I can afford to throw away my vote.

I’m a middle-class, straight, white American Christian man.

I have a lot of margin for error. I can afford to throw away my vote.

To me personally, a Donald Trump presidency would be … moderately annoying. I’d roll my eyes at the cowboy bluster he calls “foreign policy.” I’d be irritated that rich people get more tax breaks than I do. I’d take to Facebook to denounce the right-wing justices he appoints to the Supreme Court, ultimately knowing that their decisions won’t have that much effect on me personally, since I’m a middle-class, straight white American Christian man.

[...]

When the stakes are low for us, but high for everyone else — that’s white privilege.

When we proudly declare that we will waste the fundamental right that others fought and died for, and still don’t fully have — if that’s not white privilege, I don’t know what is.

As I type this, poor, black, and brown people are being lied to about how to get a voter ID. Many of them will never get their ID, and will never vote. Others will be turned away at the polls.

We’ve tracked countless cases here where cops were able to keep their jobs after killing unarmed people, killing people after responding to the wrong house, killing people and then lying about it . . . the list goes on.

Give the Weirton, W.Va., police chief some credit. He’s come up with a new spin on the the same problem. He just fired a cop for not killing someone.

After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.

Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.

“I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.

Mr. Mader, who was standing behind Mr. Williams’ car parked on the street, said he then “began to use my calm voice.”

“I told him, ‘Put down the gun,’ and he’s like, ‘Just shoot me.’ And I told him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you brother.’ Then he starts flicking his wrist to get me to react to it.

“I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and deescalate it. I knew it was a suicide-by-cop” situation.

[...]

As it turns out, Williams’s gun wasn’t loaded. There’s no way any of the police officers could have known that. But it does show that Mader had read Williams correctly — he wasn’t actually a threat to anyone but himself. His life could have been saved.

Coffea Arabica—which accounts for 70 percent of the coffee grown globally, including your morning joe—requires the cool year-round temperatures and ample rainfall found in tropical highlands. Robusta (Coffea Canephora)—source of the the low-grade joe that supplies the instant market—also requires a tropical climate, but can tolerate warmer, drier conditions.

Both coffee species are already under pressure from climate change, the reports finds, and as the planet warms and weather patterns shift, the globe's landmass suitable for coffee production is likely to shrink by half within three decades. And a key tool for maintaining coffee on a hotter planet is also under threat: Wild coffee plants, which "could prove vital in the development of new, drought- and disease-tolerant varieties at the very time when coffee farmers need them most," could be driven to extinction within 70 years, the report warns.

It’s not the Metroid II players of the original will remember. Project AMR2 has taken the fast-paced gameplay of Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance, mixed it with the atmosphere of Super Metroid and incorporated a bunch of helpful new features:

Metroid Zero Mission style gameplay
Map system
Updated enemy AI
Minibosses
New areas
Challenging Metroid fights
Stackable beam system
Completely redrawn enemy and Metroid sprites
Log system with non-intrusive narrative
High quality soundtrack

A strong current of food-systems research holds that local food systems are preferable to systems at larger scales. Many assume that eating local food is more ecologically sustainable and socially just. We term this the local trap and argue strongly against it. We draw on current scale theory in political and economic geography to argue that local food systems are no more likely to be sustainable or just than systems at other scales. The theory argues that scale is socially produced: scales (and their interrelations) are not independent entities with inherent qualities but strategies pursued by social actors with a particular agenda. It is the content of that agenda, not the scales themselves, that produces outcomes such as sustainability or justice. As planners move increasingly into food-systems research, we argue it is critical to avoid the local trap. The article’s theoretical approach to scale offers one way to do so.

The local trap refers to the tendency of food activists and researchers to assume something inherent about the local scale. The local is assumed to be desirable; it is preferred a priori to larger scales. What is desired varies and can include ecological sustainability, social justice, democracy, better nutrition, and food security, freshness, and quality. For example, the local trap assumes that a local-scale food system will be inherently more socially just than a national-scale or global-scale food system. This article argues that the local trap is misguided and poses significant intellectual and political dangers to foodsystems research. To be clear, the concept of the local trap is not an argument against the local scale per se. We are not suggesting that the local scale is inherently undesirable. Rather, the local trap is the assumption that local is inherently good. Far from claiming that the local is inherently bad, the article argues that there is nothing inherent about any scale. Local-scale food systems are equally likely to be just or unjust, sustainable or unsustainable, secure or insecure. No matter what its scale, the outcomes produced by a food system are contextual: they depend on the actors and agendas that are empowered by the particular social relations in a given food system.