Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

A glacier is dead. A monument will tell visitors whose fault it was
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/07/25/glacier-is-dead-now-monument-tells-future-visitors-whose-fault-it-was/ #climatechange #climatecrisis

#Anonymous    #FuckDonaldTrump    #FuckICE   #FuckThePolice    #ACAB


Watch as these Trump I.C.E Nazi SS Obergruppenführer FuckFace motherfuckers smash a car window to drag a father away from his family.

Better watch out, you racist, Nazi PIG motherfuckers, because people will eventually begin to fight back.

I'm so fucking over these low-life Nazi cunts!.


https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1154172660026355713

More than £1bn of #food wasted before reaching #supermarkets – study | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/25/food-waste-farms-before-reaching-supermarkets-wrap-study

#Waste #UK

Gotta Hand It To Them

The market regulates itself!

EFF Extensions Recommended by Firefox

Earlier this month, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 68, which includes a curated "list of recommended extensions that have been thoroughly reviewed for security, usability and usefulness." We are pleased to announce that both of our popular browser extensions, HTTPSEverywhere and PrivacyBadger, have been included as part of the program. Now, when you navigate to the built-in Firefox add-ons page (URL: about:addons), you'll see a new tab: "Recommendations," which includes HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger among a list of other recommended extensions. In addition, they will be highlighted in Add-ons for Firefox and in add-on searches.

What does this mean for users who already have our extensions installed? If you initially installed them from addons.mozilla.org or the recommendation list, it means that there will be a slight delay after we update the extensions while Mozilla reviews the new versions for security, utility, and user experience. If you installed the self-hosted extensions directly from eff.org without going through Mozilla, you'll get the updates right away after a routine automated check. Either way, you can rest assured that EFF has audited every piece of software we release for security and performance problems.

We're thrilled that Mozilla is highlighting privacy and security-focused extensions, and greatful that HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger are included in that list.

As Puerto Rico Erupts in Protests, “La Junta” Eyes More Power

While la junta and its supporters have painted the Puerto Rican government as financially irresponsible, the board itself is no paragon of fiscal restraint.

The post As Puerto Rico Erupts in Protests, “La Junta” Eyes More Power appeared first on The Intercept.

The FTC-Facebook Settlement Does Too Little to Protect Your Privacy

EFF is disappointed by the terms of the settlement agreement announced today between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Facebook. It is grossly inadequate to the task of protecting the privacy of technology users from Facebook’s surveillance-based system of social networking and targeted advertising.

This settlement arises from the FTC’s 2012 settlement order against Facebook, concerning the company’s deceptive statements about user privacy. Facebook violated the 2012 FTC order through its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which violated the privacy rights of millions of Facebook users.

Today’s FTC-Facebook settlement does not sufficiently protect user privacy. For example:

The agreement does not limit how Facebook collects, uses, and shares the personal information of its users. It is not enough for the agreement to require Facebook to conduct its own privacy review of new products; that just empowers Facebook to decide its own collection, use, and sharing practices.
The agreement does not provide public transparency regarding how Facebook collects, uses, and shares personal information, or how Facebook implements the FTC settlement. It is not enough for only Facebook and the government to have this information.
This agreement does nothing to address Facebook’s market power in social networks and internet advertising, and may risk cementing Facebook’s market power.

These deficiencies are not cured by the $5 billion fine against Facebook. For a company the size of Facebook, this is not an effective deterrent against future violations of user privacy.

If the FTC were serious about putting a dent in the privacy problems created by Facebook’s targeted advertising business model, it could have taken aim at two of Facebook’s biggest sources of information: data brokers and third-party tracking.

Some provisions of the settlement agreement are positive. For example, it requires Facebook to delete existing face recognition templates, and bars Facebook from creating new ones, absent the user’s informed opt-in consent. Also, the settlement bars Facebook from using phone numbers provided by users to enhance their security (i.e., for two-factor authentication) for advertising purposes. Unfortunately, the settlement does not address Facebook’s other egregious abuses of user phone numbers, including exposing two-factor authentication numbers to public reverse lookup, and vacuuming up “shadow” contact information that users never gave to Facebook in the first place.

Taken as a whole, this settlement is bad news for consumer privacy. But this is bigger than Facebook. Its surveillance-driven targeted ad business model is common across the web. To protect user’s privacy rights, we need solid consumer data privacy legislation.

Causes of multidecadal climate changes

A new reconstruction of global average surface temperature change over the past 2,000 years has identified the main causes for decade-scale climate changes. The new temperature reconstruction also largely agrees with climate model simulations of the same time period. This suggests that current climate models accurately represent the contributions of various influences on global climate change -- and are capable of correctly predicting future climate warming.

Scientific consensus on humans causing #GlobalWarming passes 99% | #Science | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/24/scientific-consensus-on-humans-causing-global-warming-passes-99

#ClimateChange #Environment

Activists Camped at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea Face Government Opposition as They Attempt to Block Telescope Construction on Sacred Land

Gov. David Ige gave law enforcement more authority to remove activists and ensure delivery of materials to the Thirty Meter Telescope construction site.

The post Activists Camped at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea Face Government Opposition as They Attempt to Block Telescope Construction on Sacred Land appeared first on The Intercept.

A New Study Found that 15,000 People Died Because Their State Didn’t Expand Medicaid

Approximately 15,600 people died between 2014 and 2017 as a result of their states refusing to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The ACA promised to expand Medicaid coverage to individuals whose income was at or below 138 percent of the […]

House Intelligence Chairman Blasts Trump’s “Disloyalty to Country”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) offered a striking review of President Donald Trump at the hearing with Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Wednesday, accusing him of “something worse” than criminality: “Disloyalty to country.” “Your investigation determined that the Trump campaign—including Trump himself—knew that a foreign power was intervening in our election and welcomed […]

30,000+ US lives could be saved by reducing air pollution levels below current standard

Research findings show significant human health benefits when air quality is better than the current national ambient air quality standard. The estimate of lives that could be saved by further reduction of air pollution levels is more than thirty thousand, which is similar to the number of deaths from car accidents each year.

The Only Thing to Say About Boris Johnson, Prime Minister

Alex Norris on the UK’s new leader.

The Protests in Puerto Rico Against Gov. Rosselló Are About Life and Death

Police donning anti-riot gear—many with their names and badge numbers covered—used teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons to dislodge protesters from the streets surrounding the Puerto Rican governor’s mansion in Old San Juan on Wednesday evening. Earlier that day, tens of thousands assembled at the Capitol building before marching to the governor’s mansion to demand the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. This marked the fifth day of protests and a significant escalation in police violence against civilians. A series of leaked chat conversations involving the governor and other members of his inner-circle provided an unlikely spark that ignited mounting frustrations with the abuses of local elites and the colonial government. 

Last Tuesday, a small trove of messages from a private chat between Rosselló and a number of high-ranking officials sent on the encrypted messenger service Telegram were leaked to the press. The messages showed Rosselló and members of his administration using derogatory language to mock political rivals. Although the 11 pages of the chat initially released were damning on their own, Puerto Ricans were shocked by what they read when the Center for Investigative Journalism released a total of 889 pages to the public on Saturday.

The full leaked chat—although there are rumors that more leaked chats involving additional members of the Rosselló team could be on the way—demonstrated the utter contempt and disregard that the political ruling class has for the people of Puerto Rico. The chat paints Rosselló and his inner circle as little more than a pack of overgrown frat boys. The men in the chat engage in all manner of homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist “locker room talk,” calling political opponents putas (whores) and mamabichos (cocksuckers), commenting on women’s bodies, and insulting feminists and members of the LGBTQ+ community. While this alone is certainly worthy of condemnation, protesters are not taking to the streets because of the profanity in the chats. Rather, protesters are situating the chats within a broader context of structural violence, degradation, and exploitation that mark contemporary Puerto Rican society.

The combined catastrophes of the island’s debt crisis and Hurricane María have forced Puerto Ricans to endure an onslaught of both symbolic and material violence that must be negotiated on a near daily basis. From a surge in police killings and repression to rampant government corruption to the regular insults emanating from the colonial government, Puerto Ricans are confronted with constant attacks on their communities, bodies, mental health, and very humanity. The leaked chats painfully show how the current political formation in Puerto Rico, and the economic and political elites who sustain it, devalue life and facilitate the premature deaths of Puerto Ricans—particularly those who occupy the most vulnerable positions in society. The rhetoric and attitudes of the governor and his closest allies captured in the chat are ones that promote harm and death in myriad ways, from the outright incitement of violence to the promotion of a neoliberal politics of deadly neglect. This is something that protesters have been clear about since the beginning of the protests, although the mainstream media, and particularly U.S. based outlets, have narrowly framed the story around the governor and his associates’ inappropriate language and conduct. To suggest that thousands upon thousands from across the political spectrum are pouring into the streets with an intensity that has not been seen in years over foul language minimizes the ways that, for Puerto Ricans, these protests are quite literally about life and death.

It’s not just that Rosselló and others in the chat referred to women as putas and gatitas (kittens)—it’s that they did so in a context where feminist organizers have been calling on the governor to declare a state of emergency to deal with high rates of gender-based violence for over a year. The governor, when asked about the misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic language used throughout the chat, said that he was overworked and blowing off steam. But as feminists in Puerto Rico are quick to note, dozens of women have been killed at the hands of stressed out men who were just blowing off steam. The governor’s words aren’t just profane— as he has repeatedly refused to address the high rates of violence that women and queer people confront in Puerto Rico, they translate into lives lost. As Vanessa Contreras Capó, a spokesperson for the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción put it, “His attack was not that he called us ‘whores,’ ‘kittens,’ or any other macho epithet; the governor’s attack is that he still has not declared a state of emergency against gender violence.”

In one of the most disgusting exchanges in the chat, the “brothers,” as the participants refer to themselves, made light of the unprocessed bodies that accumulated in the Office of the Medical Examiner following Hurricane María. In response to comments made by Rosselló’s chief of staff Ricardo Llerandi, Rosselló notes in the chat that they have to work to bury the story—“Hay que matar esa historia rápido” (We have to kill that story quickly). Former chief financial officer and the governor’s representative to the Financial Oversight Board, Christian Sobrino, then replies, “Now that we're on that subject, do we not have a corpse to feed our crows? They clearly need attention.”

As numerous studies have shown, thousands lost their lives as a result of government ineptitude following Hurricane María. Yet the dead emerge in the chat as little more than a problem of optics. The punchline of this macabre joke drives home what many Puerto Ricans already knew—that their lives mattered little to the local government or Washington, and that their deaths mattered only insofar as they represent a problem to be managed. The past couple of days have seen protesters outside of the governor’s mansion holding signs with the names of loved ones who died as a result of the crisis provoked by Hurricane María. These protestors connected the chat’s disrespect of the dead to the larger structural violence of the Rosselló administration’s mishandling of the recovery, as well as its efforts to cover up the true scale of the disaster. For Puerto Ricans, this wasn’t just a crude or distasteful joke—it was proof of the callousness and disdain for the public with which elites govern.

For Puerto Ricans, the leaked chat was only the latest reminder of the ways that their lives are devalued and their futures circumscribed by both colonial rule and the avarice of local elites. Protesters are speaking out against the content of the chats, but they also are voicing a set of much broader demands to fundamentally reshape Puerto Rican society. People are demanding a life-affirming and more just society as they fill the streets of Old San Juan. They are demanding an end to the austerity measures that have already caused great suffering and threaten the ability of future generations to remain in Puerto Rico and live a dignified life. They’re demanding an audit of the island’s $124 billion debt and the dissolution of the Financial Oversight Board, which critics slam for deepening Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States. They’re demanding that government officials be held responsible for acts of corruption and profiteering that further deplete public funds and strip nurturing institutions of necessary resources. They’re demanding a future where lives are valued and deaths are mourned.

What the chat makes clear is that the current political arrangement cannot provide that future for Puerto Ricans. That’s why people are taking to the streets—not only to demand Rosselló’s resignation, but also to clearly express that the current political situation is unacceptable. Wednesday’s protest was one of the largest in recent history and some are even likening the protests of the past few days to the mobilizations to eject the U.S. Navy from the island municipality of Vieques. Indeed, the protests have brought together an important cross-section of Puerto Rican society speaking to widespread discontent with the current political situation.

Tellingly, one of the most galvanizing figures of the protests has been El Rey Charlie, who mobilized motorcycle and four track enthusiasts to join the protests and wage audio warfare against the governor by revving their engines outside of the governor’s mansion at night. El Rey Charlie has successfully brought working class Puerto Ricans who are often ignored by both political elites and activists into the heart of these protests. On Wednesday night, El Rey Charlie and his crew rode through working class neighborhoods and public housing communities encouraging people to join their caravan to the governor’s mansion. Just as a motorized cavalcade of an estimated 3,000-4,000 people were about to ride into Old San Juan, the police declared the protest over, said the constitution no longer applied, and started to forcibly remove people from the area, nearly causing a stampede.

Protesters have committed to remain in the streets until Rosselló resigns despite threats from police commissioner Henry Escalera to defend the “democratic” government of Puerto Rico “to the last drop of blood.” It’s not clear what exactly will come next, as the governor refuses to step down in the face of mounting protests. Still, one thing is certain: For people taking to the streets, Rosselló and the elite boys’ club that he represents have no future in Puerto Rico.

This story first appeared at NACLA.

The Just Transition for Coal Workers Can Start Now. Colorado Is Showing How.

This past May, Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis signed a series of new environmental bills into law, with the enthusiastic backing of the state’s labor movement. Legislation ranged from expanding community solar gardens to establishing a “Just Transition” office for coal-dependent communities.

Robert Mueller’s Testimony So Far

Lieu: “The reason again that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC opinion stating you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Mueller: “That is correct.” pic.twitter.com/yemIYmMkmb — Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 24, 2019

Read Robert Mueller’s Full Opening Statement Before the House Judiciary Committee

The USDA Didn’t Publish Its Plan to Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change. Here’s Where They Need it the Most.

The Trump administration’s department of agriculture has apparently settled on its strategy for preparing the food system for an uncertain future: ignore climate change.  This wasn’t always the agency’s tactic. Back in 2017, as Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich recently reported, the USDA was set to release a big plan on how to “help the agriculture industry […]

#GNOME is going mobile on the #Librem5 and we want to help you design and build amazing #convergent #mobile apps. Follow our tutorial series on our blog to get started https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-app-design-tutorial-naming-your-app/ and join the active community of developers on Matrix https://matrix.to/#/!wrRnhiBGdsithqslNz:talk.puri.sm?via=talk.puri.sm&via=matrix.org&via=librem.one #linux #linuxphone