Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Copper-based nanomaterials can kill cancer cells in mice

Scientists have succeeded in killing tumor cells in mice using nano-sized copper compounds together with immunotherapy. After the therapy, the cancer did not return.

World’s #fastest #driverless #bullet #train launches in #China | #Travel | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/jan/09/worlds-fastest-driverless-automated-bullet-train-launches-beijing-china-olympics

#Engineering #Technology

Plants' 'organic' wounds improve produce

Scientists found benefits of insect leaf-wounding in fruit and vegetable production. Stress responses created in the fruits and vegetables initiated an increase in antioxidant compounds prior to harvest, making them healthier for human consumption.

Many Android phone vendors subsidize their cost w/ malware/spyware/adware just like many laptop vendors, but Android lets vendors make it impossible to remove.

In this case, free Android phones the US govt. handed out to the poor contained Chinese malware. #privacy

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/01/09/us-funds-free-android-phones-for-the-poor---but-with-permanent-chinese-malware/

Labor 101 for Undergraduate Workers Seeking To Unionize

AMHERST, MASS.—Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” plays in a classroom at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) as students mill about with pink “Undergraduate Workers UNITE!” buttons pinned to their shirts.

Nearly 40 students from 10 institutions across the Northeast gathered Nov. 15–17, 2019, at UMass Amherst, a highly unionized workplace, for the Northeast Undergraduate Worker Convention (NEUWC). The convention is the first in the nation aimed at training undergraduate student workers in collective organizing. UMass Amherst is home to one of the country’s only undergrad unions, known as RAPMU, which represents residential assistants (RA) and peer mentors.

The event gave students a space in which to unpack attitudes surrounding undergraduate labor, and to understand how such attitudes can lead to poor working conditions. “When I’m employed on campus, the way [my supervisor talks] about my employment is very much like, ‘This is you building your skills, it’s a good opportunity for you,’” says Ben Hayes, 23, a senior at Skidmore College. “It’s using the idea that you’re a student and therefore not a worker [who has] to be paid a fair wage and have good working conditions and be treated right.”

Led by labor organizers and educators, the workshops covered unique organizing challenges faced by undergrad workers. For starters, many students are unaware that unionizing is even possible. The largest logistical hurdle is the high turnover rate for student workers: Students graduate, study abroad, take on extracurriculars and leave campus for breaks, often interrupting organizing momentum.

As the price of higher education skyrockets, working has become a necessity for many. “I feel strongly that everyone who has this job needs it,” says Violet Daar, 19, an RA and sophomore at Wesleyan University. Emma Rose Borzekowski, 23, one of the convention organizers and a recent Wesleyan graduate who worked as an RA, says that RA positions are one of the highest paying jobs on campus.

A position as an RA is a particularly fraught one because students live in the same place they work, so it becomes more difficult to take needed breaks. Many attendees are frustrated that their work stipends don’t cover the cost of housing, despite the job requiring residing on campus. At UMass Amherst, RAPMU has bargained for higher pay and more dignified working conditions.

Elizabeth Pellerito, director of the UMass Lowell Labor Education Program, presented on the importance of inclusion. She noted that, historically, cis white men have been overrepresented in union leadership, and that there’s still a long way to go before leadership truly reflects membership. “We are a movement that’s about power, so how are we sharing the power and recognizing the privilege?” she asked.

Though the convention attendance itself was overwhelmingly white, many expressed a need to change. Conference organizer James Cordero, 21, a senior at UMass Amherst and RAPMU member, explained how RAPMU incorporated racial justice training for RAs in its bargaining contract after racist incidents on campus in 2018. “We are building a new chapter of the labor movement to improve upon past mistakes, incorporating more social justice into the movement,” Cordero says.

“The big takeaway for me is to have union organizers who are racial justice organizers, who are environmental organizers,” says Joy Ming King, 22, a Wesleyan senior.

Convention organizers stressed relationship-building as central to the success of student unions. “We wanted this [convention] to be a chance for undergraduates to meet each other [and] know they’re not alone,” Borzekowski says, which the convention facilitated. Over an afternoon break, students shared curly fries and contact information, and brainstormed strategies to bring back to their campuses.

Most convention attendees were students at private institutions, who face a pivotal moment: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposed, in September 2019, to overturn its 2016 ruling which designated student workers at private institutions as “employees”—and allowed them to unionize.

Though the young organizers worried about the NLRB’s proposal, the mood at the conference was hopeful. “We still have all of the power that selling our labor gives us and that building relationships with one another gives us,” Borzekowski says. For Lucy James-Olson, 19, a sophomore at Mount Holyoke College, “underlying all of the conversations about organizing and improving the material conditions of workers is just a conversation about love and care for each other.”

How to: Use #KeePassXC | #Surveillance #Self-Defense

Might be useful to some folks.

https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-keepassxc

#EFF

Biden interacting with a woman

Findings on education, malnutrition 'deeply disturbing'

For the first time, researchers have mapped years of education and child malnutrition across all low- and middle-income countries at the level of individual districts. The findings include precision maps illuminating disparities within countries and regions often obscured by national-level analyses.

The US Oil and Gas Industry's 5-Year Plan Is a Climate and Health Nightmare
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-us-oil-and-gas-industrys-5-year-plan-is-a-climate-a-1840876323 #climatechange #climatecrisis

Dodgy...

How my application ran away and called home from Redmond
https://medium.com/sensorfu/how-my-application-ran-away-and-called-home-from-redmond-de7af081100d

Fucked Up.

https://boingboing.net/2020/01/08/rip-open-web-platform.html

We Need a Strong Anti-War Movement—Yesterday

The new year opened with the United States committing an extrajudicial assassination in a foreign country by drone.

I’m not talking about the January 3, 2020 rocket attack that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. I’m talking about the January 1, 2019 drone strike that killed Jamal Al Badawi, an alleged Al Qaeda plotter, in Yemen.

The U.S. carrying out assassinations from above — without trial, without warning — is nothing new. What was different about the killing of Al Badawi was that the U.S. military was public about it, announcing the killing via Twitter on January 6.

For years, activists, journalists, scholars, and others have been calling for transparency regarding the notoriously clandestine Defense Department and CIA-run drone programs. How one ends up on the lists of people targeted, to whom one appeals to get off of such a list, where the drones are based, and even when they strike are matters that were shrouded in secrecy during the Bush and Obama administrations.

That’s largely remained true under Trump — in fact, it’s even more difficult to get information about civilian casualties now. But here was an example of an assassination by drone being done in the open.

Presumably, the reason to have more information about the drone war is so the people running it can be held accountable for their actions. And yet, given the opportunity to ask questions about the New Year’s Day attack, precious few were asked by Congress or the mainstream media.

Today, as we spiral perilously toward direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, it is worth reflecting on the failures to rein in Trump’s aggression along the way. Given the obvious signs that Trump has been keen to escalate the United States’ many wars — and begin new ones — the complicity of other institutions in Trump’s belligerence, particularly Congress, is stunning.

Crickets from Congress

Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from — and efforts to destroy — the nuclear deal sparked a predictable trajectory of escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Many have pointed that out, most recently former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. What we need to examine more deeply are the decisions between then and now that enabled Trump to pursue such a path.

At several key junctures, lawmakers simply failed to challenge acts of U.S. aggression carried out without even a pretense of accountability, as when Amnesty International documented the fact that the U.S. killed civilians in its escalating air war in Somalia, in a report that received too little attention. Or when journalists reported that the U.S.-led siege against ISIS in the Syrian city of Raqqa was devastating for civilians of that city — whom the U.S. then abandoned, after saying it would help rebuild.

Other times, lawmakers and other officials did raise their voices in opposition to Trump’s foreign policy moves — by saying that he wasn’t committed enough to pursuing U.S. wars. Such was the response when Trump announced that he was withdrawing troops from the Turkish border with Syria. Critics advocated maintaining the open-ended military presence throughout Syria.

But we don’t even have to look back that far.

On December 9 — barely a month ago — the Washington Post began publishing a series of articles known as the Afghanistan Papers, which documented years of lies by U.S. officials and catastrophes caused by U.S. actions in its 18-year occupation of that country. Two weeks later, the New York Times released documents and video, principally testimony from U.S. Navy SEALs, that confirmed the unmistakable war crimes committed by Navy SEAL chief Eddie Gallagher, who had been recently acquitted of the most serious charges — and pardoned by the president.

Here were the major newspapers of record running front-page coverage of serious abuses people should be called to account for. Yet where were the congressional hearings?

Instead of taking steps toward that accountability, Congress did the opposite: It passed a new $738 billion military spending bill, effectively approving and fueling the wars. Despite vocal condemnation of the bill from California Democrats Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee, just 41 House Democrats voted against it, compared to 188 who joined Republicans in passing it.

Among the provisions that Khanna called attention to for being stripped away from the legislation that passed: an amendment he sponsored that denied the president authority to wage war on Iran.

Movements matter

In a national address today, Trump threatened even more sanctions against Iran. As his rhetoric becomes more belligerent — and as he deploys even more troops to the Middle East to set the stage for attacks on Iran — members of Congress’ calls to bring the president into compliance with the War Powers Act are certainly welcome. But the questions that lawmakers are raising now, after the U.S. has already committed an act of war in assassinating Soleimani in Iraq, run contrary to their actions up to this point.

Going into the new year, Congress had already sent the message that Trump and the Pentagon could do whatever they please. And whatever misgivings members of Congress have about military attacks on Iran, the body has supported the sanctions imposed on that country by the United States — which have been disastrous for the Iranian population, and which act as precursors to war.

The so-called War on Terror is completely out of control. What is needed is for the widespread opposition in the U.S. to the wars waged in our names — including attacking Iran — to be turned into a fighting resistance.

We have seen mass protest under Trump — even in its brief moments — have significant impacts. The Women’s Marches may not have ended sexual violence, but they, along with the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns, opened the most wide reaching and serious conversations about gender-based abuse in recent memory, and some high profile abusers have been made to account for their actions. (Even a UN convention was passed, though the U.S. hasn’t ratified it.) The spontaneous, mass mobilizations to airports against Trump’s Muslim Ban set back those plans for a time as well.

We need to extend that resistance to a U.S. military machine that’s moving like a runaway train, undeterred by the human costs of its destruction, or even the apparent lack of a strategy from a military perspective.

Popular power matters. There was, in fact, a moment where there was a conversation in Congress about ending U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s cataclysmic war in Yemen — a war that has only been made possible with U.S. weapons, intelligence, and other forms of support. Despite votes in both houses to stop that assistance, Trump was able to veto the legislation, and the moment passed.

What if there had been mass actions in the streets? Could that effort have been pushed over the line?

We need to ask these questions, and imagine the answers. In doing so, we will be joining in solidarity with various efforts in the Middle East to challenge governments and the foreign powers — particularly the United States — backing them.

After all, the news that dominated headlines out of Iraq for the months prior to the U.S. assassination of Soleimani was that Iraqis were mobilizing en masse against a government whose origins lie in the 2003 U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation, and whose forces are armed and trained by billions of dollars in U.S. aid. (There were Iraqi protests that also targeted Iranian influence in the country.)

In fact, focusing on the movements of people throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia who find themselves in the crosshairs of the War on Terror must be essential to a movement here that challenges U.S. wars. Imagine the power, for example, of massive U.S. rallies coinciding with the movement inside Iraq to remove U.S. troops from the country. Imagine if more members of the U.S. Congress were compelled to follow Iraq’s parliament in calling for those soldiers to come home.

Behind every Bahgdadi

For the few conversations that do take place about our wars, it’s distressingly typical for the people having them forget about the people bearing the brunt of those wars.

After the October 26 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, for example, Defense Department officials held a press conference at the Pentagon. You can read the transcript. Journalists in the room asked two questions about the storied dog who assisted in the killing operation, and several more about the prospect of U.S. personnel securing Syrian oil fields.

The reporters in the room didn’t ask a single question about whether others besides Al Baghdadi, including civilians, were wounded or killed in the mission.

Thankfully, other journalists did ask. NPR reporters learned that in the same raid where Baghdadi was killed, the Syrian farmer Barakat Ahmad Barakat saw his two friends killed by U.S. rockets — and his own hand severed from his body — as they were caught up in the attack while driving in van.

The three farmers were unarmed. Aside from the trauma of being maimed and seeing his friends killed, Barakat’s work is impossible without his hand. His life as he knew it ended.

Behind every “bad guy” like Baghdadi are masses of ordinary people suffering the endless grind of war — a grind that this country has made ever more brutal, with ever fewer constraints or accountability from the U.S. political system.

It is crucial that we are all talking about Iran now, as we stand on the verge of a new chapter of catastrophes — and work to prevent it. But the killing and destruction of the War on Terror is happening around the world, every day. The lack of attention to it is part of what keeps it going, and sets the stage for the current situation involving Iran, Iraq, and the United States.

The truth is, these wars are criminal, and any conversation about them that doesn’t center the people most impacted is unacceptable. That conversation won’t start in the U.S. government. Instead, it must be raised by those of us outraged by wars that have devastated generations, and who believe that people from Somalia to Afghanistan, and now to Iran — indeed, all of us — deserve a better world.

This article was produced in partnership with Foreign Policy In Focus.

Warren’s an Ally. We Need a Leader.

In the face of Trump and the imminent threat of fascism, and after over years 40 years of experiencing the 1% usurp our political system, progressives cannot let dogmatism and ultra-leftism lead us to confuse allies with enemies. Elizabeth Warren is an ally who has embraced many progressive reforms. The difference between her platform and that of Bernie Sanders pales in comparison to the difference between either and Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg, the picks of the corporate Democrats. We must not allow loyalty to Warren or Sanders to pit us against one another and lose sight of our most important task—to use this moment to build a robust social movement Left.

At the same time, we need to understand the differences between the candidates. In the American political circus, it can be easy to get caught up in a candidate’s personality and see this as the driving force of change. However, far more important than individual characteristics are the political projects they are building.

One indicator is how well they inspire people to take action beyond the ballot box—because defeating both the far Right and neoliberalism will require a mass movement. In "What an Elizabeth Warren Presidency Would Look Like," Kathleen Geier fails to acknowledge that Warren has not mobilized working-class people across racial difference as effectively as Sanders. In 2017, polls showed Sanders was the most popular U.S. politician. His base is younger, more diverse and more working-class than Warren’s. He has an enormous grassroots campaign infrastructure and more donations from working people, including teachers and Walmart workers, than any other candidate. It’s important to note that Sanders’ popularity is not a product of his personality or a good slogan. It is a product of his politics.

When Sanders lost in 2016, he immediately funneled his campaign infrastructure into an independent political organization with a bold title: Our Revolution. In addition, dozens of other organizations have spun out of his campaign all across the country—a testament to the grassroots, independent nature of the Sanders political project. Elected officials at all levels of government—including Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—credit Sanders as inspiration for their run. This is important because transforming the make-up of Congress will be essential to moving Medicare for All, free college, decarceration and the Green New Deal forward.

Warren’s base is wealthier, whiter and more college-educated than Sanders’, and she takes a friendlier approach to the Democratic establishment. It’s hard to imagine how Warren might juggle these competing interests, but the Obama years give us a good idea what it might look like. When Obama was elected, Obama for America, the grassroots organization that fueled his campaign moved to the Democratic National Committee. As a result, his 2.5 million activists were no longer positioned to build an independent power base but instead became an arm of the Democratic Party. This took the millions of people, who had been ignited by Obama’s campaign and his independent vision for the future of American politics, off the streets and co-opted them into the confines of the neoliberal Democratic Party. This was fatal for the reforms Obama campaigned upon. In order to actually move promises like a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants, the shutdown of Guantanamo Bay, and the repeal of tax breaks on the wealthy, his inside strategy would have had to be matched with robust outside pressure. But Obama saw grassroots activism as a hindrance to his ability to build trust with moderates and Republicans. On multiple occasions, including during the Ferguson rebellion, he condemned popular resistance. As a result of his focus on compromise, Obama failed working people—by bailing out the banks instead of the people, by expanding the War on Terror and the military’s drone program and passing a watered-down version of healthcare reform.

If Warren follows in Obama’s footsteps, big ideas like Medicare for All will be dead on arrival—and there are signs that she may. The New York Times reported in August 2019 that Warren was courting party officials by stressing that she will revive the party from the inside, not mount a challenge from the outside, as has been Sanders’ approach.

As Geier notes, the bully pulpit is another tool at the president’s disposal. Geier describes how Warren went up against Wall Street and neoliberal Democrats as a freshman senator—no small feat. Warren quickly became a champion against corporate greed. But is that enough in 2020?

Today, three billionaires own more wealth than half of Americans. Given these conditions, people are demanding a total overhaul of our economic system. Polls show the majority of young people prefer socialism: 55% of women under 55 say they would prefer a socialist country to a capitalist one, and 70% of millennials—a growing slice of the electorate—say they would vote for a socialist. As the Overton window shifts, Warren remains stuck, referring to herself as a “capitalist to my bones.” She cites “corruption” as the source of every ill, implying our problems aren’t so much systemic as a matter of a few bad apples. We can anticipate that, as president, Warren will not only reinforce the false notion that capitalism can be saved, but that it can be divorced from corporate greed and that it isn’t predicated upon exploitation and the creation of a permanent underclass. While regulating corporations is necessary, we know it won’t solve the crises of climate, housing and debt. The fossil fuel industry’s very existence relies on burning carbon, the real estate industry’s relies on gouging tenants and the private banking system’s relies on massive debt. Under capitalism, the needs of people and planet are always secondary to the profit motive. Warren will offer BandAid solutions to problems that, without deep economic transformation, will only persist.

The policy plans for which Warren is famous reinforce this rhetoric. For example, while Sanders is fighting for the complete elimination of student debt, Warren’s plan targets debt up to $50,000. For people like my sister, who has accrued more than $150,000 in student loans, Warren’s plan isn’t super helpful. Yes, it would aid many students and tangibly change millions of lives—but the plan would simultaneously legitimize greedy corporations like Sallie Mae and the idea that it’s not only okay, but normal and right, to prey upon young people’s desire for a good education. Another example: On January 3, Warren broke with Sanders in announcing her support for the Trump administration's United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), citing the agreements improvements over its predecessor, NAFTA. However, these modest improvements do nothing to change the fundamental logic of free trade that has forced millions of people into poverty. Warren’s approach to issues such as these undermines the long-term battle to wrest our society from the grips of corporate greed, as well as the basic tenet that every human, by virtue of being born, has a fundamental right to healthcare, housing, food, water, safety and education.  

While Geier mentions Warren’s poor record on foreign policy, it does not receive the level of scrutiny it deserves. It’s a shame that even our most progressive candidates for elected office are moderate when it comes to issues of foreign policy, given that the U.S. military receives more than half of all discretionary federal spending, and the U.S. is waging a War on Terror in 80 countries. Progressives cannot limit our values to the confines of U.S. borders and ignore the devastation that millions of people are experiencing around the world under U.S. militarism.

On issues of war and peace, Warren is not to the right of the Democratic party, but she is also not a progressive leader. Sanders is no saint here, either, but he has championed progressive foreign policy ideas before they were politically popular, such as ending the war in Yemen and our allyship with Saudi Arabia, cutting off funding to Israel for its occupation of Palestine and ending economic sanctions against Venezuela. Warren, meanwhile, championed Israel’s 2014 war against Gaza, has moved to the right on sanctions against Venezuela, and has been an ally to the defense industry.

Just last week, when Trump assassinated Iranian Commander Qasem Soleimani, waging war without Congressional approval, Warren began her Twitter statement against war with the qualifier "Soleimani was a murderer." In using rhetoric that jibes with Trump’s claims of “Iranian aggression," Warren may be covering her political bases, but she is also handing Trump a justification for war. This, coupled with the fact that Warren voted for the sanctions that led up to the war, makes her complicit in the deaths of thousands that may result. (Sanders, by contrast, took to nearly every platform to state clearly that the United States is the aggressor and to make steadfast his stance against war.)

Warren’s track record on foreign policy is quite clear: She moves with the political winds—when it’s popular to do the right thing, she does it, and when it’s not, she doesn’t stick her neck out. As president, will she signal to others in the party that they can continue to move to the right on foreign policy? Can we expect a continuation of the Democratic status quo under Obama, when we killed more people with drones than ever before and bombed Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia?

While both candidates are scaring billionaires, only Sanders is building a loyal base of support among working-class people. Only Sanders is moving the needle left on foreign policy. Only Sanders can be trusted to avoid the Obama trap of watering down policies in the name of bipartisanship. Only Sanders will lead a movement for the transformation of capitalism we urgently need.

This is a response to Kathleen Geier's cover story in the January 2020 issue, "What an Elizabeth Warren Presidency Would Look Like." Read it here.

The views expressed in this piece are the author's own. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, In These Times does not oppose or endorse candidates for political office.

Introducint #gtherm to get thermal zone and cooling device information easily: https://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/Introducing_gtherm.html

#gnome #gobject #librem5

Lincoln v. Douglas – 2020

The 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas over the issue of slavery were notable for their erudite discussion of an important policy matter. Now we don’t talk about issues, we talk about political viability in terms of how much the candidates have to spend. Ideas? Not so much.

@yogthos Exactly! That’s me in my recent job interview. (No, didn’t get it.) I guess I’m just tooooo old to do the buzzword ooga booga dance around the office totem properly...

The @answercoalition@twitter.com is holding emergency anti-war protests Wednesday, January 8, in numerous cities in the US

There is information here for demonstrations in NYC, DC, LA, SF, and Atlanta:
https://www.answercoalition.org/emergency_demonstrations_announced_step_back_from_the_brink_no_war_with_iran?recruiter_id=341832