Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Here Comes “Uncle Joe”!

Biden is just like your REAL uncle! Yeah.

The Texas “Fairies Fiasco”

In the 1970s, a San Antonio gay bar staged a unique protest against police harassment: a play.

Did you know that you can check out source code for things Purism works on (such as Librem One applications and bits relating to the upcoming Librem 5 smartphone) right from https://source.puri.sm?

Source code should be Free.

That's just how we roll.

Revealed: #UK #government failing to tackle rise of serious #air #pollutant | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/13/revealed-uk-government-failing-to-tackle-rise-of-ammonia-serious-air-pollutant

#Pollution #Ammonia #Agriculture

So, Blackwater founder/war criminal Erik Prince goes full Leopold II and expands operations in Democratic Republic of Congo, with a mandate to extract minerals and timber and conduct financial operations
https://af.reuters.com/article/idAFKCN1TE23M-OZATP

Why The Intercept is Reporting on Secret Brazil Archive https://prismo.xyz/posts/09df360e-cfec-457f-aa27-95d2dbd21d11

The Last Black Man in San Francisco’s Walking Tour of a Lost City

Around the bend of Bernal Heights Park, along the path they used to walk as teenagers, Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails marveled at the scene before them: a trio of people contorting their bodies on yoga mats on an edge overlooking the stark high-rises of downtown San Francisco, the Salesforce Tower rising like a monstrous […]

Rent Control Mainly Helps . . . the Affluent

Because I’m a neoliberal shill I’ve never been a big fan of rent control. I figure that if you want to help poor and working-class folks afford the rent in big cities, you should just let the market work normally and then give them money or vouchers or whatnot that they can use toward their […]

The United States Is Notoriously Bad at Counting Civilian Casualties. Its Allies Are Even Worse.

Since the Syrian civil war broke out in the summer of 2011, more than 500,000 people have been killed. Of that total, some untold number of children and other civilians have been killed by the American-led military coalition, which has fought ISIS in Syria and Iraq since 2014. The Pentagon has only claimed responsibility for […]

Low vitamin K levels linked to mobility limitation and disability in older adults

Researchers evaluateD the association between biomarkers of vitamin K status and mobility limitation and disability, and found older adults with low levels of circulating vitamin K were more likely to develop these conditions.

Yes, A Woman Can Beat Trump

Are women electable? A flurry of recent reports suggests that, for many Democratic women, the answer is no. One 20-year-old told ABC News that, though she wants a woman president, “America’s just not there yet.” Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel tweeted that numerous “middle-aged women” told him “2016 showed that voters won’t elect a female president.” Polls show that defeating Donald Trump is extremely important to Democratic voters, and that the candidates they believe are most likely to beat him are white men like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke.

It’s clear that Democratic voters remain haunted by the specter of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. Frustratingly, we seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.

For starters, when it comes to a complex event like an election, it’s simply not true that any single factor—even gender—predetermines the outcome. In 2016, if any number of factors had gone the other way—if the economy had been just a little better, if FBI Director James Comey hadn’t reopened the email investigation at the eleventh hour, if Clinton’s campaign had poured more resources into key Midwestern states—Clinton likely would have won.

Of course, gender played a role—Clinton was subjected to a tsunami of appalling sexism from the media, Trump, slimy operatives and an army of internet trolls—but it’s surprisingly hard to prove her loss was because of gender bias. Yes, post-election studies show sexist attitudes were associated with voting for Trump, and a 2015 Gallup poll revealed 8% of Americans wouldn’t vote for a woman president—but these were mostly Republicans who would never have voted for a Democrat anyway. One study suggests Clinton’s gender could have won her more votes than it lost.

As political scientists Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless point out (based on non-presidential elections), women candidates are not less likely to win primary and general elections than men; the issue is that not enough run in the first place. Men are more likely to consider themselves qualified and more likely to be recruited. Perhaps there is something different about presidential elections, but as any social scientist will tell you, you can’t make broad generalizations based on a sample size of one.

Clinton’s own focus groups showed the glass ceiling argument was “the least effective positive case” for her candidacy. Instead, what voters cared about was whether the candidate could “make their own lives better.” Clinton failed to make that case and instead focused on her qualifications and biography (remember “I’m With Her”?) and the awfulness of Trump.

Things might have been different had Clinton crafted a strong economic message for working people. When pollster Stanley Greenberg tested a Democratic message attacking Trump’s character against a message “demanding big economic changes” and attacking Trump for “protecting corporate special interests,” the economic message “performed dramatically better,” including among key swing voters like white working-class women.

To their credit, several of the 2020 female candidates appear to have taken this lesson to heart and are running on platforms well to the left of Clinton’s. Sens. Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren are all co-sponsoring bills in support of Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee and a $15 nationwide minimum wage—positions Clinton avoided. Even the most moderate woman running, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, supports a $15 minimum wage. Warren, the female candidate doing best in the polls, has run a robustly populist campaign steeped in policy and aimed at structural economic change.

Warren clearly understands the moral stakes involved in the electability argument. At one candidates’ forum, she asked: “Are we going to show up for people that we didn’t actually believe in, but because we were too afraid to do anything else?” If we are too afraid to vote for women, there’s a danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy, discouraging women from running and voters from supporting them.

If the Democrats run the kind of campaign that Clinton ran (and that Biden shows every sign of running), they are likely to produce the same dismal results we saw in 2016. An obsession with electability will likely fuel the same politics of reaction and inequality that made voters cling so desperately to “electable” candidates in the first place.

Trump’s EPA Has a Monsanto Problem

A jury awarded a California couple more than $2 billion in May for damages in their suit against Monsanto, a subsidiary of the chemical giant Bayer.

Farmers Alva and Alberta Pilliod claimed their use of Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide, Roundup, caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in each of them, and presented internal Monsanto documents revealing the company covered up evidence that the herbicide itself, glyphosate, caused cancer.

That verdict marks the third consecutive decision against Monsanto; an additional 13,400 lawsuits are pending. Since acquiring Monsanto in June 2018, Bayer has lost more than 40% of its stock market value, now worth less in total than the original Monsanto price tag.

The EPA, whose officials have for decades proclaimed the safety of glyphosate over the objections of its own scientists, has come to Bayer’s defense, declaring April 30 that “glyphosate is not a carcinogen” and (when used properly) poses “no risks to public health.” Yet, in March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, citing multiple peer-reviewed studies, determined that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” One pivotal laboratory study using mice sounded the alarm as early as 1983. This February, researchers at the University of Washington found exposure to glyphosate increased the risk of certain cancers by more than 40%.

The fact that you can buy a carcinogenic herbicide at your local Home Depot is a prime example of “regulatory capture”: when an industry and its allies control the operations of a government agency to advance their own corporate interests.

Regulatory capture occurred, for example, when Scott Pruitt, Trump’s former EPA administrator, dismissed members of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board and Board of Scientific Counselors and replaced them with industry allies.

An industry-friendly EPA ensures there will be no new environmental regulations with teeth. Liam Condon, president of Bayer’s crop science division, shrugged off the $2 billion judgment, telling agricultural investors: “The key point is, from a regulatory point of view, nothing has changed.” Indeed, as Bayer appeals these cases, it will argue that the EPA determination that glyphosate is a noncarcinogen should preempt the right of state courts to rule against glyphosate manufacturers.

The legal doctrine of preemption holds that claims in state courts are not allowed if they conflict with federal law. Bayer’s hope is that the glyphosate cases end up in the Supreme Court, which has heard three analogous preemption cases since 2005 and, every time, ruled for the corporation.

It doesn’t hurt Bayer’s chances that Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch—who, as a federal judge, refused to let environmental groups participate in lawsuits involving public lands—would help decide the case. Neil’s mom, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, an anti-environmental activist and President Ronald Reagan’s first EPA administrator, sits alongside Pruitt in the pantheon of corrupt GOP officials forced from office in disgrace.

Political radicals have long claimed that big business dictates government operations. Nevertheless, in the 20th century, pressure from the labor and environmental movements led to important regulations.

Today, we observe a Great Regression to the savage capitalism of the Gilded Age—the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Steve Bannon would call it. As the Democratic primaries approach, voters should distinguish candidates who have demonstrated an appetite to confront corporate power from those who have proven themselves beholden to it. It’s time to break the chains of corporate capture.

Discover the new adaptive view switcher and adaptive preferences window from libhandy 0.0.10: https://bytesgnomeschozo.blogspot.com/2019/06/libhandy-0010.html

#Librem5 #libhandy @purism

Carbon-neutral fuel made from sunlight and air

Researchers have developed a novel technology that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels exclusively from sunlight and air. For the first time worldwide they demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain under real field conditions.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Campaign Organizers Are Training Working-Class Progressives to Take on the Consultant Class

“Things like Movement School, where we wanna get more progressive leaders trained at the local level, the state level, matter a lot because the current infrastructure isn’t serving our policies.”

The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Campaign Organizers Are Training Working-Class Progressives to Take on the Consultant Class appeared first on The Intercept.

For the Rich, the Great Recession Was Just a Blip

Matt Yglesias points us to the latest Federal Reserve calculations of net worth, and as usual, we can say that the post-Reagan era has been a great time to be rich in America. Here’s the net worth of the top 1 percent: That’s an increase of more than 4 percent per year above and beyond […]

#Jolla is looking for new sailors for the following positions: Product Management Lead, UI Developer, Middleware Developer, Visual Designer

Visit their website for more information and apply now! https://jolla.com/careers/ #SailfishOS