Administrative detention in Isreal

Administrative detention is based on secret suspicions, secret evidence and no charges being brought. To conceal its inherent absurdity, hearings are held in-camera and away from the public eye. As such, even the little that is revealed to the defense remains prohibited for publication.

"Like all administrative detention hearings, it was held in-camera, to obscure the fact that detainees' lawyers do their job without access to the facts of the case. Even the few details that are not secret are prohibited for publication. The administrative detention order was approved in full for a period of six months"

" In the past, it was considered, at least officially, a measure reserved for the most extreme of cases. This hypocritical position has always been false, but now there is no longer any need to save face. According to the Israeli army's own data, almost 5,000 arrests were made in the West Bank in the past eight months. These are very conservative numbers, as they don't include the many thousands arrested and released without being indicted.

The data shows that administrative detention, this so-called extreme of extremes, is now the norm. According to Israeli Prison Service numbers, Israel now holds 7016 people who have not yet been convicted in its jails – either awaiting trial or under administrative detention. Of these, 4,299 – more than 60%! – are held without charge or trial. And all that is without saying a single word about the torture, hunger and humiliation to which all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel are subjected these days."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/28/spying-hacking-intimidation-israel-war-icc-exposed

+ Article on the threats that Israel made against the journalist writing about this

A large-scale nuclear power station in China is the first in the world to be completely impervious to dangerous meltdowns, even during a full loss of external power. The design can’t be adapted to existing nuclear reactors around the world, but could be a blueprint for future ones.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2440388-chinese-nuclear-reactor-is-completely-meltdown-proof/

Recognising the limitations of techno-economism, focused on markets (price adjustments) and technology (efficiency gains), this contribution introduces sufficiency corridors as a concept, research field, and policy approach. Sufficiency corridors represent the space between a floor of meeting needs and a ceiling of ungeneralisable excess, i.e. within the sufficiency corridor everyone has enough (to satisfy needs) while no one has too much (to endanger planetary boundaries and need satisfaction). Establishing such corridors entails a process over time that continuously narrows the gap between floors and ceilings, lifting the former and pushing down the latter by strengthening forms of consumption and production that contribute to need satisfaction while shrinking those that do not.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-024-02027-2

Libraries + Community Centers

https://www.wpl.ca/your-library/locations-hours/john-m-harper-branch/

This is The Farming Left: these land workers share a politics, united by the concept of food sovereignty: the right to control of local food systems, which originated with farmers in the Global South. ‘We’re talking about equitable access to resources to enable localised food supplies’, explains Fernandes. These organisations are tackling the challenges of access to land in an unequal landscape: the ELC, for example, purchases large plots and obtains planning permission for dwellings before parcelling them up into affordable smallholdings.

The Kindling Trust in Manchester is also seeking to foster a new generation of agroecological farmers. The Trust, which was established in 2007, has a veg box scheme and a community garden, and also offers training to new entrants, but there has always been a long-term plan to establish a cooperative farm. Since raising over a million pounds from more than six hundred investors last year, the Trust is looking to purchase a 120-acre farm in the Manchester area. ‘We want people to feel ownership in whatever way they get involved’, explains co-founder Chris Walsh. Whether they are founding members, workers, investors, or tenants, they will all be represented equally on a governing board.

While the radical agrarian community in the UK pales in comparison to the strength of conservative farming interests, this fight for land – and the right to use it – is happening on a global scale. The international peasants’ movement is connected through the 200-million strong La Vía Campesina, linking groups such as Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or ‘Landless Workers’ Movement’, which has, since the 1980s, been occupying land to their counterparts across the world. The world’s farming Left is a David to big agribusiness’s Goliath, the latter having been bolstered by states, major international institutions, and the liberalising of global political economy since the Second World War. From Zapatistas to Scottish crofters, the peasants’ movement is fighting to turn the tide on our social and ecological future before it is too late.

In a recent report, the democratic ownership thinktank Common Wealth suggested bringing private land into public ownership to create experimental agroecological farms. ‘I’d situate myself within the tent of a Green New Deal for agriculture’, explains Rob Booth, the author of the report. Booth is particularly interested in county farms as a potential model for democratic ownership of land and agroecological innovation – established in the nineteenth century in response to agricultural depression, these farms are owned by local authorities and rented out at reasonable rates to tenant farmers. They still cover 200,000 acres of land (down from double this amount forty years ago). Booth sees a state-led county farm renaissance with a focus on agroecological practices as a potential keystone of a Green New Deal. ‘These are examples of how public ownership in the classic sense can create space for new environmental practices and more equitable access’, he explains. ‘With tools that aren’t a million miles away from what we have now, we can facilitate a more democratic use of land.’

https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/who-is-the-farming-left

I think it's important to know what Biden has or hasn't done. This is not an endorsement.

In my opinion, Biden, far from being "the most progressive president in the past 40 years" or whatever people are calling him, has mainly been responsible for:
- renewed industrial policy (not bad, but hardly a leftist because of it)
- continuing much of Trump's foreign policy and immigration policy
- Some good but generally narrow center-left policies

Other stuff he's done:
- The White House is threatening the patents of high-priced drugs developed with taxpayer dollars
- 35$ insuline cap under medicare
- Biden admin to require replacing all lead pipelines within 10 years
- Federal pardon for those convicted of marijuana possession
- other stuff (not all that is mentioned has been passed, some were just proposals)

Ending mass human deprivation and providing good lives for the whole world's population can be accomplished while at the same time achieving ecological objectives. This is demonstrated by a new study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science, recently published in World Development Perspectives.

About 80% of humanity cannot access necessary goods and services and lives below the threshold for "decent living." Some narratives claim that addressing this problem will require massive economic growth on a global scale, multiplying existing output many times over, which would exacerbate climate change and ecological breakdown.

The authors of the new study dispute this claim and argue that human development does not require such a dangerous approach. Reviewing recent empirical research, they find that ending mass deprivation and provisioning decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.

The authors argue that, to achieve such a future, strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification.

In the Global South, this requires using industrial policy to increase economic sovereignty, develop industrial capacity, and organize production around human well-being.

At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production (of things like mansions, SUVs, private jets and fast fashion) must be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries, as degrowth scholarship holds.

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-growth-required-good-environmental.html

The main outcomes of the paper are that:
- A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product, which in turns means that
- The costs of rising global temperatures are so high, wealthy countries like the US have a strong incentive in unilaterally reducing carbon emissions. Environmental policies are not simply sound of mind, they're outright "economically" beneficial in the long term

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/17/economic-damage-climate-change-report