Linux has many benefits, the biggest of which is that it's open-source. It allows you to have the freedom to develop and create without the constraints of a more extensive system. If you've chosen to start using Linux as your OS, remember to keep the tips here in mind when you start coding.
Devuan, with its promise of Init Freedom, provides users an alternative to systemd as an init process.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for a tour of the week’s best and brightest hacks. We begin with a call for point-of-sale diversity, because who wants to carry cash? We move on to discussing glass as a building material, which isn’t really easy, but at least it can be sintered with a DIY-grade laser. Want to make a call on a pay phone in New York City? Too late — the last one is gone, and we offer a qualified “good riddance.” We look at socially engineering birds to get them away from what they should be really afraid of, discuss Apple’s potential malicious compliance with right-to-repair, and get the skinny on an absolute unit of a CNC machine. Watching TV? That’s so 2000s, but streaming doesn’t feel quite right either. Then again, anything you watch on a mechanical color TV is pretty cool by definition.
UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) is an easy-to-use command-line-based program to manage the Netfilter firewall. It acts as a frontend for iptables configuration using simple commands. UFW is originally designed for Ubuntu OS and has been available since the 8.04 LTS version.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vivaldi Browser on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Vivaldi is a multi-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. Is based on Chromium, its minimalistic user interface and features such as tab stacking and tiling, built-in ad blocker and trackers, custom themes, quick commands, etc.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Vivaldi web browser on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
The Wine development release 7.10 is now available.
What's new in this release: - macOS driver converted to PE. - Mono engine updated to version 7.3.0. - Windows-compatible Unicode collation. - Wow64 support in SECUR32. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.10.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.10.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
This week we did a lot of work to fix bugs and make UI improvements, but we still need help to knock out the remaining issues found during the Plasma 5.25 beta. If you are an experienced developer, please consider fixing one or two of these bugs within the week! Plasma 5.25 is a big release, but let’s not let it get a reputation for big bugs too.
Since the last update two month ago KDE Itinerary gained support for managing discount program memberships and flat rate tickets, gives you more control over alternative connection searches and transfer connections, produces correct train station indoor maps even in complex cases and much more.
This past week I fixed an issue on Tasks and also developed a new little app!
It's not a secret that maintaining an open source project is often thankless and time-consuming work. However, I've learned that there's one shared joy among open source maintainers: They love building with a group of technologists who passionately believe in their vision.
Bach’s name does not appear in Zedler’s Lexicon, but the word Clavier (keyboard) does, defined in a modest paragraph of five lines in volume six from 1733 as “the part of an organ, harpsichord, or clavichord made from wood, bone, or ivory and played with the fingers so that the strings or pipes bring forth their tones.”
The accessibility of the encyclopedists and the wikipedists increasingly dominates our days and nights, not just as a philosophical precept but as a practical way of knowing the world. At smartphone or computer keyboard our fingers feed our brains—or, so the more skeptical might claim, enfeeble them. The digital revolution may have increased facility with the digits while the brain atrophies under the monogram not of JSB (Johann Sebastian Bach) but GTS: “Google that Shit.” Bach’s admirers and students praised what they saw as his revolutionary inclusion of the thumb as an equal partner at the keyboard: his first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, wrote that “in Bach’s method the thumb was made a principal finger, because it is absolutely impossible to do without it in what are the difficult keys.” How fascinated—or, more likely, perplexed—Bach would have been by the silent symphony of thumbs playing at tiny flat keyboards made not of bone or wood but of glass.
After a busy Friday and Saturday, our house lost electric power for a few hours on Sunday. My wife and I decided to go to a local secondhand bookstore while we waited for power to be restored. I'm not much of a reader these days, but on a whim I decided to pick up a fantasy novel at random. The book I chose is called "The Stone and the Maiden" by Dennis Jones. I'm just past a quarter of the way through the book, and I've been greatly enjoying it so far.
Interestingly, a coworker recently asked me if I would be interested in reading a draft of a novel he is currently writing, even though he knows I don't often read fiction. I didn't want to turn him down, so I accepted a preprint, but I discovered the story was fascinating to read.
We’re suckers for a nice seven-segment LED display around these parts, and judging by how often they seem to pop up in the projects that come our way, it seems the community is rather fond of them as well. But though they’re cheap, easy to work with, and give off that all important retro vibe, they certainly aren’t perfect. For one thing, their visibility can be pretty poor in some lighting conditions, especially if you’re trying to photograph them for documentation purposes.
With feline obesity on the rise, keeping track of your cat’s weight is an important part of keeping them healthy. However, a weighing session can be anything from a routine job to a painful procedure, depending on your cat’s temperament. [Andy]’s cat Ellie is one of those who dislike being weighed, so in order to track her weight without drama [Andy] got creative and built an internet-connected weighing platform for her litter box.
Here’s an older but fantastic video that is as edifying as it is short. [Topias Korpi] demonstrates a 3D printed flexure with a dial indicator on one end, and an M3 screw on the other. As the screw is turned, the dial indicator moves steadily with roughly a 15:1 reduction between the movement of the screw and the indicator. Stable deflections of 0.01 mm are easily dialed in, and it’s neat seeing it work while the flexure itself shows no perceptible movement. A demonstration is embedded below the page break and is less than a minute long, so give it a watch and maybe get some ideas.
Dovetail joints on a piece of furniture are one of those features that make it say “master carpenter” rather than “IKEA”. Traditional hand-made dovetails require accurate measurements and even more accurate sawing and chiseling, skills that may take years to develop. A slightly less artisanal method is to use a router and a dovetail template; the router makes perfectly straight cuts while the template makes sure it goes only where it needs to go.
But he’s remarkable. He communicates by using his nose to type on a keyboard attached to his wheelchair. His mind is sharp, and he’s passionate about advocating for people with disabilities and their families.
He’s learned so much about policies that can help disabled people like him live independently at home. But heartbreakingly, he’s also had to learn about the political forces that seem dead set against helping anyone.
After the COVID-19 pandemic hit and by the end of 2020, a generation of new vaccines against the disease based on a long-studied but never before widely utilized technology was rolled out in the form of mRNA-based vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, a new generation of antivaxxers has arisen to dominate the antivaccine movement. Like most antivaxxers who view themselves as scientific and reasonable, these antivaxxers really, truly, honestly believe that they are not “antivaccine.” Back in the old days, antivaxxers would claim that they are “not antivaccine” but one or more of excuses such as “I’m pro-safe vaccine” or “I’m against mandates/for ‘freedom.'” New antivaxxers, while spewing the same old antivax tropes repurposed for COVID-19 vaccines (and not realizing that they are old), think of themselves as “not antivaccine” but just highly skeptical of the new COVID-19 vaccines. It turns out, though, that the longer these “new school” antivaxxers preach their pseudoscience and intermingle with longtime antivaxxers, the more they start sounding just like the old school antivaxxers they once dismissed. This principle was on display a couple of weeks ago at a panel held during an antivax conference held in Bath, England called the Better Way Conference.
Unlike the countless inexperienced middlemen and outright swindlers who jumped into the mask market at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tim Morgan knew what he was doing. In the 1990s he taught English in Japan and later traveled throughout Asia, scouting factories that produced Nike watches and shades for Sunglass Hut, before he returned to Cleveland in 2000 to form his own import business, International Sourcing Group.
Two decades of navigating supply chains and negotiating with far-flung manufacturers taught Morgan it was best to steer his firm clear of the mask frenzy, which was rife with fraud and confusion. In the summer of 2020, though, he was inundated with requests for a similarly cheap but tough-to-get commodity: nitrile gloves. Hospitals and businesses were burning through them faster than they could be shipped from Asia, home to most of the world's protective equipment production.
Slowly I began to realize that these social networking sites were echo-chambers that really didn't mean much at all.
[...]
Github is the worst kind of social networking site. Like a virus, it has infected my mind and is constantly getting me to engage with it. It's a social networking site that I have to use for work.
[...]
Github isn't just a code repository, it's a social networking site. The network effect makes it really hard to host other open source projects anywhere else.
[...]
I really like sourcehut[1] and will be moving everything there. There are no "engagement" features like stars or trending projects. Drew, more than anyone, has made me realize that you don't have to participate in social networking in order to have people use your projects.
When NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station have to clamber around on the outside of the orbiting facility for maintenance or repairs, they don a spacesuit known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU). Essentially a small self-contained spacecraft in its own right, the bulky garment was introduced in 1981 to allow Space Shuttle crews to exit the Orbiter and work in the craft’s cavernous cargo bay. While the suits did get a minor upgrade in the late 90s, they remain largely the product of 1970s technology.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently revised its policy on charging violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1986 law that remains the primary statute by which federal prosecutors pursue cybercrime cases. The new guidelines state that prosecutors should avoid charging security researchers who operate in “good faith” when finding and reporting vulnerabilities. But legal experts continue to advise researchers to proceed with caution, noting the new guidelines can’t be used as a defense in court, nor are they any kind of shield against civil prosecution.
Digital rights advocates on Friday cautiously welcomed news that congressional lawmakers have agreed to advance a bipartisan, bicameral data privacy bill while reaffirming the need for antitrust legislation to truly tackle Big Tech monopoly abuses.
"To say that it's high time for real progress on a federal privacy bill would be a tremendous understatement."
Clearview may as well exit Europe entirely. Things are not going to get better for it. Online privacy laws are far more restrictive on the other side of the pond and Clearview’s business model will always be in violation of those laws.
Members of CAJAR, a Colombian human rights organization defending victims of political persecution, indigenous people, and activists for over 40 years, have had their communications intercepted by Colombian intelligence agencies and faced ongoing threats and intimidation since the 1990s, EFF and its partners said in an amicus brief submitted to the court in CAJAR’s lawsuit against the Colombian state. Since at least 1999, Colombian authorities have subjected CAJAR members to constant, pervasive secret surveillance on every facet of their professional and personal lives, including their locations, activities, finances, travel, contacts, clients, and protection measures.
The brief demonstrates that Colombia's intelligence law and unlawful communication surveillance practices violate the right to privacy and other human rights under the American Convention on Human Rights. The brief also provides evidence of the range of targeted and mass surveillance tools employed by the state. In short:
As the brief explains, Colombia employs both targeted and mass surveillance tools. Colombian authorities collect, monitor, and intercept, in real-time, individual audio and data communications from mobile and landline phones. Intelligence authorities intercept communications data without prior authorization or judicial oversight, with direct access to communication networks, despite the fact that Colombian law does not authorize any agency to engage in communications interception outside the confines of criminal investigations and without judicial oversight. Colombian intelligence services also have conducted intrusive operations exploiting software, data, computer systems, or networks to gain access to user information and devices.
Senator Ron Wyden has never been shy about demanding both the government and the private sector stop doing so much damn spying on their constituents/users. Eleven years ago — long before it became apparent federal agencies were accessing/buying location data from any private party willing to give them access — Wyden was looking to enact laws against these activities.
This blog post aims to compare and contrast the data policy for seven Indian states, namely, Punjab, Odisha, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Telangana and Chandigarh. While India still lacks a national-level data protection or governance framework, many states have come up with a state-level data policy which largely deals with accessibility, use, sharing and exchange of data. In this post, we attempt to analyse these policies through a lens of data protection and privacy.
I smelled a trap and politely declined. The Fox anchor, I imagined, would stress the agent’s heroics and berate me for criticizing BORTAC (this was before the news of the police delay at the school).
The Border Patrol Tactical Unit, BORTAC for short, was formed in the 1980s to quell unrest in immigration detention facilities. Since then, the SWAT-style unit, whose training mirrors that of U.S. Special Forces, has been involved in high-profile operations, taking part in a joint task force in the wake of the Rodney King verdict in 1992, the custodial seizure of Cuban child Elián González in 2000, and the manhunt for the prisoners who escaped Dannemora prison in northern New York State in 2015. More recently, BORTAC joined up with ICE in a show of force against undocumented people in sanctuary cities, snatched protesters off the streets in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020, and raided a camp (twice) set up by the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths in southern Arizona.
Host Robert Scheer speaks with veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Lawrence on his criticisms of provocative US and NATO policies — and his subsequent ban by Twitter.
June 3 marks the hundredth day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Meduza’s sources say that the Kremlin is trying to play down this fact, but Russian officials continue to assure that everything is going to plan. After three months of intense fighting, Russian forces have managed to occupy large swaths of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in southern Ukraine, but were driven out of the Kyiv region. In mid-April, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that the “second stage” of the invasion was underway. This bloody “battle for the Donbas” remains ongoing. Throughout the invasion, the Ukrainian army has not only defended the country, but also launched counter offensives. For insight into what these 100 days of all-out war have meant for Ukraine and its armed forces, Meduza turned to military expert Mykhailo Samus from the Kyiv-based Center for Army, Conversion, and Disarmament Studies (CACDS). This interview has been edited and abridged for length and clarity.€
The leading manufacturer of taser devices wants to mount them on quadrocopters in the future. Civil rights organization EFF warns against normalization of arming drones and robots.
Here are a few amendments to the Second Amendment:
1. All owners of guns, up to the age of 70 (beginning at age 16), shall serve a minimum of four weeks annually in their state Militia. As citizens, they shall serve at their own expense.
Bullet by bullet the kids are dying, America. Blood everywhere, deep red and rancid. Kids€ call 911. Kids plead. Kids wait for seventy-eight damn minutes. They bleed and bleed as the€ police€ and politicians choose to wait on the sidelines.
Later those same politicians step up onto their brightly lit podiums and stand erect in front of their microphones, prayers on their lips, stashes of money in their pockets. And they say: Arm the teachers. One-door schoolhouses. More guards. Bulletproof backpacks. They say it’s not guns, it’s mental health. Yet they€ condemn social emotional learning€ for being a radical left-wing ideology, a “Trojan-horse” for critical race theory. They’d rather ban books in schools than pass gun laws.
I remember the€ high spirits€ of the occupying€ troops and€ tribunal staff,
The joy of triumph and victory. I€ danced with them in the ballroom of€ the Grand Hotel, where the€ officials and court lawyers spent their evenings.€ I scared myself by looking€ into seemingly-bottomless bomb craters, played in the war-shattered€ wreckage of€ our commandeered€ townhouse, and listened to stories told by the servants, who were tearfully glad to be fed and sheltered during the hunger-stricken post-war years.
Today, Europe is again at war, albeit a proxy war between Russia and the West after Russia crossed NATO’s red line by invading Ukraine or NATO crossed Russia’s redline after expanding to its borders depending on your allegiances. There may be a simpler explanation, however, that harkens back to the age of Standard Oil and the Nobel Brothers: the fight over the supply of petroleum and the control of imported energy to Europe. One thing for sure, Big Oil or indeed Big Gas is calling the shots, never mind the devastation in Ukraine where real people are dying and cities are being turned into rubble. Or that global warming is perilously increasing. Climate crisis? What climate crisis?
Having relied on Russia for 40% of its imported oil and gas, much of it via a tangled web of cross-border pipelines, Europe is now scrambling for fuel and warmth. Europe’s “4-corridor” policy of sourcing energy imports from Russia, MENA, central Asia, and Scandinavia is hurriedly being re-written. Russia is being given the economic boot as the global number-1 (US 21%) and number-2 (Russia 15%) natural gas producers fight it out over who controls the sale of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas per year to Europe and beyond. [1] At the same time, we’re being told the earth is heating up beyond repair, thanks to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide from ongoing fossil-fuel burning.
In May of this year, four economists from Ukraine (Bohdan Kukharskyy, Anastassia Fedyk, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Ilona Sologoub) working in the United States took umbrage with Chomsky’s comments on the war, or at least what they assumed were the ideas (and “patterns”) he expressed. They held some of his statements to be either inaccurate, or even when true, irrelevant to the conflict and/or giving succor to Russia’s war effort. The Ukrainian economists invited Dr. Chomsky to respond. What follows at bottom are Noam’s responses to their assertions, their rejoinders to his answers, and his following comments.
In the ensuing exchange Professor Chomsky demonstrates several of the positions he was purported to hold by the economists, simply were never articulated by him. Provided with two chances to substantiate remarks attributed to Chomsky, the four economists often could not. Moreover, some points which the four economists asserted were either false or contested, Dr. Chomsky demonstrated were true, with any “contestation” of them chiefly evasions of inconvenient facts. Parts of their debate comes down to points of language and meaning, which the four economists at one point concede that Dr. Chomsky is more precise in his use of.
Wars are initiated over specific grievances, real or believed. The particulars of each case often cause a neglect of long-term and overriding factors.€ During times of escalating conflicts, one is tempted both to up the level of threat and to blame the adversary's behavior as the reason why this new level is necessary. Typically, each new level of threat or act of aggression is described as a moral outrage against an incorrigible and dangerous opponent. Civilian populations are bombarded with images of the enemy and criticism of one's own increasing military build-up, and intervention is viewed as weak and giving in to a tyrant. Increasing the ante is presented as the needed path to create an enemy back down. This thesis was articulated at the height of the cold war by strategist Herman Kahn's theory of escalation dominance. Kahn described an escalation ladder in which 44 gradually increasing moves would be prepared for and enacted until the enemy got the message and gave up.
The horrific Uvalde massacre, and the Republican non-response, confirms what many of us have thought:€ the U.S. political process is broken. Not "strained" or "damaged" but rather "rent asunder."€ America's political process can't be repaired by applying duct tape. It needs reconstructive surgery.
Indeed, for us boomers, Dylan Kleebold and Eric Harris from Littleton, Adam Lanza from Newtown, Nicholas Cruz from Parkland and Salvador Ramos from Uvalde are our children’s children.
Amid the desperation, pain, and frustration in the wake of last month's massacre of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school, there is renewed debate about whether making public post-mortem images of those killed by AR-15s and other assault weapons would help move the public or lawmakers in the U.S. towards taking real action on gun violence and mass shootings.
"I just cannot believe that Americans in this country would see what these weapons do to our children, our teachers, our community, and that they would stand by and do nothing."
As President Biden calls on Congress to enact new gun control measures, we go to Buffalo to speak with Cariol Horne, a racial justice advocate and former Buffalo police officer. She says the nation must address white supremacy, as well as gun control, following last month’s massacre in Buffalo, when a white supremacist attacked a grocery story, fatally shooting 10 people, all of whom were Black. “He victimized everyone in that community, even the people who arrived on the scene after it happened and watched the carnage that he left behind,” says Horne. “This is racist terrorism. We have to call it what it is.” Horne also talks about how she was fired from the Buffalo police force for stopping a white officer from choking a Black man who was handcuffed.
Truly a nice thought. And recent studies would seem to support this rose-colored view of the future.
Polls show growing support for stricter gun control laws among Millennials and Generation Z, also known as Generation Lockdown. Similarly, young voters overwhelmingly support action on Climate Change, while large majorities of young people back government run health care. By all accounts the younger generation is more tolerant of people’s differences as well as more critical of hyper-capitalism. They are less trusting of institutions like the military, police and religious institutions. Union membership is growing for the first time in decades.
There is no Establishment pathway to the final destruction of the Imperial British state. It will be momentous; the daft pomposity of the Jubilee celebrations reminds us of how powerful the United Kingdom once was. Only real power can prevent such forms from looking ludicrous. The show continues with the power behind it gone.
Peace advocates fear the Biden administration’s high-tech arms shipments to Ukraine are increasing the likelihood of a full-scale conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
Twenty years ago, I left the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for my next assignment. I haven't been back since, but today I travel there (if only in my imagination) to give my graduation address to the class of 2022. So, won't you take a few minutes and join me, as well as the corps of cadets, in Falcon Stadium?
There is more carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere than at any time in the past four million years, as the world's continued dependence on fossil fuels keeps humanity hurtling toward a "global catastrophe," officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned on Friday.
"It's depressing that we've lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO2."
Convening at the United Nations-backed Stockholm+50 conference in Sweden, youth climate campaigners from around the world joined Indigenous leaders and others Friday to call on countries to adopt a binding Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty as part of an urgent effort to rein in runaway warming.
During a press conference in Stockholm and at subsequent marches in the streets outside the U.N. event, youth leaders said a growing body of scientific evidence points to the necessity of a sweeping treaty that commits nations around the world to halt all new fossil fuel extraction, phase out existing production, and ensure a just transition to renewable energy.
A new report out Friday from the OECD warns that the amount of plastic waste worldwide is likely to nearly triple over the next four decades, leaving the world with a terrible fate by 2060 if "radical action" is not taken to curb the level of pollution.
The report—titled "Global Plastics Outlook: Policy Scenarios to 2060"—predicts that nearly two-thirds of the estimated plastic waste polluting the environment by 2060 will be come from short-lived and single-use products such as packaging, cheap toys, consumer goods, household items, and textiles.
In a soft pitch interview by Andy Serwer of Yahoo Finance on Saturday, May 28th at Davos World Economic Forum the Climate Czar expressed optimism about handling the climate change crisis, in part, based upon the fact that several of the world’s leading corporations are dead set on stopping the multitude of dangers associated with an out of whack climate system. They understand the risks.
According to Kerry, climate change is not complicated. It is basic physics: “There isn’t anybody I know today who doesn’t admit that the planet is warming and that life has changed as a result of this… this trend is pretty obvious… the climate crisis is getting worse, not better, and we have to more rapidly reduce emissions and take the necessary steps, not what politicians are saying we should do, but scientists whose lives are dedicated to determining the mathematics and the physics of this particular challenge.”
But I’m finding it hard to muster a celebratory mood. Of course I love the Gila. Of course I want to commemorate all that this place stands for—an emblem of wildness, a landscape with a sacred Indigenous heritage, the home of our only population of lobos, and the inspiration for a new land ethic that fundamentally changed who and what we perceived public lands to be almost 100 years ago.
But the Gila is on fire. In fact, it feels like half the state of New Mexico is on fire. The human-caused Black Fire, currently 262,000 acres and the third-largest fire in New Mexico history, continues to burn in both the Aldo Leopold and Gila Wilderness areas, fueled by exceptionally dry conditions perpetuated by the megadrought that has been bearing down on the American West for decades, by bad grazing management, and by climate collapse. The human-caused Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Complex Fire just set the new state record for size at over 316,000 acres. There’s no rain in the forecast. The winds continue to whip. Many national forests in the state are closed. And the best we can do is hunker down with our air filters and fire maps and solemnly say to one another, “Pray for rain!”
Sen. Bernie Sanders suggested Friday that instead of bringing the weight of the criminal justice system down on marijuana users, the United States should use its resources to crack down on corporate crime as prosecutions of law-breaking businesses and white-collar offenders remain at record lows.
Noting that a disproportionate number of those arrested for marijuana possession are poor people and people of color, Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in an email to supporters that the Justice Department must "start prosecuting the crooks on Wall Street for laundering money from drug cartels, suspected terrorists, and corrupt foreign officials."
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Friday a Senate hearing next week focused on expanding Social Security as he and other defenders countered false and repeated Republican claims that popular program is headed toward insolvency.€
While a report released Thursday by the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds showed that Social Security has a surplus of $2.85 trillion, the independent senator from Vermont said benefits should be increased for retirees—an expansion that could easily be paid for with by raising the cap on payments into SSI by wealthy Americans who contribute at a disproportionately low rate compared to most.
President Joe Biden on Friday signaled little patience with the world's richest man's hand-wringing over the U.S. economy, dismissing Tesla CEO Elon Musk's comments about job cuts at his electric car manufacturing company.
According to Friday reporting by Reuters, Musk said in an email to Tesla executives that he has a "super bad feeling" about the economy and will be cutting 10% of salaried jobs while increasing the number of hourly workers.
The CEO of America's largest bank is worried, and for good reason.
Climate change has worsened global inequality, with poorer countries less able to withstand and adapt to climate change’s effects. It also has worsened inequality within countries between the rich and the poor: The impacts of drought, floods, hurricanes, and extreme heat are disproportionately felt by low-income communities and communities of color.
But new research suggests the reverse is also true: Not only is climate change contributing to greater inequality, but inequality is also fueling climate change. A new peer-reviewed paper by Fergus Green and Noel Healy, published in One Earth, analyzes the various ways in which inequality contributes to more greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously making climate action even more difficult to pursue. The paper also asserts that climate policies that only focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, while ignoring inequality, will prove less effective at addressing the climate crisis compared to a much broader movement — like the Green New Deal — that attacks both inequality and climate change at the same time.€
We speak to San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was elected in 2019 after promising to end cash bail, curb mass incarceration and address police misconduct. He now faces a recall campaign, with opponents blaming rising crime rates on his policies, even though sources like the San Francisco Chronicle report that crime rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Boudin says the recall campaign is spearheaded by wealthy donors, the real estate industry and Republicans who desire a conservative DA who will not hold police and other powerful actors accountable. Opponents who attack Boudin’s social justice reform without any of their own proposals “are a scourge to democracy,” says Boudin. “We don’t need to jail our way out of poverty or other social programs.”
The Biden administration this week canceled almost $6 billion in student loan debt for borrowers who attended the now-defunct network of for-profit schools known as Corinthian Colleges, which defrauded thousands of students before being shut down in 2015. We speak to two activists from the Debt Collective, a group working to end the student loan crisis, about the ongoing fight for full federal student debt cancellation. Pamela Hunt was a former Corinthian College student who accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and was one of the original 15 students who refused to pay their loans. “It’s a very monumental win,” she says, adding that her crushing debt prevented her from becoming a homeowner and contributed to the stress of her cancer diagnosis. “If student debt is illegitimate, why not cancel all of it?” says Braxton Brewington, press secretary of the Debt Collective.
This essay constitutes my response. I will address the seven claims they make against Chomsky. I won’t cover all of their arguments, but provide enough data to suggest that their arguments are filled with holes. My view is that Russia is engaged in a horrible, horrific attack on Ukraine, although the pre-history of this conflict illustrates that there are€ additional factors to consider€ when assessing the current Ukrainian government’s actions. There have been various arguments made to simplify this conflict or distort its understanding involving various€ intellectuals€ or€ analysts. The Gorodnichenko and company letter simply continues with this trend.
Claim 1: Chomsky has Denied Ukraine’s “sovereign integrity”
Still, there was a deep undercurrent of abandonment and anger.
Far from the South, Confederate flags pierced the landscape. And at church, there was often little help for people struggling to overcome isolation, daily struggles, or poverty. Instead, the focus of church life for many people around me was the sin of sex — especially homosexuality.
The quote above is excerpted from Life, Art and Mysticism*, written by the brilliant mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer in 1905, some years before he would gain fame as a pioneer in the field of topology. But he is, perhaps, most well known for his development of Intuitionism.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Brouwer’s “brainchild is intuitionism, a revisionist foundation of mathematics. Intuitionism views mathematics as a free activity of the mind, independent of any language or Platonic realm of objects, and therefore bases mathematics on a philosophy of mind. The implications are twofold. First, it leads to a form of constructive mathematics, in which large parts of classical mathematics are rejected. Second, the reliance on a philosophy of mind introduces features that are absent from classical mathematics as well as from other forms of constructive mathematics: unlike those, intuitionistic mathematics is not a proper part of classical mathematics.”
Congress will never deliver on a progressive agenda as long as a coalition of right-wing Republicans and corporate Democrats thwart action on even the most popular proposals to reform and renew the United States.
Nupes stands for€ Nouvelle union populaire écologique et sociale. The coalition gathers together the main left-wing parties: the€ Parti socialiste€ (PS),€ Parti communiste français€ (PCF),€ Europe écologie les verts€ (EELV), as well as smaller parties such as€ Génération.s,€ Génération écologie, and the€ Nouveaux démocrates.€ Nouveau parti anticapitaliste€ (NPA), the only anti-capitalist party that was invited to join the coalition, opted out as it refused to be part of a coalition alongside the PS.
In the first instance, each party signed a bilateral agreement with€ La France insoumise, Mélenchon’s movement. On 19 May, all one-to-one agreements merged in a€ comprehensive platform€ containing 650 policy proposals. This is not the first time that the left in France has formed such a broad electoral coalition. There are four historic precedents: 1924’s€ Cartel des gauches€ (Socialists and Radicals); 1936’s€ Popular Front€ (Socialists, Radicals and Communists, although the latter did not join the government); 1972’s€ Common Programme€ (PS, PCF and€ Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche) and 1997’s “Plural Left” (PS, PCF, Citizens’ Movement and the Greens).
Yet, in a country with a North Korean style media dominance of Fox News owner and Australian-born Rupert Murdoch, the country’s Independent Australia news network saw Labor’s win as Anthony Albanese defeats Rupert Murdoch to become 31st PM of Australia.
Despite years of media support by Murdoch for the unloved and self-appointed bulldozer Scomo and Murdoch’s daily attacks on Labor, Labor still won. Worse, Australia is a country that is known not as a democracy but as Murdochracy. Yet, Labor still won. And, it won against its two formidable adversaries:
Clarence’s pleasure at being a member of the Court has been lessened, not because of having to recuse himself from significant cases because of conflicts of interest, a concept that numerous commentators have tried to explain to him, but by the changing complexion of the Court. As he explained in an interview with Robert Barnes of the€ Washington Post, the Court that he served on when he first joined the Court was, as he described it, “a fabulous court.” € He said how great his former colleagues had been, saying of Ruthe Bader Ginsburg with whom he served for almost 30 years that: “You knew where she was and she was a nice person to deal with.” He continued praising € Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, and saying, without doing it, that € “I can go on down the list.”€ He explained that in his first 11 years on the Court it might have been “a dysfunctional family, but we were a family.”
Sadly for Clarence, personnel have changed € and as he said in his interview, the present Court is “not the Court of that era.”€ € € In response to a questioner, he said that he was worried that it might be difficult to keep respect for ideological differences among the Justices given the people now on the Court. He might have been prescient in making that comment although prescience has not been one of the qualities for which he has been known.€ His lack of prescience was clearly on display in his dissent in the 2020 opinion of€ Rogers v. Grewal€ in which the Court refused to hear an appeal from a case affirming New Jersey’s right to refuse to permit a person who services automated teller machines in high crime areas to carry a gun to use for self-defense while at work.€ In explaining his dissent and referring to an issue that was not before the Court but was merely illustrative € he said that: “It seems highly unlikely that the Court would allow a State to enforce a law requiring a woman to provide a justifiable need before seeking an abortion.” The recently leaked draft of the opinion that may overrule€ Roe v. Wade, demonstrates his lack of prescience.€ On the other hand, the next sentence in his dissent explains his apparent lack of interest in self-recusal because of conflicts of interest caused by his wife.€ In that sentence he says that:€ “This Court would almost certainly review the constitutionality of a law requiring citizens to establish a justifiable need before exercising their free speech rights.”€ And in that sentence he explains his complete lack of concern over the obvious conflict of interest that presents itself when he is asked to consider cases that involve attacks on the 2020 election results in which his wife, Ginni Thomas, has been an active participant and in which she is merely exercising her free speech rights.
At a meeting in Toyko last week, Joe Biden reportedly had high words of private praise for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The two leaders met with their Japanese and Australian counterparts, Kishida Fumio and Anthony Albanese, for a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) summit. Dating back to 2007, the Quad summits have been elevated by Biden as a major foreign policy instrument for the United States to forge an alliance system to counterbalance the rising power of China in Asia.1
I regret to inform you that the “Dr. Oz” Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania might actually be important. Currently, television doctor and paranormal enthusiast Mehmet Oz leads hedge fund manager and “Let’s go, Brandon” troll Dave McCormick by 900 votes. McCormick has asked for a recount, and I can only assume that extending this fight over who can be wrong the loudest counts as entertainment in Hell.
American politics—especially now—is not noted for its graciousness. But last week something happened in Vermont that deserves notice, if only because the example it sets could help other progressives in other places consolidate power.
John Fetterman, the progressive lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania who's running for U.S. Senate, released a statement from his cardiologist Friday assuring the public that Fetterman is in good health following a stroke he had May 13.
Dr. Ramesh Chandra, who examined Fetterman on Thursday, said the politician "is taking his recovery and his health very seriously" after previously neglecting to take medications for an irregular heart rhythm diagnosed in 2017.
I set off for Havana at the end of April to participate in the 15th International May Day Brigade organized by ICAP (The Institute for Friendship with the Cuban People). Having achieved one of the lowest COVID mortality rates and highest vaccination rates in the world, Cuba had reopened the country to international guests on November 15, 2021. The U.S. had tried and failed to exploit the global disease disaster to bring about regime change, but the intensified embargo have made living conditions worse than ever for the Cuban people. May Day 2022 was a chance for Cuba to welcome tens of thousands of international guests to uphold the vision of International Workers’ Day and demonstrate that global solidarity with Cuba lives.
Goodbye to the SIU
Despite the fact that the decision to expel the Unit was made and executed more than a year ago, neither of the two governments announced the measure publicly and it was not until April of this year that the Reuters news agency published an article confirming, through anonymous sources, the Mexican government’s decision. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed and justified the news in his morning press conference April 21, saying, “We maintain cooperation between national agencies in charge of security, but they must respect our sovereignty, and before they came in and out of the country at will, and they made the rules, they did what they wanted, they even fabricated crimes. So, we’re putting the situation in order.”
The press has been neither humiliated nor found out because most of the country still believes the lies they were told and have not seen corrected.
The “Disinformation Governance Board,” housed in the Department of Homeland Security, will supposedly “standardize the treatment of disinformation by the agencies it oversees.”€ That means that the government will be the final arbiter of what is truth.
The nearly 650 comments on the Young America’s Foundation’s April 6 tweet are laced with venom. The post is a video of Lukas Tucker, a first-year student at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro (UNCG) who filmed a peacekeeping message to the university community ahead of Ben Shapiro’s visit to campus.
On June 7, 1989, three days after Chinese soldiers massacred protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Hongkongers were about to launch what would have been the city’s largest ever general strike. Throughout the 1980s, China’s market reforms had exposed deep contradictions in Chinese society, and students were flocking toward Western liberalism. The death of General Secretary Hu Yaobang, a supporter of economic reforms, led to weeks-long sit-ins in Tiananmen Square and in cities across the country. The Army cracked down and, after the June 4 slaughter, grieving Hongkongers called for mass action against China. But on the eve of the general strike, Szeto Wah, a pro-democracy leader in the Tiananmen solidarity movement in Hong Kong, called it off, having heard that militant demonstrators were planning to target Chinese financial institutions in the city. He feared that the protesters would go too far and that they would be uncontrollable. Tens of thousands of Hongkongers marched, but without the organized support of pro-democracy leaders and organizations.
Consortium News€ is being “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a U.S. government-linked organization that is trying to enforce a narrative on Ukraine while seeking to discredit dissenting views.€
Pyotr Mylnikov, a business owner from the village of Olovyannaya in Russia’s Zabaykalsky Krai, has become the first person to be convicted under the new law banning “fake news” about the war in Ukraine. The charges were brought after Mylnikov shared two posts on Viber (in a group chat called “We live in ruins”) about the progress of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On May 31, a court found him guilty and imposed a fine of one million rubles ($16,148). Meduza spoke to Mylnikov about the content of his posts, how he was treated during his arrest, and why he decided to plead guilty.
May 2: “Literal Enslavement” and “The Carnage the Supreme Court is About to Unleash”
First came the May 2nd leak of a draft decision penned by one of the nation’s five woman-hating Republifascist Supreme Court Justices and backed by each of those judges. Sam Alito’s draft majority opinion reversing the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and thereby overturning woman’s half century right to an abortion was an open revanchist assault on liberal, humanist, and social-democratic precedent. Alito cited alleged authorities from the 17th and even the 13th Centuries to defend his determination to re-impose the physical bondage of forced motherhood. It suggested that there is no sound constitutional basis for a vast swath of basic human, civil, personal, labor, environmental, and broadly human rights. The nation’s leading law professor Lawrence Tribe put the arch-reactionary draft decision in chilling context:
In a week when senator Mazie Hirono just urged President Biden to pardon Leonard Peltier, a Native activist wrongfully imprisoned for roughly 50 years, Casuse’s story and beliefs are especially relevant. He was quite clear-eyed about what white colonialism meant for Natives. White men “brought disease, raped our women, killed our brothers the animals, murdered our elders, levelled out the vast forests, polluted our rivers, filled our air with chemicals, called us savage, pagans, Indians,” Casuse testified to the New Mexico senate at a time when, David Correia clarifies in his new book, An Enemy Such as This, Casuse still clung to nonviolence to bring change. But none of it worked. Patient cooperation had no effect at all. What was the Navajo college student to do?
Corrreia’s new book zooms in on Casuse and his ancestors, using this one family as a lens through which to view treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. and Mexican governments over hundreds of years. As everyone knows, that treatment was abysmal.€ The two countries sank to the lowest point in that abyss with blood contracts – bounties on indigenous scalps. This started in the southwest in the 1830s. “The military strategy prior to the use of scalp bounties was based on a ration-based pacification strategy,” but “Mexico discovered that it was cheaper to pay Americans to kill Apaches than to maintain Mexican armies to pacify them.”
This pattern of lying has played out over the past 10 days since the Uvalde mass shooting. The police lied about what they did. They lied about what they didn’t do. They lied about the time line of the shooting. They lied about who was on the scene, when they got there and what they did. They lied about barricades, 911 calls, and the shooter’s weapons. They lied about doors. They lied about the school resource officer. They lied about a teacher. They lied about their lies.
+ The police did their job. What you saw them doing in Uvalde, on a sidewalk in Minneapolis and in Breonna Taylor’s apartment was their job. These disparate events were not aberrations.
Matsuda, in a typical move for critical race theorists, makes a special pleading on behalf of university students, who are said to be emotionally vulnerable, and deserving of special consideration when it comes to protection from the presumed epidemic of hate language because they need a safe community to experiment with their identities and passions.
It seems to me that it is this model of infantile protection that has been transposed from the academy and applied to the population at large in meeting the rise of the alt-right. The American populace too, like the subset of university students, must be defended against “lessons of cynicism and hate,” which replace “lessons in critical thought and inquiry.” Even if hate speech is directed at a group rather than an individual, the individual student feels personally attacked; using this logic, there is no such thing as group attack but only individual attack. Richard Delgado, in “Words That Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and Name Calling,” rejects the counterarguments against tort liability for racial attacks stemming from the difficulty of assessing and allocating damages, and the wave of fraudulent claims that is likely to result, with such splintered logic that while one may demonstrate at City Hall in Skokie one may not disfigure a neighbor’s doors, or that racial insults can be analogized to obscenity (itself a notoriously difficult description), or that the perpetrators of racism are themselves in need of protection lest their civic participation be dulled.
The Zubaydah case is procedurally unusual. Abu Zubaydah is currently detained at Guantanamo, but the history of his confinement and treatment at numerous sites over the past two decades is well-known. The government has admitted to waterboarding him and subjecting him to other forms of torture, and the 2014 Senate Report on Torture refers specifically to Zubaydah at numerous points. Moreover, former President Obama conceded that Zubaydah was tortured. In the course of seeking a tribunal that would hear his claims, Zubaydah asked the Polish government to investigate criminally the interrogations that took place at a CIA black site in Poland, Stare Kiejkuty. Since much of the supporting evidence was located in the United States, Zubaydah had to petition a US District Court for an order compelling its production. Federal law allows for such a petition, but when it was filed, the US government objected, citing the state secrets doctrine. The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court and the Court ruled for the first time in years on the scope and application of the doctrine.
The state secrets privilege (SSP) is an evidentiary doctrine originating in the 1953 case of US v. Reynolds, a Cold War-era dispute involving the crash of a military aircraft. In Reynolds, the victims’ families sought information about the crash, specifically survivors’ statements and an accident report. The government objected, claiming that revealing this information would endanger national security. The Supreme Court agreed, and their ruling gave birth to the SSP, which expanded in use over the ensuing seven decades. In short, the ruling says that the government is entitled to withhold information, in the course of litigation, where there is a “danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.” But the potential for such a broadly stated secrecy power to be abused is self-evident and was so even in the Reynoldscase itself. As Louis Fisher has shown, the information withheld in Reynolds surfaced on the Internet in the 1990s and was quite mundane, containing not military secrets but evidence of government negligence instead. Courts have applied the SSP to thwart discovery of evidence in a case where a twelve-year-old boy came under CIA scrutiny for writing letters overseas, where government workers sought information about deadly chemicals to which they had been exposed (so they could get treatment for their illness), and where the victim in an earlier torture case sought relief. But some questions had not been settled. Could the very subject matter of a case be a state secret, so that no discovery requests could even be made? Could trial courts order production of alleged secret evidence in chambers so a judge could view it before ruling on the SSP? And most centrally relevant to Zubaydah’s case, could the SSP apply to information already in the public domain (in other words, to non-secrets)?
The Supreme Court made it pretty clear in its Rodriguez decision that pretextual traffic stops were fine, but once the pretext evaporated, it was time to cut civilians loose.
Earlier this year,€ we noted how€ FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had launched a bad faith effort suggesting that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the internet, and should be forced to fund broadband expansion. Carr’s argument, that companies like Google and Netflix somehow get a free ride (they don’t) and should “pay their fair share” (they already do) is a€ fifteen year old AT&T lobbyist talking point.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining independent blogs. And, in many ways, I really miss the era of independent blogging that became a thing mainly in the early 2000s. Over time, most people have moved on to either new media organizations (often funded or owned by the old media organizations) or simply embraced social media and tried to become relevant and widely followed on this or that platform. The switch from a truly distributed internet to one where most people are heavily reliant on some giant company is unfortunate — and it’s something that many of us warned about a decade ago.
On both the state and federal level, a flood of new bills are targeting companies’ efforts to monopolize repair by implementing obnoxious DRM, making repair tools and manuals hard to find, bullying independent repair shops (like€ Apple does), or forcing tractor owners to drive hundreds of miles just to get their tractor repaired (one of John Deere’s€ favorite pastimes).
Last October, a whistleblower sent the FDA a report detailing safety and sanitation violations at the Abbott Nutrition factory in Sturgis, Michigan, the largest baby formula manufacturing plant in the nation. It would be months before the FDA took action. Abbott fired the whistleblower. Four babies who had consumed formula from the plant suffered bacterial infections; two of them died. The FDA could not conclusively link the illnesses or deaths to the plant. In February, Abbott shut down the plant and announced a voluntary recall of its Sturgis-manufactured baby formula. The FDA followed with a product warning. The life-threatening formula shortage was not due to a natural disaster or circumstances beyond Abbott's control. Rather, it is a predictable outcome of corporate greed, a coverup, and a captured regulatory agency.
I know I haven't talked for a while my life's been going up and down and there have been a lot of things happening. But overall I have to say that the world seems to be on fire right now, everything is going up and down, on one side you have the monopoly of Google and other big tech giants that seem to want to enslave humanity and take control over everything and everyone to increase their profit margins by another few Billions next month
While Western countries have largely lifted Covid restrictions and are attempting to put the pandemic behind them, countries in the Global South, where vaccines and treatments are still often hard to come by (e.g., just 11% of the African continent has been vaccinated against Covid-19), have no such privilege. But despite US media’s occasionally stated concern with vaccine equity, the role of pharmaceutical companies in perpetuating this gap is rarely mentioned.€
UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz this week offered a grim assessment of the state of patent waiver talks at the World Trade Organization, warning that sustained obstruction by rich countries has undermined hopes of a final deal and left billions without access to Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.
"The drug companies did not want a quick response. The slower the response, the higher their profits."
In this interview, we were delighted to speak with Revekka Kefalea, a graduate of the CC Certificate for GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).€
I’m starting to lose count of how many regulatory proceedings there have been in the last 6 months or so to discuss “standard technical measures” in the copyright context. Doing policy work in this space is like living in a zombie movie version of “Groundhog Day” as we keep having to marshal resources to deal with this terrible idea that just won’t die.