 01 December 19 We Have Wonderful Sustainers, We Just Need a Few More of Them
This was one difficult fundraiser we just attempted to complete. Try as we might it amounted to one of the worst fundraiser in a long time.
That does not mean a lot of wonderful sustainers did not step up for RSN. Many did. We are grateful and inspired.
Time to take a short break and recover a bit.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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01 December 19
Bezos Wants Us to Build Space Colonies - We Just Want Him to Leave the Planet
Paris Marx, Jacobin
Marx writes: "For Bezos, our future is a series of free-floating space colonies called O'Neill cylinders in close proximity to Earth. This proximity, he argues, will help the planet to avoid exceeding its capacity as the population swells into the trillions. Such a development, argues Bezos, will allow us to produce thousands of 'Mozarts and Einsteins.' But what about everyone else?"
Paris Marx, Jacobin
Marx writes: "For Bezos, our future is a series of free-floating space colonies called O'Neill cylinders in close proximity to Earth. This proximity, he argues, will help the planet to avoid exceeding its capacity as the population swells into the trillions. Such a development, argues Bezos, will allow us to produce thousands of 'Mozarts and Einsteins.' But what about everyone else?"
EXCERPTS:
Hero Complex
The richest man in the world with an intent to “save the Earth,” Bezos has claimed that space travel is “the only way” he can see to effectively deploy his enormous wealth — a statement he saw fit to make while simultaneously working to defeat a small tax increase in Seattle that would have bolstered programs to help the city’s soaring homeless population.
The quest for space habitats is essential, Bezos argues, because we’re destroying the planet. He says this as he nonetheless courts the oil and gas industry. Amazon workers have demanded their boss take stronger measures to address the company’s environmental footprint, but even his renewed pledge doesn’t go far enough. Its inaction is of course motivated by the logic of profit maximization — at the expense of planetary destruction. This is the same imperative that has driven Bezos to look to the stars.
[Niander Wallace of Blade runner] Wallace is frustrated that humans can no longer be treated as disposable, but Bezos has no such limitation. He has a net worth in excess of $100 billion because he’s been able to squeeze Amazon workers to the bone, and we lack the collective impetus to boycott the digital platform to force the company to improve its working conditions. Convenience is our highest value.
Bezos has been working on automating aspects of Amazon’s fulfillment process, but in the meantime, he’s succeeded at turning human workers into virtual robots who have almost no autonomy and are treated as disposable inputs from which to extract labor at the lowest possible cost. He then discards them once they’re spent.
Handheld scanners double as instruments of surveillance, with workers’ every movement timed, including bathroom breaks. Conditions are dire, with the company opting to have medics on standby rather than fit warehouses with air conditioning systems. With all the scanning and walking on concrete floors, injuries are common. Who needs Replicants when you can grind down the working class in the pursuit of your grand vision?
'Impeach.' (photo: Anna Moneymaker/NYT)
America's Descent Into Legal Nihilism
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Lithwick writes: "The thing that concerns me greatly these days is simple: The president seems to have no intention of leaving office, and we seem to have no meaningful plan to address that."
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Lithwick writes: "The thing that concerns me greatly these days is simple: The president seems to have no intention of leaving office, and we seem to have no meaningful plan to address that."
EXCERPT:
The growing hysteria about imaginary past Ukrainian election interference, a ludicrous impeachment defense, will be used to deflect from the emphatically certain future Russian election interference (as well as interference from other nations that reasonably want in on the fun). The Mitch McConnell–dominated Senate has declined to do anything to protect against that certainty and instead is building a judiciary that will permit it. Please consider, as well, that the geniuses among us who claim that we should ignore Trump’s effort to conscript Ukraine into working on his 2020 presidential run, and just defeat him roundly at the polls, are forgetting that Donald Trump’s entire raison d’être, his past and future destiny, is to manipulate presidential elections in ways that preclude his round defeat at the polls. That is why he worked—as we now know—with Roger Stone to distort the outcome of the 2016 elections; it is also why he withheld almost $400 million in appropriated aid to Ukraine this summer. Insisting that we will let the voters decide this matter in a free and fair election in 2020 has to be the Lucy-football-est move ever, in a three-year festival of Lucy-footballing.
There’s more. Donald Trump does not necessarily intend to leave office even if he loses the 2020 presidential election. He jokes about it constantly. He never agreed that he would concede if he lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016, remember. His claims about election and voter fraud are not just ego food about his popular vote numbers in 2016, but also setup for 2020. The anonymous author of a new Trump book says as much. It’s taken a long time to even consider this possibility openly. And just as we soothed ourselves that the military would be the keystone to his removal if it came right down to that, the president has redefined the U.S. military as an appendage of his own desires. At his Florida rally on Tuesday night, Trump dismissed any resistance to his actions in pardoning service members accused of war crimes as emanating from “the deep state.” He reportedly wants these new military heroes he is elevating to join him on the campaign trail. And just as he has falsely dismissed honorable career professionals in the foreign service as “deep staters” and “Never Trumpers,” he will now refuse to hear from anyone in the military who argues for internal honor codes and discipline as the same.
Margaret Atwood. (photo: Reuters)
Margaret Atwood | The Life Lessons of "Little Lulu"
Margaret Atwood, The New Yorker
Atwood writes: "I grew up in the golden age of comics: the nineteen-forties, and most particularly, the five years immediately after the end of the Second World War. Comics were one of the main sources of entertainment for children then: there was not yet much television, and, although there were Saturday matinées, most films were for adults."
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Margaret Atwood, The New Yorker
Atwood writes: "I grew up in the golden age of comics: the nineteen-forties, and most particularly, the five years immediately after the end of the Second World War. Comics were one of the main sources of entertainment for children then: there was not yet much television, and, although there were Saturday matinées, most films were for adults."
READ MORE
Fingerprints. (photo: Mark Pernice/The Intercept)
Fingerprint Analysis Is High Stakes Work - but It Doesn't Take Much to Qualify as an Expert
Jordan Smith, The Intercept
Smith writes: "Brendan Max and two of his colleagues in the Cook County, Illinois, public defender's office got some good news and some bad news in the spring of 2018. Actually, it was the same news: The three lawyers had nearly aced a proficiency test designed for fingerprint examiners."
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Jordan Smith, The Intercept
Smith writes: "Brendan Max and two of his colleagues in the Cook County, Illinois, public defender's office got some good news and some bad news in the spring of 2018. Actually, it was the same news: The three lawyers had nearly aced a proficiency test designed for fingerprint examiners."
READ MORE
Jennifer and Gordon White Bull at home in White Swan, South Dakota. Their basement was submerged in water after a blizzard and the putrid smell made it hard to breathe. (photo: Amber Bracken/The Guardian)
Flooding Brings Misery to a Struggling Community
Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "These climate catastrophes have triggered three federal major disaster declarations for the state, but help has been slow to arrive to this tribal community where severe flooding has compounded longstanding social and economic inequalities by wrecking jobs, homes, and infrastructure."
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Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "These climate catastrophes have triggered three federal major disaster declarations for the state, but help has been slow to arrive to this tribal community where severe flooding has compounded longstanding social and economic inequalities by wrecking jobs, homes, and infrastructure."
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Maltese businessman Yorgen Fenech, who was arrested in connection with an investigation into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, leaves the Courts of Justice in Valletta, Malta, November 29, 2019. (photo: Yara Nardi/Reuters)
Maltese Tycoon Fenech Charged With Complicity to Murder in Journalist Case
Stephen Grey and Chris Scicluna, Reuters
Excerpt: "One of Malta's wealthiest men, Yorgen Fenech, was charged in a Valletta court on Saturday with complicity to murder in the car bomb killing of anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017."
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Stephen Grey and Chris Scicluna, Reuters
Excerpt: "One of Malta's wealthiest men, Yorgen Fenech, was charged in a Valletta court on Saturday with complicity to murder in the car bomb killing of anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017."
READ MORE
California wildfires. (photo: AP)
Warming Toll: 1 Degree Hotter, Trillions of Tons of Ice Gone
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
Borenstein writes: "Since leaders first started talking about tackling the problem of climate change, the world has spewed more heat-trapping gases, gotten hotter and suffered hundreds of extreme weather disasters. Fires have burned, ice has melted and seas have grown."
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Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
Borenstein writes: "Since leaders first started talking about tackling the problem of climate change, the world has spewed more heat-trapping gases, gotten hotter and suffered hundreds of extreme weather disasters. Fires have burned, ice has melted and seas have grown."
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