Drifter – Plain Toe Derby in Lustrous Navy
Tuesday shoesday – vote blue USians!
We really messed up the bank bail-out
It didn’t have to happen this way. The massive investment in the fossil fuel infrastructure after the bank bailout could just as easily have gone to renewable technologies, like wind and solar projects, which, in an ironic twist, have been pilloried for their reliance on subsidies and inability to turn a freestanding profit. Today, that’s a better description of the fracking industry, which has been on a massive money-losing streak.
Source: How the Bank Bailout Hobbled the Climate Fight | The New Republic
Tuesday Shoesday
Drifter – Alma Libre in Natural Green
This is not a good look for Israel
In an attempt to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the Israeli government is using lobbies, spy agencies and think tank fronts to spy on and smear US college students that speak out against right-wing politics in Israel and fight for Palestinian rights .
Students recounted in the documentary exactly what they faced. Summer Awad, who took part in a campaign for Palestinian rights in Knoxville, Tennessee, was harassed on Twitter, and information about her, some of it dating back a decade, was posted online: ‘They are digging and digging. Somebody contacted my employer and asked for me to be fired. If they continue to employ me they will be denounced as antisemitic.’ Denunciation can end careers or make it hard for students to find a job after graduation. To get their names off the blacklist, some victims write messages of ‘repentance’, which Canary Mission posts on its site (8). These anonymous confessions, whose writers explain that they were ‘deceived’, are much like those of suspected communist sympathisers under McCarthyism in the US in the 1950s, or victims of authoritarian regimes today. Baime said: ‘It’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down, or they spend time investigating [the accusations against them] instead of attacking Israel. It’s extremely effective.’ Another person told Kleinfeld: ‘I think antisemitism as a smear is not what it used to be.’
These campaigns, based on personal information gathered about US citizens, would not be possible without the resources of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Its director-general, Sima Vaknin-Gil, said in a talk at the IAC annual conference shown in the documentary: ‘The fact that the Israeli government decided to be a key player means a lot because we can bring things that NGOs or civilian entities involved in this thing [don’t have] … We’ve got the budget. We can bring things to the table that are quite different. Everybody out there who has anything to do with BDS should ask himself twice: should I be on this side or do I want to be on the other side?’
Imagine the US government spending millions of dollars and using NGOs as front groups to spy on people in the UK who support the Minority Rights Group International because of their advocacy for Native Americans in the US and then getting them fired from their jobs, or China doing this to US citizens who oppose Taiwan reunification.
It’s really not ok that Israel does this and it’s less ok that the US lets it.
Once you get in a car it’s hard to get out
Many people equate car ownership and freedom. But cars are a trap for most of us.
My relatives almost all live in car dependent areas. They typically think of themselves as relatively fit. Yet when I visit them or they me, they are so out of shape that the basic daily errands of my life are exhausting to impossible for them.
Driving everywhere leaves you unable to walk anywhere.
Driving degrades most people’s health. Walking, cycling, and public transport are fucking great for your health.
The basic pedometer goal is 10,000 steps. Unless I’m stuck in my house with a migraine, it’s hard to NOT reach that goal just heading to the post office to grab a parcel and walking to the train to get to work. I don’t have to think about getting enough exercise – just going about my day as usual is enough.
My relatives buy fitbits and walk in circles around their living rooms or drive to a track to walk. Some don’t have nice places to walk because it’s all rushing cars and there’s not even sidewalk connectivity. Some have lost the ability to walk in the rural landscapes outside their doors – obesity and the resulting joint damage mean they can’t handle the uneven surfaces of a field or forest.
Driving has destroyed the bodies of my family. They have lost so much function that even when put in a walkable urban environment, they struggle. When my mother visits, she delights in walking to the shops – but only the ones 1 or 2 blocks away. Places 15 minutes away are too difficult, as are the shops up the hill. We can take a bus to the world-class urban park a 15 minute walk away, but can’t explore much of it together. She needs a mobility device to go further because she has used a car for so long. Her car has become her mobility device.
There are better mobility devices than a car. Walkers and scooters and wheelchairs support you while you’re in the shops and let you engage with your community. My city has more accessible infrastructure for pedestrians than most and we could actually explore more local spaces if she had a walker or a scooter than if we were in a car. She is very resistant to getting one of those – it’s an admission of disability in a way having a car isn’t, even though she’d have more freedom and enjoy herself more in many environments with a walker than with a car.
Driving doesn’t just trap us by harming our bodies, it also changes the physical landscape so that it’s hostile to other forms of transportation. If you drive someplace, you have to park, and so places get further and further apart as we build more and more space to put our cars. Then, to get between places, you have to drive or walk for miles with ugly and unpleasant parking lots on one side and dangerous rushing traffic on the other, that is, if there’s any pedestrian infrastructure at all.
In most places, cars are a blight and one that is very hard to recover from.
Driving everywhere doesn’t just leave us unable to walk anywhere, it also doesn’t leave us anywhere to walk.
Music for cooking until you fall over
1000 Years of Classical Music : ABC Radio : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Notable pieces of classical music presented in chronological order with engaging historical context. Guaranteed to improve any tedious task.
The urban-rural divide is the fundamental political divide
Many longstanding rulers and parties still command massive support in rural areas where government control is greater, though more than half the population of Africa is predicated to live in towns and cities within 30 years.
Youth alone is not enough to effect radical change, said Cheeseman. “The really important element is urbanisation. The biggest divide is between urban and rural, not young and old. When the majority of national votes are urban … that will massively transform opposition parties and politics.” Source: Young Africa: new wave of politicians challenges old guard | World news | The Guardian
If these African countries have democracies like ours in North America, that hope may be misplaced. Rural voters often hold a disproportionately large share of the power.
Many political redistrictings are all about rural (and suburban) power grabs, taking advantage of a fundamental bias in our democracies against high density populations. We don’t have one person-one vote in most places – a vote in Nunavut counts 5.6x more than a vote in the Niagara Falls riding of Ontario.
I grew up in a rural area and people there had this persistent sense of persecution from people in the cities. It’s not really true. People in rural areas have much more power than those in urban areas – it doesn’t always feel like that because there are so many people in urban areas!
That rural people feel persecuted by the cityfolk, especially in much of America, is particularly grating as the growing political homogeneity in rural areas is due in part to their bigotry driving out as many of the people who don’t believe like them as can get together enough resources to get the hell out. It doesn’t engender my sympathy either when so much of the (very real) economic hurt they’re facing is due to their consistently terrible political choices.
But it’s not like a person in a rural area can just pick up and leave if they don’t like it. And many people are in suburban areas because they effectively got booted out of the city.
Cities fuck over people in rural and suburban areas – and themselves – by letting land values in cities accrue to private individuals instead of the public interest.
Rural areas are under-resourced. There aren’t enough good schools or access to medical care or transportation. But on a per-person basis, people in rural and suburban areas still receive much more financial support from the government because providing infrastructure at low density is really, really expensive and inefficient. The government saves money when people move to cities. When you consider the extraordinarily high carbon footprint of people in rural areas, it makes even more sense to get them to the city.
But from the perspective of an individual person, living in a rural or suburban area often makes more financial sense – it’s cheaper! What most people don’t realize is that is because it’s more heavily subsidized, not just through infrastructure provision, but also through policies around land ownership, taxation, and housing policies that drive up the cost of rent and buying a place to live in a city.
The federal and provincial/state governments should be incentivizing people to live in cities. We should crush housing prices in cities and make sure the land value returns to the public. Living in a city is cheaper for the government and it should be too for the people who live there. Living in rural and suburban environments should better reflect the costs they exact on society – higher infrastructure expenses, dealing with natural hazards like wildfire, more expensive (per-capita) disaster recovery, higher contribution to climate change, etc.
We should make cities more pleasant places to live. Right now, most cities are bright and loud and smelly and designed more for cars than humans. We can fix that. Some fixes are hard, but many are easy. We should be making places for more people in our cities and building up small towns with good housing, people-oriented streets, and solid infrastructure. This would make people living in cities an even better deal for the government thru reduced healthcare and climate costs.
I don’t think that everyone should live in a city. Some people just can’t bear it and we do still need people in rural areas for agriculture and resource extraction. But those industries have been heavily mechanized and most people who live in rural areas have absolutely nothing to do with them. The decline of rural areas won’t stop unless something dramatic like de-mechanizing agriculture happens.
Let’s make cities better and more affordable places to live so that everyone who wants to be here can. It’ll be good for us all.