TimB

In the early 20th-century English fireworks company C.R. Brock and Company (now known as Brocks Fireworks) published colorful catalogs displaying designs from Japanese companies such as Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks. Six catalogs of diverse pyrotechnic diagrams have been digitized and made available for download thanks to the city of Yokohama’s public library. If you don’t read Japanese, you can download each publication’s PDF by visiting their website, clicking one of the book’s English titles near the bottom of the page, and then clicking “本体PDF画像” link below the image. Each catalog is a tremendous and varied selection of the firework shapes and colors of the time, with several designs you might recognize no matter where you view contemporary fireworks displays. (via Open Culture)

If bikes are your thing, great. If you’re a vegan crusader, bully for you. If you’re a solar-power enthusiast, way to go.

The greenest among are often evangelists for our favorite causes. But according to the blockbuster report out this week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s not enough to stick to your thing, or even to take up all of the causes environmentalists love. If we want to prevent the likely consequences of climate change — food shortages, forest fires, and mass extinctions — we’ll need to deploy the popular solutions as well as the some of the unpopular ones, the report concludes.

That means turning off coal plants and building lots of renewables, but also devoting more acres to growing biofuels. It means reducing consumption (fly less, drive less, and eat less meat) but also increasing our use of nuclear power.

The danger is so great, in other words, that the IPCC’s team of 91 scientists and policy experts suggest we consider all of the above. Whatever works. They came up with 90 different mixes of solutions that would keep warming limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but none of them work without biofuels, atomic energy, and reigning in consumerism.

Here are three unpopular ideas that the report says we’ll need to embrace, and two that are still up for debate.

The must-do list:

Less stuff: Every scenario for keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius requires reducing per capita consumption. The scenarios range from shrinking world energy demand 15 percent by 2030 to constraining it to a 17 percent increase. Either way would mean less power for anyone rich enough to read this on a computer (if poorer people get more stuff under constrained growth, it means the richer people are going to have to make some lifestyle changes).

Some of this would come from efficiency, but it would also require “behavioural changes.”

The report does offer some “high overshoot” scenarios that don’t require giving up creature comforts. But in those scenarios the world zips past the 1.5 degree mark, then reels it back in with “negative emissions.” That would rely on growing huge tracts of forest that suck up carbon before the trees are logged; then burning the wood for energy and capturing the carbon. But it might not work.

Biofuel: Every scenario laid out by the IPCC relies on ethanol, biodiesel and other biofuels to some extent, and projects an increase in farmland devoted to growing fuel. We could really use biofuels to replace jet fuel and gasoline, but it’s controversial. There are good scientists who say corn ethanol has a bigger carbon footprint than gasoline. Others say burning ethanol is already carbon negative and getting better all the time. It seems impossible to tell who is right. If you are cutting down rainforests for palm oil, that’s definitely a climate catastrophe. If you can get algae in a tank to turn sunlight to fuel, well, that’s awesome.

Nuclear power: All scenarios have nuclear providing a greater share of our electricity through 2050. Right now, nuclear power provides 11 percent of the world’s electricity. In one 1.5 degree scenario, the IPCC report has the world doubling the percentage of electricity it gets from nuclear by 2030, and quintupling it by 2050. The most “degrowthy” scenario, with dramatically decreasing energy demand, doesn’t require building new atomic plants but does require keeping the ones we have open.

Up for debate:

Carbon capture: Most scenarios to limit warming rely on fossil-fuel power plants capturing their carbon as long as they’re still running, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. There’s a bunch of plants already doing this around the world, but it’s pretty expensive. The businesses that capture carbon affordably are usually injecting the carbon into the ground in a way that squeezes out more oil for them to sell. Many environmentalists dislike carbon capture because it opens up a way for the fossil fuel industry to survive and thrive.

There’s no carbon capture required if global energy demand declines 15 percent between 2010 and 2030, but that’s looking more and more unlikely: Since 2010, energy demand has gone up, up, up.

Geoengineering: Imagine high-altitude airplanes constantly spraying reflective dust into the air to bounce sunlight back into space. Or fertilizing the ocean to allow a million carbon-sucking algal blooms. Technology to the rescue!

Except it’s all in your imagination. None of this whizbangery has been modelled enough to tell how it would affect the scenarios in this report. There’s just not enough science on geoengineering to say something substantive about it, according to the IPCC.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The U.N.’s climate report has something to piss everyone off on Oct 9, 2018.

A guest editorial from the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America by Members of the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America
Jeff Bezos must be losing sleep lately. Off the back of his recent $2 billion “gift” to Seattle in the form of another thinly-veiled charter school system in which “the child is the customer,” Bezos announced on October 2nd that Amazon will be raising the minimum wage for all employees to $15/hour. This number will look familiar to folks in Seattle who organized successfully around the Fight for $15 back in 2015—and that’s no coincidence.

This is a victory we should not take for granted.

This past summer, Bezos worked incredibly hard to kill a progressive tax on big business that would have put $45 million a year toward funding affordable housing and homelessness services. He even went so far as to put 7,000 jobs and two massive construction projects on hold in a “capital strike” in protest of a tax that would have cost Amazon roughly $10 million a year. (Bezos’s net worth is currently $155 billion.)

This paints quite the different picture from the charitable image he is now desperately trying to pivot to. While the laser-focus on Amazon and Bezos during this fight resulted in the tax being killed by our own Bezos-approved Mayor Jenny Durkan in an embarrassing (and possibly illegal) repeal, it clearly stoked the fire that has roared nationwide ever since the repeal.

We shouldn’t take this victory for granted, but we should be clear: this is a victory by and for the workers.

Amazon workers are some of the most exploited in the nation, with some Amazon warehouse workers being forced to pee in bottles or risk losing their job and thousands paid so poorly they’re forced to rely on food stamps. Workers have collectively refused to put up with this injustice and abuse any longer.

In Minneapolis, Muslim Amazon workers protested working conditions forced upon them during their observation of Ramadan. These conditions reportedly included Amazon doubling work by turning two jobs into one, which allegedly led to injuries during the month-long fast. Precarious contract delivery drivers in Seattle filed a lawsuit against Amazon over failure to pay overtime or give breaks. And on the heels of a massive acquisition by Amazon, employees at Whole Foods Market who rightly fear the company’s now-infamous exploitation want to unionize. Their key demand is “a $15 hourly minimum wage.” Congratulations workers of Amazon, this $15/hour minimum wage victory literally belongs to you.

While this will materially benefit thousands of workers and should be celebrated, it is vital to continue keeping Jeff Bezos up at night. Because while this is a positive step in the right direction, Jeff Bezos still has a dramatic distance to go before he should be able to sleep soundly.

Predictably, reporters found that to pay for its new wage increase Amazon will be cutting bonus and stock options previously promised to warehouse workers, because how else is Bezos supposed to satiate his vampiric need for the surplus value his workers create?

With this move, Bezos has unintentionally laid bare the contradictions of capitalism. He’s made it painfully clear that he is hoarding the surplus value of his workers, doling it out in small parcels only when he gets enough bad press. He is also currently doing his best to ensure that local taxes, minimum wage laws, pre-schools, and low-income housing are under control on his terms, not ours—the actual people of this city.

As economist and University of Massachusetts – Amherst Professor Emeritus Richard D. Wolff noted, “566,000 Amazon employees produced his wealth; he alone decides its use. That’s capitalist autocracy, not economic democracy.”

Nevertheless, this victory shows that bottom-up organizing based in class struggle works. Even in the “new gilded age,” the world’s richest man is not impervious to the powers of organized labor. As the old adage goes, we do not need the bosses, the bosses need us. Even Bezos is starting to realize that. Let’s keep it up.

Here's how: Support organizing inside and outside of your workplace. Show up to picket lines. (Don’t cross them!) Don’t let the bosses off the hook, and provide desperately needed solidarity to those on the front lines of the class war. Come learn the basics of organizing a union or a solidarity organization. If you have a job, organize your workplace! Form a union! Join one! Are you part of a union? Run for union office! Make it better! Are you none of the above? Then just keep up the pressure.

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by Charles Mudede
On Friday, October 6, the art world was stunned by a pretty predictable Banksy prank. The street artist's famous "Girl With Balloon" sold for $1 million pounds to an unknown buyer. This was a "new auction high for a work solely by the artist," London's Sotheby claimed. But at the very moment the buzz of the buy began filling the room, a device built into the work's thick frame started shredding it. All of that money was destroyed before the eyes of the art world. Banksy had struck again. Facebook feeds exploded. There was much emoji laughter with the tears in the eyes. According to the New York Times, Sotheby’s made this statement on Saturday: “The successful bidder was a private collector, bidding through a Sotheby’s staff member on the phone. We are currently in discussions about next steps.”

None of this, as you can see, is deeply interesting. The picture and the prank emerged from the same so-so imagination. Equally uninteresting was the icon-loud laughter the incident generated. It had as its source the image of a rich person getting royally screwed in public. The power of their money was reduced to trash in mere minutes. How much is the painting worth now? A fool and his money. LOL. But let's stop the social media laughter for a moment and seriously consider the actual value of the work.

But where did the value of this work come from in the first place? How did it end up being worth $1.4 million? And is this high value exceptional? Does it only explain the madness of the art world alone, or the madness of those with too much money? Or is it consistent with how all things are valued in our society?

Let's begin with this: The question that puzzled the founders of economics (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx) was the source of value. It was understood that a commodity had a use value and an exchange value. But where did profit come from? An entrepreneur has the basic goal that the money they put into the capitalist circuit will return, not as the same amount of money, but as an increased amount. What was the source of this increase? All believed, to some degree, it was labor. But it was Marx who argued that it was not just labor but surplus labor. The worker was paid less than they produced. But how exactly does one measure the "less" for the worker? There had to be in the society an amount that was necessary for the reproduction of the labor's power: food, shelter, clothes. Anything above these necessities is the source of surplus labor, which represented surplus value. This part of value was, at the end of the capitalist circuit, transformed into profits.

The theory of surplus value is solid, but it does not answer or name exactly what value is. For example, can we describe it as the sheer transference of brain and muscle power into an object? If so, is this the same for all societies? And if such is the case, then value must be just food (purely biological/natural) in another form. But clearly it isn't because not all of the necessitates are natural. Indeed, most are cultural—clothes, Bibles, and spices. The mistake made by early economists was to see all necessities (natural and cultural) as just natural. The cultural, which is variable, was eclipsed by visions of the biological, which is constant (and as such, quantifiable: how much energy can an average body extract from the products of photosynthesis).

But from its beginning, capitalism has been driven not by raw needs but by wants. Needs can be satisfied, and therefore have a hard limit; wants, on the other hand, are only limited by the imagination. Nature determines the former; culture, the latter. And so we see what the early economists missed, and what neoclassical economics (which followed the classicals in the 1870s and is still the dominant mode of economic thinking) avoided with the utilitarian concept of utility, and thereby displaced the question of value (which is objective) with a question of demand (subjective), or, put another way, a question of prices (what is one willing to pay for something). The truth of the matter is there can be no science of value in a capitalist system because it is historical rather than transhistorical. Meaning, value is cultural, not immediately natural.

The late historical theorist Moishe Postone grasped a part of this fact by separating material wealth from value. He saw that capitalist material wealth was the source of value, but that the former was specific to capitalism. What the entrepreneur wants is more value, and the medium for value is use-value (material wealth). But because value is infinite, the productions of capitalism must also be unlimited. This is why commodities must constantly change or be improved; and it's also why the means of making things must be revolutionized. For Postone (who entirely focuses on the latter—the advancement of the means of production), this constant change, which is driven by want rather than needs, is the source of historical time in capitalism, which has one direction: forward (rather than cyclical). If this is grasped, then one can better understand the current environmental catastrophe.

But Postone's framework does not include what it is that drives capitalist change or revolutions. And this occlusion means that his theory does not break completely with the original notion of necessity—the idea that capitalist value is measurable, that it is trans-historical, and therefore natural. To see how value is cultural, we need to turn to the work of another important thinker, Noam Yuran.

Value as want must depart from value as simply useful. For this reason, the genealogy of Yuran's economics has luxury as its point of departure. The standard genealogy of a history of economics begins with Adam Smith's sober The Wealth Of Nations (but even this Scottish philosopher is mostly ignored by the neoclassical school, which is indifferent to history, and in this way does not have a genealogy). This book was published toward the end of the 18th century. Yuran's genealogy, on the other hand, begins with a scandalous poem by Dutch-born social philosopher Bernard Mandeville, "The Fable of the Bees." Published near the opening of the 18th century, this work, which Smith disliked, places not the sober self-interest of bakers and brewers at the heart of capitalism, but the intoxicating passions of epicureans: envy, lust, greed, pride. And things that excite these passions are not "absolute needs" but luxurious goods—merchandise.

Capitalism is powered by things that were once only available to the elite. This is why its formative period in the Dutch moment is defined by commodities that are nutrition-less (tobacco, tea, sugar, coffee). These stimulants owe their production and demand completely to culture. If this fact is grasped, then much of the world we see around us today will be better understood. Its explanatory power is considerable. An urban theory based on this concept of the passions will be able to explain the strong resistance to public transportation. It is not a luxury. It is practical, and therefore inexpensive. It will also explain surburbanization and single-family homes and luxury apartments, forms of living that increase value because they generate a great deal of waste.

My point: Very little in capitalist value is natural (or related to absolute needs or to anything close to efficiency—the first line of defense for the justification of the free market). This is not to say that other and older cultures have nothing in them that's unnecessary. It is instead to point out that capitalist value is not only almost entirely immaterial but has little to do with what most think defines the subject (or "science") of economics.

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In Washington Heights, a hilly neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan, 128 P&L Deli Grocery is the busiest hub on the block. Outside, neighbors lounge in lawn chairs and pass around a hookah hose. Inside, customers watch baseball on an iPhone mounted behind the counter and sip tamarind juice through straws. Yucca, plantains, and bagged heads of lettuce loiter by the entrance.

Porfirio Mejia, the Dominican-born New Yorker who has owned this grocery for six years, seems to know everyone. He pats a few kids on the head and nods when a woman tells him she’ll pay him tomorrow. He pauses to inspect the peppers and tomatoes, remarking that a fresh produce delivery is due the next day. He works with the anti-hunger advocacy organization City Harvest to promote fruit and vegetable purchases, and he says that more than half of his customers buy their groceries with SNAP, the government assistance program formerly known as food stamps.

Well, they used to. The SNAP transactions at P&L tripped the wires of an algorithm that the U.S. Department of Agriculture uses to screen for fraud. Mejia’s decision to issue IOU’s to his regular customers — a policy that allowed him to deliver food to elderly neighbors and settle up after they received their benefits — triggered a suspicious activity flag in the system. By allowing customers to rack up a few weeks’ worth of grocery bills before paying with their benefit cards, Mejia violated the agency’s rules, which prohibit retailers from establishing informal credit systems with their customers.

About a year ago, a USDA letter informed Mejia that he was suspected of defrauding the government, so he rushed to enlist more than 30 of his neighbors to write letters explaining that his credit system did not constitute fraud — trading cash for food stamps. When I visited P&L in May, a stack of handwritten letters still sat on Mejia’s desk, with receipts attached.

His efforts weren’t enough. The agency wanted itemized receipts for the purchases that had been flagged, but Mejia’s cash registers at the time printed only total sales figures; he couldn’t provide an accounting of the individual products that his clients had bought on credit. He was permanently banned from accepting food stamps. When he lost his SNAP customers, 35 to 40 percent of his income went with them. When we spoke in May, he said he’s had to cut down on employees’ hours, and started working 14- and 15-hour days. He’s thought about selling the store.

Mejia is hardly alone. Last year, the USDA disqualified more than 1,600 retailers across the country from receiving SNAP payments. Over 90 percent of those businesses are convenience stores or small groceries. And while some of them almost certainly engaged in the cash-for-food-stamps fraud that the system is designed to detect, many of them, like P&L, were probably unjustly caught in the crosshairs.

It’s impossible to pin down exactly how many retailers were banned from accepting SNAP dollars due to fraud charges that the government can’t actually prove. But court testimony by a USDA official indicates that, just last year, hundreds of retailers were permanently disqualified from the program based primarily on an algorithmic assessment of their transaction patterns — the same circumstantial evidence that ensnared Mejia. “It’s a jerry-rigged system against small retailers unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” said Stewart Fried, an attorney who has represented store owners flagged by the algorithm.

“It’s a jerry-rigged system against small retailers unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

The USDA does not bother to justify or even explain the precise sales figures or thresholds that cause retailers to be flagged for investigation. In fact, officials appear not to know how they were developed in the first place. Douglas Edward Wilson, a USDA program analyst who has worked with the ALERT system for more than a decade, testified in a 2017 deposition that he had no idea who originally set the parameters for flagging fraudulent transactions.

Mejia seems to have been disqualified from the SNAP program based almost entirely on the atypical transaction patterns identified by the algorithm. He said he was never asked to explain these patterns before he was charged with fraud, nor did the agency present him with any evidence that he had traded cash for food stamps. Once accused, he was expected to prove his own innocence and the odds were stacked against him.

His situation is not uncommon: Retailers are regularly issued letters alleging “unusual, irregular, and inexplicable SNAP activity” based on their transaction history. According to a deposition given by Gilda Torres, a USDA section chief who oversees disqualifications, algorithm-flagged stores referred to her office for investigation are issued charge letters more than 95 percent of the time. And once they’re charged, their chances of reversing the decision are close to zero.

After the charge letter is received, retailers have 10 days to submit evidence to prove their innocence, a process that rarely results in decision reversals. Torres oversees SNAP disqualifications in New England, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. In her district, 100 percent of cases that landed on her desk resulted in permanent disqualification in 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Businesses that do not successfully challenge the charge letter then have the option to seek administrative review of agency decisions, but that process is just as unforgiving. Of the 1,283 administrative reviews requested nationwide in 2017, only 20 disqualifications were reversed.

It’s a justice system that puts the burden of proof on the accused — and one in which most cases are decided long before they reach a courtroom. In the blink of an eye, the owners of small, neighborhood grocery stores can lose half their income.

When the Trump administration announced its half-baked proposal to replace some SNAP payments with pre-packaged “Harvest Boxes” in February, it justified the change in policy by claiming that it would help reduce food stamp fraud. But fraud plays a much larger role in the popular imagination than it does in the program itself. The USDA estimated that fraud accounted for 1.5 percent of the roughly $70 billion in benefits the program administered, or about $1 billion, in 2014. By contrast, that same year the government misallocated 2.27 percent of total benefits simply by overpaying beneficiaries, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Regardless, for each of the last three years, the agency appropriated more than $17 million to fight retailer fraud in the more than quarter million retail establishments that accept food stamps. (The USDA administers SNAP at the federal level.)

Before the agency fully transitioned to debit-style Electronic Benefit Transfer cards about 20 years ago, food stamp fraud was policed primarily using undercover agents. These agents watch for less serious program violations — like the sale of non-food items — and fraud, the exchange of cash for food stamps. A 2018 USDA request for information from potential government contractors provides a glimpse into how these investigations operate: Agents try to pass as a typical customer, then attempt to use EBT cards to purchase SNAP-ineligible items like sponges or cigarettes.

While the agency still uses these undercover agents — in 2017, it conducted 5,557 such investigations — they rarely find evidence of fraud. Last year, less than 6 percent of retail investigations found retailers engaging in actual fraud. (Less than half identified any program violations at all, even minor ones.)

The introduction of EBT cards provided a new way for the USDA to detect potentially fraudulent behavior: It could digitally monitor all transactions in real time and screen for patterns suggesting irregularities. The agency commissioned the development of an algorithm, dubbed the ALERT system, that is used in many SNAP fraud cases today.

The ALERT system analyzes millions of SNAP transactions and assigns ratings to businesses based on the number of unusual transactions they process. Unusual transactions can include sales volumes that are much higher than those at neighboring stores, multiple withdrawals from the same card over a short period of time, multiple purchases that end in the same number of cents, or very frequent or large purchases.

It was the last of these that ensnared Mejia. His practice of letting customers purchase food on credit — which resulted in one-time payments of hundreds of dollars when they cleared their accounts — showed up in the system as an atypical pattern and initiated his disqualification from the program.

The USDA argues that the ALERT system is one tool among many in a thorough disqualification process. “When [the USDA] suspects a store may be committing SNAP violations, staff will carefully review the store information including SNAP redemptions, any history of complaints, the owner’s history in the program, and store visit records which include photos and details of the store and inventory,” a USDA spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “If, after review of all the information gathered, [agency] staff believe further investigation is warranted, they (not the ALERT system) will initiate a compliance review — which may include further investigative analysis or an undercover investigation — and if warranted, charge the store with violations.”

Torres’s 2017 deposition tells a different story. The USDA section chief testified that the “investigative analysis” referenced in the agency’s emailed statement is based primarily on ALERT data. And there’s little leeway if a grocer is deemed to have violated the rules: According to decisions posted to the agency’s own website, retailers can be disqualified with no prior violations and decades of successful participation in the program.

Raul Barrios, a senior healthy retail specialist at the anti-hunger advocacy group City Harvest, spends most of his time visiting small New York City groceries to encourage proprietors to stock fruits and vegetables. He said he regularly encounters retailers who have been permanently disqualified from SNAP and appear to have inadvertently tripped the ALERT system’s wires through normal business activities that stop short of fraud. He cited stores like Mejia’s, which allowed customers to buy food on credit, and said that the multiple withdrawals flag could be triggered by neighbors who drop in for a gallon of milk in the morning and a bottle of water later in the day.

“In family-owned businesses that are pillars of the community, people go numerous times,” he said, adding that convenience store owners’ tendency to round prices to the nearest 50 cents likely triggers the same-cents flag. “A lot of them are not aware of the laws, of the do’s and the don’t’s.”

Barrios said he thinks up to half of retailers disqualified based on algorithmic evidence did not actually commit fraud. After all, credit systems like Mejia’s look the same on paper as the kind of cash-for-benefits scenario the government wants to stamp out.

Once a retailer receives a charge letter, they have 10 days to appeal the ruling by submitting proof that their transactions are all legitimate. (According to a USDA spokesperson, retailers can request extensions.) Last year, only 4 percent of retailers nationwide succeeded in reversing the decision during this stage.

Then, retailers have another opportunity to appeal during a process called “administrative review.” Reversal rates at this stage are even lower. For people like Mejia, who had no way of knowing that he needed to be saving itemized receipts, it’s an uphill battle. According to documents posted to the USDA’s website, retailers send a wide variety of paperwork to prove their innocence: medical records that show transactions flagged as fraudulent happened while owners were taking care of a sick family member, proof that employees had been trained in SNAP policy, credit logs, and in some cases hundreds of pages of receipts and letters from customers. Torres, the USDA section chief, testified that her region did not overturn any of its decisions in the last three years based on retailer-provided evidence during the administrative review period.

“[Retailers] lose almost 100 percent of the time because they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know what [the USDA] is looking for,” said Fried, the lawyer.

According to Mejia, no one from the USDA ever called him to explain the appeals process. He does remember someone from the agency coming to his store before he received his charge letter, but that person only took pictures and didn’t initiate a conversation.

In Torres’s 2017 testimony for a separate SNAP case in Maryland, she said stores are initially inspected by agency contractors — sometimes months before a charge is issued — to measure square footage and look at inventory. These visits generate a sort of in-store snapshot for USDA staff members to cross-reference with ALERT system findings, and contractors aren’t tasked with finding hard evidence of fraudulent behavior. Torres said agency staff don’t typically visit retailers at any point in the disqualification process.

Mejia thought about retaining a lawyer but decided it would be too expensive. Had he sought legal advice, he might have discovered that there is one avenue for redress beyond the initial appeal and administrative review: judicial review of the decision, which means a trip to federal court. “At that point, the playing field gets leveled remarkably,” Fried said, adding that this process gives retailers access to the USDA’s full records and allows their lawyers to take depositions.

But legal representation can be expensive, and Barrios said small retailers are often skeptical that lawyers are worth the cost. The USDA doesn’t provide data on how many cases go to judicial review, but according to Fried, the number is almost certainly very small.

In other words, once retailers are accused, their chances of successfully proving their innocence are vanishingly slim. “That’s a big problem, when 100 percent of the retailers in all of New England, Jersey, Maryland, and D.C. are convicted based on a case that’s largely circumstantial,” Fried said, referring to Torres’s decision record since 2015. “The only hard evidence is a snapshot 30-minute visit [a USDA] contractor does, going out to the property one time to look around it.”

For now, Mejia’s moving on. He says he knows he broke the rules by allowing customers to buy on credit, and he accepts the agency’s decision to permanently disqualify him from SNAP. Still, he doesn’t think accepting credit is the same thing as trading cash for food stamps. And he thinks others have found themselves in the same boat, denied badly needed revenue simply for providing a service they see as neighborly. “It’s a system small business owners don’t understand,” he says in Spanish.

Top photo: Porfirio Mejia, the owner of a New York City bodega recently banned from accepting SNAP, poses for a photo in May 2018.

The post How an Algorithm Kicks Small Businesses Out of the Food Stamps Program on Dubious Fraud Charges appeared first on The Intercept.

Meet Mylko, an exciting Mexico City-based multi-instrumentalist production duo formed of Jose Pablo Ibarra and Patricio Dávila from Mexico City.

Forging the gap between Mexican mainstream music and the rest of the world; beat, rhythm and dance-making is their goal.

Speaking about Runaway, Mylko says,

“Runaway talks about the romantic self-destructive abandonment of a loved one which everyone seems to be going through nowadays. Still, this sample-heavy track and retro mellow synths are intended to make you dance while you get over your breakup.”

Watch the kaleidoscopic video below.

Sounds like: Tame Impala, Phoenix, MGMT

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The post Mylko – Runaway appeared first on Indietronica is a new music blog.

Gerrard Gethings has captured a lot of personalities as an animal photographer, including his own canine muse Baxter. Therefore when he began shooting his latest series that paired humans and look-alike dog breeds, it would only make sense that he would first focus on finding the perfect animal models before locating matching humans. For the memory game Do You Look Like Your Dog? Gethings spent a year creating images that examine the classic trope of owners looking just like their canine friends. The new game presents 25 matches, which include a long-haired Afghan and equally silky-haired owner, a messy-haired kid and his scruffy puppy, and Schnauzer with a matching beard to his leather jacket-clad owner. You can now purchase the memory game through Laurence King, and see more of Gethings’s animal portraiture on Instagram.

Artist Rae Swon recently brought a fantastical creature from The Temptation of St. Anthony to life on the New York City subway. The triptych painting created by Hieronymus Bosch in the early 16th century includes a small, peculiar figure on the left-hand triptych (detail below). The character has bird-like facial features, and is wearing what appear to be ice skates and a funnel as a hat. After creating the modern-day costume using needle felting and other found materials, Swon took her character for a subway ride through Manhattan. Although this particular costume is sold out, you can see more of Swon’s fantastical felted creations like a Starling Coin Purse and an Opposum Purse on Instagram and Etsy. (via Hyperallergic)

squares, turning

by Charles Mudede
According to the New York Times, the US government is surreptiously relocating migrant children to a "tent city" in Tornillo, Texas, which is near El Paso. This location is new and contains "rows of sand-colored tents." When it opened in June, it was meant to hold only 400 migrants, but it was expanded in September to hold nearly 4,000. Children staying at standard shelters around the US are being bussed there in the middle of the night. Immigration officials rudely wake the boys and girls up and force them into the dark unknown.

From the New York Times:

Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.

As Americans sleep and dream, terrified children are being transported to a concentration camp.

But the mass transfers are raising the alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.

The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.

The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.

The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation, and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.

Those who think that the association with concentration camps is nothing but alarmist liberal nonsense, please read this sentence carefully: "The children [wear] belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts." Can you feel that? Trump's America is not fucking around. The camp, unlike the shelters, also offers few professional services or support. We are basically dumping children into a social black hole during the most informative years of their lives.

The New York Times:

The tent city in Tornillo... is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters

None of this will end well for the children and the soul of this very rich nation. A process instituted by monsters will likely produce monsters.

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by Charles Mudede

One night not too long ago, a 21-year-old college student with not much to do decided to attend a party. To protect the identity of the young man and his family, I will not name him or the college.

At this party, the young man met some friends and some enemies and drank a lot of cheap beer. At around 11 p.m., he was very drunk and in an argument with an old enemy, who was a member of the frat house where the party was held. The cause and content of the argument are unimportant. The important thing is where it ended (on a couch in the backyard of the frat house) and how (with a cigarette extinguished on this couch).

You will not go through college without becoming familiar with this kind of couch. It's always ugly and has been exposed to all of the elements: rain, sun, hail, snow, ice, and so on. It hasn't seen anything like a living room in decades and is covered by stains, each with a different and most likely seedy story. The one thing you must never do with this type of couch is look beneath its cushions.

by Charles Mudede

Last night, Rachel Maddow dropped what should be a bomb on mainstream media: Trump diverted almost $10 million from FEMA, an organization whose importance only grows with the hardening inaction on climate change, to ICE, an organization that essentially does nothing but feed white America's insatiable hunger for racist solutions to all American problems.

So, to make this as clear as possible: money to protect white Americans (the leading subject of this democracy—without them, one of the two largest parties in the US would not exist in its current form) from a real danger was re-directed to the fictional danger of brown immigrants. Trump has also dedicated billions to an irrelevant space program. But these and other damning facts will have no impact on Trump at this moment because white America has transformed racism and climate denial into an instinct.

Racism because they cannot see that what happened in brown Puerto Rico is bound to happen to them when the costs of protecting whites from the growing and more devastating facts of climate change become fiscally overwhelming. The moment when these whites could have done something will, by then, be long gone. The damage to their lives and whatever they own will exist only in the past, not the future, which has the supreme advantaged of not being fixed.

Climate denial because they have been repeatedly fed the idea that the economy needs fossil fuels to produce "much-needed" jobs (the imagined means of survival). And so in Texas, the last huge deep-red state, we have a cop charged with shooting and killing an unarmed black man (the leading image of the world's problems in the minds of many white Americans) in his own apartment (and this story appears to have many holes), and petroleum companies, who fed climate denial propaganda to whites while, at the same time, asking the government for funds to protect their Texan refineries from climate change. Racism and climate denial should not be dissociated in the US context. The rulers of other societies have their own tricks to maintain and expand the atmospheric liberation of carbon; this society, because of its history, has race.

Documents appear to show government diverted nearly $10 million from FEMA to ICE ahead of hurricane season https://t.co/9RZ3bmFgCv pic.twitter.com/iAzDmIBtHt
— The Hill (@thehill) September 12, 2018

From The Guardian:

When North Carolina got bad news about what its coast could look like thanks to climate change, it chose to ignore it.

In 2012, the state now in the path of Hurricane Florence reacted to a prediction by its Coastal Resources Commission that sea levels could rise by 39in over the next century by passing a law that banned policies based on such forecasts.

The legislation drew ridicule, including a mocking segment by comedian Stephen Colbert, who said: “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”

North Carolina has a long, low-lying coastline and is considered one of the US areas most vulnerable to rising sea levels.

This willful ignorance will cost all tax payers billions, for now. But soon the cost in lives and property (the cornerstone of this society) will become too much, and the government will, in favor of protecting the wealth of the rich (no taxes), refuse to support middle-class white Americans from the growing expenses of global warming. And these whites, even in red states, will find that they are indeed the descendants of the brown Puerto Ricans neglected by FEMA after Hurricane Maria. But by that time—the time when they wake up—it will be, sadly, too late. Racism is a powerful drug for the control and management of the white middle and working classes. It has been this way since the birth of this nation.

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Search for that string in Google. Enjoy the sounds, relax and unwind. Evening car ride to nowhere kind of a vibe.

This story originally appeared on Anthropocene.

The latest world-changing idea for agriculture sprouted three years ago, not from a field but from a computer lab.

In 2015, Caleb Harper, an MIT Media Lab research scientist, wowed the audience at a TED Conference in Geneva with his vision for personal food computers: automated, indoor hydroponic gardens capable of downloading and replicating the conditions needed to create perfect parsley, excellent escarole, and beautiful broccoli. Harper seized the audience’s attention by telling them that the average apple in a supermarket is 11 months old. He then presented an alternative to a global food system that is draining aquifers, polluting waterways, and burning fossil fuels to ship produce thousands of miles — all to deliver less-than-fresh food to consumers who end up throwing out roughly a third of it uneaten.

Harper’s big idea, a project he called the Open Agriculture Initiative, was to unleash the innovative power of the internet on agriculture by means of wetware — tech that merges edible plants with silicon chips. Empowered with free, open-source software and food computer designs, he argued, we could all soon be experimenting with crops, sharing our discoveries, and fixing environmental problems. Imagine reducing our dependence on centralized Big Agriculture and growing more food more sustainably by bringing the farm into the home — or at least into the city limits — and building a distributed network of a billion nerd farmers.

Though the technology is still evolving, the open-source model should feel familiar to growers. Information sharing has been a part of the farming ethos for centuries. Agricultural co-ops, extension offices, and land-grant universities were all set up long ago to provide farmers with easy access to best practices and troubleshooting tips.

Now, the addition of automation and open-source software could, in principle, take crop production to a new level. Just look at what happened when the open-source model was applied to the nascent internet: We got the Firefox browser and Apache web server, the Linux and Android operating systems, Wikipedia, and myriad other leaps in capability.

Applied to agriculture, Harper reasoned, the open-source approach could reverse a generations-long slide into increasingly concentrated control over agriculture. A century ago, one American worker in three was a farmer. Today, just one in 85 is. Four companies now control about 90 percent of the world’s grain supply, and the top four strains of wheat capture 95 percent of the market.

Food computers could recycle precious freshwater and eliminate the need to use toxic chemicals to protect crops from pests, disease, and competitors. Online gardens could inject new creativity into cultivation and yield new vegetable varieties optimized for flavor or nutritional value rather than for size and shelf life.

Harper’s vision is inspiring, to be sure. But to challenge the globe-spanning titan that is Big Ag, the new technology must expand quickly in two directions at once: horizontal growth, through a burgeoning community of enthusiasts; and vertical growth, through the commercial growers who have tipped flat farms skyward, planting crops in tall stacks inside indoor food factories. Numerous startups in North America and Asia are now trying to grow high-value crops close to city centers this way. The big question that Harper’s big idea faces is, how far can this technology really go?

#Nerdfarmers

Harper’s high-flying rhetoric lit a fire in computer nerds around the world, who started buzzing about this irresistibly cool idea of the personal food computer. Peter Webb, a 23-year-old business-development analyst working at a food-display company in St. Louis, saw the TED talk and resolved to reduce Harper’s grand plans to practice.

But Webb and other similarly inspired hackers soon slammed into two large barriers. The first was money: the design that MIT released was available in kit form, but it cost around $5,000, well beyond the budget of most enthusiasts. Then there was the daunting amount of effort needed to make the technology, which was still as buggy as a termite mound, actually work. So the first step was to come up with simplified blueprints and software that could work smoothly at less than a tenth of the original cost.

Nobody in the enthusiast group was going to be able to accomplish this alone — but a bunch of nobodies working together could. Webb proposed some ideas on an MIT online forum. Harper responded with encouragement, and two other like-minded St. Louis residents, Joe O’Brien and Jim Bell, joined Webb in the effort. They then connected with Drew Thomas, an experienced builder. Bit by bit, a team of hackers, driven purely by the excitement of solving a puzzle, coalesced from the ether.

The team’s first goal was to build a “minimum viable product” — Silicon Valley lingo meaning the simplest, cheapest version that early adopters will be willing to use. Rather than trying to impress the ghost of Steve Jobs with a design, the thinking goes, teams should kludge together something quickly in order to understand all the ways it fails, as well as the unexpected ways it might succeed.

After kicking around various ideas, Thomas said, “I basically drank a bunch of beers after going to Lowe’s, and built one.” The hardest part was getting so many disparate kinds of hardware — a water pump, a fan, a camera, multiple sensors, and the computer — to work together reliably. They roped in Peter’s father, Howard Webb, a retired computer whiz. “The one thing I wish I had known before I began was how addictive DIY tinkering becomes,” he says.

By August 2017, after a few months of dead ends and restarts, they had it: a small hydroponic food computer built for under $300. The ten-person group, which now proudly referred to itself as #nerdfarmers, published its shopping list and carefully documented construction steps on the MIT forum. Before long, others from all over the world started reporting their own construction progress and offering refinements to the design. A chain reaction had begun.

Scaling up

Take a warehouse full of oversized personal food computers and stack them to the ceiling: that’s a vertical farm. While Webb and the open-source community are scaling the concept outward, companies such as Plenty and AeroFarms are scaling it upward in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Newark.

AeroFarms’ leafy greens factory in New Jersey is the largest vertical farm in the world, but it looks like any other building in its industrial neighborhood of Newark, where airplanes roar overhead and trains chug past. Years ago, the company bought an old mill here and retrofitted it to forge vegetables instead of steel. When you open the door, a blast of air hits you full-force. Pressure replaces toxic chemicals: because pathogens, pollen, and insects can’t get in, there is no need to spray the greens with anything other than water. To be on the safe side, people entering the farm must first sanitize their shoes, wash their hands, and don hair nets, safety goggles, jackets, and gloves.

Panels of LED lamps hang inches above each tray, bathing the leaves in light adjusted to just the right spectrum and intensity, while spritzes of customized nutrient solutions moisten the roots hanging below. It’s a botanical spa for herbs.

The cleanroom-like conditions aren’t just about food safety, says Marc Oshima, the company’s chief marketing officer. “We’re creating a utopia for the plants,” he says. It’s also a kind of utopia for plant scientists, whose field experiments are often confounded by fungi, bugs, drought, and other uncontrolled variables. Inside AeroFarms’ utopian growth chambers, managers control virtually every variable as they monitor what makes plants thrive, optimizing conditions for peak flavor and nutrition. “We’re harvesting data as much as we are harvesting plants,” Oshima says.

Inside the growing room, stacks of white trays full of plants tower 12 layers, to the 36-foot ceiling. Panels of LED lamps hang inches above each tray, bathing the leaves in light adjusted to just the right spectrum and intensity, while spritzes of customized nutrient solutions moisten the roots hanging below. It’s a botanical spa for herbs. The air, humid and comfortably temperate, smells like spring growth after an overnight rain. Visitors instinctively inhale deeply.

In such brave new farms, the entrepreneurs tell their venture capitalists, science and commerce are joining forces to reverse the spread of agriculture by expanding up, rather than out. Oshima boasts proudly about the environmental benefits: 95 percent less water used per kilogram of produce, zero insecticides, all fertilizer captured and recycled. Sophisticated climate controls allow a vertical farm, in principle, to recreate all 13 USDA growing zones under one roof. That makes these farms a hedge against climate change. And sitting vertical farms inside the cities they serve dramatically reduces the energy needed to transport food from farm to table.

That’s the pitch, anyway, and it has worked. Venture capitalists have been pouring money into vertical-farm startups in recent years, investing a record $271 million in 2017.

Excess energy needed

When it comes to energy, vertical farms have yet to live up to their green hype. All those lamps and pumps and climate-control systems gulp electricity around the clock — and that electricity is usually made, with only about 40 percent efficiency, by burning fossil fuels.

We aren’t likely to see vertical farms that generate all their needed energy from renewable sources. Bruce Bugbee, a scientist at Utah State University who studies indoor farming, estimated in 2015 that you would need at least five acres of solar panels to produce enough power to light just one acre of crops in a vertical farm. Energy inevitably falls away each time it changes form, from sunlight to electricity and then back to light. Inventors have been squeezing those conversion losses toward their limits, but there is no cheating the second law of thermodynamics — or the fact that the construction and climate control of vertical farms consume a lot of energy as well.

In fact, all things considered, says Mark Bomford, director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, “it’s generally a lower-impact proposition to move food around the planet than to move the climate.”

That environmental inequality could change direction, however, if we find ourselves with more electricity than we know what to do with in the future. A few timely breakthroughs in cheap photovoltaic film might allow us to plaster solar cells over every window and glass skyscraper. Before we even get close to replacing all fossil fuels with renewables, solar farms will pump out way more electricity than we can use — whenever the sun is unobscured and directly overhead­ — because the dirty secret of renewables is that their inconstancy forces us to overbuild capacity. (Already, wholesale electric prices go negative in California when the sun is high, as grid operators scramble to find customers to take excess solar power.)

A similar embarrassment of riches could occur if engineers figure out fusion energy or better nuclear power and if we replace all our polluting generators with reactors. We could keep those plants humming at night, when demand is low, and shunt the clean, cheap electrons into vertical farms.

In the meantime, says Leo Marcelis, a vertical-farming researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, indoor farmers could rig their grow lights to switch on and off to take advantage of periodic dips in electricity prices. Their plants would take a little longer to mature, but they would still thrive.

Bomford, however, is unpersuaded by such scenarios. “I’m concerned about the opportunity cost,” he says. “If the vertical farm is using low-carbon energy, it means there is some other area that doesn’t have the opportunity to use it” — for example, recharging electric vehicles, running automated factories, or making hydrogen to power fuel cells.

Good for veggies, not for grains

Setting energy aside, the environmental pros of vertical farms do seem to outweigh their cons, but only for high-value, fast-growing crops. Peek inside most vertical farms or food computers, and there is an excellent chance you’ll see leafy greens such as lettuce or herbs.

The technology shines brightest for such crops. Dan Blaustein-Rejto, an agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, has calculated that indoor farms in Sweden, where nuclear and hydroelectric power generate 90 percent of the electricity, can already grow lettuce with a slightly smaller carbon footprint than conventional farms produce. He showed that outdoor farms fall behind in the carbon race when you factor in transportation and waste. Indoor lettuce isn’t vulnerable to hailstorms or armyworms, and it’s not as likely to go bad in transit since it won’t be moving from California to New York. Indoor farmers also need less fertilizer because the nutrients can be recycled. One-third of the nitrogen applied to fields, in contrast, is converted to polluting gases or washed away to turn ponds into pools of green slime. Over the longer term, cropland put out of work by indoor farms could even be used to grow carbon-storing forests.

The math may work out for lettuce and certain other vegetables when energy is cheap and green enough. But the numbers don’t add up for grains, which account for the vast majority of farming. To clean up the oxygen-deprived dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi, for example, we’ll have to figure out new ways of growing corn. Or, as Bomford puts it: “The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force was not formed in response to rapacious arugula expansion in Iowa.”

Though it might be technically possible to move our amber waves of grain indoors, Marcelis says, “it will take a long time — let’s prove it with vegetables first.” A blade of wheat needs five months to produce a kernel, whereas microgreens can be harvested every few days. And dry, hard grains are a breeze to store and transport compared to spring mix, which is little more than water packed into millions of gossamer cells.

A farm in every home?

As with every new technology, it’s easy to see the flaws and limitations in food computers and vertical farms. But it’s worth contemplating how this technology might feed into other big trends in food and agriculture as it evolves. In the United States and other wealthy nations, consumer demand for locally grown, organic, and heirloom produce has been growing rapidly. The number of farmers markets has doubled every decade since the government started keeping track in 1994. The number of households growing vegetables has also risen, particularly within the past five years. Houses — and kitchens in particular — have been getting larger and more automated. All of this suggests fertile ground for the idea of high-tech gardens.

Sensing an opportunity, some companies have started selling kitchen countertop farms. Three square feet seems to be enough space to keep a small family in lettuce. If you can devote an entire wall or basement room to a food computer, it could probably supply all your staple vegetables.

Hard-core gardeners and gadget lovers are likely to be the early adopters, attracted not by any cost savings but by the novelty and the ability to experiment on their food. The appliances will get cheaper, more useful, and more stylish as nerd farmers keep innovating. Webb and Thomas have already cofounded a startup called MARSfarm that makes food computer kits for schools. Before long, many children might first experience a garden by tending to the artificially illuminated hydroponics box in their classroom.

Early skeptics of vertical farms, such as Cornell University agricultural economist Per Pinstrup-Andersen, are now finding it easier to imagine a future in which the farms catch on. Back in 2010, Andersen dismissed the notion of vertical farming “as a mere pipe dream.” Last year, he wrote that he has “become an agnostic” and believes the technology is actually approaching a tipping point. Going vertical, he points out, could take much of the risk (and associated insurance costs) out of farming. It could make transportation more efficient and ensure a steady supply of healthful nutrients as climate change and population growth threaten to make them scarce.

Leo Marcelis, from his home in the Netherlands, finds it easy to envision how food production could move inside. This tiny country is the world’s second-largest exporter of produce, in large part because it grows 35 percent of its produce — and 100 percent of its tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers — indoors. At the edges of Dutch cities, farmers grow leafy greens and herbs indoors in warehouses. The production cost is double that of greenhouse-grown greens, but consumers hardly notice because the money paid to the farmer accounts for only about a quarter of the price of a head of lettuce.

Because most plant varieties have been optimized for Big Ag and long-distance distribution, plant biologists can explore many new avenues to find cultivars that will perform even better when grown inside. Marcelis’s experiments, for instance, suggest that fine-tuning the lights in a food computer could double the shelf life of lettuce and double the vitamin C in tomatoes. A generation from now, mothers may pass along to their kids their favorite recipe for tomatoes along with the family recipe for tomato sauce.

Eat what you like

If the past century of food retailing has hammered one lesson home, it is that people love to have options. They are eager to try new things, and many see their dietary choices as part of their identity. In the food industry, fresh produce remains one of the last true commodities, but automated agriculture could open the door to branded and even personalized veggies. If that leads to a renaissance in the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables, it could be a boon for arteries and waistlines as well as for the environment.

But even if this technology falls short of mass adoption, it could still serve as a massively networked food-science laboratory, a way to harness the collective intelligence of nerd farmers around the world and apply it to some of our toughest food problems. Despite his doubts about the commercial viability of vertical farms, Bomford sees real opportunity for building knowledge.

“They offer a level of control that is quite laboratory-like,” he said. “They could be something like Biosphere II [the massive ecosystem in a glass bubble that failed as a self-contained replacement for nature’s life-support systems but was repurposed as a tool for science], which started out as a ridiculous cautionary tale but is now an experimental tool with a high output of empirical understanding.”

Webb, in his new role as an evangelist for personal food computers, takes a broader view of the technology’s potential to democratize the food supply. “When companies own the entire food system, that’s scary,” he says. To truly serve a diversity of tastes, he says, “you need diversity in control.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The open-source movement to hack your arugula on Sep 5, 2018.

In addition to laying claim to the title of France’s first independent bookstore, Librairie Mollat has carved a unique niche on Instagram with its #bookface portraits. The Bordeaux-based bookstore regularly features photographs of book covers held up in front of perfectly scaled, dressed, and nose-shaped people (presumably, some are customers, though some repeated faces seem to indicate a few photogenic employees). You can see more from Mollat—and perhaps even get your next book recommendation—on Instagram. If you enjoy this, also check out Album Plus Art. (via Hyperallergic)

 

If you search YouTube for "how to fold a fitted sheet," the resulting list seems to scroll endlessly.  If I had to recommend one video on the subject, it would be this one, via Neatorama, where Miss C always posts excellent videos.

encroachment

by Charles Mudede

To grasp the current conjuncture (the city council's repeal of the "Amazon Tax") of Seattle's unending and worsening homeless crises, we only need to examine the 2017 Seattle Bike Blog post "I want to endorse Nikkita Oliver, but she says she may pause downtown bike lanes and the Missing Link." It's by Tom Fucoloro, who is very much on the left, and is even challenging one of the foundations of American capitalism, car ideology, by advocating for increased funding of Seattle's bike infrastructure. In the post, Fucoloro expresses his desire to endorse the most radical candidate of the 2017 mayoral election, Oliver. But he is not at all impressed with her picture of Seattle's priorities: she places the homelessness crisis above completion of the bike network.

Oliver to SBB:

“I have to stress that our city is currently in a state of emergency around homelessness.. I believe it is the duty of our city leaders to prioritize addressing these exigent human service needs first. This may require us to put some projects, like construction of bike lanes on hold in order to ensure that we have the financial resources to address the state of emergency around homelessness in our city.”

And there you have it. Oliver stated something that many on the conventional left find hard, if not impossible, to stomach. Most would be fine using tax dollars to pay for safer bike lanes. Even Amazon might approve of this kind of public expenditure, which by no means a bad thing. But taxes going directly to the homeless? This is seen by many as throwing a lot of good money into a form of poverty that has, in their eyes, resisted all attempts to end. It is a black hole.

Yes, there are many who are just upset about the Amazon Tax as a tax, and there are some who mostly see it in the terms of an ideological battle that has been with us ever since the poor started getting ideas. On one side are the values of those at the bottom (give me!); and on the other side, those at the top (do not take from me!). And those at top want their values (no taxes/taking) supported by the government and the public—even if the latter benefits greatly from the taxes. But I suspect that if the Amazon Tax wasn't directed at the homeless, and instead, went to something like dedicated bike lanes, or, as my friend Angela Garbes said to me during drinks at the Clock-Out Lounge, to increasing the number of plastic poop bags at parks and along sidewalks, the Amazon Tax's chances would have been much better. That kind of spending is seen as going into something, rather than nothing, which is how we in Seattle see the homeless. These great no-things.

It's not amazing or profound to point out that the feeling Ryan expressed in this tweet is typical...

Do you seriously think that taxing businesses for hiring a lot of people is the right way to fund homelessness programs? I mean, seriously.
— Ryan (@ryanhealy) June 11, 2018

The fact that is standard stuff exposes the extent to which the city has aligned its core values with the values of the rich—who naturally hate the poor as much as they hate taxes. We really see the homeless, not as we see them, but as the rich do. As useless. As a big waste of time and effort. A problem that only knows how to grow and grow. As a black hole.

Recall this striking scene from Charles Burnett's film, To Sleep With Anger:

HARRY
Well, you and your husband are special. Ya, Gideon tells me you do volunteer work to help feed the
poor.

Pat beams with joy because Harry recognizes the important work she is doing.

HARRY
How many people do you all feed?

PAT
Last Saturday we handed out over 200 meals.

HARRY
Good God Almighty, bless your bones. (pause) But the problem grows.

PAT
Week by week the crowds at the door keeps getting larger. We can't feed all the hungry.

HARRY
Of course not. Have you ever heard of a man jumping in the river to save 500 drowning people? No you ain't. (pause) You have to take just one and fatten him up. When you spread help too thin, you, you just nickel and dime the situation. If you try to save all, all die but if you save one life, life goes on. You just
have to remember, medicine that works leaves a bitter taste.

That was filmed in 1990. But both Harry (the bad guy of the film) and Pat (a faithful Christian) articulate a popular sentiment that's still with us today: the homeless crisis grows on its own. It's like an invasive species, a demon-possessed blackberry bush. It has an inner will. It thrives, it breeds, it spreads from a force within. Money is just too weak to stop or repress it. Dollars that get sucked into the hole of the homeless will only disintegrate.

The hatred of the wretched, of course, has an important social function. It makes them wretched all the more, and this indeed makes more and more tangible their wretchedness, which is, in itself, abstract, or, to use Werner Bonefeld's translation of sinnlich übersinnlich: sensuous-supersensible. There is really no reason why anyone should be in this condition of wretchedness. We live in society that suffers not from scarcity or want, but chronic overproduction. The housing crisis of 2008, to give just one of many examples, was not about a lack of houses; it was about too many house not making enough money to cover interest payments.

Wretchedness in our inverted world is imposed on humans by humans. But we do not blame the otherwise obvious production of wretchedness on a system of cultural values that, through ideological platforms, is matched with the values of those at the top. We actually do not see the enforcement—just the wretchedness, which, though culturally produced, has real effects (sensuous-supersensible): the RV is all beat-up, the RV owner dumps shit here and there, homeless people stink, their clothes are dirty, they sleep on the street, and so on. However, these conditions are as unreal (as abstract) as the home values that seem to rise so wonderfully. If you hate the homeless, you are chained to (and speaking for) your master.

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The distributed network has gobbled the hierarchical firm. Only by seizing the platform can workers avoid digital serfdom

By George Zarkadakis

Read at Aeon

Following the revelation in March that Google had secretly signed an agreement with the Pentagon to provide cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology for drone warfare, the company faced an internal revolt. About a dozen Google employees have resigned in protest and thousands have signed a petition calling for an end to the contract. The endeavor, code-named Project Maven by the military, is designed to help drone operators recognize images captured on the battlefield.

Google has sought to quash the internal dissent in conversations with employees. Diane Greene, the chief executive of Google’s cloud business unit, speaking at a company town hall meeting following the revelations, claimed that the contract was “only” for $9 million, according to the New York Times, a relatively minor project for such a large company.

Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story. The September emails show that Google’s business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year.

In fact, one month after news of the contract broke, the Pentagon allocated an additional $100 million to Project Maven.

The internal Google email chain also notes that several big tech players competed to win the Project Maven contract. Other tech firms such as Amazon were in the running, one Google executive involved in negotiations wrote. (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.) Rather than serving solely as a minor experiment for the military, Google executives on the thread stated that Project Maven was “directly related” to a major cloud computing contract worth billions of dollars that other Silicon Valley firms are competing to win.

The emails further note that Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, “has some work loads” related to Project Maven.

Jane Hynes, a spokesperson for Google Cloud, emailed The Intercept to say that the company stands by the statement given to the New York Times this week that “the new artificial intelligence principles under development precluded the use of A.I. in weaponry.” Hynes declined to comment further on the emails obtained by The Intercept. 

The September email chain discussing the recently inked deal included Scott Frohman and Aileen Black, two members of Google’s defense sales team, along with Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the head scientist at Google Cloud, as well as members of the communications team.

Black provided a summary of the Project Maven deal, which she described as a “5-month long race among AI heavyweights” in the tech industry. “Total deal $25-$30M, $15M to Google over the next 18 months,” she wrote. “As the program grows expect spend is budgeted at 250 M per year. This program is directly related to the Sept 13 memo about moving DOD aggressively to the cloud I sent last week.”

“I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry.”

The September 13 memo sent by Black was not included in the emails obtained by The Intercept. It appears to be a reference to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a contract worth $10 billion over 10 years, a project that Google has expressed an interest in obtaining. The JEDI program was announced on September 12.

The project had finally come together and was moving along rapidly, Black wrote. The Pentagon was “really fast tracking” Google’s cloud security certification, a development she called “priceless.”

The Google executives discussed the potential for a public relations fiasco from the Project Maven contract. Whether or not to reveal the deal was a point of concern.

“This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google. You probably heard Elon Musk and his comment about AI causing WW3,” wrote Fei-Fei.

“I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” she continued. “Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images.”

The Google team noted that it has no press plan for the rollout of the contract and agreed that the company should work to set the “narrative” as quickly as possible. The “buzz” generated by the contract could be a positive, Black suggested.

The government sales team noted that Project Maven had been concealed through a contract awarded to ECS Federal, an arrangement first reported by The Intercept.

“The contract is not direct with Google but through a partner (ECS) and we have terms that prevent press releases from happening without our mutual consent,” wrote Black. The Defense Department “will not say anything about Google without our approval.”

Despite the secrecy, Black cautioned that news will eventually leak and that information about the contracting process could be obtained by the public through the Freedom of Information Act. Google’s involvement with Project Maven “will eventually get out,” Black warned. “Wouldn’t it be best to have it released on our terms?”

The project, however, was never announced publicly until news broke in March 2018.

An internal work timeline about Project Maven, also obtained by The Intercept, provides a window into the quick progression of the contract.

On October 27, 2017, a team from Google Cloud visited Beale Air Force Base — a major hub for drone pilots — to “meet operational users (Air Force data analysts) who will be the end users of our technology, and primary testers starting June 2018.”

The previous week, Lt. Gen. John N.T. “Jack” Shanahan, who helped spearhead Project Maven, visited Google’s Advanced Solutions Lab to meet with 50 members of the team working on the project. Shanahan declared that “nothing in DoD should ever be fielded going forward without a built-in AI capability,” according to the timeline.

The timeline describes how Google engineers were continually working with the military to improve the product, including the user interface. “While the initial core technology focus will remain detection, classification, and (limited) tracking of certain classes of objects, we are considering how to address customers’ concern regarding more challenging use-cases that solve user’s real problems,” the document notes.

Top photo: A U.S. Air Force MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle carrying a Hellfire missile flies over an air base after a mission in the Persian Gulf region on Jan. 7, 2016.

The post Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Lucrative Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal Magistrate Judge Ronald G. Morgan is in his 60s, with a bright-pink face and a crisp, friendly manner — though lately he has been making disconcerting little mistakes in court. He has spent eight years on the bench in Brownsville, a small Texas city on the U.S.-Mexico border. Morgan knows how to run a court smoothly, but during a morning session I attended in early May, he announced that he’d just dealt with 35 defendants — all at one time — when the actual number was 40. And after the proceedings, he forgot to pronounce their guilt. Marshals had already led them out, so Morgan sheepishly had to call the 40 defendants back to the courtroom to correct his error. These days, he seems distracted and troubled.

That is understandable. In late April, magistrates’ courts in Brownsville suddenly turned into “zero tolerance” factories for criminalizing migrants, many of whom have no prior criminal record. Many are from murderously violent countries in Central America and have fled to the U.S. seeking asylum, and they often arrive with children in tow. It used to be rare to charge migrants seeking asylum with crimes. If they did so, they were put into detention with their children while they pursued their claims. Or they were released with supervision — along with their children. The best interests of the children were considered paramount, and those interests including keeping families together.

But now, in federal courts like Morgan’s, not only are parents are finding themselves charged with the crime of “illegal entry,” but the government is breaking up families, sending children to detention centers, often hundreds of miles from their mothers and fathers, or to distant foster homes.

These family separations had been occurring intermittently since last fall, and mass trials have been occurring off and on since “Operation Streamline” was first introduced in 2005. But on May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the U.S. government will prosecute “100 percent of illegal southwest border crossings.” He added that people who were “smuggling a child” will be prosecuted “and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” In practice, this means that even parents fleeing violence to protect their young children will be deemed smugglers — that is, criminals. Sessions’s announcement came just two weeks after an official with the Department of Health and Human Services told Congress that the agency had lost track of 1,475 unaccompanied migrant children it had placed with sponsors.

The anguish that parents communicated in Morgan’s courtroom, and the spectacle of dozens of migrants being convicted and sentenced en masse, in proceedings lasting just a few minutes and with only the most perfunctory legal representation, has shocked courthouse employees. And not just in Brownsville. Taking photographs of federal court proceedings is strictly forbidden. But in the federal courthouse in Pecos, Texas, someone apparently felt so bad about the new policies that they secretly shot a photo — obtained by The Intercept and published at the top of this page — of dozens of immigrants clogging a court in orange jumpsuits.

But most Americans do not attend these courts. They live far from the border, and Sessions’s new “zero tolerance” plan seems distant and theoretical. On the border itself, however, the new policy feels close and horribly real. Sessions’s policy of deliberately breaking up families is a new low in U.S. border policy. Today “zero tolerance” is playing out from Texas to California. In Brownsville, it’s driving Judge Morgan to distraction.

Audio from a mass trial of immigrants presided over by Federal Magistrate Judge Ronald G. Morgan, in Brownsville, Tex., on May 10, 2018.

Until recently, the procedure that brought a handful of defendants a day to the Brownsville courtroom for criminal prosecution was straightforward. First, Border Patrol agents arrested people after they arrived in the U.S. “by swimming, wading or floating across the banks of the Rio Grande River,” as the government’s boilerplate complaint puts it. Subsequent to their arrests, the detainees were processed at a Border Patrol station that everyone complains feels as cold as an icebox: in Spanish, an hielera.

If a detainee expressed fear to the Border Patrol agents about returning to their country, criminal charges were rarely brought. When immigrants were bussed to the federal courthouse in Brownsville, attorneys from the Federal Public Defenders office also asked the migrants if they feared returning to their country. If anyone expressed credible fear, the public defenders asked the federal prosecutors to drop the criminal illegal entry charges and refer the person directly to the asylum system.

Meanwhile, immigrants who weren’t making asylum claims went through the criminal process. Before the “zero tolerance” policy began, Morgan and another federal magistrate, Ignacio Torteya III, usually took turns seeing between three and eight of these people a day. Most pleaded guilty. Theoretically, the judge could sentence first-time illegal entrants to six months in prison. But they almost always got time served and were then typically deported. The asylum applicants stayed in the U.S. — with their kids — while their cases proceeded.

On April 30, Torteya was on duty and was informed that he had 41 “illegal entry” cases — about six times more than usual. Accompanying each of these immigrants’ criminal cases was paperwork from the U.S. Attorney’s office with a label at the top reading “Attorney General Zero Tolerance Initiative.” Attorneys and staff from the Federal Public Defenders were ordered to represent this startling mass of defendants who would go into court at 10 a.m. The public defenders had less than two hours to speak with all 41 people. That worked out to just a few minutes per defendant.

Soon, this scenario was being repeated daily in Morgan’s court, with the added feature of people telling the judge that they were afraid to go back to their countries — and that the U.S. government was taking away their children.

Each day was the same. The courtroom was filled with exhausted immigrants, with hands cuffed and shackled to their waists, their legs in chains — dozens of defendants stumbling, shuffling, clanking, and clanging in tandem. “Raise your right hand,” Morgan commanded as a translator spoke Spanish into their headphones. The shackled defendants struggled to comply.

The judge’s job is to determine if defendants understand the criminal charges against them and whether they feel they have had adequate legal representation. If they say they want to plead guilty, he asks whether they are doing so of their own free will. After that, they can make a statement — an “allocution” — and then the judge sentences them.

Morgan has a long, scripted list of explanations and questions for the defendants. On May 7, there were 40 defendants facing charges of illegal entry. Morgan had no time to read all these items to each individual and deal with their responses. So the judge asked many of his questions en masse. This had the astounding effect of eliciting, from otherwise mute and downcast defendants, thundering group responses.

“Are each of you satisfied with the help of the lawyer?” the judge asked the huddled people.

“Sí!” they roared in unison.

“Has anyone offered you anything or threatened you?”

Another roar: “No!”

Morgan often tried to individualize the proceedings. “Mr. Zamora, do you understand the charge against you, the maximum punishment, and your individual rights? … Did your lawyer explain all those things to you so that you can understand?”  … “Ms. Pineda, do you understand the charge against you, the maximum punishment, and your individual rights? … Did your lawyer explain all of these things to you so that you can understand?” And so on, through the clanking of the chains, over three dozen times. In each case, the defendant answered, “Sí,” and the translator echoed, “Yes.”

Sometimes the judge sighed. When it came time to hear the defendants give up their rights to trial, he got a second wind, ordering each one to stand, pronouncing their name, and asking, for example, “Ms. Guerrera, how do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

“Culpable.” Guilty.

“OK, you may take a seat, ma’am. Mr. Escobedo, how do you plead, sir?”

“Culpable.” Guilty.

Forty times.

The judge tried to vary his spiel. But as his “how do you pleads” droned on, he ran out of variations as he instructed people to take their seat.

After the guilty pleas, Morgan lectured the immigrants. “The world is a different place,” he explained on his first day of mass proceedings. “This country has become a different place. I’m not going to say right or wrong — it’s just what the law says.”

On the second day, he was more laconic and direct, explaining that the government had made “a decision that there is to be zero tolerance.”

It was unclear if the silent defendants had a clue about what the judge was referring to.

Each day, the proceedings continued with the judge offering defendants the chance to take the microphone and address him before they were sentenced. As the week wore on, several did.

One man told Morgan that he wanted to apologize for entering the United States illegally. But he’d done so, he explained, because “I have been kidnapped twice. I have a vegetable business. In my country, I can’t work. That’s all.”

“I can’t do anything about it,” Morgan replied. “Coming in illegally is just going to make a bad situation worse.

A very small, very young woman with chiseled features and disheveled hair spoke. She had been apprehended two days earlier after rafting across the Rio Grande near a county park with big trees and picnic tables that abuts the international line. She wept as she told Morgan, “I’d like to apologize, but the circumstances in my country made me do it.” She said she’d been almost raped and killed there, and she had come to the U.S. for protection and to see if she could help her sisters escape the danger.

“You are going to be sent to one of the immigration camps,” Morgan said. “You can try and request asylum.”

By May 10, Morgan was starting to get rattled by the increasingly disturbing content of the allocutions. By then, the government had begun systematically separating mothers and fathers from their children, including children who are preschoolers. A week later, the government announced plans to house the children on military bases.

One woman who spoke about her children in open court was from Honduras. “Is my little girl going to go with me when I get deported?” she asked Morgan.

“Your Honor,” interjected Jeff Wilde, director of the Federal Public Defender’s office in Brownsville, “both she and the man next to her have their children with them. They had a credible fear claim [for asylum]. … Their children have been separated from them, and I’ve been unable to figure out where their children are at this point.”

A young father then said he’d been separated from his 6-year-old and was very worried.

The judge tried to assume his crisp air. But he seemed overwhelmed, with the parents’ worry and with suspicion that the government was misrepresenting to him what was really happening to the children.

“The way it’s supposed to work,” he told the parents, “you’re going to be sent to a camp where your child will be allowed to join you. That’s my understanding of how it’s supposed to work.”

“They told me they were going to take her away,” a mother interjected about her young daughter.

“Well, let’s hope they don’t,” said Morgan. “You and your daughter, you should be joined together.”

And then, for many seconds, he was silent.

“If You Can Imagine There’s a Hell”

Did Morgan know that his assurances to these parents were very likely false? I asked his clerk, who told me that Morgan does not give interviews to the press. But up and down the border this year, from Texas to California, immigrants coming into the United States, even those applying for asylum at ports of entry, have had their children taken from them.

According to data prepared by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services that takes custody of children removed from migrant parents, more than 700 children were taken from adults claiming to be their parents from October 2017 through April 2018, including more than 100 children under the age of 4. Declarations included in a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union indicate that immigrants apprehended in Brownsville were already having their children taken away months ago. Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s deputy director for immigrant civil rights, told The Intercept that advocates working in Texas brought the Brownsville cases to the ACLU’s attention.

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, said in a statement that the U.S. government’s separating children from their parents as they seek asylum is “a flagrant violation of their human rights. Doing so in order to push asylum seekers back into dangerous situations where they may face persecution is also a violation of U.S. obligations under refugee law.”

But with the “zero tolerance” policy, the number of child separations promises to increase. In one week in May, I counted six people in the Brownsville court who said their children had been taken. There have also been reports of similar separations in district courts located in McAllen and Alpine.

Judge Morgan could easily verify that parents are not being “joined together” with their children in ICE detention centers. He could use a publicly accessible, online ICE database to see where the people who’ve gone through his own court are taken. In almost all cases, the destinations only house adults.

Another parent who appeared in Morgan’s court was from a Central American country that provides no meaningful protection to women and children who are victims of homicidal domestic violence. She asked for her identity to be concealed, because she fears retaliation by the U.S. government. We will call her Delia. Before fleeing her country, she was for years beaten up, cut, assaulted with guns, and threatened with death by her partner. He also threatened to kill their young child. When she hid in another city, he found her and dragged her home.

Delia said she fled her country weeks ago and went on the road to Mexico, eventually crossing the Rio Grande with her child on an inner tube. She saw three Border Patrol agents watching her and floated in their direction, so she could turn herself in.

Delia said that when she arrived later that night at the hielera — the Border Patrol processing office — she told the officers that she and her child needed asylum. She described the beatings and assaults and death threats. “Oh, come on!” she said the officers snickered. “You and everyone else with that old story!”

“You’re going to be deported,” she remembers them telling her. “And your child will stay here.” The next morning, the child was taken. Delia fell on her knees during the removal, wailing and begging not to be separated. Officials looked on indifferently, she said, as her child screamed incessantly.

When I spoke with Delia a few days later, she was in ICE detention, without her child, hours from Brownsville, and appeared to be in shock. She was having problems concentrating and answering simple questions. She wept constantly. She said she was wracked with fear and worried about her child, with whom she has had no contact since their separation. She could not imagine being deported back to her home country. “He will kill me there,” she said. “He will kill both of us.” Neither could she imagine her child being left behind in America. Her mind seemed shattered.

When she was able to organize her thoughts, Delia talked about two things. One was the child. The other was God.

In Brownsville, Judge Morgan also started alluding to biblical matters. It was Thursday, the fourth day of “zero tolerance” in his court, and defendants were telling their stories. The judge had just asked Holly D’Andrea, the assistant U.S. attorney handling illegal entry prosecutions that day, if it were true that families were being reunited in detention. D’Andrea sounded uncertain, but answered that she thought it was true.

“Tell you what,” the judge said slowly, with a hard edge in his voice, “if it’s not, then there are a lot of folks that have some answering to do. Because what you’ve done, in effect, by separating these children is you’re putting them in some place without their parents. If you can imagine there’s a hell, that’s probably what it looks like.”

Seconds later, he pronounced a blanket sentence for all of the defendants: no prison, no big fine — merely time served. With that, his court concluded. In 46 minutes that morning, 32 people had been convicted, sentenced, and dispatched en masse to ICE detention. “All rise!” said the bailiff, and the judge exited the room. The chained migrants then shuffled and clanked to their fates, without their children.

Top photo: The photo shows a mass trial of immigrants at the Lucius D. Bunton Federal Courthouse in Pecos, Texas.

The post Hidden Horrors of “Zero Tolerance” — Mass Trials and Children Taken From Their Parents appeared first on The Intercept.

by Charles Mudede

This story is not at all surprising. Harley-Davidson, a white American cultural icon, made 350 of its employees in Kansas City, Missouri redundant after receiving a huge, supposedly job-stimulating tax break from the GOP and announcing a massive stock buyback, which will upload the profits and cash transferred from the public's purse directly to its shareholders. (It's not likely that those who lost their jobs own shares in the company.)

Harley-Davidson is also planning a bit of "wage arbitrage" (all that comparative advantage amounts to) by opening a plant in Thailand. In this way it will plug into the defining circuit of the global economy: goods manufactured in a low-income country are exported to one with much higher wages, but whose leading job sector consists of unproductive (Adam Smith's sterile) workers (they distribute or sell or service the imported cheap products), and whose capital markets are dominated by a tiny upper class that draws more and more of its income from financial assets with values inflated by speculation, the public purse (quantitative easing), and buybacks.

You will not be surprised to learn that a white male employee laid-off at the Harley-Davidson factory still supports the white man he voted for in the 2016 presidential election—Trump—despite being a direct victim of this white man's pro-business and anti-labor policies. Let's think about this for a moment. You will not find a Trump voter in the whole of America who is in a better position to see the light (this is class warfare), and change their mind (I'm going to vote for someone who stands up for the working class) than this now-unemployed Harley-Davidson white male worker. But, no, he still wants Trump to stay in power and to make his life worse. How do we explain this mind-fuck? I believe we must begin with a new essay by the celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty: "Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict" (PDF here).

Let's go right to the take-home of Piketty's essay. By examining voting records in France, the US, and the UK, he determined that all three countries are converging on a post-crash political order that is essentially a two-party system dominated by those with a high education (the left) and those with a high income (the right). This is something new because in all three countries, high-education voters used to vote like high-income voters (for right-wing parties), and low-education and low-income voters supported the left. The Democratic Party in the US, for example, increasingly represents high-education white voters; the same is true, but to a lesser extent for historic reasons, for the Labor Party in the UK.

Piketty also notes that minorities of all classes and incomes in the UK, the US, and France are aligned with the high-education voters. But what about the standard white working-class voters in these countries? Who are they aligned with? The answer becomes visible if we the voting bodies in these countries are broken into four parts: Egalitarian globalists and pro-rich globalists on one side; and pro-rich nativists and pro-poor nativists on the other. We can call the latter two fascists.

For Piketty, the high education and high income political order will eventually dissolve into a globalist party that's opposed to a nativist one. This explains why the left and, say the e-commerce corporation Amazon, are one on the issue of Trump's racist Muslim ban. Though leftist globalism is not defined by the free flow of capital, and pro-rich globalism is (everyone must participate in the market), they see eye-to-eye when it comes to basic civil rights. What this means is that the top Western political systems in the world have in their futures a system that has on one side anti-fascists and the other fascists. A working-class white man or woman who continue to support a leader whose entire goal is to weaken and break the working classes must have accepted a working-class nativism as his or her final political solution. But why?

The answer is not hard to see. With fascism, a poor person surrenders their human morality (make me equal to you) to the opportunity to participate in the robbery (primitive accumulation, dispossession) that regenerates unchecked capitalist accumulation. It has no inspiration that's higher than obtaining this authorization to rob the other. Fascism is the adaptation of the weltanschauung of those with power—the bed, the home, the job, the market is all about the struggle for survival, about red teeth and claws—by the powerless. This is the promise that Trump and his kind keep making to those who have lost everything: You can still be just like me. I will give you the permission to do exactly as I do.

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Run the Jewels member El-P profanely slams the NFL after the league sought to place their track in the Super Bowl. by Dave Segal

In strong terms, MC/producer El-P of the popular hiphop duo Run the Jewels rejected the NFL's request to air their ominous, rugged track "Legend Has It" during the Super Bowl. (The song appears on the soundtrack to Black Panther.) Disgusted by the football league's decision yesterday to fine players who kneel during the national anthem, El-P aired his grievances about the matter on Twitter.

NFL been trash. they asked for the rights to play legend has it in the stadium during the superbowl. we said no because fuck them. they operate like they're an indispensable public utility. they aren't. they are gone with the flip of a channel. fuuuuuuck you.
— el-p (@therealelp) May 24, 2018

and just in case anyone is wondering how much the nfl wanted to pay us for using legend has it, that would be zero dollars and the strong suggestion that we take them up on the opportunity to enrich a private, racist and for profit company masquerading as a non profit. blow me.
— el-p (@therealelp) May 24, 2018

It's a bit rich—in two senses of the word—that owners would make a move to stifle the legitimate expression of employees who help them to make enormous sums of money annually. In a league whose on-field personnel is about 70 percent black and in a nation still afflicted with racism on macro and micro levels, players should have an outlet to raise awareness of injustices that directly affect them, their families, and their friends. With this ruling, the NFL committed a tone-deaf, offensive penalty that looks like it's going to hurt the league more than boost its fortunes. And in an interview this morning with Fox News, so-called President Trump, in yet another demonstration of his extensive ignorance about American law, is bleating about deporting pro football players who kneel during the anthem. To where, one wonders? Oh, don't worry about the details—this pronouncement was made simply to whip up Trump's know-nothing base, and to distract from mounting Russia-collusion bombshells that will hasten DJT's descent into lunacy—and eventually prison, if justice prevails.

My advice to NFL players—no matter their race—to stiff-arm this repulsive rule: They should give black-power salutes during the anthem... which, it should not go unobserved, is an irredeemably ugly piece of music and a lyrical fiasco. Or, failing that, they should find another clever, symbolic method to bring attention to the oppression that people of color inordinately suffer in the United States. Or—if they really want to keep politics out of sports—maybe leagues should simply do away with playing the national anthem before events. Seriously, who's going to miss this jingoistic musical monstrosity besides sappy chumps who think they're "patriotic"?

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Chris Sayer pushed his way through avocado branches and grasped a denuded limb. It was stained black, as if someone had ladled tar over its bark. In February, the temperature had dropped below freezing for three hours, killing the limb. The thick leaves had shriveled and fallen away, exposing the green avocados, which then burned in the sun. Sayer estimated he’d lost one out of every 20 avocados on his farm in Ventura, just 50 miles north of Los Angeles, but he counts himself lucky.

“If that freeze was one degree colder, or one hour longer, we would have had major damage,” he said.

Avocado trees start to die when the temperature falls below 28 degrees or rises above 100 degrees. If the weather turns cold and clammy during the short period in the spring when the flowers bloom, bees won’t take to the air and fruits won’t develop. The trees also die if water runs dry, or if too many salts accumulate in the soil, or if a new pest starts chewing on its leaves. “All of which is quite possible in the next few decades, as the climate shifts,” Sayer said.

The weather had been strange lately, Sayer told me. In the past year, Californians have lived through a historic drought, a massive wildfire that blotted out the sun, and a strangely warm winter followed by that unseasonable freeze. When I visited in April, his lemon trees were already loaded with ripe fruit — that usually doesn’t happen until June. “Things are screwy,” Sayer said.

From the vineyards of the north coast to the orange groves of Southern California, farmers like Sayer have been reeling from the weird weather.

“We are already suffering the effects of climate change,” said Russ Lester, who grows walnuts at Dixon Ridge Farms, east of Sacramento. “I can look out my window and see trees that don’t have a leaf on them and others that are completely leafed out.

“The trees are totally confused.”

It might feel like we’re peering into the distant future when we hear that by 2050, temperatures may very well climb 4 degrees, seas could rise a foot, and droughts and floods will become more common. But for farmers planting trees they hope will bear fruit 25 years from now, that seemingly distant future has to be reckoned with now.

A lot of the country’s tree crops grow in California, which produces two-thirds of the fruits and nuts for the United States. The same is true of grape vines, which bear abundant fruit for about 25 years (they slow down after that, but can keep going for hundreds of years). It’s in large part because so many farmers are making these long-term gambles on orchard crops that a recent scientific paper noted: “Agricultural production in California is highly sensitive to climate change.”

Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, goes even further: “It’s a virtual certainty that California will get drier. I don’t think it’s a climate that’s conducive to orchard crops anymore.”

In other words, for anyone trying to make money off long-lived crops, climate change is already here. And yet new saplings are pushing out of the ground all over the state.

If these farmers were planting an annual crop, like cilantro, they’d be making a bet on the weather for the next 45 days. But they’re planting trees, which means making a bet on the next 40 years.

After years of putting it off, Sayer is about to place such a four-decade bet by planting a bunch of new avocado trees. There’s no way Sayer can foresee oncoming climate disaster, if that’s what’s hurtling toward the land his family has worked for the past 130 years in Ventura. He can see just a little bit of what might be coming — as if he’s straining to glimpse signs of danger while blinkered. When I asked him how it felt, he said: “Like I’m about to cross a very busy road with my hood pulled over my head.”

When Katherine Jarvis-Shean was a doctoral candidate researching the decline of cold winters a few years back, she thought more farmers should be freaking out. “I used to think, ‘Why aren’t you guys more worried about this? It’s going to be the end of the world.’”

After all, many fruit and nut trees require a good winter chill to bear fruit. But after spending a few years as an extension agent for the University of California — working directly with farmers and translating science into techniques they can apply on the land — she understands better. It comes down to this: Farmers have a ton of concerns, and the climate is just one of them.

“If you decide what to plant based on climate, but then can’t make the lease payment, that’s not sustainable,” Jarvis-Shean said.

If you are worried about water running out in 15 years, you might think it’s a good idea to cut down half the state’s almond groves — but if those almond trees are still putting money in your pockets, that wouldn’t make sense until the killer drought hits. That’s the crux of the matter for Sayer, and other farmers I interviewed. They’re concerned about the changing climate, but they always come up with ingenious plans to adapt to bad weather. It’s much harder for them to adapt to an overdrawn bank account.

Sayer grows mostly lemons right now, but they’re not long for this world. “You can see these lemon trees are getting a little rangy looking,” Sayer said, gesturing toward a leafless branch. “This is going to be their last harvest, then they’ve got a date with the chipper.”

Sayer knows lemons. He knows how to coddle them in old age, how to nudge them to produce more, how to keep them alive when rains fail, how to protect them from aphids and snails and scale insects and the nematodes in the ground. But this land has provided a home to a citrus orchard for 70 years, and each year more pests accumulate to suck the life from the trees. So Sayer needs to move on from lemons, and he’s settled on avocados.

From a climate perspective, the leather-skinned fruit are a risky choice. Avocado trees like their surroundings not too hot and not too cold, and they always need water. One study estimated that climate change would hurt California avocado trees so much that the state’s production could be cut in half by 2050.

As the sun burned off the marine layer of clouds over the orchard, Sayer patiently laid out the reasoning that led him to plant avocado trees. He explained that climate poses risks that are easy for outsiders to see — when you’re reading about historic droughts in the newspaper and driving past acres of withered crops, it seems crazy to plant orchards. But farmers often have to contend with other risks that outweigh the danger of bad weather. Sayers puts them into three categories: climate risk, market risk, and execution risk.

If he were only worried about climate risk, Sayer said, he’d plant prickly pear. “They would grow in any post-apocalyptic hellscape you could imagine,” he said. But who would buy them? Most Americans don’t put prickly pear on their shopping lists. So there’s a huge market risk.

Then there’s execution risk: the chance that Sayer screws things up. If he didn’t have to worry about that, Sayer might follow his neighbor’s lead and start growing annual crops. He pointed across the road from his farm, where orchards once stood, at a flat expanse of strawberries dotted with hustling pickers. There’s always an appetite for strawberries so they pose a low market risk. And because strawberries get planted every year, they’re not such a big gamble on the changing climate. If a freak storm kills everything growing in Ventura, for instance, Sayer’s neighbor would lose that year’s strawberry crop while Sayer would lose a 30-year avocado investment.

But the execution risk of switching to strawberries — figuring out how to grow them, buying the right equipment, and learning how to sell them — is too high for him. “We’re talking about years of learning,” Sayer said. “It would be like me deciding to go back to college to study medicine.” He’s 52, and not prepared to start fresh.

Sayer has one other option that would eliminate all the climate, market, and execution risks: Pave his farmland and build houses. When I visited in April, workers were constructing apartments on what used to be farmland at the end of his street. If more farmers start taking climate risks seriously, a surge of subdivisions could start sprawling across some of the most fertile farmland on the planet. But the thought of that saddens Sayer. He wants to farm.

After weighing all those risks, he decided to bet the farm on avocados. These trees are no climate savior — far from it. But Sayer been experimenting with them for decades and understands how they work. He knows he can sell avocados, because he’s tapped into a network that reserves spots for the fruit in every grocery store, and turns sunburned avocados into frozen guacamole. Also, you might have noticed the market is strong: Americans are chowing down so much avocado tonnage in new, creative ways — smoothies, toast, ice cream, you name it — that consumption has increased sevenfold since 2000.

Orchards can endure weird weather brought on by climate change, but if they don’t get any water, the trees will die. In the past, California farmers have always survived droughts by sticking deeper and deeper straws into the ground to suck up groundwater. But since 2014, the state has had a law against depleting aquifers, and farmers soon won’t be able to take out more water than goes in.

That policy alarms growers, especially since they can no longer depend on snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Mountains hold water — in the form of glaciers — through the colder months, then release it during the warmer months. But as the climate heats up, more of the precipitation that fell in California as snow will turn to rain. That means more floods in winter and more droughts in summer.

To adapt to this boom-and-bust cycle, a few farmers around California are letting swollen rivers spill into their orchards. If carried out on a large scale, this would slow down rushing flood waters and let them percolate into aquifers.

After four years of experimentation in almond groves, scientists have found that this inundation hasn’t hurt the trees. They’ve also identified nearly 700,000 acres under almond trees suitable for recharging groundwater, said Richard Waycott, president of the Almond Board of California. At the same time, growers continue to use less freshwater for irrigation and draw more water recycled from city drainpipes.

In another example of climate adaptation, farmers are developing a kind of hyper-local climate engineering, spraying clay dust over their trees to create shade and cool them down in unseasonably hot weather, according to David Zilberman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. Elsewhere, scientists have planted a pistachio orchard where no self-respecting pistachio farmer would ever put a tree: in the middle of the Southern California desert near Coachella.

Most pistachio trees grow 200 miles north, where colder winters allow them to settle into their natural cycles. But in a few decades, that traditional pistachio land could have the climate of Coachella. It’s a type of time travel; the idea is to find a version of the future that already exists.

The pistachio trees aren’t at all happy in the desert: “It’s just terrible out there,” said Craig Kallsen, another extension agent for the University of California. “It looked like someone had irradiated the place with toxic chemicals.”

All the same, a few pistachio trees are beginning to produce leaves. By growing this orchard in this analogue of the climate future, researchers like Kallsen can see which varieties stand up to heat, and then zero in on the genes that allow those trees to adapt. Using those genes, researchers hope to breed trees that can thrive in a hotter, drier world.

Sayer is also adapting by growing different varieties of avocados, but the most visible climate adaptation in the orchard was the knee-high carpet of grasses and turnip stems we waded through as we made our way among the trees.

“Back in the 1970s, bare dirt between the rows was considered clean and tidy,” Sayer said. “If you had a blade of grass sticking out, oh man, that wasn’t good.”

Letting plants grow beneath the trees seemed like a squalid, lazy, weed-spreading hazard. When he and his father first began planting between the rows in 2005, it felt taboo. Other farmers would sidle up to them at the coffee shop and ask in an undertone, “What’s going on with your orchard? Is that a cover crop?”

A cover crop protects the soil from heavy rains and helps turn it into a habitat for worms, beetles, and thousands of microbes. As we walked through the dappled sunlight, the ground beneath my feet was yielding like a giant sponge.

Sayer has calculated that, since first planting the cover crop, his lemon orchard can absorb 2.5 million gallons more water in a downpour. “Since every scenario I’ve seen involves water stress, better soil is going to put us in a better position, because it holds and absorbs more rain,” he said.

Lester, the Sacramento-area walnut grower, also plants cover crops. And he has an audacious justification for planting new trees: He hopes to reverse climate change.

Cover crops pull carbon from the air into the soil and — if we can figure it out — all of agriculture could become a giant carbon-dioxide sponge. Lester powers his operation with solar panels and a walnut-shell burning furnace (releasing carbon his walnut trees recently sucked out of the air), making his farm carbon negative.

“Call me optimistic, but I believe if all farmers adopted healthy soils technology, agriculture can play a huge role in stopping, slowing down, maybe even reversing climate change,” Lester said.

Not all farmers are as scientifically literate as Lester or Sayer; many shrug off climate change as just another shift in the weather. But even the ones who readily accept the science of climate change continue to plant trees. Perhaps they are overly optimistic. Perhaps they are just human: It’s not in our nature to ignore threats right in front of our face so we can focus on those in the seemingly far-off future.

After I’d spent the day with Sayer, his decision to plant more avocados made sense: It’s the choice that allows him to keep farming. He’s making preparations based on the best climate projections he can get, while also setting himself up to react to the unexpected. He can see a path to profitability, though he allows that his vision into the future — in terms of both climate and weather forecasting — is severely restricted.

If you recall, he likened planting a new round of avocado trees to crossing a busy road with a hood over his head. There was a second part to that analogy: “At least I know which way to look for the oncoming traffic.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’ll we eat in 2050? California farmers are placing bets. on May 22, 2018.

Is this a violation of city rules? No. by Eli Sanders

I should confess upfront my deep fascination with a spat over photocopier usage that's currently raging on the second floor of Seattle's City Hall. (And has been rumbling beneath the surface for years.) It's like an episode of The Office gone very, very wrong.

So I was thrilled to see that Erica C. Barnett has now used public record requests to assess the validity of an allegation—aired most recently and publicly by Council Member Sally Bagshaw—that charges Council Member Kshama Sawant and her staff with using the taxpayer-funded office copier to print up signs for events such as their recent "Tax Amazon" rally.

The verdict:

"Between 11:02 am on May 10 and 10:19 am on May 14," Barnett reports, "documents show that Sawant’s office—specifically, her legislative assistants Ted Virdone and Adam Ziemkowski—printed several thousand posters and other documents related to the rally, including hundreds of chant sheets to guide rally participants during the 'March on Amazon.' The printing jobs dwarf other council office’s print requests; moreover, the council offices that did relatively large print jobs during the time when Sawant’s office was using the city printer to produce her rally posters were printing presentations, copies of studies, and agendas for council meetings—not posters for weekend demonstrations against Amazon aimed at pressuring council members to adopt a larger tax."

Is this a violation of city rules?

No, Seattle Ethics and Elections Director Wayne Barnett told ECB.

Is Sawant apologizing?

No, according to ECB, who quotes Sawant defiantly suggesting that other elected officials should join her in using the office copier "to further social movements and not for the protection of the interests of the chamber of commerce."

You gotta read the whole thing.

But all in all, Sawant, while clearly pissing off her colleagues, is at least being ideologically consistent. She's seized the means of rally poster production on the second flood of City Hall and is more than happy to keep them under government control.

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Robert Proch combines the aesthetics of street art and fine art in his dizzyingly complex paintings and murals. The artist engages multiple perspectives, glitched repetitions of figures, architectural motifs, and tightly controlled color palettes to create his distinctive style. Scenes tend to radiate out from a central perspective point, surrounded by abstracted shapes and atmospheric brushstrokes.

Proch’s artist statement describes his work as mini-narratives that “examine the modern human condition using vivid colors and tangible emotions. Sentimentality, ambition, fear, loss, hubris, greed, and friendship play their roles in snapshot dramas.”

The artist studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland, which is where he currently resides. Proch also explores his signature style in the mediums of drawing and wood bas-relief sculpture, which you can view on his website and Instagram. (via Booooooom)

After Bishop Michael Bruce Curry delivered his sermon at today’s wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan...

How much are drivers for ride-hailing apps like Uber actually making? by Heidi Groover

Another new study attempts to answer a perennial question about the gig economy: How much are drivers for ride-hailing apps like Uber actually making?

In Seattle and elsewhere, policy makers have heard very different accounts from drivers about whether they're able to make a living using rideshare apps. An analysis released this week from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C., finds that Uber drivers make between $9 and $12 an hour.

The study also douses some cold water on the idea that the gig economy represents an overwhelming economic trend finding that Uber drivers make up a tiny fraction of the total economy.

"The findings reinforce our skepticism that Uber, and 'gig work' more broadly, represent the 'future of work,'" writes the study's author, EPI Fellow Lawrence Mishel. Instead, Uber drivers' hours and pay make up a "very small share" of total hours and pay. The findings, Mishel writes, "argue for a change in perspective."

In the study, Mishel calculates driver pay after accounting for the fees drivers pay Uber, their expenses, and some benefits like health insurance, which drivers would pay for themselves because they are independent contractors not employees. Driver pay deducting only Uber fees and vehicle expenses averages $11.77 an hour, according to the study. With other expenses, including "the cost of a modest benefits package," drivers would average $9.21 per hour.

That is below the minimum wage in 13 of 20 "major urban markets" where Uber operates, including Seattle, San Francisco, and New York City. Seattle's minimum wage is currently between $11.50 and $15.45 an hour depending on the size of the employer and benefits offered.

Beyond just the minimum wage, Mishel also compares that pay to other low-wage workers like service employees:

One benchmarking exercise is to identify where Uber drivers’ average hourly wage falls within the overall wage scale. The 10th-percentile hourly wage—the wage earned by workers who make less than what 90 percent of all wage and salary workers earn but more than what 10 percent of all workers earn—was $9.54 in 2016 (EPI 2018). This means that Uber drivers, had they been employees and been provided a standard benefits package, would have earned less than what 90 percent of other earners did. However, since Uber drivers are primarily in higher-wage urban areas, this comparison understates how low Uber driver wages are relative to other, comparable workers.

To compare Uber's share of the economy to the economy as a whole, Mishel looks at how much people signed up as drivers on the app are actually working.

"I have long been skeptical that Uber or 'gig work' represents the 'future of work' ever since it was clearly established that most Uber drivers do not drive as their main source of income, but instead do so to supplement other income sources," Mishel writes. This echoes the debate here in Seattle, where union-affiliated drivers often depend on Uber for their entire income, while others who are more sympathetic to Uber use it as a side gig.

According to the study, Uber drivers on average work three months of the year and just 17 hours a week. With 833,000 Uber drivers in a year, that works out to 90,521 full-time equivalent workers or just .07 percent of national full-time employment.

If Uber makes up two-thirds of the gig economy, as research from Princeton University has found, then the entire gig economy accounts for .1 percent of national full-time employment, according to the study. (Uber is notoriously withholding of data about its workforce. According to the EPI study, the total Uber driver count comes from newly available Uber data used in a recent Stanford study about the gender gap in the gig economy.)

Much more about how Mishel got to these findings in the full report here.

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Another week in the Donald Trump presidency, another handful of days so stuffed full of sordid and highly complicated stories that even journalists have trouble keeping track of what's going on.

But the thread tying all the latest news together — from Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's sundry exploits, to Trump's ongoing presidential profiteering, to the Russia investigation — is corruption. The Trump administration will surely go down as one of the most — if not the most — rotten in American history.

Let's roll this most recent bit of tape. Ronan Farrow, who has become one of the signature investigative reporters of the Trump presidency, revealed at The New Yorker why somebody leaked the notorious financial reports of Michael Cohen showing that he had been given fantastically large sums of money from AT&T, Novartis, and a Russian oligarch-connected LLC. This information came from a "suspicious activity report" (SAR), which is something a bank files with the Treasury Department when they suspect something fishy is going on with a customer.

It turns out the source is a law enforcement official, and he released the SAR after he discovered that two more SARs detailing $3 million of additional similar transactions had somehow vanished from the Treasury Department's database. The source told Farrow that he feared that someone within Treasury was withholding the documents for political reasons, and thus released the one he had.

The precise meaning of this revelation is as yet unclear. But let me suggest a reasonable tentative conclusion: corruption. AT&T and Novartis have already admitted they were paying Cohen personally for "insights" into the Trump administration, particularly regarding, respectively, a huge proposed merger with Time Warner and health-care policy. Given that Cohen has zero experience with antitrust or health-care law and the scale of the secret payments, it's nearly beyond question they were really hoping to purchase political influence. And as for the disappearance of the SARs, Trump already straight-up admitted on national television that he fired then-FBI Director James Comey to stifle the Russia investigation, so obstruction of justice is clearly not a charge the president fears.

Obviously Cohen is legally innocent until proven guilty. But let's have a whisper of common sense here. It's not exactly a stretch to figure that the other SARs probably contain something similar to the first one, or that someone very well could be attempting to quash the Russia investigation, as Trump has already tried to do. (Oh, and a Qatari investor recently alleged that Cohen hit him up for a $1 million bribe in December 2016.)

That brings me to Trump's bizarre about-face on the Chinese phone manufacturer ZTE, in which he promised to help restore the company's jobs after being hit with U.S. fines and sanctions. Are we really to believe that this has nothing to do with China loaning $500 million to a huge Trump-branded development in Indonesia days beforehand? It simply beggars belief — indeed, there is practically no other comprehensible explanation.

Then there is the Russia investigation. As David Klion writes, the thing to remember about "Russiagate" (an unfortunate appellation, but one which seems to have stuck) is that Russia as such is only an incidental part of the story. Nearly all the major players are American, and if Russian efforts to influence the election did actually succeed to some degree, it's only because America's democratic institutions are rotten nearly to the core. Nations meddle in each other's elections all the time, for good reasons and bad. The United States has done it dozens of times, and often immensely more aggressively than anything Vladimir Putin allegedly did in 2016. The remarkable thing was that such relatively moderate and cheap efforts actually made any sort of difference — and in such a rich and powerful nation.

One important reason why Trump was able to become president is because his business career was not derailed at any of the several points in which he allegedly committed crimes. He could have been finished on one of the dozen-plus occasions he was credibly accused of sexual harassment or assault, or when he illegally discriminated against black tenants in his properties, or for the Trump University scam, or for an illegal loan to one of his casinos, or about 10 other things. But instead, he was actually coddled and lifted up by the New York establishment.

And he was far from alone. It turns out that when you stop enforcing the law against rich people, a seething plasma of corruption tends to engulf the national political system. Perhaps in the future we can start applying laws to everyone, even the wealthy and powerful.

by Charles Mudede

The Trump Show, which successfully eclipsed the revolt of teachers in red states, has pretty much eclipsed the Senate's move to repeal the FCC's repeal of net neutrality. This vote is a big deal, and not because of its chances of success, which are not huge, but, as Eli Sanders explained, it provides Dems with a hot and easy election issue for the mid-term elections. But this considerable victory for democracy, an institution that no longer enjoys bi-partisan support, and potential upset for Trump did not make the main pages of all the major news websites yesterday afternoon, when the measure was passed. Today, the websites yawned and moved on. All are back where they were for much of yesterday, and for much of the day before that, and day before that, and the day before that: covering the Trump Show. Its cast includes a porn star, a shady lawyer/fixer, peeing prostitutes, and the former members of the KGB.

In the book Life Ascending, the eloquent biochemist Nick Lane described mammals as "the original eco-hooligans" because "our thermostat is jammed at 37°C, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of need." The US's news media programming is presently jammed at the Trump Show. The great difficulty for thinking viewers has been when to turn it on or off. We all know that the Alex Jones Show is a complete waste of time. But this is not so with the Trump Show. Most of its content does nothing but burn time; but there are times when it doesn't, when the program must be watched.

For example, the recent opening of the rudiments of a US embassy in the controversial city of Jerusalem was indeed important. This bizarre event concluded with an openly antisemitic white American evangelical pastors ("Jew are going to hell") giving a speech to ultra-right wing Jews (a situation that, if witnessed by a living Hannah Arendt, would have sent shivers down her spine because of its dark recognizability). The event also happened as Israeli snipers shot and killed a large number of unarmed Palestinian protesters (of course, Palestinians were blamed for this slaughter—since the Eden of capitalist colonial forms of oppression, late-18th-century Great Britain/Ireland, the oppressed have always been blamed for their oppression). One should not have missed this part of the show (the bizarre event, the protests, the slaughter), because it provided more evidence of the decline of the US empire under Trump.

As Mandy Turner and Mahmud Muna point out in their excellent academic analysis of the embassy mess and the seemingly endless Jerusalem crisis, "The United States’ Recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel and the Challenge to the International Consensus," the US can no longer be classified as a “third party” but "a party to the conflict." Meaning, the US has officially sided, to its long-term disadvantage, with a minor power and, as a consequence, sent the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians in the direction of an EU currently run by a Germany that's more and more seeing this moment of policy confusion and rapid decline as an opportunity to leap from its long but mostly zone-limited currency position to a much wider geopolitical one. Expect the euro to follow Germany's global ambitions.

This part of the Trump Show was certainly watched by US foreign policy experts on the right and the left. Many of them even have the time to watch the non-stop program. They were once employed by the State Department. They were fired by Trump.

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