Consider This....
Consider This....
Paying Attention to Nature—Urgently
Eric Holthaus: There’s the octopus in the parking garage, and 26,500 other signs that climate change is here. ... The simultaneous disturbance of nearly every ecosystem on Earth is helping opportunistic, weedy species flourish while specialized plants and animals race to adapt. There’s no better example of this than the worldwide boom in jellyfish, which have become a danger to swimming and power plants, and are newly dominating ecosystems all over the planet. ... A new era of urgently paying attention to nature has arrived. Lately, the behavior scientists are seeing is so unusual that it’s starting to seem more like tipping points are here...
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Jul 28, 2020, 3:11pm
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The case for unschooling
Tyshia Ingram: Why the hands off alternative to homeschooling might get parents through the Covid-19 pandemic. ... the challenge — for children to explore their own interests rather than adhere to the criteria and curricula predetermined by school boards or other entities. Unlike the traditional homeschool model which often seeks to mimic the classroom or follow a defined curriculum usually with parents acting as teachers, with unschooling, children take the lead. ... Adults, sometimes parents, but not always, typically offer support, assistance, and guidance when needed. ... The term emerged in the ’70s, popularized by author and educator John Holt ... (who) realized the motivating factor for many of his students wasn’t a love of learning, but a fear of failure and criticism...
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Jul 17, 2020, 5:00pm
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Your White Neighbor’s “Black Lives Matter” Yard Sign Is Not Enough
Shayla Lawson: Being anti-racist means making places safe for Black people to inhabit. Without that, BLM yard signs are just performative allyship. ... We’ve migrated into a time in which it is more important for people to feel not-racist than it is for them to act not-racist. ... “We’re clearly not in a post-racial America” ... Cities across America are carving liberal, predominantly white, enclaves out of what used to be socially and culturally mixed, or predominantly black, neighborhoods. ... In the summer of 2017, the FBI marked Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization, a “Black Identity Extremist” group...
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Jul 6, 2020, 2:58pm
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Freedom Rider: Russia, Afghanistan, and the Big Lie
Margaret Kimberley: Far from being an enemy, Russia assisted the U.S. and its coalition in their fight against the Taliban. ... In the late 1990s and early 2000s, jihadists nearly tore Russia apart. Separatists from the Chechnya region terrorized the entire country which was weakened and divided after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ... “The charge is ludicrous on its face but the story is quite useful to people who want to hide their own criminality.” ... “The imperialist newspapers play an important role in creating propaganda tropes for public consumption.”...
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Jul 1, 2020, 4:45pm
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The FBI has a history of targeting black activists. That's still true today
Mike German: Throughout its history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has viewed Black activism as a potential national security threat. It has used its ample investigative powers not to suppress violence, but to inhibit the speech and association rights of Black activists. ... 1919, a young J Edgar Hoover, director of the Bureau of Investigation’s general intelligence division, targeted “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey for investigation and harassment ... The FBI’s Cointelpro program targeting civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael ... By 2017, the FBI had invented a new domestic terrorism program category it called the “Black Identity Extremism movement..
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Jun 26, 2020, 3:17pm
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Reparations and Juneteenth - The Debate Over Slavery Reparations Takes on a New Tenor
Jordan Wren: A truly unprecedented development this Juneteenth — a celebration of the day the last freed slaves learned they had been emancipated — is the emergence of a sustained, collaborative, and consistently visible social movement in regard to the mistreatment of Black Americans. ... Reparations for crimes against Black Americans have been implemented only in very specific cases. ... Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Network (BET), recently called for $14 trillion in reparation for slavery. ... A $14 trillion dollar reparations bill would provide every Black American less than $300,000 ... Economic and community development has long been considered the most viable option...
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Jun 22, 2020, 2:43pm
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Beware of Police “Reforms” That Reinforce the Very System Killing Us
Janaé Bonsu: We can’t fix the problem by investing more resources in police. We must defund and disband. ... There is a broad consensus that there is a problem with police in the United States, but divergence on whether the problem lies with individual officers and their respective departments, or with the institution itself. ... Abolition is the theory and practice of chipping away at a vast system of formal social control, imposed through punishment and surveillance, while also building new practices and systems that affirm people’s humanity. ... Ultimately, abolition is about striving for a world where police, and the prison-industrial complex in which they operate, is obsolete because we can build communities that are equipped to rely on each other for safety and create alternatives to punishment...
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Jun 13, 2020, 3:29pm
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Movement to Defund US Police Departments is a Beautiful and Doable Idea
Dave LIndorff: “The police are a 19th-century creation that is inappropriate for a 21st-century society.” ... Their role expanded over time to include pursuing criminals, but also to putting down political demonstrations, busting unions and strikes and to basically protecting the wealthy from the great unwashed — the workers, the unemployed and the hungry. ... While we’re at it let’s defund police intelligence units, which don’t belong in a free and democratic society. ... Police should be limited to dealing with violent criminals. ... In that regard, we should take a lesson from police in enlightened places like Scotland and Norway, Finland, Germany and many other European countries, where de-escalation is taught, and police often normally work unarmed, only signing out weapons when needed...
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Jun 9, 2020, 12:05pm
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Tear Gas Is Banned in International Warfare––Why Are Police Using It On U.S. Civilians?
Janea Wilson: Police say they’re using tear gas to clear crowds, but the chemical agent’s effects can cause long-term physical damage. ... While U.S. officials have a history of using tear gas as a “riot control agent” (defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “chemical compounds that temporarily make people unable to function by causing irritation to the eyes, mouth, throat, lungs and skin”), tear gas was banned in international warfare through the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997. ... Tear gas irritates the respiratory system, skin and eyes, which can lead to loss of eyesight and breathing problems, classifying it as a chemical weapon if used to intentionally cause harm or death (such as when it was used during World War I)...
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Jun 5, 2020, 3:29pm
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What a World Without Cops Would Look Like
Madison Pauley: “Can we come up with a situation where there are fewer killings, and fewer collateral consequences?” .... Five years ago, in the wake of the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, we were told, “Don’t worry, we’re going to fix it. .... But things did not get better. ... We have [millions of] low-level arrests in the United States every year and most of them are completely pointless. ... Reducing policing goes hand in hand with widespread decriminalization ... sex work, drugs, homelessness, mental illness. ... We don’t need school police, we need counselors and restorative justice programs. We don’t need police homeless outreach units, we need supportive housing, community based drop-in centers, social workers...
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Jun 3, 2020, 3:20pm
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Riot or Resistance? How Media Frames Unrest in Minneapolis Will Shape Public’s View of Protest
Danielle K. Kilgo: The general public’s opinions about protests and the social movements behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving the narrative of a demonstration. ... Decades ago, scholars James Hertog and Douglas McLeod identified how news coverage of protests contributes to the maintenance of the status quo, a phenomenon referred to as “the protest paradigm.” They held that media narratives tend to emphasize the drama, inconvenience and disruption of protests rather than the demands, grievances and agendas of protesters. These narratives trivialize protests and ultimately dent public support....
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Jun 1, 2020, 2:28pm
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Local television stations broadcast fake news stories scripted by Amazon
Douglas Lyons and Nick Barrickman: Amazon provided edited and scripted news reports to nearly a dozen local news stations ahead of Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday. ... At these stations, reporters read dutifully from scripts handed out by Amazon, without disclosing they were repeating verbatim text that had been fed to them by the company. ... The company’s fake news broadcasts turned reality on its head, presenting Amazon as a paragon of concern for workers’ safety. ... These fake news broadcasts aired in Miami, Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; Bluefield, West Virginia; Lexington Kentucky; Columbus, Georgia; Palm Springs, California; and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. ... Amazon was listed on “The Dirty Dozen” list maintained by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) in both 2018 and 2019...
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May 29, 2020, 3:45pm
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Why ‘Obamagate’ Will Never Lead To Anything Of Significance
Caity Johnstone: You will never see Obama or his administration officials brought down by “Obamagate” for the same reason Trump wasn’t brought down by the Mueller investigation: the swamp protects its own ... Both Obama and Trump administrations are packed full of crooks and mass murderers who could and should be imprisoned for any number of offenses, but they won’t be, because that would require a prosecutorial body that is separate from the swamp of corruption with which both of America’s mainstream parties are inexorably interwoven. ... You cannot use the swamp to drain the swamp. ... By collaborating with the swamp you ensure your own protection, and by attacking it you ensure your destruction...
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May 16, 2020, 11:54am
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COVID-19 and a New, Better World
Karl Grossman: Arundhati Roy: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” ... “We can choose,”...“to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our ... dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through ... ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” ...
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May 11, 2020, 1:37pm
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Sorting Out the Debris of Modernity – When the ‘Old’ Becomes the New ‘New’
Alastair Crooke: We inhabit the psychology of ‘betwixt times’. Instinctively, we know the world will never be the same again, but we cling to the familiar. And for now, the future – our ‘new’ – cannot be construed intelligibly. .... People are finding that they are managing with less. They have less. They discover that they didn’t really need it: (they don’t have to summer in the Caribbean). They can survive without the consumerist ‘froth’. ... Will these ‘discoveries’ embed? ... The flaws and weakness of the ‘Open Society’ stand naked: Open borders, open airways, open off-shoring of labour costs, open exports of dollar credits, and free trade, has set up the West for a collapse ... The inherent fragilities are too brittle, and systematically, too tightly-coupled...
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May 4, 2020, 2:38pm
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