Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

When the elites say, "nobody likes Bernie," it's not that they can't see you; they just belive that you are nobody, a mindless drone that exists only to provide labor for exploitation
@Bernie2020 #Bernie2020

ok i wrote another update on the state of Reform, i guess the last one before campaign launch https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-01-18-finishing-reform.html

Just solved one of those »Took me 2 minutes to re-read the man-section, will save me 2 minutes of fiddling per week« issues:

ssh_config can specify "IdentitiesOnly" to make sure SSH client won't offer all the keys in your current ssh_agent, but only the once you specified via IdentityFile.

How the 1% is used to dealing with politicians v. how a people powered campaign operates
@Bernie2020 #Bernie2020

The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1952 a 23-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a love letter to Coretta Scott. Along with coos of affection and apologies for his hasty handwriting, he described his feelings not just toward his future wife, but also toward America’s economic system. “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he admitted to his then-girlfriend, concluding that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness.”

King composed these words as a grad student on the tail end of his first year at the Boston University School of Theology. And far from representing just the utopianism of youth, the views expressed in the letter would go on to inform King’s economic vision throughout his life.

As Americans honor King on his birthday, it is important to remember that the civil rights icon was also a democratic socialist, committed to building a broad movement to overcome the failings of capitalism and achieve both racial and economic equality for all people.

Capitalism “has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes,” King wrote in his 1952 letter to Scott. He would echo the sentiment 15 years later in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?: “Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

In his famous 1967 Riverside Church speech, King thundered, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

And in an interview with the New York Times in 1968, King described his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) this way, “In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.”

Speaking at a staff retreat of the SCLC in 1966, King said that “something is wrong … with capitalism” and “there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the country. “Maybe,” he suggested, “America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

In Where Do We Go From Here, which calls for “the full emancipation and equality of Negroes and the poor,” King advocates policies in line with a democratic socialist program: a guaranteed annual income, constitutional amendments to secure social and economic equality, and greatly expanded public housing. He endorses the Freedom Budget put forward by socialist activist A. Philip Randolph, which included such policies as a jobs guarantee, a living wage and universal healthcare. He also outlines how economic inequality can circumscribe civil rights. While the wealthy enjoy easy access to lawyers and the courts, “the poor, however, are helpless,” he writes.

This emphasis on poverty is not always reflected in contemporary teachings about King, which tend to focus strictly on his advocacy for civil rights. But Where Do We Go From Here and the final project of King’s life—the Poor People’s Campaign—show that King’s dream included a future of both racial and economic equality.

“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter,” King is widely quoted as asking, “if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” In King’s view, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the voter registration drives across the South and the Selma to Montgomery march comprised but the first phase of the civil rights movement. In Where Do We Go From Here, King called the victories of the movement up that point in 1967 “a foothold, no more” in the struggle for freedom. Only a campaign to realize economic as well as racial justice could win true equality for African-Americans. In naming his goal, King was unflinching: the “total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”

The shortcoming of the first phase of the civil rights movement, to King, was its emphasis on opportunity rather than guarantees. The ability to buy a hamburger at a lunch counter without harassment did not guarantee that the hungry would be fed. Access to the ballot box did not guarantee anti-racist legislation. The end of Jim Crow laws did not guarantee the flourishing of African-American communities. Decency did not guarantee equality.

Some white people had gone along with the fight for access and opportunity, King concluded, because it cost them nothing. “Jobs,” however, “are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls.” When African-Americans sought not only to be treated with dignity, but guaranteed fair housing and education, many whites abandoned the movement. In King’s words, as soon as he demanded “the realization of equality”—the second phase of the civil rights movement—he discovered whites suddenly indifferent.

King considered the Poor People's Campaign to be the vehicle for this next phase of the movement precisely because it offered both material advances and the potential for stronger cross-racial organizing. For King, only a multiracial working-class movement, which the Poor People's Campaign aspired to be, could guarantee both racial and economic equality.

King was disgusted by the juxtaposition of decadence and destitution in America. We “compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity,” he fumed. Quoting social justice advocate Hyman Bookbinder, King wrote that ending poverty in America merely requires demanding that the rich “become even richer at a slower rate.”

For King, the only solution to America’s crisis of poverty was the redistribution of wealth. In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King declared, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

From his early letters to Coretta Scott until his final days, King put forward a vision of a society that provides equality for people of all races and backgrounds. This is the cause King spent his life fighting for. And it is one we should recommit to as we honor his legacy.

When Bernie Met Liz, They Stopped Thinking Straight

The most interesting aspect about Elizabeth Warren’s allegation that Bernie Sanders told her that a woman can’t be elected president is what it says about the way American voters and political journalists reason and think.

#ExtinctionRebellion listed as ‘key threat’ by counter-terror #police | #Environment | The Guardian

This is overbearing and ridiculous.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/19/extinction-rebellion-listed-as-key-threat-by-counter-terror-police

WHAAAATTT THE FFFFUUUUCCCCCCK

https://payup.wtf/doordash/no-free-lunch-report

"Our analysis of more than two hundred samples of pay data provided by DoorDash workers across the country finds that DoorDash pays the average worker an astonishingly low $1.45/hour, after accounting for the costs of mileage and additional payroll taxes borne by independent contractors. Nearly a third of jobs actually pay less than $0 after accounting for these basic expenses."

If This is a Democracy, Why Don’t We Vote for the Vice President Too?

            Let’s say you owned a house and needed extra cash to make ends meet, so you decided to rent two of your bedrooms. Would you agree to lease those rooms to two people, but under the condition that you could only meet and run a credit check on one of them? Would you allow […]

Update: Kashmir Hill's piece in the NYTimes today describes a US startup that's providing law enforcement the exact kind of facial recognition tech I was warning about in China. China's present surveillance state is becoming our future. #privacy https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Low doses of radiation used in medical imaging lead to mutations in cell cultures

Common medical imaging procedures use low doses of radiation that are believed to be safe. A new study, however, finds that in human cell cultures, these doses create breaks that allow extra bits of DNA to integrate into the chromosome.

The #librem5 devkit driving it's internal panel via DSI and an external screen via HDMI at the same time.

#etnaviv #mesa #imx8

An Upcoming Supreme Court Ruling Could Starve Public Schools—In Favor of Religious Ones

On January 22, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, a case that could result in the massive expansion of public funding for private religious schools. The petitioners in the case—which will be litigated by the conservative law group, Institute for Justice—are asking that the court rule unconstitutional the denial of "public funds' to religious schools, invoking the First Amendment "freedom of exercise" clause to defend the position. In the event that the court rules in favor of the petitioner, the result, argue its detractors, would be tantamount to a mandate for religious voucher programs in every state.

Iranian users in Iran and abroad are getting kicked off of U.S. platforms due to ambiguous sanctions. We call on the Department of Treasury to issue guidance to tech companies, and on tech companies to offer clearer notifications to users https://eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/iranian-tech-users-are-getting-knocked-web-sanctions

@kyle mastercard sells realtime transaction data: https://www.mastercardservices.com/en/data-analytics

There was some way to opt out per card, but you need to look that up.