Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Hitting the Books: Your personal data makes the digital world go round
https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/18/hitting-the-books-How-to-Be-Human-in-the-Digital-Economy/ #privacy

News Analysis: It Was Supposed to Be Australia’s Climate Change Election. What Happened?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/world/australia/election-climate-change.html #climatechange

These Days, It’s Not About the Polar Bears
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/climate/climate-solutions-polar-bears.html #climatechange

DS Exclusive: The Butts stream “Alex Jones Is One Of Them” off upcoming “Nightmare at Area 51” EP

Austin, TX punkers The Butts have just announced their upcoming EP, Nightmare at Area 51, to be released on Stars at Night Records this coming June. This will be a follow up to the band’s 2017 self-titled full-length, and hopefully marks a pivotal stance towards more future releases from the group who had not previously released any […]

The post DS Exclusive: The Butts stream “Alex Jones Is One Of Them” off upcoming “Nightmare at Area 51” EP appeared first on Dying Scene.

"Recognizing that something needs to be done is easy. Looking to AI to help do that thing is also easy. Actually doing content moderation well is very, very difficult, and you should be suspicious of any claim to the contrary." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/content-moderation-broken-let-us-count-ways

Why are so many people running for president and so few for mayor? Blame the media (and the Internet) » Nieman Journalism Lab https://prismo.xyz/posts/a893c242-9d50-43fc-b074-b297f80a11a7

Should we ban links on Mastodon that are from Facebook? #Thoughts #deletefacebook #askfosstodon

Young Democrats Are Furious Over the DCCC’s Blacklist Punishing Insurgents

NORMAL, ILL.— On May 5, newly elected Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chair Cheri Bustos faced a surprisingly chilly reception at this year’s College Democrats of Illinois Convention, which is typically a chance for participants to hone organizing skills and hobnob with elected officials. Bustos' appearance quickly turned into an interrogation.

The College Democrats questioned her about the DCCC's new policy of refusing to hire consultants and vendors who work with any challenger to a Democratic incumbent. The policy is widely perceived as a broadside against the party's insurgent progressive wing and its enthusiastic younger voters.

“How does the DCCC intend to win congressional seats while weakening youth support?” College Democrat Victoria Koffsky asked Bustos.

“Wow, um, I would not say we’re weakening youth support,” Bustos replied, saying that the policy exists to protect current House members, who pay dues to the DCCC.

“We won on our message of healthcare in 2018, and I’m wondering why the DCCC is trying to protect a candidate who isn’t on board with that,” asked Hadiya Afzal, referencing incumbent Daniel Lipinsky (D-Ill.), a conservative Democrat who opposed the Affordable Care Act and now faces a primary challenge.

While waving away concerns about Lipinsky (“you could look at any member of our caucus and there would be something that we don’t all agree about”), Bustos emphasized again and again that the DCCC’s “first priority” was to hang onto the “fragile majority” in the House that Democrats achieved in 2018. “We are an incumbent-friendly organization,” she stressed.

Bustos’ explanations, however, did not convince her critics.

“That’s not an okay answer, especially when that’s clearly not the case,” says Koffsky, 22, about Bustos’ denial that the DCCC is weakening youth support. Koffsky is the vice president of the College Democrats of America, the Democratic National Committee’s official youth outreach body.

Afzal, 19, the current president of the College Democrats of Illinois, was even more blunt, calling Bustos’ defense that the DCCC is incumbent-friendly “kind of a garbage answer.”

The DCCC blacklist inspires particularly strong emotions in Illinois for a reason. It's here that pro-choice challenger Marie Newman has seen consultants, pollsters, mail firms and a communications group abandon her bid to unseat Lipinski, an eight-term Congress member who vocally opposes abortion.

It’s a situation that threatens to become the norm for any insurgent challenger under the policy, as wary vendors steer clear of challengers’ campaigns lest they lose out on the DCCC’s business.  “I interned at a small political consulting firm, and while they don’t agree with the policy, they have no choice but to go with it,” says Koffsky. “They need the income and to keep their employees employed.”

Lipinski, who inherited the seat from his now-lobbyist father Bill Lipinsky, regularly votes against the party—almost twice as often as the average Democrat. Lipinski declined to endorse President Obama for re-election in 2012 and has received dismal scores from groups advocating the rights of immigrants and the LGBTQ community, as well as issues such as public education and the environment. This is all in a district on the edge of Chicago that Bernie Sanders won by nearly eight points in 2016, putting Lipinski far to the right of his own district.

Outrage among College Democrats about the blacklist is not limited to Illinois. On April 24, the Harvard College Democrats announced that a coalition of 26 chapters of College Democrats, Young Democrats and other Democratic youth groups are calling for a boycott of donations to the DCCC until the “regressive” blacklist policy is reversed. The boycott spans chapters from Massachusetts to Michigan to Alabama to Arizona. Within three weeks, the coalition tripled in size to 74 members, according to Harvard College Democrats President Hank Sparks.

“The two languages the DCCC speaks are money and media,” says Sparks, 20. To that end, the coalition has not just shut off its donations to the DCCC and encouraged others to redirect their DCCC gifts directly to candidates, but embarked on a media campaign drumming up the kind of negative press the DCCC—already fighting off a reputation for hostility to progressives—has been trying to shake.

Sparks says that, after informing the Sanders-aligned group Our Revolution of the boycott, the organization cited the embargo in an April 25 meeting about the blacklist with Bustos in Chicago, in which Our Revolution presented Bustos with a letter criticizing the blacklist. The letter was signed by more than a dozen local Democratic officials and other progressive figures, including Phil Hare, a former Congress member who previously represented Bustos’ district.

“We laid out our position, and she laid out her position,” says Clem Balanoff, chair of Our Revolution Chicago. “She said it wasn’t a blacklist, we believed that it was. And we agreed to another meeting.”

That meeting was meant to take place in late May in Washington, D.C. Balanoff says that a little more than a week prior, a member of Bustos’ staff informed him the meeting was off, owing to an Our Revolution press release about the event that led to bad press for Bustos. Balanoff believes the complaint about press is a “red herring,” and Our Revolution and the College Democrats are now deciding on next steps.

The young Democrats rebelling against the DCCC's policy aren’t radicals looking to take a sledgehammer to the party. Sparks began his involvement in the party as a Fall Fellow for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, before phone-banking and door-knocking for Democrats during the 2018 midterms. Koffsky worked her way up the College Democrats hierarchy before becoming vice president and considers herself a “lifelong Democrat.”

“I'm a Democrat because of Democratic values,” she says. “There’s no reason why Democratic organizing efforts should be going towards incumbents like Dan Lipinski that don't hold my values.”

The young Democrats interviewed by In These Times want primaries to serve as a “contest of ideas.” They point to recent insurgents, most commonly Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), as bearers of the kind of bold new ideas that will be squeezed out by this policy.

“If we stifle these progressive, mostly people of color, people who aren’t establishment, then we are not bringing these voices into the general election, which really hurts us,” says Kyle Varellie, communications director for the Rutgers-Newark College Democrats, a boycott signatory.

“We shouldn't be punishing people for bringing new ideas to the forefront,” says Tim Ennis, communications director for College Democrats of Massachusetts and incoming president of UMass Amherst College Democrats, both signatories to the boycott.

These young party activists view the DCCC blacklist as a slap in the face, as it is they who do the unglamorous but crucial drudgery that helps win elections.

“We are the backbone of the Democratic Party when it comes to canvassing hours and door-knocking,” says Afzal, who in 2016 ran unsuccessfully for the DuPage County Board in Illinois in 2016, and was endorsed by Hillary Clinton.

Afzal sees it as hypocritical for the party to lean on young Democrats’ electoral work but ignore their policy preferences. And yet, she says, “They're always, 'Woe is me, why don't we have more young people voting’.”

“Dissent is patriotic,” says Ennis. “As people on the ground, we think it’s important for party leaders to listen to young people and value our desires for a better party that doesn’t just inherently and blindly protect incumbency.”

It remains to be seen whether this youth revolt will lead the DCCC to drop the contentious policy. In Illinois, the blacklist appears to have galvanized progressives: Endorsements and donations have come pouring in for Marie Newman, including from Planned Parenthood, MoveOn and EMILY’s List—groups not always quick to buck the Democratic establishment. Despite the DCCC’s best efforts, the primary in Illinois’ 3rd district may end up being a contest of ideas after all.

Bustos, for her part, recently announced that she will be hosting a fundraiser for Lipinski. 

“The government tried to sell our lands to the oil companies without our permission. Our rainforest is our life. We decide what happens in our lands. We will never sell our rainforest to the oil companies. Today, the courts recognized that the Waorani people, and all indigenous peoples have rights over our territories that must be respected. The government’s interests in oil is not more valuable than our rights, our forests, our lives.”
–Nemonte Nenquimo

‘Extraordinary #thinning’ of #ice sheets revealed deep inside #Antarctica | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/16/thinning-of-antarctic-ice-sheets-spreading-inland-rapidly-study

#GlobalWarming #ClimateChange

Google, Apple and Amazon are playing catch up with Purism https://www.fastcompany.com/90349731/the-hardware-trend-google-amazon-and-apple-are-throwing-their-weight-behind #privacy #security

The Teacher Strikes Could Set Off a Private Sector Strike Wave—If We Dare

In the spring of 2018, teachers across West Virginia improbably shut down schools statewide, creating a political crisis that forced Republican Gov. Jim Justice and the GOP-led legislature to back down. Drawing inspiration from the West Virginia strikers, teachers in the red states of Arizona and Oklahoma soon followed suit by carrying out statewide strikes of their own.

It’s Not Progressive To Fund Medicare for All by Agreeing to a Bloated Military

House Progressives have fashioned what they may see as a pragmatic response to the unconscionable budgeting priorities of a U.S. government that pours money into the Pentagon while constricting public goods like housing assistance and education. The chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), proposed in April that spending caps for discretionary domestic programs should be raised in 2020 to match the discretionary military budget.

Pocan and Jayapal’s approach would, indeed, mark a departure from the modus operandi of Congress, which reliably sets higher ceilings for military spending than for domestic. But by tethering progressive programs to war spending, this plan abandons the moral priority to oppose U.S. imperial ambitions. Progressives cannot build domestic gains on the backs of the people of the Global South. No amount of domestic spending could justify the size of the Pentagon, the largest military empire humanity has ever seen.

Progressives are eager to find funding for bold, popular programs like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, and are chafing at the constraints of the Budget Control Act of 2011, a compromise by the Obama administration: Republicans agreed to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for limits on discretionary defense and non-defense spending (which, in practice, has led to far more constraints on the latter). Lindsay Koshgarian, program director for the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project, a budget-focused nonprofit, puts it this way, “Every couple of years [the act has] meant a deal with more Pentagon funding and a little more funding for everything else.”

The Congressional Progressive Caucus chairs are pitting themselves against centrist leaders in their own party, including Budget Committee Chair Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), who rallied Democrats behind a budgetary plan that would increase discretionary defense spending caps to $664 billion in 2020 and non-defense spending to $631 billionThe split came to a head April 9, in an episode the Washington Post called a “liberal revolt” by House progressives, when Jayapal and Pocan introduced an amendment to increase the domestic cap by $33 billion to bring it in line with the military cap. “Here’s a real opportunity to tell people we are investing in their future and not in a Pentagon,” Jayapal said.

But Democratic leaders rejected the amendment on the grounds that it wasn’t fiscally prudent, and ultimately canceled the vote.

To be fair, dollar-for-dollar parity between domestic and military spending wasn’t every progressive Congress member’s first choice. During the initial House Budget Committee hearings on Yarmuth’s proposal, Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.) put forward an amendment to freeze defense spending at 2019 levels, which gained the support of six other Democrats, but was voted down. Reps. Jayapal, Khanna and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) then voted against the Yarmuth plan, the only three House Democrats to do so. “This is a key philosophical moment for our party,” said Khanna. “We cannot be against endless wars and then fund those wars.”

But even if the Pentagon budget were frozen, it still constitutes, by far, the biggest military budget of any nation in the world—roughly the size of the next seven combined. Military spending has increased for four years straight, climbing from $586 billion in 2015 to $716 billion in 2019 (an inflation-adjusted increase of $85 billion, or 13%). The money funds a global empire, with 800 military bases, active and reserve troops stationed in at least 172 countries and territories, and U.S. commandos deployed in 75% of the world’s countries. According to one estimate, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq resulted in the death of 1 million Iraqi people. Since 2014, the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS has killed up to 12,000 civilians in Iraq and Syria. U.S. military bases, for their part, erode nations’ self-determination, are associated with environmental harm and sexual violence, and fuel proxy wars, which can be ruthless.

And yet, at a time when aspirational, socialist-leaning programs are taking the national stage, left demands to reduce the U.S. military footprint have nowhere near the same momentum. This puts us in danger of repeating a long history of liberal and left chauvinism—a belief in the superiority of one’s compatriots that enables domestic progressivism and imperialism to go hand in hand.

 The last significant outburst of progressive reform—Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” beginning in 1964—saw the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and the National Endowment for the Humanities, with aspirations for what Johnson called “The Great Society.” From 1965 to 1968, the U.S. budgeted $2.64 billion in new local welfare programs—a 25% increase over 1962 levels. The U.S. also budgeted an increase of 30% for the Defense Department budget, to $76.5 billion.  

Those additional billions financed military expansion—and mass atrocity. As Johnson declared war on poverty, he also greenlit tens of thousands more U.S. troops into Vietnam. With the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson went all in on a war that between 1965 and 1974 would leave an estimated 1.7 million Vietnamese dead.

According to Margaret Rung, professor of history at Roosevelt University (and board president of In These Times), Johnson “wanted to take the Great Society and export it to the rest of the world, especially parts of the world that might turn to Communism. In [Johnson’s] mind, they were all part of the same project.” In a 1965 speech, Johnson laid out plans for economic development in Vietnam, including a Mekong River Delta Project, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Three years later, that delta would be the site of the U.S. military onslaught “Operation Speedy Express,” which took the lives of more than 10,000 Vietnamese people and gave U.S. Major General Julian Ewell the epithet, “Butcher of the Delta.”

Similarly, Pierre Laroque, considered the “father of social security” in France in the aftermath of World War II, argued for a "universal welfare state" that incorporated French colonies, from Algeria to Senegal, providing ideological fodder for ongoing violent colonization. A decade later, Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet would bring a wave of progressive domestic reform to France at the same time that he escalated the war to crush Algeria’s struggle for independence, deploying 200,000 more troops who engaged in systematic torture.

Today, the liberal ruling class still displays chauvinist priorities. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), a 2020 presidential hopeful, showcased them on Wednesday when she tweeted, “Climate change is real, it’s worsening by the day, and it’s undermining our military readiness.”

Domestic and military spending caps remain unresolved in ongoing budget negotiations. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has yet to release its annual People’s Budget, where it has the opportunity to draw a hard line against military spending. Support for a program like Medicare for All should stem from the principle of solidarity—that an injury to one is an injury to all. The same solidarity should be extended to the lives of the tens of thousands of Yemeni people dying in a U.S.-backed war.

We need to oppose war spending with the same gusto we push to expand public goods, on the grounds that lives beyond U.S. borders matter just as much as those within. By failing to root domestic demands in anti-imperialist principles, we risk repeating the horrors of the past—and present.

European telcos want the right to perform "deep packet inspection" on our data https://boingboing.net/2019/05/15/dpi-nein.html

Write Black Americans a Check Already

This piece is a response to "Universal Policies, Not Reparations, Are Needed To Counter Racism's Effects" and "The 2020 Candidates Are Dodging the Reparations Question."

Universal, race-neutral policies are insufficient to repair the past and ongoing harms of racial injustice. Whether or not reparations are “divisive,” they are the right and necessary thing to do. Indeed, the moral act is frequently divisive. Opposition to slavery was divisive.

Reparations for native black Americans must fulfill three objectives: The U.S. government must admit its wrongs (acknowledgment), restore the injured parties to the condition they might have attained had the harm never occurred (redress) and reach an agreement with the injured that the debt has been paid (closure).

The historic harms against black Americans are many—from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. The recipients of reparations should be those who can establish they have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States, and who identified as black, African-American, Negro or the equivalent for at least 10 years before the reparations program begins. This is the group that most directly bears the cumulative effects of centuries of oppression.

One major effect is racial wealth disparity. Data from the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that the mean black net worth per household was $138,000, while mean white net worth was $934,000, a difference of close to $800,000.

Zaid and Leighton point out that the Latino-white wealth gap is similar. Its causes, however, are not the same. We encourage Latinos (or any group) to develop their own claim for reparations, if they so desire, based upon their unique historical relationships to the U.S. government. But these claims should not be collapsed onto the black American claim.

Nor can universal programs (such as “baby bonds”) substitute for reparations. For one, they are not near enough to erase the $800,000 wealth gap. And the specific injustices toward black American descendants of the enslaved require a specific process of acknowledgment, redress and closure.

Several Democratic presidential candidates have said that reparations, if undertaken, should be something other than “cutting a check.” However, other injured groups have received reparations in the form of direct payment, including Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated during World War II and Holocaust victims and their families. We wonder why, when the subject is native black Americans, there is a sudden aversion to “cutting a check.”

We agree that a reparations fund, once assembled, may be used for a variety of purposes beyond payments to individuals, including institution building (e.g., payments to historically black colleges), neighborhood improvement efforts, or subsidies for higher education or business development. But funds used this way may miss their intended targets; funding for a historically black neighborhood, for instance, may end up primarily benefiting white families due to gentrification.

Ultimately, a sound program of reparations for black Americans must include a substantial direct payment to each eligible recipient. (At least some of this payment, too, should take the form of illiquid assets that can build long-term wealth.) The nation must “cut the checks.”

Finally, we come to closure. If a comprehensive program of reparations eliminates the racial wealth gap and other legacies of slavery, legal reforms undo housing, pay and other ongoing discrimination, and no new race-specific injustices arise, native black Americans will make no further race-specific claims on the U.S. government. Only then will the accounts of American history have been settled.

Embracing Failure as an Intrinsic Part of Science #Failtales - Digital Science https://prismo.xyz/posts/91cca629-8652-4558-9409-8f8d4242c7ab

The Crackdown on Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange Is About Protecting U.S. Empire

On April 11, the U.S. unsealed a year-old indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. That same morning, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno revoked Assange’s asylum. London Metropolitan Police entered the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange had lived for seven years and arrested him. While he was initially arrested for skipping bail in the UK, the U.S. was seeking his extradition. This was the culmination of a nearly decade-long vendetta against WikiLeaks.

The indictment against Assange does not pertain to sexual assault allegations in Sweden or the publishing of Democratic National Committee emails that had become a point of inquiry in the Mueller probe. Instead, the indictment stems from the publishing of a trove of U.S. secrets turned over by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. WikiLeaks from 2010 to 2011 worked with news outlets spanning the globe, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spegel, Le Monde and Al Jazeera, to publish the leaked information. The increased connections of Assange and WikiLeaks to the Right, as well as allegations that WikiLeaks worked to assist the election of Donald Trump, have both given fodder to critics and alienated some long-time supporters. But as Diane Abbott, a senior figure within the UK Labour Party who objects to his extradition, said, Assange “is being pursued because he has exposed wrongdoing by U.S. administrations and their military forces.”

Far more is at stake than the fate of one person. The U.S. is targeting an individual for publishing information of public interest. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, and his “crime” did not take place on U.S. soil. The U.S. is asserting the right to track down and imprison anyone in the world who exposes its crimes. Assange’s prosecution sets not just a precedent against press freedom domestically, but the world over

Criminalizing journalism

Press freedom groups have long feared that Assange would be charged under the Espionage Act. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under this act for publishing classified information, as it is widely presumed that doing so would be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that journalists cannot be held criminally liable for publishing information illegally obtained by third parties, so long as they themselves did not play a part in illegally obtaining it. The Obama Administration balked at charging WikiLeaks under the Espionage Act. Even though the Obama Administration oversaw a record number of prosecutions of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, it viewed prosecuting a publisher of classified information as being too  threatening to press freedom. As the general counsel for the New York Timespointed out, any precedent allowing the government to prosecute WikiLeaks would also apply to legacy publications that print similar information. With Trump at the helm, many feared his administration did not share such reservations.

Unexpectedly, Assange has been charged not under the Espionage Act, but with conspiring with whistleblower Chelsea Manning to crack a password on a Department of Defense computer. This was not so that Manning could gain access to new files, but to help her make it harder to identity her as the source. (The attempt also appears to have failed.) After requesting extradition, the U.S. has 65 days to bring addition charges, which may be forthcoming against Assange. The law of extradition generally forbids bringing new charges after a party is extradited.

While the charge may appear on its face to be about computer crimes, it is very much about silencing those who publish information the U.S. government does not like. Pressfreedomgroups have argued that elements of the conspiracy, such as counseling Manning on the significance of Guantánamo detainee assessments, constitute newsgathering practices. By making newsgathering part of the “conspiracy,” the U.S. is criminalizing journalism. (Full Disclosure: This author works for Defending Rights & Dissent, a free expression organization that opposes the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and the prosecution of Assange.)

An Espionage Act indictment would not only have posed significant constitutional issues, it would have been a hurdle to extradition. Political offenses are excluded from extradition, and espionage is historically considered a political offense. But as journalist Kevin Gosztola argues, the indictment itself reads very much like an Espionage Act indictment. James C. Goodale, one of the Pentagon Paper lawyers, has lambasted the computer-cracking charges as a “snare and a delusion” designed “to divert attention from the basic fact that this indictment punishes the publication of truthful information.”    

Exposing the crimes of U.S. empire

The publications the U.S. is using to pursue Assange date back nearly a decade ago. In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning realized she couldn’t stay silent anymore. Stationed in Iraq, she became disturbed by the dehumanization of Iraqi life that is inherent in protracted military occupations. She also had access to a massive trove of documents that showed how, in Chelsea Manning’s words, “first-world countries exploited third-world countries” through “crazy, almost criminal political backdealings.” Manning believed that if she could get this information to the U.S. public, she would reveal “the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare.” Her intent was clear: to expose the truth and spark a public debate. Manning tried to take her secrets to the Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico, but they weren’t interested. Manning turned to WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks first released a video of a July 12, 2007 airstrike filmed from an Apache helicopter gun-sight. The strike killed at least 12 people, including two Reuters reporters. Provocatively, WikiLeaks titled the video “Collateral Murder,” a clear commentary on the euphemism “collateral damage,” which U.S. officials use to describe civilian deaths. Soldiers fired on a van rescuing the wounded, injuring children in the process. One of the pilots responded, “Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” Reuters had filed Freedom of Information Act requests about the incident, but never received the video. The Pentagon was reportedly taken by surprise at its release.

If the Pentagon was taken off-guard by the release of Collateral Murder, one can only imagine how they took what happened next. In the largest leak in U.S. military history, WikiLeaks released internal military logs from Afghanistan. The Afghan logs didn’t stay the largest leak for long. They were quickly surpassed by WikiLeaks' release of similar logs from the Iraq War. Next came releases of State Department cables and the U.S. Guantánamo Bay detainee assessments.

The Iraq and Afghan War logs expose the reality of U.S. occupations. According to Dahr Jamail, who had reported from Iraq, “[t]he WikiLeaks cables from Iraq displayed the brutality of U.S. policies that were ongoing throughout the occupation.” Phyllis Bennis, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote that the Afghan War Logs “were crucially important,” as they showed “Afghanistan was and is a real country where hundreds of thousand, millions of people with no connections to 9/11, would be killed or see their lives and families destroyed.”

These publications empowered anti-war veterans to speak up. After the release of Collateral Murder, two members of the unit involved went public. Ethan McCord could be seen in the video trying to rescue the children. He struggled psychologically as a result of what he witnessed. He didn’t initially know a video existed. But its release allowed him to publicly speak about the events of the day and against the brutality of the war. Josh Stieber had also been in the same unit depicted in Collateral Murder. Like McCord, after its release he publicly spoke out against the war. Stieber toldDemocracy Now in April 2010,“if we’re shocked by this video, then we need to be asking questions of the larger system, because, again, this is how these soldiers were trained to act.” Stieber would call on Congress to investigate the crimes exposed by WikiLeaks.  Both McCord and Stieber would publicly apologize to those impacted by the airstrike.

The Guantánamo leaks revealed that the U.S. government knowingly held 150 innocent men. The U.S. also held Sami al-Hajj, an Al-Jazeera journalist, at Guantánamo, in part to learn about his employer. The massive, sprawling nature  of the State Department cables makes it impossible to cover in its entirety. But with Venezuela currently in U.S. crosshairs, it’s worth noting the cables reveal a particular fixation with Venezuela. In order to destabilize the Bolivarian process, the U.S. pursued tactics such as working to support  the opposition, foster divisions within Chavismo and isolate the country internationally.

In the crosshairs of the U.S.

This massive insight into the U.S. foreign policy apparatus essentially showed “the world according to U.S. empire.” But exposing the U.S. empire comes at a cost. Manning was subjected to a pretrial detention that a UN expert said constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment—and possibly torture. While Obama commuted her 35-year sentence after seven years, she still spent more time in prison than anyone in U.S. history for leaking information to the media. (Manning recently spent 62 days in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury against Assange. As she has been subpoenaed yet again to testify about the same information, it possible she may be jailed again.)

When Swedish authorities sought Assange’s extradition from the UK as part of a preliminary investigation into sexual assault allegations, Assange argued it was a ruse to have him extradited to the U.S. Believing threats from the U.S. to be credible, Ecuador granted Assange political asylum. With the UK guarding the embassy around the clock and threatening to arrest Assange, he was trapped in the embassy. Assange’s critics have disputed the characterization that Assange was an involuntary prisoner in the embassy, instead arguing that Assange’s fate was of his own choosing. However, a UN Working Group found both the UK and Sweden to have arbitrarily detained Assange. Even after Sweden dropped its investigation, the UK still threatened to arrest Assange for skipping bail. (Swedish authorities reopened the rape investigation on May 13, 2019.)

While western media has focused on how Assange was a bad houseguest who wore out his welcome with his Ecuadorian host, they’ve missed a larger story. Assange’s asylum came at the height of the Pink Tide, when left-leaning Latin American nations asserted their sovereignty against the U.S. It was President Rafael Correa who granted Assange asylum. Correa has blasted his successor for permitting the arrest of Assange, calling Moreno the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history.” The current president is embroiled in a corruption scandal. Ecuador’s interior minister has accused one of Moreno’s chief political opponents, Ricardo Patiño, of conspiring with WikiLeaks to destabilize the Ecuadorian government. Moreno’s revocation of  Assange’s asylum comes on the heels of a $4.2 billion IMF loan, leading critics such as former Ecuadorian foreign minister Guillaume Long to assert the two were connected.

The U.S. government has fought to keep secret its program of disappearances and torture, detention sites, and even what countries it bombs. But it isn’t just official secrecy that has helped obscure the nature of U.S. wars. Evidence of the human toll of U.S. wars isn’t hard to find.  It’s certainly not a secret to those in other countries who live it daily. But for much of the mainstream U.S. media, there is little if any true reckoning with the civilian cost of war. WikiLeaks is currently in the crosshairs of the U.S. government, because it challenged this secrecy head on. Its fate will impact all those who wish to shine light on the U.S. empire.

Exxon Predicted 2019’s Ominous CO2 Milestone in 1982
https://earther.gizmodo.com/exxon-predicted-2019-s-ominous-co2-milestone-in-1982-1834748763 #climatechange

Librem 5 App Design Tutorial – Part II

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-app-design-tutorial-part-ii/