Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Abrupt shifts in Arctic climate projected

Researchers project that as the permafrost continues to degrade, the climate in various regions of the Arctic could potentially change abruptly in the relatively near future. Their research also suggests that as the permafrost degrades, the severity of wildfires will double from one year to the next and remain at the new and higher rate for regions in the Northwestern Territories and the Yukon.

Southern California earthquakes increased stress on major fault line

A new study has found that last summer's Ridgecrest earthquakes in Southern California earthquakes increased stress on the Garlock Fault, which has been dormant for at least a century.

Harmful emissions from traffic, trucks, SUVs

Almost one third of Canadians live near a major road -- and this means they go about their everyday lives exposed to a complex mixture of vehicle air pollutants. A new study reveals that emissions from nearby traffic can greatly increase concentrations of key air pollutants, with highly polluting trucks making a major contribution.

Prenatal air pollution exposure linked to infants' decreased heart rate response to stress

A mother's exposure to particulate air pollution during pregnancy is associated with reduced cardiac response to stress in six-month-old infants, according to new research. This study is among the first to find that particulate air pollution exposure in utero can affect heart rate variability, which is a known risk factor for health issues.

Whatever Works

Wow, paying “taxes” for “owning everything”? Ridiculous!

The Unfairness of It All!

No President in HISTORY has been treated like this!

The Underground Migrant Support Network

One early morning this September, organizer Sendy Soto, 38, asked Manuel (a pseudonym), in line at the busy Chicago Greyhound bus station, if he wanted a cup of tea. (Soto requested a pseudonym for Manuel to protect him from ICE.)

“In Guatemala, where I’m from, there is something called los nervios, and they’ll diagnose you for it,” Soto said. “Whenever there’s something tragic in our town or something difficult, people come with tea to calm you down for los nervios.”

Manuel, 26, was wearing a thin white shirt and holding a plastic bag with all his belongings. He nodded and Soto poured warm chamomile tea into a paper cup.

Soto is the founder of Chicago Immigrant Transit Assistance (CITA), an organization that serves people seeking asylum in the midst of legal processing as they pass through the Chicago Greyhound station. Thousands of families and individuals released from ICE detention centers are sent on Greyhound buses across the United States each year, forced to navigate the arduous transit system without assistance on their way to reach their sponsors and await their hearings.

“We don’t know if there is anyone on the bus who can use our help,” Soto says. “The best thing for us is to just be present and watch out for those who didn’t get assistance on the way.”

CITA is entirely volunteerled, funded through a GoFundMe campaign and donations from the American Red Cross and community groups. Volunteers wait at the bus station in two-hour shifts, day and night, for people like Manuel, who had walked from the ICE processing center a few blocks away, as well as asylum seekers passing through from detention centers around the country. Around 30 volunteers have helped distribute food and clothes, call family members and offer translation services to more than 1,000 asylum seekers since the group’s founding last year.

CITA is one of several volunteer-led groups doing similar work around the country, including the Mariposas Collective in Tennessee, Angry Tias and Abuelas in Texas and Cincinnati Immigrant Transit Assistance. These groups form what Soto calls an “aboveground railroad.”

The Chicago Greyhound station is not easy for asylum seekers to navigate. Information is posted almost exclusively in English, and there is just one part-time Spanish-speaking staff member. Families or sponsors pay for migrants’ tickets, and a last-minute change costs $20 in cash.

Yet, many Greyhound staff members work with CITA to help support these migrants. The same day Manuel passed through, another young man arrived from the Chicago ICE office. Staff and volunteers bought him a ticket, provided him with food and helped him call his family, all within 10 minutes, so he could board the noon bus to New York.

When Soto offered to help Manuel call his wife and young daughter, he was brimming with excitement. His family had been living in Iowa since January, seeking asylum from violence in Guatemala. When Manuel legally crossed the border to join them in June, he was first detained in Texas, then transferred to the Kenosha County Detention Center in Wisconsin for three months, then ordered to post a $7,500 bond for release. Not all asylum seekers are afforded this option—in 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for illegally detaining asylum seekers with credible cases for extensive periods.

Manuel’s family was able to pay his bond, and he was transferred to the ICE processing center in Chicago in September, where he stood handcuffed until his release hours later. ICE officials gave him a paper map to the Greyhound station, in English, photocopied so many times the streets were indiscernible.

This experience of being moved across the country, paying thousands of dollars in bonds and then being released with little more than a paper map is typical of how asylum seekers are treated in the United States. 

Although Soto and another volunteer were able to assist, Manuel still has a long journey ahead as he awaits the outcome of his asylum case, which could take years. As of September, courts were backlogged with over a million pending immigration cases.

“It’s kind of like a Band-Aid,” says Jeanie Vondriska, another CITA volunteer. “Everything’s broken, you’re traumatized, and I’m giving you a cup of ramen?”

Still, CITA’s goal is to help migrants become self-sufficient. “If I just teach somebody how to read the bus schedule, I’m sure they’re not gonna need somebody at the next stop,” Soto says. “They have all the abilities in the world to care for themselves. They just need the resources.”

In the short term, Soto would like to see a more sustainable system at the bus station, similar to Travelers Aid at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Travelers Aid has a permanent desk and paid staff members who provide guidance and support for those in need, including refugees. Longer term, the solution lies in comprehensive immigration reform.

“It is really wonderful that so many kind people can come together and fill the gaps [left] by our government,” Soto says. “But the best way to solve this is to change those policies so that people are treated justly, fairly and have an opportunity to seek safety in this country.”

Chicago Teachers Are Carrying the Torch of Decades of Militant Worker Struggles

“I solemnly swear that I will never stop fighting for my students.” This hand-made picket sign, one of hundreds at an October 25 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and SEIU 73 rally, sums up what makes the teachers’ strike so important. In an approach CTU pioneered during its 2012 strike, the 25,000-strong CTU refuses to draw a firm boundary between justice in the workplace and justice for its students. For the union—under the leadership of the leftwing Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators—affordable housing is a bargaining issue because roughly 17,000 CPS students are experiencing houselessness. And so is the shortage of school nurses, counselors and librarians—along with the corporate and hedge-fund pillaging of a city beset with deep poverty and racial segregation.

Living in a noisy area increases the risk of suffering a more serious stroke

The high levels of environmental noise we are subjected to in large cities can increase both the severity and consequences of an ischaemic stroke. More precisely, researchers put the increased risk at 30% for people living in noisier areas. In contrast, living close to green areas brings down this risk by up to 25%. This is the first time that these factors have been analysed in relation to stroke severity.

Play Ball

Overlord Trump can’t catch a break from the mutant rabble!

Photo Black Ops

Obama’s White House photographer suggests that Trump’s Al-Baghdadi situation room photo was staged.

Extent of human encroachment into world's protected areas revealed

Largest study yet to compare protected with 'matched' unprotected land finds 'significantly higher' increases in human pressure -- primarily through agriculture -- in protected areas across the tropics. Researchers argue that efforts to increase coverage may not help save wildlife unless protecting land 'on paper' is backed up by funding and local community engagement.

Make-Believe

Witch culture IS your costume, actually.

Over the Last Week, At Least 85,000 Workers Were Out on 13 Different Strikes

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 485,000 U.S. workers were involved in strikes and lockouts during 2018. That’s the highest number since 1986. The data for 2019 won’t be released until 2020, but there’s a good chance that number will be exceeded, a point driven home by the fact that, over the last week, at least 85,000 workers participated in 13 different strikes across the United States.

Delays May Occur

If the music’s loud enough, it’ll drown out all that incriminating testimony!

The Death of the Kurdish Dream

It briefly looked like the Kurds would get their own independent state. What happened?

The Postal Service Is the Most Popular Federal Agency in America. Let’s Massively Expand It.

For most of its 244-year existence, the United States Postal Service (USPS) was widely considered as an innovative powerhouse binding the American experiment together. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French diplomat who toured America in the 1830s, called it a “great link between minds.” During World War I, the post office teamed with the Department of Agriculture to institute a “Farm to Table” program to help distribute produce and other nutrient-rich foods across the country. Today, USPS stands as Americans’ favorite federal agency.

Since the 1970s, however, a combination of financial woes and political attacks have wounded the post office. What would it take to return USPS to a pioneering force capable of addressing our country’s multiple crises? Why not leverage the nearly 250,000 letter carriers and over 30,000 post offices that blanket all 50 states for more than just mail delivery? Why not expand the workforce and presence of the American public’s most favored government agency?

With mega companies like Amazon vying for the future of delivery, and conservatives increasingly calling for privatization, the U.S. Postal Service needs a makeover, not a dismantling.

In an era of little faith in government, a reimagined postal service could demonstrate how public solutions can solve many of our collective problems, from climate change to a predatory financial industry. That’s exactly what the post office did in the country’s early days.

As journalist Winifred Gallagher describes in her 2016 book How the Post Office Created America, universal mail service helped spark a communications revolution rivaling that of the telegraph through slashing the price of correspondence and buoying westward expansion. The 1792 Postal Act effectively underwrote newspaper circulation, spreading national and global news across the newly formed states and territories. 

In 1897, a resident of the Arizona Territory wrote to the Postmaster General, “I am more than ever proud of being an American citizen. I live three and a half miles from the Tempe post office, and have been sick for a week past, yet my mail is brought to my door every morning, except Sunday.” The abolitionist John Brown served as a local postmaster before making his contribution to emancipation, just as did Abraham Lincoln.

But by 2001, as first-class mail usage began to decline, and scares of anthrax increased following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, USPS’s financial losses were growing. Five years later, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, limiting its ability to innovate beyond the delivery of mail and packages, just as the internet began to boom. The law also required the agency, which receives no taxpayer dollars, to make annual payments of $5.5 billion for ten years to fund the healthcare of its future retirees. Today, the postal service continues to bleed money despite delivering more packages than ever due to e-commerce.

As calls for privatization mount, the agency still manages to innovate within its limited mandate. Letter carriers deliver “last mile” parcels for FedEx and UPS, helping keep both corporations’ services affordable. The agency has also built the world’s largest gantry robotic fleet, which moves 314,000 mail trays per day.

Handing over the keys to the private sector would run counter to USPS’s stated purpose of connecting every American home and business, no matter how remote. Private corporations, following the whims of the market, would likely charge more for delivery in less dense, rural areas, while pricing out low-income residents everywhere.

True modernization would expand the agency’s ability to serve the common good, not undermine it.

Post office locations could provide free Wi-Fi access, computers with access to government services, printers, and public meeting rooms. Clerks could provide drivers’ license renewal, multilingual translation, help with immigration processing and other services. The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) has proposed expanding vote by mail, providing follow-up census services, and notary, among other services.

The buildings themselves could be used to extend broadband infrastructure and be fitted with green technology like solar panels, electric car charging stations and rooftop farms. USPS’s Los Angeles mail processing facility has 31,000 solar panels, making it one of the city’s largest buildings generating electricity through solar. Depending on their location, some buildings could even be rebuilt as community-controlled, mixed-use development, to include affordable housing.

USPS could also return to providing affordable banking services, as it did from 1911 to 1967. In addition to the international and domestic money orders it already sells, the post office could allow Americans to collect savings, cash paychecks, transfer money electronically and pay bills. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently introduced such postal banking legislation aimed at curbing predatory lending practices. Such a move would help catch the country up with the rest of the world: Less than 10% of post offices across the globe do not currently offer basic financial services.  

None of these ideas are as revolutionary as it was to blanket the country with post offices. Yet, a truly modern postal service would be more than the sum of its parts. It would help restore confidence in the public sector’s role in serving the common good, at a time when faith in government seems so hard to come by.

Exxon accurately predicted 2019's climate change and CO2 emission in 1982:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368593