Severance’s workplace brutality isn’t sci-fi. Neither is its worker power.

The Apple TV+ show is a road map of worker organizing.

By Caitlin PenzeyMoog

VOX

Apr 9, 2022, 

Mark and Helly, plotting. Apple TV+


You may not have heard, but people don’t like their jobs.

Americans are quitting in droves. Companies paying poverty wages are having a hard time finding and retaining workers. Highly paid digital workers don’t want to return to the office. The pandemic stripped the padding that made white-collar jobs bearable — lunches with coworkers, Starbucks runs, breaks in fresh air — leaving only the rotten core of actual work behind.

Setting aside generalities, consider your own work. Does it suck? Is it exhausting? Is it meaningful? Or does it detract from the parts of your life that bring meaning? Do you have a good job, or is it only good compared to the worse jobs you could be forced into?

Enter Severance, a show on Apple TV+ starring Adam Scott as Mark. Mark has voluntarily undergone a procedure known as severance, which means he has chosen not to remember what happens during his workday. It’s an intoxicating premise. If you were paid handsomely to do it, why wouldn’t you?

Mark works at Lumon, a powerful corporation with mysterious intent and one of the most ghoulish dystopian settings on the small screen. Lumon offers the most in-demand perk of all: work-life balance. His job self, his “innie,” spends his days sorting and filing numbers in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Division, for no reason that he knows of. His “outtie” is blissfully unaware of the pointlessness of his innie’s days, though the complete removal from work hasn’t exactly translated into happiness for Mark. (Spoilers follow for Severance.)

THAT’S WHAT MAKES WORK PALATABLE: YOUR COWORKERS BECOME YOUR FRIENDS AND, GIVEN ENOUGH TRAUMA BONDING, YOUR COMRADES

Mark and his severed coworkers make an ideal workforce to be exploited. With no personal memories and no context of the outside world, attempts to understand their jobs and surroundings are childlike and naive. But Lumon can’t stop coworkers from caring about each other: Mark empathizes with new hire Helly (Britt Lower); Irving (John Turturro) falls in love with Burt (Christopher Walken) from Optics and Design, abandoning his zealotry for the Handbook in the process; Dylan (Zach Cherry) accidentally discovers his outtie’s fatherhood, radicalizing him to help his coworkers escape instead of working late to win chintzy prizes.

Severance is a sneaky paean to worker solidarity, and the heart of the show is a metaphor for how workers come together in the face of oppression. Mark’s compliance is first shaken by the expulsion of his work bestie, Petey (Yul Vazquez). The loss awakens a quiet recalcitrance because that’s what makes work palatable: Your coworkers become your friends and, given enough trauma bonding, your comrades.

While the workplace sitcom has been a staple of TV for decades, no show about work has captured quite so accurately how damaging work can be in real life. You don’t work at the Cheers bar, and you don’t work for Leslie Knope. You are not Jim Halpert; most likely, you are Stanley Hudson, painfully aware of the stupidity of your labor.

Lumon may represent a particularly hellish version of the office, but it doesn’t have to stray far from reality to depict the cruelty of work. The workplace is already dystopian. Entire sectors of the economy are based on a large pool of low-wage workers, aided by state governments run in large part by business owners. In America, 44 percent of workers — 53 million people — work in low-wage jobs that are physically exhausting and arduous. Semi-employed gig workers live precariously while their employers fight tooth and nail so they won’t be classified as their employees. Better-off white-collar workers face their own set of harms. Like the members of the Macrodata Refinement Division, we’re all dealing with hardship, some of which is the direct result of our jobs.

Because as we know in our bones and Severance makes clear, we are our jobs, every shitty minute. We speak of “work-life balance” because we know work is opposed to life. When Mark tells Helly he just hopes he has things he cares about outside of Lumon, it’s because he knows his job is not one of those things. For all the fantastical elements in Severance, the only real science fiction is the consciousness-searing technology facilitating ever-greater worker compliance. The suffering at work, and the characters’ futile attempts to separate work from everything else, is the lived reality of millions of us in the real world.

Lumon employees, caught commiserating. Apple TV+

The pandemic only highlighted the brutality of our jobs in the current extractive labor setup we call a capitalist democracy. We learned that we’re either essential or not. Unless you’re a doctor, “essential” mostly means people working in low-wage, dangerous, punishing jobs necessary to keep the economy going, like farmworkers, bus drivers, and cashiers. There seems to be a direct correlation between how necessary your job is and how low you are paid and indecently you are treated.

On the flip side are those working inessential jobs, or what the anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger,” Graeber writes in his essay. Macrodata Refinement is a perfect example of a job that doesn’t really need to be done, and one brought about by Severance creator, writer, and showrunner Dan Erickson’s real-life temp job entering data.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Erickson was able to make a show out of the “profound psychological violence” (Graeber’s words) of a meaningless job, or that that show could double as an ingenious depiction of workplace organizing. TV workers are part of a formidable union with a history of militancy that brings strong protections. (TV writers are represented by the Writers Guild of America West; as an editorial employee of Vox, I’m represented by their sibling, Writers Guild of America East.) There’s a reason the saying “an injury to one is an injury to all” has stuck around in the labor world, and Hollywood writers are especially good at using their collective power to secure better conditions for everyone in their industry.

In an interview with Inverse, Erickson states the themes of his show bluntly: “It’s about workers reclaiming power, which is obviously a brutal, ongoing human struggle. Workers are extremely powerful, but I think solidarity is one of the biggest challenges in that, especially when those in power try to divide in the ranks.” The best that can be said of the vast majority of jobs is that you may come to prioritize the value of your coworkers over the circumstances that brought you together, i.e., the meaninglessness of your shared toil. Severance is a road map of organizing, a revolution in progress, and it begins and ends with caring about your fellow worker, who in turn cares about you.

In Severance, Helly, newly severed and rebellious, represents the audience surrogate and an unadulterated reaction to all this, and perhaps what everyone’s reaction should be to spending their days doing pointless tasks for the profit of others: rage, repulsion, and determination to escape. Those are the seeds of worker organizing. People know their jobs are bad; it takes someone like Helly, or organizers who won the recent union drive at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York warehouse, to light a fire under their immiserated coworkers in order to do something about it.

The stakes are high for workers. While Jeff Bezos’s wealth is greater than the GDPs of more than half the world’s countries, employment at his company is so precarious and difficult that the high turnover rate is a feature of employment; routine injuries are a feature of employment; peeing in bottles is a feature of employment. “You’re not a person” — the message Helly’s outtie tells her innie — brutally epitomizes the loss of dignity and humanity we endure in the workplace.

A union cannot solve every problem workers face, but it wins us a seat at the table to determine at least some of the conditions of our working lives. I know this because I’ve organized a workplace. It was the single most meaningful thing I’ve done in my life because it led me to understand my power when working collectively with my coworkers, and because it materially improved the lives of many of us.

Media isn’t the only white-collar industry where unions are booming: Workers at nonprofits, museums, and even Big Tech are revolting against the norms that use their own drives against them. It’s much easier to get people to work long hours if you teach them they’re choosing to do it.

EVEN DEVOID OF THE CONTEXT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD AND THEIR PERSONAL HISTORIES, EVEN WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT A UNION IS, THE WORKERS STILL REBEL

Similarly, Lumon gets workers to exploit themselves. They choose to undergo severance — if they don’t like it, they can quit! If there’s a lesson here, it’s that owners will do everything they possibly can to extract as much surplus value from workers as possible — especially under the guise of technological advances — and it’s up to the workers to stop it. The severance procedure is a funhouse mirror version of the ways real executives use technology to make work ever more dehumanizing in pursuit of ever-greater profits. At least on the severed floor, there’s hope, because even devoid of the context of the outside world and their personal histories, even without knowing what a union is, the workers still rebel.

We cannot ignore what happens to us at work, even if we’d like to, and even if our overseers do their best to facilitate the idea that our work lives are separate from the rest of our lives. “No one should be as invested in their boss’s bottom line as they are in their own life or happiness,” showrunner Erickson said in the Inverse interview. “But there are certain things we learn as humans, like empathy and self-worth, that I think we’re often discouraged from bringing to the workplace, to our own detriment. The less of ourselves we bring to work, the easier we are to exploit, or roped into immoral practices. But also we need that separation in order not to lose ourselves entirely.”

The benefit of exploring a topic like workplace organizing in a sci-fi story like Severance is that its outlandish premise allows its viewers some remove from the cultural baggage we see as entrenched and unchangeable. It’s a narrative that puts the brutality of work front and center, and through stories, we can learn that what seems impossible is not. Even in the most dystopian version of corpocratic America imaginable, workplace empathy and uniting in our common struggle triumphs.

Congrats! You formed a union. Now comes the hard part.

The boring, crucial work that happens now that Starbucks and Amazon have unionized.

Public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965

By Rani Molla@ranimolla 

VOX

 Apr 12, 2022,

Amazon Labor Union workers celebrate their election win on April 1. The next battle is getting a contract.

 Andrea Renault/AFP via Getty Images

Union membership in the US has been in decline for decades, but there’s recently been a potential shift. Seventeen corporate Starbucks locations in the US have voted to form a union since the end of last year, and another 170 or so are slated to vote in the coming weeks and months — all in an industry where unionizing is rare. And in early April, workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse also voted for a union, making them the first to organize in a company known for quashing organizing. These successful votes are historic, and they’re an optimistic sign for unions in America.

But while the hard-won union votes might be the most cinematic part, it’s not the end of the story. The lengthy and difficult process of negotiating a contract that benefits workers has only just begun — and its conclusion is far from certain.

To move forward, the union must write a contract with the company, the union and the company must agree on it, and then union members vote on whether they also agree. The process can take anywhere from six months to a few years — and some don’t end with a contract at all. Some 30 percent of unions don’t establish a contract within three years.

The unions representing Starbucks and Amazon workers are off to a good start because, for the most part, their goals are clear. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) has said its main objectives are to raise wages to $30 an hour, give workers longer breaks, and mostly eliminate mandatory overtime. The first Starbucks Workers United union, at the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo, New York, has been in contract negotiations since January 31; it has so far proposed “just cause” firing, better health and safety protocols, and giving customers the option to tip on credit cards. Future proposals include better wages and benefits.

The harder part, experts say, will be getting Amazon and Starbucks to agree on contracts. That’s not for lack of trying on the unions’ part. Rather, unions often face uphill battles with uncooperative companies and toothless labor laws.

Companies can find any number of ways to stall. Amazon is already objecting to the historic Staten Island vote, accusing the union of threatening voters to vote for the union, among other complaints. Starbucks has filed appeals that have delayed union votes but has said it will respect the bargaining process for the stores that have voted to unionize.

Companies are supposed to bargain in good faith, but there’s no timeline on when that should happen, nor are they compelled to agree to the contract. “Our law has no mechanism to force management,” Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell University’s labor relations school, told Recode. If the NLRB, the federal body charged with enforcing labor law, finds that they’re stalling unnecessarily, there’s not much it can do.

It’s clear why many companies stall: It can make unions lose momentum. If years pass without a contract, workers might wonder what the point of the union is at all. Additionally, both Amazon and Starbucks are in industries with high turnover, where the people who were so keen on unionizing might not be in that job long enough to see the contract through, which could potentially stunt the union drive.

The trick for the unions will be leveraging collective action like strikes, as well as public and political pressure, to try to get these employers to agree to a contract.

The Amazon Labor Union, which was created to organize the Staten Island warehouse, is not affiliated with an older union, so it doesn’t have the infrastructure — or cash — from unions that have been collecting dues for years. That means the union, which has so far been funded by crowdsourced money and pro bono help, will have to figure out on its own the labyrinthine processes of writing, negotiating, and enforcing a contract. Most importantly, its lack of affiliation might stymie workers’ ability to strike. Unlike established unions, the ALU doesn’t have a fund to help workers — many of whom make a low hourly wage and might not have cash reserves — get through a protracted strike in which they would forgo their pay.

However, a strike at an 8,000-person warehouse in New York City wouldn’t take that long to be effective, according to Rebecca Givan, a professor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Studies. “It’s possible that fairly modest actions can cause significant disruption,” she said, saying that one-hour or one-day strikes might be enough to push management to agree. It would be very difficult for Amazon to quickly replace striking workers at such a large warehouse.

It’s also possible that the Amazon Labor Union could accept formal or informal help from an existing union, like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is affiliated with the Starbucks parent union. Mary Kay Henry, international president of the SEIU, told Recode in a statement her union would “offer whatever support we can to help workers at Amazon who are fighting for a voice on the job to bargain a better future.” The Teamsters, a union that represents warehouse and distribution workers, may also get involved: On Thursday, ALU leaders Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer met with Sean M. O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president. They discussed resources and assistance the Teamsters could provide to help them get their first contract with Amazon, according to a Teamsters spokesperson. Amazon Labor Union did not respond to requests for comment.

Growing union membership across the US, even if it’s not for their own union, is in unions’ best interest, according to Givan. “Amazon is a huge threat to the quality of jobs in the shipping and logistics sector, many of which are Teamsters jobs,” she said.

Part of what has made the Starbucks and Amazon unions successful is their worker-led structure, which has allowed them to largely avoided the criticism that they are outsiders. Starbucks workers themselves are negotiating their contracts — not union lawyers. That will most likely be the case with the Amazon union as well, which is formed entirely of Amazon workers.

The Starbucks union, however, is part of a larger, established union called Workers United. That means it has a lot more resources to guide them through writing and negotiating a contract. That union could also help it with a strike fund if it chose to do so. However, Starbucks stores are a lot smaller than an Amazon warehouse, so a strike at just one of its 9,000 stores would have less of an impact. It would also be relatively easier to replace 20 or so striking baristas.

Something that could work in the unions’ favor is that both Amazon and Starbucks are widely known, customer-facing companies, making it potentially easier for workers to attract political and public boosters.

Politicians from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to President Joe Biden have shown support for these union efforts. 

Public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965, according to Gallup.

“The whole country is watching and working people everywhere are watching, and they are judging Amazon and Starbucks by their actions,” Givan said.

Public and political union supporters could help pressure the companies to agree to union demands. Perhaps more directly, Starbucks’ own investors have asked the company to remain neutral on unions and quickly come to collective bargaining agreements with stores that unionize.

As to whether the recent spate of successful organizing and current contract negotiations are enough to reverse long-declining union membership, Katz said, “I think it’s going to lead to more [organizing] but I don’t think it’s yet an indication of a massive turnaround.” He added, “We need more Amazons, we need a lot of the Starbucks to get organized. And then we need more signs [of increased unionizing] in the more traditional sectors.”

PREVENTABLE INCIDENTS

Stop calling them “accidents”

From car crashes to environmental spills to workplace injuries, author Jessie Singer encourages us to reconsider the word “accident.”

By Marin Cogan@marincogan

VOX

Apr 12, 2022,

Steve Cicero/Getty Images


From the desk of my home office in Washington, DC, I can see a four-way intersection with stop signs on each corner. About a year ago, I started to notice something alarming: The cars seemed to be going much faster, and they were running stop signs much more frequently than usual.

More than 31,000 people died in car crashes on America’s roads in the first nine months of 2021, a 12 percent increase over the previous year, and the highest percentage increase during the first nine months of a year since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started tracking the numbers. The problem only seems to be getting worse.

When you look at the number of people being killed on our streets, the word “accident” starts to feel really unsatisfying. It almost seems to say “there’s nothing to see here,” when, clearly, something larger is going on. In America, we hear and read about “accidents” every day. Most of us shrug our shoulders: After all, if it’s an accident, there’s nothing much that could have been done to prevent it, right?

In the new book There Are No Accidents, author Jessie Singer argues that basically everything we consider to be an “accident” — be it car accidents or fatal fires or workplace injuries — are in fact not accidents at all. Humans, Singer writes, make mistakes all the time, but it’s the dangerous conditions in our built environments that result in fatal consequences. Larger systemic forces, shaped by corporations and governments, intersect to create vulnerabilities that we don’t all share equally. Anticipating and reducing those opportunities for human error is the key to preventing needless death.

“As a disclaimer, I don’t like to use the word ‘accident,’” Singer told me in the interview. “I don’t normally use the word ‘accident’ but I’m going to use it throughout our conversation, so that you can see when it starts to sound weird to you.”

I spoke with Singer about their book, their critique of how we use the term, and how we can make our communities safer. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you mean when you say there are no accidents?

This is a real tricky thing for us to wrap our heads around because the word “accident” is quite tricky. By definition, it’s a contradiction. It has two definitions: One is a random event, and the other is a harmful event. So an accident is unpredictable, but with a predictable outcome.

From that direct contradiction, we get a lot wrong about what an accident is. What’s important when we talk about accidents, and perhaps the number one thing that we get wrong about accidents, is that we focus on the last person involved when things go wrong. In that viewpoint, accidents seem random, and we miss the layered causality that leads to accidental harm. We miss the stacked, dangerous conditions that lead to people being killed and injured in accidents.

What’s the problem with the term “accident?”

There are a lot of problems with it. Accidents are supposed to be random, right? And unpredictable. If that were true, then accidental death would be randomly distributed across the country, but it’s not. When we look at the data, we see that Black and Indigenous people and people living in poverty die by accident most often.

So we’re told at once that this is random, and then we’re told by example that this is totally not random. When we look at the racial and economic differences in accidental death, we see that this is especially true for accidents where policy and infrastructure make a difference between life and death. The safety of our homes, our roads, of our workplaces — what we see is that policy decisions and an unregulated corporate environment lead to risk unequally distributed across the US. But we’re told to think of it as a matter of personal responsibility.

When we say “it was an accident,” we’re saying it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t their fault. In doing that, we’re almost always focusing on the wrong thing and setting up the same accident to happen again.

Why are Black and Indigenous people more likely to die “by accident” than white Americans, and what are some of those things that we think of as accidental?

When we talk about accidental death, what we’re talking about is unintended, injury-related death, not violence and not disease. There is a huge swath of ways that people die, from choking, to falls, to drowning, to traffic crashes, to fires, to poisoning, to drug overdoses. It is a massive category that includes much more obscure and unlikely ways to die, like freezing to death or starving to death, which of course still do happen.

These are all considered accidents. But there are racialized and economic differences in some accidental deaths — they’re not universal. Indigenous people are more than twice as likely as white people to be killed by a car crossing the street, and Black people are more than twice as likely to die in an accidental house fire than white people. There’s quite a bit of conditional exposure in whether or not a house fire is deadly, whether or not a traffic crash is deadly. It has to do with different layers of exposure, and that layered causality is really important.

If you’re driving an old car, you’re more likely to die in a traffic crash. If someone is driving a much bigger car than you or if you live in a low-income neighborhood where they’re not repairing the roads, you’re also more likely to die. And if you’re in a scenario where all three of those factors are interacting and maybe there are other factors too, like your local hospital recently closed, which means you’re farther away from emergency medical services — all of these layers contribute to whether or not we survive our mistakes. Certain people have less opportunities to survive their mistakes.

When someone is killed in an “accident,” let’s say a car crash, for example, people almost always ask questions like, “Was he in the crosswalk? Was she wearing a helmet? What color clothes were they wearing?” Why is it that we feel compelled to do that?


Questions of blame are really important to us when things get scary. This is especially true with accidents because they seem random, because we’re focused on that last person who made a mistake. It seems like there could have been no other conditions under which that mistake was made.

Seemingly random horrors and tragedies are terrifying. As a result, victim blaming, or even perpetrator blaming, is a comfort because it’s a way of feeling in control of an uncontrollable situation. This is an incredibly strong urge because there are few things more disquieting to us than not having control. In that disquiet, we search for the simplest and quickest and nearest cause, and the simplest and quickest and nearest cause is always the last person who made the mistake. It’s important to point out that victim blaming and perpetrator blaming aren’t that different. Obviously one is especially cruel, but both are useless because they don’t lead us to preventing the problem.

Victims are especially blamed. That’s because they’re dead or they’re hurt, it’s because they can’t speak up. The urge to blame victims is a way to say, “Not me, couldn’t happen to me. I wouldn’t have made those decisions.” It gives us quite a bit of space from this thing that terrifies us.

I know the whole point of your book is that we focus too much on individual responsibility and not on these larger systemic changes that need to be made. But for those of us who don’t want to feel completely helpless, what can we do as individuals to change things?

There are so many ways that we can throw a pillow between us and our mistakes. In terms of the big picture of the federal government, we should be pushing for the re-funding and the reviving of our regulatory agencies, to rein in corporate power and to put a cost on accidental death. Every time someone dies on a corporation’s watch, whether in an unsafe car, on the roads, or in an unsafe workplace, there should be a major cost that makes it no longer feasible for them to continue.

We should also be advocating on the federal level to rebuild the social safety net so people don’t have to make bad decisions. Pay people money to protect themselves, to drive a safer car, to not take the most dangerous job or live in the least-safe place. There’s also so much you can do locally. There are a million ways to prevent accidental death. In your neighborhood, you can advocate for traffic calming and public transit expansions, because if you don’t have to drive a car, you are much safer. If you’re able to take a bus or a train, that makes you more likely to survive your trip from point A to point B.

You can advocate for safe injection sites, and the free distribution of Naloxone and syringes. Simply making them accessible without stigma will not only prevent accidental overdose, but will prevent the accidental transmission of diseases. You can fight for in-your-home and in-your-office ADA accessibility, like ramps and grab bars, so an accidental fall is less likely to end in death.

This even extends to much less-common causes of accidental death, like fighting for fire safety requirements like sprinklers and self-closing doors in apartment buildings in the city you live in. It means that when someone makes the mistake of lighting something on fire, it’s less likely to kill people. As long as we can stop focusing on the last person who made a mistake, as long as we can accept that mistakes are inevitable but premature death is not, we can do so much to protect each other.

Old-school homophobia is back

Why anti-LGBTQ laws and accusations of “grooming” children seem to be everywhere now.

By Christian Paz@realcpaz 

VOX

 Apr 13, 2022,

Students in Walpole, Massachusetts, protest anti-LGBT proposals in Florida and Texas. Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The past month hasn’t been great for queer and trans Americans.

In March, after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill restricting the kind of discussions and instruction public school teachers can have that involve “sexual orientation or gender identity,” copycat proposals popped up in at least three Republican-run states. Conservative proponents of these bills then launched new broadsides against LGBTQ people, accusing teachers of “grooming” school-age kids and queer allies of enabling pedophilia in their criticism of the bills and the chilling effects on school discussions.

In the span of what seemed like a week, old-school bigotry felt mainstreamed. Sitting members of Congress, cable news hosts, and conservative intellectuals coalesced around “ok, groomer” discourse as a new way to attack LGBTQ Americans — not just the teachers these bills are targeting. Their attacks come in a country that is more accepting of queer Americans than at any other time in history; about eight in 10 Americans back nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people. But suddenly, it seemed, 20th-century homophobia acquired a modern, QAnon-esque edge.

“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted at the beginning of March. On his talk radio show last week, conservative activist Charlie Kirk tied same-sex marriage and the acceptance of LGBTQ Americans to corrupting children: “We’re talking about gay stuff more than any other time. Why? Because they are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”

The feedback loop of anti-LGBTQ legislation and “grooming” discourse reveals new dimensions to the conservative movement’s efforts to stymie the progress of recent years: Some members of the political right see opportunities to wield their advantages in the nation’s increasingly conservative courts against LGBTQ people — and opportunities to claw back the ground they’ve lost in the culture war as Americans’ opposition to discrimination grows.
What “Don’t Say Gay” and its conservative backers hope to win

Florida’s education law is couched in the language of parental rights and uses vague language to implicitly threaten LGBTQ teachers and allies with lawsuits. Though supporters had said the law bans inappropriate conversations about sexual activity with young students, the text never explicitly references discussions of sex — only explicitly forbidding conversations about “sexual orientation or gender identity.” The ban applies from kindergarten through third grade but leaves an opening for “age-appropriate” restrictions beyond those grades, while also not defining what “age-appropriate” means.

The legislation never uses the words “gay” or “trans,” but advocates argue that queer and trans Americans would be the primary targets of lawsuits by parents and officials behind the restrictions. Echoing the model of Texas’s abortion ban, Florida’s law deputizes parents as watchdogs, providing a path through the courts to punish schools and staff that violate the statute.

Legislatures in Alabama, Ohio, and Louisiana have since advanced similar proposals; Texas’s lieutenant governor is looking at introducing a bill when its next legislative session starts, and lawmakers in six other states, mostly in the South, have supported iterations of restrictions on LGBTQ identity in schools.

Some of these proposals are more explicit than Florida’s — Tennessee’s proposal seeks to ban books or material that support or promote LGBTQ “issues or lifestyle” altogether — but all offer a window into how social conservatives see opportunities to roll back protections for queer and trans people: score victories in the courts and make the cultural fight more extreme.

Their path to win legal fights looks more promising, with Republican majorities in these statehouses passing these bills on to Republican governors, expecting fights in lower courts, and biding time until a conservative majority on the Supreme Court reviews the challenges, Carl Charles, a senior attorney with the civil rights organization Lambda Legal, said.

Drawing on pandemic-era anger over school closures, mask-wearing, and the specter of critical race theory, state Republicans see an opportunity to rile up their most conservative constituents ahead of primaries, general elections, and a new Supreme Court term.

But what these bills communicate coyly, its supporters in media and politics have been saying out loud for quite some time: The way to win back lost ground in the culture war over LGBTQ people is to cast them as morally corrupt villains — and use schools as a starting point for a bigger cultural shift.
The extreme right’s “grooming” line reveals a note of desperation

Radical right-wing activists and commentators in recent weeks have been making literal accusations of pedophilia (in a callback to a trope from the 1970s and earlier) and grooming (which in its true sense means to “gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught,” according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network). But they’ve also been increasingly using “grooming” as a casual insult to try to create a vague link between all LGBTQ people and cases of child abuse.

What started on the fringes, with conservative activists riding the coattails of last year’s anti-critical race theory moral panic, crossed over into mainstream media during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last month. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned the future justice’s thinking on gender, child abuse, and race. As Georgetown professor Don Moynihan wrote about Hawley’s line of attack, the point was “to create an association between Jackson and this broader trope” of child predators running rampant in public institutions. That spawned a universe of outrage in conservative media, further buoying the legislative action underway in Republican states.

Historical examples abound for how these kinds of moral panics bolstered discriminatory action against LGBTQ people since the 1970s. In that decade, California conservatives rallied against gay and lesbian people to prevent them from working in public schools and anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant led an effort to repeal anti-discrimination protections in Florida with her “Save Our Children” campaign.

Today’s “anti-grooming” line bears a resemblance to these old activist efforts, but it is becoming prevalent at a time when conservatives have lost many of the cultural and legal battles over gay rights and anti-discrimination protections, Cathryn Oakley, a senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, told me. Support for same-sex marriage has broad bipartisan support; a large majority of the country believes gay and lesbian people are “morally acceptable.” And those numbers have grown year over year.


“It’s very frustrating to see that we are having the same fight over and over again … but I believe that these folks are desperate. They have lost every fight they have picked on LGBT issues. They lost on trying to criminalize sodomy, they lost on marriage equality, they lost on bathroom bills, they lost on wedding services refusal — and we’re at 75 to 80 percent support for nondiscrimination laws,” she said.

Some of the loudest supporters of this effort have admitted this: “The alternative to the culture war is a culture surrender. There is no neutral option,” one reads. “The right needs to go scorched earth with ‘groomer,’” says another. “We are building a new model of conservative activism” with the grooming messaging, argues Christopher Rufo, a leading anti-critical race theory activist.

The rhetoric complements the institutional work that conservative think tanks are doing in pushing these bills. Lawmakers in these states have consulted organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and American Principles Project in crafting proposals, Vice reported. (The Alliance Defending Freedom confirmed its involvement in a statement to Vox.) The progressive advocates I spoke with told me they see this feedback loop among radical activists, lawmakers, and think tanks as part of a more desperate ploy to use transgender people as a wedge issue to open the door to more mainstream attacks on trans and queer people in public life.

“We’re at this all-time high with people who are saying, ‘I don’t like anti-LGBT discrimination, I’m pro-nondiscrimination, this is my deal.’ And [conservatives] are losing their foothold,” Oakley said. “Where do they go from here? They pick on trans kids in the first place, because there are lots of well-meaning people who don’t totally understand what it means to be trans.”

This tension between well-meaning or naive Americans and their uneasiness with newer understandings of gender identity comes through in polling, which shows Americans remain a divided public on acceptance of trans people. Even a recent survey asking about Florida’s law shows one in four Democrats supports the policy. That gap worries advocates like Brandon Wolf, an activist with the group Equality Florida, who told me these bills are meant to exploit the general public’s lack of knowledge on trans people and create an opening for further attacks on queer and trans rights. So far, the scorched-earth strategy is working, but its staying power is being tested.

“Part of the strategy of the extremist right is to make so much noise that there isn’t space to have a really deep conversation about who people are,” he said. “We’re so busy trying to fight for the basic dignity and humanity of people that it becomes difficult to find the bandwidth or the spaces to share people’s stories. But that’s our challenge. That’s our job right now.”

The secrets hidden in sewage

Wastewater can help us monitor Covid-19. 

What else can it tell us?

By Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@vox.com Apr 13, 2022, 

The potential for human waste to tell us about what is happening with our community’s health extends far beyond Covid-19. Getty Images/EyeEm

The first signs of the most recent Covid-19 waves have often been detected in our sewers instead of nasal swabs.

But in the future, the potential for human waste to tell us about what is happening with our community’s health could extend far beyond the novel coronavirus.

“This has been its coming-out party. We’ve realized the power in this pandemic,” John Dennehy, a biologist at the City University of New York who has been assisting with NYC’s wastewater surveillance program, told me. “Now there’s great interest in developing an infrastructure to sustain this capability beyond the pandemic.”

Sewage surveillance is becoming more valuable right now as conventional testing is becoming less transparent. More people have been using rapid at-home tests and might not report results to a public health agency. That means the number of positive cases being reported by official sources might not actually provide a full picture of what’s happening with the pandemic.

But no matter how or if they’re testing, infected people — whether they have symptoms or not — flush out the virus when they go to the bathroom, leaving viral RNA that can be detected in wastewater samples. It requires careful collection and testing, but sewage can provide a less biased look at the viral trends in a given community.

Science has not yet reached the point where we can say that X amount of viral load in a community’s sewage means Y number of people are infected in that community. But still, knowing which way viral loads are trending is useful. If they are going up, even before the number of positive tests starts increasing, it could in theory allow public health authorities and the local health system to start preparing for a surge. If they are going down, public health officials (and the general public) can be confident that any waning in official case numbers is real and not the byproduct of, say, less testing.

So far, health authorities have not been using wastewater levels to trigger a public health response — ordering people to mask up again once viral loads hit a certain level, for example. But experts say a more direct link between sewage surveillance and public health policies might be established in some places in the coming year.
Covid-19 has shown the value of public health sewage surveillance

The pandemic has revealed the potential for wastewater surveillance — and the shortcomings in the current US infrastructure.

Dennehy told me that his team in NYC had noticed an unusual iteration of the virus back in November, but it wasn’t until South Africa announced the presence of the omicron variant in people there a month later that they realized they had been seeing the mutations that would soon start a new wave of infections worldwide.

South Africa has been commended for its genomic surveillance system, which is what allowed it to be the first to identify omicron as a threat, even though, as the New York example shows, the variant was likely already present in other parts of the world. The US, on the other hand, lagged behind other countries for much of the pandemic in that work, and integrating sewage into that surveillance system remains a work in progress.

Before the pandemic, using wastewater for disease surveillance was not unheard of, but it was generally limited to monitoring for diseases like polio, where the appearance of any amount of virus would be cause for alarm.

Covid-19 has shown that wastewater can provide an even more nuanced and varied picture of a community’s health. Since researchers showed the ability to detect the coronavirus in sewage in early 2020, wastewater surveillance has spread across the globe. More than 470 sites in the US and nearly 3,400 sites worldwide are reporting the amount of virus they are detecting in the waste we flush.

Wastewater has its limitations, including challenges with proper collection and adjusting for the concentration of human waste in the sewage. Some rural areas don’t have a community wastewater system, relying instead on individual homes’ septic tanks, which makes broad monitoring impossible. Across Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and Nebraska, only two wastewater sites are reporting their coronavirus levels to the CDC.

Setting up a strong wastewater monitoring program also requires political support and coordination between public health departments, environmental agencies, and local water authorities, which may not be accustomed to working together.

In spite of those obstacles, sewage monitoring has become more integrated into the global pandemic response over time. And experts don’t expect it to stop there. They are already imagining how else we might use all the information that can be gleaned from our waste to get ahead of future outbreaks and target public health interventions.

“Most people believe wastewater testing is not going away,” Marc Johnson, a University of Missouri virologist who has helped lead that state’s wastewater monitoring program, told me. “It’s too nice of a tool. It can give us an unbiased readout of a community’s health, without having to worry about individual patient confidentiality.”
All the ways wastewater surveillance could help us improve public health

For the foreseeable future, sewage surveillance could help the country keep ahead of Covid-19. Not only can the general trends — an increasing or decreasing amount of virus being found — give a warning about emerging or fading waves, but wastewater can also provide scientists clues about new variants that may soon appear.

After wastewater is collected and taken to a laboratory, scientists run the same kind of test that is conducted for an individual diagnostic PCR test. Beyond identifying whether or not the virus is present, the lab can also determine how much of it there is depending on how many testing cycles they need to run to detect it. (Fewer cycles means more virus.)

Then scientists can also take the sample and analyze the genetic make-up of the virus found therein. If it’s different from the most common variant at the time, that may be a signal that another variant is lurking out there with the potential to take over. Johnson said that, in Missouri, his team has seen Covid-19 variants that have not been detected in humans yet. They may have found their way into the wastewater system from animals, he told me, and we know that animal-to-human transmission is one way for new variants to emerge.

US scientists are also starting to use wastewater in more targeted ways to combat Covid-19. Dennehy said an NYC hospital had asked his team if they could start analyzing the sewage coming out of their facility specifically so they could get an early warning if the virus was appearing more frequently in their patients and staff. Continuous diagnostic testing would be expensive to maintain, and this population-level surveillance would allow the hospital to institute more rigorous testing only when the viral load in the wastewater suggests that it’s necessary.

That kind of creative approach can be applied to other public health problems as well.

Johnson described a similar proposal in Missouri prisons that want to monitor for tuberculosis outbreaks. They have asked for their sewage to be regularly tested for TB, which they could use to determine when to conduct individual diagnostic tests, which are both costly and logistically cumbersome.

“They don’t have to waste money on testing when they know there is nothing there,” he said.

Surveillance programs could watch for other pathogens, too, such as influenza, hepatitis, and norovirus for early warnings of emerging outbreaks. Julianne Nassif, an expert on wastewater surveillance with the Association of Public Health Labs, said we could also monitor for bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that are resistant to current treatments. Public health officials could try to get ahead of an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a nursing home, for example, with the information gleaned from downstream sewage.

Johnson envisioned communities monitoring for narcotics, to better tailor their public health campaigns. Wastewater could be tested to determine whether cocaine or opioid use is rising in a given sewage shed. It could even determine what kind of opioids are being used, which could be helpful to health departments. Widespread heroin use might require a different intervention than diverted prescription opioids or black-market fentanyl.

The possibilities sound almost endless, extending to research that could help us better understand human health. Dennehy described to me one hypothetical experiment that could be run with sewage monitoring, looking for the viral markers associated with colon cancer. By comparing the results from one community with, say, a nearby nuclear power plant and another community somewhere else, we could get a better understanding of how the surrounding environment affects people’s health.

But for all of this potential to be realized, these efforts would require sustained support. The CDC bet on the wastewater boom, launching a national Covid-19 surveillance system in the fall of 2020. But dedicated investments in infrastructure and a workforce would be necessary if the country were to begin conducting wastewater surveillance on a more permanent basis.

In general, the US has not appeared willing to make big investments in public health. Scientists working on these programs hope that the same may not be true of wastewater surveillance, given the opportunities it presents.

“We learned a lot of hard-won lessons with the Covid pandemic. We got caught with our pants down at the beginning. A lot of things that we did were too late,” Dennehy told me. “The hope is we can remember these lessons for the next time this comes around, which may not be that long.”

Why Did Two Antarctic Ice Shelves Fail? Scientists Say They Now Know.

The collapse of the two ice shelves was most likely triggered by vast plumes of warm air from the Pacific, researchers have found.

Satellite images showed the Larsen B Ice Shelf splintering and collapsing from Jan. 31 to April 13, 2002.

CreditCredit...NASA Earth Observatory


By Henry Fountain
Published April 15, 2022

The rapid collapses of two ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula over the last quarter-century were most likely triggered by the arrival of huge plumes of warm, moisture-laden air that created extreme conditions and destabilized the ice, researchers said Thursday.

The disintegration of the Larsen A shelf in 1995 and of the Larsen B shelf in 2002 were preceded by landfall of these plumes, called atmospheric rivers, from the Pacific Ocean. They generated extremely warm temperatures over several days that caused surface melting of the ice that led to fracturing, and reduced sea ice cover, allowing ocean swells to flex the ice shelves and further weaken them.

“We identify atmospheric rivers as a mechanism that can create extreme conditions over the ice shelves of the Antarctic Peninsula and potentially lead to their destabilization,” said Jonathan Wille, a climatologist and meteorologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France and the lead author of a study describing the research in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

While there have been no collapses on the peninsula since 2002, Dr. Wille and his colleagues found that atmospheric rivers also triggered 13 of 21 large iceberg-calving events from 2000 to 2020

Dr. Wille said the larger Larsen C shelf, which is still mostly intact and, at about 17,000 square miles, is the fourth-largest ice shelf in Antarctica, could eventually suffer the same fate as A and B.

“The only reason why melting has not been significant so far is because it’s just farther south compared to the others, therefore colder,” he said. But as the world continues to warm, atmospheric rivers are expected to become more intense. “The Larsen C will now be at risk from the same processes,” he said.



A rift in the Larsen C Ice Shelf in February 2017. Scientists say the C ice shelf could meet the same fate as A and B.

Credit...British Antarctic Survey, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Kyle R. Clem, a researcher at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand who was not involved in the study, said the work also showed that other parts of Antarctica that are not warming as fast as the peninsula could eventually be susceptible as well, since the mechanism that the researchers documented is more dependent on warming where the atmospheric river originates.

“The amount of heat and moisture that atmospheric rivers transport is higher than it would be without global warming,” Dr. Clem said. “So the air mass that slams into Antarctica is much, much warmer. And it’s these episodes of extreme events that lead to ice shelf collapse.”

“You could get this anywhere in Antarctica,” he said.

Shelves are floating tongues of ice that serve to hold back most of the ice that covers Antarctica to depths up to nearly 3 miles. When a shelf collapses, the flow of this land ice to the ocean accelerates, increasing the rate of sea level rise.

While the Antarctic Peninsula ice sheet is relatively small (if it all melted, seas would rise by less than a foot) the collapse of ice shelves elsewhere on the continent could lead to much greater sea level rise over centuries.

Last month, a small ice shelf collapsed in East Antarctica, which is considered the most stable part of the continent. In the days before, an intense atmospheric river arrived in the region. It led to record high temperatures, but researchers are not yet certain how much of a role it played, if any, in the shelf’s disintegration.

Atmospheric rivers occur when a large stationary zone of high-pressure air meets a low-pressure storm system. A narrow stream of moist air flows from the confluence of the two.

In a typical Southern Hemisphere summer, the peninsula gets from one to five of these events, the researchers said. They looked at only the ones that contained the highest volume of water vapor.

If a river is intense enough, it can lead to several days of surface melting of the ice shelf. As the meltwater flows into crevices it refreezes, expanding and widening the cracks. Eventually such repeated hydrofracturing, as the process is called, can cause the ice shelf to disintegrate.

The atmospheric river can also spur the process by melting sea ice, or if its associated winds push the sea ice away from the shelf. That allows ocean waves to rock the ice shelf, further stressing it.

Some large ice shelves in West Antarctica are thinning as a result of melting from underneath by warm ocean water. Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who was not involved in the study, said that regardless of the long-term trends of warming and thinning, “this paper brings up the important point that very brief weather events can push an ice shelf past its tipping point.”

Rising From the Antarctic, a Climate Alarm

Wilder winds are altering crucial currents. The sea is releasing ancient carbon dioxide. Vast ice shelves are melting from below. See why the experts are increasingly alarmed.



Henry Fountain specializes in the science of climate change and its impacts. He has been writing about science for The Times for more than 20 years and has traveled to the Arctic and Antarctica. @henryfountain • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2022, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Plumes of Warm Air Caused Collapse of Antarctic Ice Shelves in ’95 and ’02, Scientists Say. 

Climate activists block four of London's busiest bridges

• 21 hours ago

Demonstrators take part in an Extinction Rebellion protest on Westminster bridge in London on Friday. AP

UK climate activist group Extinction Rebellion on Friday shut down four of London's busiest bridges, snarling traffic on the first day of the Easter bank holiday.

The activists blocked Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster and Lambeth bridges, which cross over the River Thames, Extinction Rebellion tweeted.

"As long as our government fails to act now on the climate crisis disregarding expert advice, licensing more drilling for oil and gas, locking up scientists, we have no choice but to disrupt," it said. "We're on track for a catastrophic 3°C warming" above pre-industrial levels, the group warned.

 Police officers stand nearby as activists from Just Stop Oil sit in front and on top of a fuel tanker during a protest in Grays, Essex. Reuters

Such a figure would be much higher than the 2015 Paris climate agreement goal to limit temperature rises to between 1.5˚C and 2˚C.
Nine scientists were arrested after a protest targeting the energy ministry Wednesday and one of the individuals started a hunger strike the next day after she was not released from custody, the group said.

The Metropolitan Police said on Twitter it was aware of "pockets" of protests that were "causing delays and disruption across central London," adding that officers were "working to manage the impact."

 Activists from the Extinction Rebellion hold a banner as they block Lambeth Bridge during the Just Stop Oil protest in London. Reuters

The group has carried out a series of protests in the past week, including shutting down the iconic Tower Bridge last Friday.
Members of the group also targeted the headquarters of British energy giant Shell Wednesday, and some glued their hands to the building as they called on employees to quit their jobs.

The British government last week presented a new energy security strategy after the war in Ukraine and soaring inflation, with a greater focus on nuclear power and renewable energy, but also oil from the North Sea.

Agence France-Presse

Climate activists bring London traffic to a standstill

By Joshua Askew with AP • Updated: 15/04/2022

Demonstrators take part in an Extinction Rebellion protest on Westminster Bridge in London, Friday, April 15, 2022. - Copyright Stefan Rousseau/live


Climate activists brought traffic in London to a standstill on Friday, after blocking off multiple bridges across the city.

Hundreds of Extinction Rebellion activists gathered on London's major bridges at Waterloo, Blackfriars, Lambeth and Westminster, causing cars and buses to snake along the surrounding roads and streets.

The movement organised the action to bring attention to the ongoing climate emergency, and call for an end to new fossil fuel investments.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police force said "pockets of protest" were causing delays and disruption across central London.

Friday's protest is part of a broader uptick in environmental action in the UK, with groups such as Insulate Britain obstructing roads and motorways in a bid to get the government to invest in making homes more energy-efficient.

Environmental group Just Stop Oil has targeted the oil industry in recent weeks, with activists climbing on top of oil tankers, blocking access roads and chaining themselves to buildings across the UK.

More than 600 people in this campaign have been arrested over the past two weeks.

The UK's conservative government has introduced measures aimed at curtailing disruptive protests, yet this has drawn criticism for infringing on rights to assembly.

“While we value the right to peaceful protest, it is crucial that these do not cause disruption to people’s everyday lives,” said energy minister Greg Hands.

Speaking to the BBC this week, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas recognised that, while these bridge protests could be counterproductive, they were the only way campaigners could be heard.

"I am sorry that it has come to this," she added.

Extinction Rebellion blocks London bridges on second day of mass protest



Sophie Wingate and Luke O'Reilly, PA

Extinction Rebellion climate activists staged sit-down protests in central London for a second day, with dozens arrested after they blocked two bridges to demand an end to the fossil fuel economy.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park on Sunday morning before marching into the city centre and “occupying” both Lambeth and Vauxhall bridges, major traffic arteries across the Thames where they prevented vehicles from crossing.

However, they allowed ambulances and fire engines to pass, with organisers parting the crowd by shouting “blue light”.

Crowds sat in the middle of the road, waving multicoloured flags bearing the group’s “extinction” symbol and placards that read “there is no planet B” and “we want to live”, and listened to music and speakers in sunny weather.

After several hours, police cleared first Lambeth and then Vauxhall Bridge, saying 38 arrests were made in the process.

Officers told protesters there was evidence they were causing “serious disruption” to the public, warning them to leave or face arrest.

Police physically removed the last of the activists, a number of whom were taken away in police vans.




The Metropolitan Police tweeted on Sunday evening: “Both demonstrations within the Vauxhall Area have now concluded and the roads have reopened.

“As a result of today’s policing operation we have made 38 arrests.”

Doctors and nurses from a small group of medical workers who refused to leave Lambeth Bridge were among those arrested, Extinction Rebellion tweeted.

The Met said it had imposed conditions under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 on Extinction Rebellion to clear areas around Vauxhall Bridge.

A protestor in nurse’s scrubs is searched by police on Lambeth Bridge (Yui Mok/PA)

Activist and student Kiri Ley, 21, from Birmingham, said the group was occupying the capital peacefully in order to try and force the Government to make change when nothing else had worked.

She told the PA news agency: “I know that very often people will question our tactics about disruption for example, to ordinary people, stuff like roadblocks, like gluing on, locking on, and so on.

“What I would ask people, if you make that criticism, is what actually do you suggest that we do?

“We tried all the other methods – we’ve written letters, we’ve marched, we’ve spoken to our MPs, we’ve done literally everything we can and time and time again we see them doing completely the opposite of what the scientific evidence says and this is what is left to us, really, we do it because we know it works.”

Adam, in his 60s, from York, said: “This may seem disruptive, but it is chicken feed in comparison to climate change.”

Former Love Island contestant Amy Hart tweeted a photograph of herself with protesters while on her way to the Olivier Awards, with the caption: “Extinction Rebellion have closed Lambeth Bridge so we’re literally doing the Lambeth walk oi x”.

Earlier, campaigners spray painted red hands outside the London corporate offices of oilfield services company Schlumberger.

It came a day after some 8,000 protesters flooded the streets of London, according to Extinction Rebellion.

On the first day of mass action on Saturday, they blockaded roads around Oxford Circus and Trafalgar Square.

Extinction Rebellion has vowed to “block areas of the city for as long as possible” every day for at least a week, and on the next three weekends.

Extinction Rebellion demonstrators prevented vehicles from crossing Vauxhall Bridge on the second day of mass protest (Yui Mok/PA)

The environmental activist group plans to recruit new “rebels” and hold training in non-violent action and resistance tactics in Hyde Park in the mornings before marching into the city centre “en masse”, it said on its website.

“Our disruption will not stop until the fossil fuel economy comes to an end,” it said.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said that some Extinction Rebellion protests are counterproductive, but their disruptive actions are the “only way that people feel they can make their voices heard”.

She told Sunday Morning on BBC One: “I think that being on the streets of London has been shown to be a way of capturing people’s imaginations. People have joined those protests who have never protested before. They are doing it because they know we have to leave new fossil fuels in the ground.

Police talk to protestors taking part in a demonstration on Lambeth Bridge in central London (Yui Mok/PA)

“The International Energy Agency says that, the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report says that and yet this Government and this energy strategy .. is foreseeing getting out even more oil and gas from the North Sea, that is frankly immoral and said the UN general secretary said that is frankly both morally and economically mad.”

On Friday, two Extinction Rebellion protesters shut down Tower Bridge during the morning rush hour by abseiling off the sides of the landmark.

Activists from the group, also known as XR, and Just Stop Oil have also been blocking access to oil terminals for ten days, demanding that the Government stops new oil and gas projects.

They disrupted supplies from three oil terminals in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Essex on Sunday, Just Stop Oil said.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/04/climate-change-activists-block-london.html

Ukraine’s Military Industry Should Not Be Underestimated


April 15, 2022
By Chan Kung


With the progress of the war in Ukraine, the non-advanced weapons of developed countries have become a worldwide focus. There are a few notable examples of this. For instance, the Ukrainian side had used Starlight anti-aircraft missile to take down Russian Ka-52 helicopters, or Stinger to blow up Russian aircrafts. In addition, the Ukrainians also utilized Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones to destroy Russian tanks. Those who pay attention to these developments often overlook one of the most critical roles, that the Ukrainian Stugna, which is the most commonly used anti-tank weapon in the Ukrainian army, may also be the missile that strikes down the most armored vehicles of the Russian army.

Many have in fact, greatly underestimated the Ukrainian’s military industry.

Before the war started, Ukraine’s overall defense and military production system had actually been decentralized, which was completely preserved in accordance with the supply chain system. For Ukraine to be able to fight a protracted war with the disproportionately stronger Russia, the second largest military power in the world, in addition to the three necessary conditions which are the people’s will to resist, the supports of weapons and intelligence, and the strategic use of environmental terrain, there is a fourth key condition which is rarely mentioned so far. This would be Ukraine’s own defense industry and military system, which can be effectively mobilized in wartime.

In fact, long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian defense industry was the main pillar and the core of the Soviet military-industrial complex. At that time, more than 30% of the Soviet Empire’s arms production came from Ukraine. Under the arms race of the long-term global Cold War, 40% of the cutting-edge technology development in the Soviet Union came from Ukrainian scientific research institutions. Most of the Soviet Union’s long-range strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were produced at the Yuzhmash plant in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth largest city. It is not only China that obtained aircraft carrier technology from Ukraine, Russia’s aircraft carriers and many of its warships were produced there as well.

In 1991, after the independence of Ukraine, according to statistics, it had 1,840 military companies and armament scientific research institutions, with the total employment population of the military industry being as high as 2.7 million. During the current war, it is often seen in videos posted online that some elderly Ukrainian farmers and workers using tractors to drag armored vehicles left by the Russian army, and they even knew how to repair and alter such vehicles. It is clear these senior citizens were in the military industry before, though retired they retain experiences accumulated over many years which are only shown during the war.

According to incomplete statistics, during the first five years of Ukraine’s founding from 1992 to 1996, there were 113 military-civilian equipment companies in the country. Even then, these companies were underground arsenals for global conflicts. Military equipment manufactured in Ukraine could be found all over the world. In order to rectify such a chaotic situation, the Ukrainian government passed a law in 1996 to nationalize arms exports and established a large state-owned enterprise as a single window for arms and equipment exports, standardizing the export control system of the military industry.

Right until 2014, Ukraine’s military industry system was still export-oriented, where the country even became the fourth largest arms exporter in the world in 2012. In fact, all the countries that use Soviet-style weapons in the world rely on various key parts made in Ukraine. The military maintenance, repair and operation (MRO) alone provided its military industry an annual growth rate of nearly 60%. In addition, all countries, including Russia, are actually highly dependent on Ukraine’s military industrial chain. At its peak in 2012, Ukraine recorded a huge export scale of 117 billion hryvnia, of which 90% was exported to Russia as a reserve of equipment.

When the Crimean War broke out in 2014, Ukraine finally realized that the biggest threat to the country’s survival turned out to be Russia. The various armament parts produced in the past would eventually help Russia to invade and assault Ukraine itself. From then on, Ukraine began to adjust the orientation of its military industry to a domestic demand.

In the current war, it is quite a shock for the world to see the Ukrainian army could withstand the sudden attack of the Russian army, and even launch counterattacks. This can be credited to Ukraine’s military industrial enterprises, including those military-civilian integrated enterprises. They possess a strong reserve of technical talents, and can quickly repair a large number of captured Russian military equipment, thereby transferring them to the Ukrainian army. This is one of the key reasons why the Ukrainian army can fight a protracted war.

In fact, the Ukrainian army is not weak at all. According to GFP’s 2022 Global Military Strength Ranking, the Ukrainian army ranks 22nd in the world, and its combat power ranking is much higher than that of Vietnam and North Korea. Its achievement today is not accidental.

The hunt for ‘antimilitarism’

 Leaked documents indicate that Russia’s federal censor has been monitoring the Internet for peace activism since at least 2020

April 13, 2022
Source: Meduza



A rally in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny on January 23, 2022
Elena Volzhankina / Kommersant

In early March, the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) published hyperlinks to a large data leak from the office of Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor (RKN), in the Republic of Bashkortostan. With help from colleagues at The Intercept, Meduza downloaded and indexed hundreds of gigabytes of these data and learned that RKN started monitoring protest sentiment back in 2020, sharing daily reports with various government agencies (including the national security apparatus) about “the destabilization of Russian society.”

The semi-secret information we found in the data leak

Meduza learned that RKN has a new automated monitoring system called the Office of Operational Interaction (AS KOV) that is missing from the agency’s official list of information systems. We managed to find just two public mentions of AS KOV: (1) in December 2020, RKN announced that it was planning to spend 7 million rubles (now about $85,000) to equip its Main Radio Frequency Center (which monitors the mass media and Internet) with the “AS KOV mobile app” as part of a “unified digital platform” program, and (2) in March 2021, an anti-extremism commission in Russia’s Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug ordered the development of an algorithm using the AS KOV system to facilitate interdepartmental work on monitoring the mass media and Internet for content “capable of destabilizing [Russia’s] sociopolitical situation.”

Meduza found evidence that RKN’s regional divisions are tasked with identifying supposed “hotbeds of tension” and compiling daily reports about spikes in popular dissent appearing on social media and “instances of the destabilization of Russian society.”

Using the Office of Operational Interaction automated monitoring system, RKN sends these reports to the central offices and local branches of the Federal Protective Service (FSB) and the Interior Ministry (Russia’s police force), as well as regional governments and federal inspectors working for the Kremlin.
What keeps RKN up at night

Roskomnadzor’s Bashkortostan office didn’t get access to AS KOV until December 2020, but RKN began testing the new system three months earlier in Novosibirsk. In October 2020, the agency’s branch there delivered a presentation “on the organization of monitoring the information space to identify hotbeds of tension based on the example of the Novosibirsk region.”

Based on the data Meduza analyzed, RKN’s monitoring work always begins with a review of the number of “negative publications” concerning President Putin. Officials use a predetermined list of “destabilizing topics” that appears in every report, even when monitors recorded no cases on a particular day. This was the list in March 2022:

Criticisms of Russia’s current state officials, comparisons involving living standards

Coverage of the non-systemic [anti-Kremlin] opposition’s activities

Sanctions pressure

Regionalization and violations of Russia’s territorial integrity

Religious and ethnic conflicts

Anti-militarism

Sexual and other “freedoms,” imposed tolerance [sic]

The legalization of recreational drugs

Foreign aggression, interference by foreign states in Russia’s domestic affairs

Distortions of WWII history, pro-Western interpretations of the results and course of the war

Cross-border influence by neighboring states

Notably, RKN was targeting “anti-militarism” as early as September 2020 — well more than a year before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.



Pages from the October 2020 slideshow prepared by RKN’s Novosibirsk deputy director, Ksenia Kalashnikova

Meduza was unable to establish who decided which subjects RKN would monitor, but the list was likely determined in advance of the agency’s trials in Novosibirsk, given the fact that reports often left many of these sections blank. A year and a half later, the structure of this monitoring work has barely changed. The reports leaked in Bashkortostan, for example, feature just a single new “destabilizing subject” (and it appears to be the product of Russia’s struggles in Ukraine): “cross-border influence by neighboring states.”
How RKN searches for “hotbeds of tension”

The materials recovered from RKN’s Novosibirsk trials indicate that this monitoring work is designed to cover all mass media resources (the news media, blogs, and social networks), with the exception of what the agency calls “pro-state” outlets. The records Meduza reviewed, however, contain no explicit criteria for determining whether a resource is “pro-state.”

RKN divides all the information sources it monitors into two main categories: “propaganda” and “soft power.” Every report on “instances of social destabilization” takes these two groups into account separately. The agency considers “propaganda” to be resources that rely on the technique of “repeating the simplest and most understandable concepts.” In RKN’s reports, the resources that fall into this group are the “websites of large news agencies and sources founded back before the dissolution of the USSR.” Resources built on “soft power,” meanwhile, specialize in manufacturing “underlying shifts in individuals’ attitudes.” This typically means social networks, content from opinion leaders, and news outlets and websites that don’t directly violate Russia’s media regulations.

To hammer home this distinction, RKN’s slideshow represents “propaganda” with a radio set and “soft power” with a smartphone.


RKN labels every information resource as either “propaganda” or “soft power.” In their monitoring work, analysts summarize various displays of discontent: criticisms of “the local authorities,” “of the electoral process (amendments to the Constitution),” “of public health measures (coronavirus),” “daily news reports criticizing the current state authorities,” and so on.

Meduza was unable to find any official documents regulating this monitoring program. Roskomnadzor did not respond to our questions about the purpose of its Office of Operational Interaction, and representatives of other state agencies connected to this system did not return Meduza’s calls.

Story by Denis Dmitriev
Translation by Kevin Rothrock