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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
US citizens: call on 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.
A: Next time a group of people asks me to run a nonfree program
with them, I will say "No thanks."
B: Why so negative?
A: It's not negative, it's dispositive.
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.
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
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.
The GM workers' strike was a victory, part of a trend toward more
labor militancy.
Thousands of tourists photograph themselves on a stairway just because
it was a movie set. How foolish.
The fact that thousands of people do something for no reason
is not a reason for you to do it. If you do do it, you will
experience a sensation of "So what?"
Best of all, don't have an Instagram account, and you will avoid being
influenced by "influencers." Remember, Instagram is another tentacle
of Facebook. Don't be a zucker!
Was it wrong to greet the conman with chants of "Lock him up"?
I think he asked for it, very directly.
And note that they didn't say, "without trial."
Giuliani's complex connections with business and officials in Ukraine.
Pinochet's privatization of old-age pensions is still impoverishing Chile. Chile needs to tax the rich more.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban government use of face recognition.
We must also strictly regulate private use of face recognition.
If you call, please spread the word!
"Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Europe’s velvet
revolutions, a new generation is standing up to the [right-wing extremists]."
I don't like to use the word "populists" for right-wing extremists.
Republicans are trying to smear Colonel Vindman by questioning his loyalty
to the US.
Vindman was born in the Soviet Union, and moved to the US at age 3 as
a refugee, with his family.
It is characteristic of right-wing politicians to accuse their
opponents (or anyone that doesn't serve them) of the wrongs that they
themselves commit. Today's Republicans' primary allegiance is to the
conman, not the US.
The House of Representatives adopted a resolution condemning the
genocide of the Armenians.
In and of itself, this is the right thing to do. It would be wrong,
however, to impose censorship on what others say about this question, as both Turkey and France do.
It won't hamper Erdoğan's attack on the Kurds, but it is a setback for
his policy.
Even common birds in Australia are in danger as governments allow massive elimination of native forests.
"A new study [of cannabis-based medicines] shows evidence of positive
outcomes is scarce while symptoms can be exacerbated."
The harsh reaction to Hong Kong protests is splitting the thug department between the thugs and the police officers.
A lesson for today's Republicans, and the rest of us, about lynching.
What will Tump impeachment trial look like in Mitch McConnell-controlled
senate?
Even if Republicans defend him regardless of his crimes, the Senate's rules
and Chief Justice Roberts will make the Senate examine the evidence.
The Yes Men demonstrated to Duluth what it's like to have a tar sands oil pipeline forced through your land.
They could not demonstrate the difference between more global heating
and less global heating, as that will be over coming decades. But we
know that there is no room in the carbon budget for any additional fossil fuel facilities.
Scientists do not know whether the radio waves used for 5G phone
communication are
dangerous
to human health.
Big Tech companies are screwing their workers and spying on their
customers, like the robber barons of the 1920s, but Americans are fed
up and are
pushing
for laws that will tie them up.
Craig Murray attended a preparatory court session about extraditing
Julian Assange, and reports that Assange is
aging
rapidly and seems mentally dazed — like torture victims
Murray has seen.
Assange's lawyers were unable to talk with him until a week before the
hearing, and asked for a delay so they could present their case
properly. The UK magistrate refused, apparently insisting on a
schedule imposed by the US.
This schedule may prevent evidence from a Spanish court, which is
investigating a CIA plan to kidnap Assange, from being considered in
the extradition hearing.
The actual extradition hearing will be held in a place nearly
inaccessible to the public, so that the UK can violate Assange's
rights without any reporting of it.
Italian pun: gli ulivi sulle scogliere
The bully attended a world series game and the whole stadium booed him.
The Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo has been convulsed by
civil wars for decades. Now this has degenerated into unending war between
armed gangs that will murder at the drop of a hat.
27 youth climate activists arrested for Canadian parliament sit-in demanding green new deal.
70% of Americans 23 to 38 would support a Socialist candidate for
president.
The bully has forced 3,400 children under 5 years old to wait for an
immigration hearing in very violent border regions of Mexico.
The article itself refers to all minors as "children", which is an
attempt to exaggerate; but the unexaggerated facts are bad enough.
Explaining the legal distinction between whistleblowers that go through
channels and whistleblowers that speak to the public.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Students Not Profits Act., which would deny federal aid to for-profit "colleges".
If you call, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on Google to fire Miles Taylor, who was one of the bully's bigots.
If you call, please spread the word!
A Reminder Following al-Baghdadi's Death: 'The Terrorists We're Killing Today Are the Terrorists We Created Yesterday.'
He experienced US torture himself, and this surely influenced his career.
It takes a great spirit to respond to torture by rising above hatred.
Most people are not so gifted. So they are likely to respond to
torture by seeking revenge. Just as people who were abused as
children often abuse other children, people who experienced torture
may turn to torture themselves.
The Getty museum north of LA was designed specifically to be safe from fires around it.
New York Governor Cuomo, a right-wing Democrat, regards homeless people living in the NYC subway as a nuisance.
Canada pays people to relocate from isolated villages. A village with
54 permanent villages voted to resettle, and all but two people will
move away.
The Democratic Congressional Campaigns Committee is campaigning to pass the bullshitter's new NAFTA without fixing its grave problems.
The DCCC is also punishing campaign operatives that work for
the progressive primary challengers we need in order to make
the Democratic Party worth supporting.
"We
should stop measuring our counter-terrorism efforts by how many
terrorists we kill or our security by how many US troops are deployed."
Two of Assad's officers face charges in Germany for torturing
prisoners, many of them to death.
The fight to stop Nestlé from taking America's water to sell in
plastic bottles.
A hefty tax on bottles of water might do the job.
The tax could be two dollars per liter.
Australia's extractivist government wants to eliminate the "green
tape" that slows down potentially damaging projects, so it can plow
full-speed-ahead through everything that ought to be preserved.
US citizens: call for making fossil fuel companies financially
responsible for the damage they cause through global heating.
To literally make them pay for the damage is impossible. The damage
will be a large fraction of the total wealth of humanity. Perhaps as
little as 30%. Perhaps as much as 99%. Either way, it is far more
than the money that will pass through these fossil fuel companies'
hands. If we sued them for those damages, we'd end up owning the
fossil fuel companies but still not compensated for the damage.
Moreover, by the time those damages fully occur, there may be no functioning
legal system to sue them in.
So the reason to do this is not to make them "pay for the damage".
It is to give them a pressing reason to stop doing the damage.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on states, especially your state, to enact network
neutrality regulations.
If you call, please spread the word!
'Tax
the Hell Out of Me,' Says Young Millionaire Google Exec at
Prospect of a President Bernie Sanders.
You don't have to choose your vote according to your own selfish
interest.
The European Union is
failing
to defend democracy from bullies.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to investigate Amazon's videosurveillance of the
public.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass HR 3 to let Medicare negotiate lower drug
prices.
Rep. Katie Hill has
resigned
because of her prohibited sexual relationship with someone on her
staff.
I see the point of that rule, but I think that her resignation hurts
the whole country.
Drought is destroying Australian wetlands which are
supposed
to be a protected sanctuary for some bird species.
Global heating will keep making this worse. Perhaps solar-powered
desalinators will be needed to keep the bird sanctuary functioning.
Short Story: War Drone.
WeWork aimed to dominate the market by running at a loss and underselling
its competitors. Then it tried to go public for an inflated stock price,
and fell flat on its face.
The strategy of trying to dominate the world by running at a loss is
what Uber is doing. It is predatory, and we should not leave its
failure to chance. We should make it a crime and prosecute the
executives who do it.
Some cities are finding ways to make the construction of flood
defenses profitable in itself.
I don't see anything wrong with doing this. At the same time,
we must reject the idea that every flood defense must be profitable
to construct. That would lead to bowing down to business and letting
it extract too much from the public. To get a good deal with businesses
you must always be ready to say "no deal".
The best flood defenses will work only for a few decades. Beyond that,
we need to stop increasing the levels of greenhouse gases in the air,
then massively remove them from the atmosphere.
The head of the NHS has objected to accreditation of homeopaths, since that
would grant homeopathy an air of validity which it does not deserve.
Homeopathy is pure superstition. Based on biology, it cannot work — and in practice, it does not work.
Right-wing politicians have learned from the bullshitter to use minor
"mistakes" to magnify their message. We should refuse to take the bait.
Some "centrist" Democrats in Congress are acknowledging how plutocratist they are, by working with the US Chamber of Commerce.
(satire) pharmaceutical giant Pfizer unveiled a new
prescription medicine Thursday to help adults cut down on and
eventually quit the practice of sitting.
A law professor suggests that the House of Representatives arrest Giuliani and
others who are not US officials and refuse to answer questions.
Sanders calls for bringing back rehabilitation as the primary goal of
prison.
US prisons put substantial emphasis on rehabilitation in the 1970s,
but the massive increase in imprisonment in the 1980s meant that prisons
could barely afford to warehouse the prisoners.
US forces cornered al-Baghdadi, head of PISSI, and he blew himself up
along with a few of his children, who he was using as hostages.
Even disregarding questions of right and wrong, I can't see the logic
of using human shields against one's own suicide bomb.
The bullshitter is presenting this as a great victory. Perhaps mainstream media will say that war makes him "appear
presidential", as they did for Dubya in such situations.
Alas, this is unlikely to be a significant setback for PISSI. Such
organizations expect their officers to be killed, and systematically
prepare replacements for them. If the bullshitter does get a boost
from this, that could harm the US and the world. That harm could
easily outweigh the good of doing a small setback to PISSI.
US citizens:
call on Hilton
and Unilever to stop using voice and face scanning for hiring
decisions.
The bully has
effectively
prohibited humanitarian trade with Iran.
The surviving participants in Nazi mass murder are very old,
but one is
on
trial as an accessory to 5,000 murders.
One prisoner who escaped is a witness.
The extractionist policies of the Australian government are
putting
endemic species at risk of extinction.
Catholic bishops from the Amazon region
call
for ordaining married men as priests, and even women, though not
yet as priests.
I can't see the sense in religious belief, but I am nonetheless glad
to see a major church consider reducing bias.
A woman I loved long ago, Julie Fabre, became an Anglican priest.
Since then I have lost touch with her. If anyone knows her, I would
be glad to speak with her again.
One corporate executive
displayed
his intention for a tacit conspiracy to hold US wages down.
An appeals court
ruled
in favor of the US no-fly list, approving a drastic punishment
without trial.
If understood as a precaution against air terrorism, it is being
misapplied, since many of these people are not associated with
any such thing.
Calling for a
boycott
of companies that source anything from Xinjiang.
Countries should enact laws to forbid reselling the products of slave
labor.
Over
1 Million Chileans Take to the Streets to Demand Political
Reforms, Change to Country's Neoliberal Economic System.
Chilean thugs are attacking protesters, sometimes with bullets or
something like round shot, sometimes with rubber-coated bullets in the
eye to blind them. They shoot at witnesses, too.
Doctors say it is
hard
for them to treat the hundreds of casualties. The underfunded
public hospital is short of all sorts of supplies. This reflects the
right-wing policies that the protests oppose.
Experiments with particularly small and cheap apartments
might
offer a way to reduce homelessness.
However, in order to do that, they need to be made in large
quantities.
Protesters in Iraq aim to overthrow the government.
Government suppression forces are responding with great violence.
What would the replacement government be? The current government is
surely corrupt, but any government in Iraq would be corrupt. It was
chosen democratically, and its sectarian nature reflects the sectarian
voters. To get a better government in a legitimate way would seem to
require educating the voters.
Special housing for old people, in a central part of town, can enable
them to avoid expensive nursing homes and have a better life.
The European Commission is suing Poland in the European Court of Justice for failure to respect judicial independence.
A science-denying "think tank" in the UK has links to 14 members of
Bogus Johnson's cabinet.
The IMF calls for a big increase in carbon taxes — by a factor of 35 or more.
Anything less is unlikely to curb global heating enough.
How Erdoğan neutralized Europe as a restraint on his aggression in Syria.
One scenario for life in 2050 with not-quite-adequate climate defense
measures.
The Denver region is full of frack wells, often right next to people's
homes. This can poison their air and water, as well as contributing
to global heating disaster.
There is no room for new fossil fuel facilities in the carbon budget.
Fossil fuel companies still fund astroturf campaigns against climate
defense.
We need to decrease extraction, but they are investing on new extraction facilities.
In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute (a trade organization of
those companies) considered a unified global heating denial plan. Companies say they never specifically adopted this plan, but this shows they were planning denialism together, and some aspects were in fact carried out, along with other devious forms of denialism and sabotage described in the article.
Car manufacturers lobby against climate defense, too.
Mining companies dominate the Australian government's
climate surrender policy, according to a former prime minister.
Facebook isn't free speech, it's algorithmic amplification optimized for
outrage.
In other words, don't censor the specific material people post on
Facebook. Instead, forbid the kind of algorithm that spreads violence
and fake news most.
China will require each new portable phone user to give a face scan.
Let's make face recognition surveillance illegal for both governments and
private entities, with very limited exceptions.
Attorney General Barr has launched an investigation of the Mueller
investigation.
Investigations by Republican officials tend to be some sort of nasty
sabotage. Think of Starr, the special prosecutor appointed to
investigate President Clinton; that was a scheme to eliminate special
prosecutors so that they could not be used against the real crimes of
Republican officials. Now, however, Republicans use will deploy this
against any official that gets in their way.
Target employees really are the target employees for a system of
tracking and punishment comparable to the Amazon warehouse. Here is their organizing campaign.
A thug sued an Iowa local newspaper for libel, and lost, but now the
newspaper is begging for funds to continue to operate.
Everyone: call on an ACM symposium to reject sponsorship by Palantir.
Many US schools issue each student with a computer running nonfree software
that monitors everything the student does.
The operating systems of tablets, and ChromeOS, collect and transmit
personal information about the user. The schools add more spyware
so as to surveil students totally.
Google has put a new Chrome add-on on the computers of Google workers.
Workers fear this will be used to surveil them and then attack their
rights in one way or another.
Every nonfree program warrants that suspicion,
since so many are in fact malware.
Ralph Nader: progressive candidates state only part of the case for
single-payer universal medical care.
Right-wing rule in the UK crushes the poor so much that single
mothers, and students, are compelled to do sex work.
Sex work is not immoral, and it shouldn't be illegal. But when a
society that people need to do sex work in order to survive, or to
keep their children well, that is a cruel society.
And what about the ones who are not attractive enough to succeed
at sex work? What can they do to survive, or keep their children well?
Fight for the Future organized musicians and fans to pressure US music
festivals to back off use of face recognition.
Are there any festivals that still plan to use it?
US citizens: call on the IRS to investigate the NRA's violations of the laws for tax-exempt organizations.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Zuckerberg some carefully chosen questions. His answers will aid the investigation of Facebook's cover-up of its
dealings with Cambridge Analytica.
Heat that can make people sick, together with smoke from fires all
year round, are making the Los Angeles region a dangerous place to
live.
(satire) "In order to eliminate factors that could contribute to the
fires’ growth, we will cut the flow of oxygen in high-risk areas
throughout the northern part of the state."
when the centrist neoliberals tell you that change is incremental, what
they're really saying is they don't want that much change.
The New Deal was not incremental. Civil rights laws were not incremental.
Environmental protection laws were not incremental. The laws we need
to end plutocracy, provide medical care for all, and curb global heating
cannot be incremental either.
Australia and its states have agreed to plans to help agriculture adapt
to global heating effects.
That's wise, as far as it goes; but once you recognize that global heating
will damage agriculture, you ought to work to slow it down.
Seven protesters who protested symbolically against nuclear weapons in
a military base have been convicted of crimes including "destruction" of government property.
Hong Kong has prohibited publishing photos of thugs.
About 41% of the world's people are under 24. And they're angry…
One of the valid reasons for them to be angry at older people is for
having made so many people under 24. It is hard to give a good life,
in a sustainable way, to such a large population. Our population
is living unsustainably and it is still increasing.
This is one underlying cause of many of the specific hardships that
people are protesting about. The other underlying cause is
inequality, which protects the privileged (and especially the
wealthy) from these hardships by dumping them entirely onto the
disprivileged and the poor.
Reducing inequality is a just cause, but we also need to reduce the
cost of our existence, and doing that without making everyone poor
will be much easier if we have fewer humans in the future.
Let's aim for 25% or less of the population under age 24.
Why you should worry if you have a Chinese smartphone.
If you have a non-Chinese smartphone, you should worry too.
Other countries are moving rapidly in the direction of
massive surveillance used to control and repress,
and the system developers (Google and Apple) don't respect
freedom much either.
The approval of "golden rice", which supplies Vitamin A, has been
delayed for 20 years by regulation.
I find it plausible that this rice will, in medical terms, help people
and not cause harm. This does need to be verified; perhaps it has been.
But does it carry nonbiological pollution — with patents, or plant
variety monopolies? Are farmers allowed to save the seeds and plant
them?
When bureaucrats are told to find reasons to deny benefits to the poor
and sick, your politeness and even the bureaucrats' own mistakes
become excuses to put you in the wrong.
An analysis of how two of Peter Handke's books tried to minimize and excuse the well-documented massacres of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs.
One important point is that the existence of a prior state of war does
not justify committing a war crime.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's example is leading the Democratic Party
gradually away from depending on donations from rich people and rich
businesses.
George Monbiot: The [planet roaster's]’ Masterstroke Was to Blame the
Climate Crisis on You And Me — by creating a system which leads
people towards heavy use of fossil fuels.
The article also explains the reasoning for massive disruptive but
nonviolent protests as a way to make governments change this system.
Amnesty International says Turkey is using threats and deception to
deport Syrian refugees.
Authoritarian right-wing politicians in Eastern Europe are choosing
queer people as the next handy scapegoat.
The Catholic Church is supporting those politicians.
Governments are not doing enough to prevent the spread of invasive species.
Part of the problem is the massive international trade in live (or
dead unsterilized) plants and animals. There are so many
opportunities for a weed to tag along. Why not require safety
inspection of every cargo?
The ballast water of ships often carries invasive aquatic organisms,
often as larvae. Why not have an official go aboard while the ship is
20 miles out, to require it to clean its ballast tanks?
These measures would be expensive, but so are invasive species.
How the perceived obligation to reach a consensus pressures scientists
to err on the side of underestimating the likely effects of global heating.
Now that Americans are required to have medical insurance, the premiums
are in effect taxes. This means that Medicare for All would reduce taxes
(counting the insurance premiums) for most Americans.
US citizens:
call on
Microsoft and GitHub to stop working for the deportation thugs.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The UK missed a chance to help limit global heating, by allowing the
UK to provide
a
billion pounds of subsidy to fossil fuels.
Further
subsidy for old nuclear reactors in the US does not help either.
They are so expensive that we should simply replace them.
The UK has convicted Aidan James of
going
to Syria to join the Kurds and fight against PISSI.
How absurd this perverse posture of neutrality.
The entry of whistleblowers into partisan politics has
convinced
some congresscritters to defend some whistleblowers.
By contrast, whistleblowers such as Manning and Snowden were condemned
by everyone in Congress.
Why we need to
ban
automated face recognition. (Note that article's title is
misleading, a red herring. The author of an article in a newspaper
does not write the title.)
Another reason to reject the straw man suggestion to simply wait and
let the Supreme Court decide is that we can't count on it to protect
our privacy. If all we wanted was to have the question decided, never
mind how, we could leave it to the Supreme Court. But if we want
anonymity, that approach won't work. We can't campaign to influence
the Supreme Court. So we must campaign to influence legislatures.
We do need to campaign to
limit all
kinds of surveillance. But that is not a reason to avoid deciding
specific cases. Quite the contrary: laws banning face recognition
would pave the way for restricting other kinds of massive
surveillance.
Seven mayoral candidates in Colombia have been assassinated.
President Duque blamed a remnant of the FARC, and drug dealers. He
omitted to blame the paramilitares, Colombia's worst terrorists, perhaps because he is associated with them. He belongs to the political party founded by ex-president Uribe ("Horrible"),
and Uribe was closely associated with them.
In order for Colombia to know peace, it must disarm the paramilitares.
Rep. Katie Hill is being attacked by publishing nude photos that were private.
Some US labor unions are supporting Big Pharma and lobbying against the bill to reduce prescription drug prices.
The US border thugs are still separating families. Sometimes the
"parents" of the family are not the biological parents, but are the
parents that the child loves and needs.
A Fresno thug shot a black teenager in the back of the head as he was
running away. As the teenager lay dying on the ground, the thug
handcuffed him.
As usual. The thug department said the unarmed teenager was a threat
to the thug's life. Perhaps the thug feared he would turn around,
pull his pants off, and attack the thug with them. The teenager was
such an enormous threat that he had to be handcuffed even in the
ambulance.
Facebook is "donating", to buy public admiration, a fraction of what it should be paying in taxes.
British police spied on grieving black families for decades. Now we want the truth.
The US medical system spends less money on a black patient than on a
white patient, given the same level of health. As a result, a widely used
algorithm estimates that the black patient is less sick and doesn't need
supplemental health monitoring.
This is one more example of a common occurrence: bias that results
from innocently-collected data that reflects the bias of society.
Biden's lobbyist friends are setting up a Super PAC for him.
Why Ilhan Omar shifted from supporting Warren to supporting Sanders.
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: protect black-footed ferrets from extinction.
If you sign, please spread the word!
How the conman's supporters twist Christianity to get Trumpism.
Australia denies Cameroonian journalist visa for press freedom conference.
The Cameroonian journalist happens to work in Germany, making
Australia's given reason to refuse the visa absurd by ordinary
standards.
That does not mean it was a cover for some other reason. It could be
the real reason for the refusal. When people are trained to seek and
find reasons to say no, they learn to exaggerate.
Some US companies are giving in to pressure to publish their political donations.
Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program, was forbidden to
say that PFAS chemicals cause various diseases. That conclusion was
embarrassing to the businesses that donate to Republicans.
Now that she has retired,
she
can say that.
I expect the next person appointed to those posts to be chosen for
willingness to advance by subservience.
Spain has
evicted
the corpse of the dictator Franco from the mausoleum that he built
with the forced labor of people who defended the Republic.
Don't Be Fooled — the EU Is
No
Defender of Workers' Rights.
Some Palestinians who are political prisoners in Israeli prisons have been
on
hunger strike for two months.
With weak US environmental protection laws,
even
a wealthy town can be struck by a wave of cancer.
The Gullah culture, an ethnic minority that lives on the US southeast
coast islands, may be wiped out by global heating.
Exxon has misled Americans [about global heating] for decades. Here's how to fight back.
Activists demand that a UK study of bigotry and harassment in UK
universities to define harassment for being white, or English,
as outside the question.
Bigotry against whites, or English people in Wales, is unusual. It
doesn't generally happen enough to blight someone's life, and the
victim can easily move elsewhere to avoid it. Bigotry against blacks
or Muslims is a much more grave problem, and you can't avoid it by
moving. This should be the priority target of the investigation.
Nonetheless, the other is still bigotry, and it shouldn't be omitted.
The US ambassador to Ukraine testified to Congress about the conman's
shakedown of Ukraine.
The conman's own negotiators went around the ambassador, who was not
personally involved, but they told him about the details of the
shakedown, and he reported what they told him.
They described a deal which demanded a quid-pro-quo from Ukraine, and
said it wasn't a quid-pro-quo.
A US citizen living in the US went to a customs office at the border
to pay the duty for a shipment of gifts which had arrived by plane, so
he could go back to the airport and collect the gifts.
The border customs office made him and his relatives prisoner and searched their phones.
This is total tyranny. Whatever special powers the customs agency has
at the border should be limited to people who just did cross the border,
or are about to cross it.
Cutting down the Amazon rainforest is making the remainder dry up.
Assad's men reported to have tortured 14,000 prisoners to death,
and they are still doing it.
Australian thugs are strip-searching Extinction Rebellion protesters, apparently purely to harass them.
Sanders and Warren advocate prosecuting CEOs for monopolistic practices once again, as we used to do.
New South Wales (a state in Australia) seeks to open new coal mines,
so it seeks to eliminate rules about the global-heating effect that
burning the coal would have.
US citizens:
call on the Fish
and Wildlife Service to protect the endangered Franklin's
bumblebee.
If you sign, please spread the word!
[Disused but loved] Danish Lighthouse Put on Wheels to Move It Away
from
Eroding
Sea.
This is just one of the thousands of harmful effects global heating is
causing already.
It seems a shame they did not move the old church. Buildings from the
1200s must not be very common in Denmark.
Scientists Fired by [the conman] Warn Particle [existing] Pollution Standards
Don't
Protect People [because they're not strict enough].
The Tories
plan
to divert loan funds meant for renewable energy into fracking in
Argentina.
Sense
has prevailed over zero-tolerance in a Wisconsin public school.
Medical initiatives to treat and suppress HIV, carried out in certain
cities,
can
greatly reduce the transmission rate.
Humanity can lick HIV, if technological civilization continues. But
it will take a century or more to get rid of HIV this way. If global
heating disaster makes the efforts stop, HIV will resume spreading.
The FBI has a long history of treating political dissent as terrorism. (Especially leftist dissent.)
This is not to say there is no such thing as real terrorism.
Sanders says he would end prosecution of whistleblowers as "spies."
Will Senator Warren adopt the same stance?
Assad, Russia and Turkey are now combining to force the Syrian Kurds out of an 18-mile zone along the frontier with Turkey.
The effect will be considerable ethnic cleansing, since that is where many
of the Kurds live.
Trudeau won less than a majority, and will have to make deals with opposition parties.
The US ambassador to Ukraine testified that the conman did threatened to cut off military aid unless Ukraine investigated Biden's son.
The conman tried to order the ambassador not to testify to Congress,
but he did it anyway.
The world economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis,
according to the UK's former head of the central bank.
The International Energy Agency forecasts only 50% growth in renewable
electricity generation in the next 5 years. This is not fast enough!
New York City is considering a ban on solitary confinement.
Warren's plan to limit charter schools is a little stronger than Sanders'.
Farming could be absorber of carbon by 2050, says report.
Eliminating the protections for uncontacted indigenous peoples in the
Brazilian Amazon will surely lead to killing them.
Diseases will kill most of each group, and they are so small that they
could not continue.
The brother of Honduras's president has been convicted in the US of taking bribes on the president's behalf to permit smuggling cocaine through Honduras.
Prohibition of cocaine makes it so profitable that it is nearly
impossible to stop it from generating corruption. However, the
existing corrupt, plutocratist Honduran regime is the result of the
coup that Hillary Clinton winked at, and which has received US support ever since.
A suicide bomber attacked a mosque in Afghanistan and killed 62
people.
The Taliban condemned the attack, which makes sense: they are strict
Islamists, and their policies violate human rights, but they are not madmen. I suppose this was the work of PISSI.
Prohibiting the routine use of antibiotics in farm animals, necessary to
slow the evolution of resistance genes that can spread to organisms that
cause disease, has led to a new form of drug smuggling.
I don't think this will be as hard to control as smuggling addictive drugs.
A farm uses the antibiotics to increase its profits, so it won't pay
any more than the increased profit would be. Indeed, given the risk
of legal trouble, it won't pay even half that much.
Leading US generals are extremely angry at the conman for abandoning
the Kurds. Those who have retired are saying so.
The argument that the US should not abandon an ally has validity, but only
to a certain extent. It was used to argue for continuing the war in Vietnam,
and the war in Cambodia. ISTR it was also used in Iraq, and I think
it has been used to argue for continuing the war in Afghanistan.
In the case of the Syrian Kurds, this argument reinforces other
reasons why the US should have defended them.
There are many systematic forms of hate, but hatred of the poor may be the biggest.
Hatred and phobia are different things. A phobia is an intense,
irrational fear. People who are afraid of heights or small places do
not hate them; conversely, people who hate the poor do not fear them
(though they may feel disgust, which is not the same).
To avoid building confusion, let's not refer to systems of hatred as
"phobias". I disapprove of antigayism, antimuslimism and
antitransism, but I reject the terms "homophobia", "islamophobia" or
"transphobia".
Another systemic form of hatred, which the article cites an example of
but doesn't discuss, is hatred of atheists. In the domain of
religion, atheists are the most hated group. We should oppose
antiathism (short for antiatheistism) as well as antimuslimism and
antisemitism.
What
it's like putting poor Americans in jail for medical debt.
Snowden explains
why
the US government attack on end-to-end encryption is a danger to
everyone.
Violence against Brazilian indigenous people has
increased
substantially since Bolsonaro became president.
When a couple get a mortgage together, then split up,
the
one who moved out can destroy the other — by refusing to pay
per own half of the mortgage.
The FBI
uses
outside informants as investigators so it can bypass its own rules
that require probable cause.
Zero-tolerance at work: a student called a school security guard, who
is black, "nigger". The guard said, quite properly, "Don't call me
nigger."
The
guard was fired for this.
The guard did not use that word. Rather,
he mentioned it, to oppose its use. I can't believe that the
school officials fail to understand the difference — of course
they understand it, just as you do. So why the absurd decision? I
suspect they have bought into the idea of rigidity as virtue, which is
the root of zero tolerance.
All rules, including valid rules, are liable to become harmful and
unjust when applied rigidly.
Sanders advocates
public
funding for federal elections, as well as limits on campaign
donations and on the revolving door.
A secondary reason to demand the right to repair is to
reduce
gratuitous waste.
I call this reason "secondary" because stopping people from fixing and
modifying products is simply oppressive.
Mexico's president, López Obrador, campaigned as a leftist, but as
president he
supports
billionaires and represses the protests he formerly led.
The Chicago Teachers' Strike
Shows
How to Go on Offense Against Neoliberalism.
Erdoğan has used war against the Kurds as an occasion to
whip
up Turkish nationalism and prosecute opponents.
Maybe this is why the conman supports Erdoğan.
Steven Butler of the Committee to Protect Journalists had a visa to
visit Pakistan, but when he arrived at passport control his visa was
specially cancelled, and Pakistan somehow
sent
him back to the US under a kind of arrest.
Hong Kong students in the UK are holding rallies in support of Hong
Kong's freedom, but they
face
systematic attacks by Chinese students.
Those
Xi-ple are not learning anything
important from their stay in Britain.
Proposing to fund the government expenditures for Medicare for All
by
cutting
the military budget.
I think this proposal confusingly connects two good ideas.
We should adopt Medicare for All, also known as a universal national
medical system, but we should reject the idea that this is an increase
in expenses. If we get rid of the parasitic profitmaking medical
system, this will save people in the US a
large
fraction of what they now spend on medical care and insurance. So
it doesn't need to be "paid for"; what it needs is to rechannel part
of the current spending.
We should cut the arms budget, because many of the arms being
purchased are
wasteful, or even
dangerous
to peace. But that is independent of how we reform medical care.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Schedules That Work Act.
If you call, please spread the word!
Senator Warren will reintroduce the Schedules that Work Act
which will forbid employers from jerking part-time workers around on short notice.
The bully ordered the Kurds to surrender to Turkey a 20-mile strip along the border within five days or face mass murder. He called
this a "cease fire deal".
It turns out that Admiral Nelson, Britain's greatest naval hero, was
also a defender of slavery. Does that mean his statues should be taken down?
It is impossible to compare the evil Nelson did by defending slavery
with the good he did by helping to defeat Napoleon to see which is
more important. That is imponderable. But we can be sure that
Nelson, who died in 1805, had no say over how Britain treated es-slave
black sailors after the war ended in 1814.
Statues of Confederate generals were put up to glorify the past system
of slavery, aiming to strengthen the system of segregation. That is
what those statues stand for. I think they should be taken down.
By contrast, statues of Nelson were put up as symbols of naval
victory, and that is what they stand for. They don't stand for any
position on race relations. I don't think there is a need to take
them down, even though British naval power is a thing of the past.
"Flight-shaming" could slow growth of airline industry, says IATA.
That is the aim of it.
Increasingly people are taking the high-speed train from London
to continental Europe rather than flying.
If you never have children, you will avoid so much future greenhouse gas emissions that a lifetime's worth of flights will hardly count.
Florida plans to demand that students give lots of personal details
and biometrics. This is supposedly to keep them safe. Like the thugs in the schools,
it will endanger them instead. The direct harm will fall mainly on
people from minority groups, but don't assume your child will be safe!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call for ending section
215 of the U SAP AT RIOT Act (aka "USA PATRIOT Act").
That is the section that authorizes collection of many kinds of personal data without even a real court order.
Wisconsin's governor establishes task force to face the 'grave threat'
of global heating.
The UK has canceled its requirement for porn sites to identify users. The stated motive for this was to exclude teenagers, but what is important
is the tracking itself, not its purpose.
Why stop people from viewing porn, if they want to? Much of today's
porn is aimed at heterosexual men and presents a totally wrong idea of
what women like. When teenage men believe this, they can get twisted.
When they practice out what they have learned from this, they can make
women very unhappy.
Leading them to porn showing sexual practices that various real
teenage women really do enjoy would solve this problem in a better
way. (This does not require real teenage actors, or even real human
actors.) Why replace bad education with no education? Replace it
with good education.
Corporations have too much debt. Even a moderate downturn would cause
a crisis.
Governments are supposed to prevent this sort of situation from arising.
Plans to privatize national parks outlined in Trump admin memo, would enrich donors and special interests.
Right-wing campaigns establish slogans, then right-wing politicians use them,
so as to drive searches to them.
Apple plans to require that all application software for MacOS be approved by Apple first.
Offering a checking service as an option could be useful and would not
be wrong. Requiring users to get Apple's approval is tyranny.
Apple says the check will only look for malware (not counting the malware
that is part of the operating system), but Apple could change that policy step by step. Or perhaps Apple
will decide that helping Hong Kong protesters constitutes malware.
Sanders and Ilhan Omar introduced a bill to provide gratis school lunches to all public school students.
(satire) marine biologists at the University of Rhode Island
projected Tuesday that the planet's oceans will be a nice, simmering
seafood bisque by 2040.
The UK's official unemployment rate omits many people who would like to work
but are blocked by circumstances or have given up finding a job.
Referring to global heating as an "existential threat" is a little
exaggerated, since it isn't likely to kill all humans. That could perhaps happen, but more likely it will merely kill billions and wipe out technological civilization.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass the PROTECT Hong Kong Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone:
call on
Comcast to withdraw its Supreme Court challenge of the first US
civil rights law.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to preserve methane emissions limits, to help avoid
global heating disaster.
The methane emissions do local harm too, but global disaster is
enormous by comparison with that.
You can sign without running the nonfree Javascript code if you use
Lynx.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Omar are
endorsing
Sanders, for the same reasons I do: his positions are more boldly
progressive.
I don't choose candidates to support based on gender.
China is
threatening
the relatives of Uighurs living in Europe, so silence them.
Ten million poor Americans are jailed for a while each year, most of them
pre-trial because they
can't
afford bail and fees. How about taking the opportunity to
register them to vote?
Some Kashmiri political prisoners are held in prisons far away from
Kashmir,
where
their relatives can hardly reach them.
Why
Xi is reluctant to crush Hong Kong with the Chinese army.
George Monbiot writes about
planning
to be arrested for protesting for Extinction Rebellion. (I read
that he was indeed arrested.)
It is misguided, even unfair, to criticize Extinction Rebellion for
being "too white" or "too male" or too whatever of that kind, because
that is not their choice. A volunteer activity must to go with those
that volunteer. When an activity needs to recruit as many people as
possible, it would be self-defeating to reject some volunteers for the
sake of demographic balance. Rather, the activity must seek, and
welcome, every volunteer that is willing and able to work for the
cause.
If you would like more blacks or more women to participate in
Extinction Rebellion, by all means try to recruit them. But don't
criticize the campaign for doing the most it can with the people who
have volunteered.
Indeed, people from less privileged groups may have rational reasons
to hold back. Maybe they have to work 50 hours a week to get by.
Maybe they expect the judicial system to treat them with bias. Maybe
they can't afford bail and fear being
jailed
for months if they are arrested, or being stuck for years in a
Ferguson-like
cycle
of fines and jail.
Given that privilege exists, I'm glad that people with more privilege
are taking advantage of it to take risks for the sake of saving the
world from disaster.
When Los Angeles sentences people to community service, they often have
to work to difficult targets in stressful, even hazardous conditions.
They are also required to pay to do this work.
If this is meant as a way to pay fines or other debts,
they should be paid the prevailing wage.
Is "impostor syndrome" a self-blaming way to say, "I come from a
disprivileged demographic background"?
Australia wasted decades in climate denial — and must break free of the mire of misinformation.
Australia's computer program has cut off a million people's benefits
automatically. Then they have to prove the program was wrong.
Cory Booker's gun control legislation focuses strategies on people, not guns.
It might be a good idea.
Ivory Coast law could see chocolate industry "wipe out" protected forests.
The insane behavior of the UK makes the EU look wise and just by comparison,
so don't forget its oppressive side.
The EU has a democratic structure that doesn't give the people much
power to limit what the banksters and businesses want. Look, for
instance, at the unjust copyright directive that was adopted under
pressure from the publishing lobby. Since three branches of the EU
must agree any change, it is hopeless to repeal bad directives once
they have been adopted.
Sanders advocates government programs that aid everyone, whereas
Warren advocates similar aid only for the poor.
The weakness of the latter is that the rich can organize the middle
class to support cutting these programs and attaching onerous
conditions — which is exactly what right-wing politicians do.
As for the waste of subsidizing a few rich people along with the many
non-rich, it will be a small fraction of the total cost of these
programs. A progressive tax on the rich will easily make up for it.
Machine learning can be useful for guiding the priorities of social
services, as long as humans think about the actual decisions.
This could be a good thing provided the government doesn't use it as
an excuse to cut budgets even more. Right-wing governments are looking
for any excuse, and whatever makes for more efficiency will mean they
can cut more.
StackExchange has imposed a code of conduct saying that participants have
to refer to each other person by per specified pronouns.
Paraphrasing to avoid pronouns is forbidden; people are required to get
practice using all sorts of pronouns.
The rule was received with tremendous hostility.
I have never used in StackExchange and wasn't thinking of doing so.
(Too busy, in any case.) I don't even know whether it is possible to
post on the site without running nonfree Javascript software — if it
isn't, I urge you to reject posting there, for your freedom's sake.
But I reject the demand to speak or write with singular "they".
I have a better system for gender-neutrality in English, and I will use that.
I hope others will take it up; I suggest you consider it.
But I don't claim the power to demand you use it.
If you do participate in StackExchange, you might choose unusual
pronouns for yourself. Not absurd ones, or nasty ones, just unusual.
How the anti-net-neutrality lobby
impersonated
a million people to kill network neutrality.
This is in addition to whatever they spent to get Ajit Pai
put in charge of the issue.
The conman and his ministers hired
281
former lobbyists in just the first two years.
At that rate they will have hired another 50 or 100 by now.
(satire) Hunter Biden
admitted
Tuesday it was poor judgment on his part to be involved with the
corrupt Biden family.
A family of British tourists in Canada were
arrested
for entering the US on an road with no warning of the frontier.
They were taking a short detour to avoid an animal in their intended
road.
This incident puts the sadism of the border thugs in clear relief.
Why arrest people for entering the US such a short time?
Why not wait a minute and see if they leave again?
Why deport them to the UK instead of back to Canada where they were?
In addition to the trouble that causes them, it will also cost the US
government a lot of money — perhaps tens of thousands of
dollars. We see that, to the border thugs, a chance to be cruel is
worth any expense.
It is clear that the thugs are looking closely at that road. If
temporary entry there is deemed a real problem, why not put a sign
there telling people not to cross? That would have been cheaper, but
the thugs would have missed a possible opportunity for sadism.
This is in addition to the cruel conditions that the thugs have
arranged to visit on tens of thousands of people who knew they were
entering the US, simply by overcrowding the immigration prisons.
British tourists are not the intended target of this cruelty. It was
set up to deter, and endanger, refugees from Central America. But now
that cruelty is their priority goal. the most zealous grab any
opportunity that comes their way.
The US State Department
promoted
Pompeo's speech in favor of Christianity, violating the
constitutional requirement for separation of church and state.
Fortunately, Pompeo backed off this.
Senator Warren has proposed
additional
incremental measures to reduce the influence of rich donors on
elections.
I'm in favor, but I think we need stronger measures.
(satire) 911 Operator Informs Black Caller That
Death
Is On The Way.
Republicans set up a "grass roots" organization called "Pennsylvanians
Against Gerrymandering" to lobby
for
gerrymandering.
Thanks to Extinction Rebellion, We're Experiencing a
Climate
Culture Change.
The Fort Worth police department is doing something amazing:
condemning
rather than excusing the thug who shot Atatiana Jefferson.
Recognizing that this was wrong is step in the right direction,
a step toward teaching thugs to act like police officers.
Facebook compared itself to a TV or radio broadcaster, thus inviting
the government to regulate it as it regulates broadcasters.
Congress is considering enacting sanctions against Turkey
for attacking the Kurds.
Russian soldiers are acting as peacekeepers between Assad's forces and
Turkey's proxy forces, in one area, but their attack on the Kurds
continues.
"EU nationals are often barred from homelessness benefits unless they
have a job — a hostile environment policy that charities are
effectively enforcing."
Investor-owned hospitals are leading the fight against the creation of a universal national health system in the US.
This suggests that one step forward would be for states to prohibit
for-profit hospitals.
Everyone: call on the European Investment Bank to adopt its previous plan and reject new natural gas projects.
If you call, please spread the word!
London thugs threatened to arrest anyone protesting anywhere in London,
but Extinction Rebellion activists are willing to be arrested and even jailed for the sake of avoiding global disaster.
Russian investigators have raided opposition offices across the country.
Struggling Americans are haunted by zombie debt. Will you be next?
'Stop Funding Ecocide': Extinction rebellion protesters target London financial district.
On the issues raised by US military airshow jets.
I disagree with the article's arguments. The costs are insignificant
compared with the US military budget, the dangers to the airmen
is a small problem compared with the danger of professional football,
and the danger to the public is small compared with the dangers of life.
On the other hand, military airshow flights can do big harm in another
way: they strengthen the grip of the military-industrial complex,
which wastes hundreds of billions of dollars, and encourages wars of
aggression that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
Rich people, their media and their politicians are trying hard to prop
up Biden, but it isn't working very well.
(satire) "As the business leaders of this country, we promise to
never, ever stop fighting to ensure that the vast majority of Americans
aren't able to afford the products they need or live the life they
want."
(satire) Jubilant [PISSI] Prisoners Hail American Liberators.
700 scientists in the UK declared their support for Extinction
Rebellion.
(satire) a new patriotic Gatorade ad that aired
Friday showed terrorists being waterboarded with Gatorade.
US citizens: call on the DNI to pledge to protect the Ukraine whistleblower's
identity.
Big US banks are investing heavily in digging civilization's grave.
The price of recycled plastic has risen greatly due to increased demand.
This is a sign of progress. It will lead to an increase in recycling
capacity; then the plastic handed in for recycling will really be
recycled.
Tories want to keep prisoners in prison for longer, but won't pay
to operate prisons safely.
Using AI to judge applications for public assistance provides
right-wing governments with an opportunity to cut welfare benefits without any official change in the rules.
Ecuador's president Moreno reinstated fuel subsidies and made the indigenous
protesters happy. However, the climate must be weeping.
Eight proposals for how to make big reductions in fossil fuel use.
A thug was sent to check on why a black woman's front door was left
open. He shot her dead through the window, with no effort to find out
what the situation was.
Is it possible to teach thugs to think before they shoot?
Duterte's chief of national thugs (including their death squads) has resigned due to accusations of involvement in drug dealing.
Apple's nonfree Safari browser spies on users for the Chinese company Tencent.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban government use of facial recognition.
This is not enough, but it's a good start.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to end all funding for the war in Yemen.
If you call, please spread the word!
Preet Bharara: Congress should formalize the former unwritten rules
about who is qualified for appointed government executive posts.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the bully's plan to reject most immigrants.
If you call, please spread the word!
Hungarians showed their mounting dissatisfaction with the authoritarian
Fidesz party by defeating it in significant local elections.
This is a step towards removing it from power, but that won't be easy
because of the grip it has given itself over other institutions.
The Syrian Kurds have allied with Assad to resist the invasion from
Turkey, and turned over two border cities to Assad in exchange.
If Rojava can peacefully reconcile with Assad, perhaps recognizing his
suzerainty but without submitting to the tyranny of his regime,
it would be a step forward — as long as Assad allows it to continue.
However, the fighting between Assad and Turkey could lead to fighting
between Russia and Turkey. That is potentially dangerous.
A deal permitted hundreds of PISSI fighters to escape from Raqqa, along with thousands of people in their families, in order to end the fighting to capture that city.
700 more supporters of PISSI have now escaped from prison
as a consequence of Turkey's attack, as the Kurds had to move their
forces to oppose Turkey.
Federal prosecutors charged two men (who work with Giuliani) with transferring foreign funds to the cheater's campaign.
This might be part of a broader scheme that could be managed by Giuliani.
When multinational companies depend on a relationship with China,
either for manufacturing or sales, China can force them to support its repression.
Some countries operate "free trade zones" that are great for money laundering.
We should not reject friendship with people who disagree with us on important political issues.
I won't condemn Ellen DeGeneres for being friends with Dubya.
I've called for prosecuting him for war crimes since the time he was
in office, but I don't condemn her for not thinking so.
I bring up my politics so often that I might find it difficult to be
friends with right-wing people, but that's just me.
US citizens: call on Greyhound's conglomerate to end cooperation with deportation thugs.
Some Confederate officers brought family slaves with them to the army. Subsequently, apologists for slavery have pretended that those blacks were Confederate soldiers.
Turkey's proxy forces are murdering selected Kurdish civilians.
US sanctions are driving Cuba into poverty because no ships
can transport Venezuelan oil to Cuba.
It surprises me that Russia or China or Iran doesn't send ships to do
this.
Britons complain their taxes are too high, but they are less than in
1970 — especially for the rich.
Hong Kong now has an unofficial national anthem, which protesters sing
at every protest.
The video linked in the article — which you can view and hear without
nonfree software by using Icecat, or the Viewtube extension for
Firefox — makes me cry because of their heroism against all odds.
Senator Warren gave Facebook a taste of its own medicine with a political
ad that said Zuckerberg supported the bullshitter — then said that wasn't
really so and Facebook shouldn't allow ads with lies.
MI6 is under pressure to publish its secret files about the plane crash
that killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961.
This could confirm or refute the theory that the plane was shot down.
The companies BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street together own 300 billion dollars of fossil fuel investments.
Turkey's Arab proxy army is advancing into Rojava against hard resistance.
Rojava is rather thin, from North to South, so it can easily be cut in two.
Turkey may aim to conquer it entirely.
(satire) … the NCAA announced a new
rule Thursday forcing athletes to remove all facial features to prevent
them from profiting off their likenesses.
Campaigning for Free Range Kids laws in various states.
Fossil fuel firms spend millions on social media ads against climate regulations while portraying selves as green heroes.
Corbyn and Sanders vow to crack down on fossil fuel firms.
Google donates to quite a few right-wing think tanks, some of which
are global-heating denialists.
Google said a few years ago that it wouldn't do this any more.
Some of those groups do other bad things as well. Early this century,
some of them spread FUD about the GNU GPL. I doubt it was Google that
funded that campaign.
Everyone:
call on
Facebook to ban lies in political ads.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The US has impoverished most Haitians by applying neoliberal "free
trade"; Haitian farmers could not compete with
subsidized
US megafarms.
The US tendency to impose large aid projects without verifying they
will be useful occurs here
as
it did in Afghanistan.
A project will try to
map
all the Earth's land area precisely using lidar.
Hong Kong thugs have arrested around 2400 protesters, of who 750 were
minors.
I doubt that any of them were children, though.
Hunter Biden's career, whether or not it involves crimes, is payback
for political favors. It reflects systemic corruption.
Syrian Kurds retaliated for Turkish bombardment by bombarding a Turkish border town.
I don't think that can be militarily justified — it sounds like a war crime.
Meanwhile, arousing resentment among Turks will strengthen Erdoğan.
The Al-Soufi Syrian restaurant in Toronto will remain open, defying right-wing death threats.
I wish I could go to Toronto and give my support by eating there.
Revealed: Top UK thinktank spent decades undermining climate science.
3C of global heating could wipe out two-thirds of bird species in
North America.
The sabotage US government updated the regulations for lead in water supplies to _slow down_ the replacement of lead pipes.
Protesters in Ecuador have taken over Quito and captured some state thugs.
Some protesters are looking for targets for violence; others try to
prevent violence. It is crucial that the movement reject violence
(except in defense) in a very clear way.
President Moreno certainly ought to be replaced, but the fact that
the opposition to him is based mainly on a demand for cheap fossil
fuels is very sad. It is an example of the foolish short-term thinking
that impedes defense of Earth's climate. The survival of civilization,
and millions of species of life, depends on overcoming that foolish way
of thinking.
For Australia to meet its weak Paris carbon targets, it needs to apply a carbon tax of more than USD 75 per ton of CO2 or equivalent.
How global heating and other factors affect wildfires in Australia.
Young people
often
become addicted to nicotine even from smoking once per month.
Don't take the risk of using nicotine even once.
If your friends pressure you to do things that are bad for you,
such as smoking tobacco (even if mixed with marijuana) or playing
nonfree games together, find some new friends — true friends.
The US is following the general pattern:
as
economic inequality increases, inequality of life expectancy increases
too.
Emperor penguins are vulnerable to extinction due to
melting
of the sea ice they depend on. The only way to protect their
habitat is by curbing global heating — exactly what we need to
protect everything else.
The extra-powerful hurricanes that result from global heating do lots
of short-term damage, which can be repaired if there is enough money.
They
can
also cause extinction of species, especially those that live only
in limited areas near the Florida or the Caribbean.
Pointless and absurd regulations on abortion clinics
could
make abortion unavailable in some US states.
India plans to follow China's example, with a
nationwide
system of face-tracking surveillance cameras.
Don't be distracted by the discussion of data protection laws. If
India had them, they would make little difference to the injustice
that such a system would enable.
US citizens:
call
on Democrats in Congress to fight the hedge funds that control
Puerto Rico.
Instead of fighting them over and over, why not change the law
to chop down the hedge?
If you sign, please spread the word!
As Climate Rebellion Spreads, UK Govt
Risks
"Carbon Blowout" By Investing in Gas.
The US is prosecuting an alleged whistleblower, Henry Kyle Frese.
He is
accused
of spying on behalf of the public.
Leveraged buyouts are
killing
America's remaining newspapers. (As well as many other businesses.)
What I wonder is, if the debt gets dumped on a company that is likely
to go bankrupt, does that mean the bank that lent the money never gets
repaid? If so, why don't banks refuse to lend for these transactions?
If you work for the deportation thugs,
you can
quit.
Sanders is the only presidential candidate who proposes a sufficient effort to curb global heating.
A methane seep under the Arctic Ocean is "boiling with methane bubbles".
(satire) Trump assures Kurds there will one day be very nice tree
planted in D.C. commemorating their deaths.
Thailand's government demonstrates its repressiveness by requiring
cafes to keep records on customer's internet contacts, and to record
customers' identification.
It is obvious when Thailand does this that the purpose is repression.
In countries that are less overtly repressive, this may not be so obvious,
but it serves the goal of repression.
This is why I refuse to identify myself to an organization that will
store my name in a database in order to connect to the internet. If I
do it at a friend's house or a host's house, I don't mind that person
knows who I am, but the ISP must not know.
"Anti-abortion laws are an attack on our right to live with dignity
and decide what happens to our bodies."
Why quitting vaping is harder than quitting cigarettes.
US sends migrants to Mexico's border towns as it warns citizens of violent
crimes in region.
Apple has
censored
an application designed to help Hong Kong protesters communicate.
Apple surely did this because of threats from China. (We are not
supposed to suggest that a "good corporate citizen" would uphold
freedom at the cost of profits.) But the reason Apple could
do this is that it gave itself
censorship
power over applications for iMonsters, through the proprietary
code of the operating system.
Papua New Guinea
jailed
50 asylum seekers incommunicado. These are among the refugees
that Australia gave Papua New Guinea to hold.
I am sure Australia's minister of cruelty will claim he had nothing to
do with jailing them.
PISSI "sleeper cells" may take advantage of Turkey's attack on the
Kurds to attack the Kurdish guards of the al-Hawl prison camp and
release
other PISSI supporters.
Dear Ellen: The Problem With George W. Bush Is Not His Beliefs —
It’s
His
War Crimes (and other destructive and deadly deeds).
Applauding Sanders and Warren's Rejection of Privatized Water Systems,
Group
Calls
On All 2020 Hopefuls to Follow Suit
(satire) “To show that China will not tolerate this flagrant
disrespect for our nation amongst the ranks of the NBA, we intend to
enlighten our citizens in the ways of the National Hockey League,”
said Vice Premier Han Zheng, overseeing the first of many
re-fanification
ceremonies in a detention center outside of Beijing…
DeVos is threatened with sanctions, up to and including jail, for
violating
a court order prohibiting collection of repayments for student
loans for studying at Corinthian College.
Robert Reich: Please Note:
The
2020 Election Won’t Be Won by Democratic Centrists.
The bullshitter
plans
to help multinational corporations dodge more US taxes.
The 400 richest American taxpayers pay a
lower
overall tax rate than any other income group.
The conman blocked cooperation with the impeachment inquiry.
Congress could demand that the Supreme Court decide the conflict, but
the cheating party has already rigged it to support their continuation
in power at almost any price. However, Congress dare not give up.
Revealed: Northern Australia's fossil fuel plans push climate goals beyond reach.
"Just 20 companies are responsible for 35% of carbon emissions yet they
continue to ignore calls for change."
Warren debuts ambitious policy plan that addresses environmental racism.
The OECD has proposed to reform taxes on multinational businesses so that they
can't dodge all taxes by shifting nominal profits between countries.
Turkey has attacked the Syrian Kurds.
(satire) GOP lawmakers watch silently As Trump strangles each of their loved ones in turn.
(satire) area man
Daniel Walter was wed Saturday to Kelly Kaminski, a woman he hardly
even knows after five years of dating.
How the Right [Wing] has tried to rebrand antisemitism.
In particular, American Jews are called
"antisemitic" if they are more loyal to the US and human rights
than to Israel and its occupation policies.
Sleep deprivation and a freezing cell: a Palestinian woman is interrogated by Israel.
It would be no less wrong to treat a man the same way. However, the fact
that this prisoner is a journalist does make the wrong worse.
In LA, a white driver is more likely to carry illegal drugs than a
black driver, but the black driver is much more likely to be searched
arbitrarily than the white driver.
Even if there were not a hint of bias in these searches, they would still
be an injustice.
Parts of Australia are facing a deep drought.
Strange that even writers who are preoccupied with ghosts of previous,
lesser droughts ignore the ghost of global heating.
Australian Extinction Rebellion protesters are being given bail with a requirement not to associate in any way with other members of the group.
The state wants them to go home and act neutral. Whatever they do, it
must not be that. It is better to reject bail and be jailed.
Australia censored speakers in a cybersecurity conference — banning two whistleblowers from speaking there, and trying to stop someone else
from showing how Australia's encryption law was similar to China's.
The only effective power people have against spying by devices such as
Alexa and Siri is to refuse to bring them into your home.
Substantial parts of rural California are facing a power shutoff to avoid fires started by electric power.
A friend was told the shutoff might last for 36 hours.
This is one of the many forms of harm done by global heating. Not the
worst harm, but spread over a wide area.
In 20 years there will be much worse regular problems.
A Guatemalan refugee was seriously ill due to having been shot in the
head. The treatment US border thugs offered him was months of
solitary confinement, and ibuprofen.
Australia's two principal parties, both more or less neoliberal in
philosophy, are both in favor of two new business-supremacy treaties.
The article does not even touch on how such treaties can undermine
democracy; it gives no information on whether the treaty includes
an ISDS (I Sue Democratic States) clause that would give foreign
businesses the power to (effectively) veto laws.
China has openly demanded that Apple obey orders to ban the
protest-supporting HKmap.live app.
I would consider that app a totally good thing, if only it were free software.
Come to think of it, there is probably an Android version. It could be
released as free software and included in FDroid — and it should be.
Readers, if you know the developers of HKmap.live, would you please
suggest this to them? An app to defend freedom ought to respect freedom too.
Christianist extremists threaten Australia, pushing to allow the businesses they own to fire employees who don't obey an imposed Christianist moral code.
"President Trump is at war with the rule of law. This won't end well."
Economic growth has lifted a large fraction of Bangladesh out of
poverty. Slowly, things are getting better.
Alas, this progress cannot continue for very long, because of an
overriding factor that the article fails to mention: global heating.
Sea-level rise will inundate substantial parts of Bangladesh, and
millions will be forced off their land. Indeed, the cloth from which
to make the clothing pushes against resource limits.
Most articles about development of poor countries, indeed most articles
about possible future economic growth, disregard the limits to growth.
These limits used to be projections into the distant future, but we
are starting to run into them, and they will press humanity tightly
in the next few decades.
White House notes on the conman's phone calls could find more crimes to impeach him for.
Israeli thugs arrested Samer Arbid and tortured him, stopped him from seeing a lawyer, then took him to a hospital in critical condition and didn't tell his family.
(satire) … Facebook unveiled a new Terms Of Service contract
Tuesday that included
compulsory
conscription into Mark Zuckerberg’s upcoming war against the
U.S. government.
One way to end sectarian hostility in Northern Ireland is
through
integrated schools — integrated with Catholics and
Protestants.
Netanyahu
has
sabotaged democracy in Israel in order to cling to power.
Juan Cole's view of
likely
consequences of a Turkish invasion of the Kurdish region of Syria.
Another
extrapolation on the same subject.
The Swedish parliament is considering a constitutional amendment that
would
grant a personified "Nature" the rights to "exist, flourish,
regenerate, and evolve."
I am in favor of making ecocide a crime, and also other acts that
greatly reduce habitats or the world's greenhouse gas capture.
I can't agree that "Nature" is capable of having rights.
I am specifically worried by the mention of "evolve" in that list.
Evolution has no target; it means that things change however they
happen to change. If "Nature" has a right to evolve, that seems to
mean a right not to be shaped intentionally by humans. That could
possibly lead to prohibiting efforts to eradicate intrusive species,
even efforts to keep them out.
In the US, it is humans that want to stop kudzu, zebra mussels, Asian
carp, Burmese pythons and many more introduced species from wiping out
other species. In evolution, such things happen, and the fact that
human activity introduced those species into the US doesn't alter the
fact that they are present now.
Would "Nature's" "right to evolve" cover viruses such as smallpox and
polio, or the protozoa that cause malaria and sleeping sickness?
Let's not risk it.
Support
the bill to tax companies extra if the CEO gets much higher pay
than the median worker salary.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Amazon to
stop
giving "ring" doorbell videos to thugs.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress
not to
let Amazon influence future laws about face recognition.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to
cancel
student debt for attending colleges that went broke.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Lobbyists are denouncing Sanders' decision to bar business donations
to the Democratic National Committee if he wins the Democratic
nomination for president. Sanders welcomes their hatred.
Money from business can help a party win, but the price of accepting
that money is that the party has to represent business.
Bravo, Bernie Sanders!
1/3 of millennials generally feel lonely; 1/4 can't identify a single
real friend. This could be because "social media" have distracted them from the
activities where one can make real friends.
Would it be more accurate to refer to them as "antisocial media"?
From the US to Hong Kong, the right to protest peacefully is under attack.
NHS opens clinic to help child addicts of computer games.
US blacklists 28 Chinese companies and government agencies over Uighur Repression.
This is the right thing for every country to do. It is a shame
that the unabashed cruelty of the bully and his ministers has
stripped this of moral seriousness.
The two leading parties in Canada's upcoming election are both
planet-roasters. Trudeau of the Liberals has pushed hard for exporting more tar sands oil. The previous Conservative government imposed repression for the sake of fossil fuel export.
"Modi’s vision for [India] is one that stifles dissent and
difference, in defiance of its people’s history."
Turkey may plan its attack against the Kurds to forcibly push Syrian
refugees into a piece of Syria.
Hong Kong suspends metro system and closes banks after violent protests. The ban on face masks enraged the people. The move could backfire.
Xi can crush Hong Kong if he resorts to unlimited force. What I hope
is that that will boost general hatred for him and his repressive
regime.
I think other countries should ban WeChat and the other Chinese
digital systems that are used to impose conformity on Chinese people
living outside China.
Cable TV companies in the US mislead customers by
presenting
prices that are not the whole price they charge.
With proper regulations, they would not be able to do this.
E-cigarettes can be more addictive than ordinary tobacco cigarettes,
and there is
no
research yet on how to quit.
Unilever
pledges
to cut its single-use packaging in half by 2025.
If it really does this, it will be exemplary. But we need more than
an example — we need to make all of society do this.
Thieves often cut down trees in US national forests and sell them.
Lam's emergency decree banning wearing masks in Hong Kong was a big
inspiration for the citizens.
However, the thugs have started arresting people for wearing masks.
Ironically, the "emergency" law that the Hong Kong puppet government
is using was imposed on its colony by the UK. Hong Kong did not have
a democratic government until the absence of democracy there
embarrassed the UK, which was criticizing China for planning to deny
democracy to Hong Kong.
In such situations, it is a fundamental mistake to compare the wrongs
of two parties. Rather, we should hold each one responsible. The UK
should have given Hong Kong a democratic government much earlier, but
that lateness doesn't excuse what China has done to make democracy a
sham.
The bully agreed that Erdoğan could attack part of the Kurdish region
of Syria.
Supposedly Turkey will take over holding the captured supporters of
PISSI. I suspect it will gradually kill them off, over time — but
how will Turkey get hold of them to start with? By attacking and
capturing the prisons? In the confusion, many of them would get
loose, and they could become underground supporters of PISSI.
If Turkey and Northeast Syria made a deal to hand over the prisoners,
that could be carried out.
The next challenge for Extinction Rebellion is to pressure politicians
to propose climate defense plans that could could possibly do the job.
Plans like the ones advocated here.
“We always apologize for causing inconvenience,
but this is nothing compared to the inconvenience that is going to
start happening when we start to run out of food and water.”
The bully is punishing California by selling oil leases there.
The bully has responded to impeachment with flagrant illegalities: "Stop me if you can!"
US citizens:
call
on Congress to investigate how Hurricane Maria caused a general
communications breakdown in Puerto Rico.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call
on the acting DNI to pledge to protect the identity of
whistleblowers that report on the bully's crimes.
The bully is trying to find out the Ukraine whistleblower's identity,
so that people can persecute per.
Some sentences in the article are hard to understand due to referring
to an individual whistleblower as "them" instead of
"per".
If you sign, please spread the word!
Ten
US army bases are named after Confederate generals that fought
against the US army. Some of them were special champions of slavery.
I understand the concept of honoring specific soldiers separately from
the issue of slavery, but I don't think all of them were ever soldiers
in the US Army. In any case, rejecting the Confederacy, along with
the system of slavery it fought to defend, takes priority. The army
should change those names.
Australia
traded
an Iranian prisoner for two Australian tourists jailed in Iran.
The Iranian prisoner was accused by the US of violating trade
sanctions. I don't think Australia had any reason to cooperate with
that. At the same time, this demonstrates that Iran is quick to
treat visitors as pawns.
The US diplomatic campaign against Venezuela is
making
no progress. However, the economic sanctions are doing harm.
Scientists accuse the National Marine Fisheries Service of
misrepresenting
their report so as to disregard danger to whales and reopen a
closed fishing area.
Australia's planet-roaster governments at all levels stand firm for
committing ecocide and mass murder, and they don't intend to let
annoying protesters interfere. It's
repression
all the way.
Bogus Johnson's message, "If you don't support us you're a traitor",
is stirring up death threats against Labour MPs.
As a man of little moral scruples, he may rejoice in intimidating them
from campaigning by meeting their constituents.
Putting children (or adolescents) in cages is also an impeachable offense: it demonstrates direct contempt for laws that the president's duty is to uphold.
Georgia is about to install insecure voting machines state-wide.
A fenced-off national park in Australia will provide a safe habitat for the
threatened bilby.
Keeping cats and foxes out of such a space requires maintenance. A
few decades from now, if civilization is too hard pressed, people will
let those fences fall apart, and cats and foxes will kill the bilbies.
Perhaps before that happens it will be possible to wipe out the feral
cats and foxes in Australia, as well as the cane toads and rabbits,
and other introduced species that shouldn't be there.
Might it be possible to clone the extinct lesser bilby?
Salafi Arabia's repressive clerics must be horrified that the country
will allow a foreign couple to stay in a single hotel room.
If you do this, I suggest you not tempt fate by getting into the same
bed together.
Meanwhile, you can show your disgust for the murder of Khashoggi, and
the many political prisoners, by taking your vacation in some other country.
Human fire-suppression practices have made giant sequoia trees
vulnerable to fire. Droughts caused by global heating make them
vulnerable to beetles.
Global heating could make the places they now live unsuitable for them.
They may need to grow in other places — but we cannot predict the
microclimate of a particular place in 30 years, let alone the different
microclimate in 60 years, ore the even more different microclimate
in 90 years.
Extinction Rebellion activist:
"I'm scared of my own future. How could anyone think about having kids now?
It's not even just about the carbon footprint and population growth …
What kind of world are you thinking they're going to live in?"
Daniel Hale is accused of publishing information about how the US manages its assassination list.
Labour's pledge to authorize generic manufacture despite drug patents
will save lives.
No sooner did the WTO get set up, imposing drug patents on all member
countries but allowing an exception for compulsory licensing when
necessary, than big countries started pressuring against use of that
exception. In the late 90s, President Clinton put Al Gore in charge
of that pressure.
Jamie Love pointed out to Gore that this would look bad if he ran for president,
and Gore stopped.
US citizens:
oppose
plans to re-privatize two large government-controlled home mortgage
lending companies.
London thugs preemptively arrested suspected Extinction Rebellion protesters preparing for another nonviolent action.
One after another, the chemicals used to fight fires are being found carcinogenic.
Will we have any acceptable way to put out fires when water won't do it?
As permafrost melts in Siberia, it ruins the land for agriculture. That is a big problem for local people. At the same time, it contributes
massively to global heating in a giant positive feedback loop.
(satire) the nation’s top pseudo-scientists announced Friday that they had harnessed a high-energy quartz crystal capable of reversing the effects of being a Gemini.
"Almost all the nearly 10,000 persons shot by live fire by Israeli
professional snipers have been unarmed civilians posing no threat to
anyone."
The heartless president wants the US to do the same thing to people crossing
the border.
(satire) Trump furiously searching Raytheon catalog for gift after realizing he promised China And Ukraine same Javelin missile.
Many for-profit "Medicare advantage" medical plans, which add to the
coverage Medicare itself provides, have been cheating their customers.
Saboteur officials want to help and encourage them.
Pence was directly involved in shaking down Zelensky.
The bully wants to limit immigration to the US to wealthy people only.
Medicare for all would save so much of our medical costs
that we could afford to cover immigrants.
London thugs agreed to stop the practice of reporting crime victims for
deportation, but they are desperate to resume.
That practice threatens public safety for everyone: it makes people
in the group least likely to commit violent crime afraid to report it
or testify about it.
I think Corbyn would put an end to it for good and all.
Serving the rich is not as useful for presidential candidates as it
used to be. Sanders raised almost 1.7 times as much money, from small donations alone, as Biden got from plutocrats.
Some large US movie theater chains have prohibited customers from
covering their faces if they go to watch one particular movie.
The important issue here is anonymity. Do those theaters save pictures of their customers? Do they save those pictures permanently? Do they make those pictures available to any other entity, even when no crime is reported?
Let's be grateful to the various whistleblowers that informed us about Trump's attempt to shake down the president of Ukraine.
"Imagine if the CIA were asked to bring down the government of Australia."
This is not hard to imagine, since it did just that in 1975.
Two of three Australian visitors recently imprisoned in Iran have been
freed. The third has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
I give roughly the same advice as the Australian government about
visiting Iran: "reconsider your need to travel", and stay away.
US citizens:
call
on funds to stop investing in prison profiteering.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass the No Taxpayer-Funded Stays at Trump
Properties amendment.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call on
music festivals not to use face recognition.
The site also indicates what various festivals say they will do about
this.
If you sign, please spread the word!
San Francisco Bay has an
especially
high concentration of microplastics.
Ralph Nader presents a
series
of ironic contrasts between increased raw capabilities and decreased
actual results.
In some cases, there may be an ironic causal relationship. The
difficulty of getting through to people personally could be due to the
larger number of people that could try to reach them. The increase in
exercise opportunities may be the result of increased obesity. The
increase in numbers of hungry Americans could be partly due to the
increased international trade in food.
Ukraine Texts Show How [the corrupter] Has Warped the State Department …
into
serving
him personally rather than government policies.
Government policies can be evil and unjust in other ways, but
inserting personal corruption is no remedy for that — it only
adds another level of evil.
Ahmed Abu Ali was convicted in the US based on evidence obtained by Salafi Arabia's torturers. (They testified that they did not torture him.)
(satire) … Amazon reportedly issued a reminder Wednesday that
the company expressly forbids bringing outside thoughts into the
workplace.
"Democracies will only begin to revive when we reverse the Reagan
Revolution and return to the classical economic and political systems
that existed in the Western world before the neoliberal 1980s."
If all "democracy" gets you is what trickles down from plutocrats'
excreta, it isn't functioning properly.
Ireland has legalized abortion, but antiabortionists are making it
difficult to get an abortion. Women have resumed the campaign to make abortion accessible.
California has legalized public banks, so that cities don't have to enrich private banks holding their funds.
Snowden calls on the mainstream media to support whistleblowers that inform the public, such as Daniel Hale who is being prosecuted for publishing right now.
Saboteur of Agriculture Purdue told the owners of small farms to drop dead.
Alaska Governor Dunleavy faces an energetic recall campaign after he made
sweeping cuts on spending that helps the non-rich. The cuts were advised by the Koch brothers' lobbying organization.
Ecuador is paralyzed by protests over an end to fuel subsidies.
Subsidies for fossil fuels boost the consumption of fossil fuels,
just as taxes on them reduce consumption. Thus, it is vitally
important to eliminate all subsidies to fossil fuels, whether
at the retail level, the extraction level, or the transport level.
However, for poor people this is not merely an incentive to conserve,
it can ruin them immediately. Therefore, it is important to protect
the poor from this effect. One way is to distribute the subsidy money
to the poor in some other way. It can also help to taper off the
subsidy rather than cut it abruptly.
Why did Ecuador do it the cruel way? The answer is two acronyms long:
"US, IMF". President Moreno accepted US dominion, the US pushed
Ecuador to surrender to the IMF, and the IMF aims (as usual) to crush
the poor.
Bolsonaro is endorsing murder of opposition politicians by being
photographed with people accused of murdering Marielle Franco.
Half the bird species in the UK are heading towards extinction.
Mammal species are doing a bit better, as only a quarter are at risk.
That will increase in a few decades as global heating speeds up.
US officials told Ukraine's President Zelenskiy in writing that to get
US civilian aid he would have to publicly call for an investigation of Hunter Biden. They even sent him words he was supposed to say to the public.
Ukrainian officials were uncomfortable with this corrupt deal. They
did not like being a tool for dishonest US domestic politics. I
suspect that the bully had a feeling Ukraine would not go through with
it and that he canceled US military aid to increase the pressure. But
this backfired.
Now that Lula's trial has been exposed as corrupt, prosecutors want to
release him from prison while letting his conviction stand. Lula
insists on exoneration, which would allow him to run for office again.
The real question is, how to get rid of ecocidal president Bolsonaro
and allow Lula to assume the office he would surely have won if not
for the unfair trial against him.
The Silencing of Kashmir: Arundhati Roy on India, Modi, and Fascism.
The repression of Kashmir has continued so long that we cannot
consider it a momentary action. It is a lasting military occupation.
India used to be a democracy, with some problems. Now it is being
rapidly modi-fied into outright repressive tyranny.
Imprisonment in Bilibid jail is effectively a death sentence: a
prisoner's half-life is just three years.
US citizens: call on Congress to prevent awarding Title X funds to phony clinics that mislead women.
After one repressive measure in Hong Kong (banning face masks), Lam threatens a curfew next.
Hong Kong elections are rigged, a sham, so delaying one would be no
loss.
Two pipeline protesters being prosecuted for symbolic damage to the
Dakota Access pipeline face being imprisoned longer than they are likely to live.
Iraqis are protesting against unemployment and corruption, and
thugs
are killing protesters.
Organic cotton
reduces
global heating and uses much less water than conventional growing
of cotton.
Industrial proposals for recycling single-use packaging have big
flaws. The are
not
sustainable for the long term. We need to move to repeated-use
packaging.
Booming Demand
Could
Drive Tuna to Extinction, Researchers Find.
Saudi-Led Forces Have Deliberately Targeted Civilians Since the War's
Early Days — And
US
Officials Have Done Little to Stop It.
US government secrecy is abused so badly that
even
a "Merry Christmas" message can be labeled "top secret".
Perhaps the sender did not want it known that perse was celebrating
Christmas rather than Grav-mass like everyone else.
Auditing the taxes of rich people costs the IRS so much that
now
it audits them no more often than poor people.
Senator Warren's
plan
to stop lobbyists from swarming and tying up regulatory agencies.
This could be helpful provided the officials in the agencies are not
corrupted, either in advance or by the promise of the revolving door.
The European Union has adopted a weak right-to-repair law which
doesn't
include your own right to repair your property. Still, it is a
step forward.
When the SEC allowed corporations to buy back stock, it
gave
the stockholders a way to drain the corporations. As a side
effect, it put US corporations on the road to failure in the market.
With 2C of global heating, global droughts
could
wipe out 60% of the world's wheat harvest in some years.
"I was scammed by a fraud so ingenious even bank staff were fooled."
If the bank staff are fooled by the fraud, the bank should have to make
good the loss.
That's how it used to be. It was the bank's responsibility to detect
and stop fraud, not the customer's. If the bank failed to do this,
the loss was to the bank.
With internet banking, banks redefined this. Instead of "fraud
against the bank", they decided to call it "identity theft", a crime
against the customer. Which means that the customer loses the money
instead of the bank.
This is one reason I don't do internet banking. The other reason is
that I would have to run nonfree Javascript code.
US citizens: support the National Popular Vote Compact to elect the president by national popular vote.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The thugs that shot and killed unarmed black man Stephon Clark will not face charges.
However, Amber Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing Botham Jean.
I don't think merely finding a man in what you believe is your
apartment excuses killing him, if he is only sitting on the couch
watching TV and eating ice cream.
When the bully ordered border thugs to take DNA samples from refugees,
supposedly that was in order to reunite families after first
separating them. That made no sense as a reason. Now it is overt:
surveillance as such is the purpose.
DNA samples did not make sense for reuniting families because (1) the people
in a family are not necessarily biologically related, and (2) there are much
easier ways to do it.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, "Impeach the conman now."
If you call, please spread the word!
Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger won the lawsuit against Chevron
for polluting part of Ecuador, so Chevron has destroyed his life with an unfair trial, apparently rigged by the judge.
43% of the white students admitted to Harvard College were given a
special preference, often for being an athlete or the child of an
alum, a faculty member, or a donor. Most of those would not have been
admitted without without the preference.
Racial wealth inequality ensures that few black applicants have any of
those preferences, except perhaps being athletes.
Despite 'enormous potential' as carbon sink, Australia's damaged coastal
ecosystems spewing millions of tons of CO2.
"The language of violence and outrage is dominating our discourse. To
defeat it, we must learn not to respond in kind."
Perhaps we need to adopt the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines for political discussions.
The number of pedestrians killed (and the number injured) by car
collisions in the US increases every year. It is not clear why.
The first step in understanding this issue might be to report
on the number of pedestrians killed per pedestrian mile walked.
Driverless cars with nonfree software, and driverless taxis, may not
kill additional people through collisions, but the increased political
repression that they facilitate could easily kill protesters and
whistleblowers. Simply repressing protesters and whistleblowers could
pave the way for policies that will kill millions of non-rich people.
Australia's minister of cruelty and suffering usually crushes refugees
who are sick, but now he wants to repress protesters too.
Instead of covering right-wing extremists and what they say or do,
which gives them opportunities to sabotage discourse, cover their victims.
[The saboteur's] War on Science Has Hit 'Crisis Point', Experts Warn.
North Korea claims to have launched a ballistic missile from a submarine. This makes North Korea a real nuclear threat.
There is nothing the US can safely do to change this; we must simply
accept this. Attempting to eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons
and missiles with a military attack would court disaster, since anything
other than total success would likely result in a nuclear war.
It is possible for two nuclear powers to remain at peace.
I am surprised that North Korea, an impoverished country,
has been able to make so much progress in missiles.
Has it been receiving continuing help?
The infant had a tantrum about impeachment while hosting Finland's president for a joint press conference. Everyone there was bullied to pretend it was normal.
Pundits talk about the "imperial presidency" — this is the presidency
of Caligula.
In most of the US, a worker of average salary can't afford to buy a home with the median price. And things are getting worse.
Use of the average (mean) to compute the salary to compare
tends to understate the problem, since the median wage is likely
to be lower than the mean wage.
A significant factor is that new jobs in the US are concentrated
in a few very successful cities.
(satire) … rookie forest ranger TJ Hayward told reporters Friday
that he was
not
getting his hopes up about seeing a tree on his first day of work.
Australian banks convinced the right-wing government to
enforce
"responsible lending" laws weakly and tell the borrowers that if
they don't understand the consequences of loan contracts, it's their
tough luck.
Democratic candidates
can
make themselves more "electable" by aiming to curb the power of
Big Pharma.
Oceans and Ice Caps
to
be Compromised Beyond Repair Unless We Put an End to Fossil Fuels
Now, Finds New IPCC Report.
Ocasio Cortez has
proposed
new laws to make an adequate social safety net that covers
everyone.
Rent control can tackle a short-term rent crisis. However, it doesn't
solve a long-term housing shortage. For that we need to increase the
housing supply — either by more construction, or discouraging
keeping apartments empty.
Singapore's new censorship law
will
permit government ministers to order deletion of "fake news".
The bullshitter wants that power, and you can imagine what he would do
with it. Singapore's ministers are not bullshitters; their lies are
consistent. Their repression may be sober and predictable, but it
will still be repression.
Melting glaciers
put
alpine villages in danger from falling rocks.
The Oregon Titan Fusion Center was established to stop terrorists, but
it
helped
track environmental activists.
Such mission creep is easy, and when big oil asks right-wing thugs to
help crush protesters, they will tend to give help. We must make sure
they don't have the opportunity.
Sunnis have federated with Kurds to
make
a common state in Northeast Syria.
I hope that they respect human rights and democracy more than any
government in Syria ever has, but it is important to check that.
Northeast Syria
calls
for an international war crimes tribunal to try the supporters of
PISSI.
The conman's foreign policy of corruption threatens even US national security
in the narrowest sense.
In a broader sense, the security of the US as a society depends on
more honesty, more democracy, and less inequality. We already knew that
the conman is opposed to all three.
Crimes committed at sea, even murder, are hardly ever prosecuted.
Even if the heat outside isn't enough to kill you, the heat in a
factory or bakery can do it.
Revealed: Hundreds of Migrant Workers Dying of Heat Stress in Qatar Each Year. They are working outdoors, and heat stress can kill them even in the cooler parts of the year.
If you build a building in a place like Qatar, you're betting that global
heating will be curbed and reversed. Will Qatar have the sense to try
to cut down world greenhouse gas emissions?
"Big food and agribusiness companies are desperate to portray themselves
as part of the solution to the climate crisis."
Their own initiatives, presented as ways to reduce greenhouse emissions,
have failed to do so.
A campaign aims to pressure 150 US universities to commit to
moving quickly to 100% renewable energy.
The universities themselves are responsible for a small fraction of US
greenhouse gas emissions, but the campaign makes sense because they would
influence the rest of society.
We need a similar campaign demanding universities move to free
software.
One year after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, world leaders have
basically allowed Salafi Arabia's acting king to get away with it.
The recordings and transcripts of the bully's phone calls with the
acting king of Salafi Arabia may conceal complicity in crime.
Environmentalists in Congress support Mass Senator Markey, coauthor of the Green New Deal, and oppose Joe Kennedy's running against him.
It turns out Kennedy even owns fossil fuel stocks.
The local social network Nextdoor excludes homeless people, which makes
it ideal for organizing a neighborhood to persecute the homeless.
Whales sequester large amounts of carbon. This service may be worth
millions of dollars per whale to humanity.
Amazon wants to write the laws on face recognition — presumably so as not to protect our anonymity thoroughly.
What we need is to prevent it from being deployed at all in many cases.
Some [US] voting machines still have decade-old vulnerabilities.
For many years, the US Department of Justice has basically ceased to
prosecute large corporations. Instead it allows the corporations to
plead "guilty but not subject to punishment". Often the same
corporation does this over and over.
Sanders proposes an annual wealth tax of around 5% on billionaires.
That would cut their fortunes in half in 15 years.
Eventually they would get into a lower bracket and the tax rate would
decrease, I presume.
The bully has nominated one of Dubya's torturers to be in charge of
dealing with other countries about issues of human rights.
Presumably that means he will seek to abolish human rights in other
countries.
The US has effectively established border patrols around the world
to stop people from taking steps to get closer to reaching the US.
Everyone: call on Netflix to
cancel "Border
Security: America's Front Line". That show is propaganda for the
border thugs.
I have supported this petition calling on Netflix to terminate one
program, even though it does not go as far as I really wish. Netflix
ought to shut down entirely, because its manner of operation attacks
the freedom of its users.
I have refused to support petitions that asked Netflix
to change how it handles certain programs because they
implicitly support the continued operation of Netflix without
correcting those injustices.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call for ending section
215 of the U SAP AT RIOT Act (aka "USA PATRIOT Act").
That is the section that
authorizes
collection of many kinds of personal data without even a real court
order.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call on
Congress to end the bully's indirect ban on most Muslim visitors
to the US, as well as other arbitrary obstacles to visas.
If you sign, please spread the word!
It is amazing and absurd how far US prisons have gone in banning books for prisoners.
"An impeachable offense occurs when a president violates the
oath to abide by the constitution’s limits and respect its values.
[The cheater's] use of political pressure on a foreign power to further his own
re-election chances clearly fits."
Efforts to make it a crime to destroy parts of nature are going astray by designating them as "persons".
If you start from the fixed assumption that only a person can have
rights, the only way to give a river or an ecosystem rights is to
call it a person. But that assumption is unnecessary.
Officials accuse the conman of treating his conversation with Zelensky
as if it were a state secret, in violation of regulations.
Oaxaca has legalized abortion in the first 12 weeks.
Let's hope this serves as an example for the rest of Latin America.
An indomitable Palestinian is bringing solar power kits to Gaza to substitute for the diesel generator that can't get fuel.
Germany, France and Malta will take some of the refugees rescued
and brought to Italy.
China's thugs arrested protester Wang Meiyu, and he died in jail,
apparently from torture.
The Tory party
has
adopted antimuslimism.
This at the same time as Labour is suffering from the
zero-tolerance
extirpation of antisemitism, making it difficult to for Labour
supporters to criticize Israel's continued occupation (and creeping
annexation) of Palestine.
There is a
proposal
to rename the airport which is currently named after John Wayne.
I don't like honoring that right-winger at all, but Reagan's wrongs
were far, far worse. He
crushed
unions,
eviscerated
antitrust law,
cut
taxes for the rich, made a deal with Iran to hold American
hostages for longer in order to win election, later sold arms to Iran
to ransom Americans hostages taken by terrorists in Lebanon, and
funded
other terrorists to attack Nicaragua. In detestation for him, I
always call that airport by its former official name, "National
Airport."
Around the world, right-wing politicians
demonstrate
their power by showing they can get away with crushing truth and
honesty.
Bolsonaro demonstrates his power by
showing
he can get away with supporting torture and dictatorship.
I don't like the use of the term "populists" for these liars.
The
populists of 1900 were admirable and honest, and they made the US
a better place.
Let's call today's truth-hating right-wing politicians "bullshitters".
That's what describes them.
There may have been left-wing bullshitters in the past — perhaps
Lenin and Stalin fit that term — but I don't know of any today.
Hong Kongers declared China's big holiday, the day when the Communist
Party took power, a
"national
day of grief".
Colombia published supposed "proof" that Maduro, in Venezuela, was
supporting Colombian rebels. But the "proof" proved to be fake, and
Colombia's head of military intelligence was found to be
insufficiently intelligent.
French plans for massive surveillance to catch people with unexplained
wealth carry a big danger of tyranny.
The talk of "data protection" is a clear example of how that concept
is bullshit, The idea is that the state collects your personal data and
uses it against you. So what if the state "protects" it against some
other use against you?
Perhaps it is acceptable to look at at publicly visible postings for
this. But the state is surely not going to limit itself to those. I
expect it will also look at "private" communications on the same sites.
The danger of snooping on people's purchases on eBay is that once the state
benefits from tracking people's every purchase, it will try to force people
to identify themselves in every purchase.
The bullshitter's cabinet is conspicuously disregarding science about
public health.
To be effective, a climate defense plan must also address the shortage
of housing.
I disagree about one point. We should not encourage 10 million
immigrants to come to the US unless we reduce the per-capita
environmental footprint of Americans to a level comparable to Europe.
Without that, bringing the immigrants to the US would harm the whole
world.
WeWork, like many other companies, profits by subcontracting some
kinds of jobs to precarious, low-paid workers.
Chile has given permission to use bulldozers or steam shovels to dig
up buried pirate treasure, disregarding the laws about national parks.
One must suspect corruption at work.
Australia's bullshitters agreed to dig up bullshit about Mueller
to help the US bullshitter.
Climate Leadership Requires a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production.
Our use of fossil fuels will end. Each path to end it — barring some
technological miracle — is some mix of painful and disastrous.
We had better choose the pain, and soon.
(satire) Trump Aides Investigating Whistleblower Struggling to Identify Single
Person in CIA with Moral Principles.
Italy's constitutional court ruled to legalize assisting the suicide of
someone facing "intolerable suffering" due to an incurable illness.
Significantly, this is not limited to people who will die anyway soon.
Moroccan journalist Hajar Raissouni was sentenced to a year in prison
for supposedly having an abortion (she said she didn't), as well
as sex outside of marriage.
Unmarried couples should avoid tourism in Morocco.
Each expensive nylon teabag releases billions of tiny particles of
plastic.
Germans vow to resist the expansion of a strip-mine for coal onto their lands.
The bigger danger would come from burning the coal.
(satire) Audubon society president spends another morning in attic
feeding nation’s 2.9 billion missing birds.
Sanders vows, if elected, to pursue criminal charges against fossil fuel CEOs for knowingly 'destroying the planet'.
What they have done ought to be a crime. I don't know whether there is
or was a law against it, though. Is it negligent homicide?
More extreme weather in the US: a
heavy
snowfall in September.
Tribe:
How
the House of Representatives can tackle the conman's obstruction
of the impeachment investigation.
Organizing
the workers at McDonalds in New York.
Greta Thunberg's
speech
to the UN.
This summer was the
hottest
one ever recorded.
The Trump-Ukraine Scandal Is a
Taste
of How Dirty the US Elections Will Get.
The military rulers of Thailand are
still
killing dissidents.
"This isn't extinction, it's extermination:
the
people killing nature know what they're doing."
Everyone:
call
on Google to end its contract with the US deportation thugs.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Massachusetts legislators are
proposing
a tax on sugary drinks. I am in favor of it.
Do note that there is
evidence
that low-calorie sweeteners confuse the brain, which tells the
body to get ready to digest sugar.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Global heating is
eroding
the beaches of Cape Cod, chasing buildings inland and sometimes
catching and destroying them.
US citizens:
call
on the Boy Scouts of America to stop sending boys to the border
thugs for a bad education.
Milk? Sugar? Microplastics? Some tea bags found to shed billions of
particles.
We should put a stop to that, but don't forget about the plastic fishing
gear.
President Do-dirty's murder on drugs provides cover for land-grabbers to murder and intimidate.
Something similar happened in Colombia — the "paramolitares",
supposedly intended to resist the guerrilla, turned into murderers for
profit and one of the ways they profited was making peasants sign over
their land.
Israel raided the headquarters of the Palestinian prisoner support group Addameer.
Israel often imprisons Palestinians arbitrary, without even charging
them with anything.
Swampy Symbiosis: "Fossil Fuel Industry Has More Clout Than Ever Under
[the conman]".
CO2 emissions from commercial air travel are rising roughly 70% faster
than the predicted rate, which is used to estimate future amounts.
Instead of tripling by 2050, the emissions will grow by a factor of 10
if this trend continues.
Lula's trial was manipulated by a corrupt judge. Free Lula!
Bad News to a Sick and Miserable-Looking Earth: "I'm Afraid You Have
Humans."
Around 60% of Europe's species of trees are now threatened.
Why did the conman fire CIA director Coats shortly after
trying to corrupt Ukraine?
A movie satirizes the FBI's practice of recruiting and then
prosecuting "terrorists" that couldn't bomb their way out of a paper
bag without the FBI's help.
It is legitimate and useful to use stings to catch people that have
decided, without FBI encouragement, to commit terrorism, and have a
chance of actually doing it. It becomes wrong when the FBI goes
further and manufacturers imaginary "terrorists" to imprison, in the
absence of real terrorists.
Republicans have been working hard to make it impossible to remove a
Republican president
no matter what crimes he might commit.
Companies such as Blackstone are buying lots of houses in the US
and deal with tenants in a rigid and unforgiving way.
Asylum-seeker Ajay Kumar went on hunger strike for 70 days in a US
immigration prison. He has now been released on a
sort of parole.
[The butcher's] Plan for Those Seeking Safe Haven:
a Ticket to the
Violent Heart of Central America.
The man who murdered Pakistani celebrity Qandeel Baloch, for reasons
of repression,
has been sentenced to life in prison.
This was an act of patriarchal murder. I am very glad that the fact
that he was her brother did not enable him to get away with it.
Chechen exile Zelimkhan Khangoshvili seems to have been murdered
in Berlin by a Russian agent.
Republican Party officials wrote, not for publication, about the
partisan intentions of their gerrymandering.
Labour will pledge to
eliminate specific parts of the Tories'
crush-the-poor policies.
A report says that China is holding writer Yang Hengjun
incommunicado in brainwashing conditions.
Cutting him off from his lawyer is part of predetermining the outcome
of the case. Political trials in China are not real trials.
They intend to convict him; his crimes remain to be decided.
They must hope that boredom will drive him to read the propaganda
material for making Xi-ple. (The consonant in Xi is pronounced
somewhat like "sh".)
Indonesian police seem to be
lying about the violence in West Papua,
about question such as who started it, and how many indigenous people
were killed.
The UN has made a
long-term general agreement with the most powerful
corporations.
The article doesn't say specifically what the agreement involves
doing, but if the UN depends on those corporations for support, it
will tend over time to become their tool — along with many national
governments and many universities.
"Turns Out 'Tough on Crime' Is Only for the Poor": Report Details Trump DOJ's
Corporate-Friendly Record.
The fiend claimed that the whistleblower about his Ukraine
investigation-bullying was "close to a spy".
Perhaps person really is a US spy. The New York Times reported that
the whistleblower is a CIA agent whose work focuses on Ukraine.
US laws are very harsh to whistleblowers. This shows that Congress should
change these laws.
Was it right or wrong for the New York Times to publish this
information about per? That kind of question is, in general, a
difficult judgment call. In this situation, I don't think anyone is
likely to want to murder per over this except the fiend himself, but I
think he would just fire per.
The US must stop
inviting courts to second-guess minor decisions
that parents make about how to raise their children.
Sure, there are things parents could do that would be very dangerous
to their children and society. For instance, not vaccinating a child
for various diseases could, with a low but significant probability,
lead to the serious injury or death of that child, and of other
children as well. That decision calls for public attention that most
decisions don't.
For instance, leading your child on a walk through a parking lot,
rather than telling per to wait in the car, occasionally results in
the child's injury or death. On the national scale, the danger is
measurable. At the personal level, it is a minute probability.
Courts should not intervene on questions like this.
Climate Crisis Leaving 2 Million People a Week Needing Aid — Red Cross
US citizens: call on Congress to
investigate all of the conman's crimes.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call
on Congress to crack down on Big Pharma over drug prices.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
tell
Congress you support the impeachment inquiry.
Here are
some
reasons to support it.
If you sign, please spread the word!
NRA
Acted
as 'Foreign Asset' to Russia Before 2016 Election, Says Senate
Report.
Planet roasters seek
federal
prosecution of people who block construction of oil pipelines.
Eventually thousands of Extinction Rebellion members will be
ready to go to prison for this.
The bully's threat, intended to force Ukraine to investigate Hunter
Biden, has
made
Ukraine realize that the US is not a reliable ally. Indeed, the
US government is hardly a reliable actor at all.
I've often seen right-wing interventionists insist that the US keep
supporting a tyrannical client government to show it is a "reliable
ally." I think, on the contrary, that it is good to show rulers that
they can lose support if they attack the people. But this case is
totally different. The bully made the US unreliable, not because
Ukraine had done anything wrong, but only because he demanded what he
was not entitled to.
The cruel bastard has cut the number of refugees allowed into the US
to around
16%
of what it used to be.
This comes pretty close to rejecting all claims for asylum.
The Environmental Poisoning Agency (what the conman converted the EPA into)
accuses
California of violating water pollution rules by allowing homeless
people to occasionally defecate on the sidewalk.
California should provide more toilets for them, not for this reason,
but because they are human beings.
The climate crisis isn’t just causing extreme weather. It’s fueling extreme
politics, too.
Revealed: How US Senators Invest in the Firms They're Supposed to Regulate.
Global heating at work: Mont blanc glacier in danger of collapse, experts warn.
"For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth."
Aurelia Skipwith, nominee to lead US Fish And Wildlife Service, linked to groups opposed to protections for endangered species.
"Everyone thought Trump was untouchable — that may have just changed."
Even some Senate Republicans express doubts about him.
That doesn't mean it will go far enough to remove him.
Public retirement funds and universities are financing Empower Texans,
a far-right lobbying group, new report reveals.
Barr's testimony suggests that the conman may have previously asked some other country's government to investigate US political candidates.
China has aimed malware in very targeted ways at leaders of the
Tibetan exile community.
List of tech companies that support the US deportation department, ICE.
(satire) Obsessive-Compulsive Baseball Player Has To Touch All 3 Bases
Before Going Home.
(satire) Nation Perplexed By 16-Year-Old Who Doesn't Want World To End.
Investigating corruption in the Department of the Interior.
It doesn't get much attention, but the bully has escalated the bombing in Afghanistan; as a result, the US side is killing more civilians now
than the Taliban are.
The bully does not uphold freedom of the press; the reporters
for US newspapers can no longer rely on the US government to stand up for them
against tyrannical governments.
An Israeli sniper shot Ali al-Ashqar during a protest in Gaza,
after he had thrown a stone. Then soldiers shot at medics so they
could not reach him, and he bled to death.
Ali was not a child. He was a teenager, indeed almost an adult. But
that makes no difference. Nothing can excuse shooting at medics so
they cannot reach a wounded person.
Now that Bogus Johnson has been exposed as a liar, he is running for
reelection on the liar platform.
Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives will investigate impeaching the conman.
The reason is the evidence that the conman ordered a cut in aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden.
He has given dozens — or is it hundreds? — of reasons to justify
impeaching him and removing him from office. If we could do that, I would
be entirely in favor.
However, until the Republicans that control the Senate rediscover a
shred of appreciation for their own honor or the national interest, we
have no hope of removing him from office after impeaching him.
That being so, impeachment can at most be a political act. Whether to
do it is a matter of political strategy. I have been content to leave
that strategic decision to Pelosi. If she thinks that now it is a
good strategy, I trust her decision.
New South Wales (a state in Australia) proposes to pass an ag-gag bill. That is unjust already, but it will criminalize protests in
many other places.
Australia does not have a bill of rights to protect the right to protest
from local infringement like this.
China is punishing Uighur dissidents' families with long prison sentences.
"[Smoke from] Indonesian forest fires putting 10 million children at
risk", says Unicef.
The school-to-prison pipeline threatens even children six years old.
Revealed: how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing.
If you are not in China, don't use TikTok!
On meeting with the conman, Jacinda Ardern
made
trade "liberalization" the priority, rather than climate defense.
One could perhaps excuse omitting climate defense with him on the
grounds that the conman would have ignored anything she (or anyone but
his bosses) said about the subject. However, "liberalization" often
means deregulation, and deregulation of business is harmful in itself.
We should not forget that she
signed
the TPP with its
ISDS clause.
By 2050, many coastal areas will get a hundred-year-flood
every
year.
40 progressive prosecutors elected in 2018 to reduce the rate of
imprisonment are
facing
pushback from thugs, especially the fraction involved in
right-wing extremism.
Greta Thunberg, at the UN,
stared
coldly at the bullshitter, and may have chased him away from the
climate summit, which he did not attend.
All discussions about the climate can make better progress without
him. When he participates, it is to interfere. Other US officials
can interfere, too, but not as effectively as he can. Also, he lost
an opportunity to confuse the public extra.
"'No, you're corrupt!': why there's method in Trump's playground taunts."
Source
The fact that this works is testimony to the decay of the sort of
public discussion that democracy depends on. Republicans are
systematically helping to make it decay, but we need a system that
resists the attempts of a party to destroy the system.
US citizens: call on Congress and state legislatures to make voting easier for college students, not harder.
The bully has put 52,000 immigrants in prison as they wait for
an immigration hearing.
He has also put bias and injustice into the immigration hearings.
FBI internal documents show the imaginary threats it used as excuses to investigate nonviolent environmental activists as suspected terrorists,
Labour in the UK has endorsed a variant of the Green New Deal.
Bravo, Labour and Corbyn!
Well-meaning but foolish activists take umbrage at Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto" and demand to cancel that name.
Finding bigotry in harmless self-deprecating humor must be a lot
easier than campaigning to end housing discrimination. By the way,
until recently ghettos were neighborhoods where Jews were pressured or
required to live, but I don't feel offended by the "gourmet ghetto".
Let's end the war on humor!
US citizens: call on Congress to stop the censorship of books for prisoners.
If you call, please spread the word!
UK promises extra £600m for family planning in poorest countries.
This will be very good if it really happens. Unfortunately, promises
from Bogus Johnson are not worth much.
Spain will move the corpse of the dictator (and mass murderer) Franco
out of the national monument he built.
The UK's Supreme Court ruled that Bogus Johnson's order to prorogue Parliament is void. He is a pro rogue — that has been his whole career — but he
can't prorogue.
Countries' greenhouse reduction commitments need to be tripled just to limit to 2C of heating, and avoiding disaster (under 1.5C) requires
5 times the planned reductions.
US citizens:
support
the No Shame at School Act, which would pay poor families' debts
for school lunches.
I don't think students should be charged for lunch at school. The
cost of meals, like the cost of everything else at school, should be
paid by the state, out of taxes that fall mainly on the rich.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The cheater may have bribed Ukraine's President Zelensky to relaunch a
criminal investigation of Hunter Biden, Senator Biden's son.
(I previously mixed him up with Biden's other son, Beau, who is the
one that died.)
Labour to commit to big increase in charging points for electric cars.
Labour supporters, please talk to party organizers about offering anonymous
charging. See the recent note about how Orwellian they are.
"Trump and Modi are the mainstream faces of the global far-right."
A drone video shows of hundreds of prisoners in China being transported blindfolded. They may be Uighur political prisoners.
The US blindfolded the prisoners it was taking to Guantanamo (see note from 4 April 2002).
I hope this did not give China the inspiration for doing the same
thing to a million Uighurs.
Girls in Bangladesh can get coaching in how to talk their parents out of forcing them to get married.
Democrats
must
fight hard for state legislatures so that they can stop Republican
gerrymandering.
Iran has released the British oil tanker which it seized shortly after
Gibraltar seized an Iranian tanker.
To the FSF board,
I hereby resign as president of the Free Software Foundation and from
its board of directors. I am doing this due to pressure on the
Foundation and me over a series of misunderstandings and
mischaracterizations of what I have said.
Richard Stallman
Indigenous people in Canada are
still
trying to block the tar sands oil export pipeline Trudeau wants to
build there.
"If the world ran on sun,
it
wouldn’t fight over oil."
We must
respond
to Big Data with Luddism.
I think it was a mistake for the article to start by forecasting the
worst possible outcome: "coming to saturate our stores, workplaces,
homes, cities." That weakens the effect of, later on, urging that we
stop that from happening. I'm disappointed that it used the word
"cloud" — the purpose of that word is to cloud issues, and using
it inevitably does so. There is no cloud, only other entities'
computers.
However, I am very glad to see someone besides me advocate Luddism.
Charging stations for electric cars, in the UK at least, require
motorists to
identify
themselves.
The article focuses on the fact that the charging IDs are not secure
against third parties. However, I think the fact that the charging
station identifies the motorist is the worst injustice. We need laws
requiring charging stations to allow anonymous use. This should
include paying cash or with an anonymous digital system such as GNU
Taler. Drivers on a plan that covers the cost of charging should be
able to demonstrate digitally that they are members without revealing
their identities.
Some charging stations collect
a lot more data than
that.
We need laws to require them to offer anonymous charging, for cash,
without collecting any information except the price charged.
In Brazil, thugs are so ready to shoot that they are killing children.
The cheater ordered a spy official to conceal from Congress the identity of an inside whistleblower who reported a gross irregularity.
Shahid Buttar is challenging Rep. Nancy Pelosi in the Democratic primary.
Sanders's plan to end homelessness in America.
Expanding carbon offsets will not solve the climate crisis or protect tropical forests.
Is democracy failing in the US because of people's "lizard brains" or
because the plutocrats negated it 25 years ago?
A new scanner can detect guns and knives at a distance of 30 feet.
If it doesn't identify the passersby that don't have weapons,
I think it is acceptable. I'd rather see independent confirmation
of that.
US citizens:
call on the
FDIC to block the BB&T/SunTrust banking merger.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
tell GM that
we stand with striking workers.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Denying California the Right to Set Its Own Emissions Standards
Hurts
All 50 States.
Some French towns are
banning
glyphosate.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to pass the Khanna-Gaetz amendment and thus block the
bullshitter from fighting a war with Iran.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Right-wing government policies are making GM's investors prosper,
but
workers
are getting none of it.
Use of AI surveillance technology is
becoming
the global norm, even in liberal democracies.
Don't take this threat to our anonymity as a fait accompli!
America Needs Ranked Choice Voting —
Here's
Why.
I think
another
system is even better, but ranked choice would be a big step
forward.
Egyptians have dared to protest
demanding
that military ruler al-Sisi step down. He sold out the country to
the IMF and the people are feeling the burden.
The cause of Egypt's poverty is inequality (due to plutocracy and
corruption) colliding with population growth. The IMF is an
instrument of plutocracy and corruption.
In one sense, the Egyptian people are at fault for having too many
children. But it is people as a whole that is at fault; the
individual Egyptians compose that people and yet at the same time are
subject to it, as it drags them all under.
The situation in the US is only partly different.
Scientists Set Out How to
Halve
Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030.
Global Climate Strike and Extinction Rebellion are having an effect:
the public is
recognizing
the importance of climate defense.
I call it "climate defense" because the point is to preserve a livable
climate and avoid or reduce disaster, rather than to cope with
disaster.
"Moderate" (plutocratist) Democrats have
proposed
an alternative to the Green New Deal, which would take small,
inadequate steps in the right direction.
"We Can Find You Anywhere": the Chechen death squads
stalking
Europe
Greece's violent and manipulative neo-Nazi party has collapsed, but
the new right-wing government has
adopted
some of its policies.
Arguing that giant armaments companies
have
more effect on militarizing the US border than the bully has.
This means that plutocratists in Congress will fight to maintain
the militarization even if the next president is opposed.
Introduced carnivorous plants, in places they were not naturally
found,
can
smother other growth like kudzu.
They can't eat other plants, but can drive them into extinction.
Australia's former destroy-the-environment minister
blocked
a wind farm even though the inhabitants of the region were in favor of
it.
The wind farm would have replaced burning diesel fuel.
How useful is it to require companies to
give
workers some shares and some seats on the board of directors?
This won't directly give most poor people a decent life. It won't do
anything for the unemployed, the retired, the students, or those who
cannot work. It won't do anything for the millions who are compelled
to be "independent contractors".
But it could be one part of restraining corporations from predatory
behavior and from lobbying for more suffering and inequality.
The bully is
campaigning
for increased repression of homeless people.
Plutocratist policies make Americans homeless; now plutocratist
politicians aim to make use of their troubles by scapegoating them.
"Perhaps we need to explain [global heating] to politicians
as
we would to very small children."
Brazilian Meat Company Which Has Supplied McDonald's And Burger King
Bought
Cattle from Farm Using Deforested Land Earlier This Year,
Investigation Shows.
A previously safe species of moth in Australia has
almost
entirely disappeared in two years. The consequence could be the
extinction of a species of mammal.
Doctors
suspect
that pesticides were responsible for the brain injuries of
diplomats in Cuba.
Malta's persecution of murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia
continues
after her death.
Airbus Forecasts That Number of Planes in Sky
Will
Double in 20 Years.
We dare not let this happen — because if it does, it implies the
likely collapse of technological civilization, and planes will be only
a tiny part of what we lose.
25
Ways the Canadian medical system is superior to the American
system.
(satire) Pope Francis Tells Sinner Risky Experimental Sacrament
Only
Thing Capable Of Saving Him.
300,000 Indonesians have signed a petition opposing a
proposed
law that would make it a crime to have sex outside of marriage.
It would impose many kinds of repression. For instance, since
same-sex marriage is not permitted there, homosexuality would also be
a crime.
This repression is an expression of religious fanaticism. I would
like to coexist civilly with people of various religions, but those
religious people refuse to coexist civilly with anyone who won't
knuckle under to their laws.
Climate
Emergency Poses Major Threat to Future Global Health, Say Top
Medics.
Sad to say, focusing on the danger over the next 25 years
is short-termism, because the danger in 50 years will be
enormous by comparison.
Hong Kong protesters and the uniformed thugs are now
doxing
each other.
The thugs can arrest protesters they identify. How much pressure can
protesters put on thugs they identify?
Pakistani feminist Gulalai Ismail criticized Pakistani thugs for
repression
of women's rights, including crimes reaching as far as rape. She
was charged with "terrorism" (?!) and has fled to the US.
Today's Sex Workers, Like Their Victorian Sisters,
Don't
Want "saving".
Feminism today is drifting off the track into a campaign of prudery
that harms everyone, except those who are asexual.
Carbon-capture systems could be a part of avoiding climate disaster,
if
and when they work.
What we must avoid is letting hypothetical future carbon-capture
systems, systems that don't actually work today, serve as an excuse to
do less to reduce our emissions now.
Global Outbreak of Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs
Linked
to Overconsumption of Meat.
Bird populations in the US and Canada have
declined
around 30% since 1970. This shows how badly we are damaging the
ecology.
The US has a shortage of skilled employees. Not for unskilled workers, however. What does this say about robots?
Perhaps robots doing skilled jobs are ok for the economy. However,
replacing store sales personnel with robots is harmful. Please join
me in refusing to use those robots — always go to the human sales
clerks.
If you bring a book or computer, you won't mind waiting.
Drug dealers in the UK enslave adolescents and even children to carry drugs.
The poverty that Tories have imposed on families has made more
children vulnerable, and thus susceptible to enslavement. A Labour victory
would reverse that change. It wouldn't automatically put an end to
the enslavement but would limit the extent.
'The Silenced': Meet the Climate Whistleblowers Muzzled by [the bully].
Australia may extradite Veronica Koman to Indonesia for the "crime" of publishing information about the crimes of Indonesian thugs.
Tim Flannery: "I now look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure. The climate crisis is so severe the actions of the denialists are now an immediate threat to our children."
Plutocratist Democrats are still giving only lip service to the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Canada's prime minister Trudeau apologized for the perceived slight of
using face makeup as part of an Aladdin costume at a costume ball.
Subsequently it appeared that he also appeared in parties wearing
blackface.
Blackface is racist because it is part of a longstanding US practice
of mocking blacks using black face makeup on stage, in conjunction
with denying them legal rights. I've never heard of any
comparable practice of mocking Arabs. He certainly wasn't doing that
by dressing as Aladdin, whom we know as the hero, not the villain, of
an old story from the Middle East. I don't see racism there.
All this is small potatoes compared with his wrongs that have done
great practical harm: silencing ministers to cover up corruption and advancing global disaster by pushing the export of tar sands oil.
Sad to say, his opponent in the election is probably even worse
on all issues. The most progressive party with substantial support,
the NDP, is half planet-roaster too.
A revised criminal code for Indonesia could impose terrible repression, both sexually and politically.
A giant project to set up anonymous radio phone communication is under way.
The US is
suing
the publisher of Snowden's new memoir, claiming it reveals "state
secrets" — information that was published years ago.
It was Obama that
started
that absurd pretense.
I am disappointed that Snowden published the book through Amazon.
Please do not buy this or anything from
Amazon.
Instead, get an unauthorized copy of the e-book. When an e-book is
published the way Amazon does it, the unauthorized copies are the only
copies that don't
oppress their readers.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the printed copies, but if you
buy one in the US you are paying royalties to the US government. I
wonder if that covers the copies sold in Canada, too. It might, if
they are sold by the same publisher.
Giant
corporations control the US major media. No surprise that the
major media are pervasively uninterested in the harm big business
does.
Advances in modeling the climate now predict
6C
or 7C of global heating by the end of this century — if we
don't reduce our emissions.
Of course, modeling is not certain. We might "luck out" and get only
4C of heating — but that
could
still kill billions of people.
The UN
will
not allow countries without climate defense plans, or countries that
promote use of coal, to give speeches in the coming climate
summit.
These countries will still be welcome to make commitments —
though I expect they won't want to — but they won't have a
platform to oppose the goal.
Swiss Voters to Decide on
Whether
to Allow Factory Farming to Continue.
One of the many benefits of a single-payer medical system would be
that
companies could not imperil employees' medical care, whether by
firing them or in any other way.
If the US attacks Iran, that could mean a world war,
the
US against Russia and China.
One important point of dissimilarity between the present is that, in
1914, none of the European powers had a way to mobilize only part of
the army. Mobilization was a complex plan, and the only plan was for
complete mobilization. This meant that a country which feared attack
had to mobilize completely, which meant its other enemies had to do
likewise.
If a country which had feared an immediate attack had had the ability
to mobilize partially, that might have deterred its enemies while not
threatening them.
There is no such problem today, with mobilizing reserves.
But I don't know whether that makes a big difference.
(satire) …
the
city once known as Philadelphia will now be called DirecTV, PA,
after the cream cheese company opted to discontinue its long-held
naming rights to the city.
The saboteur of agriculture
proposes
to let pork plants inspect their own work, which would turn the
inspection into a joke. The plants would also rush the workers, so
they would more often be injured.
Thus, the workers would get more of one kind of malady and the public
would get more of another kind.
Iran apparently
prefers
escalating warfare to defeat by sanctions. Salafi Arabia's war in
Yemen gives Iran a way to do this without starting a new war.
This reminds me of the sanctions the US placed on Japan in 1941. The
sanctions, in that case, were intended to make Japan stop conquering
China — a morally valid reason.
Japan had the choice to fight the US, be defeated by the sanctions, or
leave China alone. It chose war, and was defeated anyway. The cost
of that war was tremendous.
The US has no valid reason for sanctions against Iran. The valid
goal, avoiding a nuclear-armed Iran, was being achieved by Obama's
non-nuclear deal.
Experts Warn World
'Grossly
Unprepared' for Future Pandemics.
"Kavanaugh
should
never have been appointed. Impeachment is our only hope."
Alas, as long as Republicans in the Senate are partisan and
unscrupulous, impeachment does not offer a hope of removing Kavanaugh
from the Supreme Court. What the Senate might be able to do, if
Democrats control it in January 2021, is to increase the size of the
Supreme Court so as to counterweight his vote.
Even
in China, people campaign for defending the climate.
Not all beef is equally
carbon-burdensome.
Political correctness fanatics have
demanded
the censorship of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Oxford University Press shows no sign of bowing to this pressure, but
people should get ready to support dictionary publishers against it.
In the US, a small fine
can
put you in jail over and over, if you are poor. The article is
about Oklahoma, but it isn't only there. Ferguson, Missouri
did
the same thing.
Arms companies have taught Americans to really love weapons —
even
jet planes that bust the budget and don't work well.
Now these planes
might
not be important even if they worked.
Snowden says he
would
return to the US for a fair trial, in which the jury can judge
whether what he did was good or bad for his country.
Stop
Engaging with Online Trolls altogether, Public Figures Say.
As my experience shows, sometimes a troll storm does not depend on
publicity from the victim.
Some parts of President Clinton's 1994 crime bill
caused
an enormous increase in imprisonment in the US. Now some
presidential candidates propose to reverse that.
(satire) New Pop-Up National Park Offers
500
Square Feet Of Pristine Wilderness For Next 2 Days.
Middle East drones signal end to era of fast jet air supremacy.
Now many countries can attack in ways that are hard for anyone to stop.
$1m a minute: the farming subsidies destroying the world.
They promote resource exhaustion and greenhouse gas emissions.
On 18th Anniversary of 9/11, Bernie Sanders Calls for End to Endless War.
Russia Has ‘Oligarchs,’ the US Has ‘Businessmen’.
Dunkirk has made the bus system gratis, and some people are giving up
their cars.
Someone in the Sackler family moved a billion dollars to offshore bank
accounts, then brought the money back to the US to invest. The
investments are apparently not traceable to the Sacklers.
The usual motive for this is tax evasion. What we really need are
laws that make this sort of tax evasion fail to work — for instance,
to require information about who owns investments in the US.
To the MIT community,
I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at
MIT.
I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of
misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
Richard Stallman
2/3
of Americans now say defending the climate is urgent.
Now if only we can overcome
Republican
electoral cheating and translate that into votes.
Ironically, the US fights wars to preserve access to fossil fuels,
which it burns copiously and that
creates
more occasions for wars.
Italy has started
permitting
entry of refugees rescued at sea.
The UK is
sliding
into the politics of unabashed dishonesty, following Russia,
Australia, and the US.
An abortion doctor who recently died is being vilified by some for
violating a recently passed Indiana law
requiring
fetuses to be buried as if they were people that had died.
I don't think he did anything wrong by violating that law. For one
thing, we must suspect it was intended to lead people to condemn
abortion for irrational reasons.
I do think the clinic should have followed more carefully the other
laws, which are precautions for patients' safety.
A region of Australia is
close
to running out of water completely.
I hope climate activists are working to inform the people there
of how Australia's planet-roasting government is responsible.
Republicans "won" the 9th Congressional District of North Carolina by
cheating — they
removed
over 100,000 mostly-Democratic voters from the voting list based
on vague suspicions they might have voted in another state as well.
The margin of the supposed Republican victory was only 4,000.
It is almost certain that the "victory" was due to cheating.
It is not illegal, or even suspect, to be registered to vote in two
states. That is what normally happens when you move to another state
and register there. Voters are not asked to tell the previous city,
"I have moved away", the requirement is not to vote there.
However, many of the voters who were removed were not really
registered in another state. The other registration had a name that
was similar but different. Republicans do not fall into voter
suppression by accident. These schemes are carefully planned,
and
occasionally
politicians are heard admitting this. They push as far as they
think they can get away with.
In addition to arms-limitation treaties, Bolton
has
destroyed the National Security Council which used to consider
issues including arms-limitation treaties.
India is building prisons for the
roughly
2 million people in Assam that couldn't prove they are Indian
citizens. The construction workers expect to be imprisoned there
when they finish.
Merely being born in India is not enough — they have to prove
things that their ancestors in 1971 qualified. In many cases there
are no records.
Compostable plastic and biodegradable plastic
require
a specially designed composting or biodegrading system. Using
them now, in the absence of such a system, could encourage people to
throw them into the wild.
Ralph Nader: Avalanche-Level Liar Trump Learned
Art of Deception From the Pros: US Corporations.
Biden is pushing even harder his
falsifications to justify his voting for attacking Iraq.
Gamers in general feel manipulated by loot boxes. When Belgium banned them entirely, the users were glad.
Let's ban them everywhere.
Note: I reject all these games for another reason: they are nonfree software.
Buying on-line not only mistreats you (with nonfree client code and making a dossier of your purchases), it also has brought about the loss of many jobs. In the UK, 75,000 jobs have been lost this way.
An oil refinery in Salafi Arabia has been set on fire by a drone attack.
It couldn't have happened to a more deserving country.
If the inflow of petroleum can be cut off, the fire itself should not last long. I hope so. Then refinery will be out of service. That will reduce the supply of oil and gasoline. That would be an opportunity for conservation, but I think the planet-roasters will try to make it an excuse to build more fossil-fuel facilities elsewhere.
Arab members of Israel's parliament face the constant threat of expulsion for opposing the majority (as they were elected to do).
Israeli thugs in an Arab area of East Jerusalem practice continual violent harassment on any excuse. Sometimes the violence is deadly.
The "two-state solution can be achieved through a confederation," proposes the "A Land For ALL" movement.
Bernie Sanders says DMVs should stop profiting from drivers’ personal data.
White nationalism and crony capitalism are the sparks that started fires in the Amazon.
Activists follow the money fueling Amazon fires.
(satire) … longtime Sleepytime Tea addict Katie Ball divulged Tuesday that she must consume six bags of the sedative brew in order to merely feel drowsy.
(satire) …former conversion therapy practitioner McKrae Game apologized Friday for the harm his work has caused and offered to electrocute his past patients into being gay again.
One important method of voter suppression is closing polling places.
Over a thousand have been closed since 2014.
Texas officials want to execute Rodney Reed and disregard the evidence that
argues he is innocent.
Charities' mission should include advocating for governments to help the poor better, not merely give some of the help the government fails to give.
The scapegoater's border wall is being built through a nature reserve, which will involve bulldozing parts of it and do ecological harm to the endangered wildlife it is supposed to protect.
Whole Foods to cut health-care benefits for 1,900 part-time employees starting next year.
Public schools in Kentucky now openly endorse religion.
Austin, Texas, has made funds available for women to travel out of state
to get an abortion.
The House of Representatives voted to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It will not be easy to prevail over the sabotage-minded Senate. But it is better to try than not try.
Studying Germany's effort to learn to reject the ideas of its Nazi past.
Scientists report that dipping chickens in bleach does not kill
all the dangerous bacteria. Some of them convert into spores,
which are hard to detect without special tests, so the chicken
appears safer but isn't.
California is adopting a ban on face recognition in thugs' body cameras.
It is a significant first step in making body cameras do good and
not harm, but much more is needed. If the system saves the video when
there is no specific justification to do so, it becomes a system to
surveil people's houses at will. I recommend an automatic system that
can determine when to save the footage.
I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I
posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The
coverage totally mischaracterised my statements.
Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from
the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to
be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and
other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what
they believe I said.
I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the
misunderstanding.
"Israel should receive precisely the same response as Russia got."
Naomi Klein talks about Greta Thunberg and the do-or-die mission of climate defense.
The bully's various measures to block refugees from Central America
can be a death sentence.
(satire) Matthew McConaughey was reportedly forced to apply for food stamps Thursday after his first month working as an adjunct professor.
Why I'm Currently Blocking the Largest Oil Export Channel in the U.S.
Climate change will create 1.5 billion migrants by 2050 and we have no idea where they'll go.
As these people desperately try to flee, tens of millions of them will
be trafficked. (Maybe hundreds of millions.) They will accept "job
offers" in other regions or countries which will turn out to be
slavery. They may even do so knowingly, since the alternative would
be a substantial chance of death.
Major contributors to global heating, such as David Koch and Stephen
Schwarzman, will through their intentional acts of destruction be
predictably responsible for a fraction of this result. That fraction,
for each one, will amount to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands,
of people enslaved.
I think that MIT should reconsider whether to have institutions named
after those people.
I don't think MIT is obligated to return or give away the money they
donated. Rather, it should spend the money doing something good.
(The introduction to Major Barbara explains the reasoning of the
Salvation Army on this question; I found it convincing.) What is
clearly wrong is to give those donors something — favorable publicity,
or access to people — in exchange.
California has banned private prisons.
California had already moved most of the prisoners out of them
as preparation for closing them.
The bill covers deportation prisons.
Twitter has blocked Raúl Castro's account.
If it can do that, it can block the bullshitter's account too.
The saboteur in chief has finished cancelling Obama's rule to protect wetlands and streams.
Dolphins in the English Channel have high levels of persistent toxins
in their blood. We do not know whether this is causing tangible harm.
Some airport terminals in India are imposing face recognition on every
passenger.
They say that the biometrics will be stored only temporarily,
and deleted after the flight departs, but we can hardly trust that
it doesn't send a copy to a government agency in the mean time.
Indeed, I can't see why they would bother implementing this (since the
existing system works) if it isn't the basis for some other snooping.
The UK barred a journalist from covering an arms sale fair. Political bias is suspected.
"My son is one of Kashmir’s ‘disappeared’. When will India tell the truth
about their fate?" He was disappeared in 1991 and his mother has had no news of him since.
"West Africa and Congo basin are hotspots for forest loss but receive
lower global attention [that the Amazon]."
(satire) Trump Under Fire For Forcing Astronauts To Stay In Irish Trump Hotel
While On Specialized Space Mission.
Kamala Harris declines to support a ban on use of face recognition by the government.
Instead she supports "regulation" that would make little practical difference.
The bully wants to monitor everyone in the US diagnosed with mental
illness (almost 100 million) in a vain effort to detect the few who
will commit massacres.
It won't have much of the intended effect, but it is a great excuse
for extending repression. Many of your friends and colleagues have a
mental illness, but you don't know how numerous they are because they
don't let on.
With increased inequality of wealth, the US suffers increased
inequality in life expectancy. Poor people die younger.
If Britain leaves the EU, the EU laws that guarantee many human rights
will cease to apply there.
The article lists a few specific areas, but the problem is not limited
to those. Many other human rights would also become vulnerable.
Healthcare ad spending exceeds $65 million in 2019 as insurance industry
ramps up effort to kill Medicare for All.
Now that the bully has cut support for housing and made more people
homeless, he proposes to "fix" what he intentionally broke by
exacerbating repression against homeless people on the street.
We can take action against homelessness nationwide with laws that make
it unprofitable to use real estate as a meaningless asset. The only
way to profit from it should be by renting it out — and corporations
should be discouraged from being the owners.
California's landmark bill giving gig workers the rights of employees
causes problems in a few edge cases. For example, for writers of a weekly column.
Would a weekly columnist really be required to become a "full time"
employee? That implicit claim seems fishy: surely this law does
not put an end to part-time jobs.
Overall, this bill is a great step forward. It means that Uber will
have to mistreat its employees less. But it won't stop mistreating
the customer. If you value your freedom and anonymity, please join
me in refusing to surrender them to Uber.
B'liar's partial privatization of the NHS brought about huge debts
which are now starving it of funds.
The US Supreme Court ruled that the bully can deny asylum to everyone
from Central America that passes through Mexico.
This policy would be reasonable if Mexico were a safe place.
Some microplastics in soil can cause earthworms to lose weight.
The article doesn't say what level of microplastic content was used in
the experiment, but if we keep dumping microplastics into the
environment we are likely to surpass that level sooner or later.
Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex
between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand
how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my
mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am
grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Journalist Erick Kabendera, political prisoner in Tanzania, is
likely
to be in prison for five years before a trial on dubious charges.
Israel
planted
stingrays near the White House to spy on the officials, perhaps
including the conman.
Media
Worry
About 'Premature' End to Afghan War.
Florida's Governor Scott
rejected
federal funds for preventing and treating AIDS.
Now Bolsonaro's son has
indicated
support for overthrowing the Brazilian government. This follows
Bolsonaro's endorsement of the military coup in Chile. Bolosonaro
ought to be impeached for that, but his party protects him in
Congress.
Even though Bolton has been fired, the danger of war he worked to
create lives on, and
he
will seek opportunities to make more.
Congress called The 3M Company, the Chemours Company and DuPont to
testify
about their responsibility for PFAS and their toxic effects.
Explaining section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which
protects
all internet sites from liability for whatever users post.
Every reduction in this protection leads to a massive increase in
censorship.
A court
ruled
that Parliament should reconvene despite the orders of Bogus
Johnson.
The UK Supreme Court will have the final say.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass stricter gun control.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone:
call on
big US banks to stop financing fossil fuels.
Warning to investors:
investing
in fossil fuels could leave you broke.
If you sign, please spread the word!
A courageous gynaecologist
fights
both the antiabortion movement and medical quackery (fantasies of
"wellness"), and notes that the two are converging in the language
they use.
The saboteur of commerce, Wilbur Ross,
threatened
to fire the staff of the NOAA if they did not legitimize the
bullshitter's error about the likely trajectory of the hurricane.
They obeyed him.
They should have summoned the courage to refuse. The NOAA's chief
scientist
has
rebuked them.
Avoiding the worst effects of global heating (including the consequent
extreme weather)
will
cost trillions of dollars.
However, preventing even worse global heating must take priority.
Since we are almost too late to avoid disaster, we must go all out in
trying to avoid it. It is a mistake to treat the steadily increasing
symptoms at the expense of effort to prevent the disease from getting
worse.
Europe's Marine Sanctuaries Are
No
More Than 'Paper Parks'.
Boeing, the result of merger of all US companies that made large
jetliners, has become
primarily
a political machine and only secondarily a builder of machines.
"A company once run by engineers is now in the thrall of financiers
and its stock remains high even as its planes fall from the sky."
The benefit of a free market comes from competition. When Reagan
gutted the laws meant to maintain lots of competition, this benefit
started to evaporate, not just in making jetliners but all across the
economy.
One neighborhood in Kashmir has
forced
out the Indian repression forces, using barricades and throwing
stones.
The Indian forces attack with tear gas, sometimes fired at people not
involved in fighting.
Study: The Only Place On Earth More Surveilled Than London Is …
China.
(To what extent China is Communist is a difficult question, and not
relevant anyway. What matters is that China is repressive.)
The spawning of coral in the Red Sea is
disrupted.
If the coral animals of a species do not try to mate at the same time,
they will not reproduce.
A heatwave in the ocean off the US west coast
threatens
a giant toxic algal bloom.
Summer Heatwaves in France
Killed
1,500, Says Health Minister.
After the 2003 heat wave, France took precautions to prevent heat
waves from killing people. For the latest heat wave to have killed
almost the same number, despite the precautions, it must have been
considerably stronger.
The bullshitter said he was about to have a secret meeting in the US
with Taliban negotiators, and
cancelled
it because they carried out a bomb attack in Afghanistan. (No
cease-fire had been agreed.)
Lots of politicians criticized him for this, al everyone assuming he
was telling the truth about what he had done. I wouldn't believe, on
his say-so, that he had cancelled a meeting, or that there ever was a
plan for a meeting.
Then the Taliban
affirmed
that the bullshitter cancelled a meeting with them. Amazing
— he told the truth about this!
I don't agree with the critics that there is anything wrong in
inviting Taliban negotiators to meet with US representatives, whether
in the US, or anywhere else. I am surprised though that they trusted
him enough to say they would come.
The bullshitter's approach to diplomacy is to posture as tough by
canceling meetings on whatever excuse comes to hand. I don't see
anything inherently wrong with that maneuver, but I doubt it pressures
other countries' negotiators as he thinks it does. I expect they see
through it.
That being so, if it creates a problem in negotiations, at least it
won't be permanent.
The Tories are rationing medical treatments, and visits to
specialists,
in
order to give the wealthy a new tax cut.
Factory farms in Brittany are
causing
deadly toxic algae to bloom in sea.
A president who terrifies officials that correct his mistakes
is unbearable for officials that retain a shred of honesty.
Bogus Johnson wants to make the main UK government web portal collect personal information.
Does it permit access via Tor? With JS disabled?
The bullshitter has fired his hawkish advisor, John Bolton.
This is surely a change for the better. But it was the bullshitter
that was responsible for following Bolton's advice.
A study of the collapse of World Trade Center 7 concludes it could not
be due to fire set by the fires in the larger buildings.
I am not competent to evaluate the investigation reported here. In
particular, I can't judge whether it is more scientific than other
investigations. I can only say that the official explanation of the
collapse has always struck me as fishy.
The US is going to demand immigrants give their user names on many social networking sites.
If the US looked only at public postings on these sites, perhaps that would
be acceptable. But we now see that the US examines messages sent to
the immigrant from others, and will bar people for that.
Media Lab Director Joi Ito confessed that he had secretly accepted donations from Epstein after MIT had decided not to do so.
He also accepted funds for some personal activities of his own.
That dishonesty, and conflict of interest, make his resignation
obligatory.
But I fear for the effect on the Media Lab. Under Negroponte, the
lab was notoriously stingy and proprietary. Ito corrected that.
I fear that the next director will undo some of Ito's changes.
Maria Isabel Bueso's medical condition has no cure, but can be treated
in the US. The deportation thugs told her to leave the US within 33 days.
That period is now almost up.
Evelyn Hernández was acquitted of "murdering" a stillborn fetus,
but the prosecutors are going to appeal.
Allowing an appeal of an acquittal means that even once you are acquitted
you remain in jeopardy. This should not be allowed.
Drug prohibition has had a racist tinge since 1857.
Its repression still falls mostly on the poor and disprivileged.
I cheer consumers that are willing to pay 25% more for fair trade
cocaine, but I think it will be unnecessary — a decrease in
repression would cut the price by far more than that. Legalizing
sales only through a regulated market might open the door for fair
trade initiatives, as well as make drugs' strength and composition
predictable (thus avoiding most of the deaths) and discouraging some
new users.
Mexico has been rather effective serving as the first barrier for the
US against refugees from central America.
Agriculture depends on phosphate mined from rocks, and if the demand
keeps accelerating we could run out by 2040.
If we cut down on beef production, we could eliminate a substantial fraction
of the world's agriculture, and maybe have enough phosphate for a century.
During that time we could arrange to recycle it.
Avoiding global heating disaster requires defeating the fossil fuel companies, which want to keep expanding production.
It would be nice if there were a way to finesse this, but I think that
is impossible. The companies won't accept a compromise in which their
business shrinks to zero, and we won't be safe with anything less. We
have known for some years that there is no room in the carbon budget
for any new fossil fuel facilities.
51 years later, relatives of those who died on flight AF1611 want
France to reveal the facts about the crash. Due to the secrecy, they
believe it was shot down by a missile from a French ship.
When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner by mistake, the
US eventually admitted it. France should likewise admit its mistake
and publish the information that has been secret.
Efforts to train flight attendants to recognize children that are
being trafficked lead to false accusations against parents travelling with adopted children whose skin color is different.
People who are being trafficked do travel on commercial airlines.
(How else would they travel?) I'm in favor of efforts to detect and
stop trafficking, in principle, but they must reduce the consequences
of a false positive or they will do more harm than good.
Corbyn promises a new ministry in charge of enforcing workers' rights.
Of all the kinds of illegal actions of businesses, the ones that most
need to be enforced directly by the state are those that mistreat
workers and customers. If they have to launch proceedings on their
own, nasty employers can make that very unlikely for workers that are
paid little.
NOx emissions from diesel cars rise 20% or more on hot days.
Climate crisis is greatest ever threat to human rights, UN warns.
The perverse reinterpretation of US antitrust law, starting in the
1970s, allows big businesses to merge with little restraint, while targeting unions.
It was proposed and pushed by Robert Bork, but judges adopted it.
"Our investigation found Amazon escapes responsibility for its role in deaths
and serious injuries even though the company keeps a tight grip on how
third-party delivery drivers do their jobs."
Australia's right-wing government seeks to extend its contempt for
human rights to the field of surveillance. Even the inadequate
protection of requiring consent for redistributing personal data will
be eliminated from the proposed law.
"Climate minimizers" don't deny we are heading for disaster, but consistently downplay its magnitude. They harm on the cost of avoiding the disaster
and never compare that with the disaster itself.
India's cruel government says it will expel everyone in Assam that has been unable to prove Indian ancestry.
Since Bangladesh won't let them in, India will have to bribe some
country to take them all. Perhaps Papua New Guinea will take them.
But India might find it easier to make their lives so difficult that
most of them die.
With 70% of Americans supporting Medicare for All, you'd expect
Democrats in Congress to rush to endorse it — but in fact we need to pressure them to do so.
(satire) Kim Kardashian tried to escape in a rowboat after discovering
that her whole life had been a scripted TV program.
The 2017 Republican tax cuts enabled more companies to do business in
the US and pay no income tax.
Taking the UK out of the EU would be an
opportunity
for neoliberals to make every aspect of Britain cruel — if
they are in charge.
The International Organization for Migration has
started
censoring its communication to avoid mentioning climate mayhem,
ceding to US pressure.
You don't need any Iranian ancestry to be jailed in Iran as a pawn.
Even
tourists are in danger.
Hong Kong Journalists Warn of
Rising
Police Violence Against Them.
Indian troops killed a teenager in Kashmir, then
claimed
he was killed by the nonexistent stone-thrower.
Others have been killed as well, but under military occupation it is
hard to find out how many.
Malaysia is
wiping
out its indigenous peoples — cutting down their jungle
homes, giving them unsafe water, and making them die of unknown
diseases they had no immunity for.
This is, I suppose, to bully them into becoming Muslims. Malaysia
officially rejects freedom in the domain of religion.
Seven countries which include parts of the Amazon forest have
agreed
to steps to protect it. Paradoxically, Brazil is one of them.
Money From Arms Sales (for attacking Yemen)
Dwarfs
Aid for Yemen.
Fat-Shaming Is Just the Start.
Seek
Fault in Kids' Books And It'll Never End.
Australia's government is demonstrating its cruelty by
deporting
New Zealanders that have lived there for decades, if they were
sentenced to prison.
Australia is not finding many refugees to deport, but its government
depends on scapegoating someone.
It's not yet spring, but northern Australia is
suffering
from dangerous wildfires.
An investigating hacker has cracked Moscow's internet voting system.
Voting over the internet is an absurd idea. In the case of Moscow, it hardly
matters since those elections are rigged anyway.
China announced it would limit face recognition in schools.
This is the practice that the new plan would restrict.
Bizarrely, this means China is ahead of the US on one aspect of
anonymity protection.
DMVs in States around the US are taking drivers' personal information and selling it to thousands of businesses.
Even worse, they are making the info available to other government
agencies that persecute people for reasons unrelated to driving.
When officials spit on scientific knowledge and invite disaster,
scientists must not limit themselves to developing more scientific
knowledge for officials to ignore. They need to join in protests
demanding officials heed science.
Europe is tasting the beginnings of climate catastrophe that will reduce food production as it kills forests.
(satire) … members of the Liberty University board told
reporters Monday they were concerned investigations into Jerry Falwell
Jr.’s corruption risked undermining the college’s core mission of
subjugating
women and gay people.
(satire) MIT Media Lab
Agrees
to Return All of Jeffrey Epstein's Donated Girls.
The rogue, Bogus Johnson, has pro-rogued Parliament, but Parliament
had made it
illegal
for him to take the UK out of the EU without an agreed-on deal.
"Conservatives are more open to leftwing arguments when they come from
people who don't
pretend
to be perfectly objective."
This makes sense, because that pretense is dishonest; people who sense
a hint of it are likely to distrust the speaker.
Lack of water is causing
collapse
of the ecosystems in Australia's largest river.
The lack is partly due to taking too much for irrigation, and
partly due to global heating. Short-termist governments have
encouraged both problems at once.
Document Reveals The FBI Is Tracking Border Protest Groups
As
Extremist Organizations.
Even nonprofit charter schools
offer
opportunities for corrupt profit.
Australia's late-spring wildfires are
spreading
faster than anyone recalls seeing there.
Trumpets
seek
to raise 2 million dollars to fund fishing expeditions to find
accusations to make against reporters that publish bad news about
right-wingers.
Many US states
exclude
ex-cons from nearly all good jobs. The result appears to be to
drive them back to crime.
(satire) … the nation’s bison hosted an opulent gala fundraiser
Friday in an
effort
to convince the 2020 Democratic candidates to support the
environment.
Republicans are
looking
for a hidden way to cut social security benefits, because they
don't dare admit that is their goal.
The giant planet-roaster companies
have
not slowed their construction of fossil fuel facilities.
Biggest Fossil Fuel Extractors Warned They Risk
Wasting
$2.2tn "in a Low-Carbon World."
That is to say, the money they put into planet-roasting facilities may
win them no profit if governments wake up and prohibit or prevent
actually using it for unlimited extraction.
Even worse, they might succeed in preventing governments from shutting
off the extraction and the greenhouse gas emission. Eventually
civilization will start teetering and their profits will not be worth
very much.
A proposed AI doomsday machine
would
not even appear necessary if the conman hadn't rejected arms
limitation.
Of all the ways to avoid a nuclear first strike attack, arms control
treaties are the best. They reduce the danger of accidental nuclear
war as well as intentional nuclear war. And they save a lot of money,
too.
Buying a loot box in a computer game is effectively
a
form of gambling, and gambling companies advertise in the games
which sell loot boxes.
The article may be is using some specific legal definition of
"gambling", which excludes loot boxes. I don't see any reason to
allow governments to legislate for me what the word "gambling" means.
What governments can legislate is what kinds of gambling to allow.
Loot boxes don't make games more fun, only more exploitative.
So let's prohibit them.
Bangladesh has
cut
off phone service in Rohingya refugee camps.
Since India is getting away with doing
this
(and more) as part of its military occupation of Kashmir, other
countries will soon conclude they can get away with doing similar
things to other persecuted groups.
US citizens: call on
Big Pharma to make insulin affordable, as it used to be.
If you sign, please spread the word!
China uses pandas as instruments of international public relations.
Now Germans are turning that around by calling two newborn pandas
"Hong"
and "Kong".
To maintain its monopoly on pandas, China only leases them, never
selling them, and the lease says that all offspring belong to China.
But this is no reason for Germans to call the pandas by the names that
China says are "official".
One small but significant way to push back on China is by not making
any particular fuss about pandas.
Austrians have made the right to pay
cash an
election issue.
Please help do this where you live.
A 20% levy on cakes and sweets would be more effective than taxing
sugary drinks, suggests
a study
by nutritionists.
Indonesia plans
to prosecute
a prominent human rights lawyer for spreading disagreement with
the official line.
Following the bully, Indonesia describes this dissent as "fake news".
I've warned for years that laws against "fake news" are an excuse to
prosecute whoever disagrees with the lies of tyrants.
The American Left's 2020 Mission: Not Just Defeat [the conman]
— But
Change The World.
Michael Mann: Global Heating Made Hurricane Dorian Bigger, Wetter —
And
More Deadly.
Netanyahu
said he
would claim to annex the territory of Israel's colonies.
The conman will surely say that the US "recognizes" the annexation.
The next president should recognize Palestine as sovereign over the
West Bank.
US congresscritters' staff went on a tour which included
an Israeli
right-wing extremist who endorsed assassination of the last
Israeli prime minister that was serious about making peace.
The CIA makes Abu
Dhabi a
blind-spot (surely under orders from above) as it intervenes in
various other countries.
"Discover, identify and interfere":
the MUROS
surveillance vans.
One use of these is to watch and listen to everyone at a protest or
demonstration.
We can't expect billionaires to donate to preserve the Amazon forest;
many of them are profiting from destroying it. In effect, Bolsonaro
is working
with and for them.
This article goes too far in treating the Amazon forest solely as the
property of the indigenous people that live in it, and hyping their
authority. If they decided to sell their land, or accept royalties
from farmers, that would not make it acceptable to cut the forest
down. The reasons not to allow this are global.
Calling it "the lungs of the Earth" is basically correct (even though
a little exaggerated, since the rest of the Earth's forest share in
the role). The extinction of perhaps half a million species (counting
microbes) that live only there would be a disaster even if the forest
had no human inhabitants. The global heating effects would also be
disaster.
US citizens:
call on the
Department of Agriculture not to allow logging in the Tongass
National Forest.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone:
call on the
Suwannee River Water Management District not to let Nestle
overdrain the Santa Fe river.
If you live in a place where the public water supply is potable, you
can also help by avoiding bottled water. When I travel I carry a
refillable water bottle, and I rarely use bottled water except
where it is medically necessary.
If you sign, please spread the word!
"Boris Johnson is using the act of leaving the EU as a vehicle for his
goal —
showing
the impotence of his adversaries." And that of Parliament. In
effect, he is declaring himself autocrat and defying anyone in Britain
to prove him wrong. Even though Parliament is fighting back, he could
build support for brushing away democracy.
The UK's democracy has grave problems. As in most countries,
plutocrats have too much power and subvert the state to their
interests. However, the remedy must be more democracy, not less.
The AFL-CIO is supporting an Oregon ballot initiative to
limit
the number of robot cash registers a store can operate.
I support this initiative but I'd rather set the limit at zero
and extend it to other kinds of stores.
Many people's lives have become so full of small required tasks that
they
can't
keep up with all of them.
The Internet of Stings has stung users of a proprietary program for
adjusting a certain telescopic rifle sight. The US has
demanded
the list of all the 10,000 or more people who have downloaded the
app.
The investigation aims at possible illegal export of the telescopic
sight. The goal seems valid to me, but seizing data about over 10,000
people to investigate the crimes of a few of them should not be
allowed.
If the program had been free software, the issue would not even arise.
Thus, one of the forms of surveillance attached to many proprietary
programs is keeping track of who uses it.
The University of Alabama squeezed out a dean because he had
criticized
US thugs and the American flag for their association (over time)
with racism.
The flag of the US stands for the country. I love my country but
recognize that it kept blacks in slavery for a long time. So even
though I would not draw the overall conclusion about the US and its
flag that Dean Riley drew, I can't fault his criticism.
I also agree with the article's disapproval of "cancel culture".
A bipartisan group in Congress
aim
to deny funds for US military intervention in Yemen.
Greta Thunberg refuses to be lionized. What counts, she says, is that
we all
push
for defense of the climate.
If the ice caps melt, they will release so much methane that it
could
cause a lot worse heating.
(satire) unconscious Amazon warehouse employee Anthony Cargill, 41,
was reportedly chastised Monday for
failing
to file a time-off request.
South Africa has a
high
rate of murders of women.
The Republican Party rigs its own primary elections, too, by
cancelling
them entirely.
Bolsonaro
overtly
endorsed the bloody military coup in Chile.
He has kept company with supporters of Brazil's military government,
but this is more explicit.
"Neoliberal economists present themselves as ‘neutral’ technocrats,
but they’re actually
partisans
for the status quo [and for inequality]. Don’t fall for it."
The Democratic National Committee stubbornly
refused
to allow candidates to debate each other about climate policy. It
refused to sponsor such a debate, and insisting it would exclude any
candidates that participated in an unofficial debate.
This illustrates the plutocratic domination of the Democratic Party
structure, which we can also see in the
blacklisting
of consultants that work for primary challengers.
Most Democratic candidates have
pledged
to cancel the permit for the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
One, however, is Biden his time, or perhaps under pressure from rich
fossil fools that support him.
Proposing a
European
Green New Deal, including an Environmental Justice Commission for
compensating colonized countries for the harm done by extraction
there, and prosecuting ecocide.
How Medicare for All will avoid the
imaginary
problems that for-profit medical insurance lobbyists warn us
about.
AOC: the conman's real purpose is looting the treasury, but he
uses
racism to disguise it. (To his followers, racism looks better
than looting.) We need to attack the cynical racism to expose the
sincere looting.
Two New York City thugs received a shockingly light sentence for
having
sex with a handcuffed prisoner.
A prisoner literally cannot refuse, so that was rape.
Bolsonaro has declared his hatred for Brazil's indigenous peoples.
Evidently he wants to burn them out of their homes. People in Brazil
and elsewhere are
organizing
to fight this.
Accusing Google search ads of being a
shakedown
for businesses.
The
campaign
to legalize dumpster diving in Germany.
US citizens:
call
on Germany to make the European Investment Bank get out of fossil
fuels.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call
on Congress to stop HHS from spending medical funds on Obria and
other anti-birth control, anti-abortion fake clinics.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Call
on Congress to cut funding for ICE and CBP and put a stop to the
agencies' backdoor money grabs.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Monsanto and John Deere
want
to scan the production of each spot in a farm and analyze how to use
it.
The farmer should be able to do this using free software on per own
computer.
Prison thugs in Florida attacked prisoner Cheryl Weimer and
broke
her neck. She is now permanently paralyzed.
The motive for the attack is that she complained that her work was
causing her pain due to a physical ailment.
Sanders
urged
all candidates to join him in supporting a complete ban on
fracking.
New York City thugs are carrying out a slowdown strike.
Interestingly,
crime
has gone down.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to hold companies accountable for selling PFAS
chemicals and concealing the danger of them.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Experts Want to
Give
Control of America's Nuclear Missiles to AI.
This is called a "doomsday machine." See the movie, Dr Strangelove,
for what that could do.
The
Secret
to Democrats Winning the Midwest: Fight Big Agriculture.
Global Food Producers
'Failing
to Face Up to Role' in Climate Crisis.
The military occupation of Kashmir has now lasted
30
days.
We cannot believe anything that the Indian government says about what
is happening there. Perhaps five civilians have been killed. but it
could be 500 or 50,000.
Facebook to
Redirect
Anti-Vaccine Searches to Public Health Pages.
Iran is
still
holding the British oil tanker that it seized in apparent
retaliation for the Iranian tanker that the UK had seized.
This does not seem justified to me, nor an effective way to push back
against the US tactics.
Germany has
announced
a ban on glyphosate.
Modelling suggests that European agriculture will
lose
around 15% of its yield by 2050.
It is probably similar for the US.
US workers now have as much assets, on the average, as they had in
2007. But still
30%
less than in 2003.
(satire) Inclusive New Texas Bill Prevents Gun Sellers From Discriminating On
Basis Of Background Check.
Warren's climate plan doesn't recognize the need to cut down on fossil
fuel extraction everywhere — not merely on public land.
An infra-red photon doesn't discriminate between CO2 molecules that
came from fuel mined on public land, and molecules from fuel mined on
private land.
Should We Feed Hungry Children, or the War Machine?
Plutocratist legislators choose the latter because arms manufacturers
spend more on lobbying than poor people.
The Walton Family Plot to Privatize the Public Schools of Arkansas.
"If Biden is serious about taking on the power of the fossil fuel
lobby, why is he going to a fundraiser hosted by the co-founder of a
natural gas company?"
Biden may not have known Goldman founded a fossil fuel company,
but he knows Goldman is rich. Biden is too friendly with
plutocrats to be any use in taking their power away.
A federal court ruled that putting US citizens on the "terrorist watch list"
violates their constitutional rights.
Bravo! But we have to see whether this leads to a real change.
And it is unfair to foreigners, too.
Comparing Biden, Sanders and Warren in regard to global heating.
Each one made a valid point, but Biden's point is useless without the
other points. The only way the US can get other countries to do more to
curb global heating is by doing more itself.
If AI leads to an effective lie detector, those that have dangerous
power already will leverage it to get more power.
San Francisco's city council voted to designate the National Rifle Association
as a "terrorist organization".
The NRA uses disinformation tactics to promote sales of guns, and supports
candidates that are right-wing extremists (Republicans).
That is
harmful, but it is not terrorism.
It is wrong for any government (or the UN) to arbitrarily attach the
label of "terrorist" to an organization. Such designation is
legitimate only as the result of a fair trial.
The US intervention in Somalia against al-Shabaab cannot succeed, because it
doesn't recognize the role that al-Shabaab plays in life in Somalia.
The article omits to mention that the US is responsible for the very
existence of al-Shabaab. The Islamic courts movement had taken
control of Somalia had established peace. Peace with incomplete
respect for human rights, to be sure — Islamists oppose some aspects
of human rights — but peace with incomplete human rights was a big
step up from faction war with incomplete human rights.
Then Ethiopia intervened, clearly as a US proxy, to destroy the
Islamic courts government. One part of it, no longer in power, was
al-Shabaab.
Erdoğan demands western help in setting up a "safe zone" in Turkey for
refugees to return to.
In principle, this is reasonable. But neither Assad nor the Syrian
Islamists would run a zone that is safe for Syrians in general. The
Idlib domain of the Islamists is not safe for transgender Syrians.
Bogus Johnson told his aides weeks ago that he planned to prorogue
Parliament (and effectively rule without Parliament), even as he
continued to say publicly he had no such intention.
A prisoner in Virginia was kept in solitary confinement for almost 2
years, and it made him severely mentally ill. For instance, he can no
longer communicate in English, only mutter unintelligibly. And he
cannot recognize his mother any more.
This makes me think of the terribly sad ending of the great movie,
Brazil.
The nastiest part is the fact that prisoners in solitary in Virginia
that can't communicate in written English can never get out of
solitary. What kind of fool cannot recognize the injustice of this?
Young Chinese are posting lots of messages to attack Hong Kong
protesters and sentimentally support mindless loyalty to their
mind-controlling government.
Thoroughly credulous teenager volunteers work along with paid
propagandists. They are organized into groups and follow government
orders; they simply are not paid.
They can be compared with the credulous Americans who thought that
Dubya did Iraq a favor by hijacking the US military to conquer and
occupy that country.
The conman has much in common with Britain's conman (Bogus Johnson),
but one difference is that Bogus couldn't intimidate the whole Tory
party into supporting him.
Carrie Lam has finally declared the extradition bill dead,
demonstrating that this was not impossible.
The protesters, meanwhile,
have added democratic elections to their demands, as well as release
of the political prisoners jailed over the months of protests.
Italy has a new coalition government which excludes the bullying-based
League party.
Salivini
is no longer a minister, so he won't be able to recruit support
by public displays of cruelty.
Ploy 17 in the plutocratic repertoire: after taking lots of money
away from the poor, offer a much smaller increment in aid so as to
look like "compassionate conservatives".
Proposed Tory tax cuts (not for the poor) would force even bigger cuts
in support for the poor.
As always, right-wing tax cuts are dooH niboR.
Officer Mcgruff says, "Never talk to the cops."
The inspector general’s office in the Department of Health and Human
Services reports that some refugee children separated from their parents
suffer from PTSD.
Sexual violence is rife in Samoa —
60%
of women say they have been victims. It is part of a society of
male domination.
Many Samoan women are
raped
and then compelled to marry the rapist. Men rape women
specifically for that purpose.
Hurricane Dorian is devastating the Bahamas. Its winds were stronger
than in other hurricanes. No one could get around, not even
ambulances. Some houses were flooded up to the second story by the
ocean.
Global heating will bring us even stronger hurricanes in the future if
we allow the plutocrats to keep it going.
The Netherlands is a tax haven, and
companies
including Uber are taking advantage of it.
Rather than convincing tax havens to change their laws, I think other
countries should cancel the deductability of payments to businesses in
those countries.
Proposing that the UK should
let
citizens write a new constitution, as Iceland did.
Bogus Johnson appears to be
lying
about negotiations with the EU in order to manipulate domestic
politics.
I think it would be wiser for the EU to cancel discussions with Bogus
so that he can't pretend he is on the verge of making a deal.
Artificial creation of a memory has been
done
in a lab in transgenic mice.
Although it is several big steps from there to mind control of humans,
it is not too early to think about where we need to stop this. And it
is certainly not too early to think about establishing democratic
control over the state, which is what we would need in order to stop
this at any future point.
"Activists plan
to release drones near [Heathrow] airport. Their possible arrest
is a small price to pay for fighting the climate crisis."
Amazon has tripled its income tax payments in the UK, from just barely
more than nothing
to little
more than nothing.
5
Biggest Corporate Lies About Unions.
Public
pressure eliminated use of face recognition on cameras in a retail
area in London.
Carrie Lam, who heads Hong Kong's government, was recorded telling
Hong Kong business owners
that she
wished she could quit but China was somehow stopping her. She
also told them they could not expect China to send its army in as a
"solution" to the inconvenience of protests.
Of course she could quit. She could flee to the US and ask for asylum.
Her whole family could go.
For a government to have a "CEO" is despicable in itself, but that
accurately describes the despicable governmental system of Hong Kong.
Interacting with wild animals, even coming close to them, can cause
them stress that injures them. But tourists now do
this seeking
an appealing photo.
Camden, New Jersey,
is trying
to organize a police department in place of the thug department it
used to have.
Cops are now trained in many ways to deal with problems without force.
Sometimes the British NHS treats nonviolent Extinction Rebellion protesters
as
if they were terrorists.
Many state schools in England are driving families into penury by
demanding students
wear expensive
customized uniforms.
I can think of two ways parents can work together to resist this swindle:
Why your free software project should
be independent
of GitHub.
A UN investigation is identifying war criminals in Yemen. There are
some
on all sides.
Elites are golfing
as
global heating effects destroy and kill. How much destruction and
death will it take before they stop?
"Enid
Blyton had racist views. But I still read her."
I agree that we would be fools to "cancel" writings from the past over
prejudice in them. Readers who understand what prejudice is will be
able to note it and criticize it as they read.
However, young or naive readers may simply accept it as normal, and
that is what we would want to prevent. Perhaps it would be good to
publish these works with a preface that points out the prejudice
mentioning a few instances and challenges the reader to spot other
instances.
Indirect evidence suggests that social media were
responsible
for a big increase in anxiety and depression in US college
students, around 2012.
Ring does not support face recognition …
yet.
If that rebuke is addressed to the plutocrats, the ones that Bolsonaro
and the bullshitter serve, it is valid. It doesn't seem fair when
addressed to me. I supported Lula; I still do. It is bad to lose a
crucial battle, but that's not the same as being on the wrong side.
Some cities are setting up
infrastructure
to help sex workers' safety and quality of life.
What remains to be done is find an effective way to free trafficked
workers (whether in sex work or some other kind of work).
Georgia Republicans are harassing their opponents with
subpoenas
based on no grounds.
The Republican Party stands for "power by hook or by crook."
Greta Thunberg says that
her
form of Asperger's syndrome makes her stronger.
Her rebuke makes Andrew Bolt look very small-minded and foolish.
However, his mockery may be effective with the right-wing audience he
hopes to influence. They often judge people by condemning those who
disrespect authority or seem somehow not to be as people "should" be.
Pointing out these things about Thunberg might reduce her influence
and that may be all he cares about.
As has happened many times before, a teenager in the US has been
convicted
of sending someone a nude photo of perself.
It should never be a crime to send a nude photo of yourself, not for
anyone of whatever age.
It could make sense to prohibit persuading a minor to send a nude
photo of perself, and redistributing one without permission.
The
Democratic
presidential race is heading towards Sanders vs Warren.
The article's title is misleading: Sanders is not "fighting" Warren
and neither is Warren "fighting" Sanders. I am very glad to see the
way that they compete but refuse to be enemies.
I would be terribly disappointed if one of them drops out and does
anything other than endorse the other.
Reportedly the al-Hawl refugee camp, set up for people who fled PISSI,
has been
infiltrated
by PISSI supporters who now control it. The Kurdish soldiers
meant to prevent this are outnumbered.
(satire) … horrified warehouse worker Paul Diaz awoke from
heavily medicated sleep Friday to find Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
welding
robotic limbs onto the stumps where his arms once were.
Calls to End Inhumane Border Conditions Aren't Enough. ICE (the
deportation thugs)
Must
Be Abolished.
The International Criminal Court tried to investigate some US war
crimes in Afghanistan. The US
created
obstacles which made the investigation impossible.
One more victory for crime.
Climate defense activists
plan
to shut down transportation in Washington DC.
The danger is enormous, and such annoying protests may be the only way
to make plutocratist officials allow actions to change course.
A voter made a video showing a voting machine
altering
the vote person had entered.
The cruel bastard shifted funds from disaster aid to
fund
imprisonment of more refugees.
This way he can cause suffering for potentially everyone located in
the US whether citizens or not.
Stiglitz: even supposing that CEOs have good will when they say that
income for stockholders is not the highest value, we
can't
count on them to change in practice.
Thugs entered a home without a warrant and
one
started choking a teenager who had properly refused to open the
door. The thug desisted after being informed he was on candid camera.
A lawsuit is not enough to redress this act of violence. It calls for
criminal prosecution.
Independent analysis of independently collected data says that
Uber
and Lyft keep 10% more of the customer's payment than they claim to
keep.
The companies say that is false but refuse to cooperate with trying to
verify it.
More about
brain-reading
software and freedom.
Brain reading is more intimate than sex. I think that "affirmative
consent for each step" is a little too strict for sex, but maybe it is
the right standard for neurotech.
DeVos's latest attack on students: if they were defrauded by schools,
they
must
still repay the loans that went to pay those schools.
PISSI has not been wiped out. It now
operates
as an underground terror group.
Jane Fonda describes knocking on doors and conversing with voters that
supported the conman — to
listen
and make a connection.
I think it is a good thing to do if your talents lean towards that.
Big Ag Is a
Major
Obstacle to Combating the Climate Crisis.
Jeremy Corbyn talks about
plans
to take back control of the UK from Bogus Johnson.
An important Massachusetts high school exam asked students to portray
the viewpoint of a white woman refusing to help a runaway slave. Some
black students were
so
upset by this that they did badly on the rest of the exam from that
point.
The ability to present viewpoints you disagree with, even strongly
oppose, requires empathy. Practising that must be a useful exercise;
I think I could have learned a lot if I had practiced it more. But we
shouldn't ask students to start that exercize in the middle of a
high-stakes exam. If each student does dozens of such exercizes, over
a period of a few months, with no special pressure, the student may
become comfortable with portraying attitudes that disgust per.
A study found that
12%
of pro football players developed cognitive problems in their 30s and
40s, in contrast to 2% of the general public.
Let's put an end to professional football. There are lots of
less-dangerous sports that people could obsess over, if they want to
obsess over a sport.
The bully is
considering
ordering another tax cut, mainly for the rich.
Non-rich Americans would get some benefit when they sell their houses,
but they don't do this very often and the benefit would be small by
comparison. What non-rich Americans need more is the government
spending that would be cut in order to avoid the deficit that this tax
cut will cause.
It adds up to dooH niboR.
Technology for deducing thoughts from observations of the brain is
still in its infancy, but it is
not
too early to discuss legal limits for it.
The right number 1 in this article, "to freely decide you want to use
a given neurotechnology or to refuse it," is obviously insufficient.
You have the right to decide whether an insurance company can track
your car's movements with a GPS box, but many people can't afford the
extra cost of insurance without tracking. You have the right to work
without a LinkedIn account, but many jobs will pass you by if you
don't.
We need a stronger version of that right, one which will stop
anyone from pressuring you to say yes.
A foreign mining company wants to open a gold mine that
could
poison Armenia's water supply. Protesters have blocked the mine,
but the company threatened to use business-supremacy treaties to sue
the country if the government does not attack the protesters.
The government of Armenia
should pull out of those
treaties and negotiate new treaties without ISDS ("I Sue
Democratic States").
Companies that make exploitative "investment" deals with a corrupt,
nondemocratic government deserve to lose the investment. That will
teach them not to make exploitative deals with a corrupt,
nondemocratic government.
Protests against fracking have been
effectively
banned in Britain. The protesters have lost the legal support
from Friends of the Earth because the organization can't afford the
risk of being made to pay the frackers' legal bills.
The frackers can make that prohibitively expensive just by spending a
lot.
Kashmiris report
beatings
and torture by the Indian army of occupation.
Since India is responsible for the lack of communications in Kashmir
and the lack of official responses, we must presume these accusations
are valid.
A homeless musician in LA was
murdered
while he slept. Someone set his tent on fire.
No word yet on the motive for this killing, but it illustrates the
fact that being homeless puts a person in many kinds of danger, not
least
destruction
of one's meager property by official cruelty.
Washington, DC, is
worse
than all 50 states in regard to poverty for children.
The bully's trade war with China
ricochets
and hits the Amazon forest.
This is a peculiar result, and I don't think it is a valid argument
for "free trade" (that is, for business-supremacy treaties).
The British constitution, which consists mostly of traditions, has
proved
unable
to stand up to the dishonesty-without-bounds of Bogus Johnson, who
wields the Queen's authority, never mind that he isn't nominally a
monarch.
It is not clear that a European-style president and written
constitution would keep Britain safe. That did not keep Hungary and
Poland safe. Likewise, the cheater is attacking the weaknesses of the
written US constitution.
President Clinton
accepted
responsibility for contributing to massive imprisonment in the US.
I think he is mistaken in claiming that his law was an important
factor in reducing crime. The crime rate fell in the 1990s because of
factors such as removing lead from gasoline in the late 70s.
Installing
red streetlights so bats can cross the road.
Bogus Johnson has
arranged
to shut down Parliament after just one week, to prevent it from
doing anything to alter his plan to take the UK out of the EU without
any trade deal. Since most MPs are against this, they are trying to
pass a law within that one week.
Meanwhile, Bogus is trying to present himself as the people's hero for
defeating Parliament. Right-wing authoritarians operate by
scapegoating and condemning democratic institutions. Bogus has found
a way to combine the two by making Parliament his scapegoat.
California Senator Pan, a pediatrician by profession, is pushing to
make vaccination requirements strict. An anti-vaxxer
attacked
him on the street.
The US has set a standard for use of air conditioning that
won't
fit its carbon budget, and the rest of the world is copying it.
The oil price shock of the 1970s made air conditioning (and buildings
designed to require it) a public concern. But that did not lead to
much change in construction practices.
Back then, I slept in a room without air conditioning. In periods of
hot weather, it was too hot for me to sleep, even with a window fan
and a fan blowing at me. I wish now that I knew what the temperature
was in my room, but I did not get a thermometer because knowing
then would have made no difference.
Leaked UN Draft Report Warns Rising, Warming Oceans
'Poised
to Unleash Misery' Worldwide.
Koch money failed to convince Phoenix voters to put an end to
construction
of light rail in that city.
Supermarkets [in the UK] Misleading Shoppers with
False
Savings.
The enemies of human civilization will soon be delighted that they
can
cut down the Tongass National Forest.
How Technology is
Hijacking
Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist.
I find it regrettable that the article talks of "consuming" whatever
you see on a web site.
The Environmental Pollution Agency
plans
to cancel the regulations that require fossil fuel extractors to limit
methane leaks.
Bolivia's president Morales is accused of
letting
business cut down part of the Amazon forest, and holding back on
fighting the fires.
Protecting ocean ecosystems is
linked
with curbing global heating.
Five prisoners in Guantanamo are
supposed
to have a trial soon. It is a special "military tribunal"
designed not to properly respect the rights of the accused.
Guantanamo prison now requires journalists to be accompanied all the
time and to submit their articles to
military
censorship.
The movement for independence of western Papua
has
come out in the open, very strong.
United Electrical Becomes
First
US Industrial Union to Endorse Green New Deal and Global Climate
Strike.
This union also supports Sanders for president.
Explaining the
fallacies
in arguments for choosing a plutocratist Democrat.
The Worker's Friend? Here’s How Trump Has
Waged
His War on Workers.
The bully's immigration prisons
refused
Congress access to inspect them.
Destruction
of satellites in war could bring on the "Kessler syndrome"
depicted in the film Gravity, making all space travel impossible.
This problem
has
already started, and it is getting worse, but very slowly. There
are efforts to design a system to clean up the debris.
When I saw the film Gravity, all I felt at the end was sadness for
this great loss. The survival of one astronaut made hardly any
difference relative to that.
"A sustainable environment means
consuming
less, not differently. With retail therapy losing its appeal,
that should be easy."
Oxfam Urges Shoppers
Not
to Buy New Clothes for a Month.
It should be easy. In most months, I don't buy any article of
clothing.
India has
declared
2 million residents of Assam to be non-citizens, supposedly
Bangladeshis though India made no effort to verify that.
The aim, I believe, is to kick out Muslims by labeling them as
foreigners, but some Hindus were thus designated also. Court cases
were decided in such a sloppy fashion you'd think it was Alabama.
In principle these people could be deported, but in practice
Bangladesh will not accept them. With the cruelty of the BJP, they
could be imprisoned until dead, or made into a caste of enslaved
workers.
Phone systems
don't
always track phone location data correctly. Errors can lead to
false criminal convictions.
In principle, they can also lead to false acquittals.
The crucial point about these errors is that they aren't enough
to make phone location tracking safe for society.
Workers in the sweatshop service economy are
inventing
ways to organize and even strike.
Gaming the system can get you something, but real victory comes only
when you make the system change. Unions, when they were strong,
achieved that by means of contracts with the company. These forms of
resistance rarely reach that point. They need support from the state.
To put an end to this oppression of workers, vote for Sanders and
Corbyn.
In Tucson summer, the heat and humidity are not quite at the
automatically fatal point, but they come near that point. This
can
kill people who are old or who are working vigorously outside.
A just international order
should
stop and punish ecocide as well as genocide.
It will be hard to get plutocratist governments to do this.
They are on the side of destruction.
DEA agents
regularly
intimidate people into allowing their luggage to be searched, and
hardly anyone dares to stand on per rights not to be searched.
They make use of the passenger name records to find and intimidate
individual suspects.
Sometimes they
steal
people's money on mere suspicion.
A Teachable Moment:
Educators
Must Join Students in Demanding Climate Justice.
To Rescue Democracy, We Must Revive The
Reforms
Of The Progressive Era (1900-1910). And more.
Various governments are
twisting
the 80-year commemorations of World War II events to their various
political ends.
The assassin who killed an exiled Chechen rebel in Germany last week
was apparently
sent
by the Russian military.
Extreme weather has
destroyed
12% of France's wine production this year.
Governments have focused on fossil fuel income and disregarded the
loss of other income that fossil fuels increasingly cause.
Colorado could elect a progressive Democrat as senator, but
the
Democratic establishment is supporting plutocratist Hickenlooper.
(satire) Widespread human-caused fires … revealed a small tribe
of
isolated
rich sociopaths who are completely untouched by consequence,
…
"Decimate" is an interesting word because it means to take or destroy
one tenth of something. If what you mean is not about one tenth, why
not say simply "destroy", "ravage" or "ruin"?
When mainstream media present unusually hot weather as enjoyable, they
are
lulling
you to ignore a fever.
The bully shows total contempt for law by
telling
officials to break laws to build a border wall, and he will pardon
whatever crimes they may commit in the process.
By January, I wonder, will he pardon murders?
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter to cosponsor the Pregnant Workers Fairness
Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
New York City raised the minimum wage for restaurant workers, and
right-wingers said this would cause restaurants to fail — but
they are
doing
very well.
Salvini used his coalition partner, the Five-Star Party, to seize
opportunities to show off his cruelty and recruit support based on
cruelty. Recently he decided it was time to dump the partner and have
another election, after which he hoped for absolute control. However,
the
other parties put together a coalition and there will probably not
be an election.
He remains dangerous, but at least he won't be able to look so tough.
Side-view mirrors on cars
may
be replaced by cameras.
If the cameras were used only to show the driver the view, at the
moment, I wouldn't object. But if they record, they are a
surveillance threat.
I propose a law that cameras installed in a car by the manufacturer
must be designed not to record or transmit the video anywhere. No
exceptions.
The ring door spy camera system has
"partnewships"
with 400 thug departments.
A US border thug has pled guilty for
violently
attacking a border crosser.
Being punched in the face is not part of the legal treatment
of unauthorized immigrants.
Politics-As-Usual Can't Fix the Climate Crisis. Maybe It's Time to
Try a
Citizens'
Assembly.
India: 10 Men Sentenced to
Life
[imprisonment] for Killing of Dalit Christian (for trying to marry
the sister of one of them).
Cathay Pacific Airlines
fired
two employees under orders from China.
Britain's anti-smoking policies are effective: cigarette use has
fallen
by 25% since 2011.
Some fraction of them will have been replaced by e-cigarettes, but
those are surely not as dangerous as ordinary cigarettes.
New York's governor, a rather right-wing Democrat, is
blocking
the creation of safe injection places for addicts to use.
The policy of criminalizing opioid addicts, rather than helping them,
is a considerable part of the cause of deaths.
As Papua New Guinea prepares to allow its imprisoned refugees (which
it has held on behalf of Australia) move to the capital city, it has
also
stopped
providing them food and money to live on.
Providence, RI, has attracted kids to parks by giving them
opportunities
for unsupervised play.
The bully has made the Federal Election Commission completely inactive
by not appointing members; now it
does
not have a quorum.
Republicans had already made the FEC nearly useless by
appointing
partisan cheaters who would never enforce complaints against
Republicans. It's one of many ways in which Republicans try to
steal elections. The bully didn't really win the 2016 election
— he
got
the last few necessary electoral votes by cheating in a few
states.
Atlanta has convicted a thug for a
violent
attack on a criminal who was surrendering with his hands up.
Bravo! We need to prosecute thugs who commit gross violence
and not only when it is fatal.
Even better, the other cops who were present acted like police
officers, not like thugs.
US
citizens: call
on the Department of Justice to Block the CBS-Viacom merger.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone: call
on BlackRock to stop financing deforestation of the Amazon region.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Bogus Johnson wants to knock Parliament for a loop so he can impose a
neoliberal fate on
Britain, lying
all the way.
Parliament will have one week to stop him.
The
United Flooded States of America organizes Americans whose homes
have been flooded for collective action, such as demanding aid for
moving to higher ground.
The GDPR may be developing some teeth: a school in
Sweden has
been fined for using face recognition to take attendance.
Global heating will threaten Hajj pilgrims by making Mecca so hot that
just being there can cause heat stress. This may happen occasionally
as
soon as next year.
Will this be enough to sway the heart of Salafi Arabia's acting king,
and the other Muslim countries that sell fossil fuels?
China is arresting prominent supporters of democracy in Hong Kong,
hoping that the protests will collapse without them — but the
protests have no organizers,
and they
continue anyway.
Joshua Wong (one of
them) Predicted
Hong Kong Crackdown in Interview Before Arrest.
Prisoners in the US now use prepaid purchasing cards as a form of
cash. They also
use various
commodities as money.
Some refugees from India are on hunger strike in US immigration
prisons. Several
are being
force-fed, which violates their right to refuse medical treatment.
One of them is in danger of being killed by incompetent medical care.
The Taliban and PISSI
are killing
human rights activists in Afghanistan, and the US-supported
government doesn't care about them.
Businesses promote "green" initiatives
that make
only a tiny difference but may save them money.
If the hotel room is 75 F, I will need a powerful fan in order to
sleep.
Use of leather
is directly
pushing the destruction of the Amazon forest. Apparently the
production of beef doesn't produce enough leather as a byproduct.
Many US schools require students to
lock
their phones into a pouch during the school day.
This seems to be a good thing, as far as I can tell from the article,
but it doesn't do the whole job. It ought to block the phone's radio
reception and transmission, so that the phone can't track the
students' movements in school. It should also block sound; otherwise
any phone can keep listening to the whole class, if its software has
been remotely modified to do that.
One of the ways Israel inflicts suffering on Palestinians in Gaza is
by
limiting electricity
there. Israel just cut it in half.
US citizens:
call on the
Senate to reject Steven Menashi as a federal judge.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to pass the No President is Above the Law Act, so
presidents that are criminals can be prosecuted after they leave
office.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to Oppose Hyten's confirmation.
US citizens:
call
on Congress and states to end the copays for medical care in
prison.
The Palestinian farmers of Beit Ummar face continual violent attacks
from the nearby Israeli colonies. They are
organizing
nonviolent resistance.
This is
part
of a general plan to force Palestinians out and annex the land.
Sanders and Warren advocate
pushing
Israel and Palestine towards a two-state deal.
It was
Netanyahu's
toadying to the bully that made it acceptable in mainstream US
political discourse to condemn Israel's occupation of Palestine, and
advocate using pressure to change it rather than merely begging.
The article speaks of "anti-Israel Democrats", but that is unfair.
Sanders and Warren are not against Israel, they are against Israel's
occupation of Palestine. That is also my position, and I am very glad
to support US presidential candidates who advocate it.
More on how Netanyahu was
obeying
orders from the bullshitter.
Ecuador
tried
to imprison Ricardo Patiño, one of Correa's ministers, for trying
to launch a wave of protests. He fled to Peru before the order was
made.
Sorry that I have only a reference in Spanish.
The protests were going to be
against
the IMF's "help".
Many visitors to the US report being sent back after border thugs
search their phones, reportedly
on
account of things said by people they know. Currently it seems
they are mostly Muslims, but there is no telling what group the thugs
might target next.
Nestle wants to take
more
water from Florida's Santa Fe river than the river can sustain.
Peaceful protests like this human chain
help
to counteract the violence and cynicism shrouding the city (of
Hong Kong).
However, the spell didn't take on China's satrap for Hong Kong, Ms
Lam, who
threatens
to declare something comparable to martial law.
When a country accepts "help" from the IMF, it gets a
permanent
jolt of oligarchy and inequality. Sometimes injustice, too.
One of the bully's backers
owns
companies heavily involved in destroying the Amazon forest.
California Uber and Lyft Drivers
Rally
for Bill Granting Rights to Contract Workers.
The UK set up a media web site to lead Muslims away from extremism by
raising
other important social and political issues.
It seems like a good idea to me, but why treat it as a secret?
Is there some other side to it that we still don't know about?
The west is being destroyed, not by migrants, but by the fear of
migrants. In country after country,
the
ghosts of the fascists have rematerialised … They have
successfully convinced their populations that the greatest threat to
their nations isn’t government tyranny or inequality or climate
change, but immigration.
Sanders's
plan
to protect media from dangerous consolidation: block mergers, undo
some past consolidation, fund independent media, and limit the
dominance of Facebook and Google over media.
I'd like to see more details of how he would limit the dominance of
Facebook and Google, but in principle I'm in favor. I support the
rest of the plan, too.
This would be a candidate for using my proposed progressive tax on
business to pressure media giants to split up.
US regulations on lead in the water supply
should
be much more strict, and we should replace all the lead water
pipes.
Meanwhile, they can teach their children how to respond with defiance
if anyone in the school sneers at them for not having the fancy
expensive school-specific uniform: "My parents are right to prioritize
things that we really need. If you want to blame someone, blame the
Tories for allowing schools to demand expensive uniforms which are a
burden on students' families. And for making so many Britons poor."
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