Tegan Tuesday: “Smart” devices are giving corporations the ability to surveil you and your family 24/7

Digital security is an actual nightmare. We are surrounded by internet-capable technology at all times. Even if you personally do not have a smart watch, a smart phone, GoogleGlass, a car run through a computer, a smart doorbell, a smart washer, a smart fridge, a smart printer, a smart tv, a smart thermostat… the chances are incredibly high that your neighbor does.

And every single one of them is tracking you.

How could advertisers know what to sell you if it didn’t know that you mentioned ‘oreos’ in a conversation just seconds ago? What makes it even more frustrating is that this kind of technology is useful.

A woman I know with mobility issues and extreme temperature regulation problems has a smart thermostat because she can adjust it from her phone; an obviously helpful aspect for someone who’s bed-bound and having temperature problems. What is less helpful is the built-in feature where the power company can override any of her settings and decide FOR HER what temperature her house should be. Another woman I know has her smart watch connected to her pacemaker, all the better to moniter her health. Many of the technologies in my earlier list have equally helpful aspects to them. But just as people with sleep apnea have their CPAP machines locked or taken away from a perceived ‘lack of compliance’, each of these life-saving technologies are primarily being used to erode personal liberty and privacy.

What is honestly even more frustrating than this kind of monitoring is how easy they are to hack. There are countless stories of baby monitors being hacked, not to mention cars, smart tvs, and smart fridges. Each one of these systems, logged into your personal network, is a door to your personal data that could be used in a myriad of ways. Some of the reasons for this is that tech companies often don’t bother putting any effort into dealing with security. How many of us have gotten letters or emails informing us that Macy’s, or WalMart had a security breach and “your credit card information may be among those affected”? But with the prevalence of technology in every aspect of life, that risk is both compounded, and an expected part of life.

Ah well. We are adults. We can make the call about what is an acceptable invasion of privacy for improved ease of living or comfort. What then about the increasing amount of technology on children? We know the effects of long-term surveillance on developing minds: extremely negative. There have been discussions of the the impact of Elf on the Shelf (and it’s 24/7 surveillance of the child) for nearly a decade.

This was about the status of the interaction of life and technology up until 2020. Then the pandemic and its resulting lockdowns began. Jobs and schools alike went remote. Workers were observed at all times (Fun fact: my admin job in 2009 put surveillance software on my computer, so my boss could observe every action, every mouse movement, every keyboard entry. My boss could also override my own actions on my computer. I put in my two weeks that day. But how easy is it to find that type of job without it now?) But of course the mandatory laptops and tablets provided to students are monitoring their every move, too. In the case discussed above, think about the long-term implications of your child accidentally uploading child pornography just because their phone put their (fully clothed) selfie on the cloud or the school district’s network? This is a problem with far-reaching implications and I Want It Gone. The reckless and unrelenting monitoring of private information needs to stop.

Which brings me to the spot of good news: remote test proctoring software has been ruled a violation of constitutional rights. Cleveland State University, much like every other university on the planet, used a third-party monitoring program to assess whether students taking remote exams were cheating (My opinions about the over-reliance on exams and a pathological fear of ‘cheating’ is a different story). But a student went to court claiming that the proctoring software, which scanned his room and stored that information, was a violation of his privacy. The judge agreed! This type of monitoring is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right protecting citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. Which is absolutely wonderful news! Now to get from Stage: ‘It’s Illegal’, to Stage: ‘It’s Not Used.’

This is a long fight ahead, since laws always lag behind technology by at least a decade. But it’s a start.

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Video: Shaun’s take on the cost of the monarchy

This is an old video, but given current events, I think it’s worth sharing. Part of that is because the crown of the UK just changed hands (heads?), and a lot of people are voicing their opinions about the institution, and their justifications for keeping the House of Windsor in their palaces and finery. I also think it’s relevant because  a couple people have been arrested for voicing their opposition to hereditary monarchies. Aside from one or two folks literally making the case for the Divine Right of Kings, mostly the arguments I’ve seen have been about how much money the Crown makes for the UK.

Combatting the frustration of slow change in a time of crisis

I talk a lot about the need for rapid systemic change, and I sometimes worry that I don’t do a good enough job drawing a line between the kinds of individual action for which I advocate, and the scale of change that I want to see in the world. I’ve been hoping for something to help build a sort of social momentum on climate change for a long time. Back in 2011 or so, I started advocating for members of the New England Quaker community who could, to contribute to a loan fund so members of that community could get zero-interest loans for stuff like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and so on. The idea was to have people pay back the loan out of savings on their power bills (always assuming they could afford to), and then contribute a little extra, as able, to grow the fund and help the next person. Ideally, over time, the number of people helped by that project would grow, and the speed at which they could make change would increase. There have definitely been a number of group efforts on solar panel installation since then, but I don’t know if anything that organized ever cropped up.

Since then, as you may have noticed, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to address the systemic problems that are blocking climate action, but that basic principle remains the same – if you have the patience to do things right at the beginning, you build a movement that’s flexible, hard to eradicate, and capable of achieving great things seemingly overnight. Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay that discussed similar topics a while back, and she recently shared this cartoon illustrating a section of that essay.

For those of you who can’t see it, the image in the tweet is three horizontal, rectangular panels, arranged vertically under the title, “Mushroomed:”. The top panel has a picture of a single mushroom, the second shows several in a cluster, and the third shows a cross-section of the soil, revealing all of those mushrooms to be part of the same organism lying beneath the soil. The images are accompanied by the following excerpt from Solnit’s essay:

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus.

The passage in question then goes on to make the metaphor explicit:

Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

Right now we’re at the foundation-laying stage. We’re forming those underground connections (called “hyphae“, if you’re interested), and extending our ability to interact, pool resources, and plan for the future. For me, this process is frustrating, and painfully slow, but it’s important to recognize that the small actions we take can be part of much larger change, especially of those actions are made with the larger change in mind. Altering consumer choices is an “individual change”, but it’s one that has proven itself to be incapable of supporting the more dramatic change that we need. To switch back to the building metaphor, it’s a weak foundation. It might support a small shack above, but any attempt at something bigger will collapse.

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Wall Street is sacrificing lives for money, as usual.

There are patterns in this society of ours, and the most reliable one is rich people screwing over poor people, because the greed of the rich is endless. It’s frustrating to see the same problems happening year after year, decade after decade, without even any real change in the justifications given for poverty around the world. Our political and economic systems are designed to reward profit-seeking above all else, and this is the result:

Russia’s war on Ukraine has wreaked havoc on global commodity markets, driving up energy and food prices and exacerbating hunger emergencies around the world.

But while disastrous for the global poor—millions of whom are living on the brink of famine—the chaos has been a major boon for Wall Street giants, according to new data showing that the world’s 100 largest banks are on pace to smash commodity trading profit records this year.

“The 100 biggest banks by revenue are set to make $18 billion from commodities trading in 2022,” Bloomberg reported Friday, citing figures from the London-based firm Vali Analytics. “That would be the highest in the data, which goes back 14 years, and exceed the previous high watermark in 2009.”

“The prediction is the latest evidence that the wild swings in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine are delivering a boon to commodity traders, even as they push European nations into crisis,” Bloomberg added. “Vali, an analytics firm that tracks trading business, compiled data that includes the leading five banks in commodity trading: Macquarie Group Ltd., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and Morgan Stanley.”

I would argue that in addition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the volatility of the markets and the rise in food prices also relate to the climate emergencies that keep happening. I do not think we’re currently at the point of climate-driven famine. The current crisis is being caused by the same thing that has been causing most of the planet’s problems in my lifetime: Capitalism. I’ve discussed before how the profit motive leads corporations to grow food to feed to livestock, rather than people. This is another piece to the puzzle. In the magical land of Real Capitalism, “market forces” will take care of supply, rationing, and so on. If something becomes scarce, the price goes up, and people at the bottom just… do without. The problem is that there’s nothing in the system that actually places a value on people. We’re valued for the work we can do for those with money, but actual people? We’re just another over-regulated commodity, in the eyes of the aristocracy. That means they get to play games with human life, so they make more money:

“People’s misery makes capitalists’ superprofit,” Salvatore De Rosa, a researcher at the Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies, tweeted in response to Bloomberg‘s reporting. “How do you reform this?”

Wall Street banks have not just benefited from the commodity price increases—they’ve actively helped fuel them, experts say.

“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Mongabay in July.

“Commodity markets are supposed to be hedging markets for people who are dealing with the commodity involved,” Greenberger said. “In the case of wheat, it would be farmers and people buying wheat. But if we looked at it, there would be banks in there with no interest in what the price of wheat is, writing swaps and controlling this price.”

“It’s too easy to say the war in Ukraine has unbalanced all these markets, [or that] supply chains and the ports are shot, and that there’s a supply and demand reason for these prices going up,” Greenberger added. “My own best guess is anywhere from 10% to 25% of the price, at least, is dictated by deregulated speculative activity.”

There will always be an excuse. There will always be some justification for why things just have to be this way. This is not something that can just be reformed away. This is the inevitable result of an economic system designed to funnel money and power upwards. This is the system working as intended.

There’s also not any point at which things get so bad that the people just rise up and change everything. Maybe there have been revolutions like that in the past, but from what I can tell, the story of Les Miserables paints a more accurate picture of what happens if you expect “the people” to just rise up because life sucks.

Change – meaningful change – will only come from the bottom, and only through organization. Whether it’s getting people vital supplies, or communicating in a crisis, or bringing a nation to a halt with a general strike, organizing will be key. Humanity’s greatest strength is our ability to work together to achieve better results than we could alone. That stuff requires coordination, and we’re at a point where we need billions of people to pull in the same direction. Historically, we’ve left that kind of work to our governments, under the notion that they would work on our behalf. There are ways in which that abdication of responsibility does makes life easier for a great many people, but both history and current events show just how catastrophic that can be in the long term.

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Friday Film Review: The Sandman

Growing up, a lot of my taste in media was influenced by my older brother. I’ve encountered a lot of good stuff (and some bad stuff) based on either his recommendations, or on what he just had on his bookshelf. The Sandman was “good stuff”. It’s a surreal, and sometimes horrific comic about the anthropomorphic personification of The Dreaming – a world made up of the collective dreams of all beings. Those of you with the fortitude to read my first novel will probably notice rather a lot of influence from him in my writing at that point. While I’m grateful that I’ve outgrown that copycat phase in my own writing, Gaiman’s work – especially Sandman – remains some of my favorite fiction.

So I felt nervous when I hear there was going to be an adaptation of it. My mind tends to hold on to details from stories I read or watch, and so film adaptations have been a sore spot for me for a long time. The effects tend not to be as I imagined or hoped, the characters are interpreted differently, the plots are changed – it’s annoying to see an adaptation that falls short of what I feel the story deserved.

I was very worried about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation. Overall it was wonderful, and the effects were fantastic, but there were choices made that bothered me enough to sour the experience. I didn’t appreciate Frodo being turned into a sort of piteous burden, carried through the journey by others. It’s not that he didn’t need their help in the books, but he didn’t go catatonic every time the ringwraiths showed up. Likewise, I feel that Jackson butchered the character of Faramir, and his justification for it was rubbish.

All I will say about his adaptation of The Hobbit, is that I could barely make it through the first film, and didn’t bother with the others.

So yeah – my initial intent was to avoid this new adaptation like the plague. I don’t appreciate having schlocky film versions cluttering up my memories of a good story. That lasted for a while, but eventually my curiosity got the better of me. I’m glad it did.

I’d heard that Gaiman was working closely with this adaptation, which was a good sign. I also liked the recent adaptation of Good Omens – a collaboration between Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The fact that the original was in comic form also meant that the original vision was already there to copy. Combine that with recent advances in visual effects, and you’ve got everything you need for a good adaptation, at least in theory.

Even with newly elevated hopes, this show exceeded my expectations.

The first thing to note is that it’s very clear a lot of care went into recreating the visuals from the comics. The story will be familiar to those who’ve read them, and most of the characters will be largely what you expect. There are changes in appearance, and in some cases gender for a number of the characters, but in my opinion, they’ve done an admirable job in capturing the characters I’ve loved for so long.

Second, I want to talk about the changes. Any adaptation has changes from the original text. For all they’re both visual media, comics and film are still very different, and Sandman relies heavily on text narrative in addition to visuals and dialogue. The Sandman comics were also a part of the DC comics universe, and so a number of characters from that universe, like John Constantine or Martian Manhunter, needed no real introduction. This series is separate from that superhero universe, so some changes were made to allow for that, while keeping the central plot intact.

And honestly? A lot of the changes just made the story better. Violence and gore are some of the things that don’t tend to have a one-to-one translation from comics to film. While this series does have violence and gore, it’s less explicit than in the comics, and much more in service to plot and characters. A great many side characters are far more fleshed out, in ways that serve the story very well. The show also makes masterful use of suspense that’s effective even for those of us who know where the story’s going.

I get the feeling that Gaiman’s view of his own work has shifted, slightly, in the decades since the the first volume came out, and this show was a chance for him to do it all better. It may be that they’ll blow it in later seasons, but that seems unlikely to me. I now have very high hopes for the rest of the series, and I expect that this will remain one of my favorites for a long time.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

 

 

Some More News: The GOP Simply Wants to Abolish Public Education

I doubt this is a shock to any of my regular readers, but yeah – the GOP wants to get rid of public education, or at least public education as it exists today. I could believe that they’ll find a new love for it if they take full control of the U.S. government, but I think it’s more likely that public education would become more explicitly about job training for the working class, with a real education being locked behind a paywall. Money will buy education, and if you can’t afford that, then you can always put yourself into debt peonage, to guarantee you’ll spend your life working for the benefit of those at the top.

Unequal distribution of temperature and green space is killing people.

Racial and economic inequality have always come with environmental inequality. The least powerful tend to be forced to live closest to our most dangerous waste products, from traffic pollution, to industrial or electronic waste. As the planet warms, there’s a new kind of environmental inequality, but rather than the things we’ve come to expect – poisoned air and water – we’re facing unequal distribution of temperature.

Equipped with heat sensors, this group of citizen scientists were participating in a groundbreaking study: the first ever street level assessment of heat in New York City. The goal was to find differences in neighborhoods – which communities were relatively cool? Which were sweltering hot? – and map the city’s heat inequality.

Joined by others in upper Manhattan and Harlem, the volunteers scanned temperatures along the streets with sensors attached to their cars and bikes. The results, presented to community members in January, showed a harsh reality of city living: the south Bronx was 8F (4.5C) hotter than the Upper West Side and Upper East Side, some of the city’s richest neighborhoods, just a few miles away.
“The variation in temperature is stark,” said principal investigator Liv Yoon. The data was analyzed by Climate Adaptation Planning and Analytics Strategies and is part of a nationwide heat-mapping initiative by Noaa. “The built environment really matters on how heat manifests and what people feel,” said Yoon.

The results mirror what residents and researchers have known and brought attention to for years: in cities like New York City,heat is distributed unequally – and people of color and low-income residents shoulder the highest burden of heat. Poor air quality, inadequate access to cooling and air conditioning further exacerbates the likelihood of heatstrokes and deaths from heat exposure. There are approximately 370 heat-related deaths in New York City on average each year, with the Bronx being especially vulnerable.

This is not a surprise. I’ve talked before about the various health benefits of living near greenery, and I think it’s no accident that wealthier parts of cities tend to have more trees, more parks, and more vegetation in general. As the temperature continues to rise, that inequality will increasingly become a matter of life and death.

Heat is especially severe for people with pre-existing conditions such as heart disease, and as higher night-time temperatures prevent people from recuperating overnight, it is also driving a rise in sleep-related mental health problems.

Some residents, who have been living in close proximity to sweltering asphalt and further away from parks and trees, may not be surprised by this.

“The thing is, we already knew where the hotter areas were,” said Yoon. “What we wanted to contribute is connecting the dots.”
Environmental advocates say the data, because of how granular it is, can help make the case that certain neighborhoods need better resources and access to green space.

“We have always gotten the brunt of the city’s pollution,” said Melissa Barber, researcher and co-founder of environmental justice group South Bronx Unite.

The difference in temperature between the south Bronx and the Upper West Side reflect a myriad of other environmental inequalities. There are five major highways that run through and around the south Bronx, including the hulking Cross Bronx Expressway, which contributes to the surrounding area’s noise and air pollution. Despite being bounded to the south by the Harlem River, the waterfront in the south Bronx is so developed that residents cannot readily access the blue space. Meanwhile, the Upper West Side sits between Central park and Riverside park, which looks out on to the Hudson River.

Asphalt roads and densely built buildings in cities trap heat. These urban pockets of heat can also overlap with other health disparities: the south Bronx has one of the highest asthma rates in the country. Residents here also live in housing that tends to trap heat, and where the median age of apartment buildings is nearly 90 years.

“These spaces are not only deprived because of the heat they’ve acquired, the existing infrastructure is failing as well,” said Satpal Kaur, an architect who volunteered in the heat-mapping survey.

Climate change is killing people right now, and it was entirely predicted that it would hit the poorest first and hardest. That very fact may well be part of why the richest among us felt comfortable ignoring the problem for their own benefit. As things continue to get hotter, and people continue to suffer and die because of it, remember this: We, as a species, have the resources to help. It does not have to be this way.

Ground-breaking research expedition gives dire new meaning to “glacial speed”

For a while now, glaciologists have been worried that as the oceans warm and rise, coastal glaciers will be lifted clear of the sea floor, allowing them to flow much faster. The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica has been of particular concern, because it’s holding back enough ice to raise global sea levels by as much as ten feet. If the glacier starts flowing into the ocean faster, the ice behind it will also speed up. As you can imagine, knowing the shape of the sea floor is key to understanding and predicting what the glacier will do. More than that, it can give us insight into what the glacier has done in the past.

And what it has done in the past is worrisome, to say the least:

For the first time, scientists mapped in high-resolution a critical area of the seafloor in front of the glacier that gives them a window into how fast Thwaites retreated and moved in the past. The stunning imagery shows geologic features that are new to science, and also provides a kind of crystal ball to see into Thwaites’ future. In people and ice sheets alike, past behavior is key to understanding future behavior.

The team documented more than 160 parallel ridges that were created, like a footprint, as the glacier’s leading edge retreated and bobbed up and down with the daily tides. “It’s as if you are looking at a tide gauge on the seafloor,” said Graham. “It really blows my mind how beautiful the data are.”

The image is a collage of pictures showing renderings of the sea floor, with regular

a–d, Examples of high-frequency sidescan imagery illustrating the back-stepping conformity of ridge shape (a), non-alignment of ribs to underlying lineations (b), rib formation on terraces (c) and the ‘beading’ (red circle) and overprinting (red arrow) of existing subglacial features (d). e, Multibeam hillshade showing fine-scale landforms, <20 cm high, crossing lineation ridges and grooves. f, Corresponding profile X–X′, demonstrating the subtle geometries of some of the landforms (5–20 cm) and their surprising depth (>740 m). g,h, Multibeam swath bathymetry covering the longest series of ribs (profile Y–Y′ and Z–Z′ combined; stars mark start and end of profile sections). Inset shows close-up example of lateral continuity in the southern portion of the ribs. Black arrows in ‘b’ mark lateral continuation of one oblique ridge. Yellow arrows in each image show ice flow direction inferred from lineations.

Beauty aside, what’s alarming is that the rate of Thwaites’ retreat that scientists have documented more recently are small compared to the fastest rates of change in its past, said Graham.

Yeah, “alarming” feels like the right word.

With global warming, it’s not just the changes that are happening that causes problems – it’s the speed. Faster changes mean more people dead. It really is that simple. That’s also why slower action to respond to climate change means more people dead. We know that this sea level rise is coming, we know we’re not ready for it, and we’re doing next to nothing to get ready. The death-cult of Neoliberalism, with its dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire capitalism, could not have taken over the United States at a worse time.

To understand Thwaites’ past retreat, the team analyzed the rib-like formations submerged 700 meters (just under half a mile) beneath the polar ocean and factored in the tidal cycle for the region, as predicted by computer models, to show that one rib must have been formed every single day.

At some point in the last 200 years, over a duration of less than six months, the front of glacier lost contact with a seabed ridge and retreated at a rate of more than 2.1 kilometers per year (1.3 miles per year) — twice the rate documented using satellites between 2011 and 2019.

“Our results suggest that pulses of very rapid retreat have occurred at Thwaites Glacier in the last two centuries, and possibly as recently as the mid-20th Century,” said Graham.

“Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails, and we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future – even from one year to the next – once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed,” said marine geophysicist and study co-author, Robert Larter, from the British Antarctic Survey.

Completely aside from its implications, this mission was an accomplishment all on its own. Getting close to the edge of a rapidly retreating glacier is difficult and dangerous. In this case, it was only possible because of record lows in sea ice, combined with advances in technology.

To collect the imagery and supporting geophysical data, the team, which included scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, launched a state-of-the-art orange robotic vehicle loaded with imaging sensors called ‘Rán’ from the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer during an expedition in 2019. Rán, operated by scientists at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, embarked on a 20-hour mission that was as risky as it was serendipitous, Graham said. It mapped an area of the seabed in front of the glacier about the size of Houston – and did so in extreme conditions during an unusual summer notable for its lack of sea ice. This allowed scientists to access the glacier front for the first time in history.

Anna Wåhlin, a physical oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg who deployed Rán at Thwaites, said, “This was a pioneering study of the ocean floor, made possible by recent technological advancements in autonomous ocean mapping and a bold decision by the Wallenberg foundation to invest into this research infrastructure. The images Ran collected give us vital insights into the processes happening at the critical junction between the glacier and the ocean today.”

“It was truly a once in a lifetime mission,” said Graham, who said the team would like to sample the seabed sediments directly so they can more accurately date the ridge-like features. “But the ice closed in on us pretty quickly and we had to leave before we could do that on this expedition,” he said.

While many questions remain, one thing’s for sure: It used to be that scientists thought of the Antarctic ice sheets as sluggish and slow to respond, but that’s simply not true, said Graham.

“Just a small kick to Thwaites could lead to a big response,” he said.

And that brings us back to our regularly scheduled existential dread!

I believe this glacial retreat, and associated sea level rise are going to happen. I do not think it is a question of “if”, but of “when”. I suppose it is hypothetically possible that all of the world’s rich and powerful decide to completely change how they’ve always behaved. It’s “possible” that they could invest in truly dealing with climate change and its attendant problems. Were that to happen, it’s possible that through herculean effort, we could even stop the warming in my lifetime. Maybe.

I think it is equally possible that I will be named king of the world.

The unfortunate reality is that before we can devote the needed time and resources to climate mitigation and adaptation, we need revolutionary political and economic change. It’s my hope that in working towards that will also push more incremental change, like the recent climate bill. Things like that will never be enough to solve the problem, but they can slow things down, and buy us the time that this research shows we very much need.

This is one more warning among so many that it almost feels like white noise at this point. I think that could be a very real danger. In addition to our propensity to think that “the weather has always been like this”, after a certain point we just don’t have the energy to get worked up over every new apocalyptic update. I think the antidote to that is to keep the focus on the step we’re currently on – building collective power. Networking and organization aren’t just tools for affecting political change – they can also make a community more resilient, and better able to survive the disasters that our governments are too corrupt and incompetent to prevent.

When disaster strikes, humanity is always forced back to our single greatest strength – the ability to work together to achieve more than any of us could alone. Warnings like this give us a heads-up that we need to be exercising that muscle now, so that it’s fit for purpose when we really need it.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

 

Video: Let’s talk about Labor Day’s origins…

Two posts today! How exciting!

For those of you who don’t know, because of the relentless drive to crush left-wing thought and politics in the United States, that country (and Canada, because of course) celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September. The decision to have it then rather than on May 1st, when everyone else celebrates Labor Day, was almost certainly made to avoid tying the holiday to the global struggle for workers’ rights.

As usual, Beau gives a good overview of the history, and includes a point that I think we would all do well to remember. Too often, when we celebrate victories or “heroes” of the past, we place those people and events on pedestals. On the one hand, I get the desire to do that, but it lowers those of us living today by comparison. The reality is that people are just people, and our role in the labor movement today is just as important as any worker of the past. The fight continues, and the idea that it’s a thing of the past – as with every other movement for change – is just an effort to protect the status quo.

“Labor day is for you.“

Video: Can Capitalism Solve World Hunger?

In writing about yesterday’s good news, I mentioned the fact that we currently produce more food than is needed to end world hunger. As usual, Second Thought provides a nice, approachable overview of the scale of the problem, why capitalism cannot solve world hunger (and why, as I’ve explained, that means capitalism also can’t solve the coming famines caused by global warming).

There’s one point I wanted to add that’s often left out of conversations about this topic. As I briefly discussed in this post, there’s a big portion of farmland that could grow food for people, but is instead dedicated to growing food for livestock. While some of that is hay, a lot of it is various grains fed to livestock like cattle. That means that actually feeding everyone with our current system would require a shift away from animal agriculture. Basically, we need to start growing more food for us, and less food for our food. I can imagine a variety of reasons why this is left out so often, but that speculation on that matters less to me than just correcting the deficiency.

What the video DOES cover well is the role that the IMF and World Bank has played in the unequal distribution of food, for the sake of profits for the upper class of wealth countries. With all of that said, I hope you enjoy the video!