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newstfionline · 7 months

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Monday, September 18, 2023

Americans broadly support military strikes in Mexico, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds (Reuters) About half of Americans support sending U.S. military personnel into Mexico to fight drug cartels, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, though there is less backing for sending troops without Mexico’s approval. The findings show broad public support for calls by most major candidates in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest to send special forces into Mexico, the U.S.’s biggest trading partner, or conducting missile or drone strikes there. Some of the candidates have said they would be prepared to send military forces without first receiving permission from the Mexican government. With the United States experiencing a dramatic rise in overdose deaths related to the synthetic opioid fentanyl, tamping down the flow of narcotics from Mexico has become a major theme among Republicans. Almost 80,000 Americans died from opioid-related overdoses in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, with fentanyl being the primary culprit.

Battle Over Electric Vehicles Is Central to Auto Strike (NYT) A battle between Detroit carmakers and the United Auto Workers union, which escalated on Friday with targeted strikes in three locations, is unfolding amid a once-in-a-century technological upheaval that poses huge risks for both the companies and the union. The strike has come as the traditional automakers invest billions to develop electric vehicles while still making most of their money from gasoline-driven cars. The negotiations will determine the balance of power between workers and management, possibly for years to come. That makes the strike as much a struggle for the industry’s future as it is about wages, benefits and working conditions. The established carmakers are trying to defend their profits and their place in the market in the face of stiff competition from Tesla and foreign automakers. Workers are trying to defend jobs as manufacturing shifts from internal combustion engines to batteries. Because they have fewer parts, electric cars can be made with fewer workers than gasoline vehicles. A favorable outcome for the U.A.W. would also give the union a strong calling card if, as some expect, it then tries to organize employees at Tesla and other nonunion carmakers like Hyundai, which is planning to manufacture electric vehicles at a massive new factory in Georgia.

Guatemala’s president-elect says he’s ready to call people onto the streets (AP) President-elect Bernardo Arévalo plans to call Guatemalans into the streets next week to protest efforts to derail his presidency before he can take office, he said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. It would be Arévalo’s first such request since winning the election Aug. 20. Since his landslide victory, the attorney general’s office has continued pursuing multiple investigations related to the registration of Arévalo’s Seed Movement party, and alleged fraud in the election. International observers have said that is not supported by evidence. Arévalo said he has tried his own legal maneuvers to stop those who want to keep him from power, but now it’s necessary for the people to come out to the streets to support him. Arévalo, a progressive lawmaker and academic, shocked Guatemala by making it into an Aug. 20 presidential runoff in which he beat former first lady Sandra Torres by more than 20 points.

Ukraine’s Crimea attacks seen as key to counter-offensive against Russia (BBC) This week saw spectacular Ukrainian attacks on the Crimean Peninsula, hitting Russian warships and missiles. Estimates of the damage done ran into billions of pounds and raised the question: is Ukraine getting ready to retake Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014? Crimea is a Russian fortress, so it is important not to get carried away. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry estimates that some 32,000 Russian troops were stationed in Crimea ahead of Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Russian nuclear weapons are reportedly deployed there as well. “[Ukraine’s] strategy has two main goals,” says Oleksandr Musiienko, from Kyiv’s Centre for Military and Legal Studies. “To establish dominance in the north-western Black Sea and to weaken Russian logistical opportunities for their defence lines in the south, near Tokmak and Melitopol.” In other words, operations in Crimea go hand-in-glove with Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the south.

Three Neighbors of Ukraine Ban Its Grain as E.U. Restrictions Expire (NYT) Hours after the European Union ended a temporary ban on imports of Ukrainian grain and other products to five member nations, three of them—Poland, Hungary and Slovakia—defied the bloc and said they would continue to bar Ukrainian grain from being sold within their borders. As Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain exporters, has struggled to ship its grain because of Russia’s invasion, the European Union has opened up to tariff-free food imports from the country, a move that had the unintended consequence of undercutting prices and hurting farmers in several countries in the east of the European Union. As part of a deal meant to protect those countries, the bloc allowed some grain to transit through them, but prohibited domestic sales. Brussels’ decision to let that deal expire at midnight on Friday revived an issue that has threatened European Union unity on support for Ukraine. The Hungarian agriculture minister, Istvan Nagy, announced an extended ban that would include more products in a Facebook post early Saturday morning, saying that “we will protect the interests of the farmers.” On Friday, Poland’s president ordered that the ban be kept in place and Slovakia’s ministry of agriculture also announced a continuation of the ban, underlining that it didn’t apply to transit through the country.

Afghan Taliban Detain 18, Including American, on Charges of Preaching Christianity (VOA) Afghanistan’s Taliban have detained 18 staffers, including an American, from a nonprofit group for allegedly preaching Christianity. The Afghan-based International Assistance Mission (IAM) confirmed Friday that Taliban authorities had twice raided its office in central Ghor province this month and taken away the staff. They were taken into custody on charges of “propagating and promoting Christianity” in Afghanistan, a spokesman said. The IAM says on its website that the nonprofit group has been working in Afghanistan only to improve lives and build local health, community development and education capacity. “We are a partnership between the people of Afghanistan and international Christian volunteers, and we have been working together since 1966.”

U.S. and China Expand Global Spy Operations (NYT) As China’s spy balloon drifted across the continental United States in February, American intelligence agencies learned that President Xi Jinping of China had become enraged with senior Chinese military generals. Mr. Xi was not opposed to risky spying operations against the United States, but American intelligence agencies concluded that the People’s Liberation Army had kept Mr. Xi in the dark until the balloon was over the United States. When Mr. Xi learned of the balloon’s trajectory and realized it was derailing planned talks with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, he berated senior generals for failing to tell him that the balloon had gone astray, according to American officials briefed on the intelligence. The episode threw a spotlight on the expanding and highly secretive spy-versus-spy contest between the United States and China. The balloon crisis, a small part of a much larger Chinese espionage effort, reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the United States as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China. The C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency have set up new centers focused on spying on China. U.S. officials have honed their capabilities to intercept electronic communications, including using spy planes off China’s coast. The spy conflict with China is even more expansive than the one that played out between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War, said Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director.

Villagers survived Morocco’s earthquake but lost nearly everything else (Washington Post) By all accounts, life in this village in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains was simple and good, even if it was rarely easy. Families had lived for generations in the small cluster of houses surrounded by olive and nut trees, which generated a third of the village’s income. Money from sons and daughters who grew up and moved to cities provided the rest. When a 6.8-magnitude earthquake shook the region on Sept. 8, Tiniskt was decimated in a matter of seconds. More than 50 of its 330 residents died—there was no time to wash and bury them properly. Everyone knew each of the dead. But the survivors have each other. They have spent the past week in blue, government-provided tents. On a recent morning, women ladled out milk porridge from communal pots for breakfast. Men parceled out equal portions of donated goods for each family. Boys played soccer in the dirt. Toddlers nestled into adults’ laps—it didn’t matter whose. On Thursday, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI announced an aid package to help people rebuild their homes. The villagers in Tiniskt—used to relying on each other—weren’t waiting around. A local association affixed solar lights to wooden poles to illuminate the central road. A young man collected plastic to construct a shower. Starting over was a daunting task, one man said. But it their only choice.

Adventure tourism (NYT) In 2001, a British man named Tom Morgan decided to host an extreme car race. It would start in Britain and end in what he thought was the world’s most difficult destination for most people to reach: Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, more than 5,500 miles away. He called it the Mongol Rally. Participants had to drive the worst car they could find, avoid any planning and have as much fun as possible. Only six cars raced the first year. But interest grew as people began to talk about the rally online. “It’s gone ballistic,” Morgan said. More than 2,000 teams are on the wait-list to join the next Mongol Rally. The growing popularity of the race is one example of interest in trips to remote destinations. Adventure travel companies and insurance providers are reporting record sales this year. Companies say their clients are skipping Bali or Santorini in favor of destinations with less tourism infrastructure. The number of visitors to Antarctica has more than tripled in the last decade. Nepal granted a record number of permits to climb Mount Everest this year. And car rental companies in Mongolia sold out of SUVs this summer.

#headlines #news

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bopinion · 11 months

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2023 / 22

Aperçu of the Week:

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not the ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

(Stephen Hawking - British theoretical physicist and astrophysicist at Cambridge University)

Bad News of the Week:

With the Manhattan Project, mankind has already opened Pandora's box once. For there will be no way back to a time before nuclear weapons. Despite knowing better, the lid will never be put on the box, because there will always be people who see an advantage in it: personal preservation of power, deterrence against real or imagined threats, signs of national strength and other superficial egoisms. We will never get rid of this curse. And exactly the same thing is happening again now. With artificial intelligence. Says Warren Buffett, too.

The scientists can't be blamed for this. It is in their nature to test the limits of what is possible. And if the goal of their research and development is also economically attractive, there will always be someone to fund their work. It started with shopping recommendations in online stores. It continued with the analysis of movement profiles. And today, AI in insurance companies is already making decisions about who gets which rate at which conditions. All based on bare numbers, so 100% objective.

In a way, the great advantage of human intelligence is the equally human retarding moment. It is called conscience. Doubts are good, because they let humans think again, risk a second look, weigh things up based on personal experience. Artificial intelligence does not have this control mechanism. It decides purely on the basis of facts, coldly, ruthlessly. Example: how would artificial intelligence decide if the power fails in a hospital and the emergency generator only has enough electricity for one system. What would it shut down - itself or the life-support systems of patients in palliative care who were doomed anyway? Exactly.

The statements from critics - and there are many among them who have been or are in AI development themselves, such as Sam Altman, the head of ChatGPT creator Open AI - calling on policymakers to act are serious. Once again, technical progress is much faster than regulatory requirements. Still, for example, the handling of fake news and hate speech in social media lags far behind. But this time there is (even) more at stake: the control of the human over the machine.

Joachim Weickert, professor of mathematics and computer science at Saarland University, lists four areas of risk: Upheaval in the labor market, even for highly skilled professions. Destabilization of societies through disinformation. Loss of control, intransparency and one-sidedness. And finally, the damaging independence of AI itself - by simply taking command itself, fully aware of its own superiority. Almost 40 years ago, we were introduced to the central machine instance Skynet in the cinema. Let's hope it's not "I am back!" one day in reality.

Good News of the Week:

I am a child of the Cold War. Germany and Europe were divided. In school we learned what to do in the event of an atomic bomb explosion and subway stations led to bunkers. The world seemed clearly divided into good and evil. Nevertheless, I took to the streets against the stationing of Pershing missiles, found the "nuclear sharing" frightening - to this day, we Germans do not know where the U.S. forces keep how many nuclear weapons in our country. Neither do we know about Great Britain and France. Creepy.

Then came the turning point. Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union collapsed, the war of systems seemed to have a clear winner. And nuclear weapons were to rust away uselessly, serving only as a fetish of Arab and East Asian rulers. With Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, there are now two men in power in undemocratic states for whom nuclear weapons are a perfectly normal utensil of geopolitical interests.

And the United States is not very squeamish about its words either. In the future, the United States should be able "for the first time in your history, to deter two roughly equal nuclear powers," says national security adviser Jake Sullivan. And, "one of our greatest nonproliferation successes in the age of nuclear weapons has been extended nuclear deterrence, which gives many of our allies the assurance that they don't have to develop their own nuclear weapons." In short, living with the bomb is again (or still) quite normal.

At this point in Sullivan's speech on Friday in the White House press room, I would have preferred to get out of it and would have expected unpleasant dreams for the following night. But then I was surprised: In light of the New START nuclear arms control treaty, which expires in 2026 and which Russia suspended four months ago anyway, Sullivan called for talks "on how to deal with nuclear risks beyond 2026" so that no new conflicts would arise.

And then came a double whammy: first, the U.S. called for talks "without preconditions," and second, it directed that call to Russia - and China. And thus, for the first time, acknowledges an equal footing. Therefore, the talks will happen. I am not naive, there will be no large-scale waiver with reciprocal controls that everyone would then abide by. But whoever made the statement "Where there is talk, there is no shooting." was almost always right.

Personal happy moment of the week:

My son returned yesterday from a vacation in Italy with his mother and sister. Where he was not only willing to risk a glimpse of nature and culture, but also went swimming for a whole two hours every day. And today he left with my father for a week-long bike tour, from Koblenz along the Moselle to Luxembourg. And he has already declared that he will also make a detour to a church or castle worth seeing. In addition, he not only tanned his skin in Italy, but also overtook my wife in height. So in every sense it means: he is getting big.

I couldn't care less...

...about the further rapprochement of the Arab powers Saudi Arabia and Iran. This time in the form of the establishment of a naval alliance. Officially it is said that this is the only way to bring security to the region. Iranian naval commander Sharam Irani declares: "Then we will witness our region being liberated from unauthorized forces." This can only mean the U.S. naval base in Bahrain. A common adversary is apparently enough to bridge fundamental differences - in this case, the Shiite versus Sunni faiths of Islam. Unfortunately, this will do nothing for democracy or even human rights. On the contrary: The oppression of women, for example, will be cemented even more firmly.

As I write this...

...a mixture of full moon, everyday worries and Monday horror keeps me from sleeping. Well at least I'll get my blog done, which I didn't get around to finish yesterday / Sunday.

Post Scriptum

On Saturday was organ donation day. A topic that urgently needs more attention. Because about 8,500 Germans are currently waiting for an organ transplant, for kidneys, for example, about eight years - too long for many. And in 2022, only 900 people donated an organ. Theoretically, people are much more willing to donate, but bureaucracy is the main obstacle: many relatives don't even know what the deceased person's position is on the subject, and there is often no valid identification. The so-called "objection solution" would put an end to this, as the donation would then have to be actively and centrally documented. But there is currently no majority in parliament for this. And at least one person dies every day in Germany - avoidably.

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dgpr-punjab-newsroom · 2 months

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With compliments from, The Directorate General Public Relations,

Government of the Punjab, Lahore Ph. 99201390.

No.241/AbdulAli/Mujahid

HANDOUT (A)

MARYAM NAWAZ SHARIF OUTLINES EXTENSIVE AGENDA FOR PUNJAB AS FIRST WOMAN CHIEF MINISTER

Lahore, February 26: Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif expressed her vision of inclusive governance, stating that she aims to serve as the Chief Minister for the entire Punjab, with open doors for all. She emphasized a zero-tolerance policy towards corruption and highlighted that harassment of women is a red line that will not be crossed. Maryam Nawaz Sharif pledged to take the oath, go to the office, and immediately start implementing the manifesto.

Addressing the Punjab Assembly after her election as Chief Minister, Maryam Nawaz Sharif announced several key initiatives. Free emergency medicine will be available in government hospitals starting today. A health screening program will be launched for timely disease treatment, along with a redesign of the health card system. Ultrasound machines and qualified doctors will be deployed in Basic Health Units (BHU) and Rural Health Centers (RHC).

To improve healthcare infrastructure, air ambulance and Motorway Rescue 1122 services will be initiated for timely patient transfers. Nurses will be trained and sent to hospitals in Gulf and Europe. Playgrounds will be established in every union council, with school grounds open for players in the evening.

State-of-the-art hospitals will be constructed in each district to treat cancer, kidney, and liver diseases. During Ramadan, 6.5 to 7 million relief packets will be delivered to homes under the "Nighaban" program. Talented students will receive education in top foreign universities.

A series of youth-focused programs will be launched, including the Youth Loan Programme, Interest-Free Loan, Youth Training, Small Business Loan, Laptop and iPad Scheme, and Paid Internship. Electric bikes will be provided to youth, especially women. An IT startup program will be introduced for freelancers.

For working women, hostels, daycare centers, and ladies' washrooms will be built at workplaces. Model women police stations and women desks will be established in every police station. Safe cities Program is being developed in 18 cities, with completion expected in 5 years.

A comprehensive program for screening prisoners will be launched, along with the creation of an IT city and the provision of 10 doorstep services. Free Wi-Fi will be available in major cities, starting with a pilot project in Lahore. The Farm to Market Roads Program will resume, and metro bus services will begin in Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Sialkot.

Special attention will be given to South Punjab, with meetings starting with MPAs from the region. Charging points will be installed for electric buses, and smart agriculture zones will be created for farmers. Agricultural machinery will be provided at discounted rates, and a special package will be offered for livestock.

Disease-free animal meat from Pakistan will be exported to the Gulf market. Garbage collection in cities will be improved, and a free school transport program will be introduced, especially for girl students. Solar panels will be provided in convenient installments for citizens consuming less than 300 units of electricity.

The "Apna Chhat Apna Ghar" scheme will be launched, providing one lakh houses. Street markets will be kept clean under the "Suthra Punjab" program. A project will be launched to provide services to overseas Pakistanis, and health and life insurance will be provided for journalists.

While addressing the Punjab Assembly House, Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif expressed her gratitude to Allah Almighty, saying, "I humbly thank Allah Almighty by bowing my head." She reflected on the journey that led her to this moment, noting that "the system of nature first endures and then honors."

Maryam Nawaz congratulated Speaker Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan and Deputy Speaker Zaheer Iqbal Chanhar on their election, expressing hope that "under the leadership of Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan and Zaheer Iqbal Chanhar, this House will raise the flag of democracy."

Expressing regret over the absence of opposition members in the House, Maryam Nawaz remarked, "It is regrettable that the opposition members are not present in the House, I wish they were also present." She emphasized the importance of competition in politics, stating, "We are all democratic workers, competition is necessary in politics."

Reflecting on the challenges she faced, Maryam Nawaz expressed gratitude for the unwavering support of her party members. She stated, "There were very difficult moments, everyone was against us and we were subjected to brutality, thank God that every member of the party and all of us as a party did not give up."

Maryam Nawaz extended an open invitation to all members of the Assembly, saying, "My office, my doors, and my chambers are open 24 hours a day for every Member of the Assembly." She thanked her family, party workers, and supporters for their support, acknowledging, "The party not only nominated me for the Chief Ministership but also fully supported me, I thank you from the bottom of my heart."

Expressing gratitude to members of other political parties for their support, Maryam Nawaz highlighted the significance of her election as Chief Minister, stating, "Today is a day of honor for every Pakistani daughter, sister, and mother that there is a woman on the chair of the Chief Minister."

Despite facing adversity, Maryam Nawaz emphasized her lack of desire for revenge, stating, "Despite the difficulties and sufferings, there is no desire to take revenge from anyone in my heart." She credited her opponents for her growth, saying, "Opponents have trained me in difficult conditions by putting me in difficulties, putting me in death cell and putting me in Adyala Jail, NAB Jail, and Kot Lakhpat Jail."

Maryam Nawaz concluded by expressing her gratitude to her mother and teachers for their guidance, and to Nawaz Sharif for his mentorship and vision. She said, "Today I am on the chair where visionary leaders like Nawaz Sharif used to sit. Nawaz Sharif is honored to have made the country invincible." She also thanked Allah Almighty for Nawaz Sharif's leadership, noting, "Nawaz Sharif is the only person who was made Prime Minister 3 times by Allah Almighty."

Maryam Nawaz Sharif emphasized the importance of respecting and valuing parents, noting that "a parent's prayers reach places beyond human imagination." She acknowledged the legacy of Shahbaz Sharif, who is remembered as the "Khadim-e-Aala Punjab" and for his commitment to Punjab's development, recognized not only in Pakistan but also worldwide.

Maryam Nawaz highlighted her awareness of the challenges faced by the poor and the expectations associated with the Pakistan Muslim League (N). She pledged to take the oath, go to the office, and immediately start implementing the manifesto, focusing on addressing public issues.

Maryam Nawaz outlined her vision for Punjab, aiming to establish state-of-the-art hospitals in every city to ensure that no one has to travel to another city for treatment. She announced that government hospitals will start providing free emergency medicine from today.

Regarding business and economic development, Maryam Nawaz expressed her vision to make Punjab an economic hub. She emphasized the government's role in providing facilities to the business community and pledged to eliminate red tape and other obstacles. She promised to create a system where all business registrations can be completed under one roof and to convert existing government businesses into public-private partnerships.

Maryam Nawaz reiterated her zero-tolerance policy against corruption and pledged to bring a transparent system that would end bribery. She committed to monitoring government projects personally to ensure timely completion. She announced the continuation of helplines for youth and women and the launch of a relief package named "Neghaban" for Ramadan, delivering relief packages to people's homes.

Recognizing the need for authentic data for effective relief distribution, Maryam Nawaz directed the Chief Secretary to submit authentic data within three months. She expressed her dedication to youth welfare, promising to provide resources for education to those in need, resume scholarships under the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), and support students studying in international universities. She also pledged to restore the youth loan program started by Nawaz Sharif.

Maryam Nawaz Sharif outlined a comprehensive plan for youth empowerment, including education, interest-free loans, training, laptops, and small business opportunities. She emphasized providing laptops, iPads, or tablets to students as needed and expanding internship programs with stipends of at least 25,000 to support their expenses. Electric bikes will be provided to students and professionals, and Maryam Nawaz Sharif pledged personal engagement with youth, keeping the doors of the Chief Minister's House open to solve their problems.

She committed to improving the education system, ensuring equal standards for all students, and enhancing teacher training programs. Buildings, classrooms, and labs will be upgraded, and a transport system will be provided to all schools in Punjab.

Maryam Nawaz Sharif emphasized curriculum development, addressing child labor by providing stipends to children working in kilns, and focusing on special education and the welfare of special needs individuals. She pledged to screen children for diseases early and establish a special education institution in every district.

In the health sector, she promised to deploy qualified doctors, medicines, and equipment in Basic Health Units (BHUs), Tehsil Headquarters (THQs), and Rural Centers. She committed to working tirelessly for the financial independence, protection, and empowerment of women and announced a special package for the transgender community to mainstream them into society.

Maryam Nawaz Sharif highlighted the importance of protecting minorities, promoting sports through the "Khailta Punjab Program," focusing on a digital Punjab, and providing 43 services at people's doorsteps under the Dastak program. She promised to investigate police brutality incidents, reduce police response time, and improve facilities for jail patients.

She pledged to pay more attention to small farmers, create smart agriculture zones, and adopt modern agricultural methods. A one-window program will be started for farmers, providing agricultural credit, quality seeds, and fertilizers.

To provide relief to the public, Maryam Nawaz Sharif announced the provision of solar panels to houses consuming less than 300 units of electricity and the construction of one lakh houses under the "Apni Chhat Apna Ghar" scheme. She also emphasized cleanliness under the Suthra Punjab program, combating climate change and smog with modern technology, and addressing the issues of overseas Pakistanis and media workers.

Maryam Nawaz Sharif concluded by emphasizing that while success is in the hands of Allah, good intentions and efforts are in the hands of humans, and requested the Speaker for opening of the press gallery.

** **

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unwilting · 10 months

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Passing Comments on A Recent NC Meeting

The National Committee of the CPUSA has met and published Joe Sims’ speech — some points need to be made.

The speech is a summation of both the recent work of the Party and what is to come before the upcoming convention in 2024.

Nothing is to be said on the sections on the internationalist peace movement and working class leadership — these sections are wholly adequate, making excellent propaganda while highlighting the great work of U$ communists. Let’s listen:

“No matter what today’s Cold Warriors allege, Cuba and China are not Turkey and Hungary. A new, socialist way of being, living and decision making is being attempted in the countries exploring socialist paths and it’s way past time U.S. imperialists realize it. Not every country’s model of democracy is going to be stamped “made in the USA.” The challenge here is not to democracy: rather it’s to the system organized for the pursuit of private profit above all else — this is what’s behind Washington’s and Wall Street’s fear, and their endless drive to exorcize the very spirit of socialism from the public imagination. What they can’t seem to fathom is that the threat to democracy comes not from outside but from within: it’s the relentless drive to maintain maximum profits that gives rise to authoritarianism, or to put it more precisely, fascism. In this regard, Lenin nailed it long ago, describing imperialism as “reaction all down the line.” However it’s packaged and marketed to gain working-class buy-in, it is late stage capitalism that’s breeding war, racism and national hatred. Make no mistake, this is what Washington is selling, but we’re not buying it.”

With this in mind, Sims assures us that continued efforts against the wars, against U$ imperialism, will be brainstormed in an upcoming peace conference in November of this year. He is correct when saying, directly after this assurance, that the peace movement needs to draw in more of the working class, because they are the that ones have everything to gain from peace. U$ workers may benefit from imperialism, from the fruits of it, but we have lost so much in this exchange as well with our home imperialists, and have even more to gain in the process of cutting them off.

The section on working class leadership mostly speaks for itself:

“The road ahead remains long, and the climb steep, but it’s happening. Witness the 154 strikes that have taken place so far this year, keeping steady pace with what occurred the year before. In addition, a number of important organizing victories have been won over the last several months. For example, the Steelworkers won a union vote in rural Georgia at the Bluebird electric bus plant and Amazon drivers and dispatchers voted to join the Teamsters in Palmdale California. The local recently went out on strike. At Starbucks, some 300 stores have been organized. Importantly, the Amazon Labor Union is also keeping the pressure on. Another indication that workers are seizing the time is that petitions for union representation continue to rise. Last year, they were up 53 percent over the year before and the first six months of 2023 are comparable.”

The Party, in a true Leninist fashion, connects these trade struggles with the broader struggle, stating two paragraphs below that it must support these struggles and lend itself to the social-democratic struggle within the bigger context. The party must build “united fronts of support ensuring demonstrable solidarity from elected officials and mass organizations ranging from statements, resolutions and letters to editors, to strike fund support and consumer boycotts.” — the only thing one might want to add here is the necessity to also teach the working class movement its final aim, or speak on how the Party is drawing in the leaders of the trade struggles to our broader struggle.

Now, onto the expected, and the reason any of this is being written: the usual bowing to electoral politics.

Make no mistake — the threat of the christofascists is real in the electoral sphere, but equally threatening is their existence in every other facet of our lives. “Both parties are the same” is a sentiment that loses more adherents as the snakes’ heads make themselves known. Democratic rights are under a barrage of fascist attacks — part of the problem is that the attacks are coming from within the democratic framework, so how does focusing so much on electoral victory do anything other than delay the inevitable.

One may call me a doomer for that last sentence, but if so much effort is put into working within the framework that is set up against us, that a Party forgets (buries?) its real reason to exist, to help build a new machine and smash the old, then my doomerism with the group is perhaps not misplaced. Delaying the return of cristofascists in particular seats of power is only delaying the return of cristofascists in particular seats of power — where is our power being built?

But enough generalities, I’ll let these sections of the speech speak for itself and its entrenched electoralism-in-denial:

“Buoyed by the passage of the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, despite stiff extreme-right opposition and key Democratic defections, Biden so far has managed to fend off significant challenges, notwithstanding the campaigns of Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr. The president’s electoral coalition has been shored up by Bernie Sanders and Brandon Johnson’s coming on board, and has been given additional heft by the AFL-CIO’s endorsement (the earliest ever by the federation) and CBTU’s support. The administration’s foreign policy on the other hand, remains a major negative and may potentially suppress sections of the youth, peace and left vote. While important components of the coalition are coming into focus, a mass movement on the scale of what brought the Biden-Harris ticket to power in 2020 in the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising, has yet to take shape. That’s important, because it’s going to take a mass movement to defeat Trump. Whether the anti-MAGA majority will rise up and meet the demands of the political moment remains to be seen, though this year’s local contests in LA, Chicago, and Tampa are promising. At the end of the day, however, voter enthusiasm will be determined by the degree to which bread-and-butter issues are addressed. Needless to say, such a task cannot be left only to official circles: the people’s front must be fully mobilized, with labor playing a key role.”

“Apparently, Professor West has now jumped ship and is seeking the blessing of the Green Party. But how will the good professor conduct his campaign? Viable campaigns are born of grassroots responses to issues and the movements and coalitions from which they arise. This includes protest campaigns, many of which are shaped by understandable frustrations with the two-party system and a desire not to be associated with its corruption and concessions. But given the U.S.’ winner-take-all set up, a decision to run must take care not to inadvertently contribute to electing fascists and other right-wing extremists. Directing fire at the fascist danger is one thing — a plague-on-all-your-houses approach is quite another. In a close contest, even small numbers of votes can have a big impact. That said, it’s unlikely West’s first foray into presidential politics will garner significant support among African American or broader quarters — a spoiler campaign would be a disaster. The ball is now in West’s court. One should never forget what happened on January 6th and the lead up to it. In this regard, stock must also be taken of the No Labels initiative now seeking ballot status in all 50 states. Organized by center-right figures like Democrat Joe Lieberman, Republicans Larry Hogan, Pat McCory, and the curiously chameleon-like figure of Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis, (formerly Benjamin Muhammed of the Nation of Islam), No Labels claims a pragmatic problem-solving approach to politics. A more likely possibility is that the problem they’re designed to solve is how to peel off the independent vote, providing the MAGA right a stalking horse upon which to ride to the White House. A telling reminder of the potential danger is that No Labels has studiously refused to reveal its funding.”

“Individual votes here and there may not make much of a difference (except in the case of very close contests), but their impact, when joined with tens of millions in a simultaneous, joint action, can be huge. At stake in organizing these collective acts is laying the basis for forcefully addressing the central issues of the day by building movements around them. Jobs, housing, health care, abortion rights, police killings, gun violence, student debt and the environment — the Canadian wildfires are a case in point — are the key issues that will drive election turnout. The role of the party is to help build working-class political independence within these movements, and in so doing, maximize advantage: that’s the essence of Communist mass electoral work. Appeals emphasizing the fascist danger cannot stand alone and must be combined with attention to the issues that matter most to voters.”

[MY EMPHASIS]

The section ends thus:

“Hence, the next election cycle is not so much about the current spate of candidates as individuals, but rather the issues and platforms their coalitions champion. For the Communist Party, the key thing is how, within the broader people’s front, can the working-class movement have the greatest leverage and exert the largest influence? In other words, how can the working class place its stamp on the battle for democracy?”

[MY EMPHASIS]

This question, and it is a great question, is not answered. Instead we have the all too often heard, all too repeated, tautologies for voting blue-no-matter-who hidden within warnings of taking care to not “inadvertently contribute to electing fascists” — these passages contain the obvious lip-service to bourgeois electoralism, and in particular the U$’s constant lesser-evilism electoralism, but the fact it is coming from the communists and not from an average liberal is of concern.

Finally, I will say nothing of the CPUSA’s conception of the democratic front at this time, partly because it would require its own space, and partly because I am not ready to talk on it due to my own ignorance.

#filed under: class war 2023 #cpusa #biden #trump #filed under: notes on works

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talenlee · 1 year

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The Magic of Goo

You know that book I wrote (that I’m willing to admit)? One Stone? The story set in an alt-history British Empire at some mangled point in history where they have guns and trench warfare in the middle east, but also farmers unions are recruiting to mass-harvest food and oh yeah, there are dinosaurs. It’s an ahistorical setting that’s about how stories about fantasy kingdoms that are clearly England feel to me, as an author raised on those stories from the wing of the empire.

I mentioned, offhandedly, to someone recently that the magic system of One Stone is – and they interrupted, asking hang on, what magic system?

It’s really subtle – in the first book, it’s basically absent. There are only two references to the way magic works in One Stone, and they’re not called that. The first is the seer, who prophecies and sends Vince whirling down a set of haunted memories and what-if scenarios with his words. I agonised about that scene for a long time, because I knew, to keep true to the story that One Stone is based on (Julius Caesar), that the seer needed to be there, but the seer also needed to be someone who didn’t have the means to change things except by how he told people things. If he knew things legitimately, he had to have some reason he couldn’t act, if he didn’t know things, then what’s it matter what he says?

The dude is covered in weirdo tattoos, which are the magic. Over time, this old sailor started accumulating magical ink, and being covered in these interlocking circuits, and they started to leak into his consciousness and the result is becoming a seer. There wasn’t an intention to make himself a blind freak who scared sweet gay boys with tales of his own involvement in a dreadful war, but it just happened as a byproduct.

The other time magic shows up in the kettleweed – a simple weed that if you make tea out of it, prevents periods. Not prevents pregnancy, though I might have been too oblique there – Rafe cuts off the long-form explanation. In the story, there’s a trans woman, Gael, and she has, in the context of the story, done some form of medical transition. I don’t describe her body or anything beyond that she’s tall and has red hair, but she does mention having access to people who can help with major changes in someone’s life. What she’s describing is how, in the setting, there are ways to medically transition including HRT.

It’s ultimately Gael’s HRT that made me give up on an entirely ‘no-magic’ setting, by the way. The point of magic in a setting is to short-cut inconveniences and let you tell the kind of story you want to tell, and I’d like to not have Gael mindfully checking where she can get her next dose of fertile cow piss or whatever.

Instead, the solution is a solution. In One Stone, the magic, such as it can be done, is done by magical potions, unguents, lotions and salves. You probably can’t cast a ‘fly’ or ‘teleport’ spell anywhere, but you can probably make a goo that makes it easier to climb a wall, or cross a canyon. I don’t want people to look at strangers on the street and wonder ‘okay, who can be a wizard’ because that ties magic to an inherent quality of some people.

Instead, the thing I want to compare ‘magical abilities’ to to the web programmer. That is, there are a lot of people hanging around, with their small, private practices, that are often very intricate and involve a complicated process for making something that most people think they can interact with very freely. It’s about user-utilised magic, stuff where people can carry around spells on their own all the time, but between market needs and the expertise to make things, most of the time, you just don’t encounter anything too out of the ordinary.

There are some standardised pieces, as befits a type of magic that can be mass produced – for example, the lighting that shows up in the setting, which I did not delve into because who cares, works like an electric lighting arrangement where you can walk into a room and slap a switch on the wall and the room lights up, and all of the lighting is being handled by alchemical compounds. Goo. I even had a plan for an assassination that used the lights once and realised that the fact I had to explain the alchemy of how the lights work would be required for the setup and it wasn’t worth it. Plus, all the characters in the setting knew that stuff so why would they explore it?

Drugs are also covered by this – and drugs show up a lot in One Stone. Rafe grew up in an Obliteratum, a den for weed and other relaxants, and Wardell Cherish worked for a store that sold ‘Cherish patches,’ – which were reusable tea-bags that contained potent drugs. This is the basic way that you ‘do’ magical stuff in the world, to the point that people don’t think of it as ‘magic.’ It’s just alchemical stuff, it’s just stuff you can buy. There are people who buy disposable alchemical things, like potions in bottles, as a utility tool, but also, some of those things are dangerous. Fireball potions are great and do their job but how many of them can you carry at a time? Are you comfortable carrying grenades like that knowing that falling over in the wrong way could turn you into a punchline?

It makes these into specialised tools, and it also lets them scale in ways you don’t normally let mages do. A mage with a month to prepare is probably the same kind of thing as a mage with a week to prepare. An alchemist with a month to prepare can make dozens and dozens of potions and find ways to deploy them. Alchemists can also, with preparation time, even arm other people, and distribute their magic, but that distribution needs to work with people who can be trusted to use it.

Or not! An alchemist who wants to cause some havoc could distribute their potions and lie to people about what they do or how to use them.

Alchemists in the setting work in a way to me that mostly translates to my experience of web pages. Everyone in the world I know of, everyone in any reasonable proximity to my spaces, knows how to use a webpage, and probably interacts with one even if they don’t mean to. Ads in shopping centres are using webpages, the barber’s timing queue is using webpages, the mcdonalds kiosks are using webpages, and so, even if people think they’re not ‘using’ them, they are.

If you want a webpage, there are a bunch of standardised, market-available ways to do it. Even people who will step you through it. But if you want to do something difficult or interesting or good or with strange requirements, then suddenly you step off the edge of a shelf, and tumble down into the vast depths of complex opportunities. Because when you realise that the mass produced things, even the things you see every day, are made to a reliable standard for user consumption and are almost always quite bad at what they do, you’re suddenly realising that you could spend your whole life refining just one particular execution.

And that’s why alchemists are either mass-production type workers who care exactly enough about their work to make it do the thing they need to do so they can pump out the product they want to deal with in their jobs, thanks to the stressful demands of capital, or they’re galactic weirdoes who spend their time in tiny garretts refining exactly how many drops of saltpeter you need to make this potion the correct shade of green because they know it should be possible.

And this is the magic of One Stone and all the stories in its universe. It’s a world of goo. Magic is done, if you can link it back to the making of some kind of goo. It doesn’t need an egghead giganerd to work with it, it’s not reliant on things that only the most privileged have access to like powerful libraries, but those things can lead to useful expansions on your skillset. The artisan who tempers potions in foul gasoline in a dug-out ditch is just as much a mage as the fancy beardo with a bunch of glass flasks to maximise their surface areas, and any argument about the advantages of one form over the others is entirely a diegetic argument. There’s no ‘definitely better’ because the two skillsets are all arriving at the same end point through individualised, refined, extremely challenging to analyse routes.

And then, the only thing that remains is, hey, what can you do with goo? What of our everyday can you do with goo?

Things that people can do when they drink the goo.

Things that people can do when they apply the goo to things.

Things that goo can do when it’s combined with goo.

That’s a lot of things! And the magic gets to do its job, it gets to be magic, it gets to short-circuit impossible in the name of the story, but it doesn’t get to do it conveniently, or quickly, or by exalting a classical wands-and-wizards vision of ‘magic’ in a setting where pulling out a wand would get you immediately hit with a brick.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Making #OneStone

#Making #One Stone

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boricuacherry-blog · 1 year

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Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner, or ETC Werner, and his daughter Pamela lived in a traditional Chinese courtyard house on a hutong in Peking's Tartar City, just outside the Legation Quarter. Their daily routine appeared comfortable and privileged, based more around English than Chinese traditions even though Werner, a widower, had chosen to avoid the overtly European world of the Legation Quarter.

In a city with plenty of old China hands, Werner was perhaps the most notable, having lived and worked in China since the 1880s. As a scholar and a former British consul, his life story was well known. His books were widely read and translated, his complex but highly regarded lectures to the Royal Asiatic Society and the Things Chinese Society were well attended. He wrote articles on Chinese culture, tradition and history for the local newspapers, and his experience and learning might have made him a much sought after dinner guest. However he rarely, if ever, accepted, preferring a solitary and scholarly life.

These days Werner had a post at Peking University, where he lectured occasionally, and he also sat as the only foreigner on the Chinese government's Historiographical Bureau. But mainly he worked from home, at his house at 1 Armour Factory Alley, in the shadow of the Fox Tower. His home was separated by the Fox Tower by only an old canal and its population of noisy ducks. Once part of China's Grand Canal, it was now too silted up to allow the grain barges to transit, and had become a fetid rubbish dump.

Armour Factory Alley, known as Kuei Chia Chang by the Chinese, was close to the old imperial examination halls and a number of papermaking factories, small family businesses that had given the warren of lanes squeezed under the Tartar Wall the name of the Papermakers' District. During the day it witnessed a constant procession, beginning with bird fanciers strolling with their covered cages, street hawkers calling out their services, people coming and going by rickshaw and late-night snack sellers.

There were an influx of foreigners who couldn't afford to live in the Legation Quarter, such as the White Russians who'd fled the Soviet Union and European Jews escaping persecution in Nazi Germany.

Though the bulk of these exiles headed for Shanghai, Peking was also seeing their numbers rise, and many were semi-destitute, forced to live in run-down lodging houses in the sprawling, often malodorous Tartar City, or around the fringes of the Badlands. They found work as doormen, barmen, croupiers, prostitutes and pimps, or survived by begging.

Armour Factory Alley, although in the Tartar City, was no place for poor foreigners. Grey courtyard residences, or siheyuan, sat behind ornate gates along both sides of the alley. Werner's house was built on a traditional north-south axis with a raised step at the entrance to ward off ghosts. In the courtyard a century-old wisteria climbed the walls, and an ancient poplar tree stood amidst a small rockery. Werner rented the house from its Chinese owner, and although old it had been fitted out with electric lights, a palatial bathroom, steam heating and glass in the windows instead of paper.

The household had a cook, a housemaid who'd been Pamela's amah when she was younger, and Werner's number-one boy - a term used in the world of foreigners in China - who was actually a man in his forties. He'd been Werner's valet for many years and was the chief male servant in the household. There was also a gatekeeper who ensured the security and upkeep of the property, and he too had been with the family a long time. Except for the cook, all the staff lived on the premises.

Werner loved the sprawling Tartar City and would regularly take long, invigorating walks through its hive of narrow hutong. This was an area of one-story shacks, street markets with ramshackle restaurants, open-air butchers and hawkers. Winter in the Tartar City was the time for roasted chestnuts, cooked in brazier that were pungently fueled by charcoal or animal dung, as well as noodles and spiced bean curd, cut into squares and fried for dumplings. There were bathhouses, fortune-tellers, professional letter writers scribbling for the illiterate, pavement barbers who cut hair before an audience, impromptu Peking opera singers, child acrobats and bearded magicians. A few cars fought their way between clusters of rickshaws, and when it rained, the rutted roads were ankle-deep in mud.

As a scholar, Werner wanted to observe as much of Peking's street life and traditions as possible, and being a skilled linguist, he was keen to engage people in conversation. In winter he would wrap up in a long gabardine coat he had used on research expeditions to Mongolia. He attracted attention - an elderly but straight-backed white man, invariably wearing specially made wraparound dark glasses of his own design to protect his eyes from Peking's dust storms.

Aside from his scholarly work, his main concern was his daughter Pamela. She had been an orphan, abandoned at birth by an unknown mother and adopted by Werner and his English wife, Gladys Nina.

They adopted Pamela from the Catholic-run orphanage at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. Here the nuns took in the unwanted babies of Peking's indigant foreigners, mostly White Russians. In those years of turmoil, as the White Russians fled the Bolshevik revolution, traveling across the steppes of Siberia and down into Harbin, Tientsin, Peking and Shanghai, the orphanages became crowded with discarded white babies. For the mothers, their money gone, their husbands and brothers still in Russia fighting in the White Army, babies were an encumbrance or a mortifying embarrassment.

What was it about that one baby girl, among so many, that led the Werners to choose her? Perhaps Gladys Nina stared into her grey eyes and the decision was instant. Grey eyes, more so than any other color perhaps, seems to look deep into you. Whatever the reason, the Werners took her home and named her Pamela - Greek for honey and all things sweet. They did not know her birth mother, her birthday or her exact age, since the nuns had not known either. The date of birth listed on the passport issues to her by the British Legation was February 7, 1917.

But before Pamela could really get to know her adoptive mother, Gladys would die, leaving Werner to raise his daughter alone. Pamela's very distinctive eyes would continue to catch attention. There was an unusual grayness of her iris, and she had light straw colored hair. As she grew up, Pamela never kept her adoption a secret. When people commented on her eyes, or questioned her about her heritage, she would say she supposed her birth mother was Russian, as grey eyes were most commonly found in Russians. People who knew Pamela always commented on her independence; how she was able to take care of herself when her father left on long research trips, her excellent Chinese language skills, the fact that she seemingly had no really close friends. In a tight-knit, often socially incestuous small foreign community, Pamela's independent, self-contained character marked her as somewhat different from the run-of-the-mill foreign girl in Peking.

While she'd grown up outside the Legation Quarter, first in a house on San Tiao Hutong in the Ch'ienmen district and then on Armour Factory Alley, she enjoyed the Quarter's skating rinks and hotel tea dances. The young men who knew her described her as gay and fun, always laughing and dancing. She also spoke fluent Mandarin, and moved more comfortably and more frequently in Chinese society than did most of her white contemporaries. She regularly visited the teeming food market of Soochow Hutong and ate at the cheap Chinese restaurants patronized by Chinese university students near her home.

Pamela had become that rare thing among the city's foreign community - a white girl who enjoyed both the European lifestyle of the Quarter and the life of Chinese Peking. Her ease in conversing and interest in China's culture, no doubt fuelled by her father's work, meant that she tended to roam widely across Peking on her bicycle, exploring parts of the city other foreign girls never ventured into.

Much as she was independent, and appeared to be largely content with her own company like her father, she had been a problem at school. At the first school, the Convent of the White Franciscans, she was rebellious, answering back and infuriating her teachers. Then she'd gone to the French School, where she was asked to leave, after which she was refused admittance to the American School. Pamela was intelligent though. She took exams for a scholarship to the Peking Methodist School and won a place, but there too because of her rebellious spirit, her father was asked to remove her.

Finally, in 1934, unable to control his daughter, who was then fifteen, and at his wits' end, Werner sent her off to board at a grammar school in Tientsin. She would be a boarder. Tientsin Grammar was a little slice of England in warlord-wracked, Japanese-threatened northern China. It was run on strict English public school lines and was known for its discipline. Those who knew Pamela, though, gave her some latitude. After all, she was an only child with no mother and an elderly father who left her alone in Peking for long periods while he went off on expeditions, looking for the lost burial tomb of Genghis Khan in Mongolia or pursuing rare artifacts in the wilds of Muslim western China. It was hardly surprising that she was a little wild.

Pamela's new friends in Tientsin were unaware she had been thrown out of schools in Peking. They knew her only as a plain, quiet girl and a keen sportswoman who was in the school hockey and netball team. She would also have a boyfriend at the school. And it was true that Pamela had been turning over a new leaf, trying to behave and stay out of trouble. When the term was finished, Pamela would go to stay at her father's house, and celebrate the Christmas holidays.

That day, on a cold January morning, Pamela was sitting at a desk by the window, writing letters. She told her father she was going out shortly to meet an old school friend; they were taking tea together and then going ice-skating at the rink, barely a mile away and in the safety of the Legation Quarter. She would be back by 7:30, in time to have dinner with her father, who was a worrier. So after her father had gone on his daily walk and she had finished writing her letters, Pamela donned her heavy overcoat and woolen mittens and pushed her straw-fair hair up into a beret. She took her iceskates and her bicycle.

She went and had tea at Ethel Gurevitch's house. Ethel was from a White Russian family who'd been living in Peking for five years. At fifteen, she was younger than Pamela, but the two had gone to the same school, until Werner enrolled his daughter at Tientsin Grammar. The girls had run into each other the day before at the skating rink, where they caught up on news about school, their lives and mutual friends, agreeing to meet again the following afternoon. Around six o'clock, the girls headed over to the rink. A mutual friend, another White Russian girl who'd been at school with Pamela, named Lilian Marinovski, was there too. At seven o'clock, Pamela said she had to go home. She told Ethel and Lilian she'd promised her father she would be back by half past seven. It had been long dark by seven, and it was freezing, with a bone-chilling wind through the blacked-out streets at the edge of the Quarter. The girls stood around the coal brazier that had been set up by the rink. 'But aren't you afraid to ride home alone?' Ethel asked, while Lilian wanted to know if she was scared of the dark. They both lived nearby, within the Quarter, and were staying out later than normal on account of it being Russian Christmas, but Pamela would have to ride a mile or so outside the Quarter to Armour Factory Alley, skirting the notorious Badlands by riding along the Tartar Wall. Then she'd be pedaling through the Tartar City in the dark, down unlit hutong, with not even moonlight to help. From the Tartar City, looking back into the Legation Quarter, the only landmarks at night were the spindly spires of St. Michael's Church, the lights in the upper windows of the Wagons Lits and the Hotel du Nord, and the black frame of the radio tower at the American Legation. 'I've been alone all my life,' she replied, 'I'm afraid of nothing! And besides, Peking is the safest city in the world.' And with that, her friends waved goodbye as she disappeared into that bitter January night.

Peking was a city that retired early. In the winter of January, the streets of Tartar City were virtually deserted by nine, the shops shut, the street hawkers gone, and most sensible people home in bed. Outside the Legation Quarter, streetlights were infrequent, motorized taxis and rickshaws rare. Only the hardiest and most financially needy of the pullers were willing to ferry the night owls home from the bars and nightclubs, and the dens of the Badlands. Peking was populous, but it was not a nighttime city to rival Shanghai. It was more conservative, reserved. Apart from the Badlands.

The Badlands was a network of twisting hutong devoted to sin and vice. This part of Peking was sleepy and calm during daylight hours, but at night it grew raucous with those seeking illicit pleasures. Anything was available in the Badlands, at a price. It used to be a buffer zone before the fall of the Qing dynasty, where attackers would be forced to expose themselves. Back then it was a no-man's-land between Chinese and foreign Peking. Since then, it had become developed, yet it still retained its no-man's-land feel, neither completely Chinese nor completely foreign, although technically it was under the jurisdiction of the Peking police. Into this vacuum moved the dive bars, brothels and nightclubs, the gambling and drug dens, most of them run by stateless White Russians or, increasingly, Koreans acting as fronts for the Japanese. Effectively beyond the law, it had become the playground of the foreign underworld of Peking. The stiff-backed authorities of the Legation Quarter ignored the sin on their doorstep, and the Peking police turned up only to receive their 'gifts' from the various criminal elements. Along with low-life Chinese and foreigners, it drew curious visitors, and played host to the U.S. Marines, British, French and Italian soldiers who guarded the nearby legations. Its rookeries of vice catered to all tastes, no matter how exotic or depraved.

The Badlands felt impermanent, hastily thrown together, with buildings that had been knocked up from rough wood or cheap brick, then slathered inside with plaster to make them appear more robust than they were. Inferior lodging houses clustered on the fringes, with rooms to rent for incognito assignations. There was rotgut and hooch in the flophouses for the destitute, which were home to Peking's foreign driftwood - men and women who'd come about as far as possible to escape something they mostly kept to themselves. On the streets were Chinese beggars with suppurating sores, missing limbs, milky eyes, and goiters protruding from their necks. White Russian down-and-outs with straggly beards and frayed tsarist uniforms wandered aimlessly. The Badlands' flourishing trade in flesh, narcotics , and sleaze, wrapped up in desperate poverty, was the end of the road for many. The heart of the Badlands was Chuanpan Hutong, a winding street of jerry-built structures, fetid and dank lodging houses for the transient, and all-night restaurants where pimps met their girls. Those too old, ugly or strung out to work in the brothels walked the street, touting for business. The presence of red lanterns and bouncers outside a joint indicated a late-night bar with a tacky cabaret show, or a protected brothel overseen by a fearsome madam who'd accommodate any request - white girls, Chinese girls, Chinese boys. About halfway along its length, Chuanpan Hutong formed a junction with Hougou Hutong, which ran down to the Tartar Wall. The wall formed a natural southern border of the Badlands, extending all the way to the Tartar City and the Fox Tower. On Hougou Hutong, street sellers sold opium, heroin, along with the works to inject it, and cheaply printed pornography of pubescent Chinese and White Russian Carole Lombard lookalikes. The only piece of goodness in the area was the church of the China Inland Mission. Converts were few and far between, but unwanted babies were daily arrivals. The Protestant missionaries dubbed their church the Island of Hope. The higher class foreigners thought the Badlands typified Chinese depravity; the Chinese thought it symbolic of barbarian foreign ways. Both mostly pretended it didn't exist.

Fox Tower was the tower in Peking said to be haunted by fox spirits, a superstition that meant the place was deserted at night. By day, the fox spirits lie hidden and still. But at night, they roam restlessly through the cemeteries and burial grounds of the long dead, exhuming bodies and balancing the skulls upon their heads. They must then bow reverentially to Tou Mu, the Goddess of the North Star, who controls the books of life and death that contain the ancient celestial mysteries of longevity and immortality. If the skulls do not topple and fall, then the fox spirits - or huli jing - will live for ten centuries and must seek victims to nourish themselves, replenishing their energy through trickery and connivance, preying upon innocent mortals. Having lured their chosen victims, they simply love them to death. They then strike their tails to the ground to produce fire and disappear, leaving only a corpse behind them. After dark, the area became the preserve of thousands of bats, which lived in the eaves of the Fox Tower and flitted across the moonlight like giant shadows. The only other living presence was the wild dogs - or huang gou - whose howling kept the locals awake.

When daylight broke on another freezing day, the tower was deserted once more. The colony of bats circled one last time before the creeping sun sent them back to their eaves. It was the morning of Friday January 8, and an old man named Chang Pao-chen was taking his prized songbird for a walk along the Tartar Wall towards Fox Tower.

Caged songbirds were an ancient Peking tradition, and every morning old men like Chang could be seen carrying lacquered wooden cages draped with blue linen covers. All Pekingers recognized the distinctive sound of these swallows, which were let out of their cages with flutes attached to their tails to go whistling through the morning air, soaring across the sky before returning to their masters. Chang came to the Tartar Wall everyday to smoke, drink tea and talk songbirds. That morning, shortly after eight o'clock, he was following the Tartar Wall eastwards to the Fox Tower when he noticed, in the icy wasteland between the road and the tower, the wild dogs prowling curiously and sniffing at something alongside a ditch. It was a badly mutilated body, clothing disheveled, with an expensive wristwatch on one arm that had stopped just after midnight. Partially clothed in a tartan skirt and a bloodied woolen cardigan, he assumed it was a girl. Her shoes, into one of which a handkerchief had been stuffed, were lying some distance away. But only a short distance from her body was a blood-spattered membership card for the French Club iceskating rink. It was hard to tell from the features of her brutally stabbed and beaten face whether she was foreign or Chinese. Her entire sternum had been cut open, her ribs broken, and the open cavity gave off a strong smell. The body was strangely bloodless though. The blood had to have been drained elsewhere. When police were summoned, they too were horrified. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, which had split the skull and caused massive haemorrhaging in the brain. Most of the injuries had been inflicted postmortem. The throat was cut postmortem, and horrifying, her heart had been ripped out. She had been stripped before being repeatedly stabbed in a frenzy and mutilated. Her right arm was nearly severed. The cuts to the shoulder, though, could not have been made with an ordinary knife; some sort of specialist cutting tool must have been used, like a surgeon's scalpel or a professional amputation knife. It was not the hack job of an amateur. Her organs had been removed. Under the intensely bright lights of the pathology room, her small hands clenched rigidly tight, her thumbs locked inside her fists, trapped there by rigor mortis, with her distinctly grey pupils fixed to the sky, they could see she had freckles. But they couldn't figure why or who would have committed such a brutal act.

Werner would watch as Pamela's coffin was lowered into the ground next to her adopted mother's. His daughter had been barely five years old at that time, her blonde hair in a pudding-bowl cut, a few of her milk teeth missing. She'd worn a new black overcoat with black woolen stockings as the mother she'd hardly known was buried. Now mother and daughter lay beside each other, under the hard and frozen earth.

Even though Peking had been living under the threat of invasion from the Japanese for months now, the city's dread now coalesced at the discovery of the body at Fox Tower. It seemed to graphically symbolize the spiral into barbarism. The hunt for a the nineteen-year-old girl's killer was about to consume, and in some ways define, the cold and final days of old Peking.

#pamela werner #peking #china #30s #1937 #homicide #murder #unsolved #wentworth prentice #ugo capuzzo #fred knauf

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etrioindia · 1 year

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Logistics Sector to Take-Up the Lion’s Share of the EV Market - Etrio

The logistics region has had a visible exponential boom with inside the previous few years. Even in an international pandemic, the arena noticed a sharp rise. With the implementation of the latest technology at each step, the logistics region has been keeping up with all the recent changes that are happening in the markets. The kind of boom and change that the logistics sector has witnessed is unprecedented and unmatchable in so many ways.

The region has been very energetic in bringing the EV revolution to India, and this may just be the kind of push that the electronic vehicle industry needs to get a catapult change in the markets. With all the recent updates in the logistics sector technology-wise, it is only understandable that they would want to implement and work on a sustainable and revolutionary model in nature. The logistics sector has been on the front foot when it comes to incorporating and implementing changes, and one of the most pleasant changes that it has witnessed is switching to the EV lane. Another commendable and noteworthy reason why the logistics sector in India has adapted to so much change is that India has joined the World Logistics Passport consortium.

Under the insightful leadership of Mr. Nitin Gadkari, the Union Minister of Road Transports and Highways, many new rules have been implemented. One such direction is that of "Green Tax", and with this new rule, a significant shift has been observed in the logistics sector alone. Under the "Green Tax" rule, all older vehicles will have to pay 50% of the road tax against all the damage they cause to the ecosystem. This automatically means that most logistics companies that rely on trucks and other heavy three-wheelers will want to save the additional costs associated with the "Green Tax" and switch to electric vehicles.

According to the ministry, all those vehicles that are older than eight years will fall under the radar of the Green Tax (at 10-25 % of street tax). The entire propaganda of the Green Tax is to ensure that the older vehicles responsible for most of the pollution are benched and off the road.

If we look closely, the logistics sector has been operating for the longest time, and just because it is old, it does not mean that they use old vehicles. With so many upgrades happening on the front of logistics, now is the time to switch to a safer and more economical means of transporting electric vehicles. The logistics sector, on the whole, has decided to make amends by adapting to this change that the government wishes to implement through and through. India has decided and vouched to switch to electric vehicles entirely by the year 2023, which makes the logistics sector the pioneers in driving this change.

It is undeniably true that the logistics sector has geared ahead for the longest time with changes that have been implemented. Whether it was the change to automation and AI or now that of switching to the EV mode. For the longest time, the logistics sector has been one of the strongest influencers in the changes being implemented by the government. In the current situation of the pandemic, when there is not much importance given to standing up to the changing times, the logistics sector has braced ahead and stood up to the challenge with the help of electric vehicles.

With so many sectors now wanting to switch to EV for their operational purposes, it is also true that the supply should be sufficient. One key industry player that has been manufacturing the best quality of electric three-wheelers is Etrio. Today, a large number of small, medium and large scale ecommerce and logistics owners have switched to the strength and durability of the Etrio three-wheeler vehicles. It is clear to understand that the logistics sector will be one of the most significant users of the EV market in the coming years.

#EV #Electric Vehicles

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aleksadnezz · 3 years

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Sweet Night 5

Jae x Reader

“I’m sorry.” I said while still damping the tissue on his wet hoodie.

“It’s okay. What were you saying again?” He took the tissue from me and he do it on his own.

“Oh I was just gonna ask if you are?” I raised my lanyard to show the keychain to him. His small eyes widen when he saw it.

“How did you now?” He asked. So it’s true??? OMG!!!! My lips formed a big smile. I can’t believe, I’m going to tell it to Ara she would be excited.

“I saw your stuff animals’ collection.” I said cheerfully and pointed his shelves.

He looked at It and returned his eyes on me. He still looked confused so I tried to explain what I mean.

“I actually have a friend, she gave me this and she told me it’s a merch from a kpop group, you have the same so I assumed that you are..” He looked at me waiting me to continue speaking. I can clearly see the nervousness from his eyes. He might think that I’ll tell to other people what I know.

“You are a fan too.”

“Please don’t tell it to other people-“

We spoke at the same time but I heard what he said. He softly laughed and scratched the back of his nape.

“Yeah.. that’s right.. I’m a fan too.” He shyly said.

“Don’t worry I won’t say it.” I said, now I’m hesitating if I’m gonna share this to Ara. I bet she would be happy if I told her that I have a fanboy friend. It’s still weird for me to have a neighbor that is my friend too because I’m not that friendly. What in a bigbang theory is this, except that we’re both introverts and he don’t have a Sheldon.

“Uh have you seen or heard anything about that group?” He suddenly asked. I shook my head.

“Nah. I only know that they’re one of the kpop groups.” I said. I heard him laughed so I looked at him. “Why?”did I said something wrong?

“Nothing. I think they’re more of a kband than a kpop but that’s okay.” He explained. I know nothing about any of that but I like bands for sure I would like them. I almost forgot about the group that Ara said to me earlier, I’ll try to listen to them maybe I would like them too, the thing is I forgot their group name, I’ll just ask Jae if he knows it.

“By the way you know a kpop group that has kids in their name?”

“Stray Kids?”

“Yeah! that’s right, Stray Kids.”

“You like them?”

“Not really I’ll just start listening to them actually.” He nodded. “My friend will bring me to their concert so..”

“Really? That’s awesome.”

“You can come too. I will tell to my friend.” I suggest. Since he’s a fan too might as well invite him to their concert. “Have you attended a concert before? Because I haven’t” I laughed.

“Yeah I’ve been into some concerts, I perform there.” He said the last words under his breath so I didn’t hear it clearly.

“Ha?” I asked but he only shook his head and smiled at me.

“I’ll try to join you with your friend in the concert.”

“Cool!! I’d let you know..” I said. I wonder if he has other socials, but I still don’t know how his name spelled so it’s hard to find him. “Anyway, I think my job here is done so I’m now gonna head out. I have to feed the cat.”

We walked over his opened door. Before I turn and bid him goodbye he spoke.

“How’s Minnie by the way. I haven’t seen her.” He said. Of course you haven’t, you didn’t leave your room for a week.

“She eats a lot and whines a lot. So if you heard her in the middle of the night please don’t knock on my door.” He let out a smiley laugh where I can see his pearly white teeth and the disappearance of his eyes.

“It’s a cute cat. I won’t get mad.” He assures.

“I’ll keep that in my mind.” I raised my finger and pointed my head. I glance at his stretched lips, and that smile. what? I didn’t say that.

Today is Friday and I got off from work extra early. When this happens usually Ara and I would go to mall to window shop or I just accompany her but today she told me that she has something to go to. Also, I didn’t tell Ara about Jae yet, maybe soon if he agrees to come with us to the concert.

I went straight home after my shift so I can go to market. Minnie is running out of cat food supply and I’m running out of food too. I also want to have a chill night where I’d lay on my bed while I watch sum movies. I quickly changed my polo into a shirt and sweats. I wore the glasses that I only wear when I use my computer or phone. I went in front of my mirror to check myself. I stared at my reflection for a long time trying to examine what seems weird. Was it my face? I don’t have dirt on my face and I don’t look tired either. It’s the clothes. I look like Jae. Sweats and glasses, I look comfy as heck.

I don’t want to spend time just to change so I’ll just ignore that I accidentally dressed up as my neighbor, as if that I would bump into him today, I barely see that guy. I carry my tote bag with my phone and wallet in it, and I wore my slides. I left my apartment and locked it.

“You’re going out too?”

I jolted when I heard a voice. Speaking of my neighbor, in fact I don’t even have to turn around just to know who it is. Still, I turned around to face him.

“Yeah, just grocery and you?” Thank g he’s wearing a black hoodie while mine’s gray.

“I need to pick up something.” He said while he’s locking his door.

“Where do you grocery shop?” He asked. I waited him so we can walk together.

“Emart.”

“My way is also there; do you want a ride? I already booked a grab.” He showed me his phone with the said grab. I mean free ride? Of course I do.

“Sure.” The lift opens so we enter. From 15 floor going to ground floor is a long ride so I made myself busy by observing every single thing that I see here inside the lift. When we entered there are already sum people inside, 2 guys and a couple who can’t keep their hands off each other. Not that I’m judging them, but from what I can see, what they’re doing considered PDA already. Hugging, laughing and teasing like there’s no tomorrow.

I don’t know if those guys are annoyed too and just trying to ignore them or maybe it’s just only me. I glanced to Jae to see what he’s doing, looks like he’s not bothered at all. His left hand slipped inside the pocket of his pants; other hand is on his phone.

Another person entered the lift. I moved backwards so she can have space. The couple moves backwards too so they’re now standing beside me, I can even feel her bag nudging my arm but I tried to ignore it. Within a hot minute her arm hit my side causing me to bumped Jae. I looked at the couple as calm as I can possibly can.

“I’m sorry miss.” “sorry miss.” They both said in union.

“It’s okay.” I said calmy and showed my nicest smile. I want my afternoon to be chill and stress free plus I may see them again I want to protect my pure reputation as a good neighbor. Suddenly I felt a hand on my elbow that slowly pulled me closer to him. I felt an electric shock that send shivers all over my body. I stood frozen next to him because of how close we are. I can even smell his perfume, it’s like a mixture of fresh fruity and baby powder. I wonder where he bought it.

He let go of my arm when we reached the ground floor. We walked towards the entrance of the building but I stayed walking behind him. He looked back at me and stopped walking so I can catch up with him. When we got out the building, we can see that there’s a car already waiting. Jae made me get on first and I thought that he would sit beside the driver but he sat next to me.

It’s rush hour already and we we’re caught by traffic. I stared outside the car window like I always do when I commute. There’s time where I’m channeling my main character vibes when I look outside the window. None of us is taking and the sound from the cardio radio playing sum R&B soul songs was the only noise. Jae was busy scrolling through his phone, though I don’t want to bother him but I feel like I should speak.

“So where are you heading to?” I blurted out. I tried not to look at him directly so I stared at the driver’s seat.

“Somewhere near the TBD Company”

“Isn’t that where most celebrity’s hangout or sumthin?” I’ve never been into that area and I know that, that place is one of the richest districts.

“Well not all because I go there all the time.” He said before he turned off his phone and looked at me.

“Have you ever bumped to a celebrity?” I asked. For sure he had at least once, especially when he said that he have been there a lot.

“Just some of them. I’ve always seen Mark Tuan in a coffee shop that I go to, you know him?” Is he kidding? I think he’s the only famous person that I could remember that Ara ever told me. She showed me a video clip of him dancing and I think I forgot to breathe for a sec, plus he got the cutest smile. I must admit that prolly have a thing for people’s smile.

“You mean the very good-looking guy?” I said in awe and he laughed at my reaction. Well, I only said what know is true.

“Yeah, that very good-looking guy.” He said casually as if that he knows him but he’s still laughing. Wait if he seen some celeb then he might have seen his Kpop Idols.

“How about your favorite Kband? Day6?” I’m honestly just guessing, but I believe most of the company’s are located there so assume that they work there. Instead of answering me he let out a fake cough.

I immediately understood what he’s trying to say so I leaned to him and whispered. “Okay I won’t mention in public that you’re a Kpop fan.”I assure him. I find it funny that he’s getting conscious and shy about other people knowing that he’s a fanboy.

“No actually.. yeah alright, I’ll just take that.” Yeah, whatever Jae. I looked outside and saw that we’re almost near the market, I turned to Jae and poked him.

“You can drop me off here.” He nodded.

“Mr. can you pull over to the next street.” Jae said.

“Thank you for the ride Jae.”

“No worries, what time you will be done?”

“I don’t know I may take a while.” I may take a while since I don’t have a grocery list so I’ll prolly have to go to every aisle to remember all the stuff that I needed, a life hack that I learned when I started living on my own.

The driver pulled the car off the road. I turned to Jae before I opened the door.

“Thank you again.” I said and he smiled. I opened the door and got off the car. I waited for them to leave before I enter the market.

1 2 3 4 5

#day6 #day6 jae #jae #eaj park #eaj #jaehyung #day6 fluff #day6 x reader #jae x reader #day6 imagines #sweet night #fanfiction #au

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robertreich · 4 years

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When Bosses Shared the Profits

After the bruising crises we’re now going through, it would be wonderful if we could somehow emerge a fairer nation. One possibility is to revive an old idea: sharing the profits.

The original idea for businesses to share profits with workers emerged from the tumultuous period when America shifted from farm to factory. In December 1916, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report on profit-sharing, suggesting it as a way to reduce the “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers, thereby “fostering the development of a larger spirit of harmony and cooperation, and resulting, incidentally, in greater efficiency and larger gains.”

That same year, Sears, Roebuck and Co., one of America’s largest corporations, with 30,000 to 40,000 employees, announced a major experiment in profit-sharing. The company would contribute 5 percent of net earnings, without deduction of dividends to shareholders, into a profit-sharing fund. (Eventually the company earmarked 10 percent of pretax earnings for the plan.) Employees who wished to participate would contribute 5 percent of their salaries. All would be invested in shares of Sears stock. The plan’s purpose, according to The New York Times, was to “to engender loyalty and harmony between employer and employee.” In reviewing its first three years, The Times noted that 92 percent of Sears’s employees had joined up and that “the participating employee not only found an ever-increasing sum of money to his credit, but eventually discovered he was a shareholder in the corporation, with a steadily growing amount of stock to his name.”

Sears’s plan was admirably egalitarian. Distributions of shares were based on years of service, not rank, and the longest-serving workers received nearly $3 for every dollar they contributed. By the 1950s, Sears workers owned a quarter of the company. By 1968, the typical Sears salesman could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing movement included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak, S.C. Johnson, Hallmark Cards and U.S. Steel — some because it seemed morally right, others because it seemed a means to higher productivity.

Profit-sharing did give workers an incentive to be more productive. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions, because payroll costs dropped as profits did. But it subjected workers to the risk that when profits were down, their paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, they’d lose all their investments in it. (Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.) The best profit-sharing plans came in the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wished, on top of predictable base wages.

Profit-sharing fit perfectly with the evolution of the American corporation. By the 1950s, most employees of large companies had spent their entire working lives with the company. Companies and their employees were rooted in the same communities. C.E.O.s typically worked their way up, and once at the top rarely earned more than 20 times the average wage of their employees (now they’re often paid more than 300 times more). Over a third of private-sector workers were unionized. In 1958 the United Auto Workers demanded that the nation’s automakers share their profits with their workers.

Some remnants of profit-sharing remain today. Both Steelcase Inc., an office-furniture maker in Grand Rapids, Mich., and the Lincoln Electric Company, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of welding equipment, tie major portions of annual wages to profits. Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif.

But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same.

This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers. Paradoxically, it was the beginning of profit-sharing with top executives and “talent.” Big Wall Street banks, hedge funds and private-equity funds began doling out bonuses, stock and stock options to lure and keep the people they wanted. They were soon followed by high-tech companies, movie studios and start-ups of all kinds.

Even before tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and incomes in the current pandemic, the pay of the typical worker had barely risen since the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, ever-greater wealth continues to concentrate at the very top.

Since 2000, the portion of total national income going to American workers has dropped farther than in other rich nations. A steadily larger portion has gone into corporate profits, which have been reflected in higher share prices. But a buoyant stock market doesn’t help most Americans. The richest 1 percent now own half the value of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent, 92 percent.

Those higher share prices have come out of the pockets of workers. Daniel Greenwald at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, Martin Lettau at the University of California’s Haas School of Business and Sydney Ludvigson at N.Y.U. found that from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.

Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty.

If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904.

There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees.

It’s impossible to predict what kind of America will emerge from the crises we’re now experiencing, but the four-decade trend toward higher profits and lower wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. Sharing the profits with all workers is a logical and necessary first step to making capitalism work for the many, not the few.

#corporate social responsibility #corporate power #Corporate Profits #american workers

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aroundfortwayne · 2 years

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Union Street Market announces new leadership and businesses

New Post has been published on https://aroundfortwayne.com/news/2022/09/14/union-street-market-announces-new-leadership-and-businesses/

Union Street Market announces new leadership and businesses

Today, the Union Street Market announced three new concepts that will open at Electric Works this fall, along with new leaders who will oversee the market.

#Bottleworks Hall in Indianapolis #Electric Works #Ermin Husidic #Fort Wayne Indiana #Grabill Amish Deli #Grabill Amish Pastries #Grabill Indiana #Herculean Meal Prep #Katy Silliman #Ted Spitzer #Union Street Market at the Electric Works

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awesome-casuallyfamouscollector · 3 years

Photo

The VAZ-2106 Zhiguli inherited from Soviet occupation era, Riga, November 6, 2020. Photo by D.P.

Now, it is very rare sight on Riga’s streets. In late 1970s and 1980s, it was on top list of Soviet occupation era car owner’s dreams. Comparing with average working-class salaries, it was quite expensive vehicle. People were forced to work and to wait their new vehicles for many years on a very long waiting list. In many occasions, the Soviet Union collapsed first, before arrival of Soviet (Russian) “dream car”!

The Soviet second-hand auto-motive market was extremely weird looking from perspective of people living in free market economy. Even heavily used VAZ-2106 was two times more expensive as new one with “regulated and controlled” sticker price dictated by Soviet regime!

By mid-1980s, this car was hopelessly outdated: Engine – 1568 cc; Power output – 79 hp; Transmission- 4-speed manual; 0–100 km/h (0–62 mph) acceleration in 16 seconds; Top speed – 150 km/h (93 mph); Fuel tank – 39 liters (Considering the distances and low fuel efficiency, it was tiny! Actually, modern EVs have much better autonomy that this Soviet era petrol car!). Air conditioning not available; air bags not available, electric windows not available and etc…, and many other things missing that you expected to see in normal car in the West by mid-1980s.

The real history of Soviet auto-motive industry explains quite a lot why the Soviet Union collapsed as well it explains why communist/socialist dictatorship sucks…! Indigenous Latvians were happy to destroy the Soviet regime. It is funny to see, but, actually, Putin’s regime fellow riders and useful fools even today don’t know why Soviet regime collapsed...

After collapse of the Soviet Union, when Latvia restored its independence, Latvians obtained freedom to buy what they want on car market. Almost everybody rushed to get rid from Soviet occupation era cars (actually, we called all of them – Russian cars) as fast as possible.

Color scheme of this car is different from original as well original rear wheels were replaced by owner. It looks that car was stopped here by flat tyre.

Author: D.P. Story from my life experience...

#Latvia #Riga #vintage car #street photography #original photography on tumblr #VAZ-2106 #Lada #soviet occupation #collapse of the soviet union #Baltic States #European history #daily life #Northern Europe

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rocknrollarticles · 3 years

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The Artwoods Story

The Artwoods’ 100 Oxford Street is a UK compilation album released in 1983 that features a four-page booklet (pictured above) that tells the band’s story, written by guitarist Derek Griffiths.

Since there's a limit on the number of photos that can be added to one post, I'll be reblogging this a couple times until I have all the info up. To see this post with all the info added in reblogs, click here.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy Derek’s words as much as I do!

Transcript under the cut (main text + Record Mirror article from page three's rightmost side)

“ It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Artwoods came into being because everything just seemed to evolve naturally. The one date however that does stick in my mind is the 1st October 1964 which is the date I turned professional, thus depriving the accountancy profession of a valuable addition to its ranks! But seriously, one must go back to previous events in order to trace the history of the group.

I first met Jon Lord at a party in West Hampstead when he was a drama student at The Central School of Speech & Drama. He was introduced to me by Don Wilson whose claim to fame was his membership of the famous skiffle group Dickie Bishop & His Sidekicks. They had had a hit years previously with "No Other Baby But You", and Don now ran a band on a semi-pro basis called Red Bludd's Bluesicians in which I played guitar. Well, I say we were called this, but only when we were fortunate enough to cop an R&B gig. We used to play The Flamingo Allnighter and lots of U.S. air bases. The rest of the time we played weddings and tennis club dances as The Don Wilson Quartet! Jon Lord was brought in on piano and was a very valuable addition especially as he could get his hands around a little jazz and all the old standards. Jon used to ring me at work and interrupt my vouching of sales ledger invoices in order to discuss the coming weekends gigs. We would bubble with excitement at the approach of an R&B gig as we really hated all the weddings and barmitzvahs.

Around this time Don made a very important policy decision and we suddenly became the proud owners of a Lowrey Holiday organ for Jon to play. Shortly after this Don contrived to drive the band-wagon into the back of a lorry on the North Circular, doing himself considerable mischief in the process. This brought about the unfortunate end of Don's career with us, but not before he had masterminded an important merger of two local bands.

For some time we had been aware, and not a little envious, of The Art Wood Combo led by none other than Art Wood himself. His band underwent a split at that time and Red Bludd's Bluesicians, alias The Don Wilson Quartet, were neatly grafted on. We really felt we were moving into the big league by doing this as Art not only had more work than us but, wait for it, used to sing with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated with Charlie Watts on drums and Cyril Davies on harmonica! The next problem was a replacement for Don, and this was solved by stealing the bass player from another local group The Roadrunners, a good looking cove who went by the name of Malcolm Pool. The offer and acceptance of the gig were transacted in a pub car park somewhere in West Drayton staring into the murky waters of the Grand Union Canal clutching pints of local bitter (Fullers?). (Authors note: drugs had not been invented at this stage, as far as most groups were concerned, apart from the odd pill to keep one awake on an all nighter!)

The next personnel change took place some time in 1964 and this involved the retirement of drummer Reg Dunnage, who did not want to turn pro. Auditions were held in London and lots of drummers attended. However it was more or less a foregone conclusion that Keef Hartley would get the job. You see we'd already decided that what The Artwoods needed above all else was a Liverpool drummer! Unfortunately none came to the audition, but Keef hailed from Preston which was near enough for us. Keef had previously played with Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, replacing Ringo Starr in the process (heady stuff this), and Freddy Starr & The Midnighters. Both were such influential bands of their time that these credentials combined with Keef's quasi Liverpool accent (at least to our ears) provided him with a faultless pedigree.

So that was it, the line-up that would take us through to 1967 when Colin Martin eventually replaced Keef Hartley on drums.

For a while we worked as The Art Wood Combo but then decided it was hipper to drop the Combo and become The Artwoods.

The period when The Artwoods were operating was one of musical change when groups went from recording and performing other writers' material to writing their own. In fact the last year of the group's existence was 1967 which heralded the arrival of "Hendrix", "Flower-Power". "Festivals" and experimental use of mind expanding drugs! 1966/67 were particularly exciting years to be based in London and every night would be spent in one of the many clubs which had recently sprung up. The Ad Lib, The Scotch of St. James, The Cromwellian, Blaises and of course The Speakeasy to mention a few. Many of these we played in and the trick was to be well known enough not to have to pay the entrance fee on nights off. Any night you could be sure to meet your mates "down The Speak" and it became the unofficial market place for rock musicians.

It was also the days before huge amounts of equipment took over. Equipment meant road-crew and trucks and in turn financial hardship. This simple equation has been the downfall of many bands over the years. We used to travel in a 15 cwt van together with all the gear-no roadies, just us. It's amusing to recall but after recording the TV show "Ready, Steady, Go" (in Kingsway in those days?) one would be besieged by autograph hunters on the way to the van with the gear. Even really 'big groups of the day like The Zombies would hump their own equipment and apologetically place an amp on the ground in order to sign an autograph! Because it was financially viable to travel to small clubs in this way, we would often average 6 or 7 nights a week, every week, on the road. A bad month would probably mean less than twenty gigs. This meant we were living, sleeping and eating in close, and I mean close, proximity. You really found out who your friends were.

The subject of equipment is an interesting one as it really distinguishes the bands then from those of today. The average pub band of today would carry more equipment than we did. As I've already mentioned we were quick to realise that we could elevate ourselves musically by investing in a proper electric organ as opposed to a Vox Continental or Farfisa that many groups used. Consequently the group purchased a Lowrey Holiday and we thought this alone would provide us with the Booker T and Jimmy Smith sound.

What we failed to realize was that we also needed a Leslie cabinet with a special built-in rotor to get that "wobbly" sound. Our friend and mentor Graham Bond, the legendary organist/saxophonist, was quick to point out the error of our ways one night when we were gigging at Klooks Kleek in West Hampstead. We groaned inwardly when we discovered the extra cost and humping involved, but it had to be bought. We were fortunate very early on to score a deal with Selmers, who provided us with free amps and P.A., but we had to make the trek to Theobalds Road once a week to get it all serviced as they were not as reliable in those days. I used a Selmer Zodiac 50 watt amp and Malcolm had Goliath bass cabinets with a stereo amp.

The P.A. comprised two 4 x 12 cabinets and a 100 watt amp! When we toured Poland we played in vast auditoria and linked our system with the Vox system being used on tour by Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas. This meant we were pumping out no more than 300 watts which is laughable by today's standards. Although it would never have compared in quality, I can remember standing at the back of extremely large halls and being able to hear clearly all the words Billy J sang. One day in 1963 Alexis Korner sent me off foraging in and around Charing Cross Road for a new guitar, with instructions to mention his name whereupon I would receive a discount of 10%. Previously I played a Burns Trisonic (collectors will appreciate this model did not have "Wild Dog" treble) but fancied owning a Gibson ES335 as favoured by many blues players. Sure enough one was hanging invitingly in the window of Lew Davis's shop.

I ended up paying £135 and still use it regularly today although its value has multiplied five fold. Malcolm came with me that day and bought an Epiphone bass, the same colour and shape as my guitar. For years we looked like matching book-ends on either end of the group! Keef started off using a Rodgers drum kit, but somewhere along the line changed to, I think, Ludwig. There was no out-front mixing as is common today, just the P.A. amp on stage with the vocalist. Primitive I know, but everything revolved around bands being able to travel economically with their gear and perform at small clubs anywhere in Britain. The college circuit was much sought after and provided the icing on the cake while package tours were not necessarily well paid. We did our first with P. J. Proby and got £25 per night (for the lot of us) and we had to pay for our own accommodation!

I have already mentioned "Ready, Steady, Go" a show on which we appeared on more than one occasion. The original format called for groups to mime to their records but after a time it was decided that it would become "live" and that the show would be re-titled "Ready Steady Goes Live". We were proud to be picked for the first "live" show and learnt the news via a telephone call to our agent in London from a phone box high in the Pennines. We managed a drunken war-dance of celebration round the phone box believing that this meant we'd really cracked it. As I remember the first show we did featured Tom Jones (complete with lucky rabbits foot) miming to "It's Not Unusual", The Kinks, Donovan and Adam Faith's Roulettes playing live (without Adam). We were promoting our first single "Sweet Mary" and I would put the date at around late 1964.

Our first recording deal was with a subsidiary of Southern Music Publishing called Iver Productions and I reckon that would have been mid 1964. Southern had a four track studio in the basement of their offices in Denmark Street ("The Street") and getting the gear downstairs, especially the organ, was "murder". Our first producer was Terry Kennedy and we recorded several tracks with him. Without going too deeply into all the details of recording techniques of the period, one tended to compensate for the lack of tracking facilities available, by attempting to duplicate the live excitement. In many ways it was a frustrating experience particularly for ambitious guitar-players. I was a Steve Cropper freak and I knew as a musician that a lot of his sound on record resulted from him working his amplifier hard in the studio— thus the speaker would emit the sound he was used to on stage. In Britain however, engineers would say "You don't need to play loud man, we can turn you up on the desk". The result was a weedy, thin guitar sound. From way back I'd been experimenting with "feed back" on stage and I really had to dig my heels in about the guitar sound in the studio. Once when I turned my amp up to give it a bit of "wellie" on a solo the engineer bounded out of the control room screaming that the level would bust his microphones!

Sometime during the career of The Artwoods it was decided that we should graduate to a better studio. This was arranged by Mike Vernon who also became our producer. Our records had all been released through the Decca Record Co. and Mike was a staff producer with them. Mike w also an authority on "The Blues" and the relationship led to our only single chart record "I Take What I Want" a cover of a Sam & Dave U.S. R&B hit. Mike was also producing John Mayall at the time and it seemed only natural that Mike and The Artwoods should team up. From this point on we recorded at the Decca studio in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, but I can't honestly say it did any more for us than our previous efforts in the Southern Music basement, although we could now indulge ourselves in the comparative luxury of the eight track studio. Later on, towards the end of the groups life we were signed by Jack Baverstock at Philips Records who was looking for a group to cash in on the thirties-style gangster craze which had been triggered off by the film "Bonnie & Clyde". As a result we changed our name to "St. Valentines Day Massacre" and released a single of the old Bing Crosby hit "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" It was an ill- fated venture, which I would prefer not to dwell on, virtually signalling the end of the band apart from a few heavy-hearted gigs with a changed line-up.

Before that though, there were many great times to remember, and a fair number of gigs that were memorable in one way or another.

One of our favourite gigs was Eel Pie Island which we regularly played once a month; in fact we held the attendance record there for a while until the ageing blues artist Jesse Fuller took it from us. Eel Pie Island is literally an island in the middle of the River Thames at Twickenham and there's never been a gig like it since. It was an Edwardian ballroom originally I believe, that achieved notoriety in the 50's with the Trad Jazz boom. At that time, an overloaded chain ferry was used to convey the crowd across the river, but during the 60's a small bridge was in existence although it was only wide enough to take the promoter Art Chisnall's mini van. He had to make three separate trips across with the gear strapped to the roof and hanging out the back doors.

The audiences were exceptional for those times and I don't know where they all came from... very much like art students and very much more like the 70's than 60's. Long hair predominated and this was before 'hippies' had officially been invented! If you can imagine a ramshackle wooden ballroom, bursting at the seams, condensation pouring from the walls, the audience on each others shoulders leaping up and down, the sprung dance floor bending alarmingly in the middle, in the summer couples strolling outside and lounging on the river bank ... all this and not a disc jockey in sight! One other bonus was that it was a “free” house and therefore sold many different types of beer— we always favoured Newcastle Brown. Back on the 'mainland' afterwards it was always riotous packing the gear into the truck. I don't know how he managed it but one night Malcolm drove our truck over the support band's guitar which happened to be lying about, thus breaking the neck. I'll never forget the shocked look on that poor guitarist's face as Malcolm smoothly slipped the van into gear, apologised and drove off in that order!

No trip up north was complete without stopping at the famed Blue Boar on the M1 for a "grease-up" on the way home. I do not refer to truck lubrication but to a particular rock'n'roll delicacy known as “full-house”. This comprised double egg, sausage, chips, beans, tomatoes, fried slice, tea, and (if you were man enough) toast. It was considered a Herculean task to break successfully the 10 bob' (50p) barrier-all served on wobbly cardboard plates that doubled as items to sign autographs on for the self service waitresses.

Waitress: What band are you?

Me: You won't have heard of us.

Waitress: Oh go on, tell us.

Me: OK. The Artwoods.

Waitress: Never 'eard of you!

It was everybody’s dream to walk into the Blue Boar just as their hit of the moment was playing on the Juke Box.

One time we were chosen to represent the twentieth century at the centenary celebrations of the State of Monte Carlo— a most lavish affair which the aristocracy and dignatories of Europe attended. Princess Grace and Prince Ranier were the hosts and people like Gina Lollobrigida and the like were there. The ball was held in the famous Casino at Monte Carlo and we stayed in an opulent hotel called The Hermitage, I think. All I can remember is that we all had single rooms (a rare luxury) which were massive, and you could have pitched a tent under one of the bath towels, they were so big. After this we jetted off up to Paris where we played next door to the Moulin Rouge at a club called The Locomotive.

Whilst we were there we were taken out by our friend Mae Mercer, the American lady blues singer who we backed in England. She lived in Paris and took us out to Memphis Slim's club where we all set about drinking like it was going out of style. At the end there was an embarrassing scene concerning the bill with the result that Mae ended up in tears. Whilst we were bumbling about in an alcoholic stupor, an upright looking gentleman put his arm round Mae to comfort her and a wallet appeared magically from his inside pocket. Without further ado the bill was despatched and we later learned that our anonymous benefactor was none other than Peter O'Toole who was busy in the street outside filming 'Night Of The Generals' and was an old buddy of Mae's.

One Boxing Day we loaded up with turkey sandwiches and Xmas pudding and headed off for a gig down in Devon or Cornwall somewhere. We arrived to find the club closed and boarded up, and as usual we were broke. Naturally we were livid, checked into an hotel and located the promoter who lived with his mum. Next morning we drove round to where he lived and burst our way past his confused mum. We found him in his bedroom nervously cowering against some fruit machines which he collected. He had no money so we forced him to empty his damned machines with the result that we drove back to London with 50 quids' worth of 'tanners' (approx 22p for the younger reader!)

Whilst on the subject of disasters I suppose I am duty bound to mention Denmark. The first time we went there we caught the ferry to the continent, drove up through Germany, then caught another ferry to Denmark. There was no promoter to meet us when we arrived so all we could do was drive to Copenhagen and check in at the Grand Hotel. It cost us an arm and a leg but at least we got a good nights sleep after being awake for nearly two days travelling. The next day we made a few phone calls and finally tracked down the promoter. He said: "Didn't you get my telegram cancelling the tour?" We politely said no we hadn't and what did he intend doing with us? He checked us into another hotel (cheaper of course) and set about booking us at places that were similar to English coffee bars and youth clubs. We made enough to survive on and paved the way to more successful tours of that country. In fact by now we had Colin Martin on drums and were pursuing a much more adventurous musical policy and writing our own material. It was just right for Denmark who had taken Hendrix to their hearts to name but one, and we subsequently became quite big there in 1967.

The Artwoods achieved modest success-a minor hit single in "I Take What I Want", but we worked constantly, travelled abroad, had fantastic fun and made a living doing so. We had seven single releases, one album, and one EP, and we broadcast both on radio and TV many times. We did stage tours such as the P. J. Proby tour and covered most aspects of "show-biz" apart from actually making a movie. It was the era when bands still had to prove themselves as a live act before being offered a recording contract. now frequently happens of course that an act can become huge record sellers without so much as venturing to do a live gig.

So what happened to everyone? Well Art returned to his former occupation as a commercial artist and finds some time to fit in free-lance work between accompanying brother Ron Wood on raving excursions between Rolling Stones gigs. Malcolm moved into the same field as Art and they now work in the same building. Both of them gig occasionally on a semi-pro basis although Malcolm spent some time playing with Jon Hiseman's Colosseum and Don Partridge in the early 70's. Jon Lord became famous with Deep Purple and Whitesnake as did Keef Hartley with John Mayall and various bands of his own. Colin Martin is now a BBC Radio producer of repute. I played in various bands such as Lucas and The Mike Cotton Sound, Colin Blunstone's band, Dog Soldier (with Keef again), before I somehow drifted into studio and theatre work. Recently I formed an R'n'B band called the G.B. Blues Company, and it's great to be back on the road again. ”

Derek Griffiths.

Clipping from Record Mirror on June 5, 1965, by Norman Jopling.

“We aim to excite!” … say the Art Woods

Just for the record, the Art Woods aren't a part of Epping Forest. In fact they're a group of five interesting young men, named after the group's leader Art Wood. They also happen to be one of the most realistic groups on the scene.

For a start, they are the awkward position of having a large following, a club residency but no hit record. Secondly. they don't mind pandering to commercial tastes, even though they have been hailed as one of the most authentic R & B groups in the land.

NO PULL

“But authentic R&B just isn't pulling the crowds any more,” says Art. “The audiences want to be excited, not to be lectured on what is 'good' and what is 'bad'. Although there was a time when you could spend half an hour on one number with long solos by everybody, it didn't last long. And although there are some clubs like that still, most of them want something fresh and new.

“And we try to cater for them. We like authentic R&B, but we also like playing everything and anything else. So far, our two discs haven't meant a light. Of course we'd love a hit. But we're lucky enough to make a good living without one.”

DISCS

The Art Woods latest disc is "Oh My Love" and the one before that “Sweet Mary”. Of them Little Walter has said that he couldn't believe any white group could sing and play the blues like they do.

Line-up of the group is Art Wood, leader. vocalist and harmonica. Derek Griffiths, lead guitar, Jon Lord, organ and piano. Malcolm Pool— base guitar, and Keef Hartley on drums. The boys use a specially adapted Lowrie organ, and get a sound that's really different.

But even if the boys sometimes become depressed about no hits records, they should remember groups like Cliff Bennett, the Barron-Knights, the Rockin' Berries and the Yardbirds, and how long THEY waited before they had a hit!

N.J.

#the artwoods #the art woods #art wood #derek griffiths #malcolm pool #jon lord #keef hartley #colin martin #100 oxford street #the 100 club #articles #liner notes #newspaper clippings #record mirror #my posts

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seashellsoldier · 3 years

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“A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear” by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

This is undoubtedly the most entertaining book I’ve read in years. Not that libertarianism isn’t hilarious on its own ridiculous footing, but every attempt at some microcosmic utopia fails miserably. Free Town probably earns second prize in crackpot ideas though, just behind Jonestown. “Get yer gov’ment out of my taxes!” “Get yer gov’ment out of my Medicare!” “Get yer gov’ment out of my unemployment insurance . . . those COVID relief checks . . . my potable water . . . the electrical grid . . . fire departments and hospitals and community centers . . . school systems and healthcare and libraries . . . game wardens . . . and bridges . . . and roads . . . and dams . . . and get yer g’damned gov’ment out of my guns, Guns, GUNS!!!!” (To libertarians, it seems, everything can be resolved with guns.)

“The creation of America’s first Free Town was so ambitious in scope that it seemed doomed from the start, and indeed, almost every such population-level social experiment in history has failed spectacularly. Most efforts at planned communities involve artificially populating an uninhabited place, like a stretch of desert or an island—as in 1972, when a Nevada millionaire and his libertarian friends declared independent ownership of an island off the coast of New Zealand (a claim that was promptly quashed by the New Zealand military).

The building of utopias is limited by the rarity of visionaries with deep pockets. Building a new community from scratch requires millions or billions of dollars to create an infrastructure and overcome the challenges preventing people from living there in the first place. Henry Ford, whose assembly line kick-started the automobile revolution, learned this the hard way when his planned Amazonian utopia, Fordlandia, succumbed in the 1930s to the threats of rainforest blight, cultural clashes, and an unhelpful Brazilian government.

The four libertarians who came to New Hampshire had thinner wallets than Ford and other would-be utopians, but they had a new angle they believed would help them move the Free Town Project out of the realm of marijuana-hazed reveries and into reality.

Instead of building from scratch, they would harness the power and infrastructure of an existing town—just as a rabies parasite can co-opt the brain of a much larger organism and force it to work against its own interests, the libertarians planned to apply just a bit of pressure in such a way that an entire town could be steered toward liberty” (p. 48).

New Hampshire really is a microcosm of Caucasian America’s problems, fueled by Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch rose-filtered parable, and the Free Town Project a fringe of that, with Free Town having a fringe of their fringe, and a fringe of that fringe’s fringe on downward into those who wet-dream of 1790s’ live-off-the-land pioneering colonialism.

“For Grafton’s Free Towners, Rand’s vision of a market-driven society was what kept them privatizing and deregulating everything they could. For seven long years, they joined thrift-minded allies in issuing vociferous challenges to every rule and tax dollar is sight; one by one, expenditures were flayed from the municipal budget, bits of services peeled away like so much flesh”</i> (p. 125). The results are predictably ruinous. Infrastructure fell apart; crime went up; disputes, blame, and tribalism poured from social media feeds into the streets; and all the while, the bears foraged throughout. <i>“What seemed clear was this: in a town that refused to allow the government to protect it from bears, vigilantism seemed the only option. Just as libertarians wanted, it was every man, woman, and bear for themselves” (p. 234).

BBQ BEER FREEDOM

From Ruby Ridge to the Capital Hill insurrection, ignorant flag-waving yokels have screamed for their moronic “freedom” from the chains of civic responsibility, the duties of citizenship, and simple Christian moral accountability. “Freedom. Freedom! To the obedience-averse libertarians, the clarion call was—ironically—irresistible, a liberation-tinted tractor beam that drew them deep into Grafton’s wilds.

Those who moved to Grafton under the banner of the Free Town Project between 2004 and 2009 were free radicals, unbounded to existing living situations, because they had either too much money or not enough” (p. 78). It’s better to watch your neighbor’s house burn down than fund a local fire department.

Now of course if governments big and small managed their budgets better, libertarian-bashing would be an easier argument, Charles Koch, Roger Stone, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and their ilk be damned. It’s almost impossible to count how many hundreds of billions—maybe even trillions—of dollars get wasted every year, from healthcare to the military, grift and graft, bridges to nowhere, etc., food and electricity and potable water, subsidies for monolithic industries year after year and decade after decade, and tax breaks/shelters/loopholes for the filthy rich and their corporations, while our physical and human infrastructure continues to suffer and degrade year after year and decade after decade. Our plutocratic priorities are backwards (unless you’re a plutocrat), and finding an unbiased assessment of waste in the US, for me, is challenging. Ugh, I digress.

This really is a funny book; I laughed out loud often at the author’s wit and sarcasm. Hongoltz-Hetling’s literary voice harkens back to the glory days of A Prairie Home Companion, and this cast of characters fits perfectly into the good-natured buffoonery of such backwoods stage-play. These aren’t your Nazi-saluting gym rats cosplaying Call of Duty soldiers with their American flag capes and InfoWars codpieces. These are “rugged men” (and some women) who languish (not unlike Ted Kaczynski) in the woodland fortresses of their own Fantasyland, armed to the hilt and proud of it, and they have apparently been infecting the entire state with their wingnuttery. If New Hampshire tries to “secede from the Union”, I say let ‘em. “From my cold, dead hand!”

(shrug) “OK.”

The bears, of course, have a serious role too, and Hongoltz-Hetling gives them pleasant prominence. Patrick Blanchfield reviewed this book for The New Republic as well, highlighting the problems of New Hampshire overall (https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project): “The bear problem, in other words, is much bigger than individual libertarian cranks refusing to secure their garbage. It is a problem born of years of neglect and mismanagement by legislators, and, arguably, indifference from New Hampshire taxpayers in general, who have proved reluctant to step up and allocate resources to Fish and Game, even as the agency’s traditional source of funding—income from hunting licenses—has dwindled. Exceptions like Doughnut Lady aside, no one wants bears in </i>their<i> backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either. Whether such indifference and complacency gets laundered into rhetoric of fiscal prudence, half-baked environmentalism, or individual responsibility, the end result is the same: The bears abide—and multiply.”

Another imploding social experiment, but it will surely not be the last. “I have no doubt that Grafton will make the news again, in some wild, unpredictable way. The soil there may be rocky, but it’s fertile ground for dreams, and humans will always be drawn to places where they can slip off the radar of communal oversight and nurture their own private worlds” (p. 316). This nation as a whole needs serious course-correction, and such Petri dishes like the Free Town Project show symptoms of a sick society desperately grasping for alternatives. The fabric is frayed, fraying further, possibly deteriorating for certain circles, and I wonder if it can ever be sewn into the beautiful tapestry it could possibly be.

#libertarianism is moronic

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Sunday, March 7, 2021

Job Market Picks Up Strength (NYT) Driven by unexpectedly large job gains at the nation’s restaurants and bars, the labor market picked up strength in February, raising hopes that the economic recovery was taking hold more firmly. All told, employers added 379,000 jobs, the government reported Friday, the strongest showing since October. The increase, as vaccination efforts ramped up and restrictions on businesses eased, followed a deep loss in December and a modest rise in January. But the February pace was still far short of the gains recorded from late spring to early fall as the pandemic’s sudden stranglehold loosened. There are roughly 9.5 million fewer jobs than a year ago, and a year’s worth of lost opportunities—as many as two million jobs that would most likely have been created if previous hiring trends had continued. Congress is considering a $1.9 trillion package of pandemic relief intended to carry struggling households and businesses through the coming months.

Can Biden Keep Coal Country From Becoming a ‘Ghost Town’? (NYT) From a porch in Martin County, Ky., in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Decades later, President Barack Obama dedicated millions of dollars to work force development projects in Appalachia. President Donald J. Trump even pledged the impossible: a revival of the region’s faltering coal industry. President Biden is talking big, too, assuring residents that his climate plan will also create well-paying jobs there. But after generations of promises, communities once reliant on coal mining are understandably skeptical. Administration after administration has tried to bring the region sustained prosperity, yet many communities remain on the brink. In eastern Kentucky, the poverty rate in several counties exceeds 30 percent. Unemployment is among the highest in the nation. And an outward migration over several decades has cut the populations of some counties nearly in half, leaving local governments strapped for tax revenue and struggling to fund essential services. “Fifty years from now, this could be a ghost town,” said former Gov. Paul E. Patton, an eastern Kentucky native. “That’s my prediction.”

Hyperinflation Pushes Venezuela to Print 1,000,000-Bolivar Bills (Bloomberg) Venezuela said it will introduce new large-denomination bolivar notes as hyperinflation renders most bills worthless, forcing citizens to turn to the U.S. dollar for everyday transactions. The country’s central bank posted a statement on its website Friday saying it would begin circulating the new 200,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 bills to “fulfill the current economy’s requirements” without providing further details. The 1,000,000 note—the largest in the nation’s history—is worth only $0.53 cents. As Venezuela’s economy shrank for a seventh straight year in 2020, the government turned a blind eye to a growing number of dollar transactions, kick-started by rolling power outages that prevented credit and debit card purchases and fostered the use of cash. About 66% of transactions across the country are estimated to be made in foreign currency, according to Ecoanalitica. While the dollar has gained ground, Venezuelans continue to rely on bolivar bills for public transportation and to purchase subsidized fuel. The Caracas subway recently issued an electronic payment system after it routinely stopped charging passengers due to cash shortages.

Protesters and Police Clash in Paraguay Amid Anger Over Pandemic Response (Reuters) Protesters clashed with the police in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, late on Friday as anger over the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis boiled onto the streets and forced the resignation of the country’s top health official. Security forces fired rubber bullets and tear gas at hundreds of demonstrators who had gathered around the Congress building, while protesters broke down security barriers, burned road barricades and threw stones at the police. The protests broke out amid growing outrage as coronavirus infections hit record levels and hospitals verged on collapse throughout Paraguay.

UK COVID-19 lockdown provides boom towns for rats (Deutsche Welle) Rats, and other members of the rodent family, have a lousy reputation. They crop up regularly in our everyday language to describe bleak situations and sentiments (Rats!, caught in a rat race, someone with rat-like features—you get the drift). They seem to be omnipresent in the best of times, but now, they’re having a, er, field day. In London and other major cities across the UK, rat sightings have soared during the pandemic. The British Pest Control Association (BPCA), which represents 700 vermin catchers across the country, said its members reported a 51% hike in rodent activity during the first lockdown last spring, and a 78% increase in November after the next lockdown. Typically, rats avoid humans and make drains and sewers their homes. However, as a result of shuttered businesses and deserted high streets, the creatures are out in full force and making restaurants, pubs and empty buildings their new habitat as they look for other sources to satisfy their dietary needs. “It seems their lifestyle patterns are changing. Rats, in particular, are also becoming more visible in areas of population. With less footfall across cities and towns, there is less associated food waste being left in bins and on the floor. Also, bin areas behind restaurants and pubs are empty and free of food waste making it unavailable for the local rat population,” Natalie Bungay, technical officer with the BPCA, told DW via email. As a result, rats are also moving further afield to find other food sources. “Rats seem to be moving from cities closer to residential areas, where we’re still filling our bins with food waste,” says Bungay.

Brexit Antagonism Escalates as EU, U.K. Go Another Round (Bloomberg) When the U.K. and European Union shook hands on a trade deal late last year, few expected the new relationship to be plain sailing. And as with many divorces, antagonism between the sides has refused to fade. Among the most sensitive issues is Northern Ireland, and tensions ramped up considerably this week when the U.K. announced it will ignore some crucial obligations under the Brexit deal and the EU responded with a dramatic threat of legal action. With Prime Minister Boris Johnson already under pressure from members of his own party to rip up the Northern Ireland deal, the risk is a further escalation that erodes relations. That could have spillovers far beyond politics, and the ongoing saga is a frustration for business. The U.K.’s huge finance industry, for example, is seeing the potential for beneficial trade agreements being slowly whittled away by endless political spats.

Pope, top Iraq Shiite cleric hold historic, symbolic meeting (AP) Pope Francis and Iraq’s top Shiite cleric delivered a powerful message of peaceful coexistence Saturday, urging Muslims in the war-weary Arab nation to embrace Iraq’s long-beleaguered Christian minority during an historic meeting in the holy city of Najaf. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said religious authorities have a role in protecting Iraq’s Christians, and that Christians should live in peace and enjoy the same rights as other Iraqis. The Vatican said Francis thanked al-Sistani for having “raised his voice in defense of the weakest and most persecuted” during some of the most violent times in Iraq’s recent history. Al-Sistani, 90, is one of the most senior clerics in Shiite Islam and his rare but powerful political interventions have helped shape present-day Iraq. He is a deeply revered figure in Shiite-majority Iraq and his opinions on religious and other matters are sought by Shiites worldwide. The historic meeting in al-Sistani’s humble home was months in the making, with every detail painstakingly discussed and negotiated between the ayatollah’s office and the Vatican. The “very positive” meeting lasted a total of 40 minutes, said a religious official in Najaf.

A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles (Washington Post) Beside the ruins of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, more than 1,000 huge metal tanks loom in silent testament to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, the meltdown of three nuclear reactors 10 years ago this month. The tanks contain nearly 1.25 million tons of cooling water from the 2011 disaster and groundwater seepage over the years—equivalent to around 500 Olympic-size swimming pools—most of it still dangerously radioactive. Running out of space to build more tanks, the government wants to gradually release the water into the sea—after it has been decontaminated and diluted—over the next three decades or more. Even though a formal decision has yet to be announced, the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) have insisted that an ocean release is their preferred solution and that it is perfectly safe. The only thing holding them back appears to be the Olympics and the bad publicity it could generate before the Games begin in July, experts say. The idea of releasing the water has infuriated Fukushima’s fishing community, only now getting back on its feet after taking a battering in the wake of the 2011 disaster and the subsequent ocean contamination. Also angry is South Korea, even though it is more than 600 miles away on the other side of Japan.

Hong Kong reforms prevent ‘dictatorship of the majority’, pro-Beijing lawmaker says (Reuters) China’s proposal for Hong Kong electoral reforms could prevent a “dictatorship of the majority”, pro-Beijing Hong Kong lawmaker Martin Liao told Reuters on Saturday. The Chinese parliament is discussing plans to overhaul Hong Kong’s electoral system to ensure Beijing loyalists are in charge. Hong Kong representatives, in Beijing for an annual session, say the change is necessary and desirable. “Many people in Hong Kong are politically immature,” Liao, who sits on both Hong Kong’s and China’s legislature, said in a telephone interview. “They think ‘one man one vote’ is the best thing, and they take advice from countries that don’t even have ‘one man one vote’,” Liao said, referring to how neither the U.S. President nor the British Prime Minister is elected by a popular vote. The proposed changes, which include expanding the city’s Election Committee from 1,200 to 1,500 people and expanding the city’s Legislative Council from 70 to 90 seats, will make Hong Kong’s electoral system more “representative”, and less prone to “dictatorship of the majority”, Liao added. Critics say that Beijing would be able to stack the two bodies with even more pro-establishment members, to gain the numerical superiority needed to influence important decisions such as the election of the city’s Chief Executive, leaving Hong Kong voters with less direct say in who they want to lead them.

Myanmar forces fire tear gas, stun grenades on protest as U.N. envoy calls for action (Reuters) Myanmar security forces used tear gas and stun grenades to break up a protest in Yangon on Saturday, just hours after a United Nations special envoy called on the Security Council to take action against the ruling junta for the killings of protesters. The Southeast Asian country has been plunged in turmoil since the military overthrew and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1, with daily protests and strikes that have choked business and paralysed administration. More than 50 protesters have been killed since the coup, according to the United Nations—at least 38 on Wednesday alone. The army says it has been restrained in stopping the protests, but has said it will not allow them to threaten stability.

Lebanon on edge as protests persist, caretaker PM pleads for new government (Reuters) Demonstrators blocked various roadways across Lebanon for the fifth day in a row on Saturday, and a heavy army presence filled parts of the capital as anger simmered over the country’s economic downturn. Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab threatened in a speech earlier in the day to stop performing his duties to pressure politicians to form a new government. Groups of protesters have been burning tyres daily to block roads since the Lebanese currency tumbled to a new low on Tuesday, enraging a population long horrified by the country’s financial meltdown. Lebanon’s financial crisis, which erupted in 2019, has wiped out jobs, raised warnings of growing hunger and locked people out of their bank deposits. A new cabinet could implement reforms needed to trigger billions of dollars of international aid.

Electricity, time, and Bitcoin (The Baffler) In early 2018, millions of digital clocks across Europe began falling behind time. Few took notice at first as slight disruptions in the power supply caused bedside alarms and oven timers running on the frequency of electric current to begin lagging. Three minutes were lost in January, three more in February. In March, the Brussels-based European Network of Transmission System Operators of Electricity issued an apology. Whoever was causing the unprecedented power shortages “must cease”—but, until they did, the thirty-six nations plugged into Europe’s common electric grid were tasked with ratcheting up their voltage frequencies to speed the continent’s clocks back up. European authorities soon traced the power fluctuations to North Kosovo, a region commonly described as one of Europe’s last ganglands. Since 2015, its major city, Mitrovica, has been under the control of Srpska Lista, a mafia masquerading as a political party. Around the time Srpska came to power, North Kosovo’s electricity consumption surged. Officials at the Kosovo Electricity Supply Company in Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital city, told me that the region now requires 20 percent more power than it did five years ago. Eventually, it became clear why: across the region, from the shabby apartment blocks of Mitrovica to the cellars of mountain villages, Bitcoin and Ethereum rigs were humming away, fueling a shadow economy of cryptocurrency manufacturing.

#headlines #news

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dragontrailz · 4 years

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Greta Thunberg - Her Privilege Makes Her Blind To Her Own Manufacturing

This is what privilege looks like - 'Only people like me dare ask tough questions on climate’. Only the affluent upper middle classes could possible engineer a quote quite this stupid.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/11/greta-thunberg-people-like-me-ask-difficult-climate-questions

She’s not the only type of person to do this. She’s not the only person with a disability, autism or Asperger’s to speak up. She’s playing on the fact that she’s on the spectrum. Many people have spoken up before she did. Some of them from working class and ethnic backgrounds. She literally can’t see that her privilege, affluence and her parents connections have made this happen for her. As Cory Morningstar has pointed out, Greta Thunberg’s mum was a WWF Hero of the Year in 2017; she does adverts for Greenpeace and moves in those circles. When the 15 year old created her Twitter account in 2018, after her mother, the next accounts she followed were Greenpeace Sweden, Greenpeace International, Greenpeace UK, Friends of the Earth International and Friends of the Earth USA. A little further down the list we find Bill McKibben, 350.org, fellow speakers who would join her at XR’s Declaration of Rebellion (months later on October 31st): George Monbiot and Rupert Read and soon after that We Don’t Have Time, an NGO that would play a crucial role, as well as This Is Zero Hour, their founder, Jamie Margolin and the main account for Extinction Rebellion. Morningstar also cites Callum Grieve, a former Communications Director at The Climate Group and We Mean Business, who now works for Mission 2020, as a key architect of her manufacturing. Grieve also assisted Thunberg; on the first day of her protest he was the third person to respond on that platform. He’s not a huge Twitter influencer though, as he doesn’t have so many followers there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzCgKEjgCng

https://soundcloud.com/lastborninthewilderness/cory-morningstar

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/17/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/

This 17 year old is still being used; but nows seem to enjoy the limelight so much, that they’ve made a film. Her mum is an opera singer, her dad an actor, she was propelled from her first protest to global superstar within weeks. On the day of her first protest, on August 20th, 2018, she was approached by We Don’t Have Time’s Ingmar Rentzhog who ‘discovered’ her and she was soon a major story, appearing on the front page of Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet the same day. Rentzhog had met Greta Thunberg’s mother at a climate event in May 2018, shortly before Greta’s Twitter account was set up. On September 1st, Greta Thunberg was featured in her first Guardian column. It’s worth noting that the Aftonbladet account was followed after those mentioned in the previous paragraph, which suggests she was looking to the global stage before the Swedish national stage.

https://medium.com/@frackfree_eu/green-capitalism-is-using-greta-thunberg-66768db6c0e1

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/01/swedish-15-year-old-cutting-class-to-fight-the-climate-crisis

The sequence of events which led to Greta’s sudden rise to prominence and the role of Ingmar Rentzhog is explained in more detail here:

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/the-pr-guru-behind-the-rise-of-greta-thunberg/news-story/fae7bd1704d58e8ff0dd4d93ec0b3560

Talk of her “'zero-carbon yacht” in this article is nonsense. There is no such thing. Manufacture of it has embodied energy, besides which, how many of us can afford a transatlantic yacht for those times when we want to sail to the USA to lobby the climate capitalists in that country? The same narrative was peddled when she made her way from Sweden to London by electric car for XR’s Declaration of Rebellion on October 31st, 2018 (I was there that day). What was wrong with using public transport? Surely that would have conveyed a much more sustainable message?

Climate change isn’t the only crisis we face; people have been trying to defend nature from the onslaught of extractive capitalism for a long time; again many of them were poor or Indigenous people, so their narratives were airbrushed away and they weren’t given a number of Guardian articles to platform themselves so that the middle classes could be softened up.

Since those early days, the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos used Thunberg and the global media to manufacture consent for what’s coming - the new fake ‘Net Zero’ world, the '4th industrial revolution’ and next year’s 'New Deal for Nature’.

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/10/19/perfect-distractions-and-fantastical-mitigation-plans/

Thunberg herself happily plays along signing the letter about 'Natural Climate Solutions’ that appeared in the Guardian alongside fake green George Monbiot, who also wrote an abysmal column to go with it, which seemed to be more about geoengineering and terraforming than habitat restoration, particularly when the academic references to support his narrative are analysed. This climate-washing of the narrative has got to stop.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/03/natural-world-climate-catastrophe-rewilding

The Climate Emergency Fund (USA), set up by Trevor Neilson and funded by Aileen Getty and Rory Kennedy are just one of the big money foundations who now fund the movement she helped create, Youth Strike. I was at the first big Youth Strike protest in London; it was organic and spontaneous. Children took the roads and risked arrest; the cops brought out mounted patrols, some children were arrested, later de-arrested. I noticed that several people within the UK, who’ve positioned themselves at the heart of the climate movement, people from 350, UK Youth Climate Coalition, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. were already there on the sidelines, coordinating and framing the media message.

At the second big Youth Strike protest in London, the children were pushed aside, the speakers on the big red bus that positioned itself on Victoria Embankment were now mostly adults. The Trade Unions were now also in attendance, alongside other NGOs like Global Justice Now, War on Want and MPs like Jeremy Corbyn (he gave a great speech that day) and Caroline Lucas (she did not and seemed very irritable afterwards when I tried to speak to her, a first). The SWP were eagerly recruiting youngsters and filling their heads full of propaganda. It was painful to observe.

By the third big protest, the children were told to march aimlessly around the streets of London, whilst 'activists’ from Greenpeace, FoE and 350 who had coordinated the event looked on. Something so energetic faded so quickly. Very little has happened since that day in Autumn last year, although #Covid19 perhaps has also been responsible for muting any efforts to mobilise.

Her marketing team now seems to think a film about her, to go with the numerous books (yes, I’ve read one of them, the speeches have aged very badly) is now what’s required. Roger Hallam recently made a film, called 'The Troublemaker’, it was largely a work of propaganda. I wonder what Greta’s film will say?

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/16/i-am-greta-review-slick-yet-shallow-thunberg-documentary

“Intriguingly, even bafflingly, Grossman’s film begins by showing Thunberg’s pre-famous self as a high-schooler with her homemade climate strike placard, enduring a lonely vigil outside the Stockholm parliament every Friday with a few grumpy older shoppers coming up and telling her off for not being in school. Here she is: the non-famous nobody, and these scenes lead seamlessly to later moments showing her campaign taking off. So … does this mean Grossman has been prophetically following her career from the very beginning?“

This journalist has clearly not been following the story. That all these early protests were filmed shows they had much larger plans.

Do people think any of this is normal? This post is likely to grate with people. If it does, may I suggest you’re emotionally invested in this story and you can’t see what’s really happening. Step back and get some perspective. I invite discussion but nobody is fooling me with what’s happened over the last two years.

https://starecat.com/greta-thunberg-theyve-stolen-my-childhood-hardworking-kid-cool-story-bro/

Many people seem to be of the opinion that Greta can’t be criticised. There’s a confirmation bias in wanting to believe her story, from a one person protest to meeting world leaders, the UN and the Davos set at the World Economic Forum, where she platformed herself alongside David Attenborough and Jane Goodall. These people won’t engage with the narrative that indicates she’s been manufactured. This is compounded by her support from those in XR, who also can’t seem to see their own movement is also constructed and coupled to her story. A lot of the themes in her speeches, that of the planet being 'on fire’ or that we’re running ‘out of time’ are common to XR and Youth Strike and then later authors like Naomi Klein, and are based on mobilising people based on urgency. We’ve seen this go very badly wrong many times, notably in Afghanistan (See Adam Curtis - The Power of Nightmares)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwvSQ56HYg8&list=PL46FkcYcj-72IK9xFcWVRwoIu9Lfsi1S9&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwvSQ56HYg8&list=PL46FkcYcj-72IK9xFcWVRwoIu9Lfsi1S9&index=2

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB8m6nNWpMA&list=PL46FkcYcj-72IK9xFcWVRwoIu9Lfsi1S9&index=3

In her film trailer, we see the time theme being repeated once again. Her father also continues to perpetuate the myth that she did this on her own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwk10YGPFiM

“My name is Greta Thunberg and I want you to panic!” - but this repeated doomerism has had a paralysing effect on many people. Other flanks of people have been mobilised to take action, notably within the UK as XR, which is a larger movement than Youth Strike. However, much of the mobilisation has been about virtue signalling, their virtuous non-violence and colourful boats has meant their movement has failed to really diversify beyond it’s white, middle class base. The movement appears to have now peaked and largely run out of money.

There is also the common theme of expecting governments to act to resolve this. When are people going to realise that’s not going to happen. Parliaments are not going to end capitalism. Who was the last parliamentary candidate who ran on a #degrowth platform? As such, both movements are self defeating and tend to reinforce hierarchy and statism. In the worst case scenario what they are asking for is EcoFascism. If people are struggling to deal with Covid19 restrictions on movement which have only brought about around a 6-7% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, then how would they cope when they are told the truth about what ‘Net Zero’ would really mean: private cars would be banned, consumption would be drastically reduced along with an end to pointless bullshit jobs, international flights would be rationed and restricted and people in the Global North would have to eat perhaps 75% less meat. Some of us have made or are making these changes already and will be ready for this world when we run out of oil and when critical metal resource depletion also punctures the myth of the electric car.

Net Zero within 5 years is a fallacy. Anyone who’s looked at the data knows this. The Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales appear to be asking for a radical strategy in stating that a 60% reduction in primary energy usage is required, then you realise that they’ve massively underestimated the actual emissions as they don’t include consumption emissions from overseas. This suggests an 85-90% reduction in energy demand would be required.

Meanwhile the IPCC based their models on a doubling of energy consumption between now and 2050. The pretence is maintained by claiming there are ‘Negative Emissions Technologies’ that will magically sequester away our historical and future carbon debt. The primary technology that they envision will do this, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is not yet technically viable and never will be. It’s neither safe, nor ethical and it won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Delaying the urgent mitigation required now leaves a larger problem for future generations. BECCS would also require huge amounts of land, freshwater and fertiliser and would destroy biodiversity, threaten food security and trample on Indigenous land rights. The IPCC ‘science’ that Greta Thunberg claims is her version of the truth, is merely only one part of the picture. There are good scientists and bad scientists. Which ones is she backing?

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1318216965639503873

She seems blind to the modelling work going on which assumes that #BECCS is viable and cost effective, a trick of economic models within which subsidies and discounting correct for impossibilities. BECCS will never happen at scale as citizens will mobilise against it. Thus Thunberg’s attempt to lecture Joe Biden, who is well aware of what carbon capture is and has opened the door to it, merely show how little she understands the bigger picture. In the following article, Steve Horn explains how Biden has embraced carbon capture under pressure from oil industry lobbying, which will lead to enhanced oil recovery and won’t reduce emissions.

https://www.drillednews.com/post/biden-climate-change-platform-fossil-fuel-carbon-capture

In reality, what we now have is this pretend world of ‘Net Zero’ False Solutions, where corporations have taken centre stage. Yet, XR, Youth Strike and Greta Thunberg are largely silent on this and are still screaming for governments to take action. In the UK, they did take action as XR suggested and set up a citizen’s assembly, which was then rigged to provide the wrong outcome as these resources clearly show. Under the guidance of the Committee on Climate Change, the process has been captured by false technofix solutions and corporate thinking.

https://www.climateassembly.uk/resources/

The conversation is so far from where it needs to be. Greta now has a film about her life, which will make the middle classes feel like they can change the world if they just shout loudly enough. The trouble is their dominance of the debate and misdirection has wasted two years. Only Covid19 has really reduced emissions, as its forced a much needed reduction in hypermobility and a reduction in oil use.

I hope people can start to see what’s happened over the last two years now. Some folks are waking up to the reality of what needs to be done. No one else is going to fix this mess but us. The only way we can do that is by collectively disengaging from the system, but in more constructive ways, where we can come together, build community and connection. I’ll be writing more about how we do this another time. The solutions need to be centred on mutual aid, land rights, agroecology and permaculture.

#GretaThunberg Privilege Entitlement Affluence

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