A collection of the best links gathered around the net on a wide variety of engaging substances. I hope you all enjoy! All links are found up on The People's Party Of Planet Earth on Facebook for discussion. Feel free to join in, and submit your own articles for discussion as well:
All links are collected by theProphet, founder of The Infidel Netwerk, and songwriter performer behind Jenova Project & M-Fap. Keep up to date with his latest happening on his official Facebook:
Economy & Sociology
Amazon Algorithm Is Manipulating Suppliers Into Favoring It Over Other Retailers by Truthout
Commentary: Manipulation and monpolization tactics by the biggest company on earth? No suprise here. Crony capitalism leaves even smaller players able to bully the everyday person, makes sense the biggest guy around can bully even the suppliers themselves.
America’s Super-Rich See Their Wealth Rise by $282 Billion in Three Weeks of Pandemic by Mint Press News
Link: https://www.mintpressnews.com/super-rich-see-wealth-rise-282-billion-three-weeks-coronavirus/267027/
Commentary: Spending millions to save billions? If people think that's okay then they don't really understand the order of magnitude that a billion, let alone multiple, really entails. Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone stolen from the taxpayer at the expense of the social well-being of the whole nation, all while making their money in the first place on the near slave labor of their lowliest employees.
A New Global Order? How Coronavirus Will Change the World Forever by Mint Press News
Commentary: We need to stop turning to celebrity philosophers, failed western economists, and corrupt politicians for answers, and instead look to true academics & humanitarians to help plan our future.
Canada’s Pandemic Response Threatens Worker Solidarity by Canadian Dimension
Link: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/canadas-pandemic-response-threatens-worker-solidarity
Commentary: Canada really stepped up to the plate once exposed, but it took being exposed for their priorities, and the risk of real social chaos, for the Liberals to offer something more comprehensive. And even with the current far more optimal setup, there are still plenty of people swept under the rug and forgotten. This situation is chaotic for sure, but even in good ol "Socialist Canada" as we're so often called in the States, our neoliberal tendencies are exposed wide open by crisis.
Cops Claim Man Charged At Them, But Video Shows They Executed Him On His Knees by The Free Thought Project
Commentary: Stuff like this is why we need body cams on every police. Seriously the amount of stories where there are serious discrepancies between police reports and what actually happened is staggering.
Life After COVID: A Look at the New Economy by The Organic Prepper
Commentary: Banks and major corporations stealing money from the small business relief fund? No surprise here. The real question is, what are Americans gonna do about it? And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The unemployment benefits will encourage part-time and minimum wage workers to not wanna go back to work. This means much small business may not get their employees back even if they can open. No employees, no store activity. No store activity no profits and bam closures. Food prices will be going up, package sizes will be going down, availability will be crushed (As many of the small businesses that offered specialty products shutter). And specialty products won't be the only thing that suffers from shortages. As this crisis goes on and depending on how long it goes on and how we continue to react, key items may have repeated and even long-durations of shortages.
Meat shortages are looming across U.S. and Canada by Treehugger
Commentary: Meat shortages are a key example of all the problems of Capitalism. Between overcrowding, low safety standards, and low education requirement for the job it makes the workplaces prime places for infection. Many of the jobs are low paying jobs that rely on immigrants, so when bonuses are offered to come to work through the pandemic they are more likely to take it. And then to top it all off, the biggest companies in the game have been allowed to dominate the field so heavily that in the last 40 years we went from over 100 meat processing facilities in Canada to only 20. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong, but all so predictable under Capitalism as you see similiar structure in many other industries. The key issue I guess is that we want cheap food. But why do we want cheap food? Because we mostly get cheap wages, or our cost of living is so high that it makes our wages feel cheap due to inflation. If we had a stronger economy with a more balanced cost of living, people could make more and spend more and everyone would do better. But instead, we let a few Corporations take a majority of the profits and give a majority of their employees shit wages, and it creates a feedback loop of austerity for the masses and financial and resource concentration for the elite.
Relief Is Funneled to the Wealthy. We Need a Financial Infrastructure Overhaul. by Truthout
Commentary: It's hilariously tragic how pretty much everything could be a lot better than it is, even with this terrible stimulus package, if there was greater attention to accountability. But I guess that was never part of the plan anyway. This crisis really shows the fragility of the North American market and workforce, and how built on the back of manipulation and deception it is.
Take back the streets and give them to restaurants by Treehugger
Commentary: This is a brilliant idea, especially with traffic essentially going to being wayyy down for the foreseeable future. It's a great way to help social distancing, bolster businesses, and breath new life into the cities.
The Corporate Food System is Making the Coronavirus Crisis Worse by Counterpunch
Commentary: Making countries go back to food self-sufficiency, at least as a primary, and reintegrating ancient growing and harvesting techniques, is gonna be essential to dealing with food crisis' that were there well before the COVID crisis hit, and could be made far worse depending on how things continue to pan out.
The Era of Mass Strikes Begins on May 1, First Day of General Strike Campaign by Dissident Voice
Commentary: A revolution starts with workers demanding for their rights. If the West wants to prove it actually has elements of Democracy left, it will be forced to answer much like it has in the past when people demand their rights be listened to.
USDA Under Fire for Allowing Millions of Pounds of Produce to Rot by Truthout
Link: https://truthout.org/articles/usda-under-fire-for-allowing-millions-of-pounds-of-produce-to-rot/
Commentary: Allowing food to rot when they're literally deploying the army out to food banks to prevent civil unrest in case of the inevitable event when their stocks run out seems like madness. America needs to figure out its distribution issues ASAP.
What cities can learn from lockdown about planning for life after the coronavirus pandemic by The Conversation
Commentary: Pandemics make the flaws of tightly packed urbanization unignorable as they are pushed to their absolute extremes, but they are just manifestations of city planning build upon greed rather than human rights with many of the issues now facing tons the plenty being issues that faced the impoverished and disabled well before the crisis hit.
Why we aren’t running out of food during the coronavirus pandemic by The Conversation
Link: https://theconversation.com/why-we-arent-running-out-of-food-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic-135514
Commentary: Unless there's a long term closure of the border (and I'm talking about a year or two) specifically for food (which hasn't happened yet at all, food travel is exempt from border restrictions) then chances are Canada will be fine for food.
WFP Chief warns of hunger pandemic as COVID-19 spreads (Statement to UN Security Council) by World Food Programme
Commentary: Truly I am thankful to live in Canada, where even with massive foot shortages across the world we do have small numbers and good infrastructure we could manage something. Some of these third world and/or war torn countries really are gonna get hit BAD in the coming months to years.
Environmental
Local-Level Fossil Fuel Fights Face Violent Retaliation From Industry by Truthout
Link: https://truthout.org/articles/local-level-fossil-fuel-fights-face-violent-retaliation-from-industry/
Commentary: The fact of how such rampant abuse will exist in compliance with oil companies, often when the countries themselves complicit will get little to no benefit from the deals they are enforcing, really shows just how corrupt things are behind the scenes.
Report: Nearly Half of Americans Breathing Unhealthy Air by Desmog
Commentary: Another reason infectious disease and viruses are gonna hit us so much harder now and going into the future is directly to do with our air quality. Our health, and ability to fight viruses, is intimately tied with the quality of the air we breathe, and America has some of the worst air around despite claims of the otherwise.
Silence is Golden for Whales as Global Lockdown Reduces Ocean Noise by The Mind Unleashed
Link: https://themindunleashed.com/2020/04/silence-golden-whales-global-lockdown-reduces-ocean-noise.html
Commentary: Peace and quiet in the ocean? Not only is it bliss for whales but a golden opportunity for researchers just to see just how much of an impact our noise pollution is having on them, and what a reduction will do.
We Need Healing From Our Oil-Addicted Society by Counterpunch
Commentary: We need to see our health and our environment as interconnected. As highlighted in articles I posted previously, air pollution is directly linked with our reduced immune response and susceptibility to disease. People in polluted areas face issues with health at a far greater rate than people who are not, and the fact is between spills and air pollution, more and more of our world's population is becoming victims of these issues. When will we wake up and divert from this dying non-renewable near monopolized source of energy, and switch to prosperous forms of renewable energy that safely benefit all? Soon I hope, because not only would it help our environment, it would help our health and economy as well.
Why Isn’t Canada Treating Climate Change With the Same Urgency as COVID-19? by Canadian Dimension
Commentary: As long as we have a profit-controlled political system with little to no accountability, we won't see politicians that truly represent the ideals you elect them to uphold.
Politics
A former neighbor of Joe Biden's accuser Tara Reade has come forward to corroborate her sexual-assault account, saying Reade discussed the allegations in detail in the mid-1990s by Business Insider
Commentary: We have multiple people who knew the accuser at the time corroborating their recollection of her talking about the story at the time. This is getting serious. #bidendropout
‘Calexit’ May Be A Long Way Off, But Balkanization Won’t Be by The American Conservative
Commentary: While California lacks the national identity of other exit movements across the world, it makes up for it in cultural and political identity. And it has the size of a mini-nation, making it more and more likely that it's increasing demand for autonomy may be listened to, especially of a Calexit wants to be prevented.
Congress invests big in pharmaceutical, tech stocks by Open Secrets
Commentary: Lawmakers who own stocks or financial investment in pharmaceutical companies should be banned from voting on laws regulating them.
In a Slap in the Face to Progressives, Biden Appoints Larry Summers, a "Literal Architect of Neoliberalism," to Economic Advisory Role by Down With Tyranny
Commentary: Bringing in the financial architect for neo-liberalism for the Clinton and Obama administration, and the key person behind the banks getting their no-strings-attached bailouts in the 2008 economic crisis, should not be associated with your campaign if you want to win this one Biden. But we all know you don't wanna win, this was all just a show stop Bernie and pretend like the Democratic Party still exists...
The Luxury to Fear COVID-19 by Counterpunch
Commentary: El Salvador is a prime example of how everything can be done wrong in an "effective" lockdown. By creating extreme systems of control, that are enforced with an arbitral nature, it creates an even further divide between the disparity between the haves and have-nots. Providing no real safety net while having extreme penalties for participating in society, leaves the vast majority of the people who were poor before in a state where starvation or detention is your choice.
Trump and McConnell Aren’t Waging War on COVID. They’re Waging War on Us. by Truthout
Link: https://truthout.org/articles/trump-and-mcconnell-arent-waging-war-on-covid-theyre-waging-war-on-us/
Commentary: Using aid as a weapon against States that don't vote for you during a pandemic is the epitome of the worst elements of politizing a crisis. Sadly this is a pretty standard playbook for Trump & McConnell. How these people get re-elected is beyond me...
Science & Technology
China Is Installing Surveillance Cameras Inside People's Homes by Futurism
Commentary: Particularly concerning considering the positive attention certain media outlets have been giving China's techno-dictatorship.
Consumer Beware: Coronavirus Antibody Tests Are Still A Work In Progress by KHN
Commentary: Between faulty tests falsely flagging people or undetecting others, to a misunderstanding of antibodies giving us false confidence, we can't let our rush to get on top of this promote bad science, products, and practices.
Crops sown in a uniform spatial pattern produce higher yields and reduce environmental impact by The University Of Copenhagen
Commentary: It's crazy how our straight line farming we've done forever now could be one of the reasons for such problems we've had with weeds.
Dirty carbon reveals a sophisticated side by MIT News
Commentary: The greening of tar and other fossil fuels into their usage in more complex and long-lasting products could be a way to save some of the industries jobs without destroying the environment as heavily with our constant production-pollution issue.
Microbes Have Memory: Surprising Parallels Between Simple Microrganisms and Sophisticated Neurons by SciTechDaily
Commentary: The world of synthetic biology took a step forward with this discovery, opening up further potential for microbe computers.
Microsoft Wants To Mine Cryptocurrency Using Your Brain Waves by Futurism
Commentary: Creating a captcha based system for future tech that literally is impassable without confirmation by your brain is a sneaky way to beat ad blockers. Sneaky and dystopian. Neurobiologist Believes Plants Can Communicate, Memorize And Problem Solve by Truth Theory
Commentary: Our understanding of what exactly dictates intelligence, and what sort of biology is required for intelligence, is vastly changing over this last decade.
Unique Nanostructure Enables Leap in Using Silicon for Battery Anodes by SciTechDaily
Link: https://scitechdaily.com/unique-nanostructure-enables-leap-in-using-silicon-for-battery-anodes/
Commentary: Breakthroughs like this are gonna be essential to the longevity and future success of the renewables industry. Making batteries last longer and contain more energy is gonna be essential to reducing their production carbon footprint.