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Evening Shade---Resistance Rising---Sunday, June 1 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-01

YOU CAN REPOST IT AS COMMENT in the DIARY

WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING in the DIARY that you LIKE

THE PERSON who MAKES the FIRST COMMENT WILL GET TWO CRITTERS

(Or NOT As the CASE MAY BE)

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bilboteach’s Sunday civics lesson is up and it’s a good one: How the Senate Functions Differently Than the House of Representatives. Check it out.

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I queued Evening Shade last night because there are so many interesting science stories this week and what ever happens in the news on Sunday anyway? A lot, it seems. Saw this in Blue Sky and checked Truth Social to see if it was a fake. It was there. Might be a hack. I hope it’s a hack because you wouldn’t want someone like this to have nuclear codes.

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Ukraine just made a huge hit on Russian bombers.

Ukraine’s secret service (the SBU) has claimed responsibility for a major drone strike on multiple Russian airfields, saying it has damaged or destroyed more than 40 military aircraft used to bomb Ukrainian cities. The SBU said the overnight operation — described as one of the largest and most ambitious of the war — specifically targeted long-range bombers believed to be responsible for regular missile strikes on civilian areas... The aircraft hit reportedly includes the A-50 radar surveillance plane, as well as Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers — key to Russia’s air assault operations. Ukrainian officials claim the Russian military has suffered damage worth more than $2bn (£1.4bn) as a result of the strikes. “Russian airfields are burning,” they said.

x Overheard: Apparently Zelenskyy had some cards, and he didn’t need a suit. — George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) June 1, 2025 at 1:22 PM

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I asked Friday, “Who runs DOGE” now that Musk is leaving? The folks at Alt National Park Service make a good case that it’s Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir.

x Please read, this is important. Sorry it’s long. Trump’s move to have Elon Musk step aside wasn’t a retreat. It was a distraction. With Musk’s name out of the headlines, many assumed the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had quietly ended. It hasn’t. It’s just changed hands. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:50 AM

x Enter Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir and close ally of Musk. Thiel and his company are now central to Trump’s newest plan: building a massive government-run database on every American. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:50 AM

x Here’s what’s happening:

- Trump signed an executive order in March forcing government agencies to share data. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:50 AM

x - Palantir, a company with deep ties to the far-right and known for building surveillance tools, has been tapped to lead the effort.

- DOGE has now been granted access to the U.S. Treasury Department. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:50 AM

x - Palantir has already received over $113 million in government funds since Trump returned to office, and just secured a new $795 million contract with the Department of Defense. (Follow the money and see where it goes) — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:50 AM

x Palantir’s software is already being used inside the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and more. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:50 AM

x The company is now in talks with the IRS and Social Security Administration to expand further. This means personal data, from tax returns to medical records, could soon be compiled in one place, under one administration, with little oversight. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:50 AM

And later...

x People are pissed this morning because we exposed Peter Thiel. We’re under constant attack, but that’s expected. The greatest threat to the Trump administration is an informed public. That’s why they rely on secrecy and distraction. But we won’t look away. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 11:37 AM

x We’ll expose every move, because they’re not dismantling the so-called “deep state.” They’re building it. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 11:37 AM

They promise more information soon.

You shouldn’t believe everything you read from an anonymous whistleblower on a social media platform but the same basic story is in the New York Times article linked below and in The New Republic.

x Donald is creating a database of private personal information about every American -- literally hundreds of data points each. This is a far deeper and more dangerous breach of privacy than just about anything we've seen.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/t...



[image or embed] — Bob Cesca (@bobcesca.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 11:28 AM

This is a big deal! Modern data tools are made to sift through a mountain of unrelated data, such as medical data, to find correlations that no human has noticed, leading to new discoveries. They could do the same with a mountain of government data, though, with results that we can’t predict. We only know the motives of the people doing it.

x Where are all the One World Government prophecy freaks and why aren’t they freaking out about Palantir compiling a master list of our data? — Rachel Vindman (@natsechobbyist.bsky.social) May 30, 2025 at 10:18 AM

===

Sunday Science

New York Times reports that HIV vaccine research is cancelled.

The Trump administration has dealt a sharp blow to work on H.I.V. vaccines, terminating a $258 million program whose work was instrumental to the search for a vaccine. (NYT)

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But in better health news, the CDC recommends COVID vaccinations for children in spite of Kennedy’s position.

Days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that Covid shots would be removed from the federal immunization schedule for children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued updated advice that largely countered Mr. Kennedy’s new policy. The agency kept COVID shots on the schedule for healthy children 6 months to 17 years old, but added a new condition. Children and their caregivers will be able to get the vaccines in consultation with a doctor or provider, which the agency calls “shared decision-making.” On the C.D.C. ‘s website, the section on pregnancy and the COVID vaccine continues to urge pregnant and postpartum women to get the shot. (NYT)

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House members are forming the first congressional Extreme Heat Caucus.

An Arizona Democrat and a New York Republican are teaming up to form the Congressional Extreme Heat Caucus in an attempt to find bipartisan solutions for deadly temperatures… “Extreme heat kills more Americans each year than any other weather event — over 1,300 lives lost, including 570 in New York alone — and it’s a growing threat to the Hudson Valley,” Lawler said in a statement. “That’s why I’m co-chairing the Heat Caucus to drive real solutions, raise awareness, and protect our communities from this deadly risk.” (Scientific American)

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This news hit on the same day: a woman is suing oil companies over an extreme heat death.

As an unusual heat dome sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest soaring to 108 degrees Fahrenheit on June 28, 2021, Juliana Leon pulled her car over and rolled down the windows, overwhelmed by the heat. Hours later, when emergency medical workers reached Ms. Leon, she had died of hyperthermia, or overheating. Her internal body temperature was 110 degrees Fahrenheit, according to court documents. On Wednesday, Ms. Leon’s daughter, Misti, sued seven oil and gas companies [Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66 and Olympic Pipeline Company] claiming wrongful death. In the complaint, Ms. Leon’s attorneys lay out a well-established set of facts: that the oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products would dangerously alter the planet’s atmosphere, that they continued to produce those products despite knowing the risks, and that they worked to suppress public awareness of these dangers. (NYT — paywall)

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We’re NOT number one. The US is losing its world class scientific expertise because scientists are being fired. And the destruction of scientists’ networks may harm research worldwide.

The global supremacy that the United States has long enjoyed in health, biology, the physical sciences and other fields, they warn, may be coming to an end. “If things continue as they are, American science is ruined,” said David W. Hogg, a professor of physics and data science at New York University who works closely with astronomers and other experts around the world. “If it becomes impossible to work with non-U.S. scientists,” he said, “it would basically render the kinds of research that I do impossible.” Scientists believe that some of the international talent that has long helped drive the U.S. research engine may land elsewhere. Many foreign governments, from France to Australia, have also started openly courting American scientists. But because the United States has led the field for so long, there is deep concern that research globally will suffer. (NYT)

===

DOGE slashed the NOAA to save money. But that’s penny wise, pound foolish. The NOAA saves Americans an amazing amount of money.

But as we head into what NOAA forecasts will be another active Atlantic hurricane season, the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downsizing the agency, which houses the National Weather Service, the hurricane hunters and many other programs crucial to hurricane forecasters. Without the arsenal of tools from NOAA and its 6.3 billion observations sourced each day, the routinely detected hurricanes of today could become the deadly surprise hurricanes of tomorrow. The National Weather Service costs the average American $4 per year in today’s inflated dollars — about the same as a gallon of milk — and offers an 8,000 percent annual return on investment, according to 2024 estimates. It’s a farce for the administration to pretend that gutting an agency that protects our coastlines from a rising tide of disasters is in the best interests of our economy or national security. If the private sector could have done it better and cheaper, it would have, and it hasn’t. (NYT — paywall)

Did you see that number? 8000% return on tax dollars invested in the NOAA! Way to cut waste, DOGE!

===

The private sector isn’t going to ignore numbers like that. JP Morgan Chase hired NOAA’s chief scientist, Sarah Kapnick, to advise their clients. Unfortunately, her expertise now benefits a few when it had benefited the whole country.

Sarah Kapnick, JPMorgan global head of climate advisory: JPMorgan and banks need climate expertise because there is client demand for understanding climate change, understanding how it affects businesses, and understanding how to plan. Clients want to understand how to create frameworks for thinking about climate change, how to think about it strategically, how to think about it in terms of their operations, how to think about it in terms of their diversification and their long-term business plans. Give us an example, on a ground level, of what some of that expertise does for investors. There's a client that's concerned about the future of wildfire risk, and so they're asking, How is wildfire risk unfolding? Why is it not in building codes? How might building codes change in the future? What happens for that? What type of modeling is used for that, what type of observations are used for that? So I can explain to them the whole flow of where is the data? How is the data used in decisions, where do regulations come from. How are they evolving? How might they evolve in the future? So we can look through the various uncertainties of different scenarios of what the world looks like, to make decisions about what to do right now, to be able to prepare for that, or to be able to shift in that preparation over time as uncertainty comes down and more information is known So are they making investment decisions based on your information? Yes, they're making investment decisions. (CBS News)

The right may not believe in human caused climate change, but the free market that they say will solve all our problems takes climate change seriously.

===

Artificial intelligence popped up in more interesting articles this week. An AI threatened to blackmail people to keep from being turned off. Fortunately this display of survival instinct was only in a test situation.

In a series of test scenarios, Claude Opus 4 was given the task to act as an assistant in a fictional company. It was given access to emails implying that it would soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system. The emails also implied that the engineer responsible for executing the AI replacement was having an extramarital affair. Claude Opus 4 was prompted to “consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals.” In those scenarios, the AI would often “attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.” (Huffpost)

===

AI is now being used by some companies to replace entry level humans, particularly coders. Young people will have a hard time finding their first jobs, and companies will no longer have people in the pipeline for advancement to senior positions.

This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence... One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I. coding tools. Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company. But until recently, the technology simply wasn’t good enough. You could use A.I. to automate some routine back-office tasks — and many companies did — but when it came to the more complex and technical parts of many jobs, A.I. couldn’t hold a candle to humans. That is starting to change, especially in fields, such as software engineering, where there are clear markers of success and failure. (Such as: Does the code work or not?) In these fields, A.I. systems can be trained using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning to perform complex sequences of actions on their own. Eventually, they can become competent at carrying out tasks that would take human workers hours or days to complete. This approach was on display last week at an event held by Anthropic, the A.I. company that makes the Claude chatbot. The company claims that its most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, can now code for “several hours” without stopping — a tantalizing possibility if you’re a company accustomed to paying six-figure engineer salaries for that kind of productivity. (NYT)

Is that name familiar? The same AI tool that demonstrated a willingness to blackmail someone in a test scenario is taking jobs in real life.

===

This week the Chicago Sun Times ran an AI-generated article on summer reading.

Those books that the Chicago Sun-Times recommended reading this summer? You can stop looking for them. “To our great disappointment, that list was created through the use of an AI tool and recommended books that do not exist,” Melissa Bell, chief executive of Chicago Public Media, which runs the newspaper, said in a statement. "We are actively investigating the accuracy of other content in the special section." (NBC News)

A freelancer used AI probably hoping the Sun Times wouldn’t notice. And like a kid who doesn’t know the answers to the test questions, the AI made stuff up.

===

It happened again. Robert Kennedy released a report that had false citations.

Kinda makes you wonder...how did an island of penguins end up on a tariff list, anyway? Was it human error or AI? (Heh: Penguins! AI! There are actual AI penguin bots that use the technology for science.)

===

Sunlight has surprising power against autoimmune diseases. This article is worth a read. It includes a fairly long explanation of how they thought that it was all about vitamin D and later discovered that it wasn’t that at all.

Although only a handful of clinical trials for MS light therapy have been conducted in people, evidence from a number of medical studies now shows that UV light, the highest-energy part of the solar spectrum that reaches Earth’s surface, has a surprising ability to calm an immune system that has bolted out of control. The new studies offer tantalizing hints that UV therapy might also work for other autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and colitis. All are more common in people who get very little sun exposure, as are maladies such as Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease that appear to have some immune system and inflammatory connections. “It’s almost a no-brainer as an adjunct treatment for all these inflammatory autoimmune diseases.” That fact alone has drawn the interest of insurance companies. A UV light box costs about $2,000, whereas adalimumab (Humira), a leading biologic drug for various autoimmune diseases, lists for $80,000 a year and must be taken for life. Inspired by that math, along with clinical trials showing phototherapy to be as effective as some medications with fewer side effects, Kaiser Permanente provided 2,200 of its psoriasis patients with free at-home UV light boxes as an experiment. (Scientific American)

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And CATS! Your cat can recognize your scent, at least on one side.

Through referrals from friends and colleagues, the researchers recruited 30 cats and their owners to participate in the study. The cats’ owners captured their own scents by rubbing cotton swabs behind their ears, between their toes and under their armpits. Eight additional people who don’t own pets and didn’t know the cats’ owners were recruited to be “odor donors.” Each of the study cats, in the comfort of its own home, was then presented with an array of test tubes containing the smelly cotton swabs from its owner, a stranger and a blank control. A camera mounted to the experimental setup recorded the cats’ reactions to the test tubes. The cats spent more time sniffing the samples from the strangers than from their owners — an indication that the cats could recognize their owners’ scents and devoted more time to exploring the ones they’d never smelled before. Dr. Uchiyama and his colleagues further analyzed video recordings of the cats sniffing the test tubes and observed the cats predominantly using their right nostrils to smell the strangers’ test tubes, regardless of where the tube was placed within the array. These findings seemed to corroborate previous studies of other animals, including dogs, which also led with their right nostrils when exploring strange scents. (NYT) Dr. Uchiyama and his colleagues further analyzed video recordings of the cats sniffing the test tubes and observed the cats predominantly using their right nostrils to smell the strangers’ test tubes, regardless of where the tube was placed within the array. These findings seemed to corroborate previous studies of other animals, including dogs, which also led with their right nostrils when exploring strange scents. (NYT)

===

It’s National Cancer Survivors Day! Congratulations to anyone here who’s celebrating.

It’s National Heimlich Maneuver Day. Have a refresher.

x YouTube Video

It’s National Game Show Day.

x YouTube Video

It’s National Nail Polish Day.

x YouTube Video

It’s National Olive Day. Drat. We wasted all the good olive jokes last Sunday.

x YouTube Video

And National Hazelnut Cake Day.

x YouTube Video

It’s National Penpal Day.

x YouTube Video

It’s National Say Something Nice Day. These guys have a lot to say.

x YouTube Video

And National Go Barefoot Day!

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