#human infrastructure bill

[nientedal]

What progress at home has biden enacted? What policies of his show that he is making progress that prove he is actually different than trump?

I like to pretend I have faith in humanity, so I'll answer as if you're asking this in good faith.

Biden's DEA has lifted restrictions on telehealth prescriptions to make appointments and assistance more accessible.

He put a funding package into place to help unhoused people get access to mental and physical healthcare, as well as short-term and long-term housing.

He has attempted and is still attempting to get student debt relief through - this was blocked by Republican judges appointed by Trump, but he's still working on it.

Infrastructure repair - his administration has budgeted funds to actually fix some severely-damaged and frequently-traveled bridges.

Trying to expand access to healthcare to include undocumented immigrants who came to the USA as children (Dreamers) under the Affordable Care Act. Support for Navigator programs and outreach has also been increased.

He has vetoed Republican-led bills that were attempting to overturn environmental protections - one that would have forbidden investment fund managers to consider climate change in their portfolios (I have two degrees in accounting and this is actually huge), and another that would have overturned restrictions on agricultural runoff into our waterways.

He and his administration worked for ages to get rail workers paid sick days.

This is just some of what he's been doing. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans want to criminalize the lives of LGBT people like you and me. They want to eliminate no-fault divorce and force births that will kill parents or devastate them financially. They have stated flat out that they want to install a military dictatorship in the USA. They attempted to put that in motion on January 6th, 2021. They failed once. They will do better next time.

One party wants to house the homeless and expand social safety nets, while the other one wants to criminalize homelessness. One of them wants a future in which I might be able to vote to change how much of a war machine my country is, while the other one wants to eliminate my ability to vote entirely. Those are not the same. Those literally are opposites.

At the end of the day, all you and I can do is choose to do the least amount of harm possible. You and I cannot choose to do no harm. This is the USA, we sell war, you and I cannot choose to do no harm. I wish we could, my god do I wish we could, but that is not an option. So we grieve for the harm we couldn't eliminate and work to minimize the harm that is done. Despite all the crap they support, Democrats are the minimum amount of harm right now. Acting like they aren't is exactly what brought us to an election where our options are a future where we are either wading in blood or drowning in it.

Not voting for Biden will not help Palestine. Not voting for Biden will guarantee a Republican president who will make the situation in Palestine WORSE. AND it'll hurt a lot of other places as well, both at home and abroad, because Republicans are about business and the USA is in the business of war! And I would very much like that to change someday! I would very much like to someday be able to choose to do no harm! And I know what I have to do to try for that future, so what are YOU going to do? There is no standing off to the side in this. If you aren't helping pull, you're the dead weight we're pulling. Are you going to dig your feet into the mud and blood and drown us there? Or are you going to get the fuck off your ass, grit your teeth, and help us pull free?

#askbasket #iam-the-wild #us politics #israel #palestine #if you do not vote blue you do not get to call yourself an antifascist #i HATE that that's the case; don't mistake me #but that is the reality we're working with #there isn't any other #do nothing and kill five people or act and kill one. #so what are you gonna do? i can't choose for you. but i know what my choice is. #i'm part of this world. and as much as i hate it...turning away is not one of the options. #we fight on ALL fronts #we protest we donate we write we call #AND WE ALSO FUCKING VOTE FOR THE LEAST OF THE EVILS. BECAUSE NO EVIL IS NOT AN OPTION.

[calder]

Released in 2010, Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas actively concerns itself with the realities of gay existence, and is widely recognized as a noteworthy work of queer science fiction. New Vegas extensively examines social attitudes towards homosexuality among the game's major factions, and primarily conveys this lore through gay and bisexual characters describing their own experiences. It also allowed the player to mechanically set the Courier's sexual orientation. By taking both available perks, the player character can be bisexual. By choosing neither, the player can opt out of seeing flirtatious dialogue options.

Uniquely, Fallout: New Vegas explores homosexuality in the context of wasteland societies, and touches upon related issues. The core theme of New Vegas is that the desire to recreate the past is driven by irrational nostalgia, and any endeavor to manifest past glory is dangerous and doomed. The social issue of homophobia is used as a demonstrative example. The resurrection of corporate and military power structures presents new avenues for Old World problems such as institutional homophobia to reemerge. One of the many issues that divide the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion is the latter's open persecution of gay people. The NCR is described as tolerant and even accepting of same-sex relationships, though acceptance tends to fall off the further one moves away from the developed, urbanized core of New California. In recent years, the Republic's rapid economic transformation has led to an unforeseen erosion of the humanitarian ideals which it was founded to serve. In practice, to recreate America was to take on its shortcomings and its sins. As subsistence scavenging has dried up, the people of the NCR increasingly turn to wage labor, entrepreneurial venture, or military enlistment to keep their families fed. Meanwhile, their government enacts morally corrosive imperialism (narrative verbiage), their dominion expanding indefinitely as their infrastructure crumbles from within. This has led to a profit-based imperial monoculture which must conquer, consume, and coerce to perpetuate. As personal politics and service labor grow in importance, people find themselves more inclined to present as "normal" in the interest of financial stability and political expedience. A loading screen visualizes this culture of artificial social normalcy: the portrait of President Aradesh on the NCR 5$ bill neglects to depict his unibrow, earring, and facial scarification, overall portraying the once-chieftain so cleanly-cut as to be unrecognizable at first glance. He also appears to be wearing a collared shirt or suit as opposed to the robe he wore in Fallout.

In the Legion, Caesar has mandated that every legionnaire take a wife and produce children, citing high infant mortality rates and the constant need for soldiers, and going as far as instituting child quotas. He treats human beings as a resource to be exploited for war. Ostensibly in this aim homosexuality has been declared a capital offense punishable by death. Historically, routine demonstrations of violence towards women and gay people are a deliberate feature of fascist societies, the only logical cultural conclusion of a government devoted entirely to war and control. In Forlorn Hope letter 9, an NCR soldier wrote wrote the following to his boyfriend:

Dearest Andrew, Writing this seems pretty morbid, but tomorrow we march into the no man's land between our camp and Nelson, which is crawling with Legion. The Major insisted I write this damn "if you get this, I'm dead" letter so here it is. What a crock. I have the luck of the devil and your love on my side, so I'll be home soon. Keep the porch light on for me. We'll party in New Vegas when I get back. I love you. —Devin

Devin believed he would prevail over the Legion because his love would keep him safe. He was found dying or dead on the battlefield, the letter was found on his body. In a post-release patch, the injured soldiers were removed from the battlefield for performance reasons, and never re-implemented. Driven largely in reaction to the Legion's hyper-masculine posturing and misogyny, rumors persist across the Mojave that gay male relationships are not only common within the Legion, but condoned. These rumors are repeated commonly in NCR society. A closeted NCR Major mentions that the Legion is "a little more... forgiving" about close male "friendships," speaking in a hushed tone to avoid suspicion. At the same outpost, the player can encounter Cass, a bisexual civilian woman. She may flirt with a male Courier, who may imply they are gay, prompting her to imply gay men are more common in the Legion. Even as gay men fight and die in the name of love under his command, NCR General Oliver may remark to Courier Six at the Second Battle of Hoover Dam: "If you think after all that's happened, I'm going to grab my ankles and take it like the Legion..."

This writing pertains to institutionalized homophobia which manifests in practice though power structures and social interactions without being written into law. Simply put, in his derogatory remark, the general expresses to his army that military surrender is gay, much like their gay enemy. From the brevity and bluntness of this remark, it's clear that this sentiment is already well understood among his ranks. Logically, to project strength in the eyes of such a leader, one might also project homophobia by scrutinizing and harassing one's peers and subordinates. In this atmosphere, the expression of homophobia is not only normalized, but materially incentivized. For the ambitious, it becomes a tool, and a way of casting shame upon rivals. For the closeted, homophobia becomes a survival tactic, hoping to throw scrutiny off oneself. This is why Major Knight is immediately frightened when a male Courier flirts with him. He is so profoundly alienated that he romanticizes life as a gay man under the Legion. The Legion punish homosexuality with death, and yet Knight characterizes them as more "forgiving" than the NCR. Through these apparently disparate events, the audience can trace how a distorted perception of gay people emerges among insecure men in a military environment, and subsequently becomes ingrained in the corresponding civilian culture. At the 188 Trading Post, a lesbian from the Brotherhood of Steel named Veronica also wryly remarks that she believes legionaries have gay sex about as often as straight sex. She also notes that this only applies to men, as women have no rights whatsoever in Legion society. In this aside, she conveys a pre-existing frustration with lesbophobic social norms. Veronica also mentions that the people of her bunker would rather she remain on the surface. The Mojave Brotherhood of Steel has no official policy prohibiting homosexuality, but an implicit attitude among its dominant members that their limited numbers require everyone to have children to avoid extinction. Numerically, this may seem logical on the surface, given their reluctance to recruit outsiders. However, given their tiny population, this is an ineffective countermeasure, as they do not have nearly enough members to maintain genetic diversity for more than a few generations. This approach is not universally supported by all family units within the Brotherhood, but every individual is ultimately at the mercy of the elder. Veronica was in a lesbian relationship, but they were quietly separated by Elder Elijah, due to the dominant culture of enforcing heterosexual pairing among their population.

Caesar's law has not ended homosexuality within his domain. Despite the obvious risks, some legionaries have continued to pursue relationships behind closed doors, especially given their access to slaves. So long as members complete their societal obligations and fulfill the child quotas, they are able to pursue romance with other men in secret. Homosexual relationships in the faction are noted as being relatively equal compared to the average Legion husband and wife, in a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" sort of open secret policy. Gay legionaries must always make sure to keep their activities hidden. A centurion was once almost caught fraternizing with the teenage boy he had chosen to tend his tent. Despite previous "romantic" intentions, he quickly resolved to dispose of the slave to dispel suspicion. Had they been caught together, the centurion would have been charged with homosexuality and sentenced to death. This story is only known because the enslaved young man, Jimmy, managed to escape execution. Further illustrating the cruelty intrinsic to Legion governance, it's stated that homosexuality was the crime, and not the rape of a young slave; in fact, it seems Jimmy was forced to contribute to the child quota despite being a gay teenager, and the experience left him traumatized. He has resolved to never have sex with another woman, as the very notion triggers memories which fill him with disgust, and (in his own words) makes him feel like a slave all over again. The Strip is indifferent to gay people, viewing them as another opportunity to make caps. Both the Gomorrah and the Atomic Wrangler are interested in maximizing profits, and their prostitution services cater to clients regardless of their orientation. The openly gay Jimmy works at nearby Casa Madrid, but there is some tension among his peers due to his co-worker Maude's blatant homophobia. She supposes he's "okay, for one of those," and if propositioned by a female Courier, Maude will direct them to Sweetie for such "perverted" services. Pretty Sarah must regularly intervene to keep the peace among her staff.

The Followers of the Apocalypse, well-read punks who seek to embody healing through anarchistic values, are not concerned with gender. Most are openly and casually sexually active. Upon meeting Courier Six, Arcade Gannon offhandedly makes his gayness known, unprompted. The audience must face the fact that Arcade's apprehension of the Legion is far from abstract; under Legion law, he would be put to death. One possible ending gives further insight into Caesar's hypocrisy: should the player sell Arcade into slavery and leave Caesar alive, he will keep Arcade as a personal physician and philosophical advisor. They intellectually spar at length, and Caesar grows singularly fond of him. Accordingly, Arcade imitates the historic suicide of Cato the Younger by disemboweling himself. The Legion's remaining medics attempted to save his life, but none were Arcade's equal. Caesar understood his doctor's final gesture of contempt, and mourned him for months.

New Vegas ventures further into themes of healing from the trauma of sexual violence, from the perspective of a lesbian character. Corporal Betsy, an NCR sharpshooter, is a rape survivor, and suffers with PTSD from the incident. Her unprocessed trauma has manifested as a maladaptive tendency to aggressively and explicitly proposition the women she encounters, in an effort to reassert a sense of control. This defensive hypersexual impulse has negatively impacted her ability to connect with other women. A male superior officer notes that her behavior is inappropriate for anyone of her stature, but abstains from disciplining her out of sincere concern for her mental health. The Courier can help her begin to recognize these problems, and convince her to seek treatment from Doctor Usanagi at the New Vegas medical clinic, which proves helpful to her as she processes and heals from her trauma.

In Old World Blues, the Think Tank are five floating brains in jars who express themselves by waving robotic arms bearing screens depicting facial features. Before the War, they were federal scientists who committed crimes against humanity in the name of weapons development. Each is stuck in some sort of neuro-bionic feedback loop which prevents them from moving forward with their projects, mentally binding them to their central laboratory. Walking through their homes at Higgs Village, it's clear each was deeply neurotic before they were transformed into floating brains. Now without bodies, they attempt to maintain the illusion that they are exempt from sexuality as purely mental beings, but each displays obvious interest in the human form. They have codified this shaming with the term "formography." Most of the men are obsessively defensive over their complete disinterest in penises, which they talk about constantly. However, the shameless Dr. Dala shows overwhelming interest in observing and recording any and all human functions. Already androgynous in her pre-War life, Dala has taken to self-identifying as a "gender neutral entity" (though she is not known to use they/them pronouns). Regardless of the Courier's gender, they may coquettishly scratch themselves, clear their throat, and stretch in front of Dala until her biomed gel decoagulates. Dr. 8 also responds positively to graphic masturbation advice from Couriers of either gender. The X-8 research facility is ostensibly a massive immersive shrine to Doctor Borous's hatred of Richie "Ball-Lover" Marcus, a long-dead child who bullied Borous centuries ago. He also clings to his resentment of one Betsy Bright, who refused to attend a dance with him, supposedly so she could "go smoke with RICHIE MARCUS." Clearly arrested in development, Borous has literally built a temple to the fantasy of torturing his adolescent romantic rival and feeding him to dogs. His frozen, static characterization of the jock Richie Marcus as a "pinko-commie" who "likes balls" reflects the shallowness, pettiness, and overall misanthropy underlying his patriotic identity. It remains apparent throughout Old World Blues that the Think Tank are all chronically sexually repressed, which is inseparable from the values of the violent and judgmental pre-War culture which created them. With time and isolation, this ingrained repression has manifested as various intense and deranged psychosexual behaviors, including rage-fueled homophobia, voyeurism, and the obsessive performance of puritanical pretense.

____

“Although I’ve been out for a very long time, I made a conscious effort to be out with relation to this project, as I wanted to be visible as a lesbian in the game industry. New Vegas itself is, I think, one of (if not the) best games out there in how we treat homosexuality – and all of that is very intentional.”

“If my work on FNV, if my being out has helped even one gay person, then I have succeeded.” — Tess “Obsidian’s Gay Cowgirl” Treadwell

____

written (with help from other editors) for fallout.fandom.com/wiki/LGBT_representation_in_the_Fallout_series criticism welcome

#fnv

[evilminji]

Actually? WOULD Earth be the ones to petition Oa?

They are interstellar Space Interpol. You don't usually call them on different parts of your OWN settlements or systems. You call them in when someone is breaking THE Laws. Not necessarily YOUR laws, though obviously by breaking THE laws they clearly ARE. But THE Big Laws(tm).

Like Geneva Convention for Space type laws.

You have discovered Planet or King X is committing WAR CRIMES. Call Oa. Tax fraud? That's an inter-personal planet side issue they can't help you with. Pointing Nukes at your nursery settlement and threatening to blow up the infants there unless you give them sex-slaves?

Knock-knock! Taste HARD Light Constructs!

But if so? Then how would the situation get so out of hand on Earth? With the G.I.W.? Simple. Tell me, Mr. President, what do you know of the current day to day life of villagers in rural Siberia?

That they exist? Could you even NAME their village, if I referenced specific individuals? Likely not. And no one would realistically expect you too.

There are countless planets out there! With Leaders busy with local industrial conferences and infrastructure bills. Farming regulations. Talks with that planet a few stars over. Very busy. What do THEY know of Earth? Why would they NEED too?

But! As we know, Ectoplasm is EVERYWHERE. Not just earth. And? Thin spots are not just an Earth-centric phenomenon. Other planets most CERTAINLY would have them too. And depending on the species? The culture? To quote the wise sage Bill Wurtz "you can make a religion out of this!"

After all, chosen few, returned from death... glowing and more powerful then before? Immortal? It's a pretty reasonable conclusion to come too. They are clearly Gods Touched. Some sacred task they must complete.

It would likely even shape the ghosts of the region themselves. After all, they TOO, would believe they were chosen for some Important Religious Task. Be it study or collecting rocks. To what end? Unknown. Who are they to question The Gods?

But! Oh happy day! The old tyrant is no more! A chosen Hero! They go to greet him! Honor him, as you do. Traditional gifts and ballads. Maybe some sacred rocks. A fancy hat. But? Oh? The Champion is wounded! Gasp! Still? But the fight with Pariah happened-

And then they are given Grave Warning(tm). Don't go to Earth. Heretics attacking people. KILLING souls! Trying to KILL the king of all the Infinite! He is somber because his living parents were hurt. Preventing the END OF ALL THINGS!!!??

WHAT!?

These "People In White" tried to EXPLODE the very FABRIC of all realities!? Several of them faint. Truely, these Fentons MUST be chosen by the Gods! Heros. Legends. Such bravery in the face of such HORRORS. Please, let them be brought to their Living counterparts! The hospitals are quite good!

And you know what? Fuck it. Danny will take that. Because his Mom n Dad got hurt. BAD.

They learned he was Phantom at probably the SINGLE worst time imaginable and still chose HIM. Chose THEM. The GIW were coming for him. Gonna hurt Jazz. And his parents told them, with fire and blood, it'd be a cold day in hell before they let them so much as TRY it.

They BLEW UP their own life's work. Went literally scorched earth. And now? They're not doing so good.

Because the Zone isn't made for the living. No food, no water, and no real human-safe medical supplies. They've run out. Danny will take what he can get. He'd even go to Vlad but... his Portal's gone too. And the Buzzards said he looked... spirally. Very... "suicide runs until everything BURNS".

So, yeah. No one's doing so great.

Alien planet it is.

They are greeted with fanfare and respect. The best medical teams on the PLANET. The King and his family is there, to welcome him. It's... it's beautiful. Hardly some perfect utopia, but the air is lite. Art everywhere. The stars vivid and so easy to see, at night.

The King kinda reminds him of Mr. Lancer to be honest. Balding and a bit round around the middle, stern but endlessly fair about it, wants people to do their best and succeed in life. Maybe that's why Danny finds himself opening up. Because... because here is a real, honest to God, KING king.

Somebody who was actually TRAINED to do all this King stuff.

Unlike Danny.

And Danny? He's scared. People expect him to Lead now. To know what he's doing. To somehow just... suddenly KNOW how to do all these things he's never even heard about. He only barely just died. Has BARELY been keeping everybody safe.

BARELY stopped Pariah.

He doesn't know what to do. But he pours his guts out. All the things that have bottled up. And King Not-Lancer listens. Somber and thoughtful. There is little, if anything he can TRUELY do to help. But... there ARE things he can do. Lessons on statescraft, while he's here, for one.

As for the other? Well, as King, he does have the local Lantern's Call Sign. Not to be used lightly, mind you. But what Danny describes? And from what the Sacred Ones have reported? THAT must be reported to Oa. He can show Danny how to do that.

(He does)

[The Lanterns of Earth get a VERY exciting call from Oa. Are every different shade of pissed. But? Whoops! Looks like they ACCIDENTALLY put the Watchtower into a complete Quarantine! Well, dang. Guess we're all stuck here for two weeks!

Reset it? *sound of smashing computer terminal* Yeah, don't think that's gonna work! :)

WHO WANTS TO PLAY 20 QUESTIONS?? We'll start! :) Who here has heard of an organization called, and I quote, The Ghost Investigation Ward? :) ]

@hdgnj @ailithnight @nerdpoe @the-witchhunter

#dpxdc #dcxdp #dc x dp prompt #tw violence #tw slavery #not sure if i got everything #but i hope that helped

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Electrons, not molecules

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call us dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality – humanity needs energy – and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

Here's the thing: they're full of shit.

Mostly.

Humanity does need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it can't. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.

Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are more than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a material problem, not an energy problem. If we could capture a mere 0.4% of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).

Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also continuously replenished. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency – even as we treated materials as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of – the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.

A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.

In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."

Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":

https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/

As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is not in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does not want a future where we have all our energy needs met:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting

That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."

Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.

Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late – it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).

But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it is too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all, #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.

Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms – and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.

Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long.

When Woods – and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants – was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.

These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science – he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.

Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."

McKibben points to the forthcoming book The Price Is Wrong, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

The crux of that book is:

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

#pluralistic #bill mckibben #exxon #exxonknew #solarpunk #climate #climate emergency #climate crisis #gaslighting #guillotine watch #Darren Woods #incentives matter

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week. #5

Feb 9-16 2024

The Department of Education released the first draft for a wide ranging student loan forgiveness plan. After Biden's first attempt at student debt forgiveness was struck down at the Supreme Court in 2023, this new plan is an attempt to replace it with something that will hold up in court. The plan hopes to forgive debt for anyone facing "financial hardship" which has been as broadly defined as possible. Another part of the plan hopes to eliminate $10-20,000 in interest from all student loans, as well as a wide ranging public Information push to inform people of other forgiveness programs they qualify for but don't know about.

The House passed 1.2 Billion Dollars to combat human trafficking, including $175 million in housing assistance to human trafficking victims

The Department of Transportation announced $970 Million for improvements at 114 airports across 44 states and 3 territories. They include $40 million to O'Hare International in Chicago to improve passenger experience by reconfiguring TSA and baggage claims, and installing ADA compliant bathrooms(!). The loans will also go to connecting airports to mass transit, boosted sustainability, installing solar and wind power, and expanding service to under served committees around the country.

Medicare & Medicaid released new guidelines to allow people to pay out of pocket prescription drug coats in monthly installments rather than as a lump sum. This together with capping the price of certain drugs and penalties for drug companies that rise prices over inflation is expected to save the public millions on drug coasts and assure people don't pass on a prescription because they can't pay upfront

The EPA announced its adding 150 more communities to its Closing America's Wastewater Access Gap Community Initiative. 2.2 Million Americans do not have basic running water and indoor plumbing. Broken and unreliable wastewater infrastructure exposed many of those to dangerous raw sewage. These Americans live primarily in poor and rural communities, many predominantly Black communities in the south as well as those on tribal lands. The program is aiming to close the wastewater gap and insure all Americans have access to reliable clear water.

The White House announced deferred action for Palestinians in the US. This means any Palestinian living in the United States, no mater their legal status, can not be deported for any reason for the next 18 months.

The Department of Energy announced $60 million in investment into clean geothermal energy. The plan will hopefully lead to a 90% decrease in the coasts of geothermal. DOE estimates hold that geothermal might be able to power the hopes of 65 million Americans by 2050 making it a key step in the Biden administration plan for a carbon-free grid by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050.

The EPA launched $83 million to help improve air quality monitoring across America. With updated equipment local agencies will be better able to report on air quality, give more localized reports of bad air quality and the country will be better equipped to start mitigating the problem

The Department of Energy announced $63 million in investments in domestic heat-pump manufacturing. Studies have shown that heat-pumps reduce green house gases by 50% over the most efficient condensing gas boilers, as technology improves this could rise to 75% by 2030. Heat pump water heaters meanwhile are 2 to 3 times as energy efficient as conventional electric water heaters.

HHS awarded $5.1 million to organizations working with LGBTQI+ Youth and their Families. The programs focus on preventing homelessness, fighting depression and suicide, drug use and HIV prevention and treatment, as well as  family counseling and support interventions tailored for LGBTQI+ families.

The House passed two bills in support of the oppressed Uyghur minority in China. The "No Dollars To Uyghur Forced Labor" Act would prohibit the US government from spending any money on projects that source materials from Xinjiang. The Uyghur Policy Act would create a permanent post at the State Department to coordinate policy on Uyghur Issues, much like the special ambassador on antisemitism.

#Joe Biden #Thanks Biden #politics #US politics #Democrats #climate change #student loans #student loan forgiveness #green energy #Palestinians #Uyghur

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Bernie Sanders has hit back fiercely at Benjamin Netanyahu over the Israeli prime minister’s claim that US universities were being overrun by antisemitism on a scale comparable to the rise of Nazism in Germany.

In a video posted on X, the progressive senator from Vermont – who is Jewish – accused Netanyahu of “insult[ing] the intelligence of the American people” by using antisemitism to distract attention from the policies of his “extremist and racist government” in the military offensive in Gaza.

“No Mr Netanyahu, it is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that, in a little over six months, your extremist government has killed over 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 78,000, 70% of whom are women and children,” Sanders said.

The two-and-a-half minute video listed a catalogue of further consequences of the war in the Palestinian coastal territory, including the destruction of infrastructure, hospitals, universities and schools, along with the killing of more than 400 health workers.

Sanders, who sponsored an unsuccessful Senate bill in January to make US aid to Israel conditional on its observance of human rights and international law, said Netanyahu’s government had unreasonably blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza, causing “thousands of children [to] face malnutrition and famine”.

In a blistering conclusion, he said: “Mr Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people. But please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal policies of your extremist and racist government. … It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.”

Sanders’ comments were a riposte to a video posted on social media by Netanyahu in which he waded in to protests sweeping American university campuses and claimed not enough was being done to combat a “horrific” rise in antisemitism.

“Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities,” Netanyahu said. “They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally, but that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now fortunately, state, federal and local officials, many of them, have responded differently. But there has to be more.”

Netanyahu’s comments came against the backdrop of police deployments to break up pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and numerous other US campuses. In some universities, faculty members have been arrested, including the chair of the philosophy department and a professor of English and Indigenous studies at Emory University in Atlanta.

Jewish students have reported feeling threatened by the protests and heated atmosphere that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, resulting in the deaths of about 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of more than 200 others.

Videos posted on social media have depicted anti-Israel protesters shouting “go back to Poland” and “go back to Belarus”, apparently at Jewish students. A congressional hearing earlier in April into a reported upsurge of antisemitism at Columbia heard allegations that Jewish students had been subjected to taunts of “F the Jews”.

Last October’s attack triggered an overwhelming and continuing Israeli military response that has so far killed more than 34,000 Palestinians – according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza – and led to a burgeoning humanitarian disaster, accompanied by accusations that Israel is committing “genocide”.

In his video, Netanyahu said Israel was being “falsely accused” of genocide and called it part of an “antisemitic surge”.

“Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians,” he said. “Yet it is Israel that is falsely accused of genocide. Israel that is falsely accused of starvation and sundry war crimes. It’s all one big libel. But that’s not new. We’ve seen in history that antisemitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander.”

The Joe Biden White House, while resisting pressure to condition or limit weapon supplies to Israel, has voiced frustration over its resistance to allowing more humanitarian aid freely into Gaza and roundly criticised the recent strikes that killed seven workers from celebrity chef Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen charity.

Protests on campuses across the US continued on Saturday, with some protesting student bodies and universities locked in a standoff that saw demonstrators vowing to keep their movements going at the same time as college authorities moved to close down the encampments.

Police in riot gear cleared protest tents on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston, while students shouted and jeered at them, the Associated Press reported. The university said the protest had been “infiltrated by professional organisers” with no connection to the institution, while some demonstrators had used antisemitic slurs.

The picture of campus antisemitism run amok was lent further credence by Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and ex-US treasury secretary, who accused authorities at his former university of failing to act decisively against protesters occupying Harvard Yard.

“This is the predictable culmination of the Harvard Corporation’s failure to effectively address issues of prejudice and breakdowns of order on our campus,” he posted on X. “There can be no question that Harvard is practicing an ongoing double standard on discrimination between racism, misogyny and antisemitism.”

His comments provoked a sharp response from critics of Israel. “Your efforts to portray student demonstrators challenging Israel’s genocidal actions as ‘antisemitic’ are cheap & disingenuous,” wrote Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). “These students should be commended for their courage & compassion, risking suspension & smears (like yours), to fight the most heinous crimes underway in Gaza.”

#us politics #news #the guardian #2024 #sen. Bernie Sanders #Benjamin Netanyahu #israel #israeli defence forces #genocide #ethnic cleansing #free palestine #free gaza #Palestine #gaza #World Central Kitchen #biden administration #protests #hamas #israel hamas war #Lawrence Summers #Sarah Leah Whitson

[themirokai]

now I wanna know- why isn't drinking water free in the US?

Hi there friend! Thanks very much for taking the bait from this post. Buckle up, this is a long one.

If you want to put out a cistern and collect rainwater and use that, congratulations! Your water is free! Plus the cost of maintaining your cistern and keeping it clean. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with a high enough water table to have a well, then your water is also free + the cost of the well and well maintenance.

But if you want water to come out of your tap on demand and you can’t or don’t want to maintain a cistern and you can’t or don’t want to have a well… you need public water!

How do we get public water? Well, a government entity (usually. there are some private utilities, but that’s a different post. I have strong feelings) has rights to take water out of a river or a lake, or they have a reservoir, or they have access to an aquifer. Then they have to transport the water out of the source. This generally requires aqueducts or massive pipes, which are expensive and need to be maintained, which is also expensive. The pipe leading out of one of my utility’s reservoirs is 12 feet in diameter.

Does the water go directly from the source to your home? Nope! It gets piped to a water filtration plant! The process of modern water filtration is complicated but it involves both physical and chemical treatment to make sure the water isn’t carrying any parasites, harmful bacteria, or pollutants and it has the right pH. Not only are these filtration plants extremely expensive to build and maintain but the process of operating them is extremely expensive, both in terms of hiring skilled staff and having appropriate materials for the filters and chemical treatment.

After the treated water (called “finished water” in the biz) is ready it does get piped to your house.

If you use public water, do you know where your local water filtration plant is? No? That probably means it’s not in your immediate neighborhood, which probably means it’s several miles or more away. To get to your house, the water needs to travel through an extensive pipe network. These pipes are smaller but they have to remain pressurized so that no contaminants can get into the water on its way to your house. But pipes break! Especially if you live somewhere with a freeze/thaw cycle. Maintaining this pipe network is, you guessed it, expensive! It requires materials and extremely skilled workers who perform in very very difficult conditions. Plus lots of engineering to keep the whole system pressurized even when one part of it breaks. Oh, and you know what lots of pipes were made out of in the early 20th century? Lead! So all around the country utilities need to make extensive and costly infrastructure upgrades because now we know lead pipes are really freaking bad.

Okay, so you get the basic picture. And I haven’t even gotten into Safe Drinking Water Act compliance, but most of that happens at the filtration plant. Oo! Or desalinization because some utilities pull their water from the sea and need to take the salt out. I know basically nothing about this except that it is likely complicated and expensive to do at scale.

This is essentially why I get frustrated by people who argue “why should we pay for something that falls out of the sky?” Because finished water doesn’t fall from the sky and it sure as hell doesn’t fall from the sky into your faucet. (Side note: as a public utility official I have been screamed at by the “it falls from the sky” people. A thing I like about the private sector is that people scream at me a lot less.)

Now, there is a very strong argument to be made that because water is necessary for human life, it should be provided by the government for free to everyone. And just like the costs of roads or public education, this should be part of the public budget and paid for by taxes and no one should have a water bill. I don’t disagree with this. I’m sure that’s how it’s done in some countries.

I don’t have a well-researched answer on the history of water utilities but I do have some facts and some (very) educated conjectures. Water rights in the US are complicated (another separate post!) but they’re based on private ownership. Ever since white people came to this country people have been claiming ownership over water and charging each other money for taking water out of rivers or lakes or the ground. You can measure how much of it someone uses and charge them for it. Water is treated like a commodity because unlike other public goods, it *can* be treated like a commodity and then, you know, capitalism. Again, I’m not saying that’s right.

But as a society, if we believe that no one should have a water bill, then we need to figure out how to pay for all the very expensive steps in the process I outlined at the top. Could that just be taxes? Sure, if you have a system that supports taxes at that level. Do I believe that public funding of water infrastructure would be a fuckton better than a lot of things we use taxes for now? Absolutely! But that requires massive institutional change and this isn’t generally an issue that people know enough about to demand change.

If you read this far, congratulations! You now know more stuff about drinking water!

#hey if you enjoyed reading this consider reblogging it #it took me a while to write up #and I love educating people about this stuff #also if you have follow up questions please send them along #miro does asks #miro irl #drinking water #public utilities #water utilities #public water #long post

[thesimblrofficedirectory]

Welcome to The Simblr Office Directory

This blog is an archive of the submissions for the office-centric OC prompt posted by the light of Simblr, @kashisun.

Here you can browse all the amazing creations submitted by your fellow simblrs. Feel free to scroll to your delight or click one of the links under the cut to see who's on roster under (or over) a particular bureau or delegation.

Want to be added to the directory or confirm that you've been queued? Just include a link to your post in an ask off anon and it will be queued within 48 hours. Until we get through the backlog and can queue at a more leisurely pace, all ask submissions will receive a confirmation. You can always mention us, but we won't be able to provided confirmation for that method.

Leaving the company? If you'd like your post removed, just include a link to the post in an ask off anon and it will be removed. Sideblogs may require additional verification. Please allow, at most, 48 hours for the request to be honored. Removal requests will not be confirmed, only acted upon.

Every company's hierarchy is a little different. Designations for this directory are based on some of the companies I've worked for, but especially on the multi-media marketing company I work for now.

Bureaus and Their Delegations

Delegations with an * currently have low or no headcount (posted and queued). Excludes leadership.

Bureau of Client Engagement

Leadership

Billing*

Escalations*

Product Support*

Quality Assurance*

Sales*

Bureau of Compliance (Bureau-specific Internal Affairs and Auditing)

Leadership

Client Engagement*

Facilities*

Finance*

Human Resources*

Information and Technology*

Legal (General)

Legal (Leadership)

Marketing*

Bureau of Facilities

Leadership

Catering*

Environmental (Janitorial, HVAC, and Plumbing)*

Mechanical (Electrical, Elevators, Equipment Maintenance)*

Premise* (Grounds Maintenance and Real Estate)

Purchasing* (From pushpins to pallet jacks)

Security

Warehousing* (Shipping, Receiving, Mail room, and Inventory)

Bureau of Finance

Leadership

Accounting

Asset Management*

Investments*

Travel and Accommodations*

Vendor Relations*

Bureau of Human Resources

Leadership

Career Development (Internships and Internal Role Transitions)

Dependent Care*

Employee Activities Committee (Members are volunteers)

Employee Benefits*

Floating Delegates (Administration) (For profiles that list a nondescript secretary/admin/receptionist/assistant role)

Floating Delegates (General) (For profiles that do not list a position)

Floating Delegates (Leadership) (For profiles that list a nondescript managerial role)

Health Services*

Payroll*

Recruiting*

Training*

Union Relations*

Bureau of Information & Technology

Leadership

Data Security*

Infrastructure*

Public Relations

Research and Development*

Systems and Devices*

Telecommunications*

Bureau of Marketing

Leadership

Copy

Design

Planning and Implementation*

Board of Directors

Chief Officers

CEO - Chief Executive Officer/President

COO - Chief Operations Officer/Vice President

CCO - Chief Compliance Officer/Vice President

CFO - Chief Finance Officer/Vice President

CITO - Chief Information and Technology Officer/Vice President

CMO - Chief Marketing Officer/Vice President

Executive Administration* (Admins that report to chief officers)

#new simblr #the simblr office #thesimblroffice #pinned

[ellaandtheocean]

STOP THE NZ GOVERNMENT'S WAR ON NATURE

Just when you thought they'd hit rock bottom, the National/Act/NZ First coalition government keeps digging. The fast-track approvals bill was released last month and forms the latest part of the government's war on nature. This would allow major infrastructure and industry projects such as mining, road construction and large-scale aquaculture to be fast-tracked if they are considered to be regionally or nationally significant. While I completely agree that the current Resource Management Act consenting process is not fit for purpose, its regulations are stringent for a reason - to protect our climate, our indigenous biodiversity and our whenua. We need development in New Zealand to be sustainable, and to focus more on nature-based solutions. This legislation is taking our country in the wrong direction. It's not the fast-track it's the wrong track!

Lack of consideration for environmental damage: This project requires the economic benefits of a project to be considered above all else. In the midst of intersecting climate and biodiversity crises, we should prioritize protecting the habitats we have left and supporting efforts to restore ecosystems.

Lack of regulation against negative human health impacts: Even if you're not a nature lover like me, we can probably all agree that exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and other toxins, dangerous pollution in outdoor recreation areas such as rivers and beaches, and air pollution are things that no New Zealander wants. This bill does not exclude projects and activities that will have a negative impact on human health.

Lack of transparency: There are already many projects earmarked for fast tracking under Schedule 2A of this bill, but this list has not been published, meaning a fast-tracked project could be coming to a place near you soon, and you'd have no idea until after the bill has passed. Details about the process for project selection and review are scarce.

Undemocratic: Rather than going through the full submission process, projects are sent straight to a panel to be reviewed. This means that local people and conservation groups won't get to have their say on projects that will directly affect them and the work they do. This is a blatant overreach of central government into local affairs, from a government who criticized Three Waters because they thought it took too much decision-making ability away from the regions.

Risks of corruption and conflict of interest: The expert panels do not get the final say of which projects are approved; they can be overridden by any of these three ministers: Simeon Brown (Minister for Energy and Transport), Chris Bishop (Minister for Infrastructure) and Shane Jones (Minister for Oceans & Fisheries, Resources and Regional Development). Having one person make these calls presents a much greater risk of conflicts of interest occurring (and let's be honest, this is quite a risk).

Submissions on this bill are open until April 19th, and there are templates online you can use to make a submission if you're pressed for time. My favourites are from the Forest & Bird (the organization I volunteer with) and the Environmental Defence Society (linked below). You can also write to your local MP and let them know you DO NOT support this bill.

More information and submission templates:

STOP the War on Nature | Forest and Bird

Make a submission on the Fast-track Approvals Bill using EDS’s template | EDS

#nzpol #new zealand #aotearoa #nz politics #conservation #wildlife #nz wildlife #conservation nz

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Nuanced Foil Lena AU Pt 3

After Lena's mic drop outside L-Corp, CatCo is aflurry by the time Kara arrives. During the morning's pitch meeting, James wants an official interview as soon as possible. Half the room turns to Kara, but she remains quiet, saved only by Nia volunteering herself as tribute.

"I'll reach out to her team," she offers. "Any particular angle you're looking for?"

James shakes his head. "We'll let her guide us on that-- make that clear to her people and it might get us in the door faster."

"On it."

---

To Kara's surprise, Lena accepts the interview offer with Nia almost immediately, and more than that, agrees to a fully televised interview at CatCo HQ. On the day of, Kara doesn't need to be there-- in fact, she's sure Lena would prefer if she wasn't. But she lurks in a corner of the studio with a handful of other reporters, watching as the finishing make up touches are made and the mic packs are given their final adjustments.

Her heart beats loudly in her chest as the room quiets, and the countdown starts.

"Thank you for being with us tonight, Miss Luthor." Nia's tone is rich and professional, betraying nothing of the relatively friendly conversation they'd shared before the cameras started rolling. "As I'm sure you can imagine, a lot of people have been asking questions following your comments earlier this week."

Lena smiles self-deprecatingly. "Of course-- Has another Luthor lost their mind? More at eleven."

She chuckles at herself, but where others might have seemed disingenuous in doing so, it only serves to make Lena more approachable. Nia's responding grin is a testament to that, with some of her first-big-interview jitters easing off, allowing her to relax just a little.

"But can you blame them? A Luthor speaking out against a Super certainly carries some heavy baggage."

Lena nods. "It does, unfortunately."

"So let's get the big question out of the way, shall we? Are you, Lena Luthor, denouncing Supergirl?"

"No, not at all," Lena delivers, her smile still in place. Historically, Lena's smiles in public interviews are a little too perfect to be real, but tonight the one she wears is warm, gentle, and humanizing.

"Yet you claimed Supergirl was a burden," Nia digs a little.

"I did. I do. Since her first appearance three years ago, National City's infrastructure has been overbudget to the tune of 1.6 billion dollars overall. That's a lot of money that the city simply doesn't have. It's money that its *citizens* don't have."

Nia nods thoughtfully. "But as a scientist, wouldn't you agree that corellation doesn't always equal causation?"

"Sometimes that's the case, and it can absolutely be said that equal or greater damage wouldn't have occurred without Supergirl in the mix. I'm certain studies are currently taking place to determine the true relationship, but really, the whole thing simply sheds light on the greater issue at hand."

"Which is?"

"Tell me, Miss Nal-- if you step out into the street and get hit by a car, what happens?"

Nia's eyes widen slightly. "Go to the hospital, hopefully!"

There's a laugh in her voice, and Lena joins in, waving her off. "Yes, of course! You're fine, maybe a few broken bones. But it's still an ER visit, maybe even an ambulance ride to get there. So who pays for all that?"

"My insurance, I would think. Or theirs."

"Bingo." Lena leans in, suddenly more intense. "Now let's say it wasn't a car that hit you. A hero pulls you out of the way, breaking your wrist in the process. They don't mean to, of course, but accidents happen. It may not even be a result of their speed or strength, just the wrong amount of pressure applied the wrong direction. What happens then?"

Nia blinks. She doesn't respond right away, which gives Lena the opportunity to continue.

"Do heroes have insurance that would cover medical bills? Could you take a hero to court and sue for damages?"

Kara's stomach clenches, and she has to fight every urge she has to not to interrupt, to rescue her protegee from the offensive Lena is suddenly on.

"What if Supergirl is investigating a crime, and believes there is relevant evidence inside your home. Do heroes have the burden of obtaining a warrant before entering your residence? If she gets the house number wrong, and enters an entirely different home by accident, what recourse do those homeowners have to get repaid for property and emotional damages?"

The studio is so quiet, one could hear a pin drop. But where everyone else seems stunned, Nia looks thoughtful.

"Are you saying that heroes shouldn't do what they do to help protect the public?"

Lena eases back in her chair a little bit, shaking her head. "I think it's clear by now that without heroes, National City wouldn't be here. It certainly wouldn't be the same city it is today, at the very least."

"So what are you suggesting?"

"Oversight. Legislation. Regulation." Lena shrugs. "Think about it-- every other position within our judicial system, as flawed as it is, requires demonstrable qualifications. Lawyers have the bar, police officers undergo months of training... to what standards do we hold a hero?"

"It's sounding a little like you're calling for registration," Nia hedges.

Lena lifts her hands. "I understand that's a slippery slope when it comes heroes, or really anyone with special abilities. I won't speak to that. And honestly, I'm not claiming to have all the answers. I'm just asking the questions."

Shifting in her seat, Nia glances at her notepad. "And what would you say to those concerned that you're following in your brother's footsteps? As you say, it can be a slippery slope."

Taking a deep breath, Kara watches Lena consider her answer. For a moment, Lena's gaze unfocuses as she thinks, looking inward, before sharpening with resolve.

"I would say... you're right to be concerned. I certainly was, making the decision to say anything on the matter. In a lot of ways, I don't feel like I have the right to ask these questions. But if not me, then who? Who has the platform or the privilege to ask and actually be heard?"

"So you have responsibility."

Lena smiles again, close-lipped and sweet.

"I'd say we all do, don't you think?"

#supercorp #nuanced foil lena au #getting juicy!!

[probablyasocialecologist]

In a position paper published Wednesday, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders Michel Forst chronicled the increasing criminalization of environmental activists in Europe and argued for states to protect protesters and listen to their demands instead of harassing, intimidating and repressing those engaged in peaceful acts of civil disobedience.  Meanwhile, the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law tracks state and federal legislation introduced in the U.S. that restricts first amendment rights to peaceful assembly and has found 42 currently enacted laws and 25 pending bills that would restrict these rights.  Examples include new or expanded “critical infrastructure” laws in Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia that explicitly protect pipelines and mining operations, ramping up fines and multi-year prison sentences for trespassing or impeding operations. Some states will also fine those conspiring with individuals found in breach of critical infrastructure laws up to $100,000. At the U.N., Forst’s analysis followed a year-long inquiry in a landscape of rising risk for environmental defenders: As global public demand for decisive climate action grows and activists engage in more frequent and targeted forms of civil disobedience, there’s been an uptick in violent crackdowns from law enforcement, harsh sentencing for protesters and legislation to make it harder for protesters to engage in peaceful demonstrations. 

#environmental defenders #environmental activism #environmentalism #protests

[hold-him-down]

Welcome to Belleview - Chapter 1

Notes: ~11 years after the beginning of The Fighter, this is not a Luke/Leo story but is in-universe.

TW: Institutionalized slavery, nonsexual nudity, starvation mention, human euthanasia mention, degrading language, all the things.

✥ ✥ ✥

From the outside, it is a beautiful campus. Elegant in its simplicity, with three brick buildings forming a crescent at the mouth of a long, rose-bush lined drive that intersects wrought iron gates.

Today, police swarm it, more for the optics than anything else. They’re not here to enact change, or to start building moral credit, but they are here, and so he smiles, shakes hands, introduces himself.

He opens the double-paned glass door, which sits just in front of a set of reinforced steel bars, and he’s immediately met with the silence of a reception area from which all of its workforce has been escorted out. 

Almost all.

“Lincoln Prescott?” says a singular man, in his mid-twenties on his best day, peeking around the corner. He’s nervous, skittish even. Fidgeting palms run down his sweater and he smiles, but it’s not the smile of someone who’s happy, welcoming, comfortable, warm. 

Lincoln returns the gesture and nods. He doesn’t extend his hand. Instead, he turns over the key he’s just been handed, and he reads the man’s name-tag.

Jared Fisher, Handler. Level Two. 

Jared smiles sheepishly and takes off the name-badge. “I wasn’t sure if I should wear it. I guess… I guess it’s not really needed anymore.” He holds it out to Lincoln, who stares at it for several seconds, before he sets it on the counter behind him.

“Uh,” Jared says, cutting through the silence of the massive waiting area. “I’m sorry. I know, I’m sure, that you’re not– I get it, I mean. I know I’m the enemy here.” 

Lincoln narrows his eyes, shaking his head once. 

“They said if I– Uhh, they said they’ll take it into c– consideration, I guess. When the trials start. When… whatever is going to happen, happens.” He swallows, and Lincoln feels something that is related to sympathy, but not quite it. He lets that feeling fizzle quickly. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” Jared says quietly. 

There’s silence again. Lincoln lets it settle over him, watching the ex-handler’s fidgeting intensify, before he says, “Oh. You’re waiting for me to speak.” 

Jared shrinks.

When the final nail in the coffin of support for the trade and consumption of government-sanctioned slavery had been hammered in, there wasn’t the type of frenzy that anyone expected. That morning, people, by and large, woke up, had their coffee, showered. They caught their trains to work, they read their news and they watched, closely, but there wasn’t an uproar. They stole glances at their phones and monitors for updates, for news, for what happens next. 

Truth be told, it had been heading this way for a while. Within the last ten years, Individual states had begun passing legislation that, in hindsight, paved the path for widespread challenges to the system, led by a few congresspeople who finally woke the fuck up. Things turned violent early, with protests, rallies, boycotts, demonstrations… everything imaginable. 

Videos of workers being tortured, followed by videos of workers recounting their own stories, began making national headlines. Consumers of workers’ labor fought hard to sway public opinion back to the positive outcomes the system had brought the country, but with each passing week, with each new video of a worker strapped to a table being violated in unimaginable ways, it was a losing battle.

As local legislation was passed, certain states became a kind of safe-haven for runaways. And eventually, things started going federal. 

The most significant bill, the one that fully outlawed the use of worker labor and reinstated the ‘freedom’ of current workers, was going to be codified that morning. It wasn’t unexpected, at that point, but still, the infrastructure, the plan, was… well, it had holes, to say the least.

The workers who were deemed functional, by some arbitrary metric, would be relocated to massive government-owned housing units. They would share rooms by the half dozen, be fed, given medical attention, and slowly be reintegrated into society. No one knew exactly how that would work, but it had been successful in the states that had already outlawed worker labor (with some notable exceptions), so the plan, half-assed as it was, was set into motion.

Former safehouses were repurposed as halfway houses for those who were less “independent.”

Individual volunteers were gathered who would open their homes to those who were unable to care for themselves but didn't pose any significant safety or medical risk.

In the days leading up to the vote for reinstatement of worker rights, when it was clear how things were going to go, people did go into a frenzy. Hospitals scrambled to hire, doctor’s offices scrambled to modify policy, the call for volunteers to offer shelter, food, medical assistance, jobs… it was madness.

But that morning, the morning the final nail landed, it was quiet.

Jared leads Lincoln down a narrow hallway, spouting off information as he does. The linoleum tiled floor is clean, but peels around the edges. The walls are white, chipped along the corners and where the doorframes meet the drywall. The ceiling is white, but there’s a yellow cast. The fluorescent lights that line the halls give it a sort of eerie post-apocalyptic vibe, and it’s fitting.

The building, Belleview, is eerily quiet. There’s no obvious screaming coming from within, so it’s already better than he expected. 

Jared slaps his keycard against a box outside a set of double doors, and Lincoln takes a breath. The volunteers are gathering outside by now. His group of nurses, doctors, caretakers. They could be with him, but he wanted this run-through alone. To give him time to make sure the plan that he spent the last week finessing would work.

Jared stops at the first door, and pushes a button outside of it, bringing to life a screen. There’s a name on the top, and Lincoln glances through the information he’s shown. Jared presses another button, and the door unlocks audibly, the light above it turning from red to green.

Inside is a man, with nothing else. Brown hair, blue eyes. He doesn’t look at them. 

“This one can get aggressive.” Jared’s voice is matter of fact, as he points out the information on the tablet. “They come here to… you know, to be of whatever use they can be until they…” he whispers, and Lincoln offers him the briefest of glances. He regrets it immediately. “Expire.”

Lincoln turns his attention back to the screen, and so Jared continues. “We have 21, uh… residents, right now. I think that’s what we’re supposed to call them now. They were… well, you know. They were workers, but the rejects, I guess. They’re in… they’re in various states of um…”

Lincoln clears his throat tersely, throwing a warning glance to the ex-handler. 

“Well, okay. I’m sure you’ve been briefed, and if not, I’m sure you will be.” He begins walking again, letting the last door close without another glance, as he approaches the next. “We tried to take as good of care of them as we could. They’re fed and watered and we tried to... whenever we could, some of us tried to offer them some comfort.”

He stops at the door. “Obviously, they’re here for a reason, so they don’t tend to be super… uh, super cooperative or trainable or anything. They’re usually just… they’re here for a short time, and then–” He stops himself this time, without the warning glance.

“We call this guy Tank, but I think his real name is Tyler, if that means anything to you.” 

Lincoln nods. “Does it say here? Anywhere on here? What his name is?”

Jared fiddles with the screen for several seconds before it comes to a demographic page. It lists 20 inhabitants, and presumably, their room numbers. 

“Look at that,” Jared says then, interrupting Lincoln’s review. “Looks like I was right, it is Tyler. That was a guess.”

Lincoln takes a breath, because there’s no benefit to causing a scene here. If Jared was offered leniency, then he was a handler who, at least on the surface, wasn’t as bad as he could have been. 

“Anyway, this one used to be aggressive, too." The door opens and Jared gestures to the man who lays on his stomach, bandages across his back. "But now? Nothing going on in there.” He points to his own temples, and lets the door swing shut. He switches to the video feed, where Tyler stares into the camera.

Jared continues along to the next room, and Lincoln follows behind him, his thoughts racing.

Lincoln Prescott was already in his car on his way to the site he’d been assigned to oversee before they even finalized things in the White House. It’s a temporary solution to a very serious problem, they said. It would take ten to fifteen days to get those who were in no shape to get to a halfway house the medical attention they needed and find suitable placements for them. 

In the meantime, they were safest where they were. He was needed to help organize the volunteers and medical personnel, and to act as a sort of director of the temporary housing facility.

So he drove. He knew it would be bad, maybe the worst of the worst. He had been briefed. He was given a stack of files of the inhabitants that he would be overseeing. He looked it over that night, and every night since then. He spent the last six days memorizing every face, every backstory.

It was a site to house those that the government had deemed unable to be placed, for one reason or another. Too violent, too unpredictable, too difficult to be trained. From what Lincoln could gather, these workers served any and all purposes. Their primary reason for existence was, it seemed, to trial training techniques, to trial drugs, to motivate the workers who were difficult, to show that there were worse fates.

They ranged in ages from 19-26. None survived longer. 

“Doctor Prescott?” Jared asks, from somewhere far away. Lincoln looks up from the tablet, and Jared is already down the hall at the next door. Lincoln takes a breath, biding his time. They’ve gone through eighteen of the men, with Jared's special commentary on each of them. Twice, Jared had promised that he wasn't a bad person, and that the culture had been one thing, but now it was another, and he was ready to pivot.

Only once had Lincoln felt himself snap, and had to excuse himself before serious harm was done.

Some of the men were given the accommodation of a bed, some of them were given clothing, some had rotten food in their cells, some had broken bones, open wounds. Some slept fitfully, and some slept so completely still that Lincoln thought that they might not be alive at all. Jared had assured him, in those moments, that they probably were.

Jared opens the door to the twentieth room, with a small, “We call this one ‘Felix.’ I think you’ll like him,” as he does. The man, short blonde hair and dark brown eyes and at least forty pounds less than his frame should support, blinks himself awake. He sits in the corner of the tiny room and stares at Lincoln. He tries to smile, but the tremors that rock his body make it hard to buy. He doesn't wear any clothes, and has one of the DLS-issued shock collars affixed to his neck. His ribs shake when he breathes too deep, but again, he tries to smile, even as he backs further into the corner.

Jared is speaking to him, but Lincoln doesn’t clock exactly what’s being said. The man looks so afraid, but still, he lifts his fingers in a sort of wave, shaking as he does. Lincoln waves back, offering him a small smile in return.

“We’re not allowed to euthanize them,” Jared is saying. 

“What?” 

“When they hit the end, I mean. We have to give them enough food, give them enough water. If they choose to stop eating or drinking or… whatever, that’s on them. We can’t assist them. Once they’re too far gone, sometimes we’ll just stop trying to get them to eat, and let them go.”

He thought, by now, that he’d heard it all. His eyes widen. “Is that where we’re at with him?”

Jared shrugs. “He’s sick. The director said he’s gonna go any day now, but it’s better if we don’t directly cause that.”

Lincoln doesn’t attempt to keep the hatred out of his eyes.

“He knows,” Jared says. “They all do. Once we stop pulling them for testing, it’s only a matter of time. He wants you to pull him, though,” he continues. “He wants to know it’s not his time yet. He wants to show you he can still be of use. He doesn’t really speak anymore, but he tries to be sweet, so we will keep him in rotation.”

“Stop talking,” Lincoln says then, his fist in a tight ball but, remarkably, not around the man’s throat. Jared’s mouth snaps shut. 

“Show me the last one, and then you’re finished here.” 

As they retreat away from the man’s cell, the door closes behind them, and Lincoln watches the hope leave his eyes.

They make quick work of the last door, and the weasley man leads Lincoln back through the main wing, mumbling about how there were several wings they didn’t tour, but he at least got to see all the residents, and how if he has questions, he is more than happy to take a call, day or night, and how… 

✥ ✥ ✥

The volunteers stand in a haphazard group, each with a color coded name-badge to at least give Lincoln a starting point as to their role. He begins by directing the doctors and nurses to rooms, providing instructions on how to access the rooms, providing instructions on how to access the medical files, providing whatever information he can.

They’re working on finding placements for each of these boys, he tells them. But they all require intensive, specific treatment. As they find placements, they’ll be housed, and once they’ve placed the last boy, the volunteers will be reassigned.

As the last of the volunteers heads inside to get their own bearings, Lincoln takes a step back, regarding the innocuous building. 

“I guess that’s that,” Jared says from behind him, taking a step forward and extending his hand out once more. Lincoln looks down at it, shoving his hands into his pockets, as Jared mumbles,  “Welcome to Belleview.”

UNTITLED SYSTEM COLLAPSE STORY TAGLIST: @pigeonwhumps @peachy-panic @whump-cravings

#belleview #institutionalized slavery #this is going somewhere #its going places #maybe not to the pulitzer prize people #but places #nonsexual nudity #torture mention #government stuff #it's a set up ok #they'll be sweet soft guys eventually

[unpretty]

accountant thoughts:

so there's a certain amount of fixed costs associated with water systems and wastewater treatment, right? like. sewage. making human shit less toxic. keeping water clean and then getting that water into houses. there are ways that costs increase the more the system gets used, but it would also cost money if it just sat there. it might even cost more money, because the systems aren't designed to shut down and just sit there. if the whole city were abandoned except for one house, and it became the only house served by the water department and the sewer system, there would still be all that base cost associated with the various systems and plants and so on. i'm simplifying because i don't actually know how all that works.

anyway. so from a financial perspective, water and wastewater treatment get cheaper the more people you have being served by the system. because that's more people you can divide the cost up by. that's how the fixed cost works. the fixed cost is less per person the more people there are.

a lot of prisons in the usa are in small towns and rural areas. that's how prison gerrymandering works. you take people out of the cities where they actually live, and you stick them in a prison in bumfuck, and then you say "i represent the 5,000 residents of bumfuck" while ignoring that 4,000 of those residents are in a prison and can't vote.

prisons use a lot of water!

so when they're doing the budgets in a small town, if they say, "here is how much we think it's going to cost to run for the next year, here is how many gallons of water we estimate being used, we will divide the cost by thousands of gallons and that's what we're going to charge", what impact does a prison have? what if a prison represents half of all water usage? how much higher would residential bills be without the prison there? is it a private prison, or is it the state that's paying for that prison's water usage? at what point can it be said that in certain rural areas infrastructure is subsidized by the state through the imprisonment of people primarily from urban areas where infrastructure is allowed to fail

#original #a local prison closed and residents were big mad about the water bills going up #doing the math behind the scenes on how much their bills were previously being subsidized by the prison has haunted me ever since! #idk if i'm coherent i was just reading about more failed urban infrastructure and wondering things

[magz]

Lets Talk Palestine, summary. March 31 to April 5, 2024. Quote:

March 31. Day 177 - Easter

✝️ Israel denied Palestinian Christians — the oldest in the world — access to the old city in Jerusalem

🇫🇷 France to prosecute its citizens serving in IOF for implicated war crimes after video showed French citizen assaulting Palestinian hostages

• 77 Palestinians killed, 108 injured in last 24 hours

🇮🇶 Iraqi group’s drone strikes & damages Israeli naval base in Eilat in southern Palestine, bypassing Jordanian & Israeli air defense to do so (📸 above)

• Another massacre of aid seekers at Kuwaiti roundabout killed 17 & wounded 30. This major aid distribution point now dubbed a “deathtrap”

🏥 Israeli bombing of tents housing displaced Palestinians at al-Aqsa Hospital kills 4, wounds 17 incl. journalist

• IOF abducts 14 in overnight raids in West Bank

🏥 26 patients killed in Israel’s siege of Shifa Hospital. The remaining 107 patients face mass disease spread

🐀 Palestinian Authority President Abbas swears in new unelected gov’t

April 1. Day 178

🏥 IOF withdraws from Shifa Hospital after 2-week siege that completely destroyed the hospital as they set fire to buildings (📸 above). 400+ bodies of Palestinians executed by IOF found, many missing body parts, showing signs of torture

•⁠ 63 killed, 94 injured in Gaza in last 24 hours

•⁠ ⁠Israeli army report admits that IOF executed Palestinians for crossing arbitrary invisible “kill zones” determined by IOF

🇸🇾🇮🇷 Israel strikes & destroys Iranian consulate in Syria, killing 7 in a dangerous regional escalation

•⁠ ⁠4 foreign @ wckitchen aid workers (incl. Australian, British & Polish) & their Palestinian translator killed by Israeli targeted bombing of their car while distributing food

•⁠ Hamas says the Palestinian Authority & Egyptian officials coordinated w/ Israel to infiltrate Gaza via Rafah crossing as an "intelligence plan" disguised as "distributing aid". PA denies the accusation; 6 PA officers were arrested by Hamas. The PA seeks to administer Gaza post-genocide

April 2. Day 179

• 71 Palestinians killed, 102 injured in Gaza in last 24 hours

•⁠ ⁠Netanyahu claims yesterday’s attack killing 7 foreign aid workers (🇦🇺, 🇨🇦, 🇬🇧, 🇺🇸, 🇵🇱) was “unintended”. But the workers were in a deconflicted zone, coordinated movement w/ Israel, & were in clearly marked @ wckitchen cars

👆UK & Australia summon Israeli ambassadors, demanding accountability; but US & Canada accept Israel’s excuse that the killing was unintended

🇺🇸⁠ Alarming level of US intelligence sharing w/ Israel since Oct 7 from Gaza surveillance. US unsure of its intel’s contribution to civilian deaths

• Knesset (Israel Parliament) pass bill paving way to ban Al Jazeera, claims it poses threat to international media & freedom of the press

• Multiple aid orgs incl. @ aneraorg & @ wckitchen halt Gaza operations after yesterday’s attack + aid shipment returns to Cyprus w/ 240 tons of undelivered aid. Due to Israel targeting humanitarian workers

• World Bank: Gaza infrastructure damage estimated at $18.5bn

April 3. Day 180

• After 6 months of genocide, Israel has killed 32,975 Palestinians, not including thousands buried under rubble; incl. 14,500 kids, 140 journalists & 484 medical staff. Starvation & disease are expected to kill even more as Israel prevents aid

🇺🇳 UN Human Rights Council to consider draft motion for arms embargo on Israel to halt arms sales

• 30% of children under 2 in Gaza are ‘acutely malnourished’

🇺🇳 UN suspends night aid deliveries in last 48 hours after Israel’s killing of 7 @ wckitchen aid workers

⚖️ The PA attempted to arrest a Palestinian resistance fighter in Tulkarem (West Bank), and later PA forces killed Motassim Al-Arif of Tulkarem Brigades (local resistance group), making him the 7th Palestinian resistance fighter killed by the PA since Oct 7. This sparked Tulkarem brigades to initiate a state of “civil disobedience” in Tulkarem. The attempted arrest of the Hamas leader occurred in Jenin (West Bank) and is another escalation of clashes between the PA and Palestinian resistance groups in the West Bank

🇬🇧 YouGov Poll: 56% UK voters support ban of arms export to Israel

April 4. Day 181

‼️ Gaza death toll surpasses 33,000 not including thousands under rubble

•⁠ ⁠Israel’s bombing of Gaza is driven by flawed AI software with little human review of the thousands of Palestinians placed on its ‘kill list’. The AI accounts for 5-10 ‘acceptable civilian deaths’ per targeted resistance fighter

[Magz note: This is a part of Israel's various efforts to kill Palestinians / "Hamas" with more efficiency and ease for the IOF. Other examples being robot dogs and high-tech missile launchers and dropping specialized bombs on highly-concentrated "concentration camp" of Gaza. In this case, the machine-learning database is called "Lavender", and 'identifies' targets that 'might' have any connection to Hamas at all, so the IOF directs "dumb bombs" on the targets. The unspoken implications is that the targets' identifications would include potential family members and friends - thus having as many as 37000 target list total for "Hamas", as the dehumanization of Palestinians is to idenitfy them all as inherently "terrorist". ("‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets", The Gaurdian article. Article date: April 4, 2024)]

🇮🇷 Israel evacuated several of its embassies abroad, halted deploying combat units & called reservists in response to Iran’s threats of retaliation after Israel killed 7 Iranian personnel in strike on its consulate in Syria. Israel taking Iran’s threat seriously

• Israeli doctor reveals catastrophic conditions for Palestinian captives incl. requiring amputations from being shackled for 24 hours, regularly blindfolded, denied toilet access & surgeries without proper medical care

• IOF strikes homes in ‘safe zone’ Rafah, killing 8+ Palestinians

🇱🇧 2000 acres of Lebanese farmland destroyed by Israeli bombardment

• IOF shot & killed 28-year-old Asad Amr in Jenin in West Bank

April 5. Day 182

•⁠ ⁠On Palestinian Children’s Day, Israel has killed 14,000+ children in Gaza, 117 in West Bank since Oct 7. 31 kids killed by starvation while 50,000+ are acutely malnourished, 200 kids held captive by Israel & 17,000+ unaccompanied or separated from immediate family

⚖️ Colombia follows Nicaragua in requesting to join South Africa in ICJ genocide case against Israel

🇺🇳 UN Human Rights Council passes non-binding motion urging states to halt arms sales to Israel, citing ICJ ruling; US voted against. First time UNHRC takes a position since Oct 7

•⁠ Israel to open Beit Hanoon crossing to north Gaza & Ashdod port temporarily; analysts say it’s inadequate as Gaza subject to ‘catastrophic starvation’ by Israel’s blockade

•⁠ After international outrage, Israel dismisses 2 officers & reprimands 3 for attack killing 6 foreign aid workers, but no criminal trials or real accountability

•⁠ Israeli sniper kills Palestinian while filming an Israeli raid from his rooftop in West Bank

#on palestine #letstalkpalestine #text post #magz upload #o post #long post

[reasonsforhope]

I’m scared, and I’m sad. I look at positive news every day, but sometimes things happen that make me derail. What can I do?

It's natural to be scared and sad about this stuff. We live in a world that gives us more information about more people than we were ever designed to handle. And a lot of that information is about really upsetting, tragic, or horrific things.

What I try to do whenever I start to feel like I'm falling into despair, I try to remember to take a long view of history.

Change isn't often visible in the short term because change is so chaotic. But in physics - and I would argue therefore for organisms and humanity as well - chaos at the micro level creates stability at the macro level.

The fact is, statistically, this IS the best time to be alive. It really doesn't feel like it a lot of the time, but it is.

But a lot of things still suck, and sometimes it feels like all the reasons in the world are slipping through your fingers. It can be very easy, sometimes, to give into the despair in the face of all the things humanity has done, to ourselves and to each other.

Here's the one fact I hold on to with all my strength, when all else fails. The one thing that is too powerful to slip through my fingers:

For almost all of human history, until the past roughly 200 years, the child mortality rate was about 50%.

Sure, it varied based on location and century and the hygiene practices of the dominant culture. But overall, it was about 50%, with child morality defined as any infant or child who dies before their 15th birthday.

That means that half of all people born died before their 15th birthday.

Most of human history, as famous journalist and nonfiction author Bill Bryson puts it, was "overwhelmingly a place of tiny coffins."

Imagine how fucking awful that would be to live with. Imagine all the extra grief and pain and suffering flooding the world.

That fact alone basically guarantees that ever single person who ever lived, until very, very recently, was traumatized, or died before they could be. And that's leaving out the rampant trauma of famine, nonfatal disease, exposure, violence, and everything else that can come from a lack of resources or just the brutal vagaries of nature.

But we don't live in that world anymore. We live in a world where we have reduced child mortality from 40% to 3.7% in just two hundred years.

And those rates are going to keep falling as developing nations with higher child mortality rates get access to better infrastructure, medical care, and resource distribution.

So this is what I cling to, when I can cling to nothing else: no matter how bad things are, no matter how much technology fucks things up, technology and progress have freed us from the hell of half of all our children dying.

We have already done so, so much to free ourselves from one of - if not the - absolute worst curses of human existence

The world has improved so, so much more that most people can even imagine - more than our ancestors could have ever expected - just from that one fact. In just a couple of centuries.

What isn't that worth? Very, very, very little, I'd argue.

The challenges we're facing are formidable. Just a few years ago, they looked insurmountable. From child mortality to climate change, we still have so much more to do.

But if we can save ourselves and our children from a mortality rate that was, for almost all of human history, an inevitable part of the human condition...

Then what can't we do? What won't we be able to achieve, in the end?

Again, I'd argue: very, very, very little.

#toastedsmoreo #ask #hope #hope posting #child mortality #cw child death #cw death #cw infant death #children #infants and toddlers #public health #global health #progress and development #good news #hopeposting #hopepunk #faith in humanity #me #advice

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇱⚔️🇺🇳🇵🇸 🚨

ISRAELI OCCUPATION AUTHORITIES DEMAND THE DISMANTLING OF UNRWA BEFORE ALLOWING AID INTO THE GAZA STRIP

The Israeli occupation authorities have submitted a proposal to the United Nations demanding the dismantlement of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, also known as UNRWA.

In an article published in the British liberal news website The Guardian, a source within the United Nations (UN) describes a proposal submitted by the Israeli occupation authorities to the UN for the dismantlement of UNRWA in return for the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) allowing humanitarian aid to flow into the besieged Gaza Strip.

According to The Guardian, the proposal was submitted last week by the Israeli Chief to the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi to UN Officials stationed in occupied Palestine who forwarded the proposal to the United Nation's Secretary General, António Gutierrez on Saturday.

The agency itself had no part in the discussions as the IOF refuses to deal with the humanitarian organization beginning last Monday with accusations occupation authorities made against the organization which remain unproven, even according to The Guardian.

Still, "Israel's" allies acted quickly to back their claims, with 16 major donors immediately withdrawing funding from the organization, cutting off the aid agency from more than $450m in funding, at a time when nearly the entire population of Gaza, around 2.3 million Palestinians, are dependant on UNRWA for food.

The United States Congress went so far as to ban funding for UNRWA in a recently passed budget bill, however some countries have restored funding to the aid agency, citing a lack of evidence provided by Israeli authorities.

Under the terms of the potential agreement, Zionist authorities are prepared to allow large amounts of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, with the only limiting factor being the capabilities of the United Nations and the newly formed aid agency, however the agreement would gut the humanitarian infrastructure already existing, and hollow out the agency by transferring 300-400 UNRWA staff to other UN agencies such as the World Food Programme (WFP).

According to The Guardian, more UNRWA staff could be transferred at a later date, however details are few and far between for how another humanitarian organization could be created on a scale necessary to provide for the humanitarian needs of the civilian population of Gaza, nor where the staff for such an organization would come from. Also absent were any security guarantees for humanitarian staff, nor who would provide such security guarantees.

Such an arrangement will likely sound attractive for those wishing to see an end to "Israel's" starvation campaign in Gaza, however, unlike whatever organization could be created on such short notice, UNRWA has been established in the Gaza Strip, and in the occupied Palestinian territories, going back to 1950, and over generations has earned the trust of the Palestinian population there, providing countless jobs for a Gazan population under blockade by "Israel" for the last decade and a half.

The Guardian quotes UNRWA's Director of External Relations, Tamara Alrifai, as saying, “Unrwa has not been systematically privy to conversations related to coordinating humanitarian aid in Gaza."

Alrifai also said the size proposed by the Israelis for the new humanitarian organization would "hobble its ability to effectively deliver aid in Gaza" at a time when it is so desperately needed by the civilian population in the Palestinian enclave.

“This is no criticism of WFP, but logically if they were to start food distribution in Gaza tomorrow, they’re going to use UNRWA trucks and bring food into UNRWA warehouses, and then distribute food in or around UNRWA shelters,” Alrifai told The Guardian, “So they’re going to need at a minimum the same infrastructure that we have, including the human resources.”

The Guardian article also mentions that some UN officials told their reporters that they see the proposal by the Israelis as a way to portray the United Nations as unwilling to work with the Zionist entity to get aid into Gaza in time to prevent a famine.

On Thursday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague, in the Netherlands, implemented additional provisional measures in South Africa's case investigating "Israel" for the crime of genocide, ordering the Zionist entity to take "all necessary and effective measures" to ensure the large-scale delivery of humanitarian aid be provided to Gaza.

The Guardian also mentions that some inside the UN see this as the "culmination of a long Israeli campaign to destroy UNRWA."

UNRWA has long been a target of the Israelis. As the UN agency in charge of maintaining the records of Palestinian families who were displaced from their homes during the Nakba, and where those family's homes were located, the organization essentially guarantees their Right to Return under International Law.

Israeli authorities see this record keeping as a threat to their expansionist aspirations, and hopes that by dismantling the agency, they will help eliminate the threat those records pose to their settler colonial agenda.

“If we allow this, it is the slippery slope to us being completely managed directly by the Israelis, and the UN directly being complicit in undermining UNRWA, which is not only the biggest aid provider but also the biggest bastion of anti-extremism in Gaza,” one UN official is quoted as saying.

"We would be playing into so many political agendas if we allowed this to happen.”

UNRWA derived its mandate from an act passed by the United Nations General Assembly, which The Guardian says, "in theory" remains the only organization with the authority to end that mandate.

The United Nations Secretary General's office did not respond to The Guardian's inquiries into the proposal, nor did the Israeli occupation army before the time of publishing.

#source1

#photosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

#united nations #unrwa #united nations relief and works agency #palestine #palestine news #palestinians #starvation #famine #blockade #siege of gaza #gaza #gaza strip #gaza news #gaza genocide #genocide in gaza #israeli genocide #war crimes #international law #israel palestine conflict #war #politics #israel #israeli occupation forces #news #geopolitics #world news #global news #international news #breaking news #current events