Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Microbes from humics lakes surprise – bacteria and algae produced omega-3 fatty acids from microplastics

The environmental fate of microplastics has been difficult to trace. A research group used carbon isotope labeling to follow the fate of polyethylene in the food chain. To the researchers surprise, plastic carbon was transformed into beneficial fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6, by the microbes originating from humic lakes.

https://www.codepink.org/01042020
Anti-war protests in 60 cities today

Why I'll never install cloud-based security cams...

Google Home Hub shows stills of other people's Xiaomi security cameras:

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/eine1m/when_i_load_the_xiaomi_camera_in_my_google_home/

Mutt running natively on my #Librem5 #Chestnut phone--just needed to install the deb and scp my mutt settings from a different computer. #livingthedream

To Stop Trump’s War with Iran, We Must Also Confront the Democrats Who Laid the Groundwork

Since President Trump took office in 2017, the leadership of the Democratic Party has overwhelmingly supported the precursors  to today’s dangerous U.S. escalation towards Iran: sanctions, proxy battles and a bloated military budget. Yet, now that we stand on the brink of a possible U.S. war of aggression, Democratic leaders are feigning concern that Trump is leading a march to  war without congressional approval, and using a faulty strategy to do so. These objections, however, are grounded in process critiques, rather than moral opposition—and belie Democrats’ role in helping lay the groundwork for the growing confrontation.

The U.S. drone assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force and a ranking official of the Iranian government, takes confrontation with Iran to new heights, inching the U.S. closer to the war the Trump administration has been pushing for. While Trump deserves blame for driving this dangerous escalation, he did not do it on his own.

As recently as December 2019, the House overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020 with a vote of 377-48. Two amendments were stripped from that bill before it went to a vote: Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-Calif.) amendment to block funding for a war with Iran barring congressional approval and Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-Calif.) amendment to repeal 2001’s “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists” (AUMF). That AUMF effectively allows the government to use "necessary and appropriate force" against anyone suspected of being connected to the 9/11 attacks, and has been interpreted broadly to justify U.S. aggression around the world. Officials from the Trump administration have suggested that the 2001 AUMF may give them authority to go to war with Iran.

Of the 377 Representatives who voted for the $738 billion defense bill, 188 were Democrats. Just 41 Democrats opposed the legislation. The bill cleared the Senate with a tally of 86-8, with just four Democrats voting against it. None of the Senators running for the 2020 Democratic nomination were present for the vote. Before the vote, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor to brag about the fact that “partisan demands” had effectively been removed from the bill and declared that “sanity and progress” had won out. “Reassuringly, the past few days have finally brought an end to bipartisan talks and produced a compromise NDAA,” said McConnell.

At the time of the bill’s passage, 31 organizations, including Yemeni Alliance Committee and the National Iranian American Council Action, put out a joint statement condemning the NDAA as a looming disaster destined to be abused by the Trump administration. “The NDAA is a massive blank check,” reads the statement. “The authorization of $738 billion is obscene. Further inflating the Pentagon’s overstuffed coffers does not make us safer—it perpetuates a system that treats military intervention as the solution to all world problems.” Despite these concerns, Democrats did not put up much of a fight, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus declined to whip the vote against the NDAA.

Democrats’ complicity doesn’t stop with bloated war budgets. In July 2017, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was the only lawmaker in both the House and the Senate who caucuses with the Democrats to vote against a bill that bundled together sanctions on Iran, Russia and North Korea. Democrats didn’t just vote for the bill—their leadership in the House helped make the decision to tie the sanctions together, and proponents of the bill used anti-Russia rhetoric to ram it through Congress. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the Intercept at the time, “I just looked at the sanctions, and it’s very hard, in view of what we know just happened in this last election, not to move ahead with [sanctions].”

Sanders was clear that he opposed the bill because of his opposition to sanctions on Iran, but supported sanctions against Russia and North Korea, which are also aggressive and harmful to the people of those countries. Still, he was demonized by some in the Democratic establishment. As we previously reported, Adam Parkhomenko, former Hillary Clinton aide and founder of the Ready for Hillary PAC, said on Twitter at the time, “Feel the Bern? Bernie Sanders voted against Russian sanctions today. 98 Senators voted for Russian sanctions today. Sanders voted the same way anyone with the last name Trump would vote if they were in the Senate. No excuses―stop making them for him.”

When Trump—surrounded by hawkish advisors—pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in May of 2018, the Democratic establishment roundly criticized him, often citing the supposed threat posed by Iran, even though the country has no nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. intelligence agencies’ own assessments. “The president's willingness to shatter the international consensus, forged over years of arduous negotiations, on how to constrain Iran's nuclear program only makes sense as part of a campaign to erase his predecessor's legacy, regardless of the consequences to our national security,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said at the time.

Yet, Democrats’ previous support for sanctions already violated the Iran deal, whose benefits for the Iranian people were almost entirely premised on relief from devastating sanctions. In December of 2018, high-profile Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, called for the United States to return to the Iran nuclear deal. While such a move would certainly constitute a de-escalation, these calls were bereft of accountability for the role that Democrats played in emboldening Trump to impose even more sanctions—and ultimately walk away from the agreement.

These failures are consistent with a troubling pattern: Democrats tee up the ball for Trump’s aggressive maneuvers, and then express outrage when his administration takes a swing. The Trump administration has been on a course towards towards confrontation with Iran for three years. He’s hired notorious Iran-war fanatics Gen. James Mattis, John Bolton and Elliot Abrams. His biggest donor is anti-Iran radical billionaire Sheldon Adleson. His State Department appears to have staffed out some of its Iran policy to the pro-Israel, rightwing think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He’s signaled from day one his goal was to march the United States towards war. Yet, Democrats still padded his war budgets, often voted for his appointments, baited him to have a tougher stance against Iran’s most important ally, Russia, and did nothing to curb his support for anti-Iran forces in the Middle East. Democrats have, for the most part, been not only unwilling to spend their political capital trying to change this course, but have actively encouraged it through their support for proxy battles against Iran in Syria and Iraq. And we must not forget that it was President Obama who, in 2014, sent troops back to Iraq as part of the war against ISIS.

Although many Democrats were quick to criticize Trump’s deadly drone strike, most of the statements were qualified with assertions about the murderous nature of Suleimani. “No American will mourn Qassem Suleimani’s passing,” begins Joe Biden’s statement. “He deserved to be brought to justice for his crimes against American troops and thousands of innocents throughout the region. He supported terror and sowed chaos.” Initial statements from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar began with similar declarations. The first statement that has even referred to the killing as an “assassination” has been from Bernie Sanders. Warren later followed up her initial statement with remarks that also used the language of assassination.

Some Democrats who voted for the NDAA and handed the Trump administration a blank check suddenly expressed concern about the President’s powers. “Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question,” tweeted Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.)—who voted or the bill. “The question is this - as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

Other Democrats are also expressing concern that Trump is deploying the wrong strategy against a dangerous enemy, while accepting the premise that intervention could be justified. This approach is reflected in presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg’s statement, released today: “Before engaging in military action that could destabilize an entire region, we must take a strategic, deliberate approach that includes consultation with Congress, our allies, and stakeholders in the Middle East.” This statement presumes that a destabilizing war of aggression could be justified, conceding Trump’s moral justifications, even as Buttigieg handwrings about the method.

We can’t stop a war with Iran unless we recognize U.S. aggression is not the product of failed strategy, or the Republican Party alone. It’s the product of a system where it’s normal bipartisan politics to lay the building blocks of war with no public account of the profound harm that is being done. And then, on the eve of said war, those Democrats who have been setting its course feign outrage and shock—if a Republican is in the White House, that is. We saw this script play out with the Iraq War, and we’re seeing it again now. In a U.S. political establishment where killing people abroad comes with little political cost, the politicians who contributed to the U.S. climate of belligerence are never forced to face the consequences. It costs nothing to to jockey for war, but everything to stand against it––including war’s precursors, such as sanctions, bloated military budgets and CIA meddling. Our only hope is to change this.

The Decade That Put Capitalism On Trial

I can’t say I’m convinced this decade has really just ended, especially since it didn’t start Jan. 1, 2010. As far as I can tell, it actually began in 2007, with Wall Street’s historic financial crisis.

That calamity has defined the last 13 odd years—call them the long teens—and transformed American politics by showing the center, indeed, could not hold. In the immediate aftermath of the mortgage debacle, the Tea Party rose to prominence, foreshadowing the racist, rightwing populism that continues to gain ground at home with Trump and around the world. But over time, the U.S. Left learned its own lessons: that capitalism can fail and that the government can spend huge sums of money to intervene in the economy. These revelations, in turn, have shaped the emerging generation’s sense of what is possible, spurring a democratic socialist revival and opening space for teenage environmentalist Greta Thunberg to credibly insist in 2019, “If we can save the banks we can save the world.” United behind the proposal for an economically and ecologically transformative Green New Deal, young people understand it isn’t some pie-in-the-sky fantasy but a pragmatic and urgent necessity.

Greta’s comments echo the now famous refrain, which I first heard on Sep. 17, 2011 when a few hundred of us gathered at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan for Occupy Wall Street: “The banks got bailed out; We got sold out.” As a result of the financial crash, around 7.8 million U.S. homes were foreclosed. Black households lost half their collective wealth. Back then I didn’t have a home or savings to lose, yet my personal finances were in meltdown nonetheless. Around the same time Lehman Brothers collapsed, I got a call telling me my student loans were in default. I remember trying to grasp the logic: “I don’t have money, so you are increasingly my principal by 19%?” My balance ballooned, as did my monthly payments, which meant I was even more broke than before.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as I became more deeply involved in Occupy, I found myself gravitating to work focused on the problem of debt. It made sense, since most people drawn to the encampments were in the red as a result of being forced to debt-finance basic goods such as housing, healthcare and education, often with disastrous results.

Soon enough, I was collaborating with people I met through the movement and devising new creative ways to organize to transform indebtedness into a source of power and leverage. We co-founded the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and in 2015 we launched the country’s first student debt strike, eventually winning over $1 billion in loan relief and crucial changes to federal law. Early on our position was mocked by mainstream media, but through organizing and public education we have shifted public opinion, helping lay the groundwork for the decommodification of higher education. We never would have predicted that in 2020 two leading presidential candidates would make our twin demands of mass student debt cancellation and free public college central planks of their campaigns.

Occupy marked a decisive break with the aughts, a difficult decade for social movements. In the wake of 9/11, New York City protests were often massively overpoliced, making demonstrating a grim and dispiriting affair, with the protesters who did show up to an action typically quarantined in “free speech pens” or arrested after being trapped by the awful orange netting cops would use to catch demonstrators like fish. Fortunately, most of the young people who had answered the call to “Occupy Wall Street” were new to activism—their sense of possibility hadn’t been constrained by the previous decade’s crackdown on dissent. Emboldened by recent uprisings including the Arab Spring, the Spanish and Greek indignados, and the occupation of Wisconsin’s state capitol, the people gathered in Zuccotti Park were determined to hold their ground for the night, and they succeeded.

This has been one of the astonishing motifs of this decade: wave after wave of new people engaging in social movements for the first time, be it Occupy, Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, the Women’s Marches, #MeToo, Indivisible, Democratic Socialists of America, Sunrise Movement, the Schools Strikes for Climate, and more. Since 2016, there has also been a remarkable insurgency of bold, unabashedly leftwing candidates for public office, many inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ progressivism. If you had told me in 2010 that socialists would be winning office from Houston, Texas, to Fulton, Georgia, and serving as judges, city councilors and Congresswomen, I never would have believed you.

If this decade has been anything, it has been a decade of crisis: the financial crisis, the post-Trump political crisis and the climate crisis. I spent much of this period writing a book and making a film about democracy and one thing I learned is that the word for crisis, like the word democracy, comes from the ancient Greek, krisis. It means the turning point in an illness—death or recovery, two stark alternatives. It’s fitting, then, that two divergent possibilities lay ahead: on one side, the path to a more egalitarian society, underpinned by a wholesale transformation of our economic and energy systems; on the other, a nostalgic, ethno-nationalist rightwing backlash combining plutocracy with other forms of minority rule. No one knows what the next decade will bring, but given the high stakes we have no choice but to pick a side and try to be part of the cure.

Blast From the Past

Meet the new war, same as the old war.

That Won’t Do, Pig

Cops are fast food fetishists now.

Welcome to Decision 2060

Here we are, talking about the horse race in presidential politics. Meanwhile, humanity is headed toward extinction and we aren’t even discussing it.

The Grooming Gap: What “Looking the Part” Costs Women

Madison, who works a customer service job at an airport spa, has an employee handbook that says “makeup should be well maintained” and “hands and nails must be well manicured.” She says the few men she works with just ignore these guidelines “because they’re meant for women but [it] doesn’t explicitly say that.” Her wages ($13.25 per hour + 15% retail commission) do not include additional pay to purchase manicures or makeup. During her interview, her now-boss commented on how nice her makeup looked and how well her shoes matched her purse—comments that make her feel like she needs to keep up that kind of appearance even though she already has the job.

It’s well known that a persistent wage gap exists for women workers in the United States, a gap that becomes even wider when race, industry, age and geography are taken into account. But less frequently discussed is the often silent expectation around appearance imposed on women workers, which has its own financial costs—known as the “grooming gap.” The grooming gap refers to the set of social norms regarding grooming and appearance for women, including the time women workers must spend to conform to these norms and the material consequences it has on their lives.

We’ve all heard the common advice to “look the part” at work. For men, that can often just mean business casual clothing and a short haircut. For women, it can mean hours spent each week on makeup, hair styling and curating an outfit that’s both attractive and professional.

The rules are usually unspoken; even when employers do not explicitly require workers to wear makeup, for example, women workers often feel required to wear it anyway.

They’re not wrong: Sociologists Jaclyn Wong and Andrew Penner found that physically attractive workers have higher incomes than average-looking workers, but that this relationship is eliminated when controlling for grooming in women. In other words, if you purchase the right clothes, makeup and haircut, higher wages are more within reach. It’s true that men need to abide by certain grooming rules, too, but they are less complex, less expensive and less time consuming. Men’s haircuts, for example, often cost much less than women’s haircuts—regardless of hair length. The grooming gap essentially constitutes a pay cut catch-22: If women don’t conform, they are paid less; if they do conform, they’re expected to use those higher wages on beauty products and grooming regimens.

Grooming costs for women can be extremely expensive; the global beauty industry, valued at $532 billion worldwide, directs aggressive advertising toward women to convince them they need to purchase a whole host of products to have a chance at being beautiful, well-liked or successful. The industry relies on maintaining impossible expectations around women’s looks so it can continue to rake in enormous profits. One 2017 study found the average woman puts $8 worth of product on her face each day; another found the average woman spends up to $225,000 on skincare and makeup during her lifetime. And then there’s the “pink tax”: Studies confirm that, 42% of the time, products marketed to women are more expensive than comparable products targeted to men.

The grooming gap also results in a loss of free time: 55 minutes each day for the average woman, the equivalent of two full weeks each year. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFACWA), says that, in her industry—a workforce that is 79.3% women—the expectation around appearance literally “interrupts your sleep”: Flight attendants get minimal rest between flights, and that rest time is further shrunk because they are expected to appear “perfectly coifed” before their next flight. Nelson says that all of her grooming tasks took 30–40 minutes each day (more than two hours in a five-day work week). Madison agrees: it takes her 45 minutes to do her makeup and style her hair before her 7 a.m. shift—and she wakes up at 5 a.m. to get it all done. Prior to this job, Madison says she worked at the beauty department at Target, where she spent $200 on products every other week.

Restaurant and hospitality workers are perhaps hardest hit by the grooming gap, as they rely on tips to survive. When I was a barista in 2010–2011, the only official dress code rule was to wear closed-toed shoes, for safety. Still, I knew I had to show up looking pretty to pay the rent; I made less than $10 an hour and I needed the tips.

Katie, 36, a veteran bartender and server in Fort Smith, Ark., says at her current job, it’s “understood” she should wear makeup. At a previous restaurant, a manager even told her and her coworkers they would “make better tips if [they] wore makeup.”

“Based on my own appearance—weight fluctuations, makeup versus no makeup, jewelry versus no jewelry—there’s a definite difference,” Katie says. She adds that she was passed over for the most lucrative bartending shifts at her previous job after overhearing her managers say they wanted “cuter girls” to bartend instead.

Multi-billion dollar industries also market fad diets and anti-aging products to women. Both Katie and Jeeva, 24, a bartender and member of UNITE HERE, the union representing hospitality, hotel and airport workers, worry about aging. “As you get older, as a female bartender, your tips can go down,” Jeeva says. Katie says she “hope[s] to leave [the service industry] in the next 10 years, before I get too ugly.”

The grooming gap’s effects are compounded for women of color. According to Restaurant Opportunity Center, restaurant owners look for workers who are “clean-cut, [have] good hygiene or a professional appearance, all potential code words for race.” For instance, Black women spent $473 million on relaxers, weaves and other hair care in 2017, in part because of racist ideas that natural Black hair is not professional or attractive. Black workers annually spend nine times more on hair and beauty products than other workers.

For transgender women, too, there can be an added layer of work, stress and self-consciousness. Autumn, who transitioned while at her current publishing job in Washington, D.C., says she quickly realized how much time and energy it takes to perform femininity for work. She used to spend 20 minutes to get ready in the morning, but now takes at least 45 minutes. Autumn adds, “I have to do things that cis women don’t have to… [but] it’s gotten easier with time and practice,” like tucking and dealing with facial hair. Because she presents extremely femme, Autumn says she hasn’t dealt with enforcement around her appearance, but other women workers around the country have been disciplined and even fired for appearing insufficiently feminine. Women workers have sued—and won—over gender discrimination that manifests as attractiveness discrimination.

Nat, a trans woman who works at a union in the Washington, D.C., area, says, “I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be a woman if I liked masculine things. It delayed any kind of self-reflection” about gender and identity “for such a long time.”

At work and in the world, all women—cis and trans—feel the pressure to conform to normative standards of femininity and attractiveness. But the solution to this problem isn’t to throw away all the eyeshadow or take out a new line of credit for weekly manicures. The solution is to organize together.

“Building your union in the workplace is also about tackling the social issues that are directly applicable to your economic experience,” says Nelson. Because they were organized and had a voice in management’s ear, AFA-CWA flight attendants were able to relax and modernize aspects of their dress code. Prior to 2006, newly hired female flight attendants were required to attend a one-day training with a makeup artist (while men had the day off). Women were also encouraged to buy makeup if they didn’t have any, since female flight attendants were required to wear makeup. There are still appearance standards “that put a greater burden on women than men,” says Nelson, but there’s no longer a makeup training day, and no requirement to buy or wear makeup.

Because the vast majority of union contracts include language around wages, promotions, discipline and firing, the ways in which unionized women workers move up (or down) in a company are clear. They don’t have to wonder if they’re being pushed out because their boss doesn’t like the way they look—every infraction must be documented and explained. And because union workers receive raises based on seniority, gendered gaps around wages and promotions are far less likely, which gives women workers more freedom to ignore unspoken pressures around grooming, and a vehicle to further expand their rights at work.

Regardless of whether a workplace is unionized, workers can still organize to challenge gender inequity on the job. There’s a nascent movement around organizing for workers to be paid wages for time spent commuting to work, since commuting is a necessity. The same could be said of the grooming that women do before leaving for work. Working women, in unions and outside of them, could organize around extra compensation for women’s grooming products, as well as the time spent applying them; Madison suggests a “stipend.” Women workers also could fight against the tipped minimum wage, which invites pay discrimination based on appearance and which predominantly affects women.

Ultimately, social understandings of beauty and the many ways they impact women’s working conditions are just a piece of a bigger, systemic problem: the larger impacts of a patriarchal society’s effects on women. Women are constantly bombarded with advertisements and images of the ideal woman: thin, white, cis and beautiful—ideals that, of course, carry over into the workplace. The vast majority of women do not fit into these narrow, normative archetypes of beauty, and they can lose out financially because of them. But there are clear ways to organize at work around these issues: by forming unions or by standing together and fighting for legislation that ends the gender pay gap and the tipped minimum wage.

Closing the grooming gap and engaging in the struggles that will be needed to fundamentally challenge these exploitative systems—in and out of the workplace—will not be easy. But when has the fight to create the world we deserve ever been easy?

Good Riddance

Commemorative collectibles from the 2010's.

@eletrotupi problem #1: People make web apps when they should be making web *pages*.

Problem #2-#N: these problems are all symptoms of problem #1.

Repeat after me: you don't need javascript to make 90% of websites.

States defended their privacy legislation this year, even while the big technology companies lobbied heavily against it. Here's the play-by-play. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/consumer-privacy-year-review-2019

The Important Pundits vs. Anti-Semitism

A muslim woman said something in public! This won’t stand!

In Some Weird Countries, Elections Depend Entirely on Religious Fanatics

There is a Civil War between Christian evangelists in the United States over whether or not to support Donald Trump. Some Christians point to his moral degeneracy. Others say that God often works with flawed people. I just wonder, why do we have to care about what these crazy people think?

Yes, we made it!

A Grim New Definition of Generation X

            People born in the 1960s may be the last human beings who will get to live out their full actuarial life expectancies.             “Climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat” to humanity, warns a recent policy paper by an Australian think tank. Civilization, scientists say, could collapse by 2050. Some people […]

Won’t Somebody Think of the Guns?

Wal-mart has banned open carry and certain kinds of ammunition in their stores.