WaterVille
Old men in flannel just keep on keepin' on...
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed. (W. Gibson, maybe)
...I tried to figure this out the only way I know how: by reporting. I happened to have been on campus on April 18, the day Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, decided to call in the New York Police Department to clear the protesters from campus, and I returned a week later to spend the day reporting on the protests and the mood on campus.
What I saw were moving, creative and peaceful protests by people seeking to end the slaughter in Gaza, where more than 34,000 people have died, the majority of them women and children. I also saw things that left me quite troubled, and heard from Jewish students both inside and outside the camps navigating a campus fraught with emotions. But while reporting on the protests up close gave me insight into how unsettling some aspects of activism can be, it doesn’t mean the protesters’ actions are misguided. These young people seek a worthy cause: to end what may be the most brutal military operation for civilians in the 21st century...
...Just outside the campus gates, the scene was more tense. The protests have become a destination for opportunists of all kinds. Nasty purveyors of chaos. Gavin McInnes, right- wing founder of the Proud Boys, turned up, student journalists reported. On Thursday, Christian Nationalists descended on Columbia to stage their own, ostensibly pro-Israel protest, screaming through the campus gates to the student protesters inside: “You want to camp? Go camp in Gaza!” according to a reporter on the scene...
...On Thursday (April 25th), video began circulating of one of the student protest leaders at Columbia, Khymani James, saying that “the same way we are very comfortable accepting that Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world,” and “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” James later released a statement apologizing for the video...
...It is easy when looking backward to remember the fight for a good cause as pure and untainted, even if it did not seem so at the time. In the same way, we now remember the Vietnam War as an American tragedy. The students at Columbia University who protested it seem, in retrospect, to have been right. But our memories elide some of their more outré tactics. A list of popular chants employed by antiwar protesters at a time when thousands of American soldiers were dying each year fighting in the war included things like “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, We’re on the side of the Viet Cong!” and “Save Hanoi, Lose Saigon, Victory to the Viet Cong!”
These slogans are sickening. But by 1968, when the protests reached their peak, the U. S. government had already realized, according to the Pentagon Papers, that the war was all but unwinnable. Yet its brutal killing machine ground on for another five years, and an additional 38,000 Americans, and countless more Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people died pointless deaths in a senseless, futile war.
There are clear signs that Israel is prosecuting a war just as brutal, and unwinnable, as the United States did back then. Some people might not like the slogans, tactics or proposals of today’s pro-Palestine protesters. But the truth is that a majority of Americanshave qualms about Israel’s pitiless war to root out Hamas, whatever the consequences for civilians. As politicians send riot police onto campuses to try to smother a new protest movement, we’d do well to keep in mind why we’ve forgotten the ugliest aspects of the Vietnam protests: Those memories have been replaced, instead, by an enduring horror at what we did.
...The proportion of British Columbians who would like to see BC United and the BC Conservatives merge before the election has risen from 32 per cent in January to 39 per cent in March, and encompasses small majorities of people who would cast a ballot for each of the individual parties (53 per cent and 54 per cent, respectively)...
Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., passed a historic vote to join the United Auto Workers on Friday, making the auto factory the first in the South to vote to unionize since the 1940s.
Nearly three-quarters of 3,613 workers voted yes in a three-day election that drew high turnout, giving the union an impressive first win in its campaign to organize the factories of a dozen automakers in the South...
...Local “right to work” laws in Southern states, as well as political and cultural traditions, have made it difficult for unions to expand. That could change if the UAW’s momentum continues in the region, Rutgers University labor professor Rebecca Givan said.“There will be an opportunity to raise standards across the South,” Givan said. “Other employers will not be able to compete for workers in a tight labor market if they don’t keep up. We’ll likely see organizing in manufacturing and areas where there already have been campaigns — everything from Starbucks to hospitals.”...
...(Fiona Wilson, president of the BC Association of Chiefs of Police) said she supports B.C. and Ottawa trying to add exceptions to decriminalization in areas like skate parks and playgrounds, so that police could ask people to move along and arrest them if they refuse to comply...
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...(Provincial NDP Government) Premier David Eby is attempting to create more exceptions, by banning open drug use in places like beaches, bus shelters and businesses. But that legislation is tied up in a court challenge...
...“Prior to decriminalization, if someone was using drugs in a problematic circumstance, for example at a playground, or a bus shelter or a beach, community members were able to call 911, police were able to attend and address that circumstance,” she (Wilson) said...
...“In the wake of decriminalization, there are many of those locations where we have absolutely no authority to address that problematic drug use, because the person appears to be in possession of less than 2.5 grams and they are not in a place that is an exception to the exemption.”
It was a stark comment, and not one we hear B.C. police leaders often say out loud — perhaps out of fear of retribution from the provincial NDP government...
...Before the province announced plans to require cities to allow multi-unit developments in residential neighbourhoods, Vancouver changed its zoning last September to allow what the city calls “multiplexes” — developments with up to six units on a single lot — across almost all residential neighbourhoods. One notable exception to Vancouver’s medium-density zoning was the First Shaughnessy area, which is designated as a “heritage conservation area.”...
...Imagine how much worse our understanding of BC politics would be if we were unable to independently see that the BC Conservatives were more than a rump party for PPCers. It’s quite clear that Kevin Falcon’s rebrand to BC FC has killed the centre-right and is allowing for voters to have a better, clearer sense of the state of play. If the election ends up being close, as Liaison suggested last week, it’s possible Greens voters or moderate, federal Liberals who prefer BC FC provincially, may swing to the NDP to stop the insurgent Cons. I’m not saying that will happen, but it’s better that those voters have that info...
Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said.That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”...
Shares of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company plunged on Monday after the company filed to register the potential sale of tens of millions of additional shares.Trump Media & Technology’s stock fell 18 percent, erasing hundreds of millions of dollars from the company’s market value...
...In December, Vancouver council slashed two-thirds of the proposed budget for the Vancouver police board, the independent governance body for the Vancouver Police Department.The decision received no public attention at the time — even some city councillors said this week they did not realize it had happened.The mayor’s office says the reduction was a necessary response to “very dramatic” recent increases in board spending...
...On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically...
...In 2023, Germany's Supply Chain Act went into effect, which bans large corporations with a German presence from using child labor, violating health and safety standards, and (critically) interfering with union organizers...
...(I)n the USA, Mercedes has a preference for building its cars in the American South, the so-called "right to work" states where US labor law is routinely flouted and unions are thin on the ground...
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...(However, w)orkers at Mercedes' factory in Vance, Alabama are trying to join the UAW (United Auto Workers), and Mercedes is playing dirty, using the tried-and-true union-busting tactics that have held workplace democracy at bay for decades...
...(T)he UAW has also filed a complaint with BAFA, the German regulator in charge of the Supply Chain Act, seeking penalties against Mercedes-Benz Group AG.
That's a huge deal, because the German Supply Chain Act goes hard. If Mercedes is convicted of union-busting in Alabama, its German parent-company faces a fine of 2% of its global total revenue, and will no longer be eligible to sell products to the German government...