(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Normal [1]

['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags']

Date: 2023-02-26  

Carey Gilliam of the Guardian cites, in part, Environmental Protection Agency data, says that cemical accidents are becoming all to constant in the U.S.

But such accidents are happening with striking regularity. A Guardian analysis of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and by non-profit groups that track chemical accidents in the US shows that accidental releases – be they through train derailments, truck crashes, pipeline ruptures or industrial plant leaks and spills – are happening consistently across the country. By one estimate these incidents are occurring, on average, every two days. “These kinds of hidden disasters happen far too frequently,” Mathy Stanislaus, who served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of land and emergency management during the Obama administration, told the Guardian. Stanislaus led programs focused on the cleanup of contaminated hazardous waste sites, chemical plant safety, oil spill prevention and emergency response. In the first seven weeks of 2023 alone, there were more than 30 incidents recorded by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, roughly one every day and a half. Last year the coalition recorded 188, up from 177 in 2021. The group has tallied more than 470 incidents since it started counting in April 2020. The incidents logged by the coalition range widely in severity but each involves the accidental release of chemicals deemed to pose potential threats to human and environmental health.

Retired ambassador Kenneth C. Brill writes for The Hill that it is imperative that the United States and our European allies maintain public support for assisting Ukraine in its was against Russia.

While public opinion in the U.S. and Europe has generally remained steady in support of Ukraine over the last year, a few polls suggest some softening of that support. A November 2022 Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs poll, for example, found that only 48 percent of Americans thought the U.S. should support Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” down from 58 percent in July 2022. There are also indications that partisan differences are developing on Ukraine. Former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, criticized Biden’s trip to Ukraine, and a recent Gallup poll indicated Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the U.S. is doing too much for Ukraine. Public opinion matters in democracies. Putin believes he can wait out the West on Ukraine and is counting on first Western publics and then Western leaders tiring of the costs of supporting Ukraine on and off the battlefield. Putin’s view of Ukraine and his commitment to the war are rooted in centuries of Russian regional imperialism. From the 13th into the 19th Century, the principality of Moscow grew through a sustained campaign of military conquest, diplomatic deals, and annexations to become the world’s largest country. Ukraine has existed in one form or another since the Viking age, but reached a treaty with Moscow in 1654 that resulted in Russia — and then the Soviet Union — claiming political control. While Russia agreed in 1994 to respect the independence and existing borders of Ukraine, Putin is seeking to use military force to return Ukraine to the Russian “empire.” Were Putin to succeed in Ukraine, other nearby dominos would fall. He would increase pressure already being exerted on other former parts of the Soviet Union, such as Moldova, Georgia, and Belarus, and would seek to create additional mischief in and through autocratically minded nations, such as Serbia and Hungry (sic). The reconstitution of a hybrid Russian empire would create insecurity along its borders with Europe and the Baltic states and strengthen autocratic trends elsewhere. That insecurity would promote neither stability nor prosperity.

E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post says that chunks of Vladimir Putin’s speech last Tuesday about the war in Ukraine were squarely aimed at the American far right and the culture wars.

It has become a habit to cast the struggle over Ukraine in Cold War terms. Maybe that’s natural, given Putin’s old job as a KGB agent and his determination to expand Russia’s imperial reach to something closer to the hegemony once enjoyed by the old Soviet Union. But it’s closer to the truth to see Putin as trying to build a right-wing nationalist international movement (no pun intended). And it’s obvious that his embrace of social and religious traditionalism is aimed at winning over right-wing opinion in the democracies and splitting the traditional right. You don’t have to watch Fox News commentators waxing warm about the Russian president to see that this strategy is working. Opposition to helping Ukraine is growing among rank-and-file Republicans. Pew Research survey in January found that 40 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that the United States was providing too much help to Ukraine, up from 32 percent in the fall and 9 percent last March. A Jan. 27-Feb. 1 Washington Post/ABC News poll found 50 percent of Republicans saying that the United States was doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 18 percent in April in January found that 40 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that the United States was providing too much help to Ukraine, up from 32 percent in the fall and 9 percent last March. A Jan. 27-Feb. 1found 50 percent of Republicans saying that the United States was doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 18 percent in April

Totally normal, nowadays.

John Sakellariadis and Maggie Miller of POLITICO write that is it highly probable that there will be a renewal and escalation of Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine in the near future.

In recent weeks, two threat intelligence firms have warned that Russia is set to escalate its cyberattacks in Ukraine. Google’s Threat Analysis Group said last week it had “high confidence” that Moscow “will increase disruptive and destructive attacks” in 2023 if the war shifts “fundamentally” in Ukraine’s favor. Cyber threat intelligence firm Recorded Future predicted this month that Russian cybercriminals will “almost certainly” support Russia’s next big military push against Ukraine. “We’re entering a new phase of the war,” said Gabby Roncone, technical threat intelligence analyst at Google-owned Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm. “Despite all of the successes that defenders have had with stopping Russian cyberattacks, the GRU is very persistent,” she added, referring to Russia’s military intelligence arm. Other Kremlin hacking groups continue to present a threat to Ukraine, too, she said. “We’re just sort of bracing for what comes next and hoping that we can help,” Roncone said. A renewed cyber offensive could also expand the war into regions of Ukraine that Russia has been unable to take with physical force, deepening the conflict even as Kyiv bolsters its armies with new weaponry from NATO allies. Major attacks could even spill over into NATO allies.

Evan Pheiffer writes for New Lines magazine about the stunning destructiveness of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria two weeks ago. Not since Hiroshima and Nagasaki have entire city centers been wiped from the earth in the course of a few hours. Similar in scale to the Little Judgment Day of 1509 (a 7.2 quake that damaged half of Ottoman Istanbul), the evil twin earthquakes of Feb. 6 have destroyed at least four ancient cities in southern Turkey — Antakya, Iskenderun, Adiyaman and Kahramanmaras — and probably hundreds of villages as well. […] Straddling many of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical and geological fault lines, Turkey is no stranger to catastrophe. But last week’s disasters are pushing many to the proverbial edge. “It’s worse than Armenia in 1988,” says Mickey, a veteran cameraman who covered the cataclysmic quake that caused the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, “and far worse than Kathmandu,” a 7.8 eruption in 2015 that killed 9,000, moved the Nepali capital by three meters, and induced a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest. For what it’s worth, the calamity of Feb. 6 was the worst crisis in Turkey since the major earthquake of 1939, when the country was still recovering from over 10 years of total war (1912–23) and had merely 17 million people, roughly the size of Istanbul today (and sustained 30,000 deaths). Contrast that with Feb. 6, which directly affected 13.5 million of the country’s 83 million people, or 16%. If an equivalent disaster struck the United States, it would mean the semi-destruction of the entire West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii. Lauren Turner of BBC News reports that a deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol is now imminent.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said the deal over trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland was "inching towards a conclusion". A No 10 source has described the negotiations as positive. [...] The Northern Ireland Protocol was agreed under former PM Boris Johnson after the UK left the European Union. It sees Northern Ireland continue to follow some EU laws so that goods can flow freely over the border to the Republic of Ireland without checks. Instead, goods arriving from England, Scotland and Wales are checked when they arrive at Northern Irish ports. Critics, including Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), feel this undermines the nation's position within the rest of the UK as well as impacting trade.

I agree with Ms. Turner that the fact that European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was originally scheduled to meet with King Charles yesterday is an indication that a deal is imminent (the King, I assume, will have to go through the formality of giving royal assent to such an agreement)

Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer that it seems that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has learned a new word.

“We want education, not indoctrination,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at last month’s news conference where he announced the cancellation of that state’s Advanced Placement African American history courses. “And so when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that’s a political agenda.” Never mind that intersectionality has nothing to do with abolishing prisons. For DeSantis, the word’s actual definition is unimportant. Unlike woke, whose origins lie in folk music, intersectionality comes from academia, and is much newer. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Columbia Law School professor, coined the word in a very academic-sounding 1989 paper called “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Think DeSantis has read it? The Oxford English Dictionary — which defines intersectionality as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise” — added the word in 2015. Merriam-Webster followed in 2017 with a definition that’s slightly more accessible: “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”

DeSantis graduated from Harvard Law School in 2005. I’d bet that DeSantis has read Crenshaw’s 1989 paper about intersectionality. Probably several times.

Have the best possible day, everyone!

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/26/2154948/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Normal

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/