AUCTION HOUSE)

Jung would also often ask questions pertaining to Jewish culture and language, such as when he asked for an interpretation of the word rikmah (embroidery, tapestry).

“This unique collection sheds light on various aspects of Jung's life and philosophy,” said Meron Eren, Kedem Auction House CEO and co-founder. “This is a true treasure to see such a large collection of unseen letters uncovered and published. A rare occasion for researchers, students, and all who study Jung’s heritage.”

'There is no convoy to support' Lich testifies in defence of accepting 'freedom award'

Aedan Helmer 

MAY 20,2022
Ottawa Citizen

Tamara Lich, pictured 

The second day of Tamara Lich’s bail review hearing began Friday with the Crown lobbing accusations that Lich violated her bail conditions on several occasions and an on-record suggestion that the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is financing her legal defence.

Lich testified by videolink from her Alberta home that she does not believe her acceptance of the JCCF’s 2022 “George Jonas Freedom Award” constitutes a breach, while her lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, lodged an immediate objection to any questions regarding her legal fees.

“Wow. Object,” Greenspon said, citing a “clear case” of solicitor-client privilege.

Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips sided with Greenspon on that point, ruling the privacy of solicitor-client privilege “far outweighs” any value the evidence of her legal fees could provide to the proceedings.

Temperatures had cooled considerably inside courtroom No. 36 by the time court resumed Friday following a fiery session on Thursday, which featured a rare testy exchange between Assistant Crown Attorney Moiz Karimjee and Phillips, the presiding judge.

Karimjee at one point asked the judge to “recuse” himself Thursday, a request Phillips flatly denied.

Karimjee continued his cross-examination of Lich on Friday by accusing her of breaching several conditions of her release order, suggesting Lich knew her support of the JCCF fundraiser was “related” to the “Freedom Convoy.”

Lich acknowledged the gala event and the award may be “related” to the cause, but said, “I don’t think it’s a breach.”

Karimjee also produced a social media post on Friday featuring Lich wearing a pendant emblazoned with a truck and the words “Freedom Canada,” which Karimjee said is being sold in an online fundraiser to support the convoy.

“There is no convoy to support,” Lich shot back.

Lich said she understood the March 7 release conditions to mean “there’s no organizing of anything related to the convoy or any future protests.”

This week’s much-anticipated bail review of one of the most prominent “Freedom Convoy” leaders had initially been scheduled for Greenspon to challenge Lich’s bail conditions that restrict her from accessing her social media accounts.

Lich is seeking to have her social media access reinstated, with Greenspon arguing the condition was overly broad and restrictive, amounting to an outright “banishment.”

The Crown filed an application this week arguing Lich should be returned to jail on the grounds that she “has continued her support of the convoy cause” by agreeing to accept the JCCF’s freedom award, which is to be presented at a June 16 gala in Toronto featuring keynote speaker Rex Murphy.

Lich is currently barred from entering Ontario as part of the conditions of her release. She said she hopes to attend similar JCCF events scheduled for Calgary and Vancouver.

Lich and fellow protest organizer Chris Barber are jointly charged with mischief, obstructing police, counselling others to commit mischief and intimidation.

She was arrested Feb. 17 and was initially denied bail on Feb. 22, though that decision was overturned on March 7 and she was ordered to return home with list of conditions, including a broad order not to “verbally, in writing, financially or by any other means support anything related to the Freedom Convoy.”

The hearing was initially set for a day-and-a-half, though Phillips has already expressed his concern the parties may not complete their submissions in the allotted time.

More to come…

ahelmer@postmedia.com

Lich - Wikipedia 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lich

In fantasy fiction, a lich (/ˈlɪtʃ/; from the Old English līċ, meaning "corpse") is a type of undead creature. Lich. Wesnothlich.png. A lich from the game The ...

Scientists Create Material That Can Scrub Polluted Air Clean

Michael Leidig, Zenger News - 
Newsweek
© UL/Bernal/Zenger


New sponge-like material has been invented by scientists in Ireland that can absorb toxic benzene from polluted air.

Benzene is classified as a carcinogen that increases the risk of cancer and other illnesses and is also a cause of bone marrow failure.

It is a natural constituent of crude oil and used in gas. It has a sweet smell that is responsible for the aroma at most petrol stations and is frequently used as an industrial chemical that has limited consumer use because of its toxicity.

But now, researchers at the University of Limerick, in Ireland, have developed a new material that has the ability to capture it from the air.

The material is capable of capturing even trace amounts of benzene from the air, and crucially uses less energy than existing materials to do so, according to the researchers.

The sponge-like porous material could revolutionize the search for clean air and have a significant impact in the battle against climate change, the researchers believe.

Professor Michael Zaworotko, Bernal chair of Crystal Engineering and Science Foundation of Ireland research professor at University of Limerick's Bernal Institute, and colleagues developed the new material, with findings reported in the prestigious Nature Materials journal.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including benzene, are a class of toxic pollutants that cause severe environmental and health issues. Developing technologies to remove benzene from air at trace concentrations and doing it with a low energy footprint are both challenges that have not been overcome until now.

Zaworotko explained, "A family of porous materials - like sponge - have been developed to capture benzene vapor from polluted air and produce a clean airstream for a long working time."

He added: "These materials could be regenerated easily under mild heating, making them candidates for air purification and environmental remediation.

"Our materials can do much better in both sensitivity and working time than traditional materials."

Zaworotko and Dr. Xiang-Jing Kong from the Department of Chemical Sciences at UL, along with colleagues from leading universities in China, developed the new porous material which has such a strong affinity for benzene that it captures the toxic chemical even when present at just 1 part in 100,000.

This material resembles Swiss cheese because it is full of holes, and it is these holes that attract the benzene molecules, according to the researchers.

In terms of energy, because the capture process is based upon physical rather than chemical bonding, the energy footprint of capture and release is much lower than previous generations of materials.

Zaworotko said: "Breaking up gas mixtures is hard to do. This is especially true for the minor components that comprise air, which include carbon dioxide and water. The properties of our new material show that breaking up is no longer hard to do for benzene."

Earlier work from Zaworotko's lab resulted in leading materials for carbon capture and water harvesting.

The water harvesting material has favorable properties for capturing and releasing water from the atmosphere that is already being used in dehumidification systems.

Xiang-Jing Kong explained: "Based on smart design, our materials do well in addressing challenges of both technical and social relevance, such as trace benzene removal from the air. This is hard for conventional materials, and thus highlights the charm of porous materials."

Overall, these results suggest that a new generation of bespoke porous materials of the type invented at UL can enable a general approach to the capture of toxic chemicals from the air.

"Aromatic isomers are difficult to separate in their mixtures with traditional methods, which are always energy-intensive," Xiang-Jing Kong explained.

"This research opened up possibilities to design porous materials for efficient separation of these chemicals with low energy input as well as the removal of other trace pollutants from the air."

The study was funded by the European Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland.

This story was provided to Newsweek by Zenger News.

Pharmacy in the sea: Dolphins ‘use coral as medicine for skin ailments’

A bottlenose dolphin rubbing its belly on coral. The animals are prone to skin conditions, such as yeast, bacterial and viral pox infections, which seem to be exacerbated by climate change. 

Photograph: Cultura Creative RF/Alamy

New research suggests the cetaceans may be self-medicating for their skin ailments, adding to evidence of the medicinal properties of some corals and sponges


Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by

About this content

Sofia Quaglia

Thu 19 May 2022 

Who doesn’t like a bath scrub? Dolphins definitely do: they are known for being clever, playful, tactile animals, and they like to rub against rough surfaces, nap in coral beds and soak on sponges like guests at an underwater spa.

However, dolphins may be getting more from their bath scrubs than just relaxation and leisure. A study published today suggests that bottlenose dolphins may be self-medicating their skin ailments with the help of corals, adding to growing research on their previously unexplored medicinal properties.


“It’s very intensive,” said Angela Ziltener, one of the study’s lead authors, of the behaviour of the dolphins with particular corals. “They don’t just go through [the coral] – they go up, they come back down again and they rub their belly, their ventral area and the back.”

Dolphins in the Red Sea cleaning their skin in seagrass. The researchers found dolphins were meticulous in choosing which parts of their body to rub.

 Photograph: Natalia Pryanishnikova/Alamy

Dolphins have thick, smooth and resilient skin, but can be prone to skin conditions such as yeast and bacterial infections, scars or tattoo-like lesions caused by viral pox infections. These ailments seem to be exacerbated by global heating.

Ziltener, a wildlife biologist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and her team have been surveying a community of 360 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in the northern Red Sea since 2009. They observed that the dolphins often queued up nose-to-tail to rub themselves against corals as soon as they woke up and right before they went to sleep, as if they were showering for the day. As well as a mechanical rub, the dolphins also caused the corals to release a polyp mucus.

The team also noticed that the dolphins returned to the same coral species, and appeared to be meticulous in choosing which parts of their body to rub. They ran lab tests on 48 samples of corals, sponges and coral mucus “chosen” by the dolphins, including the gorgonian coral Rumphella aggregata, the leather coral Sarcophyton sp. and the sponge Ircinia sp.

A bottlenose dolphin scratches itself on bushy black coral (Rumphella antipathes) in the Red Sea. Photograph: imageBroker/Alamy

The results, published in the journal iScience, revealed at least 17 different bioactive metabolites with antibacterial, antioxidative and oestrogen-like hormonal properties, all of which could be useful in skin treatments.

The compounds are not commonly used in antibiotics for humans or animals, but an expanding body of research shows that some corals and sponges have medicinal properties, including antimicrobial.

“Such metabolites are helpful if you have an infection,” said Gertrud Morlock, an analytical chemist at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany, and a lead author of the study. “If the dolphins have a skin infection, these compounds could have something like a healing property.

“If you think about it, they have no other options. If they have a problem with the skin, what can they do?”

The researchers tested 48 corals, sponges and coral mucus used by dolphins, including (from top left) the sponge Ircinia sp., the leather coral Sarcophyton sp., and the gorgonian whip coral Rumphella aggregata. 

Photograph: Alamy

The authors note that further research is needed to show which coral’s medicinal properties the dolphins need to treat given ailments, and whether these properties have a measurable, positive impact on the cetaceans’ health.

Learning more about the dolphin’s social network and demographic could help with this. Tracking individual dolphins that display the behaviour, and seeing if they have fewer skin diseases or decreased mortality compared with the rest of the group, would make this argument stronger, according to Sarah Powell, a former marine biologist who studies how dolphins transmit their skin diseases but was not involved in the study.

Past research has shown that dolphins like to use coral sponges as foraging tools. “I do not find it to be such a reach that dolphins would utilise corals and other plants in their environment for other purposes,” said Powell.


Highly contagious marine epidemic rips through Caribbean’s coral reefs

Stephanie Venn-Watson, a marine biologist who studies health and longevity in dolphins and was also not involved in the research, said: “Since dolphins are inherently playful and tactile animals who love to rub, it is difficult to be sure that the dolphins are using the corals for medicinal purposes.”

A next step in proving the link would be to show that corals ignored by dolphins lack the same medicinal properties, she said. “This is a nice science-driven itch to be scratched.”

The Christian leader trying to break America’s link between faith and guns

Peter Cook says in the aftermath of the Buffalo racist shooting white Christian denominations have a duty to act

Peter Cook, head of the New York State Council of Churches:

 ‘It starts with straight-up, honest conversations within our churches.’

 Photograph: Edward Helmore/The Guardian

Edward Helmore

The Guardian

Thu 19 May 2022 

In the aftermath of the racist shooting that killed 10 on Saturday in Buffalo, the director of the New York State Council of Churches, the Rev Peter Cook, has been a constant presence at prayer gatherings and public memorials.

The organization he leads represents eight denominations to New York state government; and he has the ear of political leaders, including Governor Kathy Hochul, in shaping the political response to a massacre that targeted the Black community of East Buffalo – one that has been met with expressions of faith as well as anger and distress.



How the Buffalo massacre is part of US tradition: ‘We’ll continue to see killings’

Cook’s message is that it’s the responsibility of white Christian denominations to challenge white America’s relationship with God and guns that is intertwined with white supremacy. According to online postings, the alleged shooter, Payton Gendron, wanted to fashion America as a white-dominated, Christian nation.

Such extreme conservative views developed over time from President Nixon’s “southern strategy” to increase political support among white voters in the south by appealing to racism against Black people, tough-on-crime policies and anti-abortion sentiments. According to Cook, guns became ensnared in the strategy.

“It really gave tacit cultural permission to people of faith to own guns, so they conveniently worked their way into this religious freedom argument and conflated it with Christianity itself,” Cook said on Wednesday. “It doesn’t have any theological integrity to it at all, but we use the language of faith to acquire power and to further white supremacist notions.”

Drawing attention to the marriage between faith and guns comes with political risk, as the then Democratic party presidential hopeful Barack Obama found in 2008 when, in an unscripted moment, he took aim at white working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses. “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama said in remarks that his rivals pounced on.

How to detach gun ownership from being a marker of Christian faithfulness, and the accompanying politicization, concerns Cook. Without knowing Gendron’s faith background, he said the accused shooter “really stepped into that political slew of white nationalists, another derivation of the southern strategy, advanced also in … looking to preserve the sense of a white, Christian nation and of the original founders being white, Christian men, being representative of what America is”.




Some Black churches, Cook said, have had to accommodate the language of things like “tough on crime”, and the increase in mass incarceration under Bill Clinton, in order to maintain their own political influence and power.

East Buffalo has suffered from discriminatory lending practices, poor health outcomes, high rates of maternal death, lesser investment in schools, food deserts and highways driven through Black neighborhoods to connect white people from one place to another.

In the Buffalo massacre’s aftermath, most denominations have come out with strong statements against violence and are advocating for federal legislation to require a universal gun background check, prohibit buying firearms at gun shows and ban semi-automatic weapons. In New York, they are pushing for legislation to stop guns from being imported from states with laxer gun laws.

“I think for the church, with a number of exceptions because gun culture infuses Christianity, we need the strongest gun laws we can think of,” Cooks says. “We don’t think much of the second amendment.”

Attempts to forge stronger relationships between churches and gun control advocates have proceeded slowly. Two years ago, Everytown for Gun Safety began an interfaith effort with more than a dozen religious leaders to increase election turnout in support of candidates who support anti-gun violence measures. The group’s partners include representatives from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh backgrounds.

“Churches, especially white evangelical churches, have largely ignored this question – I think, much to their own detriment and to the detriment of the people they’re called to serve,” said the Rev Rob Schenck at the time.

Schenck, a former evangelical anti-abortion activist who shifted to support abortion rights, described gun violence as a “life-or-death issue”, making it essential to include gun control in “pro-life” agendas.

Others who have taken up that call include the Rev Traci Blackmon, who became prominent after police fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Blackmon is expected in Buffalo this weekend as the funerals of the Tops Friendly Market shooting victims begin.

Cook said he was appalled when a church in his region held a fundraising raffle for an AK-47.

A memorial for the victims of a weekend shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

 Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters



The effort to detach guns from faith within church leadership and congregations may need an assertive voice that links pastoral care to larger structural questions while resisting the inevitable political pushback.

Cook alluded to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian who opposed the Nazis.

“It’s going to come from a lot of conversation and teaching within the church and really getting people within the faith to act on their faith and really weigh in on these policy questions,” Cook said. “That’s a really hard thing to do, but I think if there were more people within our congregations who paid attention to this stuff and really put the pressure on Congress and their legislators to pass tough gun laws, that could be really important.”

But Cook concedes that could be tough.

“It starts with straight-up, honest conversations within our churches and getting people to get out of their pews, get out here, and show up at rallies, be present and listen to people, listen to their pain,” Cook said. “A lot of times churches can be a little insular.

“We’re debating what color we should have for the carpet and what kind of coffee we’re going to serve at coffee hour. We’ll preach about loving thy neighbor and non-violence, but how that really translates to people’s personal and collective lives is complicated.”

Interview

‘A catastrophic failure’: computer scientist Hany Farid on why violent videos circulate on the internet

‘Hashing’ would allow copies of videos to be removed from social media – but tech companies can’t be bothered to make it work

‘These are now trillion-dollar companies. How is it that their hashing technology is so bad?’ Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images

Johana Bhuiyan
Thu 19 May 2022 

In the aftermath of yet another racially motivated shooting that was live-streamed on social media, tech companies are facing fresh questions about their ability to effectively moderate their platforms.

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old gunman who killed 10 people in a largely Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday, broadcasted his violent rampage on the video-game streaming service Twitch. Twitch says it took down the video stream in mere minutes, but it was still enough time for people to create edited copies of the video and share it on other platforms including Streamable, Facebook and Twitter.

So how do tech companies work to flag and take down videos of violence that have been altered and spread on other platforms in different forms – forms that may be unrecognizable from the original video in the eyes of automated systems?

On its face, the problem appears complicated. But according to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, there is a tech solution to this uniquely tech problem. Tech companies just aren’t financially motivated to invest resources into developing it.

Farid’s work includes research into robust hashing, a tool that creates a fingerprint for videos that allows platforms to find them and their copies as soon as they are uploaded. The Guardian spoke with Farid about the wider problem of barring unwanted content from online platforms, and whether tech companies are doing enough to fix the problem.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Twitch says that it took the Buffalo shooter’s video down within minutes, but edited versions of the video still proliferated, not just on Twitch but on many other platforms. How do you stop the spread of an edited video on multiple platforms? Is there a solution?

It’s not as hard a problem as the technology sector will have you believe. There’s two things at play here. One is the live video, how quickly could and should that have been found and how we limit distribution of that material.

The core technology to stop redistribution is called “hashing” or “robust hashing” or “perceptual hashing”. The basic idea is quite simple: you have a piece of content that is not allowed on your service either because it violated terms of service, it’s illegal or for whatever reason, you reach into that content, and extract a digital signature, or a hash as it’s called.

This hash has some important properties. The first one is that it’s distinct. If I give you two different images or two different videos, they should have different signatures, a lot like human DNA. That’s actually pretty easy to do. We’ve been able to do this for a long time. The second part is that the signature should be stable even if the content is being modified, when somebody changes say the size or the color or adds text. The last thing is you should be able to extract and compare signatures very quickly.

So if we had a technology that satisfied all of those criteria, Twitch would say, we’ve identified a terror attack that’s being live-streamed. We’re going to grab that video. We’re going to extract the hash and we are going to share it with the industry. And then every time a video is uploaded with the hash, the signature is compared against this database, which is being updated almost instantaneously. And then you stop the redistribution.

How do tech companies respond right now and why isn’t it sufficient?

It’s a problem of collaboration across the industry and it’s a problem of the underlying technology. And if this was the first time it happened, I’d understand. But this is not, this is not the 10th time. It’s not the 20th time. I want to emphasize: no technology’s going to be perfect. It’s battling an inherently adversarial system. But this is not a few things slipping through the cracks. Your main artery is bursting. Blood is gushing out a few liters a second. This is not a small problem. This is a complete catastrophic failure to contain this material. And in my opinion, as it was with New Zealand and as it was the one before then, it is inexcusable from a technological standpoint.

But the companies are not motivated to fix the problem. And we should stop pretending that these are companies that give a shit about anything other than making money.

Talk me through the existing issues with the tech that they are using. Why isn’t it sufficient?

I don’t know all the tech that’s being used. But the problem is the resilience to modification. We know that our adversary – the people who want this stuff online – are making modifications to the video. They’ve been doing this with copyright infringement for decades now. People modify the video to try to bypass these hashing algorithms. So [the companies’] hashing is just not resilient enough. They haven’t learned what the adversary is doing and adapted to that. And that is something they could do, by the way. It’s what virus filters do. It’s what malware filters do. [The] technology has to constantly be updated to new threat vectors. And the tech companies are simply not doing that.

Why haven’t companies implemented better tech?

Because they’re not investing in technology that is sufficiently resilient. This is that second criterion that I described. It’s easy to have a crappy hashing algorithm that sort of works. But if somebody is clever enough, they’ll be able to work around it.

When you go on to YouTube and you click on a video and it says, sorry, this has been taken down because of copyright infringement, that’s a hashing technology. It’s called content ID. And YouTube has had this technology forever because in the US, we passed the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that says you can’t host copyright material. And so the company has gotten really good at taking it down. For you to still see copyright material, it has to be really radically edited.

So the fact that not a small number of modifications passed through is simply because the technology’s not good enough. And here’s the thing: these are now trillion-dollar companies we are talking about collectively. How is it that their hashing technology is so bad?

These are the same companies, by the way, that know just about everything about everybody. They’re trying to have it both ways. They turn to advertisers and tell them how sophisticated their data analytics are so that they’ll pay them to deliver ads. But then when it comes to us asking them, why is this stuff on your platform still? They’re like, well, this is a really hard problem.

The Facebook files showed us that companies like Facebook profit from getting people to go down rabbit holes. But a violent video spreading on your platform is not good for business. Why isn’t that enough of a financial motivation for these companies to do better?

I would argue that it comes down to a simple financial calculation that developing technology that is this effective takes money and it takes effort. And the motivation is not going to come from a principled position. This is the one thing we should understand about Silicon Valley. They’re like every other industry. They are doing a calculation. What’s the cost of fixing it? What’s the cost of not fixing it? And it turns out that the cost of not fixing is less. And so they don’t fix it.

Why is it that you think the pressure on companies to respond to and fix this issue doesn’t last?

We move on. They get bad press for a couple of days, they get slapped around in the press and people are angry and then we move on. If there was a hundred-billion-dollar lawsuit, I think that would get their attention. But the companies have phenomenal protection from the misuse and the harm from their platforms. They have that protection here. In other parts of the world, authorities are slowly chipping away at it. The EU announced the Digital Services Act that will put a duty of care [standard on tech companies]. That will start saying, if you do not start reining in the most horrific abuses on your platform, we are going to fine you billions and billions of dollars.

[The DSA] would put pretty severe penalties for companies, up to 6% of global profits, for failure to abide by the legislation and there’s a long list of things that they have to abide by, from child safety issues to illegal material. The UK is working on its own digital safety bill that would put in place a duty of care standard that says tech companies can’t hide behind the fact that it’s a big internet, it’s really complicated and they can’t do anything about it.

And look, we know this will work. Prior to the DMCA it was a free-for-all out there with copyright material. And the companies were like, look, this is not our problem. And when they passed the DMCA, everybody developed technology to find and remove copyright material.

It sounds like the auto industry as well. We didn’t have seat belts until we created regulation that required seat belts.

That’s right. I’ll also remind you that in the 1970s there was a car called a Ford Pinto where they put the gas tank in the wrong place. If somebody would bump into you, your car would explode and everybody would die. And what did Ford do? They said, OK, look, we can recall all the cars, fix the gas tank. It’s gonna cost this amount of dollars. Or we just leave it alone, let a bunch of people die, settle the lawsuits. It’ll cost less. That’s the calculation, it’s cheaper. The reason that calculation worked is because tort reform had not actually gone through. There were caps on these lawsuits that said, even when you knowingly allow people to die because of an unsafe product, we can only sue you for so much. And we changed that and it worked: products are much, much safer. So why do we treat the offline world in a way that we don’t treat the online world?

For the first 20 years of the internet, people thought that the internet was like Las Vegas. What happens on the internet stays on the internet. It doesn’t matter. But it does. There is no online and offline world. What happens on the online world very, very much has an impact on our safety as individuals, as societies and as democracies.

There’s some conversation about duty of care in the context of section 230 here in the US – is that what you envision as one of the solutions to this?

I like the way the EU and the UK are thinking about this. We have a huge problem on Capitol Hill, which is, although everybody hates the tech sector, it’s for very different reasons. When we talk about tech reform, conservative voices say we should have less moderation because moderation is bad for conservatives. The left is saying the technology sector is an existential threat to society and democracy, which is closer to the truth.

So what that means is the regulation looks really different when you think the problem is something other than what it is. And that’s why I don’t think we’re going to get a lot of movement at the federal level. The hope is that between [regulatory moves in] Australia, the EU, UK and Canada, maybe there could be some movement that would put pressure on the tech companies to adopt some broader policies that satisfy the duty here.

Twitch did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Facebook spokesperson Erica Sackin said the company was working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) to share hashes of the video with other companies in an effort to prevent its spread, and that the platform has added multiple versions of the video to its own database so the system automatically detects and removes those new versions. Jack Malon, a spokesperson for YouTube parent company Google, said YouTube was also working with GIFCT and has removed hundreds of videos “in relation to the hateful attack”. “In accordance with our community guidelines, we’re removing content that praises or glorifies the perpetrator of the horrific event in Buffalo. This includes removing reuploads of the suspect’s manifesto,” Malon said.

More than 3,000 potentially harmful chemicals found in food packaging

International experts who analyzed more than 1,200 scientific studies warn chemicals are being consumed with unknown long-term impacts

Manufacturers are either intentionally or unintentionally adding chemicals to packaging, said a report co-author. Either way, many of those chemicals are ending up in the human body, he said. Photograph: Sergio Azenha/Alamy


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Matt Krupnick

Thu 19 May 2022 

Scientists have identified more than 3,000 potentially harmful chemicals that can be found in food packaging and other food-related materials, two-thirds of which were not previously known to be in contact with food.

An international group of scientists analyzed more than 1,200 scientific studies where chemicals had been measured in food packaging, processing equipment, tableware and reusable food containers.

A report released on Thursday by the Food Packaging Forum, a Switzerland-based non-profit, noted little is known about many of the 3,240 chemicals examined in these studies or their effects on people.

Manufacturers are either intentionally or unintentionally adding these chemicals to packaging and other equipment, said Pete Myers, a report co-author and founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, a non-profit advocacy group. Either way, many of those chemicals are ending up in the human body, he said.

“If we don’t know what it is, we don’t know its toxicity,” Myers said. “The mix of chemicals is just too complicated to allow us to regulate them safely.”

The new analysis, published in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, comes amid growing concerns about exposure to potentially toxic chemicals in food and water.

The Food Packaging Forum has created a searchable database with the chemicals found in the packaging and equipment, known as food contact materials. While many of the chemicals on the list are known hazards such as phthalates and PFAS, others have not been adequately studied, the group said, and their health effects are unclear.

Researchers were shocked to find chemicals in food contact materials that consumers could have no knowledge of. Just one-third of the chemicals studied appeared in a previously compiled database of more than 12,000 chemicals associated with the manufacturing of food contact materials.

Previous studies have found potentially dangerous PFAS “forever chemicals” in food packaging. Those chemicals have been linked to a list of health problems.

Nearly two-thirds of the studies analyzed in the new report looked at chemicals in plastic. Packaging manufacturers often add chemicals without knowing the long-term ramifications, said Jessica Heiges, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate who studies disposable food items such as plasticware and packaging and was not involved in the report.

The chemicals “are terrifying because we don’t know what their impacts are”, Heiges said. “What’s most alarming is this cocktail of chemicals, how they’re interacting with each other. Some of them are persisting in the environment and in our bodies as we’re consuming them.”

It’s likely many of those unknown chemicals are harmful, said Alastair Iles, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s environmental science, policy and management department, also not involved with the study.

“The report only underlines our gross ignorance when it comes to the chemicals that people are being exposed to every day,” he said. “If we didn’t know that there were so many chemicals in packages, what does that say about our knowledge about chemical risks?”

OUR SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENT

Murray Bookchin Introduction by Bill McKibben

TRADE PAPER

CLASSIC REPRINTS, ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY, REBEL READS, SOCIAL SCIENCES

• 264 PAGES
• 5.5 X 8.25 INCHES
• ISBN: 9781632461278
• 2021-09-15

14.95

Originally published in 1962, Our Synthetic Environment is a pioneering work that exposes the negative effects that chemicals and other toxins in our environment have on human health. From the degradation of our food and soil due to industrial agricultural methods, to how pollution, radiation and other issues with the air we breathe and the way we live are the causes of illnesses like cancer, the book was visionary in its anticipation of many of the ecological problems our planet faces today. Written by one of the leading radical eco-thinkers of the twentieth century, Our Synthetic Environment is as vital a read today as it was sixty years ago.

An essential companion to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, this new edition of Our Synthetic Environment features an introduction by environmentalist and best-selling author Bill McKibben.

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) was an American anarchist, political philosopher, trade-union organizer, and educator. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning, within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among his most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). Bookchin was a prominent anti-capitalist and advocate of social decentralization along ecological and democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, and Occupy Wall Street.

WAR CRIMINAL STAND UP

George W Bush accidentally admits Iraq war was ‘unjustified and brutal’ in gaffe


Former president makes slip when speaking at his presidential library in Dallas on Wednesday


01:20

'I mean Ukraine': George W Bush says Iraq invasion unjustified in speech gaffe – video


Julian Borger 

in Washington

Thu 19 May 2022 

Sigmund Freud was unavailable for comment, but George W Bush saying Iraq instead of Ukraine when condemning “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” certainly suggests he still has a lot on his unconscious mind.

The former president jokingly attributed the slip to his 75 years, but there has always been a faulty connection between his brain and his tongue. There are whole books full of “Bushisms”, like his boast that people “misunderestimated” him, and how much he felt for single mothers “working hard to put food on your family”.

There may have been something Freudian about his 2004 warning that America’s enemies “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we”. And then there was the time he was thanking an army general for his service in 2008, telling him he “really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq”.

Bush has already told us that the fiasco of Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction still troubles him.

“No one was more shocked and angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons,” he wrote in his memoir, Decision Points.

“I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.”

But Bush sought to justify the 2003 invasion anyway, on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a vicious despot “pursuing” weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and therefore the US was safer without him in the world.

The 43rd president was making a similar argument to an audience at his presidential library in Dallas when he made his gaffe on Wednesday.

Bush was making a distinction between a democratically elected Volodymyr Zelenskiy, “the Churchill of the 21st century”, and the rigged elections and despotism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where the absence of checks and balances led to “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq – I mean Ukraine”.

The audience laughed along, but the mistake was a reminder that the world is still living with the consequences of that invasion. It broke Iraq and set off a sectarian civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people died.

Nearly two decades on, it continues to weaken the US on the world stage, and is undoubtedly a factor in the ambivalence of countries in Africa and the Middle East over joining a decisive global response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Putin has cynically copied from the Iraq playbook the Bush administration left behind, with spurious claims of Ukrainian WMD. The US failure to prosecute war crimes by US troops and contractors, its use of torture in the “global war on terror” and Bush’s campaign to undermine the international criminal court, all contributed to a more permissive environment for the many crimes against humanity that have followed Iraq, from Syria to Ukraine and well beyond.

Wednesday’s Bushism was a reminder that for all the former president’s aw shucks self-deprecatory jokes about Iraq, it was never really funny.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets engaged to long-time partner Riley Roberts


Democratic congresswoman confirms engagement to Roberts, whom she met as a student at Boston University

Ocasio-Cortez with Riley Roberts at the In America: a Lexicon of Fashion show at the New York Met in September. 

Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Rex/Shutterstock


Ankita Rao

Thu 19 May 2022 
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took a break between visiting Amazon union workers and endorsing progressive candidates to get engaged to her longtime partner Riley Roberts.


Ocasio-Cortez to unionized Amazon workers: victory is ‘just the beginning’

Ocasio-Cortez, 32, confirmed to Insider on Thursday that she and Roberts, who met while both were at Boston University, got engaged last month while visiting her parents’ home town in Puerto Rico.

She then wrote on Twitter: “It’s true! Thank you all for the well wishes.”

According to Insider, the pair were quiet about their relationship even before Ocasio-Cortez became a popular political voice, and their friends at university did not always know they were together.

Roberts has also been one of her greatest support systems throughout her career, according to a biography published earlier this year, People magazine reported.

“What we do know about Roberts doesn’t fit the stereotype of a politician’s partner,” writes Josh Gondelman in an essay in Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC by the editors of New York magazine.

“He doesn’t seem focus-grouped or media-trained for state dinners and press conferences. We know he’s supportive and encouraging in private,” Gondelman writes. “And his expertise, as far as his public image goes, is his elusiveness and restraint.”

The few times Roberts, a marketing professional, has popped up in media it has been with the couple’s dog, Deco, or in the 2018 documentary Knock Down the House.

Ocasio-Cortez said she and Roberts would not start planning a wedding for at least a month.