#Americans for Responsible Technology

[stopsmartmetersaustralia]

Doctors, Lawyers, and Scientists Join Together in International Children's Declaration for the Digital Age

NEW YORK, Nov. 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — An international group of leading lawyers, physicians, physicists, epidemiologists and other children’s health experts have today announced their support for a new International Declaration intended to raise public awareness of three fundamental rights of children which are not adequately being protected: the right to be free from addictive platforms and…

[thefirstvessel]

I find it absolutely fascinating that liminal haunted house horror got a huge spike in popularity not too long after the start of a traumatic global event that forced us all involuntarily into our homes for uncomfortably long amounts of time.

It's fun finding cultural anxieties in horror, man.

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #26

July 5-12 2024

The IRS announced it had managed to collect $1 billion in back taxes from high-wealth tax cheats. The program focused on persons with more than $1 million in yearly income who owned more than $250,000 in unpaid taxes. Thanks to money in Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act the IRS is able to undertake more enforcement against rich tax cheats after years of Republicans cutting the agency's budget, which they hope to do again if they win power again.

The Biden administration announced a $244 million dollar investment in the federal government’s registered apprenticeship program. This marks the largest investment in the program's history with grants going out to 52 programs in 32 states. The President is focused on getting well paying blue collar opportunities to people and more people are taking part in the apprenticeship program than ever before. Republican pledge to cut it, even as employers struggle to find qualified workers.

The Department of Transportation announced the largest single project in the department's history, $11 billion dollars in grants for the The Hudson River Tunnel. Part of the $66 billion the Biden Administration has invested in our rail system the tunnel, the most complex Infrastructure project in the nation would link New York and New Jersey by rail under the Hudson. Once finished it's believed it'll impact 20% of the American economy by improving and speeding connection throughout the Northeast.

The Department of Energy announced $1.7 billion to save auto worker's jobs and convert factories to electronic vehicles. The Biden administration will used the money to save or reopen factories in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Virginia and retool them to make electric cars. The project will save 15,000 skilled union worker jobs, and created 2,900 new high-quality jobs.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development reached a settlement with The Appraisal Foundation over racial discrimination. TAF is the organization responsible for setting standards and qualifications for real estate appraisers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics last year found that TAF was 94.7% White and 0.6% Black, making it the least racially diverse of the 800 occupations surveyed. Black and Latino home owners are far more likely to have their houses under valued than whites. Under the settlement with HUD TAF will have to take serious steps to increase diversity and remove structural barriers to diversity.

The Department of Justice disrupted an effort by the Russian government to influence public opinion through AI bots. The DoJ shut down nearly 1,000 twitter accounts that were linked to a Russian Bot farm. The bots used AI technology to not only generate tweets but also AI image faces for profile pictures. The effort seemed focused on boosting support for Russia's war against Ukraine and spread negative stories/impressions about Ukraine.

The Department of Transportation announces $1.5 billion to help local authorities buy made in America buses. 80% of the funding will go toward zero or low-emission technology, a part of the President's goal of reaching zero emissions by 2050. This is part of the $5 billion the DOT has spent over the last 3 years replacing aging buses with new cleaner technology.

President Biden with Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau and Finnish President Alexander Stubb signed a new agreement on the arctic. The new trilateral agreement between the 3 NATO partners, known as the ICE Pact, will boost production of ice breaking ships, the 3 plan to build as many as 90 between them in the coming years. The alliance hopes to be a counter weight to China's current dominance in the ice breaker market and help western allies respond to Russia's aggressive push into the arctic waters.

The Department of Transportation announced $1.1 billion for greater rail safety. The program seeks to, where ever possible, eliminate rail crossings, thus removing the dangers and inconvenience to communities divided by rail lines. It will also help update and improve safety measures at rail crossings.

The Department of the Interior announced $120 million to help tribal communities prepare for climate disasters. This funding is part of half a billion dollars the Biden administration has spent to help tribes build climate resilience, which itself is part of a $50 billion dollar effort to build climate resilience across the nation. This funding will help support drought measures, wildland fire mitigation, community-driven relocation, managed retreat, protect-in-place efforts, and ocean and coastal management.

The USDA announced $100 million in additional funds to help feed low income kids over the summer. Known as "SUN Bucks" or "Summer EBT" the new Biden program grants the families of kids who qualify for free meals at school $120 dollars pre-child for groceries. This comes on top of the traditional SUN Meals program which offers school meals to qualifying children over the summer, as well as the new under President Biden SUN Meals To-Go program which is now offering delivery of meals to low-income children in rural areas. This grant is meant to help local governments build up the Infrastructure to support and distribute SUN Bucks. If fully implemented SUN Bucks could help 30 million kids, but many Republican governors have refused the funding.

USAID announced its giving $100 million to the UN World Food Program to deliver urgently needed food assistance in Gaza. This will bring the total humanitarian aid given by the US to the Palestinian people since the war started in October 2023 to $774 million, the single largest donor nation. President Biden at his press conference last night said that Israel and Hamas have agreed in principle to a ceasefire deal that will end the war and release the hostages. US negotiators are working to close the final gaps between the two sides and end the war.

The Senate confirmed Nancy Maldonado to serve as a Judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Maldonado is the 202nd federal Judge appointed by President Biden to be confirmed. She will the first Latino judge to ever serve on the 7th Circuit which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

Bonus: At the NATO summit in Washington DC President Biden joined 32 allies in the Ukraine compact. Allies from Japan to Iceland confirmed their support for Ukraine and deepening their commitments to building Ukraine's forces and keeping a free and Democratic Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. World leaders such as British Prime Minster Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, praised President Biden's experience and leadership during the NATO summit

[headspace-hotel]

The USAmerican imagination cannot consider land that is multi-purpose.

A corn field is Corn, an endless monoculture, and all other plants must be eliminated. A residential area is Houses, and absolutely MUST NOT!!! have vegetables or fruits or native plant gardens or small livestock. A drainage ditch is only a drainage ditch, and cannot harbor Sedges and native wetland plants, A sports field is for A Sport, and let no one think of doing any other event on that field, shops and storefronts must have their own special part of town that everybody has to drive to, which requires parking lots...and God forbid we put solar panels on roofs or above parking lots or anywhere they can serve an extra purpose of providing shade, instead of using a large tract of perfectly fine land as a "solar farm."

Numerous examples. But it is the most annoying with agriculture. The people who crunch all the numbers about sustainability, have calculated that a certain percentage of Earth's land is "Used up" by agriculture, which is troubling because that leaves less "room" for "Wilderness." It is a big challenge, they say, to feed Earth's humans without destroying more ecosystems.

Fools! Agriculture is an ecosystem—if you respect the ways of the plants, instead of creating monoculture fields by killing everything that moves and almost everything that doesn't. Most humans throughout history, and many humans today, sustain themselves using a mixture of foraging and agriculture, and the two are not entirely different things, because all human lifestyles change the ecosystem, and the inhabitants of the ecosystem always change themselves in response.

Even if you are a hunter-gatherer that steps very lightly in the forest and gathers a few berries and leaves here and there, you are being an animal and affecting all other parts of the ecosystem. By walking, breathing, eating, pooping, drinking, climbing, singing, talking, all of those things affect the ecosystem. If you gather leaves to sleep on, that affects the ecosystem...if you pile up waste, that affects the ecosystem...if you break a tree branch, that affects the ecosystem...if you start a fire, if you create a small shelter, if you cut a path, that DEFINITELY affects the ecosystem.

This idea, that human activity destroys the ecosystem and replaces it with something Else, something Not an ecosystem, is so silly. "But you just said that even the earliest most technologically simple human societies altered their environment!"

Yes, I did. Because we believe that "pre-agricultural" humans could have no effect on their "wilderness" environment, we ALSO believe another false idea: That when humans affect an environment, they destroy "Wilderness" and change it to something else, like Agricultural Land, that can never have biodiversity and never benefit many life forms.

I think it is the European idea of agriculture that it always involves people settling down and relying on a few special plants that are domesticated intentionally and grown in specially dedicated fields. After all, this idea of an agricultural lifestyle, is in contrast with the "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle, which is assumed to be what humans do before they "figure out" agriculture. The European mind imagines "pre-agricultural" folks ignorantly bumbling about, thinking plants and animals conveniently pop out of nothing for their benefit.

Bullshit! I shake my head in disappointment when I see websites describing Native Americans using wild plants as if those plants just-so-happened to grow, when those same wild plants just-so-happen to thrive only in environments disturbed by humans in some way, and just-so-happen to have declined steeply since colonization, and just-so-happen to be nonexistent in unspoiled "Wilderness" locations, and (often) just-so-happen to have an incredibly wide range where they either once were or are incredibly common, making it very...fortunate that they just-so-happen to have a wide range of uses including food, medicines, and materials for clothing and technology.

Accidentally of course, without any human impact from the humans that were impacting everything. /s

"But if it wasn't an accident, how did it happen?" Here is how to understand this idea: Look at the weeds! The weeds will teach you.

Look at the plants you always see growing without being planted around human buildings and roads, and learn their history. Often you will learn that these plants have many marvelous properties, and have actually been used by humans for thousands of years.

In fact, some of the most powerful and difficult to control weeds, were once actually some of the most essential and important plants for human civilizations to depend on. The dreaded Kudzu, in its home in East Asia, was one of the main plants used for clothing for over 6,000 years, and not only that, it has been cultivated for food and medicine for millennia. You can make everything from paper to noodles out of Kudzu! And Amaranth, the most expensive agricultural weed in all the USA, produces edible and healthy grains as well as several harvests of greens per growing season, and several species of the genus have been fully domesticated and formed a staple crop of Mesoamerica.

Meanwhile...some people have come up with this neat "new" idea called Polyculture, which is where you plant a field with two crops at once and somehow get better yields from both of them. WITCHCRAFT! Unrelatedly, there are other ideas like "Cover Crops" and "Agroforestry" that for some reason have the same beneficial effect.

Wow...It turns out, sterilizing the whole environment of every plant except one crop...isn't actually a good way to do agriculture in many places in the world.

Just think about it from an energy point of view...

We have some places used for "Agriculture," where we wring the land as violently as possible to squeeze green vegetation from light energy.

And we have other places for Other uses, where we spend massive amounts of fossil fuels mowing, chopping, poisoning and trimming to STOP the land from producing its incredible bounty of green vegetation.

And in the agricultural fields, we spend even MORE resources killing the unwanted plants that grow spontaneously

This system is hemorrhaging inefficiency at both ends. It simply isn't a one-to-one conversion of land and fossil fuels to food energy. The energy expenditure of agriculture is mostly going into organizing the vegetation's energy into the shape and configuration we want, not the food itself.

In the Americas, indigenous agricultural systems involve using the plants that exist in the environment to construct an ecosystem that both functions as an ecosystem and provides humans with food, clothing, and other important things. This is the most advanced way.

Most of our successful weeds are edible and useful. A weed is simply a plant that is symbiotic with humans. My hypothesis of plant domestication is that it was initiated by the plants, which became adapted to human environments, and humans bred them to be better crops in response. Symbiosis.

Humans did not pick out a few plants special to intensively domesticate out of an array of equally wild plants, instead they just ate, selected, and bred the plants that were best adapted to live near human civilization. That is my guess about how it happened.

Just think about it. Why would you try to domesticate teosinte (Maize ancestor?) It sucks. Domesticated plants in their wild form are usually like "Why would you put hundreds of years of effort into cultivating this?" Personally I think it's because the plant grew around humans and humans ate and used it a lot because it was abundant. So we co-evolved with the plant.

Supporting this hypothesis, there are many crop plants that mutated and evolved back into weeds, like "weedy" rice, "weedy" teosinte, and "weedy" radishes. Also weeds develop similar adaptations to crop plants to survive in the agricultural environment.

Consider Kudzu. Everyone in the USA knows it as an invasive weed, but since ancient times in China, it was a crop that provided people with fabric from its bast fibers, food from its enormous starchy roots, and many medicinal and other uses. Kudzu is not evil, it simply has a symbiotic relationship with humans, and just as any other species might serve as a biological control, the main biological control of kudzu in nature is the human species.

Think of the vast fields and mountain sides of the South swallowed by thick mats of Kudzu covering lumps that used to be trees. Think of the people toiling away to clear the Kudzu, while wearing clothes made of cotton that was grown in a faraway place using insecticides and depleting fresh water, using energy from their bodies that came from crops grown in fields far away.

Now imagine people working to harvest the Kudzu, to cut the new vines and dig up the starchy roots and use the plant the way it is used by the people who know its ways. Imagine the people using the starch from the Kudzu root to make flour and noodles and sweet confections. Imagine workers processing the vines into thread which is woven into fabric. The hillsides and fields flourish with plants that used to be suffocated, and hillsides and fields in faraway places also flourish with their own plants, instead of being made to grow cotton and crops to provide for the needs the Kudzu provides for.

Imagine the future where we accept our symbiotic relationship with the plants!

[bunny--manders]

Thinking about how each protagonist in the Fallout TV show believes themselves to be the last true American because each of them is a different kind of American myth. Is being an American all about getting to be the lone gunslinger who exists in a world without rules or limitations? Is it about being controlled by a corporation in a hyper-consumptive society that only gives you the illusion of free choice? Is it about being in control of such overwhelmingly dominant military technology that you believe your power grants you the responsibility of being the world's moral authority? Let's do some drugs about it.

[gothhabiba]

St. Paul, MN – During the early morning hours of November 20, 50 pro-Palestine protesters gathered at the site of Lockheed Martin’s new microelectronics subsidiary, ForwardEdge ASIC, in Saint Paul. They unfurled long banners, one reading, “MN, divest from Lockheed,” and blocked the driveway entrances to the facility for almost eight hours.

Police arrived shortly after the activists occupied the space and made their presence throughout the day, but no arrests were made. Due to the protesters’ presence, no employees of ForwardEdge ASIC were able to enter the facility and go to work that morning. The parking lot remained empty save for a lone security guard’s vehicle.

Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest weapons company by revenue and one of the major suppliers to the Israel Defense Forces. Lockheed Martin supplies Israel with a wide variety of weapons, including fighter jets, attack helicopters, and missiles. Lockheed Martin technologies are also integrated into Israel's main weapon systems.

Activists participated in as part of the newly formed Free Palestine Coalition in the Twin Cities, which comprises groups such as the Anti-War Committee (AWC), American Muslims for Palestine – MN, Council on American-Islamic Relations – MN, Students for Justice in Palestine – UMN, Students for a Democratic Society – UMN, Women Against Military Madness (WAMM), Jews Against Genocide, Red Nation, and several others.

Protesters emphasized the role of the state of Minnesota in funding Lockheed as well as other companies that make possible Israel’s violence against Palestinians. “Minnesota granted Lockheed over $1 million to open the Saint Paul facility this year,” explained Wyatt Miller of the AWC. “Meanwhile, the State Board of Investments has invested over $53 million of public pension money it controls in Lockheed. Governor Tim Walz chairs that board, so we also want to send a message that Minnesotans don’t want to see our taxpayer dollars used to fund this massacre in any way.”

After protesters determined that a majority of the workday had been disrupted, they marched in unity towards the facility to plaster the building with the protest signs as a show of victory.

Sarah Martin, a longtime anti-war activist with WAMM who was prepared to be arrested Monday, stated, “Because of our presence, weapons components were not made at the facility today by a manufacturer largely responsible for the murder of Palestinian children.”

“Protesters across the world have been shutting down business as usual as long as this massacre of Gaza continues,” said Miller. “We are proud to do what we can to slow the operations of the U.S. military-industrial complex, which is the backbone of Israel’s oppression of Palestine.”

[queerpunktomatoes]

Here is the pdf version of Project 2025. It's long and dry, so here are some talking points for you.

Note the page numbers so you can back yourself up. Most people are not going to read the whole document (because it's awful to read tbh) so you need to be able to defend your critiques.

We don't need false arguments to weaken our entirely correct conviction that Trump is a fascist.

Page 5 "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children... should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered." Translation: Transgender people should be seen as pornographic, and those who make/distribute porn should be imprisoned. Being transgender should be illegal.

Page 94 "Sustain support for Israel." Translation: Continue funding the Palestinian genocide with taxpayer money.

Page 97 "Senior acquisition leaders should design a system that allows decision-makers to stay within the law but bypass unnecessary departmental regulations that are not in the best interest of the government and hamper the acquisition of capabilities that warfighters require." Translation: Reduce workplace safety regulations in the interest of making more money.

Page 103 "Require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding." Translation: Children in public schools have to take the military entrance exam. Children in private schools do not.

Page 104 "Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service." Translation: Keep trans people out of the military.

Page 155 "Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts... The entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One." Translation: End FBI's effort to combat disinformation.

Page 246 "Conservatives will thus reward a President who eliminates this tyrannical situation. PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives." Translation: Don't publically fund anything that isn't explicitly right-wing, including children's entertainment.

Page 259 "The next conservative Administration should rescind President Biden’s 2022 Gender Policy. It should remove all references, examples, definitions, photos, and language on USAID websites, in agency publications and policies, and in all agency contracts and grants that include the following terms: 'gender,' 'gender equality,' 'gender equity,' 'gender diverse individuals,' 'gender aware,' 'gender sensitive,' etc. It should also remove references to 'abortion,' 'reproductive health, and 'sexual and reproductive rights'... produces unnecessary consternation and confusion among and even outright bias against men.” Translation: All language related to gender, equality, and sexual rights should be removed from all official USA websites and documents.

Page 260 "PLGHA requires foreign NGOs, as a condition of receiving assistance, to agree not to perform or actively promote abortions as a method of family planning in foreign countries... The new pro-life executive order should apply to foreign NGOs." Translation: American doctors are not allowed to perform abortions domestically or internationally.

Page 285 "The department [of education] is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination—and the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states." Translation: The Department of Education should be eliminated.

Page 302 "Return to the Original Purpose of School Meals. Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs... To serve students in need and prevent the misuse of taxpayer money, the next Administration should focus on students in need and reject efforts to transform federal school meals into an entitlement program." Translation: Roll back free school lunches to apply to ~185% fewer people than it does currently.

Page 320-322 "In July of that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Congress reached a consensus that the mistreatment of [B]lack Americans was no longer tolerable and merited a federal response... In 1973, [Congress] passed the Rehabilitation Act, and, in 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act... The next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government, eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants." Translation: Repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Page 372 "The U.S. nuclear arsenal needs to be updated and reinvigorated... Fund the design, development, and deployment of new nuclear warheads, including the production of plutonium pits in quantity. Expand the U.S. Navy and develop new nuclear naval reactors to ensure that the Navy has the nuclear propulsion it needs to secure America’s strategic interests. End ineffective and counterproductive nonproliferation activities like those involving Iran and the United Nations." Translation: Withdraw from "let's not use nuclear weapons" agreements, build more nuclear weapons, and resume nuclear weapons testing.

Page 451 "Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on 'LGBTQ+ equity,' subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families. Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures... homes with non-related 'boyfriends' present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be. HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies. In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them." Translation: The cishet nuclear family is the only valid, legally recognizable family.

Page 474 "Reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination. CMS should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding 'gender reassignment surgery' for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans." Translation: Remove all gender-affirming care coverage from government insurance plans.

Page 482 "Eliminate the Head Start program." Translation: Remove free education/health programs for low-income families.

Page 508 "Repeal climate change initiatives and spending in the department’s budget request." Translation: End all programs that address climate change.

Page 524 "Rescind the Biden rules and reinstate the Trump rules regarding... The Endangered Species Act rules defining Critical Habitat and Critical Habitat Exclusions." Translation: Remove protections for endangered animals.

Page 524 "Reinstate President Trump’s plan for opening most of the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and development." Translation: Expand Arctic drilling.

Page 587 "The Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employees in the private sector the ability to choose between receiving time-and-a-half pay or accumulating time-and-a-half paid time off." Translation: Employers are not required to pay extra for overtime.

Page 592 "Employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four-week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period." Translation: The 40-hour work week should become a 160-hour work month, so employers can make you work extra hours with no overtime pay by cutting your hours later in the month.

Page 664 "The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories." Translation: Americans should not get free extreme weather warnings. We should have to pay for it, and watch commercials between segments.

Page 708 "The next conservative Administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ... Treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment." Translation: Fire any/all government employees who participated in DEI training.

And remember:

[darcylindbergh]

I've talked a lot about why you should vote AGAINST Trump. No fucking shit, right? But I want to vote FOR something, too.

Kamala Harris hasn't had time yet to put together her platform documents, though no doubt we'll see those in the coming days. But this is a good analysis of where she and Joe Biden stand - and Kamala is more progressive on every front.

Abortion rights: Joe would've restored Roe, but Kamala would expand it to prevent states from limiting access. The pre-clearance measure discussed here is a non-starter but I'd expect Kamala to be looking at how to frame the issue for another try.

Israel and Gaza: it's true that Kamala hasn't broken with Joe publicly about Gaza. However, the article goes on:

Harris hasn’t exactly broken with Biden over the issue. But she has expressed more public sympathy than Biden has over the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died during Israel’s counterattack. In March, she was one of the earliest high-profile leaders in the administration to call for an immediate temporary cease-fire in March. She also delivered the sharpest rebuke against Israel’s handling of aid flows into Gaza and described the conflict as a “humanitarian catastrophe” for innocent civilians. And privately, she has told Biden and other top officials that the administration needed to take a stronger stance against Netanyahu and focus on a long-term peace to the decades-long conflict, people familiar with her remarks have previously told POLITICO.

Kamala has also declined to preside over the upcoming session of Congress that Netanyahu is speaking at, on invitation by Republicans. She wasn't scheduled to before this, but I think declining now is a clear indicator that her foreign policy will not include the broad support we saw from Joe.

Climte Change: Honestly, the Build Back Better bill was so fucking substantial and incredible I think Kamala would be hard-pressed to do much more. I think Kamala needs to have a solid response ready to the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Chevron, which is the biggest threat to the EPA and other agencies in our lifetimes. (Trump, by the way, would abolish the EPA and the vast majority of environmental protections.)

Student debt relief: She was more progressive earlier, and I expect we'll see many of Joe's relief packages continue expanding.

Similarly:

Free college: Kamala's in full support. I understand Joe's position that students from wealthy families should pay their own way, but I also know from experience that students from wealthy family not immune to financial abuse by controlling parents.

Trade: this is actually a great one to know, because Kamala's hesitance on these trade agreements are related to a) environmental concerns, and b) outsourcing American jobs. Republicans love to lose their shit over outsourcing American jobs. Here's more significance in the trade sphere:

This is going to be a HUGE talking point for your conservative-leaning relatives. Business leaders do not want Trump in office, because the agenda laid out in Project 2025 will make it harder for them to do business - it will make it harder for them to attract global talent, costlier to import and export, and stunt economic growth. Do you know that "undecided" voter who votes red for "fiscal responsibility?" This your talking point. Kamala's platform spends, but in such a way that it will stimulate economic growth and solidify the US as a business leader worldwide.

Artificial Intelligence: I'll let Kamala speak for herself.

“History has shown, in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over the wellbeing of their customers, the safety of our communities, and the stability of our democracies,” Harris said during her visit to the U.K. for November’s AI Safety Summit.  Last July, during the early days of the White House’s mobilization on AI policy, Harris led a meeting among civil rights, labor and consumer protection groups where she rejected the “false choice” between promoting innovation and protecting the public.

The article also talks about data privacy, where Kamala and Joe are very similar, and animal welfare. Historically, Kamala defended animal welfare protections in CA, but remember that as Attorney General, Kamala's job was to defend the law no matter what her personal feelings were. Biden made some strides here, but many will agree not enough - I think this is a place where Kamala has to tread very carefully because progressives are in favor of more stringent animal welfare protections, but agricultural and rural voters are already a demographic inclined to view progressive agendas negatively, feeling forgotten, misunderstood, and passed over in favor of large cities. It's definitely a weakness for the Dems so I wouldn't expect to hear much about animal welfare as a voting issue.

IN SUM

I'm very happy to vote FOR Kamala, not just against Trump. I think she stands to take stronger action on abortion, stronger action on Israel and Gaza, stronger action on college and student debt relief. I think she'll continue work inherited on environmental protections and infrastructure. I think she will do more to protect LGBTQ+ individuals and unions, as well as standing strong on disability reform and criminal justice reform (yes, I know she was a prosecutor, and I also know that she worked on several important CJ reforms during her time as AG - here's an article about her progressive record as DA).

Remember, there's no such thing as a protest vote. The only people who benefit by third-party voting or choosing not to vote are the far-right.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Degrowth basics

"The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress."

What is Degrowth? | Caracol DSA

Why degrowth is the only responsible way forward | OpenDemocracy

Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment

We Need A Fair Way To End Infinite Growth | Current Affairs

Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance | Common Dreams

Can degrowth save us and the planet? | Nottingham Trent

Defending limits is not Malthusian | Undisciplined Environments

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? | New Yorker

The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy | The New Republic

Giving Up on Economic Growth Could Make Us Cooler and Happier | The New Republic

A guide to degrowth: The movement prioritizing wellbeing in a bid to avoid climate cataclysm | CNBC

What is ‘degrowth’ and how can it fight climate change? | Popular Science

Enough for Everyone | Yes! Magazine

Toward a Post-Capitalist Future: On the Growth of “Degrowth” | Lit Hub

All we are saying is give degrowth a chance | The RSA

A pathway out of environmental collapse | newsroom

On Technology and Degrowth | Monthly Review

What is degrowth (and more importantly, what is it not)? | META

Green growth

"There is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth."

Is Green Growth Possible? | Jason Hickel & Giorgos Kallis

The Myth of America’s Green Growth | Foreign Policy

The decoupling delusion: rethinking growth and sustainability | The Conversation

Is green growth happening? | Uneven Earth

Green Growth | Uneven Earth

The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth | Scientific American

Degrowth is not austerity – it is actually just the opposite | Al Jazeera

A response to Paul Krugman: Growth is not as green as you might think | Timothée Parrique

Deceitful Decoupling: Misconceptions of a Persistent Myth | Alevgul H. Sorman

Degrowth isn’t the same as a recession – it’s an alternative to growing the economy forever | The Conversation

Degrowth and the left

"In the middle of an ecological emergency, should we be producing sport utility vehicles and mansions? Should we be diverting energy to support the obscene consumption and accumulation of the ruling class?"

The Left should embrace degrowth | New Internationalist

Ecosocialism is the Horizon, Degrowth is the Way | The Trouble

Degrowth: Socialism without Growth | Brave New Europe

Toward an Ecosocialist Degrowth: From the Materially Inevitable to the Socially Desirable | Monthly Review

For an Ecosocialist Degrowth | Monthly Review

Degrowth and Revolutionary Organizing | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

The necessity of ecosocialist degrowth | Rupture

Degrowth is Anti-Capitalist | Protean Mag

Degrowth Communism | PPPR (Part one | Part two | Part three)

Economic Planning and Degrowth: How Socialism Survives the 21st Century | New Socialist

Degrowth and the South

"Southern countries should be free to organize their resources and labor around meeting human needs rather than around servicing Northern growth."

Who is afraid of degrowth? A Global South economic perspective | IBON Foundation

The anti-colonial politics of degrowth | Jason Hickel

Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonization | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth requires the Global South to default on its foreign debts | Resilience

Journals/Reports

Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance | Jason Hickel

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights

What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification | Jason Hickel

Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario | Global Environmental Change

Urgent need for post-growth climate mitigation scenarios | Nature Energy

Degrowth and critical agrarian studies | Julien-François Gerber

Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability | European Environmental Bureau

Incrementum ad Absurdum: Global Growth, Inequality and Poverty Eradication in a Carbon-Constrained World | David Woodward

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help | Nature

A New Political Economy for a Healthy Planet | Jason Hickel

Planning beyond growth. The case for economic democracy within limits

Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions | Cleaner Production Letters

Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries | The Lancet

Books

Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide | Pluto Press

A People's Green New Deal | Max Ajl

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World | Jason Hickel

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job | Verso Books

The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism | Verso Books

The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism | Verso Books

Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism | Kohei Saito

Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social-ecological transformation

27 Essays and Thoughts on Degrowth | Giorgos Kallis

Videos

Yes To Limits To Growth! | The Other School

How Degrowth Can Save the World | Andrewism

How We End Consumerism | Our Changing Climate

Demystifying Degrowth | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth is not Austerity | John the Duncan

Degrowth and Ecosocialism | Planet: Critical

Degrowth in 7 minutes: Fighting for climate by living better | Think That Through

The Future is Degrowth (w/ Aaron Vansintjan) || SRSLY WRONG

"Degrowth means power to the working class!"with Jason Hickel | GND Media

Others

degrowth.info

Degrowth Journal

Doughnut Economics

[zvaigzdelasas]

The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group. The Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) “bunker-busters” that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.

With the Palestinian death toll in Gaza surpassing 20,000, the international community is calling for a cease-fire. Israel vows to press ahead[...]

The Biden administration has quietly continued to supply arms to Israel. Last week, however, President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged that Israel was losing international legitimacy for what he called its “indiscriminate bombing.”[...]

Israel’s offensive has destroyed over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis,[...]

The percentage of damaged buildings in the Khan Younis area nearly doubled in just the first two weeks of Israel’s southern offensive, they said. That includes tens of thousands of homes as well as schools, hospitals, mosques and stores. U.N. monitors have said that about 70% of school buildings across Gaza have been damaged. At least 56 damaged schools served as shelters for displaced civilians. Israeli strikes damaged 110 mosques and three churches, the monitors said. Israel holds Hamas responsible for civilian deaths by embedding militants in civilian infrastructure. Those sites also shelter multitudes of Palestinians who have fled under Israeli evacuation orders. “Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture,” said Scher, who has worked with Van Den Hoek to map destruction across several war zones, from Aleppo to Mariupol.[...]

By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II.[...]

“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said Pape. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”[...]

So far, fragments of American-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) bombs and smaller diameter bombs have been found in Gaza, according to Brian Castner, a weapons investigator with Amnesty International.[...] In an Oct. 31 strike on the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya, experts say a 2,000-pound bomb killed over 100 civilians. Experts have also identified fragments of SPICE (Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective) 2000-pound bombs, which are fitted with a GPS guidance system to make targeting more precise. Castner said the bombs are produced by the Israeli defense giant Rafael, but a recent State Department release first obtained by The New York Times showed some of the technology had been produced in the United States.

22 Dec 23

[fatehbaz]

Chicago, Illinois is often considered to be on the periphery of the plantation. William Cronon's famous narrative of Chicago's relationships with the "Great West" positions the burgeoning city at the edge of American expansion into plantation agriculture in the Midwest and industrial farming on a national scale. [...] [W]e could also characterize the city as an anticipatory hub between the twin plantation figures of the pre-war American South and America's 20th century colonies [in Central America, the Philippines, and beyond]. During the Reconstruction years, Chicago emerged as a logistical center, channeling America's railroads and telegraph lines into itself. As parts of this communications node, Chicago newspapers and military police served to convert white anxieties about Black migration from the plantation South into new techniques and technologies of prediction that became transportable across a newly imaginable informational plane of US imperialism. [...] [I]n Chicago between 1875 and 1890, [...] white anticipations of African American migration from plantations in the South were translated into new information sciences and policing techniques that made their way to plantations in places like the Philippines. [...] [S]uch feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant. [...]

---

On May 3, 1879 the Chicago Tribune published a greatly anticipated investigatory series entitled, “The Negro Exodus: Causes of the Migration from the Negro’s Point of View” [...] the latest in a long sequence of deeply uneasy reports dating from 1860. From its location at the communicative center of all major US rail and telegraph lines, the Chicago Tribune undertook an imagined responsibility to inform its Midwestern audience of Black peoples’ movements and behaviors. [...] At the climax of the “Negro’s Point of View” series, [...] May 3, the Chicago Tribune presented its showstopping report from its correspondent in Vicksburg, Mississippi entitled “Letters Written by Negroes in Kansas to their Friends South”. In this report, the writer discusses his skepticism of earlier methods of [...] interviews with Black migrants. [...] [The newspaper] conducted its fact-gathering through the mass surveillance of Black peoples' letters [...] [to assess] inner motivations [...] about Black peoples’ “perceptions, enjoyments, and reasons” [...]. Such informational appetites became the anticipatory basis for 20th century enumerative practices. As Colin Koopman argues, informational fastening, or the atomization and separation of facts from Black peoples’ bodies, became commonplace during the Great Migration in the practice of racial statistics, criminology, and health policy directed at Black migrants [...]. [T]his desire for packaged information was itself made transferable into geographies beyond Chicago, and beyond the United States.

---

White Chicagoans’ prolonged concern over predicting Black behaviors and intentions materialized in 1877, when the city became a central hub of militarized response to a nation-wide railroad strike. Adjutant General Richard C. Drum, who commanded the Military Division of the Missouri (Western Frontier) in Chicago from 1873 to 1878, took control of Chicago’s military response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In 1879, after his final year in the city, Drum moved to Washington, DC and proposed the establishment of the Military Information Division (MID) [...]. The MID, which formally established in 1885, maintained close ties to Chicago's local information collection system, adopting a Bertillon identification system of collecting and storing intelligence cards at the time that the National Association of Chiefs of Police established their central bureau of identification in Chicago in 1896 [...]. By the tun of the 20th century, Chicago's police force had expanded tenfold [...], and Drum's MID had amassed over 300,000 intelligence cards [...].

---

The affective atmosphere into which the MID intensified its own predictive techniques later traversed the Pacific Ocean into the Philippines. Alfred McCoy argues that the American introduction of communication technologies and surveillance techniques in governing the Philippines constituted the United States’ first information revolution (McCoy 2009: 18). Colonial police trained in the anxious habits of the MID, rendered the Philippines a laboratory for securitized speculation. McCoy further contends that these informational “capillaries of empire” embedded themselves into the Philippines’ plantocratic-security state as well as US domestic surveillance practices. I add to McCoy’s argument by suggesting that trained feelings of white apprehension translated into imperial mechanisms for governing the Philippines through systems of intelligence cards, telecommunications infrastructure, policing units, and management sciences. Reminiscent of the psychological investigatory projects that saturated Chicago’s public life, the MID and its successors developed techniques for psychological examination and personality typing led by another Chicagoan, Harry Hill Bandholtz. [...] Bandholtz sharpened the MID's informational sciences by training Philippines police forces in the neurotic art of collecting every imaginable fact about Filipino behaviors [...].

---

Ultimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures which had been trained on apprehensive practices and feelings emanating from Chicago’s racialized geography. [...]

[T]he informational networks that extended from the image of the American South, through the anticipation of Chicago's public, [...] animated the governance of colonial plantations in the Philippines [...].

---

All text above by: Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. The symposium was introduced and edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés León Araya. The symposium was hosted and published by Antipode Online, part of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Published online 4 January 2024, at: antipodeonline.org/2024/01/04/plantation-methodologies/ [In this post, bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[creatingblackcharacters]

As October approaches, I would like to encourage everyone to watch Jordan Peele films if they haven't already. It's quality horror with Black characters whose experiences as Black people actually play into the genre. I feel like Peele's contributions were a defibrillator we all needed. (IMO there was a lull where storytelling was taking a backseat to edginess, but these movies gave me some hope again.) Not to mention, his movies star Black people with full stories, meaningful action, and chilling commentary. Favorite characters galore. Even if you don't like to dissect horror, his content is enjoyable.

The easiest to recommend, personally, is Nope. A sci-fi Western horror, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually the best and SUPER fun. It's not nearly as scary as the other Peele movies, and it's a good start to anyone interested.

MY favorite character is Otis Junior Haywood, our main protagonist. He runs the family business: they're trained horse handlers for the film industry. He's softspoken but responsible and sensible, and is trying to take care of things after his father passes from a tragic accident. He's much better with horses than with people, but he's sharp and serious and sentimental. Even when he has to resort to selling horses to a local theme park, he wants to acquire them back and give them a good, long life.

The fan favorite is Emerald, his sister. She's funny, playful, and easygoing. She's OJ's confidant, but also a free spirit who is exploring all her options and trying to find her own place in Hollywood, so long as it's away from horse training. Unfortunately, it's not going well, as CGI and changing technology are quickly replacing all their gigs. The siblings notice paranormal activity in their area, though, and it's Em's idea to capture video proof of its existence so they can save the family business.

I think about OJ so much. He's a well-written character and every single interaction he has serves immense purpose-- and even the moments when he's all alone in the open, it's less that he's waiting for something to happen and more that he's watchful and observant. No second feels wasted while riding behind his eyes. He also has an EXTREMELY interesting foil to another character, whose trauma in film has been distorted to an extreme form of profiteering and delusion. I do love Em and my family thinks she's the best character, but OJ as our main protagonist is a perfect fit and I love how he was made for the role.

The main themes in Nope are about spectacle and exploitation: a legacy can be built on the remissions and injuries of others, like Hollywood and its unfair treatment of Black people; it's about the illusion of power between an animal handler (man) and a wild animal (the unknowable); it's about bearing witness to tragedy, and how the consumption of said tragedy can make the difference in how we interact with it. I think it's especially compelling that Western themes were incorporated into the story, as an extremely American-centric storytelling that often exploits BIPOC lives and storytelling for its perpetration. But in Nope, the siblings win the day and protect their home.

‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #4

Feb 2-9 2024

The White House announced that a landmark 23 million Americans, 1 in 6 households, have been connected to affordable high speed internet with the help of the Affordable Connectivity Program, saving Americans between $30 and $75 every month on their internet bill. 4 Million ACP users are seniors, 1/4th of households on the program are African American and 1/4th are Latino, and it supports 320,000 households on Tribal lands. Sadly the program will be forced to end if Republicans in Congress continue to block new funding

The White House announced $5 billion for a National Semiconductor Technology Center, focusing on research and development as well as workforce needs. This is part of an effort under the CHIPS and Science Act to make America a world leader in science and grow jobs for the 21st century. This will include hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in workforce development

The EPA announced finalized rules that will strength air quality standard around fine particle pollution, AKA soot. The new stronger rules are projected to prevent 4,200 premature deaths and save Americans $46 billion in health costs by 2032. Soot is particularly harmful to those with lung and heart illnesses, children and those with asthma. Industrial soot is more common in low income communities

The Department of Transportation announced $1.5 Billion investment in America's bus systems. The bulk of the money will go helping local transport authorities buy low or no emission buses. There will also be investment in bus facilities.

President Biden signed a memorandum directing a strengthening of human rights safe guards around weapons transferred from US stockpiles to allied nations. The directive seeks to guarantee no arms are transferred that might be used to violate human rights.

HHS and HUD announced a join program partnering with 8 states and DC to help streamline an all of government response to homelessness. This is an off shoot of the $3.16 billion dollar investment amounted by HUD last week to end homelessness in America

The Department of Energy and FEMA released the findings of a two year study that projections Puerto Rico will be able to be 100% renewable energy by 2050. DoE also announced that by the end of the 30,000 low income Puerto Ricans will be able to apply for a solar power program, the first investments in a billion dollar DoE program for the island's renewable energy future

Department of Transportation announced $417 million dollar loan to the North Carolina Turnpike Authority to complete a major transportation overhaul in the greater Raleigh area

The EPA and Department of Energy announced a joint plan to invest federal funds to help measure and reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas production. Methane is the second largest green house gas after CO2 and is responsible for 30% of global warming in the last 200 years. This comes after the EPA pushed new rules to fine oil and gas manufacturers for excess methane emissions.

The Senate confirmed 2 more Biden nominated federal judges. This brings the total number of Biden judges to 177 For the first time in history a majority of a President's judicial nominees are not white men, Biden has nominated a majority women and people of color Biden also nominated 4 more federal judges, including two LGBT candidates. If they are confirmed it'll bring Biden's LGBT judge total to 11 tying with President Obama for the most LGBT people put on the federal bench

[headspace-hotel]

There was this post a while ago where somebody was saying that Cheetahs aren't well suited to Africa and would do well in Midwestern North America, and it reminded me of Paul S. Martin, the guy I'm always pissed off about.

He had some good ideas, but he is most importantly responsible for the overkill hypothesis (idea that humans caused the end-Pleistocene extinctions and that climate was minimally a factor) which led to the idea of Pleistocene rewilding.

...Basically this guy thought we should introduce lions, cheetahs, camels, and other animals to North America to "rewild" the landscape to what it was like pre-human habitation, and was a major advocate for re-creating mammoths.

Why am I pissed off about him? Well he denied that there were humans in North America prior to the Clovis culture, which it's pretty well established now that there were pre-Clovis inhabitants, and in general promoted the idea that the earliest inhabitants of North America exterminated the ecosystem through destructive and greedy practices...

...which has become "common knowledge" and used as evidence for anyone who wants to argue that Native Americans are "Not So Innocent, Actually" and the mass slaughter and ecosystem devastation caused by colonialism was just what humans naturally do when encountering a new environment, instead of a genocidal campaign to destroy pre-existing ways of life and brutally exploit the resources of the land.

It basically gives the impression that the exploitative and destructive relationship to land is "human nature" and normal, which erases every culture that defies this characterization, and also erases the way indigenous people are important to ecosystems, and promotes the idea of "empty" human-less ecosystems as the natural "wild" state.

And also Martin viewed the Americas' fauna as essentially impoverished, broken and incomplete, compared with Africa which has much more species of large mammals, which is glossing over the uniqueness of North American ecosystems and the uniqueness of each species, such as how important keystone species like bison and wolves are.

It's also ignoring the taxa and biomes that ARE extraordinarily diverse in North America, for example the Appalachian Mountains are one of the most biodiverse temperate forests on Earth, the Southeastern United States has the Earth's most biodiverse freshwater ecosystems, and both of these areas are also a major global hotspot for amphibian biodiversity and lichen biodiversity. Large mammals aren't automatically the most important. With South America, well...the Amazon Rainforest, the Brazilian Cerrado and the Pantanal wetlands are basically THE biodiversity hotspot of EVERYTHING excepting large mammals.

It's not HIM I have a problem with per se. It's the way his ideas have become so widely distributed in pop culture and given people a muddled and warped idea of ecology.

If people think North America was essentially a broken ecosystem missing tons of key animals 500 years ago, they won't recognize how harmful colonization was to the ecosystem or the importance of fixing the harm. Who cares if bison are a keystone species, North America won't be "fixed" until we bring back camels and cheetahs...right?

And by the way, there never were "cheetahs" in North America, Miracinonyx was a different genus and was more similar to cougars than cheetahs, and didn't have the hunting strategy of cheetahs, so putting African cheetahs in North America wouldn't "rewild" anything.

Also people think its a good idea to bring back mammoths, which is...no. First of all, it wouldn't be "bringing back mammoths," it would be genetically engineering extant elephants to express some mammoth genes that code for key traits, and second of all, the ecosystem that contained them doesn't exist anymore, and ultimately it would be really cruel to do this with an intelligent, social animal. The technology that would be used for this is much better used to "bring back" genetic diversity that has been lost from extant critically endangered species.

I think mustangs should get to stay in North America, they're already here and they are very culturally important to indigenous groups. And I think it's pretty rad that Scimitar-horned Oryx were brought back in their native habitat only because there was a population of them in Texas. But we desperately, DESPERATELY need to re-wild bison, wolves, elk, and cougars across most of their former range before we can think about introducing camels.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Electrons, not molecules

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call us dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality – humanity needs energy – and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

Here's the thing: they're full of shit.

Mostly.

Humanity does need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it can't. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.

Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are more than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a material problem, not an energy problem. If we could capture a mere 0.4% of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).

Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also continuously replenished. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency – even as we treated materials as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of – the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.

A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.

In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."

Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":

https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/

As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is not in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does not want a future where we have all our energy needs met:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting

That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."

Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.

Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late – it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).

But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it is too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all, #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.

Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms – and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.

Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long.

When Woods – and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants – was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.

These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science – he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.

Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."

McKibben points to the forthcoming book The Price Is Wrong, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

The crux of that book is:

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

[fairuzfan]

(This got soo much longer than I meant for it to be omg... sorry about that!!)

American Holocaust by David Stannard is a flawed book with some dated language, but of everything I've read, I think I like its explanation/argument against this weird sort of... competitive genocide stuff. I'm gonna butcher it a little by cutting out a LOT in order to not nuke your inbox with a super long ask, but:

[…] To say this is not to say that the Jewish Holocaust-the inhuman destruction of 6,000,000 people-was not an abominably unique event. It was. So, too, for reasons of its own, was the mass murder of about 1,000,000 Armenians in Turkey a few decades prior to the Holocaust. So, too, was the deliberately caused "terror-famine" in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s, which killed more than 14,000,000 people. So, too, have been each of the genocidal slaughters of many millions more, decades after the Holocaust, in Burundi, Bangladesh, Kampuchea, East Timor, the Brazilian Amazon, and elsewhere. Additionally, within the framework of the Holocaust itself, there were aspects that were unique in the campaign of genocide conducted by the Nazis against Europe's Romani people, which resulted in the mass murder of perhaps 1,500,000 men, women, and children. [...]

Each of these genocides was distinct and unique, for one reason or another, as were (and are) others that go unmentioned here. In one case the sheer numbers of people killed may make it unique. In another case, the percentage of people killed may make it unique. In still a different case, the greatly compressed time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. In a further case, the greatly extended time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. No doubt the targeting of a specific group or groups for extermination by a particular nation's official policy may mark a given genocide as unique. So too might another group's being unofficially (but unmistakably) targeted for elimination by the actions of a multinational phalanx bent on total extirpation. Certainly the chilling utilization of technological instruments of destruction, such as gas chambers, and its assembly-line, bureaucratic, systematic methods of destruction makes the Holocaust unique. On the other hand, the savage employment of non-technological instruments of destruction, such as the unleashing of trained and hungry dogs to devour infants, and the burning and crude hacking to death of the inhabitants of entire cities, also makes the Spanish anti-Indian genocide unique.

[…]

A secondary tragedy of all these genocides, moreover, is that partisan representatives among the survivors of particular afflicted groups not uncommonly hold up their peoples' experience as so fundamentally different from the others that not only is scholarly comparison rejected out of hand, but mere cross-referencing or discussion of other genocidal events within the context of their own flatly is prohibited. It is almost as though the preemptive conclusion that one's own group has suffered more than others is something of a horrible award of distinction that will be diminished if the true extent of another group's suffering is acknowledged.

Compounding this secondary tragedy is the fact that such insistence on the incomparability of one's own historical suffering, by means of what Irving Louis Horowitz calls "moral bookkeeping," invariably pits one terribly injured group against another […]

Denial of massive death counts is common--and even readily understandable, if contemptible--among those whose forefathers were the perpetrators of the genocide. Such denials have at least two motives: first, protection of the moral reputations of those people and that country responsible for the genocidal activity (which seems the primary motive of those scholars and politicians who deny that massive genocide campaigns were carried out against American Indians); and second, on occasion, the desire to continue carrying out virulent racist assaults upon those who were the victims of the genocide in question (as seems to be the major purpose of the anti-Semitic so-called historical revisionists who claim that the Jewish Holocaust never happened or that its magnitude has been exaggerated). But for those who have themselves been victims of extermination campaigns to proclaim uniqueness for their experiences only as a way of denying recognition to others who also have suffered massive genocidal brutalities is to play into the hands of the brutalizers. Rather, as Michael Berenbaum has wisely put it, "we should let our sufferings, however incommensurate, unite us in condemnation of inhumanity rather than divide us in a calculus of calamity."

The whole thing is available to read on the Internet Archive if you're interested. (This part starts on pg 149, if you'd just like to have the full context without the parts I chopped.)

Additionally, Carrol Kakel's book The American West and the Nazi East, while imperfect, too, is also very useful in getting at the core issue with these arguments and what makes them harmful--regardless of intent. I'm gonna spare you and not quote too much from this one, but the general gist of what it's about and argues in favor of is summed up like this in its conclusion:

In the case of the Holocaust and its contexts, the new ‘optics’ helps us see that – contrary to the prevailing image of ‘industrial genocide’ – many aspects of the Holocaust are akin to earlier ‘colonial genocide’. It is worth noting (and emphasizing) that the distinction I make between ‘colonial genocide’ and ‘industrial genocide’ is not to suggest some type of crude and arbitrary ‘partitioning’ of the Nazi Holocaust; it is, rather, to suggest and reassert the (settler) colonial roots, content, and context of the Nazi project in the ‘Wild East’ – a content and context linked, in Hitler’s and Himmler’s ‘spatial’ and ‘racial’ fantasies, to the ‘North American precedent’. And finally, the new ‘optics’ also allows us to understand that the ‘genocide and colonialism’ nexus holds the key to recognizing the Holocaust’s origins, content, and context; that the Nazi Holocaust is not a copy – but an extremely radicalized variant – of earlier ‘colonial genocide’; and that ‘holocaust’ is not a separate category from, but the most extreme variant of, the blight on human history we call ‘genocide’.

One of the more infamous examples of someone trying to argue against comparison (at least in the NDN circles I run in, anyway) was Deborah Lipstadt claiming that "[What the United States did to Native Americans] was not the same as the Holocaust" because, she says, "The Native Americans were seen as "competitors" for land and resources. There was, therefore, a certain logic-horrible and immoral as it was-to the campaign against the Native Americans."

Just for context, the full paragraph from her blog post:

What the United States did to Native Americans was horrendous. I have not studied it closely and it's not my area of expertise, however, it seems clear that the treatment of the various Native American tribes was revolting. However, it was not the same as the Holocaust. The Native Americans were seen as "competitors" for land and resources. There was, therefore, a certain logic-horrible and immoral as it was-to the campaign against the Native Americans. [Please note: I am NOT justifying the attacks.] The German campaign against the Jews had no logic and was often completely illogical. People who were "useful" to the Germans were murdered or exiled, e.g. slave laborers in factories producing goods for the Wehrmacht and scientists who were producing important technological advances for the Germans. In a prime example of illogic, in June 1944 at the time of the landing at Normandy, when the Germans were truly on the defensive, they used precious ships and men to go to the Island of Corfu and deport the 1200 Jews who lived there. They ended up in Auschwitz. Approximately 100 of this old Jewish community survived.

This is obviously a repulsive take, but the bizarre rationalization of abject evil isn't what I think makes this such a good example of the big issue at the heart of the constant emphasis on "uniqueness." There are plenty of people who hold these "exceptionalist" beliefs without taking it that much further and dismissing other genocides altogether. No, the thing that makes this such a perfect encapsulation imo is the very first sentence, where this historian, this professor of "Holocaust Studies," this woman who's ostensibly spent most of her entire life studying genocide openly admits she's never really bothered to look into what, exactly, happened to all those Indians way back when.

This is ultimately what I, personally, see as the main issue with this line of thinking. The harm doesn't necessarily come from holding the Holocaust up as "worse" than any other genocidal event, though that way of thinking definitely has its own problems, but from holding it up as fundamentally different.

It's the way this view holds it up as completely separate, in its own little bubble of history where we can study it and analyze it and teach about it all we want... all without ever having to broach the subject of colonialism. You can have entire classes where you study every single minute detail of this one specific genocide without ever having to mention or--god forbid--criticize the system that's driven pretty much every other instance of it.

Deborah Lipstadt has spent the better part of a century learning everything there is to know about the Holocaust, but in all that time, she's apparently never felt the need to look into the events that its perpetrators openly and repeatedly referred to as their inspiration.

This is what makes this sort of framing so dangerous imo. You can spend your entire life educating yourself about genocide, but if it's only in the context of one genocide and the belief in the uniqueness and incomparability of that single event is core to your understanding of both it and your worldview as a whole, you will still be completely incapable of recognizing the signs when it starts to happen again.

this is a really informative ask. thank you so much for sending this in (love the citations haha) i think it adds a lot to the overall discussion.