December 26, 2022

4 power substations vandalized in Washington state, over 14K lost power

Here they go with that 'lone wolf' shit again.....


(abc news) The search continued Monday for vandals who targeted four power substations on Christmas Day in Pierce County, Washington, setting fire to at least one of the facilities and knocking out power to more than 14,000 utility customers, authorities said.

Two of the break-ins were at Tacoma Public Utilities substations and two others were at a Puget Sound Energy station, according to the sheriff's office in Pierce County, which encompasses Tacoma.

No arrests have been announced.

The vandalism came amid a string of similar sabotage incidents across the country, including several in the Northwest, and follows a bulletin issued last month by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warning that critical infrastructure could be among the targets of possible attacks by "lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances." .............(more)

https://abcnews.go.com/US/2-power-substations-attacked-washington-state-7k-lost/story

December 26, 2022

Mapped: Explore our interactive CTA ridership map (Chicago)

The CTA publishes informational network maps that most riders are familiar with, but what’s less well-known is that they publish daily average ridership statistics for each bus route and train station as well. So I took an interest in combining the two to visually highlight how ridership is spread throughout the CTA network. Before drawing any conclusions it’s important to note that ridership is strongly correlated with frequency of service, so low ridership does not necessarily mean low demand for transit, but could mean low-quality or infrequent service. Keeping that in mind, take a look at the interactive version of the map (based on weekday ridership from May 2022) and explore your most used routes.

In the map, bus routes are colored black and routes with lower ridership are drawn thinner and more transparent. Train lines are all drawn the same thickness (since we only have station-level boardings and no information on transfers), with stops’ areas scaled to boardings. You can pan, zoom and hover over bus routes and stations to see the available information.

What jumps out to me is how important the bus network is to transit ridership. The 79th Street bus route had about the same daily ridership (12,866) as all the Blue Line stations from LaSalle to Forest Park combined (12,844), and many other routes have comparably high ridership. These numbers are still well below pre-pandemic averages, but speak to the importance of buses not only in supplementing rail but as a transit modality in their own right. Looking at the map, it’s not hard to see that many of these routes lie where rail service is absent or going in the opposite direction of travel, and given the lower cost of bus service in comparison to rail, it’s quite impressive that ridership is as high as it is. Further, most of these routes have few or no bus priority treatments – bus lanes, signal priority or bus boarding bulbs or islands, to name a few – the introduction of which would improve quality of service and bolster ridership. ..............(more)

https://chi.streetsblog.org/2022/12/21/mapped-explore-our-interactive-cta-ridership-map/

December 26, 2022

Reflections on 2022: Fair electoral maps in Michigan

‘A perfect alignment’: Michigan citizens draw fair electoral map
After a decade of government-drawn maps, citizens in Michigan were in charge of the electoral map for the state’s 2022 midterm elections. The result was that the elected legislature almost exactly reflects the votes, a change from past elections.

By David A. Lieb Associated Press
November 22, 2022


Democratic candidates for the Michigan House and Senate won a majority of votes this year, translating into their party winning control of both legislative chambers. That may seem like a natural result, but it hasn’t been in previous elections.

While Democrats also won a majority of votes in 2018 and 2020, Republicans won majorities in the Legislature. The difference this time: Candidates ran in new districts drawn by a citizens commission instead of ones crafted by Republican lawmakers that were designed to help keep their party in power.

“Michigan went from some of the most extremely gerrymandered maps to some of the country’s fairest maps, and now we have a perfect alignment between the votes that voters cast and the officials that were elected into office,” said Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians. Her group spearheaded a successful 2018 ballot initiative that changed the way Michigan’s legislative districts are drawn.

An Associated Press analysis of election data indicates that Michigan’s new state legislative districts reduced the built-in advantage Republicans had enjoyed over the previous decade. It shows that gerrymandering – or the lack of it – can affect the balance of power in legislatures and, ultimately, the policies they pursue. ...............(more)

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2022/1122/A-perfect-alignment-Michigan-citizens-draw-fair-electoral-map

December 26, 2022

'I was throwing up with anxiety': how Democrats fought back in America's most gerrymandered state

‘I was throwing up with anxiety’: how Democrats fought back in America’s most gerrymandered state
Chris Stein

Ben Wikler, Wisconsin’s Democratic party chair, on midterm success that means ‘democracy is going to survive in our state’


(Guardian UK) Ben Wikler spent so much time poring over polls ahead of the midterm elections that it eventually became too much to bear.

“I was throwing up with anxiety,” Wikler, the chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, confessed to the Guardian.

It wasn’t merely out of concern, common to Democrats nationwide in the run-up to the early November vote, that voters were set to give their candidates the traditional drubbing of the party in power, powered by Joe Biden’s unpopularity or the wobbly state of the economy.

Rather, Wikler feared that in Wisconsin his party was on the brink of something worse: permanent minority status in a state that is crucial to any presidential candidate’s path to the White House.

....(snip)....

Wisconsin has the most gerrymandered legislative map in the country, designed to ensure the GOP has as easy a path as possible to capture majorities in the legislature, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study.

Meanwhile, the Cost of Voting Index ranks Wisconsin as the fourth most difficult state in the country for people to exercise their right to cast a ballot, thanks to its strict voter identification requirements and laws that make it practically impossible to conduct voter registration drives. ..........(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/26/ben-wikler-wisconsin-democrats-midterms-interview

December 25, 2022

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was 'chilling' in the American Airlines lounge at JFK before flying...

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was 'chilling' in the American Airlines lounge at JFK before flying business class to his parents' home to await trial

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been pictured in the American Airlines business class lounge at John F. Kennedy International Airport before flying to his parents' home at Palo Alto, California on Thursday.

The cofounder and former CEO of collapsed crypto trading platform FTX was released on a $250 million bond on Thursday. He was required to surrender his passport and stay with his parents ahead of a federal trial over the failure of FTX.

Litquidity tweeted pictures of Bankman-Fried at JFK on Thursday.


https://twitter.com/litcapital/status/1606380998056415236

Bankman-Fried was arrested on December 13 in the Bahamas, where his company was headquartered, as federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an eight-count criminal complaint against him.

He was flown to New York on Wednesday night after a Bahamian magistrate, who denied him bail on charges there, signed off on the extradition to the US. ............(more)

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-153701848.html

December 25, 2022

Highest-profile January 6 trial begins with Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio

(Guardian UK) The January 6 committee investigating the attack on the Capitol may have issued its huge final report, but the wheels of the justice system in the US are grinding on and one of the most high-profile trials emerging from the insurrection is about to begin in earnest.

Jury selection began last week with the seditious conspiracy trial against ex-Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and four others involved in the far-right, often violent militia group.

Tarrio and his co-defendants in the Washington DC federal court trial – Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Proud Boy organizer Joe Biggs – are charged with seditious conspiracy and other counts related to the attack that delayed congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, injured dozens of police officers and is linked to multiple deaths. They have all pleaded not guilty to the charges.

A fifth man charged in this case, Charles Donohoe, pleaded guilty in April to conspiring to attack the Capitol. Under Donohoe’s plea deal, he agreed to cooperate against his co-defendants. Approximately 900 people have now been arrested in the Capitol attack, with prosecutors securing convictions against hundreds.

The start of the trial comes amid a wider reckoning with those responsible for the January 6 attack. .............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/25/january-6-proud-boys-trial-begins-enrique-tarrio

December 24, 2022

A Landmark Wage Increase at the University of California

A Landmark Wage Increase at the University of California
Graduate students won a major raise after five weeks on strike. The victory is a product of the militancy that has pushed the union to the vanguard of organized labor in higher ed.

Nelson Lichtenstein ▪ December 24, 2022


(Dissent) After a five-week strike at the University of California, employed graduate students have ratified a pathbreaking new contract that offers most of them 50 or 60 percent wage hikes within the next two-and-a-half years.

The agreement, which covers more than 36,000 at the ten UC campuses, was not without controversy, with some arguing it was hardly far-reaching enough. Among teaching assistants, tutors, and readers, 11,386 voted yes, with just over 7,000 voting against. Student researchers, largely in the sciences, favored the agreement more strongly, with more than ten thousand supportive and less than half that opposed.

The agreement is a stunning accomplishment, raising the bar for all workers, in the academy or not, who have faced an inflationary surge that has eroded real incomes and generated economic anxiety in a post-pandemic era where layoffs and recession loom just over the horizon.

The UC grad students, who are organized into the United Auto Workers, have more than doubled the raises won in other recent wage settlements. Railway workers got just a 24 percent increase in the five-year contract that Congress imposed on them earlier this month; another recent agreement, for grocery workers in Southern California, provides for about a 20 percent boost over three years. Grad student employees at other universities have had to settle for single-digit wage increases. And for the 90 percent of all U.S. workers who are not in a union, pay has hardly kept pace with inflation, while employment turnover remains high. ...............(more)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-landmark-wage-increase-at-the-university-of-california

December 24, 2022

The great Pele is in pretty dire condition, apparently.....

The family of Brazilian soccer legend Pelé have gathered at a São Paulo hospital, prompting concerns about the deteriorating health of the 82-year-old.

Two of his daughters have been at his side in the Albert Einstein hospital for most of this week and they were joined on Saturday by his son Edinho who came from Londrina, 540km away, where he coaches the second division team.

One of his daughters, Kely Nascimento, published a picture on Instagram late on Friday of her hugging her father on his hospital bed with the message: “We’re still here, fighting and with faith. Another night together.” Her sister Flavia Arantes do Nascimento also posted the picture, which showed her sleeping on a couch, on social media.

Edinho shared a picture of him holding his father’s hand. “Dad … my strength is yours,” he wrote. ............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/24/another-night-together-pele-fights-with-faith-in-hospital-as-family-gather

December 24, 2022

Is voting for Republicans literally killing white people in rural America? Because the correlation..

There really is a "great replacement" — but it's not what Tucker Carlson says it is
Is voting for Republicans literally killing white people in rural America? Because the correlation is striking

By MIKE LOFGREN
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 24, 2022 12:01PM (EST)


(Salon) Very likely the reader is wearily familiar with one of the memes that American right-wingers endlessly repeat. It's called the "great replacement": the claim that shadowy but apparently omnipotent elites are deliberately replacing the old stock (meaning white) American population with immigrants from predominantly non-white or non-Christian countries.

The notion had its beginnings decades ago in the mental swamps of Southern segregationist politicians and has been recycled in various iterations through white supremacist groups. Donald Trump's election and the popularization of the phrase (in more or less coded language) by professional jackasses like Tucker Carlson made it into another of the Republican base's innumerable slogans.

The idea is bunk, of course, and easily understood as yet another of the many myths designed to play into right-wingers' persecution complex. But it is also possible to understand it as a folk-psychological projection of something that is indeed happening in the strongly Republican regions of the country inhabited by what Sarah Palin called "real Americans." It's not so much the great replacement as the great die-off, and Republicans are both its chief promoters and its principal victims.

The phenomenon first received attention in 2015, thanks to a paper by Anne Case and Nobel Prize laureate Angus Deaton. They detailed first the stagnation and then the absolute decline in life expectancy among non-Hispanic white populations, particularly in white rural areas of the U.S. They charted a significant rise in "deaths of despair" like suicide or drugs (particularly synthetic opioids) or obesity-related illness among the white working class. .........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/12/24/there-really-is-a-great-replacement--but-its-not-what-tucker-carlson-says-it-is/

December 24, 2022

A Taste of Home: How Ethnic Grocery Stores Create Community

A Taste of Home: How Ethnic Grocery Stores Create Community
Ethnic grocery stores have served as a cultural pillar of immigrant communities. Can they survive today’s economic challenges?

BY MICHELLE CHEN
11 MIN READ
DEC 22, 2022


(YES! Magazine) For many immigrants, the first place they feel at home in the United States isn’t the place they live, but the place they buy the ingredients for their first home-cooked meal. The grocery store—the bodega, halal deli, spice shop, Asian fishmonger—has historically been not only where they reunite with the smells of their grandmother’s cooking or their favorite childhood street food, but also where they can hear a conversation in their mother language again, buy an herbal folk remedy, or catch up on local gossip. That shop can be the rare place in a new country where a migrant feels as though they are, at least within those four walls, part of a majority.

While the first ethnic grocery stores—food retailers catering to a migrant or diasporic culture—in the U.S. opened up during the 19th and early 20th centuries in urban minority neighborhoods in coastal cities, today, such grocery stores have mushroomed around the country, wherever new migrant communities have sprung up. And often, the communities surrounding these businesses are growing more diverse and globalized, even as their storefronts serve as hubs of cultural tradition.

An Authentic Experience

At La Palma, a “Mexicatessen” nestled in San Francisco’s historic Chicano neighborhood, the Mission District, generations of Latin American families have come for enchiladas and tamales that taste homemade for nearly 70 years. The current co-owner, Aida Ibarra, purchased it with family members in 1983 after working for years in the hospitality industry.

The work of managing a specialty kitchen and catering and wholesale operation that supplies local restaurants, with just a handful of employees, is grueling. When the city was largely shuttered during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ibarra recalled how she felt an obligation to keep the store open, even though their business had suffered as the restaurants they usually supplied had closed. To limit the number of shoppers inside the store, customers had to line up outside, which frustrated some, but in the end, she recalled, “a lot of our customers thanked us for staying open. I guess they knew that it was a risk for us, too.”

....(snip)....

The Future of the Ethnic Grocery Store

As much as the ethnic grocery store has historically served as a cultural pillar of immigrant communities, in many U.S. cities, the rising cost of living, competition from online food delivery services, and displacement of non-white neighborhoods through gentrification could undermine long-standing immigrant-run retail stores and markets. .............(more)

https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2022/12/22/grocery-community-ethnic