As the owner and writer for RealLinuxUser.com, I am regularly approached by my frequent readers. Usually it is a word of thanks for an article that I have written, or a request for help or support or advice in case of problems. But I also regularly get one specific type of recurring question, namely what my Linux system looks like, what I use for hardware, how my data work flow is set up and what my backup plan looks like. Apparently a lot of readers find it interesting to read about other people’s Linux setup, so that’s why I’m devoting this blog to my Linux setup. I will pay attention to both the hardware and the software. I also give a glimpse into the past, the present and the future.
On the Collabora blog, developer Mike Blumenkrantz has given an exciting update to Zink, an open source Mesa Gallium driver for Linux that provides OpenGL on top of Vulkan.
Announced two years ago last month, the point of it is for providing hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. Not really a situation we're going to see right now but perhaps an important project for some time in the future and perhaps if it can eventually provide better performance - an option to pick later on.
Blumenkrantz mentioned how they've been mentored by hackers at Collabora on their work, and that if a Mesa update shipped now it would come with OpenGL 3.3 support, macOS support and even RaspberryPi 4 support, which curiously was done with the help of Igalia to help test the RPi 4 V3DV Vulkan driver as they have a lack of Vulkan apps to test on the RPi 4 so this can help bridge the gap.
Hello! I'm Mike, and this is your regularly-scheduled Fall news roundup for the Zink project. While I'm not currently working at Collabora, I've had an absolute blast working with and getting mentored by the experts here (hi Erik!) as I struggled to figure out all of this graphics driver stuff and then get coding on the project. I've since accounted for roughly 70% of all patches to the driver since May of this year, and significant progress has been made.
That being said, I thought it would be great to post my latest Zink update on Collabora's blog, as this week marks a little over 2 years since the project was initially announced!
A data scientist devotes considerable time and effort collecting, cleaning, and filtering data. The goal is to extract valuable insights and useful information from that data. Anything that speeds up that process is going to be desirable. Being able to interactively explore data helps streamline this process. An increasingly popular way to interact with data is with an interactive notebook. So what’s this type of notebook offer?
A notebook interface is a virtual collaborative environment which contains computer code and rich text elements. Notebook documents are human-readable documents with the analysis description and the results together with the executable documents which can be run to perform data analysis. These documents can be saved as files, checked into revision control just like code, and freely shared. They run on any platform, thanks to their browser-based user interface. In essence, they are a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming. They offer a great developer experience and allow for rapid development and extensibility.
The term Linux web caches refer to some caching software that runs on Linux. I am pretty sure that you are familiar with the word “cache”. Cache means temporary storage. It can be a software or a hardware system. In most cases, the cache is optimizing web content so that it loads faster on browsers by storing some static content on the device. There are some other uses of caches in modern computers. But I am not going to dive deeper into that. Almost all browsers can store HTTP caches. However, the ability depends on the ISP, CDN, or the server. There are many server-side tools on Linux that are used to enable caches into the served website to loads faster.
The size of the average web page of the top 1000 websites passed 1600K for the first time in July (see Figure 1). At the same time the number of objects in the average web page increased to 112 objects in July 2014.
I wanted to learn new things and set up a framework for serving static web pages. The easy way out of course would be to just use OpenBSD httpd and some type of templating, but that would’ve been too easy and for me it definitely falls under the “been there, done that” department.
This first part is more or less documenting what I’ve accomplished so far on my test setup, which still lacks some features I’ll detail at the end.
In practice my setup took the following form:
user <-> relayd <-> httpd <-> ipfs
NVM is a command-line version manager for the Node.js programming language. With the help of nvm utility, you can install multiple node.js versions on a single machine. You can also choose specific Node version for applications.
You can also create an .nvmrc configuration file to auto select Node version.
This tutorial help you to install NVM on your system and managing multiple Node.js version.
The .NET Core is a free and open-source software framework designed with keeping Linux and macOS in mind. It is a cross-platform successor to .NET Framework available for Linux, macOS and Windows systems. .NET Core framework already provides scaffolding tools for bootstrapping projects.
This tutorial explained how to install .net core on Debian 10 Linux system.
This tutorial shows you how to configure user quota in Dovecot and PostfixAdmin. Set custom domain & user quota. Send quota warning emails.
To understand what a Linux host file is, we will need to undertake this tutorial through a visual aid approach. So fire up your Ubuntu terminal but first ensure you are a root user or have root user privileges.
[...]
You would get a ‘permission denied’ error as displayed if the Linux OS has sudoer privileges. This authentication aspect of the Linux operating system is important for the prevention of unwarranted security breaches. Since this tutorial article focuses on understanding the Linux host file, such authentication levels are important.
The Linux operating system ensures that access to such file systems is privileged or authenticated. They serve an important role in the functional and design hierarchy of the Linux operating system. To test this theory, let us now update our Ubuntu Linux system using the ‘sudo’ command as a prefix.
LibreOffice allows you to configure the entire interface. Here we create tailored toolbars that can be activated as needed.
[...]
LibreOffice has various tools that allow you to configure the entire interface to put the options you need exactly where you need them. In this tutorial we create a collection of task-focused toolbars that can be activated as needed. We also create an additional menu and load it up with our mos-needed tools.
Selling products and services is the best way to earn money with a WordPress webite. But many people don’t know how to set up custom packages for their users. So they end up spending money on hiring developers to set these pages for them.
Creating custom plans can be done using plugins and templates. There are so many premium and paid options that you can choose from depending on your website theme. Furthermore, they integrate with other platforms that offer payment gateways and email services such as PayPal and Aweber, respectively.
Learning to use these plugins can save you a lot of cash for hiring developers. In this article, we will look at how to create custom plans, benefits, and the best plugins and templates that you can use.
Kup is created for helping people to keep up-to-date backups of their files. Connecting a USB drive is the primary supported way to store data, but saving files to a server over a network connection is also possible for advanced users.
About a year ago ago, I got a new laptop: a late 2019 Razer Blade Stealth 13. It sports an Intel i7-1065G7 with the best Intel's Ice Lake graphics along with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650. Apart from needing an ACPI lid quirk and the power management issues described here, it’s been a great laptop so far and the Linux experience has been very smooth.
Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box integrated graphics performance of my new laptop was less than stellar. My first task with the new laptop was to debug a rendering issue in the Linux port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider which turned out to be a bug in the game. In the process, I discovered that the performance of the game’s built-in benchmark was almost half of Windows. We’ve had some performance issues with Mesa from time to time on some games but half seemed a bit extreme. Looking at system-level performance data with gputop revealed that GPU clock rate was unable to get above about 60-70% of the maximum in spite of the GPU being busy the whole time. Why? The GPU wasn’t able to get enough power. Once I sorted out my power management problems, the benchmark went from about 50-60% the speed of Windows to more like 104% the speed of windows (yes, that’s more than 100%).
This blog post is intended to serve as a bit of a guide to understanding memory throughput and power management issues and configuring your system properly to get the most out of your Intel integrated GPU. Not everything in this post will affect all laptops so you may have to do some experimentation with your system to see what does and does not matter. I also make no claim that this post is in any way complete; there are almost certainly other configuration issues of which I'm not aware or which I've forgotten.
I’ve been using zsh for about 15 years but despite this I’ve noticed lately I’m pretty inefficient at editing commands in particular, mostly because I don’t have a clue about emacs keybindings. I am however very familiar with vi bindings but my config was never properly setup for zsh, I couldn’t search history like I could in emacs mode and I’ve been blundering along in this state for too long. (turns out it was just because the bindkey’s were not declared after doing bindkey -v to go to vi mode, oops)
Today I will show you how to install the python PyGame version 2.0 package with python version 3.9...
Explains how to install and set up Oracle MySQL server 8.x on Debian 10 LTS Linux, including new users and databases for your project.
A quick post on advanced container configurations in Amazon ECS.
Tealdeer is a very fast, un-official tldr client that allows you to access and display Linux commands cheatsheets in your Terminal.
The Docker pull command is used for downloading Docker images from the Docker Hub or private registry. By default, it will download the images from the Docker Hub. You will need to specify the name of the private registry if you want to pull from it.
The Docker push command is used to upload or share images to the Docker Hub registry. Before pushing an image to the Docker Hub. You will need to create an account on Docker Hub.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to use Docker pull and Docker push command with examples.
Recently I found that vim has a built in session manager, or I guess it's more fair to describe them as workspaces because they don't behave like a tmux session would at least without doing a bit of work to configure them to do so.
The GlusterFS network file system is perfectly suited for various use cases that require the handling of large amounts (think petabytes) of stored data. In other words, this could be the ideal storage system for your various cloud or container deployments. With features like sharding, tiering, AFR Statistics, file snapshots, distributed hash tables, nonuniform file access, OVirt and QEMU integration, RDMA connection manager, rebalance, server quorum, distributed geo-replication, and brick failure detection, this file system might be ideal for your needs. Red Hat currently manages this open source network file system.
Of course, how you use GlusterFS with your cloud implementation will depend on which cloud platform you are using. But before you can roll it into your system, you first must get this networkable storage up and running.
humhub is a PHP based open-source social network platform that one can install on Linux server or desktop editions such as Ubuntu 20.04/18.04, CentOS 7 /8, RHEL, and others. Here, we will show the steps, on how to install and use this personal social network platform to build your own community. It is perfect for social Intranets, Enterprise Social Networks, Collaboration, and Private Social Networks.
Although there are many social media networks present online to use such as Facebook, however, if you worry about privacy and want a restricted social network of your own then Humhub can be an option to go with. You can use it for public or private communities, in schools, for creating enterprise social Intranet in your own premises only; for agencies, etc. It all depends upon you what is your need.
If we talk about the features of this personal open-source social network platform then that is extendable using additional modules available to download from its marketplace.
GIMP 2.99.2, the first development release for the next major GIMP 3.0, now is available to install for testing purpose.
Following yesterday's Wine 5.21 release is now an adjoining Wine-Staging update that carries over 700 patches on top of it for testing purposes.
Wine-Staging 5.21 is a bit lighter thanks to a number of patches around Wine GStreamer and other areas having been upstreamed to Wine 5.21. But this release is still 737 patches on top of upstream even without any new patches added.
Small when just looking at that, but as always that only shows off one side of it. They also noted 24 bugs fixed across the likes of: Fallout 76, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Mu Online, Path of Exile, League of Legends, GOG Galaxy and more.
One other fix tagged as of this release was also quite interesting, with developer Georg Lehmann implementing support for VK_EXT_debug_marker. This newly hooked up extension support with Wine should hopefully allow people working on it to do a little extra debugging, with the likes of DXVK and Wine.
This week the new Plasma System Monitor app had its first independent release! This app is a future replacement for the current KSysGuard monitoring app, and features a radically better user interface, an overview page with “just the facts”, simpler and more powerful customizability, and an easy to understand “Applications” page that shows individual apps rather than processes.
Development on EndeavourOS is an ongoing process, just like the base system that lies in our foundation.
Some of the things you can expect in the near future are the further development for ARM, a revamped Discovery with a more active link to the forum and new development coming out of FLVAL’s creative hat.
Red Hat is a provider that offers open-source software products to the enterprise community. The vendor provides operating system platforms, middleware, applications, and management solutions, as well as support, training, and consulting services. Red Hat also provides Red Hat Ceph Storage, an open-source software product supporting block, object storage access, file access, and the underlying storage for Red Hat’s data analytics infrastructure solution and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud. The platform supports modern workloads like cloud infrastructure, data analytics, media repositories, and backup and restore systems.
plocate 1.0.7 hit Debian backports.org today, which means that it's now available for use on Debian stable (and machines with zillions of files are not unlikely to run stable). (The package page still says 1.0.5, but 1.0.7 really is up.)
New Wasmtime and Wasmer releases appeared this week for advancing WebAssembly on the desktop.
First up is the new Wasmer release that continues to focus on being a universal WebAssembly runtime. Wasmer 1.0 Alpha 5 is the new release that brings a number of additions to its C language API, more examples for its Rust API usage, the new wasmer create-exe sub-command, upgraded Cranelift and other dependencies, better LLVM auto detection, and a variety of other improvements.
It’s fitting she flew off on Halloween since she was one of the greatest, most magical, Make-Love-Not-War witches of our times.
Death rises on Halloween, but it’s sad (at least for the living) when Thanatos takes one of the world’s great humans away from us.
He may have counted bars rather than ballots, but Bach was a master of political music. In his nearly three decades as director of music in Leipzig, Bach produced festive cantatas for the installation of the flourishing commercial-and-university city’s leaders each August. One of most famous movements——and certainly the most exciting—from these works, most of which have been lost, is a sumptuous, fully orchestrated version of the prelude from one of the just-mentioned solo violin works—the Partita in E major (BWV 1006).
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus
A Scientific American article from 2009 describes the following [1]...
+ I don’t know about the rest of you, but the last four days have left me lost in the fog of bores. MSDNC’s Steve Kornacki and his tedious explanations of meaningless demographic trivial, all delivered in a rapid-fire patter, as if he had consumed a Sartrean-quantity of black beauties, the pompous posturing before maps and charts by John King, € the banal patter of Gloria Borger, who seems to have eclipsed Elizabeth Drew as the chief purveyor of conventional wisdom (often wrong), which she then repeats, phrase by clichéd phrase over the course of her three hours, the lethal drone of Wolf Blitzer’s voice. The more they say, the less meaningful any of it becomes. Face it, any network, besides the Comedy Channel, that hires Rick Santorum as a political analysts should lose its license. And Santorum isn’t even the worst of the bunch. That honor probably belongs to Van Jones, who, if Trump somehow survives, will eagerly pronounce the Fluke of Orange humbled by the experience and ready to assume a new, more presidential bearing. God, let’s hope not. The best thing about Trump is that he’s never even pretended to be the least bit presidential. Trump’s going out, the way he came in. The “burden of the office” hasn’t changed him…
+ Largely, I escaped from it all by turning to the only offering of any value on HBO-Max and it alone is worth a subscription: Sergei Bondarchuk’s meticulously restored film of War and Peace, all 460 glorious minutes of it. I’ve long mourned the fact that Stanley Kubrick, after years of preparation, junked his plan for an epic film on Napoleon, allegedly because the financing fell through after Bondarchuk’s own€ Soviet-Italian production of Waterloo, was released a year earlier. I’ve read Kubrick’s treatment and script and looked at the designs for the costumes and sets, all meticulously done (See: Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Film Never Made). But it wouldn’t surpass Bondurchuk’s masterpiece, made over three years (1965-67), with its gorgeous cinematography, swirling camera movements, subjective points of view (including a charging horse at the battle of Austerlitz) and panorama of nearly the entire spectrum of Russian society from aristocrats to serfs, Cossacks to Orthodox priests, bankers to the bankrupt, pacifists and anarchists to monarchists and genocidal maniacs. It’s an overwhelming cinematic experience, even when the sweeping images are shrunk to the diminutive confines of a TV screen. Even the minor characters pulse with more authenticity than almost anyone on our political or cultural scene today. € The duel between the rakish Dolokhov and the portly, near-blind intellectual Pierre (played adroitly by Bondarchuk himself) is one of the most compelling two-minutes sequences in film.
Check out all installments in the OppArt series.
"If you actively campaign against majority opinion on healthcare during a pandemic, don't be surprised that voters don't like it," warned one journalist, looking ahead to runoff races in Georgia.€
Cyber criminals have attacked the SPIE Group, an European operator that provides a number of technical services, using the Nefilim ransomware that can encrypt files on Windows systems.
If you’re an individual practitioner, become an expert in these types of infrastructure. If you want to ride the human work wave in InfoSec as long as possible, learn the big platforms like AWS, Azure, etc., with a focus in securing them.
And make sure you are good with data, which really means knowing how to code and use APIs. I recommend strong Linux and Python skills, with Go as a nice to have.
While we were watching US election returns, our neighbors to the north were adopting new travel regulations that incorporate some of the worst aspects of the US system of surveillance and control of air travel., and in some respects go even further in the wrong direction.
Canadian authorities don’t generally want to be seen as imitating the US or capitulating to US pressure. There was no mention in the official analysis of the latest amendments to the Canadian regulations of the US models on which they are based. But according to the press release this week form Public Safety Canada, the latest version of the Canadian Secure Air Travel Regulations€ which came into force this week for domestic flights within Canada as well as internatioinal flights to or from Canada include the following elements, each of which appears to be based on the US Secure Flight system:
As our Canadian friends at the€ International Civil Liberities Monitoring Group put it in a statement this week:
The EFF -- representing former California Highway Patrol officer Miguel Guerrero -- has achieved a significant legal victory. The California Appeals Court has given citizens a better shot at demanding law enforcement transparency about intrusive surveillance efforts.
Officials from Brazilian telecommunications companies have snubbed a visiting US official who has been making the rounds and pushing various countries to exclude Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies from their 5G rollouts.
The BVT domestic intelligence agency “told us that the visits to these mosques furthered the attacker’s radicalisation,” Raab said. Only one of the mosques was officially registered as such, Raab said.
On October 24, the historic U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (a.k.a. the nuclear ban), officially received its fiftieth ratification, clearing the threshold to enter into force. Nuclear weapons make the world less, not more, safe, and with this critical milestone, they will now be treated as prohibited weapons of mass destruction.
None of the nuclear-armed nations are parties to this treaty, and although it will carry the force of law, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, the United States, has not only announced that it won’t abide by the treaty but has actively encouraged other nations to withdraw their ratifications.
The US empire’s insatiable greed and determination to colonise every last inch of the planet, if only with our waste products, is gradually killing the life-systems we depend on.
Local police and the FBI launched an investigation after two men with unlicensed guns who drove from Virginia were arrested near a site of the ongoing vote count in the 2020 election.€
Dozens of Bedouins—including 41 children—were left homeless after occupation troops bulldozed their community to the ground on Tuesday.€
The White Landry Parish man who€ torched three Black churches in April 2019 to curry favor with “black metal” music fans has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison after multiple members of the incinerated churches described the suffering he had caused them.
Earnest Hines, a deacon at Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church in Opelousas who works as a bricklayer, told U.S. District Judge Robert R. Summerhays on Monday he had been “mending and fixing on that building” for 30 years. “The legacy that I wanted to leave behind was you don’t need a lot of money, resources, or even a big congregation to have a church,” Hines said. “Now I can’t point to the steps and say I built those by myself. I wanted my work to be an example to all people. That’s all burned down.”
We have got so used to the United States being an extremely violent danger to the rest of the world, that the prospect of it internalising its violence is fascinating as well as horrifying. I am hopeful that it is not however likely.
Democratic Party propagandists and “frightened” leftists are desperate. They tell their supporters and the public that the republic will not survive another term of Donald Trump. They point to his despicable, racist descriptions of undocumented migrant workers from Mexico; his characterization of some global South nations; his misogyny; his crude and obvious white supremacy; his authoritarian proclivities; and his pathological dishonesty—among his many character flaws—as reasons why he must be stopped.
However, for those of us who have been historically subjected to the colonial fascism that is the U.S. settler project, the liberal-left argument that the Trump regime represents some fundamental departure from previous administrations that were equally committed to white power and that he is an existential threat (to whom, we are not clear) remains unpersuasive.
We have to switch the energy sources powering farms and food production from fossil fuels to renewables, while halting the deforestation that creates new farmland.
The world’s leading efforts at environmentalism have become directed first and foremost by exactly what West addresses here. In the Rocky Mountain West, in addition to the despoliation of wild lands by extractive industries as well as misguided efforts at “forest management” – which itself has become a hotly contested and too-often perverted concept, recreation has proved to be a major threat to both the ecological and the aesthetic or spiritual values of these lands. Over and over and over, we have carved up wilderness for another and yet another “use” that degrades its integrity. The policy that has dominated this unending subdivision that eschews rigorous reflections on both ecological science and conservation aesthetics and losses of opportunities for quietude has been known as “collaboration and compromise.”
This model has been promoted by neoliberal capitalist or, one could accurately say here, predatory capitalist corporate foundations on whose grants most Big Green environmental groups have grown dependent for their survival. This is Cornel West’s “the commodification of everybody and everything.” It’s what the political philosopher Wendy Brown calls in her Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, “the economization of everything.” It’s not just that monetary reward drives decisions, but more that corporatization has been unfettered and ubiquitous in its social engineering that has us, as a collective, thinking we can go on indefinitely and with impunity in such acts as the unending subdivision of nature.
That satellite call referenced a sleeping giant that has enough carbon firepower to adversely impact the world’s climate system. The expedition discovered methane (CH4) that had been securely frozen in shallow subsea permafrost waters forever, and ever, and ever, now “stirring.” Colloquially, “The Monster of the North awakened.” (Although, in fairness to accuracy, the ESAS has been perturbed and leaking/seeping into the atmosphere for some time… but, now it’s much worse than ever before, and terrifyingly, it’s more noticeable to passersby, like expeditions of discerning scientists).
After all, there are scientists who believe the East Siberian Arctic Shelf and neighboring Russian coastline continental shelf seas contain enough methane in frozen hydrates to change human history forever, unfortunately, not for the betterment of civilization.
"Meanwhile many people in high places are still in denial about the reality of climate change. How much proof do we need?"€
“Finally, I wanted to provide my thoughts on the current state of the election,”€ Hamm said after discussing Continental Resources’€ financial performance. “The election process is not final and we like you are waiting to see the results when all legal votes are€ counted.”
"Joe Biden can prove himself to be the leader these precarious times require."
At one time, I was among a few dozen actively publishing moose scientists in the world, and I’ve read much of the scientific literature on moose, the topic, so I went straight to the chapter on Shiras moose. The biological account of the species is quite accurate, and the accompanying historical accounts of the original extent of moose range, near-extirpations due to overhunting, and subsequent expansion throughout the Rocky Mountains, were enlightening. I learned a lot.
One of the interesting historical aspects highlighted by the book are the pitched battles between the sheep and cattle industry and sportsmen groups that happened during the first half of the 20th Century. Today’s issues of access privileges and private land habitats prevailed then as well, but hunting and fishing groups fought against livestock producers back then to bring back native species in the face of political crosswinds. Today, the sportsmen’s lobby is all but invisible in Idaho (except for the NASCAR sportsmen bent on driving native carnivores extinct), and wouldn’t dream of taking on the agriculture industry, even to advance the interests of hunted or fished species. It makes one wonder: What happened?
One of the historical debates that I have been absorbed with since the mid-1990s is over capitalism’s origin. When James Blaut, an anthropology professor who died in 2000, showed up on the Marxism list around then, he had just published “The Colonizer’s Model of the World.” In this book and the next installment for a planned trilogy on Eurocentrism, he challenged the idea that capitalism originated in England and diffused to the rest of the world. The second book was titled “Eight Eurocentric Historians” and included a chapter on Robert Brenner, a professor emeritus at UCLA who gathered disciples under the banner of “Political Marxism.” In brief, Political Marxism, also known as the Brenner thesis, theorizes that capitalism began in the British countryside in the 15th century. For reasons too lengthy to detail here, lease farming on large estates set into motion a market-driven process that inevitably led to the industrial revolution and the British Empire.
As a corollary to the Brenner thesis, there is an argument that slavery and precapitalist colonialism had nothing to do with England’s “take off.” Furthermore, in the USA, as historians Charles Post and James Clegg argue, slavery was an obstacle to the growth of capitalism and had little impact on economic development in the north. Unlike the often arcane debate over whether lease farming was the prima facie basis for take off, the slavery debate had much more relevance to current days. The so-called New Historians of Capitalism, such as Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert, wrote books linking slavery to America’s capitalist success. For this transgression, the Trump administration linked their scholarship to Project 1619 and called for a curriculum purged of such anti-American propaganda.
This week on CounterSpin: As we record on Thursday, November 5, corporate media headlines would have you think it’s still a legitimately tight race for president, because they’re holding up Biden’s larger number of votes and delegates alongside Trump’s efforts to huff and puff and blow the house down. Part of the problem are media so invested in a both-sides, major-party frame that, even after election 2020, they fail to highlight the bigger break: between those who believe in the democratic project and those who do not. We’ll talk about the ongoing election with Steven Rosenfeld, editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
In a stunning win Tuesday night, labor activists in Florida managed to pass Amendment 2, raising the state minimum wage up to $15 per hour by 2026. From 2026 onward, it will be inflation indexed, so that its value won’t corrode over time.
Stop the Money Pipeline coalition pressures executives at major banks, insurance companies, and asset managers to call out his behavior.
After a monthslong legal fight over the transparency of one of the federal government’s largest coronavirus relief programs, a judge in Washington required the disclosure of data on thousands of smaller business loan recipients.
The Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, created by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act in March, has so far dispensed more than $525 billion in loans that can be forgiven if the money is mostly spent to keep employees. The Treasury Department originally declined to release the names of borrowers, maintaining that doing so would expose “proprietary information.”
The explanation is that the financial elites know that they win regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, which is something that some leftists, who had advocated temporarily subordinating an independent working-class alternative to campaign for the leading neoliberal candidate, did not firmly grasp.
Trouncing the contender that Noam Chomsky hyperbolically called “worse than Hitler” would be a blow to overt white supremacy. But bedrock institutional racism, entombed in the US carceral state, will still endure and the tasks of the left will remain.
The great majority of enterprises will continue to be owned and operated by a small minority of Americans. They will continue to use their positions atop the capitalist system to expand their wealth, “economize their labor costs,” and thereby deepen the United States’ inequalities of wealth and income.
The employer class will continue to use its wealth to buy, control, and shape the nation’s politics to prevent the employee class from challenging their ownership and operation of the economic system. Indeed, for a very long time, they have made sure that (1) only two political parties dominate the government and (2) both enthusiastically commit to preserving and supporting the capitalist system. For capitalism, the question of which party wins matters only to how capitalism will be supported, not whether that support will be a top governmental priority.
"We, the voters, decided this!"
Many elections across the country demonstrated that progressive, pro-worker policies are not just good economics, but also can be electoral winners.
The same cannot be said for those more centrist lawmakers who continue to defend the nation's increasingly unpopular for-profit healthcare system.
"The fight isn't over. But man, this feels good right now."
The new lameduck president showed no sense of irony, hypocrisy, or self-awareness at all as he accused Biden, who has repeatedly over the last four days urged for all the ballots to be counted and for the nation to be patient, of claiming his win prematurely.
Madison, Wis.—The car horns started honking to the rhythm of the chant “This is what democracy looks like!” People came out of the houses and apartments, banging on pots and pans. Cheers went up. The music rose. Fireworks exploded. There was no sigh of relief when the news came that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. had finally defeated Donald Trump. There was jubilant recognition of the fact that, as Vice President–elect Kamala Harris declared at Saturday night’s victory party in Wilmington, Del., “When our very democracy was on the ballot in this election, with the very soul of America at stake, and the world watching, you ushered in a new day for America.”
"We don't have a final declaration of victory yet," said the Democratic nominee, "but the numbers tell us it's clear."
Loaded with nearly twice as much money as the GOP, the Democrats showed that weak candidates with no robust agendas for people where they live, work, and raise their families, is a losing formula.
Too many outlets turned an imminent threat to democracy into a factchecking "gotcha."
On Saturday morning, the U.S. president falsely claimed he "won this election, by a lot." The only legitimate, fact-based response to that must be: No, you didn't.
One dark irony of QAnon has always been that the conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump is waging a war on a cabal of elite liberal pedophiles, rose to prominence on 8chan, an imageboard where users swapped child pornography.
But that irony may have a darker, deeper layer: Mother Jones has uncovered that Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan and its successor site, 8kun, controls a company that hosted scores of domains whose names suggest they are connected to child pornography.
Is America really ready to reclaim democracy? I’m going to share a fact with you — and you’re not going to like it. America’s problems can be reduced to the following. White Americans want America to be a failed state — and that is its fundamental, deep, and long standing problem. That is how America ended up here — more than half a century of white hostility to any kind of social progress whatsoever — which resulted in social collapse, and culminated in Trumpism. White people made America a failed state. But are white people ready to own this problem, of their own extremism? Is that long-term social position really about to change this election, finally, after more than half a century? Are white Americans ready to become a modern, functioning society? The answer, right about now, is a kind of hysterical “yes!” We all — all of us sane and thoughtful people anyways — want Biden to win, and put an end to the long nightmare of the Trump years. But — despite what the polls might say — how realistic is that? “Kill Umair! Get him!!!” Maybe you’re foaming at the mouth, ready to dispute my simple fact. So take a hard look at the chart above. What does it say?
Donald Trump going out with a limp seems like an oxymoron,” a senior adviser to the president told me. In width and in word, in soaring skyscrapers and Brioni suits and arena rallies and various euphemisms for great (yuge, bigly), the man has been defined by and obsessed with largeness. His presidency is ending small.
On May 3, 2000, a 17-year-old boy hijacked a bus in Fukuoka, Japan, and slew one of its passengers. Despite its reputation as a safe country, Japan has had its share of mass killings and high-profile murders. What was unusual about this attack was that, before carrying it out, the teen had posted a cryptic threat on an anonymous Japanese imageboard called 2channel under the moniker “Neomugicha” — Neo-Barley Tea. He was arrested and confined to a medical reformatory for several years, but to this day he remains anonymous.
In the aftermath of the attack, Japanese law enforcement started to more closely monitor the imageboard for copycats, and even frequent posters on the website started to take threats seriously. Observers noted that rhetoric on 2channel that was directed against Koreans and other ethnic minorities in Japan reflected a political movement called the “netto-uyoku” — internet right-wing.
Zealously nationalistic, participants in this online movement supported Japanese historical revisionism, denying that imperial Japan did anything wrong when it colonized and annexed other countries in Asia in 1910 and during the 1930s and 40s. The netto-uyoku claimed that atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army, such as the 1937 Nanking Massacre, either never happened or were greatly exaggerated by the liberal media and leftist academics. The online movement was vitriolically xenophobic, focusing its resentment on China, South Korea, North Korea and the mainstream media. Their activities eventually sprang from the social web, with street demonstrations against Japan’s Korean minorities.
That price difference wasn’t an anomaly. The Markup analyzed every known Trump and Biden ad purchased between July 1, 2020, and Oct. 13, 2020, and found that Facebook has charged the presidential nominees wildly varying prices for their ads, with Biden paying, on average, nearly $2.50 more per 1,000 impressions than Trump.
Twitter applies special policies to world leaders and some other officials, leaving rule-breaking content online if there’s “a clear public interest value to keeping the tweet on the service.” The public interest policy was formalized in 2019, codifying a rule that had been informally enforced for some time.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) expresses its deep gratitude to the work of Black, Indigenous, and communities of color around the country who have led the way to the end of a fascist Trump presidency.
[...]
As Angela Davis reminded us, “We know now that we can, indeed, forge our own futures.”
After we take a few moments to breathe, re-group, and celebrate, we will get back to work.
The president's suits,€ said one law professor, look less like a legal strategy and "more like public relation stunts meant to create a false impression that the election is filled with improprieties and fraud."
Trump's remarks were plainly desperate, a last-ditch effort to claim that he is losing because others are cheating him.
I haven’t felt this unhinged and desperate for oblivion since the first weeks of the lockdown and that shit was kid stuff compared to the last weeks of the 2020 presidential abortion. The most important election of my life, I’m told. I’ve been sold that bill of goods every four years for the entirety of my short and painful life and it’s beginning to ring a bit hollow. Then again, there does seem to be something extra special about this years campaign season. It’s never felt more unhinged. Both sides have adopted the tactics of the Manson Family to get their chosen mentally depraved scion of scumfuckery in the White House. Scrawling their names in blood across suburban doorways with subtle threats to take back America and make it heinous again. I’m starting to believe them. I can feel the fear and loathing closing in.
This post isn’t about the election. It isn’t about Biden or Trump. By the time you read this, one of those two rapidly disintegrating conmen will likely be our president-elect and I could honestly give five fucks and hardy shit which one it is. They’re two different flavors of the same goddamn hand grenade. Cram either one in your mouth and your skull won’t know the difference. No dearest motherfuckers, this is a post about America’s national mental illness, election fatigue. Some fancy fuckers in white lab coats on cable news call it Election Stress Disorder, and ain’t that just swell. Another clever word salad for the next installation of the DSM. America is supposedly the freest country on earth and voting is supposedly our most sacred right. Then how did this right become a mental illness? And how many sticks of Xanax do I have to down with Two-Buck-Chuck to make it go away? Four? Five? Better double it and chase it down with a shot of Robitussin.
It’s not enough to be anti-Trump. Socialists are showing you can win elections by standing for something.
"The whole 'progressivism is bad' argument just doesn't have any compelling evidence that I've seen."
Back in October 2016, my friends and I frequently discussed the challenges progressives would face if the candidate we expected to win actually entered the Oval Office. There were so many issues to worry about back then. The Democratic candidate was an enthusiastic booster of the U.S. armed forces and believed in projecting American power through its military presence around the world. Then there was that long record of promoting harsh sentencing laws and the disturbing talk about “the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy.”
In 2016, the country was already riven by deep economic inequality. While Hillary Clinton promised “good-paying jobs” for those struggling to stay housed and buy food, we didn’t believe it. We’d heard the same promises so many times before, and yet the federal minimum wage was still stuck where it had been ever since 2009, at $7.25 an hour. Would a Clinton presidency really make a difference for working people? Not if we didn’t push her — and hard.
This tiring election season doesn’t seem like it will ever end, as the vote count slowly trudges forward. But where the count is heading is now clear: The remaining votes in Georgia and Philadelphia are all in heavily Democratic areas. Joe Biden is on track to become the next president of the United States.
Joe Biden is almost certainly going to be the next president of the United States. The Biden-Harris ticket received the most votes of any ticket in American history, and he is expected to win the popular vote by somewhere between two to five points. Biden is currently leading in enough states to give him 306 Electoral College votes, more than the 304 Donald Trump received in 2016, which Trump called “historic.” Biden is likely to win, even if he ends up losing a state or two where he is currently leading. And if state legislatures had simply given their states the resources to count ballots as they were received, this would have been evident since Tuesday night.
Having persuaded states to give up their constitutionally mandated taxing powers by substituting their main revenue source, the sales tax, with a goods and services tax (GST)—administered by a GST Council dominated by the center—with the promise that their revenue shortfall will be made good, the center has now coolly reneged on that promise. States at present have no taxing powers (except over just three commodities); and the promised compensation from the center has not materialized.
But it is not just control over resources that has been centralized; decision-making too is being centralized against the provisions of the Constitution. Education, for instance, is in the Concurrent List; but the center has recently come out with a new National Education Policy (NEP), without any consultation with the states. The states are simply expected to fall in line and implement the NEP. Agriculture belongs to the State List; and yet the center has just rushed three bills through the parliament, with no consultation with state governments, making far-reaching changes in the country’s agricultural arrangements, which, apart from their impact upon the peasantry, would also mean significant revenue losses for states.
Biden teetering on victory as latest vote counts continue to lean toward Democratic challenger.
There has been much conversation about Barrett’s Catholic faith, which, in and of itself, is entirely irrelevant to any discussion of her qualifications. But there are many issues that are pertinent to any conversation about her lack of suitability for her new position, and one of them does relate to her religious beliefs.
The new Supreme Court justice is a member of an organization called ‘People of Praise’, comprised mainly, but not exclusively, of Catholics. It grew from the Pentecostal movement, and “The group organizes and meets outside the purview of a church and includes people from several Christian denominations, but its members are mostly Roman Catholic.”
A lot of men were biting dogs in pre- and post-election analysis. “Trump Is Losing Ground With White Voters but Gaining Among Black and Hispanic Americans,” 538 (10/19/20) reported. “The Trump Vote Is Rising Among Blacks and Hispanics, Despite the Conventional Wisdom,” declared an NBC article (11/2/20). “Many Latino Men Are Supporting President Trump This Election,” said NPR (10/28/20), while a CNN headline (11/4/20) said, “More Latino Voters Support Trump in 2020 Than 2016.”
We have, over the course of the trump tenure, grown accustomed to the dispensation of medical advice, prognosis, and explanation from the trump.€ A recent event, however, showed that the trump is, when the occasion warrants, willing to take advice from those who, on the surface at least, are completely lacking in any sort of qualification that would cause them to be in a position to render € advice to the trump.€ But first things first. The € October surprise.
The October Surprise pertained to the increasing number of deaths in the United States from the coronavirus even though, as the trump has repeatedly explained, “we have rounded the € corner.”€ Because of the ignorance of the coronavirus (which lacks the cognitive skills of both the trump and its detractors,) it didn’t see the corner coming and completely missed the turn.€ The unfortunate consequence of the missed turn was that the number of people it is affecting has grown rather than, as the trump has repeatedly proclaimed at his rallies, shrunk.
To defeat Trumpism the extreme centre must stop blaming leftist and minorities for their losses.
Policymakers cannot ignore the economic devastation happening to workers and their families across the country.
Both cynical positions forget to do one thing: count the damn votes. There is lots of analysis about how this should have been a landslide (probably not considering Biden’s heinous record). But this analysis tends to act as if all the votes are counted. It’s as if all the coverage of voter suppression stopped as soon as we cast our votes for the Democrats. It’s like the pundits are saying it doesn’t matter if the Republicans actually win, it matters we voted to prove we live in a democracy, even when we don’t. The alt-left media is no better, as they barely have an inch of daylight from the alt-right these days as they hammer home how Trump speaks to the people and that Democrats are forgetting the “white working class”.
The white working-class should be outlawed from American speech. Cancel it. I don’t care. Cancel culture is great. It’s the one redeemable thing from the Trump era. No one seems to care that poor people of color can’t get their votes counted. Maybe try to “reach” those people. Furthermore, this whole breakdown of votes by category is a sign of fascism too. People seem to be obsessed with how this or that group voted. Let’s categorize people by income, race, gender, ability, occupation, etc. and make sweeping conclusions! What could go wrong?! Who else does that?
It means Trumpism will live on, giving the American people a bitter victory in having ousted a demagogue. He was leading us down a path of authoritarianism. His defeat marked a step forward; progress will be made in climbing out of the grave he was digging for our democracy, our country. That’s true even if those who voted for the sociopath don’t know it.
First things first for Biden. That means attacking the virus and its COVID-19 follow-on. At least 233,000 Americans have died of the disease and 9.4 million have been infected. The pandemic is surging through the country with 100,000 cases a day recorded for the first time Wednesday.
If Trump Tries to Sue His Way to Election Victory, Here’s What Happens It’s easy enough for the Trump campaign to file a lawsuit claiming improprieties, but a lot harder to provide evidence of wrongdoing or a convincing legal argument. Here’s what you need to know as the election lawsuits start to mount. Read the story.
Whether the GOP Can Stop Voters From Legally Fixing Rejected Mail-In Ballots Could Decide the Election Many states allow voters to fix and resubmit ballots rejected for technical reasons. It’s called “curing” votes, and the GOP is trying to prevent them from being counted because they could help Biden win. Read the story.
Without a strong progressive program as a rudder, the Biden presidency will be awash in much the same old rhetorical froth and status-quo positions that have so often caused Democratic incumbents to founder, bringing on GOP electoral triumphs.
"Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend!"
"The GOP is telling the nation, on cable television, that it installed its 6-3 Supreme Court majority in order to steal elections. Believe them."
"Don't blame myself and others who are fighting for issues that matter to our communities," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
This disposition is not held as sacrilegious as one would suppose for more than one reason. Trump has a number of followers who also don’t find anything sacred in a political/economic order which they’d like to see dropped on its head. There are also some who identify that order with Liberals who don’t hold Guns, God, and Personal Freedom sacred. That Liberal order can also be dropped on its head.
If we pan back a bit, we can see that we are all encompassed by an economic order that holds nothing sacred but the elevation of the Dow Jones and the S&P 500, or le ROI (“return on investment”). This lot, and they cross party lines as does wealth, can easily put up with a president who holds nothing sacred but his own will as long as he holds sacred le ROI.
But we will not get anywhere politically by looking at half the country with disgust. Trying to win over some of Trump’s voters doesn’t mean giving in to Trump’s racism and sexism, it is about recognizing that large segments of the country have not benefitted from the economy’s growth over the last four decades as a result of deliberate policy.
This group does not at all coincide perfectly with the group of people who support Trump. Many Trump supporters have done quite well economically. There are also many among those who have been pushed behind who do not support Trump. This is especially the case for Blacks and other people of color who do not see a happy home for themselves in a party dominated by Trump’s racism.
It was bizarre, surreal even, to watch Election Night on the “Public” Broadcasting System. It was like sitting in a family dinner or a church group meeting where too many of the attendees were right-wing and/or militantly nonpolitical to safely discuss anything political in an honest and serious way.
Much if not most of what mattered about the event being covered was off the table of serious discussion. Council of Foreign Relations member and “P”BS “Newshour” host Judy Woodruff and her gaggle of exceedingly polite and respectful “experts” couldn’t mention that Trump had promised in advance to steal the election by declaring victory before all the mail-in ballots required by the pandemic he spread were counted over many days – and then by challenging those ballots in court. The talking heads just yapped along, as if it was a normal election, calling one state after another without the slightest reference to the coup that the Trump administration had pledged to undertake.
Besides these two countries, there are other places on the globe where the United States military presence is a hostile one. These include the Persian Gulf, where the US Navy maintains a large and constant presence, southern Korea, and some nations in Central and South America, and various nations on the African continent. In addition, tens of thousands of US forces are also stationed under friendlier conditions in Europe, Japan, and other Latin American countries. The presence of troops in the latter areas is usually related to the perceived need to keep so-called enemies at bay: Russia in Europe, Venezuela and Bolivia in South America, Nicaragua and Cuba in Central America. Even a superficial examination of the global situation shows that none of those nations are enemies. They are, however, either competitors for certain markets and resources or, in the case of Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Iran, and possibly Nicaragua, examples of an alternative form of governance that is not beholden to the US empire.
Since Donald Trump ended up in the White House, some have insisted that he is some kind of antiwar president. They point to the fact that he has not started any new wars and has even withdrawn some regular forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan (most were then transferred to another theater overseas). These same people fail to acknowledge the increase in civilian deaths from US-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, just like they ignore the presence of at least one US military base in Syria—a nation the US was not invited into and whose civil war is arguably the result of ongoing covert US intervention in the internal politics of that country that intensified in 2011, when Obama was president and protests shook the Arab world. Tangentially, these same champions of Trump’s military policies seem to have forgotten his aggressive actions against Iran (most notably the assassination of Suleiman) and the murderous bombing of Yemen by Saudi Arabian forces flying US-made bombers dropping US-made bombs. In addition to the bombers, US forces operate on the ground in Yemen in support of the Saudi bombing.
We go to Atlanta for an update, after Joe Biden pulled ahead of Donald Trump for the first time in Georgia. The 2020 presidential election could hinge on this extraordinarily tight race. Many credit the state’s blue shift to community organizers on the ground, including Stacey Abrams, who lost a hotly contested race for governor of Georgia in 2018 amid claims of widespread voter suppression and has since led a massive effort to get out the vote through her organizations Fair Fight and Fair Count. Both Senate races in Georgia also appear to be headed to runoff elections, and the state could determine if the GOP holds onto its Senate majority. “There has been a wide investment that has been deeply driven by community to expand the electorate,” says Anoa Changa, a freelance journalist based in Atlanta who focuses on electoral justice and voting rights.
We look at Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the U.S. presidential election with Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, negotiator and senior policy fellow at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center who was an eyewitness to the 2000 Florida recount. She says the 2000 election holds lessons for today, when Democrats allowed Republicans to claim a controversial victory. “We have to have a counternarrative. We have to have very large numbers of people in the streets,” she says.
The Obama regime’s deplorable trade and military “pivot to China,” along with its sanctions against high-ranking Russians and Russian energy, financial and defense firms and the Trump regime’s provocations, sanctions and insults aimed at both countries have now born fruit: There is talk of a military alliance between China and Russia. Both countries deny that such is in the offing, but the fact that it is even discussed reveals how effectively U.S. foreign policy has created enemies and united them. Even if they would have drawn closer anyway, China and Russia cannot ignore the advantage of teaming up in the face of U.S. hostility. A more idiotic approach than this hostility is scarcely imaginable. Remember, not too long ago the U.S. had little problem with its chief trading partner, China, and there were even reports some years back of actual military cooperation in Syria between the U.S. and Russia. All that is gone now, dissolved in a fog of deliberate ill-will.
So what are some of the absurd U.S. policies that have reaped this potential whirlwind? An utterly unnecessary trade war with China, with tariffs that were paid, not by China, but by importers and then passed on to American consumers. There is the Trump regime’s assault on China’s technology sector and its attempt to lockout Huawei from the 5G bonanza. Then there are the attacks on Russian business, like its deal to sell natural gas to Germany, attacks in which the U.S. insists Germany buy the much more expensive U.S. product to avoid becoming beholden to Russia. And of course, there are the constant mega-deals involving sales of U.S. weapons to anyone who might oppose China, Russia, North Korea or Iran.
Missing from the electoral mix for a reason was politics, the act of putting together a political program and selling it to prospective voters. For the second election in a row, the Democrats assumed that running as not-Donald Trump would be a winning strategy. Possibly it was. But should Joe Biden prevail, the oceans of circumstance beyond being not-Trump will require a political program. While Mr. Biden could in theory co-opt Bernie Sanders’ program, he was appointed by the Democratic leadership to bury it. That doing so doesn’t appear to have bought him much in electoral terms is the setup for the eternal refrain that being to the right of Ronald Reagan is too far left for the Democrats.
The divide that led to the 2016 outcome, and that has persisted since, was brought about when the oligarchs and their agents in the PMC had their economic lots restored by the Obama administration while the bottom 70% didn’t. This class divide has been framed variously as rural versus suburban and urban, and through identity politics. What Democrats did was blame the people whose jobs were lost in the Great Recession, or in the decade of planned de-industrialization that preceded it, while praising the beneficiaries of Mr. Obama’s bailouts as if they had bailed themselves out. The bailed out then had the gall to call the not-bailed-out racists and fascists for not voting for more of the same.
It ain’t over, not quite, but the finish line for the 2020 presidential election is a few short strides away, and matters are looking grim for The Donald.
Now, four years later, Trump may lose the election to the former vice president Joe Biden but by a small margin, i.e., by less than 4 million votes – it’s a big achievement for Trump. He has, after all, not done much for most of his supporters except incite them against immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, and liberals, thus bringing out their wild instincts. He has instead killed many of them, including his opponents, through careless mishandling of COVID-19.€ Trump fared better€ in counties with high COVID-19 related deaths than his performance in 2016! Yes, it is true! Go figure!
Trump is not a religiously inclined person otherwise he could start a new religion: he would just have to declare to his followers that he’s the Father of God (son of god or prophet would still be a subordinate and against Trump’s€ Mount Everest€ kind of ego.) He would probably be very successful – financially and with number of followers.
Not so fast, Mitch McConnell. The grim reaper from Kentucky can’t count his Senate majority just yet, thanks to a quirk of American democracy and a constitutional codicil that could see Georgia voters take his gavel away.
As Never Trumper Rick Wilson put it early on in this four-year nightmare, everything Donald Trump touches dies—or #ETTD, as the hashtag had it. Right now, the miserable president is managing to kill much of the joy Democrats ought to be feeling over Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s historic win. We are still waiting for major news outlets to call the race for Biden-Harris, hours after it became obvious that Trump lost in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and, most importantly, Pennsylvania, given what we know about where the outstanding ballots lie. (Even in Trump counties, in all four states, they’re mostly mail-ins coming from Democrats, and they are little by little dooming him.)
In the chaos of this moment, it seems likely that Joe Biden will just squeeze into the presidency and that he’ll certainly win the popular vote, Donald Trump’s Mussolini-like behavior and election night false claim of victory notwithstanding. Somehow, it all brings another moment in my life to mind.
Of course, all bets are off if your toast falls on the floor buttered side down and you haven’t mopped the kitchen in recent memory.
Today, after a contentious election and with the results of the presidential race still uncertain, we are all now looking down at the ground. It’s been four years since Donald Trump dropped the buttered toast of our democracy onto the floor.
This election was a referendum on Trump. Biden was Not-Trump, nothing more. Biden has no solutions for the climate, poverty, racism, and nuclear war.
The Hawkins/Walker campaign thanks our supporters for their donations and campaign work in a difficult year for the Green Party and independent socialists. The media blanked us out. After the Democratic establishment closed ranks to defeat Bernie Sanders, most progressive leaders lined up behind Biden without making any policy demands on him. The Biden administration is now free to ignore them.
It isn’t yet light when Alexander Tschugguel and his cameraman sneak into Rome’s Santa Maria in Traspontina Church to steal the statues. A lone elderly parishioner sits in the pews as Tschugguel—a young Austrian convert to Catholicism, so neatly dressed he might work there—quickly genuflects, then steps behind the rail of a side altar and picks the statues up: five slim wooden carvings, less than two feet tall, of a naked, kneeling woman with long dark hair, Indigenous features, and a heavily pregnant belly.
No one stops him as he carries them outside and down the Bridge of Angels, where, in the shadow of the hulking Castel Sant’Angelo—the setting of both a purported medieval miracle and an action sequence in a Dan Brown novel—the two men abruptly pitch one statue over the side. Sensing a need for greater ceremony, Tschugguel aligns the remaining four on the bridge’s ledge, then shoves them, one by one, into the Tiber. On their YouTube video, you can see the last one land with a splash, stirring a chorus of seagulls as the current carries it away.
In yet another attempt to slow the spread of misinformation on its platform, Facebook plans to put groups on its platform with too many posts that violate its content rules on a kind of probation, the company said. First reported by The Washington Post, Facebook will restrict any groups— both public and private ones— with multiple posts violating its community standards. Moderators for the groups will have to approve any posts manually for 60 days, and there’s no appeal available for groups on probationary status.
On this edition of the “Dissenter Weekly,” host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola shares an update on President Donald Trump’s National Regulatory Commission and their plans to allow the dumping of radioactive waste in garbage landfills.
The UAE's government said it would repeal a law that allowed judges to issue lenient sentences for such killings.
They usually involve the murder of women perceived to have brought dishonour upon relatives.
Such crimes will be treated like murder from now on, the UAE's government said.
The United Arab Emirates announced on Saturday a major overhaul of the country's Islamic personal laws, allowing unmarried couples to cohabitate, loosening alcohol restrictions and criminalizing so-called "honor killings."
The broadening of personal freedoms reflects the changing profile of a country that has sought to bill itself as a skyscraper-studded destination for Western tourists and businesses, despite its legal system based on a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Now, after Mississippi voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to replace the flag’s Confederate imagery with one featuring the state’s official flower, a magnolia, and the phrase “In God We Trust,” schools that balked at flying the state flag are now planning to hoist it for the first time in recent history.
I first wrote about her after she was arrested in August 2016 in the wake of the failed coup in Turkey in July of that year. That article was published here in CounterPunch (“The Stone Building” and the Post Coup Erdoßan Crackdown, Oct.16, 2016). She was one of the fifty to sixty thousand people arrested in the crackdown that followed the attempted coup. Recep Tayyip Erdoßan used that event as a pretext to move against people in all professions whose only offense was their public opposition to him. Writers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, military officers et al found themselves swept up and thrown in prison in the weeks that followed.
Aslñ Erdoßan was imprisoned in Turkey for more than four months. The charges made against her, the trial, the dismissal of the charges and then their reinstatement—all of that and more is recounted below in her own words. She also discusses the continuing campaign by the other Erdoßan against all dissent in Turkey and now even against dissenters in exile like herself. She speaks of the effects of the Covidvirus on the continuing crackdown and especially on those still imprisoned. That campaign of repression has gotten pushed aside in the news not only by the global pandemic, but also by Erdoßan’s clumsy misadventures in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean. Those she points out, no matter how they fail abroad, serve to rally his supporters. She tells how, although she left Turkey in 2017, a campaign in Turkey vilifying her goes on unabated in her absence. Once crossed Recep Erdoßan, like Trump, never tires of attacking his opponents.
After months of nightly protests against police brutality and racism in Portland, Ore., voters here overwhelmingly approved the creation of a new police oversight board with the power to discipline and fire officers. But they decided not to fire Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner and has been criticized for lax oversight of the Portland Police Bureau. Portland police officers were repeatedly filmed assaulting protesters during demonstrations this summer, and their use of tear gas has been the subject of multiple lawsuits. Wheeler beat opponent Sarah Iannarone, an activist and urban policy wonk who ran an aggressive campaign largely defined by her embrace of the protests, 46 to 40 percent. Thirteen percent of voters selected write-in candidates, including Teressa Raiford, a longtime advocate for police reform.
However, this also leads to serious questions of training of academic historians, as can be seen by the treatment of a major scholar in this field and, arguably, the reliance if not over-reliance on government officials’ official documents.
This paper begins by drawing attention to a key issue that resulted in the field opening up. That is followed by a review of the literature, focusing initially on that developed before 2010, then a look at the 2010 and later writings, with a concentration on what has been learned. Interestingly, we see historians entering the discussion, which is welcomed, but they are encouraged to break out of the confines of their discipline, and to engage with the existing work that has previously been done by activists and researchers/writers in other academic disciplines, something that so far, they have tended not to do.
As most eyes were focused on the race for the White House, Puerto Rican voters on Tuesday narrowly approved a nonbinding statehood referendum. We get analysis from Democracy Now! co-host Juan González and speak with Afro-Puerto Rican human rights, feminist and LGBTQI activist Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, who was elected to the Puerto Rican Senate.
However, we would be remiss to ignore the political context that led a 21-year-old Tunisian refugee to allegedly stage a knife attack against peaceful worshippers in Nice. While it is fairly easy to recognize the individual culprit behind such a violent event, it takes much introspection, let alone honesty, to identify the true culprits, who, often for political reasons, fan the flames of hate and violence.
Since his advent to the Elysée Palace, in May 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron, has led an aggressive foreign policy abroad and an equally contentious domestic agenda. These choices were not random, as Macron was dogged by numerous domestic challenges: rising inequality and unemployment, mass protests led largely by the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ – Yellow Vests –€ Movement and the unhindered rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant populist movements, such as the National Front (FN) of Marine Le Pen.
Tyler Stumpf is 31 years old. Tyler and his mom moved to Arizona from Iowa last year. His mom’s name is Melody Linderwell.
Tyler wants to work with animals. He is a janitor. His mom helped him find his job. They were not able to find him a job working with animals.
Emory Webster, 11, lives in Tucson. In a recent interview, she said she does not like to cuddle. Her favorite thing to do in the summer is swim.
Her mom, Adiba Nelson, listened carefully as Emory spoke — sometimes asking a question two or three times to make sure she understood — then explained that Emory loves to paint and hang out with friends. Recently, she’s embraced the idea of being a DJ, pretending to beatbox and scratch records.
Many people think Arizona does a good job helping people with developmental disabilities. But some people have problems getting help. It can be confusing. People wait a long time. This is a story about a person who had problems getting help in Arizona.
Drew Bolender is 41 years old. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his mom. His mom’s name is BJ.
Emory Webster is 11 years old. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Emory does not like to cuddle. Her favorite thing to do in summer is swim.
Drew Bolender is a grown man who likes weightlifting, video games and the band Green Day. He is perfectly capable of using the bathroom on his own. He just needs help getting there.
So when a manager from Arizona’s Division of Developmental Disabilities called his mother to suggest she put Drew in adult diapers to save the state the cost of overnight caregivers, she was outraged.
Tyler Stumpf wants to work with animals, but instead he’s a janitor. That’s the only job his mother could find for him when the two moved to Arizona from Iowa last year.
Now 31, Tyler was born with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare genetic condition that results in intellectual disability and low muscle tone and is probably best known for leaving people unable to regulate hunger. Refrigerators and pantries must be locked. Caretakers must monitor food consumption. If not, people with Prader-Willi can literally eat themselves to death.
As of early morning on Wednesday November 4, Trump seemed to be closing in on victory. But four key states were still in play: Wisconsin, where Biden enjoyed a slight edge, plus Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, where Trump had a solid lead. But if Biden held onto Wisconsin, that would mean that the president would have to win the other three in order to rack up the 270 electoral votes needed for victory – a likely possibility, but far from a certainty. So both Democrat and Republican strategies were crystal-clear at that stage: the first wanted to keep the tabulation going until every last ballot was counted, while the second wanted to cut it short.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the election,” Trump tweeted in the early hours. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the polls are closed!”
T-Mobile has been forced to pay $200 million because Sprint took taxpayer money it didn't deserve to "service" customers that apparently don't exist.
Google’s current market share in online searches globally stands at about 92 percent and rises to more than 98 percent in countries like India. The only market in which it has virtually no market share is in China, where it shut shop for its search engine in 2010.
The four major tech companies—Google-Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple—are globally on the radar for their monopoly power and their ability to drive out competition. The recent hearings in the U.S. Congress relating to the Big Four were followed by a staff report of the subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law that recommended appropriate legislative action to Congress to either break up or limit these companies.
On October 29, 2020, the European Patent Office ruled in favor of Sanofi and Regeneron in their dispute concerning Amgen’s Praluent€® (alirocumab) patent. The EPO found invalid certain claims of Amgen’s European patent, EP 2 215 124, which is directed to PCSK9 antibodies. This EPO decision follows a ruling in Sanofi and Regeneron’s favor in August 2019 by the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware that found invalid for lack of enablement, as a matter of law, certain claims of Amgen’s patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 8,829,165 and 8,859,741) directed to antibodies targeting PCSK9.
Law enforcement in the US and UK have assisted a massive anti-piracy operation in Brazil which has taken hundreds of pirate sites offline. The US Department of Justice confirmed the seizure of three torrent site domains. UK officials have yet to comment on their actions, but it is likely that the recent suspensions of EZTV.io and Torrents.io are connected.
After New Zealand's Supreme Court handed down a "mixed bag" decision this week which allows Kim Dotcom more time in the country to fight extradition, former colleague Mathias Ortmann is now under the spotlight. Police in Australia are reportedly preparing to seize the assets of the Megaupload co-founder in response to a forfeiture order issued by the United States.
Last week we reported how a defendant who failed to defend herself in a BitTorrent piracy lawsuit was treated leniently by the court which rejected claims for substantial damages. There are now signs that this decision is having repercussions, with many more defendants receiving the same treatment.
The makers of the films 'Ava' and 'Rambo V: Last Blood' have filed a lawsuit targeting 16 alleged movie pirates. The complaint suggests that the defendants are registered users of the popular torrent site RARBG, but provides no proof for this allegation. The film companies do have evidence that the IP-addresses were caught sharing torrent files.
