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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
US citizens:
sign this petition
calling on the Attorney General to take action against Arizona's "show us your papers" law.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Nebraska is trying to
overturn Roe v Wade
and shut down the US' last late-term abortion facility. Late-term abortions are lawful only under rather strict limits. I think only medical necessity.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Human Rights Watch describes a secret Iraqi prison and how the prisoners were tortured. Maybe the US should invade Iraq to put an end to these practices. Oh, sorry, it already tried that.
The way the US uses drones to attack violates international law.
The music industry says: "Child pornography is great." It is great as the edge of the wedge, intentionally proposed in order to lead to other kinds of censorship.
Obama is getting his economic advice from Larry Summers, who under Clinton blocked regulation of risky new investment vehicles and thus caused the economic crisis. Chomsky's recent speech explained that the banksters have a lot of control over Obama. Maybe that is why his advisor is Summers. Perhaps an outpouring of public hostility to the banks will make some progress possible. On the other hand, if Obama really wanted to fix the problem, he could have fired up this public hostility and gained a victory with which to build deeper support than banks' money could have given him.
An Israeli peace activist is
on trial
for sitting in a Bedouin family's home when Israel sought to demolish it.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Israel released a Palestinian prisoner (whose sentence was over), then
forcibly took him to Gaza,
while his family waited in the West Bank for his return. The reason this is so bad is that Israel prevents nearly all travel from Gaza. People cannot leave even for medical care. Hundreds of seriously ill Palestinians have been killed by
this policy,
which amounts to mass murder.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Reportedly
Netanyahu promised the US to stop construction in areas annexed to Jerusalem, but is encouraged to keep saying he didn't agree. If it's good enough for the Palestinians to start talks, I won't object.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Citizens of India:
oppose mandatory ID.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
UK citizens: contact your MP candidates for
the Open Rights Group
to get rid of the Digital Economy Bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Fair use contributes $4.7 trillion to the US GNP.
Someone seems to be attacking Afghan girls' schools with chemical weapons, but the Taliban says it isn't them.
Frontline interviewed a supporter of real, single-payer health reform and edited the interview to give the impression he was talking about a mere "public option". A similar thing happens to me when the media affixes the label "open source" to me or my work.
Stop Too Big To Fail is a front group that pretends to advocate financial reform but actually wants to sabotage it.
Republican fundraising junk mail pretends to be official US census forms.
"If the spill does hit the beaches along the Gulf, it will shut down everything." Will our courageous president reverse his support for more oil drilling, more coal mining, and more nuclear power?
The war against the Taliban continues in Pakistan. A Taliban leader who was reported killed appears to be still alive. In a guerrilla movement, no one leader is crucial. The US killed the previous leader last August; that did not affect the Taliban much. If it did kill this leader, that would not affect the Taliban much either.
The lies Bush used to launch a war of conquest have been exposed, but Bush and those who supported these lies have yet to be punished.
I disagree partly with the article's interpretation of Roosevelt's actions in 1941. While the Japanese attack was not in fact a surprise, it was a real attack and Japan intended it as a surprise. The policy that "provoked" this attack consisted of economic sanctions against a country already involved in a war of aggression and conquest. See also.
That side issue doesn't invalidate the main point.
The Burmese dictators are relabeling themselves as civilians so that they can't be called a "military dictatorship". Then they can get elected in a rigged election.
The UK police killed a protestor in 1979, and hid for 30 years the results of an investigation that ascertained policemen had killed him. I am not surprised that other policemen lied to cover up what happened. That is typical gang behavior. The comrades of the policeman who attacked Peter Watts lied too.
Noam Chomsky applies the political lessons of the 1930s to the US today. One interesting point is how the banksters ordered Obama to say nice things about them.
US citizens: if you have a Republican senator, call to say, "Bring the financial reform bill up for a vote." And
sign this
to call on the CEO of Goldman Sachs to call of the filibuster by the senators that the banks have bought.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Peter Watts received a suspended sentence for the crime of being beaten by US border police.
It is good that Watts won't immediately go to prison. (I am not sure how long the judge can maintain the threat to send him to prison later.) But this is not justice. Justice would be to put the border guards on trial, apologize to Watts, and change the law. Until this is achieved, we should keep the pressure on — for instance, more signs like "Unprovoked Beatings Ahead". The basic question here is whether the US should be a country of servile people, who jump to obey the orders of authorities, or the land of the free. The law under which Watts was convicted calls for the former. If Americans do not want to be servile, they should refuse, when on juries, to convict anyone of a crime for not hurrying to obey.
A large boycott of Arizona is being organized to protest its harsh law to control illegal immigration.
I do not oppose the US laws that require permission for immigration. (Instead I oppose the US policies that impoverish other countries and drive their inhabitants to emigrate.) However, allowing police to stop anyone and demand proof of citizenship, or proof of whatever, is dangerous to everyone who is lawfully in the US.
Slavoj Žižek: How Hollywood Hides The Horrors Of War.
The effort to humanize occupation soldiers contrasts with the tendency to dehumanize the conquered people, a tendency that led to the wanton slaughter of many Iraqis.
US citizens: Support the Conflict Minerals Trade Act.
Drug companies are trying to convince women they have a medical problem if they feel little sexual desire.
The discussion of this issue is handicaped by the presupposition thet all experience is divided into "disease", which should be cured, and "normal", which people are supposed to accept. This is an artificial choice between two extremes.
Let's accept that "normal" female sexuality includes a wide range of levels of desire, including zero. So there is no reason for any woman to feel there is "something wrong with her" on account of how much or little she wants sex.
With the judgmentalism removed, what remains? Personal preferences only. If you wish you had more sex drive — or less — and a pill can do it for you safely, why not take it?
A former Bush regime official testified that
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld
knew that hundreds of prisoners in Guantanamo were innocent.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
An example demonstrates a crucial danger in storing your data in a commercial server: you lose legal rights.
I have no sympathy for spammers, but I'm more worried about abuse of government power than about spam. Just look at the pol notes of recent years and you'll see lots of things done by the US government that are far worse.
North Carolina is trying to get Amazon's list of who bought what.
Amazon is doing the right thing on this occasion, but we cannot be sure it will always try. We also cannot be sure it will win, because the legal protections for Amazon's list are weak. If someone whispered you are a terrorist, I am sure the FBI would find a way around them.
It is not acceptable to depend on Amazon for this, or on anyone else. We should buy our books only with anonymous payments.
The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake — it was a con.
Proper regulation means keeping the system so simple that cons cannot be hidden. Competing with other countries to deregulate industry, in this field or any field, is a recipe for disaster.
A lawyer comments on the US lawsuit against Goldman Sachs.
Belligerents, tyrants and even genociders have learned to appropriate humanitarian aid towards their own ends, even manipulate them to achieve their war aims.
I don't have any simple solution to suggest, but let's recall that many of these conflicts are fueled by business. Many of Africa's recent wars are funded by selling minerals for manufacturing and jewelry. The businesses involved use influence on servile states (such as the US) to achieve their ends (this is visible in Haiti).
Thus, one way to attack this problem is to fight against the power of business. Support parties and politicians that are ready to adopt needed measures regardless of corporate profits.
A UK brainstorming team suggested branding a line of condoms after the pope.
I think it is a great idea.
Supporters of Franco are trying to unseat the Spanish judge who has tried to prosecute the murderers that worked for Franco.
The former Kyrgyz president's PR man was arrested for money laundering for the ex president, and was denied medical treatment and contact with a lawyer.
I have no way of judging the accusation of money laundering against him. Doing private PR work for the government or the president should arguably be illegal, but it probably wasn't. But whether or not he is guilty of a crime, the suspect should receive medical care and should be able to meet with a lawyer
Crime is booming in Iraq, including kidnaping for ransom and for trafficking people and organs.
Can any Iraqis feel grateful to the US for this "liberation"?
The Afghan secret police regularly torture prisoners, and the UK government hands prisoners over to them, "trusting" them not to torture the prisoners.
The Economist cast doubt on today's long copyright term.
Uri Avnery: the Israeli right wing, increasingly dominant in Israel, openly attacks those that stand for peace, reviling them as "traitors", "enemy agents", "destroyers of the fatherland". These terms remind him of the rage propaganda of the Nazis, whose effects he experienced before fleeing Germany.
Greece has asked for an IMF bailout, and the IMF typically demands that the burden fall entirely on the poor and middle class, so this is going to mean a further explosion of protest.
I bet the Greek government is planning new repressive measures now.
The problem is real, and cannot simply be ignored. However, justice requires solving it by putting the burden on the rich, not mainly on the poor and working class.
Afghanistan's population is dependent on making opium for heroin, so as long as the US tries to end it and the Taliban supports it, the Taliban cannot lose.
I don't believe anything can stop heroin production in Afghanistan other than reducing world demand for heroin. The only civilized way to do that is the way the Netherlands has done it: by letting registered addicts get their fix in a doctor's office.
US citizens: sign this petition for strong regulation of banks and finance companies.
Ezili Danto, formerly the Haitian offical in charge of coordinating aid, writes about how the aid state uses the poor as an excuse while keeping them down. You'll need to follow that link, indicate you're not a spammer, then view the message from April 16, 2010. You can also reload this link after you "indicate you're not a spammer" to go straight to the page.
Carbon-offset schemes are often either fraudulent or unreliable. They direct the public's good will into useless activities.
The effective way to reduce carbon emissions is to tax them.
Young Burmese use music to resist the dictatorship despite very strict censorship.
The shutdown of commercial flights in Europe was a disaster caused by regulatory overcaution: small jets kept flying the whole time, with no problems at all, but the regulators didn't care. The only way to fully avoid risk is to be dead.
To deal with many other real but small dangers, governments propose to reduce our freedom, even down to zero. This time they got a bigger outcry, because they caused billions of dollars in economic damage instead of damaging our freedom. The regulators will surely reconsider this issue.
This example shows that if we gave a similar outcry about attacks on our freedom, we could make them reconsider those too.
Microsoft is trying to push Hotmail users into using other services, and revealing
private information
about their previous communications in the process.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: sign this petition for a criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs' for betting against its own service.
9/10 of Iraqi former prisoners have
psychological illnesses
afterward, and 4/5 of the children are doing badly in school.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support the Paycheck Fairness bill. Here is a summary of the bill.
US citizens: sign this petition against expanding a US Marine base on Okinawa which would destroy a coral reef and wipe out the last population of dugong (a marine mammal) in Japan.
Part of the "grass-roots" tea party movement is actually funded and directed by Republican operatives.
The US Chamber of Commerce is using a badly conducted poll to present a false appearance of public opposition to regulating the banksters.
The US government has paid over a trillion dollars to mortgage companies, but only 90 million to save citizens from losing their homes.
We can estimate that the US government represents big business about 10,000 times as much as the citizens. Which means most politicians are on the side of business and against the citizens.
US citizens: tell Obama to
stop pressing for a ban
on labeling genetically modified foods.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
How computerized
"high frequency trading"
gives certain financial companies an unfair advantage in the stock exchange.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The name-calling in the article is somewhat overblown, but it does give a clear explanation of how this works and why it is harmful.
Protest the banksters in Wall Street on April 29 at 3:30pm.
A secret Iraqi military unit reporting directly to President Maliki has been holding hundreds of Sunni men in
a special prison
and torturing many of them.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Oklahoma is trying new ways to harass women who get abortions.
The bill to publish information about women who get abortions is dishonest in that it is designed to violate their privacy while pretending to respect it.
Formaldehyde has been established as toxic, but a Republican business operative in the Senate wants to stop the EPA from protecting people from it.
Brazilian indigenous people threaten war to stop a dam that would flood their lands.
The IMF proposes two new taxes on financial activities. This may be a good idea, but I am skeptical about a tax on banks' "profits" because they can twist the accounting so as to disguise the profits. A tax on transactions would prevent that.
A new book analyzes how extreme economic and social inequality is propagated in the wealthy countries which are most unequal. Society and government act in directions that excuse and maintain the inequality.
The book is specifically about the UK, but I expect much of what it says must apply to the US as well.
A global warming denialist won a lawsuit for the publication of a large data base of measurements. These scientific data should be published. Professor Baillie's objections are based on selfishness, not science. Scientific conclusions and analyses must be independently tested; that is the only way we can eventually rely on them.
The fact that the plaintiff in this case is a denialist means he may try to confuse the issue with misguided analysis, but practicing secrecy is the wrong response.
A lunatic cleric in Iran says that women's sexuality is responsible for earthquakes. Perhaps he heard someone say "I felt the earth move" and took it literally.
Copying Is Not Theft
— by Nina Paley and Connie Champagne.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A Chinese artist's work was removed from an exhibition for criticizing the president. Not in China, but in France.
Darryl Durr faces execution, and the State of Ohio has blocked DNA tests that could prove he was falsely convicted 22 years ago. This shows a government which will murder people to avoid admitting a mistake. Unfortunately many governments are like that. The US government plans to send Peter Watts to jail for 2 years to avoid admitting that its border bullies commited violence for no reason.
The Yes Men crashed a Dow Chemical greenwashing "Run for Water"
event with hoax
"Dow spokesmen".
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A broad range of German human rights organizations, unions, and consumer organizations have condemned Europe's Internet data retention policy as a threat to human rights.
A Philadelphia school spied on many of students through laptop cameras, not just a few, and has no excuse to offer. If the software in a computer isn't free/libre software, that means someone else controls it — so you can never tell when it is transmitting photos of you, or transmitting audio recordings of you.
And since cellular phones are computers, this applies to them too.
Egypt's pressure for
nuclear disarmament in the Middle East
is starting to get support from major powers.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
This would put pressure on Israel to disarm, and might convince Iran to forego nuclear weapons.
Israeli "settlers" who have occupied a Palestinian home near Jerusalem tried to
frame one of the international supporters
for attacking the settlers with gas. Fortunately there was clear proof
that the accusation was false. Soldiers arrested international
solidarity workers who accompany Palestinians trying to farm their
fields.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The solidarity workers serve as witnesses in case "settlers" attack
the Palestinians. The soldiers arrested them because they
want no witnesses to the attacks.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Blau wrote an article before Israel's attack on Gaza which was censored in an unusual way, and remains censored a year after the attack. This creates suspicion is that the article revealed plans to commit war crimes. That the standard military censorship process had already passed the article is more evidence that the motive for censoring it was not about revealing legitimate military secrets but rather illegitimate ones.
The threat to prosecute Israel's best investigative journalist and the pressure to close Haaretz mean that fascism in Israel is inches away from putting an end to criticism of the government. If that occurs, the "only democracy in the Middle East" will be no more of a democracy than Iran is.
I hope that the editors of Haaretz will not allow a submissive newspaper to be published under that proud name.
If Uri Blau continues to face prosecution for whistleblowing if he ever returns to Israel, I think his best option will be to apply for political asylum as a persecuted journalist.
Israel seized water pumps, cutting off water supply to a Palestinian village. For decades, Israel has taken the water resources of the West Bank away from Palestinians. When an Israel official says "they get water from us", he is talking about water sources that Israel took from them.
Pervasive and increasingly
overt racist propaganda
is pushing most Israelis toward right-wing parties. However, the majority still would like to end the occupation of Palestine (or most of it, at least).
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
A new "unprovoked beatings ahead" sign warns people not to cross the US border into Canada.
Way to go, Kai! I would have written a more forceful condemnation of the bullies at the border, but that's just a detail — the important thing is that he has started real action to push back against them.
I hope to hear of more such signs in the future, not just at this border crossing but at any and all of them, until US pardons Peter Watts and puts the border gangsters on trial.
For the story of how the US border guards attacked Peter Watts, see here.
The organization
J Street
fails to seriously oppose Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, and criticizes efforts to do so as "anti-Israel".
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
This, I think, is the statement by J Street. This doesn't directly call any organization "anti-Israel" but does describe the Berkeley ASUC resolution in that way.
Here's the UC Berkeley ASUC resolution: This text shows that J Street's criticism misrepresented the resolution. It boycotts only companies that support Israel's violence towards and occupation of Palestine. It is not in any way against Israel in general.
Human Rights Watch accused Iraq's Bush-installed government of restricting journalism and endangering journalists.
Mugabe made a speech calling for reconciliation in Zimbabwe, but the MDC says it is phony — he is encouranging increased violence and intimidation of the opposition.
NATO has more or less acknowledged that the biggest problem in Afghanistan is the corruption of Karzai's government.
To recognize the problem is a necessary step towards solving it, but doesn't guarantee a solution exists. NATO and the US were unable to stop Karzai from obviously rigging the last election, so can it do anything to reduce his corruption?
An Italian charity providing medical care in Afghanistan says
some of its doctors have been arrested.
There was a news report that some Italian doctors were accused of an assassination plot, but Karzai's government has refused to give Emergency any information about the prisoners.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Italian doctors and most of the clinic staff have been released, but the clinic remains closed.
Big Content's war on democracy.
I wrote about this in 1997.
Uri Avnery: both Israelis and Palestinians have given up hope for peace, but Obama might be able to convince both peoples that it is worth a try.
The Spanish enclave of Melilla, on the coast of Africa, accumulates would-be illegal immigrants that cannot be deported and in practice cannot leave. It is clearly wrong for border guards to shoot to kill. There are many nonlethal means they could use to arrest people trying to cross the wall. But aside from that, I don't have any simple recommendation for this sad situation.
I don't believe that everyone in the world has a right to move to Europe, or the US for that matter. I have no sympathy for the Bangladeshis that paid smugglers to help them illegally enter Europe and were cheated, and even less for the fools who continued to pay more to those who had cheated them. However, the force that drives them and other would be immigrants to go to Melilla is the poverty of their own countries.
A major cause of poverty is rapid population growth. The responsibility for this is shared — between the local people (particulary the men, who typically have the power) that want to have many children, and the wealthy countries that don't give enough contraceptive aid.
Another cause is corruption, which is rooted in local culture, though often exacerbated by foreign companies.
However, the poverty of Africa, and even Bangladesh, is partly due to an economic system that the rest of the world has set up. We have a responsibility to stop sucking the wealth out of those countries, and stop the increasing concentration of wealth in the world.
Police in Kyrgyzstan used "unauthorized copies of software" as an excuse to shut down a TV station which was broadcasting news about protestors.
I was disappointed that the article uses the propaganda terms "pirated" and "Intellectual Property". The latter term is so misleading that even quoting a name in which it appears spreads confusion if you don't deconstruct the term. See here for more information.
Also, to say that "software piracy" is a "legitimate problem" whitewashes the real problem: proprietary software which forbid redistribution.
Brazil used unauthorized copies of software as an excuse in the 90s to arrest activists of the landless rural workers' movement. In that case, the copies really were unauthorized, but that didn't alter the effect. To protect themselves, they moved to GNU/Linux. Everyone else should do that too.
The West Virginia mine disaster that killed 29 miners was no accident. After years of safety violations and union-busting by Massey Energy Company, something like this was bound to happen.
Massey also spent millions to change the West Virginia Supreme Court.
Poor Haitians' anger at the elite and the ineffective government is close to leading to violence.
US citizens: tell Obama not to consider sexual orientation when
choosing a Supreme Court justice.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your senators to support strong financial reform. Shrink the 'too big to fail' banks, regulate derivatives tightly, and create a strong independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
You can also send an email through www.BanksterUSA.org, but a phone call has more effect.
Colombia's supreme court blocked President Horrible's referendum to
allow him to run for president again, saying it had been
passed
dishonestly and invalidly through the legislature.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A Spanish judge accused Venezuela of arranging links between ETA, the Basque terrorist group, and the FARC, the Colombian guerrilla group turned organized crime gang.
I have no sympathy for the FARC, but we must not let them be used to distract us from the worst terrorists in Colombia. Those are the paramilitary thugs supported by President Alvaro Horrible, and the regular army troops who murder civilians at random and dress the corpses in FARC uniforms to claim a bounty. The US calls FARC terrorists, while supporting Horrible and his terrorists.
Spain, by contrast, is a real democracy and not a terrorist state, which makes the violent separatism of ETA totally inexcusable.
So it is very disappointing to see a credible accusation that Chavez's government is mixed up with these groups. President Horrible accused Chavez of supporting the FARC, but he is too dishonest for his accusations to carry weight. A Spanish judge cannot be thus dismissed. This is not yet proof, but it must be considered seriously.
The powerful, when guilty of murder or of destruction of the environment, may face prosecution when they travel.
There is plenty of evidence that the Catholic Church protected pedophile priests from prosecution. What I have read so far does not convince me that the current Pope was directly, personally involved in it. He refused to grant a pedophile priest's request to leave the priesthood, but that doesn't imply protecting him from prosecution (which did happen) or allowing him to work with children in the future (though that too seems to have happened).
The biggest obstacle to the practice of prosecuting official crimes against humanity or the ecosystem is US opposition. The Bush regime pushed hard to oppose this (since many of its officials are candidates for such prosecution). Bush made many countries protect US soldiers from prosecution in the ICC.
Iceland has thoroughly investigated its bank crisis and produced a report showing how various bank executives, stockholders, government regulators and political leaders were culpable.
It would be nice to see such an honest investigation in the US, but I don't expect it, because the banks remain alive and in control.
Alma Llenera: With the melody of Alma Llanera
Laurie Penny: Campaigns to protect girls from "sexualisation" assume that sexuality itself is a corrupting influence on young women.
It is possible to let people develop sexuality at their own pace, provided we do not interpret that as meaning they develop without social influence. Society will inevitably have some effect. Since sex is basically enjoyable and good, it's better for society to encourage people to have sex than to discourage it.
What seems thoroughly harmful is the effect of bullying, and more generally, peer pressure with its threat of rejection. I was immune to that, perhaps because I considered rejection inevitable, but what it does to other people (even adults) seems to be totally twisted. I wonder if there is any way to break its influence on most people.
The House and Senate versions of banking reform are both weak.
Here's a summary of what's wrong with each of them.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Agribusiness is campaigning in favor of using corn for ethanol fuel, a practice which was responsible for worldwide hunger.
Here's the report of an activist from Hyderbad in a group that visited nearby villages, to encourage and help Dalits claim equal rights.
The FCIC is supposed to investigate the causes of the financial crisis, but it is doing an incompetent job.
I have to wonder if it was intended as a whitewash.
The EnergyStar program, which rates appliances for efficient use of electricity, is so weak in rules and enforcement that there is no telling whether its ratings are valid.
US citizens: Sign
this petition to Congress to reduce tax breaks on companies.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A Chinese factory that makes Microsoft products (and many others) treats its workers much worse than animals, and teaches them how to participate in the coverup of what it's doind.
It seems Microsoft closes its eyes to these violations of its "code of conduct", which apparently is meant more to give a positive impression than to avoid the abuses.
The fact that people work in this factory voluntarily (and that they can leave when they choose) reflects the great poverty of most of China. It is good that the fectory allows people to quit, but that is no excuse for permitting working conditions as found there. If the workers were paid decent wages, the products would cost a little more, but they would still be made, and workers would still be hired to make them. However, the owners of Microsoft and the other "manufacturers" that use these factories would not get so much money.
It used to be that workers could form unions to demand better pay and working conditions. I am sure Microsoft is happy to have moved the production to a country which doesn't allow that. That's what the WTO was meant for.
Corporations have clever strategies to present themselves as "socially responsible" while continuing practices that harm people or the environment.
Asia Pulp and Paper is cutting down virgin forests in Sumatra and selling them as "ecologically sustainable" paper.
It's not clear whether this constitutes cheating; it could be that the rules are so weak that this operation really does qualify.
Science writer Simon Singh's legal victory over the Chiropractic organization, which sued him for libel, leaves him with major legal expenses.
A UK detention center for immigrants let a prisoner die of a heart attack, refusing to call a doctor.
Privatized prisons are always going to skimp on something; it is more profitable that way.
In Bolivia, you can now get the real thing: Coca Colla.
The boycott of Coca Cola company does not apply to Coca Colla.
This reference says that Coca Cola did originally include some coca extract.
Whether that is the same as containing cocaine, I am not sure.
Nawal El Saadawi has fought against sexism in Egypt for a whole lifetime and still won't give up.
Members of the 1960s Indonesian women's movement, some of them former political prisoners of Suharto, demand to clear their names of political charges brought against them decades ago.
"We fired on buses full of civilians" -- Bush forces veterans are haunted by the frequent atrocities they committed and saw.
Individual soldiers who knowingly committed war crimes cannot evade responsibility by citing their orders, but those who gave the orders, such as Bush, are the ones most important to put on trial.
Those soldiers cannot shift the blame entirely onto the situation they found themselves in, but the responsibility for creating that situation falls on those who launched the war.
The British Bush forces sent two prisoners to Afghanistan, then refused to confirm their identities to family and lawyers, on the pretext it was protecting their privacy.
Refusing to confirm the identity of prisoners not only violates treaties, it is utterly despicable and worthy of a tyrant such as Stalin.
Of course, the US just as guilty in this case.
The FBI has taken action against plundering archeological sites in Utah.
Sacking artifacts from archeological sites destroys the record of the past. Only a professional investigation can recover the information that the sites contain.
Whether or not the police might have achieved more by acting more gently, I cannot say, but action was definitely needed.
Mugabe's history of tyranny goes back to the first Zimbabwe elections of 1980.
Goldman Sachs has been charged with fraud, for setting up a investment scheme, betting it would fail, and filling it with the most risky mortgages.
A UN report accuses Musharraf of conniving at the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
NPR presents Monsanto ads that whitewash genetically modified crops and falsely suggest that they help solve the problem of world hunger.
I stopped giving to NPR in the 90s when I noted the presence of advertisements. NPR is noncommercial, but that no longer means no commercials.
The cost of the armed forces and wars are now over half the US federal budget, and the fraction is increasing.
US citizens: sign
this petition to close tax loopholes and make
profitable corporations pay more (or at least some) income tax.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice who will defend abortion rights.
Blackwater's former president and other former employees face charges of having illegal weapons.
Iraq Vets: Coverage of Atrocities Is Too Little, Too Late.
An independent inquiry concludes the Climatic Researcher Unit scientists acted honestly and were basically right in their science. Although this rejects the accusations of the corporate-funded denialists, they don't have to care. They have succeeded in misleading millions of people to disbelieve global warming. Billions will probably suffer the resulting damage.
How the mass media propagandize Americans about Afghanistan.
A full interview with Josh Stieber, a Bush forces soldier in the unit whose troops callously shot Iraqi civilians and journalists, who later became a conscientious objector after he couldn't reconcile considering all Iraqis enemis with the idea that he was liberating them.
UK citizens: demand that MPs defend your privacy as much they defend their own, and scrap the ID cards.
US citizens: call on Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice who will stand up for citizens against the power of corporations.
The Islamist extremists in Somalia have banned music on the radio.
If the radio stations of the "government" and the UN are the only ones with some music, they might gain some popularity from this. If so, it would be the first time the "government" ever had any. What the US achieved by having the Ethiopian army intervene in Somalia was to replace peace under the Islamic Courts Movement with war and the danger of something more extreme.
When EU officials met in Barcelona to announce new attacks on the freedom of Internet users, they encountered a massive opposition event and did not dare announce the plan.
US citizens: Tell Senator Kerry not to sell out the Clean Air Act.
Millions of Mexicans have resisted a government demand to identify themselves as owners of a mobile phone.
The drug dealers of Mexico are a real threat to society there, but a total surveillance society is not an acceptable response. The way to solve this problem is through legalization of drugs, at least of their transport through Mexico.
As the Vatican faces demand to end celibacy for priests, it tried to scapegoat homosexuality as the reason for priestly pedophilia.
The Israeli "security" forces
regularly burgle dissidents' homes, rather than get a search
warrant.
Anat Kam says she copied secret Israeli Army documents
because they documented war crimes.
A Dalit who converted to Buddhism explains
how caste prejudice works today and how conversion is a partial
response.
Pakistan's army killed 71 Pakistani civilians by mistake, but refuses
to admit it happened.
Pakistan's army never admits killing civilians. That's even worse
than the US army, which often denies having killed civilians but does
sometimes finally admit it when proof is presented.
If the information given in this article is accurate, these civilians
were killed by accident. It is impossible to totally avoid such
accidents. Therefore, when they happen, the army has to admit them
and apologize humbly. It also has to try to find ways to reduce such
accidents in the future. If it does this, the people may put up with
some level of civilian casualties if they support the war aims.
A commission in Canada's parliament is preparing to
label criticism of Israel as antisemitism.
That labeling would be false and should be rejected. But I do not
see how it would lead to censorship of such criticism, unless Canada
either has or will adopt censorship of antisemitic views. If so, that
would be an injustice much bigger than this issue. Even bigoted views
that we despise must not be censored. I support activities to reduce
bigotry, but not through censorship.
A group of Canadians are in Italy to accuse the Catholic Church of
the murder of thousands
of indigenous children in Canada.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
California's marijuana growers want it to remain illegal to keep the price up.
A former Bush forces soldier confirms that the gratuitous killing of civilians visible in the recent Wikileaks video was commonplace.
A
secret Israeli database
says 3/4 of "settlements" (i.e., colonies) have done construction without permits, and many built on private Palestinian land. All of these colonies violate the treaties that prohibit seizing land in conquered countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US troops in Afghanistan shot some women and
dug the bullets out of their bodies
in order to lie about what happened.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Israel is claiming the power to arrest or exile Palestinians just for not having an Israeli permit to live in their territory.
Avoiding the use of nuclear weapons
requires abolishing nuclear weapons.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Although the article mentions this point only briefly, eliminating enriched uranium, and nuclear fission power, is also important for nuclear nonproliferation.
Thai protests in favor of exiled Thaksin Shinawatra are heating up and the government is losing support in Bangkok.
Shinawatra won democratic elections several times, retaining support despite corruption and despite operating death squads. So I am not happy with either side in this dispute.
Uri Avnery: Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is staking everything on Washington's willingness to accept a nonviolent approach to recognition for a Palestinian state and peace with Israel.
7 million Iraqis, over 20% of the population, live on under 2 dollars a day This is mostly thanks to the conquest and occupation of their country, but I think Iraq has a high rate of population growth, which also contributes to poverty.
US citizens: sign this petition to support the Student Non-Discrimination Act (HR 4530). Also phone your congresscritter; a phone call carries more weight.
Kyrgyzstan's President Bakiyev sold off nearly all the state's assets at low prices to his family's cronies. Kyrgyzstan should seize the former state assets that are physically in the country, such as the telephone company, and tell the new "owners" they can try to collect from Bakiyev.
Constance McMillen was allowed to bring her girlfriend to the prom, but it turned out to be
a separate-but-equal prom
for a few students rejected by the rest of the senior class. These actions show the other students to be prize bigots. However, let's not get caught up in the idea that these parties are important. There are many opportunities for bigotry in private life, parties with no connection to a public school. Bigotry in those events cannot be addressed by legislation or lawsuits, only by greater maturity.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The US government has targeted Anwar al-Awlaki for
"capture or killing".
This could mean that the US will try to arrest him, trying to achieve this without harming him. If there is evidence he is part of a group that is sneakily arranging murder far away, that is grounds to charge and arrest him. But has he been indicted?
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Arresting him should be feasible. Such a group is not a combat unit and isn't trained to fight like one. Police can arrest the whole group, without hurting them unless they resist.
However, this announcement could also mean that the US might decide to kill him with no attempt to arrest him. Even if he is guilty of planning murder, but he has a right to a trial, not summary execution based on an administrative order. And what if he isn't guilty? Accusations are often mistaken.
Israeli and US targeted assassinations have repeatedly shown that they are likely to kill many family members and bystanders. A missile doesn't give any warning; it doesn't offer the other people in the house or the street a chance to leave. The US is risking committing a worse atrocity than anything Awlaki is suspected of.
A US court abolished all regulation of ISPs, so they can now impose any requirements or limitations whatsoever on customers.
UK citizens: don't vote for any MP that voted for the Digital Economy Bill. They chose the record companies' side and not yours.
The major US media fall prey easily to false information from the Pentagon.
In the UK high gasoline prices are leading people to drive less. This is unpleasant, but it helps avoid a disaster.
Bailed-out banks are repaying comparatively small amounts of money, and the media are touting this to present the bailout as profitable.
The UK government adopted blockage of web sites, and punishment by disconnection of people that share files. This shows that both the Labour and Conservative parties serve business against the citizens.
Rep. Duncan says,
abolish the US Air Marshal service
because it accomplishes nothing. With four arrests per year, it has made around 40 arrests in the past decade. If one of those arrests prevented the destruction of an airplane, it might justify the cost. But I recall hearing that the air marshalls ever played a crucial role in preventing such an attack.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The US government has no intention to prosecute the Bush forces soldiers who shot civilians and journalists for no reason. The US government says its rules do not permit gratuitous killing, but these rules are worth nothing if it winks at soldiers who flagrantly ignore them.
Karzai and the US government are openly condemning each other. This situation is full of irony. The US is trying to make the Afghan government stop being corrupt and stop making the elections a joke, so the Afghan people will respect it. But if the US achieves this by taking control, it will mean that the government is a puppet, not a democray, and they won't respect it.
In South Vietnam, the US replaced several governments through military coups, but that never resulted in a government anyone could respect. Now Afghanistan is in the same spot. I think the US government sees this and has no idea where to go from here.
Faux News is trying to present Sarah Palin as a journalist, by giving her a show with interviews that were done by others years ago.
US citizens, support the Shareholder Protection Act which would let shareholders (including pension funds) vote on whether corporations can spend money on political campaigns.
Two British soldiers were convicted of beating a prisoner in Afghanistan, but they were sentenced only to discharge from the army.
China has broken the spirit of human rights activist Gao Zhisheng, reportedly through torture. Some of his quoted words lead me to suspect China also threatened his family.
The people came onto the streets to fight the government of Kyrgyzstan, after the government had opposition leaders arrested. Over 50 protestors were killed, but they seem to have won the battle. I am concerned that Obama will try to put the president back in power so as to keep using the airport. The US supports compliant dictators in many countries, and might be glad to support one more.
Haiti's Prime Minister refuses to talk about who will get the benefits from Haiti's oil, but apparently it won't be Haiti's poor.
Australia's government has catered to foreign coal exporters' profits rather than protect the Great Barrier Reef from oil spills.
A short-term solution is to block the Douglas Shoal physically so that ships will never try to cross it again. But if we don't reduce CO2 emissions, the whole reef will die in a few decades from the acidification of the ocean. What's needed in the long term is to put a heavy tax on coal, and thus decrease the amount of CO2 emissions.
In the US: tell textbook publishers
not to impose Texas' right-wing lies in textbooks for other states.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A
report from a protestor arrested at a union march in Venezuela.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Wikileaks has published a video showing how US soldiers in a helicopter shooting Iraqi civilians and journalists, then shooting the ambulance that came to pick them up.
The US government lied persistently about what happened there, despite having the video as proof.
This is what happens when an army of occupation faces resistance. The soldiers, or at least many of them, consider the occupied people less than human. They kill civilians for their sport, then lie to make it seem justified. The commanders repeat the lies, perhaps after giving advice about what to say. The civilian government presents the lies as justification for the occupation.
The soldiers who killed these civilians should be tried for murder. Everyone responsible for covering up the crimes should be tried as an accessory. But those are secondary to a much larger crime.
The worst culprits responsible are Bush and all those who helped him launch the invasion of Iraq, based on lies. Murder like this, probably repeated thousands of times, was contained in the orders that Bush gave. Those responsible should be tried for crimes against the peace, as were the Nazis who launched the invasion of Poland.
Thank you, Wikileaks, for thwarting the effort to cover up these crimes.
Bush's conquest has made life in Iraq more unjust as well as more dangerous.
The article has a final note about how Egypt is crushing dissidents and making a mockery of the coming election.
President Ford
authorized warrantless wiretapping
in 1974. I wonder whether this was constitutional.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Almost a year after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, 75,000 Tamils with no connection to the LTTE are still in prison camps. I wonder what it takes for villages to be declared "cleared". If it is a matter of clearing them of mines, that does take time, but why keep people in prison until their villages are safe? Is there any information about what the Sri Lankan government says it means to "clear" a village, or about what it is really doing?
China refused Bob Dylan permission to play concerts. I link to this because the criticism of Björk is an example of a common phenomenon in which those who don't self-censor are criticized for "making trouble" for others. The censorship of Dylan is not Björk's fault, it is China's fault.
Uri Avnery: The leaders of Israel know that future Iranian nuclear weapons are not a big threat to Israel, but they use the supposed threat as an excuse and distraction.
The Sunni militias that Bush supported to oppose al Qa'ida now face arrest from the Iraqi government and assassination in their beds by someone. The killers might be al Qa'ida, but it occurs to me that they also might be Shi'ite militias. I see no real evidence in this article about their identities.
The US bank bailout totals over 4 trillion dollars; most of it was provided secretly to the banks.
A judge ruled that NSA wiretapping of a US charity without a warrant
was illegal.
However, there needs to be a way to enforce this even when the government doesn't unwittingly admit the crime.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
As the recent airplane bombing attempt shows, the weakness of our defense against non-state-sponsored terrorism is not in the ability to collect information; it's in the ability to use the information already being collected.
The Torture Report researches and reports on US torture practices.
The Open Rights Group served "disconnection notices" to political parties and lobbying groups.
US citizens:
sign this petition
calling in Obama to stop invoking "state secrets" to deny justice to the victims of illegal NSA wiretapping. I suggest adding something to the effect that this applies to ALL such cases, and the US must not try to sabotage them by hiding evidence of spying and then saying "You can't prove we did."
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Code Pink fooled journalists with a hoax press release in the name of AIPAC condemning the Israeli construction of "settlements" in Palestinian territory. One result is that AIPAC was forced to say it supports this land grab. A statement from Code Pink about this and other actions at AIPAC's meeting.
Iceland is considering a suite of laws to protect freedom of the press in practice, not just in theory.
The
planning
for rebuilding Haiti must include the Haitians.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Iraqi government waited till just after the election to cut food aid to the public.
Having imprisoned the opposition presidential candidate, Sri Lanka's President Rajapaksa has left no room for defeat in the legislative elections. After editor Lasantha Wickramatunga was assassinated, his posthumous editorial blamed Rajapaksa for organizing the murder.
An oscillating magnetic field applied to a certain part of the brain interferes with moral judgments based on figuring other people's intentions.
An Israeli whistleblower/journalist faces a trial for treason, which the media are forbidden to report on, while another journalist has fled into exile. These journalists revealed how the army carried out assassinations in defiance of a court order. The Israeli government, rather than prosecuting the perpetrators of these crimes, seeks to crush the people who revealed them.
It is common for governments to use twisted excuses to crush people who expose government crimes. Consider, for instance, the Pentagon Papers case in the US, which also involved publication of leaks of government documents which showed horrible government crimes.
Consider also the case of the Japanese Greenpeace activists, who face prosecution in Japan because they intercepted stolen whale meat and handed it in to the authorities.
Peter Bethune of Sea Shepherd faces more than 30 years in prison for his nonviolent attempt to perform a symbolic arrest of a whaling captain.
The US refuses to
certify Bolivia's cooperation
in the "War on Drugs" based on arbitrary standards that come down to politics: Colombia is a US client state and Bolivia refuses to be one.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
I mostly agree with this article's recommendation about dealing with drugs. However, for addictive drugs such as cocaine and heroin, another option is to let addicts get their drugs legally from doctors but not legalize general public sale. This can be more effective at reducing the use of these drugs.
A description of Russian atrocities in Ingushetia. Whether they were the reason for the Moscow subway bombings, or just a handy excuse, it is clear that years of Russian atrocities created the motivation for them.
If we do not believe that Russian atrocities in Chechnya and vicinity justify suicide bombings, we must not passively accept Russia's argument that these suicide bombings justify the far larger Russian atrocities that will surely follow.
Simon Singh's appelate victory is not the end of the story. He still faces several more years before a possible victory in his libel suit. He explains why libel reform is still urgently needed in the UK.
The government of India, in a tyrannical move, plans to take the fingerprints of everyone (except the Maoist rebels).
Everyone: sign
this petition calling on India not to relieve companies
of responsibility for causing nuclear accidens.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Why should companies get the upside, while dumping the downside on the public?
A rational drugs policy requires politicians who can resist the irrational demand to "do something" in order to consider thoughtfully what policy would be best for the people affected.
Many organizations are campaigning to for strengthened privacy protection for Internet and phone users in the US.
I support this, but I doubt it will be enough. Police have a long history of breaking such laws, and a long history of infiltrating and sabotaging dissident groups and protests.
The article makes the mistake of talking about "the cloud". That term encourages confused thinking so we should make an effort not to use it.
A UK science writer who denied the effectiveness of chiropractic for a broad range of medical problems, and then was sued for libel, has won an appeal.
Nonetheless, the UK's libel law remains a disaster and needs reform.
Africa remains in poverty because tax-evading corporations suck out billions of dollars every year.
US citizens: Tell Obama,
"Say no to more offshore oil drilling.
We need clean energy."
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Increasing the burning of fossil fuels is a move in the wrong direction.
Movie companies are suing tens of thousands of Americans for file sharing,
and
many more lawsuits are likely to follow.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
How about a boycott of the companies that are behind these lawsuits?
Cape Town is building an expensive shiny new face the soccer World Cup. To do so, it is evicting the poor and sending them to conditions worse than under apartheid.
Big sports events such as the World Cup and the Olympics are big business. They typically get funding from business-subservient governments, which justify the subsidy by claiming the event will bring money into the region. But the money benefits certain businesses only, and the rest of the inhabitants have to pay for the trouble.
Every city's inhabitants should resist any plan to hold a major sports event there.
The LibDems in UK parliament said they will try to block the hasty passage of the unjust Digital Economy Bill.
They are doing the right thing, which the other parties are not. But they missed a chance to be courageous by failing to condemn the bill's substance as well as the haste.
The governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and
Zimbabwe have all tried to interfere with Wikileaks, and now the US
government is
attacking Wikileaks at multiple levels.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Republicans are being pilloried for accusing Democrats of making back-room deals in the health insurance bill. The Democrats made a number of nasty back-room deals — with Republican legislators, in a futile and idiotic attempt to gain their support. And then, when Republicans did not keep their side of the deal, the Democrats stuck by their side. What a shame.
There was another back-room deal, with the big pharma companies, granting them privileges in exchange for not lobbying against the bill.
Hollywood has begun making the occupation of Iraq look good by portraying Bush forces soldiers as heros. The Bush forces were taken from the US military, as well as from companies such as Blackwater, and sent to carry out an unjust war of conquest. Although many Americans criticized the war once it started going badly, they mostly continued to "support the troops", and thus bought into the fiction that these occupation troops, as they killed and tortured civilians, were "serving their country".
Of course, my point is not Pinkerton's point. He is a hawk; he lauds unjust wars of conquest and lauds Hollywood for supporting them. I condemn them both.
This article says that Pinkerton misrepresented the films he is talking about.See also Slavoj Žižek's article about The Hurt Locker as distraction.
This myth undermined the anti-war movement and continues to do so. Here's
an explanation of how.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Koch Industries has paid 48 million dollars to organizations for global warming denial and disinformation.
China executes thousands of people every year — or is it tens of thousands?
Mohamed el Baradei warns that western support for repressive Arab regimes leads Arabs to think that Islamic extremism is the only way to end the repression.
Egypt is very repressive; many Egyptian journalists and bloggers have been arrested for opposing the government. Is it really possible for anyone to challenge Mubarak in an election? Perhaps Baradei hopes at least to focus world attention on the lack of democracy in Egypt.
Belgium is moving to ban people from covering their faces in public.
While I feel little sympathy towards the use of the burqa, religious motives are not the only reason to hide one's face. Protestors may not want the police to know who they are; this law will harm the political rights of everyone in Belgium.
Beyond that, hiding one's face is the only way to be anonymous in a society filled with face recognition cameras. The burqa, a detestable symbol of subjection, provides a convenient excuse to expose everyone to total surveillance. Big Brother would love this law.
Will dark sunglasses be illegal too?
US citizens: call your your congresscritter to support HR 4790 which would give shareholders a veto over corporations' political campaign expenditures. Also sign this petition.
This law is not enough, but it is a good step to take among other steps.
An investigation faulted the Climate Research Unit for not publishing all its data, but says there is no flaw in its scientific work.
In the UK, police are punished for hurting dogs, but not for hurting citizens.
Suicide bombings in the Moscow subways have been attributed to independence campaigns of Chechnya or neighboring regions. It would be a mistake to focus solely on these crimes and disregard the equally horrible crimes committed by Russia in suppressing resistance in Chechnya.
Maliki's government plans to bar 6 of the just-elected members of parliament, which would effectively reverse the results of the election.
Everyone:
support the ad campaign
against the UK's proposed Digital Economy Bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Yes Men
spoofed Canada
before the Copenhagen meeting with an announcement that Canada would cease to oppose efforts to limit global warming.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
MPs called for revision of the procedures for approving arms sales to Israel after concluding that Israel must have used British arms to attack Gaza.
Google has directed world criticism towards Australia's internet censorship plans. It is unjust for governments to block public access to any sort of published material.
The exiled Chagossians have objected to the proposed Chagos islands marine reserve as another obstacle to their return. I am in favor of this marine reserve provided adequate and clear provisions are made in advance for the islanders to fish using sustainable methods when they return.
The Pentagon is blocking a second autopsy for one of the Guantanamo prisoners who supposedly committed suicide but may actually have been killed by torture.
Israeli soldiers shot two teenagers plowing a field near Nablus. Last week soldiers shot boys in a village, and the government maintains they didn't fire any shots. Is it plausible that boys would try to stab a soldier who is with a group of soldiers? Of course not. It's a lie, meant to be believed by people who want an excuse to believe.
Seven years after the conquest of Iraq, what has it achieved?
Peter Watts has been convicted of a felony. His crime: asking a customs officer "What is the problem?", after the officer had punched him in the face. I hope Mr. Watts will steadfastly refuse to admit that he did anything wrong. He will be under pressure to do so, but that would grant his oppressors a victory that they cannot get in any other way.
While Mr. Watts says he does not criticize the jury, I think he is mistaken. Being on a jury does not excuse people from moral responsibility for their actions. It does not entitle then to plead "I was only obeying orders (from the judge)" if they rubber-stamp an injustice in progress. The reason we need juries is so that can protect people accused based on obviously unjust grounds. The jurors that convicted Peter Watts were derelict in their duty and should be ashamed of themselves.
But what is really needed is to change the law which gives every customs officer the power to imprison people for asking them questions.
I think it would be useful for a campaign to call on Obama to pardon Peter Watts, and to demand a change in this law. It could also warn people to stay away from the US lest they meet the same treatment. I think this campaign would have an excellent chance of contributing in the long term to a change in the law, and some change of gaining Watts a pardon.
The natural place to carry out this campaign would be in science fiction fandom, where there may be fans of Watts' writing, as well as many people who would be incensed at the US government's conduct regardless of who the victim was.
But I cannot organize this campaign as I would wish to, because the free software movement takes up all my capacity. Would anyone else like to organize this campaign? Can anyone suggests contacts in fandom to whom I could suggest it?
The
NGOs in Haiti
amount to a privileged class that the US uses to rule Haiti and keep the poor people down.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
I disagree with one point in that article: I would not advocate giving the aid money to the Haitian state. I doubt it is capable of running the recovery effort, and I expect it is just as corrupt as the worst NGOs. But that doesn't invalidate the overall point of the article. There are NGOs that are not corrupt, and they can be identified.
In the UK: email your MP again, saying to vote against the Digital Economy Bill if it includes web blocking or disconnection for people who share. And explain what
this article
says about how they are being misled to think the vote won't include anything "controversial". Here's
more information.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Just one Bush forces soldier
will stand trial
for the killing of 24 helpless, unarmed Iraqi civilians who had the bad luck to be present in the neighborhood where a bomb went off. This soldier probably really believes he did nothing wrong, because he had dehumanized the Iraqis and saw their lives as worth very little.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
support Amnesty International
in calling for an independent commission to investigate US torture, and a criminal investigation to prosecute the perpetrators.
For more information.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The US wants a weak global warming treaty even as other countries are prepared for a stronger one. If Obama was honestly seeking Republican support for this bill, he doesn't learn fast. He should have learned from the health care reform battle that this is self-defeating. If he proceeds now with a "bipartisan" approach, that will mean he is either unable to learn, or perhaps (as some suggest) really on the Republicans' side.
The US military have acknowledged that it is useless to fight the Taliban unless Karzai's government improves. This is one of the lessons of the Vietnam War: a government which inspires no loyalty cannot win a war no matter how much US help it gets.
The willingness to talk about the issue is a necessary precondition to doing anything about it. According to The Real War by Jonathan Schell, US officials recognized that the South Vietnamese government was incompetent to do anything, but kept up the public pretence that things were going fine.
However, recognizing the disappointing truth does not imply there is a way to change it. I don't know if there is any way to bring about a non-corrupt government in Afghanistan.
A committee of the UK parliament recognized that there is no such thing as a "special relationship" between the UK and the US. Disclosures over the past year have made it clear that B'liar was so subservient to Bush that the word "poodle" fits. The UK must recognize this too, in order to change it.
Right-wingers in Israel are calling Obama a "disaster" because he objects to constructing colonies in areas Israel calls East Jerusalem. Such exaggeration is a frequent right-wing tactic: to exaggerate how much their opponents disagree with them, in order to make them seem really bad. Consider, for instance, how Republicans call Obama a Liberal.
If mere criticism of a land-grab is a "disaster", I wonder what they will say if the US ever exerts real pressure for Israel to stop the land grab. They will have run out of extreme words.
Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese human rights lawyer, has been contacted after a year of being incommunicado, but he didn't dare say where he was.
High-speed copiers are computers, and store copies of the documents they copy. Others might get access to them.
The full text of a draft of the Anti-Citizen Tyranny Agreement (ACTA) has been leaked.
ACTA is pervasively bad because it is based on the twisted concept of "intellectual property". As this article shows, ACTA's first decision is to treat copyright law, patent law, trademark law, and several other laws together as if they were part of a single issue. That's a fundamental mistake so naturally it leads to a bad treaty.
The Clown regime demands that its drug science advisors reach scientific conclusions in accord with the policy the regime has in mind. It appears mephedrone turns its users temporarily into morons. For me, that is sufficient reason not to use it.
As for the risk of serious harm, whether that is a large risk for teenagers (comparable to driving, for instance) or a small risk is not yet known. Either way, prohibition is likely to do more harm than good. If mephedrone is more dangerous than MDMA, it would be wiser to make MDMA available once again.
The Clown regime wants the power to secretly open people's mail without court orders.
Maliki has decided to reverse the election results by arresting elected MPs from Allawi's party before they are formally seated.
The head of the IPCC accused right-wing politicians of persecuting climate scientists to sabotage research.
A border incident on the frontier of Gaza caused casualties on both sides. The article mentions that Palestinians have fired some rockets in the last few weeks. It doesn't mention that Israeli troops have killed Palestinians in Gaza on a number of occasions too.
Uri Avnery is optimistic that Obama will require Israel's government to end its settlement construction and start on the path towards peace. I am not so optimistic. From this beginning, to reach a point where Israeli policy is conducive to peace means crossing many obstacles, and the Israeli right wing will resist at each one. And even with good will on both sides, making an agreement won't be easy. Still, this is a good beginning.
The push for "three strikes" policies in the Anti-Citizen Tyranny Agreement seems to come from the US.
An EU proposal to censor Internet access, Chinese style, supposedly to "protect children from abuse", has met opposition from a group of survivors of child sexual abuse.
Allawi's secular party got the most votes in Iraq's election, but not enough to govern by itself.
A court ruled that plans to expand Heathrow airport must be reconsidered in the light of the commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
After Democrats in Congress were subjected to threatening violence, a Republican in Congress strained to claim he too was attacked.
Iceland has banned strip clubs, under the influence of feminism gone awry. If the article's description is accurate, this law also bans commercial production of movies with nudity. I think this law is wrong, and the reasons given in this article are clearly not a justification for it.
If many strippers in Iceland are foreigners, it is legitimate for Iceland to bar foreigners from working in those jobs in order to make more work for Icelanders. Either Icelanders would do the work, or the clubs would close for lack of staff. Perhaps the clubs would have to improve the pay and/or working conditions for strippers in order to attract applicants.
That would be good, but it isn't what Iceland has done. If after this the strippers are not "happy in their work", perhaps it is proper to pass a law to help them. (I am not a supporter of laissez-faire economics.) However, what law would really help them? That depends on why they dislike it, and why they do that job despite disliking it.
Are some stripping because they are drug addicts? That's better than stealing because they are drug addicts. I don't think there is any reliable way to treat drug addiction, but I don't think unemployment is one of the recommend methods. Is it that their other options are worse? For instance, being broke? If so, the way to help them is not to ban stripping and force them into worse options, but rather to improve their other options.
Is it that they don't make enough to live on unless they do lap dances, and they don't like doing them? Requiring the clubs to pay strippers better, and other regulations, could eliminate that pressure. It is wrong to ban prostitution, but there is no reason why strippers should be pressured into also being prostitutes.
I think these supposed reasons are excuses, and the real reason is an irrational prejudice.
As regards whether prostitution is empowering or degrading to the prostitute, that depends on the conditions. Working on the street under the domination of a pimp is surely degrading. Being an independent courtesan is empowering compared with working at MacDonalds, and more honest than selling cars. In an ideal world, perhaps there would be no MacDonalds and no cars, but I don't see a reason to try to eliminate courtesans.
B'liar works for
a multinational oil company
that profits from the results of the conquest of Iraq. So do many other political figures including Ross Perot and General Abizaid.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Internet filtering in schools
blocks access to educational materials.
While that article focuses on blockage of the educational materials that prudes would admit, porn is also very important for education. Blocking adolescents' access to porn, or keeping them ignorant of sex in any way, is likely to stunt their emotional growth and make them vulnerable to mistakes that can hurt them badly.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Anti-Citizen Tyranny Agreement includes an organization to effectively supersede WIPO and the WTO in ramping up copyright enforcement. The governments which work for business against their own citizens have a pattern of creating a new international organization for the purpose whenever the existing ones are checked by public opposition. For instance, when the World "Intellectual Property" Organization ceased to be the most convenient tool for ever-increasing copyright and patent powers, the rich countries put requirements about the same laws into the World Trade Organization, using trade pressure on other unrelated issues to bully sell-out governments of other countries into accepting restrictions on their citizens.
But the poor countries allied a few years ago to block further tightening of WTO requirements. So Bush (and now Obama) to seek to create a new and pliable international body in which to do their dirty work.
In 2009, before the election in Aceh, the Indonesian military's commandos assassinated leaders of a party calling for independence of Aceh. Now Obama is considering resuming military aid for those commandos.
Abnormal high temperatures combined with water-losing tree plantations have led to drought in a large part of China.
A specific part of the brain plays a necessary role in making moral judgments based on people's intentions.
US citizens:
sign this petition
for a federal law against discrimination against gays.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell the Democratic Party to
stop supporting anti-abortion
candidates.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Greg Palast reports: Before "progressive" congressman Eric Massa resigned, he got in bed with a vulture capitalist fund that wants to convert the US into its collection agent. It is vicious when the US government attacks poor countries, but it is not a rare event. (See today's note about the US and Aristide.) Indeed, it's a major part of the US Trade Representative's job. The corruption goes deeper than an individual congresscritter here and a senator there; it is fundamental to the system, as long as business has political power.
The US and President Aristide: how it organized a coup, returned him to power with conditions that crippled reform, then organized another coup.
The Chinese government can censor web pages from outside the country, but it is struggling to keep the lid on 400 million Chinese who want more freedom and justice.
The Clown regime is trying to fudge the meaning of "complicity in torture" to evade past and future responsibility, so MPs demand an independent investigation.
US citizens:
sign this petition
asking the senate to pass legislation to reduce global warming emissions. I dispute what that page says about the health care law. Having the medical policy decisions dominated by the insurance companies, and by the pharmaceutical companies which got a favorable deal at the beginning, is no change, and the details of the bill change less than one might have hoped.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
However, none of that concerns the petition itself, so I decided to sign it and I hope you will too.
Senator Dodd pushed his weak banking bill out of committee. This will make it very hard to pass a bill that will weaken the power of the banksters.
Canada has joined the UK and the US in organizing witch hunts against photographers, but it warns against artists too. The fuss about photographers in transport stations is mostly foolish, but not 100%. There's a place in some airports where taking photos is a real concern.
The US and Russia are ready to take a small step in reducing nuclear arsenals.
In Europe: join the opposition to the EU ministers of "culture" and their conspiracy with culture as an industry. The physical activities are in Barcelona, but you can participate from anywhere.
Constance McMillen won in court; her school cannot cancel the prom to punish her and her girlfriend. This is not the end of bigotry in our society, so I hope this won't be the end of her career in fighting it.
The UK has given police the power to enter people's homes to take down anti-Olympics posters.
Protestors in Vancouver faced censorship too.
No country is so free that its citizens can take for granted they are safe from tyranny.
Bill Clinton acknowledged that his decision to send cheap US rice to Haiti
destroyed Haiti's agriculture.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
For the moment, the US should give Haiti as much food as people need. However, next time Haiti's farmers are in a position to plant rice, the US should adopt policies to show them they will be able to sell their crops.
Michael Moore tells more about the flaws of the health care law. For instance, an insurance company will still be able to terminate your coverage when you need an expensive operation. It will cost them, but not as much as the operation would have.
Moore also says his disappointment with Obama. I can say "I told you so", but I'd be happier if Obama had proved me wrong.
Congressman Kucinich explains
how he decided to vote for the health care law despite
disapproving of its basic method.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Tell Nestle to stop supporting deforestation in Indonesia.
Indian dissident Binayak Sen, who criticized the Indian government's war against the tribals whose land contains valuable minerals, has been imprisoned on charges of helping them.
Google's founder Brin presents censorship as a trade barrier in asking the US to act against censorship.
Ten years ago people like me accused the US government of caring more about trade barriers than human rights. Now this has gone from an accusation to a presupposition. Such a government is ipso facto amoral.
Haitian NGOs criticized an international donors' conference about how to reconstruct Haiti which allowed essentially no participation by Haitians.
Angered by the weekly nonviolent protests, the Israeli army declared the Palestinian villages of Bil'in and Ni'ilin "closed military zones". This did not scare the Palestinians or their Israeli supporters.
Amnesty International calls for an
independent investigation into the UK's collusion with torture
by other countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
UK citizens: support the campaign against DRM at the BBC.
Uri Avnery: General Petraeus, by pointing out how Israel's rejection of peace with Palestine endangers Americans. The article is mistaken in treating all American Jews as supporters of AIPAC and the Israeli right wing. A large fraction, perhaps a majority, criticize Israel's policy and want Israel to make peace with Palestine.
Arundhati Roy reports on meeting with the tribals that are resisting all the might of the Indian government that wants to crush them for corporate mining.
Even before the quake, the
US repression of Haiti
was ongoing.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
UK citizens:
Sign this petition
to MP Harriet Harman saying to give the disgusting Digital Economy Bill full debate.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Karzai is negotiating with an important militia of Islamic extremists that is allied with the Taliban. I think this is a positive development. Hekmatyar's extremism is cruel and unjust to women, and his participation in the Afghan government would be a disaster for them; but the existing Afghan government is a disaster for them already, and I do not see that it's sufficiently better than Hekmatyar to justify continuing a war.
Google has defied the Chinese government by routing searches in China to uncensored servers in Hong Kong. Even though China censors access to these servers, this is a step forward because (1) Google is no longer complicit and (2) people can see the censorship is imposed by the Chinese government. The complaints from that government indicate that the change has hit the target.
The only part I do not see is how this relates to the Chinese cracking attacks on Google. But never mind that — it is the right thing to do anyway.
Three cheers for Constance McMillen, who is insisting on the right to wear a tuxedo with her girlfriend at the high school prom. I admire Ms McMillen because she is campaigning against official endorsement for bigotry. She didn't choose which manifestation to campaign against; rather, it popped up in her life, and gave her the option to resist or cave in.
But let us recognize that this issue is important because bigotry against gays is a major injustice — and avoid the mistake of thinking that the importance comes from the high school prom.
The prom is one of the things that people artificially hype themselves into caring excessively about, the way many care more about their weddings than about what their marriages will be like. The prom is an opportunity to show off your popularity, if you have some, or to fail conspicuously. It is natural that those who expect to do well at this game would enjoy the chance. It is also an opportunity to dress up, if you like doing that. Those conditions could make it an enjoyable occasion, but they are no grounds for the fuss people make.
Instead of feeding this hype, we should gently point out that there are more important things in life. If you expect to enjoy the prom, go and enjoy it. If you encounter bigotry there, resist it there. But don't treat it as an important part of your life.
Clinton denounced Israeli settlement construction in a speech to the Israeli hawks' lobby, AIPAC. I am impressed. There couldn't be a clearer way to tell that lobby that the US government is not its puppet.
It seems that Obama has decided not to let the issue drop again, and will continue criticizing the Israeli government for its colonization of Palestinian territory. If so, this could be the beginning (though just the beginning) of what it will take to make Israel make peace.
Thousands of Russians came on the street to protest bad government.
Putin has made serious electoral opposition impossible at the presidential level, and he was quite popular a couple of years ago.
The proposed Anti-Citizen Tyranny Agreement would include a permanent organization to change the rules imposed on us.
Dalits in an Indian village organized and won permission to visit the temple, the hotel, and the barber shop.
But then the caste Hindus
locked the temple against them
and the police attacked them.
[References updated on 2018-04-02 because the old links were broken.]
Under the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are lots of methane. If part of the ice sheet melts away, it will release its methane into the atmosphere, causing a burst of global warming that could melt more of the ice sheet.
If the water under the ice sheet begins flowing faster, that too will increase the methane release.
Human activity is making the Earth's temperature slowly. It looks like we could arrest this rise later if we don't do it now. But sooner or later the rise will trigger a positive feedback loop (this one or another) that will push the Earth to disaster, and we don't know how far away it is. Should we push our luck?
Wal-Mart fires employees for lawfully using medical marijuana,
then tries to
deny them unemployment benefits.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Callous cruelty towards its workers is typical of Wal-Mart and has been ever since it started. If you want to reward and promote that, buy from Wal-Mart.
The influence of the mass media is such that there are people who now follow the "jedi" religion.
US residents: tell textbook manufacturers to resist the Texas demands for right-wing rewriting of US history.
For background.
The UN's former special representative to Afghanistan believes that Pakistan intentionally arrested the Taliban leaders that were willing to consider peace.
Correcting common misunderstandings about Buddhism.
Bibi Aisha husband's family cut off her nose and ears because, by running away from their abuse, she made them feel ashamed.
They deserve to be ashamed. A war against the Taliban for women's rights would be a just war, if we were really fighting it — but we are not. As this article shows, Karzai is not a lot better than the Taliban in regard to women's rights. (Remember the law that forbade Shi'ite married women from various activities without their husbands permission?)
Meanwhile, have you noted how the US political right wing behaves similarly? They attack people who report the US's crimes of violence, saying that they shouldn't make the US look bad.
UK citizens: use this page to write to your MP and demand a full
debate on the "Digital Economy Bill" that the record companies
want to impose on Britain.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The UK is working on guidelines for its agents so that they won't collude in torture, but Clown just broke his promise to publish them.
Detroit plans to turn many nearly-empty neighborhoods into farmland.
The plan is good overall, but I think it is unjust and unnecessary to force people to move. If there are just a few occupied houses in a block, they can make the rest of the block farmland even while people remain in those. There are other places in the US which have a similarly low density of houses, and the inhabitants are happy to have it that way.
If it is too expensive to provide city services to the few remaining houses in a neighborhood, Detroit should de-annex the area, making it into unincorporated land.
The UK police planted informers in progressive protest organizations for many years starting in the mid-90s.
That they infiltrated the G20 protest in London does not surprise me. Recall the statement that someone arrested in at the massive protest in Genoa saw phony "anarchist protestors" armed with sticks getting out of a police vehicle.
An exhaustive study of a week's output of 10 Australian newspapers found that 55% of the stories were planted by PR campaigns.
The Clown regime is trying to "sidestep democracy" by rushing through parliament its law to escalate the War on Sharing (including Internet censorship requested by the record companies). 7 years ago B'liar was in excessive haste to launch another unjust war.
The copyright industry is starting to regret its propaganda term "pirate".
Since I recognized it as propaganda, I have rejected it, preferring terms such as "unauthorized copying" and "forbidden sharing". However, the Pirate Parties are trying a different tack, turning it into a badge of defiance like "Yankee". Maybe this is partly responsible for making the term less appealing as propaganda.
I don't think the propaganda term is dead or ineffective yet, so I will keep on rejecting it. However, for those who want to try to turn it around, it's possible to do that while refusing to use it in ways that help enemy propaganda. Those are when you are talking about unauthorized copies or the people who make them, in the middle of a discussion in which you do not give the terms a positive association.
Journalists caught 10 MPs offering to sell influence in the British government.
The pope says he's sorry about sexual abuse of children by priests all across Europe, but tries to lay the blame on the secular society to avoid any consequences to his church.
The association between supposedly celibate priests and supposedly forbidden sexual practices is nothing new. I have a recording of a Basque folk song in which a woman fends off the advances of a priest. Perhaps what has changed is that priests no longer have sufficient impunity to impose on adults.
The Lib Dems have voted to
officialy condemn the unjust law that the record companies want
to impose on the UK.
The Maoists in Nepal won an election have learned the lessons of the
evils of the Communist states, and from Buddhism. After they won the
election, and the army and oligarchs refused to let them govern, they
are
trying to win power nonviolently using their massive political
support.
I wonder what the Maoists propose to do about Kathmandu's smog
problem. The obvious solution is to ban private cars in the city, and
set up lots of buses and a fixed number of taxis, and I'd expect the
Maoists to advocate this; do they? And what do the inhabitants think
of the idea?
The fact that the US labels Nepal's elected Maoist government as
"terrorist" reflects the dishonest nature of that labelling practice.
The US pins the label on whatever groups it dislikes, whether they are
really terrorists or not. When they aren't, the label is a lie.
Such lies are easy for the US because the designation of "terrorist
group" is made by administrative decision, without the need to charge
and convict anyone of a crime. The state uses this power with a
curious selectivity: Islamic charities are
banned after requesting and scrupulously following government advice
about how to operate, but highly dangerous organizations such as large
banks and insurance companies are left untouched.
Regardless of how honestly or wisely the government uses this power,
The power's existence contravenes a basic human right: freedom of
association. This is sufficient by itself to condemn the US
government as tyranny.
New Zealand has
set up Internet filtering, blocking a secret list of
sites, which some ISPs have imposed on their customers.
Internet users in New Zealand should switch to the ISPs that refuse
to support filtering, even if this means extra expense and trouble.
This is not just a way of escaping government injustice, it is a way
of resisting it.
In the Iraqi election, Maliki's Iranian-style arbitrary banning of
many candidates undermined his pretense to be nonsectarian. The
result is
a split parliament in which no party dominates.
I wonder if Allawi and al-Sadr can make an alliance. Al-Sadr, though
clearly representing Shi'ites, in 2004 tried to restrain the drift to
civil war for the sake of the unity of Iraq.
France is considering
legalizing brothels, with strong public support.
Israel backed down to US pressure and privately
postponed one program of settlement construction in areas annexed
to East Jerusalem.
This concession is not enough to make progress towards peace possible.
That would require a long-term halt to construction of settlements in
the West Bank, not just the current short-period freeze. What is
potentially significant is is that it shows that Obama can stand up to
the Israeli government and make it back down. If he does it a few
more times, he might create a situation where peace is possible.
Short-term thinking
blocked protection of bluefin tuna.
The overfishing industry, which avoided being devastated now through a
ban international trade in bluefin tuna, will face similar devastation
in a few years when it can hardly find any tuna to catch.
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass a law (approved by the House)
requiring factories to switch to the safest feasible process, to
avoid dangerous chemicals.
Here's background on the bill.
The government spares no expense to have TSA goons harass travelers
because it can point to that harassment and say, "See how we protect
you." If half of what they do is for show, they can pretend it protects us.
Measures like this, that would protect us without harassing us, appeal
to the government less. If we are not harassed, how would we know how
safe we are?
With preemptive war and assassination as acknowledged policies, we can
imagine the havoc the US will wreak with
superdrones now being developed.
I take issue with one small point: the use of drones in Afghanistan
against Taliban fighters may be lawful under international law, since
the US troops are there with permission of the Afghan government and
are fighting an armed rebellion. The same might be true in Yemen. I
don't know what to think about Somalia, which has no effective
government
because the US had Ethiopia destroy the one that did exist.
However, I don't think this invalidates the overall conclusions.
Rea Dol
established her school in a former prison with no help from
the international NGOs that supposedly exist to fund such activities.
Now that the school building is ruined, she cannot get tents to hold
classes in. The US is supposed to be providing aid — why is it
hard to bring in enough tents?
The US
plans to "rebuild" Haiti with sweatshops that will pay even
less than sweatshops in other countries. Haitians have already gone
on strike against sweatshops, and the UN "peacekeepers" crushed the
strike.
Other countries need to recognize that the free exploitation treaties
that the US offers them are intended to keep them poor and struggling,
and say, "Even if other countries let you do this, we will not." Even
better, they should sign treaties binding each other to reject these
offers.
Texas voted that school textbooks
should praise Joe McCarthy and say less about Thomas Jefferson
— and that's just the beginning.
Since Texas buys a lot of textbooks, these changes may affect other
schools too.
Kucinich says he
will vote for the health care bill.
Despite my respect for Kucinich, and my agreement with him on what
really ought to be done (a national health system), I might not agree
with his decision. For me, it depends on whether the bill to be
passed includes a public option. This article does not explicitly
say, but I think the answer is no, and that means the bill is a change
for the worse.
US citizens: phone your senator saying,
"Break up the banks so they are not 'too big to fail'."
Here's more info on what's good and what's bad in the Senate bill.
For-profit schools in the US
charge a lot of money and may not deliver what they hint that
the student will get.
Chris Floyd: the "War on Terror" is a system, and its purpose —
to the extent it has one — is to
concentrate power for those who gain power from it.
Unlike Mr Floyd, I am not a pacifist. There is a war in Afghanistan;
that the US military try to kill Taliban does not seem outrageous to
me, though given the nature of Karzai, continuing the war seems
futile. However, whether the CIA should join in the fighting is a
different question.
Starbucks set up an official-looking site to
disinform the public about World Water Day.
Do you really want to buy from Starbucks?
The UK is considering a radical limitation on trash; among other things,
discarding food in the trash would be prohibited.
I am in favor of recycling what can be recycled, but I don't see how
composting is either feasible or useful for people living in
apartments in the city. And from the little I know about composting,
not all food waste can be composted.
There is an
irrational clamor to ban mephedrone in the UK because
it has been linked with a handful of deaths, even though it is not
yet clear whether that was a coincidence.
Even if there is a small danger in using mephedrone, is that a reason
to ban it? Is it more dangerous than alpinism? Perhaps that too
should be banned. Is it more dangerous, for teens, than driving a
car?
Some Muslims have been accused of
conspiring to murder cartoonist Lars Vilks
after taking offense at a cartoon. I have often felt offended by criticism of my views, but people have a right to criticize and even insult ideas they disagree with, so I learned to live with it and Muslims must learn it too. Nothing that people do or say is entitled to immunity from criticism — not even the Church of Emacs.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
An executive whistleblower at Lehman Brothers was laid off a month after telling the accountant about dishonest practices.
Everyone: sign the petition for libel reform in the UK.
Utah has made it a crime for a woman to intentionally cause a miscarriage. Since there would rarely be clear evidence of intention, this means persecution of any woman who has a miscarriage in Utah and that the public does not like.
Colonel Nicholas Mercer
tried
to prevent the torture of prisoners in Iraq, starting shortly after the Bush forces' invasion, but his commanders silenced him and threatened to punish him.
Another article
has some additional information.
[Second reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Clinton acknowledged that the onus is on Israel to make concessions for peace. This is a big step forward in US policy. If the US follows up on it with due pressure, it could lead to peace.
A Chinese local government, which arrested people on the way to get medical tests, tried to excuse the injustice by saying it thought they were planning a protest. Although China continues to call itself "Communist", this sort of collusion between government and business, combined with disrespect for human rights, is more accurately known as Fascism. Fascism occurs in many countries, including the US, but the authorities are usually ashamed if people find out. In China their are often totally brazen about it.
A report from
the protest at Sheikh Jarrah
in Jerusalem. For
background.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The FBI is using Facebook to find criminals. I don't see anything wrong with this, as far as the article describes it, as long as the crimes are real wrongs. Only a stupid criminal would publish information on Facebook, but real criminals (as distinguished from those in detective fiction) are often stupid.
It starts becoming worrysome when this is applied also to absurd "crimes", such as running web sites about the animal rights movement, that really represent the denial of human rights. And when it is applied to investigating dissident groups so as to sabotage their actions. We can hardly count on the FBI's respect for democracy to hold it back from such things.
The UK has proposed large wave and tide power generators. The one step between the construction of sea and wind power facilities and a reduction in carbon emissions is to reduce the generation of electricity by burning coal and oil. This is why the plans to build new coal-powered plants are worrysome.
Palestinians
keep struggling
to build homes, schools and wells in large areas of the West Bank where Israel has forbidden all development.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Israeli colonists in the West Bank did not like having Masab Rabai near their settlement, herding his sheep on his land, so
they called soldiers who arrested him and tortured him.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Now that people around the world have started to pay attention to what human rights groups in Israel say about the violation of Palestinians' human rights, the Israeli government is
attacking these groups at every level:
from calling them terrorists, to cutting off foreign funding, to making all members register with the government, to blocking their supporters from visiting Palestine.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Wikileaks has posted a
plan made by the Bush regime
plan in 2008 to attack Wikileaks by punishing or harming its informants.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Protestors have taken over Bangkok on behalf of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was convicted of corruption. Although Thaksin is the clear choice of Thai democracy, there are grave charges against him. I have no way of judging the corruption charges against Thaksin; it would not surprise me if they were valid, and it would not surprise me if they were a frame-up. I also don't know whether Thaksin authorized the death squads. If he is guilty, it means a dilemma for Thais who support both democracy and justice. Somehow they have to strengthen other parties that support both the common people's economic well-being and human rights.
The US is preparing to remove most of the Bush forces from Iraq. However, some 50,000 "non-combat" troops will remain, and some of them are really combat troops labeled as non-combat troops. But even aside from troops, the Iraqi government will remain more or less under US control, and its oil industry will be controlled by multinational oil companies.
Everyone in the US: Rachel Corrie's parent say: call the White House at 202-456-1111 to say that envoy George Mitchell should visit Gaza, and the US should immediately provide humanitarian aid and building materials to Gaza. Then go
here
to report your call.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
China
condemns the US for violating human rights.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
These criticisms seem generally accuratem, although I cannot check each and every statement.
Of course, China violates human rights even more; many previous notes here document that. But that is no excuse for the US violations.
Israel's insult to Biden, by announcing construction plans in a part of the West Bank that Israel claims to have annexed, is increasing tension with the US government.
What makes these construction plans bad is that they are part of a continuing plan to cement the annexation of part of the West Bank. The insult of announcing the plans just after Biden's visit is a minor detail, in ethical terms. But if the insult creates an opportunity for increased US pressure to stop settlement construction, it could have good effects.
Ireland's principal bishop is accused of pressuring the victims of sexual abuse by priests to promise to keep silent.
Tigers in India are rapidly vanishing due to poaching, while the officials responsible for protecting them show no energy to try to stop it.
I am glad this article mentions overpopulation as a cause. Usually that factor is ignored.
After Hurricane Katrina, when the authorities were more interested in arresting people than saving them, Abdulrahman Zeitoun saved 10 stranded people with his boat. For this he was arrested and accused of being a terrorist.
Pro-government Georgian TV broadcast a hoax report of a Russian invasion, apparently to boost support for President Saakashvili who started the war in 2008 by attacking Russia.
Opposition accuses Maliki's party of
rigging the Iraqi election.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
McCarthyism 2.0: US right wing leaders call defense lawyers "Al Qa'eda"
and say that
"social justice" is a code word for Communism and Nazism.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Kandahar, Afghanistan's second city, is slowly falling under the influence of the Taliban.
Racial profiling is ineffective for catching violent Islamist extremists.
It might be a little more effective for catching violent Christian extremists in the US; perhaps they are all WASPs. Or maybe they aren't.
Humans are causing extinction of species at 100 to 1000 times the natural rate of extinction — far faster than new species evolve.
Karl Rove says he is "proud" of waterboarding.
In addition to the vicious idea that this torture can be justified, he repeats the lie that it was a success.
Compare them with the information in this article.
It shows that torture, whether the acute physical kind that Bush loved or the slow mental kind (brainwashing) that Obama approves, causes lasting mental illness.
It also reports that torture tends to corrupt the victim's memories. Thus, even if the victim is a real terrorist, not one mistakenly accused, and even if he has crucial information, and even supposing torture makes him give that information rather than a false confession, what he says still can't be trusted.
Torture works great for extracting confessions, as long as you don't care whether they are true or false.
People who flee to the UK after being tortured in their home countries are almost always imprisoned there, then refused asylum.
Israel arrests Palestinian children as young as 12, and forces them to sign confessions they cannot read.
The city of Mountain View "protected" elderly Loretta Pangrac from the danger of her unrepairable leaky roof by demolishing her house and billing her for it. Perhaps it is true that Ms Pangrac might have been killed by collapse of part of her house, and then the city could have been sued. But she is not out of danger now. If she cannot afford another place to live, she could die from sleeping under no roof at all. But the city would not be liable if she dies that way. Thus, the city has not protected her, only itself.
A house which is dangerous to live in is a real problem — unlike disconnecting your refrigerator — and something has to be done about it. If it could not be repaired, it would have to be demolished, some day. But why the rush? Surely some temporary makeshift could have made it safe enough for Ms Pangrac to continue living there for her remaining years. Then they could demolish it.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, "Ask Speaker Pelosi to include a public option in the House health care bill."
Cigarette companies are trying hard to encourage smoking in poor countries; they have sued in Uruguay to block pictorial warnings of the danger of tobacco.
US citizens: phone your senators in support of strong regulations on banks and other companies that lend to the public.
The food industry has learned to design foods that make people eat (and therefore buy) more, leading to spreading obesity.
Some Democrats who mistook Obama for a progressive are recognizing his nature.
Big beverage companies are using distraction campaigns to sabotage efforts to impose a tax to discourage consumption of sugar-filled beverages in schools. I doubt that selling smaller portion of soda would directly reduce the amount students drink. They might just as likely buy more portions. A larger number of smaller portions might cost more; this price increase could reduce consumption just as a tax would. But the money would go to the companies instead of to the public treasury. Maybe schools should stop selling sugary drinks.
The vaunted US offensive in the "city of Marja" was a P.R. deception to impress Americans; the city which was supposedly liberated from the Taliban is not a city at all.
The US calls for protecting polar bears from hunting, since global warming and melting Arctic ice is likely to cause their numbers to crash. The goal is valid, but these measures can hardly suffice to protect polar bears if we destroy their habitat. What we need to do is cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The UK bill to defeat vulture funds was blocked through a strange parliamentary maneuver. I don't understand how this maneuver worked, or why they cannot bring the bill to a vote again.
When Israel slapped Biden's face by announcing settlement construction in Jerusalem suburbs that it wants to annex, just after his visit, the timing was only partly an accident.
The EU will support a ban on international sales of bluefin tuna, so the species can recover. I am all in favor of better management of the fish stocks, but experience shows that we must not presume the management will improve. We also must not presume that an attempt at better management will succeed in increasing fish stocks. A ban on international sales may not even be enough; consider the cod of the Grand Banks, which have not recovered despite more than a decade of incomplete protection. It would be safer to ban all catching of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, then apply better management. If stocks increase, fishing could resume.
Un-american extremists such as Liz Cheney are attacking the US government for providing lawyers to people accused of terrorism. I guess Cheney and friends would prefer a system which simply declares people guilty, as Stalin used to do.
European companies are saving up large amounts of carbon emission credits, bought from countries where nobody needed them, so that they can avoid any real emissions reduction under possible future treaties. This is a well-known flaw in the "cap and trade" approach to CO2 emissions: it is too easy to game that system. (Likewise, most "carbon-neutral" business schemes are bogus.) It is much better to put a tax on all emissions. If this is done in an intelligent way (for instance, tax the sale of fuel rather than the burning of the fuel), it would be easy to collect and hard to evade.
The US Chamber of Commerce launders money for businesses, buying "issue" ads while concealing who paid for them.
A bankrupcy examiner says that Lehman Brothers executives misrepresented the firm's balance as it was bought out, and the accountanting firm, Ernst & Young, supported the deception despite warning from a whistleblower. The health of the financial system depends on punishing those responsible severely, especially the accounting firm. Everyone involved there should not be allowed to practice accounting any more.
In Kansas City, everyone who isn't poor has abandoned the public schools, and now half of them have to be closed to save expense. Consolidating the schools is not a bad thing; why waste money keeping open more schools than are needed? But there remains the deeper issue remains how to fund public schools. Many have argued that funding schools from local taxes leads to bad education in areas where people are poor.
A girl wanted to go to the prom with her girlfriend, so the school canceled the prom. The school is trying to manipulate the other students into blaming this girl for the school's decision. "The authorities" commonly use this trick. The response is to explain the trick so students learn not to fall for it.
US citizens:
sign this petition
calling on Obama to name the Democratic senators that no longer support the public option.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Palestinian Authority is adopting a law
forbidding Palestinians from working
in the Israeli colonies in the West Bank. This boycott, entirely nonviolent, is an obvious step, but it will require real sacrifice.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Burma's dictators say they have annulled Aung San Suu Kyi's election as president. Their "law" cannot change the truth, which is that her prior election as president annuls any authority they claim to have.
The UN official in charge of Burma's human rights record called for investigation of the dictators for crimes against humanity.
Theory: congressional Democrats planned all along to pass a bad health care bill.
The theory as stated
has a flaw: it assumes that Democratic legislators planned to be voted out of office. I expect most of them can be bought, more or less, but I doubt they would sell their careers. Nonetheless, it is useful to look in these directions for a theory.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Republican Party's message to its supporters, which presents centrist Democrats as Batman's enemies, is based on a big lie: that these Democrats are "socialists".
Christine Stevens may lose her home because she disconnected her electricity and lived without a refrigerator. We need laws about the quality of housing offered for sale or rent, to protect the public from mistreatment. But if you live in your own house, as long as it isn't dangerous to others, they have no business telling you it isn't good enough.
The European Parliament
voted nearly unanimously
to oppose ACTA. This is a victory, but not a complete victory over ACTA. The European Parliament has limited power.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
It is too bad this article uses the propaganda term "piracy" to refer to forbidden sharing of copies.
A
growing protest campaign
opposes Israel's evictions of Palestinians from East Jerusalem.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Israel has put 30% of Gaza's farmland off limits to the inhabitants, but people there are
engaged in nonviolent protest
too. Nonviolent protests also continue in West Bank towns including Bil'in.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
So the
Israeli government demands
that the Palestinian Authority repress these protests, threatening reprisals if it does not. This clearly shows that Israel is opposed to human rights.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
A Sea Shepherd protestor who boarded a Japanese whaling ship, to conduct a symbolic arrest of its captain, faces charges carrying 3 years in prison. Meanwhile Japanese anti-whaling activists who found whale meat that had been stolen by whaling ship crew, and showed it to the authorities as evidence of that theft, still face trial for "stealing" the meat.
Massachusetts citizens: call Speaker of the House Robert DeLeo, and State Rep. Sanchez, co chair of the Joint Committee on Public Health, and Senate President Teresa Murray, to support HB 2160, the medical marijuana bill. For more info, see mpp.org.
The Burmese generals have invented a legalistic excuse to force Aung San Suu Kyi out of the National League for Democracy.
This illustrates the principle that laws deserve only the respect they earn.
Phishing attacks to get at people's bank accounts are mushrooming. Viruses could also be set up to get people's bank account information. I think the wisest thing to do is avoid online banking.
The UK protested privately to the US about Bush's torture policies, when it found out about them. It made sense to try a private protest as the first step. However, when that protest achieved nothing, the UK went on with its "special relationship" with the torturer. That cannot be excused.
The EU is talking about restricting credit default swaps. This is the right direction to go; any solution to the problem caused by financial speculators must work by interfering with what they can do.
Wikileaks is looking for donations.
Atheist students are offering to trade pornography for religious "holy" books, saying that the latter are more smutty. I like the idea, I just wish they wouldn't endorse the position that pornography is in general bad.
China has
arrested lots of Tibetans
to make sure there cannot be a protest. China is not the only government which preemptively sabotages protest.
Iran
has done this often in the past year and
the UK
has done it too. The European Union has
closed borders
to stop Europeans from coming to protests.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Israel showed its contempt for the US by announcing big extension plan for "settlements" in the West Bank, just after Biden visited Israel.
Israel calls this "East Jerusalem", but that shouldn't disguise the reality.
Americans who organized to provide support to people who want to commit suicide have been arrested. It appears all they gave was advice and logistical arrangements.
It appears that these people are still ambulatory and don't need physical assistance to kill themselves. But they want help with preparations, and moral support.
There are many kinds of suffering which make us say "I'd rather die" when we think about them. Not all of them are fatal in the short term. When these things happen, many of the victims decide they'd rather live after all. But some don't, and they should not be perversely forced to go on suffering — especially if that is forever.
US citizens: sign the ACLU's petition telling Obama to give Guantanamo fair trials instead of military kangaroo courts.
Most of the US troops are withdrawing from Haiti, but thousands remain.
Even a few thousand troops could effectively maintain military control over Haiti's weak government,
Berlusconi's latest viciousness: cowardly harassment of the family of Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered by Russian agents.
European countries are punishing the big banks that caused the financial crisis by excluding them from bond sales.
Any punishment for these banks is good news, but this is not enough. They must be split up into pieces that are considerably smaller.
Lots of Iraqis are voting.
This article makes the election sound like a great success, but the article fails to mention that hundreds of candidates were banned from running. That's not democracy.
Uri Avnery: Israel identifies dubious "holy sites" a an excuse for driving Arabs out of the neighborhood.
Nuclear power plants are found to cause danger to their workers and the people in the surrounding areas.
Renewable energy generation, and increases in the efficiency of using energy, are cheaper as well as safer. As Amory Lovins showed, spending money on building new nuclear plants will mean less reduction in carbon emissions than spending the same money on renewables and efficiency.
Contrasting the attractive fantasy of the movie Avatar with the ugly but real resistance of the Dongria Kondh people to their oppressors.
The CIA's version of waterboarding
used doctors and medical technology to take the victim even closer
to death and still force him to stay alive.
Some victims gave up and tried to let themselves drown.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
If you read this article you will see how cruel the US government is.
39 people who entered the CIA's secret prisons were never heard of again. We they tortured to death? Shot? Are they still prisoners? If the US does not say, that means it has disappeared them. This puts the US in the same class with the murderous generals of Argentina.
General Varela is now in prison. Bush and Cheney ought to be in prison, along with everyone else who participated in the US torture system.
39 people who entered the CIA's secret prisons were never heard of again. Were they tortured to death? Shot? Are they still prisoners? If the US does not say, that means it has disappeared them. This puts the US in the same class with the murderous generals of Argentina.
General Varela is now in prison. Bush and Cheney ought to be in prison, along with everyone else who participated in the US torture system.
Mountain gorillas may survive poachers but their habitat will soon be attacked by humans cutting trees to make charcoal.
This is a consequence of human overpopulation. Where humans are destroying the forest for fuel, they are heading for disaster; cutting down the forest, while it extinguishes gorillas and many other species of wildlife, can at best postpone the disastr a few years, and will make it bigger when it happens. Sooner or later people will have to live with the energy resources they have. The sooner they have to start, the less harm they will do.
Greek workers
plan another general strike about increased taxes and reductions
in income.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The deficit-reducing measures described in this article are all regressive: the burden falls hardest on the poor. Shouldn't the rich bear the same share of the burden, or more? The loss of a given fraction of of income hurts the poor more than it hurts the rich, so the same share of the burden means that the rich would lose a larger fraction of their income.
If the public rejection is strong enough, maybe Papandreou will decide to shift tax to the rich. Or maybe some other party prepared to do so will present itself.
The UK is in the process of blocking vulture funds from their courts; will the US do the same? Liberia should make it a crime to try to collect for a Vulture fund; then its agents could seize the perpetrators anywhere in the world as the US does with suspected terrorists. But, unlike the US, it should give them fair trials.
The Iraqi government
refuses to give reasons
for disqualifying hundreds of candidates in the current election, and says the UN asked it to conceal them. This is no better than Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Several Icelandic banks collapsed in 2008; foreign governments are making threats to pressure Iceland's people to assume the cost, but they seem to refuse to give in. IMF loans come with conditions that put the burden mainly on the poor. To accept one is the problem, not the solution.
German email data retention law was
ruled unconstitutional
in its present form. It is not clear how much less bad the replacement will be.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
On Tuesday, March 9, insurance company CEOs are meeting in Washington DC to plot how to make health care reform even worse. There will be a protest. The march starts at Dupont Circle at: 11:00 A.M. and goes to the Ritz Carlton. I think you can find more info somewhere here.
Women in Falluja are warned not to have children because birth defects are so common there. But the Iraqi government doesn't want this to be studied.
Kevin reports on how
a mall security guard
called him a pedophile as he was taking a photo of his son in the mall, and then called the police on him.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: sign the ACLU's petition for reform of some of the dangerous aspects of the U SAP AT RIOT act.
Many women are terrified of giving birth. I can't see why anyone wouldn't be terrified of something so painful.
Since population growth exacerbates many world problems, if a woman (or a man) is afraid to have children, the best response is help in avoiding it.
Right-wing extremism has become much stronger in the US with help from "tea party" tax protestors. These extremists are right that the US government has attacked our freedom. Bush launched the attack, with the U SAP AT RIOT act, torture, military tribunals, systematic spying, Guantanamo and Bagram prison, but the right-wing extremists don't blame Bush. Instead they blame Obama, who merely supports and continues the evils Bush began.
I suspect that right-wing organizations with lots of money are playing both sides of the game. They supported Bush, and now they mislead the extremists about who to blame.
Scientific criticism of the Climatic Research Unit by the Institite of Physics seems to have been the work of a man whose business does consulting for oil companies.
Contrasting America's pretense of morality with China's out-and-out greed. Is it better to be an unabashedly greedy bully, or to be a greedy bully that pretends to give moral lessons? I think it's a toss-up between lousy and lousy.
UK citizens: support the Open Rights Group in fighting the Digital Evil Bill. This bill has been made even worse; it now includes forced blockage of web sites as part of the War on Sharing.
In Chile,
soldiers protected food in supermarkets from "looters" who were hungry, and shot water cannon at people who needed water to drink. Older roads in Chile survived the earthquake, but newer ones made by private contractors were built badly to save money, so they collapsed.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The spying-industrial complex is spreading FUD about "cyberwar" to excuse redesigning the Internet into a system of control.
The article ironically supports a similar FUD campaign by using the propaganda term "piracy" to refer to forbidden sharing. Perhaps the author did not recognize that as propaganda. Also, it was not nice to us hackers to use the term "hacker" to refer to someone who breaks security.
Hamas, like Israel, denies its war crimes with twisted logic.
US citizens: oppose the expansion of commercial whaling.
US citizens: phone your representative to support the Stop Outsourcing Our Security Act, which would ban use of mercenaries such as Blackwater.
You can also sign
this petition, but a phone call carries more weight.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Climate scientists receive enormous amounts of hate mail when their names become known.
Israeli soldiers
persistently attack Palestinians making video recordings of the
army's attacks on civilians, and even though the army acknowledges
that these recordings are lawful, it does nothing to punish the
soldiers that attack.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your senators to support repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy towards gays in the military.
(I have declined to support some actions for this particular cause because they invited people to praise the US military for "serving their country". They could potentially do so if the US were attacked, but in reality they more often invade other countries. Recent examples include Haiti and Iraq.)
Blackwater has a new alias, Paravant, for doing the same bad things.
US citizens: use this page to tell Obama not to let the Republicans limit medical malpractice claims as part of health care "reform".
I suggest also saying that the Republicans have got too much already and that health care reform without a public option is a change for the worse.
TV "news" shows in the US feature commentators who are paid by corporations to promote certain policies and don't admit it.
Coca Cola Company has been
sued by its workers in Guatemala
for repeated practices of murder, rape, and torture. This is more reason to
join the boycott
of all Coca Cola Company products.
[First reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
World pressure has made Israel suspend a plan to
demolish 22 Palestinian homes
in Jerusalem. Here's more information on (I think)
the same demolition plan.
This does not mean demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem has been stopped. This suspension applies to just one project.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Meanwhile, Israel continues demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza, along with trees and wells.
The US pointedly declined to support the UK against Argentina's demands to for control over the Falkland Islands, This is, apparently, the UK's reward for its slavish "special relationship" in which B'liar had to launch a war of aggression when the US told him to. Apparently the relationship was special only from one side.
Clinton says she wants the UK and Argentina to "talk", but that is wrong advice. The inhabitants of the Falkland islands don't want to be ruled by Argentina, and Argentina has no right to impose its power on them. There is nothing to talk about.
The Israeli Army is
tracking Israeli participants
in Palestinian nonviolent protests and stopping them from reaching the protest area. Interference with freedom of assembly is common among states that are democratic in form but not in substance.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Excess CO2 in the ocean is dissolving coral reefs. By 2100 they are likely to all be gone. This by itself would be a mass extinction. It would also be disastrous for many fish populations, if we have not already destroyed them, and would cause a food crisis for humans.
A mall security guard threatened a man for taking pictures of his child who was riding on a toy train. Note how the security guard magnified his power to threaten the public by telling a policeman a distorted version of what had occurred.
At the investigation into the leaked Climatic Research Unit emails, Philip Jones says the accusations against him are false and that the facts will show this. It definitely should be standard scientific practice to show the software source code used to analyze the data. Not just in climate research, but always.
The
nonviolent Palestinian resistance movement
is spreading even though troops threaten the participants.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Liberian president urges the UK to take action against vulture funds.
Many Iraqis openly
sell their votes,
because they are desperately poor and don't believe it matters who wins the election. President al Maliki is accused of
buying votes with guns.
It is not unusual for political parties in Iraq to hand out guns. In the recent past, most political parties had militias; as far as I know, they still do.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Global warming is changing the composition of soil in the UK.
The "Defense" department broke the law 800 times by spying on Americans illegally — including antiwar groups and Planned Parenthood.
UK citizens:
sign this petition
calling on the UK to publish the draft text of ACTA.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
EU citizens: Help the European Parliament oppose ACTA.
The UK plans to
outlaw open wifi networks
in order to conscript everyone into the copyright police. People should keep their wifi networks without passwords specifically to refuse to serve in the army of the copyright empire.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
CCTV cameras are being sold as a way of preventing crime, but outside of certain special locations, they fail to achieve that goal.
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police shot unarmed people. Then they conspired to lie about what happened. Police attacks against the populace during and after Hurricane Katrina were widespread and organized.
The
nonviolent protests in Bil'in
are going strong after years despite attacks by the Israeli police.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your senators to
support a strong climate
protection bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Democrats' response to one less vote in the Senate is to have the House pass the lousy Senate version of the health care bill.
Since this does not have a public option, it is worse than nothing.
A Republican congressdummy said that the god he worships hands out disabled children as a punishment for having an abortion.
Congress renewed the U SAP AT RIOT act without doing anything to limit the police power it creates.
The UK judges who released information about MI5's participation in the torture of Binyam Mohamed have restored into their judgment the paragraph that effectively accuses MI5 of a dishonest coverup.
There is a suggestion that the officials in charge were not actually lying because they had been kept in the dark about what MI5 agents actually do, then they were not dishonest — but they were incompetent.
One of the newspapers that published cartoons about Mohammad made an ignominious apology to settle a lawsuit which it ought to have stood up to.
An OAS report accused Venezuela's President Chavez of undermining political freedoms and the independence of the judiciary.
Yemen will soon have insufficient drinking water due to population growth combined with other bad habits.
Earlier I linked to an article saying that Chinese crackers attacked Google servers through back doors set up for police to use. It appears this was not true.
A Saudi prince
has bought 7% of Faux News, so his influence now
contributes to the bias of that network.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The right wing in the US is profiting from the anger of downtrodden Americans, while the Liberals are failing to.
It is not true that the left has given up on rage against injustice. You will see plenty of such rage in this site, and in articles that it links to. But it is true that we see little Liberal rage in US politics.
Part of this is that most Democratic politicians have become centrists, and do not aim to do more than make small aleviations of government policy, while accepting its general orientation of serving the corporations. They have no Liberal rage because they are not Liberals.
So the real question is how Liberal rage has been marginalized and excluded from mainstream politics, while right-wing rage directed against mythical problems flourishes. Perhaps it is because the "tea party" groups are operating with concealed funding from the rich people that hope to take advantage of their anger.
The government of Argentina is once again using the Falkland Islands to stir up foolish nationalism.
The inhabitants of the Falkland Islands want British rule, not Argentine rule, and that decides the question. Citizens of Argentina should not let this unimportant issue distract them from real issues of sovereignty, such as the political power exercised by megacorporations, and the use of non-free software in the Argentine government.
The UK has set guidelines for when assisting suicide will not be prosecuted.
But they fail to address the case where someone is so incapacitated that he needs more than secondary forms of assistance.
The CIA briefed congress about how it treated prisoners. What's not clear is whether it explained about torture.
Microsoft
used the DMCA to shut down the cryptome site,
which published leaked material showing how Microsoft facilitates
spying on its customers.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Copyright and censorship have been intimately linked for hundreds of years. This illustrates one of the injustices of copyright law in the US and many other countries today.
Shame on Network Solutions. People should move their business to other ISPs as a punishment for its rolling over.
European pressure for Greece to cut its deficit has led to a general strike.
In the long term, the Greek government needs to spend within its means. But why just now? An economic downturn calls for deficit spending to stimulate the economy; cuts now could imperil recovery.
In the long term, spending within its means does not have to mean that the burden falls mainly on poor and working people.
Cheney's evidence which was supposed to prove torture is "effective" is false in basic facts.
Torture cannot be effective for getting the facts because it makes people say what the torturers want to hear. It is, however, effective for extracting confessions provided you don't care whether they are true.
Sugary drink companies are borrowing strategies from the tobacco companies in their campaign to protect obesity.
The Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook shows just how much info Microsoft will cheerfully give to the police about users.
US citizens: tell your senators to
support Rep. Perriello's bill to end health insurance's exemption
from anti-trust law.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Burma has extended Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest.
The Burmese regime is a dictatorship. Like many dictatorships, it apes the forms of a government of a free country, such as courts, but they do not mean anyone has legal rights.
"Myanmar" is the name that the dictatorship prefers. Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's legitimate elected president, asks us to call her country "Burma", and Reuters is wrong not to do so.
China has imprisoned Xue Mingkai for joining a pro-democracy political party.
Sign this petition calling on Switzerland return the money stolen by Haiti's dictators to the people of Haiti.
Everyone: sign this petition calling on Chevron to accept resposibility for the environmental damage that it did in Ecuador.
Iran arrested a Sunni terrorist leader whom it says receives US support. We cannot presume the Iranian government is telling the truth about this. We also cannot presume the US government is telling the truth when it denies this. So it is hard to know what to believe. However, the independent reports that the US supports Jundallah suggest that the US really is supporting these terrorists. The US supported the coup in Honduras in 2009.
German Jews will send an aid ship to Gaza.
A US academic supported the siege of Gaza as a means to
reduce the birth rate.
A high birth rate often does incline a society towards instability. Everyone would be better off if countries with high birth rates took steps to reduce them. But that is no justification for placing people under siege. The first step to reduce the birth rate is to provide easily available contraception and abortion services; the next step is to encourage upward mobility through education, which tends to induce couples to have fewer children in order to educate them more. Usually that takes care of the problem.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Tell Obama not to use unjust "military tribunals". Everyone suspected of a crime deserves a fair trial, and these are never fair. Even Bush and Cheney, and their torturers, deserve fair trials.
Also phone the White House at (202) 456-1414 to oppose trial by military commission.
Israel wants to
demolish a Palestinian village
in the West Bank to build an Israeli colony. Construction of colonies
contines rapidly
in Jerusalem.
[References updated on 2018-04-02 because the old links were broken.]
Australia is paying people to have more babies even though it doesn't know where to get the water they will need. Australia's population density is low, but it cannot support a higher density. Most of its land is arid and not very fertile. Thus, a long-term plan to increase the population is self-defeating.
I suspect that the real motivation for the policy is racism: that the increased births are meant to be caucasian, and will serve as an excuse for cutting immigration of non-caucasians. This way the policy won't alter Australia's population growth, but it will contribute to world population increase just the same.
Many countries in Europe are trying to encourage births, in the same way. These policies put the whole world deeper in the hole.
The US wants to use the
proposed ACTA treaty
to force ISPs to act as copyright police.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Police in the US are tracking people through their cell phones without bothering to get search warrants. The legal standard for a search warrant in some cases, as described in this article, is pitifully weak: a mere assertion that the information is "relevant" to an investigation. That too needs to be changed. It is no use establishing higher standards only for access to GPS records, since localization without GPS is enough to be intolerable.
This is why I refuse to have a cell phone.
A pregnant Nicaraguan woman cannot get treatment for her cancer because of the ban on abortion. When she dies, her embryo will die too; but since that won't be an abortion, these religious fanatics don't mind.
Rachel Corrie's family is suing the government of Israel for killing her with a bulldozer.
Poland has given specifics about secret CIA prisoner transport and a secret CIA prison. The US continues secret imprisonment under Obama so it is incumbent on freedom-loving governments to spill the beans on the CIA.
Chinese crackers attacked Google accounts using a back door made so the US government can attack Google accounts.
US citizens:
sign this petition
for a good health care reform bill rather than a bipartisan one.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Karzai took control of the election complaints commission, apparently preparing to rig the election for parliament. Karzai can never inspire loyalty which he does not deserve. Fighting to support his corruption is a waste of lives, and the war reduces to a contest for which side Afghans despise more.
NATO apologized for killing some Afghan civilians. This is much better than Bush's approach to such incidents, which was to deny them.
It is impossible to totally avoid civilian casualties in war even with the best of efforts. When the civilian population considers the war necessary, it forgives these casualties or holds the other side responsible for them, up to a point. The crucial question is whether Afghans in general can see in Karzai's corrupt government something worth supporting.
Another photographer was arrested in the UK, this time for "suspicious" interest in a Christmas celebration. Even worse than suspecting someone for photographing a public gathering is the attitude of the police, whereby the exercise of a legal right not to identify oneself is taken as the grounds for another accusation.
But the worst aspect is the blanket power that the police have to label any activity as "antisocial" and arrest people for it.
Ireland is determined to give away oil resources to Shell and uses every legal avenue against protestors who resist the unsafe pipeline.
Local governments in the UK frequently
sue themselves.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A vigorous program of detecting and treating HIV infections could put an end to the spread of the virus and ultimately eradicate it.
The murderers in the Colombian Army, trained by the US School of the Americas, are now killing and threatening the witnesses to their murders.
The story in the film Avatar resembles the real life threat to the Dongria Kondh people in India. A billionaire wants to mine their mountain for aluminum, and probably poison their water supplies in the process.
Right-wing Israeli politicians are looking for a way to attack the New Israel Fund, and the human rights NGOs that criticize government activities and receive support from there.
US citizens: call on the US government
to indict Cheney for arranging torture.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Berlusconi's supporter gave out construction contracts for bribes and sex.
A prominent Sunni Iraqi politician calls for boycott of the elections after many of their candidates were banned.
Massachusetts citizens: sign the ACLU's petition to your state legislators to support SB 931, which would protect against misuse of the police "fusion center".
Obama wants to make new nuclear warheads. I continue to be amazed at how Obama proposes to give things to the Republicans on the faith that they will give something back, without even making a particular deal. It has to be a front for something else.
In the US: send a message to the Japanese Embassy in support of the Greenpeace activists who are being framed for exposing the smuggling of whale meat.
Obama is trying to give handouts to the builders of nuclear reactors, but
the price keeps going up.
Tritium is not particularly dangerous, but the other points are valid.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Barrie Sheldon dares the UK to prosecute him for bringing his wife the drugs with which to kill herself at the last moment she would still have been able to.
US citizens:
contact your senators
on Feb 24 in support of health care reform with a public option.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The EU is considering getting 10% of its fuel from palm oil, which would devastate rainforests and raise worldwide food prices. Biofuel will be a great idea if and when it can be made from plant waste or weeds, but cultivating crops for this purpose is stupid (or worse, corrupt).
Deep water trawling is devastating the ocean bottom.
UK police are investigating allegations that UK agents colluded in torturing Shaker Aamer, who is now in Guantanamo.
A dirty deal with Goldman Sachs enabled Greece to disguise its growing debt, and maybe other countries too.
A South African was
arrested because he gave the finger
as the president was passing by.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A new law prohibits credit card companies from suddenly raising interest rates. Citigroup hopes to evade the law by using different words to describe its policy.
A school gave laptops to its students and used the cameras to watch them at home. Schools have no business trying to control what students do out of school, even if they find out about it without spying. But the deeper lesson here is about nonfree software.
If you don't control the software on a computer, you don't know what it can or can't do. In this case, the school used its limited control to turn the computer into a spy camera. But the ultimate control over that computer's software is in Apple's hands, and Apple could always do the same.
Making companies responsible for their environmental damage would take 1/3 of their profits.
The Humane Society of the US faces a corporate-funded smear campaign.
Censorship has won a major victory in the US as a man goes to prison for drawings that depict children involved in sex. The proponents of censorship used to say they were concerned about the abuse of real children in the making of photos and videos. That excuse was, evidently, a lie.
An oil business front group is suing to stop the EPA from acting to reduce carbon emissions. Oil companies continue funding their attack on climate science.
Sarkozy said France will forgive Haiti's debt. I am not sure whether this means all of it, or just the part that France owns. Either way, it is a step forward, but France should pay back the ransom that Haiti paid for the freedom of the slaves.
BBC presenter Ray Gosling was arrested for murder; the police are following an inhuman idea of ethics.
It looks like Israel sent an assassination team to Dubai carrying false passports from European countries.
An industry lobbying group aimed sabotaging California's carbon emissions reduction law is so deceptive that it even fooled its some of its own contributors.
NATO says the Taliban are using civilians as human sheilds. I am skeptical of the accusation, since the Taliban are neither depraved nor stupid. Surely they know this could make lots of Afghans want to fight against them.
In war, it is easy to dehumanize a foreign enemy; for instance, plenty of soldiers in the Bush forces did not care if any Iraqi lived or died. It is much harder to think that way of your own people.
So I wonder if there is any proof of the claim.
Because the US militarized its "aid" to Haiti, a lot of effort went into maintaining the troops and little into helping the people there.
Google added a "neat feature" that
published people's email contacts.
This could mean imprisonment for dissidents that use gmail. Maintaining your list of contacts on Google's server put you at risk, because Google decides what to do with it. Even without any malice it can hurt you badly.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
"Settlers"
are still building
their "settlements" in the West Bank despite a government order to stop. As Uri Avnery predicted, the "settlement freeze" has not succeeded in halting the expansion of these colonies. However, for Israel to show a serious intetion to make peace, it is not enough to cease robbing more West Bank land and water here and there. It must give back what it has taken.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
A UK radio celebrity says he killed a lover, at that man's request, when the latter was dying of AIDS and in great pain. But he refuses to tell the police details, such as who it was, that might enable them to prosecute him for this. Right on! We have no duty to cater to the sadists who want to force people to die slowly in pain.
US citizens: phone your senators and say, "Pass real health care reform, with a public option, using the reconciliation procedure that blocks filibuster."
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Sign this petition opposing Uganda's proposed law to execute gays and their friends.
Everyone:
sign this petition
calling on Toyota to stop lobbying against automobile safety regulations.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The US has given up on negotiating with Iran without really trying it. The Iranian regime fully merits Clinton's criticism. (I only wish the Obama regime were in a better position to criticize others.) But that is a different question from whether the broad negotiations would be a good idea. Nixon's approach to China still seems to have been a good idea, even though the Chinese state was a monstrous dictatorship (and remains a dictatorship now, albeit less bad than in the 1970s).
It's true that subsequent US policy towards China was stupid and has put the US in a position of great weakness, but that was a separate later decision. That later decision is why China's support for Iran makes the US threats of sanctions empty bluster, and Iran knows it.
US health insurance costs could already be in a
"death spiral"
that will force nearly everyone out of the system.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Ms. Joya, elected to the Afghan parliament and suspended for saying the Afghan government and NATO had no clothes, says that NATO's military strategy is absurd and will only hurt civilians.
Fanatical American Christians are accused of fomenting the persecution of gays in Africa. This is an example of Christian Cruelty.
Obama wants to waste $50 billion building nuclear reactors. It is another handout to business, disguised as a way to reduce carbon emissions. It might reduce carbon emissions, but that money could do a lot more so if spent differently. The "broad-based support" this article speaks of must come from legislators "influenced" by the companies that are going to get the money.
The Obama regime kidnaps and disappears people frequently in various countries, taking them to Afghanistan for torture and refusing to identify them as prisoners. While al Qa'ida is more overtly vicious than the US government, I doubt that it does as much evil as the US government, which has greater means and can operate aboveground.
The EU is pushing Greece to impose more sacrifices, but apparently the rich people will not have to share in them. The VAT burden, like a sales tax, falls mostly on non-rich. They could instead increase income taxes on high income brackets.
Heroin users are dying due to contamination of the heroin with anthrax. These people are casualties of prohibition, just like those who die of overdoses. If Heroin were legal, at least for addicts, it would be uncontaminated and its strength would be predictable. That would not make using heroin a wise thing to do, but it would avoid unnecessary added harm.
Iraq has ordered all former Blackwater employees to leave the country.
As bluefin tuna are being overfished and the population is dwindling, there is a move to restrict trade in tuna.
A major Iraqi political party threatens to boycott the election due to the banning of many candidates.
Japanese Greenpeace activists found and reported whale meat that had been diverted by a whaling ship crew. They were arrested on false charges and subject to interrogation which is essentially torture.
Uri Avnery: clumsy falsified accusations against the Palestinian Authority leadership, meant to put pressure on President Abbas, are actually a boon to Hamas. The question that ends the article hints that Israel wants to boost Hamas, so it can cite Hamas as an excuse to continue annexation rather than making peace.
Vancouver's poor protest against the harm done by the Olympic games. Gord Hill: Why protest Vancouver's 2010 Olympics?
The hugely hyped offensive against the Taliban took the objective easily, because the Taliban followed guerrilla doctrine and scattered instead of resisting. This is not a victory, just an exercise. The Taliban can fight just as easily somewhere else, and they will probably move back in.
The chief of MI5 says it did not try to keep the public and parliament in the dark about the UK's collaboration in torturing Binyam Mohamed and other prisoners. At the same time he presents arguments to justify such a cover-up. Evans' argument, that if the UK's crimes became known then it might be criticized for them by enemies, is not valid. It rests on the premise that the UK always deserves to triumph, and therefore should escape the due consequenes of its conduct no matter how heinous.
Every criminal would like such a "get out of jail free" card, and none deserves one. If the UK government wants support so it can triumph, it must first reform its conduct so that it deserves support, by punishing its torturers. Then, while on parole, it must avoid the company of other torturers (such as the US) until they too reform.
Evans' argument is invalid, but the fact that he made the argument is very significant. Attempting to justify a coverup effectively admits the coverup took place, which means he was lying when he denied it. As long as the UK claims coverups are justified because it is entitled to a good reputation despite bad conduct, no one will believe its denials — of anything.
Usman Saddique was charged and then kept in prison or near house arrest for over three years based on evidence that was totally insufficient to prosecute him. Saddique was acquitted by the judge because there was no evidence that the CD which included bomb-making information was his. But suppose it had been his — would that matter? Should people be imprisoned just for having general information in their possession? This sort of censorship is more dangerous than terrorism.
I received an anonymous email announcing denial-of-service attacks against Australian government sites as a response to censorship there.
I have no other information. I don't even know whether the attacks referred to are actually taking place. If they are, I am sure the government of Australia will want to punish the people who did this. Without knowing more, I cannot judge whether I support that.
What is clear is that censorship poses a greater threat to Australians in the long term, and the ones Australia really needs to punish are the censors.
A state that practices censorship puts itself in the same category with China and Tunisia, and deserves the same amount of loyalty.
UK officials are going all out to bury the truth that the UK colluded in the torture of Binyam Mohamed. It is funny how each point at assurances from the other, as if it were unthinkable that any of them would lie, while they are visibly going all-out to suppress the truth.
Forgiving Haiti's unjust debts is not enough. The rest of the world owes Haiti reparations for the poverty that it imposed on Haiti by collecting debt payments for almost 200 years. Any debt that a nation undertakes in a corrupt fashion should be automatically repudiatable.
Print out and post
this Greenpeace "wanted" poster.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Imprisoned women facing possible future deportation from the UK are on hunger strike because of the squalid conditions of their prison.
Republicans planned to delay health care reform, now criticize the Democrats because it has taken so long. Most of today's Democrats are too right-wing for me to admire or support, but this shows the total dishonesty of the Republicans. Their party is nothing but a lie.
San Francisco invites people to take toxic sludge from sewage treatment and put it on their lawns and gardens. The claim that Alzheimer's disease is caused by a prion is a new hypothesis that has not been established, so we should not presume it is true. But there are plenty of toxins and drugs that end up in sewage, so we can hardly treat the sludge as safe without checking what they do.
After rain in Haiti, large numbers of poor Haitians protested because they have no shelter.
Everyone: call on Google not to make a deal with the NSA. We can't trust the US government to use the information it collects only for good purposes, and neither can we take for granted Google will do so. So it is important not to give Google so much information. To prevent this, (1) don't identify yourself when you use Google services (other than mail, if you use that), and (2) contact Google the servers from computers that aren't specifically yours.
It is also important to use Noscript to block the non-free Javascript programs that Google services try to install into your browser.
You can also use scroogle.org to anonymize Google searches.
Greece may be the first EU country to be subject to an IMF austerity program. These programs typically require people to pay for medical care and education, which cuts off poor people from them, much as poor people in the US are partly cut off.
An internal Chinese report shortly after the failed Copenhagen talks accuses the rich countries of callously dividing the poor countries. To prevent climate disaster, including the likely submergence of areas inhabited by tens of millions of people, will require China and other large developing economies to cut emissions. The Chinese report is based on refusal to recognize this.
However, China is not alone at fault. Chinese accusations against the US, Canada and the EU seem valid to me. Unless these states show a strong willingness to make sacrifices, they cannot convince China, India and Brazil to make sacrifices. And the sacrifices must not spare the wealthy and fall mainly on everyone else.
Iran's dictators crushed protests with massive preemptive police action. Iran has the form of a democracy, but it is in fact a dictatorship. The challenge for Iranians who want freedom will be to keep the idea of freedom alive: to continue thinking in terms of replacing their evil regime with a real democracy that respects human rights until a chance to do so arises.
We in the US face a similar challenge. There is a tiny amount of democracy in a system principally controlled by business. The regime does not respect human rights, and dedicates itself to unending wars and occupations. But now that not many Americans are dying in those wars, most Americans can fool themselves with the idea that the soldiers fighting them are "serving their country" and that they should "support the troops".
Many poor countries have sold or leased huge tracts of land — sometimes entire regions — to companies that intend to chase off the inhabitants. I cheer on the people that fight to cancel and annul these deals, but we need to look beyond the immediate problem to its underlying cause: global overpopulation.
It is getting harder and harder to find enough of various things, so the rich try to buy them and the poor fight for them. It is good that human population growth is slowing, but it isn't stopping, and it will be harder and harder to find enough for an increasing number of people.
Jill Stein is running for Governor of Massachusetts on behalf of the Green Party. I am not sure what Deval Patrick refers to when he says he "created jobs", but my guess is that it refers to the same sort of policies to draw jobs away from other states, by pandering to business, that are criticized by Professor Bowles.
The Israeli supreme court is trying to prevent
illegal arrests of foreigners
visiting the West Bank, but the police keep doing them. It's worse for Palestinian nonviolent activists; they get
arrested and beaten.
[References updated on 2018-05-13 because the old links were broken.]
To do good science using computers requires releasing the source code.
The Israeli government is
attacking NGOs that defend human rights
and attacking their funding. There are, however, no complaints about foreign funding for building colonies in Palestinian territory.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Israel is also arresting Palestinians who
defend the rights of Palestinian prisoners.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
A high school principle who refused to let the army advise teachers has
received death threats
for it.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The TSA had a student
arrested for flash cards
for learning Arabic, plus a book he was reading.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident who helped write Charter 08 which called for human rights in China, has been sentenced to 11 years of prison.
Issan Hamdan needs medical treatment to avoid paralysis, but
Israel will not allow him to travel out of Gaza
to get it. Hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza
have been killed
in this way.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush forces released a journailst who was held prisoner for 17 months without charges.
The most effective way for the US to protect itself from terrorism is to stop its interventions in the Middle East which fuel terrorism.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and insist on public funding of congressional campaigns in the bill to protect politics from business money.
Obama's deficit spending on war and the military is
driving the US into overwhelming debt.
Deficit spending is needed now, to get out of the recession; but if what we buy with our money is nonproductive, we will end up with no way ever to repay the debt.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
To see where this leads, look at what external debt has done to Haiti across 200 years. The US could end up in a similar situation of disaster.
Spain has
changed the law
which permitted prosecution of crimes against humanity and war crimes around the world, to protect the officials of the Bush regime. In order to protect itself, the US exercises its influence to protect mass murderers everywhere.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
China has imprisoned a number of journalists who investigated the faulty school construction that enabled the Sichuan earthquake to kill so many children.
The FBI continues trying to impose tracking of internet connections in the US.
A Chinese study recognized that farms in China produce more pollution than factories.
Some big businesses that use oil are now warning that peak oil is essentially here, masked by the recession, and will bring high oil prices in a few years. It is no surprise that companies that use oil are quicker to recognize the issue than the sellers. The producers are hoping for a windfall if there is an oil shock, whereas the consumer companies would lose.
Meanwhile, Amory Lovins claims conservation activities are already on track to prevent oil demand from rising as high as it did before, so even if we have passed the peak in oil extraction, it won't cause a shock. If that is true, it will be a pleasant joke on us all. But we may still have to watch out that we are not shifting to dirtier fossil fuels such as coal and tar sands.
The Obama regime reassures us that it will be very careful before assassinating US citizens.
A policeman in the UK was convicted of falsely accusing a citizen. It is good to see a policeman get punished for making a false accusation. I wish I could expect conviction to become the usual fate for lying policemen, but I think this will be a special case. First, because the policeman just convicted was an outspoken member of a minority group. The police command might have pressured the IPCC to act against him, but usually it would do the opposite.
The second thing that makes this case unusual is that the citizen who was falsely accused in this case was just a victim, and the accusation was part of a private vendetta. If the victim were a dissident, regarded as an enemy by the police in general, they would close ranks to protect the lying officer.
President Rajapakse of Sri Lanka arrested the rival candidate, who claimed his defeat was due to election fraud. I don't know if there was any independent monitoring that could tell us whether the accusation of fraud was valid. Rajapakse was accused by a famous editor, posthumously, of arranging the editor's murder so it is not implausible he would make a false accusation.
India's government is trying to impose cultivation of genetically modified eggplant against strong public opposition. I cannot evaluate the claims about safety of eating these eggplants, or about the danger of contaminating other varieties. Any studies that were funded by Monsanto should simply be ignored since they are likely to have been corrupted. What I can say is that forbidding farmers to breed their own crops is unjust, and the financial dependence it causes is likely to cause thousands of them to kill themselves.
Israel killed many civilians in Gaza using drones which are now being sold to many countries. Some of these countries are even more likely to assassinate their own citizens than the US.
As states and countries continue giving handouts to business in a futile effort to convince them to move jobs from other states, economist Professor Bowles explains how
reducing inequality is the path to prosperity.
It should be obvious that when all governments compete to attract jobs, the main effect is a handout to business, with little benefit to anyone else. I suspect part of the reasons politicians don't see this is that they are happy to be able to give a handout to business and pretend it is for the sake of jobs.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Top US military officials spoke in favor of allowing gays to serve in the military.
I hope this gratuitous prejudice will be eliminated. The change will set an example for eliminating prejudice in other circles, and will give straight soldiers a chance to get to know gays and become comfortable with them.
However, the most important change to make in the US military is to make it start serving the country instead of serving for the conquest and subjection of other countries.
The UK is using drone missiles increasingly in Afghanistan.
Drones could be less dangerous to civilians than manned airplanes, since the drone offers the chance to wait and watch for a longer time.
That doesn't imply that the drone attacks are not killing civilians. If we want to know whether an army's operations have killed civilians, the army's PR officers are the last ones in the world we should trust. What do others say about US and UK drone attacks in Afghanistan?
British Atheists have objected to a judge's decision to give a convicted man a lesser sentence because he is religious.
US citizens:
sign this petition
to redirect government funding from coal and nuclear electricity into renewable electricity and efficiency. The key point is that nuclear power is so inefficient that no one will build it without a tremendous subsidy. If we put the same funds into renewable power and energy efficiency, we will reduce emissions more, and with less danger and less risk.
[More info on the bad proposal]
|
[More info on the issue]
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
European citizens: call your MEP and say, "Support the civil liberties committee: don't hand over all our bank data to the US." Note how the US threatens "bad relations", just as China threatens "bad relations" when world leaders meet with the Dalai Lama. Both of those countries deserve, in response, to get the finger. The US must learn to respect people's rights.
I am sure European countries will cooperate on those occasions when the US presents solid grounds to investigate someone.
I distribute zero-dollar bills as a joke, but zero-rupee notes in India are a serious way of fighting corruption.
Congress set up a panel to monitor how "anti-terror" measures affect civil liberties, but Obama has not bothered to fill it. Since he supports torture, imprisonment without trial, and even assassination, and since he secretly authorizes illegal surveillance, perhaps he thinks this panel could only annoy him.
Many poor families in the UK have been lured into a cycle of inescapable debt. The measures that the government proposes are inadequate either to solve the present problem or to prevent recurrence. Poor people's debts to predatory lenders should simply be canceled. That will help the poor, and discourage predatory lending in the future.
Medical evidence for danger from cell phone microwaves is quite strong, if you throw out the industry-funded studies.
Obama claims the
power to order the assassination of US citizens, and
the US is now trying to assassinate one, apparently for exercizing his
constitutional rights to freedom of speech.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Obama is starting to talk tough regarding the banksters, but his support for people such as Geithner and Bernanke undermines that stand.
Secret funds are already flooding into the US Chamber of Commerce to make Congress a sock puppet for business.
The Obama regime
defends illegal FBI spying
and illegal torture, using all-purpose excuses copied from the Bush regime.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The strength of the US intervention in Afghanistan is hidden by
the use of mercenaries.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Fraud charges were filed against Bank of America and its former CEO.
Homeopaths cited some scientific papers as granting validity to homeopathy, but the authors of those papers say the words they wrote were taken out of context and twisted.
BAE, a major UK arms company, has admitted fraud, but in exchange the US and UK will not prosecute anyone. This is better than what happened when B'liar intervened to protect it from prosecution (I guess it was considered "too big to criticize"), but it is still not justice.
The Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland have agreed to a power-sharing deal. I rejoice in this agreement, as a step towards peace. However, there is one aspect which calls for criticism: there is something sick about foreign investment as a reward for anything. The investments will produce wealth, and which will mostly belong to the foreign investors, and the local people will get the leftovers. Peace in Northern Ireland is a good thing in its own right — not because of these leftovers.
Join the protest in Berne against the Berne Copyright Convention on Feb 10.
German text of the same announcement.
Press release in English.
Press release in German.
Iraq's oil production has come close to prewar levels, but the oil companies still face obstacles.
A 16-year-old girl in Turkey was murdered by her family for conversing with boys.
Wal-mart creates phony grass-roots activist groups.
John Pilger:
the US under Obama is an Orwellian state.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
I think the article is too harsh on some of its interpretations. Given the limited ability of the US to influence Afghanistan, it may not be able to protect women's rights there without occupying the country. The Viet Cong were thoroughly infiltrated and controlled by Vietnamese Communists, and after their "victory" over the corrupt dictatorship of South Vietnam they handed it over promptly to the Communist dictatorship in Hanoi. Most of all, I doubt that the Bush regime intended Iraq to fall apart into three groups that fight each other. It seemed that the bushmen were surprised when this happened, and it got them in hot water in the US.
However, I think that the facts about Afghanistan that the article cites are important and the arguments based on them are strong.
As Obama plans to spend billions to build nuclear plants that produce dangerous waste, Amory Lovins explains that it is far more effective to spend the same money on renewable electric generation, and it avoids feeding nuclear weapons proliferation.
National Public Radio's right-wing bias can be seen by comparing its obituaries for Howard Zinn ad William Buckley.
I used to donate to the local NPR station in the 90s. Then I noticed its increasingly right-wing attitude, its hostility towards Clinton for the wrong reasons — and the commercials (which they call by another name, but they are still commercials). So I stopped donating.
A hospitalized patient who appeared to be a mindless "vegetable" is able to answer questions "yes" and "no" via a machine that detects brainwaves.
The article suggests that up to 40% of the people who are apparently unthinking may be conscious but unable to communicate.
This is pertinent to the issue of whether to keep those patients alive and whether to give them a painless death. If they are conscious, we must ask them what they want.
However, it doesn't follow that people were wrong to assume in the past that these patients were unconscious. We need to make the best decision we can based on the information we can obtain.
While arresting a Palestinian nonviolent activist, Israeli troops told the family, "You have one minute to get of the house where your children are sleeping, or we will blow it up." Israel considers
nonviolent protestors an intolerable threat
because it cannot pretend to have the moral high ground with them.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The Supreme Court will consider the case of genetically modified alfalfa.
Israeli soldiers
shot Tristan Anderson at a nonviolent protest
and left him in a permanent coma, then lied about him. The police hardly bothered to investigate this crime.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
India's surrender to globalization means that 70% of children are malnourished; the poor get no medical care and almost no education.
Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, says that Israel must make peace with Palestine or turn into an apartheid state. Others such as Desmond Tutu say Israel already has established more or less an apartheid state, but recognizing the possibility is better than no recognizion at all. However, acknowledging the need for peace with Palestine is one thing; willingness to stop taking Palestinians' land is another.
The Iraqi government has reversed its decision to ban 500 candidates for office.
US citizens: sign this petition in favor of the Cape Wind offshore wind-powered electric generation plan.
Il Ducino has constructed another excuse to evade trial on many corruption charges.
The Goldstone report, which documents Israeli and Palestinian
war crimes in Gaza,
will not go away.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Egypt's
participation (under US demands) in the siege of Gaza
has brought its dictatorial government into contempt. Since the opposition in Egypt is Islamist, it would not respect human rights either, so Egypt has a choice between two unjust regimes. I am not sure which one would be more cruel and restrictive towards Egyptians, but it's clear that the present government is the more contemptible of the two.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
If the US does not want an Islamic regime in Egypt, it ought to help Egypt find a way out from participating in the siege.
The Israeli army drives Palestinian shepherds off their land, in support of a nearby colony, disregarding the Supreme Court.
Clare Short, who opposed the invasion of Iraq from within the UK cabinet, says that B'liar lied to parliament and kept the cabinet in the dark.
Australia
censors videos
that show female ejaculation — or small realistic breasts.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
UN miner removers found an air-dropped bomb in a building in Gaza, showing that the Israeli army lied about attacking it.
After a report showed that the FBI persistently lied and trampled the weak legal rules that limit surveillance, Obama secretly legalized the lies. Is it time to start speaking of the Obama regime?
People involved in climate change negotiations say it is hopeless to get a treaty in 2010. It is true that national policies have more direct influence on reductions in emissions. But given the tendency for business interests to corrupt and deceive national governments, it will take a strong treaty to make nations implement truly effective policies.
Governments can set up strong international measures when they make it a priority. For instance, many governments decided to take power away from the citizens and give it to business, so they set up the World Trade Organization, which has the power to punish countries that disobey demands from business. If governments were equally motivated to prevent climate disaster, they would take equally strong measures for that.
Civilization has fallen into a trap, the trap in which the most greedy has the most power, and lacks the willpower to pull itself out of the trap even to save itself.
Supermarket refrigerators use gases that contribute heavily to global warming.
Until the day of the superbowl or when CBS changes its decision. In the US:
sign this petition
calling on CBS to apply the same rules on advertising to conservatives as it does to progressives, and thus reject an ad from an anti-abortion right-wing group.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The US could find 85 billion to bail out AIG, but refuses to forgive Haiti's 1 billion dollars of debt. Bad decisions like these come from bad goals.
The doctor whose mistaken claims made many people fear measles vaccine has been found to have carried out unethical experiments on children.
Western countries say they will give aid for the third world to cope with their CO2 emissions, but they plan to take it away from other aid.
US citizens: Sign the EFF petition demanding true network neutrality, without a big loophole.
The UN has begun talking with the Taliban.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to call for public financing of election campaigns.
Douglas Robinson
has been arrested 96 times in 2 years, but he always
gets released because the jail is full and he is no threat to anyone.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Almost all of these arrests were for actions that at worst annoy someone. Is it right to arrest people for such things?
The phone company Rogers in Canada is forcing Android phone users to give up all control of their phones, cutting them off if they don't accept imposed software changes.
If all the software in the phone were free, users could program it to pretend that they have installed the patch while continuing to run software that does not restrict them. I wonder if this is possible now.
B'liar spoke in the Chilcot inquiry, insisting on all the lies he told before.
This is because the inquiry lacked the skill to catch him in the lies.
If the inquiry had an experienced prosecutor, it might have achieved something.
The "mass overdose" protest against homeopathy campaigns against support for bogus medicine from the state and from pharmacies.
These sugar pills are not totally inactive; the sugar can make you fat.
US citizens: sign
the petition in favor of Rep. Grayson's bills to
make it hard for corporations to give money to political campaigns
or secretly help them.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
This is good, public financing is good, and the two together are even better.
It is not widely known that
Haiti has oil.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Is that why Bush launched a coup against Aristide?
A UN report says that "proxy detention" (a.k.a. "extraordinary rendition") is tantamount to torture, and secret detention is equivalent to "disappearing" people. Although this report is directed at the UK, it is clear that the same conclusions apply to the US. It is appropriate that this UN committee was set up to investigate the disappearances practiced by Pinochet, since his regime was installed by a coup organized by the US.
I rarely watch movies, but I watched and enjoyed
Nasty Old People,
which is released for download and redistribution online (
more info
). Hollywood movies tend to hammer each point in, and underline it with music that says, "Watch this, this is very important!" Nasty Old People is the opposite: most of the points are stated very quickly, and crucial connections are stated by implication. Perhaps a little too much so. But it is still better than most of Hollywood.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
UK police used "anti-terror" powers to justify their interference with
people making a children's TV program.
The outrage is not that the police thought a hair drier was a gun when seeing it from far away. The outrage is what they did when they knew it is a hair drier. They didn't say, "Sorry, we thought you were carrying a gun, but you're not, so carry on." Instead they invoked "anti-terror" powers, obviously too broad, and gave the TV presenters a warning, as if the mistake were their fault.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
That's what's dangerous about police these days. If they make a mistake about you, they hold you as the victim responsible for the mistake.
A corporation announced
plans to run for Congress,
demonstrating that "government by the people" has been replaced with "government by the corporations."
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Making the region of the Chagos Islands a marine reserve would help many species survive, but no one consulted the Chagos islanders about it. They have not given up hope of returning to the home they were kicked out of. If they return home, and practice traditional fishing methods, the reserve will still function as long as nobody else can fish there. I hope that these two campaigns can join together.
Bush regime torture
continues under Obama.
He has banned only some torture methods.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
NATO is pressuring Karzai to act to reduce corruption, and Karzai is resisting with all his might.
China accused the US of hipocrisy for criticizing Chinese censorship. The Chinese argument is fallacious when it equates all political dissent with promoting terrorism. Rumors are the only way to spread the news in China when officials suppress it, as they often do. But the US is flawed in that regard too, since the corporate media keep most Americans unaware of how the government works for the corporations against the people. The US is also using a double standard by failing to criticize "free" countries for their censorship.
Both the US and China are insulting us hackers by using that term to refer to people who break security.
A thoughtful study of prospects for peace with the Taliban.
Frances Inglis may have been too quick to give up on her son's chances of regaining consciousness. By the time she actually killed him, there was more basis to conclude his case was hopeless. It does happen on rare occasions that someone comes out of a coma after a long time, but the probability is low.
It may be that Tom was not conscious enough to feel pain. If so, his death was not urgent. It would have been better to wait longer. But, given that the system was unwilling to offer Tom Inglis anything but death from hunger and thirst, I cannot criticize Ms Inglis' for taking action to avoid that.
Australians: support the blackout campaign against Internet censorship.
Doctors trying to reexamine the suspicious "suicide" of Dr. Kelly found the the UK government has sealed the records more than usual. This fuels suspicion that the government murdered Dr. Kelly to silence him.
Kay Gilderdale was found innocent of attempted murder. She had helped her daughter commit suicide.
Everyone: sign this petition to cancel Haiti's debt.
Microsoft executives tried to excuse Chinese censorship by saying it is "limited" and that wizards can get around it. It is true that wizards can get around the censorship, especially if they have help from western friends. But only a tiny fraction of Chinese internet users know how to do that; as a result, Chinese censorship achieves its goal of suppressing political opposition in China.
A study casts doubt on UK police claims that searching lots of people on the street for no specific reason has cut down on knife crime. In the 90s, New York Mayor Giuliani imposed many practices that violated civil liberties and claimed they were responsible for a big decrease in crime. But other cities which did not employ those practices had a similar decrease in crime at the time, showing that Giuliani's nasty policies were not responsible for the decrease.
As for the real cause of the decrease, one theory is that there were fewer males in the main violence age group that had been raised by mothers who couldn't cope with them, because starting in the 70s women in such situations often had abortions instead. It is an interesting theory but I am not sure we can regard it as proved.
Abortion can't be the reason for the decrease in knife crime in the UK this year, because it has been legal there since much more than 20 years ago. But this illustrates how hard it can be to determine the causes of reduced crime,
Bush gave Shell permission to drill for oil in the sea near Alaska, disregarding environmental threats, but now Shell is running into legal snags. The idea of "reducing US dependence on foreign oil" made sense in the 70s, but it is obsolete now. Now the whole world needs to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. Leaving this oil in the ground would be a step towards that; however, we must leave dirtier Canadian shale in the ground too.
This article illustrates how corporate funding of university research corrupts research; we see this in medicine too. This corruption will touch any area of science which pertains to how business practices public well-being.
The solution is to deny these businesses the choice of whether to support research. We should increase their taxes, and pay for the research out of that.
Novelist Martin Amis faces controversy after advocating easy euthanasia for anyone who wants it. I am almost as old as Mr. Amis, and I feel much as he does. Respect for other people's lives means that, while they see value in their lives, we should help them stay alive. Respect for their lives also means that, when they consider their lives to be torture and death is the only escape, we should help them escape.
After years of fascist pressure and assassination, only one doctor in the US does late term abortions. Someday he will die or be incapacitated. Unless other doctors take up the work, American women in danger of dying from pregnancy will have to travel to other countries — if they can afford it.
A judge ruled that Americans can't sue over illegal wiretapping because we are all victims of it.
A meeting about ACTA in Mexico was attended by activists for freedom.
There are probably around 3 million disabled Iraqis, and the government cannot do anything for them.
US citizens: sign the ACLU's petition to close the Guantanamo prison and either give the prisoners fair trials or release them.
Some of the Taliban are imitating NATO's effort to avoid civilian casualties, which are now mostly caused by them. It now seems that the main obstacle to defeating the Taliban is the Afghan government itself. It is hard to motivate anyone to fight for a government that inspires no loyalty.
UK police want to add military drone airplanes to their drone helicopters, and they have chosen a cover strategy to divert criticism.
The US is still encouraging biofuels made from food crops, even though that is wasteful, makes food expensive all around the world, and contributes to global warming by destroying rainforests to grow crops. Growing the crops uses fertilizer and machinery, and both consume petroleum. Biofuels make sense only when made from plants that grow wild or with only renewable inputs.
Obama has begun to advocate real banking reform. After so much merging, it is not enough to prevent further mergers. We need to split up the existing big banks, and not just along the lines between their divisions, so that afterwards the banks we have are no longer "too big to fail." The same goes for other industries.
Nonetheless, Obama is heading in the right direction. He seems to have realized that he needs to appeal directly to the people who voted for him.
The big pharma company GSK will publish a list of some 13000 chemicals that might do some good against malaria, but is trying to make that sound like more than it is. The article becomes incoherent when it starts discussing what GSK will or won't do with its patents that restrict some of these drugs. Perhaps it is only offering to make deals with the other big pharma companies.
We cannot really tell. What is clear is that GSK wants to avoid the real solution: poor countries should not allow patents on medicine.
The Supreme Court ruling that let corporations buy US elections effectively lets Chinese corporations do it too.
Polish citizens:
sign this petition
against Internet censorship in Poland.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Iranian influence
is behind Iraq's election purge of Sunni candidates. I do not think Iran can take control of Iraq through agents such as Chalabi. Iraqis will not go along with that. Rather, I think that Iraqi Shi'ites are going to aim for chasing out the Sunnis, with Iran's encouragement and support.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
In effect, Bush's invasion gave Iraq a rough kind of democracy, but not the toleration of disagreement and human rights that need to go with democracy. Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was based on support, more or less, from the minority Sunnis. Now the majority Shi'ites have control and regard the Sunnis as an enemy.
Majority rule in Iraq inevitably means most of the voters are Shi'ites. I don't think it inevitably had to mean a split along religious lines, civil war, and the expulsion of the Sunnis; but expulsion of the Sunnis is what the Shi'ites are determined to do, I don't think any outside pressure can prevent it.
Thus, a large fraction of the population of Iraq will end up as refugees; those who remain will be split effectively between two states (Kurdish and Arab Shi'ite). The Shi'ite state will be aligned with Iran. But at least the oil will belong to the multinational companies, and that's what they wanted when they launched the war.
How Haiti's history of foreign rule and oppression, by France and then the US, created the poverty which made people so vulnerable to the earthquake. The article doesn't mention that it was the US that overthrew and kidnaped President Aristide.
US citizens:
sign this petition
for public financing of election campaigns.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have dashed democracy to little pieces, by letting corporations
spend as much as they like on election campaigns.
The party which claimed to be against "judicial activism" swept away a century of precedent.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Democracy in the US has already been nearly submerged by a flood of business money going indirectly into political campaigns. Witness how the Senator from Aetna has turned health care reform into a give-away to insurance companies, and how other business-dominated legislators have blocked banking reform and global warming prevention. Now the last dam has fallen and democracy will be washed away.
There are various ways the US could correct this problem. One would be a constitutional amendment to reverse it. Another would be public funding for campaigns (a good thing anyway). People are trying to implement these, and I will help, since we can't achieve anything by not trying.
But I don't think we have much chance of implementing any measure that would take this power away from business, because the companies will use their newly augmented dominion to block any attempt to take it away.
The US government was already largely a tool of the corporate empire. After this change it will be nothing but.
Clinton denounced Chinese government censorship of the Internet. She apparently did not denounce Internet censorship in "democratic" governments such as Denmark, Australia, and soon Poland.
Russian police arrested a journalist and beat him to death. Of course, like any gang, they lie to protect each other when caught in crimes. The article does not say this journalist criticized the powerful, so maybe the police did this on their own initiative and not at a request from on high.
For comparison, the US seems probably to have tortured several prisoners to death in Guantanamo, and is still covering it up, and that was done on orders from the White House. Obama is still protecting the people who gave the order from prosecution.
US citizens: support the campaign for a constitutional amendment to explicitly authorize limiting corporations' influence on elections. I think we should go further. We should strip corporations of entitlement to legal status as persons, and allow the federal and state governments to decide which rights of persons apply to corporations and which don't.
Jack Straw, former foreign minister, said that he "believed the war would be averted by Saddam Hussein complying with the requirement to co-operate with UN weapons inspectors." That makes no sense, because Hussein <em>did</em> comply, and everyone knew he was complying. Bush decided to attack anyway and had the inspectors removed from Iraq. If the inquiry does not grill him on this point, it is not doing its job.
Obama has not achieved much as president, but he has the strength to attack Americans for sharing.
Frances Inglis was convicted of murdering her son, rather than let him die of thirst and hunger in the hospital. Those who participated in convicting and sentencing Ms Inglis defend the principle of obedience to unjust laws. If the state orders you to torture someone, they say you must obey. Shame on them all.
Ms Inglis' courageous act was a reaction to the policies of the hospital, which are perhaps imposed by the state. The hospital should have offered him a painless death instead of a cruel one.
Perhaps it did offer him that but misled Ms Inglis. Perhaps the doctors would have given Tom morphine to save him pain (and maybe speed his death), but thet didn't dare tell her so, lest they be prosecuted. If so, it would make this a tragedy reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet.
Ms Inglis' sentence supposedly would make it possible for her to be released after around 8 years. However, I think that under UK prison rules she cannot be released early (i.e., while alive) unless she says that her act was wrong. That would mean betraying herself, the others who loved Tom, and everyone who in the future is in a similar situation. I hope she will have the strength to stay in prison instead.
The big banks, which masterminded the mortgage bubble, sold mortgage debt to lots of investors while betting that they would lose it. That ought to be a crime, and maybe is. But the government investigation is ineffective at getting to the bottom of the wrongdoing.
The IPCC rejected its statement that Himalayan glaciers could disappear in a few decades, finding it was included by mistake, not based on scientific evidence.
The Democratic Party is foundering because it has
failed to propose reforms that energize the public.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The reason for this, I suspect, is that too many Democratic legislators are under the control of business, and few really want to challenge that control.
US citizens: sign this petition telling Democrats that they must really oppose business interests or they will lose.
The New York Times says it will charge people to read articles, beyond a certain number per month.
I would not object to paying to see these news articles, if I could do so anonymously. But I absolutely refuse to identify myself to read the articles, and I fear that means I will be totally excluded.
I also will not link to articles that require readers to identify themselves. However, there are already links to nytimes.com on this site, and I suspect that they will become an embarassment.
So I invite people to look for replacement links for them. These should be either the same story in another site, or another good story that provides the pertinent information. These links should be stable (as far as we can tell), and should allow anonymous access.
Please mail these replacement URLs to me, rms@gnu.org, and please include the full HTML text of the note that contains the link.
Kay Gilderdale is on trial because she helped her daughter commit suicide to escape unendurable, incurable pain. I admire Ms Gilderdale for having the courage to the sad task that her daughter wanted and needed. This illustrates why the right to assisted suicide must not be limited to people with illnesses that won't last long. People such as Lynn Gilderdale should not be condemned to decades of pain and helplessness.
China will block text messages with "illegal content". Compare this with the UK, where you could get arrested when the government reads a joke you send through computer systems. I suppose China already does arrest people for their text messages.
Haitians need humanitarian help. The US sent a military invasion. (You may need to go through this link a second time to reach the correct page.)
Vietnam threatens to execute dissidents who wanted democracy and human rights instead of rule by the "Communist" party. This party admires free trade agreements more than Marx; it is no longer a Communist dictatorship, just a dictatorship.
The latest overreaction: a school was closed because of a student's harmless electronics project. I wonder what "school policies" were violated. "Don't bring electronics projects to school"? "Don't do anything that the principal might misunderstand?" At least they didn't file criminal charges to pretend it wasn't their mistake, as police in Boston did to Star Simpson.
Skeptics will take an "overdose" of homeopathic "remedies" to illustrate the fact that they have no medicine in them. Sugar may not be a real treatment for an illness (other than starvation), but it is not an inactive ingredient. An overdose of sugar could make you fat.
The FBI illegally obtained Americans' phone call records and made up false excuses afterwards.
A UK man was arrested, and has lost his job, because of joking with his friends on Twitter. Taking away his job seems utterly gratuitous. As for seizing his computer, if he had made a joke with his voice would they seize his mouth?
This shows the danger of allowing police too much access to people's private communications. "Terrorists" have been unable to do anything in the UK for several years, but hundreds of thousands of people in the UK must be examining their every word with fear.
Maliki is attacking Iraqi Sunnis in many ways, provoking a boycott of the election and a possible resumption of civil war. Since the Sunnis could at best elect a small minority, I can't see Maliki's motive for disenfranchizing them. It must be due to something not visibly political.
Guantanamo prison staff say some prisoners who supposedly committed suicide in their cells actually died somewhere else; this suggests they were tortured to death.
The Taliban sent suicide bombers and commandos into Kabul, attacking government buildings and civilians inside a supermarket. Throwing grenades into a market is a worse attack on civilians than the US troops have done. They have killed Afghan civilians many times by carelessness, mistaking them for combatants and not checking enough; but the grenades in the supermarket must have been intended to kill Afghan civilians.
India joins China in the tyranny of restricting satellite phones. Restriction of citizens' communication is unacceptable no matter what excuse is given.
The US
took control of Haiti's airport
and did not allow a deligation from neighboring countries to land.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Haitians are franticly obssessed with what will happen to their dead relatives' corpses, to the point where they are ready to spend their last dollar on burials. How foolish is this obsession with corpses! What difference does it make where your body (or mine) ends up? No matter how many other bodies are in the same grave, we won't feel it. How many people's lives will be lost for the sake of burial?
In the past, mass graves caused one real problem: it was hard to be sure whether someone you were looking for had been buried in one. But is easy enough, when burying corpses together, to record all the names that are known, and to take photos of all the corpses buried there to help people identify them later.
Kenyan fishermen report that ocean fish which had been depleted have bounced back, because the Somali pirates have chased away the illegal foreign fishing ships. It is heartening that these species of predators have bounced back in just two years. That shows increased protection of them in other areas would bring results soon.
However, it may be that effective enforcement of current international law would not suffice to achieve that result. The fear of piracy affects an area of the ocean well beyond the limits of Kenyan sovereignty.
The person quoted calling pirates "terrorists" was mistaken, just as it is a mistake to describe ordinary burglars as "terrorists". The Somali pirates rob, they kidnap, and maybe they sometimes kill, and that in itself is bad enough. Let's not exaggerate by calling it "terrorism".
The west aims to keep itself safe regardless of the suffering this causes in other countries.
China and Iceland got aid to Haiti fast, while the US couldn't get its act together. I am sure the US slowness was not an intentional goal. It stems from a sort of rigidity of thinking — for instance, the obsession with security in a zone where there is no enemy — which makes it hard to do any job right. They can't airdrop water lest people fight over it, but is it better if all die of thirst? If you drop enough water at one time in any one area, people there won't fight over it, they will drink it. Or they could drop a squad to hand out the water that was dropped. Meanwhile, why did the earthquake do so much damage? Because Haiti is too poor to build buildings that will stand up. That is due to two centuries of mistreatment by France and then the US. The article doesn't mention that US troops under Dubya's command kidnaped Aristide, showing that the coup was Dubya's work. The government set up afterwards has effectively banned Aristide's party from elections.
The president of Haiti vetoed a bill to increase the minimum wage because the multinational companies did not like it.
US citizens:
Sign this petition
asking the FDA to pull apparently dangerous genetically modified corn off the market (for food). The links in that page explain more about the issue; do follow them if you are curious.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Genetically modified corn causes liver and kidney damage in rats. More studies are needed, but Monsanto uses its patents to suppress and control research.
Iran's Majlis censured an official responsible for fatal mistreatment of arrested protestors.
Not satisfied with banning 500 candidates for office, Iraq's government wants to ban their parties too. The connection with Iran makes sense, since Iran also bans candidates from elections.
So Bush's war of conquest has resulted in an Iraq whose government is aligned politically with Iran, but the multinational companies get the oil.
Organized poachers are killing more and more elephants in Africa. A question that the article does not answer is whether the killing of 10% of the elephants each year will drive them to extinction.
Conspicuous consumption is a major element in Chinese culture. The reason Chinese are wiping out the world's sharks to make shark's fin soup is not because they love the taste. That is a customary way of showing you're prepared to spend a lot of money on a banquet. So it could be that the high price of ivory paradoxically increases the demand for it.
Everyone:
call on credit card companies
not to charge fees for donations to charity.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Stephen Gough faces life imprisonment for walking around Scotland nude.
Yemen says it has killed the leader of the local al Qa'ida group. Killing the leader of a guerrilla group usually has little effect; they just appoint a new leader. Killing or capturing a considerable fraction of the membership can make a dent in the group, but only if that goes faster than recruitment.
In Italy, il ducino wants to require people to get administrative permission to
distribute video (any video) by internet.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
sign this petition
to investigate how insurance companies paid for their lobbying.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Hazing in South Africa is done with a knife, and can kill. It continues because those who have been through it sneer at those who have not. It's absurd to claim that Shaka Zulu's troops were not manly enough, given that they defeated everyone in the area.
After Bassam Nabulsi published a tape showing Sheikh Issa of Abu Dhabi torturing a captive, the court there found Sheikh Issa innocent, and convicted Nabulsi of blackmailing him. Lest Americans feel smug, remember that Obama is protecting the officials responsible for US torture.
Global warming has brought the shipworm (a kind of clam, I think) into the Baltic Sea, where it is now eating the wood of ancient shipwrecks.
If global warming raises the seas by 20 feet, that will destroy a lot more of humanity's past, around the world.
A Yemeni program claims to be successful at convincing fervent Muslims that terrorism (attacking civilians) is wrong, but the US doesn't like it, because it distinguishes terrorism from fighting an occupying army.
In other words, the US wants to stretch the definition of "terrorism" to include people like George Washington.
Everyone: support the boycott of the planned Tintin film, which responds to the oppressive use of copyright by the author's widow's husband. As a further measure, don't buy new Tintin books, either! If you want to read them, borrow them or get used copies.
Many who criticize the Chinese government have found their email has been cracked or diverted, apparently by China. It's unfortunate that they use the term "hack" as meaning "attack", but that doesn't reduce the importance of the article's point.
The US is imposing the utmost pressure to make Costa Rica sign the CAFTA treaty, which faces opposition because it would make copyright law nastier there. The article also mentions an unrelated issue which concerns trademarks, and thus gives the impression that the two issues are similar. This is inaccurate: there is no similarity or relationship between copyright law and trademark law. The only resemblance between the two issues is that in each one the US is demanding something that would benefit some of the companies (American and foreign) that the US government works for. This confusion between different laws is the typical result of allowing the term "intellectual property" into your thinking.
AT&T appears to be tricking and suborning various organizations into supporting its campaign against net neutrality, through its local representatives, and their friends who owe them favors.
US citizens: sign this letter to the FCC which opposes the copyright loophole in proposed net neutrality rules.
Coca-Cola company
tried to block showing
of a film about the US lawsuit filed by the families of murdered Colombian union organizers.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Copyright has locked up the vast majority of 20th century culture. My view is that copyright should last for 10 years from the publication of any work, and this reduction should be applied retroactively just as the extensions were.
Police in Massachusetts have arrested people for recording police brutality with their phones.
The former operator of OiNK, a site which posted links to torrents for unauthorized copying, was found innocent on charges brought by the copyright industry. When the entertainment companies lose the fight against an individual, they present this as a reason why they need nastier laws.
China canceled a gay beauty contest by saying the event wasn't properly "licensed". To require events to get licenses is itself an act of tyranny.
Scientists who were fired or quit the UK's "scientific" drug advisory committee have founded an independent organization to study the risks of various drugs.
Iraq's government has banned 500 candidates, most of them Sunni, delegitimizing the coming elections.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, don't give any more funds for the war in Afghanistan without a concrete plan to remove the troops in 2011/2012 as Obama said he will do.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The Iraqi army is
diverting oil and selling it.
It is arguably more patriotic for Iraqis to do this than to let the foreign companies sell the oil.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Pat Robertson says that
Haitians made a pact with the devil
and this is their punishment. That sort of craziness is what results when people believe in Christianity in a literal-minded way.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Israel has killed over 300 Palestinians from Gaza by not letting them leave for medical care.
The latest victim
was 3 years old. Egypt too is responsible, since it could also let these people leave for treatment. Egypt participates actively in the siege of Gaza.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Increased methane seepage from the Arctic, caused by warming there, can now be estimated by satellite observations. Although it is a small fraction of methane emissions now, the danger is that further warming in the Arctic could trigger catastrophic methane emissions. There is some temperature at which that will happen, but we don't know what it is.
Sign this petition to Senator Dodd urging him to use his last year in the senate to fight hard against the banksters.
Israel continues
frequent killings of Palestinians
near the borders of Gaza.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Wasteful US consumer culture is spreading to the wealthier people around the world. It will lead to disaster, one way or another, if it isn't checked.
Israel made 150 Palestinians homeless
by destroying their homes.
The excuse that these homes are illegal (i.e., forbidden by Israel) could fool someone who wants an excuse to be fooled. However, when Israelis build houses in the West Bank, violating international law as well as Israeli law, the government disregards court orders
to demolish them and tries to legalize them instead.
[References updated on 2018-04-02 because the old links were broken.]
Uganda plans to sentence people to life imprisonment or even death for homosexual sex. Knowingly having sex with others while infected with HIV can be considered attempted murder, and people have been prosecuted in some countries for doing so. But it is absurd for the gender of the victim to make a difference.
Amnesty International is campaigning for Israel to
release various Palestinian political prisoners
— organizers of nonviolent protests. Bringing charges of illegal weapons against someone who collects used bullets and gas grenades shows egregious contempt for justice.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Israel
released one of them,
organizer Jamal Juma, after a month of detention without charge. But it has recently
arrested other nonviolent protest organizers.
One of the foreigners who come to act as witnesses to Israel's treatment of Palestinians was
grabbed by the Army from the West Bank and deported.
[References updated on 2018-05-13 because the old links were broken.]
Journalists face
arbitrary expulsion
too, if they don't support Israel's line. The US also
restricts the entry of foreign journalists,
a policy that would a shame to the US, except that it is lost under piles of far worse nastiness. The Palestinian Authority also carries out
arbitrary arrests of opposition,
despite a crackdown which has mostly stopped torturing them.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
A UN commission reports that the Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his assassination by the government actually arranged his own killing. Here's the note where I reported his death.
A Bush forces soldier got in trouble when the Pentagon received a copy of his hip-hop song that talks about killing the officers. Today's volunteer soldiers share in the responsibility for their presence in Iraq, so they can't put all the blame on the officers. I admire those who refuse to fight, who denounce the war as immoral (or, secondarily, as illegal).
The lawyers for Guantanamo prisoner Shaker Aamer have received secret UK documents that prove MI5 agents were involved when the Bush regime tortured him in Afghanistan.
But the Clown regime is keeping these secret from the public, so it can continue to lie to the public about its involvement in torture. And continue to protect the US from being held responsible for its torture.
Americans should demand that the UK release this proof of US torture in Afghanistan.
The Washington Post ran a propaganda piece from a right-wing organization as a news article.
US citizens: call your congresscritter and senators and say that the health care bill must not interfere with coverage of abortion.
And demand a public option too. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Goldman Sachs thinks it can continue feeding at the public trough by requiring its executives to give 4% of their pay to charity.
Insurance companies gave millions of dollars to the US Chamber of Commerce to run ads to destroy health care reform.
A Dutch inquiry concluded that the invasion of Iraq "had no legal mandate" under the UN, which means it violated the UN treaties.
UK officials admit that the "intelligence" dossier about Saddam Hussein was altered to match Bush's speech. Of all the absurd places to look for intelligence, they tried to get it from Dubya's brain.
The UK will ban two Islamic extremist organizations for their political views, which are described as "glorifying terrorism". I don't like terrorism, but banning opinions is more dangerous than terrorism. Since the UK regularly labels protest as "terrorism", it could use this as a pretext to ban all organizations that glorify protest.
Google refuses to continue censoring search results for the Chinese government even if that means it ceases providing the service in China. It is unfortunate that the article uses the totally vague term "intellectual property". In this context, it could refer to any data whatsoever that was on Google's computers, but gives a false impression of having a more specific meaning.
Amazon insists on restricting ebook users even when the author and publisher don't want to; Amazon boasts of selling lots of ebooks, and then claims they have not been sold.
B'liar wrote to Bush in April 2002 promising the UK would attack Iraq, although in public Bliar pretended the decision would depend on later events.
The west may be kidnaping some Iranian nuclear scientists, or perhaps they are defecting. One was just killed, and it's no clear by whom or why.
A European court ruled that the UK's law allowing police to search anyone on the street they suspect of "terrorism" is a violation of human rights.
A poll reports increased support in Afghanistan for Karzai and NATO. This is good news, if true, but I have to wonder if it is too good to be true.
In London: Join the mass photo shoot to click for the right to take photos.
Iceland's president vetoed a bill to take responsibility for the debts of failed banks. There is no moral reason why Iceland's people should assume this debt, which was never theirs, and no logical reason why anyone should refuse to do business with Icelandic companies in general merely because the government won't bail these banks. (Most companies are not going to be bailed out by the state if they fail, and we don't refuse to do business with them.)
So if it is true that companies will refuse to do business with everyone in Iceland, that is a threat aimed at extortion.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Murkowski's amendment that would stop the EPA from limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Also
sign this petition.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: write to the FCC in
support of net neutrality.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Multinational seed companies are
using patents on genes to restrict and censor research
into the effects of genetically modified crops.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
According to a law professor, patents are the basis for this policy.
The article blurs the issue through its use of the term "intellectual property": it is not clear from the article itself that the issue is due to patents. Even more confused, when the article says seed companies consider this "necessary to protect their intellectual property", that is backwards: the license is based on the patent, not vice versa. They don't need to obstruct science in order to maintain the patents. They obstruct science because they don't want the truth to be known.
The term "intellectual property" also provides an excuse for the article to rush to endorse the policy of forbidding farmers from saving and distributing seeds. I disagree, but I don't want to raise that issue here, only to point out that the propaganda term is doing additional dirty work.
45,000 people die each year in the US for lack of proper health care.
By comparison, terrorism is a minor danger.
The Gaza aid convoy was able to bring most of its aid
across the border from Egypt.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
But Egypt used the occasion to block all further aid to Gaza.
Egypt's government is a US-sponsored dictatorship, and the US requires Egypt to support the Israeli siege of Gaza. I have doubts that Egypt will allow aid to reach Gaza via the Egyptian Red Crescent, but we will see.
This policy will increase Egyptians' disgust for their government. Its main opposition is an underground Islamist group. Sooner or later that group will overthrow the current dictatorship and replace it with an unjust Islamic regime. (The Islamic tyranny in Iran came to power through the overthrow of the US-supported dictator, the Shah.)
I wonder if Obama and his men are planning on that outcome. It would give them another enemy they could cite as an excuse for unending war.
There is a controversy over whether people are overly worried about small radiation leaks from nuclear power plants. A few scientists even claim that small doses are harmless.
It is misguided to compare nuclear power with radiation therapy, because radiation therapy isn't meant to be safe. It just needs to be safer than other treatments for a fatal disease.
I'm sure people exaggerate the danger of small radiation leaks, just as they exaggerate the danger of terrorism. There is no point worrying about doses of radiation that are much smaller than what we are exposed to in other ways.
That doesn't mean building nuclear power plants is a good idea. The waste is very radioactive and will remain so for millenia. The plants are so expensive that we should spend our money on renewables and efficiency instead.
Karzai's man in charge of anti-drug activity is a former minister who was sacked for egregious corruption.
The Nazca people may have caused a
disaster through deforestation.
Much of Peru is following the same path today.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Howard Dean is giving voice to many Democrats who now see that Obama is rather right-wing.
The president is not all-powerful, and perhaps Obama simply can't do some of the things he said he would do. I would not criticize him for admitting that he cannot pass a good bill. However, that is no excuse for passing a bad one. And many of the bad things he has done did not require congressional help.
Global warming will force species to move up to 10 km per year to follow the climate conditions they can live in.
Large animals can do that, but trees and soil organisms will find it quite difficult.
Koalas are among beloved species that could be wiped out by global warming.
2008 was not unusually warm in North America because a La Niña event occurred.
US residents (and maybe others):
move your money out of the big banks
that have robbed the US, and into small local banks and credit unions.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
(I do not refer to their home page because it contains a YouTube video. It is harmful to distribute or recommend video in Flash and MPEG4.)
Global warming has increased the escape of methane from the Artic sea bottom.
This is a positive feedback cycle that could cause greatly increased global warming.
A study suggests that we're headed for 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30) feet of sea-level rise, enough to flood important large inhabited areas of the world.
African workers in mafia-controlled Italian farms rioted against the local mafia, after some of them were shot for no specific reason.
The police arrested all the immigrants, but not all of the mafia.
The US had better think about Somalia before intervening in Yemen.
It is common to call Somalia a "failed state", but that is not true nowadays. The last Somali state didn't fail, it was destroyed by the US. The Islamic Courts Union set up a state that brought peace to the country and had considerable public support, but Bush used the dictators of Ethiopia to destroy it.
That state followed unjust Islamic law, but that's not enough to justify the intervention — not that Bush cared much about justice.
His intervention sought to install the previous "transitional government" which had been set up by the West. Hardly anyone in Somalia supported it before. Not surprisingly, few support it now. As a result, Somalia now has lots of pirates and renewed civil war.
Many scientists and campaigners have rejected the UK's government plans for genetically modified crops, pointing out that their main effect is to replace forests with cattle and contribute to global warming.
UK MP Galloway was deported from Egypt after returning there from Gaza. His exclusion from future aid efforts will make it easier for Egypt to block them quietly and without much world attention.
A 50% tax rate on bank executive bonuses in the UK did not convince the banks to reduce the billions they spend on bonuses. However, it's a good thing anyway, since it collects more tax from these rich people. If not for that, poor people would lose that money (one way or another).
Iran is following the path of totalitarian crackdown as it bans talking with many foreign news organizations.
More fallout from drug prohibition: a student was punished for
bringing peppermint oil to school.
I distrust the school's claim that this policy is meant to protect students who have allergies. If the school is serious about this, it should focus on likely causes of severe allergies. Does it have a rule against bringing nuts to school and sharing them? If it does, I will believe that claim.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
A Japanese whaling ship rammed a small Sea Shepherd vessel, the Ady Gil, which is sinking. The Japanese whalers claim that the Ady Gil's crew intentionally caused the collision; so too, police will accuse a protestor of assaulting an officer's stick with his head. It is plausible that the Ady Gil crew stopped in front of the Japanese ship so that it would have to turn to avoid a collision. The Japanese crew must have decided to ram it rather than turn.
Blackwater has paid compensation to people killed in Iraq, but other employees face murder charges for killing civilians in Afghanistan. Both mercenaries and official soldiers ought to be prosecuted when they wantonly kill civilians. But only a small fraction of such cases can be prosecuted, because it is hard to get the necessary evidence.
Controlling a country whose populace is in rebellion, as in Iraq and now Afghanistan, predictably leads the occupying soldiers to dehumanize the populace, and repeatedly leads them to kill whoever vaguely seems like a threat. In the case of Iraq, the war was obviously unjustified at the outset. Bush, and other officials who started it, are responsible for all these killings.
I wonder how much of the settlement money is really going to the Iraqi victims' families, and how much will be diverted to officials before it reaches them.
The US has recently used its "no-fly" list to interfere with travel between other countries, effectively labeling journalists such as Hernando Calvo Ospina as "terrorists". Those events occurred in April, so it is possible that the policy has changed since. If that is so, I would like to know.
In Bulgaria: join the protest on Jan 14 against broad new government surveillance plans.
Iraq has sued Blackwater over the murders of civilians. This after the charges against the murderers were dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct.
UK police intensify their attacks on innocent photographers, suspected (along with everyone else) of "terrorism".
Cancer and birth defects increased in Iraq after the 1991 war, and they are increasing again now, probably called by Dirty Uranium in US weapons.
US support for tyranny in Egypt, and intervention in countries such as Somalia and Yemen, helps Al Qa'ida spread around the world.
Anthrax-contaminated heroin demonstrates the danger of prohibition. I do not like being dependent on a drug, so I would never try heroin, and I would urge others not to try it. But as regards real danger, prohibition is much more dangerous than heroin itself. For instance, most of the people that die from a heroin overdose got the overdose because of the unreliability of illegal, unsupervised production. That would not happen in the Netherlands where addicts can register and get their dose from a doctor. Neither would the current contamination.
The other dangers of prohibition include corruption of police, corruption of politicians, support for criminal gangs, denial of human rights, expansion of prison population, reduced wage levels due to competition from prison labor, suppression of research about effects and uses of these drugs, and a tendency towards dishonest anti-drug propaganda. Many of these effects extend into the countries where drugs are produced or trafficked.
Denmark continues to hold Copenhagen activists in prison on trumped-up charges, and intends to prosecute protestors for walking into a meeting uninvited.
China sentenced
a Tibetan filmmaker to years of imprisonment
after a fraudulent trial.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Minnesota has placed a
tax on electricity from coal.
This should be done everywhere.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
US immigration agents are holding prisoners (accused of illegal immigration) in
secret prisons
and under horrible conditions.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
UK airport body-scanners can't be used on anyone under 18 because the images are "child pornography".
The irony of this case demonstrates the general absurdity of this system of censorship — including its supposition that people of age 17 are not accustomed to having sex. But the real harm of the law is in the cases that are not related to security: for instance, art, taking pictures of or for one's lovers, and taking pictures of one's children. These important cases are, naturally, not the ones that the UK proposes to legalize.
This law should be abolished.
If the concern is about real sexual abuse of children, it would make more sense to aim action at actual abuse (in which photos are rarely taken), rather than censor images. That would also be safer for society, since it would not offer an excuse for the dangerous practice of censorship.
Someone in Japan could face a prison sentence, if the marijuana planted in his suitcase by a customs officer gets found later by police.
A Slovakian in Dublin was arrested, after Irish police were tipped off
about the explosives that were planted in his suitcase, without his
knowledge, by Slovakian police.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
The coup regime in Honduras
keeps killing dissidents.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
It is clear that the election they ran was baloney; a fair election cannot occur under repression like this.
US troops in Afghanistan took 8 sleeping schoolchildren from their homes, handcuffed them, and
shot them
(along with a couple of adult relatives). No possible orders could excuse shooting captives, even if they were enemies. US therefore has a duty to prosecute these soldiers, with any commanders who gave orders that encouraged this act. Unless it does so, unless it clearly rejects such conduct and punishes all those responsible, the US is no better than Al Qa'ida.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Israel plans to demolish
hundreds of buildings in East Jerusalem
where Palestinians live. Individual Palestinians are
often attacked by fanatical "settlers".
In the West Bank, "settlers" that have occupied Palestinian farmland
destroy their olive trees.
This is ethnic cleansing, carried out slowly enough that the US government can pretend not to recognize it.
[References updated on 2018-05-13 because the old links were broken.]
EU citizens: sign the petition against software patents in Europe.
China is building a commercial empire as the US builds a military one.
Iraqi doctors demand a probe into why cancer rates in a region have risen by tenfold.
Iran took Shirin Ebadi's sister hostage and Mousavi's brother-in-law hostage, after murdering Mousavi's nephew right outside his home.
A Muslim fanatic tried to attack the cartoonist who drew cartoons making fun of Mohammad. That's religion for you.
Irish Atheists have defied the law that prohibits blasphemy.
US citizens: Phone your congresscritter and insist that the health care reform bill have a public option. Passing Lieberman's gift to insurance companies would do harm rather than good.
The bill should also tax the rich (as the house bill does) rather than working Americans, and should make health care affordable (as the house bill does) for them. And it should extend anti-trust law to insurance companies (as the house bill does).
On the difference between
activism and organizing.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Kazakhstan's turn as the head of the OSCE, responsible for human rights in Europe, comes as it systematically attacks opposition press.
Kucinich will run an investigation of the Fannie/Freddie bailout.
Uri Avnery on Egypt's support for Israel's blockade of Gaza.
Egypt is building an underground metal barrier to make the siege of Gaza even tighter.
The US is surely behind this, even though it pretends not to be involved. Egypt gets a lot of money from the US, and would not do this if the US had not demanded it.
I am not at all impressed by the argument that missiles are brought in along with the food and supplies for building houses. Israel imports missiles too. Is that a reason for a siege of Israel?
The obsession with "child pornography" has reached the point of censoring art.
How about ancient Greek sculptures and paintings of boys?
A
court dismissed charges against Blackwater guards who killed Iraqi
civilians, saying prosecutors acted illegally collecting evidence.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
In the 2000 decade, right-wing economics proved itself
a failure
and a lie. But it reinforced the power of big business over US politicians.
That is why Republicans call for more of the same bad policies while
Democrats don't dare say how bad they are.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
As an example, the government just gave the banksters more presents.
Nigerians are suing Shell in the Netherlands for pollution from its oil operations in Nigeria.
Reportedly Iranian agents kidnaped Britons from Iraq to stop one of them from installing accounting software that would reveal their embezzlement from the Iraqi government.
I am not ready to take all that at face value. I won't say that Iran's government would not do such a thing, but I there are many Iraqis in the government who would too, and putting the all blame on the government we love to hate would be great for diverting suspicion away from themselves. Perhaps Iraqi officials and Iranians worked together.
I wonder why kidnaping Moore prevented installation of the accounting software. Was there no one else to do it? That seems unlikely, a priori. Whoever wanted to block the installation probably had to take further steps to prevent someone else from doing so.
Israel continues to persecute Mordechai Vanunu, who told the world
about Israel's weapons of mass destruction.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
More than 20 years later, Vanunu has no more secrets to reveal. That is just an excuse to continue his punishment. Many of today's Israelis came from the Soviet Union, and found it difficult to leave since they were banned from emigrating. Now it is Israel that prevents Vanunu from emigrating.
"President Obama, It's Time to Fire the TSA".
I don't agree 100%. I think it is valid to check airline passengers for weapons and obvious bombs, and I don't particularly care whether this is done by the TSA or by some replacement organization.
But I agree with the basic point, which is that the TSA is terrorizing Americans into surrendering their freedom and that is very dangerous.
Egypt is
blocking the Gaza Freedom March (surely on orders from Obama),
so Hedy Epstein, who survived Nazi genocide, is now on hunger strike
demanding passage for her and the rest of the march.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
Reportedly the government of Yemen is crushing a local rebellion
by bombarding villages and killing many civilians.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-02 because the old link was broken.]
I can't judge the accuracy of the statements and I don't know enough to draw conclusions, but I don't
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