Amazon contractor delivery corps
Portland, OR companies Last Mile and Triton shut business down due to unsustainable demands by their sole contractor[^1], Amazon.
Clips:
- contractors are present to obfuscate responsibility
- closing their doors
- amazon has complete control
- Amazon has firing power + on how that’s different from franchising
Sources:
- https://www.workers.org/2021/07/57307/https://workstoppage.podbean.com/e/ep-57-we-see-this-all-the-time-feat-laborkyle/
Jeff Bezos thanks Amazon employees and customers for paying for his trip to “space”
Spain’s top court ruled COVID lockdown unconstitutional
The government’s stay-at-home lockdown order issued last year during a state of emergency was unconstitutional, Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled on July 14, AP reported.
The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by the far-right Vox party.
Fire Season 2021
Wildfires continue to burn actively across 13 states where 78 large fires and complexes [are burning] 1,346,736 acres. [that is, more than a million acres of fire in America right this very moment. 2,636,109+ acres total have burned this year alone.] More than 20,700 wildland firefighters and support personnel are assigned to incidents. New large fires were reported in California, Montana and Wyoming.
States experiencing large fires right now include: Montana (17), Idaho (16), California (8), Oregon (7), Washington (7), Alaska (6), Wyoming (6), Arizona (6), New Mexico (1), Colorado (1), Utah (1), Minnesota (1), Nevada (1). Fires currently contained: 3 out of 78 total.
There are about 4,644 active wildfires across Western Canada as well, totaling more than 5 million acres. Most of those are also out of control according to government sources. You can find an interactive map of active wildfires in Canada at https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map . British Columbia is currently under a state of emergency as of July 20 and will remain so for at least 14 days.
submitted to the FAO in 2005: Boreal forest fires: an increasing issue in a changing climate
The area burned in Canada has doubled during the past 20 years compared to most of the twentieth century, with wide interannual fluctuations. Global and regional climate models suggest that the area burned and severity of boreal fires will increase as a result of climate change.
‘Near-complete loss’ of young salmon in Sacramento River possible, California officials say
California Department of Fish and Wildlife staff are on the ground monitoring drought impacts — and among the alarming findings is “the possibility of a near-complete loss” of young, winter-run Chinook salmon on the Sacramento River this fall due to a dwindling water supply and persistent dry, hot weather.
via SFGate
Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’
I don’t think people realize that climate change is not just a loss of ice. It’s all the stuff that’s dependent on it. The ice is really just the canary in the coalmine. To have 97, 98 degrees in Glacier national park for days on end is insane. This is not just some fluke.
There are many years where the snow is gone so early that you just don’t see it in the mountains. And water getting that warm is absolutely devastating to fish and algae.
Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked.
There have been total losses of a lot of baby birds this year. You see these ospreys and eagles sitting on top of the trees in their nests and those young, they just can’t take the heat. Year after year of that and you lose your birds.
People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated, they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.
I’m also an artist. I recently finished a 10-week art course called Identity in America where the instructor made us use a medium we had not worked with before, because he felt we couldn’t go back to old habits. I ended up drawing myself morphing from being an ecologist to the guys who walked around during the plague to bring out the bodies
When I was forced to actually confront my identity, I realized that I’m no longer doing what I thought I was. My whole life has been documenting how life works, how we can conserve species that are in trouble. I was no longer cataloging life and finding ways to prevent ecosystems from reaching tipping points. I had actually hit my own tipping point. Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death. And that is what is accounting for my kind of overwhelming sense of grief.
This is what really brought home to me that my entire job has changed. I don’t like my new job, but I can’t quit. Even if I quit being a professor and doing research, I’m always going to be a coroner now.
When I started work, I didn’t think about climate change. It was far enough back that people were still kind of wondering, is it really happening? Then pretty early in my career as a professor, I realized I had to incorporate climate change into most of what I was doing. These tree-killing bark beetles I study have always had outbreaks. It’s not anything new. But when mountain pine beetle developed this most recent outbreak, it was so far out of the norm in size and severity, we couldn’t ignore that.
I would walk through these forests and almost everything was dead. When you see a beetle kill 70 acres of trees across North America, you just have to change your research questions. My focus had to shift from the beetles to how we can help our forests survive this. You have to come at these systems from a completely different direction now.
We’re coming at things all wrong, trying to save a species by putting it in a zoo or replanting trees. But if you aren’t going to the root cause of the problem it’s still going to happen. That’s not to say that if we didn’t just get our act together and make some major changes, we couldn’t save some of this. We just can’t do it one species at a time.
Diana Six
via The Guardian
Jan 6th Commission, Authoritarianism, and Censorship
Clips:
- CD Thank You FinCEn clip
- Tucker and Greenwald
- allow lots of time for nitpicking
- Tucker says problematic shit every 2 seconds
- Greenwald says “this is fascism”[^2]
- “a merger of state and corporate power which is a classic definition of fascism”
- naturally leads into an opportunity to discuss the difference between “left” and “liberal”
owen has some criticisms of the idea of free speech in the first place — here is a Marxist source on the subject https://www.marxist.com/our-cherished-freedom-of-speech-myth.htm. Basically, we don’t have freeze peach now, so it’s disingenuous to claim our nonexistent freedom is somehow under attack. Leftists have been silenced since the dawn of journalism, the right are huge babies about it because their views are already enshrined in the hegemony and so they aren’t used to the idea of moderation.
Freedom of expression is routinely and uncritically heralded as our society’s proudest achievement to be defended at all costs. It is always assumed that, essentially, we possess this freedom, and it is only necessary to preserve it in one way or another. In truth, under capitalism there is no such thing as free expression nor a free press, for capital decides everything.
“If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.” -John Swinton at a meeting of journalists on free speech, 1880
Furthermore, freedom of speech is actually a Marxian value!
free speech is never a major theme for Marx, but he would have demanded limits if he had turned his attention to the question. Right? To the contrary, censorship haunts Marx’s entire life. His earliest publications dissect and heartily mock it.
Footnotes
On Glen Greenwald’s “a classic definition of fascism”: a discussion of what fascism actually is. if you take Robert Griffin’s definition, fascism requires Palingenetic ultranationalism, which we can analyze this for. Palingenesis is revolution in order to achieve a “national rebirth.” Wikipedia’s overview of fascism, topically-relevant detail bolded: “Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy, which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.”