Why the Linux console has sixteen colors (SeaGL)
At the 2018 Seattle GNU/Linux Conference after-party, I gave a lightning talk about why the Linux console has only sixteen colors. Lightning talks are short, fun topics. I enjoyed giving the lightning talk, and the audience seemed into it, too. So I thought I’d share my lightning talk here. Jesień Linuksowa 2018
Last weekend I participated in the conference Jesień Linuksowa 2018 in Krakow, Poland. It was my first time in a country with so much tragic historical experiences.
On the hand, I was impressed by the community members and the organization of the event.
We celebrated another edition of Linux Autumn in the hotel Gwarek and my post-event wrap up will take into consideration seven basic points:
Organizers
This time I was accompanied by my friend Ana Garcia, who is a student at the University of Edinburgh and the members of the organization were supportive and kind all the time with us. We felt a warm environment since we arrive at night in the middle of the fog at midnight. They helped us with our talks and workshops we offer related to parallelization.
We meet new friends! Thanks to Dominik, Rafal, Filip, Linter and Matej from Red Hat. Sustain OSS 2018: quick rewind
This year, I attended the second edition of the Sustain Open Source Summit (a.k.a.
Sustain OSS) on October 25th, 2018 in London. Sustain OSS is a one-day discussion on various topics about sustainability in open source ecosystems. It’s also a collection of diverse roles across the world of open source. From small project maintainers to open source program managers at the largest tech companies in the world, designers to government employees, there is a mix of backgrounds in the room. Yet there is a shared context around the most systemic problems faced by open source projects, communities, and people around the world.
The shared context is the most valuable piece of the conference. As a first-time attendee, I was blown away by the depth and range of topics covered by attendees.
This blog post covers a narrow perspective of Sustain OSS through the sessions I participated and co-facilitated in. Hacktoberfest Celebrates 5th Anniversary
Five years ago the community team at DigitalOcean wanted to create a program to inspire open source contributions. That first year, in 2014, the first Hacktoberfest participants were asked for 50 commits, and those who completed the challenge received a reward of swag.
676 people signed up and 505 forged ahead to the finish line, earning stickers and a custom limited-edition T-shirt.
This year that number is an astounding 46,088 completions out of 106,582 sign-ups. We’ve seen it become an entry point to developers contributing to open source projects: much more than a program, it’s clear that Hacktoberfest has become a global community movement with a shared set of values and passion for giving back. Web Browsers Firefox Ups the Ante with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Price Wise and Email Tabs
Over the last few years, the Test Pilot team has developed innovative features for Firefox desktop and mobile, collaborating directly with Firefox users to improve the browser – from reminders to return to a tab on your desktop to a simple and secure way to keep track of your passwords.
Today, just in time for the holiday shopping season, the Firefox Test Pilot team is introducing Price Wise and Email Tabs — the latest experimental features designed to give users more choice and transparency when shopping online. These game-changing desktop tools are sure to make shopping a breeze with more options to save, share, track and shop. We’ve also made a few updates to the Test Pilot program itself to make it even easier to become a part of the growing Firefox users testing new features. Let Price Wise track prices for you this holiday shopping season
The online shopping experience is really geared towards purchases that are made immediately.
Countless hours have been spent to get you checked out as soon as possible. If you know what you want, and you’re happy with the price, this is great. On the other hand, sometimes you want to take your time, and wait for a deal. For those times, we have our new Test Pilot experiment, Price Wise. Track Prices and Send One-Step Email Links With Firefox’s New Test Pilot Experiments
Firefox Test Pilot is Mozilla’s way to test out interesting new features. Some of these features see the light of the day, and others just vanish into thin air. However, that doesn’t stop the Firefox Pilot team from experimenting with browser.
Today, Firefox announced two new such experiments — namely Price Wise and Email Tabs.
Both are ridiculously useful for a user who would like to crack tedious work in mere seconds. Shop intelligently with Price Wise
Tell Price Wise to keep an eye on a product, and it’s added to your watch list. Price Wise will automatically monitor the prices of products on your watch list. When they drop, we’ll let you know:
When the price drops, Price Wise alerts you with a colorful heads-up.
Price checks are done locally, so your shopping data never leaves Firefox. We’re particularly excited about that; Price Wise is the first Firefox feature designed around Fathom, a toolkit for understanding the content of webpages you browse. Existing software like this works by tracking you across the web, and it’s often run by advertisers and social networks seeking to learn more about you. Your browser can do these checks for you, while making sure the gathered information never leaves your computer.
We know it’s possible to deliver great utility while protecting your privacy, and want you to get a great deal without getting a raw deal. Mozilla Reps Community: New Council Members – Fall 2018 Elections
We are very happy to announce that our 2 new Council members Monica Bonilla and Yofie Setiawan are fully on-boarded and already working moving the Mozilla Reps program forward. A warm welcome from all of us. We we are very excited to have you and can’t wait to build the program together.
Sharing links via email just got easier thanks to Email Tabs
If your family is anything like ours, the moment the calendar flips to October, you’re getting texts and emails asking for holiday wish lists. Email remains one of the top ways people save and share online, so you likely do what we do: help make everyone’s life easier by diligently copy and pasting the URLs, titles and descriptions into a list. What if Firefox could make that process easier? Thanks to our new Test Pilot experiment Email Tabs, it can. Mozilla Reps Community: Rep of the Month – October 2018
Please join us in congratulating Tim Maks van den Broek, our Rep of the Month for October 2018!
Tim is one of our most active members in the Dutch community.
During his 15+ years as a Mozilla Volunteer he has touched many parts of the Project. More recently his focus is on user support and he is active in our Reps Onboarding team. As far as I’m concerned, email signing/encryption is dead
A while back, I used to communicate a lot with users of my popular open source project. So it made sense to sign emails and let people verify — it’s really me writing.
It also gave people a way to encrypt their communication with me.
The decision in favor of S/MIME rather than PGP wasn’t because of any technical advantage. The support for S/MIME is simply built into many email clients by default, so the chances that the other side would be able to recognize the signature were higher.
As you may already know, last Friday November 09th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 64 Beta 8.
Thank you all for helping us make Mozilla a better place: Gabriela, gaby2300.
From Bangladesh team: Maruf Rahman, Tanvir Rahman, Md.
Raihan Ali, Sajedul Islam, Rizbanul Hasan, Mehedi Hasan, Md. Rahimul Islam, Shah Yashfique Bhuian. Databases Michael Howard: Embrace of open source is destroying ‘artificial definitions’ of legacy vendors
Michael Howard, Berkley grad and alumnus of Oracle and EMC, took the helm at open-source biz MariaDB almost three years ago. Reflecting on how things have changed, he reckons the biggest shift is in how both investors and enterprise have embrace open-source. Now, he has an IPO on his mind.
In an interview with El Reg, Howard – who, as noted at the time of his appointment, has worked for a number of companies who were slurped up by bigger businesses – said the end of 2018 will see the end of the first year of a three-year plan he devised for the firm.
Broadly, Howard sets out an overall roadmap of three pieces for the firm. Unsurprisingly, cloud native technology is first up. The other two are adaptive scalability, with the aim of supporting “mom and pop shops all the way to planet-scale processing for the largest social platforms”, and boosting the quality of service by professionalising people and technology, for instance through machine learning.
But in addition to these technical goals, there’s the business side of things, and the boss said the plan “is being able to go public; to be able to get the company buttoned up at the right revenue level to go public”.
“We have a voracious appetite for getting to our strategic goals, and part of that is revenue and going public.
” Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing) Microsoft’s New Open-Source Project Is “Shader Conductor” For Cross-Compiling HLSL [Ed: Why does Phoronix help Microsoft’s openwashing of proprietary lock-in, DX?] BSD Capsicum
I spent a couple of years evangelizing about Capsicum.
I wrote many articles about it. So, it is very natural that I would also like to update you on this blog about the progress of the Capsicum project in FreeBSD, because this is what I’m doing in my free time.
That said I feel that this blog wouldn’t be completed without some introduction to what Capsicum is. This post should fill this gap. Over the next weeks and months we will extend this topic and discuss different parts of Capsicum. Without further introduction let’s jump into the topic Licensing/Legal FSF Update Rules Commons Clause Non-Free
The Free Software Foundation has added the Commons Clause to its list of non-free licenses among a number of recent updates to its licensing materials. Other changes clarify the GNU GPL position on translating code into another language and how to handle projects that combine code under multiple licenses.
More companies want fairness to open source license enforcement
The 16 new companies in this announcement are a diverse set of technology firms whose participation makes evident the worldwide reach of the GPL Cooperation Commitment. They comprise globally-operating companies based on four continents and mark a significant expansion of the initiative into the Asia-Pacific region. They represent various industries and areas of commercial focus, including IT services, software development tools and platforms, social networking, fintech, semiconductors, e-commerce, multimedia software and more.
The GPL Cooperation Commitment is a means for companies, individual developers and open source projects to provide opportunities for licensees to correct errors in compliance with software licensed under the GPLv2 family of licenses before taking action to terminate the licenses. Version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), version 2 of the GNU Library General Public License (LGPLv2), and version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv2.1) do not contain express “cure” periods to fix noncompliance prior to license termination.
Version 3 of the GNU GPL (GPLv3) addressed this by adding an opportunity to correct mistakes in compliance. Those who adopt the GPL Cooperation Commitment extend the cure provisions of GPLv3 to their existing and future GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x-licensed code. What you need to know about the GPL Cooperation Commitment
Imagine what the world would look like if growth, innovation, and development were free from fear.
Innovation without fear is fostered by consistent, predictable, and fair license enforcement. That is what the GPL Cooperation Commitment aims to accomplish.
Last year, I wrote an article about licensing effects on downstream users of open source software. As I was conducting research for that article, it became apparent that license enforcement is infrequent and often unpredictable.
In that article, I offered potential solutions to the need to make open source license enforcement consistent and predictable. However, I only considered “traditional” methods (e.
g., through the court system or some form of legislative action) that a law student might consider.
Introducing Jake Glass, FSF campaigns and licensing intern
Hello software freedom supporters! I am Jake Glass, and I will be interning for both the campaigns and the licensing teams this fall/winter.
I am a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where I earned an engineering degree in computer science, and I am currently in the process of applying to law school.
During my summers as an undergraduate, I worked in software development, where I began to consider the ethical ramifications of computing. I realized that my peers and I were often unintentionally building tools to exert social and political control. As the Snowden leaks were emerging around this time, it became clear to me that the pervasiveness of these tools is an imminent threat to freedom worldwide. This was my original motivation in supporting the free software movement: how can we be sure the programs running on our own machines are not spying on us without having access to the source, as required by the Four Freedoms? My interest in these issues concerning copyrights, patents, and civil rights on the Internet has convinced me to attend law school, where I can engage in formal study of these topics.
Free Software Foundation updates their licensing materials, adds Commons Clause and Fraunhofer FDK AAC license
Commons Clause is added to their list of non-free licenses. This license is added to an existing free license to prevent using the work commercially, rendering the work nonfree.
By making commons clause as non-free, FSF recommends users to fork software using it. So, if a previously existing project that was under a free license adds the Commons Clause, users should work to fork that program and continue using it under the free license. If it isn’t worth forking, users should simply avoid the package.
This move by FSF sparked a controversy that the Commons Clause piggybacks on top of existing free software licenses and thus could mislead users to think that software using it is free software when it’s, in fact, proprietary by their definitions.
However, others found the combination of a free software license + Commons Clause to be very compelling.
A hacker news user pointed out, “I’m willing to grant to the user every right offered by free software licenses with the exception of rights to commercial use. If that means my software has to be labeled as proprietary by the FSF, so be it, but at the same time I’d prefer not to mislead users into thinking my software is being offered under a vanilla free software license.
”
Another said, “I don’t know there is any controversy as such.
The FSF is doing its job and reminding everyone that freedom includes the freedom to make money.
If your software is licensed under something that includes the Commons Clause then it isn’t free software, because users are not free to do what they want with it.” Programming/Development C language update puts backward compatibility first
A working draft of the standard for the next revision of the C programming language, referred to for now as “C2x,” is now available for review.
Most of the changes thus far approved for C2x don’t involve adding new features, but instead clarify and refine how C should behave in different implementations and with regard to its bigger brother C++. The emphasis on refinement is in line with how previous revisions to C—C11 and most recently C17—have unfolded. 4 tips for learning Golang
My university’s freshman programming class was taught using VAX assembler.
In data structures class, we used Pascal—loaded via diskette on tired, old PCs in the library’s computer center. In one upper-level course, I had a professor that loved to show all examples in ADA. I learned a bit of C via playing with various Unix utilities’ source code on our Sun workstations. At IBM we used C—and some x86 assembler—for the OS/2 source code, and we heavily used C++’s object-oriented features for a joint project with Apple. I learned shell scripting soon after, starting with csh, but moving to Bash after finding Linux in the mid-’90s. I was thrust into learning m4 (arguably more of a macro-processor than a programming language) while working on the just-in-time (JIT) compiler in IBM’s custom JVM code when porting it to Linux in the late ’90s. ARMv8.
5 Support Lands In GCC Compiler With Latest Spectre Protection
Landing just in time with the GCC 9 branching being imminent is ARMv8.5-A support in the GNU Compiler Collection’s ARM64/AArch64 back-end.
This ARMv8.5-A support is an incremental upgrade over the existing ARMv8 support. The ARMv8.5 additions are similar to what we already saw land for LLVM / Clang. Comparing The Quality Of Debug Information Produced By Clang And Gcc
I’ve had an intuition that clang produces generally worse debuginfo than gcc for optimized C++ code.
It seems that clang builds have more variables “optimized out” — i.e. when stopped inside a function where a variable is in scope, the compiler’s generated debuginfo does not describe the value of the variable. This makes debuggers less effective, so I’ve attempted some qualitative analysis of the issue.
I chose to measure, for each parameter and local variable, the range of instruction bytes within its function over which the debuginfo can produce a value for this variable, and also the range of instruction bytes over which the debuginfo says the variable is in scope (i.
e. the number of instruction bytes in the enclosing lexical block or function). I add those up over all variables, and compute the ratio of variable-defined-bytes to variable-in-scope-bytes. The higher this “definition coverage” ratio, the better. Quo vadis, Perl?
By losing the sight of the strategies in play, I feel the discussion degenerated very early in personal accusations that certainly leave scars while not resulting in even a hint of progress.
We are not unique in this situation, see the recent example of the toll it took on Guido van Rossum. I can only sympathize with Larry is feeling these days. All of the Stan Lee cameos from Marvel movies, and why we love them
Stan Lee is the godfather of modern comics, and his death at age 95, although extremely sad, is a chance to celebrate exactly how much he gave to the world of pop culture. Today, the internet has been flooded with eulogies of his work, life, and his immense impact on comics and film. Many fans fondly recalled the cameos that Lee regularly made in Marvel films over the years, including the pre-Disney Marvel movies, the new Sony Spider-Man Universe, and, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Science Imperial College’s quantum compass cools atoms to navigate without GPS
Imperial College estimates that just a day without satellite access would cost the UK £1bn, which wouldn’t exactly be ideal.
Fortunately, the university has ideas for a backup just in case all the satellites go caput. Though, as you can see from the picture above, it’s probably not quite ready to be built into a running watch, unless the athlete in question also does some serious lifting. Behind-the-scenes audio from Apollo 11 mission made public for first time
The main air-to-ground recordings and on-board recordings from the historic mission have been publicly available online for decades. But that was just a fraction of the recorded communications for the mission.
Thousands of hours of supplementary conversations (“backroom loops”) between flight controllers and other support teams languished in storage at the National Archives and Records Administration building in Maryland—until now.
Thanks to a year-long project to locate, digitize, and process all that extra audio (completed in July), diehard space fans can now access a fresh treasure trove of minutiae from the Apollo 11 mission. And those records are now preserved for future generations. Hardware Confirmed: Apple’s New T2 Chip In MacBooks Blocks Third-Party Repair
The Cupertino giant has confirmed to The Verge that its new security-focused T2 chip will require the software check to be performed after components like logic board and Touch ID sensor are repaired. Apple has not mentioned all the components would require the software check to run in order to complete the repair.
The new T2 security chip brings many security-related features for Mac users. One of the most interesting features is “hardware disconnect” that disconnects any audio device connected to a MacBook as soon as its lid is closed. This feature is touted to bring protection against surveillance and from getting eavesdropped by hackers.
Health/Nutrition Child care available for only 23 percent of Mississippi’s infants and toddlers, report finds
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Mississippi Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes with trends and top stories about education in Mississippi. Subscribe today! Mississippi’s child care desert is especially evident for infants and toddlers: There are currently only enough spots at licensed child care centers for about 23 percent of the state’s youngest children. That’s one of the findings of a new report by the Center for American Progress, which analyzed census data and state child care licensing data to determine the extent to which infant and toddler care is available in nine states, including Mississippi, North Carolina and West Virginia, and in the District of Columbia. The report takes an in-depth look at data revealed last year in another Center for American Progress report that found 42 percent of children under the age of 5 live in a child care desert, defined as areas in which there are either no child care centers or so few centers that at least three children need care for every spot available. What Can Be Learned From Democrat And Republican Delusions On Obamacare
After a decade of intense political fighting and two of the largest wave elections in history, the United States finally has a quasi-stable political equilibrium on the Affordable Care Act.
We have Obamacare, just minus the deeply unpopular stuff—i.e.
, the individual mandate and the Cadillac tax on employer-provided insurance.
This fills me with both personal vindication, since this what I advocated Democrats pass in 2010, and deep concern because it shows neither major political party has any idea how to make laws popular.
When it comes to big pieces of legislation, they are only as popular as the least popular major provision. Most voters don’t evaluate legislation with a complex utilitarian calculation weighing the net value of every provision. Most judge legislation the way they would a pizza.
You could have five amazing toppings on that pizza, but if the sixth topping is rotten fish, no one will want to eat your pizza.
If you understand this axiom and realize none of the so-called political gurus leading either major party in our country do, something becomes clear. The last decade of political fighting over the ACA has been less of a titanic struggle between genius ideological leaders and more of a farcical dark comedy performed by fools. Why drug policy is a feminist issue
People who use drugs face widespread stigma and criminalisation. This is well-known. But drug policy discussions often centre on men.
The experiences of women, trans and gender non-conforming people who use drugs are ignored and silenced – though they face particular challenges accessing care and the gendered stigma of being perceived as unfit parents and ‘fallen’ women.
In May, I participated in a meeting that AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) co-organised in Berlin with feminists and women who use drugs from across eastern Europe and Central Asia. We carried very different experiences and backgrounds, but had a common purpose: to learn from one another and connect the dots between drug policy and feminism in the region.
Women shared their experiences with using drugs including shaming and violence from doctors, sexual violence, criminalisation and stigma within their communities. We looked at how feminism could help push for responses centred on their unique experiences. Three days and many conversations later, I was convinced that drug policy was a feminist issue.
On Veterans Day, Advocates Warn Against Pence & Trump-Led Attacks on VA Healthcare
On the federal observance of Veterans Day, we take a closer look at the issue of veterans’ healthcare. On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an article for Fox News touting Trump’s record on veterans’ health and the passage of a policy known as “Veterans Choice,” which is seen by veterans’ advocates as an attempt to drain the Veterans Health Administration of needed resources and eventually force privatization of the system. We’re joined by award-winning journalist and author Suzanne Gordon. Her new book is “Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans.” She recently wrote an article for The New York Times titled “By Protecting Veterans’ Health, You May Protect Your Own.” WTO TRIPS Council Debates Competition Law, Plain Packaging’s Spread To Other Products
The World Trade Organization intellectual property committee met last week with lively discussions on the benefit of IP rights protection for new businesses, and on the role of competition law to prevent abuses of those rights and in particular ensure greater access to medicines.
Also, considering the recent WTO Dispute Settlement Body ruling on the tobacco plain packaging, some countries warned against this decision becoming a precedent and spreading to other goods, and undermining trademark protection. Key Hepatitis C Drug Licensed To Medicines Patent Pool, Access Expanded For LMICs
A key drug to treat hepatitis C has been licensed to the Medicines Patent Pool, enabling generic production and expanding affordable access to the drug in low and middle-income countries, excluding the very largest. The agreement between the Pool and AbbVie had been over a year in the making, MPP Executive Director Charles Gore told Intellectual Property Watch. Security Buttercup – A Free, Secure And Cross-platform Password Manager
In this modern Internet era, you will surely have multiple accounts on lot of websites. It could be a personal or official mail account, social or professional network account, GitHub account, and ecommerce account etc.
So you should have several different passwords for different accounts. I am sure that you are already aware that setting up same password to multiple accounts is crazy and dangerous practice. If an attacker managed to breach one of your accounts, it’s highly likely he/she will try to access other accounts you have with the same password. So, it is highly recommended to set different passwords to different accounts. Container Labeling
Container policy is defined in the container-selinux package.
By default containers run with the SELinux type “container_t” whether this is a container launched by just about any container engine like: podman, cri-o, docker, buildah, moby. And most people who use SELinux with containers from container runtimes like runc, systemd-nspawn use it also.
By default container_t is allowed to read/execute labels under /usr, read generically labeled content in the hosts /etc directory (etc_t).
The default label for content in /var/lib/docker and /var/lib/containers is container_var_lib_t, This is not accessible by containers, container_t, whether they are running under podman, cri-o, docker, buildah … We specifically do not want containers to be able to read this content, because content that uses block devices like devicemapper and btrfs(I believe) is labeled container_var_lib_t, when the containers are not running.
For overlay content we need to allow containers to read/execute the content, we use the type container_share_t, for this content. So container_t is allowed to read/execute container_share_t files, but not write/modify them. How my personal Bug Bounty Program turned into a Free Security Audit for the Serendipity Blog
This blog and two other sites in scope use Serendipity (also called S9Y), a blog software written in PHP.
Through the bug bounty program I got reports for an Open Redirect, an XSS in the start page, an XSS in the back end, an SQL injection in the back end and another SQL injection in the freetag plugin.
All of those were legitimate vulnerabilities in Serendipity and some of them quite severe. I forwarded the reports to the Serendipity developers.
Fixes are available by now, the first round of fixes were released with Serendipity 2.1.3 and another issue got fixed in 2.1.
4. The freetag plugin was updated to version 2.
69. If you use Serendipity please make sure you run the latest versions. IoT security and Linux: Why IncludeOS thinks it has the edge [Ed: Promoting IncludeOS by bashing Linux even though security of IncludeOS is yet unproven; Linux devices’ Achilles heel: weak/consistent passwords, open ports]
Per Buer, CEO and co-founder of Norwegian software company IncludeOS, thinks the growing use of Linux as an embedded operating system is giving it a role for which it is far from perfect.
“Linux has impressive hardware and software support.
It supports just about any protocol and any peripheral. It is all dynamic so anything at any time can connect to a Linux system,” he wrote recently.
“The result is a massive amount of code and following this a considerable number of potential bugs that could lead to compromise.”
He thinks his company’s OS offers a better solution. It has created an open-source OS that links into the application at compile time, resulting in one software image where the OS functionality is inside the application and running directly on top of the hardware.
IncludeOS links only the OS functionality that the application needs into the binary software image, thus reducing both its size and possible attack surfaces.
This approach is normally termed a ‘library OS’.
IncludeOS runs in a single address space, so there are neither interprocess communications nor concepts like user space and kernel space. D-Link’s Central Wifi-Manager Seems To Be Vulnerable To Privilege Escalation Attacks Through Trojan File
D-Link’s Central Wifi-Manager is quite a nifty tool. It’s a web-based wireless Access Point management tool, enabling you to create and manage multi-site, multi-tenancy wireless networks.
Whether deployed on local computer or hosted in the cloud. But it seems there might have been a security issue with the software. Kaspersky starts processing threat data in Europe as part of trust reboot New Linux-Targeting Crypto-Mining Malware Combines Hiding and Upgrading Capabilities [Ed: When your system gets cracked anything can happen afterwards; does not matter whether there’s an upgrade or not? No.]
Japanese multinational cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has detected a new strain of crypto-mining malware that targets PCs running Linux, according to a report published Nov. 8. The new strain is reportedly able to hide the malicious process of unauthorized cryptocurrency-mining through users’ CPU by implementing a rootkit component. The malware itself, detected by Trend Micro as Coinminer.
Linux.
KORKERDS.AB, is also reportedly capable of updating itself.
Defence/Aggression One-Hundred Years Later, It’s Time to Disarm Armistice Day
The sulphurous smoke of cannon fusillades drifted over the field in hazy clouds as an Army chaplain declared in a voice booming with hooah how inspiring he found its scent, how much he loved the smell of the battlefield.
An Army general then spoke. Those of us gathered there that day were “true patriots,” he said. We could find more “true patriots” like us in Texas and Oklahoma and throughout the Southern US states.
We were in Kansas, but he didn’t explain why we could only find them in those states and here, or what especially made us (and them) “true patriots.”
This was Memorial Day seven years ago at the National Cemetery where just a few months earlier my wife and I had buried our son, Francis. A veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan during some of the worst fighting in the early years of those conflicts, he died at home, like too many other young veterans, a casualty in the aftermath of these wars.
The blustering and factionalism of that spectacle is strongly etched in our memories.
It left us feeling empty, even sickened, not just for ourselves, but for our son, too. It was perhaps an extreme example of how both Memorial Day and Veterans Day have been wrung out of shape since their origins, yet it was also emblematic of the contrasting ways we collectively and individually experience them. Veterans Resist: Deploying Art to Oppose Militarism
It took me a long time to find words to describe the US-orchestrated injustices that I witnessed and participated in while in Iraq. I’ve now been out of the Army for over a decade, and for nearly half of that time I told few people I had even been in the military.
Like many veterans, I didn’t know how to talk about war when I came home. People wanted to thank me for my service but they didn’t want to hear how disillusioned I had become with my country. Returning to college, I found that many students weren’t paying attention to the wars. Perhaps most frustrating, I found the frame of reference provided by Hollywood to be a grave distortion of what I had seen and done.
I, like most veterans, hadn’t been a sniper, I didn’t defuse bombs, nor had I been in Special Forces. Major films like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty only served to confuse the conversation about why the US was occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and what the day-to-day deployment routine really looked like. Ultimately, I repressed my guilt and stayed quiet.
It wasn’t until I joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (now called About Face: Veterans Against the War) that I learned about the history of the veterans’ anti-war movement, simultaneously gaining a vocabulary that corresponded to what I had experienced. Now I had a frame of reference that made sense. I could see how my own war experience fit into the systemic corruption of the military-industrial complex. Finally, I began speaking out against US militarism. Does America Have a “Gun Problem”…Or a White Supremacy Capitalist Empire Problem?
It’s been another fortnight of mass murder inside Fortress America.
Carnage reigns from Coast to Coast, from a progressive synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, to a line-dancing bar in Thousand Oaks, CA. The high-profile shooters? Both white American men: One a 46-year-old die-hard white supremacist, publicly declaring his hatred for Jews and for immigrant “invaders,” opening fire on a morning Shabbat ceremony. The other, a 28-year-old, US Marine veteran, experienced with machine guns from tours in Afghanistan, targeting “College Night,” at the Border Line Bar and Grill, a country music establishment he reportedly frequented.
Both commando-style killers wielded legally purchased Glock handguns (and one of them an AR-15 assault rifle), as they each slaughtered nearly a dozen people, just eleven days apart.
[…]
Looking back across the sixteen years since the film collected the Oscar for Best Documentary, Bowling for Columbine seems prescient, just as the shooting at Columbine High School that prompted Moore’s film looks more and more like part of a trend that is here to stay. From the 2006 shooting at Virginia Tech that left 32 dead, to the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting that killed 27, to the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre that same year, to the nightmare in Las Vegas last year that killed 58, to the Parkland, Florida shooting in February that triggered the massive “March for Our Lives,” the shameful ‘records’ set by the Columbine killers have been broken, time and again.
According to recent reports, the shooting in Thousand Oaks, CA was the 307thmass shooting in 2018 alone.
A subset of an American gun violence epidemic that altogether steals tens of thousands of lives per year,‘mass shootings’ in the United States now occur approximately once per day.[iii]
Compared to other ‘Western powers,’ all these numbers are essentially off the charts.
How to explain this ugly American exception?
Recently declassified documents show that the former CIA director and former director of national intelligence approved illegal spying on Congress and then classified their crime. They need to face punishment, writes John Kiriakou.
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Brennan and Clapper, in 2014, ostensibly notified congressional overseers about this, but in a way that either tied senators’ hands or kept them in the dark. They classified the notifications.
As a result, Grassley knew of the hacking but couldn’t say anything while senators on neither the Intelligence or Judiciary Committees didn’t know.
It’s a felony to classify a crime. It’s also a felony to classify something solely for the purpose of preventing embarrassment to the CIA.
For all of this—for the hacking in the first place, and then the classification of that criminal deed—both men belong in prison.
This kind of over-classification is illegal, but few Americans know that because this law is not enforced. The Justice Department has never brought over-classification charges against a U.S.
spying authority.
But this would be a good place to start. Amnesia and Impunity Reign: Wall Street Celebrates Halliburton’s 100th Anniversary
When it comes to the ruling elite’s corporate plunder and crimes against humanity, the U.S. national memory’s short and no one, not even its political henchmen, assume blame or suffer real consequences: take Halliburton and former chief executive and U.S.
Vice President Dick Cheney for example. Not only did Cheney plan and justify the invasion, occupation and pilferage of Iraq’s oil, gold bars and national museum treasures under treasonous false pretenses, but its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR Inc.), overcharged the U.S. taxpayer to a tune of more than $2 billion due to collusion engendered by sole source contracting methods and shoddy accounting procedures.
It’s even forgotten that Cheney received a $34 million payout from Halliburton when he joined the Vice President ticket in 2000, in advance of his unscrupulous maneuvers, according to news commentator, Chris Matthews; because on November 5th 2018, in celebration of its 100-year anniversary, its chief executives rang the New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) opening bell.
Sadly, as a nation, the U.S. doesn’t recall Cheney’s lies, or his role in planning the contemptible “Shock and Awe” saturation bombing campaign that destroyed a sovereign nation, which posed no threat to the United States, and left the world’s cradle of civilization in ruins. Conveniently, it doesn’t recall the over 500,000 deaths from war related causes, as reported by the Huffington Post in its 2017 updated article; nor does it recall that obliterating Iraq’s government created a sociopolitical vacuum that enabled the exponential growth of the CIA’s unique brand of Islamofascism and its resulting terrorism, which has culminated in war-torn Syria and Yemen.
Iraq’s only “crime” against the United States, if you want to call it that, was being hogtied by Washington’s sanctions and embargo against it – in what can only be called a Catch 22 situation. Iraq couldn’t do business with U.
S. corporations not because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to, but because the U.S.
government effectively barred Iraq from doing so. This Catch 22 situation is presently being repeated in Venezuela and Iran in advance of its planned invasion and occupation. Could integration help Ukraine’s Roma?
Since the beginning of 2018, there have been five attacks on temporary Roma settlements in Ukraine. After people arrived in Kyiv, Ternopil and Lviv areas for seasonal work from other areas of the country, mostly Zakarpattya in the southwest, nationalist extremist groups evicted Roma from their camps, setting fire to tents and household goods. These far-right groups were angered by the fact that Roma set up camp in parks and wooded areas, while the police “did nothing about it”.
In most cases, the attackers were charged merely with “hooliganism”, although the additional charge of “infringement of the equal rights of citizens in connection with their racial or ethnic origin or religious identity” was added in relation to attacks in Kyiv and Lviv after pressure from activists. In the most recent attack, in the Lviv area, a 24-year-old man, David Pap, was murdered, and four more were injured.
Civil society remained unsatisfied with Ukrainian law enforcement’s reaction on the attacks against Roma settlements. Attacks on Roma aren’t only offences under the criminal charges of hooliganism, murder and infringement of equality.
This kind of persecution contravenes Article 24 of Ukraine’s Constitution, which states that “there can be no privileges or restrictions on grounds of race, colour of skin, political, religious or other principles, gender, ethnic or social background, material position, place of residence, language or any other factor”. Transparency/Investigative Reporting
When telling the truth is a revolutionary act, journalists and whistleblowers are targets. When politicians attack freedom of speech, media becomes weaponized.
And here we are.
How ironic that the government of Turkish President Erdoğan is postured as truth-leaker in the apparent gruesome murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Turkey is the leading per-capita jailer of journalists, whose “crime” often consists of speaking out against the repressive regime.
CIA Director Gina Haspel’s recent meeting with Erdoğan about the Khashoggi case raises questions. Declassified cables reveal that when Haspel led a “black site” CIA prison in Thailand, prisoners were subjected to “extended sessions of physical violence, wall slamming, box confinement, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, shackling, stress positions, and waterboarding.” She later admitted to “being an advocate” of destroying evidence. Crucifying Julian Assange
The Democratic Party—seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian “interference” rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of the working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and the corporate coup d’état that the party helped orchestrate—attacks Assange as a traitor, although he is not a U.S.
citizen.
Nor is he a spy. He is not bound by any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets.
He has not committed a crime. Now, stories in newspapers that once published material from WikiLeaks focus on his allegedly slovenly behavior—not evident during my visits with him—and how he is, in the words of The Guardian, “an unwelcome guest” in the embassy. The vital issue of the rights of a publisher and a free press is ignored in favor of snarky character assassination.
Crucifying Julian Assange
JULIAN Assange’s sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His Ecuadorian citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the process of being revoked. His health is failing. He is being denied medical care. His efforts for legal redress have been crippled by the gag rules, including Ecuadorian orders that he cannot make public his conditions inside the embassy in fighting revocation of his Ecuadorian citizenship. Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has refused to intercede on behalf of Assange, an Australian citizen, even though the new government in Ecuador, led by Lenín Moreno — who calls Assange an ‘inherited problem’ and an impediment to better relations with Washington —is making the WikiLeaks founder’s life in the embassy unbearable.
Almost daily, the embassy is imposing harsher conditions for Assange, including making him pay his medical bills, imposing arcane rules about how he must care for his cat and demanding that he perform a variety of demeaning housekeeping chores. The Ecuadorians, reluctant to expel Assange after granting him political asylum and granting him citizenship, intend to make his existence so unpleasant he will agree to leave the embassy to be arrested by the British and extradited to the United States.
The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, whose government granted the publisher political asylum, describes Assange’s current living conditions as ‘torture.’
His mother, Christine Assange, said in a recent video appeal, ‘Despite Julian being a multi-award-winning journalist, much loved and respected for courageously exposing serious, high-level crimes and corruption in the public interest, he is right now alone, sick, in pain — silenced in solitary confinement, cut off from all contact and being tortured in the heart of London. The modern-day cage of political prisoners is no longer the Tower of London. It’s the Ecuadorian Embassy.
’ ‘Here are the facts,’ she went on. ‘Julian has been detained nearly eight years without charge. That’s right. Without charge.
For the past six years, the UK government has refused his request for access to basic health needs, fresh air, exercise, sunshine for vitamin D and access to proper dental and medical care. As a result, his health has seriously deteriorated. His examining doctors warned his detention conditions are life-threatening. A slow and cruel assassination is taking place before our very eyes in the embassy in London.’ Moreno’s Neoliberal Restoration Proceeds in Ecuador
Lenin Moreno won Ecuador’s presidency in 2017 by campaigning to continue the economic policies of Rafael Correa (a leftist who was in office from 2007 until 2017) but upon taking office immediately shifted dramatically to the right.
Andres Arauz, a former member of Correa’s economic team whom I interviewed for Counterpunch in May, provides an update on Moreno’s remarkably cynical Neoliberal Restoration. In addition to the troubling state of Ecuador’s economy under Moreno despite increased oil prices that help Ecuador, Aruaz discusses major assaults on the rule of law, looming corporate capture of Ecuador’s highest courts (including the role played by some environmentalists in helping it happen) and the fact that candidates in upcoming elections are forced keep alliances with Correa secret to avoid disqualification.
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Additionally, Moreno’s accused Correa’s government of having exceeded a legal public debt limit, but then his brilliant solution to this alleged problem wasn’t to reduce the debt, like Correa famously did in 2008-9, but to remove the legal limit. A law was approved to remove it entirely for the next 4 years.
That generates concern, because now this government has no limit.
The government also now requires that any surplus revenue from high oil prices has to go into a fund.
The budget was based on a price of $45 per barrel, but prices this year have averaged around $70. In spite of the fact that the law is in force, the fund hasn’t been created. Not one dollar has been deposited in any such fund, so they disregard their own self-imposed “austerity”. Why? The reason is that the government also issued two decrees.
One decree eliminated the Law of Energy Sovereignty that established that windfall oil revenues were to be shared 50/50 with the Ecuadorian government. So that law no longer exists.
A second decree did the same in the mining sector. The windfall revenues are no longer available to the government because they have given them away to transnational corporations.
It shows the implications of Moreno’s political about face.
Another thing is the so called “Trole” law that was approved a few months ago. It changed a bunch of regulations and was aimed at blocking the state’s ability to finance itself internally, to get loans from within the country. That was clearly done to be in tune with transnational capital markets.
The best example of this is that instead of getting $500 million internally – something that would have been very easy for the Central Bank or the Social Security institute to provide – the government had to go to Goldman Sachs and guarantee the loan with $1.
2 billion in bonds. So the sustainability of our public finances is now a concern. Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature Unstoppable: The Keystone XL Oil Pipeline and NAFTA
On Thursday, November 8, a federal court in Montana ordered a pause in the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Sounds like cause for celebration, doesn’t it? It’s not. Nothing can stop Keystone XL, and the reason is NAFTA.
The order from Judge Brian Morris of the US District Court for the District of Montana came in a lawsuit brought by the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), North Coast Rivers Alliance, and other environmental and Native American groups. Defendants are the US State Department, which approves trans-border oil pipelines, and TransCanada Corp., the Calgary-based corporation which is constructing KXL, a 1,179-mile long oil pipeline which will run from oil fields in Alberta, Canada to Nebraska, USA and from there via an already-existing pipeline to refineries in Texas.
In his 54-page order, Judge Morris held that the State Department had failed to take a “hard look” at the environmental consequences of approving TransCanada’s permit application, particularly the impact the KXL pipeline would have on global climate change. KXL will transport Canadian tar sands oil, crude with a high carbon content. Judge Morris ordered that work on the pipeline be suspended until the State Department could conduct further environmental studies.
Judge Morris’ serious treatment of global climate change places him in sharp contrast with President Donald Trump who dismisses climate change as a Chinese hoax..
