Weekend Reading
What fresh Hell is this? #Incompetence #Corruption
“More than 200 wealthy crypto bros gathered for a private event at President Donald Trump’s golf club just outside Washington, DC, on Thursday night — dining on filet mignon and halibut while the president stood at a podium regaling them with tales of his 2024 victory. The black-tie dinner was a special reward for the top 220 holders of the president’s personal $TRUMP meme coin, with those in the room having contributed millions in investment in his crypto token. The 25 biggest investors got an even more exclusive privilege — access to a small VIP reception with the president. Media reports estimate the purchases and associated fees of the coin have generated an estimated hundreds of millions in fees for its issuer … Many of the attendees watched as Marine One touched down on his golf course at his Sterling, Virginia club — then were greeted personally by the president. Donning a blue suit and his famous red tie, he told the cheering crowd: ‘Hello, what a nice place. Did you get to see the helicopter?’ according to videos shared by attendees on social media … Even Republican crypto advocate Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said the event gives her ‘pause’ … According to a video Sun posted to Instagram, his investment amounted to 1,319,904.266 in ‘time weighted $TRUMP holdings,’ which are currently valued at about $18 million. Sun also posted a video declaring he was awarded a ‘Trump Golden Tourbillion’ watch. Christoph Heuermann, who declares himself the ‘Youngest German in all countries of the world’ on his Instagram page, was also in attendance. He shared a series of photos from the event, including a snapshot of the poster where his name was listed among the top 220 holders of Trump’s crypto token. ‘I got to see some very rich crypto billionaires,’ Heuermann wrote in one such Instagram post. ‘But the majority of the crowd were young professionals from the crypto space hailing mostly from Europe. A fair share of Chinese and a few Americans, but a great diversity of most European countries. People working mostly for crypto exchanges, funds, market makers or just trading themselves. Very nice networking’ … Other attendees included former NBA player Lamar Odom, who was greeted with boos as he walked to the event, according to a video posted on social media ..” (Alayna Treene/CNN)
“Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3-D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a fluffy orange-and-white Maine coon cat. But most important, he had an authentic birth certificate and passport that cemented his alias as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian citizen. After six years lying low, he was impatient to begin real spy work. ‘No one wants to feel loser,’ he wrote in a 2021 text message to his Russian wife, who was also an intelligence officer, using imperfect English. ‘That is why I continue working and hoping.’ He was not alone. For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities. Major Russian spy operations have been uncovered in the past, including in the United States in 2010. This was different. The goal was not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian. Once cloaked in credible back stories, they would set off for the United States, Europe or the Middle East and begin working in earnest. The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives like Mr. Shmyrev.” (Michael Schwirtz and Jane Bradley/NYT)
“China has launched the first 12 satellites of a planned 2,800-strong orbital supercomputer satellite network, reports Space News. The satellites, created by the company ADA Space, Zhijiang Laboratory, and Neijang High-Tech Zone, will be able to process the data they collect themselves, rather than relying on terrestrial stations to do it for them, according to ADA Space’s announcement (machine-translated). The satellites are part of ADA Space’s ‘Star Compute’ program and the first of what it calls the ‘Three-Body Computing Constellation,’ the company writes. Each of the 12 satellites has an onboard eight-billion parameter AI model and is capable of 744 tera operations per second (TOPS) — a measure of their AI processing grunt — and, collectively, ADA Space says they can manage five peta operations per second, or POPS. That’s quite a bit more than, say, the 40 TOPS required for a Microsoft Copilot PC. The eventual goal is to have a network of thousands of satellites that achieve 1,000 POPs, according to the Chinese government. The satellites communicate with each other at up-to-100Gbps using lasers, and share 30 terabytes of storage between them, according to Space News. The 12 launched last week carry scientific payloads, including an X-ray polarization detector for picking up brief cosmic phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts.” (Wes Davis/The Verge)
“It wasn’t quite the dead of night, but in the bleary dawn of Thursday morning, the House GOP conference rallied to pass President Donald Trump’s signature domestic spending bill, by the narrowest of margins, with a vote of 215 to 214 … The legislation, which House sponsors officially dubbed the Big Beautiful Bill in fealty to Trump, is actually a big ugly lie. The package crams together a lavish tax cut to the wealthiest Americans with a regressive set of cuts to basic income supports for working Americans—notably $625 billion in reduced Medicaid benefits over the next 10 years, which would deny coverage to 7.6 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Food assistance under the federal SNAP program will also undergo $300 billion in cuts, with cash-strapped state governments expected to pick up the lapsed support. The bill cannily schedules the first wave of cuts to such critical assistance to kick in after the 2026 midterm cycle, in the hopes that off-cycle votes won’t feel the brunt of these massively unpopular rollbacks during campaign seasons. GOP candidates will be able to campaign instead on cynical symbolic features of the package that have almost no redistributive or revenue impact, such as the suspension of taxes on tips and a write-off for automotive loans. (These deductions are also scheduled to phase out at the end of Trump’s presidency, another deeply cynical link to the electoral cycle that budget analysts say hasn’t turned up in past spending deals.) When you look beyond such cosmetic frippery, the bill enacts the largest upward redistribution of wealth under any piece of legislation in American history, with some $4 trillion in projected tax cuts.” (Chris Lehmann/The Nation)
“Most Eurointelligence readers will probably not be familiar with the concept of a token, unless they spend time in casinos. In the US, the crypto exchange Kraken just launched a token that allows people to trade US equities at virtually no transaction costs. The token represents a claim to part of an asset. You may wonder, what’s the point here, since we already have low-frills, low-cost retail brokers. The big idea here is to provide a direct link with the savings and investments. Right now, we are talking about the tokenisation of existing equities. The next step is the merger of the two: companies raising money by launching tokens, sold on crypto-exchanges directly to investors. People often criticise cryptocurrencies because they do not see an obvious economic value. With a tokenised equity, the value is more apparent. They reduce friction by taking out the middleman, the banker, very much like Amazon cut out the retailer. But if you think this forward, tokens are not just taking out the bankers. They are taking out parts of the capital markets themselves. All that separates the company that issues those tokens and the buyer is a blockchain. The trading of tokens occurs on an electronic exchange. As the former Fed chairman Paul Volcker once quipped, financial innovation is rare. The only one he observed in his long life was the introduction of the cash machine. Most financial innovations of the past are just ways of hiding credit. Tokenisation is real innovation.” (Eurointelligence)
“An 800-year-old mummy donated to a museum in Italy a century ago has revealed new clues about ancient face tattoos. But the mummy's origin remains shrouded in mystery. Some time prior to 1930, the mummy of an adult female was donated to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAET) at the University of Turin, with no records of its archaeological context. The mummy recently caught the attention of a team of researchers due to the surprising presence of tattoos on her face. In a study published in the May-June issue of the Journal of Cultural Heritage, the international team of researchers detailed their analysis of the mummy and her tattoos, noting that they were extremely unusual both in their location and in the composition of the ink used to make them. The mummy has straight black hair cropped short and is tightly flexed into a seated position, typical of mummy burials in the Andes. Researchers carbon-dated textile fragments stuck to the body and determined the woman died between A.D. 1215 and 1382. ‘On the basis of current evidence — particularly preservation, body placement, associated materials and documents — a South American origin is strongly supported,’ study lead author Gianluigi Mangiapane, an anthropologist at the University of Turin, told Live Science in an email. But while looking closely at the mummy using infrared reflectography, a technique often used to "see through" paint layers of artwork to find older brush strokes, the research team noted a series of unusual tattoos: three lines on the mummy's right cheek, one line on the left cheek and an S-shape on the right wrist. ‘Skin marks on the face are rare among the groups of the ancient Andean region and even rarer on the cheeks,’ the researchers wrote in the study, and the S-shaped tattoo ‘is so far unique for the Andean region.’ To identify the ink used to make the tattoos, the researchers used a suite of non-destructive techniques. Although they expected to find evidence of charcoal in the ink, they instead discovered that the unusual ink was made with magnetite, an iron oxide mineral, with traces of the mineral augite. In South America, augite and magnetite can be found together in southern Peru, suggesting a potential homeland for the mummified woman … But (Archaeologist Aaron) Deter-Wolf, who is an expert in ancient tattooing, is not convinced that the mystery mummy hails from the Andes. ‘Stylistically, these particular face markings have far more in common with historic Arctic or Amazonian traditions than with Andean practices,’ Deter-Wolf said. ‘It would be fascinating to see what oxygen isotopes or other studies might be able to tell us about the origins of this individual.’ At this stage, though, isotope analyses have not been carried out.” (Kristina Kilgrove/Livescience)
“AI’s energy use already represents as much as 20 percent of global data-center power demand, research published Thursday in the journal Joule shows. That demand from AI, the research states, could double by the end of this year, comprising nearly half of all total data-center electricity consumption worldwide, excluding the electricity used for bitcoin mining. The new research is published in a commentary by Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company that evaluates the environmental impact of technology. De Vries-Gao started Digiconomist in the late 2010s to explore the impact of bitcoin mining, another extremely energy-intensive activity, would have on the environment. Looking at AI, he says, has grown more urgent over the past few years because of the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other large language models that use massive amounts of energy. According to his research, worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year. ‘The money that bitcoin miners had to get to where they are today is peanuts compared to the money that Google and Microsoft and all these big tech companies are pouring in [to AI],’ he says. ‘This is just escalating a lot faster, and it’s a much bigger threat.’ The development of AI is already having an impact on Big Tech’s climate goals. Tech giants have acknowledged in recent sustainability reports that AI is largely responsible for driving up their energy use. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, have increased 48 percent since 2019, complicating the company’s goals of reaching net zero by 2030. ‘As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute,’ Google’s 2024 sustainability report reads.” (Molly Taft/WIRED)
“The United States said on Thursday, May 22, that it had determined that Sudan's military used chemical weapons in the country's bloody civil war last year and will impose sanctions on Khartoum. ‘The United States calls on the Government of Sudan to cease all chemical weapons use and uphold its obligations’ under the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international treaty signed by nearly all countries that prohibits their use, the State Department said … The New York Times reported in January that Sudan's military had used chemical weapons on at least two occasions in remote areas of its war with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Citing anonymous US officials, the newspaper said that the weapon appeared to be chlorine gas, which can cause severe respiratory pain and death. The State Department said it notified Congress on Thursday of its determination on the use of chemical weapons, triggering sanctions after 15 days. The sanctions include restrictions on US exports and financing to Sudan's government. In practical terms, the effect will be limited as both Sudan's military chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his adversary, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, are already under US sanctions. A power struggle between the army and RSF erupted into full-scale war in April 2023, with devastating consequences for the already impoverished country. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced 13 million and created what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.” (Le Monde)
“A few rows back from them, I chatted with Hugo Guinness, another pal of (Martin) Amis’s from those days, who fondly recalled tennis games and ‘lots of drinking.’ Novelists were still cool and glamorous then, he said; playwrights too. He and his wife, the painter Elliott Puckette, had also attended the London memorial. This event, as the speakers soon made clear, was the New York version of that service. The event was billed as a ‘celebration,’ and I didn’t quite know what that would mean. I was thinking maybe a panel, perhaps some group discussion of his books. Instead a procession of venerated writers stood behind a lectern to deliver what were effectively eulogies; it was a celebration of life, two years after Amis’s death. Isabel Fonseca, Amis’s wife, reflected in gracious opening remarks on Amis’s recurrent interest in the theme of aging. She noted that he was searing on each stage of life, including old age, though he ‘hardly touched his own.’ The speakers shared tender anecdotes about ‘Martin.’ Jeffrey Eugenides, who spoke after Fonseca, noted that Amis was actually a ‘sweetheart’ who’d gone to the trouble of shipping his daughter’s stuffed animal, left behind at Amis’s rental house in Brazil; cigarette ash was stuck to the stamps. (That the speakers noted that Amis could be tender did not surprise me: Anyone who has read Amis’s writing about children, not to mention the boundless sorrow of losing his cousin Lucy Partington, the victim of a brutal murder, suspects this.) Lorrie Moore described how he aged gracefully from an enfant terrible, recalling the handful of times she encountered him. She said, intriguingly, that money in his work functioned as a ‘La Brea Tar Pit of the soul.’” (Lora Kelley/The Paris Review)
“But even if preoccupation with Biden’s age was unfounded initially, it later was not. The villains of this book are clearly identified and repeatedly blamed. Leading the list are (Michael C.) Donilon, legislative affairs chief Steve Richetti, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and personal aides Annie Tomasini (to the president) and Anthony Bernal (to the First Lady). But the tight circle seems to remain unbroken: there are no smoking guns here corroborating an intent to mislead. Instead, the group, dubbed by the authors (and some junior aides) as the Politburo, lives in a world where, to the end, Biden remained a strong candidate and a fully effective executive. The greatest disappointment of Original Sin is its lack of reflection on the performance of the press. Last month, at the annual dinner hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, Thompson accepted the group’s highest honor, recognizing his reporting on Biden’s decline. In a speech, Thompson acknowledged that even his own daily coverage had been less than it should have been. And he was right: of the pieces that earned him the award, only one was published before the debate. It was a curtain-raiser on Hur’s special counsel report, and made no significant mention of Biden’s age. Thompson did publish one story focused on age, in late April 2023. It noted that Biden rarely scheduled events before 10am or after 6pm and often took weekends off from making appearances. Its theme was summed up this way: ‘Biden’s close advisers say he’s mentally sharp. But even some of them concede his age has diminished his energy, significantly limiting his schedule.’ Thompson also included a passage that later became the central assertion of Original Sin: ‘Some White House aides privately have compared Biden to an aging king: He has a tight-knit palace guard of longtime aides whose first instinct is to protect him, and not take chances.’” (Richard J. Tofel/CJR)
“I borrowed my hostess's clothes because she had proper party clothes, silk this and satin that, and she had makeup which I played with. I was likely a clown show but it was all in fun. Anyone I had met from my childhood in England and from my experiences in Southampton, all of my parent's friends, they washed up at Studio 54, including Taki! Thus I became reacquainted and now we were in touch. I was invited out. My nightlife was busy. Taki stalked me and I was flattered. Alfie was a lovely boyfriend (Taki caused trouble with this relationship in order to show his fervent ardor) and on weekends we would go to a house Alfie had rented up the Hudson River, we called it a castle. I think the owners even called it The Osborn Castle. These weekends were all about talking by roaring fires playing backgammon eating too much pasta and generally ignoring reality. I devoted myself to that experience. So much so that a year passed and I was still living in the hostess's dining room. She came home one night about four in the morning. I was in bed, awake. She came towards me swinging her brandy bottle and she started to cry. This happened regularly and we would then spend hours with her crying and telling me about her childhood trauma. I would try to reassure her. These were grotesquely redundant occurrences because she just wanted to ramble. Per usual one night she came home about 4:00 a.m. and she approached me weeping, she wanted a hug. I was so emotionally unavailable that I could not do that, in fact, I bounced like a tennis ball across the room and landed near a window, like I was trying to fly out of the apartment. Holding myself in a tight hug myself I told her, ‘Sorry! I can't! I can't do that.’ She threw me out on the spot.” (Christina Oxenberg/Patreon)