Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I suspect that Mastodon is going to be under attack any time soon. We better be ready and defend the users that need and deserve defending

Golden Sunset

Nationalist political party Golden Dawn is on trial in Greece for inciting fascist violence. Other countries with a dangerous far-right should be taking notes.

These Boots Were Made For Lickin’

Why are we defending billionaires again?

Pesticide management is failing Australian and Great Barrier Reef waterways

Scientists say a failure of Australian management means excessive amounts of harmful chemicals -- many now banned in countries such as the EU, USA and Canada -- are damaging the country's waterways and the Great Barrier Reef.

Study: Actually, potted plants don't improve indoor air quality

Plants can help spruce up a home or office space, but claims about their ability to improve the air quality are vastly overstated, according to new research. A closer look at decades of research suggesting that potted plants can improve the air in homes and offices reveals that natural ventilation far outpaces plants when it comes to cleaning the air.

Unless warming is slowed, emperor penguins will be marching towards extinction

Emperor penguins are some of the most striking and charismatic animals on Earth, but a new study has found that a warming climate may render them extinct by the end of this century.

UK needs to act to prevent electric vehicle battery waste mountain

Recycling technologies for end-of-life lithium ion batteries (LIBs) are not keeping pace with the rapid rise of electric vehicles, storing up a potentially huge waste management problem for the future, according to a new study.

Stressed to the max? Deep sleep can rewire the anxious brain

Researchers have found that the type of sleep most apt to calm and reset the anxious brain is deep sleep, also known as non-rapid eye movement (NREM) slow-wave sleep, a state in which neural oscillations become highly synchronized, and heart rates and blood pressure drop.

How hot (and not-so-hot) compounds in chili peppers change during ripening

Anyone who has tasted a hot chili pepper has felt the burn of capsaicinoids, the compounds that give peppers their spiciness, as well as possible health benefits. Related pepper compounds, called capsinoids, have similar properties, minus the heat, so they are attractive as potential functional food ingredients and supplements. Now, researchers have measured amounts of both compounds in three types of chili peppers as they ripen.

Pharmacy in the jungle study reveals indigenous people's choice of medicinal plants

In one of the most diverse studies of the non-random medicinal plants selection by gender, age and exposure to outside influences from working with ecotourism projects, researchers worked with the Kichwa communities of Chichico Rumi and Kamak Maki in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They discovered a novel method to uncover the intracultural heterogeneity of traditional knowledge while testing the non-random selection of medicinal plants and exploring overuse and underuse of medicinal plant families in these communities.

Go with the flow: Scientists design new grid batteries for renewable energy

Scientists have designed an affordable 'flow battery' membrane that could accelerate renewable energy for the electrical grid.

The #radicale project (selfhosting carddav/caldav solution) is currently looking for some new core maintainers.

If you would like to work on an awesome #opensource project and (in best case) you are familar with #python please join us.

https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/997

Please re-toot and share it in your community if you want to help.

The Real America

Join us as we take a journey to the HEARTLAND to talk to some REAL voters!

Facebook's 2020 Election Plan Is What George Orwell Warned Us About

With its 2020 election policy, Facebook is shaping up to be the Big Brother George Orwell warned you about in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

https://www.ccn.com/is-facebooks-2020-election-plan-orwellian/ #DeleteFacebook

Solar and wind energy preserve groundwater for drought, agriculture
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191106083624.htm #climatechange #climatecrisis

Why is Australia trying to shut down climate activists?

A surge of climate activism is flooding Australia as the country falls behind on its promise to reduce emissions — effectively ignoring the Paris Agreement the Trump administration just abandoned. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is arguing that the government should outlaw “indulgent and selfish” efforts by environmental groups to rattle businesses with rallies and boycotts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/world/australia/australia-climate-protests-coal.html #climatechange #climatecrisis

Started training a bot that tries to analyze and identify hate-speech on Twitter.

A few things became quite apparent after only a few days:

1. There are huge networks of (seemingly) fake accounts that like and retweet each other's posts. Someone is operating this at a _massive_ scale.

2. Reporting and banning fake accounts seems futile. You're fighting a hydra that spawns new accounts quicker than one can report them.

3. I'm feeling sick to my stomach just browsing through the logs.

Trashing Teachers and Red-Baiting: How a Republican Governor Lost in Kentucky

When Kentucky teachers staged a series of walkouts in February and March, shutting down school districts across the state, their message was clear: Stop the attacks on workers and fund public education. It had become a common refrain as a series of teachers strikes swept the country, starting with the historic statewide walkout in West Virginia last February, which soon spread to Oklahoma, Arizona, California and other states.

But Kentucky educators were up against a singularly odious adversary: Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. The least popular governor in the country, Bevin made the incendiary accusation that  teachers abetted sexual assault of children through their labor action, telling local station WDRB-TV: "I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them. I guarantee you somewhere today a child was physically harmed or ingested poison because they were home alone because a single parent didn't have any money to take care of them."

The teachers, who were protesting cuts to their pensions as well as school privatization scams, were furious. J.P. LaVertu, a Shelby County teacher, called Bevin “a disgrace to our state." Kentucky Education Association President Stephanie Winkler said she was “appalled” by his comments. Even Republican state Sen. Max Wise said Bevin’s accusations were “reprehensible.”

And on Tuesday night, Kentucky voters showed Gov. Bevin the door. Losing a widely watched race to his Democratic opponent, Andy Beshear, Bevin proved that viscously assailing and insulting working people while throwing your arms around President Trump is a recipe for electoral disaster, even in one of the reddest states in the nation.

On Monday, Trump visited Kentucky to rally voters behind Bevin, saying, "If you lose, they're going to say Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. This was the greatest. You can't let that happen to me!"

Despite Bevin’s refusal to concede, that defeat did indeed happen to the scandal-engulfed president. And while anger toward Trump isn’t the only reason Bevin went down in flames, turnout in some of the most progressive areas of the state soared on Tuesday, suggesting that voters fed up with a president on the verge of impeachment and a Republican Party deadset on implementing a craven anti-worker agenda fueled Beshear’s victory.    

In addition to being one of the most Republican states, Kentucky is also one of the poorest. In 2017, over 17% of state residents were living in poverty (the fourth highest rate in the country) and nearly 15% faced food insecurity (the seventh highest). A report released earlier this year shows that Kentucky is the worst state to retire in.

It was under these stark conditions that Gov. Bevin in 2018 chose to implement work requirements in order for residents to receive Medicaid, which would cut the healthcare coverage of at least 95,000 Kentuckians. When a federal court blocked the plan, Bevin pivoted to unilaterally taking away Medicaid recipients vision and dental coverage, which impacted 460,000 people.     

Beshear has pledged to reverse these plans, protecting Medicaid coverage while strengthening the Affordable Care Act. On the issue of education, Beshear campaigned on “expanding early childhood education, ending a teacher shortage and increasing mental health services for children.” He also called for fully funding public education in the state while proposing a $2,000 pay raise for all of Kentucky’s public school teachers and making sure none make less than $40,000. As Beshear said, “We’re going to be the best administration for public education that this state has ever seen.”

Ahead of the election, Republicans attempted to paint Beshear and fellow Democrats as “socialists,” and Gov. Bevin claimed his opponent was “in line with Bernie Sanders” and “spreading his hateful class warfare and communist ideology." Sanders, for his part, said in 2016, “I understand your new governor Gov. Bevin is busy cutting health care and cutting education. So if you can imagine the kind of governor Gov. Bevin is, think about Bernie Sanders as a president doing exactly the opposite.”

While Beshear’s politics are far more moderate than Sanders, such attacks should make clear that Republicans will try to tar any and all Democrats as radical socialists ahead of 2020, no matter their actual platforms.

The fact that Democrats won across the country on Tuesday night, retaking the Virginia state legislature while coming up big in the Philadelphia suburbs, indicates that this red-baiting is not a winning strategy—especially considering that open democratic socialists themselves had a good night.

It’s no surprise that Gov. Bevin and his fellow Republicans would use their power to strip working people of healthcare and pensions while vilifying teachers—the vanguard of the growing working-class insurgency. But just as attempts to peg Democrats as subversive threats to American democracy have failed to protect the GOP, so too will the continued attacks on public school educators.

During their walkouts earlier this year, “Remember in November” became the teachers’ rallying cry. Tuesday’s results suggest that they meant it.     

#Bones of #ape living 12m years ago point to genesis of #upright #walking | #Science | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/06/bones-of-ape-living-12m-years-point-to-genesis-of-upright-walking

#Biology #Zoology #Primatology #Anthropology #Palaeontology #Evolution

Labor Needs To Embrace Social Justice Unionism

Proponents of the “rank-and-file strategy” (RFS) emphasize the need to lay the foundations of a revitalized labor movement through rank-and-file workers—as opposed to union staff or leadership. As Laura Gabby notes, this idea has a long history: In the 1970s, for instance, thousands of leftists (myself included) of both working-class origin and otherwise entered the workforce to build a real working-class Left and rebuild organized labor.

Though this rank-and-file emphasis is more of an orientation than a full strategy, it is good in that it encourages people on the Left to engage as rank and filers—to enter into the working class as coworkers rather than staff. The idea is not, as Andrew Dobbyn argues, elitist; instead, it suggests fellow workers have something to teach, rather than simply being vessels for knowledge from leftists.

But the current discussion has certain important blind spots. First, the mostly white socialists discussing the RFS often fail to recognize that leftist formations composed mostly or entirely of people of color have historically been instrumental in developing and leading efforts to retool the labor movement. The direction and character of these formations has frequently differed from that of white-led formations.

Peter Shapiro presents one example in his Jacobin article, “On the Clock and Off,” drawing on his work with the League of Revolutionary Struggle. He writes about the Mexican immigrant women who emerged as rank-and-file leaders in the 1985–87 frozen food strike in Watsonville, Calif. They were not part of their union’s progressive reform caucus, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, nor would they have been considered part of any conventional “militant minority”—which is why, Shapiro writes, “some strike supporters on the Left viewed them skeptically.” But these women established their own informal infrastructure, bound together through the solidarity of not just working together but the shared experience of racial and gender oppression, and propelled the strike to victory.

More broadly, proponents of the rank-and-file strategy must look beyond the clear, identifiable base of organic leaders and leftists and assess the forces within any workplace, including conservatives and pragmatists. As Fernando Gapasin and I write in our book, Solidarity Divided, to defeat the conservative elements, the Left must pull the center along. Advocates of a “militant minority” can be skeptical of such alliances, but this is a mistake.

William Z. Foster, a brilliant trade unionist who led the Communist Party USA, advocated a militant minority strategy but later adjusted his approach to pursue a “Left-Center Alliance,” recognizing that, even in the militant 1930s, the Left was not sufficiently powerful to act alone. Workers will not necessarily agree with the total program of a leftist, so it is unlikely that leftists will be organizing workers around an exclusively left-wing program. To the extent to which we ignore the center we cede territory to conservative forces that will build their own alliances to crush the Left.

Leftists in the labor movement must also look beyond the narrow objectives of trade unionism as we know it, centered on making gains within the workplace. In fact, the Left needs an alternative framework, a “social justice unionism,” with objectives focused on the larger working class—which includes, for instance, what Stephen Lerner and others refer to as “bargaining for the common good.” Here, the union takes issues of the larger community to the bargaining table. Unions, too, might provide active support to or establish shared agendas with other worker or progressive community organizations.

Lastly, rebuilding the labor movement requires recognition that labor, as Andrew points out, is not only trade unions. The rise of so-called alt-labor, such as worker centers and domestic worker organizations, is part of this rebuilding. Leftists play a major role in this sector, which is disproportionately workers of color. Unions can and should provide direct material assistance to this organizing; the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, for instance, has worked to ally with informal economy workers.

A Left without a working class base is not a Left, but a collection of advocates for change. Our mission is to rebuild that base, transforming the Left and the labor movement together.

For alternate perspectives on the rank-and-file strategy, see "Want To Build the Labor Movement? Get a Job at a Union Workplace."and "90% of Workers Aren't in a Union. Labor's Future Depends on Them."