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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.
Hong Kong's press freedom is threatened by the business ties of its mainstream media, much as occurs in the US, but Hong Kong journalists are often physically attacked too.
Unidentified professional soldiers have seized the regional parliament of the Crimea on behalf of Russia.
I suppose this was arranged by Russia.
Egyptian workers have concluded that the new government will do nothing for them, and have started a wave of strikes.
Documents Say Navy Knew Fukushima Dangerously Contaminated the USS Reagan.
DOJ Still Ducking Scrutiny After Misleading Supreme Court on Surveillance.
The UK Conservatives reject plans to reduce child poverty. I guess they conflict with the Conservatives' plans to increase poverty.
The US Senate is pursuing Credit Suisse for helping 22000 Americans evade US taxes.
GCHQ collected Yahoo webcam images of almost 2 million people, some of them nude.
It's irrelevant for investigation but handy for blackmail.
Author Stieg Larsson made progress in investigating the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme.
The Prevailing Myth of Consumer Clout Distracts Us From the Reality of Cartel And Monopoly.
Proposed geoengineering methods have inherent limits and can't counteract global heating.
The US NAS and the Royal Society go on record affirming that global heating has not ceased since 2000.
A South Korean missionary arrested months ago in North Korea has confessed he was setting up a spy ring. Under the circumstances, I am skeptical of this confession. Truth is of little importance to the North Korean state.
Bullying people to make false confessions is, alas, not limited to North Korea.
Fast food companies are working hard to market unhealthful foods to children.
Foreign workers in Qatar and some other Gulf states are forced into a sort of indentured servitude called Kafala.
The cost of caring for disabled middle-class old people in the US regularly bankrupts them.
Amnesty International has accused Israeli soldiers
of killing
and wounding many Palestinian civilians for no reason.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
These soldiers enjoy almost total impunity.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to oppose two anti-environment bills.
Everyone:
call
on Proctor and Gamble to commit to stop buying palm oil made via
deforestation.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The Australian government offers aid to farmers hit by drought now, but hides from the need to stop making drought more frequent.
A 30% insufficiency in fresh water is predicted for 2030.
I think the fresh water scarcity demonstrates that humanity needs a new ethic of reproduction and resource use.
A UN warning: the effect of fracking is to delay the adoption of renewable energy.
Companies are trying to make plastic by taking CO2 out of the air.
Plastics made in this way should not have to compete on an equal basis with plastics made from petroleum. Rather, they should be subsidized through a greenhouse gas emissions tax, which in their case would be negative (a subsidy).
15-year-old Palestinian prisoner Ubaida Asaid, who is imprisoned without charges, needed two hunger strikes to get transferred to a political prison rather than being locked up with criminals.
Convicted anti-fracking protester Natalie Hynde calls for more to resist fracking.
The US continues to claim that it works to "promote democracy", although its actions often hardly fit that description.
Tiny GPS trackers on birds are providing a wealth of surprising information about their migration practices.
I'm entirely in favor of this, but the threat of using such trackers on people should be obvious.
Right-wing criticism of needed cuts in the US Army illustrate the political power of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about.
The Manifold Lies of Chris Christie.
The US will take steps to make school meals less fattening.
This seems like a positive step, but the fact that it needs the support of beverage companies illustrates the lack of democracy in the US. In a democracy, the people would be strong enough to adopt policies that some businesses don't like.
Please don't buy any Coca Cola Company products; please support the world-wide boycott of Coca Cola Company, launched because of the murder of union organizers in Colombia.
Credit cards will be connected with cell-phone location tracking.
Schemes like this, that pressure people to let themselves be tracked, worry me greatly for the future. However, this one will only pressure those that are already surrendering to pressure, by paying with credit cards. Don't be tracked — pay cash!
A few Palestinian children threw stones at some Israeli occupation soldiers, so the soldiers fired tear gas at a crowd of fleeing children.
Israel arrested a Palestinian journalist for calling an Israeli official "the mayor of occupied Jerusalem".
Does that look like a crime to you? I don't know whether I agree with the statement or not, simply because I don't know the pertinent facts about that man's office; but even if the statement is a stretch, it must not be a crime.
For a Palestinian, getting a permit to bring a 7-year-old child to Gaza after surgery is not easy.
Cutting back on nurses in European hospitals increases the death rate after surgery.
US hospitals cut back on nurses 20 years ago. A friend who was a nurse quit the profession rather than take legal responsibility for supervising lots of untrained personnel, more than she could effectively supervise, and be at risk of a lawsuit if any of them screwed up.
People who smoke a few cigarettes a day underestimate the danger to their health.
[Somali] Security Agents Still Hound Journalist After Detaining, Torturing Him.
Kareem Khan was grabbed by Pakistani thugs and tortured for campaigning against US drone attacks.
Turkish PM Erdogan is accused of corruption with phone call recordings he claims are falsified.
I don't know what the truth is about these recordings, but it is clear that he is the enemy of freedom in Turkey.
Iranian journalist and dissident Mohammad Nurizad was attacked and arrested by thugs as he protested in front of the "intelligence ministry".
In the Crimea, with a Russian-descent majority, there is agitation for secession from Ukraine.
It seems to me that if the inhabitants of the Crimea want to become part of Russia, they should be allowed to do so; therefore, I suggest committing to hold a plebiscite in two years time to decide this.
That will give the Crimeans a chance to see whether the government of Ukraine is democratic and to think about whether they really prefer to be ruled by Putin.
North Korean escaper Park Sang Hak sends balloons with leaflets over the sky of North Korea.
The US Army
infiltrated
antiwar protesters in Washington State.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Chinese Man Demands Local Government Repay Cost Of His Treadmill In Landmark Anti-Pollution Lawsuit.
Over 60 West Virginia Facilities Could Contaminate The Elk River's Water Supply, Report Finds.
9 of the 10 most unhappy US states are run by Republicans.
A Uighur Chinese faces possible execution for calling for independence for the Uighurs.
I have no opinion on the question of independence for the Uighurs, but criminalizing his point of view is clearly wrong.
Pilots that flew US planes that had previously been used to drop Agent Orange on Vietnam were exposed to the toxin, perhaps to high levels of it.
Keep this in mind with regard to the corn that is designed to be resistant to Agent Orange.
Don't shrink the US post office — what the US needs is jobs.
A complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a good idea.
Which expenses the media blame for tight
budgets reflects
assumptions about values.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
When we're talking about proprietary software such as Mr Bill profits from, don't get distracted by the price paid for it; that's a secondary problem: proprietary software is an injustice even if it costs nothing.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which was supposed to hold nuclear waste and never ever leak, is leaking.
I'm not sure that this leak is dangerous, but until people understand how it happened, there is no way of guessing how much more may leak.
Ireland faces a lot of embarrassment for imprisoning anti-military protester Margaretta D'Arcy.
Right-wing extremists have been arrested for plotting an attack on the US government.
I have no more sympathy for these right-wing militants than for Islamists, but in both cases we must beware of letting the state manufacture plots to prosecute people who would otherwise never have done any harm.
Foreign domestic workers in Qatar are subject to slave-like conditions.
This happens in the UK too, and it's unacceptable in either place.
Personalized "news" feeds are atomizing society and facilitating well-funded pseudoscience such as global heating denialism.
For a thug to visit a person with a sign is not violence and doesn't deny that person's human rights. Thugs often bully and threaten people, but if all the thug does is show up at someone's door with a sign, that is not bullying.
Thus far, I don't see any reason why this needs to be restricted or why it matters what the algorithm is that selects people for visits.
The real question here is, does that visit tend to make a person less likely to commit crimes? And if so, what other effects does it tend to have?
If the visits — or other consequences of selection — tend to have harmful effects on the person selected, that would be a real problem, and whether race indirectly causes people to be selected would become a real issue.
The patent system is, at best, not work keeping.
A $10.10 Minimum Wage Would Make A DVD At Walmart Cost One Cent More.
U.S. Lags Behind World in Temp Worker Protections.
President Obama Is Fighting Cuts to the Military, Not Demanding Them.
The US Should Respect Venezuela's Democracy.
The growth and retreat of the giant Qori Kalis glacier in Peru has been linked to world temperature.
Public Knowledge has condemned a bill to legalize unlocking of portable phones because it has been modified so as to endorse in principle the idea that copyright should control this activity.
I agree. The DMCA provisions that ban breaking DRM must be repealed entirely and replaced with a ban on DRM (digital restrictions management).
Everyone: tell the CEO of ExxonMobil that he's not the only one whose backyard shouldn't be fracked in.
Don't let the oil companies drive us to frack and fruin.
Denial of global heating is a form of pseudoscience.
LinkedIn is setting up a censored Chinese subsidiary.
A man in Japan tried to kill strangers, but since he couldn't find a gun, he had to use a car, and didn't succeed in killing anyone.
New York City postponed a plan to wake up all the homeless people sleeping on the E train line.
Edward Snowden's moral courage, and why massive surveillance made it necessary.
I know something about moral courage. Thousands of programmers could, in 1983, have decided to reject the enticing profits of proprietary software and develop a free operating system, but I'm the only one who did it.
I had the determination to swim against the current, and keep doing so despite ridicule, insults, and attempts to convince me to ruin everything by compromising too far. But I didn't have to face a threat to put me in prison.
Snowden's act demanded far more moral courage than mine, and I honor him for that.
Boko Haram
murdered
school children sleeping in their dormitory.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Prestigious journalistic outlets now publish advertising designed to look just like news articles.
The perpetrators of mass murder in Indonesia in 1965/6 remain in power and honored. A documentary that offered them a chance to re-enact the crimes they are proud of has started a debate about the crime.
China's air pollution is so bad that it interferes with agriculture.
If Hillary Is the Only
Candidate, Where
Does She Stand on Keystone XL?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
I won't vote for a right-winger like Hillary Clinton. I did not vote for her husband in 1996 after I had seen what a right-winger he was, and I did not vote for Obama for the same reason. It was clear even in 2008 that he was talking about "Change" to avoid taking a stand for any important change.
I think it will be an advance if a woman can get elected president, just as it was an advance that a black man can get elected president, but I won't support a candidate because of that person's sex or race. Nor will I support the Democrats merely because Republicans might be worse. Voting for the "lesser of two evils" is a road to ever worse. If Ms Clinton is the Democratic candidate, I will vote Green (again).
I hope to have the chance to vote for Elizabeth Warren.
Former plantation colonies of the UK want reparations for the slave trade.
The descendants of slaves in the US deserve reparations because the effects continue. Whether this applies to most of the countries in the Caribbean, I don't know, but Haiti certainly deserves reparations from France.
The people of Ukraine
should think
carefully before making a deal with the EU.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Proposing a world-wide fishing police force.
Yanukovych's hidden millions spotlight how easy it is to hide the fruit of corruption offshore.
Volcanic eruptions since 2000 have caused a temporary cooling that cancels out part of the heating effect of greenhouse gases.
To cancel it out entirely would require a higher level of vulcanism. However, that would work only for a time. As we pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, cancelling them out would require a steadily increasing level of vulcanism.
Setting aside the harm those eruptions would do if they occurred, there is no reason to expect them to happen.
Moreover, eruptions can also emit greenhouse gases, so over the long term they can make things worse.
GCHQ uses dirty tricks to ruin people's reputations. It uses this tactic against dissidents who are in no sense terrorists.
There may be an active whistleblower inside the NSA now.
Is digital delivery of bills and such more sustainable than mailing paper? It's not clear.
What is clear to me is that I'd rather not have the information going through the internet. I don't do banking over the internet, and I get my statements in paper.
Anatomy of the Deep State:
Beneath Veneer
of Democracy, The Permanent Ruling Class.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Hypocrisies of the Super-Rich.
Australians rallied against the government's secrecy about how it is treating refugees.
Sea Shepherd says Japanese whaling ships attacked one of its vessels in an attempt to damage it.
Australia's right-wing government does not know what is happening because it cancelled a commitment to send a ship to monitor the whaling fleet.
The anti-Putin protesters of 2012 have
been sentenced
to 4 years in prison, a little less
than some
US protesters.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Economic growth in Africa is going mainly to the rich.
I suspect "free trade" and other neoliberal dooH niboR policies that are designed to transfer wealth to the rich.
11 million homes are empty in Europe, as many are homeless.
Homeless is still increasing in Ireland.
US citizens: call on Obama
to cut the nuclear
weapons budget.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Ever since Obama told the NSA to stop snooping on Angela Merkel, it has snooped on her aides instead to get the same data.
Obama's men continue promoting the TPP with a long string of falsehoods and half-truths.
Ukraine now faces the threat of IMF shock treatments and "free trade" with the EU.
Uganda's president signed the anti-homosexuality and censorship bill.
Artificial intelligence could make massive surveillance even more dangerous.
Everyone:
support
Russian environmentalist Yevgeniy Vitishko.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call on the US
Olympic Committee to reject Billionaire Polluters as a sponsor.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on the EPA not to lift Billionaire Polluters' suspension from new
federal contracts.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Make BP mean Billionaires Punished.
Some US businesses install lots of sensors to monitor employees' movements and conversations.
The proposed HTTP 2 spec includes allowing ISP proxies to decrypt communications between your computer and any web site. Just what the NSA wants!
Uganda's president Museveni is backtracking on signing the anti-homosexuality legislation.
The most clearly unjust provision I've seen listed in this law is its prohibition on expressing the position that homosexuality is acceptable. I'm not saying this provision is more unjust than the others (I am not trying to compare them on that dimension), but rather that the injustice of this provision is the most indisputable, because it violates freedom of speech.
In Ukraine, Chaos and Violence Hide Nefarious Role of US.
This article points out a side of the situation which our media tend to ignore; but it seems to ignore the other side which our media focus on. President Yanukovych's thugs were the ones that started shooting the protesters, and as long as they continued, there was no reason to criticize the protesters for shooting back.
A lesson in real life for the foolish judges that tell activists they should limit themselves to the ineffective and ignored methods of protest that have not been prohibited.
If any lawful method of protest starts to be effective, the state finds an excuse to ban it or crush it. Consider how the Occupy protests were violently crushed. Now consider the ag-gag bills.
Global heating's reduction of Arctic sea ice has accelerated global heating worse than scientists expected.
Is drug kingpin Guzmán the Mexican state's prisoner or its ally and honored guest?
Everyone: tell the Justice Department that protesting nuns shouldn't be imprisoned while banksters enjoy impunity.
It is impossible to tell whether some of the people in the Yemeni
wedding party were supporters of al Qa'ida, but even if some were, is
it right to
attack a
wedding party?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The US military produces propaganda clothing in foreign sweatshops.
Egypt's military rulers are saying the US is plotting against them while continuing to accept lots of US support.
Honeybees are spreading diseases to bumblebees.
Egyptian soldiers attacked alleged terrorists from helicopters.
If the people attacked were indeed bombers associated with al-Qa'ida, that's a good reason to arrest and prosecute them; but does Egypt need to attack criminals in Egypt with the army? This attack is the sort of thing one would expect in a civil war.
Pension funds that invest in fossil fuels are ruining their clients' descendants' lives.
The campaign for privatization of US public schools started from a false report of a nonexistent fall in US educational results.
Governments that want more control over the Internet are using the revelations about government snooping as an excuse to promote dangerous changes in "internet governance."
The Athabasca River in Alberta is being contaminated by waste from tar sands oil, which was disposed of in the cheapest possible way: dumped on the ground.
US citizens: call on Congress to preserve funding for vital conservation programs.
The UK government still denies that its policies have pushed many Britons into hunger, and still pretends that they are poor because they are lazy, as an excuse to waste their time applying for an inadequate quantity of jobs.
Food banks are admirable, but their inadequacy demonstrates the need for adequate government aid for the poor.
Anti-Putin protesters from 2012 have
been convicted
of "rioting" and attacking thugs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
It's probably the "He hit my stick with his head" accusation that thugs around the world like to make after they attack someone. Even in the US, courts tend to believe the thugs if there's no hard evidence to the contrary.
California is considering a law to make schools protect personal data of students.
The proposal is well-meaning, but I think its provisions are inadequate because the US government will find some way to collect that personal data.
The law really should order schools not to release data about their students to any one except the student, or to another school that the student wishes to enroll in.
Fix the Debt's campaign to cut government spending on the non-rich has failed.
However, if Obama is presenting a smaller deficit as an improvement, rather than a sign of a failure to stimulate the economy, he is still a right-wing influence.
US citizens: phone the Bureau of Prisons to demand an end to (illegal) threats against whistleblower John Kiriakou.
The IRS proposals for campaign spending by 501(c)(4) organizations
don't
go far enough to stop them from filtering dark money from
billionaires and businesses.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The FCC
is trying to
defend network neutrality with half-measures instead of the common
carrier status that really should apply.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Venezuela is filtering the internet as a reaction to the protests.
US citizens: tell the Secretary of the
Interior not
to allow drilling for oil in Arctic waters.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Islamist fanatics in Syria reportedly killed a girl for being used by Facebook.
Being used by Facebook is bad enough — these people need help quitting, not punishment.
Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Says Any Damage Was Caused by Reporters Who Exposed It.
Everyone: call on Ms Clinton to heed Jeffrey Sachs and oppose the Keystone XL pipeline.
Recommendations for what the UK NHS should do to allay fears of misuse of people's medical records.
I think this does not go far enough. No companies should be given access to any of this data. We can't trust pharma companies to investigate the effects of their own drugs, so that work should be done by universities with no direct contact with the company.
In Ukraine, the protesters and the president have made a long-term peace deal.
US citizens: call on Senator Leahy to change the practice that enables a solitary Republican senator to veto a judge nominee.
US citizens: tell the FDA to ban the practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock even when they are not sick.
The Committee for Public Safety — oops, Department of Homeland Security — has not canceled its plans for systematic tracking of drivers via license plate recognition.
It should be illegal for companies to systematically accumulate records of license plates unless they are (1) invalid or (2) subject to specific surveillance orders issued by a court.
Ukraine's parliament removed President Yanukovych, but the country may be in the process of splitting up anyway.
Accusations that Germany and the US are paying protesters in Ukraine.
A new canal through Nicaragua could cause tremendous ecological damage and is likely to be of no benefit to most Nicaraguans.
Container shipping has no need for a canal. The containers can be offloaded at one coast, then shipped by rail to the other coast. This would require a little more work, but (with a fast train line) could even reduce shipping time.
A study concludes that hot weather increases violent crime and theft.
Global heating might then lead to an increase, though it is not certain that the effects of week-to-week temperature variation would apply also to a permanent temperature rise.
Supposed limits on US surveillance of journalists' communications are meaningless because they don't apply to using the PAT RIOT act against journalists.
AT&T's surveillance report is more misleading than accurate, because it omits 80 million NSA targets.
Welcome to Algorithmic Prison.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operated entrapment mills across the US.
A proposed ban on aiding military interrogations won 53% of the votes at the American Psychological Association's conference, but failed because it needed a 2/3 majority to pass.
Egyptian thugs crammed 45 prisoners into a van meant for 24, left them for hours in intense heat without water or air, then finished off most of them with a tear gas bomb.
Then, of course, the thugs made up lies to excuse this.
US citizens: call on the FAA to respect the wildlife refuge on Merritt Island.
US citizens: call for regulating emissions of methane.
Meet The Family The Tar Sands Industry Wants To Keep Quiet.
Cop Allegedly Shot And Killed Teenage Boy After Mistaking His Wii Controller For A Gun.
The important issue is not the mistake made on this one occasion but the general factors that make such mistakes likely.
The Troubling Fine Print In The Claim That Raising The Minimum Wage Will Cost Jobs.
Saturated with Oil Money, Texas Legislature Saved Industry from Pollution Rule.
US courts are moving to discard the "third party" doctrine which says that people have no "expectation of privacy" in information that they provide to a "third party".
If this change is universally adopted, it will only partly reduce the harm done by accumulating massive digital dossiers about everyone.
Colombia spied on email between FARC peace negotiators and foreign journalists.
The FARC is Colombia's second-worst terrorist group. The worst one is the army-backed paramilitaries.
US citizens:
call
on the Navy to drop its plans for sonar exercises that will kill
lots of marine mammals.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Prostitutes in Italy demand the right to pay tax and get a pension.
New Report Exposes America's Highest Paid Government Workers.
Wal-Mart
firmly
denies the idea that it will give its workers a raise.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
However, the worst thing about working for Wal-Mart is that it usually is too few hours to make a living, and has no benefits or job security.
EU citizens: call on certain MEPs to support a specific aspect of network neutrality when they vote on Feb 24.
People are exposed to low levels of toxic and hormone-disrupting substances throughout their lives, as they leach into food from plastic packaging. There is very little research into the effects of this.
It is a difficult question to study; there is no way to do a controlled experiment, and it is hard to find comparable populations that differ mainly in how much they keep food and beverages in plastic packaging.
Press under Threat on Anniversary of Libyan Revolution.
Journalist Luke Harding reports that someone was messing with his word processor as he wrote a book about Snowden.
US citizens: call on Rep Pelosi and Senator Reid
to advocate
changes going the opposite of fast track.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Privatization of electricity in parts of Australia turned out to be inefficient: it caused prices there to shoot up.
High prices of electricity might have a positive effect: incentivizing conservation efforts. But it would have been better to do that with a tax increase, rather than giving away the increase to private parties.
Wages in Australia have been falling, but right-wingers warn of the danger of a "wage explosion".
This is standard right-wing tactic.
Australia has put refugees in danger by leaking their personal data to the countries they fled from.
In the UK: opt out of the UK's
lax medical records sharing system.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Islamic oppression reaches a new extreme: in Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to go to a medical clinic without a male guardian.
New Hampshire is considering a bill to restrict local thugs from acquiring armored vehicles, machine guns, and so on.
The local citizens would be empowered to permit exceptions.
Let's have this in every state!
Criticizing "voluntourism": don't think that your brief participation in an aid project will be constructive if you don't have a special skill to do the job.
HIV denialists are using the DMCA to censor criticism of their video.
Vindictive San Francisco thugs arrested and beat up a man for helping people who had a bicycle accident.
Some poor Venezuelans have joined in protests.
It would take many Snowdens to give Americans a picture
of all the
things the US government is secretly doing that might be
dangerous.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Snipers killed protesters in Kiev.
Ukrainian thugs burned down the internet tent at the protest camp.
The western part of Ukraine is starting to break away.
Naturally, the government calls the protesters "terrorists".
I hear that some sort of deal has been made.
The Ethiopian woman raped in Sudan won't be executed, but faces a fine she surely cannot pay.
Al-Jazeera journalists are now on trial in Egypt for their journalism.
South Africa tried to force a gay rights activist unto a flight to Uganda where he would face imprisonment for his political views.
Drone
Report: US
Must Account for 'Turning Wedding Into a Funeral'.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Chevron: if our frack well explodes, you get a free pizza!
Readers have served Penguin India with a demand to surrender the copyright on The Hindus if it is not going to publish the book there.
I wonder if Doniger's contract says the rights revert to her when the book goes out of print.
The existence of one billionaire who plans to support candidates that intend to curb global heating does not make it ok to let billionaires determine the results of elections.
The massive extinction at the end of the Permian period occurred in a time span between 10,000 and 110,000 years — rapid in geological time.
One candidate is a supervolcano that emitted tremendous amounts of CO2.
US citizens: tell Congress to bring the minimum wage raise bill to a vote.
A Republican extremist claims he wants to reduce poverty by pushing more of the right-wing policies that have increased poverty in the US so far.
Rand Paul: telling Americans that the NSA spies on us all does not make it right to do so.
I disagree with his "cheating spouse" analogy, since I do not believe monogamy should be a requirement for love.
Right-wing ideologues deny global heating because confronting it requires massive governmental activity.
This is not to say there is no room for markets in preventing this disaster. One of the advantages of the carbon tax is that it puts the free market to work in reducing emissions.
One good use of massive surveillance surveils forests rather than people.
A web comic explains the injustice of the TPP.
Even if we defeat the TPP, we should not forget the politicians who are trying to inflict it on us. They have proved they are on the wrong side, the 1%'s side.
Ukrainian protesters defeated riot thugs to take control of Independence Square, but it seems the right-wing extremists are taking the lead among them.
A delusional man faces the death penalty in Pakistan for blasphemy.
This law is the reason I will not go to Pakistan. Nobody should go there.
More about the protests in Venezuela.
I do not find it implausible that the US has helped organize the protests. I do not find it implausible that a provocateur (either working for the Venezuelan government or working for the US) has killed people on both sides.
In any case, it is clearly wrong to prosecute the leader of a protest because violence breaks out later. This resembles what the US did to the Haymarket martyrs.
The cleanup manager at the Hanford nuclear facility was fired after informing the public about safety faults.
Previous whistleblowers were fired, too. I guess we can't believe anything the employees say unless they get fired.
Republican state politicians in Tennessee bullied Volkswagen workers, who then voted not to unionize.
Republicans have seized on a study that predicts that increasing the minimum wage would eliminate 500,000 jobs but lift 900,000 workers out of poverty.
The minimum wage needs to be combined with a welfare system for those who are unemployed. That way, all low-paid workers benefit, whether they are still working or not.
To work out an example, suppose half a million jobs are eliminated, and 50 million minimum-wage workers get a raise. If those workers pay 3% of their increase in income as tax, that would cover the costs of supporting the other half-million, and all will be better off than they are now.
This sort of system to transfer income from the rich (who have grabbed an ever-increasing share) to the rest is exactly what we need.
A new land-grab for US farmland by big companies threatens to
increase
consolidation and could make working conditions worse.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
G8 Brings Big Ag Colonialism to Africa
It's the usual neoliberal "solution": big foreign companies lobby for permission to "invest", which means taking control.
The G8 New Alliance facilitates investors' "access to land", which means local people lose their land and end up in penury.
Another aspect is pushing farmers to seeds they can't reproduce. This makes them dependent on agribusiness and reduces diversity.
The G8 New Alliance also threatens Ethiopia's distributed seed bank.
Australia is practically giving away its natural resources to foreign mining companies.
I would guess that a few strategically chosen Australians receive some of those profits.
US citizens: sign this
petition for bringing back postal banking.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Ecuador's oil drilling in the Yasuni National Park is supported by roads it calls "trails", as it pushes indigenous people off their land. To cover up the truth, it restricts access by journalists.
I would not criticize Ecuador for starting the planning to exploit the area before formally announcing failure of its plan to permanently protect the area. That plan depended on donations from wealthier countries, and it was already clear that the funds requested were not forthcoming. Its failure was not Ecuador's fault.
However, it appears that Ecuador treated this as more than a contingency plan.
Meanwhile, Chevron, which is grasping at even imaginary straws to get out of its judgment for pollution in Ecuador, is twisting the RICO law to claim that any criticism of Chevron is "racketeering".
US citizens: call for extending unemployment benefits by cutting the war budget.
Kellogg has agreed to buy palm oil only from suppliers that protect wildlife and human rights.
We will have to keep after Kellogg to truly implement this agreement, since it will have an incentive to wink at abuses. However, what worries me even more is that the unethical suppliers will simply sell to other companies. To stop the deforestation caused by palm oil requires systematic enforcement not dependent on one purchaser.
Residents of Ile a Vache, Haiti, are resisting an attempt to evict them all for an ecotourism scheme.
The Ukraine
thugs attacked
20 journalists as well as many civilian protesters.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The fighting in Kiev was started by thugs who had been positioned as snipers.
Comcast regularly mistreats its broadband customers.
If it gets permission to merge and get bigger, this can only get worse.
US citizens: call on the Federal Housing Finance Agency to support the use of eminent domain to rescue US home owners from the banksters.
The Australian shark cull is driven by the aim of reducing tiny risks to zero, together with exaggeration of those risks, stirred up by sensationalist media.
It's too bad we don't attend with similar determination to the really big risks: obesity, environmental pollution, plutocracy and its consequent often-deadly poverty, and global heating.
A deal between protesters and the government broke down and thugs attacked the protesters, who fought back.
Guatemala's attorney general, who prosecuted the corrupt and genocidal elite, has been forced to leave office early.
Thugs broke up a Pussy Riot performance by attacking the performers with whips.
US protesters for nuclear disarmament have been sentenced to as much as 5 years in prison.
The "sabotage" they were convicted of was symbolic.
Keep this in mind when other countries threaten large penalties against protesters. It's equally wrong when the US does it.
US citizens: reject the idea that presidents are allowed to kill at will.
US citizens: call on the Department of Agriculture not to let poultry agribusinesses inspect their own chickens.
That would be letting the fox watch the henhouse.
Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López has surrendered to the state, daring the state to prosecute him.
I don't know what his political platform is. I suspect it is to benefit foreign businesses and their local allies, which I do not support at all. Nonetheless, he is also standing for political freedom, in a short-term sense. Maduro had better get behind this too.
On the erroneous idea that everyone needs to be good at math.
Speaking as one who loves math as it ought to be loved — for its beauty — I agree with the article. My knowledge of mathematical logic informs me that it is a fallacy to think that "There are mathematical jobs available now for workers who are good at math" implies "If everyone were good at math, there would be mathematical jobs for everyone."
The US, especially, has no need to increase workers' productivity. Its production is high enough. The US needs to change the economic system so that everyone can have a decent life, not just the small fraction whose labor is still in high demand.
Now we see why same-sex marriage rights have gained so much in the US: businesses want to be able to hire gay professionals.
Legalizing same-sex marriage is the right thing to do. But if we need to depend on business support to win for a worthy cause, we can't defeat the plutocrats' class war that is driving most Americans, gay or straight, into poverty.
The Casualty of America's Same-Sex Marriage Fight: Civil Unions.
North Carolina riverbed coated by toxic coal ash, officials say.
The UK's excuse to crush the poor is to demand they futilely apply for jobs at a grueling pace, or be left to starve.
This "culture of fear" often leads to hunger and homelessness.
Refuting the apologists for the 1%'s class war.
"Free trade" agreements block vital regulations on banks.
Where Syrian Islamists take control, they oppress women, and men too.
A UK court ruled in favor of the interrogation of David Miranda even though it was intended to interfere with press freedom.
Laws that authorize oppression are typical of unjust regimes. All that court did was confirm, yet again, that the UK is one of them.
The proposed "European internet" is not meant to protect Europeans from massive surveillance.
South Dakota is considering a law to give purchasers of digital products a right to be able to repair them.
The US government has published a falsified history of the Vietnam War — a work of propaganda directed at misleading future generations of Americans.
Mozilla is planning to put advertising into Firefox, and talking about it in ways that don't acknowledge that.
The Ethiopian government snuck spyware into an Ethiopian exile's computer through a Word file.
This is one of many reasons you should refuse to open a Word file.
FEMA falsified the flood risk for 500 rich people's seaside mansions so they could get cheap government flood insurance at our expense.
An Ethiopian migrant in Sudan faces capital charges for getting raped.
Wikipedia Mounts Courtroom Defense for Editor Sued by Politician.
The editor (i.e., contributor) was ordered to delete the text that he wrote in that politician's page, and did so, but others restored it immediately. The judge does not seem to understand this.
Two banksters get lots of money from Bank of America and Citigroup and then were hired by the White House to work on the TPP.
This is the worst kind of corruption of the government.
Former members of Pussy Riot were arrested in Sochi, apparently to prevent a hypothetical protest.
Sochi is under special Olympic repression that is worse than the usual repression of Russia.
One proprietary software developer fights with other proprietary software developers, with the user's computer as battlefield.
Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus, has been "recalled" in India by its publisher, which was threatened legally by a Hindu militant group that didn't like the book.
The censorship has extended to web downloads.
This act of censorship has provoked a world-wide reaction.
Many important works are banned in India, including the book Lajja by Taslima Nasrin which describes persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh.
Corporate Cronyism: The Secret to Overpaid CEOs.
How the NSA combines phone call data with internet contact data to collect more information about Americans in general.
Two UK thugs face criminal charges for arresting a student protester.
High-tech fishing operations are leaving Senegal's traditional fishers with no fish.
Ray McGovern is suing the CIA for putting him on a watch list because of his lawful political activity.
True Free Market Proponents Should Support Private-Public Competition.
The antidemocracy movement in
Thailand attacked
with guns and teargas.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Over a million EU citizens
have filed
an initiative petition against water privatization.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The legal effect of the initiative is only to direct the European Union to consider the issue. We will have to see whether this has more influence than a petition on whitehouse.gov.
University students in Venezuela have been protesting for days against Maduro's government, and a leader of the opposition has been accused of terrorism.
Several other South American countries condemned the protesters' violence.
I can well believe that US diplomats are plotting to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The US supported the coup attempt a decade ago. However, the shortages, caused by price controls, and other real grievances are stimulating real opposition.
Accusing protesters of "terrorism" is wrong in Venezuela just as it's wrong in the US or Russia or Egypt.
Sousveillance in a competitive situation can become, in effect, a form of nearly obligatory self-implemented surveillance.
Everyone: call on Monsanto to stop selling its wildlife-destroying pesticide, Roundup.
Debate: Was Snowden Justified? Former NSA Counsel Stewart Baker vs. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
US and UK surveillance specifically targeted Wikileaks.
US banks make tremendous money from the fees on credit card payments.
In addition, when you use a credit card, they get data about your purchases. That's more important to me than the 2% fee. Don't be tracked, pay cash!
The frequency of heat waves in parts of Australia has already exceeded what was forecast for 2030.
Kerry gave a strong speech about the danger of global heating.
Will he practice what he preached, and kill the Keystone XL pipeline?
Free enterprise does a great job…except for certain giant and sometimes deadly flaws.
Farm deregulation, based on right-wing pander-to-business ideology, exacerbated the floods in England.
Fossil fuel use is subsidized almost 2 trillion dollars a year, which makes renewable energy appear discouragingly expensive.
Karzai said he will change the law that would have stopped abused women from testifying against the relatives that did it.
The latest right-wing bigotry tactic is to claim bigotry is an expression of religious freedom.
Venezuela banned a Colombian TV channel which was the only one that gave substantial coverage to anti-government protests.
US citizens:
support
clarifying IRS rules about electioneering by nonprofits.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: oppose the bill to ban states from mandating GMO labeling.
US citizens: phone to ask your Congresscritter to cosponsor the Government By The People Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Paris Censors Street Artist Who Criticized Anti-Piracy Law.
Egypt in 2012 experienced a dangerous jump in births.
This was perhaps due to Morsi's policies.
Gay rights activist Vladimir Luxuria was arrested for a nondisruptive protest in Sochi.
Banning any point of view is an offense against human rights.
The US had subservient UK agents harass Jesselyn Radack, Edward Snowden's lawyer, as she was going to the UK.
They told her she is on a sort of US no-fly list, the "inhibited persons" list. Perhaps as a lawyer she appears "inhibited" when asked to talk about her clients' affairs.
The UN warns Kim Jong-un that he could face charges at The Hague for crimes against humanity.
Here are details of the charges.
Even if the Security Council approves the charges, I see no way the court could have a chance of getting him and trying him. Still, this recognition of how monstrous North Korea is may do some good.
How Privatization Perverts Education.
5 Obnoxious Libertarian Oligarchs Who Earned Fortunes from the Government They'd Like to Destroy.
The US taught Australia how to spy on the Indonesian government about its position in a trade dispute with the US.
If the trade dispute was the one about clove-flavored cigarettes, Indonesia deserves no sympathy for insisting the US allow those deadly addictive products. Trade treaties are being used world-wide to block measures to discourage smoking, which is an additional reason those treaties must be abolished. But these treaties and the surveillance are different issues.
US citizens: call for repeal of "stand your ground" laws that provide an excuse for what is effectively murder.
US citizens: tell Congress
to reject
politicization of the NSF grant procedure.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The CEO of AOL tried
to shaft the
employees on their benefits because a couple of them had big medical
expenses.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
In this context, I have to mention that I don't think it serves society's interests to go to such lengths to save a very premature baby which hasn't even started to become a human being. But that does not justify Mr Armstrong's position. There are lots of reasons why employees (or their family members who are already human beings) might need expensive medical care. Also, the point about commercial pressures that lead women to delay having children and thus face greater risks when they do is valid.
Resistance is growing against the Gates Foundation's plan for redesigning education in the US.
A series of spills and explosions have highlighted the danger of fossil fuels under a right-wing deregulating state.
Investigating all sorts of dangerous facilities, and punishing infractions with stern rectitude, is one of the many necessary jobs that only a state can do well.
The Moral Movement (against right-wing cruelty) brought 80,000 people to Raleigh, North Carolina, and is spreading to other nearby states.
Bravo!
The ACLU warns that Obama's drone assassination program is illegal.
Supposedly, in post-constitutional America, Obama can kill anyone anywhere for any reason.
Future global heating is likely to cause Britain worse droughts some of the time, as well as worse floods at other times.
So you think you have nothing to hide…
Why the Comcast-Time Warner Deal Is Far More Dangerous Than You Think.
Obama is rewarding donors with ambassadorships a lot more than his predecessors did.
Thugs in California tased and beat up a deaf man for trying to sign at them.
US citizens: call on Obama to appoint more public interest lawyers as judges rather than corporate lawyers.
The Australian government is trying to intimidate the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Earth has had six massive extinction events, each apparently for a different cause. This one is caused by humans.
Leaked orders show Congolese exiles face torture if sent back by the UK.
400 construction workers have died working on sports facilities in Qatar, due to the abusive conditions. 4000 are expected to be killed by the time they are used in 2022.
The wealthier Americans are
increasingly
unwilling to "pay for them" (i.e., all the rest).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
We should not give those arrogant bastards any choice about it.
Senator Sanders
restored cuts
in veterans' pensions by taking the money out of the war budget.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
It is a net plus for Americans because military spending (especially overseas military spending) benefits mainly a few businesses and makes few jobs.
The New York Times reported on a sham right-wing "institute", but then for the sake of "balance" criticized Liberal groups that don't do the same thing.
NAFTA and the US-Korea free exploitation treaty have both done US workers documented harm.
US companies said they would create more jobs if NAFTA were signed, then did the opposite.
"Child pornography is great" — as an excuse for internet censorship.
US citizens: call on the US to restore Snowden's passport.
The US now allows banks to deal with state-legalized marijuana businesses.
Everyone: call on the US to promise no foul play against Snowden.
Fish farms accused of destroying wild salmon in Scotland.
UK citizens: support the Don't Spy on US campaign.
This campaign does not go far enough, but it is worth supporting anyway.
US cities and states are discovering
that privatization
is costly and harmful.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
A private operator has a financial incentive not to do the whole job. If it sells to the public in a competitive market, people will judge it on that. Otherwise, it will screw people without restraint.
EU citizens: talk with your MEPs to support network neutrality.
Uganda's law censoring "promotion of homosexuality" and imposing prison for any touching in public has been approved.
The influence of genes on homosexuality is not a secure base for arguing for equal rights for homosexuals.
I think the issue is simple. People who don't want to have sex with you have a right not to have sex with you, and aside from that it's none of their business who you have sex with.
A global heating denialist tactic is to misrepresent the consensus of nearly all climate scientists and pretend it is something very weak.
As business increasingly looks for land grabs, efforts to confirm indigenous people's land rights are stalling.
The Syrian peace talks are hopelessly deadlocked.
No one has any idea of a feasible form of intervention that would make things better.
A British Muslim extremist, perhaps a convert (judging from his name), has been banned from preaching on pain of arrest.
Incitement to murder is legitimately punished. This man's "vigilante patrols" may have included attacking passers-by. (Some such Islamist vigilantism in Britain has done that.) If he advocates Shari'a law, then he has no respect for others' human rights. He is evidently an example of the tendency for religions to inspire hatred, which is common today in Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism.
But that doesn't justify banning him from stating his views, which is not a crime. That tramples his human rights.
The UK fails to distinguish between "discrimination and persecution" and stating a political position.
The Turkish government is taking control of the judiciary so as to resist corruption charges against relatives of ministers.
In Dubai, the law makes every battered wife a prisoner.
When US politicians stimulate fear of terrorism in order to take more control, the US mainstream media support them.
Thugs implementing the War on Drugs shot Eugene Mallory to death in his bed, then made false accusations about him (as usual).
A former FCC commissioner regrets the media consolidation that the FCC permitted over and over.
Although the water in West Virginia is supposed to be "safe", people are still having horrible reactions to it.
A Utah law banning private license plate recorders is being challenged in court.
This sort of law is vitally needed to curb massive surveillance. People must be free to take photos and videos, but companies should not be allowed to systematically watch everyone.
The perverse Corporations United decision (to call it what it really is) in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are entitled to human rights may lead to a bad decision on this law. Please support the campaign for a constitutional amendment to cancel that decision.
Pakistani anti-drone activist Kareem Khan was arrested and tortured by Pakistani thugs.
The History of Surveillance and the Black Community.
Congresscritters in the pocket of the copyright industry abolish and create subcommittees to make sure Hollywood has power over you.
I recommend people join in my almost-boycott of Hollywood: never pay to see a movie unless you have some reason to believe it is actually good. While in theory this is not a complete boycott, in practice the difference is small.
Of the 19 places where winter Olympics have been held, 13 will be too warm in 2080 to do so again.
By 2080 I expect the world economy will be too shattered to continue holding events like the Olympic games. Thus, I have to admit that global heating will have occasional minor benefits. However, they will be minuscule compared to the disaster.
The thugs who shot innocent women in LA (while looking for one man) won't even be fired.
For the US government, leaks from people who like drones are good; leaks from people who don't like drones are bad.
GMOs Are Killing the Bees, Butterflies, Birds and... ?
The latest clever idea for persecuting homeless people: Pensacola has banned using a blanket or newspaper to protect oneself from the weather.
Everyone who supported that deserves to be sentenced to a year of homelessness.
Another danger from massive surveillance: once investigators believe someone is guilty of a crime — any crime — confirmation bias will encourage them to focus on whichever parts of the surveillance information confirm that suspicion, and ignore the parts that say otherwise.
California and the US government are considering laws requiring a remote kill switch and erasure feature in all smartphones.
This would make them even more open to attack by the state.
Obama said, "We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government", but that's exactly what the government continues to do.
"How far would [officials] be willing to go to cover up serious crimes such as torture and assassination?"
Brazil is persecuting sex workers to "clean up its image".
Idaho's "Ag-Gag" Law Latest to Criminalize Defenders of Animals.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Obama's anti-abortion judge nominee.
US citizens: call on congressional Democrats to stand firm against Republican hostage taking.
US
citizens: object
to GM corn designed to be used with Agent Orange.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The Other NRA: National Restaurant Association Eviscerates Rights of Customers, Workers, and Children.
Natural gas leaks a lot more methane, and contributes a lot more to global heating, than was previously believed.
Ocean heating seems to have caused grave damage to an old, remote coral reef whose location keeps it safe from other human-caused depredations.
A privatized prison in Idaho covered up its understaffing by fraudulent overbilling.
The million dollar non-fine seems inadequate as a punishment. The company ought to be prosecuted and put in its own prison.
It has been pointed out that one aspect of white privilege is that whites are less likely to be prosecuted for certain crimes than blacks are. By the same criterion, the most privileged class in the US is that of corporations.
Comparing protection of elephants with prohibition of drugs.
There is a significant difference between the two. Ivory has no physiological effect; if people like owning ivory, that is just an acquired taste, which they could easily learn to change. Nonetheless, the article could be right.
TEPCO Blasted for Withholding Data as Fukushima Radiation Levels Soar.
Almost 6 million Americans can't vote because of previous criminal convictions,mainly from minority groups because members of those groups are more likely to be prosecuted. This is enough to change the outcome of elections.
US citizens: tell the State Department not to follow its joke of an environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL pipeline, and reject it.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to have the EPA block Pebble Mine.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Geologists are seriously considering the idea that humans, through global heating and ecological disruption, have caused a new geological period, which they propose to call the Anthropocene.
I am concerned that the name "Anthropocene" may provoke irrational pride: some humans may think, "An epoch named after US humans proves our importance — we've really made it now." Even people who would not say this may feel it and be subtly influenced by it. That would be most unfortunate, since considering the epoch as an award would lead people not to recognize this development as the catastrophe that it is.
I therefore suggest choosing another name. The name that best characterizes what's coming in this epoch is "Obscene".
Seriously, since the change consists primarily of global heating, how about "Thermocene"? The heating is caused mainly by combustion (of fossil fuel and forests), so how about "Pyrocene"?
An ACLU victory: a federal court ruled that the government needs to get a warrant before it can access the confidential data base of people's prescriptions.
It's a step in the right direction, but access is still too easy. The state should not create a centralized data base of everyone's prescriptions.
School shootings are happening in the US at record pace, and 3/4 of the shooters found their guns at home.
Congresscritters say Deputy Attorney General James Cole's testimony about snooping on their phone calls was "not entirely accurate". It was the usual misleading half-truth.
21 things you can't do in the US while black.
US citizens: call on the US to block the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable.
These are the two biggest US cable operators.
It should be a no-brainer to block such a merger, but the US government is too corrupt to be counted on even for no-brainers.
These two companies are both ALEC members, and ALEC supports their lobbying campaigns to eliminate local regulation of cable TV and ban public network access.
Freedom to protest in the US is under systematic attack.
The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement is protesting against President Rousseff's support for agribusiness.
In the 1990s, I was told, activists of this movement were arrested on the pretext that they were using unauthorized copies of Windows. They could not afford authorized copies, of course. Then I heard that they had switched to GNU/Linux to protect themselves.
US citizens: tell the mainstream media to start talking about the TPP.
Everyone: Support Children 404 and demand Russia drop charges against Elena Klimova.
Iran has executed an Arab poet, labeled as "terrorist".
Belgium will give children dying slowly in great pain the option of euthanasia.
The devastating UK floods are part of a trend: 4 of the 5 wettest years ever recorded have occurred since 2000.
Elizabeth Warren Calls for Closing Loopholes for the Rich to Cut Student Loan Debt.
US citizens: tell Obama, no chained CPI — no cuts in Social Security, not even veiled cuts.
US citizens: call for extending the Clean Water Act to all waterways.
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service not to delist wolves from protection.
NSA Whistleblower: USA Freedom Act Will Not Go Far Enough To Protect Civil Liberties.
It falls short in other ways too.
We should support it, but we must demand more.
The Australian plan to kill large sharks violates a treaty meant to protect migratory endangered species such as the great white shark.
ISP lobbyists have pressured (or paid?) 20 states' legislatures to ban public broadband.
If US Republicans are serious in their concern for future generations, they should protect them from global heating disaster.
This reasoning won't influence congressional Republicans, because they don't care about future generations except for the wealthy. Their pretended concern is nothing but an excuse to kick the poor today.
The protests in Bosnia are aimed at privatization which (as usual) was done so as to screw the non-rich, and at the corruption of the state.
I don't know the facts, but my guess is that some of the ex-Yugoslav industries should have been privatized, because they made products for a competitive market. That doesn't justify cheating the workers. Perhaps they should have been turned into worker cooperatives.
Russian environmentalist Evgeny Vitishko faces three years in prison for spray-painting on a fence.
Similar repression of nonviolent protest is found also in the US.
Biggest Rises and
Falls in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The big music factories are trying to force a major Irish ISP to start punishing customers accused of sharing.
To make a deal with the copyright industry is self-delusion. If you try to "meet them half way", they come back later and demand the rest.
Janet Yellen acknowledged that the US "economic recovery" has failed to provide jobs.
While I am glad Yellen recognizes the problem, interest rates have little leverage for correcting it. Low interest rates help banksters make more money, but they have no reason to put this into the rest of the economy. What we need is to expand deficit spending. When Obama endorsed the Republicans' goal of deficit cutting, he screwed the US until we replace him.
The Stasi, the East German secret police, collected metadata too. But it could not collect everyone's metadata as the US does.
Obama is considering launching an assassination of an American in a country where the US is not at war.
The fact that no attempt has been made to charge that person with a crime adds to the scandal, but if there were charges against that person, that would not justify summary execution.
More about how CIA drone attacks are aimed at SIM cards identified based on metadata.
Glenn Greenwald says he will not remain in exile forever, even though the US government refuses to say whether he will be prosecuted for his journalism.
The Committee to Protect Journalists warns that mass surveillance endangers journalism.
Israeli soldiers shot and killed unarmed Mohammad Mahmoud Mubarak as he was busy directing traffic. Then they claimed he has shot at them first, although he was unarmed and nobody shot except them.
The Israeli army arrests Palestinian children and tortures them into signing confessions they can't read.
North Carolina's first response to Duke Energy's coal ash spill was to minimize it and protect the company from penalties.
The EU envoy to Israel says that relations will depend on the outcome of peace talks with Palestine.
Since the peace talks began, Israel has accelerated its demolitions of Palestinians' houses.
A bill in the US congress would punish universities for making statements in support of a boycott of Israel.
It might be harder to punish them for supporting a boycott of companies and institutions that support the illegal Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory.
The US and UK have fallen down in ratings for freedom of the press.
It may not be enough to help us but it is a start.
After floods have caused tremendous damage to houses and transport in the UK, the government says it will provide "unlimited" funds for repairs.
Given their perverse austerity policies, they will take those funds out of aid for the poor. But why didn't they offer unlimited funds to prevent floods — including curbing CO2 emissions that are likely to make for worse floods in the future?
US Sailors Sick From Fukushima
Radiation File
New Suit Against Tokyo Electric Power.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Iowa farmers tell a presidential hopeful that supporting big food processing companies does not mean supporting them.
Canada's government is attacking democracy on behalf of oil companies.
US citizens: support the campaign for proper prosecution of rape by soldiers.
Everyone: Endorse
the Google
shareholder resolution aimed at Google's support for right-wing
groups such as ALEC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Google wants to detect that lots of people are taking photos or videos with their phones — and call the thugs.
Why should Google be allowed to know what people are doing?
Anger in Bosnia, But This Time the People Can Read Their Leaders' Ethnic Lies.
Everyone: tell the governor of North Carolina to start protecting people rather than the mining companies that make toxic pollution.
US citizens: call on Agriculture Secretary Vilsack to implement the Farm Bill in a way that favors healthful food.
It is so warm in Sochi that snowboarders are having trouble.
In 2054 they will need to hold the winter Olympics in a far more northerly place. By 2074, the world will have no attention or money left to hold such games.
UK victims of undercover thug infiltrators in political groups have launched a campaign for an independent inquiry into the practice.
One sheriff in the Seattle area wants to run a police department instead of a gang of thugs.
UK thugs arrested student protesters for no reason except to get their names, then the university suspended them for protesting.
The thugs had besieged the students for hours.
Greenwald/Scahill: How the NSA Helps the US Assassinate.
The railroading of human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart demonstrates the degradation of the US trial system.
You can see the effects of this in the repeated convictions of "criminals" who only went along with plans suggested by thugs and would never have been able to carry them out.
Cecily McMillan elbowed the person attacking her from behind, who turned out to be a thug, so she is threatened with 7 years in prison.
I wonder who groped her breast — was that the thug?
Thugs often attack innocent people, and make a special point of attacking people who are particularly virtuous (such as protesters for good causes). They are hardly ever prosecuted for this. If once in a while they get hit back, that's only a small step towards justice.
An Indian mining company is suing poor villagers as well as destroying their forest.
Xenophobia is rising around the world: "these are dangerous times to look foreign".
I understand the pressure to limit immigration. As millions start to flee from land that has turned into desert or ocean, this pressure will become enormous. No country is obliged to accept millions of refugees.
However, it makes a difference that our carbon emissions are responsible for the spreading deserts and oceans — and stop them. If we don't want to accept those millions of refugees we should stop destroying their land.
A Spanish judge has opened a criminal investigation of Chinese
ex-officials for
crimes
against Tibetans.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
I suspect that the mostly-right-wing US government is pressuring Spain's government to end this practice. Obama protects Bush and his torturers from criminal prosecution.
Time to Take a Stand to End US Impunity
Obama will imprison another whistleblower, who was identified by massive surveillance of journalists' phone call records.
European Parliament candidates are asked to sign this proposed Charter of Digital Rights.
It is not strong enough on certain issues. For instance, it fails to oppose the censorship which many EU countries have already imposed, and fails to call for an end to existing mass surveillance measures such as the mandatory data retention for ISPs and phone companies.
However, I support it anyway.
Now that US network neutrality has been
eliminated, Verizon
is slowing Netflix traffic.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
It would be great if Verizon killed off Netflix, whose business is fundamentally unethical because of DRM. But there is little chance of that; eventually they will make a deal, with Netflix paying Verizon some money.
Aristide reported in 2005 that Dubya had him removed because he was unwilling to privatize as the US demanded.
Thugs in Egypt and Sudan regularly conspire with kidnapers that torture Eritrean refugees to squeeze money out of their relatives.
To ransom hostages is cowardly; the right thing to do is to hold a funeral for them, in effect spitting in the kidnapers' faces. This takes courage, but discourage kidnapers, whereas a cowardly response keeps it going.
It is not clear how the Eritreans first fall into the hands of traffickers.
The US government destroyed and hid photos of Osama bin Laden body in contempt of a Freedom of Information Act request.
What can you expect from these thugs? They murdered bin Laden to avoid the inconvenience of putting him on trial.
Under today's British laws, the volunteers who fought in Spain against Franco and fascism would be charged with "terrorism."
Qatar will undertake to protect construction workers from abuses, but only on a few specific projects.
Republicans controlling state governments are trying to amend the US Constitution to require a balanced budget, which would mean making recessions worse.
Overseas, Culture
of 'Impunity' for US Soldiers Guilty of Sexual Assault.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The first rule of ensuring that a foreign army can get along with local civilians is to punish any crimes by soldiers against civilians very sternly. The US may think it doesn't need to do this. The US is mistaken.
The enormous US military aid to Israel includes bombs and planes used to attack civilians in Gaza.
Everyone: tell General Mills to remove GMOs from all its cereals, not just from Cheerios.
Everyone: demand that the World Bank stop financing land grabs in Kenya and elsewhere.
An Australian supporter of boycotting Israel is being sued for refusing to support a study application by an Israeli academic.
If Lynch's grounds for refusal were as stated, that the scholar was associated with a university with a campus in a colony in Palestinian territory, that was political, not racial. So I think the lawsuit is mistaken.
However, I criticize Lynch's decision to apply the boycott to an individual person. The American Studies Association, in adopting a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, emphasized that this was not aimed at Israeli scholars.
California's drought may be the worst in 500 years, and it is going to get worse.
How Entitlements for the Rich Cheat the Rest of Us.
A Catholic school in the US fired a teacher for getting pregnant.
China has started helping Kenya prosecute ivory smugglers.
The Thai government has arrested a leader of the antidemocratic protest movement.
I can't criticize the arrest of people that represent a minority and try to sabotage elections.
Bottom Trawling: How to Empty the Seas in Just 150 Years.
Tar sands leaks in Canada that were reported last May have not been stopped.
An unprecedented speed-up of the trade winds is driving the Earth's heat gain into the ocean instead of letting it accumulate in the atmosphere.
Aside from the point that the speed-up is cyclical, there's also the point that the reason it causes heat to go into the ocean is that the air is hotter than the ocean. Once the ocean gets sufficiently hotter, heat will start to remain in the air.
Today's extreme weather is just a foretaste of what we have already made inevitable in a few decades. The question is whether we will take steps now to prevent it from getting even worse.
To prevent all but the rich from being squeezed out of major cities, we must build, build, build.
The obstacle is zoning that was designed to prevent the sort of density that we need in order to accommodate everyone.
US citizens: call on the government to make college tuition gratis.
(I try to avoid using the word "free" to mean "zero price" even when we're not talking about software.)
Once again, Turks protested state-imposed internet censorship on the street.
Across the US, businesses and products that aim at middle-class customers are failing — because those customers aren't there any more.
Responses to creationists' 22 questions.
Substitute drug maintenance problems are
pretty effective
at saving addicts' lives and enabling them to do useful work.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
I speculate that what makes the substitute drugs safer is that they are regulated and medically administered. In other words, part of what makes the original drug so dangerous is prohibition.
The US spent 7 years covering up the fact that it had put Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list by mistake.
This list is punishment without trial, and as such is a prima facie injustice.
Syngenta's own documents prove that it tried to sabotage and discredit Professor Hayes, whose work showed that Syngenta's pesticide atrazine was dangerous.
US television has a nearly total blackout about the TPP.
Republicans set up fraudulent web sites pretending to represent Democratic candidates so as to divert donors' money.
This reflects the motto of the Republican Party, "By hook or by crook", as observed in voter suppression laws and distribution of false information about where to vote, as well as just plain lying about Democrats.
Everyone:
tell Whole
Foods to stop firing workers because they have to leave for an
emergency.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The time scale of global heating makes it hard to treat as news, but it could be the end of all news.
US states are slowly passing laws to allow the terminally ill to get help in suicide.
This is a step forward, but it is a shame to limit this escape route to those who are going to die soon anyway, and exclude people who can't commit suicide on their own because they are totally physically incapacitated. Some of those people face possibly decades of futile boredom, in some cases combined with horrible pain.
Mexican gangsters roam villages and kidnap girls as young as 7 for prostitution. No one dares openly resist them; the corrupt thugs are no help.
Widespread flooding has shown what a disaster global heating will bring to Britain.
The hard part will be to make the government confront the costs of avoiding the disaster, which get higher with delay.
Now that homosexuals fleeing Uganda can claim asylum because they'd face persecution there, how to decide if someone is not faking being gay?
Why
Are Bitcoiners Going to Jail for Money Laundering While Big Banks
Walk?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
A bunch of protesters were convicted of being led by thugs to prepare molotov cocktails, but they were acquitted of "terrorism" charges.
Another blow to Australia's immigration policy secrecy, which consists of "We won't tell you what we're doing" and "How dare you make accusations?"
Shezanne Cassim was imprisoned in Dubai for posting a humorous video that didn't even criticize country's despicable government.
Humans are depleting groundwater around the world, just as global heating is reducing rainfall in many areas.
Britons: tell the NHS not to sell patient data to companies.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter in favor of network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The UK's environmental research organization has made a dirty deal with Shell.
Protesters in Rio de Janeiro occupied the main train station and let everyone travel gratis.
The Australian plan to kill large sharks, which migrate very far, pushes this endangered species towards extinction to save a tiny number of humans.
South Africa is concerned that this will wipe out sharks there too, since sharks swim between the two continents.
Boat people towed to Java by the Australian Navy in an Australian lifeboat say the Navy sailors burned people as punishment for asking to use a toilet.
Since the Australian government is covering up the whole activity, its denials are worthless. If it wants to convince us, it should make recordings as proof. As long as it covers up its actions we should believe all the accusations.
If vitamins don't address medical problems, will university researchers funded by a vitamin company tell us?
I need to point out that the same exact problem exists for the Big Pharma companies.
The US Green Party says the Farm Bill
should
be vetoed.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Mainstream media are still struggling to cover up US and UK's actions in the Middle East.
Sponsors of the Olympic games that refused to publicly criticize Putin's repression: Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald's, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Samsung and Visa.
Garry Kasparov says that the Sochi Olympics are all about Putin's cult of personality.
Part of the cause of lower pay for women is that male senior managers are afraid of being accused of sexual harassment if they socialize or meet with women employees.
Israeli thugs attacked a Palestinian protest camp near Jericho.
Japanese women are organizing a sex strike against men that vote for a sexist candidate.
The UK's privatization of its post office was a giant give-away to the investors.
If you are like most Internet users, the way you use the net is bad for you directly, in addition to snooping on you.
Ralph Nader: The Law Must Be Free and Accessible to All — Not Secret and Profitable.
The US is ignoring efforts towards nuclear disarmament.
It's no use retraining US workers to fit jobs better, because the available jobs are simply far too few.
Perverse economics contribute to the lack of jobs.
US citizens: Tell Senator
Reid, don't
allow a vote on Fast Track.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on your senators to defend EPA regulation of power plant CO2 emissions.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on Kerry to get the facts right about the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Please do not access this page with Javascript enabled. I would be ashamed to have posted the link if you did that.
Brazil's Government Has Set the Favelas And Middle Classes Against Each Other.
The Ukrainian Protesters Must Make a Decisive Break with the Far Right.
The FBI is forcing ISPs and phone companies to install metadata monitors called "port readers".
Haiti deserves more than forgiveness of it dictator-imposed debt. It deserves reparations.
Palestine has been negotiating for 20 years under grave threat; now Israel is starting to feel the pressure of possible European boycott.
ABC spins very hard to pretend that stock market trends are relevant to most Americans.
US citizens: ask your congresscritter to support bills that would end the war on marijuana at the federal level.
US citizens: call for stopping the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion.
Children of the Occupation: Growing up in Palestine.
3000 civilians were killed by fighting in Afghanistan in 2013, mostly by the Taliban (as usual).
New video surveillance systems can see everyone's movements in a whole city.
Here's the ACLU's response.
What matters is not which people they do track, but which people they could track after the fact. If they can track where journalists or whistleblowers went in the past, democracy is sunk.
In the US it is legal to pay partially disabled workers a pittance, and thousands of people are exploited in this way.
A test of 900 foods in the UK found that over 300 were falsely labeled.
In Egypt people are arrested for carrying cameras on the street.
Assad has agreed to a truce and to allow civilians to be evacuated from Homs.
Privatized probation companies in the US jail poor people who can't pay the fees.
These companies have thousands of poor Americans jailed when they are too poor to pay the fines they owe.
Cambodian journalist Suon Chan, who reported on use of illegal fishing methods, was killed by fishermen.
Campaigning for women's rights in Morocco.
The practice in which relatives despise girls that have been raped is found in many parts of the world. In Samoa, men used (and perhaps still use) surreptitious rape to as a means to force girls to come and live with them; they knew their families would reject them for being raped. This happens because the girl's parents think of her as an asset rather than as a person.
US citizens: call for extension of unemployment benefits.
Senator Warren challenged other senators: does anyone believe that US enforcement of banking regulations is working?
The UK plans
to entrust
everyone's medical records
to proprietary
software (which is asking for trouble) made by a company with
a track
record for shafting the public, thanks to an inadequate concern
for privacy starting from the top.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The system will also allow the state easy access to all the data. Naturally.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Empty Oceans Act.
Now that Obama can get judges confirmed, he should appoint public interest lawyers as judges.
A Ukrainian protest leader says
that thugs
captured him and tortured him into making a confession that he was
paid by the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
A UK thug has been sentenced to prison for making a false accusation, saying that an important politician called him a "pleb". The politician, being a Tory, probably thought this but apparently did not say it.
While this is the right thing to do, I wonder when the UK, US, and other countries will start sentencing thugs to prison for making more serious false accusations against people who are not important politicians.
Philip Seymour Hoffman Is Another Victim of Extremely Stupid Drug Laws.
Teenage girls in Britain are campaigning against female genital mutilation.
They know that girls in their communities are at risk.
Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is held and interrogated for hours every time he returns to the US.
Turkey's new internet law allows the state to block a web site by administrative decree, and requires ISPs to record people's contacts.
Several European countries also block web sites by decree, and the US government "seizes" domain names by decree. India has the power to take down a web site by decree. These practices are unjust in any country.
The tracking of web visits also exists in Europe and to some extent in the US.
Citizens of Massachusetts: sign this petition for establishing a public health care option.
The Australian government, which will do anything to boost the fossil fuel industry, is now fabricating an excuse to end the program to promote renewable energy.
More than half of the world's marine reserves are inadequately protected and fail to encourage wildlife.
The DEA's guide for how to disguise use of secret snooping data has been published.
The Chaos Computer Club has filed a criminal complaint accusing the German government and other governments of illegal surveillance.
Five predictions made by Karl Marx that fit today's extreme form of capitalism.
Cities and states are lured to paying millions in subsidy for big sports events based on wildly exaggerated estimates of how much the local economy will gain from the events.
This article refers to the Superbowl, but it's the same for the Olympics or the World Cup.
I would tell the boosters of these games to seek private investment if they are so profitable.
Qatar Airways subjects flight attendants to a regime almost like prison, firing them for the slightest infraction of absurd rules.
Qatar is one of the countries I would never visit. The required iris scan is just one of the reasons. I won't even change planes in the U.A.E.
Nobody should ever work in a country that demands exit visas.
New Zealand's digital snooping agency says it failed to preserve the data for Kim Dotcom's lawsuit alleging illegal snooping.
UK agents ran DDOS campaigns against Anonymous, interfering with their chat sites and with all the other sites co-hosted with them.
I reject the term "DDOS attack". When activists do it, it is a form of online protest; I won't call it an "attack" when someone else does it. What happened here is that the state sent a crowd of state agents to protest at a people's houses and the pubs where they meet.
US citizens: support fixing the Voting Rights Act.
US citizens: Support the Government By The People Act.
Egyptian journalist Hossam al-Meneai was tortured by thugs, says the American journalist who was arrested with him.
Americans need to be concerned about Japan's secrecy law.
2013 was the second-hottest non-el-Nińo year since records began.
Iraq's US-installed government imprisons women without trial, tortures them into confessing (or threatens to rape their daughters), then executes them. All this to punish their male relatives.
French protection for organizers of the Rwandan massacres may be exposed in court.
The NSA spied on German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder because he refused to help Dubya conquer Iraq.
Evidence that Sri Lankan soldiers and thugs destroyed graves to cover up murders, under orders from the high command.
There is evidence also against the LTTE, which is no surprise. But those responsible are dead.
What's good and what's bad in the US Farm Bill.
Evidence that the Three Mile Island meltdown made lots of people sick in Pennsylvania, and killed animals.
Israel continues making a mockery of peace talks by
authorizing
additional construction of colonies in Palestinian territory.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The European Parliament strengthened the weak energy targets that the European Commission had proposed.
Congress and Obama, with the cuts in food stamps, are making America's children go hungry.
Republicans aim to force US women to have more children and prevent them from feeding these children.
Oil and gas drilling in the US are using up lots of water in the driest areas.
Although Russia has banned saying "It's not bad to be gay", its law is
does not go as far as some
other
countries' laws against homosexuality.
Obama harps on "opportunity" to distract from high US inequality, but
the US poor
haven't
got much opportunity either.
CVS has
decided
to stop selling tobacco.
I don't advocate banning tobacco, because prohibiting addictive drugs
does great social harm. However, it should not be sold in pharmacies
because selling it there gives tobacco a sort of medical endorsement.
The US has
temporarily
ceased drone attacks in Pakistan to try to encourage peace talks.
Extractive
agriculture is part of the cause of the UK's floods.
Russia is arresting people who monitor environmental damage from the
Olympic games, using
bizarre
and meaningless pretexts.
Some US claims about the use of chemical weapons in
Syria can't
be true.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Chomsky reports on how Syria
was destabilized
by effects of global heating and by the consequences of Dubya's
occupation of Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
This does not in any way excuse Assad for his tyranny and crimes. It also does not excuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia for funding and encouraging an armed rebellion in Syria when peaceful protests were going strong.
The recent report about execution of prisoners by Assad's men was paid for by Qatar.
That doesn't mean the it isn't true, but Qatar should not succeed in hiding its atrocities behind Assad's atrocities.
The NOAA has retreated from trying to abolish state bans on shark fins.
Facebook's mobile
app snoops
on SMS messages.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Indian thugs attacked a demonstration by Christian Dalits outside the parliament.
Republicans want to make it easier for employers to leave workers without health care: just give them only 39 hours a week of work.
Since the US deficit has gone down greatly, why do Republicans keep trying to hurt the unemployed?
Because the misguided goal of cutting the deficit was always just an excuse to take from the non-rich.
The Republicans will pursue their War on Drug Users to the end, but only against non-rich drug users.
NAFTA hurt family farms in Mexico, the US and Canada, at the expense of agribusiness. The TPP threatens to do the same in many more countries.
Researchers say that tar sands oil companies have greatly underestimated the amount of toxic pollution they produce.
To build the Olympic games venue, Russia destroyed forests and wetlands and "replaced" them with ecologically worthless artificial substitutes.
Is Freeing a Duck "Terrorism"?
I only partly agree with the idea of animal rights, but I do support human rights, and labeling animal rights activism as "terrorism" clearly violates them. I don't have to agree with them to support their right to campaign for their views.
Google, Facebook and other companies have released statistics showing at most 100,000 users have been subject to FISA orders and national security letters.
That's a small fraction of the users — but if they include journalists, whistleblowers and dissidents, democracy is in danger.
What matters is not how many people's data the state has looked at but how many people's data the state could look at when it wishes.
US citizens: call on Obama to stop South Dakota from taking Lakota children away from their relatives on trivial excuses.
I think the word "kidnapping" used in the petition is incorrect, but I signed anyway because I think the substance is valid.
US citizens: urge your congresscritter to oppose several bills intended to attack wildlife and wetlands.
US citizens: call on your senators to extend the Production Tax Credit for renewable energy.
With the International Olympic Committee supporting Russian repression, the Olympic Spirit means repression.
This is not surprising given that the Olympic Games have for many years brought repression to every place they have been held.
Colombia's principal terrorist group, the state-linked paramilitaries, have announced bounties for the murder of political candidates.
Karzai has been holding peace talks with the Taliban for months.
I wish these talks had made progress. Given that the Afghan government lacks the support necessary to defeat the Taliban, and that it increasingly spits on women's rights, I don't think trying to "win the war" makes any sense.
Pakistan is also trying to talk with the Taliban.
The Antidemocratic Party in Thailand has sued to invalidate the elections on the grounds that the actions of the Antidemocratic Party interfered with voting.
Several foreign journalists succeeded in escaping from Egypt before they could be captured by the forces of state repression.
The coup has taken Egypt from a danger of repression to blatant repression.
With cancer rates increasing world-wide due to tobacco, alcohol and
obesity, cancer treatment is not enough —
laws are needed to
make it easier to avoid those dangers.
Superstitious Nevada farmers are
holding
prayer sessions asking for an end to the drought in the
southwestern US.
They ought to be holding Keystone XL protests instead: that would at
least have a chance to reduce the future droughts that are expected to
be much worse.
One writer tried to "opt out" from tracking by commercial data brokers
and found that the
possibility
of doing so is rather spotty.
I have opted out from these data brokers by paying cash.
NPR
published
a whitewash of toxic sewage sludge.
The
hiring
collusion between big tech companies shows that their adoration of
the "free market" is just a story they tell to fool the gullible.
A competitive market is a kind of social system. For certain
purposes, is a good solution. Keeping it competitive depends on state
regulation.
The West Virginia toxic spill
isn't
over yet. Moreover, it's just part of a permanent toxic spill
that usually goes unnoticed in the media.
Mexico's supposed crackdown on pimps that force women into
prostitution has got off to a
weak
start.
Clever
tricks that web sites use to collect information about visitors
and correlate those with names.
How these companies currently use the data they collect is not
significant because (1) they could change those policies tomorrow and
(2) those policies don't apply when government agencies such as the
NSA collect the data.
Uganda's first step to impose control on women is to
ban
miniskirts, not to mention bikinis, and any pictures of them, and
any writing about them.
I think even the song "Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polkadot bikini"
will be criminalized by this law, not to mention lots of movies that
could get a G rating in the US.
One user writes that Facebook led her to be
in
love with "the projection of [her] own desired life".
Cutting down on the amount of her usage by Facebook may have addressed
this problem, but not
all the others.
People in Rio de Janeiro are
mocking
the surreal prices provoked by the coming World Cup.
Seafood caught in Galveston Bay, Texas, is
contaminated
with dioxin.
Prince, who briefly thought of changing his name to Jerk, has dropped
a
lawsuit
against his fans for distributing "bootleg" recordings.
I see nothing wrong with that practice.
The US "War on Drugs" has
cost
a trillion dollars in South America, and resulted in over 100,000
killed.
Clothing, even for children, often contains
toxic
substances.
Japan wants to sell India some
potential
meltdowns.
The Pentagon spends millions on directing Hollywood to make
pro-military
propaganda and convince Americans to support military adventures.
Obama's "MyRA" retirement accounts
won't
do much good for the Americans who might try to use them.
Ten
arguments against prohibition of prostitution.
It's not just Muslims that try to shut down art that makes fun of
their religion. In Australia,
Christians
are trying.
Sea Shepherd described Japanese whalers'
violent
tactics.
The Theater of Security Agency and all its staff
knew
in advance that X-ray scanners were useless and dangerous. The
TSA delayed and endangered passengers with those machines solely to
give the impression it was Doing Something.
The article also says that power-tripping TSA agents impose extra
searches and delays as a form of harassment, while dishonestly
claiming it is a "random search".
Obama says he thinks prohibition of marijuana is unfortunate but fails
to recognize that
he
could end that prohibition any day.
Staples and many other stores offer
different
prices to different customers and don't admit that they are doing
so.
This is a consequence of letting them have too much information about
the purchaser. When I buy something, the store doesn't know who I am,
because I pay cash.
In gaming terms,
Straight
White Male is the lowest "difficulty setting" for real life.
The anti-government movement in Thailand, a substantial minority with
some powerful backing, has
blocked
tens of thousands of people from voting in the election.
We have to consider them the anti-democracy movement.
Afghanistan is trying to have a democratic
election
for president.
Canada is negotiating a
business
rights treaty with the EU, and says it has to be kept secret in
order to negotiate it, even the parts that are supposedly finished.
Leaked: Pakistan's secret record of the
casualties
of US drone attacks. In 2009, it abruptly stops treating which
casualties are civilians.
Refuting
the pseudoscience that the US Senate was told about global
heating.
George Lakoff's advice on
framing
is vital for progressives.
It's also vital for the free software movement. We reject the weak
compromises advocated under the term "open source"; we take a clear
moral stand.
The Australian government is
secretly
transferring boat people onto its own lifeboats and towing those
boats to Indonesia.
Studies confirm that "free trade" is the
main
cause of increased inequality in the developed world.
Many companies
say
they support action to curb global heating, then contribute to
groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce that try to prevent it.
Obama
still
supports Clapper even after admitting (euphemistically) that
Clapper lied to Congress.
Obama was never much of a supporter of human rights.
More about Canada's
WiFi
tracking scheme, which seems to have been a dry run for the NSA.
China struggles to pretend it is not kicking out foreign journalists
in retaliation for
criticism
in the press.
The US is not spotless on this issue either: it requires journalists
to apply for a special visa, even if they come from countries whose
citizens normally don't require a visa.
The Gates Foundation and the US government want to
track
all students from preschool to workforce.
Utah
School Threw Out Students' Lunches Because They Were In Debt.
It is disgusting for public schools to make students pay for lunch, or
for anything.
The UK wants to
secretly
subpoena journalists' notes.
The US State Department adopted
another
bogus evaluation of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Global heating was expected to bring flooding to the UK in 2030,
but
it is hitting already.
The US is going
to pressure
Sri Lanka to investigate war crimes committed against Tamil
civilians.
This is the right thing to do, but when will the US investigate
the war
crimes committed by Dubya in Iraq?
If Obama wants to save our
climate, he
must drop the "all of the above" energy policy.
US citizens: call on Congress
to raise the minimum wage.
I've promoted similar campaigns before, and it is good to keep showing
Congress pressure to do this.
Citizens of California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia,
Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey,
New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and
Wisconsin: call on your senators
to oppose
the cuts in food stamps, which will fall mainly on those states.
Surveillance in the US
today exceeds
Orwell's worst nightmare.
This level of surveillance
is incompatible
with democracy.
7
big omissions in the State Department's whitewash of Keystone XL.
Global heating
is helping
fungus kill the Douglas fir trees of the Pacific Northwest.
Record-Breaking Long-Term Unemployment in Virtually Every State, and
Obama
Turns to Big Business?
The Indian ID card
is the
world's biggest biometric scheme, and the state has tried to
impose it on everyone.
Media
Suffer Winter
Chill in Coverage of Sochi Olympics.
Bayer CEO
says, "We
did not develop this medicine (Nexavar) for Indians, We developed it
for Western patients who can afford it."
Heed
the Warnings in Extreme Weather — Or Risk Losing Earth.
Proposed vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems for cars
could
turn out to be a way to track them.
It's possible to design such a system so that it provides the same
benefits and can't be used for tracking. All it requires is political
will.
The More We Learn about Nuclear
Past, the
More an 'Accident' Seems Likely.
Most Americans consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
failures.
The conquest and occupation of Iraq were much worse than a failure
— the right term is "crime against humanity". Bush deserves to
be prosecuted for it.
But was it a failure? In terms of its stated purpose, eliminating
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, it was a success before
the start — since he
didn't
have any.
New product:
mobile
surveillance robots for shopping malls.
I do feel irritated when I get checked by "security", usually at
airports. I hope you do, too. If this robot keeps permanent records,
which I expect it will, it will be like a mobile surveillance camera
installation.
In coal country, toxic spills happen continually and
people
are disposable. It has been that way for over a century, as
companies find excuses to block or ignore regulations against
pollution.
The EU has a
secret
plan to put devices in all cars to allow them to be stopped
remotely.
This would be used by the state against criminals and protesters,
but experience shows that others will find out how to use it too.
Islamist
terror is growing in Egypt.
Forget
Iron Man-Child — Let's Fight the White Maleness of Geek
Culture.
The Spanish government's plan to nearly ban abortion
has roused
big opposition.
Canada's spy
agency snoops
on WiFi users in airports, then follows them through other
connections. We don't know how it does this.
US citizens: call on
Obama not
to approve the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
US citizens: call on Minority Leader Pelosi
to oppose
"fast track" for the TPP.
Clapper thinks Japan's state secrecy law, which impedes access to
information about the handling and status of the Fukushima
meltdowns, is
a great thing.
Assad's army
has demolished
entire neighborhoods whose inhabitants were thought to favor the
rebels.
For-profit colleges in the US prey on people desperate for a way to
escape
poverty using
exaggerated claims and high-pressure sales.
Federal student loans should not be available for these
schools. However, the underlying problem is that of
the plutocratic
policies that favor the rich
and have
driven 1/3 of the middle class down and out.
The evolution of the death penalty in the
US responds
to a philosophical conflict.
The skinflint UK government
is rationing
access to health care through the NHS.
That dumps Britons into a US-like situation where the wealthy can pay
for their own care while the rest are screwed.
The Great Barrier
Reef faces
death by a thousand cuts.
As some cities consider removing their money from the big fraudster
banks, they need another place to put that
money, such
as public banks.
Some penguin species
are threatened
by the effects of global heating.
US citizens: call on Congress
to end
the NFL's tax exemption.
US citizens: call on Obama
to permanently
cancel plans to drill for oil in Alaskan Arctic waters.
India passed a law to end manual scavenging of human wastes,
but isn't
implementing it very energetically.
Simply dictating "no more manual scavenging of human wastes" won't
change anything in places where the systems require manual scavenging.
What's needed is a program to build sewer systems and toilets
connected to them. That will take money and time.
17 rural communities in
California are
about to run out of water. They contain at least 11,000 people.
The drought extends across most of the state, but it is only a
foretaste of what global heating will bring.
The only independent TV
channel may
be pushed off the air for asking a question about Russia's strategy
during World War II.
Whatever you think about the question, the response seems suspiciously
extreme.
In the US: join a protest vigil against the Keystone XL pipeline
on
Feb
3.
Armed, masked Israelis
attacked
some Palestinian farmers; Israeli troops came and molested the
Palestinians further.
Netanyahu's proposal to give Palestine sovereignty over some Israeli
settlements was meant to provoke Palestinian rejection, but
some
Israelis rejected it first.
More
comments on the situation in Ukraine.
A
review
of Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat.
The article dares to raise the question of how many children we should
have.
Having no
children is an important way to contribute to civilization's
survival. It also frees you to do something that matters with
your life, even if you're not rich.
A new study shows that a neonicotinoid pesticide
damages
bumblebees' ability to collect pollen for their young.
Bumblebees are important pollinators; endangering them is playing with
fire. The doubts that are raised in the article might affect the
level of damage that normally occurs, but not the fact that it
happens.
The
axolotl
seems to be extinct in the wild.
Public
pressure made the UK government back down from prosecuting the men
who tried to 'steal' food from a supermarket's garbage bin.
Persecution of gays in Nigeria
ranges
from betrayal to trial to lynching.
Egypt plans to charge 20 al-Jazeera journalists with
ludicrous
charges ranging from belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood to
"harming the national interest" and illicit possession of broadcast
equipment.
This is Putinesque contempt for freedom of the press.
Some of these journalists are being kept in
brainwashing
conditions similar to those Bradley Manning suffered.
This also reminds me of the
Yemeni
journalist imprisoned at Obama's request for interviewing
terrorists.
China
is installing
solar generating capacity at an amazing pace, but coal generating
capacity 3 times as fast.
This is not progress, merely regress a little slower than it might
have been. Progress will be when the amount of coal-based generation
goes down.
The US government is advancing a regulation about sharks that
would overturn
state and local bans on selling shark fins.
Flooding Experts
Say Britain
Will Have to Adapt to Climate Change — And Fast.
This is the result of failing to curb global heating a decade ago.
With the fossil policies of today's fossil governments, it will be a
lot worse in 30 years.
The NSA
spied
on other countries' participation in the 2009 Copenhagen climate
conference.
This was when the attempt to reach a global agreement to reduce CO2
emissions and avert disaster failed spectacularly because many
governments were unwilling to agree on a real solution. The US was
unwilling, and this NSA surveillance surely helped the US government
achieve its aim of "no deal, burn away!"
Clapper told Congress that al-Nusra, one of the Syrian factions that
labels itself as
"al-Qa'ida", would
like to attack the US.
Clapper
has lied
to Congress before with impunity; I would not put it past him to
lie about this too. Whether this is true or not, his am is surely to
convince us that massive general surveillance is necessary.
If he is not lying, perhaps he is exaggerating. Perhaps some member
of al-Nusra said to others, "Wouldn't it be great to attack Americas
some day?" and others said, "Sure, after we kill all the Syrian
Shi'ites and Christians, let's kill Americans next."
An interesting point is that al-Nusra is part of the group of Syrian
factions that the US may support
because it
is fighting against ISIS.
Syria is a fight involving at least three sides that are murderous and
evil. If any one of them were the only one, we could envision
intervening against that side if the Syrian people wanted us
to. Those who want an intervention against one side can easily
cite valid reasons for it.
But it is not feasible to intervene against all the evil
sides; and if we were to intervene against only some of them, in
effect we would be supporting the others.
I don't see any military way to make things better in Syria; at least
let's avoid making them worse.
Now
that "school
choice" proves to give no academic benefit, the advocates of this
indirect scheme of privatization hunt for bizarre excuses.
How many other UK convictions of protesters and others
are invalid
because of dishonesty by the thugs? Their own investigations
can't be trusted.
US and EU
citizens: sign
this petition for network neutrality.
US citizens: tell Obama
to stop
pushing the TPP.
Right-wing "marriage promotion" programs are
an excuse
for shafting the poor, and do nothing to reduce the obstacle that
make poor people's marriages fail: poverty itself.
The article also shows that ease of access to divorce has nothing to
do with successful marriages.
As for Ross Douthat's idea of trying to force women to have babies so
that they might feel it necessary to get married, it's not only a
nonsequitur, it is
perverse. We
need fewer babies to be born.
Israel is blocking Gaza's wastewater plant from operating, which is
causing
further pollution of Gaza's aquifer.
I guess the plan is to make Gazans get sick and die.
Tony B'liar
has endorsed
the Egyptian military government.
It's true that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood trampled Egyptians'
human rights. That's what Islamists stand for. However, the coup
government has gone much further in this harm.
Shell abandoned
plans to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic this year.
That delays the damage but we need to block it entirely.
Unable to do
both, Scarlett
Johansson chose to promote SodaStream rather than Oxfam.
I guess SodaStream pays more.
Activist Vera Scroggins has
been banned
from going to the local hospital, the local supermarket and the local
Chinese restaurant by an extremely broad anti-protest injunction
for a fracker.
Merely to ban someone from really protesting is injust in itself.
Roundup
is responsible
for the great decline in Monarch butterflies.
Fanmi Lavalas
activists face
criminal charges, which seem to have been fabricated.
Pakistan's Prime
Minister wants
negotiation with the Taliban.
US citizens: condemn
the House's foodstamp cuts and call on the Senate to undo them.
Justin Bieber is Lucky That He's
Rich. Poor
Immigrants Don't Get Off so Lightly.
If Bieber was driving drunk, that charge should not be dropped. Drunk
drivers risk killing someone, and stars are no exception. On the
other hand, people shouldn't be deported for minor things.
Does Obama Administration View Journalists
as Snowden's
"Accomplices"? It Seems So.
US citizens: Call on the American Pharmaceutical Association
to ban
pharmacists from making up drugs for executions.
Showering
in Formaldehyde? Fresh Fears in West Virginia.
Everyone: call on Wilmar to carry out its promises
to stop
causing deforestation.
Schools where US
taxpayers fund
teaching of anti-science.
Obama's efforts aimed at ending imprisonment without trial are so slow
and narrow that we can
conclude they
are programmed not to do the job.
US citizens: call on the EPA
to ban
the pesticide sulfoxaflor, which is known to hurt bees.
Israeli troops attacked
a peaceful protest in the Jordan Valley. The authorities arrested
two activists, handcuffed them, kicked them in the ribs, blindfolded
them, lodged false charges against them, and did not let them contact
lawyers.
Frackers should have to pay a lot of money to cover
the
environmental damage they will do.
A
Ukrainian Explains 10 Things The West Needs To Know About The
Situation In Kiev.
The rich in Haiti say that Port-au-Prince is being rebuilt, but the
poor
don't
see much improvement since the earthquake.
Boat people accuse the Greek Coast Guard of
causing
their boat to sink and then kicking people who tried to cling to the
Coast Guard ship.
If these charges are false, why didn't the Coast Guard make a video to
document the truth?
The migrants share the responsibility for the death of the children,
having brought them on such a dangerous trip, but that doesn't excuse
the Coast Guard for killing them.
This doesn't mean that migrants are entitled to go to Greece just
because they would like to. I understand that they had to flee
Afghanistan and Syria, but they could stay in Turkey (which is where
they were coming from).
Pakistan has imposed a state of emergency, including
secret
courts and allowing thugs to freely shoot to kill, supposedly as part of a plan to suppress the Taliban.
A British lawyer told members of Parliament that
much
of GCHQ's spying is illegal.
Karzai
accuses
the US of carrying out false-flag suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
I don't think it is true in this case, but the US has
done
things like this before.
Global heating may be responsible for making many species of fish
smaller, up to
1/3
smaller than 38 years ago.
Intense fishing may be responsible, because there is usually a size
limit on allowable catch; that selects for fish that become mature
with a smaller size.
US citizens:
phone
your senators to support extension of unemployment benefits.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter to end prohibition of marijuana.
Some
obvious ideas for what San Francisco techies could do to help
convince the rest of the city's residents not to resent them.
However, there is no substitute for building a lot more living space
in San Francisco.
US states can't get drugs to execute people with, so they are trying
experimental
combinations with unpredictable results.
I think the means of execution is a secondary issue — the death
penalty is
wrong
regardless of how it is done.
US prison is
illegally
harassing prisoner John Kiriakou, for instance by reading the
letters he sends, and reading mail from his lawyer, and claiming he is
forbidden to write to the media.
When users log in to a site through Facebook, Facebook
gives
the site access to lots of information about the user.
If this is what a site demands from you, you should not touch it anyway!
Australian protesters are
trying
to block the clearance of a forest which is needed to launch a
coal mine.
Both the means and the end endanger civilization's survival.
If you use Google Maps from a smartphone, you're
giving
data to the NSA.
To some extent this is because Google designed it to track you. This
includes the fact that it asks you which address you're interested in.
I used to use Google Maps, back when it worked without running nonfree
Javascript code, but I never entered an address; instead I scrolled
around in the area I was interested in and found the address for
myself.
I've pointed out for years that the system could do the same job while
respecting privacy more by
searching
the map data in your own computer for the addresses you're
interested in.
ALEC claims it does not track the progress of bills that follow its
proposals, notwithstanding
proof
that it does so. It could be that ALEC faces an IRS investigation
and is trying to cover up.
The UK
will
prosecute three men for taking food from a supermarket's garbage
bin.
This decision is coherent with the rest of UK policy. The UK
government has worked hard to drive Britons to starvation. To allow
them to eat food meant for the landfill would spoil all that work.
In a place with a sufficiency of food overall, hungry people
who can't afford food are entitled to steal food.
Alabama's legislature is on the verge of extending the Republican War
on Women by
authorizing
hospitals and medical personnel to refuse medical care (even in an
emergency) involving ending a pregnancy.
NYC thugs
beat
up an old man who was crossing the street against the light, then
charged him with "resisting arrest" (he ignored their orders because
he doesn't understand English). Naturally, the New York thug
commissioner stood up for the thugs.
The author may be right that most thugs would not engage in such
violence. But nearly all thugs will defend their fellow thugs who do
carry out such attacks, and that's why they deserve the name of
"thugs".
The US is
suffering
from its growing inequality.
Robert Gates' former boss in the CIA
evaluates him
again.
FDA
Concealed the 'High Risk' Livestock Antibiotics Pose to People.
A study suggests a
connection
between DDT and Alzheimer's disease.
Costs
of Privatization Hidden in Plain Sight.
It is no accident that privatizations are set up to give the public a
bad deal. They are designed to do that.
Information-gathering companies want to know so much about you
that they
can tell when you're about to buy something.
If these companies know what you're likely to do, the NSA will know if
you are planning to be a whistleblower. The existing level of general
surveillance in the US is already too much for democracy.
I will
continue not
to use most of the systems that would give companies such information
about me. Don't be tracked — pay cash!
The government has made a small
concession allowing
companies to publish the rough numbers of certain kinds of demands for
people's data.
This is not quite enough for us to tell whether we are all being
surveilled. One single order (such as the one for Verizon) can cover
the data of millions of people.
What we really need is for each company to publish a figure (even if
approximate) for how many people's data was actually delivered to the
government.
RNA interference can be used to make
pesticides, but
they can go wrong.
The proposed applications vary in terms of the danger of bad side
effects. Dosing bees with RNA to kill varroa mites is unlikely to
result in exposing other wild insects to that RNA; if it doesn't hurt
the bees, it won't do harm. By contrast, corn that generates
interfering RNA can't avoid exposing all the species that live near
the field, and there are lots of those.
I think that the interfering RNAs should be delivered in sprays, not
made by crops, for two reasons:
The predicted fastest-growing US jobs for the next decade are, mostly,
very
susceptible to automation.
It looks like the US is heading for a situation where millions of
people who are fit to work can't find any jobs. The plutocrats would
like to take advantage of this to force wages down for just about
everyone. Instead we must redesign society so that everyone can have
a decent life, even those who get no work. This could involve welfare
for everyone. This could involve rejecting, even banning certain
forms of automation. One way or another, it must be done.
A Dutch appeals court says ISPs
are not
required to block access to the Pirate Bay.
This is a victory for internet freedom.
Rick Falkvinge says
the copyright
industry is doomed, because it can survive only by surveilling all
forms of private correspondence.
I wish I could be so confident. I fear that states, which already
seek to surveil all private correspondence and already act as agents
for the copyright industry, will extend their surveillance to the
point of achieving what Falkvinge considers impossible.
There is another way that the copyright industry can succeed in
subjugating everyone: through streaming. If people are so foolish as
to tolerate streaming instead of having a copy, no one will be able to
share.
It is clear that we must reject any streaming service that doesn't
allow users to download copies. And if it does allow users to
download copies, we must make a point of using it that way.
Out, out, damned Spotify!
If You Used This Secure Webmail
Site, the
FBI Has Your Inbox.
This is comparable to searching all the apartments in 20 blocks of
Manhattan just in case their might someday be warrants against some of
the residents.
Police Banned From Enforcing Traffic Laws In Oklahoma
Town Over
Abuse Of Traffic Tickets For Money.
Can we get governments
to fund
research in integrated pest management instead of supporting
Monsanto?
Ukraine
has repealed
the new repressive law
that forbid
protests and imposed censorship.
Thugs in the
Philippines tortured
suspects for fun.
US citizens: support Bernie Sanders' bill
to use
money allocated for war to pay for benefits for veterans.
Plutocrats
often compare
progressive taxation with Nazism.
Propaganda: The
Dominant Grand Narrative Of Our Time.
Angry
Birds spies
for the NSA as well
as for
companies.
UK residents who were sentenced in effect to restrictive probation
without
a trial for suspicion of perhaps intending to commit crimes, who
ran away and hid, are appealing the probation order.
One of them faces criminal charges for violating the restrictions of
this punishment without trial.
Peru has approved gas
prospecting deep
inside an indigenous people's reserve.
1/3 of the US middle class in
2008 is
no longer middle class.
Edward
Snowden responds
to Obama's proposals for minor changes in the general surveillance of
everyone.
Everyone: tell Kellogg's
to adopt
a firm policy to stop causing deforestation.
Obama's "Promise
Zones" promise
very little.
A US bomb attack in
Somalia killed
one of the main leaders of the Shabaab.
I have no sympathy for Sahal Iskudhuq, or for the Shabaab, which is an
Islamist extremist group. However, the death of a leader in such a
group is generally not much of a setback. Lots of others are ready to
take his place. What affects the success of the group is its power to
recruit. Did this attack reduce that, or increase that?
Given that there is a civil war in Somalia, in principle the US can
legitimately give the government military support. Did that
government ask for this attack? Maybe in general terms.
But let's not forget that this government
was imposed by outside intervention.
While it now has control of substantial territory, it's not clear that
it qualifies as more than a puppet. Furthermore, al-Shabaab is
the result
of the previous US-organized intervention, carried out by Ethiopia as
a proxy, which destroyed Somalia's previous stable government,
which was Islamist too but not as extremist as al-Shabaab.
It all raises the question of whether these interventions are good for
anyone except arms companies, participants in the perhaps puppet
Somali government, and Islamist extremists.
Right-wing US policies have made American workers and students so
afraid of losing the competition with each other
that they
dare not fight back.
The Taliban
are intimidating
Pakistani journalists who might criticize their crimes.
Tunisia has adopted a constitution
that recognizes
religious freedom. However, freedom of expression may not be
strong enough.
8 years after Hurricane Katrina, the poorest neighborhood in New
Orleans
has
only partly rebuilt.
Global heating is raising sea level. What would be considered today a
100-year-flood will in 50 years be much more frequent.
The right to a public trial
is threatened
in the trial of Chicago protesters accused of terrorism.
DNA from plants humans
eat gets
into the human bloodstream. This adds to the reasons for concern
about genetically modified plants.
It's clear that these GMOs can't be broadly toxic to humans, for the
consequences would have been impossible to miss. However, problems
affecting particular classes of people (perhaps depending on the
details of their immune systems) are not impossible.
What worries me most is the spread of pollen. Plants do hybridize in
nature.
The UK
press fears
a system of mandatory prior censorship will be imposed.
The maker of fraudulent "bomb
detectors" paid
the UK government to help sell them.
The US government also acts as the marketing arm for companies such as
Microsoft. In 2011 the Indian state of Tamil Nadu switched from
distributing computers with GNU/Linux to distributing them with
Windows, and this is suspected to be the result of a visit by Hillary
Clinton.
This adds
to many
other reasons for not supporting her candidacy for president.
The anti-government Thai protesters, representing a substantial
minority with a lot of
clout, have
seized and shut polling stations to block the election.
Half the children in Afghanistan
are stunted
from early malnutrition.
I think people should not have children under such circumstances, but
women in Afghanistan are not given the choice.
Snowden says the NSA does
industrial
espionage.
The CIA paid Poland
$15
million to run a secret prison there.
Activists have used
"citizen's
search warrants" to make governments come clean about dirty plans.
Yes, Things
are Very Bad at Fukushima but it's not the Apocalypse.
The word "disaster" can be applied to events considerably less severe
than the end of humanity, and it clearly applies to the Fukushima
meltdowns even though no significant radiation reaches the US.
JP Morgan
shows that crime does pay.
How wolves in the US, and big cats in Africa, keep ecosystems in
balance by
preventing
population explosions of their prey.
Sea otters protect the kelp forests of the Pacific coast; the decline
of sea otters fuels global heating.
Ukraine's president has started
offering
concessions to the opposition, but the torture of many protesters
and journalists by riot thugs has made the protesters so angry that
they demand more.
US citizens: phone your senators to
oppose
S. 1881, the bill to provoke war with Iran.
Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe are being
sued
for conspiring to keep wages down.
US citizens:
call on the
World Bank to stop funding coal.
Everyone:
call for
dropping charges against Darrin Manning.
US citizens:
tell
your state legislators not to be scared when Big Food companies
spread false claims that state laws to label GMOs are
unconstitutional.
Indian villagers have obtained a demolition order for a Coca Cola
plant that
sucks
the water from their farmland.
5 journalists have been killed in Egypt since the coup in July,
dozens
have been attacked, and dozens imprisoned.
The Global
Elite: Rigging the Rules That Fuel Inequality.
Anti-government protesters (some pro-Morsi, some pro-democracy) faced
repression
in Cairo.
With pro-government rallies too, it is not easy to tell which side has
more popular support.
A UK politician
faces
threats for saying that a shirt showing Jesus and Mohammed
greeting each other is not horrible.
Companies say the US has a "skills gap", but really it's just that
employers are trying to push wages down and
skilled
workers are not enthusiastic.
Even if there were enough job offers to give every American that would
like to work a low-paid job, that wouldn't make the country
prosperous. Additional demand for workers is needed in order for
wages to rise. So we need to create more jobs — until we
reorganize society so you can have a decent life without working if
nobody wants your labor.
Electric cars can reduce pollution (including greenhouse gas) provided
they are combined with a push for
cleaner
electric generation.
San Francisco residents are up in arms against
employees
of Google and other companies for driving up the price of housing
there.
I sympathize with them, and with everyone that wants to live in San
Francisco, and I think the real solution is to build a lot more
housing space there.
Obama banned physical torture, but
authorizes
brainwashing techniques such as long-term sleep deprivation and
long-term solitary confinement.
Long-term solitary confinement is also
practiced
on many US convicts.
Medical marijuana is
the
only hope for some children with epilepsy.
A court ruled that Texas law
doesn't
require keeping a corpse on life support for the sake of the deformed
fetus inside it.
The
campaign
to eliminate toxic substances from clothing factories.
Everyone:
call
on Monsanto to stop hiding the costs of GMOs.
Fracking in the
UK may
produce marginally less CO2 than using imported gas; but if that
gas is used elsewhere, the emissions from fracked UK gas will add to
the total.
When demand is elastic, increased supply causes a lower price and
increased consumption. To burn less fossil fuels we must reduce the
supply. A rising price would indicate success.
The UK has passed a law that
will restrict
organized political activity, except by the companies that can
afford their own lobbyists.
Three protesters are on trial in Chicago for alleged terrorism,
although it
seems that thug provocateurs may have fabricated everything.
The intense security and obstruction of public and press access to the
trial is, in effect, a way of prejudicing the jury to think the
defendants are very dangerous people.
The result of skimping on higher education is
that most
teachers are exploited "adjuncts" with no hope of tenure and
intolerably low pay.
Proprietary video
games give
the illusion of agency because the players can choose the little
details of what they do. The important choices are imposed on them.
Further emission of
CO2 will
cost business money. Given plutocratic (thus, illegitimate)
government, that seems to be a crucial point to try to limit global
heating.
Egypt's repression
includes arrest
of an al-Jazeera news team, supposedly accused of "broadcasting
false news" although they have never actually been charged.
For such a thing to be a crime indicates tyranny.
A series of terror bombings in
Egypt have
been claimed by self-described Islamists.
The regime blames the Muslim Brotherhood for these bombings, with no
evidence. A few months ago I predicted
that some
Islamists who formerly supported the MB would turn to violence in
response to the massacre of protesters.
However, another possibility occurs to me. Given how much these
bombings benefit the military rulers, I wonder whether some of them
are false flag attacks — carried out by the military and
attributed to Islamists.
Neither explanation seems impossible. I can envision Islamist
extremists who continue using violence even when it is self defeating,
and I would not put anything past al-Sisi's men.
A mentally ill man has
been sentenced
to death in Pakistan for claiming to be the prophet Mohammed.
Muslims who don't want their religion to be equated with oppression
had better demand the repeal of laws against blasphemy.
The European Court of Human Rights
has demanded
information from UK ministers about GCHQ for a case about whether
it violates privacy rights.
Chinese dissident in exile Wang Yam
was sentenced
to life imprisonment in the UK through a secret trial, almost as
if he were in China.
Genetically modified
crops might
produce the "fish oils" that are made in nature by algae and
accumulated by fish.
Will these crops be safe for humans to eat, and for wildlife? I don't
see any obvious reason why they would not be, but you can't predict
what will happen in complex systems such as the human body or natural
ecosystems. Only trial will tell.
It could be that it is safe for most people but a few are allergic to
it. It is important to maintain alternatives, so that anyone who is
allergic can avoid this.
These crops would be patented, which means they would deny farmers
their traditional right to save seeds. Note how the person
interviewed cites
the bogus term
"intellectual property" to justify the radical claim that the
results of publicly funded research should be used to extract money
from the public.
Why did the thugs in Wisconsin mistake a basketball victory gesture
for "gang membership" and arrest three happy teenagers?
Everyone: call on
Iraq not
to execute prisoner al-Qahtani, who was tortured into a confession
(like many others in Iraq).
The
Modern Day 'Starving Artist' Is Likely On Food Stamps.
Everyone:
support
the bill in the State of Washington to refuse cooperation to NSA
massive surveillance.
US citizens:
support
the science-based estimate of the cost to society of emitting
CO2.
US citizens:
Call
on Obama to order a living wage for federal contract workers.
US citizens:
Call on China to
free imprisoned Tibetan singers.
There was a second possibly toxic chemical in the West Virginia toxic
spill, which the company
didn't
bother to report.
Since the company is already bankrupt, its owners probably see no
reason to care what happens.
Once the spill happens, our system for preventing spills has already
proved inadequate. We must inspect chemical plants frequently, and
tax them enough to pay for it. They must be required to report about
the storage of toxic materials, too; we cannot cater to their desire
for secrecy.
"Homeland Security" attacked a man who wore his Google Glasses into a
movie theater, because the MPAA suspected him of
"movie
theft".
I would ask people to remove Google Glasses in any private gathering.
It's not a wise idea to depend on them for your lenses.
Attempting
to convince finance ministers that they need to curb global
heating for the sake of economic growth.
It makes perfect sense if you want growth in jobs and income for most
people. It's not good for fossil fuel billionaires, though.
Beijing will go
all-out
to reduce air pollution from both cars and power plants. This
includes moving away from coal.
Iran's president is at Davos
asking
for western investment.
Western investment comes with dangerous strings, which would add to
(not replace) Iran's home-grown repression.
Väexjö, in Sweden, builds
"passive
houses" that need no heating even in the coldest winters.
The US could do this too, if it appreciated the extent of the danger
that threatens.
The Australian government
says it
can't afford the welfare system. Meanwhile it proposes to offer
amnesty to rich tax-evaders.
It's just a matter of priorities: the rich or the poor.
Assad
has cut
off polio vaccination in rebel-controlled areas, as well as other
supplies necessary for public health such as preventing water-borne
disease.
The Ukraine anti-protest law
also abolishes
fair trials and imposes arbitrary censorship.
It also bans collecting information about thugs, which I presume
includes photos or videos of what they do. In the US, that's not
illegal, but the thugs wish it were, so they fabricate accusations
against those who take photos.
Thugs have been fighting with protesters in
Kiev, and
the protesters have been fighting back.
Subsequently a truce was agreed, for talks between the president and
the
opposition. However,
no deal was reached.
This
report claims that the violence was started by right-wing
infiltrators. I have no way to evaluate this claim.
A clever scheme
for distributing
anti-censorship software in China.
People should try this in the UK!
The Canadian
government liquidated
the library of Health Canada. The scientists are scrambling to
create their own research resources.
Tunisia's new constitution seems pretty good in regard to freedom of
expression, but
some points need improvement.
The EFF explains how the presence of software in products is used
to prevent
people from owning them.
It's a good article but has two flaws. It uses
the weak
term "digital locks" to refer to DRM, and refers to
the confusing
term "intellectual property".
Tracking phone calls to a newspaper, to find a
leaker, has
created a scandal in Costa Rica.
I wish the US courts responded with such diligence to the scandal of
its own far worse surveillance.
In cereals other than
Cheerios, General
Mills will continue to mean Genetically Modified.
China plans
to stop
using agricultural land as large as Belgium because it is polluted
with heavy metals.
US citizens:
call on congressional
Republicans: if they want to interfere with abortions, they should
support the rights of pregnant workers.
The ACLU is
suing
to make South Carolina public schools stop imposing Christianity (and
mocking students that don't agree).
The school teaches bogus science, too.
The independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded
that
NSA
massive surveillance is illegal.
The US
systematically
imposes harsh punishments for minor cyber "crimes".
I don't think most of these "crimes" should be punished at all. In
particular,
net
protests at a web site virtual are the equivalent of a protest on
the street. It is a mistake to call them "attacks".
Bugs in Chrome allow sites to turn its speech recognition into a
listening
device.
If the speech recognition is implemented, as I suspect, by a Google
server (this would be
SaaSS)
then Google and the NSA are certainly listening to anything you say to
this "feature".
Utah has a solution for homelessness:
give
homeless people apartments.
Another
attempt
to do a citizen's arrest on Tony B'liar failed, but eventually we
will make him stand trial.
The NSA and GCHQ collect
200
million phone text messages a day, and look through them with
little restraint.
The FISA court judges have recognized they cannot truly oversee the
NSA, but
they
oppose any change that might fix this.
A woman in India was
sentenced
to be raped as a punishment for not paying the fine for having
unauthorized sex.
Her lover seems to have been fined as well, but it was his wife who
actually paid the fine.
California is in drought,
perhaps
the worst ever recorded. Little snow has fallen in the US west
this winter — it has all gone to the center and east.
Global heating is
expected
to make the US southwest more arid, so this is just a foretaste.
The Gates Foundation's investments,
compared
with its stated principles.
The article presents the information annoyingly via images, which help
the companies by presenting their logos. I see no reason to do that.
Here's what the text in those images says.
Gates Foundation says: "Our nutrition efforts focus on delivering
proven interventions and developing better tools and strategies for
providing pregnant women and young children with the foods and
nutrients they need"
The foundation's trust invested in:
Bill Gates says: "As a businessman, I believe the free market fuels
growth. Unfortunately, the market often fails to address the needs of
the poorest".
The Gates foundation trust invested in
Walmart.
Gates Foundation says: Bill and Melinda Gates "Have defined areas in
which the endowment will not invest, such as companies whose profit
model is centrally tied to corporate activity that they find
egregious".
The Foundation's trust invested in:
Gates Foundation says: "The foundation believes that climate change is
a major issue facing all of us, particularly poor people in developing
countries …"
The foundation's trust invested in:
14 things that
conservatives compare to slavery.
I won't say that nonfree software is as bad as slavery.
It's oppressive, but not as much so as slavery.
Republican wreckers in Congress have
repealed the energy efficiency
standards
for light bulbs.
US citizens:
tell
the SEC to bring back its rule to make public corporations
disclose their political spending.
In Massachusetts:
call
on Stop and Shop to label products with GMOs.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to repeal the authorization for war with Iraq.
UK thugs demand
water
cannon to use against the people, saying that austerity is going
to cause riots.
Nobel laureate Randy Schekman
campaigns
against the "luxury journals" that use their prestige to maintain
an exploitative relationship with science.
The percentage of US adults in or looking for employment fell to
under
63%. Large numbers have recently given up looking for work.
Perhaps they gave up hope of finding a job long ago, and were counted
as seeking employment only because of their unemployment benefits.
Once those were cut off, they had no reason to keep looking for
work that they know they can't find.
NOAA says 2013 is tied for the
4th
warmest year on record.
Snowden
refutes
the absurd charges that he spied for Russia.
It is no coincidence that Snowden is in Russia. It is because the US
blocked him from going anywhere else.
Why does the US want Snowden to be in Russia rather than Bolivia or
Venezuela? I conjectured last July that it is in order to smear him
one way or another.
A new supermarket plans to
sell
edible but slightly bruised or wilted food, that is currently
wasted.
Reportedly Kerry
wants
to extend the Israel-Palestine peace talks, because they are
deadlocked (of course).
Netanyahu would like the talks to continue so that (1) he can say he
is trying to make peace, and (2) occasionally the US will make a
concession to him.
An Israeli teacher may be fired for
saying
negative things about the Israeli army and the occupation of
Palestine. His students have taken to the street to support him.
The most ironic part is the claim that such ideas should not
be heard in a civics class.
The London thugs are so committed to institutional racism that they
systematically
attack the organizations that resist it.
They
offer
money to innocent victims of their attacks, but never admit
responsibility.
Erdogan's struggle to retain power in Turkey at all costs now
endangers
rule of law.
The EU has adopted
targets
for greenhouse gas reduction and for renewable energy generation,
for 2030.
Announcing a target is only the first step to reaching it. It is a
good thing that the corrupt EU governments (mainly UK) that serve the
fossil fuels were overridden, but they did weaken the targets.
Meanwhile, these targets are
insufficient
to prevent disaster.
The big question, for civilization, is whether the
US,
Canada
and
Australia,
effectively subservient to fossil fuel companies, will frustrate hopes
for a climate protection agreement in 2015. They have won every time
so far.
Success requires cooperation from China, India, Brazil, Indonesia
and other major countries.
Many
Chinese anti-corruption
activists are being put on trial.
The Chinese government hardly tries to disguise the fact that they are
being tried for political activities, unlike the US
where protesters
face charges of a "terrorist hoax" for the glitter that fell off their
banner.
Shell has
been blocked
from oil drilling in Alaskan waters on the grounds that the
threats to the environment have not been studied.
The European Union's new renewables
target does
not apply to individual countries; the UK now has no target for
renewable energy.
This is what
the UK
government fought for, so that it could slow the increase of
renewable energy and burn as much fossil fuel as possible.
The Russian law against "homosexual propaganda"
has stirred
up a wave of private violence against homosexuals.
Advocacy
of gay rights is also banned by the law.
Syrian
women are organizing to campaign for peace in Syria.
9 of the 10 hottest years on record were since 2001, the exception
being 1998 which had a very strong El Niño. In 2013, the short-term
variable factors operated for cold; despite
them, it
was tied for fourth hottest on record.
When we get another strong El Niño, we will see what hot is.
The American Psychological
Association dismissed
the ethics complaint against its member John Leso, who help plan Bush
regime torture policies, despite conclusive evidence.
The organization claims to have high ethical standards but apparently
will go to great lengths not to uphold them in practice.
The Koch
brothers paid
for ALEC's report, "Rich States Poor States", which ranks states
based on how little they spend.
Students in
London supported
a planned strike by university staff.
Poor women in various
countries face
more abuse from men and use less contraception.
Lack of money to meet ordinary needs could be responsible for both.
The sense of desperation causes stress that leads to anger; some men
would express that anger with violence. Poverty may also impede
access to contraception.
A decent society offers everyone a decent life. This can involve
having to work, but should not impose the stress of being poor.
Two Australian thugs were
convicted
of shooting a prisoner repeatedly with tasers.
Heavy air pollution from China
spreads
smog to the US west coast.
An
artificial
island built near Lagos for Nigeria's wealthy shows how the elite
plan to wall themselves off and leave the rest to suffer from human
and environmental disasters.
Victoria (in Australia) is considering laws that would empower thugs
to
ban
a protest based on their subjective impressions. This is
tantamount to a policy of no protests but the state could pretend it
is not so.
Major western banks help the Chinese political
elite hide
their wealth.
The US, UK and Canada
are turning
their "national security" system on peaceful protesters, on behalf of
fossil fuel companies.
Bristons convicted of a protest against coal-fired electricity had
their convictions overturned because prosecutors concealed evidence in
their trial — for
instance, that
an undercover thug was snooping on them.
This is good, but prosecuting people for a peaceful protest is an
injustice even with a fair trial.
The UK thugs continue attacking protesters arbitrarily; a legal
advisor at a fracking protest
was left
injured after thugs attacked him as he was talking to them.
Syrian
refugees strongly
wish for a negotiated settlement and a cease-fire.
Everyone: call on Iceland
to stop
killing whales.
US citizens: call on your congressional representatives
to counteract
the Corporations United (*) decision.
* Officially called the "Citizens United" decision.
In my message I urged legislators to work on various corrective
approaches in parallel.
Australia has converted Nauru into a quasi-satellite and is therefore
responsible
for Nauru's absolution of independence for the judiciary.
The growing opposition to the TPP means
we
may be able to defeat "fast track", which would make it hard for
it to be ratified at all.
19
things that conservatives compare to slavery.
I won't say that nonfree software is as bad as slavery. It's
oppressive, but not as much so as slavery.
As Obama's health care program starts giving Americans health
coverage, people who were taught to despise it
become
grateful.
Everyone: answer the European Union's
copyright survey. You can answer
even if you are not European.
Here are
explanations
of what's behind the questions, and suggestions for answering.
Here's
more
advice.
US citizens:
support Senator
Reid in blocking the impetus for war with Iran.
The Pakistani Taliban
fatally
attacked a Pakistani TV team, and it's not the first time.
My not having a TV or a DVD player and not doing internet shopping
protects me from the deepest level of that strange trap.
Mining may expose Haiti to the
"resource
curse".
Denial of global heating had no political influence in 1990. That
movement results entirely from a
paid
political influence campaign.
A Syrian government photographer defected with his photos, which
showed
11,000
prisoners' corpses that appeared to have been tortured as well as
killed.
A widely used pesticide makes bumblebees smaller, which tends to
harm
colony survival.
The Turkish government has
prohibited
offering first aid to injured protesters.
France is considering a
wide
range of laws to give women social equality.
The UK government holds millions of old files that have been withheld
from publication, apparently
illegally.
Some of these files go back to the 17th century.
US citizens: sign
350.org's petition against
the TPP.
350.org is against the treaty because it would obstruct efforts to
avoid global heating disaster.
Centralized digital medical records risk privacy violations, but the
UK's
lax policy is turning "risk" to "ensure".
A group of multinational tech companies, probably including Google,
are
lobbying
secretly to prevent the EU from taxing their earnings.
Large numbers of protesters, enraged by new limits on protests,
battled
thugs in Ukraine.
The anti-protest restrictions are interesting. The ban on amplifiers
follows New York City, which restricted Occupy Wall Street the same
way. The ban on masks is found in France and in many other places.
These restrictions on protesters are antidemocratic no matter where
they are found.
Fighting 'extremism' in Syria by
supporting
whoever its enemy is at the moment is not well thought out.
Iran has
stopped
enriching uranium to 20% U235, with inspectors to witness.
Turks protested again on the street against internet censorship,
and were
attacked
by thugs.
CO2 emissions are being
'outsourced'
by rich countries to rising economies.
Global inequality is rising due to plutocratic governments.
The
richest 85 people own more wealth than half of humanity.
Cuba is
moving
to allow private business, in a limited territory.
This can be good if it leads to respect for human rights. It will be
bad if, as in China, it leads to corrupt plutocratic tyranny.
Thirty
Years Since Betamax, and Movies Are Still Being Made.
A study suggests unusual "extreme" El Nińo events, which cause
economic damage and can kill thousands of people, will
double
in frequency due to global heating.
Today's face recognition technology can't recognize you as you walk on
the street, but the US government is
setting
out to develop that.
Congress added a rider to a large bill to
bar
Obama from transferring CIA drone attacks to the Pentagon.
The reason for that transfer is that the Pentagon has to obey laws of
war which the CIA
secretly
ignores. It is bizarre for Congress to concern itself with such a
thing. I wonder if some members of Congress were blackmailed.
"Freedom Industries", the company responsible for the toxic spill in
West Virginia, has gone
bankrupt.
In a small way, this is deserved punishment for the owners — but
nowhere near enough. Chemical and fossil fuel octopuses operate by
atomizing their facilities under lots of tentacle corporations, so
that in the event of an accident,
only
one tentacle goes bankrupt and the victims can't get compensation.
Perhaps we need laws to make holding companies responsible for the
debts of their tentacles.
An NSA whistleblower says that the only way to do sufficient oversight
is
to appoint
a team that can investigate anything the NSA does.
How many members of
Congress does
the NSA control through blackmail?
The UK appears to
have snooped
on Belhaj's communication with his lawyers, and played legal games to
get the judge in his lawsuit to disregard that violation of his
rights.
The End of
Ownership: Why
You Need to Fight America's Copyright Laws.
The Iraqi government
is attacking
Ramadi.
I've seen reports that local Sunnis are allied with the government,
and reports that they are the ones being attacked. I don't know which
to believe.
The World Bank lent millions to a Honduran palm oil company that
peasants
say forced
them off their land.
The CPFB is considering
whether to
stop banks from requiring customers to use arbitration rather than
going to court.
This is good, but mandatory arbitration is found also in other
contexts, including between companies and employees.
The Mayor of Hoboken says Chris Christie
is blocking
Hurricane Sandy rebuilding funds to extract support for a building
project for rich cronies.
A specialized machine
can replace
human cooks for making hamburgers. This threatens to eliminate
millions more jobs in the US.
Keeping wages low is not a solution. That would force people into
worse poverty, and then the machines would get cheaper.
Although it is a different issue, keep in mind
that it
isn't healthy
or sustainable
to eat lots of hamburgers.
UK prosecutors falsely claim that prostitutes are controlled by
unidentified pimps as
an excuse
to evict them and force them to work on the street.
98% of Egyptians voted for constitutional changes
which combine
greater rights for women with greater power for the suppression
forces.
I have no knowledge with which to weigh the good of the former against
the bad of the latter, but I would guess that the Egyptian
constitution still fails to defend human rights, including
the right
to change one's position regarding religion (including ceasing to
be a Muslim) and
the right
to criticize or mock any idea (including, for instance, Islam).
The one-sided result convinces me that charges of intimidation are
valid.
Tiny
transmitters allow
scientists to track migrating birds.
That's very good, but I fear they will track us too.
A few heroic
Nigerians continue
defending the rights of gays.
West Virginia Chemical
Spill: When
Small Government Doesn't Work.
The privileged few businesses that have access to the TPP text
give
lots of money to the congresscritters most closely involved.
Ukraine
has plans
to adopt the whole suite of standard forms of Internet repression.
An
Iran Hawk's Case Against New Iran Sanctions
The DMCA takedown
system undermines
fair use by making it easy for bullies to get fair use taken down.
Pennsylvania's voter-ID
law was struck down as unconstitutional.
This is not final; it will probably be appealed to other courts.
US citizens: Sign this petition calling on your congresscritter and
senators
to support
the USA FREEDOM Act.
It is not enough to protect democracy from digital surveillance, but
it is a step in the right direction.
US
citizens: support
paid family and medical leave.
US citizens: call on the EPA
to promote
biofuel made from plant waste and cut down the use of ethanol made
from food.
Everyone: call on Google, Facebook and Yelp
to stop
supporting ALEC.
US citizens: call on your senators
to oppose
S.1881, which is designed to get the US into war with Iran.
Bizarre accusations in Egypt that
the US
wants to assassinate General al-Sisi.
This is ridiculous. The US is more or less a supporter of the
Egyptian military government, as it was of Mubarak.
US
media repeat
persistent government smears against marijuana.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to replace the part of the Voting Rights Act that the
Supreme Court struck down.
US citizens:
tell
Obama not to propose veiled cuts in Social Security again.
London wants to use
RFIDs
in cars to charge for parking. And track people.
Poaching of rhinos in South Africa is accelerating and
on
track to wipe them out in 20 years.
Of course, the last few will be better protected, so it might take a
few more years for poachers to get them all. However, when a species
is reduced to a few individuals, its genetic diversity is reduced and
it is more vulnerable for hundreds of thousands of years thereafter.
Former undercover thug Peter Francis was given immunity and testified
about the
infiltration
practices of UK thugs.
The UK government
worked
closely with fracking companies to manipulate the public and
overcome opposition.
It's no surprise. The UK government's goal is to emit as much
CO2 as possible, as soon as possible, while slowing down
development of renewable energy as much as it can get away with.
The soldiers that control US nuclear missiles are
prone to
various peccadilloes which, in that context, might lead to
something really important.
Obama's NSA
'Reforms' Are Little More Than a PR Attempt to Mollify the Public.
Advocates
and Digital Rights Defenders Reject Obama's Whitewash of Intrusive
Spying Regime.
Obama
Continues War on National Security Whistleblowers.
The small improvements in US bank regulations may be doing some real
good: the
banksters
profits are down.
Obama's drone killings have
roused all
Yemen to demand the US stay out.
Israel is considering a
plan
to ban the word "Nazi" outside a few specific exceptions.
Would it be forbidden to call a right wing-group "Neo-Nazi"? What
about "Soup Nazi"? Would Seinfeld be banned in Israel?
Now that many of Rio's favelas are peaceful, and relatives are
returning to them, they are
threatened
with eviction in the name of possible landslides, or as schemes
for gentrification.
The UK Labour leader says he will forcibly break up the big 5 banks
…
a
little.
Why push for just 7 big banks? Why not make them split into 20 or
even 50, so that none of them is too big to fail? It's the same work
either way.
Instead of micromanaging the splitting, my tax proposal would
pressure
the banks to split themselves up.
Greenhouse gas output
grew
faster from 2000 to 2010 than in the previous decades, says the
IPCC.
The report cites growing human population as part of the cause. For
decades this problem has been the one whose name most people dare not
mention.
One proposed
genetically modified organism seems like probably a good idea.
Genetic engineering is a method of modifying organisms, not a kind of
organism. The results are disparate. Whether any given genetic
modification is safe (for humans that eat it, for the environment, for
the rights of farmers) depends on the details. It has to be tested
and evaluated separately for each GM variety, since we have too little
experience to generalize about the effects. Likewise, whether it
really improves anything is also a matter of details. The GMOs now in
use mostly go with use of pesticides.
Ellen Brown is running for treasurer of California as a campaign to
set up a state-owned bank
for
the state to deposit in and borrow from.
Censorship
in Greece: a satirist has been imprisoned for making fun of a
long-dead monk.
Calls
Intensify for Obama to Fulfill Campaign Promise on GMO Labeling.
If you put together what Obama says with what NSA officials say,
it adds up to an
assassination
threat against Snowden.
New York City had to pay
18 million
dollars' compensation to protesters injured by thugs in 2004.
These compensation claims don't make up for the initial wrong, and if
they don't convince the city to make the thugs stop attacking
protesters, they are totally inadequate.
The US military infiltrates internet multiuser games such as
Second Life, and may be using them to
propagandize
Americans in favor of certain policies. Perhaps increased
military spending, or war, or whatever the president tells them to
propagandize for.
US citizens:
Tell the
USDA you oppose the growing of corn designed to be resistant to
Agent Orange.
Changes in marijuana have made it
impact
memory a lot more now than it did 30 years ago.
As Australian heat waves get ever worse, the government
cracks
down on renewable energy projects.
Greg Palast reports Chris Christie's
financial
connections with the Koch brothers.
More about
surveillance
of Americans by "border" patrol drones.
Ukraine has adopted a new anti-protest law,
banning
unauthorized megaphones and also masks.
If face recognition software comes into widespread use, wearing a mask
will be the only way to avoid being tracked everywhere on the street.
The UN still
does
not screen its peacekeepers for cholera.
An Australian was kept in solitary confinement for a month, before
trial, on charges of
being
in a pub with four members of a banned motorcycle club.
These charges, whether true are false, are obviously unjust.
It is prima facie injustice to ban groups without trial.
Asylum seekers parked permanently on Christmas Island have started a
hunger
strike.
The EPA reports that the Pebble Mine would
devastate
salmon fisheries in the region of Bristol Bay.
Heat waves in Australia have become
considerably
more frequent since 1971.
The West Virginia chemical storage facility that leaked
did
not maintain adequate safety precautions, and neither does the
site where the company moved the chemicals after the spill.
The US Trade
Representative spreads
distortions and lies about "fast track".
US citizens: call on the EPA
to go
ahead with stricter rules on emissions from cars.
A secret UK report from 2003, recently leaked, said
that criminal
gangs had infiltrated several UK agencies including prosecution and
customs, as well as the thugs.
This is the small-time organized crime. The big-time cheating occurs
in the banks that compose the City of London, and they have made most
of it legal.
Very
little is known about the health effects of the chemical that spilled
in West Virginia. No research has been published.
Everyone: urge
Brazil to offer asylum to Snowden.
Cesium from Fukushima
has spread
around the Pacific Ocean and plankton samples contain small amounts of
cesium.
A lot of the fish caught in the Pacific Ocean
are showing
small levels of cesium from the Fukushima meltdowns.
When large numbers of people are exposed to small levels of
radioactivity, a small danger for each person can add up to a
substantial number of additional deaths. It might mean, for instance,
101,000 cases of a certain kind of cancer in a population of 10
million, instead of 100,000. 1000 deaths is worth avoiding if
possible, but there is no reason for any one person to go to great
lengths to avoid this small danger.
Some of Europe's "foreign aid" is
really loans
to countries that would struggle ever to repay.
The UN climate head calls for
a trillion
dollars a year of investment to avoid 2C of global heating.
Each year we wait will increase the rate of spending required.
NSA to
Sen. Sanders: We
Can't Legally Tell You if We Spied on You.
Will Congress dare pass a law saying "yes you can tell us"?
"These days
Americans have as much familiarity with democracy as they do with
homesteading on the frontier."
The environment chapter of the TPP has been leaked. It
offers toothless
pretend protection for the environment.
US citizens:
call on
the Department of Justice to go after the company (perversely
named "freedom industries") that spilled toxic chemicals in West
Virginia's water.
Everyone:
call on
West Virginia to hold the company responsible for the large toxic
spill fully responsible.
Wait,
We Inject Antibiotics Into Eggs for Organic Chicken?!
The world
cannot
address economic inequality without preventing global heating
disaster
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Whole Foods, under pressure, agreed to stop selling food grown in recycled sewage sludge.
NAFTA's harmful legacy affects more than just the three countries that signed it. NAFTA introduced the unjust "investor-state" provision.
Drone surveillance of the US "border" goes beyond what the US government says.
The "border" area stretches a considerable distance from each frontier or coast, and includes the homes of most Americans.
Even US farmers are starting to reject GMOs.
In principle, genetic engineering could be great for agriculture. But not when it's developed by companies that are always seeking opportunities to cut corners on safety.
Kurdish protesters leaving the UK for Paris were robbed of their cash by the border guards who accused them of planning to give it to the PKK.
The is a rebel group; I don't know whether it is terrorist. Banning contributions to the PKK is legitimate, but taking away small amounts of cash like this on unproved suspicion is gratuitously nasty. The PKK would be on its knees if it depended on that funding mechanism.
Global heating at work: signs of spring in January in the UK.
Trees grow faster as they get bigger.
This means that cutting down old forests and replacing them with new tree plantations — as the UK government wants to do — would require the new plantations to be far larger.
Global investment in clean energy is falling, reflecting powerful efforts by politicians whose goal is to keep people burning lots of fossil fuel.
Billionaire Polluters predicts that greenhouse gas emissions will rise 30% by 2035.
In effect, it predicts that the half-hearted efforts to curb global heating will fail, partly thanks to the lobbying of fossil fuel companies such as BP itself.
US emissions of CO2 rose slightly in 2013 due to increased burning of coal.
Coal spews lots of toxic pollution, including radioactive fallout. The EPA needs to make rules to reduce use of coal.
Canada says it will increase CO2 emissions almost 40% by 2030, which is probably an underestimate of the emissions that extraction of oil from tar sands will cause. Furthermore, it doesn't count the emissions from burning that oil in other countries.
How Israel obtained nuclear technology, with the help of various western countries, and the US was eventually drawn in to the pretense.
People in Britain are accused of arranging to have children sexually abused in the Philippines and get video streamed to them.
Censorship laws are not needed to prosecute this, since they have participated in conspiracies to abuse those children. In general, the real abuse of real children can be stopped without censorship.
Georgina Roberts obtained poison, then helped her hopelessly ill parents kill themselves.
It is horrible that people find themselves in such situations. It's even more horrible if they are denied escape.
German and British companies sold goods made by prison factories in East Germany during the 70s and 80s.
The companies may not have done this intentionally, but it should not have been able to happen.
The idea of making an agreement with the Great Satan is creating deep debates in Iran.
Everyone: call on the governor of Maryland
to reject
a huge natural gas export terminal which would push for more
fracking.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, no new sanctions against Iran — allow diplomacy to work.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The latest election in Bangladesh was won by banning opposition parties.
Megan Rice is likely to be imprisoned for the rest of her life for a protest in which she trespassed in a US military base. The maximum sentence is 30 years, and she is already 83 years old.
Her protest demonstrated that security protecting US atomic weapons is totally inadequate; that alone was a service. She did, and intended, no harm.
Contrast this with Putin's threat of only 15 years' imprisonment for Greenpeace protesters.
Non-fanatical Islam in Pakistan is under attack from Saudi-funded strict fanatics.
The incorporation of lots of superstitions in Barelvism makes it vulnerable to rationalist criticism, but the replacement they propose is not rationality.
This is one of the dangers of Islam: the forms that are not cruel and harsh are vulnerable to fanatics who claim that it isn't true Islam if it isn't cruel and harsh.
US citizens: call on the FCC to classify ISPs as telecommunications services and make them common carriers.
US Black leaders signed a declaration of empathy with Indian Dalits.
Survey found that 1/5 of Britons borrowed money to pay for their housing last year.
This is what the totally unnecessary cruelty of the government causes.
Netanyahu's ally called Kerry "obsessive and messianic", which is ironic given how far Kerry has acceded to ridiculous Israeli demands and ignored the Israeli government's contempt.
Israel is using these negotiations to kill time, and demonstrating how much contempt the US government will swallow from that direction.
Time after time, new GMOs are touted in the media as solutions to big problems, and they turn out not to do the job after all.
US citizens: sign this petition against "fast track" for the TPP.
There was a shooting in a school in Roswell, New Mexico.
It has not yet been claimed that a UFO or an alien is involved, but I think it's only a matter of time.
Senator Warren's program goes deeper than Mayor de Blasio's.
Under a judgment from India's Supreme Court, the Dongria Kondh people denied approval for a giant mine in their territory.
Victories like this are not final. Businesses generally make another attempt to undermine the same opposition.
Google's purchase of Nest indicates that Google wants to control the "internet of things" — and entice people into handing over lots more information about their lives to Google.
If you want something to figure out that it should turn up your home thermostat because you're heading for home and the day is cold, there is no a priori reason why that should involve any company's server. That computation is yours, personally, and need not involved anyone else.
Google wants it to involve a Google server, but doing it that way is SaaSS (service as a software substitute).
A memo shows that Kissinger directly urged the Argentine government to do away with dissidents.
All the governments in South America that worked together in the 70s to crush dissent said they were fighting "terrorists". Remember that any time a government proposes an "anti-terrorist" law.
A study of real cases finds that the US government's general surveillance has very little to do with stopping terrorism.
The UK has established quotas for defeating asylum seeker appeals.
The UK thug who demanded journalists' notes etc. about an undercover thug whistleblower says he wants this because the whistleblower refuses to testify. The whistleblower says he won't testify because other UK thugs have threatened to prosecute him if he does.
In effect, the thugs' left hand pleads it is justified in attacking journalism to compensate for the right hand's attack on justice.
Thugs who beat a man to death were acquitted of murder.
It makes no difference that the man was suspected of a crime. That would be grounds to arrest him, but not to batter him to death once he was held down on the ground.
What could possibly have been in the minds of those jurors? Were they kept in the dark about important evidence? Do they give "officers of the law" improper respect?
Bulgaria is considering a law that would punish journalists working for foreign news organizations.
Everyone: call on Northern Dynasty
to cancel
the Pebble Mine
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The other two companies have already dropped out.
Citizens of the EU: ask your MEP to oppose the European Commission's plan to allow ISPs to censor the internet, blocking or slowing down sites however they wish.
A Florida thug has been charged with murder after shooting a man in a theater in an argument.
I hope that the "stand your ground" law won't let him get off.
Apple is trying to sabotage and replace a court-appointed monitor whose job is to make sure Apple obeys anti-trust requirements.
I guess this is what happens when a court-appointed monitor tries to do his job right. It suggests that Apple is too big to monitor, and therefore too big to be allowed to exist.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose "fast track" for the TPP.
The TPP is a dooH niboR treaty, designed to give more riches to the rich, and would do it based on taking freedom and safety from everyone.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The FCC'snet neutrality rules were found unconstitutional because it didn't go all the way to make ISPs common carriers.
The solution is obvious: make them common carriers.
Rima Najdi walked around Beirut in an unrealistic suicide bomber costume to encourage people to think.
President Hollande refused to answer questions about a sex scandal in his private life, insisting that it is a private matter.
I agree. Furthermore, I think scandals about the "other lover" are to be blamed on the misguided demand for monogamy, which is tantamount to demanding "perfection or nothing".
How oil heated up the factional and interethnic rivalry in South Sudan to the point of warfare.
The UK, Poland and a few other governments that are evidently for shale have blocked EU-wide fracking regulations.
Noorzia Atmar, former member of Afganistan's parliament, had to flee when threatened by reprisals from her family and her ex-husband's family.
Sahar Gul, tortured by her in-laws, faces the danger of a law that
would ban
women from testifying when they accuse their relatives or in-laws of
torturing them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
I wish we could do something to protect Afghan women, but supporting Karzai's government isn't doing it. There isn't enough will in Afghan society to do this.
The only idea that occurs to me is to arm Afghan women and help them form refugee camps where they can defend themselves. That plan might be inadequate for various reasons, but it illustrates the though of new thinking that we have to try.
US citizens:
insist on no cuts to
food stamps.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to close the Guantanamo prison.
Plain packaging for cigarettes in Australia was followed immediately by a big jump in the numbers of people asking for help in quitting.
Individual banksters face criminal charges for falsifying the Libor rate.
They were in charge of local trading activities, and must have been 2 or more levels down from the top management. Was it possible that Libor rigging could be so widespread without encouragement from above?
An experiment shows that humans can often detect that there has been a small change in a scene, even though they cannot determine what the change was.
This mental ability provides a rational explanation for many experiences that people often interpret as premonitions or otherwise supernatural.
Egypt's vote on the new constitution, which gives the military too much power, is being run in unfair conditions.
Many Egyptians intend to vote yes, but the point is that the unfair conditions mean they have never been exposed to arguments against.
Another victory for bigotry, as Nigeria imposed long prison sentences on homosexuality and even membership in organizations associated with homosexuality.
ACLU Stops Suspicionless Home Searches in Etowah County, Alabama.
The US is good at starting wars, but doesn't seem to be able to end them.
9%
of wetlands in China have been lost in the last decade.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Apple's ibeacon gives physical stores a new way to track patrons.
E-commerce already enables the abuse that you can't tell what price is offered to someone else. Things like ibeacon could extend the abuse to physical stores.
An Iranian woman fled in a boat to Australia, only to find out on arrival that Australia had just announced a policy to refuse asylum to anyone that arrived by boat.
She had to struggle to get medical care for her husband.
The Palestinian Authority won't allow Israeli colonies to use its landfill, so Israel has shut it down entirely.
Pseudoscience: there is no evidence that yoga can cleanse anyone's liver.
Everyone: tell Starbucks to stop trying to undermine San Jose's living wage law.
Ten Examples
of Welfare for the Rich and Corporations, in the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Israel shoots at Palestinian fishing boats that get 4 miles from shore.
Sometimes they get shot even closer to shore.
US citizens: call on your senators
to oppose
the lunatic plan to tie restoration of unemployment benefits with an
attack on the EPA.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The Israeli government asked for bids to expand colonies in Palestinian territory.
When Israel demolishes a colony in Palestine that it has not authorized, the fanatical "settlers" retaliate against any Palestinians that are handy.
Even settler children age 12 participate in pogroms.
The fanatics enjoy protection from the Israeli army even in the act of attacking Palestinians.
There have been dozens of such attacks, amounting to a sustained campaign of robbery.
A man from Afghanistan has been given asylum in the UK because he is an Atheist.
Afghanistan follows most Muslim countries in having legal retribution against Muslims that convert to any other position. The world needs to be more aware that Islam in political power means persecution.
The UK thugs are fishing for an excuse to punish the whistleblower who revealed that UK thugs spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence.
This is the way whistleblowers are generally treated.
EU farm subsidy policies pressure farmers to cut down forests for no use at all.
Comparing the West Virginia chemical spill, which has poisoned the water for a while in that region, with the New Jersey bridge harassment.
While it was an accident that this particular plant leaked toxins into the river just now, it is no accident that the US has lots of chemical plants that have a certain chance of poisoning people or exploding at any time. That is the result of policy choices.
Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed faces charges of "lack of respect for the prophet" for an article criticizing Mohammed.
What else would you expect from a man whose name parodies "Mohammed" twice ;-).
Mauritania is not alone in this sort of injustice: most countries that identify themselves as Muslim trample religious freedom and freedom of expression. It is one of the standard injustices of Islam.
A study finds that in nondemocratic states, the internet does not boost democracy; rather, it has become an instrument to suppress dissent.
It can do this in the US too: the US massive surveillance system is the seed of what the elite will want whenever anything makes the populace desperate enough to demand change.
William Binney proposed to give the NSA a spy system that wouldn't spy on ordinary Americans, but the highest officials rejected it.
The Ugly Truth about Charter Schools: Padded Cells, Corruption, Lousy Instruction and Worse Results.
Charter schools are a form of privatization. In general, privatization is presented as a way to make some service more efficient, but its real effect is to enrich a few. That's true in this case, but it also represents a way for the state to abandon poor people, now increasingly considered superfluous by the plutocratic state.
Some restaurants are replacing waiters with computerized order-takers. This threatens to leave millions more Americans unemployed.
Applebees alone may cut half a million jobs.
Using an ithing to take the orders is bad for restaurant, too. It is full of nonfree software that tramples the freedom of the user (in this case, the restaurant) and exposes the user to malware
For the sake of sales clerk's employment, I refuse to use the self-checkout machines in supermarkets and drug stores. When I go into a drug store that has these machines, I shout to the people who use them, "Using those machines puts Americans out of work".
I think we should prohibit those machines simply to keep employment up.
Handing over personal data to stores turns out to be no safer with big stores than with any other stores.
The risk that the store's copy of your personal data might be obtained by crackers should not distract you from the bigger risk — the use that will be made of your personal data with permission of companies that possess it.
I won't give any personal data to a store, because I don't want my purchases to be associated with me. I won't give the store even my name.
The worst piece of data to give to a store is your credit card number. Even if it is never obtained by crackers, it will identify you to the store's data base together with what you bought.
Do as I do: pay cash, and never give stores your personal data. If you never give it, you won't learn it as a habit, so you won't start handing it over as a habit.
The UK government is entirely for shale, and hopes that local councils are for shale as well.
Iran and other countries have worked out the last details of the nuclear agreement, and the implementation will begin on Jan 20 — provided Congress doesn't ruin everything.
Everyone: urge Brazil to reject Monsanto's BRM (Biological Restrictions Management), also known as "terminator seeds".
Syria outside Assad's control is a mosaic of mutually hostile militias.
Global heating has pushed the giant Pine Island Glacier into irreversible melting, and will melt away over the next few decades.
This is expected to raise global sea level by just one centimeter. If only the melting ice were limited to this! However, melting for the whole Antarctic melting is speeding up.
This demonstrates once again pro-surveillance officials' predilection for stretching the truth. Aside from that, the issue is a secondary one. Even if terrorists change their tactics, and even if that helps them a little, they are a secondary threat. A government that surveils everyone and thus eliminates democracy is more dangerous than any independent terrorists.
A lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center pushed the US government to recognize that x-ray body scanners could be dangerous. Now EPIC has made the DHS yield its information on test results and radiation risk estimates for airport body scanners.
Cultivation of genetically modified soybeans by plantations has taken over most of Argentina's agricultural land, and this involves taking land away from lots of peasants.
US sailors say they were drenched with radioactive fallout which caused them persistent medical problems, while their ship was rescuing people swept out to sea near Fukushima.
UK generals in the Bush forces, and politicians, face possible prosecution in the International Criminal Court because they did not prevent torture of prisoners.
Yoshitatsu Uechi, a worker at Fukushima, says he repeatedly
encountered
dangerous
cost-cutting and slipshod work there.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
A tracking company is encouraging stores to track customers through the WiFi chips of mobile phones.
This particular company doesn't know anyone's name, but there are other companies that can relate the phone's MAC address to a name. Put those two data bases together and presto, it says who has gone where.
If the phone talks to the phone network, then the phone company already records where it goes. The two methods of tracking lead to the same intolerable result.
A few congresscritters are
trying
to smear Snowden by saying that his disclosures "could" do harm to
US national security.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Such a weak assertion could be said of anything you do, even getting out of bed.
Since the security of America includes the security of our democracy, massive general surveillance by the US government does great harm to our democracy.
Snowden is a hero because he gave us the beginning of a chance to defend our democracy from that threat.
Everyone: support the Feb 11 action against NSA surveillance.
To fight surveillance effectively, our target must go beyond the NSA. Other branches of government do surveillance too; we must limit license plate recognizers and face recognizers even if they are run by local governments.
The root of surveillance is when digital systems record data about people. We must demand the redesign of digital systems to retain little data about people in general.
Quantifying the social cost of carbon emissions might encourage governments and companies to take necessary steps.
If you understand that global heating is probably leading to disaster, and we don't know exactly how far away the disaster is, you don't need to a measure of the cost of short-term effects. However, that measure may help to convince short-term-minded people.
Privatization of electric generation in Argentina was supposed to attract investment, but the companies extracted money instead of investing.
The UK's "lobbying" bill threatens to restrict civil society, while business lobbying will simply adapt.
The Australian government's plan to reduce CO2 emissions is to give money to the companies that produce it, then let them do whatever they wish.
It also endorses cap-and-trade, which pretends to reduce emissions but really promotes pretend reductions.
That government will say anything whatever, but its actions are in service to fossil fuel companies.
Hrant
Dink, martyr for freedom of speech, was tried in Turkey for the
"crime" of affirming the genocide of the Armenians. Then, when France
first considered a law to make it a "crime" to deny the genocide of
the Armenians, Dink said he would go to France and deny it as a
protest.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Turkey now plans to increase internet censorship and make it harder to evade.
Banning "hate speech" is an excuse for dangerous policies. No matter what we think of views, we must not ban their expression.
Former Merck employees claim in a lawsuit that Merck falsified data
about the effectiveness of its vaccine against mumps, and
used
incorrect test procedures designed to make the vaccine look more
effective than it really was.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
I found out about this through a site called nvic.org, but that site exaggerated and distorted this issue by presenting the vaccine as unsafe. Another page claimed that a tiny amount of formaldehyde in a vaccine was dangerous on principle, though it is much less formaldehyde than is normally found in the human body. While that site is not 100% false, it is not reliable either.
Unfounded rumors claiming vaccines are dangerous has led people to refuse vaccination for their children, which ironically has resulted in disease outbreaks that really damage children. The most glaring instance is the opposition to polio vaccination in Pakistan and Syria, which results in permanent palsy for some children.
Obama talks about helping small areas in the US with lots of poverty, but part of the "help" is cutting taxes for business.
Once a tax cut gets applied to a part of the US, businesses will push to spread it to more parts. Then businesses elsewhere say that "fairness" means they should get a tax cut too. Eventually it spreads into a general tax cut for business.
Business pays too little taxes in general. If we want to put specific zones at an advantage, let's raise taxes for business everywhere except those zones.
Study: Polarization and Gridlock Work Well for the Wealthiest Americans.
The idea that Congress is "not functioning" represents a fundamental misunderstanding, comparable to saying that a football game is "not functioning" because the score is 0-0. What it means is that neither side can overcome the other side to score.
However, that analogy goes only so far. In Congress, it's not a mere game. The two sides are "totally for the rich" and "mostly for the rich but with some concern for the rest", and the points that are occasionally scored against the poor do tremendous harm.
The US has replaced checks and balances and rule of law with the
national
security jihad.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Nauru, where Australia stores unwanted asylum seekers, now demands $7000 dollars for a journalist's visa, effectively saying Australia's dirty deeds are off limits to journalism.
It is an injustice to require special visas for journalists. The US should set a good example by abolishing the practice.
Exposure Chris Christie's underlings' disguised retribution scheme has called attention to bad decisions that are clearly the responsibility of Christie himself.
I won't claim that Christie must have known about this particular scheme. I would not expect a governor to personally pay attention each specific action taken, whether ethical or not. However, he may have told, or led, his underlings over the years to plan various kinds of political pressure and retaliation and not bother him with the details. That would still make him responsible overall.
Medecins Sans Frontiers
has wrestled
with various ethical and political questions about how to carry out
its mission.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
One form of massive surveillance, usually ignored, is surveillance of prescriptions.
US policy has
spread al Qa'ida to many countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Baraa Shiban has received a death threat for investigating the casualties from a drone bombing in Yemen.
Most members of Congress are millionaires.
The Pakistani internet rights group Bytes for All is suing the UK government for surveillance of its communications.
India has implemented massive surveillance of communications, with no court supervision.
Two points Gates does not mention when criticizing Obama about Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding these points, Obama is ultimately responsible for his decisions.
Feminist playwright Meltem Arikan was driven out of Turkey by threats from fanatical supporters of the ruling party.
They accuse her experimental play Mi Minor of being a plan for the Gezi Park protests.
Everyone: call on California Governor Brown not to permit fracking.
Global heating may have to do with more frequent blooms of plankton in certain parts of the Pacific, but they have nothing to do with radiation or Fukishima.
Canada's government in 2013 displayed a record of blatant and shameless corruption and pandering.
The UK is pushing a law to make arbitrary prohibitions (ASBOs) even more sweeping and arbitrary.
People could be subject to two years in prison for almost any sort of behavior that judges dislike. Protests and meetings could be banned arbitrarily.
The FBI has shifted its focus to terrorism, neglecting white-collar crime. The attorney general sets an example of neglecting white-collar crime by declaring the banksters too big to jail.
The US Fish And Wildlife Service plans to drop rat poison on the Farallon Islands to eradicate mice that threaten the survival of endangered storm petrels there.
To eradicate mice (or rats or cats) from an island in order to protect endemic wildlife is entirely legitimate. It is only the method they propose that threatens to be very foolish.
Lester Grinspoon explains how his clinical observations convinced him that marijuana is not harmful and should be legal.
A committee of the European Parliament has decided to invite Snowden to give testimony remotely.
What It's Like When The FBI Asks You To Backdoor Your Software.
I am shocked that anyone would agree to do this — or that anyone thinks most developers would agree to do this.
An artist who visited Guantanamo was not allowed to speak with prisoners, or even see them clearly, but she could see the evil that has contaminated the US.
Guantanamo attacks the freedom of prisoners' relatives, too, when it requires them to communicate through the Skype client, a program that denies freedom to its users.
The campaign against eating shark fin is making great strides in China.
The only reason banquets ever serve shark fin soup is to prove how much the sponsor is willing to spend.
Life in the electronic concentration
camp: the
many ways that you're being tracked, catalogued and controlled.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US hospitals systematically gouge on prices.
NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong.
Advocates Hail 'Groundbreaking' Guidelines to Stop 'School-to-Prison Pipeline'.
I think another crucial point is to make sure that no thugs are stationed normally in the school.
Over 40,000 people may have been falsely convicted due to dishonesty
in a Massachusetts crime lab. The ACLU wants the State of
Massachusetts to take the initiative
to reinvestigate
the cases and free anyone who ought to be freed.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
How "too
big to fail" turns into "too big to jail".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Taxing banks' gross income, at a percentage that increases with the
size of the bank,
would put
large banks under financial pressure to split up.
[Reference updated on 2022-07-15 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support the Truth in Settlements Act.
I might suggest going even further: rather than publicizing the details of these settlements so as to embarrass the government out of accepting weak provisions, why not rule out weak provisions?
Israel is proposing to raise the threshold for a party to enter parliament, in the aim of excluding the Arab parties. Juggling the threshold is the parliamentary system's equivalent of US voter suppression laws.
Meanwhile, in a complex of ironies, the extremist Lieberman wants to transfer some Arab villages from Israel to Palestine, as a drop of ethnic cleansing, but the inhabitants would rather be Israeli Arabs.
US citizens: call on the EPA
to require
and help chemical plants to switch to safer chemicals and
processes.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The series of heavy rains (and floods) experienced by the UK in the past month is more likely due to global heating.
It would not have been impossible before, but CO2 and methane emissions are making it more probable in the future.
Corporations hide in cyberspace, with no physical address, making it hard to sue them.
US mainstream media talk about the Bush forces' destruction of Falluja as if it were a heroic sacrifice, rather than an atrocity.
A cell phone for children that's turns the child's whole world into a cell.
The aim is total robotic tracking of children, then old people, then everyone.
Don't make the mistake of postponing your rejection of intrusive surveillance technology till it gets even worse. I started years ago.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose putting new sanctions on Iran.
Give diplomacy a chance!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: support the Social Security expansion bill.
US citizens: tell the FDA you oppose the plan to stop states from requiring GMO labeling.
Everyone: call on Morocco to change the law that allows rapists to escape punishment by forcing their victims to marry them.
For a politician to be a "strong leader" overlaps with being a bully.
Peak oil has not gone away: the supply of oil per unit time may contract, and cause economic problems.
The crucial question, not apparently addressed here, is: would it be possible to burn oil faster than it's going to be available, while avoiding the worse disaster that global heating is taking us towards?
A limit at a place that, for other reasons, we must not even approach is no real limit.
Maybe the forces in control in Falluja are not al Qa'ida.
This would be entirely plausible, except for the report that local Sunnis said they are allied with the Iraqi government against al Qa'ida.
I'm not sure what to make of this.
US protesters could be imprisoned for 10 years because prosecutors called their banner a "terrorist hoax".
We should tell those prosecutors to go to Russia if they don't like American freedom.
Senator Leahy's "privacy and security" act would make the CFAA even easier to stretch. People could face years in prison for just proposing to violate the terms of service of any web site.
A lawsuit might allow Verizon to trash net neutrality for cabled Internet even as AT&T trashes network neutrality on mobile devices.
CREDO Mobile is the first phone company to report how many times it had to give customer data to the US government.
This information does not really tell us much, since any one of these requests might have covered all of the company's customers. But it shows their heart is in the right place.
US data brokers sell lists of people with HIV, lists of people with drug addictions, lists of elderly gamblers, and other lists that are particularly subject to abuse.
Senator Rubio's "reforms" for US help for the poor have hidden dangers.
New modeling concludes that global heating won't limit itself by causing more clouds.
When Wisconsin's anti-worker Governor Walker was facing recall, the Koch brothers bought TV ads invoking a peculiar principle that it's unfair to recall an official merely to stop him from pushing horrible laws.
The NSA's capabilities for breaking security of specific systems are an argument against "need" for massive surveillance of everyone.
Robots are being developed for many farm tasks.
These jobs are done inefficiently by humans, often at very low pay and in bad conditions. If new the robots are able to do the jobs, it will be good that people don't have to live like that. On the other hand, it will not be good if they starve instead.
At a meeting in Cambridge, some 15 years ago, a man said, "If robots make it, we've gotta take it." We must not let the owners of the robots own what the robots produce, leaving most people with only trickle-down.
If you're a farmer, watch out for nonfree software in these robots!
Senegal's coast guard captured a Russian intensive fishing ship. Russia's response is to blame Greenpeace.
Several Republican governors are being attacked for soliciting secret-source money to support their campaigns.
Personal insults directed against Edward Snowden reflect a general pattern of smearing whistleblowers, but the real target is not Snowden but the act of whistleblowing.
Ford says its cars have GPS so they know everywhere the car goes.
This is a consequence of the fact that the GPS data is stored by software that is nonfree, not controlled by the driver or car owner.
It is not clear to me whether this applies only when the car has a GPS navigator installed, or whether it means all new Ford cars.
More about surveillance of cars in the US.
NSA whistleblowers warn that Obama's "reforms" are being managed so as to avoid any real improvement. They make recommendations for real reform.
The loss of large carnivores around the world is causing damage to plants and animals through ecological effects.
US citizens: call on the FCC to enforce the requirement for TV stations to say who pays for ads.
Everyone: call on 60 Minutes
to clean
up its smear of US clean energy industry.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Four Years after Earthquake, Housing, Sanitation, Health Care are Still Pressing Needs in Haiti.Aid has been misused, or diverted into plans to employ more Haitians working for export for a pittance.
What Haiti really needs is to end the US occupation.
US citizens: email your congresscritter
to oppose
"fast track" for the TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support the EPA's plan
to regulate
carbon emissions from new power plants.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The Liberal Democrats in the UK are looking at a platform involving reducing the collection of data.
US electric utilities are slamming the brakes on installation of solar panels, and homeowners are fighting back. I've heard that the same is happening in Spain.
Many homeowners would be delighted to disconnect from the electrical grid, and depend on their own solar power and their own batteries. If they use heavy equipment such as washing machines only when the sun shines, and leave refrigerators closed at night, it might work. However, some cities in California prohibit this: I'm told that in San Jose, a house with no electric utility account will be condemned just for that.
A campaign in the UK to reduce the general level of sugar in foods.
NSA's Harshest Critics Meeting With White House Officials Tomorrow.
A last-ditch scheme to block mandatory labeling of GMOs: a
scheme for
voluntary labeling.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
California Introduces Landmark Bill
to Deny
the NSA State Resources.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
This effort is good because it is resistance, but a real solution can't be reached in this direction.
20 million Indians work making bricks, many of them children, and many of them as slave labor.
Citizens of Massachusetts: demand a clean minimum wage bill that doesn't cut unemployment benefits.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, oppose HR 2279, which would turn the laws requiring cleanup of polluted land into a sham.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
While it's the cold that directly kills homeless people, the underlying cause is the inequity that makes them poor and therefore homeless.
The NSA wants to have
companies accumulate
dossiers for the NSA to look at later.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
To a large extent, this is how the massive surveillance system already works.
Thugs in Nebraska seized the victims' cameras that held proof of their crimes, but fortunately there was a third camera.
There won't always be another camera. For thugs to seize or destroy cameras or their contents should be a crime, regardless of other circumstances.
The fans of Insane Clown Posse are suing the US for harassing them by labeling them as gang members.
UK ISPs, by applying censorship, have made themselves liable for anything illegal that they do transmit.
I fear that the UK government will respond by immunizing them.
The incidence of hypoglycemia is highest at the end of the month, because poor people with diabetes have spent the month's money and can't afford food.
The solution is difficult if we accept as immutable that they can't get more money. However, Congress could give them more money easily enough. The problem is ill will.
Is America Ready for a New War on Poverty?
Mystery: why does chicken meat from chicken never exposed to antibiotics carry superbugs just as often as other chicken?
The jury ruled that London thugs lawfully shot Mark Duggan.
It's possible that the thugs really believed Duggan had a gun. It's possible he did have one, in the box. It's possible the thug who shot Duggan really believed at the time that the gun was in his hand. These are not implausible.
But it seems clear that someone other than Duggan put the sock-covered gun on the other side of the fence, and the obvious suspects are thugs trying to make the shooting look justified.
I think that calls for its own investigation.
Warning: antibiotic resistance is creeping up on us.
Wetlands are being
contaminated
with neonicotinoid pesticides, which threatens disastrous effects on
wildlife.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
These pesticides are persistent Even if we stop using them, it could take years for them to dissipate.
NAFTA: 20 Years of Regret for Mexico. (Not to mention the US.)
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
How Obama and Clinton made Afghanistan go from bad to worse.
How Uncle Sam's Cash Is Funneled Into Abusive Sweatshops (in Bangladesh).
The Internet of Things Is Wildly Insecure — And Often Unpatchable.
When the article says "Linux operating system", I think it really does mean Linux — the kernel Linux, not a complete operating system such as GNU/Linux.
In Brazilian Amazonia, enforcement of laws to protect the forest is so weak that the loggers barely put a fig leaf over it.
Puncturing the right-wing claim that the US should have kept the Bush forces in Iraq.
The USDA's standards for approving GMOs are limited to such narrow concerns that they are little different from deregulation.
In 1971, heroic activists stole FBI documents that proved the FBI was infiltrating US dissidents.
They found that the FBI had specifically tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide.
One of the activists explains
what they did
and why.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Large parts of Australia are stricken by drought again, after just a couple of years of adequate rain since the previous drought.
This combines with the effects of the hot weather. Global heating is expected to make Australia more arid as well as generally hotter. It is also expected to reduce global food production; indeed, it seems to be already doing so.
India has imposed the usual tax rate on commercial use of the grounds of the US embassy.
Bravo for this, but the government of India would do a lot more good for Indians by cracking down on inadequate wages for Indian workers, whether they are working in the US or in India.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose bill HR.7, which would require women who were made pregnant by rape to prove the rape to justify an abortion.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The "sharing economy" smears the word "sharing" — "sublet/resale economy" would be a better term. And note that these activities generate few jobs, so they can't solve society's real problems.
Congress
must hold a
real investigation of the NSA.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government considered making alcohol more expensive to encourage people to drink less, but changed course after 130 meetings with lobbyists.
Pumping sulfur dioxide into the air could cancel global heating, but it would cause massive droughts.
Israeli intelligence continues using torture, distorting a Supreme Court ruling against torture into meaninglessness.
Professor Ahmad Qatamesh has been freed from Israeli prison after 2.5 years. He was never charged with a crime, and Amnesty International pushed for his release.
The government of Ghana wants to close the refuges for people accused of witchcraft; this is likely to cause those people to be killed.
Comparing Arab and Israeli racist insults.
Journalists in Burma protested the jailing of a journalist.
The charges are typical of states that want to punish journalism and pretend that it is something else.
Honduran peasants' land was stolen to grow palm oil, which provides "carbon offsets" for international businesses, so they can avoid cutting emissions. Crushing the resistance peasants' resistance seems to have part of the motive for the coup.
Emissions trading is a mistake in general; it has been gamed so much that it achieves nothing, while promoting evil like this in Honduras. A tax on fuels can't be gamed.
The Syrians fighting the Islamic State of Iraq include al-Nusra, another al-Qa'ida supporter.
Cuts in UK support for offshore wind energy has led to
cancellation
of many projects.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Spain reduced fossil fuel use in electricity by around 30% last year due mainly to installation of a lot of renewable energy generators.
Various methods are being tested to reduce the numbers of birds and bats that are killed by wind turbines.
New Jersey ignores 99% of accusations about attacks by thugs.
Stealing Americans' retirement funds in 4 despicable steps.
The network of pollinator species and the plants that depend on them could collapse suddenly if it is stressed past a certain point.
Climate Change Imperils Peru's Drive to End Poverty.
US mainstream media persistently disparage the idea that banksters should be punished for well-documented crimes, including the fraudulent foreclosures against thousands (maybe millions) of American homeowners.
Obama gave up on the war in Afghanistan in 2011.
So why didn't he end the war? Fear of being called a quitter, I guess.
86% of Americans believe the government has the responsibility to fight poverty.
The fact that so many politicians are elected who oppose this is a measure of voter suppression and dishonesty of the media.
JPMorgan Chase seems to be involved in just about every banking scandal.
Highly profitable Boeing has imposed pay and benefit cuts on its workers by threatening to move production.
This is, of course, what the rich generally want to do: pay workers less. Laws and treaties need to be changed so that they can't.
The body of a brain-dead woman in Texas who is 20 weeks pregnant is being kept alive so the fetus can be born.
This might make sense if the father wanted that baby as a relic of his deceased wife — which he doesn't — except that nobody knows whether it is healthy.
Paradoxically, the extreme cold in the US today may be due to to the heating of the Arctic.
In the US: Call on Disney to stop promoting fracking to children.
The longest running sequence of measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentration may come to an end because funding has been cut.
A wild dolphin that lives near the Australian coast keeps trying to play with humans and ignores other dolphins.
There are reasons to avoid accustoming wild animals to people, but when that has already occurred, there's no use denying it. At some point, we might as well accept that this dolphin needs human company.
There have been thousands of complaints that fracking wells harmed water supplies in he US. Only a few of the complaints have been confirmed, and maybe many of them are spurious. However, I suspect that the tests miss some real problems.
Secrecy about what chemicals are used in the wells may make it hard to confirm that contamination is due to fracking.
AT&T invites web services to pay to for exemption from data caps, thus proving the supposed reason for data caps does not exist.
The result will be to give bigger companies an advantage of smaller competitors.
Of course, many of these services are bad in their nature, such as the movie rentals with DRM. But that's an independent issue.
Please don't refer to web pages as "content".
Everyone: call on Hanes to stop robbing and swindling workers in Haiti.
The EU's commitments to free expression: Libel and privacy.
It appears that rhinos can no longer survive in Kenya except in special sanctuaries. And maybe not even there.
Digital Rights Ireland asks for help coping with legal costs imposed when it asked for permission to intervene in a trial and was denied.
If not helped, the organization could get shut down.
CIA
Lawyer: Stopping Torture 'Would Have Been Easy,' But I Approved It
Anyway.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
LBJ's War on Poverty cut poverty in the US by 40%.
It proves that governments can reduce poverty. But then right-wingers took power, put an end to these efforts, and drove poverty up again.
Conservative media provide a platform to the 3% of climate scientists who deny global heating, and don't mention how their predictions have proved wrong in the past.
The enemies of al Qa'ida in Syria include other Islamist groups.
Five Australians face charges of being members of a motorcycle gang and staying in the same hotel. Being in a hotel is not a crime for people in general, only for them.
Next will they pass a law making it a crime to breathe and have your name?
A heat wave killed thousands of bats in an area of Australia.
In a couple of decades, none of those bats will live anywhere near.
New South Wales gave permission to build a house near the coast, on condition it be demolished in 20 years if sea level rises as expected.
It is a kind of foresight — at least it does not ignore the issue — but it seems wasteful and foolish to build a house that will need to be demolished in 20 years.
What the court appears to have done is much more foolish: permission with no foresight at all.
Judging who to hire based on Facebook pages seems to be completely ineffective. (As well as an invasion of privacy.)
China has destroyed a large stockpile of confiscated ivory to campaign against buying ivory.
I can't understand the mentality of a person who would buy something totally frivolous at the cost of rushing a species to extinction.
Bluefin tuna are so overfished that most of the fish caught are juveniles.
Peace negotiations in South Sudan
failed
to get started.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Part of the basis for the fighting is tribal hatred, but when interethnic hostility reaches the point of fighting, often it has been stirred up by politicians.
I have a suspicion that the oil in the ground has something to do with it, and that the US government is playing some sort of game to get control of that oil.
The UK government announces more punishment for Britons on the way to a mythical, meaningless "recovery".
"The [unlikely] possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures."
The US government didn't need any more surveillance to stop the Sep 11 attacks. It had plenty of warnings — here are the details.
Even to preserve the public domain from further attacks requires a fight.
Preserving the public domain is not enough. Copyright is too restrictive and we must reduce it.
The US government goes to cruel extremes to collect college debt.
The idea that the US government needs to collect student loans from those who are unable to work is absurd. The only "economy" that depends on collecting this money is that of the evil rich. Even asking students to pay for college is right-wing. If they have to pay, it should be based on their incomes, as in the Oregon plan.
What's more, a large part of these debts were for payments to for-profit colleges that tend to be a waste of money in the first place. By allowing loans for those colleges, the government entices people into debts they can't pay.
Drug trafficking involves lots of killing; the number murdered, over decades, may amount to millions.
Those directly responsible are the killers. Drug users help create the circumstances that encourage the traffickers/killers, but they are not alone in doing so. Prohibition plays an equally crucial role.
Rich Republicans have put 50 million dollars into defeating Tea Party loonies whose risible statements have imperiled their dooH niboR agenda.
The Canadian government trashed archives of scientific data and research, especially pertaining to the environment.
Canadian scientists say this was done to sabotage informed resistance to the extractivist agenda.
US citizens: call on your senators
to oppose
new sanctions against Iran. Give diplomacy a chance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Long-term unemployment makes many young people despair and think of suicide.
The "defensive patent license" ought to be called the "still offensive patent license", because of the exclusion of anything it calls a "clone" — which is itself dishonest, since it the way they define it, it includes a lot more than clones. It includes any similar functionality.
Apple could license its patents this way and still use them against free software smart phones.
The US is plagued by redistributionist politicians, redistributing as usual to the rich.
I'm proud to be a redistributionist: I say we should move that money back.
Peer
pressure turns
children into competitive consumers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The NSA refuses to say whether it snoops on Congress.
I suspect it makes special efforts to snoop on Congresscritters, in order to blackmail them.
Underfunding of medical care in the UK kills people by slowing down the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
The UK government wants to destroy old-growth forests and replace them with tree plantations.
The full text of Jacob Appelbaum's speech about NSA attack methods and what they can do to computer systems.
Everyone:
call
on the US and UK governments to stop persecuting journalists that
write about the wrongdoing of the state.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The non-al-Qa'ida Syrian rebels say they have launched outright war with al Qa'ida.
Before rejoicing, we need to get confirmation of what is really happening, though that won't be easy to get.
Welcome to the New America: Low-Wage Nation.
The USDA says it wants to deregulate GM corn that is resistant to Agent Orange.
Talk about "bringing the war back home"!
The Government Accountability Project Statement on Edward Snowden and NSA Domestic Surveillance.
The US does not have a choice between fixing unemployment and fixing
inequality.
Fixing one
requires fixing the other.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The Israel Lobby in the US is
trying
again to kill the deal with Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
As the US endorses letting Israel retain control of the Jordan valley, maintaining a permanent siege of Palestine, Netanyahu demands even more.
Idaho will take back a privatized prison that has been run horribly.
For a company to squeeze a profit out of a prison, it has to mistreat the prisoners somehow.
Imploring Mayor de Blasio to close the school-to-prison pipeline.
2013 was Australia's hottest year, and for each of its regions too.
Abbott says he will bring about a small, insufficient reduction in emissions by 2020, by methods that aren't likely to work at all. Planting trees may be good in other ways, but it takes a long time for them to pull CO2 out of the air, assuming they don't die or even burn.
The new planned coal mines would swamp that.
Meanwhile, Abbott has appointed a "business advisor" that campaigns loudly to deny global heating.
We can guess what business his advice represents.
What will we see next on the Abbott and Australia show? Perhaps this: Abbott lights a match on Australia, and Australia says, "Hay, Abbott!"
The carbon price in emissions-trading schemes has fallen
so
low that the schemes do nothing to reduce emissions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Large UK landlord companies are refusing to rent to people on welfare.
The Tories are evil, greedy monsters that deserve to live on the street along with the banksters.
Senator Sanders has
asked the
NSA whether it snoops on Congress.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
As poor in the UK face hunger and homelessness, the government has announced it will cut off another aid program which is meant to help in "emergencies".
It would defeat the purpose of pushing millions into emergencies, if there's a program that would help.
Cambodian thugs
shot
garment workers protesting for higher pay.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
We must put an end to the treaties that drive countries to compete to offer foreign business the lowest wages.
The Australian government wants Greenpeace activist Colin Russell to pay for the useless "assistance" it gave him when he was persecuted by Putin.
In effect, Abbott seeks a way to punish him financially after Putin jailed him for months.
This is because Abbott and Putin are on the same side — the extractivist side.
How MIT's callousness and exaggerations condemned Aaron Swartz.
David LaMacchia set up an internet bulletin board site where anyone could upload and download files. He didn't put the files in it himself, but the US government wanted to hold him personally responsible for the files that were uploaded. US government representatives systematically smeared LaMacchia, who on his lawyer's advice did not dare say they were wrong; but he had already explained the facts to people at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and that's where I heard them. This article repeats the givernment's claim.
The government used this smear to push for the passage of the law that criminalized noncommercial sharing on the Internet, an attack on our rights that we will have to fight to undo.
The US regularly puts nonviolent accused "terrorists" in solitary confinement for years, blocking them from discussing their cases properly with their lawyers, and eventually gets them to plead guilty after their minds have broken.
US suppression of possible Muslim "radicalization" has been stretched to the point of prosecution of thoughtcrime.
You don't have to be Islamist, or even Muslim, to think that people in a country conquered by the US have the right to resist occupation. Anyone who hates oppression believes that. Why shouldn't Muslims say that?
On the other hand, anyone who is such a "good" Muslim as to support Islam's contempt for women, its cruel Shari'a law, or its disrespect for everyone's religious freedom, deserves plenty of criticism. You can't duck the odium of those views by saying it's a religion.
US citizens: Sign this petition calling on Congress not to turn the Endangered Species Act into a hollow absurdity.
US citizens: sign this petition calling for prosecution of Clapper for lying to Congress.
US citizens: sign this petition for Obama to give Snowden amnesty.
And this one:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
There is another campaign asking people to fax Obama copies of the New York Times editorial that says Snowden should be offered a reduced punishment. I think that is an insult to a hero, and I didn't support it. I support this instead.
Just about all the sides in Syria and Iraq are fighting against al Qa'ida. Even some other Islamist militias.
The defeat of al Qa'ida would mean the defeat of the worst sort of fanaticism. However, if the other Islamist militias are part of the winning side, I fear that women, human rights and non-Muslims in those areas will still be on the losing side.
Taliban attacked and murdered foreign climbers on a mountain in Pakistan, as an intentional reprisal against people who had nothing to do with the war.
This is much nastier than US drone attacks. Imagine if the US had deliberately targeted a wedding party while believing that everyone there was a noncombatant, and you'd have an equivalent for this.
Pakistan says it has arrested those responsible.
The US
participated directly when Colombia attacked a FARC camp just across
the border in Ecuador.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The argument that a state has the right to fight its enemies when they are sheltered by another state is valid in some circumstances, but one must look at the rest of the situation. For instance, did the Ecuadorian government shelter or sponsor that camp (or even know about it)? Did Colombia ask Ecuador for assistance in dislodging it?
There may be other relevant factors. The Colombian state was and still is closely connected with the worst terrorist group in Colombia, the paramilitaries.
Although the FARC have degenerated into drug trafficking and kidnap for profit, they are still better than the paramilitaries. Is support for the FARC justified on these grounds?
Michael Moore: The Obamacare We Deserve.
I'm a real Liberal, and Obama is hardly much of a Liberal, so I don't silence my views to support him.
Israel Cages
Palestinian Children in Outdoor Holding Pens During Freezing
Storm.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Employees of Mèdecins Sans Frontières seem to have
been kidnaped
in Syria.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Ralph Nader calls on Dubya to accept responsibility for turning Iraq into a place of horror.
US citizens: call on the Senate
to extend
unemployment benefits.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Bretons are protesting and destroying cameras to prevent implementation of a tax on truck travel.
Taxes like this are necessary to conserve fuel, and the pain they impose is nothing compared to the pain they will avoid. I think the protesters are making a mistake — like protesting about a visit to the dentist.
The tax money should be to stimulate the economy in other ways.
The Iraqi state
has allied
with non-radical Sunnis to fight al Qa'ida.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
If Sunnis and Shi'ites can work together, it might offer some hope for ending the terror in Iraq.
Everyone: call on Peru to ban hunting dolphins to use as bait for sharks.
The dolphins are not endangered, but the sharks are on the road to being wiped out.
US citizens:
tell
the Senate, no cuts in food stamps!
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
UK local governments use "back to work" schemes as a way to make people do real work for much less than the minimum wage.
UK austerity is about to create a wave of mass homelessness.
Newly released papers expose several lies by and about Margaret Thatcher.
In particular, there was her lie to the striking miners, claiming she had no plans to close additional mines. What else would right-wing politicians do besides lie?
Selling out to business has made India rich, while making half of all Indians abjectly poor.
What India needs most is to provide reliable modern contraception to every woman in India.
The UK's "porn filter" is a system of outsourced state censorship, based on the standard idiotic excuse.
Mesh networks could make the internet more flexible and reduce surveillance.
Iceland's ice is melting fast, and when it goes, Iceland will be short of water.
Its longest bridge spans a river that has gone permanently dry.
The plan to remove the grey wolf from the endangered species list is based on twisting the meaning of the law so as to make it systematically ineffective.
Information about the tiny physical surveillance devices that the NSA (or anyone) can install.
I am not especially bothered by the NSA's having these, since they won't be installed everywhere (and in the US would require a court order). What's dangerous to democracy is general surveillance applied to everyone.
An Indian girl who reported rapes was subsequently murdered by the rapists.
Giant mines planned in Sweden will block reindeer migration, and dust spread by the mines will kill reindeer anyway.
If someone tells you that the ship now caught in sea ice near Antarctica disproves global heating, here's the real science.
The software freedom fight comes to the farm, as computerized farm machines have created a battle over whether farms will control their own computing and data, or be prey to Monsanto and other large companies.
It's regrettable that this idealistic author adopts the anti-idealistic term "open source", which was designed to suppress this sort of idealism. Clearly, the suppression does not work 100%, but it continues to weaken our movement.
An Economy
That Benefits Ordinary People? What We Learned From the 1%.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
How to reverse financialization.
2013 was Iraq's deadliest year since 2008.
Republicans are planning a new series of artificial impediments to abortion.
Considering the many ways not having an abortion can harm a woman — before, during, and years after birth — it would make more sense to require a waiting period for the decision not to have an abortion.
Chomsky on the NSA, earth's destruction, the loss of journalism, the downgrading of education, and more.
NSA, Benghazi
and the Monsters of Our Own Creation: the US government knows
everything but learns nothing.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
The same can be said about al Qa'ida in general. Despite all its intelligence gathering, the US has only managed to make al Qa'ida stronger.
The ACLU is trying to find out about the surveillance of Americans that the NSA does as a byproduct of supposedly spying on foreigners.
NSA Intercepting Laptops Bought Online to Install Spy Malware.
Gmail was planned from the start as a massive surveillance system, to make psychological profiles not only of Gmail users but of everyone who sends mail to Gmail users.
The New York Times (and other media) use truncated time lines to claim that fighting between Israel and Gaza is always started by Gazans.
A few years ago it was noted that it was typically Israel that broke the truce with Hamas.
US citizens: call for allowing the Monsanto Protection Act to lapse.
From Turing to Snowden: How US-UK Pact Forged Modern Surveillance (of everyone).
It should be noted that the US got various warnings of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, but officials did not take the warnings seriously.
A world-wide poll found that the world's population considers the USA to be the biggest threat to world peace.
An ACLU victory: families applying for welfare in Florida can't be required to take drug tests.
I joined the ACLU when George I criticized Governor Dukakis for being a "card-carrying member", effectively likening the defense of civil liberties to Communism. I asked myself, "If Michael Dukakis can be an ACLU member, why am I not one?" Then I joined.
22000 students in New York City are homeless.
Will Mayor de Blasio help them find shelter? There are places in New York City where tents could be set up.
Legal marijuana stores are opening in Colorado.
Transporting oil by
rail is
very dangerous, but pipelines are becoming less safe, too.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
Why are pipelines less safe than previously? Maybe they are just getting old. Maybe the government doesn't require as much inspection and maintenance as before. Maybe the government has fewer inspectors, or doesn't dare fine companies enough to make them comply. It certainly isn't trying hard enough.
Abbott is using his "business advisor" to spread global heating denialism.
Abbott warned Australia that he isn't the suppository of all wisdom, but who needs a suppository with shit like this?
Ideas for compromise about Netanyahu's demand for recognizing Israel as "a Jewish state" rather than just a state.
The Israel double standard: other countries get sanctions for violating human rights, but Israel only gets a boycott.
10,000 Palestinian children living with their parents in Jerusalem can't get Jerusalem residency cards, or health care , and after they reach 16 they won't be allowed to live with (or even visit) their mothers.
Required identity cards are an injustice in themselves, of course, even if not applied in this discriminatory fashion.
Daily Kos: 15 things everyone would know if there were a Liberal media.
Congressional Republicans ask the IRS to produce a one-sided report, creating an appearance of a scandalous political bias, which the same Republicans then attacked.
Japanese companies recruit homeless people to work on the Fukushima cleanup, then cheat them of their wages.
I'm glad that there is work available for homeless people, but cheating them is despicable. (It's common practice for businesses to cheat workers.) And this work might be dangerous to them, and to others if not done right. It needs to be done by people who know what they are doing.
Services that claim to test your DNA and predict risk of various diseases don't really know what they are doing.
Some researchers expect that 10 to 20 percent of jobs for college graduates will be replaced by AIs in the next two decades.
This is in addition to many other jobs that will be eliminated — drivers, for instance, and supermarket sales jobs.
We are already seeing the effects of this, in long-term unemployment of people who have given up looking for jobs. All economic growth goes to the rich few, so it creates few jobs. The jobs lost to computerization will not be replaced by other jobs.
If you are a young person now and you are not brilliant or aiming at a career such as medicine, I recommend that you not get yourself in debt to go to college. You'll never pay that debt off. Instead, organize for your state to adopt Oregon's plan for funding a college education. If it takes ten years to win, you can go to college then, and you'll still be better off.
Passing the entrance exam for a Japanese university is less challenging for an AI than you might suppose. Those exams focus on rote learning, so passing requires a lot of knowledge but no creativity. It does, however, require human-style common sense for the reading comprehension, and that is the central challenge in AI.
Oil extraction from Canadian tar sands spews out mercury, which is toxic.
Burning coal also spews mercury.
Letting companies "regulate themselves" is a standard right-wing agenda. The conservative regime in the US is considering letting chicken factories inspect themselves.
The NSA's methods of spying on computers include physical spy devices such as radio-transmitter USB plugs, as well as devices they insert into a computer while it is being shipped.
What
this implies.
Greenwald and an ACLU lawyer comment on how
Obama
is the NSA's trojan horse in the Democratic Party.
We had a name, in the 1980s, for politicians with views like Obama's:
"Republicans". I used to be a Democrat … until the Democratic
party as a whole turned conservative and no longer deserved my
support. However, we are now electing some Democrats worthy of the
name, such as Elizabeth Warren.
The owners of the factory in which fire killed 112 workers now face
murder
charges.
I don't think that the executives of western clothing lines deserve to
be charged with murder. It is more effective to make them responsible
for the working conditions of the factories that make their clothing
— and prosecute every time they fail to check, not just
on the rare occasions when that kills someone.
3 more
prisoners in Guantanamo have been released.
The US has known for 10 years that there was never any reason to
imprison them.
Obama
keeps
lying to whitewash the NSA.
Shoot-to-kill rangers protected elephants, but
oppressed
humans.
What can the replacement be?
Egypt is applying
US-style
forfeiture to 500 leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Extreme
weather disasters in the Caribbean.
The Shocking
Redistribution of [US] Wealth in the Past Five Years.
A new climate model says we are on track for
4C
of global heating by 2100.
The Israeli government displayed its contempt for Kerry's "peace
negotiations" by
backing
a plan to annex a large fraction of the West Bank in order to keep
it permanently under siege.
Netanyahu does not care how this affects the "negotiations", since he
has no intention of making a peace agreement. I think his goal is to
show that he still has the US government cowed; that he can ridicule
the US and the "negotiations" and Kerry won't dare make a peep.
The NSA's
catalog
of attack software: they can attack BIOSes, routers, even the
firmware of hard drives.
The NSA has a special unit to
crack
security of machines that are hard to crack.
It is legitimate to have a unit like this, but its operations must be
very strictly controlled, and we cannot trust officials that lie to
Congress to do that.
The comparison with "plumbers" is telling, since Nixon used the
same metaphor to describe his team of burglars, whose best known
crime was in the Watergate hotel.
States that vote right-wing
tend
to take from the Federal government, while Democratic states
contribute.
Another oil train collided and started
another
big fire.
We were lucky this time — the collision took place in a deserted
area and it seems nobody was directly hurt. Oil trains go through
towns and cities, and we can't be lucky every time.
Everyone: On Jan 3, make a sign saying "Edward Snowden", go to an
airport, and wait for
him to arrive.
Thug infiltrators tried to get Occupy Austin protesters to commit
violence, but the protesters firmly refused. So the
infiltrators
gave them "lockboxes" — basically tools to strap themselves
together for a sit-in so that removing them would be more work —
then accused them of a felony, "possessing a criminal instrument",
even though legally lockboxes don't qualify.
Next time you think about how Putin threatens nonviolent protesters
with years in prison, remember that the US does it too.
The charges about the lockboxes were eventually
dropped.
It's not clear whether the court ultimately acknowledged that
it is absurd to call lockboxes a "criminal instrument".
The UK government has taken
another
substantial step towards making the National Health Service
nonfunctional.
If the Labour party still stood for the non-rich, this taste of what
the rich do in power would give it every chance of winning again.
Gang wars in Central America are sending
large
numbers of refugees fleeing to Mexico.
Ending the War on Drugs would cut off a lot of the
money
that fuels the gangs.
The human tendency to stigmatize those who are unusual
gets
whipped up in times of hardship.
Plutocrats find it a useful way to distract people from them.
44 Iraqi Sunni MPs resigned in protest of state
attacks
against Sunni nonviolent protesters and the home of an MP.
Iraq has been unable to establish a state that can hold the sects
together peacefully. I think that can only lead to more war.
India continues to fight against drug patents that
threaten
to kill millions.
FAIR's year-end list of
2013
US media distortions.
If you grow chickens in a city garden, watch out for
lead
in the eggs!
Tech companies that boast "disruption" as their goal are
on
the way to being hated by the 80 or 90% of Americans who will be
left with only precarious employment.
President Reagan's "welfare queen" was a real woman whose life was
crime after crime against most everyone she came in contact with. Her
frauds against the welfare system were
illegal
already.
She was sentenced to prison for some of these frauds, and it looks
like she deserved it. However, Reagan and Clinton used her as the
excuse to punish all poor families in America, and they did not
deserve this punishment.
It is important to reduce the rate of births by teenagers,
but instead of doing this the cruel Conservative way, which
consists of pushing poor people's children into worse poverty,
let's do it the kind Progressive way: offer taxpayer-funded
reliable birth control to every teenager.
Benjamin
Franklin set an example of leaking, 240 years before Manning and
Snowden.
South Dakota is a
tax
haven for any rich person that sets up a trust there.
Officer Vagnini, who committed illegal anal searches against a series
of people, was
sentenced
to only two years in prison. That's not much of a sentence for a
serial rapist. Meanwhile, the other thugs that supported his crime
wave received very light sentences.
A federal judge ruled that the NSA's collection of phone records is
lawful.
This directly contradicts another judge who ruled it was an Orwellian
violation of 4th amendment. Either or both could be overruled on
appeal.
The reference to the September 2001 attacks is mistaken, because we
know for a fact that phone surveillance would not have been necessary
for preventing the attacks if the US government had been paying
attention.
The
US government had various warnings, including the flight student that
wasn't interested in learning to land the plane, but ignored them.
Dubya had told the FBI to reduce the resources into
counterterrorism.
It is also irrelevant as a reason. If the state were allowed to
monitor everything and search everything, it could prevent many kinds
of crimes, as well as many kinds of dissent and whistleblowing, but
that doesn't invalidate the 4th amendment.
Psychological evidence shows that plain paper packs, not covered by
"cool" branding, make cigarettes less attractive and
encourage
quitting.
That is
supported by a
study in Australia which compared smokers that got plain packs
with smokers using the same cigarette brands in attractive packs.
There is no direct evidence yet about whether it reduces cigarette
consumption. That would take more time. However, it is unlikely
to hurt.
The UK censorship filter blocks more than porn. It
blocks
access to sex education sites, even help-lines.
It also blocks many
free
software sites, and even amnesty.org.
These schemes always make mistakes, and this is proof that that
continues to happen. But let's not be distracted by the mistakes.
Even if they could fix all the mistakes, which they can't, that would
not make censorship acceptable. Fixing 90% of the mistakes, which
maybe they could do, would not make it acceptable either. Down with
censorship and the tyrannical rulers that impose it!
Al Jazeera correspondents in Egypt have been
arrested
for interviewing members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
When a government accuses someone of publishing "false news", or says
it is illegal to interview someone because he's been declared a
terrorist (or even convicted in a fair trial of a terrorist act),
that's manifest tyranny.
The US-backed government of Yemen did something similar to
Abdulelah
Haidar Shaye, imprisoning him at Obama's request for interviewing
people in al Qa'ida.
Resisting
and reversing the privatization of water systems.
TED is
based
on the assumption that all we need is a clever new idea.
SD cards (and other memories) have processors whose programs
can be
changed.
If it is normal to change that software — for instance, if
users are sometimes given upgrades — then it is an injustice
that these programs are proprietary. However, even if it is not
normal to change that software, this is a dangerous vulnerability
to viruses, the NSA, etc.
New Zealand offers an example of regulating prostitution that
really
does make prostitutes safer.
It seems to have worked out well there, based on
anecdotes and
official
reports.
Meanwhile, the US keeps prostitution illegal and maintains
a stigma against prostitutes, with
predictable
results.
As the damage of global heating on poor countries becomes increasingly
large and irrefutable, the
rich
polluting countries will have to pay compensation.
Many Americans have been led to believe that the prime culprit of the
financial crisis was the government,
rather than
the banksters.
The right wing strategy is, after each thing they do to hurt
Americans, to get Americans to curse the government for it, rather
than
recapture
the government and use it for democracy.
This article makes a common mistake in its rhetoric:
it says that "we" have done some foolish thing, in a way that
implies we have all participated in it. That's not only
unfair, it is also defeatist.
The
background of the Dinka-Nuer conflict in South Sudan.
Obama keeps selling arms to Saudi Arabia despite its
repression
of human rights activists.
A drone combat analyst explains that the image is so fuzzy
that they
can't
tell whether someone is armed.
A judge ruled that the FBI was allowed to arrest an air passenger
for no reason other than
carrying
flash cards for learning Arabic.
Is studying Arabic more suspect than already knowing how to speak
Arabic? If not, then how about arresting people only for knowing
Arabic?
Egyptian thugs stormed the country's main university,
attacking
students and burning a dormitory.
Ukraine's
government cites
the UK as an example of violating human rights.
Chinese schools
are designed
for producing great test-takers, which makes them look good when
their students are judged by a standardized test, but lousy in other
respects.
However, US "school reformers" seem bent on
pushing US
schools in that direction.
Iraq's Sunnis have been protesting for a year against the
Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government. The state sent troops
to arrest
a protest leader, and his guards fought back.
I have no way of judging the claim that the protesters support al
Qa'ida. It might be true. Al Qa'ida calls for wiping out the
Shi'ites.
This unending sectarian war is Dubya's gift to Iraq. Ironically,
Dubya found a way to wind it
down: buying the support of the
Sunni clans. But the money
was cut off as the Bush forces left
Iraq and the Shi'ites don't seem ready to employ it.
The UK has
started charging
non-citizens for births and antenatal care, so women who can't
afford this give birth at home without aid.
The financial "savings" achieved this way will lead to bigger
financial costs, as well as injuries and deaths. That's part of the
goal: to accustom more people to poverty. Once this is the norm for
immigrants, it will be applied to Britons.
Many internet sites
are requiring
commenters to identify themselves.
I am happy to post comments under my name, but I can afford to because
I am in a pretty safe position. I don't have to fear that I will be
fired if my boss does not like what I say.
Turkish prosecutor in charge of the corruption investigation says the
thugs
interfered with the investigation. Meanwhile, the ministry has
removed him from the case.
If Snowden were tried in the US, all evidence about the good he has
done for the country, or intended to
do, would be
inadmissible.
Poor people in the UK can no longer afford
heating, so
their walls are getting wet and moldy, which triggers asthma.
Almost
900 people died in US jails in 2011, often because the thugs in
charge disregard their medical problems.
Plutocracy leaves most Americans with two
choices: to
exploit or be exploited.
Even so, you can still campaign for progressives against the
illegitimate plutocratic government.
Some
of the things that e-book stores have learned by tracking the
suckers that use commercial e-books.
Don't be a sucker — reject these malicious products.
Insist on using only e-books that respect your freedom as much
as ordinary printed books.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-14 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A Persian exile accuses the West of supporting Khomeini's return to Iran and his plan to establish a fundamentalist regime.
I don't know that this is true. I would like to see proof.
The French and Russian teams that examined Yasser Arafat's remains say he was not poisoned with polonium-210. These reports contradict the findings of the Swiss team.
The French team found polonium-210 and said it was of "natural origin", which does not make sense, as polonium is exceedingly rare and found only in uranium ore.
Ten States Have Banned Cities And Counties From Passing Paid Sick Days.
LA thugs' latest power trip is against pedestrians.
Global heating is causing scarcity of water and food.
Maintaining Nuclear Arsenal To Cost $355 Billion
(over 10 years, but still it is a ridiculous waste).
A journalist in Ukraine was pulled out of her car and maimed by unknown men after accusing a minister of corruption.
That minister is probably in charge of the thugs, and people accuse him of sending thugs to carry out this attack.
Pharmaceutical Extortion: Pay Up, or Die.
The root of this injustice is patent law, combined with the failure of the US to do what other advanced governments do: directly negotiate the price of pharmaceuticals.
In addition, all countries must remove the funding of studies of drug effects from the hands of the drug companies, since they corrupt the results.
The fossil fuel agenda is anti-business (as well as anti-civilization and anti-your-survival).
I hope that this argument wins some support, but the fact that it even needs to be made demonstrates a fundamental flaw in our current political system: plutocracy, the political power of business.
It's due to plutocracy that the fossil fuel companies have the power to keep humanity stuck on the path to global heating disaster. Why do Republicans in Congress deny global heating and its effects? It's due to fossil fuel money.
That's not the only area in which plutocracy oppresses us. Plutocracy is why governments propose laws like SOPA. Plutocracy is why the US government proposes to let poultry producers inspect their own products. Plutocracy is why the US government doesn't label GMOs. Plutocracy is how the banksters abolished the Glass-Steagall Act and then fraudulently take many Americans' homes and get off scot-free because they are "too big to jail."
And they are planning treaties to give them increased power.
It makes sense to appeal to these illegitimate powers to see when their interests are threatened by something that threatens us too. But we must take care, when doing this, not to grant any legitimacy to their rule. We need to replace plutocracy with democracy.
Troubling Pattern as De Blasio Taps Goldman Sachs Exec.
Haitians in a shantytown are being
evicted
with no help or place to go.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
They moved to that shantytown after their homes were destroyed in the earthquake after which large amounts of "aid" from wealthy countries were offered but put into preparing sweatshops rather than helping homeless Haitians.
The Swarthmore Hillel society has
rejected
the parent organization's ban on speakers that criticize Israeli
policy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
This in response to Harvard Hillel's cancellation of a speech by a former Israeli parliamentarian who criticizes Israeli policy.
Israel arrested the leader of nonviolent protests in Kafr Qaddum.
How lead got put into gasoline: a series of corrupt influences led to nationwide suffering.
The Egyptian government declared the Muslim Brotherhood a "terrorist group", an excuse to say every member is a criminal.
Declaring groups "terrorist" without a trial is a gross violation of human rights. The US must cease this practice to set an example of respect for human rights; if it does not, other countries such as Egypt will surely take inspiration from the US' bad example.
A US court ruled that prisoners in Bagram in Afghanistan have no right to habeas corpus.
It is legitimate to capture enemy soldiers and hold them as prisoners of war. (If this were not allowed, prisoners would instead be shot.) Being a prisoner of war is not punishment for a crime, and no trial is needed. Of course, prisoners of war do have rights, and torture violates them.
However, the 2010 decision, about people kidnaped in other countries where the US was not at war, and then transported to Afghanistan just to hold them in prison, was wrong. Those cases are exactly like Guantanamo.
US citizens: Call on Senator Sherrod Brown not to support the bill to sabotage diplomacy with Iran.
After pressure, Obama allowed congresscritters to look at the text — without staff to help them understand the implications — but they can't tell us what they saw.
The only plausible reason to negotiate a treaty like this is that Obama is planning to sell out his country, like Dubya before him.
Americans hit by cuts in food stamps tell their stories.
Snowden says that he did not set up an "insurance packet" for release if he is killed, since that might have tempted various entities to kill him so as to cause that data to be released.
Many computer manufacturers have adopted a new way of subjugating users: keeping the repair manuals secret.
Unfortunately, the iFixit manuals are not free. The article says they are, but it means they are gratis. I tried to convince Kyle Wiens to release them under a free license, but failed. I hope he will change his mind.
Hakan Yaman was tortured by Turkish thugs who mistook him for a protester. (Not that it would have been justified to torture a real protester.) They gouged out an eye and threw him in a fire: attempted premeditated murder.
The government is has been unable to find the thugs who were responsible. Perhaps it has not tried very hard.
This case is among the most extreme, among the general repression of the protesters.
The Israeli siege includes
denying
Palestinians with cancer access to medical treatment, like a cat
toying with mice.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The European Union is trying to pressure Israel and Palestine to make peace, but Israel and the US insist on a continuing occupation of 1/4 of the West Bank, which would give Israel control over Palestinian travel and commerce.
An everyday war crime in Palestine: Israeli troops ransacked a
Palestinian family's house and
stole 5 years of
savings.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The US Export-Import Bank is planning to fund a project in Australia that is likely to damage the surrounding environment, but the environmental impact study ducked the question.
Everyone:
encourage
the proposal for systematic anti-trafficking policies in Scotland.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The CIA is helping the Colombian government kill and torture FARC members.
The FARC is a rebel group which has also financed itself through drug trafficking and kidnaping. However, the most vicious terrorist group in Colombia is the paramilitaries that are linked with the state.
Teenagers are fleeing Central America to the US because they are threatened with conscription into criminal gangs.
The War on Drugs seems to be ultimately at fault.
A former BP geologist says that we have reached Peak Oil, and that the rate of oil extraction will decline from now on.
Whether this is a bad thing depends on how humanity reacts to it. The high price of oil reduces demand: Americans drive less, nowadays, than they did when oil was cheaper. The high price of oil encourages investment in other energy sources — some renewable (solar, wind, geothermal) and some polluting (coal, fracking, nuclear).
If only our governments pushed for renewable energy rather than polluting energy.
We could use a lot less energy for heating and for transport if we pushed harder to achieve that. Amory Lovins showed years ago that a small fraction of what we now use could do the job. And mass transit uses a lot less energy than travel by car.
The extent of economic inequality in the US is so great that our main need is not increased production of things, but rather a way for everyone to get a share. If the US produced only half as much, we would get along ok if the poor got a bigger share.
Violent Islamists in Egypt carried out a car bombing against a municipal thug office. There have been a series of such attacks.
It is clear that they are inspired by the violent suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Extra, extra! Netanyahu admits he doesn't want peace with Palestine!
He did not say it in so many words, but that's the inescapable implication. For Israel to demand release of an American who spied for Israel — or any other unrelated concession — says, "Peace isn't something we seek, just something we might do for the US in exchange for something we want."
Palestinians shot an Israeli who was working on the fence around Gaza, so Israel retaliated with bombs, killing children in Gaza.
Although the Israeli who was shot was not a soldier, he was doing a job that is not entirely civilian in nature, like the Iranian nuclear scientists that Israel killed a few years ago. The Palestinian children, by contrast, were simply being children.
Millions of American families received a Christmas gift from Congress: hunger.
Snowden says that Obama's NSA review panel proposed "cosmetic" changes.
I think they might be slightly more than cosmetic, but they are far from sufficient. In this interview, Snowden explains what he thinks is needed.
What I think is needed is to redesign digital systems so that they don't amass data about users in general.
Supporters of Israel's occupation of Palestine are pressuring US universities to boycott the American Studies Association. Meanwhile, members of the association are receiving hate mail.
This demonstrates the courage required in the US today to oppose that pressure group.
I am sure the ASA will not yield to this pressure, but what happens to the ASA will influence others. Thus, it is important to urge universities not to cease their support for the ASA.
Pardoning Alan Turing and him alone is not enough: 75,000 Britons were convicted of homosexuality, and they all deserve the same apology.
If the UK wants to deserve a pardon, it needs to go further.
Australia has approved a coal mine that will destroy a wildlife reserve, replacing it with "offsets" that are just an excuse to proceed.
Obama may be operating under fear of threats from the CIA.
The appointment of Dulles to the Warren Commission is extremely suspect because there is no other plausible reason for it except to enable him to cover things up.
Miami and Los Angeles have sued big banks for racism in application of subprime mortgages.
Republican governments in 23 states have blocked Obama's extension of Medicaid, which will leave around 5 million Americans without health care.
Afghanistan is imposing biometric ID cards.
As a temporary measure for the war with the Taliban, they could be excuses. Such circumstances justify measures that normally must be condemned. But they will surely be meant as permanent.
100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility.
Rosewood in Madagascar has been nearly wiped out by illegal logging, while the government hardly bothers to intervene.
Assad's air force
is bombarding
civilians with shrapnel bombs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The two members of Pussy Riot just freed will launch a campaign for humane treatment of prisoners in Russia.
This is good, but as an American I wish they would extend their campaign to aid prisoners in the US.
They also called Putin's amnesty, which led to their release, a "PR move".
The absence in the Bay of Fundy of right whales may be due to global heating.
Senator
Warren's opposition
to the Keystone XL pipeline shines a light on Clinton's support for
it.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
RSA Inc responded to the disclosure of its secret contract with the NSA with a cunningly worded announcement that appears to say it wasn't true. However, a careful reading shows it doesn't really say that.
When cooking food in US prisons was privatized, Aramark started serving food that is spoiled or unfit for human consumption, prepared in unsanitary conditions.
The only way such a company can make a profit is by mistreating someone.
Unemployment is painful, but long-term unemployment is a disaster.
"Open carry" of guns is asking for trouble, because just seeing guns causes fear and encourage aggression.
Debt costs the Philippines far more than typhoon Haiyan. Many of these loans represent the corruption. The "aid" for rebuilding often consists of more loans.
The Philippines should decide that these loans were predatory and therefore don't have to be repaid. The predatory lenders should be taught a lesson by losing their money.
While rich celebrity musicians spread a weak form of feminism, other musicians have rejected the record companies' manipulation.
Calling for an anti-austerity movement at the European level.
French companies are being fined for paying women less than men.
Hear, hear!
Everyone: call on Chick-fil-A to stop harassing the artist that makes "Eat more Kale" shirts.
Everyone: call for elimination of the National Football League's tax-exemption.
Here is the background.
The
new
style of apology from a politician that gets caught.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Many telemarketer calls use canned voice recordings, and a human selects which response to give next.
I don't see telemarketing as particularly bad, just wasteful and annoying. I have never bought anything from a telemarketer, and I don't let the call go on for more than a few seconds, because I don't want to spend my time on them.
It is useful to train yourself out of applying normal ideas of politeness — for instance, that it is rude to hang up on someone — to a commercially-motivated call from a stranger.
I think it might be good to legally require telemarketing calls to start by playing a recording that says, "Stay on the line if you wish to talk with a telemarketer."
Mariah Carey is entertaining a dictator again.
Leaders of the protests that brought down Mubarak have been sentenced to 3 years in prison.
The Consumer Finance Protection Board receives anonimized credit card purchase data from a company; that company gets it with names, which might facilitate misuse of the data.
Of course, the underlying problem is that the banks and the stores get to identify their customers when they pay by credit card. Thus, it is better to use an ATM to withdraw money and pay cash.
FDA action on antibiotics on farms is inadequate.
A Florida student was denied his prize for a speech, when authorities discovered his speech was about injustice in the name of religion.
US pharmacists frequently give teenagers false information telling them that they are not allowed to buy emergency contraception.
Obama's health care program could be an opportunity to move towards treating drug problems instead of punishing them.
The Obama regime pretends that what Snowden told us is still secret, and had the chutzpah to tell a judge that there's no proof the NSA is spying on everyone.
Surveillance cameras which record audio are being put on buses & trains.
The TSA is funding this.
Here are the specs on some bus camera and microphone systems.
There is no possible excuse for microphones in buses. The arguments in favor are arguments for listening to everyone everywhere.
It's not just the NSA. These systems must be removed and banned.
A study found that states with more guns have higher murder rates, and the two rates vary together over time.
Obama's review of the NSA called for substantial changes.
However, they involved limiting government access to dossiers, not limiting the accumulation of dossiers, and this can't be sufficient.
The Chinese communist party desperately tries reform and censorship.
A study in which researchers interviewed people at home found that the rate of domestic violence in England is substantially more than was known. Many are afraid to tell anyone what is happening to them.
Report on the living conditions of migrant workers in Abu Dhabi.
Some individual stories.
Allowing an employer to hold a worker's passport is the gateway to abuse.
Everyone: call on Uganda's president to veto the bill to punish gays even worse.
More
about this law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell the FDA we need forceful action against feeding antibiotics to farm animals other than to treat infections.
One flaw in Obama's health care law is that, for many people in the lower middle class, it doesn't make health care affordable.
This is no surprise, however. The law was designed to offer medical coverage to many of the uninsured poor, while catering to medical insurance companies. To reduce costs for others would have required the public option and big savings would have required a single payer plan.
Catholic school students in Seattle went on strike to protest the dismissal of a teacher because he had entered a same-sex marriage.
Scientific journals must start insisting that authors provide the raw data, so it does not get lost.
8 Down,
Thousands To Go After Obama Commutes 'Unfair' Crack Cocaine
Sentences.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Many writers self-censor for fear of NSA surveillance.
Proper government regulation could ensure that chemical products are not toxic.
The US government is aiming to radically advance facial recognition software.
If that is used against journalists and protesters, it will be curtains for democracy.
The Renault Zoe
forces
the owner to "rent" a battery which can be turned off remotely.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
As usual, the EFF advocates a remedy which doesn't go far enough. It's not enough to make it legal for car owners to defeat these vicious schemes. The schemes themselves should be illegal, period.
Explaining the loophole the NSA uses to search Americans' communications while "not targeting Americans".
The article advocates the USA FREEDOM Act, which would limit the government's right to access digital dossiers. This would be a step forward, but nowhere near enough.
The anti-democracy protesters of Thailand's "Democratic Party" decided
to
boycott
the coming election, which they know they would lose.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Five Ways to Curb Your Child's Materialism This Holiday Season.
US student activism against racism and various forms of oppression.
Morsi now faces
absurd charges of conspiring with Hamas and Hezbollah.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni theocratist group. Hezbollah is a Shi'ite group, militant but more concerned with defending Shi'ites' political interests than with religion. The idea that they would work together is as ridiculous as the idea that Saddam Hussein and al Qa'ida would work together — but Dubya found it useful to claim they did.
As for the charges of escaping from prison, at that time state agents went around arresting (and sometimes killing) people for political reasons. Zero-tolerance for escapes, and immunity for the captors, is hardly justice.
Kansas says state universities can fire professors for saying anything the university administration says is "contrary to the best interest of the university".
A woman is suing because thugs in Texas subjected her to medical procedures including X-rays, without her consent. Then the hospital tried to make her pay for $5000 for this.
Oakland installed a combined surveillance system, supposedly to fight "crime", but its operators were only interested in suppressing protests.
The ACLU is making a mistake by using timid words like "troubling" to describe this. This surveillance is un-American tyranny, and any the community should demand shutting it down.
Awards for the most thuggish thug activity in the US.
The UK's internet censorship scheme blocks sex education sites and sites that help rape victims.
Maybe these are mistakes, but every such censorship scheme makes such mistakes.
Anti-pipeline protesters displayed a banner, and some glitter fell off it, so the thugs charged them with a "terrorist hoax".
TransCanada, the company that wants to build the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline, is working with local thug departments and encouraging them to accuse nonviolent protesters of "terrorism".
We need to pass a law making it a crime for officials to make absurd charges against anyone.
Shaker Aamer gently ridicules the inexplicable book censorship of the Guantanamo prison guards.
A recently freed ex-prisoner says the prisoners were subjected to
"meticulous,
daily torture".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A Snowden document says that the NSA paid RSA Inc. to make the NSA's ineffective key generator the default option.
More
information.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
If the program is not free, its users are defenseless against malice at all sorts of levels.
Imagine what TV would say if someone bombed a wedding party in the US; now contrast that with what US TV said when the US bombed a wedding party in Yemen.
A Murdoch paper made a joke out of it.
Uri Avnery: Israel puts African refugees in a sort of prison which it pretends is not a prison.
It reminds him of how other countries treated Jewish refugees trying to flee from Nazism.
In the long term, the way to end mass migration for economic motives is to end the wealth-concentrating policies that keep most people poor.
Organizations campaigning to continue global heating received .9 billion dollars a year in funding over the past 8 years.
Not all of that money was used to promote global heating; it is not possible in some cases to separate out what was spent on that and what was spent on other right-wing causes.
Americans whose health insurance plans were recently canceled will not be fined if they don't get new plans.
Obama's health care plan is, overall, a step forward, and this flexibility is welcome. But it does cost some people substantial money because it was designed to cater to the insurance companies and the drug companies.
The US economy is not "back on track" to give most Americans a decent life.
The NSA and GCHQ spied on Unicef and Médecins du Monde, in addition to European officials.
In the Colombian Amazon, oil and highways mean destroying the forest after poisoning the people.
The Nukak people lived in the forest by themselves, until their forest was cut down for coca plantations.
A UK judge quashed Libyan dissident Belhaj's lawsuit, saying that the he had a valid case against the UK for handing him to Gaddafi's men, but that this was unimportant compared with sucking up to the US.
A former prosecutor found that he couldn't get NYC thugs to arrest him for minor crimes, apparently because he's white. They just ignored his crimes.
Once he finally got himself arrested, for spray-painting on city hall, the prosecutors demanded outrageous and unusual punishments, even violating standard penal policies, apparently out of pure spite.
Tax meat to discourage its global heating contribution.
Most Americans would live longer if they ate less meat.
Everyone: call on Lend Lease not to build a coal port near the Great Barrier Reef.
The London School of Economics has concluded that Jesus & Mo t-shirts do not have to be censored.
UK law goes too far in prohibiting expressions of opinion. If it is even plausible that pictures of Mohammad are illegal on the grounds that someone might take offense, freedom of speech is too weak.
New York City residents are paradoxically hurt by Obama's health care program because they have a much better program available from the city.
Some Republicans in the House of Representatives asked for investigating Clapper for lying to Congress.
I support this call. He deserves to go to jail.
Democratic Senators are again looking for a way to block diplomacy with Iran.
Uganda has adopted a law punishing homosexuality with life imprisonment.
Like many other unjust laws and policies, this one is supposedly "to protect children".
Doctors sent by Australia to treat the imprisoned refugees on Christmas Island describe the atrocious conditions the refugees are subject to.
The West must not ignore the repeated messages that its wars stir up hatred.
There are two ways to consider terrorist attacks such as those in New York in 2001 and in London in 2005: as crimes or as war.
To consider them as crimes means responding by hunting and prosecuting the perpetrators — not by launching wars. If we view the issue in terms of crime, the attack on Rigby was a crime too and prosecuting its perpetrators was legitimate. However, invading Iraq was not legitimate and we have a duty to prosecute those responsible.
On the other hand, if we consider those terrorist attacks as war and say they justify war in response, the enemy can say the same. Viewed as war, the killing of Rigby was an attack by a guerrilla force on a military target. The US has committed plenty of war crimes, and so have the Taliban and its supporters, but attacking Rigby wasn't one.
We can't have it both ways.
South Sudan is being torn apart by tribalism.
A mother writes about joining an anti-fracking protest because of the threat to her children's lives from future global heating.
If you are a young person today, there is considerable danger you will be killed by global heating — not soon, of course, but when it reaches the point where millions are starving, and fighting over food, globalized supply chains could break down, which would make a lot of technology and industry stop working world-wide.
We can't predict what will happen, as there are too many imponderables. Maybe some lucky surprise will avert the disaster, but do you want to bet your life on that? If we are to avoid it, we have to curb the greenhouse gas emission now.
Belgium requires ISPs to actively seek out mirrors of the Pirate Bay and censor access to them.
In other words, it is copyright uber alles.
Iraqis believe that their government, set up by the US, is responsible for a lot of the violence that the government attributes to al Qa'ida.
The Internet Giants Oppose Surveillance— But Only When the Government Does It.
The FCC could make TV stations say who pays for the ads but it doesn't bother.
Although the UK government has effectively killed all followup for the Gibson report, the report is enough to prove plenty of wrongdoing.
20 years of NAFTA shows the
harm
that "free trade" treaties do.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The plutocrats are not satisfied; they want even more.
This year's NDAA makes progress on two issues: prosecution of rapists in the military, and releasing prisoners from Guantanamo.
Can anyone find out what has happened with the most un-American part of the NDAA, the provision that allows the military to imprison anyone without trial if the person is accused of being a "terrorist"?
Uri Avnery: Netanyahu's "security concerns" about the Jordan valley are obsolete and militarily irrelevant; their only purpose is to provide an excuse not to make peace.
If Kerry could satisfy Netanyahu on this issue, Netanyahu would fall back on the next excuse.
Canada's Supreme Court has ruled that restrictions on prostitution are
unconstitutional.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
In the midst of a blizzard, Israeli soldiers are demolishing the shacks and tents Palestinians live in.
In Gaza, donkey carts are used to pick up rubbish, because there is no fuel for garbage trucks, or even for pumping water.
Israeli soldiers shackled Palestinian children aged 6 to 9 who were playing with burning tires and asbestos.
Burning tires makes fumes, and I suspect breathing them is not good for children. Asbestos is quite toxic. However, that was no reason to shackle the children.
The Australian government has disregarded its previous commitment to send a coast guard vessel to monitor the Japanese whaling fleet.
Christian extremists say that secularists are fighting a "war on Christmas", but the real War on Christmas is the one waged by business.
Speaking as a secularist, I am not fighting a war on Christmas. I have no conflict with what Christians do for Christmas, as long as they don't try to get the government to promote their religion above my nonreligion.
What I strongly resent is the commercial version of Christmas, which blares out at me in every store.
People who get trafficked into the UK and then forced into growing marijuana get prosecuted rather than helped.
This particular problem is ultimately the state's fault, since the right approach to growing marijuana is to legalize it. However, that would not eliminate the issue of trafficking; that needs to be addressed by itself.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, plutocrat turned political prisoner, has been pardoned.
The Warsame case shows that civil courts can handle captured terrorists.
The ACLU approves of his prosecution, but criticizes holding Warsame prisoner in a navy ship.
A poll finds most Americans say it was a mistake to invade Afghanistan and want US troops removed faster.
I am not sure it was a mistake. The results were good in the beginning, and if Bush had not invaded Iraq, perhaps things would have turned out well in Afghanistan.
However, things are totally screwed now in Afghanistan and the US is not achieving much by keeping the fighting going.
Obama boasts about increasing extraction of fossil fuels.
The EFF criticizes the weak recommendations of Obama's review of NSA massive surveillance.v
To make democracy safe, we must put an end to the massive accumulation of data about Americans.
"Zero tolerance" means the idea of childhood has been swept away by fear.
The first step toward obsessive fear was when parents started thinking that children could never be left alone. I remember how happy I was, when I was 8 or so, during those periods when I was home and I could read without being annoyed by my mother.
Meanwhile, no one freaked out about the fact that I, and the other students in my school, walked to school and back on the sidewalks of Manhattan.
The Gibson report says that UK agents were directed to help cover up US kidnapings and torture.
The Islamists that have taken control of parts of Syria are practicing their usual cruelness, flogging and executing adults and teenagers after cursory "trials".
I don't see any feasible way to dislodge them.
An engineer at the Big Spill was convicted of obstruction of justice for deleting messages in which the spill rate was estimated.
Everyone: urge Argentina to reject the proposed Monsanto GMO seed factory.
US citizens: call for increasing Social Security and rebuke Republican hostage-taking.
US citizens: call on Kerry to cancel the review of the Keystone XL pipeline by ERM, which has been found in even more conflict of interest.
High speed trains in Europe are so expensive that, for long distances, they push most travelers to flying.
I general prefer to travel by train if it is feasible, partly because I don't have to identify myself, and also partly because, with my luggage, "low-cost" airlines are not cheap.
The C+= language project, a funny parody of the form of speech of some feminists, is getting kicked off various web platforms in an act of political censorship.
Later I was told that BitBucket had deleted it too.
Equal rights and equal pay, regardless of gender, are causes I support. I've condemned patriarchy and proposed a way to make Spanish gender-neutral.
I also support satire, even satire of causes I support.
I will not support censorship.
Trashing human rights is everyday practice in Australia.
Everyone: call on banksters
to give
their holiday bonuses to the people they made homeless.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The world may be hitting Peak Food.
The human race needs to hit Peak Population soon, or we're asking for trouble.
Why Taser Is Paying Millions in Secret 'Suspect Injury Or Death' Settlements. When Does "Less Lethal" Actually Mean "Deadly"?
Being tased is surely less dangerous than being hit with a bullet. If we think of tasing as a substitute for shooting, tasing probably results in less harm. But if tasers encourage people to shoot, on the basis that they are safe, tasers could result in more harm.
Alberta is considering a law to criminalize suggesting that public employees go on strike.
South Korea bans all publications from North Korea, and even access to a site that analyzes North Korea's internet presence. (See last paragraph.)
A bill that is supposed to regulate lobbying in the UK will tie up citizens' campaigns in red tape.
I suspect the problem is due to not distinguishing business funding from other funding.
Edward Felten analyzes the strained language that Obama's NSA report uses to give the impression that the NSA has not put back doors into software people use. If the statements are literally true, they are full of loopholes.
They might also be false. If the NSA officials will lie to Congress, why wouldn't they lie to us?
It's not just the NSA: the FBI also snoops on Americans unjustly.
US citizens:
call on
Obama to grant Snowden immunity.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Volcker Rule
Made Meaningless by Abundant Exemptions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Three different disasters in Asia come from the same cause: the political dominance of business.
To change this, we should abolish the institutions such as the WTO that cement their power.
The coroner in charge of investigating the death of Alexander Litvinenko says that the government won't allow him to investigate properly whether Russian agents murdered Litvinenko.
If someone were accused of the murder, that person would deserve a fair trial, being considered innocent until proven guilty. However, for these political purposes, we can presume the Russian state is guilty.
In China, prostitutes are sentenced to labor camps that use them for profit.
A US official in Vietnam
told
journalists not to believe anything US officials say, because they
lie all the time.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Catholic hospitals in the US try to excuse their contempt for women's rights by claiming that they serve the poor. Not very true nowadays.
The Indian state has not punished the perpetrators of a pogrom against Dalits, so the Maoist dissidents are killing them.
Buddhism in India, by Gail Omvedt, argues that Dalits are the descendants of India's Buddhists, from the time when the nobles suppressed Buddhism.
An aborted inquiry into UK rendition of Libyan dissidents to Gaddafi's hands says there is a case to be investigated.
Italy will shut or block access to sites without trial if they are accused of facilitating sharing.
Republicans' method for reducing the unemployment rate is to cut unemployment benefits. In North Carolina, this made 77,000 people give up looking for work, so they are not longer counted in the "unemployment rate".
It is a mistake to judge the success or failure of government policies by the official unemployment rate. The real measure of unemployment is number of people who are of working age but not working or in school, and not independently wealthy.
Israeli troops
shot
a Palestinian in the back, but said he was shooting at them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Cows in the US are fed litter from chicken cages, and that includes beef.
This creates a danger of spreading mad cow disease.
One of the missions of the Environmental Defenders Office in Australia is to make governments implement legal requirements to protect endangered species.
Officials, perhaps in bed with mining or logging interests, seem to wish to let these species be wiped out.
China will require journalists to take an
ideology
exam.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government has given up on pursuing large companies for around 60 billion dollars in dodged taxes.
A Swedish man was fined $600,000 for distributing a movie through a torrent site.
The copyright industry wants to imprison people for this. It is part of the War on Sharing, which we must put an end to.
Most Americans want the government to reduce economic inequality.
Though the plutocrats have failed to convince most Americans, they still have other strategies to prevent Americans from exercising control over the state.
Spain's right-wing government will vary its attacks on the non-rich to attack women instead, by banning abortion with very limited exceptions.
Senator Warren's push to increase Social Security seems to have made it politically impossible to cut Social Security.
This was very important, but we also need to increase government revenue by increasing taxes on the rich and on businesses. Also, while we are in a recession, we need deficit spending.
TAFTA, the proposed business deregulation treaty for the US and Europe, threatens to give many businesses increased power. For instance, it could blow away the just-established Volcker Rule, ban labeling of GMOs, make medicines more expensive, and stop countries from protecting data from spying by other countries.
TAFTA stands for "Turn All Freedom To Ashes".
Morsi faces another prosecution on improbable charges of a terrorist conspiracy including Iran.
Facebook carefully studies all the text that its useds type in and then don't submit.
Glenn Greenwald told the EU that the NSA's goal is to eliminate privacy, world wide.
Putin hopes that amnesty for some political prisoners will wipe away the shame of having imprisoned them (and others) in the first place.
On the Front Lines of Class
War: Why the
Fight for a Livable Wage is Everyone's Fight.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US Budget Deal: the Good, Bad And Stupid.
The UK government, through deregulation and privatization, has allowed vital industries including food and banking to shrug off rule of law.
The latest censorship proposal: ban saying that someone is fat.
Once you accept in principle the idea of forbidding some sort of insult, there is no natural stopping point; any statement that might hurt someone's feelings is likely to be banned.
I do not feel offended when people call me "fat", if they do not mean it as an insult, since it is undeniably true. If someone does mean it as an insult, that indicates a mental confusion on that person's part. Being fat is not an ethical failing.
It is amazing that Ms Lawrence is so sensitive to insults to her appearance — as if Einstein felt crushed if anyone said he was stupid. This bespeaks an inner insecurity that disregards objective reality. That insecurity is her real problem, not the insults.
Let the Sun Shine In: The Rightwing Attack on Our Solar Future.
It's perfectly logical: someone who wants to sell as much fossil fuel as possible, and cares nothing about the rest of the world, would try to discourage, even prohibit installation of solar generators.
Trapwire files for "suspicious events" show both idiocy and unofficial racial profiling.
The Big Spill made dolphins sick, some fatally.
The UK government will smother the inquiry into rendition by handing it to a picked committee of Parliament instead of a judge.
The UK government apparently fears people's opposition to fracking, so it says frackers need not inform the people who live above the wells.
This way, if they get sick, it won't occur to them to suspect fracking is the cause.
Turkish thugs that dared to arrest well-connected people for corruption charges have been fired and rebuked by President Erdogan.
How can pressure be put on Putin, and other Russian anti-gay bigots?
Ultimately, the 2012 Olympics did nothing to spur exercise in England. Their legacy to England consists of repressive laws and benefits for the rich.
The ACLU praises Edward Snowden as an American patriot, and refutes the state's attacks on him.
The Australian government will cease funding the offices that advise people on protecting themselves from polluting industries. This is to help businesses get away with illegal pollution.
Australia's Human Rights Commissioner proposes to abolish one kind of censorship, which penalizes some "offensive" views.
This right-wing politician appears to have little real love for human rights. Nonetheless, Australia should abolish this censorship if it has an opportunity.
The UK government has rejected EU funds for food banks.
After working so hard to make Britons so poor they cannot afford food, why would the government let the EU help them escape? That would spoil everything!
US citizens: phone your senators at 202-224-3121 and say, no new sanctions against Iran — give diplomacy a chance.
The arrogant international "tribunal" set up by a US-Ecuador investment treaty has already twisted the law and the treaty to make excuses to declare Chevron the winner against Ecuadorians.
I wonder why Ecuador has not withdrawn from this treaty. Even if the treaty should not properly apply to this case at all, other cases will arise in the future. The treaty can do no good, only harm.
Australia plans to imprison refugees on accusation, without trial, by requiring them to sign a "code of conduct" in which they promise not to commit crimes.
This means that if they are accused of crimes, rather than trying them like anyone else, functionaries can decide they have "violated the code of conduct," cancel their visas, and imprison them right away.
Meanwhile, the government has changed another "code of conduct", for ministers, to allow them to own stock in businesses.
Since these ministers were chosen to serve the interest of business anyway, if they have another personal reason to do that it might change nothing.
Greg Palast: the Nelson Mandela Barbie doll.
Schools in Puyallup, WA, are installing palm scanners for students to identify themselves with.
I think palm scanners are much less bad than fingerprint scanners, because people don't leave palmprints on everything they touch. Perhaps the palm scanners are ok, if the state can't get any personal data from them.
The US government plans to deploy a laser scanning system that can detect even tiny quantities of chemicals in people's clothing and people's bodies.
The publisher of a Turkish edition of a raunchy book by Apollinaire is being tried under censorship laws.
An alleged food fraud gang in France has been arrested. They took the meat of horses that had been used in medical experiments and labeled it as beef.
The members of the American Studies Association have approved the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
Palestinians call for this boycott because Israeli universities have direct connections with the occupation of Palestine.
A global campaign aims to secure cheap anti-hepatitis pills.
The obstacle is the WTO, which requires countries such as India to allow patents on drugs.
This murderous policy is one of many reasons that the WTO must be abolished.
Amazon's warehouse workers in Germany have gone on strike.
Bravo!
Voicing the People's Anger, Yemen Parliament Calls for Drone Ban.
Zoning limits are pushing poor people out of US cities to far-away places from which commuting is hard and expensive.
I've opposed housing density limits since I saw this happening in Cambridge Massachusetts.
Around the world, buses are not funded enough, because rich people don't take buses.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, on trial in Guantanamo, keeps trying to tell the judge that guards make noise to keep him from sleeping.
This is a military kangaroo court rather than a proper trial. Is that supposed to make sleep deprivation of the defendant ok?
Obama's record on global heating: with few exceptions, he supports it.
The European Commission objects to UK plans to subsidize nuclear power plants.
America's Greediest: The 2013 Top Ten.
Many economists say that the inequality that results from this greed costs even the rich, because it reduces the total economy.
Not that it matters ethically. Hurting the poor couldn't be justified by enriching the rich.
211 Journalists in World's Jails in 2013. The worst country is Turkey.
2013 was filled with extreme weather events.
Billionaire Polluters has found a large new oil field in the Gulf of Mexico.
Shall we celebrate?
Libyan dissident Ziad Hashem was imprisoned without trial in the UK, apparently based on information that Libyan torturers extracted from Abd-el-Hakim Belhaj after the UK and US delivered him to them.
If extraditing Abd-el-Hakim Belhaj secretly without the usual hearings was "approved by ministers", it demonstrates that that is insufficient as a safeguard.
The Los Angeles Airport shooter has been accused of "terrorism".
This attack does seem to be premeditated murder, but I think it is stretching the term "terrorism" to apply it here. Stretching strong words such as "terrorism" is a form of inflation that devalues them.
A British former headteacher (school principal, in US terms) has been convicted of sexual assault on 5 students, all before 1970.
The victims must have resented this for decades, which pretty clearly implies they were unwilling at the time. Thus, I think those acts do deserve to be crimes.
Human Rights Watch reports various forms of repression used in Saudi Arabia.
It's December, normally the cooler and wetter season, but a wildfire destroyed houses in Big Sur.
It isn't proven yet, but one must suspect that this reflects the effects of global heating, which is expected to alter the base conditions towards the hotter and drier.
A vocational school in the UK gave radio transmitter tags to its students and staff for several years without telling them.
I think it is misleading to call these "RFIDs" because what they do is very different. Their signals show exactly where the wearer is located.
The Indian state of Maharashtra has passed a bill to ban harassment by people who claim supernatural power.
However, the bill is weak.
This is in response to the murder of a rationalist campaigner.
Bank of America played tricks to avoid modifying American homeowners' mortgages, so it could foreclose them instead.
The US Senate should release its report into Bush regime torture practices.
A lawsuit against NSA bulk collection of phone records has more or less won at the trial court level. The judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering the NSA to stop collecting this metadata.
However, it's not really in effect because it will be appealed. I expect this case to go to the Supreme Court before anything really happens.
An Italian protester that kissed a thug's helmet has been charged with "sexual violence" and insulting the thug.
The first charge is blatant distortion of the facts, but the second shows blatant disrespect for freedom of speech. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to insult anyone, especially including officials. A state that denies this right is clearly in the wrong.
US citizens: support Senator Warren's bill to forbid employers to look at job candidates' credit reports.
US citizens: Tell Congress, don't go on vacation without extending unemployment benefits.
The FDA will move to ban anti-bacterial soaps unless they demonstrate health benefits.
The bactericides can cause harm, and there is a possibility that the killing of bacteria may lead indirectly to the spread of asthma because people's immune systems don't get trained as they should be.
60 Minutes Is Now in the Spin Business.
Everyone: call on
Philadelphia not
to allow advertising in its public schools.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US border thugs interrogated two New York Times reporters about their journalistic activities as they were returning to the US. Now the Committee for Public Safety (oops, Department of Homeland Security) says it has no record of this.
An Indian diplomat in the US faces criminal charges for paying a domestic servant less than the minimum wage and lying about it in her visa application.
The servant is also Indian. Indians should cheer that the US is doing something to protect poor Indians from exploitation by the Indian elite. Reportedly it is a long time since an Indian diplomat was arrested. It has probably been an even longer time since Indian servants' wages were protected in this way.
The strip search seems excessive, however, for the nature of the accusation.
Senator Warren's bill would stop employers from discriminating (in effect) against poor people.
This bill would be a change for the better, but we also need to make more jobs, which calls for increased government spending. I'm sure Senator Warren is in favor of that too.
Spineless in
Bali: Fooled Again by the WTO.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
50 sailors on a US navy ship that brought aid to the Fukushima area have got cancer, and are suing TEPCO.
The ship carries around 3000 sailors. For 50 of those healthy adults, mostly in their 20s, to get cancer in under 3 years is amazing.
The ship is named after President Reagan, and his name should not be mentioned without reminding people how he harmed the US. He gave arms to terrorists in Lebanon to ransom hostages, to get funds to illegally fund terrorists in Nicaragua. He also launched the campaign to impoverish most Americans, which continues to this day. His supporters called him the Great Communicator, but Great Swindler would fit better.
Neonicotinoid pesticides cause brain damage to mouse fetuses, so they may harm human fetuses too.
AT&T's latest method in the War on Sharing is a new user-profiling scheme to identify sharers, whom they call "pirates."
Please don't call them "pirates" — that is propaganda for the enemy.
Falkvinge: Our Free Society Stands Or Falls With Our Defense Of Sharing Knowledge And Culture.
The Sad Decline of '60 Minutes' Continues With This Week's NSA Whitewash.
Seven Ripoffs That Capitalists Would Like to Keep out of the Media.
JROTC uses lots of money to convince American teenagers to join the army. It's instead of teaching them American history.
Nelson Mandela's funeral has finished, after serving to illustrate the political issues of today's South Africa and how the US helped the apartheid state to capture him.
I admire Mandela's fight for freedom, and his personal courage, as much as before, and I reject the idea that he'd have to be perfect to deserve our admiration.
However, I am disappointed with the fuss that people make about his death. Why fetishize a corpse that used to be the body of a great person? A dead body is not a person anymore. It's not Mandela's corpse that deserves our admiration, but rather his life.
Everyone: call on the Washington Post to acknowledge it is owned by the owner of Amazon, which has a big contract with the CIA.
The American single mothers who depend on food stamps have been forgotten by the mainstream media.
Suing for the right to plant vegetables in your front yard.
Snowden writes to the people of Brazil asking for asylum there.
Refuting the NSA falsehoods that CBS presented on 60 Minutes.
The UK's system of Internet censorship has been inaugurated.
People who use the Internet via public access points, schools, and so on will have no way to turn the censorship off.
People passing through Dubai airport are imprisoned for having microscopic amounts of marijuana in their pockets or even on the soles of their shoes.
I wonder how they detect these microscopic bits of marijuana. Are they using the inspection laser system that the US has been developing?
Some years ago it was reported that most US bank notes had traces of cocaine. I wonder if they will start imprisoning people who have US money on them.
Don't be a fool — reject all flight transfers in Dubai. Don't even think of flying on Emirates.
Fracking appears in many cases to leak endocrine disruptors into water supply.
Scientists Explore Paths to 'Radical' [CO2] Emissions Reductions.
I do not think we need to consider the digital ration cards for carbon emissions, because a tax on carbon emissions could achieve the same reductions without the oppressive surveillance.
Mother
Teresa gave
sick poor people no painkillers and little medical care, because she
believed that their suffering was "beautiful". This cruel sadist
raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but didn't spend it to help
them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The media campaign to promote her has fooled many Americans into thinking that she was a great example of charity and goodness.
Chile's new President Bachelet promises reforms to spread the wealth and make education more accessible.
A European couple in Egypt was jailed for a month, accused of a crime they couldn't possibly have committed, apparently only to pretend to the Chinese embassy that a complaint had been dealt with.
If this is how the Egyptian state treats foreigners, I shudder at what it must do to Egyptians.
Advertising of prescription drugs in the US is leading to greater and often improper use of the drugs.
The Boston Thug Department's automatic license plate recognizers collected millions of records about lawful vehicles, but they repeatedly ignored one that was stolen.
Which reminds us not to judge surveillance technology by the official purpose but rather by its side effects.
Some nuclear power experts call on Japan to hand over the handling of the Fukushima nuclear plants to an international team.
The cleanup also needs to have plenty of funds. TEPCO is hiring the cheapest workers it can get.
It appears that substantial amounts of radioactive cesium are continuing to leak out of the damaged reactors.
Salt on roads in New York State is coming from oil and gas wells, and it tends to be more toxic than ordinary salt.
Amazon "sold" someone Disney Christmas videos, but not physical copies; subsequently Amazon, at Disney's command, cut off access for Christmas.
This demonstrates why we should not trust remote hosting disservices. Insist on having your own copy which is yours.
USaid rejects all support to abortion in poor countries, and fear of this leads many women's health clinics in poor countries to refuse to do abortions at all.
32 Privacy Destroying Technologies That Are Systematically Transforming America [and the world] Into A Giant Prison.
A Genentech scam against Medicare: selling a very expensive drug Lucentis where cheap Avastin would work just as well.
The article extends too much sympathy to pharma companies. They have corrupted the medical system in many ways, rip off Americans so much, and lobby for deadly patents in countries with lots of poor people, so they don't deserve sympathy.
Viewing the fighting in Syria as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
I don't think Saudi Arabia is likely to use its influence to hold back Islamist extremists, since it has spent years funding and supplying them. There have been reports about this all along, and the US government must have know about this. The US ignored the Saudi connection as al-Qa'ida, boosted by Saudi money, took over the Syrian resistance to Iran's friend. What kind of strategy was that?
"Affluenza" is a new excuse for letting wealthy people escape punishment for crimes such as vehicular homicide.
I doubt whether a 20-year prison sentence is the best way to teach a 16-year-old not to drive while drugged and drunk. However, I agree with the article that, whatever society's best response is, the culprits should not be allowed to pay their way to more favorable treatment.
The ANC, on abolishing apartheid, abandoned its plans for socialism to share the wealth with the impoverished. Did Mandela have a choice?
I don't advocate a Communism that would abolish private property and business. However, the decision to have private business still leaves a wide range of possible societies. Cruel societies such as today's US and Mexico are one option, but today's Scandinavia is also an option. Some socialist elements can make society much better for the non-rich while most work continues to be done by private businesses.
A US Navy study predicts that before 2019 global heating will melt all the ice in the Arctic Ocean every summer.
This will cause global heating to accelerate, since the water surface will absorb more light, which currently the ice reflects out to space.
Three Ways the Super-Rich Suck Wealth Out of the Rest of Us.
Seymour Hersh: When Obama threatened to attack Syria, the US government did not know whether Sarin was used by Assad's men or by al-Nusra the Islamist fanatics. And it still does not know.
The destruction of chemical weapons is a good outcome, and I continue to support it. Cherry-picking intelligence to support a military attack is the sort of thing Dubya did.
Dredging Australia's new coal port is likely to wipe out several protected, endangered species and poison part of the Great Barrier Reef.
Burning the coal will kill the whole thing.
Ukraine is split between a European-leaning western part that was and a Russian-leaning eastern part.
The split mainly derives from the partition of Poland in the late 1700s, when the Russian empire took the eastern part and the Austrian empire took the western part. However, the eastern part was under Mongol rule for centuries before Poland took it.
Palm oil producers continue destroying Sumatran rainforest. Few orangutans remain.
Giving legislators a raise, in the European parliament, resulted in their being less committed to their work.
I don't think this one study can justify concluding that higher pay necessarily causes less dedication.
The US budget deal is cruel to the poor, and panders to the rich and business.
It is a compromise between mainstream right-wing and extreme right-wing.
The practice of making computers to last a short time and be replaced tremendously increases the quantity of toxic e-waste.
This also increases the demand for certain minerals to the point that armies fight over mines in Africa.
Banning the shipment of e-waste to poor countries is proving ineffective. Requiring a 3-year warranty for every computer sold might do a better job. Many of the purchasers would demand warranty service, so the manufacturers would have to make their products cheaper to repair. In addition, a lot of the waste would end up in the hands of authorized service agents. Regulating its disposal by them would be easier.
The next threat from Facebook: using AI to figure out more about you.
If you refuse to be one of Facebook's useds and tell the AI about yourself, it will do what it can with the data it gets from Facebook surveillance — plus what other people tell it about you.
The Islamist fanatics in Syria greatly outnumber the secular rebels and are better equipped. Thus, if Assad's regime is replaced, the replacement will be worse.
Tobacco companies pay corrupt governments to use trade treaties to block anti-smoking measures.
These murderous treaties must be destroyed!
What the state could find out with location data from tracking you and other people you know.
PBS Budget Debate: Wall Street, the Right and the Further Right.
Karzai's conditions to allow some US troops to remain in Afghanistan: end air attacks (including drones) and facilitate peace.
Freedom of political speech is widely threatened across Europe.
For instance, Spain is now considering a law to make it a crime to "insult Spain".
This is not to mention the censorship of specific views in many countries.
A US drone attack killed 15 people on the way to a wedding in Yemen.
This is a consequence of using drones as death squads, in places that are not battlefields. A wedding party would not travel through a battlefield; people would recognize the danger and stay under cover.
Australia's gun regulations could be a model for the US.
The population of barn owls in the UK is crashing because of various human activities.
Use of rat poison is one of them. Another is global heating, which paradoxically makes Britain colder in the winter.
The government of Colombia makes sure right-wing gangs can get away with rape so as to keep foreign companies happy.
The oppressive treaty with the US is another plan to keep foreign companies happy.
US citizens: urge your senators
to oppose
attempts to weaken the Endangered Species Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Avnery on the latest Israeli excuses to reject peace with Palestine.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to cut subsidies to
agribusiness, not food stamps.
Also send
mail through this page.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: call on India to abolish the law against homosexuality.
Brazil may allow use of "terminator" seeds (biological restrictions management or BRM).
Fracking Hell: What It's Really Like to Live Next to a Shale Gas Well.
Mass graves of Albanian
Kosovars give
the lie to claims that the Serbs did not commit atrocities there.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Global heating leads to extreme weather disasters, and those lead the victims to be trafficked.
Too Many Secrets: Fixing the Government's Broken System for Classifying Information.
Some NSA officials said they would consider amnesty for Snowden if he stops revealing secrets.
This seems to be pure PR. They know that Snowden is no longer revealing any US secrets. He no longer has any! Before going to Russia, he divested himself of all copies so the data would not fall into Russian hands. Journalists have the data now.
Thus, what the NSA officials really proposes is to make Snowden a hostage to make the journalists stop publishing.
ISPs in Venezuela have been ordered to censor access to sites that publish the black market exchange rate between dollars and bolivars.
This is stupid as well as wrong. However, when judging the policy, keep in mind that many countries have similar (and equally wrong) policies, including quite a few in Europe.
Price controls tend to cause shortages, so they are generally an unwise policy. But they are not unjust like censorship.
Schools put students' personal data at risk by entrusting them to companies.
No matter what these companies might put in their contracts, centralizing data from schools in one company inherently makes them more vulnerable. In addition, these technologies increase the amount of data collection about a student.
The student's data should be kept on a physical memory that is the student's property, on loan to the school. Teachers should be allowed to look at the data when there is a valid reason, and the physical memory should be wiped after the term, leaving nothing but the grades.
US schools routinely terrify and traumatize kids in the name of protecting them from terror and trauma.
If we banned large magazines and guns that repeat at a high rate, much of the problem will go away.
I fear that these lockdowns will teach many children to think in the direction of shooting a lot of people, in school or elsewhere. When that's what you know (or think you know), you will think of that.
Poor People Deserve Digital Privacy, Too.
Companies have pushed workers to act like machines, which makes them very vulnerable to being replaced by a machine.
I think there is some truth in this article. At the same time, the approach it recommends won't put millions of long-term-employed back to work. If society does not need these people to work, it must offer them good lives anyway.
It is incoherent to say "If you don't work, you don't eat" and "There is no work for you" at the same time.
A "small" nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce a small nuclear winter. The loss of food production could endanger 2 billion people.
The UK's cruel cuts force many poor Britons to live on 3 dollars a day for food.
It is no surprise that these policies have not helped people find work. That was never a real goal, just an excuse to hurt people.
The reason these people are unemployed is that there are no jobs for them, and that is due to the spending cuts.
Illegal gold mining is driving deforestation in Peru.
I think such phenomena demonstrate the importance of sharply cutting the birth rate. People will find ways to get money through extraction, especially if they have little other opportunity.
Greenpeace declares it will continue protests against Arctic oil drilling, even in Russia.
In companies where Domino's Pizza operates: tell the company
to reinstate
the workers who were fired for complaining about illegal low
wages. Note, this campaign was successful.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: sign
this petition to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama not to gag his new advisor John Podesta regarding the Keystone XL Earth-roaster pipeline, especially given that corrupt interests are operating unimpeded.
Documents show that ALEC presented itself to companies as making their profits its primary goal.
Renewable energy is growing rapidly in South Africa, but coal interests want to tie the country permanently to coal exports.
The Australian government is abolishing environmental protection by handing approval power solely to individual states.
The tyrant of North Korea executed his uncle, calling him "despicable human scum". Well of course — he was an official in North Korea, so how could he not be despicable human scum?
Controversial
Anti-Protest Law Challenged in Ugandan Court.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
500 prominent writers have published a manifesto for restoring privacy by curbing digital surveillance.
I agree with their manifesto, because it doesn't insist narrowly that the solution consists of limiting state access to massive dossiers while continuing to accumulate them.
It took me a while to find a place to refer to it, because the reference I saw was to a page I could not even view, on change.org. When I tried to view that page, all I got was a brief message saying the site requires Javascript and cookies even to see a page.
In addition, they ask people to endorse the statement on change.org. I won't do that, or refer others to that, because of the requirement for nonfree Javascript software.
So I am stating my agreement here.
Everyone: Urge German PM Merkel
to give
asylum to Edward Snowden in exchange for his testimony.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Japanese continue protesting against the new state secrets law, which over 80% condemn.
The FDA is looking at stopping the indiscriminate use of some antibiotics in farm animals.
Victoria (a state in Australia) will legalize sexting by teenagers but only in narrow age bands. This is a step forward but not enough. No one should be punished for sexting, and the recipient of the sext shouldn't be punished either.
The law will also ban sending nude photos of someone else without that person's consent. That part seems ok to me.
Israel has abandoned the plan to force Negev Bedouin off their lands and into artificial villages where they have no livelihood.
However, the victory won't necessarily last.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose "fast track" for the
TPP.
Also send
mail through this page.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The US government has decided to keep hunger strikes in Guantanamo secret to avoid the odium they shed.
A researcher studying plastic in the Pacific Ocean found that plastic has a larger presence than living organisms.
It turns out to be difficult to count the plastic in the ocean, and difficult to filter it out without catching the plankton.
An unarmed man who did nothing worse than walk into the street has been charged with shooting people — who in fact were shot by the thugs.
To hold the criminal responsible for the consequences of the crime is valid when the crime is comparably grave. For instance, Dubya and B'liar should be held responsible for all the killings in Iraq caused by their invasion, including the killings carried out by the Sunni and Shi'ite militias as well as by the Bush forces.
However, putting a hand in a pocket is hardly grave enough to justify blaming anyone for other people's shootings. In addition, it gives the shooters immunity, which encourages them to shoot again.
The Theater of Security Agency shows no sense of shame after confiscating a two-inch-long toy pistol that was to be put on a puppet.
The idea that there is a principle that requires harsh, strict and pointless application of rules is a collective folly known as "zero tolerance". "Zero tolerance" is the basis for the school-to-prison pipeline. We must condemn the general idea, every time it comes up, and not only its crazy excesses.
The former prime minister of Thailand has been charged with murder for ordering snipers to shoot protesters.
Coca Cola Company is trying
to teach US
waiters to discourage people from drinking tap water.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
I usually have only tap water in restaurants, except in Chinese restaurants where large pots of tea are usually provided.
See also the boycott of Coca Cola Company.
Israel, Palestine and Jordan made an agreement on a joint desalination project and will divide up the water.
Heroic whistleblowers call on spy agency employees to become whistleblowers.
New Zealand border thugs took all of Samual Blackman's computers and disk drives.
They kept him incommunicado, and demanded he give them his passwords.
Blackman suspected this was because he went to a meeting in London about massive surveillance. The thugs said it is for some kind of censorship. We should not assume they told the truth, but if they did, that is no better. Censorship is evil too.
Today's law in Australia (and the US) would have made it a crime to send funds to "terrorists" such as Nelson Mandela, and maybe even to teach anti-apartheid activists how to use a photocopier. But that's not enough for right-wing politicians, who want to imprison protesters that interfere with business.
I guess those right-wing politicians support Putin's plans to imprison Greenpeace protesters.
It is a fundamental injustice to allow functionaries to label a group as "terrorist" without putting the group on trial and convicting it of that crime.
The Volcker rule is so complex, and has many exceptions; it might not do its job very well.
An Egyptian teenager has been imprisoned for having a pro-Morsi symbol on a ruler and notebooks in school. Many others have been punished for displaying the banned symbol.
Even though I disagree very strongly with what the symbol stands for, I am against this censorship.
US citizens: Tell Congress to reject the Scrooge budget deal.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on the Massachusetts senators to support diplomacy with Iran.
The Australian government's malice against foreigners has reached the point of denying a short-term visa for medical treatment.
Australia imprisons boat people in Papua New Guinea, where homosexuality is illegal, and the prisoners have been told that any homosexual acts will be reported to the local thugs.
AT&T offers a discount on broadband in exchange for snooping on users' browsing.
Another way to put it is, even a shadow of privacy costs extra.
I think this demonstrates the fallacy trying to address the problem of surveillance by saying users "own" the personal data that companies want. Companies have so much clout that they can get people to "sell" nearly anything — especially with mass unemployment and falling wages making people desperate.
Google uses a third-party cookie to track users from one site to another. The NSA looks at the same cookie to do the same job.
It's wrong for the NSA to track people in general, and wrong for Google to do it. We need to change browsers so they do not cooperate with this. GNU IceCat blocks most third-party material in web pages.
As for the cooperation that the NSA gets from portable phone apps, you should accept nothing less from proprietary software.
When lawyer Eric Crinnian told thugs they couldn't search his home without a warrant, a thug threatened to exercise the warrant at night, breaking down his door and kill his dogs, gratuitously.
That shows thugs' attitude towards our rights. If these threats by thugs are not illegal, we need to make them illegal.
Furthermore, the thugs should be required to carry audio recorders at all times when on duty. If when accused they don't present recordings to show the accusation is false, courts should take the citizen's word over the thug's word.
Students held protests around the UK against anti-protest violence by the thugs.
Earth's awesome rate of CO2 emission, and what it means.
Pollution from coal burnt in China kills 250,000 people each year.
Fraudulent food is a widespread organized crime practice in the UK.
I attribute it to the deregulation that makes it easy to change the supply chain frequently.
Aetna shareholders have sued the company for misleading them about its political spending.
Apple appears to be censoring all bitcoin apps for iThings.
It should be illegal to make or distribute computers which are platforms for censorship.
The UK thugs systematically cancel domain names without trial by quietly intimidating domain name registrars.
They do this in the name of the bogus concept of "intellectual property", propaganda that conveys a misunderstanding of the various unrelated laws it is applied to.
Israeli thugs attacked protesters against the plan to kick the Bedouin of the Negev out of their homes and force them into villages where they have no livelihood. The thugs attacked even children with violence.
China is considering a ban on smoking anywhere in public.
I am strongly in favor of discouraging smoking, but I don't see a justification for going so far.
Focusing on whether a few women have an equal chance to be executives and board members is a distraction from how most women (and men) are treated by society.
The Pakistani doctor that helped the US find Osama bin Laden faces repeated bogus accusations, and his defense lawyer has been driven into exile by death threats.
To use a vaccination program as a front for a manhunt was extremely harmful because it fed suspicion of vaccination programs. This has impeded the eradication of polio.
However, that doesn't make these bogus charges valid.
Islamist fanatics in
Syria seized
supplies that the US had provided to non-Islamist rebels.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Is it lawful for the USPS to record the outside of all envelopes?
Global heating of even a few degrees will affect bats' ability to echolocate.
In the long term, many thousands of years, bats could evolve to cope with this. But the heating we are causing today is too fast for evolution to adapt to.
Ice loss on West Antarctica is causing Antarctica, the continent, to shift.
An alpine glacier that was stable for thousands of years is warming up and melting rapidly.
Repeatedly watching TV coverage of a bombing can cause more stress than witnessing the bombing.
I know someone in California who was so traumatized by watching coverage of the Sep 2001 attacks as to become afraid to go outside.
That morning I made an intentional decision not to watch the coverage. It would have been both boring and anxiety-producing; all in all, I preferred to work on an article talking about the danger of sacrificing our freedom for "security".
Saudi Arabia has expelled a million foreign workers, treating them horribly.
To tighten rules for allowing foreign workers, and expel some, is not in itself wrong. To kill them, or even to physically abuse them, is not excused by the decision to expel them. Denying them the chance to sell their property is also wrong.
Thugs attacked protesters in Ukraine.
The proposed deal with the EU might have traps in it. However, being dominated by Russia is very bad, and rejecting that does not require submission to the EU's temptation.
Uruguay has legalized regulated sale of marijuana, but the people may not support it.
Marijuana is not addictive like tobacco and alcohol; ceasing use of marijuana does not cause withdrawal symptoms.
Homosexuality
is once
again a crime in India.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
In the UK, children have the right to opt out of biometric data collection.
A British man is being prosecuted for having sex with a teenager who said she was having voluntary sex with him and asked please don't prosecute him.
His defense, as reported here, would be vile if anyone were likely to believe it. Since no one could take it seriously, I can't condemn him for saying it, but I don't see what the point is.
Overall, this is another example of "protecting" "children" in a way that does nothing but harm to everyone involved. They will probably say that he "raped" her.
Brazil's President Kubitschek was murdered by the military dictatorship which pretended he had been killed in a car crash.
UK thugs persistently infiltrated and snooped on anti-apartheid campaigners.
Former treasury
secretary Geithner
is now a bankster.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Previously he was the "banksters' man in Washington."
The Australian government is trying to intimidate the Australian public broadcasting organization ABC so it won't publish news such as that Australia was spying on Indonesia.
The accusation of "cannibalizing local media" might be true, but if so, the solution is not what the right-wing government would want to do.
The FBI has launched prosecutions of prison guards in LA.
I am glad to see the statement that they will prosecute even though these abuses have become institutional. If only they adopted the same policy towards banksters.
US citizens: urge Senator Rockefeller
to co-sponsor
Senator Sanders' universal health care bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on your senators to renew credits for renewable energy.
You might as well call on them at the same time to cut subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
Obama pardons turkeys but hardly ever pardons human beings.
"Corporate social responsibility" practices can psychologically influence executives to adopt antisocial policies feeling that they already did their good deed for the year.
One study is not enough to prove this is true, but if it is, it suggests that we need to tax companies more to pay for social needs rather than inviting companies to make donations.
Chinese agents kidnaped human rights activist Wang Bingzhang from Vietnam, and imprisoned him for life after a secret trial. He has been in solitary confinement for a decade.
This is what the US calls "rendition".
The Washington Post warns that Senator Warren might pull the Democratic Party "away from the center" by championing progressive policies.
This is despite the fact that Americans generally agree with them.
This "center" is only a "center" in the sense of being located in between the two mainstream right-wing parties. It's used to suppress what most Americans want.
In the US:
call
on Suffolk University to reject politicized funding from the Koch
brothers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say you oppose any new sanctions on Iran now — give diplomacy a chance!
Then report your call.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
European governments have used the euro crisis as an excuse to wipe out workers' rights and adopt US-style precarity.
It adds up to a campaign that attacks workers' rights in one country at a time.
Australia is likely to need twice as many firefighters by 2030 due to effects of global heating.
US "zero tolerance" reaches new heights of insanity: a child is threatened with expulsion from school for miming the shooting of an imaginary arrow with an imaginary bow.
The NSA snoops on chats between users of online games.
How schools teach gender stereotypes.
How unemployment benefits create jobs.
Finally the US
will adopt
the Volcker rule to restrict banks' speculation.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
I am worried that the complexity of the rule will make it hard to enforce. We will see.
As for the possibility that this will reduce banks' speculation, I hope so. Too large a fraction of the US GNP goes to banks.
Who will put the bell on the cat? You!
Canada wants to claim the seabed at the north pole for the fossil fuels there.
Oil and natural gas from the north pole have no value because they will never be used. To extract even 30% of the known reserves will lead to global heating disaster. Before civilization gets to the point of extracting the expensive fossil fuels from the north pole, it will collapse.
However, Canada and companies can pretend these fuel reserves have value, thus adding to the carbon bubble.
Movement Rises to Kick 'Corporate Reform' Out of Public Schools.
Why does bankrupt AIG get a bail-out while bankrupt Detroit and Chicago workers get pension cuts?
The Thai government called new elections to cater to
protesters'
demands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Edward Snowden won the Guardian's person of the year election.
When I talk about surveillance in my speeches, I call for "three cheers for Edward Snowden." You might think this is superfluous because everyone knows that he deserves our admiration. Not so! US politicians (especially those that support massive surveillance) continue trying to demonize Snowden. We have to defeat them, and the way to do it is by showing our views.
The Over-Policing of America and Criminalizing Everyday Life.
In the US:
call on
Verizon and AT&T to support transparency about government
surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: Tell Congress to support diplomacy with Iran, not to sabotage it.
Senator Warren rejected the idea of formulating the issue of Social Security in terms of how much to cut, and proposed ways to fund increasing it.
Cutting social security is a right-wing idea that most Americans reject. Please don't grant it a sort of legitimacy by calling it the "center". It is only "central" between the two right-wing major parties.
The American Studies Association voted to join the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
This follows a debate at a meeting in which over 80% of the speakers (randomly chosen from those who asked to speak) supported the boycott.
The full membership is now voting on the resolution.
Uri Avnery: Kerry is making the mistake of taking Israel's obsolete "security concerns" seriously.
The K Street Perversion of Cost-Benefit Analysis.
Amnesty International will sue the UK about probable phone call snooping.
The UK government has created excuses to ignore such cases by hearing the evidence secretly.
Solar Would Be Cheaper: US Pentagon Has Spent $8 Trillion to Guard Gulf Oil.
Without the large government subsidies for fossil fuel, solar would be cheaper anyway.
Life is more fun in a society with more equality.
Japan Reacts to Fukushima Crisis By Banning Journalism.
The US
has given up
resisting a merger between American Airlines and US Airways, which
will mean even less competition.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The European Parliament wants to talk with Snowden by video.
I am surprised that Snowden is willing to do this. A couple of months ago, he refused to speak remotely with the German Parliament; he insisted on getting a safe-conduct to go there.
US citizens: Phone Nancy Pelosi's office to pressure her to take a clear stand against "fast track" for the TPP.
The radioactive material leaking from the Fukushima
meltdowns will
kill people, including an estimated 800 eventual deaths (not soon)
from eating contaminated fish.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
This is 800 out of the millions who are likely to eat some of that fish.
800 deaths is a large number to result from a single accident. It is important to try to stop more radiative material from leaking into the ocean from Fukushima, since that as it continues leaking, it could kill more hundreds.
On the other hand, the danger to any individual from these leaks is minuscule; there is no point taking any trouble to make sure you never eat even a little of that fish.
US citizens: call on the FDA to ban menthol cigarettes. Menthol in cigarettes encourages people to start smoking.
Humanity
is unprepared
for possible abrupt climate impacts.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
In the US:
call
on the Consumer Goods Forum to require its members to stop getting
palm oil from deforestation.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: Phone Senator Warner's office to
demand
a hearing about the Keystone XL pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The American Library Association has denounced NSA surveillance.
I think libraries should adopt a system that makes it difficult for the library to find out who has borrowed a book unless the book becomes overdue.
12 Mandela Quotes That Won't Be In the Corporate Media Obituaries.
I think it is very important for outside observers to monitor elections in most countries, and perhaps the US needs them too.
We're supposed to be concerned about anonymous web sites because some of them distribute violent porn.
I don't want to watch violent porn, or violent non-porn, but neither should be censored.
However, if a business sells videos of real rapes or other real crimes and pays or rewards those who commit the crimes, the business participates in those crimes. That is valid grounds for prosecution.
I am surprised that the credit card payments can't be used to trace the business that runs the site.
Mainstream media commemorations of Nelson Mandela's life often falsify him, pretending that he stood for nonviolent resistance.
Mandela was right: nonviolence is not the only ethical way to resist oppression. Those oppressed with violence are entitled to fight back with violence. Of course, the founding fathers of the United States said the same thing about resistance to British oppression.
Here Mandela explains the ANC's motives for adopting first sabotage, then guerrilla warfare.
Chief among them was that the state's crackdown on dissent had closed off the possibility of nonviolent resistance.
Shanghai's solution to frequent bad air quality is to >raise the threshold for alerts.
A large leak at a uranium mine in Australia has been contained — for now.
The error behind claims that male brains and female brains are wired very differently.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, "Don't play Scrooge
— extend unemployment insurance." Also sign
this
petition.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: state your support for
cuts
to the military and the people's budget.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
insist
that Congress have the chance to approve or reject any agreement
to keep troops in Afghanistan.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The
Great Corporate Tax Shift.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
La Quadrature du Net: Net Neutrality: EU Parliament Must Amend Kroes' Dangerous Proposal.
A UK soldier has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing a prisoner in Afghanistan.
However, the UK government is trying to quietly bury most accusations of killing prisoners.
Some chicken sold in the EU has 30% added water.
Barbie dolls have changed: now all their outfits are hypersexy.
The House of Representatives passed a bill discouraging the use of patents whose validity is questionable, and some other abusive practices.
This bill would be a step forward, but it fails to address today's biggest patent aggressors, such as Apple.
The real solution to the problem of patents in the software field is to take software out of the scope of patents.
How right-wing political "think-tanks" operate, perhaps mislead the IRS, and are tied to ALEC.
Journalist Abdulelah Haidar Shaye, imprisoned in Yemen on request from Obama himself, was given the Alkarama Human Rights Defenders award.
The mainstream media that supported Dubya's conquest of Iraq, treating weak evidence as sufficient, now downplays the danger of global heating, treating powerful evidence as dubious.
I suspect that both show oil money at work.
This site alleges that John F
Kennedy Jr. was killed by a bomb in his plane, which was followed by a
US government coverup effort, and alleges this was done by Israeli
secret agents because he was about to publish secrets of their
involvement in the assassination of Israeli Premier Rabin.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
This extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof, and this article isn't enough. So I am not convinced this claim is true. But I think it is not immediately dismissable. To verify the truth of the facts cited would be a lot of work. I don't have time to do that.
Thus I have decided to point readers at his report without saying I believe any of it.
Some pro-Morsi protesters were released with suspended sentences, meaning that if they protest again they will automatically be imprisoned.
The UK uses a similar nasty trick, giving accused protesters bail with conditions banning them from coming anywhere near a protest.
Apple
will invite
fanboys to let it track them around the Apple Store.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Geoengineering could lead to war between countries that have different needs for how to engineer the Earth's climate.
Any geoengineering method that aims to affect temperature directly will not do anything to stop ocean acidification due to dissolved CO2. This threatens to destroy all coral reefs, along with all the other species that depend on coral reefs. The result could easily be the loss of most of the sea food that a billion humans depend on.
In experiments, CO2 affected the behavior of some species of fish too — they ceased to hide from predators. That could wipe them out.
Suspended student protest leaders in Sussex University say they refuse to surrender to the privatization of the university.
Thugs in London punched student protesters and pushed them to the ground.
One student leader said he thinks this was a planned tactic intended to pre-emptively intimidate other students who might potentially join protests. Instead it inspired a "cops off campus" protest.
Of course, it's not the only one, but that is no excuse.
A Move Towards Generalised Internet Surveillance in France?
Many states are launching preemptive attacks to abolish privacy rights before people get motivated to defend them.
Wikileaks activist Sarah Harrison has been warned not to go home to the UK because its laws can label any sort of protest as "terrorism".
ALEC says it is in favor of "local control", but many of its proposed state laws are designed to prohibit local regulation of business, even prohibit local municipal broadband.
US citizens: call on your senators
to support
bills to reduce harsh minimum sentences for nonviolent drug
crimes, including for those already in prison.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on CBS to present the success stories of Obama's health care law.
Social movements criticize the WTO agreement.
Conservatives' cuts in health care are subjecting old people in the UK to pain and danger by delaying needed operations.
Pakistani anti-drone protesters have blocked US supplies to Afghanistan for 10 days. They say they will continue until the US stops the drone attacks.
As weapons of war, drones are not very different from bombers with human crews. Drones raise a special issue when they are used away from battlefields, in countries where the US says it is not fighting — Pakistan, for instance. In these cases, they more resemble death squads or terror campaigns than a war.
Senator Warren called for the big banks to disclose their contributions to "think tanks" (which in many cases are really right-wing pressure groups).
Suffolk University denounced a right-wing think tank that it hosts for a politically-minded campaign to undermine regional greenhouse gas reduction initiative.
A network of right-wing "think tanks" campaign for right-wing laws in many US states.
US citizens: phone your senators and urge them to cut the military budget. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on Senator Warren to endorse the deal with Iran.
Another apology that deserves an apology: Martin Bashir's apology for what he said about Sarah Palin.
Bashir said that if anyone deserved the punishments that slaves received, it would be Ms Palin. The use of "deserved" indicates a counterfactual: Bashir explicitly avoided saying that she, or anyone, deserves those punishments. He was criticized wrongly for a palinode that was entirely justified.
US citizens: call on your senators to oppose Senator Feinstein's bill to increase NSA massive surveillance.
Everyone: call on a mining company not to sue Costa Rica in the World Bank.
US citizens: call on all companies
to stop
funding ALEC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Rahinah Ibrahim's daughter, who is a US citizen, was supposed to go to the US and testify as a witness in Ms Ibrahim's lawsuit. The US government blocked her return by putting her on the no-fly list, then lied about it in court.
This article says that the list Rahinah is suing to be removed from is the no-fly list.
The government's lawyers are claiming that the government can exclude "secret" information from the case even if it has been published. We've seen this contempt for reality in the Obama regime's attitude towards secrets revealed by Wikileaks and Snowden.
Over and over we see that US government agents are willing to lie to achieve their missions. Some lie to Congress, while others lie in court. These lawyers should be disbarred, just as Clapper should be jailed for contempt of Congress.
Toys-R-Us tried to replace the idea of Thanksgiving with the idea of "I want more".
The World Cup has provided an excuse to evict 19,000 poor families in Rio de Janeiro and move them up to 25 miles away.
Five bloggers have been arrested in Iran for publishing criticism of the theocratic tyranny.
Brazil will attack protesters' legal rights on behalf of the World Cup.
Everyone: Sign this petition calling on Google, Facebook and Yelp not to fund ALEC.
Isa Muaza, who has been on hunger strike more than 100 days, won a new court hearing about whether he can stay in the UK.
Prisoner Carol Lester was put in solitary confinement for advocating proper medical care for other prisoners.
The privatized prison can't make a profit without squeezing someone, so it has a reason to isolate those who complain about the squeezing. But non-privatized prisons use solitary confinement eagerly too.
After the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology published a paper reporting that GMO corn caused cancer in rats, it hired a new editor who used to work for Monsanto, and he retracted the paper.
The article links to change.org, which is unfortunate since you can't sign an article there except by running a nonfree program. The same with links to vimeo.
The Egyptian military government has shown clearly
that repression
isn't just for Islamists.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The proposed new constitution allows various sorts of repression.
Sussex University sparked strong student resistance by suspending 5 students, including some who participated in an occupation protest, and at least one who didn't participate.
Note the standard bullshit statement from the university administration saying that it has to do this to protect "students, staff and visitors" from disruption or (in their imagination only) worse.
This is part of a broader pattern of students' campaigning for decent treatment of workers, and increased repression by the state which advocates bad treatment of workers.
The former head of Israel's secret service said that the biggest threat to Israel's security is its refusal to make peace with Palestine.
Uruguayan President Asks for World to Support His Marijuana Legalization Plan.
States should withdraw from that 1961 UN treaty.
The methods now being developed to obstruct access to "child" pornography will enable blocking anything in the future, such as perhaps the revelations of the next Snowden.
US citizens: sign
this
petition calling on Obama to support reform of the ECPA to require
the government to get a warrant to examine people's email.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
This is a fairly small change: under current law, the warrant is needed for recent emails (those that arrived in the last 6 months), but not needed for emails that have remained for longer.
US citizens: call on the FCC to block the wave of TV station mergers.
Everyone with a relation to the US: tell Third Way to publish the names of its financial sponsors, so we know the origin of its "advice" to Democrats not to be real Democrats like Elizabeth Warren.
Everyone: tell companies that quit ALEC not to join it again, not even under a different name.
Scandals revealed by the ALEC leak:
The NSA collects 5 billion cell phone locations per day, from hundreds of millions of phones.
The NSA uses this to determine when people meet each other physically. Thus, if you are going to a meeting, take the batteries out of your phone well before you get to it, as a courtesy to those you will meet with.
Here are some significant conclusions.
We did not know that the NSA was tracking phones world-wide, but we have known all along that they were being tracked by phone companies, and the governments that control them, and often by Apple and Google too. That's already unacceptable.
I have never "connected to our modern communication system" because I refused to be tracked. I have refused for 15 years now. This does not require me to "live in a cave". In my travels, if I need to make a call in a train or on the street, I ask whoever is there to call for me.
A horrible typo was fixed in Why We Need a State. It incorrectly said "the many non-poor" when it should have said "the many non-rich".
The next "advance" in exploiting people through their computers: ads tuned based on people's emotional state.
These ads are typically shown by software and services that are malicious in other ways — for example, a game server that monitors you might also show ads based on figuring out when you are vulnerable, or a car might monitor your emotional state using proprietary software you can't change.
Be skeptical of attempts to invent evolutionary stories to justify cultural practices such as sexism.
It is very difficult to tell whether a widespread human behavior pattern is genetically determined or not.
The UK could win independence from the banksters simply by exiting the EU.
Then it would be able to tax businesses including Amazon that extract money from the UK.
Gas companies are suing cities that have imposed bans on fracking.
We need a national ban on fracking. Most known fossil fuel reserves need to be left in the ground, and the first to be left are those whose extraction might poison water supplies.
Riot thugs attacked anti-fracking protesters in Romania so that Chevron could start fracking, and kept journalists away so they could hide their dirty work.
Large animals in the Sahara has been devastated — many are extinct or remain in only a small part of their former range.
Philadelphia should reject
commercial
advertising in schools.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A whistleblower in the EU team of election monitors in Honduras says most of the team wanted to report the election was rigged, but the team leaders insisted on approving it.
Detroit has been allowed to declare bankruptcy. This is likely to mean drastic pension cuts for present and former city workers.
Rahinah Ibrahim, formerly a student at Stanford, is suing to get taken off a US "terrorist watch list", or at least find out if she is really on it.
I can't tell whether the list in question is the "no-fly" list or some other list. Does anyone know?
Chicago's subways make it very expensive not to be spied on, and the City Colleges of Chicago demand biometric ID from the staff.
I would be willing to use a biometric system to get my pay, if it tested some part of my body other than my finger tips.
The French government says that the EU, supported by the UK, are blocking stricter traceability requirements for meat.
Ethical questions for custodians of the natural world.
I don't think that animals in general have a right to life — not even whales. I don't think, for instance, that we have a duty to stop orcas (one type of whale) from killing other whales as we would protect humans from being killed. I don't think we have a duty to stop chimps from killing other chimps.
But it is important to prevent the loss of species and ecosystems, because that is an irrecoverable loss.
Everyone: sign this petition opposing the TPP.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to end the sequester which is killing more jobs every year.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: Once again, tell the SEC to move forward with requiring public companies to disclose political spending.
The SEC said it would do this, then quietly dropped it.
Noam Chomsky: America Hates Its Poor.
He explains how the "tea party" idea that "We want the government off our backs" is used to distract working-class Americans from organizing for Liberal (social-democratic) that they favor when asked.
Canada's legislature is quietly pushing a law to impose nasty copyright punishments.
Please don't follow this article by using the term "intellectual property" to formulate your thoughts or your words.
The NSA gave its staff "talking points" to tell their families, praising the NSA and its massive surveillance. This article refutes them.
The new chairman of the FCC in his first speech endorsed network neutrality as a principle, then advocated selling privileges to certain web sites, although that directly conflicts with network neutrality.
The government of Australia wants to give refugees arriving by boat temporary visas instead of permanent visas, but since the opposition blocked the law to make this change, the government has decided arbitrarily not to give visas to asylum seekers at all.
In effect, it is holding recognized refugees hostage to ram through that law.
An important Japanese politician,
defending
the proposed anti-whistleblower law, said protesters' shouts were
in essence much like terrorism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A survey of climate scientists suggests most expect sea level rise to be more than the IPCC predicted.
How much sea level rises will depend on unknown aspects of global heating but also on how much greenhouse gas we emit.
Former CNN correspondent Bob Franken says that the Obama regime is the "most hostile" to journalists in US history.
Prohibition of "child pornography" led to charges against journalists that published a video of two students having sex in a classroom alongside an article
I wish I knew who made the video, who distributed it, and whether the students in it approved of doing so. Depending on those facts, someone might have done something wrong here, but probably not the news site.
A study projects that 2C of global heating in the short term would lead to considerably more later.
Thus, it is not an adequate target for curbing short-term heating — and yet it is almost unattainable.
The EFF argues in court that full-time video surveillance of a home for a long period of time should require a warrant.
Amnesty International criticizes Israel's plan to imprison asylum seekers.
Catholic hospitals in the US endanger womens' lives rather than abort pregnancies.
Even more absurdly (I won't say "worse", since it isn't actually worse), they do this if the fetus is doomed anyway.
Hospitals should be required to provide all services including abortion, and if the Catholic Church doesn't like that, it should sell the hospitals.
The leader of protesters in Thailand demanded that six TV channels cease broadcasting government statements and broadcast only his side.
This suggests that these "protesters" think they have a lot of power behind them. This is not a popular protest movement even if it looks like one.
The European Court of Human Rights is considering the case of two prisoners in Guantanamo who accuse they were tortured in Poland by US agents while held in a secret prison.
The US does not allow these prisoners to testify. It should try them or release them. Maybe they are guilty of crimes, but so is the US in torturing them.
A French team says Arafat was not poisoned, disagreeing with the Swiss team that found radioactive Polonium that implied he was murdered.
This disagreement begs for further investigation to discover the reason for it.
Netanyahu pretends Israel is going to attack Iran, so as to keep his supporters in the US Congress activated to sabotage the US-Iran nuclear treaty.
Israeli troops attacked foreign journalists, shooting at their heads with rubber-coated steel bullets, and shooting them in the back.
This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have shot to kill and then denied it.
In Gaza, families have trouble getting fuel for cooking, and water.
Israeli forces used bulldozers to destroy wells in Palestine. They also bulldozed tents that Palestinians lived in.
This is part of a long-term campaign of ethnic cleansing to evict Palestinians from a large slice of Palestine near the border with Jordan.
Alec lost 40 corporate sponsors after the killing of Trayvon Martin, but it is furiously planning how to get them back into a new organization with a different name.
One sponsor it has not lost yet is Google. Please sign the petition calling on Google to stop supporting Alec.
Australia arrested a former official who was going to be a witness at the Hague, and raided his lawyer's office for legal documents.
The case concerns Australian spying during negotiations with East Timor for a treaty over fossil fuels. The witness was going to prove that Australia bugged the Timorese negotiating team. Apparently the current Australian government is so subservient to fossil fuel interests that it will trash traditional civil liberties for them.
The court should regard the witness's claims as proven conclusively by his arrest. That will serve the cause of justice in this case. Repairing the damage to civil liberties in Australia will take rather more.
A witness says Mark Duggan was surrendering, with his hands up and a phone in his hand, when a thug shot him.
Google funds many right-wing campaigns in the US, including ALEC and tea party nut Senator Cruz, and "tax reform" that would tax the rich less.
Intense business lobbying — for false solutions or just against real ones — helped make the Warsaw climate negotiations a failure.
It's too bad the report uses the nebulous term "intellectual property". I suppose the companies reported on used that term, because the confusion it spreads serves their purposes; those who oppose them would do well to pull that veil aside.
With cuts in food stamps, many families are in trouble if children are dismissed from school before lunch.
A book spells out what 4C of global heating will mean for Australia — what it is going to experience if it does not join in cutting emissions.
A new sweater changes color depending on the wearer's feelings.
Imagine wearing this sweater while playing poker.
Now imagine hacking one to show whatever color you tell it color to show, and wearing it while playing poker.
Denmark offers child care to all young children, and it isn't overprotective.
American children used to organize their own play, too. They didn't need help from adults.
Repeatedly, caste Hindus that attack Dalits in Bihar, India, are given impunity.
A study reports people who measure success by material things fall into a "loneliness loop" and then have trouble coping with reverses.
US citizens: support the bill to allow renewable energy projects a sort of tax benefit available to fossil fuel projects.
We should withdraw this form of public assistance for fossil fuel projects, because they must be discouraged.
As US nuclear plants age, and various parts rust or become brittle, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission keeps the plants open by reducing safety standards over and over.
Nikkei Shimbun reported that US pressure for Japan to continue using nuclear power plants came from Obama himself.
I don't think we need to worry about occasionally eating seafood caught near Fukushima. The level of radioactive material in it is small compared with the radiation we are normally exposed to.
The US government has a persistent habit of treating journalists as terrorists, and refused to promise not to prosecute journalist for publishing interviews with terrorists.
ALEC is considering proposals to attack the rights of workers, patients, customers and students, vis-a-vis employers and businesses.
Small pieces of plastic in the ocean are harming worms that are food for many other species.
Pieces 5mm in size shouldn't be called "microplastics". Perhaps some pieces are small enough to deserve that name.
Once the worms have a low level of toxins, the animals that eat the worms will accumulate higher levels, and the animals that eat those will get even higher levels. The same thing happens with mercury, which is why tuna have so much mercury that they are dangerous for humans to eat.
Australia's digital spying agency offered to share raw, complete data about Australians with the US. This practice may have been directly illegal.
The agency discussed including medical and legal information too; whether it went ahead and did so is not stated.
UN investigators say Bashar al-Assad is tied directly to war crimes.
I hope there is an investigation of what led to the armed uprising which supplanted the initial nonviolent protest movement. Was it funded by Saudi Arabia?
How massive surveillance affects us all.
The Corporate Bully Whose Front Groups, Willful Distortions and Hate-Mongering Has Poisoned U.S. Politics.
Most Americans today consider other people untrustworthy. This has major effects.
Americans' purchases of gifts for their kids are part of overconsumption that endangers the world they will live in.
Massachusetts is considering a 10-year moratorium on fracking.
A permanent ban would be safer.
A Canadian writer was barred from the US because she had been hospitalized for depression. She wonders how the US found out about this — whether the Canadian government illegally gave her records to the US.
It is absurd for the US to bar people for depression. It is not communicable.
Research confirms that removing DRM boosts sales of copies of music, except for the biggest sellers, which are not affected at all.
Please don't call sharing "piracy"; it is propaganda for our enemies. A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that "piracy" and "theft" are smear-words.
A new threat to your privacy: programs to recognize facial expression.
If the program that recognizes expressions does not record the video, that doesn't make it ok. Indeed, another program might run at the same time to do that.
41
Leading Scientists Call on EPA to Protect Our Forests And Climate.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The population of migrating monarch butterflies has plummeted from 60 million last year (already a record low) to a few million.
This is because US agriculture has dropped conservation as a priority and switched to new pesticides.
The US plans to sell more advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia while Saudi Arabia arms Islamist fanatics in Syria.
Saudi Arabia also organized the repression in Bahrain.
Christian extremism correlates with global heating denialism.
Exposing rats to certain pesticides can cause damage to their
descendants
3
generations later.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A glossary for NSA massive surveillance.
Canada approved producing GMO salmon eggs in quantity.
I don't think it is likely these salmon would hurt people that eat them. Their danger is to wild salmon.
Maybe these are safe for the environment if raised in Panama. But fish eggs and young fish can drift a long way in the ocean. They would be much safer if they were engineered to be sterile. When there's a small chance of a big and irreparable harm, we need multiple lines of defense, each of which ought to be sufficient by itself.
Uri Avnery, regarding Israel's position on the US-Iran deal: "The fools would have been amusing, if they had not been our fools."
Everyone: call on Walmart to pay a decent wage.
Everyone: call on the governor of Washington to block a proposed giant oil terminal.
Shipping the oil, by train and ship, would endanger the Columbia River and cities including Spokane and Vancouver. Burning the oil would endanger everyone in the world.
Current US robotics research turns out to be just what's needed for autonomous killer robots.
China's "re-education" forced labor camps have been changed into
"drug
rehabilitation" forced labor camps.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Most US prisoners had the option of a trial, though most get pressured into a plea bargain so they didn't have a trial. And the US puts a larger percentage of its population in prison than China does.
Repression of pro-EU protesters in Ukraine mobilized 100,000 of them.
The background for the protests in Ukraine.
Xiomara Castro accused election fraud in Honduras, which seems plausible given that 30% of the registered voters were invalid and that the difference between her percentage and the establishment candidate's percentage was less than 30%.
What did the exit polls say?
France has copied Sweden's harmful policy of punishing the clients of prostitutes.
I am not surprised that this law repression prostitution, but that is no help to those who choose (or might have chosen) to become prostitutes. It could discourage human trafficking that forces people to become prostitutes, but there are other ways to do that: (1) interviewing possibly trafficked immigrants in private in their own languages as they enter the country, (2) giving them advice on how to get help if they find they have been enslaved, and (3) visiting them once or twice a year for a private conversation to ask and check whether they have been enslaved.
It appears that these methods have not been tried.
Helping those who wish to leave prostitution is a good thing, but doesn't excuse the rest.
In Thailand, anti-government mass rallies have started fighting with mass groups of government supporters.
The anti-government crowds have seized various government buildings, one after another.
Pretending a Name Is Still Secret — in the Name of the Cult of Secrecy.
A giant conglomerate, Blackstone, has bought 40,000 houses across the US, using money obtained from a wacky new financial instrument.
The housing subsidiary, "Invitation Homes", bullies renters for "late fees" when it makes a mistake collecting their rents. Many companies do this nowadays. It should be a felony to ask for any sort of extra fee from someone who has a contract for service.
If the new financial instrument goes belly-up, the company could fail. That could knock 40,000 US families out of their rented homes all at once.
Government in the US hasn't gone broke by spending too much. Rather, it has been robbed — by business.
Visiting activists from West Papua were not arrested at the independence rally in Papua New Guinea, but three citizens of Papua New Guinea were charged with "unlawful assembly".
Charging anyone with "unlawful assembly" is a crime by the state. Of course, it is possible for protesters to do things which are properly prohibited. But assembling, as such, must not be prohibited.
Several Latin American countries are working to make the UN accept ending the War on Drugs.
The cosmetics company Lush, which refuses to sell through Amazon, has sued Amazon for trademark infringement because searching for "lush" there finds other products.
I sympathize with Lush's motivation, but I think it is wrong on this case. "Lush" is an English word and everyone has the right to use it as such. If Amazon's search facility searches for any English word, it would be wrong to ban this one as an exception. However, I see no harm in requiring Amazon to present a clear statement that these products are not made by Lush, and that Lush does not sell through Amazon.
In directory.fsf.org, if you search for names of nonfree programs, we don't show them (they don't qualify to be listed); instead we show their free counterparts. It would be unfortunate if we were banned from doing this.
I think Lush is more entitled to prevail in regard to Amazon's adwords articles.
The use of the vague term "intellectual property" where "trademark" would have been clearer added avoidable confusion to the article. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for why that term spreads confusion.
See stallman.org/amazon.html for many other reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon. See stallman.org/ebooks.pdf for why the Kindle and Kindle ebooks are an attack on your freedom.
The UK attempted to suddenly deport Ifa Muaza before he could fast to death, but Nigeria did not allow the plane to land, so it brought him back to the UK.
"You proved your toughness at the expense of your humanity" — well said.
Another form of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been found on poultry.
Even though this strain is not very dangerous to humans, the next one might be. Have we got our eyes shut towards dangerous business practices?
The Venezuelan congress voted President Maduro powers to legislate by decree on economic matters.
This is in accord with the constitution, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea. Price controls tend to cause shortages, and Venezuela already has shortages. I feel no sympathy for store owners that gouge, but preventing future gouging requires changing the system that generates the gouging.
The corruption accusations against Asambleadora Aranguren are not inherently implausible, but this still seems fishy. The alleged corruption took place before she ran for election as a supporter of Chavez. However, the accusations were made in September 2013, after she had switched parties, and when her vote became inconvenient.
It is proper to take action against corrupt legislators, but it should be done in an unbiased way, not selectively based on their politics.
The British Red Cross is launching a food drive for hungry Britons, for the first time since World War II.
1/4 of the population has had trouble getting enough food this year, due to the poverty that the government has inflicted.
A behavior pattern found in Canadian women helps men dominate them.
The article errs when claiming the experiment described is proof that this behavior pattern is "hard-wired". The experiment does not tell us whether it is neurological or cultural.
The UK government asked UK energy companies to keep prices stable for a while (through the next election) in exchange for the abolition of taxes meant to pay for energy efficiency.
In other words, the ruling parties want to give the public a short-term pleasure (cheap energy for the moment) in order to avoid investing in the country's future.
US hospitals have a new trick to charge medicare patients a lot more: put them on "observation" when they ought to be admitted as inpatients.
Judges say Berlusconi paid witnesses to lie in court.
A US bomb killed civilians in Afghanistan, and Karzai demands greater efforts to avoid such casualties.
Accidentally hitting civilians is an inevitable part of war: bombs do miss, even despite the best attempts to hit the target. Thus, this event is not a war crime.
I wish, however, that the US made the best possible efforts to avoid killing civilians and that it owned up to civilian casualties when they occur. It does not.
A protester in the UK faced criminal charges for calling the MP behind the anti-squatting law a "coward".
The fact that such charges could even be brought demonstrates that the UK does not respect freedom of speech.
I don't know whether that MP is a coward, but it is clear that he is cruel and chooses to make the poor suffer. Which, in my book, is much worse than being a coward.
The US sent the Dominican Republic an ambassador who is gay and in a same-sex marriage.
Around 20 years ago the US sent a black ambassador to South Africa, which was surely intended as rebuke to racism. I don't know whether this choice was meant as a rebuke to bigotry; it might be he was promoted due to merit and given the next available country.
In either case, now that religious bigots are demanding that the US accede to their bigotry, it must not do so. Bigotry is not the sort of "local custom" that deserves respect.
The battery for the Zoe electric car has to be rented, and when the rental contract runs out, the battery can be disabled by remote control.
Cars are full of nonfree software, and it is common for nonfree software to be malware.
Public Citizen will sue on behalf of the customers whose credit rating was ruined when Kleargear "fined" them for publishing a criticism.
Los Angeles finds homeless people unsightly and plans to ban giving them food from a truck.
If it bothers you that there are homeless people in your neighborhood, remember that their lives are much more unpleasant and dangerous than yours. The reason they look unsightly is that they don't have much money and they have no place to keep clothing while not wearing it. If they defecate in the street, they surely feel rather uncomfortable doing so, but they have no practical choice.
The excuses that these anticompassionate people give are full of holes so obvious you have to shut your eyes to fail to see them. If the neighborhood homeowners are annoyed that the homeless people don't have a proper place to defecate, they should set up a toilet. If they are annoyed that the homeless people sleep in the bushes, they should set up a camping space.
US research contracts to German universities seem to be aimed at weapons development.
The Ganges is so polluted now that nobody can drink from it.
The NSA obtained embarrassing information against "radicalizers" so as to discredit or blackmail them.
If these techniques are applied to foreign enemies of the American nation, I could not criticize it. But they can just as well be applied to Americans, and to democratic political activists of other countries, at which point the practice resembles J. Edgar Hoover's blackmail (which focused on US politicians).
Global heating has caused a 40% decrease in the moose population in New Hampshire in just 5 years.
They are not endangered yet, but with 30 more years of increased heat, maybe they will be.
A proposed African "cybersecurity" treaty could turn into censorship.
A stress expert, looking at an undercover report about an Amazon warehouse, says these conditions make physical and mental illness more likely.
Alex Saleh installed a video camera in his store to protect his customers and staff from persistent, repeated harassment by thugs.
One of Saleh's employees was arrested 62 times for "trespassing" in Saleh's store.
A thug in Pennsylvania was caught on video tasing a handcuffed prisoner and laughing about it.
Protesters oppose Japan's new secrecy bill.
Everyone: tell Walmart to give workers a raise.
Chinese business power has prevailed over the UK government, which will shun the Dalai Lama.
Politicians that approach international relations prioritizing exports over all else are despicable.
Ukraine's
thugs attacked
protesters who object to the president's decision to align with Russia
rather than the EU.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The government of Ukraine appears to be repressive, but rejecting the "trade" treaty may be wise. I have no information about what it says, but quite likely it contains unjust requirements, since that's normal for "trade" treaties.
An independence activist from West Papua has been threatened with arrest in neighboring Papua New Guinea for planning a peaceful protest for independence.
Soldiers sent to fight wars, then return to become thugs, may contribute to violence at home.
High School Student Tasered in School by Cop Is in a Coma, Mother Says.
After the Gates Foundation pushed Microsoft's competitive staff ranking system on US public schools, Microsoft has abandoned it, concluding it was harmful to rank the staff.
I don't think the US politicians who imposed this system will regret it. They don't want public schools to achieve anything; they just want to spend less on them and destroy teachers' unions.
Boeing machinists voted down a contract with give-backs.
Technological "progress" now means more cunning tracking of people's purchases so as to offer different prices to different people.
In Afghanistan, the killers of journalists enjoy impunity.
The EU
should not allow personal data to be sent to US companies unless
they follow a data protection regime as in the EU.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Canadian opposition politicians are outraged that Canada's spy agency, legally barred from spying in Canada, did such spying by outsourcing it to the NSA.
Several prominent Egyptian secular freedom activists have been arrested.
US law requires cutting off aid to the Egyptian military, as was pointed out in August. Will Obama continue to deny that there has been a military coup?
Two British women who went to Zanzibar to teach English as volunteers were attacked with acid, apparently by a stranger.
Since it seems the attacker did not know them personally and did not rob them, only an ideological motive remains. I suspect it was motivated by hostility to foreigners, or to women not dressed as strict Muslims.
Britons protested at a right-wing MP's office against the law criminalizing squatting, while the UK's empty buildings could house the country's homeless.
I'm delighted that this time the thugs did not intervene, as they so often do, on the side of the wealthy and against the downtrodden.
This cruelty contributes to the fast-rising housing prices.
Obama has proposed strict rules against electioneering by tax-exempt organizations. This is good because it will hinder the rich and corporations from contributing lots of money secretly to campaigns.
Portugal has descended to even greater austerity measures.
The euro imposes a vicious circle: its rules require budget cuts to reduce the deficit, but these shrink the economy so tax receipts fall, and the deficit continues despite them.
Portugal's austerity is killing people.
The ACLU has sued to demand publication of information about the CIA's torture practices.
Once again, Muslims try to impose their religion on everyone else — this time in Nigeria.
An experiment shows that fertilizer runoff does great harm to coral, and that the coral can recover quickly if the fertilizer runoff stops.
A port in Canada says it plans to "survive" by taking advantage of global heating to bring oil in by train for export, thus causing more global heating. How narrowminded. This attitude, "We are going to 'survive' (i.e., maintain our business) by killing people elsewhere", is why the world does nothing to escape disaster.
The trains will from time to time explode and kill people.
This is the sort of behavior that should lead the rest of the world to forcibly stop it.
Karzai says Afghanistan will not use execution by stoning as a penalty for adultery.
What will Afghanistan do to people who have sex outside marriage? Something else almost as nasty?
Businesses spying on activists can buy the support of the FBI and CIA for their War on Democracy, which in many cases is part of their War on the Ecosphere.
US
citizens: oppose
"trade" treaties that give businesses more power.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A panel to propose ways to protect the Australian endangered Leadbeater's possum is controlled by the lumber industry, and refuses to consider any serious plan to protect their habitat.
An attempt to sue Apple for designing the iThings so that apps could
easily snoop on the user failed
because the
requirements for winning are so strict that it would be almost
impossible to meet them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
What this shows is that the US lacks proper privacy law.
People in Dubai have been arrested for posting a parody video and for posting a video of a man battering another on a bus.
This policy is one reason why I absolutely refuse to go to Dubai.
In the US, you might get arrested for making a video of an attack, if the attacker is a thug. And even in that case, you can probably prevail in court.
The US military manipulates news coverage of wars, and turns movies into war propaganda, with devastating effects on politics.
Research suggests that deforestation in Amazonia will contribute cause increased drought and fire in the western US.
Global heating is making the western US dry out anyway, but since it also threatens to dry out Amazonia, this will mean even more aridity there.
Jeremy Hammond believes that the FBI was running the Antisec group to crack security of systems around the world for the FBI's sake.
WordPress joined two bloggers to sue over use of the DMCA for censorship.
US citizens: call on Hillary Clinton to endorse the deal with Iran.
Regarding the possible prosecution of Julian Assange, the Obama regime is trying to have it both ways: on the one hand, spreading rumors that Assange is "unlikely" to be prosecuted; on the other, keeping the prosecution option open.
The nastiest part is when people condemn Assange for prudently refusing to bet the rest of his life on the truth these rumors.
UK Internet censorship will cover some political views.
I don't like those views much either, but freedom of speech means the freedom to say things that you and I and the UK government don't like.
I wonder how long it will take before the UK blocks access to stallman.org.
Alexis Tsipras, head of the anti-austerity Greek opposition, will run for president of the European Commission to galvanize opposition to austerity across Europe.
The UK's clever "bedroom tax" is supposed to make people move to smaller apartments, but no smaller apartments are available, so it really amounts to an excuse to squeeze the poor.
Someone has to suffer to enable banksters to take home more pay.
Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis, prosecuted for publishing a list of suspected tax evaders, has been acquitted.
A broad coalition opposes the requirement to demand ID from everyone that connects to the Internet in Ecuador.
The wording of the law would require you to record the ID and make a video even if you let someone use your network at home. I campaigned against this measure when I was in Ecuador in October.
But this is the first I heard that Peru had adopted this nasty law. I will have to think twice before going there again.
The Supreme Court plans to consider a case in which a company's owners claim that paying for health care that covers birth control violates their religious freedom.
I fear that this Supreme Court will rule for that company. It has granted companies absurd "human" rights on other questions.
Belgium is on track to approve
voluntary euthanasia with no age limit.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
I am in favor of this. The safeguards must be quite careful so that children are not pressured into a decision they are not sure they want.
If we can allow minors the choice of dying, it is ridiculous to deny them the far less drastic choice of having sex. That too should be permitted, with suitable safeguards; for instance, that the minor would declare in advance an intention to start having sex.
Berlusconi has been ousted from the Italian senate because of his criminal convictions.
The EU demands that the US stop spying massively
if
it wants US companies to hold data on business in Europe.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
This not strong enough, however.
On the problems of
building
public parks based on tax-deductible donations from the rich.
[Reference updated on 2022-07-11 because the old link was broken.]
If we taxed them enough, we would not have this problem.
Pope Francis condemned trickle-down economics and the greed of the plutocrats, and called for action on income inequality.
As a supporter of this cause for many years, I welcome this additional support.
79 Egyptian secular dissidents have been arrested under the new ban on protests.
Ever since the massacres of Morsi supporters protesting on the street, it has increasingly appeared that the military was taking Egypt towards another military dictatorship.
Polar bear populations in Canada are falling due to the effects of global heating, but the minister in charge is a global heating denier.
The Real Fix for Obamacare's Flaws: Medicare for All.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to
pass
a farm bill that protects wildlife.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641, and 888-355-3588.
In the US (or any country where Kmart operates): rebuke Kmart for ordering workers to work during Thanksgiving.
US citizens: call on the USDA not to approve genetically modified apples.
The UK government has repeatedly blocked investigations into a massacre of Malay civilians by British soldiers.
It appears the RBS bank forced small businesses into bankruptcy to buy up their assets.
This is a natural result of the culture of competing to be less ethical than the other banks.
Larger banks are doing the same thing to states, most notably Greece but many others too.
The Polish government gave 11 companies special access to the ineffective Warsaw global heating negotiations, including some that lobby furiously to keep burning fossil fuels.
The "ETS" is the emissions trading system, which was meant to pressure industry to reduce emissions, but has fallen flat on its face.
PR Watch: Return to Nixonland: How the NSA Slipped its Leash.
The UK government has finally silenced the investigation into the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko.
The dictator of Angola regularly has dissidents shot, or feeds them to crocodiles, but since he controls lots of oil, he buys international support.
Anti-Shinawatra protesters in Bangkok have attacked journalists they consider unsympathetic to their cause.
These protesters do not represent the majority, but seem to be
an
influential
minority.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Interpol's system is used by repressive regimes to catch dissidents and refugees.
Putting a financial value on parts of nature invites companies to pay that much to destroy them.
The US, in pushing development drone weapons, is failing to consider what will result when its enemies have drones too.
Rather than censorship, the way to end abuse of real children is with social workers that help real children.
Since poverty often brings out the worst in people, ending austerity would help a lot too.
A road planned to go through a rainforest in Sumatra, for coal export, could wipe out many endangered species.
Everyone:
tell
Google to stop supporting ALEC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
ALEC is a right-wing scheme by which businesses twist state legislators to pass the bills those businesses want.
Everyone:
rebuke
US Airways for kicking a blind man and service dog off a flight.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
If you've flown a while, you know that flight crew can act like little tyrants when they take it into their heads to push passengers around, and that when they say he was "disruptive", that is an exaggerated way to say "He talked back to us."
IMF harshness helped spike Ukraine's deal with the EU.
How a Shadowy Network of Corporate Front Groups Distorts the Marketplace of Ideas.
An iPad on Every Desk: A Trojan Horse, Teachers Say.
They don't realize this is true in the computing sense too.
Ralph Nader:
Corporate
espionage undermines democracy.
[Reference updated on 2022-07-11 because the old link was broken.]
A former Wall Street mathematician describes how his job was to invent complex financial instruments so as to dupe customers, and all managers participated in the pressure to be more deceptive than the competition.
Proposed cuts to US food assistance will cancel out all voluntary food donations to the poor.
From Quebec to Spain, anti-protest laws are threatening true democracy.
The more government becomes a mechanism for control by the plutocrats, the less it can tolerate protest or democracy.
A French couple, age 86, committed suicide together, leaving behind a manifesto for legalization of the choice to die.
Assad and his Syrian enemies will have negotiations.
It will not be easy to find anything they can agree on. Meanwhile, the goal of the original protesters, a secular democracy, has been completely ruined by Assad and Saudi proxies.
Global heating has encouraged an insect pest to wipe out the lavender crop in France.
The wealthier the country, the less its people care how they treat the natural world — perhaps because of the industry of pointless consumption.
Busting Eight Common Excuses for NSA Mass Surveillance.
When you decide to help fight against massive surveillance, remember that we need to go beyond limiting the state's access to the data companies collect. We need to reduce the accumulation of data about everyone.
Biofuels made from food crops are a "crime against humanity".
A thug who is proved to have lied, claiming he heard Andrew Mitchell call another thug a "pleb", will face prosecution.
Thugs often lie to put someone in the wrong; they think they are privileged to do so. I am glad that they get prosecuted when they do this to a powerful politician. I wish they got prosecuted when they do this to other people.
The world media don't mention the massive corporate lobbying effort that has sabotaged negotiations that were supposed to curb global heating.
US banks threaten to charge for savings accounts because interest rates are so low.
Why are they so low? To promote "economic growth" of the sort that benefits companies but not workers. The effective way to promote true economic growth is with deficit spending, but Republicans have blocked this since 2010, so the Federal Reserve uses "quantitative easing" as a substitute that doesn't quite work.
Ioane Teitiota, from Kiribati,
was denied
asylum in New Zealand as a global heating refugee.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
He asked for asylum because his home is certain to become uninhabitable due to rising sea level. The court denies the danger. It is clear that he is probably safe in Kiribati this year and next year. It is equally clear that they will be inundated.
Reportedly growth of coral is enlarging some of the islands at present. However, in a few decades the coral will be killed by ocean acidification, and the islands won't be able to grow after that.
Will people be accepted as climate refugees when inundation gets closer?
What about the millions who live at low elevations in Bangladesh?
Everyone: call on world
leaders to
reject the TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Prisoners in Guantanamo can get
out, if
they have strong enough al Qa'ida ties, by turning informer. On
the other hand, if you were captured for being in the wrong place at
the wrong time, you may never get out.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
I have no objection to infiltrating al Qa'ida. Unlike the dissident movements that the thugs usually infiltrate, al Qa'ida supports neither human rights nor democracy. What does bother me is that this might be part of the motive for the oppressive practice of imprisoning people indefinitely without a trial.
The NSA employs over 1000 crackers and has infected over 50,000 computer networks with malware to be activated later.
(Please don't use "hackers" to mean "people who break security".)
Poverty in the US is not only painful, it is deadly.
A driver in Ohio faces charges of driving a car which has a secret compartment in it. They simply assume his intent was to smuggle drugs.
The UK government wiped out a large offshore windfarm project by talking about cancelling previously promised subsidies.
I don't think this is a stumble, and I don't think the UK government's ambitions run in the green direction at all. It has given plenty of signs that it is subservient to the fossil fuel companies. I think it did this to keep fossil fuel use high.
Despite success of efforts to protect some endangered species, each year more species are under threat.
UK visa law leads directly to slavery for immigrant domestic workers.
Why pass a law that is so obviously unjust? Who would ask for such a law? Evidently the people wealthy enough to employ live-in servants. In other words, plutocrats legalized domestic slavery in the UK.
Deaths from AIDS have gone down, except in teenagers.
I have a hunch that prudish attitudes contribute to this.
Everyone: support Walmart workers'
protests
on Nov 29, and pledge to
boycott
Walmart on Nov 29.
[References updated on 2018-03-12 because the old links were broken.]
US citizens: sign this petition in support of the Affordable Care Act.
US citizens:
say
no to trusting Transcanada to avoid oil spills on the Keystone XL
pipeline notwithstanding its horrible maintenance record.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support diplomacy with Iran.
NAFTA and US Farmers — 20 Years Later.
I just got a new passport. It came with a brochure whose front page says, "With Your U.S. Passport, the World Is Yours."
What a claim!
Nonviolent protesters against the JP Morgan Chase bank face charges in the US carrying a year in prison.
Their protest criticized the company for bankrolling massive environmental damage that is going to kill thousands, maybe millions of people. Of the forecast of a hundred million human casualties from global heating by 2030, to be followed by larger numbers afterward, surely JP Morgan Chase will be responsible for at least 1%.
We see increased repression of environmental protesters, in the US as in Russia. I predict it will increase steadily, because the fossil fuel companies will demand ever more repression to keep a lid on the people who see the current system is going to kill them.
A high and stable carbon price is needed to avert disaster.
I will go further and assert that this must be implemented via a carbon tax. A cap-and-trade system is easy to game.
Correcting myths about retail jobs.
Now imagine what these people will do if they are replaced by automated sales machines. Beg on the street? That is why I refuse to use those machines, and call on other customers to refuse too.
Technology is not the main cause of increased poverty in the US. Mostly it is due to policies that favor the rich.
Nonetheless, eliminating millions of jobs through technology will add to the problem. The US does not need more efficiency, it needs to support everyone better.
Antibiotic-resistant bladder infections are linked to bacteria found in chicken treated with antibiotics.
We must end the regular use of antibiotics in farm animals, and if the result is to make meat more expensive, we'll probably eat a more healthful diet.
Vandada Shiva: How Economic Growth Has Become Anti-Life.
The Warsaw climate summit achieved little except to decide to decide on something later. If indeed they do so.
The Afghan government plans to bring back stoning (a form of execution) and flogging as punishments for adultery.
I supported the intervention in Afghanistan to end the Taliban's oppression of women, but it has been creeping back for years, and accelerating recently.
A crusader writes about her experience fighting and defeating a revenge porn site.
Revenge porn achieves its intended effect because of a neurotic taboo against nudity. Why fire someone for making a nude photo that gets posted by someone else? Why fire someone for making a nude photo and intentionally posting it? Why fire someone for stripping in a bar, or in Central Park? It is all gratuitous cruelty, and that cruelty makes Moore's cruelty possible. In effect, his activities are part of the harm done by the taboo.
We could make it illegal to fire people such as Jill the teacher. That would be better than nothing. However, the real solution is not at the legal level. Rather, we need to get over the nudity taboo, so that nobody thinks of firing such people.
Facebook could do something good for society (for a change) if it required each of its users to post a nude selfie. After a few months of that, revenge porn would no longer succeed in bothering anyone. Victims would say, "Oh, you're going to post another nude photo of me? Please tell me the URL so I can link to it." The Hunter Moores of the world would have to search for some other way to harass people.
The wrong of the taboo does not excuse revenge porn — or any company that argues, "What we're doing is lawful, and you can't criticize us for anything that's lawful and profitable." Yes we can! That the nastiness is lawful is no excuse, ethically. In general, someone who exploits a flaw in a system to hurt people is responsible for his actions, and the system is also responsible if it could be better.
United Airlines, after nearly killing a woman's dog, offered to pay the vet bill, but only if she signs a confidentiality agreement.
I flew on United a few days ago. Before the usual safety announcement there was an ad showing staff (or perhaps actors) talking about how good service was their priority. I didn't pay it much attention, but it occurred to me for a moment to think, "Don't tell us — show us!"
I think there should be a law invalidating any confidentiality commitment made to a business by a client.
New Pun - sushi.
US citizens: support a basic income for all citizens.
Feeding antibiotics to turkeys has led to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in turkey meat.
LG said its Smart TV was sending back filenames found on USB drives as part of an unfinished feature to search for other things "you might also like".
We are fortunate it was not finished, or they would have presented it as a reason not to remove the feature.
Egypt's military-controlled government has banned protests (without special permission).
A poor person in the US explains how poverty makes it hard and expensive to do things middle class people think ought to be easy and cheap.
Urgent efforts are needed to protect the Great Barrier Reef.
Part of the urgent effort Australia must make is to extract less coal.
Companies with valuations based on the carbon bubble must warn investors.
Anti-drone activists who protested at Hancock Air Force Base were acquitted of charges after demonstrating they were actually helping the US to follow the constitution.
The US and Iran have made an interim agreement limiting Iran's uranium enrichment.
The deal calls for diluting Iran's 20%-enriched uranium, which would put any possible nuclear weapon further away.
Netanyahu hates this deal, for understandable reasons: it will deny him the chance to get the US and Iran into war, and he will no longer be able to cite Iran to distract attention from the occupation of Palestine.
Uganda illustrates the repression that theocratic Christians want to impose on homosexuals everywhere, including in the US.
Thanks to the UK's deregulation of planning, the iron age hill fort of Oswestry will be covered by new housing.
The UK took money from funds for normally local charities and spent it on the Olympic Park. At the time, the government promised to make up the loss, but it seems to be breaking that promise.
The Olympic Games leave behind debt, surveillance and repression; if there is a proposal to hold them in your city, organize now to push them away.
There is evidence that the South African thugs who massacred striking miners had met with the mine management and made a plan to break the strike. This was designed to promote an ANC-associated union and block the acceptance of an independent and more vigorous union.
I don't think the ANC has done anything good since Nelson Mandela ceased to be president.
An "independent" organization run by a relative of a minister of Azerbaijan corrupts UK MPs with expensive vacations and parties.
Floating windfarms are cheaper and can be located further away from the shore.
The sponsors of Politico's "Playbook" seem to get favorable "news" coverage there that agrees with their ads.
Carl Malamud is being sued for posting official German safety standards, which the state is charging substantial amounts to see.
Two students at the London School of Economics sold atheist and secularist books while wearing Jesus and Mo shirts, and met with censorship from the university and the student union.
I think the article generalizes too far about leftist students; I am sure many of them are not inclined to support such censorship.
Many registered voters in Kansas have been blocked from voting in state elections.
40% of workers for US businesses get no sick days and can be fired if they miss a day of work for getting sick.
Bills are being considered in 10 states to ban cities from taking steps to protect workers from this.
The US government is a government of occupation on behalf of the plutocrats.
China lends pandas to countries as bargaining chips for dirty trade deals.
Obama has shut out press photographers almost 100%.
Aid for Syrian refugees is serving as a test platform for
iris
scanning biometric ID, which is almost compulsory for them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Internet freedom in India is under attack from all directions.
US citizens: tell the FDA not to approve GMO salmon.
These fish could cause harm to wild salmon.
With all the massive surveillance it does, the NSA was not satisfied. In 2012 it established a strategy to collect even more data about everyone.
Three women released from 30 years of slavery in a house in London were shown an iPad, inviting them to enter into a more subtle form of submission.
Greenpeace protester Anthony Perrett says that if Russia imprisons him he will not regret his protest.
The activists freed on bail must be glad, but if they talk by Skype, another regime is surveilling them.
The residents of Lafourche Parish voted to fund libraries rather than a new jail.
The ebooks they are talking about are, apparently, commercial. It is a shame that these libraries promote commercial ebooks. They should reject those on ethical grounds.
Lafourche county's existing jail would be perfectly adequate if they stop fighting the War on Drugs.
Hawaii legislator Tom Brower boasts of crushing the belongings of unsightly homeless people.
People who are hungry in the midst of plenty of food are morally entitled to steal food. And if Brower doesn't like their use of shopping baskets to carry around their few possessions, he should provide them with some other way to store those.
Oil companies plan to create enormous toxic lakes full of waste water from tar sands oil extraction.
There is no way of knowing how far the toxins will spread. At low temperatures they may degrade especially slowly. (Toxic metals last forever, unless they happen to be radioactive.)
If the cost of proper disposal of these toxins were included in the cost of that oil, it would be so expensive that nobody would buy it today.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce Attempting to Undermine Anti-Bribery Law, Public Citizen Report Shows.
Senator Franken asks for a federal investigation of commercial use of face recognition.
I think this is a positive step, but what we really need to investigate, and limit, is the use of face recognition by the government, and its ability to collect images to recognize.
A House committee rejected a small step towards greater accountability for civilian casualties of drone attacks.
Half a million UK students from poor families will suffer from a new budget cut.
This and more austerity in the UK stem from subservience to businesses that want to extract money from the country and pay little tax.
Corporations claim US taxes are too
high. Here's
how that is a lie.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Nadia Tolokonnikova endorses the boycott of the Olympic Games in Russia.
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service
to protect
some species of bats that face the danger of extinction from
white-nose fungus.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Citizens of Massachusetts: call for accurate and non-prudish sex education.
Corporate Espionage and the Secret War Against Citizen Activism.
Companies implicated include Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald
A Republican Congressman will be sentenced to probation for buying cocaine, which he called a "disease" in his own case, but he voted to impose drug tests on Americans that get food stamps and for punishing them harshly.
Thousands Protest in Japan against New State Secrets Bill, which would punish whistleblowers severely.
There a world-wide wave of increasing government surveillance and secrecy power, as various governments preemptively attack human rights and democracy before the movement builds up to defend them.
The FBI acts as a buffer to keep Internet company staff unaware that they are working for the NSA.
The EU proposes to ban sale of unregistered seed varieties. Registration is so expensive that many varieties (especially for home gardeners) will disappear, along with the small seed companies that sell them.
Isa Muazu is fasting to death in prison in the UK rather than return to Nigeria.
I don't know whether Muazu has a valid claim for asylum — in particular, this article does not show whether he has a real reason to fear being attacked by Boko Haram. However, a system that is rigged so that people with a valid claim can't prove it is prima facie unjust.
The Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to take effect, which imposes restrictions on abortion designed for no reason except to make it unavailable.
This is not a final decision about the law's constitutionality; that remains to be considered. But it seems to imply the court is considering declaring it constitutional.
In effect, the right-wing US Supreme Court has found a way to negate the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, by allowing states to ban it indirectly.
If you think 3D-printed guns are dangerous, consider an automated virus synthesizer.
The contractor responsible for the failing Healthcare.gov site is making lots of money from doing a bad job.
I suspect this is because the system was delivered to the US as nonfree software so that no other company could even try to fix it.
Tony Blair let the American NSA Spy on Millions of Britons and Store their Private Data.
Here's more detail of what the UK allows the NSA to do to UK citizens.
CNN broadcast a misleading and one-sided pitch for breeder reactors. Here are the problems that it did not mention.
A militia or militias have taken over the Central African Republic and kill helpless people for no obvious reason.
Google might be able to smash Chinese internet censorship, if it dares try.
Prime Minister Cameron privately called investment in renewable energy "green crap".
Russia threatened economic warfare against Ukraine to make Ukraine break off plans for a closer trade relationship with the EU.
Russia is not alone in this. The US uses threats of economic warfare to bully countries into imposing anti-sharing laws that repress their citizens.
Walmart workers plan protests now through "black Friday", Nov 29.
The ironic history of decades of war in Afghanistan.
How the inhabitants see the US today.
The latter article refers to the former for the claim that the Mujahedeen were ideologically united with the Communists by hatred for the US, but I can't see any sign of that in the former article.
Everyone:
call
on Google to change YouTube policies to prevent people from sabotaging
a channel via false complaints of copyright infringement.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on your senators to oppose Senator Hatch's bill that would ban
regulation of fracking on public lands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The US, UK and Australia failed in the attempt to undermine and sabotage a UN resolution affirming privacy rights.
When a woman accused a Florida State University quarterback of rape, detectives tried to protect him and pressure her to drop the charges.
US citizens:
support
the Green Party's budget approach.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
European Parliament Members Explore Decriminalizing File-Sharing.
Spain's right-wing austerity government plans to impose heavy fines on protesters, without trial.
You can send your images of Spanish thugs to me; I will find a way to publish them.
Joseph Stiglitz:
The Insanity
of Our Food Policy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The US Senate has abolished filibusters for presidential nominees.
This will put an end to one form of systematic Republican obstructionism: blocking all Democratic appointments, not bothering to judge them individually.
The UN client negotiations now have corporate sponsors, in effect corrupting the negotiations directly in addition to the older indirect corruption through governments.
Irish women asked the UN to denounce Ireland's restrictive abortion law.
Nicaragua's is even worse.
UK thugs use blackmail and bribery to recruit informers in activist groups.
Kuwait: 5 Years for Tweet 'Insulting' Prophet.
India's greatest hero of freedom and justice, Dr. Ambedkar, tends to be ignored by upper-caste Hindus.
Norwegian ministers say the NSA falsely told them it wasn't doing massive surveillance of activities of Norwegians.
Sweden plans to give thugs and various agencies unlimited and unchecked power to tap any and all phone calls and emails.
Campaigns to divest from fossil fuels are moving at 400 US colleges and universities.
Canada's Refusal to Protect Polar Bears Scrutinised.
It is a rational policy in a way. If you are determined to run our whole planet off the climate cliff, and destroy most of the existing species before human civilization ceases to be capable of causing more heating, why spend any money on a doomed attempt to protect one of them?
Men can reject the social pressure to be "masculine", meaning tough with themselves and cruel to women.
Greenpeace and other organizations warn governments to expect rebellion around the world if they do not curb global heating.
They and other organizations held a walkout protest at the climate talks because of the visible lack of ambition to avoid disaster.
It is still possible to avoid 2C of global heating, but it will require denying the plutocrats the increased riches they want.
But we have to start right away — which Australia, Canada and the US will not allow.
GCHQ is in trouble for helping the NSA spy on Britons.
Everyone: call on Cambodia to free housing activist Yorm Bopha.
Everyone:
Pledge to
boycott GAP, Old Navy and Banana Republic until they sign the
agreement to enforce fair labor standards in Bangladesh.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support the Women's Health Protection Act. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: support Elizabeth Warren's pledge to expand Social Security.
132 poor countries have walked out of the global heating conference in Warsaw because the richer countries refused to discuss compensation.
The poor countries want compensation for the tremendous cost of weather disasters caused by rich countries' CO2 emissions, such as 5 billion dollars to rebuild in the Philippines after just one superstorm.
A billion Africans face dangers such as hunger and flooding, and likely resulting war.
With rich countries cutting their CO2 commitments, it looks like the talks are failing entirely and we are on a track towards almost 4C of heating.
It has been clear for several years that the rich countries' governments, in thrall to fossil fuel companies, are determined to continue making this problem worse. Negotiating with them is useless, and serves as cover for making things worse, much like the useless "peace process" between Israel and Palestine.
Overt rupture might be good since it would show the world that we are heading for disaster.
Massive surveillance developed in the US because a pliant court operated in secret.
Students don't want to pay to study neoclassical economics, especially now that it has catastrophically failed.
Neoclassical economics is a pseudoscience cult that gives academic respectability to Reagan's bogus trickle-down economics. How did university departments end up hiring mostly cultists? Influence of the rich, that trickle-down was meant to serve, must have played some role. I think it would be interesting to investigate how this occurred.
Making a monkey out of European data protection law, Luxembourg ruled
that Skype is
allowed
to send data to the US and the NSA.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Will the EU Parliament Enable Discrimination Online or Uncompromising Net Neutrality?
Obama says he's for legalizing unlocking of cell phones, but he's pushing for the TPP to insist on banning it.
Senators joined a lawsuit, claiming there is no evidence that massive metadata surveillance is "useful".
We should not base our argument on the claim that this can never do even the tiniest "good". It's hard to keep batting exactly zero forever even if you're totally inept, so maybe someday this surveillance will turn out to be helpful for something positive. If that happens, that won't be enough to justify it.
A report accuses the forces pushing for bankruptcy in Detroit have greatly exaggerated the city's debt.
I suspect some persons or businesses hope to make a lot of money from this bankruptcy. Who are they?
Trafficking and forced labor follow patterns which could be followed to put an end to the practice.
I suspect that the reason the UK does not trace these patterns and put an end to the practice is a lack of will. For instance, the major supermarket chains pressure farm to cut prices, and the supermarkets will be happy if farms do that by means of forced, trafficked workers — as long as the supermarkets are not punished for it.
If supermarkets were fined 100 times the retain value of any products they sell that are found to have been made with forced labor, they would put an end to the practice for sure.
A network of 64 right-wing think tanks received over $80 million in money of mysterious origin.
Most foreign exchange trading is speculation; for stability, we need to tax these trades.
90 companies are responsible for most of global heating.
Many businesses are recognizing the costs that fossil fuel and global heating will impose on them.
Investors are also pressuring fossil fuel companies to report on how their profits would be affected if we cut emissions drastically by 2050. I think the fossil fuel companies have already investigated this and that their behavior — making governments cancel or sabotage policies meant to reduce emissions — is their response.
The US should pass the International Violence Against Women Act.
Poor people in the UK are suffering from increasing indebtedness, which is also true in the US.
The next excuse for snooping on everything on the Internet will be "child" pornography.
The term "child abuse images" is deceptive: I think in practice it includes teenagers labeled as "children", and stretches the word "abuse" too. However, some of these images will show real abuse of real children.
The government should focus on protecting the children themselves, not on censoring (and surveilling) all communication.
In the US:
call
on WGBH to remove the Koch brother from its board.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone Congress on Dec 12 to end austerity and close tax loopholes.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on JP Morgan to pay its penalty and not shift it onto taxpayers.
US citizens: sign this petition against "fast-track authority" for the TPP.
I've recommended several actions against the TPP; please do them all. This is so bad that it's worth a few minutes of your time.
US citizens: call on the EPA to remove lead from aviation fuel.
Iceland's initiative to protect journalism may be rendered ineffective by massive surveillance that scares off sources.
The NSA defied the FISA court by providing information to other agencies.
The Kenyan anti-terror thugs are accused of killing and disappearing people.
New estimate for rebuilding the Philippines: 5 billion dollars.
In the US, "Socialism" is no longer tarred with the association of Communism.
Nowadays, it's the US government that's spying on everyone, even worse than the Soviet government did.
Rich fossil-burning countries ought to pay for the costs of the weather disasters they impose on poor countries.
A clear summary of why the TPP is harmful and unjust.
Most Americans will lose economically, as well as losing freedom, since these exploitation treaties transfer wealth from workers to business owners.
The two central ideals of the Gettysburg Address are under threat today.
Some LG "smart" TVs send surveillance data to the manufacturer.
A friend commented:
Note the article makes a mistake: that the destination page returns a 404 error means nothing. First of all, it's extremely easy to fake an error code (I know that in PHP it's just one line of code!). Second, even if it's indeed missing, all the data is still going to the server logs anyway, and it wouldn't be hard to retrieve it from there (in fact, using this would make the load on the server much smaller as no script ever gets executed).
Canada's "natural resources" minister charged that labeling tar sands oil as highly polluting would "stigmatize" Canada.
Ready, aim, stigmatize!
Something that stigmatizes Canada even worse is its policy of encouraging other countries to help fry our planet.
Oil spill expert Simon Boxall says a devastating oil spill is inevitable if Russia drills in Arctic waters.
US citizens: call on your senators to end filibusters on judicial nominees.
US citizens: Call on Congress to defend Obama's health care reform.
What we really need is a national health service, but the right-wing demand to undo what Obama did would make things worse.
US citizens: phone your Congresscritter to oppose bills that pander to fossil fuels. Also send email through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on your senators
to support
Senator Levin's bill to facilitate releasing prisoners from Guantanamo
or trying them in civil court.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A Walmart is soliciting food donations for its employees, because they can't afford a Thanksgiving meal on low Walmart wages.
Thousands of Haitians protested demanding the resignation of the president, who was more or less imposed by the US.
The EPA is reducing the amount of corn-based ethanol to use in US cars, but it should reduce this to zero.
The Gates Foundation talks about giving everyone in the world a toilet to use, but its solutions are ridiculously expensive.
Waleed Al-Shehhi was sentenced to prison in the UAE for tweeting about the trial of Islamist dissidents.
Proposing state laws
to turn
off cooperation with NSA massive surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
If this effort is serious, it should start by deactivating the "fusion centers" by which state and local thug departments share information with the FBI about "terrorist suspects" such as Occupy protests.
Drones, tanks, and grenade
launchers: Coming
soon to a [thug] department near you.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Boston thugs are outraged that the city plans to put GPS trackers in their official cars.
These cars belong to the city, and their used for official work, so personal privacy is not involved here. Anyway, thugs while on duty are not entitled to the same privacy rights as an ordinary citizen.
The Supreme Court rejected EPIC's challenge to the legality of massive NSA surveillance of American's phone calls.
Abusing copyright powers must be punished at least as hard as infringing copyright.
A US blogger has been imprisoned for disobeying an unconstitutional prior censorship order.
Interview with the organizers of an anti-Assad militia in Syria.
How humans are changing the sea — disastrously.
When Pope Francis looks good, it is in contrast to the Church's record of bad, bad, bad.
UK universities are working with thugs to repress student protest at the root.
I think Michael Chessum made a mistake accepting release on the condition that he not engage in protest in or near his university (let alone others). That neutralizes him semipermanently.
I would urge him to tell the court that he rejects the conditions and will go to jail and be a political prisoner rather than legitimize this repression.
The UN climate chief told the World Coal Association that most coal reserves must be left in the ground.
Bravo! But unless our governments stand behind this, coal will kill us.
The NSA's Global Threat to Free Speech.
International agencies are demanding even more austerity in Greece, despite the objection that this might cause a revolution.
Shaker Aamer was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and demanded to be freed.
Aamer and the others like him conclusively refute the claim that "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from the US government." The US government owes them an apology and compensation, but most of all it must make sure not to repeat the offense with anyone else.
David Hicks deserves an apology for the torture and unfair trial that the US gave him.
Everyone: Call on Shell to pressure Russia (actually Gazprom) to free the Greenpeace 30.
"Healthy aging" is an oxymoron. Aging is nothing other than the tendency for bodies to become less healthy.
Economic growth does not require growth in CO2 emissions. US per-capita economic production has doubled since 1970 but per-capita CO2 emissions have gone down (though not enough).
The politicians who say this is impossible may be under the influence of the fossil fuel companies.
David Hicks deserves an apology for the torture and unfair trial that the US gave him.
The dead hand of dictator Pinochet, in the form of screwy election rules, continues to block important legal reforms in Chile.
Since Pinochet's rule was not legitimate in the first place, one could argue for following the previous constitution.
Companies are selling sophisticated surveillance equipment, even able to tap fibre cables.
No one can reconcile one thug's testimony, that Mark Duggan had a gun in his hand when he was shot dead, with other thugs' report that they found that gun 20 feet away, wrapped in a sock, on the other side of a wall.
It seems that Duggan could not while dying have thrown the gun over the wall, but above all, he could not have put a sock over it at that time.
I suggest that Duggan had no gun, that the one thug is mistaken in saying he saw one, and that another thug placed the gun to be found.
The funds provided to help poor countries survive global heating are almost exhausted and little more is being given.
Mainstream media can't find real climate scientists to deny global heating, so they present "experts" with no scientific experience in that field.
The death toll from Typhoon Haiyan is at least 3,900, and the repair will cost half a billion dollars (or more).
US citizens: stand behind Yeb Saño, Philippines negotiator at the climate summit.
US citizens: call on Senator Warren to withdraw support from the FDA's plan that would ban states from requiring labels on GMOs.
The Afghan army has reportedly killed a lot of Taliban, but (as usual) that has little effect on how the war is going.
The UK tracks diplomats through 350 important hotels around the world, so as to spy on them.
A Nepali worker in Qatar describes the abusive treatment by employers.
Amnesty International says these abuses amount to forced labor.
The trees uprooted by Typhoon Haiyan may never be replaced if more big storms keep coming through. If so, they will give global heating a permanent boost.
The UK government wants the power to cancel citizenship, leaving people stateless and exiled.
The government of Ireland proposes to make freedom of information requests so expensive that hardly anyone would dare make them.
All states
should regulate
automobile insurance the way California does.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
In addition, they should ban insurance companies from collecting from drivers any information about the car's location over time, or that would enable deducing the car's location.
Christians teach lies about sex in US public schools.
Geithner will now receive his reward for years of loyal service to Wall Street as Secretary of the Treasury.
How Our Public Schools Became a "Communist Threat".
Why
Taxpayers Shouldn't
Fund Private Schools.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Note how these two forms of plutocratic pressure line up ironically.
Anti-Drone Movement Speaks: 'End the Secrecy, No to Kill List'.
In North Carolina, the thugs spying on protesters offer the excuse that they are "anarchists".
Remember when it was "terrorists"?
Obama has jailed another whistleblower.
This one was found by massively searching journalists' phone records.
Jeremy Hammond and the Need to "Promote Respect for the Rule of Law".
I wish they did not equate "hacking" with "breaking security".
Spanish protesters are threatened with long prison sentences for throwing pies at an official.
This reflects the general attitude of the right-wing party that rules Spain, which seeks to abolish democratic rights in practice even though not in theory.
The new Xbox has a body scanner that can make a very sharp image of your body under your clothing.
When you enter someone's home, ask if there is an Xbox present and, if so, insist on seeing it unplugged.
Ralph Nader calls on the Washington Post to set up a structure to maintain editorial independence from its owner, also the owner of Amazon.
Amazon mistreats nearly everyone involved with books, including its customers.
A nefarious company, Kleargear,
makes
customers promise never to publicly criticize the company, and
"fines" them if they do. The "fine" is probably not legally
enforceable, but poor people lack the resources to fight back.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
One solution: someone else who has never done business with Kleargear can post the condemnation.
If the TPP passes, foreign companies would be able to sue the US government if it enforces the first amendment against such behavior.
Businesses have a history of forecasting that regulations will destroy lots of jobs…but, in the end, that never seems to happen.
What does destroy jobs? Austerity. Prioritizing efficiency over jobs.
The Maldives held a democratic election. The
right-wing
islamist won.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
We will see how human right are treated subsequently.
A Greek group, never before heard of,
claimed
responsibility for killing Golden Dawn supporters as retaliation
for a Golden Dawn's supporter's murder of a left-wing rapper.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The highest priority policy goal of the Australian government is the fossil fuel industry's priority, which is to ensure humanity uses the maximum amount of fossil fuel in the shortest possible time.
Prisoners with cancer in Arizona are denied medical care and told to pray instead.
That's religion for you.
Jeremy Hammond says that the FBI directed him (via its tool, Sabu) to crack web sites in Brazil, Iran and Turkey, and the FBI then took advantage of this.
Will the FBI be investigated?
US citizens: tell Congress to expand Social Security.
US citizens: Tell Congress to respect the progress in the Affordable Care Act, and vote on expanding Medicare to all Americans.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Feinstein's fake fix for government surveillance.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The women in Texas "colonias" near the Mexican border can't travel far enough to get an abortion, or a cancer test, or any other health care. Even when they can afford the treatment, they are afraid of being deported while traveling for care, even if they are legal US residents.
Richard Falkvinge says the TPP is the United States' way to reassert its role as a world bully.
Republicans are blaming Obama for the medical plans that insurance companies choose to cancel, and the ones they created just recently knowing they couldn't continue.
Setting aside those, which are the insurance companies' fault, Obama's health care claim (that people can keep their old insurance plans) is true.
China: Abolition of Labour Camps Must Lead to Wider Detention Reform.
Alongside the TSA security theater, we suffer from the MPAA's theater security.
The EFF supports the USA FREEDOM Act as a first step, saying it does not go far enough.
The EFF says that additional measures are needed to limit the government's access to data in private hands, and I agree about those points. However, that too fails to go far enough, because it does not limit the government's own direct collection of data about people (for instance, with license plate recognizers, surveillance cameras, and microphones in places such as buses and lampposts) or business collection of data about people. Once data is collected, it will be misused. We therefore must strictly limit the systematic collection of data about people.
Both the US and the UK governments are trying to spike the UK's Iraq war inquiry.
US citizens: call on the Supreme Court to apply to itself the ethical standards for all other federal judges.
Everyone: sign this petition against the Trans Pacific Partnership.
US citizens: call on the Senate to block the attempt to ban abortions after 20 weeks.
Such late abortions are only done when something goes gravely wrong.
Everyone: stand in support of Philippines Climate Commissioner Yeb Saño, demanding strong action to curb global heating.
Cameron, embarrassed about having attended the Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka, now calls for an international inquiry into Sri Lanka's human rights abuses.
UK lawyers plan to go on strike against plans to cut payments to defense lawyers.
Anonymous activists have been
accessing
US government computers, putting the shoe on the other foot.
Strangely, the US government doesn't like being treated the way it
treats us.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
It would in general be wrong to take money from individuals' bank accounts; I hope these crackers are honest enough not to do that.
A UK journalist in Sri Lanka reports that the government sent crowds to block him from travelling to the north to observe the conditions in the Tamil areas.
Uri Avnery says it must be Ariel Sharon who ordered the assassination of Yasser Arafat.
Jeremy Hammond received a 10-year prison sentence, which he calls a political act.
He said that the suggestions for which sites to target came from the FBI tool, Sabu.
I do wish he would not use the word "hacking" to refer to security breaking. That confuses the public about the activities of hackers like me, which don't involve security breaking.
A Libyan militia shot and killed unarmed protesters calling on the militia to disband.
Eternal Austerity Makes Complete Sense — If You're Rich.
The CIA is collecting the financial records of nearly all Americans.
Right-wing extremist parties are gaining strength in many parts of Europe.
These parties are willing to fight hard against the immigrants that they blame for the spread of poverty, while parties on the left are generally timid about confronting the plutocrats that are really to blame. People who are willing to fight, and don't have a firm grip on who the enemy is, may choose the right wing parties just to see a real fight against someone.
Sri Lanka's government tried to take control of the Commonwealth Foundation's charity events.
The UN rapporteur on freedom of expression accused UK political leaders of verging on tyranny by calling the Guardian's journalism a crime.
US
citizens: call
for reform of the ECPA.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: Sign this petition against the TPP.
Everyone: tell Nestle to stop drying up part of Pakistan for bottled water.
US citizens: tell ex-senator Blanche Lincoln to stop representing Monsanto.
Japan has effectively abandoned its plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The presumption that people looking for food to survive after a disaster are "looters" regularly provides an excuse to repress them.
The search for informers in dissident groups on UK college campuses is part of a broader pattern of repression.
A US judge rebuked the US government for not prosecuting any banksters for their frauds.
Deforestation in Brazil
sped
up greatly in the past year, partly due to a change in forestry
law that people
campaigned
to stop.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The plutocrats of Fix the Debt wrote op-eds for austerity and got right-wing students to submit the text as their own writing.
A rare possum in Australia is threatened by clearcutting.
A chapter of the TPP has been leaked, covering a wide range of topic including copyrights, patents, ISP censorship, and international tribunals that don't care about human rights.
Not surprisingly, the US government takes the harshest position towards people (including Americans). However, there is no possible good to be achieved by such a treaty; all it can do is harm.
This would attack our freedom in many unrelated ways, but the most basic attack, which paves the way for the others, lies in lumping together so many unrelated laws and issues and calling them "intellectual property" as if they had some coherent relationship. That term spreads confusion, and if we repeat it when criticizing the details of the chapter, we're undermining our own side.
The TPP's an
attack on
public health.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
13 US cities held protests against the TPP.
A technique helps people get more information from FOIA requests to the FBI, so the FBI wants to shut down all FOIA requests for 7 years.
The FBI says that these requests threaten national security. I think the FBI threatens national security and doesn't want us to find out about it.
The campaign for more gun control in the US has been blocked.
There are good reasons to condemn the US government — for catering to the rich and failing to help the poor, for instance — and right-wingers are surprisingly good at twisting this anger to their own uses. Owning a gun won't protect you when you can't afford medical care, when you can't get a job, when a bank commits fraud to take your house, when the government forces you to have a baby, or when the government signs a free exploitation treaty that gives foreign corporations privileges over you. The way to protect yourself from that is to vote for progressives.
The UK Conservative Party deleted lots of old speeches from its web site, and set up a robots.txt file to tell the Internet Archive to stop distributing its copies.
A friend at the archive told me they removed the robots.txt file subsequently, apparently in response to public criticism.
UK conservatives advocate permanent austerity, permanent suffering for most of the country.
The UK opposes a European investigation into the flaws deliberately put into our computer systems.
Australia seems to be planning to sabotage negotiations aimed at preventing global heating.
Alas, so is the US (in a subtler way).
Devout Muslims want their brain-damaged father, who has more or less ceased to be conscious, kept alive with heroic measures so he can suffer.
They say that suffering brings him "closer to god". I guess that god is a sadist — which would fit the amount of suffering in the world.
Corporate America's New
Scam: Industry
P.R. Firm Poses as Think Tank!
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The US is bullying the UK to conceal Dubya's discussions with B'liar, which would indicate how much B'liar shared responsibility for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Watch the World's Forests Disappear on Google Earth.
If you are thinking of trying to use Google Earth yourself, be sure to disable Javascript first, or install LibreJS. If a site doesn't work with LibreJS enabled, you should not use it.
US citizens: support the Drone Strike Transparency bill.
The EFF and other opponents of the TPP challenged the NSA to affirm it is not spying on their work.
How the NSA has converted the Internet into a device for injecting malware.
New street lights have audio recording, video cameras, and cell phone tracking. Because they connect to the Internet, they are unacceptable surveillance.
Worse, the proliferation of sensors threatens a regime of 100% enforcement of lots of petty rules, that would leave people feeling they are ruled by robots.
Trademark Law Does Not Require Companies To Tirelessly Censor the Internet.
US citizens: Chris Christie condemned the previous governor's methods for balancing the budget, then used the same ones.
He has not done a good job economically in New Jersey.
One point in that article is questionable. Is it good for a state to have a "business-friendly" tax policy? Often it is bad.
US citizens: call on Obama
to block
fracking on public lands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
A court ruled that Google Books is fair use.
Google tried first to get special permission by making a settlement with a few large publishers. Many authors, including me, objected to this deal, and the court rejected the settlement. Thus, Google was forced to argue that this is fair use, which means we are all free to do this.
A UK thug was filmed trying to recruit an activist in at Cambridge to report on students for dissident behavior.
This shows the real reason they want to spy on everyone. The "terrorists" they want to catch are the dissidents, often labeled as "terrorists" by the enemies of democracy.
The US government keeps track of who purchases books about lying and polygraphs.
The US wants the TPP to require ISPs to monitor and punish their customers, and narrow down fair use.
Even one of these would be a disaster, so we must defeat the TPP.
More nasty stuff: requiring
patents on medical treatments, raising prices of medicines (this will
kill people!),
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Watch out! That article is steeped in enemy propaganda terms such as "intellectual property" and "protection". Using these terms helps the enemy.
The article also assumes that the unjust requirements of the WTO will be maintained. Thus, it disregards one big injustice in the TPP: making future copyright reform impossible.
US citizens: tell your congresscritter to oppose the bill to end regulation of fracking on government land.
The UK government condemns Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed's escape, but the UK kidnaped him after helping to torture him, and then denied him justice. Why shouldn't he escape?
He might have despicable Islamist views that don't respect other people's human rights. But that is no excuse for torturing him, kidnaping him, or suppressing his lawsuit for torture.
When a government is accused of crimes, and the same government obstructs justice, that is grounds to declare it guilty as charged.
Canada encourages other countries not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
This shows that Canada's government has the explicit goal of frying our planet. Canada already has a clear policy of trying to increase its own fossil fuel exports, but this goes even further.
Countries greatly threatened by global heating, such as Bangladesh and Spain, should regard Canada's conduct as an act of war. It can kill millions of people.
Crime gangs are worried that Pope Francis will interfere with their corruption of the Vatican Bank.
More Than 3,200 Serving Life Without Parole [in the US] for Nonviolent Offenses, Finds ACLU.
A football player who sued his team in Qatar for not paying his salary
has been blocked from leaving Qatar by
denying
him an exit visa.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
It is a fundamental injustice to require people to get an exit visa to leave a country. The Soviet Union did this. But what else would you expect from a country that works foreigners to death?
I think you'd have to be a fool to go to Qatar.
Occupy has found a new method of freeing Americans from debt.
Since bankruptcy is available to clear most kinds of debt, but not student loans, I wonder if it might be a good idea to apply this specifically at student loans.
Guantánamo 12 Years On: How the Media [Are] Missing the Point.
Protections for cod in the North Sea are starting to raise the population, so we need to keep them in place until the numbers get high enough.
Protecting fish stocks generally entails overcoming the short-termism of the fishermen.
Violence between Israelis and Palestinians is
increasing.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
As usual, most of the victims are Palestinians. The article doesn't say, but I suspect that the Palestinian perpetrators are punished but the Israelis are not.
Palestinians are
attacking
Israeli soldiers with knives, apparently retaliating for increased
violence by Israelis against civilians.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Morsi called the head of the military government a "traitor" and refuses to cooperate with the trial proceedings.
Relatives of the people whose murder Morsi's accused of inciting placed the charges before the coup. I won't say that Morsi can't be guilty of this; I don't know the facts. If he is guilty, that justifies some sort of prosecution, but doesn't justify a military coup.
23 Petty Crimes That Have Landed People in Prison for Life Without Parole.
Support the campaign to ban autonomous killer robots.
Costa Rica's public banks have shielded that country from the worst damage, even through US economic warfare that subjugated the economy in every other aspect.
By the way, the world urgently needs some countries to default on their debt, so as to teach predatory lenders a lesson. At present they have every reason to suppose they can profit heavily by leading a country into international debt.
De facto segregation has returned to US schools. Where in the 1950s it was segregation between schools in the same school district, now it is segregation between school districts.
This seems to be a consequence of de facto segregation in housing.
When combined with the practice of funding education mostly from local property taxes, the result is that the schools where poor children go are badly funded.
ALEC's latest nasty proposal: an agency to streamline privatization of any government services, including any and all roads.
This would naturally lead to a new form of massive surveillance of drivers.
In most US states, child care costs more than college.
This may have contributed to the big increase in discouraged workers, as parents find that the costs of going to work leave them with no gain from working.
If it were feasible for these people to work, that would not create jobs for them. Rather, they would appear in the unemployment rate, and thus make the harm done by anti-employment anti-poor policies harder to disguise.
Growing up in poverty can permanently stunt a person, so the US policies that augment child poverty are causing irreparable damage.
US school "reform" turns weak evidence into "proof" that their methods work.
Palestinian journalist Mohammed Abu Khdeir was secretly arrested when returning from Egypt. In Israel it is forbidden to report the arrest.
To force 15,000 Palestinians out of the territory Israel has annexed to Jerusalem, Israel plans to demolish 2000 housing units. Some of them are slated to become parks.
The Israeli
army ordered
Palestinians to uproot their olive trees because an Israeli colony
is being built nearby on their land.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The government says the colony is illegal, but it nonetheless receives government support. The state is trying to have it both ways.
The attacks against Palestinian agriculture proceed constantly, with the tacit support of the Israeli army and state. They get so little attention that Palestinians despair of reporting them.
Armed Israeli colonists attacked a Palestinian villages farms, and Nadel Shafiq Taher Shatiya photographed them. When soldiers came, they took his cameras and gave them to the colonists, who later returned them broken.
The army generally does not dare confront the violent colonists.
An unofficial investigation found that Israeli troops shot and killed Ahmad Tazaz'ah while he was doing nothing in particular, in violation of their rules of engagement.
22 organizations report that people are now afraid to phone them for help, fearing NSA surveillance.
These organizations are now suing the government.
The New York Times endorsed the Trans Pacific Partnership sight unseen. How's that for bowing to the plutocrats?
Inside The Chinese Labor Camp That Made Halloween Decorations Sold At Kmart.
KMart says it has different suppliers now, so if any of the present suppliers are using political prisoners as workers, KMart can remain ignorant. That's how flexibility of the supply chain makes room for sweatshops, factory fires and slave labor.
It should be KMart's legal responsibility to know these things, to ensure that it isn't using prison labor.
Employees of G4S, one of the main privatizers of government services in the UK, have been accused of forging papers to thwart someone's case for asylum.
In South Africa, G4S operates a prison and has been accused of giving prisoners electric shocks and forced injections.
Reporter Francesca Borri: In Aleppo I only survive by looking Syrian.
Iraqi women had far more rights under Saddam Hussein than they do now.
Afghanistan is growing a record opium crop.
US citizens: call on the US border patrol to limit its use of deadly force — use it only when necessary.
This doesn't mean they can't defend themselves. It means they shouldn't shoot someone in the head — and 8 more times, once he is flat on the ground — for throwing rocks.
Everyone: call on Obama to meet with Walmart workers that are on strike.
In Paris: protest Nov 24 against the proposed free exploitation treaty, TAFTA.
The UK government wants even more surveillance power, showing contempt for freedom.
Many Democrats, revitalized in demanding progressive policies, condemn Clinton as a servant of Wall Street.
Elizabeth Warren rebuked federal regulators and Congress for allowing banks to remain "too big to fail".
American writers say they self-censor because of NSA surveillance.
The New York Times tries unremittingly to believe NSA excuses.
UK spies used a man-in-the-middle network switch to create fake LinkedIn profile pages so as to insert malware into the computers of employees of Belgacom, a Belgian mobile phone company.
This is how the GCHQ spies described their "vision" in 2011: "Any mobile device, anywhere, anytime!" Mobile phones made today all have a universal back door: if you carry one, you're a sucker.
Some areas near Fukushima will be considered uninhabitable for many years.
Israeli soldiers occupy Palestinian homes as "training".
The global campaign to give women access to contraceptives proceeds despite opposition from prudish religion.
The global heating denialists' cosmic ray theory bites the dust.
I'm sure they will find another straw to grasp at — there are so many candidates, and the pay is so good.
Theft of food from stores in the UK is rising due to increased poverty. It is noteworthy that a substantial fraction is stolen by staff. Perhaps these stores should pay their staff better.
I don't think there is anything wrong in stealing food if you're in a place where there is sufficient nutritious food but you can't afford it. However, that argument doesn't apply to stealing luxurious food.
Oil Espionage: New Leak Reveals Spy Agencies Tapped Int'l Oil Group.
How does this relate to stopping terrorism, which is the supposed excuse for NSA general surveillance? Well, Saudi Arabia is a member of OPEC, and most of the Sep 2001 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Is that the excuse?
How GOP Governors Are Preventing Millions Of Low-Income Diabetic Americans From Getting Medical Care.
The Republicans in Georgia, by refusing to extend Medicaid to poor people, are also cutting off funding for hospitals that do treat the poor.
As the US argues in court for tracking everyone's phone calls, it seems to have quietly retracted the claim that this is "indispensable" for finding terrorists.
This is significant because that claim was the reason the FISA court approved this tracking.
Texans fear an old oil pipeline will leak again and pollute their reservoir.
5 million Americans have given up on finding a job since the crisis 6 years ago.
Those who still have jobs are worse off: the median wage has declined 4%.
US thugs, courts and jurors accept the death of cyclists due to collisions with cars as normal.
Punishing the few drivers that hit a cyclist while following usual driving practices will not change the usual driving practices. It will strike jurors as unfair to punish someone for doing what "everybody does".
To change these practices requires adopting clear rules that will make cyclists safer, then punishing violations of these rules whether or not a cyclist was hit.
The world's ten worst toxic sites.
None of them is in a wealthy country. Wealthy countries have for some decades offloaded their pollution onto poor countries.
How the Koch Brothers Organized the Federal Shutdown.
Heat waves could kill 2000 people a year in the Eastern US by 2060.
If global heating leads to a collapse of today's technological systems and air conditioning ceases to be available, that might go up to 20,000 a year, or more.
The US plutocracy funds weapons even if they fail in tests, but calls successful programs to help the poor "failures" in order to cut them.
Software is being developed to try to diagnose a person's state of health from voice.
Will there also be software to change your voice to hide these problems?
Palestinians accuse Israel of denying Palestinian prisoners proper medical treatment for diseases such as cancer.
The Democrats' list of tax loopholes to be
closed inexplicably
omits the tax subsidies for fossil fuel.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
We must promote climate-friendly farming before it's too late.
Al Qa'ida is recruiting suicide bombers in Turkey, and parents are afraid their sons will be recruited and die.
People say the government turns a blind eye to it.
One of the "new atheists" wrote that moderate religion contributes to the crimes of extreme religion by protecting it from criticism. This seems to be a good example of it. Any form of Islam makes a person vulnerable to infection by the jihadi mind-virus.
A designer drug could give the pleasure of alcohol without some of the damage.
This new drug might be less addictive than alcohol, but that's not automatic. Addiction results from the body's physiological adaptation to the effects of the drug. Whichever receptors respond to the new drug as they do to alcohol, they would tend to adapt and produce addiction. Meanwhile, whichever body systems are not affected by the new drug would not develop addiction; that might reduce the total addictive effect, but how much that occurs would have to be seen.
The Philippine government is planning how it will cope when global heating gets even worse.
But since that will become impossible in a few decades, it is also pushing for strong action to curb global heating.
The negotiations with Iran seem to have failed over a rather small disagreement, which gives hope that further discussions could bridge the gap.
Can we stop using disposable plastic cutlery by bringing our own?
It will be hard for travelers to do this unless they can bring their cutlery onto an airplane. Given that there is no real danger in this, the TSA ought to permit it.
Genetically engineered yeast have been designed to produce medicines, flavorings and other useful things.
Although "in principle" the substances that are made ought to be safe, that can have exceptions — and each case is a different issue.
Sweden is closing prisons because of increased emphasis on rehabilitation and a relaxation in the War on Drugs.
If the US tries to do this, the owners of private prisons will sue.
Newspapers in Sri Lanka urged the UK not to proceed with a royal charter to regulate the press, lest states like Sri Lanka cite it as a precedent.
US citizens: call on your senators to vote for independent courts for accusations of rape and sexual harassment in the US military.
President Maduro has sent state agents to enforce low prices in some stores in Venezuela.
In general, price controls cause shortages and are not a good idea. However, if applied only to certain stores which were given permission to buy dollaws at the low "official" exchange rate, they can be seen as a condition of getting that permission, and they should not cause shortages.
Venezuela has had shortages of certain products. No one I met there could tell me why, but it did not seem to be due to price controls.
The US will ceremonially destroy its stockpile of seized ivory, as part of a campaign to end legal sales of ivory.
An Australian senator and a New Zealand MP went to Sri Lanka on a fact-finding mission to judge whether their countries should attend the Commonwealth Summit. Sri Lanka made the answer quite clear by arresting them.
This ham-fisted attempt at repression would be funny, if it were not for the seriousness of the repression when it is aimed at Sri Lankan dissidents and journalists.
The poorest South Africans organize for housing rights, against the corruption of the state, and despite repression that goes as far as murder.
US citizens: sign this petition to respect the rights of prisoners who report on prison abuses.
Seven Things Veterans Need More Than a Holiday.
The US attracts youths into the army by telling them they will "serve their country". As we know, that's only occasionally what US soldiers are used for. If we spread the word about what they are really likely to do, it might do some good.
Bloomberg News censors stories about China.
The liquid bomb terrorists were originally accused of planning to mix liquids to make the explosive TATP in a plane, but that would be impossible.
However, later it came out that their plan was somewhat different, and not impossible, merely very difficult.
Banning the practice of discarding "by-catch" (fish that the fishermen did not aim to catch) is not enough to enable overfished stocks to recover.
The only way to protect fish stocks is to defeat the political power of the fishermen, who are generally short-termist.
Australia keeps setting high temperature records, but the government, totally subservient to coal interests, says it will reduce plans for CO2 emissions cuts.
These long-term targets sound impressive until they are cancelled without having been achieved. The way to get real results is with a carbon tax.
The business-ridden UK government invited a gas company employee to write its energy policy.
Note how the ministry claims that conflicts of interest are a minor matter compared with the "knowledge" that business employees have. I'm sure they know plenty about what policies will serve their employers, but knowledge can't compensate for bad goals.
Typhoon Haiyan killed over 10,000 people, perhaps much more.
Many of the dead were drowned because the storm drove a 6-meter wall of water onto the land.
The rise in sea level, for which global heating is directly responsible, surely increased the height of the storm surge and therefore increased the death toll. Global heating also played a role in making the storm so strong, which also increased it.
One study forecast that global heating would kill a hundred million people by 2030.
Economics classes in the UK continue teaching right-wing myths that the 2008 crash demonstrated were false.
Of course, this was not the first sign that they were false.
I think that an investigation of why these falsehoods are taught would come across the influence of plutocrats' money.
It seems Israel has convinced France to block a first-stage nuclear deal with Iran.
Everyone: tell Warren Buffett to stop threatening rail workers that want to unionize.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support raising the minimum wage to $10. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on your senators to call for the US to allow a free election in Honduras.
Friends of the Earth lists many reasons to stop the Trans Pacific Partnership. This is in addition to the probable injustice against people who share.
Geophysicist Brad Werner says "Earth is Fucked" if we continue under plutocracy. We can save the biosphere from global heating disaster, but to do so, we must break out of plutocracy's rules.
A right-wing US appeals court temporarily reinstated the Texas law to make abortion unfeasible. Some women have been unable to get an abortion as a result. The abortion clinics have appealed directly to the Supreme Court to try to reverse this.
Ladar Levison has been threatened with prosecution for closing Lavabit rather than deceiving all its customers.
Why Does Congress Think It's OK for Working Americans to Go Hungry?
Organizations of private schools in Pakistan have banned Malala Yousafzai's memoir from school libraries. The book is not in accord with their religious views, and dissent is not supposed to be allowed.
This sort of disrespect for basic human rights is typical of Islamic countries.
Leopoldo García Lucero, tortured by Pinochet's men after the US-supported coup in Chile, received a judgment against Chile in the Inter-American court.
Nothing can heal the wounds he received, but he is glad to have gained a precedent in the fight against torture and tyranny.
Hillary Clinton's official actions have served the plutocrats, not the people.
I'm fed up with right-wing Democrats like Clinton, Clinton and Obama. It takes lunatic Republicans to make them look good, but that's not good enough to get my vote.
Will valuing "natural capital" lead businesses to preserve it?
If corporations were inclined to manage their resources for long-term capital value, they might do this to natural systems based on their natural capital. However, corporations today typically don't look beyond the stock price 6 months from now. they are more likely to loot natural systems than manage them.
A BIOS-level virus that spreads by infecting the firmware of USB sticks.
Coca Cola Company said it would stop buying sugar grown on land that has been taken away from people.
I am not sure whether this applies to the companies that bottle Coca Cola in countries other than the US.
Caribbean islands demand compensation for the slave trade from the European countries that ran it.
The book Inequality by Design, by Fischer et al, explains how discrimination against a minority group has a pernicious effect that continues to affect their descendants. The descendants of the slaves are still suffering today from the crime committed against them.
The country that most deserves such compensation is Haiti. Haiti was made to pay a lot of money for its independence, which is why Haiti is so poor and indebted. Haitians deserve to get all that money back.
Suggested arguments for convincing people to support action to curb global heating.
Local thugs in the US
are joining
in massive surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Power Plants and Other Vital Systems Are Totally Exposed on the Internet.
Polio is spreading to the Middle East from Pakistan, where religious lunatics kill vaccination teams.
Even in states which have legalized pot, people get fired for using it.
One disadvantage of the US is that companies can fire employees for almost anything, with a few special exceptions.
U.S. Manufacturing Only Has Jobs for the Skilled Few.
Self-driving cars cut put 2 or 3 million Americans out of work, if we allow them to. Why not ban them?
The UK government is dishing out cruel treatment to children of illegal immigrants, as a scheme to discourage immigration.
US citizens: phone Attorney General Holder and say, don't let JP Morgan get a tax deduction for its penalty.
Everyone: demand that Russia
say what
has become of political prisoner Nadya Tolokonnikova.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell Obama to drop his opposition to Mike Bishop's case against the Keystone XL planet roaster pipeline.
American voters prove vulnerable to manipulation when companies launder money to pay for political advertisements.
Voters approved many other progressive ballot initiatives.
Americans need to learn that expensive political ads represent their enemy.
US citizens: tell the EPA you
want strong
limits on CO2 emissions from new power plants.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The US government gave civil society organizations a chance to comment on the dangers of TAFTA, if they can afford to fly to Brussels on one week's notice.
TAFTA stands for "Turn All Freedom To Ashes", and if you are not in favor of that goal, they don't want to hear from you.
Everyone: call on Pepsico to follow Coca Cola Company and commit not to buy sugar from land-grabbers.
Biomass as an energy source is renewable in principle, but if that means burning wood, it could also mean deforestation.
IPCC chairman: Are we prepared to "pass on a lousy, spoilt and defiled planet"?
US citizens:
support
the Stop Subsidizing Multimillion Dollar Corporate Bonuses Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
oppose
a proposed coal export terminal in Washington State.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to pass the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act, which the Senate just passed. Also send a
message through
this
page.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The scandal about NSA spying in Europe has temporarily thwarted plans for a new, unjust trade treaty between the US and Europe, TTIP.
This proposed treaty is also called TAFTA, or "Turn All Freedom to Ashes", and it is likely to be similar to the TPP. Any "trade" treaty that the US government proposes nowadays is likely to be an instrument to give business more power and undermine democracy.
While Poland hosts negotiations to consider perhaps saving the Earth's biosphere, it also contemptuously holds a coal industry forum.
More on David Eckert's forced colonoscopy.
I think it is abuse of language and common sense to stretch the word "rape" to include a forced medical procedure. Rape is not the only sort of wrong; if we want to criticize something, we don't need to scrape up an excuse to call it "rape".
Walmart workers held the largest protest ever.
I nearly always avoid Walmart.
Eckert wasn't the only person in Deming whose colon was searched for drugs based on no evidence.
Might
Netanyahu launch an attack on Iran to sabotage the possibility of
a nuclear agreement?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The food industry wants the US government to
ban states
from requiring labeling of GMOs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Tony B'liar's advice on "good governance" has not led Kazakhstan to respect human rights any better. It has got worse since he started.
The argument that Kazakhstan is "an important country" is a red herring.
Sheik Yassin Kadi was declared a "terrorist" by the US and then by the UN, without a trial, based on accusations kept secret from him.
This is the natural result of the laws that ban organizations by declaring them "terrorist", without a trial. Such laws are inherently unjust and all of them must be repealed.
Several governments are learning to reject unjust trade treaties.
Too bad the US is not one of them.
US citizens: tell the Coast Guard not to allow toxic fracking waste to be shipped on rivers. A barge accident could pollute water supplies.
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter and senators to oppose a bill to deny the EPA
the power to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to judge the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline
honestly and not join the State Department's greenwash.
US citizens:
call
for enforcement of the law to protect marine mammals from fishing.
Leaked
IPCC Report Links Climate Change to (coming) Global Food
Scarcity. The problem is already affecting food production in the
US.
Judge
Demands US Gov't Hand Over Secret Docs Detailing Gitmo Torture.
I understand the ICRC's reason for not publishing its reports
on how states treat prisoners.
I'm not convinced that the ICRC's reputation for confidentiality
will be significantly impugned if a state publishes
the report that the IRCR made about that state.
The UK intends to quash a torture case using a
new
secret court procedure, in which the state can present evidence to
the judge while concealing it from the torture victims and their
lawyers.
The government's witnesses, testifying in secret, could lie like a
Clapper, confident that no one will have the chance to investigate to
find facts to put up against their testimony.
MPs ordered the heads of UK surveillance organizations to testify in
Parliament, and squandered the opportunity by
giving
them easy questions.
The spymasters told us nothing, just
repeated
their usual bogus arguments in favor of spying on everyone.
Saudi Arabia is funding a
new
group of Islamist Sunni rebels in Syria, this time excluding al
Qa'ida.
This exclusion of al Qa'ida removes one reason why the US would oppose
it, but they would seek to oppress Shi'ite, Christian and secular
Syrians with a tyranny comparable to that of Saudi Arabia.
A proposed giant coal mine in Borneo could cause deforestation
locally,
wiping
out orangutans (and many other species), but the revenge on the
rest of the world will take the form of global heating and
ocean
acidification.
We need to
end
the War on Drugs, and not just for marijuana.
What horoscopes would look like
if
astrology were really valid.
Bill de Blasio, New York's first day-mayor
(*) in several decades,
will have to deal with
protecting
New York City from the effects of global heating, as well as the
problem of housing used by rich people for vacations * Giuliani and Bloomberg were
night-mayors.
The NSA instructed its speakers to defend massive surveillance with
a vague
reference to the September 2001 attacks. In effect, an allusion
to the idea that we're supposed to believe their spying on all of us
protected us from something more dangerous than a nondemocratic
government.
The Government Accountability Project says that
other
NSA staff are revealing information, inspired by Snowden.
Solitary confinement produces
hidden
mental scars, and in New York State prisoners are put in solitary
confinement for ridiculous arbitrary reasons.
Five
reasons to ban depleted uranium from weapons and armor.
If the US were ever invaded, we could not dare use tanks with depleted
uranium armor, or fire the DU shells — it would be less damaging
to surrender.
What's the right strategy
to end
deforestation in Sumatra?
The Philippines was
just struck
by the strongest hurricane ever recorded over land.
Global heating
causes increasingly
strong storms and rising sea level, which combine to cause ever
more damage.
A UK marine
was convicted
of murdering a prisoner in Afghanistan.
Global heating denying celebrities stem from
the corporate-funded
astroturf "wise use" movement in the 80s.
With their bogus scientific claims rejected, they move to the free
market fundamentalist think tanks of the cult of the invisible hand.
("Whatever the market does is right, by definition, even if it makes
everyone suffer.") Those circles don't care if the science is wrong
as long as it supports their faith.
Egypt's military
government announced
a schedule for elections next year.
I hope this is sincere, but I would not count on it.
Netanyahu
is making
wild threats over the possible nuclear deal with Iran.
A school in Canada
has prohibited
children from touching each other. The game of tag is not
allowed.
Google is using spyware in apps
to track phone
users into physical stores.
A list of facts that show
how unequally
divided wealth and income are in the US.
US citizens: support
the Stop
Tax Haven Abuse Act.
Here's what
the bill does.
More info about
a previous
version of the bill.
"Unreasonable Force" In Chicago Evidently Does Not Mean A Probably
Drunk
Cop Killing
An Unarmed Guy Lying On the Ground By Shooting Him 16 Times.
Two proposed mines in Australia would emit
almost 4
billion tons of CO2 or equivalent.
This happens as investors
are questioning
fossil fuel companies about high valuations based on the carbon
bubble.
Governments' large subsidies to fossil fuel companies are in effect
the
opposite of a carbon tax.
Right wing governments are trying to skew funding even
more in
favor of fossil fuels.
These subsidies are a form of corruption: the fossil fuel companies
have "invested" in looting the treasury.
Greece closed its public broadcasting system and fired all the
employees, while starting a new public broadcasting system with
different personnel.
The fired employees occupied the building for five months, publishing
over the Internet, but the state has
now sent
thugs to force them out.
This move was equivalent to firing everyone and hiring other people.
Why do that? Perhaps to pay them all less. Or to choose people who
have less character, ethics or scruples.
The lies that appear to have
defeated GMO
labeling in Washington.
The FARC, Colombia's second-worst terrorist
group, has
reached a peace agreement in principle with the state.
The end of the guerrilla war between the FARC and the state would be a
step forward, but I have to wonder what effect this will have on the
fight against the Colombia's principal terrorist group, the right-wing
paramilitares, which was closely associated with the previous
president Alvaro Horrible.
Also, I am concerned that boosting President Santos might hurt the
chances for electing a president that will tear up the
unjust free
exploitation treaty with the US.
Amnesty International
says Shell
lied about damage caused by oil spills in Nigeria.
US citizens:
phone
Senator Durbin's office and call on him not to cut Social
Security, Medicaid or Medicare. No Grand Sellout!
US citizens:
tell Congress not
to sell our national parks.
US citizens:
oppose
a plan to allow even more oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea.
New York City's jail
keeps
mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement, sometimes for
years on end.
That's likely to make them sicker.
Thugs got "doctors" to search David Eckhart's intestines
6
times just because he was seen clenching his buttocks.
The colonoscopy procedure has a certain degree of danger. That danger
is worth while for people who have an a priori risk of colon cancer,
but that cannot excuse applying it to anyone else.
US citizens:
send a message
to your congresscritter and senators to oppose the TPP and
especially oppose "fast track" for it.
Here's the
true
nature of the TPP.
US citizens:
call for an end to
the federal loophole that undermines state laws intended to stop
thugs from confiscating people's property at will.
British journalist Sarah Harrison has
gone
into exile fearing she will be accused of "terrorism" if she
returns home.
A French court ordered Google to
delete
certain foreign web pages from search results.
This seems like dangerous censorship to me.
A scientific-sounding article brushes quietly over
reasons
to reject genetically modified foods. It looks thoughtful but its
reasoning is invalid.
It is clear that today's widely used GMOs are safe for most people to
eat. If they caused harm to a substantial fraction of people, it
would have shown up in medical statistics by now.
This does not imply that they don't cause allergies in some people.
(I linked to a
different
report of such allergies.) Labeling GMOs is just what's needed to
enable people with those allergies to avoid the problem — even
if most of us can safely ignore it.
Meanwhile, today's GMOs cause big environmental problems.
"Roundup-ready" plants have led to an
increase
in pesticide use, while Bt-toxin plants kill other insects besides
the
pests
they are meant to kill.
If we wish to reject these crops to protect the environment, we should
have that option. Why should agribusiness be allowed to conceal use
of these crops from the public?
The veil comes down when the article makes a patently absurd claim
that the probable defeat in Washington should affect our goals. That
defeat shows the effect of agribusiness' millions, but has nothing to
do with the question of what is good policy.
The lies that defeated GMO labeling
A
high
level of polonium 210 was found in Yasser Arafat's corpse,
suggesting he was killed with that poison.
Israel has a nuclear reactor (and nuclear weapons), and could easily
make polonium 210. Arabs would find it difficult to obtain.
UK
secrecy
about communications between B'liar and Dubya is blocking the
report about why they decided to invade Iraq.
Large palm oil companies are
disregarding
the ethical commitments they made, and destroying forests in
Africa and Asia.
Human Rights Watch calls on the US to investigate 18 killings in
Afghanistan in which US troops
seem
to have killed prisoners.
New York State has issued a "protective order" to
block
protests against a drone base.
Global heating
will
make dry regions drier, and this will undermine the life of the
soil.
Geoengineering schemes designed to reflect sunlight away from the
Earth would
reduce
global rainfall.
They would also fail to save the oceans from
acidification
which is likely to wipe out coral reefs and all the species that
depend on them.
Why Big Pharma
Won't Stop Breaking the Law.
A lack of biodiversity in the nearby environment correlates with
different bacteria on your skin, and a
greater
incidence of allergies.
Queensland (a state in Australia) has extended the unjust model of banning
organizations by fiat, previously applied to supposed terrorists, to
supposed
motorcycle gangs.
Ireland bankrupted itself by agreeing
to pay
for the losses of private banks. This led to austerity which only
made things worse.
The Washington initiative to require labeling of
GMOs has
probably been defeated.
Companies put many millions into ads against labeling.
Protesters gather around the world
for Million
Mask March.
A Google security expert accuses GCHQ
of "subversion
of judicial process".
The state has subverted its own judicial process for the sake of
snooping
of various kinds.
4 Foods
That Could
Disappear If New Food Safety Rules Pass.
Lots of "foreign
aid" is
neither foreign nor aid.
I think cancellation of a poor country's debt is real aid, and
urgently needed too. However, encouraging external investment is
business in a country is not real aid, since investment tends to be
predatory and subjugating (it leads to pressure to sign treaties with
"investor-state" provisions
that damage
human rights).
Oil commodity traders say they will prove that big oil companies
including Billionaire Polluters and
Shell have
fixed prices for a decade.
So, will our plutocratist governments jail the people responsible, or
just fine the companies a small fraction of what they made from this?
Progressive Democrat Bill de
Blasio has
been elected mayor of New York. This is a victory, though we will
have to wait and see how much of one.
China is pressuring Hollywood movie
companies to
join its PR force.
Yet another reason we shouldn't go out of our way to help Hollywood
— such by as tolerating nasty copyright restrictions and the War
on Sharing, or by competing with other countries to offer movie
production the biggest tax cut.
Everyone:
call
on the Dominican Republic to restore citizenship for people of
Haitian descent.
The US shut down its listening post in Berlin, so now it has to listen
to the German government
via
the UK embassy.
Although US spying on foreign officials makes those officials angry, I
consider that practice more acceptable, and less scandalous, than US
spying on you, me and everyone.
After reporters exposed theft by soldiers, Kenya's congress passed a
law to fine or shut news media if they violate a
"code of
conduct" which will be decided later.
Even if the code is not unjust at first, it could be changed easily
later.
Snowden,
Assange, Manning, Vanunu — The True Heroes Of Our Time.
Anat Kamm should be listed in the title, too.
Israel has announced
plans
to demolish the homes of 15,000 Arabs in the areas Israel calls
part of Jerusalem.
Gaza's electric plant is shut down because there is
no
fuel.
Some Palestinians tried to go to their farm land, but
Israeli
troops attacked them because Israeli colonists have built
greenhouses on that land.
Sometimes the colonists even
attack
Israeli soldiers, and get away with it.
Israel applies
one
law to Israeli children and another law to Palestinian children.
Norwegian journalists in Sochi were repeatedly
arrested
and threatened with imprisonment, for no obvious reason.
The American Psychological Association is
soft
on torture.
The UN reports that the CO2-reduction targets of the
countries in the world won't be enough to avoid global heating
disaster.
Much
more cuts are needed by 2020.
An OECD study found that a
carbon
tax is the most efficient way to achieve cuts of whatever level.
More about the
surrender
of the M23 rebels in the DR Congo.
If advertising tobacco to children wasn't bad enough, now
loan
companies
are doing it.
The UK
snoops
on many undersea cables from its base in Cyprus.
Argentina's
New Biometric ID System Ignores Right to Privacy.
This system (SIBIOS) is
why
I decided not to go to Argentina again. (Sorry, that article is in
Spanish.)
Six
Journalists Given Life Sentences in Turkey.
The rebellion in the Congo (DRC)
seems
to have ended.
The fighting in that region tends to be due to rivalry between
mineral-trafficking gangs that supply the demands of users in
wealthier countries. Some of these gangs are known as "governments"
while others are called "rebels". The fighting flares up when the
gangs disagree about what share each gang will get. People are better
off when the gang structure is stable and nobody is getting shot.
Mike German, former FBI agent,
refutes
the bogus arguments for massive surveillance.
Even if general surveillance did protect us from terrorists, it makes
us vulnerable to a much bigger danger: the rogue state.
Greek
Protesters Rally Against IMF And EU Inspection.
China's plan to reduce smog by replacing coal will result in
doubling
the CO2 emission the coal was producing.
The death of honeybees has caused a
drop
in almond production in California, and a shortage.
UK massive surveillance appears to violate
European
human rights law.
Edward Snowden's
open
letter to Germany.
On Snowden's prospects of being given
asylum
in Germany.
Amnesty International says that
prosecuting
Snowden would make him a political prisoner.
Kerry asks Europe not to let the dispute about NSA surveillance
interfere with joint plans for a
trade
treaty to render democracy powerless.
Richard Dawkins raised a public issue that affects all of us, using
his bottle of honey as an example; people
criticized
him as if he only cared about that bottle.
The human rights lawsuit against undercover UK thugs, by the lovers
they tricked, has been
buried
in a secret court that is designed to be unfair in favor of the
state.
Planning to cut
US poverty in half over the next ten years.
The question is whether we can reduce poverty faster than the
plutocrats can crank out more.
Obama's
sellouts to the meat industry.
Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega has been
imprisoned
for 18 years for calling for democracy, along with many other
supporters of human rights.
The
Employment Non-Discrimination Act is not strong enough; it has a
religious loophole.
It's not just gay staff that face the threat of discrimination when a
secular hospital merges with a religious one; the patients do, too.
We should require religious hospitals to provide all sorts of care
that patients are entitled to, including abortions; if the church
doesn't like it, it can sell the hospital to a foundation.
The Marshall Islands' inhabitants
are trying
to live sustainably, and hoping that the rest of the world will
follow their example rather than inundating them.
New Zealand has passed a US-style
law requiring
telecommunications companies to implement interception facilities.
I don't think such facilities are bad in themselves; however, the
state must not be able to use them unmonitored.
Democracy activists in the Maldives
are calling
for a tourist boycott to pressure the state to allow a free
election; meanwhile, the state has made it a crime to advocate that
boycott.
This reminds me of the Israeli law
that threatens
to bankrupt anyone that advocates the boycott of products made in
Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory.
Judging Obama's drone attacks against international
law finds
that many of them are crimes.
Offering men paternity leave to match women's maternity leave could
indirectly reduce
employment discrimination against women.
A former congressman
was denied
a voting ID under the state's tough new voter suppression law.
Brazil is
being accused
of hypocrisy for minor forms of surveillance such as following
foreign diplomats' cars.
I don't see anything wrong with the practices described here, which
are aimed at specific people that there is a specific reason to be
suspicious of. It isn't wrong for the US to do this sort of
surveillance, either. What makes US surveillance an injustice is that
it is massive and general, aimed at all Americans.
Global heating
is making
polar bears starve, so in part of Canada a few of them try to eat
humans.
We can't blame the polar bears. They don't understand global heating;
we do.
An Iranian "reformist"
newspaper has
been closed, reminding us that even if Iran makes a deal about
uranium enrichment, it will still be a theocratic tyranny.
ALEC's "transparency"
initiative omits
important information, compared with what as been obtained in the
past through open-records requests.
Cowardly leftish politics: instead of adopting a livable minimum wage,
"reward"
the businesses for paying enough.
If we keep on giving employers tax cuts instead of requirements, soon
they won't have any tax to dodge, and we'll all be taxed to pay for
their "incentives".
Everyone:
call for
holding China to account as it seeks to join the UN Human Rights
Council.
US citizens:
show support for
negotiation with Iran.
One of the Greenpeace 30 reports on
prison
conditions in Russia.
Note how the Australian government refuses to help him.
That's because it works for the fossil fuel companies.
Morsi, on trial,
condemned
the military coup.
He may very well be guilty of some crime, but the military's crimes
are so much bigger that they make this trial absurd. The Muslim
Brotherhood advocates disrespect for human rights (for instance, the
right to change from being a Muslim to being anything else), but
shooting protesters dead on the street is also violating human rights.
An organization of doctors says the US government
told
doctors and psychologists to participate in torture of prisoners.
The Nobel Prize in Economics was given for
unfounded
economic hypotheses that economists like to believe because they
support right-wing conclusions.
James Hansen calls for development of
"safe
nuclear power".
I respect him, but that is easier said than done. Some of the dangers
would be addressed by using
Thorium,
but not all.
Imprisoned Iranian human rights defender
Abdolfattah
Soltani has started a hunger strike.
Religious conservatism leads its believers to think that seeing
anything sexual is dangerous for children,
but seeing
violence is no problem.
The NSA collects Americans' contact lists on the pretext that this is
all "foreign intelligence", citing the authority of
an executive
order that has been kept secret from Congress.
The European Union plans to give foreign companies
a stranglehold
over all areas of law, through an "investor-state" treaty with the
US.
To establish such a treaty in a democracy is treason.
America's rich
are abandoning
America, after extracting what they could get.
A new
study forecasts
23 meters of sea level rise by 2100. Large parts of Boston would
be under water, as well as Shanghai, Mumbai, Miami and more.
And that's just considering the normal sea level, not high tides and
hurricanes.
Drug prohibition
is blocking
brain research in the UK; promising treatments cannot be studied.
The situation is similar in the US.
In the US, drug prohibition
also attacks
the use of existing medicine.
The
Great Austerity Shell Game, which is the only way out until you
tax the rich enough.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government's decision to interrogate David Miranda and threaten him with imprisonment was based on a document that equated publication with terrorism.
There you have it. Measures that strip people of their rights in the name of "fighting terrorism" will be used to attack freedom and democracy. These measures are far bigger threat than terrorism.
North Dakota Oil Spill Spotlights Obama Delay on Rules (about detecting leaks).
Why prosecutors to prosecute heroes like Swartz and Kiriakou, rather than banksters.
By the way, this also shows us why proposals to "reduce crime" by putting cameras on the street are missing the boat. If they want to make a real dent in crime, they should put the cameras in bank executives' offices.
Resistance to plant variety monopolies and other restrictions of crops
is spreading in Latin America.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
This generally admirable article falls for enemy propaganda when it treats the term "intellectual property" as if it were a principle. It is nothing but a way of lumping together various unrelated laws, one of which is the law of plant variety monopolies. These laws don't have anything meaningful in common, but the propaganda term leads people to think that they do, or should. Therefore, I never use it, and when I see it used, I explain how it is misleading.
See for more explanation,
The paradigm of economic growth, as typically understood today, is anti-life.
It is not inevitable for economic growth to be anti-life; but if people formulate their thoughts in terms of economic growth and never mind how, it could come out that way.
Going to shop in Tesco's? Wear an Anonymous mask.
The fossil fuel industry's pet government in Australia has approved a giant coal mine, never mind that running it will cause a local water shortage.
As many as two million workers are on strike in Indonesia.
The UK plans to deport a witness to sexual intimidation of immigration prisoners before she can testify about it.
UK thugs say they arrested and interrogated David Miranda as a suspected "terrorist" because he stood for a "political or ideological cause".
UK Claim That 'Journalism Equals Terrorism' Sparks Outrage.
The law they used is ripe for such misuse because it gives the state far too much power to begin with. The idea of limiting its use to "real terrorists" is a pipedream. The powers must be reduced.
Blasting people with loud sounds (even if it's music) is dangerous. It can even cause permanent injury.
Cancelling Americans' health care plans rarely received news coverage until it got connected with Obama's health care law.
The government of Sri Lanka says that defending freedom of the press is "anti-government activism."
Since they said so themselves, there's no room for doubt.
Looking closely at NSA statements, it's not clear that the massive collection of phone call data of people in France and Spain is entirely made with the help of the governments of France and Spain. The NSA may do some of the collection directly.
This detail doesn't alter the wrongness of the activity, or even who's culpable. It only affects what fraction of the practice the French and Spanish governments are culpable for.
A Palestinian teenager faces the threat of life in prison for throwing stones at Israeli occupation soldiers.
Whether the teenager really threw stones, we have no way of knowing, since the torture and brainwashing applied to Palestinian children in Israeli prisons can easily lead to false confessions.
US citizens: call on your senators to reject proposals to sabotage negotiations with Iran.
The built-up housing of the Israeli colonies in Palestinian land are just a small fraction. Lots of farm land has been taken too.
Jewish activists who went to Hebron to oppose segregation met with repression and arbitrary arrest by the thugs.
The purpose of laws is to prevent the state from acting arbitrarily. In Israel, they don't achieve that.
Mustafah Barghouti,
MD, leads
a nonviolent secular Palestinian movement that goes up against Fatah
and Hamas.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The Jewish National Fund does not only help implement expulsion of Palestinian villages, it also participates in choosing the plans to do so.
A statement by the activists facing prosecution in France for advocating a boycott of Israeli products.
The page contains the text in French, followed by the English translation.
Netanyahu's party is campaigning based on racism against Israeli Arabs.
Israeli colonists attacked Palestinians who were harvesting their olive crop, including beating one of them with a metal pole.
Since the time and place of harvesting were predictable, the Israeli thugs and soldiers were able to be elsewhere during the attack.
Other Palestinians can only get to the fields with the help of Israeli peace volunteers, whose presence compels the thugs to restrain their cruelty just a little.
The Israeli thugs have found the culprits for around 3% of the reported attacks against Palestinians' olive trees.
Putin's unpredictable and slow repression has crushed opposition.
The enforcement of abortion restrictions (which are unjust in themselves, of course) leads to further oppression of women.
In the US: call on AAMCO to stop supporting Rush Limbaugh.
Revlon threatened to sue the Breast Cancer Fund for running a petition criticizing carcinogens in Revlon products.
I don't know whether there is a significant problem with those products, but this response is a wrong in itself.
The exploitative "tradition" of engagement rings was created by a marketing campaign during the 20th century.
Like many exploitative "traditions", this one takes advantage of some people's vulnerability to competitive consumption.
I've always felt an intuitive revulsion for such practices, the things that you're supposed to do "for" people you know whether they do any good or not. At some point in my teens I opted out from birthday presents and birthday cards. Not only did I resent the pointless effort of giving them, I didn't want to impose on anyone the pointless effort of giving them to me.
Chinese reporter Chen Yongzhou included a hint in his confession to show it was false.
Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef faces censorship by the TV channel as well as prosecution by the military government.
Uri Avnery speaks about what kind of Israel will exist in 90 years.
When Did "To Serve & Protect" Become "To Seize & Profit?"
Use of supposedly pest-resistant GMO cotton has led small Indian farmers to use more pesticide, and has not increased their production. They used it because the Indian government effectively pushed them to use it.
The House of Representatives voted to exempt derivatives from bank regulations, using a text written for them by Citibank.
Too bad Obama doesn't want to confront the banksters strongly. He is more on their side than ours.
Many women in Saudi Arabia endorse the extreme sexism of their own society.
It is clear that these women occupy rather privileged positions. Most Saudis are not rich, and the women who are not rich are not treated like queens. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how patriarchy convinces women to support patriarchy.
NIST says it will audit all its encryption-related standards to see if the NSA has sabotaged them.
US citizens:
call for action
to stop unfair dismissal of pregnant workers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
support
the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Senate Republicans to stop the filibuster against the gender identity nondiscrimination bill.
US citizens: sign this open letter to maintain and increase social security benefits.
Egypt's military government is punishing use of a symbol used by Morsi supporters, and investigating TV comedian Bassem Youssef.
Relatives of disappeared journalists and dissidents in Sri Lanka asked the UK to put pressure on Rajapaksa's government, which they suspect was responsible.
Several European countries have developed mass surveillance in cooperation with the UK's surveillance agency GCHQ, which also helped them shrug off legal limitations.
Income-segregation in the US has increased greatly in the past few decades.
Economics students call for education in models other than neoclassical.
Neoclassical economics is based on a
long
list of assumptions that are often not true in real life.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
The grandchildren of Mamana Bibi
testified to
the US Congress about the drone attack that killed her.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Reportedly Chinese water boilers have been found with WiFi devices designed to do some harm.
A survey of the harm that ALEC-supported laws have imposed on ordinary Americans.
Congress should arrange to give Edward Snowden amnesty.
He deserves the highest possible honors from the US and every country.
The UK government plans to pay public defenders to betray their clients, rewarding these lawyers for every guilty plea.
Attendees at a summit meeting in Russia received official gifts that try to invade their computers.
Can anyone verify whether GNU/Linux systems are safe from them?
In Australian media, almost 1/3 of the articles that mention global heating cast doubt on its causation by human activity.
Uruguay is
removing
its troops from the UN force that keeps Haiti down.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Hamburg has a plan to cope with the effects of global heating by helping people walk and bicycle around the city.
An article by one who joined the protest that stopped New York Thug Commissioner Kelly from speaking at Brown University.
The event celebrated repression, surveillance and attacks on democracy.
It deserved a protest. The information in the article suggests that some part of the university has sold itself to the forces of repression. I think a long-term campaign to change that is called for.
Despite that, I don't think that they should have prevented the speech from occurring, because that turns into censorship.
Hillary Clinton was probably paid $400,000 for speeches at Goldman Sachs.
We can hardly expect her to do anything about the banksters' political power. I am almost certain I will vote Green again.
A US court has imposed secrecy on a report that some product might be dangerous. The public can't tell what product it was.
Can Congress, Hawks and the Israel Lobby Wreck the US-Iran Talks?
The US government is trying to stop someone from selling shirts with parodies of logos of certain US government departments.
ACLU: The US government spreads around any strange rumor that citizens call in as "suspicious" for whatever reason.
The complication of the servers in Obama's health care program reflects the wasteful complexity of the law, which results from Congress and Obama's unwillingness to set up a national health service.
The web site does not protect people's personal data from third parties.
Of course, it doesn't protect them from the state either. Although the US does not have the benefits of a national health service, its digital health records are quite easily available to the state.
US citizens: tell the US Department of Transportation not to allow dangerous oil trains.
Egypt's equivalent of Jon Stewart is threatened with prosecution for "insulting the military."
For insulting someone or something to be a crime is always an injustice.
Coastal hunting of porpoises and small whales in Japan kills thousands of them and could endanger some species. Some species may already have been hunted so far down they can't recover.
They may take revenge on people who eat the meat.
Another Snowden document says that the NSA has tapped cables connecting various Google and Yahoo data centers.
Syria's
chemical
weapons production and packaging facilities have been destroyed.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-12 because the old link was broken.]
Destroying the weapons that already exist will take longer.
The UK will cut off one avenue for tax dodging, by requiring all companies to inform the public who really owns them.
This is important progress, but there are many other avenues for tax dodging.
A survey of panhandlers in San Francisco found that most of them get under $25 per day. Less than half take drugs or alcohol.
The US should be ashamed of doing so little for the poor that they need to do this.
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