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Ever since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, many analysts have worried about the durability of Western support for Kyiv. Not a week goes by without new reports of weakening resolve, war fatigue, or cracks in the coalition. Yet a year into the conflict, the West’s commitment to Ukraine is undiminished—and, measured by aid delivered, stronger than ever.

This unity is unprecedented and underappreciated, and it far surpasses the strongest periods of transatlantic cohesion during the Cold War. It runs across states, societies, and companies. Every EU and NATO member state except Hungary has rallied behind Ukraine, despite deep divisions that preceded the war—over Poland’s authoritarian drift, for instance, and the United Kingdom’s ill-tempered exit from the European Union. Troubled economies roiled by war-fueled inflation have not led any major political party to argue that the costs of backing Ukraine are too high or that it is time to accommodate Russia’s demands. Pro-Ukraine policies have passed electoral tests in Italy and Sweden, where governments have turned over but support for Kyiv has endured. French President Emmanuel Macron beat off a challenge from far-right opposition leader Marine Le Pen, who came to see her long-standing ties to the Kremlin as a liability and destroyed thousands of leaflets picturing her with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Investors may be wary about the elevated state of the stock market but M&G Investments manager Eric Lonergan said they will look back at this time as a ‘golden era of stability’. Citywire A-rated Lonergan, who is head of multi asset research at M&G, said ‘behavioural bias’ has kept investors trapped in a pessimistic mindset where they expect another recession, despite facts to the contrary. He believes the current economic backdrop in the UK, US, Japan and Germany is ‘near perfection’ with ‘stable and persistent growth, close to full employment and low inflation’, which would not have been dreamed of 20 years’ ago. ‘That is economic perfection,’ he said. ‘But you have this narrative of secular stagnation and that we will all be replaced by robots.' He added: '2% US GDP growth is not stagnation.’ Lonergan also believes investors are too pessimistic about technological advances that are being made, with the rhetoric geared towards job losses. ‘People see the jobs that may be lost but not those that may be created. If you look at economies with the greatest technological diffusion, they are close to full employment.’ Lack of growth and robots causing widespread unemployment are ‘two hypotheses that are false’, said Lonergan. ‘We have secular stability, where you have stable and consistent growth.’ This distortion in investors’ outlook is due to the residual memories of the 2008 financial crisis, which has left them ‘mentally scarred’, believes Lonergan. ‘Since the financial crisis, the system has been reacting like an organism that has been attacked, and it is trying to heal itself and prevent a reoccurred,’ he said. ‘The mental scars associated with 2008 will last a long time, which suggests when people look back [on today] it will be seen as a golden era of stability. But people are not thinking about that, people are thinking about 2008.’ Exploiting behavioural bias is the way which Citywire A-rated Lonergan aims to deliver returns through the three multi-asset funds he manages, M&G Episode Defensive + , and co-manages; Episode Growth + , and Episode Macro + . He argued that multi-asset manager cannot claim to have a ‘research edge’ as they ‘operate in the most information efficient part of the market’ and so he has turned to human psychology, which he described as ‘the least objective and analysed part of the financial market’. ‘We do not believe in forecasts and put a lot of emphasis on human psychology: how people think and feel and the errors they make, and on their perception of risk,’ he said. This has led to a contrarian investment approach where the areas that are seen as most at risk are the most attractive. ‘Everyone talks about the financial crisis, which means the probability of its happening again is very low, and that is a huge opportunity for investors,’ he said. Lonergan said he benefited from holding US banks post-crisis when people were concerned that they were too risky. Following the crisis, they were forced to increase their capital ratios and more conservative management teams were brought in, de-risking the banks and the investment. ‘You end up with a banking system that is de-risked and regulation that is on the side of the investor,’ he said. ‘People do not want a recession to happen again and when people are most afraid of a recession, the probability of it happening is at its lowest – that is the psychology of probability.’

(David, “How worried should you be about the federal deficit and debt?,” pg online @ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-worried-should-you-be-about-the-federal-deficit-and-debt/ //um-ef)

Is debt at that level a problem? For now, it isn’t. The U.S. government borrows trillions of dollars a year at very low interest rates on global financial markets, and there doesn’t appear to be much private sector borrowing that is crowded out by U.S. Treasury borrowing right now. Indeed, the fact that global interest rates remain very low while governments around the world are borrowing heavily to fight the COVID-19 recession suggests that there is still a lot of savings around the world, more than is needed to finance private investment. No one really knows at what level a government’s debt begins to hurt an economy; there’s a heated debate among economists on that question. If interest rates remain low, as currently anticipated, the government can handle a much heavier debt load than was once thought possible. And the recent increase in borrowing—while enormous—is a temporary increase intended to combat an emergency; it changes the level of the debt, but not its long-run trajectory.

(Sam, “How spending cuts will hit the U.S. economy,” pg online @ https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2023/05/30/how-spending-cuts-will-hit-the-u-s-economy-00099190 //um-ef)

But there was no appetite from either party to address big ticket items like Social Security, Medicare or defense spending. And once it became clear that the White House would largely block any raid on funds appropriated through Biden’s landmark legislative accomplishments — the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS — it assured that the macroeconomic impact of any deal would be negligible. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former chief economist to retired Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, on Sunday said the headline caps on regular, non-emergency discretionary spending have so many “caveats and asterisks [that] may render these figures mostly meaningless.” (That underscores why the deal has raised the hackles of many policymakers on the GOP’s right flank — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.) The cuts amount to “a rounding error” of GDP, Riedl told MM.

(John, “What Does the Debt-Ceiling Agreement Say About the U.S. Political System?,” pg online @ https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-does-the-debt-ceiling-agreement-say-about-the-us-political-system //um-ef)

Last Thursday night, when the U.S. Senate passed, by a vote of sixty-three to thirty-six, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, raising the nation’s debt ceiling until January 1, 2025, and capping some federal spending for a couple of years, it effectively ruled out the possibility of a U.S. debt default, at least for now, and brought a long-running political saga to an end. President Biden, in his first televised address to the nation from the Oval Office, hailed the bipartisan agreement as a sign of our political system’s health, saying, “I was told the days of bipartisanship were over and that Democrats and Republicans could no longer work together.” He praised Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House, who led the negotiations with the White House. “We were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another, and respectful with one another,” Biden said. “Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.” If we judge by Wall Street’s reaction to the debt-ceiling crisis, most investors agree with Biden that, for all the noise and theatrics that emanate from Washington, the American political system is still capable of carrying out some basic tasks that require bipartisanship, such as resisting the urge to blow up its golden goose—the U.S. bond market. During the past few weeks, as the “X-Date” approached, the markets remained pretty calm, indicating faith that a debt default wasn’t a serious possibility. And, on Friday, following the vote in the Senate, the Dow climbed seven hundred points. (To be sure, a strong payrolls report for May also contributed to this.) Amid all this good cheer, the debt-ratings agency Fitch sounded a discordant note. A couple of weeks ago, when the Biden-McCarthy talks appeared to be stalling, Fitch put the U.S. government’s debt on negative watch for a possible credit downgrade. (Such a downgrade has occurred only once: after the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, Fitch’s rival S. & P. lowered the country’s rating from AAA—the highest possible grade—to AA+.) On Friday, Fitch announced that it would not be reversing its decision to put U.S. debt on a negative watch. “Reaching an agreement despite heated political partisanship while reducing fiscal deficits modestly over the next two years are positive considerations,” the agency said. “However, Fitch believes that repeated political standoffs around the debt-limit and last-minute suspensions before the x-date (when the Treasury’s cash position and extraordinary measures are exhausted) lowers confidence in governance on fiscal and debt matters.” At Friday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about Fitch’s announcement. She pushed back on Fitch’s concerns, saying the debt-ceiling agreement insured that the U.S. government would continue to meet its financial commitments, and adding that the market for U.S. Treasury bonds “remains the safest, the deepest, and the most liquid market in the world.” This was clearly a prepared answer, and it suggested that the Biden Administration is irked that Fitch hasn’t reversed its decision. That’s an understandable reaction, especially given that, as Biden mentioned in his television address, he has managed to get other significant bipartisan legislation passed during his tenure, including a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill in 2021, and the two-hundred-and-eighty-billion-dollar chips and Science Act, in 2022. Biden’s world view, which he has stuck to doggedly since launching his Presidential candidacy, in 2019, is that, even as full-scale partisan warfare rages on social media and cable news, there are still enough reasonable people in Congress, and enough moderate voters in the country, who can be mobilized to keep the show on the road, and even get some constructive things done, such as subsidizing green energy and reducing the cost of insulin for seniors. (The debt-ceiling agreement preserved both of these policies.) Inside the 2020 Biden campaign, this argument got reduced to the mantra “Twitter isn’t real life.” But, to the President himself, fostering bipartisanship is a personal mission. “No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries but as fellow-Americans,” he said in his television address. “Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans, to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together to pursue progress, secure prosperity, and keep the promise of America for everybody.” Admirable sentiments. But the fact remains that the House Republicans recklessly manufactured a crisis to pursue their political ends and ended up achieving some of them. After vowing for months not to negotiate about the debt ceiling, the White House was forced to reverse course and make a series of concessions to reach a deal. As I argued last week, the agreement could have been a lot worse, but the process by which it was reached—extortion, basically—supported Fitch’s argument for staying on high alert, namely that “there has been a steady deterioration in governance over the last 15 years.” Fitch is essentially arguing that the U.S. political system is suffering from slow rot. As well as pointing to the repeated episodes of brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, the ratings agency cited “increased political polarization and partisanship as witnessed by the contested 2020 election,” and how a “failure to tackle fiscal challenges from growing mandatory spending has led to rising fiscal deficits and debt burden.” There can be no wholly reassuring response to these statements. Last week, as federal judges continued to sentence to prison participants in the January 6th riot on Capitol Hill, the man who instigated the violent attack was flying to Iowa and leading the 2024 G.O.P. Presidential primary polls by about thirty points. And, although the debt-ceiling agreement imposed tight caps on non-defense discretionary spending until fiscal 2025, it didn’t really affect the biggest drivers of higher deficits and debts, which include higher spending on contributory entitlement programs, the vast Pentagon budget, and a long-running failure to raise taxes to match rising spending, by, for example, taxing wealth or eliminating the upper income limit on Social Security contributions. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the budget deficit would rise from 5.8 per cent of G.D.P. this year to 6.9 per cent in 2033, despite assuming that the economy will grow steadily during that period. Such a trajectory would be unprecedented outside national emergencies (such as wars and pandemics) and economic slumps, and the budget-ceiling deal seems unlikely to alter it much. If the Republicans return to power, they are likely to make the fiscal outlook considerably worse by cutting taxes again, especially taxes on the rich, which is what they did during the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump administrations. When Republicans are out of office, they talk about reducing the deficit; when they have power, they introduce policies that increase it. This is a long-standing pattern, and there’s no compelling reason to assume that it will change soon. Fitch failed to mention this ongoing threat to fiscal stability, but it’s a key feature of the deterioration in U.S.-government finances over the past forty years, and the ratings agencies should be willing to point this out. Financial irresponsibility in Washington isn’t a symmetrical phenomenon.

With global temperatures rising and midterm elections approaching, 2018 is the year the climate movement must take bold action towards a fossil-free future. Across the country, young people face daily reminders that our society doesn’t serve our futures. We suffer from unemployment and underemployment that is well beyond the national average, with young people of color struggling disproportionately to find work and economic opportunity. We are straddled with historic student loan debts. And in a moment when we should be working quickly to avert climate catastrophe and transition to an inclusive, fossil-free economy, many of our elected officials remain passive as the Trump administration attacks our air, water and land. As youth leaders in the climate justice movement, we believe now is the time to embrace a bold political vision that addresses climate change while working to end racialized economic inequality. A centerpiece of that vision is a federal jobs guarantee, a policy through which the government directly employs anyone who wants a job but doesn’t have one. The jobs guarantee has deep roots in the U.S. progressive tradition and is seeing growing support from scholars and movement leaders who tout its potential to put Americans to work while helping to rebuild our infrastructure, schools and healthcare system. With Sen. Bernie Sanders developing a jobs guarantee proposal, as well as a score of down-ballot candidates and Democratic presidential hopefuls also voicing support, the policy is sure to feature prominently in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. Climate scientists say that the next few years may be the only ones we have left to avert catastrophic global warming. A jobs guarantee program with a strong focus on stopping and preparing for climate change — a climate jobs guarantee — might be the last, best hope to quickly marshal public support and resources behind climate action. Simply put, this is a can’t-miss opportunity for the climate movement — and for our generation. Toward a climate jobs guarantee Solving the climate crisis will be no easy feat. It will require massive investments, to the tune of trillions of dollars over the next few decades — to transition toward a 100 percent renewable energy economy; to overhaul how we farm, transport and consume food; to restore depleted ecosystems; and to empower the communities already affected by the climate crisis to adapt to changes that cannot be reversed. Each of these undertakings will also require massive job creation. A climate jobs guarantee has the potential to create a labor force that could be the engine of rapid decarbonization, and the services it generates can enhance communities’ resilience to climate impacts. Importantly, such a program can elevate those communities who have been systematically excluded from economic prosperity as well as those workers who risk being left behind by the transition to a renewable energy economy. A climate jobs guarantee could be the climate movement’s ​“Medicare-for-All” policy — a universal program big enough to address the massive and complicated crisis of climate change, but still tangible and popular among the vast majority of Americans. Like Medicare for All, a jobs guarantee is wildly popular. Polling firm Civis Analytics identified it as ​“one of the most popular issues [they’ve] ever polled,” with a majority of Americans’ support, and with disproportionate interest among low-income groups and communities of color, who tend to bear the brunt of unemployment, underemployment and climate chaos. While we’ve seen growing momentum around calls for 100 percent renewable energy and keeping fossil fuels in the ground, a jobs guarantee is the most promising means of popularizing the deficit spending and enlarged role of government that rapid decarbonization of the economy will require. Framing the climate movement’s efforts around empowering Americans from all walks of life to build an inclusive economy will not only garner more popular support for climate justice goals, it could also help build stronger relationships with labor, economic, social and racial justice movements which will likely also throw their weight behind such jobs program proposals. The climate jobs guarantee offers an opportunity to strike down one of the deepest fissures on the left, that between some labor and environmental activists. By hammering home the message that we can put Americans to work solving the climate crisis, we can help end the fallacy that has long undercut our ties with labor and other allies — that access to good-paying jobs is incompatible with the well-being of our planet. From vision to reality While climate advocates have much to gain from embracing a jobs guarantee, this is no one-sided alliance. Existing jobs guarantee proposals can be significantly strengthened by embracing a climate justice lens. A growing body of evidence suggests that many of the jobs needed to avert and prepare for climate change can be created relatively cheaply, and are jobs that last long term. More fundamentally, failing to curb and prepare for climate change will seriously compromise a federal jobs program, not to mention the stability of life on this planet as we know it. Superstorms, wildfires and droughts, which will worsen and multiply as temperatures rise, are already putting people out of work and destabilizing our economy. They also stand to cripple the infrastructure and healthcare system that many hope a jobs guarantee will support. And the low-income groups and communities of color that jobs guarantee proponents hope to reach will be hit hardest by extreme weather. Many jobs guarantee proponents mention tackling climate change as one of many social goods that such a program could produce, but they have yet to fully map out what they understand ​“tackling climate change” to mean. To ensure that climate change is meaningfully embedded in whatever proposal progressives coalesce around, the climate movement needs to play an active role in helping to guide the development of such a proposal, and mobilizing Americans to make it a reality. The climate movement must align around and articulate our priorities for a climate jobs guarantee and develop a strong case for how and why to include them in existing proposals. This will mean expanding the debate beyond its current focus on green infrastructure projects, which are essential, but cannot fully address the myriad ways Americans will experience climate impacts. Instead of new roads and seawalls, many communities will require other services to effectively adapt, including access to affordable, healthy food, care for the elderly and other vulnerable populations, and stronger school systems to enable younger generations to transition from climate-vulnerable livelihoods. Our generation is in desperate need of good, well-paid jobs and of a future that will be livable on this planet. And there is so much good work to be done to stop climate change. A climate jobs guarantee is the solution America needs for our overlapping climate and employment crises, but it’s up to our movements to build the political support to make such a policy a reality. Let’s get to work.

The looming food crisis starts with three primary causes: The global ‘just-in-time’ industrial food and supermarket system is not fit for purpose in guaranteeing food security. It is all about money, and not about human safety or nutrition. Its links are fragile and any of them can break, precipitating chaos – especially in big cities. The agricultural system we know and love is becoming increasingly unreliable owing to climate change, catastrophic loss of soils worldwide, shortages of water, and narrowing of its genetic base. Farmers are struggling with their own pandemics in the form of swine fever, armyworms, and locusts. This unreliability will become increasingly critical from the 2020s to the mid-century. The predatory world economic system now punishes farmers by paying them less and less for their produce, driving them off their farms and increasingly forcing those who remain to use unsustainable methods of food production. This is causing a worldwide loss of farmers and their skills and destruction of the agricultural resource base and ecosystem at a time of rising food instability (4). The reason that a food crisis is far more serious than either the coronavirus or its economic meltdown, is that the death toll is generally far larger. More than 200 million people have died in various famines over the last century and a half, and many of those famines led to civil wars, international wars, and governmental collapses. That is why we need to pay attention now – before a new global food crisis arises. Not brush it aside, as so many inept world leaders have done with the virus. The Spanish have a well-learned saying that “Lo que separa la civilización de la anarquía son solo siete comidas (5).” The French and Russian Revolutions both arose out of famines. WWII arose partly out of Hitler’s desire to capture Soviet farmlands in order to avoid another WWI famine in Germany. Many modern African wars are over food or the means to produce it. The Syrian civil war began with a climate-driven food crisis. Indeed, there is growing evidence that lack of food plays a catalytic role in around two-thirds of contemporary armed conflicts. As US former president Jimmy Carter has observed: “Hungry people are not peaceful people (6).” Food failures bring down governments and cause states to fail. In 2012 a drought in Russia and the Ukraine forced them to cut grain supplies to Egypt and Libya – where governments promptly fell to popular revolutions. It was a strange echo of history: in the third century, a combination of climate change and a pandemic caused a failure in grain supplies from North Africa, an economic crash and, ultimately, the end of the Roman Empire. While there is ‘no need to panic’ over food, there is a very clear and urgent need for plans to forestall major shortages around the world. Yet, there is very little evidence that governments worldwide are preparing to head off a food crisis, other than to reassure their citizens, like Trump, that there isn’t a problem. However, lack of trust by citizens in their governments has already prompted a global rush to stock up on staple foods which has ‘upended’ the vulnerable ‘just-in-time’ food delivery system in many countries (7)

Though much of the synthesis report echoes warnings scientists have issued for decades, the assessment is notable for the blunt certainty of its rhetoric. The phrase “high confidence” appears nearly 200 times in the 36-page summary chapter. Humanity’s responsibility for all of the warming of the global climate system is described as an unassailable “fact.” Yet the report also details how public officials, private investors and other powerful groups have repeatedly failed to heed those warnings. More than 40 percent of cumulative carbon emissions have occurred since 1990 — when the IPCC published its first study on the dangerous consequences of unchecked warming. Governments continue to subsidize fossil fuel use; banks and businesses invest far more in polluting industries than they do in climate solutions. The consumption habits of the wealthiest 10 percent of people generate three times as much pollution as those of the poorest 50 percent, the report said. Decades of delay have denied the world any hope of an easy and gradual transition to a more sustainable economy, the panel says. Now, only “deep, rapid and … immediate” efforts across all aspects of society — combined with still-unproven technologies to pull carbon from the atmosphere — will be able to stave off catastrophe. “It’s not just the way we produce and use energy,” said Christopher Trisos, director of the Climate Risk Lab in the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town and a member of the core writing team for the synthesis report. “It’s the way we consume food, the way we protect nature. It’s kind of like everything, everywhere, all at once.” But few institutions are acting fast enough, the report said. November’s U.N. climate conference in Egypt ended without a resolution to phase down oil, gas and coal — a baseline requirement for curbing climate change. Last year, China approved its largest expansion of coal-fired power plants since 2015. Amid soaring profits, major oil companies are dialing back their clean-energy initiatives and deepening investments in fossil fuels. Humanity is rapidly burning through our “carbon budget” — the amount of pollution the world can afford to emit and still meet its warming targets, the IPCC said, and it projected that emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure will make it impossible to avoid the 1.5-degree threshold Yet even as environmental ministers met in Switzerland last week to finalize the text of the IPCC report, the U.S. government approved a new Arctic drilling project that is expected to produce oil for the next 30 years, noted Hans-Otto Pörtner, a climatologist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute and a co-author of a dozen IPCC reports, including the latest one. “These decisions don’t match reality,” he said. “There is no more room for compromises.” Failure to act now won’t only condemn humanity to a hotter planet, the IPCC says. It will also make it impossible for future generations to cope with their changed environment. The report reveals thresholds in how much warming people and ecosystems can adapt to. Some are “soft” limits — determined by shortcomings in political and social systems. For example, a low-income community that can’t afford to build flood controls faces soft limits to dealing with sea level rise. But beyond 1.5 degrees of warming, the IPCC says, humanity will run up against “hard limits” to adaptation. Temperatures will get too high to grow many staple crops. Droughts will become so severe that even the strongest water conservation measures can’t compensate. In a world that has warmed roughly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — where humanity appears to be headed — the harsh physical realities of climate change will be deadly for countless plants, animals and people. “It’s as if we’re traveling on a carbon-intensive superhighway and we’re in the fast lane,” Trisos said. Unless people immediately pump the brakes on carbon emissions, we will zoom past the off exit for 1.5 degrees of warming — and there will be no turning back. Yet just like drivers who have missed their exit, humanity must strive to stay as close as possible to the 1.5-degree target, Trisos said. “We can still take the 1.6 exit, which will be better than 1.7.” “With every increment of global warming, the danger will increase,” he added. “As we leave it later and take hotter and hotter exits, the fewer options we have to thrive.”

A new groundbreaking discovery has been made within the most basic of resources. Scientists have just discovered what they have called “The Discovery of The Millennium”, and a huge revelation in human consciousness. Scientists from Germany now believe that water has a memory, meaning that what once was seen as a simple commodity has now been closely examined to reveal a scientific revelation, uncovering a mind-blowing truth. By examining individual drops of water at an incredibly high magnification, scientists were able to physically see that each droplet of water has its own individual microscopic pattern, each distinguishable from the next and uniquely beautiful. A scientific experiment was carried out whereby a group of students were all encouraged to obtain one drop of water from the same body of water, all at the same time. Through close examination of the individual droplets, it was seen that each produced different images. A second experiment was then carried out where a real flower was placed into a body of water, and after a while a sample droplet of the water was taken out for examination. The resulted produced a mesmerizing pattern when hugely magnified, but all of the droplets of this water looked very similar. When the same experiment was done with a different species of flower, the magnified droplet looked completely different, thereby determining that a particular flower is evident in each droplet of water. Through this discovery which shows that water has a memory, according to scientists, a new perception of water can be formed. The German scientists believe that as water travels it picks up and stores information from all of the places that it has traveled through, which can thereby connect people to a lot of different places and sources of information when they drink this water, depending on the journey that it has been on. This has even been compared to the human body, of which each is incredibly unique and has an individual DNA unlike any other. Whilst the human body is made up of 70% water, conclusions could be drawn from these new discoveries that human tears can hold a unique memory of an individual being, through the body’s store of water hosting a complete store of information that is linked to individual experience. Suggesting that everyone is globally connected by the water in the human body which travels through ongoing journeys, whereby information along the way is always stored.

Dr. Emoto found that when individual water crystals were presented with a variety of words and found that the crystals would change. The water was affected by by human language.

FJG to employ all people who want a job so that they are distracted when the gov is poisoning the water

Extinction (policy impacts)

Bostrom recently suggested another possibility, the “Vulnerable World Hypothesis,” Bostrom (2019) where a technological advance occurs that will by default lead to extinction. He suggests that this is concerning, but notes that it is unclear if there are in fact such technologies in humanity's future. It is far more clear, however, that there are already technologies or events which would lead to global catastrophic risks short of extinction, and it seems implausible that more will not be found. Such events would create widespread devastation, could at least severely limit humanity's potential future advancement, and would at the very least cause tremendous human suffering and death in the short term. Bostrom, 2003; Bostrom (2003), Parfit (1984)

The philosopher Martin Heidegger saw most clearly that modern technology has its own point of view which is completely separate from any other structure of human aims and purposes. The critical feature of modern technology is its willingness to treat anything as a resource to be reordered in the furtherance of other aims, usually its own. Heidegger, in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” concludes that modern technology is an independent force in human existence. It builds a new and incompatible order on top of what was there, primarily in order to extract and store energy for later uses (Heidegger, 1955, pp. 14-17).

The point of view of modern technology regards everything as a potential resource, as “standing reserve” to be used or reused later in other related processes. A forest has status only as a timber resource. Land itself is only a resource for the building industry. Even human beings themselves become “human resources” from this point of view. Or they become “consumers.” Or ill people become a “supply of patients for a clinic”. Many distinctive modern technologies embody this notion of “standing reserve” in their very conception. Thus, electric power, whether in the form of available current or batteries, is always entirely standing reserve, on hand for potential use. This way of looking at things, insofar as it ignores the previous pattern of processes, uses, and ends, is inherently “violent” in its effects on those processes, especially concerning the environment.

Achieving space colonization capabilities means obtaining sufficiently advanced technology for venturing beyond Earth and permanently sustaining human life there. In order to achieve that goal, maximizing the pace of technological development seems like an instrumentally desirable goal: The faster we technologically innovate and develop, the higher the probability of obtaining space colonization capabilities. However, the problem with such a technological push is that the increased pace of technological development might also result in an increased pace of existential risk creation.

As I argue above in subsection 2.1, anthropogenic existential risks correlate with human technological development. All non-natural existential risks are the result of our technological progress, and more technological progress is likely to beget more existential risks. Of course, this should not be misunderstood as a quasi-Luddite argument against all technological progress in general. Scientific and technological progress has made life enormously better and removed tremendous amounts of suffering from the world, to the bene t of current as well as all future generations. However, existential risks are an unprecedented challenge, and the more numerous and probable they are, the more difficult it is to mitigate them in time. In the context of space colonization, this issue is of elevated importance because, as I argue above in subsection 3.1, delaying space colonization has an almost imperceptible impact on the long-term future of humankind, whereas existential risks and our attempts at mitigating them (or failing to do so) has an enormous impact.

2. Novel Technologies Reframed as an Explore/Exploit tradeoff

Bostrom's recent “Vulnerable World Hypothesis” lists several ways in which “there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the 'semi-anarchic default condition.”’ He illustrates this with an analogy modeled on a classic type of explanation in probability theory, that of an urn from which we draw balls. In his analogy, each ball represents a technological advance, and the balls can be white, black, or any shade of gray – representing the impact on humanity. Since we do not know what the future of technology will bring, the distribution of the colors of the balls inside the urn is unknown. He then discusses four scenarios which posit the existence of a “black ball” technology drawn from the urn, which, unlike those found so far with positive effects or mixed effects of humanity, “invariably or by default destroys the civilization that invents it.”

This section turns to an empirical analysis of the forces of destruction, based on evidence from four cases of anthropogenic existential threats: nuclear war, climate change, bioengineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence. The analysis identifies three empirical trends in the evolution of the forces of destruction (see table 2). First, there are now three modes of human agency that constitute the threat of physical destruction: violence between human actors, destruction of the natural environment, and loss of control over technology. Second, the scale of physical destruction has reached the critical point at which it becomes an existential threat to human civilization and survival—the forces of destruction have become “total.” Third, the diffusion of technology has made it so nationstates no longer possess a monopoly over the forces of destruction—non-state actors have become potential “agents of destruction.”

Modes of Destruction

All no votes were from Republicans; 16 GOP members joined 217 Democrats to approve the bill.

But just half of the 16 Republicans who supported the legislation will return to a Republican-controlled House next year, and the measure is set to face significant headwinds.

The House of Representatives voted by a 233-191 margin on Thursday to pass the Puerto Rico Status Act, with all but 16 House Republicans voting against the measure. Every House Democrat voted for the bill.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who worked on the bill and is of Puerto Rican descent, presided over the vote. The bill would give voters in Puerto Rico the opportunity to vote in a plebiscite next November, allowing them to choose between statehood, independence, or to enter into a compact of free association with the United States. Lawmakers had long been working on the bill, and its addition to the calendar this week was unexpected. A handful of Republicans had co-sponsored the legislation, including Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida and Don Bacon of Nebraska. It also had the support of the territory's Republican Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón who serves as a non-voting representative for the island in Congress.

After the United States Supreme Court’s overwhelming decision validating (in an 8-1 vote) the exclusion of Puerto Rico residents from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in the case of José Luis Vaello Madero, the opportunity to unlock that access seems to be in the hands of the Democratic-majority Congress. The window, however, is short and uphill during Congress’s ongoing session ending in December.

The extension of SSI to Puerto Rico residents is currently included in three congressional bills, among them the budget reconciliation bill called “Build Back Better” (BBB), which contains US President Joe Biden’s social agenda. The bill, approved last November in the House of Representatives, includes the extension of the SSI program to Puerto Rico. The Social Security Administration (SSA), which manages SSI, estimated the extension would have an annual cost of $2.27 billion in 2020, out of the roughly $1.85 trillion total in the Build Back Better bill. In a Senate divided halfway and in which US Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the tiebreaker vote– the legislation, being a budget reconciliation bill, could be approved by a simple majority and avoid the filibuster rule, which typically requires 60 votes to bring a bill to a final vote. However, with Republicans in total opposition to the BBB, Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema halted —without taking a stance on the SSI extension to Puerto Rico— a bill that they considered too onerous.

What’s next: Even progressives acknowledge the 118th Congress isn’t going to be the one to pass Medicare for All.

"We got a big election next year, not just for the presidency. We have 33 Senate seats up for grabs," Rep. Jamaal Bowman said during a press conference last week.