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Concert For Climate a sell out

https://www.newsofthearea.com.au/concert-for-climate-a-sell-out
Created
Mon, 08/05/2023 - 03:44

TICKETS for the Coffs Youth Climate Alliance (CYCA) concert at the Botanic Gardens last Friday April 28 sold out quickly. The youth-led event featured six primarily youth bands, with all proceeds donated to support the Alliance’s activities in advocating for climate action and combating homelessness in the local community. Advertise with News of The Area...

The post Concert For Climate a sell out appeared first on News Of The Area.

The action is in the state houses

https://digbysblog.net/2023/05/07/the-action-is-in-the-state-houses/
Created
Mon, 08/05/2023 - 02:30
I think we’ve all had our eyes opened about the dangers of letting this extremist GOP take over state houses. They’re building a farm team for national politics and it’s scary as hell. Just take a look at Florida if you want to feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Howie Klein sent this out to Blue America members this morning. And In The Process Help Your Favorite Candidate Win $1,000 From Blue America We’ll get into the contest in a second; I just want to make sure that you know that the Virginia legislative elections are this year, 2023, not next year like most elections. We’re trying to flip the House of Delegates blue and expand the narrow Democratic lead in the state Senate. Blue America has identified 5 crucial progressive races for this contest, 2 for Senate seats and 3 for House seats.

Take a number

https://digbysblog.net/2023/05/07/take-a-number/
Created
Mon, 08/05/2023 - 00:31
Is unsorting America even possible? Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort,” considered Americans’ tendency to self-segregate into communities “with people who live, think, and vote like we do.” There are also economic consequences to that. Inequality follows. American society has “become less random” as it has “become more unequal,” observes Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley. He offers a quirky thought experiment in The New Yorker on how, had we the will, we might tackle inequality resulting from geography and the birth lottery. His answer to the problem that “when rich people are asked to pay more in taxes, or to send their children to school with poorer kids, they tend to move,” is a lottery of another sort. But is inequality a problem for most Americans? Or do they see inequality as “the way things are.” Meritocracy, the prosperity gospel, and royalist sentiment argue vigorously for the status quo. Whatever. Conley’s is a thought experiment: The core issue is that our social contract is based on place: we make decisions and fund our government in a fundamentally local way.

Italian Fascism Never Went Away

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/05/italian-fascism-never-went-away/
Created
Mon, 08/05/2023 - 00:20

The Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement Party or ‘MSI’) was founded in 1946 on ‘the assumption that fascism was not a parenthesis in Italian history, a twenty-year aberration, but a movement, a set of ideas and values, that survived military defeat,’ according to its founder Giorgio Almirante. Like Almirante, most of MSI’s leaders were […]

It’s Mourning Again in America

https://digbysblog.net/2023/05/07/its-mourning-again-in-america/
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 23:00
“the price of freedom”? “For years now, after one massacre or another,” writes Heather Cox Richardson this mourning, “I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority.” A minority that, like Bill O’Reilly, considers daily slaughter “the price of freedom.” None of that was normal until about the time Ronald Reagan and Movement Conservatism arrived in full. Fueled by National Rifle Association money, the right twisted the Second Amendment into an “unfettered right to own and carry weapons.” They’ve turned America into a place Old West residents of Tombstone and Dodge City would not recognize. At least eight dead and nine injured at a suburban Dallas, Texas outlet mall (Washington Post): Six of the eight people killed were found dead at the scene. At least nine people injured in the shootingwere taken to hospitals by the local fire department, Allen Fire Chief Jon Boyd said.

Mastodon monoculture problem

https://rys.io/en/168.html
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 10:23

Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (the software project and the non-profit) has on the rest of the Fediverse.

Good. We should be worried.

Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole Fediverse, on a single instance. Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.

The 2023 SIFF Preview

https://digbysblog.net/2023/05/06/the-2023-siff-preview/
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 10:00
The 49th Seattle International Film Festival (May 11-21)  opens next week, featuring 264 shorts, docs, and narrative films from 74 countries. As always, the looming question is – where to begin? I’ve found the trick to navigating festivals is developing a 6th sense for films in your wheelhouse (so I embrace my OCD and channel it like a cinematic dowser). (deep breath) Let’s dive in. This year’s Opening Night Gala selection is Past Lives (USA/Korea), the latest offering from A24 (Ex Machina, Ladybird, Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once, et.al.). Billed as “a heartrending modern romance”, the drama was written and directed by Celine Song, who will be attending and participating in a Q&A following the screening. Always with the personal drama: Dean Kavanagh’s Hole in the Head (Ireland) is a character study about a mute projectionist who uses the tools of his trade as a conduit for coming to terms with long-repressed memories. Adolfo (Mexico, U.S.

*Sigh*

https://digbysblog.net/2023/05/06/sigh-2/
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 07:00
It’s going to take work to educate people about this issue: Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children, a Washington Post-KFF poll finds, offering political jet fuel for Republicans in statehouses and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation and medical care. Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth. A 57 percent majority of adults said a person’s gender is determined from the start, with 43 percent saying it can differ. This is the saddest part: And some Americans have become more conservative on these questions as Republicans have seized the issue and worked to promote new restrictions. The Pew Research Center found 60 percent last year saying one’s gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, up from 54 percent in 2017. Even among young adults, who are the most accepting of trans identity, about half said in the Post-KFF poll that a person’s gender is determined by their sex at birth.

Pence says he told the story he’s always told

https://digbysblog.net/2023/05/06/pence-says-he-told-the-story-hes-always-told/
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 05:30
That does not make me feel confident Washington Examiner: I know you cannot get into any of the specifics about your grand jury appearance, but I’m wondering if you could just peel back for readers what the was process like? Mike Pence: I really can’t speak in any detail about the proceedings. But I can tell you that the American people can be confident that the story I wrote in my memoir about those difficult days, the story I’ve told in numerous interviews and in the wake of the release of my book, is the same story that I tell in every respect. And so, for me, I just have a lot of peace about the process. I’m very concerned about what I see as the politicization of the Justice Department. I’m very concerned about what I see as the criminalization of politics, but we obeyed the law. We did our part, and the American people can be confident that the story we’ve written, the story we told, is the same story that took place in that setting. In other words, he didn’t come through with the full truth about Trump’s coup plotting. He never has.

Environment: the real meaning of CCS: capitalism, corporations and subsidies

https://johnmenadue.com/environment-the-real-meaning-of-ccs-capitalism-corporat…
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 04:57
Carbon Capture and Storage, nothing but an inadequate fig leaf for obscene government endorsed corporate practices. Direct Air Capture may play a useful climate role in a few decades. Banks still lending trillions to fossil fuel companies. Capturing carbon: where are we? Part 2 of 2 Last week I described the difference between absorbing CO2 Continue reading »

Doubts about AUKUS

https://johnmenadue.com/doubts-about-aukus/
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 04:56
Eighteen months ago, when Australians first learned of the AUKUS proposal for their country to build nuclear-powered submarines, it came as a stunning shock. So great was the shock, in fact, that for a time it eclipsed any serious debate about this revolutionary and quite unprecedented idea. An initiative of such scale and audacity seemed Continue reading »

A revolution in Journalism: WikiLeaks and Julian Assange

https://johnmenadue.com/a-revolution-in-journalism-wikileaks-and-julian-assange/
Created
Sun, 07/05/2023 - 04:55
Speech at The Persecution of Truth conference According to Dr Suelette Dreyfus, Julian Assange was the most original voice in twenty-first-century journalism. She justified this claim by referencing the invention of the anonymous digital dropbox that WikiLeaks and Assange pioneered, which allowed whistle-blowers to transfer information to the public, while preserving their anonymity. This invention Continue reading »