November 28, 2022

Swedish youths launch landmark climate lawsuit against government

Over 600 Swedish children and young people - including climate activist Greta Thunberg and three seven-year-olds - are suing the Swedish state for doing too little to combat climate change.

https://www.thelocal.se/20221125/swedish-youth-launch-landmark-climate-lawsuit-against-government/


STOCKHOLM 2022 11 25 Climate demonstration in Stockholm that the youth-led organization Aurora engaged in before submitting their lawsuit against the state for their lack of climate action. The demonstration train ran between Mynttorget and Stockholm District Court.

The so-called Aurora lawsuit has been in preparation for two years, and the group is accusing the government of, among other things, failing to carry out investigations into how large a percentage of the global work to combat the climate crisis Sweden should be responsible for. “If the state’s climate measures are lacking, they are threatening our human rights in the future,” law student Ida Edling told Dagens Nyheter (DN), the newspaper which first reported the story.

“It’s a legal responsibility which the state can be legally called to account for. That’s why we’re suing them,” she said. Edling is one of the people behind the initiative, which climate activist Greta Thunberg is also involved with. Aurora would have launched their lawsuit no matter which political bloc had won September’s election, Edling said. “We’ve worked on this for two years and would have sued any government which is not working towards a climate policy in line with Sweden’s fair share of the global climate transition,” she said. “That includes the previous government.”

On Friday, she marched to the Stockholm courthouse to file the lawsuit alongside young people from Aurora and other members of the climate and environment movement. “In a state with the rule of law, everyone has to follow the law. Even the government,” Edling said. “When the state’s climate policy threatens our human rights, it breaks the law.”

Climate minister Romina Pourmokhtari told DN via her press secretary that she had no comments on the case. Similar suits have been brought forward in other European countries. In Germany and the Netherlands, climate activists won against the respective governments in court, forcing both countries to sharpen their climate targets.

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November 28, 2022

Communist China's vulnerabilities bubble to the surface

America’s chief geopolitical and ideological competitor suffers from inherent weaknesses

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/communist-chinas-vulnerabilities



Thousands of protestors took to the streets of Shanghai, China’s financial hub and largest city last weekend, chanting for China’s Communist leaders to step down. The immediate spark was growing public discontent with strict lockdowns as part of the communist government’s “zero-Covid” approach. These protests have reportedly spread to other cities, including the country’s capital, Beijing, where students chanted, “Freedom will prevail.”

China has witnessed previous protests over the government’s handling of the pandemic, and government authorities are now cracking down on these protests as they have in the past. Only time will tell if this round of demonstrations unfolds any differently, but the regular outbreak of protests inside of China in recent years shows an inherent vulnerability in a communist system that lacks basic freedoms.

Communist China’s three main vulnerabilities

1. China’s political system fails to respect basic freedoms. There’s nothing new here: Communist rulers in China have run roughshod over the basic rights and freedoms of its own people for decades. But as Freedom House noted in its most recent Freedom in the World report, “China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years.” These stepped-up efforts to crack down on dissent reveal the sense of insecurity that China’s communist leaders feel from their own people. A ruling system that targets a 90-year-old Roman Catholic cardinal and puts its own people in forced labor camps is not one that is confident in its own legitimacy.

2. China’s rigid economic system stifles innovation and potential for growth. The “zero-Covid” approach is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to China’s current economic model. The country faces major debt challenges in its real estate market, and the government recently stepped in with measures in an attempt to address the strains in that market. But beyond this immediate crisis in the real estate market, China has larger, structural challenges with its economic model, including an aging population and growing restrictions on private enterprise. America’s private sector has continued to shift away from China, leading to an erosion of financial and economic ties between the world’s top two economies. Beijing’s growing international isolation caused by its own unforced errors has motivated some of the talent it needs to look elsewhere for opportunities.

3. China’s global engagement strategy has failed to win friends and overtake competitors.......

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November 28, 2022

Lauren Boebert Can't Believe People Are Linking Her Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric to the LGBTQ+ Club Shooting

She recently said as much while…going on an anti-trans rant.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/lauren-boebert-colorado-shooting-anti-lgbtq-rhetoric

https://archive.ph/QgMuR



Colorado representative Lauren Boebert has a well-documented history of demonizing the LGBTQ+ community—but in the wake of Saturday’s mass shooting at Colorado LGBTQ+ nightclub Club Q, she’d prefer that people forget about everything she’s ever said and definitely not link her hateful rhetoric to the uptick in violence against the community.

On Tuesday, while speaking to Ross Kaminsky, a radio host at Colorado’s KOA station, Boebert called it “disgusting” to blame her for what happened over the weekend or accurately note the various ways she’s vilified LGBTQ+ people. “That is completely false,” she said, falsely. “I have never had bad rhetoric towards anyone and their personal preferences as an adult.” Then, because she’s a bigot—and not a very smart one at that—she immediately added: “What I’ve criticized is the sexualization of our children. And I’ve criticized men dressing up as caricatures of women.” While most rationale people would agree that children should not be sexualized, Boebert, like many on the right, equates allowing gender-affirming medical care for trans youth with child “grooming.” She also believes that drag queens pose a threat to children just by simply existing, and we know this because she’s previously said as much:

https://twitter.com/laurenboebert/status/1549093007097577473
https://twitter.com/RepBoebert/status/1560340349519904768
On the subject of Drag Queen Story Hour events like the one above—during which a drag queen literally just reads stories to kids—Boebert bizarrely suggested that they operate like strip clubs, telling KOA, “We don’t need six-year-old children putting dollar bills in the thongs of grown men shaking and twerking in front of children…That is child abuse.” She added that she would continue to speak out against the “grooming” of children, a term that has been co-opted by the right to describe behavior by LGBTQ+ people they don’t like, rather than the way child molesters lure their victims.

In addition to previously smearing the LGBTQ+ community online, Boebert has attacked legislation like the Equality Act, which protects transgender youth. Last year, on the House floor, she urged her colleagues to vote against the measure, saying, “Where is the equity in this legislation for the young girls across America who will have to look behind their backs as they change in school locker rooms, just to make sure there isn’t a confused man trying to catch a peek?” On Sunday, after Boebert tweeted that the victims of the Club Q shooting were in her “prayers,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded: “@laurenboebert you have played a major role in elevating anti-LGBT+ hate rhetoric and anti-trans lies while spending your time in Congress blocking even the most common sense gun safety laws. You don’t get to ‘thoughts and prayers’ your way out of this. Look inward and change.”

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1594406529603670016
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November 28, 2022

A Fish Tale

Long before Moby Dick, Herman Melville set off on a Polynesian trip that became a famous literary hoax.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/swindle-fraud/fish-tale



I can offer only the sketchiest explanations for how I came to occupy the top floor of a pleasantly wide banker’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, where the sun pours in through two high windows until midafternoon, glancing off the painted surface of the desk where I have lately been composing manuscripts on a little Olivetti manual typewriter. I purchased the typewriter on the street while in the company of my daughter, who shares my pleasure in beautiful old things that have survived the general shipwreck. Putting your grandmother’s stuff out on the sidewalk is the birthright of every American. We define ourselves in the present by forgetting the past, an auto-da-fé that illuminates the rituals of self-invention, which allows us to make ourselves up from scratch, or to sell chewing gum to the masses, or to move to California, the land of oranges and movie stars and a place my longtime companion Herman Melville imagined when he wrote the Gold Rush into his novel Mardi.

Americans have always flitted back and forth between the present and whatever imagined future might dissolve outstanding complications and debts. Our penchant for self-invention has led to misunderstandings between Americans and nearly everyone else. But those who understand this driving quirk may admit that it is the source of much that is useful and particular, if also maddening.

I do my own arbitrage on the top floor of my house, which I rent together with my wife. The three floors below my sunlit aerie, which faces out toward the harbor, are noisily occupied by my older children—a son, age nine, and the aforementioned daughter, age five—according to a custody schedule approved by New York State family court. The aforementioned wife is also the mother of our infant son, Elijah, whose namesake is the prophetic old salt who warns Ishmael against boarding the Pequod in Melville’s Moby Dick. Our two Siberian cats, Herman and Melville, run up and down the stairs and wedge themselves behind the washer-dryer, until the creak of a floorboard sends them off like a shot onto the landing, with the sound of cat claws sliding and scraping on polished wood. When they get tired of these shenanigans, they will come curl up on my lap, which makes it devilishly difficult to work the Olivetti.

Having grown up not far from here, in a lower-middle-income housing project where the junkies left broken syringes at night in the sandbox, where I played among them the next morning, I can’t fault you for wondering how I pay for this whale of a house. Any honest man sans a private fortune will give you the same answer: I hustle, and play the angles, while keeping two steps ahead of the bill collector. At the end of the month, I take the kids to school in a cab and then I hunt for spare change in the cushions of my couch, until I gather a hoard that is sizable enough to exchange for a sandwich. The weight of the hustle is squarely on me, which is basically how nature intended it.

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November 27, 2022

Stew hash browns for a spicy Creole twist on a favorite dish

https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/11/22/creole-hash-browns-recipe/

https://archive.ph/mWb5i



Unlike traditional hash browns, these potatoes are not shredded and sauteed in a pan until crisp. As chef Kwame Onwuachi explains in his cookbook and memoir, “My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef,” his mother, Jewel Robinson, used to get up early and prepare these unique stewed hash browns.

“My mom’s secret was ... letting the hash browns reduce and reduce, getting richer in flavor and darker in color,” Onwuachi writes. The spicy hash browns, the chef says, were a regular feature at the family’s Sunday breakfast table.

NOTE: Onwuachi’s recipe for a Creole Spice Blend is heavy on cayenne pepper and packed with Worcestershire powder. It delivers a kick. You can substitute your favorite Cajun/Creole spice mix for his blend.



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November 27, 2022

United Furniture Industries Fired Thousands via Text, Email as They Slept

“I thought it was a joke or something,” Jimmy Herring told The Daily Beast after being fired days before Thanksgiving and just weeks ahead of his baby’s expected arrival.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississippi-based-furniture-company-united-furniture-industries-fires-2700-workers-via-text-and-email



Days before Thanksgiving, a Mississippi-based furniture company laid off 2,700 workers across the country—via text and email—while many of them were sleeping. United Furniture Industries sacked nearly its entire workforce in the state, as well as employees in North Carolina and California, and in a heartless parting blow, discontinued the employees’ health care benefits, according to reports. After the mass layoffs, one company driver was arrested for allegedly stealing furniture and a truck.

Now the firm is facing at least three federal lawsuits in the Northern District of Mississippi. Toria Neal, who has worked for the company since July 2014, filed a class-action suit this week alleging United fired all employees except for “over-the-road drivers” just before midnight on Nov. 21 in violation of federal law. She argues United didn’t give workers a required 60-day advance written notice. (Two other employees, Frances Alomari and Willie Poe, filed lawsuits making the same allegations against the company.)

The abrupt firings were a punch to the gut for longtime employees of United Furniture, which operates under the Lane Furniture brand. Jimmy Herring, 24, told The Daily Beast that he was promoted to floor supervisor at a Lane plant in Trinity, North Carolina, a week or two before his termination. Herring said that before he and his colleagues were let go, they were making recliners for Lowe’s retail stores. But at 11:56 p.m. on Monday, the firm sent him a text message while he was asleep. He wouldn’t see the digital pink slip until a day or two later.


Jimmy Herring and his girlfriend, Chey, are expecting a baby on December 8. Courtesy of Jimmy Herring

Instead, his boss texted him the next morning, without providing many details, and announced they didn’t have work. At first, Herring assumed they were getting a day off because of the upcoming holiday. Then he contacted his co-workers. “They said we had all been terminated,” said Herring, who was with the company for six years. “I thought it was a joke or something.” He said his reaction was one of “complete panic.” “I didn't know what to do, where to start,” said Herring, whose girlfriend, Chey, is expecting a baby on Dec. 8. Instead of shelling out for Thanksgiving dinner, the couple scrambled to buy supplies for their future child including a baby bath.

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November 27, 2022

Kulajda Is the Hearty Czech Soup You Need This Winter

It’s a Bohemian classic made with mushrooms and lots of fresh dill.

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/kulajda-czech-soup-recipe



If there were any justice in the world, Czech food would be better known internationally. Sure, a few restaurants in neighboring Germany and Austria might boast that they offer traditional Böhmische Küche, or “Bohemian cuisine,” and many Texans are well aware that their beloved kolaches have Czech origins. But, as we all know, justice is in short supply on this planet, and in large part, the cuisine of Bohemia—the western region of the modern Czech Republic—has been unfairly overlooked for decades.

One of its best-kept secrets? Kulajda (pronounced “coo-lie-duh”), a rich, fragrant, sour-sweet soup that makes for a perfect cold-weather warmer. Imagine a creamy broth with wild mushrooms and thick chunks of potatoes. Add enough fresh dill to make it bright and aromatic, a dose of vinegar for acidity, and a soft-boiled egg for heartiness. It might look like a simple soup, but with a thick slice of Czech rye bread, a bowl of kulajda is a rewarding winter meal.

For chefs like Roman Paulus, kulajda is home-cooking that dresses up quite nicely, thank you very much. The first Czech chef to win a Michelin star, Paulus gave the dish a starring role at the Alcron, the now-shuttered landmark hotel and restaurant in central Prague. “It was always on the menu when we had fresh forest mushrooms,” he says. “I think we did pretty well, because it was always very popular.”

Originally from the region of South Bohemia, near the German and Austrian borders, kulajda is filled with the wild mushrooms that locals have gathered in the Czech Republic’s dense forests for generations. Fresh fungi are ideal, but dried versions also work. Paulus likes to use lišky, or chanterelles, but many Czechs will make the entire dish with hřiby, or king boletes, which are also known as porcini, penny buns, or ceps. While some argue that chanterelles are the traditional choice, Paulus thinks the type is not a dealbreaker. “I’m sure that people in the past didn’t care about the kind of mushrooms—they just used what they had,” he says. “The nice thing about forest mushrooms is that you cannot really count on the season. You just take what’s there.”

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November 27, 2022

Pre-empting the coming world war

Despite Ukraine, Paul Mason writes, Europe is still not awake to the security threat it faces.

https://socialeurope.eu/pre-empting-the-coming-world-war



It must have been a shock in Britain to see a book entitled The Coming World War published in 1935. That after all was the year a ‘peace ballot’ took place, an informal referendum in which 11 million people—half the electorate—voted for peace, disarmament and active support for the League of Nations. The book was vague about where the war might begin. But it warned that whole cities would be razed by bombers, with uncontrollable outbreaks of mental illness, starvation and social breakdown as a result. Published by the Communist Party, the book was aimed squarely at the pacifist movement, an audience targeted so successfully as to require a second edition, in 1936. But within six months of its appearance its author, Tom Wintringham, was himself at war—in Spain, commanding the British battalion of the International Brigade. The pacifist moment was over. That’s how quickly the world can turn. Today, too, we seem to be sleepwalking towards a global conflict whose shape is becoming all too clear.

Systemic incompatibility

There are justified grounds for believing the Ukraine conflict may soon become ‘frozen’. Back-channel negotiations are said to be happening between the United States and Russia. Behind the extreme gestures—the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline and the nightly threats of nuclear war on Russian television—some western analysts believe the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is seeking to de-escalate and freeze the invasion at its current territorial limits. The contours of any future global conflict have however become sharper in 2022. The declaration on February 4th by Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping—20 days before the invasion began—was a formal assertion of systemic incompatibility. There is no longer a single, ‘rules-based’ order, said the two presidents, but a multipolar world in which universal definitions of democracy, freedom and human rights are dead. By implication we, the Chinese Communist Party and United Russia—state parties which do not allow of alternation—will decide what constitutes freedom and democracy.

If this were merely a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, the west might simply decouple its economies from China, wean itself off Russian gas and resign itself to the strategic paralysis of the United Nations Security Council. But the invasion of Ukraine, Chinese manoeuvres against Taiwan and the relentless propaganda against universal norms being waged by both powers inside western societies are signals that coexistence will be hard. Economic deglobalisation is under way, as each of the global trading blocs scrambles to secure raw materials and energy supplies. Russia has diverted its oil and gas supplies to China; the US is exploring long-term energy agreements with Britain and Germany. Meanwhile the US president, Joe Biden, has banned the export of semiconductor tools to China while pouring $52 billion into semiconductor manufacturing and research, with the express aim of overtaking China in this critical field.

Unsustainable models

But what’s really undermining the rules-based order is the long-term unsustainability of the socio-economic model each of the world’s major powers has chosen. The Russian oligarchic elite lives off economic rents from oil and gas—impossible in a future of net-zero carbon emissions. The Chinese ‘communist’ elite thrives on the super-exploitation of a giant factory workforce which cannot bargain because it has no rights. And the US plutocratic elite tops a financialised capitalism reliant on dollar dominance and repeated central-bank largesse: high inequality and structural racism have turned it into the most fragile of the G7 democracies. None of these models can endure long-term. They are pushing the national elites into confrontation with one another—even as they proclaim their desire for peace and co-operation. Which leaves us with a world system built around an American hegemony for which its electorate no longer has the stomach, a Russian elite which feels compelled to lash out in the direction of its near neighbours and a China straining to move from regional dominance to matching the US in global power.

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November 26, 2022

Don't forget Empty G spoke at neo nazi Nick Fuentes' conference this year. She needs to be lit up.

Put this fucking piece of dog shit on the back foot. Attack attack attack....

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-cpac-nick-fuentes-afpac-white-nationalist/

November 25, 2022

China Covid: Record number of cases as virus surges nationwide

China has recorded its highest number of daily Covid cases since the pandemic began, despite stringent measures designed to eliminate the virus.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63739617



Several major cities including the capital Beijing and southern trade hub Guangzhou are experiencing outbreaks. Wednesday saw 31,527 cases recorded compared with an April peak of 28,000.

The numbers are still tiny for a country of 1.4 billion people and officially just over 5,200 have died since the pandemic began. That equates to three Covid deaths in every million in China, compared with 3,000 per million in the US and 2,400 per million in the UK, although direct comparisons between countries are difficult.

While China's zero-Covid policy has clearly saved lives, it has also dealt a punishing blow to the economy and ordinary people's lives. The country slightly relaxed some of those restrictions a few weeks ago.



It cut quarantine for close contacts from seven days in a state facility to five days and three days at home, and stopped recording secondary contacts which allowed many more people to avoid having to quarantine.

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