Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Living in a noisy area increases the risk of suffering a more serious stroke

The high levels of environmental noise we are subjected to in large cities can increase both the severity and consequences of an ischaemic stroke. More precisely, researchers put the increased risk at 30% for people living in noisier areas. In contrast, living close to green areas brings down this risk by up to 25%. This is the first time that these factors have been analysed in relation to stroke severity.

Play Ball

Overlord Trump can’t catch a break from the mutant rabble!

Photo Black Ops

Obama’s White House photographer suggests that Trump’s Al-Baghdadi situation room photo was staged.

Extent of human encroachment into world's protected areas revealed

Largest study yet to compare protected with 'matched' unprotected land finds 'significantly higher' increases in human pressure -- primarily through agriculture -- in protected areas across the tropics. Researchers argue that efforts to increase coverage may not help save wildlife unless protecting land 'on paper' is backed up by funding and local community engagement.

Make-Believe

Witch culture IS your costume, actually.

Over the Last Week, At Least 85,000 Workers Were Out on 13 Different Strikes

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 485,000 U.S. workers were involved in strikes and lockouts during 2018. That’s the highest number since 1986. The data for 2019 won’t be released until 2020, but there’s a good chance that number will be exceeded, a point driven home by the fact that, over the last week, at least 85,000 workers participated in 13 different strikes across the United States.

Delays May Occur

If the music’s loud enough, it’ll drown out all that incriminating testimony!

The Death of the Kurdish Dream

It briefly looked like the Kurds would get their own independent state. What happened?

The Postal Service Is the Most Popular Federal Agency in America. Let’s Massively Expand It.

For most of its 244-year existence, the United States Postal Service (USPS) was widely considered as an innovative powerhouse binding the American experiment together. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French diplomat who toured America in the 1830s, called it a “great link between minds.” During World War I, the post office teamed with the Department of Agriculture to institute a “Farm to Table” program to help distribute produce and other nutrient-rich foods across the country. Today, USPS stands as Americans’ favorite federal agency.

Since the 1970s, however, a combination of financial woes and political attacks have wounded the post office. What would it take to return USPS to a pioneering force capable of addressing our country’s multiple crises? Why not leverage the nearly 250,000 letter carriers and over 30,000 post offices that blanket all 50 states for more than just mail delivery? Why not expand the workforce and presence of the American public’s most favored government agency?

With mega companies like Amazon vying for the future of delivery, and conservatives increasingly calling for privatization, the U.S. Postal Service needs a makeover, not a dismantling.

In an era of little faith in government, a reimagined postal service could demonstrate how public solutions can solve many of our collective problems, from climate change to a predatory financial industry. That’s exactly what the post office did in the country’s early days.

As journalist Winifred Gallagher describes in her 2016 book How the Post Office Created America, universal mail service helped spark a communications revolution rivaling that of the telegraph through slashing the price of correspondence and buoying westward expansion. The 1792 Postal Act effectively underwrote newspaper circulation, spreading national and global news across the newly formed states and territories. 

In 1897, a resident of the Arizona Territory wrote to the Postmaster General, “I am more than ever proud of being an American citizen. I live three and a half miles from the Tempe post office, and have been sick for a week past, yet my mail is brought to my door every morning, except Sunday.” The abolitionist John Brown served as a local postmaster before making his contribution to emancipation, just as did Abraham Lincoln.

But by 2001, as first-class mail usage began to decline, and scares of anthrax increased following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, USPS’s financial losses were growing. Five years later, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, limiting its ability to innovate beyond the delivery of mail and packages, just as the internet began to boom. The law also required the agency, which receives no taxpayer dollars, to make annual payments of $5.5 billion for ten years to fund the healthcare of its future retirees. Today, the postal service continues to bleed money despite delivering more packages than ever due to e-commerce.

As calls for privatization mount, the agency still manages to innovate within its limited mandate. Letter carriers deliver “last mile” parcels for FedEx and UPS, helping keep both corporations’ services affordable. The agency has also built the world’s largest gantry robotic fleet, which moves 314,000 mail trays per day.

Handing over the keys to the private sector would run counter to USPS’s stated purpose of connecting every American home and business, no matter how remote. Private corporations, following the whims of the market, would likely charge more for delivery in less dense, rural areas, while pricing out low-income residents everywhere.

True modernization would expand the agency’s ability to serve the common good, not undermine it.

Post office locations could provide free Wi-Fi access, computers with access to government services, printers, and public meeting rooms. Clerks could provide drivers’ license renewal, multilingual translation, help with immigration processing and other services. The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) has proposed expanding vote by mail, providing follow-up census services, and notary, among other services.

The buildings themselves could be used to extend broadband infrastructure and be fitted with green technology like solar panels, electric car charging stations and rooftop farms. USPS’s Los Angeles mail processing facility has 31,000 solar panels, making it one of the city’s largest buildings generating electricity through solar. Depending on their location, some buildings could even be rebuilt as community-controlled, mixed-use development, to include affordable housing.

USPS could also return to providing affordable banking services, as it did from 1911 to 1967. In addition to the international and domestic money orders it already sells, the post office could allow Americans to collect savings, cash paychecks, transfer money electronically and pay bills. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently introduced such postal banking legislation aimed at curbing predatory lending practices. Such a move would help catch the country up with the rest of the world: Less than 10% of post offices across the globe do not currently offer basic financial services.  

None of these ideas are as revolutionary as it was to blanket the country with post offices. Yet, a truly modern postal service would be more than the sum of its parts. It would help restore confidence in the public sector’s role in serving the common good, at a time when faith in government seems so hard to come by.

Exxon accurately predicted 2019's climate change and CO2 emission in 1982:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368593

Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people...

When do the #clocks change around the #world? And why? | News | The Guardian

Abolish the #DaylightSavingTime charade!

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/oct/21/spring-forward-fall-back-who-changes-the-clocks-when-and-why

Study casts doubt on carbon capture
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191025170810.htm #climatechange #climatecrisis

They Know What You Watched Last Night

Recent deals involving the media conglomerate AT&T, the streaming device seller Roku, the advertising giant Publicis and other companies have expanded the surveillance infrastructure that operates in the background of streaming services. While viewers focus on the action onscreen, tracking technology quietly sops up information about their habits and uses it to target them with more relevant, traceable ads. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/business/media/streaming-data-collection-privacy.html #privacy #security

The Return of The Limits of Growth:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-01-10/return-limits-growth/

Five years from now: "Whoops, it turns out we trained our AI on existing staff so it finds white men most trustworthy. Sorry everybody, we were told AI was unbiased." https://www.maketecheasier.com/face-scanning-ai-judge-job-applicants/

Climate Change-Fighting Youth Need Adult Allies. Their Teachers Should Be First in Line.

On September 20, millions of young people staged a worldwide strike to demand government action on climate change. The New York Times reported, “Rarely, if ever, has the modern world witnessed a youth movement so large and wide, spanning across societies rich and poor, tied together by a common if inchoate sense of rage.”

Something unprecedented is happening among the world’s young people. The youth-led climate movement successfully ramped up the pressure on political leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, and it only continues to grow. But young people can’t do it alone. They need adult allies, and their teachers should be the first to join them. After all, teachers have gone through a similar experience finding their voice through a wave of strikes for public education that have rocked the country—including my union, the Chicago Teachers Union, that currently has over 25,000 workers on the picket line.

Teachers are the people who are supposed to be educating our children about the dangers of climate change. With mere years left before it’s too late, the time is now for teachers to follow their students’ lead and help carry their message into the classrooms, the streets and the halls of power.

Energy behind the climate movement surged as a result of a young girl from Sweden named Greta Thunberg, who decided to take dramatic action for climate justice. She describes in her TED talk that after learning about the climate crisis at the age of 8, she fell into a deep depression and refused to eat, talk or go to school. She couldn’t understand how nothing was being done to solve this horrific problem. Instead of solutions big enough to address the problem, she only heard the common refrain: reduce, reuse, recycle.

At that time, Thunberg was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism. Nevertheless, in August of 2018, at age 15, Greta began protesting outside the Swedish Parliament. By November of that year, her School Strike for Climate had spread to 112 countries involving an estimated 1.4 million people.  Since then, the movement has only continued to grow, with the most recent strike in September ballooning to an estimated 4 million participants. 

Part of Thunberg’s appeal is that she fearlessly speaks truth to power. In one of her speeches ahead of the recent UN Climate Action Summit, she patiently explained that if we continue our current level of CO2 emissions, we will likely reach a tipping point by 2030, making it impossible to undo a climate catastrophe. Most of us have heard about what this catastrophe will look like: devastating flooding, hurricanes, droughts and wildfires that will lead to mass-extinctions, wide-spread crop failure, famine, millions of climate refugees and unanticipated military conflicts around the world.

Of course, many of these climate impacts are already beginning to take shape. That’s when many of us fall into despair and get stuck. What can we do to counter a problem so immense? For Thunberg and millions of young people, there is no other choice but to join together to demand government solutions on the scale necessary to solve the problem. That means working to pass a Green New Deal.

Our students deserve to understand what Thunberg has learned. They have the right to know what’s at stake and how they can join with others to solve this crisis before it’s too late. To people young and old around the world, Thunberg is a climate hero. But it was only once she found a way to take action that she was able to overcome her depression and transform her personal adversities into strengths in the fight that has become her calling. It is our job to teach our students about the crisis, but also what they can do about it.

Imagine a curriculum that engages students by studying the life of Greta Thunberg and other inspiring youth leaders like Isra Hirsi, the 16-year-old daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Hirsi is the director of US Youth Climate Strike and a leading organizer of the recent mobilizations. Students can watch the group’s videos, analyze their speeches and grapple with the data they use. A number of texts have come out that could come in handy, including Thunberg’s book No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference and Greta’s Story: The Schoolgirl Who Went on Strike to Save the Planet, also available in Spanish.

By learning about these young activists making history, students will ask, What needs to be done to stop climate change? But also, What qualities enable them to be such effective leaders for the climate? and in Thunberg’s case, How might being differently abled actually be an extraordinary asset? These are the types of discussions that move kids from climate despair toward action for climate justice.

Here are some more ideas for how teachers can join the movement for climate justice:

Try planning a few lessonson climate change and climate justice for your students. With a little help from the internet, this could lead to a unit of study or a school-wide Earth Day event. Use the recent news to strike up a conversation with a colleague and get the ball rolling.
Start a climate education working group in your school, union or district. Search out professional development on teaching climate change and climate justice. Ask the important questions: What are people doing to fight for a just transition to a carbon-free future? What are the public policies we need to make it happen? How can we make sure all teachers feel equipped to teach about the climate problem and solution?
Push for laws to put comprehensive climate education in every school. Work with your union to push for legislation and district policies that mandate climate education across the grades and subjects. Borrow tactics from the victory in Portland, OR where the school board passed the first comprehensive climate justice initiative of a major city in the United States.
Support substantive climate legislation. In Illinois, climate organizers are working to pass the Clean Energy Jobs Act: a bill that would lead to 100% clean renewable energy in the state, decarbonizing the electric grid by 2030. Learn about the Green New Deal and get your union behind it.
Make a plan with your union for the next time students mobilize for climate justice. Call on districts to follow the lead of teachers in New York and Chicago and allow students to protest without the threat of punishment.
Connect climate justice to the fight for racial and economic justice. As public school teachers, we are already active in efforts for educational equity, justice for immigrants and communities of color. Look beyond the school walls and you’ll find that people are also coming together to fight against big polluters that are endangering many working-class communities of color. These fights are directly linked to the fight for climate justice and bring the people most impacted by environmental degradation into the struggle for a climate solution.
Organize a protest that your friends and coworkers would actually attend. You shouldn’t have to call in sick to protest for climate action. The choice can’t be strike or do nothing. Let’s lower the barrier to entry for working adults and hold large after-work rallies the next time students call us to action. This can build for even more dramatic forms of protest in the future.

Teachers have always put their heart and soul into helping nuture the next generation. That passion has led us to rise up in the hundreds of thousands across the country to improve conditions in our nation’s public schools. We’ve found that when we take to the streets and speak directly to the public with one clear voice, meaningful change is possible. This newfound power can also be leveraged for climate justice. Our future and the future of our young people depend on it.

GIS-based analysis of fault zone geometry and hazard in an urban environment

Typical geologic investigations of active earthquake fault zones require that the fault can be observed at or near the Earth's surface. However, in urban areas, where faults present a direct hazard to dense populations, the surface expression of a fault is often hidden by development of buildings and infrastructure. This is the case in San Diego, California, where the Rose Canyon fault zone trends through the highly developed downtown.

Why We Need Young People To Run the Country—And Why I’m Voting for Bernie Anyway

Young people are badly underrepresented in the U.S. government.  The average age of Senators is currently 63, a full 25 years older than the median U.S. resident. In the House, it’s 58. The four leading presidential contenders, including Trump, are all in their 70s. Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972—he has been one of the planet’s most powerful people for nearly half a century, longer than most have been alive.

Politics is often construed as noble public service, but it is also a tremendous privilege. Federal officeholders wield power over not only U.S. voters but also many who have no say in our elections, including residents of other countries and those under 18. In fact, climate change, nuclear war and environmental pollution have the potential to affect all life on this planet for centuries if not millennia to come.

Probably no single government should have such power. At the least, a supposed democracy should share this power as widely as possible. In reality, most ordinary people never get near it.

Over time, this power corrupts. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) reports: “Behind closed doors, your arm is twisted, the vise pressure of political pressure gets put on you, every trick in the book, psychological and otherwise, is used to get us to abandon the working class.”

“As a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met,” wrote Barack Obama of his 2004 Senate campaign in The Audacity of Hope. “I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality and frequent hardship of the other 99%. … I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions.”

The youth counterculture of the 1960s used to claim that you can’t trust anyone over 30. Obama’s words suggest that you can’t trust anyone who’s held federal office for over 30 years.

The ancient Athenians would have agreed. They believed elections favor the wealthy and influential, instead appointing (male, non-slave) citizens to political positions for one-year terms through random selection.

Despite high-profile successes such as the victory of Ocasio-Cortez (age 30) over Joe Crowley (age 57), most Congressional incumbents can rest relatively easy, with well above an 80% likelihood of reelection. What we get is an insulated class of professional politicians, propped up by a relatively wealthy and old donor class. As Astra Taylor argues in the New York Times, structural obstacles from age limits to economic precarity to the Senate’s rural-state bias hinder young people (who disproportionately live in cities) from entering politics.

On the surface, this may seem only a modest injustice—can’t millennials just wait our turn? But the importance of youth representation becomes clear when you begin to consider climate change: The old folks in Congress will die before the worst impacts hit. (While the elderly poor are already getting slammed by heat waves and storms, the elderly poor are not who sit in Congress.) They can dismiss youth-led calls for a Green New Deal as a “green dream, or whatever” (Nancy Pelosi, 79), knowing they will be safely in the grave while future generations struggle to make a life among the wreckage. An aging elite is refusing to “pass the torch”—and using that torch to set the planet alight. As Greta Thunberg asked: How dare they?

Of course, age should not be the only factor in making our presidential decisions. It is perhaps ironic that the oldest candidate, Bernie Sanders, has the most ambitious plan to rein in climate change, student debt and war, all issues disproportionately affecting the youth; he also eschews corporate fundraising and, according to Ocasio-Cortez, who recently endorsed him, has maintained “consistent and nonstop advocacy” for the 99% despite his 34 years in elected office. This is probably why the vast plurality of millennials planning to vote in the Democratic primary—this author included—back him.

It is probably not coincidence, however, that the long-tenured Sanders has been reluctant to embrace such institutional reforms as abolishing the filibuster or expanding the Supreme Court. Several younger candidates, such as Pete Buttigieg (37) and Kamala Harris (55), are much more open, as is Elizabeth Warren (70). Their relative youth and newness to politics may give them a fresher perspective on how government should be operated. (Warren, although just eight years younger than Sanders, has only held elected office since 2013.)

In fact, Buttigieg, the youngest candidate at 37, introduced “intergenerational justice” as a campaign theme and has voiced the strongest support for court packing. (Unfortunately, the details of his court-packing plan are needlessly convoluted and, like his whole campaign, leave much to be desired.)

Sanders’ other electoral weaknesses—his improved but imperfectmessaging around raceandgender; baggage and old grudges from 2016 (not totally his fault); concerns about his heart—also correlate with age and length of time in politics. All of this suggests that “passing the torch” to a younger, more diverse suite of left politicians will need to happen sooner than later.

It is to his credit that Sanders is doing this, both directly and indirectly. The organization that came out of his 2016 campaign, Our Revolution, is actively working to build up new progressive leadership at every level of government. And many of the young people mobilized by that campaign have gone on to hold office, from Ocasio-Cortez to socialist Chicago alderman Andre Vasquez (now 40). Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn., age 38), too, says she was inspired to run for Congress by the Sanders campaign.

We may have seen a glimpse of the future in New York this October, where Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez shared a stage before an audience of 26,000.

“Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt, even if you are not?” Sanders asked to close his speech. “Are you willing to fight for a future for generations of people who have not yet even been born, but are entitled to live on a planet that is healthy and habitable? Because if you are willing to do that, if you are willing to love, if you are willing to fight for a government of compassion and justice and decency … [then] together we will transform this country.”

Later, in a joint interview, Ocasio-Cortez was asked whether she would work in a Sanders administration. Bernie jumped in: “Yes, you would!”

This is part of a debate about whether age matters in a presidential candidate. Read the first entry, “Ageism Has No Place in a Presidential Election,“ by Susan Douglas, here.