Rafael Ochoa, Autumn Quinces, 2014

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Letter from Hong Kong

"I think you should still have the party later in the month,” the gallery owner was saying to a friend. We were at the opening of an art show. “It’s important to let people know that life still goes on.”

Life went on—at a gallery, a hotel bar by the water, hot pot at midnight—until out of nowhere, people who were just on one side of the room laughing to themselves rushed to the window where I was sitting to take a better look at the scene below. Riot police were chasing a protester down a barricaded thoroughfare in the middle of a busy shopping district. “Do they really need seven cops in full gear against someone walking around in a T-shirt and jeans?” I asked, now squeezed between my friend and a man who had installed himself at our booth with a big camera. A small part of me was ready to play devil’s advocate: what did I miss that justified the excessive violence?

“It’s just the way it is now,” said the man, while his friends teased him for interrupting our dinner.

If at the beginning of the crisis in Hong Kong, three months ago, it was hard for some to imagine how a supposedly democratic conclave within authoritarian China and the pride of imperial capitalists everywhere would soon become the undeclared police state it now is, it’s an even bigger challenge to imagine how the political crisis might be resolved without a dramatic redefinition of the relationship between the semi-autonomous territory and Beijing’s dictatorial central government. (...)

At every point of unprecedented escalation in this fight, there has been reason to expect it to be the last. But the unraveling of Hong Kong has fallen on a series of deaf ears: first those of its ineffectual local government, and then the central government in Beijing, who jumped to take out fire hoses on the banging of pots and pans. The unraveling has been lost, too, on some at the office, in the family group chat, on first dates. When you meet someone, the first thing they want to know is, what are you doing this weekend? What does your family think? How do you think this will end? Of course, under any circumstances, what everyone asks is, which side are you on?

Tear gas, water cannons, fire, vandalism, “mobs,” and blood make headlines, but as anyone can tell you about what it’s like to fight for things that have been taken away from them, the real test is in the tedious minutiae of organizing, strategizing, communicating, reading the news, reading the enemy’s news, analyzing, investigating, budgeting, fact-checking, panicking, and waiting. There is, most of all, the waiting. Waiting in line at the ticket machine, waiting for the daily police press conference, waiting for the bus in boycott of the subway, waiting for the “I’m home” text from friends who live in neighborhoods threatened by state-sanctioned thugs, waiting for time to pass during the eighth hour of a three-day airport sit-in, waiting for a news-free hour to pass, waiting for a single sensible response from the government.

What protesters in Hong Kong are up against is more than often absurd, but no longer shocking, even when the small victories won with orthodox protest tactics feel dated by the time the government counteracts them with brute force. Barely a month ago, few would have expected that a peaceful 1.7 million-person rally against police brutality might be the last of its kind legally permitted in Hong Kong. Police had rejected the organizers’ original application for an August 18 march but allowed for an assembly at Victoria Park, the route’s original starting point and a space that fits approximately 100,000. To bend the rule without breaking it—an assembly is not illegal if the crowd is waiting to enter a legal assembly—the protesters came up with a strategy called “orderly flow.” On paper, we were to fill the park to capacity until the crowd inevitably spilled out onto the streets, forcing the original protesters to vacate and make room for newcomers, and creating, in effect, a conveyor belt of protesters on the original marching route.

In practice, it was a slow procession of first making our way through an over-crowded subway station to the park; then sitting around, suffering the blitz of traffic directions over loudspeaker, following the call to slogan chants and cringing when the response waned; then standing around, waiting for the crowd to move, the downpour to stop, the march to begin. I thought of Renata Adler’s report from a 1966 Mississippi Black Power march:

Perhaps the reason for the disproportionate emphasis on divisive issues during the march was that civil-rights news—like news of any unified, protracted struggle against injustice—becomes boring. One march, except to the marchers, is very like another. Tents, hot days, worried nights, songs, rallies, heroes, villains, even tear gas and clubbings—the props are becoming stereotyped.

For the ordeal that Hong Kong’s protesters have put themselves through, there are no traditionally understood rewards to speak of: no recognition of individual heroism, no big checks, no promised land. Even moral superiority grows stale in political warfare. The paradox of this insurgence is that the protests have been driven by defensive necessity rather than choice. It is those who don’t come out for whatever reason—because they support unquestioned authority, because they don’t think they have a stake in politics, because they believe this is other people’s fight for other people’s futures, because they have more important interests to protect—who are really choosing.

Around me at the Victoria Park assembly were middle-aged couples, families with young children, fashionable girls leading the chants with their perky pubescent voices. As someone crowd-adverse and by nature suspicious of mass emotion, I tend to recoil at these engines for rousing collective morale. If protesting against the tyranny of an unaccountable government is the noble thing to do, am I supposed to feel invigorated, exhilarated, or at least enthusiastic? What is the correct emotional expression of a moral duty? Nonetheless, my reaction to these call and responses has become Pavlovian: whenever I hear “Hong Konger,” my brain completes, “add oil.” “Liberate Hong Kong”—“Revolution of our times.”

by Jaime Chu, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Studio Incendo

Artificial Intelligence Takes On Earthquake Prediction

In May of last year, after a 13-month slumber, the ground beneath Washington’s Puget Sound rumbled to life. The quake began more than 20 miles below the Olympic mountains and, over the course of a few weeks, drifted northwest, reaching Canada’s Vancouver Island. It then briefly reversed course, migrating back across the U.S. border before going silent again. All told, the monthlong earthquake likely released enough energy to register as a magnitude 6. By the time it was done, the southern tip of Vancouver Island had been thrust a centimeter or so closer to the Pacific Ocean.

Because the quake was so spread out in time and space, however, it’s likely that no one felt it. These kinds of phantom earthquakes, which occur deeper underground than conventional, fast earthquakes, are known as “slow slips.” They occur roughly once a year in the Pacific Northwest, along a stretch of fault where the Juan de Fuca plate is slowly wedging itself beneath the North American plate. More than a dozen slow slips have been detected by the region’s sprawling network of seismic stations since 2003. And for the past year and a half, these events have been the focus of a new effort at earthquake prediction by the geophysicist Paul Johnson.

Johnson’s team is among a handful of groups that are using machine learning to try to demystify earthquake physics and tease out the warning signs of impending quakes. Two years ago, using pattern-finding algorithms similar to those behind recent advances in image and speech recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence, he and his collaborators successfully predicted temblors in a model laboratory system — a feat that has since been duplicated by researchers in Europe.

Now, in a paper posted this week on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org, Johnson and his team report that they’ve tested their algorithm on slow slip quakes in the Pacific Northwest. The paper has yet to undergo peer review, but outside experts say the results are tantalizing. According to Johnson, they indicate that the algorithm can predict the start of a slow slip earthquake to “within a few days — and possibly better.”

“This is an exciting development,” said Maarten de Hoop, a seismologist at Rice University who was not involved with the work. “For the first time, I think there’s a moment where we’re really making progress” toward earthquake prediction.

Mostafa Mousavi, a geophysicist at Stanford University, called the new results “interesting and motivating.” He, de Hoop, and others in the field stress that machine learning has a long way to go before it can reliably predict catastrophic earthquakes — and that some hurdles may be difficult, if not impossible, to surmount. Still, in a field where scientists have struggled for decades and seen few glimmers of hope, machine learning may be their best shot. (...)

More than a decade ago, Johnson began studying “laboratory earthquakes,” made with sliding blocks separated by thin layers of granular material. Like tectonic plates, the blocks don’t slide smoothly but in fits and starts: They’ll typically stick together for seconds at a time, held in place by friction, until the shear stress grows large enough that they suddenly slip. That slip — the laboratory version of an earthquake — releases the stress, and then the stick-slip cycle begins anew.

When Johnson and his colleagues recorded the acoustic signal emitted during those stick-slip cycles, they noticed sharp peaks just before each slip. Those precursor events were the laboratory equivalent of the seismic waves produced by foreshocks before an earthquake. But just as seismologists have struggled to translate foreshocks into forecasts of when the main quake will occur, Johnson and his colleagues couldn’t figure out how to turn the precursor events into reliable predictions of laboratory quakes. “We were sort of at a dead end,” Johnson recalled. “I couldn’t see any way to proceed.”

At a meeting a few years ago in Los Alamos, Johnson explained his dilemma to a group of theoreticians. They suggested he reanalyze his data using machine learning — an approach that was well known by then for its prowess at recognizing patterns in audio data.

Together, the scientists hatched a plan. They would take the roughly five minutes of audio recorded during each experimental run — encompassing 20 or so stick-slip cycles — and chop it up into many tiny segments. For each segment, the researchers calculated more than 80 statistical features, including the mean signal, the variation about that mean, and information about whether the segment contained a precursor event. Because the researchers were analyzing the data in hindsight, they also knew how much time had elapsed between each sound segment and the subsequent failure of the laboratory fault.

Armed with this training data, they used what’s known as a “random forest” machine learning algorithm to systematically look for combinations of features that were strongly associated with the amount of time left before failure. After seeing a couple of minutes’ worth of experimental data, the algorithm could begin to predict failure times based on the features of the acoustic emission alone.

Johnson and his co-workers chose to employ a random forest algorithm to predict the time before the next slip in part because — compared with neural networks and other popular machine learning algorithms — random forests are relatively easy to interpret. The algorithm essentially works like a decision tree in which each branch splits the data set according to some statistical feature. The tree thus preserves a record of which features the algorithm used to make its predictions — and the relative importance of each feature in helping the algorithm arrive at those predictions.

When the Los Alamos researchers probed those inner workings of their algorithm, what they learned surprised them. The statistical feature the algorithm leaned on most heavily for its predictions was unrelated to the precursor events just before a laboratory quake. Rather, it was the variance — a measure of how the signal fluctuates about the mean — and it was broadcast throughout the stick-slip cycle, not just in the moments immediately before failure. The variance would start off small and then gradually climb during the run-up to a quake, presumably as the grains between the blocks increasingly jostled one another under the mounting shear stress. Just by knowing this variance, the algorithm could make a decent guess at when a slip would occur; information about precursor events helped refine those guesses.

The finding had big potential implications. For decades, would-be earthquake prognosticators had keyed in on foreshocks and other isolated seismic events. The Los Alamos result suggested that everyone had been looking in the wrong place — that the key to prediction lay instead in the more subtle information broadcast during the relatively calm periods between the big seismic events.

To be sure, sliding blocks don’t begin to capture the chemical, thermal and morphological complexity of true geological faults. To show that machine learning could predict real earthquakes, Johnson needed to test it out on a real fault. What better place to do that, he figured, than in the Pacific Northwest?

by Ashley Smart, Quanta Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Race Jones, Outlive Creative

What If We Stopped Pretending?

There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.

I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.

Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control. The consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that we’ll pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius (maybe a little more, but also maybe a little less). The I.P.C.C.—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. We need to approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three decades.

This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust the I.P.C.C.’s calculations. New research, described last month in Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature, scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make a “best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. The rise might, in fact, be far higher.

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I draw from the prescriptions of policy-makers and activists, share certain necessary conditions.

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new energy and transportation projects already planned or under construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep pumping oil and driving pickup trucks.

The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn farmers.

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.

by Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Leonardo Santamaria

[ed. Mr. Franzen has taken a lot of crap for this article (defeatist!), but does anyone dispute his characterization of human nature and short-sighted self-interest? See also: Death on the Beach (The Baffler).]

Amazon’s Allbirds Clone Shows Its Relentless Steamrolling of Brands

In its pursuit of being “the Everything Store,” Amazon has been known to copy popular items and sell them itself for cheaper.

Allbirds now appears to be the latest target. Billing them as “the world’s most comfortable shoes,” Allbirds creates environmentally friendly footwear that has been unofficially recognized as part of the Silicon Valley tech worker and entrepreneur uniform. The five-year-old direct-to-consumer shoe startup has been valued at $1.4 billion, and doesn’t sell its goods on Amazon.

Now the Amazon-brand 206 Collective Men’s Galen Wool Blend Sneakers have a striking resemblance to Allbirds’ popular shoe, the Wool Runners—at a much lower price. While Allbirds sells for $95, the Amazon brand is priced at $45. The shoe appears to be newly released, with the first customer review dating to Sept. 19. Amazon declined to comment.

Accumulating data on sales history and customer shopping patterns, the online retailer can swiftly turn around copies of products that already exist, and at a much lower price. For years, Amazon has aggressively been cutting out the middleman to make more profit. Since launching AmazonBasics in 2009, it now reportedly carries 135 brands selling items ranging from batteries to everyday items. Amazon sells products very similar to its best-selling items. For example, the Instant Pot has been a hit for Amazon, and, for more than a year it has sold an AmazonBasics clone of it.

The site has also adjusted its search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for Amazon, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Amazon denied that report.

by Michelle Cheng, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. I love my Allbirds. See also: Allbirds calls out Amazon for its unsustainable knockoff of its sneakers (Quartz).]

The Avett Brothers

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
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Lili Lakick, 1983
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Doomed, Delusional, Divided and Corrupt: How the Democratic Party Became a Haunted House

Face to face with what looks an awful lot like the rise of American fascism, the Democratic Party has a historic opportunity — and a historic responsibility. It has repeatedly proven itself to be unequal to the task, to a comic and pathetic degree.

Democratic congressional leaders, Democratic presidential candidates and the party’s true-blue believers keep wandering through familiar patterns, like someone in a dream state out of a Kafka story or a surrealist film, clinging to the fading hope that this time around the nonsensical narrative will reach a satisfactory resolution. If you tried to design a center-left political party trapped between the traditions of social democracy and classical liberalism, unclear about its core beliefs and equally terrified by both its most vicious opponents and its most ardent supporters — in other words, a party perfectly positioned to capitulate to tyranny with nothing more than a few disapproving whimpers — I hardly think you could do better than the one we’ve got.

I’m not just talking about the endless, dispiriting dithering over whether or not to impeach the obvious criminal in the White House, although that has been both patronizing and cowardly, a combination most often achieved by parents with something to hide. (Something, of course, that the kids already know).

That particular failing was thrown into strong relief this week after reports that President Trump tried to arm-twist the president of Ukraine into digging up (or perhaps inventing) damaging information on Joe Biden, approximately the 10th scandal of Trump’s presidency that would have ended the career of any normative, old-school politician. Even mainstream congressional Democrats and sympathetic media commentators have begun complaining openly about the leadership’s inaction — but there is no serious indication anything will change. With the Iowa caucuses now 16 weeks away, Nancy Pelosi has pretty well accomplished her goal of running out the clock on impeachment.

I’m also not just talking about the party’s steadfast refusal to adopt coherent, progressive and broadly popular positions on issues like health care, gun control, marijuana legalization and electoral reform. But it’s important to grasp why Democrats in power won’t embrace those things — as opposed to embracing them on the campaign trail, which really doesn’t count — because the reasons go well beyond ideological confusion or political cowardice and into deeper, darker places.

Over the last 40 years, the Democrats have become an increasingly awkward coalition of affluent, cosmopolitan whites and urban people of color, and have largely abandoned their previous mistrust of corporate power, Wall Street and big capital in general. Go down the list of powerful congressional Democrats — especially the committee chairs and members of leadership — and pay attention to where and how they raise money, and who their major donors are. The corruption is widespread and deeply rooted, and it cannot be dislodged simply by anointing a reformer or “socialist” as the presidential nominee. If anything, that should be the end point of a renovation or redemption project that has not happened. (...)

But all such questions, when considered piece by piece, ignore the deeper underlying narrative that frames them in the first place. They all signal toward the Democratic Party’s remarkable ability to manufacture defeat, even (or perhaps especially) when objective conditions seem overwhelmingly favorable to victory. The real problem here, I’m afraid, admits of no easy solution: The Democratic Party comprises a wide range of views and voices, some of whom are vigorously trying to change its direction. But all of them are trapped inside a haunted house. Troubled by the ghosts of the past and clinging to useless rituals, Democrats appear largely unable to perceive actually existing reality or react to it appropriately.

This is not exactly a new idea. In political science, it’s expressed through the concept that the relationship between our two major parties has become asymmetrical: Democrats cling to norms and standards of a bygone era, Biden-style, and also, by their nature, are driven by principles of dialogue, reasoned discourse and compromise. LOL! Republicans are totally over that shit, and have gone full-on ruthless culture war, a dynamic explored by Salon's Amanda Marcotte in her book "Troll Nation": They know they can’t win a fair fight on issues and policies, but when it comes to semiotic battles rooted in racism, nationalism and cultural division, they consistently hold the upper hand.

That’s a useful construct, but I suspect it doesn’t go far enough, in that it still appears to rest on the assumption that our political system more or less works, or almost works, or at least could be made to work with some structural improvements that compel the Republicans to stop being so nasty. That’s the fundamental premise of virtually everyone in the Democratic Party. I believe it’s completely wrong. I believe it's not just wrong but dangerous, and not just dangerous but doomed. It threatens to sink democracy with passivity and politeness. (If, that is, democracy hasn’t been sunk already.)

I’m not sure whether to call the contention that democracy is kinda-sorta-maybe functioning normally — in the face of literally all the evidence, not just here but around the world — cynical or childish. I'm not sure whether it's driven by misguided faith or by a self-interested desire to preserve power and privilege. (Those things feed into each other, to be sure.) This article of faith or doctrine of blindness gets expressed in its most comic and pathetic form, of course, in Joe Biden's campaign. The former vice president has assured us that Donald Trump's presidency is an "aberrant moment in time": Apparently Trump came out of nowhere and has no history; once he is gone, Republicans will experience an "epiphany" and normal politics of bipartisan comity and compromise will be restored.

As I've observed before, this fails to answer the question of what kind of normalcy we are to imagine, and when or where it can be found. Fortunately, former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden adviser and surrogate, answered the question in a recent interview with Michael Scherer of the Washington Post. (Kaufman only served in the Senate as Biden's appointed successor, after the latter became vice president in 2009.)

“To get back to where we were on November 1, 2016, is going to be a herculean effort. You are going to need somebody who has a lot of experience, who has bold, realistic policies and who knows people around the world. ... After four years of Trump, we are going to face a really difficult time rebuilding the country.”

There you have it: Read it and weep, if you have tears left to spare. Kaufman’s warning about “a really difficult time” aside, November 2016 was apparently the lost golden age of American politics, or at least the only one Joe Biden is willing to promise. Now, as I recall that distant era, it featured total legislative paralysis, endless investigations of a minor foreign-policy debacle in Libya, a Supreme Court nominee under blockade by the Senate and the majority party in both houses of Congress gripped by paranoid conspiracy theories. But at least the president wasn't a racist, lying fuckwad trying to impose a discount-store police state. It's an inspiring vision!

Unfortunately, if understandably, a large proportion of the Democratic base has been so thoroughly abused and gaslit and terrorized — both by the ruthless, vicious opposition and by the self-abasing leadership of its own party — that it’s willing to settle for that. I mean, I get it: Democrats understand either consciously or instinctively that the odds are rigged against them, and the pragmatic response is to lower your expectations into the basement and pursue a short-term victory at almost any cost. So let’s at least get this terrifying idiot out of the White House and replace him with a vaguely normal adult; all that stuff about the dying planet and economic inequality and Medicare for All (not to mention trying to build or restore a functional democracy) will just have to wait.

If it’s easy to mock the Bidenites for their weird combination of delusional fantasy and defeatism, it’s harder and more painful to observe that this syndrome is found throughout the Democratic coalition, if in subtler form. As I suggested earlier, supporters of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have fallen into a top-down, shortcut-to-power fallacy, which is conceptually related to the Bidenite delusion. In this version of the future, electing a progressive reformer or a socialist “revolutionary,” as the case may be, will somehow be enough to uproot a deep-tentacled system of privilege and power, and make up for decades’ worth of Republican institutional conquest and Democratic capitulation.

by Andrew O'Hehir, Salon |  Read more:
[ed. See also: The President Needs to be Impeached (TPM); and Trump is Discovering New Powers (The Atlantic). It's not "new powers", it's an abuse of powers, and a Republican congress colluding with an executive branch to undermine the Constitution.]

Jean Genius: How Kojima Became Japan’s Denim Mecca

In a country where craftsmanship is so highly prized, it’s no surprise to learn that even a product as universal as jeans has been raised to an art form. Thanks to traditional production methods that create high-quality, long-lasting jeans, Japanese denim has iconic status among “connoisseur denim heads”, who are prepared to pay £250 or more for a pair.

Major Japanese brands, such as Momotoro, Pure Blue Japan and Studio d’Artisan, all have stores in the big cities, but arguably the best – and certainly the most interesting – place to buy jeans in Japan is hundreds of kilometres away from Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, in a sleepy coastal district on the southern coast of Honshu, the biggest of the four main islands.

An hour’s train ride south of Okayama city, Jeans Street in the port town of Kojima is a hub of 38 specialist denim shops. The “street” is actually four streets – each strung with lines of jeans as if someone has just hung them out to dry. Shopping here couldn’t be further from the big city experience of Japan – there are no crowds, no neon lights, no department stores and no subcultures on display. I strolled near-empty streets, and browsed quiet shops where I was left in peace to look around.

More than just a retail experience, Jeans Street is a homage to denim, with the hard-wearing blue fabric referenced in everything from vending machines to drain covers and signs to public loos. Some stores are traditional in style, with sliding screen doors, tatami mats and tranquil gardens; others are tiny modern boutiques. Inside they sell not just beautifully made jeans but shirts, jackets, skirts, coats, aprons and wallets.

To understand why one of the country’s most intriguing shopping experiences is in a small, unassuming town in Okayama prefecture, you have to rewind a few decades – to postwar Japan. One of the side-effects of the US occupation during the second world war was an obsession with Americana among Japanese youth, who embraced American pop culture and created a healthy black market in used Levi’s and Lee jeans.

In Kojima, textile factories that had for decades specialised in school uniforms and workwear saw a business opportunity. The first Japanese denim company chose the most American-sounding name it could come up with: Big John. And then it did the same for its women’s brand: Betty Smith. Initially, Big John used denim fabric and sewing machines imported from the US, but in the 1970s it started to produce its own denim using old shuttle looms and traditional indigo-dyeing techniques – and Japanese jeans were born.

by Isabel Choat, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Shifting Baselines: When the Last Fish Dies

The devastation of the vast majority of the world's marine life is much closer than we think.

Picture a beach along the same vast ocean you know today—the same powerful waves and shifting tides, reflecting the same beautiful sunsets, even the same green-blue water. Now imagine a crowd gathered at the shoreline, standing in a big circle, gawking at something that just washed up. Kids tug on their parents’ shirt sleeves, asking questions about the dead creature lying on the sand. Reporters arrive. The story is momentous even if the takeaway isn’t much fun. Everyone knows there used to be fish in the oceans—kind of like the ones that still live in some rivers and lakes, except they could be much bigger, sometimes meaner, more diverse, more colorful, more everything. But those mythical ocean fish all died. Except maybe this one. This one was alive in there, and now it’s dead too.

According to Stanford University paleobiologist Jonathan Payne, an expert in marine mass-extinction events, a scenario where all the ocean's fish, mammals, and other creatures—even tiny animals like krill—are all gone is far from science fiction. The type of die-off that would lead to a largely lifeless ocean has happened before, and we're well on our way to seeing it happen again.

To get into Payne's frame of mind, we have to look at two areas of history. First, there's pre-dinosaur times, where we can find a precedent for the kind of huge-scale extinction we're seeing now. Then, we have to look at the past few hundred years, to understand why our fishless future kind of looks like, uh, the present.

We know that, about 250 million years ago, some extremely bad stuff happened, because almost everything on Earth that was alive at that time died very quickly, taking only a few million years to die off. This event is not to be confused with the meteorite impact that happened 65 million years ago—the one that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. That was nothing. A lot of those dinosaurs never went truly extinct; they're now known as "birds," and quite a few mammals made it, and evolved into humans, in pretty short order. This earlier event, the Permian–Triassic Extinction, is frequently called "the Great Dying" by paleontologists who like historical events to sound like Morrissey album titles. It made the Earth pretty quiet for a while—the oceans quietest of all.

In 2017, Payne and several colleagues looked into the source of the aforementioned extremely bad stuff that led to the Great Dying. They concluded that temperature-dependent hypoxia—loss of oxygen due to changes in temperature—caused about 70 percent of the losses. An oddly familiar culprit was fingered for this temperature change: "rapid and extreme climate warming." Payne and his pals weren't the first to draw comparisons between the events leading up to the Great Dying and the changes we're seeing today. A previous study had found that the Great Dying had resulted from rising carbon emissions—caused at that time by geothermal events—that occurred over the span of two to 20 millennia; in other words, the blink of a geological eye.

"The relevant thing we know from these recent results is that the patterns of warming, and loss of oxygen from the ocean that can account for the extinction at the end of the Permian are the same features we're starting to see right now," explained Curtis Deutsch, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Washington and one of Jonathan Payne's colleagues on that 2017 study.

Thanks to our species' multi-pronged and comprehensive approach, humanity's present day "Kill All the Marine Life" project is going extremely well. Here's a quick cheat sheet listing our main strategies:

• We dump several metric tons of plastic garbage into the oceans every year.

• Bottom trawling, or dragging fishing equipment across the seafloor, is turning "large portions of the deep continental slope into faunal deserts and highly degraded seascapes" according to a 2014 report on the long-term effects of this widespread practice.

• The planet is heating up really fast, and the resulting extinctions are happening in real time. (Although, for the record, at this rate it will take a few more centuries for this effect to reach the lifeforms at the deepest depths of the oceans.)

• Ocean acidification—the other major side effect of CO2 emissions besides global warming—is causing countless die-offs, most famously in corals, the backbone of coral reefs, the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth.

• Fertilizer and pesticides poison the ocean, and when combined with the above factors, they help create "dead zones," nearly oxygen-free patches of ocean where almost nothing can live. According to a 2018 paper published in Science magazine, dead zones make up four times as much of the oceans as they did in 1950.

• We eat the sea's living creatures—which is the number-one cause of their declining numbers. There are rates at which we can supposedly fish sustainably—meaning in such a way that we don't run out—but the fishing industry operates in volumes that meet, or surpass the peak equilibrium rate. (Right now, we're hauling up 90 percent of fish stocks globally, according to the UN.) In other words, we're killing as many fish as we possibly can as a byproduct of our industries, and then on top of that, we're also eating as many as we can.

To be clear, the Great Dying wasn't 100 percent caused by warming either. But whatever the cause, 286 out of 329 marine invertebrate genera we know of died back then. All the trilobites and blastoids died, for instance. Every single one! But no one mourns the trilobites and blastoids, and that actually helps illustrate why we fail to grasp that we're annihilating life in the oceans. There's actually a sociological term for this phenomenon: it's called a shifting baseline.

"Shifting baselines" have to do with everyone's gut-level perception of the natural world. The term refers to our tendency to perceive our own early experiences of ecology as the norm, in contrast to what we see later in life. To explain with a non-oceanic example, my own childhood memories of summers in California's Inland Empire include street gutters choked with thousands of California toads. Twenty years later, those toads are mostly gone—likely decimated by chytrid fungus infections. Their loss leaves me with the false impression that the natural order in Southern California has vanished in a very short time, when actually, the damage humanity has caused here is of much longer duration and much larger in scale than the loss of one species of toad (a species that arguably wasn't "supposed to be there" in the first place). Much more serious losses of biodiversity have been rolling out for centuries, but I don't miss animals like the Southern California kit fox, which went extinct over a century ago, because my own baseline never included them.

Similarly, according to Deutsch, we won't collectively care about the death of all the fish, because when it finally happens, our baselines will have shifted so much that the lack of fish will seem normal.

by Mike Pearl, Vice | Read more:
Image: Cathryn Virginia

"Hey, I just got my thousandth follower!"

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Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America

Fittingly enough, it was hot as blazes in Kentucky when Mitch McConnell slunk back home for Congress’ annual summer recess. One week earlier, Robert Mueller had testified that Russia was meddling in the 2020 U.S. elections. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, responded by shooting down Democrats’ efforts to bring two election-security bills to a vote — bills that McConnell, in his familiar fashion, had previously sentenced to quiet deaths after they passed the House. In the hailstorm of opprobrium that followed, McConnell had been tagged by “Morning Joe” Scarborough with the indelible nickname “Moscow Mitch.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called him a “Russian asset.” Twitter couldn’t decide whether he was #putinsbitch or #trumpsbitch. The Kentucky Democratic Party was selling red “Just Say Nyet to Moscow Mitch” T-shirts, emblazoned with an image of the senator’s jowly visage in a Cossack hat, as fast as they could print them up.

McConnell would undoubtedly have preferred to cool his heels in his Louisville home and let the storm subside. But he couldn’t afford that luxury. The biggest political event of the year in Kentucky, the Fancy Farm Picnic, happens on the first Saturday every August, and McConnell knew he had to show his face and speak. Fancy Farm, a 139-year tradition in the tiny western Kentucky town (population 458) it’s named for, is simultaneously one of America’s most charming political gatherings and one of its most brutal. On the one hand, it’s a pint-size Iowa State Fair in a prettier setting with better food, raising money for the local St. Jerome’s Catholic Church. The smoke from hundreds of pounds of pit-cooked mutton and pork barbecue wafts over a small carnival with bands plunking out bluegrass and country standards. Thousands of folks mingle, waving themselves with fans provided by the local candidates who glad-hand their way around the festivities.

But the mood shifts around 2 p.m., when the day’s main entertainment — the “political speaking” — begins. Under a big corrugated shelter, hooting and hollering Republican partisans assemble on the right, Democrats on the left, and candidates for office — joined, almost always, by McConnell — enter to cheers and jeers and seat themselves on a makeshift platform while trying to remember their most cutting quips about their opponents. Speakers at Fancy Farm aren’t supposed to persuade or inform; here, they’re expected to demonstrate, in the finest tradition of old-style Southern politics, that they can deliver zingers that cut the opposition down to size. Heather Henry, the Democrats’ candidate for secretary of state this year, puts it aptly when it’s her turn to face the mob: “It is no coincidence that Fancy Farm happens during Shark Week.”

It’s McConnell’s kind of event, in other words, and he’s done his part over the years to ramp up the partisan rancor. “My favorite year was 1994,” he once told a reporter. “I took a cardboard cutout of Bill Clinton onto the stage and defied the Democrats to come over and have their picture taken with it.” When a congressman took up the challenge, the photo ended up in Republican ads. He lost in November. Last summer, after months of waving through President Trump’s judicial nominees, McConnell opened his remarks with a typically pointed jab — “Father, I’ve been preparing for my visit to the parish by performing as many confirmations as I can” — then stood back, his thin lips curling up slightly into the look of smug satisfaction that happens whenever he’s gotten one over on the liberals.

This year, it was no use. Even before “Moscow Mitch” became a thing, Kentucky Democrats were smelling blood. McConnell has been unpopular in his home state for years, but his approval rating plunged in one poll to a rock-bottom 18 percent — with a re-election campaign looming in 2020. In January, he had raised red flags among Republicans and -Democrats alike when he took a key role in lifting sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Putin ally under FBI investigation for his involvement in 2016 election-meddling; three months later, Deripaska’s aluminum company, Rusal, announced a $200 million investment in Kentucky. A billboard funded by a -liberal group was subsequently erected on a busy stretch of I-75: “Russian mob money . . . really, Mitch?”

More recently, reports emerged that McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, had set up a pipeline in her department to funnel grants to Kentucky to lift her husband’s political prospects. And as Trump’s trade war with China escalated, uncomfortable old stories began to recirculate about how McConnell “evolved” after he met his future wife in the early Nineties, going from being a fierce China hawk to a potent ally on Capitol Hill. Chao’s father, James — a Chinese American shipping magnate and close friend of former People’s Republic dictator Jiang Zemin — gave McConnell and his wife a huge gift in 2008 that boosted the senator’s net worth from less than $8 million to nearly $20 million. While “Beijing Mitch” doesn’t have quite the same ring as his new moniker, McConnell’s change of heart on Russia was hardly without precedent. (McConnell declined to comment for this story.)

Plus, McConnell made an unusual blunder in July. When a group of former coal miners suffering from black-lung disease caravaned to Washington to ask the senator for help, he met with them for only two minutes, leading to terrible headlines. As Fancy Farm got underway, coal miners in Harlan County were holding a protest that made news throughout the state. Their company had declared bankruptcy without warning and was refusing to pay their final paychecks, and the miners were blocking the tracks to prevent rail cars from shipping $1 million worth of the coal. As the protest stretched into late August, the site became a 24-hour encampment, attracting activists and food donations from around the country, and was visited by nearly every Kentucky politician except McConnell. Practically every story featured the miners cursing the senator. “He’s not pro-coal,” said miner Collin Cornette. “I don’t even think he’s pro-Kentucky.”

Not surprisingly, Democrats and progressive activists swarmed Fancy Farm this year, hopelessly outnumbering the Republicans. Even with a closely contested governor’s race in the offing, most folks came to taunt their senior senator and revel in his troubles. You can’t blame them: For almost four decades, McConnell has been ruthlessly mowing down his opponents with big-money negative campaigns and transforming the GOP into the state’s dominant party. And while many Kentuckians once took pride in having such a mighty mover-and-shaker in Washington, they’ve become increasingly appalled by what he’s done with his power: ensuring that big donors have undue influence in elections, turning Congress into a strictly partisan battlefield, and serving as the indispensable wingman for Trump. The crowd is teeming with Cossack hats and homemade signs with messages like “Putin for senator — cut out the middle man.” Before the speechifying, I run into Bennie J. Smith, a civil-rights activist and jazz musician making a long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination to unseat McConnell, and he assesses the mood: “I’d say the crowd is pretty evenly divided the way Kentucky is: Some don’t like him, and some hate him.”

by Bob Moser, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

Trade War Farm Bailout

Trade War Farm Bailout (The Big Picture)

According to Reuters, “the U.S. government will pay American farmers hurt by the trade war with China between $15 and $150 per acre as part of a $16 billion aid package.” Aid is going gone to mostly wealthy corporate farms.

In other words, the cost of the trade war is being borne first by farmers, who lose a major market for their crops, second by taxpayers, who are bailing out the farmers.

[ed. See also: Trump’s $28 Billion Bet That Rural America Will Stick With Him (Bloomberg): "At $28 billion so far, the farm rescue is more than twice as expensive as the 2009 bailout of Detroit’s Big Three automakers, which cost taxpayers $12 billion. And farmers expect the money to keep flowing: In an August survey by Purdue University and the CME Group, 58% said they anticipate another round of trade aid next year."

Marc Lester, ADN
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[ed. These guys are pretty scarce when September rolls around (hunting season).]

Bill Gates: If We Break Up Big Tech, We'll Just Have More Bad Companies

In an interview with Bloomberg, Bill Gates dismissed the idea of breakups as a remedy for Big Tech's monopolistic market concentration; Gates said that breaking up an abusive company will just produce more abusive companies. Instead, Gates believes that specific monopolistic activities should be banned.

Gates has some company in this position: For example EU competition commission Margrethe Vestager (recently blessed with a surprise reappointment) says that attempts to break up Facebook will turn into protracted litigation boondoggles, and instead, she just wants to go on extracting massive fines from tech companies that misbehave (though these fines are also the subject of high-stake litigation).

But it's not just Vestager and Gates: Mark Zuckerberg wants to see regulation for Facebook. He says that clear rules will help him steer his company without daily, ghastly scandals.

The problem with this model is that expensive, difficult-to-implement compliance rules are tantamount to permanent licenses to dominate the internet: if you have to be a giant to afford to comply with the law, then we'll only get giants.

The other problem is that giants who extract monopoly profits from their suppliers and customers have plenty of money left over to lobby governments to let them get away with progressively worse behavior (which improves their profitability, leaving more money to lobby with, lather, rinse, repeat). This is why the first trustbusters focused on breaking up the giant companies (which were run by executives who were no less wicked than Big Tech's supposedly benevolent dictators): they didn't just want to have fairer, more competitive markets, they wanted to hamstring the industries' ability to corrupt democratic governance.

Gates is practicing a form of tech exceptionalism here: implicit in his view is that tech is intrinsically corrupting, and that the companies behave badly because it is in their nature to do so, not because we let them get away with it.

But he should know better. Tech's rise coincided precisely with the decline of antitrust enforcement (literally: Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail the same year the Apple ][+ went on sale, and one of his first acts after the election the next year was to gut antitrust enforcement).

Companies that had been around for a while either had first-hand experience of the truly unpleasant experience of being targeted for antitrust enforcement, or had watched it happen to others close up. Senior counsel for these companies trained juniors to warn execs that monopolistic behavior would produce brutal, extended legal trouble.

But not tech: the fresh Stanford Law grads who went to work for the startups their EE and Comp Sci colleagues had dropped out to found had not direct experience of antitrust, and when the execs they worked for proposed monopolistic conduct that would have been severely punished under pre-Reagan antitrust, these lawyers did not pump the breaks -- they hit the gas-pedal. And every time they did this, they were rewarded: the companies they worked for enhanced their profits by buying or crushing nascent competitors, by merging with major rivals, by cornering entire vertical markets. Corporate counsel went from being the adult supervision in board-rooms full of unexceptionally greedy and atavistic executives to being enthusiastic enablers of these execs' worst impulses.

Cue the Microsoft antitrust investigation. Bill Gates put in a legendarily terrible performance for his deposition, one of the first-ever corporate depositions to be video-recorded and released to the public, going viral as best as it could given the technology of the day. The sight of Gates, stimming and rocking and displaying belligerent arrogance with every word, was deeply traumatic to both Gates and Microsoft's executives.

Microsoft insider accounts claim that this traumatic experience, as well as the years and millions Microsoft spent fighting the DoJ (successfully, for the most part) changed the microeconomics of Microsoft's decision-making. Like every other large institution, Microsoft is (and was) composed of people with a variety of views on the wisdom and fairness of different courses of action, but the people who'd argued for monopolistic conduct had won every argument, because whenever the company followed their advice, it grew more profitable and faced no consequences.

But, after having faced lengthy antitrust action that was both personally and financially traumatizing, the naysayers in the board room gained a powerful new argument: "If we do this, they'll put Bill back on the stand."

Those same Microsoft insiders say that this caution is what allowed Google to emerge, without being crushed using the underhanded, unethical, monopolistic tactics Microsoft used on every other upstart that threatened its dominance.

This effect wasn't confined to Microsoft, either: for a brief moment in the early 2000s, the whole industry discovered a new forebearance, during which the ecosystem became more diverse, weirder, more interesting and more competitive than it had ever been, before or since.

(This same dynamic may be the reason that the IBM staffers who argued that the first PCs should be built from commodity components, and that Phoenix should be left in peace to clone its ROM chips won their arguments, despite IBM's usual practice of building systems out of proprietary components and subcomponents, and the bullying, monopolistic tactics that mired them in DoJ litigation for more than a decade, at the end of which the company produced its first PC)

Gates wants us to believe that Tech is Different, and that anyone who runs a tech company will be so intrinsically rapacious and villainous that they will behave as he did when he was growing Microsoft; but the reality is that Gates and his fellow monopolists past and present are totally unexceptional in their willingness to cheat and bully their way to dominance. They're no less and no more rotten than Carnegie or Rockefeller or the Sacklers. The thing that let these garden-variety sociopaths get away with their bad behavior was not their exceptional brilliance: it was the state's deliberate decision to let them get away with it.

Gates's prescription is for governments and tech companies to create state monopolies, a new kind of industrial constitutional monarchy, in which companies like Microsoft (and Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, etc) are guaranteed eternal rule over their sectors, in exchange for suffering themselves to be draped in golden chains by a regulatory aristocracy drawn from their own executive ranks, who will ask them to exercise noblesse oblige and throw some crumbs to us peasants laboring in their digital fields.

But even if breakups take a long time and even fail in the end, they're still worth pursuing. DoJ antitrust litigation changes the way companies operate, puts them on their best behavior and puts a giant thumb on the scales for the internal angels of the companies' better natures when they joust with their amoral board-room rivals.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:
Image: YouTube

Aliens Win Again

The secrets of Area 51, the highly classified Air Force facility long rumored to house extraterrestrial artifacts, remain unseen.

Despite millions responding to the public Facebook event "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," Nevada authorities say about 40 people gathered at the gates before being confronted and dispersed by law enforcement.

According to the Lincoln County Sheriff's office, one arrest was made — not for an attempt at freeing an alien, but for public urination.

'Storm Area 51' Fails To Materialize (NPR)

Image: John Locher/AP
[ed. See also: I 'stormed' Area 51 and it was even weirder than I imagined (The Guardian).]

Across the Globe, Millions Join Biggest Climate Protest Ever

Millions of people demonstrated across the world yesterday demanding urgent action to tackle global heating, as they united across timezones and cultures to take part in the biggest climate protest in history.

In an explosion of the youth movement started by the Swedish school striker Greta Thunberg just over 12 months ago, people protested from the Pacific islands, through Australia, across-south east Asia and Africa into Europe and onwards to the Americas.

For the first time since the school strikes for climate began last year, young people called on adults to join them – and they were heard. Trade unions representing hundreds of millions of people around the world mobilised in support, employees left their workplaces, doctors and nurses marched and workers at firms like Amazon, Google and Facebook walked out to join the climate strikes.

In the estimated 185 countries where demonstrations took place, the protests often had their individual targets; from rising sea levels in the Solomon Islands, toxic waste in South Africa, to air pollution and plastic waste in India and coal expansion in Australia.

But the overall message was unified – a powerful demand for an urgent step-change in action to cut emissions and stabilise the climate.

The demonstrations took place on the eve of a UN climate summit, called by the secretary general, António Guterres, to inject urgency into government action to restrict the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C, as agreed under the 2015 Paris agreement.

Carbon emissions climbed to a record high last year, despite a warning from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that there is little more than a decade left to act to slash emissions and stabilise the climate.

Donald Trump will be at the UN headquarters during Monday’s key summit on the climate crisis – but will be there to take part in a meeting on religious freedom instead, in what will be seen by many as a snub.

On Friday, the voices of key political leaders were noticeable by their absence. Instead it was a day for people to set forth their demands, ranging from a ban on new mining in countries like South Africa and Australia, to a “green new deal” in the UK and US to better air quality and more trees in countries like India.

“We are out here to reclaim our right to live, our right to breathe and our right to exist, which is all being denied to us by an inefficient policy system that gives more deference to industrial and financial objectives rather than environmental standards,” said Avinash Chanchal, a young protester in Delhi.

Asia-Pacific

The action began in the Pacific Islands, where citizens have repeatedly asked wealthier nations to do more to prevent rising sea levels. Over the course of the day children and students from Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Tonga, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea took part in poetry performances, silent protests, sporting events and discussions. Students held placards in Kiribati and chanted: “We are not sinking, we are fighting.”

The demonstrations spread across Australia – the world’s biggest exporter of coal and liquid natural gas – where more than 300,000 people took to the streets in 100 rallies, prompting a tweet from Thunberg – awake in New York – that the “huge crowd” would set the standard.

The Australian finance minister, Mathias Cormann, had said on Thursday that students should stay in class rather than go on strike.

In a retort, Danielle Porepilliasana, a Sydney high school student said: “World leaders from everywhere are telling us that students need to be at school doing work. I’d like to see them at their parliaments doing their jobs for once.”

by Sandra Laville and Jonathan Watts, The Guardian| Read more:
Image: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

[ed. Because adults won't lead on climate change, gun control, or anything else. See also: Trump to snub climate summit for religious freedom meeting at UN (The Guardian).]

Andrey Shpatak, Japanese Warbonnet (Chirolophis japonicus).
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Hans Hartung, T1936-2, 1936

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