Clif @Clif@qoto.org

House Democrats’ path back to the majority could run through the Supreme Court

Democrats are suing to overturn congressional maps in six states they weren’t able to undo before the midterm elections: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio and Texas. If courts side with them, Democrats believe it could be the difference between the majority and the minority.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/22/house-democrats-path-back-majority-could-run-through-supreme-court/

The Colorado Springs mass shooting is terrorism. GOP politicians share responsibility., by @MSignorile@twitter.com https://open.substack.com/pub/signorile/p/the-colorado-springs-mass-shooting?r=bydn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

On Nov. 17, the Biden administration filed a suggestion of immunity on behalf of Mohammad bin Salman (#MBS) in a suit filed by the fiancée of Jamal #Khashoggi, who was assassinated in 2018. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, brought a case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2020, seeking relief under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 and Alien Tort Statute in connection with Khashoggi’s killing.

#SaudiArabia

On site with summ: https://www.lawfareblog.com/biden-administration-recognizes-mbss-immunity-khashoggi-case

New study from Ontario and Quebec which isolated pathogens causing tick-borne illness from ticks and small mammals. Results: plenty of Lyme (Borrelia burgdorferi) and some Babesia. A surprise: some samples positive for Rickettsia rickettsia, the agent of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which is not supposed to occur this far north!

Tick-borne illness was once rare in Canada and is now becoming common, largely as a result of #climatechange. #Lyme #tickborneillness
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vbz.2022.0036

Check out this epic piece in The New Yorker by @elizkolbert . ‘Climate Change from A to Z: The stories we tell ourselves about the future’.
Because of the alphabetical presentation, the article winds a non-linear path through the past, present, and future, with narratives of the underlying physics, natural sciences, history, politics, tech, and what we tell ourselves about the future of #ClimateChange.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/28/climate-change-from-a-to-z

How much of Canada’s ongoing climate failure is caused by oil and gas industry pollution?

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/11/21/analysis/how-much-canada-ongoing-climate-failure-caused-oil-gas-sector

#ClimateEmergency #pollution #ecology #environment #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCatastrophe
#ClimateChange #climate #canada

Unusually warm lakes lead to mammoth snowfall

Upstate New York digs out from one of its biggest November lake-effect snows on record

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/11/unusually-warm-lakes-lead-to-mammoth-snowfall/

#ClimateEmergency #pollution #ecology #environment #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCatastrophe
#ClimateChange #climate #snowfall #NewYork #USA #US

#IMO is developing a crucial role to achieve a massive reduction of #GHG emissions on atmosphere. Shipping is responsible for approximately 2% of global #CO2 emissions and IMO is actually taking direct actions to reduce these emissions at least 50% before 2050. #ClimateAction #UN #mastodon #environment #climatechange #climatecrisis #climateemergency

Simple infographic showing GHG emissions atmospheric balance

Erik Button, 2022

#ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ClimateChange #Sustainability

Junk Carbon Offsets Are What Make These Big Companies ‘Carbon Neutral’.
For more than a decade, Credit Suisse Group AG has claimed to be “carbon neutral” in its operations. Every gleaming office tower, every flight by an executive — all the emissions generated directly by a global banking giant are supposedly counterbalanced. A closer look at the Swiss bank’s #sustainability reports tells a different story: its sweeping claim is based on purchases of low-quality carbon offsets that experts rate as useless.
#climate #climatechange #cop27
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-carbon-offsets-renewable-energy/?sref=Ptu9QECN&leadSource=uverify%20wall

If you're interested in #politics, #global, #news, #climatechange, #ukraine, #science, #health and more, give us a follow here.

And if there's something we're not covering, drop us a line in the comments and we'll send it to the staff.

#Europe’s #Cities Are Getting More Crowded—That’s a Good Thing
The sprawling mass of #suburbia has been a disaster for the #environment. But now smaller, denser cities herald a renaissance in #city living.
https://bit.ly/3UUfaat #climatechange #climatecrisis #climate

120 years of climate change animated

Countries turn from mainly blue to mainly red in more recent years, illustrating the rise in average temperatures in that country.

For each country, the average temperature in 1971-2000 is set as the boundary between blue and red colors, and the color scale varies from +/- 2.6 standard deviations of the annual average temperatures between 1901-2000.
"Warming stripe" data: https://showyourstripes.info/c/globe
Viz: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hdoxkv/oc_animated_map_showing_120_years_of_climate/
#Climate #ClimateChange

Less than a week here so I’m still learning and fine tuning. While I definitely need to find my #blackmastodon community, I’m open to and interested in these other communities as well:
#ScreenWriting #TVwriters #ClimateChange #Science #Writers #SciFi #HorrorMovies #SocialActivist #WomeninFilm #theater #lgbtqally

Late to the party, but Emily Atkin wrote an excellent piece for her newsletter HEATED about the climate impact of Elon Musk, the one man who has supposedly done more good for the climate than anyone else. (Spoiler alert, that’s total horseshit.) #climatechange #ElonMusk https://open.substack.com/pub/heated/p/the-climate-case-against-elon-musk?r=gtavi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

@amywestervelt John Oliver did a whole segment on Carbon Offsets. https://youtu.be/6p8zAbFKpW0
#climatechange #johnoliver #carbonoffsets

I love all of you and I want nothing but the best for each of you, particularly those on infosec.exchange. I understand that Mastodon isn't Twitter, that DMs are end-to-end encrypted, that we are spread across different instances and it can be hard to find your friends, and that an instance can go away at any time, and that translating posts doesn't work correctly, and there is no native giphy support, and that some instances are overwhelmed and super slow, and that you don't think the federated model can scale to a billion users, or that it doesn't support full text search of every post and account, or that we can't comply with the GDPR, or that we don't support quote tweet style functionality, or that we shouldn't collect IP addresses, and many other things.

The fediverse is a work in progress. I've been here for going on 6 years. In that time, it's come a long, long way. That said, Mastodon is not going to appeal to everyone. The decisions I make are not going to appeal to everyone. No one is forcing you to be here. No one is forcing you to disclose your personal secrets into a network of federated servers running by volunteers and hobbyists. NB: this is not Twitter. It has some similar functionality, but it is not Twitter. Parts of it are better, IMO, and parts are not. The security community is generally among the most skilled and competent IT people the world has to offer. Mastodon is open source. Do you see where I'm going?

I set this instance up a long time ago for reasons I don't even remember. I have poured my soul into this thing because I believe in the importance of this community. I have effectively peaked in my career as a CISO and I and my family live well. I am not running this instance for fame, money, a better job, or anything other than wanting to foster a community of people that can learn from each other and make the world a better place. That's it.

As I've said in several recent interviews, I felt particularly obligated to ensure the security community had a good handing spot in the fediverse as everyone was running for the doors in Twitter. We've grown from 180 active users to about 30000 in the span of 3 weeks. I do not expect everyone to stay. Some will set up their own instances. Some will move to one of the other excellent security focused instances. Some will give up and move to on to some other social media. And that is OK. While I am super excited to see the buzz here, I don't have subscriber targets, engagement targets, retention targets, or anything else. The only metric I hold myself to is whether I think this is serving a useful purpose to the community.

I appreciate all of you, regardless of where you land. Infosec.exchange has been here for a long time and will continue to be here for you.

Interesting development: “Poynter is in talks with the journa.host team about bringing the social network under its umbrella. For the overworked administrators of the server, it would come as a relief.”
“We don’t have the time to be doing this,” Mr. Weiss said. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/style/mastodon-twitter-adam-davidson.html @bernstein @nytimes #journalism #media