May 16, 2024

Wicked - Official Full-Length Universal Pictures Trailer (just dropped a few hours ago)

May 15, 2024

Nuclear War Expert: 72 Minutes To Wipe Out 60% Of Humans, In The Hands Of 1 Person - Annie Jacobsen

Annie Jacobsen is an investigative journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her books include, ‘Area 51’, ‘Operation Paperclip’, and ‘The Pentagon’s Brain’.

00:00 Intro
01:59 Why Write This Book Now?
06:30 Are We Getting Closer to Nuclear War?
08:05 Who Is in Charge of the Nuclear Button?
12:23 The Evolution of Nuclear Weapons
16:16 Who Has Nuclear Weapons?
21:32 What Is the Football and Why Is Near the President 24/7?
24:30 How Important Is Picking the Right Leader?
28:17 What If the President Is Dead?
29:28 The Biggest Mistakes in Nuclear Detection
32:16 Nuclear War Games and Strategies
38:09 How Do the Decision Makers Cope?
40:32 How Would We Know Where the Nuclear Bomb Got Launched From?
46:02 What Happens After the First Minutes?
51:46 What Happens if the President Dies
53:23 The Aftermath
01:01:59 What Would Happen to a Country After It's Struck by Nuclear Bomb
01:06:51 How Many People Will Die?
01:07:35 Where Is Safe?
01:10:07 What Is the Solution?
01:14:02 How Did Annie's Feelings Change?
01:15:53 Conspiracy or Real?
01:26:55 The Role of the CIA
01:30:36 AI and the War Machine
01:40:55 Is Annie Optimistic?
01:43:37 The Origin of War
01:46:24 The Most Important Takeaway from Annie's Books
01:50:25 The People on Both Sides of Nuclear
01:59:18 The Impact of Your Books on You
02:00:46 Survivors of Nuclear Bomb
02:02:28 Conversations with Her Husband
02:06:18 What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

May 15, 2024

Inflation, Misguided Economics, and the Fed

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-15-inflation-misguided-economics-fed/



The latest CPI number was released this morning by the Labor Department, and it showed average prices increasing at an annual rate of 3.4 percent for April with core inflation of 3.0 percent. This is still above the Fed’s target of 2 percent. Financial markets took this news in stride and markets rallied, because it was below what financial forecasters had expected and suggested a slight downward trend. The rate of job growth has diminished somewhat in recent months, also suggesting a softening economy. So presumably the Fed won’t raise rates and eventually will have to lower them, even if it takes longer than the Fed signaled earlier this year. But both the Fed and the typical story in the financial press miss what’s beneath the headline inflation rate. This isn’t that hard to find. It’s right in the charts that the Bureau of Labor Statistic releases along with the aggregate inflation number. But taking a deeper look requires breaking ranks with the assumption that what matters is the overall rate.

Take housing. It accounts for fully one-third of the CPI. Rents were up at an annual rate of 4.8 percent in April. This has nothing to do with an overheated economy and everything to do with America’s failure to have an affordable-housing policy. The Fed’s tight money aggravates that shortage by raising credit costs to builders and developers. The supposed increase in owner-occupied housing costs is even more misleading. The CPI uses the imputed rental value to owners and shows that number increasing at an annual rate of 4.8 percent in April. But this indicator is months if not years out of date, since most homeowners do not sell their homes in most years. The real question is what homebuyers pay. This chart from the St. Louis Fed shows the CPI without housing; the result is more than one-third lower. According to Zillow, which uses real-time data, the average housing price is projected to increase by just 1.9 percent in the next 12 months.



Housing prices are also heavily regional. High prices in hot markets skew the data. In depressed areas, housing prices are flat or declining. The Fed’s tight money policy only further depresses regional economies that are already hurting. Why doesn’t the BLS use real-time sales data for the homeownership component of its price index? Long ago, technical economists decided that the imputed rental value was a better indicator. It may be for some purposes, but not for calculating changes in the current rate of inflation. And there’s more. Several other areas of sharp price hikes in recent months reflect structural factors that are not affected by monetary policy at all. According to the BLS, the cost of motor vehicle insurance increased 22.8 percent over the past year. That reflects factors ranging from increased road rage to more complex cars that are more expensive to repair. In the CPI, auto repair costs also rose by 7.6 percent over the past year. These sectoral price hikes have nothing to do with whether the economy as a whole is overheated. Likewise homeowner insurance, which got more expensive because insurers took big hits from floods and hurricanes and compensated by hiking rates generally.

Hospital costs rose by 7.2 percent over a year ago, and drug costs by 6.0 percent. And price-gouging in rental housing has been driven by the growing number of absentee private equity owners. All this reflects increasing concentration and market power in these sectors, not the overall strength of the economy. Strip out housing, where the index is misleading, and these other factors where price hikes are structural and opportunistic, and the real inflation rate is well below the nominal 3 percent. And there’s one other key trend which suggests that we may never get back to 2 percent inflation. That is global climate change. Climate change will increase costs in ways large and small, which have nothing to do with interest rates. Insurance costs will keep rising. Electricity costs are likely to rise, as we invest in a more reliable grid, and until we complete the transition to renewables. Building costs will increase as both homes and offices need to spend additional money on needed resiliance. In short, the Fed needs a more realistic target and the BLS needs better indicators, especially when it comes to housing costs. Economists and commentators need to start looking at the structural factors behind many price hikes.

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May 15, 2024

Republican Court Rulings Keep Helping Republicans Win Elections

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-05-15-republican-court-rulings-gerrymandering-voting-rights/



A set of ongoing lawsuits over new voting districts drawn after the 2020 census have made it more and more clear that some Republican- and Trump-appointed judges are tacitly colluding with state officials to give Republicans an advantage in elections, by disenfranchising the growing population of Black and Latino voters. They’ve been quietly successful thus far. But a decision expected as soon as today from the U.S. Supreme Court will be a key indicator as to how these anti-democratic efforts will fare in this year’s and future elections. This Republican effort to predetermine election results isn’t coming from the place you might expect. Despite all the bluster and countless failed lawsuits, former President Donald Trump and his allies haven’t been able to produce a shred of evidence to back their claims of rampant election fraud by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election. Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani had his radio show canceled last week for repeatedly violating a station ban on spreading lies about the 2020 election, for example.

https://twitter.com/mcpli/status/1790051450451546207
On the other hand, there’s clear evidence that conservatives, acting in concert with courts that they’ve stacked with partisan judges, have effectively stolen elections in recent years. Republicans now hold a majority of seats in the House largely because GOP-appointed judges and U.S. Supreme Court justices allowed state legislators to draw and use electoral maps that were racially discriminatory. And they appear to be relying on the same strategy to hang on to those seats and gain others in November. The Supreme Court’s right wing made a number of indefensible interventions and rulings in 2022 that allowed states to use congressional maps that lower courts had already found to be racially biased—and which a majority of the justices themselves later agreed were discriminatory. (It’s worth noting that courts have made it extremely difficult to prove racial gerrymandering in the first place, as even Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged last June.)



Republicans in Alabama, for example, had been ordered to redraw a racially gerrymandered map by two lower federal courts prior to the 2022 elections. Still, conservative justices granted Alabama’s “emergency” petition, despite the fact that there was plenty of time to redraw the unlawful map, and allowed the state to use it in a February 2022 ruling that was unsigned and essentially unexplained. A year later, the Supreme Court held that the map, which had been used in the 2022 elections by then, had in fact diluted the voting power of Black Alabamians. That decision came only after Alabama Republicans openly defied a Supreme Court order, actually diluting the Black vote even further in a subsequent map. Alabama’s map for 2024 does include a second district with a near-majority-Black voting population, which will likely add a Democratic House seat.

The Supreme Court made similar moves in 2022 to allow Louisiana to use a racially discriminatory electoral map, and lower courts followed its lead in other cases. All told, those unjustifiable rulings allowed Republicans to racially gerrymander districts representing seven House seats, transforming them into safe Republican districts. Despite the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that ultimately unwound the racial gerrymander in Alabama, that pattern of tacit, yet fairly open, collusion continues today. As things stand, voters in three states—South Carolina, Florida, and Utah—will likely go to the polls in November in districts that some courts have found to be illegally discriminatory against Black voters, according to a ProPublica report last month. The discriminatory South Carolina map was reinstated after the Supreme Court’s inaction. And the court also refused to block the adoption of a map that was found to discriminate against Latino communities in Washington state last month.

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May 15, 2024

Westminster Dog Show: 'Perfect end': Miniature poodle Sage wins Westminster in handler's farewell

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/may/14/westminster-2024-sage-the-miniature-poodle-named-best-in-show



A miniature poodle named Sage is America’s top canine after earning the title of best in show on Tuesday night at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, sending her veteran handler into retirement on the highest of notes. The perfectly manicured non-sporting group winner from Houston with the shiny jet-black coat was the last dog standing after a winnowing-down process that began on Monday morning with more than 2,500 canines in 213 breeds and varieties hailing from all 50 states and a dozen other countries, including Canada, Japan, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates.

Sage’s handler, 65-year-old Kaz Hosaka of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, who began showing at Westminster when he was 20 and had said this year’s show would be his last, was immediately overwhelmed by emotion after judge Rosalind Kramer’s decision was announced to the crowd of several thousand onlookers inside Arthur Ashe Stadium. “I’ve been here for 45 years in America,” a teary-eyed Hosaka said. “I’ve been lucky. Did a lot, especially at Westminster. This is my seventh group win for poodles. That’s more than I could ask for. This is my perfect end. I cannot ask for more than this.”



On a drizzly Tuesday evening at the home of the US Open tennis tournament, Sage won the crown over a stacked field with six other group winners, among them a German shepherd named Mercedes (awarded reserve best in show), a black cocker spaniel named Micha, a colored bull terrier named Frankie and a popular Afghan hound named Louis. A fifth, the sassy Comet, was attempting to become the first ever shih tzu to take the top prize. Another, a giant schnauzer named Monty, made it to the final seven after winning the working group for a second consecutive year only to again be pipped at the final hurdle.

“She did it for me today and she did it yesterday,” Hosaka said. “Poodles are not easy. Sometimes they pick the day [they feel like showing]. But she did it yesterday and today. And even in best in show, with all the echoes and a lot of people applauding, it’s not easy but she managed it. I was more nervous than maybe she was, but I’m so excited.” It was a fairytale ending for Hosaka, who moved to the United States from Japan in 1979 with a dream of winning America’s most prestigious dog show. He finally achieved it in 2002 with another miniature poodle called Surrey Spice Girl, Sage’s great-grandmother, but a return trip to the mountaintop proved elusive.

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May 15, 2024

Money Misses the Mark in Maryland

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-14-maryland-results-alsobrooks-trone-elfreth-dunn/



Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks pulled off an upset victory in the Democratic primary race for Maryland’s open U.S. Senate seat, for which longtime Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin chose not to seek re-election. She defeated Rep. David Trone, the multi-millionaire wine merchant who burned through $62 million of his own fortune, the most ever spent by a candidate in a Senate primary race. Alsobrooks will now face off against two-term former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan in the general election, a key race in the Democrats’ bid to try to hold their current Senate majority. Trone’s blatant attempts to buy political office through an inescapable deluge of advertisements likely turned off many more voters than it won over. With nearly 60 percent of the vote in, Alsobrooks has a double-digit lead, in a race where polls only showed her closing to a toss-up in the final week.

By tapping his own personal wealth, Trone had outspent Alsobrooks by 9:1, according to the most recent figures by the Center for Responsive Politics. Late spending could have pushed that even higher. Besides his own self-funding, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its network were the next largest outside contributors to his campaign, though this particular money spigot was turned off down the stretch including when Trone became more critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Trone has for many years been a top “minyan” donor to AIPAC, and a vocal critic of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Trone led in polling for most of the race in large part because of his early advantage in blitzing the air waves with non-stop ads.

That may have led to oversaturation by the end. In the final weeks of the race, Trone ran three separate attack ads against Alsobrooks simultaneously across the state’s three media markets. One veteran Maryland campaign strategist said he’s never seen that kind of barrage before. Trone focused to a significant extent on criminal justice reform, criticizing Alsbrooks’s record as a state prosecutor in a transparent attempt to siphon away Black voters from her campaign. He claimed the issue was personal to him as a “victim” of the criminal justice system, which strained credulity since his experience consisted only of charges against him as a white-collar offender for business malpractice.

This electoral strategy failed to pan out. Alsorbrooks won by handily carrying three predominantly black counties in the state—Prince George’s, Baltimore City, and Charles. She also opened a narrow lead over Trone in the largely white Washington suburbs of Montgomery County. Black voters were projected to be about 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. Those areas will be critical for Democrats in November. Despite Trone’s best attempts to claim the progressive mantle, the distinctions between the candidates were not chiefly ideological, though there were substantive differences between the two. Alsobrooks ran mostly on kitchen table issues, such as expanding healthcare access, education reform, and creating better jobs. Trone emphasized criminal justice and some of his pro-labor credentials, which drew backing from some building trades unions.

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May 14, 2024

Restaurant Review: 'New Nordic' Isn't New, but ILIS Adds a Fresh Spin

Mads Refslund’s creative ideas at this Brooklyn restaurant can be dreamily seductive, even if the execution isn’t always as compelling.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/dining/ilis-restaurant-review.html

https://archive.ph/gTrAf



The most talked-about dish at ILIS, the cavernous Brooklyn restaurant opened by the Danish-born chef Mads Refslund in October, has to be the clam flask. This is a drinking vessel made by opening a surf clam, removing the clam, resealing the halves of the shell and shearing off a bit of the top lip to create a small opening through which you sip the liquid inside. When I first had the clam flask, it was filled with a blend of tomato juice and dried-clam broth that tasted something like a virgin Caesar cocktail. The contents, though, are not what has captured everybody’s attention.



The reason everybody remembers the flask is that it is tightly bound and knotted with twine, like a corset designed for bivalves with a taste for mild kink. Mr. Refslund’s cooks must spend a good part of the workweek at the arts-and-crafts station. An Okinawan sweet potato is presented in a fluted tart shell molded from beeswax. Chopped whelk in potato foam is nestled inside the shell and is eaten with a birch stick lashed to an operculum, the part of the whelk that normally seals the shell’s opening and looks something like a guitar pick.



This use of natural materials in the kitchen is one of the hallmarks of the New Nordic style that Mr. Refslund helped found, and the handmade pieces at ILIS have a certain spooky pagan beauty. They cast a spell over all my meals there, a daydreamy state so pleasant that I didn’t want to admit that many of the dishes weren’t really landing the way they should. A similar spell must have fallen over the writers and influencers who have been talking about ILIS as if it were a New York City branch of Noma. It’s far from that.



Mr. Refslund and René Redzepi served as co-chefs of Noma when it opened in 2003 in Copenhagen. After about six months, they agreed that they weren’t cut out to work together, and Mr. Refslund left. He doesn’t try to claim credit for what Noma became, but a lot of people in New York seem eager to give it to him. The food at ILIS doesn’t resemble any of the dishes I ate at Noma six years ago, each of which pulsed with flavor and originality and was as satisfying as a great pop song or short story. Some of the cooking at ILIS is heading in that direction, but a lot of it tastes wispy and unfinished.

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May 14, 2024

Swedish PM says he'd consider hosting nuclear weapons in wartime

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said there's broad consensus not to allow nuclear weapons on Swedish soil in peacetime, but added that wartime is a different matter.

https://www.thelocal.se/20240513/swedish-pm-says-hed-consider-hosting-nuclear-weapons-in-wartime

https://archive.ph/El55h



Sweden's parliament is set to vote on a Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) with the United States in June which will give the US access to military bases in Sweden and allow the storage of military equipment and weapons in the Scandinavian country. Sweden abandoned two centuries of military non-alignment to join Nato in March this year. Calls have mounted in recent weeks, from the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Association among others, for the government to put in writing in the DCA agreement that Sweden will not allow nuclear weapons on its soil.

The government has repeatedly insisted there is no need to have a ban spelled out, citing "broad consensus on nuclear weapons" in Sweden as well as a parliamentary decision that bars nuclear weapons in Sweden in peacetime. But Kristersson said on Monday that wartime was a different story. "In a war situation it's a completely different matter, (it) would depend entirely on what would happen," he told public broadcaster Swedish Radio.

"In the absolute worst-case scenario, the democratic countries in our part of the world must ultimately be able to defend themselves against countries that could threaten us with nuclear weapons." He insisted that any such decision to place nuclear weapons in Sweden would be taken by Sweden, not the United States. "Sweden decides over Swedish territory," he said. But, he stressed, "the whole purpose of our Nato membership and our defence is to ensure that that situation does not arise". If Ukraine had been a Nato member "it would not have been attacked by Russia", he said.

Sweden's Social Democratic Party, which was in power when Sweden submitted its Nato membership application in May 2022, said at the time it would work to express "unilateral reservations against the deployment of nuclear weapons and permanent bases on Swedish territory". Nordic neighbours Denmark and Norway, which are already Nato members, have both refused to allow foreign countries to establish permanent military bases or nuclear weapons on their soil in peacetime.

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May 14, 2024

Why Elon Loves China and Hates Sweden

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-13-why-elon-loves-china-hates-sweden/



Elon Musk’s recent one-day visit to Beijing confirmed his status as China’s fair-haired American capitalist. Tesla, the Chinese government said, has become the only foreign-owned company that is fully compliant with their data security laws. Accordingly, it has given Musk the go-ahead to build lots and lots of self-driving cars in the company’s Chinese factories. Musk’s next move, The Wall Street Journal reports, is to get Chinese government approval to transfer the data that its cars collect, with the help of the Chinese search-engine company Baidu, to the U.S. in order to upgrade its self-driving-car technology here. That may just lead to U.S. security concerns similar to those which led officials to ban companies from using technology from Huawei here in the States.

But then, Musk’s politics seem a lot closer to China’s than they are to America’s. After all, we don’t know if the Tesla/Baidu traffic-monitoring technology won’t also prove to be a boon to China’s “social credit” surveillance, which monitors the pro- and anti-government sentiments of China’s citizenry. Even if it is put to that use, though, it will also likely boost Tesla’s revenues, which could use some boosting these days. Musk’s dependence on China has been growing for years. Tesla’s factory in Shanghai, at least for now, sells more cars and brings in more revenue than any elsewhere, and much more profit than any elsewhere, too, as Chinese workers come cheap when compared to their U.S. or European counterparts. In turn, Musk has repaid his debts to Beijing with a host of policy pronouncements that could have been drafted by the CCP’s press office.

At a conference in Los Angeles last September, Musk opined that China’s “policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because … the U.S. Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force.” This Elon-ism prompted Taiwan to start building a company that could rival another Musk enterprise, Starlink. And just in case his nondefense of Taiwanese independence got lost in the shuffle of his outrageous tweets, Musk has also told one interviewer that before blaming China for its oppression of Uighurs, we need to realize that this situation has “two sides” that may be susceptible to blame.



Just as China is his sweet spot, so Europe has emerged as Elon’s battleground. In Sweden, he has refused to bargain with a union of Tesla mechanics who’ve been on strike since last October. Musk’s adamant anti-union stance is completely at odds with Swedish norms, where unionization is as omnipresent as the summertime sun. Fully 90 percent of Swedish workers are represented by unions, which has facilitated, rather than impeded, Sweden’s rise as one of the most competitive nations on the planet. The scope of unionization means that companies can’t compete by paying lower wages than their competitors, but rather by making better products, which is why Swedish goods do well on the world market.

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May 14, 2024

Trendy Nonsense About Gen Z

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-14-trendy-nonsense-gen-z/



The conservative and financial press has been filled with articles proclaiming how well Generation Z is doing. According to The Economist, “Generation Z is unprecedentedly rich. Millennials were poorer at this stage in their lives. So were baby-boomers.” The Economist adds, “The typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above baby-boomers at the same age.” A Forbes piece, warming to the theme, claims, “In 2022, nearly a third of 25-year-old Americans were already homeowners, outpacing both millennials and Gen X at the same age.”

This is nonsense. In truth, homeownership rates among adults under age 35 fell from 44 percent in 1960 to 34 percent in 2017. The fact that those numbers have even stayed as high as they have is the result of more and more homebuyers relying on parental help. According to one survey, 49 percent of Gen Z homebuyers relied on family help with a down payment, as did 27 percent of millennials. Obviously, parental help is not an option for young adults whose parents have little net worth and are struggling themselves. According to a Pew survey, 43 percent of young adults from lower-income families report giving their parents financial help.

The story is even more stark when you add race. Black professionals who made it into the professional class are even more likely to help their parents financially. Black homeownership rates peaked in 2005, at 49 percent. By 2019, they had fallen back to 40 percent, the lowest rate since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. Subprime lenders targeted Black homebuyers and Black homeowners seeking refinancing. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, in 2006, just before the financial collapse, 52.9 percent of Black borrowers assumed a subprime mortgage compared to 47.3 percent of Hispanic borrowers and 26.1 percent of White borrowers. In the ensuing epidemic of foreclosures, Blacks suffered disproportionately.

The Economist piece and kindred articles are good examples of how to lie with statistics. You can show that the typical 25-year-old’s income outpaces boomers’ income when they were 25 only by failing to adjust for inflation and the rising costs of life’s necessities, or using averages rather than medians. According to the Federal Reserve, for people under 35, the average net worth is an impressive-sounding $183,500, while the median, which represents the typical young adult, is just $39,000. And to the extent that the average Gen Z 20-something has a cushion of wealth, that wealth reflects windfall inheritances, which in turn reflect the extreme maldistribution of income and wealth in society as a whole.

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