Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The only good alternative to cash I've seen as of yet is GNU Taler. All the crypto bullshit making us dependent on shady consortiums of whoever has the most cycles to waste, or worse (PoS) whoever has the most money.

And now Facebook and co. just trying to shackle us to their corporate grip by pretending to make a cryptocurrency when really they're just making Zuck dollars to get even more power and influence

A Researcher Found a Bunch of Voting Machine Passwords Online

A little more than a week ago the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it was going to forensically analyze computer equipment associated with part of the 2016 elections in North Carolina in association with questions about Russian hacking. The news prompted an information security researcher to announce last week that he’d found evidence of […]

Facebook bucks: a real-world Evil-Coin, with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook. Just what all of us have been waiting for!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-new-cryptocurrency-gets-big-backers-11560463312

Space Force Yes! Baby Nukes No! What Congress Is Sticking in the Pentagon Budget.

Congress completed its most significant step toward funding the Pentagon for the next year—and it only took close to 21 hours. By 6:53 a.m. this morning, when House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) gaveled his panel out of session, members had resurrected President Trump’s beloved Space Force, blocked the Pentagon from using so-called […]

Elizabeth Warren Just Unveiled a Plan to Close the Racial Wealth Gap

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a plan Friday to close the racial wealth gap by issuing $7 billion in grants to entrepreneurs of color. The grants could be used for startup capital to support an estimated 100,000 new minority-owned businesses, potentially creating 1.1 million jobs. “Every American should have a fair shot at starting a […]

Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan for Winning the White House, and Right Now It’s Working

Elizabeth Warren is having what political reporters like to call “a moment.” This policy maven seeking the White House has risen to third place in the Real Clear Politics national polling average of Democratic voters, trailing frontrunner Joe Biden and second-placer Bernie Sanders but surpassing Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. Better yet for Warren, she […]

Here Comes “Uncle Joe”!

Biden is just like your REAL uncle! Yeah.

The Texas “Fairies Fiasco”

In the 1970s, a San Antonio gay bar staged a unique protest against police harassment: a play.

Did you know that you can check out source code for things Purism works on (such as Librem One applications and bits relating to the upcoming Librem 5 smartphone) right from https://source.puri.sm?

Source code should be Free.

That's just how we roll.

Revealed: #UK #government failing to tackle rise of serious #air #pollutant | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/13/revealed-uk-government-failing-to-tackle-rise-of-ammonia-serious-air-pollutant

#Pollution #Ammonia #Agriculture

So, Blackwater founder/war criminal Erik Prince goes full Leopold II and expands operations in Democratic Republic of Congo, with a mandate to extract minerals and timber and conduct financial operations
https://af.reuters.com/article/idAFKCN1TE23M-OZATP

Why The Intercept is Reporting on Secret Brazil Archive https://prismo.xyz/posts/09df360e-cfec-457f-aa27-95d2dbd21d11

The Last Black Man in San Francisco’s Walking Tour of a Lost City

Around the bend of Bernal Heights Park, along the path they used to walk as teenagers, Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails marveled at the scene before them: a trio of people contorting their bodies on yoga mats on an edge overlooking the stark high-rises of downtown San Francisco, the Salesforce Tower rising like a monstrous […]

Rent Control Mainly Helps . . . the Affluent

Because I’m a neoliberal shill I’ve never been a big fan of rent control. I figure that if you want to help poor and working-class folks afford the rent in big cities, you should just let the market work normally and then give them money or vouchers or whatnot that they can use toward their […]

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.