Monday, August 08, 2022

ANS -- My Opinion Should Not Threaten You — But I’m Sure It Will: These topics are off limits in America, yet they are the very concepts holding us back

This is a fairly light article.  It's about why we pay taxes and some myths.  



--Kim


Libby Winkler

Jul 3

·
4 min read
·
·

My Opinion Should Not Threaten You — But I'm Sure It Will

These topics are off limits in America, yet they are the very concepts holding us back

Photo by David Underland on Unsplash

When we voice an opinion, weak men often strike out in anger leaving a person standing there wondering what the hell happened.

Ideas are big, scary, and dangerous. This fear of ideas is spiraling us back into a new Dark Ages.

New ideas can threaten those in power, fearful of the loss of power. Leaders of nations, ethnicities, and churches alike use the threat of unfamiliar ideas to scare their following. Big, intimidating monickers are used, labeling the new ideas for the masses and instilling fear.

Today, this is the game plan of the conservative end of the political spectrum.

When suggestions of use of taxpayers' resources to benefit those very taxpayers, we hear calls for communism, socialism, marxism — literally any grand, fuzzy concept. The impact on the masses is sure to evoke emotions of fear, anxiety, and revulsion with no concern of the ideas having no resemblance to any of these.

The Death of Democracy — Can this Phoenix Rise from Ashes?

In the state of our union, can we save ourselves? Are we in a terminal state — simply in a form of hospice — only…

libbysuethewriter.medium.com

Yes, Paying Taxes is Necessary

Before you head down the rabbit hole of the anarchy or revolutionary, claiming taxes are unjust and a person should protest by not paying any, just stop.

Taxes are the necessary price of admission in living in a civilized world.

Taxes mean we are educated at least on a very basic level.

Taxes provide roads, supporting interstate commerce.

By paying taxes, an individual is holding up their end of the social contract. Individuals pay taxes in exchange for the government delivering some basic infrastructure, relative domestic tranquility, and certain services which otherwise the free economy would not provide. This is not socialism, communism or any other 'ism' you choose.

This is called not being a third world county.

Photo by Nohe Pereira on Unsplash

Arguments against our taxation system invariably turn to several talking points.

These talking points rely of the same few stereotyped lies, often parrotted on social media. These false narratives make some folks puff out their chests and claim their 'heritage'.

Fallacy #1 — No One Can Stand on Their Own Two Feet

Would-be rebels love to claim to have never taken any 'guv'ment' money.

Individuals claiming to have never accepted any help from the government, have always been self-reliant, and only through their own hard work have made their own way in life amuse me. Doesn't it remind me of the two-year-old who tells their mom "me do it!"

Humans are social being by nature, relying on our fellow man for our very survival. This is how we have evolved since the times of our prehistoric, cave dwelling ancestors to now.

Fallacy #2 — Helping Someone Does Not Make Them Lazy

When a house is aflame, burning to the ground, the fire department shows up to extinguish the blaze.

Does this make the homeowner lazy?

When a patient is diagnosed with cancer, the oncologist goes to work with the best treatment plan to cure or at least extend a person's life.

Does this make the patient lazy?

Lending aid to our fellow humans in their time of need does not create laziness. Helping each other means we are decent humans. Our lives have meaning only in relationship with others.

Our interdependence defines our experiences here on earth.

Are You Willing to Burn Down our Democracy

Republicans instill fear because they are scared to death, afraid of what the next will bring, petrified their loss of…

medium.com

Fallacy #3 — Mythical Cowboy Personas

Tough guys — Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, or who ever you see in your mind's eye when you think of the quintessential cowboy motif.

The concept of an individual with unrealistic skills, abilities, and heroic qualities. The imagery of one guy in a white hat coming to the rescue of an entire town with no regard to their own well-being, even to the point of sacrificing their own life.

Sound too good to be true?

Only because it is.

America's fascination with the cowboy stereotype is a juvenile idolatry with little basis in reality,

Enough For Now

America, it is time to wake up, grow up, and step up.

We need to cease the bullshit patriotism, join the civilized first world economy, and start dealing with our issues like adults.

Join Medium with my referral link - Libby Winkler

Read every story from Libby Winkler (and thousands of other writers on Medium). Your membership fee directly supports…

libbysuethewriter.medium.com


Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, August 07, 2022

ANS -- Definition of capitalism

This is one person's definition of Capitalism, but it sounds right to me and to Joyce.  
--Kim


Definition of capitalism

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1515977488110915587.html?fbclid=IwAR2Ox0HC86KNZv7SReFPn5pyQDG5JlueGHqLKBLTexKOrTsFV9lQ12JNh94


2,534 views

Jason Hickel Profile picture

Jason Hickel

  Twitter logo

Apr 18 • 16 tweets • 3 min read

Top of Form

 Bookmark

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

 Save as PDF

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

 My Authors

Bottom of Form

People often assume that capitalism is defined by "markets and trade". But markets and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism is only 500 years old. So what is distinctive about this economic system? Three things (well, more, but three for now): 

1. First, and most importantly, it is defined by enclosure and artificial scarcity. The origins of capitalism lie in a systematic effort by elites to restrict people's access to commons and independent subsistence, in order to render them reliant on wage labour for survival. 

Over the past 500 years, this has taken the form of privatization of commons, forced dispossession, destruction of subsistence economies and - particularly in the colonies - taxing people in a currency they do not have in order to induce them to seek wages in that currency. 

This continues today, with attempts to ensure an artificial scarcity of access to essential goods such as housing, healthcare, education, transit, and so on - goods that could very easily be provided, at high quality, on a universal public basis. 

Where universal public goods do exist, these have usually been won by longstanding struggles by labour movements and other progressive forces (including the anti-colonial movement). 

2. Second, capitalism is organized around - and dependent on - perpetual expansion, meaning ever-increasing production of commodified goods. It is the only intrinsically expansionary economic system in history (meaning it basically has a crisis if it doesn't continually expand). 

Crucially, under capitalism the purpose of increasing production is *not* primarily to meet human needs, but rather to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. (It is also the main objective of innovation). 

It's important to distinguish here between small businesses, which quite often operate with a steady-state, use-value logic (and which obviously preceded capitalism), and corporations whose main objective is expansion and accumulation (which define the capitalist era). 

To sustain the process of perpetually increasing surplus accumulation, capital requires an ever-rising quantity of inputs (labour and nature), and requires that these inputs be obtained as cheaply as possible. 

This introduces a constant pressure to depress real wages and attack environmental protections wherever possible (in the absence of countervailing political forces). The result is a system that, left to itself, automatically generates inequality and ecological breakdown. 

3. Finally, capitalism is notable for precluding democratic decision-making. Even in countries that prize political democracy, democratic principles are rarely allowed to operate in the sphere of production, where decisions are made overwhelmingly by those who control capital. 

The result is that decisions about what to produce, for what purposes, for whose benefit, and under what conditions are generally made in the narrow interests of the capitalist class (workers, the people actually *doing* the production, rarely get a voice at all). 

It is worth pondering how our production priorities (and our treatment of labour and nature) might be different under conditions of economic democracy. Existing evidence suggests that democratic conditions lead to less exploitation, more equality, and more care for ecology. 

In sum, the tendency to equate capitalism with "markets and trade" naturalizes a system that is not natural, and prevents us from having a clear-eyed view of how it operates and how we might want to do things differently. 

(The "more" I referred to involves exploitative relations of race, gender and imperial power, which are effects of the tendencies described here, and which sustain them, but this deserves a thread unto itself - coming soon). 

We can have a democratic economy organized around meeting human needs at a high standard, where production is socially just and ecologically regenerative. Such a system is possible, but it will require a political movement to bring it into being. 

• • •

 


Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, August 06, 2022

ANS -- Clerics sue over Florida abortion law, saying it violates religious freedom

So, it is finally happening -- someone is pointing out, in court, that going with the Catholic and Evangelical ideas about abortion and ignoring all the other religions is religious discrimination.  It's about time.  We will see what becomes of it.  
this article is a bit long -- the gaps are where ads were, so keep scrolling...
--Kim



Clerics sue over Florida abortion law, saying it violates religious freedom

Image without a caption
By Michelle Boorstein
Updated August 2, 2022 at 1:50 p.m. EDT|Published August 1, 2022 at 6:03 p.m. EDT
The Rev. Tom Capo of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Miami, in the sanctuary. (Taimy Alvarez for The Washington Post)
CORRECTION

In an earlier version of this story, a caption misidentified the Rev. Tom Capo's affiliation. He is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association. The story has been updated.

When the Rev. Laurie Hafner ministers to her Florida congregants about abortion, she looks to the founding values of the United Church of Christ, her lifelong denomination: religious freedom and freedom of thought. She taps into her reading of Genesis, which says "man became a living being" when God breathed "the breath of life" into Adam. She thinks of Jesus promising believers full and abundant life.

"I am pro-choice not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith," Hafner says.

She is among seven Florida clergy members — two Christians, three Jews, one Unitarian Universalist and a Buddhist — who argue in separate lawsuits filed Monday that their ability to live and practice their religious faith is being violated by the state's new, post-Roe abortion law. The law, which is one of the strictest in the country, making no exceptions for rape or incest, was signed in April by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), in a Pentecostal church alongside antiabortion lawmakers such as the House speaker, who called life "a gift from God."

The lawsuits are at the vanguard of a novel legal strategy arguing that new abortion restrictions violate Americans' religious freedom, including that of clerics who advise pregnant people. The cases are part of an effort among a broad swath of religious Americans who support abortion access to rewrite the dominant modern cultural narrative that says the only "religious" view on abortion is to oppose it.

The Rev. Laurie Hafner of the Coral Gables United Church of Christ. (Taimy Alvarez for The Washington Post)

"The religious right has had the resources and the voices politically and socially to be so loud, and frankly, they don't represent the Christian faith," Hafner told The Washington Post. "Those of us on the other side, with maybe a more inclusive voice, need to be strong and more faithful and say: 'There is another very important voice.'

"Look biblically; Jesus says nothing about abortion. He talks about loving your neighbor and living abundantly and fully. He says: 'I come that you might have full life.' Does that mean for a 10-year-old to bear the child of her molester? That you cut your life short because you aren't able to rid your body of a fetus?"

Antiabortion advocate worked for years to overturn Roe, but worries over next steps

The five lawsuits seek to invalidate the Florida law, which went info effect July 1 and bans abortions after 15 weeks, except in cases where the mother could face serious injury or death, or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It also makes it a felony to "participate" in an abortion, which the suits charge could include counseling someone to have one.

"Since time immemorial, the questions of when a potential fetus or fetus becomes a life and how to value maternal life during pregnancy have been answered according to religious beliefs and creeds," say the suits, which use identical language except when describing each plaintiff's faith.

The new law, the suits read, sets "a pernicious elevation of the legal rights of fetuses while at the same time it devalues the quality of life and the health of the woman or girl who is pregnant. It is in direct conflict with Plaintiff's clerical obligations and faith and imposes severe barriers and substantial burdens to their religious belief, speech and conduct."

The cases are unusual in that they frame major liberal values through the lens of religious-liberty law. For years, religious conservatives have successfully argued in high-profile Supreme Court cases that their beliefs should allow them to open churches during a global pandemic, discriminate against LGBTQ people and decline to give employees contraception, among other cases.

A lawsuit similar to the clergy members' was filed in June by a Florida rabbi, who argued the abortion law violates his practice of Judaism. Jewish views on abortion are complex across the ideological spectrum, but law and tradition do not ban it, sometimes appear to require it and do not recognize an unborn fetus as a full, legal person. According to that lawsuit, filed last month in Leon County Circuit Court, Congregation L'Dor Va-Dor of Boynton Beach argues that the new law "prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and … violates their privacy rights and religious freedom."

Tuesday, August 02, 2022

ANS -- Blowhole wave energy generator exceeds expectations in 12-month test

This sounds good.  I hope it really works and helps.  
It's a way to make electricity from wave power, but, because all the moving parts are above the water, it doesn't bother sea life.  It can be incorporated into seawalls.  It sounds really good.  We need it here.
go to the page -- there are a couple of videos of it that probably won't appear here.  The first of the two videos shows how it works. 
--Kim


ENERGY

Blowhole wave energy generator exceeds expectations in 12-month test

By Loz Blain
July 31, 2022
The UniWave 200 has been making reliable, clean energy for Australia's King Island for a year now, delivering better performance than expected
The UniWave 200 has been making reliable, clean energy for Australia's King Island for a year now, delivering better performance than expected
Wave Swell Energy
VIEW 4 IMAGES
VIEW GALLERY - 4 IMAGES

Wave Swell Energy's remarkable UniWave 200 is a sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. After a year of testing, the company reports excellent results.

As we've discussed before, the UniWave system is a floatable device that can be towed to any coastal location and connected to the local energy grid. It's designed so that wave swells force water into a specially designed concrete chamber, pressurizing the air in the chamber and forcing it through an outlet valve. Then as the water recedes, it generates a powerful vacuum, which sucks air in through a turbine at the top and generates electricity that's fed into the grid via a cable.

MORE STORIES
A diagram illustrating how the new metasurface works as "optical tweezers" to trap individual atoms
PHYSICS
Nanopillared lenses let scientists trap individual atoms with light
Using a digital device to remember bits of information was found to free up mental space for people to memorize other things
SCIENCE
Outsourcing our memory to digital devices may actually be beneficial

As a result, it draws energy from the entire column of water that enters its chamber, a fact the team says makes it more efficient than wave energy devices that only harvest energy from the surface or the sea floor.

The UniWave 200 in place off King Island, Tasmania
The UniWave 200 in place off King Island, Tasmania
Wave Swell Energy

WSE's key innovation here is that one-way generation; other devices that harvest the same effect use bi-directional turbines, requiring the ability to reverse blade pitch or redirect the airflow. WSE says its design allows for far cheaper and simpler turbines, that should also last longer since they're not getting as much salt water splashed through them when a big wave hits. Indeed, all this device's moving parts are above the waterline, a fact that should help extend its service life as well as making it completely harmless to marine life.

Interestingly, the UniWave's design also makes it easy to incorporate into breakwaters and seawalls, where it can take a coastal erosion protection project and turn it into a clean energy source. You can see an animation showing how it works in the video below.

WSE Technology and King Island Project

A 200-kW test platform was installed last year off King Island, facing the notoriously rough seas of Bass Strait, which separates the island state of Tasmania from the mainland of Australia. There, it's been contributing reliable clean energy to the island's microgrid around the clock for a full 12 months. The WSE team has made a few live tweaks to the design during operation, improving its performance beyond original expectations.

"We set out to prove that Wave Swell's wave energy converter technology could supply electricity to a grid in a range of wave conditions, and we have done that," said WSE CEO Paul Geason in a press release. "One key achievement has been to deliver real-world results in Tasmanian ocean conditions to complement the AMC test modeling. In some instances, the performance of our technology in the ocean has exceeded expectations due to the lessons we've learnt through the project, technological improvements and the refinements we have made over the course of the year."

"Our team is excited to have achieved a rate of conversion from wave power to electricity at an average of 45 to 50% in a wide range of wave conditions," he continues. "This is a vast improvement on past devices and shows that the moment has arrived for wave power to sit alongside wind, solar and energy storage as part of a modern energy mix."

We asked Geason over email how much energy the device generated during the trial. "It's important to stress that the demonstration at King Island was not about producing high volumes of electricity," he responds. "Rather, it was to prove the capabilities of our technology in a variety of wave conditions. The results have met and at times exceeded our expectations. As an example, when the unit is generating 40 kW of power in reasonable wave conditions, you could extrapolate the amount of energy to be in the order of 1MWh in a 24 hour period."

The UniWave can turn erosion protection projects into clean power sources
The UniWave can turn erosion protection projects into clean power sources
Wave Swell Energy



The King Island platform will remain in place at least until the end of 2022, and the company is now gearing up to go into production.

"Having proven our device can survive the toughest conditions the Southern Ocean and Bass Strait can throw at it, and deliver grid compliant electricity, our priority now shifts to commercializing the technology," said Gleason. "For Wave Swell this means ensuring the market embraces the WSE technology and units are deployed to deliver utility scale clean electricity to mainland grids around the world."

Geason tells New Atlas that commercial deployments could vary in size. "The units can scale up from 200 kW," he writes. "Exact size will depend upon the attributes of the wave climate at any particular location. The sweet spot, as you put it, will be site dependent. We're currently engaged with a number of third parties that are seeking to deploy commercial units, and our efforts and resources are focused on further deployments and commercialization of our technology."

See the UniWave 200 test platform running in the video below.

WaveSwell PowerUp

Source: Wave Swell Energy

Editor's note: this piece has been updated on August 2, to include responses from our communications with WSE CEO Paul Gleason.


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)