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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.
Errol Graham died because the UK cut off his welfare benefits because he missed an appointment. His unsent letter to the officials who did that begs them to "judge [him] fairly." He was too depressed to send it, or take any action except to huddle in a quilt as he starved.
*Thousands of people in the UK are dying from the cold, and fuel poverty is to blame.*
*How Alabama blocked a man from voting because he owed [the state] $4.*
What is said in Assange's hearing, Assange cannot hear, because he is kept in a glass box. He has to get a summary from his lawyers — but not very often, as they are forbidden to speak with him in the court.
The Department of "Health" refuses to commit to making Covid-19 vaccine affordable for all Americans.
This is terribly foolish, because it would forfeit the chance of achieving herd immunity and thus eradicating the disease.
Party of famously rainy New Zealand is suffering from an unheard-of drought.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the MORE Act, which would legalize marijuana.
The page displays in an ugly way in IceCat — it looks better in lynx. Both browsers allow you to sign this without running nonfree JavaScript code; in IceCat you should enable LibreJS to make sure that code does not run.
Palau has banned commercial fishing on most of its waters. The protection needs to be re-balanced, because people have entirely stopped catching tuna and now catch the more rare (and more easily threatened) reef fish instead.
People should not draw the simplistic conclusion that marine protected areas are a bad idea. Stricter protection on reefs, along with allowing some additional area for fishing for tuna, might correct the problem.
*'In Chile, In Guatemala, In Iran': Sanders Applauded for Highlighting US Record of Overthrowing Governments Around the World.*
In order for the US to quit the coup addiction, it needs to start by recognizing it.
Billionaires are accustomed to getting the US government to do their bidding, and feeling poor compared to decabillionaires, that they believe they naturally deserve to rule and don't grasp what poor Americans suffer.
*'I Bough...—I, I Got Them': Bloomberg Almost Admits to Buying Members of Congress.*
I suppose he was going to say that he bought their offices for them rather than that he bought them. After all, slavery is still illegal in the US, and so is bribery — unless it is indirect and disguised.
The conman's campaign has sued the New York Times for libel based on a story which asserted that the conman had an "overarching deal" with Russia to help get him elected.
That was four years ago. It would be entirely in character for the conman to make such a deal, but I can't remember whether we had evidence showing he had done so. I would like to see what the Times says to support that claim. It is somewhat closer to truthful than the conman is, but it often presents half-truths, as cited in many political notes.
It is extremely difficult for a public figure (in particular, any candidate for office) to win a libel lawsuit in the US. Since the suit a New York State matter, the conman hasn't got much influence to pervert justice with. Maybe he plans to drop the suit after the election.
The school-to-prison pipeline begins in Florida at age 6.
At least the thug was fired.
WHO and UNICEF: Children's "collective concerns must now be heard, and effective actions taken to prevent the next generation inheriting an irreversibly damaged planet."
Starbucks is firing staff for organizing a union.
(satire) *the American Psychiatric Association announced Thursday the supplemental addition of “Obsessive Categorization of Mental Conditions” to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders.*
*Barbaric': 8 Million Americans Have Been Forced to Start Crowdfunding Campaigns to Cover Medical Costs, Survey Shows.*
British MP Debbie Abrahams leads a parliamentary group concerned with occupied Kashmir. She went to India bearing a valid visa and India without warning said her visa was cancelled.
This is typical behavior of authoritarian truth-denying governments; compare with Israel and the US.
Kashmir remains under military occupation, and last I heard, most people there are still denied internet access.
The corruptor is replacing many US civil servants with people personally loyal to him.
Some ocean bottom species live only in in a small area of the bottom. A single zinc mine could cause extinction.
Lead poisoning from lead paint continues to stunt the intelligence of many US children.
Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day 2. The judge is so hostile towards Assange that when his lawyer, joined by the prosecutor, call on her to ask the prison officials not to persecute him (so he would be able to participate properly in his case), when they both said this was normal practice and that prison officials usually followed judges' advice, she said she had never heard of such a thing.
At the end, she announced that UK law authorized extradition for political offenses. Shame on the UK, if that is true.
The arguments in Assange's extradition hearing show that he is being prosecuted for journalism.
Google directs some email from political campaigns to secondary mailboxes. More from some campaigns than from others.
Armed gangs of Hindu extremists in Delhi are carrying out a pre-planned pogrom against Muslims. Often the uniformed thugs support the unofficial thugs.
The gangs were urged on by an official of the Hindu-extremist BJP, which is the ruling party. I suspect it organized the gangs, too, to win more votes in the Delhi election. Bigotry against Muslims is its platform. Prime Minister Modi got his initial political boost from presiding over a pogrom in the state of Gujarat, where he was a state official.
The conman and Modi are made for each other: each shift his country towards hate and cruelty.
*Living under an oligarchic system, we should develop a healthy skepticism of the actions of billionaires, whether they are running for office, bankrolling other candidates or giving billions to charity.*
*'String of Intentional Outright Lies': Bloomberg Campaign Deletes Tweets Containing Fake Quotes of Sanders Praising Despotism.*
Climate Defense Team endorses Sanders for president. Comparing all the presidential candidates' climate defense plans, it finds that Sanders's plan comes closest to what is needed to save the ecosphere.
*There is nothing radical about Bernie Sanders’ views on Israel, yet the American Jewish establishment seems bent on portraying the Democratic front-runner as an anti-Semite.*
What those organizations can't stand is that Sanders takes the two-state solution seriously and is willing to press for it. They present themselves as representing all American Jews, but most of them agree rather with Sanders.
*The IDF Spokesman Announces: Continue to Shoot Palestinian Children.*
Slavoj Zizek: *US enters brutal ideological civil war as four-party system begins to take form.*
I disagree partially. It is a mistake to talk about four parties; really there are only three. There are still some "moderate" Republicans (though they are even further from what most Americans stand for than the "moderate" Democrats) who disagree with the bullshitter, but hardly any dare to stand against the extremist Republican Party.
The US had real moral leadership during World War II and the Cold War. In some places and times its behavior was consistent with its stated principles, especially in Europe and Japan, even as in other parts of the world the US supported colonial empires or economic elites.
Meanwhile, the US contended against horrible enemies. Communist Russia and China committed massive crimes. Imagine if the bully could have anyone in the US imprisoned or shot, as a whim, and nobody dared to hint at disobedience; that's what Stalin's rule was like. In China, Mao's delusional "Great Leap Forward" caused an artificial famine that killed millions. There too, no one dared criticize. The imprisonment of a million Uighurs for brainwashing is a sample of what Mao's rule was like.
These were not merely a low standard of comparison against which US looked better than it was. They were real enemies on a global scale.
In today's United States, the good aspects have faded while the bad ones have increased. But we know that the way forward is with Sanders and his political revolution.
When our land was great before, We taxed the rich a whole lot more.
*To connect the enclaves that make up Kedumim, [illegal Israeli colonists] seized control of a central road serving Palestinians and blocked their access to it.*
*Israeli ["settlers"] torch Palestinian school in latest 'price tag' attack.*
India has released some of the arbitrarily-imprisoned political leaders of Kashmir. But the former highest leaders are still in prison.
Physicians for Human Rights reports on how the bully's family separation policy amounts to torture — and often included intentional cruelty to the parents and their children.
*Bloomberg effort to mock Sanders with tweets praising dictators backfires.*
Over and over, plutocratists accuse progressives of exactly what the plutocratists often do. Supporting and praising dictators is a perfect example.
The conviction of Weinstein shows that victim-blaming and millions no longer assure impunity.
Black students in some countries' public schools often face punishment because of the shape and form of their hair, which doesn't easily comply with the rules designed based on white students.
*A 'brokered convention' designed to block Bernie Sanders would be a poison pill.*
We will see whether the Democratic Party is so obedient to plutocrats (including Bloomberg) that it will destroy itself at their command in order to block Sanders.
Bloomberg is spending a lot of money to make that happen.
Buttigieg has morphed into a plutocratist tool to attack Sanders, along with progressive political ideas.
Because Chilean thugs systematically shot protesters in the eye, people have painted bloody eye sockets on statues around Chile.
Craig Murray reports on how Julian Assange's extradition hearing is being stage-managed as a show trial. The public is nearly excluded, and the mainstream media quote from prosecutors' press release instead of reporting on the real matters at stake.
The whole article is worth reading. The details are far worse than I would have supposed.
*Julian Assange was handcuffed 11 times, stripped naked twice and had his case files confiscated after the first day of his extradition hearing, according to his lawyers, who complained of interference in his ability to take part.*
To do this to a person who has never shown any tendency to violence, and who is hardly able to access weapons, is sheer political theater as well as sabotage of his defense.
Sanders will not attend the AIPAC event: "You can support the Palestinian and Israeli people without supporting leaders or organizations that oppose the freedom and liberation of the Palestinian people."
China has sentenced kidnapped book publisher Gui Minhai to 10 years in prison.
(satire) *the United States unveiled a plan Monday for the rest of the world to become carbon-neutral by 2030.*
Sanders proposes federally-funded prekindergarten and child care for young children, as an investment in America's future.
Greyhound has stopped allowing deportation thugs to enter buses at will and demand to see passengers' ID.
Governments meeting about protecting biodiversity have presented a "Global Rescue Plan", but aside from the name, it is inadequate.
Public pressure for climate defense convinced a mining company to drop its application to start a new tar sands oil mine.
UK plans to keep prisoners, that were convicted of somehow supporting terrorism (which can include having copies of propaganda or information), longer in prison can backfire by giving prisoners more of a chance to further radicalize each other.
Whatever we do to those prisoners, it has some chance of reducing terrorism and some chance of inciting more terrorism. No perfect solution is known. It is foolish to presume that "tougher equals better."
1/3 of the population of Venezuela has trouble getting food.
This is partly because of Maduro's foolish policies, and partly because of crushing US sanctions on Venezuela.
*Bloomberg’s Investment Portfolio Includes Bets on Private Equity, Fracking.*
Half a million people in Britain live in buildings with flammable "cladding" insulation, and they face the threat of enormous bills to replace it — bills they cannot ever pay.
3/4 of Americans support the Equal Rights Amendment. 3/4 of Americans also believe the Constitution already requires equal rights for men and women. I wonder how the two questions, and their answers, relate. Did the pollsters inform people about the current situation before asking whether they support the amendment?
The US mainstream media have thrown a series of fabrications and exaggerations at Sanders, but now that we have actual election results, we can see they are not true.
US mainstream media's coverage of Sanders is not just subtly wrong. It is thoroughly and persistently disconnected from reality.
Protesters are blocking train tracks in Canada to protest the planned planet-roaster pipeline to Canada's west coast.
The indigenous Wet’suwet’en group continues to resist attempts to build the pipeline across its land.
*Beware the politics of identity. They help legitimize the toxic far right.*
The US and the Taliban have agreed on a truce and are considering a peace deal if the truce holds.
*[Thugs], Prosecutors, and Republicans Are Looking to Undo a Criminal Justice Reform in New York.*
A fable about what happens if all life activities are managed over the internet, and it goes down.
Cash will continue to work.
People who criticize the cost of Sanders's plans to fix our pressing problems fail to compare them with the cost of not fixing them.
Except for Warren, the other candidates don't propose to really fix them.
Gentrification is replacing old fashioned food stalls and food trucks with "gourmet" versions inside chic markets, that make the food a little fancier and far more expensive.
They may enable you to formulate a romantic fantasy of your meal, as long as you can afford to eat there.
The bully is preparing to ban unions for the civilian workers in the Defense Department.
A right-wing MSNBC anchorman compared Sanders's success in Nevada with the German conquest of France in World War II.
One crucial difference which he disregarded is that Sanders is doing well in a peaceful, democratic election, whereas France in 1940 was defeated by a military invasion. Many MSNBC commentators are also smearing Sanders.
India built a wall so that the bullshitter would not be able to see a slum during his visit there.
Supposedly this was for "security reasons", and that might be true in an ironic way. If he had seen the poor people's improvised houses, who knows what he might have done? Bomb the whole city?
Bloomberg News killed Michael Forsythe's article about intimate financial dealings of relatives of Chinese party officials, because it didn't want to jeopardize its sales in China. Then it fired him, and demanded repayment of money provided for him to move to Hong Kong unless both he and his wife signed a nondisclosure agreement. Then it threatened to sue them if she didn't.
She, Leta Hong Fincher, now reports on those events. Bloomberg News seems to demand others bow meekly to its threats just as it bows to China's threats.
Bravo Ms Fincher!
New exhaust scrubbers now required for ships keep toxic pollutants out of the air by sending them into the ocean instead. This is not necessarily better.
A worst-likely-case scenario for 2050 if the planet-roasters remain in control.
Some have envisioned the complete extinction of humanity. I think that is unlikely. People survived with low tech in harsh environments before, and could do so again, albeit in small numbers (most of humanity would be killed by such a transition).
CommonDreams reports that Emily's List and the Center for American Progress silenced their criticism of Bloomberg because they couldn't do without his donations.
That's the power oligarchs enjoy. In the same way, Bill Gates's money ensured that hardly anyone in the field of education would criticize his plans to restructure public schools in the US.
Teaching assistants at the University of Santa Cruz are on strike and are threatened with being fired from their assistantships.
(satire) *General Motors unveiled Friday their new 14-seat, 11-door, 7-wheel, 4-trunk Chevrolet Teton.*
Always paying cash (as I do) can save you lots of money by helping you decide not to buy. It is important to learn to appreciate that, each you consider buying.
And that's not to mention the most important thing it can give you: privacy!
Bolivia's court says Evo Morales cannot run for senator in Bolivia because he is not a resident there. What a sick excuse! (He has taken refuge in exile since the coup in November, only 3 months ago.)
Safe drinking water advocates applauded the public pressure which forced the EPA on Thursday to announce it would regulate substances known as "forever chemicals"—but warned the new rules could take years to have an impact on water safety.*
*Democrats Call on White House to Ensure Any Coronavirus Vaccine Is Not [a Monopoly] for Big Pharma.*
*'No Tolerance': Union Urges DCCC to Cut Off Support to Dems Who Voted Against Pro-Labor Bill.*
The bill passed the house despite them, but when a "Democrat" is as Republican as that, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee should not support per.
People demonstrate racist and sexist bias in showing sympathy for someone who reports pain. When the sufferer is black, or female, others often look for excuses to disbelieve the report.
The British state tells schools and other institutions to report people for nonviolent commitment to dissenting positions such as protecting the environment, and animal rights.
It was only a matter of time before this mechanism was put to the service of labeling dissent as "terrorism".
Decreased acquaintance with neighbors in the UK is marching along with increased use of antisocial media.
A US Republican politician tried to bribe Assange to say that Putin was not involved in leaking DNC emails, offering him a pardon. Assange refused.
There is a disagreement about whether that offer came from the conman or not, but I don't think that detail changes anything.
Bravo for opposition shadow-minister McDonnell for speaking up for Assange.
Sanders would work to reduce the global problems that Putin derives his power from exploiting: tax havens (plutocracy), dependence on fossil fuels, and seeing international relations as a zero-sum competition for power.
The Democratic candidates running against Sanders would welcome superdelegates giving them the nomination.
There is a real danger that that will happen.
Australia's main opposition party now calls for prioritizing ending greenhouse emissions.
His plans have the usual faults — too late, and too little (net-zero emissions sounds nice but offsetting tends to be self-delusion). Nonetheless, this is a big step forward.
Too bad it is over 2 years to the next election there.
Warren and other candidates put Bloomberg on the spot in the Democratic debate, mostly for his personal politics, but also for his political positions.
The Onion's satire in which the DNC asks the bullshitter to run as a Democrat is just a small exaggeration of what it is doing by facilitating his fellow billionaire, Bloomberg.
"If he wins the presidency, striking a 'grand bargain' with Mitch McConnell to cut our earned benefits is likely to be among his top priorities."
Australia seeks to arrest and try the Australians accused of supporting PISSI, who are now in prison in Syria.
That is the right thing to do with them — not exile them.
A white-supremacist terrorist murdered 9 people in bars in Germany, then killed himself. He was inspired by US right-wing extremist conspiracy theories.
The Nazi-like AfD party is accused of fomenting this hatred.
Ironically, there really is a conspiracy in the US to abuse and torture children (plus a larger number of teenagers), operating at locations that are inaccessible. It is a right-wing conspiracy, created by the bully and operated by the US Department of Hatred and Suffering (DHS). Its victims are imprisoned immigrants.
The latest Australian excuse to ban environmentalist protests is claiming the protests are making an unsafe workplace.
Tories have brought renewed misery to Britons that don't own a house.
However, Bogus Johnson is making specific exceptions to the policy of crushing the non-rich, cutting into the resentment against making people suffer without eliminating all the suffering.
1/4 of all tweets about global heating come from denialist bots.
Low-paid UK university staff, including teachers, are on strike.
Global heating is slowly drying up the Colorado River. The resulting drought could force millions of people to move.
California is also drying due to global heating.
*Leaked Reports Show EU Police Are Planning a Pan-European Network of Facial Recognition Databases.*
Congressional representatives say that US intelligence warned them that the Russian disinformation army is still at work, supporting the conman.
Russian election meddling is a real danger, but I expect that Koch election meddling and Bloomberg election meddling are bigger dangers.
Ideas for teaching children media literacy.
Methane emissions from fossil fuel extraction seems to be 25%-40% more than previously thought. This implies that cuts in extraction will make an even bigger and faster difference. Let's get cracking!
Locusts in East Africa threaten 25 million people with hunger.
FFII contends that the departure of Britain from the EU has invalidated the "unitary patent" agreement, and this offers a chance to kill it permanently.
This is important because that deal would make the European Patent Office effectively autonomous regarding the question of which ideas are patentable — and it would certainly take advantage of that to rule that computational ideas are patentable.
This offers one more chance to try to save software from patents in Europe. FFII will campaign to do this, and I will offer my help.
There is no time to wait for more data before taking action to prevent the insect apocalypse. The danger is desperately urgent.
When you need to stop the train before it runs off the broken bridge, you can't afford to spend a minute calculating precisely how hard to push the brakes.
After the UK's exit from the European Union, Google plans to move the data about UK residents to the US. It will be able to do this because the GDPR will no longer apply
The GDPR are inherently weak, because they aim at "protection of data" already collected, rather than at preventing the collection of data about people's activities.
The US has blocked Eyal Weizman from visiting Miami to open an exhibit about his work. He leads Forensic Architecture, which investigates human rights violations world-wide.
The border thugs said that a computer program suggested he was a security threat. However, it was the humans who decided to heed that suggestion. They demand a list of all citizens of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia that he has met, and invite him to volunteer names of everyone else he knows who might perhaps be somehow suspect. In effect, "conduct a fishing expedition on yourself."
In the course of investigating human rights violations he has talked with witnesses from those countries, people of various political affiliations. To turn him into a US spy on all of them could benefit the US government, both by getting more information for its giant data bases, and by getting a lever with which to ruin his career at any time. It could use that lever to stop him from investigating human rights violations committed by the US.
He was wise to this danger, and refused to give the information.
In the past, being caught doing this would have chastened the US. The bullshitter will boast of having damaged two birds (human rights investigation, and justice) with one lie.
In Fiji, large trees protected crops from the wind and waves of a hurricane — in farms that had not cut the trees down.
(For reasons of tradition, the term "hurricane" is not used for storms in the South Pacific, but it's the same kind of storm.)
Many kinds of computer components have processors which contain nonfree preinstalled firmware that can be altered maliciously by anyone with bad intentions.
Some require the firmware to be signed with a particular key. In those, to alter the firmware maliciously requires the aid (willing or unwilling) of the manufacturer. Still not secure.
Real security requires that the device not allow modification of the firmware through the connectors for normal use of the device.
AI programs that are claimed to recognize emotions from facial expressions have to be bogus, because different people express the same emotion with different expressions.
Trying to refute internet propaganda lies often backfires and has the overall effect of spreading them further. It's best for most of us to ignore them.
*Fox in the Henhouse: Koch-Backed Opponent of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Chairs Taskforce to Evaluate Its Regulations.*
Everyone: call on Facebook to delete false political ads.
The UK plans to push hard to end immigration of low-wage workers. We will find out if it really achieves a increase of standards of living and of productivity.
Scandinavian countries have a different approach: tax the rich more and spend more on helping people. That method visibly does work.
The bully demonstrated his contempt for all attempts to restrain corruption by pardoning a number of corrupt officials and crooks.
Sanders put it well.
Amazon's Ring surveillance cameras are marketed as a way to catch burglars and reduce burglary, but there is no evidence that they really do either one.
This seems to be a campaign of marketing that uses fear to manipulate people.
China's early coverup for Covid-19, and the resulting epidemic, has led to mass demand for freedom of speech, just as the state is applying quarantine via threats far beyond the normal level of cruelty.
One example is Chen Qiushi, who has reported from Wuhan. A week ago, he was apparently disappeared and his mother could not find him.
*Impunity Guaranteed for Torturers (and Presidents).* None of the US government's torturers has been held responsible. Before the bully, Dubya and Obama protected them.
Bloomberg has not stopped pushing to cut Social Security, but he has learned to be more cagey about it.
*Buttigieg and Centrist Dems Want a Military Response to Climate Change. That’s Dangerous.*
They want to enhance the military's capacity to fend off refugees and flood waters. That won't enable the United States of 2060 to survive as a free and stable country.
*Greenpeace Finds Labels on Plastic Products "Mislead the Public and Harm America's Recycling Systems"*. Many plastic objects that are labeled for recycling cannot really be recycled in the US today.
WHO: *The world is failing to ensure children have a 'livable planet'.*
A certain level of hunting is ecologically sustainable. In the case of deer, it is absolutely necessary.
What it's like for a Dalit to "pass" as Brahmin: fear of making one little mistake that will give it away.
Urban trees and hedges absorb air pollution. They also soak up rain, thus reducing flooding.
"Neglected" tropical diseases have harmed hundreds of millions of people. We are on the verge of eradicating some of them, but if we don't push on and reach that point, they will spread again.
Utah Republicans have become aware all of a sudden of harm global heating can do.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban face recognition in schools.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the judge presiding over Assange's extradition hearing not to extradite him.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Bloomberg to fund racial justice groups instead of a presidential campaign.
If you sign, please spread the word!
An interview with Alan Singer about what schools can do to lead students away from hate.
Notably, schools can't do the whole job of eradicating racism and bigotry. That requires changing the conditions of inequality that people grow up in.
*"We can’t afford healthcare": US hospital workers fight for higher wages.*
Henry Ford famously paid the workers of his car factory enough that they could buy his cars.
Bloomberg aims to privatize public schools, much like DeVos.
*The Escalating Class War Against Bernie Sanders.*
China's medical system, overwhelmed by people sick with Covid-19 coronavirus, is unable to treat them all, so China is censoring people who talk about needing help.
To be ready to treat so many sick people is not easy. Are other countries stockpiling what they will need? In the US, Republicans tend to neglect such preparations because they don't care about non-rich people. The bully cares even less than usual.
The amount of online purchasing of goods has brought about mountains of additional packaging waste.
*Researchers find a western-style diet can impair brain function. After a week on a high fat, high added sugar diet, volunteers scored worse on memory tests.*
*Beavers cut flooding and pollution and boost wildlife populations — according to a five-year study of animals in Devon.*
*The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather review – the hero who sent himself to Auschwitz.*
Jan Karski infiltrated the guards of a Nazi murder camp, and since he was not a prisoner, he found it easy enough to leave to report on the murder methods. Later, in the US, he reported this to officials, who did not believe what he told them. He recounted this is in his book, Story of a Secret State.
Reasons to imprison Uighurs in brainwashing camps include *growing a beard, wearing a veil or accidentally visiting a foreign website.*
(satire) *DNC Offers Startup $500 Million To Develop Pencil That Can Accurately Record Election Results.*
*More Than 2,000 Former US Department of Justice Officials Tell William Barr: Resign Now!*
The Afghan government's soldiers say the reason they are fighting is for the pay. They can't find other work.
Meanwhile, the Taliban soldiers are fighting mainly because the US side has killed their relatives. That is not a deep commitment, but it is stronger than a salary. No wonder the Taliban keep gaining. But this suggests that if the US stops fighting them, in a few years they will not be motivated to fight the US any more.
Washington State is considering a law to put its waters off limits to bottling.
Dicamba, Monsanto's latest herbicide, the next generation after Roundup, is meant to be used with genetically engineered resistant crops. But it drifts off the field and poisons nearby farms. Monsanto has been ordered to pay 15 million dollars in compensation to a large peach farm that has been destroyed, plus 250 million in punitive damages.
Will it be possible to rebuild the production there, or is it lost forever?
After the US-supported coup in Honduras in 2009, the country has suffered two more attacks against the constitutional order, both with US support of course.
The UK never set up a system for Parliament to review or approve trade treaties. Ministers and officials write them in secret and impose them.
Any bad law can be policy-laundered this way, and a trade deal with the US under any plausible president but Sanders or Warren will surely do great harm.
The article falls into the common error of talking about "intellectual property" as if that term referred to some specific thing.
*The great vape debate: are e-cigarettes saving smokers or creating new addicts?*
The UK, France and other countries are blocking their citizens captured by Rojava (for supporting PISSI) from returning home.
The Kurds are now reluctantly trying them for their crimes, but are not in a position to reliably keep people in prison for decades.
US citizens: call on Connecticut to make phone calls for prisoners gratis.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to extend the deadline on ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to Ban local subsidies for Amazon Ring snooping cameras.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Politicians in the UK, Europe and Australia are starting to campaign against extradition of Julian Assange.
The sad thing is that Bogus Johnson has a pattern of contempt for everything that gets in his way. He does not care about Assange, one way or the other; he is negotiating a deal with the conman, so I expect him to offer Assange in exchange for some of what he does want.
*Will Tennessee Kill a Man Who Saved Lives on Death Row?*
*A Professor Was Called a Pedophile Because of His Work.*
*Deportations to Jamaica, the Shamima Begum case and Windrush betray a woeful regard for the notion of citizenship* in the UK. *negligence of a basic human right for many of its own citizens.*
This puts "all children of immigrants, all Jews and everyone from Northern Ireland" at risk of arbitrary exile.
Personal medical data is a special case, among data bases of personal data, because there is a pressing reason to collect it and a pressing reason to look for patterns in it. Perhaps the data can be made safe through a system where no company or researcher can have a copy of the data, or unlimited access to it; rather, they have to submit queries to be vetted.
*In his assault on justice, Trump has out-Nixoned Nixon.*
*Bloomberg and [the conman] are two sides of the same sinister coin.*
The use of untrustworthy computers and software in elections — in other words, any computers and software — turns any mishap, even an accidental one, into a source of distrust. People worry that the system was "hacked" (that is, cracked).
There is a danger that Russian crackers will break the security and alter the results. But I am more worried about that the voting machine companies or election authorities will alter the results. They can do this without cracking the security — they simply step around it.
The UK's policy of budget cuts for everything except enriching the rich has undermined efforts to de-radicalize terrorists.
The US government subsidizes some cattle ranching businesses by charging a pittance for letting their cattle graze on public land.
This subsidy to beef promotes eating too much beef, which is bad for individual health and for the survival of a livable climate. It should end.
*Mike Bloomberg Claims He Cut Stop and Frisk by 95 Percent — After Increasing It Seven Fold.*
He misrepresents his past actions in several ways, and denies his documented past racism.
*Foreign-Funded Dark-Money Groups Lobby IRS to Repeal Remaining Reporting.*
This illustrates a standard phenomenon: the rich lobby to change the rules in their favor.
A worst-likely-case projection of climate disaster in 2050.
If you have a child this year, that's what per 30th birthday could be like. Per 40th would be even worse. Unless you want to do that to someone you love, don't have one!
Each birth avoided will make it a little less bad.
The DCCC and Pelosi are supporting Rep. Cuellar, who is so plutocratist that the Koch brothers support him too.
(satirical title) After [the bully] Shoots Susan Collins In the Middle of 5th Avenue, She Says She's "Troubled" But Still Supports Him.
This is not the Onion. The title is extrapolation, but the article is serious criticism of Senator Collins.
The conman has the Secret Service pay exorbitant rates for his bodyguards to stay in his hotel when off duty.
This sort of corrupt self-dealing is the conman's basic MO.
A county in Kansas has a peculiar law that arrests people for unpaid medical debt, charges them $500 "bail", and never returns it. The money goes to the gougers, and to a lawyer who implement the scheme.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the BURN IT act, which would let Barr ban services from supporting effective encryption.
"BURN IT" is not the bill's official name, but describes it accurately.
At most 2C of global heating, around 120,000 years ago, caused at least 3 meters of sea-level rise.
*Of course there’s a globalization backlash. It has failed billions of people.*
Globalization of manufacturing is also a danger for society, because it eliminates redundancy. If only one company knows how to make an XYZ, it is easy for one local disaster to eliminate all the capacity and knowledge of how to make them. This is happening just as we are doing things that will make lots of local disasters.
(satire) *… moderate Democrats were worried Amy Klobuchar could split the crucial people-who-will-vote-for-anybody vote.*
(satire) *Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign hired thousands of canvassers Friday to stop black men on the street and force them to hear his campaign pitch.*
Could we say his campaign is getting frisk-y?
One city in the UK has reduced recidivism rates by 15% by offering people charged with certain crimes the opportunity to participate in rehabilitation courses and win deferred prosecution.
This rehabilitation before prosecution is unusual, but US prisons used to provide rehabilitation programs for the convicted. That was eliminated in the 80s when US politicians found they could win elections by promising to be "tough". That is also how the US ended up with the world's highest percentage of population in prison.
Senators to Barr: "The shocking action taken by you or your senior staff to seek special protections for Mr. Stone make a mockery of your responsibilities to seek equal justice under the law."
But Barr has done this more than once: he has a habit of subjecting political cases to special review of the prosecutors' actions, looking for excuses to intervene.
Prosecutors in the US have been known to break the law so as to make trials unfair. It might be a wise policy to give every trial a special review to see if prosecutors violated the defendant's rights — if that were done fairly.
However, special preference for cronies of the conman is not justice. The prosecutors in the Stone case resigned in protest.
Bizarrely, Barr claims that the conman is undermining his authority by tweeting about this. I cannot believe that Barr really wishes to be independent of the conman, or that he is so.
Modeling that considers species' ability to move forecasts 30% of species on Earth could be wiped out in 50 years.
US citizens: call on the FCC not to damage the lifeline program. (It provides phone and internet to poor people at low cost.)
If you sign, please spread the word!
The Senate passed the resolution to deauthorize fighting Iran. However, this is apparently a joint resolution (which requires presidential approval or else a 2/3 supermajority) rather than a concurrent resolution. Why did the Senate choose to do this in a form that won't have legal effect?
British immigration thugs held Rahman Mahafuzer’s six-year-old boy for 10 hours, and refused to call a medic even though the boy was vomiting.
They seem to have blamed the father for the vomit, as if he had intentionally made his son sick just to annoy them.
This is probably indirectly related to leaving the EU, because the campaign stirred up bigotry and this look like an instance of that bigotry.
The oil leaked from the Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010, spread below the surface much farther than was visible on the surface from satellites.
Since fishing was not banned in areas beyond the visible oil slick, that underwater oil could have got into fish which humans then ate.
I wonder if the dispersants that BP poured on the oil, which make the oil mix more with water, played a role in causing that. This response was criticized at the time.
Las Vegas has made it a crime to live on the sidewalk. Someone campaigned for this cruelty because he did not like finding excrement on the street.
They could have addressed the ostensible problem by providing proper toilets instead. But if the real goal was to treat homeless people with contempt, that would not have sufficed.
As for squatting, if people suffer from homelessness and a house is uninhabited, I think they should take it.
The violence of the French thugs was derived from repression in African colonies. Now there is video to prove it, and the state is facing public reprobation.
Amal Clooney and others propose international sanctions against countries that repress journalists.
I am in favor of it. Don't forget the US and UK, for their treatment of Julian Assange.
The UK deported 17 people to Jamaica last week, 7 of them are living in hiding, afraid of being murdered by gangsters who have threatened them or their families.
Delta Airlines announced a plan to become "carbon-neutral". The plan involves ten years of spending. It is not clear whether it includes a specific target to complete the work in ten years.
The biggest weakness in the plan is that it depends on offsetting the emissions, and these offsetting plans are likely to have full effect only over ensuing decades — if they work at all.
(satire) *the Nevada State Democratic Party announced Friday that it had addressed election security concerns by upgrading to a new system of electronic voters.*
Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, explains how the legal process against him was rigged from the start and violated legal norms over and over.
Why he is concerned about this case:
The case falls into my mandate in three different ways: First, Assange published proof of systematic torture. But instead of those responsible for the torture, it is Assange who is being persecuted. Second, he himself has been ill-treated to the point that he is now exhibiting symptoms of psychological torture. And third, he is to be extradited to a country that holds people like him in prison conditions that Amnesty International has described as torture. In summary: Julian Assange uncovered torture, has been tortured himself and could be tortured to death in the United States. And a case like that isn’t supposed to be part of my area of responsibility?
Melzer also explains how the legal procedures against Assange in Sweden and the UK were run corruptly all along, violating all norms of justice.
He also explains painstakingly how the Swedish state fabricated charges against Assange, twisting what the two women actually said. Rather than pursuing "justice" for them — supposed "justice" which they did not want — the Swedish state only used them as an excuse for bullshit.
Bloomberg raised funds for a Republican congresscritter in 2018.
Nepal tried to protect Nepalese women from effective enslavement as domestic workers in Persian Gulf countries by prohibiting Nepalese from going there for such jobs. But it didn't stop them, and made them even more vulnerable once there.
Nepal's embassy could give them new passports and fly them back to Nepal. But since Nepal is so poor, maybe cannot afford the flights.
Is there a chance or organizing ship they will take them to India, perhaps once a month? They might have to wait a few weeks on the ship, but it would be better than being stuck in Kuwait as a slave.
The world powers could make these Gulf countries change their policies, if they got together.
In a few decades, the problem may solve itself — those countries probably won't exist any more, due to global heating and sea-level rise. If we can stop them from exporting oil and causing global heating, those countries may stop hiring foreign workers.
Immigrants in California are going without food and medical care for fear of being denied residency for accepting them.
*EU spending tens of millions of euros a year to promote meat eating.*
It is one of many issues where the EU works for the interests of European businesses even to the detriment of Europeans' (and others') life, health, or freedom.
*AIPAC Is Helping Fund Anti-Bernie Sanders Super PAC Ads in Nevada.*
*When Trump interferes with the proper exercise of power, as he did with Roger Stone, he puts at risk the life, liberty and reputation of every American.*
(satire) *Fox News Producer Knows His Work Formulaic But At Least It Helps People Escape Reality For Couple Hours.*
Toxic pollution from fossil fuel is estimated to kill over 4 million people annually.
This does not count the number killed by global heating effects.
Bloomberg acts like a true oligarch, using his money's power to reshape the political system so he can squeeze more money out of it.
The idea of “hate the game, not the player” is sometimes valid when the game is one that people play for recreation — because they can play some other game instead.
However, the idea is inapplicable when they treat our political system as their game and exploit people through it. Those who take advantage of a bad political system to exploit people are always personally culpable, even if the system is too.
*Bloomberg in 2014: "We Should Hope" the NSA Is "Reading Every Email".*
Republicans propose to destroy the climate in order to "save" it. This is done in the most blatant possible way: by extending a tax cut on oil.
*How to Support Your Children in Turning Climate Angst Into Climate Action.*
The comparison with the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign illustrates a common paradigm: business change the system in a way that tends to create a problem, then tells the millions they deal with that compensating for that tendency is their responsibility.
UK universities are ordering academics to keep silent on social media about issues affecting their work environment.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the conduct of the war in Afghanistan based on the Afghanistan Papers.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to stop the prosecution of drone whistleblower Daniel Hale.
If you sign, please spread the word!
*Earth just had hottest January since records began, data shows.*
A temperature of 20C was observed in Antarctica. That's almost as high as the temperature I like to have in my office.
It feels like spring now in Boston, and it is only February. People with their heads in the sand may think it is comfortable. I find it frightening!
Bloomberg is keeping his actual views out of the limelight, apparently so voters won't notice their disagreements with him. The mainstream media are helping. But he has shown his repressive views.
Obama also hid his views behind the vague slogans of "hope" and "change". I did not expect much of either from him.
Salafi Arabia has agreed to prosecution of airplane crews that carried out specific war crimes, such as attacking a hospital and a wedding party.
Ilhan Omar proposes laws to direct US foreign policy towards international cooperation and encouraging peace, and reducing the president's power of economic warfare.
The insect apocalypse has been measured in the UK and Denmark.
It was previously reported from Germany.
*Bernie Sanders Isn't a Radical — He's a Pragmatist Who Fights to Un-rig the System.*
"Trump wants to destroy Medicaid while claiming to save it." This will kill thousands of poor and disabled Americans.
Sanders got the most votes in New Hampshire Democratic primary, but two corporate Democrats were close behind.
*A humanitarian crisis looms in Africa unless we act fast to stop the desert locust.*
A TV show in Pakistan showed an extramarital affair — unusually, involving a wife rather than a husband. The producer and actors are accused in court of misogyny, putting freedom of expression in danger.
I reject the assumption that monogamy is morally imperative. I refuse to use the words "cheating" and "unfaithful" to describe sex, or romantic love, in conflict with monogamy. I think people should be monogamous if they wish, and not if they don't. When I love a woman, I do not ask her to be monogamous, because I do not think of her as my possession. I simply wish for her to join me in keeping our love going well.
The article refers an the end to the violence in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Americans a few decades ago began to question whether it was a good thing to enjoy that violence. I read that point, and it made me aware of the pain that the violence depicted would cause in reality. I began to identify with the character suffering the violence. I am grateful to those who wrote about this.
But it must not be a crime to show violence in cartoons.
Bogus Johnson wants to politicize the selection of judges in the UK and limit their ability to overturn decisions of government agencies.
In effect, the UK has evolved something comparable to the explicit "checks and balances" of the US Constitution, and Bogus wants to weaken it so he can do whatever he wishes.
In 1960, the UK framed Stephen Ward so he couldn't say that a minister had lied to Parliament. The trial was "a charade, presided over by a judge committed to a conviction." It was characterized by "manipulation of the trial by the lord chief justice."
The UK has not got any more honest. It is now doing something comparable to Julian Assange.
UK thugs set up face recognition cameras looking at the door of a shopping center. They put up signs saying "you are not legally required to go through this area", but that does you no good if you need to go there to shop.
They made a statement about what they would do with the videos, but did they promise not to save the videos and do other things with them later?
*EU accused of climate crisis hypocrisy after backing 32 gas projects.* The amount spent will be over 30 billion dollars that should be spent on defending the climate rather than destroying it.
Damming off the North Sea (and thus the Baltic too) would be a feasible and cost effective way of protecting large parts of northern Europe from inundation due to global heating.
However, it would not protect anyone from the other aspects of climate disaster — that should be the preferred solution.
The UN has published a list of companies linked to Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory.
The UN does not call for boycotting companies with a special tie to these colonies, but I do.
The bully's "peace plan" proposes to hand over some Israeli territory to a future powerless Palestinian "state". The Palestinians living there would rather remain part of Israel.
Amazing respect for justice: a woman facing possible deportation from the UK won a decision that she would not be deported, at least not immediately. But the prison guards tried to force her onto a plane. She resisted this illegal action by fighting back. A court has ruled that this was legitimate self-defense.
*More than two-thirds of the migrants fleeing Central America’s northern triangle countries … experienced the murder, disappearance or kidnapping of a relative before their departure.*
US citizens: Phone your senators and say to pass a "concurrent resolution" deauthorizing war with Iran.
A concurrent resolution does not require the president to sign it.
US gun owners do not feel happier or sleep better than people without guns.
Objectively, having a gun in the house makes people less safe.
*A Canadian Energy Company Bought an Oregon Sheriff’s Unit.* It wasn't officially a purchase, but in effect that's what it was. The unit's purpose was to fight pipeline protesters, and its funds came from a fossil fuel company.
Bogus Johnson is putting his relatives into powerful government positions, much like the conman and Bolsonaro.
113 species of Australian animals need help to survive after the great fires.
Offering shared parental leave from work reduces one of the causes of the gender pay gap: the assumption that women will time off for babies and men will not.
It will also enable babies to feel less stress, which will help them grow up healthier.
The climate crisis will give them too much stress, all too soon, which is part of why people should avoid having babies nowadays. But starting the stress when they are newborns is not a humane way of making this point.
Global heating is damaging the delta of the Río Ebro in Spain, squeezed between two effects of the heat.
On one side, bigger storms start from the higher sea level. On the other, Spain is becoming more arid and needs more water from the river for irrigation.
*Every leading Democratic candidate supports a form of conservation that can reduce greenhouse gases and create jobs in rural America.*
*If Bloomberg Wants to Buy an Election, He Should Run as a Republican Against Trump—Not Sabotage Democrats.*
Why didn't he? He may have judged that the bullshitter's fanatical supporters can't be swayed by mere mainstream media, or that the bullshitter is a master of stirring them up into hatred.
In any case, we have to deal with what he is actually doing.
You can't go far wrong by voting against the candidate supported by lots of expensive TV ads.
*Sudan says it will send former dictator Omar al-Bashir to [the International Criminal Court].*
Chile's very loud labels for food with high sugar, high salt or high fat have had a big impact: consumption of sugar-laden drinks has fallen by about 1/4.
Thugs tend to hold right-wing views, so it is no surprise that they sometimes frame anti-fascists, and sometimes succeed in putting them in prison.
*Utah cuts healthcare costs by flying employees to Mexico for prescriptions.*
Medicare for All, with its plan to negotiate an overall quantity price for drugs (as most European countries do), would eliminate this problem once and for all.
A company that sold encryption systems to 100 countries was controlled by US and German intelligence, and the equipment spied on the governments that used it.
Of course Huawei equipment will do likewise.
Moral: never trust a nonfree program, especially not for encryption.
Many different kinds of human activities are together responsible for driving insects to extinction, and if they die, we die.
*[The saboteur in chief’s] Proposed Budget Cuts Disastrous for Public Health, Clean Energy Investments.* He is going to subsidize coal instead.
He also wants to cut support for food and water.
The house will not pass this budget, but since the bully has said he wants it passed, we can judge him by it.
The US is spreading prudery to workplaces around the world.
If your main way of meeting and getting to know people you could hope to find love with is at work, and you're forbidden to have a relationship with them, you may have no way at all.
The UK is systematically deporting to Jamaica people who have lived in Britain since they were children — in some cases, since they were born.
People who grow up in a country deserve citizenship there, and it is unjust to exile citizens even if they commit crimes. That applies to the UK and the US.
*Pacific Islanders have been experiencing climate-induced disasters for years, now they have reached Australia.*
(satire) *Jared Kushner held a press conference Wednesday to make assurances that the administration’s Israel plan would relocate all Palestinians to a generous swath of the Mediterranean Sea.*
The next stage of global heating will be that of "climate apartheid".
People with more wealth and/or privilege will move to places that are safer from global heating effects.
I forecast that this will be temporary. Once global heating cuts into food production, while population growth leads to more demand for food, increasing numbers will be trapped in hunger. And if wars disrupt the globalized manufacturing system, technology will crash.
There are millions of people who imagine surviving this on their own. That is a pipedream. You can't stockpile a lifetime's worth of food and computers, Even solar cells need to be replaced eventually. In a Mad Max world, only a tiny fraction will survive even 20 years. You are not likely to be one of them.
The only way we can all survive — or at least most people — is to do it together. We have to avoid the situation that will cause climate apartheid.
That means, Sanders for President!
The new NAFTA is a lot less bad than the previous one. But it is still bad, as Sanders points out.
Americans are being pressured towards a state of "total work", in which every waking moment is occupied with one's job.
Referring to writers and artists as "content-producers", as the article does, is a reflection of this change. Please join me in refusing to describe works of art or authorship as "content".
*West Virginia Legislation Would Make Civil Disobedience Against Gas Pipelines a Felony.*
Chinese live under the total surveillance of a totalitarian state. The new face recognition systems can recognize people even wearing masks. And the systems automatically judge everything people do.
In the special emergency of the coronavirus epidemic, I might consider tracking justified as an emergency measure. It could, potentially, save thousands of lives, maybe even millions. I would pay the price of being surveilled to achieve that — if it were used only to prevent the spread of the epidemic, and would be removed when the disease is eradicated.
But once a country gets people used to surveillance, it won't stop surveiling people, and mission-creep is sure to follow.
Meanwhile, the US government uses location data from a commercial database to track unauthorized immigrants. The database is fueled by malicious phone apps.
*Virginia will eliminate a state holiday honoring Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It'll make Election Day a day off instead.*
*The FBI Just Put White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis on the Same Threat Level as [PISSI].*
I think that the right-wing extremists are far more dangerous in the US than Islamists. There are other parts of the world where Islamist terrorists are a substantial threat, but they don't have much power here.
EU citizens: contact your MEPs and call on the EU to spend more on green energy and stop financing fossil fuels.
*In Thuringia, mainstream parties have allied with [the neo-Nazi AfD]. The response has been furious and chaotic.*
Can anyone tell me whether this is a case of channeling into bigotry the anger provoked by the all-suffocating power of business over every area of life? That is a foolish response, as the right-wing extremists won't give the non-rich anything but a scapegoat to look down at, but people do it.
The unfolding climate crisis is causing harm, so people fear more harm. This means people suffer from climate anxiety.
Don't let it paralyze you. If that starts to happen, join and work for an organization that works to curb global heating — the Sanders campaign, a Green Party, the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion.
There are many other systemic injustices that afflict humanity, and working to end any of them will help you feel better about your life. User-subjugating software is one of them; would you like to >help the GNU Project?
*Pete Buttigieg’s Policy Director Has Been Traveling the Country for Months to Meet With “Investors” in His Campaign.*
Senator Warren has a plan to revamp US agriculture to end the dominance of giant agribusiness and the contempt for small farms.
It could offer an opportunity to end wasteful overproduction and exhaustion of resources.
Immigration thugs tried to arrest someone in NYC and did not say they were official thugs. The victim tried to fight them off, and a relative helped. They shot the relative, fortunately not fatally.
There is a long history of prosecution of people who tried to defend themselves from unknown assailants, who later turn out to be official state thugs but did not reveal that at the time. Many of the people were convicted of various crimes for these acts of self-defense.
What were they supposed to do? Use telepathy?
Tim Flannery: *This is the age of the megafire — and it’s being fueled by our leaders.*
Another record high 65F in Antarctica should make us reflect on the coming submergence of New York, Miami, New Orleans, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and so many other great cities, after the ice melts.
*Drought and hunger: why thousands of Guatemalans are fleeing north.*
Global heating is gradually making things worse. We can see these people as the start of a wave of central-American climate refugees.
It is not just food that they need. They also need birth control, sterilization and abortion. Desperately supporting an increasing population where food production is falling is as futile as desperately preserving coastal housing as the sea level rises. It will inevitably fail, and cause suffering as described in the article. Humanity must reduce the burden it puts on the Earth!
Goober, which pays drivers peanuts, has changed some details of how it deal with drivers, so as to convince California voters that drivers shouldn't have the right of employees.
Leaving the EU offers the UK opportunities for deregulation, such as *Putting the lead back in paint, the sewage back on beaches and enhancing the lethality of children’s toys.* But even weak regulation needs people to write them and enforce them.
Varoufakis: *The EU's green deal is a colossal exercise in greenwashing.* It proposes to spend a fair pile of money, but that money was already in the plans. The real increases proposed add up to little.
Brazilian artists and musicians: *Brazil’s rightwing regime wants to censor textbooks, spy on teachers, and repress minority and LGBT groups. We need the international community’s support.*
A UK government inspection bureau has investigated 69 suicides possibly caused by cutting off welfare benefits in recent years, but suggests that there may be far more such cases.
The DNC is turning to Bloomberg and his money to block Sanders, but we can still win.
So don't give up!
The corruption of Instagram "influencers" has now reached election campaigns: Bloomberg plans to pay them as campaign advertising.
If influencers are influencing you, you have been suckered. But you don't have to allow this to continue. You can change your habits so that influencers no longer impinge on you.
Did growing up with apps deprive today's teenagers of the chance to learn to spend time on their own, or with a small group of people?
Professor Sussman thinks it also hampered them from learning to do activities as a group. He reports that clubs and community activities of many kinds are dying.
Four ways that global heating of the oceans is causing chaos and destruction, and what we don't yet know about it.
When the RCMP arrested pipeline protesters, it also drove off journalists with a threat to arrest them too.
After three months, Australia's enormous fires are being extinguished by heavy rain.
A pro-occupation campaign group is running ads claiming that Sanders is unelectable — the same old would-be self-fulfilling prophesy that is money can make believable. It doesn't try to argue openly in favor of the occupation of Palestine because Democrats have ceased to support that position.
I don't call it a "pro-Israel" group because defending Israel's existence (as do I, as does Sanders) is not the same thing as defending the occupation of Palestine. The latter is the real bone of contention.
The bully took revenge against impeachment witness Alexander Vindman, who worked for the National Security Council, and against his brother for nothing more than being his brother.
Turkey threatens war with Syria if Assad's forces continue advancing into Idlib.
Idlib is filled with millions of Syrians who are refugees from other parts of Syria that Assad's forces have conquered.
Chinese are honoring the public service of Dr. Li Wenliang, who discovered the coronavirus infection and tried to spread a warning, caught it, and then died.
China suppressed his warning because it was unpleasant news. If China had not been so repressive, the epidemic might have been stopped at the outset, or perhaps only delayed.
Chinese repression shares the responsibility for all the problems caused by the disease, and the Chinese people (on whom the suffering is now chiefly falling) are aware of this.
*Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy the presidency – that should set off alarms.*
If your goal is to save the republic, don't get sucked into a fight between Pompey and Caesar.
A citizen's crimes are no excuse to deny citizenship to per. Each country has the responsibility to treat per as a citizen, even when doing so means prosecution and punishment.
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is straining to appear preferable to the original Liberal Party while supporting coal nearly as much.
It's not for nothing that it has been called the Alternate Liberal Party.
*More than half of women in Zimbabwe have faced sextortion, finds survey.*
The UK's National Health Service medical records are sold by the millions to data companies — in supposedly "anonymized" form, but they can be de-anonymized.
Continuous partial attention — a state of partial distractedness — could explain why people who are not stupid nonetheless forward fake news which they would recognize as fake after a minute's though.
*How Advocates Are Fighting Voter Suppression.*
Georgetown University has decided to divest from fossil fuels.
Australia's planet-roaster government said it would put limits on greenhouse emissions from big mining and industry companies, but in practice the limits do not limit them — companies get them increased as they wish.
Supporters of the bully did a DOS attack against the Democratic caucus hotline.
Australia is on the verge of prohibiting the use of cash in large amounts.
I don't think I would want to use cash to pay $10,000 or more, However, limits like this tend to start high and get pushed much lower. Some countries have limits of a few hundred dollars.
An officials of the Hinduismist BJP party is calling nonviolent protesters "terrorists" and says to shoot them all.
His statements can be summarized as "MIGA", "Make India Great Again", and it is as bogus as when the bullshitter says that about America.
Glenn Greenwald seems to be safe from prosecution for his journalism, because of a Supreme Court injunction that his journalistic acts are not crimes.
*The principal producer of chlorpyrifos has decided to stop making it. It has been linked to brain damage in children.* However, the Environmental Poisoning Agency has made sure agribusiness will be able to obtain chlorpyrifos elsewhere.
The former Environmental Protection Agency did not stand up to business fully or often enough, but it did some good.
(satire) *Senate Republicans Say One Mistake Should Not Ruin The Life Of A Naive, Promising Young Man Like Trump.*
Two members of the DNC's rules committee work for the Bloomberg campaign.
This is clear evidence of the DNC's bias against Sanders. More evidence is that DNC Chairman Perez, a plutocratist Democrat, demanded that the Iowa caucus work sheets be studied and accumulated again.
A poll by the American Psychological Association found that over half of US adults consider "climate change" the most important issue facing society.
I recommend calling it "global heating", and its consequences "climate mayhem" or "the climate crisis." "Climate change" was introduced on orders of the Dubya administration in the aim of downplaying its importance.
The UK deportation authority gave immigration prisoners cell phones to talk with their lawyers, but they can't get a usable signal in the prison so cannot make plans with their lawyers.
*Forget [the bullshitter's] Lies, Here's the Real Economic State of the Union.*
*Brazil's Bolsonaro unveils bill to allow commercial mining on indigenous land.*
Activists against female genital mutilation have a big task to do and little support.
Posting the codes for the locked toilets of London cafes has made it possible for a lot of people to find a toilet when they need one.
It should be illegal for a restaurant or cafe, with a toilet for patrons, to deny any orderly person the use of it.
Congress Quietly Adopts Exxon Mobil-Backed Law Promoting New Gas Pipeline, Arms to Cyprus.
I don't object to the arms, in this case, but every new fossil fuel facility makes war against humanity and nature.
US citizens: call on Japanese companies to stop financing the Vung Ang 2 coal plant.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Barbara Smith, campaigner for the rights of black women, endorses Sanders.
Russian anti-fascists have been sentenced to 6-18 years in prison for "terrorism".
The official bias towards fascists and against antifascists exists in the US too.
In Canada, pipeline protesters blocked ports and railways to oppose a new fossil fuel pipeline.
As unions endorse Sanders, *Attorneys From Union-Busting Law Firms Are Throwing Support Behind Joe Biden.*
Many colleges and universities in the US lead or pressure their students to agree to be surveilled through portable phones.
The best way for students to resist this is not by hacking the system, but by confronting it. "No, I won't install your app — nonfree apps cannot be trusted." Better, "No, I won't carry a smartphone — the nonfree operating system cannot be trusted." Or do as I do: "No, I won't carry a portable phone — they track people's movements and can listen all the time."
Best of all, organize a group of students to make such a statement together.
When you do that, don't be belligerent in tone. Chances are it never occurred to the staff that surveiling people was an injury to their rights. You must be firm, so don't add anger to that.
Be proud that you are standing up for freedom. Even if you lose, you can be proud of trying.
The US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is supposed to verify the honesty of the audits that big accounting companies do on publicly-traded corporations. One accounting company, KPMG, corrupted the PCAOB through the "revolving door", even hiring away its employees and telling one of them to regard his new salary as a bribe for telling KPMG which of its audits would be investigated.
To advance the campaign to curb global heating, stop feeling guilty and trying to make small decreases in your own use of fossil fuel, and join efforts to change the system that makes everyone live wastefully.
The exception to "stop feeling guilty" is for activities that make profligate use of fossil fuels. For instance, to have a private jet, a large boat, a mansion, or a child, are things you can and should avoid.
The same advice applies to the campaign against nonfree software. People often write to me asking me to forgive them for using some nonfree software. But I don't ask them to apologize for this; I ask them to support campaigns against nonfree software, such as the GNU Project.
Keith Martin approached a car to wash its windows, The driver was an undercover thug; he shot Mr Martin and then charged him with making a "terrorist threat".
I can understand how the "offer" to wash your windows can be annoying. These people often rush to start washing before you can say no, then they manipulate you into paying them out of a feeling of undeserved obligation, or to get the soap off your windshield. It is bad behavior, indeed.
But does it qualify as a "terrorist threat"? What an absurd exaggeration! Do they deserve to be shot for this? Obviously not. That thug should be prosecuted, because firing is not enough to stop those menaces to society.
What children need most, to learn anything or everything well, is curiosity. It is also a vital requisite for doing well on grades and tests. But schools systematically squash their curiosity in the name of maintaining order.
I conjecture that teaching a class takes more work for the teacher if the teacher encourages curiosity by answering the children's questions. I further conjecture that the extra work increases with the number of children in the class. Perhaps this is part of the reason why smaller classes are better: because they make it easier for the teacher to answer questions for all the children and avoid squashing their curiosity.
Getting to know people in your neighborhood, building community trust, makes your children safer than hovering over them, while giving them a chance to learn and explore.
The US should stop exporting oil — that would make a big reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
The comparison with smallpox-infested blankets (which the US government gave to some indigenous groups during the 1800s) is misguided, since those two wrongs are wrong in different ways. The blankets were intended to, and likely to, kill only people in the targeted groups. Burning more oil, no matter who does it, is likely to kill more people all around the world. The one was a sneaky, treacherous act of war; the other a contribution to global suicide.
*Wales to ban parents smacking their children from 2022.*
When my father spanked me, he terrified and humiliated me. It only happened a few times, but each time it drove me permanently further away from him. I am sure it is better for families to avoid such anger.
At the same time, I am sure that if I were a parent I would arrive at situations where I was at my wits' end and saw no way to carry out my responsibilities without spanking. I don't understand how some parents do it.
It's one more reason why it is good that I have not had children.
*Was order to kill Soleimani lawful?* It seems to have been an act of war, not authorized by Congress.
The US deports lots of Salvadoreans to El Salvador. Since 2013, 200 of them have been killed, raped or tortured — usually by the same gang that had threatened them before.
*‘I'm not a robot’: Amazon workers condemn unsafe, grueling conditions at warehouse.*
This is one of the many reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon. I have never done so, and I refuse to start.
*‘Try to stop me’ — the mantra of our leaders who are now ruling with impunity.*
The UK responded to a small terrorist attack (three people wounded) with drastic proposals, such as a life sentence for terrorists.
The recent terrorist attacks in the UK add up to a tiny amount of violence compared with all the violence in the UK now. Even if these measures reduced the violence (and we don't know), that would make a very small difference in safety.
It is self-defeating to respond to this with disproportionate symbolic "toughness". What is needed is to search for an effective way to deradicalize.
The International Energy Agency says we should work out a plan with the fossil fuel companies to slowly reduce fossil fuel use, starting many years from now.
This is a plan to cause disaster. The article explains the details.
Finland has revamped the school curriculum to teach children and teenagers the practice and habit of checking facts.
The campaign distinguishes discusses three categories: misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. All three have been used against me.
A retired general in El Salvador admitted that the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion killed 800 civilians in 1981. The US, under Reagan, helped cover this up, through attacking the US reporter who had written about it.
The "School of the Americas" became notorious for such "training". In response to demands to shut it down, the US changed its name.
A few years later, Reagan started funding a right-wing militia to destabilize Nicaragua through terrorism, and paying for it by selling arms to Iran.
*America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical amnesia.*
(The history of the US includes all three, but not all at the same time. Violent exploitation of the working class wasn't a very big factor until after the Civil War. Before then, most Americans lived on farms.)
The most interesting part of article is the part about Joseph Roth and what to do after vicious inhumanity has taken over your country and civilization has been defeated.
The US system of primary elections is badly flawed as a way of representing the voter's preferences. This article proposes improvements.
Unscrupulous right-wing extremists circulated false information about the Iowa caucuses to try to discourage participation.
One woman yearns to have a president who resembles her … and has concluded that resemblance in values is more important than resemblance in gender.
Republicans are ready to impeach at the drop of a hat, and are already thinking about how to impeach Biden for alleged shortcomings in the past.
The impeachment standard they propose does have one benefit: it would permit impeaching Kavanaugh for attempted rape in the past. But I think that this would not outweigh the permanent damage caused by debasing impeachment as Republicans generally debase things.
Meanwhile, Biden still claims he can "work with Republicans" in the Senate.
*Only Sanders among the candidates understands the urgency of the Crisis of Plutocracy and has a workable plan for dealing with it.*
Warren also understands plutocracy, and I have confidence that her plan is workable too. But Sanders does go further.
Switching from coal to fracked gas did not reduce greenhouse emissions. Meanwhile, fracking in the US is expanding so much that it guarantees disaster.
*A "sustainability charge" on meat to cover its environmental damage could raise billions to help farmers and consumers produce and eat better food.*
This tax would discourage people from eating meat — which is a good idea, for the sake of health. If the tax on beef is especially high, it would also discourage raising cattle, which makes sense because they generate methane.
However, it makes sense also to tax the cultivation of plants that are grown specifically to feed to animals farmed for meat.
Indigenous Australians in Western Australia are fined by human enforcers (thugs) of the rules of the road much more often than other drivers. Strangely, robot enforcers do not fine them especially often.
This seems to be proof of human bigotry.
Tanzania's government wants to accept repressive conditions (on non-rich people) with a loan from the World Bank — but there is opposition.
*Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government’s “Gruesome Logic”.*
*Airlines want you to think they’re serious about the climate crisis. They’re not.*
US citizens: support Medicare for All.
A family doctor insists on Medicare for All, and Sanders.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the International Energy Agency to push for decarbonization, instead of asserting the world will burn more and more fossil fuel.
If you sign, please spread the word!
A few weeks ago, the US deportation thugs interrogated quite a few Iranians entering the US from Canada, including students with US visas to study, and did not let them return. The thugs said this was coincidence. An internal memo says it was a written plan.
London thugs want more power to crush Extinction Repression protests, which are nonviolent but inconvenient.
No matter how much people may care about distant matters such as the survival civilization, that must not be allowed to interfere with maintaining order today.
The Tories introduced a system of blindly insisting that disabled people are fit to work, and cutting their welfare benefits until they can prove otherwise. Errol Graham was too disabled to do this, so he starved in his cold apartment as they prepared to evict him.
Each disabled person who dies this way means more funds to give to the rich.
*Biodiversity hotspots with millions of years of climate stability could be among the world’s hardest hit regions*, in future global heating.
Most people feel false to themselves after buying some impress-with-your-wealth luxury product. The exceptions are people who feel highly entitled.
If I had bought such a product, I would feel mad at myself for having been manipulated into wasting my money on appearance rather than anything I really wanted.
*Fireflies under threat from habitat loss, pesticides and light pollution.*
Yazidis in the UK are working to preserve their traditional choral music.
I would very much like to hear it some day.
A leading Dutch politician fabricated an incident of harassment on a train, attributed to "Moroccans". He cited this a basis for bigotry.
(satire) *DNC Mulls Asking Donald Trump To Run As Democrat In Effort To Stop Sanders.*
*China's leadership admits ‘shortcomings’ in coronavirus response.*
In this regard, at least, they are more honest and responsible than the US leadership.
Bogus Johnson has rejected the extreme forms of climate denialism, calling for a weak pledge to aim for "carbon neutrality".
This would be a step towards what is needed, and if anyone can pressure the extreme denialist governments to make this pledge, it would be an advance, It has two big flaws: (1) 2050 is too late, and (2) "carbon-neutral" is an invitation for self-delusion. Are those trees you are planting really going to survive in the climate of 2030 the climate of 2040? Are they even going to survive this year?
The fines in Australia for destroying native forest habitat are insufficient: one rich farmer has been fined several times.
A few years in prison might be enough to deter this nearly irreparable crime.
The UK government held a press briefing but said that certain reporters were not welcome. The rest of the reporters walked out in sympathy.
Two workers at monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Mexico have been murdered in recent days.
What do supporters of continuing war in Afghanistan say to the parents of casualties of US soldiers who were killed in that war?
What do they say to the parents of Afghan civilians who were killed?
*Why is Boris Johnson waging war on the EU? To distract from his cuts.*
California's new law that requires companies to show a customer all the data it has about per is helping people realize how much Amazon surveilles their lives — especially any reading they do on the Amazon Swindle.
I hope you will join me in boycotting unjust e-books and Amazon in general.
An Indian law school has a special program to train women who were raped or enslaved, so they can bring about prosecution of the perpetrators.
"The rapist is you" could be condemning anyone whatsoever.
There are judges, thugs and politicians that facilitate and encourage rape, and they deserve the song's accusation. But that accusation can be aimed at any man. The song stirs up general hatred of men just as the bully's rhetoric stirs up general hatred of women. It is a form of three-minute hate.
Iran's government knew its missiles had hit the Ukrainian airliner before it hit the ground. The coverup started then.
*The Midwest was made with socialists’ sweat and abolitionists’ blood.*
If a book about Hispanics at the US border is written by someone who doesn't have that background, it is likely to be based on stereotypes and therefore crap.
Thus, a concept of "cultural appropriation" isn't needed for criticizing such books.
China is taking surveillance and control to a level that is shocking even by Chinese standards.
This may be justified for a national emergency that could potentially kill millions of people in China. But China won't get rid of all the new surveillance and control when the epidemic ends. Like the Olympic games (which a city can choose not to have), this epidemic can leave freedom permanently debilitated.
Hinduismist violence is driving Indians to try to flee to the US illegally.
Plutocratist officials are gradually encroaching on Canadians' right to nonviolent protest.
Sea otters can save kelp forests by eating sea urchins, but where there are no sea otters, humans need to do that job.
Past defeats of "centrist" Democrats.
They don't all lose. Obama and Bill Clinton won, but that didn't do us much good.
Libya's civil war is now between proxy forces for various foreign powers.
To understand this, we need to understand what those powers want. My first guess would be, Libya's oil — but that is no more than a guess.
All US internet discussion and conversation sites are in danger if their section 230 defense is repealed.
*Trump Administration Gives Texas the Green Light to Limit Family Planning Services for Poor Women.*
Putting this together with repression of abortion, it adds up to a plan to force poor women to have more babies.
New Yorkers protested heavy policing of the subways, saying it is racist and calling for the subways to be gratis.
*Palestinians cut ties with Israel and US after rejecting Trump peace plan.*
This was basically the Palestinian Authority's last recourse, to be used only in case of total desperation. The PA has also stopped helping Israel against violent Palestinian factions.
*Short story: The Ghost Town on the Moon.*
The mutilator has authorized the US army to plant landmines.
The new policy claims that advanced technology will protect civilians from these mines — but it would take years to determine whether the mines reliably deactivate as they were supposed to. Civilians would find this out the hard way.
Above-freezing water just found under the ice sheet coming off the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica shows that the glacier will eventually melt and raise sea level by 10 feet.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop the bully's plan to work with Republican states to cut funds for Medicaid.
These cuts would kill poor disabled people and perhaps their relatives.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at (202) 919-7073 to support the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act, which would correct some of the worst aspects of the PAT RIOT act's surveillance provisions.
It is far from enough, but any step forward deserves support.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
*Climate, extreme weather, biodiversity, food and water crises could lead to 'systemic collapse'.* This could imperil human survival, as the combination is worse than the sum of its parts.
*UK taxpayers funding African fossil fuel projects worth $750m.*
As Democrats condemned the bullshitter's "normalization of lawlessness", Republicans demonstrated the truth of this by normalizing their own contempt for law and truth.
People are calling this a "cover-up." If only it were merely that. The conman's basic strategy is overt contempt for the law, and the checks and balances that are supposed to defend democracy.
The US government is not much more democratic than Maduro's, and it's just barely legitimate enough to justify rejecting a coup.
AOC: The official US "poverty line" is far too low and systematically underestimates poverty.
40 million Americans now live in poverty, and 1.5 million public school students are homeless.
Salafi Arabia is trying dissidents in a special court for "terrorists".
The practice of labeling dissidents as "terrorists" is found in many countries, including the US and the UK. Salafi Arabia's "justice" is more violent and arbitrary in general, and especially where dissidents are concerned.
A woman who shot the man who had raped her, as he was fighting with her brother afterward, has been denied the benefit of Alabama's "stand your ground" law.
That decision seems absurd, but even without that law, isn't this clearly a case of justifiable homicide?
Collin Clabaugh moved in with his grandparents after his parents died. But the homeowner's association says they are not allowed to let him live there, and demanded they kick him out.
I think states should pass laws guaranteeing people certain rights that override all homeowners' associations. Not only the right to have dependents live with them, but also the right to post a sign supporting a position regarding an election or political issue.
*Help bees by not mowing dandelions, gardeners told.*
Australia's current bushfires are so hot that they break even rocks. Old rock art has been destroyed.
The fact that these fires have destroyed rock art that had come through many fires in the past reflects the increased heat of these.
*‘I’ll destroy your family’: India’s activists tell of false arrest and torture in [prison].*
South Dakota proposes to imprison doctors for giving puberty-blockers to people under 16.
But they can't wait until hey are 16. By then, it is too late — they have already had puberty.
Protesting face recognition by wearing the makeup designed to fool it.
*By denying witnesses, Republicans made clear even a smoking gun would not be enough.* That was blatant contempt for the truth, the constitution, and their country.
A book explains how Russia's political system functions: illustrating how it forces people into compromises that corrupt them and uphold the corrupt system that corrupts others in turn.
This resembles some aspects of the US social and political system, but they are not as pervasive or complete as in Russia.
Please don't buy books, or anything, from Amazon and please reject unjust e-books.
How an ecological ricochet from global heating caused whales to get tangled up in crab lines.
*An oligarch [Bloomberg] has bought his way into the 2020 race. Why is no one talking about this?*
Allowing oil demand to continue to grow could create the need for a sudden change later, which could cause an avoidable economic crisis. This will look small compared with the climate crisis itself, but suppose it is as bad as the recession of 2009. Crises give plutocrats the opportunity to take wealth away from every else. They did that after 2009.
Perhaps they are planning to cause this mini-crisis in order to profit from it.
Global heating has helped to fuel the devastating plague of locusts in East Africa and Arabia.
'Screaming the Quiet Part Into a Bullhorn': Sen. Joni Ernst Admits GOP Using Impeachment Trial to Damage Biden in 2020.
I am not outraged on Biden's behalf — he deserves it — but I am disgusted by the disrespect Republicans show for anything that limits their power.
*EPA Proposes to Re-approve Bee-killing Pesticides With Token Restrictions.*
*A Majority of Americans Support Decriminalizing Sex Work.*
Coronavirus is stimulating bigotry against Chinese people.
The EPA approved glyphosate again.
This may not be as wrong as it seems. There is evidence that glyphosate is not carcinogenic by itself, but becomes carcinogenic when combined with other ingredients of Roundup. If that proves true, it might be valid to rule that glyphosate is not carcinogenic, and rule separately that Roundup is carcinogenic.
But I don't think the EPA is going to do the second half of that.
Roundup has other dangers, too.
The mutilator has deployed a "low-yield" nuclear weapon on a Trident missile on a submarine. This threatens to lower the political and moral threshold against starting nuclear war.
I suspect it is also a stunt. It doesn't make practical sense to put such small warheads on an expensive Trident missile.
For the first time, the House of Representatives voted to cancel the 2020 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
However, even if the Senate passes this too, the mutilator can veto it. This is treated like an ordinary bill.
That seems nonsensical to me. Since the AUMF is Congressional permission for the president to make war, Congress should be able to withdraw that permission on its own; it should not require the president's approval.
Does anyone understand why it isn't treated that way?
Salvini cut off all aid for immigrants, which hit Sicily very hard. Now that he is out, people are starting to help immigrants again.
121,000 immigrants in one year, as occurred in 2017, is not a real burden. At that rate, the population of Italy would double in 500 years. But if we don't curb global heating, in a few decades it could become a million per year, or ten million.
Wells Fargo bank and its executives have suffered greatly for 14 years of frauds.
Antisocialism — also known as propertarianism, but calling itself "libertarianism" — has foundered because its philosophy cannot permit any way to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
*Chicago [thugs]' predictive policing tool has been shut down after 8 years of catastrophically bad results.*
It did no good, while embodying racial bias.
Don't restrict scraping — ban face recognition!
California's bill to reduce zoning limits on housing was defeated, so there will continue to be little housing construction in the cities that need it most.
Unless a city has a lot of vacant land, there is no way to build more housing units except to demolish some buildings and replace them with bigger buildings. However, the law can put requirements about how this is done — for instance, the requirement to include at least as many low-income units as were demolished. The law could even assure the old tenants of returning at the same rents they paid before. But there needs to be more housing space.
*US underprepared for coronavirus due to Trump cuts, say health experts.*
Everyone: call on the judge to release Chelsea Manning from jail.
If you sign, please spread the word!
80% of the migrants that the bully forces to wait in Mexico suffer violence of some kind while there. Many are kidnapped for ransom.
US citizens: call on the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to Stop the Line 3 Tar Sands Pipeline.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to support the NO-BAN Act, which would put an end to the bully's cruel policy towards visitors from certain countries.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to end its blacklist policy.
If you sign, please spread the word!
With the support of a judge prepared to twist any law, and an army of its own lawyers, Chevron has crushed the life of Steven Donziger, who won the lawsuit against Chevron for pollution in Ecuador. Next step, to put him in prison.
Pressuring US universities not to use face recognition.
Israeli soldiers have left 50 Palestinians half-blind by shooting them in the eye with rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas canisters.
This is intentional. Hitting someone's eye by accident is extremely unlikely.
Legal ways that a progressive US president could pressure Israel to respect Palestinians' rights, without passing new laws.
Senator Warren's political journey began with recognizing that bankruptcy laws for corporations can be designed either to concentrate wealth or to spread wealth.
For decades, Big Pharma has used the US government to push broader and longer patents on the rest of the world. Now the conman and Modi are about to kill the Indian generic drug industry which supplies many poor countries.
I advocate abolishing patents on medicine and treatments.
Please do not refer to patents (or anything else) as "intellectual property"; that term spreads confusion.
*For all its fiery rhetoric, Riyadh actually benefits from a standoff between Iran and the US.*
David Miranda and Glenn Greenwald: *The far-right Bolsonaro movement wants us dead. But we will not give up.*
Chinese local officials endangered the whole world (starting with China) by covering up the danger of the new coronavirus for a few weeks. To avoid public attention required skipping crucial precautions that would have revealed the danger of the disease.
Bruce Schneier is mistaken in claiming that there is no important difference between face recognition and other kinds of surveillance systems.
The error starts in the article's first line: "The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently," referring specifically to commerce. That is only one of the points of modern surveillance: repression of dissidents, whistleblowers and journalists is another. The article's reasoning simply doesn't address that.
Face recognition is especially dangerous for this because it is especially hard to avoid. It is not hard to leave a portable phones (if you have one) home one day, and pay cash for travel and food that day. But it is very hard to avoid face recognition and license plate recognition. Therefore, those two types of surveillance pose a special danger to political freedom.
Hong Kong protesters are boycotting Chinese-owned business.
The Tories' welfare reform (a plan that shuffled benefits around so as to disguise how much it cut them) is "sending people into arms of loan sharks."
Sanders has introduced a bill to tax companies that make PFAS to pay for water treatment to take them out of the water supply.
*Companies [in France] to be banned from destroying unsold clothes, cosmetics and other items.*
They will have to be put to some use, recycled, or given away.
Americans have learned to recognize the reasons to decriminalize sex work, and many Democratic politicians too.
If a country installs Huawei wireless networks, it would be impossible to prevent China from spying on them. The same is surely true with with US wireless networks: it would be impossible to keep the US from spying on them.
The Australian government may not mind if the US spies on Australians. Indeed, reports are that the US government spies on Australians and gives the data to the Australian government so that it can bypass the legal protections of Australian law (and vice versa). Still it seems foolish to build in vulnerability like that.
India's repression of dissent knows no bounds. The leaders of a primary school face various criminal charges for a school play that included "slurs" against Modi and criticized the discriminatory immigration law.
A Hinduismist fanatic shot marchers who were peacefully protesting against that law. He chose the date and time to honor the 1948 murder of Gandhi by another Hinduismist.
I predict that Modi's supporters will praise the shooter try to get charges against him dropped, just as Israel's right-wing extremists lionize the fanatic that assassinated Prime Minister Rabin in 1995.
Several Swedish media sites condemned Chinese attempts to repress European journalists, editors and diplomats, and asked the Swedish government to push harder against China.
Sweden's power to do this is limited, but it could give this more priority and the Chinese market less. The EU could require foreign manufacturers to hand over the circuit diagrams and source code for security analysis.
The conman's lawyers told the Senate that he is allowed to do anything whatsoever in order to win the next election.
Turkey planted 11 million trees in November as a project for National Forestation Day. Checking them suggests that around 10 million of them have already died from lack of water.
Valve turner Ken Ward: *The US government claims I'm a 'domestic terrorist'. Am I?*
Privatization made the UK children's care homes both profitable and inadequate. If Tories privatize the NHS, it will do the same sort of damage to the adults of the UK.
PISSI is coming back to life in Syria and Iraq.
The bully contributed to this through his abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, and will have difficulty recruiting their help again. Meanwhile, Iraqis consider the US an invader and want its troops out. Shall we describe this as "Make America Hated Again"?
He is an expert at manipulating people through bullying. I wonder if his goal is to make sure that PISSI, like a comic-book supervillain, never really dies and therefore is always available for use as a villain.
*Tom Perez Stacks 2020 Convention Committees With "From the Swamp" Nominations.*
Some of them have lobbied specifically against progressive policies.
In one simple image: https://i.imgur.com/KNGsrSo.jpg
*In the topsy-turvy world of Israel's High Court, international law is nothing more than a disguise to delegitimize the state and its settlements.*
The court equated condemnation of Israel's policies with "delegitimization of Israel". Then the overbroad definition of antisemitism (the same one used to demonize the UK Labour Party) equates that to "antisemitism". Thus demonstrating how to relabel criticism of occupation policies as "antisemitism" in two easy leaps.
Global heating effects, and their ecological ricochet effects, threaten to wipe out many of New Zealand's unique wildlife.
One species, the cobble skink, survives only in a zoo. There is no longer any place it can live in he wild.
Such conservation efforts could go on for centuries, provided society continues to maintain the interest, the wealth, and the organization to carry it out. But those are likely to disappear as the crunch gets harder. In 50 years, will society still be able to carry out such efforts in he midst of calamities such as starvation, fire, and migration war?
Salafi Arabia appears to have cracked Bezos's phone and installed spyware. UN special rapporteurs call for an investigation.
If it were only a matter of justice for Bezos, we could call this crack poetic justice for Alexa. Morally there is little difference between inserting spyware in a product after sale and building it in before sale.
But Bezos is not the only person whose rights matter, and Salafi Arabia's doing wrong to Bezos will not protect the public from the wrongs Amazon does.
Salafi Arabia has committed far worse crimes: repression of women, diffusion of fanatical Salafi Islam, torture, murder, executions, and the war of aggression in Yemen.
Erdoğan's right-wing party is trying to punish rape victims by making them marry the rapists.
Several Islamic countries have such laws and have had them for a long time.
The right-wing fanatic that attacked reported Owen Jones has been convicted. He writes that the UK has not figured out a way of sentencing fanatics that will deter or avoid future violence.
Qatar will make an improvement in the laws that now effectively trap foreign workers in the country, but a new requirement might have almost the same effect as the requirement being eliminated.
A campaign in Rajasthan aims to make it acceptable for women not to cover their faces in public.
I am in favor of encouraging women to go unveiled if they wish. However, I worry that requiring them to unveil in order to vote could have the harmful effect of discouraging them from voting.
*Republicans push to weaken court that caught them rigging elections.*
In effect, they plan to gerrymander the election of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
The Guardian will reject advertising from fossil fuel extraction companies.
The Supreme Court has approved the bully's scheme to block non-rich people from immigrating.
*Who Will Protect My Right NOT to Pay for Your Child’s Religious Education?*
Decriminalization of sex work in New Zealand has protected prostitutes from violence from all sides. This makes it safer to continue doing sex work. Paradoxically, it has also removed an obstacle that hampered moving out of sex work. The organized sex workers have overcame efforts to criminalize their clients.
*The for-profit U.S. healthcare system is so broken that a growing number of people who are fortunate enough to have private insurance coverage are still unable to afford doctor visits and other essential services due to soaring costs — leaving a larger [fraction] of Americans with unmet medical needs today than there were two decades ago.*
The article says "larger number", but lest you think that simply reflects the increase in population, here we see that the fraction has increased too.
The share of adults aged 18-64 who were unable to afford to see a doctor rose by nearly a third—-from 11% to nearly 16%—-between 1998 and 2017.
3% of the current US military budget could pay to end starvation for human beings worldwide.
Modi's right-wing religious nationalist party, the BJP, is trying to pass itself as the heirs of Dr Ambedkar, even though it is the enemy of everything he fought for except small details.
The BJP is a Hinduismist party (Hinduismists are to Hinduism as Islamists are to Islam). Caste prejudice is deeply rooted in Hinduism so Hinduismists cannot help perpetuating caste prejudice.
India has little traditional of liberalism — that is, championing freedom to disagree peacefully and to advocate different views.
(satire) *Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated Monday that the United States has overwhelming and undeniable evidence to support going to war with whoever.*
*"Like a Kleptocracy": Investigation Details How [Republican] Lawmakers Cashed In on [the conman's] Tax Cuts.*
Byung-Chul Han contended in 2018 that the digital surveillance society seduces people into building their own panopticon.
If you want to buy his book, or any book, make sure you cannot be identified as the purchaser. And don't accept an e-book if it tramples your freedom.
In a reversal of what 19th-century socialists believed, surveillance capitalists sells citizens the rope to tie themselves up in.
In 2019, Shoshana Zuboff described the system of surveillance capitalism. She explained how this new system of tyranny functions and how it developed.
But what do we do about this?
The first part of the solution is free software — we users can make sure it doesn't spy on us. But that addresses only the programs we run on our own programmable computers. To go beyond that, we need laws to prohibit systems from collecting people's personal data.
Don't fall for foolish substitutes that wouldn't fix the problem, such as the idea that "you should own your own data". People would sell the use of that data for a pittance, if they don't see a path towards truly changing the surveillance society.
*Sick of Big Pharma’s pricing, health insurers pledge $55M for cheap generics.*
Creating a drug company with other motives aside from profit is a good thing to do. Its competition could hold back other companies from gouging. However, there is a danger that the other companies could get out of that business or merge. That could lead to even less competition.
I hope the founders have taken very firm measures to prevent this company from being co-opted later and turned into a monopolistic super-gouger.
Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, facing possible extradition to the US, got support from protesters at the court house. One of the protesters said he was paid to appear and had been told it was for a music video.
It's not only Chinese businesses that do this sort of thing. Not long ago, Senator Warren spoke to a group of black voters and met with a protest organized (though they didn't publicly say so) by an organization that campaigns for charter schools. I suspect that organization is funded somehow by businesses that extract money from charter schools.
The UK government wants to prohibit "possession of terrorist propaganda".
The UK is already taking a stab at labeling Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace as violent extremists. Prohibition of their publications would be only a few more steps further down this path.
Furthermore, prohibiting the possession of some kind of writings or art, no matter what kind, puts people in danger.
* Misguided assumptions about race are going mainstream, but hard facts can help you combat entrenched attitudes.*
In particular, one can't deduce anything about large groups of people from the few who are so atypical as to be finalists in an Olympic sport.
A video recording shows that the bully discussed dismissing Ambassador Yovanovitch with Lev Parnas in 2018.
This refutes several of his lies. It may challenge some Republicans' capacity for blackwhiting.
(The term "blackwhiting" comes from the book, 1984, where it meant telling lies even though they are obviously false.)
*Interim Bolivian Government Taps the Same Lobby Firm Hired to Sell the Coup in Honduras.*
EFF: The charges against Glenn Greenwald, for reporting on corruption in the Brazilian prosecution of Lula, are an example of a dangerous practice: stretching vague "computer crime" laws to attack the reporters and activists. The same was done to Aaron Swartz.
The expression "playing the race card" is the racists' excuse to bury the issue of racism.
For burying the issue of gender bias, the expression is "You must be a feminist." Meanwhile, the supporters of plutocracy say you are "trying to start a class war" if you talk about their War for Poverty.
The giant vampire flower of Sumatra is endangered due to habitat destruction, and needs protection.
Don't worry, it can't attack people. It only sucks sap from plants, as mistletoe does.
*Bernie Sanders’s Lonely 2017 Battle to Stop Iran Sanctions and Save the Nuclear Deal.*
Over 100 human rights defenders in Colombia were murdered in 2019. Likewise in 2018, and it hasn't slowed down this year.
When the article refers to the government's "military-focused response", I suspect that really means the paramilitaries, Colombia's unofficially state-sponsored terrorist group.
Pompeo blew his top in an NPR interview in response to questions about Ambassador Yovanovitch.
*TV shows erase racism, normalize police misconduct and leave women and [racially disprivileged people] of the creative process, study finds.*
The American Nazi terrorist organization, "the Base", has been exposed by leaks, and some of its members arrested.
The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has enabled the willows, aspens, eagles, songbirds, beavers, foxes and badgers to recover. The elk, deer and coyotes are now kept in check.
Lebanese protesters accuse thugs of torturing protesters.
An effort to replace illegal gold mining with cacao farming in the Yanomami reservation at the North of Brazil.
The US wants to deport Omar Ameen to Iraq, where he would probably be killed, accusing him of having committed murder there for PISSI. In fact, it has good evidence that he was a refugee in Turkey at the time, but it is keeping this secret in the name of "national security".
Seeing their parents occasionally naked at home seems to be good for children in many ways.
There are suspicions that China suppressed information about the coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan until too late to contain it there.
On the other hand, as long as the epidemic was small, quarantining an entire city may have been politically impossible even in China.
US citizens: call on your (present or former) university to reject face recognition.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act.
This would undo some of the damage that the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act, thus launching the modern era of voter suppression.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Massachusetts state legislators to pass a law to avoid helping the deportation thugs harass immigrants
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on senators to remove press restrictions in the impeachment trial
If you sign, please spread the word!
(satire) *[The bully] Makes Powerful Pro-Life Case By Speaking About The Joys Of Neglecting A Child.*
*Over 200,000 Iraqis protested against the U.S. military presence in their country on Friday, demanding American forces leave.*
The US forces should leave. They are not doing Iraqis any good, now. Having betrayed the Syrian Kurds, they cannot be very effective against PISSI. The Iraqi Army could not face PISSI in 2014, but maybe it has learned how to do so.
London thugs will set up face recognition systems on streets, to check the face of each person that passes by.
They say that each system will have a specific list of suspects' faces to look for. However, today's face recognition systems are inaccurate. If a suspect in the list is black, the system is likely to trigger on other blacks who resemble the suspect. The thugs will stop them and identify them, and determine that they are not that suspect. This does not imply they will be allowed to proceed down the street. They could be searched, arrested, whatever.
In effect, these systems can provide an excuse to stop large numbers of people "for cause".
It doesn't go all the way to China, but it takes a big step in that direction.
*Greta Thunberg: Davos leaders ignored climate activists' demands.*
Biden and Buttigieg keep misrepresenting Medicare for All in order to attack it. This goes well beyond a mere difference of opinion: it is dishonest, and makes them unfit to be president.
Sanders or Warren for president!
Kindergarten in the US (at least in some places) has been converted into rigorous training that most children can't handle, and teachers can't bear to make them suffer.
The article talks about "standards" that require this. I am curious where those standards come from. If from government, is it the US government, some state governments, some cities, what?
The campaign for racist censorship has launched a new battle, targeting a book about Hispanics that live near the US-Mexico border, written by someone who is basically a gringo.
We must reject any attempt to claim that someone has no right to write about a certain subject. However, if the book repeats stereotypes, that is a valid criticism of it. And it is entirely legitimate to criticize publishers and demand that they publish and promote the writing of Hispanics that live near the US-Mexico border.
Please don't buy this (or any) book from Amazon. For your freedom's sake, always pay cash for books, and without identifying yourself. And never accept commercial e-books that impose DRM, surveillance, or an antisocial contract that forbids sharing copies.
*The Assange Precedent: The Spark That Lit the Fire in the War on Journalism.*
*Emails show Trump and appointees tried to craft a narrative that forest protection efforts are responsible for wildfires.*
*Frequency of intense floods and storms could double in 13 years, says study.*
Floods have caused a food shortage in East Africa.
*The real issue of 'representation' isn’t that there aren’t enough powerful women. It’s that what is represented as feminism is actually corporatism.*
I've long had the feeling that focusing on how many women are executives of large companies is a distraction from the issues that affect the lives of millions of non-rich women for whom a steady 9-to-5 job would be a dream.
*Most political unrest has one big root cause: soaring inequality.*
UN Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard is keeping the heat on Salafi Arabia's acting king.
The EU is pushing to standardize the connectors on phone chargers. Apple is fighting this.
An experiment concluded that glyphosate-containing pesticides damage human DNA, but pure glyphosate does not. They attribute the damage to the presence of secret secondary ingredients.
A Monsanto scientist was aware of this as far back as 2002.
I conclude that all pesticide should be sold with full disclosure of chemicals included. If the manufacturers complain about not having trade secrets, the proper reply is "Tough! People's lives are at stake."
*Millionaires like me should pay more taxes. Giving to charity is a fig leaf.*
Egypt's vicious military rulers jail people for the slightest criticism, and try to silence exiles by taking their relatives hostage.
That regime has the full support of the US government.
I would not feel safe visiting Egypt; I urge everyone to stay away.
New York City now requires retail businesses to accept cash.
It is true that rejecting cash discriminates against poor people who don’t have a bank account or a credit card. If you are not poor, that problem may not affect you — but your privacy is not safe.
Poland enters a constitutional crisis as the Supreme Court rejects the legislature's attempt to punish judges at will.
Tories propose to reduce the UK's energy efficiency standards for new buildings.
Why would they do this? To serve business, or course — but which and how? I suppose builders would spend less and profit more, but I am surprised that the increased profit would pay for the sort of lobbying needed to win this.
*The persecuted Rohingya now have legal protection, but will it amount to anything?*
(satire) "As you address members of this deliberative body, please bear in mind that nothing you say or do will have any effect on the completely predetermined outcome of these proceedings," said Chief Justice Roberts to the senators.
There is evidence that the conman's inaugural committee gave some of its funds to the conman's own business.
*Humanity Risking 'Global Disaster' as Material Consumption Passes 100 Billion Tons Annually.*
The EPA's new Dirty Water Rule aims to give some lucky Americans once again the chance to see a river catch fire. However, the most common result will be toxic drinking water.
(satire) *In response to ongoing complaints of unexpected outages and subpar customer service response times, cable provider Comcast debuted a new bundle deal Thursday that includes 24/7 live-in technical support.*
The bully admitted his plan to cut funds for Medicare.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the "doomsday clock" at 100 seconds to midnight, representing the dangers of global heating, pollution and resource exhaustion as well as possible nuclear war.
Venezuela's coup-supporting opposition has been thwarted, and visible US support has driven Venezuelans away from it. Now the political division is between supporters of Chavismo and Maduro, and supporters of reforming Chavismo to move on from Maduro.
Italy's efforts to prosecute people-smugglers have gone astray. They concentrate on the boat drivers, who are usually migrants conscripted into that job, and can't get evidence to identify the real smugglers, who stay in Africa.
US citizens: Call on Microsoft to liberate the code of Windows 7.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone: state your support for Glenn Greenwald.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support modifying the PAT RIOT Act to reduce government power for warrantless collection of data, in Section 215.
The bill under consideration would affect section 215, which allows the FBI to collect almost any data base of personal data with "national security letters". The FISA court admitted that it was unable to exercise effective control over the FBI's use of these powers. I think section 215 should be eliminated entirely.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: call on NYC Speaker Corey Johnson to enforce regulations on facial recognition technology.
If you sign, please spread the word!
We should prohibit face recognition network companies, but we need to go further than that. Some years ago, I called for something stronger: to prohibit cameras that transmit images over the net more than once in a while.
This prevents not only the purpose-built face recognition networks but also cameras that could be incorporated into such networks.
*Snowden Warns Targeting of Greenwald and Assange Shows Governments 'Ready to Stop the Presses—If They Can'.*
2C of global heating will eliminate over half the world's vineyards.
With a 4C rise in global temperature, I don't think anyone will have attention to spare for making or drinking wine. They will be too busy trying to find a little butter to put on their insufficient bread.
Pompeo is now using lies to attack NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly,
in whose interview he blew up when he couldn't intimidate her facts.
Pakistan has arrested a leading equal rights activist and accused him of advocating unacceptable political views. Specifically, criticizing the country's constitution, on grounds of justice.
Whether we agree with his position or not (I don't know enough about Pakistan's constitution to have an opinion), we should defend his right to advocate that position.
The cheater's deal with China will allow China-grown chicken meat to be sold in the US without labeling, and with no inspection except China's untrustworthy inspection. Disease is sure to come with them.
Robert Reich: Republican senators will not remove the bullshitter from office because that would require courage and integrity. We will have to remove him in November.
Increased poverty and the danger of becoming homeless inspire people to the short-term thinking whereby they protest against plans to reduce subsidies for fossil fuels.
Ironically, right-wing planet-roaster governments use this to win support from the poor. Once elected, what they give those supporters is even deeper poverty.
In other words, electing Sanders is the way to curb global heating soon.
Waste brine from frack wells in some places carries a very high load of radium. If it gets into dust (particulates) in the air, people can breath it in and develop cancer from its radioactivity many years later.
The desperate search for new sources to release more atmospheric CO2 is bringing us to frack and ruin.
*Google’s ads just look like search results now.*
In effect, when Google Search started offering advertising, that was the first step on the path to total corruption.
The article exaggerates slightly. The user can distinguish the ads by a slight difference between two icons.
*Police called on man for attempting to deposit checks while black.*
Warning! What if they do "reinvent every industry" in the next 10 years?
Change qua change is not necessarily bad. But if this "reinvention" is done under a plutocratic regime, the plutocrats will make this an opportunity to give business more power to get away with mistreating customers, and more "flexibility" to tie workers' lives in knots.
The specific change that Diamandis yearns for would create a surveillance dystopia. People will say it is "impossible" to live without participating in those dis-services, but the first condition of participation will be "consenting" to be tracked. Further conditions will control many aspects of people's lives -- for instance, requiring them to buy from particular allied companies, use certain products, not use certain other products, do exercise on command, or allow video and audio recording inside their homes.
Companies are rushing to mine metals from the ocean floor.
This will increase pollution of the ocean and endanger the unusual species that live near the undersea volcanoes that deposit metals.
*Southern Peace Activists Help Soldiers Become Conscientious Objectors.*
Calling for mobilizing to fight global heating as we mobilized to win World War II.
The effective approach for leading youth away from fanaticism is a positive one, but the UK plans to step up the ineffective punitive approach.
On the other hand, the punitive approach will work great for scapegoating and boosting the right wing.
The commercial orientation of universities tends to turn them into mere professional training.
Increased pressure on young people, the big gap between the good jobs and the bad one, leads many of them to gladly focus everything on training for a job. Some of the benefit that college used to bring about disappears. Studying at home through proprietary software using rented textbooks, with little contact with other students let alone teachers, will eliminate another piece of it.
*'Mexico has become [the bully's] wall': how AMLO became an immigration enforcer.*
Pacific Ocean’s rising acidity causes Dungeness crabs’ shells to dissolve.
Eventually all crustaceans and corals will be wiped out by the excess CO2 in the water.
Palestine has no allies that will strongly resist Israeli annexation/occupation.
However, no Arab country showed support for the bully's annexation plan.
US citizens: call on U.S. banks to cease funding drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for abolition of the Electoral College.
If you call, please spread the word!
85% of Americans want a transition away from fossil fuels. The main disagreement is about how fast. Around 45% want to hurry.
Ralph Nader: *Trump Is an Unparalleled Threat to Safety and Security [of every American].*
several meanings of "deep state" and whether they relate to the US.
*Harvard Law School Students Disrupt Recruitment Event, Calling on Major Law Firm to #DropExxon.*
*Senate Urged to Convict Trump After GAO Says White House Broke Law by Freezing Ukraine Aid.*
Forest ash washing into rivers in Australia are killing fish. In some places they have killed all the fish.
Scientists say it could take decades for the river to recover, but that projected recovery is not guaranteed. In a decade or two, there is likely to be another such fire every few years, so the rivers will always be full of ash.
Or perhaps the minerals lost in the ash will stunt regrowth of forests entirely. Maybe there won't be enough plant life to produce much ash.
*Stella Nyanzi, imprisoned in Uganda after writing poem about president’s mother’s vagina, lambastes regime's "fear of writers".* She has just been given a PEN award in the name of freedom of expression.
I can imagine that that poem was rather insulting in tone. The point is that freedom of expression includes the freedom to offend people, even insult people. We must not gag people merely because we disagree with or resent what they say.
*EU eyes temporary ban on facial recognition in public places.*
This could be a first step towards proceeding beyond the GDPR, which are insufficient.
*Biggest food brands 'failing goals to banish palm oil deforestation'.*
Guatemala is serving the US government by blocking refugees from Honduras from trying to reach the US.
Guatemala suffered civil war for decades under a repressive governments that obeyed the US, and its citizens still try to flee the violence.
Lev Parnas said that his efforts to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden were explicitly known to the conman — the two discussed them on the phone. Barr, Bolton and Giuliani also knew.
Videos of responses to real victims of street violence showed no sign of a "bystander effect".
The idea of a bystander effect was launched by reporting in the New York Times of the murder of Kitty Genovese. Wikipedia says that the New York Times admitted in 2016 that the original story was fabricated — the reporter did not find evidence of a bystander effect after all.
Bruce Schneier: 5G mobile networks are so pervasively insecure that it hardly matters who built the hardware — people and countries are screwed anyway.
In South Korea, graduates need to study how to fake out AI systems used to choose who to hire.
The UK has made no changes in its auditing system in two years since a major government contractor went bankrupt while its directors concealed what was happening.
The directors made out handsomely from this. Perhaps laws should be changed so that directors cannot do that in the future -- but unscrupulous rich people wouldn't want those laws. Do you think Tories would ever pass such laws?
If you are having something made in China, avoiding forced labor is not going to be easy.
*Gun Violence Isn't a Problem — it's actually 5 Problems, with Different Solutions.* Not all, but most deaths due to guns, fit into 5 specific patterns, and it might be possible to prevent many of them with specific actions.
Fast, efficient, domain-limited voice-command recognition can operate locally without sending personal data to anyone.
This technology can in principle respect privacy, but that doesn't guarantee it will respect privacy. It could transmit data just so that a company gets personal data. How can we make sure it doesn't?
Former state fire commissioner Greg Mullins tried in April to warn Australia's planet-roaster prime minister that "adapting to climate change" is insufficient to avert disaster.
The minister did not pay attention.
US deportation thugs often ignore court orders not to deport someone. Especially for Iranians.
The hypocrisy and dishonesty of a "moderate" Republican senator has a good chance of preventing her reelection. Overcoming the damage she has done will be more difficult, and I suppose she will be paid well for her service.
*'A Fact-Free Sham Trial Perpetrated in the Dead of Night': McConnell's Trump Cover-Up in Senate Begins.*
Israel labeled around 1/5 of the territory of the West Bank as "fire zones" for the army, to create a pretext to force most Palestinians out of those areas.
The US press has mostly ignored the report that the bully assassinated Soleimani at the request of Republican senators wanting a distraction from his trial.
He could have been lying when he said this. His supporters could have made it up. But it also may be true. Indeed, maybe the senators asked him to do it.
*Addameer Collects Hard Evidence on Torture and Ill-Treatment Committed against Palestinian [prisoners] at Israeli Interrogation Centers.*
*If the [US] minimum wage kept pace with productivity growth since 1968 it would be over $24 an hour today.*
Since 1968, it has not even kept up with inflation, let alone productivity growth.
The second article refutes some of the plutocratist arguments claiming this problem is inevitable.
African gray parrots tend to help other African gray parrots even when they don't expect any direct benefit from doing so.
*Warning of 'Environmental Ruin and With It a Human Tragedy,' Report Details Triple Threat to Coral Reefs.*
*Mayfly populations have fallen 50% since 2012.* They are an important food source for other animals, so their populations are falling also. *We Risk Living in an 'Empty World' If Assault on Nature Not Stopped, Warns UN Biodiversity Chief.*
"People's lives depend on biodiversity in ways that are not always apparent or appreciated. Human health ultimately depends on ecosystem services: the availability of fresh water, fuel, food sources."
Not-exactly-natural disasters cost 3 trillion dollars in the last decade, up from 1.8 trillion in the previous decade.
Global heating effects are responsible for much of the increase.
A survey found that 57% of Australians have been affected directly by the fires.
The fires are still spreading, so the number may yet increase.
A quarter of the population has experienced medical problems from the fires.
After removal of dangerously flammable insulation from two housing projects in London, heating has become so expensive that the residents are starving and/or freezing.
The local government needs to replace the insulation with something not flammable.
Unexpected levels of PFAS chemicals have been found in water supplies in various US cities.
These chemicals do not break down naturally, and can do various kinds of damage. No one knows yet what levels of them are safe.
Brazilian prosecutors want to charge Glenn Greenwald for publishing information, obtained by crackers, about the corruption of Brazilian prosecutors.
This is not exactly parallel to the US case against Julian Assange (since the information he published was leaked), but they are mostly parallel, and they pose similar threats to freedom of the press.
US border thugs forced foreign student Shahab Dehghani to fly back out, defying a court order saying that for the moment he could stay in the US.
The US and France agreed to push for an agreement on taxing internet sales.
If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, Clinton said she will not endorse him.
I don't think Clinton has an obligation to endorse a candidate simply for having the Democratic nomination. But why does she not want to endorse Sanders? I conjecture it is because he is progressive — and she is not. We saw in 2016 that she was a dyed-in-the-wool corporatist.
Former Clinton supporters ask, *Why is Clinton amplifying destructive myths about Sanders and his supporters just weeks before the primaries begin?*
I conjecture the same answer for this question too.
Psychologist and torturer James Mitchell testified about his torture for the CIA, saying he was so determined to ensure that the US used the best possible torture that he felt obligated to carry it out himself.
The American College of Physicians has endorsed Medicare for All.
*Does Letting [thugs] Enter Your House Give Them Permission To Wreck It?*
The doctrine of "qualified immunity" assures that when thugs commit mayhem in a way that no court has ever ruled on, no court will ever rule on it and they will always get away with it.
Tilli Buchanan faces charges of "lewdness" in Utah for stripping to the waist, along with her husband, inside their house, while his children were present.
If convicted, she could be put on the sex offender's list. As this shows, people can be put on the sex offender's list for things that are not very wrong. Some didn't actually do anything to anyone.
*Countries from Britain to Greece are guilty of democratic backsliding.* It is not only Hungary and Poland.
George Monbiot: *Police say climate groups such as Extinction Rebellion are a ‘threat’. They’d have done the same for the suffragettes and Martin Luther King.*
The most violent of extremists are those whose plans will bring about the premature death of hundreds of millions of people: the planet roasters.
Gangs which splintered off rebel groups are now enslaving everyone who lives in the llano region around the Venezuela-Colombia border.
*Rising temperatures put more US workers at risk of dying from heat.*
A interview with the president of Planned Parenthood.
She discusses the right-wing attacks that target many aspects of sexual and reproductive medicine for women.
When Biden first ran for the senate, in 1972, he adopted progressive positions. By 1982, he was working with Republicans against Social Security.
*'A perfect storm': US census imperiled by Trump rhetoric and growing distrust.*
For Republicans, corrupting the census is one more method of voter suppression. They know that it will reduce the representation of areas where people that face discrimination live.
Global heating is increasing wildfires in Europe, too; even in the Arctic.
The fires in Sweden in August 2018 were the worst ever observed there.
*Unsustainable use of resources is wrecking the planet but recycling is falling, report finds.*
US citizens: phone your senators to urge them to vote to block war with Iran.
If you call, please spread the word!
Some UK teachers say how they would respond to commands to report students to the government for supporting Extinction Rebellion.
Taking women's reports of violence and danger seriously could protect everyone from grievous harm, including the Flint water supply kind of harm as well as mass shootings.
*Greta Thunberg tells leaders at Davos to heed global heating science.*
*As [the bully] goes on trial, so does the conscience of the Republican party.*
*The case for … cities where you're the sensor, not the thing being sensed.*
Poor men in their 50s in England today are considerably less well than comparable men who were in their 50s four decades ago.
Australia has stripped a woman (perhaps a supporter of PISSI) in Syria of her Australian citizenship.
The Australian government backdated the penalty so that her last two children, born in Syria, will not be Australian citizens either. They are, apparently, stateless.
China's birth rate continues to fall. This will be inconvenient in the next few decades, then tremendously beneficial in the long term for China's land, water and air, and may enable the smaller number of Chinese to escape with less damage through a smaller global disaster.
Iran is holding Kylie Moore-Gilbert in prison because she refused to work as a spy for Iran.
I am sad to point out that the US has punished people simply for refusing to work as spies.
AirBnB is canceling customers' accounts for engaging in certain kinds of sexual activities not carried out in an AirBnB room.
This is a little taste of the developing US social credit system. We must protect anonymity.
*'Modi is afraid': women take lead in India's citizenship protests.*
A scenario of justice implemented with machine learning.
California's governor intervened so that the homeless mothers (with their families) who squatted in a house in Oakland will be allowed to buy it.
Fixing one instance of bullying by a company is nice, but what we really need is to prevent such situations from arising again.
*The European Union risks wasting €29bn of taxpayers’ money … in gas projects which will be unnecessary under Europe's climate action plans.*
I wish this were nothing worse than a waste of money.
Operating the Guantanamo prison has perverted the US military and legal system in ways that have spread beyond Guantanamo.
You may enjoy my song parody, Guantanamero.
About teaching students about the causes of US war, the professed reasons for them, and resistance to these wars.
On learning the skill of listening.
The article advertises a book. If you want to buy it, please defend the right of anonymity by buying it anonymously with cash.
*Countering Annual Whitewash of His Legacy, Progressives Remember the 'Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Imperialist' Martin Luther King Jr.*
Indigenous Australians propose to use their traditional fire management technique — small controlled burns — to prevent large fires. The problem is that global heating effects make that harder to do.
Before English colonization, the aboriginals kept forests much thinner using fire. It was easy to walk through the forests in those days, with spaces between trees and little underbrush.
*Citing Threat From Armed [right-wing extremist] Groups, Virginia Gov. Declares Emergency and Bans Guns at State Capitol.*
Canada's Supreme Court ruled that the province of British Columbia cannot block the Trans Mountain planet-roaster pipeline. Canada agreed to a business-supremacy treaty with China that requires building the Unkinder Morgan pipeline. The penalty for not doing so could be even more billions than the cost of building the pipeline, and the government might pay it secretly.
Seven questions expose the ways mainstream media implement their bias against progressives.
The mainstream media are big corporations owned by giant corporations. Naturally they support the policies that serve giant corporations, on the issues that those care about.
Shipment of live animals between countries is dangerous for everyone — many bring infections with them.
China ended manufacture of the greenhouse gas HFC-23, but emissions have increased despite that.
Nasty behavior by thugs inspires distrust, and this seems to lead to increased gun violence — not only by thugs.
On a raid of a nail bar accused of enslaving workers.
University professors nowadays are regularly treated by the university with the same abuses that the staff of fast-food joints have long had to suffer.
*Climate refugees can't be returned home, says landmark UN human rights ruling.*
*Humans risk living in an empty world, warns UN biodiversity chief.*
I think that is an exaggeration. Surely some weeds and cockroaches will survive.
*Big oil is the new big tobacco. Congress must use its power to investigate.*
The Tory victory is rapidly increasing the price of housing. Rich people now feel secure that they will be able to exploit the poor with high rents.
Scientists at the Environmental Poisoning Agency say that the Republican officials at the top have excluded them from the process of developing new rules to facilitate poisoning the US.
I wish that statement were satire, but it is true.
Many museums are changing to expose children to new kinds of joy via learning and exploring,
However, I am not taken with the child's idea that "objects have rights"; it seems to be an instance of the childish mistake of personifying everything.
Objects cannot have rights because they are unable to exercise any rights. To do that requires feelings, wishes, preferences, and a way to express them. If we can ever make objects which have those faculties, such as are familiar in science fiction, they might deserve to be considered persons — but they don't exist now.
This is an instance of a gratuitous conceptual rigidity, according to which the only way to conclude that a non-person ought to be protected somehow is to say it has rights. Thus, we can't simply protect a river from pollution, we would have to say the river "has rights."
Experience shows that laws against polluting rivers will do the job, given political will to uphold them. Absent that will, defining that protection as "rights of rivers" won't help much; governments that don't value justice often allow the rights of human beings to be trampled.
A company plans to track people on streets all around the world by facial recognition.
The article mentions secondary ways this could be used to oppress and mistreat people, by stalkers and foreign governments. It tiptoes around the biggest threats: that companies and your own government could do this.
My recommendations would make this system's operation illegal.
DiEM25 members are voting on a proposal regarding "Tech Sovereignty".
The proposal is inadequate because it fails to tackle the crucial issues: moving government agencies to free software and stopping the collection of data.
Removing the bias from Oxford's admissions process.
Sanders tells New York Times editorial board: *Trump's Racist Demagoguery Only Works Because Too Many Americans Feel Establishment Has 'Failed Them',*
A stolen Afghan statue from the 2th century AD has been found. It will be returned to the museum in Kabul to await destruction by the Taliban.
The US Space Force represents an eager plan to extend war into more theaters rather than try to limit space arms.
(satire) *"This new evidence proves beyond a doubt that Bernie Sanders strongly wants to lead a nation that has repeatedly enabled, supported, and encouraged misogyny …"
(satire) *Stephen Miller Hurt At Being Passed Over For Job Stalking Female Ambassador.*
*Grand Jury Backs Murder Charges Against Houston [thug] Who Lied to Justify a Deadly Drug Raid.*
Other thugs may be charged too.
*The Missouri Library Association says it is monitoring a bill put forward in the state House by a Republican lawmaker, which, if passed, could create committees across the state with the power to jail librarians for distributing material the panels deem "inappropriate."*
This is an example of the general conclusion that "inappropriate" describes a judgment call, so we must not use that as grounds to punish or restrict anyone.
Public Citizen: The New NAFTA isn't very good, but it is a lot less bad than the old one.
In my view, in order for a trade treaty to avoid being a business-supremacy treaty, it would need to avoid helping companies become larger and develop more political power.
Bogus Johnson is, surprisingly, not going all out to crush the poor and weak.
*Montessori education could reduce the advantage gap between rich and poor, but it's only available to the rich.*
Society should make sure every child gets the education and other requisites to realize per potential. Denying this to anyone is not only unfair, it's a waste.
Virginia's new Democratic legislature voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, but it is not effective because the deadline passed in 1982. The process will have to start over again in Congress, and that will require taking control of the Senate.
Leatherback turtles, pikas, monarch butterflies, puffins, polar bears: each of those species is falling victim to an ecological disconnect that puts its survival at risk.
China is pushing hard to reduce plastic waste.
The PLO calls on the European Union to recognize the State of Palestine.
Exposure to sugar caused changes in pigs' brains similar to those caused by opioids.
It would be harmful to ban sugar — just as it is harmful to ban other recreational drugs — but it could be helpful to change social systems to reduce the social pressure to use them.
Australian planners recommend buying the land from people whose isolated houses in the forest were burned.
This will surely reduce property damage and deaths from future fires. It may also make containing those fires a little easier, as fire-fighting will not be complicated by the wish to save houses where there are no houses.
However, over the decades as the fires get ever worse, that won't make a noticeable difference. Short-term improvements are good, but we must not let them steal the show from what we need for the long term: to curb global heating.
US citizens: call on Congress to defund the bully's border wall.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on lawmakers to preserve the right to encryption.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Parts of the US sanctions against Iran are hitting US citizens and residents of Iranian origin.
Aside from the question of whether US economic warfare against Iran is necessary, or makes any sense, it clearly makes no sense to stop parents in Iran from paying their children's school in the US. The bully has introduced hatred into the issue, and officials seem to think that anyone that hurts or rejects some Iranian is good.
The IRS has terminated its commitment not to release its own tax-filing software. Does this matter?
When the article says "free", it means "gratis" — zero price. The gratis digital filing options offered by companies almost surely require the user to run a nonfree program. (Can anyone check the facts for me?). In addition, they require trusting the company with your personal data.
A gratis digital filing option from the IRS won't require trusting a company with personal data, but no other improvement is assured.
The IRS would be able to release it as free/libre software, but we can't expect that to happen by itself. More likely it will release that software in the unjust way most software is released. A nonfree program is equally unjust whether it comes from a company or a government agency.
We will need to urge, perhaps pressure, the IRS to respect taxpayers' computing freedom by releasing free/libre tax-filing software.
*Kimberly Gardner, first African American circuit court attorney in St Louis, accuses city and police union of conspiring to remove her from office.* She is suing them and has the support of other black prosecutors.
The UK government classed nonviolent Greenpeace and PETA along with Nazis.
*Beetles and fire kill dozens of 'indestructible' giant sequoia trees.*
Mature, healthy trees are proving vulnerable in ways that didn't happen before.
*Oakland’s Moms 4 Housing Were Evicted by a Giant Corporation That Runs National Home-Flipping Operation.*
There is no reason to allow companies to buy large numbers of houses, and no reason to allow a company to conceal who its owners are. In particular, there is no reason to allow a company with concealed owners to buy real estate at all.
*Choking point: how Australia's bushfires have left its citizens struggling for air.*
US pesticide companies have persistently manipulated the media and science to prevent recognition of how dangerous neonicotinoid pesticides are to various kinds of animals.
A constant effort may succeed in protecting the honeybee population, but no one is trying to protect all the wild insects that get exposed to the same pesticides.
The danger may not be limited to insects. If neonicotinoids can cause birth defects in deer, we cannot rule out a priori that they might do so in humans. And since these compounds last for many years, we may be accumulating more of them every year.
The UK sentences Islamist extremists to longer prison terms than right-wing extremists, for similar crimes. Three times as long, on the average.
The UK does not fully recognize freedom of speech, and some of the crimes in question involve posting extremist opinions and nothing more. I condemn those opinions, but imprisoning people for their opinions is dangerous too.
Putin's plan to reduce the president's power seems designed to transfer the power to other offices which he could hold for the rest of his life.
*Brazil culture secretary forced out after appearing to paraphrase Nazi Goebbels.*
Bolsonaro often appoints ministers for sharing his extremist ideology.
*Germany will pay billions to speed up coal-fired power plant shutdowns.*
It is important to shut down the coal-burning plants, but the idea that electric utilities should not have to pay any part of the cost of this change seems unfair to me. If it is a matter of supporting the poorer eastern regions of Germany, the support should go to those regions and their people, not to electric utilities.
Florida's citizens voted to allow ex-cons convicted of felonies to vote, so the Republican legislature found an excuse to block 80% of them: requiring them to pay all their fines and court fees first.
There is no record of what any ex-con owes, so those who wish to pay these fines and fees have no way to make sure they have done so.
It looks like nothing will convince Australian PM Scott Morrison to stop trying to convert Australia and the rest of the world to ashes. How can Australia bypass his power and protect itself?
Senator Paul threatens that if other senators call Bolton as a witness, he will call Hunter Biden as a witness.
Hunter Biden's testimony, whatever he may say, will be irrelevant to the question of the conman's guilt or innocence. Biden may have done something corrupt in Ukraine — it would not surprise me — but the conman did not seem to have evidence of this. If he had evidence that Biden had committed some crime, he had many legitimate ways available to act on that. The military aid shakedown was private political manipulation, not a legitimate channel of law enforcement.
Wendell Potter apologizes for helping inventing a powerful message which US insurance companies use to oppose universal medical care (Medicare for All): the mostly-false claim that the existing system gives Americans some meaningful "choice".
Seattle Bans Foreign-Influenced Corporations From Spending in Local Elections.
More precisely, corporations with over a certain minimum percentage of foreign stockholders are not allowed to do that.
Really, all corporations should be barred from political spending. Corporations are not beings; they have no feelings or wishes. They are not entitled to human rights.
Everyone: call on companies that sponsor the Olympic Games to ask for elimination of Rule 50 which prohibits political gestures by athletes.
*Backtracking in light of recent polls that indicate public dismay over his handling of Iran, President Trump announced Wednesday he was moving forward with a plan to reverse the killing of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.*
Released documents seem to show the bully's henchmen talking about possible violence against Ambassador Yovanovitch.
Democrats say the bully is concealing documents pertinent to proving the case against him.
*UN sounds alarm over unprecedented levels of hunger in southern Africa.*
Since this involves flooding and drought, I suppose it's climate mayhem.
*Key Architect of 2003 Iraq War Is Now a Key Architect of Trump Iran Policy.*
With only one letter of difference between Iraq and Iran, why distinguish? Fight one, fight 'em all!
Good thing there are no countries Irao and Irap for the US to fight.
*In a sense, this moment calls for Sanders and Warren supporters to be better than their candidates, who've descended into an avoidably harsh conflict that hugely benefits corporate power and corporate Democrats.*
Arguing that BlackRock's climate pledge represents an attempt to forestall the sort of fossil fuel legislation that we need for those companies.
Putin announced a plan to transfer some political power from the presidency to the legislature.
The article calls this a "power grab" but I don't see how he personally could gain any power from this. Although I am not inclined to trust Putin, this seems to be a plan to make sure that his successors as president don't have the same power he has had.
Unusual heat in a large area of the Pacific Ocean seems to have killed around a million seabirds in 2015. They died because of a shortage of the small fish they eat, one of many consequences of heat in the ocean.
*Taliban offer to stand down fighters to restart peace talks with US.*
It appears that YouTube gives gratis advertising to global heating denialism.
Before handing decisions (even about how to treat individual humans) to AIs, the previous step is to tell the human officials or service representatives to follow rules like AIs. This is already common and we can see how badly it malfunctions.
3 million Syrians are trapped in Idlib province as Assad's forces slowly advance and squeeze them tighter.
Assad may kill many of them if he captures them.
The offensive includes systematically attacking hospitals and clinics.
It is unconstitutional for the US government to prioritize someone for deportation because of dislike for per political statements and activities. Activist Jean Montrevil is suing for the right to return from Haiti.
Instagram (one of Facebook's mouths) deletes postings simply for containing photos of General Soleimani.
This reflects badly on the freedom of speech which the US defends.
In 10 years since the Corporations United decision, 25 billionaires have spend 1.4 billion dollars to influence US elections.
There is no way of knowing how much corporations have spent.
Macron, president of the French Republic, hopes his crowning achievement will be to proudly lead his country in complete surrender to the empire of globalized business.
That disgusting editorial likewise makes surrender the goal.
Je ne mange pas les avocats, mais les mac(a)rons oui.
*Victory for Democrats as Wisconsin appeals court puts hold on voter purge.*
*Yes, Iranians can protest against both US intervention and their government.*
*Netflix … pushed up to £330m in profits through low-tax state [the Netherlands], despite generous UK reliefs and rebates.*
Offering special tax discounts to incite a company to profit from you is being a sucker.
*The [bully]'s decision to kill Suleimani stemmed from ego rather than the country's best interests, Douglas London [former CIA employee] claims.*
US citizens: call on Facebook not to publish the bullshitter's false ads.
If you call, please spread the word!
*Germany’s abortion law: made by the Nazis, upheld by today’s right.*
Bogus Johnson has now learned that a trade deal with the US would require servile support from the UK.
*When it comes to growth versus green, the short-term view always prevails.*
Teaching and leading the public to choose pain starting now to avoid death and disaster later is not easy, but the first step is having the courage to try.
The Tories are embarrassed each time the underfunded NHS fails to meet its targets on metrics of good care, so they will cancel the metrics.
*Warming oceans force leatherback turtles on longer journeys to feed.*
Over time, this could wipe them out — if something else doesn't get them first.
Frequent sex correlates with later menopause, according to one large study.
This study doesn't demonstrate what causes what.
A meteorite that crashed on Earth contains pieces of material emitted by dying stars before the Sun was formed.
*[Australia] refuses to reveal extent of exports as arms sold to UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and Democratic Republic of Congo.*
*UN draft plan sets 2030 target to avert Earth's sixth mass extinction.*
Australia's climate denialists have "adapted" to evident global heating.
Now they attack a strange straw man by saying that the amount of wildfire can't be related to a specific greenhouse gas reduction policy. That may be true but it isn't pertinent to anything.
11 endangered Australian animal species that the fires have brought closer to extinction.
The oceans continue heating up. 2019 saw an especially great rise in ocean temperature.
The Department of Harassment and Subjugation (DHS) listed the nonviolent Valve Turners as "suspected environmental rights extremists."
To criticize climate defenders as "extremists" shows the conceptual error in using "extreme" to define "dangerous". Not all extremists are dangerous, only those who lean towards violence when there is no justification for violence. When plutocrats have maneuvered almost everyone into disregarding the harm that plutocrats are doing, the few who try to oppose that are by definition "extremists" -- but that doesn't make them a menace to society. Quite the contrary.
The right concept to use here is "fanatical".
The EU offered to let UK banks do business in Europe in exchange for letting EU fishing boats fish in the UK.
Each of those would make the world a worse place.
Iran's failed denial of having accidentally shot down an airliner has reminded Iranians of their criticism of the regime — from which they had been temporarily distracted by the bully's rash act.
The criticism of the regime is strong.
The wisest thing for the US to do is avoid any hint of meddling. Iranians will not welcome advice from the US about a domestic matter. If the bully had any concern for the interests of the US, he would heed advice to do that.
The regime's best hope is that the bully will commit another rash act that will unify Iranians again.
This reminds me of the way Dubya and al-Qa'ida used to strengthen each other's support base through belligerent and offensive statements.
*Human Rights Watch head says China is a ‘surveillance state’ using its economic clout to stifle international criticism.*
*Activists cheer BlackRock's landmark climate move but call for vigilance.*
When companies promise to reduce the harm they do to the world, it often turns out to mean no effective change.
Most scientific researchers feel great pressure, from job insecurity with bullying on top.
Indigenous groups in the US are fighting to be counted in the census.
"Dumb" cities can do many things better, even preventing floods and cleaning ground water. And they can do it without tracking people.
However, a "dumb" city in China will surely track people too.
Wollemi pines have survived 200 million years, and are known to survive in just one place in Australia. Helicopter water-drops saved them from fire — this time.
It will be hard to keep them alive for the rest of this century.
*Sacked or silenced: academics say they are blocked from exploring trans issues.*
Puerto Rico, which has still not recovered from the hurricane which struck over a year ago, was recently hit by damaging earthquakes. The US government is holding back money to support repairs.
An unintentional experiment suggests that air filters in schools improves students' work.
In the UK it appears that participatory local government strengthened and protected the vote for the Labour Party. I wonder if it might have a similar effect, in support for progressive politicians at the national level, in the US.
UK thugs put Extinction Rebellion on a list of terrorist ideologies to be repressed by schools. When this became public, the thugs said it was a mistake.
This illustrates the danger of repression inherent in that system for controlling ideologies.
*Droning the World: The Assassination Complex From Bush to Obama to Trump.*
We can make it easier to recycle plastic by changing the system for making aid distributing plastic objects. But that won't do the job that needs to be done. We need to reduce the amount of stiff that we make, buy, and throw away.
Global heating is drying out Tunisia and destroying the date palms.
*Justin Trudeau: US escalation partly to blame for Iran plane deaths.*
I think he is right about this. Both sides engaged in the escalation of violence which created the situation in which the airliner was shot down. I don't think either side intended that outcome, but playing with fire made deadly accidents more likely.
I wonder why Iran is arresting some of the people who fired on what they believed was a cruise missile.
Sanders and Warren have started attacking each other.
I am very disappointed with this. They are the only two progressive candidates for the Democratic nomination. If they tear each other down, they will benefit plutocratist candidates. They should end their dispute forthwith.
Oslo has made tight constraints against driving that have cut down the use of cars.
This depends on truly good public transport, reaching into the suburbs, but the great benefit of that will be worth the price.
A total surveillance app invites parents to snoop on children 24 hours a day. At least it teaches the children to resent and resist being tracked.
Senator McConnell demonstrated blatant contempt for Senate ethics rules when he said he would not act as an impartial juror in the conman's trial.
Leaked messages show that the conman approved assassinating Soleimani months ago. When he said it was because of an immediate threat, he was apparently lying.
The reason he gave at the time was in the nature of revenge or reprisal, not prevention.
US citizens: call on the EPA not to relax regulations for coal ash.
If you call, please spread the word!
Rick Wilson (former Republican campaign consultant)'s latest book presents the conman's corruption.
Do not, as my party did, underestimate the evil, desperate nature of evil desperate people. Do not come to this fight believing that the Trump team views any action, including outright criminality, as off limits. [The 2020 election] is a battle that decides whether they have an unlimited runway to create a dynastic kleptocracy based on an authoritarian personality cult that makes North Korea look like Sweden, or whether the immune system of the Republic kicks in and purges them from the body public … There is no bottom. There is no shame. There are no limits … He is surrounded by cowards with frightening and tremendous skills …
*More than 300 human rights activists were killed in 2019, report reveals.* The worst countries were Colombia, Philippines, Brazil, Honduras, and Mexico.
The first four are ruled by murderous regimes.
(satire) *[the bully] Warns Iran Not To Kill Any Protesters Who U.S. Already Has Dibs On.*
A report proposes that the US spend $100 billion (over a period of many years) to prevent extinction of hundreds or thousands of endangered species.
The proposal does not include curbing global heating, but it depends on doing that. Without that, preventing a mass extinction is hopeless. In addition, without curbing global heating, technological society is likely to take such a big hit that it will no longer have the capacity to do the things proposed in this plan.
We must do both.
The moderators Facebook employs to moderate postings suffer regimentation comparable to the Amazon warehouse. Facebook counts the seconds of their toilet breaks.
It also punishes them for the time they spend looking up the rules they are supposed to judge by.
They need a union. However, the worst of this should be illegal for any employer.
Please don't call people's communications or works "content". That term disparages all communications indiscriminately.
A survey of women who had abortions, asking them across five years how they felt about the abortion, found that 95% of them felt relief.
The campaign to divest from fossil fuels has won support from half of the UK universities.
Nepal is considering 5-year sentences for offensive postings or ridicule.
Three news announcers have quit Iranian state TV, apologizing for telling lies for the state.
*Joe Biden Has Advocated Cutting Social Security for 40 Years.*
Iran's terrible mistake, on top of the death of Soleimani, has weakened Iran's influence without immediately sparking violence.
New York City is a good place to document languages that are on the verge of extinction.
US citizens: call on Congress to guarantee a home for every American.
If you call, please spread the word!
US recycling capacity for paper and plastic is so insufficient that many cities are considering ending their recycling programs.
A real solution for this requires limiting the commercial distribution of plastic to make it easy to recycle.
On Jan 18, participate in the global Women's March for Human Rights.
It is not easy to see the list of events in the organizing site without running nonfree JavaScript. I found a way: first, click the EVENTS button, then move the mouse onto the list of events and a scroll bar appears with which I believe you can see the whole list.
If you click on the word MARCH or ACTION in an event, you may get a page with some additional information. But in some cases, not enough. The crucial information to participate is where and when. Some of the events do not say precisely where, at least not in that page.
Perhaps you can see it if you run some nonfree JavaScript code, but doing that is bad for your freedom.
If you can get in contact any event organizers and suggest adding the missing information directly in the event's own page, that would help some people find the event and participate.
If you go, please spread the word!
*This wave of global protest is being led by the children of the financial crash.*
*Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in?*
Has it made the main populated parts of Australia too dangerous to live in?
Will we stop greenhouse emissions before they make much of the Earth too dangerous to live in?
BlackRock has joined other big investment funds to demand companies reduce emissions.
Kentucky Republicans hope to defeat the state's new Democratic governor by means of a stricter voter-ID law.
US citizens: call on the BLM not to strip polar bear habitat protections.
The US militarily dominates Iraq, and its oil, from two large air bases. Iraq does not have a real air force so it must obey.
This is challenged by the Shi'ite militias that Iran supports, and were the work of General Soleimani.
Sports fans in the UK protested against face recognition at a match, and covered their faces.
*Scientists reveal how they are dealing with a profound sense of loss as the climate emergency worsens.*
We all need advice on this. Global heating disaster will be worse, in many places, than military conquest and occupation has usually been.
Android phones subsidized by the US government come with preinstalled adware and a back door for forcing installation of apps.
The adware is in a modified version of an essential system configuration app.
The back door is a surreptitious addition to a program whose stated purpose is to be a universal back door for firmware.
In other words, a program whose raison d'être is malicious has a secret secondary malicious purpose.
All this is in addition to the malware of Android itself.
Recordings show that the deportation thugs falsely accused visiting foreign students of seeking to enroll in their fraudulent university so as to cheat immigration requirements.
The students wanted to enroll in a real university, take real classes, and fulfill the requirements. Only the deportation thugs wanted them to cheat.
Amazon gets access to video from Ring devices.
This was highlighted by the fact that some Ring employees who were authorized to look at the videos used that access for personal motives and were fired. There will always be employees who do this, and with Ring the uniformed thugs often can do it too, which is far more dangerous.
Facebook gives video-publishing media sites exaggerated view counts to attract them to move from YouTube. Some of them borrow money to invest to profit from this increased popularity, and they go bankrupt.
Another drawback is that if you refuse to be a zucker, the site becomes inaccessible to you when it is on Facebook.
Tulsi Gabbard's campaign staff attacked protesters who criticized the powerful right-wight Hindu extremist group, RSS.
A New York City thug has been convicted of perjury for trying to frame someone for an imaginary attempted murder.
The sentence, four years probation, seems too light to me. Will it succeed in deterring similar crimes in the future?
30,000 in Sydney demanded to get rid of the denialist prime minister who will defend fossil fuels at the expense of humanity.
Almost 2/3 of Americans support Senator Warren's wealth tax proposal.
There is a report that the bully had General Soleimani assassinated to help Republican senators stand up to criticism of protecting him blindly from impeachment.
Freedom of humor is under attack from both political sides.
We all lose from censorship. You don't have to like every joke, and neither do I, but we must fight against censorship.
International judges participated in a march in Warsaw for judicial independence, which the authoritarian government plans to eliminate.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to cosponsor the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
If you call, please spread the word!
*The [saboteur's] administration has filled the parks department with anti-public land sycophants.*
Lula and his foreign minister helped the US and Iran negotiate the nonnuclear deal. Their motive was to avoid a war.
Greta Thunberg and associates call on the elite meeting in Davos to end the investment in destroying their future.
*Ballooning debt [and international pressure] forces poor countries to cut public spending.*
*Citizens' panels ready to help Macron set French climate policies.*
I don't know whether this is a good idea, but I suppose it can't make things worse.
*UK "deliberately" separating families in flagrant breach of international law, report finds.*
Millions of people can no longer deny the global heating danger we all face. This will lead to anger — but if the anger fades with time, how do we go on?
Boeing employees' told each other in emails that the design of the plane was grossly disregarding safety.
"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys." "I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd." One message referred to "the very very few of us on the program who are interested only in truth."
The New York City Bar Association called on Congress to investigate the US Attorney General for partisan use of his official powers.
*Iran admits shooting down Ukrainian airliner 'unintentionally' — state TV*
This mistake was very sad, but the only moral lesson to be drawn is that it would be good for the US and Iran to reduce tensions.
Globalization has decoupled US companies from Americans. The success of the former means little for the latter. The "success" of the bullshitter's deal with Russia is entirely for the former.
The Environmental Poisoning Agency (formerly Environmental Protection Agency) approved over 100 products using toxic pesticides it previously committed to eventually prohibit.
Increasing the US minimum wage saves a few thousands of lives per year per dollar of increase, simply by reducing suicides.
People should have the right to kill themselves, and to get help. But a good society will avoid driving people to the despair that leads to suicide.
I am confident that the minimum wage increase saves even more lives by enabling people to afford food and medicine.
Ralph Nader: Democrats Need to Rip Off the Mask of Timidity and Impeach Trump on All Counts.
*Sanders, Khanna Lead Dozens of Lawmakers in Introducing No War Against Iran Act.*
US citizens: phone your senators and insist on a real, proper trial for the bullshitter — not a rigged excuse to let him off.
Also sign this petition.
Plutocratist Democrats proposed a climate protection plan which would be insufficient to avoid disaster.
It seems that their aim is to placate supporters who really want to protect the climate.
The border thugs started a "pilot program" to separate minors of all ages from their parents, a year before they made that the standard, blanket practice.
The blanket practice was cancelled, but they didn't really stop. Rather, they came up with various excuses to separate some minors from their parents, and still do this quite often.
*Corporate Media Welcome Back Iraq War Hawks To Make Case for Iran.*
Online shopping has cost thousands of jobs in the UK this year. It also costs heavily in tax revenue, and attacks privacy (which depends on anonymity). It would make sense to penalize online shopping.
The flora is changing on high Himalayan mountains, perhaps due to global heating.
This could lead to flooding in India and neighboring countries.
Now that Democrats in favor of gun control govern Virginia, right-wing extremists there are threatening violent disobedience. Some sheriffs and some local governments have announced in advance they will defy whatever new gun control laws are passed, and threatening to start a civil war.
Comparing this violent mob to a "powder keg" is fundamentally wrong. It exempts them from responsibility from the violence they are planning to cause. (Powder kegs do not pack themselves with gunpowder.) The consequence is to presume, for the Democrats, a moral onus not to irritate the mob — in effect, to obey its orders.
A better analogy for this mob is a gang of terrorists with powerful suicide belts. I think we had better take their guns away.
Right-wing extremists used this approach in Oregon and intimidated the state government. Virginia must find the way to overcome the scheme. It must not let a violent faction impose its will by force.
India's Supreme Court ruled that keeping Kashmir incommunicado indefinitely is unacceptable.
Will Modi take this as an opportunity to display his power through contempt for the court?
A study found that 1/3 of adults in Hong Kong are suffering from PTSD. Following the news on social media seems to increase the risk.
The study did not cover minors.
The smoke from far-away wildfires subjects everyone to toxic pollution. It fills hospitals and makes some medical equipment unusable. It injures babies as they take their first breaths. Author Gemma Carey wonders whether the pollution caused her to miscarry.
She now doubts whether it is right and proper to get pregnant again.
If the fires next summer in Australia are not as big as this summer, don't let that fool you. As long as temperatures keep increasing, worse fires are inevitable. But ever-increasing temperatures may not be inevitable yet.
Global heating could cause temporary shutdowns of the Gulf Stream. This would make winter in Britain cold and snowy like winter in Scandinavia.
The US Congress hardly bothers to scrutinize the warlike acts ordered by the bully.
A billionaire has warned other rich Americans to get ready for President Sanders.
It is unwise to assume that Bolton's testimony to the Senate will hurt the conman.
The Sunrise Movement, youths campaigning for a Green New Deal, has endorsed Sanders for president.
Overall, it is wise for society to encourage people to attend college.
The article argues that it is beneficial in the US to go to college. That may be true for most people, but there is a substantial risk of a bad outcome.
The article reports that college graduates earn a lot more, on the average. On the average, they can pay back their loans. But I suspect that a considerable fraction of graduates make much less than the average and can't pay back their loans. Especially those whose college degrees did not aim narrowly at a particular profession. And then there are all the people that didn't graduate from college, don't get the higher incomes, but do get the enormous debts.
And this doesn't take account of the graduates that do get higher incomes because they are doing evil things such as working on nonfree software products or on internet dis-services. They may avoid being trapped in debt, but their lives have been harmed anyway.
*San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident.*
This bespeaks the need for changes in the law that will get those housing units put into use. As a last resort, the city should be empowered to lodge people in those units without asking the owner's permission. However, other milder measures should suffice to achieve the job.
The bullshitter's surely killed General Soleimani to manipulate the public. His critics' responses should be more emotionally powerful.
The bullshitter's effort has not worked with most Americans. Most Americans believe that the assassination of Soleimani made America less safe. Almost 2/3 believe it made war more likely. Likewise, a majority say that the bully's actions towards Iran were reckless.
However, the minority that supports the bully are surely jumping up and down and longing to see more blood flow.
Rumor has it that Iran is developing a tiny drone equipped with a cigarette lighter, which they will use to target the bullshitter's pants while he is not wearing them.
*"As long as the cloud of impeachment exists, it would be a grave mistake for the Senate to allow the president to continue making lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary."*
The US and some of its Five Eyes allies claim that Iran fired missiles by mistake at the Ukrainian airliner that crashed recently just from after taking off from Tehran.
Since the claim is based on secret intelligence material, I have no way to judge its validity, but there is some other evidence that missiles destroyed the airliner.
Morally the question is not crucial, if it was a mistake. A mistake is not a crime.
The largest national group of passengers in that airliner were Iranian. If indeed Iranian soldiers destroyed the plane by mistake, there is no call for other countries to harass Iran about it. Rather, I pity whoever made the mistake (or whoever Iran blames for the mistake).
This recalls the air liner shot down some by the USS Vincennes over the Persian Gulf.
It also recalls the air liner shot down by the Ukrainian rebels a few years ago, also apparently by mistake.
The "fog of war" leads soldiers sometimes to kill civilians without intending to. There is no way for any army to avoid that completely. What we should criticize is the recklessness about civilian casualties and intentional killing of civilians.
Military occupation of conquered territory is not supposed to result in long-term repression of nonviolent dissent. A report from Human Rights Watch explains that Israel systematically imprisons Palestinians for nonviolent criticism of the occupation, and for journalism, on strained excuses.
Israeli thugs destroyed the homes and sheep-pens of Palestinian shepherds. People gave them tents, so thugs came back and took away their tents.
This is part of a slow-moving campaign of ethnic cleansing, described by Uri Avnery as aiming to make the West Bank "araberrein".
An interview with Chomsky on the world's most powerful rogue state and how the egoist has used its power to mess everything up.
I was surprised that he suggests that the downing of an airliner by the USS Vincennes was intentional. I find that theory implausible. Would Reagan have ordered a crime that would arouse hostility to the US, and gain nothing? I don't think so. It requires being worse than merely unscrupulous.
*Mike Bloomberg Says He’s Immune to Corporate Influence. His Campaign Is Managed by Lobbyists.*
Traditionally, conservatives advocate prudence to prevent a problem rather than waiting and fixing it. Plutocratists, even if they call themselves "conservative", are nothing like that.
They rediscover their conservative views each time they need an excuse keep poor people down.
A Christian evaluation of the conman.
Congress should limit profiteering on war. Capping CEO pay could be part of that, though I think more is needed.
70% of people in one zone Detroit are black, and polluting industries have concentrated there. Life expectancy there is 10 or 15 years less than in the suburbs.
The residents of "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana have finally got some attention from their congresscritter, a thoroughly plutocratist "new Democrat".
A new form of gentrification is filling San Francisco with empty storefronts. Perhaps empty condos. too. Landlords would rather have no tenant than a rent lower than their wildest dreams.
This calls for a heavy tax on housing units that are not anyone's primary residence. This may be blocked in California by the tax-limiting initiative adopted in the 1980s.
India's unions held a 24-hour general strike in protest against Modi's policies that prioritize the rich over workers.
Carlos Ghosn said he escaped from Japan because he was likely to remain in jail for years unless he confessed.
It's true that Japan does this to accused people. That doesn't imply he isn't guilty, but he might not get a fair trial.
Many non-rich defendants in the US face a similar unfairness due to the bail system and they are often effectively compelled to plead guilty.
US citizens: call on the Senate to hold a fair impeachment trial.
If you sign, please spread the word!
British prosecutors blame budget cuts for failing, in half of all trials, to hand over the evidence that defendants are entitled to.
The bully's officials presented a "briefing" about the "imminent threat" that supposedly required and justified assassinated General Soleimani, but when senators started asking probing questions, the officials walked out.
US citizens: call on Forest Supervisor Russell Bacon: Don't strip away protections for Thunder Basin's prairie dogs.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on Netflix to cancel its program that is propaganda for the border thugs.
But do keep in mind that Netflix systematically shreds its customers' freedom. For your freedom's sake, join me in refusing to be a customer of Netflix.
Sharing is good. The only ethical way to watch a movie is a way that enables you to share copies.
If you sign, please spread the word!
A book accuses Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump of intentionally lying to sell condos.
This could be fraud, which would be a New York State crime. The conman could not protect them from prosecution there.
The will to war is so strong in Washington and Tehran that we cannot rely on them to keep stopping short.
*The thing about maximum pressure is that it normally causes things to explode.*
We can't expect the reckless US president to look for a way to de-escalate the conflict with Iran. But Congress can.
It would also be nice if Congress were to legislate that the US cannot refuse or delay visas to attend UN sessions, for foreign officials entitled to attend under the UN treaty.
The superfluous bureaucracy of the US medical system costs $2000 per year per person.
Medicare for All would eliminate this. It would also save costs in other ways. As much as $8000 per year per person.
Economist Thorsten Veblen, from 1890 to 1920, analyzed how the plutocrats dominated US politics in the first "golden age" of inequality and poverty. What he wrote illuminates this, the second such "golden age".
I just wish the author had not called this the "age of Trump". The conman wasn't the leader in creating today's inequality and poverty. What he did do was escalate the attack on the idea of seeking to know and state the truth. But he doesn't deserve to have us affix his name to the whole practice or to the age as a whole.
The US government has been claiming for 12 years that Iran was chiefly responsible for arming Iraqis to fight the US army, with no evidence for it.
Iran has backed the Shi'ite militias in Iraq, but they were not the Iraqis that fought the US army. On the contrary, those who did so were Sunnis. They regarded Iran and its Shi'ite militias as the enemy.
Biden, in 1998, already advocated attacking Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He continued to advocate that in 2003 when he voted to support Dubya's invasion.
What I said in 2003: invading a country to remove a dictator is justified if (1) we are sure the people of that country want this sort of help, and (2) we can be confident the new government will be better than the existing one. I also said that I didn't believe either condition was true in Iraq.
The Tories have not reestablished "select committees" whose job is to monitor the conduct of ministers.
One might think that Tory ministers are trying to evade accountability.
US citizens: call on Congress to adopt a Social Security cost-of-living adjustment that reflects the real costs of living.
The bully held a meeting in the White House with Salafi Arabian military minister, and tried to conceal that bare fact from the public.
*In Australia's Nightmare, a Vision of the Planet's Terrifying Future.*
Part of Western Australia has a food supply problem because fire has closed the only highway for supplies for the last two weeks.
The assassination of General Soleimani was another step in the US practice of erasing the border between war and peace.
Science fiction has imagined tiny killer drones that can be programmed to seek and kill any particular person and can be employed by anyone willing to commit murder. If this happens in the future, we will be able to thank Dubya, Obama and the bully.
UMass Amherst Removed a Professor for Showing a Downfall Hitler Parody Video made by a student. Most of the students laughed. Later, most of them protested the decision to remove her.
I think Professor Lowry would have done better by being less contrite.
Climate emergency is a bigger danger than nuclear war. Nuclear war could happen; climate disaster is inevitable unless we go to great lengths to avoid it.
*By killing Qassem Suleimani, [the bully] has achieved the impossible: uniting Iran.*
*Venezuela: Maduro opponents storm parliament to reinstall Guaidó as leader.*
Smoke from Australia's fires has a global reach. It has arrived in Chile.
*TV Pundits Praising Suleimani Assassination Neglect to Disclose Ties to Arms Industry.*
The whole world is facing a slow-motion climate emergency. Some places, such as California and now Australia, have reached acute climate emergency.
Normally wet New Zealand is starting to have significant wildfires.
*The Australian fires are a harbinger of things to come. Don't ignore their warning.*
I am gratified that someone else is using the term "Pyrocene", which is one of the names I recommended for this epoch. However, I now believe that nothing less than "Obscene" does justice to it.
I'd be even more gratified if people started taking sufficient actions to prevent this from getting worse.
In 1972, UK thugs infiltrated nonviolent protests against South Africa's apartheid system.
In my view, trying to defend apartheid is the biggest wrong revealed here.
US employers increasingly require workers to participate in oppressive "wellness programs", imposing on them to contort their lives to overcome problems that are substantially due to being underpaid.
*More than 60,000 people are missing amid Mexico's drug war, officials say.*
The Boston public school system has been collaborating with the US deportation thug department for years.
A four-day work week overall increases productivity and reduces greenhouse emissions. The problems that arise can be solved.
The die-hard planet roasters of the Australian government insist on keeping taxes on fossil fuel companies to a minimum.
Holding them liable for the damage of global heating could be useful in a world with the political will to shut them down, but it does not guarantee a good outcome by itself. It is not a substitute for the political will to curb global heating.
It would be just and right to make the various businesses that are responsible for global heating pay the cost of the damages. But I think the damages will amount to more than the worth of those companies. The effect of holding them 100% liable would be to seize the companies. That would leave their shareholders with nothing — which is arguably more than they deserve — and effectively nationalize the companies.
That won't guarantee that the companies change their actions. The government would have the power to order nationalized companies to change; but that would take firm political will. The government might be tempted to keep running the companies for short-term profit instead of shutting down the fossil fuel operations, or to sell off their assets to other private companies that would operate them. In the short term, those actions would be advantageous — and fatal only in the long term.
*Expert Notes US Bombing of Iran That Didn't Target Cultural Sites Would Still Be 'Terrible and Illegal'.*
To end and reverse the "insect apocalypse" requires an end to use of some pesticides and fertilizers, and curbing global heating rapidly.
The dearth of insects will harm the many animals that eat them, and this will impact plants too.
Scientists recognize that human overpopulation and overconsumption are among the roots of this developing disaster. It is very important to have fewer children, or none.
But this is a long-term issue; the other recommended actions can have much faster effects.
Republicans plan to approve US government projects with incomplete environmental impact judgment and no greenhouse gas consideration.
In Massachusetts and some other states, the deportation thug department is now required to present ground for keeping immigrants in jail until their immigration cases are heard.
*Transformation is recognizing the facts: Australia is a climate vandal, led by wreckers. We are [105]ranked the worst of 57 countries on climate policy.*
The politicians who have for decades opposed efforts to avoid climate disaster are arsonists and murderers, because their years of work are directly responsible for these fires.
We can still try to hold the US short of committing war crimes and a big war with Iran.
*Iraqi Parliament [Resolved] to Kick Out US Troops.* The bully responded by threatening crushing sanctions.
The parliament backed down from the threat.
*Children who experience severe deprivation early in life have smaller brains in adulthood, researchers have found.*
Cas Mudde: *In obsessively pursuing white, middle-class Midwestern voters, Democratic leaders are setting their party up for disaster.* They need to appeal to the non-voting majority.
There are limits to how far the UK will follow the bully into war crimes.
US citizens: call on Congress to block war with Iran.
US citizens: call on the bully not to attack Iran.
The bully's threat to bomb Iran's cultural sites is on a par with the intentional destruction carried out by PISSI in Palmyra and the Taliban in Bamiyan.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate Saboteur of the Interior Bernhardt for corruptly aiding his former clients.
Outsiders with masks entered the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University and used sticks to attack students.
The students suspect the attackers were sent by Modi's political party. It would not surprise me; it is associated with many violent organizations.
An Australian politician calls for a national civil defense corps for fighting fires.
Maybe that is needed, but it seems really foolish to focus on treating the symptoms and neglect the disease that will make them worse each decade.
Bogus Johnson is the bully's flunky. When the bully says "Jump", the UK government asks "How high?"
Iran responded to the killing of General Suleimani by canceling entirely the nonnuclear deal that the bully had already pulled the US out of.
European countries tried to convince Iran to keep the deal in order to trade with them, but the US sabotaged their efforts to keep doing so.
US border thugs questioned many travelers of Iranian origin, including US citizens, for hours asking about their politics.
Maduro reportedly had thugs keep opposition members of the national assembly out as the assembly elected its leader for this year. Instead of Juan Guaidó, it elected a supporter of Maduro.
As people eat less meat, or avoid it, it becomes a problem that our vegetables have only 50% the nutrients that vegetables used to have.
Arundhati Roy: *The rise of Modi and the Hindu far right.*
*As Sanders and Warren Vow to Block War With Iran, Biden and Buttigieg Offer Better-Run Wars.*
The bully threatened to destroy unnamed important Iranian historic places, clearly not military targets. This would be a war crime.
*Killing Suleimani was the equivalent of lighting a match on top of a powder keg.*
The US Green Party calls on Congress to prevent war with Iran.
*Corporate Media [turn] to War hawks, Including Former Bush Officials, to Beat Drums of War on Iran.*
*German Rail Company Cuts Long-Distance Fares by 10% in Response to Government Climate Package.*
Republicans preach fiscal conservatism, yet they always find money for war.
The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica may be collapsing. Its complete collapse would cause .6 meter of sea level rise.
Joe Biden’s Role in Creating the Student Debt Crisis Stretches Back to the 1970s.
There is pressure to eliminate the fare on Boston-area buses.
I agree that this by itself would not attract people to take buses. That would require an increase in frequency and bus lines. Combining that with gratis use of buses would be a big improvement. For society as a whole, it could pay for itself in reduced car traffic, and reduced car pollution. It would require more subsidy to the MBTA, but surely that can be solved one way or another.
The bully displayed his contempt for the UN by forbidding Iran's foreign minister from attending a meeting of the UN Security Council.
This is very bad for world peace -- even worse, perhaps, than assassinating General Soleimani.
Can the UN Security Council arrange for the official to make a presentation by video?
The United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions on Monday called for an impartial probe into the legality of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.
London and NYC Mayors Call on Every Major City in the World to Divest From Climate-Destroying Fossil Fuels.
Iran's Parliament Designates Pentagon an Official Terrorist Organization.
This demonstrates the tyranny and injustice of arbitrarily labeling an organization as "terrorist". The US ought not to sink to such arbitrariness. It should require a trial to do this.
US peace activists campaign against war with Iran.
Australians right-wing extremists are pumping out fake news to discredit climate science and environmentalists.
The economic costs from Australia's wildfires are expected to be more than 4 billion Australian dollars.
The fires are predicted to keep burning for another month or two, increasing that figure.
Iran retaliated for the killing of General Suleimani by launching missiles at US bases in Iraq. The choice of targets suggests the missiles were intended to satisfy requirements of honor rather than to cause US casualties.
Progress on making a range of foods using bacteria could eliminate most farms in a few decades. This could avoid several sorts of medical and environmental disasters and permit rewilding of much of the Earth.
However, patenting this technology could lead to economic disaster.
Coastal land in Bangladesh is now frequently flooded. Farmers have found clever ways to adapt — but in a few decades, when their land has become sea, there will be no way to adapt to that.
The country can adapt via birth reduction.
*'Wrong then, wrong now': US clash with Iran echoes march to Iraq war.*
The population of the new "territory" of Jammu and Kashmir is 12 million people. 7 million are still cut off from the internet. Those organizations allowed to connect face strict censorship.
100,000 people protested in Hyderabad against the discriminatory citizenship law, which combined with the register of citizens amounts to an excuse to expel Muslims who lack documentation about their parents' citizenship before 1970 or so.
The coup-installed government in Bolivia threatened to arrest political opponents.
Indeed, it is threatening the Mexican embassy which has given asylum to legislators in Morales's party.
The world pattern of weather no longer fits into what was normal in 2000. In the world-wide weather of any given day, scientists can now detect and measure global heating.
Telling children "Be careful!" gives zero practical advice, and can undermine their confidence.
However, to state practical advice may not be feasible. How long would it take you formulate and then say the words to express the advice that writer had in mind? I couldn't do it fast enough for it to do any good.
When it is urgent, for an immediate physical action, perhaps "Look all around!" might be a good first thing to say.
Thugs in many areas in Uttar Pradesh have arrested and tortured Muslims, and attacked the homes of Muslims, following the massive hate campaign backed by prominent supporters of the ruling party.
*Reminder: American Officials Lie About War.*
*A Federal Job Guarantee Is a Crucial Tool to Fight Inequality.*
Interest rates are so low that businesses are borrowing to pay dividends on their stock, rather than investing. If interest rates ever rise, such that they can't pay their enormous debts, it could cause a collapse.
The numskull has given the Shi'ites of Iraq and Iran a martyr to unite them against the US.
The assassination of General Soleimani brought hundreds of thousands of Iranians to hold rallies of support for him, and hostility to the US.
This should not surprise anyone. Many Iranians criticize government policies and want more freedom, but they will not stand for other countries to attack their country. The idea that the US might give them freedom, as it says it has done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and Bolivia, does not appeal.
*The United States' Assassination of Iranian Military Leader Violates International Law.*
Two US officials that got intelligence briefings about the assassination of Soleimani say that the information didn't add up to a justification for an act of war.
Two Texas thugs shot black driver Schaston Hodge almost to bits because he drove away instead of stopping.
Maybe he did that because he was scared of being framed. Maybe he was afraid of being caught with something illegal. If so, it surely was not a capital offense.
The Australian wildfires may have already obliterated the habitat for several endangered marsupials. Those individuals that survive may starve, or have no place to nest.
And that is not to mention the species that lived in small areas of the forest and had not yet been discovered by science.
Conservation of endangered species is mostly a matter of preserving their habitat. When most of the habitat burns, it takes many years to make any more.
*Sen. Tim Kaine Files War Powers Resolution to Stop [the bullshitter] From 'Stumbling Into a War With Iran'.*
The bullshitter does not expect to stumble — he expects to manage the process and adjust the frequency of the dog's wagging each week — but stumbling is always a possibility in a fight.
I don't clearly understand the text that describes what the resolution would require, but I have the impression it depends on more honesty and good will than the bullshitter generally exhibits.
*Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna Friday night unveiled new legislation that would bar any Pentagon funding for "military force in or against Iran" without congressional approval.*
This seems more solid as a method for preventing war.
*Stop saying Biden is the 'most electable'. [The bullshitter] will run rings round him.*
Chelsea Manning stands firm in refusing to testify, even though she expects to be kept in jail for a long time.
Australia wasted the 2019 election, and lost the chance to get to work on preventing the fires of the 2030s from being much worse than this year. The US could waste the 2020 opportunity if it doesn't see the future flames (and floods) coming towards us now.
Learn to recognize the patterns of denialism used by planet-roasters today.
*Eight Ways the [Republican] Tax Cuts Have Made the Rich Richer While Failing Working Families.*
Google's former head of international relations was forced out after objecting to doing censorship for China.
Technology is not likely to make the world a better place unless the users control what it does.
If we don't want US companies to censor for China, the US should forbid companies that censor for China to do business in the US.
Australia now has its first Dunkirk: rescuing people by sea while abandoning their equipment — and, this time, their homes as well.
Alas, the world today has no Churchill and no Roosevelt — no leader preparing strategically to convert that tactical defeat into overall victory against humanity's worst enemy ever. We know what has to be done, but every powerful country is controlled by the enemy.
Climate scientist Joëlle Gergis fears that the great Australian fires indicate a tipping point towards inescapable disaster. *Failing to adequately plan for the known threat of climate change in a country like Australia should now be considered to be an act of treason.*
A big part of the motivation for banning alcohol in the US was to reduce violence against women.
Prohibiting alcohol was oppressive and boosted organized crime, just as prohibition of other drugs is today. As a cure, it is worse than the disease. But use of more than a little alcohol is still a big problem. Prohibition is not the answer, but I am in favor of exploring ways to eliminate the social pressures to drink to excess.
The lunatic in chief used a drone to assassinate an Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, who was visiting Iraq. That is an overt act of war against Iran, and Iraq too for that matter.
The lunatic's supporters are cheering at the possibility of outright war. Others forecast that Iran will instead respond in a way that will hurt the US without being an overt act of war.
Iran may not need to move a muscle. Recently masses of Iraqis were protesting against the officials that are friendly with Iran. That was working against Iran's interests in the region, in a way that could have strengthened US interests there at no cost to the US.
What the lunatic just did could reverse that dynamic. Suleimani's death could strengthen the resolve of Iranians and Iraqis that oppose the US and are allied with Iran.
Republicans' latest scheme to hurt the poor is to make disabled people prove more frequently that they are disabled.
The Tories have achieved wonders with this approach.
*Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg Are Not to Be Trusted. It’s understandable that corporate-backed candidates don’t want to be cornered by questions that touch on realities of political and economic power.*
Thugs in Los Angeles and San Francisco are much more inclined to stop and search blacks than whites, even though they find something criminal much less often when searching blacks.
Indian thugs launched a pogrom against Muslims in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Thousands of Muslims have been forced to sign false confessions. Many more have been attacked on the street, or their homes were looted.
The thugs have killed 17 people and are covering up the information about how they were killed.
The Squamish own a piece of land in Vancouver, and plan to develop it with 6000 apartments meant for people with no cars.
I like the plan, but that land is right on the edge of an arm of the Pacific Ocean, and close to sea level. How long will it remain habitable land?
Automatic Gender Recognition AI systems threaten to impose a rigid set of gender roles on society.
I agree with the author that these systems should be banned from public spaces, just like face recognition ID systems.
By 2050, global heating effects will cause annual (at least) flooding of coastal regions where 300 million people live.
Anxiety leads some people to want a "strong" leader. Leaders appear strong by being visibly harsh and cruel.
Twitter's ban on political ads means that companies can pay for ads that promote climate denialism, while overtly political counter-ads are banned.
Residents of Massachusetts: call on Massachusetts legislators to adopt the moratorium on face recognition.
Various groups that live in the Brazilian Amazon are putting aside their rivalries to unite against the planet roasters.
If you enjoy seeing exotic wildlife that formerly lived only far to the south, let that remind you of the need to fight to stop this trend.
Remember that the next exotic tropical organism to come your way could infect crops, trees, or human beings.
It seems that Indian thugs used face recognition to identify the participants in a protest against religious discrimination.
Joseph Stiglitz: "After 40 years of Neoliberalism, the verdict is in – the fruits of growth went to the few at the top."
There are other approaches to economics, but we rarely come across them. Here is the approach of the latest Nobel prize winners.
How did it happen that neoliberal trickle-down came to dominate the academic field of economics? I suspect that some rich people donated to economics departments and used their influence to get them filled with that ideology.
* More than 75% of companies now forbid [romantic] relationships between an employee and someone in [per] chain-of-command. Should corporations dictate who we can go out with?*
It is important to stop sexual harassment, but surely that does not require the extreme of prudery. We need to recognize that sometimes a romance is not harassment.
Pakistan is imposing strict and blatant political censorship.
A study ties increased poverty in the UK to changes in systems to support the poor.
A US court blocked North Carolina's new voter-ID law, which was designed to achieve the same discrimination as the old voter-ID law while avoiding the specific reasons for which that one was overturned.
I worry that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will restore it.
Macron called for a rapid "compromise" with government workers that would include their acceptance of his plan to cut their pensions.
As usual for plutocratist politicians, the French government wants to "unite the French" in serving the rich better.
A Tesla traveling in driverless mode crashed into another car and killed the people in it.
I presume Tesla's engineers are working hard to design a system that will never do this. I've seen reports that this is fundamentally difficult.
But even if they succeed, Tesla's servers could remotely command a car to crash off a cliff.
Why would they do that? I don't think the staff of Tesla would send such a command, but they might not know about it. Various governments, or criminal gangs, might be able to crack their system, or use the law to demand access, so they could do this.
*Sanders Vows to Create National Clean Drinking Water Standards to End Corporate Contamination.*
*Australia is becoming a nation of dread — and the world looks on with pity and scorn.*
The head of the planet-roaster government tries to deny the facts by suggesting that it is unpatriotic to doubt that Australians and their "can-do" spirit can ride over this with ease.
This fire season is a timely warning. The fires have not killed many humans, not so far; humans with high tech are very good at helping each other escape. It won't be so easy to escape the effects a few decades from now, when it gets much worse.
The teachers in five primary schools in London made a careful effort to avoid personally transmitting gender-linked rules and expectations to the students. It was very effective.
The 1946 Disney film, Song of the South, was recognized as a paean to plantations and slavery even while it was being made. It still spreads apology for slavery.
To make half the Earth's surface wild, eco-region by eco-region, would require moving a billion humans out of those wild areas.
This will be much easier if we work hard to reduce the human birth rate. The human population is predicted to peak 9 or 10 billion, but I expect a big increase in deaths to set in during this century as we rush towards ecocide. The human population will decrease — sooner than predicted — in a gruesomely painful way. We can avoid those deaths with a strong effort to reduce births first. This would also make space (physical and economic) for those billion people to move to.
Ukraine has adopted a law to protect whistleblowers that report corruption to the government.
The bully's demonization of a US government employee for internally reporting the shakedown of Ukraine has made many government employees afraid to report corruption. I expect that was an intended result.
Anonymity and other protections for internal whistleblowers are always needed, because agencies — like companies — tend to punish whistleblowers.
India says it will permit text messaging in Kashmir, but the internet will remain turned off.
Because of the communications shutdown since August, the outside world has no way of knowing how Kashmiris India has killed or imprisoned.
Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture, said that the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning amounts to torture.
*West Virginia governor fires 34 [prison guard] cadets and instructor over Nazi salute photo.*
Bigotry and hatred disqualify people from certain jobs, and this is one of them.
*Global heating supercharging Indian Ocean climate system.*
This system, called the "Indian Ocean dipole", makes Australian seas hotter and East African seas colder, or vice versa. Cold seas around Australia make for drought, and then fire.
Scientists expect such problems to happen in the Atlantic and Pacific as global heating continues.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject Romney's quiet attempt to cut Social Security.
If you sign, please spread the word!
*We all say things we regret. Trawling young activists’ tweets denies them a chance.*
Republican political groups have given the conman's businesses at least 8 million dollars (since 2016) by renting space at his hotels.
Global efforts to make contraception available to a bigger fraction of the world's women are falling behind population growth.
*Trump’s 2019 War Against Science, Public Health, the Environment and Climate Awareness.*
An armed security team stopped a shooter in a church, making one instance where two "good guys" with guns were able to do that.
It is not easy in such a situation to hit the attackers and not bystanders. It requires special training to do that reliably. I have no objection to allowing churches to authorize security teams, if the teams are trained enough to do it safely. But this has little effect on the issue of gun control.
A Hong Kong thug shot Indonesian journalist Veby Mega Indah in the eye, leaving her half blind.
She wants to sue the shooter, but the thug department is blocking this, keeping the thug's name secret until she misses the deadline.
*Recorded incidents of water-related violence have more than doubled in the past 10 years compared with previous decades.*
"Presentism": a term for trying to judge people in the past by the moral standards of today.
*Greek activists warn of surge in police brutality and rights violations.*
This was to be expected from a right-wing government.
*E-cigarettes are still safer than smoking, scientists find.*
*The Y2K problem is now seen as a bit of a joke — but only a fool would be complacent about the vulnerability of IT systems.*
The article describes some of the many system faults that occurred at the start of the year 2000 (the last year of the second millennium AD). These were the fraction that were overlooked by the world-wide effort to find and correct all such problems.
*The ocean plastic we see is 'the tip of the iceberg'. Where's the other 99%?*
The US attacked bases of an Iran-sponsored militia in Iraq. Iraqi supporters of Iran mobbed the US embassy in Baghdad and broke in.
Meanwhile, large numbers of Iraqis have been protesting against the government by corrupt politicians supported by the Iran-sponsored militias.
Barcelona has more or less banned old cars from the city, and it will enforce this through surveillance cameras.
The rules do not seem to take account of the fact that diesel cars, even newer ones, were found to pollute a lot more that was previously believed.
Will the new transit passes track where people go? That threatens human rights.
Will the city guarantee that the system will not record the passage of cars which are not banned? Tracking cars likewise threatens human rights.
South Dakota yielded to an ACLU lawsuit and agreed not to enforce its protest-is-rioting law, which was intended to protect the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline from the inconvenience of nonviolent protests.
A Philippine court convicted the ringleaders of a massacre of journalists in 2009, as well as uniformed thugs that helped carry it out.
When the conman personally ordered an end to military aid to Ukraine, he violated a law which took away the president's power to override appropriations by Congress.
Humans are pumping out groundwater so fast that aquifers are likely to run dry — and in arid regions it will take thousands of years of rainfall to replenish them.
*In countries like Peru, extractive industries contract police to suppress Indigenous protesters and detain international observers-—including me.*
*Women in medicine are not given the respect they deserve, from their male colleagues or patients.* It happens over and over, in every kind of interaction with anyone.
*How Much Does It Cost to Read a [gratis] Book on a [gratis] Tablet?* The prison-industrial complex is gouging prisoners for using tablets that oppress them with DRM.
It is well known that the best thing to help prisoners avoid crime once they are released is to encourage them to participate in their community. What nonfree software does is cut people off from their communities, and Digital Restrictions Management makes it even worse.
UK thugs have investigated 6000 children (age 13 or under) for the crime of sexting.
Varoufakis believes that the only way to stop corporations from ruling the world is to eliminate corporations (more precisely, eliminate buying and selling of shares in corporations).
I am not convinced that this is necessary.
Indians are recognizing Dr Ambedkar as the symbol of resistance to theocratic oppression.
No sane person in Australia can deny the danger of global heating after the continuing wildfires, but some right-wing politicians are still insane.
*"Facial recognition technology is now being sold as standard in CCTV systems, for example, so hospitals are having to work out if they should use it.*
If we forbid surveillance cameras, and permit only security cameras, this issue won't arise.
*Domestic violence kills 15 times as many as terrorism in Britain.*
I am sure the ratio is similar in the US. "Terrorism" is exotic and sensational, and on rare occasions has many victims, so people see it as bigger than it really is. By contrast, violence tends to be covered up and downplayed.
Everyone: call on Hershey, Nestlé and Mars to end child labor practices in their supply chains.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Elif Shafak: Surrendering to rage can be a pleasure, but not a wise one.
"Anger…is addictive. It must be diluted and counterbalanced with more powerful, positive feelings: empathy, compassion, kindness, sisterhood and love."
Putin is trying to blame Poland for starting World War II.
I conjecture that Putin wishes to be seen by Russians as heroically strong, so he is trying to promote admiration for Stalin, then identify himself with Stalin. He therefore seeks to bury the fact that Stalin joined Hitler in the conquest of Poland, hiding it under a pile of distracting bullshit.
US citizens: call on Justice Kavanaugh to recuse himself from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau case.
If you sign, please spread the word!
*This was the decade America’s self-serving myths fell apart.* Myths such as that the US political and economic system was good for Americans, and was the only model people of other countries could want to adopt.
China is trying to destroy Taiwanese politics with a giant barrage of fake news.
*The environment in 2050: flooded cities, forced migration — and the Amazon turning to Savannah.*
*Afghanistan's Taliban ruling council ready for ceasefire with US.*
Greta Thunberg's activism has helped her overcome depression.
Feeling that your life is doomed and useless, and that your activities serve only to distract yourself from that, is inherently depressing. When you start to take action that has a chance to make the situation better, that naturally reduces the depression.
By contrast, her father's self-described attitude is an example of the narrow focus that puts humanity and the ecosphere in danger. Will she, some day, lead him to rise above that?
The EFF is starting to push for companies not to collect personal information in the first place.
This is, at least, a step on the path to a real solution.
Mexican avocados have become so valuable that they are driving deforestation and gang wars.
Prisoners in South Carolina are complaining to the UN about inhumane conditions.
Global heating affects the water of the ocean. Too high a temperature is killing the kelp forests of Tasmania's coast. This could cause extinction of the species that shelter in the kelp. That includes many species that grow much larger, but which start out as small larvae that shelter in the kelp.
There is no shallow sea region between Tasmania and Antarctica — no natural place where the kelp could move to. I wonder if it is possible to make underwater platforms that kelp could grow on. This would protect the kelp and the other species that depend on it.
They would have to be held up by flotation, as the sea bottom is too deep for them to rest on. They would therefore circulate around Antarctica. Perhaps they could use solar power to maintain a stable latitude.
These might be economically valuable by acting as nurseries for fish that people would catch. Can anyone tell me whether kelp sustains any commercial fisheries? Can anyone tell me how to reach people that might consider this idea?
Amnesty International reports on Israeli state attacks against freedom of expression, including expression by elected legislators, and suppression of Palestinian voters,
In 2018, Exxon gave money to oppose climate defense, even though it claims to recognize the need for that.
This follows decades of denialism.
No wonder the name is pronounced like "Yech-on" without the "y". ;-}
(satire) *Newly Discovered Scrolls Suggest Jesus Devoured Twin Messiah In Womb.*
The falling child vaccination rate in the UK was not caused by anti-vaxxers. It was caused by Tory budget cuts and reorganization.
*Chile protests: UN to investigate claims of human rights abuses after 18 deaths.*
*With Assange on Verge of Extradition to US, Sweden Drops Years-Long Rape Investigation Into WikiLeaks Founder.*
I don't know whether he was guilty of those charges, but it is clear that, for the Swedish state, pursuing those charges was simply a way to help the US get its dirty hands on Assange. If the prosecutors had really been concerned about justice in that matter, they could have got Assange to go to Sweden years ago, simply by promising Ecuador not to extradite him to the US.
Bernie Sanders identified the overthrow of President Morales as a coup. This is one of the issues on which Sanders is better than Warren.
The false OAS accusation of election fraud in Bolivia could not be an ignorant mistake. The OAS has served the US by imposing its power on other countries before.
*Fossil fuel production on track for double the safe climate limit. "We're in a deep hole over the climate crisis and we need to stop digging," warn experts.*
*Noise produced by human activities should be better regulated to protect wildlife, say the authors of a study exposing how sound pollution affects myriad creatures from fish to birds.*
Now that few deny the climate crisis, the movement needs to make some basic decisions.
How long a time period should we consider? I argue for an answer for that. In principle we should consider the really long term; but we cannot make concrete plans for 10,000 years from now.
I think we can use this heuristic: if high-tech civilization with human rights can survive to reach 2070 with the greenhouse gas level going down, it should be in a position to cope after that. We must aim to make sure we reach that level of success.
We need to preserve human rights, or we face a China-like world forever after.
Beyond that, we should preserve as much of what is good in today's world as we can. But that has to be secondary to avoiding disaster, because there will be no way to protect anything through a full-blown climate disaster.
Over a million Uighurs in China are imprisoned in concentration camps, being brainwashed to talk about how they love Chairman Xi, as well as starved, sterilized, tortured, raped, and, killed.
Those outside the camps are subject to total tracking and control.
Uighurs outside China say they can no longer reach their parents or their children, nor find out where those are.
Ironically, China's wealth has bought the support of governments that claim to defend Muslims.
I disagree with the claim made by an interviewee that imprisonment in Guantanamo is nothing compared with imprisonment in those concentration camps. The two have a lot in common.
The article reports about Chinese people who defend the oppression and totalitarian control of Uighurs to be "patriotic" Chinese. This reminds me of the Americans who defend US wars to be "patriotic" Americans. Just as Americans are inclined to assume their superiority to other nations, so are Chinese, who have long called other peoples "barbarians".
Both peoples need to learn to resist that misguided idea of "patriotism". A true patriot wants per country to deserve respect, not extort it through bullying.
*The European commission has been accused of seeking to cut EU funding for the continent’s poorest people by 50% to secure post-Brexit cost savings and extra funds for defense projects.*
Big US businesses pledge responsibility to their "stakeholders", but that doesn't seem to include workers, or the customers of their customers, or the public.
The WWF works with companies that damage the environment, hoping to teach them to do that less.
It sounds great in theory — supposing that it achieves the intended results. But I wonder what they are giving those companies today to achieve the hoped-for improvement years from now. And what they will do if the improvement achieved is less then hoped.
*Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood "Watch Lists" Built on Facial Recognition.*
A crash vaccination campaign has ended Samoa's measles outbreak, at the cost of 81 deaths that could have been avoided by vaccinating babies earlier.
An area of Australia half the size of Belgium has been ordered evacuated ahead of bushfires expected on Dec 30.
Five dangers caused by large wildfires.
Building the bully's border wall will require pumping 50 million gallons of water out of an arid area that is drying up. This could kill off eight species of animals that live in the region.
We should not allow water-guzzling crops to be grown in arid areas. That practice represents a competition to be the first to grab the last of a resource being drained. For society as a whole, that is imprudent, so society as a whole should stop it.
(satire) "Father Christmas is dead. No US personnel were lost in the operation, while a large number of Christmas’s elves and reindeer were killed with him," is how the bully announced an intervention against socialist distribution of toys.
Redirecting US agricultural subsidies from Big Ag to small regenerative farms could turn America's agriculture regenerative in a decade. It would be good for human health and soil health, and reduce greenhouse emissions.
Farmers that have experienced John Deere's subjugatory tractor software should not make the same mistake again. Instead of jumping into dependence on another nonfree program, they should develop free software for mapping their pastures, and not save their data unencrypted in a cloudy server.
US labor, housing and business policies have made it impossible for most working Americans to buy a home, and compel them to live many to a house, if they are not on the street. Changing these policies can fix that.
The states that restrict abortion tend to have the worst records on the health of new mothers and babies.
This is no coincidence: the right-wing christianitist ideology that bans abortion generally treats women as inferior, and it is inclined to tell poor people that their poverty is a divine punishment which they deserve.
The way the political system responds to right-wing extremists plays into their hands.
Medical procedures tend to cost a lot more in the US than anywhere else. The US typical price is often several times as much.
US citizens: call on presidential candidates to cancel Real ID.
While I agree with the petition's concerns about immigrants, I am even more concerned about increased control over citizens.
Apple designs its products so that they are hard to repair then cites this as a reason not to let anyone else do it.
Discussing right to repair as a matter of costs is missing the most important part of the issue: our control over technology. Apple computers today don't permit replacing the nonfree software. If someone gave me one, my quandary would be whether it is less wrong to sell it to a would-be user or give it away for recycling. To keep it and use it would not be an option.
Today's AI technique of reinforcement learning has a fundamental insecurity: messing with the training data can create a back door which can be controlled by presenting a trigger in the incoming data.
Thus, a driverless car controlled by a reinforcement learning system could be mis-trained to make it drive off the side of the road (which could be a cliff edge) when it sees a particular object on the other side of the road.
A victory for voter suppression in Georgia.
*For the past six months, Israeli police have subjected Issawiya's residents to daily raids and arrests. No one seems to know the goal of the operation — including the police.* Issawiya is a part of the West Bank which Israel claims to have annexed as part of Jerusalem.
US citizens: call on presidential candidates to pledge not to nominate any large donors and bundlers as ambassadors if elected.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Former soldier Danny Sjursen reports on how all the soldiers in his unit put on an act of "building democracy in Afghanistan", because that pretended the command was succeeding.
Bloomberg news published a fallacious criticism of Sanders and Warren. The article presumes that criticizing a company is hypocritical if you don't completely boycott that company. That is too rigid.
I think they should reject Amazon totally — that's what I do. The reason they don't is that they see only part of the danger of Amazon: the economic part. They don't understand the harm that Amazon does to each customer directly, through accumulating data and imposing nonfree client software.
The other candidates don't understand that either, and neither does Bloomberg News, so it is not in a position to criticize anyone else for not understanding it.
The right thing to do about this problem is to teach more people to recognize it and act accordingly.
Modi's repressive regime has expelled a German student who compared his regime to the Nazi regime.
His sign said, "1933-1945 — We have been there".
Scrooge-in-Chief: *Sanders and Tlaib Rip Trump 'Holiday Menu' of Gifts for the Rich and Nutrition Cuts for the Poor.*
Tree plantations are no substitute for natural forests. The other species that live in a forest can't survive in a plantation.
The Amazon forest is a sort of hybrid. The precolombian inhabitants planted useful trees, which still make up a large fraction of the trees there, but these were native trees and they did not wipe out the other tree species.
US drone bombings in Afghanistan grind on every day, killing enemies and killing civilians, all rarely mentioned in the US press because no American soldiers are present and the government says hardly anything about the casualties.
Any given Afghan civilian is not very likely to be killed in a drone bombing in a given year. But the author reports that millions of children feel terror every time they hear drones circling. How often does that typically happen? Perhaps, in some places, every day.
I don't think it is worse for people to be killed by drones than by fighter-bombers, artillery, or guns. The difference is in the systems of war that these weapons fit into.
*Bernie Sanders Is the Movement Candidate We Need.* He will be the president we need, and leads the movement we need.
*Progressives Unveil New Bill to Investigate How Anti-Trafficking Law Has 'Demonized and Harmed' Sex Workers.*
Many prestigious US universities have stated support for an expected US government initiative against paywalls for scientific articles.
Their campaign is weakened philosophically by the mistake of advocating "open access" rather than the stronger and deeper goal of libre scientific publishing. However, it is possible that the publishers will make the articles libre anyway, or that they won't bother to repress sharing even if that isn't officially permitted.
US border thugs put Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez in a cell and did not have a doctor to look at him. Next morning they found him dead, so they lied about what they had done.
I don't think those thugs were exceptional. It seems to be typical of their agency.
Someone quoted in the article calls Hernandez Vasquez a "child", apparently thinking we will feel more outraged that way. I think the US government should not do that to anyone regardless of per age. Anyway, someone of age 16 is not a child.
Plastic debris that washes up on beaches acts as deadly traps for hermit crabs, which could be wiped out by this.
People in Russia that work for foreign news media are now officially labeled as "foreign agents" and in danger of prosecution.
Russia claims to have hypersonic nuclear missiles ready for launch.
The ability to elude antimissiles may not make any difference since there are no credible defense systems to stop ICBMs. However, the short travel time and the ability to strike anywhere from anywhere could require governments to make a snap decision about whether to retaliate. This would increase the chance of nuclear war by mistake.
A world in which the US, Russia, China and other countries have hypersonic nuclear missiles will face a bigger danger of nuclear war than the world without them. I think that stationing interceptor missiles in space will destabilize the situation further, because those could be wiped out by changing the trajectory of a piece of space junk.
The sane way to deal with these weapons is by negotiating an arms-limitation treaty to get rid of them. This is what past US presidents would have done.
*If Corbyn can be defeated with a libel it can work just as well on Sanders.*
Tel Aviv has started running buses on Saturdays, defying the demands of Judaismists who seek to impose their religious rules on others.
*My family are among those protesting. It shows how much Indians value secularism.*
Most Americans now want the Senate to remove the conman from office.
The price of natural gas has dropped by half in the past year, so much is the US extracting by fracking.
Short-term thinkers might rejoice. Long-term thinkers will be terrified.
Sanders points out how Biden's voting record will make him vulnerable to valid criticism by the conman.
US citizens: call on Amazon to stop putting garment workers' lives in danger.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate Amazon for its surveillance and market-domination.
*Billionaires rule the American art world. A radical response? Nationalize museums.*
State ownership of many museums seems to be pretty good in France, though I am sure there is something to criticize, something I as a non-artist would not know about. But the US does not have the same consensus about showing the nation's greatness through art, so I think the result would be to close the museums.
Why do many billionaires support museums and other cultural institutions? It might just be a way to present themselves as "philanthropists" to discourage criticism of their harmful business practices. For some, it is also a way of ensuring that those institutions don't become nuclei for criticism of their practices.
*India Under Modi Is Becoming a Brutal Authoritarian State.*
Even accused terrorists are welcome in public office if they are Hinduists.
The bully has begun deporting refugees that came from violent Honduras and violent El Salvador to violent Guatemala, where they can beg or steal until their US asylum cases are heard.
The head of Australian volunteer fighterfighters says that the wildfires are "out of control" and accuses planet-roaster officials of doing little to help them cope with the magnitude of the job.
They are reduced to asking for donations for crucial equipment. Meanwhile, they can't afford to neglect their jobs for many months without support.
An internal email shows that officials implementing the conman's freeze on military aid to Ukraine treated it as a secret, unofficially.
US citizens: call on the Senate to vote for gun safety provisions in the Violence Against Women Act.
US citizens: call on Congress to tax excessive CEO salaries and thus reduce income inequality.
Russia has silenced protest activist Ruslan Shaveddinov by drafting him and sending him to a remote Arctic island airbase without bothering to give him any training.
*'People Should Take Him Very Seriously': Sanders Polling Surge Reportedly Forcing Democratic Establishment to Admit He Can Win.*
*Here It Comes: Get Ready for a Stop-Bernie Onslaught Like You've Never Seen.*
Protection of the sea bottom from bottom-trawling, off the US northwest, has brought back fish stocks so well, in under 20 years, that it has been possible to resume fishing in part of the area.
The War on Homeless escalated in California in 2019.
The UK is prosecuting Dan Newey for going to Syria to fight for Rojava. Now it has started investigating his relatives, perhaps for helping him travel there. They are both accused of "terrorism" according to a twisted definition of the word.
*A New [Pennsylvania] Anti-Abortion Bill Could Require Death Certificates for Fertilized Eggs.*
These Christianitist fanatics aim to go blatantly to the utmost extreme simply to prove what extremists they are.
The Harvard students that protested against ICE, the deportation thug agency, condemned the Harvard Crimson for asking ICE for comments before publishing an article about the protest.
I don't know the details of the criticism, but (as you can see from previous political notes) I rebuke the deportation thugs and might very well have supported this protest. At the same time, I praise the Crimson in insisting on the rules of journalistic integrity.
The "Oligarchy" game demonstrates how a "free market" can create social classes of poor and rich, just at random. It then proceeds to make one person the dictator or emperor.
For a market system to avoid its various instabilities requires careful planning — planning by the state, since it alone has the power to carry out such plans. But the state won't aim for this goal unless it is effectively democratic.
John Barnett was a quality manager in the production of Boeing 787s. He found and reported three systematic problems that threatened passengers' safety, and management retaliated against him.
One flaw is that 25% of the oxygen masks don't provide oxygen work when activated. Another flaw can cause fires, years down the line. As for the defective parts that were installed secretly in planes, they could cause various kinds of problems.
He tells his family not to fly on a 787.
A late-model computerized voting machine system screwed up and said that one candidate had received zero votes. A hand recount determined that that candidate had actually won the election.
Has anyone seen more recent news?
*I was a drug rep. I know how pharma companies pushed opioids.*
"A good sales rep builds credibility with doctors by using scientific-seeming language to push the product and makes them feel subtly obligated to write more scrips."
The author could pressure a doctor using data about the doctor's prescribing patterns, obtained from data brokers that bought the records from pharmacies. This suggests we should legislate that any given doctor's prescribing patterns are confidential, and punish pharmacies from distributing them to anyone except a specific state agency, which would also treat them as confidential. This would take away one of the sales reps' tools.
Increased competition and lower profit margins — which we need for other reasons — would also reduce the amount of pushing that the companies would do.
The "second wave" of studies on algorithmic accountability is taking up questions about which jobs algorithms should be used to do.
I think the crucial underlying question about whether to job algorithmically is whether to collect the data needed to do it algorithmically.
Collecting data about people in a database is inherently threatening and dangerous — more so for some data than for others. If the algorithm requires dangerous data collection, that is a reason not to use the algorithm.
It is a mistake to assume that the danger affects mainly "marginalized communities". Many dissidents come from marginalized communities, because they campaign for justice for those communities. Whistleblowers, by contrast, usually have to be insiders in order to come across the secrets they reveal. And we all depend on them, whether our communities are marginalized or not, to give us the opportunity to restrain our countries from crime and oppression.
Kansas City, Missouri, has made use of city buses gratis.
This not only helps the poor, it can also reduce car traffic and car pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions.
Imagine a business-supremacy treaty designed specifically to bar laws that would reduce fossil fuel use. It's called the Energy Charter Treaty, and negotiations were held a couple of weeks ago.
All treaties with ISDS clauses (I Sue Democratic States) are an attack on democracy, and they must all be destroyed. But this one is even worse, because it threatens people's lives as well as their control over their governments.
Can anyone find out what happened in those negotiations, a couple of weeks ago?
*Evo Morales Says He Is 'Absolutely Convinced' US Led Coup in Bolivia to Exploit Lithium Reserves.*
*Michael Bloomberg’s Blatant Lies About Terrorism Show That He’s a Mainstream Politician.*
Farm dogs learn to work with a farm drone. Elsewhere, sheep learn to follow a drone.
*Turkish court orders country's Wikipedia block to be lifted.*
It is a pleasant surprise that a Turkish court goes against Erdoğan's dictates. I have a feeling he will not allow the verdict to stand.
Removing dams and reintroducing some large animals has rebuilt wetlands in Ukraine.
Comparing population growth to growth of traffic explains the fallacy in the "self-soothing" conceit that your children will make the world better (unlike most other people's children).
'Thinking your child will be part of the solution, not the problem, is hubris.' We are the collapse. Our children are the collapse.
That article is brilliant, but the author's reasoning errs at the end when she asserts that her only choice, aside from reproducing and regretting the harm that will do, is to be unwilling to "believe the Earth can survive us." The error is exaggeration of little hope into zero hope.
"The Earth" here is a synecdoque and refers to Earth life as it exists today. The crucial point is that its chances of survival are not zero, and they depend on what we do today.
In particular, its chances are greater if we don't add to the population load it will have to cope with. Each additional birth makes it more difficult for the Earth to survive us, and that is a reason not to have children.
But if you think survival is impossible, you might conclude you may as well have a child and enjoy knowing per for 20 or 30 years till the climate disaster gets you both.
A study of a few people's patterns of reading news via smartphones revealed that manipulative dis-services choose which exaggerations and distortions to show them.
The authors of this article encourage that helpless attitude by using the word "consume" to describe what people do with news items (and with other publications). If you don't want people to be foolish, don't presuppose that there is no other way to be.
Texas is planning so much additional fossil fuel facilities that they will guarantee world disaster.
If you are young, these projects are likely to kill you in a few decades. If you want to act accordingly, what actions would that be?
DeVos wants to put shift debt into a separate government-controlled corporation so that the next president won't be able to cancel it.
It is a common Republican trick to reduce the authority of future officials so they can't correct what the Republicans do today. They have done this in some states when a Democratic governor had been elected.
Celebrated author Bernardine Evaristo denounces the concept of "cultural appropriation" as something wrong.
A plan to reduce violence in the most violent US cities, using the most effective known methods, would save so much in non-costs of prevented killings that it would be a great investment even in purely monetary terms.
That is aside from the virtue of saving lives and reducing fear.
Stockton, California, is trying a guaranteed monthly income supplement.
Border thugs systematically board Greyhound buses passing through Spokane, and pounce on people that look Hispanic (or otherwise likely to be immigrants). Greyhound facilitates this, although legally it doesn't have to.
Drug companies are lobbying to undermine a new Massachusetts law to hold down drug prices by pressuring weaker regulations to implement it.
There are so many words that various people demand we treat as taboo, replacing them with an initial, that it is difficult to tell which word some initial letters stand for.
If you would like people to change their terminology, you should present it as a request, not a demand, and offer reasons aiming them to convince them. For instance, I ask people to refer to the operating system which is basically GNU with Linux added as "GNU/Linux", rather than confusingly and unfairly calling it "Linux". I show reasons why this is the right thing to do.
Likewise when I ask people to call security-breaking "cracking" to distinguish it from what we hackers do.
But I do not make this a demand. When people decline, without hostility, to make the change I ask for, I do not rebuke them for that refusal, and I will cooperate with them in many ways (there are a few exceptions relating to publicity) nonetheless.
Boeing's board has dismissed its CEO, Mullenberg, who risked plane crashes in order to save money.
It may not be easy for Boeing to find a new CEO who gives safety priority. His leadership would not have trained subordinate managers to adopt that attitude, and Boeing has no US large competitors to get one from.
The statement by Carl Tobias raises a different moral concern: "The CEO just seemed to be insufficiently responsive to deep public concerns about [safety]." Should the executives of an aircraft manufacturer prioritize "public concerns" about safety, or safety itself? The former is part of a somewhat broader idea of business success.
Buttigieg says he wants to ban surprise medical bills, but one of his campaign fundraising supporters is an executive of Blackstone, which has built up the business of surprise medical bills.
His campaign said that donors get no influence on his positions in exchange for their money, but one of his fund-raisers seemed to say the contrary.
There is no logical contradiction between accepting donations from an executive of a company and calling for a ban on one of the ways it does business. But it would put him under pressure to change that position for one that the company would like better, if he were elected.
Or perhaps Buttigieg is already doing the main thing that company wants: rejecting Medicare for All. Perhaps that is what he gives to Blackstone for its money.
Clinton and her campaign have tried to paint Jill Stein as serving Putin as a distraction from the rational reasons Americans didn't vote for her.
*While many on the left now reject gender categories, they seem determined to enshrine racial categories.* However, some now argue it may be possible for society to "unlearn race".
From all I have read, the distinction we understand to exist between races was no part of people's thinking in the ancient world. If they could ignore "race", it must be doable.
If you know for a fact that many people are likely to classify you in a certain category — black, white, male, female, or whatever — it would be silly to deny that fact, or the way it may affect your life. But you don't have an obligation to define your sense of identity on that basis merely because other people do.
When The Tories are accused of antimuslimism, they shrug it off and get away with it.
How different from the way the Labour party was treated when accused of antisemitism, often for just barely stepping across someone's sharp line.
I think this double standard, and others, defeated Labour.
*Home affairs (ministry) warned Australian government of growing climate disaster risk after May election.*
The Australian government is a blackwhiting bunch of planet roasters. They know who they serve, and they flatly deny that it causes any problems.
The verdict on the trial of (some of) Jamal Khashoggi's murderers was bullshit.
*Saud al-Qahtani: who is fixer cleared by Saudis over Khashoggi murder?*
What the movie It's a Wonderful Life teaches about banks and politics.
Global heating threatens reindeer.
Everyone: call on the judge to release Chelsea Manning from jail.
Attorney General Barr has ordered federal agencies to design a system to monitor everyone in the US for possible murderous intentions (specifically, mass shootings).
No one knows of a reliable way to tell whether any given person might turn to murder, which means no amount of surveillance will be "enough". Great excuse to demand to monitor more and more of everyone's life.
The plutocracy of the US is already killing many Americans every year. Increased surveillance will make that worse; by comparison, all murders don't add up to much.
Almost 600 UK companies have helped rich suspects bring funds into the UK, using 17,000 shell companies. The money amounts to over 300 billion dollars.
Australia has wildfires every year, but the current fires have burned more than 10 times what typically burns in a year. Even rainforests have burned recently, because they have got no rain.
*Don't Forget That Saudi Arabia Is Imprisoning and Torturing Women's Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul.*
When Chinese companies restart defunct US factories, the jobs they create are nowhere near as good as factory work used to be.
In effect, US manufacturing workers are competing, person for person, with workers in China, Mexico, Vietnam, and wherever — due to business-supremacy treaties.
US citizens: call on US presidential candidates to publish basic proposed federal budgets.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate Rep. Nunes for handling the Trump/Russia investigation corruptly while he was committee head.
*Mike Bloomberg Exploited Prison Labor to Make 2020 Presidential Campaign Phone Calls.*
The London Stock Exchange has a list of "ethical investment" suggestions which includes companies that work on fossil fuel, even coal, as well as a prison company.
Bangladesh is cutting off communication for Rohingya refugees. This helps conceal the conditions that the refugees have to live in.
Macron's pension cuts now affect public school teachers, so they went on strike too.
Human behavior choices are strongly governed by systems (physical and social). If the goal is to change people's patterns of using energy, changing the infrastructure is the effective way.
For instance, the construction of bicycle lanes (often separated) in Boston and Cambridge may make a big difference in how much people commute by bicycle. Having more frequent buses would encourage a lot of people to give up their own vehicles.
* … residents of Burleigh County, North Dakota, rejected a proposal that would have made the county the first in the nation to refuse entry to refugees.*
*If we don’t start holding the Washington DC foreign policy establishment to account [for launching and continuing wars that unjustified and/or stupid], they will continue to act with impunity.*
A prominent Hong Kong protester was arrested incommunicado and subject to forms of torture, so he fled to Australia. Chinese people came to his home in Australia and attacked him.
I wonder how they knew where to find him. Perhaps Huawei had something to do with that.
An ex-minister of public security in Mexico, who retired to the US, has been charged with taking bribes to protect a powerful drug cartel.
With so much money, the cartel was sure to find someone to bribe.
New Zealand calls on farmers to reduce greenhouse emissions in 5 years or be included in a national emissions-trading system.
The argument that some farms would rather stop operating or that this would lead to more imports is specious, since that would happen only if the government allows unsustainable foreign farms to undercut sustainable local farms. To prevent that, New Zealand need only put a suitable import duty on food, and abrogate any business-supremacy treaties that get in the way.
The anti-Muslim discrimination of India's new immigration bill, plus the planned expulsion of those who can't prove citizenship back almost 50 years, add up to discriminatory expulsion of lots of Muslims.
*How the Prosecution of Animal Rights Activists As Terrorists Foretold Today’s Criminalization of Dissent.*
In a Gallup survey of Americans, 1/4 said someone in their families delayed medical treatment for a serious illness — in the past year alone — because of its expense.
This shows the extent of the disaster that US medical gouging has become. We need Medicare for All.
The UK's biggest coal-burning electric plant has a questionable plan to become carbon-neutral.
There are three problems with this plan.
A realistic plan would be to build up renewable electricity generation rapidly and shut that power plant down soon.
People in Romania stopped a foreign company (Gabriel Resources) from turning their town into a large toxic gold mine. So the company is using a business-supremacy treaty to extort billions of dollars from Romania.
The treaty has an ISDS (I Sue Democratic States) clause which gives foreign companies priority over citizens of the country. All such treaties must be fixed or eliminated.
Does anyone know which treaty is being used?
The anti-billboard movement in France is growing as advertising invades every public space and surveilles the people that look at it.
Surveillance systems can also occur without associated advertising. Let's ban them either way.
*Revealed: RNC and DNC awash with corporate cash from donors seeking access.*
US border thugs are refusing asylum applications using zero tolerance for punctuation errors, even failures of the facts to fit the forms.
"Zero tolerance" of any kind means elevating strictness over justice.
Foreign prisoners appear to be subject to forced labor making Christmas cards for western companies. One card contained a note from a prisoner.
Republicans want to make all public schools surveil students' communications, supposedly to discourage killings, although no one knows whether it would reduce killings or increase killings.
The Saboteur of Housing wants to make housing discrimination allowable as long as it is laundered through a biased algorithm.
The Republican scheme to limit funds for Medicaid to assure some sick poor people will go untreated, or become homeless after paying for it.
*The Experts Have Spoken: Disbanded Particulate Pollution Panel Finds EPA Standards Don’t Protect Public Health.*
Particulate levels allowed by current standards have been demonstrated to cause an increased death rate.
The Ongoing Effort to Write Wall Street Out of the 2008 Financial Crisis.
It works by focusing on small-time cheaters rather than the banks that swindled millions of Americans out of their homes through filing fraudulent foreclosure papers.
The US border thugs have special teams that search and jail travelers, sometimes based on mere hunches without any concrete grounds or evidence. The ACLU is suing to find out more about them.
George Monbiot argues for "political rewilding" — allowing politics to evolve without being centrally managed by parties.
Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution to authorize delivery of humanitarian aid to rebel areas in Syria. Without this, the UN will block the aid at checkpoints on behalf of Assad.
US sanctions against Iraq used to block trade in food and medicine. Nowadays that is happening to Venezuela.
It is wrong when the US does this, and wrong when Russia and China do it.
Cambodian Aki Ra leads an unofficial volunteer team of deminers.
It would be nice if a few team members could establish new teams.
A poll by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that majorities of voters in some agricultural states would favor candidates that will offer support for agricultural practices that protect the environment and the soil.
*'They Are Turning India Into Kashmir': Government Crackdown Intensifies as Protest Movement Grows Across Subcontinent.*
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is choosing plutocratist candidates, even ex-Republicans, rather than progressive candidates.
*In 'Mind-Blowing Omission,' Buttigieg Campaign Failed to Disclose Wall Street Power Brokers in Release of Major Fundraisers.*
*US Navy bans TikTok from mobile devices saying it's a cybersecurity threat.*
It is, and that is a wise choice, However, lots of apps are threats to your personal data security ‐ and so are Android and iOS themselves. The wisest choice is to reject them all.
One Labour activist says that Corbyn wasn't nationalist enough to satisfy older voters. "He fundamentally believes British lives are of equal value to the lives of others."
If I understand this article, the Supreme Court has affirmed an appeals court decision overturning a city law prohibiting sleeping on the sidewalk.
"Private equity" funds buy companies so as to gouge someone or use a loophole to cheat someone.
Senator Warren has proposed rules that would block the cheating. I don't see that they would block the gouging, though, whether the victims are diabetics or the US government. I suppose an additional change in law is needed for that.
I see this part of a broader destructive pattern in US business, the inclination to strip every asset as fast as possible rather than protect it for continued service. I wonder whether this is generally due to bad rules about corporate governance, reporting and finance.
Wisconsin made a sucker contract with Foxconn whereby it would pay Foxconn to build a factory there and manufacture displays. Foxconn didn't do that, and has been vague about what if anything it would build in Wisconsin or do there, but it seems to want to get the subsidy anyway.
I have a theory that Foxconn is changing the deal repeatedly in hopes of making the state officials anxious about whether they will get the too-expensive factory (and putative jobs) that Foxconn promised, to make them so desperate for "a deal" that they will pay for nothing but the show of a success.
I advocate a federal law forbidding states and cities from competing to be the site of a company's business.
At least 450 ersatz news sites mainly publish right-wing propaganda disguised as news.
Not the Onion: Lyft told some users — including Cara Dick and Nicole Cumming that their accounts would be cancelled if they did not change their names.
This impudent demand is a secondary injustice. The primary injustice is that Lyft demands the passenger's name at all. It should be illegal to ask for that. Taxi companies should use an anonymous payment system such as GNU Taler and respect users' anonymity.
Many schools in Illinois tie children down as a punishment. This often results in injury to the child.
Pakistan has sentenced Junaid Hafeez to death for blasphemy. The trial was a political abuse, since it didn't bother to prove what he actually said. But even if that had been proven, nothing can justify punishing people for criticizing a religion.
This menace is one of the reasons I have never gone to Pakistan.
*Top [conman] adviser: Republicans have 'always' relied on voter suppression.*
The fact that they no longer bother to hide this testifies to their belief that they have seized power so firmly that the public does not matter.
*Facebook & Twitter ban pro-Trump network that reached 55 million accounts with AI-generated faces, Epoch Media Group and Falun Gong links identified.*
The EU's mandatory automated copyright filters are being implemented
in national laws, and they
will
tend to support the dominance of the giant platforms such as Youtube.
Attempting to explain
why
the US wanted weak global trade rules from the 1940s to the 1980s,
then strict rules, and is now turning back to weak rules.
The fact that the WTO cannot render judgments against countries means that
businesses cannot use it
to make countries eliminate good laws. However, the WTO has not
been eliminated. The TRIPES agreement (Trade-Restricting Impediments
to Production, Education and Science) is still in force, with its
requirement for unjust patent law and unjust copyright law.
Understanding the bullshitter's supporters as
a
cult. He fits the profile of a cult leader.
Perhaps the US should be obligated to
welcome
as refugees all the people who are compelled to flee by the
consequences of its foreign interventions. That rule would make
officials less eager to intervene.
A proper statement of the real rule of a pottery store is,
"If you break it, you have to pay full price for the pieces."
Unfortunately, no one knows how to fix a country that has been
devastated in this way, not even with billions to spend. The Marshall
Plan worked well in western Europe, but that may be because the
beneficiary countries already had traditions of democracy, business,
unions, and other things, which only needed to be resuscitated.
New Zealand gun owners
handed
in (and were paid for) 56,000 now-prohibited guns, and almost 200,000
now-prohibited gun parts.
Since such guns are no longer being sold there, I think these guns
represent a permanent decrease in the danger of mass shootings.
*Purchasing devices that constantly monitor, track and record us for
convenience or a sense of safety
is
laying the foundation for an oppressive future.*
I agree, but we who do not want to be monitored, tracked and recorded
must go beyond that.
We
must prohibit systems that systematically monitor, track or record people.
Women's March Global Worldwide Protests Against the Rollback of Women's Human
Rights To
Take Place 18 January 2020.
I would like to promote these rallies and participate in one. I hope
the organizers arrange to let people to find the rallies without being
required to run nonfree Javascript software on their own computers to
get the information.
(satire)
"In order to avoid forcing people to relive the trauma of
9/11, we are working with a graphics team to remove the Twin Towers
from all the background shots of United 93 for the upcoming remastered
release."
(satire)
*… employees at Humana
Insurance were becoming annoyed Wednesday with a customer who did not
seem to realize that offers to pay for healthcare were just supposed to
be a polite gesture.*
A poll found that around 45% of Americans demand a rapid and drastic
reduction in fossil fuels.
Over
40% want a reduction, but slower.
That leaves at most 15% that could possibly support continuing government
subsidization and promotion of fossil fuels.
(satire)
*Chinese government officials defended their move toward mass
surveillance Thursday by explaining that life was a grand
performance, a ballet of sorts, that they were privileged to bear
witness to.*
If a tree falls in the forest where there is no surveillance camera,
did it really fall?
US data brokers sell location tracking data for cell phones, with the
phone numbers.
Even
in places such as the Pentagon.
If foreign countries or criminal gangs can track the movements of
officials and military officers, it might conceivably be useful for
planning a small attack of some sort. I doubt it would make much
difference for a major attack.
However, if the US government can track the movements of dissidents,
whistleblowers, and journalists, that can devastate our democracy.
Both are dangerous to Americans,
but
the latter is much more dangerous.
*[Senator] Schumer Revealed as Key Industry Ally
in
Defeat of Effort
to Curb Surprise Billing.*
Stated less tersely, Senator Schumer, a plutocratist Democrat,
privately pushed hard to protect hospitals' right to charge you
thousands of dollars that your medical plan won't cover, if any one
the separate billable treatments or services you received when you
were unconscious in the emergency room was provided by someone outside
of the plan's network.
The right-wing UK government has proposed a law
that
would treat national
security journalists and their sources as spies.
This is the sort of policy under which Obama
has
prosecuted many
whistleblowers, and which his administration
planned
all along to apply
to Julian Assange.
There were suspicious large stock trade and futures contracts in advance
of statements by the conman
that
caused changes in stock prices.
This is a natural kind of crime for a conman.
*'I Was Wrong': Bernie Sanders Admits Barbara Lee Only Member of Congress in 2001
Who
Had it Right on Afghan War.*
*Johnson will break his Brexit promises.
Labour
must be forensic in exposing
this.*
*ICC to investigate
alleged
Israeli and Palestinian war crimes.*
It appears that the recent rash of disease caused by vaping is due
to a specific additive, Vitamin E acetate.
Perhaps vaping itself
is not dangerous (though tobacco sure is).
Under Russia's absurd repression, protests are permitted as long as there
is only one protester. But someone found an excuse
to
jail climate striker
Arshak Makichyan anyway.
Twitter is deleting accounts used for
state-organized disinformation
and propaganda.
13-year-old Izzy Raj-Seppings led her father to a protest outside the
residence of Australia's prime minister because of the immediate disaster
that his planet-roasting policies have caused.
The
thugs broke up the
protest by arresting protesters.
Right-wing Washington State Representative Matt Shea has been
tied to
three armed uprisings against the US government.
Right-wing governments stretch the law to imprison unarmed, nonviolent
protesters that protect the environment or human rights. Will anyone
dare prosecute the right-wing rebel, Shea?
Warren and Sanders criticized Buttigieg, and also Biden,
for raising funds
from billionaires.
*Smoke without fire: the myth of
a
‘Labour antisemitism crisis’*.
The US and France are both trying to prohibit opposition to Israel's
occupation of Palestine by
identifying
that with antisemitism.
The sadist has forced 57,000 refugees to stay in the most violent part
of Mexico, just across the US border, where they are not allowed to
work. But they can't go home,
since
they will be killed there too.
Presenting a coming disaster as a disaster
is
effective for raising concern
in high-school students.
Most adults may disregard it, but they disregard "don't scare 'em"
presentations too. I figure it is better to be honest than hide the
truth.
Canadian thugs discussed killing nonviolent protesters to drive a
deadly pipeline
through
their land to the Pacific Ocean.
There is no room
in
the carbon budget for any new fossil fuel facilities, except perhaps
if they are redundant and useless.
A denunciation of militarism from 1909
is
still valid today in the US.
*Dutch supreme court upholds landmark ruling
demanding
climate action.*
*Court rules Dutch government has duty to protect citizens’ rights in
face of climate change.*
*Sanders Report Shows How Millennial Generation Is 'Being Punished
With
Crushing Student Debt and Low-Paying Jobs'.*
A loophole permits billionaires to take a tax deduction for
"donations" to charity and
then
control what the charity spends the
money on.
*Evangelical Christian magazine calls for
Trump's
removal after impeachment.*
It looks like impeachment could be a great victory against the conman
politically even if he isn't removed from office by the Senate.
*2019 has been a year of climate disaster.
Yet
still our leaders procrastinate.*
US citizens: call
on the Senate to convict the conman and remove him from office.
If you call, please spread the word!
(satire) … the House GOP
turned
away dozens of Democrats from impeaching President Donald Trump
Wednesday after determining they did not have adequate voter ID.
*Is a carbon-neutral world possible by 2050? Yes… but
the
longer it takes, the more expensive it will become.*
I think adopting 2050 as the target is going too slow.
The
US water crisis: toxic pollution today in many cities, and water
shortage coming in a few decades.
Both problems are due to bad government policies set up by the
plutocratic system that has substituted itself for democracy.
China is developing a surveillance network that tracks people through
phones, face recognition, and other things, and gives every
level of the state
total
repressive control over everything people do.
Similar repression is coming to your country too, if you don't stop
it.
The article doesn't mention tracking people through payments, but the
state is working to make that inescapable too.
Some Chinese people object to this, but the crushing power of the
state gives them little chance to oppose it.
To prevent that requires preventing anyone from collecting data about
people's daily activities — where you go, what you do there, and
who you talk with. Laws about how to use the data will prove in
effective because the state will make exceptions for itself. (The
recently proposed US privacy bill
does
not cover government activities at all.) The government will say
this is to catch criminals or stop terrorism — and it probably
will do those things also, but so what?
*Greenland's ice sheet
melting
seven times faster than in 1990s.*
The forecast global sea level rise by 2100 is now 67 cm. However, I
expect considerably more, because the models are based on
well-established phenomena and tend to underestimate.
*China
cuts
'freedom of thought' from top university charters.*
Amazon Ring cameras are
insecure even in the
usual narrow sense of the term. This is in addition to the
insecurity imposed on society as a whole by the tracking they are
intended to do.
Please do not refer to the acts of security-breaking as "hacking".
Please call them "cracking", to distinguish
what we
hackers do from them.
A corruption investigation has
searched
homes of Bolsonaro's son and his associates, as well as a store they
are accused of operating as a cover.
However, the year's delay in doing this has offered plenty of time to
cover up any evidence there might be.
Mowing lawns less is
good
for ecosystem health and human health.
A UK employment tribunal
ruled
that people can be fired for denying, as a general statement, the
possibility of changing sex.
I don't agree with that opinion, but people should not be punished for
stating it. It is an error to suppose that it must inevitably lead
the speaker to say anything whatsoever about any individual.
With gender-neutral words and
pronouns,
it is easy to talk about a person in ways that are entirely respectful
without ever identifying per as a "man" or a "woman".
*Warrant
for arrest of Evo Morales issued in Bolivia.*
The charges are absurd exaggerations;
they remind me of how many governments place charges on protesters.
*The
A
to Z of Things Trump Could and Should Have Been Impeached For.*
*The US Senate must show America, and the world, that there are
consequences
for presidents who abuse their power.*
Large fires can generate pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which can
send
embers miles away where they can start new fires.
They also generate lightning, which can start new fires closer by.
All of Australia could burn up if this cycle really gets going.
Paul Lamb, paralyzed except for his head, is condemned by UK law to
perhaps decades of pain and a useless life. He tried to sue to
authorize people to help him if he decides to commit suicide, but
the
court rejected the case.
People would be prosecuted even for helping him go to Switzerland,
where he could get assistance for suicide.
The EU is considering a proposal to
phase
out nearly all use of PFAS chemicals — ALL the kinds of PFAS
chemicals — by 2030.
By 2050, half the ski resorts in the Alps won't have enough snow
unless they
generate it artificially.
It is OK if they do so, as long as they can do it with renewably generated
electricity. Wind power ought to work, since they can make the snow
in advance when the wind blows, then protect it until people want to use it.
Indians have not been cowed by a ban on protests, and
they have continued
protests in many cities to hamper protests against
the
discriminatory immigration law.
This is despite the shutdown of down internet and phone service in Delhi
and other places.
Northern Ireland nurses went on strike for 12 hours because Tory
budget cuts have
made hospitals unsafe.
The Tories plan to reduce those cuts, but not enough; their plans
won't
fix the staff shortage.
*Woman dies in Welsh hospital
after
six-hour wait for ambulance.*
This sort of thing did not happen before the Tories took power in 2010.
New Zealand will hold a referendum to decide whether
to legalize
assisted suicide (only for people expected to die within 6 months
anyway), and an advisory poll about legalizing marijuana.
600 rallies for impeachment
were
held across the US on December 17.
I thought about participating in a protest, and definitely wanted to
post info about them. I couldn't do either one, because the site
which presented the info didn't function for me, due to nonfree
Javascript code.
Some easy ways for the US to tax the rich more, that might be
easier to
enforce than a wealth tax.
Each of these measures would be an improvement, but I think that to
make them effective enough requires blocking the methods that rich
people use to shelter their estates and their income from taxation.
The article does not raise that issue.
A wealth tax would also avoid that issue.
US medical research still gives low priority to medical problems only
women encounter —
even
if they affect large numbers of women.
US citizens: call
on Senator McConnell to recuse himself as effective judge
in the conman's trial in the Senate.
If you call, please spread the word!
Global heating effects
threaten
Australia's wine industry this year.
Is there any chance that the massive losses
global heating is causing
now could pull Australia's government away from fossil-fool policies?
Proposing a small international tax on fuel for ships,
to develop
ships that run on hydrogen fuel.
I am surprised by the idea of using ammonia as fuel. What would that
do with the nitrogen? Combining it with oxygen would be very
undesirable.
In Samoa, measles spread in clinic waiting rooms. The staff did not
comprehend how easily measles spreads,
and
did not take precautions.
I wish the article had said what precautions they should have taken.
Boko Haram has expanded into part of Burkina Faso, and
half a million
people have been driven from their homes there.
Common Cause: Attorney General Barr
gives
his loyalty to the conman
rather than to the United States.
A frack well had a blowout, and
produced
one of the largest methane
leaks ever observed in the US.
I have a suspicion that as these wells get older they will be more likely
to break and leak.
US border thugs told a mother
they
would deport her but keep her sick baby in a hospital. She would
very likely never have seen it again.
Classrooms are a
testing
ground for monitoring even beyond the level of an Amazon
warehouse.
The Human Rights Watch report on the
repression
of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank.
Israel has
declared
Palestinian Laith Abu Zeyad a "security threat" because he is a
political inconvenience: a campaigner for Amnesty International
who argues and lobbies against the occupation.
When governments deny people political rights, and don't distinguish
between political opposition and war, it is a natural step for them to
equate "campaigners for some cause" with "security threats."
*Denouncing the
Smear of Anti-Semitism Against Labour and Corbyn.*
Haaretz has
documented
256 cases of fanatical Israeli "settlers" who have committed violence
against Palestinians. Israeli officials ought to punish them, but
instead often encourage them.
*The Catalan crisis is
key
to the rise of the Spanish far right.* *The Vox party drew on
Catalan unrest to gain seats in [the November] election. Both sides
feed off the other’s nationalist vision.*
Turkey is forcing Syrian refugees to move to the so-called "safe zone"
along the border inside Syria. But
they
do not find it very safe.
Peace is returning to Darfur after river improvements
help
water soak into the surrounding land.
When works like these enable people to cope with the current level of
global heating,
continued heating can become too much for them to
overcome. In order for Darfur to remain at peace, we in rich
countries must stop heating up the Earth.
Cobalt, used in electric car batteries, is toxic. *In Zambia, studies
of soil and mango fruit grown near copper and cobalt mines have
revealed metals
above
the safety limit.*
As capitalism spreads into aspects of life which were not marketized before,
it commoditizes those aspects even for people who don't want that. The worst
case is
in
politics.
Even
friendship
and dating become commoditized.
When we talk of "globalization", that usually stands for globalization
of the power of business. Including people in more countries in
global markets does not inherently have to imply a big transfer of
income from workers to business owners, but when businesses rule the
roost, their owners insist on that transfer.
*After the autumn clampdown, fighting for the right to protest has
become a
vital
part of the collective fight for survival.*
The thugs
aim to cause so much suffering that protesters will give up,
and take any fragment of an excuse to break the law, even steal
mobility aids from handicapped people. But Extinction Rebellion will
not give up, because they are fighting for everyone's children's
lives.
The Global Alliance on Health and Pollution says that toxic pollution causes
15%
of premature deaths. But this must be an undercount, because the
effects of some widespread pollutants are impossible to count due to
the lack of varied environments to compare.
I don't think the single-country totals are interesting, because the
size of the population is one factor in those totals. Single-country
percentages would be interesting to compare.
*Depression
and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study.*
Tories
plan
to allow lower courts to overturn laws that implement EU
requirements.
The Tories plan to make it easy to undermine workers' rights,
environmental protection, public health, privacy, and all other rights
protected by the EU.
Trump Is Leading a Revolution That Is
Destroying
America.
(satire) …
local
Luddite Thomas Berkshire reportedly refused to merge consciousness
Tuesday with his new self-driving 2070 Hyundai Elantra.
Congress
quietly reauthorized the Ex-Im Bank to support planet-roasting
projects for 7 years.
This defeat follows a
long
struggle which succeeded in stopping it for a time.
Plutocratist politician Obama
deploys
ageism against Sanders.
Human Rights Watch reports on how Israel uses military law
to
oppress Palestinians in the West Bank and crush protests.
20 years of global heating
have cut the average profits of Australian
farms by 22%, amounting
to a total of a billion dollars per year in losses.
Indigenous Australian communities in the middle of Australia are at
the edge of fleeing because global heating is making the region
dangerously hot without air conditioning,
and
drying up their sources
of water.
A UK football club
chided
a player not to criticize Chinese atrocities.
A football club that gets lots of income from foreign fans becomes
just another globalized business — censoring for China,
just
as Apple censors for China.
Murray Energy, on the path to bankruptcy,
continued funding global
heating denialism.
The saboteurs are planning
to
cut Social Security benefits for hundreds of
thousands of disabled people.
Reagan tried this, and public criticism made him back off.
In some parts of the US,
rain
contains enough
PFAS to be possibly dangerous.
*A third of the Indigenous languages used in America two decades ago have gone
extinct, and Congress
isn't doing enough to preserve what remains.*
*US Denounced as 'Threat to Humanity' as COP25 Ends
Without Deal on Big
Polluters' Responsibility to Frontline Nations.*
Even worse, we don't have a binding agreement to avoid a disaster
so complete that trying to compensate anyone would not even make sense.
(satire)
… a new study published Friday
indicates that ancient humans buried crude oil deep underground in a
desperate attempt to protect future generations from the grave threat
it posed.
Goldman Sachs says
it
will no longer invest in thermal coal (cheap for
electric generation, which makes up 85% of what is mined).
It also will not invest in Arctic oil exploration and drilling.
This is an important step, but not enough by itself (even if all other
investors do likewise) to avoid disaster.
The bullshitter suggests
he
will refuse to participate in campaign
debates.
I speculate he figures that his opponent will be a progressive, that
he would look bad in debates, and that the mainstream media will not
give that opponent much coverage otherwise.
Senator Booker has proposed a bill
to
limit factory farms and the giant
businesses they work with.
This would protect family farms from being put out of business, and
the environment from the concentrated pollution. It would
Since 1979 at least, US military spending has generally increased. It
is now higher
than at during the cold war, higher than during the
Vietnam war, and higher than during the Korean war.
Americans need to trim that large excess, in order to stop starving
the country's needs (along with millions of Americans). This is why
some progressives in Congress are voting against the NDAA.
Ralph Nader: *Boeing’s
Perilous Bungling Requires New Leadership.*
He also reminds us that the FAA enabled this by rubber-stamping
Boeing's lax safety evaluations.
Plutocracy has a general tendency to do this. Compare with what US governments
(under Obama and under the conman)
have
done to drug factory inspections and mean inspections.
Doctors call on
Australia
to protect Assange by bringing him to a hospital
in Australia.
Australia has a truth-despising government like those of the US and
the UK. It would have no interested in Assange's life. But even if
the Australian government were humane and defended justice, Bogus
Johnson would consider it more important to suck up to the conman than
to respect Australia.
The DCCC boycotts campaign consultants
that
work for primary challengers,
but working for Republicans is ok.
*Climate thinktank Sandbag said the heavily subsidized plans to cut
carbon emissions will result in a "staggering" amount of tree cutting,
potentially
destroying forests faster than they can regrow.*
Damming the Mekong river system is
changing
the river's flow, its
water, its shape, and its fish. The fish are mostly
dying/disappearing.
*As GOP State Attorneys General
Fight
Environmental Regulations,
Fossil Fuel Companies Bankroll Their Campaigns.*
*'Astonishing' [conman regime] Rule
Could
Let Banks Classify NFL
Stadium Investments as Aid to Poor Communities.*
WHO doctors warn that the development of the food distribution system,
in
countries that are not poor overall, is leading to more obese
children and more malnourished, stunted children at the same time.
The full causes of this tendency are surely complex; however, it is
clear that one significant cause is plutocracy.
US citizens: call
on congressional committees
to investigate the conman's role in rewarding a big donor with a big border wall contract.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call
on supporters of Sanders or Warren to pledge to focus criticism
on plutocratist candidates, not on the other progressive candidate.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your state legislators in support of automatic
voter registration in your state.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call
on the University of North Carolina to stop funding
the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
If you call, please spread the word!
Indian thugs displayed a
level
of repression shocking even in India when they attacked student
protesters and bystanders.
The new citizenship bill discriminates in favor of non-Muslim refugees
from three countries, but
does
not take any existing rights away from anyone. Thus, it is biased
but not repressive.
By contrast, what India has
done to deny citizenship to residents of Assam
threatens
to expel people who have lived all their lives in India, and
what
it has done to Kashmir is comparable to China in
Xinjiang.
However, they all spring from the same source: the repressive spirit
of religious prejudice that Modi's party is based on.
600
French doctors threaten to quit in protest against the funding
cuts that are making public hospitals inadequate.
This is the work of the plutocratist president, Macron.
Campaigns for social change
can
benefit greatly from solidarity from the community around them.
Tufts University
requires
all professors to raise 40% of their salaries from outside
sources. Some tenured professors are suing, calling this a
violation of contract.
They may be right, but this harms a lot more than individual
professors. It represents another step in the overall corruption of
that university (and it's surely not the only one). With this
requirement, the university downgrades (and tends to eliminate)
research that isn't profitable, and pushes research under the power of
either the US government or businesses that already have dangerous
amounts of power.
Tufts may claim that it is only ceding to outside pressures. That may
be true from a short-term perspective. However, these pressures stem
from sources that will keep pushing. The more they get, the more they
demand.
*A victory won by Brexit lies
does
not make those lies true.*
Governments used to borrow for infrastructure projects using public
bonds. Now they set up "public-private partnerships",
which means
private investors profit.
This costs the taxpayers a lot more to get the same result.
An LA thug faces charges for "fondling" a corpse. Apparently
he did
not ask the corpse for permission. There is no word on whether
the corpse's feelings were hurt.
Will it next be a crime to fondle a doll without the doll's express
consent?
The evangelical supporters of the bullshitter are crazy religious
fanatics. The author's conversation with his mother
illustrates that
point.
In their fervency, they overlook the fact that their scriptures do not
say that the hoped-for second coming will occur in the next century or
even the next millennium. That is an arbitrary addition to their
religion. Perhaps they would conclude that preserving everything the
Earth's ecosphere is consistent with their religion if they are
hammered on that one point.
*Argentina's 'dirty war':
France
approves extradition of suspected torturer.*
US citizens: phone
your senators at 202-224-3121 and call on them to
vote against the record-breaking NDAA (Pentagon spending authorization bill).
Sanders and Warren will vote against it.
*The lies have it:
Republicans
abandon truth in [bullshitter] impeachment defence.*
With global heating, Australia's rural volunteer fire departments
are
not sufficient for the job.
White supremacists in the military are using a hand gesture that is a slight
variant of the one for "OK"
as
a sign of their racism.
Choosing a sign that is similar to a common innocuous one is dishonest
as well as hateful. It means that people who mean "OK" can get wrongly
punished by the authorities, while at the same time they are falsely
cited as supporters by the extremists.
Maybe the army can turn this dishonest tactic back on them by teaching
everyone to use that sign to mean "OK".
Protesters and journalists in Lebanon
are
targeted by organized
disinformation campaigns.
Donald Trump fears only one Democrat:
Warren Sanders.
US life expectancy is going slowly down while life expectancy in other
advanced countries is slowly increasing. The causes seem to be
drugs,
guns, despair, and obesity.
Bogus Johnson is trying to turn the BBC into a Tory supporter
by
accusing it of hostile bias while threatening its funding.
US citizens: call
on Biden to endorse an adequate climate defense plan.
(satire)
Mark Zuckerberg Argues High Taxes On Wealthy Could Stifle Innovation In
Human Suffering.
Republicans have
used
the NLRB to make it harder for workers to vote to unionize.
Lousy medical care in US immigration prisons
killed
four minors and made two others so sick they needed major surgery.
They included At least one child.
Having pulled the US out of the intermediate-range missile treaty,
the conman has
had
an intermediate-range missile tested.
I don't think it is possible to build and test a new kind of missile
in four months. I think the construction must have started earlier.
Plutocratist candidate Biden is
exploiting
Corbyn's defeat to argue once again that progressives are not
"electable".
However,
the
"centrists" in the UK lost badly also.
Biden's argument is an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy: whatever
popularity Biden has in the primary is
due to people who believe
it.
Wealthy countries (even including the EU)
blocked
any strong deal in the COP25 climate conference that just ended.
They preferred to encourage dodgy "offsets" rather than cut emissions.
In theory, an offset for greenhouse gas emissions is equivalent to a
cut. However, when you look at the proposed offsets, they are mostly
designed to operate later — if you're lucky.
In August, the government of Finland tried to cut the wages of 700
postal workers. (In the US, with 70 times the population, the
equivalent would be 49,000 workers.) All postal workers went on
strike, and this
inspired
a general strike. The government had to resign.
Imagine what we could do if the US had this spirit of solidarity!
Let's spread that spirit.
The conman's campaign has hired a data broker that
collects
data about people's movements by tracking their phones.
It appears that the company gets the data from various other companies
which get the data through various apps.
The apps very likely get users' consent for this, buried in the fine
print of terms and conditions, and the app won't work unless the user
"consents". That is a common practice, In practice, it is ineffective
at checking these abuses, because the companies are expert at the
manufacture of consent.
We
need
stronger restrictions on collecting data on people's movements or
their presence in any place.
The bully's current and planned cuts to food stamps
will
leave almost 5 million Americans hungry.
The
Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource (1999)
The OAS continues to claim there was something wrong with the election
in Bolivia. The CEPR
continues
to point out the errors in those claims.
Sediments from just after the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs
shows ocean acidification
sufficient
to explain the death of many species of sea animals.
We are heading for even more acidification in this century if we don't
stop it.
Thailand has again banned an opposition party. Now
several
opposition parties are protesting together.
Corbyn
decided
to step down for a new leader of the Labour Party. However, he
refuses to apologize for Labour's policies, saying that the party won
the arguments and lost because Britons voted based on whether to leave
the EU.
It was foolish of them to vote that way, and they will suffer greatly
as a result. The only party that had a chance of making departure
from the EU an opportunity for a better Britain was Labour. The
Tories are
already
planning to use the departure as an opportunity to surrender to US
businesses, through
business-supremacy
treaties that will lock in hunger, sickness and homelessness.
Many British voters were
observed
to hate Corbyn personally.
The article supposes that this is due to something bad about Corbyn,
but omits to tell us what that might be. This leads me to suspect it
wasn't due to anything real about Corbyn, but rather the result of a
successful propaganda campaign against him, which was supported both
by centrists and the Tories.
One Labour politician reports that working-class Britons
disbelieved
Labour because it said it would campaign for their rights and
well-being. In other words, they are so cynical that it becomes
masochism.
She seems to be a centrist, and I fear this is an argument for Labour
to become centrist and aim for so little that cynics will trust it.
*Out
of this darkness we must find the will to fight back.*
Computerized algorithms are
not
the only decision-makers that can be biased, inconsistent and
inscrutable. "Before humans become the standard way in which we
make decisions, we need to consider the risks and ensure
implementation of human decision-making systems does not cause
widespread harm."
This simplistic argument is only half-right. With algorithms, we
can insist they are nonbiased, consistent, and transparent
— but in many cases institutions don't bother to even try. We
need rules to insist that this be done.
As Arctic sea ice dwindles, Greenland could become the center of
coldness in the Arctic. Because Greenland is far south of the pole,
this could
increase
the destabilization of weather in the Northern hemisphere, causing
even bigger and longer rains which will often ruin harvests.
This trend has already been observed in recent years. The point is
that the Greenland effect could make it get much worse, and quickly,
in a few decades.
It's not a certainty. Want to bet your life that it won't happen?
The rate of deforestation in the Amazon has
doubled
since a year ago.
McConnell
plans
to coordinate the conman's trial with the conman himself.
This means, I suppose, mocking the idea of justice and the idea of
truth.
The US deportation thugs
set up a fake university, the University of
Farmington, to
lure
foreign students into committing fraud against their visa
requirements. But it made the university so realistic that
students had no way of knowing it wasn't valid — which means it
wasn't fraud.
Of course, the deportation thugs punished them anyway.
Medical treatment companies gave congressional staff to luxury resort
where they listened to
presentations
meant to keep US medical care expensive.
*The Recent Natural Gas Blowout in South Texas Highlights the
Need
for Strong Regulation.*
Democracy movements in various southern states are
campaigning
to end Republican-imposed impediments to voting.
Wisconsin Republicans have
constructed
a simple excuse to stop 200,000 poor, old or young people from
voting.
Buttigieg's campaigns is
giving
refunds to donors who are disappointed by his plutocratist
attitudes, because they though he was a progressive.
I will never vote for Buttigieg, and I am glad that people are
spreading the word about his support for plutocracy. However, I take
issue with the idea that campaigns owe refunds on demand. It is
reasonable to conceive of the spending of campaign funds as first-in,
first-out. In those terms, the early donations have already been
spent.
Greenpeace
protested
the EU's too-slow climate defense proposal by making an EU
building in Brussels appear to be on fire.
"If the livestock sector were to continue with business as usual,"
experts warn, "this sector alone would account for
49%
of the emissions budget for 1.5°C by 2030." They call for "peak
livestock" within 10 years.
An online t-shirt vendor stopped selling Techdirt's t-shirts and
wouldn't
say why, except to point at a long list of possibilities and say
"you figure it out".
This is an example of a kind of runaround that has become standard
with businesses that communicate with the public digitally. I deal
with such businesses as little as possible — directly, never.
The article uses terminology that we should avoid. For instance, it
refers to art works and slogans as "content". That term spreads a
presupposition I think is misguided and harmful. I urge you to
reject
that term, as I do.
Even worse, the article talks about "intellectual property" as if that
were a single coherent thing, and equates it to copyright. That is a
grave confusion. To formulate any issue in terms of "intellectual
property" is to confuse. For the sake of proper understanding,
please
join me in never
using the term.
In 2019, the public became aware that always-listening computers are
as
malicious as you could possibly imagine.
A cafe chain announced a
plan
to eliminate the use of single-use containers and bags.
Does its connection with Nestle matter? Not very much. in my opinion.
My view in general is that if a company has several activities, and
they are effectively separable, we should judge each of them
separately.
*Papers Owned by Oligarchs
Unsurprisingly
Oppose a Wealth Tax.*
After For-Profit College Agrees to Forgive $141 Million in Student Debt,
Sanders Says: "Good. Now
$1,685,456,413,335
More to Go."
US citizens: call
on senators to support the Save the Internet Act.
US citizens: call
on states to join the National Popular Vote compact.
US citizens: call
on Congress to investigate Facebook's role in the
right-wing disinformation machine.
US citizens: call
on the SEC to stop undermining shareholder activism.
US citizens: call
on all Democratic presidential candidates to end the US's broken for-profit medical system.
The US government, under Dubya
and under Obama, lied to itself about
the war in Afghanistan because the presidents and their cabinets
preferred
soothing falsehoods to painful truth.
*The historical case
for
abolishing billionaires.*
They like to cite Adam Smith's "invisible hand", but he also warned about
privilege for the rich.
I prefer to focus criticism on the system (plutocracy) that
concentrates wealth and spreads poverty, rather than on the
billionaires who are its extreme manifestation.
A film taints the name of a deceased female journalist by claiming she had
sex with an FBI agent to get a scoop.
The
filmmakers cite no evidence
for this accusation.
The act they accused would have been wrong because it would be
bribery. Giving sex as a bribe is no more legitimate than giving money as a
bribe.
The article ties this accusation with the tendency to call women
"sluts" if they depart from strict chastity and modesty such as some
repressive religions impose.
I have never called anyone a "slut" and I cannot imagine doing so. I
somehow escaped absorbing the prevailing attitudes about who can or
should have sex and when. I only became aware of those attitudes when
I was in my 20s, and they were never accompanied by any reason to
adopt it.
If "slut" means "someone who has sex too readily", then according to
my understanding, in this society men are more likely to be sluts than
women are. But the term is almost never applied to men.
If "slut" means "someone who has sex without affection", then I find
it hard to understand why people want that, but I see no reason to
criticize them for that preference.
The article mentions a Chilean song (though it isn't really a song, as
it has no melody) whose main point is to condemn the justice system's
bias against rape victims and
its
tendency to excuse rape.
When it accuses thugs, prosecutors and judges of this bias, it is
right.
But its chorus says, "You are the rapist." I take this to refer to
men, and being one of them, I take offense. I am no rapist. How dare
they accuse me (and every man, indiscriminately) of rape!
Falsely accusing someone of rape based on no evidence is just as
scurrilous as falsely accusing someone of using sex as a bribe based
on no evidence.
A UK economics think-tank reports that special low tax rates on
capital gains do not achieve their ostensible goal of encouraging
investment in business. All they do
is
reduce the effective tax rate
for people who are at least somewhat wealthy.
Glenn Greenwald shows that the DOJ inspector general found that the
FBI repeatedly lied to the FISA court to get permission to spy on
Carter Page during the 2016 election. Then he explains how the liars
get away with such practices:
former
military and intelligence
officials make a second career as pundits on TV.
Given how much ordinary thugs
lie, it should not be surprising that
federal cops and spooks lie too.
Poor United States: battleground between a conman running a gang that
blatantly spits on truth, and the "deep state" gang that also won't
hesitate to lie.
Some Republican senators who used to defend state surveillance almost ad lib
are
starting to see the danger.
UN special rapporteurs
condemn
Queensland's laws that repress protest.
Some of the bullshitter's campaign fund-raisers
look
suspiciously like
cons.
Why wouldn't they be? We know he's a conman.
US and Philippine unions are trying to work together, since
US companies
are trying to play those workers against each other.
Israel carries out court-approved torture. One example, that of Samer Arbeed,
provides an
illustration of a practice that has continued for decades.
*What could the US afford
if
it raised billionaires' taxes?*
The answer is, most of what we need.
Croatian thugs
deported two Nigerian visitors to Bosnia without taking time
to
verify that they had visas for Croatia.
Now they are in prison in Bosnia, where they had never been before.
Why did Bosnia accept the deportation there of people who had no
connection with Bosnia?
They have asked to be sent to Nigeria. They may not be able to afford
to buy new tickets there on their own.
*Revelations that [Buttigieg] worked for a healthcare firm
that hiked insurance rates and a scandal-hit Canadian company
have
raised serious questions.*
*Huge crowds have massed in Algeria’s capital to protest against the
election of a former loyalist of the deposed leader Abdelaziz
Bouteflika as president
in
a widely boycotted poll.*
*Chile: UN calls for prosecution of police and army
over
response to protests.*
What will the Tories do, now that they have won the election?
They will keep starving the NHS,
which
is already on the edge of collapse.
Then they will "save" it by signing exploitative business-supremacy
treaties and bringing in the same US companies
that
are gouging Americans and killing those that can't afford treatment.
In the US, if you're a Republican and lose an election,
you can try
framing the winner.
UK conservatives, for 60 years or more, have appealed to continuity
with past way of life,
while
inviting laissez-faire to destroy it.
It is a con veiled in dishonesty.
Evo Morales has
received asylum in Argentina.
From there he could easily return to Bolivia if Bolivians rise up to
support him.
*Sierra Leone ordered to revoke
ban
on pregnant schoolgirls.*
*While big cities are finally putting fewer people in jail, small towns
and rural counties
are
locking up more people than ever.*
"I drafted the definition of antisemitism.
Rightwing
Jews are weaponizing it."
Assange's lawyers say that the UK is interfering with their visits to
him and stopping
them from informing him about evidence.
This is yet one more sign that the UK government is railfoarding him
and trashing his legal rights.
*Lip-reading CCTV will have people 'cupping hands over their mouths' in
street, warns
surveillance watchdog.*
*Value of European agriculture could fall 16% in 30 years
due to drought
and higher rainfall.*
The residents of Mt Tamborine. Australia, are
running
out of water because Coca Cola and other bottlers are taking away
all they can carry.
Israel's arguments that it needs to control a broad strip of land next
to the Jordan River are
obsolete
in the modern world.
Quite a few UK teachers are
joining
Extinction rebellion. They feel that teaching young people in
school is not as important as making sure
global heating disaster
won't kill them.
*Warren, Baldwin, Brown, Pocan, Jayapal, Colleagues Unveil Bold
Legislation to
Fundamentally
Reform the Private Equity Industry. Comprehensive Bill Would
Ensure Private Investment Funds Have Skin in the Game.*
*The Dutch justice system is cutting jail populations by
offering
specialist rehabilitation to people with mental illnesses.*
*Reach ‘peak meat’ by 2030 to tackle climate crisis,
say
scientists.*
*Populists understand the power of human emotion.
Europe’s
liberals need to
grasp it, too.*
I think that a passionate defense of liberal democracy must also
be compassionate towards the millions that have been deprived by
the plutocracy that has manipulated it for its own gain.
In other words, we must defend liberal democracy as a platform
for the many to defeat the plutocrats with.
Oakland, California, has raised taxes and spent them on gang
rehabilitation programs
that
have reduced murders by 30%.
The trial of the libel suit against Elon Musk exemplifies how
billionaires have made themselves into a legally privileged class —
not entirely above the law,
but
treated with privileges.
Compare, for instance, how Bill Gates was able to make US schools
twist education
around
a standardized test.
There must be over 100,000 Europeans who have US citizenship but don't
know it. Due to a threat from the US,
European
banks may now freeze
their accounts.
I think it is entirely reasonable for the US to demand its citizens
pay taxes on large foreign income. (ISTR that there
is already an exemption for up to a certain amount.) However, The US
should revise the FATCA law so that the tax applies only to FATCAts,
and only to people who have acknowledged US citizenship in some way
since attaining adulthood.
The EU should do more than just beg the US to back off. It should
protect its citizens by setting up alternative banks which do no
business in the US, and legislating that banks which close accounts
under threat from FATCA must move the accounts to the alternative
banks rather than freeze them.
*Berlin’s rubbish collection service is urging [people to celebrate
by] shopping less, choosing to eat rather than throw away leftovers,
and doing
a good turn for a neighbour.*
Bravo!
You could also celebrate Grav-Mass.
*Could peace between Ukraine and Russia
finally
be at hand?*
Putin started that war because having a war there would be convenient
for him. The Russian-speaking rebels depended on Russia's military
support all along, and without it, I think they would accept some kind
of autonomy as part of Ukraine.
*'Let's Bring Rumsfeld In': Khanna Calls for Hearings on US Officials
Who
Lied to American People About Endless Afghan War.*
*NAFTA 2.0 Is an Assault
on
Food, Air, and Water.*
Balancing these new injustices against the elimination of part of
the current NAFTA's injustices, I think the new one is less bad.
The bully
plans a sneaky, indirect move to force US universities to
shut down student groups that support the Palestinian boycott,
divestment and sanctions campaign
to
end Israel's military occupation
of Palestine.
On all issues pertaining to Israel, I ask myself, "What would Uri
Avnery do?" Avnery, who grew up in Germany and saw Nazis in power,
compared the oppression of Palestinians to the Nazi oppression of Jews.
in the 1930s. He used the term "Araberrein", meaning "without any
Arabs", to describe Israel's real goal for the West bank, as a
reference to the Nazi term "Judenrein".
A legal requirement for people to keep silence about this truth
is political censorship.
Nonprogressive US legislators gave the Pentagon even more than the war-lover
asked for, and didn't
raise the question of "how will we pay for it"
That question is raised whenever progressives propose to protect
non-rich Americans from the bigger dangers — hunger, homelessness,
mounting debt, surprise medical expenses, and
global heating disaster
— because the wealthy believe they can cope with those problems
on their own, by abandoning the rest of their country.
They may be right, in regard to most of those dangers. Rich people
are not likely to lack money for food, shelter, or medical care. But
they can't save themselves from
global heating disaster alone.
Facebook pressures political organizations to show ads only to people
that Facebook believes support them.
It
charges extra to show the
ads to anyone else.
This has the effect of encouraging twofaced campaigning.
The Republicans' next attack against the poor: a scheme
to underestimate
the poverty line even more in the future.
Global heating effects in the Arctic
are
already disastrous.
Global heating
in the Arctic may already have passed tipping points so that
it
would be difficult to stop.
Defeating the bully is the first step: after that, we will need
detrumpification of the nonelected officials of the US government. To
do this will require
a
substantial progressive victory and the will to
do the job.
One part of this process must be to increase the size of the Supreme Court
so as to dilute away the influence of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
A small victory for progressives in the House of Representatives:
a bill to allow Medicare to negotiate prices for medicines
will cover
50 medicines instead of 25.
Why only some medicines? Sensible countries do have their medical
systems negotiate prices for all drugs. The law that stops Medicaid
from doing this is an arbitrary plutocratist measure; we should
eliminate it entirely.
Studying how Venice planned to cope with high tides, and
what it will need
to do in the future.
There is no plan for decades from now.
US citizens: call
on Buttigieg to disclose which companies were his
clients while he worked for McKinsey and Company.
The mere fact that he did that sort of work is confirmation that he is
a plutocratist and we should not elect him.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call
on Congress to end surprise medical bills this year.
If you call, please spread the word!
Veolia privately warned Flint's imposed nonrepresentative city government
that planned changes would make Flint's water carry lead.
Then it carried
out the orders anyway.
Public Citizen: the revised NAFTA
is
considerably less bad than the one
that is still in effect.
Nonetheless, it will continue to strengthen the hand of businesses against
democracy.
US medical billing is full of exaggerations and falsehoods
that are in
effect fraud.
Usually the bills go to an insurance company that pays them because it is
too much trouble to question them. Occasionally they go to a real patient
whose life can be ruined by them.
When owners of Amazon's Ring surveillance camera post footage on
Amazon's local social network, it becomes pretty easy to find exactly
where the camera is,
even
though Amazon says that is confidential.
(satire)
"Nearly every day, we see deceased
Americans losing out on parts in police procedurals to living,
breathing actors who have no firsthand experience with what it’s like
to lie immobile on a cold slab while a mortician embalms your abdominal
cavity."
The fish that the Gulf of Maine is famous for are dwindling because
the area
is getting too hot for them.
US citizens: call
on Congress to oppose any new Trump tax proposal and repeal the 2017 tax scam.
If you call, please spread the word!
*Don't invest in Brazilian meat,
warn
deforestation campaigners.*
Nadine Batchelor-Hunt: During this election I have felt my Jewishness
and my blackness frequently weaponised, sometimes pitted against each
other. I have cried, I have been angry, and I have often found it
impossible to articulate how horrific this has all been. …
Labour has admitted fault on the issue of antisemitism and
begun to
reform in a way that the Conservative party has not.
She seems to have been mapped by
intersectionality
into the empty set.
*Factchecking Aung San Suu Kyi's claims over genocide allegations.*
Many of them are
at best half-truths.
*Americans take fish antibiotics because
it's
cheaper than a visit to the
doctor.*
It is bad for society as a whole when people people get antibiotics on
their own and use them without seeing a doctor. They are likely to
use antibiotics when they shouldn't be used. That tends to promote
antibiotic resistance.
Medicare for All would avoid this problem by making it easy and cheap
to see a doctor and cheap to fill the prescription.
Ted Rall wrote in December, 2001, that the US had completely messed up
by
invading Afghanistan and would surely lose.
At that time, I thought that the US had basically won already.
I didn't expect the Taliban to resurge. Ted Rall understood what
I did not.
The U.S. Government Lied About the Afghanistan War.
They
Couldn’t Have Done It Without Lapdogs Like the Washington Post.
India has passed a law offering citizenship to non-Muslims who moved to India
before 2015 from
three nearby countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
The idea seems to be that non-Muslims in those countries are likely to be
oppressed, and should be treated as refugees. That is probably valid.
Meanwhile, India
oppresses the minority Muslims.
*Revealed: fires
three
times more common in Amazon beef farming zones.*
*Calls grow for laws requiring firms
to
reveal links to deforestation.*
I am generally skeptical about systems which expect company A to make
sure supplier B doesn't engage in practice C. The problem is, A has
every incentive not to try very hard to stop B from doing C and
covering it up.
I wonder if it might be more effective to impose on all possibly
deforestation-related products an import tariff whose rate is based the
fraction of deforestation in the country of production since a given
base year. The tariff function could be 1/R - 1, where R is the
fraction of the forest in the year 2000 which still survives. After
90% deforestation, the tariff would be 8 times the exporter's selling
price.
US citizens: call
on Pelosi to meet with Extinction Rebellion
hunger strikers.
If you call, please spread the word!
'Staggering' New Data Shows Income [after taxes] of Top 1% [in the US]
Has
Grown 100 Times Faster Than Bottom 50% Since 1970.
Ramzy Baroud: *Thousands of foreign journalists, with no cultural or political
connection to the Middle East, were shipped in, to replace their Arab
colleagues, and to participate, willingly or otherwise,
in the dirty
propaganda campaigns championed by one rich Arab countries or another.*
The repression of journalists by Middle-Eastern countries is well
documented, so I am confident that that claim is true. The other
claim, about naive foreign journalists brought in for propaganda
purposes, might be true also, but I have no independent basis to judge
that point.
Toys Я Us Worker: Wall Street Billionaires Should Not
Be
Making Money By
Putting People Out of Work.
Let's not romanticize Toys Я Us. It pressured people to buy expensive
toys that they couldn't afford and that their children didn't need.
I would expect that most of the toys sold there were media tie-ins, so that
children would perform unpaid advertising for other programs which themselves
were full of advertising.
In addition, the odd and inexplicable admixture of Cyrillic with the
Latin alphabet is annoying — and does "toys ya us" actually mean
anything?
This does not, however, excuse the harm done by leveraged buyouts or
invalidate the arguments made in the article.
The plutocratist world pushed Zambia into enormous debts,
so now it is
selling everything to China.
Sooner or later, China will use that power to gain more power.
I wonder whether there is a chance that Western governments will
support debt relief for poor countries once the debts are in the hands
of a strategic rival such as China.
Of the 800-odd species of Eucalyptus trees in Australia,
1/4 are
endangered.
Mostly they have been decreased by humans that cut them down to make
farms, but fire now contributes. Eucalyptus trees are adapted to
survive ordinary fires, but if the fire is very hot, it can destroy
a tree entirely.
Today's youth display admirable and unusual maturity in campaigning now
to cut greenhouse gas emissions,
even
though those are not likely to
kill them until a few decades from now.
Climate emergency protest in Australia:
"NSW
is Burning, Sydney is
Choking."
We should have acted before it became an emergency.
Our response was blocked by corrupt leaders,
starting
with Dubya.
We should make it a crime to continue operating fossil fuel facilities,
and hold companies' major owners responsible for the crime.
Instead of jailing the poor suspects because they can't afford bail
and calling them "flight risks," let's jail the rich suspects because
they might bribe someone, and call them "corruption risks."
Denmark has taken a serious approach to decarbonization, with
a
legally-binding reduction target every 5 years.
This would eliminate the weakness of having only long-term targets
that can easily be ignored for a decade or two without political consequences.
Their schedule is still not fast enough, but at least it is an
approach that can do the job.
The EU is now proposing a bold initiative
to
cut total greenhouse
emissions in half by 2030.
*EU's soaring climate rhetoric
not
always matched by action.*
Right-wing supporters pretend that their side can do no wrong.
When evidence appears showing the harm their policies have done,
they
post lies to discredit it.
The lies sound so plausible, and the people they are attributed to
seem so normal and credible, that honest people are often taken in by
what amounts to a con.
*The US lawyers rolling back wildlife protection
one
species at a time.*
The US deportation thugs
refused
to allow doctors to offer flu vaccinations to children and adolescents
in an immigration prison.
The doctors had brought vaccine with them and were prepared to
administer it if permitted to.
The main UK political parties are
failing
to give people the data that the parties hold about them.
The Government Has Taken
At
Least 1,100 Children From Their Parents Since Family Separations
Officially Ended.
*1.9
billion people at risk from mountain water shortages, study
shows.*
Part of the problem is a projected 50% increase in population in
certain affected regions. That must not happen!
China has
put
Swedish diplomat Anna Lindstedt on trial for organizing a meeting in
Stockholm between Gui Minhai's daughter and some Chinese
businessmen who were thought capable of helping her campaign for Gui
Minhai's freedom.
If China is going to violate diplomatic immunity, the rest of the
world must not stand for it.
The system of US intervention in Afghanistan
systematically
generated false reports overstating military progress (of which
there was none).
This
resembles
what happened in Vietnam.
An influential MEP
rejected
the proposed trade treaty with parts of South America because its
environmental provisions are too weak.
I expect that he's right, but I suspect that many other things are
wrong with that business-supremacy treaty. For instance, does it have
an ISDS provision ("I Sue Democratic States") that
would allow businesses to
sue countries for passing laws that diminish the businesses'
profits? Would it interfere with cancelling fossil-fuel projects
already agreed to?
More broadly, does it undermine the wage level of workers in Europe?
Does it encourage concentration of business in various fields, or
concentration of wealth in general?
I don't know any more facts about it, but I'd be amazed if it did not
do these things.
Algeria is
holding
an election to choose between several establishment candidates.
The opposition is inclined not to vote.
A nativity scene in a church a couple of hours away from the border
with Mexico
depicts
Jesus and his parents in separate cages.
This presents the side of Christianity that calls for compassion,
especially for the poor and weak.
It contrasts with the repressive side of Christianity, which developed
when one form of it was made the established, state-imposed religion
of the Roman Empire. That side is visible in the Christians that
support the bully.
Democrats, in impeaching the conman, have not touched on the
crimes
that Democratic presidents have also done.
Netanyahu's latest plan to avoid prosecution is to annex 25% of the West Bank,
even though that
violates the treaties that govern occupation.
"Disruptive" online banks offer to cushion the pain of being in debt.
Sooner or later the price for this cushion
will
be to push their customers a little faster and further into debt.
If you are unable to make ends meet, you need to find cheaper
alternatives (don't buy something if you don't need it, share
facilities with others rather than getting your own), and fight for
higher wages (join or start a union, campaign for progressive
candidates).
Why do US hospitals find it easier to order expensive tests and
treatments than to have enough nurses?
This article proposes the explanation that paying for the expensive
things concentrates wealth whereas hiring nurses spreads wealth.
The capitalists and their lobbyists
push
in favor of the former.
Another explanation that occurs to me is that the expensive tests and
treatments are billed separately in the US, whereas attention from
nurses is not.
It could be that both explanations are partly valid. At this point
they are only hypotheses.
Indonesia increasingly imprisons nonviolent activists
who campaign for
independence of Indonesia's colony in New Guinea.
People who to try to act as their lawyers face repression too.
The ISP which hosts papuansbehindbars.org faced a DOS attack
when the report was posted. One must suspect it was organized
by the Indonesian government.
Apple's new "security chip" includes
security
for Apple against the
"owner" of the computer.
The annual report on human rights in most of the world's countries
shows a general trend downwards.
*China tells government offices to
remove
all foreign computer equipment.*
China is right to do this, just as the US is right to reject Huawei
equipment. But remember that computers can be made malicious for
other reasons too. I have heard that Netflix limits some kinds of
service to computers with new hardware meant to restrict users.
That is just as bad as what China and the US do to snoop on people.
Old Japanese documents show that the government was in charge of
enslaving
women of colonized and conquered countries as prostitutes
for the army. We
already
knew this, but Japanese governments keep denying it.
In Europe, marine cargo
is
a significant part of greenhouse gas
emissions.
80% of the students in for-profit US "colleges" fail to graduate and
are
left with huge debts.
Why stick to small steps? Let's prohibit for-profit businesses from
being certified as schools.
U.S. Lobbyists Prepare to Seize "Historic Opportunity" to
impose
an exploitative trade deal on the UK.
I warned in 2017 that leaving the EU under Tory control would enable
the Tories to screw all non-rich Britons. This confirms what I said.
Senator Warren talked about
selecting
Kamala Harris as candidate for vice president.
I am very disappointed.
Sanders and AOC have condemned a pharma company, Gilead, for
applying
to extend the patent on a drug combination called Descovy, which
is used for treating AIDS.
They accuse the company of delaying development of Descovy so that
the patent would start later and thus end later.
Based on information from Wikipedia it appears that the company's
business is more mergers and acquisitions than research as such. Its
founder seems to be in the VC field rather than medical research.
The amount of development needed for such a drug combination is
little. It seems to be mainly a matter of testing the effects of
combining drugs already approved.
Corporate-funded clinical tests of drugs are suspect anyway, so
the
government should fund them. Therefore, even if we continue to allow
patents on drugs, which I think
we
should not, we should at least disallow patents on combinations.
Farage, leader of a UK right-wing party, has been
tied
to a real antisemite from the US.
The latter staunchly defends the
bully, and blames impeachment on
unspecified "Jews" as a scapegoat to distract attention from why he
deserves impeachment.
*Aramco’s flotation may have been scaled down, but it shows that
capitalism
and carbon still go hand in glove.*
Naturally,
authorities turn to censorship systems that would justify total
surveillance and strike fear into people. But
there
are other ways to
teach young men that women generally don't enjoy force or violence.
Here's an idea: sell cute signs with slogans such as, "I don't like
being slapped, spit on, gagged or choked. How about asking what I do
like?" Women could put those up in their bedrooms, to be seen by
their male lovers. For men who have been taught wrong, and were never
informed it was wrong, one occasion could set them straight.
The
mainstream media systematically misrepresent popular progressive
programs as "extremist", mainstream Democrats as aiming to serve the
people, and anti-governance Republicans as trying to make the US
government operate well instead of to wreck it.
President Zelenskiy of Ukraine
aims
to negotiate peace in the eastern
border regions with Putin, but not quickly.
*Hong Kong: mammoth
rally marks six months of pro-democracy protests.*
After New Yorkers blocked the corrupt plan to give Amazon a special tax break
to open an office in NYC,
Amazon
did it anyway.
Thus, calling Amazon's bluff was a success, in narrow terms.
However, for Amazon to grow bigger this way is still bad for all of us.
Please join me in refusing to buy from Amazon. Let's make it smaller!
US citizens: call
on Republican senators to reject campaign contributions
raised by the conman, which are effectively bribes for their coming role
as jurors in his trial.
If you call, please spread the word!
The US may block the WTO's power to eliminate national laws,
including
laws to protect the environment and public health.
Never mind the article's alarm over this; it implicitly adopts the
values of business-over-democracy and growth-with-trickle-down.
Weakening the WTO would be a signal victory over business-dominated
globalization.
Here are two examples of how the WTO compelled the US to eliminate
laws that served good purposes.
ISTR that the WTO was involved in compelling the US to cancel a ban on
cigarettes with added flavors other than mint. The goal of that ban
was to discourage teenagers from smoking.
For several other examples of how the WTO and other business-supremacy
treaties were used to give business more power over governments,
see the business-supremacy treaties page.
A pilot from Salafi Arabia,
being trained by the US Navy at Pensacola,
killed others in the classroom,
motivated
by hostility to US wars.
It has been clear for many years that US wars, perceived as
aggression, inspire many people to fight the US, but right-wingers
refuse to acknowledge the connection. This example is particularly
direct.
*Opioid manufacturers
made
parody rap videos to help push products.*
*The Labour leader [Corbyn] argues that the health service will be
sold off piecemeal
if
the Conservatives are not stopped on Thursday.*
The Tories have already allowed
the
sale of patients' personal data to
foreign companies. This data is said to be "anonymized",
but we know how
ineffective that is.
Dessalines, who led Haiti to independence from France,
has been made legendary, and
the
people refer to him as a symbol
when confronting tyrannical rulers.
Compare with the legends about George Washington's boyhood which were
promulgated in the US in the early decades after its creation.
A convicted Islamist terrorism participant was released on probation
and committed terrorist murders in London. What lesson should be
drawn?
According to Simon Cornwall, who set up the probation system which
deals with those convicts,
the
cause was that the system was changed
to eliminate the human mentors and community contacts that enabled it
to succeed.
Based on the dates, it is clear that the Tories made the changes.
I wonder — was the purpose to reduce spending and reduce taxes
for rich people and businesses?
Ralph
Nader: Failure by Congress to prevent devastating precedents from being
invoked and followed by future presidents will create a legacy of
disgrace for Congress.
*The [so-called] Consumer Energy Alliance, an industry front group,
is
pressing for the controversial and legally imperiled Atlantic Coast
Pipeline.*
Texas alone is building so much new fossil fuel capacity that
it is enough
to produce catastrophic levels of greenhouse gas.
Socialist governments in South America, as well as right-wing
neocolonialist governments,
depended
on economically on extraction.
The socialists spent money better, but they got it the same way, and
the people who live where the resources are tend to get hurt in the
process.
Dead zones are spreading in the oceans,
boosted
by fertilizer run-off
and global heating. The result is to boost jellyfish and decrease fish, especially large
fish.
I suggest people find a Vietnamese restaurant that offers a jellyfish
salad, and get accustomed to it. Jellyfish is boring all by itself,
but becomes delicious when mixed with a dressing and a few other
things.
In Chile's people's summit:
A
Clear Line from Neoliberalism to Brutality.
The 140 wildfires in Australia
are
doing lasting ecological damage.
A large fire near Sydney is likely to burn for months (rain is likely
in February), because it is too big to put out. What about using
firebreaks? Perhaps firebreaks are ineffective because the trees are
so dry that a flying spark can spread the fire.
Normal life is now impossible in the regions
where
half the population
of Australia lives.
Australia has been getting hotter, and its fire season worse, for a
few years now. I hope people draw the proper conclusion.
Zero tolerance has ruined another career: Robyn Williams convicted of
having a child sex video on her computer,
which
had been sent to her
by her sister who wanted legal action taken.
Her sister was convicted also for trying to show it to her.
Laws against possessing a copy of something are inherently unjust,
regardless of what that something might be. When interpreted rigidly
they make life into a minefield.
Despite Warmest Decade on Record, We Still Act Like
"Addicts Blowing Our
Carbon Budget".
Big Spanish polluters that
are
sponsoring the COP25 climate defense
conference.
Putin has asked to extend the New START nuclear weapon limitation
treaty. We
have to hope that the numskull will agree.
(satire)
Pete Buttigieg Blames Inability To Disclose Political Stances
On NDA With Buttigieg Campaign.
The EU has
banned the use of brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos on
food crops.
This amendment says that human rights are for natural persons,
not
for "artificial" persons such as corporations.
I think that the wording should be changed so that artificial physical
persons (for instance, robots) can qualify for human rights if they
meet certain criteria. We can expect that this situation will arise,
so why not get it entirely right the first time?
Bernie Sanders Joins Des Moines Climate Strike, [also] Young People In
20 States Begin Sit-Ins
Demanding
Green New Deal Support From
Establishment Dems.
The Democrats in the House of Representatives
have
passed the Voting
Rights Advancement Act.
Republicans in the Senate refuse to allow a vote on it, so what this
serves is to provide an opportunity for political pressure on them for
refusing to hold the vote.
In substance, the federal approval requirement is a good one. Any
changes in voting rules that discriminate against nonwhites are
unjust. However, I don't think any group should be singled out for
less protection. Changes in voting rules that systematically tend to
disenfranchise any demographic group should be stopped.
Years too late, the Federal Trade Commission has ruled that
Cambridge
Analytica may not claim to properly protect users' privacy.
Even if this ruling had come soon, its effect would have been so
narrow that it might have changed little.
The US border thugs
proposed to require face recognition on citizens
entering and leaving the US,
but
backed down in the face of hostility.
When I left the US on my last trip, Delta airlines offered me the
"convenience" of face recognition instead of scanning my boarding
pass. I could have quietly said "I opt out of face recognition", but
I wanted to have a bigger effect, so I held my computer bag in front
of my face and said in a loud voice something like, "Don't do face
recognition on me!"
To make democracy safe, we need to fight against all systems that do
face recognition (outside of very narrow contexts), and indeed nearly
all
systems that can collect data about people's movements and activities.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to investigate Facebook’s role in the right-wing
disinformation machine.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say
urge
Congress to investigate the conman's other crimes, not just the
shake-down of Ukraine.
Here's more about
why
that is the right thing to do.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
Israel's Next Move:
The
Real Danger in US Decision to Normalize Illegal Jewish
Settlements. It replaces the previous tacit connivance with
Israel's occupation policies with overt support.
Israel is jumping on this support with a
plan
to seize and colonize the commercial center of Hebron, which was
turned
into a no-mans-land because of the Israeli colony right near by.
Hezbollah supporters
attacked
Lebanese protesters in Beirut, and put the rather un-thuggish
Lebanese police in a dilemma.
(satire) Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg confirmed Tuesday that
he had decided to treat himself to a
second,
flashier presidential campaign.
This year's climate conference is
once
again sponsored by businesses including fossil fuel companies.
This undermines its purpose, just as fossil fuel companies
lobby hard to eliminate the substance of all policies and agreements
to render them ineffective.
Surveys of several countries, including the US, have found that
70%
of people overall want regulation of how businesses use personal
data.
This is a big step forward in public awareness of the problem of
surveillance, but people have a long way to go before they see
the
full
dimensions of the problem and start to consider real solutions.
Attorney General Barr threatens communities that fail to "respect"
thugs by
saying
that thugs will neglect to protect them.
The swindle is that those thug
departments already put more effort
into harassing them than protecting them.
G20 countries subsidies to coal extraction and use add up to
over 60
billion dollars per year. To save the ecosphere, countries must
terminate this quickly.
On some attempts to get the money out of US politics, and the
problems
they have encountered.
Conservative family values are about obeying rules. Progressive
family values are
about
whether the people in the family love each other and make a good life
together.
(satire) local mom Tara Cochran
scolded
her daughter Wednesday for pointing at a homeless man instead of
ignoring his very existence.
The conman
should
be impeached for trying to block the impeachment investigation, as
Nixon was going to be.
*The oil and gas sector
intends
to invest USD 1.4 trillion developing new oil and gas extraction. This
risks locking in enough carbon emissions to push warming beyond 2°C.*
The concept of "locking in" is that the owners will fight like
gangsters to make sure the new wells are run until exhausted, so what
matters is the quantity of emissions the wells will generate if run
that way.
The EPA (now Environmental Poisoning Agency) wants to dump more
waste-water from
oil and gas extraction into waterways, carrying toxins
that ordinary sewage treatment plants are not designed to remove.
(satire) Sonny Perdue Argues Food Stamp Cuts Will Incentivize People
To
Get Exploitative Jobs That Won't Exist In 5 Years.
When the CIA got its hands on taxi driver Ahmed Rabbani, he was
supposedly
the terrorist Hassan Ghul. Then it caught the real Hassan
Ghul, who confessed in detail and was released.
Rabbani confessed to being a taxi driver, and has been kept in
Guantanamo ever since.
My song Guantanamero is not as famous as The Who's music, presumably
because it isn't as good, but you might
like it anyway.
A newly
discovered metal-eating microbe seems to be adapted specifically
for meteorites.
It's conceivable if it might have arrived on Earth on meteorites four
billion years ago. It will be very interesting to see how its DNA
relates to other species of archaea.
ICC Holds Hearing on Afghanistan War Crimes,
Including
US Torture.
Let's
stop marijuana from being a gateway drug — gateway to prison.
A robbery conviction in London in 1972 has been overturned because the
thug who provided evidence
was a crook.
Fortunately the people falsely convicted didn't spend all the
intervening time in prison. But they had to struggle with being
labeled as robbers.
The Sunrise Movement says that Sanders is the
best
of the candidates for
the Democratic Party nomination.
(satire) Boris Johnson Worried
Anti-Semitism
Accusations Against
Labour Party Will Hurt Tories’ Hold On Bigot Vote.
US citizens: call
on Congress to ensure the NDAA blocks US war with Yemen or Iran.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors
to
appoint a Postmaster General who is fully committed to universal
service and public ownership of the Postal Service
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call
on Congress to repeal section 215 of the Patriot Act
which authorizes massive surveillance.
If you call, please spread the word!
Countries must adopt binding measures to protect wildlife
so
it won't die away.
About US cities' plans to protect people
who
are especially vulnerable
during heat waves.
This puts a band-aid on a potentially fatal injury. As the heat keeps
increasing over the years, any measure for protecting people during
heat waves will become inadequate. In a few decades, the whole summer
will be as bad as today's heat waves.
Some US parents are becoming concerned
about
schools' surveillance of
their children. The solution they are trying, calling on companies to delete some of the data
once a year, may do some good, but
it
is far from adequate.
*Amazon will
pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.* Precisely
how Amazon achieves this is a secret.
How about requiring all corporations operating in the US (or whichever
country it may be) to publish their full international accounts?
Greta Thunberg says that the school strikes for climate have failed
since they
have not led to the start of effective action.
I would rather say that they have not won the battle yet.
Indian thugs report that four suspects accused of rape and murder
were
shot and killed while trying to escape.
Even people accused of grave crimes deserve a fair trial, not a
summary execution.
Reductions in air pollution
lead
very quickly to big decreases in death rates.
Sydney weather forecast:
fire
and even more fire.
Australians (along with the rest of us) have brought this on
themselves, electing a planet-roaster government. Will they learn a
lesson now?
*The Kamala Harris campaign is over.
So
is the era of the tough-on-crime
Democrat.*
I think that her support for internet censorship may have contributed, too.
Salafi Arabia is loosening its repression of women,
at least for
wealthier urban women.
The UN says that Iran jailed 7,000 people during protests, and killed
over 200, with
thugs intentionally shooting to kill civilians who were
running away.
*The dangers Ilhan Omar faces are real, relentless and deadly. And they
are being fueled
by
her opponents in the Republican party.*
I think that Republican politicians would regard her assassination as
a triumph, expecting it to strengthen the right-wing extremism that is
their base.
Some suggested ad policy changes intended to prevent manipulative use
political advertising
on
Facebook and other platforms.
I think these are good changes, but the collection of personal data
is a wrong and danger
much
bigger than political advertising.
The conditions of Israel's siege of Gaza
are
encouraging the evolution
of antibiotic resistance. These diseases will eventually spread and kill
people all around the world, ironically including Israel,
and your country whatever it is.
Uber is planning to trap drivers with car loans that will
compel them to
keep driving for Uber.
Ayanna Pressley has filed a bill to
close
off the school-to-prison pipeline.
An Indian woman was going to a court hearing for the trial of men
accused of raping her. Before she could get there, they and some
other men grabbed her, set her on fire, and left her for dead. She is
still alive and
may
still be able to testify against them.
Edit: Alas no, she
died of her wounds.
Ahmed Rabbani, prisoner in Guantanamo for around 15 years based on
mistaken identity,
hopes
that the International Criminal Court will take
up his case.
That not much of a hope, but he has no other.
WHO estimates that 140,000 people
died
from measles in the past year. All this is because of anti-vax superstition.
The LA Times published an article about a poll of California voters
and took
three paragraphs to mention who is leading.
The candidate who is leading is the one they try to avoid mentioning.
PBS 2020 Segment Finds Time for Klobuchar, Sestak, and
Bullock-—But
Completely Ignores Bernie Sanders.
Tories are searching for various ways to rig UK elections in their
favor, and to punish their political enemies
using personal
disfavoritism.
A business profits from mass-producing
coordinated fake news to
support right-wing extremists including the conman.
The ESA has designed a satellite to grab and deorbit obsolete satellites
so they
cannot collide and make more space debris.
Social media questioning by US in visa application endangers filmmakers
that need to hide their identities publicly;
some
don't dare visit the US.
Evidence argues that Albert Camus was assassinated in 1960 by the KGB
with
connivance of the French government.
*We need to protect nature to stand any chance of tackling climate chaos.*
The UK Green Party
proposes
a New Deal for Nature.
Protests in Haiti are petering out
after
they failed to oust President
Jovenel Moïse, who
was
imposed by the US which bypassed the election.
Bolsonaro's officials are supporting the burning down the Amazon forest
by bringing arson
charges against activists that tried to fight fires.
French workers are going on strike
against
Macron's pension cuts.
Brown University Committee Votes to Divest From
Companies
Complicit in Human
Rights Abuses in Palestine.
This directs the yearning for justice in a valid and possibly
effective direction.
Washington College canceled a performance of The Foreigner because it
is a comedy and presents a villain who is a KKK organizer. Some
students demanded
to forbid mentioning an aspect of history that
included racism in a comic tone.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass the People's Justice Guarantee.
Here is a
summary
of the specific policies in the bill.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call on state
governors to veto expansion of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
If you sign, please spread the word!
*Pursuing economic growth at the expense of the environment is
no
longer an option as Europe faces “unprecedented” challenges from
climate chaos, pollution, [96]biodiversity loss and the
overconsumption of natural resources, according to a report from
Europe’s environmental watchdog.*
*French
workers cherish their welfare state. That’s why they’re striking.*
When loggers make a road, it leaves a long-lasting scar in the forest
which
prevents
new trees from growing on the former road.
I wonder whether there are small machines that aerate the soil.
The National Butterfly Center
got
a court order to stop right-wing volunteers from building an
unofficial wall on the center's land for butterflies.
Bogus Johnson
says
that children of working mothers tend towards crime.
One must not believe anything on his say-so, but if it is true, whose
fault would it be? It would be the fault of Tory politicians,
including Bogus Johnson, for imposing poverty and stress on those
families.
Blaming the victims of their own budget cuts is just the sort of thing
plutocratist politicians do.
*UN
calls
on Nicaragua to end 'persistent repression of dissent'.*
*[In the UK] the divisions between politics, the media and business
have dissolved,
eroding
integrity. It's not bad news for everyone.*
*Climate models have
accurately
predicted global heating for the past 50 years, a study has
found.*
*New Zealand’s political system relies on an
untraceable
flow of donations from rich individuals with personal agendas.*
Banning foreign donations won't change that.
2010 protester Alfie Meadows: "Over the past decade the police's
response to nearly killing me has been to
attempt
to blame and criminalise me, and to delay and deny accountability
for their actions. This pattern is found in many cases of police
violence and deaths in custody, where racism and maltreatment of
people with mental health problems are often significant factors."
*Trump
abused
presidency for own gain, Democrats' impeachment report concludes.*
US Navy Places $22 Billion Cyber Monday Order for Nuclear Submarines,
But
Who
Is Asking How We Gonna Pay For It?
I think the US can afford submarines and all the other things we need.
What we cannot afford is the handouts to the rich.
Greenpeace: Tackling degraded oceans
could
mitigate climate crisis.
Australia has clamped its foot on sick refugees. When the refugees
that Australia has dumped into Papua New Guinea and Nauru get sick,
they
will
no longer be able to get treatment in Australia. Instead, they
will get only whatever treatment Papua New Guinea and Nauru can give
them.
Nauru effectively
excludes
the press, so the world may not even find out when those refugees
get sick, or when they die of curable diseases.
New Zealand's government
will
henceforth make it standard practice to consider the effect on global
heating of all major decisions.
This is necessary, but no substitute for taking action to reduce
emissions quickly.
Congress has
passed
a bill authorizing personal sanctions on Chinese officials on
account of the repression in Xinjiang.
I would have been inclined to suppose that China would shrug this off,
but apparently it really bothers the rulers.
Farmers have killed 40% of the pigs in China in an attempt to contain
African swine fever. This has resulted in a
world-wide
shortage of pork.
Since the disease keeps spreading, the shortage could easily get much
worse.
Perhaps what we need to do is assure that pigs don't eat scraps of
pig. That is how we stopped the spread of mad cow disease, which can
also infect humans.
Saboteur
of the Interior Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for fossil fuel
companies, is
still
working for them. He just proposed to reduce the royalties that
oil companies must pay for risking a big spill in the Caribbean.
The World Meteorological Organization
warns
we are on track to 5C of global heating in the next 80 years.
Needless to say, very few of the children born today are likely to
reach age 80. I doubt many will reach age 60.
Thru Tuesday
US citizens: call
Rep. Eshoo's office at (408) 245-2339 and say,
If you call, please spread the word!
Wealthier Americans can afford to delay Social Security till age 70
and get a higher monthly rate. Poor Americans often desperately need
it at age 62. So
they get substantially less.
The flaw here is not in Social Security itself. Rather, it is that the
rest of the political-economic system crushes the poor.
That is what ought to be changed.
Research into death sentences in the US found that 1/3 of the trials
that produced death sentences were carried out wrong and
had to
be re-adjudicated.
I wonder if the same is true of trials that did not produce death
sentences.
*Malta's corruption is not just in the heart of government,
it’s the entire
body.*
The OAS should retract its
groundless
accusations of fraud in the Bolivian
election.
A medical study of homeless people in several countries found half of them
had
suffered traumatic brain injury.
The murderers of Berta Cáceres, and officials that organized it,
have been
given long prison sentences.
*Revealed: 'monumental' NSW bushfires
have
burnt 20% of Blue Mountains world
heritage area.*
That area is located a short distance west of Sydney. A few years of
increasing fires and that area could be entirely gone.
I think I visited Katoomba and played recorder for some wild cockatoos
during my first trip to Australia.
Indiana Deliberately Altered Amazon Worker’s Death Record
in Effort to Lure
[Amazon's] HQ2: Report.
This is an extreme example of the corruption that results when
governments bow down to business. Democracy means the state fears
the people and business fears the state. When the state fears business,
that is plutocracy.
US citizens: call
on Congress to ban surprise medical bills.
If you call, please spread the word!
German activists
occupied
a coal mine and blocked the train tracks to
other mines.
Climate-related local disasters
have
displaced 20 million people each year
for the past decade. The numbers will increase as years pass. By 2030 it could be 50
million a year, and many of them will not be able to return home.
It is crucial for the US to stop its wars, but
it
is so attached to war
that it won't let go.
The article describes Sanders as as expressing "strong support for Israel",
but (unlike the other candidates) that does not include support for Israel's
occupation policy.
"Safety" in school is now the excuse for total surveillance of
students, teaching a whole generation of Americans to
surrender
to China-style surveillance.
School violence is shocking, but it is a small danger as dangers go.
Suicide is a bigger danger, but I am skeptical that surveillance can
prevent suicide when the conflicting pressures of our society and the
menace of global heating can so easily create despair.
Alan Singer endorses the boycott of Israel, and
most but not all
the demands of the Palestinians' BDS movement.
Corporate Media's Mantra Is
'Anyone
But Sanders or Warren'.
Insurance Industry Is Clearly 'Terrified,' Says Sanders, As Lawmakers Admit
Lobbyists Helped Them
Write
Attacks on Medicare for All.
They are trying to discourage us so we won't push on and win.
Turkey, a member of NATO, has vetoed a plan for NATO's defense of the
Baltic region as a shakedown,
depending
that NATO support Erdoğan's
war against the Kurds of Syria.
Bullies like Erdoğan, Putin and the conman use threats and shakedowns
to get what they want, but they are no one's friend or ally.
Under international law, Israel's control over Gaza's borders and use of
Gaza's territory means that Israel
is
considered to hold a military
occupation of Gaza [PDF].
Many US and European insurance companies
now
refuse to insure
coal plants.
However, there are still some companies that will insure them,
so this is not yet starting to protect us.
Oil and gas plants need to be next.
China requires everyone who has a mobile phone
to
submit face scans for
face recognition.
Putting this together with the elimination of cash, they add up to
total surveillance of almost all activities.
Western tourists seek the noble savage
among
modern-day hunter
gatherers, who need to hide their digital devices when a tour comes through.
*How Biden helped create the student debt problem
he
now promises to fix.*
He supported the law that made it impossible to eliminate student debt
via bankruptcy.
For Vaugh Hatch, try Mekar Bhuana Centre
info@BALIMUSICANDDANCE.COM.
What sort of laws
would give us real privacy?
*Of course Facebook and Google want to ‘solve’ social problems.
They’re hungry
for our data.*
*Californians are turning to vending machines for safer water.
Are they being
swindled?*
Whether or not any given brand of bottled water is a swindle in the
narrow sense, to give up on tap water and resort normally to bottled
water is being swindled in a broader sense.
To the extent that elites collaborate globally to maintain their
power over their countries, we must reject the idea of "national
interest" vis-a-vis other countries and
globalize
our campaigns for
promoting democracy and ending poverty.
Bolivians don't trust the coup-installed government
to run a free and
fair election.
*Fossil fuel lobbyists
push
to dilute EU anti-greenwash plan.*
An Australian whose family home was destroyed by a wildfire fueled by
Australian coal mines brought the remains to Parliament,
demanding
climate defense action.
Chile is a wealthy country, but the rich
don't
let the rest get much
of that wealth.
The new head of the IMF says that
global heating is the main threat
to the world's human economy,
more
dangerous than an economic crash.
Global heating
disaster will eventually cause an economic crash, but
by that time there will be no way to stop the slide down the cliff.
*[US military] contractors gleefully report record earnings in divisions
that bid on 'classified' projects,
the
fastest-growing part of the
Pentagon's budget.*
Aside from the harm of a pit for public money spent in unaccountable
ways, there is also the danger that these systems will be used to
repress people, either in the US or elsewhere. This includes mass
surveillance, which
(as
China shows, especially in Xinjiang) is the preparatory step for repression.
What to do with imprisoned Islamist terrorists
poses a conundrum,
world-wide.
In Western countries the danger of Islamist terrorism is pretty small,
overall. The danger of being murdered by an Islamist terrorist is
tiny compared with the danger of being murdered for some other reason,
and unless you are black that too is small.
Thus, if we resist the pressure to freak out about this tiny danger, we
will find that releasing Islamist convicts at the end of their
sentences is an acceptably small risk in an otherwise-risky world.
Corbyn is
resisting that pressure.
US citizens: call
on Congress to pass the Put Patients First Act,
which would insist that religion is no excuse for discrimination
in providing medical care.
Iraqi Crowds Erupt in Joyous Celebrations as PM, Elected Under Bush
Constitution, Offers to Resign.
Setting up a system that is less corrupt will be a bigger challenge.
I hope they succeed.
Regarding Ayatollah Sistani, I have read that the long-established
Shi'a tradition is to have separation between the religion and state,
so that religious leaders can criticize oppression by the state.
Iran's "Islamic Republic" was an aberration against this tradition.
ACLU: Reducing HIV Transmission
Requires
Decriminalizing Sex Work.
Michelle Bachelet: for Hong Kong's government to end the protests and
crisis, other than by wrecking the city,
it
needs to consult the
people truly.
The Article One Act would limit national emergencies to 30 days
unless
Congress approves continuing them.
UK prisons, suffering from budget cuts, are
not
effective about convincing prisoners to stop being violent
Islamists.
The bully's planned cuts for food stamps
would
have cut off almost 4 million Americans from food stamps.
Millions more would have lost part of their benefits, and a million
students would have had trouble finding lunch.
Amnesty International condemns Turkey for
repeatedly
bombarding Syrian civilians in Idlib.
Comparing
the proposed Green New Deal with FDR's New Deal of the 1930s.
Buttigieg wants people to oppose gratis public college education based
on a
foolish
horror of giving even a small handout to rich people the same as
everyone else.
Aside from the valid argument that programs which help everyone are
harder for plutocratists to eliminate, the point at hand will make
little difference in practice. Rich people won't make use of gratis
public college education, because they will send their children to
private colleges.
At his core, [Sanders] is the same
democratic
socialist who ran for mayor of Burlington, Vt., in the 1980s and for
the Democratic nomination in 2016. He is who he is, and you know
who he is, …
That is why I support him. He won't change his policies without a
reason that convinces him. If it convinces him, I trust it would
convince me, too.
The DA of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, is looking for old arrest warrants
to discard because
they are somehow obsolete or pointless.
I think he should go further. For crimes that are not violent or
terribly serious, the warrants should be discarded after some years.
Scientists do not have enough knowledge to estimate how fast methane
is leaking out of the ground and sea bottom into the air, and can't
begin to predict
how
much this will contribute to global heating in
the future.
If it happens fast, it could push the ecosphere's temperature up by 7
degrees C. This would be likely to kill most of humanity, perhaps
even all.
Protests in several countries demand that Amazon
treat warehouse
employees better.
I support this, but it does not go far enough. We must require Amazon to allow
anonymous purchases, and we must help other companies compete with Amazon so
that it ceases to control a large fraction of online sales.
Students at Liverpool University were told it was illegal for them
to support striking teachers, so
they
blocked a building instead.
Iraq's prime minister agreed to step down
in
response to the protests.
An additional reason to impeach the conman:
so
a future president cannot
pardon him.
US citizens: call
on Amazon, Walmart, and Target to stop
funneling money to anti-abortion legislators.
If you call, please spread the word!
Global heating is spreading dengue fever to cities and countries
where
it did not exist before.
Iranians protested the rise in gasoline price by blocking streets.
The state responded
with
tear gas, bullets, and blocking the internet. Estimates are that around 70 people were killed.
We must end subsidies for fossil fuels —
global heating disaster
threatens to kill billions of people a few decades from now. We would
be fools to delay that for any reason whatsoever. Thus, governments
need to develop a way to do that without short-term suffering for the
poor.
*UK's military interventions
have
fueled terrorism, says Corbyn.*
Corbyn has courage that other politicians lack.
Tenants in Atlantic Plaza Towers campaigned against installing face
recognition cameras and
got
the landlord to back down.
It should be illegal to install face recognition cameras in a
residential building, except for cameras installed inside an
apartment by the residents of that apartment.
Ohio has already prohibited abortion (though this law has not been
approved by courts). Now its Republican-gerrymandered legislature is
planning to define a fertilized egg as a human being.
This means women
would be imprisoned for failing to carry it to term.
The law would also forbid doctors from treating an ectopic pregnancy
(by requiring them to do the impossible afterward). Without treatment,
ectopic pregnancy carries a substantial chance of death.
There was a large student climate strike, but the kept politicians continue
doing
their job for the planet-roasting plutocrats.
*Countries from Siberia to Australia are burning:
the
age of fire is the
bleakest warning yet.*
Dishonest Baltimore thugs concealed the evidence
that
would exonerate
three men who were convicted of murder by lying witnesses.
The ICRC rebuked the UK for canceling the citizenship of people
who
went to fight for PISSI.
You've heard of virtue-signalling. Exiling citizens for crimes is a
right-wing form of this, based on equating cruelty with virtue.
As often happens, the US is even worse. The US is persecuting a whole
family after one member attempted to commit an act of terrorism. The
relatives were not involved, but since they are Muslims, the
bully's
men make
excuses to crush their business and cancel their citizenship
or residency.
Bogus Johnson may win the UK election because all the Tory voters care
about is defeating Corbyn (and thus protecting plutocracy).
They
don't care whether he is coherent, or even honest.
Everyone: call
on Colorado to maintain its clean air rules.
If you call, please spread the word!
Use of euphemisms such as "passed away" reflects a powerful and
harmful taboo that our society
has
placed on the topic of death.
That taboo has made it hard for people to cope with death.
The main reason drug prices in the US are increasing
is that companies
can get away with it.
The Treating Workers With Dignity Act would guarantee employees a
break to eat a meal, use the restroom, or
tend
to their medical
needs while on the job.
Giuliani pursued
various personal business deals with Ukrainian
government agencies and officials.
There is nothing inherently corrupt in offering Ukraine the service of
finding money that has been siphoned away from the Ukraine by corrupt
former officials. That service, done honestly, could be well worth
the price Ukraine pays for it, if it leads to Ukraine's recovery of a
substantial fraction of that money.
However, for Giuliani to offer that service to Ukraine while serving
as the conman's lawyer while the conman shakes Ukraine down is a
corrupt combination — in effect, a secondary shakedown.
If Medicare for All 'Too Risky,'
How
Would NYT Have Reported Push for Social
Security, Abolition, or the Overthrow of King George III?
I think the word "overthrow" is incorrect as regards what happened to
George III. He remained king, although his kingdom ceased to include
the rebellious colonies.
Australian thugs
put arbitrary restrictions on French photojournalists
to exclude them from public places
where
they could have photographed
the coal terminal that endangers the Great Barrier Reef (as well
as the whole ecosphere). This included surveilling them to discover
and sabotage their plan to hire a boat to take pictures from
the harbor side.
Scientists warn that several global heating tipping points
may already
be starting to tip.
We must err on the side of safety, not on the side of danger. Since
we can't see the cliff edge, and we don't know how far away is, we had
better brake pretty hard.
The EU Parliament has declared a climate emergency.
Will
it do anything to
curb the problem?
The US major media
systematically
apply a double standard when comparing
Israeli violence and Palestinian violence.
The DNC leader rejected the demand for a specific debate about the
climate emergency, promising instead to have many questions about
climate in their debates it would hold.
It
has not kept that promise,
not even close.
[The saboteur-in-chief]'s Climate Recklessness
Is
Grounds for Impeachment.
Sudan has taken
a
step towards religious freedom.
There is a movement to return to Benin the many bronze sculptures that
were taken by a
British military punitive expedition in 1897.
I think this is the right thing to do, but how about making and
keeping copies?
Learning from the WTO protest in Seattle 20 years ago: protest campaigns
should think about
building
institutions and solidarity as a base to
fight the next battle.
The husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe says that Bogus Johnson promised
to win her freedom,
then
did not try.
In general, I condemn paying ransom for hostages. However, in this
case it was wrong for Britain not to return Iran's money. It is wrong
for Iran to take people hostage to get that money back, but Britain
ought to pay it rather than steal it.
DiEM25, the campaign against plutocracy in Europe organized by
Varoufakis and others,
endorses
Labour in the UK election.
It also endorses the Greens or the SNP or Plaid Cymru where those
have a better chance of defeating Tories.
The EU national governments rejected a proposed directive to make
companies disclose how much sales they have in each country and
how
much tax they pay to each country.
This demonstrates the power that these companies have over the
governments that have become their servants, and the importance of
measures to cut off their poverty.
The plutocratic system is the root of most evils in the world today.
There are a few exceptions — the system may have no particular
interest in bigotry, except when that proves useful for right-wing
politicians to distract public attention from plutocracy.
A British TV channel invited all the party leaders to a debate about
global heating.
Bogus Johnson refused to participate, so the debate
substituted a melting ice statue for him. Now the Tories
threaten
to punish the TV channel for this.
Selling durable plastic bags in the UK has led to an increase in
plastic for bags, because customers
keep
buying another bag rather than reusing each bag many times.
I carry three durable bags with me all the time, and I use each one
repeatedly until it wears out.
Evgeny Morozov: the idea of protecting privacy by "breaking up" big
tech companies is misguided: what matters is not the size of companies
that collect personal data, but
who
controls those systems.
I partly agree, but I would say that what is important is what
personal data they collect, and whether it is feasible to stop them
from collecting anything about you.
Meanwhile, breaking up the companies would at least reduce their power
to block and ignore regulations.
The native life of the Farallon Islands can be protected from
introduced mice by
eradicating
them.
Mice are not endangered, so I think we should proceed with the
eradication. It will take work to protect vulnerable species (though
gulls are not worth the trouble of saving), but this work will be
needed just once. If we succeed in eradicating the mice from any of
the Farallon Islands, the native species there will be safe
indefinitely from mice; with any luck, the operation will never have
to be repeated.
The latest fashion in planet-roasting politics: recognize the causes
of global heating, but
delay
real action until decades from now when it will be
too
late.
Brexit?
This election is about something much bigger than that.
It is about who the UK exists for — the rich alone, or everyone
in Britain.
Maltese
PM's aide accused of being mastermind of Caruana Galizia killing.
AOC: "I see decisions made every day that
cost
the American public billions of dollars a year for bogus reasons
and nobody asks how we pay for it."
One of the Argentine generals' murderous subalterns is
on
trial in Italy for several political murders.
Students and workers in Colombia are holding another large protest
because a
thug killed a protester in the previous large protest.
Killing protesters with a tear gas canister is usually not an accident.
It results from aiming at someone's head, instead of away from people.
Many Extinction Rebellion protesters charged with the crime of
protesting in London
will
have charges dropped.
Some Extinction Rebellion activists are using a hunger strike to
demand that various UK parties
support
their climate emergency bill.
Scientists say, watch out for climatic tipping points which lead to
irreversible
slide towards disaster.
How citizens of Michigan won
the
elimination of Republican gerrymandering.
A leaderless movement in Italy sparks large protests against Salvini,
sometimes
bigger than his own campaign rallies.
The Tories have discussed with the US plans to let Big Pharma (and
other drug companies)
gouge
on drugs for the NHS.
*My investigation into a US trade deal shows
it
really could cost the NHS
millions.*
Small temporary increases in levels of particulate air pollution lead
to small
temporary increases in the rate of hospital admissions for
heart attacks and other illnesses.
It suggests that larger long-term increases in levels of particulate
air pollution lead to larger long-term increases in the rate of the
same illnesses.
The study covered Americans enrolled in Medicare — that is, almost
entirely those aged 65 and over. Whether the same would apply to
younger people is not known.
Samoa's measles vaccination rate has fallen way down, leading to
an
outbreak that has infected 3000 people and killed 39.
(satire)
History of on-line advertising.
[The conman] Reportedly Knew of Whistleblower Complaint
When He
Unfroze Ukraine Aid.
In other words, he knew his shakedown was going to become public
knowledge.
A refugee who was tortured in Sudan and then beaten up in Italy
reached the UK and was subsequently jailed repeatedly there. The UK
Supreme Court ruled that this was illegal.
It
took the UK 7 years to
agree to consider his asylum claim.
Bloomberg, as mayor of New York City, eliminated some public libraries
and reduced the collections of the rest.
Now
New York City is doing more
of the same.
My favorite library branch, the Donnell Library Center, is where I
went to look for textbooks on many subjects. It was shut down in 2008
to sell the land to a hotel, and replaced 8 years later with a much
smaller library.
It
Was Revealing Who Joe Biden Saw — and Who He Didn't See — in California.
Many US governors never pardon a human being,
only turkeys.
Micah Sample, a student at Indiana Wesleyan University,
was harshly
punished for publishing a statement rejecting the idea that "cultural
appropriation" is something to be condemned.
One of the comments pointed out that the article errs in describing
his statement as "trollish". He stated his sincere views, not
a phony provocation.
I've stated similar
views and I stand by them. Culture exists for everyone to appropriate,
because that is how culture develops. It is as harmful for an ethnic
group to own a cultural practice as it is for Disney to own one.
This is not to say that there is no such thing as an offensive
statement. Obviously, a statement or gesture can mock or insult
people, and it is normal for the targets to take offense at this.
Harsh mockery and insults are unkind, and can get to the point of
being nasty.
However, the issue at hand is the claim that incorporating elements
from some other cultural group into your statement or gesture is not
merely unkind but a violation of their rights, and that this is
regardless of the intended meaning.
There is an inherent risk in borrowing or "appropriating" elements
from a culture you don't know well: that of displaying your ignorance
or looking like a fool. (The same things can happen with other
microsubcultures in your own culture.) Don't blame anyone else if you
make such a mistake. But we should let people live those mistakes
down.
Senate Democrats have introduced a data privacy bill which begins, though
just barely, to
limit collection of some data.
But it has obvious loopholes. It won't require companies to reveal
the conclusions they have deduced from the personal data they have
access to — because they argue that those are not "the client's
data." It won't, as far as I can see, limit the targeted ads that are
the basis for surveillance capitalism.
And it won't even try to make it possible to buy something over the
internet anonymously. We have the technology for this.
The most sensitive personal data about you are where you go during the
day, what you do there, who you talk with, and what you and they
say. It should be illegal to set up or operate a system
which
systematically collects any of those data, except when authorized
by a court order targeted at specific people.
I propose a law requiring stores to offer the service of bringing an
item to the store for you to buy later, in exchange for an ordering
fee paid in advance.
A new coalition against Amazon
plans
to criticize the company heavily
during the holiday selling season, but apparently not call (as
i do) for refusing to buy from Amazon.
This doesn't reference a web site for the coalition, only a Twitter
URL. I would like to see a list of the injustices they criticize,
because I worry that the fundamental injustice Amazon does to its
customers, making them identify themselves, is missing.
Here's my list of the injustices of Amazon.
US citizens: call
on Facebook to stop funding the Federalist Society and the social
acceptance of Brett Kavanaugh.
If you call, please spread the word!
*That the EU now frets about the extent of China’s investment in
critical infrastructure but fails to acknowledge that its own policies
partly created the vulnerability
is
evidence of a divided and
profoundly inconsistent approach to China.*
Plutocratists see Bloomberg as the opportunity to give plutocracy
a good name again
and
avoid fixing its biggest problems.
*Bloomberg kicks off campaign with $31m ad buy — and
he, Steyer and
Trump make up two-thirds of all ad spends.*
What a shame it would be if a billionaire got the Democratic nomination.
Germany
is damaging the European economy. The answer? Raise German
wages.
Governments acquire malware "to spy on terrorists", then use it to
spy
on dissidents and reporters (as well as whistleblowers).
The goal of stopping terrorism, while good in itself, cannot justify
endangering dissent and journalism, because a repressive and
unaccountable state is far more dangerous than underground terrorists.
Matthew Hedges:
I
was detained in the UAE. I learned that Britain puts trade before its
citizens. He reports being tortured and drugged.
The article lists other foreigners that were imprisoned there for
absurd reasons.
Iran crushed nationwide protests with
gunfire
and arrests.
The Tories' reshuffling of welfare payments
makes
people wait 5 weeks with no income at the start. Some (60%, or
one million families) have got loans to cover that period, but the
price of this is repaying the loans after. It makes people hungry or
homeless.
Amazon’s Ring
Planned
Neighborhood "Watch Lists" Built on Facial Recognition.
We
must not abandon the women and children of [PISSI] in camps in
Syria
"If we think our exit strategy is to either beat the Taliban — which
can’t be done given the local, regional, and cross border circumstances
— or to establish an Afghan government that is capable of delivering
good government to its citizens using American tools and methods, then
we do not have an exit strategy because both of those are impossible&helliip;
We did not know what we were doing."
Hi, my name is ______ and I’m calling to request that Health
Subcommittee Chair Rep. Eshoo invite a nurse from National Nurses
United to be a witness in Tuesday’s Energy & Commerce hearing.
Nurses have firsthand experience in our country’s broken health
care system, and they are a crucial voice that must be included.
Thank you.
The UK's "hostile environment" for foreigners extended to jailing asylum seekers who had been tortured or trafficked. The Supreme Court ruled this was illegal.
It also covers foreign academics at UK universities. Terrified universities are checking passports when faculty from other universities are going to do even small tasks.
Academics are pushing back by refusing to show their passports on such occasions.
The Realism of Bernie Sanders' Climate Policy. It will make rich people and companies pay to build the systems that will enable everyone to reduce their greenhouse gas footprints.
(satire) a Cognitec FaceVACS-VideoScan Unit #121 facial recognition camera expressed frustration Monday after focusing on a man it knew it had seen before and found itself unable to remember his name.
Uber has lost its license to operate in London, ironically for failing to assure the identity of drivers.
It should lose its license for insisting on identifying passengers.
A British company provided a crucial piece of weapons technology for Turkey's armed drones, which it has used recently to kill civilians.
George Monbiot: *A vote for the planet means a vote for Labour or the Greens.*
China has dispatched over a million Han people to live in the humes of Uighurs who must treat them as "relatives".
*[California] crabbers are postponing their harvest to avoid entangling whales.*
*How can it be wrong to raise taxes on middle-class workers but acceptable to cut benefits and squeeze working-class wages?*
Everyone: call on the UK to free Julian Assange.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to pass Medicare for All.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Missouri Attorney General Schmitt to free Lamar Johnson.
If you call, please spread the word!
Polls say that Americans want to end the US's ground wars. Even most Republicans do.
That leaves out the question of the drone assassination campaigns in many countries.
*My hunger strike could be deadly. But I am willing to risk that for climate action.*
"Billionaire-funded protests will inevitably make everyone more cynical about the integrity of real protests."
The world Go champion has retired from professional play, saying he considers it pointless for humans to compete in that game.
*Jeremy Corbyn reveals dossier 'proving NHS up for sale'.*
Many US cities have problems with lead poisoning. Here is how Cleveland is taking action to put an end to it.
We can't count on Democrats in the House of Representatives to stand firm against funding Salafi Arabia's war with Yemen.
It may be useful to phone your congresscritter (of whichever party) to oppose this.
The "Contract for the Web" aims to protect privacy, but its privacy rules are inadequate — similar to the European Union's GDPR.
There are cities in Europe and the US that require motorists to enter the car's license plate number to pay for parking. Cities say they chose this method because it is efficient — but its byproduct is to impose an additional system of massive surveillance on a large fraction of the population.
The most sensitive data about you are your daily activities: where you go, what you do there, and who you talk with. Machine learning can deduce many important things about you from these data. It can identify dissidents, whistleblowers, and journalists.
It is useless to try to prevent abuse of these data with rules about using them. Personal data, once collected, will be misused. Businesses and states will push to misuse them, and China shows where that will lead.
Thus, adequate rules to protect privacy must ensure nobody collects these data about you except under a court order that specifies you.
In particular, adequate rules would clearly prohibit using massive surveillance to collect parking fees. So we can judge any proposed rules by checking whether they would certainly prohibit that.
The Contract for the Web offers no certainty of this, so it is not adequate.
The private companies that own the UK electric and water grids have moved them into offshore holding companies to take advantage of special business-supremacy treaties that the UK has made with a few other countries.
The UK should try to renegotiate those treaties to exclude former state assets that have been privatized. If that doesn't work, it should abrogate those treaties entirely.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate Amazon's surveillance.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on legislators to eliminate face recognition in schools.
If you call, please spread the word!
The UN says that the total greenhouse gas emissions need to fall 7.6% a year for next decade, if global heating disaster is to be avoided.
Bolsonaro is cutting off archaeology to study the ancient societies of Amazonia.
If his plans to cut down the forest for plantations go ahead, much of the evidence will be destroyed.
Prison phone companies in the US continue to gouge poor people in prison and cut them off from their families.
Closeness with family is an important factor in steering ex-cons away from crime. If the US penal system were seriously trying to reduce crime, it would immediately offer each prisoner many hours per week of gratis phone calls to family and close friends.
You might suppose that a "gang enhancement" is intended to make a gang larger. Actually it is a euphemism for lengthening a prison sentence based on claiming the prisoner belongs to a gang. Most prisoners in California have their sentences increased in this way, but generally it happens only to blacks and Hispanics.
While in prison, the prisoners can be put in solitary confinement for long periods based on flimsily arguments that they belong to gangs.
"Whenever you read a newspaper article claiming EVs are worse than diesel or petrol cars, that article will be based on a report that deliberately makes EVs look worse than they are."
"Only two weeks since seizing state power, the evidence is clear: this is a rightwing, military dictatorship. The telltale sign for a country like Bolivia is the outright Indian killing."
Replanting coral reefs in Kenya has brought back fish and invertebrates for people to catch.
Alas, when the ocean gets acidic enough to kill all coral, replanting won't work any more.
The market model of the university is pushing professors into poverty.
There are some exceptions in that pattern. In some fields, a professor can raise lots of research grants, especially by selling per research to business. But that isn't good either.
Plutocratist Democrats in New York State are pushing to make it harder for parties other than the principal two to participate in elections.
The House Progressive Caucus rubber-stamped a short extension of PAT RIOT Act massive surveillance powers.
Apparently that caucus doesn't recognize the need to resist surveillance. Not yet.
Bizarrely, the lack of right to repair shafts the US military just as it shafts individuals.
Morally, the individuals are more important; but this example may help persuade legislators.
The provost of the University of Indiana says that perse would not fire bigoted Professor Rasmusen for his bigotry even if perse could.
What perse will do is make sure that Rasmusen cannot grade students based on bigotry, and that no student is required to take his classes.
I think this is the right way to deal with such situations. Apparently Rasmusen's bigotry is extreme and unmistakable, but anyone can make statements in which someone else will detect some sort of stereotype, and could then be denounced as "racist" or "sexist". It is right, it is crucial, to discourage bigotry without a witch hunt.
The bullshitter is trying to distract attention from his shakedown of Ukraine by claiming this is a legitimate response to supposed "Ukrainian election interference" in 2016. Some Republican officials endorse this claim. However, US intelligence officials have told senators that there was no such thing: rather, Putin is trying to pin his own interference on Ukraine.
Aside from that, even if Ukraine had tried to interfere in the US election of 2016, that would be entirely irrelevant to the issue of the shakedown.
Senator Warren called the conman's secret meeting with Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel "corruption". This is correct.
This may well be corruption in the narrowest moral sense; campaign funds from the rich are effectively bribes. However, there is a broader sense of corruption: even in the absence of an outright bribe, the power of the rich corrupts Democracy. This meeting is certainly a part of that.
Corbyn and the Labour Party plan to tackle Tory-imposed suffering firmly and thoroughly.
The cost will not be exorbitant. Other countries' examples show that businesses and rich people will have no trouble paying for this.
A judge ruled in clear and strong terms that the president's aides must testify to Congress under subpoena.
Will the Republican-appointed judges on the Supreme Court heed this obvious principle, or will they fabricate an excuse to protect the bullshitter?
A survey found that Black Friday is almost all phony, in the UK at least. 95% of the deals do not really offer a specially low price.
There is a deeper fault in Black Friday: it focuses people's attention on yearning to buy things they surely don't need. Some of the things may be of actual use, and I wouldn't say nobody should buy any of them. (Though some of them are full of proprietary malware which may spy on users, or restrict them with DRM, and nobody should buy those.) However, even if there is nothing immoral about a particular product, and it is of some use, you should not let yourself be manipulated so by sales campaigns.
Should Congress investigate the conman's practice of pardoning military personnel convicted of war crimes as possible grounds for impeachment?
Pardoning them was wrong — war crimes call for punishment, and the US usually fails to try the perpetrators.
Whether a politically controversial pardon should be grounds for impeachment is a different question. I think a president ought to pardon whistleblowers and journalists, including Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. That too is politically controversial. Should a president be impeached for pardoning them?
Should Governor Altgeld have been impeached for pardoning the union leaders wrongly convicted of the Haymarket bombing? (Their "trial" didn't try to prove they had anything to do with it.) He was quite unpopular after pardoning them, but the act was not treated a crime.
*Research reveals that living in proximity of traffic increases risk of lung cancer by 10%.*
Chilean thugs have killed 23 protesters, and wounded over 200 in the eye with various kinds of shooting. Many of those have lost an eye.
As usual, they lie to excuse this violence.
A campaign aims to reduce infant mortality for American blacks to the same level that American whites have.
Medicare for All would give them proper care, and other progressive programs would reduce the poverty that imposes increased stress. Poor whites might benefit, too.
The selfish fools of Alberta consider Canada's minimal attention to the danger of global heating are "expropriation" and are determined to profit from oil even if it kills us all (and them too).
*US law enforcement officials preparing for fresh Keystone XL pipeline protests have privately discussed tactics to stop activists “by any means” and have labeled demonstrators potential “domestic terrorism” threats, records reveal.*
Pro-democracy candidates swept the elections for Hong Kong local councils. Supporters of China's power won 10% of the seats.
I've been told that 57% of the votes were for pro-democracy candidates, according to this article.
Now it is clear that the people of Hong Kong mostly agree with the protesters. Can anyone find out what fraction of votes were for the pro-democracy candidates?
I've read that these local councils choose some of the territory's legislature, too. So the consequences could be significant.
*Why can we no longer believe in a well-run welfare state that supports us all?*
One cause is that plutocratists have dominated the major media for decades, and spread the idea that state can't do a good job of anything. We are supposed to disregard the fact that businesses often profit by not even trying to do a good job.
A study has tied birth defects in Iraqi babies with exposure to depleted uranium.
Their hair has a high level of thorium, which is the main decay product of uranium 238, so the amount of thorium is a good way to measure the extent of a baby's exposure to depleted uranium.
This effect was predicted at the time of Dubya's invasion of Iraq. The use of depleted uranium shells and armor makes for a long-term increase in birth defects, for humans and other animals. The half-life of U-238 is so long (roughly the age of the Earth) that we can't expect its decay to get rid of it.
Bloomberg's plutocratist positions are a perfect fit for the Republican Party, as it was in 2015.
Bloomberg News will not investigate any Democratic candidates.
This policy is better than some alternatives — for instance, to publish biased reporting. Still, it is not a good thing for owners of major news sources to be candidates.
The bully pardoned US soldiers accused of war crimes. In effect, he rejects the idea of justice.
*A new report shows conclusively that the coal industry was aware of the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels as far back as 1966.*
People of Venice Protest over Floods And Cruise Ships.
Venice is becoming impractical as a place for people to actually live, and the population of residents is falling. If this keeps up, there won't be many protesters any more.
*Why has Buttigieg flipped from being a putative progressive to being perhaps the most conservative, pro-corporate Democrat remaining in the field? A good place to start would be to follow the money.*
We could call him Nothing Buttigieg because, if elected, he will give us only a song and dance.
500 spectators at the Harvard-Yale football game participated in the half-time disruption protest for divestment of fossil fuels.
Ocasio-Cortez's proposed Green New Deal would require companies working on it to respect workers' rights.
Documents link Pompeo and Giuliani to shaking down Ukraine and smearing Ambassador Yovanovitch.
Labour proposes to put the UK on Sweden's economic path (or most of the way there), rather than one resembling the US.
How to Win the Holiday Healthcare Debate With Your Conservative Relatives.
Tahir Imin Uighurian criticized China's treatment of the Uighurs from exile outside China. China sentenced his relatives to long prison terms to punish him.
His wife and daughter have been cut off from him; he has no idea what has happened to them.
Speaking Uighur in school is more or less forbidden in the main Uighur area of Xinjiang.
This reminds me of what the US, Canada, and UK have done to people who spoke minority languages. I'm told that Louisiana pretty much eliminated the Cajun traditional French, a few decades ago. But those countries don't do this any more.
Corporations certified by B Corp adopt making the world a better place as an official goal, alongside profit.
This has the potential to do good, but we will have to see how it turns out in practice.
Egyptian thugs have arrested editors of the news site Mada Masr. The article describes several forms of repression of independent publishing in Egypt.
An Uighur man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for pushing religion.
Wouldn't some European countries penalize this as "hate speech", for what he said about eating food cooked by non-Muslims? It is wrong for European countries to punish stating opinions, not just for China to do it.
Here is a summary of the Chinese brainwashing system for Uighurs.
Students that feel offended by expressions of bigotry at Syracuse University demand that the chancellor obey their orders to the letter in adopting measures to clamp down on it. They seem inclined to engage in bullying unless they get their way.
They rebuked the administration because it had to wait until morning to address a reported 11:30pm SMS hate campaign, which ultimately proved to have been a hoax (no one actually received the supposed SMS). If it had really happened, it would be nasty, but not an emergency. Such things can wait till morning.
Hitting back at hate in a direct way can backfire and promote hate. It can also make society more repressive. Chancellor Syverud should think carefully about how to discourage bigotry at Syracuse University, and resist pressure to "repress someone right away." He should refuse to be bullied, refuse to resign, think calmly, and aim to reduce bigotry rather than trying to look tough.
The forms of bigotry present in Syracuse University include antisemitism, and I am one of the people targeted by that. Speaking as such, I call for the treatment to cure the disease of bigotry, including antisemitism, not be more repressive than the disease itself.
The conman's shakedown of Ukraine is so plainly demonstrated that Republican politicians can defend him only by blackwhiting. Interestingly, some pundits that used to support him can't stomach that any more.
Important forests are threatened in many parts of the world.
*Repressive violence is sweeping Bolivia. The Áñez regime must be held to account.*
When plutocratist politicians have imposed poverty for decades, people may become unable to believe any politicians could ever change that attitude. Unlearning that defeatism is crucial for victory.
It is clear now that Warren is much less progressive than Sanders.
She is better than the usual run of plutocratist Democrats, but it would be sad if we don't get ourselves a true progressive.
All the avenues of research can't reduce the greenhouse footprint of aviation if people keep flying more. We need global taxes on flying, designed to discourage it.
With enough investment, we could also build high-speed trains as China has done. They could replace most air travel, and the remainder we could perhaps live with.
In Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, people are protesting against the power of the government of Iran. Too bad that many of them are protesting to demand subsidized fossil fuels. That's exactly the thing to kill billions of people, given time.
The article errs in equating Iranian influence with Shi'ite power. The Shi'ites are the majority in Iraq, by far, and they will surely continue to be the dominant group in Iraq whether Iran is involved or not. The crucial question is whether they will admit individual Sunnis on a basis of equality, or crush them to the point that they rebel yet again.
Stiglitz: It's time to retire metrics like GDP. They don't measure everything that matters.
I propose three numbers to measure the overall health of the economy:
The Bolivian coup government accuses Morales of "sedition" and terrorism, based on an audio recording calling for protest strikes.
Protests are not terrorism, and even less is advocating protests terrorism. The use of the term "sedition" proves the injustice of the charges, since it simply means "criticizing the government," and a government which makes that a crime is unfit to rule.
Harvard and Yale alumni held a protest for fossil fuel divestment on the field at half-time at the annual Harvard-Yale game.
Amnesty International says that the surveillance done by Facebook and Google amounts to a threat to human rights.
This is a big step towards what I've said for years, but they still have a ways to go. Every system that tracks people's movements or actions is a threat to human rights. A lot of tracking is a bug threat. Whether that tracking is done by one large system or by many small systems, either way it adds up to a big threat.
A suspect in the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia is linked to government ministers of Malta.
A Colorado thug grabbed and mauled a teenager whose limbs had all been amputated, regarding him as a "threat".
Then he attacked another teenager for making a video of his attack on the first one. He arrested them both.
US citizens: call on Congress to end federal prohibition of marijuana.
To sign this without running nonfree Javascript code, use the Lynx browser.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the New York Times and Washington Post to quit being a megaphone for the corporate elite.
If you call, please spread the word!
An Alabama thug was convicted for shooting and killing Gregory Gunn, who was running away from him.
The thug claimed Gunn had attacked him, but that seems to have been fabrication. But even if it had been true a moment before, it was no longer true when Gunn ran away.
The fact that rural jury of mainly whites would convict a uniformed thug for killing a black man gives me hope that Americans are unlearning their unquestioning support for thugs that kill, and especially those that kill blacks. This is the first step to learning to try not to kill.
The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad national historical park will become the Harriet Tubman Undersea Railroad national historical park by 2050, if we don't curb global heating soon.
The visitor center was finished only 2 years ago will face flooding. Apparently the US government did not consider sea-level rise when planning it. Republicans work hard to prevent such planning. It's as if they were interested only in a chance to pay money to business, and not on whether the project would produce anything durable.
Leaders of authoritarian movements mobilize people's fear of death so as to offer them a feeling of safety.
Immigrant Americans that love their country testified in the impeachment hearings, and were speared by Republican native Americans that primarily love their gang.
The Environmental Poisoning Agency (EPA, formerly the Environmental Protection Agency) eliminated its rules for safety of chemical plants in order to reduce the inconvenience for plant owners and increase their profits.
(satire) Voluntarily surrendering the remarkable talent that gave her profound insight into the true nature of existence, the only person with the ability to see the world for what it actually is has started taking antidepressants …
Improved efficiency of renewable electric generation could make fossil fuels peak by 2030.
That is not soon enough! By 2030 we need to have reduced greenhouse emissions substantially. We do need laws to push out fossil fuels.
Bills to set long-term targets for 2050 can help, but we need to force faster action.
The standard way to make a company "grow" nowadays is by making a bubble around it.
Medea Benjamin: the coup-installed government sent soldiers to end an occupation in El Alto, and they shot wildly, wounding dozens of bystanders and maybe some occupiers as well. The press in Bolivia do not report this because the government has threatened to jail them if they do.
US citizens: call for updating medical records privacy law (HIPAA) to protect privacy from data digestion companies such as Google.
Here's how the law is inadequate today.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Advertising billboards track individuals through their cell phones' ID numbers for cellular radio and WiFi.
They can't see me, because I don't have a cell phone, and the WiFi of my laptop is switched off (and I change the MAC address). But they should not be allowed to track anyone.
Ortega is arresting protesters in Nicaragua again. Mothers of prisoners have resumed Hunger strikes.
Another disgusting thing about Buttigieg is his hostility towards heroic whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. He puts loyalty to the system above loyalty to justice and freedom.
No matter what happens I will not cast a vote for Buttigieg.
Almost all the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted to extend PAT RIOT Act snooping — but a few progressives opposed it.
If your representative voted for this, phone and complain.
Ilhan Omar asked the judge to apply restorative justice rather than harsh retribution to a man who said he wanted to murder her.
Examples like this give me an opportunity to be inspired to be a better instance of a moral person.
Many US schools put children in solitary confinement — for hours — supposedly to make them "calm down", though frequently the effect is just the opposite.
When I was a child, occasionally the staff at a school or a summer camp would grab me (they called it "restraining" me) with the absurd idea that this would make me "calm down". What it did was enrage me. As long as he kept trying to "restrain" me, I gave nonstop rage. I made it absolutely clear that if he wanted me to "calm down" he must first stop that aggression against me.
Senator Warren's plan to counter white nationalist violence effectively.
I support the plan, but I have to object that no organization should be labeled as "terrorist" by an arbitrary decision of functionaries. Promoting terrorism is a crime, and the only way to be labeled as a criminal should be via a conviction in court.
I also note the use of the ridiculous word "Latinx".
Worker-owned cooperative gig platforms can eliminate the exploitation of workers typical in the piecework sweatshop service economy.
Alas, many of them exploit the customers in the same way as Amazon and Uber: users must run a nonfree "app" and identify themselves.
The "platform cooperativism" movement needs to get on the right track and protect users as well as workers from exploitation. Platforms must give people a way to get the service anonymously and pay cash, without ever being told to run a nonfree program.
If any of these platforms satisfies those criteria, please tell me. I would like to hold it up as a good example.
"OxyContin’s makers delayed the reckoning for their role in the opioid crisis by funding think tanks, placing friendly experts on leading outlets, and deterring or challenging negative coverage."
*Sidewalk Labs' quiet plan for Canada's banks to manage a national digital ID for health care and housing.*
A unified ID data base for various unrelated purposes is dangerous regardless of details. That is because linked data bases potentiate each other for controlling people. I think there should be a law that a credential established by the state for one purpose may not be used for any unrelated purpose.
Explaining why the overthrow of President Morales was indeed a coup, indeed a military coup, even though it didn't operate in quite the usual way. And showing how the US worked for years to bring it about.
Sanders spoke up for Palestinians' rights in the Democratic Party debate, and received applause.
Google has stopped allowing targeting of political ads based on voters' inclinations.
This is a step forward, but we should pass laws to require complete transparency about online advertising. All political ads, and all political mass emails, should be publicly archived so that anyone can see later what statements were made and by whom.
Senator Markey questioned an Amazon representative about the street-snooping Ring camera and found no measures to protect Americans' privacy from the device.
The fossil fuel extraction plans of governments and companies add up to far more than 2C of global heating.
(satire) … both houses of Congress voted unanimously Thursday to extend $3 billion in emergency military aid to Benjamin Netanyahu to defend himself against the Israeli justice system.
Senator Warren tried to present a campaign speech to an audience of black women, and protesters sent by a Walton family astroturf organization blocked her from speaking. The organization advocates charter schools.
The article reports that fact but doesn't seem to take cognizance the implications of it. It says that Warren has "a problem with black women", but is it really a problem with the Waltons and their charter school plans?
Australia has imprisoned someone whose identity is secret, after a secret trial on secret charges.
Maybe Australia need not worry about Chinese influence, given that its own policies are so similar at heart.
Artificial lighting is a significant contributor to the rapid decline of insect populations.
Historically, economic growth does not increase most people's life expectancy. It often does the opposite. Life expectancy increases for most people when the people make the elites share the wealth.
50,000 planned low-orbit satellites with reflective surfaces could make a new telescope unable to see the potential Earth-colliding asteroids it was designed to find.
It is natural that Zuckerberg had a secret meeting with the conman. The two have the same basic political stance: "More money!"
However, one could be shocked that Zuckerberg joined right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel at the same dinner.
Some protesters remain besieged in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. They are afraid to surrender to the thugs because the thugs might maul them.
Former Israeli occupation soldier: "… looking back a few years later, I realize what being drunk with power combined with boredom can do to you. You toy with the life and livelihood of a person for entertainment."
The University of Indiana recognized that it cannot fire a professor for his bigoted statements on Twitter. As a public institution it must obey the first amendment.
I too disapprove of his bigotry, but I think it is proper to protect people from bring fired because of unpopular opinions of any kind. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to state views you and I disapprove of.
Ilhan Omar has proposed a ten-year plan to build 12 million affordable, low-footprint housing units.
This is an alternative to the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.
Warning: China is trying to subvert and control the Australian government.
Control by China would be very bad, in the area of human rights. Australia is already vicious in that area, but China would surely continue the existing injustice and add to it.
Currently fossil fuel companies control the Australian government. Would China continue their planet-roasting policies or change them?
Iran has centralized its outside internet gateways, and has tested a firewall that separates all domestic internet users from the rest of the world.
This is an advance in repression — exceeding that of the great firewall of China, but more bearable for nonpolitical people than what India has done to Kashmir.
*Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu indicted for bribery and fraud.*
His corruption has been generally known for many years. Uri Avnery wrote about how difficult it was for the state to get to grips with this.
Assad's army fired missiles containing cluster bombs at a refugee camp and a hospital, both in Idlib.
The major powers have given up entirely on trying to stop such warfare.
MSNBC went to great trouble to make sure Sanders supporters would not be seen by TV viewers.
Louisville, Kentucky, is trying to cool its climate by planting trees
It needs to plant 100,000 trees per year, but has not yet given this priority for funds.
Sondland testified that Pence, Giuliani and Bolton all participated in the conman's shakedown of Ukraine.
Uber plans to make audio recordings in its cars. In addition to recording where people go, it will record what they say to each other.
Labour pledges to ramp up construction of public housing to 150,000 units per year.
Bolivian soldiers killed pro-Morales protesters in El Alto, a city of poor people right next to La Paz.
The army says it didn't do the killing, but the evidence is plain to see.
Some of the dead were not even protesters, just people walking to work.
The US surely helped organize the coup, just as it did the coup in Honduras when Clinton was the Secretary of State. However, "genocide" is too strong a word to describe six unjustified killings.
Labour proposes its version of a Green New Deal: a million jobs doing work that will reduce greenhouse emissions, including energy efficiency and tree planting as well as renewable electricity.
Global heating is replacing kelp in the Gulf of Maine with other seaweed which doesn't shelter fish very well. This change is bad for the fish.
The US government prosecuted Scott Warren for giving humanitarian aid to unauthorized immigrants near the Mexican border. His first jury could not reach a verdict so it prosecuted Warren again. He was tried again… and acquitted, so he is now safe.
Bravo to the jury who rejected the cruelty which this prosecution embodies.
Being prosecuted multiple times can exhaust anyone's resources. It can destroy the target even if perse is never convicted. I think the government should be required to pay the legal expenses of anyone who is tried more than once for a given act.
One-third of tropical African plant species at risk of extinction — study.
459 animal species are designated as endangered in the US. All but one of them could easily be wiped out by global heating effects. But the US government refuses to protect them from that.
Poor Americans cling to the positive myths about the United States and thus fail to struggle to make reality match them.
Colombia's right-wing president Duque is facing large protests.
China jailed Simon Cheng for 15 days and tortured him. He formerly worked for the British Consulate in Hong Kong, and Chinese thugs accused him of working for the British government to promote protests. He eventually made a false confession (that's what torture is good for).
Stalkers can track connected cars, and start or stop them, through the cars' computers.
No one should be able to do this to your car. The way to stop it is to stop the data antenna and the GPS antenna from functioning.
Minnesota school threw out hot meals of students with over $15 lunch debt, then apologized.
The school, and the state, should apologize for charging students for school lunch.
The New York City thug department violates people's rights so often that it has to pay hundreds of million dollars of damages each year.
It is a good thing that their victims get some justice, but monetary compensation doesn't wipe out the damage that they do. These thugs are a menace to society and New York City needs to put an end to their depredations.
Many additional political prisons have been identified in Xinjiang, which leads to the suspicion that the number of Uighur prisoners exceeds one million.
The US kept almost 70,000 immigrant minors in prison away from their families during 2019, and the year isn't even over.
Some of these minors were children, even as young as 3 years old, and they can be terribly traumatized by the experience. Teenagers can also be traumatized, especially when jailed in this way for a long time, but it is misleading to call them "children".
Many thug departments in Washington State are sharing face recognition systems and keeping this secret from the public.
This indicates a malicious attitude and all those who did this should be fired. However, the most important thing is to pass a law that will stop them from making any use of face recognition or face recognition results, except when authorized by a specific court order based on suspicion of a particular crime.
Ideas for reforming the structure of the US Supreme Court.
I am not convinced any of these would be an improvement for the long term. Any possible structure is vulnerable to subversion if a powerful corrupt party takes over the other branches of government. We have a temporary problem — five right-wing judges — and we should fix that, but there is no point hoping that it will be better in some lasting or intrinsic way.
*Iceland accused of putting mackerel stocks at risk by increasing its catch.*
"A cosy consensus among politicians allowed lofty targets to be set, and then ignored. But now voters want actual solutions."
In a university in India, Hindu bigots demand that Professor Feroz Khan stop teaching Sanskrit, because of his religion.
David Miranda: Bolsonaro wants to end democracy in Brazil, and he is seeking to promote unrest and violence to create an excuse.
Indigenous peoples in California want to resume their practice of using controlled fires to prevent big fires. Done their way, it also protects against invasive plants and aids the trees.
Labour will tax fossil fuel companies for climate defense.
The staff of the Election Assistance Commission refused to let the commissioners see the actual comments — 50,000 of them — which said "don't connect voting machines to the internet."
China's increase in coal consumption dwarfs the reductions in the rest of the world.
Norway has cut the average sugar intake by almost 50% since 2000.
Extinction Rebellion protesters accuse the London thug department of 521 acts of injustice against them.
US standards for particulate pollution are inadequate: legally acceptable levels of this pollution seem to kill around 200,000 Americans per year.
Bolivia's new unelected government is now arresting legislators from Morale's party.
Most Americans recognize that collection of their personal data endangers them but feel hopeless about avoiding it.
Actually Americans can easily stop this data collection if they join forces. All it takes is clear laws that prohibit collecting personal data outside very limited circumstances.
Facebook prohibits pro-vaccine ads but allows anti-vax superstition.
New Jersey demands that Uber and Lyft pay 1/3 of a billion in back payroll taxes for the drivers that it failed to treat as employees. This is for their unemployment and disability benefits.
These drivers deserve the rights and benefits of employees, especially the minimum wage. However, it is a mistake to fund anything by payroll taxes, because they create an incentive to replace workers with automation. We should tax companies based on their income, not their payroll.
Bugs made it possible to extract the private keys from TPMs and defeat their restrictions. What a shame that these bugs have been fixed!
The TPM was invented for treacherous computing, and the private key it contains was intended to enforce DRM restrictions. The idea was that the TPM would enable a web site to verify that your computer was running some officially authorized malicious program, rather than a replacement program that would not restrict you. Extracting the private key would give you the option to run a patched program that could bypass the DRM.
People have found ways to use TPMs for other purposes, jobs that are not oppressive. If you're using a TPM this way, the bugs would have worked against you. However, you don't need a TPM to do these things. Keys that you are forced to use but cannot extract or change can act as handcuffs, and we should not allow them in our computers.
We must learn to recognize the difference between true security, which works for the users, and tyrannical "security" which is meant to clamp down on the users (like the Hong Kong "security forces"). Breaking the former "security" can be bad. Breaking the latter is a victory.
Too bad these bugs could be fixed.
Report from Hong Kong: the astounding persistence and determination of the protesters, attacked over and over with chemical weapons and forbidden to protect themselves from them.
Private equity companies are buying up lots of medical service providers and creating oligopolies that gouge helpless patients.
Amazon has implemented face recognition for its Ring door cameras, just not enabled it yet.
US citizens: call on the SEC not to block shareholder resolutions.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to Stop the Big Pharma giveaway in NAFTA 2.0.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Evo Morales tried to implement progressive change, but succeeded only a little. The obstacles were partly due to his own imperfections, but more due to the strength of the plutocratic system.
Editor Dan McGarry believes that Vanuatu expelled him for writing about growing Chinese influence there.
China. like the US, has a lot of money to throw around and often uses it to choke freedom. The coup in Bolivia is the latest example of what the US does.
Farming in the Canadian prairies is suffering from a series of bad harvests due to climate conditions.
I have to suspect that this is a consequence of global heating, and that Alberta and the Canadian government are working to ruin farmers by extracting tar sands oil.
The crisis of liberalism: why centrist politics can no longer explain the world.
Liberal centrism was tolerable while the institutions of society made it possible for everyone to thrive. Now that they have been subverted and twisted by plutocracy, advocating liberal centrism is in effect just an excuse for more plutocracy.
The International Criminal Court is considering investigation of the killing of civilians by British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, because the British government seems to have blocked prosecution of them.
The level of welfare benefits in the UK has reached a record low in comparison with wages, which have themselves gone down by 20% since before the financial crisis. Since they can't push their wages back up, they have to work a lot more than they did.
They work more so as to bring in the same income that they became accustomed to (if they were not poor) or need in order to survive (if they were poor).
I would love to see how the situation in the US compares to this.
The overall effect of using drones to kill is to transfer the risk from combatants to civilians. But they also lead countries (such as the US) into despicable cruelties, such as killing medics.
Everyone: call on PBS to show the impeachment hearings.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to demand the resignation of Stephen Miller, white-supremacist official.
If you call, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on Aramark to serve decent meals to prisoners, rather than starve them, gouge them or lie about them.
If you call, please spread the word!
Leaked Iranian diplomatic cables show how thoroughly Iraq's government was dominated by Iran, specifically in 2014-2015 but it probably has not changed.
Dubya probably won't like this, but he probably won't care all that much given that his US oil company friends/masters got the profits from Iraq's oil.
Here is a general article about this leak.
Russia has tightened its control over Yandex, which means in effect its control over almost everything done on the internet in Russia.
What practical effects this will have is not self-evident, but it will surely be used to facilitate Putin's already-substantial repression.
Sweden has given a press freedom award to Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong publisher imprisoned by China for publishing books that criticized Chinese officials.
China immediately confirmed the nasty impression that the story of Gui Minhai suggest, by trying to bully the world into silence about China's crimes. Apparently Xi believes he can convert all the world's countries into Xiple using China's market power.
The sad thing is, he may be right, since so many countries are dominated by plutocrats who would gladly dispense with freedom of the press to get included in China's business.
It is interesting to compare Xi with the conman. The conman uses the US's power to increase his own power over the US. Xi already has total power over China, so he uses China's power to increase China's power over the rest of the world.
Salafi Arabia wants to sell stock in its oil business, but buyers won't pay what was expected. This must mean that investors recognize that fossil fuels will not have a long and bright future.
Amazon Deforestation 'At Highest Level in a Decade'.
Bolsonaro is doing this, and getting away with it.
A plutocratist politician can get away with lying because the major media are working for the same plutocrats.
The departure of migrants from Libya to Italy is not affected by whether ships would rescue them if their boat sank.
*Companies that over-perform financially are more likely to breach environmental and social regulations, academic finds.*
The bully has called Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory legitimate, so some Israelis call for a formal statement to annex them.
In terms of international law, such a claim would alter nothing. But in practice, it could be another step towards the long term goal of annexing much of the West Bank and kicking all Palestinians out of those areas.
Feh!
A state official in Australia wants people to be somewhat afraid of the uniformed thugs.
Such fear is a symptom of an oppressive regime.
Hong Kong thugs besieged 600 protesters in the Polytechnic University. The students made attempts to break out, but eventually surrendered.
The article seems to use the term "children" to refer to minors. I Get the impression that all the captured protesters who were not minors have been arrested.
The new Arab Spring: protesters in Lebanon and Iraq oppose poverty and corruption, but also foreign interference.
Senator Warren proposes to take a partial step towards Medicare for All first, rather than push to make it universal all at once.
This is a question of strategy. Taking universal Medicare for All as the goal, is Warren's strategy likely to achieve more of it or less of it? I am not sure.
The arguments in the article are valid, but there can be an advantage on the other side, too. If each American opts to switch to Medicare for All after the option becomes available, the other medical plans could wither and cease to oppose universal Medicare for All, so the second step could be a walkover.
However, whether that can occur would depend on details, and on court cases, and the private plans would fight to shape that terrain so that they could hold on.
Ultimately my conclusion is that Warren made a bad choice. It might make sense in 2000 or 2001 to take this partial step as a sort of deal with the adversary, but it is a mistake to compromise with the adversary's demands other than as part of a deal that gets you an advance. Whatever compromise you make in that way will be used by them to shift the starting point of the negotiations, to your disadvantage.
The UK government has privatized handling of some visa applications, which gives the company a chance to gouge people for the extra price of "premium" service, simply by making the regular service faulty or unbearable.
No modern company would bid to run a privatized service and neglect such opportunities. If its executives failed to figure them into the business plan, they would be dismissed for neglecting the interests of the shareholders.
Which is one of the reasons why no government service should ever be privatized.
The biometric residency permits raise other issues of oppression and tracking, but that is independent of privatization.
"We have spent most of this year writing about the death of people on our streets [in the UK]. This crisis has simple, practical solutions, and everyone cares about it. Why isn’t it an election priority?"
In the long term, the main reason people die while homeless is that they can't afford a place to live. The Labour Party has made that an election priority. Likewise providing everyone with enough food, and increasing wages and working conditions.
Tory cruelty (including trickle-down policies) makes a small fraction of people homeless, but it causes suffering and even death to a much larger part of the people. I think Labour is wise to prioritize the broader injustice rather than its worst-case symptom, especially since success in these goals will as a natural result save most people from ever being homeless.
Australia's official war historians, including the one appointed to publish an honest official history of Australia's participation in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, call on the government to permit the publication of that work.
Bolivia's New Puppet Regime Wastes No Time Aligning With US Foreign Policy.
New French pun: Manger les avocats ou pas ?
A fishing-rights dispute between Libya and Italy has led to bitter feelings on the part of Sicilian fishermen.
I think that what really matters in this dispute is to prevent overfishing.
While Israeli thugs directly mistreat Arab citizens, they also deny those citizens protection from crime.
"After years of being told to ‘think positively’ we no longer know what to do with our negative feelings, so we blurt them out online."
I don't know whether it is true, but it is an interesting idea.
A tentative victory in Australia: the government will stop pursuing poor people for alleged debts that reflect alleged government overpayment of welfare benefits as reported by software.
Hong Kong's highest court ruled that the British colonial "emergency" law which was used to ban wearing face masks is unconstitutional. The Chinese state responded by claiming that that court has no say about such questions.
Will the "authorities" of Hong Kong challenge this or eagerly endorse it as support?
Everyone: call on Google to fire Miles Taylor, who previously pushed antimuslimism in the Department of Hostility and Sleaze.
If you sign, please spread the word!
As the Arctic ice melts and opens the hoped-for "northwest passage", a disease has travelled that way from the Atlantic and is now killing otters and seals in Alaskan waters.
On the 30th anniversary of the [Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia], Václav Havel’s allies say the revolution’s ideals are again at risk.
This is because right-wing extremists threaten the country.
The extradition of Julian Assange is a scheme to defend the US government from criticism for its crimes.
Failing Nuclear Industry Pushing for $23 Billion Federal Bailout, which would undermine wind and solar power.
The main cause of deforestation in the Amazon is to clear and sell land. The main defense is where forest dwellers protect their forest. Extinction Rebellion is supporting them.
Government investigators say they had found evidence that British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq killed and tortured civilians, but the investigation was shut down.
My Venezuelan colleague, who supported Chavez but not Maduro, says that this article is an accurate description of the situation in Venezuela.
He told me
My point of view about this: Venezuelan opposition is a foreign group (almost all are outside the country) and a business to ask for money support "in the name of freedom to fight dictatorship" and asking for more and more economical sanctions which is not useful in any way to fix the major problems. Maduro government is a disaster, but in any way it can be better with invasions or more and more economical asphyxia and this is what opposition mainly ask for and work to harden this awful situation.
*Scientists and climate advisers condemn Tory environmental record.*
The murderous brother of murderous ex-president Rajapaksa will be the next president of Sri Lanka.
"The best tribute to our combat veterans would be to create fewer of them in the future."
US citizens: phone Senator Schumer at 1-833-STOPWAR to press for cutting off US funds for Salafi Arabia's war in Yemen.
Using that number will tell Just Foreign Policy that you called him
If you phone, please spread the word!
China is accustoming Hong Kong to the presence of the Chinese army by small steps.
"Progressive and collective social struggle is the path out of neoliberalism."
US citizens: call on the IRS to revoke the National Rifle Association's tax-exempt status for mismanagement and the misuse of assets for personal benefit.
If you call, please spread the word!
It is important to use clear words to describe the conman's crimes so people understand what makes them crimes.
While Warning of Nazi-Like Fascism and Corporate Crimes, Pope Francis Proposes Adding 'Ecological Sin' to Church Teachings.
Extinction Rebellion Members Blockade Private Jet Terminal Used by Wealthy Elites in Geneva.
Using a private jet emits 20 times as much CO2 as riding on a commercial flight.
Ralph Nader: The Most Impeachable President in US History vs. The Most Hesitant Congress.
Leaked Chinese documents explain how China organized the imprisonment of Uighurs in "schools".
The documents told officials to inform Uygur students returning home to Xinjiang that their parents had been forcibly sent to these "schools" and would be used as hostages for the students' good behavior.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass H.J. Res 79 to remove the arbitrary time limit on ratification of the Equal Rights Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Guaidó's right-wing supporters now think maybe they can take over Venezuela.
Unlike Evo Morales, President Maduro of Venezuela is incompetent and antidemocratic, and the people around him are corrupt. But his main opposition is as plutocratist as the opposition that just took over in Bolivia.
Stephen Miller is no outlier. White [supremacism] rules the Republican party.
Fighting this will not be straightforward. They are not ashamed of it; they have taught their supporters to flaunt it.
Former Australian fire chiefs say Coalition ignored their advice because of climate change politics.
Paris police fire teargas on anniversary of gilets jaunes protests.
I met one of the leaders of the gilets jaunes this weekend, and he told me that he had personally observed thug provocateurs dressed in black carrying out violence, early in the protests.
The enormous power demands of machine learning contribute significantly to global heating, and only big companies can afford to do it.
Another evil is that it is generally done using GPUs that require nonfree software to run anything whatsoever.
Trump personally kept pressure on Ukraine, says impeachment inquiry witness.
Flood defenses protect cities, not rural houses. But this is inevitable.
When a lot of people live in a small area, a small perimeter can protect them all. Where this approach can work, it is efficient use of public funds.
By contrast, protecting houses lying sparsely on the ground would be far more expensive per person protected. That is not feasible. The efficient thing to do for the people who live in those houses is to buy them out so they can move to places that are safer.
If we want to use some sort of biometric to identify people, let's use a biometric that can't be observed except when you choose to identify yourself.
Houses with solar panels and batteries can join together as a "virtual power plant" and replace fossil fuels.
A network of Nazis around the US planned defacement of synagogues in two states.
A Green Party senator in Australia has been castigated for comparing the planet-roaster politicians "arsonists".
In general, someone else's supporting a policy which you believe will have result X is not in general morally equivalent to per personally supporting or doing X. Person might honestly believe that the policy won't cause X, and even if perse turns out to be mistaken about that, it is still a mistake rather than an intentional choice. Anyone can make a mistake.
However, in the issue of global heating and climate disaster, the relation between fossil fuels and wildfires has been so fully established, for so long, and so widely explained, that we have gone past the point where a politician can be excused for disregarding science on this question. Promoting fossil fuel use today is indeed equivalent to fomenting arson.
The New York Times supported global heating denialism by equating the Green New Deal with the bullshitter's border wall.
The difference is that one fights a real and moral danger, while the other fights only a scapegoat.
Massive Anti-Coup Protests Explode Across Bolivia 'Against the Many Violations to Democracy'.
In Cochabamba, the thugs shot at these protesters, and perhaps killed some. The Bolivian thugs defended the right to protest for the upper-class protesters that opposed Morales, but not those of his (often indigenous) supporters.
The Environmental Protection Agency determined that atrazine was poisoning fish, so its unofficial Republican replacement, the Environmental Poisoning Agency, is going to permit 50% more of it.
Atrazine is an endocrine disruptor and also associated with birth defects in humans as well as in aquatic animals.
Many cities and states are building public broadband internet so as to offer the limited network neutrality that Republicans eliminated.
These cities and states should take the opportunity to prohibit making any record of who a user contacts over the internet, in the absence of a specific subpoena.
Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger is effectively in house arrest because of a ruling that Chevron obtained from a judge that is obviously biased.
*Chilean lawmakers agree to referendum on new constitution.*
Carrying vindictiveness to an extreme, US officials deport foreigners for using marijuana and ban them for life.
*Our fight against the Dakota Access pipeline is far from over.*
Former Israeli ministers and ambassadors call on the EU to prohibit import of goods produced in Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory (the West Bank).
Floods due to big storms have destroyed crops in the UK.
The storms are caused by global heating, so they will get worse.
Two Gay Saudi Journalists 'Treated Like Criminals' in Australia After Seeking Asylum.
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or orientation.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass S. 2797, to protect the families of present and former military personnel from deportation.
If you call, please spread the word!
Armistice Day celebrates the end of World War I, but the US turned it into a celebration of soldiers, Veterans Day. Veterans for Peace seeks to convert it back.
Gush Shalom: A war to keep Netanyahu on his throne.
Behrouz Boochani, Voice of Manus Island Refugees, Is Free in New Zealand. But only for a short time. It is not clear where he can go and stay.
More Than 250 Authors Urge India's Prime Minister to Reinstate Overseas Citizenship of British Journalist Aatish Taseer.
Very little plastic is really recycled — often plastic collected to recycle is just thrown away — but the plastic companies promote America Recycles Day as a distraction from reducing production of plastic.
Most of the children under state custody in the UK get criminal records. Part of the reason is that the "care homes" call the thugs for minor infractions.
Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Sentsov, recently released from political imprisonment in Russia, says that Putin is building a tyrannical system that replicates the Soviet Union.
"I'm the Google whistleblower. The medical data of millions of Americans is at risk."
I have to point out that anonymizing a database gives people little protection because it is often easy to deanonymize, and that HIPAA is not strong enough as protection for patient's privacy.
The rebel leaders in Ukraine were obeying orders from Russia.
This is significant for the moral significance of the rebellion as a whole. It was clearly a Russian attack on Ukraine.
However, this does not show that any of them knowingly and intentionally fired on an airliner. I think they assumed it was a military plane.
The Right-Wing Coup in Bolivia Is Exactly the Opposite of What Democracy Looks Like.
What Evo Morales achieved for the non-rich in Bolivia, especially the indigenous people who tend to be quite poor.
It seems clear that his enemies organized a dishonest campaign to force him out, but it isn't clear to me what tangible acts the military did to further that campaign. I think this is an important question. We should not call it a "military coup" unless the military played a central role.
Rodney Reed, facing immediate execution, has been given a stay to evaluate the claim that he was framed.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez proposed a detailed plan for the Green New Deal in the area of public housing. This would address the housing shortage in US cities as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and in the process create many good jobs.
Space tourism would emit lots of greenhouse gas: one rocket launch would equal 200 round-trip transatlantic flights.
The violence and cruelty of Guatemala's 36-year civil war was mainly due to US aid to the right-wing government installed by a US-supported coup in 1954.
(satire) Deval Patrick Acquires High Favorability Numbers, Good Iowa Polling After Leveraged Buyout Of Buttigieg Campaign.
*Minutes after the Venetian city council voted down a resolution addressing the climate crisis Wednesday, the council chambers were [flooded] with water for the first time in history.*
US citizens: call on the State Department to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
If you call, please spread the word!
(satire) … Mike Pence was reportedly against a bathroom wall for hours Thursday following an encounter with a doorknob resembling the female breast.
Analysis of Primetime MSNBC Programs Finds Sanders Received 'Least' and 'Most Negative' Coverage of Top 2020 Democrats.
The Russian bank Sberbank is pressuring its clients to hand over biometric data even though this is not actually required.
The European Investment Bank decided to stop investing in most fossil fuels.
There are two weaknesses in its decision: it won't take effect for another 14 months, and it has a loophole for gas.
According to a medical study, delay in curbing global heating will endanger people's health and cause premature death — especially for children.
Plutocratist senators, including some Democrats, are pushing a law for "automatic deficit reduction" — to work by cutting spending, not by increasing taxes.
In other words, every tax cut for the rich will automatically cut support for the non-rich.
Fight for the Future scanned the faces of passers-by on Capitol Hill, tracking people including congresscritters and senators, to bring home to them why they should make such scanning illegal for anyone to do.
The Situation Room, October 2039: the president and vice president, and other high civil and military officials are following the damage from Hurricane Monica, Hurricane Nicholas, and Hurricane Ophelia, as well as Southern California where "millions of people are under mandatory evacuation orders with essentially nowhere to go because of a maelstrom of raging wildfires."
Fortunately, the US no longer needs to worry greatly about Russian and China, which have been hit by their own human-caused climate disasters.
In 2019, important US military bases have already been ruined by storms and threatened by wildfires.
Civilian life will be in constant danger from these events, too. It will not be easy to grow as much food as we produce today.
The soundest policy would be for the US, China and Russia to join together now and force all countries to join them in rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is foolish to wait until the disaster makes it impossible to delay any longer.
US college student newspapers face relentless pressure from activist students to become overtly partisan.
I support the campaign to abolish the US deportation thug department,
ICE, and I would have joined in protesting Sessions' visit to Northwestern if I had been there. But it is important for newspapers (not just those of students) to cover these protests in a nonpartisan way. One of our deep political problems (not new) is that our journalism is too politicized. This makes it hard to determine what really happened — so how can we decide where to stand on an issue?
US citizens: call on the Senate to restore the DACA program, that allows people brought to the US as children to remain and become citizens.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Various little-known companies are setting up America's embryonic social-credit score systems. Well-known internet dis-services give them data, and they make the derived scores or ratings available to those dis-services and others.
Requiring these companies to give you the raw data they store about you will only give you a partial idea of just how much power they wield. To reduce their power would require reducing their data collection.
Fraud is not a good thing, and in principle I am in favor of preventing fraud, but doing it by prejudging people (often based on bias along with the data) is not a solution. We should adopt solutions that respect anonymity and stop fraud — such as GNU Taler — so that there is no need to guess who might be likely to commit fraud.
Facebook sponsored the rightwing Federalist Society to host a dinner honoring Justice Kavanaugh, who tried to commit rape years ago and lied about it while testifying to Congress.
US citizens: call for banning the use of cyanide to cull wildlife.
If you call, please spread the word!
Two Italian thugs have been sentenced to 12 years in prison for beating a prisoner to death.
Sweden has sold bonds issued by Alberta, because that Canadian state pushes tar sands oil.
It is noteworthy that Alberta complains it is unfeasible to start new energy projects, but I suspect that is an exaggeration. If it were true, the Keystone XL pipeline project would be abandoned.
Australia's firefighters are worn out after two months working with little chance to sleep. But the fires are not finished.
Australians must insist on curbing global heating now, for otherwise it will get much, much worse.
Hong Kong: Protesters Lift Highway Blockade on Proviso [that local] Elections Proceed [as scheduled].
"The US and Britain face no existential threat. So why do their wars go on?"
The CIA could resume torturing prisoners.
Burning imported plastic waste in Indonesia spreads toxic chemicals in the neighborhood. The toxins then get into local chickens and their eggs.
Coal mines leak lots of methane — even after the mining stops.
Does anyone know how to stop the methane emissions from an abandoned coal mine?
Both protesters and thugs in Hong Kong are causing deaths with their violence.
I don't know the local conditions in Hong Kong, but I do know that violence on the part of protesters tends to lead to defeat as it gives the state an excuse.
"Capitalism" and "socialism" are vague words. Bernie Sanders's views can be considered to fit either one. The article says that the real question is,
"if we say markets will play some limited role — as opposed to gobbling up all of society like they do now — then we're not really saying anything until we start laying down specifics."
reCIRCLE — the Swiss reusable system for take-aways.
As the Coal Industry Shrinks, Miners Deserve A Just Transition. This means developing ways to support the ex-coal-miners other than mining coal.
Fighting the border-industrial complex, which profits from the disasters that the US causes in other countries, which drive people to flee.
Sanders has denounced the coup in Bolivia; Warren has not.
Leaked emails prove that the bully's immigration advisor, Stephen Miller, really is a white supremacist.
Legalizing same-sex marriage in Sweden and Denmark led to a big decrease in suicide for people in same-sex relationships.
Accusing China of falsifying its figures on organ transplants and continuing to get organs by executing prisoners.
The International Criminal Court has approved an investigation into Burma's persecution of the Rohingya.
A student in France set himself on fire to protest against poverty, and this led to wider protests about poverty.
The Assyrian empire seems to have fallen after a decades-long regional drought.
That drought wasn't the result of humans' greenhouse gas emissions. But that is what causes today's increasing droughts.
Venice had another flood, the highest since the 1960s. Predictably, there was a lot of damage — but didn't people expect this? They ought to expect it to get worse.
Unless we curb and then undo global heating, the occasional flooding of Venice will become more frequent and higher. Protective barriers will work only temporarily until the sea surmounts them. Eventually only dams will do the job.
Damming off the lagoon will change its water and life; I wonder if it would be adequate to let water flow into the lagoon some of the time, while pumping water out at other times.
Tory election campaigns have been funded for years by Russians, which is why the Tories are blocking an investigation.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support impeaching the bullshitter.
It wouldn't hurt to ask for the investigation to cover other crimes as well as the Ukraine shakedown.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US wars since 2000 are estimated to have caused three million deaths.
There is no way to get anything more accurate than an estimate. For Iraq, the organization Iraq Body Count counted only specific casualties which could be verified — and that was clearly a small fraction.
The New York City thug department keeps fingerprints of juvenile delinquents, in direct contempt of the state law prohibiting this.
I gather that they are all teenagers rather than "children", but that is no excuse. The law applies to teenagers, too.
Turkish journalist Ahmet Altan has been arrested again, for bogus political reasons.
Erdoğan has thousands of people jailed or fired from their jobs using the failed coup as an excuse.
Can the government evade its human rights responsibilities in regard to a certain service by outsourcing it? A court in Scotland ruled yes.
(satire) Amazon officials announced Wednesday that they’ll be encouraging faster shipping speeds by strapping a cinder block to the accelerator of their drivers’ delivery trucks.
Increasing inequality in the UK has shrunk the tax base. The top 1% now pay 1/3 of the income tax.
It is good to tax the rich, but getting a lot of income from a few gives them power they should not have.
The situation calls for spreading the income more widely.
"When a rotten administration repeatedly seeks to gain an improper advantage at the ballot box, it no longer makes sense to regard the ballot box as the only means of removing the president from office."
"I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic."
(satire) Cursing their luck after scientists confirmed their nation’s worst fears had been realized, officials in Paraguay were reportedly panicking Wednesday after discovering a rich deposit of natural resources.
"The EPA wants to ban [regulatory consideration of] research that doesn’t violate the privacy of its subjects. That means less science—and fewer rules for polluters."
Palestinians report that Israeli forces violated the rights of Palestinian journalists 600 times this year. That includes 80 instances of shooting journalists.
Israeli soldiers blocked Palestinians from harvesting their olives. That was after they discovered that someone had dumped sewage and pig parts on their land — most likely the Israelis from the nearby colony.
Raluca Ganea: A war to keep
Netanyahu
on his throne.
(Translated and published by Gush Shalom.)
Morales wanted to develop Bolivia's lithium reserves in a way that would benefit Bolivians, not mainly multinational corporations. Western companies refused, and recently Chinese companies accepted.
The EFF won a court judgment that US border thugs need a specific suspicion to authorize searching travelers' computers (including phones).
Foreign governments have lawful ways to subvert US politics, with their money.
Of Americans under 30, over 70% distrust other people in general. Could this be a consequence of their controlling upbringing, which teaches that every stranger is a "danger"?
The lack of trust interferes with the cooperation that makes society function. It can cripple the functioning of society.
After thugs attacked some Hong Kong universities, foreign students felt threatened and began leaving.
The IEA warns that increased sales of SUVs could wipe out the greenhouse gas reductions achieved by electric cars.
That the IEA pays attention to global heating is a change for the better.
A 1990s conspiracy theory was believed by Nobel Prize jurors and that is why they gave the Nobel Prize for Literature to Peter Handke.
The International Energy Agency has become seriously concerned about global heating. It has warned governments that their current plans are not enough to avoid disaster.
Scientist Bambang Hero Saharjo is an expert on demonstrating in court how deforesters are responsible for specific wildfires and thus for the destruction they caused.
Britons of Indian descent have pressured Labour into treating the issue of Kashmir as a dispute between India and Pakistan.
The article takes no notice of the fact that Kashmir is now under Indian military occupation.
There was no anomaly in the Bolivian vote count. The quick partial count, which covered 87% of the votes, found that Morales was not leading by 10% and a second round would be needed. The full count found a margin of over 10%, meaning no second round.
Morales had heavy support in rural areas whose votes were not reported in until the quick count had got enough votes to issue its report.
Morales says that he fled Bolivia because someone offered a $50,000 reward for murdering him.
It looks like this was not a military coup such as we are accustomed to seeing. Rather, the OAS fabricated the suspicion to create an excuse to overthrow the government, and the wealthy right-wing minority seized the opportunity.
This is what Republicans threaten to do in the US next year if they lose. We must not let this daunt us. If we don't dare try to vote them out of power, we have already lost.
Violent Hate Crimes in US Reach Highest Levels in 16 Years, FBI Reports.
This seems to happen generally in countries where right-wing extremists get into power, and they provoke it as a strategy to gain more power.
Greta Thunberg's parting call to Americans: vote (to arrest global heating).
New South Wales (a state in Australia) held an event to discuss how it can adapt to global heating effects. Some of its officials were told not to say anything there about the global heating effect that is causing destruction just now — ,greater fire danger than ever before recorded there.
The choice of "adaptation to" as the topic, rather than "prevention of", reflects Australia's political decision to prioritize continuing fossil fuel profits over everyone's survival a few decades from now.
"Insect Apocalypse" Poses Risk to All Life on Earth, Conservationists Warn.
400,000 known insect species could be wiped out by pesticides.
"It really worries me to hear people say we need more long-term studies to be sure. [More certitude] would be great, but we can't wait another 25 years before we do anything because it will be too late.”
The bully has made the first asylum interview much more strict, in some secret way, such that almost everyone is rejected at that point.
Hong Kong protests continue, increasingly chaotic, as thugs gradually increase their level of violence against protesters and the protesters retaliate.
Poverty and hopelessness in Turkey are leading to a steadily increasing suicide rate.
Erdoğan's tyranny surely contributes to this, but I suspect that population growth plays a role too. The best possible government policies could not compensate for the effects of overpopulation, but could perhaps avoid it.
Chile developed so much inequality by following the advice of right-wing economists in the US.
Thousands of Chileans are participating in local meetings to discuss how to move Chile out of crisis.
What most everyone wants is a new constitution to replace the one imposed by the dictator Pinochet, who seized power in a bloody coup on Sep 11, 1973 with US support.
Analyzing the protests in Lebanon: demanding an end to the sect-based corruption in which the leaders of the various religious groups split up the country's wealth, and dribble out some in their groups to maintain support.
Chlöe Swarbrick spoke in the NZ Parliament and said something ageist: "OK boomer", which expresses bigotry against old people.
What she says in the article seems valid to me. Also, if I lived in her district I would probably vote for her, since she is in the Green Party. Nonetheless, using the ageist rebuke is not right, and I hope she will avoid it in the future. If an old white man does something unfair to her, he deserves criticism for his conduct (and perhaps his political stand), not for his age.
Categorizing Feminism, Atheism, Homosexuality as Crimes Exposes [Salafi] Arabia's Dangerous Intolerance.
When schools monitor students' communications, that can put them in danger.
The European Court of Justice ruled that products from Israel's colonies in Palestine must be labeled as such.
This will make it easier for people in Europe to practice the boycott originally proposed by Gush Shalom in support of peace between Israel and Palestine.
Europe is importing shrimp from Myanmar and disregarding the use of slave labor to cultivate them.
Some celebrities refuse to have a mobile phone. For some, one of the objections is tracking.
The US military regards global heating as a dangerous and deadly enemy to the United States — not solely to the military.
An analysis of the situation in Brazil — what Lula faces as he starts to reawaken the Brazilian left.
I don't know that what the article says is true. I don't have confirmation of most of it. But it could be true.
Was the ouster of Morales a protest or a coup? I don't have enough information to draw a conclusion. Did the army actually do something? I don't know. Did the OAS find real evidence of an invalid election? I hope to see the CEPR report soon. What I do know is that the "opposition" to leftist governments in Latin America is often made up of the prosperous fraction of society that finds it profitable to manage their country on behalf of foreign companies.
Two faithful servants of the bullshitter argue about who was dishonest.
Sanders: antisemitic hatred leads the way for other hatreds; all progressives should oppose it. Opposing antisemitism means defending Israel's existence, and by extension ending Israel's military occupation of Palestine.
Australia is on the verge of approving a new coal mine that could cause in the short term the extinction of an endangered native bird.
The CO2 from burning the coal would help wipe out hundreds of thousands of species, and kill hundreds of millions of human beings.
An Israeli court authorized torturing Samer ‘Arbid and not allowing him to talk with his lawyer.
The bully wants to charge refugees for asylum. 500 dollars for a work permit would condemn many refugees to live on charity.
"The biggest fear among the billionaire class is not that a progressive Democratic nominee will lose against Trump. The biggest fear is that such a nominee will win."
The UK seems to treat the violence of thugs as a serious problem. Perhaps the state is serious about employing police officers rather than thugs. The US should have such an enlightened policy.
US citizens: call for an end to "opportunity zones", which are excuses to reduce taxes for investors (principally rich people).
If you call, please spread the word!
More inequality leads to underfunded public services. In California today, even firefighting is underfunded. Rich people hire private firefighters to protect only their own houses, and don't mind if the town's fire department is inadequate.
Some US military veterans visit schools to teach the students how bad war is.
Kshama Sawant won reelection to the Seattle city council despite the 1.5 million dollars Amazon spent to defeat her.
How the bullshitter uses rhetoric to get others to frame the issues as he wishes — including "quid pro quo" as the criterion for impeachment.
The US "health care provider" Ascension is giving Google the medical records of 50 million patients.
Merely notifying the patients and the doctors would not make this legitimate, or safe. That calls for an approach in which nobody at Google has access to any patient's data. More information.
Contracts between Google and Ascension may put limits on what Google is ostensibly allowed to do with the data, but Google is very clever about finding loopholes in such rules. As for anonymization, that is easy to defeat.
Cutting the US military budget could easily pay for the domestic programs we need. Ingrained militaristic thinking works to prevent this.
Thus, we are pressured to endorse the idea that US soldiers are "serving their country" when they spread destruction in other countries, regardless of the circumstances, and that we should thank them.
This is why starting in 2003 I said that Dubya had hijacked the US military and converted it into the Bush Forces. They may have joined with the idea of serving their country, but in fact they were serving Dubya and his oil cronies.
Re-enacting the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt.
Bolivia's mass protests have ended, but Morales's supporters are protesting. There are reports of arson attacks against his family.
Sanders: antisemitic hatred leads the way for other hatreds; all progressives should oppose it. Opposing antisemitism means defending Israel's existence, and by extension ending Israel's military occupation of Palestine.
Australia is on the verge of approving a new coal mine that could cause in the short term the extinction of an endangered native bird.
The CO2 from burning the coal would help wipe out hundreds of thousands of species, and kill hundreds of millions of human beings.
An Israeli court authorized torturing Samer ‘Arbid and not allowing him to talk with his lawyer.
The bully wants to charge refugees for asylum. 500 dollars for a work permit would condemn many refugees to live on charity.
"The biggest fear among the billionaire class is not that a progressive Democratic nominee will lose against Trump. The biggest fear is that such a nominee will win."
The UK seems to treat the violence of thugs as a serious problem. Perhaps the state is serious about employing police officers rather than thugs. The US should have such an enlightened policy.
US citizens: call for an end to "opportunity zones", which are excuses to reduce taxes for investors (principally rich people).
If you call, please spread the word!
More inequality leads to underfunded public services. In California today, even firefighting is underfunded. Rich people hire private firefighters to protect only their own houses, and don't mind if the town's fire department is inadequate.
Some US military veterans visit schools to teach the students how bad war is.
Kshama Sawant won reelection to the Seattle city council despite the 1.5 million dollars Amazon spent to defeat her.
How the bullshitter uses rhetoric to get others to frame the issues as he wishes — including "quid pro quo" as the criterion for impeachment.
The US "health care provider" Ascension is giving Google the medical records of 50 million patients.
Merely notifying the patients and the doctors would not make this legitimate, or safe. That calls for an approach in which nobody at Google has access to any patient's data. More information.
Contracts between Google and Ascension may put limits on what Google is ostensibly allowed to do with the data, but Google is very clever about finding loopholes in such rules. As for anonymization, that is easy to defeat.
Cutting the US military budget could easily pay for the domestic programs we need. Ingrained militaristic thinking works to prevent this.
Thus, we are pressured to endorse the idea that US soldiers are "serving their country" when they spread destruction in other countries, regardless of the circumstances, and that we should thank them.
This is why starting in 2003 I said that Dubya had hijacked the US military and converted it into the Bush Forces. They may have joined with the idea of serving their country, but in fact they were serving Dubya and his oil cronies.
Re-enacting the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt.
Bolivia's mass protests have ended, but Morales's supporters are protesting. There are reports of arson attacks against his family.
Vanuatu has forced a newspaper editor to leave the country by cancelling his work permit.
DWIM in a software tool can be a pain in the neck. DWIM in a car can kill you or give you a terrible scare.
How global heating makes wildfires bigger and more dangerous.
Varoufakis reviews the book, Good Economics for Hard Times, whose authors just received the Nobel Prize for studying how various measures affect poverty.
In regard to AOC's proposed 70% tax bracket, we do mot have to permit companies to pass money to executives untaxed through trust funds.
Chile and Hong Kong are considered model societies by right-wing think tanks for "economic freedom", code words for allowing the rich to do whatever they like. It is no coincidence that they are also models of inequality, and models of popular protest.
The proponents of "economic freedom" have come to recognize that it is incompatible with democracy, and some have concluded they don't want democracy.
US citizens: call on Popeyes to pay staff more money.
To me, it doesn't matter whether the staff are black, white, purple or paisley. Companies should pay them a living wage.
Turkey has captured many of PISSI's foreign fighters, and is sending those prisoners to the countries they came from.
I think this is legitimate, but it runs into difficulties when those countries have terminated their citizenship as a punishment. I think it is wrong to punish people with denial of citizenship.
Ecuador's Vanishing Jaguars: the big cat vital to rainforest survival.
The US government has done a "threat assessment" on a group of peaceful protesters the way the government treats minors that cross the border.
It also calls protesters against the border wall "anti-border wall extremists".
OAS observers reported manipulation in Bolivia's election. Morales agreed to replace the electoral agency and hold a new election.
It appears that the protesters' accusations were valid. Then he resigned as president, apparently pressured by the military.
All his constitutional successors resigned too, until the first one who was from a right-wing opposition party, who will now become president.
I don't know enough to reach conclusions now.
The UK's immigration agency regularly stretches its rules so as to deny visas. The only way to get it to correct these not-exactly-mistakes is to create a media scandal.
It won't be easy to teach them better habits. I fear that the staff of that agency have been rendered unfit to work in any job where their decisions would affect people's lives.
Turkey's proxy forces in Syria attacked an ambulance carrying Kurdish medics.
Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg Backs Fracking and Invests in Fossil Fuels.
He is not the worst of the worst, but he is also not a good choice for president, or any political office that influences energy policy.
Papua New Guinea is imprisoning boat people on Australia's behalf in such horrible conditions that one of them has decided to face prison in Iran instead.
He reports being kept incommunicado, on starvation rations, in horrible heat, and not allowed anything to read or to write on. The guards tantalized him with use of a shower so hot he could not actually wash.
"The Holocaust has functioned on multiple planes, and primarily as an example of pure evil that, by consequence, allows other societies to divert attention from their own misdeeds."
The head of the Environmental Pollution Agency is sabotaging an investigation by the agency's inspector general. The investigation is about an attempt to pressure a scientist to change per views.
The UK hasn't set up a way to deal with the areas which will be flooded so often that they are effectively uninhabitable. For instance, no way to save the people who live in those places from destitution.
Pelosi's opposition to the Green New Deal puts her out of touch with the voters.
The natural consequence of defining fetuses as "persons" is to charge pregnant drug addicts with murder.
Such charges will not protect anyone from being harmed. Quite the contrary: they drive pregnant drug addicts away from medical treatment because they fear it will lead to prosecution.
A potential person that never begins to exist cannot suffer any wrong or harm. Thus, the idea of "murdering" a fetus is an absurdity; that is simply a form of abortion. Even if the abortion doesn't follow the usual rules, it isn't murder.
Four Basic Principles for a Full, Transparent, and Fair Impeachment Trial.
The GDPR are
Working to reduce plastic waste and energy use
in
biological and chemical labs.
Republicans on the National Labor Relations Board want to allow
businesses to spy on workers so as to
detect
and attack any attempts to organize a union.
The white supremacist recently arrested by the FBI in Colorado was a
real would-be terrorist. He
was
looking for ways to commit an act of anti-semitic violence before the
FBI contacted him.
Still, suggesting a crime he couldn't have tried to commit on his own
is a dangerous practice for the state to engage in.
(satire)
‘The Onion’ Launches New Cover-Up Desk To Suppress Today’s
Most Damning Stories.
'As Corrupt as It Gets': Oil Lobbyist Turned Interior Chief Proposes
Giving
'Coveted' Contract to Ex-Client.
Republicans practice corruption so blatantly that it seems like "dog
bites man." But if we want an honest government we need to punish
each one.
The Republicans'
two
defense arguments for the conman are "He didn't
mean to do anything wrong" and "He was too dumb to have done what is accused."
US citizens: call
on Congress to pass the millionaire surtax.
If you call, please spread the word!
Murder of Two Journalists
Leads
to Arrest of Indonesian Palm Oil Boss.
Whoever killed them did so directly. Palm oil's deforestation will
cause millions of additional deaths, perhaps hundreds of millions, but
it won't be possible to tie a particular death to a particular
company.
Realistic 3d-printed artificial meat, made mostly from vegetable
material, is
likely to be available soon.
Reportedly it tastes and feels like real meat. It will require far less
greenhouse gas emissions, and it might be much better for people's health.
If it catches on, there will be lots of unemployed soy bean farmers.
The world needs to provide for them somehow — perhaps paying them to
replant local forest trees on the disused farmland.
We will need libre 3d-printers to make our own artificial meat and not
be subject to DRM. People should start developing these now.
The true danger of physically powerful robots is not that they might
rebel against all humans, but
that
they might obey some humans just as
they are designed to do.
The US threatens
Thailand with a trade war if it goes ahead
with plans to ban three toxic pesticides.
Billionaires Fear Warren And Sanders —
But
They Should Fear Us All.
Bigotry against old people is deeply embedded in American society, and
is
generally accepted even as other forms of bigotry are criticized.
On a few specific issues, there is a reason to distinguish. For old
people to have children is unwise because the old parents are very
likely to die before those children grow up. That would put the
children in difficulty as well as pain.
Of course, it is unwise for younger people to have children, too,
in today's society and circumstances.
One very common form of bigotry against the old is to snear at them
for romantic or sexual involvements with people who are not old.
Many people think they are entitled to demand that old people confine
themselves to relationships with old people.
It's comparable to telling blacks that they should only have
relationships with blacks, or telling men that they should only have
relationships with women.
What can the
US learn from Germany's example in atoning for past
oppression?
There are more tigers in houses and backyards in the US
than remain in
the wild.
In Italy as in the US, globalization is concentrating prosperity in a
few cities, driving
most of the country to poverty, despair, and sometimes
right-wing extremism.
Firefighters Are Exposed to Smoke And Chemical Vapors That Can Cause
Long-Term Health Damage.
Scientists
are studying the problem.
Facebook's targeted ads enable manipulative right-wing parties
to
try many bogus attacks and see which ones catch on.
UK citizens: vote for Labour, or Green if it has the better chance of
winning your district.
It is a mistake to vote an MP based on whether to exit the EU. There
are many other important issues now.
US-style
unaffordable prescriptions are just one of the nasty things Tories
would do.
Therefore, put Labour in power. Labour will do the right thing about
most issues, and hold another referendum on whether to leave the EU.
Nowadays global heating
denialism often takes the form of
denying
the real solutions, which operate at the level of society and
systems rather than through individual sacrifice.
Illustrating the nature of support for the bully, a man
slashed
a protest balloon with a knife.
India has
exiled
journalist Aatish Taseer for criticizing Modi, citing an excuse
that was never held against him before.
Lula has been
freed
from prison, on the grounds that the appeals against his
conviction have not been completed.
This is a good thing, as far as it goes, but it doesn't undo the
injustice of the
corrupt
legal process nor does it undo the danger of having
coup-threatening
Bolsonaro as president.
Fiona Hill, Russia expert formerly in the National Security Council,
reports getting a wave of death threats
trying
to deter her from testifying in the impeachment hearings.
Other officials that got in the way of the conman's corruption have
also been targeted. They were accused of conspiring with George
Soros, which makes no sense in reality, but fits with the antisemitism
of right-wing extremists that support the bully.
"We need to teach girls that sex is something to be enjoyed —
not
feared."
That means dropping the idea that there is something admirable or
desirable about "virginity". It is simply a lack of experience.
I recall seeing the slogan, "Virginity can be cured."
DNA data bases in the US
can
be searched by court order. With a government hot on persecuting
immigrants and whistleblowers, we must consider it dangerous to let
anyone sequence our DNA.
Global heating is causing heatwaves in Britain that
put
train lines at risk. Trains have to run slowly to avoid damage or
derailment.
(satire) billions of
blessed souls were forced to wander around Earth this week during a
pest-control fumigation of Heaven.
The US system of prosecution and punishment responds to public pressure,
but mainly the powerful part of the public. This means
it has evolved to
support racism and the power of the rich, and (on some issues) sexism too.
The system isn't "broken", rather it evolved under pressure to do
suppression rather than justice.
The article uses the word "designed", but I think that is a misnomer,
for their punishment system just as for the genomes of living species.
Neither one was designed as a whole; rather, decisions were made, step
by step, under the selective pressures of the moment.
About the importance of coral reefs, and
the
several ways human activity
is killing corals — including coastal development.
Amazon spent
1.5 million dollars to weaken the majority of
the Seattle City Council that advocated taxing Amazon more.
Many Bolivians are protesting and accusing Evo Morales of rigging the
recent presidential election.
Some
cops are supporting these protests.
I have no information on whether the accusations are true. This could
be nothing more than an expression of some people's opposition to
Morales. Or it could be a response to real rigging.
As the conman orders his staff to ignore subpoenas from Congress, he
commits a crime that in itself justifies impeachment,
declaring
contempt for the Constitution.
He does this because he is confident that Republicans in the Senate
will protect him, and as long as they do, he may be able to succeed.
Destroying the ability of Congress to check abuses by the president
may be exactly what he seeks.
Florida Republicans
want
to override Key West's ban on coral-killing
sunscreens.
They say the reason is because some people might dislike the other
sunscreens and use no sunscreen, thus exposing themselves to danger
of skin cancer.
Surely there are other ways to encourage use of sunscreen without promoting
the ones that kill coral.
(satire)
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reportedly pledged $25
billion Thursday toward eradicating whatever disease drives people to
support taxing the rich.
More about the court case that has shut down the Trump Foundation,
a "charity" that the conman's family
was
found to have persistently abused.
The UK must use this election to rethink its trickle-down economics,
and most opposition parties are not talking about where they stand.
They
are focusing on the side issue of whether to leave the EU.
Labour promised to hold another referendum about this. Britons should
set aside the EU issue and vote for Labour, for the sake of all the
other vital issues. (Or Green; it is generally progressive and will
do the right thing.)
Then vote in the referendum about whether to leave the EU.
Mexican thugs
tortured four Maya people they found on a bus in 2015,
believing them to be Guatemalan refugees. But it turned out
they were
indigenous Mexican Maya from Chiapas.
Nowadays, Mexico tortures Guatemalan refugees
so
they cannot reach the
US.
"I was an astrologer —
here's
how it really works, and why I had to stop."
She pleased lots of customers, who remembered accurate, specific
predictions which came from their own imagination, not from her.
The "common core" curriculum and its education-distorting tests turn
out to have
failed to improve education.
Biggest UK Fund Manager Invested in (fossil fuel) Firms
It Shamed over
Climate Crisis.
The idea that "engaging with" planet roaster companies is really a way
to get them to change has been discredited by the environmentalists
who
tried it for years in the past.
Senator Segre of Italy achieved her goal of setting up an anti-racism
commission, despite
the daily death threats.
Although Salvini condemns the threats, his example of violence against
the weak stirred up the hatred that manifests itself in these threats.
If unmarried people become a political bloc,
what
will their demands be?
The UK government
used
public funds to publish lies about poor people and the cuts to their
welfare benefits.
As Fires Rage in World's Largest Rainforest, NASA Warns
'Human
Activities Are Drying Out the Amazon'.
Italy to Put
Sustainability
and Climate at Heart of Learning in Schools.
The UK has sentenced Aidan James to a year in prison for
training
with the Iraqi Kurds in order to fight PISSI.
A Chilean thug has been
arrested
for shooting protesting students.
Chile deserves praise for having a legal system strong enough to do
this. The US usually fails to do so.
A judge shut down the Trump Foundation. The bully
admitted
misusing some of its funds.
How Big Tech Is
(perhaps)
Dragging Us Towards the Next Financial Crash.
When economists claim some change is "inevitable", this is generally
at least partially a self-fulfilling prophecy. It says, "You won't
summon the political will to stop this change." But perhaps that's
exactly why we should do so.
Republican Congresscritter Matt Shea has been linked with violent
extremists through
leaked
messages.
The bully
and his helpers want to identify the Ukraine whistleblower,
even though per testimony is no longer needed (plenty of other
witnesses are available), in order to
destroy
the system that was set up to limit abuse of power.
A
new,
realistic form of fake rhino horn might fool buyers enough to kill
the market for real rhino horn.
The two are equally ineffective as "treatments".
The weakness I see is that dealers and customers may learn to
distinguish the fakes. They will certainly try, and since it can be
done, they will probably learn how.
How One Employer [in the US, of course] Stuck a New Mom With a
$898,984
Bill for Her Premature Baby.
New Zealand has passed a law committing to end carbon emissions
by
2050.
That goal isn't sufficient, but the law is a great step forward in
terms of willingness to confront the danger.
US citizens:
call
on the House of Representatives to pass the Pregnant Workers'
Fairness Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Israeli soldiers say that they shot Palestinian child Abdul Rahman
Shteiwi in the head with a rubber-coated bullet; but researches
concluded he was
shot
with an ordinary bullet, the kind that is meant to kill.
They should not be shooting adult protesters, let alone 9-year-olds.
The Term 'Privilege' Has Been Weaponized.
It's
Time to Retire It.
There are people who have real power, and some use that power to
mistreat others. Others, including me, are attacked for fictitious
power that is just an excuse.
A famous rapper created a scandal
by
announcing that he has someone
verify each year that his daughter still has a hymen.
In addition to the criticisms in the article, his approach to the issue
foolishly equates having sex with vaginal penetration.
However, the deepest error is to normalize the foolish wish for your
lover (whatever per gender) to have had no experience with sex — to
be ignorant about how to please others, and about how others can
please per. We all start out ignorant, of this as well as everything
else, but there is nothing good about being ignorant.
[Tory crush-the-poor cuts have] Pushed Families into Crisis
And
Then Thrown Away the Lifelines.
Philippines Grants
Asylum to Iranian Woman Held in Airport.
Interpol had better do something to avoid being a tool for catching
refugees from political persecution.
19 participants in a Gay Pride march in Ankara
face
criminal charges
because all Gay Pride events had been forbidden.
US citizens: call
for protecting the endangered Joshua tree.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call
on US oil companies to stay out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
If you call, please spread the word!
Africa is not only making a lot of humans,
but
also a lot of coal-fired
power plants, which are just the thing to kill lots of those people with
global heating effects in a few decades.
The Australian agency that is supposed to regulate pesticides is
shamefully lax; pesticide runoff
is
killing the Great Barrier Reef
even before global heating gets around to it.
Shutterstock censors
image searches coming from China.
I think the root of this danger is the existence of large multinational
companies for which exclusion from the Chinese market is so terrible that
they will comply with whatever China demands. It is exacerbated by
allowing the company to know which country a customer is in.
The CEO of Boeing
was
personally and directly responsible for the careless
approach that led to the two fatal crashes of 737 Max aircraft.
The deregulationism that the FAA practiced was also directly
responsible, and some high official that approved the deregulation
should resign for that.
With systems designed for reliability, a disaster typically happens
because several things go wrong together. Thus, it is normal that
different people are responsible for different layers of
unpreparedness.
Israel has arrested Palestinian elected official Khalida
Jarrar. She
may be arbitrarily imprisoned again.
Israel keeps
on seizing Palestinian land in the West Bank, a little at a time.
1000 dunams amount to one square kilometer — a tiny fraction of the
West Bank. But one square kilometer now, and another in a few weeks,
adds up across the years to lots of land.
A few provisions of the proposed Online Privacy Act
might
do some good.
Of the provisions described there, the two that would restrict what
companies can do are:
The right to "access, correct or delete" your data won't do much good
if you can't tell what conclusions the system draws from the raw data.
The sheer volume of data will defeat attempts by users to look for
errors in it.
Requiring consent will have little effect. Companies will simply
say. "No consent, no service." The site that the user sees will
ask for consent on behalf of the data-accumulating companies they use,
such as Google, or give personal data to, such as Sift.
Limiting what data companies could collect or hold might do some
good. How much good would depend on details.
If passed, this bill might curb some abuses, but it won't make
us safe from surveillance.
Humans easily saw through
the
posts that make up the bully's pointless "border wall".
I doubt that any other large animals can operate a saw, or recognize a place
where a saw has been used. So the wall will block their movements even if
it does not block humans.
Some members of the neo-Nazi web site Iron March
were
involved in murders
based on hate.
(satire)
The aliens wanted to destroy humanity, but couldn't find a method
that we were not already carrying out.
My joke of a theory is that the aliens need to make Earth considerably
warmer to be comfortable for them.
Wild boar are becoming so numerous in Italy that
they
are a nuisance,
and occasionally cause fatal car crashes.
I am in favor of hunting them to reduce their numbers.
Does it make sense to memorialize a war when
families no longer
hand down stories about ancestors in it?
US citizens: call
on Democratic 2020 candidates to support Medicare for All.
If you call, please spread the word!
The monster oil spill
endangers
life along 1500 miles of Brazil's coast.
A poll reports that
over
half of Britons support total decarbonization
by 2030.
Sanders says he
would break up ICE (informally, the deportation thug
agency) and CBP (informally, the border thug agency).
Bad news for people who live in a world with Uber in it: the company's
loss in the third quarter
was
only 1.2 billion dollars.
This might be good news if it were due to raising prices,
because that would help stop Uber from destroying its competition.
Uber is no less oppressive to its customers.
Please help kill Uber — join me in refusing to ride in an Uber car.
The Average American Eats 17 Teaspoons of Added Sugar Daily.
It's
Killing Us.
Anti-vaxxers are
using the thousands-of-lies tactic in imitation of right-wing extremists.
Tory policies that hurt the poor
play
a crucial role in driving them
into extreme poverty (including hunger).
Congo (DRC) Warlord Bosco Ntaganda
[sentenced
to] 30 Years for War
Crimes by International Criminal Court.
The WHO has recognized the existence of traditional Chinese medicine.
The medical academies of Europe
are
concerned that this might be
misunderstood as endorsing it as valid.
Supporting for the Green New Deal
helped
Democrats win in Virginia.
I was joking when I suggested that if we did not limit marriage to
couples, I
could get married solo. It turns out that
someone
has done it.
I could do without the trappings that people are taught to apply to
romantic relationships. The only part that I need is to share loving
tenderness and sometimes to delight her. But without that, my life
would be (and was) terribly sad.
Sanders condemned a proposal by the Las Vegas city council to make
sleeping in public areas a crime, and
his
campaign will mobilize supporters
to demonstrate to oppose it.
Dangerous as it is to sleep on the street, I've read that many
homeless people find sleeping in shelters even more dangerous.
(satire)
NYC Opens $500 Million Decoy Subway Station To Catch
Turnstile Jumpers, "including turnstiles that will not accept
MetroCards regardless of their available balance, increasing the
likelihood of attempts to avoid payment."
Republicans are trying to set young Americans against old Americans,
to destroy Social Security; but
if
we stay united we can preserve it.
Social Security needs tweaks to deal with the decreased US birth rate,
but that isn't a big change.
Poor Americans suffer a higher rate of inflation than the (generally
low) rate for the overall US economy. (The article explains why.)
Over many years,
this
has led to a significant underestimate of the
number of Americans in poverty.
Many US oil refineries use hydrogen fluoride, an extremely toxic gas.
If you breathe it, it turns into hydrofluoric acid in your lungs.
Some of these refineries are in cities, and a ruptured HF tank could
kill or injure hundreds of thousands of people in the surrounding
area.
The EPA just
rejected
a request to ban use of HF in refineries.
Republicans,
Not Russians, Threaten Our Elections.
One of the Twitter spies of Salafi Arabia
got
data on a friend of Jamal Khashoggi.
Twitter employees have been
charged
with spying for Salafi Arabia — specifically, getting the
private personal data of dissidents so as to identify them.
This leads me to question whether it is proper for Twitter to demand
personal info from dissidents that might make it possible to identify
them. I'm told that Twitter makes it very difficult to use an account
without using a portable phone for authentication. Given the harm
that a portable phone does to the user's freedom, it is wrong to
demand users have one.
Global Investment in Cutting Greenhouse Gases
Fell
by 11% in 2018.
Even worse, it was cancelled out by investment in fossil fuel.
Democrats
swept
the Virginia state legislature. We can expect many changes there.
Future Generations will face rising oceans and coastal inundations
into the 2300s even if governments meet climate commitments,
researchers
find. Even if the temperature does not keep increasing, the
increase that will have happened will continue melting ice.
Supposing we have put an end to
global heating, over time we could
bring the CO2 level back down, and maybe the temperature too. Then
maybe ice levels would start returning to what they were 50 years ago.
Ambassador Sondland has admitted that his testimony to Congress was
false:
the
bully did indeed set up a quid-pro-quo for Ukraine.
Juli Briskman was
fired
for giving the bully the finger as his motorcade passed by. She
used that to campaign successfully for election to the county board of
supervisors.
Way to go! Don't be afraid of bullies.
If Twitter bans issue ads, planet-roasting companies could promote
themselves and excuse their politics with "commercial" ads;
climate
defenders could not buy ads to criticize them, because those would
be "issue ads".
Two Turkish writers, convicted on charges that make no sense, have
been
released
from prison after three years.
However, other Turkish journalists have just been
convicted
on bogus charges of "terrorism".
Extinction
Rebellion won a court case against the order by thugs that banned
all protests in London.
Extra
efforts to take good care of teenagers and children that get in
trouble is making a big improvement in steering them away from
drugs and crime, in a pilot program in England.
Hazing
by other soldiers reportedly was why one Russian soldier shot
eight others on a military base.
Two large Australian banks publicly support climate protection but
they recently
increased
their lending for fossil fuel extraction.
Fishermen discard damaged nets and lines in the ocean, where they
can
continue for years killing sea animals.
This article resolves a contradiction that puzzled me. It says that
the discarded fishing gear makes up the majority of plastic in large
objects, but only a smaller fraction of the total plastic including
small and microscopic pieces.
A study has found evidence that smoking tobacco
tends
to increase the chance of developing depression or schizophrenia.
The clever design of the study demonstrates more than mere correlation
— it shows causality, mainly in that one direction.
Oklahoma has reduced the sentences for various crimes, and this
applies retroactively.
Over
500 prisoners were just released as a result.
US citizens:
call on the
House of Representatives to pass the Climate Displaced Persons
Act.
The proverb says that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,
but allowing climate refugees is not even a cure for the eco-illness
of global heating.
It is merely a treatment. We know how to prevent
global heating disaster,
so prevention must take priority.
11,000 scientists have
presented
the science that shows there is a climate emergency and what it
consists of.
The Koch brothers are
lobbying
heavily against bills that would make the US take action to curb
global heating.
PFAS chemicals that can increase cancer rates even at tiny levels have
been detected in
over
1300 US water supply systems.
With carcinogens, whether any person gets cancer is a matter of
chance, and a higher dose means a higher chance. Thus, the standard
for level of PFAS is a matter of what additional chance is acceptable.
If everyone has a 25% chance of getting cancer sooner or later, is it
acceptable for PFAS in the water to increase that to 25.1%? Maybe,
Increasing it to 30%, clearly not.
The article reports that in New Jersey nearly all the systems which
had PFAS had them at a level that might medically significant.
It would be interesting to report how many such water supply systems
exist in the US, and how many of them have been tested. This testing
seems to be a new practice, so I expect that the vast majority have
never been tested. I wonder what fraction of the water systems tested
were found to have PFAS.
Three pension funds (in California and Colorado)
lost
a lot of money over the past decade by investing in fossil fuels.
Employees whose pensions the funds manage are demanding an end to
this.
In the long term, fossil fuel companies are bad investments because
investing in the possible collapse of civilization can't be profitable
for more than a few. But we must not leave it to chance that fossil
fuel extraction winds down. We must make sure of it.
Big US investment companies are
pushing
strongly for fossil fuels.
Cambridge University
accepted
a donation from Shell for research in oil extraction.
It appears that part of the donation is for research in other areas.
Perhaps that part is good. But no one should do research on improving
oil extraction, because regardless of the details its long-term effect
will be to prolong oil extraction when what the world needs is to shut
it down.
Women anti-fracking protesters in the UK accuse the thugs of
using
violence and aggression especially against them.
A report summarizes
China's political interference in the UK,
targeting criticism of China and Chinese exiles.
"Free market" is used (especially in the US) as propaganda for a
deregulated market, but the deregulated market
leads
to offshoring as well
as monopolies and oligopolies.
Competing with other countries for the strength of export business must not be
the principal policy goal, especially not if its main means is subsidy for
business. Strategic subsidies for certain business are acceptable only if
business pays tax that far exceeds the subsidies. Also, we must make sure
businesses pass most of that money to employees.
"Which of the 2020 Candidates
Are
Ready to Address the Threat of Nuclear
Weapons?" It's a good question. The article does not tell us. Have any
candidates said anything about this?
(satire) "Our
new debt card is available in outstanding balances from $50 to $150,000
on our platinum offering, allowing customers to begin owing money
immediately,"
Noam Chomsky explains
why he supported (and still wishes for) US troops to
deter Turkey from attacking the Kurds of Syria, showing how that is different
from the US interventions he has criticized.
In England, children 10 years of age can be prosecuted for crimes.
There
is a movement to raise the age of criminal responsibility there,
following the rest of Europe.
I was surprised that the age of criminal responsibility in Portugal is
16. It is not rare for 15-year-olds to commit acts we normally
consider grave crimes. It is important to take steps to avert
repetition. It does not automatically follow that the response should
be criminal prosecution. I am curious what Portugal actually does.
Tory cruelty has made millions of people in Britain destitute, and
unable
to buy food some of the time.
Cowed and Outgunned: Why Mexico's Police
'Don't
Stand a Chance' Against
(drug) Cartels.
The only way to defeat the cartels is to take away their financial base
by legalizing the transport of the drugs.
The bullshitter's plan to "modernize" US national park campgrounds
would make them
a
lot like living in a trailer park in a city.
Why bother going — you might as well just watch the movie.
An associate of Bogus Johnson
helped
operate a misleading astroturf campaign
a year ago.
The mainstream media
are
focusing a blackout on Sanders.
Instead of debating rules for political advertising on internet
platforms, let's
ban targeted advertising as well as the collection of
personal data that it is based on.
People who want to see what's available in a certain kind of product
can search for that.
The European Court of Justice
ruled
against Poland's attempt to rush
judges into retirement.
ISTR that the ECJ is not a European Union institution; that it was set
up by a different treaty and that some countries which are outside the
EU are members of it. Poland is a member, but will its authoritarian
government obey this ruling?
E Jean Carroll wrote that the bully raped her in the 1980s; he
responded with absurd insults. She is now
suing
him for defamation.
The fact that he is president will not protect him from this.
Israel will deport the local head of Human Rights Watch, Omar Shakir,
who is a
US citizen and not an Israeli citizen. The reason for the deportation
is HRW's support for the boycott of products made in Israel's colonies
in Palestinian territory (the West
Bank). HRW says that Omar Shakir did not promote the boycott
himself while working for HRW.
I too support that
boycott, which was started by Uri Avnery and Gush
Shalom.
The saboteur in chief
has
started pulling the US out of the Paris
climate agreement.
Because that treaty does not have binding requirements, this is no
more than a gesture. The real substance of refusal to defend the
climate will not begin in 2020. On the contrary,
the US hardly even
started to defend the Earth's climate.
The FBI has
caught a would-be terrorist who, in his fantasies, was going
to bomb a synagogue.
To place a real bomb there would have been a hate crime; to thwart a
real plan to do so would be laudable. But we have to wonder whether
the supposed criminal would ever have made a real plan, or even
formulated the desire, without encouragement from people serving the
FBI. Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn't, but chances are we will never
find out.
The FBI's agents are not required to save recordings of the
conversations in which they press someone to agree to a plan to commit
a crime. They only need to save a recording of a subsequent
conversation where the subject affirms having that intention. By not
recording the prior conversations, they can entrap someone while
making sure there is no way to prove they did so.
In order for the FBI to protect us from real terrorist plots and not
from nasty vague wishes, we must make it stop converting those vague
wishes into pretend plans.
In an bizarre and ironic reversal, Los Angeles demands Uber provide
data about the movements of its cars and scooters, and Uber refuses to
hand it over, claiming
to protect customers' privacy.
The irony is that Uber is entirely right about this narrow issue —
but the issue only exists because of Uber's abusive tracking
practices. Los Angeles
should
not be allowed to know who goes where,
and neither should Uber.
Privacy advocates
sound
alarm on Google's acquisition of FitBit.
They are missing the point main, I am sad to say.
The basic injustice of the FitBit is that it collects personal
data. We need to put an end to that practice of collecting data.
Concentration of business is also a big problem, and we need to put
that into reverse. It is better if FitBit is not acquired by any
other company. But stopping the takeover by Google won't fix the
FitBit's surveillance problem.
Bernie Sanders says
Apple's $2.5 billion home loan program a
distraction from hundreds of billions in tax avoidance that created
California housing crisis.
Anyway, loans will not help people find homes unless they have
good prospects to pay back the loans. With wages not rising,
and business
conspiring to make sure they don't, not many Americans could take advantage of these loans.
Those that do would mainly buy existing housing. So Apple's investment
in selling mortgages does not address the shortage very much.
US citizens:
call on the
Senate to block anti-abortion extremist Sarah Pitlyk's judicial
confirmation.
If you call, please spread the word!
Both Sanders'
plan to fund Medicare for All and
Warren's
plan are based on continuing the current practice in which businesses pay
per employee. However, making businesses pay per employee creates an
artificial pressure to reduce employment — for instance, to invest in
automation. That is an undesirable side effect, and a very important
one.
We ought to replace all per-employee taxes with
a
progressive tax on
business income. This would eliminate the pressure to replace humans with robots and
also promote competition by imposing higher tax rates on large companies.
The bullshitter's men told the Supreme Court that spouses and
relatives of citizens would be given waivers around his partial ban on
Muslim visitors, but
that
appears to be bullshit.
As the bullshitter constantly demonizes the press, the mainstream media
bend
over backwards to treat right-wing extremists as acceptable.
Learning
from the successes and failures of the World Social Forum.
Bolsonaro intends
to sell oil leases for large offshore oil reserves,
after a large oil spill on the coast demonstrates the damage
transporting oil can do.
Much worse is the damage that the oil would do if it reaches
its destination and gets burnt.
The development of that reserve would
bust
the carbon budget. People will have to fight to shut down those
wells, for their survival's sake.
Amnesty International and Canadian organizations
are
suing to overturn
Canada's policy of presuming that the US is a "safe country" for refugees.
In practice, that policy means that if a person asks for asylum in
Canada coming from the US, Canada always sends per back to the US,
saying, "You should ask for asylum there."
The assumption was basically valid until the bully took over US
immigration and deportation policy.
World Bank Rankings
Promote
Deregulation at the Expense of Working People.
In other words, the World Bank's fundamental structure designs it
to promote concentration of wealth.
Dear Fossil Fuels:
It’s Over.
US citizens: call
on the Department of the Interior to stop the privatization of America's national parks.
If you call, please spread the word!
The conman sent US troops to Deir ez-Zor, saying
it was to protect
(steal) Syria's oil, but that makes no sense. The small amount of oil
reserves there can't be tapped because the machinery is ruined.
So what is the real reason?
Why is Latin
America Burning?
An additional factor in some countries, that the article does not mention,
is population growth. Unless you've got unlimited resources available,
population growth will bring poverty sooner or later. It also tends
to result in a lot of educated young adults that can't find the jobs they
have studied for.
US journalist Max Blumenthal
was
recently arrested for bringing food
in May to the people defending the Venezuelan embassy in Washington
from Guaidó's takeover. The prestigious newspapers that have
published his work said nothing about his arrest.
Israeli soldiers
arrested
Palestinian human rights worker ‘Aref
Daraghmeh, who attends protests to document how Israeli soldiers treat
protesters. They hit him, and put him in the sun where he eventually
fainted and had to be hospitalized.
Coral gardeners in Jamaica
are
speeding the regrowth of coral reefs that were
destroyed 40 years ago.
This is possible as long as the general conditions of the sea are conducive
to the survival of coral. In a few decades, acidification by CO2 in the
water will make sea water fatal for coral, all around the world.
Although the acting king of Salafi Arabia has legalized some
traditionally forbidden activities,
he
has increased repression of any
sort of criticism.
In Germany, children of age 7 regularly go to school by themselves
taking public transportation.
They
are also taught what to do if
they get lost.
(The child in this story got lost, but not due to any error on her
part. I think she is too capable to make any such error.)
Everyone: call
on major media outlets to stop playing advertisements for fossil fuel companies.
If you call, please spread the word!
The
report of a delay in a large business-supremacy treaty being set
up by China makes me wonder whether that treaty contains an ISDS
provision.
ISDS ("I sue democratic states") means that each signatory country
gives foreign companies more rights than its own citizens, and the
power to enforce those excessive rights in special international
courts that are beyond the reach of democracy. Such treaties
ought
to be abolished.
So, does anyone know whether China's RCEP contains some form of ISDS?
Those accused of murdering leftist politician Marielle Franco
reportedly
visited Bolsonaro's house in Rio earlier that day.
His family had a long history of association with them.
This does not prove, not yet, that Bolsonaro plotted the murder,
but given his open support for violence and repression, he would
hardly have been stopped by conscience.
This year's wildfires in California have been much less destructive
than in 2017 and 2018, so far.
This
is partly because people have learned, but partly luck.
They can't be lucky all the time.
The Tories have "suspended" fracking, but
perhaps
only until the election.
US citizens: call
on Facebook to stop allowing lies in political ads.
My signing this petition does not imply
I think Facebook is legitimate. I think it should not exist.
But that doesn't contradict signing the petition.
If you sign, please spread the word!
How key republicans inside Facebook
are
shifting its politics to the right.
The Tories say that one of their policies for squeezing the poor
will
cease in April.
Ordinarily, we would say this is a blatant example of an insincere
promise made by politicians to invite voters to disregard what they
know about those politicians. However, in the case of the Tories,
there is a simpler analysis: it could be yet another lie.
China comes
to schools in the US, with a surveillance system that monitors
everything the students say and do in their computer systems — including
their class work, their homework, and their communications.
Oil companies must
cut production by 35% to meet Paris climate accord numbers by 2040.
The conman has authorized government-funded aid programs
to discriminate
based on people's sexuality.
Haitians are
demanding the ouster of President Moise, who was essentially
imposed by the US.
Domestic workers in Kuwait are often enslaved. Their masters even
sell them, using
Instagram and other apps.
I don't think the apps are the root cause of this problem.
Rather, Kuwaiti law and state policy make this enslavement easy.
The IRS tried
to hide emails that show tax industry influence over free file
program.
The word "free" could be misleading here; the services that some
Americans can use is gratis, but I doubt you can use it without
running nonfree Javascript software. Would someone like to check?
Colorado cops
blew up Leo Lech's house to arrest an armed robber who
had barricaded himself in the house. Lech himself was ruined as a result
of this damage.
It may well be true that what the cops did was the best way to catch
the robber. I don't claim that they were at fault. But the city
should take the responsibility for damage that results, because the
city can afford to — whereas individuals (unless they are rich)
can't. Socializing risks that individuals generally can't bear is
part of the state's mission.
Just as the right wing made a battle plan for privatization,
the left needs
a battle plan to take away the power of business.
In the US, the battle plan was different in detail. The US did not
have as much publicly-owned business, so the right-wing battle plan
focused more on giving business control over politics and regulation.
Relating US contempt for the poor
to
the protestant work ethic.
The idea that doing productive work is laudable has been transformed
into the idea that those who can't work are despicable.
Internal
Google documents show that its proposed Snoop City for a
Toronto neighborhood was intended to pressure people into "sharing"
(being snooped on for) more and more data.
It is reminiscent of China's "social credit" ranking, although details
would differ.
Senator Warren proposes
to prohibit some very large companies
from hiring former "senior government officials" for four years.
This is a good idea, but I am concerned that basing the penalties on
"net profit" would undermine the effect.
The way US corporations dodge US taxes is by offshoring the profits,
so the US company can report a very small figure for net profit,
whereupon it owes a very small amount of tax. Would this also allow
it to convert the hiring penalty into a slap on the wrist?
One year after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, billionaires and US officials
think
it is ok to take money from Salafi Arabia's acting king, who
was
surely responsible for the murder.
One of them is
the head of BlackRock, which promotes
deforestation
of the Amazon forest.
The conman's men
propose
to make it easier for multinational corporations to avoid US taxes by offshoring profits.
My
progressive tax on gross income would eliminate this problem.
The ACLU demands
information about how the US government currently uses
face recognition.
UK supermarkets
are
taking steps for substantial reduction in
single-use plastic. It is surely not enough, but it gets the ball rolling and that is important.
Unemployment of young, educated adults is fueling protests in
many
Middle Eastern countries.
The article mentions that "youth populations have surged", but does
not recognize that this is one of the
crucial roots of the problem.
"The more Nigel Farage plays Brexiters for fools,
the
more they seem to like
it."
This cult-like following resembles that of the conman in the US.
Deforesters in Brazil
compounded their illegal logging by murdering one
of the indigenous land police, and shooting another.
Meanwhile, in Peru
deforesters
face murder charges.
Against cancellation:
"you don’t change minds by damning your opponents."
Bogus Johnson apparently
knew
of illegal campaign spending to persuade
Britons to vote to leave the EU.
Australia threatens
to prohibit boycotts aimed at the suppliers of
destructive mining companies.
Senator Manchin said he
would
not vote for Sanders against the
bullshitter. Manchin is a plutocratist Democrat.
This is one more indication of why it is vital to replace Manchin.
The Republican tax cuts of two years ago did no good for the country but
were a boon to the rich. Now
they
want to do even more of this.
To do it, they would needs votes from Democrats in the House of
Representatives. There are plutocratist Democrats who would do it.
Can we pressure them not to?
Rich people in the UK really believe Corbyn will tax them, so
they are
preparing to move their wealth out of the UK if Labour wins.
I expect that this report is meant as a threat, hoping voters will think
that driving them out of the UK would be unfortunate. But that is a mistake.
Those rich people use their wealth to dominate countries politically.
If the UK can't tax their wealth, it should at least drive them out.
Then it should pass laws so that they can't use that wealth to control
politics there.
(satire) Canadian
oil company TC Energy held a press conference Friday to announce that
the Keystone Pipeline’s 9,000-barrel leak was due to protesters' making
it lose confidence in itself.
Moving the COP25 climate conference to Spain may block people from poor
countries from participating, because
they
would be unable to get visas
for Spain in such a short time.
The representatives of fossil fuel countries will have no difficulty.
The UN special rapporteur on torture
warns
that Julian Assange's life is in
danger from the way the UK treats him in prison.
Erdoğan's invasion of Syria was the excuse to arrest people in Turkey
for criticizing it or reporting facts about it.
They
face charges of
"terrorism".
The UK Tories have
banned fracking.
That is a big reversal after many years suppressing opposition to
fracking.
Everyone:
call on
International Energy Agency to align its recommendations with the
Paris treaty guidelines.
If you sign, please spread the word!
When San Francisco thugs worked with the FBI, the FBI
often
told them to violate city laws. So the city pulled its cops out
of the cooperation.
Bolsonaro's son
advocated
repression in the style of Brazil's former military government,
perhaps as a distraction from criminal ties.
The Tories are
using
public funds for Facebook ads which are essentially
electioneering.
Iraqis (including Shi'ites) are now
protesting
against the influence of Iran in Iraq's government.
Sea-level rise
could
put many of the world's great cities under water at high tide by
2050.
They include Bangkok, Mumbai, Shanghai, Alexandria, and most of
Southern Vietnam. 150 million people would be displaced.
Giant earthworks could prevent some of these problems.
In California, prisoners
are
paid a dollar per hour to fight fires, yet after they are released,
they are not allowed to get the same work.
Prisoners working on something other than taking care of the prison
should be paid the usual wage for that job. And I support the bill to allow
prisoners who did firefighting work to continue to do it afterward.
(In general, we need to allow former prisoners to get decent jobs if
we don't want them to be stuck in crime.)
However, it is an exaggeration to compare this to slavery. Prisoners
are not compelled to fight fires.
Climate activists from California held a sit-in in Pelosi's Washington
office,
demanding
she support the Green New Deal to protect the state from worse
future fires.
The UK's hostility-to-foreigners agency
hardly
bothers to distinguish one foreigner from another. It sees no
need to pay much attention to the details of the people it only seeks
an excuse to deport.
Undercover Reporter Reveals
Life
in a Polish Troll Farm.
Argentina's outgoing right-wing president
has
relaxed regulations for
importation of plastic waste, which might be burned in incinerators.
"I
quit Twitter and haven’t looked back -– my fellow MPs should do the same."
The author does not recognize the danger of Facebook, which is unfortunate,
but his criticism of Twitter is interesting nonetheless.
Grading US fast food chains on their efforts to
keep
antibiotics out
of their food.
US thugs typically
get
19 weeks of training, which focuses on
protecting themselves from threats (occasionally real, often
imaginary). With three years of training, as in Norway, they might
learn to be police officers instead.
Many US interventions around the world
have
destroyed the social order
of countries, driving many to flee as refugees.
Since the bullshitter talks about ending some of America's forever
wars, the supporters of the US military-industrial complex
are pushing
hard to stop him.
This is true, overall, but it does not follow that each and every
military commitment that the US makes is automatically wrong, Most of
them defend a corrupt regime or a dictator; defending Rojava, by
contrast, defended democracy from the murderous tyrant Assad and the
murderous authoritarian Erdoğan. The one commitment that the
bullshitter actually broke was the one he should have kept.
A woman in the UK received a child porn video and forwarded it to
friends in outrage. One of the people she sent it to was her sister,
a cop. Now
the cop is being prosecuted for not denouncing her sister
as a criminal for this.
The article does not say whether the sister who sent it will be
prosecuted too.
Everyone: call
on major chocolate companies to eliminate the use of enslaved
children from the production of their chocolate.
If you call, please spread the word!
(satire)
Silicon Valley Leaders Sit Down With Wildfire At Investment
Meeting After Being Impressed By Its Rapid Expansion.
(satire)
ExxonMobil Introduces New 8-Course Gasoline Tasting Menu For Luxury Cars.
Although Rep. Adam Schiff is working hard to impeach the bully,
he
remains overall a plutocratist and a militarist.
The old, smaller Keystone pipeline
leaked
9000 barrels of tar sands oil
into a wetland. If the new, high capacity Keystone XL is built, it too will leak and
poison waters — as well as helping to destroy the Earth's ecosphere.
Insect biodiversity in Germany
shows
a steep decline in just 10 years. This applies to grasslands
and forests. Some hints suggest it has
to do with the proximity to farms, so current agricultural practices
may be responsible. (Pesticides?)
Watching
Tasmania's bird species vanish forever as human actions make it impossible for them to survive.
Australia's biggest coal mines
are
responsible for more carbon emissions than are produced in the whole of Australia.
There is no documented case of a registered sex offender's sexually
abusing a child in connection with Halloween, but many parts of the US
harass
them with annoying precautions against it all the same.
Google got its Snoop City plan for Toronto past one administrative
hurdle by
shrinking it down to just a few blocks.
The depth of snooping in the zone is more important than its area,
because the former would be used as a precedent. Toronto should
reject this proposal entirely unless the plan requires systems not to
identify individuals.
Neonicotinoids used on rice paddies in Japan
runs
off into waterways,
where it kills aquatic insects. The result was to wipe out eels and smelts.
Everyone: call
on Japan's biggest banks to stop financing coal.
If you call, please spread the word!
Chicago's striking teachers
won
gains in pay, smaller class sizes, and
better support for some kinds of students.
WhatsApp fake news in Brazil's election
was
almost all right-wing.
The lives of California's laborers and agricultural workers are so
close to the edge that they
can't
afford to miss a day's work because a fire is on the way.
Twitter
will
refuse all political advertising.
Myanmar Actors
Jailed
with Hard Labour for Show Poking Fun at Military.
Prohibiting publication of information that "endangers" some of the
state suppression forces is a widespread tool of authoritarianism.
Spain still has the ley mordaza which prohibits posting photos of
thugs,
even (especially?) thugs in the process of committing violence.
Georgia's voter-suppressing governor
plans
to delete 300,000 people from the voters list, for not having
voted recently. Activists are trying to notify them so they can
re-register.
That governor was elected due to the
voter-suppression
that he carried out as secretary of state of Georgia.
(satire) numerous anonymous tipsters confirmed this week that Bernie
Sanders recently
attended
a secret campaign meeting with 15,000 working-class donors from
the Democratic Party.
Colonel Vindman told Congress that the phone call "transcript"
released by the White House was not complete;
staff
had deleted parts.
CIA-funded Afghan militia units have
raided
medical clinics and accused the staff of serving the Taliban.
Sometimes they kill the staff.
The Taliban also threaten the clinics, even the same clinics. The
article does not say what they accuse the clinics of doing or why they
demanded closure of clinics.
Medical facilities are supposed to treat anyone who is sick or
wounded.
Australia is
considering
requiring people to identify themselves with face recognition to
access porn sites.
It is extremely dangerous to keep records of who accesses a porn site.
Porn sites that charge for access should use
GNU Taler for anonymous payments.
The US has cut the funds for study of
animal
viruses that might jump to infect humans.
Australian thugs broke a man's neck
while
serving a complaint that he was playing music too loud. He is now
permanently paralyzed.
The newspaper headline describes it
as
if the neck just broke itself.
Interviews with
protesters in Chile.
The modern Republican party
is
as extreme as any major party in our History.
[The bully's] effort to remove ‘Sexual Health’ from UN agreement
may
violate law, say senators.
Fortunately that effort did not succeed.
US citizens: call
on your senators to include a gun removal provision in the Violence Against Women Act.
If you call, please spread the word!
[Greenhouse gas] Emissions from tropical forest damage
'underestimated
by a factor of six'.
A deal will
make an effective cure for tuberculosis available in poor
countries for just 2 dollars a day.
This makes it possible to envision eradicating tuberculosis world-wide.
When playgrounds become too dull,
kids
climb other structures instead.
Women should
not feel compelled to resign from anything because their
nude images have been published.
(Neither should anyone else.)
US citizens: call
on Congress to pass the
Keep
Big Tech Out of Finance Act.
That law would prohibit large platform utilities (including Facebook)
from operating as a financial institution (for instance, operating a
digital currency).
With Kashmir under military clampdown for three months now, we can't
get a picture of the situation. Modi would like us to assume India is
in full control. But violent separatists
are
active there, even
Islamists.
When people trafficked into the UK and enslaved escape and report what was
done to them, the thugs
immediately
arrange to get them deported.
Rather convenient for those who enslaved them.
Morozov's analysis of how the strict rules of Wikipedia
require
it to choose one version for issues where the events and their significance are disputed.
African swine fever
is
spreading around the world and could kill 1/4
of the world's pigs.
As far as I can see, the only way in meat can infect live pigs is if
farms feed pigs with pork. That practice is asking for trouble:
it is
what enabled how BSE to spread among cattle. We need governments that
have the will and strength to make and enforce laws to stop this.
Farmers would reject the dangerous practice on their own, if they were
thinking about long-term risks. But instead they cede to short-term
competitive pressure to maximize efficiency. Blocking that is part
of the state's job.
Not just Russia:
China
and Iran may target US elections, according to
intelligence officials.
I expect they will all try, and it is worth making efforts to stop them.
However, the biggest threat comes from Republican officials that put their
success above their country, with
partisan
gerrymandering and
voter
suppression. Is to be doubted.
Colombia's President Duque launched a military operation, supposedly
to hunt the murderers of some indigenous leaders, but the list of
targets excludes
the paramilitares.
Sanders
endorsed
using US military aid to Israel as leverage to ease the siege of
Gaza.
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