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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: call on Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
He has vetoed the bill that was going to force approval.
Students swindled by the not-really-accredited "Corinithian College" have declared a debt strike to demand forgiveness for federal loans that supported the non-school's pretensions.
Netanyahu's political maneuvers have pushed Israel's relationship with the US to rock bottom.
Unfortunately the US has a while to go to reach what it should do: redirect its tremendous annual subsidy to Israel into dismantling Israel's colonies in the West Bank.
Brazil has arrested a suspect accused of organizing massive illegal deforestation.
South Korea asked South Africa to spy on the head of Greenpeace in 2010.
London is being ruined by the complete abandonment of the idea of public space and public interest.
Masih Alinejad is campaigning against Iran's policy of forcing women to cover their heads.
Women (like men) should have the right to cover their heads; however, given the pressure (both legal and social) imposed on Muslim women to do so, resistance to that pressure is an important area of feminist campaigning.
The EU has brought forward its plan to try to make carbon emissions trading have some real effect, but it will still wait a dangerous three years before starting the plan.
I'd wonder why these officials don't grasp what "urgent" means, but in this case I think they are being paid not to understand.
Chicago thugs interrogate people including protesters in a secret site, denying their relatives and lawyers access to them.
Broadband internet from satellites could offer a way around state-imposed filtering and sleazy ISPs.
I foresee that some governments will ban it and maybe jam it. Satellite phones are already banned in India as an "anti-terrorist" measure, though any organized terrorist attack wouldn't be held back by this.
In the UK, it takes an average of 3 years for victims of domestic violence to get help.
I would expect it to be worse in the US, but I don't know.
Why We Need a Right to Privacy for Brain Data.
Several Republican pro-pollution bills are likely to be vetoed.
Overfarming is creating vast dust bowls in Africa and China.
Coral polyps ingest tiny pieces of plastic, then can't get rid of them. Filling up the polyp's gut with plastic could cause it eventually to starve.
The question is whether they will be killed first by out plastic pollution or by our CO2 pollution.
Putin is imposing religious censorship, and has made it a crime in Russia to offend religious believers.
This is just as wrong as his repression of political dissent. Placing Christianity above criticism is just as wrong as placing Islam above criticism.
The president of Australian's human rights commission says that the government asked her to resign because she embarrassed them by doing her job.
In France, "fighting terrorism" means racial profiling as well as more censorship.
Republicans in Wisconsin are about to demolish unions there.
The term "right to work" is deceptive propaganda, which really means that unions are kept unstable. This "right" is comparable to the "right to give up your freedom" that advocates of proprietary software claim exists.
To End the Harm Inflicted by Aggressive Masculinity, Men Must Embrace Feminism — Without Stealing It.
Modi took a strong stand for freedom of religion in India.
Let's hope that he follows through and eliminates the forcible interference with Dalits that want to convert officially to Buddhism.
Modi also exposed Mother Teresa for what she really did: use poor sick Indians to promote her church (and raise money for it).
Right on!
The UK government is sneakily imposing privatization of the NHS.
Spain arrested four people for "recruiting" for PISSI.
It is legitimate to ban recruiting for PISSI, but drawing the line between that and simply stating agreement is not easy. From the article, it seems that two of these people were really recruiting, but two just stated agreement. I'm afraid Spain is putting the line at the wrong place.
What leads Muslim teenagers in England to join PISSI? Perhaps feeling that they are outcasts plays a part.
Alaska has legalized marijuana for recreational use.
Legalized marijuana allows thugs to take people's homes based on minute violations of the legal limit.
The meat lobby is fighting new US nutrition guidelines that take account of the environmental impact of various kinds of foods.
PISSI kidnapped 90 Christians in Syria, to murder them I suppose.
An Australian peace activist has been convicted of the crime of "protesting in a restricted zone".
He had been given a specific, arbitrarily order to stay away. For a government to give arbitrary orders like that is itself tyranny.
Using different terminology enabled the people of Seattle to make improvements in transport means other than cars.
ALEC's pushes laws to cut off funds for labor unions so they can't be nuclei for resistance to plutocracy.
When Netanyahu said Iran was only a year away from building a nuclear weapon, he was lying; the Mossad had told him that wasn't so.
Websites that offer health advice track visitors and enable data brokers to find out who is sick.
The Department of the Interior Says There's a 75 Percent Chance of a Major Oil Spill in the Arctic — And It's Willing to Take That Chance.
Humans can take steps to hold off the effect of ocean acidification on valuable shellfish — for a while.
The New York/New Jersey Port Authority blocked distribution of blankets to homeless people so they would not get "too comfortable".
EU wants Paris climate deal to cut carbon emissions 60% by 2050.
But it may not be enough.
After Paris and Copenhagen, Let's Not Forget Corporate Censorship.
The Corporate Debt to [US] Society: $10,000 Per Household, Per Year.
Funding from fossil fuel companies has gained them influence over many scientists and labs.
US Force Feeds GM Crops to African Nations, says New Report.
Manipulate and Mislead: How GMOs Are Infiltrating Africa.
Several US universities have restricted admission of students from Iran, even banning professors from coauthoring papers with Iranians.
This is part of a general tendency towards overeager obedience to rules in violation of common sense. We see it also when schools punish students for drawing pictures of weapons.
It seems to represent taking fear to absurd heights.
The UK government ordered an adviser to keep silent about the link between suicides in prison and the cutbacks on staff levels.
One of Greece's concessions to the euro-zone is a crackdown on rich tax-evaders.
Previous Greek governments, bowing to the rich, didn't want to do this.
The idea of "human resources" stands for a dehumanizing attitude towards employees, and that's what "human resources" departments typically do.
On the other hand, they also get the blame for implementing decisions that are the responsibility of the management as a whole, such as to fire all the older workers on pretexts.
Getting rid of the "human resources" attitude is good, but it's not good that the legitimate functions of that department are being replaced by use of services that are SaaSS.
Facebook's privacy policy breaches European law, according to the Belgian privacy commission.
Due to cutbacks, many UK women fleeing violence at home have no place to go.
US power-plant lobbyists are running sock-puppet campaigns and "studies" to pressure against rules to limit carbon emissions.
Everyone: call on National Grid to keep its deal to buy electricity from the Cape Wind wind farm.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah, one of the leaders of the uprising against military rule in Egypt, has been sentenced to prison by the new military government.
Two al-Jazeera journalists in Egypt will be tried a second time for acts of journalism.
We can hope they are acquitted, but that shouldn't lead us to forgive the act of charging them with absurd "crimes".
Abbott made a deal with Sri Lanka's repressive President Rajapaksa, to hush up about his repression in exchange for his cooperation in stopping his cronies from carrying illegal immigrants to Australia.
Blaming the
Internet for Terrorism: So Wrong and So Dangerous.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Thai dissidents face imprisonment, accused of "insulting" the royal family.
To make it a crime to insult someone — regardless of who that may be — is evil tyranny. Many countries have unjust laws of that sort, including France and Turkey.
Public pressure on advertisers is driving Rush Limbaugh's radio diffusion ever lower.
The Kurdish Peshmergas are being denied heavy weapons because the US thinks arming them would get in the way of stitching Iraq back together again some day.
The paradox is that the Peshmergas are the only forces on the ground that are really suitable for fighting PISSI. They have esprit de corps, they have battle experience, and they don't hate the Sunnis that PISSI dominates and conscripts the way Shi'ites do.
Alan Turing's family demand the UK pardon thousands of men convicted for being homosexual.
A Palestinian girl, age 14, says she was bullied into making a false confession in an Israeli prison.
The defense minister of Iraq denied the reported timetable for attacking Mosul which was stated by an unnamed US official.
There is no way of knowing which, if either, of these officials is telling the truth. Perhaps both statements are only for the home front.
An analysis of craters and scorchmarks shows that Russia is firing rockets at Ukraine.
Fine government contractors for hiring ex-officials.
Suggestion to the target of a witch hunt
Uri Avnery: violence against Jews in Europe is not anti-semitism. It's an outgrowth of the Israel-Arab conflict.
The No Depositor Left Behind Act would apply to banks the sort of measures that have been applied to schools.
Everyone: Tell BP to pay the full amount it owes for the Big Spill.
Pakistan has passed a law subjecting civilians to bogus military courts, and Pakistani newspapers are calling for the army to kill civilians without trial.
A poll in Massachusetts finds that citizens tend to believe misinformation that leads them to think pervasive surveillance could make them safer. This leads to public support for practices that threaten people and democracy.
The UK's extractivist ruling parties backed down from overtly privatizing the forests, and decided instead to sneakily achieve the same result without admitting it.
Negev Bedouin protest every week against the repeated demolition of their homes.
Billions of dollars are sucked out of Africa through corruption, which stunts development and keeps most Africans poor.
The non-rich in the US and many other countries are now getting the same treatment.
Oceans have thus far avoided waves of extinction, but massive damage is just over the horizon.
A Sea Shepherd ship intends to follow an illegal fishing ship until it has to go into a port.
Yemen has become effectively divided between the Shi'ite north and the Sunni south.
North Yemen and South Yemen were separate countries for a considerable period a few decades ago.
For everyone in Raqqa, life is a prison. Work is almost impossible, and school (for boys only) is PISSI propaganda.
This comes from someone opposed to PISSI, so it could be exaggerated, but most of it must be true.
The World Has Broken Its Promises About Rebuilding Gaza.
Global heating denier Willie Soon gets his funds from the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests.
Global heating is bringing cold polar air and deep snow to places in the US that never used to get them.
Big prisons that barely keep prisoners under control are bad for the prisoner and for the public. So why make them?
They must enable the companies to extract more money from the privatized prisons, with fewer staff.
Miami is already experiencing worse flooding due to global heating.
Global heating denialists measure from the last peak to obscure the long-term trend. So do inequality denialists.
Ohio's tax cut for the rich was supposed to benefit the non-rich through trickle-down. Now the figures are in — it didn't.
Many Americans demand that we all swear undying loyalty to thugs who might kill us for nothing.
The US may keep on fighting in Afghanistan.
Creepy, Calculating and Controlling: All the Ways Big Brother Is Watching You.
It is a mistake to respond to this by giving up. We have just begun to fight against pervasive surveillance!
It is also a mistake to assume that, because there are so many different systems for surveillance, that it is useless to resist any one of them. Each victory in resisting one form of surveillance can strengthen the movement to limit all of them to occasions when they are legitimate.
UK law makes all migrant workers liable to abuse by their employers.
Joyce and George Gruss paid for a homeless couple to stay in a motel, but the motel kicked them out because they had no identification.
For motels to demand identification from guests is a police state practice. This is one of the reasons I generally avoid hotels.
After Abbott suggested that Indonesia should spare two Australians from the death penalty because of Australia's aid to Aceh after the 2005 tsunami, young fools in Aceh propose to collect money to give back the aid — to defend their bloodthirsty practice.
I can understand any Indonesian's resentment at Abbott's suggestion that Indonesia owes Australia special concessions in return for disaster aid. He was insulting, as he usually is. But Abbott and his disrespect for everyone is a distraction. The issue here is killing people. By doing that, Indonesians are bringing shame on their own country.
The US has proposed new regulations for undersea drilling in the Arctic, requiring more preparations to handle a big spill.
This is inadequate because there is no good way to handle a big spill, even in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Arctic will always be harder. More preparations could at best bring the Arctic case closer to the Gulf of Mexico case.
Since we need to leave 80% of fossil fuel in the ground, let's leave all the Arctic undersea oil in the ground.
A German court has limited when businesses can hire detectives to snoop on their employees.
Apps could track a portable phone's movements by measuring how its power consumption varies.
One more example of why you can't trust a nonfree program. Surely some are not malware, but you can never be sure of any of them.
Nonfree software does computing for suckers.
Muslims in Norway have organized to protect synagogues from attack.
Everyone: call on the movie academy (that gives Oscar awards) to reveal the diversity figures of its voters.
Everyone: urge Senator Wyden to listen to his voters and oppose the TPP.
Denouncing rule by the "extreme center".
Everyone:
call on Judge
Garnett to release the grand jury transcript about the killing of
Eric Garner.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Tne NSA stole encryption keys from Gemalto, the world's largest maker of sim cards, which allows the NSA to listen to communications from billions of cell phones.
Christian extremists that oppose effective contraception are contradicting their stated goals by increasing the number of embryos that don't develop into babies.
I think we can model their behavior better by disregarding the reasons they proclaim, and supposing that what they really want is to use pregnancy as an opportunity to punish women that have sex.
The push for US colleges to punish someone every time rape is alleged tramples defendants' rights and threatens to punish people who did not commit rape under any definition.
Note the example at the end, of the male student who was banned from campus because he resembled someone else who had raped a female student, so he might trigger her painful memories.
Nonexistance - In response to Better Never to Have Been, by David Benatar.
Accused of 'Terrorism,' Animal Rights Activists Head to Federal Court.
Others have been imprisoned for "animal rights terrorism" just for operating a web site.
The New York Times considers decent wages for Indian workers as a failure rather than than a success.
750,000 Egyptians are still working in Libya, driven by poverty and population growth.
If people in a country take dangerous risks "so their children can get married", that country is on track to disaster and needs to reduce the birth rate as quickly as possible.
Everyone:
call on Walmart
and other clothing stores to sign the Accord on Fire and Building
Safety in Bangladesh.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The US is preparing Iraqi forces to fight to recapture Mosul.
I hope they can do it, but we have yet to see if any Iraqi army forces will fight against real opposition.
Judge "Outraged" at Innocent Man, Orders Him to Pay $30,000 in Support for Child That Isn't His.
This is another example of how the legal system finds excuses to elevate its fictions over the facts. It also happens to systematically screw the poor.
Because Obama's health care program was designed to satisfy private medical insurance companies, it imposes a big tax form burden on people who get subsidized coverage.
A national health system would not have this problem.
Everyone:
Call
on General Mills to stop lobbying against dietary guidelines with
less sugar.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
How detective Zuley tortured a series of black Chicago citizens into confessing to murder, but he didn't operate alone. He had the support of the commander of thugs in his district.
Montana is considering a law banning the showing of fake nipples.
It also prohibits display of men's and children's nipples, which would ban traditional practices and threaten a large number of people.
Hong Kong protest leaders face persistent harassment of many kinds.
US citizens: tell the USDA to withdraw its secret approval of a genetically modified pine tree, and consult the public about it.
Another issue about these trees is that the modification, which makes the wood denser, could interfere with their normal degradation.
Before any such tree is put into use, we need to develop reliable ways to keep its genetic modifications in check.
Obama's proposed rule changes for searches of computers would make it easier for the FBI to demand handover of data stored on servers in Europe.
Witnesses claim Russian bombers recently flew over England.
It fits Putin's general policy of probing anywhere he can cause trouble.
Fighting global heating and local industrial pollution on the US Gulf Coast.
Instead of "climate change", let's try to get people to say the words "global heating". The term "climate change" was imposed by the Bush administration to minimize the danger.
Ralph Nader tears into Canada's right-wing fearmonger Harper, who is channeling Dick Cheney about "terrorism" (i.e., environmental activists).
The Divestment Student Network asks university administrators, "Whose side are you on?"
This question is appropriate for other issues besides fossil fuels. It applies to all issues where the plutocrats use institutions to the detriment of everyone else, including for instance the scientists that have been corrupted by the sugar lobby's money.
In fact, we know whose side they are working for thus far. But many of them deny this — to the public and to themselves. Posing the question openly will lead some of them consult their consciences; in addition, we owe them the invitation to switch sides before we conclude that they are irredeemable.
James Risen calls Attorney General Holder America's "Chief Censorship Officer".
Holder is trying to pretend it isn't true.
The beginnings of legalization of marijuana in the US are reducing illegal marijuana imports from Mexico.
Thugs in Washington state killed a man who was surrendering to them. Now they are covering up some of the details.
Apparently they have something to hide.
The man had been throwing rocks at them, which would be a reason to charge him with a crime and arrest him, but doesn't justify shooting him when he had stopped.
Homeless activists have proposed a Right to Rest law, but no California legislator has been willing to sponsor it.
Fracking "flowback" water contains carcinogenic substances, and in California it is often pumped into aquifers.
The sugar lobby has funded so much dietary research that it has mostly gained control over the whole field, influencing the majority of researchers to close their eyes to the problem.
Hacker Claims Feds Hit Him With 44 Felonies When He Refused to Be an FBI Spy.
US war movies have mostly been very similar for 75 years.
There is, however, a change in that before 2000 they tended to teach that Americans were above such things as torture. Since then, they teach that torture is good as long as Americans are doing it.
The article does not mention a few prominent exceptions from the 1970s such as Apocalypse Now, which presented the US war in Vietnam as cruel and did not try to justify it at all. But few young Americans have seen those.
I should point out that there was a very important difference between the war against Japan and the occupation of Iraq. Japanese soldiers in World War II were fighting a war of conquest for the stated purpose of colonization, under the control of military expansionists who had taken control of Japan's government by assassinating politicians who disagreed with them; then, under the approving gaze of their emperor, they conquered parts of China. In 1941 they attacked the US and other countries, then went on to occupy Indochina, Burma, the Philippines and Indonesia. They promised the peoples colonized by European countries near equality under Japanese rule, then treated those peoples so badly (which included forcing thousands of women to be prostitutes for Japanese soldiers) that they welcomed US troops as liberators (and then fought in various ways for independence from the European colonial powers).
Only in India, which never experienced Japanese occupation, did enemies of British colonialism continue to regard the Japanese army as a potential ally for a while.
Obama told the FBI to curb its use of gag orders on PAT RIOT act data seizures, but the FBI has ignored the order.
US citizens:
call for
investigation of Alabama Judge Roy Moore.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Baby California sea lions are going hungry because their mothers can't find enough fish. This is caused by the warmer temperature of the ocean.
Uh oh, what will happen to them when we make the ocean much warmer?
World Bank Refuses to Consider Haitian Communities' Complaint about New Mining Law. It found an excuse to disregard the complaint.
Everyone: Implore California to block the Comcast/Time Warner merger.
Afghanistan and the Taliban plan to hold peace negotiations.
In order for the talks to have a chance of success, both sides need to prefer an agreement to no agreement. I have doubts that the Taliban would prefer an agreement.
Various protest groups in the UK say they will refuse to pay for permission to hold protests.
Lenovo sells PCs with rather nasty adware which also exposes them to attacks.
Most models in fashion shows are exploited much the way businesses exploit interns.
Kansas Republicans are considering excluding students from sex education if their parents are prudes.
Those students will have to figure it all out by trial and error. Some will get pregnant in the process. Republicans want teenagers to be at risk of pregnancy because that provides a supply of people to condemn.
Putin has used Russian censorship to convince Russians that uncensored information is their enemy.
Many other countries are starting along this route.
Republicans in Oklahoma are proposing to ban advanced placement US history because it mentions things in history that are unflattering to the US.
UK intelligence agencies have been illegally snooping on conversations between lawyers and their clients.
US citizens: call on the Federal Reserve to support Greece in resisting imposed austerity.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which causes brain
damage when children are exposed to it.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The UK has reached a higher employment rate, but this does little good for working people since most jobs pay so little.
The article ends by supposing that pay levels follow the productivity of labor, but that is a myth. Employers are happy to pay workers less than the value of their work, and the UK still does not have a shortage of labor.
Why Is No One Talking About the GOP's Plan to Send Millions of Disabled Americans Into Poverty?
The spread of the fossil fuel divestment movement, and the fossil fuel companies' counterattack, means that there is no room to be neutral.
The US is going to sell armed drones to other countries, facilitating assassination campaigns world wide.
Global heating will spread parasites that carry diseases. Often a parasite that currently is limited to one host species can jump to other host species when the host moves into a different ecological mix.
Pablo Iglesias: austerity means the end of democracy.
In other words, it is plutocracy.
David Hicks, former prisoner in Guantanamo, has been found innocent of aiding terrorism, but he still suffers from the effects of imprisonment.
He also says that the US and Australia knew he was innocent all along, and that his charges were a frame-up.
The Gates Foundation, following Gates himself, has a bizarre excuse for ignoring the danger of global heating.
Prisoners are being forced to shovel snow in Boston, and are being paid hardly anything. (20 cents per hour, to be precise.)
The prisoners should receive the standard wages for work they do. To pay them less undermines the income of non-prisoners.
Proprietary software controlling disk drives, USB memories is a grave vulnerability.
I think the real solution is to design these peripherals so that no one can change the software in them through the usual interfaces.
Erdogan is pushing to give Turkish thugs more power to attack protesters, and the journalists that cover the protests.
Pearson makes giant profits on standardized tests that the US imposes on all students.
Greece has received temporary funding from the euo zone.
Venezuela foiled a coup plot.
We have to suspect that it was supported by the US, as was apparently the coup in Honduras.
The coup attempt cannot be justified, but Venezuela should stop acting against political opposition.
The Telegraph, of London, deleted a news story about gross and dangerous mismanagement at HSBC.
Melting ice is causing Iceland's land to rise, provoking volcanic eruptions.
Children that enter the US without permission are imprisoned for days in in cold cells without enough food.
Everyone:
oppose the
Florida bill to require people to use the toilets for the gender they
were born with.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on energy secretary Jewell to block Arctic and Atlantic undersea
oil drilling, and tighten other safety regulations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress to require paid sick leave for US workers.
US citizens: call on Congress not to overlook or forgive the wrongdoing of for-profit colleges.
We need stricter rules so they cannot lure students to get painful loans for a usually useless "education".
Poland will pay reparations to the prisoners that the US tortured in Poland.
Architecture designed to reject the homeless can be seen all over cities in the US, as well as in London as described by this article. It makes life worse for the non-homeless, too.
A Canadian intelligence report, made for Harper himself, denies that fossil fuels cause global heating and calls activists campaigning against fossil fuels a security threat.
The mounties (thugs that also double as an intelligence agency) are telling Harper what he wants to hear, much as the CIA did for Dubya about Iraq.
A torturer at Guantanamo brought his methods from the Chicago thug department.
A new Barbie doll will double as a listening device.
The remote service that figures out what Barbie should say next is SaaSS, which makes it unethical. SaaSS always involves spying.
It looks like plain packaging for cigarettes is
reducing
smoking in Australia. The uncertainty is because smoking rates
were declining already, long-term.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
What is clear that requiring plain paper packaging does no harm. And it does not violate any rights that people are entitled to.
Companies that sell dangerous drugs are not entitled to the right to package them however they wish.
Argentina Asks US to Press Iran on 1994 Bombing During Nuclear Talks.
I sympathize, but it would be very foolish for the US to imperil the success of nuclear disarmament talks for this.
Billionaire Polluters predicts that fossil fuel use will keep increasing for decades.
This is one of those predictions that would make sense if you ignore something very important: the collapse of civilization that such an increase in fossil fuel use would bring.
The story of Stephen Kim, imprisoned by the Obama regime for talking to a reporter.
European governments are proposing increased mass surveillance, expecting the public to swallow it from fear.
US citizens: tell Republicans, don't defund Planned Parenthood.
In Scotland: oppose the national ID database.
Everyone: call on McDonalds to stop using meat grown by feeding antibiotics regularly to animals that aren't sick.
US citizens: call on Congress not to renew the PAT RIOT act with massive surveillance.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to take US nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Pussy Riot has released a song dedicated to Eric Garner: "I Can't Breathe".
The ruler imposed by China on Hong Kong, known as "the wolf", called on the people of Hong Kong to act like sheep.
Lots of nondemocratic regimes want to rule sheeple, but few admit it.
Thailand has done little to put an end to enslavement of fishing workers.
The desire to prohibit ketamine as a recreational drug is impeding its medical use (as an anesthetic and for treating depression). Even worse, the drug may be banned entirely.
A similar thing has happened in the US with pain medication: people who need it for pain are stopped from getting enough to help them.
Russian-supported "rebels" in Ukraine have captured Debaltseve.
At one point in 2014, Ukraine's forces were slowly but steadily defeating the "rebels". Then, all of a sudden, the "rebels" got a lot stronger and started advancing. There is only one way that could have happened: with Russian military support.
This point is important because it doesn't depend on believing either side.
The UK right-wing government is using "new models of care" (i.e., reform of some details) as an excuse to privatize parts of the NHS.
The finance minister of Greece stated in 2013 which aspects of Marxism he follows and which aspects he finds mistaken.
He also explained why he does not aim to destroy the euro-zone.
His experience with a first-class air ticket reminds me of an experience I had around 1990. I was invited to Japan along with Thomas Bushnell, developer of the GNU Hurd, and we were both given business-class tickets on the same flight. On arrival we found that we were both perturbed by the intensely servile attitude of the flight attendants, and perturbed even more by the idea that there are people who get used to this and expect it.
Fighting enslavement of domestic workers in Hong Kong.
The per capita GNP of the US is 140,000 dollars per person per year. Most Americans live on something like a tenth of that. The difference is a measure of exploitation by the rich.
Joseph Burrell was jailed for 4 months while his vitamins were tested to verify they were not illegal drugs.
Now he probably faces expensive jail fees. He may end up back in jail if he can't afford them.
The US Supreme Court ruled that it is ok to execute someone even if that person has been shown to be innocent.
Scott Walker, Republican presidential hopeful, is a corrupt liar that tries to crush politicians that oppose him.
He must have a good chance among Republicans.
The witnesses who got Linda Carty sentenced to death have said that they were blackmailed by the DA into lying.
Although US and NATO troops are not directly fighting much, the rate of civilian casualties in Afghanistan is the highest ever.
Republican governors are proposing tax increases that mainly hit the non-rich.
The EU obstinately demands to continue Greek suffering.
If the EU forces Greece to the breaking point, more can break than just Greece.
The Iranian state reluctantly allows Jafar Panahi to make films because they win international awards, but they can't be shown in Iran.
The Australian state which has the Great Barrier Reef has a new government that plans to make new laws to protect the reef, especially from agricultural pollution.
More Money Won't Fix U.S. Infrastructure If We Don't Change How It's Spent.
Women are being taught that it is heroic to die to save a fetus.
A fetus is only a potential person. The woman is a real person.
"Stamp scrip", which decreases in value over time if not circulated, might help Greece.
In general, Greece might be able to escape from crushing austerity by creating money other than euros. However, such schemes are tricky; one needs to navigate carefully between various pitfalls. Syriza's economists are no fools; perhaps they can do it.
I would expect all these schemes are banned by the EU and the euro-zone rules, but there may come a time when Greece must defy those rules.
We should not send humans to Mars while we don't know whether life exists there.
Ukraine's forces shot down a Russian drone over Ukraine, near Mariupol.
Russia's proxy "rebels" could not have captured it from Ukraine. It is conclusive proof of direct Russian participation in the war.
These "rebels" are on the offensive and have cut off Ukrainian forces in Debaltseve.
A UK newspaper's political commentator resigned, denouncing the paper for quashing coverage of the HSBC tax-dodging scandal in exchange for the bank's advertising.
Tories claimed solar power on farmland endangered UK food production, but documents show it had no basis to reach that conclusion.
It was just a handy fabricated excuse to boost use of fossil fuels.
In Iran's Orwellian world, the press are forbidden to mention former president Khatami. He has been declared an unperson.
Another oil train has exploded in the US.
An Indian millionaire beat his security guard for being slow to open the gate. The guard has died and the millionaire faces charges.
This arrogance of the wealthy shows in other ways in today's plutocrats.
How to Eradicate Poverty: Spend More on Wages And Strengthen Unions.
Just 30 dollars can build a tiny house with wheels that can give a homeless person what's needed to start working. As long as the thugs don't treat it like vermin.
Utah finds that paying market rates for housing for homeless people is a feasible solution.
In San Francisco, Jeff the trash collector became homeless after he was fired due to a drug test.
It does no harm if a trash collector uses marijuana while off duty. Mandatory drug tests ruin lives for no reason. We must stop them.
Many Americans can't afford bail when charged with crimes, so they have to stay in jail until trial. Since they are required to pay for being in jail, they are jailed again for non-payment even if they are acquitted.
Some plead guilty to a crime they didn't commit, just to get out of jail.
A
list
of restaurant and fast-food companies that say they will stop
using meat made with regular use of antibiotics.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Thailand's Students Defy Military Junta And Call for Return to Democracy.
Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative explains how executions dehumanize everyone involved.
PISSI has imposed cruelty to women beyond even Saudi Arabia. Many women will be unable to survive this for long.
Rather than dying passively, they should shoot PISSI supporters or make suicide attacks against PISSI.
PISSI has raped so many women and girls that Iraqi society is on the verge of realizing it is wrong blame the victim of rape.
I suggest offering those ostracized women a chance to recover their self-esteem with military uniforms, weapons, and training. They will fight like demons against PISSI, once they see they can.
Much of the US has been shut down by a big snow storm coming on top of several other big snow storms.
Most Americans probably don't know that this is one of the indirect effects of global heating.
Sudan confiscated the entire print run of 14 newspapers. It is not clear what story the government was censoring.
Censorship in the advanced countries sometimes works more subtly, but sometimes involves imprisoning people for various kinds of political statements, as has occurred in the US and France.
Begging is a crime in England, and the number of prosecutions has greatly increased in recent years.
To ban begging could be acceptable in a society that offers everyone (without exception) some decent alternative. Under a starve-the-poor government, this is just one more nail in destitute people's coffins.
The Tories have spread a "climate of fear" in the NHS; staff that see bad patient care are afraid to report it.
This is coherent with the Tory goal of cutting the NHS as much as possible. The less people realize how bad the consequences are, the farther they can go.
A St Louis thug turned off a car camera, after yelling out to other thugs (in effect), "Don't beat him up yet, the camera is still on!"
Regardless of other details, this should put those thugs in jail.
AT&T plans to charge fiber customers around $30 a month extra for not tracking their internet activities.
I've read that the main US ISPs already keep records of users' internet contacts for use by Big Brother. And AT&T already keeps lists of people's phone calls since 1988 or so. Apparently what AT&T charges extra for is merely not to use the data for its own purposes.
I think most Americans will forego privacy rather than pay $400 a year, because most Americans are on the edge of broke. They might pay for privacy if they could afford it, but they can't afford it.
If this occurs, it will demonstrate that the idea that "you own the data about you" does little good for the privacy of people who can't afford not to sell it.
People should not have to pay for privacy. Privacy should be built into the system.
Liberals (in US terminology) are better than conservatives at overcoming cruel instinctive disgust.
Ask Republican governors: why in your state do the rich pay a lower tax rate than the rest?
You can ask Democratic governors the same question.
Cancel the 2024 Olympics to reduce global heating.
The Right to Free Speech Means Nothing Without the Right to Offend.
If we surrender to murderous religious fanatics by silencing views that offend them, it will mean one can offend only decent, civilized people.
Many states punish prisoners for using social media (usually, being used by Facebook). A single post can be punished by a year's solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement for extended periods of time is a form of brainwashing and should not be allowed at all.
Rehabilitation includes teaching prisoners better life habits, and not being used by Facebook is a good habit. But this is the wrong way to teach it.
The South Carolina law seems to punish even writing an article to be posted on the internet.
The latest UK right-wing technique to divide people is to condemn poor people who are fat.
Many poor people can't afford non-fattening food, or can't buy it near where they live. If the proposal were to correct these problems, all the poor would rejoice. But that would be too helpful for any right-wing politician to consider. Their goal is to find excuses to punish the weak.
I predict that their "treatment" will consist of cutting welfare benefits for the obese, to compel them (and their children) to go hungry until they slim down.
It would take a
60%
tax bracket to stop the growth of inequality in the US. Let's do
it!
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The article explains a lot more about the causes of growing inequality and what methods would or would not stop it.
Dozens of UK employees involved in arms procurement are working directly for arms companies.
How the subtleties of how humans understand categories creates a tendency towards racism.
Standard thug interrogation methods can implant false memories of crimes that never occurred.
Psychologists spending just 3 hours talking with subjects got 70% of them to vividly imagine committing crimes that didn't happen.
This is another reason to refuse to answer the thugs' questions without a lawyer present.
A Guantanamo prisoner suffers lasting medical problems due to torture of his rectum years ago.
How Libya sank into a battlefield for competing warlords.
In 2011, I endorsed the Western intervention to stop Gaddafi from massacring the rebels. At the time, it seemed there would be hope for Libya. Was this idea wrong from the beginning, or was this outcome contingent?
Some claim it was inevitable, but I am not sure, and others are not either.
Of course, "just" killing a dictator does not make everything fine, but the intervention was never only about that.
Some argue that European countries should intervene, but it is not clear what they could do.
We should not assume that Libya is falling under the control of PISSI.
Corruption in Sierra Leone drained 1/3 of the government's funds for fighting Ebola, in the period through October. This may have greatly increased the number of deaths.
The proposed Ukraine cease-fire never got started; war is heating up.
What can we learn from the terrible consequences of western intervention in Libya?
20,000 Nicaraguan sugar farmers have died in 10 years of chronic kidney disease, which is traced to working conditions. The Sandinista government has sold out to the plantation owners, which regularly cheat the workers out of medical benefits in order to avoid paying for their treatment.
The government has also betrayed the women of Nicaragua by banning abortion, which is part of the reason that men in Chichigalpa can't find any work except that which kills them.
If the company had to pay compensation for working people to death it might start treating workers decently. But that would cost a little more, and the company competes with companies elsewhere that probably work farmers to death too. Thus the globalization of business power kills people around the world. Nicaragua would be better off if it refused to compete this way.
Rodney Reed is about to be executed in Texas, apparently framed by the thug who was the real murderer.
China is building cities on farmland, while it does not have enough farmland.
The Satanic Temple: an ethical movement calling itself a religion as a legal fiction.
The fundamental flaw in supposing that "big data" will easily solve all problems.
The Emerging Trend of Innocent Black Men And Boys Dying After Calls to 911.
Political Meltdown In Macedonia Shows Destabilizing Effect Of Massive Government Surveillance.
US citizens: call on food companies to reject genetically modified apples.
There are several reasons to worry about this particular variety.
US citizens: Obama,
tell
the Navy to protect marine mammals from loud sounds.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Apple Partners With the Government on Cybersecurity, Then Preaches About Privacy.
Boston's mass transit system is putting remote-viewable video cameras into buses, violating everyone's privacy in the name of reducing crime where it is already rare.
This sort of camera ought to be illegal except with a specific court order for a specific reason.
In the UK, the influence of Christianity is decreasing and many young Britons are becoming Atheists.
I rejoice in this, but I regard it as dangerous that the phenomenon does not include Muslims. We need to find a way to reach them with the secularist message. Otherwise, millions of Britons who drifted into a vague secularism might be vulnerable.
The competitive pressure on today's college students, due to the lack of jobs, has driven a large fraction to use concentration-enhancing drugs.
The drugs are not unfair to students who are poor, since they are cheap. They put those with a bad reaction to the drugs are at a disadvantage, but I don't see that that is worse than the advantages and disadvantages we get from all sorts of other variations.
The issues I think do matter are (1) possible long term harmful medical effects, and (2) changing what people learn from college.
One person quoted in the article said that college is a "cognitive enhancement", but that is misleading: it suggests that the intended result of a college education is only a matter of concentrating better. The idea used to be that college would teach people a deeper understanding of what they think about.
Many UK working people haven't got the cash to buy a refrigerator, so they rent one and end up paying 3 times as much.
Some children there don't get enough food and their growth is stunted by malnutrition.
Climate scientist Alan Robock believes that intelligence agencies are concerned that geoengineering might be used as a weapon, and he is concerned too.
However, no such technology is ready for the short term for any purpose.
Law for Sale: Senators that voted for Keystone XL got an average of 1/4 million from oil companies.
Blacks in London (as in New York) can't reliably keep appointments because they are likely to be stopped by thugs on vague floating suspicion. Of course, it is worse in New York City.
Scientific papers that purported to find that plain packaging in Australia did not reduce cigarette use were funded and then checked by a tobacco company. Its substance is criticized as invalid, too.
Due to perverse court rulings, only criminal defendants can challenge the legitimacy of massive surveillance — and only when they get notice that the prosecution depended on this. So the US government is deceptively abolishing defendants' right to receive notice.
Guest Post: US Intelligence Reforms Still Allow Plenty of Suspicionless Spying on Americans.
Local initiatives to improve local economic conditions or equality may palliate the injustice of the plutocratic state, but don't do much good in the long term.
The term "market state", used in the article, understates the injustice. If these states claim to provide "economic opportunity", that's a misleading claim: opportunity for the rich to get richer is the only "economic opportunity" that they care about. If they valued properly functioning markets, they would not keep hands off when banksters rig markets.
The right term for these states is plutocratic. They are plutocratic governments of occupation.
It is unfortunate that the article uses the overgeneralization "intellectual property", since that lumps together laws that have almost nothing in common and raise totally different issues.
Transparency (about internet platforms' censorship) Is No Substitute For Free Speech.
An assassination attempt against cartoonist Lars Vilks was presumably the work of an Islamist fanatic.
An American shot three Muslim students in the US as they slept. It is not yet clear why, but he seems to hate religious believers.
I think religious believers are making a mistake in a particular area, but they can be good people and good friends nonetheless.
Historical disinformation by video imagery began 100 years ago in the US with "Birth of a Nation".
The tradition continues today with movies that glorify torture and shooting civilians of occupied countries.
Scholars say China doesn't censor all internet criticism of the government — it focuses the censorship on anything that might lead to a physical campaign of action.
In Argentina, assassinated prosecutor Nisman's charges have been brought against President Fernandez.
Progress in abolishing laws that discriminate against women is slow in many countries.
China is serious about attacking corruption, even at great short-term cost.
In India, Christians are sometimes the targets of Hindu lynch mobs.
These Christians were forest tribals that did not want to be incorporated into Hinduism as untouchables.
Republicans Are Cutting Taxes on the Rich and Raising Them on the Poor.
Republicans plan to cut food stamps again and cut Social Security disability benefits.
These benefits are already inadequate, but every little bit that they can take from the poor will make poor people appear more grubby, helping to justify hurting them even more.
UK officials claimed a treaty with France prevented prosecution of HSBC tax evaders, but French officials responded out that there is no such limit in the treaty.
Those right-wing sellouts are fabricating excuses again.
The US is moving towards reapproving oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea, disregarding the danger of spills.
SWAT teams, which consist of thugs that are effectively soldiers, carry out 50,000 raids a year in the US. Nearly all of them are unnecessary. A retired thug chief suggests how to demilitarize the thugs.
That won't make America safe from thugs — thugs without military weapons kill plenty of Americans — but it is an important reduction in the danger.
The newly approved GM apple is designed not to turn brown when it gets old. That way, stores selling precut apples can hold on to them for days and you won't be able to tell.
Other possible dangers of the GM apple.
Uri Avnery: casino mogul Sheldon Adelson commands Netanyahu as well as US Republicans; he is behind Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress.
What Hollywood wants from the TPP is the power to put Americans in prison for sharing.
PISSI supporters have taken over parts of Libya and plan to kill Egyptian Christians that they captured.
If it is not limited to Iraq and Syria, I suppose we must now call it PIS, the pseudo-Islamic state.
Fossil fuel divestment now targets banks that invest in fossil fuels. People are moving their money out of those banks.
The big US banks helped cause the fiscal crisis, and we have been invited to move our money out of them for that reason.
More Teenagers Trying E-Cigarettes Than Tobacco, US Study Suggests.
US citizens:
call
on the Federal Election Commission to investigate Scott Walker's
apparent violations of campaign finance laws.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Chicago Mayor Emanuel to support the measure for reparations for victims tortured by Chicago thugs.
US citizens: call on Congress not to exclude wolves from the endangered species act.
New York thugs continue shackling prisoners that are giving birth even though that practice is illegal.
Hospital staff could put an end to this if they stood up to it. They could even require the thugs to sign a contract that they will not break this law, before allowing them into the hospital.
Doctors Worldwide Blast TPP's 'Chilling Effect' on Health, Climate Protections.
The three main British parties agreed to cooperate in reducing CO2 emissions.
However, since the Tories pledged to do this when they were elected, and then did the opposite, I think the agreement is worthless. Nothing can make them really go against their masters.
Republicans in state legislatures are looking for opportunities to discriminate against queer people.
TPP is the Crazy Train, and Fast Track is the Highway to Hell.
Bruce Schneier has endorsed the idea that we need to stop digital systems from tracking what we do.
I am glad to see this get support.
Two al-Jazeera journalists that were imprisoned in Egypt have been released on bail pending a new trial.
It is good news, but it is misleading to say they have been "freed". They may yet be convicted again, and simply being in Egypt exposes anyone to the risk of being accused of new crimes.
We should condemn tax avoiders as well as correcting the loopholes they exploit.
PISSI boasts of success in polarizing the world, making people get involved in war either for or against PISSI.
For a US mainstream media pundit, violence that succeeds in movies has to be the right approach for the US.
It is wrong to accuse the pundit of believing Rambo exists. Of course, he knows that Rambo was a fictional character. What he doesn't realize is that the story was not merely fictional, but systematically distorted from reality. It is easy to write a story so that the "good guy" wins and nothing bad comes down as a result. Getting such a good result in reality is a lot harder.
Every year, hundreds of orcas converge on Bremer Bay, but undersea oil drilling could wipe that out.
Demanding photo ID for use of food stamps is the latest idea for shaming the poor.
Governor Walker's public school cuts forced schools to lay off many junior teachers — so Walker blamed that on their union.
Typical plutocratic tactics so far, blaming the non-rich for the harm he has done them. But he got the mentioned teachers by name as examples for his point, getting the facts about them wrong, so those teachers had a chance to lecture him about it.
Australia's uranium may be used in India to build nuclear weapons.
Studies find that in Florida and Colorado, giving homeless people housing would be cheaper than dealing with them as homeless people.
However, housing them would strike Republicans as unjust: if they are poor, Republicans assume it means they deserve poverty.
The US nearly pushed Atlantic sturgeon to extinction, but with some protection they may be starting to recover.
Everyone: call on Louisiana to allow Albert Woodfox's release from prison.
US citizens: call on Congress to expand social security, not cut it.
The massive expansion in Americans' prisons contributed little to the decrease in crime rates of the past two decades.
US imprisonment does tremendous human damage. Whether it harms the economy depends on who you include in "the economy". It may be good for the plutocrats in general. since some of them profit from prisons or employ prisoners as slave labor, and the rest consider many Americans superfluous. Prisons (which tend to kill prisoners who get sick) may be their method of choice to dispose of the superfluous.
Humans put 8 million tons of plastic into the world's oceans each year, which fills them with pollution, and without management efforts this could increase by ten times in the next decade.
That would be something like 1 kg of floating plastic for each 3kg of fish. But even worse is the plastic that the fish eat.
Israel has rejected responsibility for killing Rachel Corrie.
Global heating will give the US decade-long droughts, worse than anything seen for 1000 years. Droughts such as wiped out entire civilizations in the past.
California's drought is already the worst in 1200 years.
HSBC hid money for people accused of serious crimes.
The US would have essentially eliminated poverty 10 years ago if 1979 policies had continued. Now Republican policies are designed to punish the poor because supposedly they must deserve it.
Arizona's reactionary government plans to cut education to open more prisons.
US oil refinery workers are going on strike because the owners skimp on safety to increase profits.
Ukraine and Russia have made another cease-fire agreement.
After several cease-fires have failed, I don't see much hope this one will hold. But it is worth a try.
Bob Nygaard, detective of psychics, gets them prosecuted for defrauding people.
No one can really do what these psychics claim they can do. Up to a point, people can innocently fool themselves that they are psychically healing people, just as people can innocently fool themselves that others are doing so. But when it gets to be big time, it can hardly be anything but fraud.
World Leaders Should Take Advantage of Low Oil Prices to Ditch Fossil Fuel Subsidies.
They should face punitive taxation, not subsidies!
In wealthy Norway, who are the homeless people that need to beg?
Peru Planning Highway Through Most Biodiverse Place on Earth.
A road typically brings deforestation and pollution.
Irish Tax Policies Are 'Anti-Social' to Developing Countries, Says UN Expert.
Automation of dealings with humans means that machines now make the decisions and humans can only obey.
In freedom of the press, the US isn't number 1. It is number 49.
The replacement of factory workers by robots is accelerating.
This means more profits for companies, and even fewer good jobs for the non-rich. All in all, it is a change for the worse.
What we need now in the developed world isn't more efficiency in factory production, it is to give the non-rich as much of a share as they had a few decades ago.
Macedonia: Massive Surveillance Revelation: 20,000 People Wiretapped.
Australians and Americans joined to tell the US Export-Import Bank not to fund a coal mine in Australia.
Virginia is considering a law that the state can't take people's property for merely accusing them of a crime.
A controversial UK "tax incentive" for wealthy people turns out to be a way for many of them to avoid all taxes everywhere.
Papa John's pizza in New York City has cheated workers out of nearly a million dollars.
Kevin Davis called the thugs for help, so they came and shot him dead.
It took him two days to die, and the thugs kept his family away so he could not tell them anything.
Coral face another threat: heating helps coral-eating starfish.
Assad's forces are attacking the non-jihadi Syrian rebels, who have lost a lot of ground in the past two years to al-Nusra and PISSI.
NSA Spy Program So Secret Judge Can't Explain Why It Can't Be Challenged.
Publicly owned banks are profitable as well as helpful to the public, but the current wave of plutocratic treaties threatens to destroy them.
The Turkish government is imposing sectarian education.
The global heating denialists' latest absurd claim: scientists correcting thermometer data for variations in measurement methods are conspiring to fabricate an appearance of global heating.
These people know that no lie is too absurd, if manipulated media will present it as plausible and corrupt politicians will vote for it.
Vast fields emitting bubbling methane have been detected in the Arctic.
This could mean we are sliding to the edge of the global heating cliff too fast to stop no matter what we do.
Christian anti-sex education taught Elizabeth Smart that being raped made her worthless. So she thought there was no point escaping from her kidnapper.
The UK recognized at the time that what it did to some IRA suspects in the 1970s constituted torture.
Fossil fuel company PR companies are making absurd campaigns against the divestment campaign.
Thugs considered Sureshbhai Patel suspicious because he replied "No English" to their questions, so they beat him up and left him partly paralyzed.
Obama is asking for authorization for unlimited global war against PISSI, including use of ground combat troops anywhere in the world.
The UK thugs are forgetting what a free society means.
A privately funded IUD donation program has driven down Colorado's rate of abortions and unplanned births. Now it needs public funding, but Republicans want to kill it.
Lynching in the US was a form of racial terrorism, and its consequences still affect US race relations.
The claim that capital punishment replaced lynching seems to be mistaken or perhaps garbled. The US had capital punishment since the beginning, as did other countries. Abolition of capital punishment in some countries (and some US states) is more recent than that.
The plan to protect Monarch butterflies, while allowing their prime habitat to be destroyed, is inadequate in various ways.
Unemployment causes 45,000 suicides a year worldwide, finds study.
Stores that sell surplus food could help poor people to afford food.
Malaysian cartoonist Zunar has been jailed and faces criminal charges for suggesting Anwar Ibrahim's judges were corrupted by the government.
By simply making this a crime, Malaysia shows it spits on human rights. It has plenty of company, but this is wrong for any country.
The head of Turkey's constitutional court warns that Erdogan is subverting the court system.
An Arms Race Won't Help Ukraine.
The US government distributes suggested criteria for rating people for "susceptibility" to terrorist ideas.
This reminds me of the way the Soviet Union and China rated people for their class background and punished those of bourgeois origin.
The reason that the UK has not prosecuted HSBC for tax evasion and other crimes is obvious: the UK kowtows to banks.
The UK's system of punishing the unemployed and disabled has driven about 50 identified people to suicide, but the true number must be far more.
Obama is gently de-escalating the idea of a conflict of two civilizations.
The UK has tried to track who bought copies of Charlie Hebdo.
This is another reason to insist on anonymous purchase. Don't be tracked — pay cash!
A security investigator published a list of 10 million username/password pairs, as a basis for research.
He took precautions to avoid hurting anyone, but he still feels afraid.
John Kiriakou said that revealing CIA torture was worth it and he would do it again.
There speaks a real hero.
The FBI is targeting activists against tar sands oil (and the Keystone XL pipeline, I expect).
It may be intended for intimidation rather than to get real information.
The FBI ought to be investigating those that are trying to build the pipeline. That's part of a much bigger crime: attempted mass murder, and it may yet succeed.
Working to reduce solitary confinement in US state prisons.
Uncle Sam and the Illusion of Privacy Online.
Four Reasons Why Freedom Lovers Should Cheer a Restrictionist-Led DHS Shutdown.
The example of Mohammed Toiman, age 13, shows how the US systematically lies about the victims of drone bombings.
Every victim is presumed "terrorist enemy" until other people prove otherwise, and even then the presumption is not fully dropped.
It is possible that increased inequality leads directly to increased risk of big recessions.
US citizens: phone your congresscritters and senators to oppose the DARK Act that would ban states from requiring labeling of GMOs.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Poor people in the UK pay triple the usual price.
In the US poor people often have to pay a lot more for food than everyone else does.
The FCC is trying to make the phone companies offer backup power for fiber lines that provide phone service, so that it won't be a step back from copper wires in an emergency.
Here's one situation where it would have been much much better not to allow all the "baby Bells" to merge into giant companies. The smaller companies would be less able to pressure the FCC to disregard the public interest.
Philadelphia thugs face multiple charges for doing the standard thug thing: beating a man bloody and making false accusations against him.
What is unusual is that they were prosecuted when the facts came out.
However, the thug that killed Seth Adams is protected tenaciously by the system that shuts its eyes to evidence exposing the thug's lies.
US employment has increased substantially in the past year, but wages have increased only where states or cities have raised the minimum wage.
This means that a little bit of recovery is trickling down from the plutocrats. But not much: the jobs that are being created are mostly lousy ones. And in the states controlled by Republicans, people have not got a raise.
American heroes who tried to stop the government's torture.
Bernie Sanders: the struggle for the US now is to stop it from becoming an oligarchy.
The US media systematically overlook wrongs committed by the Ukraine government in covering the war.
The UK has trouble putting more money into workers' pockets because it has put so much into banksters' pockets.
The UK government pledged to be the "greenest ever", then spent 300 times as much on fossil fuels as on renewable energy.
The desperate migrant construction workers in Abu Dhabi are punished if they complain about illegal treatment.
Mohammed Tuaiman, age 13, was killed by a CIA drone attack, after relatives were killed in other CIA drone attacks.
The CIA had decided that the men in his family belonged to al-Qa'ida and attacked them repeatedly at home, never mind the bystanders.
If Europe signs the TTIP it will become powerless to regulate US internet companies.
This Treaty Is Plutocratic. We know the details will be bad; the only doubt is precisely how bad. Europe is fortunate that Greece said it will kill the TTIP, but people must continue the struggle until the stake is in its heart.
Google dodges taxes in Australia, exporting profits through subterfuges, as in many other countries.
The anti-corruption Aam Admi party has won big in the local elections for Delhi.
Anwar Ibrahim, the main opposition leader of Malaysia, has been convicted of having homosexual sex.
This verdict was unjust, regardless of what Anwar Ibrahim actually did, because it is wrong to forbid homosexuality. This injustice is widespread in regimes dominated by repressive religions such as Islam and Christianity.
The government suggests that his assistant brought the case. Does the assistant claim Ibrahim raped him? Powerful men do sometimes act that way. But it is also possible that the political establishment pressured him to make a false charge.
A Guantanamo kangaroo court hearing was recessed because defendants
recognized
a former CIA torturer as part of the staff of the court.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Even though the rules of these "military tribunals" are enough to make the trials unfair, the government does not consider that sufficient and looks for various ways to sabotage the defense.
Perhaps rich dissident Saudis funded the September 2001 attacks.
I do understand the difference between funding the Afghan Mujahidin and funding the September 2001 attacks. The article first says Moussaoui claimed Saudi royals did latter, then it says he claimed they did the former. I suppose the author just got confused in writing, but which did Moussaoui say?
Freedom House reports that the level of freedom has been predominantly declining for 8 years.
Peter Watts: If privacy is really dead, why are so many still trying so hard to kill it?
(I've pointed out before that "Your cause is lost, give up" is a sign that it is still possible to resist.)
The state says it should see everything to "keep us safe", but that makes many of us less safe.
A thug in Utah broke Danny Baker's prosthetic arm when he
insisted
on handcuffing it behind Baker's back. Thugs denied Baker medical
care and made false charges against him.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Suing the city will compensate Baker for the damage, which fortunately wasn't permanent. It will not deter thugs from acting like this … again, and again, and again. We must prosecute and jail individual thugs for brutality and for perjury.
Fanatical Christians think it is "beautiful" that rape can make women pregnant.
It may become possible to transplant uteruses into men so that they can carry a pregnancy. Perhaps Republican men should be invited to carry the "beautiful" pregnancies that women don't want for whatever reason.
Specific examples of how HSBC helped its clients do bad things.
Some of these actions are crimes, and some are clearly wrong. Others furthered activities by clients which are or should be illegal. Fundamentally, governments have the responsibility to block companies from sending their profits untaxed through the frontier.
The US government is going to grow milkweed to help monarch butterflies survive the effects of massive use of Roundup.
The use of pesticides is a form of habitat destruction, which (as usual) threatens a whole ecosystem, many species at once. Normally, protecting on threatened species is done by protecting the habitat, which protects all the species that live there.
This peculiar method of protecting monarch butterflies avoids protecting its habitat and thus avoids protecting the other species threatened by Roundup.
Earthjustice has sued to block EPA approval of the herbicide 2,4-D for massive use with GMOs.
The US media won't tolerate Brian Williams's little lies, but what about the big lies that enabled Dubya to invade Iraq?
US citizens:
call on Congress
to call on Saudi Arabia to free Raif Badawi.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Bahrain shut off a TV channel for giving an interview to an opposition leader.
Bahrain calls the opposition "extremists".
The FBI has monitored black writers from 1919 to 1972, analyzing their work for political potential.
We Can Start Leaving the Oil in the Ground Right Now. The idea is to apply the plan that President Correa proposed for oil in Ecuador. He gave up on it because the world did not contribute the money. Maybe now it will.
Global heating is changing US ecosystems, reducing the amount of carbon they absorb.
In experimental plots, this has happened faster than was predicted.
This is a positive feedback that could accelerate global heating.
Global Warming Is Causing More Extreme Storms. This has been measured in the US and elsewhere.
The US has a PR campaign to whitewash the Vietnam War, so people will forget how bad and wrong it was for the US to fight it.
New Evidence that Half of America is Broke.
The US IRS received leaked files in 2010 showing how HSBC helped clients evade US taxes. Now the files have leaked to the public, and people want to know why the IRS has done to prosecute those clients and/or get the taxes they owe.
After Obama has gone so easy on businesses in so many fields, we must worry about whether he did it this time.
A school thug attacked a girl in middle school (under 14 years old); her sister and cousin tried to save her, so he attacked them with a stick and pepper spray. One of them needed stitches in the head.
Then he made false charges against them (standard thug practice). Isn't that a crime? With such good proof, will he be prosecuted for it?
Americans, thugs in your children's school are a threat to them. Tell your school you want the thugs excluded.
A plutocrat shows how little he cares about the millions of Americans facing retirement with no savings.
We Can Now Build Autonomous Killing Machines. And That's a Very, Very Bad Idea.
In a sense, the first autonomous killing machine was the mine with an automatic trigger. It could not move, but it could decide when to explode. Antipersonnel mines have been banned by most countries, though the US is one of the holdouts. Perhaps this autonomous nature is why landmines must be banned.
Britain's decision to create a social media military unit reflects the age of permanent information warfare.
It should be noted that other countries including Russia and China are reported already to have social media armies. The UK is continuing a trend, not starting it. However, Russia and China have already crushed democracy and control public opinion. The place we can hope for them is in countries like the UK.
I don't use social media. Originally this was because it was inconvenient for my lifestyle (I often have no internet connection, for instance.) But I am coming to think that this did me a great service.
Keeshan Harley, a black man from New York, has been stopped on the street and searched 125 times. The thugs know him as an activist and they want to harass him.
He said that things have not got better under de Blasio; that thugs still regard black males as targets, and black activists even more so.
A 1% cut in the US military budget elicits screams from the military-industrial complex, so the proportionally bigger cuts are directed at non-rich Americans, research, safety regulations, etc.
Products including drones, cars and game consoles have universal back doors that permit them to be remotely sabotaged.
President Correa of Ecuador is accused of suppressing dissent in various ways.
Hayden, former NSA director, said he thought that the September 2011 attacks made Americans' constitutional rights obsolete.
Purvi Patel in Indiana has been convicted of aborting her fetus, and of child neglect, even though the two are contradictory.
She was desperate to abort the fetus because her parents practiced a cruel abstinence-only prudery. She was crushed between them and the state that offered her no easy way to get an abortion legally.
UK universities are standing up for free speech for Muslims with rigid positions, but they have failed to stand up for free speech for those who criticize Muslims or Islam.
Unlike the writer, I am more concerned with getting them to do the right thing than with recrimination. If they have failed to stand up for free speech, it is not too late for them to start.
The UK Labour party says it will call for international pressure on tax havens that belong to the British crown.
Why it can't directly force them to change is unclear to me.
The Mexican government is accused of trying to impose false certainty about the fate of 43 disappeared students.
Private debt in many countries is reaching levels that could cause economic crises.
The banksters will take advantage of such crises to grab wealth from the rest of society again.
GCHQ's plan to cope with encryption is to crack the computers of those it wishes to spy on. It is trying to sneak around legal limits through a "code of conduct" that doesn't fully reflect them.
I think it is legitimate for spy agencies to crack the computers of legitimate targets in unfriendly countries. I wish they would do that instead of snooping on everyone.
The UK is trying to restrict large protests by making protesters pay.
Important false stories Brian Williams might apologize for.
Reporter Brian Williams is accused of exaggerating chaos and violence in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
These reports may have encouraged real acts of violence, such as when thugs stopped refugees for hours (or was it days?) from crossing a bridge to leave New Orleans to safety.
The House of Representatives voted (uselessly) to repeal Obama's medical care insurance system, while most Americans want to move in the other direction to a single-payer system.
US citizens: call on Obama to require government contractors to disclose their political spending.
Workers at some US refinery workers are on strike against forced overtime; fatigue causes mistakes that can be fatal, for them and for others.
Outsourcing maintenance to low-paid temp workers is dangerous too. They won't have the same experience with the facility that long-term workers have. Chemical facilities should not be allowed to hire temp workers that would come in contact with the processing machinery.
PISSI burned one prisoner alive, but the Bush forces burned thousands of Iraqi civilians alive.
I disagree on one point. The death of tank soldiers in battle, because their tanks are attacked by planes, is not a war crime. It's merely war. War is hell, but it is not morally equivalent to burning a captive.
The Bush forces tried to keep these burnings quiet, but PISSI publicizes its killings as part of an explicit ideology.
US citizens:
call
on the FDA to study the possible ecological consequences before
using a new method to try to eradicate Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Perhaps it would be wiser to develop the same method for Aedes albopictus, then apply it to both species at once.
US citizens: tell the FCC you will stand behind strong net neutrality rules.
A fun protest in Hong Kong was sabotaged by China's arbitrary confiscation of rolls of toilet paper.
A high school teacher reports that her students don't believe they are supposed to think. All they understand is to look things up and repeat what they are told.
This was to some extent true when I was in high school, in the 1960s. People have a tendency to remember the "good old days" as better than they really were; the change may not be as great as that writer perceives it. But I can believe that it has got worse, due to standardized tests and search engines.
Australia's record heat in 2013 could not have happened without global heating.
US citizens: support protecting polar bears from oil drilling.
US citizens:
Call on Senator
McCain to once again support closing Guantanamo prison.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Amid New Claims, Calls Intensify to Declassify Saudi Chapter of 9/11 Report.
Lone Wolf Terrorists Are Exceedingly Rare, So Why Does Everyone Keep Talking About Them?
Norway has dropped a proposed law to prohibit begging and even giving to beggars.
US farmers are becoming shy of nonfree software in their tractors, which screws them.
In a tractor, a car, a phone or a laptop, nonfree programs are an injustice. The intentionally weak term "open source" holds users back from recognizing that point. The term was coined to steer people away from demanding freedom in their computing. Calling freedom-respecting programs "open source" leads people to ask, timidly, "Please, sir, may I have some more leeway," rather than saying they deserve freedom and mean to get it.
Don't let "open source" thinking hold you back from claiming your rights. Please join us in insisting that our software must respect our freedom. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html.
Oxfam warned the US and UK governments that closing the companies that send money to Somalia would lead to disaster there.
When a region is full of people who can't survive except with money sent by expatriates, its population is unsustainably high. It seems to me that we should make sure they receive plenty of birth control supplies along with the money.
Britons are proud of the NHS, but the government made its assaults on the NHS so complex that most Britons did not recognize them as sabotage. And the press did not help them understand this.
Canada's supreme court said that people are entitled to get help from doctors when they rationally choose to die.
The article presumes, but does not say, that the ruling is limited to people whose natural death is expected to come soon anyway. It does not seem right to exclude people doomed to a life of paralysis or incommunicado from this right.
A Missouri boy's family pretended to kidnap him, to teach him to distrust strangers. Now they face real charges of kidnaping.
Scaring a child this way may be a bad idea, but it is not kidnaping. To label it so is willful blindness on the state's part. "Why do we exaggerate the charges? Because we can."
A secret UK court ruled that GCHQ acted illegally when it got information about Britons from Prism via the NSA.
The Koch Brothers' company dumps toxic waste into a river in Florida through a pipeline built without proper approval, but governors Scott and Jeb Bush smoothed that over.
The US military budget is bigger than it was under Reagan during the Cold War.
Re-colonizing African agriculture with patented seeds.
US citizens:
oppose
plans to relax regulations that restrain banks from reckless
borrowing.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Turning public institutions into businesses to keep them afloat is a step towards destroying them entirely.
Easing of China's One-Child Policy Has Not Produced a Baby-Boom.
In other words, applying the policy for a few decades has brought about a lasting social change, a form of "demographic transition". That is grounds to rejoice, and suggests that a similar policy, combined with economic growth and mass education, could have the same effect in other countries.
We can still prevent the human population from reaching 9 billion, with efforts including redistribution of wealth to the non-rich.
The UK's cutbacks now hit people too damaged to live on their own, and relatives that can't both work and care for them.
US citizens: call on the USDA to reject genetically modified cotton that is designed to be used with a dangerous herbicide.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the bill to block
the FCC from establishing network neutrality. Also send email through
this
campaign.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
There is a campaign to boycott the movie, 50 Shades of Grey, and give money to women's shelters instead.
Women's shelters are a worthy cause, but it is simply erroneous to confuse BDSM with domestic violence — like confusing a play presenting a murder with real murder.
Does anyone actually spend fifty dollars to see a movie? I have not gone to a theater in a while, but I never spent anywhere as much on their expensive snacks as the ticket cost. If people really do that, they either have money to burn or they don't understand the meaning of thrift.
Female genital mutilation in Kenya is protected by a wall of silence which makes it appear a festive occasion.
Any medical complications are blamed irrationally on the victim.
In Egypt, a few families reject the social pressure.
Almost 2/3 of US investigative journalists believe the US government is snooping on them.
I think they are right. Investigative journalists typically investigate the powerful or the government itself, and either way the plutocratic US government can be expected to regard the journalists enemies.
Americans used to burn captives to death.
The Shame of US Journalism Is the Destruction of Iraq, Not Fake Helicopter Stories.
Making big fusses about minor lies, to distract from important issues, has been a feature of US politics for a long time. Remember when Clinton (the other one) was impeached for lying about a private sex act?
Florida effectively legalized sexting by teenagers — by mistake.
At most 8% of the prisoners Obama has released from Guantanamo have gone into fighting the US. On the contrary, many of the prisoners have become rather magnanimous, given the circumstances.
The issue is a distraction anyway. If someone did fight for the Taliban and was captured, he ought to be treated as a prisoner of war (thus, kept in Afghanistan). If someone planned or committed crimes, whether terrorist or other, he deserves a fair trial.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to cut the big new nuclear weapons spending proposal.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to give Obama's judicial nominees consideration (and
a vote).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Suncor to stop polluting Canadian democracy and Canadian rivers.
How Palestinian teenagers now in prison in Israel are being tortured.
Here, as in general, I decline to use the term "children" to refer to teenagers. For many issues, what's right for children is different from what's right for teenagers. However, that doesn't affect the substance of this issue: torture like this is wrong for teenagers, for children, and for adults too.
New rules in US colleges say students are to be treated as rapists if they don't get "affirmative consent" for sex. At the same time, you can get kicked out of school and lose your job just for asking.
Israel's bombardment of Gaza provoked a big increase in antisemitism in Britain and France.
I almost never experienced antisemitism while growing up in the US. Horror over Nazi genocide made antisemitism something to shun a person for, which suppressed it to a low level.
Israel's crime in Gaza does not justify bigotry or hatred against Jews. These are two different issues. Indeed, many US Jews (and people of Jewish ethnic background, such as me) condemned the bombardment of Gaza and campaign against Israel's occupation of Palestine.
Israel itself has done its best to link the two issues, through decades of falsely claiming that those who condemn Israel's occupation policies are "antisemitic". The link can't help running both ways, thus contributing to the resurgence of real antisemitism.
A thug killed an aged, demented man by firing a rather dangerous "non-lethal" weapon, and was acquitted for it.
I am sure that several thugs could have subdued him. The hospital staff could have done so, with some persistence and thought.
Ferguson thugs want to try out a kind of bullet that is less likely to kill (but can still kill). They already have many other weapons that are more likely to injure people than to kill.
What's wrong with them is that they use these weapons when they should not.
The US car-tracking system also takes photos of drivers and passengers.
Obama said he would rein in the NSA, but his proposals are minor tweaks.
More information about how little effect they will have.
The TPP would requires several countries including Canada to extend copyright to death + 70 years.
This is bad for the US, even though the US already adopted death+70 copyright, because the US needs to shorten the copyright period. If the US ratifies the TPP, the TPP will be one more obstacle to this change.
The Canadian right-wing government's new "national security" law threatens Canadians with imprisonment on vague grounds, but enables the government to look tough.
Roger Vanderklok still trembles when he thinks of airport security, two years after he was jailed on the false word of a TSA employee with an axe to grind and no scruples about lying.
The article wonders why Kieser wasn't fired. I wonder how we can get him prosecuted for his perjury. When power-tripping tyrants try things like this, they should be jailed for years.
A large amount of money has been moved out of coal company stock in a divestment campaign.
Zacarias Moussaoui says that high Saudi officials helped fund al Qa'ida after it declared war on the US, and US congresscritters say a secret report agrees.
But other parts of Moussaoui's testimony seem to be impossible. He could be making it up.
Ireland's law against blasphemy is not only unjust in itself; it provides an excuse for other countries that punish blasphemy aggressively.
Melted Greenland ice runs to the bottom and makes lakes under the ice sheet. This speeds the flow, making the ice sheet more vulnerable to a tipping point that would melt a lot of it.
The US has persecuted Palestinian exile Sami Al-Arian with absurd charges and contradictory demands for 12 years.
Some of the accusations were based on books he had copies of (which does not mean he agreed with them).
Prosecuting someone for having copies of books is a form of tyranny. The UK practices this tyranny openly while the US uses it by subterfuge.
Robert Reich: Why Work Is Turning Into a Nightmare: the piecework service economy.
This has nothing to do with sharing. Let's reserve the word "sharing" for voluntary cooperation, and denounce its use for these businesses. And then let's abolish them.
France is trashing freedom of expression. The reaction to a non-state attack on freedom of speech is a state attack on freedom of speech.
Views on various questions are banned in France. In November I urged French officials to repeal the law banning expression of doubts about the genocide of the Armenians. People should be free to state any views whatsoever about this question, as about every other political, historic or ethical question.
We Could Keep [US] Government Small if Only the Old Weren't Getting So Much Healthcare.
Erdoğan's intimidation has made most public hospitals in Istanbul refuse to do abortions. It is probably worse elsewhere in Turkey.
When women die from underground abortions, or from forced childbirth, Erdoğan will have their blood on his hands.
Global heating means warmer winters, which threatens agriculture.
Applying Title II to ISPs is a possible basis for network neutrality, but big decisions about the Title II regulations remain to be decided.
Officials are already trying to minimize the expected failure of the Paris climate negotiations.
John Kiriakou, imprisoned by the US for his opposition to US torture practices, has been released from prison to house arrest at home.
The movie
Kiana Howard joined a strike of Walmart employees, and was fired for it.
An even bigger point visible here is how desperate her life situation is. Our modern-day Hoovers seek to make her homeless, and her child too.
230 Egyptian protest leaders were sentenced to life in prison.
Even if were legitimate to imprison people for protesting, a trial with so many defendants cannot give justice under any circumstances.
US citizens: Support Senator Sanders' plan for a big investment in US infrastructure.
US citizens: Call on Holder to investigate the shooting of Jessie Hernandez.
US citizens: demand release of the full draft text of the TPP.
PISSI is not alone in burning people to death; the missiles from US drones do the same thing. So do the phosphorus and napalm bombs that the US used in Iraq. But nobody publishes videos of that.
The reason PISSI was able to publish a video is that PISSI intentionally murdered a prisoner. That is a significant step up in barbarity compared with US missiles, which are at least intended to be fired at enemies on the loose, even though they often kill the innocent.
Armed forces of Chad and Cameroon separately won battles against Boko Haram fanatics.
It appears that competent armies have no trouble defeating Boko Haram, which suggests the Nigerian army is not competent.
The UK government snooped on 84 journalists and 242 of their sources during the past 3 years.
When attempts to increase social mobility fail, there's nothing left but redistribution from the rich to the poor.
That's what's right anyway. Painful poverty can't be excused by the fact that some poor become rich and some rich become poor.
The NSA and GCHQ take advantage of crackers to collect whatever the crackers get from various sites.
Greek austerity measures were followed by a substantial increase in the suicide rate.
A leak suggests that the Trade in Services Agreement will be designed to compel privatization of medical care.
Koch-Funded Groups Coalesce Around Axing All Federal Funding for Walking, Biking And Transit. And paying low wages for construction projects.
Israel destroyed a Palestinian water pipe near the Jordan Valley.
Israel has a systematic policy of driving out all Palestinians from that area.
Building Israel's annexation wall through Bethlehem threatens to destroy a school or cut off the town from the only nearby park.
Requiring children to be vaccinated makes a difference in disease rates, even in the US.
Your Right to Believe in Nonsense Should End When You Start Spreading a Highly Contagious Disease.
I'd say rather that they have the right to believe whatever they like, but they may not act on their beliefs that way.
Two Florida thugs pinned a child to the floor and pointed a gun at her. She had been watching TV at the time.
Couldn't they figure out that her watching TV could hurt no one except her?
Israeli "settlers" deep in Palestinian territory have found a clever way to steal a Palestinian family's land even though the family won a victory in Israeli court.
To Fix Global Poverty, You First Need to Acknowledge Where It Comes From.
The Tory Party in the UK is funded by stock market manipulators.
Fossil Fuel Companies Are the Greatest Threat to Life's Party — Not Greens.
The Golden Dawn party's recently reelected legislators will face trial for "belonging to criminal organization."
I do not like Golden Dawn's positions, but the practice of declaring a political party "criminal" and prosecuting its leaders is dangerous to democracy. What would stop your political party from being next?
What I don't know is, does the trial have to prove that Golden Dawn is a criminal organization, or has that been established by fiat?
UK thugs have put millions of innocent people's faces in a facial recognition directory.
India made employment a right and employed rural families, but it is cutting back and the program no longer does them much good.
A Seattle thug arrested William Wingate, age 70, for
using
a golf club as a cane.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Wingate pled guilty to a false charge to avoid the threat of worse charges. This illustrates the systematic injustice of the US legal system which regularly pushes people into false confessions. While the city did the right thing by dropping the charge afterward, that doesn't erase the systemic problem.
The arrest appears to be a typical example of unconscious racism: Wingate had a golf club, and the thug got the impression he was "swinging" it. (I do not see what is wrong with swinging a golf club, as long as you don't come near hitting anyone. Golf clubs are made for swinging.)
Strictly speaking, thug Whitlatch is right in saying that thugs are not "out to get" blacks. Rather, they are systematically predisposed to perceive blacks as doing something threatening, and to respond to this by arresting them, beating them up, even killing them.
Obama's budget weakens food and water safety.
I disagree on one point: I don't in principle object to funding food safety inspections through "user fees" if that means large businesses have to pay for them. But small businesses should not have to pay fees, so as to cancel out a little bit of the existing slant of the playing field.
Obama has proposed an increase in efforts to keep antibiotics working, but it isn't enough to achieve the goal.
The most important step, banning the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in farm animals, won't require any government expenditure.
Obama's proposed tax on corporations' foreign income would still leave them with a tax break that is unfair to the rest of us.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to defend Wall Street reform.
A former UK jobcenter worker wrote a play to show how the government has converted the jobcenters from "doing something for" the unemployed to a scheme to hurt them.
Scientists Pledge to Increase Interference with the Church.
It's too bad this is (apparently) a hoax; the job really needs to be done. And not just with one church.
The Greek defiance illustrates that many countries need and deserve debt forgiveness.
Corruption in Ukraine reaches even into hospitals.
Demobilized in the USA: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement. There was a massive antiwar movement in 2003 and for several years after that. However, by 2006 it was focused on the death of US soldiers, and not many of them are being killed now. Reportedly over 200,000 veterans have permanent brain injuries, but those are not visible so they don't inspire resistance.
Naive governments, like naive individuals, are often led into debt by calculating and unscrupulous banks, and that was the case for Greece. It is the banks, not Greece, that deserved to be punished so that they won't do this again.
A Russian woman faces 20 years in prison for telling the Ukrainian embassy that Russian troops from a nearby base were being sent to Ukraine.
The bizarre twist is that Russia continues to deny that its soldiers are in Ukraine, which means it has to claim that she gave Ukraine false information that she invented with no basis.
With people taking so many photos, they shouldn't think that this involves any creativity.
I don't consider my photos art, and I don't aspire to making photos that are great. I think of them as a way to show people beautiful or interesting places I have seen. Some of them are scenes that surely many have photographed, and some are not.
Afghan women protested the government's failure to include women in the cabinet.
Women in the cabinet is either a proxy or a substitute for government policies that respect women's rights. I am sure the Afghan government doesn't do that very much either.
Rich people are buying remote retreats with airstrips, hoping to use them to escape the global disaster they are preparing for everyone else.
The article ends by saying that the rich should hide from shame rather than from fear. I suggest they ought to face both.
I think it would be a good idea to maintain published lists of the plutocrats and their families — so that they won't believe they will be allowed to escape after dooming most of humanity to disaster.
It is hard to protect an Indonesian rainforest against desperate violent local people determined to cut down the trees and farm.
This is going to get worse as population increase makes food scarce. Human population growth will be stopped, so let's stop it before the mass extinction.
On-line bank statements make it hard for customers to keep track.
The former environment minister of India blocked some industrial projects on instructions from the leader of the Congress Party.
I don't see that this is particularly bad. What the new government is doing — approving projects easily — seems more dangerous.
A dissident book publisher in Belarus faces a large fine for publishing without a license. It doesn't have a license because the state refuses to give it one.
Using computer screens a lot leads teenagers to sleep much less.
Greyston Bakery will hire anyone at all, and helps people become good employees.
The US employment system nearly locks out anyone who has a criminal record or even a blemish, except for those involved in plutocratic corruption who can always get a new start.
US citizens: call on the SEC to make public companies report the ratio between the CEO's pay and the average worker's pay.
Why not go further and require reporting all the benefits that all the executives get?
Syriza has an interesting proposal for restructuring Greek debt so that Greece could someday pay it.
The non-rich in the UK are suffering an "epidemic of private despair"; in a political system which treats them like scum, they think of themselves as scum.
Some Deny Society Exists. Let's Prove Them Wrong.
If you are being oppressed, don't blame yourselves! You are not scum. The plutocrats and the politicians that obey them are scum.
The UK's "anti-terrorism" bill would extend the UK's crackdown on freedom of expression, which has already gone dangerously far.
Donors pledged 3 billion dollars of aid to the countries hit by Ebola virus but have really given only 40% of that.
If they had sent money faster, they could have ended the epidemic sooner.
A US government memo acknowledged that force-feeding prisoners violates international law. This may exculpate a nurse who refused to do force feeding and is now facing charges of "refusal to be cruel and inhumane".
Only 9% of students from poor families complete college in the US, compared with 77% from wealthy families.
Those 9% are terribly burdened by debt.
In other words, poor people have very little chance to advance.
If only 44% of the wealthy got college degrees in 1970, surely the other 56% were not hindered by lack of money. Either they were not good enough students, or they saw no need to bother, but I don't know which. I wonder why nowadays 77% of them get college degrees.
Many people seek the comfort of assuming that the world is just — that people all get what they deserve. People who cling to this tend to blame victims.
The just-world assumption feels great when you are privileged, because it gives you a basis to assume it's your own merit at work.
This plays a part in a new right-wing camp, the "redpill right wing". People in that camp close their eyes to the fact that others are held back by bigotry and other forms of social injustice.
Paradoxically, I have come across an exactly opposite form of bias, where people say, "Lots of other things could kill you, so there is no point in avoiding this one." They do this to rationalize dangerous practices such as smoking tobacco.
The world gives us partial control over our futures, but in areas that involve others, we can't expect complete control. Even in things that affect only us, others may control us through unjust power. There is also lots of randomness in the system: unpredictable events that could result in good or bad. This is what makes life so complicated and interesting. Each of the irrationalities mentioned above consists of ignoring one large aspect of life.
A NYC thug has been indicted for stamping on the head of a man down on the sidewalk who was being handcuffed.
Prosecutor Nisman wrote an arrest warrant for President Fernández, which he hoped to execute after the president's impeachment.
Underground oil leaks can put arsenic into ground water.
Thugs in Seattle blocked a protest march, then pepper-sprayed two people who were leaving the rally that had ended.
A device is available to defeat Keurig coffee DRM once and for all.
Obama called for an end to subsidies to oil companies.
Obama has started advocating a considerable fraction of the progressive causes that most Americans support. Too bad he did not do this when there was a chance of enacting the changes.
I expect that many Democrats who are not really very progressive will do likewise in the 2016 elections, without a serious intention of passing laws to do this. We will have to choose the serious progressives over the late converts.
A nine-year-old boy was accused of terrorism in school for fantasy play in which he said a "magic ring" would make another child invisible.
The school staff who did this are not really idiots. Rather, they have been convinced that it is their job to act like idiots. This is even worse. After all, only a small fraction of the staff of a school could really be idiots, but all the staff could give in to pressure to act like idiots.
Thugs pressure students caught selling pot into undercover buying for the thugs, and sometimes the students get killed.
Most Americans don't think of selling pot as antisocial, and neither do these students. They don't know how to move in the circles of hardened criminals.
Unlike hardened criminals, they are not accustomed to betraying people. Being set to cause the arrest of others like themselves must do them lasting moral damage. They must think that honesty is beyond their reach.
The UK government has eliminated the subsidy for community renewable energy.
This was the last substantial UK policy which favored renewable energy. The Conservatives said they would be the "greenest government ever", but quickly showed that their intention was to favor fossil fuels. Rather than change direction immediately, they began a step-by-step change stretched over the whole period of this government. I am not surprised that they have timed it so that the last step in the total reversal for the end of that period.
A survey of published experiments concludes that there is no real evidence that transcranial brain stimulation has any predictable effect.
It may have some effects on some people, but it is hard to be sure whether that is real or through suggestion.
In Memory Of The Liberties Lost In The War On Piracy.
I think the first battle was lost when most people (but not I!) started using the smear-word "piracy" to mean "What the copyright industry hates".
Some people want to watch the original version of the first Star Wars movie, but distributing it or downloading it is criminalized in the US.
Awareness of the danger of permanent brain injury is starting to affect Americans' attraction to football.
The US government labeled Jeremy Hammond as a "terrorist".
"Terrorist" could be a meaningful word if the government treated the concept with respect. Nowadays states have twisted it into an all-purpose excuse to demonize or imprisoning anyone for whatever reason.
Syriza will kill TTIP (This Treaty Is Plutocratic).
For the US, War Is the New Normal: various factors prevent the US from even considering peace.
After tax cuts (for the rich) and welfare cuts in Wisconsin failed to produce any trickle-down to working people and poor, Republicans conclude that more of the same is needed.
Barrett Brown explains the arrant dishonesty of his prosecution.
I'm afraid he is right — with the US mainstream media toadying to the US government, the only factor that restrains its lies is the heroes like Manning, Assange and Snowden, and flawed heroes such as Barrett Brown.
Peruvians in the Amazon region demand compensation for 45 years of pollution from oil drilling.
Irish Water Tax Rebellion Marches on as Thirty Thousand Take to Streets.
Pakistan is about to execute a man who was convicted despite a strong case he killed in self-defense.
US television spreads misinformation that torture is "effective" for getting true information.
14 of the 15 hottest years recorded by meteorology have been since 2000.
The US and China are starting to compete for control of food supplies.
We have got to reduce the human birth rate!
US citizens: sign this petition too against fast-track for the TPP.
US citizens: call on the FCC to pre-empt laws against municipal broadband.
US citizens:
call
for a continued ban on robocalls to cell phones without the user's
consent.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
A cell phone is a tracking device and a listening device, so I refuse to have one. The matter of robocalls is a small inconvenience on top of that fundamental injustice. Nonetheless, this campaign is worth supporting as long as it doesn't distract us from the deeper problem.
80% of UK universities have rules restricting freedom of expression.
There is some confusion regarding the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign supported by the UWE student union. It is aimed at Israeli institutions, including the universities (which are connected with the occupation), but not at individual scholars. Thus, it includes a boycott of Israeli academiEs but not of Israeli academiCs. Perhaps the student union extended the boycott to target individuals, but it could be that Spiked has been misinformed about it.
Chemical companies suppressed an EU report that aimed to limit hormone-mimicking pesticides that can cause cancer and birth defects.
A large part of the UK has been put off limits to fracking, with the result that business may find fracking unprofitable to try.
Egypt has sentenced almost 200 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death, supposedly for killing a few thugs.
Egyptian trials are so wacky that this one gives us no reason to think those people did anything at all, or even that they supported the Muslim Brotherhood. Who knows?
But if they really did kill thugs, so what? The thugs were already shooting supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, so why shouldn't they shoot back?
This has nothing to do with what the Muslim Brotherhood stands for (which, as an Atheist, I don't agree with at all).
Australia's carbocratic government says it will operate with "renewed vigor" on the Great Barrier Reef.
What it was doing already was bad enough.
Peter Greste has got out of Egypt but at least 11 other journalists are in prison there, along with tens of thousands of people who protested or were merely unlucky.
A basic income for everyone would do more than just replace other forms of welfare benefits.
Syriza's economics rejects the fiction of the "rational economic man".
Face recognition technology is being improved to the point where it makes everyone unsafe.
Reporter Peter Greste, imprisoned in Egypt for over a year for committing journalism, will be deported to Australia.
Will that mean he is freed? Supposedly the deportation would be so he can "continue his sentence" there. Will Australia have to promise to imprison him? Will Australia be allowed to give him the retrial he is owed?
His Egyptian colleague Baher Mohamed may remain in prison for years. Al-Sisi probably hopes we will forget about him once Greste and Fahmy are safely home.
Obama will propose a small (14%) one-time tax on money held by US corporations outside the US.
It is the right spirit, but must more than this needs to be done. For instance, to put an end to "inversions" whereby these companies cease to be US companies.
A statement from some protesters in the UK's "march for homes".
The Pirate Party's sole current MEP has drawn up a report for the European Parliament proposing reforms to copyright law.
For the European Union to adopt these reforms would be a substantial step forward. However, they fall far short of what is needed to make copyright tolerable.
In particular, they fail to establish the right to share copies (noncommercial redistribution without change). They shorten the copyright term a little, but leave it lasting an absurdly long time. The weakness comes at the root: the report accepts unjust treaties that we need to eliminate, such as the Berne Convention, as well as the World Trade Organization that must be destroyed for other larger reasons as well as copyright.
As a matter of practical politics, this may be the best one could hope the European Parliament to pass, or perhaps more than it could pass. However, Europeans, and especially parties such as the Pirate Parties that stand for the freedom to share, must demand far more reduction in copyright power, even if they cannot achieve it now.
This makes it especially worrisome that this report was drawn up by the Pirate Party's sole MEP.
The fact that it was written by her does not make it any better or any worse than if someone else had written it. However, soon she will have the responsibility to say that the report's reforms are inadequate. Will she be able to say that after having written it herself? Or has she in effect allowed herself to be co-opted by the establishment?
The developed countries must make major changes to avoid disaster by 2050, and that's without trying to end poverty for the rest of the world.
We should make strenuous efforts to prevent human population from increasing to 9 billion.
The US government says encryption and anonymity are a "lawless zone".
Implicitly this represents the claim that it is normal for the state to know everything about everyone, in order to "protect" us from secondary dangers. It's surely coincidence that this would give the state total power over everyone.
The US government's massive system of car-tracking was set up to further another injustice: "forfeiture" (taking people's property without convicting them of crimes).
DeBlasio Responds to Police Reform Protests by Giving Machine Guns to Cops for Protest Policing.
I don't think New York City will ever need a 350-thug paramilitary unit, bigger than a company in the US army. I have a feeling that the thugs demanded this from de Blasio for ceasing to attack him after he criticized them for killing people.
Social mobility in the UK has remained small for 160 years.
The only way to help the non-rich is by taxing the rich.
A clever but meaningless "solution" to massive surveillance: the "databox" would offer a way to give personal data to companies via one special company, rather than directly. It would only mean that some of your personal data follows a different pathway to companies and the state.
The databox company would hand over all your data to Big Brother on demand, as every company does (in the US, the PAT RIOT act requires this).
The databox company would hand your data to other companies, too, whenever you do business with a company that says you must agree to do so.
Meanwhile, most of your personal data is generated by transactions that you're involved in: for instance, if you order a book, listen to streaming music, or pay with a credit card. You never have this data, and neither would the databox company.
In other words, the databox is a pseudo-solution that can only distract from the measures that would really end massive surveillance.
Boko Haram is attacking the city of Maiduguri, with 2 million inhabitants, from all sides.
Prohibition of abortion kills women today in Brazil.
But even if it didn't kill them, it would force them to have babies, and that in itself is a great injustice.
A misguided attempt to stop trafficking of workers in just one field attacks the freedom of the internet on the side.
Trafficking and enslavement of workers is a broad problem, found in diverse areas of work including domestic service, sex work, factory work and construction. We need to develop measures to protect workers from this.
One of the factors that promotes enslavement in any area is poverty.
Obama told Democratic legislators to "get informed" about the TPP; but he is the one preventing them from reading it.
San Francisco thugs arrested a public defender for objecting as they violated her clients' rights.
If you want to watch the video, be sure to get it with free software. Don't watch it as embedded in this page because that would make you run a nonfree Javascript program.
Obama talks about the need to curb global heating but his actions accelerate it.
Bernie Sanders says he is waiting to see if he can mobilize people to decide whether to run for president.
He can mobilize me. What about you?
In the US, even most Republicans think global heating is dangerous and action must be taken to curb it.
Thus, all depends on whether the denialists can rig/buy the next election.
Obama's "breakthrough" with India: US nuclear reactor companies won't be liable for nuclear accidents in India.
Is this supposed to be positive?
In Laos, 500 people a year are maimed or killed by unexploded US bombs, 40 years after the war ended.
It will probably be like this in Iraq and Afghanistan a century from now.
Tens of Thousands Rally in Madrid Demanding End to Austerity.
When a person's activity history is published "anonymized", without the person's name or address, in many cases it is easy to figure out who that person is.
Real anonymity requires stopping anyone from recognizing that your various activities are done by the same person. That is why I refuse to pay with credit cards.
Some US oil pipeline companies seem to be rather careless, because they have repeated oil spills.
Will the US government force them to change? I doubt it. It would be more reliable to make them sell all their pipelines to more careful companies.
Everyone:
call on
the Smithsonian to stop employing Willie Soon, who campaigns to
deny that humans are causing global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The EU has admitted it wants to force companies to hand over their encryption keys.
Governments that cite violent enemies as an excuse to cut human rights are committing a mistake as well as an injustice.
The only case where you need to worry about the precise border of sexual consent is if you have sex with someone who is less than enthusiastic about it. Why even consider such a thing?
The NSA still collects US phone call data en masse and still cannot justify it.
It is not enough to leave most Americans out of this collection. We must leave everyone out of it except court-designated surveillance targets.
The US has declared all its spending on training the Afghan army secret.
This is a good way to hide inefficiency and corruption. Might there be any of those in Afghanistan?
What Should We Think About Big Data That Aims to Help People?
Secret Teacher: I Want to Be Like Yoda, But I Feel More Like a Stormtrooper.
US citizens: tell Congress to reject the TPP because it would further export jobs from the US.
US citizens: call on the FDA to inspect food warehouses more and punish the unsanitary ones firmly.
Everyone:
call on President
Aquino of the Philippines to stop that country's thugs from
torturing the people they arrest.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: Call on California Governor Brown to ban fracking in that state.
US citizens: Support protecting the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.
Everyone: call on Lowe's to stop selling garden plants treated with neonicotinoids.
The US government will recognize the future danger of flooding, which will be augmented by global heating, in funding future construction projects.
Ladar Levison: Prosecutors Used the Same Legal Strategy against Barrett Brown As They Did Me. Are You Next?
It is rumored that one of the Guantanamo prisoners exchanged for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has returned to fighting for the Taliban.
It is not in general considered wrong for exchanged prisoners of war to return to fighting, so why should it be wrong in this case? The US could have sent Sergeant Bergdahl back to fighting against the Taliban, as he remains in the army.
The US must release and compensate the prisoners it has tortured; this is the wise course as well as the morally required course. If a fraction of them fight the US afterward, that will make no difference alongside the thousands of others already fighting the US. Meanwhile, freeing the prisoners from Guantanamo will eliminate one factor that recruits others to fight against the US.
The Spanish "Security" bill would clamp down on Internet access, Chinese-style, and criminalize posting videos of thugs as they attack people.
The FBI seems to have labeled Gulet Mohamed's brother a "most wanted terrorist" to influence the outcome of Gulet's lawsuit about the no fly list.
Canada plans to criminalize "promoting terrorism". Civil liberties defenders oppose this because it would amount to criminalizing mere opinion, as has recently been the case in France.
Don't let the Charlie Hebdo attack be an excuse to expand surveillance.
Texas is considering a bill to permit teachers to shoot and kill people (such as students) to protect school property.
The former head of CIA and NSA said, "We kill people based on metadata". The US Congress is taking a step to reduce collection of metadata, but it is a suspiciously small step.
Oklahoma's torture-executions have led the Supreme Court to suspend execution in that state, and created an opportunity to press to end them.
For the most part I am not especially concerned about how executions are done. The point is that they should not be done.
20% of US children needed government food assistance in 2014, which is considerably more than in 2007.
This demonstrates that there is no "economic recovery" except for the wealthy.
The US Senate rejected Bernie Sanders' amendment to install more solar power and create a lot of jobs. They prefer to build the Keystone XL pipeline and make sure the world burns as much fossil fuel as possible.
The majority of senators are working for the fossil fuel companies, which is treason against humanity as well as against the United States and its people.
Kevin Thomson writes about being jailed for being unable to pay a traffic ticket.
Spanish Peacekeeper Is the Latest Example of Israel Killing United Nations Personnel.
Thailand's Military Junta Forces Cancellation of Press Freedom Conference.
Alan Morison has gone to Thailand to face vicious charges of "defaming the navy".
The idea of prosecuting people for this — regardless of what they may have done — is an injustice. That is the crucial point. The fact that Morison's "defamation" was a paragraph quoted from another publication is a distraction since the charges would be equally unjust if he had written it himself.
"Free" countries such as France that penalize "insults" give cover to Thailand, Egypt and other absolutely tyrannical states that do this.
The corrupt elite in Afghanistan don't want to defeat the Taliban even supposing they could. They want to keep the war going to get US military funds which they can divert to their pockets.
In addition, they know it is hard for the US to cut down their opium or heroin exports while the war continues.
This makes the situation resemble that in South Vietnam, where the commanders did not want to win too much against the Viet Cong lest President Diem suspect they wanted his job. They just wanted to continue doing their jobs and bringing in the bribe money.
Contrary to UK government claims, the US held and "interrogated" secret prisoners on Diego Garcia.
Will Our Smart Gadgets Become Trusted Or Oppressive Companions?
I part ways with that article at the word "our". I'm not going to use any of these, no matter what convenience it might offer.
If the gadget contains nonfree software, it's an instrument to give someone power over you.
Sports in Australia will have trouble coping with global heating.
Sports are far less important than many other things that will be damaged or destroyed by global heating, but many people care irrationally about sports and this could make them wake up. If it isn't too late.
Syriza's economist proposes a Keynesian plan to redistribute the global surplus from those countries which hold it.
The idea may need adaptation to cope with today's plutocracy, which impoverishes "rich" countries' governments and people.
China has imposed registration of all new computers in Xinjiang.
The measured frequency of heat waves and cold spells in cities around the world demonstrates global heating since the 1970s.
US government lawyers told the Guantanamo prison command that force-feeding was considered illegal.
US thugs held a student down on the ground and made a dog attack her.
She needed lot of surgery after that.
Google said it fought for years to inform Wikileaks staffers that their email had been taken by the US government.
The FBI wants local thugs to collect DNA samples from everyone arrested.
It is clear the FBI really wants to have every American's DNA.
Senator Rubio wants pervasive surveillance of all Americans, so why not start with him?
The last time the ocean got warmer, at the end of the ice age, it made most of the ocean into a giant dead zone. Will human-caused global heating do the same thing?
Biofuels explicitly grown for that purpose are no real alternative to fossil fuels.
If Elections Matter for Greece, Why Not America?
Portugal and Spain have offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews that were expelled or oppressed in the 1400s.
You'd have to be desperate to want to live under Spain's repressive government, but if Podemos gains power it might repeal the repressive laws.
Global heating is causing fish in the seas around Australia to move southward.
40 Afghans per month are killed by unexploded NATO bombs and shells.
US and UK cooperation with Gaddafi, in the form of kidnaping Libyan opposition activists in exile and delivering them to Gaddafi's torturers, had the perverse effect of strengthening al Qa'ida in Libya.
US citizens:
Support
the FAIR act which would greatly curb civil forfeiture.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
support the plan to
tax Wall Street more.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Reducing taxes for working people is a good thing, but that can't possibly be enough to enable them to have a decent life. What they need is higher wages and reduced fees for things such as education and medical care.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on your state legislators to support three ACLU-recommended privacy bills.
A gas pipeline exploded in West Virginia — the fourth serious pipeline incident in January.
If you judge the danger of pipelines by the chance you will be near one when it explodes, the danger is tiny. The danger that your water supply will be polluted for years by one is much bigger.
Justice Stevens proposes amendments to the US Constitution.
Arrogant thugs around the US attack officials that question their impunity by refusing to work with them and by making up false charges against them.
'Monumental' Win Against Female Genital Mutilation In Egypt.
President Sirisena reinstated Sri Lanka's Chief Justice Bandaranayake who had been removed by Rajapaksa for political reasons.
His government is looking at cooperating with a proper human rights investigation of the conduct of the civil war.
Activist shareholders persuaded Grumman to drop ALEC.
Grumman does not sell much to the public, so it is not directly reachable by to consumer displeasure.
The Federal Trade Commission announced worthless guidelines for security of personal data collected by household devices.
They are worthless because they assume that these devices will provide data about people to companies, and they try only to make those companies prevent unintended data breaches to unrelated third parties.
This is a secondary danger that develops out of the fundamental danger of these devices: the "authorized" transmission of data to those companies.
Putting thugs together with certain mentally ill people is a recipe for killing them.
The US continues allowing large companies to merge and reduce competition.
Illinois Says Rule-Breaking Students Must Give Teachers Their Facebook Passwords.
Right-wing Japanese are
suing
the newspaper Asahi Shimbun for publishing articles about the women
conscripted into prostitution by the Japanese Army.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The fact that one witness lied about participating in this conscription doesn't invalidate the independent evidence that it occurred.
The Chinese government sensibly insists on checking the source code for systems for use in banks.
It is dangerous for a country's banks to be vulnerable to companies in a potentially hostile country. The US should adopt the same policy vis-a-vis Chinese computer manufacturers, not as retaliation but simply for its own protection.
All banks should insist on getting control of the software they use. It should be delivered to them as free software.
Obama has failed to institute proper safety regulation for undersea oil drilling, but he wants to open a lot more coastline to drilling.
Advances in oil drilling technology, without corresponding advances in safety practices, have increased the amount of oil likely to spill in the ocean whenever something goes wrong with an oil well.
US citizens: Senators,
support the bill to
promote negotiations with Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Former US senators, who helped the Church committee investigate the CIA in the 70s, propose a new investigation.
In US schools, children as young as 6 are shackled, tied up, put inside bags, even tased.
How global heating promotes big snowstorms.
Scotland has banned fracking and similar oil extraction processes, temporarily at first.
Congress is considering a bill to replace the old 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force with a new authorization that is limited in time, place, and methods.
It may not end the US military interventions that regularly occur in more than half the countries in the world.
Pennsylvania Fracking Companies Regularly Commit Serious Environmental Violations.
Oil drilling is spreading road through the Amazon, and deforestation follows the roads.
The background to Prosecutor Nisman's accusations against President Fernández, whose text supports the claim it was really written by an intelligence agent rather than a prosecutor.
The National Football League is leading US children to do a kind of internet gambling.
Take Cuba Off the Terrorist List.
As Merkel and the banksters aim to defeat Syriza and force Greece under ever-worsening austerity, the public must defend Syriza.
An Israeli attack against Hezbollah, which killed a visiting Iranian general, has led to retaliation by Hezbollah, followed by "retaliation" by Israel.
Israel publicly "forgets" having started this sequence of attacks when it talks about needing to "defend itself" from Hezbollah.
Why media fall for sports industry's bogus economic claims about public benefits from staging the Superbowl.
The same thing happens with the Olympics.
A UK politician has apologized for pointing out that nuclear missiles, if used, would kill more people than the Nazis killed, and that misguided expenditure can't be justified merely because it creates jobs.
This is not to say that Trident missiles and Nazi murder camps raise exactly the same issues. Nazis intended to kill Jews (and some other people), whereas the Trident missile is intended to deter a nuclear attack. Despite that difference, the two have important things in common.
France proposes to punish internet platforms if they do not delete "hate speech".
European laws that prohibit "hate speech" impose censorship of political views. Such laws, in the US, would be unconstitutional. The danger is that US companies will bow to foreign censorship laws.
Google famously refused to bow to China's censorship, but that is a rare exception.
Late model cars have quieter engines, so designers put in systems to make imitation engine noise so owners feel they got what they paid for.
The manufacturers are being dishonest, tricking the car buyer. At the same time, those buyers are being irrational, in effect complaining if they are not fooled.
Car manufacturers should be required to let the driver or owner turn this feature on and off. But if the car software were free, the owner would be able to turn it off.
If Obama gets his way, every US security journalist will be prosecuted with the charges that were dropped against Barrett Brown.
Right-wing Democrats such as Obama pretend that Americans are going to benefit from a "recovery" for the rich.
When plutocrats have sunk workers' boats, a rising tide won't lift them any more.
Here Is How Rand Paul's Bill Would Curtail Civil Forfeiture.
US citizens: call on members of Congress to cancel Netanyahu's speaking invitation, and failing that, not to attend the speech.
Facebook deleted a photo of a Tibetan monk who set himself on fire.
Facebook carries out censorship on behalf of many governments. Just a few days ago we read that Turkey is one of them.
The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture.
Ukraine is caught between an alligator (Putin) and quicksand (the plutocratic west).
Syriza has started cancelling privatizations and will restore the previous minimum wage.
The Koch brothers plan to spend almost a billion dollars on the 2016 elections.
Americans, there is a simple heuristic for how to vote, if you haven't studied all the candidates' positions: vote for whoever the expensive TV ads attack.
That's the candidate that the plutocrats don't want.
Bravo, Michelle Obama, for refusing to cover your head in Saudi Arabia.
Muslims insist on practicing their own customs when they travel, and demand non-Muslim visitors adopt local religion-associated customs when they travel to a "Muslim" country. They want their customs to override conflicting customs everywhere, and they have no right to that. Either all travelers are free to dress their own way when travelling, or all travellers must adopt local practices (no veil, for instance).
Indeed, the idea of a "Muslim" country is hostile to human rights, just like the idea of a "Christian" country or a "Jewish" country or a "Hindu" country.
Now if the US would only show less respect to the king whose policies include beheadings and whippings and many other sorts of repression.
Doctors, please don't make it necessary for terminally ill people to kill themselves by thirst in a public toilet.
But it is not just terminally ill people. Those who are paralyzed or becoming demented also deserve help escaping to a less horrible fate.
Canada monitors up to 15 million file downloads every day.
Trust Reality Rather Than President Obama's Words on Drones.
If Britons vote for the party they most agree with, the Green Party will win. The only obstacle to Green victory is the self-fulfilling prophecy that it's impossible.
I love the point that if you "hold your nose" and vote for the least bad party that "might win", you get a worse stink next time.
US citizens: Support Bernie Sanders's infrastructure maintenance program.
B'Tselem suggests that Israel's leaders may have committed war crimes by establishing a policy of bombarding Palestinian civilians' homes.
Boko Haram keeps winning against a badly organized Nigerian army, and has come close to capturing the area's principal city, Maiduguri.
PISSI's defeat at Kobani can damage it in an important place: its image of irresistability.
Thus, even though Kobani as a piece of territory has no particular strategic significance, the defense of Kobani may have real significance.
PISSI stands for "Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq". Since most Muslims say it does not represent Islam, why should we call it by a name that validates its claims to do so? Moreover, the name "PISSI" gives the organization the respect it deserves. I suggest you too adopt that name, and spread the word.
Plastic in the ocean is increasing and animals are swallowing ever more of it.
An Italian writer faces prosecution for saying that it would be legitimate to sabotage a high-speed train line being built between Italy and France.
I disagree with him about the train line. High-speed trains are a great thing, and when the network is built up, they replace airplanes. I hope they finish it soon, because I will use it.
Freedom of expression means the right to say things we disagree with. The prosecution of de Luca shows that Italy — like other European governments — does not respect freedom of expression. In the US, which does more or less respect that freedom, that sort of statement is not "incitement" and he could not be prosecuted for it.
Shame on you, Italy. Stop your attempts at censorship, and build the train line.
What Martin Luther King led American blacks to do was to end white terror, which they achieved by daring to be beaten and arrested and filling the jails.
It makes me sad that this white terror has substantially returned — mainly from thugs, but also (with "stand your ground" laws) from any non-black with a gun.
Compare the advice that black teenagers receive today about how not to be shot by thugs with the 1960s advice described in the first reference above.
Even worse, since the 1960s the US has come to impose permanent punishment on people convicted of a crime, or even (in some cases) accused of one. It is hard to have a mass movement of idealistic young people ready to get arrested and pack the jails when they know they will be excluded from education or employment for life as a result.
Lots of companies spy on "smart" phones, and the NSA spied on their spying.
President Fernández of Argentina is blaming the intelligence agency for murdering prosecutor Nisman, and wants to dissolve and replace it.
This could be very good if the replacement is limited by laws in what it can collect.
I wonder if the intelligence agency had anything to do with the decision to take visitors' fingerprints and track passengers in the subway.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to say, please sign the Ellison-Waters letter and support full Title-II network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: call on US companies not to donate to Representative Scalise, who has associated with right-wing extremists.
US citizens: call on Obama and Congress to use their influence with the EU to support Greece in ending austerity.
Everyone: Tell McDonalds to stop practicing racial discrimination on its staff.
US citizens: support Senator Warren's Medical Innovation Act.
Medecins sans Frontiers accused Pfizer of profiteering from poor countries by charging them too much for pneumococcal disease vaccine.
I am all in favor of MSF's efforts, but let's not forget what created the problem and made the efforts necessary: the World Trade Organization. The US and Europe pressured most countries to join it, and one consequence is allowing patents on medicines, which is what enables Pfizer to impose a high price on vaccines even in poor countries.
Pfizer surely lobbied the plutocratic states to get this result, so it is to blame for creating the opportunity as well as for using it.
The WTO is also responsible for low pay and bad working conditions around the world, so it is truly a monster. Its consequences show up in many areas of life. If we ignore the root cause of these problems, we are reduced to treating symptoms forever.
Israel releases imprisoned minors to house arrest, making parents act as jailers for their own children.
Obama proposes more oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Atlantic too.
None of this is necessary, unless we want to extract too much and cause global heating disaster.
Glaciers in the Andes have lost at least 1/3 of their ice in the last 30 years.
CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling has been convicted.
Every whistleblower prosecuted or persecuted nails Liberty to the cross.
Obama will forgive you for torturing, but not for talking to the American people.
Proposal to stop using the word "terrorist".
"The terror" in revolutionary France was carried out by the Committee for Public Safety, led by Robespierre. I wonder if that is where "Department of Homeland Security" came from.
A tar sands pipeline even bigger than Keystone XL is being snuck through as an expansion of an existing pipeline.
To save the US middle class requires curbing Wall Street's depredations.
The Drug Enforcement Administration and other US agencies are creating a nationwide network of license-plate recognizing cameras, on their way to tracking all car travel in the US.
A Student Jubilee! Liberate 41 Million Americans From Crushing Loan Debt.
Facebook has yielded to Turkey's religious censorship, just as previously it yielded to China's political censorship.
Dust blowing out of cattle feedlots contains more than just a horrible smell. It contains antibiotics that encourage development of resistance in the bacteria in the soils (and human bodies) that they get into.
China's use of coal is levelling off, and actually decreased a little in 2014.
Right-wing UK economic policy consists of tax cuts (most of the cut goes to the rich) and cuts on the NHS and social services (hitting the poor two ways).
The tax cuts give a small amount of money to some workers, to distract them from the fact that the combined policy is very bad for them.
The same dishonest line has succeeded since the 1980s in convincing working Americans to vote to help the rich screw them.
As for Labour, it has become a centrist party which fails to challenges plutocratic rule. The similar Greek party was just wiped out, and Britain's Labour Party is headed for the same thing.
Violent thugs can end your life without quite killing you.
43 Israeli intelligence reservists refused to spy on Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Politicians Are Supporting Comcast's TWC Merger with Letters Ghostwritten by Comcast.
Julia Reda, the sole Pirate Party member of the European Parliament, has proposed a copyright reform directive which goes in the right direction but does not propose to address the issue of freedom to share.
The article suggests EU citizens write to MEPs. I suggest demanding reform on that issue too.
Global heating makes winter storms stronger.
The Cheney-Obama torture axis must be defeated.
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are working together on a tax break intended to encourage US businesses to pay taxes on their profits.
Funny that congress never seems to think of simply making them pay their taxes. They argue that it is self-defeating to keep the door closed while the window is open, so they should open the door. The idea of shutting the window never occurs to them.
Instructions for bankrupting the country:
Is it stupid or is it corrupt?
The EFF's new plan for ending massive general surveillance would not achieve its goal.
It leaves many kinds of surveillance unaddressed:
There seems to be a dispute inside the Egyptian military government about whether it was acceptable to shoot a female protester dead for no reason.
Shooting male protesters, however, they do without a qualm. Did they get this policy from the US?
Wikipedia has taken the side of Gamergate, ruling that the Gamergate-supporting editors can write the pages about the women that Gamergate attacked, and banning the editors who opposed them.
Many years ago, a clique of people that don't want the GNU system to be mentioned took effective control of pages that concern the GNU/Linux system, expunging the term "GNU/Linux" from nearly all of them and banning people that tried to resist. I tried to activate Wikipedia's decision procedure but was unable to even get it started.
Obama has dropped his inadequate proposal for reforming massive surveillance of the telephone records of everyone in the US (and elsewhere).
A court ruled that airport thugs did wrong to arrest Nick George for carrying flash cards to learn Arabic.
The UK government has adopted a standard US right-wing lie: that rich people got their money by earning it and deserve to possess it.
Rich people mostly get their money by investing piles of money, and by working other people to the bone. In the past few decade they have redistributed lots of wealth and lots of income from the rest of the population to them. Now we need to redistribute it back.
The Kurds have driven PISSI fighters out of Kobani.
Kobani has no special strategic significance, but it is good to prevent civilians from being massacred, and the attempt to take Kobani has bled PISSI badly.
The Council of Europe determined that the US and UK's massive surveillance is a fundamental threat to human rights.
That is true, but keep in mind that many other countries do massive surveillance without even the feeble legal limits that the NSA and GCHQ brush aside.
Previous modeling that predicted poor countries would cope with global heating using their economic growth overlooked a crucial factor: due to global heating, they won't have economic growth.
Their inability to invest in countering effects of global heating means that heating will cause even more economic losses. So the way to maximize economic growth is to invest in curbing global heating.
The previous modeling had another flaw: it gave too positive much significance to economic growth as a factor for general well-being. Even if a country has economic growth, a plutocratic state will not spend that on keeping poor people's livelihoods viable; the rich would rather buy their way out of the consequences of global heating.
The UK is considering an attack on human rights: censorship of a particular book.
Syriza won the Greek election and formed an anti-austerity government.
Syriza Has Allowed Greeks to Dream Again. But the Real Struggle Is Just Beginning.
Terrorism is designed to spread fear. "Counter-terrorism" contributes to spreading fear.
It is not clear that catching incompetents who can be led into acts of terrorism does any good for society.
Prosecutors in the UK are trying to get the interview tapes which the Belfast Project made, promising confidentiality until the subjects are dead.
I think the historians of the Belfast Project are honor-bound to destroy these interviews so as to carry out their promise, for the sake of future historical projects — even though they would be imprisoned for this.
This has nothing to do with the IRA's cause, which I don't support even slightly.
Target in Canada fired 17000 workers and its CEO. The severance pay for the CEO equals the severance pay for 17000 workers.
A reporter has fled Argentina due to death threats. He was writing about the recently murdered prosecutor.
Everyday harassment and danger of violence provoke mental illness, among blacks and among women.
There is pressure to ban a broad collection of unsavory political positions and historical views in the EU.
I don't like those positions, and I don't agree with those views, but this censorship violates basic human rights.
The UK Green Party leader condemned criminalization of membership in terrorist organizations.
Certainly having sympathy with the aims of a terrorist organization should not be a crime — because that is thoughtcrime.
Membership in an organization that uses criminal means is a borderline case, because it accepts in a way responsibility for that organization's actions, not only its aims.
However, organizations should never be banned by decree. That should require a trial.
The US has dropped the insistence on driving Assad out of power in Syria.
It has been clear for two years that this made no sense.
Genetically modified mosquitoes (which can't reproduce) offer a way to rid Florida of the mosquito's that spread Dengue and Chikungunya.
I think it is plausible that these mosquito's are a safe way to prevent those diseases from spreading, but there are many ways things could go wrong. Even though they are unlikely, they might conceivably have very bad consequences. I think it would be wise to investigate ways things could go wrong, to try to make them less likely, or demonstrate that the consequences would be bounded.
The Obama administration took a small step that will fund building around 8000 new homes a year for the non-rich.
Make that 50 times as big and it would solve the US housing problem in a reasonable time.
How Citizens United (sic) Paved the Way for Big Oil's Bribes.
Activists in New York and New Jersey are trying to prevent natural gas export terminals that would encourage fracking.
The low price of oil may make it easier to prevent fracking in the US as some fracking companies are already folding.
Quinn Norton says that proper journalism about alleged security breaches is now effectively criminalized in the US, and he does not dare continue it.
Google received a secret subpoena 3 years ago for essentially all its data about some Wikileaks employees.
UK internet filters to "protect children" block a wide range of web sites, including charities that help young people.
The growth of inequality (the richest 1% will soon own more than the rest of the world) is linked with decreasing wages and spreading poverty.
All economic activity needs a moral compass.
PISSI justifies a wide range of atrocities with examples from the Quran.
Comparing what we need to do about global heating with Obama's State of the Union proposals.
The FBI wants to be allowed to crack computers under very broad and vague search orders.
There is now principled opposition to the prudish campaign to bully a lousy UK newspaper to stop printing bare breasts on page 3.
I agree with Fleet Street Fox on this. What's really wrong with that paper is everything else in it.
Science has found lots of evidence that kindness and cooperation are part of biological human nature.
I would not say, however, that "humans are naturally nice". Biological human nature is complex and includes other kinds of attitudes too.
Republicans in the Senate plan to give back to the CIA the leaked Panetta report which showed the senate CIA crimes.
The Big Ag $100-million PR campaign for GMOs.
Why did Netanyahu send drones against Hezbollah, which did not threaten Israel? Uri Avnery believes it was to provoke a war so he could win the election.
But it failed, because Hezbollah declined to help him out.
One reason for the Britain to leave the EU: it is what Goldman Sachs does not want.
This is not a matter of petty revenge: the power of Goldman Sachs is a tremendously harmful effect. Britons suffer greatly from the policies the UK adopts to be a good platform for that and other big banks, and so does the rest of the world.
What sort of law should be used to protect people from violent no-knock SWAT raids?
Progressive Policies Are Popular So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?
US citizens: call for a Domestic Corrupt Practices Act to match the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
People will pay a premium for devices they can change the software in.
I suppose the fact that companies still design computers to prevent users from changing the software indicates that there are very strong commercial or legal pressures on them. We have to change that with new laws.
Note that an iThing is an injustice even if jailbroken.
The BBC and its Canadian counterpart slant the news towards the power of business.
Republicans in the senate want to cooperate with Obama in suppressing the Senate torture report.
Republicans usually hate everything Democrats do, and obstruct it just for the sake of obstruction. But they make an bipartisan exception for the truly evil.
The European Commission is sneakily trying to make trade treaties give corporations special powers even if the treaties are not ratified.
If Syriza wins the Greek election tomorrow, Syriza could block ratification of these treaties, and it should do so for the sake of all of Europe. Has Syriza said anything about this?
US citizens:
tell
your congresscritter and senators to reject the TPP because it
will surely threaten the environment and block efforts to slow global
heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Police officer John Buttress opposed racist searches of people on the street, so the thugs he works with have repeatedly made false criminal charges against him.
Senator Joni Ernst grew up poor and her family depended on government aid. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it.
Now she ungratefully campaigns to deny the aid to poor families today.
The Republican ruling Maine kicked 6000 people off food stamps because they are supposed to be working, though there are no jobs.
US gun laws permitting people to carry guns are only for whites. If you're black and you carry a gun, you are likely to get attacked even if you don't threaten anyone.
Paying workers by check forces low-income households to lose $3000 a year to paycheck lenders and such like.
If you were a low-wage worker 70 years ago, you didn't have to pay a substantial part of your wages just to receive the pay owed to you. You got it in cash.
This is one way our economy is structured to crush the poor. Others include the practice of fining poor people for being jailed when they can't pay a fee, and the fact that poor people have access only to expensive food stores.
The US refuses to shut down the reactors that are identical to those that failed disastrously at Fukushima.
US schools are starting to become concerned about leaks of students' personal data.
Activists reproach the Obamacare web site for hosting the tracking tags that enable companies to monitor visitors to the site.
It should be illegal for the web site of any government agency, or any commercial service acting for such an agency, to give out any visitors' personal data to any other entity unless this is required by law or the agency publishes those data.
Russian proxy forces in Ukraine are firing long-range missiles at Mariupol.
Mariupol is far away from the area that rebelled. If the rebels were really just rebels, they would not be interested in Mariupol. Putin, however, has a motive to conquer Mariupol: to link the conquered Crimea with Russia.
Thus we have two more proofs that the "rebels" are a Russian proxy force. This is in addition to all the Russian tanks and heavy weapons they have, and all the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.
The UK government said it would encourage people to buy the public housing they live in, and build replacements. It did the first but quietly neglected the second.
Surviving companions of the 43 disappeared Mexican student protesters insist that the army was involved in the deed, and present proof.
As China's repression intensifies, lawyer Pu Zhiquiang who defended many human rights activists is himself a political prisoner.
China is blocking access to some VPNs.
Oil wells in California were found to emit various toxic chemicals into the air.
A film festival in Belgium was cancelled because of fears of terrorism.
Terrorists don't even need a real bomb to cancel an event.
Committee to Protect Journalists: Classifying Media And Encryption as a Threat Is Danger to Press Freedom.
'Homeland': Legitimizing Torture, Lies and Killer Drones.
Methane leaks in cities mean that natural gas contributes more to global heating than was believed.
The idea that natural gas is a good "bridge" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is based on a series of underestimates of its greenhouse gas impact.
The Philippines put homeless people from the streets of Manila to a hotel so the city would look nice for the Pope's visit.
It's funny when they say that they aimed to make Manila look like a first-world city. US cities haven't looked like that since the 1970s.
In the US, they make the city prettier by chasing the homeless out. This hotel stay was an inefficient form of support for the homeless, but at least it didn't do them any American-style harm or wrong.
Can Anything Stop the Rhino Poaching Crisis?
I recall reading about a scheme that involved injecting live rhinos' horns with something that made them unsalable but did not hurt the rhino. Why isn't that being used?
The only two countries that have rejected the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are South Sudan and the US.
It is funny how legislators that want to approve the TPP would object to human rights for children as a "violation of sovereignty".
Ethiopia's Media Crackdown Is Bad News for Africa.
Who remembers the genocide of the Armenians? And why is it important?
Turkey commits a crime against freedom by prohibiting recognition of the genocide carried out by the Ottoman leaders, and France commits a similar crime by banning denial of the genocide. Hrant Dink, who defied the first prohibition and said he would defy the other, should be our hero.
You can't find a more vicious ruler than King Abdullah, but he was loyal to the plutocracy, so many plutocratist politicians and newspapers whitewash him.
Compare what Obama said about Abdullah with what Obama said when Hugo Chavez died.
Many construction projects "relocate" rare animals with the idea that this will prevent their extinction; but it is done carelessly and often they end up dying.
Brazil has imposed water rationing and electric power cuts due to an unprecedented drought.
In effect, the illegal loggers in the west of Brazil are now threatening the lives of people in the east, as well as the aborigines that live in the forests they destroy. Brazilians from cities must declare war on illegal logging, and return the plantations to the jungle.
UK tax and policy changes have hit the poor worst.
Drones and the New Ethics of War.
Drone assassinations are so imprecise that they kill on the average 28 unknown people for each target killed.
Anti-drone protester Kathy Kelly's statement about going to prison.
Lake Urmia in Iran has shrunk to just 10% of its size in the 70s. No one is sure why, but I suspect it is human diversion of water that used to flow into the lake.
200 people have been arrested blocking construction of a giant natural gas storage facility that could pollute Seneca Lake for decades. This has not stopped the campaign.
Abortion rights should be for all women, but the US has been choking them off more and more for the poor.
A UK thug kicked and battered a mother (to make her leave her child's hospital bed) so badly that she needed surgery and remains injured a year later. He got impunity, as usual.
Video proves thugs shot a black man who had got out of his car with his hands up.
If you watch that video, don't watch it on the youtube site because that requires running nonfree software. Use youtube-dl to download it and watch it without nonfree software.
When employers select who to hire based on how algorithms analyze people's internet activities, you will never know what action might make you unemployable.
This presumes that there will be a shortage of jobs, so that every employer will be able to make candidates jump through whatever hoops. But the same computer systems will ensure that too.
The conviction of Barrett Brown, based partly on denying that he is a journalist, puts all US journalists in danger.
His full statement.
The UK government assisted Gaddafi's spies, torturers and thugs, even more than we knew.
The US government's evidence against Jeffrey Sterling is that he had non-secret documents about using rotary dial phones — which were retroactively labeled as secret.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has carried out massive indiscriminate surveillance of phone call records for 15 years.
Everyone: Tell Monsanto shareholders to vote for accountability.
Google, Apple and others are lobbying to prevent governments from closing the tax loopholes that enable them to pay almost no taxes.
Boston signed a contract that forbids city employees from criticizing Boston's Olympic bid.
It is not clear the city has the right to impose this on its employees, but they might be scared to go against it. Maybe we can help them get the courage.
Unaccountable, unelected billionaires should not decide world policies.
Why the "reverence" for statements from the Gates Foundation? It gives grants to many organizations; many more apply for hope for grants. These organizations don't dare criticize whatever Gates decides to say.
The Houthi rebels have overthrown the government of Yemen, though they said this was not their aim.
They hate al Qa'ida and the US.
Female Republican congresscritters blocked a plan to restrict abortion rights.
A Guatemalan couple trying to get back to the US to rejoin their children were swindled by people smugglers and are now broke and stuck in Mexico.
If you don't dare raise children because "gangs rule the streets", you should not have children. Whoever is responsible for Ms Cruz's recent pregnancy did something wrong — but who was that?
Was it her fault? Did she choose to take a chance on getting pregnant? If so, she should be punished. Sterilization would be appropriate.
Or did her husband refuse to use condoms and force her to get pregnant? Then it is his fault.
Was she unable to afford reliable birth control? Then it's the US's fault for not providing it to her. How callous to deny birth control to people who are not in a position to raise children properly!
Did she use birth control, but it failed, and then she could not get an abortion? In that case, the Guatemalan government is to blame.
Disneyland tells children not vaccinated for measles to stay away, after some workers were infected.
Mosul is almost surrounded by Peshmerga, and seems to be suffering already from siege conditions which exacerbate the oppression of PISSI's rule.
If you're drafted by PISSI, it is better to frag your commander and die than to give PISSI any positive service.
The US government could not find a basis to charge the thug that killed Michael Brown.
It can't charge him with murder, which is covered by state law. It can only accuse him if it found direct evidence of racism. So another cop-killer (i.e., killer cop) gets off with impunity.
Misleading statistics falsely make contraceptive pills seem dangerous.
Doubling a minuscule risk results in a minuscule risk — and it is not clear the risk really increases at all.
Nigeria's army is too corrupt to fight Boko Haram, and its government seems to regard it as a small local problem.
A western official admits it might take two years to "train" the Iraqi army to be able to fight PISSI.
Since he would always put a favorable spin, if he says "two years", he must really think "four years". But I am skeptical the Iraqi army will ever have a strong enough will to fight PISSI. The readiness to risk death rather than run away can't be taught or bought.
Australia is investigating reporters who cover immigration issues.
There should be nothing secret about a country's immigration policy, but Australia's government knows its secret cruelty is extreme and would arouse disgust if revealed. What reporters have found is already arousing plenty.
An interview with Kathy Kelly, going to prison for a protest against killer drones.
Improved measurements of the heating of the oceans shows there was no "pause" in global heating. The oceans received more heat in 2014 than ever recorded before.
Palestinians in an area that Israel has annexed have gone 10 months with no water supply.
Israel does all sorts of dirty tricks to make Palestinians leave the West Bank, and especially certain parts of it.
They hold on because they don't want to surrender to this pressure.
Women in El Salvador are sentenced to many years in prison for having abortions, or even miscarriages. And this is seeping into the US.
Antisemitism is turning violent in parts of Argentina.
US Republicans shift to a modified form of global heating denialism: their second line of defense to protect their campaign to cause disaster.
The US Capitol is on a hill, so they can keep on promoting global heating even after parts of Washington DC are inundated.
Fossil fuel companies and big fossil-fuel-using utilities have taken control of the wind power and solar power lobbying organizations in Europe, and redirected them to undermine renewable energy policies.
Argentina's president says prosecutor Nisman was murdered, but that his accusations were based on others' false testimony.
"We Are the Victims of Our Own Corrupt Government" — Life as an Activist in Sudan.
The euro zone needs to forgive Greek debt for its own sake as well as for Greeks' sake.
Republicans in Wisconsin want to politicize the state elections board.
That would help them use their current position of dominance to get away with subtle violations of election law.
The World Is Watching Our [US] Net Neutrality Debate, So Let's Get It Right.
Obama Will Fundamentally Reshape the Internet — perhaps for the worse.
A breakthrough makes it possible to create genetically engineered bacteria that will die whenever supplies of certain artificial chemicals run out.
The Republican Party cut out one of Obama's sentences when streaming the State of the Union address.
US Republican election candidates have to pass through the "Koch primary."
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose "fast track" for the TPP. And your senators too!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
A badly designed survey overestimated the rate of defensive use of guns by perhaps a hundred times. Gun nuts cite it to bury the fact that guns are used far more to attack people than to defend people.
Antarctic Toothfish Poaching Ships Shrug Off New Zealand Navy.
The UK has mulishly applied a rule meant for people who do day care in their homes to people who work in schools — firing them if anyone they live with has been convicted of certain crimes.
A snooping device that insurance companies put in people's cars turns out to let anyone else snoop on or sabotage the car.
US citizens: submit a comment for protection of deep-sea corals off the US Atlantic coast.
India's film censors are hit by scandals.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to take statistics on violence by thugs, then act to restrain it.
Matt Ridley's climate myths have been refuted over and over, so why won't he drop them?
Thai migrant workers in Israel are being worked like slaves.
Two Turkish thugs have been sentenced to prison for beating a protester to death.
A founder of the anti-immigrant German party Pegida posed as Hitler. He says it was meant to accompany a satirical novel.
Put an end to bottom-trawling, which causes tremendous ecological damage to get a fairly small quantity of fish.
Rains in December have stopped, and California remains in drought.
A Palestinian man in Tel Aviv attacked passengers on a bus with a knife.
Stabbing civilians randomly is not brave, or heroic, or right; but it is indeed a natural response to the occupation, which is a far bigger wrong.
The FBI wants to be able to search computers without showing probable cause, if the computer uses Tor or a VPN.
A court ruled India must allow Greenpeace to receive funds from abroad. The government arbitrarily blocked the funds to stop Greenpeace from protecting the environment from businesses.
Feminists should focus on the low paid jobs of most women, rather than obsessing about the fraction of females among the few executive positions and corporate board positions.
The UK government rejects almost 60% of applications for to build wind power on land. By contrast, it has eliminated local power to reject fracking.
Both policies reflect the government's general policy of supporting fossil fuel companies.
Other EU countries claim that tremendous UK subsidies for a new nuclear power plant violate EU rules, and will sue.
A UK teacher that had a many-year affair with a student has been sent to prison, wrongly in my view.
Teachers have a responsibility not to become intimate with students, but there is no reason to make this a crime. Teachers who don't carry out that responsibility should be fired.
US thugs have radars that look through walls and can detect a person breathing.
I wonder what it takes to block that radar.
One UK ISP has made the higher level of censorship the default.
A considerable amount of censorship is mandatory in the UK, which does not allow freedom on the internet.
Israel holds
5000
Palestinians prisoner in Israel. Palestinian prisoners are often
tortured; since 1967, 72 have been tortured to death. This is the
worst abuse, but there are many more.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Moriel Rothman-Zecher refused to become a soldier in the occupation of Palestine. Most Israelis call him a "traitor", but he believes that Israeli patriotism means working to end the occupation.
Charlie Hebdo (and you) must be free to offend anyone and everyone.
Israeli soldiers, safe in towers, shoot stone-throwing Palestinian teenagers dead.
Airlines in the US are a clear example of how a deregulated "free" market can serve customers badly.
There is no such thing as "the" free market. Every market has rules, and a free market simply means one in which everyone is allowed to play by the same rules. Changing the rules can make a big difference between one free market and another free market.
US oil wells burn large amounts of natural gas that are "not worth capturing".
Why is it worth getting other gas by fracking instead?
A call to sanity for US parents: stop hovering over your children.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech calling for the US to end its intervention in Vietnam.
For historic clarity, I should point out some things King did not know. For instance, the NLF was run by secret Communists, the Viet Cong were mostly wiped out, and South Vietnam was ultimately conquered by the North Vietnamese Army.
But these details are not enough to invalidate King's main points. To preserve a US-friendly dictatorship against another dictatorship could not justify the violence that the US inflicted on Vietnam.
The details today are different but the US continues to inflict violence around the world — and poison its soul thereby.
The UK government has cut off unemployment benefits to 2 million people. 20% of them found work. It is not clear what happened to the rest.
Jobcentre 'Hit Squads' Set Up Benefit Claimants To Fail, Says Former Official.
Senate Republicans aim to abolish the requirement for states to provide equal education to minority groups.
Personal monitoring devices for computers open the door to employers and governments' forcing people to be monitored.
After Paris: It's Time for a New Enlightenment.
The copyright industry is so disconnected from reality that its lawyers believe the internet exists due to copyright.
GCHQ included investigative journalists in a list of high priority surveillance targets.
Everyone: boycott Koch Industries products.
The Obamacare web site gives data to many companies about its visitors; these companies can integrate that data with other personal data to increase their knowledge of the person.
They say that the companies are prohibited from using the data for "business purposes", but I expect they have already found other ways to use the data while pretending it is not "for business purposes".
I wonder if the site requires running nonfree Javascript code.
Sure, the analysis is useful — but government relationship to the public should not be designed in a narrowminded way that considers only the specific project. This web site should never give any data about people to any company.
Fracking causes medium-size earthquakes in several US states.
This is an additional reason to ban them, beyond pollution of water supplies, methane leaks, and the contribution to global heating.
A World Bank project is funding a project that drives Ethiopian peasants off their land to use it for plantations.
Russian protesters were jailed for 10 days for a protest consisting of throwing holy water at the outside of Lenin's mausoleum.
Since the current regime in Russia is not Communist, this is either a punishment for "insulting Christianity" or a punishment for "insulting tyranny".
Noam Chomsky: Obama's Drone Program 'The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign of Modern Times'.
Agribusiness claims only it can fill the world's food shortage. But there isn't one — and we don't need to let agribusiness dominate farming.
World food production would become a lot easier, and a lot better for the environment, if we ate less meat and especially less beef. It would be better for the people eating, too.
Fanatical Muslims in Niger rioted and attacked Christian churches as punishment for Charlie Hebdo's cover.
A call for a privacy opt-out in future US location-tracking technology.
This might actually do some good, because it goes beyond the inadequate approach of limiting use of data that has been collected.
The US has run secret military missions in 105 countries since October 1.
Why the US is the Biggest Threat to World Peace.
Nabil Rajab was sentenced to prison in Bahrain for an "offensive tweet".
France and Britain, do you want to be in a class with Bahrain, or will you respect freedom of expression?
The Pope is reaching for straws to reconcile the rejection of contraception with his humane general outlook, but that can't be done. The former must go.
Mexico will use drones to find the illegal fishing operations that kill rare porpoises.
Boat people sent by Australia to Manus Island are on hunger strike; their prison guards are confiscating phones so they cannot document the violence.
The attempt to remove the condemnation from the word "slut" seems to have failed.
I have never understood what is supposed to be wrong about being a "slut". I can't see why a woman shouldn't have sex however she likes, even if she is my lover.
I love Favianna's attitude, but I avoid referring to sex using the word "fuck". It has too much harshness associated with it.
India claims success in protecting tigers, saying the population has increased 30% since 2011.
In the past, India's reported tiger population included many that were dead; one tiger reserve was found to have no tigers at all. This time they seem to counted more carefully.
A new Republican senator from Koch Industries will give the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union address.
The progressive views that most Americans support may be mentioned somewhat in Obama's address, now that no one expects him to be able to deliver on them much. But it is too little and way too late, from a man who seems not to have been committed to any principles.
Once again, the FBI found a vulnerable and feckless Muslim and pushed/led him to get ready for an armed attack using the FBI's funds and the FBI's plan.
Everyone:
sign Reporters Without Borders' petition denouncing
censorship
of the press, including that done by governments.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The Spanish plutocratic parties face a vigorous challenge from Podemos.
Thugs in Baton Rouge attacked a man for making a video, first stealing his camera, then knocking him down and jumping on him. Then they framed him for a fictional crime.
Everyone: tell General Mills to stop disguising the high fructose corn syrup in its products.
The right-wing UK government used a hypocritical "big society" idea as a distraction from its plan to hurt the poor. Supposedly charities were going to pick up the burden that the government dropped — but the government cut funds for the charities too.
It did the same thing on the environment, claiming it would be the "greenest government ever", then cutting subsidies for renewable energy while increasing support for fossil fuels and nuclear power.
New treatment centers are beating Ebola, but money is needed to keep them running until there are zero cases.
The coast of the Mediterranean is being engulfed by tourist resorts and cities. In France and Italy, more than 50% of the Mediterranean coast is paved.
An important Guatemalan thug has been sentenced to life in prison (in effect) for mass murder of protesters in 1980.
This is equivalent to a life sentence; he is surely old enough that he won't live 30 years more.
For millions of Americans who are not in prison, home is a prison, due to an explosion of monitoring, sex-offender registries, and other virtual forms of imprisonment.
In Florida, an alarming number of prisoners died suspiciously after telling relatives, "The guards are going to kill me." In some cases the murders were witnessed.
When blacks carry what looks like a gun, thugs shoot them dead on sight. A white woman drove around shooting at people, even pointing her gun at a thug, and the thugs managed to disarm and arrest her without killing her.
Bravo, but if they can do this with whites, they could do it with blacks too — if they tried.
A powerful official in Kenya has taken a school's playground; thugs fired tear gas at the children when they protested.
Apparently this is a standard modus operandi for corrupt politicians in Kenya, and the school just happened to be the one that got victimized this time.
Temporary workers supplied by labor agencies never get a living wage.
I think it's a good idea to fine businesses that use agency workers for more than 120 hours a month for 3 successive months for any particular kind of work. If a business needs that much work, it should hire regular staff to do the work.
However, we should also disconnect funding for social programs from employment. A business should pay tax based its gross income, with a small deduction for each full-time worker employed.
Guantanamo guards forced Mohamedou Ould Slahi to dry his toilet with his uniform and sleep in it.
US citizens:
call
for firm and thorough regulation of methane leaks, including
existing systems.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
In Iran, a newspaper was shut down for publishing a statement "I am Charlie".
Meanwhile, in France, other sorts of statements have been censored.
Censoring political views is wrong regardless of which views are censored.
New York State's ban on fracking is based on numerous studies tying it to harm to human health.
To prevent global heating disaster, we must leave 80% of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground. Clearly the most dangerous reserves should be the first on the list not to be extracted. That includes anything that would be obtained by fracking, strip mining (including tar sands) or undersea drilling.
The richest 80 people in the world own half the world's wealth.
Just 5 years ago, it took over 300 rich people to encompass half the world's wealth. Inequality is increasing, which is an injustice.
By 2016, the richest 1% will own more than all the rest of the world.
The US claims to have obtained proof that North Korea carried out the Sony crack, through espionage on computer networks.
It could be true, but I do not have implicit confidence in the US government.
I don't object when the NSA spies on hostile governments such as North Korea, or even China. That is its legitimate purpose. What I object to is when it spies on everyone including you and me.
Many governments are "reforming" education but hardly ever do they determine whether the reforms made education better.
Since Russia denies sending troops to fight in Ukraine, it has to cover up the Russian soldiers that are killed fighting there.
Some soldiers refuse to "volunteer" for the "business trip".
A privatized NHS hospital was half owned by its workers, that that did not prevent it from being a disastrous failure.
Cooperatives are a fine way to organize a business but that doesn't make them acceptable in public services where business itself is a bad idea.
Bahrain has charged the main opposition leader with plotting to overthrow the government by force, which is absurd since the government has all the force.
US citizens: call for raising the minimum wage to
$12.50
an hour.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call on the IRS
to implement its own digital tax filing system and stop bowing down to
companies that want to profit from this.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
oppose
the bill to ban states from requiring labeling of GMOs in food.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The testimony of one of the few survivors of the Auschwitz death camp.
A former TSA officer says they all hated their job because they knew it was causing absurd gratuitous misery.
Important businesses have come out against software patents.
The EU has made it difficult to ban GM crops, but not impossible.
US pressure is a considerable part of the blame. As usual, the US acts as a bully on behalf of big business; this happens regularly in copyright, pharmaceuticals and in agriculture as in this case.
Bangladesh has shut down a messaging service that protesters found useful.
This sort of behavior has been seen in many countries.
Consumer Groups Urge President, Congress to Support "Robust Agenda" for Consumers in 2015.
An Argentinian prosecutor who recently charged a government coverup of a hate crime against Jews in Argentina was found dead.
The UK Tories are scurrying to empty the treasury to their cronies ahead of the general election. The expense of new prisons will give them (and Labour too) an excuse for further cutbacks in support for poor people outside of prison.
Registered sex offenders are "modern-day lepers". A village in Florida shelters 100 of them who are rejected everywhere else.
Some of them committed real wrongs. Others are the targets of modern-day cruel prudery.
Selma, Alabama, is today majority black and even the factory workers get low pay.
This results from decades of "free trade", union busting, and tax cutting for business and the rich.
Oxfam attacks the system that created today's massive inequality.
John Kiriakou asks why the CIA agents that committed torture beyond what the agency had officially "approved" are not being prosecuted.
Kiriakou says the CIA knew that Bush approved the torture before it started.
There is more.
On the status and prospects of the EPA's plan to regulate methane leaks.
UK thugs have asked all men in a certain town to "voluntarily" offer DNA samples in order to identify a murderer by elimination.
If I were one of those men, I would demand a written commitment from the state to discard my DNA sample after the test, before agreeing to give one.
ACLU: thugs should not be allowed to view the video in their body cameras before they write reports on incidents.
West Virginia has put global heating denialism into textbooks to please the coal companies. As often happens, they call this "balance" — balancing real science with business propaganda.
A German journalist in China reports about the arrest of his assistant, and how the Chinese thugs insisted that China has rule of law while disregarding Chinese law completely.
Uber hopes to buy the approval of cities by collecting ride data for them.
Even if this reporting doesn't give personal data on individuals, that won't change the fact that Uber collects that data and can make it available to the state in other ways. We must not accept Uber as a substitute for taxis and car services that can be used anonymously. Please don't do business with Uber.
Vox republished Charlie Hebdo cartoons and received no threats in response. When it covered bigotry against Muslims, the threats came in.
I do not use the term "phobia" to describe a form of bigotry; it is the wrong word.
Obama's push to increase penalties for cracking computer systems is completely useless against foreign state-sponsored crackers, and nearly useless against professional criminal crackers, because they expect not to be caught.
But it would be great for intimidating the next Aaron Swartz. Obama's advisors surely understand this.
One American climbed to get a good job, through skill, hard work and luck (i.e., chance), then became unemployed (and therefore unemployable) when the luck ran out. So he says, don't look down on him for buying groceries with a government benefits card then driving away in his expensive car (until it gets repossessed).
His dim chances of getting another job, whether a good one or a bad one, reflect the lousy state of the real US economy for everyone but the rich, which in turn results from years of plutocratic policies on banking and taxation.
US citizens: call on Congress to tax Wall Street to support the real economy.
US businesses have had direct ties to various kinds of slavery through history.
The Swiss government has adopted a policy of transparency about export of surveillance systems, showing exports to rather repressive governments such as Ethiopia.
How the NSA and its rivals spy on each other's spying.
Iraq's "vice-president for reconciliation" warns that fighting PISSI without offering Sunnis a share in democracy could backfire.
Many of us have said this; it is good for it to be endorsed by someone perhaps more influential.
The editors of Strike! magazine approach anarchist activism with a hacker's touch.
Surprised to see nothing about computer security? Remember, hacking means appreciating playful cleverness. There is no need for computers to be involved, and if they are, there is no need for it to have anything to do with breaking or fixing computer security.
A right-wing anti-Muslim-immigration party in Germany cancelled a protest after a leader received a death threat.
Some European Bloodbaths Are More Interesting Than Others.
In France, people are being sentenced to prison for expressing a favorable opinion of acts of terrorism.
The UK Green Party proposes a basic citizen's income for all adults.
PISSI released elderly non-Muslim captives, instead of killing them.
Perhaps its bloodthirstiness was driving some Muslims away.
Email, and texting, interfere with thinking and make people less efficient.
I avoid a lot of this problem by receiving email in batches. If only there weren't so much of it.
A bizarre charity offers young men new hope by giving them suits.
I find it hard to imagine the mentality of a person for whom this gift would make things better. So strange.
I wonder what export crop he would promote if appointed agriculture minister. Pretty flowers, perhaps?
Scientists Discover Two New Pollutants In Fracking Waste.
No one has monitored the waste for these pollutants, so it is not clear yet how often they amount to a significant problem.
A firing range in Arkansas has banned Muslims as customers, together with anyone suspected of being Muslim.
Isn't this sort of discrimination illegal?
Holder stopped local and state thugs from using the US government to seize assets from people not convicted of crimes.
They make it standard practice to do this so that they can get the property they seize — which is a corrupting influence.
The whole practice of "forfeiture" is inherently unjust, because it amounts to punishment without trial, mislabeled as something else.
Some financial experts call on Europe to forgive Greece's debt.
It should forgive debt (all or part) for all the countries that have been hit by euro-austerity. Or in some cases perhaps offer them the chance to pay starting in 10 years with no interest in the interim.
New terror or Old Troubles: MPs Still Want Curbs on Press Freedom.
Which is one reason to distrust any claim they make that people must cede human rights.
Poll: [US] Voters Want Pretty Much The Opposite Of What Congress Is Doing.
So why were these people elected? Voter-suppression policies and gerrymandering added to the effect of expensive media smear campaigns.
People can learn to ignore the last one, but the other two can't be so easily overcome.
Psychological investigation shows why intentional "positive thinking" can make people discouraged: "Don't think of a negative thought!" is as self-defeating as "Don't think of an elephant!".
In effect, positive thinking amounts to "What, me worry?"
What's really scary is that Dubya practiced this, and it led him to assume nothing he did could ever go wrong. It may have facilitated the US financial crisis, too.
Republicans have introduced a bill to ban the FCC from establishing proper network neutrality.
By the way, network neutrality means that ISPs do not check what subscribers are transmitting in any way.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to oppose two bills that would stop the public from
resisting fracking.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on Obama to defend the environment from Republican onslaught.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call on the US
government to release Mohamedou Slahi from Guantanamo.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the cable companies' weak version of "network neutrality".
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: condemn Rand Paul for attacking social security.
Of course people receiving Social Security game the system. They must do so, because the benefits are inadequate.
They are also inspired by the attitude of the wealthy. Rich people and businesses game the system constantly, taking far more although they don't need it at all. Let's go after them first.
More about Obama's plan to criminalize any disobedience in using a computer.
For instance, sending a personal email from a work computer, if that breaks the company's rule, might automatically become a crime.
It is clear that this proposal has nothing to do with protecting against anything we really want to prevent. Rather, it is an example of the practice of using a notorious attack as excuse for unrelated prohibitions desired for some other reason.
Please don't use the word "hackers" to mean real or accused security breakers. That's unfair to us hackers, who enjoy playful cleverness.
How Companies Like Walmart Are Fighting to Keep Workplace Injuries Secret.
An Indian writer has been bullied into quitting writing by a campaign of threats.
Paris Is a Warning: There Is No Insulation From our Wars.
Mauritania has arrested anti-slavery activists.
A fairly small spill of diesel fuel has left Longueuil, Canada, with undrinkable water.
Human impact on ocean life is ramping up, paving the way for extinctions that could drastically modify ocean ecosystems and cause a cascade of extinctions.
Unrestrained capitalism is rolling steadily towards global disaster.
Racism is the key to the high rate of imprisonment in the US. It offered the US a way to reconcile the push to "get tough" on criminals with the majority's wish not to be treated that way.
Here are the 10 Senate Democrats that voted to build Keystone XL.
In Orange County, poor people's children get vaccinated but wealthier people give in to superstition. This is causing a big increase in cases of measles.
The US gave Mohamedou Slahi a "letter from his mother". It was a forgery.
He argues for Americans' right to know what the government does in our name in Guantanamo.
His main entertainment was the predictable bullshit of the interrogators.
US citizens: sign this petition to amend the Constitution to override the Corporations United decision.
The US has adopted some limited protections for journalists' communications with their sources.
However, these can be set aside by the government in any instance, so they do not protect the most important whistleblowers. We need to ensure that people can communicate anonymously.
For those in the US military, hostile fire is a small danger compared with suicide and sexual assault.
Peru's youths protest against a law that stripped young workers of the usual rights of workers.
I suspect it will lead to denying those rights to all workers. If their "solution" to the problem that some people are often unemployed is to deny them some rights, that will shift the problem to another group of workers; by and by, they will employ that solution everywhere.
President Humala is Peru's Obama: he gave the impression of being somehow progressive, but he has shown little sign of that since taking office.
The harmful effects of 20 years of "free trade" treaties on the US.
Egypt is sentencing activists and human rights defenders to death en masse.
Florida thugs do target practice on photos of black men. Real, living (for the moment) black men.
After 6 years of legal wrangling, the Guantanamo diary of prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been released for publication.
Here's a part describing the torture as he was put on a plane in Bagram.
Here he negotiates openly about the false confession he is offering to get better treatment. Torture is an effective way of getting false confessions.
SWAT teams in Massachusetts pretend to be a private charity to shield themselves from open records law.
US customs reports to the FBI what people are reading, and interrogate for the FBI.
If you are a US citizen, and they ask you prying questions, say you want a lawyer.
The Washington DC library is teaching people about surveillance.
In South Korea, Deportation And Defamation Cases Mark Worrying Slide in Press Freedom.
2014 was the hottest year ever recorded.
Thus, the "pause" in global heating, when the added heat went mainly into the oceans rather than the atmosphere, has not continued.
Eradicating rats on one of the Galapagos islands has enabled tortoises to start breeding there.
There is a controversy because a teacher in London who had sex with a student was not sentenced to prison. I get the impression that the teacher and the student were both lacking in self-discipline.
The teacher's job requires not being intimate with students. This teacher failed to carry out that responsibility, and he should be fired for this, but there is no reason for it to be a crime.
Note the absurdity of this criticism:
As is clear from Annex C of the guidelines on prosecuting child sexual abuse, a 16-year-old girl cannot 'groom' an adult.Laws and regulations specify how to respond to what does occur. They cannot dictate that something cannot occur. The idea of appealing to a law to claim something could not have happened is nonsense.
Obama's paid parental leave for federal employees is a good but small first step, falling far short of international standards.
I should also point out that any privatization of government jobs will undo the effect.
Why Don't Sentences for Accused Sex Offenders Teach Them to Treat Women like People?
Religious fanatics in Pakistan brought disrepute on their own religion by protesting against Charlie Hebdo in its name.
EU competition regulators say that Amazon's tax dodging scheme violates EU law.
On Charlie Hebdo Pope Francis is using the wife-beater's defence.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to deny, criticize, offend, insult or mock any person, group, practice, or belief — whether we agree with the statement or not. Countries such as France, which arrest people for expressing views, do not respect freedom of speech.
If France draws any lesson from the assassination of Charlie Hebdo staff, it must be to desist from censorship.
Mississippi is planning to take away Dr Landrum's medical license because he treats poor people from his car.
Mississippi has rejected the federal government's offer to give Landrum's patients another way to get medical care.
Obama's War on Crackers goes to the point where you could be imprisoned simply for clicking on a link — or talking with people who did.
Doing anything on a computer that the owner would not like would be a crime.
Please don't use the word "hackers" to refer to people who really do break security, or people accused of doing so. That's unfair to us hackers, who enjoy playful cleverness.
The CFAA is already too broad in its definition of crime, as we saw when it was used against Aaron Swartz and drove him to suicide. It needs to be changed in the other direction.
It would be a strategic error to limit ourselves to criticizing these changes for the worse. Eventually they would "compromise" with us, "meet us half way", by making only part of their changes for the worse, and they would have silenced our demands.
What we must do now is reiterate the demand to correct what is already wrong with the CFAA, so that the "compromise" is to do nothing and we do not drop our demands to correct the existing injustice.
Americans: check your own state for regressive tax policies. Do the wealthy pay a lower state tax rate than the poor?
Some conclusions that follow from these facts.
When thug Franklin Foulks arrested black teenager Jamal Rutledge, then had a heart attack, Rutledge demonstrated a spark of goodness and saved Foulks' life.
There is no indication that Foulks was acting thuggishly at that time. Jamal Rutledge may indeed have committed burglary; his arrest may have been entirely proper. I call Foulks a thug because he works for a thug department. A priori, I expect that if he had seen another thug shoot Rutledge for no reason and make false charges, he would have lied in support of the false charges. This is what makes the story ironic.
It is possible Foulks is an exception. I hope so, but exceptions are unusual.
US citizens: call on your senators to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
US citizens: call on CVS to stop collecting Antarctic krill, whose numbers are plummeting.
Leaders of "free" Western countries are following the path of tyrannical countries such as China and Russia when they demand total surveillance power.
No amount of "security measures" can perfectly prevent all terrorist attacks, so there will always be more excuses for added "security measures". And note how the number of victims needed to make an excuse keeps going down. The French terrorists killed fewer than 20 people, which is surely fewer than are killed on French roads by car accidents every day, and attacks on human rights are proposed on this basis.
A new campaign for "patent reform" has been distracted completely by "trolls" and has lost sight of all the substantive issues.
Any measures directed at "trolls" would do nothing to protect software developers from the worst patent aggressors, such as Apple.
What we need is to protect software from patents.
How Verizon's interference with customers' browsing enables Verizon's advertising partner to help all manner of snooping web sites reidentify visitors.
Putin's rebels in Ukraine are on the offensive and have captured part of the long-contested Donetsk airport.
They couldn't possibly have done this without Russia's military support.
Obama has allowed limited trade with Cuba.
Secret US Cybersecurity Report: Encryption Vital to Protect Private Data.
Rate of Environmental Degradation Puts Life on Earth At Risk, Say Scientists.
John Brennan Exonerates Himself with Sham Investigation.
Embarrassed About Sex? Then Don't Pass It On To Your Child.
This was passed on to me, in a strong form, so I oppose all efforts to pass it on to others.
Environmentalist leader Jonathon Porritt has quit working with Shell and BP, saying that oil companies are structurally unable to adapt to renewable energy.
In other words, we need to defeat them — it's them or us. Them or human civilization. Them or half the species alive on Earth.
The case against Jeffrey Sterling is the CIA's political vendetta.
In India, those who massacre Dalits keep getting acquitted by courts.
Obama and the Republicans plan to authorize limitless war around the world.
The UK wants the US to join in attacking the last shreds of people's privacy rights.
Snowden gave us a chance to fight against total surveillance, but we didn't fight vigorously enough, and now the surveillance state is on the attack.
The rationale for permitting superPACs is that they are independent of candidates, but nearly half of them backed just one candidate.
Offshore wind power in the Atlantic could provide twice the jobs and twice the energy of offshore oil drilling. That's in addition to protecting marine mammals from explosions and all sea life from future oil spills.
I wonder if it is possible to use offshore windmills as a kind of fence to keep ships away from rocks where they could cause oil spills.
Why the EPA's proposed regulation of methane leaks is too leaky to do the job.
State and local taxes in the US fall heavily on the poor.
Banks weakened US financial regulations yet again. As usual, Obama is no obstacle to them.
US citizens:
call
on your senators to stand firm for environmental protection.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
say
no to a GMO potato.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
oppose the TPP
(yes, keep doing it over and over).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress not to punish Palestine for joining the ICC.
Thugs and busybodies continue to harass the parents that allowed their children to walk outdoors.
There are circumstances under which this treatment would be justified — if parents are grossly mistreating children. The insanity is in the idea that children should never be allowed to be alone.
Obama proposes to make it easier to snoop on your records of energy usage.
"Smart meters" should be designed to limit how much data they offer about your short-term energy usage.
Satellite photos demonstrate that Boko Haram destroyed thousands of buildings in an attempt to kill as many civilians as possible.
Obama took a stand against state laws that ban municipal broadband networks.
US citizens: call on Obama to veto any bill to construct the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Some Muslims still think their religion is entitled to immunity from ridicule.
"Don't ridicule our views, or I will attack you" is an explicit threat of violence. "Don't ridicule our views, or some of us might go crazy and attack you" is a slightly veiled threat of violence.
Slavoj Žižek: Murderous extremists kill because they are insecure about the beliefs they insist on; they have incorporated into their minds some of the secular attitudes they say they oppose.
The beginning is a great explanation of why "You shouldn't say such provocative things about Muslims" is comparable to "You shouldn't wear such provocative clothing."
To Catch a Non-Predator, Try Entrapment. The US government has agents that present themselves on the net as adult women interested in dates, hoping to pressure men to agreeing their younger sisters can come along on a date, to get an excuse to imprison them.
Samples of the writing for which Raif Badawi has been sentenced to receive 1000 lashes with a whip.
It is a powerful rebuke to the doctrines of a religion, and demonstrates why laws banning insult to a religion are tyranny.
Why should we show any respect to religions that don't respect us? (Note: If you are not a Muslim, Islam has little or no respect for your freedom of religion.)
I like what Badawi has written. I don't like what Mr Dieudonné said nearly so much, but he too has the right to say it. Down with French government censorship!
Bisphenol A was adopted widely, then it was found to be an endocrine disruptor. So Bisphenol S was adopted as a replacement, without testing that, and it turns out to have similar effects.
Pressuring kindergarten children to learn to read makes them anxious and could hurt their education.
Everyone:
tell the
media not to label global heating denialists as "skeptics".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support the EPA's proposed stricter limits for smog.
Measuring US handouts to the fossil fuel companies, and how much that money could do if spent on something beneficial.
The prosecution of Ross Ulbricht is concealing evidence.
It also asserts he's responsible for all uses of the Silk Road site.
New Orleans found housing for every one of the homeless veterans in the city. This demonstrates it can be done, with a will.
Now how about the homeless non-veterans? They are people too.
Charlie Hebdo exposes the repression of censorship in Turkey.
Obama Action on Methane Emissions 'Misses 90% of Pollution'.
The high price of gold is encouraging mining that is based on deforestation.
There are many problems like this. What they add up to is, when most of the Earth is covered with human activities, preserving a fraction for wildlife is harder than it looks.
Freedom of speech in France takes another hit: a comedian has been arrested for a vague statement which the state interpreted as sympathy for one of the killers. And that's one of 54 prosecutions for illegal speech launched in France since the march to defend freedom of speech.
Even if someone unambiguously expressed support for the killers, that would still be part of freedom of speech.
Microsoft has stopped informing some users about bugs in Windows. Now it tells only the NSA.
Prisoner Ricky Martin begged to be moved away from his violent cellmate, but he wasn't moved, and he was murdered.
There is some reason to think the guards arranged for him to be murdered.
In most large US cities, solar panels are a very good investment.
A massive biometric database will help LA thugs track anyone who has ever been arrested — protesters, as well as criminals.
When the US invaded Afghanistan, it captured child soldiers. Does it make sense to keep them in prison now?
Why charge captured enemy soldiers with a crime for fighting, anyway?
Welcome to 'uber-veillance' says Australian Privacy Foundation, as "wearable computers" run by proprietary software snoop on behalf of companies that control the software.
Haiti's US-imposed President Martelly has not held elections for parliament, which has now dissolved, enabling Martelly to rule autocratically.
The waste due to medical billing in the US amounts to almost 400 billion dollars a year.
We could save it all with a national health service such as Canada has.
US companies are coercing employees into "wellness programs".
If these "wellness programs" involve using wearable surveillance devices, they will mean total surveillance. Any activity that pressures people to use them is therefore unjust.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose new sanctions against Iran. There is a new push in the senate to impose more sanctions to sabotage the nuclear negotiations. The capitol switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.
The US government backed down and will not jail reporter James Risen.
Now the US should stop threatening journalists and the patriots that reveal government incompetence and injustice to them.
If the Olympic games are held in Boston, the US government will spend a billion dollars on increased repression (i.e., "security").
Obama wants to increase the absurdly high penalties of the CFAA. What we really need is to reduce the scope of the CFAA so that it is clear breaching someone's nonnegotiated contract is not a crime.
Meanwhile, the US government neglects its own cybersecurity. It would rather bluster and threaten than defend itself.
The TTIP (This Treaty Is Plutocratic) aims to abolish the principle of equality before the law.
Journalists, lawyers and MDs are campaigning against UK massive surveillance plans.
An anti-snooping campaign in the UK.
Rory Fanning, former US Army Ranger, informs new Rangers about what they will really be fighting for, and what the results are likely to be.
Ukrainian army pilot Nadia Savchenko says she was captured in Ukraine before being taken to Russia, and says she will fast to death if not released.
Climate Denier Ted Cruz Will Oversee NASA — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
David Cameron's Internet Surveillance Plans (for the UK) Rival Syria, Russia And Iran.
The Icelandic company DataCell is suing Mastercard and Visa in the US for the money lost when they refused to send money to Wikileaks via DataCell.
A leaked CIA study found that assassinating enemies can be ineffective or even backfire.
The US bombed a PISSI "headquarters building" which turns out to be a jail where it imprisoned opposition.
An Albuquerque thug will be charged with murder for shooting a civilian for no good reason.
This is an occasion for celebration, but to end thugs' reign of terror this must become the rule instead of the exception.
In response to the violent censorship of Charlie Hebdo, ministers of France and 11 other EU countries propose… more censorship!
They were going to find an excuse for this sooner or later.
Moderate "Democrats" might as well be Republicans, and now some Democrats are calling them on it.
In response to this pressure, they have started to support a weak version of the "Robin Hood tax".
Hiring Timothy Loehmann as a thug was a fatal mistake which could have been avoided.
New York City has become a less hostile place as thugs refrain from petty harassment.
Obama's proposed "cybersecurity" law endangers privacy by making it easy for companies to "voluntarily" give personal data to the government.
This idea was tried before under the name of CISPA, and defeated.
However, if we really want privacy, we should not let those companies have our data.
A small house construction project could cause the extinction of a rare spider.
The UK has streamlined planning so that projects can't be stopped by niggling considerations like extinction of a species.
Islamism in France attacks a mostly secularized Muslim community, perhaps tempted in response to racist exclusion from opportunity.
Here are some examples of opposition to racism and colonialism in Charlie Hebdo.
Why did fundamentalists attack Charlie Hebdo, whose principal target is the Muslim-hating right wing, rather than the right wing Muslim-haters? Clearly the fundamentalists are not thinking in political terms. Political circumstances may have caused them alienation, but they rebuilt themselves around irrationality.
The UK's prime minister wants to ban encryption and establish a total digital police state.
In the Arab world, you can satirize PISSI, but it is hard to satirize much in repressive Egypt, and Turkey is getting dangerous too.
Authoritarian EU politicians have seized on the Charlie Hebdo attentat as a spurious excuse for tracking travel within the Schengen zone.
Rushing to climb ice on Kilimanjaro — next week it may be gone forever.
Indonesian troops have arrested a hundred people in West Papua and burned down a dozen houses, as a random reprisal for the killing of some soldiers.
Indonesia forcibly seized West Papua in 1969 with a fishy "election", and since then has colonized the region with Javanese.
US citizens: Call on Congress once again to overturn the Corporations United decision.
US citizens: call on the FCC to give us real net neutrality.
Rajapaksa called an election based on advice from an astrologer! What an idiot!
The result could be good for Sri Lanka, even though it was bad for him.
Hitler also trusted his astrologer, who was an Allied agent and intentionally gave him bad advice.
Designing growing cities for energy efficiency could make a big difference in human energy use by 2050.
Afrileaks provides a channel for whistleblowers in Africa.
Copyright makes it difficult to make a movie about the campaigns of Martin Luther King Jr.
The behavior of his heirs is disgraceful, but the real culprit is copyright law.
Microfinance can help the poor in some circumstances, but it is not automatic.
California has passed a very weak law against the worst kind of abuses by companies that collect data about students from schools. Now Obama proposes a similarly weak federal law, with a weak voluntary policy as backup alternative.
Schools should not allow companies to collect any data about their students. If a school creates an account on a Microsoft, Apple or Google server for a student, under the student's name, that is already a violation of the student's privacy.
The "Internet of Things", and keeping people "connected" through servers run by companies, is a scheme for total control of the population.
It is too bad that the article ends with an obligatory rejection of Luddism, because Luddism simply means being selective about which technologies to accept. If we are to consider rejecting a technology that companies wish to impose on us, rather than ineffectually complaining about it, we must first be Luddites.
Verizon has been caught making directly contradictory statements to the FCC.
If the FCC is not too corrupted by business, it could prosecute Verizon for perjury.
Ten Facts About Haiti's Housing Crisis.
Facebook can understand a used's personality from "likes" more accurately, on the average, than friends and spouses can do so.
What Jews can learn from Muslims, in regard to respect for others.
A statement advocating censorship was censored on Facebook. I suspect the statement was deleted because of the appearance of the word "nigger" — ironically, to condemn the use of that word. That's what tends to happen when censorship is carried out by idiots.
That writer deserves freedom to present his views, ironically for the same reason that his views are wrong.
People never want to censor what they agree with. Respect for freedom of speech means, at heart, respecting the freedom to say what we disagree with. We must respect the freedom to call blacks "niggers", or praise Hitler, even though we disagree and disapprove. We must also respect the freedom to advocate censorship, precisely because otherwise we ourselves endorse censorship.
Egyptian Atheist Karim Ashraf Mohamed al-Banna has been sentenced to three years in prison for saying he is an Atheist.
It seems that $500 can permanently lift a person in Bangladesh out of ultra-poverty.
US states are cutting funds for pre-school which is crucial for students raised in poverty to catch up with the better off.
Meanwhile, privatized "public schools" divert money to profits and executives, and can't be converted back into real public schools.
The rich in the US are no longer interested in an educated work force. They consider a large fraction of Americans impoverished.
In Haiti, the US-imposed president Martelly has effectively eliminated democracy. He has not even tried to hold elections.
In the US, you are more likely to be shot by a toddler than killed by terrorists.
Why pay such a price — in freedom as well as money — for hypothetical protection from terrorists?
India blocked an Indian Greenpeace leader from flying to London for an event, based on false accusations.
California's new system of groundwater rights is weak and won't take effect for six more years. In the mean time, new almond plantations are taking up more water, leaving others without any.
The IMF bullied Ukraine, on Monsanto's behalf, to change various agricultural laws in favor of corporate GMO plantations.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the "Regulatory Accountability Act", a plutocratic bill to make new federal regulations nearly impossible.
For
more information.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Right-wingers in favor of total surveillance have seized on the Charlie Hebdo murders to demand total tracking of all train passengers, which would not have prevented these murders anyway. Fortunately there is opposition to these oppressive plans.
Amtrak already demands identification from passengers, which is why I refuse to take Amtrak.
Senator Feinstein wants to prosecute Julian Assange, but wants General Petraeus to be let off the hook.
US citizens: Call on Obama to let Shaker Aamer return to Britain.
Those denying that the Japanese army forced women to be prostitutes during World War II are claiming that women were the only class of people that Japan did not coerce.
Eric Taylor McDavid was sentenced to 20 years in prison for being led by the woman he loved to discuss bombing government facilities. He has been freed because she was an FBI provocateur and the FBI concealed information from his trial.
Many other supposed "terrorists" have been railroaded by FBI provocateurs, most of whom would never have done anything violent if left to themselves.
Meanwhile, a real act of terrorism was committed against the NAACP. I wonder if provocateurs were involved.
Everyone: call on the UN to establish the goal of ending child slavery.
People who watch Faux News are systematically factually misinformed about issues of US health care.
One thug has killed two drivers in two years, with impunity.
If you watch the video from youtube, for your own freedom's sake please use youtube-dl to watch it without nonfree software.
Corruption plagues the Afghan national thug force.
Some plants may go extinct because, from global heating, they bloom before bumblebees are ready to pollinate them. Some trees might go extinct because scale insects that suck their sap reproduce more in warmer weather.
And that's only what we are seeing now with around 1C of heating. With 4C of heating, lots of species might wipe each other out.
Rulers that trample freedom of the press at home came to Paris to mourn the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. Will they learn anything?
US citizens: Support Obama on gratis community college for all Americans.
US citizens: Tell Congress to drop "Title X" and give us real net neutrality.
The experience of eating widely-grown GMOs shows that they do not cause acute illness, but says nothing about long-term effects. Long-term feeding experiments have shown harm to animals.
Meanwhile, some of the transgenes get transferred to soil bacteria and to other plants.
Haiti is broken because of international intervention (on behalf of plutocracy).
Goldman Sachs is trying to threaten Greece, as it has threatened other countries, but it looks like Syriza will not obey.
President Sirisena accuses Rajapaksa of trying to launch a coup to stop the counting of ballots.
It did seem surprising he would allow himself to be voted out of office after so much violence against his opponents.
The new president says he wants to revert Rajapaksa's authoritarian changes in the constitution, but it won't be easy.
US laws increasingly criminalize discussion of computer security weaknesses in the US.
That suits the NSA, which wants your computer to be insecure.
By the way, "code is law" is false in one important case: when you're using free software. With free software, you are free to make it do what you wish.
Facebook seeks to implement the opposite of network neutrality, world-wide. Accessing Facebook will be gratis, while accessing any other site will be too expensive for half the human population.
Considering the way mobile phones track and spy on people, I think it is a shame that so many people use them now.
The Muslim tradition of painting pictures of Mohammad started in the 1200s.
The Charlie Hebdo assassins were known suspects, but French security forces had decided they were not worth paying attention to.
This shows that additional surveillance power is not what they needed.
Samaritans booked a hotel suite for six homeless people on Christmas eve, but the hotel cancelled their reservation because it considered homeless people suspect.
For a hotel to require guests to show photo ID is a repressive practice, regardless of who the guests are. This is one of the reasons I avoid hotels whenever possible in my travels. (The others are just a matter of taste.)
While this gift was a pretty gesture, if I were homeless I expect I could think of a better use for $100 than a night in a hotel.
In
France, Who's Afraid Of Freedom Of Speech?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Activists Across The Country Beg GOP Leaders To Expand Medicaid. State governments controlled by the Republican party reject this federal aid because they object on principle to providing medical care for the poor.
Tunisia: Blogger Yassine Ayari was sentenced to 3 years in prison for "insulting the army".
By criminalizing insults, the state has insulted itself.
Posting on Facebook is a bad idea, but should not be a crime.
A Muslim UK minister says Muslims must acknowledge a special responsibility to oppose terrorism carried out in the name of their religion.
With the right to be a Muslim goes the responsibility to recognize everyone's right not to be a Muslim. And likewise for any other persuasion, including Atheism.
Many Europeans ask whether America has gone crazy.
3000 Stanford professors called for the university to divest from fossil fuels.
The mother of all chilling effects: the Chilling Effects archive of DMCA threats has censored itself as a chilling effect of a DMCA threat.
Meanwhile, Canada's new takedown system that resembles the DMCA as a loophole that facilitates copyright trolls.
USA Today published an establishment right-wing take on US wage stagnation, "rebutted" by an extreme right-wing view.
The worst terrorist attack in Europe in recent years was not committed by Islamists, but by a right-wing fanatic.
The cold in the US today can be fatal to homeless people, and a lot more people are homeless in the US now than in the past.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject "fast track" for the TPP and insist on publication of the draft text.
Citizens of Boston, it is time to organize to keep the Olympics away.
The US Olympic Committee chose Boston rather than other US cities because of its experience in denying human rights.
Don't expect an economic boost for Boston from this.
US citizens: rebuke House Democrats that voted to weaken the Dodd-Frank law.
Middle-Eastern satire about PISSI.
Joseph Stiglitz: the euro is driving Europe into ever-increasing recession, and some day democracy will make it crack.
US citizens: call on Obama to veto the expected bill to authorize construction of Keystone XL.
US citizens: call on Senator Paul to stop punishing Palestine and accept its participation in the ICC.
Everyone: call on the Mall of America to oppose prosecution of the Black Lives Matter protesters.
Digital connectedness, constant with few and short exceptions, goes with people who don't know how to connect except through digital devices.
Were 11 Spanish Anarchists Arrested for Using Secure Email?
Amid Time of Soaring Inequality, Rich Say: The Poor Have It Easy.
The Charlie Hebdo Attack Was a Strike Against Free Speech. So Why Is the Response More Surveillance?
Will France Repeat US Mistakes after 9/11?
Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy collaborated secretly with the CIA.
Plastic microfibres come out of synthetic fabric when it is washed, and get caught in the intestines of fish, then get into birds.
Censorship and repression in South Korea.
Boko Haram took over a town and killed everyone that couldn't run away fast enough. Perhaps 2000 were killed.
Fossil fuel companies are funding a PR campaign that presents them as the saviours of humanity, to distract us from their plan to cause global disaster.
A study estimated that global heating would kill 100 million people by 2030. I expect the damage to accelerate as temperature rises ever faster; by 2050 it is likely to kill tens of millions per year.
Under these circumstances, even violent attacks on fossil fuel company installations could be justified on the grounds that they will prevent a bigger crime.
How Chinese paid pro-government microbloggers operate.
One borough in a small city has 300 of these paid agents.
Islam has a rich tradition old of presenting images of Mohammed, and parts of the Qur'an espouse toleration of religious dissent and even mockery.
The fallacious belief that people get what they deserve encourages people's disregard to the suffering people around them.
US citizens: call on the FDA to ban feeding ractopamine to livestock.
Freedom to insult people and religion must not be limited to Muslims as targets.
Here are examples of French political censorship, real and attempted.
Russia has banned transgender people from driving, along with people into S&M or who use sex toys.
Sounds like a twisted parody of Saudi Arabia.
How the CIA plays today's US journalists so as to maintain its impunity and lawlessness.
This presents President Truman's reasons for separating covert operations from intelligence. It seems valid to me.
EU countries must reevaluate their laws that require retention of everyone's metadata.
Feral horses are overrunning the US west. It would be good to use some of them for food.
Pesticide Industry Seeks to Leverage Power Through EU-US Trade Deal.
President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka has been voted out of office.
His government has used violence against opposition so it is interesting that he allowed a free election.
Los Angeles thugs crushed a Black Lives Matter protest outside their headquarters.
Everyone: support Amnesty International's campaign to end solitary confinement in US prisons.
US thugs have new weapons to blind, deafen, and remotely torture protesters.
EFF: Congress Should Say No to "Cybersecurity" Information Sharing Bills.
Chinese phone apps spread Chinese surveillance, even Chinese censorship, to Western countries.
The assassins that attacked Charlie Hebdo probably wanted to provoke repression of all Muslims, because coexistence is what they oppose.
Even the companies that administer the privatized UK benefits-cutting system say it achieves nothing but suffering.
It is a "parallel, secret penal system" for the disabled and unemployed.
Saudi Blogger to be Publicly Flogged on Charges He Insulted Islam.
Censorship is vile, and inexcusable.
If America Wants to Make Sure It Never Tortures Again, It Must Choose Law over Secrecy.
How video influences viewers' emotions, even to the point where fantasy supersedes fact.
The TV shows that glorify torture must be considerably responsible for the high level of public support for torture in the US today.
Please don't use the word "consume" to refer to watching video. Watching a recording does not, in fact, consume it.
House Republicans voted to impose restrictions on the Social Security Administration's internal finances that could cause it to be unable to function.
The Republican program is to sabotage all government activities that protects the public from corporations. That includes everything that protects the public from desperation, because desperate workers will work for crumbs.
When people tell you they got rich through hard work, ask them "Whose?"
— reportedly due to Don Marquis
Denmark is on track to generate 70% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
If the US set out for that target, it could get tens of thousands working on installation of generation, millions working as a multiplier effect, and give humanity a chance at avoiding global disaster.
The Don't Shoot Coalition proposes reforms to make Missouri thugs a little more like police officers.
The Federal Highway Administration has recognized that Americans are not going to drive more in the future.
This can lead to reductions in highway construction and perhaps also increases in support for efficient mass transit.
Four animal rights activists face criminal charges for making recordings of animal processing in Utah.
A Dutch journalist has been accused of "terrorism" in Turkey, apparently for journalistic work.
The UK government is working to sabotage enforcement of the UK's greenhouse gas targets.
Protesters in Pennsylvania blocked a pipeline for fracked gas.
A study determined which fossil fuel reserves can be used and which should be left in the ground.
It worked by ranking all the reserves in terms of expense to extract, and aims for no more than 2C of heating — although scientists now think that is already too much.
The study concluded that carbon capture and storage won't make much difference. I've had the feeling for a long time that it is proposed only as an excuse not to face how dangerous coal is.
The UK is in the process of adopting a mandate to extract as much fossil fuel as possible.
Australia is accelerating coal mining plans.
That's what politicians do who are in the grip of the planet burners.
23andMe has started selling its customers' genetic data.
TV news coverage of the Senate's CIA torture report presented twice as many supporters of torture as opponents of torture.
I'd call watching TV news a form of torture, but that would be exaggerating.
US citizens:
call
on the FDA not to approve another GMO potato.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call for immediate implementation of the "Volker Rule" that was required by the Dodd-Frank financial reform.
What we really should do is reenact the Glass-Steagall law that was repealed in the 90s.
US citizens: call on the FDA to require labeling of GMOs.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to vote against the Keystone XL planet-roaster
pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell the senate you oppose the plan to ban abortions after 20 weeks.
I don't think that PISSI qualifies as "civilization". It is barbarism straight out of the 7th century.
Oklahoma proposes to ban hiding your face in public.
The UK proposes to make teachers report children who are ideologically suspect — "at risk" for Islamist ideology.
The article says "toddlers", and that may not be an exaggeration: the plan seems to include preschool.
Disabled and mentally ill Koreans are illegally forced to work on salt mines. Some try to escape. Others think that slave labor is better than life on the street. South Korea is not poor: the state should offer them a better alternative.
A list of
books,
films and songs that would have entered the public domain this
month in the US — if not for the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
A summary of the NSA's attacks on internet security.
FISA court oversight of the FBI is not only weak, it's a no-op. If the FISA says no to the FBI, it just uses the PAT RIOT act instead to get the same data.
The FBI also tracks cell phones without a warrant.
U.S. Muslims Condemn Paris Terror Attack, Defend Free Speech.
Ways to campaign against use of GMOs and dangerous pesticides.
Each GMO is a separate case. There is nothing inherently harmful about a GMO. Nothing makes it inherently safe, either.
The GMOs that have been farmed in large quantity for years, and eaten by lots of people, clearly can't pose a big risk of causing illness in adult humans. If they were, it would have been apparent in medical statistics.
That doesn't mean they are safe for wildlife, however. (Look at the effect of Roundup on monarch butterflies.) Or that prenatal exposure is safe for humans.
Each GMO is a separate case. If 20 GMOs turn out to be safe, number 21 could be dangerous.
40% of Americans believe Bush's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This is very bad news because it will encourage US politicians to use big lies in the future.
Palestine's membership in the International Criminal Court has been approved.
China has authorized environmental groups to sue polluters.
Corporate Fiction in the Age of GMOs.
A terrorist attack on the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo killed 12 people.
It seems plausible that the killers were Muslim fanatics, although there is no proof of this yet. Many Muslims believe they are entitled to forcibly crush criticism or mockery of their religion.
If that is the case, their aim is probably to provoke France into doing something rash that attacks human rights.
That's generally not difficult. France has a history of trashing freedom of speech. Charlie Hebdo got its name from resisting French censorship.
Remember the man who was prosecuted for saying, "Sarkozy, I see you". French censorship is not as violent or broad as Islamic censorship, but that is no excuse for it.
Both Ukraine and the rebels have bombarded civilian populations. Ukraine resumed bombarding Pervomaisk in November.
Ally Cohen reports on how she sprained her angle in Hebron and "settler" fanatics ordered Israeli thugs to order her to move.
Israel plans to extract oil from the occupied Golan heights.
In an overt act of collective punishment, the family of a Palestinian criminal are being exiled from East Jerusalem.
This is a part of the West Bank that Israel claims to have annexed.
Israel uses various subterfuges to drive people out of East Jerusalem, including refusing to draw up land use plans so it can cite the absence of plans as grounds for refusing permission for homes.
The trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being rushed in a way that imperils due process.
I think he is probably guilty. Why not convict him properly after a fair trial?
Ford Tries to Shut Down Independent Repair Tool with Copyright.
The US government will require imported fish and seafood to meet US standards for protection of marine mammals.
Everyone: call on the Missouri Supreme Court to investigate whether the prosecutor acted illegally in the case against Michael Brown's killer.
The NAACP calls for a special prosecutor and a new grand jury to consider whether to prosecute the thug that shot Michael Brown.
Republicans in Congress plan to pretend that tax cuts for the rich will not cause the government a loss of revenue.
Their scheme is to count the taxes brought in by hypothetical future economic growth supposedly to be caused by tax cuts.
Even if that did cause economic growth, it would not make up for the lost revenue, because most growth in income goes to the rich and the corporations that don't pay taxes any more.
One Million Americans Are About to Lose Their Food Stamp Benefits.
Kochs and Walmart Clan Wage Dirty War to Stop You From Putting Solar Panels on Your Home.
Writers around the world feel threatened by government surveillance, even in "free" countries.
Prosecution of unwelcome opinions is seeping into even the US.
The Mirrors of the Future Will Point Out All Your Flaws to Sell You Products.
I wonder who else they will inform.
US citizens: call on Obama and Congress to reject the TPP.
US citizens: call for an amendment to overturn the Corporations United decision (calling it what it is, not what the corporations pretended it was), if you haven't already done so.
The entire thug department of Medellín de Bravo, in Mexico, has been arrested on suspicion in collaborating in kidnaping a pesky journalist.
Shafqat Hussain of Pakistan was tortured into a confession of involuntary manslaughter when he was 14 years old. He will soon be executed for this.
The death penalty is always wrong, but seeing it used for involuntary manslaughter is shocking in its own way.
Bernie Sanders demanded the US Trade Representative release the draft text of the TPP.
California Governor Brown proposes to get half the state's electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
Progress in converting electric generation is welcome, but the fraction of electricity generated from renewable sources is the wrong base for defining goals. The crucial point is to reduce the total greenhouse gas emissions.
Corporations have cut their US state tax bill by more than half since 1980 by making states compete to reduce their taxes.
A witness in the case that the government of Kenya killed political opponents was killed before testifying.
Bangladesh threatens to imprison the leader of the main opposition party after violence in a protest.
The Greatest Trick Obama Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World America Isn't Still At War.
Countries a lot poorer than the US have implemented universal health care.
When will the US catch up with Thailand and Rwanda?
A member of the grand jury that didn't indict the thug that shot Michael Brown is suing for permission to expose how the prosecutor procured that result.
The same prosecutor faces ethics complaints about that.
The .1% of richest in the US now own 22% of the wealth. Pseudo-recoveries, and ensuing bailouts, tend to benefit them the most.
The UK's problem, like that in the US and many other countries, is small government (and big corporations).
A Pirate Party representative is in charge of a plan to rewrite copyright law for Europe.
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was kept under house arrest with no legal grounds, so he has defied it.
Liberia has come close to extinguishing transmission of Ebola virus.
UK thugs are obstructing an investigation into the murder of a private detective who was investigating corrupt thugs.
Everyone: call on Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (all owned by the same company) to make sure it doesn't get palm oil from deforestation.
US and Russia in danger of returning to era of nuclear rivalry.
A Briton faces possible prosecution for insulting tweets.
The text of the tweets appears to be
Glaswegian ebola patient moved to London's Royal Free Hospital. Not so independent when it matters most are we jockville ? Little sweaty jocks, sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn't cricket.They seem coarse and sarcastic (which is unclear communication), and may be insulting, though I can't understand who they insult or why. Nonetheless, they are clearly not threats and it is clearly wrong to prosecute mere insults.
Tiger farming in China endangers wild tigers because killing them is cheaper than growing a tiger in a farm.
The NATO assassination target list had over 600 people on it in 2009-2011, and officers launched attacks when up to 10 civilians (not counting civilian men) might be killed along with the target.
In the UK: Protest on Monday for renationalization of trains.
Every country needs a government that dares disregard what businesses want in order to serve the public instead.
Everyone: call on Loreal to remove carcinogens from its body-care products.
US citizens: phone Obama and urge him not to renominate bankster Antonio Weiss for a post in the Treasury Department.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to curb "Sneak and Peek" searches.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
This practice was introduced in the name of "fighting terrorism", but it is hardly ever used in terrorist cases; nearly always the targets have nothing to do with terrorism.
More US troops are heading for Iraq, and some are stationed near the front lines, despite Obama's claim that they are not there for combat.
Bangladesh, India and now Britain have blocked the UN from inspecting the prisons where they hold people to be deported.
Miami thugs attack people with tasers for things like sleeping in a park. (Why shouldn't homeless people sleep in a park? If you can't offer them a better place to sleep, you have no right to interfere.)
Since tasers have not got the thugs to reduce their use of guns, what good are they?
An evidently rigid employee of an animal shelter didn't like the defiant non-government ID that Robert Lawrence showed him, and called the thugs, who killed him.
Calling the thugs over this was clearly wrong.
Afghan soldiers fired mortars on a wedding party, killing around 20 civilians.
In contrast to what happened when US troops did things like that, the Afghan government is treating this as seriously wrong.
An Indian film that satirizes exploitative Hindu "godmen" has provoked demands for censorship, but it is such a big success that the government does not dare act.
How can virtual child rape (of no real person) deserve prohibition if virtual murder (of no real person) does not?
I don't like doing either one if it appears realistic, but that's a tangent.
Cognitive colonization of US schools.
A Nicaragua canal protest organizer was arrested, then beaten with a rifle butt so badly he could not lie down.
Amal Clooney pointed out how Egyptian officials can control the outcome of trials, and was threatened with imprisonment if she said this in Egypt.
Kenya High Court Suspends Anti-Terror Measures After Opposition Objections.
Countries around the world are restricting access to the internet.
If companies store data about Russian users in Russia, those users will be less vulnerable to US spying and more vulnerable to Russian spying. They will be protected by Russian privacy law, if any (I doubt it does much for people). All in all, the users will be worse off than before.
However, in a different situation such a law might be a step up.
Another reason not to visit the US: an accident, such as giving birth prematurely, could leave you broke.
Comparing the unorganized Islamist terrorists of today with the unorganized individual anarchist killings of 115 years ago.
Everyone: state your support for NYC Mayor de Blasio against the thug unions.
Bernie Sanders: Ten Reasons Why the TPP Must Be Defeated.
If they do pass the TPP, we must not treat that as the end. We must remove our countries from the TPP.
The US has authorized export of crude oil, which is likely to increase global consumption and speed humanity towards global heating disaster.
2014 was the deadliest year so far for civilians in Afghanistan.
As of a few years ago, the Taliban killed more civilians than the US and NATO troops. I expect that is still true. Somehow this doesn't inspire as much hatred towards the Taliban as it does towards the US and NATO. However, it is the US and NATO that are keeping the war going.
India has imposed a blockage on access to a long list of foreign web sites, including Github, supposedly because they carry propaganda from PISSI.
So what if they do? That is no excuse for censorship such as this.
PISSI is the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. To call it the "Islamic State" is to endorse its claim to represent true Islam. I do not wish to give it such support.
Japan's population is declining slowly as the birth rate is substantially below the death rate.
However, Japan is only 2% of the human population, and the rest is still growing dangerously. While there are some inconveniences to a declining population, they are small compared with the catastrophic danger of an increasing population.
In 1934, when the German concentration camps were political prisons (the mass killing of Jews came later), prisoners were frequently tortured. Compare this list with US torture practices.
France has backed down on its fair tax rate for the rich, under pressure from rich people who called it "anti-business".
Plutocrats will say the same thing about any attempt to throw off the dooH niboR policies they have imposed. Once we recognize that we have to defeat the plutocrats, we see the flaw in counterarguments that a country should bow down to business to help businesses compete against businesses in other countries.
Crime statistics do not support the claim that aggressive policing of minor vandalism reduces other kinds of crime.
Palestine has asked to join the International Criminal Court, after a Security Council motion calling for a reasonable peace deal was defeated.
"I can't breathe" protesters in Nashville were handled peacefully with understanding rather than thuggishness.
Statistics suggest at least 4% of the people sentenced to death row in the US are innocent. Many of them have been taken off death row and now face life imprisonment, so little effort is given to proving they are innocent.
I was expecting a much larger fraction: a human process that errs only 4% of the time is pretty reliable, as such things go.
US citizens: call on fast food companies not to use GMO potatoes.
The ten most extreme nasty things US schools did in 2014 in the name of "zero tolerance".
These are the worst examples of rigid and extreme enforcement of rules. What worries me more is the general attitude of rigid and extreme enforcement which pervades US schools.
The US released 28 prisoners from Guantanamo during 2014, leaving 127.
It would take over 5 more years to close the prison if this rate of release continues. However, before that it would collide with the US intention to keep some people in prison for life without trial.
We think of Alaska as a cold place, but Anchorage has not had a below-0-Farenheit temperature in all of 2014.
China has become steadily more repressive since Xi Jinping took power.
A former US police officer calls for an end to the impunity of thugs.
If thugs find a police officer in their midst, they typically regard that person as a traitor to their gang.
The racism of the thugs' violence is a secondary wrong: if the people beaten, framed, maimed, and killed were distributed evenly among all ethnic groups, it would still be unacceptable. For thugs to increase their violence against whites until it matches their violence against blacks would not be an improvement. Rather, we must make them decrease their violence against black Americans.
Imagine if in 2019 the Senate investigates the US drone bombing campaign as it has investigated torture.
A secret CIA study warned about this in 2009.
The crucial difference is not between drones and manned bombers or artillery. Rather, what makes the US drone bombing campaign both wrong and self-defeating is that it is carried out away from battlefields.
A UK minister says, if the government could watch all communications, it would find more "pedophiles".
They are not talking finding and imprisoning men that have sex with children. They are talking about finding and imprisoning men who have or redistribute copies of images that depict sex with children, or perhaps with adolescents labeled as children; they want to imprison them because there is some chance they would have sex with children, or with adolescents. I don't believe that should be done at all.
This campaign, unjust in itself, is presented as an excuse for total surveillance of everyone. That power would of course be used against other targets — journalists' sources, dissidents, anyone who gets in the way.
New pun: trees.
Ferguson is planning to raise more revenue by increasing fines.
Other information confirms that this includes fines for traffic offenses. That will fall heavily on the poor, increasing the oppression they already suffer. Some will be jailed because they can't pay these fines, which will be an excuse for other fines.
A thug union objected to a right-wing city councilor's union-busting plans, so their private investigators tried to frame him.
I too object to those union-busting plans — the fact that the union members are thugs doesn't excuse them — but this form of opposition is pure thug.
A US high school basketball team was kicked out of a tournament for wearing "I can't breathe" protest shirts while preparing for the match.
What strict repression! I am sure the tournament organizers will say, "We're not racist, we only oppose criticizing racism. We're not in favor of cops' killing people, we just insist that nobody rebuke them when they do."
The NSA plans to crack into millions of computers and take remote control of them.
Alexei Navalny was given a suspended sentence of over 3 years — meaning that Putin can hold this over Navalny for any sort of protest activity that Putin chooses to declare illegal.
This is similar in spirit, though not in legal detail, to the practice in the UK and the US of making arrested protesters agree to refrain from protests as a condition of bail.
China is imposing strict conformity on views expressed in universities.
Western countries such as France which prohibit disagreement with the official view of certain issues, such as the genocide of the Armenians, provide China with an excuse for its own restrictions on permitted opinions.
Many working people in the UK are effectively working for nothing because their wages pay for less than the costs of working.
I suspect the right-wing government would punish them if they quit.
Senator Bernie Sanders: The Trans-Pacific Trade (TPP) Agreement Must Be Defeated.
The Prison State of America: prisons are a scheme for forced labor, charging prisoners fees and fines to make them work for companies for a pittance.
The private prison companies lobby for many measures, some explicit and some subtle and indirect, to put more people in prison.
The last independent TV station in Russia is being shut down.
Red knots, birds that migrate very long distances, are in danger from global heating in several ways at once.
The public school system of a city in Pennsylvania is being turned over entirely to a company.
US TV shows about the real lives of teenage mothers convinced thousands of US teenagers to avoid following that path.
It appears that these shows caused a 6% drop in the rate of teen pregnancy, from 2008 to 2012. (A further 11% drop was due to other causes.)
The UK government has decided to permit the main nightingale habitat site to be bulldozed for new housing.
Police officer Joseph Crystal was hounded out of his department after reporting a thug for attacking a handcuffed prisoner.
The thug was convicted, got a slap on the wrist, and remains employed by the department.
Campaigners are putting labels on goods in UK stores that make demands to pay their workers a living wage.
A headline-minded prosecutor in Arizona tried to charge people with intentionally killing dogs under their care, hoping to bury evidence that an air conditioner failure was the cause.
Perhaps kennel companies should be required to take care to detect nighttime air conditioner failures in time to do something to save the dogs, but prosecuting hapless employees is not the way to establish such a regulation.
Compared with 40 years ago, Americans are better off in some ways and worse in many others.
The GDP is worthless as a measure of society's economic well-being. If a plutocrat gets a billion dollars of income by taking $100 in income away from each of 10 million working people, that is a big change for the worse, but the GDP registers it as no change. When an article presents GDP figures as if they mattered, that indicates a bad framing of the issues: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Using the word "monetize" embodies and thus promotes the attitude that the article opposes.
When computer manufacturers have back doors to get people's data. that creates many threats over and above an antidemocratic government.
Al-Sisi is ruling by decree and has imposed a series of diktats against human rights.
A US-linked radio station in Azerbaijan is being shut down and its staff persecuted.
The Mall of America and its pet city government plan to sue "black lives matter" protesters into ruin.
Big banks' losses due to betting on a high oil price could be imposed on taxpayers due to the betrayal budget bill that Senator Warren tried to stop.
Obama, obedient as always to the banksters, lobbied the Senate to pass it.
Mexican farm workers, growing produce for the US, are treated as slaves and forbidden to leave the farm. If caught escaping, they are brutalized.
Forced to buy food from stores that gouge them, they end the season in debt.
A Femen protester is imprisoned in the Vatican.
Picking up a statue and holding it in a protest is not "stealing". What nonsense! As for "offending religious sentiments", that's at the core of freedom of speech.
Pfizer is trying to bully pharmacists not to prescribe generic drugs.
The Dodd-Frank bill was not strong enough in the first place, but the Federal Reserve keeps giving banks extensions on complying with it.
A court told London Activists they could reenter the unused bank building to serve a meal to the homeless on Christmas, but the court betrayed them immediately after and they were not allowed to do this.
One of the activist points out that the UK has 10 unoccupied buildings for each homeless person.
The state's refusal to let homeless people live in those buildings demonstrates its evil priorities. Making squatting a crime was vicious too.
Does anyone know whether the Green Party advocates legalizing squatting?
Mehmet Emin Altunses faces the criminal charge of insulting the president of Turkey.
Anyone who loves Turkey must fight to get these charges dropped so that Turkey does not disgrace itself.
"No Justice, No Respect": Why the Ferguson Riots Were Justified.
Treaties are needed to restrict development of autonomous AIs with deadly weapons.
A SWAT team raided Chad Chadwick's house
based
on a false report, shot him, beat him up, and tased him, then
fabricated a series of charges against him.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
They did not convict him of anything, but they ruined his life as well as rendering him deaf in one ear.
These thugs must be punished or they will ruin someone else's life next.
Privatized UK parole officers put people back in prison for taking jobs that start too early in the morning.
Jeffrey Deskovic was falsely convicted of murder, and freed after 16 years. Now he dedicates his life to freeing others wrongly imprisoned by a system that makes slapdash mistakes.
A cinema in the UK called the thugs to arrest some 12-year-olds for bringing iThings with them to the movie.
The fact that they did not in fact record the movie is a side issue. What if they had done so? Since that is not a crime in the UK, the only complaint the cinema could make is that they violated its rules. That should not qualify as an "emergency" — the thugs should have refused to come.
This is in addition to the general point that laws against sharing copies of published works are an injustice.
Protests Erupt in Nicaragua over Interoceanic Canal.
The canal raises two issues. One is that farmers who will lose their land don't trust that they will be compensated. There is an obvious solution: start buying their land at a fair price now.
The bigger and harder issue is that of potential ecosystem damage. I don't know if there is a way to prevent that.
Advice for Americans dealing with debt collectors.
How the nebulous idea of "cloud computing" led millions of internet users to lose their privacy.
The one flaw in the article is that it presumes we have all fallen for the trap. For example, "When the technology industry embraced 'cloud computing' and made it part of our daily lives, we all made a Faustian bargain." Maybe you made that bargain — I never did. I hope you will join me in rejecting it now.
Some kinds of services are acceptable to use in specific ways. But if you adopt a policy of trusting a service without first carefully checking who you would be trusting with what, you'll be mistreated over and over. This is why I have adopted the policy of not identifying myself to businesses I deal with except under very narrow conditions (for instance, the company that hosts stallman.org knows it's mine).
In other words, you've got to stop thinking that there is a "cloud", and start thinking about each particular service.
Life and business in occupied Palestine are tangled in hundreds of absurd Israeli regulations, each with its own excuse, but all designed simply to make life poor and difficult.
Obama continues to claim that the war in Afghanistan made the US safer.
A public hospital in Alabama makes patients waive their legal right not to be sued for hospital bills.
I don't think poor indebted Americans should feel the slightest shame about using bankruptcy to escape the medical bills that a civilized country would never have tried to impose on them.
Meanwhile, I wonder whether the hospital's contract with these patients is valid. If the law says hospitals can't do something to their patients, can the hospitals set it aside just by getting the patient to say yes?
Democracy protests in Hong Kong have resumed and thugs arrested dozens.
The UK government celebrates the 1914 Christmas truce because it doesn't threaten the idea of war. Contrast it with the reception of acts and movements that did.
Obama plans to send mercenaries to Iraq so he can deny he is sending ground troops there.
Mercenaries are troops.
Faux News cut a protest chant in mid-sentence to misrepresent it as advocating the kill of thugs.
Now cat litter comes with DRM.
How a woman won election as MP for Timbuktu.
Syriza's Marxist economist does not propose leaving the Euro. Rather he demands debt relief with that threat in the background.
Is Sony's Crackdown a Bigger Threat to Western Free Speech Than North Korea?
Russia reports that an unidentified witness saw a Ukrainian fighter plane take off with missiles and land without them, at the time flight MH17 was shot down.
If true, this would not be conclusive proof that Ukraine shot down the passenger jet. There could be other reasons for the fighter to return without missiles.
But is this testimony real? We have only the Russian state's word that the witness made this testimony — and that the witness exists at all.
The UK has used bail conditions to arbitrarily ban hundreds of activists from protests.
The bogus charges are dropped eventually, but in the mean time, democracy is the loser.
Israel arrested members of an anti-Arab hate group, accusing them of various violent acts.
Brazil's new Agriculture minister is the obedient servant of big agribusiness and will energetically promote deforestation.
The NSA and its friends undermine general internet security in many ways.
The NSA has created a web of cooperating companies. It helps protect them from cracking, and they allow help the NSA spy on others.
The low price of oil may be Saudi Arabia's plan to hurt Russia and Iran.
The article speculates that it may cause a big decrease in oil production a few years from now. I hope that leads to more renewables installation then, but it would be better to have a high oil price now to incentivize renewables now.
Israel's parliament is considering a law to bar the most outspoken Palestinian legislator from parliament.
I disagree with Ms Zoabi on her controversial statement: I think kidnaping children is wrong even in fighting a colonizing occupying power. Nonetheless, barring her from election to Parliament attacks the democratic rights of hundreds of thousands of people, and that is also wrong.
New Jersey is trying to clear away the democratic procedures that allow the residents of a city to block water privatization.
Governor Christie has a chance to block this by vetoing the bill. If he does not, it may hurt his presidential chances.
Homeless squatters joined activists who sought to feed them, to occupy a disused bank in London. The government sent thugs to kick them out, true to its policy of screw the poor to help the rich; but two of the activists climbed on a balcony rather than leave.
This shows that the UK state regards the idea of feeding homeless people on Christmas as a danger so urgent that it warrants an eviction on Christmas eve to prevent it. (For me, as an Atheist, I don't particularly care that it was Christmas; I'd disapprove of the eviction equally much on any day of the year.)
The court ordered the activists be allowed to return temporarily to feed the homeless today. I guess someone decided to try to smooth over resentment over the eviction. I hope it does not succeed in that aim.
Dissecting the US "evidence" supposed to tie the cracking of Sony to North Korea.
It's flimsy argument, misleadingly cited multiple times as if that made the conclusions stronger. In other words, total bullshit.
The North Korean regime is viciously oppressive; there is no need for false accusations where so many valid accusations are available. But these accusations smell like a PR campaign meant to shape US public opinion.
Don't forget Sony's cyber-attacks against its own customers.
Thugs in St Louis (near Ferguson, that is) shot another black teenager, saying he was pointing a gun at them.
If things happened as the thugs claim, I don't think they did wrong this time. But people are right to distrust the thugs and demand proof, as the thugs have lied so many times before.
The US government asks courts to order computer companies to remotely give access to people's computers — when the companies have power (through back doors) to do so.
The defense is to use free software that probably does not have a back door, rather than proprietary software that almost certainly does have one.
Let's Leave Behind the Age of Fossil Fuel. Welcome to Year One of the Climate Revolution.
The UK gave 1.5 billion dollars in subsidy to all sorts of power plants just for existing and doing what they were going to do anyway.
The subsidy was supposed to be an incentive to bring new generating capacity on line, but it did none of that.
Since a large fraction of this generating capacity uses fossil fuel, that fraction of the subsidy is subsidy for continuing to use fossil fuel (rather than building renewable capacity).
Global heating is disrupting butterflies, so that caterpillars mature in the autumn and can't survive the winter as adults.
US citizens:
tell
Congress to stop giveaways to Wall Street.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The TTIP would require US states to pay foreign companies in order to regulate toxic chemicals such as Bisphenol A.
TTIP stands for "This Treaty Is Plutocratic". Its other name, TAFTA, stands for "Turn All Freedom To Ashes".
A solidarity hunger strike persuaded Israel to release Nahar al-Saadi from solitary confinement after 570 days of it.
Solitary confinement is a form of brainwashing common in US prisons.
Israel blatantly disregards the Fourth Geneva Convention in its treatment of occupied Palestine.
Another way Comcast tries to buy support for its planned merger with a large competitor: by handing out cards that entitle the bearer to decent customer service. In Washington DC, these cards are often given to people with political influence.
As two children (ages 10 and 6) were walking home from a park, thugs grabbed them, took them to their home, then threatened to shoot their father.
I think the father should have refused to sign any papers making absurd promises, even for a few days, and told the kids, "I can't stop them from taking you prisoner, but mom and I will rescue you." Any child of 6 will understand what that means.
When I was 6 years old, I walked to school every day. That's what all the boys and girls in first grade did, in my ordinary neighborhood public school in New York City. How cowardly TV has made Americans.
A police officer in Buffalo was fired for trying to stop a thug from choking a handcuffed man.
Quite a few security experts doubt US claims that the crack attack on Sony was carried out by North Korea. This article presents their reasons.
Santa Claus and his crew joined a protest against a natural gas storage facility that is likely to pollute the regional water supply in nearby Seneca Lake.
There is still a chance for the many streams of climate defense activism to prevent the worst level of disaster — but we need to push for deep changes that go beyond changing our individual lifestyles.
CO2 emissions are putting mussels in danger.
Everyone: call on Mississippi Attorney General Hood to drop his plans for a mandatory ISP censorship list.
It does work to sign with Javascript disabled — the page of JSON data that you get indicates success.
Australia's carbon tax was effective in reducing CO2 emissions. That's why the fossil fuel companies' men were so determined to get rid of it.
Nepalese workers are dying in Qatar at the rate of 15 a month. And this doesn't count the workers from India and other countries.
Another fine mess for freedom of speech in Egypt.
Luxembourg should not bring charges against the person who leaked the tax avoidance schemes of Luxembourg.
Amazon Anonymous claims its boycott in the UK has cost Amazon 8 million dollars.
While I support the boycott, I can't say I have bought any less from Amazon than I did in the past.
In 1995, Senator Moynihan proposed to abolish the CIA.
US torture extends beyond the CIA, and everyone responsible ought to be chased down and prosecuted.
Reportedly three other countries have made a secret agreement giving Ukraine a veto over publishing results of the investigation of the destruction of flight MH17.
This article belongs to a body of writing that claims that MH17 was shut down intentionally by Ukraine. That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof — it is much more plausible that badly trained missile operators were mistaken about the target. The articles I have seen are not extraordinary proof: for the most part, the evidence is attributed to people I can't find much information about, and I am not convinced it is for real.
For instance, this article says that the unusual flight path of MH17 has never been explained, but I recall reading that it (as well as other flights before and after) were diverted away from a storm.
Nonetheless, the author personally attests to getting a runaround in requests for information about this agreement, and I think that point is credible.
The Smartest Cities Rely on Citizen Cunning And Unglamorous Technology (as opposed to fancy sensors that spy on everyone).
Refugees from Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea report on life under the rebels and/or Russia.
Some of these people could be motivated to exaggerate, but it is consistent with what Putin does in Russia, and some of them had no other reason to flee.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has laid charges of torture in Germany against two officials of the Bush regime: former CIA Director Tenet and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
Contrast the difference in reaction between the unusual event that someone shoots a thug dead and the frequent event that a thug shoots an unarmed man dead.
The producers of a documentary about Edward Snowden have been sued by someone who claims they are "profiting from the theft of documents".
From what I have read, the use by journalists of leaked documents is lawful in the US. (The movie isn't where they are used; it is about Snowden, not whet he showed us.) But the US government might try to use this lawsuit as an opportunity to press its case to label Snowden as a criminal.
US universities host raving supporters of the occupation of Palestine, but those who criticize it are labeled "antisemitic" and excluded.
Sony Threatens to Sue Twitter Unless It Removes Tweets Containing Hacked Emails.
The Lima agreement is weaker than weak — a "roadmap to global burning."
A Milwaukee thug shot an unarmed homeless man, apparently beating him up first, then accused the homeless man (apparently falsely) of attacking him. The thug will get off without prosecution.
1/4 of the tenant families in the UK have cut back on food to pay rent.
Ukraine is planning to join NATO, and
NATO
does not reject the idea.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
That seems calculated to push Russia into war.
Thugs don't seem to mind so much when right-wing fanatics kill thugs.
The oppression of North Korea is no joke.
Nonetheless, I think it is a fitting target for jokes — ha ha, only serious.
The world's wheat harvest is predicted to decrease 6% with each 1C rise in world temperature.
Maybe we could cope with a 12% decrease, but 30%?
Koalas are headed for extinction due to human destruction of their habitat.
Pressure for prosecution of US torturers is growing.
The New York Times editorial uses the word torture which many other media have avoided. It omits the ringleaders, Bush and Cheney, from the list of suspects to be investigated, but they should be the prime targets.
The senate talks about setting up a "truth commission" to investigate, as a substitute for prosecution. That won't be enough to cleanse America's name, or repudiate tyranny. The Bush regime's secret memos trashed the whole Bill of Rights.
So much evidence has been published already, including Dubya's and Cheneys' public confessions, that there should be no need to offer any of the major organizers immunity.
A Taliban-supporting cleric in Pakistan threatened violence against protesters, and is being investigated for these threats.
Italians have been charged with planning
right-wing
terrorist violence.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Painting a pretty face on the harsh life of servants is a way of romanticizing inequality.
Accepting sponsorship from arms companies promotes arms trade and war.
It's comparable to sponsorship from tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies, or Big Pharma.
Large dam projects in Amazonia lead to deforestation, and may have something to do with the failure of rains in Sao Paulo.
A high-ranking New York thug posted a tweet that appears to endorse intentional extrajudicial killings.
Listing the 32 Democratic senators that sided with the Republican betrayal budget bill.
What the banksters got from the betrayal budget bill:
taxpayers
potentially on the hook for giant losses from speculation in
derivatives.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Facebook blocked access in Russia to a page proposing a protest in Russia, in obedience to the Russian regime.
US citizens: call on the FDA not to approve genetically modified salmon.
Eating them is probably safe, but growing them in the ocean endangers wild salmon.
US citizens: call on Obama not to renominate Wall Street's Antonio Weiss to regulate Wall Street.
US citizens: call on Obama to show some spine in opposing Wall Street's corruption of Congress.
The UK's anti-immigrant party's leader reacted with bad grace to a satirical app.
I hope that the developers released the app as free software.
The New Economy movement calls for making economic activities smaller-scale and under local ownership.
Syriza could win the next Greek elections, and says it will destroy austerity — but the forces of repression could stage a coup in Greece.
US citizens: call on Holder to prosecute JP Morgan.
Everyone: call for
dropping
the "feticide" charge against Purvi Patel.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call for prosecution of the CIA officials responsible for torture.
I added a note saying to prosecute Cheney and Dubya as well.
Ten medical problems that modern contraception can prevent or make lighter — aside from pregnancy.
The Christian story of Christmas encapsulates disgust for female sexuality.
Thugs are not always the killers — occasionally they are killed. Someone shot two NYC thugs, just before killing himself, and after killing someone else.
Other thugs have seized on this as an opportunity to campaign for their own impunity, and to attack the public for the anger that has been provoked by the actions of many thugs over a long time.
In effect, the thugs claim that their lives matter astronomically more than yours or mine, and that protesting when they kill mere citizens is equivalent to shooting them.
I don't think those two thugs deserved to die. But I feel less concern about each of them than about each of the many innocent people that thugs have killed — because the thugs are part of a group that has power and uses it arrogantly to oppress.
The reason I call them "thugs" is not primarily because of the killings they do, many of which are due to haste and unconscious racism rather than malice. Rather, it is primarily because of the numerous protesters and other innocent victims that they grab, punch, kick, pepper spray, or beat with sticks, and then frame for various bogus charges. That, they do from arrogance.
Only a fraction of thugs would do those things, but when they lie about it, all their buddies support their perjury. That's why they all deserve the name of "thugs".
Once in a while someone in a thug department stands for justice and rejects the arrogance and impunity of the other thugs. Those people deserve the name of "police officer".
The Taliban are winning their war against Pakistani children's future.
The Tor project reports that some government (the US, it appears) may try to disable its directory authority servers and shut the Tor network down.
Christian fanatics falsely claim that some birth control methods are abortion, so they can stretch their restrictions on abortion rights to restrict birth control too.
From my point of view, the difference between contraception and abortion, while real, has no moral significance: they should both be legal and the state should provide them both gratis.
The EPA's proposed rules for handling coal ash are too weak to do the job.
It's not a good thing for everyone's email to be published. Or collected by the NSA.
When Maria Lopez cut her finger on a meat saw at the Hormel plant, because they had sped up the production line, they kept the line running dripping her blood into the food.
The higher production speed causes accidents and contamination, but the companies have bought the support of the US government to allow them to replace government inspection with their own half-hearted inspection. To trust these companies to inspect themselves is to invite them to cut corners on safety — for their workers and for their customers.
The UK has imposed onerous and unnecessary restrictions on volunteers returning from helping to care for Ebola patients in Africa.
These people can be trusted to tell medical personnel if they develop symptoms suggesting they might have Ebola. And if they don't have those symptoms, they are not contagious.
As Egypt's government plunges to new depths of tyranny, it is getting
full
military support from the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
A practical study in Chicago found that red-light cameras caused a small increase in injuries due to car crashes.
It wasn't a significant increase, but the lack of benefit is enough reason to get rid of them.
Why does Obama insist on sending Shaker Aamer to Saudi Arabia (where anyone may be tortured) rather than to Britain, which is ready to accept him back?
Turkish opposition editors and journalists have been arrested under absurd accusations.
The Lima climate talks seem to have failed, leaving human civilization on course for global disaster.
The political will to avoid disaster was not strong enough to overcome short term interest plus the corruption spread by fossil fuel companies.
The only agreement reached was that countries would propose unilateral measures they will take, starting in 2020, when it will be too late to avoid more or less disaster.
I think that the countries expecting to be hit first by deadly climate disaster have grounds to declare war on the main greenhouse emitting countries. They may as well die resisting climate attack rather than give up and die helplessly.
Such a war would not be mere revenge — those countries may have a chance to protect themselves from part of the expected damage. By destroying fossil fuel export or import infrastructure, they could cut the use of fossil fuel, which could reduce the extent of the disaster they face.
Actions to block activities that are likely to kill of hundreds of millions of people could be justified legally under the defense of "necessity".
The US is posting blimps near Washington DC to scan for cruise missiles up to 340 miles away.
That's a good thing to do, if it works (which is not clear), but the blimps could also watch cars and people.
Vermont's governor has abandoned the single-payer health care plan that was enacted.
He says this is because the tax required to fund it would be too high, but it will surely be less than what the same people would have to pay under the current system.
The Senate report identifies 26 men who were imprisoned wrongly by the CIA and tortured, but it seems there were hundreds more.
The CIA claims these mistakes were a tiny fraction. I don't trust the CIA to count them honestly. But even when someone was a real terrorist, that doesn't excuse torture.
Can you tell a gun from a power drill in half a second? Seeing a picture of a black person's face makes some people see the drill as a gun. This is unconscious racism at work.
The article also describes simple methods of reducing these unconscious prejudices.
If the American public considers torture acceptable, perhaps it will balk at destructive experiments on unwilling human subjects, which the CIA also did.
The two tend to go together (there are clear examples from German concentration camps).
Overprotection of children: New York City is removing swings and welding spinning disks so they can't spin.
This goes with the attitude that leads to prosecuting parents that let their kids go to the playground alone.
The lawlessness of the CIA extended to Guantanamo, and the published details provide the lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners with arguments for motions in their "trials".
I don't think it matters greatly how much imprisonment without trial was done by the CIA and how much was done by the US Army. They are both part of the US government.
A woman driving by said "fuck the police", and they
arrested
her. A court gave her a $100,000 punitive judgment to teach the
thugs respect for freedom of speech.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
They would learn the lesson better if they had to pay the judgment personally, but chances are that won't happen.
This contrasts with other countries that fail to uphold freedom of speech. In France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and many other countries, insulting officials is a crime, although they often deserve the insults.
The CIA has known for a long time that torture doesn't "work" for getting intelligence, so Bush and Cheney must have known this too. Why then did they choose to use torture rather than get better information?
One possibility is that they are sadistic savages. Another, more sinister, is that they wanted bad intelligence (fabrications) to justify attacking Iraq. Torture works great for that.
The precise headline used for an article affects how readers understand it and which parts of it they remember later.
This is part of the general human tendency to stick with first impressions or first conclusions, and not change them sufficiently when subsequent information calls for correcting them.
This is, for instance, why it is so important to talk about "free/libre software" and not "open source".
Eight proposals for how to make Wall Street cease to threaten the US economy.
Everyone:
call on FIFA to
insist that Qatar put an end to slave labor conditions in construction
for the World Cup.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
In one province of Pakistan, 40% of all criminal trials label the defendant a "terrorist". In most of those cases, there was nothing remotely terrorist about them. And Pakistan is about to execute someone based on a confession beaten out of him when he was 15 years old.
As Pakistan fights the Taliban, I hope the thirst for "blood" does not lead to more injustice like these.
Inequality of wealth distribution in the US continues to increase.
Chevron has abandoned plans to drill in Canadian Arctic waters, acknowledging it is unable to meet safety requirements.
Nobody can drill safely in Arctic waters. Even drilling safely in the Gulf of Mexico is not to be counted on.
Where to learn, at one remove, what it feels like to be tortured.
Western mining companies gladly accept slaved labor from the Eritrean government.
Movie theaters refused to show Sony's film, The Interview, after bomb threats against theaters, so Sony cancelled the release.
This is censorship by threat. Even worse, it is likely to make others self-censor in anticipation of a threat. (I wish they didn't call these crackers "hackers" — it seems clear that playful cleverness is not a significant part of their mentality.)
We should not be quick to believe claims about who is responsible. I wouldn't put this past North Korea or China, but I also wouldn't put it past the FBI to falsely accuse them.
It takes no expertise to make a false bomb threat. Anyone could have done that. Reportedly, Sony's computer security was so incompetent that even a kid could have cracked it.
Senator Feinstein is already using this to promote the privacy-threatening bill that would allow companies to give your personal data to Big Brother in bulk "voluntarily".
Sony is not an innocent victim: it has a history of launching cyber attacks against its own customers.
Remember the Corrupt Disks with the rootkit that took over the users' operating systems to install DRM software? Remember when Sony forced each PlayStation 3 owner to forfeit either the ability to run GNU/Linux or the ability to talk with Sony's game network? Remember when Sony sent thugs to arrest George Hotz for publishing how to jailbreak the PS3?
We must take action to prevent further attacks of the sort that was made against Sony, and to prevent further attacks of the sort that Sony launched. But governments are not interested in protecting us from the power of big business. The US is negotiating treaties such as the TPP that would strengthen the power of companies such as Sony against us.
Thus, I continue to say, Boycott Sony!
Reportedly some Iraqi Sunni tribes want to fight PISSI, and the US is training their soldiers.
The US is not above exaggerating good news in war, but it would be good if this is true.
After a long public campaign, Ebay has dropped ALEC.
South Korea banned a leftist party that supports North Korea.
If the party was a vehicle for plotting rebellion, this decision was legitimate. But were the trials of the imprisoned legislators fair?
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The accusations against him cannot be credited, coming from Putin.
The UK government is doing a subtle but effective job of undermining the development of ocean-wave-powered electric generation.
It offered huge guarantees for new nuclear plants, so that uncertainty would not hold back investment, and could do the same for wave power, but renewable is not its priority.
Meanwhile, it gives big subsidies to fossil fuels.
In Ireland, a brain-dead pregnant woman's body is being kept on an incubator so as to make the fetus turn into a baby born motherless.
A dead body on an incubator is not a human being, and has no rights. A fetus of 17 weeks is not a human being, and directly has no rights, but causing it to develop into a human being in disadvantaged circumstances would be harm or cruelty to that human being. That's what Ireland is trying to do here.
Western mining companies gladly accept slaved labor from the Eritrean government.
The New Era low-rent housing in London has been sold to a foundation that will keep the rents low.
This is a victory for public protest, but it is a small one. Bad laws in the UK are pushing house prices and rents up, just as bad laws have pushed wages down 10% since the financial crisis. Bad laws encourage the well-off to occupy more space, leaving less for the poor. Bad laws have enabled privatization of the housing that was built to provide homes to the poor, while other bad laws reduced the tax on businesses and the wealthy so there are no funds to replace what was lost.
All these laws need to be changed.
US citizens: call on Congress to end the embargo on Cuba.
People are mounting TV cameras on their houses in ways that violate their neighbors' privacy.
I've stated it should be illegal for anyone — including the state! — to set up a camera pointed at a place where the public is admitted, which permits remote access, except under a specific court order specifying the place to be surveilled and the time for the surveillance to continue.
This shows that if the camera can observe someone else's private space, it infringes that person's privacy even if it only makes a local recording (or no recording).
Jeb Bush is a global heating denier.
The Israeli army has closed 7 investigations into possible war crimes in Gaza, with no charges.
It also opened 8 more investigations, but it seems unlikely they will lead to charges either.
If we don't put the US government torturers on trial, it will happen again. The CIA tortured in Vietnam, but those responsible were not punished; just 30 years later, the CIA reoffended.
The main difference seems to be that now the US government doesn't even have the decency to apologize. Culpable officials such as Cheney are brazenly barbarous now.
Pakistanis are united against terrorists, but maybe not all terrorists.
The judges of the Wisconsin Supreme Court will decide whether their rich backers broke the law in supporting their campaigns.
Statistics suggest that teenagers use e-cigarettes instead of smoking.
The war in Afghanistan has cost the US a trillion dollars, 80% of which was spent under Obama.
Or should we call him O-bomber?
Ukraine has established a "ministry of information policy", supposedly to counter Russian propaganda, but it threatens to impose censorship of dissent.
Ukraine is in the middle of a civil war; some action against Russian propaganda is legitimate. But this kind of action threatens to be dangerous. What claims to be "hate Russia" could really be "like Russia".
Fights Break Out in Kenyan Parliament over Controversial Anti-Terrorism Laws.
The dangerous law has been passed, threatening journalism and dissent in Kenya.
George Stinney would be 84 years old if he had not been executed on false charges at the age of 14.
This is one of the reasons why the death penalty should be abolished.
The judge suspected Stinney was tortured or tricked into making a confession. The latter is often easy with naive kids that aren't street-smart and believe thugs are to be trusted.
Another secret "trade treaty", the "Trade in Services Agreement", attacks internet freedom in the ways that plutocrats generally want to.
I expect it does other things to deregulate companies and weaken democracy, because those are the purposes for which plutocrats set up those treaties. We don't need to see the details to determine they are bad.
The right-wing government of Australia is making Indigenous people work for 5 dollars an hour.
Australian phone companies and ISPs want to block customers from accessing the metadata about them.
The real issue is that companies should not be allowed to keep this data except about specific people subject to court orders.
A Republican senator blocked a program to help veterans not commit suicide. He considered its price, $22 million, too high.
During World War II, the US recognized waterboarding as a form of torture, and said so clearly.
The betrayal budget bill shows how Congress will try to squeeze through fast track for the TPP.
Hong Kong is trying to take a 14-year-old protester away from his parents on the grounds that they "neglected" him by not stopping him from protesting.
The willingness to do something that everyone will regard as deceptive and cruel is a stage frequently seen on a government's path to complete tyranny. It is a way of declaring open war on human rights. Putin passed through this stage a few years ago, and Erdogan is going there now.
The London bicycle rental scheme tracks all its users.
Amazingly, the company published a data base, thinly anonymized, that allows anyone to try to figure out who each user is. But I think that's just a minor add-on to the bigger danger of Big Brother, who already knows who they are.
US citizens: call for cancellation of the planned pointless and destructive road through the Tongass National Forest.
Some kinds of birds know enough to avoid getting hurt by offshore windfarms.
A Chinese version of Android has a universal back door.
In fact, nearly all models of mobile phone have a universal back door in the modem chip. So why did Coolpad bother to introduce another? Because this one is controlled by Coolpad.
The Campaigners Who Won't Forget the Schoolgirls Kidnapped by Boko Haram.
Rescuing prisoners is difficult and risky. The government could do a better job of fighting Boko Haram, but freeing the girls will be possible only with a lot of luck.
Kurdish forces are attacking PISSI, trying to recapture territory.
I hope they will be prepared also to welcome and care for women freed from PISSI captivity.
Most children kept in institutions are not orphans. Their parents can't afford to care for them.
The US is mainly ruled by political dynasties.
I won't vote for either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush unless they go through a big transformation.
Over 700 Million People Taking Steps to Avoid NSA Surveillance.
However, such measures are only partially effective. You can encrypt the contents of your email, but there is no way to stop various governments from seeing who you are sending the email to.
A proposed EU directive on trade secrets would endanger whistleblowers.
A cease-fire in Ukraine is holding.
New York State has banned fracking for two years.
It's a start.
The Taliban's massacre at a school in Pakistan has generated intense anger that might make a difference to defeating it.
The European Parliament voted to endorse a Palestinian state "in principle".
Hamas may well deserve to be labeled as a terrorist group, but such decisions should always be the result of putting the group in question on trial.
Spy agencies have persistently undermined computer and network security through many avenues.
The movie companies want to impose DNS-blocking on US ISPs.
A law professor says that organized hypersensitivity of students is an obstacle to the teaching of rape law.
Other kinds of violence can make people uncomfortable too. There are many subjects that can't be taught to or learned by the squeamish, including law, history, sociology, biology and medicine.
There are many other fields where this is not an issue, including math, physics, chemistry and some kinds of engineering. Students who are particularly sensitive may need to choose those fields. However, schools should encourage students to overcome squeamishness rather than hold back education to cater to it.
Low-wage employers in the US have received billions of dollars in subsidies from state and local governments.
People who supposedly got rich "on their own" got a lot of help from subsidies too.
Investigating how Bedouin in the Negev were driven off their lands.
Palestinian bus drivers in Jerusalem face attacks from Jewish bigots; there is an attack every day. 100 bus drivers have quit because of the danger.
The media talk about Palestinians that attack Israeli strangers, not mentioning that it goes the other direction too.
But it's not always random bigotry. A Palestinian woman was shot by a soldier after she stabbed an Israeli — but she says she was defending herself from him.
US citizens: phone your senators and say, "No new sanctions on Iran; give diplomacy a chance to work."
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on your senators to stay in Washington to confirm Obama's judicial appointments while that can still be done.
I'm not saying each and every one of them is a good choice. At least one is right-wing and should not be confirmed at all.
But in general they should be confirmed.
Everyone:
urge Michigan
governor Snyder to veto the law to authorize religiously-motivated
discrimination in Michigan.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on El Salvador to stop imprisoning women for having abortions or miscarriages.
Everyone: call on fast food chains not to use GM potatoes, which have not been properly tested.
The US and Cuba have renewed diplomatic relations, in a deal brokered by the Pope.
The three imprisoned Cubans and American Alan Gross have been freed as part of the deal.
The Cubans were imprisoned for spying on terrorist groups harbored by the US, which planned attacks on Cuba. I supported a campaign to free them.
Alan Gross's work was also legitimate, even though the Cuba government did not like it.
"Smart cities" represent a scheme to regiment and control people, which threatens democracy too.
England may prohibit smoking in a car with minors in it.
This seems like a good idea. Children get the idea of smoking from watching adults.
I object to referring to teenagers as "children", though. That is misleading.
Pakistan's response to the murder of many students by suicide bomber-gunners: resume the death penalty.
Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than the idea that execution could deter attackers who expect to die in the attack?
Most of the plastic in the sea seems to end up in sediments at the bottom.
Maybe this means the oceans will clean themselves over time — if we stop dumping more. But it doesn't change the fact that plastic is doing lots of harm to wildlife now.
As the US moves step by step towards legalizing marijuana, use by teenagers is slowly decreasing.
What should the US do with prisoners that can't be tried because torture corrupts all the evidence against them?
It's simple: release them. Imprisonment without trial is injustice and will inspire people to hate the US. (It already does.)
It makes no difference whether these men might fight the US once released. Suppose a few did — on top of the the thousands who are flocking to fight for PISSI already, they make no significant change in the situation. However, if the US stops committing gross evil, that would, over time, reduce the recruitment of its enemies.
Thugs in the US overall kill people more than New York City thugs, although the statistics for the rest of the US are incomplete.
The betrayal budget bill has one possibly good provision, intended to stop the Justice department from prosecuting state-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries.
But it may fail in its goal because it is written badly.
Congress passed a law to limit one kind of massive surveillance started by Reagan. The EFF says it is a real but small step forward.
Here's more detail.
In the US, is it "bad enough yet" to motivate people to fight the plutocrats?
Many pizzas in the US contain more salt than an adult ought to consume in a day.
Western sanctions are causing economic disaster for Russians. There is no sign Putin personally is suffering, but he is suffering a defeat.
I don't think he will go down passively to defeat. His specialty is attacking in surprising ways, and I think he will do that again.
I also suspect that this is not just a reaction to Putin's aggression in Ukraine. It seems more likely that Western plutocrats used that as an excuse for something they wanted to do anyway.
Three congresscritters got a bill for harsh confrontation with Russia passed by "unanimous consent".
US mainstream media decline to call torture what it is, and say they have to "present all sides", but they never show the side of the victims of torture.
Human Rights Watch says that the Sudanese army is using rape systematically as a method of repression.
Five proposals for avoiding the mass extinction we are on the way to cause.
If "Change our economic system so it values nature" means assigning monetary value to wild ecosystems, I fear that will backfire by encouraging them to be purchased and destroyed.
Taliban attacked a school and killed 130 children of Pakistani army officers.
The article explains that this mass murder of children is meant as intimidation. Let's hope that revulsion will cost the Taliban support among the people who now support them.
Turkish protest organizers
face
charges of trying to overthrow the government.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Although the charges appear to be false, overthrowing a repressive government is not wrong anyway.
Three UK parties including the Green Party formed an alliance against austerity.
US citizens:
call on
Kerry to pressure El Salvador to stop prosecuting women for having
abortions or miscarriages.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Luxembourg Tax Whistleblower Says He Acted out of Conviction.
The thug who shot Tamir Rice, age 12, never ordered him to put his (toy) gun down. He shot Rice almost immediately.
The Mexican federal thugs in Iguala were informed about the attack on protesting students as it started, and monitored it as it occurred.
The UK Labour Party endorsed the right-wing goal of eliminating the deficit.
Increasing taxes on companies and the rich would have the effect of reducing the deficit, but making the latter the goal would encourage doing it by abandoning the poor and helpless.
Reporters Without Borders supports the Japanese journalists that are challenging the state secrecy law.
How Huge Companies Like Apple Are Actually Parasites on America's Tech Industry.
The Sydney Siege Should Not Be Used to Justify Draconian New Anti-Terrorism Laws.
If Australia can suffer the roughly 1300 deaths per year from car accidents without going mad and destroying its freedom, it ought to be able to stay sane when violence kills two people.
North Korea says the UN should investigate US torture rather than North Korean human rights violations.
North Korea's human rights violations have millions of victims — dwarfing the scale of US torture. The reason I demand the US prosecute its torturers is that I love my country and want it to deserve everyone's good opinion.
If you look at the number of people driven out of their homes by US-started wars, it may be comparable with the crimes of North Korea.
Cryonic preservation could offer a way to preserve the biosphere and avoid global heating disaster. If we could convince 4/5 of humanity to get frozen for later revival, the part of humanity remaining active would generate a much smaller amount of greenhouse gas, and could develop space habitats providing enough room to unfreeze everyone.
Belgium was shut down by a general strike against right-wing poverty-spreading policies.
The CIA Tortured Abu Zubaydah, My Client. Now Charge Him Or Let Him Go.
The EU may ban use of diclofenac for animals so that their corpses don't kill vultures.
Egypt's repression extends even to visiting foreign academics.
Cheney's morality is that of a terrorist.
The UK government is blocking a fair trial for a pair of Burmese immigrants accused of a murder in Thailand.
Estimates of the rate of Greenland's ice melt may be too low because they don't take account of the secondary effects of surface melting.
In general, these estimates tend to be too low. Heat tends to flow from what's hotter to what's colder, and can do so in many ways. We know the ways it is flowing today, but as the temperature rises, it can find new ways to flow — which are missing from our models.
Karl Rove said that Dubya personally approved CIA torture methods.
We must give him a chance to repeat that in Dubya's trial!
Public marriage proposals are a form of emotional blackmail.
How the plutocrats are destroying the "disposable" half of the US population.
It would be good if the US population goes down to half what it is now, but not by crushing people who exist. The only ethical way to get there is by having fewer births.
Beware the three false assumptions in the limited discussion of US torture.
Affirmative action can help all of us avoid unconscious racism.
Many products contain endocrine disruptors that can cause various human illnesses. A rough estimate suggests they cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage annually.
Coal extraction appears to be headed for a new record. Just the thing to destroy civilization.
Spain's new law forbids sites that link to snippets of news articles unless the sites pay the publishers. The response, Google will omit Spanish news articles.
The stated motive is to direct more income to the publishers. My solution for this problem is to allow publishers to charge a little anonymous digital cash for viewing an article. This would also make it possible to eliminate the advertising and the surveillance of most web sites.
Unless the law has some exception that has not been mentioned, I think these political notes would be illegal if stallman.org were in Spain. Fortunately, it is not.
However, the EU seems to be considering imposing a similar law — whose justification is the bogus term "intellectual property". Use of that term always tends to be harmful.
Cheney Calls for International Ban on Torture Reports.
(This is satire. I expected this to be obvious, but a reader said he could not tell, because it was plausible Cheney would really do this.)
In the UK, good jobs require doing unpaid internships first, and only the wealthy can afford to do the internships.
It appears that these internships are illegal but the interns don't dare complain.
Sea walls built to protect beachside housing tend to destroy the beaches, which then can be maintained only by artificially replenishing them.
A few decades from now, with sea level rising ever faster and various disasters striking, no region will be able to afford to sustain beaches artificially; rich people will do it in private enclaves.
I am no expert, but I suspect that the natural process that creates new beaches may be too slow to keep up with the speed of the rise as it will be a few decades from now. The process may not get a chance to work again until hundreds of years from now, when the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps have melted and sea level is a 100 or 200 meters higher.
Torture unites the US and PISSI with the Nazi regime and medieval barbarism.
Cheney defends US torture by stretching the definition of the word and claiming the Sep 2011 terrorist attacks were torture too.
His definition is wrong, but more importantly, his implicit premise is that the US should match its enemies for barbarism.
More sick ideas from Cheney: torturing innocent people is forgivable if the US does it, and they should never be released afterwards because some of them might be so angry they would fight against the US.
This is part of an all-out campaign to legitimize torture by the US. Americans, if you love your country, now is the time to insist that Cheney stands trial for his crimes, along with Bush and their underlings.
After Ohio thugs shot John Crawford dead as he carried an air rifle he was about to purchase, they interrogated his girlfriend making wild accusations and threats.
Angela Davis talks about repression of blacks in the US from slavery to the present.
China is snooping on Hong Kong Democracy protesters and trying to crack their email accounts, as well as punishing them by barring them from entering China.
US citizens: support the Grand Jury Reform Act.
The UK government proposes to discourage poor people from having extra children by providing no funds for any extra children they have.
It makes sense to discourage excess children, but imposing penury on them and their families is neither effective nor legitimate.
The UK's privatized air traffic control system shut down because the company skimped on long-term investment.
Well, what do they expect? It had to skimp on something; how else could it extract a profit?
Israel continues its slow expulsion of Palestinians from Jerusalem, by ordering the demolition of additional homes and businesses.
China told the US, regarding human rights,
"Who
are you to criticize China?"
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Here's
China's
report on US human rights violations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The first section concerns private crimes of violence. While the lack of proper gun control in the US is a serious problem, it does not fit the category of human rights violations by the state, so it doesn't belong in this report.
Here's the US report on China's human rights violations.
A fraction of the list concerns the law limiting number of children. I support such laws, so I don't regard those items as valid criticisms. However, the rest of the list includes many grave crimes.
Overall, China is a lot worse than the US, but "we're better than China" is hardly an adequate standard for any country to apply to itself. The US ought to strive to be #1 in respect for human rights.
The US government has pressured most US colleges to hold unofficial rape trials which can (in effect) sentence the accused to permanent exclusion from higher education. They fall far short of the legal standards of real trials.
Saudi women are in jail for driving cars to the Saudi border and trying to enter their country.
AT&T is connected with several
major
attacks on US democracy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Humans are causing Earth's sixth mass extinction. Between destruction of habitats, overfishing and global heating, we could destroy more than 3/4 of the species on Earth.
Local governments in the UK are resorting to complex schemes to prevent their public housing from being privatized.
The UK Parliament will ask the US Senate for full information on UK participation in CIA torture.
An Indian man who operated a Twitter account posting material in support of PISSI has been arrested and charged with "abetting war against the state", though so far there is no evidence he did anything but distribute propaganda.
To eliminate human rights in the name of fighting PISSI is missing the point about what is bad about PISSI.
The CIA Is Still Running Amok — by lying about torture and trying to cover it up.
Obama's proposals for policing do little good. They won't stop the militarization of US thug departments.
It is important to note how making thugs wear body cameras requires privacy protections and is helpful to restrain their violence only if the rest of the system upholds that goal.
Learned Helplessness: the Enduring Effects of Torture That Haunt Victims.
The UN will ask the NSA to show its radio intercepts bearing on the assassination of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöaut;ld.
Michigan is considering a bill to allow businesses to discriminate against customers as long as the motive is religious.
Senator Wyden has proposed a bill to reject requiring back doors in computers.
European countries have been fined at least 4 billion dollars under treaties that subject governments to foreign corporations.
Other cases, not yet resolved, demand over 35 billion dollars in "compensation" to foreign corporate overlords — and that's only half the cases that are in process.
All such treaties are antidemocratic; we must fight until we eliminate every last one.
US citizens: call on the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect Arctic ring seals from the danger of oil spills.
In the Cincinnati Enquirer, "investigative journalism" means covering organizations that might pay for advertising.
This article uses the word "monetize" in the sense of "contemptuously regard mainly as a source of income". I reject that usage of the word because I reject the attitude that it embodies.
"Monetize" properly means "to use as currency".
NPR systematically avoids calling US torture "torture", because that would mean criticizing it.
The Washington Post does the same thing.
The effect is to support the torture apologists and Obama in trying to downplay US torture. Example in point: ABC television's story that is more concerned with the blowback from US torture than with the wrong of torture itself.
That attitude is "whatever we do, we don't deserve to be punished for it."
A pregnant woman in Wisconsin was put in solitary confinement because she had used methamphetamine while pregnant.
It is unjustified and cruel to punish a pregnant woman for possibly damaging her fetus. Barring her off from employment is stupid — that would do much worse harm to the possible eventual child.
It can, in principle, be legitimate to stop a pregnant woman from doing something that would cause permanent damage to a future human being, but that's easier said than done. It might be better to abort the fetus instead — if it never becomes a human being, then no human being is damaged.
The new head of Australia's government research lab believes in dowsing.
I guess that's part of what falls down on you if you take the suppository of all ignorance.
There were
87
complaints in 2014 that New York thugs put people in choke holds
(which is against their rules), and only once was any action taken
against the thug.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Ireland passed a law to allow foreign governments to snoop on communications and force ISPs to cooperate in secret trials.
"Focus on the Family"'s irrational "sex education" was plagiarized from someone else's joke.
A Seattle thug that punched a handcuffed woman and fractured her skull
will
not be prosecuted.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
When Americans sue a thug for illegal violence and win, the thug is never personally held liable.
No wonder they feel they can get away with murder.
The UK's internet censorship blocked access to a UK government site about investigation of US kidnaping and torture.
An experiment found students rate their instructors more highly when they think the instructors are male, than when they think the same instructors are female.
The actual sex of the instructor (concealed from the students) did not correlate with the ratings.
How medical doctors participated in CIA torture.
The UK government has used a string of sleazy tricks to conceal its involvement with US torture.
A US court ruled that telling people how to remove DRM is lawful.
I suppose the perpetrators of DRM will appeal this decision, so it won't be final.
Dubya's torture did "work" … to provide the false information he wanted as an excuse for the war he wanted.
The Oregon GMO-labeling referendum was defeated: a judge refused to stop the election authority from applying an arbitrary criterion to exclude 4,000 votes.
If you point out evils of the US government, such as torture, apologists pop up to claim you just want the US to look bad.
I do it because the US government needs some "tough love". I want the US to stop doing evil, so I could be proud of my country.
At a solidarity die-in in London, thugs arrested 70 peaceful protesters for fictitious "violence".
Aleppo Faces Catastrophe If Assad And Rebels Don't Agree to "Freeze" Fighting.
The Egyptian government claims there are just 866 Atheists in Egypt, after defining secularists as Atheists.
The Obama regime is concealing interviews with CIA torturers and their victims, which might occasion criminal charges against the former.
Sudan's Anti-Dam Movement Fights the Flooding of Nubian Culture.
France may legalize medicating terminally ill people into unconsciousness at their request.
US citizens: phone your senators saying to vote against the budget deal that attacks America in so many ways.
I suspect that using the site to call your senators involves running nonfree Javascript; if it does, just call the switchboard directly.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens:
call
on your representative to support the bill to ban fracking on
public lands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone the White House and call on Obama to prosecute the officials responsible for torture — starting with Dubya.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
US citizens: call on the EPA to impose strict standards to reduce toxic smog.
In the US:
support
decriminalizing the feeding of homeless people.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
An Indonesian editor has been accused of blasphemy for a cartoon that criticized PISSI.
An FBI interrogator who questioned Abu Zubaydah without torture, reports on how the CIA torturers took over, then lied about what he had achieved, while not bothering for months to question Abu Zubaydah at all.
Human predation of whales and seals has created ecosystem catastrophes, wiping out other species of animals and plants.
20 years ago, when Russia's war with Chechnya started, Yeltsin was determined not to negotiate with Chechnya and made foolish excuses.
Protesters in Oakland discovered two infiltrating disguised thugs and a few attacked them, whereupon one thug pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the surrounding crowd.
I understand that the thug might have felt threatened at that moment — but he should not have been there in the first place.
The thug department says that they infiltrated the protest to "keep the public safe". If they shot protesters, they'd say that was "keeping the public safe" too.
Italians have launched a general strike against austerity.
Thugs appear to be covering up the murder of 17-year-old Lennon Lacy by calling it suicide.
His mother is wrong to criticize the older woman he was having an affair with. That prejudice might be the same one that motivated the murderer, and it is wrong no matter who expresses it.
Turkish writers that criticize the government have been accused of being part of the "international literature lobby" by supporters of Erdogan.
Hong Kong's umbrella movement has not won, but it has not failed.
The UN special rapporteur on human rights says the US attorney general must prosecute those responsible for torture.
It is strange, however, that he thinks Dubya deserves immunity as the then head of state. Slobodan Miloshevic, Saddam Hussein, and Uhuru Kenyatta were not granted that privilege.
UK officials held 24 meetings with US Senate investigators pleading to cover up the UK's involvement in CIA torture. It looks like they got what they wanted.
There are many things a government can do to curb the power of corporations.
All that is needed is political will.
Occupy protests gained public attention because of two factors: disruption and personal sacrifice.
CIA Director Brennan arrogantly repeated his past lies in Congress, and refused to affirm that the CIA would not torture again.
If I were in Congress I would vote to cancel all funds for the CIA until it is cleansed of torture supporters.
Thugs in Baltimore attacked a woman with a taser and pulled her out of her car, then erased the video she was making of how they were attacking another victim.
Then, as is typical for thugs who think courts will believe any lie they tell, they falsely accused her of trying to run them over.
Some unidentified person has been charged with leaking the Luxembourg tax dodging schemes.
The apology offered for these deals makes no sense to me. What difference does it make whether they are similar or different? The point is that they help companies at public expense.
Canadian prostitutes feel threatened by a law that makes it a crime to be their customers.
Prisoner abd el Rahim al Nashiri might be guilty of deadly terrorism, but US government torture gets in the way of proving this in a fair trial.
The "military commission" doesn't aim be a fair trial.
A Catholic council acknowledges that the celibacy required of priests may have contributed to leading them to have sex with children.
With Help From USDA, Factory Farms 'Masquerading' Products as Organic.
All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates and the House Is About to Pass.
How to break the DRM on Keurig coffee pods.
I think that coffee pods are a bad idea because they involve more nonbiodegradable waste.
Elizabeth Warren fights hard against Wall Street, but doesn't talk much about permanent war I will vote for her if she is the Democratic candidate (which I would not do for Ms Clinton), but I'd rather have Bernie Sanders running, since he opposes both Wall Street and permanent war.
High levels of phthalates in mothers' blood is associated with a decrease in IQ for their children.
Since the experiment that would prove without a doubt that phthalates damage IQ would be unethical, there is no use waiting in the hope of clearer proof. The US should follow Europe in banning phthalates in anything meant to come in contact with food or people's bodies.
Why Afghanistan's government can't stand unless propped up by the US.
In addition, it oppresses women almost as much as the Taliban would. Do the people of Afghanistan want the US to prop up this government indefinitely at the cost of continuing the war?
Spain's right-wing government has imposed a million-dollar fine for some protests, and large fines also for publishing photos of thugs.
The latter one seems to be intended to stop people from documenting the thugs' violence. The people of Spain, under repression, need to develop networks for anonymously posting evidence outside Spain.
The same law also represses insulting a thug. Many thugs do things which provoke well-deserved insults. Prohibiting insults against anyone is inexcusable censorship.
I will suggest to people in Spain that they turn the word "policÃa" into an insult. Then it will be possible to insult a thug just by saying "es un policÃa", and it will be difficult for them to prosecute this.
The US has closed its notorious Bagram prison.
Henceforth the government of Afghanistan will be responsible for abuse and torture of prisoners in Afghanistan. It's still barbaric but the guilt will only indirectly be on US hands.
The European Commission plans to cancel proposed EU clean air and recycling directives.
In today's US wars, the very idea of a future peace has been discarded.
CIA/military torture and killer thugs are part of the same spectrum of injustice and impunity.
Obama: the US does not have to prosecute those responsible for torture because it it is exceptionally good.
For the US to be good at all, it must prosecute its torturers and its killer thugs.
Women in Brazil that get underground abortions face repression and even death.
The idea that there is something wrong with an abortion is nothing but religious ignorance.
The UK's mandatory censorship by ISPs has a
persistent
tendency to go beyond the pornography that the UK requires them to
block.
In
France
and Ireland, the parliaments have voted in favor of recognizing
Palestine.
It is too bad they make this vote advisory only.
Darfur
Radio Station Exposes the Use of Rape As Weapon of War.
What
the US must do to clear away the blot of torture.
This applies to military torture, too.
A mother in South Carolina was
jailed
for allowing her child to play in the park.
So crazy has the US become. And the result of this insanity is that
parents have to transport children everywhere — causing burden
on the parents and making children feel a lack of autonomy.
An
oil
spill threatens the Sundarbans forest, home to rare dolphins as
well as tigers, but perhaps not for much longer.
The CIA
spent
180 million dollars to build up a group of psychologists to
legitimize torture.
A leader in PISSI explains how it was
set
up inside a US prison in Iraq.
A bar manager in Burma is being
prosecuted
for displaying a lack of respect for Buddhism.
Too bad the Buddha isn't here — he would tell them to stop
making a fuss about that bar and go back to meditating.
Freedom of speech means the freedom to criticize, offend, insult, or
mock any person, idea, practice or thing — even the Buddha.
Even you or me. Burma should start respecting this freedom.
The Hong Kong government is
shutting
down the democracy protest camps.
A few activists will remain to
dare
the state to arrest them.
People will try again later.
The bipartisan deal in Congress
allows
rich people to pay more to buy the support of major political
parties.
Kerry asked Congress to approve
"flexible"
and perpetual war.
Islamic terrorists
killed
5000 people in November, mainly in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria,
Yemen and Somalia.
Note the absence of any Western country in that list. While Islamists
are vicious and evil, they are not a significant danger to people in
the West. It would be foolish for us to give up vital freedoms for
fear of a danger that doesn't come near us.
Australia is
not
quite as obstructionist in Lima negotiations as its public statements
would suggest.
I find this very surprising. The extreme statements are not going to
please many people in Australia besides the coal companies, and those
will care more about results (preventing an effective climate
agreement) than about statements.
The US infiltrated the Cuban rap scene to try to stimulate opposition
to Castro, but it
backfired.
Antibiotic resistance is
killing
almost a million people a year. Projections suggest it may kill
10 million a year by 2050.
I agree that we should give high priority to curbing antibiotic
resistance. The first step has to be
banning
giving antibiotics to farm animals (except to individual ones to
treat a sickness).
"A lot of These
Gomers Didn't Know Shit": Former CIA Officer on Torture Report.
The Keystone XL pipeline and Australia's new coal mines, if not
cancelled,
could
render the climate negotiations futile.
E-cigarettes are
of
little interest to anyone other than smokers, in the UK at least.
For CIA, Truth
about Torture Was an Existential Threat.
The article presents proof that CIA lawyer John Rizzo thought
that the CIA's activities were torture.
Shame on the Obama regime for
imprisoning
John Kiriakou for telling the truth about torture, while CIA
officials were lying to everyone.
With the attention focused on CIA torture, don't forget that
the
US military carried out torture too in Guantanamo, Iraq and in
Afghanistan.
Around
100,000
people protested in Dublin against charges for water.
Every kind of business should have to pay for water at market rates,
but each person should get a reasonable amount of water gratis.
The costs of ordinary amounts water and sewage for people should be
paid for by income tax on the rich, not by those people.
Earth's oceans contain roughly
270,000
tons of plastic trash, mostly in tiny pieces that endanger sea
animals.
6
years of CIA attempts to obstruct the investigation of CIA
torture.
Obama
withheld
almost 10,000 CIA documents from the Senate torture inquiry.
Republicans threatened to shut down the US government again, and
won
small acts of sabotage: cancelling out Washington DC's initiative
to legalize marijuana, and a little deregulation for banksters to
cause future financial havoc.
The banksters were
aiming
for more than this. If they don't get all that now, they will try
again soon enough. They have lobbyists and lawyers who will work full
time for years to be able to
create
bubbles and pop them,
swindle
their clients,
and
fraudulently
foreclose millions of people's homes.
Their first victory was
blocking
the US from imposing adequate regulations to prevent another
crisis.
Everyone:
Write
to Saudi Arabia calling for the release of imprisoned journalist
Raif Badawi.
A copyright lawsuit demanding royalties for a small sample of music
has been
defeated,
but the judge's criteria seem to favorable to the plaintiff, leaving
copyright still an impediment to remix.
A minister in the Palestinian government was killed by Israeli troops
while
engaging in a peaceful protest.
He was teargassed, then a member of the extremely violent border thug
unit bashed him with a rifle and kicked him. It's wrong to do that to
someone who is young and healthy, but this man was old and not
well, so the abuse killed him.
Everyone:
call on
Oregon to count every valid vote in the initiative on labeling
GMOs.
Violence against women in India is part of a
pervasive
attitude of sexism.
Brazil also has a new torture report, which demonstrates that
torture
of prisoners was a systematic policy in the 1970s.
The question is whether the torturers will be prosecuted.
Crucial
conclusions from the report on CIA torture.
Senator McCain
continues
to denounce torture.
However, right-wing fanatics continue to
glorify
and praise, torture and call bloodily for more.
They hope to make their cruel and bloody lies prevail over truth by
repeating them. It might work. They have convinced a large fraction
of Americans to continue believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction in 2003, despite the fact that
investigation
found he did not.
US citizens:
support
the move to legally limit use of US ground troops in Iraq and
Syria.
The US Supreme Court ruled workers don't have a right to be paid for
the
time they are required to wait for a security check.
I am no expert on US labor law, but this is a bad policy: it is good
for the rich and hurts the working poor.
In Hebron,
Israeli soldiers
watched as fanatics attacked Palestinian children then destroyed a
Palestinian's car.
This has happened
many
times before.
Israel has started
8
more investigations of possible war crimes by Israeli forces in
attacking Gaza.
It is a step forward, but these investigations tend to be whitewashes.
Palestinians in occupied and besieged territory are governed under
secret
Israeli regulations. In some case the enforcers have lost their
copies.
The head of the ACLU suggests that Obama formally pardon torturers if
he does not prosecute them,
as
a way to affirm that what they did was a crime.
While I see his point, I doubt it would achieve the goal very much.
Any torturer that could potentially be prosecuted, either in the US or
by an international court, should not get a pardon. The ACLU points
out that there is
no
statute of limitation for many of these crimes.
Some of those responsible may be prosecuted in other countries or in
the
ICC.
Everyone:
call on
Proctor and Gamble to remove known carcinogens from its cosmetics
and other products for people to put on their bodies.
US citizens:
call on Holder
to appoint a special prosecutor to prosecute the officials responsible
for US torture.
Everyone:
kick the fossil fuel
industry out of climate negotiations.
Why did the FBI give a computer security advisory secretly to some
businesses and tell them
not
to inform the public?
The CIA made prisoners
stand
for hours on broken feet.
CIA torture was
useless
for finding Osama bin Laden; prisoners who were tortured gave only
false information.
We should keep in mind that finding Osama bin Laden was of no great
importance in fighting al Qa'ida. Killing leaders such as Osama bin
Laden does little damage to an underground group that
can
recruit more leaders.
Choosing to kill him, rather than try to arrest and try him, was
murder.
To
the Criminal Justice System, Black And Muslim People Embody our
Nightmares.
This is what comes from being ruled by the suppository of all cruelty,
Abbott.
CIA
Torture Report: Europe Must Come Clean About Its Own Complicity
(in US torture, kidnaping, and imprisonment without trial).
US citizens: please call your House member right away. (General House
phone number 202-224-3121). Tell them to stop this deal while there's
still time!
"I'm a constituent. My name is...
"I'm calling about an outrageous provision that Wall Street lobbyists
and a few House and Senate leaders are trying to sneak into the budget
agreement. It would let the biggest banks go back to using taxpayer
subsidies and guarantees to gamble on the riskiest derivatives - the
exotic financial instruments that blew up the economy in 2008.
"This would be a huge giveaway to a tiny handful of the biggest Wall
Street banks, and it would put the country's financial and economic
stability at risk. Please do all you can to remove this provision from
the spending bill, and make it clear that you will oppose the bill
unless it is removed."
The US is
relaxing
requirements for home mortgages, inviting another housing bubble
that could pop and make another crisis.
Noteworthy
ways in which Vice President Cheney supported torture.
As
US Occupation Drags on, Afghanistan Suffering at Record High.
This is not uniquely the fault of the US. The Taliban are to blame too.
They kill more Afghan civilians than the US, and often do so
intentionally.
However, the badness of the Taliban is not a good reason to prolong an
unwinnable war.
The Australian government now
plans
to impose internet filters for censorship and to punish people for
forbidden sharing.
Pushover journalists are
inviting
US officials to lie to cover up the torture they are responsible
for.
The UK method to abolish rights is to
define
them as something only criminals and poor foreigners need.
New Zealand, on a weak pretext, has authorized the state to
spy
on anyone for 24 hours without a warrant.
I wonder, can they do this to you day after day?
Right-wing Japanese nationalists are
agitating
to ban a US film that depicts torture of American prisoners of war
by their Japanese guards.
Some Japanese soldiers were convicted of war crimes consisting of
torture including waterboarding. Japan has an obligation to
acknowledge and condemn its torture, just as the US does.
Protests
against the violence of thugs continue in Berkeley, California.
Five
recent oil spills have polluted the Peruvian Amazon and made
indigenous people ill.
Political leaders are meeting in Lima, but most of them are better
characterized as "fossil fuel leaders" than as "environmental
leaders".
Uber has been
banned
in Spain and Thailand.
Portland, Oregon, is
suing
to shut down Uber there.
South
Sudan's civil war, a mixture of personal rivalry and tribal
rivalry, has brought hunger to millions.
The State of Georgia is determined to execute Robert Halsey
notwithstanding
the incompetence of the lawyer who failed to defend him properly.
The death penalty is wrong even after a properly-run trial.
Electrical
brain stimulation helps some people think better, but it harms
other people.
The senate report shows CIA
tortured
Gul Rahman to death, and the agent in charge got a commendation.
Janat Gul, by contrast, begged to be killed but the CIA did not grant
his wish.
Janat Gul fell into the standard horror of those who are tortured
for information they don't know.
A
summary
of CIA torture methods.
Torture is
wrong
even in the unlikely event that it "works".
But it
often
resulted in fabricated information which the CIA took for true.
Those guilty
must be prosecuted, if not by the US then by an international
human rights court.
This includes Dubya, who has already
confessed
his guilt.
The CIA used
forced
enemas on prisoners on hunger strike.
Sudan
a Dangerous Place for Journalists Who Cross State's 'Red Lines'.
The same is true
in
the US,even for
prize-winning
reporters. In the UK, even
journalists'
spouses are in danger.
China and North Korea
used
the Senate CIA torture report to tell the US it shouldn't talk about
their human rights abuses.
In fact, both
China
and
North
Korea oppress the people much more than the US, but given the bad
things the US has done, it lacks the moral authority to criticize them
without being ridiculous.
This is an additional reason why the US must put its torturers on
trial.
The
Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men.
If thugs can't help instantly assuming the worst about blacks, in a
split second, perhaps it is necessary to tell them not to be so quick
to shoot anyone.
In US-Supported
Egypt, 188 Protesters Are Sentenced to Die Days After Mubarak is
Effectively Freed.
The new world-wide plan for failing banks is that
depositors
lose their deposits, because derivatives owed to other banks get
first priority and there won't be enough to pay them.
Depositors are supposed to be protected by deposit insurance,
but there isn't enough money in the insurance fund to cover the
depositors of a big bank.
A part of London
plans
to fine those that leave buildings unoccupied, but only buildings
constructed in the future.
Maybe that's the best a local government can do. If so, criticizing
that local government for not doing better is pointless. The national
government must do something better.
In Sierra Leone, if you report Ebola in your family, you are
likely
to be put in with people that have Ebola, and thus catch it
yourself.
Protests
in Washington against the TPP.
An OECD study concludes that dooH niboR policies (taking from the
non-rich to give to the rich) over recent decades have reduced overall
economic growth.
In other words, the idea of "trickle down" is wrong all the way down
to the root. We already knew that helping the rich get richer at the
expense of the rest does not help the rest. Now we know it hits them
twice:
they
get a smaller share of a smaller pie.
Increased US fossil fuel exports
cancel
out reductions in the US's own use of fossil fuels.
Climate defense activists
protested
the fossil fuel company influence that pervades climate
negotiations in Lima and elsewhere.
The protesters shut down a panel that falsely presented CCS (carbon
capture and sequestration) as ready for widespread use.
Wally Kowalski is a licensed medical marijuana grower in Michigan.
Thugs
raided
his house, taking his plants and equipment, all of which was
legal.
Subsequently they returned and arrested him.
Laws against growing marijuana do great harm to society, and enforcing
them is harmful even if done correctly.
Everyone:
call
on PBS not to put any global heating deniers in positions of
authority.
Sony's web site was
cracked and
effectively taken down.
Most people don't know it, but Sony has done things even worse to its
own customers. Sony sabotaged all PS3 computers: it released
a malicious firmware downgrade which gave each PS3 owner a choice of
two ways to be harmed. The owner could install the downgrade and be
unable to run GNU/Linux on the computer, or not install it and be
locked out of the Sony game network.
Sony also
sent thugs after George Hotz when
he found out how to jailbreak them.
US citizens:
call
on the US Forest Service to block a wolf-killing competition.
US citizens:
Call on
Pepsico to stop fueling deforestation to get palm oil for chips.
Reflections
comparing the first and second world wars.
I reject the idea that there is something wrong with fighting an
invading army. It was right for France and Britain to fight against
Germany's aggression (in Poland) in 1939, and just as it was right for
Iraqis to resist US occupation in the 2000s. This doesn't exempt the
conduct of the war from moral criticism. If the greatest legacy of
the second world war is massive deaths of civilians, the German air
force may have started it, but that doesn't justify the the US and UK
in responding in kind.
As it turned out, the bombing of German cities was not even effective
in stopping German weapons production. They moved the factories
underground, but not the civilian population.
New Spanish pun La Rioja
California's drought is the
worst
in 1200 years.
The drought's cause is mainly natural climate fluctuation,
but
global
heating made its effects worse.
Most of California is in a condition of "exceptional"
drought.
Anti-abortion protesters in Australia are intimidating women to the
point where
they
try to kill themselves.
Failure to confront the evil of US government torture
will
endanger American lives.
Everyone:
call
on Starbucks to stop funding the Grocery Manufacturers
Association's lawsuit to overturn Vermont's GMO labeling law.
Jersey, which has not signed up to all the human rights treaties,
is a
testing
ground for total surveillance.
It is also used as a route for extracting profits so they can't be
taxed.
Putin is
supporting
right-wing parties in Europe.
I think he is doing this to sow chaos rather than for
a specific purpose.
Yes,
People Can Starve in Benefit-Sanctions Britain.
It is
even
worse in the US.
The UK weather bureau says 2003-like deadly heatwaves
will
occur 'every other year' by the 2030s.
They won't kill as many people each time as were killed by the 2003
heatwave, because many of the old people who might be killed by
heatwave N will have been killed a couple of years before by heatwave
N-1.
Workers will
strike
in an Amazon warehouse in Germany.
Too bad US labor law makes organizing so difficult.
The UK government
proposes
to make it essentially impossible to sue to challenge legislation.
The UK government plans to make food banks a standard solution for the
poor who can't afford food. That basically means
giving
up on keeping people properly supplied.
The UK's Green Party MP opposes the Infrastructure Bill
that
would
put lots of money into increasing car traffic and maximize fossil
fuel extraction.
Everyone:
tell
the Walton family to stop opposing home solar power installations
and start donating to promote them.
This is an additional reason not to buy from Walmart, added to its
mistreatment
of employees.
US citizens:
call
on the remaining supporters of ALEC to stop.
US citizens:
call for reforming
prosecution of rapes of military personnel by military personnel.
US citizens:
call
on the US government to make all financial advisers accountable
for how they treat their clients.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to oppose additional sanctions against Iran.
Right-wingers want these knowing they would kill the nuclear
negotiations which are the only chance to stop Iran's progress towards
nuclear weapons. Sanctions can't achieve that goal.
A report by the Council of Europe
rejects
the idea that "secret, massive and indiscriminate" surveillance is
justified.
Is
the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?
Transgender people are
frequently
denied basic rights and face discrimination.
Campaigning
to prove benzene responsible for leukemia.
Uber has been banned in Delhi after a
driver
raped a passenger.
Nuclear weapons on instant launch readiness pose a
risk
of accidental war, while stockpiles are not secure enough and
could tempt thieves.
Perhaps the US, Russia and China could agree to mutual observation of
each others' launch vehicles to verify that they are not being readied
for launch.
Australia's government is accused of sabotaging climate negotiations
by
insisting
on legally binding targets.
This may be true in a narrow tactical sense. However, the US and
China, by rejecting legally binding targets, are doing their part to
make these talks fail to reach their goal. Just when the world needs
the mother of all crash programs, governments that bow down to fossil
fuel companies are blocking it from happening.
Diesel engines need to be eliminated over time because of the
effects
of pollution they cause.
With possible improvements in technology for storing electric energy,
maybe we could replace them with electric vehicles.
There are protests across Haiti
to
remove the US-imposed "president" Martelly. Perhaps the Haitian
senate could impeach him.
It's the US that
keeps
him in power.
Some
US thugs comment on the killing of Eric Garner.
An audio recording of the shots that killed Michael Brown
proves
that thug Wilson's statement of what happened is false.
In addition, the prosecutor
misrepresented
the law to help Wilson escape prosecution.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are starting to cooperate in
fighting
the Taliban.
With all the protests,
US
thugs feel they are being persecuted.
However, to say they are getting a taste of their own medicine would
be an exaggeration. No thugs have been killed in these protests.
They are moaning because people are not fawning on them as they think
they are entitled to.
Ralph
Nader: Ten Reasons Why I Don't Have a Credit Card.
I have one, but I never use it except for flights and occasionally
to donate to a political organization in a hurry.
Obama has
released 6 more
prisoners from Guantanamo, including one who has been left
wheelchair-bound by cruel treatment.
The US government is still pushing to conceal videos of how he was
tortured, claiming that knowledge of this would make people angry.
They should have thought about this before they acted that way.
Republicans
say publication of the CIA torture report could make people in the
Middle East angry enough to commit violence. What a laugh! Lots of
people there are already that angry at the US. They just assume the
worst.
For the US to confess and take its punishment, then punish those
responsible for torture, is the only way it can regain any moral
authority.
136 prisoners remain in Guantanamo. The US owes each of them
either a fair trial for some charges, or release.
Paraguay is considering a dangerous data retention bill, so vague it
could
apply to cybercafes as well as to ISPs.
That the proposed law places no limits on what sorts of offenses could
be investigated by searching everyone's phone records is an additional
nasty detail, but don't think that narrower limits would fix the
wrong.
Antivirus companies should stop
concealing
the US-implemented attack software they detect.
Everyone:
tell Chevron
to pay for its pollution in Ecuador.
Also
call
on the US state department not to give Chevron an award.
Everyone:
tell
Best Buy not to use paper made from ancient forests.
Congress is
considering
repealing the regulations adopted after the financial crisis.
They were
too
weak in the first place.
The only people arrested for the killing of Eric Garner were
two
witnesses.
Leaked
audio recordings prove the corruption and dishonesty of Egypt's
military rulers.
A student was labeled as a drug user for breathing in
crushed
candy in order to blow it out visibly.
A PR guide for thugs about
cleaning
their image after they kill unarmed people.
A cleaning company that cleaned corporate offices is going bankrupt,
leaving the cleaning workers
unpaid
for weeks of work.
This is one of the dangers caused by the increased use of
subcontractors where in the past the company would have hired workers
directly.
Forget
North Korea — the Real Rogue Cyber Operator Lies Much Closer to
Home.
Ecuadorian indigenous leader
José
Isidro Tendetza Antún, who campaigned against mining on his
tribe's land, has been murdered, and apparently tortured first.
The EU agreement allowing individual countries to ban GMOs seems to
have a
legal
loophole that could lead courts to overturn those bans.
A city in Libya has joined PISSI;
fanatics
are killing all their opponents.
Obama is
slowly
increasing the number of US troops that will stay in Afghanistan.
There are two possibilities for Afghanistan: prop up its government or
let it fall. The US can keep propping it up indefinitely at high cost
in money and Afghan lives, but what's the point?
A Cleveland thug
shot
Gregory Love clear out of the blue, then handcuffed him and fined
him. Thugs also punched and kicked a witness before handcuffing
him and taking him away.
The UK government has boosted investment in
oil
extraction in the North Sea, which is
bad
news for all of us in the long term.
7
Ways Saudi Arabia Is Silencing People Online.
Calling
on western countries to restrict export of surveillance technology
to repressive countries.
The New York thug that unintentionally shot Akai Gurley then
contacted
his union representative right after. Only then did he call for
medical assistance for Gurley, who was still alive.
Gurley later died from his wounds. I don't know whether getting aid
sooner might have saved him. The thug couldn't have known it would
not save him.
Grand juries nearly always indict accused non-thugs, but
almost
never indict accused thugs.
Catching thugs' killings (and other brutality) on video isn't going to
deter them if they enjoy impunity even once their guilt is recorded.
Many
New York thugs have killed people for no good reason, but hardly
any were prosecuted.
Another unarmed black man was
shot
dead by a thug who then made accusations against him.
AT&T condemns government regulation, except when it's
a
regulation to forbid cities from setting up public WiFi networks.
The US has published
the
full list of military equipment given to US thugs.
That's a good first step. Next we have to
close
down most of the SWAT teams so that they don't endanger people
when they make a mistake.
The US forced most Latin American countries to deport Germans to the
US, which
put
them in prison unless they agreed to go to Germany as World War II
continued.
Articles about rape accusations
should include
interviewing those accused.
Pregnant women and mothers of babies are now
under
impossible pressure to avoid many activities, most of them based
on little evidence.
This general tendency
continues
as children get older, with pressure not to let them play alone,
walk on the street alone, or just be home alone.
People with cancer felt a similar pressure during the years when many
people believed that a positive attitude was crucial to survival: it
led, in effect, to blaming the sick person for not getting well.
Everyone:
call
on New York City to fire the thug that killed Eric Garner.
On ALEC's agenda: companies' right to do
secret
political spending.
Laws requiring seed companies to test their seeds are
being
used to shut down noncommercial seed exchange libraries.
Thugs in Denver
attacked
a man, then knocked his companion to the ground, then forcibly took a
witness's tablet and deleted the video.
A group of Chicagoans out for the evening were attacked by
thugs in
disguise. Since 2010 they have been fighting to get justice from
a system that tries at every step to protect the thugs.
This includes repeatedly trying to threaten them into dropping their
complaint.
Most thugs would not intentionally beat you up. But if one thug does
so, all the rest will join in protecting that one from justice.
Journalists must not try to be "balanced"
when
freedom of speech and privacy of communications are at stake.
Interesting
political comments from comedian Chris Rock.
Air strikes against PISSI
flattened
a residential building, killing several civilians.
Because of US secrecy, we don't know what happened. Was that house an
intentional target? Was it hit by mistake? Some civilian casualties
are inevitable in war, but reckless disregard for civilian life can't
be justified. The secrecy which prevents us from telling whether the
US is reckless in Iraq, combined with certainty it
has
been reckless elsewhere, makes it plausible the US is reckless in
fighting PISSI in Iraq and Syria as well.
In general, air attacks on anyone other than fighters with arms
will
tend to cause civilian casualties.
US citizens:
tell the
FDA not to approve GMO salmon.
EU citizens:
support network neutrality.
The CIA has
renewed its
pressure to kill the Senate's release of the executive summary of
its torture report.
Some companies get enough information about most people's desktop use
and enough information about most people's smartphone use that they
can usually
figure
out when the two computers belong to the same person.
This is more reason not to let any company get that much information
about what you do with any of your computers.
New
York and Los Angeles give false figures about tying up children in
school.
I
Told a Grand Jury I Saw a Cop Shoot and Kill an Unarmed Man. It
Didn't Indict.
The thugs at the scene tried to discourage him from even making a
statement. That must be part of their habitual routine for pushing
away accountability for their crimes.
Prosecutors control the grand jury's decision. When they want someone
indicted, they almost always get their way. In this case, the
prosecutor wanted to protect the thug, so he cut the witness off,
stopping him from presenting crucial facts.
This is why we can
hold
the prosecutor in Ferguson personally responsible for making sure
Michael Brown's killer was not indicted, in addition to
Governor
Nixon for not appointing a special prosecutor.
The New York Thug department attacked a protest about Eric Garner with
a
military
sonic weapon that causes intense pain.
This was after the protesters responded to more direct violence by
thugs.
Some residents of the tent city in San Jose explain
why
they can't find any other housing in the city, even with offered
rent vouchers to supplement their pay.
What this reveals is a system totally stacked against people who are
homeless, which combines with the shortage of affordable housing so
that someone — whoever is weakest — must be shafted.
The US government appears to have
tracked all the cell
phones of people attending a protest for Eric Garner in Chicago.
Senator Wyden has introduced a bill to
ban
government requirements to put back doors into digital products.
It doesn't go far enough. The bill should ban
all
back doors whether mandated by government policies or not.
The Iraqi government has made a deal with effectively independent Kurdistan
about
oil
revenue and fighting PISSI.
The UK is
considering
a new scheme to privatize NHS hospitals.
Any form of privatization in the NHS is harmful, since it will temp
companies to harm patients and cut staff pay. The right-wing
government doesn't mind this because its long-term goal is to abolish
the NHS and impose a lousy US-style system. It can't do so directly
(too much opposition), so it plans to ruin the NHS and present the
results as "proof" there is no point in having one.
Council of
Europe Recommendation on Net Neutrality — Unclear And
Unhelpful.
UK thugs are using a run of vandalism as an opportunity to
intimidate
and insult anarchists.
However, one senior leader, to his credit,
opposes
asking thugs to decide on the limits of freedom of speech.
Israel
blocked
an Irish political leader from visiting Gaza. He wanted to talk
with leaders of Hamas.
Beware of products and treatments that claim they will
"cleanse"
or "detox" your body. The idea is medically nonsensical.
There are some toxic elements, such as
lead
and
mercury,
that can accumulate in your body over time and cause you harm. But
removing them from your tissues is a specialized job and these
products don't even try.
The International Criminal Court has
dropped
its case against Uhuru Kenyatta, president of Kenya, accusing him
of intimidating witnesses and denying access to pertinent documents.
I don't know the details; in particular, I can't take for granted that
the retracted testimony was true. But I also can't take for granted
that it was really a lie.
What we can tell is that the ICC by itself has trouble acting against
the politically powerful unless other stronger governments exert
pressure too strong to resist.
Who
is legally responsible if you set a robot running and it commits a
crime?
I would not assume a priori that the same answer fits all kinds of
crimes.
Cutting
CO2 emission is the way to cut emissions of medium-term
greenhouse gases also.
The UK's ban on sending books to prisoners has been
cancelled
by a court.
New York City has curbed "stop and frisk", but the crime rate is
getting
lower anyway.
How about ending the practice of harping on minor offenses
that led to the death of Eric Garner?
Heating of the Southern Ocean seems
likely
to start melting Antarctic ice sheets and raising sea level.
San Jose, California, has a shantytown where 300 poor people live.
The city now
plans
to evict them, which will make them homeless.
Renting space has become so expensive that even people with jobs
are homeless.
Two thugs in Texas that
banged
a prisoner's head into a table then dragged her across the floor by
her feet escaped criminal charges.
However, the root of this scandal is that she was jailed for an unpaid
parking ticket. In today's US, the system that
fines
the poor is a pipeline to jail (and opportunities to be beaten up,
maimed or killed).
The UK government is talking
about plans
to tax income that Google and Topshop transfer out of the UK, but
apparently only to very small extent.
A lawsuit by sick workers has obtained and revealed documents showing
how chemical companies
have worked
to undermine the scientific results showing that benzene is toxic and
carcinogenic.
Scotland's devolved government
is talking
about land reform, taxing rich people's hunting estates, and so
on. Even to identify and disclose landowners is a radical step in
the UK.
The cost of adapting to global
heating will
be far more expensive than previously believed. It could cost up
to 500 billion dollars a year by 2050 even if we hold heating to 2C.
Some fracking chemicals
cause a
risk of sterility and birth defects for humans and animals too.
The UK budget
proposal increases
subsidy for oil and doesn't even mention renewable energy.
Obama
should suspend
the donation and sale of military weapons to thug departments
until strict limits are in place.
The NSA spies on emails of employees of phone companies in "allied"
countries to find
how to attack their phone systems.
It even goes as far as introducing security weaknesses into phone
systems, undermining security against an crackers whatsoever.
A prominent Pakistani
Muslim faces
charges of blasphemy.
Maybe the country will self-destruct in a web of crossed blasphemy
accusations.
Kerry proposes
to continue war against PISSI for years, but there is no reason to
think such a war could ever be won.
I think this is part of a plan
to slowly
send a large number of US troops to fight PISSI on the ground.
Attrition, and death of some leaders, can't defeat PISSI. Land
battles can push PISSI back, but doing this with US troops would not
work because their occupation
would inspire
the same resentment as before.
It is impossible to defeat PISSI except by giving Iraqi and Syrian
Sunnis a way to be safe from Shi'ite repression. If they get this,
they may
well throw
PISSI out. However, the current repressive behavior
of Iraqi
Shi'ite militias surely convince them to they must keep supporting
PISSI
Thousands of fast food workers and airline workers and medical care
workers went
on
strike across the US to demand a living wage.
Obama promised plutocrats he would
impose
the TPP over the opposition of most Democrats and most Americans.
I've always considered him a Republican in disguise.
Many cruise ships
dump
poorly treated sewage into the ocean, and now they refuse to
answer questions about this practice.
Unless you're shallow in your approach to life, I suggest you avoid
taking a cruise as a vacation. I went on one once, invited to give a
talk, and found it to be more "Here's the next thing you're supposed
to enjoy" than truly enjoyable.
Most people that view images depicting sexual abuse of children
will
never do anything to real children. However, they are all likely
to be imprisoned.
The UK Tories now propose
drastic
further spending cuts. This could make the center-right Labour
appear comparatively better, but that only means it won't attack the
poor quite as much.
The effects are likely to be
disastrous.
And that's aside from the recession it can cause. The worst harm will
fall on the poorest.
Australia has given one minister arbitrary total power over boat
people. He can order that they be
secretly
deported to be tortured, or abandoned at sea. I wonder if he has
the power to order they be secretly shot.
Refugees sent by Australia to Nauru are nearly prisoners even if they
are granted some sort of
"refugee
status".
The St Louis thug department is being criticized for
publicly
warning about toy guns that look real.
The advice was not a threat, and it was wise. People should not give
children toy guns that look real, unless the children are mature
enough and trained enough to handle a real gun properly — to do
so invites many kinds of trouble, starting with scaring people, even
if thugs do not get involved.
This is independent of the many cases where thugs have wrongfully
killed adults and children.
A US court rejected an attempt to give chimpanzees the rights of
persons, on the grounds that they are
not
capable of assuming the legal responsibilities of persons.
A fully grown chimp is quite dangerous to people (and often to other
chimps), precisely because it can't fulfill these responsibilities. A
human being with the mind of a chimp would be committed to an
institution as mentally incompetent and dangerous.
The US has obtained
immunity
from prosecution for its troops in Iraq, which looks like
preparation for sending a lot of troops.
The Church of England, which owns stock in Shell and BP, will file
shareholder motions to
push
them to curb global heating.
The Cleveland thug department has been rebuked for
hundreds
of cases of brutal treatment of citizens.
We
Can't Be Complacent about Pregnant Women's Rights.
The pygmy chameleon
might
be extinct already — but if not, it will have a hard time
surviving now that humans have cut down nearly all the forest it used
to live in.
ALEC has more legislators as members, but perhaps
less
money to buy their support with, since most of the companies that
used to support it have stopped.
Protesters in Canada have
thwarted
a pipeline project to take tar sands to the Pacific Ocean.
Investment in fossil fuels is
increasingly
risky: extraction will be stopped, either by a
climate-preservation deal or by a collapse of global trade, and the
rest will lose its value.
Stop
Police Officers from Killing Our Children.
Everyone:
oppose
Ohio's proposed bill to keep execution methods and consequences
secret.
Heathrow Airport set up an
astroturf
"community group" to pressure for building another runway there.
It's a mistake to increase airport capacity in the London area,
or just about anywhere. The world needs to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions.
US citizens:
tell Congressional
Democrats not to join Republicans in a tax cut for business.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to get ready to veto Republican bills that attack the
non-rich.
Student protests have resumed in the UK, and
so
has repression by thugs.
The insecurity of a zero-hour contract
convinced
a teacher to work in a supermarket instead.
Government policies are the reason for widespread insecurity.
Insecure work where workers can't be assured of enough hours to
support themselves should be banned.
Low-tech indigenous peoples, not at all responsible for global
heating, are being
slammed
by its effects.
Kiribati is not yet underwater, but
drought
may render it uninhabitable first. It is too late to prevent
this; denialists have delayed action too long.
It may be too late for Miami, too.
An indigenous group in Australia has appealed to the UN about
government plans to allow
fracking
in their lands without consulting them.
Ecuador's thugs
repeatedly
harassed climate activists trying to go to the Lima conference,
with false accusations.
Two Australian activists decided to make their marriage a
joint
commitment to love the world by campaigning for humanity's good.
They were recently arrested trying to interfere with coal mining
promoted by Abbott, suppository of all pollution.
The massacre of radical Mexican students by the narco state has led to
a
broad
demand for the resignation of the right-wing president.
Brandon McKean was
stopped
on the street by a thug for walking with his hands in his pockets.
Perhaps it wasn't solely because he had his hands in his pockets.
Perhaps he was mistaken for someone else who was under suspicion
because the two had the same skin color.
It looks like 2014 will set a
world
heat record.
Many small volcanic eruptions have
temporarily
suppressed part of the heating that our greenhouse gases would
have caused.
The US treats pregnant women and mothers
very
badly.
I don't agree that "motherhood is the most important job in the world".
Humans need to
have fewer children. But when a child is born, we should give it
what's needed for it to have a good and healthy life.
The
executive summary
of the Senate CIA torture report has been released. It has many
gaps and flaws.
Australia
is trying
to sabotage global climate negotiations in order to boost coal to
the max.
Campaigning for the
right
of heterosexual couples to choose a civil partnership instead of
marriage.
In France, any two people can form a civil partnership.
It does not suppose that they are lovers.
When Big Brother makes Facebook and other companies run algorithms to
spot "terrorists", they
will
trigger for thousands of other people by mistake.
Canada is having a
green-energy
boom despite the government's efforts to promote fossil fuels, but
investment depends on foreign banks.
A New Net-Neutrality
Battle Brews Over…Text Messages.
The publisher of Nature is trying a
cynical
form of "open access", dependent on DRM implemented in nonfree
software.
This illustrates the weakness of the term "open access". It leads
people to think that schemes like this are acceptable. We need to
campaign for
free scientific
publication instead.
Many governments are using the DMCA to
censor
critical publications made through US internet companies.
Today's copyright descends from an English censorship law adopted in
1565.
The UK government's latest tax cut for house owners is
likely
to increase house prices, making things worse for the non-rich.
Cuba's
Extraordinary Global Medical Record Shames the US Blockade.
The great Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, apparently
killed
by the regime, admired the achievements of the Cuban revolution in
areas such as medicine, education and agriculture, and
wanted
to preserve them.
The impunity of thugs continues as the thug that choked Eric Garner to death
escapes
charges.
Cameras Aren't a
Miracle Cure for Police Brutality.
The ACLU
calls
for a reform of the New York Thug Department to prevent more such
killings.
The Justice Department is
investigating
whether to charge the thug with violating Garner's civil rights.
Hacking as a protest against prudish censorship: artist Rokude Nashiko
has been
arrested
for distributing plans for a kayak based on the shape of her vagina.
Megacorporations pay
most
of the world's bribes, and often the people who pay them are
executives or high-level managers.
The current low price for oil is the
greatest
market failure in history.
It is due to failure to make greenhouse gas emitters pay for the harm
they do.
In the US, being accused of a crime and jailed can leave you
in
debt for thousands of dollars. Poor people who can't pay those
debts can be jailed again for that (i.e., it is debtor's prison) and
thus given even more debt they will never pay.
Since states expect that less than 1/10 of this debt will actually be
repaid, it's not a serious attempt to collect money, but rather a way
to repress the poor. We should cancel all these debts and abolish
fees for all aspects of being accused of a crime or imprisoned.
Support
the Environment or the U.S. Military?
Bernie Sanders presents his
economic
program.
While he doesn't advocate all the points I think are necessary, I
would be glad to vote for him because of this much.
On Monday there were
protests
on behalf of Michael Brown (and by extension others killed by
thugs).
The UK plan to censor speeches in universities means the
end
of intellectual freedom, in a sad contrast with the tradition of
liberty.
Evictions in the UK are
hitting
a record pace. Traps placed in welfare benefits by the Tories are
almost certain to cause an eviction when they go off.
The main problem is that the wealthy are using a larger fraction of
the UK's total housing space than before. This can be reversed at
least partially by raising taxes on large houses and apartments, which
will move the middle class and somewhat wealthy towards somewhat
smaller spaces, making more buildings available for poor people to
live in.
Baby coral animals
may
be able to adapt to higher acidity.
Everyone:
support US fast food
workers on strike for $15 an hour.
Japanese corporation Sumitomo tried to get a license to mine in the
Solomon Islands by
telling
the Japanese ambassador to threaten to cut aid for a hospital.
The ambassador didn't dare say no, but fortunately he avoided carrying
out the order.
Common "complementary medicines" claimed to assist cancer chemotherapy
are likely to
undermine
its effectiveness.
Eating
Less Meat Essential to Curb Climate Change, Says Report.
Most people don't realize how big a footprint meat production has.
Especially beef.
Fixing this problem does not require "telling people what to eat";
making greenhouse-emitting activities pay for the damage they do
would be enough.
Soap,
Sunscreen And Steroids Found in Antarctic Waters And Wildlife.
Some of these chemicals can be harmful to wildlife in minute
quantities because they mimic hormones.
Important EU countries are
pushing
to end Luxembourg's tax-dodging scheme.
When thugs disbelieve a woman who makes an accusation of rape, they
often threaten her until she falsely confesses to lying. Then she
gets prosecuted and
may
be caught in prison until the rapist is caught raping someone
else.
Antisemitism
Is Racism. We Need to Acknowledge That.
The rifle manufacturer Kalashnikov, whose weapons are used in wars
around the world, now
advertises
itself as "promoting peace and calm".
Reminds me of how the US renamed the War Department as the "Defense
Department".
A journalist in Bangladesh has been
fined
for questioning the government's claims about the number of political
murders in Bangladesh's war of independence.
Ironically, he was
instrumental
in calling attention to these murders.
Such vile censorship is not unique to Bangladesh. France has two laws
each explicitly prohibiting disagreement with the official views on a
particular question. One was
adopted
just a few years ago.
All this while encouraging people to keep burning fossil fuel.
Obama isn't proposing to stop militarizing US police,
only
to monitor the process more.
The US is
dragging
its feet in Lima climate talks, acting as if we could take our
time curbing global heading slowly.
The US spent a lot of money for war but
won't
help Syrian refugees.
I think the US should offer funds for permanent resettlement of these
refugees, not just to keep them alive in refugee camps, because that
way the problem will be solved.
Australian immigration seems to have pressured Monica Jones to agree
to be filmed for a TV program,
on
pain of receiving harsh treatment.
Clinton's criticism of fracking
presumes
that there are some places where the risks are acceptable.
Clearly she is considering only the local risk of polluting water
and not the guaranteed harms of (1)
using
scarce water and (2)
contributing
to global heating.
The Labour Party would have used a little less austerity than the Tories
applied, but both would have
spread
poverty.
Obama
plans
to somewhat limit the militarization of US thugs.
Why is this program "popular in Congress"? Probably because of the
money of the companies that make the equipment, which have arranged to
divide the work around nearly all congressional districts.
We must reject the idea that an elected official's proper job includes
pulling jobs to their districts from other parts of the US, or getting
the government to do misguided spending in their districts.
Where
to draw the line between online death threats and jokes or
self-expression?
A just criterion can't rest on the subjective understanding of either
party. It has to be based on what is reasonable in the situation.
In addition we must stop publicly posting our private musings.
Web sites such as Facebook that encourage that practice are harmful.
The Iraqi army, trained by the US, had
50,000
"ghost soldiers" on its payroll who were not really acting as
soldiers.
This alone does not explain PISSI's triumph. The 10,000 real soldiers
in Mosul greatly outnumbered PISSI, and could easily have held the
city — if they were inclined to fight.
The Spanish right-wing government
cut
off funds for finding and identifying the graves of people massacred
by its predecessor, the dictator Franco, during the Spanish civil
war.
Franco was a general, and tried to stage a military coup, but ran into
resistance from the people so that it took him three years to conquer
all of Spain.
Friends in Spain told me a few years ago that Franco's supporters
still occupied positions of power. It is no surprise, therefore, that
right-wing politicians want to Franco's crimes to be forgotten.
A Bahraini human rights campaigner was
sentenced
to prison for attacking two thugs. That's what the thugs
generally say; more likely they attacked her.
The effect is to keep her in permanent exile.
London residents facing eviction by a new tax-evading landlord
protested
at the company's office.
US citizens: call
on Congress to renew incentives for renewable energy and energy
efficiency.
US citizens: call
on your congresscritter and senators not to wipe out nuclear
diplomacy with Iran.
Studying Syrian censorship through
leaked
logs.
Thousands of Hong Kong democracy protesters occupied a street,
and were attacked by thugs with
dogs
and pepper spray.
It seems to be a
very
strong form of pepper spray.
Putin is exerting
control
over publishing in Russia, not just "news".
In general I object to using the word "content" to describe
publications,
because
it disparages them. However, it may be a fitting word for the
publications of Putin's flunkies.
Millions with HIV die because they
can't
afford the drugs to keep them alive.
The World Trade Organization and its TRIPES (*) agreement is partly
responsible for the high price of these patented drugs. The leaders
of that organization, as well as the politicians that signed it and
ratified it, should be tried for mass murder by the International
Criminal Court.
* Trade-Restricting Impediments to Production, Education and Science.
How
to Police the Police: What Rules Should Govern Police Use of Body
Cameras?
When a US company has data in a server in Europe, which country has
jurisdiction
to seize the data?
1000 protesters tried to enter Tahrir Square and were
attacked
by thugs.
The Suez Canal has
allowed
toxic tropical jellyfish to invade the Mediterranean, where they
endanger people and fish. And other dangerous invaders too.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture
rebuked
the US for failing to punish torturers, as well as use of solitary
confinement and violence by thugs, and imprisonment of large numbers
of people facing possible deportation.
The small health risks of some birth control methods are smaller than
the
health
risks they prevent, and trivial compared with the health risks of
pregnancy.
Many US women are
in
prison for being unable to stop their husbands from beating their
children to death.
The legal system fails to consider that the women were terrorized by
those men.
The grand jury gives prosecutors a secret opportunity to indict anyone
— or, as in the case of Michael Brown's killing, to avoid
indicting someone.
This
article proposes a replacement system.
The UK is giving out "counter-terrorism" leaflets whose only use
is to
make
people scared and ready to give up freedoms for security against a
tiny danger.
(You know already what these campaigns are for, but the article is so
funny it would be a shame not to show it to you.)
The way for the UK (and the US) to minimize the danger of terrorism by
Islamists is to wind down the many interventions in mainly Muslim
countries.
In 1944, just after freeing Greece from the Nazis,
the
UK joined with Greek collaborators to massacre unarmed leftist
demonstrators in order to impose a right-wing government of the
former flunkies of the Nazis.
This led to the Greek civil war an dictatorship, and to today's Greek
neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.
It is quite likely you are already responding to fear of
what
internet surveillance can do to you.
Scientists protecting endangered species on the Galapagos Islands have
run
out
of money because competing local people made them close their gift
shop.
Human inhabitation of the Galapagos Islands endangers the unique
species there, and so does tourism.
Chicago's
schools lost
100 million dollars after banksters led them into a tricky financial
scheme
The crucial point is that banksters had shortly before procured a
state law to permit this sort of scheme. That's the way they work.
All the "financial deregulation" laws of the past 20 years should
simply be repealed.
In the
UK, homelessness
and destitution are becoming normal: people are starting to accept
it as a permanent state of affairs which need not be corrected.
The same happened in the US in the 1980s; it is part of Reagan's
legacy.
Right-wing Japanese officials
are pushing
denialism of forcing women from occupied peoples into
prostitution, using one piece of questionable evidence as a false
excuse to deny all the evidence.
Germany's biggest electric company
will split
off fossil fuel generators to concentrate on renewable energy.
US thugs that get fired for misconduct
typically have
no difficulty getting jobs as thugs in other places in the US.
The person who did the autopsy on Michael
Brown seems
to be hardly qualified for it, and not very honest.
Why, I wonder, did the state entrust such a sensitive job to someone
like that?
Tibetan singer Kalsang Yarphel has
been imprisoned
for encouraging Tibetans to learn and speak Tibetan.
Evidently China aims to erase Tibetan culture.
Having a baby is substantially dangerous; occasionally the only way a
woman can save
herself is
with a late-term abortion.
Washington DC thugs have planned years in advance how to spend the
money they expect to
take from
people not convicted of crimes.
An example of research that should not be
done:
tracking people automatically from one camera to another.
Note the idiotic non-response given in the article to concerns that
this is dangerous. They suggest that if the video is encrypted in
transmission to Big Brother it will protect you from being tracked by
someone else. As if anyone were as dangerous as Big Brother!
I've proposed making
it illegal
to have remotely accessible cameras pointed at public places.
US citizens:
call
on the US to stand for strong measures to curb global heating in
the Lima negotiations.
In my message, I used the term "global heating" to underline how
serious the danger is, rather than the denialists' term
"climate
change".
Michael Brown's killer
quit
the Ferguson thug department.
The buying fever on Black Friday is a
disgrace
to society, as well as a distraction from more important
things.
The people who do it don't understand how pathetic their obsession
with appliances is.
According to reports smuggled out of Raqqa, PISSI lords it over
the inhabitants like an occupying army, and
doesn't
bother defending them from Assad's bombers when they attack civilian
areas.
If this is accurate (it could be an exaggeration), it would be easy to
get people's help in pushing PISSI out, if only there were a decent
alternative on offer. But
there
isn't.
I wonder why Assad continues making them hate him.
Note: PISSI is the
Pseudo-Islamic
State in Syria and Iraq.
Murder and corruption charges against Mubarak and some of his henchmen
were dismissed
in
an arbitrary way.
With the supporters of democracy and human rights under total
repression, I guess al-Sisi doesn't need to pretend to hold the
previous military ruler accountable for anything.
Italy
is trying
to weaken EU standards for network neutrality.
Brazil's
Javari Valley Threatened by Peruvian Oil, Warn Tribes.
The Peruvian president, Ollanta Humala, gave an impression of being
vaguely leftist, but this does not seem to be very much the case.
The
harm
done by fracking could be comparable to that of thalidomide,
tobacco or asbestos.
The Germany spy agency came up with a
tricky
legal excuse to spy on the communications of some Germans.
Your Face
Is Not a Bar Code: Arguments Against Automatic Face Recognition in
Public Places.
This article is as valid as when it was written a decade ago.
However, I must disagree with one point in the article: fear of
terrorists is not justifiable for Americans in general. The danger of
terrorism in the US is so tiny that it is foolish to worry about it,
unless you're one of the small fraction who has a job to do to prevent
it.
The Massachusetts "fusion center", created to try to find
"terrorists", was
used to monitor Black
Lives Matter protesters in Boston last week.
David Brock used to get Republicans elected; now he
proposes
to work for Ms Clinton, who is almost a Republican.
An example shows how mainstream media propaganda for Wall Street works:
by
grossly
misrepresenting what progressives said.
And it handles the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline by
presenting
a "debate" between two associates of the oil industry.
Haitian thugs
shot
and wounded protesters who want the US-supported sweatshop next to
their town to provide them with electricity.
Chinese activists are being tried for
fictitious
acts of "disorder".
The UK legal system leaves many women
vulnerable
to their ex-abusers who are released from prison, unless they have
extra money to spend.
Of course, women in that position tend to be short of money.
The US needs to seriously address the question of
racism
and its effects.
Practical racism interacts with the growing inequality of wealth.
With ever more Americans poor, groups that are targets of prejudice
will tend to get poor first.
The UN human rights report reproved the US for
imposing
sleep deprivation on prisoners.
Pope Francis, visiting Turkey, calls for responding to religious
fundamentalism
by helping
the poor and marginalized.
It seems that he and I agree on political issues, except for those
related to sex and reproduction.
A Chinese
official threatened
Tibetan students with punishment later if they study the Tibetan
language.
Some of China's methods
of spreading
propaganda about Tibet.
Israel
deploys balloon-suspended
cameras over Jerusalem which can track all protesters, and
everyone else too.
A man in the US
was arrested
after pointing a banana at a thug as if it were a weapon.
It is foolish to pretend to threaten armed people with a gun, even if
it without anything that looks much like a gun. If he had succeeded
in fooling them, they couldn't be blamed for shooting him in perceived
self-defense.
However, once they knew it was a banana, they also knew it was never
seriously meant as a threat. Thus, it was wrong for them to arrest
and charge the man with threatening anyone. Mere folly should not be
treated as a crime.
A study estimates
that over
10,000 people in the UK are in slave labor.
In general, the estimates for numbers of slave laborers in various
countries
include
a lot of guesswork.
Exit
International teaches
how to commit suicide painlessly. People flock to learn this in
case they will need it later.
I think everyone should have the right to commit suicide, though it
makes sense to impose a waiting period and to treat people for
depression if that's the root of their wish to die.
Death is unfair; that people must die is a fundamental injustice in
the universe (though there is no one to blame for it). But when life
is so horrible that even death is better, forcing the person to go on
living is a kind of torture.
Ohio has been embarrassed by a series of botched executions, so now
Republicans plan
to block
even courts from investigating how they are carried out.
A thug
in Ferguson shot at a woman in a car, causing her to lose an eye.
US citizens: stand with Elizabeth Warren
in rejecting
bankster Antonio Weiss as an official of the US Treasury.
Peaceful
protests closed
shopping malls around Ferguson on Fools' Friday, and other
activities around the US.
Some
e-cigarettes contain
a lot of formaldehyde, which is carcinogenic.
I suggest that they should be sold like tobacco itself: to adults but
not to minors.
US citizens: call
on the EPA to push harder and faster to reduce CO2
emissions from power plants.
Women
on Climate Change Frontline Make Big Impact on Small Grants.
Weather
has devastated olive production in many countries.
Specific occurrences of these kinds of bad weather are random, but our
global heating activities are making them more frequent.
Most poultry in the UK is contaminated with
potentially
fatal bacteria, and the UK government is failing to tackle the
problem.
Instead it is considering an industry proposal to cut inspections.
An Indian version of Hamlet faces
censorship
threats.
Thugs beat up Hong Kong protest leaders
after
arresting them.
The European Union is trying to impose
the
right to have articles dropped from searches for your name on Google
world-wide.
I don't think this particular requirement is a big deal, but it is
dangerous for any country to have the power to limit search engines
world wide.
Dostoevski predicted the totalitarianism that can occur
when people
abandon individual morality by going to any lengths to fight for some
cause.
It is a mistake, however, to equate morality with religion.
The problem he presents is not in having ideals, not as such, but in
approaching them with the assumption that they justify any means
whatsoever.
Pakistan's Geo News to Appeal against
Owner's 26-Year
Jail Term for Blasphemy.
Two people in the Indian film industry were sentenced
to 26
years for "blasphemy" consisting of having a religious song playing
during a wedding scene.
Pakistan should beg the world forgiveness for censoring criticism of
religion, but in the second case it wasn't even criticism.
India
is not
very good in this department either.
One railroad line in the UK was run by the state, and was run so well
that
it became
an embarrassment to right-wing politicians who insist on
privatization.
Privatization of the railroads in the UK has been a rip-off. They
should all be renationalized.
Indonesia's
president proposes
plans to protect forests and peatlands.
The Five
Leaders Who Failed Ferguson.
A former UK tory
leader lost
his libel suit: the judge believed the thug who said the
politician called him a "pleb".
The judge said that the thug didn't have enough imagination to have
made this up,
but lying
in court, for a thug, is not the stretch it would be for you or
me
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
I can't find either of them credible enough to believe.
Nuclear weapons can be detonated by accidents and rebellions, making them so dangerous we need to eliminate them all.
Refusing to ransoming hostages from PISSI, so that they got beheaded for propaganda instead, may have done the US and UK more harm than ransoming would have done.
US public schools are so poorly supported that they charge students for lunch, and when students' parents have not paid, they go hungry. Some students receive lunch gratis, but they are treated as objects of scorn.
When I was a child, the public school gave all students lunch.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that rejecting the idea that the poor deserve to be looked down on is one important lesson for schools to teach.
Indian rich fritter away millions on frivolities, displaying contempt for the rest of society.
A judge rejected DNA testing that might support Rodney Reed's claim he is innocent of murder. The judge would rather kill a man than recognize doubt in a past verdict.
The death penalty is inherently wrong, because it can't be undone when evidence shows the convicted person was innocent. And other reasons too.
US citizens: call on Holder to give justice for Michael Brown and to defend the right to protest.
US citizens: call for stricter carbon emission standards for existing power plants.
US citizens: Call on Obama to give justice for Michael Brown.
The Oregon referendum on labeling GMOs came out so close that it requires a recount.
Canadian scientist Alfredo Frid explained why he joined in civil disobedience against an oil pipeline.
Frid is mistaken when he accuses the Canadian of "inaction" on "climate change". The Canadian government is a strong supporter of global heating and takes many kinds of actions to speed it up, including gagging scientists and shutting down research projects that can monitor heating.
The thugs clamped down hard on protesters in Ferguson.
One thug begged people not to burn down their city. Considered by normal standards it is foolish for people to burn down their own city, but then, if they had normal lives and considered normal standards applicable, they wouldn't want to do so.
The killings of blacks around the US is the extreme manifestation of a racist system that needs systemic change.
Of course, the system in the US oppresses whites plenty as well; just not as much on the average.
Obama is planning to send some more US troops to Afghanistan.
The US can never actually lose the war in Afghanistan, but it can't win either, and continuing the fight means continuing the suffering of Afghans and the expense and militarization of the US.
The resumption of night raids will increase the suffering.
I don't think war is justified under these circumstances.
A Venezuelan opposition politician faces charges of
organizing
to kill President Maduro.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
This is not an absurd accusation, given that the opposition launched a coup attempt against Chavez a decade ago, organized by the US.
However, it could also be stretching the facts.
A UN committee's resolution against massive surveillance left out the crucial issue of recording who talks with whom.
Records of who talks with whom are absolutely crucial. Whistleblower Donald Sachtleben is in prison because the US government exhaustively studied the phone records of dozens of journalists from the Associated Press.
The UK asked Vodaphone for the phone records of one journalist, so Vodaphone handed over the phone records of everyone at the same newspaper.
We Should Cash-Bomb the People — Not the Banks.
On the other hand, if officials' goal is to help billionaires, not the rest, handouts to banks make perfect sense.
Mexico's Missing Students Draw Attention to 20,000 'Vanished' Others.
Deforestation in Brazil has become substantially less this year.
It is not clear why.
In Egypt 78 teenagers were sentenced to prison for protesting for Morsi.
The EU has taken a
feeble
first step towards controlling CO2 emissions from
ships, but it won't even start until 2018.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Charging a fee for emissions would cover this naturally; shipping any load by air or sea should be charged for the emissions involved.
Three (or more) factions are now fighting over Libya.
I am not sure whether there is a basis to prefer any one of them to the rest.
Islamist fanatics
killed
two polio vaccinators in Pakistan.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
This is an extreme example of the harm religion does to society.
UK thugs are distributing fear propaganda which will aid their campaign for further surveillance and censorship.
Human overpopulation is leading to increasing human incursion into a national park in Mumbai.
The UK government wants to follow the US in weakening the inspection rules for farm animals.
This would save money for companies in ordinary operation and make some rare big dangers more likely.
US citizens: call on Obama to require increases in fuel efficiency for trucks.
US citizens: call for federal guidelines to prevent racial profiling by state and local thugs.
Although most countries have signed the treaty to ban cluster bombs, Russia, China and the US have not, and many banks and funds have invested in their production.
A gene modification treatment for an obscure disease costs
over
a million dollars per patient. What will happen to the poor?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The ham-fisted UK spy-on-all agencies are blaming Facebook as an excuse to get themselves off the hook for incompetence in detecting jihadists planning an attack; but the real problem is the unjust interventions that make people so angry they will kill.
It seems incorrect to call that attack "terrorism", because it was aimed at a soldier, not at civilians.
In the Greek "economic recovery", the state drains people and schools to support banks that hardly lend money.
I'd say it's an extractivist government of occupation.
Warm weather in autumn leads some frogs to breed now rather than in spring. But it is a risky bet.
Turkey has
banned
reporting about the investigation of corruption accusations
against members of the government.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Erdogan dismissed the prosecutors that brought the accusations long ago.
Suggestions for fixing the racist system that leads to killing so many black people in the US.
It appears Mexican thugs arrested protesters more or less at random and charged them with attempted murder.
This is in addition to attacking other protesters.
The conduct of the thugs so far has already demonstrated that protesters have plenty to worry about (including being murdered like the 43 students that all this started with).
US Republicans
enabled
the current Canadian government to gain power.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Ferguson, goddamn: No indictment for Darren Wilson is no surprise. This is why we protest.
The law may have spoken but the Ferguson verdict is not justice.
The Australian whistleblower who leaked a report about an apparently corrupt scholarship given to Prime Minister Abbott's daughter will not face charges, but still seems to face more criticism than the parties apparently involved in the corrupt proceedings (the school and the prime minister).
How did Mari Sherkin end up on a dating site unwillingly? Through a new scam by Facebook: it pops up windows showing other companies' sites, which then trick Facebook useds into "agreeing" to let those companies get their personal data from Facebook.
The extremely sophisticated cracking software referred to as "Regin", used to attack computers in many countries including Belgium, seems related to Stuxnet which ties it to the US and UK.
Arguing against term limits on elected officials.
I have always opposed term limits for legislators.
Global heating will endanger honeybees by helping a parasite.
Hong Kong thugs arrested two of the main protest leaders.
The new owners of low-income housing in London, who plan to evict the poor to raise the rents, will evade taxes on the increased income.
I hope the victims organize physical resistance to the evictions, and to further use of the building by the anonymous new owners.
1/6 of all killings in Utah are committed by thugs.
Russia is moving to annex Abkhazia, a breakaway part of Georgia.
It is not exactly comparable to the case of Crimea: the Abkhazians rebelled on their own rather than experiencing a Russian invasion. Still, to be ruled by Russia is to suffer tyranny.
Welfare cuts in the UK are leaving disabled children hungry and sick, and their parents are in even worse state.
But it's even worse in the US, where over 2 million children were homeless during 2013.
Texas approved textbooks which list Moses as one of the founding fathers of the USA. And other wacky stuff.
Thugs shot a 12-year-old boy dead when he tried to pull a pellet gun on them.
The orange "this is a toy" indicator had been removed, so it looked real. Thus, I can't criticize the thugs for this one. I would not take their word for what happened, but if the boy's family saw the video and doesn't disagree, I suppose their story is true this time.
Hagel's resignation should provide an opportunity to debate Obama's wars.
The US mainstream media will, however, express no doubts.
Human emissions have already locked in 1.5C of global heating, and the consequences will be disastrous. The question is how soon we stop making it worse.
The Senate torture investigators did not try to talk with prisoners in Guantanamo about how they were tortured.
The US government has a secret search engine to search through the billions of records of Americans' and other people's communications.
The agencies that use this data pretend that they didn't use it and it doesn't exist. They are legally required to minimize their retention of data about Americans, but they ignore that.
Monsanto asks people to calm down and have a civil conversation about GMOS, even as it sues to overturn the laws passed by Vermont and Maui.
Deforestation, "Development" Connected to Spread of Ebola in West Africa.
In a Country Without Formal Unions, 8,000 Chinese Teachers Strike for Higher Pay.
The [US] Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist.
Phony "scholarly journals" will accept any junk whatsoever for publication.
I occasionally receive an invitation to register for a conference in some foreign country. Often the stated topic is human trafficking. I wonder whether these events really occur, people use them to take a vacation and claim it's for a conference, or whether they only commit credit card fraud.
Putin is carrying out stiff repression of Crimean Tatars, including murder of activists.
The Tatars reject Russian rule of the Crimea but have not engaged in violence.
What global heating denial will look like in 100 years, assuming civilization still exists.
Rasmea Odeh's lawyer calls for reconsideration of the verdict that convicted her of concealing how she had been framed and tortured in Israel in 1967.
US citizens:
call
for protecting wilderness areas in Colorado from fracking.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Obama's "climate change" envoy recognizes that lots of fossil fuels have to be left in the ground.
Now if Obama would only start doing so.
Obama appears to have dismissed "Defense" secretary Hagel because Hagel wasn't suited for Obama's war plans.
Societies with little religion can be quite good to live in.
This does not prove that Atheism, by itself, will make a society good to live in. (It did not make the Soviet Union very good.) But this does show that religion isn't necessary for a society to be good to live in.
Please don't buy the book from Amazon.
How religions cause psychological harm to some (many?) believers.
Great apes imitate fellow apes when there's an advantage in it, but humans imitate other humans even for no reason.
Human see, human do.
US targeted 24 specific men in Pakistan with multiple drone bombings each. The bombings killed only 6 of them, but killed 868 other people including about 140 children.
Some fraction of the other people killed may have been Taliban soldiers, but clearly a large fraction were bystanders and relatives.
The Atlantic mackerel catch limit has been reduced 25%. Since the fish stock is at quite a low level, I think it is nuts to allow people to catch any of them. To try to fine-tune catch levels presumes more knowledge than we really have. We should do everything possible to give the fish a chance to bounce back; if they do, then we can start catching them again, with luck much more of them than now.
The multiple traumas inflicted on Americans are causing a massive breakdown.
Saudi Arabia has defined criticism of the state, and any defense of Atheism, as "terrorism".
The US took a start down that path by defining "animal rights terrorism" to include actions such as running a web site or loosing farm animals.
I can understand prosecuting that as destruction of property, but calling it "terrorism" is another example of a lying law.
Religion does lots of harm to society.
A Thai editor has been sentenced to over four years in prison for "defaming" the king.
Any law making it a crime to defame, insult or offend someone is a violation of freedom of speech.
The UK proposes to make universities censor "radical" speakers.
Initially this is to be applied to radical Islamism, but who knows when it will be extended to cover refusal to run proprietary software, support for the Green Party, or opposition to censorship.
The UK already has a vicious regime of censorship, but that's no reason to tolerate more.
Imposed exile without trial is also proposed, as well as an arbitrary ban on flying without trial.
It's not clear that breastfeeding is good for babies. Perhaps it's being raised in a middle-class home (which is where mothers are likely to do this) is what's good for babies.
Private companies are finding ways to squeeze money out of supervision of criminals on parole.
These companies function by mistreating their employees, the public, the prisoners, or some combination. Sometimes the indirection means they can't in practice be held accountable for how they treat the prisoners.
The California initiative just approved, releasing many prisoners that there is no need to keep in prison, is very good notwithstanding this problem.
The peace talks with the Taliban endanger the fragments of women's rights in Afghanistan.
I supported the invasion of Afghanistan to liberate women (and to some extent men) from the oppression of the Taliban. However, the existing Afghan government has allowed a large part of the same oppression, even in the places it effectively controls. I can't say that the small freedom Afghan women have gained justifies unending war.
Ebola Is Scary, But Antibiotic Resistance Should Scare Us More.
Australian thugs listened sneakily to a prisoner's discussion with his lawyer.
The government refuses to tell him why he was arrested and forbids newspapers to mention his name. I wonder if he has been gagged as well — I suspect so. Is any information about this available outside Australia?
If your relative is arrested, spread the word immediately so that the state can't put the cat back into the bag.
Psychological experiments reaffirm that it is possible for social structures to encourage and reward cooperation more, and selfishness less, than the ones existing in the US and UK.
Comparing the free software world with the proprietary software world demonstrates the same thing.
Present-day society has been reshaped by plutocrats to weaken society's defenses that restrained them. If we recognize them as the enemy, and defeat them, reversing the changes they made is a map for undoing the harm they have done. Simply to reverse all pertinent changes since 1980 would be a big improvement overall.
A few of the changes since 1980 may be considered improvements (for instance, equal rights for gays, most advances in medical technology, improvements in renewable energy technology, PCs before they were designed for DRM, the internet before apps, and the web before Javascript), so I would advocate aiming exactly to recreate 1980.
Amnesty's Detekt program may give a false sense of security.
In Massachusetts: oppose holding Olympic Games in Boston.
The Olympic Committee is leaning towards Boston because of Boston's record of clamping down arbitrarily on millions of people, when it forced everyone to stay indoors.
Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington DC should start organizing too.
If people with enough democracy to reject Olympic Games do so, the games will be held in dictatorial countries. At least that way they won't lead to tyranny worse than what those countries already have.
US citizens: Call on Obama to raise the pay limit for workers to get overtime pay.
Here's a list of products made by companies largely owned by the Koch Brothers, so you can choose alternatives.
The World Bank says it will "focus" future investments on renewable energy, but falls short of ceasing to invest in fossil fuels.
I am worried by the escape hatch to allow coal investments in cases of "extreme need". Billionaires can claim with a straight face that they have "extreme need" for the profits from a coal mine, and ways to convince politicians to endorse the claim.
Horrific pictures of casualties don't seem to stop war.
Israel's cabinet approved a law to
officially
make non-Jews second-class citizens and remove Arabic as an official
language.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
This seems ideally calculated to provoke more Israeli Arabs into random acts of violence, but Netanyahu calls it a "deterrent" like other acts of collective punishment.
There is no word on whether Netanyahu also plans to punish Jews collectively for acts such as firebombing Huda Hamaiel's house.
Conservationists are pressuring Australia's big banks not to invest in coal companies.
If those banks are looking for long-term return, they should try to make sure that Australia isn't knocked to its knees by global heating.
The Hong Kong government defeated democracy protesters by yielding nothing and waiting for the public to get tired of protests.
Lesson: people who get tired and stop protesting don't win.
Blanket Data Retention Does Not Come in "Good" And "Bad" Forms.
Communication and server companies have an interest in letting people think they care about privacy, but not so much in effectively doing so.
I disagree with one point: encryption is not a fraud or a sham. However, it can only protect specific limited aspects of privacy, which are not enough.
The old School of the Americas, under a new name, teaches fighting "terrorists" (whatever that means) and the "war on drugs".
It's a different harm but it's still harm. Recall that the dictatorships of South America in the 70s said that the people they disappeared were "terrorists".
As expected, the grand jury decided not to indict the killer of Michael Brown.
This was predictable; hardly ever do killer thugs face justice.
The decision led to predictable riots.
It is wrong to vent this rage by burning down private buildings that have nothing to do with the killing. At the same time, I understand that many in Ferguson feel that rioting is their last recourse after trying everything else. I hope it leads to some good.
Civil rights and justice groups called on Governor Nixon to appoint a special prosecutor, but he didn't. He could still do this, but he would rather provoke riots and repress them. He is directly and personally responsible for giving a killer thug immunity. We should not let him shrug it off.
Hundreds or perhaps thousands of Hong Kong citizens who protested for democracy have been banned from China.
Much like the US no-fly list, they don't find this out until they try to cross the border.
The EU foolishly relaxed its requirement to adopt LEDs for street lighting, inviting a giant waste of energy and money.
Beyond Ferguson: we need to stop giving carte blanche to militarized thugs.
US citizens: call on Obama to appoint some Federal Reserve governors who don't represent banksters.
US citizens: call on the Justice Department to charge JP Morgan now with the crimes that Alayne Fleischmann has witnessed.
US citizens: Call on Senator Udall to personally release the Senate's torture report while he is still a senator.
US citizens: support network neutrality again.
Pakistan's uniformed thugs say they go on raids to kill major criminals. Others say the thugs are killing whoever is convenient in order to run up the tally.
Claims of Satanic child abuse are coming back. These are based on convincing people to remember things that never happened to them.
Bluefin tuna in the Atlantic have recovered to some extent from past overfishing, so governments jumped at the chance to increase fishing quotas.
I hope eventually it will be possible to catch these tuna at a higher rate sustainably, but it is foolhardy to be hasty. The current numbers of tuna are more than in the 1950s, but they could be minuscule compared with the 1850s.
A variant of an RFID turns out to be a prime method used by US and Russian agents (and maybe others) to sabotage computers.
A UK politician has been forced to resign from some positions because his swiped credit card number was used to buy pornography depicting children. The fact that it wasn't him is, apparently, not sufficient to protect him; being falsely accused is considered reason why he must resign.
Isn't this nuts?
These events illustrate that the crusade against "child pornography" endangers everyone. This result tends to happen whenever possession or purchase of some sort of publication is illegal. We must abolish such laws because they whip up witch-hunts.
Many Syrian rebel groups are joining with PISSI, or at least making truces with PISSI, because they regard the US as an enemy for fighting PISSI.
PISSI is the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Israeli soldiers shot and
killed
a Palestinian who was trying to catch birds and went too close to
the Israeli border.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Israel has no right to kill people in Gaza for walking around in Gaza. If Israel wants a buffer zone, it should construct that buffer zone on Israel's side of the border.
Putin launched a plot to kidnap Bill Browder, after killing his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in prison.
Al-Shabaab terrorists captured a bus and murdered all the passengers that were not Muslims.
French thugs killed an anti-dam protester with a grenade, inspiring
continuing
protests.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Puncturing the fiction of a "recovery" in the UK, the number of poor people going to food banks continues to increase.
This includes people who have work but their wages don't cover food.
Japan is entering a recession, and as usual financial powers are pushing for spending cuts to make it worse, but the government is determined to stimulate the economy instead.
Britain seems to be entering another recession (although working people have not started to recover from the last one), so the plutocratic government plans more budget cuts to make sure of this.
Banksters are taking over state pension funds in order to drain them with high fees and risky investments.
UK newspapers were ordered not to report on sexual abuse by politicians, and the records of these orders appear to have been destroyed, or else the orders were fake.
Either way, it is very fishy.
Experimental subjects paid more to protect strangers from electric shocks than to protect themselves from shocks.
The article ends with a very good refutation of one of the typical fallacious cynical attacks against altruism.
The Australian government is attacking public broadcasting for not being right-wing.
The Chilean officers that tortured Alberto Bachelet and his daughter (now president) have been sentenced to prison.
Walmart workers plan strikes and protests on the day that foolish Americans typically start shopping for mandatory Christmas presents.
Since they are looking for support from the public, I suggest that people participate.
Robert Holsey is set to be executed, and the state of Georgia doesn't care that his defense team was nonfunctional because its leader was drunk.
The death penalty is wrong even if the criminal has competent defense lawyers. This case points rather at the willingness of the US legal system to insist on upholding decisions that were made laughably.
United nonviolent resistance is defeating the Mafia protection racket in Sicily.
A new study finds that allowing people in general to carry guns leads to more crime, in the US.
Occupy London protesters are returning to Parliament Square.
The Gates Foundation has insisted on free scientific publication for research it supports.
They use the term "open access"; I think that term is misguided because it tends to lead people in the direction of weaker positions than this. Fortunately the Gates Foundation overcame the weakness of the term itself, and took a strong stand.
There are so many ironies in this.
Meanwhile, France cut its research budget in order to pay publishers such as Elsevier.
Obama has authorized remaining US troops in Afghanistan to continue fighting the Taliban directly, hoping people won't notice.
Global heating means big snow loads from the "lake effect".
Whistleblowers are repeatedly subject to dishonest retaliation and false accusations by those in power whose errors or crimes have been exposed.
US phone companies are trying to push customers off the superior copper cables onto VOIP, by refusing to maintain the copper cables.
The idea of requiring the VOIP replacement to be improved before forcing the changeover is not sufficient. VOIP is inherently less reliable as well as subjecting people to digital monkeybusiness.
Algorithmic decision making is leading to many strange kinds of troubles caused by mistaken identity.
Obama proposed a bankster to be the Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, and Elizabeth Warren came out swinging against him.
Senators have introduced a carbon tax bill.
This has no chance of passing, but introducing it is at least a political step.
A movie exposes the methods of the paid global heating denialists.
US abortion doctors say the harassment and restrictions are the worst they have ever seen.
The last remaining "Angola 3" prisoner had his conviction overturned, but the state may appeal this decision to keep him in prison more years until he dies.
Regardless of the issues of his guilt and his trial, keeping anyone in solitary confinement for so long amounts to brainwashing.
Growth: The Destructive God That Can Never Be Appeased.
Six Vital Steps World Leaders Must Agree to Take to Protect Earth.
Here's what the agreement needs to do and why.
US citizens: Call for establishment of a clear and practical way
to report
abuses by US border patrol agents.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to make sure the pollinator health task
force
takes
sufficient measures to truly protect bees.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Jewish Voice for Peace mourns the Jewish and Palestinian casualties of individual violence in Israel and Palestine.
An example of how US mainstream media promote escalation of war against PISSI.
Examples of how they promote the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
When they do acknowledge the real argument against the pipeline, next they claim it's impossible to stop the extraction of tar sands oil.
"Stop resisting, you can't win" has been used against every successful resistance movement.
Are "We the People" Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?
American women are ceasing to feel ashamed of accusing men of raping them.
The idea of being ashamed of being assaulted in any fashion makes no moral sense to me. I can only understand it intellectually.
It was common to for families to despise women who were raped, along with women who had sex without authorization, treating women as possessions of the family rather than as persons. For instance, a legend about the foundation of the Roman Republic admires a woman for committing suicide after being pressured into sex. In some twisted societies, this attitude continues today and is the basis for "honor killings".
I suppose women internalized this condemnation and converted it into shame.
Everyone: sign up to boycott Amazon.
I gave this as my additional statement.
There are additional reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon. It keeps a database of what people buy, and does not accept cash. Amazon ebooks are a surveillance system and Amazon can erase them remotely: see stallman.org/ebooks.pdf.
See also stallman.org/amazon.html for more bad things Amazon does.
Thus, I agree to boycott Amazon, but it won't change anything, since I'd never consider buying from an organization that treated me that way, even if it didn't abuse its workers and evade taxes.
Always-listening, always-watching computers are supposedly meant to serve people, but when they're full of nonfree software they are actually tools to subjugate people.
Many car companies now make cars that track where they go. The companies are trying to make this acceptable with weak promises about what they will do with the data.
Those policies are irrelevant because real protection for the driver's privacy consists of not tracking the car in the first place. If you own a car, make sure its tracking hardware is deactivated.
FISA Judge To Yahoo (in 2008): If US Citizens Don't Know They're Being Surveilled, There's No Harm.
Two men in Ohio spent 40 years in prison because thugs bullied a teenager into testifying against them.
At least they weren't executed.
GCHQ Whistleblower Calls for Public Interest Defence.
It's a rare moment in the US when black victims get justice for the violence of whites.
When Police Spy on Journalists Like Me, Freedom Is at Risk.
A Haitian opposition march was
attacked
by supporters of the president, who was imposed by the US through
a
twisted
election.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Walmart pretends to be trying to protect the environment, but it gets its electricity from coal.
Utah's legislature proposes to shut off the water supply to the NSA's data center.
A subtle point in the TPP would make transitory copies (such as loading a program into memory to run it) copyright infringement.
Iran has worked around western sanctions at the cost of destroying its environment. The result is dust storms.
You might think that humanity won't wake up to the dangers of global heating and extinction until it sees catastrophes, but the catastrophes are already happening, and the only awakening is by businesses that want to abolish environmental regulations.
Many US cities arrest blacks far more often than whites. Ferguson is not the worst.
The UK government is losing billions of pounds by not keeping track of tax give-aways to businesses.
This while they nickle-and-dime the unemployed and disabled into homelessness.
Aarhus has an interesting personal active approach towards people returning from fighting in Syria, which seems to have been effective at preventing more youths from going there.
Meanwhile, the UK plans a system of internal exile for such people.
U.S. Firms Accused of Enabling Surveillance in Despotic Central Asian Regimes.
UK journalists are suing the thugs for spying systematically on them as they covered protests.
Thugs have long regarded democracy as their enemy; what is new is to have proof.
New Report Finds Little Oversight of Surveillance, Intelligence Agencies in Latin America.
US citizens: call on Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline.
Menlo Park's license plate cameras recorded car license plates 263,000 times in a few months. Just one of them helped solve a crime. All the rest were massive general surveillance.
The question of cost is a side issue; what's wrong here is injustice.
Alayne Fleischmann has gone public about how JP Morgan and Attorney General Holder conspired to cover up JP Morgan's crimes. She offered her testimony several times, but they worked together to stop this from coming out in court and to avoid really punishing the bank.
It should be noted that "securitization" of home mortgages is a harmful practice even if it is not done fraudulently. Your mortgage should be owned by a local bank that has the power to adjust it if you fall behind, and the incentive not to give you a mortgage without confidence you can pay it. Thus, I think that the practice should be stopped entirely.
Rich countries have not pledged enough to do the job of helping poor countries cope with the effects of global heating.
But it is a hopeless job, because the costs will go up each decade. If we don't stop the heating, sooner or later the poor countries will be overwhelmed, followed by the rich countries.
Thugs in Brisbane, where the G20 meeting was held, brutally attacked a man with no legs. They will probably claim he was trying to run away.
Of course, the thugs accused the man of various crimes. I am skeptical.
Harvard students have sued Harvard for mismanaging the school's endowment by investing it in fossil fuel companies.
These companies' value is inflated by the carbon bubble, which has to pop some day.
The American Nursing Association has given its support to a Guantanamo nurse who faces a military trial for refusing to participate in force feeding.
North Dakota's public bank is more profitable than US private banks.
The oil boom in North Dakota is not an occasion for humanity to rejoice, given the grave danger it contributes to. But that is orthogonal to the merits of a public bank.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation helped develop a treatment, then sold its share of the patent rights to a company that is charging almost $400,000 per year. Most of the patients can't afford that.
Other countries' national health systems will negotiate a price that will probably be far lower. US law, paid for by Big Pharma, does not allow this.
A proposal: instead of network neutrality regulation, create a competitive market for ISPs.
Causing competition between ISPs is a good idea, but I would not trust that to replace network neutrality. Four competitors are too few to make a truly competitive market. And even companies in a competitive market impose nasty terms on customers. Consider the hotel that "fined" customers for bad reviews. It competes with lots of other hotels but that didn't stop it from pulling a fast one.
Competition would pressure ISPs to improve their performance, price, and customer service. Those are things that customers notice all the time. We need common carrier regulation also for all the things that are less visible.
US officials refused to explain to the Committee Against Torture why nobody was prosecuted for US government torture.
Bankers, after being led to think about their work, become more likely to cheat than people in general.
In other words, it's not that bankers are inherently dishonest but rather than working as a banker encourages dishonesty.
The Swedish appeals court did not cancel the arrest warrant against Julian Assange, but pressured the prosecutors to accept his invitation to question him in the Ecuadorian embassy.
If the Swedish prosecutors were really concerned about the sexual allegations against Assange, they would interview him in the embassy so as to advance that case and either charge him or not. Their refusal to do this demonstrates that they are using the allegations as a pretext to send Assange to the US.
Women are speaking about their abortion experiences to counter the harassment against women who have abortions.
If anything, it's not aborting a pregnancy that raises questions as the human population continues to grow.
Thugs attacked protesters in Ferguson already, after creating pretexts, although the decision on prosecuting Michael Brown's killer has not been announced.
A UN agency called for prosecution of North Korea's ruler in the International Criminal Court. North Korea responded by threatening to throw a tantrum.
This UN move was entirely justified, but I wish it would go after the even more flagrant human rights violators such as Bush II.
Australia's government has sunk to shameless self-contradiction.
Frackers polluted clean aquifers in California with fracking waste water.
The weakened USA Freedom Act is so weak that Obama plans to revive it.
US citizens:
sign
this petition to amend the constitution to stop the rich from
using their money to dominate US elections.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Republicans used Twitter to disguise their violation of US election laws.
Journalist Sarah Lacy writes about how an Uber executive said he would punish her critical journalism by using lies to smear her family life. It was the culmination of years of contempt for the company's drivers and passengers.
By the way, I don't see anything wrong in offering taxi rides driven by attractive models of either sex. Since I believe sexual services should be legal, I would not object if they offered to fly you while driving you. However, this need not and should not be accompanied by Uber-style contempt towards women (and men).
UK spending cuts have reduced tax income and caused a fresh budget deficit. The insane remedy is to cut spending more, and never mind that it has failed in its ostensible goal, because the real goal is to reduce workers to desperation.
In teenage girls' fascination for the Hunger Games, they show a form of political maturity.
The world of The Hunger Games is a projection of today's starve-the-poor plutocracy. It's much worse than today's USA, but the America of 2100 might be even worse. If globalized manufacturing collapses, we might be left with nothing but low-tech.
Refuting the claim that unemployment insurance causes unemployment: a study shows it is mostly false.
Note that the claim really argues for lower wages; but US wages for many jobs are not enough to live on, so they must be raised.
The US has many other policies that discourage employment, which we should change. For instance, charging employers for social security and medical care is a mistake. That money should be obtained by taxing rich people and businesses' income, independent of how much they pay to workers.
The Illinois legislature is considering raising the minimum wage but banning cities from adopting a higher minimum.
This measure would be harmful to workers. The statewide raise will probably not be enough, and living in Chicago is even more expensive.
A hotel charged guests extra, on their credit card, for posting a bad review of the hotel. The hotel claimed it was entitled to charge them because it had put that in the contract guests are made to sign. I suppose most guests don't read the contract; but if they did, having arrived and with perhaps nowhere else to stay, refusing to sign would not be much of an option.
Hotels should not be allowed to write their own conditions arbitrarily to impose on guests.
Many big US companies pay their CEOs more than they pay in taxes.
When Mega Corporations Get Mega Tax Breaks, We All Pay.
Financialization of rental residences means that people live in financial instruments.
Under Putin, the former KGB now runs Russia and has returned to actively harassing and intimidating journalists and dissidents.
By contrast the US style of massive surveillance is done quietly, so people don't realize how much they are being tracked. Digital technology means that both the US and Russia have a higher level of general surveillance today than was found in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could not tell where everyone went all the time; its agents could follow only a limited set of people.
Although the NSA and FBI don't entirely run the US, the level of oversight by Congress and courts is very weak.
US citizens: call on the Secretary of the Interior to cancel a wolf-killing competition.
The defeat of the USA Freedom Act could, ironically, backfire and abolish part of the PAT RIOT act, reducing mass surveillance even more.
However, we need more than just to abolish the PAT RIOT Act, since that pertains only to certain methods of massive surveillance.
http://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html.
Prisons can help prisoners escape from gangs. Like other forms of rehabilitation, it costs money and requires not adopting the goal of being as tough as possible.
US citizens: call on the US not to allow Shell (or anyone) to drill for oil in the Chukchi sea. A spill would turn it into the Upchukchi sea.
The USA Freedom Act, already weakened so much that even Obama supported it, was defeated in the Senate.
This means our next battle will be against renewal of the PAT RIOT act.
Due to the shortage of ambulances, people who go to the MSF treatment center in Sierra Leone because they might have Ebola are sure to catch it by the time they arrive.
Secret disenfranchisement lists denied Democrats 4% of the vote, and enabled the Republicans to steal control of the senate.
Netanyahu plans a "harsh" retaliation to the murder of 5 Israelis.
This harshness will be on top of the harshness of decades of Israeli occupation. The killers were retaliating for a much larger set of murders and other crimes committed against Palestinians by Israelis, together with persistent oppression.
Retaliating against them with additional crimes (house demolitions, which are illegal collective punishment) and additional persistent oppression is more likely to inspire more Palestinians to retaliate in their turn.
I suppose Netanyahu knows that.
Trying to silence individuals considered misogynist has become a substitute for campaigning to change sexist institutions.
The US plans to allow fracking in the George Washington National Forest.
Solitary confinement regularly drives prisoners mad, but the US government continues to do it and to misrepresent it.
Ten illegal attacks on protesters that thugs in Ferguson might plausibly do.
2.5 million children in the US were homeless at some time in 2013. That's up 8% from the previous year.
Traffickers now recruit or even force teenagers to run boats full of people from Africa to Europe.
Most of the people using Britain's food banks went there directly because of government policies of harshness to the poor.
CO2 emissions must be cut to zero by 2070 to avoid disaster.
How much it will cost to achieve this depends on how actively we cut emissions before 2030.
The lack of toilets in rural India goes with gender discrimination that makes it even worse for women.
Energy drinks are dangerous for children.
A US coal company is accused of falsifying its environmental reports.
The slowly-closing ozone hole has altered climate and ecosystems in the southern hemisphere.
A male TV presenter wore the same suit every day for a year, just to prove that nobody cared in the slightest about his clothing style, unlike the way viewers treated his female counterpart.
Students in the UK marched on Parliament to make university gratis again.
The Greenpeace boat that was captured by Russia has now been captured by Spain.
Human Rights Watch reports on political prisoners in Uzbekistan, which relates to the forced labor of picking cotton.
A survey of clod computing practices.
Mainstream media continue to parrot the Obama regime's claims that the casualties of drone attacks are mainly "militants".
Astroturf and intimidation are the proposed methods to gain approval of an "backup" alternative to the Keystone XL pipeline.
A Spanish navy boat rammed a Greenpeace boat that was interfering with oil drilling.
In Nairobi a mob of men stripped a woman because they disapproved of her miniskirt. This led to a protest in favor of women's right to dress as they wish.
The idea that revealing clothes are "not African" is ludicrous given that women in many parts of Africa did not cover their breasts until Europeans taught them prudery.
Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon proceeds over the murder of land defenders.
A Briton was convicted of possessing a copy of a book about how to make a bomb, after a secret trial.
This case illustrates the principle that possession of a copy of a publication must never be illegal. Such prohibitions are outright tyranny, and so is a secret trial.
The governor of Missouri declared an emergency, preemptively attacking expected protests over the expected decision not to prosecute the thug that killed Michael Brown.
The governor was asked to appoint a special prosecutor but refused. Looks like he's on the side of the thugs.
The Australian government nullified environmental planning requirements for a giant coal mine by saying the environmental impact study could be done after the mine is running.
Campaigns to silence people whose views we dislike endanger a fundamental freedom.
This includes even PISSI, the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
US citizens: call on the EPA, in reducing power plant CO2 emissions, not to encourage fracking.
Everyone: Send
a message of support for Ghoncheh Ghavami.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support a proposed EPA regulation to reduce ozone pollution.
A teacher's resignation letter: "my profession no longer exists" due to bizarre school reforms.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's permitting system for pipelines and other gas and oil facilities is designed to let companies have what they want.
Germany's law punished WiFi network owners for what people download through those networks. The result is — very few publicly usable WiFi networks.
This law is unjust because (1) it is a system of collective responsibility, conscripting anyone that has a WiFi net as an enforcer, and (2) the War on Sharing is unjust in its entirety.
It would be ironic if a mere economic consideration leads to elimination of this unjust law. In the mean time, Germans should operate WiFi networks without passwords, to refuse conscripting as enforcers in the War on Sharing.
Even the US Supreme Court cites junk science to interfere with abortion.
Elizabeth Warren: Corporations Are Taking Over the Courts with the GOP's Help.
I suspect they got help from some "Democrats", too.
Is there room on Earth for humans and wildlife?
Sometimes it is justified to evict humans from an area so that other species can survive. After all, we humans occupy so much land on Earth, and we tend to take all the land there is.
Mexico is revealed as corrupt from top to bottom.
Peña Nieto's election was corrupt too.
But it was the reaction to the killing of protesting students that ended society's willingness to tolerate it.
A refugee who escaped from North Korea sends balloons over the border to teach the people of North Korea the idea of freedom.
The CIA believes arming Syrian rebels to fight PISSI is hopeless, and Obama knows this.
So who does he think he is fooling when he proposes to do more of this?
The Rosebud Sioux tribe says that building the Keystone XL pipeline would be an act of war.
Yes, it would be — against the whole world, not just them.
Accusing Putin of waging an "information war" by supporting anyone that criticizes the west.
There is some truth in this; however, western governments deserve a lot of criticism, Putin or no Putin. Indeed, they do a substantial amount of the same things.
The polar bear population on Alaska's north coast has fallen 40% in 10 years. Few young bears have survived.
Rodney Reed is about to be executed for the murder of his lover, but she may really have been killed by her jealous thug fiance. The investigation did not consider the thug seriously as a suspect.
The St Louis thug chief accused all the protesters, journalists and bystanders teargassed and attacked in Ferguson of being "criminals".
Nurse Kaci Hickox condemns the politicians that want to impose unnecessary and harmful quarantines in order to look like they are protecting us.
Rich people think that the idea that geoengineering could make global heating go away is likely to encourage them to go on burning fossil fuels.
The fallacy is that geoengineering is just an idea, not a real solution.
Australia gave business representatives accreditation to the G20 but denied it to union representatives.
Documents show US drug companies wined and dined doctors to get them to prescribe narcotic painkillers more.
These painkillers certainly have their place. It has been a long time since I took one, but they are far better than pain. However, these sales tactics (for any drug) corrupt medicine and must not be tolerated.
In Venezuela, some people in the opposition are being prosecuted for expressing happiness about an assassination.
I managed to see some of Inés González Árraga's tweets; they were quite hostile to the government, but did not make threats or call for violence.
German Spy Agency Wants To Buy Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Order To Undermine SSL Security.
US citizens: urge your senators to vote for the USA Freedom Act
I suggest you add, as I did, that this is not enough to restore our privacy.
The IRA protected rapists within its ranks much like the Catholic Church and some sports teams.
Evidence that the gender pay gap can't be explained by anything other than bias.
US citizens:
oppose
rigging the electoral college.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The thug that killed Michael Brown arrested a man for making a video of him, then lied about it (standard thug procedure).
US citizens:
call
on Obama to cancel spending a trillion dollars for replacing the
US nuclear arsenal.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The FBI used surveillance to try to pressure Martin Luther King Jr. commit suicide.
We know that the NSA now does surveillance to get data for blackmail.
The coal company government of Australia fought to the bitter end inside the G20 meeting to undermine actions against global heating.
A series of bank scandals, leading to large fines, are the predictable result of deregulation.
I suspect that the fines are not big enough to motivate the bank executives and shareholders to try to prevent more corruption. In the US, they aren't. The result of inadequate fines is that the executives would like another corrupt scheme to make a lot of money followed by an inadequate fine.
Complicated and changing banking systems will tend to offer new opportunities for corruption. Let's have a simple banking system that changes little.
Africans who recover from Ebola face ostracism by ignorant neighbors who don't understand they are not contagious any more.
Environmental groups are suing to deny Shell permission to harass, capture and kill walruses in drilling operations in the Chukchi sea.
Melting sea ice due to global heating is making it hard for walruses to find food. To have a chance to survive, they need what protection we can give them.
Palestinian rights activist Rasmea Odeh faces imprisonment and loss of US citizenship because she didn't mention a criminal conviction in Israel, which she says was a false confession that was beaten out of her.
I see the point that she ought to have mentioned the conviction and said it was false, rather than hiding the issue. Strictly speaking, what she did was wrong. However, it's also clear that she had reason to fear a second injustice would result from the first.
Since all she did was break a rule, not hurt anyone, the court ought to seek to remake the decision properly, as it should have been made given all the pertinent information.
Revealed: How [UK] Coalition Has Helped Rich by Hitting Poor.
US privacy and search law doesn't know how to cope with the indiscriminate surveillance of phony cell phone towers.
Surgeon Mads Gilbert, who treated the wounded of Gaza while Israel attacked, says he will not let Israel stop him from returning to Gaza.
Texas Oil Regulator Says It Will Not Honor Town's Vote To Ban Fracking.
It's Dangerous to Be So Cosy with the Gulf's Autocrats.
On the other hand, the forces opposing them may turn out to be PISSI.
A US woman who had a heart attack faces bankruptcy because
the
ambulance took her to "the wrong hospital" where her insurance did
not cover the costs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Medical costs are a common cause of bankruptcy in the US, because the medical system is totally broken. We need a national health system.
Big US cable companies spent 8 million dollars to buy support in the last election.
The "Justice" department
admitted
that it misled an appeals court regarding secrecy of "national
security" letter surveillance orders — once the EFF caught the
fib.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Hong Kong protest leaders wanted to go to Beijing to try to talk with Chinese officials, but they were denied entry.
Thug departments make lists of what kinds of cars to seize from hapless members of the public.
Some states have tried to restrict civil forfeiture, or stop thug departments from keeping what they confiscate. The US government works with thug departments to circumvent those restrictions.
Forfeiture is punishment without trial. Many of the victims are never even charged. It ought to be considered unconstitutional.
Israel's "Minister of Home Security" publicly said thugs should to carry out summary executions.
Amazon and Hachette have resolved their dispute about ebook prices. This will please those who just want to "get a book right now" and don't care about anything deeper.
Using the Amazon Swindle makes you stop lending books to your friends — which means you're not their friend any more.
Wall Street likes Clinton better than it likes Obama!
Apparently he hasn't been a total pushover, and they think Clinton will be.
So many companies have dropped ALEC that it has lost 1/5 of its funding and is running at a deficit.
That means we should campaign even harder to convince more companies to drop ALEC.
US citizens: call on Obama to order federal contractors to pay workers a living wage.
Everyone: tell Walmart to pay workers $15 an hour.
Everyone: call on Luxembourg to stop facilitating tax-dodging.
US citizens: call on the FCC to instate true network neutrality.
Everyone: tell eBay to quit ALEC.
US citizens: call on Obama to block Keystone XL and apply global heating considerations to all federal projects.
The US government carries fake cell phone towers in planes to identify people on the ground.
In India, women are pressured or forced into sterilization, sometimes because they are poor or low-caste.
This practice is an injustice, but incentives for sterilization are not the same as compulsion. If people are so poor that they desperately jump at any incentives, that doesn't mean the incentives are wrong, but rather that society is too unequal.
A law such as China's one-child-per-family law would be fair and necessary in India.
Plans for recording all Australians' phone contacts are meeting opposition in parliament.
This is wise, given how the Obama regime used phone records to find a whistleblower in the US.
Will the UK government investigate the thugs' attack on striking miners, which was followed (as usual) by trying to frame them?
US citizens: call on Obama
to respect
journalists and journalism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
British spying on journalists and lawyers directly threatens Americans and people in other countries.
Conservatives have political control of the English-speaking world because the traditional left parties have lost the spirit to disagree with their assumptions.
In the US, rigging elections through voter-suppression and gerrymandering help them do it.
The morale problem with the US ICBM corps is not just a matter of details. It comes from the nature of its activity.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject plans to encourage export of fracked gas.
Journalist Rafael Marques de Morais: 'No politician, however strong, will stop me doing my job'. But they sure try hard.
Robot watchmen are in their infancy, but if they work well in 10 years, they could put a million Americans out of work.
They carry cameras that can be viewed over the internet. We know from experience that many users will not alter the default password, so anyone will be able to watch through their cameras. Quite a joke that will be on whoever uses them.
The latest bad idea: farm out servers to lots of buildings so that their waste heat can provide heat for the buildings.
That would be efficient in winter; not so much in summer. But what about the privacy implications?
The idea of "the cloud" means "Don't ask who stores your data (and can look at it); don't concern yourself with who does your computing (and controls how it is done). Put your blind faith in you-don't-know-who."
With this scheme, you put your faith in an unidentified homeowner as well as several unidentified companies.
Here's a better idea. Get your own servers to heat your water, and store your own data in them.
Berkeley California disregarded the drink companies' ad campaign and approved a tax on soda.
The tax should apply to all drinks that contain sugar. For instance, fruit juice as sold often includes a lot of added sugar; so it is not good for you. I have stopped drinking all drinks that have sugar, with occasional exceptions when there is something special available.
Australian thugs did not arrest protesters for carrying banners and wearing Anonymous masks, but did arrest someone for having a gas mask.
A gas mask is not an offensive weapon, so prohibiting them is inexcusable.
The US admitted torture practices to the UN. Next step: correct them, and hold the guilty accountable.
Dubya is still lying about Iraq.
US citizens: call for a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, which endanger the bees that pollinate crops and wildlife.
The executives of the company that made thalidomide used political pull to escape punishment.
Major UK ISPs have added political censorship to their sexual censorship.
The American Psychological Association will investigate how in 2002 it revised its code of ethics to permit its members to participate in Bush regime torture.
Bravo for James Risen, who is also standing up to a threat of imprisonment by the Obama regime for protecting his sources.
The US-China climate pledge will be harder for China than for the US.
Too bad that it isn't enough to avoid disaster. Both countries must do more.
To stop Britons from going to fight for PISSI, the UK government proposes punishment without trial, imposed arbitrarily by border control agents and airlines.
Boko Haram captured Chibok, the town where it kidnaped around 300 schoolgirls earlier this year.
US citizens: Thank Obama for making a climate deal with Russia.
US citizens: support Wall Street pay reform to
end
incentives for bad investments.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on Congress to resist bills to promote fracking or undermine food
safety.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Where is the real excitement about Ms Clinton as president?
Relating devastation in the Philippines to corrupt debt, and the Ebola epidemic to economic colonization.
Walmart workers are holding a sit-down strike to protest repression against attempts to organize.
I am sad that this links to ustream.com, which can't be viewed without nonfree software. To develop a free front end for ustream would be a very useful project. In the mean time, please don't ustream, and please don't stream with ustream.
The mere presence of a cell phone tends to make discussions about meaningful issues shallow.
On the other hand, if you do have a meaningful discussion about an important issue, such as how to resist plutocracy, carrying cell phones will pre-alert the NSA about who you are talking with.
Using text messages for a dispute is a recipe for
escalating
them. (We old-timers discovered this fact about email back around
1980.)
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
A heatwave in Brisbane will give G20 delegates a hint of what the fossil fuel companies want to do to the world.
"Improved" lampposts do various kinds of spying.
Fining the unemployed in the UK is not pushing them to get jobs, only making them dependent on food banks.
Raising the minimum wage, and abolishing zero-hours contracts, would circulate more money among the poor and thus create more jobs. That would get these people working.
Arnold Abbott says he will continue feeding homeless people in Fort Lauderdale "as long as there is breath in my body."
France ordered Google to delete an article from search results world-wide.
This reminds us of the danger of services provided by multinational companies that operate in countries that limit what the companies can do. In other cases it goes beyond this fairly mild requirement (which applies only to searches for a person's name).
Australians buried their heads in the sand to show
what
Abbott is doing regarding global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Documents show Shell disregarded safety in Nigeria and then tried to cover up the damage.
Australia has banned a peace activist from the G20 event area, and refused to say why.
Perhaps because he would do some sort of nonviolent protest.
EU bureaucrats have abolished the position of Chief Scientific Adviser.
1/3 of natural "world heritage" sites face environmental threats.
"Democratic" senator Landrieu is trying to win a runoff election by pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline.
Elizabeth Warren states what the US government's agenda should be, and what it should not be.
A teacher in the UK is being prosecuted for having sex with a 16-year-old student, after he boasted of it to his friends.
He now says he feels "disgusted", but I think that is only what someone told him to say, or convinced him to feel.
Every secondary school should aim for all of its graduates to be fully capable in sexuality; none should be excluded from participation in sex due to lack of proper experience. Therefore, the school should have several sex teachers, adults with whom students can learn to be comfortable with sex and confident in pleasing their lovers. They would also learn good habits for avoidance of disease and pregnancy.
US citizens:
tell
your senators to vote against the Keystone XL pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: oppose "Republibama" government.
This page has been found to work with LibreJS enabled.
Artists protesting against surveillance still naively presume that it is possible to flood the NSA with so much data that it will not provide effective surveillance.
That would have been true 20 years ago. Nowadays the NSA can easily have computers find the interesting bits and discard the rest.
The UK government now demands that companies illegally spy on their customers.
Fascists and neo-Nazis are a significant force in Ukraine; it's not just a Putin fantasy.
On the good that unions do, and the bad that they don't do.
Peabody Energy (operator of the world's biggest coal mine) ran the "energy forum" at the corrupt G20 meeting. It took outside protesters to bring in even the slightest mention of global heating.
Uzbekistan Students Stage Rare Protest Against Forced Labour in Cotton Fields.
The US government investigation of CIA torture seems to have been a whitewash; many victims were never even interviewed.
The Neocon Plan for War and More War.
Where Obama's potential successors stand on global heating.
350.org comments on Obama's carbon deal with China.
The Islamist rebels in the Sinai have joined PISSI.
US employers are denying workers their rights by contracts that impose arbitration.
NATO says Russian tanks are invading Ukraine. Russia denies this, but that denial is worthless. Unfortunately, we can't assume NATO is telling the truth either. If it is true, they should appear in fighting soon enough.
Unidentified drone aircraft are flying around the US and often come close to airliners.
Sooner or later there will be a collision.
A Paraguayan writer faces imprisonment for supposed plagiarism.
Plagiarism is a form of dishonesty, so it is generally wrong; but except in cases where it has been the basis for fraud, it should not be a crime.
The US secretly pays compensation to the families of civilians killed by US drone attacks in Yemen.
Paying compensation for killings is considered appropriate in Yemen, so the US should do this openly and win respect. What is wrong is the refusal to admit that US attacks kill civilians.
Shi'ite militias in Iraq are applying PISSI's bloody practices towards Sunnis they conquer.
The consequence is that Sunnis must support PISSI or be massacred. This is the best news that PISSI could have hoped for.
Obama says that torture is banned for US personnel everywhere in the world.
The EU Needs to Crack Down on the Real Scroungers — Tax Avoiders.
The US-China deal about curbing greenhouse gas emissions is a milestone, but not enough to avoid disaster.
To do this, and increase energy provision as planned, China will have to develop enough renewable energy to power the whole US.
Even though the effort will be heroic, if it isn't enough to prevent disaster, China must do more (and so must the US, Europe, Australia, India, etc).
Republican denialists say they will sabotage the deal.
A movement for antiprivatization attempts to undo what was corruption in the first place.
I think that corrupt privatizations should be cancelled, pure and simple, so that the privatizers can't profit from it.
Thugs in Brazil kill six people per day.
Why Welfare Is Not About Them And Us.
If you want to buy that book, please support a local bookstore, and above all don't get it from Amazon.
Global heating will make ocean "dead zones" bigger in several ways.
Once human civilization crashes, however, we will stop dumping lots of fertilizer into the ocean. At that point, the dead zones may cease.
Fruit drinks for children are full of sugar.
I generally drink water or unsweetened tea. At least my beverages don't make me fat.
"Forfeiture", i.e. legalized robbery by thugs, is going strong in the US.
Forfeiture is an injustice because it is punishment without trial. Indeed, many of the victims are never charged with any crime.
Obama called for real network neutrality.
Hong Kong is planning violence against the student protesters.
The UK is apparently investigating an anti-blacklisting group and its activists because they threaten to show how the state colluded in blacklisting workers.
Putin is pouring money into the Crimea to win the support of some; others face unemployment or confiscation. Those who disagree with the annexation of the Crimea face imprisonment.
The UK government spied on MPs' confidential phone calls with prisoners.
The UN will try to hold US officials accountable for US torture practices.
In the UK, obesity rates are linked to the number of of fast-food outlets in a neighborhood, and both tend to be high where poor people live.
This does not demonstrate what is the cause and what are its effects. For instance, it may be that poor people eat badly because they feel stressed, or that eating better requires time, money, kitchen equipment or access to broader range of ingredients, which they don't have.
Through sleight of hand, Australia's plutocratic government has eliminated the goal that economic growth should be fair.
G20 thugs will arrest protesters for wearing masks even though a judge says they can't.
Detroit's bankruptcy plan demands the highest sacrifice from workers and residents. Rich creditors had to do much less.
It is another example of the general practice of crushing the non-rich. When they become desperate and act accordingly, the rich can demonize them as "scroungers" so as to justify crushing them further.
Books that have been banned in the Guantanamo prison.
An outbreak of illness in an Indian sterilization clinic focused attention on India's gratis sterilization program.
India's population is still growing, which hampers efforts to reduce poverty and contributes to future global heating. Thus, sterilisation programs are extremely important — but the job should be done with proper sanitation and technique.
US citizens: Thank Obama for calling for real network neutrality.
Australian thugs confiscated protesters' projectors that were meant to display images on walls at the G20 event.
If they say it was because they suspected these projectors were weapons, why don't they put the projectors back now that they know they are projectors? Obviously, this is just an excuse to silence protest, on behalf a government set on killing millions of people.
G20 countries are spending 88 billion dollars a year to find more fossil fuel reserves.
This is a total waste, since we already know of 5 times as much reserves as we can burn without causing global disaster.
In Vienna, a model shows what could have been built for the money spent to bail out a big bank.
I think bank bailouts should be done in return for equity in the bank. For big bailouts, the previous owners should surrender all their equity.
Since the US does not fund good solutions to social problems, it dumps those affected into prisons to make them disappear for a while.
Afterwards they typically return worse than before.
Israel is planning to change election rules to keep the Arab political parties from being represented in Parliament. As in the case of US Republicans, the aim is to be able to claim to have a democracy while not really having one.
I disagree with Ms Zoabi on one point: kidnaping (or killing) civilians for a political purposes is indeed terrorism. The forces of repression continually try to stretch that word to apply it to whatever displeases them, but it does have a valid meaning and that act fits it.
Which is not to say that that act justified Israel's repressive response which was apparently designed to provoke Hamas into giving an excuse to attack Gaza.
Anyway, Ms Zoabi's opinions are no excuse for legal discrimination. And prosecuting anyone for insulting thugs (or anyone else) is obvious injustice.
Stop Investing in Colombian Blood: Land Activists Appeal to the UK.
The UK has dropped its US-subservient objections to allowing Yunus Rahmatullah to sue over his torture.
Over a third of the species of freshwater fish are threatened.
The Italian scientists sentenced to prison for saying it was unlikely an earthquake would occur in L'Aquila have been exonerated on appeal.
What sorts of suffering global heating will cause in 30 or 40 years: it includes wars.
It is so warm in much of Alaska that bears have not hibernated.
The president of Mexico appears to have a corrupt relationship with a Chinese construction company.
Plutocratic control of American elections has been measured by a survey finding that 2/3 of Americans want to raise taxes on the rich, while hardly anyone in Congress proposes that.
A rich Tory MP bought some of the last low-rent apartments in London so as to quadruple the rent and make 93 families homeless.
That's plutocracy for you. Perhaps every plutocrat should be sentenced to 6 months' homelessness to see what it is like.
A study predicts 1/3 of the jobs in the UK will be eliminated during the next 20 years.
Either the unemployed must get decent support or they will be in penury.
US citizens: call
for protection
of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your senators
and call
on them to fill all the empty judicial slots.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
I suggest mentioning that a few of Obama's nominees are famously right-wing "compromises" with the Republicans; they should not be confirmed now.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The risks of global heating include irreversible consequences — problems that could not be corrected. The way to manage the risk is to reduce CO2 emissions.
US citizens: call on Obama to boost solar energy.
Obama took a stand in favor of full and true internet neutrality.
It is too bad he appointed an FCC commissioner who's against that. I can't believe he couldn't guess that someone from the ISPs would be against it.
Asylum-Seeker Conditions Inhuman And Unlawful, UN Committee Tells Australia.
Now that some of the murdered students corpse's have been identified by DNA, protests in Mexico have increased, so thugs are trying to discredit them by false-flag violence.
The Billion Dollar a Month Club: A Runaway Transfer of Wealth to the Super-Rich.
Median wealth has dropped by 43 percent since 2007.
US attacks against PISSI in Syria turned out to help Assad.
Alas, that is probably inevitable since PISSI and Assad are enemies and PISSI is worse than Assad. It is not obvious how to try to support the weak non-Islamist anti-Assad rebels in any meaningful way.
Several Palestinians have killed Israelis in the street using cars or knives. It is not exactly suicide, but some of them have been killed. The prospect of death or imprisonment has ceased to deter Palestinians from getting revenge for the occupation.
Killing civilians who are doing nothing wrong is not justified, and the responsibility falls on Netanyahu as well as the Palestinians who actually do it.
Netanyahu threatens more collective punishment against Arabs in general — just the thing to inspire this violence to grow.
I suppose Netanyahu finds this violence a convenient distraction to enable him to continue stealing land and water.
The world's largest coal mine is an impressive feat of technology. Peabody wants to make it even bigger. Too bad it is going to destroy civilization.
Peabody has done other nasty things before.
The UK government, ever eager to boost fossil fuels, proposed to distribute more of the income from fracking to everyone in the north of England.
It would be an appropriate thing to do, if we consider only the short term.
Australia's efforts to prevent renewable energy have been quite effective: investment has dropped over 70% since a year ago.
Four economic factors are mainly responsible for falling wages.
Technology is one of them, and society has no obligation to allow businesses to use any and all kinds of automation to replace workers.
GCHQ has gone on the offensive for total surveillance of everyone. Of course, this is to "protect" us from lesser dangers such as terrorists.
How Voter Suppression Helped Produce the Lowest Turnout in Decades.
Ethiopia
is repressing
dissidents and suspected dissidents among the Oromo ethnic
group. It goes as far as torture and death.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Even worse than remote car-shutdown devices, now there are remote lock-out devices for apartments.
Both should be forbidden by law, because they give lenders too much power over renters.
Poland and its neighbors demand to keep burning fossil fuel past the end of this century.
Poland might be able to mine and burn some coal despite global disaster, but it won't get any oil once global trade has broken down.
"Smart TVs" are the 1984 telescreen, watching you all the time.
A number of women are appearing topless in public or in photos to puncture the taboo against showing breasts.
I think it will be good to get rid of the taboo for future generations.
The tedium of maintaining ICBMs and being ready to launch them has produced horribly low morale, which invites mistakes that could cause disaster, and corruption.
China's effort to reduce air pollution in Beijing have failed, so as a last resort it has blocked access to US embassy pollution measurements.
In countries where Starbucks does business: call on Starbucks to stop funding the lawsuit against Vermont's GMO labeling law.
How Surveillance Turns Ordinary People Into Terrorism Suspects.
Facebook is pushing publishers to publish through Facebook.
This could make them inaccessible to us non-useds of Facebook, or could surveil us as we access their publications.
People will have to push back against in an organized way.
The US is pumping lots of oil to decrease the price.
While the government may see this as a way to hurt Iran and Russia, its principal effect is to hurt the whole world by discouraging the move to renewable energy.
Hindus have petitioned to place a statue of Hanuman on the Oklahoma capitol building.
If Christians have that right, Hindus do too.
Senator Udall: while you're still in office, publish the Senate's torture report!
How Republicans use gerrymandering to control the House of Representatives by misrepresenting voters.
Roca Labs has actually sued customers that complained about its work.
Documents explicitly give UK spies permission to snoop on privileged conversations between lawyers and their clients.
Morocco is preventing the Moroccan Human Rights Association from holding meetings.
Due to global heating, covering the alps with snow requires artificial help.
90% of Switzerland's glaciers will disappear by the end of this century, and it won't stop there. This does much bigger harm than merely interfering with winter sports.
Argentina is trying to prosecute crimes committed by Franco's dictatorship in Spain.
Bravo, Argentina, but please don't stop there — go after Dubya and his henchmen too.
A genetically modified potato may be introduced into production.
Genetically modified foods are not necessarily harmful, there is a risk that any given type will harm some people who eat them, or harm wildlife, or that its production (if different) will harm wildlife. These potatoes may be ok, but that doesn't mean that herbicide-resistant corn is ok.
In addition, the patents attack farmers' rights.
US citizens: tell the OMB and the EPA to tackle the issue of using oil dispersants in the sea.
The "new cold war" between the US and Russia differs from the old one in that there are no ideas at stake, just two blocs competing for power that neither one deserves.
To be sure, Putin's personal regime is more arbitrary and dishonest than the US. The US broadcasts lots of lies but is somewhat restrained by the facts. Putin and his men will say anything at all.
Israeli thugs did a Ferguson, murdering an Arab who was running away then claiming he was attacking them.
Naturally this started a riot. Naturally, Netanyahu wants to punish the rioters and not the murderers.
The Conflict Restaurant, which picks a country that the US is in conflict with and serves its food and presents messages from its people, was shut by death threats after presenting messages that criticize Israel's occupation of Palestine.
These criticisms are being labeled as "anti-Israel" — like labeling criticism of Guantanamo prison or US wars of aggression as "anti-US".
World governments failing Earth's ecosystems, says top conservationist.
Evidence shows an important UK thug met with the construction industry blacklist organization.
The Obama regime approved another export terminal for fracked gas.
The problems that Republicans attribute to Obama's medical care system are caused by the involvement of private companies.
A Spanish prison for children, which focuses on treating them and helping them fit into society, is very effective at leading them away from crime
CNN Host: Climate Change Is Undeniable, So Here's a Denier.
Egyptian activists were sentenced to 3 years in prison for a peaceful protest for the freedom to protest. Bystanders, not involved in the protest, were convicted and sentenced with them.
Ralph Nader: some Democrats lost because they did not stand for anything that could inspire downtrodden people to vote for them.
The FBI impersonated an AP journalist to catch a suspect.
The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns this, saying it undermines trust in journalists.
The FBI probably wants to do that.
High-school students in Colorado turned civil disobedience on the school board that is trying to exclude civil disobedience from history classes.
Abu Wa'el Dhiab's lawsuit against force-feeding in Guantanamo was rejected.
The US has admitted it has no justification for keeping him in prison at all.
Laws intended to undermine abortion rights have been used to accuse hundreds of women of crimes because of miscarriages, attempted suicide, etc.
Canadian cities are now installing face recognition cameras.
They say it is only for watching for known or wanted criminals. The question is, how to make sure they aren't lying?
Mandatory sentences and sentencing guidelines mean that, in practice, prosecutors control sentencing in an arbitrary way. As a result, nearly everyone accused of a crime pleads guilty in order to get a reduced sentence, even those who are actually innocent.
UK human rights groups say the government's investigation of rendition and torture is a cover-up.
Comparing today's America with that of the 1850s shows that surveillance endangers the oppressed.
G20 Protests Begin with Mock Tropical Tax Haven Set Up in Brisbane.
US citizens: call on Obama to do 10 vital actions to resist the expected Republican attack.
In the US, and just about everywhere except Europe, companies can monitor every move employees make, physically and on the internet. And they are finding new ways to do it.
I hope you will refuse to accept nonfree software onto your computer "for work". This is one place where it is very important for you to push back.
One more prisoner has been released from Guantanamo.
At this rate, most of the prisoners will spend decades more in prison without trial, which is a national disgrace for the US.
In the leaked Luxembourg tax dodging records, US companies are the most numerous.
But they don't use only Luxembourg.
Will Republicans help Obama betray the US to foreign corporations?
Ecuador gave in to European bullying by accepting an unjust "free trade" treaty which includes heavy punishment for copyright infringement (and other things that are bad for Ecuador).
The killers of 43 Mexican student protesters may have been found.
One can't presume that the confessions are true, though they may be true.
Everyone:
call
on the president of Afghanistan to protect victims of rape and
punish relatives that kill them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Changes in agricultural practices have cut the European population of many birds in half.
Famous authors are campaigning against the UK's ban on sending books to prisoners.
North Korea ships slave workers to Qatar.
Egypt has responded to the Islamist rebellion in the Sinai with a further clampdown on human rights including the press and local civilians.
The rebels don't hesitate to threaten local civilians too.
Egypt is about to impose total censorship of all news about the army. If soldiers shoot your neighbors it would be illegal to say so.
Satellite measurements of Earth's air temperature have been too low due to an unnoticed effect of clouds.
Economic sanctions are hitting Russian business hard.
It seems Putin's response is to
attack
Ukraine more.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Global heating denialists never run out of false arguments. Whack one, and they invent another.
They are paid to invent these.
How Luxembourg enables tax dodging on an industrial scale.
As always, after a Democratic defeat, the commercial mainstream media advise that the party should become more right-wing.
On most issues, most of the Democratic party is more right-wing than the general public.
US citizens: call on Obama to make the FCC support real network neutrality.
Censored and monitored Facebook has wiped out independent opposition media projects, including SchNEWS and, to a large extent, Indymedia.
Republican plans to trash the environment in the US.
Several US cities and states voted to increase the minimum wage.
The former editor of a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says he was working under CIA orders for his whole career.
This is part of a broad pattern of converting mass media into CIA propagandists.
Here's Carl Bernstein's 1977 article about CIA infiltration of major US media.
Elimination of many well-paid jobs is pushing UK wages down.
Wages need to be increased for the jobs that do exist today.
100,000 workers protested austerity in Brussels.
Families of people killed by Chicago thugs protested demanding a federal investigation of their thug department.
The EFF asked the Library of Congress to make a 3-year DMCA exception for people to repair their own cars.
Of course, these requests for exceptions are all valid; but we should not let them become our focus. The ban on breaking digital handcuffs is fundamentally wrong; it should be replaced with a ban on digital handcuffs.
Advice to fracker executives: frighten the public, and find dirt on environmentalists to discredit them personally.
A whistleblower from the UK's privatized "work program" tells that her job was to find excuses to push people into working, by fining them, and never mind their illnesses and disabilities.
One of her clients, mentally ill and homeless, had not eaten in five days. This was probably due to being fined on one of the many pretexts that the UK has come up with to punish the helpless for being helpless.
2014 Was the Year Men Finally Got Feminism .
A Russian opposition activist died mysteriously. Friends say he was murdered.
We can't be sure, but I would not trust an autopsy done under Putin's government to be truthful.
Florida activists including church leaders were arrested for offering food to the homeless in Fort Lauderdale.
Although I'm not a Christian, I agree with one basic principle of Christianity: we have a duty to feed the hungry. Anyone who tries to prevent this for no good reason (such as, to please businesses that want the street to look nice) is neither a good Christian nor a good Secular Humanist.
The people who enforce these law are not acting at gunpoint. They choose to do those jobs, and they are personally responsible for all things they do, including enforcing these laws. If they were decent people, they would quit their jobs rather than do this.
UK sex workers have mobilized and blocked the plan to criminalize their clients.
Swedish prostitutes say that criminalizing their clients has caused them to be treated worse in various ways.
Workers are trafficked and enslaved in many trades, including domestic service, farming, and construction.
I think we need general policies to thwart trafficking and enslavement — not repression of specific trades.
Global heating is disrupting pollination of the early spider orchid.
It is done by males of a particular species of bee, but male bees are only flying around for a short time, and that no longer corresponds to when the flowers bloom.
If global heating were happening slowly, most species would adapt to it. However, aside from bacteria, most species don't evolve fast enough to adapt to what we are doing.
A global heating denier will be chairing the the US senate's environmental committee.
If you are young, these people are trying to kill you (and a large fraction of Earth's human and nonhuman population).
Pennsylvania's "gag Mumia" law gags all prisoners.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj's lawyers want the court to investigate how spying on his privileged communications with them has been used to undermine his case.
2014 Was an Election of Firsts for Republican Women. But It Wasn't a 'Win' for Women At All.
The International Criminal Court decided not to take up the case of the Israeli killing of activists on the Mavi Marmara.
A group of Irish people were introduced to US snack foods and found them disgusting.
If you watch the youtube videos, take care not to play them directly since that would mean running nonfree software. Instead, use the youtubedl script or some other free program, that can access youtube.
Who benefits from business tax avoidance schemes?
Chinese demand for ivory is wiping out the elephants of Tanzania.
Oil money failed to buy the local election in Richmond California.
The thugs that shot Darrien Hunt told two demonstrable lies about it, and likely another.
Thugs are not like you and me. They are accustomed to lying, even in court. I would not take their word for anything without objective confirmation.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the Dominican Republic for taking citizenship away from its inhabitants of Haitian descent. In response, the Dominican Republic withdrew from the court.
A study found that pollution from burning coal in China causes around 700,000 deaths a year.
The figure given was 670,000, but that's too much precision. The study used statistics from 2012, but since coal use has increased since then, it must be worse.
I estimate around 15 million people die each year in China, which would make coal responsible for around 5% of those deaths.
The president of Sierra Leone personally ordered the arbitrary imprisonment of a prominent critical journalist.
Americans vote for bans on fracking because they can't trust governments to protect the safety of drilling operations.
It is entirely logical that when corporations are too powerful to regulate, they should be shut down entirely.
However, an even more important reason to ban fracking is that we can't burn so much fossil fuel.
Real Democrats might have won some of the races that "Democrats" have lost.
Germany is escalating the war on sharing.
While I do not condemn commercial publishing as such, we need to wipe out the organizations that back the war.
Voting discrimination is the worst since 50 years ago.
Luxembourg is a tax dodge in the middle of the European Union.
New Zealand's trade minister admits that the reason for secrecy in the TPP is to prevent public debate.
Those involved in negotiating the TPP are ipso facto enemies of democracy, and, in my view, trying to betray their countries.
How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make in Yesterday's Close Races?
Denton, Texas, voted to ban fracking. Its inhabitants have plenty of experience with the effects.
Hawaiians Win Community GMO Victory Over Monsanto.
Pakistan
arrested
44 people accused of lynching the Christian couple accused of
"blasphemy."
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
A family of Dalits who resisted caste oppression were
murdered
as a planned political act. The killers' identities are known but
nothing has been done.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government has cut subsidies for solar power in farms, claiming that this is taking land out of use for farming, but has no idea how much land has been taken out of use in this way.
The argument would be irrational even if it were based on true facts, because global heating will do a lot more damage to agricultural output than these solar power plants would do.
DC and Oregon voted to legalize marijuana. Right-wingers in Congress might override the former.
If you read your "smart TV"'s antiprivacy excuse document, you won't use it at all.
The one he's talking about is from Samsung, and here is its antiprivacy excuse document, but other companies' models may not be much less bad.
The first article's author recommends greater legal barriers to access to the data the smart TV collects. That is the usual inadequate solution; even with those protections, the device would damage users' privacy. Appliances should not make recordings of people's voices or actions, except when the people explicitly ask them to.
Disconnecting the TV's microphone and blocking its camera would correct only part of the problem. Be wise: buy a non-smart TV that doesn't record your voice or your actions.
Even better, don't have a TV. I was a TV addict as a teenager, so at age 17 I decided to cut it off cold turkey. I have never regretted that decision. As a side benefit it disconnects me from corporate mass culture.
Republicans took control of the US Senate.
They did so by passing laws to block hundreds of thousands of poor and minority group members from voting, and disenfranchising millions more by secret dishonesty, together with blanketing TV with misleading ads (harping on side issues) paid for by billionaires.
It is clear that some of these senate races would have been won by Democrats if the election had been free.
In effect, this means that democracy in the US has been mostly extinguished.
Republicans will use their additional power to impoverish more Americans (with the bonus that they may be disenfranchised as a consequence), boost global heating, and sign the TPP.
As right-wing political parties in the UK blame European immigrants for the spreading poverty, a study finds that they have paid more in taxes than they received in government benefits.
The real cause of the losses to the UK treasury is the failure to tax the rich and businesses enough.
Israel is proposing a law to imprison Palestinians for 20 years for throwing stones.
In theory, it will apply to Jews too. In practice, Jews carrying out pogroms will have immunity (as they generally do), and only Palestinian teenagers will be punished this way.
Throwing stones at people is a form of violence. In peaceful circumstances, under a democratic government that respects human rights, throwing stones ought to be a crime. However, under such circumstances, no one would suggest a punishment of 20 years in prison for that crime.
In occupied Palestine, the violence of throwing stones is tiny compared with Israel's violence and oppression against Palestinians. The proposed 20-year punishment is evident reinforcement for the occupation. We must not let tiny wrongs serve as pretexts for giant wrongs.
Since throwing stones achieves nothing, and undermines the nonviolent protests that Palestinian adults carry out, it would be wiser for Palestinian teenagers to stop it.
Israel continues demolishing more Palestinian homes and buildings in areas of Palestine that Israel annexed to Jerusalem.
The "lack of permit" is a pretext which Israel systematically constructs by refusing to give permits to Palestinians in areas where Israel is trying to expel them.
Even in situations where it is legitimate to forcibly demolish people's home, to do so without first letting them remove their movable property is gratuitous cruelty.
Demolition is part of a much broader policy of
pushing
Arabs out of East Jerusalem and its annexed territories.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
Now Israel plans to build housing for 1000 more colonist families in East Jerusalem.
I don't suppose those houses will be demolished for lack of a permit.
Udi Segal, one of the Israel youths that refuse to serve in the army and carry out the occupation of Palestine, has declared a hunger strike for his next term of imprisonment.
Australia's repeal of the carbon tax is causing its biggest-ever annual increase in CO2 emissions.
Abbott says that "coal is the future" and claims it will become clean, but Australia is cutting funds for developing CCS.
The fossil fuel magnates are planning to trash human civilization and Earth's ecosphere; they figure their families will use their money to escape the disaster. Whatever they say they will do to avert the disaster is just talk.
The TTIP is a plot against democracy, but despite powerful opposition, the plot is not dead yet.
The name stands for "This Treaty Is Plutocratic, and even The Economist says it is too plutocratic.
What does the UK Labour Party say about TTIP? What does the UK Green Party say about TTIP?
Things Are Going From Bad to Worse in Syria—And Iraq.
The worst thing that happened is that PISSI (the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) conquered and massacred a Sunni tribe in Iraq that did not yield to PISSI.
The US and the Iraqi government and militias did not do what was necessary to defend that tribe. This has big consequences: other Iraqi Sunnis who resent PISSI will feel they have no choice but to support it.
Training soldiers from the Libyan army turns out to be ineffective because they belong to factions that hate each other. They fight each other even during training, and when they return to Libya, they join militias that fight each other.
Inaccurate information about you in data brokers' hands can get you shot to death, but data brokers refuse to correct errors.
I wonder how they find out about people's addresses. Does the Post Office tell them? The IRS? Utility companies? Stores?
Fanatical Muslims in Pakistan lynched a Christian couple, accusing them of "desecrating" a copy of the Qur'an.
To oppose their vicious ideas, we must stand firmly behind the principle that freedom of speech includes the freedom to insult anyone or anything. All laws punishing an insult are an injustice.
Furthermore, I think that all visitors to the US should be required to make a video recording, for publication, stating that they endorse this principle as a matter of human rights. If they will not endorse this, they can stay away.
ACLU sues to allow people to post photos of their ballots when voting.
I disagree with the ACLU on this issue. The purpose of the law is to protect you from pressure to sell your vote. The US has no shortage of people with power who would try to force you to vote their way.
UK Museums and Libraries Protest (some) Outdated Copyright Laws.
The inordinate length of copyright on published works is just as bad, maybe worse.
This article repeats the propaganda term "protection" to describe the effect of copyright. That term frames the issue in a way that favors the copyright industry — please join me in rejecting it.
The Government is in Pursuit of a Less Secure Internet.
AT&T, like Verizon, inserts identification codes into mobile customers' web browsing.
Interview wih Jean Lamy Matulnes, local leader of people of Ile a Vache opposing resort hotel land grab, from months ago before he was imprisoned.
If Europe persists on aiming for an inadequate 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, it should explain why it has abandoned its commitment to do what is needed to avoid 2C of global heating.
It is not clear that limiting global heating to 2 degrees C is enough to avoid disaster, but more heating will lead to disaster unless a miracle saves civilization.
The Koch brothers support Libertarian Party candidates, but not sincerely, only to help a Republican defeat a Democrat.
Unofficial "transnational passports" provide a way to check in at a hotel without showing your real name.
I prefer not to stay in a hotel.
Being an activist for a good cause (such as free software, ending surveillance, or defeating dooH niboR) is a good way to be happy. It will easily help you do some of these steps toward happiness.
An official investigation legitimized the shooting of Darrien Hunt by thugs.
I don't trust what the thugs say about the events, but if Hunt indeed posted a message saying he was going to get shot, it's possible this was "suicide by cop".
On the other hand, why should cops question someone for carrying a sword in a place with no one else, when they would not question someone for carrying a gun there? Was that racism?
The failure of Atlantic City casinos illustrates the dead-end that gambling is, as an economic base.
The other local casinos authorized over the past 20 years by various states mainly took away some of Atlantic City's revenue, adding nothing. Given that the income does not "trickle down" to the local residents, governments should not make any concessions to keep casinos operating or to help them start. Such concessions are "beggar thy neighbor" tax-cuts.
Instead, governments should increase the minimum wage, so that workers will spend more money and promote businesses that make things that are good for people.
The West Is Silent as Libya Falls into the Abyss.
It isn't obvious what could save Libya or what to propose.
The UK's proposed "mansion tax" is a small substitute for proper taxation of expensive houses.
Who's Buying the Midterm Elections? A Bunch of Old White Guys.
Worse, they are a bunch of rich right-wing old white guys, and they want to buy policies to help them get richer at other Americans' expense.
Brisbane airport bans "political" ads aimed at the G20 delegates, except for those in favor of fossil fuel.
The G20 is considering a plan of action against global heating disaster, but all it requires is that they consider taking some action.
Ghoncheh Ghavami's trial shows that the idea of justice is absent from the Iranian state.
This is aside from the fact that the charges against her could only be made by a bigoted regime.
Abbott insists that coal is the future, directly opposing UN efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
What he means is that the destruction of civilization is the future.
UN Refugee Agency Launches Global Campaign to End Statelessness.
Perhaps the deepest problem is the practice of excluding stateless people from usual activities and human rights. It's one thing to deport someone, and another to deny that person schooling, health care, driving, banking, and so on.
Alaska's mad experiment with internet voting is an invitation to fraud.
Republicans cite the danger of fraud when they impose laws to block poor, old and minority people from voting. Why, we must ask, aren't they up in arms against internet voting?
In the US: join a protest against the FCC's plan for phony net neutrality.
(Sorry that I don't know a site to point to.)
No, We Don't Need a Law Against Catcalling.
I have not yet seen the Hollaback video. It is not easy for me to see any video from YouTube, since I won't connect to that site from my own computer. I am looking for a chance to see it, because I want to see the range of actions in question. Do they include physical attacks? Threats? Intimidation? Insults? Pressure? Invitations? Praise? Silent gaze?
I want to find out what sorts of things women typically experience on the street, and also where this movement draws the line in its criticism.
To make insults a crime is injustice; calling the insults "harassment" does not excuse banning them. However, insults may deserve a rebuke.
Not everything that someone takes offense at is wrong. A woman once rebuked me, as we were riding on BART, for looking at her. I responded that people moving about in public must expect to be looked at. Nobody has a right to order people in a public place to avert their eyes. When I got off, a few stops later, I told her, "I'm leaving, so you can now proceed to your destination unobserved." (By me, at least.)
Soot and ozone pollution in India are cutting crop yields — in some areas, by as much as 50%.
The UN accused Britain of spying on delegations during UN climate summits.
Aside from the scandal of infiltrating spies into a UN meeting to spy on other delegations, the UK government's goal since 2010 has been to slow down renewable energy and keep consumption of fossil fuels high. In other words, to kill you (supposing you are young enough to live 50 more years) through global heating disaster. This spying furthers that goal.
Since July, Israel has imprisoned 900 Palestinians from East Jerusalem.
Only 300 have been charged with crimes; the rest are imprisoned arbitrarily.
Organised Hypocrisy on a Monumental Scale.
"It almost seems as if the Israeli state has mapped the entire Palestinian economy in terms of input-output relations, right down to the capillary level of the individual, the household, the small firm, the large firm, the school, the university, so as to find all possible choke points, which Israeli officials can tighten or loosen at will."
Australian thugs say that ending domestic violence against women requires teaching men to stop despising women.
I agree that needs to be done, but more funds for support to help women escape from violence would also help.
Russia's puppets in Donetsk held a Putinesque election, and are threatening to attack other cities in Ukraine.
Feminist T-shirt Makers' Working Conditions Not Shocking, But the Norm.
Egyptian journalists denounced the editors' plan to give total blind support to the state.
The UK government will send every household a misleading breakdown of how government funds are spent, designed to make people resent those that receive public assistance of any kind.
California farmers are expanding their water-devouring nut farms even though global heating will bring droughts even worse than the present record-breaking drought.
You could say it's nuts.
When women report being trafficked into the UK, thugs and officials often imprison them for lacking a passport.
A destitute Briton decided to protest full time rather than accept forced labor for a pittance.
To change plutocratic capitalism, we need to change the stories that were taught us to sustain it.
The income of the richest 1% of Americans exceeds the cost of all US social programs.
Egyptians were imprisoned for making a video which included a (simulated) gay wedding.
Even in right-wing capitalist terms, the UK's austerity is a failure: it has not paved the way for important economic growth.
These right-wing capitalist terms ignore important forms of harm: dooH niboR, forcing millions into poverty, and strengthening plutocracy.
The UK parliament has destroyed all expense records from before 2010, blocking investigation of accusations of unjustified reimbursements.
A Georgia judge upheld the failure to process
40,000
voters' registrations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The US and Iraqi governments did not resupply the Sunnis of Zawiyat
who were resisting PISSI. PISSI
massacred
them after defeating them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
The thugs in Ferguson asked for a ban on overflights mainly to keep news copters from making video of the protests.
Richard Branson's Space Tourism Shows What Today's Obscene Inequality Looks Like. And also the way being a consumer dulls the mind.
I am strongly in favor of space exploration and eventually space settlement. I don't see anything inherently wrong with space tourism, either, if people were going to visit a place of some interest — but that won't be possible in the near future.
Commercial attackware is being sold to many governments, few of which can be trusted not to use it to violate human rights.
I think it is legitimate to use such methods in cases where planting a listening device would be allowed — when ordered specifically by a judge. The hard part is to make the thugs accountable and keep these orders very specific.
US courts are chipping away at accountability for many kinds of illegal searches.
Everyone: Tell Bank of America not to invest in Australia's new coal port.
Oxfam's recommendations for ending dooH niboR.
The head of IPCC says, avoiding global heating disaster is still possible, but we don't have much time.
This means that wreckers such as Abbott, Harper and Cameron need only hold out a little more before they can hammer in the last nails in the coffin of human technological civilization.
Beware the Fear Industrial Complex.
US billionaires have hundreds of millions of dollars stashed in IRAs so as to avoid taxes.
It makes sense to encourage the non-rich to save. With the rich, however, this is just another dooH niboR give-away.
Tiny Cuba is contributing more to the fight against Ebola than the grand United States.
There is good and bad in the Cuban revolution. The good is that Cuba has thrown off the foreign plutocracy and done wonders for the people in the areas of health care, education, and organic farming.
The bad is that Cuba does not recognize freedom of speech or freedom of travel. Dissident Oswaldo Payá, who campaigned for those principles, was reportedly killed by the state which arranged a car crash and blamed his driver.
Payá, who impressed me more than anyone else in Cuba, wanted to maintain the social advances of the Cuban revolution.
The US boycott of Cuba makes no sense except as a sop to the exiles who have a lot of influence in Florida.
Afghan women disguise some daughters as sons, so the daughters can experience a little freedom, and so the mothers themselves won't face condemnation for sonlessness.
US citizens: call on your state's election officials to count every vote.
A UK professor criticized how thugs dealt with her mother's accidental death, so they investigated her political background and listed her as mentally ill.
US citizens: Oppose the plan to build a highway through a designated roadless area in the Tongass national forest.
The IPCC's stern warnings about the pressing danger of global heating are an understatement.
How to ramp up the sense of danger? For one thing, stop using the bland term "climate change" that was imposed by Dubya's global heating denialists and start talking about "global heating".
Meanwhile, efforts to direct politicians' attention towards the necessary action face censorship.
Under great pressure, Abbott agreed that the G20 meeting statement can include a token paragraph about global heating.
As long as he prevents any substantive action to reduce use of fossil fuels, he considers it a victory.
Fast-growing cities correlate with high levels of violence.
Humans must have fewer children — and those with wealth must provide the poor with the effective painless means to limit their reproduction.
Uri Avnery debunks false US accusations against Netanyahu, and explains why Netanyahu thinks it safe to insult Obama.
(Digital) Surveillance Begins at Home.
In Hungary, an Independent Website Defies Censorship And Pressure.
Because many US nuclear power plants are getting older, the EPA proposes to increase radiation exposure standards.
US democracy is being crushed by voter-suppression and gerrymandering.
A leaker reports on the dirty tricks PR plans of the frackers.
Twitter is using Verizon's phone-ID tracking code.
A bill to reduce criminal penalties for libel in Italy does not go far enough.
California thugs consider it a "game" to collect and share nude photos from the phones of women they arrest.
A large study found that occasional use of marijuana by teenagers is not associated with any school or intellectual problems, after controlling for other activities known to be harmful.
Airline security idiots delayed overnight because someone had made a wifi hotspot called "Al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork."
Theater of Security Agency agents confiscated a belt buckle that looks like a fictional raygun, calling it a "replica" of a weapon.
Those whose job is theater anyway may not recognize the significance of the difference between a real weapon and a fictional one.
The UK government regards dissent in itself as criminal, a reason to infiltrate informers into a person's life and record everything.
Life Is Getting Harder For Objective Journalists in Turkey, Says Cartoonist Sued by Erdogan.
If publishers want to compete with Amazon and Netflix, they should try ditching DRM.
They should also stop imposing unfair contracts (EULAs) and stop making purchasers identify themselves. Then the copies they sell would be no less ethical than a typical CD or printed book.
Angela Davis: US racism is visible in not only when thugs kill innocent people but also when they frame anti-racist campaigners and label them as "terrorists".
Russia and China blocked creation of a marine conservation zone in the Southern Ocean.
Spain adopted a law for DMCA-style takedowns, but even more strict. (That's the second issue in the article; I don't think the "Google tax" is very important.
Is Ireland the new Detroit? Citizens say they will go to jail rather than pay water charges.
It is important to charge businesses for water use, but everyone is entitled to water in a reasonable quantity for personal use.
A Canadian court fined Google for publishing a photo of a woman sitting on the steps of her house. People could tell who she was even though Google blurred out her face.
This decision is fundamentally wrong and dangerous, because the right to take a photo outdoors and publish it must be respected.
The plaintiff received nasty criticisms because the photo showed her wearing revealing clothing. However, Google was not to blame for this. She wasn't to blame either, since there is nothing wrong about wearing revealing clothing. The blame falls on the people who attacked her.
Australia has replaced "polluter pays" with paying some companies to (perhaps) pollute less.
The crucial difference is that the new policy will do nothing to impede the extraction and combustion of coal.
Hungary's government backed down on plans for an internet use tax.
Orban's general strategy is to avoid doing things that make lots of people angry.
The latest proposed way to export tar sands oil is a pipeline to Canada's Atlantic coast. Lots of people are determined to block it.
Canada has adopted
a silly
and gratuitous defense against Ebola.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]
If someone was exposed to Ebola a whole month ago, there is no chance he would have a contagious case of Ebola today. Either he has recovered already or he didn't catch it at all.
Deforestation in the Amazon may be causing the drought in Sao Paulo.
The US government got more power with the PAT RIOT act in the name of "protecting us" from terrorism, but uses that power mainly for the insane War on Drugs.
The War on Drugs does far more damage to the US than terrorism.
The UK is high on the War on Drugs: ministers insist on "toughness" even though the people, the press and even most members of Parliament are ready to end it.
Interviews with makers of "fair-trade" porn.
I have always been puzzled by those who assume that "porn" means "violent" or "cruel". The arbitrary exclusion of kind, nonviolent sex from the category of porn seems perverse to me.
IPCC Report: Six Graphs That Show How We're Changing the World's Climate.
Corporations demand "free markets" while rigging markets in their own interests.
Violent video games don't make people kill, but they do tend to make people more aggressive and less empathetic.
An ex-thug in Miami says that other thugs talked about how they were framing Krishna Maharaj.
Social Security figures show that US workers are getting worse off, making the US like a third-world country.
Not coincidentally, the number of billionaires in the world has doubled in recent years.
Peter Young gets harassed by the Theater of Security Agency every time he flies, because he has been convicted of a "terrorist" crime.
His "terrorism" consisted of freeing minks from farms. Labeling this as "terrorism" was the first step in the distortion of that term by the US.
I wish this were a mere bureaucratic mistake, but it something much worse: obstinacy for obstinacy's sake, on the part of bureaucrats who think that obstinacy for obstinacy's sake is what the public deserves.
The US government estimates that only 20 or 30 Americans have gone to Syria to fight for various anti-Assad groups, and only some of them are in PISSI.
Such a small number are insignificant, thus no reason for any change in laws or any denial of Americans' human rights.
Why do thugs want armored vehicles? To intimidate people who are not even accused of a crime.
Massive resistance to tar sands oil has done tremendous harm to the oil extraction companies' profits.
Will Coal Or Solar Power Fuel India's Drive to Bring Electricity to Its Villages?
Greg Palast's full report on a secret Republican scheme to block 2 million minority group members from voting by falsely accusing them of registering in two states.
The trick is being sloppy and treating false matches (nearly all of them) as real matches.
Many Republican-dominated states are using other measures to stop college students from voting.
Unidentified drones have been flying over French nuclear plants.
Facebook threatens to take control of many commercial publications; they may publish only through Facebook.
I will probably not read them if they do that.
Although there is some interesting analysis in this article, it suffers from a superficial business-minded outlook framed by referring to publications as "content" and viewing them as "consuming". It assumes that publishers are motivated by nothing except profit. It is interesting as an analysis of what such publishers might be led to do.
As for other publishers — my home page is not dead, and neither is gnu.org's.
You can't trust a server to maintain your anonymity.
The only way to be anonymous is to stop servers from knowing anything about you.
In the US: tell NPR not to cut its climate reporting.
US citizens: tell the FCC that its latest phony network-neutrality plan is still no good.
Here's more information.
Everyone: call on Shell to stop funding ALEC's global heating denial.
US citizens: call on FCC commissioner Wheeler to state why he resists proper network neutrality.
US citizens: call on the Justice Department to take action against Georgia's voter-suppression disenfranchisement of 40,000 voters.
US citizens: call on the EPA to close the loophole about pollution made in starting up and shutting down plants.
Sodastream will move its factory out of an illegal colony in Palestinian territory.
Global Supply Chains Link Us All to Shame of Child And Forced Labour.
These complex supply chains are due to business-driven globalization, and that does so many other kinds of harm that we might as well get rid of them all at once.
Sweden has recognized the state of Palestine.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj has won the chance to sue the British government for helping Gaddafi get him and torture him.
Giant reforestation campaigns are starting in Africa.
1/3 of the shrimp on sale in the US carry false labels.
Over a million schoolchildren in the US are homeless.
This is a national shame, and reflects the greed of the illegitimate rulers of the US.
Computerized voting machines in the US are already committing fraud.
97% of US doctors are concerned about the danger of overuse of antibiotics.
The school-to-prison pipeline in Minneapolis starts with arresting black children for "truancy", "disorderly conduct" or homelessness.
Palestinian nonviolent protester has been imprisoned for "disturbing an Israeli soldier".
Using such pretexts to imprison protesters is a sign of tyranny.
Australia's government wants to record all phone calls in a data base it could search without restriction.
This would directly threaten all whistleblowers.
The US is rushing to approve genetically modified salmon, while Panama has fined the operator of the salmon hatchery they would come from.
These salmon threaten to contaminate wild salmon with the artificially introduced gene, which could wipe out wild salmon stocks.
Verizon is funding an explicitly censored technology news site which has a commitment not to discuss network neutrality or massive surveillance.
Many mainstream media hush up or mistreat these issues. What is amazing is to admit it.
UK state schools, which are supposed to be gratis, impose large costs that poor families can't pay. The biggest cost is the uniform.
The US harasses many journalists entering the US, in some cases just to make their lives difficult.
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