Fossil Fuel Companies Build Structures To Hide Methane Flaring From Satellites - CleanTechnica https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/03/fossil-fuel-companies-build-structures-to-hide-methane-flaring-from-satellites/
Tags: #dandelíon
via dandelion* client (Source)
Via Ben Wikler:
Absorb this graph—but note that the final year is 2018, the year of Trump’s tax cuts. That’s #Trump’s big goal, always has been: to rip off working people and hand huge bags of cash to the ultra-wealthy, like himself and his Mar-a-Lago buddies.
Rutger Bregman:
Stunning graph: the plummeting tax rates of the richest Americans. For the first time in history, billionaires have a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans.
'Real men wear diapers: ' Trump supporters spotted in nappies at rallies
He then read out posts from [Michael] Cohen. “This one says, oh my, S**tzInPantz," Blanche said, entering a screenshot of the post into the court record.
As a result, the official court stenographer typed the phrase "s**** in pants” into the court record.
https://www.indy100.com/politics/trump/trump-supporters-wearing-diapers
backup: https://archive.ph/hviy0
pics from elsewhere
Former election official fined for obtaining fake military ballots
Zapata served as deputy director at the Milwaukee Election Commission in October 2022 when she used her work-issued laptop to obtain three military absentee ballots using fake names and Social Security numbers, according to a criminal complaint. She sent the ballots to Republican state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, an election conspiracy theorist, two weeks before the state’s gubernatorial and legislative elections.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-election-official-fined-obtaining-005810757.html
Why are billionaires scared of Brazil’s plan to hit them with a global tax? Because it makes perfect sense | The super-rich | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/02/brazil-global-tax-billionaires-perfect-sense
Tags: #dandelíon
via dandelion* client (Source)
Government defeated in High Court over climate plans https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68947242
As a lifelong lover of the web, it's hard not to feel a little hopeless right now.
Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.
Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”. Within those enclosures, the character limits, neutered subset of web functionality, and constant push to satisfy the enigmatic desires of an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform encourage sameness, vapid engagement farming, and rage bait while stifling creativity.
Newspapers, whose evolution towards online models once stoked optimism for more accessible and dynamic journalism that could lead to a more informed and democratically engaged citizenry, have become luxury goods as aggressive paywalls and expensive subscription models are increasingly deployed by the hedge funds and other profit-hungry entities that control these papers. Some use the excuse that they're trying to protect their journalism from the unsanctioned scraping by companies training ever-hungrier artificial intelligence models. Yet those same media outlets hasten their own demise with wave after wave of layoffs, or by chasing harebrained schemes like churning out tedious clickbait or their own AI-generated soup even as their executives continue to cash huge checks.
Many websites now require one to steel themselves for battle against the advertisements and trackers and GDPR cookie consent popups and AI-powered chatbot windows that interrupt you to offer to helpfully bungle whatever you ask of them. AdBlock is no longer optional, and even with it, trackers and advertisements slither through the cracks. Browsing the web brings with it the ever-present feeling that you're being watched — your activities and preferences and habits all being logged and funneled into a giant vat of horrifying data soup, all just to help more companies serve you more of these intrusive ads that you must endlessly swat away as you try to find whatever it was you were looking for.
It is tempting, amid all of this decay, to yearn for the good old days.
Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/paywall-problems-media-trust-democracy/678032/
I learned of this article on Techdirt. I keep JavaScript off by default, so I have no trouble reading this. See if you do.
It almost feels like a publicity stunt. They put an article called "Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls" behind a paywall. It's like performance art. I think it's very funny.
Here's a bit of the Atlantic article.
Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.
See also "The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free" at https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/
#the-atlantic #paywalls #democracy #free-journalism #election #funny #media #news #journalism
Most of the federal debt is due to Bush and Trump tax cuts for the rich
Robert Reich nails it as usual.
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/what-to-say-to-a-republican-who-complains
In Coastal British Columbia, the Haida Get Their Land Back
Twenty years ago, Geoff Plant, the then attorney general of British Columbia, made an offer to the Haida Nation. Many West Coast First Nations, including the Haida, had never signed treaties with the Canadian government ceding their traditional lands or resources, and Plant was trying to revive the faltering process of treaty making. He wanted to smooth over relations with Indigenous peoples, but he also wanted to help the province extract more resources from Indigenous lands. To entice the Haida—a nation known throughout Canada for its political savviness and resolve—he had what he thought was a bold bargaining chip.
Like many other officials, Plant viewed the BC government as the clear landlord of provincial lands, including those of the Haida Gwaii archipelago—10,000 square kilometers of forested islands located roughly 650 kilometers northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Haida’s home for at least the past 13,000 years.
So here was Plant’s pitch: the BC government would give the Haida control of 20 percent of their lands, but that would require the nation dropping a title case it had recently filed with the BC Supreme Court. Title refers to the inherent right to own and manage Indigenous territories based on traditional use and occupation. The Haida maintained that their territory included all of the land area in the archipelago, as well as the surrounding airspace, seabed, and marine waters.
The Haida saw Plant’s offer to the door.
“Why would we give up 80 percent of our land to get 20?” said Gidansda (Guujaaw), the then president of the Council of the Haida Nation, to media at the time. “This case is about respect for the Earth and each other. It is about culture, and it is about life.”
The Haida’s steadfastness paid off. Although Haida leaders have kept a potential court case in their back pocket all these years for leverage, they ultimately haven’t needed it. In April 2024, the Haida Nation and the province of British Columbia announced the Gaayhllxid/Gíihlagalgang “Rising Tide” Haida Title Lands Agreement. In it, the BC government formally recognizes Haida ownership of all the lands of Haida Gwaii. This is the first time in Canadian history that the colonial government has recognized Indigenous title across an entire terrestrial territory, and it’s the first time this kind of recognition has occurred outside of the courts. Experts say it marks a new path toward Indigenous reconciliation.
Via Fix the News
