Here in Arizona the election turmoil continues. Yesterday Cochise County, located in southeastern Arizona, refused to certify their election votes. The state of Arizona had a deadline of November 28th for all Arizona counties to certify. The Secretary of State’s office, under governor elect Katie Hobbs, immediately sued Cochise County.
If the votes in Cochise County are not counted, it would lead to possibly two Democratic wins, one for the Superintendent of Public Instruction and one for a congressional seat.
Zoom world: now that everybody can see what everybody else has and everybody wants what everybody else has. That’s what’s happening in Iran; that’s happening in Afghanistan (!); that’s what’s happening in China. Ideology aside; ideology pushed aside: people just want simple freedom of speech, people scream they just want normal lives. Female virtual house arrest; entire cities locked down at the first sign of infection push Zoom world freedom demands over the top.
Remember Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message”? The means by which information is transmitted is just as important the content. Zoom world is the internet version of McLuhan .
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When is AB going to have two open threads: one for back and forth discussions and one for dueling cut-and-paste essays? Would be conversants (me) feel smothered by the thousands of words of borrowed essays on all sides.
When unions take over the economy the average person will have the same financial punch as the oligarchs and most of the votes. And pushing this issue takes no finances now — the central impact on most people’s lives comparing to the impact of 1960s anti-segregation impact on minorities alone.
All we need do is talk up the proposal in venues we usually inhabit and watch the political wild fire cross the country.
Communist Party officials are using decades-old tactics, along with some new ones, to quash the most widespread protests in decades. But Xi Jinping is silent.
NY Times – Nov 29
Reacting to China’s boldest and most widespread protests in decades, the security apparatus built by Communist Party leader Xi Jinping is mobilizing on multiple fronts to quash dissent, drawing on its decades-old tool kit of repression and surveillance.
In a meeting of the party’s top security leaders, reported in state media on Tuesday, officials were ordered to “resolutely crack down on illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order.” And by evening, the demonstrations already appeared to be smaller and more scattered, with new videos emerging on social media — the main channel for news of the protests to reach a wider audience — showing only groups of residents in several different locked-down developments demanding to be freed.
At the same time, the government announced that it would step up vaccinations of older adults. That move is deemed crucial to easing China’s tight Covid controls that have fueled public anger, signaling that as Beijing suppresses dissent, it is also moving to address the problem underlying the protests.
Public security personnel and vehicles have blanketed potential protest sites. Police officers are searching some residents’ phones for prohibited apps. Officials are going to the homes of would-be protesters to warn them against illegal activities and are taking some away for questioning. Censors are scrubbing protest symbols and slogans from social media. …
Oath Keepers Leader Convicted of Sedition in Landmark Jan. 6 Case
A jury in federal court convicted Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia, and one of his subordinates for a plot to keep Donald Trump in power.
Three other defendants in the case were found not guilty of sedition and Mr. Rhodes was acquitted of two separate conspiracy charges.
… The Justice Department alleged that the Oath Keepers members – Rhodes, Meggs, Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson and Thomas Caldwell – conspired to forcibly stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power from then-President Donald Trump to Biden and plotted to attack the US Capitol.
Jurors considered 10 charges against the five defendants, including three conspiracy charges, obstructing the certification of the electoral college vote and tampering with documents. The defendants were convicted on multiple charges, and all five were found guilty of obstructing an official proceeding. The charge, like the seditious conspiracy charge, carries a 20-year maximum prison sentence.
It remains to be seen how much time each defendant will serve, as Judge Amit Mehta could issue a sentence that exceeds 20 years or decide to sentence them to far less than the allowed maximum.
Mehta said in court that four of the defendants, including Rhodes, will remain behind bars. Only one defendant – Caldwell – had been on pretrial release. …
Days later, videos of chants and confrontations are still visible on the Chinese internet. It’s a sign of how a groundswell outmatched the world’s best internet control system.
In one video, a man sarcastically sings a patriotic song. In another, a group of protesters hold up blank pieces of paper and chant in unison. In a third clip, a group of mourners light candles around a vigil to those who died in a fire while in lockdown in western China.
Signs of organized dissent are rare in China; so is their survival in the country’s digital space. China’s censorship apparatus — the most sophisticated of its kind in the world — has hunted down and deleted countless posts on social media showing the eruption of protests and anger at the government.
Yet over the past few days, as Chinese people frustrated by severe Covid lockdowns have taken to the streets, videos of the marches and rallies have continued to surface on Chinese sites such as WeChat, a chat app, and the short video sharing app, Douyin. Experts say the sheer volume of video clips has likely overwhelmed the automated software and armies of censors China has tasked with policing the internet.
“This is a decisive breach of the big silence,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Once the anger spills on to the street it becomes much harder to censor,” he added, pointing out that hundreds of demonstrators and onlookers posting videos from different angles is much harder for an algorithm to screen than a single key viral video. …
The sheer amount of footage speaks to the deep well of anger inside China against the country’s exceptionally stringent Covid policies that have affected hundreds of millions of people, especially over the past year. If China wanted to scrub the content completely, it would need to hire more people and develop far smarter algorithms, according to a former censor and an internet control expert. …
Russia’s foreign minister Lavrov defended the strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, which the United Nations has said could amount to war crimes …
… Speaking at a news conference in Moscow, Mr. Lavrov said that the repeated strikes against Ukraine’s infrastructure — which have knocked out electricity and water for millions of people as winter looms — were justified because Russia is hitting targets that are used to replenish Ukrainian forces with weapons provided by Western nations. …
The United Nations launched a record-breaking appeal to international donors on Thursday asking for $51.5 billion to tackle spiraling levels of desperation, fueled in part by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The disruption to food and fertilizer shipments caused by the war has combined with climate-related disasters and a looming threat of a global economic recession to produce what the U.N. appeal warns is “the largest global food crisis in modern history.”
“The needs are going up because we have been smitten by the war in Ukraine, by Covid, by climate, and I fear that 2023 is going to see an acceleration of all those trends,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N. humanitarian aid coordinator, told reporters in Geneva.
About 339 million people, or one in every 23 people on the planet, will need assistance in 2023, the United Nations estimates. That is 25 percent more than in 2022 and more than the population of the United States, the world’s third most-populous country. …
… Ukraine tops the list of funding needs for a single country going into 2023, he said.
U.N. agencies have delivered aid to more than 13 million people in Ukraine this year and are seeking $5.7 billion in 2023 to keep assistance flowing to country and to some five million Ukrainian refugees who have fled the war for other countries in Europe. To deal with the humanitarian crisis triggered by the war, the United Nations said it had delivered the largest cash assistance program on record, providing $1.7 billion to a total of more than six million people, up from 11,000 people in the previous year. …
… During the most difficult times of the AIDS and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemics, Tony has been a model of calm, yet decisive, leadership despite often harsh criticism from those with different views. He has also advised the ID community, often through articles in JID and elsewhere, on what the NIAID research priorities would be on individual topics such as antimicrobial resistance, malaria, sexually transmitted infections, opioids and infectious diseases, tuberculosis, microbiota, HIV/AIDS, microbiota, and COVID-19 [7–14]. These efforts have helped shape grant preparation and submission for many investigators. Tony Fauci will leave his position as NIAID Director at the end of this year, having served in this role for almost 4 decades. He has successfully fought for (1) increased ID research budgets, (2) international efforts to contain diseases, (3) better scientific research both at basic and clinical levels, and (4) improved public health efforts at disease prevention. We can think of no one who has played a more central role in controlling and treating infectious diseases or who could have done a better job representing the world’s ID community. Tony will likely make more important contributions to the conquest of infectious diseases, and we look forward to working with him in these efforts. However, for the critical work done as NIAID Director, we say, job well done, thank you, and best wishes in your future endeavors.
… About 87 percent of men ages 35 to 44 were working as of October, down from 88.3 percent before the pandemic struck in 2020. The stubborn decline has spanned racial groups, but it has been most heavily concentrated among men who … do not have a four-year college degree. The pullback comes despite the fact that wages are rising and job openings are plentiful, including in fields like truck driving and construction, where college degrees are not required and men tend to dominate.
Economists have not determined any single factor that is keeping men from returning to work. Instead, they attribute the trend to a cocktail of changing social norms around parenthood and marriage, shifting opportunities, and lingering scars of the 2008 to 2009 downturn — which cost many people in that age group jobs just as they were starting their careers. …
(graphs at the link)
Men have been withdrawing from the labor force for decades. In the years following World War II, more than 97 percent of men in their prime working years — defined by economists as ages 25 to 54 — were working or actively looking for work, according to federal data. But starting in the 1960s, that share began to fall, mirroring the decline in domestic manufacturing jobs. …
… What is new is that a small demographic slice — men who were early in their careers during the 2008 recession — seems to be most heavily affected.
“I think there’s a lot of very discouraged people out there,” said Jane Oates, a former Labor Department official who now heads WorkingNation, a nonprofit focused on work force development.
Men lost jobs in astonishing numbers during the 2008 financial crisis as the construction and home-building industries contracted. It took years to regain that ground — for men who were then in their 20s and early 30s and just getting started in their careers, employment rates never fully recovered.
Economists came up with a range of explanations for the men’s slow return to the labor force. After the war on crime of the 1980s and 1990s, more men had criminal records that made it difficult to land jobs. The rise of opioid addiction had sidelined others. Video games had improved in quality, so staying home might have become more attractive. And the decline of nuclear family units may have diminished the traditional male role as economic provider.
Now, recent history appears to be repeating itself — but for one specific age group. The question is why 35- to 44-year-old men seem to be staying out of work more than other demographics. …
Here in Arizona the election turmoil continues. Yesterday Cochise County, located in southeastern Arizona, refused to certify their election votes. The state of Arizona had a deadline of November 28th for all Arizona counties to certify. The Secretary of State’s office, under governor elect Katie Hobbs, immediately sued Cochise County.
If the votes in Cochise County are not counted, it would lead to possibly two Democratic wins, one for the Superintendent of Public Instruction and one for a congressional seat.
Zoom world: now that everybody can see what everybody else has and everybody wants what everybody else has. That’s what’s happening in Iran; that’s happening in Afghanistan (!); that’s what’s happening in China. Ideology aside; ideology pushed aside: people just want simple freedom of speech, people scream they just want normal lives. Female virtual house arrest; entire cities locked down at the first sign of infection push Zoom world freedom demands over the top.
Remember Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message”? The means by which information is transmitted is just as important the content. Zoom world is the internet version of McLuhan .
***********************************************
When is AB going to have two open threads: one for back and forth discussions and one for dueling cut-and-paste essays? Would be conversants (me) feel smothered by the thousands of words of borrowed essays on all sides.
Why go through all the ups and downs and in and outs — yada, yada, yada — and rounds and rounds of labor organizing ?
Let your elected legislators do all the hard work for you.
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/
All you have to do is show up on election days and vote.
* * * * * *
When are progressives going to wake up to the political possibilities of pushing for this labor reform:
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/
When unions take over the economy the average person will have the same financial punch as the oligarchs and most of the votes. And pushing this issue takes no finances now — the central impact on most people’s lives comparing to the impact of 1960s anti-segregation impact on minorities alone.
All we need do is talk up the proposal in venues we usually inhabit and watch the political wild fire cross the country.
With Intimidation and Surveillance, China Tries to Snuff Out Protests
Communist Party officials are using decades-old tactics, along with some new ones, to quash the most widespread protests in decades. But Xi Jinping is silent.
NY Times – Nov 29
What China’s Protesters Are Calling For
Protests against Covid restrictions have evolved into broader demands. Here’s what videos show about what demonstrators want — and the risks. …
Oath Keepers Leader Convicted of Sedition in Landmark Jan. 6 Case
A jury in federal court convicted Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia, and one of his subordinates for a plot to keep Donald Trump in power.
Three other defendants in the case were found not guilty of sedition and Mr. Rhodes was acquitted of two separate conspiracy charges.
Stewart Rhodes and one of his subordinates convicted for plotting to keep Donald Trump in power
‘Breach of the Big Silence.’ Protests Stretch China’s Censorship to Its Limits
NY Times – Nov 30
Days later, videos of chants and confrontations are still visible on the Chinese internet. It’s a sign of how a groundswell outmatched the world’s best internet control system.
Russia’s foreign minister defends strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure
(This is not a free link.)
NY Times – just in
Russia’s foreign minister Lavrov defended the strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, which the United Nations has said could amount to war crimes …
UN seeks $51.5 billion in aid, driven in part by the war in Ukraine
NY Times – just in
Thank you, Tony Fauci
Journal of Infectious Diseases – Dec 1
Why Are Middle-Aged Men Missing From the Labor Market?
NY Times – Dec 2