Petr Pavel in Sydney

 Coffee is a language in itself…

The Bohemians tend to like first name from Petr Pavel to Jozef Imrich

Past Lowy Lecturers have included leaders such as Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson, David Petraeus, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and Jake Sullivan, as well as four sitting Australian prime ministers, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in 2023. 

 

Tickets are $300 for members/subscribers or $350 for non-members. 

Event tickets include dinner and drinks. Dress code is lounge suit.

The Lowy Institute is grateful for the support of our event partners AWS and Mercer.

 

We hope to see you at the 2024 Lowy Lecture and Dinner.

We’re thrilled that @prezidentpavel of the Czech Republic will deliver the 2024 Lowy Lecture in Sydney on Nov 26! With decades of military & political leadership, he’s a leading voice on Europe's role in global security. Join us for this flagship event

The Rural Ski Slope Caught Up in an International Scam

One Type of Fiber May Have Weight Loss Benefits Similar to Ozempic. “The findings align with another recent study by Duca, which fed barley flour, rich in beta-glucan, to rodents. Even though the rats continued eating just as much of their high-fat diet as before, their energy expenditure increased and they lost weight anyway. 

A similar outcome was observed in mice fed beta-glucan in the new study. These animals also showed increased concentrations of butyrate in their guts, which is a metabolite made when microbes break down fiber. 

Butyrate induces the release of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), which is the natural protein that synthetic drugs like Ozempic mimic to stimulate insulin release.”

We’re about to enter the Digital Dark Ages

Business Insider via MSN: “The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post. Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear. 

Here’s the gist: Google used to have an online service that generated pithy, user-friendly versions of long, commercially unwieldy uniform resource locators — the key addresses that identify everything on the web. Shorter URLs are easier to track and better for online commerce. Google stopped shortening addresses back in 2019, but the concise URLs it had already created kept right on doing their job. 

Click on one and it would take you to the right webpage, the way it’s supposed to. No more. In the blog post, Google announced that as of next year, all of the existing shortened URLs are getting turned off. Poof. And on the web, if your URL doesn’t work, you might as well not exist. You are unreachable. Without laborious renaming, everything behind those links — billions of them, a decade of digital content — will become inaccessible. Gone. Ask not for whom the 404 message tolls. Now, rendering a bunch of web content invisible isn’t the end of days. Not by itself. 

The problem is, this kind of thing keeps happening. And it’s getting worse. Social networks go bankrupt. Digital journalism sites close up shop. Companies pull their online products. Links rot. Files get not found. The cloud, as wags have noted, is really just “someone else’s computers.” And when clouds get turned off, not even the silver lining is left to tell the tale…”

See also: Internet Archive Services Update: 2024-10-17 [Washinton Post piece] Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security.  The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable. The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed, as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications.  

Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online. In coming days more services will resume, some starting in read-only mode as full restoration will take more time.  We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach to rebuild and strengthen our defenses. Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure. 

As a library community, we are seeing other cyber attacks—for instance the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and now Calgary Public Library. We hope these attacks are not indicative of a trend. For the latest updates, please check this blog and our official social media accounts: X/Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Foreign Malign Election Meddling Persists but Struggles to Gain Traction

 

Why millions of Americans avoid the news and what it means for the election

Nieman Lab: “We are seeing a huge divide between people who are interested in news and those who are not, and I suspect that this divide is intensifying…Benjamin Toff is one of the leading experts on the rise of news avoidance and one of the authors of this recent book on this issue, based on survey data and interviews with people in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He was also the leader of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s own Trust in News Project and is now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. 

As Election Day approaches in the U.S., I spoke to Toff about why news avoidance may be shaping this year’s election, how candidates are trying to reach these elusive audiences, and what news organizations are doing to reach those who don’t follow the news in its current form. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Benjamin Toff: According to this year’s Digital News Report, up to 43% say they avoid the news in some form. It doesn’t mean that 43% of the country is not consuming any news at all. But it’s a sign of a clear decline in interest in news. 

There is a smaller group of people that we call consistent news avoiders. They consume news less often than once a month or never, and this group is around 8% of the U.S. public, which is still millions of people…

Compulsory Voting’s American History

137 Harv. L. Rev. 1138 – “Voter turnout was higher in the 2020 U.S. presidential election than it had been in 120 years. Nearly sixty-seven percent of citizens over eighteen voted that November, exceeding rates that hovered around sixty percent in the twenty-first century and never broke sixty percent from 1972 to 2000. Some pundits have read this recent record as a triumph. 

But it can also be seen as a travesty: even with the best turnout since 1900, nearly eighty million eligible voters stayed home. Slim turnout has long prompted reform efforts. Yet the United States has always shied from one direct solution: requiring everyone to vote. “Compulsory voting” — where legislatures require attendance at the polls, often enforced by fines or penalties — exists in around two dozen countries, but nowhere in America, relegating the idea to “goo-goo reformers” and law review notes. 

Recently, however, compulsory voting has entered mainstream debate. President Obama floated the idea in 2015 to fight money in politics and diversify the electorate. A 2018 New York Times article piqued interest in Australia’s mandatory voting system. 

And in 2022, E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport published a popular book arguing that “universal civic duty voting” will end voter suppression, improve representation, and boost belief in government. Their work has inspired legislators in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Washington to introduce compulsory voting bills.

Compulsory voting may not yet be on the horizon. But the recent wave of advocacy has given the issue a greater spotlight than it has had in a century. Amid this momentum, we have much to learn from exploring compulsory voting’s overlooked American history. From the colonies to the Progressive Era to the twenty-first century, Americans have seriously considered making voting a duty of citizenship. That history helps illuminate the depth of democratic creativity in our Progressive past. And, given our crises of democracy today, that past should push us to keep reviving this powerful policy today.”

 

Your Vote Is Safe

TIME: “As Nov. 5 approaches, former president Donald Trump has left little room for doubt about his intentions. He will almost certainly declare victory on election night, as the votes are still being counted. He may turn out to be right. But if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, Trump will reject the result as corrupt and launch a scorched-earth campaign to overturn it. This plot is so well telegraphed that it barely counts as a prediction. 

Trump has stated repeatedly that he cannot lose unless there is “massive fraud”—and, separately, that the election is “rigged,” with a “bad voting system.” As he told the Fraternal Order of Police on Sept. 6: “We win without voter fraud, we win so easily.” Voters, by that reckoning, can make no other legitimate choice. That upside-down view of elections may still have the power to shock, but after Trump’s response to defeat four years ago it cannot be called surprising. 

Perhaps one candidate will win so conclusively that no reasonable person can doubt it. But pollsters continue to assess, as they have for months, that the presidential contest is too close to call, and a narrow win in the current environment is cause for concern. 

Public opinion surveys show that many Americans are not sure whether to trust the machinery of elections, and many flatly say that they do not. Barely half of those surveyed in a September NORC poll said they were confident of an accurate vote count. That is nothing like a normal number, historically. 

We are embarking on a presidential election in which tens of millions of Americans disbelieve the results in advance. The 2020 election, relatedly, was the only one in American history which the loser refused persistently to concede. The partisan split—close to 80% of Democrats, but just 30% of Republicans, have faith in the vote count—reflects the cumulative damage of countless lies. 

As the American experiment nears its semiquincentennial, is it capable of holding a secure election with a trusted process and a widely accepted result? If the outcome is not to Trump’s liking, can democracy defend itself against another attempt to overthrow a President-elect?..”

Your Guide to Voting in the 2024 Election

• Everything You Need to Know About Voting in the 2024 Election
• How to Survive Election Season Without Losing Your Mind
• Why Hand Counting Ballots Could Create an Election Disaster
• How to Protect Yourself from AI Election Misinformation 
• How to Read Political Polls Like a Pro

Foreign Malign Election Meddling Persists but Struggles to Gain Traction

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies(FDD): “In September 2024, FDD published a report documenting Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence operations targeting the 2024 U.S. elections. This follow-up report details the ongoing efforts of U.S. adversaries who seek to undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral process in the weeks leading up to the November election. 

To raise public awareness and aid efforts by the U.S. government and research community to track these campaigns, this report documents new content from several significant, previously exposed influence operations. It also shows that many of these operations appear to have failed to gain significant traction.The new content described in this report follows a well-established pattern: 

Russia continues to criticize Vice President Kamala Harris heavily and promote former President Donald Trump. Iran criticizes both candidates but generally favors Harris while criticizing Trump. China criticizes both candidates, often using antisemitic tropes to allege that Israel controls both candidates. Both government-affiliated and independent researchers have documented much of the infrastructure of Russian, Iranian, and Chinese campaigns, including domains and social media accounts. 

To date, these researchers have largely exposed foreign malign influence operations before their narratives and posts went viral. Nevertheless, the U.S. government and social media platforms should act more quickly to dismantle the known infrastructure associated with influence operations, including domains and social media accounts. 

Americans must avoid either overestimating or underestimating the severity of the threat of foreign influence to U.S. elections. Accordingly, FDD continues to publicize ongoing influence operations while carefully documenting their limited reach. 

To facilitate balanced appraisals, the U.S. government should similarly provide metrics or estimations of reach and impact whenever it shares information with the public about malign influence operations. Americans must remain vigilant without becoming fearful…”

 Trump Says Jack Smith Should Be Thrown Out of the Country, Suggesting He Believes You Can Deport American Citizens—and That in a Second Term, He’ll Try

Media Monitoring Guide Everything You Need to Know

Muck Rack – Media monitoring is the practice of listening, watching, and tracking media coverage and conversation about your organization, your industry, your competition, and topics that relate to your industry.

Table of contents

• What media monitoring means in PR
• Why is media monitoring so hard?
• What to monitor and where to start
• What functionality to look for

See also Washington Post – Misinformation is everywhere this election. Can you tell what’s real? Test your skills at spotting online falsehoods.

Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind

The New York Times unlocked article Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now he’s alarmed by what he sees in global politics — including Trumpism…Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,”traced the internal political forces that led the French to collaborate with their Nazi occupiers and compelled France to reckon fully with its wartime past…Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. 

But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”

• See also Washington Post – Tucker Carlson says father Trump will give ‘spanking’ at rowdy Georgia rally “Daddy’s home!” the crowd chanted when Donald Trump took the stage in the swing state of Georgia less than two weeks from Election Day.
• See also The Status Kuo – John Kelly Speaks Out. The retired general and former Trump Chief of Staff goes on record, and in person, in a series of interviews.
• Historian and scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has a new book out called On Freedom (Bookshop.org), a companion to his 2017 bestseller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Kottke: Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means — and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: 
• We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to — the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.