Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Lights on fishing nets save turtles and dolphins

Placing lights on fishing nets reduces the chances of sea turtles and dolphins being caught by accident, new research shows.

You MUST play AI Dungeon 2, a text adventure game run by a neural net.

@nickwalton00 built it using @OpenAI's huge GPT-2-1.5B model, and it will respond reasonably to just about anything you try. Such as eating the moon.

https://aiweirdness.com/post/189511103367/play-ai-dungeon-2-become-a-dragon-eat-the-moon

Hung Out to Dry

A Florida congressional candidate threatened Rep. Ilhan Omar in a fundraising letter.

The Politics of Masochism

American voters are exceptionally good at voting against their own interests about a host of issues.

Jane Jacobs vs. The Power Brokers

How the patron saint of progressive urban planning’s ideas and ideals were implemented - and corrupted.

“Quite Divorced From Reality”: Climate Scientist, Activists Call Out Shell Exec at UN Conference

MADRID—A few dozen activists had packed a cramped meeting room at the UN climate negotiations, where executives from Shell Oil, Chevron and BP were to speak about their plans to tackle carbon emissions. Just as Shell executive Duncan van Bergen took the mic, the activists stood up solemnly and put their hands over their ears, slowly filing out of the room in protest of what they saw as false solutions.

Van Bergen was talking about the company’s high-profile but controversial new initiatives to invest in natural ecosystems to help reduce its own carbon footprint and that of its customers. The company has also signed on to a new “markets for natural climate solutions,” spearheaded by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), a trade association representing many of the world’s biggest polluters (including the three aforementioned oil giants).

The plan is for IETA, together with its partner companies, to create global markets to trade carbon credits (representing emission savings) generated from forestry, sustainable agriculture and other projects, akin to the way stocks or other financial instruments trade on financial markets. Once created, the credits can be bought, sold or traded by companies, governments and other investors, creating new revenue streams for companies trading in the credits. Carbon marketplaces like this are expected to become increasingly lucrative if the Paris Accord can boost investor confidence (thus far lagging) through, among other measures, establishing strong and transparent rules to ensure that the projects that underpin the credits actually remove the stated tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and establishing stringent carbon accounting rules to eliminate double counting.

Critics, however, denounced the new carbon trading plans as just the latest additions to Big Oil’s long history of misleading statements and outright greenwashing when it comes to climate change, an attempt to pad companies’ profits while avoiding other, more stringent forms of emissions reductions.

As the activists walked out, van Bergen responded to their silent rebuke: “We believe that nature has a role to play, not instead of but in addition to. A lot of hard work needs to happen to decarbonize energy, transportation, agriculture, and other sectors of the economy, and that work will require a lot of investment.”

While pro-business attendees applauded van Bergen when he later left the event, not everyone was impressed. “This is quite divorced from reality, what you are all discussing,” Simon Lewis, a climate science professor at University College London, told the oil executives during a Q+A. Lewis went on to explain to the audience that even if polluters invested in every nature conservation, sustainability agriculture or other “natural climate solution” in the world, those projects would only offset about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions; the vast majority of cuts would still have to come about through actual reductions in fossil fuel use. Given this, Lewis asked them to explain how the initiative was any different from other corporate schemes put forth in past decades—good PR that doesn’t actually tackle the problem.

In addition, carbon offset trading—which has been going on at smaller scales for decades—is no silver bullet. It has had mixed results to date, including failed projects, outright fraud, and human rights abuses against rural, indigenous and other vulnerable communities, prompting fierce opposition from grassroots climate organizations against including carbon trading in the Paris Accord. The carbon trading question is one of the remaining thorny issues country negotiators are supposed to iron out during this two-week climate conference, which ends December 13. The rules for such “market-based solutions” (included in what is technically known as Article 6 of Paris Agreement) were supposed to be decided at last year’s meeting, but countries remain far apart; in fact, some observers wonder if it won’t be punted off again until next year.

Meanwhile, the oil majors have yet to unveil a plan for reducing their own company emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, which calls for dramatically reducing fossil fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe.

“In 2019, to hear representatives of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies introduce discussions about dealing with emissions and not mention their own plans to get their emissions down to net-zero—shocking,” Lewis told In These Times after the event.

The Thursday afternoon side event is one of hundreds taking place at the UN climate summit, as delegates representing governments around the world negotiate final rules for carbon trading and other issues that are expected to define whether the United Nations’ process, now in its 25th year, successfully sets the world on a path toward heading off the worst impacts of climate change.

Scientists say this can only be done by keeping much of remaining fossil fuel reserves in the ground and transitioning swiftly to clean and renewable energy. To date, though, the oil majors have preferred to make vastly less significant and expensive climate change investments. Some—like the new marketplace unveiled Thursday—could conveniently even increase their profits.

In addition, this year Shell made a $300 million dollar green investment promise, going for the mantel of good corporate citizen BP once strove for. When Shell rolled out the initiative last April, The Nature Conservancy CEO proclaimed the company “the first in the industry to set near-term targets for the emissions of both its operations and its products.” The new IETA marketplace initiative has members of business-friendly nature conservation groups Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy on its advisory board.

But Shell, like the other oil majors, has a business model that relies on extracting fossil fuels and pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The five largest publicly traded oil and gas majors (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP and Total) have invested a combined total of more than $1 billion in recent years on misleading climate-related branding and lobbying, according InfluenceMap.org.

Some of the $300 million Shell has promised over the next three years may very well benefit ecosystems, biodiversity and local communities. But the investments will only bring down the company’s net carbon footprint by 3%, at best. And the company is planning to get a little help from its customers, given the option to pay a bit more when they fill up their gas tanks to offset their own emissions—a scheme Lewis characterized as greenwashing.

Social justice and indigenous rights activists who have flocked to the UN climate talks as independent observers are lobbying hard for the exclusion of carbon trading from the Paris Accord, though there is no indication that their views have swayed negotiators.

“When Shell is boasting that carbon markets are part of the Paris Agreement in part thanks to its lobbying, you know something is off,'' Nine de Pater, who co-organized the action, said in a statement. “The likes of Shell have no plans to reduce emissions in line with 1.5°C, and carbon markets allow them to buy credits and continue business as usual. We need to stop Shell, we need to kick polluters out and we need real climate solutions.”

Earlier Thursday, climate justice organizations including Friends of the Earth International, Indigenous Environmental Network, La Via Campesina, Asia People’s Movement on Debt and Development, It Takes Roots, SustainUS, Corporate Accountability International, and several others kicked off a day of protest against market solutions like the new IETA initiative.

Activists vowed to continue the fight against commodifying the Earth. They say the sky is not for sale. Several of the same groups also released a petition Thursday demanding that carbon markets not be including the so-called Paris Rulebook, which will govern how countries fulfill their pledges to bring down their country’s emissions.

Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network called for an end of CO2 colonialism and rejected trading schemes. “The Paris Agreement is full of market-based solutions … that are not solutions,” he said. “It’s a false solution.”

Why has it taken me so long to learn about set pgp_auto_decode=yes in mutt? So many mail clients skip MIME and just embed armored PGP in-line. #gamechanger

RT @UP_Rennes2@twitter.com

Toutes nos condoléances à la famille de cette Porsche venue manifester à Rennes. #5decembre

Recycling nutrient-rich industrial waste products enhances soil, reduces carbon

Recycling biotechnology byproducts can enhance soil health while reducing carbon emissions and maintaining crop yields.

Congrats to @AINowInstitute on this report, which provides important recommendations on how cities can use automated decision-making systems in fair and transparent ways. https://ainowinstitute.org/ads-shadowreport-2019.pdf https://t.co/WWkjayv32r

84% of the top 20 newspapers in circulation are owned by right wing billionaires

Woman whose vulva was probed by Burbank TSA "officers" who ignored her refusal sues
https://boingboing.net/2019/12/05/groin-search.html

The New Deal Funded the Arts. The Green New Deal Should, Too.

Near the end of his first term, as effects of the Depression lingered, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced growing popular clamor for dramatic economic action. In response, he launched a series of initiatives in 1935 that historians dub the Second New Deal. Among these audacious programs were the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided jobs for more than 8.5 million unemployed Americans. WPA workers built crucial infrastructure around the country, including the start of the federal highway system and hundreds of thousands of public buildings, parks and playgrounds.

The WPA also had a cultural wing that supported writers documenting the nation’s folklore (including the stories of elderly freed slaves), artists creating murals and statues for new public buildings, and playwrights and theater workers staging inexpensive performances across the country. WPA organizations like the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) brought art to the people and provided jobs for unemployed cultural workers— all while shining the spotlight on pressing political issues. The Green New Deal should learn from this: A federal Green Arts Project could help lift up radical solutions to corporate malfeasance in our own time, while creating huge numbers of low-carbon jobs.

In 1936, roughly 27 million Americans lived on farms, largely without electricity. As the science writer Waldemar Kaempffert argued in a New York Times editorial that year, electrification was a critical challenge for the United States, whose relatively weak federal government prevented it from launching the kind of nation-spanning modernization projects initiated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. 

This challenge underlined the inequities and dysfunctions of the United States’ capitalist economy. As Kaempffert explained, “Power companies are not philanthropic institutions. Investors look to them for dividends. If there is no market in a sparsely populated territory it is ruinous to electrify it, and this because it costs 10 times as much to distribute as to generate energy.” The logic of the market, in other words, not only acted against the public interest, but excluded a significant segment of the public—in particular, rural residents—from access to key infrastructure. As Kaempffert argued, “The profit motive must be subordinated to the obvious social duty of spreading the use of electricity.”

It was in this context that, in 1937, the Living Newspaper unit of the FTP debuted the playPower in New York City. Billed as “a thrilling dramatization of modern industry,” Power presented details of the corrupt dealings of the nation’s private, investor-owned electric utilities, such as rampant price fixing and other methods of gouging the public. Power challenged corporate control and corruption in media in two ways: on stage—showing how the big utilities bought off academics and newspapers to discredit the idea of publicly provided electricity—and off—by giving artists a space to produce critical accounts of timely social and political issues.

Power remains all too relevant. The nation’s dominant electric utilities are still in private hands, gouging ratepayers around the country. Worse still, saddled with massive fossil fuel assets, these monopolistic corporations are one of the major obstacles to a transition to renewable energy. Electric utilities largely rely on coal and natural gas and spend billions lobbying Congress in their interest.

The second half of Power documents the struggle to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the public entity that electrified much of the rural South. At the time Power was produced, the utilities were fighting TVA in the Supreme Court, but the FTP did not shy away from controversy; it was defined by its daring interventions. Under the direction of the pioneering female theater director and writer Hallie Flanagan, the FTP’s Living Newspaper unit assembled a team of journalists to gather factual information about an issue of public concern, then distributed the research to editors and writers to create narratives. The FTP’s focus on public power—in both senses—offers a suggestive model for today.

The Green New Deal, as outlined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and others, is self-evidently about transforming the country’s infrastructure. But like the New Deal, it also needs a cultural wing. The Green New Deal must, at bottom, be about changing people’s minds: about where power should come from and who has the right to generate it; about what a just transition for workers and affected communities should look like; about what constitutes a good life. While much has changed in U.S. culture since the 1930s, the corporate media is still failing to host these important conversations. When even supposedly enlightened companies like Google are contributing to climate change-denying think tanks, the public needs a space for media in the general interest.

We all know that a Green New Deal would involve massive public works: transforming the electrical grid to renewable energy; electrifying transportation; decarbonizing manufacturing; building millions of zero-carbon public buildings and social housing units; retrofitting existing buildings for efficiency and electrified heating and cooling; and totally revamping the country’s agricultural sector. All this will generate hundreds of thousands of wellpaying jobs that could lift entire communities out of economic and social oppression.

A federal Green Arts Project could boost such projects, too, by explaining the necessity and attractiveness of infrastructure like high-speed rail and zero-carbon social housing, using artforms that speak to the public more effectively than data ever could. Such a Green Arts Project could help dramatize the need for a just transition, one that attends to and rectifies the unevenness of environmental impacts.

The Green New Deal cannot just be about building more stuff. In fact, a crucial element of the Green New Deal must be figuring out how to consume much less without spurring mass unemployment. Capitalism as an economic system is inherently driven to grow or face crisis, which explains why CEOs sit around boardrooms figuring out how to get people to buy more Whoppers, 15-foot Rudolph-the-reindeer inflatables and Return of the Jedi wall clocks—wonders of consumer culture that make us sick and contribute to the destruction of ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest. All this economic growth has meant feeding more and more of the planet into the insatiable maw of capitalism. In the period from 1970 to 2017, as inequality skyrocketed, the global extraction of natural resources increased more than 240%. In 2017, the world extracted a staggering 92 billion tons of material stuff, from construction materials to metals to fossil fuels to food. The Global Footprint Network estimates that resource use overshoots, by more than 70% annually, what can be sustainably maintained.

While we should strive to increase our economic efficiency, the evidence shows that more growth inherently means more carbon emissions, and more extraction writ large. We ultimately must scale down global economic activity if we intend to avoid climate chaos, and build up new, low-extraction industries to avoid galloping unemployment. What we need is jobs that don’t involve working endlessly to make more useless stuff; instead, the Green New Deal should pay handsomely and connect people with one another. Building up the so-called social economy could include cooperative institutions for childcare, elder care, education and other services. It must also include cultural work.

The arts can be a low-extraction sector of the economy, and a Green Arts Project would clearly seek to support low-budget, minimal-impact ventures akin to the Federal Theatre Project rather than blockbuster Hollywood cinema. As with the FTP, the content of local productions could be tailored to local circumstances, allowing masses of people to consume relevant cultural productions without consuming lots of resources. And, as the model of Power suggests, a federal Green Arts Project could also allow writers and artists to catalyze important debates about corporate monopolies and the limits of economic growth.

Power could easily be updated for a contemporary audience. But in addition to such muckraking, a Green Theater Project might provide a forum to debate vexing questions about what public energy ought to look like: local and decentralized, largescale and federally run, or some combination? And how do we ensure that the energy transition is as just and democratic as possible?

There are obviously many complex technical issues behind these questions, about which members of the public need to be educated. But the challenge of creating renewable public power is ultimately a political, and even cultural, one. The American public needs new stories, ones that challenge dominant Hollywood narratives that suggest the climate crisis will inevitably devolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all. In place of such box office nihilism, we need visions of human empathy and solidarity in the face of ecological chaos. We need hope for a damaged people and planet. And to give it to us, we need an Arts Project for the Green New Deal.

Restorative Justice: A Better Model of Criminal Justice

re•stor•a•tive jus•tice

noun

A response to crime that prioritizes repairing the harm done to victims and communities

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" —Eleanor Roosevelt

What does that actually look like?

Restorative justice programs are increasingly common within schools and nonprofits, and 35 states have adopted legislation encouraging the practice. Mental health and drug courts aim to connect offenders with the treatment they need. Diversion programs allow young people to avoid the conventional juvenile justice system and meet with those affected by a crime (which can include the broader community, family of a victim or, if they so choose, the victim themselves) for a process of learning, mediation and restitution. Outcomes are non-punitive, and can include some form of direct assistance to the victim as well as commitments from the offender to various forms of community engagement (including but not limited to conventional community service).

This sounds touchy-feely.

Maybe. But restorative justice is also an urgently needed alternative to locking people up. In the U.S., one out of every 38 people is under some form of correctional supervision, a costly system that exacerbates racial and economic inequality without actually stopping crime. In 2015, the school district of Jefferson Parish, La., made headlines when a Black eighth-grade student was arrested and handcuffed in front of his class after throwing some Skittles. The district committed to a new discipline code and restorative justice training for teachers and staff, and in one school, suspensions—which are statistically four times more likely to be given to Black students—are down 56%.

So does restorative justice work?

It’s looking good! There’s solid evidence that drug courts and alternative juvenile justice courts are more effective at reducing recidivism than traditional approaches. In a number of studies, victims of crimes prefer restorative justice over the traditional court process, which can trigger the trauma of the crime all over again. This method does not require victims to forgive anyone—and they often do not—but, unlike conventional trials, the process is designed to heal, address root causes and prevent offenses from happening again. Programs labeled as restorative justice aren’t always a step in the right direction. There are concerns that fee-based or privately operated programs may actually exacerbate inequities. Viewed as part of a larger movement against mass incarceration and for a more peaceful society, however, restorative justice is an important philosophy.

This is part of “The Big Idea,” a monthly series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism. For recent In These Times coverage of restorative justice in action, see, "To End Mass Incarceration, We Must Rethink How We Respond to Violence" and "Trial by Peace Circle: How a Chicago Community Is Pursuing Jail-Free Justice."

Peloton Alternatives

Just ride your stationary bike and read an inspirational group text.

Lowering the Barr

The AG says you have to “respect” cops enough if you want their help.

@BernieOrVest For sure - Voter fraud will take place this election. It would be amazing if some people came up with a way to use social media to independently count votes - or make sure votes were counted equally - or something.

This is where social media is going to help our cause - in order to make their voter fraud more difficult for them and less harmful to us, we need to put everything out in the open, for the public to see.

Enter the MCU

Enter...the Irish-Man!

Chicago Police Department used fake profiles as a backdoor to private Facebook groups. https://apnews.com/a0c6091e5f234d93bc46948fde4723db

There's a lot to like about Sen. Cantwell’s new Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, or COPRA. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/sen-cantwell-leads-new-consumer-data-privacy-bill