#consistently accessible to people whose freedom is at risk

[thegranddewru]

🤔

[jonaharagon]

In Defense of Internet Anonymity

In Techlore Talks #4, Henry and I discussed freedom of speech, anonymity on the internet, and the content moderation policies of online platforms. Certainly these are hot topics in this day and age, precisely because there are no clear-cut answers. In the episode, Henry posed the idea of a theoretical platform on the internet with strict identity verification, an idea which I feel has some merit: Anonymity online is too often abused in the modern day by malicious actors to spread disinformation and hateful ideas while skirting any potential consequences. Free speech is not—and has never been—an unlimited protection to say whatever you want, and if you have ever dealt with a hoard of pathetic, Lord of the Flies-esque social media profiles anonymously throwing insults your way, it’s very easy to see the appeal in a community where ideas are verifiably backed by real people.

xkcd: Free Speech

However, anonymity is still a valuable tool. Its value to society is not derived from its protection of ideas, it’s derived from its protection of people. Social media is consistently used by marginalized groups and people living under oppressive regimes to organize things like protests, and governments are increasingly called out on the international stage by their own citizens organizing themselves and posting information online that their governments might not want shared.

While some hateful people abuse anonymity on the internet to avoid the scrutiny of their peers, countless others rely on it to avoid retribution from the powers that be. A proposal requiring ID verification for social media was actually considered by the United Kingdom in 2021, in which the government rightly found that:

[… R]estricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity. These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers, journalists’ sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access social media, would force these users to disclose their identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.

Identity verification online is just as much a privilege as anonymity. A system in which an ID is required to participate will create a two-class structure in which the only people able to participate in real online discourse are people whose ideas are acceptable to their state and to their immediate peers. Any dissenting opinions would be relegated to the anonymous outskirts of the internet, if such a place existed at all, further isolating them and their ideas until they eventually disappeared.

At the end of the day, identity verification is not the solution to our collective social media woes. The onus of internet moderation should not fall on people and governments policing each other by tracing each online interaction to its original posters. Rather, social media networks need to recognize the power they have in society, and begin investing in actual moderation efforts which can separate the hate and abuse from everything else while remaining respectful of the privacy of their own users. Without anonymity, the way we use and view the internet would be unrecognizably different, and not for the better. It would be a less inclusive system operating under complete authoritarian control, and a place where content platforms like Facebook and Twitter further monetize your personal data under the guise of fighting abuse.

This post was originally posted on Techlore Dispatch on October 30, 2022.

[stoweboyd]

People Who Don’t Vaccinate Should Be Quarantined

The Supreme Court upheld the principle that the government has the right to protect citizens by quarantine or forced vaccinations.

Nicholas Mosvick captured the precedent:

On February 20, 1905, the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 majority, said in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts could fine residents who refused to receive smallpox injections. In 1901, a smallpox epidemic swept through the Northeast and Cambridge, and Massachusetts reacted by requiring all adults receive smallpox inoculations subject to a $5 fine. In 1902, Pastor Henning Jacobson, suggesting that he and his son both were injured by previous vaccines, refused to be vaccinated and to pay the fine. In state court, Jacobson argued the vaccine law violated the Massachusetts and federal constitutions. The state courts, including the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, rejected his claims. Before the Supreme Court, Jacobson argued that, “compulsion to introduce disease into a healthy system is a violation of liberty.”

On February 20, 1905, the Supreme Court rejected Jacobson’s arguments. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote about the police power of states to regulate for the protection of public health: “The good and welfare of the Commonwealth, of which the legislature is primarily the judge, is the basis on which the police power rests in Massachusetts,” Harlan said “upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”

Jacobson had argued that the Massachusetts law requiring mandatory vaccination was a violation of due process under the 14th Amendment, particularly the right “to live and work where he will” under the precedent of Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), a case that found that a state law preventing certain out-of-state insurance corporations from conducting business in the state was unconstitutional restriction of freedom of contract under the 14th Amendment. Harlan answered that while the Court had protected such liberty, a citizen:

[M]ay be compelled, by force if need be, against his will and without regard to his personal wishes or his pecuniary interests, or even his religious or political convictions, to take his place in the ranks of the army of his country and risk the chance of being shot down in its defense. It is not, therefore, true that the power of the public to guard itself against imminent danger depends in every case involving the control of one's body upon his willingness to submit to reasonable regulations established by the constituted authorities, under the sanction of the State, for the purpose of protecting the public collectively against such danger.”

[...]

When a separate question of vaccinations—state laws requiring children to be vaccinated before attending public school—came up in 1922 in Zucht v. King, Justice Louis Brandeis and a unanimous court held that Jacobson “settled that it is within the police power of a state to provide for compulsory vaccination” and the case and others “also settled that a state may, consistently with the federal Constitution, delegate to a municipality authority to determine under what conditions health regulations shall become operative.” More recently, in 2002, a federal district court declined to find a exemption to mandatory vaccinations laws for “sincerely held religious beliefs” or a fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning medical procedures of their children.

The government has the right to quarantine those whose actual or potential state of contagion poses a threat to the public.

Governments should quarantine all unvaccinated adults who have access to vaccinations but chose not to take their shots.

[jonthethinker]

After a long day of truly cursed thoughts, I’ve come to the determination that the Cerberus Assembly can act as a sort of Exandrian analog of our world’s Silicon Valley, and I hate it. I hate hate hate it.

The more I think about it, the more it just sort of melds into my mind as fact. I can’t escape it. This is where I live now.

You’ve got this collection of self-proclaimed super geniuses, unbounded by modern social mores and determined to invent a new sort of ethics, with an intent on shaping history and sagely guiding the world into a better future. This is despite the fact that most of the ideas they have inevitably end up making the world worse, and the only thing “new” that they really bring into the world is a bunch of actually very old ideas coated in fresh circuitry/magic.

But let’s dig a little deeper and start getting specific.

They both have these images of fiercely independent, creative bodies desperate to remain free from government control, and sometimes even as a check on that very government. The heads of the Cerberus Assembly outright say their intent is to act as a check on the Crown, and are known to have many secrets the Crown is, to their knowledge, totally unaware of.

Tech companies, particularly in America, have this outward facing very libertarian outlook on things, saying they don’t wish to interfere in the very important process of democracy and free speech, while simultaneously feeling it is their responsibility to fact check those in power and hold them to account, with their “serious vetting” of political ads and the like on their platforms. They also lobby heavily against any and all regulation of their various products and services, preferring to let the “invisible hand” of the market provide the service of keeping them in check, much as the Cerberus Assembly prefers to handle its own problems internally.

But when you really dig into the details this is all bullshit. The Cerberus Assembly, for all intents and purposes, IS the Empire. They run the secret police, for goodness sake. The two are so interconnected, and the Assembly as an institution is so dependent on the infrastructure and manpower, and of course money (because the fancy clothes, giant towers, and expensive sets of material components don’t pay for themselves) of the Empire to accomplish its goals, it can’t serve as a real check on Imperial forces possibly “overstepping”, and it also has no material interest in doing so; the more power and control the Empire has, the more power and control the Assembly has; the less freedom the citizens have due to authoritarian “safety” measures implemented by the Crown, the safer the Assembly itself becomes to pursue it’s morally dubious work and experimentation.

The same goes with Silicon Valley and the various tech companies that fall under its ethos. They will expound continually on the necessary freedom from government control they must have to truly change the world in the ways they think are best, but the primary source of money for most of these companies are governments. They either primarily contract with governments for most of their actual profits or to use its already established infrastructure, as is the case with Amazon, or depend heavily on publicly funded research for their innovations, which is everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft and dozens and dozens of smaller companies besides. They then even get to patent these publicly funded innovations and hold a monopolized stranglehold on their use. This is not even to mention the starter capital necessary to form many of these companies in the first place itself was provided by governments, with the rather, shall we say “morally questionable” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being among the top contributors to such start ups.

Even when either of these groups claim to be self-made, it’s all bullshit. So many of our famous tech overlords that supposedly built themselves from nothing started at the upper reaches of society, with more than enough capital and connections to insure they were never at any real risk of failing in the first place. Most even went to the same elite institutions of learning that provide the vast majority of the political leadership of the United States, institutions they had access to due to their wealth and familial connections, not their brains. Elon Musk’s family owned an emerald mine in Zambia for God’s sake, one his family would have never owned without the British Empire being a thing.

The same can be said for the Assembly. The upper classes of the Dwendalian Empire are lousy with mages and magic users. If they don’t have a place to climb among the nobility, they work for the Assembly, and hope to climb there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the only poorer mage recruits we know anything real about all were sucked up into the service of the Scourgers, one of the few arms of the Assembly known to regularly interact with societies lower reaches and not so positively at that, and had their familial identities obliterated in the process. Both of these groups are of the upper reaches of society and serve the upper reaches of society, and we should never think anything less.

And this brings us to the ideological framework both of these groups think with. They are both full to the brim with people who are individualists to the extreme. They all believe they are singular actors in the great tapestry of history, who got where they are by hard work and dedication, and anyone who isn’t there just didn’t do enough. The folks living in the tent city outside Zadash? lazy layabouts who simply have not applied their mind to be something greater, or perhaps their veins are just full of bad blood. Poor former factory workers in Detroit whose jobs have been moved to places where labor laws are weaker and wages are lower? If they’d only taken their education more seriously, they could be where I am! Or maybe they just never tried to be an Uber driver or delivering for Grubhub, because that’s how you really pull yourself out of poverty.

Meanwhile, most of the groups consist of people who have never once known real adversity and certainly not the hardship of poverty nor the lack of social and political power that position entails. They are blinded to the reality of most people in the world outside their rather small one, and thus have no understanding of the material hardship that most people experience during their everyday life.

You see this most clearer in the manner in which they try to solve what they see as societies great problems, with no clear thought put into the consequences of these particular solutions. In our world, this is particularly obvious. Uber is painted as an innovative means of transportation on a budget, when in reality it’s just a fleet of untrained, underpaid, non-unionized taxi drivers using their own personal vehicles at their own expense. Elon Musk is seen as this super genius when his solution to LA traffic wasn’t a more robust public transportation system or slowly reconstructing the city to be more pedestrian friendly, but instead to build a massive network of single car elevators under the city to zip cars to key hot spots faster in a manner people less anxious than me would still call risky at best. I mean most of these people think the key to ending poverty is teaching people to code or giving them STEM education, even when in a capitalist economy the only thing a sudden flooding of new coders and STEM educated folks would insure is that the jobs that require those skills will see a sudden massive drop in pay and benefits as the pool of prospective employees becomes over-saturated and individual workers no longer have any bargaining power to protect their once rare jobs. You already see this in animation and video game design, and you’ll certainly see it elsewhere.

For the Assembly, despite being praised as the brightest arcane minds of Wildmount, seem to get most of their ideas either by stealing them from others or digging them up out of the ground. But this is just the nature of empire; it’s always easier for an empire to consume than it is to create. So as little as they think of the Dynasty, they are eager to steal every little bit of knowledge they’ve discovered about Dunamis, and without the faith and moral sense the Luxon-based religion imposes, they will never be forced to put the use of this rare and dangerous magic into perspective. Imagine what harm they can cause with gravity and time magic when they don’t have that religious pressure to consider the value of life and choice. But this makes sense when their main sources of inspiration are the wizards of the Age Of Arcana; you know, the wizards whose hubris nearly destroyed the entire world and spurred an apocalyptic war that sent society into a dark age in which the gods themselves abandoned them? A+ inspiration material if you ask me.

Even the culture of these two groups in regards to how they regulate themselves is so eerily similar. Think of Delilah Briarwood. Member in good standing of the Cerberus Assembly. Also, worshipper of Vecna and talented necromancer. Only expelled from the Assembly after involvement from the Cobalt Soul, even when you know every other member of the Assembly almost certainly had loads of information on this lady.

It just makes me think of all the weird, right-wingers and Nazis who occasionally get expelled from the heights of Silicon Valley whenever some journalist exposes them, and how quickly their colleagues are to condemn them even when so many of them either knew this person was this way well before they were exposed or actively agreed with them and still do. I mean, think of how protected Bill Gates is, because of how much his philanthropist image has served to insulate and protect the gross consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of so few, even when his fortune was built on stolen ideas, military funding and research, and a hardcore software monopoly for well over a decade or two. Also, his philanthropy has done nothing to help African people build their own institutions of power independent of European and American influence, and have help distract us from the damage really caused to the entire continent by earlier colonialism and later capitalist imperialism.

This is to say as bad as our world is, I now definitely don’t want to live in Wildemount. I don’t want to live a world where Mark Zukerberg can cast Disintegrate. Not ideal. I guess I’ll just have to work that much harder to fix this one and not depend on learning Dunamancy to just put us on a different path. Bummer.

[joeyqtef975]

Why  Most Individuals  Will Certainly  Never Ever Be  Fantastic At Milfporn

Pornobr Hd.

Advocates say the adult movie market, which presented a widespread system of testing and call tracing to secure performers from HIV in the 1990s, has experience that might help Hollywood and also various other industries trying to find a safe way to reactivate. " The difficulties for sports, for Hollywood, and the porn market are all different but in reality, we each have things we can pick up from each various other." Globally, pornography is a 97 billion dollar market, navigate to this web-site and also the US represent 12 billion of it. In 2017, the International Organization of Net Hotlines "traced online child sexual assault product to over 70 countries," as well as greater than 60 countries in 2018. Top porn enjoyment companies, like Pornhub, promote to as well as receive content from nations around the world.

Health divisions require to be able to promptly recognize individuals understood to have actually been occupationally exposed to STDs/HIV for therapy, follow-up, and also companion management to control more spread of illness to others in the community. Movie critics have long argued that adult video is a magnet for creepy fans, pushed young women and Sexually transmitted diseases, asserts the market refutes.

A bulk of the participants at the Cambridge Union argument assumed so. I wish this symbolizes the beginning of an actual push back versus the pornography market; that youths will not enable it to distort and also deteriorate their own sexuality and also sexual orientations, none much more.

They see the magic of the movie-making and the creative thinking that goes into these productions. They appreciate and also recognize everything it takes to make it take place. Porn-studio proprietors state they'll default prior to they would certainly allow prophylactics to hinder of sales.

Hardcore Amateur Porn Video Clips

Given that its launch, the film has triggered significant discussion about the experiences of female performers and also the porn market itself. For Hollywood stars to return to function, they might need to begin acting like porn stars.

Disease private investigators have actually regularly been not able to establish contact with revealed and also infectious performers to initiate prompt treatment as well as companion solutions as well as contain the spread of infectious illness to entertainers as well as their partners. Some grown-up movie industry testing centers, manufacturing business, and ability firms have actually not been cooperative in supplying performer contact info to the local health department. This situation results in a lack of ability by neighborhood wellness divisions to recognize the resource of potential illness episodes as well as place a fast public wellness action when such break outs take place.

Take The Next Step Fund The Battle Against Huge Porn.

Diane Fight It Out is Chief Executive Officer of the Free Speech Coalition, the profession organization for the pornography industry. She claims the debate regarding wellness threats in the pornography industry is out of touch with fact, because adult performers get examined more frequently than any various other populace in the nation. It seems that the historic taboo of black men copulating white ladies is one sexual hang-up that also the pornography industry hesitates to get over. Regardless of just how often individuals utilize pornography-- Pornhub alone declares it acquired 28.5 billion sights in 2014-- its economic power remains covert amongst the masses. Unlike various other types of enjoyment, whose information consistently obtains splashed across the front web page of customer magazines, rumblings within the grown-up show business are normally just adhered to by specific niche trade audiences.

Annually, Pornhub releases a report showcasing stats from their "top 20 nations." The 2019 list of top 20 periods throughout a number of continents. Human trafficking in the pornography sector can not be isolated to one area or one populace. With most of porn easily accessible online, pornography of a trafficking survivor living overseas is just a search away. Regional wellness departments monitor STD/HIV treatment and also follow-up of revealed and infected people for condition examination objectives. Regional enforcement of the adult film market, however, has actually been met with significant obstacles, most notably in Los Angeles where the sector is mostly based.

It's much less typical currently than it was twenty years ago for stars to obtain multi-film agreements. This is an outcome of the shrinking of workshop budget plans and also eruption of web traffic to tube sites like Pornhub and also Redtube, which reveal content made by various other producers without paying for it. In her publication, Tarrant approximates that piracy sets you back the pornography sector some $2 billion a year. There's nothing incorrect with need or having a sexual cravings as long as both celebrations are consenting adults. When it concerns internet porn, that line is so regularly blurred or non-existent, that it is necessary to be clear about what constitutes dream and also reality.

Then when these attractive pieces can't wait any kind of longer, they will be permeated by a huge cock for the hardest anal sex possible.

These beautiful gays like it extreme, and if you intend to join them for all their kinky, mind-blowing orgasms, sign on to pornhub.com totally free, man on male movies.

Attractive studs recognize how to excite each other with competent mouths and also pulsating boners in the dirtiest gay videos you can ever before picture.

These toned, muscular hotties provide the most effective blowjobs and also engage in the wildest orgies, since all they crave is to be pounded hard, deep and repeatedly.

We offer streaming pornography videos, downloadable DVDs, photo albums, and the number 1 complimentary sex neighborhood on the web.

We're constantly working towards including more features that will certainly maintain your love for porno alive as well as well.

Yet if you're watching pornography that portrays physical violence as well as aggression towards females, or you're proactively searching for ladies that look underage, just how does that notify your own intimate connections? There will always be a market for pornography, that a lot is clear fromHot Ladies Desired, yet visitors can select which web content to engage with. If we can develop a greater need for even more moral porn, ladies in the industry will undoubtedly get much less duties that need their subjugation, and also our individual partnerships will certainly be favorably impacted also. The documentary 'Hot Girls Desired', generated by Rashida Jones and released in the springtime of 2015, complies with numerous young women residing in a North Miami Coastline residence as they try to enter the amateur pornography sector.

The conservative Washington, D.C.-based National Fixate Sexual Exploitation suggests that porn viewing has sustained harassment and also sexual physical violence in other profession. Some evidence supports the claim, but there is also research study that associates the freedom to check out grown-up content with fewer occurrences of rape-- the concept is that porn can promote as a risk-free sex-related release. A shooting postponement in the pornography sector was raised this weekend after an adult-film entertainer whose HIV-positive test triggered a weeklong closure of Los Angeles-area manufacturings was retested, with adverse outcomes. In my experience, gay porn, and also the whole grown-up market, has actually ended up being far much less taboo and much more extensively accepted. I have actually located audiences are far more sex positive, they're individuals that understand the art of pornography as well as see beyond the sex.

[iasshikshalove]

Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019

Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019 GS-1 Amazon fre Why in news? Over the last several days, the Amazon rainforest has been burning at a rate that has alarmed environmentalists and governments worldwide. Mostly caused by farmers clearing land, the fires have thrown the spotlight on Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies and anti-environment stance. Where are the Amazon fires happening?  Started in the Amazonian rainforests, the fires have impacted populated areas in the north, such as the states of Rondônia and Acre, blocking sunlight and enveloping the region in smoke.  The smoke has wafted thousands of miles to the Atlantic coast and São Paulo, according to the World Meteorological Organization.  Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has reported that forest fires in the region have doubled since 2013, and increased by 84% compared to the same period last year.  This year alone there have been 72,843 fires, it said, and more than 9,500 of those have happened over the past few days. How did the Amazon fires start?  The weekly Brasil de fato reported that Bolsonaro’s anti-environment rhetoric has emboldened farmers, who organised a “fire day” along BR-163, a highway that runs through the heart of the rainforest.  The weekly quoted a report by local newspaper Folha do Progresso, that local farmers had set fire to sections of the rainforest a few days ago to get the government’s attention. “  Alberto Setzer, a researcher at INPE, told Reuters that this year, the region did not experience extreme dry weather.  “The dry season creates the favourable conditions for the use and spread of fire, but starting a fire is the work of humans, either deliberately or by accident.”  The Amazon fires are so large that they are visible from space. NASA released images on August 11 showing the spread of fires and reported that its satellites had detected heightened fire activity in July and August. Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019 Why are the Amazon fires a cause for concern?  The Amazon rainforest is a repository of rich biodiversity and produces approximately 20 per cent of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere.  It is also home to indigenous communities whose lives and homelands are under threat due to encroachment by the Brazil government, foreign corporations and governments with economic interests in the resource-rich region, and local farmers.  In a 2017 study, the University of Leeds found that carbon intake by the Amazon basin matches the emissions released by nations in the basin.  The burning of forests, therefore, implies additional carbon emissions.  Research by scientists Carlos Nobre and Thomas E Lovejoy suggests that further deforestation could lead to the Amazon’s transformation from the world’s largest rainforest to a savanna, which would reverse the region’s ecology.  A National Geographic report said the Amazon rainforest influences the water cycle not only on a regional scale, but also on a global scale.  The rain produced by the Amazon travels through the region and even reaches the Andes mountain range.  Moisture from the Atlantic falls on the rainforest, and eventually evaporates back into the atmosphere.  The report said the Amazon rainforest has the ability to produce at least half of the rain it receives. This cycle is a delicate balance. How has the international community reacted?  Germany and Norway have suspended funding for programmes that aim to stop deforestation in the Amazon and have accused Brazil of doing little to protect the forests.  Indigenous groups and environment activists have led protests and criticised Bolsonaro for his comments and policies. Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019 Dacentrurus Context Scientists have described a new species of stegosaurus and dated it to 168 million years ago, which makes it the oldest known member of that group of dinosaurs ever known. About the species  Named Adratiklit boulahfa, it is also the first stegosaurus to be found in North Africa.  Its remains were discovered in the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco, and the study describing it was led by Dr Susannah Maidment of the London’s Natural History Museum (NHM).  The scientists believe it is not only a new species but also belongs to a new genus.  The name is derived from the words used by the Berber (an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa) for mountains (Adras), lizard (tiklit) and and the area where the specimen was found. (Boulahfa).  The Adratiklit was armoured and herbivorous, and lived on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which later split into Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica.  Most stegosaurus remains so far have been found in the northern hemisphere”. However, this may not mean that stegosaurs were uncommon in Gondwana. It may be due to the fact that Gondwana rock formations have been subject to far fewer excavations and detailed studies. GS-2 Henley passport inded Context: The latest edition of Henley Passport Index has been released. The Index ranks India at 86, down five places from 81 in 2018. Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019 About the index:  The Henley Passport Index (HPI) is a global ranking of countries according to the travel freedom for their citizens.  The index gathers data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) that manages inter-airline cooperation globally.  The Henley Passport Index is updated in real time according to countries’ visa policy changes.  It started in 2006 as Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index (HVRI)and was modified and renamed in January 2018.  The HPI consists of a ranking of passports according to how many other territories can be reached ‘visa-free’. What does this mean for Indian passport holders?  India has a score of 58. That is the number of destinations an Indian passport holder can travel to today, without pre-departure government approval. That is the same as a citizen of any country, on an average, could travel to 13 years ago.  In 2006, a citizen, on an average, could travel to 58 destinations without needing a visa from the host nation; by 2018, this number had nearly doubled to 107.  India ranks below other BRICS countries, with which are at a similar stage in their economic development. Significance of the index: Passports rankings point towards the strength of diplomatic relations between countries. Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019 Are there other passport indices?  The Henley Passport Index is not the only index available on passport rankings.  Others include the Arton Passport Index, which ranks United Arab Emirates’s passport at rank 1 as per its most recent rankings. GS-3 Microcredit in India Why in news? An article published on 21st August in Ideas for India, authored by Mushfiq Mobarak and Vikas Dimble and originally appearing in Yale Insights, suggests that the existing systems of microcredit have a limited impact on the long-term wellbeing of the recipients. What is microcredit?  Microcredit refers to the granting of very small loans to impoverished borrowers, with the aim of enabling the borrowers to use that capital to become self-employed and strengthen their businesses.  Loans given as microcredit are often given to people who may lack collateral, credit history, or a steady source of income. Objectives of microcredit  The core idea of microcredit is that a small loan will provide access to the larger economy to people who typically live outside the scope of the institutions on which the mainstream economy rests.  Such a loan is meant to enable them to commence with productive activities, and will give them the initial boost required to gain entry into an industry, after which production will be able to sustain itself, and the loan will gradually be repaid.  Microcredit agreements frequently do not require any sort of collateral, and sometimes may not even involve a written agreement, as many recipients of microcredit are often illiterate. Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019  When borrowers demonstrate success in paying their loans on time, they become eligible for loans of even larger amounts, allowing them to finance expansion. Why are microcredit institutions failing to deliver long-term benefits?  The article in Ideas for India cites a 2015 study that found “a lack of evidence of transformative effects of microfinance on the average borrower”.  Another study found that having access to microcredit made very little difference to changing the lifestyles of borrowers, based on six indicators: household business profits, business expenditures, business revenues, consumption, consumer durables spending, and spending on temptation goods.  These indicators only saw a 5% impact when microcredit was available.  The primary reason for the lackadaisical effects of microcredit is the stringent repayment schedule offered by most microcredit institutions.  Since most borrowers to whom microcredit is given have little to no credit history as a result of their exclusion from traditional systems of credit, institutions offering microcredit are unable to judge the risk associated with lending to certain borrowers, and cannot be sure what the risk of them defaulting will be.  To lower the risk of defaulting, microcredit lenders therefore resort to repayment schedules that demand an initial repayment that is almost immediate, after which borrowers must adhere to an inflexible weekly schedule for repayments.  The effect of this is that borrowers are unable to use the loans on investments that will take some time to be fully realised, and instead are forced to use the loans they receive on short term investments that only boost production to an extent, and the overall growth of their incomes remains meager. How can the microcredit system be reformed to have greater benefits for borrowers?  Once repayment began, both groups again had the same schedule.  Three years after the initial loans were given out, the study found that borrowers who received the grace period were more likely to have started a new business, and also reported both higher profits and household incomes.  As for the barriers to assessing credit risk, these can be mitigated by using community information. Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019  Communities can be an accurate source of information about credit risk for microcredit institutions, though the article notes that the implementation of such processes would require the elimination of bias and incentivising accurate information. What are the other applications of microcredit?  Conventionally, microcredit has been used mainly for entrepreneurs to begin production and attain self-sufficiency.  However, the Ideas for India article notes new, mostly unexplored paths for the utilisation of microcredit as a poverty alleviation and productivity-boosting measure.  A study found that small microcredit loans can allow rural labourers –those who are employees, as opposed to entrepreneurs, who are employers– to migrate to urban areas to find work during the lean season, when there is no work to be found on farms.  Those who migrated temporarily during this season experienced increased spending in both food and non-food areas, and increased their calories consumed.  Microcredit can also be used to dampen the effects of shocks like floods by providing people with a form of insurance that both increases production before the shock and provides a safety net after.  Microcredit has a vast range of applications for poverty alleviation and general development, but existing systems require reform in multiple areas to allow for unfettered benefits that last.  Furthermore, in areas were the application of microcredit is relatively new, microcredit systems must be carefully evaluated before they are put into place, so as to enable the greatest benefit from such institutions. FATF Why in news? The Asia-Pacific Group (APG) of the global terror financing and money laundering watchdog Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has put Pakistan in the Enhanced Expedited Follow Up List for failing to comply with commitments, PTI has reported, quoting unnamed officials. . Daily Current Affairs Dated On 23-Aug-2019 About FATF  The FATF is an inter-governmental body that is now in its 30th year, working to “set standards and promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system”.  was founded in 1989 on the initiative of the G7 to develop policies to combat money laundering.  In 2001 its mandate expanded to include terrorism financing.  It monitors progress in implementing the FATF Recommendations through "peer reviews" ("mutual evaluations") of member countries.  The FATF Secretariat is housed at the OECD headquarters in Paris India vs Pakistan at FATF  India is a voting member of both the FATF and the APG, and co-chair of the Joint Group, where it is represented by the Director General of India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).  Pakistan had asked for India’s removal from the group, citing bias and motivated action, but that demand was rejected.  India was not part of the group that had moved the resolution to greylist Pakistan last year in Paris.  The movers were the US, UK, France, and Germany. China did not oppose the move then.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago EFF just sent this letter to every official negotiating the EU's Copyright Directive

To Whom It May Concern:

I write today on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to raise urgent issues related to Articles 11 and 13 of the upcoming Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, currently under discussion in the Trilogues.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows. We are supported by over 37,000 donating members around the world, including around three thousand within the European Union.

We believe that Articles 11 and 13 are ill-considered and should not be EU law, but even stipulating that systems like the ones contemplated by Articles 11 and 13 are desirable, the proposed text of the articles in both the Parliament and Council texts contain significant deficiencies that will subvert their stated purpose while endangering the fundamental human rights of Europeans to free expression, due process, and privacy.

It is our hope that the detailed enumeration of these flaws, below, will cause you to reconsider Articles 11 and 13's inclusion in the Directive altogether, but even in the unfortunate event that Articles 11 and 13 appear in the final language that is presented to the Plenary, we hope that you will take steps to mitigate these risks, which will substantially affect the transposition of the Directive in member states, and its resilience to challenges in the European courts .

#

Article 13: False copyright claims proliferate in the absence of clear evidentiary standards or consequences for inaccurate claims.

Based on EFF’s decades-long experience with notice-and-takedown regimes in the United States, and private copyright filters such as YouTube's ContentID, we know that the low evidentiary standards required for copyright complaints, coupled with the lack of consequences for false copyright claims, are a form of moral hazard that results in illegitimate acts of censorship from both knowing and inadvertent false copyright claims.

For example, rightsholders with access to YouTube's ContentID system systematically overclaim copyrights that they do not own. For instance, the workflow of news broadcasters will often include the automatic upload of each night's newscast to copyright filters without any human oversight, despite the fact that newscasts often include audiovisual materials whose copyrights do not belong to the broadcaster – public domain footage, material used under a limitation or exception to copyright, or material that is licensed from third parties. This carelessness has predictable consequences: others — including bona fide rightsholders — who are entitled to upload the materials claimed by the newscasters are blocked by YouTube and have a copyright strike recorded against them by the system, and can face removal of all of their materials. To pick one example, NASA's own Mars lander footage was broadcast by newscasters who carelessly claimed copyright on the video by dint of having included NASA's livestream in their newscasts which were then added to the ContentID database of copyrighted works. When NASA itself subsequently tried to upload its footage, YouTube blocked the upload and recorded a strike against NASA.

In other instances, rightsholders neglect the limitations and exceptions to copyright when seeking to remove content. For example, Universal Music Group insisted on removing a video uploaded by one of our clients, Stephanie Lenz, which featured incidental audio of a Prince song in the background. Even during the YouTube appeals process, UMG refused to acknowledge that Ms. Lenz’s incidental inclusion of the music was fair use – though this analysis was eventually confirmed by a US federal judge. Lenz's case took more than ten years to adjudicate, largely due to Universal's intransigence, and elements of the case still linger in the courts.

Finally, the low evidentiary standards for takedown and the lack of penalties for abuse have given rise to utterly predictable abuses. False copyright claims have been used to suppress whistleblower memos detailing flaws in election security, evidence of police brutality, and disputes over scientific publication.

Article 13 contemplates that platforms will create systems to allow for thousands of copyright claims at once, by all comers, without penalty for errors or false claims. This is a recipe for mischief and must be addressed.

#

Article 13 Recommendations

To limit abuse, Article 13 must, at a minimum, require strong proof of identity from those who seek to add works to an online service provider's database of claimed copyrighted works and make ongoing access to Article 13's liability regime contingent on maintaining a clean record regarding false copyright claims.

Rightsholders who wish to make copyright claims to online service providers should have to meet a high identification bar that establishes who they are and where they or their agent for service can be reached. This information should be available to people whose works are removed so that they can seek legal redress if they believe they have been wronged.

In the event that rightsholders repeatedly make false copyright claims, online service providers should be permitted to strike them off of their list of trusted claimants, such that these rightsholders must fall back to seeking court orders – with their higher evidentiary standard – to effect removal of materials.

This would require that online service providers be immunised from Article 13's liability regime for claims from struck off claimants. A rightsholder who abuses the system should not expect to be able to invoke it later to have their rights policed. This striking-off should pierce the veil of third parties deputised to effect takedowns on behalf of rightsholders ("rights enforcement companies"), with both the third party and the rightsholder on whose behalf they act being excluded from Article 13's privileges in the event that they are found to repeatedly abuse the system. Otherwise, bad actors ("copyright trolls") could hop from one rights enforcement company to another, using them as shields for repeated acts of bad-faith censorship.

Online service providers should be able to pre-emptively strike off a rightsholder who has been found to be abusive of Article 13 by another provider.

Statistics about Article 13 takedowns should be a matter of public record: who claimed which copyrights, who was found to have falsely claimed copyright, and how many times each copyright claim was used to remove a work.

#

Article 11: Links are not defined with sufficient granularity, and should contain harmonised limitations and exceptions.

The existing Article 11 language does not define when quotation amounts to a use that must be licensed, though proponents have argued that quoting more than a single word requires a license.

The final text must resolve that ambiguity by carving out a clear safe-harbor for users, and ensure that there’s a consistent set of Europe-wide exceptions and limitations to news media’s new pseudo-copyright that ensure they don’t overreach with their power.

Additionally, the text should safeguard against dominant players (Google, Facebook, the news giants) creating licensing agreements that exclude everyone else.

News sites should be permitted to opt out of requiring a license for inbound links (so that other services could confidently link to them without fear of being sued), but these opt-outs must be all-or-nothing, applying to all services, so that the law doesn’t add to Google or Facebook's market power by allowing them to negotiate an exclusive exemption from the link tax, while smaller competitors are saddled with license fees.

As part of the current negotiations, the text must be clarified to establish a clear definition of "noncommercial, personal linking," clarifying whether making links in a personal capacity from a for-profit blogging or social media platform requires a license, and establishing that (for example) a personal blog with ads or affiliate links to recoup hosting costs is "noncommercial."

In closing, we would like to reiterate that the flaws enumerated above are merely those elements of Articles 11 and 13 that are incoherent or not fit for purpose. At root, however, Articles 11 and 13 are bad ideas that have no place in the Directive. Instead of effecting some piecemeal fixes to the most glaring problems in these Articles, the Trilogue take a simpler approach, and cut them from the Directive altogether.

Thank you,

Cory Doctorow Special Consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/23/unsafe-at-any-speed-4.html

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is famous for his plan to implement a universal basic income to help Americans who lose their jobs to robots. And that isn’t the only place tech innovation takes center stage in his platform. He also advocates that your online data be treated as personal property that you can choose (or not) to sell to companies like Facebook. In a Yang presidency, election results would be verified through blockchain (an encryption system best known for shoring up cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin), quantum computing research would be better funded, and a Legion of Builders and Destroyers would have the power to overrule local zoning and land-use decisions for the greater infrastructure good. He is definitely the only presidential candidate talking seriously about fighting climate change with giant space mirrors.

But while the Yang platform can occasionally appear to drift toward a bid for a Hugo Award, experts who study the history and sociology of tech say his enthusiasm for and belief in the promise of technology is actually in step with the way most Americans (and the Democratic party, in particular) approach innovation. To the extent that Yang, a political novice whose credentials are largely built on his history as a successful tech entrepreneur, is polling above people like Kirsten Gillibrand and Bill de Blasio, it could be because he’s done such a good job of speaking to a defining aspect of the American psyche: one that both loves and fears tech. If anything, despite the sci-fi trappings of his policies, some experts said Yang might be a little behind the curve — playing to a vision of the future already looks a little retro in its belief that Silicon Valley hype will match reality.

The American relationship with technology is a complicated one. Research suggests that a majority of Americans — 59 percent in a 2014 Pew Research Center poll — have faith that technological advancements will make our lives better in the future. In 2016, the same organization found that 52 percent of us think technology has already had a largely positive effect on society. Those beliefs have long-standing precedent, said Lee Vinsel, a professor of science, technology and society at Virginia Tech, stretching back to the cults of personality built up around 19th century inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. “There’s an emphasis on technology and how it grows the economy as an unvarnished good,” Vinsel said.

But those top-line numbers can mask some underlying discomfort with the technological tools we allow into our lives. The same polls that show a majority of Americans looking forward to a tech-enabled future also show a distinct lack of enthusiasm for technologies closer to our fingertips. We may expect unspecified “technology” to make our lives better down the road, but 63 percent of us think opening U.S. airspace to drones will make life worse; 65 percent of us don’t like the idea of robots caring for the sick and elderly; and 78 percent of us would not eat meat grown in a lab if someone set it on our plates.

That’s because cycles of techno-hype and disillusionment are a major part of American culture and public policy, said Taylor Dotson, a professor of social sciences at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Usually, politicians and the public see a social problem and decide technology will solve it; then, they discover that the solution comes with a whole new set of issues — which they often expect future technology to solve. It’s like the old Simpsons joke describing alcohol as the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems. “Oh, yeah. We see technology in a similar way to that,” Dotson said.

And experts said Yang’s platform taps right into the current American zeitgeist — for example, in the way he is simultaneously grappling with the risks artificial intelligence poses to some job markets, while proposing it as a replacement for other human jobs in other areas. But they also said he’s hardly the first political candidate to look to technology for the answers to societal ills. In fact, the Democratic Party has long considered itself the standard-bearer of scientific expertise, adopting an almost utopian vision of technological innovation since at least the Kennedy years, Vinsel said.

Practically, this means that Democrats have made technology a bigger part of their image over the years. In the 1980s, for instance, “Atari Democrats” wore fancy watches and promoted Silicon Valley boosterism as an alternative to courting labor unions, said Marc Aidinoff, a history doctoral candidate at MIT who has also worked as a junior policy advisor to Joe Biden. That trend continued under Barack Obama, said Mary Ebeling, a professor of sociology at Drexel University. Obama’s technology advisors were heavily recruited from Silicon Valley and many returned there after serving in his administration. And now, it’s not just the Democratic Party pushing tech-based solutions, Vinsel said. At this point, the ideas of technological innovation and economic growth are so linked in the American mind that neither party can step away from tech as a common good without seeming like they are anti-growth.

But Democrats’ tendency to seek solutions in technology for social problems has not always served them well. Ebeling is currently working on a project that explores how adopting electronic health records as part of the Affordable Care Act affected both patients and workers in the medical industry. The electronic records were pushed as a solution to deep-seated problems that weren’t really about technology — boosters promised they’d make healthcare cheaper and solve problems with patient access to consistent medical care. Instead, Ebeling is finding that we spent billions effectively favoring an industry that could never produce the returns it promised. “And lo and behold, by 2019, you have Kaiser Health News reporting on how much harm electronic health records have caused. Literally the death of patients because of medical errors,” she said.

When our faith and enthusiasm in the power of technology hits a wall, the collision happens with all the force of a coyote riding a jetpack. Aidinoff, the former political consultant, thinks we’re in a cultural moment when our belief in the promises of technology are meeting a crushing reality. Since the Cold War, Americans have been assured that the internet and communication networks would serve as liberalizing forces, or as tools to draw repressed countries toward democracy. But since the early 2000s, there have been a string of prominent situations where that ideal wasn’t realized. In the wake of the 2016 election, social media networks have been seen as tools of misinformation and political manipulation. But that wasn’t the first time tech failed us. For instance, dozens of internet cafes were opened in Iraq after the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, and the internet was seen as being instrumental in the democratization of the country. But, Aidinoff said, that same internet access later ended up being a recruitment tool for extremist groups such as ISIS. Hilary Clinton once spoke about the potential of the internet as akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “But freedom didn’t happen the way it was supposed to,” Aidinoff said.

That’s a problem for a candidate like Yang — and a problem for any party that wants to view technology as a solution to social ills. Someone framing a campaign around technology as a problem solver and powerful force for good is, in some ways, a few years out of date — as anachronistic as Mark Zuckerberg floating a presidential run. In the end, what’s odd about Yang’s platform might be less that it’s calling for cloud seeding or AI social workers — and more that it’s calling for those things at a time when the relationship between Americans and tech could best be described as “it’s complicated.”

[sleeplessinsiswati]

Learning to Learn—A Day in the Life

Life is. God is. Love is. I have found that the best things in life are often times indescribable in nature; sure, attributes and characteristics are easily noted, but the heart of the matter is not to be spoken on so much as felt. We know they exist because of how they make us feel, and how alive they are in us and around us. 

Long before I came to the country of eSwatini, long before I even decided I wanted to join the Peace Corps, I made the decision I had to get out of the United States. America, as some would call it, for all it’s glorious opportunities, was little more than a overused and outdated ideal that fostered little more than coerced silence and disillusioned bitterness from it’s citizens. I felt that I for one was suffocating, screaming with words trapped in collapsing lungs; I was desperately trying to breathe the air of a freedom I could not find in my mother country. Around the time that I realized that because of the color of my skin, because of my radical convictions and unapologetic perspectives I would never be accepted in America, I almost immediately wanted to belong somewhere else. 

It was in this season of my life that I began to read like I never had before; intensely, feverishly searching for an answer. In all honesty, I never exactly found what I was looking for; well, I mean, I never found what I was looking for in a book. Despite this, that time in my life planted a seed. That seed would grow into a burning desire, which eventually became my becoming a Peace Corps volunteer in the country of eSwatini (Swaziland), Africa. It was not until I arrived in eSwatini that I felt the closing of a full circle, and the beginning of a new journey with new questions and new lessons to learn. Now, a new seed was planted in me—maybe here, in this country, I can belong to the land, the people; maybe here, in this land of Black people, I can taste the air of liberation. 

 After a few days of settling in with my cohort of 46, including myself and my wife, we began our training prior to our official Peace Corps Service (Pre-Service Training, PST). It was the beginning of a 3-month-long training process that included technical, medical, cultural, diversity/inclusion, security, and personal mental health trainings in order to prepare you for service. The stakes were high—do well on your assessments, and you stay in country and move on to your service. Do poorly, and you risk returning home. When we first arrived in country we lived in a dormitory style apartment building, and would walk the breezeway to our conference room to begin trainings around 8:00 am. A few weeks later, we moved to our temporary in-community homesteads as a means of further integration and preparation for our permanent sites.

The first month was definitely an adjustment—no access to running water in our home, with home consisting of one a room house that wasn’t big enough to house much more than our (Angel and myself) luggage, a queen-sized bed, and a table.  Despite these minor inconveniences, we had a very loving and helpful Make (mother), Make Mdaka, who made sure every day we were fed and not late to our morning language classes. She also had a very sizeable homestead (the property that she owned which constituted a chicken coop, two planting fields, a garden, and several avocado and banana trees) which had three houses, including our own, and one house which had both running water and electricity which we were allowed to enter and use upon request. Honestly, we kind of had it made when it comes to temporary sites.

Other than that, our daily schedule generally was as follows—

5:30 am- Wake up and do morning routine (iron or steam clothes; pack bags; make breakfast)

7:00 am- SiSwati language class (Sentence structure; vocabulary; verb tense; sentence construction)

9:30 am- Ride Peace Corps transport to training site (IDM or SIMPA institues) for technical, security, diversity, etc. trainings

4:30 pm- Ride bus home to temporary site

5:00 pm- Settle in at home and begin evening routine (Boil and filter water for drinking; cook dinner; practice siSwati with Make)

7:30 pm- Watch a few movies or tv shows on hard drive

9:30 to 11:00 pm- Call it a night and get ready for the next day

I would say that one of the biggest challenges I have faced in my time here is learning to learn, over and over again. No matter how much you know about yourself, other people, other cultures, institutions, whatever, you must put yourself in a constant space of being willing to learn again. Whether it’s the ways of the culture, the language itself, the nuances of etiquette, or a simple trip to the store, this experience of intrinsic learning has been constant ever since my arrival. Blackness, as another example, for all it’s beauty and diversity, is not a monolith. Though I have loved connecting with umdeni wami (my family) in the African Diaspora, especially in the Motherland of Africa, it would be dismissive of me to not acknowledge there are differences between us. Furthermore, it has been challenging addressing questions that come with the nature of our being in-country as volunteers— “Are you a spy?” “Donald Trump does not even like Black people. How did you get this job?” “Why is it that volunteers always come here, but we never have volunteers go there?” “Can you just give us the money and we can do it ourselves?” The realities of imperialism and capitalism, and their effects, are felt on both a conscious and subconscious level by all involved parties at all times. Yes, we are both Black; No, we are not exactly the same. In some ways we are worlds apart, and my being here could potentially inflict as much pain as it could help. Being able to see that not unlike the missionaries and colonizers which once (and still do) settled in this country, that I can inflict damage to the self-perception of the people of this beautiful country and what they perceive as their ability to create and find solutions to concerns in their communities, is a very sobering reality. 

That said, there are times of bonding along the lines of shared experience that are utterly indescribable. It is beautiful witnessing the ways in which Black people have connections across ethnic cultures that are practically impossible considering the span of space and time. And yet, there are signs—the dancing, the rhythm, the love and compassion, the viewing of time as fluid and humanity as intricately connected with Nature— and ways of life that are deeply embedded in the fabric of Black people despite being separated and unbeknownst to either people; this, for me, is both humbling and encouraging. Despite what we may believe in the States, Black America is not too far off from the Mother and her ways. 

There have been learning curves too, interacting and fellowship within our cohort. No group of people is perfect, so long as there are people in it and our group of 43 volunteers is no different. Egos, destructive criticisms, and back-biting are all possible realities of strangers coming together to accomplish any goal. We decided as a group that our cohort name would be Simunye (meaning “We are United; We are One” in siSwati), but the chemistry of our group has not always been one of unity (and still isn’t…it’s a process). For me, coming from an HBCU undergraduate background and a very ground roots racist, institutionally neoliberal PWI for graduate school, I initially had my reservations concerning connecting with people whose backgrounds I do not know and intentions I cannot always perceive, especially White with people. Despite these prejudices I had, I have come to understand and believe that through vulnerability, transparency, patience, perseverance, and a willingness to change, even the strongest of boundaries and borders and be taken down with the strength and unity of love. We are all capable of causing each other great suffering, but because of this we are also able to bring about great healing and through that healing a greater community and a stronger bond through our shared humanity. This, for me, is a lesson I am yet learning but a journey I embark on happily (I’ll talk more about this later on!).

So I’m saying all this to say…it’s been  an adjustment. There are things that are similiar, and there are things that are not. Just like everywhere. Every city, every place has a song in it’s heart; the trick, the question is “can you catch the rhythm?” When I first arrived in country, I thought there were things that I knew; now there are things that I don’t know. I am learning to catch the rhythm. I am learning to learn, again. 

[berniesrevolution]

With their huge improvements in special elections across the country, it looks increasingly probable that Democrats will win big in the 2018 midterms, and perhaps take control of both Congress and the presidency in 2020. That raises a logical question: In an ideal world, what should they do?

American society is in dire straits, and things will likely be even worse by the time a Democrat takes office. They will have a brief window to fix multiple screaming policy emergencies, and reform American political institutions to prevent a resurgence of the diseased Republican Party.

Below, I will outline a draft platform that would both accomplish worthy goals and provide political benefits. Since the conventional wisdom on political feasibility and popularity has proved to be highly unreliable of late (see: President Donald J. Trump), I have focused on things that will provide immediate and concrete partisan benefits, while strengthening democratic liberties. The ideas are grouped under three headings: political reform, domestic policy, and foreign policy. Let's get cracking.

Political reform:

Now, Democrats should not cheat like Republicans do. It would be wrong to do a reverse Kris Kobach, and suppress the votes of old white people by making Fox News watchers present 14 different forms of photo ID before they can vote. However, there is nothing wrong with strengthening America's democratic institutions — making it simpler and easier for allAmericans to vote and obtain political representation — in part because it would provide a partisan benefit. To wit:

1. Make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states. 

This step would both address the greatest structural violation of democratic liberties in American society and provide the largest tangible partisan benefit to Democrats. D.C. residents and Puerto Ricans are quite literally oppressed colonial subjects, taxed without representation.

In D.C.'s case that creates frequent dysfunction and annoyance, but in Puerto Rico's case it is a full-blown emergency. It is obvious that the Republican government's ongoing failure to rebuild the island after it was flattened by Hurricane Maria (much less address its ongoing debt crisis) has a great deal to do with the fact that they have no congressional representation. Instead of futilely appealing to Paul Ryan's nonexistent conscience, actual Puerto Rican senators and representatives could vote, grab the ear of national media, trade favors, argue with other national politicians, and credibly threaten to gum up the wheels of Congress if their state was not fixed. (In other words, they would have power.)

2. Abolish the filibuster. 

Many big and controversial bills will need to be passed very quickly. Democrats cannot afford the swing vote in the Senate to be some quisling Blue Dog in the pocket of Wall Street, as Joe "The ObamaCare Hamstringer" Lieberman was in 2009-10. This should be done at the earliest possible moment.

3. Resurrect and strengthen the Voting Rights Act. 

Republican vote suppression and district boundary cheating has become their ace in the political hole, hugely enabled by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. Roberts' decision struck down the preclearance portion of the VRA — which forbade certain jurisdictions from making any changes to their voting procedure without first getting federal certification that they would not disenfranchise minorities — on the grounds that Jim Crow was a long time ago and so it was an unfair burden. That obstacle removed, Republicans immediately set about disenfranchising as many minorities as possible.

Roberts' "reasoning" was obviously 100 percent partisan pretext. But one solution that fits with his logic is to extend preclearance to the entire country. In keeping with Article Four, Section Four, an inalienable right to vote for all citizens and legal residents should be established, including for ex-cons and current prisoners, and all jurisdictions should be required to submit a plan to the federal government ensuring easy and universal access to the franchise. (This can be made easier by establishing a federal template for all levels of government, which would include universal mail-in voting, if people would rather not bother.) Any changes will have to be pre-cleared. Election Day itself should also be moved to a Friday and made a national holiday.

Incidentally, this will have the salutary effect of sharply improving the voting rights in many blue states like New York, where the corrupt Democratic regime is none too eager to have millions of poor people casting ballots.

Finally, as part of the voting rights package, both national and state-level district boundaries should be taken out of the hands of partisan legislatures, and put under control of nonpartisan committees required to draw maps which produce a legislature whose partisan composition at least approximates the raw vote totals.

All this aligns high moral principle with grubby partisan motives. It would mean probably four more Democratic senators and several representatives, and sharply improve Democratic prospects in several states with preposterously unfair gerrymandering or where a huge proportion of minorities have been permanently disenfranchised. However, that is no reason to get squeamish about it. On the contrary, the likeliest way that D.C. residents and Puerto Ricans are going to get their freedom, and the effectively tyrannical aspects of many American political institutions are going to be expunged, is if it can be successfully clubbed into the heads of the Democratic leadership that it is in their partisan interest to do so.

Domestic policy:

1. Climate change. 

This is one area where politics absolutely must take a back seat to principle. If Democrats believe what they're saying about climate science, and they accumulate some political capital with the above program, this is where it must be spent first. As I've argued before, this is by far the most important problem facing American society, because it is a serious emergency that will require a top-to-bottom overhaul of society. Trump's climate denier presidency almost could not have come at a worse time. The next administration will have to cut emissions as fast as it possibly can, both to slow climate change and to avoid the risk of tripping feedback loops that could push warming into an uncontrollable self-sustaining spiral.

People can and do argue all day about precisely the best way forward on climate, but one simple way of thinking about it is to take what China is doing with decarbonization, energy efficiency, and renewables, and aim to beat them by 50 percent. That both gets in the right ballpark of what needs to happen (China's climate policy is extremely aggressive, though still not good enough), and indicates the international nature of the issue. Such a "competition" — in reality, a mutually-beneficial international coordination — would be both excellent policy and a worthy national project. If we're lucky, it might even inspire China to up their game even more as well.

2. Health-care reform. 

This has been the main policy axis of mobilization for lefties during the Trump presidency, and it's not hard to see why. The ObamaCare policy approach has proved to be a massive headache with multiple pitfalls and unforeseen consequences. Its political bargain — that a more conservative, free-market road to universal coverage would be more politically stable — turned out to be wrong. Though Republicans have not managed to repeal the law outright, it is suffering major damagewith the repeal of the individual mandate and regulatory attacks. Tellingly, the market-oriented part of the law — the individual exchanges — are doing the worst.

Democrats should aim for something like an upgraded Medicare-for-all system, with complete medical coverage and no cost-sharing. It both makes the best policy sense and has steadily increased in popularity. What precisely that should look like is not to be hashed out now — the Sanders and Ellison bills and the "Medicare Extra" plan from the Center for American Progress are reasonable — but the best direction to head is obvious: away from markets, and towards traditional social insurance.

Doing so would both address an ongoing humanitarian crisis and deliver a major win to Democratic base voters who have been advocating for this for generations. Moreover, after the dust settles most people would be immensely relieved by being permanently placed on a high-quality Medicare-type system. Democrats should have the confidence to ignore the lobbyists and simply ram through as good a bill as possible.

3. Family policy. 

The structure of American society is deeply hostile to parents even very far up into the upper class. Paid family and sick leave, a child allowance, universal pre-K, and some kind of universal daycare would go a great deal towards ensuring parents don't have a near-impossible struggle between raising their children and being forced to go back to work. This would further advance the U.S. welfare state and deliver meaningful goods to an important Democratic voting bloc: young people.

And while one can't say for sure what people would think about this, the fact that the United States is literally one of two countries in the world (the other being Papua New Guinea) without paid family leave shows you how much of an outlier we are on this. Like Medicare for all, once they figured out how great it is, people would love a family benefits package.

4. Sharp tax increases on the rich and corporations. 

It's not immediately obvious that this would be a win in terms of public opinion, though polls do consistently find a large majority of people saying the rich pay too little in taxes. But it would help pay for Democratic priorities, and may well end up strengthening growth by diverting money away from shareholders and executives, and towards workers and investment. And in tangible political terms, it would definitely take money out of the pockets of the ultra-wealthy, who spend ungodly sums subsidizing right-wing propaganda and dirty tricks operations.

5. Labor law reform. 

Again public opinion is muddled on this one, since unions barely exist throughout much of the country. But passing a pro-union legal package — by, for example, banning so-called "right-to-work" laws at the national level, passing card check, or, most aggressively, mandating what's called sectoral bargaining to unionize whole swathes of the economy at a stroke — would benefit workers and raise wages.

It would also directly benefit Democrats, as newly-revitalized unions saw their power, money, and influence grow by leaps and bounds. They would surely direct their votes and campaign donations to the party that secured those benefits, as they did in FDR's time.

6. Antitrust and other corporate regulation. 

Concentration is a grave problem in the American economy, where a handful of businesses have rolled up control over everything from computer chips to chicken. Breaking up these business will both provide more options for consumers, push economic activity into places other than a handful of very large cities, and help workers, who face labor market monopsony and hence lower wages. That could assist the genuinely left-behind Americans in rural areas and smaller towns Trump championed in his campaign but utterly failed to help as president.

Wall Street should come under special attention. The biggest banks should be broken up, and heavy new regulations, deliberately designed to keep financial businesses small and less profitable, should be levied. In contrast to Dodd-Frank, these should be simple and difficult to avoid, not complicated and take years to implement. This would benefit not just the actually productive parts of the economy, from which much financial profit is parasitically extracted, but also sharply reduce the risk of another global financial crisis.

Politically, antitrust and financial regulation would knock out one prop of reactionary politics. As we've seen in President Trump's Cabinet, Wall Street has been eager and willing to help along a truly vile president, so long as it get its tax cuts. Cutting finance's share of GDP by half would considerably reduce the amount they could dedicate to electing the next future conservative lunatic.

Meanwhile, vigorous antitrust in the media space, coupled to regulation of platforms like Facebook and YouTube, will also help break the influence of deep-pocketed right-wing propaganda. Restrictions on the number of TV or radio stations any one entity can own will further prevent reactionary businessmen pushing pro-Trump propaganda throughout the nation. It would not completely disable the grifting machine that is eating the Republican Party alive, but it would help quite a bit.

Foreign policy:

1. Defense spending cuts. 

The easiest step to take on foreign policy is to cut the bloat and waste in military spending. Back in 2016, The Washington Post reported that a study commissioned by the Pentagon itself had found $25 billion per year in pure administrative waste at the Defense Department, which it then suppressed due to fear of budget cuts. Even if that's overstated, there is still the psychotically expensive and dubiously necessary B-21 heavy bomber, the even more expensive and already outdated F-35 fighter jet, the $1 trillion-plus earmarked for new nuclear weapons and upgrades of the existing stockpile, and much more burning through government cash for little or no benefit. Every big-ticket defense project needs to be examined with acidic skepticism, to see what might be scaled back or canceled outright.

2. Imperial rollback. 

Further savings can be found by ending the hundreds of pointless overseas operations throughout the world. U.S. troops should be removed from Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries, Special Forces deployments largely ended, and the enabling of the Saudi war in Yemen should cease immediately. The drunken colonialism of the so-called War on Terror must end.

All this would free up immense resources for Democrats' other policy priorities. Just the $80 billion military spending increase passed in 2017 would more than pay for free tuition at every public college across the country. Returning to a pre-Iraq War spending level (if anything, a modest ask) would free up another roughly $200 billion per year.

And far from harming national security, it would probably help. At a minimum, it would remove U.S. troops from several places where they are inflaming violent anti-American extremism. And forcing the Pentagon to economize might actually get them to focus on genuine needs rather than expensive, useless toys.

(Continue Reading)

An incomplete blueprint for a progressive landslide.

[sciencespies]

NIH Director Francis Collins To Step Down In 2021 After 12 Years

https://sciencespies.com/news/nih-director-francis-collins-to-step-down-in-2021-after-12-years/

NIH Director Francis Collins To Step Down In 2021 After 12 Years

It’s the end of an era. After 12 years at the helm, Francis Collins, MD, PhD, announced today that he will be stepping down as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by the end of the year. Here’s a tweet from the physician-scientist-leader-motorcycle-rider-rock-musician announcing his plans:

Whoa, this is a bit like hearing the end of the Beatles, ABBA, the Spice Girls, NSYNC, and One Direction runs, although Collins and the NIH are not breaking up. Far from it. He will be stepping down from his role as director but will continue to lead his research laboratory at the NIH. It’s just that with the longest ever term, Collins as director and the NIH have been like peanut butter-and-jelly or avocado and basically anything else. The two have long been associated together with each other.

In fact, no other Presidentially-appointed NIH Director has served for more than one Presidential administration, let alone three. His name is not Dr. Francis “The Rock” Collins. That nickname is kind of already taken. Nevertheless, Collins has been a rock before and through what has been a really rocky past several years for America.

Remember 2009? That was when America was still recovering from a major recession and far too many people wearing Crocs, not that the two were related. The world was also in the midst of another pandemic, the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. Well, August 17, 2009 was when Collins first officially became the the 16th Director of the NIH, after President Barack Obama nominated him and the Senate soon confirmed him unanimously. Collins subsequently continued in the position through the rest of Obama’s two consecutive terms, President Donald Trump’s one term, and the first year of President Joe Biden’s presidency.

In a statement from the NIH, Collins related that “It has been an incredible privilege to lead this great agency for more than a decade. I love this agency and its people so deeply that the decision to step down was a difficult one, done in close counsel with my wife, Diane Baker, and my family. I am proud of all we’ve accomplished.”

He continued by saying, “I fundamentally believe, however, that no single person should serve in the position too long, and that it’s time to bring in a new scientist to lead the NIH into the future. I’m most grateful and proud of the NIH staff and the scientific community, whose extraordinary commitment to lifesaving research delivers hope to the American people and the world every day.” Note that Collins used the word “scientist” here. A scientist is who should be leading any scientific endeavor, initiative, or organization unless “messing up” is one of the goals. After all, you wouldn’t have a clam bake announcer who doesn’t have any football experience lead a football team, right?

Collins was already a rock star of a scientist prior to leading the NIH. He had been the bedrock of the then-super-ambitious goal of mapping the human genome. He had led the Human Genome Project and served as the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) from 1993 through 2008. That work rocked the world as knowing what parts of human DNA handled what body functions has led to many new discoveries along with potential ways of treating different diseases. He’s an elected members of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2007 then-President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As you can see, Collins’ appeal extended across both major political parties.

Over the past decade plus, Collins has launched a number of large biomedical initiatives. For example, there was the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which supported researchers developing new technologies to better understand how the brain works and address problems such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and psychosis. Another example has been the All of Us Research Program, an ambitious project that has already gotten a million Americans to offer data on themselves to help researchers determine how different factors affect health and move more towards precision medicine. Precision medicine means better tailoring medical treatments and health care to different people. A third example has been the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, which has brought together public and private entities to accelerate the translation of initial scientific discoveries in labs into real products on the market.

Collins has steered NIH through some of the most tumultuous years that the scientific community has faced in recent memory. From 2017 through 2019, former President and current Mar-A-Lago resident Trump repeatedly proposed to Congress massive cuts in NIH funding and scientific research in general. Such cuts would have been a huge punch in the face to science in the U.S. and made America grate and far less than first in World. Fortunately, with Collins and others advocating for the NIH, Congress essentially said “oh, no you didn’t” and “WTH are you doing” to the Trump administration and ignored these proposed reductions. They chose instead to increase the NIH budget.

Then there has been that little thing called the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Ever since the early days of the pandemic, when toilet paper suddenly became the new gold and people learned that “flattening the curve” had nothing to do with body shaping, Collins worked to help put together major initiatives to help develop new ways of preventing and treating Covid-19. These included the:

Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV): a public-private partnership to accelerate development of new vaccines and treatments

Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostic (RADx) program: to catalyze the development of new Covid-19 tests,

Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities: to assist disadvantaged communities hit hardest hit by the pandemic

Researching COVID to Enhance Discoveries (RECOVER) Initiative: to address the growing problem of long Covid.

Throughout the pandemic, an anti-science sentiment has permeated many political and business leaders like a gigantic lingering fart. This has kept Collins and other physician scientists caught between a rock and a hard place, trying to tell everyone, “help us help you,” kind of like what the Tom Cruise character did in the movie Jerry Maguire. Through it all, Collins has remained focused on combating both the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the anti-science hogwash at the same time.

Most recently, Collins has been working with the White House to propose to Congress an innovative new agency, called Advanced Research Project Agency for Health (ARPA-H), that would be housed under NIH and aim to catalyze higher-risk, higher-reward biomedical and health research. As I described for Forbes previously, ARPA-H, if approved by Congress, could help get past some of the risk-averse, “fund more of the same stuff” tendencies that the current NIH peer-review process may continue to propagate.

Collins and his band The Affordable Rock N’ Roll Act (ARRA) played at the 2019 DCSWA (D.C. Science … [+] Writers Association) Holiday Party in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Bruce Y. Lee)

Bruce Y Lee

Collins has been willing to rock the boat as well when it comes to doing something about many long-standing issues that have hampered the progression of science. One issue has been the structural racism that exists throughout the scientific community and has been holding back the work and advancement of many scientists of color. Another barrier that Collins has tried to tackle is sexism and sexual harassment. For example, back in 2019, Collins announced that he will no longer appear on any “manels,” as I covered for Forbes. The term “manels” may sound like a piece of furniture or a new cologne designed to drive you wild but are actually all-male, non-diverse panels that have been driving a lot of scientists wild in a bad way. A third barrier has been scientists and organizations hoarding data as if they were toilet paper and not sharing such information with the rest of the scientific community and general public.

Collins also rocks literally. He is an accomplished musician and formed a band originally called “The Directors,” which eventually became the “Affordable Rock ‘n’ Roll Act (ARRA),” and consists of various past and present NIH members. The band has made a number of appearances in different venues, including our 2018 D.C. Science Writers Association (DCSWA) Holiday Parties in Washington, D.C. As a member of the DCSWA Board and planning committee for the party, I can say the AARA was certainly “affordable” and really rocked the joint.

Through it all, Collins has brought a distinctly human face to running the NIH. Despite his many accomplishments and responsibilities, he’s remained very accessible to other scientists and the public. He’s reminded everyone that scientists can be highly effective and multi-talented leaders who can enact change across a wide range of sectors. In essence, Collins has reminded everyone that physician scientists can really, really rock.

#News

[architectnews]

Antepavilion building "smashed up" and staff arrested in police raid on design workshops

Police have raided the building that hosts the annual Antepavilion architecture commission, arrested a number of its staff and threatened to remove an installation on its roof.

The raid was intended to target climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, whose members had been attending workshops at the Hoxton Docks arts building in east London.

However, Dezeen understands that all the people arrested during yesterday's raid were employees or tenants of Hoxton Docks.

Above: police have raided the building that hosts the Antepavilion. Top image: an installation on its roof is at risk of removal

"I spent the night in jail," he said Russell Gray, owner of the canalside building. "They smashed their way in through various doors and smashed the place up."

Gray was arrested when he arrived at the building during the raid following a call from his son, who was also arrested along with a tenant of the building.

They were released the next day but Gray said police told him they would return to dismantle the rooftop structure. "They're saying they're gonna come and take it down," he told Dezeen.

The structure, called All Along the Watchtower, is a reusable, lightweight "tensegrity" structure made of bamboo poles and steel cables designed by a collective called Project Bunny Rabbit.

The structure is based on protest "beacons" used by Extinction Rebellion

The group developed the towers for Extinction Rebellion, which used them to block access to Broxbourne printworks in Hertfordshire last year. Protesters erected the "beacons" and then climbed into them.

Consisting of several linked tensegrity towers, the Hoxton Docks structure had been completed earlier this week by volunteers attending workshops at the arts building.

The installation and workshops were not organised in collaboration with Extinction Rebellion but they attracted supporters of the group. "They got a lot of volunteers," explained Gray, who is director of property company Shiva that owns the building.

"Obviously, climate change mobilises people like few other things. People could be taught how to make the components and how to assemble the structures."

Work on the structure had just been completed when the police raided Hoxton Docks

"We are an architecture prize," he added. "We weren't prepared to become a propaganda tool for these Extinction Rebellion people."

"We support the erection of the structure, the workshop, training people to do construction and craftsmanship. It doesn't extend to any endorsement of Extinction Rebellion, on whom I'm neutral at best."

Police raided the building after receiving intelligence that the protest group planned to use tensegrity structures again on protests planned for this weekend, according to the Guardian.

The newspaper reported that a dozen people were arrested and equipment seized in raids on three different premises.

Police told the newspaper they had "taken proactive action to prevent and reduce criminal disruption which we believe was intended for direction at media business locations over the weekend”.

Tensegrity structures consist of separate structural elements held in place by tension

But Extinction Rebellion said: "As far as we are aware, those arrested have no connection to the protest last September or to Extinction Rebellion."

In September, seventy activists were arrested at Broxbourne, a town north of London, after erecting and climbing into tensegrity structures.

They were protesting against media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers are among those printed at the plant.

At the time, Extinction Rebellion said the protest aimed "to expose the failure of these corporations to accurately report on the climate and ecological emergency, and their consistent manipulation of the truth to suit their own personal and political agendas."

Diagram of the tensegrity structure

Launched in 2017 by Shiva and the Architecture Foundation, the annual Antepavilion competition seeks temporary architectural interventions for Hoxton Docks, a former coal storage building on the Regent's canal in Hoxton.

This year's competition called for temporary or mobile structures that would not fall foul of planning rules. This follows an ongoing battle between Gray and Hackney Council, which served an injunction on last year's installation of floating sharks.

The Architecture Foundation ended its involvement with the competition earlier this year following ongoing controversy over the structures.

Tensegrity structures consist of non-touching structural members held in compression by cables. The name was coined by American architect Buckminster Fuller as a contraction of "tensional integrity".

"Tensegrity was an experimental construction method was much explored in the 1960s and 1970s," Gray explained. "They just make striking structures because they're lightweight. They're open. They're basically a bunch of steel tension wires. It seemed like an ideal thing to do."

The Extinction Rebellion protest structures were praised by Dezeen columnist Phineas Harper, who last year said they were "worthy contenders for the Stirling Prize."

"Architecture rarely makes the headlines, yet all of a sudden these two structures were splashed across front pages at the centre of a national debate – put there not by starchitects but by environmentalists," he wrote.

"The towers were innovative, eye-catching, ecologically sound and socially purposeful – a combination contemporary practice rarely achieves. They are the most gutsy architecture of the year."

Police raided the building after hearing that Extinction Rebellion was planning more protests using tensegrity "beacons"

Tensegrity structures are used by protesters as they are easy to set up but, once inhabited, hard for police to remove them safely. However, Alanna Byrne of Extinction Rebellion pointed out that the Hoxton Docks structure is an artwork.

"Why are the police confiscating an art installation?" said Byrne. "Under what powers are they arresting employees of an art space and people who live in the building?"

"This is a vast overreach of police powers, a major infringement on the lives of those arrested, and suppression of freedom of expression. Would this be happening if Extinction Rebellion wasn’t holding Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the billionaire owned press to account?"

The structure was commissioned as a "special early summer commission" alongside the winner of this year's Antepavilion competition. The winner, AnteChamber by Studio Nima Sardar, will be built later this year.

The photographs are by Russell Gray and the renderings are courtesy of Antepavilion.

The post Antepavilion building "smashed up" and staff arrested in police raid on design workshops appeared first on Dezeen.

[your-dietician]

ATF fails to produce gun records, keeping industry in shadows

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/latest/atf-fails-to-produce-gun-records-keeping-industry-in-shadows/

ATF fails to produce gun records, keeping industry in shadows

One gun store had hundreds of firearms missing from its inventory. Another transferred a weapon to a convicted felon in a parking lot. Many more sold guns to prohibited buyers or without properly conducting background checks. 

The sweeping analysis that uncovered these law-breaking gun dealers was possible only because the gun control organization Brady waged a years-long legal fight to compel the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to produce records that by law should be public.

The nearly 2,000 gun dealer inspection reports analyzed by The Trace and USA TODAY provide an unprecedented look inside the ATF’s regulation of the firearms industry. They also represent less than 2% of the inspections conducted in the past decade. The full extent of gun dealers’ noncompliance, and of the ATF’s failure to regulate them, remains unknown.

Off Target:After repeated ATF warnings, gun dealers can count on the agency to back off

The ATF’s production of documents related to Brady’s Freedom of Information Act request is still ongoing. On June 3, the agency acknowledged in a filing that even the core set of inspection reports analyzed by The Trace and USA TODAY was incomplete, adding that “determining which reports are missing will take more time than originally anticipated.” 

The slow and inconsistent production of documents is consistent with what activists, lawyers, and former employees say are widespread problems with the ATF’s FOIA program. A law enforcement and regulatory agency, the ATF frequently breaks or ignores public information law, making it harder for citizens, journalists, and researchers to monitor its effectiveness. 

On We, as part of a sweeping new effort to combat gun violence, the Biden administration directed the ATF to release more detailed information about the inspection process. The new data will contain inspection counts and outcomes broken down by the agency’s field divisions. The White House said the measure was intended to “promote transparency and accountability for the enforcement of our existing gun laws.”  

The reforms will bolster access at an agency with one of the worst track records when it comes to producing public information, federal data shows. The ATF routinely takes months or years to fulfill even basic FOIA requests and sometimes ignores them altogether. Many of the more complicated requests only receive a response when filers take the ATF to court, as Brady did — a costly process out of the reach of most people.

Josh Scharff, legal counsel for Brady, said the ATF’s poor recordkeeping systems limit its ability to respond to FOIA requests in a complete and timely manner. 

“I would start by putting a lot of the blame on Congress for passing laws that restrict the ATF’s ability to manage its own data, while also under-resourcing the ATF,” he said. “At the same time, it’s incumbent on the ATF to do better, and it can do better with what it has, to manage its own data and information.”

During the course of The Trace and USA TODAY’s reporting, ATF spokesperson Andre Miller dismissed the notion that the agency’s inspections process is secretive, saying that the information is available to the public via FOIA. However, FOIA logs show that attempts to get information from the agency often fall short. In 2020, the agency received about 1,200 requests and failed to respond to more than 250 of them. The ATF failed to fulfill nearly 20 requests filed by The Trace and USA TODAY over the course of their investigation.

In a statement, the ATF acknowledged problems but said the situation had improved in recent years. ATF spokesperson Erik Longnecker said the agency’s disclosure division had reduced its backlog to the lowest level since 2013, and that the division slashed the average processing time by 41 days last year.

“We continue to improve our information-sharing capabilities,” Longnecker said. “We acknowledge that there is still room for improvement. ATF, in direct coordination with the Department of Justice, has made considerable investments.” 

Access to public records sheds light on the ATF’s failings and its achievements, yielding valuable information for elected officials, voters, and victims of gun violence. ATF employees also use public information requests to prove evidence of internal mistreatment, misconduct, retaliation, or wrongful termination. Reporters, activists, and lawyers use FOIA routinely to probe the agency’s inner-workings and spotlight problems in need of fixing. 

Gunita Singh, a legal fellow for the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said the slow trickle of information provides a significant obstacle to the public’s understanding of gun violence, a topic of increasing concern among Americans. 

“The sheer pervasiveness of [gun violence] requires robust dialogue and action, and can only take root when the public is as informed as possible,” Singh said. “If a federal agency takes months to years to respond to a records request or cites a baseless exemption to withhold records, that’s a major problem.” 

More:Gun used in Odessa shooting shows risk when illegal sale starts with home-based dealer

In a declaration filed in the Brady lawsuit, Adam Siple, chief of the ATF’s information and privacy governance division, detailed the agency’s haphazard efforts to speed up FOIA processing. After the House Committee on Oversight and Reform asked for similar records to those requested by Brady, the agency reassigned some of its inspectors normally charged with visiting gun stores to help work on the request.

Siple believed the extra hands would allow the ATF to stay on schedule to produce the reports. But the idea backfired, he wrote, with inspectors’ work so inconsistent that senior records staff had to redo it, negating “any benefit associated with the detailees” and further slowing down the process.

Some current and former ATF employees said the agency obfuscates to avoid embarrassment. The agency has often drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle related to failed enforcement operations and its regulation of firearms. 

In 1993, the ATF came under fire for its assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, setting off a firefight and a weeks-long siege that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people. More recently, the agency faced scrutiny for a botched effort — known as Operation Fast and Furious — to track guns flowing from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels. 

The ATF has also become an easy target for pro-gun lobbyists, whose Republican allies have effectively stopped the agency from updating its record keeping systems and left it with consistent staffing shortfalls. Since 2003, a budget provision known as the Tiahrt Amendment has blocked the ATF from using federal funding to release information about traces of crime guns, a restriction that Scharff says the agency has embraced. 

“The ATF absolutely does take an unnecessarily expansive view of Tiarht’s restrictions on releasing data that it collects and maintains,” he said. “And as a result of that, the ATF fails to release data and information on firearms trafficking and gun industry behavior that the public has a right to know.”

The ATF currently faces 16 pending FOIA lawsuits, according to The FOIA Project, a FOIA accountability database maintained by Syracuse University.

In 2017, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting filed a lawsuit after the ATF stopped responding to a FOIA request seeking statistics on guns used in crimes. The ATF argued that querying the database containing the requested information would violate federal law. 

If the ATF’s argument had been upheld in court, it would’ve given legal standing for all federal agencies to withhold any information held in an electronic database. Instead, in 2020, a 9th Circuit Appellate Court ruled against the agency. 

“Were we to agree with ATF…we may well render FOIA a nullity in the digital age,” Judge Kim Wardlaw wrote in the majority opinion.

The case alarmed advocates and attorneys focused on freedom of information. 

“We saw extreme pushback by the agency that risked thwarting transparency in drastic ways and well beyond just withholding ATF data,” said D. Victoria Baranetsky, Reveal’s general counsel who litigated the case. “This opacity handicaps constituents as well as legislators from having knowledge that is relevant to legislative decisions on public safety.”

In fiscal year 2020, the ATF processed about 1,600 FOIA requests, according to federal data. Federal agencies are required to respond to requests within 20 business days, though few meet this deadline. 

Among the 76 agencies that completed 500 or more FOIAs in 2020, the ATF had the fifth-longest processing time for requests designated as complex — about 16 months. Across the federal government, the number of FOIA requests backlogged was less than one-fifth the number of requests processed. For the ATF, it was nearly half.

Agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement all outperform the ATF when it comes to completing public records requests.  

The ATF’s lethargic response time has become so problematic that even ATF staff struggle to receive information from their own agency.

“They follow the policy of give nothing, and make the requester fight for it,” said Vincent Cefalu, a former ATF agent who was fired after his role in exposing the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. Cefalu, who filed multiple FOIA requests as part of a lawsuit alleging retaliation by the ATF, said the lack of transparency drives a wedge between the agency and the public. 

“It’s been a longstanding rule in law enforcement: We don’t work in the shadows, we work in the daylight,” Cefalu said. “It begs the question, ‘What are you hiding?’” 

Other former ATF staff echoed Cefalu, saying that the agency’s secrecy breeds a poor workplace culture while simultaneously doing a disservice to the public. 

“If the people who were the shady part of the ATF were exposed to a FOIA, and FOIA was actually doing its job, the shady part wouldn’t exist,” said Norm Bergeron, a former ATF agent who retired in 2017. Bergeron successfully sued the agency for information after he requested documents regarding why he was passed over for a promotion. 

In his retirement, Bergeron assists current and former agents attempting to obtain public information from the agency, often related to issues of retaliation and equal opportunity. 

“We don’t need any new gun laws,” he said. “We need an agency that’s going to enforce them, and is transparent about their enforcement.”

Contributing: Nick Penzenstadler, USA TODAY and Brian Freskos, The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to improving public understanding of gun violence, increasing accountability and identifying solutions.

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[alexsmitposts]

An Egregious Attack on Free Speech Sends Democrats Cheering!

“A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.” ― Albert CamusIt is difficult to imagine a time when such words rang more true in their foretelling of Tyranny or more poignantly accurate in their description of the precipice we all in fact find ourselves staring at.The decision by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on January 7, to suspend Donald Trump’s page, essentially acting a grand silencer over the 45th President of the United States, represents not only the most profound assertion of power by Big Tech over a democratic nation’s political life, but underlines the need for greater oversight by elected state representatives over the ever-growing powers social media executives wield over nations, and maybe more to the point nations’ ability to formulate their own socio-political narrative.January 6 events, the violence we all witnessed on Capitol Hill cannot be used as an argument in favour of censorship. Censorship cannot and should not be rationalised.Such an exercise is simply too callous and too egregiously dishonest for any sensible individual to entertain. Especially if one considers that Donald Trump was more than just an individual, he was an elected civil servant; his office was that of the Republic. For better or for worse he was the carrier of a democratic tradition whose duty remained to the Constitution and the people it served, represents and acts on behalf of. How one feels about the former president is irrelevant to the debate.John Stuart Mills’ words ought to ring loudly over the fray now that a new Inquisition dawns.

“…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”

One does not simply silence a sitting president. And if indeed many may feel that the President crossed a line in his calls for actions against what he perceives as the “Big Steal”, then such individuals are free to seek refuge in the law and draw from America’s robust legal system to redress whatever ill irks them so. But to invoke the weapons of tyrants to allegedly bring another to heel, is far too Kafkaesque … if I may dare say so I would argue that the Democrats’ cries of self-righteous anger on January 6 only prove how morally bankrupt they truly are, not to mention devoid of all intellectual consistency.Free Speech cannot be left open to interpretation. Free Speech is THE benchmark by which all democratic states can measure the strength of their institutions.In an attempt to justify his unilateral decision to ban Trump from his social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg published what can only be described as a rhetological fallacy. He writes:

“The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.”

Twitter soon joined the dance by announcing that it’d too suspended Trump’s access to its social media platform – our modern day public square. Twitter was thorough in its purge too since it targeted not one but three of the former president’s accounts: @realDonaldTrump, @POTUS and @WhiteHouse. In good fashion the move was conveniently labelled as necessary “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”If only Twitter and its counterparts proved consistent in their reproach of violence … we might have lent an ear to their arguments.What we witnessed was a deliberate and unilateral attack on a democratically elected president by corporations which have proven to wield powers and influence that are such that they now threaten the very foundations of the Republic. At the push of a button, unaccountable tech billionaires decided to cancel out the voice they wished no longer to be heard.And though today left-wingers cheer Zuckerberg’s move, for it falls within the confines of their ideology, I recall a time not so long ago when Facebook’s positions against antifa irked Democrats to no end. Big Techs serve their own interests and so far they answer to noone but themselves.Lin Yutang once wrote:“When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set.” Ironically, Trump foresaw such shadows … he actually worked to oppose them by building structures to rein in their otherwise unfettered powers.I give you May 28, 2020 Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship. It reads,

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows … Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.”

And

“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.”

Enough said … I would hope!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

EFF just sent this letter to every official negotiating the EU's Copyright Directive

To Whom It May Concern:

I write today on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to raise urgent issues related to Articles 11 and 13 of the upcoming Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, currently under discussion in the Trilogues.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows. We are supported by over 37,000 donating members around the world, including around three thousand within the European Union.

We believe that Articles 11 and 13 are ill-considered and should not be EU law, but even stipulating that systems like the ones contemplated by Articles 11 and 13 are desirable, the proposed text of the articles in both the Parliament and Council texts contain significant deficiencies that will subvert their stated purpose while endangering the fundamental human rights of Europeans to free expression, due process, and privacy.

It is our hope that the detailed enumeration of these flaws, below, will cause you to reconsider Articles 11 and 13's inclusion in the Directive altogether, but even in the unfortunate event that Articles 11 and 13 appear in the final language that is presented to the Plenary, we hope that you will take steps to mitigate these risks, which will substantially affect the transposition of the Directive in member states, and its resilience to challenges in the European courts .

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Article 13: False copyright claims proliferate in the absence of clear evidentiary standards or consequences for inaccurate claims.

Based on EFF’s decades-long experience with notice-and-takedown regimes in the United States, and private copyright filters such as YouTube's ContentID, we know that the low evidentiary standards required for copyright complaints, coupled with the lack of consequences for false copyright claims, are a form of moral hazard that results in illegitimate acts of censorship from both knowing and inadvertent false copyright claims.

For example, rightsholders with access to YouTube's ContentID system systematically overclaim copyrights that they do not own. For instance, the workflow of news broadcasters will often include the automatic upload of each night's newscast to copyright filters without any human oversight, despite the fact that newscasts often include audiovisual materials whose copyrights do not belong to the broadcaster – public domain footage, material used under a limitation or exception to copyright, or material that is licensed from third parties. This carelessness has predictable consequences: others — including bona fide rightsholders — who are entitled to upload the materials claimed by the newscasters are blocked by YouTube and have a copyright strike recorded against them by the system, and can face removal of all of their materials. To pick one example, NASA's own Mars lander footage was broadcast by newscasters who carelessly claimed copyright on the video by dint of having included NASA's livestream in their newscasts which were then added to the ContentID database of copyrighted works. When NASA itself subsequently tried to upload its footage, YouTube blocked the upload and recorded a strike against NASA.

In other instances, rightsholders neglect the limitations and exceptions to copyright when seeking to remove content. For example, Universal Music Group insisted on removing a video uploaded by one of our clients, Stephanie Lenz, which featured incidental audio of a Prince song in the background. Even during the YouTube appeals process, UMG refused to acknowledge that Ms. Lenz’s incidental inclusion of the music was fair use – though this analysis was eventually confirmed by a US federal judge. Lenz's case took more than ten years to adjudicate, largely due to Universal's intransigence, and elements of the case still linger in the courts.

Finally, the low evidentiary standards for takedown and the lack of penalties for abuse have given rise to utterly predictable abuses. False copyright claims have been used to suppress whistleblower memos detailing flaws in election security, evidence of police brutality, and disputes over scientific publication.

Article 13 contemplates that platforms will create systems to allow for thousands of copyright claims at once, by all comers, without penalty for errors or false claims. This is a recipe for mischief and must be addressed.

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Article 13 Recommendations

To limit abuse, Article 13 must, at a minimum, require strong proof of identity from those who seek to add works to an online service provider's database of claimed copyrighted works and make ongoing access to Article 13's liability regime contingent on maintaining a clean record regarding false copyright claims.

Rightsholders who wish to make copyright claims to online service providers should have to meet a high identification bar that establishes who they are and where they or their agent for service can be reached. This information should be available to people whose works are removed so that they can seek legal redress if they believe they have been wronged.

In the event that rightsholders repeatedly make false copyright claims, online service providers should be permitted to strike them off of their list of trusted claimants, such that these rightsholders must fall back to seeking court orders – with their higher evidentiary standard – to effect removal of materials.

This would require that online service providers be immunised from Article 13's liability regime for claims from struck off claimants. A rightsholder who abuses the system should not expect to be able to invoke it later to have their rights policed. This striking-off should pierce the veil of third parties deputised to effect takedowns on behalf of rightsholders ("rights enforcement companies"), with both the third party and the rightsholder on whose behalf they act being excluded from Article 13's privileges in the event that they are found to repeatedly abuse the system. Otherwise, bad actors ("copyright trolls") could hop from one rights enforcement company to another, using them as shields for repeated acts of bad-faith censorship.

Online service providers should be able to pre-emptively strike off a rightsholder who has been found to be abusive of Article 13 by another provider.

Statistics about Article 13 takedowns should be a matter of public record: who claimed which copyrights, who was found to have falsely claimed copyright, and how many times each copyright claim was used to remove a work.

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Article 11: Links are not defined with sufficient granularity, and should contain harmonised limitations and exceptions.

The existing Article 11 language does not define when quotation amounts to a use that must be licensed, though proponents have argued that quoting more than a single word requires a license.

The final text must resolve that ambiguity by carving out a clear safe-harbor for users, and ensure that there’s a consistent set of Europe-wide exceptions and limitations to news media’s new pseudo-copyright that ensure they don’t overreach with their power.

Additionally, the text should safeguard against dominant players (Google, Facebook, the news giants) creating licensing agreements that exclude everyone else.

News sites should be permitted to opt out of requiring a license for inbound links (so that other services could confidently link to them without fear of being sued), but these opt-outs must be all-or-nothing, applying to all services, so that the law doesn’t add to Google or Facebook's market power by allowing them to negotiate an exclusive exemption from the link tax, while smaller competitors are saddled with license fees.

As part of the current negotiations, the text must be clarified to establish a clear definition of "noncommercial, personal linking," clarifying whether making links in a personal capacity from a for-profit blogging or social media platform requires a license, and establishing that (for example) a personal blog with ads or affiliate links to recoup hosting costs is "noncommercial."

In closing, we would like to reiterate that the flaws enumerated above are merely those elements of Articles 11 and 13 that are incoherent or not fit for purpose. At root, however, Articles 11 and 13 are bad ideas that have no place in the Directive. Instead of effecting some piecemeal fixes to the most glaring problems in these Articles, the Trilogue take a simpler approach, and cut them from the Directive altogether.

Thank you,

Cory Doctorow Special Consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/23/unsafe-at-any-speed-4.html

[rpgsandbox]

"SIGMATA: This Signal Kills Fascists" is a cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game about ethical insurgency against a fascist regime, taking place in a dystopian vision of 1980's America.

Players assume the role of Receivers, the superheroic vanguard of the Resistance, who possess incredible powers when in range of FM radio towers emitting a mysterious number sequence called "The Signal." When the Signal is up, Receivers lead the charge against battalions of Regime infantry and armor or serve as the People's Shield, protecting mass demonstrations from the brutality of a militarized police force and neo-Nazi hooligans. When the Signal is down, however, Receivers are mere mortals, desperately fleeing from a powerful state that senses their weakness.

It's called the Sigmata, a Signal-induced stigmata, because it is a both a blessing and a curse. At least when you're marked by the state, you can’t sit on the sidelines anymore.

Two Receivers storm a Regime fortification, bullets bouncing off of their cybernetic flesh.

Regime propaganda, McCarthy's vision of an America under siege by the Interior Threat.

SIGMATA takes place in a dystopian vision of America where fascists have taken control of the government. The Regime fosters white supremacy, religious bigotry, and Cold War hysteria to turn America's fury against already marginalized populations, all while plundering America's coffers and thrusting the country into pointless proxy wars all over the globe. To punish internal threats to "Real America," the Regime rewrote the U.S. Constitution to establish the Freedom Fist, a complete merger of military and law enforcement, which dutifully executes the fascists' national program of mass incarceration and deportation.

Freedom Fist regulars protecting the State from the People.

The communities targeted by state violence have begun to fight back. The Resistance is bolstered by an unlikely alliance of radical Leftists, right wing militias, Christian extremists, and wealthy entrepreneurs, whose grievances with the Regime overpower the seething contempt they have for each other. As linchpins of the Resistance, the Receivers must take great pains to prevent the alliance from fracturing. If they allow ideology to trump strategy, the factions will fall back on their worst tendencies, handing the Regime the political victories it needs to maintain a stranglehold on the people.

A Resistance SysOp performs reconnaissance on Regime BBS systems using her blazing fast 300-baud Haze modem.

SIGMATA takes place in alt-1986, before the Internet was a thing, and at a time when less than 10% of American homes possessed a computer system. The retro technology of the 1980s is full of constraints that make for exciting stories about Resistance organizing; from seeking a payphone in a dangerous rural environment, to smuggling floppy disks of mission critical data through Regime checkpoints, to infiltrating corporate facilities in order to access room-sized mainframes, to recording amateur VHS videos of Regime atrocities and playing them on public access cable channels. The Resistance must organize using payphones, dial-up modems, bulletin board systems (BBS), floppy disks, pirate radio broadcasts, photocopied zines, and word of mouth, all while avoiding Regime forces using technology, influence, and intimidation to hunt them down.

As a foil to SIGMATA's dark political vision, the game delivers a satirical take on 1980s media, fashion, pop culture, and consumerism, complete with all the embarrassing chic, uncritical jingoism, and style-over-substance cool we've come to expect from 1980s period pieces. Expect playful nods to the 80s film that inspired this setting, including Robocop, Red Dawn, Terminator, War Games, Escape from New York, and Videodrome, among others.

Mechanically, SIGMATA is a hybrid of a traditional role-playing game and a narrativist story game. There is a game master (GM) involved, but players will be doing most of the storytelling. Players make decisions about what tactics and powers their Receivers employ during structured scenes of combat, stealth, and intrigue, but who gets to narrate the outcome of decisions depends on how well players do on their dice rolls. When a dice roll is required, a player rolls a combination of D10 and D6 dice, depending on her Receiver's four processors (i.e. Aggression, Guile, Judgement, and Valor), hoping to get a result of 6 or higher on each die. The more successes a player rolls, the more control she has over the outcome in the story space. Rolling a single success permits her to narrate a story of marginal success, complicated by an element of tension or stress that the GM contributes to the story. Rolling several success permits her to narrate a story of dramatic success, emphasizing how skilled, strong, or courageous her Receiver is, without input from the GM.

A Receiver uses the Wrecking Ball subroutine to channel the Signal into superhuman strength.

Players aren't just rolling dice for a chance to own the story; they are playing to win. Scenes of combat, intrigue, and stealth are structured in a way where each player needs to manage a resource called exposure. Exposure represents danger; the danger of getting caught during a stealth scene, the danger of getting injured during a combat scene, or the danger of being outed as a Resistance spy during an intrigue scene. Each turn, the GM makes moves to increase the Receivers' exposure. In response, each player selects a tactic, allowing her to either increase the enemy's exposure (cautiously or recklessly), reduce her own exposure, or reduce the exposure of one of her allies. The end result is exciting stories told with a narrativist approach, influenced by a tactical resource management mechanic that emphasizes risk/reward and teamwork.

Of course, this is a cyberpunk genre game as much as it is a period piece, so Receivers also rely on superheroic powers (subroutines), performance enhancing cybernetic modules (blade servers), iconic equipment (peripherals), and the evocation of fallen comrades (memory) to press through their most challenging ordeals against the Regime.

SIGMATA also features a strategic meta-game that charts the Resistance's progress in toppling the Regime, based on real counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine. The Resistance's efforts against the Regime's military forces mean nothing if they are not also winning over the local population and the international community. The strategic strength of the Resistance not only tracks campaign progress, but influences the strength of the Signal, which the Receivers rely upon to fuel their most dramatic abilities.

As an artistic work, SIGMATA attempts a merger of the gritty, cyberpunk styles of Akira with the vibrant colors and action-figure motifs of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons (e.g. G.I. Joe, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc.), all executed by the mighty Ario Murti. With Ario as the game's sole illustrator, expect maximum consistency and continuity of setting materials, quality, and mood.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, December 28 2017 11:46 PM UTC +00:00

Website: kickstarter