(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest for Wednesday, June 14 (Mr Smith Goes to Washington edition) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-14 This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments. The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, eeff, rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw. Online sellers are smitten with Jack Smith, creating and potentially cashing in on everything from mugs to baby bibs inspired by the special counsel who indicted former President Trump. Smith’s glaring face is front and center on plenty of products that have popped up since he was appointed in November to investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents, as well as his actions in the wake of the 2020 election and surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. x Horner said his “Jack Smith Fan Club” merchandise is also proving to be among the site’s top sellers. Another tee with Smith’s face includes the all-caps message, “Somebody’s gonna get Jacked up!” https://t.co/q6wSC3jZUS pic.twitter.com/hSpabApjXh — KMJ's Afternoon Drive (@DriveKMJ) June 15, 2023 ...Scott Horner hawks a dozen items that double as odes to Smith on his website, classifiedshirts.com. His best-selling swag, Horner told ITK, is a play on the classic 1939 Jimmy Stewart film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Instead of Stewart’s grinning likeness, the $25 T-shirt features the special counsel’s stern-looking image. President Joe Biden on Wednesday vetoed SJ Res. 11, a Republican-backed bill that would’ve rolled back a 2022 EPA rule that set stronger vehicle emissions standards to reduce air pollution set to take effect in model year 2027. “Earlier today, President Biden vetoed SJ Resolution 11, the most recent attempt by congressional Republicans to pollute the air our children breathe,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters during a White House press briefing. “Just think about it – while millions of Americans were taking shelter to escape unhealthy wildfire smoke made worse by climate change, congressional Republicans were pushing a bill to repeal the president’s efforts to make our air cleaner and safer.” Four of the nation’s biggest environmental advocacy groups officially endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign Wednesday night, an early declaration of support that also served as a show of appreciation for having passed the most significant climate legislation in history last year. The backing of the four major green groups — LCV, NextGen PAC, NRDC Action Fund and the Sierra Club — was no surprise, especially after last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion in subsidies for clean energy projects. x Today, we joined other leading climate organizations to endorse President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for reelection. President Biden has been the most pro-climate action president in American history — and we're ready to take the fight to the next level in 2024! pic.twitter.com/SuIzXcKWxA — Sierra Club (@SierraClub) June 15, 2023 But it does mark the first time the groups have jointly announced a presidential endorsement. And for Biden, running virtually unopposed for the Democratic nomination despite widespread concerns from within the party about his age, it may be the first of several such announcements to be rolled out early — locking in key advocacy groups and party constituencies at a moment when the nascent campaign is still being developed. x My parent’s wedding in NYC …..years before their marriage would be legal in my father’s home state of Virginia Today is the 56th anniversary of Loving v Virginia https://t.co/RP9EYWokYV Happy #LovingDay !! pic.twitter.com/2M6cbfOxMZ — Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo (@KBibbinsDomingo) June 13, 2023 House Republicans inched closer this week toward impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, officially launching an investigation that would serve as the basis for any inquiry. ...Democrats argued the hearing’s name alone shows Republicans have already reached a conclusion on whether to take the dramatic step of impeaching a cabinet secretary — an action not seen since the 1870s. “You may have a difference of opinion as to how the United States should process our asylum applicants. But the notion that that difference of a policy opinion would be the basis for a quote unquote, ‘case closed’ that Secretary Mayorkas is violating his duty, is preposterous and it is not any basis for impeachment,” said Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), who before entering Congress worked as lead counsel for the first impeachment inquiry against former President Trump. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said Tuesday she didn’t want her staff educated after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky offered to clarify the reporting procedure on COVID-19 vaccines for Greene’s team. (Watch the video below.) It was basically an interrogation intended to humiliate Walensky in front of a House committee. The anti-vaxx lawmaker interpreted data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, to baselessly suggest that an inordinate amount of Americans died from the shots, and suffered miscarriages and stillbirths. ...“We review all of the things that come into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. I’d be happy to have our staff educate your staff on the matter,” Walensky replied. “I don’t want my staff educated,” Greene snapped... x Since yesterday, 200,000 hectares, or nearly half a million acres, have burned in Canada. That is, in one day, considerably more than burned in California all of last year. — David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) June 13, 2023 ...Why it matters: The House is staring down a long list of critical agenda items this fall, including keeping the government funded, setting agricultural policy for the next five years and reauthorizing the military. ...Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a prominent member of several centrist and bipartisan groups, floated doing an end-run around the right by soliciting Democratic votes to pass procedural measures typically passed along party lines. ...McCarthy said in a GOP conference meeting last week that members of the majority shouldn't help turn the floor over to the other side by signing discharge petitions or voting against procedural motions, according to a GOP aide familiar with his comments. The notion of “externalities” has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs. While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I’ve always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics — it makes them sound Serious — but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary. x “A sobering new study finds that the world's biggest industries burn through $7.3 trillion worth of free natural capital a year. And it's the only reason they turn a profit” https://t.co/4AQ6Ess2xg — Paula Rose (@volatilerose) June 13, 2023 To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB [Editor’s note: TEEB is now known as the Natural Capital Coalition] asked Trucost to tally up the total “unpriced natural capital” consumed by the world’s top industrial sectors. (“Natural capital” refers to ecological materials and services like, say, clean water or a stable atmosphere; “unpriced” means that businesses don’t pay to consume them.) x This cartoon from 55 years ago nails today's MAGA Republicans. (Credit: MAD magazine) pic.twitter.com/a6NX4hWF50 — Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) June 14, 2023 Oil giant Shell plans to boost fossil fuel production even as the company says it still aims to zero out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Critics concerned about climate change say to meet that target, the company should be cutting production, not increasing drilling for oil and gas. In a presentation to investors in New York on Wednesday, Shell executives said they plan to grow the company's natural gas business. Executives touted the fact that natural gas emits about half the carbon dioxide as coal when burned for generating electricity, arguing that is still in line with Shell's climate goals. The company also projects stable oil production through the end of the decade, saying it met a goal of reducing production 20% by 2030 by selling some operations to rival ConocoPhillips. Shell CEO Wael Sawan focused comments on that longer-term 2050 goal instead of nearer-term objectives. That's despite a 2021 Dutch court case that ordered Shell to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030, based on 2019 levels. The company is appealing that decision. Nine women filed a sexual assault lawsuit against Bill Cosby in Nevada on Wednesday, just weeks after the state passed a law eliminating the statute of limitations for civil cases. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for Nevada, accuses Cosby of using his “enormous power, fame and prestige” to isolate and sexually assault each of the nine women named in the lawsuit. ...Cosby has been publicly accused of sexual abuses from groping to rape by more than 60 women, many of whom have allegations that are decades old but are being revived as states change statutes defining how courts handle sexual misconduct cases. x Never forget that when Seoul, Korea removed the Cheonggyecheon expressway in 2003 and replaced it with a restored stream, 1000 acre park and improved transit, not only did it transform the city’s public life & economic success, but the traffic got better. The traffic got BETTER. pic.twitter.com/1V4kKjpMzB — Brent Toderian (@BrentToderian) June 14, 2023 x You can find my acceptance speech ("The Fragility of Truth in the Existential Crisis") here: https://t.co/tZogzKHiBd — Prof Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) June 14, 2023 ...Despite the bruising battles as I’ve sought to defend the science of climate change—including my own work—from attacks by vested interests aiming to discredit it, I consider myself privileged to have found myself in a position to influence the public discourse over the greatest challenge we face as a civilization. Efforts to attack and deny the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change have long constituted a major impediment to action. But, as I argued in my book The New Climate War, we appear now to be moving past outright denial of the basic science as the evidence becomes plain to the person on the street in the form of the unprecedented heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, and superstorms we are now witnessing. We still, however, face a multi-pronged strategy by polluters and their enablers in the media and pundit class to distract, deflect, attack, divide, and delay. Among their preferred tactics today is the promotion of risky, unproven strategies, such as geoengineering or massive carbon capture and sequestration, and the promise of future action as an excuse for business-as-usual fossil fuel burning today. x Planning on redecorating? Here's the latest trend in bathrooms for 2023. 😉 pic.twitter.com/064tpP0gBc — GingerSpice❄️💙 (@thedesertginger) June 14, 2023 ...as those following the burgeoning industry and its underlying research know, the data used to train the large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models underpinning products such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney comes initially from human sources — books, articles, photographs and so on — that were created without the help of artificial intelligence. ...Specifically looking at probability distributions for text-to-text and image-to-image AI generative models, the researchers concluded that “learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse — a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution … this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning.” x turns out AI models collapse quickly once the AI trains on data created by other AIs instead of original data by humans. three things follow from this: i) AIs must continue mining human content in order to function, thus can't substitute for human laborhttps://t.co/49Whb6mQty — Terence Renaud (@terry_renaud) June 13, 2023 “Over time, mistakes in generated data compound and ultimately force models that learn from generated data to misperceive reality even further,” wrote one of the paper’s leading authors, Ilia Shumailov, in an email to VentureBeat. “We were surprised to observe how quickly model collapse happens: Models can rapidly forget most of the original data from which they initially learned.” ...more than a year ago, I learned that laundry pods—encased in dissolvable plastic—were bad for the environment. In my quest to find more sustainable, plastic-free household products, I was thrilled to come across laundry “eco-strips,” as an easy swap-out. Instead of the typical plastic jug, the thin compressed sheets are packaged in a recyclable cardboard envelope and marketed as plastic-free. I promptly ordered a year’s supply and told everyone who would listen about my new discovery. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that what holds those innocuous little strips together is a sneaky type of plastic called polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA. It’s the same exact stuff that encases laundry (and dishwasher) pods, and though it’s designed to dissolve as soon as it hits water, it is indeed plastic. A very controversial type of plastic. To learn more about PVA and come up with sustainable alternatives, I connected with Dianna Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Plastic Pollution Coalition, a nonprofit working towards a world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impacts. x 600 million plastic soda bottles worth of plastic are entering our waterway through detergent pods each year says our new study by our Director of Science Dr.Charles Rolsky @Lab_Casual #Environment #PlasticPollutionhttps://t.co/n22E8HKH91 — Plastic Oceans International (@PlasticOceansUS) August 30, 2021 PVA is a water-soluble synthetic polymer (a fancy word for plastic that readily binds itself to water molecules). You’ll find it on the ingredient list of virtually every laundry or dishwasher pod and every laundry sheet or strip. PVA has excellent barrier properties, so it’s good at holding together liquids and other squishy stuff, like soap. It’s also really good at dissolving. That’s why it vanishes in our washing machines and dishwashers. But does it really disappear? “When you stir a spoonful of sugar or salt into water, it dissolves, but is it gone?” Cohen asks. “Take a taste and you have your answer. It’s the same with PVA.” x No *New* Oil and Gas (or coal) No *more* petrol on the flames of the kids’ burning planet. Just no. (This is not my cause; it’s yours.) https://t.co/LynQqY45yA pic.twitter.com/I19TKTx2gO — Dave Hampton 🌍🌳 (@carboncoach) June 14, 2023 The Biden administration launched a hub to walk you through the process of accessing Inflation Reduction Act incentives for energy audits, heat pumps, EVs and more. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration unleashed a torrent of incentives to help individuals electrify their homes and vehicles — and thereby slash their energy bills, improve air quality and cut carbon pollution. Now, the U.S. Department of Energy has created the Energy Savings Hub, a one-stop shop to put those tax credits and rebates at consumers’ fingertips. The IRA provides American households with, on average, $10,600 to electrify, nonprofit Rewiring America estimates. x #BABYON5 folks! RETWEET! SPREAD THE WORD! Tomorrow, 6/15, Warner Bros. Animation and WB Home Ent. will release all the information about the coming #B5AnimatedMovie including release date, rating, extras, how to get it and THE FULL LENGTH TRAILER 👀👀! Here's a sneak peek.... pic.twitter.com/SoYkt5yNFQ — J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) June 14, 2023 What are you looking forward to watching tonight? Tell us in the comments! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/14/2175475/-Overnight-News-Digest-for-Wednesday-June-14-edition 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/