This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Chemistry Nobel — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• After Avoiding Safety Upgrades, PG&E Hired Lobbyists and Public Relations Instead — Lee Fang at the Intercept: Power shutoffs affecting more than 1 million residents, scheduled by PG&E this week throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California, have sparked a massive backlash, with many community members telling reporters that they are shocked that the company has not done more to upgrade its transmission lines. The decision to shut off the electricity services, a precaution over concerns about high winds, raises the question of precisely how PG&E has been spending its rate-payers’ money. And the answer isn’t pretty: While neglecting safety upgrades and investments in its aging infrastructure, PG&E has instead been lavishly rewarding shareholders and buying political influence. Over the last year, reporters have highlighted the large lobby spending and billions of dollars in dividend payments to investors by PG&E, while the company avoided necessary investments in its aging transmission towers — some of which are among the oldest in the world and were known to the company to be a potential fire hazard. The aging transmission lines caused the Camp Fire wildfires last November, the most destructive in California history, that left 86 dead, over a dozen injured, and caused at least $16 billion in damages.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Australia’s “Fair Go” Is a Lie — Jeremy Poxon from the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union in Jacobin: According to a recent survey conducted by the Australian Council of Social Service, 84 percent of Newstart recipients skip meals in order to survive on the entitlement. Colloquially, low-income Australians refer to this as “the Newstart diet.” Unsurprisingly, this level of deprivation is psychologically debilitating. Being unemployed in Australia means experiencing depression, stress, anxiety, and loneliness on a daily basis. In a recent survey, the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union (AUWU) found that 98 percent of its members experienced significant social isolation. Increasingly, Australia’s unemployed cannot afford to put fuel in their cars, pay for public transport, or meaningfully engage with their friends and communities.
• Where’s Your Football, Lucy? — Ted Rall:
  
• Assange in Court — Craig Murray: Until yesterday I had always been quietly sceptical of those who claimed that Julian’s treatment amounted to torture – even of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – and sceptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness. I had been even more sceptical of those who claimed, as a senior member of his legal team did to me on Sunday night, that they were worried that Julian might not live to the end of the extradition process. I now find myself not only believing it, but haunted by the thought. Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport.