Linked Posts

Short posts primarily intended to quote and/or comment on sites and articles around the web.

2024-12-19

🔗 Exposing the Imperial Class | Planet:Critical

What is the United States for?

Journalist Matt Kennard would argue the most powerful nation in the world exists to undermine democracy, deny national sovereignty, and funnel wealth to the financial elite. His book, The Racket, exposed the true nature of the American Empire, a nature the mainstream on both the Left and Right refuse to acknowledge.

Matt’s first appearance on Planet: Critical saw him exposing How Corporations Overthrew Democracy. Today, he reveals the complicity and active participation of the American State as a counter-revolutionary force in the world, giving numerous examples from almost every continent as to how the United States has sought to undermine the rule of law and democracy in order to secure resources, security and power for itself. We also discuss how difficult it is to broach these topics in the mainstream, with Matt giving a searing critique of major journalism outlets who take up space as seemingly leftist publications without ever challenging imperialism. We also discuss the nightmare in Gaza and how bearing witness to a genocide is radicalising people all around the world to take action. This is an episode about the lies we have been told—and how to fight the information war while we can.

An excellent interview.

2024-12-17

🔗 When suffering becomes an affirmation of life | The Electronic Intifada

Even in the darkest moments, when death looms large and life seems precarious, Palestinians in Gaza continue to fight. We rebuild what is destroyed, bury our dead and wake each day to an uncertain future. In doing so, we assert something profound: that our existence is more than just a series of tragedies. Our defiance, our survival, our resistance all speak to a deeper truth – that life, in all its pain and beauty, is worth defending.

The spirit of resistance and freedom in Palestine is awe inspiring.

2024-12-08

🔗 Street Justice | starbreaker.org

If I still believed in the rule of law, I would denounce his assassination. However, the rule of law protects men like Brian Thompson without binding him, and binds the rest of us without protecting us. Therefore — rule of law and the opinions of our leaders be damned — this asshole had it coming, and I instead celebrate his death.

Furthermore, I hope this is but the start. I want to see billionaires and CEOs living in fear of wildcat strikes and assassinations. It should be an occupational hazard for these overpaid, overprivileged self-styled “masters of the universe”. I certainly didn’t do it myself, but if they find the gunman and put him on trial, they’d better not put me on the jury. I might just vote to acquit, state’s evidence be damned.

Yep.

2024-12-2

🔗 Rewilding A Forest | Artist and Poet Maria "Vildhjärta" Westerberg - YouTube

Maria was a romantic, animal-loving, dreamy child who, growing up, had a hard time conforming to the demands associated with the trajectory towards "a normal life". As a young adult she became depressed, and was encouraged by her therapist to go for walks in the forest. The myriad of funny-looking twigs and sticks she found along the way immediately put her on a path to recovery. Now, 25 years later, she's a celebrated "twig poet" whose art is shown in galleries throughout Sweden. When a climate related crisis strikes the forest where she lives and works, she's forced into a new type of creativity in order to save the place that once upon a time saved her.

More of this please.

2024-12-1

🔗 El Salvador: The Innocent Victims | Under the Shadow, Ep. 4 | NACLA

From the episode description

In the 1980s, El Salvador was ground zero for the U.S. intervention in Central America. The United States  funneled over $6 billion to El Salvador in mostly military aid and police and security training throughout the country’s 12-year civil war, which  lasted from 1980 until 1992.

The violence and the U.S. support for the country's bloody authoritarian regimes had a deadly cost, claiming the lives of and tens of thousands of innocent victims.

A quote from the transcript, begins around 26:57:

“Less than a year into the Reagan administration, Monte Rosa and his elite US trained special forces, the Atlaquat Battalion, would carry out one of the single worst massacres, not just of the Salvadorian Civil War, but of all of 1980s Central America. Between December 11th and 12th, 1981, the battalion slaughtered 986 people in the community of El Mozote. More than half of them were children.

For the half of the US freaking out about immigrants coming from countries south of the US border, this entire series should be required listening. And for the other half of the country not freaking out about immigration, it should also be required listening because almost every US citizen I know, certainly everyone in my extended family, is entirely ignorant of US foreign policy throughout Central and South America. It's a policy that goes back to the Monroe Doctrine and the result is decades of arms deals and violent interventions that we are responsible for. This is not ancient history, it's today. It's still our policy in the Americas but it's our policy across the planet. This is American Empire, American Imperialism.

And to be clear, it was never about democracy. It is about capitalism.

2024-11-29

🔗 National Day of Mourning 2024 - YouTube

WHAT IS NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING?
An annual tradition since 1970, National Day of Mourning is a solemn, spiritual and highly political day. Many of us fast from sundown the day before through the afternoon of that day (and have a social after NDOM so that participants in NDOM can break their fasts). We are mourning our ancestors and the genocide of our peoples and the theft of our lands. NDOM is a day when we mourn, but we also feel our strength in action and solidarity.

Watched this yesterday. This is the way we should celebrate "Thanksgiving". Really inspiring to see this kind of energy. If you are a white middle class "liberal" in the US and feeling depressed, beaten or frustrated, I'd like to suggest that you watch this. THIS is what it is to fight. This is the long game of 532 years of resistance. Most of us in the US are descendants of settlers and a process of ongoing violent colonialism. This is our history, this not our land.

🔗 Under the Shadow Podcast | NACLA

This investigative podcast series takes listeners across Latin America to the scenes of some of the region’s most devastating, revolutionary, and historic moments. In Season 1, independent journalist Michael Fox dives deep into the past of Central America, uncovering the history of U.S. intervention and its lingering effects in the region today.

Want to understand immigration from Central and South America into the US today? Start here. Want to understand the origins of imperialism by the US? Start here. I've only listened to the first episode but based on that have no hesitation suggesting it. While you're there be sure to check out the work being done be the NACLA.

2024-11-28

🔗 Happy Native American Heritage Month From the U.S. Military

“Acknowledging Native veterans and Native contributions is terrific. And there are a lot of proud Native veterans. But it’s one of those gestures that is nice in theory but is, perhaps, meant to whitewash how we understand Native American history and how Native Americans ended up in the place that we did,” said Keith Richotte Jr., the director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona. “It doesn’t really address the fact that there was this longer history in which military violence was critical to the subjugation of Native peoples and maintaining the colonial project. It ignores the military’s efforts in the late 18th and 19th centuries to essentially destroy tribes, tribal nations, and tribalism.”

The US is good at whitewashing.

🔗 This Thanksgiving, Biden Should Grant Clemency to Leonard Peltier | Democracy Now!

The case of Leonard Peltier encapsulates the modern era of indigenous resistance. After centuries of genocide launched by Christopher Columbus and expanded by successive waves of European settlers, by the 1950s most of the surviving indigenous nations in North America had been contained in isolated and impoverished reservations. Hollywood appropriated, caricatured and monetized the vibrant mosaic of indigenous cultures. Many Native people moved to cities seeking economic opportunity but still faced racism and discrimination. Out of this, and amidst the civil rights and other social movements of the 1960s, the American Indian Movement, or AIM, was born.

In 2024 there is no justice for the indigenous people of the "Americas". Leonard Peltier, another of so many who have been subjugated in an ongoing process of settler colonialism. It's 2024 and the US is still mired in injustice and violence as its citizens feast. What a horror show.

2024-11-27

🔗 Rebuking The Washington Post For Whitewashing Genocide

After refusing to endorse a Presidential candidate last month, the Washington Post Editorial Board (“The Post”) published their encore abdication of duty by defending Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu against an ICC arrest warrant. “The ICC is not the Venue to hold Israel to account” the editorial board proclaimed. I took the time to carefully read their argument, hoping for some semblance of fact or truth in their words. What I found was a poorly written, illogically argued, propaganda piece full of deceptive omissions, out of context claims, bizarre contradictions, and flat out lies.

Not surprising at this point. Disgusting, yes, but not surprising.

2024-11-26

🔗 I’m a Climate Scientist. I Refuse to Give Up Hope | TIME

Yet the industry actively suppressed that research, while simultaneously secretly funding external groups to aggressively deny the science of climate change and sow doubt. These efforts have successfully provided cover for politicians to delay for decades the actions needed to phase out fossil fuels and expand non-carbon, climate-safe alternatives. Today, more fossil-fuel lobbyists than ever are attending and weakening the agreements at the annual U.N. climate summits, including the one just concluded in Baku.

We’re now experiencing the long-predicted consequences of that inaction and delay. Global temperatures are rising, extreme storms are worsening, food production and water supplies are threatened, and people are dying. And the economic and human impacts of even the relatively modest climate changes we’ve experienced so far are growing rapidly, with radical impacts      hitting the insurance, real estate, and food sectors.

I'll continue to do my part and will always urge others to do the same. But the vast majority refuse to act. We are in for the worst case scenarios. Our disregard for the future is contemptible.

🔗 "Do You Know What I mean by the Question Waking Up?" | George Monbiot | LBC Radio

'Shelagh Fogarty speaks to Guardian Columnist and Environmental Campaigner George Monbiot as commuters face rail and motorway disruptions, after Storm Bert caused flooding across the UK.

Communities in England and Wales are starting a "massive clean-up" after torrential rain and widespread flooding from Storm Bert over the weekend.

Residents in affected areas have said they do not believe the chaos will by cleared by Christmas, as the Environment Secretary said the UK's flood defences were in the "worst condition on record".

Hundreds of homes were left under water, roads were turned into rivers and winds of more than 80mph were recorded across parts of the UK.

Climate scientists have warned us for 40+ years. We've known this was coming. Our willingness to doom our children and future generations is criminal. And those of us in the 10%, the Global North, as we've seen with COP29 will continue to refuse responsibility for the rest of the planet who have not created the problem but are disproportionately paying the price.

Citizens in the US will shrug and rush off to their Black Friday deals. In 2024 deep in the crisis, we rush forward.

2024-11-25

🔗 US Senate rebuffs Bernie Sanders, supports weapons for war crimes | The Electronic Intifada

Republican proponents of laying waste to Gaza came out in force last week to defeat the effort led by Senator Bernie Sanders to cut off US weapons to Israel going to commit war crimes and other atrocities. These Republicans had help from most Democrats, though a surprising 19 Democratic and independent senators found it within themselves to vote against at least some weapons to Israel in the midst of the Gaza genocide.

The three resolutions pushed by Sanders sought to cut off 120 millimeter tank rounds, 120 mm “high explosive” mortar rounds and precision-guidance kits attached to bombs. Each of Sanders’ resolutions received 17 to 19 votes.

They are proudly going full on genocide but that's nothing new at this point.

2024-11-24

🔗 Wrinkled Time: The Persistence of Past Worlds on Earth – Marcia Bjornerud

Chronicling the way Earth archives Her geological history in the wrinkled strata just beneath our feet, Marcia Bjornerud orients us to the deep time-fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism held in the ancient and ongoing story of rock.

The perspective of time is a beautiful, comforting thing.

2024-11-20

🔗 Philosopher Michael Sandel on What Trump’s Win Says About American Society | Amanpour and Company

To make sense of the election, we must first understand the discontent that gave Donald Trump the victory...

A conversation between neo-liberals talking about the rot of civil society in the US. On the one hand, they're not wrong in their surface level description of the erosion of civil society, the loss of space for "class mixing" or the perception of "credentialed elites" that have become the face of the Democratic Party. But what is offered here is just the notion that what's needed is a progressive populist mask for the Democrats so that they'll perform better in the electoral political process.

This isn't about confronting the deep, systemic problems of the US. There's no critique here of the core problem of capitalism. This is just what adjustments need to be made to create the impression that the current social-political-economic system is fair and democratic.

2024-11-18

🔗 Back to the Backyard: So Much for “America First” Isolationism With Alexander Aviña - YouTube

Alexander Aviña will return to the show to discuss the "Monroe Doctrine" returning like it never left (because it didn't). And what we might read from some of Trump's proposed appointees. We will also discuss the notion that Trump represents an isolationist policy and what periods of so-called isolationism have historically meant for Latin America.

Alexander Aviña is a historian and professor. He is currently an Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University (ASU). His research focuses on twentieth-century Mexico, with an emphasis on revolutionary movements, the Mexican Left, state violence and terrorism, immigration, and the history of narcotics production and trafficking. He is the author of the book Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside.

An excellent and informative exploration of modern and historical US relations to Mexico, Central and South America. The discussion of the early revolutionary potential taken up my those in the Americas outside of the US seeking to strengthen democracy and a fuller expression of human rights even as the US sought to control such efforts.

2024-11-15

🔗 Ten Free Ebooks for Getting Free | HaymarketBooks.org

“What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.” —Mike Davis

At Haymarket, we believe that books are crucial tools in struggles against racism, imperialism, and capitalism—and for a better world. That’s why we’ve decided to make TEN key ebooks free to download: join us in reading these indispensable works of analysis, history, and strategy.

Wherever each of us live, work, and are in community: the time is now to build power and fight back, together.

🔗 The Red Nation Podcast - Indigenous Peoples’ Day vs. Empire

The Red Nation marks Indigenous Peoples' Day 2024 with an online discussion moderated by Red Power Hour's Melanie Yazzie
Panelists:
Vivi Camacho / Bolivia
Mohammed El-Kurd / Palestine
Monaeka Flores / Oceania
& Nick Estes / Turtle Island

As a descendent of white America the least I can do is to make an effort to understand indigenous history and the subjugation, land theft and genocide carried out in the white settler colonialism that began in 1492 and that continues today. What is our responsibility to justice today?

2024-11-12

🔗 Navigating the Storm: Some Thoughts on What Can Be Done to withstand the Neo-Confederate/Neo-Fascist Conquest of Power

It is my honest assessment that as of this writing we have a little less than two years before the neo-confederates and neo-fascists install a reactionary dictatorship by the end of January 2025. In light of my comments regarding this development, many people have been asking, and rightfully so, what should be done to confront the advance of this ultra-reactionary dictatorship over the US empire. 

What makes this question so hard to answer is the low level of organization existent in the US “left” at present. What further complicates the matter is the degree to which a significant number of forces nominally on the “left”, perhaps even the current majority, have been captured by the reformist ideology and politics of social democracy, which has a less than stellar track record at successfully confronting fascist and ultra-nationalist forces the world over. In the absence of organization and in a context dominated by the politics of bourgeois formality, respectability, identity politics and accommodation, by both social democrats and liberals, what can be done? 

An article by Kali Akuno originally posted on his website in January 2022. My previous two linked posts were interviews with Kali. If you're interested in organizing now is the time to be reading and listening to what Kali has to offer.

🔗 Shifting Focus: Organizing for Revolution, Not Crisis Avoidance - YouTube

We will discuss why the capitalist class sees fascism as a necessary form of rule due to capitalism's own contradictions at this stage of development. We will then discuss what this means in terms of organizing strategy, understanding that ultimately fascism is here and will continue to accelerate, until we can assemble a meaningful counterforce to bring about revolutionary transformation.

Another excellent interview with Kali Akuno, highly recommended.

2024-11-11

🔗 Where Do We Go From Here? Featuring Kali Akuno - YouTube

Here Kali Akuno offers thoughts on where we go from here after the re-election of Trump.

Our previous video discussion with Kali Akuno provides more of the nuts and bolts of the type of organizing he's callling for, but this conversation underscores the urgency of this program now that we are in the reality (at least in terms of electoral politics and control of government) that he predicted would come to pass.

Kali Akuno is a cofounder and codirector of Cooperation Jackson. He was the director of special projects and external funding in the mayoral administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus in this role was supporting cooperative development, the introduction of eco-friendly and carbon reduction methods of operation, and the promotion of human rights and international relations for the city. Akuno has also served as the codirector of the U.S. Human Rights Network, and the executive director of the Peoples’ Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) based in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. He was a cofounder of the School of Social Justice and Community Development (SSJCD), a public school serving the academic needs of low-income African American and Latino communities in Oakland.

If you're interested in a real response to what's coming, listen and share. Going forward community organizing is the key. Find your allies, like-minded neighbors, workmates and family members. Have dinner together and plan. Reach out to any existing community orgs that will be doing the same and help them.

Resolve and commit to yourself and your community allies.

2024-11-09

🔗 Small Good Things

It’s been beautiful to me how much I see people reaching out to each other and just metaphorically grabbing hands, connecting, letting each other know they’re not alone. I know there’s a lot of anger and fear - I feel it, too. It just means so much to me that the first impulse of the folks in my circle is to call out, “I’m here, we’re in this together, and I’m not going anywhere.” Community is restorative. And hopeful.

Well said Holly! Community, Solidarity, Mutal Aid. This is how we move forward.

🔗 A message to Americans from santa Solina (@santasolina) | TikTok

This post on Tik Tok to encourage and comfort Americans by Santa Solina, a young French antifascist woman is really wonderful.

2024-11-07

🔗 The mainstream western worldview pretends the Global South does not exist - Pearls and Irritations

Mainstream western politics and culture pretend the rest of the world does not exist. The mainstream western worldview shrinks the earth down to US-aligned countries and acts as though the billions of people who live in the global south do not share a planet with us.

You really see this illustrated in US presidential election season, when debates will feature five or six minutes on “foreign policy” with the remaining two hours dedicated to “domestic policy” and culture war wedge issues despite the the White House’s relationship with foreign countries having orders of magnitude more significant real-world consequences. Americans discuss election results as though the whole thing revolves around them and their feelings and how much more convenient or inconvenient the next president might make their lives, while Europeans discuss what the results might mean for NATO expenses and trade agreements. The fact that the next US president will be committing genocide, starving people with economic sanctions and increasing Washington’s stranglehold on earth’s population by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary barely ever enters into the conversation.

Much of my writing here in recent months has been a repetition of the fact that the foundation of the US is white supremacy, specifically the white settler colonialism and genocide followed by slavery. It is foundational to our history and our current policies. And it's not just the overt racism we see in MAGA, it's everywhere including the "liberal" half of the US that pretends to value multiculturalism.

2024-11-06

🔗 CrimethInc. : History Repeats Itself: First as Farce, Then as Tragedy : Why the Democrats Are Responsible for Donald Trump’s Return to Power

We have long argued that in the 21st century, state power is a hot potato. Because neoliberal globalization has made it difficult for state structures to mitigate the impact of capitalism on ordinary people, no party is able to hold state power for long without losing credibility. Indeed, over the past few months, upset defeats have undermined ruling parties in France, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Japan...

The Democrats have done everything they could to associate themselves with the ruling order: moving their politics to the right, shifting support away from supposed “leftists” within their ranks, demobilizing protest movements. It turns out that this was a losing wager at a time when people are hungry for change.

This is the way.

2024-11-05

🔗 Carl Sagan’s scientific legacy extends far beyond ‘Cosmos’

On Nov. 9, 2024, the world will mark Carl Sagan’s 90th birthday – but sadly without Sagan, who died in 1996 at the age of 62.

Most people remember him as the co-creator and host of the 1980 “Cosmos” television series, watched worldwide by hundreds of millions of people. Others read “Contact,” his best-selling science fiction novel, or “The Dragons of Eden,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book. Millions more saw him popularize astronomy on “The Tonight Show.”

What most people don’t know about Sagan, and what has been somewhat obscured by his fame, is the far-reaching impact of his science, which resonates to this day. Sagan was an unequaled science communicator, astute advocate and prolific writer. But he was also an outstanding scientist.

❤️✨🌍🌌🪐😍

🔗 Radio Lab: Tweak the Vote

“Is this too early for me to raise a warning flag?

You can wave. I may ignore it, but let's see it or hear it.

The commitment that people make to voting is slight. Most of us are into lunch, sports, work, and then maybe on the day of a vote, they have their best friend, so you got to vote for Sally.

Like, they know one, they're not even going to know seven.

Yeah. So, the first smell of this is it would take us more time than we want, and we might walk away from this exercise because we don't feel prepared.

You can engage with this on whatever level you'd like, Robert. If you only know one candidate's name, you can just put your one next to that person and hand in your ballot and you're done. Or, let's say there's a candidate on there you really, really don't like.”

I keep hammering on this point that most Americans don't actually want democracy because it's an inconvenience.

Currently about half the country seems supportive of fascism. I'm not convinced they actually understand what it is they seem to support, but some certainly do. The other half doesn't actually want to be bothered with democracy but they definitely don't want fascism. Mostly, they just want to live without being bothered with politics at all.

Meaningful democracy means citizen participation and oversight. It requires a public culture that encourages civic responsibility and commitment. But the American Dream, our way of life turned away from this to focus on "the pursuit of happiness", what many call the good life.

2024-11-01

🔗 What’s this American democracy crap? - Pearls and Irritations

For the worst part of 250 years, the United States of America has been a plutocracy. With 800 billionaires in a population of 345 million, the enemy is not ‘the One Percent’ but a 0.01%

Biden never tires of declaring himself the ‘proud, proud, proud son of Delaware,’ aka, the State of du Pont, after the original Merchants of Death – and long an on-shore tax haven for the likes of Mass Murdoch.

From the genocidal dispossession of the Amerindians and landing of chattel-slaves in 1619, the North American colonies have been shaped by power-plays among the ruling-race, as under Apartheid.

Damn. Well said.

🔗 Rallies at Madison Square Garden - by Timothy Snyder

The following are quotations from Donald Trump’s closing campaign rally last week and the Nazi rally of the American German Bund in 1939.

Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country

To attempt to thwart the will of nature by indiscriminately mixing the races of the world to produce some artificial standard human race is madness

Roughly 50% of the US seem to support Trump. A true step away from any pretense at multiculturalism.

2024-10-31

🔗 Michael Moore Urges Kamala Harris to Break with the President on Gaza

“We're not going to ask the Muslim community to vote for the people that are funding and doing the slaughter. So that means Vice President Harris is going to lose about 40,000 Arab and Muslim votes.”

As election night approaches, Academy Award-winning filmmaker and Michigan native, Michael Moore, talks to Mehdi. They discuss why Kamala Harris is losing voters in that key swing state, what she needs to do to win the election, and what Arab-American voters in Michigan want.

An excellent interview. Sadly, perhaps tragically for the US, Harris has made a mistake in her position on this. A strategic mistake in terms of the election but also, ethically, in terms of her apparent willingness to go along with Biden. If she loses in Michigan it's on her.

🔗 "Genocide as Colonial Erasure"

We are joined by U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, who says Israel is committing genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Facing accusations of antisemitism from Israeli and U.S. officials, Albanese is in New York to present her report, titled "Genocide as colonial erasure," which finds that Israel's genocide is founded on "ideological hatred" and "dehumanization" and "enabled through the various organs of the state," and recommends that Israel be unseated from the United Nations over its conduct. She argues that Israel's attacks on U.N. employees, including the killings of at least 230 U.N. staff in Gaza, its flagrant violations of U.N. resolutions and international law and the unique status of "the first settler-colonial genocide to be ever litigated before [an international] court" justify this measure. Israel's continued impunity, Albanese warns, "is the nail in the coffin of the U.N. Charter."

At this point the US is not just an enabler of Israel but a full partner. We are committing genocide. We are war criminals. Biden and other top US officials should face ICC charges along with Netanyahu.

🔗 How some states turn pregnancy loss into criminal cases against women

It often starts with suspicion: Why didn’t she call for an ambulance when the bleeding started? What if she didn’t want the baby? Maybe she took something — or inquired about abortion pills?

How a person handles a pregnancy loss — and where it occurs — can mean the difference between a private medical issue and a criminal charge for abuse of a corpse, child neglect or even murder. 

Rightwing white men view women with such contempt.

2024-10-30

🔗 Missouri battery plant fire in Fredricktown | ksdk.com

Evacuations are underway for portions of Fredericktown after a fire at a battery recycling facility.

Smoke could be seen rising from Critical Mineral Recovery on Highway OO, a company that recycles lithium-ion batteries and related materials. Madison County's emergency dispatch service said residents north and northwest of Village Creek Road and Madison 217 needed to evacuate immediately.

Yikes. This facility is about 3 miles south of me and we've had a 20 mph wind blowing directly from the south all day. I was sitting on my porch cracking walnuts. I couldn't see the smoke but could smell it before I knew what was going on. I moved inside immediately but I'm guessing my 15 minutes of breathing in those fumes was a couple years worth of average exposure. Yay?

🔗 Owen Jones interview with Anthony Loewenstein on Palestine as a laboratory for humanity's future

I've not yet listened to Antony Lowenstein's new podcast The Palestine Laboratory but will start it today.

🔗 At least 51 people feared dead after torrential rain and floods in Spain | Spain | The Guardian

At least 52 people are feared to have died after torrential rains hit southern and eastern Spain on Tuesday, bringing flash floods that raged through towns and cut off roads and railway lines.

Another day in the climate emergency. I wonder what percentage of the global citizenry understand the basic science that connects the never ending flash flooding to global warming? And at the same time, the severe and wide spread droughts also to global warming? It's a fairly basic concept but how many have taken even minimal time to understand it? Or the repercussions it will have on our ability to feed ourselves?

If you don't know, a hotter atmosphere holds moisture far longer. So instead of more frequent, widespread and moderate precipitation we get these huge flooding events as an oversaturated atmosphere releases far, far more rain in a shorter amount of time over a smaller area.

These first days of the climate emergency are already incredibly violent but life still seems somewhat normal for most of the planet. Certainly in the Global North the wealthiest 10% are less affected and have more funds to recover. That's now. In the not to distant future as the violence becomes more pervasive and we begin to experience mass displacement and food shortages we will no doubt look back in disgust at our inaction.

2024-10-27

🔗 Obeying in advance - by Timothy Snyder - Thinking about...

Greetings from Oklahoma. Here are a few thoughts from here on video about the decisions of the owners of the Washington Post and the LA Times to suppress their editorial boards’ decisions to endorse Kamala Harris.

A problem with the very wealthy is that, alas, the least vulnerable have a tendency to think of themselves as the most vulnerable.

Timothy Snyder is one of many putting themselves out there, truth telling in the face of the threat of facism. This is what we should all be doing. Confront it now and after the election. It won't go away. We have to be willing to defend and expand democracy.

2024-10-26

🔗 Here’s how much ground the world needs to make up on climate change : NPR

Greenhouse gas emissions need to fall immediately to limit warming to about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) by 2100. If nations continue current policies, warming could reach more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Even if countries fulfill their existing pledges to cut emissions, the world will still see severe climate impacts.

The most likely outcome based on an honest look at current real-world politics and culture is worst case scenarios playing out. My guess, something along the lines of 4 to 5° F by 2100 or sooner.

2024-10-25

🔗 'We don't really consider it low probability anymore': Collapse of key Atlantic current will have catastrophic impacts | Live Science

Trouble is brewing in the North Atlantic. Beneath the waves, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, acts as a planetary conveyor belt bringing nutrients, oxygen and heat north from tropical waters, while moving colder water south — a balancing act that keeps the Northern Hemisphere warm.

But research into Earth's climate history shows that the current has switched off in the past, and a growing number of studies suggest that climate change is causing the AMOC to slow, possibly leading it toward a disastrous collapse.

On Monday (Oct. 21), 44 oceanographers from 15 countries published an open letter calling for urgent action in the face of the weakening circulation. They warn that the risk of collapse has been "greatly underestimated" and will have "devastating and irreversible impacts" for the world.

It's ridiculous at this stage to keep pretending we're going to change course. We're 10 years too late. But even today the vast majority of US citizens are uninterested in doing what is actually required. Most don't have the faintest clue of what is required. Of course we should still make every effort but I've given up on actually expecting that.

🔗 Autocracy in America - The Atlantic

There are authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look.

Hosted by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev

Yes, we need to reject fascism and autocracy but that is not the same as defending democracy. America is not all that democratic, it is not a democracy. If you scoff at that suggestion then you've not been paying attention to what's been going on here for many decades. Americans have long failed to grow or deepen democracy.

Related: America is an Empire. Let that sink in. We are empire. That's a dark truth we need to reckon with because it impacts our understanding of who we are. What does it mean to be "empire"? What is the relationship to of empire to democracy?

2024-10-24

🔗 A woman, blogging: this is a political act – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

Women have taken up social media as a platform to share and connect — but we also blog. There are countless women mommy bloggers, lifestyle bloggers, food bloggers, craft bloggers, book bloggers… Blogging lets women create a platform for ourselves without needing to win the approval of a gatekeeper. Self-publishing means that platform can’t be taken away, and we’re in control of what reader feedback we’ll accept.

With my blog, I give myself voice despite a system that would deny me one. In The Secret of My Seduction, Caroline Linden describes an anonymous author: “She was someone, even if none of them knew it.” Even when we are not writing about political topics, the fact that women are writing in public at all is political in an age where people talk straight-faced about taking away women’s hard-fought right to vote. We are asserting our right to take up space, our right to have a say in our futures.

2024-10-23

🔗 “We Have Lost All Credibility”: Hala Rharrit on Quitting State Dept. & Ending U.S. Complicity in Gaza | Democracy Now!

As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel. We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza. Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.”

🔗 October 21, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson

On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.” 

Fascism on the doorstep.

🔗 Twelve Million Deportations - by Timothy Snyder

As an American, and as a historian who writes about forced population movements, I believe that we are not taking the Trump-Vance deportation plan seriously enough.

This failure of imagination could allow extreme repression within our country as well as a fundamental change in its society and politics.
...
Twelve million is a big number. And somehow bigger numbers are hard to imagine. It helps to start with just one person.

Try to picture just one person unwillingly deported: the altered life, the use of force, the effect on those who participate, those who inform, or those who stand by. And now try to do it twice: imagine a second person. And now consider a country with twelve million such scenes. It is a different America, one in which violence is normal and everywhere, one is which we see it and are dulled to it, one in which we all change for the worse.

I don't disagree but if Trump is defeated the deeper problem remains and will continue to resurface. Trump is the current focal point, the mouthpiece. The problem is foundational to America. Even those that are not out-right fascists or overtly white supremacist help to hold up the systemic violence. The moderate and mainstream liberalism of the Democratic Party is made of, and also represents white supremacy. I'd guess that many such folk reading that would huff and puff with incredulity at the suggestion. Which somewhat proves the point. They are blind to their participation in holding that system together. That's what makes systemic white supremacy such a bugger: it's quiet and polite. It's held together by the tension of comfort and fear that drives the middle class.

🔗 Mass Deportations, a Culture of Denunciation, and an Altered America - Kottke:

Historian Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny), who studies forced population movements, thinks we aren’t taking the Trump/Vance deportation plans seriously enough. (I agree.)
....
The Trump campaign is telling us straight out that this is their plan — they are not hiding it! at all! — and historians are letting us know what has happened in similar situations in the past and it’s just not all that confusing or complicated to understand. Even if they try and don’t succeed, it’s going to be absolutely brutal.

I keep coming back to the fact that, for the moment, roughly half of the country seems to support this alternate, much darker version of the US. I don't think we should be surprised though. If we truly face the history of Europeans on this continent it is persistantly threaded with the violence of white supremacy. The history of the US, its foundation, is built on violent settler colonialism, land theft, genocide and slavery. And that foundation persists today. We have never reckoned with it, not really. At best we've patched over the ugliest bits but that patchwork is not holding. It's not the fix.

But I'm not certain there is a fix because the root problem is the core design and the culture that design has created.

2024-10-22

🔗 Elon Musk skipping like a dipshit | C-SPAN.org

After two weeks he finally said no he did not really that is where he has been spending his time. Look, Elon on that stage jumping around skipping like a sip around skipping like a dipshit. You know it. Think about it. Think about that. That guy is literally the richest man in the world. He is spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump by an election. Look, they are saying the quiet parts outloud now. Donald Trump has already promised he would put Elon Musk in charge of government regulations including the businesses -- overseeing the businesses Elon runs. He could spend billions to make more than $10 billion on the backend. In other words, Donald Trump, in the eyes of the american public's promising corruption.

Yep. There is no attempt to hide the lies or corruption. They're just flaunting it now.

2024-10-21

🔗 AURORA - My Body Is Not Mine (Warriors Version) - YouTube

Feel no pain
And I’ll never cry
I bleed no blood
And I’ll never die
My body’s not mine
I need no body
A song for the people who have had to stay so brave, for too long.

🔗 Abortion a key flashpoint in Missouri Senate race between Josh Hawley, Lucas Kunce • Missouri Independent

Missourians are set to vote on whether to unravel the state’s abortion ban or keep it intact. And as the debate rages across the state, access to reproductive health care has become a major flashpoint in the race for U.S. Senate between Republican Josh Hawley and Democrat Lucas Kunce.

Amendment 3 seems to have a lot of support. Really hoping Kunce wins but that seems to be less likely.

2024-10-19

🔗 Voters have the chance to influence the future of the Missouri Supreme Court • Missouri Independent

On Nov. 5, Missourians will vote on a variety of important issues including who they think should be the next president, who they think should be the next governor and whether or not they feel that abortion should become legal in certain situations.

Often overlooked by many voters is their power to influence the Missouri Supreme Court through retention elections.

I'm looking forward to voting for Amendment 3 and against the retention of Judges Broniec and Gooch.

🔗 The Most Important Arizona Election You’ve Never Heard Of – Mother Jones

Approval of the construction of two gas power plants without public comment. Another’s expansion approved without an environmental review.

New fees for homeowners with rooftop solar that the Arizona attorney general has called “discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.” Approval of an 8 percent rate increase for customers of Arizona’s largest utility, largely to cover the costs of expanding its grid despite the availability of cheaper options. The gutting of the utility’s plan to provide financial support for communities impacted by the closures of coal-fired power plants.

Anyone who is still clinging to the hope that lawmakers in the US have any intention of dealing seriously with the climate emergency is not living in reality. The problem? My simplified list:

• There is an unspoken cultural and economic directive in the US to continue growth at all costs. Economic growth is never questioned.
• Legislators are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel lobby creating a default bias in favor of continuing the status quo.
• Most citizens are resistant to (or perceived to be resistant to) changing their lives.
• Too few citizens are activly protesting or lobbying to demand changes and measures to meaningfully deal with carbon emissions.

2024-10-18

🔗 No country still uses an electoral college − except the US • Missouri Independent

The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election.

Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College.

The US is broken in so many ways. And in this it was by design to limit democracy.

2024-10-17

🔗 Beyond the Web: Ostrom Workshop: Indiana University

We live in a digital world now, as well as a natural one. This new world is a few decades old at most and sure to last for centuries or millennia to come.

This world is also run, at this early stage, by corporate giants. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta control how technology operates, how commerce flows, how culture is made, how politics are done, how questions are answered, how business is conducted—at every level, from global to local. And now all of them are spending massively on AI development, while working on ways to lock us into the walled gardens of their own private AI systems.

Yet we still live our lives in the natural world, in physical places and spaces. There are many things that can only be done by people who live, work, interact, and rely on each other in real time and space. All our community institutions—schools, churches, libraries, service organizations, stores, restaurants, law enforcement, and government—still retain the potency of face-to-face and voice-to-voice interactions, even if they use technology to make things more efficient.

The initial assumption that the digital world is "sure to last for centuries" is quite a leap of faith given the current climate crisis and myriad other global social and ecological crises. With that caveat this looks like an excellent series and all of the previous talks are easily accessible via the page which links to the full archive on YouTube.

Via this post by Doc Searls.

This episode of 🔗 Countdown with Keith Olbermann | iHeart is worth a listen. You may have already heard some of this news but Olbermann lays it out plainly.

Three times this weekend Trump announced he will invoke "The Alien Enemies Act" which gives him the personal, arbitrary power to send to a concentration camp, or to deport, anybody in this country based on their race. Make no mistake that he means it. Trump’s anti-immigrant, specifically anti-Hispanic, hate speech has now climaxed with a promise to invoke the 1798 law that permits the president – in war time – to arrest and detain or deport without a hearing or without evidence of crime – American citizens and others – at his personal whim – based on their race. NOT where they were born, NOT whether they’ve committed or been suspected of a crime, NOT whether they are here legally or illegally. Based on their race. 

Trump is saying it all out in the open and has been for awhile. Fascism.

🔗 If Trump wins the election, US cities are at risk of military takeovers and mass deportations | The Guardian

Senior Democrats in US cities are preparing to defend their communities in the event of Donald Trump’s return to the White House after the former president has repeated threats that he would use presidential powers to seize control of major urban centers.

Trump has proposed deploying the military inside major cities largely run by Democrats to deal with protesters or to crush criminal gangs. He has threatened to dispatch large numbers of federal immigration agents to carry out mass deportations of undocumented people in so-called “sanctuary” cities.

Trump has made no attempt to hide where he intends to take the US if he is elected. Of the nearly 50% that seem ready to vote for him, do they really understand what they are voting for? Are they willing to call themselves fascists or are they somehow confused?

2024-10-16

🔗 He is the most dangerous person ever - Heather Cox Richardson

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” 

This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position. 

I have little doubt that if Trump is elected any pretense of democracy in the US will be lost. But, you know what? Actual democratic processes here have long been just a minimal veneer. Democracy is not something most in the US actually want. I've written on this blog many times about my belief that most Americans simply don't want to be bothered with the responsibility of even the minimal flavor of democracy we do have. Most just want to be left alone to work, consume, raise families, etc.

Of course, it's also likely that most have never really pondered what America will actually look like if it descends into something resembling fascism and probably don't want fascism. But we've gotten to this point because for decades we've fallen into an apolitical and apathetic culture disinterested to such a degree that most adults in the US don't even understand basic concepts and definitions of governance, branches of their government, etc.

The established parties are rightly viewed as corrupted and bought by capital. But when no alternative exists no effort is made to build a movement for meaningful reform. Instead an ignorant but frustrated populace fall prey to the easy solution presented by a celebrity they think is the angry boss that will just come in and sweep the problems away: You're fired!

A populace that understood reality would not elect Trump. They'd see him for the grifter he is. But that same populace would also see the grift of the Republican and Democratic parties and would not continue to go along with those options either. But real change to the system is scary and difficult and so we avoid it. Stuck in a never-ending kicking of the can down the road.

2024-10-15

🔗 The Majority Report with Sam Seder: 2347 The 'Legal' Theft of Indigenous Land with Peter D'Errico

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! Sam speaks with Peter D'Errico, professor emeritus of legal studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,  about his book Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples.

Every now and then you hear an interview or read a book and think this is something that should be required listening/reading. This is one of those. And it's especially true for US citizens of white/European decent who have not yet reckoned with the theft of indigenous lands. They are no less stolen in 2024 than they were in 1950 or 1850. Whether we want to face the truth or not, the US remains a nation built on white settler colonialism: genocide and stolen lands.

🔗 Two hurricanes and a lot of frustration. And?

Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit this island. He came to help.

Driver Nicholas Weppner, 24, downshifted and brought the 5-ton truck ‒ his father affectionately calls "Big Boy" ‒ to a juddering halt...

After getting up before 5 a.m. as the storm lessened, Weppner and his girlfriend talked their way past the cops guarding one of the bridges and rumbled the 6 x 6 truck onto the island, ready to help.

Weppner is a car enthusiast who bought the 1985 M923 a few years ago for fun.

The article ends with this:

Back at his truck, Weppner said he was glad to help out strangers. He said that's what makes America great: ordinary people helping each other in times of need. In his case, he said, his truck is a tool that can turn someone's day around.

"Not everybody has the equipment to do this kind of thing," Weppner said. "If you can help people out, you do it."

And then he added with a smile: "It's a lot of fun to drive."

I doubt it was intentional but the framing of the story at the beginning and end with a focus on the "hero" driving the over-sized, multi-ton truck seems fitting. It's the sort of thing Americans just accept and celebrate. We glorify cars and car culture and have done so for 70+ years. The hero of the story comes to the rescue with his inefficient truck, purchased not out of need, but for fun. Multiply the careless attitude towards resource consumption and the resulting carbon emissions by many tens of millions of Americans and you get exactly what we have right now.

It's not something to celebrate, it's something to change. If we want to be angry about these climate disasters, we should be angry at ourselves for refusing to change our attitudes and behaviors. It was a mistake to glorify cars and trucks but that's what happened because there was money to be made. It was and is an ongoing mistake to ignore the climate science because we don't like what's being said. Our continued petulance will not solve our problems.

🔗 Systems and change - annie's blog

We get lost in the system. It gets so big that most people forget there is anything outside of the system.

They forget they can opt in or opt out. The exits seal, then disappear.

The people are no longer voluntarily participating in a system. They are dependent on a system, enslaved to a system, unable to comprehend life outside the system.

The system no longer serves the people. The people now serve the system.

Annie Mueller has an excellent post on the need to evaluate human systems. This is the sort of thinking and perspective we need more in our discussion of democracy and current events generally. A more analytical, less emotionally charged process/framework for understanding how and why our world is the way it is. Complex social systems are social technology, they are machines built to serve a purpose. They have history and evolution. They need to be corrected, adjusted and sometimes dismantled or redesigned. In late 2024 as we face so many overlapping crises of our own making, these systems that need our attention.

2024-10-14

🔗 “Not A Humanitarian Crisis, This Is Genocide” CNN Schooled By Gaza Doctor - YouTube

It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908 an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza's population. That is the minimum, and we're still using 40k, but you know why? This has been Israel's uh strategy the entire time, is because the when they attack the civil infrastructure in hospitals, you can't count anymore, and they wanted to get to that point where there was no they've killed all the record keepers and they've destroyed all the ways to keep records. And so. Now they want they're taking advantage of this time period to kill as many people under the cloak of darkness. That's also why they kicked out all of the journalists and have targeted journalists for uh just and have killed well over 100 media workers within Gaza, cause they don't want people knowing until it's too late.

There is little doubt the official count is far lower than the actual death toll.

🔗 Israel Fires at UN Peacekeepers in Lebanon—to Broad Condemnation – Mother Jones

Israeli forces reportedly struck the UN mission in Lebanon—known as UNIFIL—in recent days, injuring multiple peacekeepers, according to the mission. As UNIFIL points out, deliberate attacks on peacekeepers violate international law.

Human rights groups including Human Rights Watch have condemned the reported attacks and called for UN investigations. In a statement posted on X on Saturday by the Polish Mission to the United Nations, a joint group of signatories said that they “condemn recent incidents, call to respect [the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’s] mission & ensure the safety of its personnel.”

It's been plainly obvious for many months that Israel and the US consider themselves to be above any law. They act and we support their acts in contempt of the international community and law. It's the sort of behavior that Trump is rightly called out for. This is where we are in 2024.

2024-10-13

🔗 Hurricanes are doing little to change Republicans' minds on climate change - POLITICO

Two major hurricanes hitting the same region of the country just weeks apart are not moving the needle for most congressional Republicans when it comes to endorsing tougher action against climate change.

Yes but the general public is also to blame. WE need to be the driving force of democracy. For decades WE sat back and did nothing as we watched corporate lobbies take over "our" government. We've been passive citizens but hyper-consumers of global natural resources, far more than our fair share. WE are a driving force of climate change. WE refuse to exercise any kind of restraint. It's easier to point fingers at "the wealthy" and corporations. But on the global scale WE are the wealthy. WE of the US are a part ef the top 10%, the Global North most responsible.

🔗 Gaza Is a Laboratory for Future Warfare - Tech Won’t Save Us

Paris Marx is joined by Spencer Ackerman to discuss the past year of Israel's actions in Palestine and the innovations in war technology being used to carry out what the ICJ has deemed a "plausible" genocide in Gaza.

An excellent podcast and this particular episode is especially worth a listen. They just dig right in. Accessible but really dense in history, the facts and narrative of the current moment. No doubt I'll give it a second listen.

2024-10-12

🔗 Dramatic images show the first floods in the Sahara in half a century | The Guardian

More than year’s worth of rain fell in two days in south-east Morocco, filling up lake that had been dry for decades

Stunning. This is what a shifting climate looks like.

2024-10-11

🔗 ‘It’s mindblowing’: US meteorologists face death threats as hurricane conspiracies surge | Hurricane Milton | The Guardian

Meteorologists tracking the advance of Hurricane Milton have been targeted by a deluge of conspiracy theories that they were controlling the weather, abuse and even death threats, amid what they say is an unprecedented surge in misinformation as two major hurricanes have hit the US.

Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, said that she and her colleagues have borne the brunt of much of these conspiracies, having received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), that meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes (they aren’t) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.

Roughly half of the US has lost it's mind. Sad and somewhat terrifying that we've gotten to this point.

2024-10-10

🔗 Hurricane Milton, Helene: Is the home insurance industry doomed? | Vox

Insured losses from natural disasters around the world in the first half of the year have already topped $60 billion, 54 percent higher than the 10-year average. Three-quarters of insured losses were due to severe thunderstorms, flooding, and forest fires. More recent calamities like Hurricane Helene will push the toll this year much higher. Damage estimates for Helene ranged as high as $47.5 billion as of October 4.

And, while rates have sky rocketed and people are finding their policies canceled or that they can no longer even get insurance in certain areas there is also this:

Despite all of this, insurers themselves are actually doing quite well. The US property and casualty insurers netted $823 billion in premiums last year, posting record profits in the hottest year on record with dozens of extreme weather disasters with tolls in the billions of dollars. Insurers have already reported even higher profits this year, and the sector is poised to do better in 2025.

Reading the article and I can only shake my head in disgust and bewilderment. It's layer upon layer of grift, profit seeking (and profit making) and political process via lobby. As with most things in the US in 2024 it is what we have wrought in allowing capital to replace us in the governing process.

2024-10-09

🔗 Video From 2040 Begs This Question of Gaza Genocide in 2024: 'What Did You Do to Stop It?' | Common Dreams

To mark this week's anniversary of Israel's yearlong assault on Gaza—which has killed, maimed, displaced, starved, and sickened millions of Palestinians with no end in sight—Palestine defenders shared a video set in the year 2040 in which children around the world ask their elders, "What were you doing during this genocide?"

The US will be notable in its complicity and support of the genocide. A shame that should haunt any decent human being.

🔗 Assal Rad on X: Heated moment in State briefing: People are sick of the bullshit here, it is a genocide

@cosgrove_iv:
This admin has financed a genocide in Gaza for the last year and every day you’re up there denying it.

Miller: There’s plenty of places in Washington you can give a speech.

Liam: People are sick of the bullshit here, it is a genocide.

For a year Miller has provided cover for Biden and Netanyahu as war crimes and genocide have continued unabated.

2024-10-08

🔗 Veteran Florida meteorologist John Morales experiences a minor breakdown trying to describe Hurricane Milton

The interview with climate analyst Eliot Jacobson is excellent and on point. He makes the point that there is no safe place going forward. A fairly standard interview until the concluding moments when he's asked about conspiracies being touted by science illiterate Congresswoman and idiot Marjorie Taylor Greene. He simply states:

I can just put out facts, I cannot fight delusions, I can't fight insanity... it's so much beyond nonsense, I don't know how to describe the lack of just basic fundamental understanding of the planet, that sort of demonstration of illogic. I don't have a remedy for idiocy, I just don't."

🔗 Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate experts | The Guardian

More and more scientists are now looking into the possibility of societal collapse, says the report, which assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide levels and human population. This indicates a “critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis”, it says.

The assessment concludes: “Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering, and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.

Look. There will be no averting profound human suffering. Let's have some fucking straight talk. We have waited too long. Should we act? YES. But look around you. Look at yourself. What are you willing to give? If you're a typical middle class American the answer thus far is not a fucking thing. The middle class of the US is a significant driving force behind the climate emergency. And from my observation these folks could not care less than they do.

Should we act. YES. I will only ever argue for action. We need mass, civil unrest, widespread voluntary reductions and pressure on government. But look yourself in the mirror and ask what you're willing to give up? Willing to do? Americans want a fix given to them that allows for them to continue living as they have. That is not fucking possible. Not this late in the process.

Should we act. YES.

🔗 Stop Calling It ‘Race Science’ - Bix Dot Blog

So, I wasn’t going to get into this despite getting irritated about it on social, but now there’s a story by Ali Breland writing for The Atlantic with the title, “Donald Trump Flirts With Race Science”, and you know I can’t shut up because there are two things wrong here.

It’s not flirting.

It’s not science.

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 🔗 Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.

The storm surge from Helene was widespread and up to 15 feet (4.5 meters) deep. The windstorm sliced through the Southeast with gusts up to 100 miles per hour (160 km/hr). And the rains were, as I predicted, “biblical.”

Record storms, one after the other. Beryl in June, Helene September and now Milton. My neice, who moved to the Tampa area in the early summer of 2023 has just evacuated from her apartment which is four miles inland. My parents moved to the Panama City Beach area last August have not yet had to evacuate before a hurricane. I warned them about the deep troubles of insurance industry there. The didn't really need my warning really but they got it anyway. I've been warning my family about the climate emergency for 20 years. Like most in the US, they've chosen to pretend it wasn't happening so that they might continue on with the "good" life.

We went into this knowing what we were doing. No one can claim they were not warned. We chose to bring this upon ourselves. We chose to inflict it upon others in the world.

2024-10-07

🔗 Dave at Scripting News is celebrating 30 years of his blog today.

Today's the big day. Thanks to John Naughton's wonderful piece in the Guardian, I'm hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog.

The guy has been building and advocating for blogging for the duration. Well done.

2024-10-04

🔗 Dear President Biden and Vice President Harris...

October 2, 2024

Dear President Biden and Vice President Harris,

We are 99 American physicians, surgeons, nurse practitioners, nurses, and midwives who have volunteered in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. Combined, we spent 254 weeks volunteering in Gaza’s hospitals and clinics. We worked with various nongovernmental organizations and the World Health Organization in hospitals and clinics throughout the Strip. In addition to our medical and surgical expertise, many of us have a public health background, as well as experience working in humanitarian and conflict zones, including Ukraine during the brutal Russian invasion. Some of us are veterans and reservists. We are a multifaith and multiethnic group. None of us support the horrors committed on October 7 by Palestinian armed groups and individuals in Israel.

The Constitution of the World Health Organization states: “The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security and is dependent on the fullest cooperation of individuals and States.” It is in this spirit that we write to you in this open letter...

If you only read one thing today.

Rebuilding my archive, a post from October 5, 2008, 🔗 Autumn Olive Update

Autumn Olive Update

Back in early September I discovered that we had Autumn Olives on the land and wrote about it. Since then they have ripened up a good bit so I’ve been eating several handfuls a day for the past couple weeks. I harvested about 1.5 pints of Autumn Olive berries in about 5 minutes from one bush, the largest I’ve found, which still has at least another 50 pints of berries on it. I’ll be experimenting with different uses. They taste great and are highly nutritious.

I'd just harvested berries from the Autumn Olive bushes and was very excited. I'm about to do the same later this morning. Pretty image on the original post linked above. 🥰

2024-10-02

A video by Mark Huneycutt: 🔗 The road to Chimney Rock is gone - Hurricane Helene aftermath

I hiked about 6 miles into Bat Cave today heading towards Chimney Rock. I'm not sure what they need because it's gone but like everywhere, they need food, water, gas. I'm hopeful that this whole community evacuated as there is just zero access to Chimney Rock/Lake Lure from the NW anymore. Downstream to Chimney Rock and Lake Lure, it's just a mess. I haven't physically seen it because I couldn't get there but I've seen videos. The clean up is going to be enormous.

Long stretches of road are just gone. It's hard to really comprehend the scope of damage even in this one video. What does recovery for this look like? How many years? And what will never be recovered but just abandoned?

A gentle, delightful 🔗 post by Simone at Minutes to Midnight: Rain.

While all my favourite writers on the internet are pouring their thoughts on the current debate about what a social web is, I deleted my Echofeed account, de facto quitting my sterile 'social media' broadcast routine. Instead, I'm enjoying the sound of heavy rain battering the roof.

He goes on to describe a quiet moment having lunch at the office. The light and sound via the sky light and the feeling of being at his new job. Just a simple shared moment.

🔗 An informative interview on The Majority Report with Manisha Sinha about her book The Rise & Fall Of The Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, interview begins at 21:30.

Diving right into the major expansion of the typical Reconstruction time frame in her work, with the 1865-77 period failing to incorporate the initial challenge for interracial democracy in the South or the decades of challenges to the progressive project of Reconstruction that were required to overthrow this effort fully, and exploring the mythologizing of this era as an abject “failure” and the “Lost Cause” revisionist history that plays into.

Interviews and books like this help explain why the US is still mired in unresolved white supremacy. The America of 2024 needs to better understand this period of history so that it may be reckoned with. Time does not heal all wounds.

2024-10-01

🔗 US: Hurricane Helene devastates coastal community with homes vanished

Keaton Beach, nestled in Florida's Big Bend region, has suffered the wrath of the hurricane, which left at least 40 people killed and dozens of homes disappeared.

Glenda Padgett, another resident, rebuilt her family home after Hurricane Hermine struck in 2016, only to face loss again. "This one just took it. There's nothing left of it."

"I have no insurance. I couldn't afford it. I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't rebuild. I don't have the money. Maybe I can clean this up and put in a camper, but I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. I never thought this would happen," said Padgett.

People are ignoring the reality around them. This woman rebuilt after a hurricane in 2016 and 8 years later says "I never thought this would happen." This is not rational. Nothing about our response to the climate emergency makes sense.

🔗 ‘Nowhere is safe’: shattered Asheville shows stunning reach of climate crisis | The Guardian

Nestled in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and far from any coast, Asheville was touted as a climate “haven” from extreme weather. Now the historic city has been devastated and cut off by Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic floodwaters, in a stunning display of the climate crisis’s unlimited reach in the United States.

While I agree with the framing here I would also make the point: No place is safe from the climate crisis because humans need to eat food no matter where they are. The climate crisis is just beginning to destabilize our ability to grow food reliably. Large scale agriculture to feed 8 billion humans requires predictable, historical weather patterns. That is changing.

No place is safe from what is happening. Stop pretending. There will be no pretending, wishing, hoping our way out of this crisis. Got it?

🔗 Extended interview: R.E.M. on songwriting, breaking up and their lifelong friendship - YouTube

The original members of R.E.M. sit down with Anthony Mason for their first group interview in nearly 30 years. They talk about crafting iconic hits, how breaking up saved their friendship, and why they don't feel the need to tour one last time.

One of my favorite bands. A great interview.

🔗 FEMA on Helene | Dave Rogers

We were all kind of hoping that the "quiet" hurricane season would continue, but I guess that was foolish.

What I fail to understand is that we seem to be unable to realize that we are living with a civilization, a physical infrastructure and a "sense" of what weather should be like, from a climate that no longer exists.

Yes. We are just at the beginning of the long climate emergency. This will not end in our lifetimes but will only grow worse, become more intense. It is tragic, no, criminal, that the wealthiest of the planet, the top 10% of the Global North, refuse to take responsibility for their lives.

What I see happening is that most in the US just pretend it's not happening, pretend they are not to blame or pretend that there is nothing they can do about it. People prefer to point fingers at the uber rich or corporations. But they themselves refuse to take any responsibility.

I made a choice 30 years ago that I would not have children for this reason. The signs were there then. We were on a path then that would not likely be altered and here we are. We've had warning. We refused to act 30 years ago. 20 years ago. 10 years ago. Today. With all the warning signs flashing red around us, with the leader of the UN saying it for years, with climate scientists saying it for years, we just push forward into oblivion. It is madness

2024-09-29

🔗 Let God Speak, Dammit | starbreaker.org

If anybody presumes to tell you what God wants, especially if it involves you paying a tithe or letting mere humans police your sex life, you can summarily dismiss that person's claims by telling them you don't believe in their God. Every scripture, religious dogma, and demand from authoritarian weirdos who are congenitally incapable of minding their own business treats the existence of God as axiomatic. Reject that fundamental premise, and any logic built atop it collapses.

A fun post by Matthew.

🔗 The War of Legitimacy: How the International Criminal Court and the UN Gen. Assembly Challenged Israeli, US Impunity

Two historic events regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine took place on 19 July and 18 September. The first was a most comprehensive “advisory opinion” by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which reiterated that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal and must come to an immediate end. The second arrived two months later, when the UN General Assembly set, for the first time in history, an exact time frame for when the Israeli occupation of Palestine must end.

It is damning that the US and Israel are ignoring two of the most important global bodies. In short the US is and Israel are acting with impunity and disregard for the standards of international law.

2024-09-28

🔗 Community memory

Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.

A little Saturday morning treasure. Some great photos and a fascinating peak into a community's history. ❤️

🔗 Roman Krznaric: “History for Tomorrow: Uncovering Future Possibilities from Humanity’s Past” | The Great Simplification

What lessons have we forgotten when it comes to being in community with and listening to each other? How have our ideas and expectations of the future been informed by seeing history as a story of individuals shaping the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than a collective effort? How could learning from the past to create better democracies, wiser natural resource stewardship, and more circular economies help us prioritize human and planetary well-being? 

We often feel alone and powerless in this see-saw world. Perhaps a part of the solution is as simple as making an effort to talk more with our neighbors and to make more space in our communities for such conversations to happen. Love some of the suggestions brought up in this interview.

2024-09-27

🔗 Coming home | A Working Library

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.

A beautifully written essay addressing the need to find a balance in use, and space from, social networks. Our time and attention might be better spent playing in our own thoughts and cultivating our own ideas via more careful reading and writing. As she points out, even the Fediverse, as a non-corporate, decentralized space is still structured in a similar way to the feeds and timelines we've all gotten used to. It's something I've been thinking and writing about recently.

🔗 Just Stop Oil activists throw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers after fellow protesters jailed | The Guardian

“Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history,” Phil Green, one of those taking part in Friday’s action, told visitors to the gallery.

Ludi Simpson, 71, who also took part, said: “We will be held accountable for our actions today, and we will face the full force of the law. When will the fossil fuel executives and the politicians they’ve bought be held accountable for the criminal damage that they are imposing on every living thing?”

A lot of people continue to be confused by this as a protest tactic because it doesn't seem to relate to fossil fuels. It's about protecting humanity's heritage. But, also, it's about prompting the public to consider and debate: what is the common heritage of humanity?

The judge from today's sentencing of activists (emphasis mine):

“You two simply had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers, and your arrogance in thinking otherwise deserves the strongest condemnation.

The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.”

The condemnation in regards to destruction of a priceless treasure should be directed not at these activists but the wealthy 10% who value paintings more than the subject of those paintings. I suspect if Van Gogh were alive today he would side with the activists. The real crime is the high emission lifestyles being led by the public.

🔗 How the fossil fuel industry helps spread anti-protest laws across the US | The Guardian

Fossil fuel lobbyists coordinated with lawmakers behind the scenes and across state lines to push and shape laws that are escalating a crackdown on peaceful protests against oil and gas expansion...

The US has the best democracy money can buy.

🔗 Dave Winer at the Scripting News writing about the social web:

Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there.

I'm seeing a lot of response to the launch of the Social Web Foundation by the ActivityPub folk who are attempting to rebrand the Fediverse as the Social Web. Old school bloggers are not having it.

🔗 Dispatch From Missouri: Mourners Decry Execution of Marcellus Williams | Truthout

The State of Missouri put its lethal hands on another of its longtime death penalty captives on Tuesday evening in Bonne Terre, prematurely ending his life with a poison injection of pentobarbital.

My friend Frances has been covering the recent string of Missouri state murders for Truthout. Her three posts are a part of a larger series, The Road to Abolition.

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Note: Beginning September 27 I'm trying a different format as I experiment a bit. Rather than create separate html files for each linked item I'm going to just offer commentary right here with a link to the post or article. The intent is to streamline the posting process, file complexity and reduce clicking for readers.

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2024-09-26

Holy Hell, The Social Web Did Not Begin In 2008 - Bix Dot Blog

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2024-09-25

The Tipping Point Podcast: Problematique (Part 1)

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2024-09-25

In his post about Juli Clover's experiment with optimized iPhone charging John Gruber exhibits his privilege and a contempt for responsible resource use

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2024-09-24

Netanyahu's lethal bombs will turn Lebanon into another Gaza. He must be brought down now.

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2024-09-22

Building the World Wide Web with hypertext – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

Water use literacy | Thought Shrapnel

Israeli Minister of Education Suggests Lebanon Will Be “Annihilated”

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2024-09-21

The case for a better web – La màquina de Turing

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2024-09-11

HathiTrust Digital Library – Millions of books online

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2024-09-09

Emily Howard on picky eating

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2024-08-28

The technology of the Global North is not always better

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2024-08-23

Ben Werdmuller on Harris speech and American Imperialism

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2024-08-22

Major Union Backing Harris-Walz Joins Call for Palestinian American to Speak at DNC

DNC Tells Uncommitted Delegates There Won’t Be Any Pro-Palestinian Speaker

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2024-08-20

The Small Way

DNC Forcibly removes Pro-Palestinian delegates, takes their banner

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2024-08-19

Antifa recounting of Charlottesville

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2024-08-16

When Will the Biden Dead-Enders Admit They Were Wrong?

Israeli Settlers Rampage in West Bank Town, Killing 1 and Setting Houses Aflame

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2024-08-13

Carbon offset setback risks corporate backtrack on climate goals

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2024-08-12

142 Palestinians killed in Gaza in past 48 hours #block-66b9d5da8f083e5b7b483bae).

Greek officials advise staying in with windows shut due to fires near Athens

More than 47,000 heat caused deaths in Europe in 2023

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2024-08-11

🔗 I recently discovered David Rogers of The Nice Marmot website via The Blogroll Club. In particular it was his post The price of Risk that I landed on. I emailed him about the post which led to his mentioning the climate and energy site Do the Math. I've added both sites to my blog roll and RSS. Good stuff.

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2024-08-10

Birthrates are plummeting world wide. Can governments turn the tide? | The Guardian

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2024-08-09

Harris Adviser Says She Opposes Israel Arms Embargo as She Shuts Down Protesters

“Welcome to Hell”: U.S. Silence on Israel’s Network of Torture Camps

🔗 Anti-War Protesters Interrupting Kamala Harris Is Great, Actually - YouTube

Yep.

🔗 Cori Bush warns pro-Israel lobby ‘to be afraid’ after primary loss | The Guardian

“They’re about to see this other Cori, this other side. Aipac, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

Bush, who will continue to serve in Congress until January, added: “All they did was radicalise me, so now they need to be afraid.”

Why is Aipac not required to register as an agent of a foreign government?

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2024-08-08

🔗 No, the news is not information junk food

Every so often, a post goes around in tech circles about how news is bad and we shouldn’t pay attention to it. I think that’s ludicrous.

Today’s was a post from 2022 called The News is Information Junk Food. I think it’s a bad argument that could have poor consequences.

Excellent post by Ben Werd on the importance of news and quality journalism to a functioning democracy. It should be obvious that an informed citizenry is the foundation of democracy. But we live in a time when the responsibilities of citizenship are barely an afterthought in a culture largely dominated by the trivial.

Vegans are radical. That’s why we need them

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2024-08-07

Cori Bush warns pro-Israel lobby ‘to be afraid’ after primary loss

🔗 Zionism on the Brink: The Gaza War Beyond Netanyahu - ZNetwork

A good number of analysts have tried to explain how Israel became a decidedly right-wing society and how young people, in particular, have emerged as the gatekeepers of Israel’s version of suicidal nationalism. The explanation, however, should be straightforward. Israel’s far-right extremism is simply the natural evolution of Zionist ideology which, even in its most “liberal” forms, was always predicated on ethnic hatred, a sense of racial supremacy and predictable violence.

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2024-08-05

The unsung heroes putting climate solutions into practice

🔗 The Overton Window: An Explainer | by Joan Westenberg

You know how you’ll hear a politician say something and think, “Holy shit, did they really just say that out loud?”
And then a few years later, that batshit crazy idea is suddenly mainstream policy?
It’s called the Overton Window, and once you understand it, you’ll see it everywhere.

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2024-08-02

Mike Grindle's OBTF workflow

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2024-08-01

Antarctic temperatures rise 10C above average in near record heatwave

Concerning Israel's right to defense

Another journalist killed in Israeli attack

Radical Acts of Care

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2024-07-31

Make Small Men Feel Small Again

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2024-07-30

🔗 Jeremy at Micro.blog:

More on the signs of the reversal of technological progress: it’s interesting that Goia frames it as a reversal of progress. The signs he discusses are evidence that high technology is worsening as a tool. If high tech was actually being dismantled, I’d be happy. But it’s just increasingly bad.

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2024-07-27

🔗 Trump tells supporters they won’t have to vote in the future: ‘It’ll be fixed!’ | The Guardian

“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more,” the Republican former president said on Friday night at a rally hosted in West Palm Beach, Florida, by the far-right Christian advocacy group Turning Point Action.

“You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians,” he said with a slight shake of his head and his right hand pressed against the left side of his chest.

He added: “I love you. Get out – you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

Trump is totally unhinged.

🔗 "Vance VP" - Marsh Family parody adaptation of "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, on JD Vance - YouTube

So since he dished it out, and since - for obvious (but different) reasons - now is not an appropriate moment for a song about either Trump or Biden, here’s our less-than-impressed profile of yet another populist politician with highly flexible morality, worrying contempt for democratic process and discourse, but big funding and a big mouth who’s happy to tap into ordinary people’s fears while claiming to be an example of their dreams.

Fantastic

🔗 Wave of Israeli airstrikes kills at least 50 people in Gaza | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian

A wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting central and southern Gaza have killed at least 50 people and injured an estimated 200, with one strike hitting a school where thousands were seeking shelter.

Wounded people poured into the nearby Aqsa hospital, while images from Deir al-Balah showed families carrying injured children for treatment.

Another day, another school in Gaza bombed. 30 killed. The war crimes and genocide continue.

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2024-07-26

🔗 Britain drops its challenge to ICC arrest warrants for Israeli leaders | International criminal court | The Guardian

Labour has announced its biggest step yet in overhauling the UK’s approach to the Middle East, dropping its opposition to an international arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu despite pressure from Washington not to do so.

Downing Street announced on Friday that the government would not submit a challenge to the jurisdiction of the international criminal court, whose chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking a warrant against the Israeli prime minister.

The US is increasingly on its own with Israel.

🔗 Kamala’s Stance On Gaza Is Crucial - YouTube

In comments that were closely watched for signs of a shift from Joe Biden’s policy approach, the US vice-president said after the meeting: “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.”

They also dig into Netanyahu’s various lies, his denial of the humanity of Palestinians and the fucked up warm welcome by many in Congress including many Democrats.

The Congress people there to cheer him on are complicit in his war crimes as is Biden. I’m guessing her policies in this area will be better than Biden but only a little. Time will tell.

Of course, much of Gaza is now rubble and uninhabitable. While the official death toll is now around 40,000, recent reporting on a Lancet study suggests the number is much higher, likely above 186,000 and still going higher this very moment.

The Guardian reports on her meeting with Netanyahu stating that she “pressed him on the ‘dire’ humanitarian situation in Gaza in talks that she described as frank, adding ‘I will not be silent’.”

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2024-07-25

🔗 Netanyahu Vows to “Finish the Job Faster” in Gaza If US Gives Him More Weapons | Truthout

Netanyahu drew one of the clearest lines yet between the supply of U.S. weapons and Israel’s genocidal assault of Gaza, essentially straight out saying that the slaughter has been made possible by U.S. assistance — and that the speed of Israel’s genocide is scaled to how many U.S. weapons they receive.

War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, met with a standing ovation by the US Congress, appealed for more weapons which would enable Israel to “finish the job faster” in Gaza. I’m sure it’s on record who in Congress continues to support Israel’s war crimes and genocide.

🔗 Truthout reports on a potential Polio Outbreak in Gaza:

Advocates for Palestinian rights are demanding that the Biden administration take urgent action to stop a potential outbreak of polio in Gaza after the virus that causes the deadly disease was found in Gaza’s wastewater, threatening an epidemic that would be nothing short of catastrophic.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that Biden bears responsibility to respond to the crisis after funding Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health and sanitation systems, which has created conditions ripe for a deadly epidemic.

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2025-07-24

🔗 On Mastodon, Joshua Holland shares the current state of Congressional support of war crimes and genocide:

A foreign leader invited to address the United States Congress is just shitting all over Americans who don't support his far-right government's campaign of ethnic cleansing and Republicans are giving him standing ovations for it.

🔗 Earth just set its hottest days on record in thousands of years

"We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years," Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said.

The records, which exceeded the old milestone set last July, very likely stands as the hottest day in thousands of years, based on tree ring records, ice cores and other so-called paleoclimate data.

🔗 A "disruptive" Capitol protest spikes security fears around Netanyahu speech

A large, raucous pro-Palestinian protest Tuesday at a U.S. House office building is spiking lawmakers' concerns about security around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's upcoming speech.

Inviting a war criminal to speak to Congress was a mistake. Of course, given the US and its current president are full partners and arms supplier in those war crimes, I suppose it fits. Yes, the US is a partner in a current, ongoing genocide.

🔗 Joan Westenberg: Fuck Looking for the Helpers. Be One.

We distance ourselves from the problem. By focusing on identifying those swooping in to save the day, we subconsciously categorize ourselves as separate from the solution. We become observers rather than participants. It's a subtle but insidious form of learned helplessness.

We absolve ourselves of responsibility. If our job is simply to notice and appreciate the helpers, we don't have to grapple with our own potential role in addressing whatever clusterfuck is unfolding.

YES. THIS. This is everything. We are the solution we need.

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2024-07-21

🔗 At This Rally, Everyone Loves Biden—and Wants Him to Drop Out – Mother Jones

“Young people have been shutting down streets, lobbying Congress, pressuring the White House, organizing for a chance to save our democracy, beat MAGA fascism, and win November’s presidential election with a new democratic presidential nominee,” said speaker Claudia Nachega, a 19-year-old college student and reproductive justice activist.

I'm not a Democrat but will vote for whatever Democrat is on the ticket. Biden's stubbornness and insistence on remaining in the race is ridiculous at this point.

🔗 Navigating Another False Binary - ZNetwork

To my old fuzzy eyes and my old bent ears the two tasks at hand that I hope to aid a little in these troubling times are to Stop Trump and to Advance The Long March Toward A Truly Desirable Society. To my still I hope young mind, however, the two are not separate because to crown Trump would at best make the Long March much longer. So to Stop Trump and to Advance the Long March are really one task. But if they are one task then why the hell did I say “two tasks”?

🔗 World Court Finds Israel Responsible for Apartheid | Human Rights Watch

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion on July 19, 2024, with significant consequences for human rights protections in Palestine under Israel’s 57-year occupation.

"In a historic ruling the ICJ has found multiple and serious international law violations by Israel towards Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including, for the first time, finding Israel responsible for apartheid." -Tirana Hassan, Human Rights Watch Executive Director

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2024-07-20

🔗 CrimethInc. : Ahead of Another Summer of Climate Disasters, Let's Talk about Real Solutions

In cooperation with Freedom, we present a short text from Peter Gelderloos exploring why the strategies that mainstream environmental movements are currently employing to halt industrially-produced climate change are failing—and what we could be doing instead...

The mainstream climate movement begins from a premise that guarantees failure.

Not just failure. Catastrophe. And the more effective it is, the more harm it will cause.

Let’s explore why.

🔗 Unlawful occupation and apartheid: The ICJ rules in favor of Palestinian right against Israeli might - YouTube

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara highlights that the recent ruling represents a corner-stone and game-changer in legal terms. He emphasizes that, while the ruling may not be surprising, it builds upon and extends the 2004 decision concerning the illegality of the apartheid wall in the West Bank. Bishara suggests that the significance of today’s ruling lies in its damning and detailed nature.

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2024-07-18

🔗 We don't get a pass. The 10% of the Global North, especially in the US, continue to live lifestyles of over-consumption, air travel, maximum heating/cooling comfort, oversized houses, oversized vehicles. TODAY. WE KNOW.

US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation | The Guardian

Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication

Yes, they knew. And most US law makers also knew but denied it. And not long after the public knew. You know who still isn't acting? MOST OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC.

🔗 When is the global population expected to peak? And how will we adapt? - Vox

The headline was clear: We are well past the days of worrying about having more people than the Earth can handle. The UN’s demographers now expect the number of people on the planet to peak at a bit under 10.3 billion in 2084.

That’s two years earlier than the UN was predicting peak population as recently as 2022, and considerably earlier than forecasts from just a few years before, when population wasn’t expected to peak until the 22nd century.

🔗 Trump fans wear bandages on ears to show support – in pictures | US news | The Guardian

Some people plastered over ears at Republic national convention, in solidarity with Trump after assassination attempt.

I'm pretty sure these people have lost their minds. If this isn't the road to Dear-Leader style authoritarianism I don't know what is.

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2024-07-17

🔗 The Only Antidote To Election Anxiety Is Training To Confront Trump’s Threat - ZNetwork

Whether he emerges a victor in November or a defeated candidate claiming he was robbed, movements for justice and peace need to offer something more specific than what they’re presently doing in order to take account of the deepening anxiety around how to deal with Trump.

While issue-based organizing campaigns need to continue, our climate, economic and racial justice work don’t sufficiently address this rising anxiety.

🔗 Tinged with Fantasy, Phyllis Shafer's Plein Air Paintings Twist the Serene Beauty of the American West — Colossal

For Phyllis Shafer, space and time are inextricably tethered. “The longer I’ve painted, the more I’ve extended my focal range. A spatial stretch in my paintings relates to time and maybe the progression of my life,” she says. “Space is a way of laying out time.”

Mesmerizing!

🔗 Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested - Raw Story

“This is a deadly serious report,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story. “A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom."

A deeply disturbing and truly dystopian story playing out in the US.

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2024-07-16

🔗 Heather Cox Richardson Talks Project 2025 - YouTube

Now is the time for action, not distraction! Project 2025 threatens our democracy. While we know that Project 2025 will destroy civil rights, reproductive freedom and turn our country towards extremist Christian Nationalism – too many of our friends and family are completely unaware. But we can change that together! No one is better equipped to help us meet this challenge than our favorite historian Heather Cox Richardson. Join us to hear from Heather on what we can do together to win this battle in November. More Info & Resources: https://redwine.blue/project2025/

Don't mourn, Organize!

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2024-07-15

🔗 Israel Has “Flattened” UNRWA HQ in Gaza in “Blatant” War Crime, Agency Says | Truthout

After months of successive attacks on humanitarian aid facilities, Israeli forces have now “completely destroyed” the headquarters of the primary aid group for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the agency reports.

Israeli forces attacked the facility as they carried out their horrific raid of Gaza City last week, leaving nothing but rubble in its place. The building was one of many operated by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the largest aid group for Palestinians in Gaza and beyond.

UNRWA Commissioner Philippe Lazzarini said that Israel’s attack on the facility represents a “blatant” war crime.

🔗 A brief video with Ari Berman on the constraints built into American "democracy". From the very beginning US political institutions concentrated power in the hands of the elite, propertied white male minority.

You know, white supremacy by design.

More than 200 years later, the series of compromises the founders made have increasingly vested the majority of political power in the hands of a minority of the population—a reactionary conservative white minority that is seeking to entrench and hold onto power through a wide variety of anti-democratic means.

🔗 Blue Maga: we need to talk about the cult-like turn of the Democratic party | Mehdi Hasan | The Guardian

Is the Democratic party, the self-proclaimed party of liberal values and scientific data, morphing into a Maga-like cult in front of our eyes?

Over the past few weeks, the calls for Joe Biden to step aside have been met not with thoughtful critiques or reasoned counter-arguments but with furious accusations of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal.

Whatever happened to the importance of voicing dissent? Of speaking truth to power? Weren’t liberals supposed to be the folks who value open debate and discussion?

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2024-07-14

🔗 Brother Ali - Uncle Sam Goddamn (Official Video) - YouTube

Damn.

🔗 The Real Gaza Death Toll - Susan Abulhawa on the Gross Underestimation - YouTube

Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa visited Gaza twice this year between February and May, witnessing firsthand the unimaginable scale of Israel’s actions. Based on statistics from the WHO, scientific literature detailing morbidity and mortality data for various conditions in Gaza, Abulhawa uses math to estimate a staggering reality: while the official death toll stalled at 30,000 for months before climbing to 37,000, they grossly underestimate the true death toll. These figures only account for identified victims of 'direct fire'. Hundreds of thousands more remain uncounted—unidentified bodies or body parts, those who died due to a lack of medicine and healthcare, those buried by their loved ones without getting to hospital, those who starved to death, those trapped under the rubble, those who succumbed to torture while abducted by the IOF and/or those missing.

🔗 The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change » Yale Climate Connections

The situation has now reached the point where the government can’t possibly make whole all those wiped out by a disaster, let alone buy out all of the properties that have flooded repeatedly or finance all the beach nourishment projects that could defend coastal property against sea level rise and stronger storms.

"The scope of the problem is vast."

Even that is an understatement. We cannot be ready because this is now an existential crisis for civilization as we know it. It's that simple.

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2024-07-13

🔗 Legendary artist Saul Williams joins Empire Files to discuss the overlap of high technology with medieval barbarism in Israel's genocide.

Brutal truth.

This conversation with Saul Williams about the historical and ongoing colonialism by the Global North of the Global South hits hard. It’s white supremacy in service of resource extraction, plain and simple.

🔗 In the South, Sea Level Rise Accelerates at Some of the Most Extreme Rates on Earth - Inside Climate News

“I think people just really have no idea what is coming, because we have no way of visualizing that through our own personal experiences, or that of the last 250 years,” said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University. “It’s not something where you go, ‘I know what that might look like because I’ve seen that.’ Because we haven’t.

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2024-07-12

🔗 The New York Times reports on soaring heat related emergencies and deaths in the US:

Extreme heat, intensified by climate change, has blanketed much of the United States this summer, killing more than a dozen people in Oregon in recent days. Large parts of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah have been under excessive heat warnings, which local officials believe contributed to more than 90 deaths in the West this month.

Living and surviving in the climate emergency will become increasingly difficult and, frankly, miserable.

Have you tried to imagine what it will be like in 20 years?

🔗 Mother Jones reports on the July 5th Lancet report on the counting of the dead in Gaza:

Factoring in a possible ratio of four indirect deaths to each direct death, researchers Dr. Rasha Khatib, Dr. Martin McKee, and Dr. Salim Yusuf wrote that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” That is nearly five times the 38,000 dead reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, the only organization conducting regular counts of the dead on the ground. That number is equivalent to 8 percent of Gaza’s population.

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2024-07-11

🔗 How Science Fiction Can Inspire Environmentalism and Climate Action - ZNetwork

As the rhyme suggests, cli-fi is a sub-genre of sci-fi. It tends to be speculative, to focus on anthropogenic global warming, and to examine the effects of climate change on human communities. Frequently, as with Atwood’s trilogy, there is a dystopian slant.

In keeping with the complexity of climate change itself, cli-fi is multiform, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thriller, magical realism, fable, satire, and everything in between.

🔗 CrimethInc. : Why Stop at Removing Biden? : The Center Cannot Hold

It would seem like a heavy-handed metaphor if it weren’t our actual reality. A doddering patriarch, representing the collapsing centrist political project, refuses to step aside even as it becomes certain that he faces defeat at the hands of an even more authoritarian autocrat. This encapsulates the global prospects for democracy today.

It’s not a particular politician that has grown senile, but an entire political system.

In 2018, when we described centrist politics as a race to the bottom dooming its adherents to advocate for “the second worst of all possible evils,” it seemed like hyperbole. Now even the most faithful centrist journalists acknowledge that this is indeed occurring.

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2024-07-10

🔗 The war crimes and genocide continue with another school bombing by Israel. 4 schools in 4 days. One school each day. When you're bombing kids playing football you are on the wrong side.

Video shows moment of Israeli strike on Gaza school | The Guardian

Asmaa Qudeih, a witness who lost some relatives in the attack, told Reuters: “Bodies flew in the wind, body parts flew, I don’t know how to describe it.”

Videos from Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the casualties were taken, showed dozens of dead and seriously injured people, including children, strewn across the floor of a room.

🔗 Sarah Kendzior: Last Chance, USA

Because Trump is widely loathed, beating him should have been easy — in the debate, and in the 2024 election. All Biden had to do was remain marginally coherent and not do something unforgivably sadistic, like abet a genocide of children, but no.

It is telling that bombing the debate instead of bombing the children of Gaza was the dealbreaker for Biden’s backers.

🔗 Our new reality is constant adaption to extreme heat and other effects of the ongoing climate emergency: The mayor of Athens, Greece on extreme heat in the capital city: "It’s about survival". The plan includes more cooling centers, water stations and planting a lot more trees for shade.

The Guardian reports on the mayor of Athens’s top priority:

Ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already witnessed record-breaking temperatures and wildfires.

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2024-07-09

🔗 What a fucking joke.

US Gaza aid pier to be permanently dismantled after operating for just 20 days – reports | The Guardian

Pier, which has delivered the equivalent of a single day’s pre-war land aid deliveries in two months, will reportedly be removed in a few days’ time

Meanwhile: Researchers Estimate True Gaza Death Toll at 186,000 or More | Truthout

🔗 A well articulated, sobering assessment of the motivations of the Democratic and Republican parties in terms of the past 30-40 years and how it's playing out in the current election.

🔗 Sadly this won't register as a problem for most people. But when a recognized animal like the polar bear goes extinct, that will get some attention.

And yes, the polar bears will go extinct.

Sea level rise wipes out a U.S. species for the first known time

Sea level rise driven by human-caused climate change may have wiped out an entire species in the U.S. for the first time.

The loss of the only known stand of Key Largo tree cactus in the U.S. shows how rising seas can alter the coastal environment.

Most people think "local extinctions due to climate change and sea level rise are something that will be affecting our grandchildren, but it's happening today."

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2024-07-08

🔗 Researchers Estimate True Gaza Death Toll at 186,000 or More | Truthout

Public health experts have estimated that the true death toll in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza could be five times higher than the official toll reported by Palestinian officials — a chilling figure that they say is, in fact, a conservative estimate based on historical death tolls in times of conflict.

In a letter published on Friday in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the researchers said that the current death toll in Gaza could be 186,000 or more. This amounts to roughly 8 percent of Gaza’s population before October.

🔗 Equally predictable: the 10% of the Global North will keep on flying to vacations, driving SUVs without concern and otherwise carry on as though there is no problem and nothing they can do.

Earth sees warmest June on record, boosts odds of warmest year

June was the warmest such month on record worldwide, according to figures released Monday, extending a heat streak even longer.

The monthly milestone increases the odds that 2024 will eclipse 2023 as the warmest year on record, and adds to the consecutive months that exceeded the crucial 1.5°C threshold in the Paris Agreement.

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2024-07-07

🔗 Pearls and Irritations have an excellent post about The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. The new book, a critique of neoliberalism as the ideological source of the myriad crises we now face.

The book argues passionately for urgent system change, away from the control currently exercised by profit makers, and the need to strengthen governance and how the economy operates, though expanded participatory democracy. This is a well written, quite brief book that deserves a wide readership by those of us concerned about the many crises that now threaten our human future.

🔗 The hard truth that needs to be confronted by America today: white nationalism is alive and thriving.. Erin Aubry Kaplan at the Los Angeles Times:

Here’s the hard truth of the last eight years: America leans at least as much toward white nationalism as it does toward democracy (and that’s being optimistic). Nobody says it out loud, on either side, which is obscuring the real shape of Showdown 2024.

The GOP cult is clearly racist and anti-equality but claims not to be, despite rapidly mounting evidence to the contrary.

🔗 How the 1990s broke politics - Vox

If you were to write the history of modern American conservatism, where would you start? Maybe somewhere in the 1930s just before WW2? Or maybe you begin with the Cold War and anti-communism?

Cases can be made for both of those entry points, but the early 1990s offer another fascinating moment in this history. While this wasn’t the beginning of any grand conservative movement, the period is, in retrospect, a revealing flashpoint. And if you’re looking for a precursor to the weird, scrambled politics of the present, it’s an excellent candidate.

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2024-07-04

🔗 The “Land of the Free” Has Been the Enemy of Freedom Around the World | Truthout

Today, streets and lawns throughout the United States bristle with red, white and blue, and a settler colony built on genocide and slavery seeks to depict itself as a scrappy young underdog that overthrew the yokes of British tyranny. Yet for hundreds of millions around the world, the stars and stripes have been a symbol not of independence but of coercion, oppression and forced dependence.

From Latin America to Southeast Asia, and from the Middle East and North Africa to Eastern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, the “land of the free” has often been an enemy of self-determination. No people — including this country’s native inhabitants — have been safe from the reach of U.S. empire, which insisted on making the world an ungated playground for its interests.

I am Palestinian. For 76 long years, the U.S. – the nation of my birth – has materially and militarily backed a state that displaced my grandparents from their home in 1948 and rendered them and their children stateless — a nation that has been cleansing my people from their land since its founding, and in its latest act of genocide, has cut short the lives of 37,953 Palestinians within the last nine months alone.

🔗 On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” | Democracy Now!

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

🔗 Freedom isn’t free • Missouri Independent

You can’t understand the scope of 122,000 names until you see them on a wall.

Stand at the foot of the National Monument to Freedom, recently dedicated by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, and you’ll see all of them, soaring three or four stories above your head.

Each name, taken from the 1870 census, belonged to a former enslaved person. These are surnames. Family names. Combined, they represent about 4 million people who emerged from bondage.

Each one stands for an American once treated as an animal. Someone who could be abused and assaulted under the law. Who could be stripped naked in front of a crowd of rich men; poked and prodded, and sold away from parents, spouses and children.

🔗 “The developed countries, the major emitters, are not taking this matter seriously.”

Science, Not Scaremongering: St. Vincent & Grenadines PM on Hurricane Beryl & Climate Crisis | Democracy Now!

As the earliest Category 5 storm ever observed in the Atlantic carves a path of destruction through the Caribbean, we get an update on damage from Hurricane Beryl from the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves. He describes the disaster scenes he witnessed and discusses the rising challenge of extreme weather fueled by the climate crisis.

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2024-07-03

Community Organizing Guide

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2024-07-02

🔗 Tragic. The devastation is hard to comprehend.

Hurricane Beryl's Aftermath: Carriacou Residents' Survival Stories - YouTube

We survived Hurricane Beryl. Now what? It's heart wrenching and inspiring to hear from residents in Carriacou who have lost everything in this powerful hurricane. As the only journalists on the island, I need your help. This is a very raw video, I walk around and talk to the people so you can hear directly from them about this Hurricane, it's impacts and how they can still smile in the face of having no hope but to wait for help to arrive.

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2024-04-18

🔗 No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel | Democracy Now!

Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military.

We could do with more worker activism. Not easy to put one's livelihood on the line.

🔗 Arctic permafrost is now a net source of major greenhouse gases | New Scientist

Areas of permanently frozen ground in northern regions are now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb, causing the planet to heat even further, according to the first Arctic-wide estimate of all three major greenhouse gases.

Frozen ground, or permafrost, which underlies 15 per cent of the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, has shrunk in area by an estimated 7 per cent in 50 years as it thaws.

🔗 Democrats Question U.S. Claims That Israel Isn’t Violating International Law Using American Weapons

More than two dozen House Democrats sent a letter to the Biden administration on Tuesday questioning its assertions that the Israeli government is using American weapons in full compliance with U.S. and international law, as required by a memo President Joe Biden issued in February.

Texas Democratic Reps. Veronica Escobar and Joaquin Castro led the congressional letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The 26 Democrats note that for months, “elected representatives, intergovernmental bodies, international courts, Israeli and global human rights observers — along with government officials themselves — have persistently expressed grave concerns regarding the actions of the Netanyahu government.”

🔗 Documenting Six Months of Israeli War Crimes in Gaza

Over the last six months, Israel has repeatedly massacred Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in the deaths of well over thirty thousand Palestinians, some 70 percent of whom are women and children. Tens of thousands more have been injured. These numbers are probably an undercount considering Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health care system, which is the sole independent source of these numbers (which are also used by Israel, including its prime minister and the military)

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2024-04-17

🔗 UN Report Describes Abuse and Dire Conditions in Israeli Detention - The New York Times

Gazans released from Israeli detention described graphic scenes of physical abuse in testimonies gathered by United Nations workers, according to a report released on Tuesday by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.

Palestinian detainees described being made to sit on their knees for hours on end with their hands tied while blindfolded, being deprived of food and water and being urinated on, among other humiliations, the report said. Others described being badly beaten with metal bars or the butts of guns and boots, according to the report, or forced into cages and attacked by dogs.

🔗 'The Deliberate Dehumanization of the Palestinians': Mehdi Hasan Calls out Media Bias on Gaza - YouTube

"One of the reasons I am hosting this new weekly show for Zeteo, is that I am fed up with media organizations failing to challenge the racism and bigotry of our leaders, and I am also fed up with media organizations themselves pushing racist, bigoted, dehumanizing coverage of minorities across the board - but especially, especially, of the Palestinians. I think the world deserves better."

Breaking it down by the numbers. Damning but not surprising.

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2024-04-16

🔗 The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature? | Physics | The Guardian

Such a new force could help unlock a deeper structure at the base of reality

Hints that physicists may be on the brink of making such a breakthrough have been accumulating over the past decade. The first tranche of evidence comes from particle physics experiments here on Earth, the results of which appear to conflict with our current best theory of fundamental particles, the standard model.

🔗 "Borrowed time": As we shatter temperature records, experts worry we're in "uncharted territory" | Salon.com

Our rapidly heating planet is regularly shattering records these days. December through February was so warm — in fact, the hottest winter on record in the U.S. — it's been described by some climate experts as a "lost winter." Last year also set new records for global surface temperature, hottest summer and ocean heat content. Perhaps most ominously, the world averaged temperatures 1.4º C higher than pre-industrial levels during those 12 months.

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2023-10-25

🔗 Global health at mercy of fossil fuel addiction, warn scientists | The Guardian

Reliance on oil and gas worsening climate impacts and compounding food, energy and cost of living crises

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2023-06-25

🔗 Stay Grounded

Just one flight can emit as much CO2 equivalent emissions as many people do in a year. While one return flight from Paris to New York accounts for a climate impact equivalent to 3.2 tonnes of CO2, an average person in Uganda emits just 1.1 tonnes greenhouse gasses.

Air travel is a fundamental act of privilege and injustice. If the wealthiest 10% continue living as they have they should own up to the their crime against the future as well as their contribution to climate injustice today. Don’t just point fingers at the top 1%. Own your contribution to the problem.

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2023-06-17

2023-06-17 Some global perspective on income and climate.

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2022-10-31

🔗 The Story Behind One of the Creepiest Scenes in TV History | Vanity Fair

A young boy with an unnaturally pallid face hovers in the mist outside his big brother's window. The lurid smile is chilling. But then the scratching—oh God, the scratching—on the glass makes it unbearable.

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2022-10-30

🔗 Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View - The New York Times

“The bad news is that we have been ‘systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” - Katharine Hayhoe

🔗 ‘It’s got nasty’: the battle to build the US’s biggest solar power farm | The Guardian

A significant portion of the US appears to have lost the capacity for rational thought and seem to want the world to burn.

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2022-10-29

🔗 How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms | by Cory Doctorow | Oct, 2022 | Medium

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2022-10-28

🔗 Climate change paintings protests: The long history of art destruction for social justice.

Destroying art in service of justice is a time-honored tradition. Does it ever work?

Just to note in the recent actions by climate activists, the art has not been destroyed.

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2022-10-27

🔗 iPadOS 16 new features tips for iPad note taking, digital planning, journaling & more - YouTube

But wait, according to all the Twitter/YouTube/podcast Tech Bros, the iPad is broken and barely usable. Someone please tell her that what she's doing isn't possible 😉

🔗 Mississippi River water levels plummet to historic lows due to drought - The Washington Post

“You wouldn’t believe this is the Mississippi River.”

🔗 Climate crisis: UN finds ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’ | The Guardian

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “Emissions remain at dangerous and record highs and are still rising. We must close the emissions gap before climate catastrophe closes in on us all.”

Prof David King, the former UK chief scientific adviser, said: “The report is a dire warning to all countries – none of whom are doing anywhere near enough to manage the climate emergency.”

The report found that existing carbon-cutting policies will cause 2.8C of warming, while pledged policies cut this to 2.6C. Further pledges, dependent on funding flowing from richer to poorer nations, cut this again to 2.4C.

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2022-10-26

🔗 Climate Pledges Are Falling Short, and a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality - The New York Times

Without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the report said, the planet is on track to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels, by 2100.

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2022-10-25

🔗 The numbers are in: the heat is taking a heavy toll on health and incomes - The Verge

Heat spells are increasingly costing people their lives and livelihoods, a new report finds

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2022-10-23

William Shatner experienced profound grief in space. It was the overview effect