Articles
Articles
Homeless Oaklanders were tired of the housing crisis. So they built a ‘miracle’ village
Gabrielle Canon: Under a highway, beautiful structures offer food, healthcare, showers and a free ‘store’ – as well as a strong sense of community ... The so-called “Cob on Wood” center has arisen in recent months to provide amenities for those living in a nearby homeless encampment, one of the largest in the city. ... But most importantly, it’s fostering a sense of community and dignity, according to the unhoused and housed residents who came together to build it. ... Cob on Wood was brought to life with help from local advocacy arts and food groups who teamed up with Miguel “Migz” Elliott, an expert in the ancient technique of making cob structures...
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May 11, 2021, 10:56am
Articles
The Drone Revolution Comes to England
Maya Evans: As cities and towns are faced with rising poverty, homelessness and drug addiction, the authorities respond with more social control, using a technology that makes George Orwell’s 1984 seem tame ... I'm seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council members representing Hastings, my small English seaside town in East Sussex. ... Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. ... The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime...
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May 4, 2021, 2:35pm
Articles
The Radioactive Underbelly of the Oilfield
Justin Nobel: The oil and gas industry has been promising great jobs for years but oilfield workers are risking their health for those paychecks. ... workers don’t always end up drilling for oil and pulling pipe, wellhead jobs stamped with a certain gritty glamour upon the American imagination. They often end up at a far seedier and even less regulated end of the oilfield, working in the largely unknown underworld of radioactive oilfield waste. Scooping it up and hauling it hither and thither in trucks. ... Waste spewed up by fracked wells in the first weeks of production is filled with toxic chemicals from the fracturing, as well as heavy metals, used fracking sand, and naturally occurring radioactivity from the formation...
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May 1, 2021, 2:26pm
Articles
The Yurok Tribe Is Using California’s Carbon Offset Program to Buy Back Its Land
Abaki Beck: In January, the Yurok Tribe in California bought a 40-acre farm. Located next to an elementary school and the tribe’s Head Start program, the farm will serve as an outdoor classroom for children as well as a source of organic produce for the tribe. ... (Cap-and-trade programs allow industries that cannot otherwise reach their emission compliance requirements to purchase credits, called offsets, from sellers that sequester greenhouse gases.) ... In 2013, when the cap-and-trade program formally launched, the Yurok became the first entity in the state to register a forest offset project...
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Apr 19, 2021, 3:00pm
Articles
When Is the Revolution in Architecture Coming?
Nathan J. Robinson: We need to build places we can’t stop looking at. It will involve lots of plants... Something is terribly wrong with architecture. Nearly everything being built is boring, joyless, and/or ugly, even though there is no reason it has to be. The architectural profession rewards work that is pretentious and bland. The cities we build are not wondrous. ... (Some very interesting examples - both good and bad)...
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Apr 15, 2021, 2:40pm
Articles
New Revelations on Germ Warfare: It’s Time for a Reckoning with Our History from the Korean War
Jeffrey Kaye: The North Korean and Chinese allegations of American use of biological weapons during the Korean War made headlines at the time, and the controversy over U.S. Air Force officers admitting under enemy interrogation details of germ warfare attacks rocked the U.S. defense establishment. ... In 1998, scholars ... published documents that they claimed showed the germ warfare charges were a hoax ... But in 2010, the CIA declassified hundreds of communications intelligence, or COMINT, daily reports from the Korean War. ... these documents vividly portray the reactions and responses of North Korean and Chinese military units responding to biological weapons attack...
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Apr 10, 2021, 3:51pm
Articles
How These Danish Bees Give Hope to Refugees
Agostino Petroni: In the face of rising anti-immigrant sentiment, an organization has worked to integrate new arrivals to Copenhagen by taking care of honeybees. ... “Denmark is an incredibly racist society, and they’ve really done everything they can to make sure that these refugees don’t come,” Maxwell says. “So for us, [Bybi] is not about producing honey, but it’s about the health of the community in which bees, flowers, and people thrive.” ... Maxwell’s approach since he launched Bybi in 2010 ... holds honey-making courses to groups of migrants, people experiencing homelessness, or anyone in need of a fresh start...
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Apr 3, 2021, 2:42pm
Articles
The States Where Efforts To Restrict Voting Are Escalating
FiveThirtyEight: But the push to restrict voting rights expands beyond just a few states. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights advocacy group, 253 bills to restrict voting access had been introduced in 43 state legislatures as of Feb. 19. ... Notably, the four states where the greatest number of voting-restriction bills have been filed — Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania — were some of the closest states in last year’s presidential election. ...They also all voted for President Biden...
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Mar 29, 2021, 4:05pm
Articles
Return of the Leviathan: The Fascist Roots of the CIA and the True Origin of the Cold War
Cynthia Chung: In whose interest did the creation of the Cold War serve and continues to serve? ... In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history ... This information sheds important light and confirms one of the biggest-kept secrets of the Cold War – the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a secret campaign against the Soviet Union. ... the CIA was not only given free reign for the execution of anti-democratic interventions around the world, but anti-democratic interventions at home, which continues to this day...
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Mar 7, 2021, 4:12pm
Articles
Tribes Revive Traditional Hemp Economies - A post-petroleum transition plan
Winona LaDuke: With 10,000 uses, hemp is one of the most versatile plants to grow—and in many ways can be a catalyst for change for Native peoples. We see a New Green Revolution in Indian Country, tied to justice, economics, restoration ecology, and a return-to-the-land movement, and it’s growing. ... It’s been said among Native tribes that the United States had a choice between a carbohydrate economy and a hydrocarbon economy—an economy that depends on petroleum, coal, and natural gas. ... The carbohydrate economy is one based on plants...
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Feb 28, 2021, 3:38pm
Articles
Dreams Outside the Hopes of the Neuronormal
Paul Haeder: "It is not for me to say whether we see best with the hand or the eye. I only know that the world I see with my fingers is alive, ruddy, and satisfying." -- Helen Keller, 1908, The World I Live In ... The legacy of a society is, well, how it treats its young, old, frail, infirm, sick, poor and those hobbled by structural and environmental injustice. ... well, you can image that young boys and girls with disabilities like Autism Spectrum Disorder or mental retardation or any number of other aspects of life dealt from a genetic and poison deck of cards will be a huge burden on families, medical services, schools, society in general...
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Feb 6, 2021, 11:47am
Articles
Radiation illnesses and COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation
Jayita Sarkar, Caitlin Meyer: In Indigenous lands where nuclear weapons testing took place during the Cold War and the legacy of uranium mining persists, Indigenous people are suffering from a double whammy of long-term illnesses from radiation exposure and the COVID-19 pandemic. ... The Diné are drinking poisoned water, putting them at risk for more severe coronavirus infections. ... From 1944 until 1986, 30 million tons of uranium ore was extracted on Navajo lands. At present, there are more than 520 abandoned uranium mines...
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Feb 5, 2021, 2:25pm
Articles
The Origins of America’s Secret Police
Cynthia Chung: When will the American people realise that the biggest threat to American freedom is not from without but from within its very own walls, where it has been prominently residing for the last 112 years... Those who seek wisdom and power have tended to also have an interest in the realm of “secret knowledge.” ... The Scottish Rite was formally organized in the U.S. in 1801, as a group of Tory partisans on the losing side of the American Revolution. ... If one is to understand what constitutes the “Morals and Dogma” of such a membership, to which J. Edgar Hoover entered the inner most circle, it will become clear that not only does the Rite act as an opposing church to Christianity, but that pledging one’s allegiance to this secret society is understood as coming before all else in this material world, including government and country. ...
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Jan 12, 2021, 12:11pm
Articles
Carceral Crisis in California
Citlali Pizarro & Shreya Chattopadhyay: Prison time -no matter how short- during a worldwide pandemic is an experimental death sentence. ... Two of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country right now are happening in California prisons, but the Governor and the CDCR have continually denied the only effective means of stemming the outbreaks—that is, the mass release of prisoners. ... “It just boils down to too many people in prison, this idea for a long time in California and probably throughout the U.S. that if you’re in prison, you’re somehow not a full human, so therefore you’re not really entitled to real medical care, and we’re not going to invest in it,” .... we need to replace institutions that punish with ones that care...
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Dec 8, 2020, 3:12pm
Articles
Once-Ignored Promises to Tribes Could Change the Environmental Landscape
Alex Brown: Last month, Michigan officials announced plans to shut down a controversial oil pipeline that runs below the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats, cited several reasons for the decision, including ... an 1836 treaty in which tribal nations ceded more than a third of the territory that would become Michigan in exchange for the right to hunt and fish on the land in perpetuity. An oil spill from the pipeline would destroy the state’s ability to honor that right ... If Native treaty rights had been honored, the natural landscape of the U.S. might look very different today. ... In recent years, some courts, political leaders and regulators have decided it’s time to start honoring those treaty obligations...
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Dec 5, 2020, 4:11pm
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