A video and some thoughts on school lunch and child poverty in the U.S.

Moving to another country can change how you see your homeland. One of the changes, for me, was the horrifying realization that I had under-estimated the degree to which everything in the United States is set up to funnel money to an ever shrinking number of aristocrats. I knew that that was the case, but I guess maybe I just hadn’t fully realized what that meant. Part of that change was just me learning more about politics, history, and how the world works, which wasn’t due to the move, but I hadn’t expected just how much the lack of worry over medical bills would change my life. It was your standard “weight lifted from my shoulders” situation, but I hadn’t even realized the weight was there. There have been a couple other moments like that, though not as life-changing as universal healthcare, and I also think the pandemic did a great job of forcing our rulers to show how little they valued our lives.

There were, however, some exceptions. Even as pundits and politicians ranted about how important it was for people to “get back to work”, a couple measures were passed that nearly cut U.S. child poverty in half. The bigger one of those was an expansion to the child tax credit, which gave parents monthly checks to help with the ever-rising cost of having children in the Land of the Free. The smaller one was an expansion to the free school lunch program that made it universal. Both of those are now expiring, and child poverty could be about to just about double as a result, back to where it was pre-pandemic. It’ll take some time to figure out exactly how much harm this will do, but we already know that the rough answer will be “a lot”.

For the first time in half a year, families on Friday are going without a monthly deposit from the child tax credit — a program that was intended to be part of President Joe Biden’s legacy but has emerged instead as a flash point over who is worthy of government support.

Retiree Andy Roberts, from St. Albans, West Virginia, relied on the checks to help raise his two young grandchildren, whom he and his wife adopted because the birth parents are recovering from drug addiction.

The Robertses are now out $550 a month. That money helped pay for Girl Scouts, ballet and acting lessons and kids’ shoes, which Roberts noted are more expensive than adult shoes. The tax credit, he said, was a “godsend.”

“It’ll make you tighten up your belt, if you’ve got anything to tighten,” Roberts said about losing the payments.

The monthly tax credits were part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package — and the president had proposed extending them for another full year as part of a separate measure focused on economic and social programs.

But Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, from Roberts’ home state of West Virginia, objected to extending the credit out of concern that the money would discourage people from working and that any additional federal spending would fuel inflation that has already climbed to a nearly 40-year high.

I think Manchin does own a lot of blame here, but it’s worth noting that Democratic leadership has proven wholly unwilling to play hardball with Manchin. They could fund pro-labor campaigning in West Virginia, which would undermine Manchin’s power, but they’re not pro-labor, so they won’t do that. They could run political ads about how Manchin’s daughter was personally involved in jacking up EpiPen prices, and how the whole family routinely hurts West Virginians for personal profit, but they don’t want to, for some reason. Whatever their reasons, they’re apparently more important than ending child poverty in “the richest nation in the world”. I’ll have another post up today that will look at one of the reasons why that might be, but regardless, the people governing our country, as a group, have chosen that more children need live in poverty and go hungry, and they have chosen to increase the uniquely USian problem of school lunch debt.

You know those snickers ads? Some person is out of place – Betty White on a construction site, or a bigfoot at a business meeting – and then they’re given a snickers, and they’re just a construction worker or office worker. The tagline is something like “you’re not you when you’re hungry”? It’s an acknowledgement of the well- known fact (as part of trying to get some of your money), that doing just about everything is harder – physically and emotionally – when you are hungry. That’s especially true for children, both because they are actively growing, and NEED those calories to literally build functional bodies, and because their perception of time is so different – an hour of a child’s life is a much, much larger proportion of their total experience than an hour of an adult’s life. Spending a whole school day hungry, and being required to focus, work, and behave, is damned close to torture in my opinion.

As usual, Beau of the Fifth Column has some good thoughts on the issue:

Let’s be clear – there is no choice here. Parents are required by law to have their kids in school, and they are required by our economic system to spend most of their waking hours working, usually for someone else’s profit, just to cover food, shelter, and other necessities. Why should they also be required to pay for food, especially at a public school? There is no good reason, but there are some bad ones. “Personal responsibility” is probably the most vapid, with some form of eugenics being the most sinister, but I think it’s more that school lunches are a way to funnel money from everyday folks to the eternally greedy upper class, and those at the top sincerely believe that they need to use poverty to motivate people to work.

I suppose that’s true, to an extent. You do need some form of coercion to get a person to spend most of their energy and waking hours working for the profit of someone else, be it the violent enclosure of the commons that created and enforced the modern default of selling labor to a rich person for survival, or the current threat of poverty or houselessness, and the lowered quality and duration of life that come with both.

I want to leave you on a rather grim note. You know how the U.S. is increasingly putting cops in schools? And how that is causing a lot of harm to kids in general, and disproportionally to black kids? Now add more hunger to that. I talked earlier about how hunger affects people, children included. Short tempers, physical discomfort, tiredness – it all comes from a lack of fuel. The body literally does not have the materials it needs for you to function well. And we are dramatically increasing the number of children who will be hungry, in schools that have been dramatically increasing their use of police to deal with the fact that children are children. It’s as if they are deliberately creating conditions that they know will lead poor, non-white, and disabled kids in particular to be criminalized for even minor “behavioral problems”.

 

Mud Wizard Monday: Serving corporate interests leaves German police stuck in the muck

So you probably haven’t heard about this, but it turns out that the climate is warming because of human activity. There are a number of factors, but the biggest one is carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas. Given that this temperature increase is already causing problems worldwide, and it’s expected to cause exponentially more problems as the warming continues, humanity needs to stop burning coal, oil, and gas, and use other sources of energy like solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and so on. I felt the need to spell that out, because judging by the behavior of most of the world’s governments, it’s not clear that the people in charge are aware.

The U.S. is where I tend to focus, of course, but China is increasing its use of coal, and Germany, despite committing to end coal use within the next eight years, is now fighting to demolish a village to expand a coal mine:

Activists have for the past two years attempted to protect the village from being bulldozed to make way for the opencast lignite mine, in a standoff that highlights the tensions around Germany’s climate policy.

Environmentalists say bulldozing Luetzerath would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, but the government and RWE say coal is needed to ensure Germany’s energy security.

It always comes down to some form of “security”, doesn’t it? I understand the concerns folks in Europe have about nuclear power, especially if we’re focused on older reactor models, but I don’t know that coal is any better. Certainly, the potential risks from disaster and war are less, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good option, especially given that fully “exploiting” the expansion would take until 2045, 15 years after Germany will supposedly have phased out coal power. I should be clear – it has apparently been a couple years since the town has had residents who are not there specifically to obstruct coal mine expansion. That said, while evicting people from their homes for this would certainly add incentive to stop it, the fact remains that we cannot afford to keep extracting and burning coal like this, given that climate change is already killing and displacing people.

It’s good that wealthy nations are making any progress at all, I suppose, but it’s nowhere near enough.

And so people are using the one thing that people reliably have – they’re putting their bodies between the ruling class and the object of their destructive greed. It seems unlikely, to me, that these protesters will get their way, but as with so many other things, I hope to be wrong about that. It’s encouraging to see thousands of people showing up to stand against the German police for all our sakes.

“I’m really afraid today,” Petra Mueller, a 53-year-old local who had been at the site for several days, said from a top-floor window of one of the few remaining houses. Mueller said she still held out hope of preserving what is left of Luetzerath “until nothing is left standing; hope dies last”.

Environmentalists say bulldozing the village to expand the nearby Garzweiler coal mine would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. The government and utility company RWE argue that coal is needed to ensure Germany’s energy security.

However, a study by the German Institute for Economic Research calls into question the government’s stance. Its authors found other existing coal fields could be used instead, though the cost to RWE would be greater.

Another alternative would be for Germany to increase the production of renewable power, cut demand through energy efficiency measures, or import more coal or gas from abroad, the study found.

This is the point that climate activists have been making for decades. It has long been obvious that when it comes to “energy security”, and issues of war and politics in general, climate change is a “threat multiplier”. It creates resource scarcity, causes mass movement of people, and damages or disrupts infrastructure, all of which can lead to political instability. The advantage of carbon-neutral power has always been that its use doesn’t contribute to the climate problem. The advantage of things like solar and wind power is that they’re generally more resilient to climate chaos than power generation that depends on burning fuel to boil water to run a steam turbine. Dependence on oil and gas has long driven war all around the globe, and it’s a bit much for the German government to plead “security” now after decades of delayed action. To be sure, they’ve done more than the U.S., but that’s a low bar to step over, and not a standard I’m willing to accept.

If there was a genuine concern about security, rather than profits, they would have put far more work into renewable energy and next-gen nuclear power, rather than spending all these resources trying to expand a coal mine that, supposedly, won’t even be halfway to fully exploited when Germany supposedly will stop using coal. Or, just a thought, they’re not serious about meeting the 2030 mark.

Maybe they are, but I think it’s entirely reasonable for the protesters to doubt them.

I give full support to these protesters, and I’ve been delighted to see some of the footage that has come from this effort to oust them. See, while I’ll spare you any (further) porcine comparisons, it has been a treat to watch the armed and uniformed enforcers of fossil fuel interests rolling around in the muck while being mocked by a prancing mud wizard:

The image shows The Mud Wizard, dressed in a monastic habit, casting down the police who thought they would withstand the power of muck.

At risk of sounding too serious, I think there is validity to things that make cops look ridiculous, especially while they’re trying to use force to further business interests. I also want to underscore that while this video is very funny, the activists have also been setting themselves up in treehouses and wooden tripods, along with welded i-beam barricades and other bits of construction designed to make it as costly and difficult as possible for the corporations and cops to get what they want. The Garzweiler mine has equipment on hand that can make quick work of all of that stuff, but unless they want to commit mass murder, they can’t use any of it before removing the protesters.

And to remove protesters, they’re relying on the police.

I think that the act of using force to enable more coal mining, in the early stages of a global climate crisis (remember, it will get much, much worse without a change of course), is both evil, and inherently absurd. I’m sure the cops think they’re doing the right thing by just following orders, but I feel like we’ve had a lesson or two in why that’s not a great way to tell right from wrong. With a little luck, hopefully the powers that be will decide to accept a different world, rather than trying to escalate the violence to get their way, but in the meantime, we have mud wizards and Yakety Sax (It seems I can no longer embed Tweets properly, but I posted it below in case it starts working again. Thanks, Musk).

 

Boston has unveiled an… interesting new tribute to MLK Jr.

Many years ago, a big tree was cut down to make way for a playground in a town near where I lived. I think the tree might have already been dead, but that doesn’t matter a whole lot for this story. A decision was made to turn the wood from this tree into a sculpture, and an artist was chosen. Now, art is subjective, and there are plenty of people who see beauty where others do not. I also have a lot of respect for anyone who is making a living as an artist in a world that doesn’t exactly encourage that. That said, the resulting sculpture was… odd. It sort of looked like two or three large wooden balls, with an almost melted-looking blob-like slab of wood draped over them. From some angles it was like an abstract turtle, from others, it was just… abstract and globular. If memory serves, it came with a poem, on a nearby plaque, about uplifting angels or something.

The town for whom it was intended considered it, and decided to give it to my grade school instead. The principal at the time absolutely saw the beauty in the sculpture and put it out in front of the school, plaque and all. In time, he left, and not long after the sculpture was rehomed to the far bank of the school’s fire pond, almost in the woods. To my knowledge, it’s still there, having gracefully grown into its role as a mossy abstract turtle thing.

On a related note another artist, whose taste I do not share, was apparently commissioned to make a sculpture for Boston Common, honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King. The resulting work was just unveiled, and, well, in the interest of fairness, I’ll show you the best angle first:

The sculpture, called “The Embrace”, is of the arms of MLK Jr. and Coretta Scott King, hugging each other, as seen in a famous photo I’ll post and describe below. The sculpture is just the arms and hands. You can see MLK’s hands in the foreground complete with jacket and shirt cuffs on the wrists, both wrapped around Coretta’s shoulder, with her arm extending down and away from the camera, elbow on the ground. One of MLK’s elbows is also on the ground, and you can see a third piece of the sculpture, presumably Coretta’s other elbow, touching the ground further back, giving the sculpture stability. The whole thing is big enough that an adult can comfortably stand under it.

So, again, I don’t like it. I respect the skill and creativity that went into it but, well, it keeps reminding me of the blob-turtle from this post’s introduction. So first off, there’s the photo that inspired this work of art. It’s a black and white photo of MLK and Coretta Scott King hugging each other. MLK’s arms are around Coretta’s shoulders, and her left arm is on the side of his chest. Her right arm, not visible in the photo, is presumably either on his shoulder, or lower on his torso. He’s wearing a white dress shirt under a jacket with three buttons on the cuff, as shown in the sculpture.

 

I feel like the artist maybe didn’t fully consider the visual impact of the piece from all angles, because:

Ok, I can do this. The image shows Coretta Scott King’s forearms and hands, elbows on the ground, holding MLK’s arm and shoulder. You can see a beaded bracelet on her wrist, and a wedding band on her finger. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is standing in front of, and underneath where MLK’s shoulder would be, if this sculpture was of a whole person. Pressley, who’s a good sort as politicians go (I voted for her) is a bald Black woman wearing a long black dress under a long tan coat, with black leather boots that appear to have white soles/heels. In the foreground are two reporters with shoulder-satchels. The one closer to her is wearing a black coat, the one closer to the camera is wearing a beige coat. The problem is that MLK’s shoulder doesn’t LOOK like MLK’s shoulder from this angle. It looks like… well, a giant, curved eggplant. It’s a little lumpy, and because it’s so glossy, the reflections give it a degree of… apparent vascularity. Further back, where the torsos should be, you can see Coretta’s arms fusing together, along with MLK’s arms, into a sort of Cronenberg-inspired starfish kinda thing.

As long as we’re going to have heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. fits the bill pretty well. I don’t know if his talk of socialism and  wealth redistribution are, as is often said, why he was assassinated, but that would certainly fit the U.S. government position on those subjects. Personally, however, I don’t feel that this sculpture is the best way to honor him and what he stood for. Obviously, that’s not up to me, nor should it be. This is just my opinion, but it seems that this art is thrusting in the wrong direction.

As Tegan said to me, it could have been worse. There’s a history of bronze sculptures turning out to be disturbing monstrosities, like the efforts to sculpt Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo. The one thing I will say is that I’ll take a hundred more sculptures by whoever made this thing over any one of the remaining statues of slavers that are spread across the U.S. like a bronze-cast pox. I’d rather give that support to someone with a less… unique vision, maybe, but again, these things are rightfully not up to me.

 

Video: Fungal photography and facts

A longer post I’m working on isn’t done, so instead, you get this video. It’s got all sorts of fascinating facts, but what I really enjoy is the fungal photography. They’re odd organisms and have their own particular kind of beauty that really comes out in photography and film.

If you want something to do this weekend, Atlanta forest defenders are asking for solidarity

I meant to write about this a couple days ago, but I just completely forgot about it until I sat down to go through my open tabs today. Still, better late than never, I guess? Last month I wrote about Atlanta forest defenders being arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism”, for the heinous act of sitting in trees that the cops wanted to cut down. The people working to stop the destruction of the Atlanta Forest for a massive, militarized police training facility are calling for demonstrations of solidarity around the country:

It’s Going Down has the following list of events being planned for this weekend, as of a day or two ago:

Roundup Of Solidarity Events

January 14th, Savannah, GA

Solidarity rally to defend the Atlanta Forest & Stop Cop City! Saturday, Jan 14 – 2pm – Wright Square. Atlanta is known to many as the “City in the Forest” for its extensive tree cover, which protects the city’s residents from flooding and extreme heat. Despite calls from residents to defund, demilitarize, and even abolish the police following the 2020 police killing of Rayshard Brooks, the Atlanta Police Foundation, Deklab County officials, and Blackhall (Shadowbox) Studios are attempting to bulldoze the city’s largest urban forest to build a militarized police training facility and Hollywood soundstage in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Brasfield & Gorrie LLC, the progect’s general contractor, has a construction site near Wright Square right here in Savannah. Amidst growing concerns of police violence and climate catastrophe, thousands of Atlanta residents have organized to protect the forest and stall construction of the facility for over a year! An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. Let’s show our solidarity with ATL forest defenders and demand that Brasfield and Gorrie drop the contract! Savannah DSA

January 14th, Brooklyn, NYC

January 15th, New Haven, CT

January 15th, Atlanta, GA

January 16th, Decatur, GA

January 28th, NYC

As you’ll note, some of these things are not happening this weekend. While having a lot of actions happening on the same day is a tactic to get more attention on the issue, demonstrations and other events happening spontaneously over time and across the country can also serve that purpose. This is a long-term fight, not just because the backers of Cop City are still intending to build it, but also because even if we do win this fight, there will be new ones for as long as we’re dealing with a system like the one we’re fighting to change. If we ever want to have real democracy and freedom, it will require this kind of sustained effort both to create, and to maintain the world we want.

On that note, I also think you should check out this interview that the Youtuber F.D. Signifier did with commentator and activist Kamau Franklin about the issue:

As Franklin describes, “Cop City” is intended to have, among other facilities, 11 firing ranges, and a mock city for police to train in crowd control. As he says, this seems far more about general control of the populace and of any movements for change, than it is about any concern for public safety. It sure seems as though the police and ruling class looked at the BLM movement, and decided that they had to be able to just outright crush anything like that. It wouldn’t shock me to learn, down the road, that some of this is about the increasing popularity of left-wing thought and political tactics in the U.S.. Bolstering this interpretation is the fact that U.S. police often train with the enforcers of Israeli apartheid, working to develop tactics for controlling the population through force. With worsening inequality, rising fascism, and a warming climate, this should worry you, as should the ever-increasing U.S. military budget.

The movement towards authoritarianism is not unique to the Republican Party. The Democrats have been on board every step of the way, from pouring cash into the Pentagon, to developing the humanitarian nightmare that is the U.S. carceral system. It is Democratic mayor Eric Adams that wants to declare houseless people insane and lock them up. I don’t think the Dems are full-on fascist like the current GOP, but they do very clearly value capitalism more than democracy or freedom. They have been on board through the bloody history of U.S. interference with left-wing governments and movements around the globe. They have been on board with supporting the genocide being waged in Yemen, and the ethnic cleansing in Palestine. This is why we need organizing that’s separate from political parties and the electoral system. This is why we need direct action like the work of land and water defenders – because both parties in power serve the ruling class, and actively work to suppress working class power. It’s evident in Democratic policy over the years, in the people from whom they seek advice, and in the many corporations supporting the development of this facility, to the tune of $60 million of the $90 million budget.

And white supremacy is absolutely a part of that, both within the United States, and in its actions around the world.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but the communities in which this monstrosity is being built are majority black, and have not been consulted on this project that will destroy a forest for the sake of building what amounts to a military training facility for the same cops who have been brutalizing and murdering black people in Atlanta and around the country. Kamau Franklin and F.D. Signifier have a much better discussion of the racial issues here than I’m able to summarize, so I recommend you watch the video. It provides a good overview of the problem from a systemic perspective. If you want to help out, Franklin pointed people to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, Community Movement Builders, and Stop Cop City, and even if you can’t do anything this weekend (sorry again for dropping the ball on this!), it still helps to get “stop cop city” in front of people, be it signs, bumper stickers, or you could even organize your own demonstrations just to get attention.

Hate-Blinded Bigots Legislating Language

As you may or may not remember, right-wing guru Jordan Peterson rose to fame by pretending, loudly and angrily, that Canada’s bill C-16 amounted to government-compelled speech. He told anyone in earshot about how bravely he would stand up to this oppression, and would hold his breath until it stopped. The bill, to be clear, just added trans people to the list of protected groups, meaning you can’t just harass them. None of the arrests Peterson predicted came, and it was always pretty obvious that they wouldn’t. Unfortunately, it may be that conservative projection is the most reliable weathervane in politics, and so as part of this national trans panic, Republican state legislatures have been trying to mandate speech, in addition to their efforts to ban trans healthcare. The most ridiculous and invasive version of this to date comes from North Dakota, where Republicans have decided they want businesses to be forced, by law, to use pronouns based on a person’s DNA. I have to say, I’m not sure I’d be willing to work for a place that required me to submit a DNA sample, or equivalent information. I’m assuming that this is based on the XX/XY binary that they pretend exists, but this feels like another one of those situations where they’re so eager to hurt people that they hate, that they’re just sort of flailing around and making life worse for everyone. Intentionally or not, there’s no way this will be functional legislation.

 The fact that the drafters of this bill include “determination established by deoxyribonucleic acid” shows that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of both biological sex and pronouns. We do not have “he” and “she” encoded into our DNA, and human biological sex is not binary. One would wonder how a bill like this would treat intersex people with nonstandard DNA profiles. Would people be forced to submit to mandatory DNA tests in order to determine what pronouns we should use for them? The implications of this bill are absurd.

The idea of “biological pronouns” is something that comes up sometimes in anti-trans spaces, and every time it does, transgender people point out that there is no such thing as a “biological pronoun.” Pronouns are human inventions and cultures have a variety of pronouns that are not necessarily attached to gender. This does not stop many states from trying to establish that such a thing exists. A Utah rep this year sent a letter to all Utah schools saying they should follow a school resource guide from Transgender Trend that mandates the use of “biological pronouns.” A federal judge in a free speech case cited “biological pronouns” in their decision-making. A Fox News story recently reported on a Tennessee bill that they state would allow teachers to use “biological pronouns.”

I’m reminded by a quote from the fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker:

You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

That’s literally what we’re seeing unfold here. It’s an effort to erase trans people, all because the bigots apparently can’t cope with their existence. Some of it is through the campaign of stochastic terrorism, as I’ve discussed before, some is through laws making it illegal to get trans healthcare, and some of it comes through literally legislating speech to fit their simplistic and inaccurate understanding of the world.

Bills like this would write discrimination into the law of North Dakota and would compel North Dakotans to harm their trans peers or risk facing fines of $1,500. There is no compelling state interest to force employers and government agents to misgender trans people. It is clear that freedom of speech is not what the far right desires in its treatment of transgender people – elimination of all legal recognition is the end goal and they are willing to go as far as to force it on transgender allies. This bill must be stopped – despite its blatant unconstitionality, the damage it can do should it pass would severe. The bill has three sponsors in the senate and three in the house: Senators ClemensVedaa, and Weston and Representatives K. AndersonSchauer, and Tveit.

As Dan from Three Arrows pointed out, this hate campaign isn’t actually popular in the United States. It’s not a “winning issue”, but they’re pushing ahead with it anyway, because they actively want trans people to stop existing, and as part of that, they want every aspect of society to be as hostile towards them as possible, including massacres like the Club Q shooting. Cis people standing in solidarity with trans people is an important part of fighting back, because the ones who are pushing this hate are depending on most people just not caring enough to stop them. That means keeping informed on the issue, not just to know what’s going on, but also to be able to confidently call out transphobia when we encounter it. Be on the lookout for ways to help, and groups local to you that are organizing for community defense.

Video: Positive Leftist News from December (and late November), 2022

Obviously I’m a bit behind in posting this, but better late than never. The December edition of Positive Leftist News covers “massive” turnout for late November’s National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, MA to honor the Native people whose genocide was whitewashed by the Thanksgiving myth. On the other side of the continent, a similar demonstration drew 400 people to call for the protection of California’s shell mounds, burial sites from a number of Indigenous nations that are threatened by capitalist developers.

In labor news, PLN highlights the international organization and solidarity shown by the “Make Amazon Pay” demonstrations that took place on November 25th in over 30 countries across five continents. I very much hope to see this kind of international action more in the future. A few days  before, a new cross-sector service union was formed in the United States, called the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), and they are demanding, of course, better pay and working conditions. There had been a niggling worry in my mind about how well people would be able to organize in the atomized modern workplace, but it seems like the answer to that is “pretty well”. This union represents people in retail, gas station, fast food, and care work across the Southern U.S., and frankly I find it uplifting to see all of these people finding solidarity in their fight for their rights.

In South Korea, truckers defied their government’s order to end their strike. In Zimbabwe food industry workers are fighting for better treatment as well. Specifically, it’s brewery and sugar workers. It seems that among other things, they’re dealing with wage theft like workers in the U.S. Small-scale farmers in the socialist republic of Tanzania have been working together for decades to fight back against the economic forces that have been pushing them down, and the plans they put together this year focus on acroecology, food sovereignty, fighting against evictions by developers – sometimes whole villages have been evicted – and economic justice. Apparently they’ve been working to build up something that sounds like credit unions. It’s encouraging to see that work continue, and I fully support their work for not just Pan-African solidarity, but a recognition of the need for global solidarity.

In Montreal, London, and Dublin, demonstrators marched for tenants rights and housing for all. I’m ashamed to admit that I did hear about the Dublin demonstration, but couldn’t muster the energy to go. I intend to be more active in that regard in 2023.

Greece saw great turnout for their annual demonstrations to honor the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against a U.S.-backed military junta.

Columbia announced the release of prisoners from its 2021 national strike, and Columbia’s new president declared them to be “guardians of peace”.

Elon Musk’s incompetent flailing at Twitter led to a bunch of big corporations, including Lockheed Martin and Eli Lilly, collectively losing billions on the stock market. I doubt it did them any real harm, because consequences are only for the peasantry, but it was fun to watch them freak out a little because an impersonator pretended they could be anything other than evil.

A Dutch court ordered compensation for victims of an illegal Dutch military airstrike in Afghanistan. Don’t hold your breath for the U.S. to follow that example.

Barbados seems to be having a winning streak. They ditched the British Monarchy, demanded reparations from British aristocrats involved in colonialism, and now their courts have struck down two laws that discriminated against LGBTQ+ people.

France seems to be on track to make abortion a constitutional right.

The governor of Oregon, US, commuted the sentences of all 17 death row inmates in that state, calling the death penalty immoral.

The students of the University of Stirling, in Scotland, have voted to make the university’s menu 100% plant-based, as part of their commitment to reduce carbon emissions, calling out all the universities that produce research pointing to emissions from animal agriculture, while doing little to nothing in response to that research.

  And last but very much not least, a new museum and clinic is to be opened in Montgomery, Alabama, to honor the “Mothers of Gynecology – enslaved women whose torture at the hands of white doctors built the foundations of modern gynecology. I’m not a fan of the way the article describes this as “sacrifice”, which seems to minimize the horror of what happened, but I think that this museum, clinic, and training facility seem like a good way to honor their memories, provide for people in need of care, and help work to prevent such atrocities from being committed in the future. Amidst everything that’s been happening in the U.S., I find it uplifting to see this kind of work continuing.

The video and linked articles have quite a few more details, but I figured I’d try to give a summary for those who won’t be watching the video for whatever reason.

As ever, all we have is us, and it’s when we work together for the good of all, that we are at our strongest.

When the sulfur in the air just isn’t cutting it anymore…

Back in 2020, I wrote a post about why we should expect a short-term temperature increase as a direct result of phasing out fossil fuel use. The TL:DR is that it would reduce air pollution that currently makes our atmosphere more reflective. The long-term effect will be cooling, but that’s about a gradual decrease in insulation, vs a sudden decrease in shade. Well, it turns out there’s been another “downside” to the successes in reducing air pollution over the last few decades, this time in the field of agriculture. I have to say, would not have guessed this, but seeing it all laid out makes sense: farmers had to increase their use of sulfur fertilizer as air quality improved.

Sulfur, an essential nutrient for plants, was as free as air back in the 1980s, drifting down onto farmer’s fields from the polluted sky. The nutrient also caused acid rain, however, and it triggered chemistry that meant more mercury in fish. Regulations led to less sulfur in the air, but in the Midwest, where sulfur-hungry corn and soybean fields were proliferating, crops still needed the nutrient.

“We find a clear increase in sulfur fertilizer use commensurate with a decline in atmospheric deposition,” said Eve-Lyn Hinckley, a CIRES Fellow, CU Boulder ecologist, and lead author of a new assessment of sulfur fertilizer use. “We have compiled the first time-series of sulfur fertilizer data spanning decades, from 1985-2015.”

As sulfur stopped dropping from the sky, farmers began applying it directly, Hinckley and her colleague,  Charles Driscoll from Syracuse University, reported in late December in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. Moreover, sulfur fertilization accelerated quickly, they found, far outpacing the growth in use of other nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus.

I’m a big advocate of moving our farming indoors, but most of that is also pretty fertilizer-dependent. I don’t know a lot about the mechanics of hydroponic and aeroponic agriculture, but I believe they’re generally more dependent on fertilizers, because they don’t have the support of a soil ecosystem. For that farming which remains outdoors, for for efforts to do soil-based indoor farming, it seems as though this is yet another reason for us to move away from the current monoculture model. Our farms do still get a lot of benefits from the ecosystems around them, but in a lot of ways they’re sort of like ecosystem parasites, giving little in return beyond pollution and vulnerability to disease.

This is not how it has to be. Biodynamic farming, for example, puts soil health front and center, and while I certainly have my philosophical disagreements with Rudolph Steiner, it seems to be a much more sustainable approach to food production. I was lucky enough to be part of a biodynamic CSA in New Hampshire growing up, and while the farmers put a lot of work in, they got reliable results, and we had in-season vegetables, fresh milk and eggs, and a number of other food items year round. It’s doubly impressive when you consider how rocky and uneven the land is in NH. I think one of the changes we may need to make is to go back to farming based on what the land can reliably support, rather than depending on the endless importing of additives, at least where we’re not shifting to more of a managed/edible ecosystem model. See, sulfur has some unfortunate downstream effects:

[…] sulfur’s impacts can be serious: the chemical can essentially make heavy metals, including toxic mercury, more “mobile” and more likely to make their way into fish, for example.

Hinckley said it’s not yet clear how extensively sulfur fertilization impacts the mercury cycle. “It’s the same form of sulfur as was going on with acid rain. However, that was diffuse, widespread atmospheric deposition, and this is intense, targeted applications in much larger amounts.” She and her colleagues are already digging into the connection, “looking at the potential interaction between agricultural sulfur runoff and stimulation of methylmercury formation downstream.”

  I feel like every time there’s news like this, there’s a part of me that just has to note that this is a description of the world as it exists. There are ways in which it has improved – I think reducing air pollution was an unquestionable good, but we’ve still got a very long way to go. That’s part of why, as much as I harp on about systemic change, I’m glad that there are people looking at how things could be improved without that. See, these folks aren’t the only ones looking at sulfur in agriculture, and a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has been working on ways to differentiate and track agricultural vs. atmospheric sulfur:

To pull apart the atmospheric and human-applied sulfur, the researchers worked like forensic detectives. All over the Napa Valley, throughout its beautiful hills and valleys, they took samples to measure the concentrations of sulfur from its path through soil to surface water. As they went, they analyzed the chemistry of the sulfur and found a unique chemical signature of the agricultural sulfur, identifiable at the atomic level.

Even as the agricultural sulfur undergoes several chemical transformations, from interactions with microbes and other chemicals in the environment, a unique signature stays with the applied sulfur that allows it to be traced, said Hinckley.

“It’s very different from the signature that we see in atmospheric deposition or geologic weathering, which are the other background sources of sulfur,” said Hinckley.

Yet the objective of her work is not to shut down the use of sulfur in agriculture—which has been used since the time of the Egyptians—but to strategically fine-tune its use and application to both sustain the wine industry and minimize unintended environmental impacts.

“This work could help inform the development of technologies that help farmers to choose when and how much they apply, rather than just applying the same amount preventatively all the time,” said Hinckley.

That team’s focus was on sulfur used as an antifungal treatment for grape vines, so maybe there’s some way in which this approach wouldn’t work for sulfur spread as a fertilizer, but to my layman’s eyes it seems like progress is already being made on tracking the stuff. Heck, given that both of the articles I’ve quoted today come from UC Boulder, and the lead author of the first paper also worked on the second, I’m honestly expecting more on this topic from this particular group of authors before too long.

This is not one of those things that demands immediate action. I think it demands action, and it’s certainly a part of the larger problem of chemical pollution, but as the second article points out, we’ve been using sulfur in farming for literally thousands of years. I suppose it might be possible that changes to farming practices would eliminate the need for stuff like sulfur, but that seems unlikely to me, and far less important than the numerous other reasons for plotting a new course. I find this interesting mainly because I hadn’t thought of air pollution as a fertilizer before, and because coupled with the tracking project, it seems like we might be on the verge of a much more detailed understanding of how our use of sulfur affects the world around us.

 

Movement within Mars

I feel like I probably had a childhood astronomy phase, but if I did, all I really remember was the feeling of existential dread upon learning that the sun was expanding and would eventually consume the entire Earth. When it comes to Mars, my primary interest was that time Calvin and Hobbes went there in their cardboard box. Later, my father spent a brief time as a consultant biologist on some part of NASA’s search for signs of life, but my understanding of the place, following the science, was that it was not only dead in terms of life, but also in terms of geological activity. The main evidence for that that I knew of was that Mars doesn’t have a magnetosphere. Earth does have one, and our current understanding is that it’s generated by activity in our planet’s molten core. It provides a great deal of protection from solar radiation, which is part of why we’re able to have such low radiation levels and such a nice atmosphere. Mars, or so the thinking goes, lost all of its heat, because it’s such a small planet. It cooled off, lost its core activity, and so lost its magnetosphere along with the capacity to shelter life.

Well, it turns out there’s a bit more going on down there than we thought. Those of you who follow science news will probably have heard about this in recent days, but there’s evidence of new movement deep within the red planet:

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge current views of Martian geodynamic evolution with a report on the discovery of an active mantle plume pushing the surface upward and causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The finding suggests that the planet’s deceptively quiet surface may hide a more tumultuous interior than previously thought.

“Our study presents multiple lines of evidence that reveal the presence of a giant active mantle plume on present-day Mars,” said Adrien Broquet, a postdoctoral research associate in the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and co-author of the study with Jeff Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor of planetary science at the LPL.

Mantle plumes are large blobs of warm and buoyant rock that rise from deep inside a planet and push through its intermediate layer – the mantle – to reach the base of its crust, causing earthquakes, faulting and volcanic eruptions. The island chain of Hawaii, for example, formed as the Pacific plate slowly drifted over a mantle plume.

“We have strong evidence for mantle plumes being active on Earth and Venus, but this isn’t expected on a small and supposedly cold world like Mars,” Andrews-Hanna said. “Mars was most active 3 to 4 billion years ago, and the prevailing view is that the planet is essentially dead today.”

“A tremendous amount of volcanic activity early in the planet’s history built the tallest volcanoes in the solar system and blanketed most of the northern hemisphere in volcanic deposits,” Broquet said. “What little activity has occurred in recent history is typically attributed to passive processes on a cooling planet.”

The researchers were drawn to a surprising amount of activity in an otherwise nondescript region of Mars called Elysium Planitia, a plain within Mars’ northern lowlands close to the equator. Unlike other volcanic regions on Mars, which haven’t seen major activity for billions of years, Elysium Planitia experienced large eruptions over the past 200 million years.

“Previous work by our group found evidence in Elysium Planitia for the youngest volcanic eruption known on Mars,” Andrews-Hanna said. “It created a small explosion of volcanic ash around 53,000 years ago, which in geologic time is essentially yesterday.”

Ok, so I was already off before this plume showed up – that’s much more recent activity than I would have guessed. Still, it seems like my surprise at an active mantle plume is shared by scientists. From what I can tell, this doesn’t affect our lives in any way – it’s not going to re-start the Martian magnetosphere, so Elon Musk’s supposed plans for colonization still have to account for the radiation problem. From the perspective of people studying Mars, however, this is a major discovery.

Mantle plumes, which can be viewed as analogous to hot blobs of wax rising in lava lamps. give away their presence on Earth through a classical sequence of events. Warm plume material pushes against the surface, uplifting and stretching the crust. Molten rock from the plume then erupts as flood basalts that create vast volcanic plains.

When the team studied the features of Elysium Planitia, they found evidence of the same sequence of events on Mars. The surface has been uplifted by more than a mile, making it one of the highest regions in Mars’ vast northern lowlands. Analyses of subtle variations in the gravity field indicated that this uplift is supported from deep within the planet, consistent with the presence of a mantle plume.

Other measurements showed that the floor of impact craters is tilted in the direction of the plume, further supporting the idea that something pushed the surface up after the craters formed. Finally, when researchers applied a tectonic model to the area, they found that the presence of a giant plume, 2,500 miles wide, was the only way to explain the extension responsible for forming the Cerberus Fossae.

“In terms of what you expect to see with an active mantle plume, Elysium Planitia is checking all the right boxes,” Broquet said, adding that the finding poses a challenge for models used by planetary scientists to study the thermal evolution of planets. “This mantle plume has affected an area of Mars roughly equivalent to that of the continental United States. Future studies will have to find a way to account for a very large mantle plume that wasn’t expected to be there.

“We used to think that InSight landed in one of the most geologically boring regions on Mars – a nice flat surface that should be roughly representative of the planet’s lowlands,” Broquet added. “Instead, our study demonstrates that InSight landed right on top of an active plume head.”

The presence of an active plume will affect interpretations of the seismic data recorded by InSight, which must now take into account the fact that this region is far from normal for Mars.

“Having an active mantle plume on Mars today is a paradigm shift for our understanding of the planet’s geologic evolution,” Broquet said, “similar to when analyses of seismic measurements recorded during the Apollo era demonstrated the moon’s core to be molten.”

My first thought, when hearing about these findings, was that this activity also increases the chance of there being active microbial life in Mars’ crust, similar to what we’ve found on Earth. Reading this article, it seems that I’m also not alone in that. I don’t know how long it’ll be before we get clear answers, but it feels like actually finding that life might be closer than I thought. Once scientists have done their recalculations, accounting for these new data, my guess is that they’ll have a better idea of where to look for life, based on current geological activity.

Not Fine with Ultrafine: Airplane pollution comes from engine lube, not just burned fuel

I first dedicated a neuron to “ultrafine particles” (UFPs) around a decade ago, when I was looking into the health problems associated with the air that I, personally, was breathing. At the time I had just moved to an apartment a couple blocks southwest of Interstate 93, one of Boston’s biggest freeways. I knew that air pollution was harmful, but if memory serves, I was only just starting to learn how that harm actually manifests in the people exposed. In digging up information for this post, I came to the conclusion that the simplest way to describe the effects is that your health will just… be a bit worse. All of your health. It basically puts a cap on how healthy you, personally, can actually be. If you do everything right, you’ll still be less healthy, more vulnerable to chronic conditions, and more vulnerable to heart attacks and strokes. Or, to quote a study from Tufts, living near a highway can be bad for your health in a million small ways:

Fine and ultrafine particulates both cause cardiovascular disease in similar ways. Once they hit your lungs, your body immediately recognizes that something is amiss. “It essentially says, ‘Oh, crap, something’s wrong here,’ and releases cytokines, molecules that control immune response,” says David Weiss, M12, who works on the CAFEH study analyzing health surveys generated as part of the community outreach component of the research project. Those cytokines are used to summon help to the site of the infection, but also affect the activity of the immune system throughout the body.

Weiss likens the body’s reaction to the terror-alert system that was put into place after 9/11. “You know, the one that was green, yellow, red,” he says. “The higher levels of cytokines will take you from a level green to a level yellow.” In other words, your whole body goes on high alert, causing elevated levels of inflammation.

Of course, not all inflammation is bad, says Doug Brugge. For example, if you cut your finger, within a day, you’ll see some inflammation (redness) around the cut as your immune system mobilizes to kill any invading bacteria. “That is an example of a good inflammatory response, because it’s localized,” says Brugge. “It’s responding to a real problem, and it’s controlled. It has a beginning and an end.”

But constant exposure to fine and ultrafine particulate pollution can cause chronic inflammation. If that happens, white blood cells called macrophages, which are part of the body’s natural defense mechanism, go into overdrive, seeking out bacteria or other foreign objects in the bloodstream. They start attacking whatever’s there with extra gusto—including certain types of cholesterol that accumulate in the bloodstream. As macrophages gorge themselves on this fatty molecule, they (and their cholesterol contents) settle into the inner lining of blood vessels, where they slowly build up and create artery-clogging plaques.

Weiss says that some of these deposits may happen anyway as the body ages, but inflammation caused by particulate pollution speeds the process, leading to premature heart attacks and strokes.

[…]

Essentially, Weiss says, this gives the pollutants that make up ultrafine particles more bang for their buck. They’re more potent than larger particles, so they may lead more quickly to heart disease. And, he adds, they may be small enough to get directly into the bloodstream, where they can do even more damage.

“Larger particles can’t cross the barrier from the lungs to the bloodstream,” says Weiss, “but the ultrafine particles can. So because of that, and partly because of their increased exposed surface area, there’s more of an opportunity for them to have reactions that will cause inflammation.” The only way to avoid this inflammation—short of somehow removing particles from the air around you—is to spend less time near major highways.

“For people who move away from the highway, it’s like they quit smoking,” says Wig Zamore, a longtime resident of Somerville with a master’s degree in urban planning. Over the past decade, Zamore has worked with community groups on public health and clean-air issues, and is a member of the CAFEH steering committee, a group of academics and community members who help guide the study’s research.

“Their risk pretty immediately starts to go down, and for the people who move closer to a highway, their risk immediately starts to go up over a matter of just a couple years,” he says, citing a 2009 study by the University of British Columbia.

The problem is, of course, that many people living near highways don’t have the financial means to move. According to Zamore, of the 35 million Americans who live by a major four-lane highway, roughly 18 percent are renters or live in low-income housing.

We were living there because of the low rent – my flat farther away from I-93 had its rent go up by something like $150/month, so we had to move, and there didn’t seem to be anything of a comparable price that didn’t come with at least as much air pollution. It should not surprise you to learn that that neighborhood, like most high-pollution neighborhoods in the US, was mostly not white. Unfortunately, the dangers of UFPs go beyond this smoking-like effect on those most exposed. Infant exposure has been linked to adult lung disease, implying lifelong problems, and exposure in utero has been linked to childhood asthma.

But wait! There’s more!

See, as previously mentioned, the real problem with UFPs is that they’re so small. They’re smaller than our body is really capable of dealing with in a meaningful way. To my knowledge, we don’t currently know the exact causal chain from UFP exposure in pregnant mothers to asthma in preschool. It could be that the aforementioned inflammation is what’s actually affecting lung development, but it’s also possible that the particles are simply passing through the mother into the fetus, especially since there’s evidence that they also cross the blood/brain barrier. Unsurprisingly, scientists are looking into possible links to neurological problems.

There’s a great deal more such research out there, but I think this is enough to get across why I think that UFPs are something we should take seriously. The fact that a lot of them seem to come from car tires, rather than exhaust, is one reason that I think we should be moving away from cars as a primary mode of transit, even without their greenhouse gas emissions. If I snapped my fingers and made every car in the world electric, Somerville would still be having problems. If we manage to build a system that’s not obsessed with profit and growth, I think there will be a lot less need for people to be moving around so much. A shorter work week, for example, would mean less commuting, and more work could be done from home. That, combined with increased investment in mass transit, and the reclamation of urban landscapes for people, rather than cars, could largely eliminate traffic as we know it today.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only big source of UFPs. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll pretend that coal plants went away with the gas-powered cars, and were replaced with insert favorite power source here. We also need to reduce air traffic, and as with cars, focusing just on the fuel would be a mistake. It turns out that jet engines – specifically the oils that lubricate them – are a major source:

Since several years, the Hessian Agency for Nature Conservation, Environment and Geology (HLNUG) has been measuring the number and size of ultrafine particles at various air monitoring stations in the vicinity of Frankfurt International Airport, for example in the Frankfurt suburb of Schwanheim and in Raunheim. Last year, scientists led by Professor Alexander Vogel at Goethe University Frankfurt analysed the chemical composition of the ultrafine particles and came across a group of organic compounds which, according to their chemical fingerprints, originated from aircraft lubrication oils.

The research team has now corroborated this finding by means of further chemical measurements of the ultrafine particles: the particles originated to a significant degree from synthetic jet oils and were particularly prevalent in the smallest particle classes, i.e. particles 10 to 18 nanometres in size. Such lubrication oils can enter the exhaust plume of an aircraft’s engines, for example through vents where nanometre-sized oil droplets and gaseous oil vapours are not fully retained.

In laboratory experiments, the researchers also succeeded in reproducing the formation of ultrafine particles from lubrication oils. To this end, a common engine lubrication oil was first evaporated at around 300 °C in a hot gas stream, which simulated the exhaust plume of an aircraft engine, and subsequently cooled down. The number-size distribution of the freshly formed particles was then measured.

Alexander Vogel, Professor for Atmospheric Environmental Analytics at the Institute for Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences of Goethe University Frankfurt, explains: “When the oil vapour cools down, the gaseous synthetic esters are supersaturated and form the nuclei for new particles that can then grow fast to around 10 nanometres in size. These particles, as our experiments indicate, constitute a large fraction of the ultrafine particles produced by aircraft engines. The previous assumption that ultrafine particles originate primarily from sulphur and aromatic compounds in kerosene is evidently incomplete. According to our findings, lowering lubrication oil emissions from jet engines holds significant potential for reducing ultrafine particles.”

The experiments show that the formation of ultrafine particles in jet engines is not confined to the combustion of kerosene alone. Potential mitigation measures should take this into consideration. This means that using low-sulphur kerosene or switching to sustainable aviation fuel cannot eliminate all the pollution caused by ultrafine particles.

I think it’s important to be clear here – I don’t think we should be focused on the total elimination of all ultrafine particle sources. It’s a nice idea in theory, but so long as we want to keep the benefits of modern engines of any sort, there’s a good chance we’ll be producing some form of harmful air pollution. What I do want is to drastically reduce the amount we generate, even as we develop things like plant-based jet fuel. As with cars, I think that changing our economy would drastically reduce air travel (it’s almost like I’m obsessed with systemic change. Funny, that), but I also think that it would open up options for slower forms of air travel, like lighter-than-air craft, that don’t require the same kind of heat and friction involved in getting airplanes off the ground.

I also – since it’s a factor we shouldn’t forget – believe that a post-capitalist society would greatly reduce the amount of pollution generated by military activity.

Pollution will probably always be something we have to manage, rather than entirely eliminate, but as we’re all aware by now, we generate far, far more pollution than is required for humanity to have a good standard of living, complete with the benefits of technology. I wish it was as easy as swapping out our fuel sources, as difficult a task as that is. Unfortunately, it keeps coming back to the need for systemic change. Capitalism and imperialism are not the only source of problems in society, but the problems they’re creating have become so big that it’s often hard to even tell what those other problems might be. It’s like worrying about wet feet when you’ve fallen overboard at sea. In the meantime, while there’s no practical way to entirely protect yourself, there’s some evidence that having plants around can help, so support efforts to increase the amount of greenery in cities, and “green walls” around places like airports and freeways. There are plenty of other benefits to doing that, and I really do believe that any steps we take to strengthen people, including literally caring for their health, will bring that systemic change just a little bit more within our reach.