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● 05.21.22

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● Links 21/05/2022: GitLab at Fedora and Pipewire in Next Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 7:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Sign of the Times: The New HP Dev One Laptop Comes With Pop!_OS

• Just we were pointing out a few weeks back that Ubuntu is clearly losing ground as a gaming distro, we can now see it’s not just the gaming world that is affected: laptops made for developers may now be switching to something else too. HP has just revealed that its new HP Dev One laptop will ship with Pop!_OS, which is developed by System76.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ PiHole – advertisement & tracking blocking (also runs on the even faster odroids) can speed up surfing +50%

=> ↺ Ep 169: 3D Print Vase Mode: Engage, Measuring Nanovolts Through Mega DIY, And The Softest Pants Are Software Pants

• Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we take a tour of our top hacks from the past week. Elliot brought some fairly nerdy fare to the table this time, and Kristina pines for physical media as we discuss the demise of the iPod Touch, the last fruit-flavored mp3-playing soldier to fall.

Applications

=> ↺ Graylog: Industry Leading Log Management for Linux

• The point of logging is to keep your servers happy, healthy, and secure. If you can’t find the data, you can’t use it effectively or efficiently. If you’re not logging what you need, you will miss some critical signs. Meanwhile, if you’re logging too much, you will miss them again because they’ll be buried in so much noise.

• Everyone can use an extra pair of eyes to manage Linux logs, whether you’re a beginner, expert, or somewhere in between.

• [...]

• You need to know whether the outage is intended or not. In some cases, the outage might be for regular maintenance, and someone ran the shutdown or reboot commands.

• In other cases, it could be that the machine crashed.

• While the logs spit out a lot of information, they don’t make it easy to find what you’re looking for. Reviewing Linux logs in plain text files written by a Syslog daemon is hard. When reviewing this information on your own, it’s easy to miss the needle of important information hidden in the haystack of plain text.

• It’s also extremely time-consuming, especially when you’re trying to figure out what happened to a machine that led to a service outage.

• In a centralized log management solution like Graylog, you don’t need to worry about knowing all the log file names or scanning through endless lines of plain text. You can set up dashboards that give you quick visibility.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Web UI Dashboard for Kubernetes

=> ↺ Dmesg Command in Linux – Options + Examples

=> ↺ How to set up your graphics card in Zorin OS – Real Linux User

• Most modern Linux distributions have out of the box outstanding support for most of the available hardware components, like your graphics card, printer and WiFi adapter. Even for many relatively new hardware technologies there is support with the help of Hardware Enablement. But it is always possible that the setup procedure doesn’t come up directly with the correct or most optimized drivers for your specific internal or external devices. In this article as part of my Zorin OS tutorial series I will focus on the support of graphics cards and will show you how to install or update graphics drivers in Zorin OS.

=> ↺ How to install Vivaldi browser on Fedora 36 – NextGenTips

• Vivaldi browser is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It has a minimalistic user interface with basic icons and fonts and, an optionally color scheme that changes based on the background and design of the web page being visited.

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ Emulate the VIC-20 home computer with Linux – LinuxLinks

• Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.

• Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.

• Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.

• The Commodore VIC-20 is an 8-bit home computer that was released in 1980/1. It featured a MOS Technology 6502 CPU, with 20KB ROM and 5KB RAM although 1.5K of the RAM was used for the video display and aspects of the BASIC and kernal.

• It offered limited low-resolution graphics (176 x 184) with storage provided by cassette and floppy disk.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Tried overlay filesystem again

• Back in the very early days of EasyOS, 2017, I tried the overlay filesystem (also known as overlayfs), but there were serious errors. Don’t recall exactly what they were, but the result was I stayed with aufs.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Some docs repos are moving to GitLab

• The Fedora Docs team is starting the process of moving repos from the fedora-docs namespace on Pagure to GitLab. We’re making this move in order to take advantage of features like improved in-browser editing and cross-repo kanban boards. This move will be entirely transparent to the docs published at docs.fedoraproject.org. However, if you are contributing to one of the repos in this namespace, you’ll need to update the git remote.

=> ↺ Red Hat 2022: Linux In a New Avatar, OpenShift Upgrades, and Other Announcements

=> ↺ Is the new open source standard no standard at all? | TechRepublic

• We’re in a strange, somewhat unpredictable period in open source that has been caused perhaps by a lessening of Red Hat’s industry impact over the years. On Twitter, Brianna Wu asked men over 40 to comment on “structures [that] existed in your life to teach you how to be a good man.” Answers included things like Boy Scouts. A similar sort of question might be asked of developers and “open source structures…to teach you how to be a good open source citizen.”

• When I got started in open source, the obvious answer to most every question was “Red Hat.” What’s the right way to build a business in open source? Look to Red Hat was the stock response. What’s the right way to advocate for code freedom in open source? Again, look to Red Hat.

Debian Family

=> ↺ FSF Does Not Accept Debian as a Free Distribution. Here’s Why! – It’s FOSS News

• The Debian Project develops a free GNU/Linux distribution that respects the freedom of its users. It’s not uncommon for software, the source code of which is distributed under this or that free license, to contain non-free components. In this case, the software is cleaned before being released into Debian. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), in turn, maintains a list of free GNU/Linux distributions, but oddly enough, Debian is not there. The fact is that Debian does not meet some criteria for getting on this list and we have to figure out which ones. But first, you need to understand how all this intellectual work is justified. In other words, why bother trying to get on some lists and this one in particular?

• Stefano Zacchiroli, who used to be the leader of the Debian Project from 2010 to 2013, once voiced several reasons why Debian should have got the FSF to obtain the status of free distribution. One of these reasons, which Stefano called “external review”, I especially liked. The fact is that Debian has criteria and quality standards that software must meet to become part of the distribution, but no one except the Debian developers themselves controls this process. If the distribution had been included in that cherished list, the FSF would have been keeping a close eye on the fate of Debian with moderate criticism. Excellent motivation, I believe. If you also think so, then let’s now have a look at the reasons why the FSF considers Debian as not free enough.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Pipewire as a replacement for pulseaudio

• Are there any plans to migrate ubuntu to pipewire and wireplumber by default for audio, now that the LTS is out of the way? My anecdotal experience is that it seems to be working fine and in some cases (eg bluetooth audio, especially headsets) surparssing pulseaudio. Using Ubuntu Jammy’s built in packages.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL Anonymizer 1.0: Privacy By Design For Postgres

• PostgreSQL Anonymizer is an extension that hides or replaces personally identifiable information (PII) or commercially sensitive data from a PostgreSQL database.

• The extension supports 3 different anonymization strategies: Dynamic Masking, Static Masking and Anonymous Dumps. It also offers a large choice of Masking Functions such as Substitution, Randomization, Faking, Pseudonymization, Partial Scrambling, Shuffling, Noise Addition and Generalization.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Annual Report 2021: Attracting new contributors to LibreOffice

• Joining a large and established project like LibreOffice can be daunting for many. The software has a large codebase, and sub-projects use a wide array of tools. In recent years, we’ve made efforts to simplify the onboarding process by linking more services together with SSO (single sign-on), thereby reducing some of the complexity. In addition, we’ve created Easy Hacks and similar “bite size” projects in other areas, so that newcomers can get involved quickly and achieve something without months of work.

• Currently, we have two websites/pages that function as starting points for new contributors: What Can I Do For LibreOffice and the Get Involved page. The former was set up by LibreOffice’s Albanian community, and lets users click through topics of interest, until they find something they want to do. The latter is a regular page, with a list of sub-projects inside LibreOffice, and quick steps to make initial contact.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Return String From Function C++

• A way to identify a series of strings as a class member is specified in C++’s definition. The String class holds attributes as a stream of bits, with the ability to handle a single-byte character. In C++, we may retrieve a string, but we should still examine how the string will be retained and transferred. Because C++ returns elements on the heap, which has a finite amount of space, providing immense components will induce stack overflow issues that could result in errors and security flaws.

• If we can return a std::string object from the standard template library, we may provide a constant pointer to the string. Ascertain that the string is retained in static memory. This article outlines various approaches for returning a string from a C++ function.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Writing it down

• PWC 165 refers us to mathsisfun for the algorithm to be used. Let’s write it down.

Java

=> ↺ How to round of Numbers in Java

• Java provides a built-in class known as Math class which belongs to the java.lang package. The java.lang.Math class provides numerous methods that are used to perform different numeric operations such as rounding of a number, finding square root, and so on. The Math class offers multiple methods to round off a number such as round(), ceil(), floor().

Leftovers

=> ↺ Sound Generation Board Makes The Tunes

• [Mcjack123] has been getting into chiptunes lately and realized that his original interest started in 2018 when he used an Arduino to turn a TI-84 calculator into a sound machine. His latest iteration is a custom-designed soundboard and he takes us through the design and construction of it in a recent post.

=> ↺ England and the Lost Princess

• We are in the middle of a discussion. It is about an abduction which took place fifty miles to the south of here, nearly twenty-two years ago, in the university town of Cambridge. The weather is unseasonably hot and my friend opens the window. All this talk of abduction grates the soul. It sparks within me such a flurry of thoughts, I want to write them all down, maybe even explore the idea of making a film about them one day. This is because at the heart of this incident is a kind of self-inflicted wound whose pain is so sharp, so deep, it possesses an ability to transform what you think about a place.

• This is why the eccentricity of where we are driving through — New York in England — somehow fits with a country increasingly uncertain about what it is anymore. There is even a token yellow cab and immaculate NYPD police car to our right. The giant Uncle Sam effigy, confusing as hell, glints in the noonday sun. It is like a page from a magical realist novel. Yet the topic of our discussion is real, not fiction at all. It is the Cambridge abduction of Princess Shamsa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a terrible and swift prohibition of a young life which took place in England when the victim was a mere 19 years old. An incident brutishly exacerbated today by the failure of Cambridgeshire police to press any charges, albeit for reasons beyond their control.

=> ↺ Tales from the Cryptic ‘60s: an Unauthorized Interview with Judy Gumbo

• Judy Gumbo arrived at Berkeley, California from Canada in the mid-60s and engaged herself in the political antics of the Youth International Party, aka, the Yippies, through Stew Albert, her boyfriend and a Yippee leader. Judy was a kind of proto-feminist (in principle) and du jour lesbian; a serious anti-war activist who went to North Vietnam, like Jane “Barbarella” Fonda, and gave ‘piece’ a chance (Oanh), with, and among, the “enemy” (in quotes, because “they” are always buying our goods after the war, as a kind of empathetic concession to Das Kapital’s dragon charm, or war seen as part of the economic negotiations to establish the market and keep the prices down — at first); she was pals with the Black Panthers at the height of the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltration and subterfuge game (and a recipient of their dossier largesse herself, the feds calling her “the most vicious” Yippie of them all); she was in Chicago in ‘68 with Jerry and Abbie and Pigasus; and, she was a journalist for the Berkeley Barb, a community news happening — so she knows the value of an interview. Her memoir of this wild and woolly (to go by her chronicled sexual antics) era is a superb addition to the home library for this period — that includes the classic Steal This Book, Revolution for the Hell of It, Steal This Dream, Soul On Ice, Howl, I Will Fight No More Forever, Dibs: In Search of Self, The Armies of the Night, and The Pentagon Papers (Ellsberg went from warplanner to charter Yippie in a few cubes of acid).

• It used to be that you couldn’t get them to stop hogging the spotlight in the service of Yippie mayhem designed to foster and fuel the street theater antics of a vibrant counterculture that refused to take the Squares seriously. Abbie Hoffman throwing cash down on Wall Street brokers from the public balcony (no longer possible) to watch them drop everything to porky snorkel through the small-bills moolah on the floor. Then, Abbie threatening to levitate the Pentagon, and actually negotiating the height down to three feet off the ground. Another time, Abbie ‘showing up’ at a designated spot to be arrested by cops for minor vandalism only to have a van arrive full of Abbie look-alikes who popped out and ran in different directions, the real Abbie standing a slight distance away crying out, Yoohoo! Yoohoo! Here I am! Making New York’s finest look like the Keystone Cops. Now that’s terrorism you’re willing to back with crypto dollars. This latter scene of multiple Abbies is vividly described in Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s classic oral history, Steal This Dream (pages 80-81). And Judy could have brought it to life with an interview. She was there; she’s got flair.

=> ↺ Fight Club

• “Fight Club,” a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, examines the integrity of the combative sinew upon which we all rely to maintain the cohesion of our federal government.

=> ↺ Ray McGovern & John Kiriakou: It’s Scoundrel Time in the Good Ol’ USA

• Critics of the West’s role in the Ukraine war, such as this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” guests CIA veterans Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou, are being ostracized from the American media landscape.

=> ↺ If you have to embrace the stupid, you might as well do it well

• Our customer, The Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, wants us to do a demo of a new feature for a certain class of clients. “Project: Lumbergh [1]” will receive a URL (Uniform Resource Location) along with the name and reputation of a phone number it gets from elsewhere. “Project: Lumbergh” will then pass this along to “Project: Sippy-Cup [2].” We already have to deal with URLs from elsewhere. The only change we have to make is allowing URLs to be passed along to the certain class of clients, which formerly did not get URLs. So far, so good.

=> ↺ Meeting my new manager before training my new manager

• I finally met my new manager [1]! It’s been … what? 3½ months? … since it was announced. I decided to ask a VP (Vice President) of the Corporate Overlords who was my actual manager, M1 [2] (who was promoted) or M2 (who is to replace the promoted manager). The VP said M2, and that since I have yet to meet him, I should invite him to the next department meeting. Why it should be up to me to invite M2 to our daily meeting and not M1 is apparently beyond my pay grade, but I invited him.

Education

=> ↺ The School Board Culture War

• Tim Nordin checked his e-mail shortly before the April 5 local election in his northwestern Wisconsin community and found a death threat. The sender, identified only as “Kill All Marxist Teachers,” attacked the president of the Eau Claire school board for “promoting the horrific, radical transgender agenda,” adding, “It’s now time to declare war on you pedos. I am going to kill you and your entire family.” Nordin made sure his family was safe, called the cops, and alerted fellow school board members. Then, after checking with his wife to make sure she agreed that it was worth it to continue campaigning for a new term on the board, he sent a message to the voters.

Hardware

=> ↺ Square Cuts On Aluminum Extrusion, No Mill Required

• If you’re looking for the perfect excuse to buy that big, beautiful Bridgeport mill, we’ve got some bad news: it’s not going to be making perfectly square end cuts on aluminum extrusion. Sadly, it’s much more cost-effective to build this DIY squaring jig, and search for your tool justification elsewhere.

=> ↺ Slow Races On A Pinewood Derby Track Built From Scratch

• Pinewood derby racing is a popular pastime for scouting groups and many others besides. [Mr Coster] whipped up his own track with the assistance of some 3D printed parts, and used it to run a competition with a fun twist on the usual theme.

=> ↺ Practice Makes Perfect For This Ball And Socket Robot

• Ball and socket joints are useful, but making a part slide over the surface of a sphere, held by magnets, requires a lot of fiddling to get right. We admire persistence and nailing all the details. [Matthew Finlay] has been doing just that with his ball and socket robot. He’s on version six, a testament to his desire to do the idea justice. Luckily for us, he’s documented each version as he went.

=> ↺ Clicker 4 for TMPM4K board targets motor control with Toshiba M4K microcontroller

• Toshiba and Mikroelektronika have launched the Clicker 4 for TMPM4K development board equipped with Toshiba M4K Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller for motor control, as well as four mikroBUS sockets for MikroE Click expansion boards.

• The Clicker 4 for TMPM4K board is also fitted with an on-board CMSIS-DAP compliant Debug Unit based on Toshiba’s TMPM067 MCU, extension connectors, JTAG/SWD debug ports, LED indicators and push buttons, and works best with Clicker 4 Inverter Shield with six MOSFETs for motor driving, a 48V switching power supply, and a 5V regulated power source that can power the M4K board.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ In a parallel universe, the pandemic would have been different

• The question is did it have to be this way?

• Consider a few selected aspects of the pandemic and then consider how they might have been handled differently in a parallel universe where our economy was a Participatory Economic one and not capitalist.

=> ↺ WHO to Convene Emergency Meeting on Monkeypox Outbreak

• The World Health Organization plans to hold an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss the international transmission of monkeypox.

• New cases of the viral zoonotic disease, which is rare and typically confined to central and west Africa, have been detected in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

=> ↺ Opinion | One Million American Covid-19 Deaths Is a Searing Indictment of Poverty and Policy Choices

• The U.S. has now reached the once unthinkable toll of 1 million deaths from COVID-19. How could this happen in the wealthiest country in the world?

Security

=> ↺ This Week In Security: IPhone Unpowered, Python Unsandboxed, And Wizard Spider Unmasked

• As conspiracy theories go, one of the more plausible is that a cell phone could be running malicious firmware on its baseband processor, and be listening and transmitting data even when powered off. Nowadays, this sort of behavior is called a feature, at least if your phone is made by Apple, with their Find My functionality. Even with the phone off, the Bluetooth chip runs happily in a low-power state, making these features work. The problem is that this chip doesn’t do signed firmware. All it takes is root-level access to the phone’s primary OS to load a potentially malicious firmware image to the Bluetooth chip.

=> ↺ $100 Bluetooth Hack Can Unlock All Kinds Of Devices, Including Teslas, From Miles Away

• While they’re not impervious, at least you know where you stand with a good, old fashioned dumb lock. That’s in stark contrast to so-called “smart” locks, which studies have repeatedly shown to be easily compromised with minimal effort. One report showed that 12 of 16 smart locks they tested could be relatively easily hacked thanks to flimsy security standards.

=> ↺ Ransomware attack affects nearly 500,000 CPS students

=> ↺ [Old] What Should Graduates Know And Be Able To Do?

• Previously, Tom served as the first executive director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a public school superintendent in Washington State and has extensive private sector experience.

=> ↺ Bill Gates-affiliated organization enables ransomware attack on Chicago Public Schools teachers and faculty.

• Battelle is also routinely affiliated with Tom Vander Ark, who previously had a high profile role in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as executive director of education.

• Since Bill Gates decided to “give away [his] wealth” to “philanthropy”, he has doubled his wealth, mainly through influence peddling through his fake charity, the Gates Foundation.

• People who hoard $80 billion dollars during times of recession and don’t pay much in taxes on it either are not a boost to the economy.

• Bill Gates has a troubled “relationship” with children. His personal engineer, Rick Allen Jones, was arrested in the Gates Mansion and found with a trove of child pornography. The detectives investigating the case also raided his apartment while Jones was at work in the Gates Mansion, and found bankers boxes full of VHS tapes, along with lots of hard drives and flash memory sticks and computers overflowing with it.

• When Jones got to court, the judge mysteriously ruled to keep Jones off the sex offender list and out of jail, and the charge of illegal possession of a handgun got mysteriously dropped.

• When Jones would accompany Bill and Melinda on trips abroad, he would photograph children on the beaches.

• Gates also flew around with Jeff Epstein on Epstein’s Lolita Express, a long time after everyone knew what Epstein was.

• When Melinda Gates divorced Bill, Epstein came up. Who would want to be married to a guy who pals around with many child molesters and those with dungeons ‘o child porn, and is possibly a pedophile himself?

• “I just couldn’t trust what we had.”.

• Why anyone lets Bill Gates deal with children is beyond me. He keeps “interesting” company.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ ICE Probably Spied on You

• As a teenager, I dismissed their concerns. “Listen, we’re not in the Middle East,” I would counter.

• My parents knew better though. I soon received a rude awakening in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

=> ↺ Report Shows ICE’s Massive Surveillance Apparatus Is All Up In Americans’ Everything

• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has long made its own case for abolishment. Before ICE earned its current reputation as a fake-school running, report-altering, rogue agency interested in ejecting as many non-white people from America as possible, ICE ran interference for entrenched industries.

=> ↺ New reports on DHS surveillance and profiling

• Two new reports from university think-tanks call attention to surveillance and profiling — including surveillance of, and action against, domestic and international travelers — by the Department of Homeland Security and its components.

• A Course Correction for Homeland Security, a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, cites to some of our work and some examples of cases we have been involved with in its analysis of DHS data collection (surveillance), and “risk assessments” (algorithmic profiling and control), especially as they relate to travelers.

• American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, a report by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law School, focuses on DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division, especially ICE access to facial images and other information obtained from drivers licenses and commercial data brokers.

=> ↺ The FBI Definitely Wanted NSO Group Malware For Investigative Use Despite Its Earlier (Non)Denial

• The New York Times has obtained more information about the FBI’s courting of NSO Group, something that has since raised questions from its oversight.

=> ↺ Supreme Court directs Technical Committee to expedite investigation on Pegasus

• The committee of technical experts constituted by the Supreme Court to investigate the use of Pegasus spyware on Indian citizens submitted its interim report to the Supreme Court in a “taped envelope” on 06.01.2022. The report was placed before the Court on 20.05.2022 and examined by the Bench of the Supreme Court led by the Chief Justice of India. As per the report, the technical committee has received 29 phones so far, and has developed their own software to examine phones for the use of the spyware. The Court has now directed the technical committee to submit its report to the overseeing Judge of the committee [Justice RV Raveendran (retd.)] expeditiously.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Taking Aim at Criminalizing Russia: Stephen Cohen Challenges A Rampant Mania

• On April 25, 2018 Stephen Cohen, unraveller of myths extraordinaire, wrote an article on “Criminalizing Russia” in The Nation (republished in War with Russia: from Putin to Ukraine to Trump an Russiagate [2022]). We are increasingly aware that the bamboozling of the citizenry prepares them for whatever bombing will follow. We are also aware that those we bomb and maim and destroy are first demonized. Noam Chomsky (in Who rules the world? [2016]) informs his readers that the Israeli government deplored the savagery of the Palestinians by deeming them “two-headed beasts” (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), “drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle” (Israeli Defence Forces Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), “like grasshoppers compared to us” whose heads should be “smashed against the boulders and walls” (Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir)—or more commonly, just ‘Araboushim,’ the slang counter part of ‘kike’ or ‘nigger’ (p. 24-25).

• Cohen states boldly that for more than a decade, the “US political-media establishment has increasingly demonized, delegitimated, and now criminalized the Russian state and its leadership.” It began, the brave Stephen states, with “personal vilification of President Putin and has grown into a general indictment of Russia as a nation” (p. 176). The present Russia-Ukraine conflict has intensified both Putin’s vilification and banishment of Russia from the company of nations. “Get out of here, you Russians!” We will burn Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s novels, shred Turgenev’s poetry, we will ban the Kirov and Bolshoi ballets from our stages, remove Valery Gergiev’s conductor’s wand and fire Anna Netrebko from singing opera, ban the music of Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky or Dimitri Shoshtakovic, ban Russians from playing at Wimbledon or competing at the Olympics.

=> ↺ How Media Reports of ‘Clashes’ Mislead Americans About Israeli-Palestinian Violence

• Yet those who skimmed the headlines of initial reports from several U.S. media outlets may have been left with a different impression of what happened.

• “Israeli Police Clash with Mourners at Funeral Procession,” read the headline of MSNBC’s online report. The Wall Street Journal had a similar headline on its story: “Israeli Forces, Palestinians Clash in West Bank before Funeral of Journalist.”

=> ↺ At Home and Abroad, is America “Fake News?”

• What does America stand for? Are we truly an exceptional country? Are we even an ethical one?

• I dedicated my life to protecting this nation. I know firsthand how misguided most Americans are about how we interact with the rest of the world. But to understand their confusion, we have to first look within. And as we condemn Russia’s aggression, we must resist the temptation to ignore our own shortcomings.

=> ↺ When the Shooting Ended

• As the pundits try to dissect the motivations of the killer in this massacre, we hear a lot about social media misinformation, Fox News propaganda, our country’s terrible history of racism, and the ongoing propagation of institutional racism today.  We also hear about different gun laws, efforts at controlling the proliferation of assault weapons, the power of the gun lobby, and the sanctity of the Second Amendment.  We hear about mental health, and the ongoing failure of the public health sector to basically exist in any meaningful form in this country, though they don’t put it that way.

• It has been mentioned that the Buffalo massacre was the 200th mass shooting in the United States so far in 2022, and it’s only mid-May.  What isn’t mentioned is that most of the other mass shootings involved men killing their families, or men targeting women.  Misogyny is so endemic, it apparently doesn’t bear mentioning anymore, like the sun rising in the east.

=> ↺ Buffalo: India Walton on the Racist Massacre & Community’s Need for Gun Control, Good Jobs, Housing

• As Buffalo, New York, mourns the loss of the 10 people killed Saturday in a racist rampage at a local grocery store in the heart of the city’s African American community, we get an update from longtime community activist and former mayoral candidate India Walton about the lack of attention to the structural issues that made the Black community vulnerable and the ineffectiveness of police. “My question is: What happens when the cameras leave? How do we continue to support the people who have been negatively impacted?” says Walton. “What decreases gun violence, particularly in places like East Buffalo, is going to be good living-wage jobs, affordable housing, a quality education and access to the basic needs that this community has lacked for so long.”

=> ↺ Is This the End of the French Project in Africa’s Sahel?

• In early 2017, under French pressure, these G5 Sahel countries created the G5 Sahel Joint Force (FC-G5S), a military alliance to combat the security threat posed by the aftermath of the Algerian civil war (1991-2002) and the detritus of NATO’s 2011 war in Libya. The G5 Sahel Joint Force received the backing of the United Nations Security Council to conduct military operations in the region.

• Mali’s military spokesperson Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga said on May 15 that his government had sent a letter on April 22 to General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno—President of Chad’s transitional military council and the outgoing president of the G5 Sahel—informing him of Mali’s decision; the lack of movement in holding the conference of the G5 Sahel heads of state, which was supposed to take place in Mali in February, and handing over the rotating presidency of the FC-G5S to the country, forced Mali to take the action of leaving both the FC-G5S and the G5 Sahel platform, Colonel Maïga said on national television.

=> ↺ Westphalian Logic and Geopolitical Prudence in the Nuclear Age

• The most influential Western media platforms, including CNN, BBC, NY Times, The Economist, with few exceptions, have largely supported these one-dimensional governmental narrative accounts of the Ukraine War. The views of progressive critics of the manner that American foreign policy has handled the crisis are almost totally unrepresented, while the extremist right is castigated for daring to oppose the national consensus as if only the only dissenters are conspiracy inclined fascists. Almost no attention given by these media outlets to understanding either the buildup of tensions relating to Ukraine in the years preceding the Russian attack or the wider security rationale that explains Putin’s resolve to reassert its former authority in the Ukraine. Similarly, there was virtually no mainstream discussion of ceasefire/diplomatic options, favored by many peace and religious groups, that sought to give priority to ending the killing, coupled with a search for possible reconciling formulas that combined Ukrainian sovereign entitlements with some adjustments taking account of Russian concerns. The most trusted media in the West functioned as a war-mongering propaganda machine that was only slightly more nuanced in its support for the official line of the government than what one would expect from unambiguously autocratic regimes. Coverage highlighted visual portrayals of the daily brutalities of the war coupled with a steady stream of condemnations of Russian behavior, detailed reportage on the devastation and civilian suffering, and a tactical overview of how the fighting was going in various combat zones. These bellicose narratives were routinely reinforced by expert commentary from retired generals and intelligence officials, and never subjected to challenge from peace advocates, much less dissenters and critics. I have yet to hear the voice or read texts on these influential media platforms from the most celebrated public intellectuals, Noam Chomsky or Daniel Ellsberg, or even from independent minded diplomats like Chas Freeman. Of course, these individuals are talking and writing but to learn their views you have to navigate the internet in search of such online websites as CounterPunch and Common Dreams.

• The fog of war has been replaced by a war fever while making the transition from helping Ukraine defend itself against aggression to pursuing a victory over Russia increasingly heedless of nuclear dangers and worldwide economic dislocations that threatened many millions with famine, acute insecurity, and destitution. The shrill assured voices of generals and think tank security gurus dominated commentary, while pleas for peace from the UN Secretary General, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Francis, if noticed at all, were confined to the outer margins of public awareness.

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: Search, Destroy and Replace

• + Not shot by police: Dylann Roof (21), Kyle Rittenhouse (18), Payton S. Gendron (18).

• Shot by police: Tamir Rice (12), Laquan McDonald (17), Michael Brown (18)

=> ↺ Beyond the Crystal Ball & Unmentionable Fascism: Dark Predictions, Human Agency, and a Beautiful Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights

• The Ugly Foreseeable: Six Dark Predictions

• It shouldn’t be so easy to predict future terrible events.

=> ↺ ‘We weren’t afraid of them — but they were very afraid of us’ Meduza reports from Kharkiv, where Ukrainians are cleaning up the mess left by the city’s failed invaders

• On May 15, Western military experts declared that Ukraine had won the “battle for Kharkiv.” Analysts pointed to the retreat of Russian detachments around Kharkiv in the face of Ukrainian counterattacks. Russian troops had been fighting to take control of the city, which lies about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the Russian border, since the beginning of the war. Residential areas on the city’s outskirts were torn apart, and on March 2, a missile strike hit the city’s central square. Thousands of civilians took cover in basements and in the city’s metro station. Now, Kharkivites are sorting through the rubble, repairing the public transport system, restoring the electricity and gas supply, and preparing their beauty salons and cafes to open up again. Larisa Kalik went to Kharkiv to talk to the residents bringing the city back to life.

=> ↺ Republicans Gave Tours of Capitol Before Attack, According to Jan. 6 Committee

=> ↺ Third Party Blues

• There’s Trump, a disgrace with his hideous January 6 insurrection, his Big Lie that he’s the real winner of the 2020 election and then all his many, many little lies about almost everything else. In the other corner of the ring lurks Biden, who on the last campaign trail promised everything from a medical public option to the minimum wage to student debt cancellation to the kitchen sink. He broke all those promises, estranging his relationship from the truth almost as badly as Trump’s.

• So neither man is to be trusted. That’s not to say they’re bad in the same way – Trump’s racism, sexism, hot crush on fascism and all-around bullying of anyone he dislikes sicken anyone with a moral compass, but opposite him, there’s Biden, who may well yet bungle us into a nuclear holocaust with Russia. According to Russian observers May 16, in the Russian/Ukrainian battle for Rubizhnoye seven U.S. citizens were killed during the fighting, while the city’s defense was led by American and Polish military advisors. The day before came the rumor that a British lieutenant colonel, a U.S. general and four NATO military instructors had surrendered to Russian troops in Mariupol. This is all very bad. If true, it means Biden has failed to keep the U.S. out of the fighting. Even if only some of it is true, he already has the distinction of bringing the extermination of human civilization closer than any president since the U.S. first split the atom.

=> ↺ I Ain’t Marching Anymore

• I Ain’t Marching Anymore is a must-read addition to books on the US peace movement.*  

• Lombardi’s writing is infused with the passion and insight of an activist. Having spent years with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors she combines deep political commitment with the skill of an accomplished storyteller and the intellect of a scholar. That alone is a huge accomplishment. It’s a very accessible page-turner and a great book for someone new to the peace movement.

=> ↺ Anti-Terrorism Bill Targeting White Supremacists Puts House GOP on the Defensive

=> ↺ Active Shooters

=> ↺ “We Are Not Terrified. We Are Tenacious.”

• “I don’t know… looks mighty white.” A friend and I were driving across New York’s Southern Tier, headed west on NY17/I-86 to Buffalo, his first trip there, and we had taken up a kind of call and response: “You wait, you’re going to like Buffalo; it’s a Black city.”

=> ↺ Lessons for Buffalo? Meet the Activist Who Sued the White Supremacists Behind Charlottesville & Won

• The Buffalo shooter wrote racist screeds online before targeting and killing people in a majority-Black neighborhood. We look at the incident’s similarities to other white supremacist killings, particularly the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Amy Spitalnick is the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit organization that successfully sued the white supremacist organizers of Unite the Right. Spitalnick says tactics such as live-streaming are characteristic of previous acts of white supremacist terrorism, and calls for systemic change and preventative measures amid a clear pattern of violence. “This is precisely part of a cycle of white supremacist violence in which each attack inspires the next one,” says Spitalnick.

=> ↺ Matt Gertz, Eric K. Ward on the Buffalo Massacre & ‘Replacement Theory’

=> ↺ Opinion | War has Wreaked Havoc on Ukraine’s Public Health System

• The Russian invasion of Ukraine epitomizes many of the challenges children face today, by inflicting serious damage to children’s health and quality of life. By the middle of May 2022, more than 6.1 million people had fled Ukraine, half of them children. Millions more have been internally displaced. 90 percent of Ukrainian refugees are women and children. Since the beginning of the conflict, hundreds of children have been killed.

=> ↺ ‘It was hard to watch’ How Ukrainian journalists turned footage from a Russian soldier’s phone into a short documentary

• On May 11, the online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda released a short documentary called “The Occupant” (“Okupant,” in Ukrainian), which tells the story of a Russian lieutenant named Yury Shalaev. According to the newspaper, 24-year-old Shalaev served as the commander of a motorized rifle platoon in a military unit based in Shali, Chechnya. He was deployed to Ukraine on March 3, as part of Russia’s full-scale invasion — and he recorded his wartime experiences on his phone. Shalaev was taken prisoner in early April and the videos he recorded ended up in the hands of Ukrayinska Pravda. The newspaper’s journalists turned the recordings into a 24-minute documentary that offers a window into Shalaev’s life before and after his arrival in Ukraine. To find out more about the making of the film, Meduza sat down with journalist Mykhailo Tkach, the head of Ukrayinska Pravda’s investigations department.

=> ↺ ‘You’re lucky it was us Chechens who found you’: The story of a Ukrainian man whose home was occupied by Russian troops as he took shelter underneath

• Bohdan is an airfield service employee at Hostomel Airport, which was the site of heavy fighting at the very start of the war. For three weeks, he and his family lived in the basement of their apartment building, right across from the occupied airport. The building, which came under heavy fire at times, was occupied first by Chechen riot police, then by an airborne assault unit from Omsk. In mid-March, all of the basement’s inhabitants were forcibly taken to Belarus. Bohdan told Meduza his story.

Environment

=> ↺ Environmental Advocates Say Public Comment Is Taking a Back Seat in Biden’s Push to Export More LNG

• During a virtual meeting on May 11, the public had an opportunity to comment on a proposed floating LNG export facility 16 miles off the coast of Grand Isle, Louisiana, a barrier island that was badly crippled last year by Hurricane Ida and is still recovering.

• Proposed by New Fortress Energy (NFE), the planned facility will be a floating offshore export terminal that would treat, liquefy, and store methane gas before loading it onto ships headed abroad. If realized, the terminal could export up to the equivalent of 145 billion cubic feet of the fossil fuel per year. Its application comes shortly after the Biden administration committed in March “to make available up to 15 billion cubic meters additional LNG this year” in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s attempts to reduce dependency on Russian gas.

=> ↺ Who Dropped the Rain Bomb on Durban Last Month? And Will They Pay Climate Reparations?

• KwaZulu-Natal province counted more than 500 dead (including 57 children). There were 128 932 people displaced, from 17 438 households, as well as hundreds of wrecked schools still unable to cater for 320 000 young scholars, and overall at least $1.6 billion in infrastructure and housing destroyed. Those are official figures released on May 15, but no doubt an underestimate.

• The main state funding needed beyond emergency relief, to repair the damage and rebuild for the next storm hasn’t arrived. According to provincial minister of local government, Sipho Hlomuka, by May 11, in spite of promises from the Presidency and Treasury, only $63 million was set aside, but even so, “We have not received the allocated funds. However, we are in talks with provincial and national Treasury on processes we need to follow to receive those funds.”

=> ↺ More West Texas

• It was a long and hot week in the Texas Panhandle. Temperature was over 100 degrees F all week.

Energy

=> ↺ It’s Time to Stop Profiteering at the Pump

• For decades, we’ve allowed big oil and gas companies to enrich themselves at the expense of our families, communities, and environment.

• Now these companies are seizing a moment of geopolitical unrest to pad their pockets even more. Oil companies are celebrating some of their biggest profits in years. In the first three months of 2022 alone, ExxonMobil raked in a record $5.5 billion, ConocoPhillips $5.8 billion, and Chevron $6 billion.

=> ↺ Say No to Nuclear Power

• But the fact is that no more big, old-style light water reactors are likely to be built in the United States. And the current 93 licensed reactors in this country (there are 400-plus worldwide) grow increasingly dangerous every day.

• As a green power advocate since 1973, I’ve visited dozens of reactor sites throughout the U.S. and Japan. The industry’s backers portray them as high-tech black boxes that are uniformly safe, efficient and reliable, ready to hum for decades without melt-downs, blow-ups or the constant emissions of heat, radiation, chemical pollution and eco-devastation that plague us all.

=> ↺ Crypto’s Hype and Promises Were Based on Lies From the Very Beginning

• As usual with the tech industry, cryptocurrencies weren’t just sold as a risky investment — they were framed as a social good. Now that the crash has ruined lives, those who promised societal transformation through crypto should be held accountable.

=> ↺ Communities in Path of East Africa Oil Pipeline Allege Intimidation and Unfair Compensation

• Ugandan communities whose lands lie in the pathway of a vast new oil pipeline under development in East Africa have accused French fossil fuel giant TotalEnergies and the Ugandan government of intimidation and poor compensation.

• A group comprised mainly of smallholder farmers from Kyotera district, southern Uganda, say the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), fronted by Total, has coerced people into opening bank accounts before rates of compensation have been agreed.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Major Shift in National Wildfire Policy Needed

• The fires burning through northern New Mexico this past month redefine what we consider a normal spring. Pushed by relentless high winds and exacerbated by an ongoing, 20-plus-year megadrought linked to the human-induced climate crisis, these wildfires have shocked and alarmed us all. As fires continue to burn, people want action to keep their homes and loved ones safe. They also look at the surrounding landscape and know it will never be the same again, at least not in their lifetime and perhaps not ever, given that the climate crisis is redefining what is normal. The resulting fear and sadness are understandable, as is the desire for something to be done.

• That is why WildEarth Guardians fully supports what fire scientists and researchers have been saying for decades: by taking common-sense actions within the “Home Ignition Zone”—the home and everything around it, up to 100 feet from the foundation—we can save homes and lives and protect firefighters and emergency responders. These are all compelling reasons to focus resources on home and community protection.

=> ↺ Protect This Place: The Langkawi Archipelago, an Ancient Jewel

=> ↺ The Biomass Peril

• In order to know specifically what’s wrong it’s pertinent to take notice of the factual details about the integrity of woody biomass to discover whether it’s truly one of the biggest blunders of the 21st century.

• Woody biomass is not a viable solution for global warming mitigation purposes. It has been the subject of considerable scientific debate with several voices expressing alarm over the absurd concept of burning trees to reduce global emissions. It’s shocking!

=> ↺ A Civilization of Fragile Images

• Olympeion: temple of the Olympian Zeus near the Acropolis of Athens. It took several centuries for the construction of the temple. The Roman Emperor Hadrian finished it in 131-132. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.

• Unless one visits Hellas / Greece and sees the ruins of ancient temples, theaters, and stadia, it is difficult to understand the magnificence of the country more than 2,500 years ago. Museums (in Greece and other Western countries) remain the depositories of mere fractions of the treasures that used to be all over ancient Greece.

Finance

=> ↺ Jerome Powell’s Fed in Two Frightening Charts

• But Jerome Powell’s Fed did not actually announce a specific plan to shrink its balance sheet until May 4 and stated at that time that the plan would not go into effect until June 1 – almost three months after the FOMC indicated that the Fed should take decisive action.

• As a result of this stalling, the Fed’s balance sheet has remained at the $9 trillion level since its March 15-16 FOMC meeting, as inflation has continued to soar.

=> ↺ Millions More Kids Going Hungry Since GOP, Manchin Killed Expanded Child Tax Credit

• A new analysis out Friday confirms that the number of U.S. households with kids that report not having enough food to eat has surged in the months since corporate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia joined Senate Republicans in refusing to extend the expanded Child Tax Credit benefit beyond mid-December.

• “Continuation of the advance CTC payments could help children avoid food insufficiency, with immediate and lifelong personal and societal benefits.”

=> ↺ Opinion | To Tax the Rich, We Need to Debunk the Myth of Fleeing Millionaires

• This November, the Massachusetts electorate will vote on a ballot initiative that will have profound consequences: the ability for the state to amend its constitution and levy a 4 percent surtax on all individuals that have an annual income of one million dollars or more. 

=> ↺ 26 of US’s Richest Billionaires Paid 4.8 Percent Tax Rate in Recent Years

=> ↺ Nearly 90,000 Small Businesses in US Expected to Close After Senate GOP Kills Main Street Relief Bill

• Advocates for independently-owned businesses warned that restaurants, gyms, and other Main Street businesses across the U.S. will be forced to close in the coming months after Republicans in the Senate on Thursday blocked a $48 billion package to provide relief to owners who have struggled to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic.

• The bipartisan Small Business Covid Relief Act (S. 4008), which was meant to replenish the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF) passed last year, was cosponsored by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), but still failed to get more than five Republican senators to support it.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Why Are Colombian Election Candidates Auditioning in Washington?

• Along with the Washington consensus crowd, members of the Colombian diaspora attended the May 13th event, especially supporters of popular vice-presidential candidate Francia Márquez. Afro-descendent environmentalist Márquez is running with presidential candidate Gustavo Petro. Their front-running ticket could be the first administration on the left in Colombian history.

• Vice-presidential debate hosts

=> ↺ The Eurasian Road to American Panarchy and the Agorist Path to Cold War Salvation

• The combination of East Asia’s booming vibrant young population and Germany’s access to the levers of institutionalized power was at once too obvious for America to prevent and too lethal for America to survive. NATO would have to collapse, the dollar would have to crash, and Atlantic primacy would suffer a fate worse than death. It would simply cease to be relevant on the world stage and the illusions of its omnipotence would shatter both at home and abroad. Riots would rage, Wall Street would burn, neocons would eat their pearl-handled pistols, and Americans would be forced to deal with the commercial emptiness that dominates our shallow existence and the newly castrated mandarins who made it all possible. Babylon would finally crumble into anarchy, and it would have been bloody fantastic. It could have been a beautiful nightmare, but Vladimir Putin had to go and fuck it all up.

• That pig-headed czarist pretender gave the American Century everything it needed for a stay of execution by walking directly into an obvious NATO trap in Ukraine. By launching a great big American style invasion of a darling Western quisling with all the carpet bombing, massacres, and war crimes that come with it, Putin has essentially financed an enormous flaming infomercial for the continued necessity of Atlantic supremacy in the face of evil Eurasian barbarians like him, and NATO colonized Europe is fucking buying it. Doubling down on the crumbling imperial institutions that have kept them from fully realizing their true economic potential for decades of globalist austerity. Meanwhile, the Military Industrial Complex is flush with blood money, selling death to Ukraine faster than the bodies can drop and NATO troop levels have exploded ten-fold from 4,000 to 40,000 and growing in just months as Europe has once again become a three-ring-circus of apocalyptic cold war hysteria and the mind-numbing jingoism and casual racism that that brand of madness invites through the front door like a vampire.

=> ↺ AOC Says Bipartisan Bill to Grant Puerto Rico Self-Determination Is “Un Milagro”

=> ↺ Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Engagement With Cuba

• “Serious instability in Cuba will have an immediate impact on the United States,” warns a secret CIA intelligence estimate, citing massive migration, civil strife and “pressures for US or international military intervention.” The dire situation amounts to a “nightmare scenario,” according to a confidential State Department memorandum that calls for a substantive change in US policy to address the looming crisis. “If ever a foreign policy case cries out for dramatic US leadership,” the memo advises, “Cuba today is that case.”

=> ↺ Opinion | ’20 Electoral Votes as Well’: The Mastriano Threat to Democracy Goes Beyond Pennsylvania

• For the last 18 months, a veteran Army intelligence officer, former Green Beret, and lawyer named Ivan Raiklin has traveled the United States and become an internet phenomenon through his obsession with one cause: undoing President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and restoring President Donald Trump to the White House based on false claims of widespread voter fraud.

=> ↺ ‘She Can Win If We Stand With Her’: Sanders to Rally for Cisneros in Texas

• Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to rally for U.S. House candidate Jessica Cisneros on Friday as she vies to unseat Rep. Henry Cuellar, a nine-term Democrat whose opposition to abortion rights, labor legislation, and climate action has made him a top primary target for progressives.

• In a social media post promoting the get-out-the-vote event, Sanders wrote that Tuesday’s runoff contest is crucial because Cisneros, an outspoken supporter of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, “is offering a bold agenda that speaks to the needs of Texas’ 28th District.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Biden’s Disastrous Choice to Exclude Nations From Summit of the Americas

• Last week, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared that he will boycott this year’s Summit of the Americas, scheduled to take place June 6-10 in Los Angeles, if the Biden administration fails to invite the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

=> ↺ Warning Bourdeaux Supports Cuts, Social Security Defenders Back McBath in Georgia Primary

• Defenders of Social Security and Medicare are rallying behind Rep. Lucy McBath as she takes on fellow Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux in Georgia’s 7th Congressional District, a primary contest spurred by the state GOP’s aggressive—and, according to rights groups, illegal—redistricting scheme.

• After her district was redrawn by the state GOP to heavily favor Republicans, McBath opted to run against Bourdeaux in the 7th District in the May 24 Democratic primary instead of staying in the 6th District and facing likely defeat.

=> ↺ ‘This Is a War’ for Democratic Party’s Future, Says Sanders of AIPAC’s Super PAC

• Sen. Bernie Sanders doubled down on his criticism of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its newly created super PAC on Friday, telling The New York Times that the powerful anti-Palestinian rights lobbying group’s foray into Democratic primary politics is threatening the future of the party and of U.S. democracy.

• As Common Dreams reported this week, AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP), is spending heavily in several Democratic primary races to defeat progressives who support Palestinian rights and are critical of the billions of dollars in U.S. funding that goes to the Israeli military annually.

=> ↺ AIPAC’s Dangerous New Antidemocratic Project

• I’ve been an organizer with the Sunrise Movement for two years, leading youth phone banks for inspiring candidates who support bold climate action. This week, our movement is celebrating Summer Lee’s win in Pennsylvania, lamenting some tough losses in North Carolina, and getting ready for Jessica Cisneros’s runoff in Texas. Each of these races is a fight between the majority of us who believe in multiracial democracy and a livable future—and the corporate, antidemocratic forces who, lacking a motivated base and an inspiring message, are spending millions of dollars to stop our rising power.

=> ↺ Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement” Theory Derives from an American Nazi

• The most common version of this whiny idea, imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French far right, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid white workers.

• Notoriously, the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 against the removal of Confederate statues chanted “Jews will not replace us.” The shooter who killed 11 Jewish Americans at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 also espoused the idea of the “great replacement.”

=> ↺ Post Left Whitewashing of Tucker Carlson’s Racism Uses MSNBC Playbook

• In the wake of the Buffalo massacre, where white supremacist Payton Gendron murdered 10 people in a racist attack, Carlson has come under fire for hyping the same Great Replacement conspiracy theory the shooter cited in his manifesto. The two men used nearly identical language to describe the topic, putting Carlson in the hot seat.

=> ↺ Trump: Orbán is a great leader and a real gentleman

=> ↺ Fidesz has been the EU’s orphan for a year, but it still votes with its old party family

• Fidesz MEPs are finally free to vote in the European Parliament independently of the left-leaning People’s Party – says the governing party’s message on how it’s dealing with the split with the centre-right in the EU which happened more than a year ago. We examined how much the Fidesz MEPs’ opinion has changed with this independence, and what similarities can be seen with the votes of their potential new allies. For now, they still vote mostly in harmony with the People’s Party, and they are more likely to vote with the liberals than with the Le Pen-Salvini block.

=> ↺ Inside the opposition’s crushing defeat against Viktor Orbán

=> ↺ Orbán embraces ‘great replacement theory’ in his inaugural speech

• On Monday, Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán gave a policy speech at the Parliament. In his address, he heavily criticized the European Union and echoed the American far-right with thoughts resembling the “great replacement theory”. Orbán said he sees a suicidal attempt across Western Europe, including the “gender madness” and the “great European population exchange”. “They are trying to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations – migrants,” the nationalist leader noted. 

• He accused Brussels of abusing its power, stating that the EU “wants to impose on us things that are bad for us”. The prime minister, who is starting his fourth consecutive term, circled back to the spread of LGBT rights in Europe, saying “We will stand up for the idea that the father is a man and the mother a woman, and we will not accept any proposal from Brussels that would destroy our families.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Trump-Loving Americans Drinking Deep From Orban’s Fascist Well

• Republicans believe that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán has figured out the “secret sauce” to turn a republic into a hard-right oligarchy, and today they’re in Budapest drinking deep from his insights on the fine points of destroying democracy.

=> ↺ CPAC Speakers in Hungary Embrace Plan for “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”

=> ↺ Last Thoughts (Let’s Hope) About Madison Cawthorn

• It’s been said by others, many times this week: The defeat of North Carolina freshman Representative Madison Cawthorn proves that Republican Party leaders can indeed purge extremists in their ranks. But they don’t purge them because they spew white supremacy, or support armed insurrection, or espouse violence—Cawthorn did all of that, as have wing nut House colleagues like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Brent Laudermilk… the list is long. His real sin was claiming, or revealing, that Republican colleagues invited him to orgies and that he saw them doing cocaine.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ No, Twitter Doesn’t Want To ‘Censor’ Anyone, It Just Wants Everyone To Stop Attacking Each Other

• Last month I wrote about how, contrary to the weird narrative, Twitter has actually been among the most aggressive companies fighting for free speech online. While many people criticize it, they are wrong, or just uninformed. Mostly, they think (falsely) that because Twitter doesn’t want some speech that you like on their site, it somehow means they’re against free speech. The reality is a lot more complicated, of course. As we pointed out, former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong’s long thread about content moderation highlighted that people doing content moderation generally aren’t making decisions based on politics, they just want people to stop fighting all the time.

=> ↺ „Action day“ on Soundcloud: Europol also removes right-wing extremist content

• Currently, removal requests to hosting providers only have to be voluntarily complied with, but on 7 June, the regulation on mandatory removal of terrorist online content will come into force. It only applies to jihadist propaganda. The German government is only now introducing an implementation law.

=> ↺ Appeals Court Hands Qualified Immunity To Cops Who Arrested Someone Over Satirical Facebook Posts

• Back in early 2016, Parma, Ohio resident Anthony Novak decided to have a little fun. He created a parody of the Parma Police Department’s Facebook page and began posting obviously satirical announcements, like the following:

=> ↺ If You Think Free Speech Is Defined By Your Ability To Be An Asshole Without Consequence, You Don’t Understand Free Speech (But You Remain An Asshole)

• One of the more frustrating things about the various “debates” regarding “free speech” lately, is how little they are actually about free speech. Quite often, they are actually about people who are quite upset about having to face social consequences for their own free speech. But facing social consequences has always been part of free speech. Indeed, it’s part of the vaunted “marketplace of ideas.” If people think your ideas aren’t worth shit, they may ignore or shun you… or encourage others to do the same.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Israel Killed Reporter Abu Akleh—but US Media Disguised the Facts

• Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known and much-loved Al Jazeera reporter who covered Palestine for two decades, was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper May 11 while documenting an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank.

=> ↺ Israel’s Killing Of Reporter Shireen Abu Akleh Reminds Me Of Mazen

=> ↺ To ‘Have Our Own Media’ Is Key to Political Power, Orbán Tells US Right-Wingers

• Right-wing activists from the U.S. and Europe gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference this week in Budapest, where Hungary’s authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán on Thursday advised them to assert control of mass media in order to defeat progressive forces.

• The call from Prime Minister Orbán—reelected last month for a fourth consecutive term—came during a keynote address on the first of the two-day CPAC gathering, held for the first time in Europe.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Labor Officials Find Amazon Threatened Pro-Union Workers With Wage Cuts

=> ↺ Entering the Season of Death at the Border

• As I drove away, the voices on the podcast—a news show from New York—seemed a million miles away. I’ve been seeing people come out of the desert borderlands for two decades now, and it is startling every time. I couldn’t get that man’s desperate face and lunging limp out of my mind. The season of death in the borderlands had now arrived, as it does every year. The below image of southern Arizona shows where thousands of people’s remains have been found over the last 20 years.

• An hour later, I met up with the pastor Mark Adams at the Frontera de Cristo office in Douglas. He told me that death had been on his mind quite a bit. Frontera de Cristo is a Presbyterian border ministry that focuses on justice, and Adams is the U.S. coordinator. Originally from South Carolina, he has been in Douglas and Agua Prieta since 1998. He told me that over the past year or two several of his close family and friends had died. The deaths were “good” deaths, he said, meaning they were surrounded by loved ones, by friends. He contrasted this with border deaths, gruesome, violent deaths, deaths often without loved ones, without families, without friends, alone.

=> ↺ Historic Enslaved Grave Sites in Louisiana Could Be Disrupted

• In July of 2021, a professional architectural historian named Erin Edwards delivered what she expected would be the near-final draft of a report about a contested swath of sugar cane plantation land along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The painstaking survey, for her bosses at a consulting firm, was supposed to identify harms to historic sites so that developers can prevent or minimize them.

=> ↺ ‘Arbitrary, Racist, and Unfair’: Judge Blocks Biden From Ending Title 42

• Immigrant rights advocates on Friday denounced a federal judge’s injunction blocking the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden from lifting Title 42, a Trump-era public health order that both presidents have invoked to deport around two million asylum-seekers under the pretext of the Covid-19 pandemic.

• “The decision undermines the Biden administration’s efforts to implement what the vast majority of Americans support—a fair, humane, and orderly immigration system.”

=> ↺ Oklahoma GOP Passes Anti-Abortion Bill That Bans Procedure at Fertilization

=> ↺ Rep. Lucy McBath Warns Anti-Abortion Laws May Treat Miscarriage as Manslaughter

=> ↺ After Which Failed Pregnancy Should I Have Been Imprisoned? Rep. Lucy McBath on Reproductive Rights

• During a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Democratic Congressmember Lucy McBath of Georgia shared her personal story about accessing reproductive care after experiencing a stillbirth. In doing so, she pointed out how anti-abortion politicians and legislators fail to see the medical necessity of abortion in instances such as hers. “We can be the nation that rolls back the clock, that rolls back the rights of women, and that strips them of their very liberty. Or we can be the nation of choice — the nation where every woman can make her own choice,” says McBath.

=> ↺ Where are the Men? No More Bystander Boys in the Post-Roe Era

• As a sportswriter, my work over these decades often brought me into a universe of male entitlement and the sort of posturing I thought of as faux masculinity. Even in that chest-beating environment, I was struck by the absence in abortion stories of what in another time would have been called manliness. What happened to that mostly storybook ideal of the brave, modest, responsible, big-hearted protector? I figured out early on not to waste time searching for him among football quarterbacks or baseball coaches, or even cops and Army officers. Much, much later, I found more people with the right stuff — that “manly” ideal — among single mothers and feminist lawyers.

• As it happened, there weren’t a lot of male heroes during the women’s movement of the 1970s or even the more recent #MeToo upsurge. Most men, except for the power boys who treated everyone else as girls, were too fearful or starstruck to intervene. The most grotesque models were, of course, the athletes who stood by silently while their teammates raped stoned or drunken women.

=> ↺ Amy Littlefield on Oklahoma’s New Total Abortion Ban & the Long Fight Ahead After Roe Falls

• After a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion revealed the intention to overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion has increasingly become a state issue, with conservative states criminalizing the procedure. Oklahoma approved a bill on Thursday that outlaws almost all abortions beginning at fertilization. The measure is modeled after a Texas ban that encourages private citizens to sue abortion providers and people who assist in abortions. The reproductive justice movement now faces not only these intense legal hurdles but also severe underfunding and an overreliance on billionaire-backed foundations that will not be sustainable for very long, warns Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation.

=> ↺ There’s No Place for Bystanders in the Coming Abortion Battle

• For 50 years now, people have told desperate, heart-breaking stories about what it was like to search for an abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade. These were invariably narratives of women in crisis. They sometimes involved brief discussions about economic inequality, police-state intrigue, and unwanted children, but for the most part men were invisible in them, missing in action. Where were they? And where are they now that a wall of fundamental rights seems to be crumbling away not just for women, but for all of us? This is another example of what I used to call the Bystander Boys.

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s Time to Unpack This Right-Wing Court

• The U.S. Supreme Court has been packed with right-wingers in contradiction of constitutional norms, majority opinion and any regard for honest and fair play. It has lost all pretensions of nonpartisanship or respect for judicial independence. Contrary to Chief Justice John Roberts’ description of justices as “neutral umpires calling balls and strikes” the court majority are now hard-core right-wing politicians wearing bright red shirts under their black robes.

=> ↺ Polling on Abortion Opinion Misses How Much Would Be Tossed Out With Roe

• Politico on May 2 released Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft abortion position, signed by four additional justices, that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

=> ↺ Noam Chomsky: The Supreme Court Is Wielding Illegitimate Authority in the US

=> ↺ Ginni Thomas Pressed Arizona Lawmakers to Reverse Biden’s 2020 Win: Report

• Democracy defenders expressed anger and consternation Friday after The Washington Post revealed that Ginni Thomas—the right-wing activist and wife of Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—pushed Arizona state lawmakers to invoke a dubious legal theory advocated by her husband in order to help then-President Donald Trump reverse his 2020 presidential election loss.

• “The conflict of interest between Ginni and Clarence Thomas has never been greater.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ We Need a Functional FCC

• The FCC regulates the airwaves, including the corporations that own your local TV and radio stations. And it plays an important role in making sure the Internet is open, free, secure, and accessible to all — or not.

• The FCC is currently deadlocked with four members. Without a fifth, the agency is largely nonfunctional —which is just peachy for the corporations it’s meant to regulate.

=> ↺ Why Antenna Didn’t Have Direct Publishing Before

• The second one… What do I mean by “DOS reflection attack”? Simply put that someone would spam the same feed URL to Antenna over and over again to cause Antenna to perform a Denial of Service attack on the server that hosts the feed.

• After long experience running Antenna I’ve concluded that this sort of attack is unfeasible to perform, at least on my installation. Even more so since I moved the service to a new server. It comes down to the sort of protection that can’t be circumvented without breaking the laws of physics. Antenna runs on hardware so weak that there’s a very very high probability that it will choke under the barrage of submissions long before the intended target is overloaded.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Baby Formula Maker Chose Shareholders Over Safety Amid Deadly Bacterial Outbreak

=> ↺ Documents Show Baby Formula Maker Enriched Shareholders Amid Deadly Bacteria Outbreak

• Financial documents and whistleblower testimony spotlighted by The Guardian on Friday show that the U.S.-based baby formula producer Abbott used the massive windfall profits it accumulated between 2019 and 2021 to enrich shareholders, even amid a deadly bacteria outbreak that has triggered nationwide outrage and contributed to a formula shortage.

• “Abbott detected bacteria eight times as its net profits soared by 94% between 2019 and 2021,” The Guardian’s Tom Perkins reported. “And just as its tainted formula allegedly began sickening a number of babies, with two deaths reported, the company increased dividends to shareholders by over 25% while announcing a stock buyback program worth $5 billion.”

=> ↺ Omar Leads Charge Against Baby Formula Monopolies Amid US Shortage

• Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and 25 other House Democrats on Friday called for a federal probe of the nation’s concentrated baby formula industry amid a national shortage that has prompted emergency action from lawmakers and the White House.

• “We are writing to urge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to work with relevant federal agencies to investigate the U.S. baby formula industry and study any unfair or unsustainable practices, like deceptive marketing, price gouging, and stock buybacks, that may be weakening our nutritional formula supply and ultimately harming our constituents,” states the Democrats’ letter to the agency’s chair, Lina Khan.

Copyrights

=> ↺ U.S. Megaupload Judge Was Replaced Due to Disney Stake, Dotcom Says

• Following the civil lawsuits against Megaupload in the US, the criminal case has been reassigned to a new judge as well. According to Kim Dotcom, District Court Judge Liam O’Grady was replaced after the defense complained about his financial ties to Disney, which is listed as a victim of Megaupload’s alleged crimes.

=> ↺ BREIN Seizes Crypto and Cash from Twice-Caught Pirate IPTV Seller

• A seller of pirate IPTV services who was tracked down last year and agreed to end his business has been caught again. Anti-piracy group BREIN says it seized cash and cryptocurrency worth 25,000 euros and if the man offends again, he will face a €5,000 penalty for each new subscription sold.

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