#1yrago UN poverty envoy calls UK poverty a “political choice” that inflicted “great misery”

mostlysignssomeportents:

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has followed up his scorching condemnation of US poverty with an even more damning report on poverty in the UK, which he calls a “political choice” brought on by a decade of austerity at the hands of the Conservative Party.

Alston characterised the findings from his two-week fact-finding tour as “a disgrace…a social calamity and an economic disaster.” He described the country’s policies as so bad for women that “if you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place.”

He predicted further declines in the lives of middle class people, who will “find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society because community roots are being broken.”

He condemned homelessness, child poverty, the rise of food banks, the sell-off of public assets, the closure of youth centres, the rise of sex-work and gang affiliation among the most vulnerable people, and said that the sole bright spot – communities pitching in to help their neighbours – “resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a natural disaster or health epidemic.”

Conservative politicians insisted that Alston didn’t understand how austerity worked and that everyone was much better off due to a decade of cuts.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/16/un-poverty-envoy-calls-uk-pove.html

Austerity is a choice for rich countries.

If UK voters want something different, its time to start voting different.

Extinction Rebellion activists close Geneva private-jet terminal

mostlysignssomeportents:



Activists from the group Extinction Rebellion, which protests climate change, blocked the private jet terminal at Geneva airport on Saturday. The group says they want to draw attention to private jets as an absurd form of transport for the rich that causes massive harm to the environment.

Geneva is a major private jet hub. The world’s 0.001% head to Switzerland to enjoy skiing in the Alps, plus privacy-minded banking, auction houses, hospitals and United Nations offices.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/16/extinction-rebellion-activists.html

Italy: Venice council flooded after ‘NO’ vote on climate change measures

mostlysignssomeportents:

Oops. Awkward.

An Italian council was flooded immediately after rejecting new measures to address the climate crisis that threatens to sink the city, and wreak havoc throughout the world.

The regional council of Veneto is situated on Venice’s Grand Canal. On Tuesday night, the office flooded for the first time in its history, right after rejecting measures to fight climate change.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/14/italy-venice-council-flooded.html

It doesn’t get much stupider than this. 

Venice is one of the first cities that will be lost to ocean rise if we don’t do something about #ClimateChange soon

I love this video.  I love this guy… the guy in the hat…



I love this video. 

I love this guy… the guy in the hat is my husband Bob Jonkman, the 2019 Green Party of Canada Candidate in Brantford—Brant, Ontario.  As Canada uses an archaic Winner-Take-All voting system (similar to the US, UK and Australia) he didn’t win.  This time.  

I love this song.  It was a tiny tune created by my favorite contemporary musician, the talented Josh Woodward.  Everything Josh creates is released with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  This video is likewise CC-By.

What this means is that any Green Party can use it.  Free of charge.  

Liner Notes:

For those of you who aren’t up on the Canadian Greens, I’ll give you a little background. 

The video is bookended by the GPC’s awesome leader, Elizabeth May.  She’s been the leader for 13 years, and the fact our Green Party is doing as well as it is has a lot to do with that.  

• Our Green Party’s “Green New Deal” was called “Mission: Possible,” and the opening line is something she said at the Kitchener GPC campaign launch. 
• The minnows are swimming in Cypress Lake, at a favorite camping spot, in  Bruce Peninsula National Park near Tobermory.
• The Tree planting footage was recorded in the spring in Paris, Ontario.  
• The CC-By temperature visualization was created by Antti Lipponen from data provided by Berkeley Earth/Robert Rohde http://berkeleyearth.org/
• The sign waving was in Brantford.
• The footage of Bob talking to people was at the Brant Greens booth at the Paris Fair.  In the background, some of our volunteers are helping kids make their own buttons, a bit of gratis outreach we make as part of our community involvement. 
• The Circle Dance was at a Rise for Climate event in Waterloo
• Bob joined Cambridge candidate Michele Braniff and friends at the Cambridge for for the first “Green Wave” segment
• for “the mountains” I used a clip of Paul Manly, recorded at the 2016 GPC Special General Meeting, before he became the second elected Canadian Green, now the re-elected Member of Parliament for the Nanaimo-Ladysmith Electoral District
• for “to the seaway” I used footage of the second elected PEI Greens MLA, Hannah Bell, speaking at the 2018 Green Party of Ontario convention in Guelph (alongside PEI Greens leader Peter Bevan-Baker)
• The second “Green Wave” begins with GPO leader Mike Schreiner  “mainstreeting” in Kitchener with the 2018 provincial election with the five Waterloo Region Greens candidates (Bob Jonkman, Michele Braniff, David Weber, Stacey Danckert and Zdravko Gunjevic) …
• … then cuts to Milton candidate Eleanor Hayward and friends at Elizabeth May’s “Community Matters” town hall in Guelph
• Guelph candidate Steve Dyck speaking to the crowd at the 2019 Platform Release in Guelph
• “Together” takes us back in Kitchener, where southern Ontario GPC Green Candidates Steve Dyck, Michele Braniff, David Weber, Kristin Wright,
Collan Simmons, Stephanie Goertz, Bob Jonkman and Nicholas Wendler join GPC leader Elizabeth May and GPO leader Mike Schreiner in support of the Mike Morrice campaign launch
• Elizabeth May’s back again, tying it all up at the end with a punch line that was part of her answer to a question posed by the youngest Green Party member at the “Community Matters” event in Guelph

#1yrago If you’re an American of European descent, your stupid cousins have probably put you in vast commercial genomic databases

mostlysignssomeportents:

Remember when they caught the Golden State Killer by comparing DNA crime-scene evidence to big commercial genomic databases (like those maintained by Ancestry.com, 23 and Me, etc) to find his family members and then track him down?

It’s not just him.

If you’re an American of European descent, there’s a 60% chance that you can be identified from genomic database searches, because even if you’ve never signed up for one of these junk science services, your stupid cousins have.

That’s the conclusion of a group of computer science, computational biology, genomics, and public health researchers from Columbia, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who published their findings in the journal Science: Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches (Sci-Hub mirror).

They also predict that in the “near future,” “nearly any US individual of European descent” will be identifiable from commercial genomic databases.

The researchers propose a mitigation technique for avoiding nonconsensual genetic profiling: “DTC providers should cryptographically sign the text file containing the raw data available to customers (fig. S6). Third-party services will be able to authenticate that a raw genotyping file was created by a valid DTC provider and not further modified. If adopted, our approach has the potential to prevent the exploitation of long-range familial searches to identify research subjects from genomic data. Moreover, it will complicate the ability to conduct unilaterally long-range familial searches from DNA evidence.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/15/thanks-cuz.html