Holiday Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Incompetence #Corruption #Medicaid #Snap #ICE #HappyFourth
“… Republicans have the votes in the House to pass the Senate bill unchanged, after several members spent a week railing against the betrayal of changes made that added more debt, weakened the phaseout of clean-energy tax credits, inserted a corrupt deal that will incentivize states to make more payment errors in their SNAP program, and deepened cuts to Medicaid, which will bring the health system to the brink of devastation. But now Republicans have created another problem. They didn’t just cut Medicaid; they also have forced nearly half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare, the health program for the elderly. Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.” (David Dayen/TAP)
“Seniors, students, taxpayers, children, parents, low-income Americans and just about everyone else will be affected by the massive tax and spending bill being hashed out in real time on Capitol Hill. Republicans call it President Donald Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ but there have been several versions. The latest passed the Senate on Tuesday with Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote. Senate Republicans’ version of the bill differs in key ways from what the House passed in May. Both chambers will ultimately have to pass the same version to send the package to Trump’s desk by his desired July Fourth deadline. But the general contours of the massive piece of legislation are known. It extends Trump’s first-term tax cuts, funds his vision for a border wall, and offsets some of that revenue loss and additional spending with cuts to federal support for the social safety net that helps Americans afford food and health insurance. Here’s what we know about how the Senate bill will affect …For many Medicaid enrollees, the biggest impact would be the new work requirement. Certain able-bodied Americans ages 19 to 64 who are enrolled through the Medicaid expansion would have to work, volunteer, attend school or participate in job training at least 80 hours a month. The mandate would also apply to parents of children ages 14 and older … Nearly 12 million more people would be uninsured in 2034, with many of them losing coverage because of the Medicaid provisions in the bill, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published Sunday, before subsequent changes to the bill that the Senate ultimately passed … More Americans who receive food stamps would have to work to keep their benefits. The bill would broaden the existing work mandate to enrollees ages 55 to 64 and parents of children ages 14 and older, as well as to veterans, former foster youth and people experiencing homelessness. Enrollees in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, the formal name for food stamps, may also face other changes: Many states would also have to cover part of the benefit costs for the first time and pay more of the administrative costs, both of which may force them to tighten benefits, cut eligibility or make other alterations, including potentially withdrawing from the safety-net program.” (Zachary Wolf and Tami Luhby/CNN)
“Astronomers have captured the clearest view to date of a massive young star gulping down swirling gas, offering a rare glimpse into how these cosmic titans grow to their enormous sizes. The star in the making, known as HW2, is about 10 to 20 times as massive as our sun and lies about 2,300 light-years from Earth, in the heart of a star-forming region called Cepheus A. Despite the thick shrouds of dust that usually obscure such regions, researchers managed to peer through the veil surrounding HW2 and study the gas feeding its rapid growth. Using radio observations of ammonia, a molecule abundant in interstellar space and familiar on Earth as a common cleaning agent, astronomers mapped the rotating disk of gas and dust swirling around HW2. The results, soon to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, confirm that colossal stars that are hundreds of times the mass of our sun grow in the same fundamental way as smaller stars: by gathering gas from swirling gas disks. ‘We are always trying to get general rules that can explain the largest number of phenomena we observe,’ study leader Alberto Sanna, a researcher at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, told Space.com. ‘Our findings strongly support that the same physical processes, although scaled up, can form both stars like our sun as well as stars of tens of solar masses.’ The team made their observations in 2019 using the Very Large Array radio telescope network in New Mexico. By tracking the signature of ammonia molecules, which glow brightly at radio wavelengths, the researchers were able to peer through the dense cocoon of dust that obscures visible light and ‘look as close as possible to the star,’ said Sanna. The data revealed that gas from HW2's accretion disk is collapsing inward at breakneck speed, feeding the star at an astonishing rate — equivalent to about two Jupiter masses per year, one of the highest stellar growth rates ever recorded.” (Sharmila Kuthunur/Space.com)
“The Ukraine War adaptation battle has also now metastised into a global adaptation war. I explored this in a recent article. Russia is nurturing a learning community with Iran, North Korea and China. This ‘learning and adaptation bloc’ sees its participants sharing battlefield lessons, collaborating in technology development and sanctions evasion, while also sharing and collaborating on methods of coercion, subversion, misinformation and, of course, learning and adapting. While there are weaknesses in this relationship, as the Russian and Chinese responses to Israel’s bombing or Iran demonstrated, the development of this authoritarian learning and adaptation bloc is occurring at an unprecedented pace. The adaptation that has occurred in Ukraine has not always been a smooth process. Nor has it been evenly distributed between Ukraine and Russia or evenly dispersed within the combat forces of either nation. But it is reasonable to assert that Ukraine and Russia have both learned how to learn better over the course of this war. The adaptation battle between Ukraine and Russia, which extends from ground combat to aerial strikes to affairs in the electromagnetic and cognitive realms, sees both sides continuously introducing new doctrine, technology, training and support concepts to achieve their objectives.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“On Tuesday, the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced that it will block AI bots from scraping data from its sites without opt-in permission. Cloudflare hosts about 20 percent of the Web, and the move is seen as a win for the publishing industry. Previously, website owners using Cloudflare could choose to block AI bots, also known as crawlers, when setting up a domain, but if they did nothing, crawlers were permitted to scrape the sites. Such free access to online content has enabled AI companies to create massive data training sets for large language models. The new policy, however, will shift the default to require site owners to actively allow crawlers. Cloudflare is also experimenting with a plan called ‘pay per crawl’ that lets publishers set fees for AI companies to access their sites. For the past couple of decades, Google and other search engines worked by returning a ranked list of website results in response to a user’s query. Last year, however, Google launched AI Overview, a feature that displays AI-generated summaries of search results at the top of the page. This means that users can get answers to their questions without leaving Google—resulting in a significant drop in traffic referrals to publishers. This trend isn’t likely to reverse anytime soon. According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, the interface of the future Web will look more like ChatGPT than a spartan search box and ten blue links. For the news industry—already struggling with a deteriorating business model—that vision is not an encouraging one. So it’s unsurprising that a flock of major news publishers, including the Associated Press, Time, The Atlantic, and even Reddit, have signed on with Cloudflare. ‘For too long, giant AI companies have built businesses on training data that they never paid for, and by scraping sites from whom they havenʼt even asked permission,’ Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, said in a statement.” (Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen/CJR)
“Remember these two watchwords as the fight against Republican-driven autocracy moves into high gear: fairness and decency. Let me start with fairness. It is a major motivator for most voters; people react to government policy that is seen as unfair—giving advantages or benefits to one group while other deserving people suffer or do not get what they should. I was first struck by this phenomenon in 1977, when Social Security Act reform adjusted benefits for beneficiaries who reached age 62 between 1979 and 1983. The reason? The 1972 formula for cost-of-living adjustments had a flaw, giving more benefits to those born before 1917, and the 1977 reforms fixed the formula. But that fix had an adjustment period to smooth out the old and new formulas. And the people born from 1917 to 1921 got lower benefits than those born earlier. Boom! That group became known as ‘notch babies,’ and they were furious—even though they were getting more generous payments than before. Though the formula did not change, members of Congress felt the wrath, especially then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and have been cautious since about adjusting Social Security formulas. Fairness is a watchword now because it was a core issue in 2024, exploited by the Trump campaign against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. First, it was transgender athletes. To many, it was puzzling that an issue involving a tiny share of athletes would be the subject of an overwhelming campaign message. To be sure, it played on a broader anti-trans phobia … But, fundamentally, the anti-trans athlete attack was about fairness, and it resonated with voters. Democrats who did not want to sacrifice anyone for temporary political advantage supported trans athletes as a matter of fairness and decency were easy to portray as being too woke to recognize the perceived unfairness.” (Norm Orenstein/The Contrarian)
“Empty grocery store shelves and grounded planes tend to signal a crisis, whether it’s an extreme weather event, public health crisis, or geopolitical emergency. But these scenes of chaos in recent weeks in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada were caused instead by financially motivated cyberattacks—seemingly perpetrated by a collective of joyriding teens. A notorious cybercriminal group often called Scattered Spider is known for using social engineering techniques to infiltrate target companies by tricking IT help desk workers into granting them system access. Researchers say that the group seems to gain expertise about the backend systems commonly used by businesses in a particular industry and then uses this knowledge to hit a cluster of targets before moving on to another sector. The group often deploys ransomware or conducts data extortion attacks once it has compromised its victims. Amid increasing pressure from law enforcement last year, which culminated in charges and arrests of five suspects allegedly linked to Scattered Spider, researchers say that the group was less active in 2024 and seemed to be attempting to lay low. The group’s escalating attacks in recent weeks, though, have shown that, far from being defeated, Scattered Spider is emboldened once again. ‘There are some uniquely skilled actors in Scattered Spider when it comes to social engineering, and they have identified a major gap in our security systems that they’re successfully taking advantage of,’ says John Hultquist, chief analyst in Google’s threat intelligence group. ‘This group is carrying out serious attacks on our critical infrastructure, and I hope that we’re not missing the opportunity to address the most imminent threat.’ Though a number of incidents have not been publicly attributed, an overwhelming spree of recent attacks on UK grocery store chains, North American insurers, and international airlines has broadly been tied to Scattered Spider. In May, the UK’s National Crime Agency confirmed it was looking at Scattered Spider in connection to the attacks on British retailers. And the FBI warned in an alert on Friday that it has observed ‘the cybercriminal group Scattered Spider expanding its targeting to include the airline sector.’ The warning came as North American airlines Westjet and Hawaii Airlines said they had been victims of cybercriminal hacks. On Wednesday, the Australian airline Qantas also said it had been hit with a cyberattack, though it was not immediately clear if this attack was part of the group’s campaign.” (Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman/WIRED)
“On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he was interested in a career in the arts, and he devoted a lot of his free time to photo shoots with his friends. But he had recently decided on a more practical path: he wanted to become a C.P.A. His Thursdays were busy, and he had forty-five minutes until a study session for an accounting class. He stowed his skateboard under a bench in the restaurant and shook his laptop out of his bag, connecting to the internet before we sat down. Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, ‘so we can both lock in our skin care.’ Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. ‘Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,’ he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. ‘I need A.I. to text girls,’ he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, ‘Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?’” (Hua Hsu/TNY)
“As Congress debated the so-called ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ two little-known and dangerous provisions quietly emerged as serious threats to our core democratic safeguards. Thankfully, both have now been resoundingly defeated. Because of Campaign Legal Center’s efforts, alongside the tireless work of many of our partners, both threats were removed from the legislation before the U.S. Senate’s final vote. This victory demonstrates how advocacy to preserve American democracy remains a worthy fight. One provision would have weakened the ability of courts to enforce the law, in a direct attack on our system of checks and balances. The other aimed to block states from regulating artificial intelligence (AI), including its use in elections. The House of Representatives approved both policies when it originally passed the budget reconciliation bill, leading CLC to sound the alarm and fight to remove these provisions in the Senate.” (Eric Kashdan and Madeline Greenberg/Campaign Legal Center)
“As a journalist in the Midwest in the ‘80s and early ‘90s and then at some points in the oughts, I bore witness in real time to Main Streets getting boarded up and abandoned school buildings turned into tire dumps. The gyre spun ever faster, and the center could not hold. Local news sources evaporated, replaced by a cacophonous online info-world, the car economy tanked and tanked again, leaving broke communities atomized into disconnected men, women, and children peering into their phone screens. Meanwhile, blood and treasure oozed out of America and into wars in the Middle East to avenge 9/11. Instead of turning on the men who led them into that, out of reach in their black SUVs and helicopters, they turned on each other – the ‘tyrant bitch,’ whether Whitmer or Nancy Pelosi, the bogeyman of the undocumented immigrant criminal, the bureaucracy at the motor vehicle department. Historian Greg Grandin, in his 2018 book The End of the Myth, looked at the timing ofTrump One’s big beautiful wall talk and his then-developing obsession with human “vermin” and enemies within. Grandin proposed that the American frontier – real and then mythic – always acted as a kind of steam valve for the simmering social violence borne of America’s heterogeneous experiment. When the Western frontier ran out, when the foreign wars of imperialism had been won or lost and there was no more blood and treasure to wage more, Grandin argued, the ideal of personal ‘freedom’ remained the last way out: ‘A restored ideal of freedom as freedom from restraint was both an effective demagogic tactic… and a way to conjure an inclusive, boundless Americanism.’” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“‘It is hard for people to imagine what immigration enforcement is going to look like once all this money goes,’ said Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank. ‘It already looks really bad and scary, like we’re turning into a police state and surveillance state. The orders of magnitude are going to be multiplied.’ The dueling House and Senate bills differ on details but agreed on a key point: Both would massively expand federal spending on immigration enforcement. Overall, the Senate version will dedicate $175 billion to an immigration crackdown, including an extra $30 billion for ICE, which can be spent over four years. To put that in perspective, ICE’s current budget is about $8 billion per year. The bill also designates $45 billion for detention facilities, which can also be spent at any time over the next four years. By comparison, the U.S. spends about $8 billion a year on the Bureau of Prisons. Although the Senate budget bill contains a dizzying array of provisions, ranging from tax breaks for the wealthy to massive cuts to Medicaid, Vice President JD Vance argued Monday that immigration is the main reason to pass it. ‘Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,’ he said. ‘Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,’ he said.The bill will give Trump years to spend the money, but observers predict that Trump will try to move quickly to hire more ICE agents, convert unused state prisons into detention centers, and hire pilots for deportation flights. The overall goal will be to create a new baseline — measured in terms of dollars, detentions, and deportations — that will be difficult for future presidents and Congresses to pare back. ‘The incentive is to move quickly through that money, get the new system of internment camps that is going to go up around the country up and running,’ Costa said.” (Matt Sledge/The Intercept)