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creepingsharia · 4 years

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Minnesota: Two BLM-supporting non-Muslims arrested attempting to support Islamic terror group Hamas

Is the FBI using paid Muslim informants posing as members of terror group Hamas at riots in Minneapolis?

Hamas-linked CAIR is managing protesters against the police and government agencies in Minneapolis and elsewhere and blaming white supremacists for the rioting and violence. The U.S. government has ruled that CAIR is Hamas, yet no one is investigating CAIR. Why not?

As for what appears to be a two-member group called the Boojahideen - will they convert to Islam in prison and join the real jihad soon?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Friday, September 4, 2020

Two Self-Described “Boogaloo Bois” Charged with Attempting to Provide Material Support to Hamas

The Justice Department today announced a federal criminal complaint charging Michael Robert Solomon, 30, and Benjamin Ryan Teeter, 22, with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization (Hamas).

Solomon and Teeter, who were taken into custody yesterday evening, made their initial appearances earlier today before Magistrate Judge Tony N. Leung in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The defendants were ordered to remain in custody pending a formal detention hearing, which is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2020.

“This case can only be understood as a disturbing example of the old adage, ‘The enemy of your enemy is your friend,’” said Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers for the National Security Division. “As alleged in the complaint, these defendants sought to use violence against the police, other government officials and government property as part of their desire to overthrow the government. While planning these activities, the defendants met individuals whom they believed to be members of the foreign terrorist group Hamas. Thinking that they shared the same desire to harm the United States, they sought to join forces and provide support, including in the form of weapons accessories, to Hamas. They failed. No matter what witch’s brew of ideological motivations inspire those who seek to engage in terrorist activity and harm our country and our fellow citizens, the National Security Division is committed to identifying and holding them accountable. I want to thank the agents, analysts, and prosecutors who are responsible for this case and ensuring that these defendants could not carry out their deadly plans.”

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According to the allegations in the criminal complaint and law enforcement affidavit, in late May of 2020, the FBI initiated an investigation into Solomon and Teeter, two members of the “Boogaloo Bois,” and a sub-group called the “Boojahideen.” The Boogaloo Bois are a loosely- connected group of individuals who espouse violent anti-government sentiments. The term “Boogaloo” itself references a supposedly impending second civil war in the United States and is associated with violent uprisings against the government.

According to the allegations in the criminal complaint and law enforcement affidavit, during the civil unrest in the Twin Cities following the death of George Floyd, according to a witness, Solomon was openly carrying firearms in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis. Solomon and Teeter interacted with the witness over the course of several days. The witness told FBI agents that Solomon and Teeter possessed firearms and substantial quantities of ammunition and that Solomon, Teeter, and other members of the Boogaloo Bois and Boojahideen discussed committing acts of violence against police officers and other targets in furtherance of the Boojahideen’s stated goal of overthrowing the government and replacing its police forces.

According to the allegations in the criminal complaint and law enforcement affidavit, in early June, the FBI received information about Solomon, Teeter, and other members of the Boogaloo Bois and the Boojahideen through a confidential human source (“CHS”), whom the defendants believed to be a member of Hamas. In audio-recorded conversations, Solomon and Teeter expressed that Hamas shares anti-U.S. government views that align with their own views. Solomon and Teeter also expressed their desire to employ themselves as “mercenaries” for Hamas as a means to generate cash for the Boogaloo Bois/Boojahideen movement, including funding for recruitment and purchasing land for a training compound.

According to the allegations in the criminal complaint and law enforcement affidavit, Solomon and Teeter shared with the CHS, and another individual whom they believed to be a more senior member of Hamas (and who was actually an undercover employee of the FBI), their ideas about destroying government monuments, raiding the headquarters of a white supremacist organization in North Carolina, and targeting politicians and members of the media.

Solomon and Teeter also expressed their ability to manufacture unmarked parts for guns and create unregistered and untraceable weapons, including suppressors. On July 30, Solomon and Teeter delivered to the individual they believed to be a senior member of Hamas five suppressors and expressed their desire to manufacture additional suppressors and fully-automatic weapons for Hamas. Solomon and Teeter later negotiated with the individual a price of $1,800 for five additional suppressors. Solomon and Teeter also delivered to the individual a “drop in auto sear” (“DIAS”), a part designed and intended for use in converting a weapon to shoot automatically. Solomon and Teeter believed the suppressors and the DIAS would be used by Hamas overseas to attack Israeli and U.S soldiers.

This case is the result of an investigation conducted by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, with assistance from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew R. Winter, and Trial Attorneys George Kraehe and Phil Viti of the National Security Division's Counterterrorism Section.

This case falls with the purview of the Attorney General’s Task Force to Combat Violent Anti-Government Extremism. Launched in June 2020, the Task Force is dedicated to supporting the investigation and prosecution of any person or group who commits violence in the name of an anarchist ideology.

The charges contained in the complaint are merely accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Defendant Information:

Michael Robert Solomon, 30 New Brighton, Minn.

Charges:

Conspiring and attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization (Hamas)

Benjamin Ryan Teeter, 22 Hampstead, N.C.

Charges:

Conspiring and attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization (Hamas)

Attachment(s): Download Complaint

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Teeter is also known as “Punk Rock Arafat” and has posted on anarchist web sites suggesting he is about as “far right” as antifa and blm. Source:

They also planned to attack white supremacists according to the complaint linked above.

According to the indictment, Solomon and Teeter also told the informant — and an undercover FBI agent posing as a senior member of Hamas — that they had plans to kill politicians, journalists, and white supremacists.

The two men discussed their plan to raid the headquarters of a white supremacist organization into North Carolina, stating ‘if we can, make it so twenty, forty of them can’t go home … it’s a win-win,’ the indictment states.

Teeter told the undercover agent that he was an ‘anarchist’ who wants to ‘completely remove the government, then just start over,’ and Solomon added, ‘our goal is the to tear it down,’ investigators say.

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This is the second recent arrest of so-called far right, white supremacists that have teamed up with Muslims to wage jihad rather than targeting non-whites. Read about the other case here.

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More on the Boojahideen from what appears to be Teeter, who claims they have a half dozen members in Minnesota:

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These guys aligned with CAIR/Hamas, are anti-police, anti-government, anti-white-supremacists and pro blm-terrorists, and they claim to be at every blm/antifa protest/riot in the country. Despite media claims that does not sound very “right-wing”.

#Islam #Muslim #Jihad #Legal #Law #Media #News #Politics #BLM #Travel #Terror #Hamas #CAIR

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alkaliyogi · 4 years

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WE ARE CURRENTLY IN HELLS PIT OF FIRE AND MISERY…

How did we get here?

2020 is shaping-up to be quite a year; we lost Kobe an important figure to sports yes, but more importantly a role model for black fathers and especially fathers to beautiful brown skinned girls. Now we have COVID, deaths, social distancing and possibly (and I shudder at this thought) mandatory vaccines in the near future.

Many people lack the vitality and life-force energy required to participate in a democracy. This is not by accident. It was designed this way.

There is a long history of manipulation of the human race at the hands of the 1% of the 1%- this is what I predict will happen on the other side of COVID;

Travel will become more of a nightmare than it already is. More abuse at the hands of underpaid/overworked security personnel and undignified body searches. I worked in aviation for over 10 years- if you still believe that Arab men flew those aircrafts into the Pentagon and World Trade Towers you are ignorant of the concept of protected air space. The planet’s only Superpower had comprehensive protected air space before, during and after the “attack” on America. Military and law enforcement of this great land long adopted the motto of “shoot first, ask questions later” long before Bin Laden was a spec in his father’s testicles. Besides, who spends more on their military and the protection of their own country than the world’s Superpower?

Already, we are subjected to unnecessary liquid restrictions- you can’t even bring a tub of hummus onboard with you...pause for reaction. If you choose to believe that restricting liquids has saved your life, I invite you to watch a lighthearted episode of “Adam Ruins Everything” where they covered ‘security theatre’ designed to provide you, the average citizen, with little more than a false sense of security. And if you look at what constitutes a ‘potential terrorist’-it’s a pretty broad net covering how you wear your baseball cap all the way to facial hair grooming standards. Seems like legalized stereotyping, unless of course you’re a polished white male in corporate America.

But perhaps in the fight against mandatory vaccines- even the average white male may find himself in the trenches with us.

Will it be vaccines passports or vaccines with hardware implanted in our bodies? Will we eventually replace handheld passports for data stored in a fingerprint, retina or swab sample? Is that where we’re headed to already? Let’s keep things in perspective, shall we? Thousands of people died on September 11th. Millions more have died at the end of a gun- but the policy makers are very selective with what tragedies they will amplify and how they’ll pick and choose (based on their own agenda) when to introduce new bills or change laws. So even though innocent children die every single year in the greatest country on earth- purchased votes by the NRA (formerly the KKK) prevent amendments to the Second Amendment. Ain’t that something? An Amendment that can’t be amended. You’d think it was written by God and not men. Illusions of grandeur coupled with idolizing the forefathers of America is the exact opposite of being Christian, spiritual, a person of faith, etc. The is the same type of fandom associated with pre-adolescent girls and boy bands.

An inside job designed to illicit fear of a common enemy (and weapons of mass destruction) became justification for us giving away many of our personal freedoms (i.e. fingerprints scans, eye retina scans, mass surveillance by our smart phones, email providers, search engines, CCTV, etc.). Does this sound familiar? It’s happened before and millions were executed as a result. Hitler wanted complete control of his people- unwavering compliance and that’s exactly where we are headed if The Gates Foundation and the WHO have anything to say about it. China is already practicing this type of population control with their face-recognition software and social behavioural grading system that assigns citizens a credit score that impacts your ability to navigate everything in your life from career, to housing to who and how one travel. Is this what we want? Who benefits? Not you, not I.

There is growing evidence that COVID is a man-made (military controlled) virus. To many this may seem utterly ridiculous. I would invite you to research this information as discovered by numerous holistic doctors (who have been censored on Google but are searchable on Qwant, a reliable search engine free from the prying eyes of Google surveillance. If you’re wondering why the government would allow for something like a manufactured virus to be unleased on it’s on citizens let me help you. It begins with big pharma and ends with decreasing the human population.

As it stands today over 300,000 people have died- not from COVID but from underlying health issues. Like an episode of Black Mirror- doctors and health professionals are threatened if they don’t adhere to naming COVID as the cause of death. It doesn’t take a genius to observe that the overwhelming majority of people that contracted COVID recovered because they did not have underlying health issues. The Italian Parliament recently went viral for stating this. I’ll say it again, the COVID virus does not kill. Ask any self-respecting health professional/scientist that is not on the receiving end of grants issued by big pharma. Even the CDC has been corrupted, pick-up a copy of Marcia Angell’s book; The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. Marcia Angell was the first woman to serve as Editor-In-Chief at The New England Journal of Medicine, the most influential science journal in the world. She’s done her part to warn us of how drug companies collude not for the benefit of the public, but for their own gain. History will show unequivocally that the real tragedy was not COVID- but the mandatory vaccines that have polluted our bodies for years with unsafe levels of heavy metals, formaldehyde, MSG and more to render your well enough to stay alive and on medications until you die. Newer vaccines will also render you sterile. That is the pandemic we’re headed towards.

Big pharma is greater and more powerful than any government on the planet. And what’s more, they’ve purchased almost every single politician there is to be purchased. In medicine, the first rule is ‘Do no harm’. In Aviation the first rule is ‘if we don’t know, we don’t go’. Thousands of people have had their lives permanently changed when their once healthy children were exposed to vaccines that left them autistic, some children have even died. Unless you can prove without a shadow of a doubt that vaccines are not harmful and toxic (which they have not proven) why do we agree to subject perfectly healthy, clean bodies to foreign matter? And no, vaccines did not eradicate polio- you can still catch that shit. The difference is more people have access to clean food and water today than ever before. As more and more countries develop, more of the planet’s population can practice better hygiene. Vaccines have cured nothing. Measles, malaria, hepatitis are still around!

Fun fact: the US government actually owns more patents of the measles virus than anyone else. Something to chew on.

Are we going to roll over and pretend that the supposed benefits of a vaccine for a non-lethal virus outweighs the damage is can have to the nervous system and reproductive functions of millions of people? We’re already dying a slow death with pollution in the air, water, food and soil we’re consuming. A great portion of the population is already unable to conceive naturally- which is your body’s way of telling you your currently too sick to create new life. So, what do we do? We employee fertility specialists to implant us with embryos instead of addressing the foundational causes and habits for our body’s rejection of bringing new life to our sick planet.

The world’s population is nearing 8 billion- very few people have died during this pandemic relative to deaths associated to lung cancer, breast cancer, heart disease, medical drug overdoses, etc. It’s sad that we lost anyone. I live in Brooklyn, New York so I’m not removed from the collective loss we’re experiencing. Let’s also take a moment to step back and take a deep breath. This was never a reason to make us anxious, depressed and fearful of each other. This is how they separate and then conquer us. And it’s certainly not a reason to change our way of living and give away more personal freedoms (that were fought and paid for).

I’m calling on citizens of the world. Stand-up! We are many in numbers- they are few. Don’t let them violate you or anyone else in a way that is not humane.

One last interesting fact to research- the United States Supreme Court or Congress (depending on which article you come across) that vaccines are ‘unavoidably unsafe’. And the kicker? If you or a loved one are damaged from a vaccine you can’t sue the vaccine manufacturers. How’s that for democracy?! Look it up for yourselves, but not on Google.

Stay up!

Alkali Yogi

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arisa-social-blog · 6 years

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DIY hair dye, 7 things to remember

Perhaps it is easy for modern people to have long white hair and no time to dye hair at the hair salon. The hair dye is no longer mysteriously seen only in the hair salon, but is seen everywhere in general stores, internet, and beauty stores.

There are more and more brands, and sales are getting bigger and bigger, which means that DIY dyeing at home is becoming more and more common. A group of hair dyes, ranging from a hundred dollars to four or five hundred yuan, most of them are labeled "without PPD". For consumers, even if they don't know what PPD is, they will follow the risk. (Private mentality! PPD is definitely not a good thing, or else, everyone stressed that it does not contain.) The

full name of PPD chemical is ParaPhenyleneDiamine, Chinese is p-phenylenediamine. There are also p-Phenylenediamine and 1,4-diaminobenzene written in the same composition.

Is the natural and botanical formula right?

The dangerous awareness that hair dyes must have is that the hair dye's irritating, toxic and life-threatening sequelae to the skin are far greater than the cosmetics rubbed on the face.

My friend sent me a group of "Henna Pure Plant Hair Dye" that claimed to be originally from India. The friend said that it was very safe, and the hair was smooth after dyeing. She put on the shower cap after applying it all over her head and washed it off in an hour. It was very convenient. The products are very popular and often sold out of stock.

I looked at the ingredient column on the box and went to the "Drug-Containing Cosmetics Permit" on the website of the Drug Inspection Bureau. The result was the same as that of the general chemical hair dye.

Therefore, please pay attention to those brands that are desperately bragging herbal hair dyes and pure plant hair dyes. Some operators will have a limited "learning" for consumers. They will tell you how terrible PPD is and confuse your cognitive attention to make purchases, but in fact, it also sells products containing PPD. (In this case, there are a lot of networks, especially to remind online shopping, we must be very careful.)

According to Chinese regulations: hair dyes must obtain the approved font size to be sold. Moreover, because the dye components used in "different color numbers" are different, it is necessary to apply for a DH approval number for each color number to be listed for sale. For example, an imported brand may apply for "Wei Department Makeup No. xxx", and domestic brands must apply for "Wei Department Makeup No. xxx". Therefore, regardless of whether it claims to be natural or botanical or does not contain PPD, as long as the website of the Department of Health's Drug Inspection Bureau confirms that there is no PPD or content, it will immediately become true. You can use the font size on the box (or the product name in English and Chinese, the name of the manufacturer, the name of the manufacturer, etc.). And if you can't find it, can you still buy it?

Without PPD, is security guaranteed?

PPD is the "half" body of the pigment. The two agents of the hair dye are like a two-section combination toy. The reason for the two-dose design is to create color in the "hair", disassemble the color material into two parts, A and B, and then infiltrate into the hair and then combine.

1. Choose a safer hair dye brand. 2. Shampoo before hair dyeing, do not use hair lotion, hair mask or hair wax to avoid "too much adhesion" of foreign substances on the hair, so as not to get dyed. 3. When dyeing hair, do not wash your hair. Spray the hair directly with a spray gun to "semi-wet". This is better for combing and easier to apply evenly. (Do not wash your hair is to "retain" the scalp grease that is raised on the scalp.) 4. Finding someone to help will be "effective." The method is to first rub the first agent on the hair (this is actually about 10 to 15 mins. to complete), after all the rubbing, the second agent is applied. After all the coating, use your hands (of course, wearing gloves) to grab all the hair and make the applied dye more uniform. 5. How long? In summer (at room temperature of 27 degrees or more), it can be done within half an hour. In winter (at room temperature below 17 degrees), it takes about four to fifty minutes. The principle is no more than one hour. 6. Warm water to wash your hair, and you must rush to no color. (Don't worry, these colors are not in the hair.) Try to flush the scalp (do not use shampoo, rush to no color before using shampoo). 7. Finally, you must use a moisturizer, and it is a traditional "foaming" lotion. Because the hair lotion is acidic, and the acidity is still full of acid PH3. The whole hair is used to neutralize the alkalinity of the hair dye, so that the hair does not collapse and the hair becomes worse.

The most important concept of not washing your hair two days before dyeing is to prevent the dye coming into contact with the skin. The way to avoid hair dyes hurting people is to refuse contact with the skin (scalp).

Wash your hair after two days before dyeing, in order to protect the scalp with oil film. Do not use double-effect shampoo or hair lotion to ensure smooth coloring when dyeing hair. Before dyeing hair, apply a high-oil, high-closure product like Vaseline to the hair and skin. Alkali agents, hydrogen peroxide, and the like are all water-soluble molecules. Therefore, as long as the grease defensive wall is dense enough, there will be no chance of success. This column reflects expert opinions and does not represent the position of the Society.

Related: The Best Lavender Hair Dye Brand and Lavender Hair Color Inspirations

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#DIY #haircolor #haircare #hairtips

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forsetti · 7 years

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On Guns In America: Full Mental Jacket

America loves its guns. It loves them so much, it is willing to overlook the damage they inflict on individuals, families, and society. It loves guns so much, it denies evidence from around the world that supports the conclusion that fewer guns = fewer gun-related injuries and deaths. It loves guns so much, it eagerly looks for ways to make them more dangerous, more lethal, more accessible. It loves guns because, in spite of being the world's superpower, its past and present have been steeped in insecurity, fear, and a false sense of superiority. Schools shootings are a microcosm of the problem of guns in America-A dangerous weapon in the hands of insecure, angry, testosterone-riddled, white males whose brains and moral compasses are at best not yet fully developed and at worst, seriously and permanently fucked up.

The problem with guns in America isn't that there aren't enough of them. The problem isn't “God has been taken out of schools and society.” The problem isn't immigrants, minorities, or Muslims. The problem is mental health-the mental health of white, male America. To be more specific, the problem is, and always has been white supremacy. If you don't understand the role white supremacy has and does play in how America views and loves it guns, you are part of the problem. This includes a lot of “good guy” gun owners who provide cover for their not-so-good guy gun-owning brethren.

The common thread from the first European white settlers to a large number of current gun owners in America is white supremacy. The first white men on this continent used guns to steal land, resources, and life from the Native Americans. The 2nd Amendment was written, in part, to ratify slavery. It was important for guns to be readily available for whites to keep slaves in line, to be able to fend off any slave rebellion, to protect their women from “violent, sex-crazed” black men. When slavery was abolished, the heavily armed Klan came to power to ensure white rule and supremacy was maintained. The Mulford Act in California was passed in 1967 and signed by then-governor, Ronald Regan, repealing open carry in response to members of the Black Panthers carrying guns while they patrolled the streets of Oakland to make sure the police did their jobs properly. Gun sales went through the roof when the first black president was elected. Right-wing media pushes gun ownership with threats of marauding bands of Mexican gangs, Muslim terrorists, race wars, and imaginary government operations that will imprison God-fearing, gun-owning, PBR-drinking, tobacco chewing, white Americans.

The fact that America has 5% of the world's population and almost 50% of the world's guns isn't by mistake, isn't to protect it from foreign powers, isn't to defend itself from its own government. America has the most guns because it was built on white supremacy. Guns were the tools used to take the land from its native inhabitants. Guns were the tools used to keep the economic resource of slavery in line. Guns were used against fellow countrymen in order to maintain the right to own other people. Guns were used to inflict fear, harm, and death in order to preserve and enforce Jim Crow Laws. White supremacy doesn't carry as much power without means and threat to commit violence. Guns and racism in America go together like Dylann Roof and a Glock .45, like Mom and apple pie.

The main reasons mass shootings are more prevalent in America now than in the “Good Old Days,” are two-fold: First, white America is losing its demographic and cultural power; Second, there are exponentially more guns now than in its mythologized past. This explosion in the number of guns in circulation is not distributed equally among the population. While the number of guns being manufactured and sold has skyrocketed, the percentage of households that own guns has been steadily declining. This means those who do own guns are owning more and more of them. I'm pretty sure the Venn Diagram of homes with guns and racists is damn near one, complete circle.

I'm not saying all gun owners are racists but a lot of the ones who own multiple guns, who purchase semi-automatics, bump stocks, high capacity magazines, push for open carry, are pro-Stand Your Ground laws, reject even the most sensible background checks, are racist as fuck. The NRA, right wing radio, FOX News, and Republican politicians have fed these people a steady diet of fear since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. They've latched onto anything and everything non-white that can be peddled as a threat. They've done this with to great success. If you don't think so, just look at the spike in gun manufactured and sold starting the second Barack Obama was elected in 2008. At no point did he discuss taking anyone's guns during the campaign but the mere fact a black man became president scared the living fuck out of white supremacists to where they went on a weapons-buying spree that would make Adnan Khashoggi blush. There was a small spike in guns sold after Bill Clinton was elected but it went back down to normal levels during his second term. New guns in circulation hit a record high in 2008 and the number more than doubled by the end of Obama's second term. If you don't think race and white supremacists' fears were not the cause of this, you aren't too bright.

This relationship between guns and white supremacy in America is why you can't have a rational discussion about gun control. Racist fears will always override common sense, logic, evidence, social well-being, decency. To make matters worse, their irrational fears have filtered down to a lot of other gun owners. Every day I hear someone say, “I'm a responsible gun owner and I don't do....” or “I know a lot of gun owners who are responsible and they don't do...,” as a rationalization and justification to not only defend the status quo but to argue for access to more guns. A lot of the “good gun owners” are sure carrying a lot of water for the “bad gun owners,” right now to the point it is impossible for me to discern which is which. Practically speaking, there isn't much difference, politically, between an overweight, shirtless red neck posting pictures of himself holding his AR-15 in front of a Confederate Flag and the gun-owning Republican next door who is a CPA who drives a KIA Soul because both are obstacles to any gun reform. The CPA might not think he is giving cover for and be providing support to Cletus's white supremacy when he parrots NRA talking points but he sure as fuck is. If this wasn't true, you'd see these “good gun owners” come out against their fellow gun-owning brethren whenever there was a school shooting or some other horrible run-related incident. The silence of “good gun owners” tells you where they stand and to me, it seriously calls into question just how “good” they really are.

A good person doesn't stand quietly by as children are gunned down in schools, as families are worshiping in church, as people are watching a movie in a theater. A good person doesn't parrot conspiracy theories about gun confiscation, Jade Helm, FEMA camps, race wars... A good person doesn't look at the overwhelming evidence from the American Medical Association, the CDC, and every other industrialized country in the world and come away with the ideas that more guns are needed and teachers should be armed. You can say and think what you will about the people you know and love who own guns about how “good” a person they are but my definition of what constitutes a good person doesn't cover this kind of moral failing.

I never see any of these “good gun owners” coming to the defense of black victims of gun violence at the hands of the police. When 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot within microseconds by the police for having an air rifle in an open carry state, none of these “good gun owners” came out in his defense. Instead, they parroted the same talking points as white supremacist websites and talking heads. The same for Michael Brown in Ferguson, Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Walter Scott in South Carolina... Unarmed black men and boys who are killed by the police are always labeled with negative terms. Meanwhile, white mass shooters are “mentally unstable,” “misunderstood,” “a good neighbor”... Not only are white shooters talked about in better terms, they are treated with more respect when apprehended. Tamir Rice laid dying in the park, he received no assistance from the police who shot him. In fact, they prohibited Tamir's sister from getting help. When the black church shooter, Dylann Roof, in S. Carolina was caught, the police stopped by Burger King to get him food before taking him in. When the school shooter in Florida was finally nabbed, he was taken unharmed, wrapped in a blanket, and courteously placed into a car. Not a single “good gun owner” said a peep about any of these situations. Instead of seeing the built-in, systemic racism of how we view and treat black victims compared to white killers, they automatically rolled out their NRA-approved talking points. When it is time to speak up about injustice, racism, inequality, if guns are involved even remotely, these “good gun owners” always seem to stand up on the wrong side of the moral fence, if they stand up at all. My definition of “good person” doesn't encompass this kind of shitty behavior. At no point does an inanimate object take precedence, priority over a human being. That many of those defending guns as THE ANSWER are also 'pro-life,” is as ridiculous as it is hypocritical.

The other main factor in America's obsession with guns is toxic masculinity. I know the term “toxic masculinity,” has gotten pushback from a lot of people for being “too demeaning,” “too mean,” “detrimental to the discussion.” My response to this criticism is, I don't fucking care. If you are male and your ego is so fragile you can't handle a negative label and need to rage about it, you've pretty much proved the need for the description. Don't #NotAllMen at me either. This is a lazy, dishonest response. When people use “toxic masculinity,” they are referring to very specific characteristic traits. If you don't fit the description, then shut the fuck up about it so you don't risk joining their ranks.

Men are more violent than women. Some men more so than others. Insecure men of this type, even more so. Add in a heavy dose of white and gender supremacy and you get a toxic mixture. Throw deadly weapons designed to kill and maim at high rates and you often get very dangerous outcomes. The more of these traits a man has, the more likely they are to be violent. Take just about any mass shooter in America the past fifty years and you will find someone who has a history of violence against women and/or racial animus. Men who exhibit toxic masculinity traits are mentally unstable. They do not know how to properly process and deal with a world where they are not the king of every hill by the mere fact they are white men. This is a cognitive problem. To be okay with people like this having access to high powered weapons designed to kill is an epic public safety failure. People in hospitals, jails, halfway homes...who are deemed dangerous are not allowed belts, shoestrings, anything that can be used to harm themselves or others. Yet, we as a society have decided it is okay for mentally screwed up white men to not only own guns but make it easy for them to get as many as they want and almost whatever kind they want. This is fucking insane.

Imagine being in charge of policy for a mental health hospital, coming up with the position that the residents who exhibit violent tendencies, believe they are naturally superior to others, and who are prone to conspiracy theories should have almost unlimited access to things that will inflict the most pain, injury, and death on others. What Board of Directors would vote or this policy? What rational person on the outside looking in would say, “This seems like a great idea”? The easy answer is, “No one,” because it is so fucking stupid.

This brings us to the “the left shouldn't be so critical of the right” stage of the discussion. Every day, I read some article or comment that claims if the left would only stop the name calling, the harsh criticism, the sense of superiority, then the right would “do the right thing.” This argument is so fucking stupid it really doesn't deserve a response but since I'm feeling generous, here goes...

Either your arguments and positions are supported by evidence and tethered to reality and morality or they are not. If they are not, then it doesn't matter what the left says or thinks about you, they are still fucked up. If you don't want to be on the wrong side of an issue, of history, of morality, then the ONLY choices you have is to either continue to be on the wrong side or mea culpa the fuck out of yourself and get on the right side. There IS NO OPTION where you get to believe the wrong things and also get to be on the right side. These are the fucking rules of logic, of morality, of history. Don't blame liberals because you are wrong. Don't blame anyone but yourself for being on the wrong side. Suck it up. Take the personal hit. Learn a fucking lesson. Just don't blame others for your intellectual, moral failings.

If you really believe guns are the answer and the more the merrier, you are a deeply damaged, cognitively delusion person and a big part of the reason why America is so entrenched in a culture of guns. You are mentally unhinged and a danger to everyone around you and to society, in general. And, I'll bet, if I scratched the surface of your personality even the slightest, I'd uncover a whole lot of racism and bigotry just beneath the surface. You can say that guns aren’t the problem, which may be true. The real problem is racism mixed with toxic masculinity. I am all for doing everything possible to address these problems. However, until we do, I think keeping weapons out of their hands that can and do inflict massive damage to others is the very fucking least we can do. To do...to think otherwise is the very definition of “crazy.”

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jamesginortonblog · 7 years

Link

For a man telling a terrifying tale, Misha Glenny is startlingly chill. During an interview in Toronto last week, Glenny (an author, BBC correspondent and Guardian journalist) walked me through the world of McMafia – both his 2008 non-fiction bestseller and the new, eight-hour BBC/AMC drama series that's been spun from it, of which he's a producer.

What a tangled, treacherous world it is, where the collapse of the Soviet Union, the loosening of international monetary laws, the rise of the internet, the globalization of capital, the greed of bankers and politicians, the ease and anonymity of cryptocurrency and the cunning of cybercriminals come together to create a dark economy of human trafficking, gun running, drug smuggling and money laundering. Much of the latter takes place via shadowy real estate purchases in Vancouver, London and New York – hello, Trump Organization.

Since the series premiered in Britain on Jan. 1 – it arrives in Canada and the United States on Feb. 26, and will be shown around the world on Amazon – not a day has gone by in British news without some McMafia reference. Not on the TV pages – in the international, business, crime and comment sections. The Russian embassy tweeted objections. The Russian papers called Glenny for interviews. Two weeks ago, the British Parliament proposed legislation that would allow the assets of foreigners to be seized if they couldn't prove they were earned legally; it was instantly christened "the McMafia law." The series's star, James Norton, has been touted as the next James Bond. The 10-year-old book is back on bestseller lists, and hit No. 20 on Amazon. Glenny's next book, Nemesis, about the cocaine lord who ran the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, has been optioned for a feature film.

Growing up in London, Glenny, 59, was forever being cheek-kissed by the Russian guests of his father, Michael, a translator and academic, now deceased. Droll, Oxford-educated, alarmingly intelligent, a speaker of Czech and Serbo-Croat, Misha Glenny spent his 20s as a political activist, smuggling books and dismembered Xerox machines into Eastern Europe to aid opposition movements such as Poland's Solidarity. As a freelance journalist in the eighties for papers including The Guardian and the Toronto Star, he chronicled upheavals in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. In the nineties, he watched as nascent capitalism in Russia became linked with the emergence of vast organized-crime networks.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Glenny discussed international syndicates, whether he fears for his life (surprisingly little) and the power of television. Here are some highlights:

Is Canada part of McMafia?

It helps to divide organized crime into zones of production, such as Colombia and Afghanistan; zones of distribution, such asYugoslavia or Mexico; and zones of consumption, such as the United States and Europe. Canada is fascinating because it's all three at once. It produces a lot of marijuana and synthetic drugs such as MDMA. It's also a distribution hub because the U.S./Canada border is unpoliceable at the moment. And you have the sensitive issue of First Nations territories that cross the border, which are used occasionally for shifting product. And the icing on the cake, which we also have in London, is that Canada is a currency-laundering centre. Half of the top 100 properties in Vancouver, nobody knows who the owners are. They hide behind anonymous companies. They could be KGB officers, bent Canadian businessmen, Colombian drug dealers, Nigerian oilmen. We don't know.

You spill a lot of secrets in your work. Have you ever feared for your life?

My friend Roberto Saviano wrote Gomorra, about the Camorra, the Naples crime syndicate. He detailed secrets and named names. Now he lives surrounded by seven guards, moving house every night, with his family in witness protection. I do something different. I go around the world, talk to gangsters and map the world of organized crime – but also its absolutely critical twin, the corruption of bankers, lawyers and politicians. After money laundering, crime syndicates move on to reputation laundering. They may get upset with me, but because they're trying to appear straight, the last thing they would do is go after me.

How did you and the series's creators, Hossein Amini and James Watkins (who also directed all eight hours), fictionalize such sprawling information?

Hos, James and I started talking in early 2013. Hos makes no secret that one of his biggest influences is The Godfather.

The main character, Alex Godman [Norton], is the London-born son of a Russian gangster. He begins Episode 1 as an upright banker. Then, like Michael Corleone, he's pulled into crime.

Some of the characters are fictionalized composites of real people. And all of the crime storylines are true. In Episode 2, we watch a Russian woman kidnapped in Cairo by Orthodox Christians, taken across the Negev desert by Muslims and Bedouins and then handed to Jewish Israeli gangsters. That's all true. In organized crime, national and confessional divisions are frequently meaningless. They all work together.

You spent three weeks in the show's writers' room. And you brought in special guests.

The writers were able to ask me, would this product be moving from Mumbai to East Africa or South Africa? I'd tell them the routes and the groups involved. I brought in a guy who was a close associate of several Russian organized-crime syndicates in the nineties. I brought in a criminal hacker. He happened to be there on the same morning as the director of Europol, the European police force. We had to take the hacker out the back route.

You do a cameo in Episode 5.

I play a BBC reporter, so it was falling off a log. James rang me up the week before, "Can you get to Split, Croatia, on Monday?" I said, "Hold the front page, I'm there." I got my own caravan [trailer]. Which was James Norton's caravan, because he wasn't working that day. It was fantastic fun. I also visited the set in Belgrade, Zagreb and London. We shot the exteriors in France, Russia and Prague. The interiors, deserts, beaches and fancy houses are done in Croatia.

What can TV exposure bring that a book alone can't?

This subject is deeply important. It goes to the very heart of the crises we're seeing in the world today. Cybercrime has completely revolutionized crime. It requires no violence whatsoever. You can sit in Kazakhstan, attack someone in L.A. and cash out the money in Dubai. People need to know about this, and with a TV show, you can reach tens of millions of people at the same time.

What can be done?

The battle is on. Since my book was published, McMafia culture has spread – the financial crisis, the rise of authoritarianism in the West, the rise in political corruption, which is always a midwife of organized crime. But we've also seen forces of resistance emerge. The publication of the Panama and Paradise Papers was really important. You have NGOs such as Transparency International or Global Witness, which have been uncovering this stuff and publishing it. At the heart of all of this is the gobsmacking rise in economic inequality over the past 40 years. Manufacturing and traditional capitalism have been seized by financial capitalism, which is one of the most parasitic phenomena history has ever witnessed.

Sounds like good material for Seasons 2 and 3.

We've already got them arced out. We're just waiting to be renewed.

Are you hopeful?

We're quietly confident.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

#McMafia #misha glenny #james norton

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newstfionline · 4 years

Text

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Rent and debt problems (WSJ) A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that outstanding rent debt in the United States will hit $7.2 billion by the end of 2020, and without additional stimulus spending Moody’s estimates that it could hit $70 billion. They estimate that 12.8 million people will owe an average $5,400 from missed payments, which is significantly higher than the 3.8 million homeowners foreclosed on from 2007 to 2010. Across the U.S., 30 million to 40 million people face possible eviction once moratoriums expire.

A Divided Nation Agrees on One Thing: Many People Want a Gun (NYT) In America, spikes in gun purchases are often driven by fear. But in past years that anxiety has centered on concerns that politicians will pass stricter gun controls. Mass shootings often prompt more gun sales for that reason, as do elections of liberal Democrats. Many gun buyers now are saying they are motivated by a new destabilizing sense that is pushing even people who had considered themselves anti-gun to buy weapons for the first time—and people who already have them to buy more. The nation is on track in 2020 to stockpile at record rates, according to groups that track background checks from FBI data. Across the country, Americans bought 15.1 million guns in the seven months this year from March through September, a 91 percent leap from the same period in 2019, according to seasonally adjusted firearms sales estimates from The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on gun issues. The FBI has also processed more background checks for gun purchases in just the first nine months of 2020 than it has for any previous full year, FBI data show. “The year 2020 has been just one long advertisement for why someone may want to have a firearm to defend themselves,” said Douglas Jefferson, the vice president for the National African American Gun Association, which has seen the biggest increase in membership this year since the group was formed in 2015.

The ‘Right to Repair’ Movement Gains Ground (NYT) If you buy a product—a car, a smartphone, or even a tractor—and it breaks, should it be easier for you to fix it yourself? Manufacturers of a wide range of products have made it increasingly difficult over the years to repair things, for instance by limiting availability of parts or by putting prohibitions on who gets to tinker with them. It affects not only game consoles or farm equipment, but cellphones, military gear, refrigerators, automobiles and even hospital ventilators, the lifesaving devices that have proven crucial this year in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, a movement known as “right to repair” is starting to make progress in pushing for laws that prohibit restrictions like these. The goal of right-to-repair rules, advocates say, is to require companies to make their parts, tools and information available to consumers and repair shops in order to keep devices from ending up in the scrap heap. They argue that the rules restrict people’s use of devices that they own and encourage a throwaway culture by making repairs too difficult. They also argue that it’s part of a culture of planned obsolescence—the idea that products are designed to be short-lived in order to encourage people to buy more stuff. That contributes to wasted natural resources and energy use at a time when climate change requires movement in the opposite direction.

Peru’s Machu Picchu reopening Sunday after pandemic closure (AP) Except workers repairing roads and signs, Peru’s majestic Incan citadel of Machu Picchu is eerily empty ahead of its reopening Sunday after seven months of closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. The long closure of Peru’s No. 1 tourist draw, which has hammered the local economy, marks the second time it has been shut down since it opened its doors to tourism in 1948. The stone complex built in the 15th century will receive 675 visitors a day starting Sunday, the director of Machu Picchu archaeological park, José Bastante, told The Associated Press. The site is accustomed to receiving 3,000 tourists a day, though it recently passed regulations limiting visitors to 2,244 visitors a day to protect the ruins. Still a large number given experts belief that in the 15th century a maximum of 410 people lived in the citadel on the limits of the Andes mountains and the Amazon.

Evo’s return (Foreign Policy) Evo Morales will return to Bolivia on Nov. 9, the day after President-elect Luis Arce is sworn in. Morales’s return will come just over a year after he was forced out of the country. An outstanding arrest warrant for sedition and terrorism issued for Morales was annulled on Tuesday, paving the way for his return. Meanwhile, hundreds of supporters of the right-wing opposition marched on a military barracks on Tuesday asking for “military help” to stop the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party from regaining power.

New protests loom as Europeans tire of virus restrictions (AP) Protesters set trash bins afire and police responded with hydrant sprays in downtown Rome Tuesday night, part of a day of public outpouring of anger against virus-fighting measures like evening shutdowns for restaurants and bars and the closures of gyms and theaters—a sign of growing discontent across Europe with renewed coronavirus restrictions. It was a fifth straight night of violent protest in Italy, following recent local overnight curfews in metropolises including Naples and Rome. All of Europe is grappling with how to halt a fall resurgence of the virus before its hospitals become overwhelmed again. Nightly curfews have been implemented in French cities. Schools must close at 6 p.m. Schools have been closed in Northern Ireland and the Czech Republic. German officials have ordered de-facto lockdowns in some areas near the Austrian border and new mask-wearing requirements are popping up weekly across the continent, including a nationwide requirement in Russia. Yet in this new round of restrictions, governments are finding a less compliant public. Over the weekend, police used pepper spray against protesters angry over new virus restrictions in Poland. Spanish doctors staged their first national walkout in 25 years on Tuesday to protest poor working conditions. In Britain, anger and frustration at the government’s uneven handling of the pandemic has erupted into a political crisis over the issue of hungry children.

Cake Lady helps wounded soldiers heal, one treat at a time LONDON (AP)—David Wiseman heard Kath Ryan before he met her. He was at the far end of Ward S-4 at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham when shouts of “Cake Lady’s here! Cake Lady’s here!” began rolling through the room full of wounded soldiers, bed by bed. Who was this Cake Lady, he wondered, until he saw a middle-aged woman in a “strange dress” pushing a trolley and handing out cake. “When all you’ve seen is doctors and nurses and the odd relative, it was just a bit of an assault on the senses,” Wiseman remembered. “And she was doling out hugs and, you know, cakes. … She just brought joy into that place.” Since 2009, retired nurse Ryan, 59, has made some 1,260 visits to British hospitals, bonding with the patients as she fed them an estimated 1 million slices of cake. But Ryan brought more than treats. She brought herself—bubbly, irreverent, and fearless. As she could see that most of the injured were in a terrible state, she never asked, “How are you?” “I would go in with the trolley and apron and stand at the end of the bed, and say, ‘Can I lead you into temptation this evening?’” Ryan recalled. “Straight away, they would scream laughing.” One soldier got into the spirit and asked, “What’s on offer, love?” “Anything you want,” Ryan replied. “As long as it’s legal, moral, and on the cake trolley.”

With eye on China, India and U.S. sign accord to deepen military ties (NYT) India and the United States signed a pact Tuesday to share geospatial intelligence, paving the way for deeper military cooperation between the two countries as they confront an increasingly assertive China. The agreement will give India’s armed forces access to a wealth of data from U.S. military satellites to aid in targeting and navigation. The two countries signed the accord in New Delhi during a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper a week before the U.S. presidential election. The agreement is the latest example of how India and the United States—the world’s two largest democracies—are drawing closer together to respond to the challenge of China’s rise. For India, that challenge is no longer theoretical. In June, India and China engaged in their deadliest clash in more than 50 years high in the mountains near the unofficial border between the two countries. Twenty Indian soldiers died, while the number of Chinese casualties remains unknown. India and China are still locked in a dangerous standoff, with tens of thousands of troops preparing to wait out the harsh Himalayan winter.

Typhoon, landslides leave 35 dead, 59 missing in Vietnam (AP) Typhoon Molave set off landslides that killed at least 19 people and left 45 missing in central Vietnam, where ferocious wind and rain blew away roofs and knocked out power in a region of 1.7 million residents, state media said Thursday. The casualties from the landslides bring the over-all death toll from the storm to at least 35, including 12 fishermen whose boats sank Wednesday as the typhoon approached with winds of up to 150 kilometers (93 miles) per hour. Vietnamese officials say it’s the worst typhoon to hit the country in 20 years. At least 59 people remain missing in the landslides and at sea. The toll may rise with many regions still unable to report details of the devastation amid the stormy weather.

Scale of Qatar Airways scandal revealed (Foreign Policy) Female passengers on “10 aircraft in total” were forced into invasive physical examinations at Doha airport on Oct. 2, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Wednesday, as the Qatari government apologized publicly and began an investigation into the incident. The women were removed from flights after a newborn baby was found abandoned in one of the airport bathrooms. The Transport Workers’ Union of New South Wales, whose members service Qatar Airways planes in Sydney, condemned “the brutal attack on the human rights of Australian female airline passengers” and is considering industrial action in response. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged a “further response” after reviewing the results of an investigation. He told reporters, “As a father of daughters, I could only shudder at the thought that any woman, Australian or otherwise, would be subjected to that.”

Australia’s second-largest city ends 111-day virus lockdown MELBOURNE, Australia (AP)—Coffee business owner Darren Silverman pulled his van over and wept when he heard on the radio that Melbourne’s pandemic lockdown would be largely lifted on Wednesday after 111 days. Silverman was making a home delivery Monday when the announcement was made that restrictions in Australia’s second-largest city would be relaxed. He was overwhelmed with emotions and a sense of relief. According to the Victoria state government the lockdown changes will allow 6,200 retail stores, 5,800 cafés and restaurants, 1,000 beauty salons and 800 pubs to reopen, impacting 180,000 jobs.

Nigeria considers social media regulation in wake of deadly shooting (Reuters) Nigeria’s information minister said “some form of regulation” could be imposed on social media just a week after protesters spread images and videos of a deadly shooting using Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Images, video and an Instagram live feed from a popular DJ spread news of shootings in Lagos on Oct. 20, when witnesses and rights groups said the military fired on peaceful protesters. The protesters had been demonstrating for nearly two weeks to demand an end to police brutality. The army denied its soldiers were there. Social media helped spread word of the shootings worldwide, and international celebrities from Beyonce and Lewis Hamilton to Pope Francis since called on the country to resolve the conflict peacefully. Information Minister Lai Mohammed told a panel at the National Assembly on Tuesday that “fake news” is one of the biggest challenges facing Nigeria. A spokesman for the minister confirmed the comments, and said “the use of the social media to spread fake news and disinformation means there is the need to do something about it.”

#headlines #news

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thechasefiles · 5 years

Text

The Chase Files Daily Newscap 17/2/2020

Good Morning #realdreamchasers ! Here is your daily news cap for Monday 17th February, 2020. There is a lot to read and digest so take your time. Remember you can read full articles via Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS), Barbados Today (BT), or by purchasing a Daily Nation Newspaper (DN).

STUART: MIA LET’S TALK – AFTER “NUFF NUFF” TALK and no action from the current Government, Barbadians are no better off, and certainly not happy. And the gun violence permeating the country isn’t helping the current regime either, former Prime Minister Freundel Stuart charged last night. Speaking for the first time on a national platform since conceding an unprecedented 30-0 defeat in the wee hours of May 25, 2018, Stuart told a packed hall of Princess Margaret School that he was tired of remaining silent. He said he still wished all Barbadians well, and would not critique the overall performance of Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley in the morning of her tenure, and would wait to do so in the evening of her time as the country’s eighth Prime Minister. But, he added, the early grade would not be a good one. (DN)

CANADIAN PM CALLS OFF DIPLOMATIC VISIT TO CARIBBEAN AMID ONGOING RAIL STOPPAGES – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled a trip to Barbados scheduled for Monday as Indigenous demonstrators and their supporters continue to halt train service across parts of the country. Trudeau planned to bring his pitch for a UN Security Council seat to a two-day gathering of leaders from across what is known as the Caribbean Community, or Caricom, but will send Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne instead. "Following the government's ongoing efforts to address infrastructure disruptions across the country, the prime minister will convene the Incident Response Group tomorrow to discuss steps forward," the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement. The IRG is a group of cabinet members and high-level officials the prime minister leans on in times of crisis. "Our priority remains the safety and security of all Canadians and the swift resolution of this issue to restore service across the rail system in accordance with the law," the statement said. Trudeau returned to Canada late Friday after spending a week in Ethiopia, Kuwait, Senegal and Germany and spent the weekend in private meetings, according to his public schedule. The decision comes amid mounting pressure from business leaders and politicians who want the government to take more of an active role in resolving the crisis, which some say is damaging the economy and could lead to shortages of propane and other consumer goods. (DN)

SOME RECEIVE DISLOCATION GRANTS – Some of the Fairchild Street vendors who have been shifted because of this week’s demolition of the old National Insurance Scheme (NIS) building in Bridgetown have received dislocation grants in the form of $2 000 cheques. A vendor, who requested anonymity, said members of the Ministry of Agriculture passed by Saturday after 4 p.m. They said those who did not receive a cheque were told they would get one today. While the vendor said she was appreciative of the gesture, she expressed skepticism. “At least we are getting something instead of nothing, but to survive on that for five weeks is impossible, because I don’t even feel it will only take five weeks to build a new market for us. This money won’t stretch. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet; I will have to wait and see. You accept what you are given and that’s what you get,” she said. (DN)

GRAZETTES LOSSES – The operations of at least four businesses were affected yesterday after an early morning fire gutted two buildings at Grazettes Industrial Park, St Michael. The fire, which reportedly started nearest to furniture manufacturer Matrix Marketing, was reported just before 6 a.m. It affected companies such as Glassfibre Products, Continental Foods Inc. and a woodwork shop. Large plumes of black smoke could be seen from as far as Brandons Beach, St Michael, and because there were chemicals involved, the flames quickly intensified, causing explosions. It took more than three hours for firefighters to get the blaze under control. Deputy Chief Fire Officer Henderson Patrick told the DAILY NATION around 10:30 a.m. that the situation was so dire that 32 personnel, including senior officers, had to be called in. “We had challenges with a number of chemicals that were stored in one of the buildings, but our officers were able to manage the situation so that there were no injuries,” he said. (DN)

DOMINICA: RESCUE TEAMS CONTINUE SEARCH FOR PASSENGERS AFTER AIRCRAFT CRASHES INTO THE SEA – Rescue teams were continuing the search on Sunday night for survivors after a single-engine Piper F-OGKO aircraft with four people including the two pilots crashed into the sea on its approach to the Douglas Charles Airport, northeast of here on Sunday night, police and fire officials have confirmed. French officials said that the Cros Antilles-Guyane rescue operation is currently underway and that initial reports indicate that the plane was among other aircraft going to Dominica for a day-long visit. They said the flights had been organised by the “Ailes de Guadeloupe” club and that the weather conditions were excellent at the time of the incident. (DN)

LUCK ESCAPE FOR CHRIST CHURCH MAN – What started out as a regular Sunday morning chore almost turned tragic for a resident of Wotton, Christ Church today. The man, who asked to remain anonymous, almost fell into a 70-foot well when the concrete slab he stepped on collapsed as he took out his garbage just after 10 a.m. Luckily for him, the garbage can, which he was pulling, served as a balance beam and stopped him from plummeting several feet to his probable death. Ironically, seven months ago 17-year-old Kyriq Boyce died in a similar manner after falling into a 100-foot well at Martin Road, the Pine, St Michael. The 39-year-old man told Barbados TODAY he believed he would have died had he not kept his balance after the concrete well cover caved in. “I was taking out the garbage and just as I was about to step on the well cover a fella shout me. I hold up my hand and at the same time the well cave in and my front foot fell into the well, but because I was holding the garbage can it help to balance me, so half of my body was inside the well and half was out. “When I catch myself I let go of the garbage can and I was able to roll myself onto the grass. If I wasn’t holding that garbage can I would have gone straight down in that well,” he said. He escaped with minor bruises to his hands, lower leg and back. And even as he struggled to come to grips with his close brush with death, the concerned man said the situation could have been much worse had it been one of the many children who live in the housing area who had stepped on the well. “If this was one of the children who live in Wotton things could have been much worse. One of them could have ended up dead,” he noted. Just after noon, personnel from the National Housing Corporation (NHC) arrived to place a temporary cover over the well along with caution tape. They encountered several irate residents, who claimed the community was being neglected by Government. Parliamentary representative for the area Ryan Straughn was also on hand and told Barbados TODAY the wooden covers were just a temporary fix and that NHC workers would return tomorrow to provide a permanent solution. He promised that the NHC would act speedily in fixing not only the affected well, but also other wells in the densely populated housing area. “The state of the wells on the public estates are obviously in dire need of repair. I know the NHC has commenced some work, certainly in the Pine area and others, but obviously as you can see here there was an incident where a resident was disposing of some refuse and luckily no one was injured seriously, so therefore we will appeal to the NHC to seek to address not just this particular situation but the rest of the wells as far as Wotton is concerned,” Straughn said. “This is a further example of the kind of neglect, if you like, that these communities would have experienced over a number of years. But we have given a commitment in terms of being able to solve these but obviously given the current resources, I know the NHC has done an inspection of all of the wells across all of the estates and has been seeking to respond to them as strategically as they can.” Straughn, the Minister in the Ministry of Finance, also used the opportunity to plead with residents not to traverse on wells as this could be a big risk. (BT)

UPDATE MAN FATALLY SHOT – Police are on the scene at Colleton Tenantry, St John investigating the shooting death of a young man from Gall Hill in the same parish. Police report they received a call around 8:56 a.m. that a man was lying motionless in Colleton. Upon investigation, they discovered the body with bullet wounds. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Anyone with any information is asked to call district C at 416-8200; Crime Stoppers 1-800-TIPS or the nearest police station. (DN)

VAUXHALL PRIMARY REOPENING ON TUESDAY – The Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training is informing parents and guardians of the Vauxhall Primary School that the school will reopen on Tuesday, February 18, for all students. However, classes will be conducted tomorrow, Monday February 17, for students of Class four. Class four students will report to the school to be directed to the Vauxhall Methodist Church, where their classes well be conducted. School meals will be provided as usual for students in attendance at this location. These students will then report as usual at Vauxhall Primary for their classes from Tuesday. (BGIS)

There are 319 days left in the year Shalom! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram for your daily news. #thechasefiles #dailynewscaps #bajannewscaps #newsinanutshell

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adambhalalough · 7 years

Video

vimeo

Battle for the Soul of Bitcoin: Stories from the Making of The New Radical

Speech delivered at Indie Memphis, Nov 2, 2017

Full transcript below (video is only the intro, film clips not included)...

There is a war being waged for the soul of Bitcoin. On the one hand you have those who want to stay true to the roots of Bitcoin. The original programmers who were inspired by the Open Source movement and the Cypherpunk movement. They created Bitcoin with these tenants in mind: privacy, security, independence, self-reliance, and most importantly: freedom. The other side of the battle can be defined in one word: legitimacy. You have those looking to give Bitcoin institutional legitimacy. Their aim is to regulate it. Their motivations are very different, however. There are those who see Bitcoin and see dollar signs. Let’s call them the bankers. They want to dress it up in a suit and tie. But to have it appeal to the angel investors of the world it must be safe, clean, free from any association with drugs, guns and dark markets. And that leads us to our third group - let’s call them the Feds. These are the law enforcement and government regulators of the world who see Bitcoin as a threat. A way to launder money. A way to make purchases without any trace back to your name or identity. So in late 2013 when Bitcoin jumped to $1,000 per coin, from $13 a coin just the year before, battle lines became drawn. That’s where I entered the fray with my camera in tow. On October 19th of 2013 I flew to Austin, Texas to meet with Cody Wilson the inventor of the 3D printed gun The Liberator. I had no idea this meeting with the “21st Century Gun-Runner of the Internet” would lead me deep into the middle of a life or death conflict over the soul of Bitcoin and the group of young men on the front lines of that conflict. I first heard of Cody Wilson in June of 2013. I was driving through Beverly Hills on the way to another boring, dead-end Hollywood studio meeting when I heard a young man speaking on the radio. (play NPR clip, 1 minute 30 second). I was equally disturbed and intrigued by what Cody was saying. I am not a gun guy, I do not own a gun nor did I grow up in a house with guns. But a trait of my personality and a common theme between my films is my attraction to people on the extremes. People pushing against the system. Where others are repelled, I find these characters to be fascinating and my curiosity lead me to Cody Wilson’s front door step. When I arrived in Austin on a rainy October morning in 2013, we began shooting within an hour of dropping my luggage at the La Quinta Inn. Day 1 was chock full of great content - We went to a gun range, Red’s, where Cody was spotted by one of the employees who geeked out like a celebrity had walked in and just wanted to shake his hand and thank him for his service. We went to a local BBQ joint. Then that night we drove to the outskirts of town to visit the tiny closet where he created The Liberator, the world’s first workable 3D printed gun. (Play Cody intro clip, 2 minutes). It was all great stuff but all of it I had expected. Day 2 everything changed. The next morning Cody notified me he had a Skype call with some anarchist hackers living in a squat outside Barcelona. Together, he and these hackers were planning a new project. And they were about to launch this project on indieGoGo the same way he initially launched the Liberator before being kicked off the Crowdfunding platform for violating their legal policy by attempting to crowdfund the manufacture of a gun. On the Skype call were a few young hackers all with foreign accents from various nations. One, Vitalik Buterin, would go on years later to receive acclaim and huge amounts of money for launching a new cryptocurrency called Ethereum. But all these hackers were dry, emotionless and frankly boring, except for one. (Play Skype call, 1 minute 11 sec) Amir Taaki immediately jumped out at me. His childlike enthusiasm was contagious. He was full of life in a way very few people are. After the Skype call ended I immediately started to ask Cody questions about Amir. Cody gave me the lowdown while flipping through Google and showing me various articles and photos of Amir. Apparently Amir was famous in the Bitcoin scene already. He had been around since the very beginning of Bitcoin and there were even rumors he was the infamous Satoshi Nakamoto - the name used by the unknown person or persons who designed bitcoin and created its original reference implementation. (Play Amir TNR intro, 3 minute 15 second) Whether Amir was Satoshi or not, I still do not know but what I do know is Amir was integral to the creation of Bitcoin, a fascinating character living in a squat somewhere in Spain and I had to have him part of my film, so that is what I did. Through Cody’s trust and vouching for me I was able to create a strong filmmaker / subject relationship with Amir and start filming with him after a few months of courtship. So I had my two main characters now, an unlikely duo. Cody Wilson, a white, Texan law school drop-out and 2nd amendment freedom fighter and Amir Taaki, a British Iranian hacker and squatter. They made a strange pair together. You wouldn’t expect them to have anything in common. Yet what they did share in common was the desire to upend governmental and financial structures and bring power to the masses through the use of technology. The stage was set. There were Crypto Anarchists on one side. The Bankers and the Feds on the other. And at stake was the future of Bitcoin. The battle for the soul of Bitcoin can be traced back to the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto written by legendary Cypherpunk Timothy C. May in 1992 and posted to the Cypherpunk mailing list. This online list was a very active forum with technical discussion ranging over mathematics, cryptography, computer science, political and philosophical discussion, and personal arguments. An early member of this list was a 23 year old Australian hacker named Julian Assange. The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto was a call to arms that predicted the online drug marketplace Silk Road a full 21 years before Ross Ulbricht programmed it. To put it into perspective the year Tim May wrote this manifesto McDonald’s opened it first restaurant in China. Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. Bill Clinton became president and AT & T released its first video telephone for $1,499. I’d like to read you a portion of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto because I believe its words will prove as uncannily prescient to you as they did to me. A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable… The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions... And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property. Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences! Fast forward 25 years later. Cody and Amir along with a group of hackers known as UNSYSTEM put the finishing touches on the beta version of the Dark Wallet, an encrypted wallet that masks transactions making the buyer and seller anonymous. They release a YouTube video as part of a launch of their crowdfunder. The video instantly goes viral among the Bitcoin community. Suddenly the pendulum has swung from the Bankers and the Feds toward the Crypto Anarchists as they make a bold play to take back the soul of Bitcoin and bring it to its roots. (Play DW crowdfunder, 4 minutes 20 seconds) The Dark Wallet crowdfunding video and the $50,000 dollars the indiegogo page quickly raises garners the attention of the Feds. Specifically FinCen, - the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, one of the US Treasury Departments leading agencies in the fight against money laundering. As well the Dark Wallet falls under investigation by both the IRS and DOJ’s cybercrime divisions. I would journey to San Francisco where I would interview the IRS agent Tigran Gambarayan, a young Russian immigrant in charge of investigating Dark Wallet. He carried a gun on his hip and told me in detail about his recent investigation and arrest of a law enforcement agent on the Silk Road case who extorted millions of dollar worth of Bitcoin from Ross Ulbricht, the same guy he was supposed to be building a case against, and then tried to launder the money using his Secret Service badge to force a bitcoin exchange in Luxembourg to give him cash. It was the first major Bitcoin heist in history. Tigran also admitted on camera he was watching Amir Taaki. I drove across town to interview Katy Hahn, head of the cybercrime unit at the Department of Justice. She also admitted she was investigating Cody and Amir after hearing them brag on the radio about Dark Wallet being a money laundering tool. And she told me how ISIS had just put a memo out about the Dark Wallet and its usefulness as a tool to send Bitcoin to the mujahideen across the Middle East without being tracked by authorities. (Play DW pushback vid, 3 minutes 10 seconds) Then, that year the Bitcoin community witnessed its first major arrest Post-Silk Road when 23 year old entrepreneur and founder of BitInstant, Charlie Shrem was busted for money laundering. Shrem was a young, successful and idealistic Brooklyn based Bitcoin millionaire. In 2013 Cody Wilson and I visited him while he was on house arrest at his parent’s place. Cameras were rolling. (Play Shrem, 6 minutes 39 seconds). Shrem was the first of a number of Bitcoin entrepreneur’s to be arrested and convicted in the aftermath of the Silk Road. The Feds and the Bankers were sending a clear signal to the community - disobedience will not be tolerated. The irony that Shrem did 2 years for laundering the equivalent of $1 million of Bitcoin while only one banker was sent to prison in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis was not lost on the Crypto community. Many argue that the financial crisis was what lead to the creation of Bitcoin and the need create a safe and secure decentralized crypto currency not controlled by a central bank, or any one person or group for that matter. A few months after Shrem went to prison Amir Taaki disappeared. He stopped answering my phone calls, my emails and my text messages. Cody had no idea where he was either. I assumed he was on the lam running from a financial crime warrant. There were rumors Interpol was looking to bust him for the Dark Wallet specifically (even though the app wasn’t even officially launched). Weeks of silence turned into months, which turned into a year and finally about a year after my last communication with him I got a pgp encrypted email. It read, “Hi, I’m in Syria. The Dark Wallet is dead. What I am doing now is far more important.” It turns out Amir was fighting ISIS on the front lines in Rojava. He was embedded with the Kurds, with a Kalashnikov and a uniform, helping to liberate the Anarchist society that had formed there in Rojava out of the ashes of a once great nation destroyed by Western meddling and warmongering. Dark Wallet development had ceased. A true final version of the wallet was never finished. Today it does seem that the bankers have won the battle for Bitcoin’s soul. Bitcoin’s total market cap is nearing 100 Billion dollars, bigger than Goldman Sachs. As of today one Bitcoin is worth $6421. When I began shooting this film it was around 400. But there is hope for the Crypto Anarchists. Recently Amir left the Middle East for Barcelona where he is now active in the squats forming a a Hacklab - a live/work commune space where Crypto products can be made and developed safely. I texted him yesterday via the encrypted Signal app and asked him if there were any other notable developments in the hacker space. He pointed me to a group called Paralelni Polis and their Institute of Crypto-anarchy in Prague. The members of this group boast on their website of hacking into a live broadcast of Czech Television and a “virtual interaction with politician’s mobile phones.” The aim of the Institute of Cryptoanarchy is to encourage a parallel decentralized economy, crypto-currencies, and other conditions for the development of a free society in the 21st century. As their website statement page reads, “New technology brings the possibility of choice – we are in a time that is defined by The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. With a fast internet connection, reliable anonymity and decentralized currency, you preserve freedom which we have been losing as a society.” Thank you. (C) Adam Bhala Lough 2017 All Rights Reserved

#bitcoin #crypto anarchy #cryptocurrency #amir taaki #cody wilson #julian assange

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New Post has been published here https://is.gd/65lHi1

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

This post was originally published here

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books.

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10.

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It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto appeared in the world, as far as anyone is aware, with the publication of the Bitcoin white paper. There is no trace of the name before that date, and after a few months of interacting with other developers on the project, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared just as abruptly from public view at the end of 2010.

With the exception of a couple of private emails (indicating that the developer had ‘moved onto other things’), and a forum post disavowing an attempt to ‘out’ the developer in 2014, Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since. Perhaps instead, more accurately, we might say that the entity referring to itself as Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since 2010.

For less interesting than the ‘real’ identity of Satoshi is the way in which that identity operates in the world – in a way that perfectly accords with Cypherpunk and blockchain doctrine.

Eating the dog food

In Section 10 of the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi outlines the privacy model of the system. In the traditional banking model, the flow of money through an exchange is anonymized by the third party administering the transactions; they hide what they know from everyone else. However, on the blockchain, where all transactions are public, the anonymity happens between the identity and the transaction; everyone can see the money moving, but nobody knows whose money it is.

The common idea of cryptocurrencies is that they set assets free, but a cryptocurrency is a monetary unit like in any other currency system – one that, because of the blockchain, is closely monitored and controlled. What’s really liberated is identity. It is liberated from responsibility for the transaction and liberated from the ‘real’ person or persons performing it. Identity, in fact, becomes an asset itself. This is also what marks out the idea of the blockchain from earlier cryptosystems like PGP; it’s not the messages that are being hidden, but the actors behind them.

A necessary part of software development is the use of the technology in real-life situations for the purposes of testing.

This is often done by the developers themselves in a process known as ‘eating your own dog food.’ While the developers of bitcoin could test mining and transacting coins between them, the real ‘product’ of bitcoin – a decentralized, deniable identity – could only be tested by someone (or a group) willing to build and sustain such an identity asset over a long period of time – and who better to perform that test than the creator of bitcoin themselves?

Satoshi Nakomoto is an exercise in dogfooding – and proof of its efficacy.

Newsweek Magazine, 2014

When Satoshi disappeared into the ether, they left on the blockchain, unspent, the piles of bitcoins they’d personally mined in the early days of the project – over a million of them. These bitcoins are still there, and only someone who holds Satoshi’s private keys can access them. Today, Satoshi ‘exists’ only to the extent someone can prove to be that individual – the only proof of which is possession of those private keys. There is no ‘real’ Satoshi.

There is only a set of assets and a key. ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ is creator, product and proof of bitcoin, all wrapped up in one.

Once again, the creation of money is the creation of a myth. In his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anthropologist David Graeber proposes that the connection between finance and sacrifice runs deep in Western culture: ‘Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the ‘redeemer’? The primary meaning of ‘redemption’ is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying of a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God’s own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.’

Satoshi’s sacrifice is something different, but in the anarchic frame from which the individual emerged, not dissimilar. In order to secure the future of bitcoin, Satoshi gave up all personal gains from its invention: some 980,000 bitcoins, valued at $4 billion in late 2018. This is a gesture that will continue to inspire many in the bitcoin community, even if few of them understand or even consider its true meaning.

The power of brands

Back in 1995, another regular Cypherpunk contributor, Nick Szabo, proposed a term for the kind of sacrificial identity deployed so successfully by Satoshi: a ‘nym’. A nym was defined as ‘an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community’. Thus the nym is opposed to a true name, which links together all kinds of information about the holder, making them vulnerable to someone who can obtain information that is, in the context of the transaction, irrelevant.

Or as Szabo put it: ‘As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one’s enemies.’

Szabo used as examples of nyms the nicknames people used on electronic bulletin boards and the brand names deployed by corporations. The purpose of the nym, in Szabo’s reading, is to aggregate and hold reputation in particular contexts: in online discussions on particular topics, or in a marketplace of niche products. But online handles and brand names are not the same things, and their elision is an early echo of the reductionism which the ideology forming around the blockchain would attempt to perform on everything it touched.

Brand names are a particular kind of untrue name, one associated not merely with reputation but also with financial value. If the brand attracts the wrong kind of attention, its reputation goes down, and so does its value – at least in theory. But because of their value (financial, not reputational), brands also bestow power on the corporations that own them – that know their real name – while often hiding behind them. Brands can sue. They can bribe. They can have activists harassed and killed. Because of their value, brands become things worth maintaining and worth defending. Their goal becomes one of survival, and they warp the world around them to that end.

Online handles are a different kind of untrue name. Their value lies precisely in the fact that they are not tied to assets, not associated with convertible value. They exist only as reputation, which has its own power, but a very different kind. They can be picked up and put down at any time without cost. The key attribute of online handles is not that they render one free through rendering one anonymous, but that they render one free through the possibility of change.

It is precisely this distinction, between financial freedoms and individual autonomy, that underlies many of the debates that have emerged around bitcoin in recent years, as it struggles to articulate a political vision that is not immured in a technological one. While bitcoin has proved to be a powerful application for the idea of the blockchain, it has also distorted in the minds of both its practitioners and many observers what the blockchain might actually be capable of.

In many of its practical applications, bitcoin has so far failed to deliver on its emancipatory promises. For example, one strand of bitcoin thinking is premised on its accessibility: the widely touted aim of ‘banking the unbanked’ claims that the technology will give access to financial services to the full half of the world who are currently excluded from real market participation. And yet the reality of bitcoin’s implementation, both technological and socio-political, makes this claim hard to justify.

To use the currency effectively still requires a level of technological proficiency and autonomy, specifically network access and expensive hardware, which put up as many barriers to access as the traditional banking system. Regulatory institutions in the form of existing financial institutions, national governments and transnational laws regarding money-laundering and taxation form another barrier to adoption, meaning that to use bitcoin is either to step far outside the law, into the wild west of narcotics, credit card fraud and the oft-fabled assassination markets, or to participate legally, handing over one’s actual ID to brokers and thus linking oneself to transactions in a way that undermines the entire point of an anonymous, cryptographically secure system.

What is blockchain for?

Even if Bitcoin can’t emancipate everyone, it might at least do less harm than current systems. Yet in the last couple of years, bitcoin has made as many headlines for its environmental impact as for its political power.

The value of bitcoin supposedly comes from the computational work required to mine it, but it might more accurately be said that it derives from a more traditional type of mining: the vast consumption and combustion of cheap Chinese coal.

It’s become terrifyingly clear that the ‘mining’ of bitcoin is an inescapably wasteful process. Vast amounts of computational energy, consuming vast quantities of electricity, and outgassing vast quantities of heat and carbon dioxide, are devoted to solving complex equations in return for money. The total power consumption of the network exceeds that of a small country – 42TWh in 2016, equivalent to a million transatlantic flights – and continues to grow.

Bitcoin mining facility, from CoinDesk archives

As the value of bitcoin rises, mining becomes more and more profitable, and the incentive to consume ever more energy increases. This, too, is surely in opposition to any claim to belong to the future, even if one is to take into account the utter devastation imposed upon the earth by our current systems of government and finance.

These complaints, which are both uncomfortably true in the present and addressable in time by adjustments to the underlying system, mask the larger unsolved problem posed by the blockchain: what is it really for? Somewhere between the establishment of the Cypherpunk mailing list and the unveiling of the first bitcoin exchange, a strange shift, even a forgetting, occurred in the development of the technology.

What had started out as a wild experiment in autonomous self-government became an exercise in wealth creation for a small coterie of tech-savvy enthusiasts and those insightful early adopters willing to take a risk on an entirely untested new technology. While bitcoin is largely to blame for this, by putting all of the potential of a truly distributed, anonymous network in the service of the market, to focus purely on this aspect of its unfolding is to ignore the potential that remains latent in Satoshi’s invention and example. It is to ignore the opportunity, rare in our time, to transform something conceived as a weapon into its opposite.

The arguments over the use of wartime weapons in a time of relative peace, made explicit in the Crypto Wars, have a clear analogue: nuclear technology. While the Allies’ desire for global dominance through atomic power was scuppered by Soviet espionage before it began, and the world settled into a Cold War backed by the horrifying possibility of mutually assured destruction, the nuclear powers agreed on one thing: if ever these weapons were to fall into the hands of non-state actors, the results would destroy not merely the social order, but life itself.

Similar arguments were made, at the end of the 20th century, about certain algorithms: the wide availability of cryptography would render toothless the apparatuses of state security and lead to the collapse of ordered society. While it’s easy to scoff now at the idea that the availability of certain complex mathematical processes would bring down governments, we are nevertheless faced with a different, more insidious, threat in the present: that of the substitution of one form of oppressive government with another.

While Tim May, part of the original Cypherpunk triumvirate, attested in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto that assassination and extortion markets were ‘abhorrent’, he had little time for those who weren’t part of the crypto utopia. In the sprawling Cyphernomicon, a wider exploration of crypto anarchy posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list, May was far clearer on the world he foresaw: ‘Crypto anarchy means prosperity for those who can grab it, those competent enough to have something of value to offer for sale; the clueless 95 percent will suffer, but that is only just.

With crypto anarchy, we can painlessly, without initiation of aggression, dispose of the nonproductive, the halt and the lame.

Lessons from the Atomic Age

Make no mistake: the possibility of cryptographically-enforced fascism is very real indeed.

A future where every transaction, financial or social, public or private, is irrevocably encoded in a public ledger which is utterly transparent to those in power is the very opposite of a democratic, egalitarian crypto utopia. Rather, it is the reinstatement of the divine right of kings, transposed to an elevated elite class where those with the money, whether they be state actors, central bankers, winner-takes-all libertarians or property-absolutist anarcho-capitalists, have total power over those who do not.

And yet, as in the nuclear age, there remains space for other imaginaries.

In the 1960s, in the name of the ‘friendly atom’, the United States instituted a series of test programs to ascertain whether the awesome power of the atomic bomb could be turned to peaceful ends. Their proposals, some of which were actually carried out, included the excavation of vast reservoirs for drinking water, the exploitation of shale gas (an extreme form of contemporary fracking) and the construction of new roadways. Another idea involved interstellar travel, using the intermittent displacement of atomic bombs in the trail of spacecraft to propel them to distant stars.

The former programme was given the name Project Plowshare, in reference to the Prophet Isaiah’s injunction to beat swords into plowshares. Long after the cancellation of the project in the face of keen public opposition, the name was taken up by the Plowshares movement, an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist organization that became well-known for direct action against nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy became a mainstay of everyday life, in the form of the greenest, if most deeply controversial, large-scale energy generation technology we possess. Its outputs, in the form of toxic, radioactive waste, became in turn a source of new contestations over the roles and responsibilities we have to one another, and to the environment.

There is no separation of our technology from the world. Bitcoin, in the decade since Satoshi Nakamoto first announced it, has succeeded technologically but failed politically, because we have failed to understand a central tenet, long established in political theory, that free markets do not create free people – only, and only occasionally, the other way round. A technology developed according to the founding principles of true anarchism – No Gods, No Masters – has already been suborned by capital, because of a lack of imagination and education, and a failure to organize ourselves in the service of true liberation, rather than personal enrichment. This is not a problem of technology, or technological understanding, but of politics.

Bitcoin’s touted environmental offenses are not a rogue emergent effect, nor the hubristic yet predictable outcome of techno-utopianism. Rather, they are a result of failing to grapple with the central problem of human relations, long diagnosed but rarely put to the test in such dramatic fashion: how to work together in the light of radical equality without falling back into the domination of the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak.

But the emergence of that particular offense at this particular time should chime with our position in history. The problem of taking effective global action in leaderless networks is not a problem confined to bitcoin; in the face of global climate change, it is the primary problem facing humanity today. Like language, the printed word, steam, nuclear power and the internet, another miraculous savior technology is revealed to be a timely question asked directly to our capacity for change.

At the time of writing, and despite the best, the worst, the most unconsidered and the most deliberate intentions of its progenitors, the blockchain is primarily being used to drive the creation of a new class of monopolists, to securitise existing asset structures, to produce carbon dioxide and to set in stone a regime of surveillance and control unprecedented in the dreams of autocrats.

And yet, and yet.

The problem created by blockchain, and dramatized by bitcoin, is fundamentally inseparable from the political situation it emerged from: the eternal battle between power structures and individual rights. The solution to this problem is not to be found in the technology alone, but in radically different political imaginaries. A word often heard in the corridors of the new blockchain industry seems to encapsulate the inherent contradictions of a cryptologically ordered future; that word is ‘trustless’. The concept of trustlessness is at the heart of a vision which seeks to escape from established systems of power by making each individual sovereign to themselves, cryptographically secured, anonymous, untraceable and thus ungovernable.

Yet lack of government is but one plank in the construction of freedom: commonality, community and mutual support are equally, if not more, important. This is demonstrated, ultimately, even in the market: as David Graeber has put it, ‘the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings’.

Blockchain, whatever products it might engender in the short term, poses a necessary problem that we should seek to answer not through technological fixes and traditional political forms but through the participation of the widest and most diverse public possible, and the creation of new forms of political relationships between one another.

Bitcoin image via CoinDesk archives

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

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southcoastvintage · 7 years

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Portrait of Reverend Alonzo H. Quint. Catalog #2000.100.2323. Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Memorial Day, 1869. Excerpts from the New Bedford Mercury. “Whatever evils threaten our country are not found in the old soldiery… It is the corruption which is eating out honor in public affairs; the shameless venality, in which members of legislatures are bought and sold, or, now and then, a whole legislature at once; the “rings” which dictate statutes and purchase officials; the laws which are framed to make the rich manufacturer richer and the poor buyer poorer…” Rev. Dr. Quint Grand Chaplain of the Army of the Republic, 1869. In accordance with order issued by the Grand Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic… William Logan Rodman Encampment, Post No. 1, of this city, decorated, on Saturday last… the graves of our deceased heroes, in the cemeteries of New Bedford and vicinity. The day was by no means a propitious one, the rain of the evening previous having so muddied our streets, as to make them disagreeable to pedestrians, and deter many from marching in the column as they intended; and at the hour of forming the procession, the darkened sky gave every evidence of a wet and uncomfortable day. At the hour designated at 8 ½ A. M. the veterans and citizens taking part in the ceremonies of the day, reported to Lieut. W. T. Soule, at the City Hall, and shortly after 9 o’clock, at a signal of three guns fired from the roof the Custom House by Mr. John B. Smith, the column moved… The post had on parade about 80 men in all departments, the color-guard being under arms, and the colors borne by two mutilated men, Edward T. Chapman and Samuel P. Winegar. The number of veterans, not members of the Grand Army, was small; the clergy of our city was fully represented, as well as our various civil offices. The procession moved through the Rural Cemetery, which was quite abundantly decorated with the national colors, the bright hues of which mingled pleasantly with the beautiful green shrubbery around. The column halted in about the centre of the cemetery, the guest alighted from their carriages, and perfect quiet being obtained, an earnest and fervent prayer was offered by Rev. Daniel D. Winn, and the list of those known to be buried in the cemetery was read by comrade Isaac H. Coe, in a remarkably clear and distinct voice. The beautiful and appropriate air “Leaf by leaf the roses fall,” was played by the band, while the disabled veterans performed the solemn task of decorating the graves of those who lost their lives in the defence of the old Flag, placing wreaths and bouquets of beautiful flowers upon the graves, while many tearful eyes around gave testimony to the tender reverence and affection for the dead soldiers. From the cemetery, the procession passed through Parker street gate, up Parker street to the Common, which place it reached at 12 ½ o’clock, a salute of thirty-seven guns being fired upon its approach under the direction of Sergt. Joseph Wing, formerly of the Third Rhode Island Battery, and who served through the entire war… Capt. Cobb then introduced Rev. Dr. Quint Grand Chaplain of the Army of the Republic, who spoke as follows… Comrades: — Two great events in the history of the present generation are unexampled. The first is the alacrity with which a million of citizens, unused to war, voluntarily sprang to arms in defence of their national flag against treason… The second is, that contrary to all predictions and all historical precedents, the soldiers of that great army, at the close of the war, peacefully, quietly, settled down in their homes, returned to their business and to their trades, melted back into the ranks of citizens, and gave one grand example to the world that disbanded soldiers can be as loyal to law in peace as they were true to the sword in war… War was not the trade of the men of 1861. It had no fascination. It required many a sacrifice. It was not to be the business of life It was chosen freely, out of love of country…It was equally as great a spectacle when these men, altogether transformed by four years of the camp, the march, and the line of battle, into a different race, laid aside their banners, stacked arms, and calmly went to their work. Where are the scenes of riot and disorder which were predicted? Where are the lawless plunderers which were prophesied? Where are the insecure villages, the dismayed towns, the alarmed cities, that were foreshadowed? In other countries, the disbanded armies have been terrors. Who fears now? Or, in the opposite danger, where is the military dictator riding at the head of his merciless columns to supreme rule? Our leader sits in the chair of government; but it is by the voice of a free people, chosen in the lawful way, and obedient himself to every law of the land. Whatever evils threaten our country are not found in the old soldiery… It is the corruption which is eating out honor in public affairs; the shameless venality, in which members of legislatures are bought and sold, or, now and then, a whole legislature at once; the “rings” which dictate statutes and purchase officials; the laws which are framed to make the rich manufacturer richer and the poor buyer poorer and the spirit of greed and covetousness which sanctions such laws… The men who knew the inspiration of a great cause cannot well descend to the depths of the politician… Let them never forget the manly life of past days, the honor of their victory, the glory of their country, the graves of their dead. …Go said the President, your work is done, you are free. No, we were not free… No power can free us from the duties which we owe to the disabled soldiers, the widow, the orphan. No power can absolve us from the eternal reverence to the Flag, and fidelity to the country over which it now waves in glorious supremacy… We have embodied three principles, Fraternity, Charity, Loyalty. We tell all the world, that to maintain these, 400,000 veterans are still united…We question no man’s religious faith. We ask not what his rank once was or now is. Fraternity… High or low; rich or poor, an old comrade is a brother. He shall not feel that, how the need of his arm is ended, he has no friends. He shall find a friend wherever those live who can say, “I was at Manassas, and I was at Antietam, and I was at Gettysburg, and I was at Goldsboro’, and I was at Shiloh, and I was at Kenesaw, and I was at Mobile, and I was with Farragut. Charity. We see the maimed men, shattered in health, without employment, and often without power to work, often discouraged, their old business gone, their lives weary; and we have pledged ourselves that so far as in our power lies, they shall have the cheering word, the hearty hand, the open purse. We see widows and children who had comfortable support before the head of the home was laid under the sod, now troubled for their daily food; and we have solemnly said… no widow or orphan of a dead soldier shall lack bread for their hunger or shows for their feet or fire for their homes… We say it for this community, which stands ready to give freely whenever we show them the hungry and the cold. Loyalty. By the flag which waves over us we have pledged ourselves to an undying loyalty to our country… We pledge ourselves to obey the laws of the land. We promise to uphold purity and honesty in public affairs. We are all united against treason… Thank God there is one place where a rebel can never come! Whether against insidious treachery at home, or against foreign foes, these 400,000 are pledged to defend the flag, whenever the national authority calls us… If in our day that time comes, which is sure some time to come, when the pride of England is to be humbled, the country will find these veterans ready for the bugle. And in the spirit of unswerving loyalty we shall educate our children to take our places when we too lie in the ground. Comrades, we have adopted a sacred public duty. It is this day performed. Every year when the grass is green and the winds grow mild, we take flowers – spring flowers, fresh and delicate—and reverently place them on the graves of the honored dead… Their work is done. The country is safe… But in memory of the past and faithfulness to the living, we leave the flowers and go our way to do our duty in the land which the dead and living made glorious. Not we alone. These flowers were gathered by other hands for us to use. Women gathered them and made them into wreaths and crosses. Men looked reverently on. This is not our day: it is the people’s day, in which every loyal man has his own right… Aching hearts own these graves. Fathers and mothers, widows and children won the sacred spots where the dead are laid. Their dead! This people’s dead!… In the late session of soldiers at Cincinnati there was presented a memorial that we petition Congress to make the 30th day of May a legal holiday. I venture to tell that I was the only one who spoke upon the subject. And I said only this: “I do not like this proposition. The beauty of our ‘Decoration day’ is in its being spontaneous. We do not want the merest shadow of law to constrain its celebration. Of the sweetest flowers, you cannot extract the perfume by law or art. Such is a people’s gratitude to our dead. That they voluntarily lay aside their day’s work, and crown the graves with flowers, in inexpressibly beautiful. But if the dedication of that day ever ceases to be the farewell offering of a grateful people, let the graves be left to the covering of God’s green grass alone.” This feeling was universal. It is ours now. Our hearts are grateful to those who honor the dead, because it is their free offering… But while you cherish such memories as you do now, you and your children, and your children’s children will preserve the grand old nation and guard its great Flag, for which the soldiers fought and the women prayed in the days of trouble, — preserving the immortal principles which live when the graves are level with the ground, and the stones are covered with the moss of years.” A benediction was then pronounced by Rev. Mr. Walker, of Fairhaven, at the close of which the Soldier’s Monument was decorated with flowers. A salute of two guns was fired, and the procession took up its line of march for Fairhaven, reaching the bridge at 2 ½ o’clock. As the column passed Pope’s Island, the artillery, which had gone there in advance, fired a salute of four guns. At nearly 3 o’clock the procession reached Fairhaven whose streets were thronged with people… There was a halt made at the residence of Capt. John A. Hawes, and beautiful crosses, wreaths and bouquets of fresh flowers placed in the wagons. Upon reaching Riverside Cemetery a large number of people were found assembled, relatives and friends of the noble dead there interred. The procession halted, and grouped themselves around the fine Soldiers’ Monument, which marks the last resting place of most of Fairhaven’s citizens who laid down their lives for their country. Rev. A. S. Walker, of Fairhaven, then delivered a most eloquent and impressive address… All things appeared to be in sympathy with the solemn ceremonies of the day. In the morning, the clouds wept and even now the heavens were draped in mourning. They had assembled here to-day, not only to decorate the graves of those who had fallen… but of those who had been brought back from the front, with their frames shattered by disease and exposure, to die in the arms of their families and friends… … The decoration of these graves was not a token of remembrance, it was an act of love...

#Memorial Day New Bedford civil war

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6dogs9cats · 8 years

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President Obama Writes His Final Letter to the People. Read and Spread.

To my fellow Americans,

Eight years ago, America faced a moment of peril unlike any we’d seen in decades.

A spiraling financial crisis threatened to plunge an economy in recession into a deep depression. The very heartbeat of American manufacturing – the American auto industry – was on the brink of collapse. In some communities, nearly one in five Americans were out of work. Nearly 180,000 American troops were serving in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the mastermind of the worst terror attack on American soil remained at large. And on challenges from health care to climate change, we’d been kicking the can down the road for way too long.

But in the depths of that winter, on January 20, 2009, I stood before you and swore a sacred oath. I told you that day that the challenges we faced would not be met easily or in a short span of time – but they would be met. And after eight busy years, we’ve met them – because of you.

Eight years later, an economy that was shrinking at more than eight percent is now growing at more than three percent. Businesses that were bleeding jobs unleashed the longest streak of job creation on record. The auto industry has roared its way back, saving one million jobs across the country and fueling a manufacturing sector that, after a decade of decline, has added new jobs for the first time since the 1990s. And wages have grown faster over the past few years than at any time in the past forty.

Today, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, another 20 million American adults know the financial security and peace of mind that comes with health insurance. Another three million children have gained health insurance. For the first time ever, more than ninety percent of Americans are insured – the highest rate ever. We’ve seen the slowest growth in the price of health care in fifty years, along with improvements in patient safety that have prevented an estimated 87,000 deaths. Every American with insurance is covered by the strongest set of consumer protections in history – a true Patients’ Bill of Rights – and free from the fear that illness or accident will derail your dreams, because America is now a place where discrimination against preexisting conditions is a relic of the past. And the new health insurance marketplace means that if you lose your job, change your job, or start that new business, you’ll finally be able to purchase quality, affordable care and the security and peace of mind that comes with it – and that’s one reason why entrepreneurship is growing for the second straight year.

Our dependence on foreign oil has been cut by more than half, and our production of renewable energy has more than doubled. In many places across the country, clean energy from the wind is now cheaper than dirtier sources of energy, and solar now employs more Americans than coal mining in jobs that pay better than average and can’t be outsourced. We also enacted the most sweeping reforms since the Great Depression to protect consumers and prevent a crisis on Wall Street from punishing Main Street ever again. These actions didn’t stifle growth, as critics predicted. Instead, the stock market has nearly tripled. Since I signed Obamacare into law, America’s businesses have added more than 15 million new jobs. And the economy is undoubtedly more durable than it was in the days when we relied on oil from unstable nations and banks took risky bets with your money.

The high school graduation rate is now 83 percent – the highest on record – and we’ve helped more young people graduate from college than ever before. At the same time, we’ve worked to offer more options for Americans who decide not to pursue college, from expanding apprenticeships, to launching high-tech manufacturing institutes, to revamping the job training system and creating programs like TechHire to help people train for higher-paying jobs in months, not years. We’ve connected more schools across the country to broadband internet, and supported more teachers to bring coding, hands-on making, and computational thinking into our classrooms to prepare all our children for a 21st century economy.

Add it all up, and last year, the poverty rate fell at the fastest rate in almost fifty years while the median household income grew at the fastest rate on record. And we’ve done it all while cutting our deficits by nearly two-thirds even as we protected investments that grow the middle class.

Meanwhile, over the past eight years, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland. Plots have been disrupted. Terrorists like Osama bin Laden have been taken off the battlefield. We’ve drawn down from nearly 180,000 troops in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan to just 15,000. With a coalition of more than 70 nations and a relentless campaign of more than 16,000 airstrikes so far, we are breaking the back of ISIL and taking away its safe havens, and we’ve accomplished this at a cost of $10 billion over two years – the same amount that we spent in one month at the height of the Iraq War.

At the same time, America has led the world to meet a set of global challenges. Through diplomacy, we shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program, opened up a new chapter with the people of Cuba, and brought nearly 200 nations together around a climate agreement that could save this planet for our kids. With new models for development, American assistance is helping people around the world feed themselves, care for their sick, and power communities across Africa. And almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago. All of this progress is due to the service of millions of Americans in intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security, diplomacy, and the brave men and women of our Armed Forces – the most diverse institution in America.

We’ve also worked to make the changing face of America more fair and more just – including by making strides towards criminal justice reform, making progress towards equal pay, repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and advancing the cause of civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights. I appointed two extraordinary women to the Supreme Court, marking the first time in history that three women sit on the bench, including the first Latina. And today in America, marriage equality is finally a reality across all fifty states.

This is where America stands after eight years of progress. By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started – a situation I’m proud to leave for my successor. And it’s thanks to you – to the hard work you’ve put in; the sacrifices you’ve made for your families and communities; the way you’ve looked out for one another.

Still, through every victory and every setback, I’ve insisted that change is never easy, and never quick; that we wouldn’t meet all of our challenges in one term, or one presidency, or even in one lifetime. And for all that we’ve achieved, there’s still so much I wish we’d been able to do, from enacting gun safety measures to protect more of our kids and our cops from mass shootings like Newtown, to passing commonsense immigration reform that encourages the best and brightest from around the world to study, stay, and create jobs in America.

And for all the incredible progress our economy has made in just eight years, we still have more work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a dignified retirement. We have to acknowledge the inequality that has come from an increasingly globalized economy while committing ourselves to making it work better for everyone, not just those at the top, and give everyone who works hard a fair shot at success.

And here’s the thing – over the past eight years, we’ve shown that we can. Last year, income gains were actually larger for households at the bottom and the middle than for those at the top. We’ve also made the tax code fairer. The tax changes enacted over the past eight years have ensured that the top one percent of Americans pay more of their fair share, increasing the share of income received by all other families by more than the tax changes in any previous administration since at least 1960. Simply put, we’ve actually begun the long task of reversing inequality. But as the global economy changes, we’ll have to do more to accelerate these trends, from strengthening unions that speak for workers, to preventing colleges from pricing out hardworking students, to making sure that minimum wage workers get a raise and women finally get paid the same as men for doing the same job. What won’t help is taking health care away from 30 million Americans, most of them white and working class; denying overtime pay to workers, most of whom have more than earned it; or privatizing Medicare and Social Security and letting Wall Street regulate itself again – none of which middle-class Americans voted for.

We will have to move forward as we always have – together. As a people who believe that out of many, we are one; that we are bound not by any one race or religion, but rather an adherence to a common creed; that all of us are created equal in the eyes of God. And I’m confident we will. Because the change we’ve brought about these past eight years was never about me. It was about you. It is you, the American people, who have made the progress of the last eight years possible. It is you who will make our future progress possible. That, after all, is the story of America – a story of progress. However halting, however incomplete, however harshly challenged at each point on our journey – the story of America is a story of progress.

Recently, I asked each member of my talented and dedicated Cabinet to prepare a detailed report on the progress we’ve made across the board these past eight years, and the work that remains to make this country we love even stronger. Today, I’m sharing them with you. And I hope you’ll share them with others, and do your part to build on the progress we’ve made across the board.

It has been the privilege of my life to serve as your President. And as I prepare to pass the baton and do my part as a private citizen, I’m proud to say that we have laid a new foundation for America. A new future is ours to write. And I’m as confident as ever that it will be led by the United States of America – and that our best days are still ahead.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

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peppernephew7-blog · 5 years

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2:00PM Water Cooler 11/30/2018

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Trade

“Xi and Trump Should Swallow Their Pride and Join the TPP” [Foreign Policy]. ‘The only way forward is to seek peaceful coexistence through piecemeal compromise. The perfect vehicle for such talks is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the multilateral free trade deal negotiated under former U.S. President Barack Obama, abandoned by Trump, and resurrected by other Asian-Pacific trade partners such as Japan. The G-20 meeting between Trump and Xi should produce an announcement that the United States and China will be launching bilateral negotiations to join the TPP together.”

“Trump signs NAFTA replacement deal ahead of the G20 summit” [CNN]. “The ceremonial signing does not mean the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — the USMCA, as it has been rebranded — will now go into effect. The deal still needs to win congressional approval in Washington, where key members of both political parties have already expressed significant concerns. ‘I don’t expect to have much of a problem,’Trump said during the ceremony.”

“Schumer calls for improvements to new NAFTA deal” [The Hill]. Schumer: “I am most interested in ensuring that any final agreement protects our dairy farmers and that there is real enforcement of new and tough labor provisions. The deal must also raise wages and should recognize that climate change is a grave threat to our countries’ economies and the health and safety of our citizens.” And–

I oppose NAFTA 2.0, and I will vote against it in the Senate unless @realDonaldTrump reopens the agreement and produces a better deal for America’s working families.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 29, 2018

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

2020

“Bernie Sanders Puts Forward a Program That Could Split the Democratic Party” [Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report]. “[T]he immediate obstacle to Sanders’ proposals for Medicare-For-All, tuition-free public higher education, expanded Social Security, a $15 an hour minimum wage, “bold action” on climate change, fixing the criminal justice system, comprehensive immigration reform, progressive tax reform, a $1 trillion infrastructure overhaul and cheaper prescription drugs, is not Donald Trump’s GOP troglodytes — it’s Nancy Pelosi and her corporate Democrats, who answer to a much higher power: big capital…. Sanders doesn’t have to win the White House to bring about this historic “creative destruction.” He just has to wreck the Party. If the Party sabotages him in the primaries, as in 2016, then progressives will get another chance to do the right thing, and say goodbye to the Democrats. Or, if Sanders wins, hopefully the corporatists will follow the money and run away to the GOP, or form their own Third Way party, and leave the Democratic carcass to the poor folks. Any split will do the trick, as long as the result is a non-corporate mass party.”

“Sanders Institute Brings Star Power to Burlington” [Seven Days]. “A star-studded crowd joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the Burlington waterfront Thursday night to kick off a three-day conference hosted by the nonprofit Sanders Institute…. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, actress Susan Sarandon, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis were among those scheduled to address such topics as climate change, housing and criminal justice reform.” Sanders (video): “We have got to make sure that the Democratic party is not just the party of the east coast and the west coast. It is a party of every state in this country. Our job is to make sure that the issues that we deal with, that people understand they impact black families in New York City, they impact white families in Kansas and Latino families in Los Angeles.” • Heads explode at the mention of Susan Sarondon….

“The Making of Elizabeth Warren” [Politico]. “For Warren, that first go-around with Dr. Phil was an epiphany. She was not being asked to talk to a reader on the other side of a printed page but to counsel actual people sitting right there in the same studio. ‘I had done interviews about [The Two-Income Trap]’ she told me, ‘but never had someone turn directly to me and say, ‘Here’s a family, here’s their problem. Give them some advice, Elizabeth.’ And that’s what I did.’ Perhaps more important, she realized viscerally the disproportionate but equally undeniable reach of TV—that ‘by spending a few minutes talking to the family on Dr. Phil’s show,’ she would write in her 2014 memoir, she ‘might have done more good than in an entire year’ on campus.” • It is true that Warren is a good explainer.

“Clinton does little to dampen 2020 speculation” [The Hill]. “‘I don’t understand the wisdom of telling a woman who has made history in our party and in the country to get off the stage,’ said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Clinton. ‘Assuming the campaign learns from its missteps, she’d be fine.'” • Oh my.

“Goodbye Midterm Dynamic, Hello Presidential Politics” [Stuart Rothenberg, Inside Elections]. “In presidential years, voters cast separate ballots for president and for Congress. During midterms, those same voters don’t have a presidential ballot, so they don’t have a direct way to express their dissatisfaction with the person in the Oval Office apart from voting against the nominees of the president’s party… With Trump not on the ballot — but traveling around the country saying that he was in fact on the ballot — the only way to send a signal of dissatisfaction to the White House and to make a statement about changing the direction of the country was to vote against Republicans for federal office. That is exactly what swing voters (including independents and college-educated whites) and core Democratic demographic groups did.”

2018

“The thrills and chills of a Democratic supermajority” [Los Angeles Daily News]. “With many ballots yet to be counted, it appears Democrats will have 60 votes in the 80-member Assembly and 29 votes in the 40-member Senate. There hasn’t been a Democratic supermajority of this size in California since 1883. The new supermajorities of roughly three-quarters in each house represent an unprecedented level of power, particularly when added to Democratic control of every statewide office. The future of California could be reshaped by it. Stakeholders are lined up to demand more money for affordable housing, infrastructure and expanded public assistance. Yet the state faces an enormous unfunded liability for public worker pensions and benefits. Combined with increased spending, it could plunge the state into disaster in an economic downturn.” • You’d think CalPERS would be mentioned by name….

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The new wave of Democrats owes a huge debt to people power” [Gary Younge, Guardian]. “There has been a gale afoot for some time now. The election of the most racially diverse and most female Congress ever is clearly a product of a moment in which #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, Women’s Marches, Fight for 15, immigrant rights, gun control and climate change have emerged or continued to surge. The election of a misogynist bigot to the White House has doubtless been a catalyst for women and minorities to stand for election too.” • Partly a product. I don’t see how you put the election of former CIA operatives, even in female, into this frame at all. “Not enough,” as Sander would say, that they’re women!

Stats Watch

Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, November 2018: “a very good month for Chicago’s PMI sample” [Econoday]. “New orders surged…. Hiring picked up…. This report can be volatile as demonstrated with today’s results which contrast with other business surveys that indicate November’s pace either held steady or slowed.” And: “The Fed manufacturing surveys have been trending down – and the Chicago ISM strongly expanded” [Econintersect]. And: “well above the consensus forecast” [Calculated Risk].

Commodities: “Commodities Drop Looks Secular, Not Cyclical” [MarketWatch]. “Any way you measure it, the market for commodities is suffering. The Bloomberg Commodity Index of 22 key raw materials ranging from oil to copper to soybeans has dropped about 10 percent since reaching an almost three-year high in May. I’ve identified 10 forces that explain the weakness and why it will persist.”

Retail: “Payless sold its discount shoes for $600 a pair at mock luxury influencer event” [USA Today]. “Payless took over a former Armani store, renamed the retail location as “Palessi” and stocked the outlet with its discount-priced boots, heels, tennis and leisure shoes. Then, it invited a flock of partygoers and sold them the shoes, typically priced at $20 to $40 in Payless stores, at inflated designer price tags of $200 to $600. “Palessi” sold about $3,000 worth of shoes within a few hours…”

Tech: “Company Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview” [Patent Panda]. “[D]uring the second year of my PhD at the [MIT] Media Lab. I was invited to visit Google ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) to learn about some of their new projects in storytelling. I got to visit their space, meet some of my creative heroes and I shared with them all of my work in interactive books and storytelling…. What started as just a visit quickly turned into a job interview. I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot.” The writer turned down the job to stay in school. Time passes… “Two years later, in March 2016 I find out from some paper engineering friends that some of the same people who had interviewed me had also applied for patents on interactive pop-up books with electronics. These patents covered many of the same things that had discussed, that I’d showed them, with no mention of my or others’ work in the field.” • Wowsers.

The Bezzle: “Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don’t call back when asked for evidence” [The Register]. “Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success. Three practitioners including erstwhile blockchain enthusiast John Burg, a Fellow at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), looked at instances of the distributed crypto ledger being used in a wide range of situations by NGOs, contractors and agencies. But they drew a complete blank. ‘We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles,’ Burg et al wrote. ‘However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development.'” • Hilarity ensues.

The Bezzle: “British tech billionaire Mike Lynch charged with fraud in the US over $11 billion Autonomy sale” [Business Insider]. “Lynch sold Autonomy to HP for $11.7 billion (£9.2 billion) in 2011. A year later, HP’s CEO claimed the company had wildly inflated its earnings, and subsequently wrote it down by $8.8 billion. In response Lynch launched a countersuit, claiming HP was scapegoating him for its own incompetence. On Thursday, the US Department of Justice filed 14 charges of fraud against Lynch in a San Francisco court, along with Autonomy’s former vice president for finance Stephen Chamberlain. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.”

The Bezzle: “Tesla has reached production milestone of 1,000 Model 3s a day: report” [MarketWatch]. “According to an internal email from Chief Executive Elon Musk to employees, which Electrek said it obtained, Musk told employees to focus on keeping that 1,000-a-day production level steady and to look for ways to reduce costs and find efficiencies. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request to confirm the report.” • Dubious provenance….

Gaia

“We Can Pay For A Green New Deal” [Stephanie Kelton, et al., HuffPo]. “We need a mass mobilization of people and resources, something not unlike the U.S. involvement in World War II or the Apollo moon missions ― but even bigger. We must transform our energy system, transportation, housing, agriculture and more…. Here’s the good news: Anything that is technically feasible is financially affordable. And it won’t be a drag on the economy ― unlike the climate crisis itself, which will cause tens of billions of dollars worth of damage to American homes, communities and infrastructure each year. A Green New Deal will actually help the economy by stimulating productivity, job growth and consumer spending, as government spending has often done. (You don’t have to go back to the original New Deal for evidence of that.) In fact, a Green New Deal can create good-paying jobs while redressing economic and environmental inequities.” • Well worth a read.

“Climate change: Australian students skip school for mass protest” [BBC]. “School Strike 4 Climate Action protests have been held in every state capital and 20 regional towns.”

“How Wildfires Are Making Some California Homes Uninsurable” [New York Times]. “California’s wildfires keep growing bigger, more frequent and more destructive. Of the 20 worst wildfires in state history, four were just last year, giving rise to a record $12.6 billion of insurance claims. It hasn’t gotten any better this year…. ‘We’re not in a crisis yet, but all of the trends are in a bad direction,’ said Dave Jones, who is completing his eighth and final year as California’s insurance commissioner. ‘We’re slowly marching toward a world that’s uninsurable.’” • Ulp.

“Coal is still king in global power production” [Phys.org]. “Coal remains the most widely used means of electricity production in the world. It also happens to be the biggest emitter of climate-changing carbon dioxide of any fuel. Despite efforts to tackle global warming, worldwide demand for coal was up one percent last year, mainly due to demand in Asia…. India seems set to replace China as the world’s biggest coal consumer while Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Vietnam have also registered big increases.”

“Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians have been exposed to dangerous PFAS chemicals, including around Pittsburgh’s airport” [Public Source]. “The contamination is from a class of chemicals referred to as PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances). The chemicals have gotten into water supplies in hundreds of locations across the country and are associated with a range of cancers and serious illnesses in humans, even if they’ve been exposed to very small amounts…. In 2016, at least six million Americans were thought to have been exposed to PFAS through their drinking water. The Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group that studies the chemicals, concluded that more than 220,000 Pennsylvanians were likely exposed to PFAS. But in May the group estimated the number of people exposed nationally is about seven times higher than they originally thought. Its latest analysis suggests more than 110 million people in the nation may have been exposed through their drinking water.”

“Mathematical Simplicity May Drive Evolution’s Speed” [Quanta]. “Creationists love to insist that evolution had to assemble upward of 300 amino acids in the right order to create just one medium-size human protein. With 20 possible amino acids to occupy each of those positions, there would seemingly have been more than 20300 possibilities to sift through, a quantity that renders the number of atoms in the observable universe inconsequential. Even if we discount redundancies that would make some of those sequences effectively equivalent, it would have been wildly improbable for evolution to have stumbled onto the correct combination through random mutations within even billions of years…. ” • But they don’t take Kolmogorov complexity into account! (Sorry, I couldn’t find a quotable nugget after the lead! But the article is interesting….)

“Study Finds Rising Sea Levels Result Of Expansive Colonization Effort By Dolphins” [The Onion].

Class Warfare

“Grinnell student workers approve campuswide union; school’s move to quash has national implications” [Des Moines Register]. “Grinnell College students voted to expand unionization of student workers, but the move could be short-lived as the school tries to quash the unionization by appealing to a Republican-majority National Labor Relations Board.” • That’s shocking. The Grinnell motto: “Truth and Humanity.”

“Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.” [New York Times]. “T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges…. In reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity….” Interestingly: “Some alumni, especially those who spent only a short time at T.M. Landry, have been successful.” • Brings up the idea that the Ivies are meant to filter out talent, rather than encourage it…

“Suicide and the chimera of American prosperity” [The Week]. “It will be tempting for some liberals to argue that the drug and suicide epidemic, which is most pronounced in states like West Virginia and in the post-industrial Midwest, is the muted response of white Americans to the prospect of their irrelevance in a rapidly diversifying country. But that’s not what I think is happening — and not just because David Duke probably says the same thing. For one thing, the despair that is the underlying cause of these phenomena is universal. The difference is that black and Hispanic communities have more hard-won resilience than whites who have led increasingly atomized, if comparatively more prosperous, existences for half a century now. They live in self-segregated communities in which the only meaningful bonds with their neighbors and even their extended families are those to which they have consented. Their experience has not prepared them for financial uncertainty, violence, atrophying attention spans, and drug taking. For them there really is no such thing as society.?

“In 1970s, workers at this GM plant tried to reinvent the American Dream. Instead, they watched it fade away” [Will Bunch, The Inquirer]. “The young lords of Lordstown found the assembly line — 35 second bursts of a dull, repetitive task, and a 5-second break before the next Impala or Vega rolled up — to be soul-crushing work. Botched cars — some of them slashed, deliberately sabotaged by angry workers — piled up in the giant lot outside the factory. A good chunk of the labor force had little fear of conflict with their bosses because they’d recently returned from the front lines in Vietnam.”

News of the Wired

“There Is Gas Under the Tundra” (photographs) [Lens Culture]. “[W]hile Xelot’s images of the peculiar fire-ice balance are arresting enough as still visuals, there are also features of the setting that cannot be captured with a camera’s lens. ‘These huge [LNG] flames in the tundra make a lot of noise, and they are incredibly hot. While I was photographing I almost burned my finger off. The atmosphere’s temperature is -30°C, but the closer you get, the more it burns, which is an impressive sensation. The tundra is historically a very silent place, but inside the yards it is noisy and crowded, and I try to make this contrast come through in the photographs.'”

Vaccination and public health. Thread:

Dear parents of children who do not have cancer: a casual measles exposure in a grocery store caused the following things to happen when my child was in chemotherapy:

— Nicole Stellon O’Donnell (@SteamLaundry) November 21, 2018

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Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Today’s plant(KH):

KH: “The recent rains, on Hawaii Island’s west side, have caused an explosion of fountain grass and the pure white Hawaiian poppy, along the ocean.”

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This entry was posted in Guest Post, Water Cooler on November 30, 2018 by Lambert Strether.

About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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