Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Coincidences influence the onset and ending of ice ages

An analysis of the so called climate spectrum shows why the ice ages have not behaved precisely as the models predict. A large element of coincidence is involved when an ice age begins or ends, the analysis shows. The results imply we should maybe use a more conservative risk assessment then the one IPCC recommends.

Our View of Black History Has Radically Shifted in a Few Short Years

Black History Month, if treated seriously, could help clarify a key point about race in America: African Americans were created by slavery. As I argued in 2006: 

Millions of Africans wound up in America only because they were kidnapped to fill the needs of a slave economy. This process forged a new people, who became American by necessity, and included 12 generations of chattel slavery. 

This history of slave—rather than racial—identification accounts for the disadvantages accrued by the progeny of enslaved Africans. With this understanding, the culpability for redressing that specific legacy rests on the government that abetted it.

My 2006 piece noted that affirmative action was, at first, created to compensate the victims of slavery’s legacy—but “other groups had to be included to gain political support … [and] affirmative action became a comprehensive attempt to offset discrimination against all ‘minorities.’ ” The resulting practice meant that a business exercising affirmative action could employ many people of color without hiring a single African American. That affirmative action has diverged so dramatically from its initial conception is yet more proof of this nation’s reluctance to face the truth of its ignoble, Afrophobic history.

The issues I raised in 2006 rose to the surface of public discourse in 2019 in two major ways. The New York Times Magazine embarked on something it called “The 1619 Project,” named to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the shores of Virginia in what would become the United States. Spearheaded by Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s goal was “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Such an audacious conception—in the Times? As I read through the special issue, I found a new awareness of how the legacy of slavery is thoroughly interwoven with America’s founding precepts. The recognition seemed too good to be true.

Despite predictable grumbling from conservative quarters and some academic salons, the response to the project has been overwhelmingly positive. The Times supplement quickly sold out. What’s more, school districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, N.Y., (among a growing number) have incorporated material from the project into their curricula.

Reparations, too, has burst into public view. In summer 2019, the House held its first hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to develop proposals to address and redress the legacy of slavery. The bill had been introduced by the late Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in each House session since 1989—where it languished, unattended—but this hearing attracted, among others, actor/activist Danny Glover and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” gave the concept an infusion of intellectual credibility. Early in the 2020 Democratic campaign, several candidates, urged on by candidate Marianne Williamson (who since has dropped out), expressed support.

While the discussion of reparations has died down again, its emergence in public discourse is another sign that the legacies of slavery—housing discrimination, wealth inequality, educational disadvantage—are being treated with new urgency. This refined perspective on our nation’s history directly connects slavery to the ongoing socioeconomic status of slavery’s victims. Finding data to trace the multigenerational path of these wrongs has become a new mission for historical researchers.

Thankfully, these new developments surrounding the conversation about race in America inject a shot of badly needed relevance into the often restrained observance of Black History Month.

Migrant Children Are Still Being Detained in Chicago

CHICAGO—Refrains of “Heartland and ICE, same shit twice” caught the attention of passing cars and pedestrians Dec. 8, 2019, at the Malibu condominiums on Chicago’s lakefront. Around 30 organizers from Little Village Solidarity Network (LVSN), Rogers Park Solidarity Network (RPSN) and Free Heartland Kids (FHK) demonstrated outside the home of David Sinski, vice president of Heartland Alliance and executive director of Heartland Human Care Services. They brandished large posters, one with Sinski’s face labeled “Detention Lord David Sinski” in bright red letters. Another read, “Your neighbor David Sinski jails kids.”

Heartland, a Chicago-based nonprofit, describes itself as a human rights and anti-poverty organization; it also operates five child migrant detention centers.

Heartland detains “unaccompanied alien children” as identified by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), defined as “a child who has no lawful immigration status in the United States ... and, with respect to whom, there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States ... available to provide care and physical custody.” Heartland’s website argues that, “without the supervision of a responsible adult, unaccompanied children are highly vulnerable to being misled or exploited”—and because of that vulnerability, a “separate system of shelter care was established.” A focus is placed on “reunify[ing] the children with their families as soon as possible.”

But according to a statement published via Truthout in August 2019 by Ramona Benitez, a former Heartland family reunification specialist, Heartland detains children regardless of whether they have U.S. sponsors. Benitez writes, “The children I interviewed knew exactly where their parents or loved ones were at the time they were picked up by the Department of Homeland Security ... The children cross the border with names, phone numbers and addresses of their families in their pockets.”

At the demonstration, Seph Mozes, 23, an organizer with FHK (a campaign of Chicago Democratic Socialists of America), quoted immigration attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg over the megaphone: “It takes a hell of a savior complex to really believe that a kid in your jail is better off than being with his family.”

Mozes continued, “Detention is inherently traumatic, especially for children ... If you’re not free to leave, that’s not a shelter—that’s a jail.”

Al, an LVSN organizer who requested anonymity to avoid retribution from his employer, added, “Heartland masquerades itself under the rubric of shelter and care in order to obfuscate the extreme duress these children have to endure.” (LVSN began protesting Heartland in 2018.)

Children are held in Heartland facilities for an average of 56 days. According to a September 2018 ProPublica report, “27 children who were in Heartland’s care during the month of July [2018] ... had been held for 200 days or more.” One 17-year-old had been in custody for more than a year and a half. More than a dozen Heartland children have run away, and there are growing allegations of sexual, physical and medical abuse, and general neglect, prompting federal and state investigations. In 2018 ProPublica reported that employees even threatened to slow down family reunification for misbehaving children.

The ORR contracts all migrant youth detention facilities and requires operators (like Heartland) to collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection. As part of the family reunification process, operators are required to conduct background checks on sponsors, as well as collect sponsors’ fingerprints. This information (which can include immigration status) then passes to ICE, making families fearful of deportation if they attempt reunification.

Meanwhile, child immigrant detention is a billion-dollar industry. Heartland Human Care Services, which runs the detention centers, received about $47 million in government grants in 2014. By 2018, the grants increased to more than $57 million. As funding for Heartland detention centers has increased, so have executive salaries—David Sinski’s annual salary rose from $184,498 in 2014 to $225,952 in 2018.

The organizers’ full demands are that Heartland immediately cease intaking migrant children; end its contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and ORR to detain migrant children; release and reunify detained children with their sponsors in the United States without sharing sponsors’ data with ICE; and pledge to use its resources to fight for a true detention-free, deportation-free and ICE-free zone in Chicago.

There are examples of successful closures of child detention centers. One migrant child tent camp in Tornillo, Texas, was shut down in January 2019 after mass mobilization, resulting in the release of 2,800 detained children within three weeks. Of these children, nearly 90% were released to their sponsors; the rest were transferred to other facilities.

And in May 2019, public outcry led Heartland to close four of its nine Illinois facilities.

Tabbi, 33, an organizer with RPSN (who also requested anonymity for fear of retribution), explains, “We are abolitionists—we believe in complete freedom of movement and dismantling all forms of incarceration.”

Or, as Mozes summed it up over the megaphone at the demonstration: “As prison abolitionists, we believe that the solution to the detention and deportation machine is not to build new jails, but to close the jails that already exist. There is no such thing as a good detention center.”

This Week in Fascism #45: Patriot Front Hides Behind Cops in DC, Former ‘Campus Reform’ Troll Outed as White Nationalist https://itsgoingdown.org/this-week-in-fascism-45-patriot-front-hides-behind-cops-in-dc-white-nationalist-outed-in-campus-reform/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

#ShutDownCanada: Injunction served and burnt at #Tyendinaga rail blockade as numbers grow [Videos] . #wetsuweten #wetsuwetenstrong #Unistoten #antireport - Read & watch here: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/02/11/shutdowncanada-injunction-served-and-burnt-at-tyendinaga-rail-blockade-as-numbers-grow-videos/

Awwwww yeah!

Goodbye, Windows: Another Government Plans En-Masse Transition to Linux
https://news.softpedia.com/news/goodbye-windows-another-government-plans-en-masse-transition-to-linux-529150.shtml

A Brazilian judge has decided against prosecuting Glenn Greenwald for cybercrime 'for now' https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/482038-brazilian-judge-holds-off-on-indicting-american-journalist-glenn

War Is an Enormous Threat to the Climate Movement

The 2020s opened with dual crises.

In Australia, unprecedented bushfires tore across a total area the size of Virginia, killing at least 29 people and an estimated one billion animals, and destroying 2,000 homes. The news was flooded with images of thousands of people taking refuge on Australia’s southeastern coastline, the sun blocked by thick smoke, children wearing surgical masks, in a crisis whose severity is unambiguously tied to climate change.

On January 3, the Trump administration brought the United States to the brink of war when it assassinated Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force and a ranking official of Iran. Iran responded by bombing a U.S. base in Iraq, and the world watched in horror to see what President Trump would do next. Though Trump has backed away from direct warfare for the moment, he vowed on January 8 to escalate already-devastating sanctions on Iran.

For those of us who went into the new year sober about the fact that this decade is our chance to stem climate change, the very real possibility of all-out war with Iran was a rude awakening to the fact that U.S. belligerence could ruin everything.

To win a Green New Deal with the teeth to keep fossil fuels in the ground and secure a just transition and job guarantee for all workers, it will take organizing and protest on an unprecedented scale.  U.S. wars, however, have historically been used to beat back and repress exactly the kind of left movements that we need to tackle the climate crisis. The supposed need to protect national unity and “security” during wartime has been used by the U.S. government to justify heightened surveillance and clampdown against those deemed disruptive—disproportionately targeting the Left. World War I was used to justify the passage of the Espionage Act, which criminalized speech deemed “disloyal” and was a bludgeon against anti-war movements, and was also used to prosecute and imprison hundreds of radical unionists. The Cold War, too, was used to justify a vicious campaign of political repression not only against people perceived to be communists, socialists and anarchists, but also against civil rights and black freedom organizers.

In the aftermath of September 11, the drumbeat for war in Afghanistan and then Iraq was used to justify a broad range of repressive measures targeting social movements. Democrats overwhelmingly voted for the PATRIOT Act, which gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies sweeping powers to search and surveil World Trade Organization protesters and environmental activists. In November of 2003, Miami Police Chief John Timoney launched a vicious crackdown on thousands of people who had gathered to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit: He was assisted by 40 law enforcement agencies, the FBI, and $8.5-million earmarked from Congress to pay for the Iraq War, and he had worked hard to convince residents of Miami that protesters were a public safety threat. A crowd of farmworkers, union members and activists concerned about “free trade” running roughshod over human and planetary wellbeing was attacked with tear gas, stun guns, rubber bullets and concussion grenades, as helicopters hovered continuously overhead.

As social movements are besieged, wars are used to justify more militarism across the globe. The United States emerged as the world’s preeminent military empire after World War II, and has since expanded its empire, now the largest in human history, with 800 bases spanning the globe. If history is any indicator, a U.S. war in Iran would almost certainly lead to a hike in overall military budgets. In fact, the United States has already used its aggression towards Iran to justify increasing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East by 20,000 troops since last spring.

This military empire, in turn, enables the same global bullying driving the climate crisis. The United States is the number-one per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases, while China is the overall highest emitter. Yet, its international domination ensures that the United States never has to pay meaningful reparations, or answer to those countries hardest hit, most of them in the Global South, and still scarred by their histories of colonialism and plunder.  And due to its position as the most powerful country in the world, the United States has also dominated the very institutions meant to intervene in global crises—in particular, the United Nations—meaning the United States will never have to answer for its staggering global wrongdoings, from pulling out of the Paris climate accords to waging war in Yemen. The United States wouldn't have the power that it has if not for its military strength, and if that strength were to diminish, so would its sway at the UN.

There are plenty of reasons for U.S. climate justice and anti-war movements to unite against common enemies. The same Democratic Party leadership that has failed to take robust action to curb climate change and gotten behind Trump’s climate-unfriendly U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement has also reliably rubber-stamped Trump’s massive military budgets and overwhelmingly voted to pass new sanctions on Iran, Russia and North Korea in 2017. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who last year famously scolded children who asked her to support the Green New Deal by telling them “I know what I’m doing,” also voted to authorize the Iraq War. And Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has been prominently targeted by Sunrise Movement sit-ins, has supported disastrous U.S. interventions, from Afghanistan to Libya, and declined to meet with Yemeni peace campaigners. The imperialist arrogance that undergirds the bipartisan war consensus—that the U.S. has the right to impose its will on the world—also underlies the political consensus that the U.S. does not need to fulfill its own obligation to reduce the climate harm it is perpetrating across the planet.

Meanwhile, the same fossil fuel companies destroying the planet are donating to powerful think tanks pushing for war. The need for “energy security”—i.e. reliable access to energy sources—has become a popular oil industry buzzword. The notoriously hawkish American Enterprise Institute and Center for Strategic and International Studies receivesignificant funding from the fossil fuel industry. The Center for American Progress, which pushes militaristic policies in the Democratic Party, also receives funding from the natural gas distributor Pacific Gas and Energy Company. Together, these think tanks have played a role in pushing the U.S. into the kind of reckless brinkmanship towards Iran this decade opened with.

There are obviously other sizable militaries in the world other than the United States––As of 2018, China and Russia, for example, had military budgets roughly 38.5% and 9.4% of the U.S. military budget respectively. But there’s only one Americans can directly curb and one whose global reach fuels others to keep pace. For the sake of humanity’s future, permanent U.S. war footing cannot continue. If climate change is the cudgel, U.S. empire is the arm that wields it. Our only choice is to stop them both.

Yvonne Rall, Educator and Passionate Advocate of French, Dead at 84

            Yvonne Rall, a brilliant and demanding educator who left her mark on thousands of high school French students, died February 7th in Kettering, Ohio. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease.             She was 84.             She was my mother.             A native of France who arrived in the United States at age 25 […]

Scientists warn humanity about worldwide insect decline

Insect declines and extinctions are accelerating in many parts of the world. With this comes the disappearance of irreplaceable services to humans, the consequences of which are unpredictable. A group of scientists from across the globe has united to warn humanity of such dangers.

Playing with the new, adaptive version of Clocks, which is really coming together.

Kudos to Allan Day and @snwh for the design, and @bilelmoussaoui and Zander Brown for making it happen!

The End of Privacy as We Know It?

An unregulated facial recognition app can probably tell the police your name, and help them find out where you live and who your friends are.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/podcasts/the-daily/facial-recognition-surveillance.html #privacy #security #purism

Jonathan Carter on the #Librem5 "The #Gnome apps are fast and responsive and just feel natural on this form factor. I’m looking forward again to having a pocket computer that can run Debian." - Random bits from FOSDEM 2020 https://jonathancarter.org/2020/02/07/random-bits-from-fosdem-2020/

Fires and floods: maps of Europe predict scale of climate catastrophe - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/10/fires-floods-maps-europe-climate-catastrophe and these are probably optimistic scenarios... #climatecrisis

Windows 10 Warning: Anger At Microsoft Rises With Serious New Failure
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-10-warning-serious-failure-provokes-questions-and-anger/#6ea063e734f4

When only people with large budgets or institutional connections can access and use research, it puts many others at a disadvantage.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/open-access-human-rights-issue

Nanoparticles produced from burning coal result in damage to mice lungs

Titanium oxide found in coal smog and ash can cause lung damage in mice after a single exposure, with long-term damage occurring in just six weeks.

Size matters! What drives zoo attendance and how does footfall impact conservation?

Conserving species in the wild remains the gold standard but there is an increasing relevance and importance to the role played by the thousands of zoos and aquariums across the globe in supporting conservation in the wild. This study provides global evidence to suggest that zoos don't need to compromise their economic viability and entertainment value in order to have a significant value to conservation.

Treating wastewater with ozone could convert pharmaceuticals into toxic compounds

With water scarcity intensifying, wastewater treatment and reuse are gaining popularity. But some methods for killing microbes in wastewater create disinfection byproducts (DBPs) that could be harmful to human health. Now researchers have found that ozone treatment and subsequent chlorination can convert trace amounts of some pharmaceuticals in wastewater into DBPs called halonitromethanes.