Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Say no to the search of your devices! Check out EFF's three-pack of "I Do Not Consent" stickers and share them with friends! https://supporters.eff.org/shop/i-do-not-consent-search-device-sticker-3-pack-0

We are living in an age where everything from clothing to furniture to technology is cheap and disposable. The assumption is that nothing lasts, so one might as well buy the cheapest thing and throw it away when it inevitably breaks. Nowhere is this more true than the phone market, but it's something we want to change with the Librem 5.

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-longevity-solving-the-problem-of-disposable-technology/

Floral foam adds to microplastic pollution problem

First study to examine the environmental effects of floral foam finds the plastic material, which breaks into tiny pieces, can be eaten by a range of freshwater and marine animals and affect their health.

Hayden explains that Russian, Chinese, and Saudi authorities will also seek exceptional access backdoors.

Proposals to get around encryption, like client-side scanning, open the door to abuses by those authoritarian regimes and other bad actors.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/why-adding-client-side-scanning-breaks-end-end-encryption

The War of a Lifetime

18+ years and a boatful of lies into our imperial adventure in Afghanistan, and what have we got?

The GOP vs Reality

Nothing is true and everything is possible.

The Democratic Case for Impeaching Trump

Why was the U.S. giving money to Ukraine in the first place?

Climate Change Is Fueling a Farming Boom in Alaska

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—Snow is on the mountains. There’s a nip in the October air. Patches of dirt are freezing. But reminders of the past summer’s heat are poking out of the ground at the tiny Grow North Farm.

The dried stalks are leftovers of what might seem an unlikely Alaska crop: dodo plants, a member of the amaranth family, which produces leafy, collard-like greens and grains in sub-Saharan Africa and South America.

These plants were cultivated by a Congolese family that, after three years in Anchorage, wanted to bring a taste of home. The crop was wildly successful during Anchorage’s sweltering summer, during which temperatures hit 90 degrees for the first time on record, says Nick Bachman of Anchorage Community Land Trust, the nonprofit that operates Grow North Farm.

“What we found with the dodo was: Just add water,” Bachman says.

This 28,000-square-foot urban farm is surrounded by a gas station, a strip mall, a middle school and rows of apartments. It was carved from a lot that once held an RV park, a remediation and construction project that took years. The farm, with more than 20 independent growers operating plots, opened this spring.

It is not the only new farm in Alaska.

From 2012 to 2017, the number of farms increased by 30% while total U.S. farms dropped by more than 3%, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2017 Census of Agriculture. Alaska’s growth is largely in small farms of 1 to 9 acres—up 73% those same years. The value of farm goods sold directly to consumers doubled from $2.2 million to $4.4 million in that time—still less than almost any other state, but growing fast.

Like much of the country, Alaska is gripped by a local-food movement with a range of benefits, including economic opportunities for immigrants and newly settled refugees. Many of the new arrivals were smallscale farmers in their home countries, Bachman says.

But there is a special force behind Alaska’s farming boomlet: climate change.

Alaska is warming twice as fast as the global rate, and changes in the state are accelerating. Of Alaska’s 10 warmest years since the late 1800s, eight have occurred since 2000, according to the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That doesn’t include 2019, which has smashed heat records.

As Alaska warms, its growing season has lengthened—in Fairbanks, for example, by 45% since 1900, according to a 2009 study—enabling the cultivation of new crops such as corn, cherries and dodo.

Climate change also makes Alaskan farming more urgent.

In May, the Anchorage city government adopted a climate action plan warning that extreme weather events will delay food imports, on which Alaskans have near-total reliance. The plan encourages urban farming and gardening.

Local farming also reduces carbon footprints. Almost all of the small-scale farmers who use the Grow North site, Bachman says, walk there or use public transit. After harvest, farmers sell from the open-air sales stand at the entrance—no fossil-fuel vehicles required.

The farming trend extends to rural Alaska, where there is a higher Native Alaskan population and traditional wild foods are becoming more difficult to obtain. The overheated waters of western Alaska caused mass die-offs of salmon this year, for example, and thinning ice on the rivers and seas makes hunting far more treacherous. Though agriculture is not generally part of indigenous tradition, farms and gardens are now helping fill the gaps.

Farming does have some Alaska-specific challenges. Ashley Taborsky, of the blog Alaska Urban Hippie, has converted her south Anchorage yard to a miniature farm with fencing to moose-proof her young apple and cherry trees. So far, unlike some Alaskan farmers, she has not had bears successfully raid her chicken coop.

There are also advantages.

Alaska, for now, lacks many of the pests that plague southern farms. Relatively cool temperatures and extended summer daylight stimulate sugar production in root vegetables (Alaska carrots are famous for their sweetness) and, sometimes, immense proportions: a giant cabbage weigh—off is a revered ritual at the Alaska State Fair in the Matanuska Valley town of Palmer, with a world-record 138.25-pound specimen winning in 2012.

Matanuska became Alaska’s farming heartland in the 1930s, thanks to a New Deal program that lured Midwestern farmers north. But the 1970s oil boom, combined with the rise of agribusiness in the lower 48, put the farming sector in a slump. Alaskan farmers struggled to compete with imported, massproduced foods and struggled to resist the temptation to cash in, selling off farmland to accommodate the oil-fueled population influx.

Today, Alaska’s oil production is about a quarter of its 1980s peak.

“If oil is declining, then what’s next?” Bachman says. “I think there is a unique opportunity to allow local foods … to become a larger wedge of the economy.”

Bob Shumaker, owner of Black Bear Farms in Palmer and a former president of the Alaska Farmers Union, hopes agriculture expands with a revived northward migration of farmers.

“Everybody down south who’s too hot—move to Alaska,” he says. “It’s great.” 

A Little Malarkey

Joe Biden tells one of his straightforward tales.

If I Were a Rich Girl

These billionaires are selfish idiots...Nothing at all what I’d be like!

From Victories to Union Militancy, 5 Reasons for Workers to Celebrate This Labor Day

Labor Day often gets short shrift as a worker’s holiday. Marked primarily by sales on patio furniture and mattresses, the day also has a more muddled history than May Day, which stands for internationalism and solidarity among the working class. Labor Day, by contrast, was declared a federal holiday in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland, fresh off his administration’s violent suppression of the Pullman railroad strike.

'Hypocrites': Teens Roast UN Climate Talks, Take Over the Streets
https://earther.gizmodo.com/hypocrites-teens-roast-un-climate-talks-take-over-the-1840271423 #climatechange #climatecrisis

Trump Has Quietly Implemented a Far-Right Takeover of the Courts That Will Last Generations

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rammed through eight of President Donald Trump's lifetime judicial picks in just three days this week, accelerating the far-right court takeover that Vox's David Roberts warned is "absolutely going to hamstring efforts to make the U.S. into a responsible, civilized country, for as long as we live."

The latest slew of confirmations, according to Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur, means that Trump and his Federalist Society allies have now hand-picked "about one in every five American federal judges," or 170 judges total.

"Nearly all are in their 40s or 50s with lifetime appointments and positioned to shape American law for generations," Kapur noted on Twitter. "It gets a tiny fraction of attention compared to other stuff he does but this is the Trump legacy that'll echo for generations after he's gone."

The Republican-controlled Senate confirmed one lifetime judicial nominee Tuesday, five Wednesday, and two Thursday. The rapid confirmation of Trump nominees was made possible by McConnell's decision earlier this year to invoke the so-called "nuclear option," which slashed debate time on judicial nominees from 30 hours to just two.

"We're appalled," the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights tweeted Thursday in response to the latest confirmations.

Progressive advocacy groups and legal experts have warned that these right-wing judges will have the power to shape U.S. law on climate, reproductive rights, and other major areas for decades to come. At a rally in Kentucky last month, McConnell bragged that he and Trump are "changing the federal courts forever."

In addition to being overwhelmingly young and far-right, a number of Trump's judicial appointments have also received a "not qualified" rating from the American Bar Association. One such judge, Federalist Society member Sarah Pitlyk, was condemned as particularly horrifying by rights groups following her confirmation Wednesday.

"Sarah Pitlyk's confirmation to the district court in Missouri is a dream come true for the anti-choice movement and a profound danger to women and families in the state," Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a statement. "Putting judges like Pitlyk on the bench who will spend their lifetime appointments working to roll back reproductive freedom is further proof that Donald Trump is paying back his debts and then some to the anti-choice movement that got him elected."

In the face of the ongoing right-wing takeover of the federal judiciary, advocacy groups are pressuring 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to explain how they would work to reform the nation's court system in order to enact progressive policy changes.

"Without a meaningful plan for court reform any presidential attempts to make needed change will simply by blocked by the courts," said Emma Janger, co-director of the People's Parity Project, a nationwide network of progressive attorneys and law students.

As Common Dreams reported in October, advocacy group Demand Justice launched a campaign urging Democratic presidential contenders to emphasize the importance of the federal courts and tell the public how they plan to break the right's stranglehold on the judiciary.

"The GOP has hijacked our nation's courts," said Demand Justice, "and voters need to hear plans to fight back."

This story was first posted atCommon Dreams.

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.”