Today we are looking at Linux Mint 20.3 beautiful backgrounds and how to download them and use them as you like. I have a feeling that we can expect Linux Mint 20.3 Beta to arrive in about a week's time as changing the backgrounds are normally one of the last things they do before releasing the beta release. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at the beautiful backgrounds of the upcoming Linux Mint 20.3.
According to Phoronix, a new patch for the Linux kernel is coming soon that deals with core prioritization problems on Alder Lake CPUs. The issue stems from enabling XMP memory profiles in the UEFI or manually overclocking Alder Lake chips. Doing either of the two causes Linux to put improper workloads on the wrong cores, reducing system performance.
More specifically, it appears that Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology is the main culprit. Linux requires functional Turbo Boost Max code to enable proper core prioritization. However, this code can easily be disabled automatically by the motherboard if it uses an XMP mode or the user enters a custom core overclock.
Box86 as the open-source project to run Linux x86 binaries on other CPU architectures like ARM is out with a new feature release along with the accompanying Box64 project for x86_64 treatment. With today's Box86 update is even expanded Vulkan support now good enough for handling DXVK.
Box86 aims to run Linux x86 binaries on other CPU architectures with better performance than QEMU or other forms of virtualization. With Box86 also comes the ability to utilize OpenGL acceleration and even running some Steam / Wine games when taking some additional steps. Though in order for Box86 to work out, the operating system does need a working 32-bit subsystem/libraries. Besides ARM, Box86 could prove important with the growing interest in RISC-V as well as there having been interest from the (Open)POWER side too. Meanwhile Box64 has also been updated as the adjoining project providing similar treatment for running x86 64-bit binaries on other architectures.
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Through it's open architecture, Blender provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility, an incredibly small footprint, and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics application in the world.
Linux has a habit of exposing information about various devices in sysfs (normally visible on /sys). NVMe drives are one such device, especially because NVMe drives are PCIe devices. Recently I found myself wondering what information is exposed here. The answer turns out to be less than I expected.
In our network layout, we have a lot of internal machines that are on subnets with private IP addresses; in fact, most of the machines on our networks are in private IP address space. These machines need DNS names, both for us (to keep track of them) and sometimes for other people (to talk to them). Using split-horizon DNS means that we can avoid leaking private IP addresses into public DNS results (well, more or less) while still allowing people to have names under our public subdomain for internal machines.
Back in the days when Ansible was invented, support for cowsay was implemented very early on, and I even added code for angry cows indicating failed tasks, but Michael rejected that patch.
CSS relative colors enable the dynamic color manipulation I’ve always wanted in vanilla CSS since Sass’ color functions first came on the scene (darken(), lighten(), etc.).
Allow me to explain a bit more about why I’m so excited.
Today we are looking at how to install OpenToonz eXperimental on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Nginx is designed to handle multiple domains on a single server and IP address. In other words, If you have a single server that is used as web server and it has allocated one IP address only, then in order to have more than one website or domain running on the server, you use Nginx virtual hosts.
Before you begin this tutorial, you’ll need to install Nginx. To learn how, read How to Install and Configure Nginx Web Server.
There are plenty of tools for screen recording. Some are even now included in your favorite operating system: QuickTime Player for macOS and the Xbox Game Bar in Windows 10, for example. Yet the Xbox Game Bar allows only up to four hours of recording. QuickTime Player allows more (the limit is in theory the space available on the storage device) but it is sometimes tricky to make it work nicely, depending on the configuration, especially for the audio part.
TaskBoard is a very Kanban-inspired app for keeping track of things and scheduling applications, which helps people to keep track of their daily important tasks. TaskBoard is free, open-source, PHP-based, and a self-hosted application available for all the Debian 11 users. It comes with a simple but intuitive UI, which helps the user to manage all their tasks and schedule from one place. TaskBoard is massively being used by many teams & organizations around the world to represent work and path of completion. So, yes you can use it as a lightweight project management tool as well.
From app testing to reducing infrastructure costs and beyond, Docker has many great use cases. But developers should remember that, like any technology, Docker has limitations.
We all have once thought in our life to be able to carry our whole computer system in a pocket wherever we go.
But what if we tell you that it is very much possible for you to carry around your system just on a USB drive? Unbelievable, isn’t it?
It’s very much possible. You can easily plug the USB in either Windows or Apple computer and once you are finished with the work you can detach it.
USB will carry all the data of your computer and all it will be e borrowing from the system it is plugged into to is the hardware and the software to use the information stored in it.
Such one enabler is TAILS, this pre-configured program, helps you set up your complete computer on a USB without much hustle and all you need is a USB drive for it.
Here in this tutorial, we will install the OSTicket open source support ticketing system on Debian 11 Bullseye using Apache, PHP, and MySQL, or MariaDB.
osTicket offers free, open-source ticket management and customer care solutions for businesses of all sizes, especially small and medium-sized businesses. The software can be used to capture tickets and assign custom fields to each ticket, creating a list of data associated with each ticket that can be shared with customers in the knowledge base. You can create automatic reply templates for incoming email tickets, and rich text HTML lets you add your logo, images, and videos to tickets.
With the ticket filter tool provided by osTicket, you can define routing rules for tickets so that tickets are sent to the correct person or department. Tickets can also be reassigned if not received by the correct person, and notes on all actions are logged in the ticket thread. The ticketing software helps to further streamline operations by preventing agent collisions using the ticket lock tool. Other features include an autoresponder, customer portal, and dashboard reports.
In the first article in this series, I discussed how, due to lack of the availability of new systems, many companies and educational institutions have chosen to repurpose existing systems as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) clients by installing Linux and a VDI native client on it. In that article, I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on a virtual machine (VM) -- first for testing and then on two old, under-powered systems. All three of these systems ran without any issues.
Good news for Linux users! The new Steam Client update adds support for VA-API hardware encoding on Linux. Users who don’t want this feature will be able to disabled it by turning off AMD and Intel hardware encoding in the Remote Play advanced host settings.
Moreover, Valve added support for DMABUF PipeWire capture on Linux, which can be enabled by launching Steam with the -pipewire-dmabuf argument, and it requires the 32-bit version of the libgbm.so.1 library.
Following experimental Zink work to improve the NVIDIA driver support as part of the broader Copper initiative that also allows running Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan for Wayland's Weston compositor, another milestone has now been reached.
As what developer Mike Blumenkrantz says will be his last update of the calendar year, the latest excitement is getting compute PBO download support merged into Mesa 22.0-devel. For some select scenarios it can lead a "2-10x performance improvement" but more important making some games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive now work well on Mesa 22.0. The PCSX3 emulator is another use-case that will work much better now with Zink thanks to this pixel buffer object download support using compute shaders.
Alterium Shift is an in-development indie RPG styled like JRPG classics including inspiration from Chrono Trigger and FFVI.
"In this game you will experience a story rich, living world, where choices and interactions matter! You’ll journey with three heroes in training; Pyra, Atlas, and Sage. Their teacher, the war hero Dolion, strives to mold his students into heroes, ones better than himself. You start the game with the three heroes taking their final test before being sent off on an important and life changing mission. What fate awaits these heroes and can they accomplish the tasks set forth before them?"
Valve's portable Steam Deck hardware may be delayed by a couple of months, but that didn't stop Valve from discussing plenty of interesting details about the system during a wide-ranging developer-focused livestream Friday. That included a lot of nitty-gritty talk about hardware specs and software interpolation, but also design decisions surrounding how to balance hardware-power and battery-power concerns.
SteamOS 3.0 will mark a before and an after in the functioning of SteamOS since it is a version developed from scratch on Arch Linux to take advantage of its system of constant updates that allow adding new features much faster and easier. This allows solutions such as the universal FSR to be integrated without much effort, and every time a new feature is ready, it is provided via an update, unlike other Linux distributions that release updates every three or even six months and have to wait a long time for new features.
This week the new KWin Overview effect gained the ability to shows results from KRunner when you search! This brings it fairly close to feature parity with GNOME’s central Activities Overview feature!
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
“Debian Bullseye has relatively few major changes which are visible to users,” according to Raspberry Pi. “There are some under-the-hood changes to file systems and printing, but most of the changes are patches and upgrades to existing applications and features. However, over and above the changes in Debian itself, the Bullseye version of Raspberry Pi OS has a number of significant changes to the desktop environment and to the support for Raspberry Pi hardware.”
Raspberry Pi OS, the custom operating system for Raspberry Pis, has had a major upgrade. It is now based on Debian Bullseye, Linux which has replaced two year old Debian Buster. “Debian Bullseye has relatively few major changes which are visible to users,” according to Raspberry Pi. “There are some under-the-hood changes to file systems and printing, but most of the changes are patches and upgrades to existing applications and features. However, over and above the changes in Debian itself, the Bullseye version of Raspberry Pi OS has a number of significant changes to the desktop environment and to the support for Raspberry Pi hardware.”
I guess you already heard, right? The Debian Bug Tracking System has hit a big milestone! We just passed our one millionth bug report! (and yes, that’s a cause for celebration; bug reporting is probably the best way for the system to grow and improve)
Sometimes I like to connect to multiple WiFi networks on my Pi for... reasons.
Other times I like being able to use a better wireless interface than the built-in WiFi module on the Pi 4 or CM4, but don't want to add dtoverlay=disable-wifi in my /boot/config.txt and reboot.
Since Pi OS uses wpa_supplicant, it's actually easy to do this.
The project relies on a Cluster HAT and Raspberry Pi 4 with 3GB of RAM. If that caught your attention, it should—the Pi 4 doesn’t come with a 3GB edition. This is a custom mod from Kuleshov who apparently removed the original 8GB RAM module from the Pi 4 and soldered it to a CM4.
Inspired by the 1980s 8-bit computers that turned a generation of Britons into developers, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was set up to deliver a low-cost computer that could do the same for today's schoolkids. Their first device, the Raspberry Pi Model B, was launched in 2012, with 256MB of memory and a 26-pin GPIO expansion port. Over the next decade the original ARM-based device has grown into a family of devices, including a full-blown computer, a microcontroller CPU, and a series of modules that can be used to build more complex devices.
C and C++ are powerful tools, but not everyone has the patience (or enough semicolons) to use them all the time. For a lot of us, the preference is for something a little higher level than C. While Python is arguably more straightforward, sometimes the best choice is to work within a full-fledged operating system, even if it’s on a microcontroller. For that [Chloe Lunn] decided to port Unix to several popular microcontrollers.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released CloudStack 4.16. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) software is used to deploy and manage extensive networks of virtual machines. Compared to the previous version, there are 22 major innovations as well as over 244 changes and fixes. It is again a release with long-term support (LTS).
Although the United Nations (UN) has previously spoken well of open source development, several recent events show the UN taking definitive actions to introduce the entire world to the open source way. In July, the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) adopted a draft resolution introduced by the representative of Pakistan titled Open source technologies for sustainable development. ECOSOC noted the availability of open source technologies that can contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The council invited the Secretary-General to “develop specific proposals on ways to better leverage open source technologies for sustainable development based on inputs from interested Member States and other stakeholders.”
Open source technology development can be an effective and rapid tool for innovation. Applying it to appropriate technologies to help reach SDGs is extremely promising. “Appropriate technologies” encompass technological choices and applications that are small-scale, economically affordable, decentralized, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and easily utilized by local communities to meet their needs. There is a particularly strong case for open source appropriate technologies (OSAT). OSAT can help everyone out of poverty and into a sustainable state by leveraging the same type of development that makes open source software such a slamming success.
Proprietary software solutions have dominated the 3D/2D animation landscape for most of the last 30 years. The animation software area is one of the sectors where proprietary solutions are gatekeeping the entire industry; it takes tens and hundreds of dollars to get a good working software, and hence, individual animators or small-sized studios don’t even have a chance of entering the market.
But this is gradually changing, and open source solutions have started to catch up with the competition and offer a similar quality to their rivals.
That’s why open source solutions have become more important: Beside the fact that they are free as in freedom, they are also free as in terms of cost. They have helped many small indie animators work on their novice animation projects easily, and even turn it into professional projects later on.
Firefox is OK with the first one, but ignores the second -- does not display the scrollbar arrows.
The deprecated warning is a grab-bag. Basically, anything that is deprecated causes this warning to be generated, and the list changes from release to release.
The only reason I can think of ever to turn this off is around a deprecated construction while you are actively working to eliminate it. Silencing it and then forgetting about it will bite you, eventually.
“JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file. The amount of content encoded in JPEGs must be surely biblical by now. If there is one thing that is going to carry into the future for historians, It will surely be a JPEG decoder.
Miramax, the film studio originally founded by Harvey Weinstein before being sold to Disney, then spun out, and currently owned jointly by a Qatari media company, beIN, and ViacomCBS, is in the news for suing Quentin Tarantino over his collection of NFTs about Pulp Fiction -- one of Miramax's biggest hit films in the 90s, and the one that put Tarantino on the map. Like many other content creators, Tarantino is exploring the NFT space, and his experiment is actually somewhat interesting. It's using a modification of typical NFTs, where some (or all) of the content remains "access controlled" and only available to the purchaser. In other words: it's DRM'd NFTs, which seems to miss the entire point of NFTs, which is creating a new scarcity of ownership without the scarcity of content access. But, hey, it's Hollywood, so restricting access and using DRM is kind of in their DNA.
But I also felt a serious sense of disquiet that took form in these distinct words:€ “This is just our chance to take a deep breath before the big plunge.”€ In the year since then, this feeling has not only persisted but has deepened, and has been confirmed by events and by other cultural observers.
Put another way, Biden’s election was not an automatic “undo” of Trump and everything he did. (Or as I would say to my geek friends: “Biden was not a ctrl+Z.”) First because some of what Trump did is virtually irreversible (like court appointments), secondly because some will take time (like rebuilding regulatory agencies) and thirdly because some is consistent with what Biden also wants (neoliberal economics, militarism).
As Austin’s hospitals filled with Covid cases over the summer, city council member Greg Casar was outraged: “The state had been sitting on hundreds of millions of federal dollars that should be used to assist us in the Covid 19 crisis.” Instead of helping cities like his own to keep their hospitals running, Texas state legislators instead “spent their time on, you know, attacking abortion and suppressing voting rights.”
Mostly the art of summitry comes down to stagecraft and after three decades of these kinds of performances the mechanics of the event are pretty well scripted. Indigenous leaders are brought in from the Arctic and Amazonia to bless the event. Global leaders memorize their lines and pitch coins into fountains for good luck, by far the most assertive act for of the entire affair. News is carefully leaked about fake fights behind the scenes in the anterooms of the conference, which threaten to imperil any agreement. The leaders of island nations are given a few moments before the cameras to declaim how many acres of their land mass have been lost to rising seas since the last summit and the members of the press try earnestly to recall how to spell the names of their countries before they disappear altogether. € Outside protesters from around the world swarm the streets, lending the whole affair a gravitas that these hollow exercises wouldn’t have without them.
The lobbies of nearby hotels are turned into showroom floors for the latest quick-fix technologies marketed by corporations, most of them also Pentagon contractors, seeking to capitalize on a global green new deal.€ The rituals of the COP are followed as diligently as the secret salutations and backroom handshakes at Davos and Bohemian Grove. The most important thing, of course, is that whatever agreement is reached–even if it’s an agreement in name only (often the most preferable outcome)–must be good for the bottom line. It must make the crypto-carbon-futures markets jump.
By buying cheap chocolate, we enable Cargill, Hershey, Nestlé and other multinationals to exploit West African workers. Here’s a brief look at what’s still wrong with the industry—and what else these companies are selling to us.
Meet the “Architects and Defenders of the Cocoa Production System of Côte D’Ivoire…”
One month after the successful launch of the podcast Going for Broke With Ray Suarez, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Nation invite you to a special conversation on work, making ends meet, and the hardships people face in everyday life. Going for Broke host Ray Suarez joins guest Ann Larson, a cultural critic who works in a pandemic-era grocery store, as they talk about how they personally experienced what was broken about today’s work world and economy, and what they’ve come to understand from their experience and reporting on how to fix it. They’ll also explain why they chose to participate in this podcast, and what they hope audiences will get from the show.
Got a question about work, or an experience you want to share? We’ll be taking audience questions and stories throughout the event. The panel will be moderated by Laura Flanders, host and executive producer of The Laura Flanders Show.
Starting with a question: In a democratic country — government of the people, by the people, for the people — who “owns” the government’s money?
Either money is privately owned (people, companies, corporations, investment banks, etc) or it’s publicly owned.
In 2003, George W Bush set up the destruction and privatization of Medicare. The end of "real Medicare" is getting closer every day, and Congress and Medicare's administrators are doing nothing.
This bioluminescent hallucination definitely belongs in the top ten greatest anti-vax lunatic hits. It’s up there along with the claim that the covid vaccine makes you magnetic. One nurse, Joanna Overholt attempted to convince the Ohio legislature of this. She “tried to place a key and bobby pin against her body in an effort to prove that both would stick to her skin…the attempt ultimately failed,” the Hill reported June 12. Another anti-vax fanatic, Sherri Tenpenny, believes not only that the vaccine magnetizes you, but that it can “interface” with 5G cellular towers. What it does then is an open question; maybe it enables hostile aliens in their spaceship laboratories to decode the DNA of freedom-loving Amuricans and “interface” with it. Probably something like that. No doubt the best protection against this 5G interface is a tin foil hat. The already-vaccinated could use their magnetism to keep it in place on a windy day.
Also ready for the men in the white coats are those convinced the covid vaccine turns people into zombies. According to a video shared in a March 31 Facebook post, USA Today reported, the mRNA vaccine transforms the human body into a “viral making factory” that “attacks itself, ultimately giving rise to a generation of zombies.” This novel theory laid out in the video “has amassed nearly 10,000 interactions on Facebook.”
By mid-November 2021, this number, according to Germany’s most recognized news broadcaster “Die Tagesschau” was above 300. Meanwhile, the total number of all infections had risen to over 50,000. All these indicators were markedly higher than two years ago, at the start of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Germans are increasingly worried about the stratospheric growth rate just before the beginning of the 4th Corona wave. The RKI notes that vaccinated people are currently still four times less likely to develop symptoms of Covid-19 than unvaccinated people. If infection numbers continue to rise – so will the number of deaths.
After long feeling ignored by Washington, D.C., this week Louisiana Cancer Alley community leaders were elated following a visit from the federal government’s highest ranking environmental regulator, Michael Regan. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator met with environmental advocates in New Orleans, Reserve and St. James on November 16, as part of his “Journey for Justice,” a five-day listening tour of environmental justice communities in states along the Gulf of Mexico. The EPA tour started in Alabama on November 15 and ended today, November 19, in Texas.
Regan promised community leaders that they will have a seat at the table during national discussions aimed at advancing environmental justice, a Biden administration priority. Though he didn’t elaborate on any specific local actions his agency will take to help those in Louisiana communities suffering from the effects of industrial pollution, he assured them that their concerns are his concerns.
A bipartisan group of U.S. state attorneys general has begun an investigation into Instagram, it was announced today.
So far it looks as though nine states are on board. The investigation comes on the back of recent news that Meta Platforms Inc., formerly Facebook Inc., knew that its Instagram app was causing mental harm to teenagers but did nothing about it.
One of the more common ways cybercriminals cash out access to bank accounts involves draining the victim’s funds via Zelle, a “peer-to-peer” (P2P) payment service used by many financial institutions that allows customers to quickly send cash to friends and family. Naturally, a great deal of phishing schemes that precede these bank account takeovers begin with a spoofed text message from the target’s bank warning about a suspicious Zelle transfer. What follows is a deep dive into how this increasingly clever Zelle fraud scam typically works, and what victims can do about it.
Nokia NOKIA.HE said on Wednesday it plans to launch a cloud-based software subscription service targeting telecom companies for providing software around analytics, security and data management.
Hardware security modules (HSM) and trusted platform modules (TPM) seemingly do the same thing: they manage secret keys and enable data protection.
But what does “managing secrets” mean, and what’s the difference between the two? Before diving deeper, let’s explore why computers need help with managing their secrets.
The dislike button and counter is part of what makes YouTube great. YouTube co-founder, Jawed Karim, perfectly summed up why that was a bad move.
More than 400 such incidents were recorded between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021, up from 352 a year earlier, according to the NCSC’s latest annual threat report, published today (November 16).
More alarmingly still, the proportion of these incidents that reached the post-compromise stage – where threat actors manage to access and move laterally through networks or otherwise cause the victim harm – more than doubled, from 15% to 33%.
Microsoft trolls claim open source is unprofessional, leading to censorship, while their own games have “boobies” and “f***face” in them.
The OSPO Alliance, consisting of four non-profit open source organizations, has published the first version of the Open Source Handbook of Good Governance. OW2, the Eclipse Foundation, the OpenForum Europe and the Foundation for Public Code have jointly developed the manual as part of their good governance initiative. It offers know-how for introducing a professional management of open source software in organizations.
We have talked a long, long time about how the concept of content moderation at the kind of scale of the largest internet and social media platforms is essentially impossible. But it's not just content moderation that is proving difficult for those platforms. Policing those platforms for anything that relies on user-based input is difficult as well. For instance, Instagram recently found out that its process for locking up the accounts of the deceased may need some work, as one person was able to get Instagram founder Adam Mosseri's Instagram account locked.
Two decades later, the TSA has more than 54,000 employees, a budget of $8 billion dollars, and a long track record of harassing passengers for no good reason. Far from contributing to actual safety, the TSA is a stunning example of government failure: Its absurd travel restrictions make air travel no safer, deprive passengers of their civil liberties, and make the process of flying much more costly, time-consuming, inconvenient, and unenjoyable. The agency should never have been created, and its 20th birthday is as good a time as any to abolish it.
For starters, the TSA routinely fails at its main purpose: preventing passengers from carrying deadly weapons onto airplanes. TSA agents constantly miss weapons, drugs, and other illicit items when government agents try to smuggle them in as part of testing.
The Tor Project is going beyond the browser with plans to develop VPN-like software in order to offer enhanced privacy safeguards.
Tor VPN will initially be developed for Android, with a target delivery date in 2023, before porting to desktop platforms over an unspecified timescale.
The development work will initially involve a collaboration between developers on the Tor Project and Guardian Project, which is known for Orbot, a proxy server that provides anonymity to users.
Today, Manuel Campos Sánchez-Bordona, Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), presented his opinion in the legal dispute between SpaceNet AG and the Federal Republic of Germany on the German law on general and indiscriminate retention of all traffic, location and internet access data. In his opinion, he states that the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data is permissible only exceptionally in the event of a threat to national security, and under no circumstances permanently as provided for in the German law on data retention.
I just don’t think enough people—whether normies or journalists—are getting how annoyed people are getting with reality. Speaking just for the US, and just for the bottom 75% of the socio-economic field, life is fucking hard.
Amazon is reported to have signed a deal with GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 for its cloud computing arm to run big data tasks for the UK’s three spy agencies. It would make Skyfall’s plot, of an ex-MI6 agent stealing a hard drive with top secret information, a thing of the past as espionage goes digital.
What is to be done about the capital-driven fascistic and ecocidal madness afoot in the world’s most dangerous nation – the subjects of my last three Counterpunch essays? Let’s reflect a bit on what is not to be done. The ongoing sado-capitalist slashing and potential liquidation of the Build Back Better Bill is a good time to reflect on a comic strip analogy. Again and again, I have seen progressives, including some very sophisticated thinkers, behave like Charlie Brown in the “Peanuts” cartoon. Even when they know better, they continue to place hopes in Democratic politicians who make progressive-sounding promises that will not be carried into policy. It is reminiscent of the scene where Lucy is holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick and then pulls the ball away at the last second before his foot can make contact. She keeps playing this trick and he keeps falling for it, again and again.
Think of Lucy as the nation’s unelected de facto dictatorship of concentrated wealth and empire. Think of progressive Dem politicos like George McGovern, Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders and even of Citigroup Democrats who pose as progressives (Barack Obama being the classic example) as football coaches telling Charlie to run back into the ballot box and give it one more kick. “Go ahead, this time you can get good things like health care as a human right and green jobs programs!” The ball is always removed during or after savagely time-staggered, once-every-four-year elections, exposing the coaches as Judas Goats whose basic function is to herd people into a hopelessly compromised, corporate-owned and elite-crafted electoral slaughterhouse. The result is mass political disillusionment and disengagement in the working and lower classes especially, which opens the door for the Republicans, who are in fact the greater evil between the two parties – not because the Democrats are any damn good but because the GOP has now gone full-on white nationalist-authoritarian, eco-cidal, and pandemofascist.
Avital Ronell: OMG, violence has had brilliant handlers, beginning with Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt in our modernity all the way through your own work, that of Vincent Emmanuelle on radio, Kathy Acker, Sophie Wahnich, Angela Davis, Allen Feldman and those who have addressed the unceasing yields of violent imposition and over-punishment. Our exposure to violence is manifold, nearly unlocatable. It is hard to extricate ourselves from codified forms of sociality that inflict pain and hierarchy, often juridically backed and meted out in terms of retribution, as Nietzsche argued. Violence swarms us, even in the form of what’s purportedly good for us. Pain and gain used to rhyme. I’ll try to be clear on these points, though the promise of “clarity” is already doing violence to a complicated set of existential givens.
We deal on a daily basis with the gridwork provided by our techno-media outlets, fielding covert as well as more virulent attacks on our personhood and histories. Sometimes the violence to which we are prey and prone is of a linguistic nature. The way we use and are used by language spills over to our zones of relatedness. We each have a place in a linguistic chain gang that keeps us limited to what can be said or done. Derrida used to say that we are stuck in the rut of paleonymy—old ways of saying, feeling, directing our actions that often are reductive, insufficient, stopping short of inventiveness and resourceful audacity. But violence takes different forms, and sometimes language itself is off limits or can’t rescue the deeply distressed. Everyone has been shut down by depressive stalls and repressed history, friendless moments, or the vacancy of being to which we are all prey, no matter how high on the food chain of protected species one may perch. There really is no violent-free zone. Birth is a breach. Violence ranges from circumscribed playing fields, including sports events, to how and what we eat. Historically, the return of the repressed exemplifies a type of violence psychically dealt and institutionally absorbed, replicated, laundered. This propensity for being absorbed and recast also means that violence undergoes changes that render it compatible with aspects of desire. The internalization of violence, its headquarters in one’s internal tribunal, what Freud discovered as the Superego, requires rigorous analysis if we are to sift through prevalent forms of violent episodes that accrue to our social body, its controlling mechanisms and repressive acts.
In God We Trust is on all our coins. But, again, which god? The one of “turn the other cheek”? The one who found his disciples among society’s outcasts? The one who wanted nothing to do with moneychangers or swords? As Joe Biden might say, give me a break.
America’s true god is a deity of wrath, whose keenest followers profit mightily from war and see such gains as virtuous, while its most militant disciples, a crew of losing generals and failed Washington officials, routinely employ murderous violence across the globe. It contains multitudes, its name is legion, but if this deity must have one name, citing a need for some restraint, let it be known as the Pentagod.
On Jan. 6, Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, became the symbol of insurrection in America with the shocking takeover of the U.S. Senate chamber.€
Besides our small multinational protest, on that same day the Dutch and U.S. militaries at Volkel were participating in another international collaboration, this one for a different purpose than ours, the annual NATO exercise “Steadfast Noon,” literally a rehearsal for the extinction of humanity.
As we gathered at a wayside near the base with F16 fighters roaring over us, a few of the local police watched from a distance. We greeted old and new friends, sang, prayed, shared food and distributed pink shovels and conspired to dig our way into the base, onto the runway and disrupt the practice. Hardly a clandestine plot, this “digging for peace” was organized openly and local authorities were informed. Our purpose was get into the base, “to advocate that the old nuclear bombs be removed and the CO2 emissions of the armed forces be counted in the climate targets and to protest against the arrival of new nuclear bombs,” but our expectation was to be stopped while trying.
When US climate envoy John Kerry€ announced€ the agreement he acknowledged that although “the United States and China have no shortage of differences” it seemed that “on climate, cooperation is the only way to get this job done.” In this, however, he seemed to be taking a different track to President Joe Biden, who played into the ever-welcoming hands of Washington hawks on November 2 when he€ castigated€ Presidents Xi and Putin for non-appearance at the COP gathering.€ € This, he declared, was a “big mistake” and contrasted with the fact that “we showed up” but “they didn’t show up . . .€ € It is a gigantic issue and they just walked away. How do you do that and claim to have any leadership mantle?”
It is barely credible that the President of the United States would state that the Presidents of the world’s other most important countries are not effective leaders.€ € The BBC’s€ record€ of his diatribe is disturbing, as it demonstrates a desire for confrontation rather than a genuine preparedness to calm things down.€ € He said that “the fact that China is trying to assert, understandably, a new role in the world as a world leader — not showing up, come on.”€ € He continued by declaring that Russia’s wilderness was burning while President Putin “stays mum” about the problem.€ € He did not know, or deliberately ignored the fact that, as the BBC€ reported, “before Mr Biden’s speech Mr Putin virtually addressed a meeting on forest management at the COP26 summit on Tuesday, saying that Russia takes the ‘strongest and most vigorous measures to conserve’ woodlands.”
Progressive advocacy groups on Friday denounced Sen. Roger Wicker's last-minute attempt to€ add another $25 billion on top of the United States' already gargantuan military budget—arguing that the Mississippi Republican's proposal reflects Congress' skewed priorities and underscores the need to redirect Pentagon funding to tackle pressing social and environmental challenges in a humane, rather than violent, fashion.
"It's time to fix our broken budget priorities, and start putting human needs over Pentagon greed."
Until recently, however, Israel has been spared due criticism, not only for its unlawful spying methods on the Palestinians but also for being the originator of many of the technologies which are now being heavily criticized by human rights groups worldwide.
Even at the height of various controversies involving government surveillance in 2013, Israel remained on the margins, despite the fact that Tel Aviv, more than any other government in the world, uses racial profiling, mass surveillance and numerous spying techniques to sustain its military occupation of Palestine.
They were known as the revisionists, as well as the Wisconsin school, because the dean of revisionism, William Appleman Williams, taught there, and his students became major figures in the school.€ Coming from a left perspective, Williams and his followers saw the U.S. global empire as primarily economic, driven by the imperatives of its capitalist ruling classes for expansion and profit. In his keystone work, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Williams focused on the Open Door Notes issued in the 1890s during the McKinley Administration.
The European colonial powers were eager to dice up China into exclusive economic zones. In the Notes, the U.S. said no, an open door to free trade and movement of capital must be maintained throughout China. The U.S. economy was already the largest in the world. Its leaders knew the U.S. would have advantage over competitors in a free trade environment.
That was illustrated at the recent 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) climate summit, in Glasgow, where governments, automakers and airlines worked on deals to cut global transport emissions. Because transportation is responsible for one-fifth to one-quarter of global emissions, that seems like a good step.
In the months before COP26, America's leadership swore that they understood the magnitude of the challenge, the urgency of the need, and recognized the opportunity that this summit could be. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry called COP26 "our last, best chance to save the planet." We were told that the American delegation would arrive in Glasgow with a historic new legislative package to put the USA on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030.
My fear lifted substantially two years ago, when the largest social justice protests in Chile’s history led to 80% of the electorate voting to replace Pinochet’s fraudulent 1980 constitution, which had been constraining indispensable reforms. The way the constitutional convention, in session since July, has been reconceiving a deeply democratic government seemed a sign that the perverse institutions and advocates of dictatorship were being permanently consigned to ashes and irrelevance.
I should not have been so optimistic.
In a sense, Poland’s turning what was initially a minor border crisis into an “existential threat facing the nation” was overdetermined, meaning there was no way the government of Jarosà âaw Kaczyà âski could have treated it as anything else. I remember one of the first days after his Law and Justice party (PiS) took control of the national news channel in 2015, when broadcasters gloated that now they can talk about Muslim immigrants “for who they really are: terrorists.” Since then, it has been a never-ending deluge of the worst kind of dehumanizing cant.
United States Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) posted an anime-style video earlier this month that depicted him stabbing a fellow House member to death. The target of the congressman’s online murder fantasy, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), called out her “creepy” colleague for his inexcusable action. Gosar’s response? He claimed that he amplified this snuff film in order to “reach out to the newer generation that likes these anime, these cartoons fabricated in Japanese likeness to actually tell them what is harmful in this bill [Biden’s Build Back Better plan] that they’re missing.”
It's not often a citizen shoots at a cop and lives to tell about it. It's even rarer when they walk away from criminal charges. When it's considered "assault" to be anywhere in the general location of an angry cop, actual shots fired tend to be greeted with severe charges. Acquittals are unicorns in the court system, which largely tends to believe people who shoot at cops always have zero justification for their actions.
“The war in Yemen must end,” declared President Joe Biden in his first major foreign policy speech; “and to underscore our commitment, we are ending all American support for offensive [Saudi] operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”
Kyle Rittenhouse, who was 17 years old when he shot three people, killing two, officially got away with murder. A jury of his white peers ruled that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense when he illegally acquired a gun, traveled across state lines, lied about his status as a medic, pointed his gun at protesters, and then used it to kill others.
Racial justice advocates reacted with outrage and a complete lack of surprise Friday after a Kenosha, Wisconsin jury found Illinois teenager Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges for killing two men and wounding a third during a 2020 protest against the police shooting of Jacob Blake, with some observers asserting that the verdict encourages vigilante attacks on protestors.
"Judge Bruce Schroeder presented a case study in how the judiciary upholds systems of white supremacy. And he's no anomaly."
Progressives recoiled in disgust Friday after at least three Republican U.S. lawmakers offered Kyle Rittenhouse congressional internships as relatives of the Kenosha killer's victims wept over his acquittal.
"They are sending a message to America that violence is not only acceptable, it's a resume booster for politics."
The very term cyberspace creates a distorted understanding of what is actually happening, making us think it must be happening somewhere.
But we know this is false. Cyber is not a space. There is no there, there.
This is recognised in a way by the Russians and Chinese who talk about the “information sphere” rather than “cyberspace.” To them, computers are information systems. To the West, computers are a location where the cyber resides. This is a profound difference of understanding that has led to strategic surprise when it turned out that their understanding is more valid than ours.
The space experts I spoke with all characterized this week’s situation as, well, bad. No one wants “a debris-generating event in outer space,” as U.S. officials put it on Monday. Close passes between satellites can happen, and they’ve become more common in recent years. Two years ago, for example, a European Space Agency satellite was forced to dodge a SpaceX internet satellite. Everyone has to simply watch their own flank: Without an international system monitoring satellite traffic, satellite providers are stuck literally emailing each other when they anticipate an uncomfortably close pass. In some cases, reaching out is a challenge. Bill Gerstenmaier, a vice president at SpaceX, said at an industry conference yesterday that while SpaceX notifies the ISS about any close approaches of its internet satellites, the company isn’t sure how to contact Tiangong, the Chinese space station, which currently has a crew of three.
In the years after the U.S. pledged to invest in human rights and rule of law, the Pentagon spent millions training elite Mexican units how to fight.
World orders are deeply rooted global systems that structure relations among nations and the conditions of life for their peoples. For the past 600 years, as I’ve argued in my new book To Govern the Globe, it’s taken catastrophic events like war or plague to overturn such entrenched ways of life. But within a decade, climate change will already be wreaking a kind of cumulative devastation likely to surpass previous catastrophes, creating the perfect conditions for the eclipse of Washington’s liberal world order and the rise of Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one. In this sweeping imperial transition, global warming will undoubtedly be the catalyst for a witch’s brew of change guaranteed to erode both America’s world system and its once unchallenged hegemony (along with the military force that’s been behind it all these years).
By charting the course of climate change, it’s possible to draw a political road map for the rest of this tempestuous century — from the end of American global hegemony around 2030, through Beijing’s brief role as world leader (until perhaps 2050), all the way to this century’s closing decades of unparalleled environmental crisis. Those decades, in turn, may yet produce a new kind of world order focused, however late, on mitigating a global disaster of almost unimaginable power.
Chomsky spoke with Poyâ Pâkzâd and Benjamin Magnusson from the Danish magazine Eftertryk in October 2021 about the war in Afghanistan, ongoing US-instigated conflicts with China, climate change, and anarchism. You can watch the conversation on YouTube here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
An influx of foreign industrial trawlers in Cameroonian waters has led to an increase in illegal fishing and highlighted the nation’s maritime and national security issues, according to a new study.
An estimated 70 industrial fishing vessels operate in Cameroon, but most of them are Chinese or Nigerian, according to research by Maurice Beseng of the United Kingdom’s University of Sheffield. Beseng studies fisheries crimes in the Gulf of Guinea region.
As in other areas in the region, the vessels are known to fish in areas designated for artisanal fishing, use prohibited chemicals, fail to declare catch data, submit fraudulent documents to fish and bribe local officials.
With smooth words obscuring a grim reality, the New York Times reporter describes “a major agreement … calling on governments to return next year with stronger plans to curb their planet-warming emissions.” COP26 left “unresolved the crucial question of how much and how quickly each nation should cut its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over the next decade.”
The Conference’s hesitant approach originates from past difficulties in reaching collective and binding agreements. In recognition of such, the 2015 COP meeting ruled that henceforth nations need only submit goals voluntarily for reducing emissions.
A potential antidote to harmful monocultures is a form of community farming invented back in the 1970s: permaculture. Permaculture is not just about farming; it incorporates economic and social principles.
I am an environmental sociologist, and I have witnessed permaculture working in two urban farming communities. I study ways that environmental justice, global development and social equity affect climate change.
Both summaries use the EPA analysis based on a 2€°C level of warming from the 1986 to 2005 base period. Prior to the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, referred to as COP26, we were on track for 2.7€°C of warming. Based on the commitments made at COP26, we may now be on track to limit warming to somewhere between 1.8€°C and 2.4€°C. Given this predicted increase in warming and that extreme heat is the deadliest of all weather hazards, the impacts of extreme temperatures must be examined. This article emphasizes the importance of considering the effects of extreme temperatures on workers, as climate change drives up the number of days a year with temperatures above 32€°C (90€°F). This analysis does not evaluate changes in labor hours that may result from other climate-driven weather events that may affect labor, such as hurricanes, forest fires, flooding, and other extreme weather disasters. The EPA report focuses primarily on the direct effects of extreme temperatures on labor hours in weather-exposed industries, such as construction and agriculture. In this article, however, we will take a broader look at these direct effects, as well as the potential indirect effects on worker health and well-being, and we will contextualize how these events may also harm industries that are not considered “weather-exposed,” such as retail.
The Direct Effect of Extreme Heat on Work Hours Across the United States
It’s been called the Great Resignation, as millions of workers opt out of degrading or potentially dangerous work under the shadow of Covid-19. But for the youngest segment of the workforce, it’s hardly a choice at all. In September, almost a full quarter of Americans ages 20 to 34 were not working or on the job hunt.
After more than two weeks of intense discussions—and many evenings of corporate-funded cocktail parties—the most powerful countries in the world left the convention center pleased not to have altered the status quo.
The focus of the discussions and negotiations by world leaders during COP26 seemed to be on the change of a word in the€ Glasgow Climate Pact, the final document that will be€ adopted€ by nearly 200 nations. Initially, the countries had begun to agree to the “phase-out” of coal; the final version of the document, however, merely€ said€ that the countries would “phase down” coal. During the last hours of the COP26 summit on November 13, Swiss Environment Minister Simonetta Sommaruga took the microphone and expressed her “profound disappointment” with the change. “The language we had agreed on coal and fossil fuel subsidies has been further watered down as a result of an untransparent process,” she€ said.
We need justice. But that word — Justice! — despite all of the philosophical pontificating from John Locke to John Rawls, is a concept incompatible with the rapacious civilizational logic of a colonial/capitalist system based on self-interest, greed, and social Darwinism. Yet, without a firm commitment to the institutionalization of a just world order in which the gifts of mother-earth are equally shared along with respect for the earth and its natural order, the evidence is now irrefutable – human society will not survive.
The elementary logic of this observation suggests the necessity for a radical divergence from production processes, consumption patterns, destructive relationships to the natural world, and degrading social relationships, is denied by powerful Northern capitalist countries.
The 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, otherwise known as COP26, concluded its two weeks in Glasgow with congratulations all around for themselves by government participants, as is traditionally the case. If you were to judge by the participants’ pronouncement, you’d think the environment is on the verge of being saved.
For example, the€ official communiqué issued by the conference€ loftily declared, “COP26 has today concluded in Glasgow with nearly 200 countries agreeing the Glasgow Climate Pact to keep 1.5C alive and finalise the outstanding elements of the Paris Agreement.” To be fair, there was more acknowledgment that more work needs to be done than is customary, as the communiqué also said, “The Glasgow Climate Pact, combined with increased ambition and action from countries, means that 1.5C remains in sight, but it will only be delivered with concerted and immediate global efforts.”
Most Americans have gotten vaccinated because they simply want protection from COVID-19. Some small number of citizens have gotten jabbed in order to go to restaurants, attend sporting events, or qualify for lottery prizes.
You’d think that would be enough. Effective vaccine against a life-threatening disease, opportunity to regain some semblance of normalcy, a coupon for 10 percent off your next purchase at the store where you got your shot: truly a no-brainer.
Environmental Justice Communities
After 18 months of lockdowns and travel restrictions, we decided it was time to hit the streets and visit some of our “environmental justice communities” on the Gulf Coast. Environmental Justice Communities (EJC) are non-white or working-class neighborhoods that have been flooded, burned, poisoned, or impoverished by the petrochemical, biomedical, transportation, real estate, timber, animal agriculture, or financial service industries. Another way of putting it is that residents in these neighborhoods are the screwed of the screwed. Whereas poverty and discrimination typically expose people to substandard housing, poor municipal services and street crime, industrial pollution in EJC communities additionally subjects residents to discomfort, ugliness, and disease. Global warming has made these impacts even worse, for example by flooding mines and factories, spreading toxic agents into adjacent residential neighborhoods.
We look at how the fossil fuel industry is shaping childrens’ education in the United States. The Texas State Board of Education is set to vote on whether or not new science standards for middle schoolers should include climate change. The language they choose will ultimately dictate how textbooks nationwide address the issue. The Board already watered down the standards after fierce lobbying by fossil fuel companies, despite urging from climate scientists that school curriculums should reflect how human activity, such as the release of greenhouse gases, has affected the climate. We speak with investigative reporter Katie Worth, who visited schools across the United States and found corporate and political interests are blocking the truth about the climate crisis from being taught in classrooms. Her new book is “Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America.” “There’s a long history of the fossil fuel industry trying to get their messages to children, because that shapes how future generations will think about their industry and how they will regulate their industry,” says Worth.
The falling cost of wind and solar power significantly reduces the need for carbon capture and storage technology to tackle climate change, a new paper has argued.
CCS, which removes emissions from the atmosphere and stores them underground, has long been presented as critical to restricting global heating to 1.5C by the end of the century.
Wielding assault rifles, helicopters, and canine units, Canadian police raided Wet’suwet’en territory this week and arrested 14 people in effort to break up the Indigenous-led blockade of the multibillion dollar Coastal GasLink pipeline being constructed by TC Energy. The occupation started in September and halted the company’s efforts to build a key portion of the over 400-mile pipeline within Wet’suwet’en lands that violates both Wet’suwet’en and Canadian laws. We speak with land defender and matriarch of the Gidimt’en Clan of Wet’suwet’en Nation Molly Wickham, one of the witnesses to the police raid. “This project does not have free, prior, informed consent of the Wet’suwet’en people,” says Wickham. “It’s as if we don’t exist as Indigenous people, and that we don’t have our own governance and that we don’t have our own system of law.”
Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took a swipe at cryptocurrencies, saying they have the power to weaken entire countries eventually.
Once completed, the total capacity of the wind farm will be 455.4 MW (megawatts).
The 650 million-euro project will be funded and implemented by a consortium of Finnish energy companies in collaboration with Swedish renewable energy and construction company OX2.
"We need to continue to protect old forests and big trees, such as those in the Tongass, to ensure our future includes essential species and a livable climate."
"We applaud the Biden administration for listening to the voices of Southeast Alaska communities who have been relentless in their advocacy to protect the livelihoods, local economies, and wildlife that depend on the Tongass," said Sierra Club Alaska chapter director Andrea Feniger in a statement. "The Tongass is a priceless resource and a critical tool in the fight against climate change, and this action brings us one step closer to ensuring that our forest wildlands remain protected for good.”
This is a big, very bold question because it would, in fact, challenge the Eurocentric, imperially-based Westphalian system and embrace the broader idea of Indigenous systems that recognise “interdependencies between political actors and relations to the land”. Powerful political actors, all too often presented as paragons of diplomacy, present a problem here because state-level support for the West Papuan project would entail enraging the Indonesian regime and its big western backers (as we’ll explain below). Yet, if ever there was a global display of the fact that small states and ordinary people must wrest power from those who presently wield it if this planet and its creatures are to have a decent future, it’s just been acted out in Glasgow.
After COP(OUT)26—where the largest delegation, if they represented a nation, consisted of over 500 oil, gas, and coal lobbyists, plus “nature-based” mavens from BP, Amazon, Air France, Coca-Cola, Dow, et tutti quanti—we can only assume that if this is really our “last, best hope”, we’re toast. The rich and powerful have once again swanked their stripes and aren’t even going to contemplate the changes the “last, best” hope requires. Hope dwells elsewhere. To cut to the chase, the rich and powerful need to be taxed out of the existence they enjoy now, and the rest of us need to heed the COP26 Coalition spokesperson Asad Rehman. “The richest have ignored every moral and political call to do their fair share. Their broken promises across 26 COPs are no longer fooling anyone…We know it is ordinary people who change history, and we will change history.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders praised House Democrats on Friday for passing their version of the Build Back Better Act but made clear he intends to push for significant improvements to the $1.75 trillion social spending and climate package before it reaches President Joe Biden's desk.
"The American people overwhelmingly demand that we ask the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share of taxes."
As the economy gradually melts down into levels of deprivation and drudgery not seen in decades, working people are subjected to a chorus of misinformation from liberal sources.
In the wake of Friday's passage of Democrats' flagship Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill by the House of Representatives, climate campaigners turned their attention to the U.S. Senate, urging members of the upper chamber to approve the $1.75 trillion social and climate investment package without delay.
"We'd be lying if we said the Build Back Better Act passing the House was not a historic moment for climate action, but it means nothing if the Senate does not pass it."
Democrats broke out into applause and celebratory chants on the House floor Friday after the chamber passed its version of the Build Back Better Act, a $1.75 trillion package that includes hundreds of billions in funding for climate action, child care, housing, and other longstanding priorities.
"President Biden and Majority Leader Schumer must ensure that Democrats pass the Build Back Better Act—without further cuts—immediately."
"You can't be a political party that talks about demanding the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, and then end up with a bill that gives large tax breaks to millionaires."
In October, Los Angeles City Council member Mike Bonin sat in the courtyard of a Ramada Inn, talking to a slender 29-year-old named Ololade Oguntayo. After spending four months homeless on Venice Beach, Oguntayo had recently accepted transitional housing at the Ramada. Oguntayo told Bonin about moving back to LA at the beginning of the pandemic. “I figured the world was ending, so let me just live with my family,” Oguntayo explained. But they soon clashed with their mother’s partner, who wasn’t accepting of their gender identity. So they ended up on the beach, living with a group of other young people. It was a grueling and often dangerous experience. “Physically, I didn’t know how strong my body was,” Oguntayo said, “whether it was healing a wound or going however long without food or just finding ways to make the day go by and stay sane.” Bonin, 54, told Oguntayo that he could sympathize. His own father had struggled to accept that he was gay. And when Bonin was in his 20s, he spent nights on the waterfront, sleeping in his car. The two of them laughed at the realization that they’d both attended the same Sunday morning Alcoholic Anonymous meeting on Venice Beach, which had certain attractions common to such gatherings (coffee, pastries) and others—the crash of the waves, a view of the surfers entering and exiting the water—not found elsewhere.
This week on CounterSpin: If you read a paper, you know that inflation is a dire, important thing right now, a problem for the Biden administration, for economic policymakers, and for…regular folks who want to buy milk? You don’t need to understand it, elite media seem to say, but you do need to be mad about it, and direct blame for it toward…yourself? Jon Schwarz writes about elite media’s confusing and conflicting instructions around inflation, among other things, at the Intercept; we’ll talk with him about the current economic reality—and storyline.
President Joe Biden won applause Friday for moving to replace Ron Bloom and John Barger, two members of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors who've shown unwavering loyalty to scandal-plagued Postmaster General Louis DeJoy even as he's dramatically worsened mail delivery performance.
"It's affirmatively good to remove Bloom and Barger from the board, men who said they were 'tickled pink' with DeJoy's actions."
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is drawing widespread ridicule for his rambling, marathon floor speech against the Build Back Better Act, which the California Republican characterized as the "single most reckless" spending bill in U.S. history despite it being a fraction of the cost of the tax cuts he championed just four years ago.
"McCarthy must only hate prosperity for families, because he joyfully passed $2 trillion in corporate giveaways."
The reason I mention my minimal time behind the wheel is to bring home how familiar I am with public transportation. I’ve been riding it since my last year in junior high when my family moved to Frankfurt am Main in western Germany. Streetcars, subways, and buses were cheap. In fact, a ride cost the Deutsch Mark equivalent of less than a nickel a ride when we first moved there. For the first time in my life I was quite mobile and did not have to depend on parents or other adults with cars. The price of a ticket from the conductor or the vending machine was the price of freedom. Ever since, I’ve been taking the bus or the train whenever I can.
There’s a certain atmosphere on city buses, a certain set of understandings. One learns a lot from watching, listening, and occasionally conversing with the people around them. It’s not always pretty, but it is almost always informative. There are those who treat the bus as car service and there are those who treat it as a temporary home. In many cities I have ridden in, it is the minimum wage worker, the houseless person, the older individual, and the single parent with small children who are the most frequent passengers. To the suburban mentality, this is often threatening. I attribute that to the antisocial nature of suburban living.
There’s been a lot to think about nationally this week. There was the extraordinary report showing that between April 2020 and April 2021 more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses: I can’t think of any single piece of data I’ve seen in recent years that so succinctly shows the scale of America’s current addiction tragedy, or the vastness of the societal dysfunction and desperation unleashed these past decades by peddlers of death such as the Sackler family. There was also news on California’s budget front showing that the state is once again improbably flush with cash, and heading for a $31 billion budget surplus. That will open up doors for more expansive social policies and safety net programs. On the other hand, there’s been the relentlessly bad news about inflation and supply chain snarls, and the impact this is having on national politics and on the public perception of the Biden administration.
The Official Poverty Measure (OPM) is widely regarded by experts as the federal government’s worst statistical indicator. It combines an anachronistic poverty line, which has defined poverty down over the last half century, with an income definition that fails to take account of the benefits provided by major social assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), housing assistance, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The SPM takes these benefits into account as well as some work expenses and out-of-pocket medical expenditures. In most respects, the SPM improves on the OPM, so it is unfortunate that the Census Bureau does not publish SPM poverty estimates as part of its annual reports on poverty and income.
In this article, we take a first step toward addressing this problem by calculating poverty rates for Native Americans using the SPM. We define “Native American” in the same way as Gabriel R. Sanchez, Robert Maxim, and Raymond Foxworth do in a recent Brookings Institute blog post on how the federal government’s monthly jobs report does not include Native Americans:
The proposed levy, which will come into effect on 1 February 2022, is a charge of 1.75% of the value of electronic transactions. It covers mobile money payments, bank transfers, merchant payments, and inward remittances. The originator of the transactions will bear the charge except for inward remittances, which will be borne by the recipient. There is an exemption for transactions up to GH€¢100 ($16) per day.
Kentucky’s Executive Branch Ethics Commission accused Democratic former Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes of misusing her office for personal and political purposes, according to an initiating order filed by the commission on Thursday.
In a provocative recent essay in The New York Times, the political historian Jon Grinspan places the distemper currently afflicting American politics in a broader context. In essence, he contends that we’ve been here before.
Amid an effort by the Republican Party to seize power with redrawn voting boundaries nationwide, GOP lawmakers in Ohio on Thursday approved a new congressional map that democracy advocates rebuked as "a classic partisan gerrymander."
"We are in a 1965 moment for democracy."
In her first election, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a gun-toting Georgian who owned a couple gyms, grabbed 75 percent of the state’s 14th Congressional District votes. That was in 2020. A few months earlier, she’d clobbered her Republican primary opponents—including a former prosecutor, a school superintendent, an Air Force veteran, and a brain surgeon. How did she do it?
The November 2 off-year elections sent a wake-up call to President Joe Biden and Democratic Party leaders in Congress, after the party suffered setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey, and other states. The voters who in 2020 gave the president and his party control of the White House and Congress were tired of bickering and wanted results.
To get from Bitola (North Macedonia) to Thessaloniki (Greece), after yet another fruitless due diligence visit to the railway and bus stations, I decided to hire a taxi to travel the twenty miles across the border to Florina, where I could catch a morning train.
I arranged for the taxi to collect me at the Hotel Theatre at 7:45 a.m., which allowed me a last breakfast in the lobby restaurant, where the resident cat, Mustafa, seemed to be in charge.
As you'll recall, a few months ago, former President Donald Trump sued Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube claiming that his own government violated the 1st Amendment... because those three private companies kicked him off their services for violating their policies. Yes, the premise of the lawsuit is that while he was president, the actions of three private companies somehow proved that the government (which he ran) was violating his rights. The lawsuits are nonsense and they have not gone well for Trump at all. Part of the (very) ridiculous argument is that Section 230 is unconstitutional.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among those who shouted backed overnight during the historic and "unhinged" marathon speech by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy when the Republican from California stated that there was no person in the country who voted for President Joe Biden last year who did so because they hoped he would act like former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ushered through the 20th century New Deal.
Quoting a recent comment from Rep. Abigail Spannberger (D-Va.) during his speech in order to argue that Democrats are misguided to make sweeping social investments as part of their Build Back Better Act—which received a final vote in the House on Friday morning—McCarthy stated, "Nobody elected Joe Biden to be FDR."
It’s time to cut the bloated Pentagon budget and use those resources where they will actually serve my fellow workers: funding good, green, union jobs.
In September, the House of Representatives passed legislation authorizing an astonishing $778 billion 2022 Pentagon budget. That’s a $37 billion boost from the year before, and more than twice the per annum size of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that has become the center of a storm of Beltway scrutiny. But because it was for the Pentagon, rather than the people, few even batted an eye.
The new role would improve the opportunities of the Cyber Security Centre to support Finnish business and industry based on cyber security. Cooperation with an EU-wide network would strengthen the role of the National Cyber Security Centre and support the development of the Finnish cyber security branch.
The designation is based on the Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing the European Cybersecurity Industrial, Technology and Research Competence Centre and the Network of National Coordination Centres. The Regulation entered into force on 28 June 2021. It aims at deepening the cooperation between the public and private sectors and the research community in the field of cyber security.
representatives in federal parliament. It requires that a 1,500-membership list, treble the previous number, be submitted by December 2 or the party faces deregistration. This would mean SEP candidates could not run under the party name during elections.
In today’s interviews electoral members draw the connection between the laws and the persecution of Julian Assange. They refer to the devastating impact of the pro-business National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) which slashes service provisions for people with a disability.
Longtime readers might remember that a a frequent topic here at Respectful Insolence was a certain Houston-based cancer quack named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. He was a frequent blog topic, particularly between around 2010-2014. When last I wrote about him, it was before the pandemic and in the context of Amazon, Facebook, and other social media’s early attempts to crack down on antivaccine misinformation. At the time, I noted how Amazon Prime had ceased to host several documentaries featuring antivaccine disinformation and quackery but had continued to host a number of others, including a documentary about Burzynski. My point was that health misinformation consists of more than just antivaccine misinformation and that it’s not enough to deplatform just antivaccine quackery, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories. As I said at the time, “Antivaccine movies are gone, but quack movies aplenty remain.”
Researchers with the cybersecurity firm Mandiant said in a report issued on November 16 that the campaign, known as Ghostwriter, was primarily aimed at sowing discord and stealing information.
The researchers said they assessed that the [cracking] group, which it calls UNC1151, is linked to the Belarusian government, and the group provides technical support to the Ghostwriter campaign.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate release of Ali Aboluhom, a Yemeni journalist based in Saudi Arabia who has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for tweets that, according to the Saudi authorities, constituted apostasy.
So, just yesterday we wrote about how the FBI's raid of Project Veritas's founder and a few associates was concerning from a press freedom standpoint -- and that you should be concerned even if you believe that Project Veritas are a bunch of dishonest grifters. However, beyond being a bunch of dishonest grifters -- who still deserve press freedoms -- it appears that Project Veritas are also a giant bunch of hypocrites.
Police learned about the plot by wiretapping conversations of prisoners in July 2021, according to Ranucci and the Rai report. Police allege that an imprisoned €´Ndrangheta drug trafficker hired hitmen to kill Ranucci, according to those sources.
Ranucci told CPJ that he has received partial police protection since 2009, with patrols monitoring his home and family on a daily basis. He said that police increased his protective measures in July when they first learned about the assassination plans, and then increased the measures to the maximum level in August.
With a small army of lawyers having already gouged hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees, Canberra law firm Meyer Vandenberg continues to stand over independent media with defamation threats, writes Michael West.
The 2021 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Press Freedom Awards, announced today, have been given to the Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan in the courage category, the Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona in the independence category and the Pegasus Project in the impact category.
The mountains are high and the emperor is far away is a saying in China that hints at how difficult it is to run a country of 1.4 billion people across 23 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities and two special administrative regions. Then there are€ 3,000 prefecture€ € and county level regions, and at least 40,000 township divisions. Consequently, local governments have long turned a blind eye to some Beijing diktats, a dynamic captured by a saying in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “A general in the field is not bound by the orders from his sovereign.” China is top heavy. Public dissent is€ verbotten, and officials hide problems and silence whistle-blowers. Simply put there is often nothing to be gained by trying to correct a wrong. When Covid-19 first appeared in Wuhan, police targeted eight doctors who tried to warn the public. The city’s mayor later said he had to wait for Beijing’s instructions before releasing information on the outbreak.
The cult of personality, once believed dead and buried, has been resurrected. No, we are not on the verge of a new cultural revolution but we are in a time of cultural resolution.
We speak with independent researcher Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary “Who Killed Malcolm X?” and helped ignite widespread public support for two men falsely convicted of assassinating the civil rights activist in 1965. Muhammad was in the court room this week a judge exonerated 83-year-old Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam due to revelations uncovered by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the Innocence Project that key evidence was withheld at the trial. Aziz has maintained his innocence, and addressed the court after he finally received an official apology, saying his false conviction was “the result of a process that was corrupt to its core.” Muhammad says being in the courtroom was “surreal.” “To watch the government admit that these brothers were sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit was stunning.”
We speak to legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis about the latest war waged by ultraconservative lawmakers against teaching the racist history of the United States. North Dakota’s Republican Governor Doug Burgum signed legislation banning the teaching of critical race theory, defining it as any suggestion that racism is systemically embedded in American society. The law prohibits even discussion of the law in state schools. Critics say the ban also endangers honest narratives of slavery, redlining and the civil rights movement. “What we are witnessing are efforts on the part of the forces of white supremacy to regain a control which they more or less had in the past,” says Davis.
A new defense budget looms. Maybe we're running out of wars to fight, but no matter. The proposed figure before Congress is bigger than ever: $778 billion.
That’s the good news.
I am happy that the government will not kill another black man today. I am overjoyed that his mother will see him again. I applaud the tireless work of Cece Jones-Davis and others who have had a hand in bringing this to pass.
Workers' rights activists around the globe rejoiced on Friday after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his government will repeal three corporate-friendly agricultural laws that the nation's farmers have steadfastly resisted for more than a year.
"We will wait for the day when the farm laws are repealed in Parliament."
At the age of 16, Kalief Browder was sent to Rikers Island, a prison complex for adults notorious for its rampant violence, for allegedly stealing a backpack. He was held there without trial from 2010 to 2013 and put into solitary confinement for two of those years. While incarcerated, he was repeatedly beaten by gang members and correctional officers. At least once, he was handcuffed while assaulted by guards. He attempted suicide at least three times. And just two years after he was released, Kalief hanged himself at his parent’s home after suffering from major depression and PTSD.
In contrast, at age 17 Kyle Rittenhouse traveled across state borders to deliberately enter a Black Lives Matter protest fully armed with an AR-15 rifle. There he killed two people and attempted to kill a third. Claiming self defense later, he was able to walk right past the police with his rifle strung across his shoulder. They declined apprehending him despite witnesses shouting to them that he had just shot three people. In addition to this, some of these officers were seen fraternizing with him earlier in the evening.
Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it's posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and now listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression.€
Just in time for the 20th anniversary of the Convention on Cybercrime, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers adopted a second Additional Protocol on Wednesday. Under the title ââ¬Å¾enhanced co-operation and disclosure of electronic evidence“, the signatory governments want to commit themselves to the mutual release of data on servers in their territory. The treaty is to be published for signature in May 2022.
The Council of Europe brings together 47 states, including all Schengen members, as well as countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the candidates for accession to the European Union. The Additional Protocol to the Cyber Crime Convention (ââ¬Å¾Budapest Convention“), adopted in 2001 in Budapest, is currently signed by 19 other governments, including the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Israel and Chile. At least ten countries have been invited to join.
Making it annoying to cancel a subscription has long been a proud American pastime. AOL was notorious for making it extremely difficult. Broadband and cable providers routinely make it a pain in the ass to cancel phone, broadband, or cable. And everyone from the Wall Street Journal to SiriusXM enjoy making signing up easy, but cancelling something that requires a phone call and time on hold. In COVID times, with support staffs often short handed, it's a practice that's become more annoying than ever.
The roll-out of the “Facebook Papers” on Monday October 25 felt like drinking from a fire hose. Seventeen news organizations analyzed documents received from the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, and published numerous articles simultaneously. Most of the major news outlets have since then published their own analyses on a daily basis. With the flood of reports still coming in, “Accountable Tech” launched a helpful aggregator: facebookpapers.com.
The recommendation encourages Member States to digitize by 2030 all monuments and sites that are at risk of degradation, and half of those highly frequented by tourists. Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market, said: “We owe the preservation of our European cultural heritage to future generations. This requires building and deploying our own technological capabilities, empowering people and businesses to enjoy and make the most of this heritage. We must take advantage of the opportunities brought by artificial intelligence, data, and extended reality.” This last point was reinforced by the EC on Twitter: “3D, artificial intelligence or virtual reality can accelerate the digital transformation of the cultural sector.”
Last December, academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society filed a lawsuit demanding that Indian ISPs block access to Sci-Hub and Libgen for copyright infringement. The ongoing case now includes an intervention application from a group of social science researchers who say that blocking the platforms would result in a great societal loss to the country.
One of the key defendants in the criminal prosecution of the Scene piracy group SPARKS has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. The US Government signed a plea deal with British national George Bridi, who explained that there was no financial incentive, but that it was all about winning the race from other groups.
