Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The United States Is Notoriously Bad at Counting Civilian Casualties. Its Allies Are Even Worse.

Since the Syrian civil war broke out in the summer of 2011, more than 500,000 people have been killed. Of that total, some untold number of children and other civilians have been killed by the American-led military coalition, which has fought ISIS in Syria and Iraq since 2014. The Pentagon has only claimed responsibility for […]

Low vitamin K levels linked to mobility limitation and disability in older adults

Researchers evaluateD the association between biomarkers of vitamin K status and mobility limitation and disability, and found older adults with low levels of circulating vitamin K were more likely to develop these conditions.

Yes, A Woman Can Beat Trump

Are women electable? A flurry of recent reports suggests that, for many Democratic women, the answer is no. One 20-year-old told ABC News that, though she wants a woman president, “America’s just not there yet.” Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel tweeted that numerous “middle-aged women” told him “2016 showed that voters won’t elect a female president.” Polls show that defeating Donald Trump is extremely important to Democratic voters, and that the candidates they believe are most likely to beat him are white men like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke.

It’s clear that Democratic voters remain haunted by the specter of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. Frustratingly, we seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.

For starters, when it comes to a complex event like an election, it’s simply not true that any single factor—even gender—predetermines the outcome. In 2016, if any number of factors had gone the other way—if the economy had been just a little better, if FBI Director James Comey hadn’t reopened the email investigation at the eleventh hour, if Clinton’s campaign had poured more resources into key Midwestern states—Clinton likely would have won.

Of course, gender played a role—Clinton was subjected to a tsunami of appalling sexism from the media, Trump, slimy operatives and an army of internet trolls—but it’s surprisingly hard to prove her loss was because of gender bias. Yes, post-election studies show sexist attitudes were associated with voting for Trump, and a 2015 Gallup poll revealed 8% of Americans wouldn’t vote for a woman president—but these were mostly Republicans who would never have voted for a Democrat anyway. One study suggests Clinton’s gender could have won her more votes than it lost.

As political scientists Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless point out (based on non-presidential elections), women candidates are not less likely to win primary and general elections than men; the issue is that not enough run in the first place. Men are more likely to consider themselves qualified and more likely to be recruited. Perhaps there is something different about presidential elections, but as any social scientist will tell you, you can’t make broad generalizations based on a sample size of one.

Clinton’s own focus groups showed the glass ceiling argument was “the least effective positive case” for her candidacy. Instead, what voters cared about was whether the candidate could “make their own lives better.” Clinton failed to make that case and instead focused on her qualifications and biography (remember “I’m With Her”?) and the awfulness of Trump.

Things might have been different had Clinton crafted a strong economic message for working people. When pollster Stanley Greenberg tested a Democratic message attacking Trump’s character against a message “demanding big economic changes” and attacking Trump for “protecting corporate special interests,” the economic message “performed dramatically better,” including among key swing voters like white working-class women.

To their credit, several of the 2020 female candidates appear to have taken this lesson to heart and are running on platforms well to the left of Clinton’s. Sens. Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren are all co-sponsoring bills in support of Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee and a $15 nationwide minimum wage—positions Clinton avoided. Even the most moderate woman running, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, supports a $15 minimum wage. Warren, the female candidate doing best in the polls, has run a robustly populist campaign steeped in policy and aimed at structural economic change.

Warren clearly understands the moral stakes involved in the electability argument. At one candidates’ forum, she asked: “Are we going to show up for people that we didn’t actually believe in, but because we were too afraid to do anything else?” If we are too afraid to vote for women, there’s a danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy, discouraging women from running and voters from supporting them.

If the Democrats run the kind of campaign that Clinton ran (and that Biden shows every sign of running), they are likely to produce the same dismal results we saw in 2016. An obsession with electability will likely fuel the same politics of reaction and inequality that made voters cling so desperately to “electable” candidates in the first place.

Trump’s EPA Has a Monsanto Problem

A jury awarded a California couple more than $2 billion in May for damages in their suit against Monsanto, a subsidiary of the chemical giant Bayer.

Farmers Alva and Alberta Pilliod claimed their use of Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide, Roundup, caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in each of them, and presented internal Monsanto documents revealing the company covered up evidence that the herbicide itself, glyphosate, caused cancer.

That verdict marks the third consecutive decision against Monsanto; an additional 13,400 lawsuits are pending. Since acquiring Monsanto in June 2018, Bayer has lost more than 40% of its stock market value, now worth less in total than the original Monsanto price tag.

The EPA, whose officials have for decades proclaimed the safety of glyphosate over the objections of its own scientists, has come to Bayer’s defense, declaring April 30 that “glyphosate is not a carcinogen” and (when used properly) poses “no risks to public health.” Yet, in March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, citing multiple peer-reviewed studies, determined that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” One pivotal laboratory study using mice sounded the alarm as early as 1983. This February, researchers at the University of Washington found exposure to glyphosate increased the risk of certain cancers by more than 40%.

The fact that you can buy a carcinogenic herbicide at your local Home Depot is a prime example of “regulatory capture”: when an industry and its allies control the operations of a government agency to advance their own corporate interests.

Regulatory capture occurred, for example, when Scott Pruitt, Trump’s former EPA administrator, dismissed members of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board and Board of Scientific Counselors and replaced them with industry allies.

An industry-friendly EPA ensures there will be no new environmental regulations with teeth. Liam Condon, president of Bayer’s crop science division, shrugged off the $2 billion judgment, telling agricultural investors: “The key point is, from a regulatory point of view, nothing has changed.” Indeed, as Bayer appeals these cases, it will argue that the EPA determination that glyphosate is a noncarcinogen should preempt the right of state courts to rule against glyphosate manufacturers.

The legal doctrine of preemption holds that claims in state courts are not allowed if they conflict with federal law. Bayer’s hope is that the glyphosate cases end up in the Supreme Court, which has heard three analogous preemption cases since 2005 and, every time, ruled for the corporation.

It doesn’t hurt Bayer’s chances that Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch—who, as a federal judge, refused to let environmental groups participate in lawsuits involving public lands—would help decide the case. Neil’s mom, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, an anti-environmental activist and President Ronald Reagan’s first EPA administrator, sits alongside Pruitt in the pantheon of corrupt GOP officials forced from office in disgrace.

Political radicals have long claimed that big business dictates government operations. Nevertheless, in the 20th century, pressure from the labor and environmental movements led to important regulations.

Today, we observe a Great Regression to the savage capitalism of the Gilded Age—the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Steve Bannon would call it. As the Democratic primaries approach, voters should distinguish candidates who have demonstrated an appetite to confront corporate power from those who have proven themselves beholden to it. It’s time to break the chains of corporate capture.

Discover the new adaptive view switcher and adaptive preferences window from libhandy 0.0.10: https://bytesgnomeschozo.blogspot.com/2019/06/libhandy-0010.html

#Librem5 #libhandy @purism

Carbon-neutral fuel made from sunlight and air

Researchers have developed a novel technology that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels exclusively from sunlight and air. For the first time worldwide they demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain under real field conditions.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Campaign Organizers Are Training Working-Class Progressives to Take on the Consultant Class

“Things like Movement School, where we wanna get more progressive leaders trained at the local level, the state level, matter a lot because the current infrastructure isn’t serving our policies.”

The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Campaign Organizers Are Training Working-Class Progressives to Take on the Consultant Class appeared first on The Intercept.

For the Rich, the Great Recession Was Just a Blip

Matt Yglesias points us to the latest Federal Reserve calculations of net worth, and as usual, we can say that the post-Reagan era has been a great time to be rich in America. Here’s the net worth of the top 1 percent: That’s an increase of more than 4 percent per year above and beyond […]

#Jolla is looking for new sailors for the following positions: Product Management Lead, UI Developer, Middleware Developer, Visual Designer

Visit their website for more information and apply now! https://jolla.com/careers/ #SailfishOS

Why Won’t the Democratic Candidates Move to the Left on Foreign Policy?

Peter Beinart on the Democratic candidates’ frustrating refusal to get radical on the world stage.

The post Why Won’t the Democratic Candidates Move to the Left on Foreign Policy? appeared first on The Intercept.

“Beyond My Pay Grade”: When Pete Buttigieg Had a Chance to Stand Firm on Abortion Rights, He Dodged

Mayor Pete Buttigieg was keeping a low profile. It was last spring, and he was in the middle of deliberating what he would later call “one of the hardest decisions” he’s had to make during his tenure in South Bend, Indiana. An abortion clinic—which was hoping to offer service to a city without a single […]

Why It Matters That a City Council in Louisiana Repealed a Ban on Saggy Pants

Lawmakers in Shreveport, Louisiana voted 6-1 on Tuesday to repeal a 12-year-old ordinance banning pants that sag below the waist after outcry over the death of Anthony Childs, who was stopped by police for violating the law.  Childs was walking down a sidewalk in early February when Shreveport Police Officer Traveion Brooks attempted to stop him […]

Wait ‘Til They Hear About Super PACs!

Can “big money” get away with this? From 1920.

Look on The Bright Side

Sure, we’re destroying the Earth and society is falling apart, but there’s always a silver lining.

For those yaml indenters out there (I'm looking at you @gitlab CI):

https://twitter.com/jpmens/status/1138543433549828104

#vim 's `set cursorcolumn` is very helpful

Indigo Ag Wants Better Farming to Help Fight Global Warming

The Washington Post reports today on the Terraton Initiative from Indigo Ag, a supplier of seed treatments and agricultural logistics. The idea is simple and appealing: we need to do more than simply reduce carbon emissions if we want to avoid the worst effects of global warming. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. […]

Experts Warn Congress: Proposed Changes to Patent Law Would Thwart Innovation

It should be clear now that messing around with Section 101 of the Patent Act is a bad idea. A Senate subcommittee has just finished hearing testimony about a bill that would wreak havoc on the patent system. Dozens of witnesses have testified, including EFF Staff Attorney Alex Moss. Alex’s testimony [PDF] emphasized EFF’s success in protecting individuals and small businesses from threats of meritless patent litigation, thanks to Section 101.

Section 101 is one the most powerful tools patent law provides for defending against patents that never should have been issued in the first place. We’ve written many times about small businesses that were saved because the patents being used to sue them were thrown out under Section 101, especially following the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision. Now, the Senate IP subcommittee is currently considering a proposal that will eviscerate Section 101, opening the door to more stupid patents, more aggressive patent licensing demands, and more litigation threats from patent trolls.

Three days of testimony has made it clear that we’re far from alone in seeing the problems in this bill. Patents that would fail today’s Section 101 aren’t necessary to promote innovation. We’ve written about how the proposal, by Senators Thom Tillis and Chris Coons, would create a field day for patent trolls with abstract software patents. Here, we’ll take a look at a few of the other potential effects of the proposal, none of them good.

Private Companies Could Patent Human Genes

The ACLU, together with 169 other civil rights, medical, and scientific groups, has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee explaining that the draft bill would open the door to patents on human genes.

The bill sponsors have said they don’t intend to allow for patents on the human genome. But as currently written, the draft bill would do just that. The bill explicitly overrules recent Supreme Court rulings that prevent patents on things that occur in nature, like cells in the human body. Those protections were made explicit in the 2013 Myriad decision, which held that Section 101 bars patents on genes as they occur in the human body. A Utah company called Myriad Genetics had monopolized tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which can be used to determine a person's likelihood of developing breast or ovarian cancer. Myriad said that because its scientists had identified and isolated the genes from the rest of the human genome, it had invented something that warranted a patent. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that DNA is a product of nature and “is not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.”

Once Myriad couldn’t enforce its patents, competitors offering diagnostic screening for breast and ovarian cancer could, and did, enter the market immediately, charging just a fraction of what Myriad’s test cost. Myriad’s patent did not claim to invent any of the technology actually used to perform the DNA analysis or isolation, which was available before and apart from Myriad’s gene patents.

It’s just one example of how Section 101 protects innovation and enhances access to medicine, by prohibiting monopolies on things no person could have invented.

Alice Versus the Patent Trolls

Starting around the late 1990s, the Federal Circuit opened the door to broad patenting of software. 

“The problem of patent trolls grew to epic proportions,” Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley told the Senate subcommittee last week. “One of the things that brought it under control was the Alice case and Section 101.”

A representative of the National Retail Federation (NRF) explained how, before Alice, small Main Street businesses were subject to constant litigation brought by “non-practicing entities,” also known as patent trolls. Patent trolls are not a thing of the past—even after Alice, the majority of patent lawsuits continue to be filed by non-practicing entities.

“Our members are a target-rich environment for those with loose patent claims,” NRF’s Stephanie Martz told the subcommittee.

She went on to give examples of patents that were rightfully invalidated under Section 101, like a patent for posting nutrition information and picture menus online, which was used to sue Whataburger, Dairy Queen, and other chain restaurants—more than 60 cases in all. A patent for an online shopping cart was used to sue candy shops and 1-800-Flowers. And a patent for online maps showing properties in a particular area was used to sue Realtors and homeowners [PDF], leading to decades of litigation.

The Alice decision didn’t end such cases, but it did make it much easier to fight back. As Martz explained, since Alice, the cost of litigation has gone down between 40 and 45 percent.

The sponsors of the draft litigation have made it clear they intend to overturn Alice. That will take us back to a time not so long ago, when small businesses had to pay unjustified licensing fees to patent trolls, or face the possibility of multimillion-dollar legal bills to fight off wrongly issued patents. 

More Litigation, Less Research

The High Tech Inventors Alliance (HTIA), a group of large technology companies, also spoke against the current draft proposal.

The proposal “would allow patenting of business methods, fundamental scientific principles, and mathematical equations, as long as they were performed on a computer,” said David Jones, representing HTIA. “A more stringent test is needed, and perhaps even required by the Constitution.”

Jones also cited recent research showing that the availability of business method patents actually lowered R&D among firms that sought those patents. After Alice limited their availability, the same companies that had been seeking those patents stopped doing so, and increased their research and development budgets.

The current legal test for patents is not arbitrary or harmful to innovation, Jones argued. On the contrary, the Alice-Mayo framework “has improved patent clarity and decreased spurious litigation.”

EFF’s Alex Moss also disagreed that the current case law was “a mess” or “confusing.” Rather than throw out decades of case law, she urged Congress to look to history to consider changes that could actually point the patent system towards promoting progress. 

“In the 19th century, when patent owners wanted to get a term extension, they would come to Congress and bring their accounting papers, and say—look how much we invested,” Moss explained. “I’d like to see that practical element, to make sure our patent system is promoting innovation—which is its job under the Constitution—and not just a proliferation of patents.”

At the conclusion of testimony, Sen. Tillis has said that he and Sen. Coons will take these testimonies into account as they work towards a bill that could be introduced as early as next month. We hope the Senators will begin to consider proposals that could improve the patent system, rather than open the door to the worst kinds of patents. In the meantime, please tell your members of Congress that the proposed bill is not the right solution. 

TAKE ACTION

TELL CONGRESS WE DON'T NEED MORE BAD PATENTS

Details of Justice Department Efforts To Break Encryption of Facebook Messenger Must Be Made Public, EFF Tells Court

Ruling Blocking DOJ Should Be Unsealed To Keep Public Informed About Anti-Encryption Tactics

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked a federal appeals court today to make public a ruling that reportedly forbade the Justice Department from forcing Facebook to break the encryption of a communications service for users.
Media widely reported last fall that a federal court in Fresno, California denied the government’s effort to compromise the security and privacy promised to users of Facebook’s Messenger application. But the court’s order and details about the legal dispute have been kept secret, preventing people from learning about how DOJ sought to break encryption, and why a federal judge rejected those efforts.
EFF, the ACLU, and Stanford cybersecurity scholar Riana Pfefferkorn told the appeals court in a filing today that the public has First Amendment and common law rights to access judicial opinions and court records about the laws that govern us. Unsealing documents in the Facebook Messenger case is especially important because the public deserves to know when law enforcement tries to compel a company that hosts massive amounts of private communications to circumvent its own security features and hand over users’ private data, EFF said in a filing  to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. ACLU and Pfefferkorn, Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, joined EFF’s request to unseal. A federal judge in Fresno denied a motion to unseal the documents, leading to this appeal.
Media reports last year revealed DOJ’s attempt to get Facebook to turn over customer data and unencrypted Messenger voice calls based on a wiretap order in an investigation of suspected M-13 gang activity. Facebook refused the government’s request, leading DOJ to try to hold the company in contempt. Because the judge’s ruling denying the government’s request is entirely under seal, the public has no way of knowing how the government tried to justify its request or why the judge turned it down—both of which could impact users’ ability to protect their communications from prying eyes.
“The ruling likely interprets the scope of the Wiretap Act, which impacts the privacy and security of Americans’ communications, and it involves an application used by hundreds of millions of people around the world,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker. “Unsealing the court records could help us understand how this case fits into the government’s larger campaign to make sure it can access any encrypted communication.’’
In 2016 the FBI attempted to force Apple to disable security features of its mobile operating system to allow access to a locked iPhone belonging to one of the shooters alleged to have killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California. Apple fought the order, and EFF supported the company’s efforts. Eventually the FBI announced that it had received a third-party tip with a method to unlock the phone without Apple's assistance. We believed that the FBI’s intention with the litigation was to obtain legal precedent that it could compel Apple to sabotage its own security mechanisms.  
“The government should not be able to rely on a secret body of law for accessing encrypted communications and surveilling Americans,” said EFF Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey. “We are asking the court to rule that every American has a right to know about rules governing who can access their private conversations.
For the motion:
https://www.eff.org/files/2019/06/12/e.c.f._9th_cir._19-15472_dckt_000_filed_2019-06-12.pdf

Contact:  Andrew Crocker Senior Staff Attorney andrew@eff.org Aaron Mackey Staff Attorney amackey@eff.org