Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Missing piece to urban air quality puzzle

Air quality models have long failed to accurately predict atmospheric levels of secondary organic aerosol, which comprises a substantial fraction of the fine particulate matter in cities. But researchers have found a missing source of emissions that may explain roughly half of that SOA, closing much of the model-measurement gap.

#MontyPython star #TerryJones dies aged 77 - BBC News

He liked traffic lights.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51209197

#MPFC

Copyright is a monopoly right, and monopolies have a tendency to accumulate in the vaults of big companies, who use them to dominate creative industries. #CopyrightWeek https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/serving-big-company-interests-copyright-crisis

Arctic sea ice can't 'bounce back'
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200121112913.htm #climatechange #climatecrisis

Greta Thunberg's Message to Capitalists: 'Act as if You Loved Your Children'
https://earther.gizmodo.com/greta-thunbergs-message-to-capitalists-act-as-if-you-l-1841130508 #climatechange #climatecrisis

What the U.S. Left Can Learn From the Labour Party’s Epic Loss

The similarities are impossible to ignore. Both are aging Boomers with long resumes in the struggle for social justice. Both have campaigned on platforms of left populism that take aim at the rich and powerful. And both have helped spark social movements led by activists 50 years their junior. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders share much in common.

So, as we survey the rubble of the Labour Party’s epic defeat, which saw the largest Conservative landslide since Margaret Thatcher, it’s not unfair to ask: What went wrong? What can the the U.S. Left—and the Sanders campaign more specifically—learn from Corbyn’s loss? And, as the hot takes flood in from American pundits with little understanding of the British political system, it is equally important to ask: What should we not learn from this defeat, as well?

There are three key areas where learning will be essential, and contested:

Staving off character assassination

I knew from my time canvassing for Labour in the UK as well as from reading the polls: Jeremy Corbyn was the most unpopular opposition leader in British history.

Pundits will point to individual traits to explain his unpopularity, ranging from his personality (a hippie! with no charisma!) to his policies (he’s a Commie!) to his political allies (he cavorts with terrorists!) to his base of supporters (they’re anti-Semites, the lot of them).

But speak with many of the Labour supporters who hit the doors in this election, and they will tell you that hatred of Corbyn was far more amorphous, more ineffable, more atmospheric than this. If you were to ask a given voter why they hated Jeremy Corbyn—and I had the opportunity to ask many such voters—they were liable to say: “I just do.”

The electoral costs of such unpopularity were extreme. According to one post-election poll, 43% of respondents voted against Labour because of the party’s leadership, compared to just 17% for its stance on Brexit and 12% for its economic policies. 

What could have produced such an atmosphere of contempt? The short answer: a sustained campaign of character assassination in near every UK tabloid, mainstream newspaper and otherwise respectable publication against Jeremy Corbyn.

The case of anti-Semitism is an instructive one. Most British voters now believe that Corbyn is an anti-Semite, but few can point to an example of his anti-Semitism. Why, then, do they believe it? Because the claim was asserted, over and over, in the papers. If Corbyn weren’t anti-Semitic, voters were right to ask, why would so many stories get written about it so many months in a row? The prophecy was self-fulfilling.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders complain about his absence from mainstream reporting. CNN and MSNBC are liable to throw Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and even Elizabeth Warren onto their chyron, but ignore Sanders, despite his consistent polling near the top of the Democratic field.

But Sanders supporters appear unprepared for the next phase of this process, when he moves back into frame but straight into the crosshairs. It’s been said before but bears repeating: We have seen only a fraction of the stories that the press will use to bring down Bernie Sanders.

The U.S. Left needs to prepare for this, diligently and creatively. The Corbyn camp was far too quick to the bunker: “It’s a conspiracy by the billionaire media.” That may have been true. But the U.S. Left will need a much more proactive strategy for combatting such destructive stories and presenting an alternative vision of Sanders’ progressive personality.

Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant—only a full-throated challenge to mounting controversy can kill it off. And that challenge may require progressive candidates to go on all available media outlets—including Fox News—and do it themselves.

Maintaining the coalition

The Labour Party electoral coalition is strikingly similar to that of the Democratic Party, in both its general composition and its direction of travel: working-class communities with low levels of education and, increasingly, wealthier city-dwellers with high levels of education.

It’s a coalition that fell to pieces in Thursday’s election. The Tory landslide was a working class wave: the Conservative Party broke through traditional Labour-voting working-class regions, formerly known as the ‘Red Wall,’ to win scores of new seats.

How did Boris Johnson—an Eton-educated, silver-spooned, elite-obsessed Tory—manage to make such gains against a Labour Party explicitly committed to the cause of the working class?

The short answer is Brexit. The question of European Union membership—or more accurately, of whether or not the British government would go ahead with the referendum decision to leave the EU—cut straight through the Labour coalition.

If the Labour Party had embraced Brexit and served as its parliamentary handmaiden, the Liberal Democrats were waiting in the wings to claim the urban middle classes as their own.

If the Labour Party moved to stymie Brexit, however, they would risk losing their Leave constituencies to a Conservative Party that promised to deliver Brexit faithfully. The Labour Party ultimately took the latter risk, and lost predictably as a result.

The good news for Democrats is, of course, that the United States has no Brexit. Nor is the Democratic Party threatened by an adjacent challenger like the Liberal Democrats.

But Americans do have an issue that closely resembles Brexit: the election of Donald Trump.

Many pundits will compare Boris Johnson and Trump, in style as in haircut. But the Brexit-Trump comparison is by far the more relevant. A vote for Trump, like a vote for Brexit, was meant to send a shock to the system and a middle finger to its political establishment. That is why Trump voters, like Brexit ones, rarely care for the immediate consequences of their vote choice: the vote was all that mattered.

If progressives are searching for lessons, then, impeachment may be a good place to start: a political strategy that could ultimately turn out to be both myopic and fruitless.

Like calling for a People’s Vote, impeaching President Trump could be seen as disrespectful to the rebel vote of the 2016 election, and could deepen the sense of discontent that gave rise to Trump in the first place. To keep its coalition together, Democrats will need to find a path to détente between its competing demographics. Impeachment alone is unlikely to be the answer.

Spin, not socialism

Finally, the S-word.

The commentariat is already swarming with takes about the peril of far-left policies. Socialism, the argument goes, was Corbyn’s Achilles heel. And it is likely to be much worse in the United States, where the S-word is wielded with much greater psychological power and historical weight.

The problem with this argument is that it’s wrong. Labour’s policies were their strongest pull—even, or especially, their most socialist ones: the nationalization of industry. A recent poll found 84% of respondents supported nationalizing the water industry. In another, 77% supported the same for energy and 76% for rail.

The issue was that, in the end, it didn’t really matter. The raft of policies that the Labour Party ushered into its manifesto—the stuff of a progressive wonk’s dreams, and the hard work of so many brilliant and creative young policy thinkers in the UK—simply did not bring people to the polls in their favor.

Simply put, socialism was not too strong an ideology, but too weak an electoral strategy.

No, spin still seems to dominate our politics: dirty, rotten spin. Johnson ran an outright corrupt campaign, disseminating lies, shirking accountability and banking on the likelihood that people wouldn’t care. It turns out that 43.6% of them didn’t—choosing to support the Tories anyway.

The lessons from this particular electoral injustice are vexed. But one is clear: Plans and policies do not deliver majorities—even if their details determine how you then govern. To win, then, progressive Democrats must get off of the page and into the street, with a message that is as simple as it is emotionally powerful.

Liberal pundits are going to stop at nothing to swing the Democratic Party back toward the center—and Corbyn’s loss will be powerful ammunition. Progressives cannot sweep it under the rug. The lessons are there, if we are willing to learn them. But in this moment of despair, those of us on the Left must keep repeating to ourselves, over and over: We can win, and we must.

Apple canceled the project to encrypt iCloud backups two years ago due to pressure from the FBI because it "would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects" #privacy

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT

When the elites say, "nobody likes Bernie," it's not that they can't see you; they just belive that you are nobody, a mindless drone that exists only to provide labor for exploitation
@Bernie2020 #Bernie2020

ok i wrote another update on the state of Reform, i guess the last one before campaign launch https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-01-18-finishing-reform.html

Just solved one of those »Took me 2 minutes to re-read the man-section, will save me 2 minutes of fiddling per week« issues:

ssh_config can specify "IdentitiesOnly" to make sure SSH client won't offer all the keys in your current ssh_agent, but only the once you specified via IdentityFile.

How the 1% is used to dealing with politicians v. how a people powered campaign operates
@Bernie2020 #Bernie2020

The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1952 a 23-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a love letter to Coretta Scott. Along with coos of affection and apologies for his hasty handwriting, he described his feelings not just toward his future wife, but also toward America’s economic system. “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he admitted to his then-girlfriend, concluding that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness.”

King composed these words as a grad student on the tail end of his first year at the Boston University School of Theology. And far from representing just the utopianism of youth, the views expressed in the letter would go on to inform King’s economic vision throughout his life.

As Americans honor King on his birthday, it is important to remember that the civil rights icon was also a democratic socialist, committed to building a broad movement to overcome the failings of capitalism and achieve both racial and economic equality for all people.

Capitalism “has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes,” King wrote in his 1952 letter to Scott. He would echo the sentiment 15 years later in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?: “Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

In his famous 1967 Riverside Church speech, King thundered, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

And in an interview with the New York Times in 1968, King described his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) this way, “In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.”

Speaking at a staff retreat of the SCLC in 1966, King said that “something is wrong … with capitalism” and “there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the country. “Maybe,” he suggested, “America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

In Where Do We Go From Here, which calls for “the full emancipation and equality of Negroes and the poor,” King advocates policies in line with a democratic socialist program: a guaranteed annual income, constitutional amendments to secure social and economic equality, and greatly expanded public housing. He endorses the Freedom Budget put forward by socialist activist A. Philip Randolph, which included such policies as a jobs guarantee, a living wage and universal healthcare. He also outlines how economic inequality can circumscribe civil rights. While the wealthy enjoy easy access to lawyers and the courts, “the poor, however, are helpless,” he writes.

This emphasis on poverty is not always reflected in contemporary teachings about King, which tend to focus strictly on his advocacy for civil rights. But Where Do We Go From Here and the final project of King’s life—the Poor People’s Campaign—show that King’s dream included a future of both racial and economic equality.

“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter,” King is widely quoted as asking, “if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” In King’s view, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the voter registration drives across the South and the Selma to Montgomery march comprised but the first phase of the civil rights movement. In Where Do We Go From Here, King called the victories of the movement up that point in 1967 “a foothold, no more” in the struggle for freedom. Only a campaign to realize economic as well as racial justice could win true equality for African-Americans. In naming his goal, King was unflinching: the “total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”

The shortcoming of the first phase of the civil rights movement, to King, was its emphasis on opportunity rather than guarantees. The ability to buy a hamburger at a lunch counter without harassment did not guarantee that the hungry would be fed. Access to the ballot box did not guarantee anti-racist legislation. The end of Jim Crow laws did not guarantee the flourishing of African-American communities. Decency did not guarantee equality.

Some white people had gone along with the fight for access and opportunity, King concluded, because it cost them nothing. “Jobs,” however, “are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls.” When African-Americans sought not only to be treated with dignity, but guaranteed fair housing and education, many whites abandoned the movement. In King’s words, as soon as he demanded “the realization of equality”—the second phase of the civil rights movement—he discovered whites suddenly indifferent.

King considered the Poor People's Campaign to be the vehicle for this next phase of the movement precisely because it offered both material advances and the potential for stronger cross-racial organizing. For King, only a multiracial working-class movement, which the Poor People's Campaign aspired to be, could guarantee both racial and economic equality.

King was disgusted by the juxtaposition of decadence and destitution in America. We “compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity,” he fumed. Quoting social justice advocate Hyman Bookbinder, King wrote that ending poverty in America merely requires demanding that the rich “become even richer at a slower rate.”

For King, the only solution to America’s crisis of poverty was the redistribution of wealth. In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King declared, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

From his early letters to Coretta Scott until his final days, King put forward a vision of a society that provides equality for people of all races and backgrounds. This is the cause King spent his life fighting for. And it is one we should recommit to as we honor his legacy.

When Bernie Met Liz, They Stopped Thinking Straight

The most interesting aspect about Elizabeth Warren’s allegation that Bernie Sanders told her that a woman can’t be elected president is what it says about the way American voters and political journalists reason and think.

#ExtinctionRebellion listed as ‘key threat’ by counter-terror #police | #Environment | The Guardian

This is overbearing and ridiculous.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/19/extinction-rebellion-listed-as-key-threat-by-counter-terror-police

WHAAAATTT THE FFFFUUUUCCCCCCK

https://payup.wtf/doordash/no-free-lunch-report

"Our analysis of more than two hundred samples of pay data provided by DoorDash workers across the country finds that DoorDash pays the average worker an astonishingly low $1.45/hour, after accounting for the costs of mileage and additional payroll taxes borne by independent contractors. Nearly a third of jobs actually pay less than $0 after accounting for these basic expenses."