● 06.09.22

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● Links 09/06/2022: Python In The Web Browser and Politics

Posted in News Roundup at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

Python

• A chainsaw can make short work of clearing out the back forty. It can also make a good horror movie. So while some people will say we don’t need another tool to allow more malicious scripting in the browser, we also know that, like any tool, you can use it or abuse it. That tool? PyScript, which is, of course, Python in the browser.

Leftovers

• The quality of any measurement can only be as good as the instrument used to gather it, and for acoustic measurements, finding a good enough instrument can be surprisingly difficult. Commonly available microphones can be of good quality, but since they are invariably designed for speech or music, they need not have the flat or wide enough response and low noise figure demanded of an instrumentation microphone.

• In the summer of 2010, when reality programming was still an incipient subgenre of television, regularly mocked as fatuous and crude, MTV aired the series finale of The Hills. Plagued throughout its run by accusations of artifice, The Hills, along with The Real World, The Simple Life, and The Osbournes, was nevertheless a chief architect of the genre’s popularity, the forerunner of a particular sort of aspirational programming in which attractive young adults jettisoned their cushy roots (in this case, Laguna Beach, Calif.,) to pursue dream careers in fashion, or something like it, in a big city (in this case, Los Angeles). After a four-year run, the series ended with what then qualified as a provocation. Decamping to Europe from her native California in search of a “new beginning,” Kristin Cavallari bids adieu to her on-again, off-again boyfriend Brody Jenner as she packs her luggage into a car headed for LAX. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he tells her. An acoustic version of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” swells in the background, and Brody looks on wistfully as the car takes off, the Hollywood sign looming large behind his signature black trucker hat. Then the camera pans back, the sign starts to move, the car turns around. And as Kristin gets back out, hugging Brody as one would a scene partner, it’s revealed that the whole thing was shot on a soundstage.

• The French Revolution, between 1889 and 1899, I remember even less about. Head cheeses rolled.  Marie Antoinette. Guy O Tines went on to play for Les Habs. I’m told that bedlam broke out at the Bastille when it was discovered that the Marquis de Sade — who, head in the dungeon, wrote prolifically about the “lust in his heart” — had been transferred to another asylum. All the big smokes had something nice to say about de Sade — Michel Foucault, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag. Michel Onfray, however, was au contraire, mon frere, saying, in Wikipedia, that “it is intellectually bizarre to make Sade a hero…” Robespierre. Antonin Artaud played Marat in the bath tub scene of a Theater of Cruelty production. My French teacher at junior high was surely part of the New Wave, a Truffault truffle worth snuffling after, and I snuffled, smitten witten her every moving curvicature, as she put Françoise Hardy’s “Tous les garçons et les filles” on the record player — even the scratches were sexy. I finally came across that French teacher again in her new form, Feist, singing “1234.” Personally, I think it’s about time we stormed the Bastards who steal. Egalite! Fraternite! Liberte!™.

• All of this is prelude, of course — to something. I was recently watching the French film, Delicious (2021). That must be it. I really enjoyed it and I’m going to tell you why. The cast, though unknown to me because I don’t watch a lot of French films these days, was delightful. It was directed and co-written by Éric Besnard, perhaps known in the West for his work in the Jason Statham vehicle, Wrath of Man (2021)  Delicious stars Grégory Gadebois as chef Pierre Manceron who starred as Charlie in a French version of Flowers of Algernon (“They also serve who only sweep and buff,” was the poster slogan, as I translated it.); Isabelle Carré as Louise, his kitchen side kick and inspiration; Benjamin Lavernhe (The French Dispatch, 2021) as Le duc de Chamfort, gasbag and flaming asshole and one-man reason for a spanking good revolution. It’s a fine tension set. They get on each other’s nerves and we feast on it. Get it?

• Personal head-up displays are a technology whose time ought by now to have come, but which notwithstanding attempts such as the Google Glass, have steadfastly refused to catch on. There’s an intriguing possibility in [Basel Saleh]’s CaptionIt project though, a head-up display that provides captions for everyday situations.

• Your [Bornhack] plans include leaving lemons in patterns as an info display. Your squirrel feeder needs to only dispense nuts when the squirrels deserve it. As promised last week, an intro to gating, feeding, and moving bulk material.

• In any era, the story of electronics has very much been about figuring out how to make something happen with what’s available at the time. And as is often the case, the most interesting developments come from occasions when needs exceed what’s available. That’s when real innovation takes place, even if circumstances conspire to keep the innovation from ever taking hold in the marketplace.

• The story is very rushed, and the small number of locations is a shame, but it still manages to reach a satisfying conclusion. So I’m glad I picked it up again, and saw it thru after many years of dropping it. There aren’t many narrative RPG adventures out there, despite how well received they usually are. Torment: Tides of Numenera is probably my favorite out of all the ones I’ve played so far.

Hardware

• Induction cook tops are among the most efficient ways of cooking in the home that are commercially available to the average person. Since the cook surface uses magnetic fields to generate heat in the cookware itself, there is essentially no heat wasted. There are some other perks too, such as faster cooking times and more fine control, not to mention that it’s possible to build your own induction stove. All you need is some iron, wire, and a power source, and you can have something like this homemade induction cooker.

• Last time we looked in on Injekto — a homemade plastic injection machine — it was at version 1.0. A recent video from the team that you can see below shows version 2 which is much improved and can work with 3D printed molds. Injection molding takes a lot of pressure and the machine certainly looks stout with lots of machined aluminum.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• In July 2021, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced to fanfare that it had just finished raising $2 billion in donations, a single-fiscal-year record for the nation’s largest health care charity. “Solving pediatric cancer is a global problem — a multi-trillion, multi-year problem,” Rick Shadyac, chief executive of St. Jude’s fundraising arm, told the Associated Press at the time. “The way we look at it is: If not St. Jude, then who?”

• Financial disclosures newly released by St. Jude, however, show $886 million of the hospital’s record $2 billion-plus in revenues last fiscal year went unspent. Those surplus dollars instead flowed to the hospital’s reserve fund, which helped it grow to $7.6 billion by the end of June 2021. That’s enough money to run St. Jude’s 77-bed hospital in Memphis at last year’s levels for the next five years without a single additional donation.

• With insulin prices in the United States so astronomical that experts have accused the federal government and pharmaceutical industry of violating human rights, California is exploring a plan to produce its own generic version of the lifesaving medicine and make it accessible to millions of people with diabetes.

• “Everyone who cares about the future of U.S. domestic policy should pay attention to this effort in California to build a public option for prescription drug manufacturing,” Steph Sterling, vice president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, said Tuesday.

• Furthermore, Diablo’s radioactive plumes could contaminate the drinking water that flows from the Sierra Mountains through the Central Valley and into cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, which would lead to a mass migration out of California.

• Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s nuclear plant, located near Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, is surrounded by a confluence of 13 known fault lines on the seismically active “Pacific Ring of Fire” earthquake and tsunami zone.

• The vote follows a three-day strike in Hawaii. In May, Hawaiian psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors walked picket lines on Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island to protest Kaiser’s severe understaffing at clinics and medical facilities. Staffing, patient loads, working conditions, these issues are the same right throughout the Kaiser’s vast system. The wealthy and powerful corporation that self-advertises as non-profit and patient centered cynically refuses to meet minimal staffing requirements (mandated by state regulations and the law) while enforcing working conditions that demoralize clinicians and place mental health patients in danger (often severe, even fatal)– all in the name of the bottom line.

• These hospital strikes are the workers’ fightback; they represent a sort of trench warfare, front lines in a war of attrition, with Californians’ lives and livelihoods at stake.

• Ellen Brown uses the example of dachas as a model for what Americans can do in their backyards.

Proprietary

• Github announced recently that is is “sunsetting” Atom. Can we please just talk normally and speak plainly? Instead of saying “sunsetting”, call it what it is: discontinuing. Is it really so hard to say that they are “discontinuing Atom”?

• [...]

• “Compelling update experience.” That was a phrase that a Microsoft employee once used to talk about Windows 11 updates. I have never installed Windows 10 or 11 on my machines, but from what I have heard, the update experience can best be desribed as a clusterf*ck. Well, I guess it is compelling in the sense that Microsoft is going to try to forcefeed the updates down your throat no matter what. Or compelling in the sense that it makes you feel like throwing your computer out the window. It is certainly not compelling in the sense that it is a joyful experience.

• Also, can we please stop over-using superlatives? This is not Microsoft-specific thing, this is more of a social media thing. It is a practise that needs to stop. Not everything is at an extreme end of experience. Use words that reflect the accuracy of the content. It’s not an “awesome” cake, it’s a “delicious” cake. It is a sign of emotional immaturity to express all experiences in hyperbolic terms.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• But leaving your browser in charge of your passwords is far from safe. Anyone who accesses your device can easily check your credentials and steal them to access your sensitive accounts. Saving your passwords also puts them at risk of online data leaks should your browser servers become compromised.

• Work has been alright. My boss’ boss has set up all of these metrics to measure our performance, which I’m not a huge fan of. I understand why, I guess I don’t like it because it can’t track everything we do.

• The Commission’s proposal would compel a broad range of technology companies to scan and analyze their users’ messages, in the name of fighting crimes against children. Email, texts, social media messages, and DMs could all be subject to plain-text access and scanning. It could eviscerate end-to-end encryption by installing client-side scanning on our devices.

• Our letter explains the many ways that this EU scanning regulation puts us all at risk. Lawyers, journalists, human rights workers, political dissidents, and oppressed minorities—the people who need secure communications the most—will be the most affected. This also harms abused and at-risk children, who need to securely communicate with trusted adults to seek help.

• These vulnerable people will be subject to constant law enforcement scans in the EU. Beyond the EU’s borders, it could be even worse. Once these special access systems are built, we can be sure that more authoritarian countries will demand the same ability to read our messages.

• These student spyware apps promise scalable surveillance-as-a-service. The lure of “scalability” is a well-documented source of risk to marginalized users, whose needs for individualized consideration are overshadowed by the prospect of building mass-scale, one-size-fits-all “solutions” to social problems. The problems of scale are dangerously exacerbated by laws that disparately impact marginalized communities.

• Today, Americans face an unprecedented, record-breaking wave of legislation targeting transgender youth: from sports bans, to speech and literature bans, to the criminalization of life-saving healthcare, all on top of the widespread practices of locker-room- and bathroom-bans.

• And it’s not just trans kids in the crosshairs: Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court precedent that protects the right to have an abortion, is likely about to be overturned.

Defence/Aggression

• The delivery to the government in Chişinău is being financed by Germany. The project is headed by an ousted Berlin police chief.

• Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a scholar of surpassing brilliance. His 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin chronicles in harrowing detail the de facto collaboration of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that resulted in the murder of millions of innocents. On any bookshelf reserved for accounts that reveal essential truths of our past, Bloodlands deserves a place of honor. It’s a towering achievement.

• Zeneta Everhart, whose 21-year-old son was shot in the neck and back during a racist massacre in Buffalo last month, told members of Congress at a House hearing Wednesday that if listening to her testimony doesn’t compel them to take action against gun violence, they should visit her home to help “clean Zaire’s wounds so that you may see up close the damage that has been caused.”

• “To the lawmakers who feel that we do not need stricter gun laws, let me paint a picture for you: My son, Zaire, has a hole in the right side of his neck, two on his back, and another on his left leg, caused by an exploding bullet from an AR-15,” said Everhart, fighting back tears.

• More than hundred days of Moscow waging war against Ukraine has changed the lives of many Russians. Those opposed to Russia’s full-scale invasion initially took to the streets. When the authorities passed criminal penalties for “discrediting” the Russian army, they started taking part in the greater anti-war movement. Many were forced to leave the country. Others went to rallies in support of the “special operation” and parroted the arguments put forth in Russian propaganda about “denazifying” Ukraine. What has changed in Russian society during the war so far? How are Russians getting along with each other, and who is really supporting the “special operation”? Meduza posed these and other questions to sociologist Alexei Titkov.

• The reported annihilation of Russia’s 35th Combined Arms Army is one of the most resonant stories to emerge from the front lines in the Donbas in recent days. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak shared the news on June 4, saying that the 35th Army had been “destroyed” during clashes with Ukraine’s Armed Forces near Izyum. Meduza’s own news update cited Yermak’s claim, albeit with the disclaimer that our journalists could not immediately verify this official statement. Upon further verification, Meduza traced these reports back to their actual original source — a LiveJournal post by a Russian military blogger who is currently serving in the “Luhansk People’s Militia.” The post, which provoked controversy among pro-Kremlin military bloggers and has since been removed, doesn’t explicitly say that the entire 35th Army was obliterated. Meduza breaks down how a dubious blog post turned into a story reported around the world.

• On May 24, 2022, a 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex.

• U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday took aim at lax gun control laws in mostly Republican-run states and the firearm industry lobby, which she accused of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in “blood money” to obstruct reforms supported by most Americans.

• “Let’s talk about one thing more important to lobbyists and the gun industry than children… Let’s talk about profit.”

• A fourth-grader from Uvalde, Texas who survived the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School last month was among those who gave powerful eye-witness testimony Wednesday at a House hearing on gun violence.

• “And then he shot some of my classmates.”

• A local pediatrician who rushed to Uvalde Memorial Hospital after the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Texas last month testified Wednesday during a congressional hearing on gun violence.

• “The thing I can’t figure out is whether our politicians are failing us out of stubbornness, passivity, or both.”

• “In the reel that keeps scrolling across my memories, she turns her head and smiles back at us to acknowledge my promise—and then we left.”

• Kimberly Rubio on Wednesday recounted to members of Congress her last moments with her daughter Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio before the 10-year-old was killed last month in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas that also left 18 other children and two teachers dead.

• Thirty-four American sailors were killed and 171 were wounded, many with lifelong burns and traumas that lingered for years.

• In a shameful response, the US Government and the Pentagon colluded in perhaps the most disgraceful coverup involving the brutal murder of American servicemen.

• We want to thank everyone who showed up on social media and voiced their concern about this dangerous and (for now) thwarted plan. We also appreciate members of Axon’s ethics board for taking a stand against the project, and then resigning when it looked as if Axon was going to ignore their recommendation.

• In an era where police are so unaccountable and have so many different revenue streams for acquiring invasive technology, it’s good to remind ourselves that there is another pressure point: the companies that make and profit off of this technology. We will keep up the pressure and we hope you’ll continue to fight with us.

• With gun massacres (counted as four or more killings) coming one after another, here are statistics on gun murders in the US (in 2020) as reported by the Pew Research Center:

• A comparison of homicides compiled from the National Vital Statistics System is telling…

• The latest developments, including: – Ian Bremmer’s analysis on the latest in Ukraine – Russia consolidating control in Donbas – The long war benefits Russia – Divisions in Europe emerging – Peace talks versus victory on the battlefield – Russia’s information war in Africa, Latin America, etc. – Russia targeting BRICS countries with its narratives

• By Éric Denécé / Cf2R.org Alongside the continuation of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine, the media war continues to be in full swing and those who are at the origin of it – as well a…

• It’s time to talk about what an American fascist government would look like. The word “fascism” gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out.

• Gun buyers behave in ways that suggest they logically anticipate that lawmakers will respond to a mass shooting by making it harder to buy a gun. After all, when consumer products are found to be a danger to humans, they are often regulated.

• The federal government routinely recalls dangerous products—such as a line of children’s bunk beds whose defective ladder resulted in the death of a 2-year-old child from Ohio. In that case, nearly 40,000 units sold to the public were recalled. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group has a lengthy list of toys that the federal government has recalled that have posed choking hazards for kids.

• The shooters’ young age was not an aberration. The average age of school shooters is 18, when tracking incidents since 1966.

• The relatively young age of most mass shooters has ignited conversations about the minimum legal age for purchasing firearms.

• Just two weeks days before the latest massacre in Texas of 19 school kids, Tom Friedman, a star columnist of the New York Times, was invited to have lunch with President Biden at the White House. For a journalist to have this kind of exclusive lunch meeting with the chief executive is a very big deal anywhere in the world. The reason, you can safely assume, was that Biden wanted to share some intimate thoughts with Friedman whom he had known for a long time. Obviously, Americans as well as the rest of the world were eagerly waiting to get a glimpse of Biden’s innermost feelings at a time when America itself is becoming increasingly restive and ungovernable.

• Unfortunately, though, the entire meeting was off-the-record and Friedman couldn’t share with his readers about what he heard from the president.

• Thanks to an old Supreme Court case, Uvalde parents will have a hard time convincing courts to hold police liable for failing to protect their kids.

Environment

Energy

• During the crypto, NFT, and “web3” era there’s been no limit of hype regarding the (largely money making) potential of the ever-evolving internet. Less cared about during the metaverse hype era has been foundational but less sexy policy issues like anti-monopolization, or affordable and even broadband coverage.

• Progressives have been urging governments to embark on an accelerated global clean energy transition since Russia’s late-February invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing Western sanctions unleashed chaos in energy markets around the world, but policymakers have opted instead to expand fossil fuel infrastructure.

• That’s according to researchers from Climate Action Tracker, which released a new report Wednesday warning that this reaction threatens to lock in decades of heat-trapping emissions at a time when the window to slash greenhouse gas pollution and avert the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis is rapidly closing.

• On February 24, as Russia invaded Ukraine, Guardian reporter Fiona Harvey posed the interesting question: “Is Putin’s Invasion About Fossil Fuels?”  Indeed, modern warfare is enabled by fossil fuels. Historians have remarked on the decisive role that access to oil made in World Wars I and II.  Defense analyst and author Michael Klare refers to wars over access to fossil fuels as “resource wars,” a term sometimes applied to the Iraq War.  But Russia is already a hydrocarbon-rich country, having recently climbed to world class status as an oil producer.

Finance

• Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted by voters Tuesday in a special recall election, after facing well-funded tough-on-crime attacks by the real estate industry. “He made enemies with very, very deep pockets,” says Lara Bazelon, professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and chair of Boudin’s Innocence Commission, who describes the primary challenge as a “perfect storm” to take down Boudin. Bazelon also discusses the mayoral race in Los Angeles, where billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Congressmember Karen Bass will head to a runoff in November after placing first and second in Tuesday’s primary. She says the two candidates will be competing for the Latinx voting bloc, which could ultimately determine the outcome of the election.

• “Hold for Peter G. Peterson.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Fox News is under fire this week for declining to broadcast the first public prime-time hearing of the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection—a Thursday night event set to be covered by other major networks and livestreamed online.

• The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol plans to hold its first of six public hearings beginning at 8:00 pm ET on June 9. Fox News’ regular prime-time programs “will cover the hearings as news warrants” while a team at the lower-rated sister channel Fox Business handles live coverage, their parent company said Monday.

• Former President Donald Trump and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, have agreed to be questioned under oath next month by lawyers with New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office unless the state’s highest court intervenes, a filing revealed Wednesday.

• The deal to begin the questioning on July 15 comes after a New York appeals court last month upheld a lower court’s ruling that the trio must sit for depositions as part of James’ civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s business practices.

• South Dakotans on Tuesday resoundingly defeated a Republican-authored constitutional amendment that would have raised the threshold for passage of most ballot initiatives from a simple majority to 60%, an effort motivated by GOP lawmakers’ desire to head off a Medicaid expansion vote set for November.

• Voters rejected the proposal, known as Amendment C, by a margin of 67.4% to 32.6%, dealing a decisive blow to state-level Republicans’ latest attempt to weaken the ballot initiative process.

• In any event this jubilee represents a sombre occasion for my family.

• On 3 July 1953, when Princess Elizabeth was crowned as queen, we lived in a then British colony. (Elizabeth became queen the moment her father, King George VI, died on 6 Feb, 1952, though her Coronation took place in 1953.)

• Top leaders from Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are all absent from the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced he would boycott the conference after the U.S. said it would not invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We speak with historian Alejandro Velasco and Roberto Lovato, award-winning Salvadoran American journalist and author, who calls the conference ”a failure of hemispheric proportions and a global embarrassment for the United States and for the Biden administration.” Lovato calls the Biden administration’s condemnation of some countries as anti-democratic hypocritical and says the absence of so many Latin American countries represents a decline in U.S. hegemony.

• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a world-renowned leftist who lifted millions out of poverty during his tenure as Brazil’s president, maintains a significant lead over the South American nation’s far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro ahead of the October election, according to new survey data released Wednesday.

• A Genial/Quaest poll found that 46% of voters would support Lula in a first-round vote, giving him a 16-point lead over Bolsonaro, who garnered 30%—a two-point decline since April.

• Joe Biden has wrapped up his first trip to Asia. He met with new South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol to shore up the U.S.-ROK alliance. He traveled to Tokyo to reinvigorate the Quad grouping with Japan, Australia, and India. And he peddled the new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an attempt by the United States to reinsert itself into the Asian economy after the Trump administration’s pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The spirit if not the letter of the First Amendment prohibits both sophisticated and simple-minded violations of free speech, writes Bruce Fein.

• As this blog series has sought to show, increased attention on issues like hate speech, online harassment, misinformation, and the amplification of terrorist content continues to prompt policymakers around the globe to adopt stricter regulations for speech online, including more responsibilities for online intermediaries.

• EFF has long championed efforts to promote freedom of expression and create an enabling environment for innovation in a manner that balances the needs of governments and other stakeholders. We recognize that there’s a delicate balance to be struck between addressing the very real issue of platforms hosting and amplifying harmful content and activity while simultaneously providing enough protection to those platforms so that they are not incentivized to remove protected user speech, thus promoting freedom of expression.

• Today, as global efforts to change long-standing intermediary liability laws continue, we now use a set of questions to guide the way we look at such proposals. We approach new platform regulation proposals with three primary questions in mind: Are intermediary liability regulations the problem? Is the proposed solution going to fix that problem? And can inevitable collateral effects be mitigated?

• This kind of hubris can only be explained by massive self-delusion. It’s not pretty but at least the denouement is wholly justified.

• Okay, so, it was just a few weeks ago that a teenager went into an elementary school and killed 21 people, including 19 children. You might think there are important things about that which should draw the attention of the state’s top lawyer. Attorney General Ken Paxton is a busy man. He’s running for a third term in the job, while still waiting for the supposed trial on his indictment that happened seven years ago. He also wasted a bunch of time on a bunch of bogus “stop the steal” lawsuits, and led the charge on the ridiculous attempt to force DirecTV to platform nonsense peddler OAN. Oh, and of course, his office is also leading the charge to enforce his obviously unconstitutional social media content moderation bill.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A juvenile detention center in Rutherford County, Tennessee, that for years illegally jailed children will now be overseen by a five-member board rather than the county’s juvenile court judge, a change designed to bring greater accountability to a long-troubled system.

• At a meeting earlier this year, the county’s mayor said he thought the shift could bring “more oversight or transparency.” The board members will be appointed by Rutherford County commissioners.

• Every year, there are multiple Military Appreciation Nights (“MAN”?) in Major League Baseball. Every year, teams inform players that they will be wearing camouflage versions of their hats or uniforms to show their solidarity with the US armed forces. Every year, soldiers are granted free tickets, and many show up in full regalia, to the delight of fans.

• The Biden administration has denied members of an Indigenous delegation from the Amazon rainforest entry at this week’s U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas. Meanwhile, President Biden agreed to meet with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who told Biden he would only attend the conference if he was guaranteed immunity from criticism on his systematic destruction of the Amazon rainforest, among other policies. We speak with one of the delegation’s members, Domingo Peas, an Achuar leader from Ecuador and territories coordinator for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative for the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. “We cannot continue to destroy the forest and expect to survive. So we call on President Bolsonaro, we call on President Lasso, to act on behalf of future generations with courage, with their heart, and to stop expansion of disruptive economies, and to really embrace fully a new path forward that’s for the benefit of all life,” says Peas.

• British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira have still not been found, after being reported missing Sunday in one of Brazil’s most remote areas of the Amazon. The pair were traveling across the region to interview Indigenous leaders patrolling the area for illegal miners and fishers for Phillips’s upcoming book. “We know that they had been receiving threats. We know that there are other people who are being threatened in this territory,” says Ana Alfinito, Brazil legal adviser for Amazon Watch. Alfinito also explains how Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has systematically destroyed protections for Indigenous groups across the Amazon.

• Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.

• Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.

• Usurping the fundamental rights of women to control their own bodies.

• With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to issue a ruling later this month that could overturn Roe v. Wade and imperil abortion rights nationwide, a group of 25 senators on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden to do all he can through executive action to protect reproductive freedoms at the federal level.

• “We need an all-of-government plan to protect every American’s reproductive rights.”

• For example, the power of the 1% – the political and corporate elite – often depends on convincing the rest of us to accept the demonization of some enemy: militant trade unions, even more militant anarchists, unruly women, conspiring Jews, treacherous communists, Islamic terrorists, etc.

• Propagandistic scapegoating is widely understood as a metaphor for targeted blame-shifting. In historic terms, the idea of scapegoating originated from the religious scripts of the Bible. Initially, it meant as the purging of a sin (as defined by the church). Such cleansing of a sin (including, of course, lust and fornication!) was often “achieved”(!) through a ritual sacrifice.

• “The blowout victory comes four months after Starbucks illegally fired seven pro-union workers,” noted More Perfect Union. “A historic victory.”

• Amazon’s lawyers filed a motion on Tuesday urging the National Labor Relations Board to bar the public—and potentially members of the press—from tuning in to a hearing next week at which the company is set to lay out its case for why the historic union victory at the JFK8 warehouse in New York should be overturned.

• According to the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon executive chairman and former CEO Jeff Bezos, the company argues in its motion that “because the hearing is being held on Zoom, it makes it difficult to know if witnesses who aren’t supposed to be able to observe the proceedings are in attendance, or if the hearing is being recorded and shared with those witnesses.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve noted for a few months how telecom and media giants are engaged in a full court press to scuttle the nomination of popular anti-monopolist and reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn’s broadly popular and highly qualified, so the telecom lobby has taken to running a broad smear campaign falsely accusing her of hating cops, rural America, and free speech.

Monopolies

• A leading digital rights group on Wednesday kicked off a new campaign aimed at boosting federal legislation that would crack down on Big Tech monopolies.

• “This and next week are do-or-die for the most significant antitrust reforms in a generation.”

Software Patents

• Finding people near you with shared interests, and talking to them, has a very long history in human culture. We’re social animals. We need to find other people close to us to work together with, play games with, and build relationships and families with. Modern online social networks are built on top of those basic human needs.

Copyrights

• The US Copyright Office’s inquiry on the option to add mandatory copyright protection measures in the DMCA has led to some interesting responses. They include a suggestion to add “VPN detection” tools to prevent people from engaging in “geo-piracy”. This request, unsurprisingly, comes from a company that offers a VPN detection service.

• Canada’s Federal Court has handed down a ‘dynamic’ blocking order to prevent live NHL games from being viewed via pirate IPTV streams. The first of its kind in Canada, the flexible injunction was obtained by companies including Rogers, Bell, The Sports Network, and Groupe TVA. Unusually, it will be independently audited to assess over-blocking and any user circumvention via VPNs.

• Too often we assume that copyright is something that only concerns Western nations like the US and EU. But it’s important to remember that copyright has been exported all around the world. Moreover, when Western nations make copyright worse, they then try to convince other countries to adopt the same bad ideas, for example through the terms of trade deals. But occasionally, nations outside the copyright mainstream manage to make some moves in the opposite direction, adding benefits for ordinary people rather than for the copyright industry. For example, in Taiwan there’s a welcome change to the law in this area, reported here by Focus Taiwan:

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