2023.01.20
The unknowable fallout of a debt default, a fork move, Marines arrested, online radicalization, proposed book and pronoun bans.
In a recent conversation, a friend who is an amazing and passionate writer mentioned that maybe I should do something with all the links I used to share on the bird site because they’re so varied and yet somehow related — if you look closely enough. The initial iteration of this Substack was focused on underappreciated risks, of which there are far too many looming in the near and not-so-near future. While that’ll continue to be the primary focus, I think it would help to step back and perhaps take a broader focus and a bit more narrative. Please feel free to weigh in.
Taking it to the limit. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told congressional leaders the nation has reached its legal — and arbitrary — borrowing capacity of $31.381 trillion to fulfill its obligations and urged leaders in Washington to act now “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” CBS News reports. While no one knows exactly what happens if Washington were to default on its debt, one expert tells MarketWatch it’s akin to the Y2K threat in that systems literally aren’t built to handle such a scenario.
The George Santos saga continues. Dubbing him “The Untalented Mr. Ripley” in her regular Dingus of the Week feature, writer Lyz Lenz zeroes in on the bind into which the lying congressman from Queens has put Congressional Republicans: “Santos has done something remarkable, he’s outconned the neocons. … Basically, if Santos is punished or his grift is acknowledged in any way, then that might legitimize concerns about other House Republicans who are doing a similar grift.”
Semper fi? Three active-duty U.S. Marines — identified as Micah Coomer, Joshua Abate and Dodge Dale Hellonen — were arrested Wednesday for their participation in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to court documents unsealed Thursday, Military.com reports.
Online radicalization. Reading this anonymously bylined first-person Washingtonian piece from May 2019 about the online radicalization of teenage boys, I was struck by the following sentence: “The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming ‘proof’ to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week.” But it’s not just the search engine, of course. The social media landscape of Reddit, 4chan, YouTube and TikTok, as well as others, contains an underlying rot.
Writer, editor and feminist media critic Joanna Schroeder had a powerful thread on the topic.
That won’t fly. A Swiss cybersecurity researcher last week discovered an unsecured and publicly accessible server with the identities of hundreds of thousands of individuals from the U.S. government’s Terrorist Screening Database and “No Fly List,” the Daily Dot reports. The text file was titled “NoFly.csv.”
Under the microscope. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are investigating whether Amazon “engaged in a fraudulent scheme” to deceive lenders about injury rates at its warehouses in order to obtain credit, the Department of Justice said Wednesday. “The investigation was announced on the same day federal workplace safety regulators filed four new citations against Amazon over hazards related to its pace of work,” Business Insider reports.
A true fanboy. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman hailed borrower Elon Musk as “one of the greatest entrepreneurs” of the last 100 years. Markets Insider adds, “Meanwhile, Twitter reported a 35% decline in revenue on Wednesday. At the same time, Twitter began auctioning off a variety of assets to raise cash, including office supplies like projectors, whiteboards and chairs.”
Banning books and pronouns. This week, North Dakota Republicans introduced House Bill 2199, which would define “gender” as an “individual’s determined sex at birth, male or female” and criminalize the use of pronouns contrary to that definition to the tune of a $1,500 fine. They also sought to ban books containing “sexually explicit” content from North Dakota public libraries.
‘The dumbest idea of the century.’ In the news recently due to the support the idea received from failed crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruism . “What is it about effective altruism and offshoots like longtermism that make them so appealing to tech billionaires?” asks Jacobin. “The short answer is that effective altruism, for all the hype about being a novel, game-changing approach, is at heart a conservative movement, which attempts to present billionaires as a solution to global poverty rather than its cause. The effective altruism movement has parasitically latched onto the back of the billionaire class, providing the ultrarich with a moral justification of their position.”
Failing upward. Douglas Glenn, a former high-ranking military official, “engaged in a pattern of racially and sexually insensitive workplace behavior — including casually using the N-word in the office,” according to a Department of Defense Office of Inspector General investigation, The Intercept reports. Glenn now serves as chief financial officer at the Office of Personnel Management.
Beware the internet of things. A Massachusetts high school’s energy-saving lighting system experienced a software failure in August 2021 that won’t allow it to turn off the lights.