Wednesday, March 28, 2018

ANS -- Judge Rules Anti-Pipeline Protesters Not Guilty Because of Necessity of Fighting Climate Change

This is a very short article about a judgement that just occurred about an incident in 2015 where several people tried to halt the building of a fracking pipeline.  
I found many versions of the information when I googled it, but not one of them was a major mainstream media organization.  Maybe they don't think it's news? the biggest was The Independent of UK.  Here's Democracy Now's version (easier to copy).  
--Kim


Judge Rules Anti-Pipeline Protesters Not Guilty Because of Necessity of Fighting Climate Change

HEADLINEMAR 28, 2018
H16 anti pipeline protestors not guilty

And in Massachusetts, a judge has found 13 protesters "not responsible" after they temporarily halted a pipeline's construction by nonviolently lying down in a trench being dug by Spectra Energy to carry fracked gas through West Roxbury. District Judge Mary Ann Driscoll made her ruling after the protesters argued the "necessity defense"—saying their civil disobedience was justified by the urgent need to stop climate change. Among those arrested in the civil disobedience was Karenna Gore, the daughter of Vice President Al Gore, who spoke on Tuesday after the ruling.

Karenna Gore: "What happened today was really important. We had a long and winding road, but, essentially, the people that put themselves in the way of building this fossil fuel pipeline were found 'not responsible' by reason of necessity."

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Tuesday, March 27, 2018

ANS -- The Anger of the White Male Lie

This is a very powerful opinion piece.  Read it.  It's about white male privilege, and asks why white men think they deserve everything.
--Kim



Ijeoma Oluo
Come for the feminist rants..stay for the selfies and kid quotes. Inclusive feminism here.

The Anger of the White Male Lie

I'm reading an email from a white man. It is about 15 paragraphs of poorly written vitriol, telling me in far too many words about how wrong I am. About everything. I'm wrong about feminism. It's unnecessary. And by the way, the wage gap doesn't exist. I'm even more wrong about racism. There is no more racism. It's been over a very long time and maybe if people like me would just get over the past we'd be motivated to get off of our asses and get real jobs. As proof of how wrong I am, he's included links to youtube videos made by other white men saying pretty much the exact same thing as him. He has also inserted a few graphs. He consistently calls me "Ms. Oluo" and reiterates a few times that he "means no disrespect" but it is clear from his insistence that I read all of his horrible paragraphs and that I "learn a little more" about "my people" that he means every bit of disrespect his poorly phrased sentences are capable of conveying and more.

He suggests that I try being "less angry" as if it is not anger that propelled him through a google search of my name, to my website, to my contact page, then to his email, and then through the writing of a billion paragraphs complete with charts and footnotes. He says "less angry" as if I am not currently adding his email into a file with countless other long-winded missives, dismissals and violent threats from white men who decided to take the time out of their day to let me know in sometimes very disturbing ways that they need me to be "less angry."

In closing he puts his full name and title. He's a woodcarver and personal trainer. And, apparently, expert on race and gender studies.

Somebody needs to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything they put their mind to.

I say that in jest. A lot. But I'm only half joking. Actually, I'm not joking at all. Somebody really does need to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything, and that they can have everything. Because it is not true, and it was never true, and we're the ones who have to pay when they find that out.

Angry black woman.

I'm the angry black woman. I'm the shouting, take no shit, finger-wagging, side-eye giving black woman. I am angry about a lot of things. I'm angry about police brutality and systemic poverty and the school to prison pipeline. I'm angry because the community I love is threatened daily and has been for hundreds of years.

There is righteous anger born of love. Born of the desire to protect those that you love and the life that you love. Anger born of the need to hold tight what little joy and beauty you've been able to find in a hostile world.

I was never told by this society that I could be anything and I could have everything. I was always told to settle for less. And my anger and the anger of so many other marginalized people has always lied in that reality. The truth of the situation.

But white male anger is steeped in a lie. It is fighting for what they were never going to have. For the promises that were never going to be fulfilled. White men are the only people allowed to fully believe in the American dream and perhaps that is the cruelest thing to have ever been done to them and the world that has to suffer their anger as they refuse to let go of a fantasy that we were never allowed to imagine ourselves in.

White men who shoot up schools and workplaces are not murderous monsters, or mindless thugs. They are "lovesick" or "misunderstood" or "tragic." Hundreds of thousands of words are dedicated to finding the reasons why someone with so much promise could have fallen so far.

But how much promise was there really?

How much promise is there in a life where you are told that all you have to do is exist in order to inherit a kingdom. How much promise is there in a life where your mediocrity is constantly applauded and every hero looks like you and every love interest is a supermodel, but at the end of the day you will be working in a cubicle with everyone else and your only consolation is that you will be making $1.50 an hour more than the women and people of color in your office?

How much promise is there in being told that your culture is the only one worth knowing, and that your language is the only one worth speaking? How much promise is there in never having to say you are sorry, never having to say you are wrong, never having to say you don't know?

Many Americans love to laugh at the ridiculousness of monarchy. At these backwards countries who believe that simply by being born, these blueboods deserve to rule entire populations. But what is white male supremacy in America if not an overabundance of kingdom-less monarchs who can't even speak French?

A few weeks ago I was sitting at a stoplight and realized that I wasn't quite as sure how to get home as I'd initially thought. As I punched the "home" button on my Waze app on my phone I heard shouting to the right of my car. I looked over and there was a white man in an SUV waving his arms at me and yelling. He was furious that I'd dared to look at my phone in my car. He was oblivious to the fact that I was trying to actually be a safer driver by knowing where I was actually going. He just knew that he had pulled up next to me and I had my phone in my hand and he had to do something. He leaned out of the window of his SUV and spittle flew out of his mouth as he angrily shouted.

I looked straight ahead as he screamed, becoming angrier and angrier. I was afraid that he might be armed, he seemed out of control. The light turned green and I pulled forward, but the man next to me was too busy yelling to notice right away. Then, angry that I had pulled forward before him, he sped ahead with such force that I could hear his tires squeeling. He peeled in front of me and then had to swerve out of the way at the last minute to avoid hitting a car that was stalled around the corner. I shook my head in wonder at the absurdity of it all.

I wrote about the weird event on facebook, figuring if anything, it would be entertaining to my friends. Within a few seconds a commenter, a white woman, said, "Let me guess, this was a white man?" She had her own story about being yelled at for driving in a way that a white man disapproved of. Soon, many others were sharing their stories. Women who had been threatened. One woman who had been yelled at by the same man twice on two different occasions, a man who apparently yelled at women so often that he was unable to recognize her the second time. One woman talked about a rock being thrown at her car because a white man didn't like how she drove. One white man tried to drive a friend of mine off the road. Another rammed a woman's car.

The road was for men. It was supposed to be theirs like so much else was. And if they couldn't boss women around at work, if they didn't have a wife at home to scream at, goddamnit they were going to take control of the roads.

"Nobody cares about white men," is a sentence I hear far too often. In facebook comments, tweets, article responses, emails, the op-eds of major national papers. Nobody cares about the white men left behind. Nobody cares about the white men who are collecting unemployment, or working middle management, or not getting regular blow jobs. Nobody cares about the white men whose hair is thinning and dad-bod is settling in and they never got to walk into a party with a hot girl on their arm and now it's too late. Nobody cares about the white men who have to learn new terms like "privilege" or "cultural appropriation" or "social justice" — terms that don't do anything to explain why they aren't rich or powerful or happy.

But of course, everyone cares about white men. Do you want a movie about what it feels like to be a middle-class white man who has never gotten to skinnydip naked in the middle of the night with a hot girl? Oh it's an entire genre. Do you want a really long think piece about how hearing the phrase "black lives matter" and having to go to community college instead of Harvard even though you only had a 2.3 gpa turned you into a neo-Nazi? If someone hasn't written it yet, they will. Do you want a great American novel about how being a white dude working a secure, middle-management job with full health and retirement benefits makes you want to open fire at the next company potluck? Pretty sure your local librarian can point you to a few dozen.

And in all these tales, these articles and movies and songs — white men are angry. Justifiably angry, because they were supposed to be so much more than this. But nobody explains why.

Why were they supposed to be so much more?

Why were they all supposed to have powerful or rewarding work? Why were they all supposed to have loving and beautiful wives? Why were they all supposed to be exempt from recessions or layoffs or just plain old bad luck?

Why were they supposed to have everything when everybody can see that there has never been enough everything to go around?

Being rejected by girls will be a valid reason as to why a white man drives his car into a group of women. Being laid off will be a valid reason as to why a white man opens fire in an office. Being "frustrated" will be a valid reason as to why a white man leaves bombs on the doorsteps of black families. Being unpopular will be a valid reason as to why a white man shoots up a school.

But living in systemic poverty with no job prospects won't be a valid reason for why a black man sells loose cigarettes on the street. Being frustrated by constant harassment by police officers won't be a valid reason for why a black woman refuses to put out her cigarette at a traffic stop. Living in a neighborhood with no jobs, no infrastructure, underfunded schools, and no dependable police presence won't ever be considered a valid reason for higher crime rates in black and brown neighborhoods.

Because we were never supposed to expect any of those things. We were never supposed to expect jobs or police protection or investment in our communities or quality education. We were never supposed to expect to see ourselves in movies or read about our heroism in novels.

Whatever there was to expect — we weren't supposed to expect any of it to come to us.

And white men expected more of it to come to them than ever existed.

And as I watch white men scramble to justify the brutality they visit upon the rest of the world in rage over a life that they think they lost, even though it never was and was never going to be theirs I sometimes wonder what is worse?

Having to fight to get what you've been told you have no right to ask for? Having to fight for your very humanity and your right to exist?

Or fighting to punish those who you think stole something from you that never actually existed and throwing your comforts and privileges to the ground in disgust because they insult the greatness you'll never achieve?

I don't know. I mean - I do know. Because the rage that ruins these white men's joy and consumes their mediocre beings and turns them violent will turn on me and countless other black people, brown people, disabled people, queer people, trans people, and women of every demographic. Because while I have to fight for my life and the lives of my community members I will also have to fight an angry white man who thinks that somehow I, or someone like me, got that bit of success or talent or visibility that was destined for him. That somehow, while dealing with micro-aggressions, macro-aggressions, a racist school system, education system and entertainment system — while trying to stay healthy with a racist healthcare system and stay employed in a racist employment system — I had time to steal the greatness that he was supposed to be and….I don't know… smoke it or eat it or something. Because a white man would rather murder strangers who look like me than admit he got conned. And other white men would rather call it justified than ridiculous and pathetic.

And it is ridiculous and pathetic.

Maybe instead of telling white men they can be anything and they can have everything, we should start asking why they ever thought that everything was there to be had and why they ever thought they deserved it in the first place.


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ANS -- Busting the Myth of ‘Welfare Makes People Lazy’

This article is in case you ever find yourself arguing with someone who says welfare makes people lazy.  There is scientific evidence that that hypothesis is not true.  
--Kim


Busting the Myth of 'Welfare Makes People Lazy'

Cash assistance isn't just a moral imperative that raises living standards. It's also a critical investment in the health and future careers of low-income kids.

A girl looking at the sky, seen from behind
Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

"Welfare makes people lazy." The notion is buried so deep within mainstream political thought that it can often be stated without evidence. It was explicit during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's WPA (Works Progress Administration) was nicknamed "We Piddle Around" by his detractors. It was implicit in Bill Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it." Even today, it is an intellectual pillar of conservative economic theory, which recommends slashing programs like Medicaid and cash assistance, partly out of a fear that self-reliance atrophies in the face of government assistance.

Many economists have for decades argued that this orthodoxy is simply wrong—that wisely designed anti-poverty programs, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, actually increase labor participation. And now, across the world, a fleet of studies are converging on the consensus that even radical welfare programs—including basic-income programs and what are called conditional cash transfers—don't make people any less productive.

Most notably, a 2015 meta-study of cash programs in poor countries found "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work" in seven different countries: Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Morocco. Other studies of cash-grant experiments in Uganda and Nigeria have found that such programs can increase working hours and earnings, particularly when the beneficiaries are required to attend classes that teach specific trades or general business skills.

Welfare isn't just a moral imperative to raise the living standards of the poor. It's also a critical investment in the health and future careers of low-income kids.

Take, for example, the striking finding from a new paper from researchers at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. They analyzed a Mexican program called Prospera, the world's first conditional cash-transfer system, which provides money to poor families on the condition that they send their children to school and stay up to date on vaccinations and doctors' visits. In 2016, Prospera offered cash assistance to nearly 7 million Mexican households.

In the paper, researchers matched up data from Prospera with data about households' incomes to analyze for the first time the program's effect on children several decades after they started receiving benefits. The researchers found that the typical young person exposed to the program for seven years ultimately completed three more years of education and was 37 percent more likely to be employed. That's not all: Young Prospera beneficiaries grew up to become adults who worked, on average, nine more hours each week than similarly poor children who weren't enrolled in the program. They also earned higher hourly wages.

This finding has direct implications for the United States, where a core mission of the Republican Party is to reduce government aid to the poor, on the assumption that it makes them lazy. This attitude is supported by many conservative economists, who argue that government benefits implicitly reward poverty and thus encourage families to remain poor—the idea being that some adults might reject certain jobs or longer work hours because doing so would eliminate their eligibility for programs like Medicaid.

But this concern has little basis in reality. One of the latest studies on the subjectfound that Medicaid has "little if any" impact on employment or work hours. In research based in Canada and the U.S., the economist Ioana Marinescu at the University of Pennsylvania has found that even when basic-income programs do reduce working hours, adults don't typically stay home to, say, play video games; instead, they often use the extra cash to go back to school or hold out for a more desirable job.

But the standard conservative critique of Medicaid and other welfare programs is wrong on another plane entirely. It fails to account for the conclusion of the Prospera research: Anti-poverty programs can work wonders for their youngest beneficiaries. It's true north of the border, as well. American adults whose families had access to prenatal coverage under Medicaid have lower rates of obesity, higher rates of high-school graduation, and higher incomes as adults than those from similar households in states without Medicaid, according to a 2015 paper from the economists Sarah Miller and Laura R. Wherry. Another paper found that children covered by Medicaid expansions went on to earn higher wages and require less welfare assistance as adults.

"Welfare helps people work" may sound like a strange and counterintuitive claim to some. But it is perfectly obvious when the word people in that sentence refers to low-income children in poor households. Poverty and lack of access to health care is a physical, psychological, and vocational burden for children. Poverty is a slow-motion trauma, and impoverished children are more likely than their middle-class peers to suffer from chronic physiological stress and exhibit antisocial behavior. It's axiomatic that relieving children of an ambient trauma improves their lives and, indeed, relieved of these burdens, children from poorer households are more likely to follow the path from high-school graduation to college and then full-time employment.

Republicans have a complicated relationship with the American Dream. Conservative politicians such as Paul Ryan extol the virtues of hard work and opportunity. But when they use these virtues to inveigh against welfare programs, they ignore the overwhelming evidence that government aid relieves low-income children of the psychological and physiological stresses that get in the way of embracing those very ideals. Welfare is so much more than a substitute for a paycheck. It is a remedy for the myriad burdens of childhood poverty, which give children the opportunity to become exactly the sort of healthy and striving adults celebrated by both political parties.


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ANS -- Paul Ehrlich: 'Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades'

Remember Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb?  This is what he has to say today, fifty years later.  
--Kim



Paul Ehrlich: 'Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades'

By 
Cities
Overstretched cities

Fifty years after the publication of his controversial book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge

The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change, says Ehrlich.
 The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Linh Pham/Getty Images

Ashattering collapse of civilisation is a "near certainty" in the next few decades due to humanity's continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.

In May, it will be 50 years since the eminent biologist published his most famous and controversial book, The Population Bomb. But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever.

Prof Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University.
Pinterest
 Prof Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The world's optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change.

Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but "the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual 'world destroyer' meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen".

The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne Ehrlich in 1968, predicted "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" in the 1970s – a fate that was avoided by the green revolution in intensive agriculture.

Many details and timings of events were wrong, Paul Ehrlich acknowledges today, but he says the book was correct overall.

"Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people."

Ehrlich has been at Stanford University since 1959 and is also president of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, which works "to reduce the threat of a shattering collapse of civilisation".

"It is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems," he says. "As I've said many times, 'perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell'."

It is the combination of high population and high consumption by the rich that is destroying the natural world, he says. Research published by Ehrlich and colleagues in 2017 concluded that this is driving a sixth mass extinction of biodiversity, upon which civilisation depends for clean air, water and food.

High consumption by the rich is destroying the natural world, says Ehrlich.
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 High consumption by the rich is destroying the natural world, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters

The solutions are tough, he says. "To start, make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men.

"I hope that would lead to a low enough total fertility rate that the needed shrinkage of population would follow. [But] it will take a very long time to humanely reduce total population to a size that is sustainable."

He estimates an optimum global population size at roughly 1.5 to two billion, "But the longer humanity pursues business as usual, the smaller the sustainable society is likely to prove to be. We're continuously harvesting the low-hanging fruit, for example by driving fisheries stocks to extinction."

Ehrlich is also concerned about chemical pollution, which has already reached the most remote corners of the globe. "The evidence we have is that toxics reduce the intelligence of children, and members of the first heavily influenced generation are now adults."

He treats this risk with characteristic dark humour: "The first empirical evidence we are dumbing down Homo sapiens were the Republican debates in the US 2016 presidential elections – and the resultant kakistocracy. On the other hand, toxification may solve the population problem, since sperm counts are plunging."

Plastic pollution lying on remote frozen ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
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 Plastic pollution found in the most remote places on the planet show nowhere is safe from human impact. Photograph: Conor McDonnell

Reflecting five decades after the publication of The Population Bomb (which he wanted to be titled Population, Resources, and Environment), he says: "No scientist would hold exactly the same views after a half century of further experience, but Anne and I are still proud of our book." It helped start a worldwide debate on the impact of rising population that continues today, he says.

The book's strength, Ehrlich says, is that it was short, direct and basically correct. "Its weaknesses were not enough on overconsumption and equity issues. It needed more on women's rights, and explicit countering of racism – which I've spent much of my career and activism trying to counter.

"Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future, and cultural and genetic diversity are great human resources."

Accusations that the book lent support to racist attitudes to population controlstill hurt today, Ehrlich says. "Having been a co-inventor of the sit-in to desegregate restaurants in Lawrence, Kansas in the 1950s and having published books and articles on the biological ridiculousness of racism, those accusations continue to annoy me."

But, he says: "You can't let the possibility that ignorant people will interpret your ideas as racist keep you from discussing critical issues honestly."

More of Paul and Anne Ehrlich's reflections on their book are published in The Population Bomb Revisited.


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