Siouxsie and the Banshees // Halloween
Trade unions have announced a sector-wide strike next week, following days of turmoil in refineries fuelled by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s statement that striking workers be ordered to go back to work.
Unions have been demanding “real wage increases” of at least 10% and have criticised the government for its “ultraliberal strategy”. They also reject reforms currently being reviewed by parliament, including unemployment insurance, pensions, and the budget.
The general strike would expand to all sectors on 18 October, the radical-left CGT trade union, alongside several others, announced on Thursday (13 October).
The decision comes from Borne’s announcement earlier this week that employees essential to the operation of Esso-Exxon-Mobil depots must go back to work, as week-long strikes strain the country’s fuel supply.[…]
The French left has lent its support to the movement.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical-Left La France Insoumise party, for example, announced it would organise a march against increasing living costs on Sunday as “the time for a showdown [with the government] has come”.
Strikers also point to the mismatch between the lack of significant salary increases and the so-called “super profits” made by energy providers. Anger is rooted in the unfairness of super profits and rising inflation, Communist Senator Céline Brulin told EURACTIV.
14 Oct 22
Data from internet searches, social-media posts, and GPS locations could theoretically tip off a company to a pregnancy. Armed with this knowledge, I took annoying and time-consuming steps to bolster my privacy. I bought prenatal vitamins and pregnancy tests in person with cash, without using rewards or loyalty programs. On the internet, I tried tactics such as using a VPN and non-tracking search engines. I was cautious when going to medical appointments. Knowing the link between location and health status, I turned off my phone’s GPS or left it at home during appointments.
Yet, because of the lack of data privacy in the U.S., the day finally came when I lost my battle to keep my reproductive information private. I was sitting on my couch scrolling through social media when I saw it: an advertisement for diapers. It appeared the same week that we lost the pregnancy.
Horrorween Day 10 / 31: Terror Train (1980) dir. Roger Spottiswoode:
“Come on, baby. Open your eyes. Come on. Look at me. Just my luck, she’s a lesbian!“
Grain and large-scale mechanized agriculture have their place in food systems, but they’re far from the only way to grow food. Feeding the world in a sustainable manner means diversifying beyond today’s food system, which is built on a few regional breadbaskets such as the Black Sea, the North American grain belt, and Brazil’s soy-producing states. A truly efficient food system would look quite different.
Agroforestry—or using orchards, groves, and managed forests to grow food—is a viable option for large-scale food production. Today, most people tend to consider trees a source of fruit and timber instead of staples such as starch, oil, and protein. But around the world, people have used oak, breadfruit, plantains, mesquite, oil palms, and other high-yielding trees for staple calories for millenniums.
Cherokee, Catawba, and other Indigenous farmers in Appalachia combined maize, squash, and bean farming with chestnut forestry. Each chestnut tree dropped 50 to 100 pounds of starchy nuts per year, and there were 3 billion to 4 billion of these trees before a fungal disease drove them to near extinction in the 20th century. Chestnut forests yielded around 3 trillion to 4 trillion calories per year, or enough to provide the carbohydrate needs for today’s U.S. population about twice over. By comparison, the U.S. corn industry grows about 6 trillion calories per year. What’s more, chestnut trees mostly grew in Appalachia: hilly, thin terrain that industrial agriculture considers “unfarmable.” Indigenous communities managed these enormously productive forests with little labor and no fertilizer industry.
Despite the blow that the de facto extinction of chestnut trees dealt to the Appalachian economy in the early 20th century, little effort has been spent on bringing these trees back. Had we started crossbreeding American chestnuts with blight-resistant Asian chestnuts when the blight began, we would have chestnut forests today. But we didn’t. In an echo of how food dependency works in international affairs, failure to invest in chestnut forests has kept Appalachia hungry, dependent on food imports, and locked into coal mining to pay for them.
Properly tended fisheries, another example of local food systems, are also powerful. Many nations dependent on food imports, such as Somalia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Algeria, have coastal fisheries—but not ones that play a major role in national food security. This is because of centuries of pollution and unmanaged fishing, including industrial-scale poaching by international fleets. These nations have few resources to enforce fishing quotas. They have even fewer resources to invest in hatcheries, cleaning up pollution, and other proactive measures to rebuild fisheries.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Aquaculture can be a powerful food security tool for arid coastal nations. For instance, managed seaweed stands can provide food or industrial feedstocks similar to sugarcane and maize now. And rather than pollute watersheds as land crops can do, seaweed removes nutrients and oxygenates the water—providing for human needs, rehabilitating the environment, and strengthening fisheries at the same time. In fact, seaweed and seagrasses can remove enough carbon dioxide from seawater to counteract acidification in their area, allowing corals and shellfish to thrive. Oysters, mussels, and other filter-feeding shellfish were once cheap staples: abundant, non-polluting protein. With proper investment and stewardship, they could be again.
