Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

#FarSide creator #GaryLarson launches #website with promise of new work | #Books | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/17/far-side-creator-gary-larson-launches-website-with-promise-of-new-work

#Art #Cartoons

Birds' seasonal migrations shift earlier as climate changes

In what the authors believe is one of the first studies to examine climate change impact on the timing of bird migration on a continental scale, researchers report that spring migrants were likely to pass certain stops earlier now than they would have 20 years ago. Also, temperature and migration timing were closely aligned, with the greatest changes in migration timing occurring in the regions warming most rapidly. Timing shifts were less apparent in fall, they add.

Our holiday #sale has begun 🎉 10% off Librem laptops, USB keys and the new Librem Server and 20% off annual Librem One plans https://puri.sm/posts/holiday-2019-sale/ #Purism #Librem #LibremServer #LibremOne

#Neolithic chewing gum helps recreate image of ancient Dane | #Science | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/17/neolithic-dna-ancient-chewing-gum-denmark

#Biology #Zoology #Evolution #Anthropology #Denmark

Archaeologists find Bronze Age tombs lined with gold

Archaeologists have discovered two Bronze Age tombs containing a trove of engraved jewelry and artifacts that promise to unlock secrets about life in ancient Greece.

Centrist Pundits Assume Voters Agree with Them. Polling Tells a Different Story.

The 2020 primary has, so far, been great for progressives. The campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have robust policy shops, churning out bold, comprehensive plans on issues from education to climate change to healthcare to immigration.

And voters are responding. Warren has seen her poll numbers rise, and is currently first in Iowa polling averages and tied for first in New Hampshire. And, after a brief dip following his heart attack, Sanders rebounded in the polls too, buoyed by the momentum of endorsements from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.

But not everyone is happy about the progressive ambition on display. And I’m not just talking about the Wall Streeters who regularly speak to the press about how much they don’t want a Warren or Sanders presidency.

No, I’m talking about those within the party as well. According to pundit Jonathan Chait, leading Democratic candidates are living in a “fantasy world” about how progressive the electorate is, setting themselves up for defeat. Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, launching a new career as a left-bashing commentator, thinks Democrats will alienate the suburbs if they push “pie-in-the-sky policy ideas” or a “smorgasbord of new entitlements.” Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has joined in on trying to temper the ambition of the presidential field, arguing, “What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan.”

All three—along with countless other politicians and political observers—have been beating the drum that a progressive policy agenda is wildly out of step with the public.

Chait, for instance, laments that Democrats are abandoning an Obama-esque incrementalism. But there isn't much reason to believe that such incrementalism is an electoral winner given the shellacking Democrats faced amid cratering turnout in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. A political program needs to build a constituency to fight for it.

To be clear, not every voter will agree with you on every single issue. A candidate simply needs to convince voters that they are more trustworthy and more likely to fight on the voters’ behalf in the areas where they do agree.

Fortunately for progressives, the voters do agree on a lot.

Taxing the rich. Data for Progress recently polled the tax plans of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Sixty-five percent of voters chose either Sanders or Warren’s plan as their favorite. Even 50% of Republicans did.

A Green New Deal. The idea of a Green New Deal has become the hallmark of ambitious climate plans in 2020, recognizing the need for massive investment in decarbonizing infrastructure and good-paying green jobs. It’s a deal voters approve of: according to the Cook Political Report, 67% of swing voters say that a Green New Deal is a good idea.

Free College. Given the crushing impact of student debt on a generation of students and recent graduates, candidates like Sanders and Warren have been talking about eliminating tuition at public colleges and universities. In a New York Timespoll from this summer, three-fifths of voters, including 72% of independents, supported the idea.

Medicare for All. The idea of moving toward a healthcare system that isn’t reliant on private, for-profit insurers especially riles up the naysayers. Polling on healthcare reforms can vary a lot based on phrasing, so the best data on popular support is one that tests multiple framings at once. When the Progressive Change Institute tested support for Medicare for All, they found that as long as progressives offer counterarguments and don’t let Republican narratives dominate, Medicare for All commands majority support.

That’s why we’ve seen Democrats run on Medicare for All in purple districts and win. Katie Porter and Mike Levin, both supporters of Medicare for All, succeeded in the well-heeled suburbs of Orange County. And Medicare for All supporter Matt Cartwright, who represents Obama-Trump territory in northeastern Pennsylvania (think Scranton), won re-election by almost double digits over a well-funded Republican challenger.

Given how broadly popular such progressive ideas are, one would think that they would be a part of any concept of a political “center.” But they’re not.

That’s because the “center” pundits talk about isn’t actually the center of the electorate. It more often refers to the center of the elite class of major donors—upholding a corporate-friendly status quo.

“Centrist” Democrats in Congress are fighting to protect pharmaceutical monopolies, thus inflating the cost of prescription drugs. By contrast, three-quarters of voters in key swing districts, according to a recent poll, want to see such monopolies broken up.

“Centrist” Democrats have aided and abetted Donald Trump’s immigration policies, but polls show that voters overwhelmingly oppose family separation and a border wall. 

“Centrist” Democrats often flock to bills that roll back regulations on Wall Street, and yet cracking down on Wall Street is popular across the political spectrum.

“Centrist” Democrats push to increase military spending year after year, and yet only one-third of voters actually think that we are spending too little.

The fact that progressive policies are popular—and that policies branded “centrist” often aren’t—doesn’t mean that progressive candidates can rest on their laurels and be assured of victory. We’ve seen progressive ballot measures win in the same elections that more progressive candidates didn’t.

What it does mean is that you can run on progressive policies and values and win. And that you can change what we even mean by the “center” in the process.   

Resident orcas' appetite likely reason for decline of big Chinook salmon

Large, old Chinook salmon have mostly disappeared from the West Coast. A new study points to the recent rise of resident killer whales, and their insatiable appetite for large Chinook salmon, as the main driver behind the decline of the big fish.

#deletefacebook
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-global-lobbying-campaign-against-data-privacy-laws-investment

Cities Aren’t Waiting for a Federal Green New Deal

In 1992, recognizing that not all countries had contributed equally to the climate crisis, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change codified the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” This framework insists that developed countries “take the lead in combating climate change” by transitioning to clean energy more rapidly, in order to allow time for developing nations to catch up to the same standard of living.

But it’s not just countries that are disproportionately liable for decades of emissions. One hundred cities account for nearly a fifth of our global carbon footprint. Three of the top 10 are in the United States: New York (3), Los Angeles (5), and Chicago (8)—these cities alone make up nearly 10% of U.S. emissions.  

This may seem counterintuitive. Dense cities, after all, are more energy efficient and data suggests that per capita emissions actually decrease with urban population growth. But after analyzing the carbon footprints of over 13,000 cities around the world, one study found that combined high population and high income made cities disproportionately high emitters.

Within wealthy cities, high-consumption lifestyles drive emissions, and those lifestyles are shaped by the architecture of our urban environment. Everything from the shape of the city and the length of commutes to bike- and pedestrian-friendliness, robustness of public transportation (and/or highway) infrastructure, and the physical buildings themselves drive emissions. Rather than simply insisting people change their lifestyles to tackle the climate crisis, we need to insist on changing the cities that shape those lifestyles. And—with the federal government unlikely to pass a Green New Deal until at least 2021—a number of cities are starting to do just that.

Just ahead of Earth Day, the New York City Council passed a historic package of climate legislation that many have called a Green New Deal for New York City. At the center of the Climate Mobilization Act is a bill that mandates buildings over 25,000 square feet reduce emissions 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. Behind the scenes, grassroots organizers had been forming a diverse coalition that united low-income communities of color with predominantly white climate activists over a period of several years. “In the end we won because of the coalition building and campaign work that we did,” says Pete Sikora, Climate & Inequality Campaigns Director for New York Communities for Change.

Buildings account for nearly 70% of carbon emissions in New York City, which has the largest carbon footprint of any urban area in the country. The city plans on implementing the policy through the creation of a new Office of Building Energy and Emissions Performance which would set performance standards, monitor building energy use and emissions, and determine penalties for buildings that fail to comply. 

“There is no way to address the [energy] grid or the radical change needed to reach massive pollution cuts without prioritizing energy efficiency,” Sikora says. The goal is to reduce energy use to such a degree that large buildings, which often rely on fossil fueled-powered boilers and gas for heat and cooking, could be fully powered by the electric grid. 

The importance of addressing buildings in general cannot be overstated. Globally, building operations, materials and construction account for nearly 40% of energy use. According to Architecture 2030, the global building stock will double by 2060. “This,” they say, “is the equivalent of adding an entire New York City every month for 40 years.”

While the federal government can set national emissions targets and provide federal funds to cities, much will be left to local governments to monitor and enforce energy efficiency standards—a task too big for the federal government to handle alone.

In July, Berkeley, Calif., became the first city in the United States to ban natural gas use in new buildings. Thirteen other cities across California followed shortly after, enacting new building codes that either require or encourage new construction to be run completely on electricity. In Philadelphia, organizers are pressuring the city council to pass similar legislation. This marks a significant first step towards long-term, government-enforced emissions standards. These progressive cities across the country are beginning to establish what will hopefully become a new normal.  

Even with fossil fuel use eliminated within buildings, though, electricity is still only as clean as the grid that supplies it. In New York state, a grassroots organizing coalition successfully pushed for a recent state law requiring the grid to be 70% powered by renewable energy by 2030 and emissions-free by 2050. And around the country, local progressive groups are hard at work trying to put electric utilities under public ownership. The Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been waging a fierce campaign, in collaboration with some of the city’s six socialist city council members, to bring their main electric utility company, ComEd, under municipal control. Similar DSA campaigns to take back the grid have appeared in New York City; Boston; New Haven, Conn.; East Bay, Calif.; and Providence, R.I.

“Our main campaign is energy democracy and we see that as a key aspect of winning a Green New Deal” say Sydney Ghazarian, who serves on the steering committee of DSA’s National Ecosocialist Working Group, which she helped found in 2017. (Full disclosure: This author is a member of DSA, though not involved with the ecosocialist working group.)

She and a few other members, Ghazarian says, “realized that [the climate crisis] was going to be the ultimate contradiction of capitalism” and would “require massive restructuring so socialists needed to be on the forefront of this issue.” The first priority for the Ecosocialist Working Group was infrastructure to implement municipal-level climate campaigns in local DSA chapters. 
“We can’t wait until 2021 to start,” Ghazarian says. “What we can do is actually make real changes at the city level and the local level to start [the transition].” While supporting candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is pushing for a national Green New Deal, DSA chapters have also been on the ground organizing a working-class base of supporters by engaging with people where they are: overwhelmingly, in cities. 

There is an additional political advantage to organizing at the city-level: dense urban areas, to a great degree, are more inclined to vote blue than their rural counterparts. And enough large cities, accounting for much of the country’s population, taking serious climate action can put pressure on the federal government to pass decisive legislation. 
Over 1,200 cities around the world have already declared a state of “climate emergency,” Oxford Dictionary’s 2019 word of the year. It’s a necessary first step and one national governments have been disinclined to take. “We have to shift into emergency mode,” says Laura Berry, research and publications director at The Climate Mobilization (TCM), which has helped lead this movement through their Climate Emergency Declaration campaign. 

The goal of the organization is to catalyze a World War II-scale mobilization to reverse the climate crisis. In 2016, Bernie Sanders embraced TCM’s demand, and helped introduced it to the Democratic Party platform. But when Trump won the election, the organization shifted its focus to the local level. With Republicans holding the White House, Senate and a majority of state legislatures, cities are proving the best option for short-term change.  

The organization has laid out a template for local government to declare a state of emergency with the hopes of “building upward.”  “Federal and international negotiations have been incredibly ineffective in addressing the crisis that we are facing,” Berry says. “We see local governments as playing a really important role in advocating and pushing for stronger action at the state and national level.” 

Nothing can substitute the need for international cooperation or a federal Green New Deal. But without municipal efforts to cooperate and enforce climate legislation, many of these policies, to borrow a pun from Sikora, will just be blowing a lot of hot air.

Mix and Match

The British had an election. But more importantly: What does it mean for OUR election?

You Have Been Defeated By Logic

More case files of Donald Trump, Detective-in-Chief.

Ad Busters

The Hallmark channel says it will “reinstate” its ad featuring Lesbian brides.

Trump’s North America Trade Deal Is Poised to Worsen Climate Change—But Dems Don’t Seem To Mind

While Congressional Democrats made clear that they would not bring the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to a vote until it had the backing of the AFL-CIO, support they finally secured last week, Democrats appear comfortable voting on the replacement trade deal that has virtually no support from leading environmental groups.

The Children Are Our Future

Wow, we really goofed things up. Good thing this child is here to save us while we do no work to fix anything!

Cold Welcome

Get outta here, Theo!

In the Future Every President Will Be Impeached over Drivel

After Democrats impeach President Trump on a relatively narrow charge of trying to influence Ukraine by withholding military aid and requesting that that country investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, it seems pretty clear that big issues will no longer be on the table and that impeachment will become a routine matter.

Harnessing nature's defences against tsunamis

As sea levels rise and adverse weather events become more common, vulnerable coastal communities are at increasing risk of devastation from storm surges and tsunamis. The death toll from tsunamis was 260,000 during the past century. A research team has now compared the effects of human-made and ecosystem protection to propose an approach including mangroves and coral reefs in coastal protection.

Trump’s Space Force Is No Joke

Update: On Dec. 11, 2019, the Democratic-controlled House passed a $738 billion defense bill that included the creation of Trump's long-sought Space Force.

In the rush to heap scorn upon the Trump administration, the president’s critics sometimes miss the forest for the trees. Such was the case in June when Donald Trump announced the creation of the socalled Space Force, a sixth branch of the U.S. military.

Critics mocked the idea as “ridiculous,” “stupid” and part of an “imaginary space war.” “There’s no threat in space! Who are we fighting?” asked Stephen Colbert. Vox wondered if the Space Force would carry lightsabers.

It was easy to miss that the idea is not uniquely Trumpian—and poses a real threat. For all intents and purposes, a space force already exists in the form of the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), a 36,000-person division of the Air Force that’s been operating since 1982.

Where Trump’s proposal differs is that it forms an entirely new military branch devoted to space, something James Clay Moltz, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and author of The Politics of Space, says is “largely unprecedented.”

According to Vice President Mike Pence, the Space Force would include a new centralized command structure for space operations that would take over satellite-based military tasks such as surveillance and navigation for ground troops, as well as monitoring and tracking missile launches, all currently performed by the AFSPC. It’ll also take charge of any offensive capabilities developed for space, such as anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), introduce an “elite group of joint war-fighters” to support the rest of the armed forces, and oversee a new agency dedicated to developing “cutting-edge warfighting capabilities” for space.

The proposal is viewed by the space-savvy in the military as “either unwise, unnecessary or premature,” Moltz says—and almost certainly expensive. It’s on the basis of its potential wastefulness and redundancy that critics such as Defense Secretary James Mattis, ex-astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly, Air Force secretary Heather Wilson and other members of the military have assailed the idea.

But there’s a much bigger debate to be had. International conflict in space is no longer a plotline ripped from a sci-fi paperback. A space war is becoming more and more likely. 

THE GEOPOLITICS OF SPACE

U.S. military dominance in space is really about maintaining military dominance back on Earth. Space infrastructure, particularly satellites, is key to the U.S. military’s global reach, servicing everything from navigation to weapons targeting to communications. A 2018 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) trumpets: “Space capabilities enable the American way of warfare.”

The global space arms race began with the Cold War, when both the United States and the USSR began testing ground-based anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. Reagan’s Air Force became the first to test one on a spacecraft, destroying an old observation satellite in 1985. (Reagan also, infamously, attempted to put in place the so-called “Star Wars” program, which would have used spacebased lasers to shoot down incoming Soviet nuclear warheads.)

The 1990 Gulf War—known now as the first “space war”—made U.S. empire and satellites inseparable. With 24-hour satellite support, U.S. forces could not only communicate across broad channels, but map out terrain, observe and predict enemy actions, and use new guided, “smart” weapons that were, in theory, less indiscriminate. Satellites make today’s drone warfare possible.

While the United States and Russia have adhered to what Laura Grego, senior scientist in the Global Security Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls an “unofficial moratorium” on stationing dedicated weapons in space (as opposed to ground-based systems that target spacecraft), the United States—and, increasingly, its rivals—continue to invest in other forms of space militarization.

The United States leads the way in satellite capacity and space military technology, and has opposed past demilitarization efforts. In 2006, the George W. Bush administration blocked a UN resolution on arms control in space, issuing a National Space Policy that pledged to resist “new legal regimes or other restrictions,” including arms control agreements, on U.S. use of space. In response to this and other steps by the United States, other countries have moved to shore up their own space capabilities.

China tested an ASAT in 2007, and both it and Russia have increasingly invested in counter-space capabilities, such as ASAT technology and jamming GPS receivers. China and Russia’s advances left Washington spooked. In 2014, the Pentagon invested an extra $2 billion into classified offensive space programs. In 2015, the “emerging threats” of Russia and China were used to justify a $3 billion add-on for national security space capabilities, as officials openly talked about fighting a war in space.

We’re still a long way, however, from ray guns and X-wing dogfights. While in-orbit ASAT weapons exist, for the time being any space conflict would be fought from the Earth. For example, all three countries have capacity to disrupt enemy satellites by jamming them with their own, or to hack into a satellite’s ground operation.

But increased reliance on satellites for warfare— not to mention everyday life—opens up “a critical vulnerability,” warns the CSIS. Space infrastructure is fragile, vulnerable to hacking and able to be brought down by other spacecraft intentionally ramming into it, by ground-based ASAT missiles or even by loose pieces of debris.

Because space is unfamiliar terrain, nations don’t know how to interpret others’ behavior. According to Cassandra Steer, an independent consultant on space security and former executive director of the McGill University Centre for Research on Air and Space Law, when the United States and its allies have run war games centered on space, they can quickly escalate to nuclear war. 

“If one major power thinks the other is about to take out its satellites, it could take reciprocal action, or even launch a conventional or nuclear attack,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

And as space becomes increasingly cluttered with spacecraft, the chance of accidental calamity increases. Pentagon officials warn that space is becoming increasingly crowded. The U.S. alone operates 859 government and commercial satellites, nearly one in five of which are military.

For the first time, two satellites collided in February 2009, producing a “debris cloud” that added to the approximately 500,000 pieces of debris currently in orbit, threatening to tear through spacecraft and add yet more debris to this total. The destruction of spacecraft by ASAT tests, too, adds to the debris.

The more debris in orbit, the greater the threat to the nonmilitary use of space that makes modern life possible. Traffic lights, banking systems, telephones, the internet, plane travel—all rely on satellites whose destruction could suddenly leave us in the dark.

“If we have no information and we’re in a blackout, people hit the panic button,” Steer says. “And that may mean an actual weapons button.”

BACK TO EARTH

Given these dangers, many diplomats and activists are pushing to declare space a weapon-free global commons. But there’s been little movement on any legally binding agreement. Although “weapons of mass destruction” have been banned in space since the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, international regulation is sparse.

In 2008, Russia and China put forward a draft treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space (PPWT), which lacked a specific verification regime and included a carve-out for the kind of ground-based ASAT weapons both countries had been testing. Still, flawed as it was, Project Ploughshares called the PPWT “undoubtedly the most substantive effort thus far” to make weapon-free space a matter of international law. The United States, however, said it couldn’t support such a “fundamentally flawed” proposal.

Many analysts say a treaty is unlikely in the near future, and look to other avenues of demilitarization. 

A more realistic solution, Steer says, is non-binding instruments like guidelines that regulate conduct in space, which can work due to political buy-in and reciprocity. These norms might include, for example, best practices on approaching another country’s spacecraft.

The United States could be amenable to such agreements. John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command and a proponent of the Space Force, has urged the creation of “international norms of behavior in space.”

“Very few military off icers are enthusiastic about weaponizing space,” James Moltz says. “That said, many in the military are skeptical that war and weapons can be kept from space forever.”

SPACE PROFITEERS

The deeply vested interests involved—interests that have the ear of U.S. politicians—also make it difficult to roll back or halt the militarization of space.

The National Space Council, a group of cabinet members who shape U.S. space policy, has a “users’ advisory group” whose members include the CEOs of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other corporations.

The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a trade group that counts these and other companies as members, funded the 2018 CSIS report calling for government investment in national security space assets, and has called for greater national security investment in space at the annual Space Symposium.

The Symposium, now in its 34th year, embodies the close ties between industry and government on space policy. Co-sponsored by the AIA and its defense contractor members, the Symposium provides an opportunity for industry to network with representatives of think tanks and educational institutions, foreign leaders, and military, national security and other government officials.

This year’s event in April saw speeches from Vice President Mike Pence, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. senators and Air Force officials. The current AFSPC commander, Lee Levy, declared that plans for warfighting in space were no longer simply a discussion, and that the U.S. military needed to “gain and maintain space superiority.” 

Industry influence extends to the politicians who advocate further space militarization. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), reportedly instrumental in selling Trump on the Space Force, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the defense industry. Reps. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), both big boosters of a more aggressive space policy, represent districts populated by the defense industry and have raked in similarly large donations.

The Space Force contributes to this build-up, further entrenching militarization and feeding money to defense contractors. “President Trump’s enthusiasm for the Space Force,” Hartung says, “creates a danger that existing norms, like keeping weapons out of space, are more likely to be set aside.” He says the resulting space arms race “could spark a general war.” 

Yet before efforts to rein in weaponization can gain momentum, public awareness must be raised, a task made harder by widespread media derision of Trump’s Space Force proposal. Conflict in space is a clear and present danger. We need to take it seriously.