Let's Know Things Por arte de portada

Let's Know Things

De: Colin Wright
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  • Resumen

  • A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

    letsknowthings.substack.com
    Colin Wright
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Episodios
  • Gaza Conflict Update

    Gaza Conflict Update
    May 21 2024
    This week we talk about Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Hamas.We also discuss Egypt, the Rafah Crossing, and Netanyahu’s motivations.Recommended Book: Going Zero by Anthony McCartenTranscriptIsrael, as a country, was founded as a consequence of, and in the midst of, a fair bit of conflict and turmoil.It was formally established in mid-1948 after years of settlement in the area by Jewish people fleeing persecution elsewhere around the world and years of effort to set up a Jewish-majority country somewhere on the planet, that persecution having haunted them for generations in many different parts of the world, and in the wake of widespread revelation about the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis in parts of Europe they conquered and controlled.Israel finally happened, then, in part because Jewish people had been treated so horribly for so long, and there was finally government-scale support for this effort following that conflict, and the realization of just how monstrous that treatment had become.The area that was carved out for this new nation, though, was also occupied and claimed by other groups of people.The British and French controlled it for a while in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, but before that it was ruled by the Ottomans as part of their Syria administrative region and, like the rest of their Empire, it was formerly a Muslim state.Thus, what serves as a hallowed day worthy of celebration for Israelis, May 14th, Israel's national day, commemorating their declaration of independence, for other people living in the region, that day is referred to as the Nakba, which translates roughly to "the catastrophe," marking a period in which, beginning that year, 1948, about half of Palestine's population of Arabs, something like 700,000-750,000 people either fled of their own volition, or were forced to flee by Jewish paramilitary groups who moved in to clear the locals leading up to the emergence of Israel, at first, and then by the newfound Israeli military, after the formation of the country.Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, people who didn't flee were massacred, and wells were poisoned to kill stragglers and keep people from returning.Ultimately, about 80% of the Arab Muslim population in what was formerly British-held Mandatory Palestine, and which was a Muslim region in a Muslim country before that were forced from their homes leading up to or just after Israel's Declaration of Independence.This, alongside the existing hatred toward Jewish people some regional leaders already had, mostly for religious reasons, sparked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which was just one of several and frequent full-scale military conflicts between Israel and its neighbors in the early days of its existence, the Israelis mostly on the defensive, and frequently targeted by surprise attacks by many or all of their neighbors simultaneously, even in the earliest days of their national founding.Israel, in part because of support from international allies, and in part because of its militarized society—that militarization reinforced as a consequence of these conflicts, as well—fairly handedly won every single war against, again, often all, of their Muslim neighbors, simultaneously, though often at great cost, and those victories led to a sequence of expansions of Israel's borders, and humiliations for their neighbors, which further inflamed those existing prejudices and fears.Israel has controlled the non-Israel territories of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip—all of them majority Muslim, and collectively referred to as the Palestinian Territories—since the aftermath of the Six Day war (which was one of those aforementioned, all of their neighbors attacking them all at once conflicts) in 1967.Israeli settlers have slowly established militarized toeholds in these areas, kicking out and in some cases killing the folks who live on the land they take, which is against international law, but generally allowed by the Israeli government.And though these areas were governed by the Palestinian Authority beginning in the mid-1990s, the PA lost control of Gaza in 2006, a more militant group called Hamas taking over practical control in the area at that time, ruling through violence and threats of violence, basically, despite the Palestinian Authority continuing to claim they run things there, too.On October 7, 2023, that more militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, Hamas, launched a sneak attack against Israel, hitting multiple areas along the Israeli border with the Strip, killing at least 1,139 Israelis and taking 252 people captive.Hamas said this attack was in response to Israel's abuses of Palestinian people, historically and contemporarily, while Israelis generally see this as an unprovoked attack on mostly civilians by a terrorist organization.What I'd like to talk about today is the conflict that's erupted since that attack...
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    29 m
  • La Niña 2024

    La Niña 2024
    May 14 2024
    This week we talk about ENSO, El Niño, and attribution science.We also discuss climate change, natural disasters, and the trade winds.Recommended Book: Titanium Noir by Nick HarkawayTranscriptThe field of attribution science, sometimes referred to as "extreme event attribution," focuses on figuring out whether and to what degree a particular weather event—especially rare weather disasters—are attributable to climate change.Severe floods and tornadoes and hurricanes all happen from time to time, which is why such events are sometimes referred to as once in a decade or once in a century disasters: the right natural variables align in the right way, and you have a disaster that is rare to the point that it's only likely to happen once every 10 or 100 years, but such rare events still happen, and sometimes more frequently than those numbers would imply; they're not impossible. And they're not necessarily the result of climate change.Folks working in this space, which is a blend of meteorology and the rapidly evolving field of climate science, do their best to figure out what causes what, and how those odds might have been impacted by the shifts we're seeing in global average temperatures in particular, and the knock-on effects of that warming, like shifts in the global water cycle; both of which influence all sorts of other planetary variables.The most common means of achieving this end is to run simulations based on historical climate data and extrapolating those trend-lines forward, allowing for natural variation, but otherwise sticking with the range of normal fluctuations that would have been expected, had we not started to churn so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere beginning with the industrial revolution.So if we hadn't done the Industrial Revolution the way we did it, what would our global climate and weather systems look like? They have a bunch of models with different assumptions baked into them that they have running, and they can simulate conditions, today, based on those models, and compare them with the reality of how things actually are in the real world, a world in which we did start to burn fossil fuels at a frantic rate, with all the pros and cons of that decision aggregating into our current climactic circumstances.This comparison, between a baseline, non-climate-change-impacted Earth, and what we see happening on real Earth, allows us to gauge the different in likelihoods for various weather systems and increasingly even specific weather events, like massive floods or hurricanes.It also allows us to ascertain what elements of a disaster or system are more or less likely, or the same, compared to that baseline Earth; so maybe we look at a regional heat wave and discover that it was a rare event made more likely by climate change, but that the intensity of the heat wasn't impacted—as was the case with a heat wave in Russia in 2010; climate change made the heat wave more likely, but had such a heat wave occurred, despite its low likelihood, in that non-industrial revolution scenario, the heat would have been roughly the same intensity as it was in real life.Both components of this system, attributing events and patterns to climate change, and confirming that they were not impacted, that they were just run of the mill bad luck, the consequence of natural systems, are arguably important, as while the former provides data for folks wanting to predict future climate change-related outcomes, and provides some degree of ammunition for the argument that climate change is making these sorts of things worse, which helps put a price tag on not moving faster to shift away from fossil fuels, it's also vital that we understand how climate and weather systems work, in general, and that we are able to set proper expectations as to what will change and how, as the atmosphere's composition continues to change, while also understanding what will remain the same, what various regions around the world need to be prepared for in a vacuum, leaving climate change out of it, and how our global weather systems work on a granular level, so that as outside influences like climate change, but not limited to climate change, act upon them, we can make better predictions about how that will adjust or overhaul the practical reality for people and ecosystems impacted by them.What I'd like to talk about today is a natural weather phenomenon that is expected to return soon, and how this phenomenon might change our latent, global weather patterns, for the better, for the worse, and for the neutral, and in turn how it might be changed by the climactic adjustments we're tracking using these simulations.—The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO phenomenon, is the monicker we've given to a collection of sea surface temperature and wind variations in the Pacific Ocean that, largely unpredictably, tweak the patterns of these systems from time to time, influenced by and influencing a large number of ...
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    17 m
  • GPS Jamming

    GPS Jamming
    May 7 2024
    This week we talk about APT28, spoofing, and hybrid warfare.We also discuss the Baltics, Tartu airport, and hacking.Recommended Book: The Middle Passage by James HollisTranscriptIn early May of 2024, the German government formally blamed a Russian hacking group called APT28 for hacking members of the governing German Social Democratic Party in 2023, and warned of unnamed consequences.Those consequences may apply just to APT28, which is also sometimes called "Fancy Bear," or they may apply to the Russian government, as like many Russia-based hacking groups, APT28 often operates hand-in-glove with the Russian military intelligence service, which allows the Russian government to deny involvement in all sorts of attacks on all sorts of targets, while covertly funding and directing the actions of these groups.APT28 reportedly also launched attacks against German defense, aerospace, and information technology companies, alongside other business entities and agencies involved, even tangentially, with Ukraine and its defense measures against Russia's invasion.This hacking effort allegedly began in early 2022, shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the head of the Russian embassy in Germany has been summoned to account for these accusations—though based on prior attacks and allegations related to them by Russia's intelligence agencies, and the hacking groups it uses as proxies, that summoning is unlikely to result in anything beyond a demonstration of anger on the part of the German government, formally registered with Russia's representative in Berlin.For its part, Russia's government has said that it was in no way involved in any incidents of the kind the German government describes, though Germany's government seems pretty confident in their assessment on this, at this point, having waited a fair while to make this accusation, and utilizing its partnerships with the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand to confirm attribution.This accusation has been leveled amidst of wave of similar attacks, also allegedly by Russia and its proxies, against other targets in the EU and NATO—including but not limited to the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Sweden.Many of these attacks have apparently made use of an at-the-time unknown security flaw in Microsoft software that gave them access to compromised email accounts for long periods of time, allowing them to, among other things, scoop up intelligence reports from folks in the know in these countries, sifting their messages for data that would help Russia's forces in Ukraine.This group, and other Russia GRU, their intelligence service, proxies, have reportedly targeted government and critical infrastructure targets in at least 10 NATO countries since the fourth quarter of 2023, alone, according to analysis by Palo Alto Networks, and experts in this space have said they're concerned these sorts of attacks, while often oriented toward intelligence-gleaning and at times embarrassing their targets, may also be part of a larger effort to weaken and even hobble intelligence, military, and critical infrastructure networks in regional nations, which could, over time, reduce stability in these countries, increase extremism, and possibly prevent them from defending themselves and their neighbors in the event of a more formal attack by Russian forces.What I'd like to talk about today is another sort of attack, allegedly also launched by Russia against their neighbors in this part of the world, but this one a little less well-reported-upon, at this point, despite it potentially being even more broadly impactful.—The Global Positioning System, or GPS, was originally developed in 1973 by the US Department of Defense. Its first satellite was launched in 1978, and its initial, complete constellation of 24 satellites were in orbit and functional in 1993.This satellite network's full functionality was only available to the US military until 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton announced that it would be opened up for civilian use, as well.This allowed aviation and similar industries to start using it on the vehicles and other assets, and normal, everyday people were thenceforth able to buy devices that tapped this network to help them figure out where they were in the world, and get to and from wherever they wanted to go.A high-level explanation of how GPS works is that all of these satellites contain atomic clocks that are incredibly stable and which remain synchronized with each other, all showing the exact same, very precise time. These satellites broadcast signals that indicate what time their clocks currently read.GPS devices, as long as they can connect to the signals broadcast by a few of these satellites, can figure out where they're located by noting the tiny differences in the time between these broadcasts: signals from satellites that are further away will take longer to arrive, and that time difference will be noted by a given ...
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    19 m
Política y Gobierno
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