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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the DARK Act which would
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone:
Support
the Chevron shareholders' measure to recognize the danger of
global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The FBI still wants Congress to ban encryption, more or less.
The archeological sites of northern Canada are being destroyed by global heating. In a century they will all be spoiled, if not washed away.
Sudan is repressing opposition leaders that asked people to boycott the phony election. They face the danger of execution, or disappearance.
UK spy agencies have repeatedly acted to sabotage and smear the Labour Party, back before that party betrayed its own cause.
Gezi Park protesters were acquitted of all charges. The trial was pure politics, just like some that we saw in the US after the Occupy protests.
Iran calls for global nuclear disarmament.
Global heating will harm Australians' health, spreading diseases and causing shortages of food and water. The poor, the old and the sick will be hardest hit.
Starbucks and Safeway are bottling water in drought-stricken parts of California.
Even the famously rainy Pacific Northwest is feeling some drought.
Corinthian Colleges has closed, due to a big fine for fraud.
Despite the short-term difficulties for current victims, this is a good thing. For most of those current victims, who wouldn't have got much benefit from their eventual degrees, it's good that they stop going uselessly further into debt.
Florida is pushing a bill to stop towns from regulating fracking.
Israel's Supreme Court approved seizing Palestinian property in Jerusalem by declaring the owners (who live nearby in occupied Palestine) "absent".
Arab citizens of Israel protested at the former site of Hadatha village and ask why they can't move back to villages that were demolished.
In Israel it is permitted to call for a boycott of anyone or anything, except the products made by colonies in occupied Palestine. If you speak in favor of that, you face the threat of bankruptcy.
This is part of a general pattern: to protect the occupation, Israel abolishes human rights within Israel.
Europe should go beyond talking about labeling those products.
Paul Krugman condemns the Tories' redoubled austerity, and Labour's planned austerity lite.
If Schools Are Teaching about Porn, Should They Show It Too?
I think schools should show videos of realistic sex (various kinds) to provide a basis for comparison for understanding porn. They should also have courses and clubs for teenagers to learn to be good lovers, so they can avoid feeling anxious about whether they can please their partners.
Burundians are protesting the president's plan to run for reelection despite what the constitution says.
The thugs that kicked and maimed the (handcuffed) Floyd Dent made a video gloating about their crime, to pass the time as they ignored his calls for a medic.
Those sadistic thugs apparently expected other thugs to enjoy this. They surely know what their fellow thugs think.
The day when we can count on nearly all cops respond to such actions by arresting the perps, I will agree they are not thugs.
In Finland, fines for speeding and other similar things are based on one's income, so that the wealthy cannot shrug them off.
Which is worse for your chances of getting a job in the US: being black, or having just got out of prison?
A study found they were equally damaging. In other words, the prejudice against blacks equals the distrust of ex-cons.
Children in the US today are much safer than in the past. For preteens to be killed or kidnaped is so rare that it is silly to worry about it. There is no reason to treat them as helpless prisoners.
The UK's right-wing government served Big Food by cancelling a life-saving plan to reduce salt levels in processed foods.
National Security Whistleblowers Call for Repeal of Patriot (sic) Act.
The right-wing government in the UK is twisting up the NHS with "reforms" as well as starving it.
Only the Green Party offers the added funds that it needs.
Protests
broke out in East Jerusalem after Israeli thugs shot a teenager dead.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The thugs say that the teenager tried to stab them. It could be true, but you can't take their word for it.
If the Pope wants women's equality, he must support reproductive rights.
Australian Copyright Censorship Bill could block VPNs and Circumvention Information.
Cutting taxes for the non-rich boosts the economy;
cutting
taxes for rich has no such effect.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The poor pay little in the way of income tax, but they pay social security tax and sales tax. Cuts in sales tax could boost the economy, if we compensate by increasing income tax for the rich.
US citizens:
support
changing US dietary advice to encourage eating less meat.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to acknowledge and explain the killing of Mamana Bibi. Western prisoners of the Taliban are not the only unintended victims whose lives matter.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to oppose HR 1732 and protect the Clean Water Act.
Only a small fraction of black males growing up in Baltimore are killed by thugs, but they all experience the contempt and repeated harassment that occasionally becomes fatal.
It is common for Baltimore thugs to injure people they have arrested.
We should not hold victims of systematic oppression to the "perfect victim" standard.
Why pent-up resentment shows up in looting and burning nearby stores: blacks feel hatred every time they go in.
The thugs in Baltimore inexplicably shut down buses and trains just as high school students got out of school. Finding themselves trapped, they were easily led to riot.
What's the difference between drone assassinations and slitting a designated target's throat? The former looks cleaner, because it is easy to close your eyes to all the other people that it kills.
The future, it is said, is already here, but not evenly distributed. With increasing automation, the future for the US may be that most adults have no work and subsist on whatever crumbs they can find. This future can be seen today in some American Indian tribes.
In London, just 43 homes for sale are affordable for typical young families. In some parts of the UK, all homes on the market are too expensive.
This is the result of many years of policies that drive up the price of housing.
The poor need more help, but the Tories make the unhelpful promise not to raise taxes on the rich, thus, not to raise money to help them.
The cataclysmic changes of coming global heating disaster are starting and visible all around the world.
Obama is spouting flimsy lies and half-truths to support the TPP.
For 25 years, the US has tried to defeat organized activities by taking out their leaders. It is not very effective.
Assassination of leaders used to be scandalous, but the US has normalized it.
Protests against same-sex marriage outside the US Supreme Court have been funded by the Koch brothers.
Big Coal's Big Scam: Scar the Land for Profit, Then Let Others Pay to Clean Up.
The Saudi bombardment of Sana'a airport has prevented humanitarian aid flights from landing.
Air pollution causes low birth weight. This has been established from statistics in Beijing, because of strenuous measures to reduce pollution during the olympics there.
A big step in reducing antibiotic resistance: Tyson will stop feeding antibiotics to chickens by 2017.
Several provinces in Canada want to limit greenhouse emissions, and are trying to do so even without the help of the government of Canada.
Half a million square miles of forest could be lost by 2030.
Hydroelectric power in California is 60% idle because of the drought.
A coalition proposes copyright reform in the US.
The concepts it uses to formulate its ideas ("creators" and "consumers") discourage consideration of any but superficial changes, and these ideas seem to call for small change.
US citizens: support Senators Warren and Brown against Obama on the TPP.
US citizens: call on Congress to preserve the estate tax.
US citizens:
tell
the US Ex-Im Bank, don't finance Australian coal mines!
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress to fully fund the food safety modernization program.
It is a good investment: for around $100 million a year, we can save thousands of lives and avoid $15 billion a year in costs.
US citizens: call on Obama to publish the full text of the TPP and all pending "trade" agreements.
Canadians:
oppose
the Anti-Civil-Liberties Bill, C-51.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Defending freedom of speech, including the freedom of Charlie Hebdo and others to criticize Islam, and defy its censorship demands, is a separate matter from evaluating Charlie Hebdo's statements in either political or artistic terms.
Courage is a third separate matter. If the Charlie Hebdo writers had previously received death threats (I think they had), and carried on despite the threats, that was courage. Recognizing that is separate from evaluating what Charlie Hebdo said.
I think there is a lot of arrogance and injustice in Islam that deserves condemnation and ridicule.
Iran seized a cargo ship that isn't American, which the US has accepted the obligation to protect.
I suspect that the Marshall Islands are one of the "flags of convenience". Most of the world's cargo ships fly the flag of one of the countries that impose little requirement on ships. This enables the owners of the ship to save money by skimping on safety requirements. Apparently the Marshall Islands flag carries protection by the US Navy as well.
I think the US should cancel arrangements for protection of any shipping unless it flies the US flag and, therefore, complies with US regulations for safety, pay rates, and so on.
Global heating and sea-level rise are pitting humans against tigers in the Sundarbans.
In a century or two, the Sundarbans will be inundated entirely. With time, adjoining areas now inland might become like what the Sundarbans are now. But those areas are full of farmers who will not relinquish their farms willingly to mangrove trees and tigers.
Obama announced with great fanfare new, more strict criteria for drone attacks. He didn't mention that they did not apply to Pakistan.
Poor Americans desperately need their welfare benefits, which add up to a small amount compared with the government benefits for rich Americans.
Thousands attended the funeral of Freddie Gray, which became a protest against the violence and impunity of uniformed thugs.
However, a riot followed, partly provoked by obnoxious racism.
While I don't feel much sympathy when uniformed thugs are attacked, doing so plays into their hands. Meanwhile, burning cars and looting stores is no more justifiable now than at any other time. But this property crime is less grave an issue than homicide.
Nasty statements by some thugs helped provoke the rioting. Eventually the riot was suppressed by soldiers.
UK "aid" to poor countries promotes privatization of medical care and education in them.
UK ministers meet with fossil fuel lobbyists far more than with renewable energy lobbyists.
This is a quantitative way of measuring the UK government's general preference for fossil fuels.
Bills to reform how Maryland deals with thugs that kill and maim were weakened by pressure from thug unions.
Over 100,000 children are trafficked each year in India, many of them sold into domestic slavery.
Saudi Arabia continues bombarding Yemen heavily; the supposed end of the bombardment campaign appears to have been a Putin-style pretense.
In Mexico City, a woman was kept chained and forced to do ironing in a dry-cleaning store.
Systems that make profiles on people to help companies sell to them could be a big help to every unscrupulous company, if they work.
They need a source of personal data. The ones you can't refuse to contribute to are the email services such as gmail that profile the people they receive mail from.
The UN concluded that Israel directly targeted UN facilities in Gaza and is responsible for killing and wounding 250 Palestinians who were sheltering there.
Extreme heat and rain events are happening much more frequently now than over the 20th century, and this has been tied to global heating.
Iran banned a magazine, Today's Women, for writing about unmarried couples that live together.
Iranian officials say that their laws which discriminate against women are not discrimination, on the grounds that they come from religion. I'd say that indicates a religion that discriminates against women.
Poverty in the UK Is As Bad As the 1940s.
US citizens: support debt-free education in public colleges.
Everyone: encourage Montana Governor Bullock to veto anti-abortion bills.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to
support
the constitutional amendment to authorize campaign spending
restrictions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Here are the details.
This doesn't entirely fix the problem of the Corporations United decision, since it does not reject the idea that corporations are entitled to human rights. But it would be a significant step forward.
US citizens: tell Congress to oppose the "fast track" bill for two reasons: not only that the TPP is bad, but because it now defends Israel's occupation of Palestine.
Everyone:
call
on BP to accept responsibility for the Big Spill.
Allowing any group to cry "racism" to deflect substantive criticism
creates a sheltered opportunity for crime and oppression. Here's
one
example of a Bangladeshi politician in the UK.
Another
example is Israel, which falsely labels all criticism of its
occupation policies as "anti-semitism".
Imprisoned Ethiopian blogger Natnael Feleke
asks
the US to stop supporting the Ethiopian tyranny.
Ethiopia is a faithful client state that even went so far as to invade
Somalia for the US. The terrorist organization al-Shabaab is the
result
of that invasion. More often, Ethiopia kicks peasants off their
land for the sake of multinational business.
The coup in Honduras was based on the excuse that President Zelaya had
a plan to change the constitution — after he left office —
so that future presidents could run for reelection.
Now the coup-installed government has
convinced
the Supreme Court to make that very change.
The coup had
signs
of support from the US, and its real motive was
protecting
plutocracy.
A
new coal mine in Australia is likely to wipe out the rare
black-throated finch
as well as parts of
the Great Barrier Reef.
Burning the coal will wipe out a lot more.
US citizens:
oppose
seismic blasting in the Atlantic Ocean. These blasts damage the
hearing of marine mammals.
US citizens:
call on
Obama to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
US citizens:
call on
Democratic leaders to endorse Warren's reform agenda for Wall
Street.
US citizens:
support Senator
Warren: publish the TPP text before any vote on "fast track".
Senator
Warren to Those Promising TPP Would Be So Great: 'Prove It.'
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at 202-224-3121 and say, "Vote
against fast track for the TPP, and oppose all secret trade treaties
negotiated together with businesses."
Everyone (especially those in the UK): write to
office@greenparty.org.uk
to tell the UK Green Party you support its plans to
reconsider
copyright power. Urge the party not to bow to pressure from the
publishers and some egoistical authors.
You might wish to cite
http://gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-vs-community.html.
You might also wish to spread the word via email, blogs and social
media.
According to
IMF data, the total economic benefit from "reduced trade
barriers" amounts to about 5 dollars a year per worker. 43 cents a
month,
more precisely.
This benefit is the purported justification for knocking down wages
and working conditions, and the suppression of democracy
through international
"trade tribunals".
These results confirm that we must demand abolition of the WTO
and all the subsequent "free trade" treaties.
Detroit is
planning to evict 1/7 of its population for not paying
property taxes.
They are too poor to pay.
This surely has some relationship to the
bankruptcy of Detroit
and the state-imposed nondemocratic city management.
In effect, the State of Michigan plans to impose mass homelessness for
the sake of the creditors. If lackeys like that could not be found to
implement the policy, the creditors would be stymied. All these
lackeys, from the appointed city manager to the functionaries that
order evictions to the thugs
that carry them out, should be sentenced
to homelessness so people passing by can spit on them.
I admire the lady who threatened to strip her house of every usable
thing if it were foreclosed. The next logical step would be to wreck
foreclosed houses — or squat in them.
US citizens: call on Obama to
end offshore oil drilling.
US citizens:
call on Obama to veto security bills that endanger
privacy.
US citizens: call on Congress to
pass a moratorium on mountaintop
removal mining.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
US citizens:
call on Congress to reject bills to ban abortion after 20
weeks.
Elective abortion is allowed in the US up to 3 months; after that, a
special reason is already required.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
US citizens:
ask Obama to choose a new head of the DEA who will
reduce mass imprisonment of Americans.
US citizens:
call on Virginia governor McAuliffe to sign the bill
restricting surveillance in Virginia.
500 million dollars worth of US weapons have gone missing in Yemen.
One comforting factor is that that probably is fewer weapons than you
might expect, given the wacky military prices.
US citizens:
call on Congress to avoid an indirect endorsement of
the occupation of Palestine.
US citizens:
oppose the Vitter-Udall bill that would block states
from regulating toxic chemicals.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
You could get turned down for a job based solely on how a program evaluates the sound of your voice.
The issue would not be very important if there were enough good jobs. The policies that spread poverty are the root of the problem.
North Korea is less different from other tyrannical states than we normally suppose. It cannot block the people totally from information about the rest of the world.
Nonetheless, North Korea is unusual among tyrannies to some extent. Its two special characteristics are the continued state of war with South Korea, and the trade embargo imposed by most of the world as a result.
The US poor are now poor in social bonds and relationships as well as in money.
The Senate's Victims of Human Trafficking Act is dangerous in several ways.
When it talks about having the customs agency do more to enforce "intellectual property", I am sure that refers to something bad. Whenever that term is used, something nasty is afoot.
The way to protect children from being forced into prostitution is to legalize prostitution by licensed prostitutes. Customers could be required to check the prostitute's license. If the customer fails to check, that concrete omission would be legitimate grounds for punishment.
Minors should not be denied prostitution licenses in a blanket way, but the state should ask them why they want one and probe their situation, then offer help so they can avoid prostitution.
Don't identify middle-class white Americans with the 1%.
The white Americans who are (still) in the middle class are not downtrodden, but as plutocracy replaced democracy, they too lose political power. Those who have political power today are fewer than 1 percent.
In Australia, due to the recent state secrets law, journalists face the threat of imprisonment for reporting on serious government wrongdoing.
Reducing Australia's greenhouse emissions will be expensive if the only method used is state expenditure.
There is plenty of evidence demonstrating that the genocide of the
Armenians
was
centrally ordered,
and centrally covered up.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Shell Lobbied to Undermine EU Renewables Targets.
Insurance companies sell information about their customers to lawyers who then pester customers looking for their business.
The "affordable" apartments behind the separate "poor door" in New York are unaffordable for any poor person.
New York City has insufficient living quarters for the non-rich. What could fix this? One idea is to increase the taxes on dwellings that are the principal residence of too few people for their size. Another is to change zoning law to allow construction of lots more dwellings. I don't know whether these would be sufficient, but they have to help.
New York City has deployed almost 150 E-ZPass scanners in places that have nothing to do with paying toll.
As usual, the proposed solution is inadequate, because it would not prevent massive state surveillance of people's movements. Systems like E-ZPass should be illegal; toll payment should use anonymous digital cash instead.
Edwin Lyngar explains how, when he was poor, he voted for politicians who wanted to crush the poor — because he thought poverty was a sign he deserved to suffer.
It's illegal for lobbyists to give material gifts to a congresscritter, but not apparently illegal for the lobbyist to go to bed with one.
Chicago may compensate the victims of 30 years of torture by thugs.
Torture is not an effective way to get true information, but in Chicago as elsewhere it works well for extracting false confessions.
The laws against public sitting or lying down, aimed at punishing homeless people, were strangely ignored when people queued up to spend money on iThings.
The US is full of door-to-door magazine salesmen, operating as "independent contractors" for companies that hardly pay them, or even keep them in debt slavery. Many of these companies defraud the people who purchase subscriptions, too.
Several aspects of these companies' practice ought to be banned. I see no harm in prohibiting the practice of contracting non-employees to do this kind of work.
However, the root cause of this problem is the spreading poverty in the US, the cutbacks in welfare, and lack of work through which people have a chance of supporting their families. In other words, dooH niboR.
That's what makes people so desperate that they will come back to this exploitative work.
As Beatriz Paez was making a recording of US marshalls arresting someone, one of them ordered her to stop, then grabbed her phone and crushed it.
Fortunately that criminal attack was caught on another phone.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the thugs that killed a captive also tried to confiscate a video recording of the killing.
The US government claims that Jeffrey Sterling is not a real whistleblower, because he "sabotaged" an operation by revealing to the press that it was misconceived, failing, and useless.
Sabeen Mahmud, Pakistani progressive activist, has been assassinated.
Gene-editing techniques now make it possible to create viruses more dangerous than those found in nature.
Reducing School Bus Pollution Improves Children's Health. And their education, since they are absent less from school.
When the NSA puts a spy or attack technique into use, other countries are sure to follow.
The TTIP would create an international commission to veto business regulations in the US and Europe on behalf of businesses.
TTIP stands for "This Treaty is Plutocratic".
Over 100 defenders of the environment and indigenous people were murdered in 2014. The rate of murder is increasing.
Russia crushes organized opposition by labeling NGOs as "foreign agents", and various sorts of sabotage and harassment.
It's possible some of them really are foreign agents, but working for Putin is more of a betrayal of Russia than working for the US.
How the Tories Dehumanise Low-Paid Families — Or Should I Say, "benefit units."
Some of the Baltimore thug leadership recognize that they need to replace the department's culture of thuggishness.
Due to reforms in the governance of the Los Angeles thug department, thugs that attack citizens are prosecuted, even if the victims survive.
How one middle-class white man discovered how thugs lie in cold blood.
Using a computer network for train signaling creates an opportunity for sabotaging trains through the computers.
Legalization of marijuana is hurting Mexican
drug traffickers and the
DEA.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Hitting two monsters with one stoned.
French citizens: oppose the massive surveillance law.
Cory Doctorow: The regulations applied to internet services have been designed by compromises with the biggest companies, and frequently they would be impossible for any smaller competitor to meet.
Hong Kong has unveiled its system for phony democratic elections, with all candidates to be chosen by China.
When this system is put into effect, I predict they will choose one bad candidate (the equivalent of Clinton) and a few horrible candidates (comparable to Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush), aiming to lure people into campaigning for the bad one. Then they will tend to convince themselves that they really agree with and support that bad candidate, like the majority of Americans whose views on issues are more progressive than Clinton's and Obama's but support them anyway.
The TPP could mean foreign banks could sue the US if it restricts financial derivatives that could cause a financial crisis, and their investors could sue the US if it declines to give the bank a bailout.
In effect, it means the US (and each signatory) would have to align each and every policy to what businesses want, or pay dearly for each divergence.
TPP stands for Treacherous Plutocratic Poison.
Google proposes to give people robotic personal assistants…that spy on them.
Thugs arrested Ervin Edwards for sagging pants, tased him to death in a cell, then lied about what they did.
The first wrong was the initial arrest. Yes, sagging pants are often a gesture of hostility — but freedom of speech includes the right to make gestures.
Deutsche Bank pled guilty to pervasive fraud, and yet nobody was jailed.
Obama admitted that a drone attack killed two western captives of the Taliban, but still refuses to recognize that it was a drone attack, even though we all know this.
The president is unable to remove from our brains the knowledge that these assassinations are done with drones, but his refusal to be straight with the American people about his assassination program is dangerous and unacceptable.
The EU's plan for collecting air passengers' personal data is still too much.
Popeye's acted quickly to offer a new job to Marissa Holcomb.
I once went into a Popeye's, but when they told me they did not sell any spinach, I told them "How can you call yourself Popeye's and not have spinach?" and left without buying anything.
I did this partly on a lark, but I really love spinach and would eagerly have bought some.
International cooperation created a way to receive millions of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It could be applied to today's refugees.
We must also provide more support to refugees in neighboring countries.
There is another attempt in Congress to narrow the CFAA to protect the next Aaron Swartz.
Shortages of water create increased need for electricity, while interfering with generation of electricity. Fracking uses lots of water to extract natural gas.
Thus, when global heating causes drought, we are pushing ourselves into a corner.
Declassified Report Shows Doubts About Value of N.S.A.'s Warrantless Spying
The UK government is privatizing the NHS very fast, and quietly.
Can US propaganda counter Russia's conspiracy ideation?
It is hard to convincingly advocate democracy while practicing plutocracy. The US needs to make itself more honest if it is to get any honest support.
Along with hair identification, other forensic methods may be unreliable; even, in practice, fingerprint identification.
Politically motivated denial of the genocide of the Armenians is comparable to politically motivated denial of the genocide of the Jews.
It won't be easy to stop Libyan people-smugglers by force.
Convincing the government of Eritrea to be less oppressive would reduce the flow.
Researchers found systematic brain differences between 6th grade students from low and high income families.
The Republican Party is having a billionaires' primary.
California presents an example of school reform that rejects the austerity and standardized tests that plague most of the US.
The harm done in the US by mismarketing of drugs is around $27 billion dollars a year, which is comparable to the amount that Big Pharma spends on research.
Patents encourage mismarketing just as they encourage research spending, so it could be that patents do so much harm through mismarketing alone that it outweighs their incentivization of research. But the raw numbers exaggerate the benefit of Big Pharma's research, since it focuses research on developing the next viagra rather than on curing dangerous diseases.
A judge sent General Petraeus a message about leaking government secrets by fining him less than he gets paid for one speech.
That is because Petraeus leaked the secrets for private selfish reasons. Heroes such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who leak secrets for ethical and patriotic reasons, are treated much worse.
A business-motivated scare campaign says Iran carries out lots of cyber attacks against the US, but the claim is bogus. Many are not real attacks, and the rest might not be by Iran.
NYU tried to insist on respect for rights of workers constructing its Abu Dhabi branch, but local contractors took advantages of exceptions to mistreat 10,000 workers.
When will the US apologize to the non-western unintended victims of drone attacks?
Inside Obama's Drone Panopticon: a Secret Machine with No Accountability. Choosing targets based on probabilities implies frequent errors, and frequent killing of civilians.
The root cause of killing so many innocent people is that these attacks are directed at people's homes in areas that are not battlefields. We must recognize the difference between war on a battlefield and assassination of people off the battlefield. The latter is more like terrorism than like war.
It is hard for poor people to avoid getting angry at the rich.
It would be wrong to blame the rich for being rich. We should not give in to envy. The correct and valid reason to blame the rich is that most of them support dooH niboR policies that hurt the poor.
The FBI has replaced integrity with "the end justifies the means".
Marissa Holcomb was working in Popeye's when an armed robber forced her to hand over $400 from the cash registers. The boss told her to repay the money or get fired.
It is wrong to punish Ms Holcomb this way, but she's doing something else that she should not have done. She should not be having another child while her ability to support her existing children is precarious.
Exhaustion of soil is connected to other global environmental problems as well as injustices of the global economy.
We can help reduce all these problems by having fewer children, and make our lives easier and less stressful at the same time.
The Baltimore thug union compared protesters to a "lynch mob".
They are inverting the truth — that it was thugs that killed someone unjustly.
Koch Funding of Universities Shrouded in Secrecy.
A study predicts that clouds (which tend to cool the Earth) will give a little less cooling as global heating continues.
In the sentencing phase of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial, the prosecutors selected one frame out of a video and blocked the defense from explaining the significance of the whole video.
It seems they are trying to mislead and manipulate the jury into a decision to do something wrong (an execution).
The USA Freedom Act has returned, without last year's undermining by Obama.
Ideas for teaching people to reject the War on Poor People.
Refuting Senator Wyden's TPP snow job.
The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Condemning Us to Climate Disaster.
A Korean woman who was forced into prostitution by the Japanese army calls on the prime minister of Japan to stop denying Japan's crimes in World War II.
A project to cover the exploded reactor at Chernobyl is short 300 million dollars.
A nuclear disaster sucks up money for decades. Let's not make more of them.
US drone attacks often kill civilians, but the state tries to duck the issue. When, by luck, one of the victims turned out to be an American prisoner of the Taliban, the US had to admit it, which shone a spot of light on this.
Drones plus secret policies for using them add up to secret wars.
The sloppy antirationality of New Age thinking proved to be fertile ground for dishonest business.
Most Muslim countries deny religious freedom to its citizens. Here's a list of countries
that forbid ceasing to be a Muslim:
Afghanistan, Bahrain, Comoros, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, UAE, Yemen.
In addition, the situation in Morocco is unclear; there is no law punishing this, but there is a fatwa threatening to kill.
Some parts of Northern Nigeria have adopted Muslim law. They are not supposed to apply it to non-Muslims, but it is not clear that Muslims there can safely stop.
I think countries should require immigrants and permanent residents to affirm, in a video for publication, that the principle of religious freedom applies to everyone, and that it includes the freedom to leave any religion as well as the freedom to join any religion.
Documents prove that Franco's forces singled out Federico García Lorca and murdered him.
The proposed FAA regulations for drones do not consider the surveillance issue.
To protect the public's right to anonymity, we need to regulate systems that record, including fixed cameras as well as terrestrial, aquatic and aerial drones. More generally, we need to prevent the collection of information about people's movements in public places, except for individuals subject to court-ordered surveillance.
Obscurity, making it hard to find and correlate all the data about you, can play a useful role. However, in order for obscurity to block governments from collecting and correlating all of that data, we need more than procedural limits. Systems must be designed so that collecting and correlating the data about any one person is substantial work, and there is no economy of scale to doing this about everyone in parallel.
Protesters are marching every night in Baltimore over the killing of Freddie Gray by thugs.
Exxon was fined half a day's profits for the pipeline break in Mayflower, Arkansas.
Earth Day has been coopted by businesses for greenwashing.
Clinton has been more of a militarist than Obama, and has been a good friend of dictators.
US standardized tests threaten both teachers and students with punishment if they talk after the test about what was in it.
Teachers are required to sign a commitment never to fail to enforce this cruel policy.
Lying to a tyrant is no wrong. These agreements are morally void, just like the End User License Agreement of a proprietary program. Teachers who can't refuse to sign are morally obligated to disobey.
Parents should tell their schools, "I don't want my child to be taught by people that sign such an agreement, unless they promise me they will not carry it out."
Medical marijuana activist Shona Banda's son was taken away, apparently because of her use of medical marijuana.
"Right to work" laws in some US states should be called "right to less pay" laws: where they exist, they cost the average worker $1500 a year.
Landowners in Brazil are pushing a constitutional amendment to make it easier to take land away from indigenous people.
Azerbaijan has imprisoned two human rights defenders based on bogus charges for the sake of an appearance of tranquility for the European Games.
Prominent sports events tend to create pressure and opportunity to make political problems worse.
Comcast's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable is probably dead.
Thanks to those who signed petitions against this.
The idea of requiring drone software to restrict where drones can fly is very dangerous. It would amount to a ban on free software for drones.
The article gives far too much legitimacy to the idea that people should not be allowed to change software in cars. As a possible cause of accidents, that will be tiny compared with (1) working on the mechanical part of the brakes and (2) driving while tired, distracted or ill.
The Sun Must Go Down on the Patriot [sic] Act.
That law's proponents called it the "USA PATRIOT Act" to manipulate Americans; the name is propaganda for the idea that a patriotic American should favor warrantless surveillance of Americans. Using that name endorses that position.
I call it the "PAT RIOT" or "U SAP AT RIOT" act to show my rejection of that position.
Since "USAPATRIOT" is an acronym, we can split it into separate words as we wish with equal legitimacy. "U SAP AT RIOT" is just as correct as "USA PATRIOT".
The Canadian government plans to extend copyright on phonorecords: a windfall for record companies with a large expected cost to society as a whole.
The US-supported bombing of Yemen has protracted the civil war. The continued fighting is causing great suffering and ingraining hostility on both sides.
Coral reefs may disappear by 2050 due to our CO2 emissions.
Morocco has influenced the Clintons by giving money to their foundation.
A journalist from The Intercept was barred from the "Counter Terror Expo".
We Can't Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership.
I'm glad that they have got out of the DMCA exemption rut and returned to advocating permanent change to the DMCA itself.
European governments are planning to send most boat refugees from Africa back to Africa rapidly without considering their cases for asylum.
Those who are fleeing repression, in places such as Eritrea, should not be forced to go back there. But perhaps they can find a safe asylum in another African country.
House Passes Cybersecurity Bill Despite Privacy Protests.
The claim that improving security protects privacy is disingenuous, because protecting privacy from crooks does not substitute for protecting privacy from the state. The state has far more power, so the danger of its knowing too much about everyone is far greater.
The Biggest Threat to the Earth? We [or most of us, at least] Have Too Many Kids.
China's one-child policy has done tremendous good; it is too bad that India didn't have one, as it might have avoided suicides like this one.
In China as in India, people often get no compensation when driven off their land, but in wealthier China you might find another way to get by.
Programs that can recognize people's emotions will enable companies to manipulate people.
Helping to protect gorillas by providing contraception to humans around their habitat.
Several LA thugs are being prosecuted for attacking people with kicks, punches or sticks — people who were shackled or not resisting.
When work is "flexible" for the employer, it becomes an inflexible shackle for the employee, who can't make plans and often can't get enough work.
One proponent of an "anti-cancer diet" admits fabricating her claim that it cured her. She never had cancer at all.
Even without an intentional liar, people easily convince each other that a remedy is working when really it does nothing. You should not believe an alternative remedy works without a controlled experiment demonstrating efficacy.
Companies are now organizing state attorneys general to lobby for them.
Bees cannot taste neonicotinoids, so cannot choose to avoid them. But they may get addicted to them.
In the UK, the Tory and Labour parties plan to increase massive general surveillance.
Reject them — vote Green.
People in New Guinea still believe that deaths are caused by curses, and seek to kill the "witches" responsible.
Persecution of "witches" is common in Africa. The idea that it is possible to kill by magic seems to be a world-wide pattern of superstition; it was found in most places in the world. The awareness that this is impossible is due to modern rationalism.
In Mexico, according to a book I read, some "witches" really can kill — with toxic bacteria or fungus they find in caves, not with curses.
It is not easy to convince men in Sierra Leone to stop transmitting Ebola virus through sex.
A cook in the (outsourced) US Senate cafeteria is on strike. He has to work 70 hours a week and still needs food stamps, so low is the pay of the company that has the contract.
Don't confuse trafficking people with smuggling people.
The Missouri National Guard, in reacting to protests in Ferguson, officially referred to protesters as "enemy forces".
That's what you'd expect the forces of a government of occupation to say about the occupied people.
The thug who beat up Floyd Dent in Inkster, near Detroit, faces three criminal charges.
It would be great, for once, to see a uniformed thug get punished for such crimes. But it won't be easy: many in the criminal justice system have surrendered their honor to the desire for a good cooperative relationship with the thugs.
Israelis and Palestinians are trying to organize a joint event in Israel. Fanatical Israeli colonists have asked the government to sabotage it by keeping the Palestinians away.
When Israeli thugs arrested 'Ali Talji Ya'qub, they also punched and kicked his brother and left him unconscious on the street.
Israeli intelligence regularly uses torture on Palestinians and extracts false confessions.
Israel treats shooting an unarmed Palestinian dead as a minor infraction.
This Declassified CIA Report Shows the Shaky Case for the Iraq War.
Overfishing threatens the ecosystem of the Great Barrier Reef.
A killer thug in Chicago was acquitted of manslaughter because the judge said the killing was more like murder. But the prosecutor was unwilling to charge the thug with murder.
Vietnam has gone from oppressive communism to corrupt capitalism.
A Vietnamese novel by Duong Thu Hong, that I read in French, presents junior party leaders as corrupt and cynical already in 1975. What is certain is that the Vietnamese state established an oppressive system of labor camps after capturing Saigon. But it appears, from this article, that it tried to protect workers — until it surrendered to US economic warfare.
I visited Vietnam in 2004 when it was about to join the WTO. I told the people I knew, "You fought to kick out France, then the US. Now you are going to invite in the WTO, which is the empire that rules France and the US. What foolishness!"
Later, at a meeting in Cambodia in 2005, a representative of the Vietnamese government compared the WTO's rules to the rules of soccer. My response made everyone laugh at him, since the rules of soccer are designed to be fair, whereas the rules of the WTO are designed to be unfair. Alas, that minor embarrassment didn't alter the trajectory of the Vietnamese state.
The US is considering spending billions to make energy systems cope with the damage from global heating.
We really should be investing billions in reducing global heating. Even better, reduce global heating by eliminating the tax breaks for fossil fuels. That would save the treasury money.
A single trader is accused of manipulating markets with rapid computerized trading which allegedly caused a 1000-point stock market crash in 2010.
Bloomberg: Break the NRA's Ban on Gun-Violence Research.
Michael McAlister's prison term of 29 years is over. It is now almost certain he was not guilty in the first place. But he will be kept in prison for life, unless he confesses to the rape he did not do.
We Didn't Learn Anything From Deepwater Horizon — And We're Going to Pay For It.
None so blind as officials paid not to see.
The principal lessons of the Big Spill: undersea oil well leaks can't be cleaned up, but they can be prevented by not drilling.
The US role in creating the current civil war in Yemen.
The article doesn't explain why the US went from using its arms to defend Saleh to supporting Saudi Arabia in bombing Saleh's allies.
Sony is making legal threats against media organizations, demanding that they not report on the leaked Sony emails.
As governments propose inadequate measures against global heating, environmental activists in many countries are getting murdered.
Obama provided his campaign email lists to send out nonsensical spin in favor of the TPP.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Americans were falsely convicted based on the bogus technique of hair identification. The FBI has admitted it is bogus, but states resist freeing the victims of this.
The cause is, prosecutors simply hate to admit that the legal system can make a mistake. Some can overcome this, but many aim to defend every last error.
US citizens: phone 202-224-312 and ask your congresscritter to sign the Schakowsky letter in favor of nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
Everyone: call on Nestle to stop bottling water in California.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and your senators to oppose the TPP. Say it is wrong to give foreign companies more rights than US citizens, and urge them to oppose both "fast track" and the TPP itself.
I've read (in a mass emailing) that many members of Congress are undecided on the issue. We need you to influence them.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: Call on the US Justice Department to prosecute CIA torturers.
Citizens' groups of many countries urge the European Commission to defend people's privacy.
The usual bad computer security, in a "smart city", makes it a sabotageable city.
Insurance companies are trying to prod the US government to change its policies towards the likely future not-so-natural disasters.
The cheapest way to prepare for these is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but fossil fuel companies don't want that to be discussed.
How To Tell If The Article About Climate You Are Reading Is B.S., In Four Easy Steps.
Baltimore thugs broke Freddie Gray's neck, and denied him medical attention for hours. He subsequently died as a result. How much they maimed him when arresting him, and how much they did it inside the thug van, is not clear.
His relatives believe the thug department is keeping evidence secret so as to construct an excuse to protect the thugs responsible.
U.S. and Russian Generals Call for Reducing the Risk of Inadvertent Nuclear War.
A robot cook will pave the way for proprietary recipes that users can't see.
United Airlines tried to protect itself from thinking about the bad
security of airplane systems, claimed by a security researcher, by
banning
him from flying.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
In developed countries, we must reject the expensive habit of bottled water.
Günter Grass, Haruki Murakami And the Importance of National Guilt.
Australia plans to deny tax exemption to organizations that give legal aid to people protecting their rights from abuses by businesses.
The sanctions against Iran hit medical charities, students, even architecture competitions.
Sanctions enforcement inevitably has uncertainty. To prevent that uncertainty from being gamed by Iran requires turning all the uncertainty into fear for banks, universities, contests, etc. That inevitably leads to over-application.
An Australian university offers a course in refuting the arguments of global heating denialists.
Israeli fanatics object to including a murdered Arab boy in the memorial to victims of terrorism.
Morsi was sentenced to prison for a fatal fight between his supporters and protesters, while he was president of Egypt.
Will al-Sisi be tried for the murder of over a thousand Morsi supporters by thugs, shortly after the military coup? Not likely.
A year after Boko Haram kidnaped 276 girls from Chibok, there is still no school in the town.
It makes no sense to build a new school there if it would be a magnet for another kidnaping. If security been reestablished sufficiently to make that unlikely, it is important to restart school there.
Students at the University of Western Australia are protesting the government's plan to establish a global heating denial center there.
The government is a tool for the fossil fuel companies and has already promoted denialism.
Machines are becoming able to make fine judgments better than humans can. Many jobs that require training and skill are in danger of elimination. They also give employers more power over employees in other jobs.
In the short term, we should ban some kinds of machines that would automate many jobs. In the longer term, we need to reorganize society so that people don't need to find work.
Russia's Leading Environmentalist Flees to Estonia to escape threats to take away her children.
Such threats happen in the US as well.
In Louisiana, a state senator that supports the interests of the oil companies is openly on their payroll.
The Summit of the Americas is principally an opportunity for businesses to scheme and lobby.
1/6 of black men in the US are absent from society — they are either in prison or died young.
The reason so many Eritreans try to flee to Europe is that their country is ruled by a dictatorship which uses the people as slaves.
Ukraine is planning a law to ban Communist and Nazi symbols and criminalize disagreement with the official line on history.
This is inexcusable tyranny, comparable to the tyranny found in France and Turkey.
The UK Green Party manifesto has many good proposals.
I am disappointed by the absence of a proposal to repeal the crime of squatting.
A oil leak running since 2004 may have leaked more oil than the Big Spill, but the public can't tell because everything about it is a trade secret.
WHO said that its initial response to the Ebola outbreak was not strong enough to quash the outbreak, so it plans to develop a large response team for the future.
After publishing a statement, it then edited the statement to be less self-critical.
Chelsea Manning's diplomatic cables included a warning of the Big Spill, because one reported that BP had had a similar explosion in the Caspian Sea.
Oil companies sponsor art projects as a way of buying favorable public opinion.
Those fossil fuel magnates, the Koch brothers, sponsor science museums.
Restoring the estate tax as it was before Dubya's cuts would cover the cost of college education for all Americans.
It would have the side benefit of curbing the increase of inequality, which harms society overall in many ways.
The "USA Freedom Act" would only correct part of the PAT RIOT Act. It would continue to be used to excuse massive surveillance. We need more than that.
Not all massive US government surveillance is based on the PAT RIOT Act; even eliminating it would not solve the whole problem. For instance, surveillance by license plate cameras has nothing to do with that law, but it is dangerous.
Everyone: support the campaign to protect the right to post links.
US citizens: oppose privatizing US public land.
US citizens: call on the Forest Service to stop Nestle from extracting water in California. Since Nestle's permit has expired, it is not legally entitled to extract any more water.
US citizens: call for elimination of tax subsidies for fossil fuels.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to
oppose
"fast track" for the
TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
TPP: Treason, Plutocracy, Plunder
It means paying foreign corporations not to pollute.
It means trashing consumer protection, and unsafe food.
US citizens:
oppose
increases in military spending.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Some colleges now track a student's every keystroke, and use algorithms to predict whether they will fail.
It is a short step from there to presuming who will fail. But even collecting this data is a violation of privacy.
Hamas reports capturing an Israeli "butterfly drone" the size of a small bird.
Five Disturbing Things About The FBI And Local Police Stingray Surveillance Programs.
An anti-eviction protester in the UK is threatened with a long prison term for "squatting".
Squatting must be legalized again. Does any party say it will legalize squatting?
Ocean 'Dead Zones' a Growing Disaster for Fish.
US hotel chains that make billions say they can't afford to pay workers a living wage.
Fossil fuel companies are trying to smash Germany's greenhouse gas emissions goals.
It is the usual short-term idiocy, arguing for global disaster later rather than some hardship sooner.
The UK Greens understand how serious the situation is. They propose to increase renewable energy as fast as possible, as if it were a war for survival. Which, in fact, it is.
We can't afford to slow down merely because that would be more efficient, as if we had all the time in the world.
Israel's slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians proceeds through an intentionally kafkaesque application of laws.
A
campaign
against mass imprisonment in the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Australia's anti-protest repression was very effective: when 120,000 protesters were expected at the G20, only 1000 dared come.
The latest version of the US "cybersecurity" bill still has the big flaw that companies could disregard users' privacy "voluntarily".
Unacceptable Surveillance of French Citizens Soon To Be Adopted!
Carbon Reserves Held by Top Fossil Fuel Companies Soar.
The EU's anti-trust case against Google doesn't even try to alter Google's collection of so much data about people.
Existing anti-trust law, by focusing on whether companies engage in unfair competition, fails to protect the public interest. Even if a company gets big only by "doing a good job", the resulting situation enables it to engage in various abuses, and by that point it may be too late to arrange for it to have competitors again.
Beyond that, the sheer size of companies makes it had for businesses
to regulate them, and that is dangerous in itself. We need to go
beyond laws to protect competition and start
preventing
companies from getting too big.
[Reference updated on 2022-07-15 because the
old
link was broken.]
Israel's Supreme Court approved the law that bans advocating a boycott of products made by Israeli businesses in the illegal colonies in Palestinian territory.
We who are outside Israel must push this boycott.
Towns in the Wild West had stricter gun control in the 1800s than they have today.
A 14-year-old in Florida faces a felony charge because he changed the desktop picture on a teacher's computer.
Little harmless pranks are hacking. This should not be a crime at all.
Germany carried out genocide in Namibia at the start of the 20th century, and has apologized for it.
It is useful to report on this crime — I did not know about it, and I am glad to inform people. However, the article is too harsh on Pope Francis for not knowing about it. Give us a break!
A study estimates the value of public domain photos in Wikipedia as
around
$250
million dollars per year.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
In other words, this is the value of just part of the benefit that we get from the fact that the copyrights on photos thru 1923 have expired in the US.
If we wipe out the copyrights on more recent photos, the additional benefit will probably be substantial too.
The War on Terrorism Targets Democracy Itself.
Germany finds that mandatory data retention makes very little difference to preventing crime or catching criminals.
Censorship is wrong; catching people who distribute censored publications can't justify anything.
Nevada passed an anti-SLAPP law two years ago. Now some legislators have sneakily planned to get rid of it.
Some restaurants in the UK now ask patrons to pay however much they wish.
The Tulsa thug that shot Eric Harris dead "by mistake" falsely claimed to have suitable training, and other deputies were ordered to support the falsehood.
The US has a social media manipulation program to match Russia's.
Syrian rebels kidnaped Richard Engel and pretended they were Assad supporters. Engel was initially fooled, later found out the truth. NBC then disregarded the correction and broadcast the initial lies.
A student's mother reports what abstinence-only sex "education" really teaches.
150,000 students in New York State boycotted standardized tests.
For journalists to pay officials for the government's dirty secrets can be legitimate journalism.
An example of "investor-state" treaty injustice: an international corporate "court" ruled that Argentina owes a French company $400 million for cancelling privatization of water in Buenos Aires.
That the company did not keep its promises was considered irrelevant.
This is the most important reason we must defeat the TPP and the TTIP (This Treaty Is Plutocratic).
Japan's population is slowly falling.
If only the same were true for the rest of humanity, our problems would be a lot easier to cope with.
I think public water should be sold at market rates, except that each person should get a certain reasonable amount gratis. ("Person" does not include corporations; they are not persons.)
US Military Working to Build Sensors That Never Die, Enabling Persistent Surveillance in Remote Places.
The head of the Labour Party asked for support from "moderate Tories".
It should change its name to the "Moderate Tory" party; then non-rich Britons can start a new Labour Party that stands for the non-rich.
Bigotry against dalits is pervasive in India. Teachers in a school forced dalit students to clean the toilets after school hours, which is not unusual, but this time it sparked protests.
With work spreading into non-work life, increasingly people are ordered to smile all the time.
Although humanity has curbed emissions of chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone hole they produce is just beginning to heal.
Despite what Billionaire Polluters says, parts of the gulf coast are still missing species that they used to harvest, and people carry toxins from the oil and the dispersant in their blood.
BP is spending some of its billions to brainwash the local people that the problems they see don't exist.
Six questions progressives insist Clinton must answer.
I could add another one, about pervasive surveillance.
World Bank-Funded Projects Fueling Land Grabs, Displacement of Global Poor.
The World Bank and the Battle for the Future of Farming.
World Bank Fossil Fuel Financing Leapt in 2014 Despite Its Calls to End Subsidies.
A study finds US teachers judge fictional students more harshly when the students have names associated with black Americans.
Xochimilco's canals and farms are threatened by construction promoted by a violent network of corrupt officials.
In the name of fighting racism and terrorism, France has increased repression for insulting thugs. The punishment is not limited to insults by terrorists, or to thugs that belong to minority groups. It applies to anyone that insults any thug.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to criticize, offend, insult or mock any person, organization, idea or practice. It includes the freedom to say things we disapprove of. France does not respect freedom of speech.
You can't crush an idea by banning it — not even a bad idea, such as bigotry.
World Bank Fossil Fuel Financing Leapt in 2014 Despite Its Calls to End Subsidies.
Corrupt Senator Dodd has become even more corrupt: he is now a lobbyist.
TSA agents steal from passengers' baggage, and sometimes destroy suitcases, even suitcases that are not locked.
Arkansas lawyer Matt Campbell gave the thugs a disk to load with evidence they were legally required to turn over. They put trojan horse programs on it along with the data.
Chef Joan Cheever gave food to the homeless with her car, rather than her food truck, and faces a fine of $2000 for this.
Cheever will argue that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act permits her to give food to the homeless as a loving expression of her religion. Amen! But Atheists like me should also be allowed to help the hungry.
Relatives of civilians killed by a US drone attack in Yemen are suing the US in Germany.
Germany provides support to drone attacks in Yemen.
The US has manufactured excuses to disregard all such cases, so they have to look for some other way to demand compensation.
Facebook's scheme that favors certain internet sites, making them gratis for users to access, is as noxious to net neutrality as schemes that artificially slow sites down.
Cutting the Amazon rain forest in Peru to grow cacao and palm oil.
The US government will now admit that a person is on the no-fly list, but only after that person asks after having been blocked from a flight.
Blocking a person from flying is a denial of that person's ordinary rights, so it can only be justified as a punishment for a crime.
A gay TSA agent finagled excuses to "pat down" attractive male passengers. At least someone got something positive out of the Theater of Security Agency.
I generally ask the agents if I could be patted down by woman. "Why should only gays get to enjoy this?"
Wikileaks republished the Sony emails and documents to demonstrate the connections between Sony and the Democratic Party.
Part of what these emails reveal is how media companies are lobbying for the TPP.
Halting Intentional Climate Inaction.
Los Angeles has dropped its program to give an iBad to every student.
Good riddance — but many students will encounter schools that try to make them carry computers with proprietary software. Defending your freedom entails refusing to use them.
The new face of France's extreme right-wing.
The Front National generally has a policy of both encouraging and forcing women to have babies. That is not only unfair to the women, it is dangerous for society.
A Hong Kong protester demands to know the names of the thugs that attacked him, so he can prosecute them.
Bravo!
Australia's proposed copyright repression could ban VPNs.
The international copyright censorship system increasingly comes to resemble China's political censorship system. Evidently the motive for censorship is a minor detail: it comes to the same thing.
We must reject the War on Sharing at the root, not quibble about the details of its repression.
After the Big Spill, which pushed the limits of undersea oil drilling, oil companies have pushed the limits even further.
Cost presents pressure to cut corners and increase the risk. This tends to create a feedback loop which servos the level of risk to one where accidents happen as often as the public will stand for.
Mohamed Nasheed, climate hero, has been imprisoned by a military coup. We should campaign to have him released.
I wonder if fossil fuel companies' money had something to do with the coup.
Blackwater's legacy: spreading the use of mercenaries around the world.
Hiring companies to do fighting is dangerous because it augments the military-industrial complex.
Elizabeth Warren rebukes the SEC and the Justice Department for not trying to prosecute Wall Street criminals under existing laws.
China confirmed a plan for more repression by imprisoning the journalist that published it.
A private probation enforcement company in Georgia holds people for ransom, imposing arbitrary fees and jailing them if they don't immediately pay.
In the US:
tell
the School Nutrition Association to stop lobbying against fruits
and vegetables in school lunches.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
That organization's name, like those of many lobbying associations, is deceptive. It should be called the School Junk Food Association.
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter to support the FAIR Act, which would
partially eliminate the injustice of "civil asset forfeiture".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
New Yorkers: call for Bratton's militarized thug unit to be canceled.
US citizens: call on Congress to respect network neutrality.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose "fast track" for the TPP.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens:
support
the EPA's plan to require big efficiency improvements for heavy
trucks.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on Clinton to endorse a ban on fracking.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
I do not support Clinton, because I do not expect her to support good policies like this. But let's pressure her and give her a chance to be better than we expect.
US citizens:
call
on the Department of the Interior to block Shell's Arctic oil
drilling.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the EPA to ban neonicotinoid pesticides.
Everyone:
call
on Wisconsin to retract its order for some officials not to use
the term "climate change".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Ironically, the term "climate change" was imposed by Republicans around 13 years ago in an attempt to disguise the issue that was then called "global warming".
I call it "global heating" to show the gravity of the problem.
US citizens: oppose coal mining in "roadless" Colorado public lands.
Everyone: Tell Ace and True Value to stop selling neonicotinoid pesticides.
PISSI is attacking again in Iraq, and capturing Ramadi.
Privatization of water supply is a scheme for private profit from public investment.
When for-profit businesses get involved in public services, the profit comes from shafting the public or the employees.
A protest against a chemical plant's pollution in China was crushed by 2,000 thugs. It must have been a rather large protest.
The people are probably getting sick from the polluted water.
The Australian government has no money for the poor, but it is funding global heating denialism.
The genocide of the Armenians was started 100 years ago.
In Turkey, as in France, it is impossible to speak honestly about this issue. Under those countries' censorship laws, one must choose between risking prosecution and parroting the official line. Hrant Dink, hero of freedom of speech, was prepared to defy both countries to prosecute him for talking about history. If you are in one of those countries and not prepared to go to that length, I recommend that you respond to the subject by saying that censorship makes honest discussion of the question impossible in that country.
Since I am not in Turkey or France, I can speak freely about the subject. I condemn the genocide of the Armenians.
This does not mean condemnation of Turks or Turkey today. Those who carried out the genocide of the Armenians are dead. Turkey's duty today is to confront its past honestly. The Turks and Turkey of today cannot inherit culpability for a wrong committed 100 years ago, but if they deny or defend that wrong, they make themselves culpable for it.
Every country with a long history has crimes in that history. Every country needs to acknowledge these crimes to go forward honestly, and apologize for them to go forward ethically. To deny national crimes corrupts the spirit. To ask which country's crime is worse is a distraction.
The government of Turkey corrupts the national spirit by denying the genocide of the Armenians. The government of Japan likewise corrupts the national spirit by denying its past crimes, including forcing women into prostitution.
The US has recognized that it stole land from indigenous peoples, and apologized for imprisoning Japanese-Americans. But Republicans in the US are actively campaigning to cover up a more recent crime: Dubya's lies that were the pretext for the conquest and invasion of Iraq. Woe to the US if it swallows this lie.
A professor at Northwestern University faces the threat of disciplinary action for expressing disagreement with current policy towards handling accusations of rape or not-quite-rape.
Big businesses use "trade associations" to lobby the EU to continue unchecked fossil fuel use.
If your MEP has given a phone number to a representative of a "trade association", you need a different one.
Shell's "plan" for handling an oil spill in the Arctic is pure fiction. The only purpose it serves is as an excuse to pretend there is a plan.
A new treaty indemnifies nuclear reactor companies from essentially any harm that the reactors might do.
The US recognizes that it put Ahmad Rabbani in Guantanamo based on mistaken identity, but still refuses to release him.
TV coverage of the California drought hardly ever mentions "climate change" or "global warming".
Neither of those terms reflects the magnitude of the danger. That's why I call it "global heating".
Senator Sanders exposed the cruelty of Rand Paul, who wants the state to tell old people with no food to turn to "noble private charity". When "noble private charity" doesn't show up, they will have to beg.
If Republicans think that poor people should beg, why do they pass laws against begging? Why do they make so many people homeless, if they hate the homeless so much?
I think they regard anyone not useful to the plutocrats as superfluous, and would like to get rid of them — not Nazi-style with death camps, but out of sight by hunger and sickness.
Ex-thug Jeffrey Walker admits he planted drugs (i.e., framed people) so many times he has lost count of them.
I would be skeptical of anything a thug says as a witness; they are habituated to "testilying" (as they call it) so they know how to make it appear they are telling the truth.
California is considering a bill to ban thugs from looking at their own camera footage before reporting what they did.
This is very important.
Coal polluters' latest lie: that burning a lot of coal would help the world's poor.
The global heating effects would be disastrous for them.
In Spain, protest of nearly any kind is forbidden by blanket repression. The only kind of protest remains possible is a hologram.
It's clever, but it won't defeat the repression. What that requires is for masses to occupy the city and spit on the fines.
Shona Banda is a medical marijuana activist. Her son talked back to a prohibition propaganda presentation in school, so thugs grabbed him, searched her house for marijuana, and now are trying to take away custody of her son.
The article refers to a youtube video. Please do not watch it directly, since that would require running nonfree software.
Voter ID in Australia has the same effect as in the US: it tends to disenfranchise old people, disadvantaged minority groups, and the disabled.
US thugs still arrogantly interfere with people recording them, and make threats of revenge.
We need to jail them for this.
Rouhani says Iran will not accept a nuclear deal unless all sanctions are lifted immediately.
This demonstrates that sanctions can be effective in convincing a country to make a deal. But this effectiveness depends on willingness to end the sanctions in exchange for a reasonable deal. If the US offers no carrot, it will get nothing.
Perhaps the sanctions could be reimposed automatically if the the deal collapses.
A German air traffic control organization calls for a remote control piloting feature for airplanes.
As a step toward this, it may already be possible to take control of an air liner using the WiFi on board.
But I won't do it, because they typically require nonfree Javascript, and require users to identify themselves (I won't identify myself to connect to the net).
When Khalifah al-Akili realized the FBI was trying to entrap him as a "terrorist", he called in journalists to document what was happening.
On many dimensions, humanity is pushing the world past safe limits.
Blackwater mercenaries were convicted of murdering civilians in Iraq and given long prison sentences.
Al-Shabaab's massacre at Garissa University continued hours longer because corruption delayed the arrival of the commandos who were sent to defeat the attackers.
Using the operational plane for training seems like a mistake, too. It's not corrupt, but it's asking for trouble. They ought to have another plane for training.
A new lawsuit against SeaWorld demands only that it cease its false statements about the welfare of orcas.
Let's not romanticize orcas. The name "killer whale" is a transposition of "whale killer". In fact, some groups of orcas make a habit of ganging up on a family of larger whales in order to kill the family's young, then eat only the tongues and leave the rest. (Orcas are intelligent enough that different groups have different practices.) That's nature for you.
But that doesn't make it good to capture them and treat them with prolonged cruelty.
Congress and Obama agreed on a scheme to permit a possible nuclear deal with Iran.
Congress Is STILL Trying to Destroy Net Neutrality.
The dispersant used by Billionaire Polluters after the Big Spill is more toxic to coral than the oil.
Suing Facebook based on an Illinois biometric law that covers face recognition databases.
Antarctica is melting faster; NASA now projects 10 feet of sea level rise by 2100. However, other catastrophes will come faster. Forests in North and South America are dying already.
Obama grasps at straws to claim environmentalists support the TPP.
Obama's own support for the TPP reveals he is really on the side of business against the US.
The danger of driving while black has increased since 2002.
Fracking in Pennsylvania is releasing radioactive, carcinogenic radon gas, increasing the amount that seeps from the ground into people's homes.
Here's the
full data.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Murdoch media still publish articles full of nonsense about CO2 emissions and their consequences.
This is a conspiracy — between media companies, mouthpieces for hire, and fossil fuel companies which have lots of money to spend to keep us burning too much fossil fuel.
A disabled Briton expected that Cameron, who had a disabled son, would feel compassion for the disabled.
If Cameron were capable of compassion, he would not be a Tory.
Billionaire Polluters abandoned large renewable energy projects in the 1990s to focus on fossil fuels.
The tyrant of Belarus has done what many right-wing politicians would like to do: make it a crime to be unemployed.
World Bank projects force poor people out of their homes with no compensation, then burn fossil fuel.
New Zealand's spy service operated in Bangladesh, giving information to Bangla spy agencies that practiced torture and murder.
The UK's supposed initiative to close some tax havens was a sham to forestall real action against them, a minister at the time told one of those tax havens.
You would not expect right-wing plutocrats to shut down tax-dodging by rich people or big businesses. Those are the masters they have sold out their country to.
Finland is having a long-term economic decline.
Finland should vote for a government that will insist on saving Greece now, so that Finland can be saved later.
Metal detectors at major league baseball games are an example of irrational fear-exaggerating security theater.
Six former Ukrainian politicians have died in suspicious circumstances in two months.
It is not clear whether they are suicides or murders.
Tens of thousands of low-paid US workers protested demanding a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
I am in favor of it.
Ethiopia has repressed journalists and political opposition as well as the peasants that objected to the loss of their land.
Pakistan officials are hiding and altering documents to ensure that Shafqat Hussain gets executed.
Doug Hughes protested against buying of laws by landing an ultralight gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn with letters for congresscritters.
Of course he was arrested. We will see how eager the US government is to find excuses to imprison dissidents for harmless protests.
If we value art, we must not let art schools become expensive finishing schools for the children of the elite.
The low wages paid restaurant workers in the US place a large burden on the public, paying for welfare benefits so the workers can get by.
Divest Harvard has blockaded two administrative buildings as a protest.
Alumni camped out in a building where the Alumni Association had refused to talk with them.
The Veterans Administration accessed medical records of whistleblowers looking for some means to discredit them.
The EU group which is supposed to study the environmental dangers of fracking has been taken over by representatives of fossil fuel companies.
Some courageous Muslim women call for reinterpretation of their religion to respect women's equal rights.
Thugs grabbed the Meitiv family's children simply for being outdoors, and held them for hours without telling their parents. Later they demanded the parents ransom them by agreeing never to leave them alone.
I do not think the parents should have caved in on this vital point. Since one of the children is 10 years old, I think that they could understand together what it means to be kidnaped by "authorities", and that an honorable rescue may take time.
When I was 10 years old, today's insane American overprotectiveness had not yet developed. It did not occur to anyone to claim that children shouldn't go out by themselves in Manhattan.
Tracking devices for children are very popular. Their marketing build up parents' anxiety so that they will buy "protection".
The result is to teach young people to accept being tracked all the time.
Republicans propose another tax cut for millionaires.
A black 14-year-old was executed in 1944 after being pressured into a confession. Most of what happened to him could still happen today.
Being working poor in America is even worse because of the callous tendency to tell the poor that it's their own fault.
It's the fault of the plutocrats who imposed policies to give themselves more and the rest of us less. So let's attack those plutocrats and take back what they grabbed.
Researchers identified some of the toxins intentionally added to fracking fluid to kill bacteria in the well. If they leak into groundwater, they can poison it.
If you have a miscarriage in Georgia, religious pharmacists may refuse your prescription for misoprostol.
A US trade court claimed additional power that could offer movie companies a way to impose censorship as in SOPA.
This illustrates the sort of harm that the bogus concept of "intellectual property" can cause. By associating unrelated laws and treating them as one "thing", it encourages policies that treat all these laws the same way.
The MPAA is a face of the big movie companies. Whatever it does, they are really doing. Don't let them attack you with one face while pretending with the other face to be something other than your enemy.
The Hedge Clippers protest the billionaires getting rich by squeezing the poor.
Towns across the US are unprivatizing their water supplies, but the TPP could put an end to that.
Everyone: ask the Washington Post to treat killer thugs as it treats other killers, by publishing their names when writing about them.
Thatcher's "right to buy" public housing apartments left Britain with insufficient public housing and thus contributed to today's homelessness. The Tory solution: do more of it.
What the UK needs is to legalize squatting again.
Does the Labour Party advocate this? What about the Green Party?
Ethiopians Talk of Violent Intimidation As Their Land Is Earmarked for Foreign Investors.
Under a dictatorship such as Ethiopia, nothing that the government encourages is truly voluntary.
A Japanese court blocked plans to restart of some nuclear reactors. The court simply followed the applicable safety criteria and concluded that the plants are unsafe and vulnerable to earthquakes.
Japan should start building up solar and wind power. It is a great way to boost the economy, too.
Iran will finally give Jason Rezaian a chance to discuss the charges against him with his lawyer — for a total of one hour before the trial starts.
It's not quite as bad as Egypt.
Thugs in the LA region chased a fugitive who surrendered. Just to handcuff him would have been enough, but they tased him, kicked him 17 times, punched him 37 times, and hit him with a stick 4 times.
After that treatment, he lay still on the ground for 45 minutes, without medical attention.
Unfortunately the video of the incident can't be watched without nonfree software. I wouldn't run the nonfree code to see it. I expect that LibreJS will block it.
His injuries still hurt, but there is no word on how serious they were.
The right-wing owners of the mass media create a myth that each one opposes a fictional "leftist media bias". The latest iteration is the "metropolitan elite".
St Anne, Missouri, jailed Juan Thompson's mother until she pled guilty to accusations against another woman, and her family had to pay $1000 to get her out of jail.
The state later acknowledged this was mistaken identity, but the guilty plea remains on her record and they can't get the money back. They don't take trouble to correct mistakes for a poor person.
Juan's aunt has been unemployed for six years because of a car fine she could not pay, and his uncle is in jail because he can't pay the fees for a previous jailing for an unpaid ticket.
The complexities of defining what constitutes a killer robot.
I am confident a good criterion can be worked out. If it is more than one sentence long, that is not a flaw.
The UK Green Party says it will abolish the cruel austerity policies.
Vote Green!
In the Netherlands, citizens are suing to demand stronger action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Sea-level rise is a serious matter for the Netherlands.
Some US special tax breaks that mainly benefit rich people.
Virginia is the worst state for the school-to-prison pipeline. An 11-year-old boy was convicted of a felony because he pushed back when a thug stationed in his school grabbed him.
The thugs in our schools are there to ruin children's lives.
US citizens: call for managing herring to protect the ocean ecosystem, not just the herring catch.
US citizens: call on the Justice Department to end "too big to jail" for banks.
US citizens: Call on the EPA to regulate the use of toxic oil dispersants in response to oil spills in the sea.
Many US workers are paid so little that they need, and get, various sorts of welfare benefits.
If we raise the minimum wage, they won't need these benefits.
The thug that killed Walter Scott has a pattern of violence. Another man is suing, saying he has proof that the thug shot him with a taser as he was lying face-down on the street and not moving.
If Facebook achieves its goal of becoming the main publication site for journalism, it will be a new chokepoint for censorship.
Governments that make surveillance of journalists easy may find that whistleblowers dump unredacted data to the public for their own safety.
In the St Louis area (which includes Ferguson), death sentences are given preferentially to blacks, after using various subterfuges to keep blacks off the jury.
Schools that divest from fossil fuel companies can reinvest the money profitably in reducing their own energy use.
French hosting companies threaten to move out of France if the latest snooping bill passes.
The Istanbul International film festival cancelled showing a film that the government doesn't like, so dozens of other films have been withdrawn in protest.
Fossil Fuel Subsidies Tempt Us to Burn More Carbon, Says World Bank Chief.
This has been said before, but not often enough.
The Labour Party is trying to prove how right-wing it is.
If I were in the UK I'd vote Green.
In France, rich people are being prosecuted for tax evasion.
Global heating is hitting the North Sea, off Britain, especially fast, and some fish species can't live there any more.
The article does not say whether these species could survive elsewhere in the world.
The US is a leader in child poverty. As the total wealth grew by 60%, the number of homeless children in the US also grew by 60%.
The discovery of oil south of London is a threat, not an opportunity.
A baby in Cleveland found a loaded gun and shot another baby, which died.
Handgun killings in the US are rising as deaths from car accidents fall; in 17 states, guns now kill more people than cars.
The US government's arguments for the DEA's massive collection of phone call records fail to show it is either necessary or constitutional.
Republicans push to control how poor people spend their government benefits, but there is no push for such controls on how the rich and the middle-class spend their larger benefits. Many Americans don't even understand that those are government benefits.
South African writer Zainub Priya Dala says she was forced into a mental hospital by her Muslim relatives to coerce her to withdraw her praise of Salman Rushdie.
This comes after fanatics tried to stab her on the street.
There is a strong current among Muslims of believing that people have no right to criticize their religion, or even talk about it lightly which is what Rushdie did. People who think that way are the enemies of human thought and human rights. They deserve the disgust of every decent person.
The same applies to some Christians who hold similar views. Even the Church of Emacs is not entitled to be immune from criticism.
"Hate speech" laws in many countries, that ban insults to religion, encourage fanatics to believe they are entitled to suppress criticism of their beliefs. These laws not only infringe freedom of expression directly, they encourage fanatics to go further.
Fargo Café Praised After Banning GOP Lawmakers in Fight for Gay Rights.
Boycott, Divest and Sanction Corporations That Feed on Prisons.
According to the article, corporations currently exploiting prison labor include Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Galxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald's, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria's Secret, Wal-Mart and Wendy's.
I'm not going to boycott all of them, but I will boycott some of them which have easy alternatives. (Of course, many of them I would never do business with anyway.) You can probably boycott those oil companies, clothing companies, food/beverage companies, and stores.
It might be a good idea for the campaign to focus on a few of those targets first, and help boycott participants inform those targets.
Rahm Emanuel: Symbol of a Sick America.
The US Isn't Winding Down Its Wars — It's Just Running Them At Arm's Length.
Fight215.org is a coalition dedicated to repealing the part of the PAT RIOT Act that is used to excuse collection of phone call records of everyone in the US.
YouTube's new focus is marketing junk food to children, collecting data about them all the while.
Letting children watch YouTube is much worse than letting them watch TV.
Another dangerous digital practice: small discounts on life insurance in return for being tracked (and following an imposed regime).
As with all such "pay the user a little for being tracked" schemes, the tendency is to put pressure on everyone to be tracked. Individually rejecting them is just the first step; we should prohibit them instead.
The strategems used by 288 big US companies to reduce their tax rate to under 20%.
CBS, General Electric, Interpublic Group, Jetblue Airways, Mattel, Owens Corning, PG&E Corp., Prudential Financial, Qualcomm, PEPCO Holdings, Priceline.com, Ryder System, Time Warner, Weyerhaeuser and Xerox pay no tax at all.
Someone "freed" goldfish in a lake in Colorado. They reproduced and are driving out the native species.
Don't ever release pets into the wild without consulting experts about whether it is safe.
Florida is considering an inadequate plan to protect part of the Everglades from agricultural runoff, so the "Tea Party" held a protest — with paid "protesters".
With current levels of Republican dishonesty, one must suspect all their "protests" of being paid.
China has a new system for injecting malicious Javascript into users' machines to make them attack any chosen target site.
A more technical analysis of how it works.
Subtle sexism, impossible to prove in a court, holds women back in their careers.
This issue is far more important than the Ellen Pao case itself, because it affects a lot of women, not executives only.
Enslavement of workers occurs in many areas of work, and the methods used and patterns of mistreatment are surprisingly similar.
US citizens: call on Obama to close tax loopholes by executive order.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass mandatory labeling of GMOs.
Cuba and the US are moving towards further reconciliation.
To end the pointless and harmful embargo of Cuba is a good thing, but as we all know, the friendship of the US does not necessarily lead a country to respect human rights — and does tend to lead to subjugation by the multinational corporations. Cuba will need to take care not to go too far in "opening up" to their power.
Campaigning to ban "conversion therapy" which amounts to forcing minors into torture.
The US government repeatedly goes to extreme lengths to stop us from knowing how it spies on us.
Thugs in Minneapolis stopped two Arab-Americans in a car and handcuffed them, then threatened to break their legs.
The thugs say they thought the two men were thieves, but they have not demonstrated any basis for that suspicion (the car was not stolen). they needed a basis to justify making the men prisoner.
But even if they had had a reason to handcuff those men, that couldn't justify threatening to maim them.
The White House's New Executive Order On Cyber Crime is (Unfortunately) No Joke.
It empowers officials to designate anyone as guilty of materially providing support for "cyber-attacks", without a trial.
This fits the pattern of letting officials ban organizations without a trial and letting thugs take people's property without a trial.
It is obviously unconstitutional, but we can't count on the US Supreme Court to defend constitutional rights — except for non-human "persons" and religious nuts.
Malaysia has augmented its law that makes sedition a crime.
There is nothing in such a law other than an attack on human rights.
Vancouver pledges to run 100% on renewable energy by 20 years from now. That will include transportation.
The FBI has organized a national conspiracy of local governments to keep courts in the dark about Stingray surveillance of cell phone activity.
Wall Street has been unable to figure out that destroying the environment means stocks will lose lots of value.
Wisconsin is considering firing all the scientists in its Department of Natural Resources, and one agency has ordered its employees not to talk about climate change.
They should talk about global heating instead.
Various groups are suing the State Department for secretly approving two oil pipelines.
Western Canada's glaciers will be mostly gone by the middle of the century if we don't stop broiling the Earth.
It turns out that Iraq had some old chemical weapons in 2003; but Saddam Hussein was not hiding them.
Some were too dangerous even to dispose of, and international inspectors had sealed them off. Some had been lost.
Either way, they were no justification for war.
Bank staff are going to protest against orders to take advantage of other low-paid people.
The extractive US system of fees and fines has been applied to pets too. Sometimes the result is to kill poor people's dogs.
Defenders of Wealth Blame Workers For Lousy Recovery, Not Policies Protecting Profits.
In Lincoln, Nebraska, cameras in the downtown area have not reduced crime or helped identify culprits. Most other cities report the same result.
Since the cameras do infringe privacy, let's get rid of them!
Why Don't Surveillance State Defenders Seem To Care That The Programs They Love Don't Work?
I have another theory. I think that the plutocratist government of the US, which is democratic only in form, wants these tools to keep the people down.
PISSI is massacring the 15000 or so Palestinians that remain in Yarmouk refugee camp after two years of siege by Assad's army.
With Syria being fought over between Assad's forces and jihadis, both sides are horrible, so what should the world do? I don't see any answer, except to defend the Kurds.
I blame this state of affairs on the rich Arab countries that stirred up the violent jihadism when Syrians were doing peaceful protests for democracy. As I recall, they were Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But the US is also to blame, for supporting them (which it continues to do).
Ancestry.com has government contracts to digitize old census records and other public records. Often it does the job by throwing the records away.
The article supposes that contracting services is typically cheaper than doing them in-house, but that is often false.
Meanwhile, they usually screw the public or their workers, because the profit must come out of something.
The UK election is now a pseudo-event, like most of US national elections.
Marine ecosystems harmed by climate change can take a thousand years to recover.
US carbon emissions are decreasing without special pressure, and the 2020 target may be reached early.
That is because the 2020 target is far short of what we need to do to avoid disaster.
For every 10 executions in the US, one innocent person has been freed from death row.
Argentina is once again trying to demand control of the Falkland Islands. Aside from distraction in Argentina, the main motor of the dispute is undersea oil.
Since we must leave most known oil reserves unextracted, Argentina and the UK should make an agreement that neither one will extract oil there.
Mohamed Soltan, visiting Egypt from the US and translating Arabic to English for a journalist, was shot by thugs, then tortured in prison. Now he faces a long sentence or execution based on charges nobody bothered to prove.
Our rate of CO2 emissions today matches the rate that seems to have killed 90% of all marine species at the end of the Permian epoch.
Saudi bombs are killing lots of civilians in Yemen. The continued fighting between the Houthis (who may still be winning) and the Hadists is causing devastating conditions (no water for a week) that will surely kill a lot more.
It is likely to lead to more wars.
9 states join many students calling for the US to forgive student loans that were given out to pay for-profit "colleges" that systematically mislead students.
When John Booker was released from mental hospital, two unofficial FBI agents began luring him into a fantasy terror plot.
It is legitimate for the FBI to keep tabs on mentally ill people who show an interest in terrorism. A few of them might proceed to real terrorism. It is also legitimate for the FBI to run people in terrorist circles to find out about real terrorist plans.
However, when the FBI lures Americans into fantasy plots, who would never have done anything on their own, it does nothing but harm.
Obama is under pressure to retract the bogus claims that Venezuela threatens US national security.
The only reason for these claims was a desire to impose trade sanctions that violate some of the trade treaties that plutocrats have imposed.
If we extract and burn all the known fossil fuel we could extract, we will heat the Earth by something like 9 degrees C (16 F).
The Australian Greens propose to make their tax system progressive in effect again.
Australia's government is concealing the names of companies that dodge taxes by shifting profits to tax havens.
It maintains a "transparent" relationship with them by refusing to have one with the people. It is clear who it really serves.
Human rights groups are suing the DEA for its massive surveillance of phone calls from the US to 116 other countries.
Rand Paul says it's unfair to bring up anything he said in 2009 when he ran for the Senate.
US citizens: ask your congresscritter to
support the CARERS act
to respect state legalization of medical marijuana.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Clinton approved a "trade treaty" with Colombia after oil companies donated to a Clinton foundation.
That treaty is bad for democracy, like all the similar " trade treaties". We need to elect people that will cancel the existing ones, starting with NAFTA.
North Carolina Republicans want to restructure local governments to give control to Republicans.
The Republican Party's motto is, "Take power by any possible means."
India has blocked funding to Greenpeace, accusing the organization of "opposing development".
When you leave things up to businesses, "development" often means damaging the environment.
Oklahoma and Kansas passed laws that arbitrarily ban a common method used for late abortions.
Late abortions are allowed in the US only for medical reasons. The method that was banned is sometimes the safest way to do them.
A Russian who lead a pro-Russian unit in Ukraine said he killed 15 prisoners after the capture of Donetsk airport.
Everyone: call on California to apply water restrictions to
agriculture,
fracking and water bottling.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
Call
for protection from toxic fire-retardants.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call for repeal of parts of the PAT RIOT Act.
Kansas plans to limit welfare benefits spending to $25 per day.
So if a poor person faces debtor's prison if she doesn't pay a $50 fine, she will go to jail.
If she needs to get her nails done to apply for a job, that will be excluded too. Kansas legislators would rather she stay unemployed.
(It is unreasonable to require employees to to get their nails done, outside of a few occupations where beauty is the job, but they do.)
Blackwater (now calling itself "Academi") has been paid
half
a billion dollars to train the Afghan government forces to stop
opium production. Result: opium production has increased.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Netanyahu admitted that he wants to block the nuclear deal because he wants to continue sanctions against Iran and keep it poor.
Voting machines used in Virginia and Pennsylvania allowed election-rigging via wifi, for anyone that could crack the machine's WEP password.
To make it even easier, they used the password "ABCDE". But that is the icing on the cake. There are programs that reliably guess WEP passwords. No matter what password they had chosen, the machine would still have been vulnerable to anyone with some expertise.
Today's voting computers might have a little better security, but that doesn't mean they can be trusted. Even if the security is enough to thwart random passers-by, that does not mean it will stop people from the company that made the machine, or people from the election authority, from rigging the election undetectably.
Virginia has decertified this machine, but is the replacement good enough for your elections? The proper criteria are more than a little more strict.
Even if the computer's security isn't so weak that outsiders can crack it, that doesn't mean you can trust it. The manufacturer might rig the election; the election authority might rig the election.
Malaysia is using terrorists, that may or may not really exist, as an excuse to crush human rights.
The US, UK, France and Australia have followed this path before.
Afghan government soldiers continue shooting Americans inside bases.
A UK university cancelled an academic conference about the legitimacy of Israel as a state, under pressure from politicians, using concerns about "safety" as an excuse.
Many colleges track their students in intrusive ways.
I don't think college students should be required to swipe ID cards.
Rand Paul is a typical right-winger except for a few niche issues.
Rolling Stone's fraternity rape accusation article, that it later had to retract, had shoddy journalism, and Rolling Stone covered it up.
A bill pushed by Republicans in Missouri would ban using food stamps to buy sea food or steak.
The people who get food stamps can't afford to buy steak or fresh sea food even with help. So why bother prohibiting it? As an expression of contempt for the poor.
An Israeli faked his own kidnapping, and Israel activated its standard harsh response that applies only when Palestinians are the suspects.
Israel imprisoned Khalida Jarrar for remaining in Ramallah (where she lives and works) in defiance of an arbitrary order exiling her from there.
Comcast has donated to many organizations; now it is telling them to endorse its proposed merger.
Was a family in Maryland killed indirectly by lack of a living wage?
The article doesn't give enough information to tell for sure, but I wonder why someone who was employed couldn't afford to pay an electric bill.
British women are dying younger as a result of government cutbacks.
I suppose Cameron and Osborne are secretly glad.
US companies impose nondisclosure agreements on employees and ex-employees to block them from talking to government regulators. The SEC just fined KBR for using this to cover up fraud.
There may be a gap between the US version and the Iranian version of the framework nuclear deal.
Scott Walker has changed Wisconsin's election system to make them easy to buy, and he took control over Wisconsin's Supreme Court so it will ignore his violations of campaign finance laws.
A thug shot Walter Scott dead, and accused Scott of stealing his taser. Due to a video recording we know that accusation is false and that the thug shot Scott in the back as he was running away.
The thug has been charged with murder.
Here's the news report we would be reading if the video had not proved the thug lied.
North Charleston is another one of the US cities where a lot of the population is black, most of the thugs are white, and their conduct is generally racist.
Saudi Arabia is extracting oil at a record rate.
The decrease in the oil price in the past year must have something to do with this. It is clearly an intentional policy rather than an economic response. Perhaps it is intended to screw other oil exporters such as Russia and Venezuela.
Jamaicans have been getting poorer for 20 years under the dominion of the IMF.
Rand Paul is a global heating denialist, like the other Republican candidates.
Wealthy people and companies are corrupting America's cultural institutions — buying support for their political maneuvers, and buying a clampdown on opposition to those wealthy donors.
Thus, Big Money is now corrupting every level of US community life.
The CIA had Maher Arar tortured in Syria even though many CIA agents said he was the wrong man.
It's wrong to torture the "right" man, too, but this reveals an incredible level of contempt.
Libya, as a failed state, is generating the usual bad results of failed states in regions of Muslim population: more radicalism and more bloodshed.
An Australian court made ISPs help a film company bully people who shared copies of a film.
Sharing copies of any published work should be legal; governments that aid the publishers' War on Sharing are doing evil.
China plans to test Tibetan monks on their "patriotism". I don't suppose this means patriotism for Tibet.
The Class War party aims to represent working-class Britons whom Labour has abandoned.
I don't think that class war is inevitable; but when the rich start one, as they have done in Britain and the US, the rest had better get organized to defeat them.
Everyone: call on Nestle to stop bottling water in California.
Everyone: call on Shell to stop lobbying against curbing global heating.
Everyone: call on chocolate companies to keep out the lead and cadmium.
Everyone: call on Indiana to pass the Fairness for All Hoosiers Act, which would prohibit discrimination against queer people.
The people that dominate the Republican Party are not conservatives. They are radical fundamentalists that call themselves "conservative".
Australia diverts refugees to Nauru, which accepts them in return for Australia's money. But the conditions of refugees in Nauru are like a prison — they could plead for asylum somewhere else as refugees from Nauru.
Nauru also tries to exclude journalists to cover this up.
I think it is not inherently wrong for a country that is the target of economic illegal immigration to send refugees to another country. But that doesn't excuse doing it in a cruel way like this.
Georgia wants to tax electric cars to make up for the gas tax revenue their owners don't pay.
To reduce fossil fuel use, Georgia ought to raise the gas tax, and tax fossil fuels used to make electricity. But that's the opposite of the orders Republicans get from their plutocratic masters.
US gun nuts encourage harassment of the author of a program that reports areas where guns are used or carried in dangerous ways.
The chief of San Francisco thugs has fired some thugs for showing racism.
Making racist statements should not be a crime, but those with an official privilege must meet a higher standard than merely not being a criminal.
Firing those thugs is not enough for me to call the chief a police officer, but it is a step in the right direction.
Five Years On, the WikiLeaks 'Collateral Murder' Video Matters More than Ever.
The US is using its own helicopters less; now the killing is done by drones, and by the aircraft of US-supported tyrannical governments such as Saudi Arabia.
Backlash to Anti-Gay Laws Not a Movement, But the Result of One.
California's "water conservation" measures do not cover farms and frackers.
Oregon is considering bills to regulate antibiotic use in the 100 biggest animal feeding operations in the state.
World Leaders Lack Ambition to Tackle Climate Crisis.
Or, rather, fossil fuel interests control their decisions.
The US-backed air intervention is creating chaos in Yemen, and al Qa'ida is capturing some areas.
If the US had stopped Saudi Arabia from intervening, the Houthis would have won by now and there would be no room for al Qa'ida to take over areas.
Canadian tar sands mines destroy large areas of land and forest — they are not like ordinary oil wells. And they poison land with oil spills. The Beaver Lake Cree Nation is trying to stop this with a lawsuit.
How government policies could be designed to reduce inequality instead of increasing it.
It's understandable that many Iranians hate the US after the things that the US did and planned to do to Iran.
Fortunately the Iranian state has the vision to consider a deal nonetheless.
Science is plagued by widespread falsification of data.
The cockpit recording from the plane crash that killed the Polish president shows the cause was not foul play. The passengers pressured the pilots to land although they thought it was dangerous. This is a common cause of flight accidents.
Indian thugs plan to attack protesters with pepper-spraying drones.
40 years ago, the US Senate investigated secret CIA crimes thoroughly and passed laws to curb them. The US needs to do this again.
Being used a lot by Facebook encourages depression; since people generally post an exaggerated positive picture of their lives, their lives appear to be better than your own.
Pakistan has brought murder charges against CIA personnel accused of being responsible for a drone attack.
City "outreach to the homeless" staff in Berkeley attacked two homeless people, then tried to frame them with false accusations. One of them pled guilty! But a video proved they had attacked the homeless people without grounds.
I am glad the courts dropped the charges that he had pled guilty to. You can't count on courts to have that much sense of justice.
Will the employees be prosecuted for their attack?
Barrett Brown in prison was banned from using email because he talked with a reporter. John Kiriakou was treated as suspicious in prison for publishing articles about the prison.
What it adds up to is contempt for prisoners' constitutional rights.
Better education would not reduce economic inequality in the US much. That's because the good jobs that people could get via education are too few to benefit most poor Americans.
We need to pay a living wage to everyone, not just the best educated.
Censorship of one blog is already too much.
Systemic racism in the US starts in elementary school and continues on through adulthood.
How Elizabeth Warren Made Expanding Social Security Cool.
She rejected the idea of making various groups of poor people fight over the "crumbs" left by the rich.
Greenpeace protesters have boarded a Shell drilling rig on its way to create an oil spill in the Arctic Ocean.
I say this with confidence because the US government estimates that the probability of a major oil spill if Shell goes ahead and drills is something like 75%.
PISSI captured 1700 Iraqi soldiers when it captured Tikrit, and massacred them. Their grave has apparently been found.
The captain of a boat that did illegal fishing, which was followed by Sea Shepherd for 117 days and could not get away, sank the boat to destroy evidence of the crime.
I think this is a victory for Sea Shepherd. I don't think many boat owners will risk the loss of the boat.
The TSA's behavior detection program is useless for finding terrorists, but catches lots of illegal immigrants, and may in fact have been designed for that.
Netanyahu is trying to stir up US Republicans to block peace between the US and Iran.
Netanyahu calls any deal "bad" unless Iran would reject it.
An unauthorized statue of Edward Snowden appeared in a New York City park. City staff covered it up and removed it.
Ukraine is considering a federal constitution that would enable people in the Donbas region (for instance) to have some autonomy.
It's too bad this was not considered a year ago.
China has set up a chain of "Confucius Institutes" around the world to teach Chinese — under the political control of the Chinese government.
Millions of Indians are giving zero-rupee bills when asked for a bribe, as an anti-corruption campaign.
I occasionally distribute zero-dollar bills as a pretend bribe, but I don't expect US officials to want a real bribe.
Saving money on probation will lead to more people in prison.
Omitting part of the data can make the rest point to a desired conclusion.
Malaysia will imprison people without trial.
The US set the example for this. A few years ago, Congress and Obama passed a law saying that the president can imprison anyone without trial.
The UK government dumped a surprise on communities: they can't block nuclear waste dumps.
Iraqi Sunnis are changing their names so as not to be persecuted by Shi'ites.
We may be headed for a "sofalarity", in which people spend so much time in fantasy worlds, that are presented as vividly as reality, that they care less about reality.
Unfettered Religious Freedom Really Does Mean the Freedom to Do Harm.
The Center for Democracy & Technology reported to the UN how Australian mass surveillance violates human rights norms.
That was before Australia passed a law imposing even more surveillance.
In Britain, children go to school sick because their parents can't afford to miss work.
These are the same poor people that right-wingers call "lazy scroungers". If you systematically pour a sea of obligations on people, while cutting out what they stand on, by and by some of them will sink.
The US government and the Gates Foundation are trying to
impose commercial seed
on African agriculture.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Israeli soldiers shoot ordinary bullets at Palestinian protests, and many Palestinians have been injured. Some killed.
Will French citizens accused of sharing be banned from flying?
There is no reason at all to ban most ex-cons from flying (unless they are being sought).
The US government will try to duck responsibility for a nationwide license plate tracking database by confiding it to a company.
The fossil fuel companies owe the public so much, for undeserved subsidies and for damages, that it justifies nationalizing them.
Then the state could order them to stop lobbying against curbing global heating.
The Tories plan to force UK ISPs to block access to sites that have porn and don't strictly identify their users.
This won't achieve the supposed goal of stopping teenagers from accessing porn. They will find other ways, perhaps via friends that are over 18. However, the attack on internet freedom could be successful anyway.
Research has associated various kinds of air pollution with increased vulnerability to the flu, increased vulnerability to allergies, and with brain damage.
Businesses and Obama agree on a bill to expand NSA surveillance by letting companies "voluntarily" give data to the government.
It is more reason not to identify yourself or your activities to any American company. However, for some purposes it is hard to avoid that.
A former Guantanamo military court prosecutor says that the military courts are a failure — those prisoners who have charges against them should be tried in ordinary federal courts.
Amen.
Those that have no charge to try should be released.
New York State's proposed bitcoin regulations still have problems.
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter to vote for a bill to stop feeding
antibiotics to farm animals, except individual animals that have
infections.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Talking with Nicaraguan farmers that oppose the planned Nicaragua canal.
There are two issues here: proper compensation for farmers' land, and the ecological health of Lake Nicaragua. The former is simple and easy to fix; the failure to do so indicts the state for surrender to plutocracy.
The issue of whether this canal can be built and run without causing a local ecological disaster is not so clear, but a state that won't even make the canal company pay proper compensation today can hardly be trusted to make it preserve the lake for a hundred years.
Russian-sponsored rebels continue daily artillery attacks on Ukrainian trenches near Mariupol.
Anthony Ray Hilton was imprisoned for 28 years because the state did sloppy ballistic testing.
The failure of his defense to hire a proper expert was icing on the poisonous cake, because that should not have been necessary; the state should have made sure its own ballistic tests were done right, and not prosecuted Hilton in the first place. Prosecutors are supposed to seek justice, not convictions based on fudging the truth.
How sad to give Hilton an iThing. From one kind of prison to another.
Construction workers in Abu Dhabi are still treated like slaves.
The intrusion of advertisements into every cubic meter of public space, and many physical objects as well as web sites, can be seen as enclosure of a commons — the commons of attention.
There's an element of truth to this, but at the same time, it is possible to refuse to pay much attention to them.
Adam Crapser, age 39, was brought to the US at age 3 for adoption. His adoptive parents never made him a US citizen, and he now faces deportation away from his family to a country he has no memory of.
The minor crimes he has committed seem, according to the article, to be consequences of his lack of citizenship.
A movie licensing group demands 1/3 million dollars as a blanket license fee from the schools of one small region of Spain, for showing some movies.
If Spain adopted US-style fair use, schools would clearly not need a license. Basically, this is another way in which Spain's right-wing government is the enemy of Spain.
5 years after the Big Spill, many species of wildlife are still being harmed by oil and by the dispersants the Billionaire Polluters poured into the Gulf of Mexico.
Israeli troops arrested Palestinian feminist Khalida Jarrar, who is also a leader in defending the rights of Palestinian prisoners.
Khalida Jarrar has been imprisoned for six months, with no charges or trial.
A veteran called on Karl Rove to apologize for his part in the conquest and invasion of Iraq, but Rove refused.
Transcanada's planned tar sands oil pipeline to the Atlantic has been delayed for two years due to rejection of one planned terminal on environmental grounds.
Facebook predicts who new useds know, based on their phone lists and email address lists. Along with the phone and email lists of all the other useds.
This is a measure of how complete and dangerous Facebook surveillance is.
It implies that giving your email or phone list to a company is mistreatment of everyone in that list!
Ireland forces women to have babies against their will, then makes them suffer poverty as a result.
Nabeel Rajab has been imprisoned in Bahrain for denouncing cruel treatment of prisoners there.
Bahrain is a US ally and its repression was imposed with help of Saudi Arabia.
Everyone:
call
on Indiana to free Purvi Patel and repeal its law against
"feticide".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
You could call that law a form of fetus feticism.
US citizens: call for a federal investigation of fast food shops' disregard for workers' safety and injuries.
US citizens: call on your senators to oppose right-wing proposals to endanger wildlife.
US citizens: call on states to treat fracking waste as toxic, or invite the federal government to do so.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to commute the sentences of more victims of the War on
Drugs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
I said, "Please commute the sentences of all the hundreds of thousands of Americans that are in prison with long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses."
Even when people try to provoke thugs into killing them, the thugs in many cases do not need to rush to kill them, if they take some care.
A big illegal mining operation on Bangka Island, approved in a way that suggests corruption, threatens the surrounding coral as well as the people who live on the island.
The general framework of a deal with Iran has been published.
It remains to work out the details. Meanwhile, Netanyahu opposes the deal with paranoid ranting. This would be insignificant, except that he will incite Republicans to sabotage the deal.
Obama approved oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea.
GMOs are not making a big contribution to feeding the human world.
Four Chicago teenagers face imprisonment and a life of punishment for having sex and making a video of it.
A Malaysian cartoonist, and his webmaster, face imprisonment for charges of criticizing the government.
France is considering a bill to threaten journalists, sources and dissidents with arbitrary surveillance without a court order.
New Jersey thugs weren't satisfied to kick unconscious Phillip White. They even had their dog bite him. No wonder he died.
Someone has sent phony anti-net-neutrality messages to members of Congress, putting on the names of people who did not approve.
California's governor has imposed new water conservation rules, but they don't go far enough — for example, they don't include shutting down the plants that extract water and bottle it.
If these measures achieve the stated goal of reducing water use by 25%, that will delay the arrival of extreme hardship for 3 additional months (15 months from now instead of 12 months).
Generous Welfare Benefits Make People More Likely to Want to Work, Not Less.
Plutocrats don't care about this because they don't need most people to work, not any more.
Anthony Ray Hinton will be freed after 30 years on death row. His trial was crap, and there was no real evidence he was guilty.
The inhabitants of south Yemen are not very happy with being conquered by Houthis. The latter shot and killed protesters.
Purvi Patel has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for trying to give herself an abortion.
But maybe she didn't even do that. The conviction is based on supposition — it might have been just a miscarriage.
The genocide that wiped out the aborigines of California.
Al Qa'ida took advantage of the fighting in Yemen to free its supporters from a prison in Yemen.
Israeli soldiers regularly block Palestinian Christians from access to Easter ceremonies in Jerusalem.
The World Bank funds private companies, even hedge funds, in an occult manner.
Supposedly this funding is to promote social goals, but those companies will eagerly redirect the money to grasping unjust practices. The World Bank should not fund them at all.
Ghoncheh Ghavami has been released from prison in Iran.
I don't understand why either women or men make such a fuss about sports, but they shouldn't be imprisoned for it.
The UK right-wing has increased taxes for the poor.
It is the UK's version of the Ferguson fine-debt trap.
An increase in the UK carbon tax will close some coal-fired electric plants. Unfortunately, the replacement will be natural gas. But increasing the tax will encourage renewables.
The Houthis have captured parts of Aden, despite the US-backed Saudi air campaign.
The Houthis are allied with the faction of former President Saleh. In other words, this is a battle for power between Yemeni factions. Meddling in this is really foolish, not least because it often backfires.
The main effect of the bombing campaign will be to make the new government of Yemen a firm enemy of the US (and of Saudi Arabia, but it hardly deserves any sympathy).
Fires in Canada and Russia are a very large contribution to global deforestation, and these forests regrow very slowly.
Domestic workers, amounting to 47 million people, lack the usual rights of workers. They may be required to work up to 22 hours a day.
When faraway fanatics "join" PISSI, it makes PISSI appear more powerful than it really is.
PISSI, it makes PISSI appear more powerful than it really is.
The US media contribute by reporting fantasy PISSI plots as if they were real.
Factory Farm Meat: Why Vegetarians, Ranchers and Conscious Omnivores Need to Unite.
The UK NHS loses money by hiring temporary staff instead of training additional permanent staff.
The CIA document that supposedly proved Saddam Hussein was developing WMDs initially said there was a lot of doubt about this.
The psychology of why people keep voting for politicians that take foolish positions.
The article doesn't mention the intentional influences, such as the powerful companies and rich owners that promote trickle-down and get it fixed into treaties so that any correction seems impossible.
A massive boycott campaign has pressured Indiana into amending the "religious freedom restoration" law so it does not authorize businesses to discriminate against persons based on characteristics such as sexual orientation.
Governor Pence of Indiana had previously defended the law by pretending it didn't authorize that.
Obama's greenhouse gas pledge sounds good in terms of politics, but it's inadequate in terms of physics.
Greenpeace says it "begins to treat the wound, but does not stop the bleeding".
For Alice Rothchild, being pro-Palestinian is also being pro-Israeli.
What I said about Hrant Dink in my talks in Turkey (Apr 2015)
Searching the internet for information inflates people's sense of how much they know and how smart they are.
Americans have been led to forget their tradition of massive strikes against the plutocracy.
The ACLU has become concerned with some of the consequences of nonfree software designed to restrict people.
I hope the ACLU will recognize that the fix for this is free software.
The UK government is underfunding the NHS so much that it will face pressure to start charging for medical care.
Part of the reason for the absence of congressional scrutiny of US massive surveillance programs is that congresscritters not on the intelligence committee are denied information about them.
Ukraine is in the grip of pervasive corruption controlled by oligarchs.
Everyone: call on Obama to press for a diplomatic solution in Yemen rather than supporting Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign.
The Houthis do not like the US but they do not want to fight the US. Intervention in Yemen means making enemies avoidably.
Everyone:
call on the
governor of Georgia to veto the religious-based discrimination
law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
for regulation of payday loans so they don't push people further
into debt.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
This is treating the symptom — what we really need is to raise the minimum wage — but the symptom is worth treating.
US citizens: call on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to reject banksters' money.
US citizens: call on Kerry to drop the plans to export armed drones.
Facebook has a new trick to get people to identify their spouses and babies in photos.
Gaza fisherman Tawfiq Abu Riyala had an idea: build an artificial reef to stimulate fish to catch. Israeli soldiers killed him for it.
A college in California tried to ban its Students for Justice in Palestine from holding an event with a mock-up of the annexation wall.
The reason given was that "people might complain". So what if people complain?
Israel holds Palestinians prisoner without trial, renewing sentences over and over.
Thugs in Oxnard, California, get tattoos for each person they kill.
They treat the people as an enemy that they are at war with.
Comcast suckered a man into buying a house by saying he could get broadband there. Then it said he couldn't, so he has to sell the house.
Melting ice from retreating glaciers is pouring into the Gulf of Alaska.
This contributes directly to sea level rise, and as land in Alaska is denuded of ice, it absorbs more sunlight.
A Republican Christian legislator said a violent attack on a woman was a punishment inflicted on America by his vindictive deity, for allowing abortion.
Alas, he's not a freak. This sort of superstitious belief was common in Christianity (as in many other religions) until it was mostly cleaned of such things; but US theocratic protestants are bringing it back.
California activists blockaded a Nestle water bottling plant, which extracts water that California can't spare.
While Egypt's regime carries out repression almost like Stalin's, Obama assures Egypt of continued military support.
The high pressure on US students, teachers and schools from standard tests led many teachers and officials to organize massive cheating.
Schools are not factories, and the pressure from these testing policies seems to harm education.
The Vatican has cleaned up corruption in its bank.
While the US and UK support the Kurds that are fighting PISSI, a British Kurd that tried to go to Iraq and fight for the Kurds faces imprisonment for it.
Absurd.
Let's Call It: 30 Years of Above Average Temperatures Means the Climate Has Changed.
Russia has closed the Crimea's Tatar news TV station. Even mild criticism of the state is repressed on TV in Russia.
Syracuse University will divest from fossil fuel companies.
Polar bears seem unable to adapt to eating the foods available on land. Thus, the loss of polar ice is likely to wipe them out.
We could maintain a few in zoos, for as long as human civilization is wealthy and organized enough to have zoos. When hunger causes wars, people will eat the animals in the zoo.
The Philadelphia-area mass transit system was ordered to publish ads equating Islam with antisemitism.
The Grand Mufti did support Hitler, but it is a mistake to claim the Qur'an endorses antisemitism. It says that Jews and Christians are to be tolerated as second-class citizens — while other non-Muslims didn't even have that level of rights. While this is far from respect for religious freedom, it is not antisemitism (hatred specifically of Jews) either.
Compared with the Christianity of the 7th century, Islam in the 7th century wasn't bad. (On the other hand, China in the 7th century was far more tolerant.) The unfortunate thing is that Islam's respect for human rights has not advanced since the 7th century.
Facebook's tracking of users through cookies combined with Like buttons violates EU law.
Why general surveillance such as Australia is doing makes individuals and society less safe.
US citizens: sign
this
petition to urge Senator Wyden to oppose fast track for the TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The TPP is a plan led by sell-out-to-business politicians such as Bush and Obama to give companies (especially foreign companies) deregulation and more power over the citizens of the US and (initially) 11 other countries.
The Wellcome Trust says it invests in fossil fuel companies so it can use "shareholder engagement", but the change it aims for is inadequate.
It is already abundantly clear that "engagement" with them does not get them to change.
The nuclear negotiations with Iran have resolved most of the issues with a broad framework.
Texas legislators threaten women's lives in order to interfere with abortion and birth control.
Aramark feeds prisoners food that was in contact with rats, food taken out of the trash, and moldy food.
That's what privatizing government activities tends to lead to. It's also typically more expensive than doing the work with government employees.
Apple is still working people to death to build phones which are jails.
The Council of Europe says that Ukraine failed to investigate the behavior of the thugs during the Maidan demonstrations in Kiev.
The US had Yemen disappeared Sharif Mobley. Now the US-supported Saudi bombing campaign is attacking the airbase where he is imprisoned.
China is building artificial concrete islands in the South China Sea as military bases and excuses to claim the undersea oil.
US states have passed vague constitutional amendments that allow big farms to claim the right to disregard environmental protection laws and laws against cruelty to animals.
Israel is going to make refugees from Africa go to some African country or else be imprisoned.
People fleeing persecution are entitled to asylum; economic migrants are not. However, the distinction is not so sharp. Sometimes a person flees real persecution, and chooses to flee to a wealthy country as a way to get more money. This is why many people try to get to the US, Israel, the European Union, and Australia. It is wrong to send those people back to where they will be persecuted, but that doesn't have to imply they are entitled to entry to the country of their choice.
However, these countries currently subject the refugees to horrible treatment to make them go somewhere else. That can't be justified and can't really be necessary.
If we didn't have so much war, so much tyranny, and so much environmental disaster, fewer people would need to flee persecution.
Several presidential candidates are pretending they are not even "testing the waters" hoping to evade campaign funding rules. At the same time, they acknowledge that they are pretending.
The tyrant of Thailand says he will convert himself from military ruler to civilian dictator.
Not much of a change, it seems.
Clinton said she ran a private email server so she could send all her email through one device, but she didn't use only one device.
This dishonesty is minor compared with the fundamental dishonesty that she as a "Democratic" plutocratist shares with the Republican plutocratists, in pretending to support democracy. I will not vote for a plutocratist candidate.
An interview with a reporter for a feminist rural newspaper in India.
Mockery of US presidents is prohibited at Dixie State University.
That prohibition is un-American. Mockery of presidents is not. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to disparage someone, especially any politician or official, and anyone like me that publicly campaigns for anything.
Scientists are suing the US Department of Agriculture, claiming that they are being censored and harassed by the USDA for trying to report results inconvenient for agribusiness.
To correct the root of this problem, we need to do away with agribusiness companies that are so powerful they can corrupt the USDA (i.e., cause "regulatory capture"). Family farms would pose no such danger.
The US government used the FISA system to investigate two Chinese accused of a crime that has nothing to do with national security.
Another reason to cut standardized tests: the companies that do it spend millions to lobby for more standardized tests, and against privacy protections for students that are tested.
As a general principle, large companies threaten democracy.
The UK government refused to stop its lawyers from reading the privileged communications with lawyers of two victims of "rendition".
A good welfare system encourages people to start more businesses.
A society which people need to be "entrepreneurial" is a harsh one. Being an entrepreneur means taking a gamble, and you shouldn't gamble what you can't afford to lose. Society should not make people gamble what they can't afford to lose.
In Australia, warrant canaries are forbidden.
I hope that thousands of Australians will defy this law by stating that they have never received one of these journalist information warrants.
Brazil and Indonesia give enormous subsidies to exports that require deforestation, dwarfing the subsidies they receive to avoid deforestation.
Stress during childhood makes diabetes more likely.
Sheldon Williams is suing North Charleston, saying that thugs stamped on his face and broke bones while he was lying on the floor handcuffed. Williams had to wait two hours for medical attention to his fractures.
That was not murder but it was a crime. Why isn't it being prosecuted?
Another man is suing because the thug that killed Scott tased him for no reason.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say you support the framework agreement with Iran, and to oppose any bill to block diplomacy. You can call 1-855-686-6927.
A study suggests that melting permafrost won't create sudden catastrophic global heating — the release is likely to take a longer time.
Europe planned to start 10 trial carbon capture and storage plants this year, but the technology is too hard to master.
I see nothing wrong with CCS in principle, but there is no reason to be confident it will work — and even if it does, I doubt fossil fuels with CCS can compete with renewables on a fair basis.
I think the real motivation for CCS is as an excuse to continue the current highly subsidized use of fossil fuels. They say, "Don't worry about using fossil fuels; CCS will come to the rescue."
If we put a proper tax on greenhouse emissions and eliminate the subsidies, as we ought to, the fossil fuel companies would be welcome to try to make CCS work cheaply enough to compete. We wouldn't have any stake in whether they succeed.
The video of the shooting of Walter Scott exposed the functioning of the thugs' lie machine, which accuses crimes up to murder by framing the victim.
France will investigate HSBC's global holding company on suspicions of aiding tax evasion.
In the UK, unemployed people are required to waste 35 hours a week applying uselessly to jobs they won't get. They are required to do this by computer, and those without a computer available find this an expensive struggle. When anything goes wrong, they have to skip the rent or the food.
The overall picture is that people's lives have been made so difficult that an occasion to punish them is sure to arise. The comparable thing in the US is the extractive system of fines and debtor's prison.
It is fine to employ people in jobs that serve the community, as long as we pay them prevailing wages. Otherwise it is merely a scheme to knock down wages.
The staff appointed by Congress to "oversee" US spying include lobbyists for spying.
They are the foxes, and the US is their henhouse. Woe is us.
Proposing a constitutional amendment to affirm that every US citizen of legal voting age has the fundamental right to vote.
I suggest that the amendment should take additional concrete steps to block the now normal practice of blocking on pretext what it would be unconstitutional to overtly ban — currently applied to abortions, voting, and being homeless.
Multinational seed companies lobby for various kinds of laws to stop farmers from sharing seeds, but the farmers fight back.
Chevron lied about cleaning up oil spills in Ecuador; a whistleblower provided proof.
US citizens: call on Clinton to come out against the TPP.
Cleveland thugs disregarded all the witnesses to a shooting and prosecutors convicted three innocent men for the murder. The three have been exonerated after 20 years in prison.
I wonder what motivated this gross injustice. This case is far from unique; the explanation might teach us something about how to prevent more such cases.
US citizens: call on your federal legislators to thwart plutocrats' dishonesty and stand up for network neutrality.
The greatest damage from a global heating disaster will come in the tropics, as a changes in rain will eliminate entire ecologies such as the Amazon rain forest. The millions of species that live in them will go extinct.
US right-wingers believe their religion legitimizes bigotry.
A former leader of the South Carolina Republican Party showed that his hatred extends beyond trans people and foreigners, and includes his wife.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to uphold the Department of Labor's plans for regulations to protect workers from being swindled out of their pensions by lying brokers.
Greece is giving international support to Russia, clearly hoping Russia will rescue Greece from the banksters. So far, Russia has not done it.
The leaders of Syriza need help against the banksters, and Western governments are on the banksters' side. I can't blame them for asking Russia for help. The West ought to give that help.
Children in the UK are now growing up in hunger and deprivation that can stunt them for life.
There is no excuse for voting for a party that won't end this.
Whaling is dangerous for humans that eat whale meat, as well as for whales.
The witnesses who saw Shaimaa al-Sabbagh shot at a protest are now on trial in Egypt for being near the protest.
The Egyptian government has the full support of the US.
Japan's CO2 cut pledge is absurdly inadequate.
Russia's approach to "information warfare": spread so many different lies that the truth can't be separated from them.
This gives everyone an opportunity to blame whoever they want to blame. Those who want to blame the US (and the US does plenty to inspire such an attitude) can find grounds to blame the US for everything.
UN Urged to Ban 'Killer Robots' Before They Can Be Developed.
Watch out for the Internet of Kafkaesque Things.
And that's aside from their snooping.
A study estimates that sprawl costs the US a trillion dollars a year.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Tobin tax (a tiny tax on financial transactions).
Everyone: call on Pepsico to get sustainable palm oil.
The Rise of the Working Poor and the Non-Working Rich.
Countries are making greenhouse gas pledges that are insufficient to avoid global disaster.
The Australian government chose to quietly disregard sexual assaults against refugees dumped in Nauru.
Wildlife in Indochina is threatened by massive hunting in even the isolated areas of the jungle.
Editors of Malaysian Insider were arrested for "sedition" for publishing an article about steps in legislation.
To have a crime of sedition at all is an attack on human rights. Malaysia has never respected human rights very well, but it is getting worse lately.
Plutocratist politicians, organized through ALEC, are using captive state legislatures to forbid city initiatives that are inconvenient for business.
Their masters, the businesses, are also suing cities that try to do this.
The replacement of democracy with plutocracy is converting the US government into a government of occupation by the rich. Only democratic governments can be legitimate.
Global heating is exacerbating drought in Australia. This threatens agriculture and cities' water supplies.
The Tory logic of austerity is to stigmatize a part of the poor and desperate as "undeserving" to win support for kicking them while they're down.
If you have been driven to the point of suicide, that means you have nothing to lose. Rather than handing your killers an easy victory by dying quietly, you may as well strike a final blow against them.
The American Pharmacists Association has adopted the position that its members should not provide drugs for execution.
This is non-binding but may have an effect nonetheless.
In the US, "predictive policing" typically predicts that if you're black, you're a criminal. Blacks are targeted by merciless surveillance.
Curbing global heating would have tremendous side benefits for public health and for the real economy.
Plutocratist governments are more concerned with the banksters' economy than with the real economy of real work and real benefits for people.
China is planning to ban foreign NGOs from operating in China unless they get government sponsorship.
DEA agents that investigated the head of Silk Road appear to have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from him through private blackmail.
Amazingly, they are being prosecuted for this.
A Days Inn fired Shanna Tippen for talking to a news reporter about the low wages.
Censorship in corporate-dominated Mexican radio news broadcasting is now officially part of the rules.
New Canadian Counter-Terrorism Law Threatens Environmental Groups.
Dissidents know better than to believe that the Canadian government wouldn't apply "anti-terror" measures to them. The US and the UK have already done the like.
The US has gone even further and labeled dissidents as "terrorists".
US citizens:
call
on your state governor to make a Clean Power Plan for the EPA.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Over 1500 Americans convicted of crimes have been exonerated — found to be innocent, and released from prison.
This must be a small fraction of those who were wrongfully convicted.
What can we do to prevent false convictions in the future? Often they are due to trials that are grossly bad.
The FBI Used to Recommend Encryption. Now They Want to Ban It.
New web services that allow everything to be traded and rewarded monetarily force all corners of life into the market.
I am glad that I don't use any of them, but I fear that they will force us to.
An Irish ISP has been forced by a court to punish users for sharing, even though there is no law that says so.
A former SeaWorld orca trainer says that the company is cruel to animals and covers it up with falsehoods.
The State Is Spying on You Right Now. Where's the Outrage?
The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has doubled since September.
It seems to be due to the bad law forced through by pro-deforestation parties.
One of the underlying causes is population growth. By having no children, you can avoid increasing all environmental and resource problems.
The Republican-controlled US Congress is moving to pass a budget that will shaft non-rich Americans.
Elizabeth Warren is putting the heat on banksters; they are threatening to stop giving money to (other) Democratic candidates as punishment.
The "Democrats" that serve the banksters only slow the adoption of dooH niboR government policies. To stop it and reverse it, we need people like Warren.
Republican governors that reject Medicaid expansion are squeezing hospitals. Some hospitals in areas of poverty are closing, or closing their emergency rooms; many more will soon join them.
The article seems unfair in blaming Louisiana's deficit primarily on Governor Jindal, since the world fiscal crisis occurred shortly after he took office in 2008. The article does not tie Louisiana's deficit to specific decisions on Jindal's part.
High fees for college drive a substantial number of students into sex work.
It must be more so in the US where the fees are higher.
Many methods of execution were promoted as humane, then rejected later as inhumane.
A bunch of nondemocratic Arab countries propose to set up a regional alliance to fight against anyone supported by Iran. Apparently with US support, too.
People who suffer from depression are unlikely to want to hurt anyone else; we must not stigmatize depression even worse.
It seems that co-pilot Lubitz had problems beyond depression.
Indonesia banned foreign boats from fishing there, so the boat operators dumped their crew on remote islands, and the crew are stranded there. Many were effectively enslaved in their ships, and some still are enslaved.
See the enslaved workers page.
Theocratic Christians endorse the right of parents to kill sick children for religious reasons; it's only fetuses they want to protect. This is because they regard women and children as property, like cattle.
California has dropped its plans to let thugs around the US use California driver's license photos for face recognition.
What about other states?
Mexico set an example by proposing a greenhouse emissions limitation plan, but it is too little and too late.
Having thugs permanently stationed in schools is already bad; giving them body cameras adds up to a big invasion of students' and teachers' privacy.
A few rich Americans get big subsidies as public-land ranchers, and the government resists telling us who they are.
In California, illegal marijuana plantations are using up the water that water bottlers don't take. Endangered fish could be killed by this.
If marijuana were legalized, it would be grown in ways that are not so illegal.
The Tories are considering big cuts in welfare for the poor. For right-wingers, welfare is supposed to be for the rich.
One proposal is to cut off support for children after the second. Governments should aim to decrease the birth rate, but making extra children grow up in poverty is not a good method. It probably won't even reduce the birth rate much.
The UK suddenly imposed a gag order on all government employees including scientists.
Canada's right-wing government did the same thing, and we know the reason: to help business suppress science.
Cleaning up plastic bead pollution in California. These beads can kill animals by starving them.
Netanyahu yielded and agreed to give the Palestinian Authority its customs revenue.
San Francisco thugs (prison guards, not police this time) forced prisoners to fight each other in order to bet on the results, on pain of being tortured.
The UK wants to show it is really serious about stopping modern slavery by sentencing perpetrators to life in prison.
Since it is an economic crime, such a heavy sentence is neither called for nor necessary. I'm sure most people would refrain from trying to enslave workers if they expected to be sentenced to five years in prison for it.
The crucial point is "expected to be". Even life imprisonment can't deter criminals if they are confident they won't be caught. To be effective in reducing enslavement, what is needed is a series of measures to put migrants on guard against enslavement, and to detect enslavement when it occurs. Also, changing laws that stop slaves from escaping, as the UK just decided not to do.
One reason schools for non-rich Americans do a bad job is that they are not given enough money.
Although the schools in poor districts get too little, it still adds up to a large sum. This enables the plutocratist politicians to say, "Look how much money we've wasted on failing schools" as an excuse to underfund them even more.
Congress and Obama are planning to make medicare pay doctors more, necessary because many doctors are refusing medicare patients, but the cost is being placed on patients.
DEA agents visiting Colombia had sex parties funded by narco gangs.
I don't see any reason DEA agents should not participate in sex parties, but if they get anything from drug traffickers, it's a form of corruption. Those agents must be booted out.
However, this incident is part of a general pattern. Prohibition of drugs makes trafficking profitable, and that money is used to corrupt officials at all levels. Even for drugs that are really dangerous, drugs that are foolish to use, prohibition is a bad response.
Banksters hate Elizabeth Warren, but they don't hate Clinton, and there's a good reason for that.
A few decades ago, musicians could succeed without being beautiful. Now they are under a lot of pressure to look good; it almost trumps how well they can play.
Poverty correlates with less brain development in schoolchildren.
Since this is not a controlled study, we don't know whether poverty causes the reduced brain development. It is implausible that the children's reduced brain development causes their parents to be poor. But there may be some other factor that causes both the parents' poverty and the children's reduced brain development. It would not be genetic differences, since the study controlled for that.
The UK's former "climate change" diplomat says that Shell is "cynically" trying to block an agreement to curb global heating.
Nemtsov's colleagues are trying to continue investigating the Russian troops in Ukraine, but after his murder people are afraid to talk.
Journalist Peter Greste, who was imprisoned for months in Egypt for reporting, calls for a world-wide charter of media freedom.
He recognizes that the threat to journalism is not limited to outright tyrannies.
The UK government did an experiment with bees and claims that shows neonicotinoids do not hurt bees. However, the data from the experiment show that they do hurt bees.
Australia has imposed general surveillance of phone and internet contacts.
The law offers a supposed shield for journalists' sources, but it is so easily overridden that no one should ever rely on it.
Republicans, asked to rate threats to the US, rate Obama as a bigger threat than Putin or Assad.
That is rational. Putin and Assad are much worse as rulers than Obama, but they do not threaten the US. Obama, however, threatens the freedom of Americans through massive surveillance, and threatens American democracy with his war on whistleblowers.
Australia's [global heating] Policy on Course for 'Disastrous' 4C Warming.
US citizens: tell Congress to pass the bill to repeal the PAT RIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act.
Here's what the bill does. It's quite a lot!
An argument in favor.
US citizens: call on Congress to extend CHIP funding for 4 years.
US citizens: call on Obama to order federal agencies to consider climate effects when judging new policies.
Bans on indoor smoking have resulted in substantial decreases in pollution levels and in heart attacks.
Due to world-wide adoption of concrete for construction, the world is running scarce on sand resources, leading to environmental degradation, corruption, and even murder.
The fracking boom is over in North Dakota, but unemployed Americans continue moving there looking for work.
The long-term harm done by fracking outweighs the benefit of employing people for a while. The US government could give a lot of people employment if it were willing to defy the plutocrats. All we need to do, to make this happen, is vote for anti-plutocratic candidates only.
The EPA has bent over backwards for decades to ignore evidence suggesting glyphosate is carcinogenic.
What It's Like to Teach Evolution at the University of Kentucky.
Promoting free software takes the same sort of patience.
Cuts in UK funds for poor people's housing are being converted directly into rent raises.
Surveillance should worry journalists and the public — whatever politicians say.
US citizens: tell Congress to
restore the Voting Rights Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress to protect the Clean Air Act.
US citizens: tell Senator Schumer, support diplomacy with Iran if you want to be minority leader.
Boehner says that Iran would not carry out a nuclear deal, but it is US Republicans that threatened to disobey such a deal.
It is standard practice for politicians that have contempt for most people to accuse others of the wrongs they themselves are guilty of.
Everyone: stand by Máxima Acuña de Chaupe, who won a court case to stop Newmont Mining from destroying her community with a gold mine, and now is facing violent retaliation.
US citizens: oppose the DARK act, that would prohibit states from mandating labeling of GMOs in foods.
Even the Rockefeller family was unable to persuade Exxon to stop denying global heating.
Now they will divest, slowly, from fossil fuels.
The UK plans to make people convicted of crimes pay an extra fine of around 2000 dollars for having insisted on a trial. Some people might plead guilty to avoid this extra fine.
Egypt sentenced Hany Amer to death for "crimes" that occurred after he was disappeared by the state.
The Egyptian judiciary is a gang of killer clowns.
Ukraine must respect the rights and culture of Russian-speaking people.
Dubya's use of "state secrets privilege" to block lawsuits was a big injustice, but the Obama regime has taken it to the absurd limit.
The UK has imposed high fees on health care for immigrants, so pregnant immigrants skip prenatal care. That leads to evitable serious medical problems.
Some give birth at home to avoid the crushing charges for the hospital.
The UN's "green climate fund" decided to fund coal power.
In the UK, thugs have a general "macho, arrogant, bullying culture" that is found in strongest form in the heads of departments.
The practice of imprisoning lots of people in order to use them as slave workers has a long history in the US. Southern states did this to repress blacks.
A study in 1995 concluded that
at least
10,000 people were wrongly convicted of crimes in the US each
year. Most instance were due to mistaken eyewitnesses.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The US started attacking PISSI forces in Tikrit, but the Shi'ite militias that are leading the attack on Tikrit are not happy with this.
I don't see why US air strikes on Tikrit would be wanted at all. Doesn't the Iraqi army have artillery that it can bring into range to fire on the dug-in PISSI troops.
Today Big Brother Watches Truckers, Tomorrow He'll Watch You.
This has already started with insurance companies that charge extra if you refuse to let the company monitor where you drive.
We should prohibit that practice.
US citizens: phone your congresscritters to support FASTR, and to ask for the bill to be strengthened to require the research papers to be published under a free/libre license.
US thugs' unofficial motto is "comply or die"; but even if you comply, they may still kill you.
Most thugs would not, I suppose, do the vicious things described in the article (and in many political notes here). But nearly all of them would support a fellow thug that has done those things, by lying in court if necessary, and that is why they deserve to be called "thugs". The few who refuse to support thugs are those who merit the title of "police officer".
To change this, we must go against the social pressure to presume all thugs are admirable except those who have been proved to beat, kill or frame someone. We must refuse to speak with deference about them or presume that they are in the right in a dispute. When thugs make accusations, we should distrust what they say about the facts.
The Ferguson thugs have agreed not to use tear gas on protesters.
Ferguson is one town out of thousands in the US. This needs to be adopted for all of them.
The US government has proposed to plan to reduce the frequency of antibiotic-resistant infections, but the crucial step of ceasing to feed antibiotics to farm animals that aren't sick is not part of the plan.
Antarctic ice shelves are melting rapidly. This has no direct effect on sea level, since they are floating. But with them gone, the ice sheets on land will be able to melt faster.
The Spanish government claims the "economy" is recovering, but this refers to totals. Apparently it is another bogus "recovery" for the rich only.
US citizens: Phone Senator Wyden and call on him to oppose "fast track" for the TPP. (202) 224-5244 and (503) 326-7525.
A new leak on Wikileaks shows that the TPP would give 9,000 foreign companies special rights in the US, beyond those of any US citizen (or US company).
Here's an example of this danger, found in the TPP and in the similar proposed TTIP agreement. NAFTA has already imposed a similar injustice on US, Mexico and Canada. Canada will have to pay 300 million dollars in compensation for blocking a quarry whose pollution would have harmed endangered species.
US citizens: oppose a trojan horse "chemical safety" bill.
US citizens: support the 21st Century Women's Health Act.
The UK will send soldiers to train "moderate Syrian rebels", if they can find any.
Omani journalist/dissident Muawiyah Alrawahi was disappeared as he tried to flee to the UAE.
Microphones installed in New York City, supposedly to detect and localize gunshots, record conversations on the street as well.
US presidential candidates are not interested in those who can obtain mere millions of dollars for them.
Google Fiber will track what TV shows people watch.
I think it should be illegal for cable TV to take note of that.
Erol Incedal was acquitted of planning an act of terrorism, but the UK stands convicted of using secret trials, a prima facie attack on human rights.
There is no reason to believe any claims officials make to justify this. Such officials see no harm in lying to the public; what they say is only what they would say.
Whatever act of terrorism Incedal was suspected of, it would have been less dangerous than secret trials. Governments have a lot more potential for violence than individuals, and it is not very long since the UK used this power for evil by supporting Dubya's invasion of Iraq.
Making it a crime to have a book like the Anarchist's Cookbook — beyond that, anything that leads to "suspicion" — is also tyranny.
Australia is using an insecure internet voting system.
In addition to the software vulnerabilities, remote voting opens the door for voters to be coerced by their bosses, by abusive spouses, etc. It is a foolish risk to permit remote voting except in special cases such as when people are travelling or in the hospital.
If young people are not voting, it's because they see the candidates that might win are working for plutocrats. Making it less work to vote is no solution.
As a pessimist by nature, I expect them to kill it.
It appears a pilot may have intentionally crashed an airliner in the Alps.
Until a few decades ago, large airliners generally had three cockpit flight crew: pilot, copilot and flight engineer. It would have been impossible for one pilot to dive the plane into the ground.
The switch to just two cockpit was implemented as an efficiency measure.
Saudi Arabia (with support from other US allies) is intervening militarily in Yemen's civil war.
This must have been approved by the US.
It seems really stupid for the US to take a side in that civil war, an opportunity to make enemies — but the consequences will be used to justify further war.
The Australian government's substitute for CO2 emissions reduction will at best do no good. It could do much worse.
The Australian government is simply obeying fossil fuel interests.
Thugs in Arab countries are even worse than US thugs, and this played a role both in stimulating revolutions and defeating revolutions.
Amnesty International accused Gaza militants of war crimes for using of non-aimable missiles and mortars.
(Mortars normally are aimed, like artillery.)
Some stores are selling imperfect but fresh fruits to reduce food waste.
Why We Execute People Is the Big Question, Not How.
It appears that US thug departments have systematically ignored many accusations of rape, often being cruel to the victims in the process. The estimate is that roughly a million rapes were omitted from statistics between 1995 and 2012.
A Republican bill would require US Air Force cadets to swear a religious oath.
These harassment policies can be quite effective in excluding people who are not religious fanatics. An Atheist in the Air Force Academy has sued against religious coercion there.
John Menard gave Scott Walker 1.5 million in campaign funds, and received almost 2 million in Wisconsin tax credits for it.
Naomi Klein: we must take advantage of the low oil price to cancel fossil fuel drilling projects.
I think we should put heavy taxes on fossil fuels, so that the price for use will be high enough to encourage conservation, while the price paid to extractors will be low enough to discourage drilling.
Israel's interception of Palestine's customs revenue is devastating the Palestinian economy.
Palestine's application to join the ICC is no valid grounds for punishment even if Israel fears that some of its officials or soldiers will be prosecuted for war crimes they committed.
The merger of Kraft and Heinz would create a giant company with dangerous economic power.
Thugs in Michigan arrested a man and beat him nearly to death.
They accuse him of possession of some (unstated) sort of drugs. Whether possessing them is a bad thing, I am not sure. Whether he really had them is hard to know, since thugs do frame people by planting drugs on them.
The UK's commission for investigating crimes by thugs upholds their subjective impressions to exonerate them.
UK thugs spied on Labour politicians even after they had been elected to Parliament.
They need not have bothered, given that the Labour party had by that time become the center-right New Labour.
Radio Shack promised not to sell customer identifying information, but the bankruptcy court is planning to do precisely that.
In other words, a company's privacy policy is valid only if the company does not fail. But then, most privacy policies are worthless anyway, because they have loopholes permitting the company to screw you.
If it occurs to you that a site or store's privacy policy would be relevant, just don't use that site or store. I have bought things from Radio Shack, but I paid cash and refused to identify myself.
Most accidents (more than half) of teenage drivers are caused by distractions such as phones or conversation.
UK prisons have become cruel warehouses for prisoners; all attempt at rehabilitation has been abandoned in the name of hyper-punitivity and cost-cutting.
The same is true in the US.
A black American male who does not finish high school has a 70% chance of going to prison.
This is partly because thugs are biased, and partly because the US has made life so much harder for poor people.
A new US "cybersecurity bill" is still inadequate as regards privacy: the ACLU rejects it.
Please don't use the term "hacking" to refer to breaking security — that insults us hackers.
Electric utilities keep on proposing laws to impede home solar power installations. We need to fight off each one.
In addition, each legislator who supports one of these attacks should be condemned personally as for sale.
US citizens: phone the white house to
oppose
oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
Everyone:
reject
the idea of allowing guns in school so women could supposedly protect
themselves from rape.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
This "protection" would hardly be usable in parties and with friends. Meanwhile, men would carry guns too…
I think the idea of this is to promote the Guns Everywhere agenda while misleading people about how rape typically occurs on campus.
Everyone: call on California to make Nestle stop pumping out and bottling water.
US citizens: phone your senators and ask them to support amendments that reduce Pentagon spending. Also phone your congresscritter to vote for the People's Budget.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
A high school near Ramallah can be reached by students only through sewage channels, as Israel has cut it off from all other directions.
The Israeli pressure group tried to make the University of Southampton cancel a conference about the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Indiana is going to pass a law permitting discrimination against anyone, as long as its motive is religious.
A bill in Wisconsin would allow companies to compel workers to work 7 days a week.
Nominally, the workers would have to "agree" to this, but they won't dare say no.
Montana proposes to ban use of food stamps to buy cookies, potato chips, seafood or steak.
Considering what a struggle it is for the people that receive food stamps to afford their necessities, I am sure they hardly ever buy those things. The real purpose of this bill is to mislead the public: to give the impression that being poor in American is painless and that it is ok to support the poor less.
Oil companies are still funding global heating denialists. They now use less prominent channels, rather than ALEC.
Thailand's military ruler threatens to kill journalists that don't uphold the government's line.
Global heating is going to claim several British train lines.
To think of "the economy" as a system of making stuff is missing the point.
Canada is preparing for "false flag" attacks on computers.
Jeb Bush had a second private email account that he does not remember.
An Australian member of parliament poured bunker oil on his hands to show how disgusting it is, asking to ban cruise ships from using it. Parliament decided to shoot the messenger.
"Getting rid of red tape" is an excuse for letting business trample people.
An interview with a Russian conscript soldier who was sent to fight in Ukraine.
Netanyahu's rejection of peace with Palestine calls for sanctions against Israel.
US coal companies have lost 3/4 of their value, and 200 mines have shut.
This good news is somewhat undermined by the fact that most of the decrease in coal use has been replaced with fracked natural gas. In order for this to have truly good results we need a policy that will move aggressively to prevent coal mines from being reopened.
Afghanistan: 'Fiction' of Sovereign Government, US Funding 'War of Attrition'.
Rafael Marques de Morais reports on corruption in mining in Angola and faces 9 years' imprisonment on charges of "defamation".
To make "defamation" a crime is a fundamental injustice, an attack on human rights. European countries take note!
This includes fossil fuels.
Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi is being punished for his Guantanamo hunger strike by torture in solitary confinement, as well as by force feeding.
The US cannot justify continued imprisonment without trial by the argument that some released prisoners would fight the US. In fact, the wrongs done to those men inspires many others to fight the US. They should be freed with an apology and compensation.
The Republican Party adopted a resolution written by a lobbyist from Taiwan.
A Pennsylvania thug faces charges of homicide for shooting a motorist who was lying flat on the ground after being tazed.
From this and other incidents I get the impression that US thugs have learned to shoot whenever they feel some anxiety.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject proposals to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, directly or indirectly.
India's Supreme Court overturned an internet censorship law.
Everyone: call on US science museums to kick the Koch brothers off their boards.
Don't sell out science for a donation from an anti-scientist.
US citizens: support big, bold, economic-populist ideas in the 2016 election.
The Gates Foundation is planning with seed companies and government agencies how to help seed companies take control of agriculture in Africa.
12 percent of the voters in Wisconsin will be disenfranchised by Scott Walker's voter ID law.
A proposed Arizona bill would conceal the names of killer thugs. It would also conceal information about thugs that have been punished, to keep the public from spotting thugs that have a pattern of attacking people.
Debra Milke has been freed after over 20 years in prison, where she was sent by a lying thug.
Overt racism against blacks persists in the US; it is not disappearing.
Chicago searches innocent people on the street far more often than New York City used to do so.
A White House official told an audience of pro-peace American Jews that Israel must end its occupation of Palestine, and that the US doesn't trust Netanyahu to try.
The UK system to create excuses to starve the unemployed is so cruel that it resembles the exaggerated villains of comedy movies.
This was done by the same party that set quotas to report disabled people as fit for work.
Converting employees into "independent contractors" is an excuse for closing down the business and cheating them of their back pay.
Costa Rica has got all its electricity from renewables since January 4.
Black Duck, founded by a Microsoft employee, tries to convince you not to copyleft your code.
Everyone:
Call
on Mauritania
to free imprisoned anti-slavery activists.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
When you disable Javascript, this petition may appear to have failed, but it does in fact function.
US citizens:
call
on the Securities and Exchange Commission to make a strong
pay-ratio rule.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Anheuser-Busch to support new clean water regulations.
Everyone:
call
on Louisiana Governor Jindall to pardon Bernard Noble.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Calling on US science museums to stop investing in science-denying fossil fuel companies.
African Elephants Could Be Extinct in the Wild Within Decades.
The UK government is covering up the barbarity of its privatized prisons by barring campaigners from seeing them.
The US "War on Drugs" has created gangs in Mexico that are as violent as PISSI, only without the religious aspect.
The US has quietly stopped protecting some murderous Latin-American officials.
Afghans demand prosecution of the leaders of the mob that burned a woman to death based on mad rumors.
Global Warming 'Set to Speed Up to Rates Not Seen for 1,000 Years'.
The FBI has disregarded the part of the PAT RIOT act that requires it to inform Congress of how it is using the massive surveillance power.
Just informing Congress is not enough; that power must be eliminated. Members of Congress should take the FBI's contempt for Congress as an additional reason to abolish it.
The Orwellian Re-Branding of "Mass Surveillance" as Merely "Bulk Collection".
How the European Central Bank dictates to European governments in order to colonize entire countries as debt farms.
The industrial food system claims to deliver "food security", but more Americans are suffering food insecurity nowadays, and that includes new kinds of food insecurity (such as obesity due to adding lots of sugar) created by the food industry.
The right-wing UK government tried to sneakily privatize a large part of the National Health Service.
Its goal is to make health care for the non-rich as inaccessible as in the US. Over the long term, that will get rid of many superfluous (no longer worth employing) Britons, a few at a time, and the government will be able to deny responsibility.
Senator Wyden says Obama is permitting too much general snooping on Americans.
UK intelligence agencies, found to have disregarded the law, have decided to admit this as a basis for changing the law to legalize most of what they have done.
Privacy Advocates Decry UK Parliament Mass Surveillance Report.
The FBI wants permission to sabotage any and all computers at will, and Congress is working to authorize it.
Please don't use the word "hacK" for this.
The Australian government is making a sham of protecting journalists from massive surveillance.
The suggestion that journalists and sources should use encryption is not adequate. Simply seeing who a journalist is talking with is enough to catch the sources.
The Australian right-wing was so eager to increase logging in Tasmania that it started cutting down the habitat of an endangered species of parrot.
Global heating denier Senator Inhofe has been paid campaign funds by BP.
The sexual revolution has been largely replaced, in the US, with an inexplicable sense of obligation to find monogamy and reproduce.
Bleah.
New Zealand wanted its trade minister to become head of the WTO, so its spy organization read the emails of other candidates.
This is embarrassing since New Zealand can hardly claim that this was a matter of national security. In fact, the security of New Zealanders depends on getting out of the WTO, whose purpose is to give businesses power over countries, thus suppressing democracy.
The WTO ought to be abolished.
In the UK, 500 minority group members have died suspiciously while in jail or prison, but no one has ever been prosecuted for this.
Allowing MDs to give heroin to addicts has reduced the harm of the drug in countries that have tried it.
The US Senate is considering a bill to cut the mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.
Scott Walker: raider against women's rights.
Thugs in St Paul arrested a black man for the crime of sitting while black.
If you view those youtube videos, be sure to download them with youtube-dl, because viewing them from the site itself requires running nonfree software.
"Returning" a tribe of domesticated gorillas to the wild is causing their deaths.
The battle successes of the Shi'ite Houthis are pushing the Sunnis of Yemen into the camp of al Qa'ida.
Pakistan's army fought a substantial battle against the Pakistani Taliban.
Trying to catch the Taliban when they retreated from the area bespeaks a serious intention to defeat them, not merely make a show of fighting them.
US citizens:
insist
on no abortion ban in victims of trafficking bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: oppose the Tesoro-Savage oil export terminal, for which the oil to export would arrive by train.
US citizens: call on Obama to stop the automatic support for Israel in the UN Security Council.
US citizens: oppose cuts in food stamps.
US citizens:
support
banning fracking on public lands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Why the proposed rules are inadequate.
GOP Budget Slashes Tax Rates for the 1 Percent, Safety Net for Everyone Else.
Jeb Bush's emails show that he granted public favors to political supporters.
In Honduras, leading women's rights activist Gladys Lanza has been convicted of "defamation" for taking the side of a woman who accused her boss of sexual harassment.
To make "defamation" a crime is in itself oppression.
A bus driver was fired because tested positive for cocaine on account of having handled lots of paper money.
This particular driver had not used cocaine at all. But suppose he had — on a vacation, not on duty. That is no grounds for firing someone.
The only sort of drug test that is legitimate to give is one that tests for intoxication while on duty.
The UK has sentenced whistleblower Bettina Jordan to 10 years in prison. She revealed embarrassing failures that the government wanted to cover up.
That she accepted money from journalists makes her less noble than Snowden, but doesn't alter the fact that her activity served her country rather than its enemies.
The French Socialist Party has neglected working people, who are turning (absurdly) to the racist nationalist party, which uses the typical "blame the foreigners, not the plutocrats" approach.
It is a mistake to prejudge men that adore girls age 8 to 12 as "predators".
France plans to abolish privacy rights by allowing an executive body to authorize the most intrusive kinds of surveillance, even planting cameras, microphones and keyloggers in people's homes, without a court order.
Among the permitted excuses for unrestrained surveillance are "the protection of France's economic interests" (such as spying on those who would denounce a company's wrongdoing) and "the prevention of collective violence" that could seriously disrupt the public peace (i.e., sabotaging protests).
This is a grab for tyrannical power.
Africa shows little political will to stop the slaughter of rhinos and elephants. The northern white rhino is now extinct in the wild.
The terrorist attack on the Bardo museum was meant to crush Tunisia's tourism-based economy.
Thailand's military rulers are trying to crush logic and consistency as well as democracy, human rights and environmental protection.
When thugs try to take psychiatric patients to the hospital, often things go predictably wrong leading to the patients' death.
WHO says that Roundup 'probably' causes cancer.
US radio chains want the FCC to legalize payola.
Measuring how much advantage Republicans get from drawing election districts that favor them.
Florida can stop officials from saying "sea level rise" but can't stop salt water from seeping into the aquifer.
Sheriff Arpaio confessed to violating the court order to cease racial profiling, and hopes to buy his way out of punishment.
Dow, the evolution denialist.
Why the US is stuck in perpetual war.
Whistleblowers have accused Transcanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, of doing faulty work on pipelines and covering it up.
This is why the Keystone XL pipeline poses a high threat of local damage from leaks, as well as a threat to all civilization from burning the oil that would be shipped through it.
Everyone:
Call on 33 US mayors
to legalize giving food to the homeless.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
33 US cities currently ban giving food to the homeless or are considering that policy.
Everyone:
Call on Shell
to stop funding ALEC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Censorship-avoiding site Greatfire is facing a sophisticated DDS attack, perhaps done by China.
States are proposing laws to limit access to thugcam recordings. There need to be limits, for privacy's sake, but the recordings must be available when they show violence without depending on the thugs' good will.
David Graeber: since the 70s, society has generated "bullshit jobs" (that contribute nothing to society's well-being overall) to keep people employed and and keep leisure time down. Meanwhile, academia has kicked out the oddballs, who have been forced into bullshit jobs.
It seems plausible for the period 1970-2007. This does not have to be an intentional scheme — here's a way it could happen without any plan. Suppose there are many ways that businesses could get into an arms race of nonproductive competition. The extent of nonproductive competition actually practiced will be controlled by macroeconomic factors such as the level of unemployment. Thus, as productive work becomes obsolete, it makes room for bullshit to expand.
However, I think this changed with the financial crisis. Nowadays, business tends to leave people in Mcjobs rather than employing them for bullshit. Why the change? Perhaps there used to be enough residual democracy that business was pressured to employ people. Now the plutocrats have defeated democracy, so they can please themselves.
Abbott's "long term" plan to protect the Great Barrier Reef addresses some of the shorter-term problems, but disregards the danger that global heating will kill all the coral.
[PISSI] Destroys Historic Christian And Muslim Shrines in Northern Iraq.
Two would-be Islamist terrorists have been convicted of planning to attack a train in Canada.
It looks like a typical FBI-led fantasy entrapment. What they talked about doing sounds bad (though the article is sketchy about what it was), but if the FBI led them to make the plan, they probably never would have done anything if left to themselves.
If it is possible to make contact with known potential terrorists, it is surely possible to monitor them to see if they ever plan any specific crime, without encouraging them to do so.
The question of independence for Scotland (or Catalunya, or any other European region) is secondary, a distraction from poverty and plutocracy.
Around 600,000 people in Syria are in besieged communities.
A thug in Maryland held a gun to a man's head saying "We're [thugs], we shoot people." What's amazing is, the thug is being prosecuted.
New Jersey has passed a law requiring local government to approve the acquisition of military weapons and equipment by thugs.
Some US schools are reconsidering whether having thugs on the premises is good for their students.
US citizens: oppose the Cove Point fracked gas export facility.
US citizens: Support the people's budget in Congress.
US citizens: support taking account of sustainability in US nutrition recommendations.
The University of Arkansas hid the diary of former senator Bumpers, apparently because it said unkind things about the Clintons.
Muslim women who cover their heads "because women are supposed to" are making a reactionary political statement against feminism and enlightenment, though they may not realize it.
They have a right to make that statement, but we should confront them with our opposition to it.
I have a Turkish friend who, on principle, absolutely refuses to cover her head as a dress code. She would not do it even for 10 minutes to accompany me in touring a mosque. Bravo!
Hong Kong Fears Beijing Crackdown on Academic Freedom.
The UK is still investigating journalists that reported on Snowden's revelations, and claims that everything about the investigation must be secret to avoid helping terrorists.
For "terrorists" read dissidents, journalists, and sources.
How to reduce the danger of re-identifying "anonymous" personal data?
ActionAid, Greenpeace, Oxfam and Civicus say that the power of the global rich is the obstacle to ending poverty.
When governments make union action methods illegal, unions must break these laws.
Beyond Happy Meals: 5 Devious Ways McDonald's Markets to Kids.
Drones Aren't Just Toys That Cause a Nuisance. They're Still Killing Innocent People.
The EU says Israel's continuing land-grab in Jerusalem is escalating division and violence.
California campaigners want to stop Nestle from pumping large quantities of water to bottle, and paying a pittance for it.
A report says that a right-wing activist tried to send provocateurs into Black Lives Matter protests to stir up violence.
A big pharma company is imposing tight control on administration of a hepatitis C drug in poor countries.
Three Chicagoans are suing the thugs for kidnaping them.
Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui and her colleagues were fired after they revealed a corruption scandal that embarrassed the President.
Does corruption involving the president of Mexico qualify as news?
Erdoğan is on a rampage against journalistic criticism: 61 journalists have been convicted of "defamating" him.
The very idea of prosecuting someone for "defamation" represents contempt for freedom of speech.
To handle California's water crisis requires big cuts in water use by business, including agriculture.
If you are anxious about missing your flight, TSA pseudoscience could suppose you look like a terrorist.
ACLU Sues TSA for Records on Discredited 'Behavior Detection' Program.
A UN court ruled that the UK must give the Chagos islands back to Mauritius.
This might allow the Chagos islanders to return home, if the UK does not disregard it.
France has mandated "green roofs" for new commercial buildings.
Facts can't be racist, but the selection of which facts to present can be racist.
Saint Mary's Cathedral, in San Francisco, set up an automatic sprinkler to drench homeless people who slept in its doorways. How typically San Francisco.
If people sleep in doorways it is because society has failed them.
The Mall of America maintained a fake Facebook account since 2009 to infiltrate various activist groups.
Palestinian teenagers were tortured into confessing to throwing stones, and have been imprisoned for two years now.
Proprietary software increasingly asks users keep paying and paying.
This annoyance is a secondary consequence of the fact that the software isn't free/libre.
Pitcairn Marine Reserve Is an Incredible Win for the Oceans.
The new order in the US is a plutocratic/military state.
Netanyahu is trying to resume pretending he will accept a Palestinian state.
Barton Bibler of the Florida environmental protection agency violated the ban on using the term "climate change", and was told to get a mental health evaluation.
France has legalized keeping terminally ill people unconscious at their request.
Create UN military unit to protect ancient sites from [PISSI], says Italy.
I am in favor of it, but it shouldn't be thought of as a like a "peacekeeping" unit. It will have to fight to capture and hold the sites it protects.
Meanwhile, antiquities in Italy are decaying for lack of money to preserve them.
That sort of thing will happen a lot more, a few decades from now, as global heating leaves many countries barely able to hold on.
War drags on as Obama keeps postponing the closure of US bases in Afghanistan.
Arctic ice has set a new record low for winter.
The Gates Foundation has 1.4 billion invested in fossil fuels.
Eritrea Blighted by ' Ruthless Repression' And Human Rights Violations, says UN.
US citizens:
Call on Obama
to order companies with federal contracts
to disclose their election spending.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Obama regrets that he did not hurry to close the Guantanamo prison.
Thousands of Tunisians take to streets to denounce Bardo museum attack.
A German couple paid some of the war reparations that they say each German owes Greece.
The UN says PISSI's killing of Yazidis may be genocide.
PISSI clearly aimed for genocide.
Developed Nations Have Sown the Wind, Vanuatu Has Reaped the Whirlwind.
Our turn is coming soon.
Weapons provided by the US to client states have often ended up in the hands of enemies.
US citizens: phone the White House at 1-888-369-5791 and call on Obama not to allow Shell to drill for oil in the Arctic. (You will hear a message from Greenpeace first.)
Maybe you can mention the Atlantic Coast too.
Turtle egg poachers in Costa Rica are murdering conservationists to stop them from protecting the eggs.
1/10 of bee species in Europe are threatened with extinction.
The US threatened to punish Germany if it gave Snowden asylum or protected him.
Israeli soldiers arrested international volunteers who were escorting Palestinian children home from kindergarten.
Israelis often regard anything that keeps Palestinians safe as an attack on Israel.
An Israeli army unit invented a rule to put land off limits for Palestinian shepherds as "Jewish grazing grounds".
Students have occupied a part of the London School of Economics as a protest against "marketisation of higher education".
Among other demands, they want the cleaning staff to get predictable hours.
One beneficial effect of the low price of oil is that many oil wells are being closed, or not started. That's a step in the right direction: leaving 80% of fossil fuel in the ground.
The UK government's response is a tax cut to stimulate oil extraction.
Google cut off its advertising service to antiwar.com because that site displays photos of torture carried out by the US military.
Google ads track the user, so when a site displays them, it treats its visitors badly. (I think IceCat blocks them but I don't have a way to verify that quickly.) Sites that take a controversial position, or have material some people might criticize, have a special duty not to display ads that work this way.
Senators have proposed a bill to regulate the chemical industry, apparently written by the chemical industry.
Australia finds that plain packaging for cigarettes reduces smoking, especially among teenagers.
Dallas thugs shot Jason Harrison dead because he didn't drop his screwdriver quickly.
Obama said he will reevaluate the US approach to the Israel-Palestine issue in response to Netanyahu's rejection of peace.
Female family mediators in Gaza try to reduce the effects of the
oppression of women introduced by Hamas. But they too face the
obstacle of
unequal
treatment.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The Israeli fanatics trying to push Palestinians out of Hebron are supported by a US charity with a tax exemption.
Israel is trying to force the Sub Laban family out of a house in Jerusalem where it has lived since the area was under Jordan's control. The case uses a bizarre and unfair technicality, claiming that the family "abandoned" the house during many years when Israel fanatics blocked it from using the house.
UK banks are closing the accounts of many people and organizations associated with anything that banks fear might cause some sort of trouble.
Tarawa, and Kiribati in general, are being inundated as our carbon emissions make sea level rise.
Rachel Corrie's family presses the US to obey US law and withdraw funding for Israel on account of its contempt for Palestinians' human rights.
The US Border Patrol was expanded so fast that there was no chance to choose good people or train them right. So it is no surprise that one of them murdered a border crosser and raped another.
The question is, will it maintain the impunity typical of thugs.
To stop thugs from going hog-wild writing tickets, don't let the fines go to the organization that employs them.
Serbia Arrests Seven Men Over 1995 Srebrenica Massacre.
A lawyer in Pakistan was assassinated; he had defended the doctor who helped the US find Osama bin Laden.
Forest Sustainability Certification Gains Ground.
Islamist terrorists attacked tourists visiting the Bardo museum in Tunis.
Those fanatics hate the Roman mosaics as well as the tourists that come to see them.
I hope Tunisia does not use this as an excuse for trampling human rights.
Lots of baby sea lions are dying on the California coast. The heat of the ocean has pushed the fish away.
We're going to be seeing thousands of such problems around the world.
Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Chris Christie have scandals about using private email accounts, like Clinton.
A now melting Antarctic glacier could raise sea level 11 feet (3.5 meters).
Virginia has passed a law that data from license plate cameras can only be kept for a week, unless relevant to an active criminal investigation.
I wonder whether thugs will circumvent this rule by giving copies of the data to other agencies, and private data base companies, which will not be subject to this rule.
Oxford University refused to decide about divestment from fossil fuels, so alumni occupied some university offices, and others are planning to return their diplomas as a protest.
The Amazon rain forest is sick, even where it has not been cut down. Its ability to sink carbon has been reduced.
This is a positive feedback effect. We may have pushed the climate so far that it is going to roll over the cliff even if we stop pushing.
French commedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala was convicted of "condoning terrorism".
Dieudonné's statement, "I feel like Charlie Coulibaly", is not explicit about its meaning; it requires interpretation. I think it means he identifies with both the killers and the victims. It is certainly not an endorsement of the killings. Thus, I think that this was a miscarriage of justice, even granting that "condoning" can be a crime.
However, making the expression of opinions a crime is an attack on human rights in the first place.
Switzerland will return 2 billion dollars of dictator Abacha's loot to Nigeria.
Republicans are pushing state laws to permit discrimination of any kind, as long as it is based on religious.
Shi'ite militias destroyed Sunni entire villages last year, fighting against PISSI.
Ghana is making a success of democracy, providing education and health care to everyone.
Will the US catch up with Ghana?
10,000 protesters are attacking the poverty-inducing policies of the European Centray Bank.
Netanyahu won reelection by stirring up fear and calling opponents traitors.
He explicitly rejected allowing a Palestinian state, putting him openly against peace and against most other powers (including the US).
I hope some of them will have the courage to downgrade diplomatic and economic relationships with Israel until it changes this policy and starts evacuating its colonies in Palestinian territory.
The biggest threats to Iran are degraded water, land and air. The US and Israel are minor worries by comparison.
Hertz puts cameras in rental cars and says, "Don't worry, we won't watch you."
I ask Hertz: do you track cars everywhere?
California's measures to reduce water use seem too weak to do the job.
This UK is considering a massive tidal power scheme.
A large subsidy makes sense for projects like this because they help avoid global heating disaster. What better use could our money be put to?
Benito Vasquez-Hernandez has been jailed for almost 3 years as a "material witness". He is going crazy and does not understand the situation enough to handle a hearing properly to get out of jail.
France is censoring web sites for political opinions, and Canada is proposing legislation to do the same.
UK thugs still fear legal reprisals if they talk about the MP they reportedly found in a sex party with teenagers.
Thugs that attack protesters are protected in Egypt, too.
US citizens: call on Congress to support several bills to reduce the influence of rich people's money on elections.
Within a decade, wind generators will be cheaper than fossil fuel power plants.
Unfortunately, we haven't got a decade to wait lackadaisically to cut down on fossil fuels. We must take strong measures by 2017.
Wind power would be cheaper already if fossil fuels were taxed to cover the cost that their emissions impose on society.
For gasoline, that is estimated at almost 4 dollars per gallon, more than the price of gasoline in the US.
I advocate taxing fossil fuels to cover these costs, mainly so as to use the market to move society away from them. As for politicians that say they will make gasoline cheaper, they are pandering to the foolish side of human nature.
Palestinians are resisting the occupation by trashing Israeli products brought into Palestine.
This accompanies a growing series of regular and permanent nonviolent protests against the occupation and theft of Palestinian land.
Syriza is negotiating with Russia as a possible saviour from euro-austerity.
It makes perfect sense to me.
Although Israel rejects its responsibility for crushing Rachel Corrie to death, activists still rally around her name.
The US is still playing games over Shaker Aamer.
Pakistan has gone on an execution spree, including someone who was tortured into a confession at age 14.
Obama followed Bush in excluding White House emails from the Freedom of Information Act.
Three UK judges have been dismissed for the shocking practice of watching porn.
I expected such an idiotic policy only from the prudes in the US.
A flame retardant common in digital devices may cause weight gain.
The US Government Is Pressuring Europe to Dial Back Its Pesticide Rules.
The Tories want to reduce inheritance tax. As if the rich people in the UK didn't have enough advantages already!
Two scientific teams concluded that Yasser Arafat was not poisoned; one team says it seems that he was.
Obama's War on Whistleblowers Leaves Administration Insiders Unscathed.
Anwar Ibrahim's daughter has been arrested, unconstitutionally, for making a speech in Malaysia's parliament.
This defiance of parliamentary immunity shows that the state is blatantly crushing opposition.
A Deputy Secretary of Energy (through 2014) who promoted nuclear power while in that job has gone to work for a nuclear fuel company.
200 domestic workers the Philippines are stuck in the Philippine embassy in Saudi Arabia, much like Julian Assange, unable to leave because of charges of illegal sex. In some cases, this is because they were raped by their employers.
Islamic law treats a woman's testimony as less than a man's, so a woman who claims to have been raped gets convicted and punished. That is one of many gross injustices in Islamic law.
Many Muslims disapprove of that approach to law, but there is no denying that Islam is where it comes from.
Cruelty in the name of Islam is no less evil than cruelty in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism. There are people who advocate making a special case for Islam, in response to western colonialism and US aggression against some Muslim countries (though Saudi Arabia isn't one of them). That's no excuse!
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are not alone in this. The UK has a similar law which is ' turning domestic workers into modern-day slaves'.
Domestic workers are enslaved in other places too.
This is why I do not support calls to prevent enslavement of prostitutes by banning some aspects of prostitution. Shall we ban domestic work, or employing domestic workers? The methods of trafficking and enslavenment are used in many areas of work.
North Koreans are working in slave-like conditions in other countries.
I suspect they have been sold into slavery by the North Korean regime.
See the enslaved workers page.
Police Officer Regina Tasca won her job back. She sued after being fired for trying to stop her coworkers from acting like thugs.
She deserves the honor of being called a police officer because she has demonstrated she isn't a thug.
People have been sentenced to prison in Burma for "insulting religion" by advertising their bar with a poster of the Buddha listening to headphones.
What would the Buddha tell the Burmese authorities, if he were there today? "The poster makes me smile. The pain you felt when you saw that poster comes from your attachments. For your spiritual progress, you should meditate more and prosecute less."
UK thugs caught an MP having sex with teenagers in the 1980s, and were ordered to destroy all the evidence on pain of prosecution.
The controversial Mars One project seems to be a hollow shell.
Perhaps it was just a publicity stunt.
Doing most of our interaction through computer screens can affect the nature of social relationships.
The EPA disregarded legal requirements when approving the pesticide flupyradifurone, which resembles neonicotinoids in that it pervades all the tissues of the plant.
Obama promised transparency on the use of drones for targeted killings, but has not followed through with it.
Conservation measures for Florida manatees are effective; it seems that numbers have increased a little.
California has one year of water left, according to a leading scientist.
Iran's repression is getting worse, according to UN special rapporteur.
Egypt plans to build a new capital city in the desert. So far it is not clear where the energy and water will come from.
A campaign for the UK government to allow undercover thugs to tell the public what they did.
US citizens:
call on the US
to cancel all student debt.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on the US government to support the revolutionary Syrian Kurds
that are fighting PISSI.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
The expense of reliable contraception is a force that increases inequality, pushing American women from poor families into poverty via unwanted pregnancy.
Eating a lot of salt makes autoimmune diseases more likely.
The US credibility problem in the Middle East comes from being ineffective and inconsistent. It's not a reason for bullheadedness.
Thousands of low-paid college teachers in Toronto are on strike.
Judge Brockmeyer, who sentenced many poor people to debtor's prison in Ferguson, has resigned.
That does not mean victory. This issue is much bigger than one judge in one court.
World Cannot Prosper Without Cutting Carbon Emissions, Says Climate Group.
The Argument for Divesting from Fossil Fuels Is Becoming Overwhelming.
How the rapid heating of the Arctic leads to heavy winter snow and intense summer heat in the US and Europe.
The FBI inveigled Sami Osmakac into agreeing to a fantasy terrorist plot. Are we any safer?
The growth of US poverty paces the growth of US extreme wealth.
A Global War on Nature and the Politics of Extinction.
Burmese monks have sued the interior minister for burning protesters with chemical spray.
Substances have different biological effects when in nanomaterial form, and science knows very little about what they are. Meanwhile, regulatory systems treat them as equivalent.
The FBI intentionally strands US citizens abroad by putting them on the "no fly" list, to pressure them to become informants. Sometimes the FBI has another country torture them, too.
Vanuatu has been devastated by a hurricane, and its president points out that global heating is part of the cause.
Bread is not a good food for ducks.
Poor people in Britain impoverished by the "bedroom tax" have in many cases become ill.
Surprisingly many Fukishima children are being diagnosed with thyroid cancer, but it is not yet clear whether this is due to examining them for that disease with special care.
There should be a similar project to examine Japanese children of the same age from comparable district far away from Fukushima. It would provide a control group.
The FCC's form of network neutrality has a big flaw: it encourages ISPs to punish their customers for the copyright industry.
Park Yeon-mi, who escaped from North Korea, now faces efforts to kill or discredit her.
The UK right-wing Conservative party and centrist Labour party both rejected a demand from MDs to fund the National Health Service properly.
That would require taxing the rich and their businesses, and these parties have both surrendered to them.
Bruce Schneier gave an interview on his book about surveillance and what it does to society. Part 2.
US rivers are being polluted by salt applied to roads in winter.
This affects the humans who get their water from the rivers, as well as the animals that live in them or drink from them.
Under the pretext of preventing abuse Twitter is harassing tor users to give up their anonymity, but it's a dumb way to fight trolls.
PISSI taught prisoners to appear calm when beheaded by subjecting them to repeated mock beheadings.
The US Supreme Court ruled Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al-Janko cannot sue for damages for the torture he experienced in Guantanamo.
The proper redress is to prosecute those responsible for torturing him and many others — starting with Dubaya. Shame on the Obama regime for protecting torturers!
The high efficiency of massive digital surveillance makes it possible for the rich to flaunt their riches without fear the rest will rise up against plutocracy.
In a few decades, the effects of global heating will mean that the rest, instead of lingering in poverty, start dying instead.
US citizens: support the Student Loan Bill of Rights.
I support this and the proposal to forgive student loans.
UK reporter John Key is being prosecuted for paying an official for secrets, which he published and revealed big scandals.
US citizens: thank the FCC for supporting net neutrality.
US citizens: tell Senate Republicans not to sabotage a bill to aid people who have been trafficked by adding an anti-abortion rider.
Everyone:
call on the
government of India not to allow GM corn.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
China demands that the Dalai Lama must reincarnate in Tibet so that China can choose the next one.
Kalpona Akter, Bangladeshi labor leader, was arrested by The Children's Place for trespassing as she tried to deliver a petition.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change endorsed the divestment movement.
The Michigan Attorney General tried to harass a reporter with unjustifiable subpoenas.
[PISSI] Are Not The Only Ones Committing Great Acts of Vandalism.
US citizens:
call
on your representatives to oppose bills to strip wolves of their
endangered species protection.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone:
call
on Florida to investigate the order not to talk about "global
warming" and "climate change".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call for blocking court access to rape victims' therapy records.
Everyone: stand behind striking Shell oil refinery workers who demand more attention to safety.
US citizens:
call
on the CFPB to ban banks from imposing arbitration on their
customers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone: call on the big US banks to say what they pay executives, especially those that move to government jobs.
The government should never hire anyone who has worked for a big bank in the past 5 years as anything more than a teller.
The US is gradually building up a DNA data base about everyone, taking samples from everyone who is arrested and all newborns.
Put this together with the fact that false DNA evidence can be constructed to frame someone, and you have a real problem.
At present, scientists cannot identify anything in a person's DNA that would show the person is prone to crime — except a Y chromosome, which shows that the person is male. (Most criminals are male.) In 50 years, maybe that will be possible. The question would be, what is the right use to make of that information?
UK libel law continues to hamper publication there.
Projecting how global heating will impact food production in Australia. It doesn't look good.
Avijit Roy's widow demands Bangladesh identify and prosecute the thugs who watched as he was killed.
Kurds say that PISSI used chemical weapons.
CISA is much worse than CISPA — think of it as PAT RIOT Act 2.0.
Some supermarkets in Venezuela now check purchasers' fingerprints.
This applies to public supermarkets in provinces near the frontier, where there is a lot of smuggling. The smuggling occurs because the state subsidizes certain commodities for the sake of the poor. It would be better to switch to a system like US food stamps.
Australia's right-wing government claims that it can't afford to support so many old people, so it will have to hang them out to die.
The argument is fallacious, as usual, and surely based on the assumption that tax rates on the wealthy will be kept low.
The effects of global heating are destroying ancient relics from Chile to Siberia.
1/4 of British adults before middle age are delaying having children because the costs of living are too high.
Fewer births is a good thing, but there are better ways to achieve that than by pushing many people into poverty.
Global heating tends to reduce the summer storms that bring cooler air from the ocean. As a result, it will tend to increase summer heat waves, above and beyond the general heating.
If you want to watch the video on YouTube, please do not view it directly from the site, since that will run nonfree Javascript code in your browser. Protect your freedom by using youtube-dl to download it.
Last week it emerged that Iraqi Shi'ite militias were torturing and killing Sunni prisoners. The US and Iraqi governments said they were surprised.
They said the same thing 10 years ago, after Bush forces troops found Iraqi government agents torturing and killing prisoners. The troops were ordered to go away and say nothing about it.
None so surprised as he who will not remember.
Reports say that US air strikes in Syria have killed over 100 civilians.
All in all, that is not very many compared with the 76,000 killed last year in Syria.
Most of the US air strikes in Syria have been done on the battlefield. I expect Syrians to understand that there is no way to make battlefields safe, and civilians try to stay away from them.
However, attacks on Raqqa are a different case. That is not a battlefield, so air strikes there are more likely to bystanders. It is hard to flee Raqqa; even harder for women.
Swedish prosecutors have agreed to interview Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
There are good reasons to believe that the real purpose of this interview was only to get their hands on him and render him to the US. But the Swedish Supreme Court told them to stop dragging their heels and get the interview done.
A Chilean officer, accused of murdering prisoners for Pinochet, was allowed to teach for years in the US National Defense University which disregarded the complaints against him.
The US coordinated and encouraged the repression in Chile and other nearby countries in the 1970s, and it continued afterward to shield many of those that carried it out.
I disagree with one person quoted in the article. These murders were not terrorism. Murder of prisoners is a different crime. Stretching the meaning of "terrorism" is an obstacle to clear thinking, so let's not do it.
How We End The War Over Standardized Testing.
There is broad opposition to Canada's proposed law for more state surveillance.
The opposition says general surveillance should have more oversight, but the problems are much bigger than that.
Is the Washington Post a state-funded newspaper? Not directly or explicitly, but its owner gets lots of money from the CIA and other US agencies.
It appears Tony Robinson had taken psychedelic mushrooms and was acting strangely when he was shot dead by thugs. A friend had called them to get help for him. They could have dealt with him without shooting him.
We see a pattern of situations where a black or hispanic person is the object of suspicion — even for something not the slightest bit wrong, such as carrying an air rifle to the sales clerk in order to buy it — and thugs resort immediately to deadly force.
The former (and only elected) president of the Maldives was convicted of "terrorism", i.e., illegally arresting a judge.
I don't know whether he arrested a judge, and if so I don't know whether it was illegal, but it certainly wasn't terrorism. Therefore it is clear that this trial was bogus.
The CIA director confirmed that the CIA still hands over prisoners to other governments and still interrogates prisoners in collaboration with them.
That would not be a bad thing if we could count on both countries to do this in an acceptable way. However, in the last decade the US has been known to turn prisoners over to governments that tortured them and even cooperated in the interrogation while letting the other country's thugs do the torture.
The New York Thug Department tried to whitewash the killing of Eric Garner in Wikipedia.
Inequality means two parallel human societies, increasingly with different rules for the poor and for the rich.
The current low price of oil is because renewable energy and economic slowdown have slowed the expected increase in oil demand, resulting in a glut.
The low price is causing cancellation of many dangerous oil extraction projects. The article says that the low price will not increase consumption much. I hope that is true, but in general one would expect the demand to be somewhat elastic.
Spain's senate approved the law to impose big fines on protesters and ban publishing images of thugs.
Ferguson protesters were arrested in their house by a SWAT team with guns pointed at them. They were suspected of shooting two thugs, simply because they ran away from the protest after the shots were fired.
I wonder: was the confiscated pistol legal? If so, why was it confiscated?
Due to the economic slowdown in China, and high investment in renewable energy, the world's CO2 emissions did not increase in 2014. That is a step towards avoiding disaster.
It is not enough, however, because in 2013 we were already emitting much more CO2 per year than the Earth's systems could dispose of. Thus, the CO2 level in the atmosphere did increase in 2014, just as in 2013.
Under Putin, people in the Crimea that express support for Ukraine are jailed, fired, even exiled.
However, charges have been dropped against Svetlana Davydova, who informed Ukraine of evidence that Russian troops were invading Ukraine.
CISA Cybersecurity Bill Advances Despite Privacy Concerns.
This was formerly known as CISPA.
The racist chant of the SAE students was despicable, but they should not be punished for saying things we don't like.
The fraternity isn't a person and doesn't have the same rights that students have. There is room for taking systematic action to teach people the wrong in racist views, without violating their rights.
US snoops are claiming, yet again, that ending massive surveillance would help terrorists. That is bullshit, since massive surveillance never caught any terrorists.
They know this is false, or should know, which makes them dishonest or incompetent.
In Portland, Oregon, thugs arrested homeless people and charged them with theft for using a "privately owned" electrical outlet on the street to get less than one cent's worth of electricity.
The word "thugs" is hardly adequate for this gratuitous cruelty to people who are down and out and are not hurting anyone.
Rutgers University sprung a surprise: mandatory face recognition for online courses.
McDonalds is suing to overturn Seattle's new minimum wage law, claiming that it violates McDonalds' "rights as a person".
Judge Brockmeyer, who jailed Ferguson residents for small fines they could not afford to pay, owes $170,000 in back taxes himself.
This problem is bigger than one selfish jerk. We must abolish debtor's prison in the US, no matter what disguises it adopts.
Thomas Piketty's recommendations for how to fix the euro-zone's austerity.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics made a revised, higher estimate of how many Americans are killed by thugs. Human rights researcher Patrick Ball explains why that is probably still an underestimate.
Armand Martin's widow asked the Albuquerque thug department for videos of the shooting of her husband. They arrived encrypted, so she has to sue them to get the key.
In the US, if you get cancer before you are old, you are likely to get fired and become unemployable. And maybe your spouse as well.
The solution to this is a national health service. Properly funded (with less than what we pay now), it would provide better care on the average.
By funding this from income or wealth taxes, rather than payroll tax, we would eliminate a big incentive to replace workers with machines.
US citizens:
object
to buying possibly contaminated chicken from China for school
lunch programs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Many US policies amount to bias against children of unmarried parents.
UK thugs infiltrated unions to spy on them, until 2008.
The Blurred Lines Copyright Verdict is Bad News for Music.
It is not a precedent, but it indicates a danger that may occur in other cases.
Bulgaria's Constitutional Court rejected mandatory data collection about everyone's phone and internet connections.
From 1951 to 2010, Democratic presidents have reduced unemployment while Republican presidents have tended to boost the stock market.
Wall Street's bonuses add up to the pay of a million workers at minimum wage.
Why Was an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Tracking a Black Lives Matter Protest?
The Thai military government's new method for knocking down the Shinawatra supporters: voting to ban 250 of their former elected officials from politics.
The greatness of Dr Ambedkar.
Lower fishing quotas in Europe would allow fish stocks to double, and the sustainable catch would double too.
Fishing policy is always based on the short term.
How could Obama intervene in Syria against PISSI.
There is no obvious feasible way for the US to fight PISSI in Syria without helping Assad. The non-jihadi Arab opposition to Assad is almost nonexistent, and supporting it would be meaningless.
The only other forces in Syria opposed to Assad and PISSI are the democratic-socialist Kurds. I'd love to see them get support, but they may not want to do more than defend their own territory, and they may not be welcomed by Arabs.
Greece demands $500 billion from Germany in reparations for World War I and World War II.
This is in response to Germany's current economic warfare against Greece, carried out through the eurozone austerity.
Afghan performance artist Kubra Khademi walked around Kabul wearing steel armor fashioned to look like a sexy woman.
The curses and death threats she received demonstrate the arrogance of misogynous men. Misogyny is found in many parts of the world, but Islamic countries are the worst extreme; men claim the right to murder women and feel no shame about it.
This is why we must fight and defeat PISSI and other Islamists — though indiscriminate use of armed force is not a likely way to win.
Mexico effectively offered $20 million to movie companies for changes in the story of the next James Bond film.
The article does not say explicitly that the movie companies accepted the deal, but that appears to be the case.
The US military has a similar practice: it cooperates only with films that will present a pro-military point of view, thus discouraging the making of films that criticize the US military or US wars.
Companies are pushing school software applications into classrooms with no checks about whether they respect students' privacy, or even whether they work.
The article notices only the tip of the iceberg. These programs are proprietary software, and teaching students to use proprietary software is wrong. If they send any data about a student to a company, even the student's name, that violates the student's privacy.
Americans, don't use tax preparation companies, says a former employee of one.
The Republican letter to Iran crowns a 6-year Republican career of sabotaging the US and taking state programs hostage.
The size of student loans in the US makes them an economic problem for the country as a whole, as well as a chain on the leg of students that did not get good jobs.
Ethiopia seems to be spying on the journalists of an independent TV channel based in the US and directed at Ethiopians.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats not to join Republicans in sabotaging diplomacy with Iran.
US citizens: urge your congresscritter to oppose Blackburn's anti-net-neutrality bill.
US citizens: call on senators to preserve the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Everyone: call on California Governor Brown to ban fracking and stop injection of toxic wastes that can pollute water supplies.
Obama absurdly declared Venezuela a "threat to U.S. security", as an excuse to impose economic sanctions.
He is also "concerned" about Venezuela's "human rights violations", such as accusing a few opposition politicians of joining a coup plot allegedly organized by the US (which organized one around 12 years ago) but strangely unconcerned about Saudi Arabia's across-the-board human rights violations or Mexico's.
I really am concerned about the charges against those opposition politicians. They could be valid, but I can't be confident of that, and that is the cause of my concern. I hope they will get fair trials and that they won't be convicted without real proof of complicity.
Jessie Hernandez' autopsy suggests thugs lied about the circumstances of shooting her dead: the car was passing them, not heading for them.
Mark Lynas insists that humanity will triple its energy use, whether that brings global disaster or not; then he hopes it won't. It is the arrogance of shut eyes.
Lynas misrepresents Naomi Klein, who did not call for eliminating the free market, capitalism, and growth. She said we must defeat what I call the plutocratic political system: "privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending."
That system gives the fossil fuel companies the power to block the measures that are needed to avoid disaster, and they are using it with great skill to ensure we charge headlong off the climate cliff.
To reestablish democracy, we must abolish plutocracy. But we can still have private businesses, and economic growth insofar as we can achieve it while keeping resource usage to a sustainable level.
35 years from now, every year will be hotter than today's record heat.
Egypt censored a newspaper article that claimed government departments don't pay their workers employer-taxes.
If the failure to pay causes the workers not to get the pensions they are entitled to, or makes the workers pay that tax instead, that is a real wrong — to the workers. Otherwise, it is not clear to me that this "evasion" of taxes from the state to the state really affects anything substantial.
The censorship of the article is a real issue even if the article's subject is not.
Thugs in Georgia shot an unarmed man who was walking nude outside. The man was manic-depressive, which is hardly a reason to kill him.
It seems thugs today are quick to shoot whenever they get the idea that something might be wrong.
The UK government underfunded the NHS, causing a backlog. Now it is using that as an excuse to take another step towards its medium-term goal of privatizing the NHS.
Its long-term goal is to get rid of universal healthcare, so that the poor can't afford it.
Someone shot and wounded two Ferguson thugs while others were protesting.
It seems plausible that this is a response provoked by the systematic violence and dishonesty of US thugs. Nonetheless, trying to kill them (I presume that was the intent) just because they are thugs is going too far. It is also a self-defeating response, because thugs will use this to try to put blame on nonviolent protesters.
A mother found shocking racism as her child began to read The Travels of Babar.
Books from the era before people learned to condemn racism often reflect the racism that was common at the time. If the book is of no great importance, we may as well forget it. But what if it is greatly loved for other reasons?
The racism of The Merchant of Venice has bothered people for a long time, and so has the sexism of The Taming of the Shrew. Rather than rejecting them, we discuss the issue of the bigotry. Perhaps it is better to do the same with Babar than to burn it.
An Indian court ordered removal of anti-coal-mine activist Priya Pillai from a list of people not allowed to travel abroad.
In Japan, some people have funerals for robot pets that have broken down.
I will be the first to admit that in principle a robot could have the same qualities that merit whatever-it-might-be as a dog, or a human. In principle, a robot could love as a human does, or at least as a dog loves a human. I am sure that these Aibos are not capable of that. Those people are fooling themselves.
But then, I've never seen much sense in funerals. When I miss someone who has died, it is a private sadness; a ceremony won't help me, but I can cope.
The person's body was important only because it housed a living person; with that person's death, the corpse is just a relic, and I don't see a point in fetishizing the relic. The only real importance of the corpse is that it can hurt or help living people.
Corpses of humans and other animals need safe disposal; burial and cremation are ways to dispose of a corpse safely and recycle its elements. That doesn't apply to robots, for which burial is not effective recycling.
Corpses of humans can also help people. Have you signed up as an organ donor? Have you willed your body for student surgeons to practice on? Those are important needs of society.
A Dutch court struck down collection of data about everyone's phone calls and internet contacts.
The financial crisis is responsible for over 12,000 suicides in Europe and the US from 2008 through 2010.
Banksters are more dangerous to our lives than terrorists, and this is not counting the other suffering (poverty, homelessness) that they cause, or the deaths due to lack of medical care, etc.
Parents of children used by Facebook are suing for a refund of money Facebook let the children spend using the parents' credit cards.
The civil war in Syria has cut life expectancy there by 20 years.
Global heating created the tinder for this war. When we talk about the effects of global heating in 30 years, imagine lots of such wars.
About B'Tselem, which reports the effects of Israel's occupation policies and war against Palestinians.
For mainstream Israel, merely reporting these effects is considered treason.
The increased poverty rate among Americans in some racial minorities result from bad policies.
The UN's top torture investigator has been waiting two years to visit Guantanamo, and federal and state prisons.
A lesson in how plutocrats bring rogue (i.e., ethical) governments to heel.
They haven't yet succeeded with the Swedish government, and I hope it tells them to jump in the lake.
Campaigning against the Barbie doll that listens (and snoops, and advertises).
The movie and record companies are transforming ICANN into an enforcement scheme for the war on sharing.
Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli ex-soldiers, shows Israelis how their occupation of Palestine is inherently based on cruelty and fear.
Pressuring and bashing teachers failed to improve education, but applying sports training methods to the activity of teaching enables many teachers to do it better.
An Australian report surveyed many experimental studies of applying homeopathy for many medical conditions and found there is no evidence it is effective for anything whatsoever.
Edzard Ernst spent 20 years looking for evidence that homeopathy was effective, but his experiments all said that it wasn't.
Everyone: call on Chris Christie to cancel the settlement that surrenders to Exxon.
US citizens:
call
on your senators to support the CARERs act, which would recognize
that marijuana has medical uses and get out of the way of
state-authorized medical marijuana distribution.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the Justice Department not to let BP get tax deductions for further settlement payments for the Big Spill.
Everyone:
Tell
Big Tuna brands: stop destroying endangered sea life in catching
tuna.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Kerry not to export armed drones.
Everyone:
call
on the mutual fund Franklin Templeton to get Sagent to stop making
drugs for executions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on the US government to require food labels to state the amount of
added sugar.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Chicago thugs stole from some of the people that they temporarily disappeared in their Homan Square black site.
One of the men accused of killing Nemtsov said he was tortured into a false confession.
The owners of an apartment building in Florida make tenants agree to assign copyright on all reviews of the place, and even photos of the inside or outside of the building.
The article says this practice is already illegal. But you can also bypass it by showing a friend the problems and letting your friend (who hasn't signed such a contract) write about them and photograph them.
Identifying the "surveillance-innovation complex".
See also http://gnu.org/philosophy/stallmans-law.html.
The conventional method of economic development are supposed to bring everyone out of poverty while some get rich. As the rich claim an ever larger portion of humanity's production, this method is ceasing to bring the rest out of poverty.
One of the British women suing about being exploited by an undercover UK thug recently learned there was a tracking device in her car.
Australia agrees to avoid dumping dredging spoils on the Great Barrier Reef, in order to continue with the plan to damage it by shipping coal and then wipe it out by burning the coal.
Amnesty International is suing to end massive surveillance since that exposes people reporting human rights abuses to retaliation.
Wikipedia is suing too on behalf of its contributors, who might be endangered.
How Burmese thugs first approved, then attacked a protest by students against a law they say threatens academic freedom.
Someone I know wrote:
The Myanmar Police went completely out of control today in Letpadan, which is a reflection of poor discipline, training and leadership. Senior police officials let things get out of control and this was a huge failure on their part and they bear full responsibility. Where were they when their officers were pummeling unarmed students who were in no way fighting back or resisting? Where were they when marauding police entered houses and blocked highways in their effort to find students who were trying to escape capture and beatings? Protesters did try to push their way out and they did destroy the barbed-wire barricades, but the violent and brutal police response far exceeded what the police needed to do. To their credit, I did see small groups of Myanmar Police working hard to keep their undisciplined colleagues from beating students, and in some cases it looked like police were fighting among themselves as the good cops tried to protect the students and activists with their own shields. In one instance, I saw police put a helmet on the head of a Buddhist monk and hold their shields over his body while he was being taken away. So maybe some of that EU police training paid off.Here is what happened after.
We Need to Attack the Morality of Fossil Fuel Investment (not only point out that it may lose monetary value).
Acceptance of "smart watches" could teach people to regard their bodies as machines to be monitored and quantified, distracting them from other thought.
A leading global heating denialist is threatening to sue the authors of "Merchants of Doubt".
A Russian expat claims that around 42,000 different Russian troops have participated in the fighting in Ukraine at some time.
He also claims that many of them are conscripts and that special troops are deployed behind them to shoot them if they run away. The "Dzerzhinskiy division" is apparently named after the man who lead the Soviet political repression police agency.
I don't know how much confidence to place in the author of this report and I won't treat this as certain truth.
Saudi human rights campaigner Mohammed al-Bajadi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
An interview with Herbert Ziegler, who rejected Japanese government demands that he delete forced prostitution for the Japanese army from his history textbook.
Just about every nation has crimes to confess to. The US has plenty. So does Japan. The US has confessed to some, including mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and this made the American nation more ethical and humane. Japan should confess to its crimes in order to make the Japanese nation more ethical and humane.
Likewise, Turkey should confess to the genocide of the Armenians, to make the Turkish nation more ethical and humane, instead of prosecuting people that talk about it.
And all governments, including that of France, should stop legislating what history should say.
Racism in the SAE fraternity goes beyond one local branch.
Cuba has a shortage of food, and rations are not quite enough. But since Cuba has allowed some capitalism, most Cubans now envy the few who can use convertible currency to buy more food.
The question is, how to use capitalism rather than being used by it, as so many poor countries' non-elites are.
Justin Levitt has tried to list all cases of alleged voting under the wrong name in the US since 2000. He has found only 31 such accusations.
This is the measure of the fraud that supposedly justifies voter ID laws.
Israeli transportation planning has isolated the mainly Palestinian city of Nazareth.
For a change, it was Israeli soldiers rather than "settlers" that destroyed Palestinians' olive trees.
Netanyahu let slip that he opposes returning any of the seized Palestinian land as part of a peace agreement.
A Spanish court ordered a brothel owner to pay social security contributions for workers.
Clinton turned over the emails her people judged to be government-related, then deleted the rest.
This means there is no way anyone can check whether she omitted (intentionally or accidentally) some that were government-related.
Ferguson's city manager has quit/been fired. He pushed the harsh policy of using fines and jail to extract money from the poor. Other officials have quit after their racism was exposed.
This is good, but small-scale. A similar jail-the-poor system (tantamount to debtor's prison) exists around the US. We need to cure it generally, not just in Ferguson, and not city-by-city.
Iran's theocratic ruler wants to ban vasectomies and end subsidized contraception, to force women to have more babies.
Increasing the human population exacerbates all resource and environmental problems. If a government wants to population increase, it should invite immigrants. Of course, hardly anyone would want to go to Iran and live under a theocratic regime.
Sugar Industry Shaped NIH Agenda on Dental Research.
In Syria, a Kurdish libertarian socialist revolution that champions women's equality is standing up to PISSI.
Saudi Arabia blocked a speech by Sweden's foreign minister to a meeting of the Arab League; she was going to talk about democracy and human rights. So Sweden decided to let lapse an arms sale agreement with Saudi Arabia.
Bravo for Sweden, daring to criticize the injustice of Saudi Arabia's medieval policies and stop facilitating arms sales to their perpetrators. Every country should do this.
The shari'a law that the Arab League ministers praised is the enemy of human rights, especially for women but also for men.
Since the sales are legal without the agreement, I wonder what benefit the agreement actually provides to that company. Does it provide financing? Bypass regulatory requirements?
A United Nations human rights expert strongly condemned the U.S. on Tuesday for being the "only State in the world that still sentences [minors] to life imprisonment without the opportunity for parole."
The expert actually said "children" but we don't need to stretch that word to make this point.
Regular feeding of antibiotics used to make pigs grow faster — but since 2000 it no longer has that effect.
The UK government is scapegoating the tiny fraction of people who are incapacitated by obesity, by threatening to bully them unless they get treatment. This is to distract from cutting the funds for mental health care that might provide useful treatment.
A call to abolish college fraternities.
A financial transactions tax could provide a lot of revenue to avoid austerity.
I am surprised by the idea of taxing derivatives less. Derivatives can destabilize the whole financial system, so it makes sense to tax them enough to discourage them somewhat.
Later: the explanation is that the tax on derivatives is stated as a fraction of the underlying assets, rather than the value of the derivative itself. Usually the value of the derivative is much less. I wonder, however, whether it is possible to create derivatives whose price includes the price of the asset and whether they would be a loophole.
American parents, let your children walk home from school — even just once.
There is hardly any danger to your children from random people on the street. It's the plutocrats and fossil fuel companies that are likely to really do so. Not this decade, of course — it will take time for things to get that bad.
Thugs in Madison, Wisconsin, entered Tony Robinson's apartment based on an accusation against him, and immediately shot him dead.
Madison's population is very liberal, and even its thugs are liberal, but the city has a big race problem.
The fight against global heating must target the extraction of fossil fuels, not just their use.
To win this fight, we need some courage. Do you have the courage to say "global heating" instead of the weaker-sounding "global warming" or "climate change"? This won't cost you anything except that a few people may ask why you use that unusual term (and that gives you an opportunity to explain). Can you take this tiny first step?
The Gates Foundation talks about women's rights but doesn't mention the fact that banning abortion kills women.
Islamist Egyptian rebels continue attacking regime forces in the Sinai.
These rebels want to impose a theocratic dictatorship, in place of the current military dictatorship that imposes unjust Islamic law in a less strict form. On the other hand, they seem to be more principled than PISSI: they only attack regime thugs and soldiers, not civilians.
I cheered the Egyptians who overthrew Mubarak to win freedom. Now Egypt has a choice between two forms of tyranny, each worse than the other.
The Cape Wind wind power farm is ready to proceed.
However, this is not the sort of urgency that we need if we are to avoid causing global heating disaster.
Obama criticized Republican senators for "wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran".
It is a valid point. Taking something important hostage and threatening to ruin it is standard Republican tactics, but this takes them further than usual.
Syriza talks about holding new elections if the eurozone's plutocrats reject its plans to end austerity in Greece.
The criticism of Syriza by Dr Bastian amounts to, "Syriza isn't playing ball with the plutocrats as it's supposed to."
In group decision making, those who are most confident tend to win, even if they are confident because they don't understand the issue.
The CIA worked for years to break the security of iThings. It is not clear how much their efforts succeeded or how much they were used.
A UN report says that Mexico makes a general practice of torturing suspects. All kinds of thugs are involved, and the military.
Senate Republicans are trying to convince Iran that it is useless to make a nuclear deal with the US.
Legally, their point is valid, but politically it is not. Any future US administration that considers ending a deal by which Iran proves it isn't building nuclear weapons will realize that the deal is better than no deal.
Unless that administration is seeking an excuse for war, as Netanyahu would want it to do.
In most of Australia, the state can order you not to talk with certain people any more, if they were ever convicted of any crime. In some parts, the state only has to declare them "suspects".
The Taliban-ridden Northwest Province of Pakistan is planning to impose official censorship of CDs.
Italy's Hacking Team Allegedly Sold Ethiopia's Despots Cyberweapons Used to Attack Journalists.
New Zealand's prime minister pledged to resign if New Zealand were doing massive surveillance. Now that we have proof that it does, he has retracted the pledge.
Pennsylvania and North Carolina also have some state agencies banned from mentioning "climate change".
People
On Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
10 Myths about Fossil Fuel Divestment Put to the Sword.
Ecologically Disastrous Dams [in India] May Get the Go-Ahead.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s won voting rights for black Americans, but Republicans are taking them away again piecemeal.
Wyoming's legislature passed a bill to limit seizure of people's property without a trial, but the governor, a former prosecutor, vetoed it.
WordPress won a court case against the source of a false DMCA takedown notice. Unfortunately, the culprit has disappeared.
Activist Arrested for Showing Rape Documentary in Indian Village.
China Detains Feminist Activists over International Women's Day.
The US government wants to develop a remote medical scanner that can measure sensitive personal medical data without touching a person. It proposes to apply this to people en masse without probable cause to suspect them of anything.
The Rhino Rescue Project to protect rhinos by infusing dye and toxins into their horns. This is intended to make them unsalable, and beyond that, to make people scared to ingest any rhino horn, thus driving down the commercial impetus to kill rhinos.
The South African government opposes the plan, claiming it is untested and won't work at all unless it is done to all rhinos.
Here's the RRP's rebuttal.
It claims the government is trying to keep up the value of its stockpile of rhino horns, which it plans to sell.
I don't know whether the infusion method will be effective at driving down demand. If the toxin is not enough to cause noticeable symptoms to users, they may ignore it. Those who buy rhino horns as trophies may not care about it. Still, the idea is worth trying.
As for the need to do this to all rhinos, that gets easier and easier as the number of rhinos goes down.
The thugs of St Lucia are especially thuggish — they made a list of people to murder.
UN: Australia's treatment of asylum-seekers amounts to torture.
Abbott's response: tell Australians to blame the UN for "lecturing." The last thing Australians should do is think about substantive issue.
Putin admits ordering the military conquest of the Crimea. This conquest was disguised as a rebellion, but that was only a flimsy excuse for supporters to fool themselves. Some of the population may well have wanted union with Russia, though the Putinesque "election" gives us no real information about how many they were. But that doesn't change the fact that it was an invasion.
The "rebellion" in eastern Ukraine has some real supporters, but that too is an invasion.
Under Republican global heating denialist governor Scott, Florida's Department of Environmental Protection ordered employees from using the terms "global warming" and "climate change".
Also forbidden are "sea-level rise" and "sustainability".
Ironically, the term "climate change" was imposed by Republicans under the orders of Bush II, instead of "global warming", so as to downplay the danger.
I think that neither term does justice to the disaster we are causing, so I call it "global heating". Please join me.
NATO misrepresented what Gorbachev said about extending NATO to eastern Europe.
Proposing to include Ukraine in NATO was a foolish provocation of Russia.
Several Chechens associated with Kadyrov, the lord of Chechnya, have been accused of killing Boris Nemtsov.
Kadyrov has total power in Chechnya, but does so as a vassal of Putin. His henchmen would not kill someone in Moscow without orders from him, and he wouldn't give such orders without clearing it with Putin. If indeed his henchmen killed Nemtsov, Putin must have ordered it.
Apparently the plan is to claim they did it from Islamist fanaticism. But why pick Nemtsov, of all people, as their victim? It does not make sense.
An ex-ambassador said he was fired by Clinton for using Gmail, which State Department staff had been told not to do.
This may not mean that Clinton was hypocritical. Clinton did not use Gmail. If the rule was "Don't use Gmail", it is a wise rule, and she didn't violate it herself.
Puerto Rico is considering a law to fine parents of obese children.
Before trying this harsh method, how about helping parents, educating families, and so on?
Enbridge is building another large pipeline as an alternative to Keystone XL, stealthily piece by piece.
Scott Walker says plainly what he plans to do — then does something else really nasty.
The euro-zone, a monetary union without a political union, will cause increasing suffering, perhaps until it is ripped apart.
The southern countries that are suffering are going to suffer increasingly from global heating, too. Parts of them will become even drier than they are now.
A minority can find itself objectively oppressed even if the people in the majority are not individually worse.
Naomi Klein: Deregulated capitalism (plutocracy) blocked correcting the global heating problem when it would have been easy. The bigger changes needed now are blocked also by the "let's be calm and not make any rapid changes" attitude. But we have to take strong measures by 2017 to avoid catastrophic heating (beyond 2 degrees).
I think it is urgently necessary to show the plutocrats that if they kill hundreds of millions of people with global heating, they won't be permitted to keep their own families out of the collective disaster.
Political parties hardly ever touch substantive political questions any more, because they take for granted that anything "bad for business" is out of the question.
The survival of civilization is bad for business, so which side are you on? Plutocracy, or democracy?
Nairobi National Park is being chopped up by human activity and many species' numbers are dwindling.
The US investigation of Michael Brown's killing concluded he had had a fight with the thug while the thug was still in his car, and also that he was facing the thug when he was shot dead.
I am concerned about judging witnesses as credible because their testimony agrees with "other testimony". There may have been a more objective basis not made clear in the article, but the words of the article are consistent with calling witnesses "credible" if they support the conclusion that the investigators have reached.
However, the evidence from bloodstains seems to show it was not murder.
Uri Avnery on Netanyahu's speech to (not all of) the US Congress.
Melting ice on Greenland leaves a thin smattering of dust on the surface, which is enough to absorb more sunlight and speed up the melting.
If the Greenland ice sheet melts, sea level will rise by 7 meters (23 feet). Great cities will be inundated.
Why Fresh Water Shortages Will Cause the Next Great Global Crisis.
The causes are wasteful use, human overpopulation, deforestation and global heating.
The crisis is already starting, but since all the causes are increasing, so will the shortages. Decades-long droughts are predicted for California and the US midwest.
Mandatory drug tests for welfare applicants, in the states that have them, find that very few parents applying for welfare use illegal drugs. And denying welfare even to those few punishes their children horribly.
A company proposes to make 230 square km of palm oil plantation in Peru by cutting down rainforest. The Peruvian government is not blocking it.
Jeb Bush and Scott Walker have used private email addresses to conceal some public business while in public office. Other Republican presidential hopefuls have their own email scandals.
9 Social Panics That Gripped the Nation, Were Totally False, and Did Horrible Lasting Damage.
Colombia and the FARC agreed to truces to remove land mines.
The English middle class decreased 43% from 1980 to 2010. It must have decreased again in the past 5 years.
Better air quality helps children's lungs develop better.
Gasoline in the US ought to cost more than twice its current price to cover the damage caused by burning it.
Big "US" companies are using their billions, not to invest, or to pay workers, but merely to push up the stock price.
The gas emission cut pledges for the Paris conference fall far short of what is needed to prevent global disaster.
The US is being dragged towards an alliance with Syrian militias which are as theocratic and cruel as Saudi Arabia, and have been (or are) affiliates of al Qa'ida.
The UK is blackmailing Germany to keep secret what Germany leans about US/UK spying on German officials.
Human institutions (including major media) tend to ignore the coming global heating disaster, for psychological reasons as well as sometimes corrupt ones.
To overcome this requires many people to start to focus attention intensely on "leave it in the ground".
A Canadian faces the threat of a year in prison for refusing to tell his phone password to border thugs.
More about the voice spy Barbie doll.
The dentist who made patients agree to assign copyright of any reviews they made about the dentist has lost in court.
State laws to let science teachers teach imaginary scientific "controversies" are an excuse to replace science with established religion.
India Censors a Rape Documentary, and the Streisand Effect Goes Nuclear.
Unfortunately, the BBC got it removed from YouTube. It may not be available any more.
Since I have mentioned YouTube, please note that watching videos there in the usual way requires running nonfree software, which you shouldn't do.
Instead, use youtube-dl.
The Palestinian Authority has ended "security cooperation" with Israel, saying in effect that it won't maintain control for Israel.
Don't Believe Mainstream US Media Coverage of Venezuela.
Lots of federal officials are about to become lobbyists for companies they used to regulate. This has a corrupting effect on them while they are officials.
PISSI and other armed groups in Syria are looting and selling antiquities.
Removing them from a site without documenting them is not as bad as destroying them. But it destroys all the information that could have been obtained from their context. It is a tragedy that can never be repaired.
PISSI's affiliates in Libya may destroy ancient remains there.
A substitute teacher was told to teach a subject she didn't know, so she showed a gory and sexual horror movie, and was imprisoned for it.
It wasn't a good thing to do, but shouldn't be a crime.
US citizens:
Oppose
the natural gas export port in New York City.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Hillary Clinton to make the Clinton Foundation return the money donated by foreign governments.
US citizens: call on the Senate to oppose any treaty that proposes "investor-state" lawsuits for foreign companies.
US citizens:
call
on senators to oppose bills to sabotage negotiations with Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone:
Tell
Pfizer to quit ALEC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone: oppose development of a large mall and transport system in a part of the Grand Canyon.
Here is some more information about the proposed project.
The developers argue that if a small project (the skywalk) at the top of the canyon is ok, then a larger project going down to the bottom must be ok too. They think we are idiots.
An up-and-coming NYC businessman gained his success by stealing wages from the workers at his Papa Johns restaurants.
Senator McConnell called on states to refuse to design their own CO2 reduction plans. This means they will get the EPA's standard plan, which may be more inconvenient. Then the Republicans will blame this on the EPA.
Foreign governments donated millions to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
Yet another oil train derailed, with cars bursting into flame.
Proper regulations could reduce the danger, but what we need to do is ship less oil.
Federal "forfeiture" policies inspire the sort of extractionist "law enforcement" found in Ferguson.
A proposed California bill would stop the state from doing business with companies that discriminate against transgender employees.
I think it is a step in the right direction.
"Flood Wall Street" protesters have been acquitted of charges; the thugs' order for them to disperse was ruled unconstitutional.
It is good that they were acquitted, but there must be some penalty for thugs that violate protesters' rights.
Elizabeth Warren to Obama Administration: Help Me Tackle Student Debt.
UK thugs have continued compiling a data base for face recognition even though a court ordered them to stop.
Law is vital to limit the state, but thugs see it the opposite way. They cite laws (often together with lies) to attack mere citizens, then show contempt for the law when it gets in their way.
Jealous Indian students threw kerosene on a Dalit student and set her on fire.
Dams and other large projects in Brazil are run for the sake of kickbacks.
Leading politicians are being investigated.
China allowed an environmental documentary for a while; it was seen by 1/4 the population of China. But then the state began deleting it.
Political satire in Russia finds it hard to get any funding, as Russian TV won't show it.
Tumblr has banned the word "torrent" from its searches, claiming that the word is "offensive".
Another Republican bill to block network neutrality.
Paraguay is threatened by mandatory "data retention" (snooping by phone companies by ISPs).
New York City's quota system for thugs to be nasty to the public is a considerable cause of the cruelty of their practices.
Watching Faux News makes people worse informed.
(The article says "stupid", but I think it is more accurate to say that watching it is foolish, not stupid.)
The perverse expression "news consumers" treats news articles as a commodity. That might be the attitude of Faux News but it shouldn't be yours!
The damage done to human health by hormone-mimicking chemicals in products is enormous, and so is the economic cost of it.
The atrocities of the war in the Congo (DRC) have been given low priority even though they are bigger than anywhere else.
Companies that do speech recognition for phones and TVs distribute recording snippets for people to listen to, to get feedback on the recognition quality.
This is not a problem in itself, but illustrates the potential of these devices to spy on you — which is why you shouldn't trust speech recognition unless it is done inside your computer by free software.
Houston thugs target prostitutes and their customers, and present it (for no obvious reason) as a way to prevent trafficking.
Due to "three strikes" laws, Americans are sentenced to life in prison for crimes like accepting 5 dollars to go and buy pot for someone.
Because blacks are accused of crimes disproportionally often, things like this happen more often to them.
The Kansas Senate passed a bill allowing prosecution of teachers for giving students works that are "harmful to minors".
Under the rule of religious lunatics, that criterion will be stretched to include all sorts of things you would consider legitimate, including textbooks for sex education classes.
Obama's proposed commercial privacy law is pretty weak.
One good aspect is that it proposes, in principle, to limit what data may be collected. But that's not enough to make it worth anything.
US government surveillance is being concealed from the public by the convenient involvement of private companies, which make local governments sign contracts of secrecy.
This ought to be outright prohibited; whenever it is done, it is our duty to assume the worst about the secrets.
The total sea ice on Earth has been declining for decades. Sea ice is increasing near Antarctica, but the loss of sea ice in the Arctic is much greater.
US citizens: tell the US government not to let BP claim any more tax deductions for compensation for the Big Spill.
Petraeus Won't Serve a Day in Jail for His Leaks. Edward Snowden Shouldn't Either. Daniel Ellsberg points out that the charges Petraeus admitted to are just as serious as those against Snowden and other whistleblowers prosecuted by Obama. The main difference is the whistleblowers published dirt to serve the public, whereas Petraeus had only personal motives.
US citizens: call on Obama to curb militarization of thugs.
Everyone: sign the anti-Keystone-pipeline Unity Letter.
Some French politicians want to ban university students from wearing headscarves.
I fear such a ban would convince many Muslim women not to get an education.
Symbols of religion, such as headscarves and veils, should not be banned. The right to cover the face is important for everyone for other reasons.
However, symbols have meanings, and symbols of Islam stand for oppression of women (and, to a lesser extent, of men). The wearing of them deserves to be criticized (but not banned) by supporters of women's rights.
In Mexico, the arrest of drug gang "kingpins" causes the gangs to fragment, but this doesn't stop the drug smuggling or the corruption of politicians.
PISSI bulldozed Nimrud, an ancient Assyrian capital. The motive was sheer blind hatred for any thought that isn't Islam.
I think that the US should protect ancient sites by bombing any bulldozers found near them.
It was Dubya's invasion of Iraq that opened the doors to the looting of ancient sites, and the Bush forces didn't try to prevent it. That was an irreparable tragedy, but there is no reason to continue the inattention and allow more irreparable tragedy.
US citizens: phone Senator Wyden at 202-224-5244 to call on him to oppose the TPP for the sake of Internet freedom. (And all the other reasons, of course.)
Also phone your own congresscritter about it.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The TPP would expose Americans to import of uninspected food products from countries with a history of food fraud.
US citizens:
call on the EPA
to ban glyphosate and 2-4,D.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
HSBC defrauded credit card users out of 1.5 billion dollars, and the UK regulatory agencies have tried their best to look the other way.
Instead of protecting the Great Barrier Reef, Australia is working hard to influence journalists to influence governments that are in UNESCO hoping it will wink at Australia's endangerment of the reef.
Thai protest leaders have been convicted of protesting.
This is part of a decade-long campaign of democracy suppression.
US Continuing Aggressive Probe Into WikiLeaks, Court Docs Reveal.
US citizens: support the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act.
As a Koch-funded court case threatens to leave 8 million Americans without medical coverage, but the real problem with Obama's health care system is that it leaves 50 million other Americans without it.
The case is based on a lie about how some states decided not to set up their own medical care exchanges.
The Clinton email "scandal" shows how US politics tends to turn substantive general issues into personal scandals.
The Demonisation of Russia Risks Paving the Way for War.
There are points in the article that I think are mistaken. For instance, the threat to Mariupol is not an uprising — none occurred there. Rather, what Ukraine's forces are defending Mariupol from is a straightforward military attack based on Russian artillery.
Also, the focus on Putin personally may be valid, because he runs a personal tyranny rather than a party-based one. He is much less bad than Hitler, but that is still very bad. With so many thugs stationed in the area, it seems likely that Nemtsov's killer was supported by someone who could order the thugs to look the other way.
Nonetheless, I linked to the article because its criticism of US and NATO actions seems to be valid.
What should we make of a sexual experience "halfway between a stolen kiss on the cheek and a full-blown rape."
A UK court ruled that suspicions about some violent protesters justify surveilling all protesters.
Turkish journalist Mehmet Baransu faces imprisonment for publishing a leaked document that disclosed plans for a military coup.
I wonder if Erdogan is imitating Obama's War on Journalism.
Berlin wanted to build on former Tempelhof airport, but the people insisted on making it park and garden instead.
An increase in business flexibility is making North Korea more productive.
It is starting on the same road that China has followed, which leads to capitalism without democracy.
The US is following a different road towards the same destination.
Iran is blinding a criminal, one eye at a time, as a punishment.
Throwing acid at someone is very cruel, and Iran's response endorses that same cruelty.
Road construction threatens the world's wildernesses.
Michael Brown's family will sue the city of Ferguson.
Some examples of the oppression of the thugs in Ferguson.
If the US has a Fukushima-like nuclear meltdown, will the US respond like Japan and designate a higher level of radiation exposure as "acceptable"?
US citizens: call on Obama not to allow Billionaire Polluters to get a tax deduction for fines for big spill.
Sex workers are campaigning world-wide against criminalization of their profession or their customers.
I am very disturbed by Washington State's proposal to seize property from customers. That sounds like "civil forfeiture", which usually amounts to punishment without trial.
McDonald's pledge to stop regularly feeding antibiotics to chicken has a big loophole that might make it mean nothing at all.
Everyone: Call on Saudi Arabia to stop punishing Raif Badawi and others for expressing their views.
A UK thug commander told thugs under his command to gather evidence to blame soccer fans for a deadly disaster.
Florida citizens: tell your legislators to reject the bill that would criminalize publication on anonymous websites — perhaps not just in Florida.
This is being done in the name of the War on Sharing, which means it is likely to be unjust.
US citizens:
call
on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management not to allow drilling near
Atlantic and Arctic coasts.
Everyone:
call on Florida's
legislature not to imprison people for using a toilet without a
birth certificate to prove gender.
Lessons
US progressives can learn from Syriza.
Due to continuing deflation, the UK's
median
income is now back to what it was before the crisis.
But that's because retired people are doing better. Those not old
enough to retire remain
worse
off than in 2007.
The rich and big businesses are much richer now. It's time for some
redistribution.
Leaks attributed to al-Sisi's office show gross illegality and
corruption; the question is
whether
they are authentic.
Arctic sea ice is getting thinner, fast. It has
lost
2/3 of its thickness since 1975.
European governments allowed businesses to weaken
Europe's
proposed standards for coal power plants — they are weaker
than what China already has.
Sunnis are
fleeing
Tikrit, afraid of being massacred by Shi'ite militias if they
defeat PISSI.
It is vital to win Sunnis away from supporting
PISSI somehow, but is
easier said than done. It would help if there were more Sunnis in the
army fighting PISSI.
I've proposed training and arming some of the thousands of women that
PISSI
raped. That would take time — months at least. But if
that is a way to avoid proving to Sunnis that they have to support
PISSI, it would be worth waiting.
Florida has been
stopped
from requiring welfare applicants to do drug tests.
The contrast with General Petraeus highlights the
injustice
of Chelsea Manning's sentence.
EU commissioners are
gutting
the parliament's proposed privacy rules.
I would guess that the parliament's version was inadequate to start
with, limiting the use rather than the collection of data. That is
inadequate
in general.
Leaders of a right-wing party in Chile have been
charged
with fraud and bribery.
Donations for aid to refugees in the Middle East are being blocked by
banks that are
hypercautious
about being accused of supporting terrorism.
The War on Drugs is
interfering
with research into whether mind-affecting drugs can help treat
depression or addiction.
The example of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shows
flaws
in the prevailing approaches for discouraging people from becoming
violent islamists.
Michael Brown's killer
won't
face charges of violating his civil rights, because there is no
proof he was acting out of conscious racism.
Given the narrow terms of this decision, I can't say it is wrong.
Rather, it shows that this particular law can't overcome the impunity
of thugs, which needs to be corrected in a more general way.
Part of the weakness is that it addresses only demonstrable
intentional racism on the part of
thugs. It is already clear that
unconscious
racism is enough to lead thugs to kill lots of black men and black
children.
Meanwhile, killing an unarmed white or women is just as bad, though it
happens less often.
Ignore
the Drumbeat of Doom, the NSA's Call Records Program Didn't Stop a
Single Terrorist Attack.
McDonalds
says
it will switch to chicken not routinely fed antibiotics.
This may be an advance towards what we really need: to
forbid
routinely dosing farm animals with antibiotics.
However, McDonalds made a similar pledge two years ago and
did
not implement it.
The Department of Justice accused Ferguson's thug department of
systemic
and individual racism and unconstitutional harassment of the
public, and says it will impose changes.
More
about these racist practices.
Snowden continues to
negotiate
to be able to return to the US without facing an unfair trial, but
there has been little change in the situation.
Texas State Senate leaders are trying to
ruin
public education and subsidize religious schools.
Benjamin
Netanyahu's Fantasy World (about Iran and nuclear weapons).
New Zealand
records
all the phone calls and emails of many countries in the Pacific
Ocean and makes the contents available for the NSA to search.
The Indian state is trying to suppress a
documentary
about a shocking rape and murder. The officials object to showing
the world the misogyny that prevails in India.
The BBC
showed
the movie early to forestall Indian pressure to block the showing.
Selling off profitable state assets is
bad
long-term policy if the goal is to support the state.
I think it is clear that the reason for this practice is that the
private interests that will profit have control over the state.
The FBI's reports of people killed by thugs
omitted
more than half of them, for 8 years (or more).
Media coverage of alternative "cures" for cancer is
dangerous
if it fails to show they don't work.
Mexico has
arrested
two drug gang leaders recently.
Such arrest do not interfere much with drug gangs' operations, though
they might set off wars of succession. However, the fact that two
have recently been caught suggests that some victory has been won over
the corruption that has enabled them to hide before.
Twitter is
blocking
users from accessing using Tor unless they register a mobile phone
number.
This is a big change for the worse. And I wonder what happens to
someone that hasn't got a mobile phone.
Chomsky: Snowden should be honored by the US for
exposing
massive surveillance whose purpose is to control the population.
(Nothing to do with terrorism; that's just the excuse for it.)
Ireland has legislated a
requirement
to sell tobacco in plain packaging.
The "trade" treaties that enable tobacco companies to interfere with
such laws ought to be abolished for many, many reasons.
Australia is
moving
to impose total surveillance on Australians' phone calls and internet
use; this will be available for nearly any sort of investigation,
without a warrant.
All this because of one criminal incident. It's an insane
overreaction.
US-imposed weak encryption in exported products makes them
vulnerable
to snooping by anyone.
The US law exempts free software, so free versions of GNU/Linux won't
be affected. Linux,
the kernel, has
nothing to do with this issue.
The UK government has found an
indirect
way to favor fossil fuels over renewables.
It's fossil fuels vs civilization, and the UK government is on the
wrong side.
Most birdwatchers are whites. Those who are blacks are
likely
to be accused of something by thugs.
Clinton's brother is a director of a mining company
with a concession in Haiti, and its operations
won't provide much
benefit to Haitians.
Racism in the thugs'
excuses
for shooting Tamir Rice.
Israel has repeatedly destroyed the homes of the Palestinian village
of Khirbet Yarza. Most recently it
destroyed
the village's water pipes.
The fanatical "settlers" that seize parts of the West Bank
call human
rights organizations "anti-semitic" and likewise everyone that
supports them.
These fanatics recently
burned
a seminary, a mosque, and a school in Palestine.
Israeli ships continue
shooting
at Palestinian fishermen; Israel agreed to permit them to go
further from the shore, but refused to do so.
A Republican senator
wants
to give US children lower quality lunch.
US citizens:
oppose TAFTA
because it will authorize chemical companies to demand to be paid not
to pollute.
US citizens:
call on the FDA
to ban feeding rBST to cows.
We
Have Been Losing the "War on Drugs" for Four Decades — End It
Now.
When a war is "on drugs", it will destroy people indiscriminately.
Clinton used a personal email address for all her official mail while
Secretary of State. This
could
facilitate a cover-up.
I am sure she had a lot to hide — we don't need to know about
her emails for that.
The point that you can't trust a vague "cloud" applies just as much
to your email as to hers.
While the eastern US got heavy snowfalls,
California's
mountains got very little, ensuring that the severe drought will
get worse.
Research has shown that droughts have become more frequent in
California in recent decades, which implies
global heating is having
the expected effect.
This drought is a small foretaste of what
global heating will do to
California, if we don't take vigorous action to limit
global heating.
General Petraeus pled guilty to leaking secrets to his lover, but
unlike whistleblowers who served the public, he was
let off with no
jail time.
Feds
Refuse to Release Documents on "Zero-Day" Security Exploits.
The use by one state of unreported bugs in software weakens security
for all users of that software, against all attackers.
In the US, private thugs have some of the special privileges of
official thugs, but
less
training and less legal supervision.
Converting cockroaches into
computer-controlled
cyborgs.
Do you think they will be used only in collapsed buildings?
Or also in your house?
Refugees sent to Nauru against their will held a
peaceful
protest about the arrest of other protesters. They were attacked
by thugs who then arrested 70 of them.
Victims say that
violence
by Chicago thugs is "as routine as traffic lights".
Is
[PISSI] the Ultimate Evil? They Would Love You to Think So.
France has passed a law
requiring
a two-year warranty for all products sold.
I think it is a good idea, but perhaps should be joined by more
specific laws, such as that electronics with batteries must permit
them to be replaced.
The UK government is accusing RT TV of bias, which is probably true,
but it strangely fails to notice the
bias
of pro-government TV stations.
I don't have a very high opinion of RT, which is designed to spread
confusion to serve Putin. But the other channels may not be any
better, and banning them is not the solution in either case.
Students in Burma are protesting against new
repressive
control of universities.
Caracas Mayor Ledezma has been
charged
with participating in a plot to hold a coup and overthrow the
government of Venezuela.
That could be true; some in the Venezuelan opposition have done that
before.
In Maharashtra (which includes Mumbai), possession of beef is a crime
punishable by
5
years in prison.
This is almost as nuts as jailing people for possession of marijuana.
But it's worse, because it is imposing the rules of one religion on
everyone.
President Karzai and his officials presided over
murder,
torture and rape.
Sound so loud that it damages human hearing is becoming
increasingly
common. In many cases, it would be easy to avoid.
Offering earplugs in music venues would be a solution if everyone used
them; given that they won't, it is merely an excuse for not correcting
the problem.
But what about people that need to commute for more than 47 minutes
a day on an underground train?
Ugandan
Farmers Take On Palm Oil Giants over Land Grab Claims.
Girls in England who were being repeatedly raped and treated as sex
slaves asked for help, but
thugs
and other officials blamed the victims.
Teenagers' sex is often dishonestly called "rape", but the two are
totally different. This case is about real rape, not voluntary sex
mislabeled as "rape". We should resist the efforts of governments to
conflate the two.
Reporting rape in the US military usually means
reporting
it to the boss of both the victim and the rapist. Thus, victims
often consider it futile to complain.
An Indian rapist was interviewed in a film; he callously
blamed
the victim. You can see how he seeks and accepts excuses to hurt
women, even in nonsensical ways.
A psychological survey found that Atheists
tend
to be no more angry than religious believers.
We Atheists that criticize religion encounter many things that make us
angry. But that's not all Atheists, just us.
The
official
portrait of President Clinton has a little sign to refer to his
affair with Monica Lewinsky, but that of
Dubya has nothing to indicate
his devastating invasion of Iraq.
Clinton's portrait should have something to indicate the evil of
NAFTA
and the World Trade Organization.
And Obama's should show the shadow of
the
TPP.
The Republicans
want
to cut off knowledge of American history so that future Americans
have no basis to see how much harm those policies did before.
The article also mentions the right-wing media strategy (since the
1980s): accuse the media of a "Liberal bias" unless it is slavishly
right-wing (which most mainstream media now are).
Governor Christy of New Jersey
settled
a 9-billion dollar lawsuit against Exxon for a mere 250 million
— 3% of the damage done.
Plutocrats are taking the US economy and political system
back
to the 19th century, eliminating the gains of the 20th century
progressive movement.
Haitians held a
large
protest against racism and lynching in the Dominican Republic.
Four
Reasons Young Americans Should Burn Their Student Loan Papers.
It used to be that we considered college education as more than just a
way for students to increase their incomes. It was meant to give them
a deeper and broader understanding of life — a benefit for
society, not just for them. Even if college no longer increases
incomes as much as it did, the benefit of an educated public is still
a good reason to educate people.
Oh, I forgot, the public no longer makes decisions and the plutocrats
prefer citizens they can easily manipulate.
Sacramento, California, is
threatening
legal proceedings against people who hold give-aways for the
homeless, invoking a law against having too many "lawn sales"
— but they are not selling anything.
One contribution to Syria's revolution was the failure of agriculture
in Syria, which was
exacerbated
by global heating.
In a few decades, such wars are likely to break out in many countries.
And global heating
will keep getting worse afterward, unless we take
very strong measures.
A genetic modification could
protect
cows from tuberculosis.
I can't immediately see any downside to this genetic modification, but
let's see what scientists warn about.
The small group of Syrian rebels that the US most preferred has been
defeated, and has
disbanded.
Al-Nusra, associated with al Qa'ida, captured the US-provided
missiles.
In general,
arms
provided to any Syrian rebel group tend to circulate around.
After Dubya's
spokesmen said that the US treated prisoners humanely,
the head of the CIA asked Cheney and Condoleezza Rice to
confirm that
torture was still authorized.
The tourists that climb Mount Everest are leaving so much human waste
that it the pollution is causing a
health
hazard.
Everyone,
call on Pasco to
fire and prosecute the killer thugs.
The EFF says the FCC's network neutrality vote looks good, but
has
not yet evaluated the fine print.
The Hindu-nationalist BJP has
agreed
to share power in Kashmir with a Muslim party.
This might give some hope for reconciliation in a state that has
experienced guerrilla war and military repression.
A general tendency to reject science is
very
popular in society.
Alas, nowadays there is a valid reason to distrust scientists'
conclusions: some of them have been corrupted by companies.
For instance, the article cites a valid scientific reason why
genetically modified foods are unlikely to harm humans that eat them,
but it is a mistake to infer from this that they can't be harmful.
For instance, roundup-ready crops in the US are
endangering
the survival of monarch butterflies, and perhaps other species as
well. The crops themselves don't hurt monarchs, but the roundup does
(indirectly, by killing milkweed).
Genetically-modified salmon
threaten
to weaken and wipe out wild salmon.
I don't suppose genetically modified apples are directly harmful to
eat, but the modification is meant to disguise the fact that the
apples have been
sitting
on the shelf for days, and that might open the door to other
things that are bad for the health of people who eat them.
As long as many scientists' income depends on rushing to a certain
conclusion, they will make statements that shouldn't be trusted.
We need to put an end to this corruption of science by business.
Mandatory cell phone "remote kill switches" make the phones
fundamentally
insecure.
Nearly all cell phones are already insecure because of the universal
back door that allows the phone company (and others) to remotely
convert them into listening devices. However, the "kill switch" is an
added insecurity, pushing the phone even further from being
acceptable. We suspect (and we are checking) that this makes it
impossible to replace some of the proprietary software with free
software.
A
history of the Canadian government's war on science and the
environment.
Hollywood lobby groups wrote a
soppy
love-letter to the TPP. If they love it, it has to be horrible.
The article unfortunately fails to criticize the concept of
"intellectual
property", accepting it as if it were meaningful and legitimate.
An
analysis of how capital works to suppress democracy around the
world.
Chicago thugs
kept some accused people shackled for as much as 3 days
in their "black site", and
applied
hunger, heat, and punches as torture.
Night-Mayor Emanuel
supports
the thugs in claiming they never did this.
Surveillance-Based Manipulation:
How
Facebook or Google Could Tilt Elections.
Paypal
Cuts Off Mega Because It Actually Keeps Your Files Secret.
I criticize the article for accepting the idea that there is something
illegitimate about sharing copies of published works. That repeats
the propaganda of the War on Sharing.
Alas, Mega has a grave ethical flaw: it can't be used in the Free
World because it requires users to run nonfree Javascript code.
Law professors warn that Canada's latest police powers bill
endangers
human rights.
Here's an analysis of some
dangers
in the law.
Canada's spy agency is
twisting
existing law to do massive surveillance on Canadians' email.
50
selected Faux News lies and their refutations.
The Supreme Court will rule on whether Monsanto controls all
planting
of ordinary soybeans in the US.
A Philadelphia man
saw
thugs attack helpless Devon Davis and break his leg, while telling
him to "stop resisting" as preparation (evidently) for making false
accusations against him.
These thugs
are arrogantly confident that they are above the law. The
shame of our governments is that it is usually true. To change the
thugs'
culture of violence and dishonesty, we must punish them for it
often.
Much is still secret about how UK thugs operated their
construction
industry blacklist.
How Netanyahu's speech is
designed
to influence his reelection.
Clumsy and nasty interventions by UK spy agencies
may
encourage radicalization of their targets.
However, the problem of dealing with many known people, each of whom
has a very small possibility of being radicalized, is
not
easy in any case.
What is clear is that an increase in massive general surveillance will
not help.
A political opponent of Putin was
shot
dead right next to the Kremlin, an area always full of thugs. But they let
the killer get away.
High officials closely related to former Colombian President Horrible
have been convicted of
spying
on opposition party leaders.
Fears
for Macedonia's Fragile Democracy amid 'Coup' And Wiretap Claims.
The UN says the US forces in Afghanistan
have
still been torturing prisoners recently.
False statistics encourage US parents to think their children are in
danger of being kidnaped by strangers — but that is
extremely
rare.
A Florida sheriffs's deputy says that
planting
false evidence to frame people is standard practice in his
department, with the approval of the sheriff.
Marijuana proves to be
far,
far safer than alcohol or tobacco.
Scott Walker showed his true opinion of Wisconsin's anti-plutocrats by
comparing
them to Islamist terrorists.
Defense Firms
Expect Increased Spending from Republicans as Republicans Decry
Increased Spending.
UK health and education workers are paid too little to live on, so
many
of them become prostitutes.
This
article expresses most of what I feel about "small talk".
The only thing worse than asking me broad unimportant questions in
English is asking them in another language, because then it is work to
understand and work to respond.
The USDA's "pilot program" for slaughterhouses to have their own
employees inspect the meat has led to exactly the sort of
corruption
you'd predict — and the USDA closes its eyes to the problem.
There is some reason to believe that the corruption of the revolving
door is responsible.
A proposal to add ketamine to the "war on drugs" could deny women
in poor countries anesthesia for cesarean section.
Many
women might die.
The US cooperated as Yemen's old government disappeared US citizen
Sharif Mobley. Then the Houthis overthrew that government (which has
reformed in Aden), leaving Mobley
in
prison in an unknown location.
In 1998, the fossil fuel companies funded a plan to confuse the facts
about global heating
and prevent action in the US to stop it. Most of
the lobbyists involved are
still
doing similar work.
Nemtsov's friends say that he was
about
to expose facts about Russia's intervention in Ukraine when he was
killed.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the Corker-Graham Iran bill
(S. 615) and the Menendez-Kirk sanctions bill (S. 269), both of which
would interfere with a possible nuclear deal with Iran.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
Everyone:
call
on New York City to defund Bratton's army.
More
evidence connecting use of lead with rates of violence in the US.
Everyone:
tell
Bayer to stop making bee-endangering neonicotinoid pesticides.
US citizens:
call on the
Federal Reserve to replace its lawyer Scott Alvarez, who is on the
side of the banks.
In Chicago:
the
Homan Square protest against Chicago thugs' torture site.
Avijit Roy was hacked to death for his secular views. Let's share
his
story.
An Islamist extremist has been
charged
with the murder.
As Shi'ite militias join in trying to capture Tikrit from
PISSI, there
is a
danger
that they may massacre Sunni civilians for revenge.
I expect that the Iraqi army is mostly made up of Shi'ites too.
I heard on the BBC that 2000 of the 30,000 soldiers in this attack are
Sunni militias opposed to PISSI.
That is not enough to show that this
danger does not exist.
As for the possibility of increased Iranian influence, there is no
help for it. The government of Iran is an Islamist tyranny which
spits on human rights, but not as much as
PISSI does, and it does not
state global expansionist goals like PISSI either.
To reduce recidivism, we need to
make
it easier for released prisoners to get some lawful job.
UN treaties for drug prohibition have
completely
failed in the goal of making them hard to get.
However, they have
blighted
millions of lives and
fueled
gangs.
The fossil fuel companies, like tobacco companies,
pay
a few scientists to produce "research" that denies the problem and
push each others' work through peer review, so that paid pet
congresscritters can cite them as "proof" there is no problem.
Tariq Ali comments on how the US and Europe have nearly crushed
dissent by
showing
that the people have no say.
Let's
stop providing PR for PISSI's movie stars.
Rauf Badawi
could
be executed on charges of ceasing to be a Muslim.
For a country to be "Muslim" generally means it treats human rights
with contempt. Here we see how such countries trample the religious
freedom of anyone who is currently a Muslim — specifically, the
freedom to cease to hold that belief.
Lots of criminals are using Apple Pay for
fraud
against banks.
Use of fingerprints for authentication is dangerous because it
accustoms people to giving their fingerprints. That threatens to
reduce the resistance to biometric identification, which then
facilitates dangerous massive surveillance.
More about the Brazilian deforestation ring whose head
faces
charges.
A crucial question is, can Brazil return these areas to forest? I
wonder, to what extent is the disastrous drought in Sao Paulo due to
deforestation, and to what extent to
global heating? If deforestation
is a major cause, it may be both necessary and feasible to field a
reforestation army combining tree-planters and police.
A birth reduction campaign is needed to, so that Brazil ceases to
generate millions of landless poor who want to tear down the forest
because they can't find another option.
A former general in Peru has been charged with murdering
journalist
Hugo Bustios.
Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, a faithful servant of Big Agriculture,
proposed a
substitute
for GMO labeling that would work only for the wealthy (and nearly
requiring nonfree software).
Note that evidence suggests the NSA doesn't break in to most
computers, only selected ones.
Some
kinds of internet use teach people very short-term thinking, which
could be bad intellectually and economically.
It's an oversimplification to say that "the internet" or "digital
communication" has a particular kind of influence. Different forms of
digital communication have different social effects, as described
by Sherry Turkle in "Alone Together".
Greeks support Syriza
even
more than before despite the compromises it has made.
If the US rejects Keystone XL, the pipeline company
could
use NAFTA to sue the US.
If so, the US should refuse to pay, and cancel NAFTA. That would
benefit Mexicans and Canadians as well as Americans; only the
plutocrats that have taken control of these countries would lose.
A new beehive has been invented that
can
make honey flow out — no need to remove a honeycomb. What
could go wrong?
Walmart's raise is
not
enough to end its employees' dependence on public assistance.
8
ways to reduce global inequality.
On
rehabilitating
sex offenders.
Silicon
Valley Likes to Promise "Digital Socialism" — But It Is Selling
a Fairytale.
Every few years, another cash-for-access sting
catches
some UK politicians who are eager for the money.
Kenan Malik: Young European Muslims turn to jihadism
looking
for some sort of identity to feel attached to.
The fact that they have little contact with life under
PISSI makes it
easier to imagine it as a paradise.
It appears that underground Arctic deposits of methane are
bursting
out into the air, leaving craters behind. The methane contributes
heavily to global heating.
2/3
of Americans believe world leaders have a moral duty to cut down
greenhouse gas emissions.
If we still had a democratic system, our government would tackle this
job with greatest urgency.
What Syriza has
gained
from his negotiations with Europe.
Forced
Blood Draws, DNA Collection and Biometric Scans: What Country Is
This?
The nutritional quality of food has
generally
declined in the US; it is not clear why.
LA thugs
shot
a man dead, then lied to fabricate an excuse.
Paying his family 5 million dollars won't convince
thugs to change
their behavior patterns.
Victoria Maureira is
begging
to be allowed to die peacefully from cystic fibrosis, but the
Chilean government is obdurate she must suffer out all the way.
Why did the Maureira family have two children with cystic fibrosis?
The Chilean government is partly responsible. Parents susceptible to
passing on cystic fibrosis genes normally avoid that by selective
abortion — but not in Chile, where abortion is illegal.
US citizens:
call
on Congress not to sabotage diplomacy with Iran.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to block Shell from drilling in Arctic waters.
US citizens: call for allowing people to sign up for
subsidized health
care when they become pregnant, regardless of the time of year.
Republicans are
more
likely to reject evolution than to recognize its validity. 2/3 of
them claim that global heating
is not even happening. Most of them
want to shred the US constitution and establish Christianity as the
official religion.
Loretta Lynch is likely to be the next Attorney General of the US,
and she already has a
record
of bowing down to banksters.
Avijit Roy, an Atheist blogger in Bangladesh, was
assassinated
in the street, apparently by Islamist fanatics.
Minnesota has boosted employment by
taxing
the wealthy more and raising the minimum wage.
"Trickle-down" policies are a fraud that hurt the poor, but
"pour-down" makes a better society and can help just about everyone.
The FCC has
pre-empted
laws in two states that blocked local governments from offering
broadband connections.
Two climatic cycles that operate over periods of decades both entered
their cold phases in the 2000's,
temporarily
cancelling out global heating.
Later, as they move to the hotter phase, they will speed up heating.
Maajid Nawaz, former Islamist:
Racism
And Violent Islamism Feed Each Other in a Vicious Circle.
Here's the
background
information.
The FCC
voted
in favor of network neutrality.
Before I celebrate I will wait to see what experts say about the fine
print.
Rebuilding housing in Gaza is going so slowly that it
would
take 100 years at this rate.
Why did thugs shoot a taser at an
old
man who had his hands up?
PISSI destroyed
irreplaceable
ancient manuscripts and art in Mosul.
Netanyahu said his main goal in his partisan speech to the US Congress
is meant to
scupper
a nuclear agreement between the US and Iran.
That he said this doesn't mean it is true. I suspect his real reason
is for the American and Israeli elections.
There is no way the US can limit Iran's nuclear program
except
through a deal.
Amnesty International says that
2014
was a low point for human rights around the world.
Since 2010, 8 US states have stopped subsidizing movie-making. But 32
states sill do it, and it adds up to
hundreds
of millions of dollars a year.
I can think of better uses for states' money than competing to take
jobs away from other states. The movie companies purchased
unjust laws such as the
DMCA
and support unjust treaties such as the
TPP.
I don't think they ought to get a cent. In fact, if I could, I'd
drive them out of business entirely.
In Wisconsin, due to Scott Walker and the Repression Party, any
teenager who gets a sext photo faces a
minimum
sentence of 3 years in prison.
It should not be a crime at all.
Belarus and Russia are
going to ban Tor
and VPN usage.
However, if they keep on down that path far enough to really
stop use of proxies, hardly anyone would consider going there
to discuss business.
A call to
ban
selling "energy drinks" to children. Those drinks are full of sugar.
Qantas wants to continue cutting jobs
even
though it has become profitable. The workers say that cuts should
stop.
Dr Craig Spencer
criticizes
the US media for turning medical volunteers into pariahs, instead
of educating the public about what really is or isn't dangerous.
Astrology
Should Never Have Any Role to Play in Healthcare, because it is
total nonsense: in fact, Chinese astrology tends to kill people who
get diseases for which their natal charts recommend the wrong
treatment.
Why
Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS
Are Such Grave Threats?
I don't use the name "ISIS"; I call that gang of barbarians
"PISSI",
for Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Chicago thugs,
confronted with reports of their illegal "black site"
for interrogation, respond by
repeating
their claim that nothing they do could ever be wrong.
Chicago's night-mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has
opposed
better oversight of the Chicago thugs.
Chicago deserves a full-time mayor instead of a night-mayor.
Vote for Garcia for mayor of Chicago!
Frackers effectively bought the Ohio Supreme Court, which
ruled
that localities can't ban fracking locally.
One of the dangers of the bogus concept of "intellectual property" is
that it encourages legislators and judges to copy specific details
between copyright law and patent law (and various other equally
unrelated laws). Here is an
example
of where that could lead to disaster.
Republicans have started a
phony
"consumer association" to attack the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau.
The IAEA will review its evidence about Iran's nuclear program
to
see if any of it contains lies planted by the CIA.
Georgia is
considering
a small but useful limitation to the system that imprisons poor
people because of fines they can't pay.
This injustice, found in many places in the US, is both an important
cause of poverty and a consequence of poverty. If most Americans had
money to pay their fines, this wouldn't happen to them. But in the
communities which are poor, such as Ferguson, this drains money out
of them steadily.
The widely implanted right-wing idea that it is wrong to tax the rich
leads towns to use this system, in effect taxing the poor instead.
Everyone:
tell New York
that going limp when arrested should not be a felony.
It is dishonest to call that action "resisting arrest" at all. A limp
person is not actively resisting, or actively doing anything. It is
twisted to make it a crime for you not to help the state hurt you;
that is the road to tyranny.
EPIC has filed a
complaint
with the FTC about Samsung's always-listening TV.
Giving
special
preferences to traffic from a particular web site violates network
neutrality just like slowing down a particular site.
Obama, to promote the TPP, is
repeating
arguments that Clinton gave for NAFTA — and which proved
false then.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to make sure the bee protection task force really
protects bees.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose permitting states to
divert federal education aid money to private schools. (That would,
naturally, mean religious indoctrination schools in many cases).
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
Russia is flying planes, including nuclear bombers, near Norway
in
an intimidating way.
The same is happening
near
England and in the Baltic sea.
The result will be increased military preparation — and spending
&mash; all around NATO. Ultimately Putin won't have gained anything,
but poor people in those countries will be the losers.
Three journalists for al-Jazeera have been
accused
of flying drones over Paris without a license.
The Eiffel Tower has new wind turbines that
can
generate enough power for its shops.
However, it would take a over million such installations (or
equivalent) to avoid global heating disaster.
Three men were arrested in the US and
charged
with planning to go to Syria and fight for PISSI.
It appears they were
encouraged by a
secret FBI provocateur, without whom they might never have planned
to do anything.
Predicting people's appearance from DNA
brings
a range of dangers.
How
Wall Street Siphons Billions From Retirees — And Gets Away With
It.
Banksters
swindled
California school districts too. Then the Federal Reserve pushed
them to hand the banksters even more.
Global heating
could
turn parts of Mexico into a dust-bowl, sending tens of millions of
people fleeing to a US which is suffering from its own dust-bowls.
The
right-wing
attack on teaching US history is a long-term plan to roll back
advances in human rights.
Apple said it would monitor its supply chain and prevent abuses, but
that
doesn't
seem to have done much.
The reason is, Apple (or any other company that outsources production)
is under no economic pressure to really prevent mistreatment of
subcontracted workers. Its interest is only to silence critics.
For Apple, the ideal response to the issue would be to silence critics
with as little effort as possible.
These companies should be legally responsible for how those workers
are treated.
A few UK thugs
may
be disciplined for trying to bully and bribe dissidents into
spying on fellow activists.
However the rot goes deeper, and punishing a few
thugs won't cure it.
Scotland
plans
a national ID data base like the one rejected at UK level some
years ago.
Mexican thugs
killed
protester Claudio Castillo, a retired teacher who was sitting in a
truck and addressing the protest through a PA system.
They also attacked a news photographer, smashing his camera, perhaps
to get rid of evidence against them.
The methods of the "war on drugs"
harm
farmers, the environment, medical care and women's rights.
Something similar is being planned for
Haiti.
A unit of unarmed women patrols a wildlife reserve in South Africa
which has
prevented
poaching for the past year.
Ebola
could
develop a permanent presence in West Africa if we don't continue
efforts to quash it.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
resist
fossil fuel lobby attempts to slow solar power development in
Massachusetts.
Emma Thompson and Greg Wise say they will
refuse
to pay their taxes until the HSBC tax-dodgers are prosecuted.
China's
Top Court Rejects Judicial Independence as 'Erroneous Thought'.
Syriza has won
some
concessions from Europe.
A Florida thug attacked a homeless man
to
stop him from using a toilet. The thug has been punished with a
paid holiday.
A "flat income tax" is unfair because it
makes
the non-rich pay the same tax rate as the rich.
A tax rate that rich people can easily cope with is a great burden
for those who have less.
The decrease in tax rates for the rich, in many developed countries
since 1980, is part and parcel of the loss of government revenue which
is cited as the cause of cutbacks in vital activities.
In Louisville, a homeless man
died
on the steps of a homeless shelter which did not let him in.
The root problem is that the US has too few homeless shelters and does
little to house homeless people. Thus, they have to compete to get a
slot and inevitably most of them are denied one.
Republicans no longer try to cover up their dirty tricks; they think
their grip on the US is so strong that they can openly attack the poor
in any and every way.
Pakistan is
requiring
all cell phone users to register their fingerprints.
This is a direct threat to human rights. Perhaps in Pakistan it can
be justified as a temporary emergency measure for the guerrilla civil
war now going on, but do they say it is temporary?
Last
Week's Texas Prison Uprising Wasn't a Surprise: Inmates Had Threatened
to Riot for Months.
Is
The Junk-Food Era Drawing To A Close?
Sao Paulo is
on
the brink of disaster due to the failure of the usual rains.
This drought is no accident. It was caused by deforestation of the
Amazon.
San Francisco may end up the same way.
The UK's teenage pregnancy drop is a
triumph
of progressive politics.
Murders,
Threats And Duopoly: the State of Press Freedom in Mexico.
Assad's air force is
dropping
barrel bombs frequently on civilians.
Jamaica has
decriminalized
marijuana.
Banksters' bonuses in the UK since 2007 will soon add up to
100
billion UK pounds. That is 1500 pounds for each inhabitant.
It adds up to a giant drain of wealth from the rest of the UK.
The mayor of Caracas has been arrested and
accused
of planning to overthrow the government of Venezuela.
Greece's deal with Europe preserves a few gains, but it looks like
Syriza
has had to surrender most of its goals.
Greeks did not want to exit the euro zone, but they had hopes of
getting a decent outcome without it. Now that Germany has declared
Greece a colony, the question is whether Greeks want to take radical
measures or surrender.
I am worried that Syriza will be corrupted by the desire to present
this as something other than surrender.
At the same time, I don't see clearly what concessions Syriza has
achieved, so I can't tell if they are enough to constitute a
significant success.
Existing US laws provide
a
way to resist businesses that push workers into being "independent
contractors".
I don't know whether this works for subcontracted workers, which is
the case that is really needed.
The obstacles Greece faces in
collecting
taxes.
Al-Jazeera published a leaked tape in which an Egyptian minister
called
for shooting protesters with machine guns.
Changes in criteria makes it
very
easy to diagnose adults as having ADHD and prescribe medicines for
them. It is great for business. Whether it is good for the
people who take these drugs is not yet clear.
Underlying the issue of whether diagnosis is being done carefully
there is the subtle question of how to decide that a part of the
normal range of personality variation ought to be called a "disorder".
Also the related but different question of whether these drugs do good
for the people who take them.
The abortion and birth control clinic in Belfast is besieged by
religious
nuts that try to harass all women coming in.
It seems that the clinic needs to be able to transport women in and
out by after meeting them at remote locations.
60% of Germans believe the
political
power of business denies them democracy. One third blame
capitalism for poverty. 27% consider that government snooping is
leading towards a dictatorship.
Is there a possibility in Germany to start a Spare Greece movement?
South
Africa may copy Obama's War on Whistleblowers.
Transcript:
NSA
Director Mike Rogers vs. Yahoo! on Encryption Back Doors.
Verizon is slowing down phone line repairs in Manhattan
to
pressure customers to switch to fiber (which has disadvantages).
AT&T says that it charges $29 (i.e., about 30 dollars) a month for
not profiling customers' browsing, but the real charge is
$44
or $66 a month, for those clients who can find the option at all.
That deception deserves condemnation, but the worst part is that this
doesn't even offer real privacy. AT&T still makes a list of the
customer's web contacts, for Big Brother. All that money buys is that
AT&T refrains from using that data for other purposes.
Chinese laws discriminate against women
in
many ways.
Around the US, children accused of crimes are often shackled in court,
which
can
do them psychological damage that can steer them into a life of
crime.
The US foresees around
10
oil train derailment accidents a year. Many of these will cause
explosions.
The head of HSBC
had
a hidden Swiss bank account himself.
US citizens: Congress Is Poised to Introduce a Bill to Fast Track TPP
so It's Time
to Act Now.
US citizens:
call on
Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
He has
vetoed
the bill that was going to force approval.
Students swindled by the not-really-accredited "Corinithian College"
have declared a debt strike to demand
forgiveness
for federal loans that supported the non-school's pretensions.
Netanyahu's political maneuvers have pushed Israel's relationship with
the US to
rock
bottom.
Unfortunately the US has a while to go to reach what it should do:
redirect its tremendous annual subsidy to Israel into dismantling
Israel's colonies in the West Bank.
Brazil has
arrested
a suspect accused of organizing massive illegal deforestation.
South
Korea asked South Africa to spy on the head of Greenpeace in 2010.
London is being ruined by the
complete
abandonment of the idea of public space and public interest.
Masih Alinejad is
campaigning
against Iran's policy of forcing women to cover their heads.
Women (like men) should have the right to cover their heads; however,
given the pressure (both legal and social) imposed on Muslim women to
do so, resistance to that pressure is an important area of feminist
campaigning.
The EU has brought forward its plan to
try
to make carbon emissions trading have some real effect, but it
will still wait a dangerous three years before starting the plan.
I'd wonder why these officials don't grasp what "urgent" means, but
in this case I think they are being paid not to understand.
Chicago thugs interrogate people including protesters in a secret
site,
denying
their relatives and lawyers access to them.
Broadband internet from satellites
could
offer a way around state-imposed filtering and sleazy ISPs.
I foresee that some governments will ban it and maybe jam it.
Satellite phones are already banned in India as an "anti-terrorist"
measure, though any organized terrorist attack wouldn't be held back
by this.
In the UK, it
takes
an average of 3 years for victims of domestic violence to get
help.
I would expect it to be worse in the US, but I don't know.
Why
We Need a Right to Privacy for Brain Data.
Several Republican pro-pollution bills are
likely to
be vetoed.
Overfarming is creating vast
dust
bowls in Africa and China.
Coral polyps ingest tiny pieces of plastic, then can't get rid of
them. Filling up the polyp's gut with plastic
could
cause it eventually to starve.
The question is whether they will be killed first by out plastic
pollution or by
our
CO2 pollution.
Putin is imposing religious censorship, and has
made
it a crime in Russia to offend religious believers.
This is just as wrong as his repression of political dissent. Placing
Christianity above criticism is just as wrong as placing Islam above
criticism.
The president of Australian's human rights commission says that the
government
asked her
to resign because she embarrassed them by doing her job.
In France, "fighting terrorism" means
racial
profiling as well as more censorship.
Republicans in Wisconsin are
about
to demolish unions there.
The term "right to work" is deceptive propaganda, which really means
that unions are kept unstable. This "right" is comparable to the
"right to give up your freedom" that advocates of proprietary software
claim exists.
To
End the Harm Inflicted by Aggressive Masculinity, Men Must Embrace
Feminism — Without Stealing It.
Modi
took
a strong stand for freedom of religion in India.
Let's hope that he follows through and eliminates the
forcible
interference with Dalits that want to convert officially to
Buddhism.
Modi also
exposed
Mother Teresa for what she really did: use poor sick Indians to
promote her church (and raise money for it).
Right on!
The UK government is
sneakily
imposing privatization of the NHS.
Spain
arrested
four people for "recruiting" for PISSI.
It is legitimate to ban recruiting for
PISSI, but drawing the line
between that and simply stating agreement is not easy. From the
article, it seems that two of these people were really recruiting, but
two just stated agreement. I'm afraid Spain is putting the line at
the wrong place.
What leads Muslim teenagers in England to join PISSI?
Perhaps
feeling
that they are outcasts plays a part.
Alaska has
legalized
marijuana for recreational use.
Legalized marijuana allows thugs to
take
people's homes based on minute violations of the legal limit.
The meat lobby is
fighting
new US nutrition guidelines that take account of the environmental
impact of various kinds of foods.
PISSI
kidnapped
90 Christians in Syria, to murder them I suppose.
An Australian peace activist has been convicted of the crime of
"protesting
in a restricted zone".
He had been given a specific, arbitrarily order to stay away. For a
government to give arbitrary orders like that is itself tyranny.
Using different terminology
enabled
the people of Seattle to make improvements in transport means other
than cars.
ALEC's
pushes
laws to cut off funds for labor unions so they can't be nuclei for
resistance to plutocracy.
When Netanyahu said Iran was only a year away from building a nuclear
weapon, he was lying;
the
Mossad had told him that wasn't so.
Websites that offer health advice track visitors and
enable
data brokers to find out who is sick.
The Department of the Interior Says There's a
75
Percent Chance of a Major Oil Spill in the Arctic — And It's
Willing to Take That Chance.
Humans can take
steps
to hold off the effect of ocean acidification on valuable shellfish
— for a while.
The New York/New Jersey Port Authority
blocked
distribution of blankets to homeless people so they would not get
"too comfortable".
EU wants Paris climate deal to
cut
carbon emissions 60% by 2050.
But it may not be enough.
After
Paris and Copenhagen, Let's Not Forget Corporate Censorship.
The
Corporate Debt to [US] Society: $10,000 Per Household, Per Year.
Funding
from fossil fuel companies has gained them influence over many
scientists and labs.
US
Force Feeds GM Crops to African Nations, says New Report.
Manipulate
and Mislead: How GMOs Are Infiltrating Africa.
Several US universities have
restricted
admission of students from Iran, even banning professors from
coauthoring papers with Iranians.
This is part of a general tendency towards overeager obedience to
rules in violation of common sense. We see it also
when
schools punish students for drawing pictures of weapons.
It seems to represent taking fear to absurd heights.
The UK government ordered an adviser to keep silent about the link
between suicides in prison and the
cutbacks
on staff levels.
One of Greece's concessions to the euro-zone is a
crackdown
on rich tax-evaders.
Previous Greek governments, bowing to the rich, didn't want to do
this.
The idea of
"human
resources" stands for a dehumanizing attitude towards employees,
and that's what "human resources" departments typically do.
On the other hand, they also get the blame for implementing decisions
that are the responsibility of the management as a whole, such as to
fire all the older workers on pretexts.
Getting rid of the "human resources" attitude is good, but it's not
good that the legitimate functions of that department are being
replaced by use of services that are
SaaSS.
Facebook's privacy policy
breaches
European law, according to the Belgian privacy commission.
Due to cutbacks, many UK women fleeing violence at home have
no
place to go.
US power-plant lobbyists are running
sock-puppet
campaigns and "studies" to pressure against rules to limit carbon
emissions.
Everyone:
call on
National Grid to keep its deal to buy electricity from the Cape
Wind wind farm.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah, one of the leaders of the uprising against
military rule in Egypt, has been
sentenced
to prison by the new military government.
Two al-Jazeera journalists in Egypt will be
tried
a second time for acts of journalism.
We can hope they are acquitted, but that shouldn't lead us to forgive
the act of charging them with absurd "crimes".
Abbott made a deal with Sri Lanka's repressive President Rajapaksa, to
hush
up about his repression in exchange for his cooperation in stopping
his cronies from carrying illegal immigrants to Australia.
Blaming the
Internet for Terrorism: So Wrong and So Dangerous.
Thai dissidents face imprisonment, accused of
"insulting"
the royal family.
To make it a crime to insult someone — regardless of who that
may be — is evil tyranny. Many countries have unjust laws of
that sort, including
France
and
Turkey.
Public
pressure
on advertisers is driving Rush Limbaugh's radio diffusion ever
lower.
The Kurdish Peshmergas are
being
denied heavy weapons because the US thinks arming them would get
in the way of stitching Iraq back together again some day.
The paradox is that the Peshmergas are the only forces on the ground
that are really suitable for fighting
PISSI. They have esprit de
corps, they have battle experience, and they don't hate the Sunnis
that PISSI dominates and conscripts the way Shi'ites do.
Alan Turing's family demand the UK pardon
thousands
of men convicted for being homosexual.
A Palestinian girl, age 14, says she was
bullied
into making a false confession in an Israeli prison.
The defense minister of Iraq denied the reported timetable for
attacking Mosul which was
stated
by an unnamed US official.
There is no way of knowing which, if either, of these officials is
telling the truth. Perhaps both statements are only for the home
front.
An analysis of craters and scorchmarks shows that
Russia
is firing rockets at Ukraine.
Fine
government contractors for hiring ex-officials.
Suggestion
to the target of a witch hunt
Uri Avnery: violence against Jews in Europe is not anti-semitism.
It's an
outgrowth
of the Israel-Arab conflict.
The No Depositor Left Behind Act
would
apply to banks the sort of measures that have been applied to
schools.
Everyone:
Tell BP
to pay the full amount it owes for the Big Spill.
Pakistan has passed a law
subjecting
civilians to bogus military courts, and Pakistani newspapers are
calling for the army to kill civilians without trial.
A poll in Massachusetts finds that citizens tend to believe
misinformation that leads them to think pervasive surveillance could
make them safer. This leads to
public support for
practices that threaten people and democracy.
The UK's extractivist ruling parties backed down from overtly
privatizing the forests, and decided instead to
sneakily
achieve the same result without admitting it.
Negev Bedouin
protest
every week against the repeated demolition of their homes.
Billions
of dollars are sucked out of Africa through corruption, which
stunts development and keeps most Africans poor.
The non-rich in the US and many other countries are now getting the
same treatment.
Oceans have thus far avoided waves of extinction, but
massive
damage is just over the horizon.
A Sea Shepherd ship intends to
follow
an illegal fishing ship until it has to go into a port.
Yemen has become effectively divided between
the
Shi'ite north and the Sunni south.
North Yemen and South Yemen were separate countries for a considerable
period a few decades ago.
For everyone in Raqqa,
life
is a prison. Work is almost impossible, and school (for boys
only) is PISSI propaganda.
This comes from someone opposed to
PISSI, so it could be exaggerated,
but most of it must be true.
The
World Has Broken Its Promises About Rebuilding Gaza.
Global heating
denier Willie Soon gets his funds from the
Koch
brothers and other fossil fuel interests.
Global heating is
bringing
cold polar air and deep snow to places in the US that never used to
get them.
Big prisons that barely keep prisoners under control are
bad
for the prisoner and for the public. So why make them?
They must enable the companies to extract more money from the
privatized prisons, with fewer staff.
Miami is already
experiencing
worse flooding due to global heating.
Global heating
denialists measure from the last peak to obscure the
long-term trend. So do
inequality
denialists.
Ohio's tax cut for the rich was supposed to benefit the non-rich through
trickle-down. Now the figures are in —
it
didn't.
Many Americans
demand
that we all swear undying loyalty to thugs who might kill us for
nothing.
The US
may
keep on fighting in Afghanistan.
Creepy,
Calculating and Controlling: All the Ways Big Brother Is Watching
You.
It is a mistake to respond to this by giving up. We have just begun
to fight against pervasive surveillance!
It is also a mistake to assume that, because there are so many
different systems for surveillance, that it is useless to resist any
one of them. Each victory in resisting one form of surveillance can
strengthen the movement to limit all of them to occasions when they
are legitimate.
UK law makes all migrant workers
liable
to abuse by their employers.
Joyce and George Gruss paid for a homeless couple to stay in a motel,
but the motel
kicked
them out because they had no identification.
For motels to demand identification from guests is a police state
practice. This is one of the reasons I generally avoid hotels.
After Abbott suggested that Indonesia should spare two Australians
from the death penalty because of Australia's aid to Aceh after the
2005 tsunami, young fools in Aceh
propose
to collect money to give back the aid — to defend their
bloodthirsty practice.
I can understand any Indonesian's resentment at Abbott's suggestion
that Indonesia owes Australia special concessions in return for
disaster aid. He was insulting, as he usually is. But Abbott and his
disrespect for everyone is a distraction. The issue here is killing
people. By doing that, Indonesians are bringing shame on their own
country.
The US has
proposed
new regulations for undersea drilling in the Arctic, requiring
more preparations to handle a big spill.
This is inadequate because there is no good way to handle a big spill,
even in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Arctic will always be harder.
More preparations could at best bring the Arctic case closer to the
Gulf of Mexico case.
Since we need to leave 80% of fossil fuel in the ground, let's leave
all the Arctic undersea oil in the ground.
A German court has
limited
when businesses can hire detectives to snoop on their employees.
Apps could track a portable phone's movements by
measuring
how its power consumption varies.
One more example of why you can't trust a nonfree program. Surely
some are not malware, but you can never be sure of any of them.
Nonfree software does computing for suckers.
Muslims in Norway have
organized
to protect synagogues from attack.
Everyone:
call on
the movie academy (that gives Oscar awards) to reveal the
diversity figures of its voters.
Everyone:
urge
Senator Wyden to listen to his voters and oppose the TPP.
Denouncing
rule by the "extreme center".
Everyone:
call on Judge
Garnett to release the grand jury transcript about the killing of
Eric Garner.
Tne
NSA stole
encryption keys from Gemalto, the world's largest maker of sim
cards, which allows the NSA to listen to communications from billions
of cell phones.
Christian extremists that oppose effective contraception are
contradicting
their stated goals by increasing the number of embryos that don't
develop into babies.
I think we can model their behavior better by disregarding the reasons
they proclaim, and supposing that what they really want is to use
pregnancy as an opportunity to punish women that have sex.
The push for US colleges to punish someone every time rape is alleged
tramples defendants' rights and
threatens
to punish people who did not commit rape under any definition.
Note the example at the end, of the male student who was banned from
campus because he resembled someone else who had raped a
female student, so he might trigger her painful memories.
Nonexistance
- In response to Better Never to Have Been, by David Benatar.
Accused
of 'Terrorism,' Animal Rights Activists Head to Federal Court.
Others have been imprisoned for "animal rights terrorism" just for
operating
a web site.
The New York Times
considers
decent wages for Indian workers as a failure rather than than a
success.
750,000
Egyptians are still working in Libya, driven by poverty and
population growth.
If people in a country take dangerous risks "so their children can get
married", that country is on track to disaster and needs to reduce the
birth rate as quickly as possible.
Everyone:
call on Walmart
and other clothing stores to sign the Accord on Fire and Building
Safety in Bangladesh.
The US is preparing Iraqi forces to
fight
to recapture Mosul.
I hope they can do it, but we have yet to see if any Iraqi army forces
will fight against real opposition.
Judge
"Outraged" at Innocent Man, Orders Him to Pay $30,000 in Support for
Child That Isn't His.
This is another example of how the legal system finds excuses to
elevate its fictions over the facts. It also happens to
systematically screw the poor.
Because Obama's health care program was designed to satisfy private
medical insurance companies, it
imposes
a big tax form burden on people who get subsidized coverage.
A national health system would not have this problem.
Everyone:
Call
on General Mills to stop lobbying against dietary guidelines with
less sugar.
How detective Zuley tortured a series of black Chicago citizens into
confessing to murder, but he
didn't
operate alone. He had the support of the commander of thugs in
his district.
Montana is
considering
a law banning the showing of fake nipples.
It also prohibits display of men's and children's nipples, which would
ban traditional practices and threaten a large number of people.
Hong Kong protest leaders face
persistent
harassment of many kinds.
US citizens:
tell the USDA
to withdraw its secret approval of a genetically modified pine tree,
and consult the public about it.
Another issue about these trees is that the modification, which makes
the wood denser, could interfere with their normal degradation.
Before any such tree is put into use, we need to develop reliable
ways to keep its genetic modifications in check.
Obama's proposed rule changes for searches of computers would make it
easier
for the FBI to demand handover of data stored on servers in
Europe.
Witnesses claim Russian bombers
recently
flew over England.
It fits Putin's general policy of probing anywhere he can cause
trouble.
Fighting global heating
and local industrial pollution on the
US
Gulf Coast.
Instead of "climate change", let's try to get people to say the words
"global heating". The term "climate change" was
imposed
by the Bush administration to minimize the danger.
Ralph Nader
tears
into Canada's right-wing fearmonger Harper, who is channeling Dick
Cheney about "terrorism" (i.e., environmental activists).
The Divestment Student Network asks university administrators,
"Whose
side are you on?"
This question is appropriate for other issues besides fossil fuels.
It applies to all issues where the plutocrats use institutions to the
detriment of everyone else, including for instance the scientists that
have been
corrupted
by the sugar lobby's money.
In fact, we know whose side they are working for thus far. But many
of them deny this — to the public and to themselves. Posing the
question openly will lead some of them consult their consciences; in
addition, we owe them the invitation to switch sides before we
conclude that they are irredeemable.
James Risen calls Attorney General Holder
America's
"Chief Censorship Officer".
Holder is
trying
to pretend it isn't true.
The beginnings of legalization of marijuana in the US are
reducing
illegal marijuana imports from Mexico.
Thugs
in Washington state killed a man who was surrendering to them.
Now they are
covering
up some of the details.
Apparently they have something to hide.
The man had been throwing rocks at them, which would be a reason to charge
him with a crime and arrest him, but doesn't justify shooting him when
he had stopped.
Homeless activists have proposed a
Right
to Rest law, but no California legislator has been willing to
sponsor it.
Fracking "flowback" water
contains
carcinogenic substances, and in California it is often pumped into
aquifers.
The sugar lobby has funded so much dietary research that it has mostly
gained
control
over the whole field, influencing the majority of researchers to
close their eyes to the problem.
Hacker
Claims Feds Hit Him With 44 Felonies When He Refused to Be an FBI
Spy.
US war movies have mostly been
very
similar for 75 years.
There is, however, a change in that before 2000 they tended to teach
that Americans were above such things as torture. Since then, they
teach that torture is good as long as Americans are doing it.
The article does not mention a few prominent exceptions from the 1970s
such as Apocalypse Now, which presented the US war in Vietnam as cruel
and did not try to justify it at all. But few young Americans have
seen those.
I should point out that there was a very important difference between
the war against Japan and the occupation of Iraq. Japanese soldiers
in World War II were fighting a war of conquest for the stated purpose
of colonization, under the control of military expansionists who had
taken control of Japan's government by assassinating politicians who
disagreed with them; then, under the approving gaze of their emperor,
they conquered parts of China. In 1941 they attacked the US and other
countries, then went on to occupy Indochina, Burma, the Philippines
and Indonesia. They promised the peoples colonized by European
countries near equality under Japanese rule, then treated those
peoples so badly (which included
forcing
thousands of women to be prostitutes for Japanese soldiers) that
they welcomed US troops as liberators (and then fought in various ways
for independence from the European colonial powers).
Only in India, which never experienced Japanese occupation, did
enemies of British colonialism continue to regard the Japanese army as
a potential ally for a while.
Obama told the FBI to curb its use of
gag orders on
PAT RIOT act data seizures, but the FBI has ignored the order.
US citizens:
call for
investigation of Alabama Judge Roy Moore.
Baby California sea lions are going hungry because their mothers
can't
find enough fish. This is caused by the warmer temperature of the
ocean.
Uh oh, what will happen to them when we make the ocean much warmer?
World
Bank Refuses to Consider Haitian Communities' Complaint about New
Mining Law. It found an excuse to disregard the complaint.
Everyone:
Implore
California to block the Comcast/Time Warner merger.
Afghanistan and the Taliban
plan
to hold peace negotiations.
In order for the talks to have a chance of success, both sides need to
prefer an agreement to no agreement. I have doubts that the Taliban
would prefer an agreement.
Various protest groups in the UK say they will
refuse
to pay for permission to hold protests.
Lenovo sells PCs with rather nasty adware which also
exposes
them to attacks.
Most models in fashion shows are
exploited
much the way businesses exploit interns.
Kansas Republicans are considering
excluding
students from sex education if their parents are prudes.
Those students will have to figure it all out by trial and error.
Some will get pregnant in the process. Republicans want teenagers
to be at risk of pregnancy because that provides a supply of people
to condemn.
Putin has used
Russian
censorship to convince Russians that uncensored information is
their enemy.
Many
other countries are starting along this route.
Republicans in Oklahoma are
proposing
to ban advanced placement US history because it mentions things in
history that are unflattering to the US.
UK intelligence agencies have been
illegally
snooping on conversations between lawyers and their clients.
US citizens:
call on the
Federal Reserve to support Greece in resisting imposed austerity.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which causes brain
damage when children are exposed to it.
The UK has reached a higher employment rate, but this does little good
for working people since
most
jobs pay so little.
The article ends by supposing that pay levels follow the productivity
of labor, but that is a myth. Employers are happy to pay workers less
than the value of their work, and the UK still does not have a
shortage of labor.
Why
Is No One Talking About the GOP's Plan to Send Millions of Disabled
Americans Into Poverty?
The spread of the fossil fuel divestment movement, and the fossil fuel
companies' counterattack, means that there is
no
room to be neutral.
The US is going to
sell
armed drones to other countries, facilitating assassination
campaigns world wide.
Global heating
will
spread parasites that carry diseases. Often a parasite that
currently is limited to one host species can jump to other host
species when the host moves into a different ecological mix.
Pablo Iglesias: austerity means the
end
of democracy.
In other words, it is plutocracy.
David Hicks, former prisoner in Guantanamo, has been found innocent of
aiding terrorism, but he
still
suffers from the effects of imprisonment.
He also says that the US and Australia knew he was innocent all along,
and that his charges were a frame-up.
The Gates Foundation, following Gates himself, has a
bizarre
excuse for ignoring the danger of global heating.
Prisoners are being
forced
to shovel snow in Boston, and are being paid hardly anything.
(20
cents per hour, to be precise.)
The prisoners should receive the standard wages for work they do.
To pay them less undermines the income of non-prisoners.
Proprietary software controlling disk drives, USB memories is a
grave
vulnerability.
I think the real solution is to design these peripherals so that
no one can change the software in them through the usual
interfaces.
Erdogan is pushing to give Turkish thugs
more
power to attack protesters, and the journalists that cover the
protests.
Pearson makes
giant
profits on standardized tests that the US imposes on all students.
Greece has received
temporary
funding from the euo zone.
Venezuela
foiled
a coup plot.
We have to suspect that it was supported by the US,
as was apparently the coup in Honduras.
The coup attempt cannot be justified, but Venezuela
should stop acting against political opposition.
The Telegraph, of London,
deleted
a news story about gross and dangerous mismanagement at HSBC.
Melting ice is causing Iceland's land to rise,
provoking volcanic
eruptions.
Children that enter the US without permission are
imprisoned for days
in in cold cells without enough food.
Everyone:
oppose the
Florida bill to require people to use the toilets for the gender they
were born with.
US citizens:
call
on energy secretary Jewell to block Arctic and Atlantic undersea
oil drilling, and tighten other safety regulations.
US citizens:
call
on Congress
to require paid sick leave for US workers.
US citizens:
call on
Congress not to overlook or forgive the wrongdoing of for-profit
colleges.
We need stricter rules so they cannot
lure
students to get painful loans for a usually useless "education".
Poland
will
pay reparations to the prisoners that the US tortured in Poland.
Architecture
designed
to reject the homeless can be seen all over cities in the US, as
well as in London as described by this article. It makes life worse
for the non-homeless, too.
A Canadian intelligence report, made for Harper himself, denies that
fossil fuels cause global heating and
calls
activists campaigning against fossil fuels a security threat.
The mounties (thugs
that also double as an intelligence agency) are
telling Harper what he wants to hear, much as the CIA did for
Dubya
about Iraq.
A torturer at Guantanamo
brought
his methods from the Chicago thug department.
A new Barbie doll will double as a
listening
device.
The remote service that figures out what Barbie should say next is
SaaSS, which makes it
unethical.
SaaSS always involves spying.
It looks like plain packaging for cigarettes is
reducing
smoking in Australia. The uncertainty is because smoking rates
were declining already, long-term.
What is clear that requiring plain paper packaging does no harm. And
it does not violate any rights that people are entitled to.
Companies that sell dangerous drugs are not entitled to the right to
package them however they wish.
Argentina
Asks US to Press Iran on 1994 Bombing During Nuclear Talks.
I sympathize, but it would be very foolish for the US to imperil
the success of nuclear disarmament talks for this.
Billionaire Polluters predicts that fossil fuel use will
keep
increasing for decades.
This is one of those predictions that would make sense if you ignore
something very important: the collapse of civilization that such an
increase in fossil fuel use would bring.
The
story of Stephen
Kim, imprisoned by the Obama regime for talking to a reporter.
European governments are
proposing
increased mass surveillance, expecting the public to swallow it
from fear.
US citizens: tell Republicans,
don't defund
Planned Parenthood.
In Scotland:
oppose
the national ID database.
Everyone:
call
on McDonalds to stop using meat grown by feeding antibiotics
regularly to animals that aren't sick.
US citizens:
call on
Congress not to renew the PAT RIOT act with massive surveillance.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to take US nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert.
Pussy Riot has released a song
dedicated
to Eric Garner: "I Can't Breathe".
The ruler imposed by China on Hong Kong, known as "the wolf",
called
on the people of Hong Kong to act like sheep.
Lots of nondemocratic regimes want to rule sheeple, but few admit it.
Thailand has done little to put an end to
enslavement of fishing
workers.
See the enslaved
workers page.
The desire to prohibit ketamine as a recreational drug is
impeding
its medical use (as an anesthetic and for treating depression).
Even worse, the drug may be banned entirely.
A similar thing has happened in the US with pain medication: people
who need it for pain are stopped from getting enough to help them.
Russian-supported "rebels" in Ukraine have
captured
Debaltseve.
At one point in 2014, Ukraine's forces were slowly but steadily
defeating the "rebels". Then, all of a sudden, the "rebels" got a lot
stronger and started advancing. There is only one way that could have
happened: with Russian military support.
This point is important because it doesn't depend on believing either
side.
The UK right-wing government is using "new models of care" (i.e.,
reform of some details) as an
excuse
to privatize parts of the NHS.
The finance minister of Greece stated in 2013
which
aspects of Marxism he follows and which aspects he finds mistaken.
He also explained why he does not aim to destroy the euro-zone.
His experience with a first-class air ticket reminds me of an
experience I had around 1990. I was invited to Japan along with
Thomas Bushnell, developer of the GNU Hurd, and we were both given
business-class tickets on the same flight. On arrival we found that
we were both perturbed by the intensely servile attitude of the flight
attendants, and perturbed even more by the idea that there are people
who get used to this and expect it.
Fighting
enslavement
of domestic workers in Hong Kong.
See the enslaved
workers page.
The per capita GNP of the US is
140,000
dollars per person per year. Most Americans live on something
like a tenth of that. The difference is a measure of exploitation by
the rich.
Joseph Burrell was
jailed
for 4 months while his vitamins were tested to verify they were
not illegal drugs.
Now he probably faces expensive jail fees. He may end up back in jail
if he can't afford them.
The US Supreme Court
ruled
that it is ok to execute someone even if that person has been
shown to be innocent.
Scott Walker, Republican presidential hopeful, is a
corrupt
liar that tries to crush politicians that oppose him.
He must have a good chance among Republicans.
The witnesses who got Linda Carty sentenced to death have said that
they were
blackmailed
by the DA into lying.
Although US and NATO troops are not directly fighting much, the rate
of civilian casualties in Afghanistan is the
highest
ever.
Republican governors are proposing
tax
increases that mainly hit the non-rich.
The EU obstinately
demands
to continue Greek suffering.
If the EU forces Greece to the breaking point,
more
can break than just Greece.
The Iranian state reluctantly allows Jafar Panahi to make films
because they win international awards, but they
can't
be shown in Iran.
The Australian state which has the Great Barrier Reef has a new
government that
plans
to make new laws to protect the reef, especially from agricultural
pollution.
More
Money Won't Fix U.S. Infrastructure If We Don't Change How It's
Spent.
Women are
being
taught that it is heroic to die to save a fetus.
A fetus is only a potential person. The woman is a real person.
"Stamp scrip", which
decreases
in value over time if not circulated, might help Greece.
In general, Greece might be able to escape from crushing austerity by
creating money other than euros. However, such schemes are tricky;
one needs to navigate carefully between various pitfalls. Syriza's
economists are no fools; perhaps they can do it.
I would expect all these schemes are banned by the EU and the
euro-zone rules, but there may come a time when Greece must defy those
rules.
We should not send humans to Mars while we
don't
know whether life exists there.
Ukraine's forces shot down a Russian drone over Ukraine,
near
Mariupol.
Russia's proxy "rebels" could not have captured it from Ukraine. It
is conclusive proof of direct Russian participation in the war.
These "rebels" are on the offensive and have
cut
off Ukrainian forces in Debaltseve.
A UK newspaper's political commentator resigned, denouncing the paper
for
quashing
coverage of the HSBC tax-dodging scandal in exchange for the
bank's advertising.
Tories claimed solar power on farmland endangered UK food production,
but documents show it
had
no basis to reach that conclusion.
It was just a handy fabricated excuse to boost use of fossil fuels.
In Iran's Orwellian world, the press are
forbidden
to mention former president Khatami. He has been declared an
unperson.
Another
oil train has exploded in the US.
An Indian millionaire beat his security guard for being slow to
open the gate. The guard has died and the millionaire
faces
charges.
This arrogance of the wealthy shows in other ways in today's
plutocrats.
How to Eradicate Poverty:
Spend
More on Wages And Strengthen Unions.
Just 30 dollars can build a
tiny
house with wheels that can give a homeless person what's needed to
start working. As long as the thugs don't treat it like vermin.
Utah finds that paying market rates for housing for homeless people is
a
feasible
solution.
In San Francisco, Jeff the trash collector
became
homeless after he was fired due to a drug test.
It does no harm if a trash collector uses marijuana while off duty.
Mandatory drug tests ruin lives for no reason. We must stop them.
Many Americans can't afford bail when charged with crimes, so they
have to stay in jail until trial. Since they are required to pay for
being in jail, they are
jailed
again for non-payment even if they are acquitted.
Some plead guilty to a crime they didn't commit, just to get out of
jail.
A
list
of restaurant and fast-food companies that say they will stop
using meat made with regular use of antibiotics.
Thailand's
Students Defy Military Junta And Call for Return to Democracy.
Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative explains
how
executions dehumanize everyone involved.
PISSI has imposed
cruelty
to women beyond even Saudi Arabia. Many women will be unable to
survive this for long.
Rather than dying passively, they should shoot
PISSI supporters or
make suicide attacks against PISSI.
PISSI has raped so many women and girls that Iraqi society is
on
the verge of realizing it is wrong blame the victim of rape.
I suggest offering those ostracized women a chance to recover their
self-esteem with military uniforms, weapons, and training. They will
fight like demons against PISSI, once they see they can.
Much of the US has been shut down by a
big
snow storm coming on top of several other big snow storms.
Most Americans probably don't know that this is one of the
indirect
effects of global heating.
Sudan
confiscated
the entire print run of 14 newspapers. It is not clear what story
the government was censoring.
Censorship in the advanced countries sometimes works more subtly, but
sometimes involves imprisoning people for various kinds of political
statements, as has occurred in the
US
and
France.
Begging is a crime in England, and the
number
of prosecutions has greatly increased in recent years.
To ban begging could be acceptable in a society that offers everyone
(without exception) some decent alternative. Under a starve-the-poor
government, this is just one more nail in destitute people's coffins.
The Tories have spread a "climate of fear" in the NHS; staff that see
bad patient care are
afraid
to report it.
This is coherent with the Tory goal of cutting the NHS as much as
possible. The less people realize how bad the consequences are, the
farther they can go.
A St Louis thug turned off a car camera, after
yelling
out to other thugs
(in effect), "Don't beat him up yet, the camera is
still on!"
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
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Regardless of other details, this should put those thugs in jail.
AT&T plans to charge fiber customers around $30 a month extra for not tracking their internet activities.
I've read that the main US ISPs already keep records of users' internet contacts for use by Big Brother. And AT&T already keeps lists of people's phone calls since 1988 or so. Apparently what AT&T charges extra for is merely not to use the data for its own purposes.
I think most Americans will forego privacy rather than pay $400 a year, because most Americans are on the edge of broke. They might pay for privacy if they could afford it, but they can't afford it.
If this occurs, it will demonstrate that the idea that "you own the data about you" does little good for the privacy of people who can't afford not to sell it.
People should not have to pay for privacy. Privacy should be built into the system.
Liberals (in US terminology) are better than conservatives at overcoming cruel instinctive disgust.
Ask Republican governors: why in your state do the rich pay a lower tax rate than the rest?
You can ask Democratic governors the same question.
Cancel the 2024 Olympics to reduce global heating.
The Right to Free Speech Means Nothing Without the Right to Offend.
If we surrender to murderous religious fanatics by silencing views that offend them, it will mean one can offend only decent, civilized people.
Many states punish prisoners for using social media (usually, being used by Facebook). A single post can be punished by a year's solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement for extended periods of time is a form of brainwashing and should not be allowed at all.
Rehabilitation includes teaching prisoners better life habits, and not being used by Facebook is a good habit. But this is the wrong way to teach it.
The South Carolina law seems to punish even writing an article to be posted on the internet.
The latest UK right-wing technique to divide people is to condemn poor people who are fat.
Many poor people can't afford non-fattening food, or can't buy it near where they live. If the proposal were to correct these problems, all the poor would rejoice. But that would be too helpful for any right-wing politician to consider. Their goal is to find excuses to punish the weak.
I predict that their "treatment" will consist of cutting welfare benefits for the obese, to compel them (and their children) to go hungry until they slim down.
It would take a
60%
tax bracket to stop the growth of inequality in the US. Let's do
it!
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
The article explains a lot more about the causes of growing inequality and what methods would or would not stop it.
Dozens of UK employees involved in arms procurement are working directly for arms companies.
How the subtleties of how humans understand categories creates a tendency towards racism.
Standard thug interrogation methods can implant false memories of crimes that never occurred.
Psychologists spending just 3 hours talking with subjects got 70% of them to vividly imagine committing crimes that didn't happen.
This is another reason to refuse to answer the thugs' questions without a lawyer present.
A Guantanamo prisoner suffers lasting medical problems due to torture of his rectum years ago.
How Libya sank into a battlefield for competing warlords.
In 2011, I endorsed the Western intervention to stop Gaddafi from massacring the rebels. At the time, it seemed there would be hope for Libya. Was this idea wrong from the beginning, or was this outcome contingent?
Some claim it was inevitable, but I am not sure, and others are not either.
Of course, "just" killing a dictator does not make everything fine, but the intervention was never only about that.
Some argue that European countries should intervene, but it is not clear what they could do.
We should not assume that Libya is falling under the control of PISSI.
Corruption in Sierra Leone drained 1/3 of the government's funds for fighting Ebola, in the period through October. This may have greatly increased the number of deaths.
The proposed Ukraine cease-fire never got started; war is heating up.
What can we learn from the terrible consequences of western intervention in Libya?
20,000 Nicaraguan sugar farmers have died in 10 years of chronic kidney disease, which is traced to working conditions. The Sandinista government has sold out to the plantation owners, which regularly cheat the workers out of medical benefits in order to avoid paying for their treatment.
The government has also betrayed the women of Nicaragua by banning abortion, which is part of the reason that men in Chichigalpa can't find any work except that which kills them.
If the company had to pay compensation for working people to death it might start treating workers decently. But that would cost a little more, and the company competes with companies elsewhere that probably work farmers to death too. Thus the globalization of business power kills people around the world. Nicaragua would be better off if it refused to compete this way.
Rodney Reed is about to be executed in Texas, apparently framed by the thug who was the real murderer.
China is building cities on farmland, while it does not have enough farmland.
The Satanic Temple: an ethical movement calling itself a religion as a legal fiction.
The fundamental flaw in supposing that "big data" will easily solve all problems.
The Emerging Trend of Innocent Black Men And Boys Dying After Calls to 911.
Political Meltdown In Macedonia Shows Destabilizing Effect Of Massive Government Surveillance.
US citizens: call on food companies to reject genetically modified apples.
There are several reasons to worry about this particular variety.
US citizens: Obama,
tell
the Navy to protect marine mammals from loud sounds.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Apple Partners With the Government on Cybersecurity, Then Preaches About Privacy.
Boston's mass transit system is putting remote-viewable video cameras into buses, violating everyone's privacy in the name of reducing crime where it is already rare.
This sort of camera ought to be illegal except with a specific court order for a specific reason.
In the UK, the influence of Christianity is decreasing and many young Britons are becoming Atheists.
I rejoice in this, but I regard it as dangerous that the phenomenon does not include Muslims. We need to find a way to reach them with the secularist message. Otherwise, millions of Britons who drifted into a vague secularism might be vulnerable.
The competitive pressure on today's college students, due to the lack of jobs, has driven a large fraction to use concentration-enhancing drugs.
The drugs are not unfair to students who are poor, since they are cheap. They put those with a bad reaction to the drugs are at a disadvantage, but I don't see that that is worse than the advantages and disadvantages we get from all sorts of other variations.
The issues I think do matter are (1) possible long term harmful medical effects, and (2) changing what people learn from college.
One person quoted in the article said that college is a "cognitive enhancement", but that is misleading: it suggests that the intended result of a college education is only a matter of concentrating better. The idea used to be that college would teach people a deeper understanding of what they think about.
Many UK working people haven't got the cash to buy a refrigerator, so they rent one and end up paying 3 times as much.
Some children there don't get enough food and their growth is stunted by malnutrition.
Climate scientist Alan Robock believes that intelligence agencies are concerned that geoengineering might be used as a weapon, and he is concerned too.
However, no such technology is ready for the short term for any purpose.
Law for Sale: Senators that voted for Keystone XL got an average of 1/4 million from oil companies.
Blacks in London (as in New York) can't reliably keep appointments because they are likely to be stopped by thugs on vague floating suspicion. Of course, it is worse in New York City.
Scientific papers that purported to find that plain packaging in Australia did not reduce cigarette use were funded and then checked by a tobacco company. Its substance is criticized as invalid, too.
Due to perverse court rulings, only criminal defendants can challenge the legitimacy of massive surveillance — and only when they get notice that the prosecution depended on this. So the US government is deceptively abolishing defendants' right to receive notice.
Guest Post: US Intelligence Reforms Still Allow Plenty of Suspicionless Spying on Americans.
Local initiatives to improve local economic conditions or equality may palliate the injustice of the plutocratic state, but don't do much good in the long term.
The term "market state", used in the article, understates the injustice. If these states claim to provide "economic opportunity", that's a misleading claim: opportunity for the rich to get richer is the only "economic opportunity" that they care about. If they valued properly functioning markets, they would not keep hands off when banksters rig markets.
The right term for these states is plutocratic. They are plutocratic governments of occupation.
It is unfortunate that the article uses the overgeneralization "intellectual property", since that lumps together laws that have almost nothing in common and raise totally different issues.
Transparency (about internet platforms' censorship) Is No Substitute For Free Speech.
An assassination attempt against cartoonist Lars Vilks was presumably the work of an Islamist fanatic.
An American shot three Muslim students in the US as they slept. It is not yet clear why, but he seems to hate religious believers.
I think religious believers are making a mistake in a particular area, but they can be good people and good friends nonetheless.
Historical disinformation by video imagery began 100 years ago in the US with "Birth of a Nation".
The tradition continues today with movies that glorify torture and shooting civilians of occupied countries.
Scholars say China doesn't censor all internet criticism of the government — it focuses the censorship on anything that might lead to a physical campaign of action.
In Argentina, assassinated prosecutor Nisman's charges have been brought against President Fernandez.
Progress in abolishing laws that discriminate against women is slow in many countries.
China is serious about attacking corruption, even at great short-term cost.
In India, Christians are sometimes the targets of Hindu lynch mobs.
These Christians were forest tribals that did not want to be incorporated into Hinduism as untouchables.
Republicans Are Cutting Taxes on the Rich and Raising Them on the Poor.
Republicans plan to cut food stamps again and cut Social Security disability benefits.
These benefits are already inadequate, but every little bit that they can take from the poor will make poor people appear more grubby, helping to justify hurting them even more.
UK officials claimed a treaty with France prevented prosecution of HSBC tax evaders, but French officials responded out that there is no such limit in the treaty.
Those right-wing sellouts are fabricating excuses again.
The US is moving towards reapproving oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea, disregarding the danger of spills.
SWAT teams, which consist of thugs that are effectively soldiers, carry out 50,000 raids a year in the US. Nearly all of them are unnecessary. A retired thug chief suggests how to demilitarize the thugs.
That won't make America safe from thugs — thugs without military weapons kill plenty of Americans — but it is an important reduction in the danger.
The newly approved GM apple is designed not to turn brown when it gets old. That way, stores selling precut apples can hold on to them for days and you won't be able to tell.
Other possible dangers of the GM apple.
Uri Avnery: casino mogul Sheldon Adelson commands Netanyahu as well as US Republicans; he is behind Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress.
What Hollywood wants from the TPP is the power to put Americans in prison for sharing.
PISSI supporters have taken over parts of Libya and plan to kill Egyptian Christians that they captured.
If it is not limited to Iraq and Syria, I suppose we must now call it PIS, the pseudo-Islamic state.
Fossil fuel divestment now targets banks that invest in fossil fuels. People are moving their money out of those banks.
The big US banks helped cause the fiscal crisis, and we have been invited to move our money out of them for that reason.
More Teenagers Trying E-Cigarettes Than Tobacco, US Study Suggests.
US citizens:
call
on the Federal Election Commission to investigate Scott Walker's
apparent violations of campaign finance laws.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Chicago Mayor Emanuel to support the measure for reparations for victims tortured by Chicago thugs.
US citizens: call on Congress not to exclude wolves from the endangered species act.
New York thugs continue shackling prisoners that are giving birth even though that practice is illegal.
Hospital staff could put an end to this if they stood up to it. They could even require the thugs to sign a contract that they will not break this law, before allowing them into the hospital.
Doctors Worldwide Blast TPP's 'Chilling Effect' on Health, Climate Protections.
The three main British parties agreed to cooperate in reducing CO2 emissions.
However, since the Tories pledged to do this when they were elected, and then did the opposite, I think the agreement is worthless. Nothing can make them really go against their masters.
Republicans in state legislatures are looking for opportunities to discriminate against queer people.
TPP is the Crazy Train, and Fast Track is the Highway to Hell.
Bruce Schneier has endorsed the idea that we need to stop digital systems from tracking what we do.
I am glad to see this get support.
Two al-Jazeera journalists that were imprisoned in Egypt have been released on bail pending a new trial.
It is good news, but it is misleading to say they have been "freed". They may yet be convicted again, and simply being in Egypt exposes anyone to the risk of being accused of new crimes.
We should condemn tax avoiders as well as correcting the loopholes they exploit.
PISSI boasts of success in polarizing the world, making people get involved in war either for or against PISSI.
For a US mainstream media pundit, violence that succeeds in movies has to be the right approach for the US.
It is wrong to accuse the pundit of believing Rambo exists. Of course, he knows that Rambo was a fictional character. What he doesn't realize is that the story was not merely fictional, but systematically distorted from reality. It is easy to write a story so that the "good guy" wins and nothing bad comes down as a result. Getting such a good result in reality is a lot harder.
Every year, hundreds of orcas converge on Bremer Bay, but undersea oil drilling could wipe that out.
Demanding photo ID for use of food stamps is the latest idea for shaming the poor.
Governor Walker's public school cuts forced schools to lay off many junior teachers — so Walker blamed that on their union.
Typical plutocratic tactics so far, blaming the non-rich for the harm he has done them. But he got the mentioned teachers by name as examples for his point, getting the facts about them wrong, so those teachers had a chance to lecture him about it.
Australia's uranium may be used in India to build nuclear weapons.
Studies find that in Florida and Colorado, giving homeless people housing would be cheaper than dealing with them as homeless people.
However, housing them would strike Republicans as unjust: if they are poor, Republicans assume it means they deserve poverty.
The US nearly pushed Atlantic sturgeon to extinction, but with some protection they may be starting to recover.
Everyone: call on Louisiana to allow Albert Woodfox's release from prison.
US citizens: call on Congress to expand social security, not cut it.
The massive expansion in Americans' prisons contributed little to the decrease in crime rates of the past two decades.
US imprisonment does tremendous human damage. Whether it harms the economy depends on who you include in "the economy". It may be good for the plutocrats in general. since some of them profit from prisons or employ prisoners as slave labor, and the rest consider many Americans superfluous. Prisons (which tend to kill prisoners who get sick) may be their method of choice to dispose of the superfluous.
Humans put 8 million tons of plastic into the world's oceans each year, which fills them with pollution, and without management efforts this could increase by ten times in the next decade.
That would be something like 1 kg of floating plastic for each 3kg of fish. But even worse is the plastic that the fish eat.
Israel has rejected responsibility for killing Rachel Corrie.
Global heating will give the US decade-long droughts, worse than anything seen for 1000 years. Droughts such as wiped out entire civilizations in the past.
California's drought is already the worst in 1200 years.
HSBC hid money for people accused of serious crimes.
The US would have essentially eliminated poverty 10 years ago if 1979 policies had continued. Now Republican policies are designed to punish the poor because supposedly they must deserve it.
Arizona's reactionary government plans to cut education to open more prisons.
US oil refinery workers are going on strike because the owners skimp on safety to increase profits.
Ukraine and Russia have made another cease-fire agreement.
After several cease-fires have failed, I don't see much hope this one will hold. But it is worth a try.
Bob Nygaard, detective of psychics, gets them prosecuted for defrauding people.
No one can really do what these psychics claim they can do. Up to a point, people can innocently fool themselves that they are psychically healing people, just as people can innocently fool themselves that others are doing so. But when it gets to be big time, it can hardly be anything but fraud.
World Leaders Should Take Advantage of Low Oil Prices to Ditch Fossil Fuel Subsidies.
They should face punitive taxation, not subsidies!
In wealthy Norway, who are the homeless people that need to beg?
Peru Planning Highway Through Most Biodiverse Place on Earth.
A road typically brings deforestation and pollution.
Irish Tax Policies Are 'Anti-Social' to Developing Countries, Says UN Expert.
Automation of dealings with humans means that machines now make the decisions and humans can only obey.
In freedom of the press, the US isn't number 1. It is number 49.
The replacement of factory workers by robots is accelerating.
This means more profits for companies, and even fewer good jobs for the non-rich. All in all, it is a change for the worse.
What we need now in the developed world isn't more efficiency in factory production, it is to give the non-rich as much of a share as they had a few decades ago.
Macedonia: Massive Surveillance Revelation: 20,000 People Wiretapped.
Australians and Americans joined to tell the US Export-Import Bank not to fund a coal mine in Australia.
Virginia is considering a law that the state can't take people's property for merely accusing them of a crime.
A controversial UK "tax incentive" for wealthy people turns out to be a way for many of them to avoid all taxes everywhere.
Papa John's pizza in New York City has cheated workers out of nearly a million dollars.
Kevin Davis called the thugs for help, so they came and shot him dead.
It took him two days to die, and the thugs kept his family away so he could not tell them anything.
Coral face another threat: heating helps coral-eating starfish.
Assad's forces are attacking the non-jihadi Syrian rebels, who have lost a lot of ground in the past two years to al-Nusra and PISSI.
NSA Spy Program So Secret Judge Can't Explain Why It Can't Be Challenged.
Publicly owned banks are profitable as well as helpful to the public, but the current wave of plutocratic treaties threatens to destroy them.
The Turkish government is imposing sectarian education.
The global heating denialists' latest absurd claim: scientists correcting thermometer data for variations in measurement methods are conspiring to fabricate an appearance of global heating.
These people know that no lie is too absurd, if manipulated media will present it as plausible and corrupt politicians will vote for it.
Vast fields emitting bubbling methane have been detected in the Arctic.
This could mean we are sliding to the edge of the global heating cliff too fast to stop no matter what we do.
Christian anti-sex education taught Elizabeth Smart that being raped made her worthless. So she thought there was no point escaping from her kidnapper.
The UK recognized at the time that what it did to some IRA suspects in the 1970s constituted torture.
Fossil fuel company PR companies are making absurd campaigns against the divestment campaign.
Thugs considered Sureshbhai Patel suspicious because he replied "No English" to their questions, so they beat him up and left him partly paralyzed.
Obama is asking for authorization for unlimited global war against PISSI, including use of ground combat troops anywhere in the world.
The UK thugs are forgetting what a free society means.
A privately funded IUD donation program has driven down Colorado's rate of abortions and unplanned births. Now it needs public funding, but Republicans want to kill it.
Lynching in the US was a form of racial terrorism, and its consequences still affect US race relations.
The claim that capital punishment replaced lynching seems to be mistaken or perhaps garbled. The US had capital punishment since the beginning, as did other countries. Abolition of capital punishment in some countries (and some US states) is more recent than that.
The plan to protect Monarch butterflies, while allowing their prime habitat to be destroyed, is inadequate in various ways.
Unemployment causes 45,000 suicides a year worldwide, finds study.
Stores that sell surplus food could help poor people to afford food.
Malaysian cartoonist Zunar has been jailed and faces criminal charges for suggesting Anwar Ibrahim's judges were corrupted by the government.
By simply making this a crime, Malaysia shows it spits on human rights. It has plenty of company, but this is wrong for any country.
The head of Turkey's constitutional court warns that Erdogan is subverting the court system.
An Arms Race Won't Help Ukraine.
The US government distributes suggested criteria for rating people for "susceptibility" to terrorist ideas.
This reminds me of the way the Soviet Union and China rated people for their class background and punished those of bourgeois origin.
The reason that the UK has not prosecuted HSBC for tax evasion and other crimes is obvious: the UK kowtows to banks.
The UK's system of punishing the unemployed and disabled has driven about 50 identified people to suicide, but the true number must be far more.
Obama is gently de-escalating the idea of a conflict of two civilizations.
The UK has tried to track who bought copies of Charlie Hebdo.
This is another reason to insist on anonymous purchase. Don't be tracked — pay cash!
A security investigator published a list of 10 million username/password pairs, as a basis for research.
He took precautions to avoid hurting anyone, but he still feels afraid.
John Kiriakou said that revealing CIA torture was worth it and he would do it again.
There speaks a real hero.
The FBI is targeting activists against tar sands oil (and the Keystone XL pipeline, I expect).
It may be intended for intimidation rather than to get real information.
The FBI ought to be investigating those that are trying to build the pipeline. That's part of a much bigger crime: attempted mass murder, and it may yet succeed.
Working to reduce solitary confinement in US state prisons.
Uncle Sam and the Illusion of Privacy Online.
Four Reasons Why Freedom Lovers Should Cheer a Restrictionist-Led DHS Shutdown.
The example of Mohammed Toiman, age 13, shows how the US systematically lies about the victims of drone bombings.
Every victim is presumed "terrorist enemy" until other people prove otherwise, and even then the presumption is not fully dropped.
It is possible that increased inequality leads directly to increased risk of big recessions.
US citizens: phone your congresscritters and senators to oppose the DARK Act that would ban states from requiring labeling of GMOs.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Poor people in the UK pay triple the usual price.
In the US poor people often have to pay a lot more for food than everyone else does.
The FCC is trying to make the phone companies offer backup power for fiber lines that provide phone service, so that it won't be a step back from copper wires in an emergency.
Here's one situation where it would have been much much better not to allow all the "baby Bells" to merge into giant companies. The smaller companies would be less able to pressure the FCC to disregard the public interest.
Philadelphia thugs face multiple charges for doing the standard thug thing: beating a man bloody and making false accusations against him.
What is unusual is that they were prosecuted when the facts came out.
However, the thug that killed Seth Adams is protected tenaciously by the system that shuts its eyes to evidence exposing the thug's lies.
US employment has increased substantially in the past year, but wages have increased only where states or cities have raised the minimum wage.
This means that a little bit of recovery is trickling down from the plutocrats. But not much: the jobs that are being created are mostly lousy ones. And in the states controlled by Republicans, people have not got a raise.
American heroes who tried to stop the government's torture.
Bernie Sanders: the struggle for the US now is to stop it from becoming an oligarchy.
The US media systematically overlook wrongs committed by the Ukraine government in covering the war.
The UK has trouble putting more money into workers' pockets because it has put so much into banksters' pockets.
The UK government pledged to be the "greenest ever", then spent 300 times as much on fossil fuels as on renewable energy.
The desperate migrant construction workers in Abu Dhabi are punished if they complain about illegal treatment.
Mohammed Tuaiman, age 13, was killed by a CIA drone attack, after relatives were killed in other CIA drone attacks.
The CIA had decided that the men in his family belonged to al-Qa'ida and attacked them repeatedly at home, never mind the bystanders.
If Europe signs the TTIP it will become powerless to regulate US internet companies.
This Treaty Is Plutocratic. We know the details will be bad; the only doubt is precisely how bad. Europe is fortunate that Greece said it will kill the TTIP, but people must continue the struggle until the stake is in its heart.
Google dodges taxes in Australia, exporting profits through subterfuges, as in many other countries.
The anti-corruption Aam Admi party has won big in the local elections for Delhi.
Anwar Ibrahim, the main opposition leader of Malaysia, has been convicted of having homosexual sex.
This verdict was unjust, regardless of what Anwar Ibrahim actually did, because it is wrong to forbid homosexuality. This injustice is widespread in regimes dominated by repressive religions such as Islam and Christianity.
The government suggests that his assistant brought the case. Does the assistant claim Ibrahim raped him? Powerful men do sometimes act that way. But it is also possible that the political establishment pressured him to make a false charge.
A Guantanamo kangaroo court hearing was recessed because defendants
recognized
a former CIA torturer as part of the staff of the court.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Even though the rules of these "military tribunals" are enough to make the trials unfair, the government does not consider that sufficient and looks for various ways to sabotage the defense.
Perhaps rich dissident Saudis funded the September 2001 attacks.
I do understand the difference between funding the Afghan Mujahidin and funding the September 2001 attacks. The article first says Moussaoui claimed Saudi royals did latter, then it says he claimed they did the former. I suppose the author just got confused in writing, but which did Moussaoui say?
Freedom House reports that the level of freedom has been predominantly declining for 8 years.
Peter Watts: If privacy is really dead, why are so many still trying so hard to kill it?
(I've pointed out before that "Your cause is lost, give up" is a sign that it is still possible to resist.)
The state says it should see everything to "keep us safe", but that makes many of us less safe.
A thug in Utah broke Danny Baker's prosthetic arm when he
insisted
on handcuffing it behind Baker's back. Thugs denied Baker medical
care and made false charges against him.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Suing the city will compensate Baker for the damage, which fortunately wasn't permanent. It will not deter thugs from acting like this … again, and again, and again. We must prosecute and jail individual thugs for brutality and for perjury.
Fanatical Christians think it is "beautiful" that rape can make women pregnant.
It may become possible to transplant uteruses into men so that they can carry a pregnancy. Perhaps Republican men should be invited to carry the "beautiful" pregnancies that women don't want for whatever reason.
Specific examples of how HSBC helped its clients do bad things.
Some of these actions are crimes, and some are clearly wrong. Others furthered activities by clients which are or should be illegal. Fundamentally, governments have the responsibility to block companies from sending their profits untaxed through the frontier.
The US government is going to grow milkweed to help monarch butterflies survive the effects of massive use of Roundup.
The use of pesticides is a form of habitat destruction, which (as usual) threatens a whole ecosystem, many species at once. Normally, protecting on threatened species is done by protecting the habitat, which protects all the species that live there.
This peculiar method of protecting monarch butterflies avoids protecting its habitat and thus avoids protecting the other species threatened by Roundup.
Earthjustice has sued to block EPA approval of the herbicide 2,4-D for massive use with GMOs.
The US media won't tolerate Brian Williams's little lies, but what about the big lies that enabled Dubya to invade Iraq?
US citizens:
call
on Congress
to call on Saudi Arabia to free Raif Badawi.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Bahrain shut off a TV channel for giving an interview to an opposition leader.
Bahrain calls the opposition "extremists".
The FBI has monitored black writers from 1919 to 1972, analyzing their work for political potential.
We Can Start Leaving the Oil in the Ground Right Now. The idea is to apply the plan that President Correa proposed for oil in Ecuador. He gave up on it because the world did not contribute the money. Maybe now it will.
Global heating is changing US ecosystems, reducing the amount of carbon they absorb.
In experimental plots, this has happened faster than was predicted.
This is a positive feedback that could accelerate global heating.
Global Warming Is Causing More Extreme Storms. This has been measured in the US and elsewhere.
The US has a PR campaign to whitewash the Vietnam War, so people will forget how bad and wrong it was for the US to fight it.
New Evidence that Half of America is Broke.
The US IRS received leaked files in 2010 showing how HSBC helped clients evade US taxes. Now the files have leaked to the public, and people want to know why the IRS has done to prosecute those clients and/or get the taxes they owe.
After Obama has gone so easy on businesses in so many fields, we must worry about whether he did it this time.
A school thug attacked a girl in middle school (under 14 years old); her sister and cousin tried to save her, so he attacked them with a stick and pepper spray. One of them needed stitches in the head.
Then he made false charges against them (standard thug practice). Isn't that a crime? With such good proof, will he be prosecuted for it?
Americans, thugs in your children's school are a threat to them. Tell your school you want the thugs excluded.
A plutocrat shows how little he cares about the millions of Americans facing retirement with no savings.
We Can Now Build Autonomous Killing Machines. And That's a Very, Very Bad Idea.
In a sense, the first autonomous killing machine was the mine with an automatic trigger. It could not move, but it could decide when to explode. Antipersonnel mines have been banned by most countries, though the US is one of the holdouts. Perhaps this autonomous nature is why landmines must be banned.
Britain's decision to create a social media military unit reflects the age of permanent information warfare.
It should be noted that other countries including Russia and China are reported already to have social media armies. The UK is continuing a trend, not starting it. However, Russia and China have already crushed democracy and control public opinion. The place we can hope for them is in countries like the UK.
I don't use social media. Originally this was because it was inconvenient for my lifestyle (I often have no internet connection, for instance.) But I am coming to think that this did me a great service.
Keeshan Harley, a black man from New York, has been stopped on the street and searched 125 times. The thugs know him as an activist and they want to harass him.
He said that things have not got better under de Blasio; that thugs still regard black males as targets, and black activists even more so.
A 1% cut in the US military budget elicits screams from the military-industrial complex, so the proportionally bigger cuts are directed at non-rich Americans, research, safety regulations, etc.
Products including drones, cars and game consoles have universal back doors that permit them to be remotely sabotaged.
President Correa of Ecuador is accused of suppressing dissent in various ways.
Hayden, former NSA director, said he thought that the September 2011 attacks made Americans' constitutional rights obsolete.
Purvi Patel in Indiana has been convicted of aborting her fetus, and of child neglect, even though the two are contradictory.
She was desperate to abort the fetus because her parents practiced a cruel abstinence-only prudery. She was crushed between them and the state that offered her no easy way to get an abortion legally.
UK universities are standing up for free speech for Muslims with rigid positions, but they have failed to stand up for free speech for those who criticize Muslims or Islam.
Unlike the writer, I am more concerned with getting them to do the right thing than with recrimination. If they have failed to stand up for free speech, it is not too late for them to start.
The UK Labour party says it will call for international pressure on tax havens that belong to the British crown.
Why it can't directly force them to change is unclear to me.
The Mexican government is accused of trying to impose false certainty about the fate of 43 disappeared students.
Private debt in many countries is reaching levels that could cause economic crises.
The banksters will take advantage of such crises to grab wealth from the rest of society again.
GCHQ's plan to cope with encryption is to crack the computers of those it wishes to spy on. It is trying to sneak around legal limits through a "code of conduct" that doesn't fully reflect them.
I think it is legitimate for spy agencies to crack the computers of legitimate targets in unfriendly countries. I wish they would do that instead of snooping on everyone.
The UK is trying to restrict large protests by making protesters pay.
Important false stories Brian Williams might apologize for.
Reporter Brian Williams is accused of exaggerating chaos and violence in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
These reports may have encouraged real acts of violence, such as when thugs stopped refugees for hours (or was it days?) from crossing a bridge to leave New Orleans to safety.
The House of Representatives voted (uselessly) to repeal Obama's medical care insurance system, while most Americans want to move in the other direction to a single-payer system.
US citizens: call on Obama to require government contractors to disclose their political spending.
Workers at some US refinery workers are on strike against forced overtime; fatigue causes mistakes that can be fatal, for them and for others.
Outsourcing maintenance to low-paid temp workers is dangerous too. They won't have the same experience with the facility that long-term workers have. Chemical facilities should not be allowed to hire temp workers that would come in contact with the processing machinery.
PISSI burned one prisoner alive, but the Bush forces burned thousands of Iraqi civilians alive.
I disagree on one point. The death of tank soldiers in battle, because their tanks are attacked by planes, is not a war crime. It's merely war. War is hell, but it is not morally equivalent to burning a captive.
The Bush forces tried to keep these burnings quiet, but PISSI publicizes its killings as part of an explicit ideology.
US citizens:
call
on the FDA to study the possible ecological consequences before
using a new method to try to eradicate Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Perhaps it would be wiser to develop the same method for Aedes albopictus, then apply it to both species at once.
US citizens: tell the FCC you will stand behind strong net neutrality rules.
A fun protest in Hong Kong was sabotaged by China's arbitrary confiscation of rolls of toilet paper.
A high school teacher reports that her students don't believe they are supposed to think. All they understand is to look things up and repeat what they are told.
This was to some extent true when I was in high school, in the 1960s. People have a tendency to remember the "good old days" as better than they really were; the change may not be as great as that writer perceives it. But I can believe that it has got worse, due to standardized tests and search engines.
Australia's record heat in 2013 could not have happened without global heating.
US citizens: support protecting polar bears from oil drilling.
US citizens:
Call on Senator
McCain to once again support closing Guantanamo prison.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Amid New Claims, Calls Intensify to Declassify Saudi Chapter of 9/11 Report.
Lone Wolf Terrorists Are Exceedingly Rare, So Why Does Everyone Keep Talking About Them?
Norway has dropped a proposed law to prohibit begging and even giving to beggars.
US farmers are becoming shy of nonfree software in their tractors, which screws them.
In a tractor, a car, a phone or a laptop, nonfree programs are an injustice. The intentionally weak term "open source" holds users back from recognizing that point. The term was coined to steer people away from demanding freedom in their computing. Calling freedom-respecting programs "open source" leads people to ask, timidly, "Please, sir, may I have some more leeway," rather than saying they deserve freedom and mean to get it.
Don't let "open source" thinking hold you back from claiming your rights. Please join us in insisting that our software must respect our freedom. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html.
Oxfam warned the US and UK governments that closing the companies that send money to Somalia would lead to disaster there.
When a region is full of people who can't survive except with money sent by expatriates, its population is unsustainably high. It seems to me that we should make sure they receive plenty of birth control supplies along with the money.
Britons are proud of the NHS, but the government made its assaults on the NHS so complex that most Britons did not recognize them as sabotage. And the press did not help them understand this.
Canada's supreme court said that people are entitled to get help from doctors when they rationally choose to die.
The article presumes, but does not say, that the ruling is limited to people whose natural death is expected to come soon anyway. It does not seem right to exclude people doomed to a life of paralysis or incommunicado from this right.
A Missouri boy's family pretended to kidnap him, to teach him to distrust strangers. Now they face real charges of kidnaping.
Scaring a child this way may be a bad idea, but it is not kidnaping. To label it so is willful blindness on the state's part. "Why do we exaggerate the charges? Because we can."
A secret UK court ruled that GCHQ acted illegally when it got information about Britons from Prism via the NSA.
The Koch Brothers' company dumps toxic waste into a river in Florida through a pipeline built without proper approval, but governors Scott and Jeb Bush smoothed that over.
The US military budget is bigger than it was under Reagan during the Cold War.
Re-colonizing African agriculture with patented seeds.
US citizens:
oppose
plans to relax regulations that restrain banks from reckless
borrowing.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Turning public institutions into businesses to keep them afloat is a step towards destroying them entirely.
Easing of China's One-Child Policy Has Not Produced a Baby-Boom.
In other words, applying the policy for a few decades has brought about a lasting social change, a form of "demographic transition". That is grounds to rejoice, and suggests that a similar policy, combined with economic growth and mass education, could have the same effect in other countries.
We can still prevent the human population from reaching 9 billion, with efforts including redistribution of wealth to the non-rich.
The UK's cutbacks now hit people too damaged to live on their own, and relatives that can't both work and care for them.
US citizens: call on the USDA to reject genetically modified cotton that is designed to be used with a dangerous herbicide.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the bill to block
the FCC from establishing network neutrality. Also send email through
this
campaign.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
There is a campaign to boycott the movie, 50 Shades of Grey, and give money to women's shelters instead.
Women's shelters are a worthy cause, but it is simply erroneous to confuse BDSM with domestic violence — like confusing a play presenting a murder with real murder.
Does anyone actually spend fifty dollars to see a movie? I have not gone to a theater in a while, but I never spent anywhere as much on their expensive snacks as the ticket cost. If people really do that, they either have money to burn or they don't understand the meaning of thrift.
Female genital mutilation in Kenya is protected by a wall of silence which makes it appear a festive occasion.
Any medical complications are blamed irrationally on the victim.
In Egypt, a few families reject the social pressure.
Almost 2/3 of US investigative journalists believe the US government is snooping on them.
I think they are right. Investigative journalists typically investigate the powerful or the government itself, and either way the plutocratic US government can be expected to regard the journalists enemies.
Americans used to burn captives to death.
The Shame of US Journalism Is the Destruction of Iraq, Not Fake Helicopter Stories.
Making big fusses about minor lies, to distract from important issues, has been a feature of US politics for a long time. Remember when Clinton (the other one) was impeached for lying about a private sex act?
Florida effectively legalized sexting by teenagers — by mistake.
At most 8% of the prisoners Obama has released from Guantanamo have gone into fighting the US. On the contrary, many of the prisoners have become rather magnanimous, given the circumstances.
The issue is a distraction anyway. If someone did fight for the Taliban and was captured, he ought to be treated as a prisoner of war (thus, kept in Afghanistan). If someone planned or committed crimes, whether terrorist or other, he deserves a fair trial.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to cut the big new nuclear weapons spending proposal.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to give Obama's judicial nominees consideration (and
a vote).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Suncor to stop polluting Canadian democracy and Canadian rivers.
How Palestinian teenagers now in prison in Israel are being tortured.
Here, as in general, I decline to use the term "children" to refer to teenagers. For many issues, what's right for children is different from what's right for teenagers. However, that doesn't affect the substance of this issue: torture like this is wrong for teenagers, for children, and for adults too.
New rules in US colleges say students are to be treated as rapists if they don't get "affirmative consent" for sex. At the same time, you can get kicked out of school and lose your job just for asking.
Israel's bombardment of Gaza provoked a big increase in antisemitism in Britain and France.
I almost never experienced antisemitism while growing up in the US. Horror over Nazi genocide made antisemitism something to shun a person for, which suppressed it to a low level.
Israel's crime in Gaza does not justify bigotry or hatred against Jews. These are two different issues. Indeed, many US Jews (and people of Jewish ethnic background, such as me) condemned the bombardment of Gaza and campaign against Israel's occupation of Palestine.
Israel itself has done its best to link the two issues, through decades of falsely claiming that those who condemn Israel's occupation policies are "antisemitic". The link can't help running both ways, thus contributing to the resurgence of real antisemitism.
A thug killed an aged, demented man by firing a rather dangerous "non-lethal" weapon, and was acquitted for it.
I am sure that several thugs could have subdued him. The hospital staff could have done so, with some persistence and thought.
Ferguson thugs want to try out a kind of bullet that is less likely to kill (but can still kill). They already have many other weapons that are more likely to injure people than to kill.
What's wrong with them is that they use these weapons when they should not.
The US car-tracking system also takes photos of drivers and passengers.
Obama said he would rein in the NSA, but his proposals are minor tweaks.
More information about how little effect they will have.
The TPP would requires several countries including Canada to extend copyright to death + 70 years.
This is bad for the US, even though the US already adopted death+70 copyright, because the US needs to shorten the copyright period. If the US ratifies the TPP, the TPP will be one more obstacle to this change.
The Canadian right-wing government's new "national security" law threatens Canadians with imprisonment on vague grounds, but enables the government to look tough.
Roger Vanderklok still trembles when he thinks of airport security, two years after he was jailed on the false word of a TSA employee with an axe to grind and no scruples about lying.
The article wonders why Kieser wasn't fired. I wonder how we can get him prosecuted for his perjury. When power-tripping tyrants try things like this, they should be jailed for years.
A large amount of money has been moved out of coal company stock in a divestment campaign.
Zacarias Moussaoui says that high Saudi officials helped fund al Qa'ida after it declared war on the US, and US congresscritters say a secret report agrees.
But other parts of Moussaoui's testimony seem to be impossible. He could be making it up.
Ireland's law against blasphemy is not only unjust in itself; it provides an excuse for other countries that punish blasphemy aggressively.
Melted Greenland ice runs to the bottom and makes lakes under the ice sheet. This speeds the flow, making the ice sheet more vulnerable to a tipping point that would melt a lot of it.
The US has persecuted Palestinian exile Sami Al-Arian with absurd charges and contradictory demands for 12 years.
Some of the accusations were based on books he had copies of (which does not mean he agreed with them).
Prosecuting someone for having copies of books is a form of tyranny. The UK practices this tyranny openly while the US uses it by subterfuge.
Robert Reich: Why Work Is Turning Into a Nightmare: the piecework service economy.
This has nothing to do with sharing. Let's reserve the word "sharing" for voluntary cooperation, and denounce its use for these businesses. And then let's abolish them.
France is trashing freedom of expression. The reaction to a non-state attack on freedom of speech is a state attack on freedom of speech.
Views on various questions are banned in France. In November I urged French officials to repeal the law banning expression of doubts about the genocide of the Armenians. People should be free to state any views whatsoever about this question, as about every other political, historic or ethical question.
We Could Keep [US] Government Small if Only the Old Weren't Getting So Much Healthcare.
Erdoğan's intimidation has made most public hospitals in Istanbul refuse to do abortions. It is probably worse elsewhere in Turkey.
When women die from underground abortions, or from forced childbirth, Erdoğan will have their blood on his hands.
Global heating means warmer winters, which threatens agriculture.
Applying Title II to ISPs is a possible basis for network neutrality, but big decisions about the Title II regulations remain to be decided.
Officials are already trying to minimize the expected failure of the Paris climate negotiations.
John Kiriakou, imprisoned by the US for his opposition to US torture practices, has been released from prison to house arrest at home.
The movie
Kiana Howard joined a strike of Walmart employees, and was fired for it.
An even bigger point visible here is how desperate her life situation is. Our modern-day Hoovers seek to make her homeless, and her child too.
230 Egyptian protest leaders were sentenced to life in prison.
Even if were legitimate to imprison people for protesting, a trial with so many defendants cannot give justice under any circumstances.
US citizens: Support Senator Sanders' plan for a big investment in US infrastructure.
US citizens: Call on Holder to investigate the shooting of Jessie Hernandez.
US citizens: demand release of the full draft text of the TPP.
PISSI is not alone in burning people to death; the missiles from US drones do the same thing. So do the phosphorus and napalm bombs that the US used in Iraq. But nobody publishes videos of that.
The reason PISSI was able to publish a video is that PISSI intentionally murdered a prisoner. That is a significant step up in barbarity compared with US missiles, which are at least intended to be fired at enemies on the loose, even though they often kill the innocent.
Armed forces of Chad and Cameroon separately won battles against Boko Haram fanatics.
It appears that competent armies have no trouble defeating Boko Haram, which suggests the Nigerian army is not competent.
The UK government snooped on 84 journalists and 242 of their sources during the past 3 years.
When attempts to increase social mobility fail, there's nothing left but redistribution from the rich to the poor.
That's what's right anyway. Painful poverty can't be excused by the fact that some poor become rich and some rich become poor.
The NSA and GCHQ take advantage of crackers to collect whatever the crackers get from various sites.
Greek austerity measures were followed by a substantial increase in the suicide rate.
A leak suggests that the Trade in Services Agreement will be designed to compel privatization of medical care.
Koch-Funded Groups Coalesce Around Axing All Federal Funding for Walking, Biking And Transit. And paying low wages for construction projects.
Israel destroyed a Palestinian water pipe near the Jordan Valley.
Israel has a systematic policy of driving out all Palestinians from that area.
Building Israel's annexation wall through Bethlehem threatens to destroy a school or cut off the town from the only nearby park.
Requiring children to be vaccinated makes a difference in disease rates, even in the US.
Your Right to Believe in Nonsense Should End When You Start Spreading a Highly Contagious Disease.
I'd say rather that they have the right to believe whatever they like, but they may not act on their beliefs that way.
Two Florida thugs pinned a child to the floor and pointed a gun at her. She had been watching TV at the time.
Couldn't they figure out that her watching TV could hurt no one except her?
Israeli "settlers" deep in Palestinian territory have found a clever way to steal a Palestinian family's land even though the family won a victory in Israeli court.
To Fix Global Poverty, You First Need to Acknowledge Where It Comes From.
The Tory Party in the UK is funded by stock market manipulators.
Fossil Fuel Companies Are the Greatest Threat to Life's Party — Not Greens.
The Golden Dawn party's recently reelected legislators will face trial for "belonging to criminal organization."
I do not like Golden Dawn's positions, but the practice of declaring a political party "criminal" and prosecuting its leaders is dangerous to democracy. What would stop your political party from being next?
What I don't know is, does the trial have to prove that Golden Dawn is a criminal organization, or has that been established by fiat?
UK thugs have put millions of innocent people's faces in a facial recognition directory.
India made employment a right and employed rural families, but it is cutting back and the program no longer does them much good.
A Seattle thug arrested William Wingate, age 70, for
using
a golf club as a cane.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Wingate pled guilty to a false charge to avoid the threat of worse charges. This illustrates the systematic injustice of the US legal system which regularly pushes people into false confessions. While the city did the right thing by dropping the charge afterward, that doesn't erase the systemic problem.
The arrest appears to be a typical example of unconscious racism: Wingate had a golf club, and the thug got the impression he was "swinging" it. (I do not see what is wrong with swinging a golf club, as long as you don't come near hitting anyone. Golf clubs are made for swinging.)
Strictly speaking, thug Whitlatch is right in saying that thugs are not "out to get" blacks. Rather, they are systematically predisposed to perceive blacks as doing something threatening, and to respond to this by arresting them, beating them up, even killing them.
Obama's budget weakens food and water safety.
I disagree on one point: I don't in principle object to funding food safety inspections through "user fees" if that means large businesses have to pay for them. But small businesses should not have to pay fees, so as to cancel out a little bit of the existing slant of the playing field.
Obama has proposed an increase in efforts to keep antibiotics working, but it isn't enough to achieve the goal.
The most important step, banning the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in farm animals, won't require any government expenditure.
Obama's proposed tax on corporations' foreign income would still leave them with a tax break that is unfair to the rest of us.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to defend Wall Street reform.
A former UK jobcenter worker wrote a play to show how the government has converted the jobcenters from "doing something for" the unemployed to a scheme to hurt them.
Scientists Pledge to Increase Interference with the Church.
It's too bad this is (apparently) a hoax; the job really needs to be done. And not just with one church.
The Greek defiance illustrates that many countries need and deserve debt forgiveness.
Corruption in Ukraine reaches even into hospitals.
Demobilized in the USA: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement. There was a massive antiwar movement in 2003 and for several years after that. However, by 2006 it was focused on the death of US soldiers, and not many of them are being killed now. Reportedly over 200,000 veterans have permanent brain injuries, but those are not visible so they don't inspire resistance.
Naive governments, like naive individuals, are often led into debt by calculating and unscrupulous banks, and that was the case for Greece. It is the banks, not Greece, that deserved to be punished so that they won't do this again.
A Russian woman faces 20 years in prison for telling the Ukrainian embassy that Russian troops from a nearby base were being sent to Ukraine.
The bizarre twist is that Russia continues to deny that its soldiers are in Ukraine, which means it has to claim that she gave Ukraine false information that she invented with no basis.
With people taking so many photos, they shouldn't think that this involves any creativity.
I don't consider my photos art, and I don't aspire to making photos that are great. I think of them as a way to show people beautiful or interesting places I have seen. Some of them are scenes that surely many have photographed, and some are not.
Afghan women protested the government's failure to include women in the cabinet.
Women in the cabinet is either a proxy or a substitute for government policies that respect women's rights. I am sure the Afghan government doesn't do that very much either.
Rich people are buying remote retreats with airstrips, hoping to use them to escape the global disaster they are preparing for everyone else.
The article ends by saying that the rich should hide from shame rather than from fear. I suggest they ought to face both.
I think it would be a good idea to maintain published lists of the plutocrats and their families — so that they won't believe they will be allowed to escape after dooming most of humanity to disaster.
It is hard to protect an Indonesian rainforest against desperate violent local people determined to cut down the trees and farm.
This is going to get worse as population increase makes food scarce. Human population growth will be stopped, so let's stop it before the mass extinction.
On-line bank statements make it hard for customers to keep track.
The former environment minister of India blocked some industrial projects on instructions from the leader of the Congress Party.
I don't see that this is particularly bad. What the new government is doing — approving projects easily — seems more dangerous.
A dissident book publisher in Belarus faces a large fine for publishing without a license. It doesn't have a license because the state refuses to give it one.
Using computer screens a lot leads teenagers to sleep much less.
Greyston Bakery will hire anyone at all, and helps people become good employees.
The US employment system nearly locks out anyone who has a criminal record or even a blemish, except for those involved in plutocratic corruption who can always get a new start.
US citizens: call on the SEC to make public companies report the ratio between the CEO's pay and the average worker's pay.
Why not go further and require reporting all the benefits that all the executives get?
Syriza has an interesting proposal for restructuring Greek debt so that Greece could someday pay it.
The non-rich in the UK are suffering an "epidemic of private despair"; in a political system which treats them like scum, they think of themselves as scum.
Some Deny Society Exists. Let's Prove Them Wrong.
If you are being oppressed, don't blame yourselves! You are not scum. The plutocrats and the politicians that obey them are scum.
The UK's "anti-terrorism" bill would extend the UK's crackdown on freedom of expression, which has already gone dangerously far.
Donors pledged 3 billion dollars of aid to the countries hit by Ebola virus but have really given only 40% of that.
If they had sent money faster, they could have ended the epidemic sooner.
A US government memo acknowledged that force-feeding prisoners violates international law. This may exculpate a nurse who refused to do force feeding and is now facing charges of "refusal to be cruel and inhumane".
Only 9% of students from poor families complete college in the US, compared with 77% from wealthy families.
Those 9% are terribly burdened by debt.
In other words, poor people have very little chance to advance.
If only 44% of the wealthy got college degrees in 1970, surely the other 56% were not hindered by lack of money. Either they were not good enough students, or they saw no need to bother, but I don't know which. I wonder why nowadays 77% of them get college degrees.
Many people seek the comfort of assuming that the world is just — that people all get what they deserve. People who cling to this tend to blame victims.
The just-world assumption feels great when you are privileged, because it gives you a basis to assume it's your own merit at work.
This plays a part in a new right-wing camp, the "redpill right wing". People in that camp close their eyes to the fact that others are held back by bigotry and other forms of social injustice.
Paradoxically, I have come across an exactly opposite form of bias, where people say, "Lots of other things could kill you, so there is no point in avoiding this one." They do this to rationalize dangerous practices such as smoking tobacco.
The world gives us partial control over our futures, but in areas that involve others, we can't expect complete control. Even in things that affect only us, others may control us through unjust power. There is also lots of randomness in the system: unpredictable events that could result in good or bad. This is what makes life so complicated and interesting. Each of the irrationalities mentioned above consists of ignoring one large aspect of life.
A NYC thug has been indicted for stamping on the head of a man down on the sidewalk who was being handcuffed.
Prosecutor Nisman wrote an arrest warrant for President Fernández, which he hoped to execute after the president's impeachment.
Underground oil leaks can put arsenic into ground water.
Thugs in Seattle blocked a protest march, then pepper-sprayed two people who were leaving the rally that had ended.
A device is available to defeat Keurig coffee DRM once and for all.
Obama called for an end to subsidies to oil companies.
Obama has started advocating a considerable fraction of the progressive causes that most Americans support. Too bad he did not do this when there was a chance of enacting the changes.
I expect that many Democrats who are not really very progressive will do likewise in the 2016 elections, without a serious intention of passing laws to do this. We will have to choose the serious progressives over the late converts.
A nine-year-old boy was accused of terrorism in school for fantasy play in which he said a "magic ring" would make another child invisible.
The school staff who did this are not really idiots. Rather, they have been convinced that it is their job to act like idiots. This is even worse. After all, only a small fraction of the staff of a school could really be idiots, but all the staff could give in to pressure to act like idiots.
Thugs pressure students caught selling pot into undercover buying for the thugs, and sometimes the students get killed.
Most Americans don't think of selling pot as antisocial, and neither do these students. They don't know how to move in the circles of hardened criminals.
Unlike hardened criminals, they are not accustomed to betraying people. Being set to cause the arrest of others like themselves must do them lasting moral damage. They must think that honesty is beyond their reach.
The UK government has eliminated the subsidy for community renewable energy.
This was the last substantial UK policy which favored renewable energy. The Conservatives said they would be the "greenest government ever", but quickly showed that their intention was to favor fossil fuels. Rather than change direction immediately, they began a step-by-step change stretched over the whole period of this government. I am not surprised that they have timed it so that the last step in the total reversal for the end of that period.
A survey of published experiments concludes that there is no real evidence that transcranial brain stimulation has any predictable effect.
It may have some effects on some people, but it is hard to be sure whether that is real or through suggestion.
In Memory Of The Liberties Lost In The War On Piracy.
I think the first battle was lost when most people (but not I!) started using the smear-word "piracy" to mean "What the copyright industry hates".
Some people want to watch the original version of the first Star Wars movie, but distributing it or downloading it is criminalized in the US.
Awareness of the danger of permanent brain injury is starting to affect Americans' attraction to football.
The US government labeled Jeremy Hammond as a "terrorist".
"Terrorist" could be a meaningful word if the government treated the concept with respect. Nowadays states have twisted it into an all-purpose excuse to demonize or imprisoning anyone for whatever reason.
Syriza will kill TTIP (This Treaty Is Plutocratic).
For the US, War Is the New Normal: various factors prevent the US from even considering peace.
After tax cuts (for the rich) and welfare cuts in Wisconsin failed to produce any trickle-down to working people and poor, Republicans conclude that more of the same is needed.
Barrett Brown explains the arrant dishonesty of his prosecution.
I'm afraid he is right — with the US mainstream media toadying to the US government, the only factor that restrains its lies is the heroes like Manning, Assange and Snowden, and flawed heroes such as Barrett Brown.
Peruvians in the Amazon region demand compensation for 45 years of pollution from oil drilling.
Irish Water Tax Rebellion Marches on as Thirty Thousand Take to Streets.
Pakistan is about to execute a man who was convicted despite a strong case he killed in self-defense.
US television spreads misinformation that torture is "effective" for getting true information.
14 of the 15 hottest years recorded by meteorology have been since 2000.
The US and China are starting to compete for control of food supplies.
We have got to reduce the human birth rate!
US citizens: sign this petition too against fast-track for the TPP.
US citizens: call on the FCC to pre-empt laws against municipal broadband.
US citizens:
call
for a continued ban on robocalls to cell phones without the user's
consent.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
A cell phone is a tracking device and a listening device, so I refuse to have one. The matter of robocalls is a small inconvenience on top of that fundamental injustice. Nonetheless, this campaign is worth supporting as long as it doesn't distract us from the deeper problem.
80% of UK universities have rules restricting freedom of expression.
There is some confusion regarding the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign supported by the UWE student union. It is aimed at Israeli institutions, including the universities (which are connected with the occupation), but not at individual scholars. Thus, it includes a boycott of Israeli academiEs but not of Israeli academiCs. Perhaps the student union extended the boycott to target individuals, but it could be that Spiked has been misinformed about it.
Chemical companies suppressed an EU report that aimed to limit hormone-mimicking pesticides that can cause cancer and birth defects.
A large part of the UK has been put off limits to fracking, with the result that business may find fracking unprofitable to try.
Egypt has sentenced almost 200 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death, supposedly for killing a few thugs.
Egyptian trials are so wacky that this one gives us no reason to think those people did anything at all, or even that they supported the Muslim Brotherhood. Who knows?
But if they really did kill thugs, so what? The thugs were already shooting supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, so why shouldn't they shoot back?
This has nothing to do with what the Muslim Brotherhood stands for (which, as an Atheist, I don't agree with at all).
Australia's carbocratic government says it will operate with "renewed vigor" on the Great Barrier Reef.
What it was doing already was bad enough.
Peter Greste has got out of Egypt but at least 11 other journalists are in prison there, along with tens of thousands of people who protested or were merely unlucky.
A basic income for everyone would do more than just replace other forms of welfare benefits.
Syriza's economics rejects the fiction of the "rational economic man".
Face recognition technology is being improved to the point where it makes everyone unsafe.
Reporter Peter Greste, imprisoned in Egypt for over a year for committing journalism, will be deported to Australia.
Will that mean he is freed? Supposedly the deportation would be so he can "continue his sentence" there. Will Australia have to promise to imprison him? Will Australia be allowed to give him the retrial he is owed?
His Egyptian colleague Baher Mohamed may remain in prison for years. Al-Sisi probably hopes we will forget about him once Greste and Fahmy are safely home.
Obama will propose a small (14%) one-time tax on money held by US corporations outside the US.
It is the right spirit, but must more than this needs to be done. For instance, to put an end to "inversions" whereby these companies cease to be US companies.
A statement from some protesters in the UK's "march for homes".
The Pirate Party's sole current MEP has drawn up a report for the European Parliament proposing reforms to copyright law.
For the European Union to adopt these reforms would be a substantial step forward. However, they fall far short of what is needed to make copyright tolerable.
In particular, they fail to establish the right to share copies (noncommercial redistribution without change). They shorten the copyright term a little, but leave it lasting an absurdly long time. The weakness comes at the root: the report accepts unjust treaties that we need to eliminate, such as the Berne Convention, as well as the World Trade Organization that must be destroyed for other larger reasons as well as copyright.
As a matter of practical politics, this may be the best one could hope the European Parliament to pass, or perhaps more than it could pass. However, Europeans, and especially parties such as the Pirate Parties that stand for the freedom to share, must demand far more reduction in copyright power, even if they cannot achieve it now.
This makes it especially worrisome that this report was drawn up by the Pirate Party's sole MEP.
The fact that it was written by her does not make it any better or any worse than if someone else had written it. However, soon she will have the responsibility to say that the report's reforms are inadequate. Will she be able to say that after having written it herself? Or has she in effect allowed herself to be co-opted by the establishment?
The developed countries must make major changes to avoid disaster by 2050, and that's without trying to end poverty for the rest of the world.
We should make strenuous efforts to prevent human population from increasing to 9 billion.
The US government says encryption and anonymity are a "lawless zone".
Implicitly this represents the claim that it is normal for the state to know everything about everyone, in order to "protect" us from secondary dangers. It's surely coincidence that this would give the state total power over everyone.
The US government's massive system of car-tracking was set up to further another injustice: "forfeiture" (taking people's property without convicting them of crimes).
DeBlasio Responds to Police Reform Protests by Giving Machine Guns to Cops for Protest Policing.
I don't think New York City will ever need a 350-thug paramilitary unit, bigger than a company in the US army. I have a feeling that the thugs demanded this from de Blasio for ceasing to attack him after he criticized them for killing people.
Social mobility in the UK has remained small for 160 years.
The only way to help the non-rich is by taxing the rich.
A clever but meaningless "solution" to massive surveillance: the "databox" would offer a way to give personal data to companies via one special company, rather than directly. It would only mean that some of your personal data follows a different pathway to companies and the state.
The databox company would hand over all your data to Big Brother on demand, as every company does (in the US, the PAT RIOT act requires this).
The databox company would hand your data to other companies, too, whenever you do business with a company that says you must agree to do so.
Meanwhile, most of your personal data is generated by transactions that you're involved in: for instance, if you order a book, listen to streaming music, or pay with a credit card. You never have this data, and neither would the databox company.
In other words, the databox is a pseudo-solution that can only distract from the measures that would really end massive surveillance.
Boko Haram is attacking the city of Maiduguri, with 2 million inhabitants, from all sides.
Prohibition of abortion kills women today in Brazil.
But even if it didn't kill them, it would force them to have babies, and that in itself is a great injustice.
A misguided attempt to stop trafficking of workers in just one field attacks the freedom of the internet on the side.
Trafficking and enslavement of workers is a broad problem, found in diverse areas of work including domestic service, sex work, factory work and construction. We need to develop measures to protect workers from this.
One of the factors that promotes enslavement in any area is poverty.
Obama told Democratic legislators to "get informed" about the TPP; but he is the one preventing them from reading it.
San Francisco thugs arrested a public defender for objecting as they violated her clients' rights.
If you want to watch the video, be sure to get it with free software. Don't watch it as embedded in this page because that would make you run a nonfree Javascript program.
Obama talks about the need to curb global heating but his actions accelerate it.
Bernie Sanders says he is waiting to see if he can mobilize people to decide whether to run for president.
He can mobilize me. What about you?
In the US, even most Republicans think global heating is dangerous and action must be taken to curb it.
Thus, all depends on whether the denialists can rig/buy the next election.
Obama's "breakthrough" with India: US nuclear reactor companies won't be liable for nuclear accidents in India.
Is this supposed to be positive?
In Laos, 500 people a year are maimed or killed by unexploded US bombs, 40 years after the war ended.
It will probably be like this in Iraq and Afghanistan a century from now.
Tens of Thousands Rally in Madrid Demanding End to Austerity.
When a person's activity history is published "anonymized", without the person's name or address, in many cases it is easy to figure out who that person is.
Real anonymity requires stopping anyone from recognizing that your various activities are done by the same person. That is why I refuse to pay with credit cards.
Some US oil pipeline companies seem to be rather careless, because they have repeated oil spills.
Will the US government force them to change? I doubt it. It would be more reliable to make them sell all their pipelines to more careful companies.
Everyone:
call on
the Smithsonian to stop employing Willie Soon, who campaigns to
deny that humans are causing global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
The EU has admitted it wants to force companies to hand over their encryption keys.
Governments that cite violent enemies as an excuse to cut human rights are committing a mistake as well as an injustice.
The only case where you need to worry about the precise border of sexual consent is if you have sex with someone who is less than enthusiastic about it. Why even consider such a thing?
The NSA still collects US phone call data en masse and still cannot justify it.
It is not enough to leave most Americans out of this collection. We must leave everyone out of it except court-designated surveillance targets.
The US has declared all its spending on training the Afghan army secret.
This is a good way to hide inefficiency and corruption. Might there be any of those in Afghanistan?
What Should We Think About Big Data That Aims to Help People?
Secret Teacher: I Want to Be Like Yoda, But I Feel More Like a Stormtrooper.
US citizens: tell Congress to reject the TPP because it would further export jobs from the US.
US citizens: call on the FDA to inspect food warehouses more and punish the unsanitary ones firmly.
Everyone:
call on President
Aquino of the Philippines to stop that country's thugs from
torturing the people they arrest.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone: Call on California Governor Brown to ban fracking in that state.
US citizens: Support protecting the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.
Everyone: call on Lowe's to stop selling garden plants treated with neonicotinoids.
The US government will recognize the future danger of flooding, which will be augmented by global heating, in funding future construction projects.
Ladar Levison: Prosecutors Used the Same Legal Strategy against Barrett Brown As They Did Me. Are You Next?
It is rumored that one of the Guantanamo prisoners exchanged for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has returned to fighting for the Taliban.
It is not in general considered wrong for exchanged prisoners of war to return to fighting, so why should it be wrong in this case? The US could have sent Sergeant Bergdahl back to fighting against the Taliban, as he remains in the army.
The US must release and compensate the prisoners it has tortured; this is the wise course as well as the morally required course. If a fraction of them fight the US afterward, that will make no difference alongside the thousands of others already fighting the US. Meanwhile, freeing the prisoners from Guantanamo will eliminate one factor that recruits others to fight against the US.
The Spanish "Security" bill would clamp down on Internet access, Chinese-style, and criminalize posting videos of thugs as they attack people.
The FBI seems to have labeled Gulet Mohamed's brother a "most wanted terrorist" to influence the outcome of Gulet's lawsuit about the no fly list.
Canada plans to criminalize "promoting terrorism". Civil liberties defenders oppose this because it would amount to criminalizing mere opinion, as has recently been the case in France.
Don't let the Charlie Hebdo attack be an excuse to expand surveillance.
Texas is considering a bill to permit teachers to shoot and kill people (such as students) to protect school property.
The former head of CIA and NSA said, "We kill people based on metadata". The US Congress is taking a step to reduce collection of metadata, but it is a suspiciously small step.
Oklahoma's torture-executions have led the Supreme Court to suspend execution in that state, and created an opportunity to press to end them.
For the most part I am not especially concerned about how executions are done. The point is that they should not be done.
20% of US children needed government food assistance in 2014, which is considerably more than in 2007.
This demonstrates that there is no "economic recovery" except for the wealthy.
The US Senate rejected Bernie Sanders' amendment to install more solar power and create a lot of jobs. They prefer to build the Keystone XL pipeline and make sure the world burns as much fossil fuel as possible.
The majority of senators are working for the fossil fuel companies, which is treason against humanity as well as against the United States and its people.
Kevin Thomson writes about being jailed for being unable to pay a traffic ticket.
Spanish Peacekeeper Is the Latest Example of Israel Killing United Nations Personnel.
Thailand's Military Junta Forces Cancellation of Press Freedom Conference.
Alan Morison has gone to Thailand to face vicious charges of "defaming the navy".
The idea of prosecuting people for this — regardless of what they may have done — is an injustice. That is the crucial point. The fact that Morison's "defamation" was a paragraph quoted from another publication is a distraction since the charges would be equally unjust if he had written it himself.
"Free" countries such as France that penalize "insults" give cover to Thailand, Egypt and other absolutely tyrannical states that do this.
The corrupt elite in Afghanistan don't want to defeat the Taliban even supposing they could. They want to keep the war going to get US military funds which they can divert to their pockets.
In addition, they know it is hard for the US to cut down their opium or heroin exports while the war continues.
This makes the situation resemble that in South Vietnam, where the commanders did not want to win too much against the Viet Cong lest President Diem suspect they wanted his job. They just wanted to continue doing their jobs and bringing in the bribe money.
Contrary to UK government claims, the US held and "interrogated" secret prisoners on Diego Garcia.
Will Our Smart Gadgets Become Trusted Or Oppressive Companions?
I part ways with that article at the word "our". I'm not going to use any of these, no matter what convenience it might offer.
If the gadget contains nonfree software, it's an instrument to give someone power over you.
Sports in Australia will have trouble coping with global heating.
Sports are far less important than many other things that will be damaged or destroyed by global heating, but many people care irrationally about sports and this could make them wake up. If it isn't too late.
Syriza's economist proposes a Keynesian plan to redistribute the global surplus from those countries which hold it.
The idea may need adaptation to cope with today's plutocracy, which impoverishes "rich" countries' governments and people.
China has imposed registration of all new computers in Xinjiang.
The measured frequency of heat waves and cold spells in cities around the world demonstrates global heating since the 1970s.
US government lawyers told the Guantanamo prison command that force-feeding was considered illegal.
US thugs held a student down on the ground and made a dog attack her.
She needed lot of surgery after that.
Google said it fought for years to inform Wikileaks staffers that their email had been taken by the US government.
The FBI wants local thugs to collect DNA samples from everyone arrested.
It is clear the FBI really wants to have every American's DNA.
Senator Rubio wants pervasive surveillance of all Americans, so why not start with him?
The last time the ocean got warmer, at the end of the ice age, it made most of the ocean into a giant dead zone. Will human-caused global heating do the same thing?
Biofuels explicitly grown for that purpose are no real alternative to fossil fuels.
If Elections Matter for Greece, Why Not America?
Portugal and Spain have offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews that were expelled or oppressed in the 1400s.
You'd have to be desperate to want to live under Spain's repressive government, but if Podemos gains power it might repeal the repressive laws.
Global heating is causing fish in the seas around Australia to move southward.
40 Afghans per month are killed by unexploded NATO bombs and shells.
US and UK cooperation with Gaddafi, in the form of kidnaping Libyan opposition activists in exile and delivering them to Gaddafi's torturers, had the perverse effect of strengthening al Qa'ida in Libya.
US citizens:
Support
the FAIR act which would greatly curb civil forfeiture.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-25 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
support
the plan to
tax Wall Street more.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Reducing taxes for working people is a good thing, but that can't possibly be enough to enable them to have a decent life. What they need is higher wages and reduced fees for things such as education and medical care.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on your state legislators to support three ACLU-recommended privacy bills.
A gas pipeline exploded in West Virginia — the fourth serious pipeline incident in January.
If you judge the danger of pipelines by the chance you will be near one when it explodes, the danger is tiny. The danger that your water supply will be polluted for years by one is much bigger.
Justice Stevens proposes amendments to the US Constitution.
Arrogant thugs around the US attack officials that question their impunity by refusing to work with them and by making up false charges against them.
'Monumental' Win Against Female Genital Mutilation In Egypt.
President Sirisena reinstated Sri Lanka's Chief Justice Bandaranayake who had been removed by Rajapaksa for political reasons.
His government is looking at cooperating with a proper human rights investigation of the conduct of the civil war.
Activist shareholders persuaded Grumman to drop ALEC.
Grumman does not sell much to the public, so it is not directly reachable by to consumer displeasure.
The Federal Trade Commission announced worthless guidelines for security of personal data collected by household devices.
They are worthless because they assume that these devices will provide data about people to companies, and they try only to make those companies prevent unintended data breaches to unrelated third parties.
This is a secondary danger that develops out of the fundamental danger of these devices: the "authorized" transmission of data to those companies.
Putting thugs together with certain mentally ill people is a recipe for killing them.
The US continues allowing large companies to merge and reduce competition.
Illinois Says Rule-Breaking Students Must Give Teachers Their Facebook Passwords.
Right-wing Japanese are
suing
the newspaper Asahi Shimbun for publishing articles about the women
conscripted into prostitution by the Japanese Army.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
The fact that one witness lied about participating in this conscription doesn't invalidate the independent evidence that it occurred.
The Chinese government sensibly insists on checking the source code for systems for use in banks.
It is dangerous for a country's banks to be vulnerable to companies in a potentially hostile country. The US should adopt the same policy vis-a-vis Chinese computer manufacturers, not as retaliation but simply for its own protection.
All banks should insist on getting control of the software they use. It should be delivered to them as free software.
Obama has failed to institute proper safety regulation for undersea oil drilling, but he wants to open a lot more coastline to drilling.
Advances in oil drilling technology, without corresponding advances in safety practices, have increased the amount of oil likely to spill in the ocean whenever something goes wrong with an oil well.
US citizens: Senators,
support the bill to
promote negotiations with Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Former US senators, who helped the Church committee investigate the CIA in the 70s, propose a new investigation.
In US schools, children as young as 6 are shackled, tied up, put inside bags, even tased.
How global heating promotes big snowstorms.
Scotland has banned fracking and similar oil extraction processes, temporarily at first.
Congress is considering a bill to replace the old 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force with a new authorization that is limited in time, place, and methods.
It may not end the US military interventions that regularly occur in more than half the countries in the world.
Pennsylvania Fracking Companies Regularly Commit Serious Environmental Violations.
Oil drilling is spreading road through the Amazon, and deforestation follows the roads.
The background to Prosecutor Nisman's accusations against President Fernández, whose text supports the claim it was really written by an intelligence agent rather than a prosecutor.
The National Football League is leading US children to do a kind of internet gambling.
Take Cuba Off the Terrorist List.
As Merkel and the banksters aim to defeat Syriza and force Greece under ever-worsening austerity, the public must defend Syriza.
An Israeli attack against Hezbollah, which killed a visiting Iranian general, has led to retaliation by Hezbollah, followed by "retaliation" by Israel.
Israel publicly "forgets" having started this sequence of attacks when it talks about needing to "defend itself" from Hezbollah.
Why media fall for sports industry's bogus economic claims about public benefits from staging the Superbowl.
The same thing happens with the Olympics.
A UK politician has apologized for pointing out that nuclear missiles, if used, would kill more people than the Nazis killed, and that misguided expenditure can't be justified merely because it creates jobs.
This is not to say that Trident missiles and Nazi murder camps raise exactly the same issues. Nazis intended to kill Jews (and some other people), whereas the Trident missile is intended to deter a nuclear attack. Despite that difference, the two have important things in common.
France proposes to punish internet platforms if they do not delete "hate speech".
European laws that prohibit "hate speech" impose censorship of political views. Such laws, in the US, would be unconstitutional. The danger is that US companies will bow to foreign censorship laws.
Google famously refused to bow to China's censorship, but that is a rare exception.
Late model cars have quieter engines, so designers put in systems to make imitation engine noise so owners feel they got what they paid for.
The manufacturers are being dishonest, tricking the car buyer. At the same time, those buyers are being irrational, in effect complaining if they are not fooled.
Car manufacturers should be required to let the driver or owner turn this feature on and off. But if the car software were free, the owner would be able to turn it off.
If Obama gets his way, every US security journalist will be prosecuted with the charges that were dropped against Barrett Brown.
Right-wing Democrats such as Obama pretend that Americans are going to benefit from a "recovery" for the rich.
When plutocrats have sunk workers' boats, a rising tide won't lift them any more.
Here Is How Rand Paul's Bill Would Curtail Civil Forfeiture.
US citizens: call on members of Congress to cancel Netanyahu's speaking invitation, and failing that, not to attend the speech.
Facebook deleted a photo of a Tibetan monk who set himself on fire.
Facebook carries out censorship on behalf of many governments. Just a few days ago we read that Turkey is one of them.
The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture.
Ukraine is caught between an alligator (Putin) and quicksand (the plutocratic west).
Syriza has started cancelling privatizations and will restore the previous minimum wage.
The Koch brothers plan to spend almost a billion dollars on the 2016 elections.
Americans, there is a simple heuristic for how to vote, if you haven't studied all the candidates' positions: vote for whoever the expensive TV ads attack.
That's the candidate that the plutocrats don't want.
Bravo, Michelle Obama, for refusing to cover your head in Saudi Arabia.
Muslims insist on practicing their own customs when they travel, and demand non-Muslim visitors adopt local religion-associated customs when they travel to a "Muslim" country. They want their customs to override conflicting customs everywhere, and they have no right to that. Either all travelers are free to dress their own way when travelling, or all travellers must adopt local practices (no veil, for instance).
Indeed, the idea of a "Muslim" country is hostile to human rights, just like the idea of a "Christian" country or a "Jewish" country or a "Hindu" country.
Now if the US would only show less respect to the king whose policies include beheadings and whippings and many other sorts of repression.
Doctors, please don't make it necessary for terminally ill people to kill themselves by thirst in a public toilet.
But it is not just terminally ill people. Those who are paralyzed or becoming demented also deserve help escaping to a less horrible fate.
Canada monitors up to 15 million file downloads every day.
Trust Reality Rather Than President Obama's Words on Drones.
If Britons vote for the party they most agree with, the Green Party will win. The only obstacle to Green victory is the self-fulfilling prophecy that it's impossible.
I love the point that if you "hold your nose" and vote for the least bad party that "might win", you get a worse stink next time.
US citizens: Support Bernie Sanders's infrastructure maintenance program.
B'Tselem suggests that Israel's leaders may have committed war crimes by establishing a policy of bombarding Palestinian civilians' homes.
Boko Haram keeps winning against a badly organized Nigerian army, and has come close to capturing the area's principal city, Maiduguri.
PISSI's defeat at Kobani can damage it in an important place: its image of irresistability.
Thus, even though Kobani as a piece of territory has no particular strategic significance, the defense of Kobani may have real significance.
PISSI stands for "Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq". Since most Muslims say it does not represent Islam, why should we call it by a name that validates its claims to do so? Moreover, the name "PISSI" gives the organization the respect it deserves. I suggest you too adopt that name, and spread the word.
Plastic in the ocean is increasing and animals are swallowing ever more of it.
An Italian writer faces prosecution for saying that it would be legitimate to sabotage a high-speed train line being built between Italy and France.
I disagree with him about the train line. High-speed trains are a great thing, and when the network is built up, they replace airplanes. I hope they finish it soon, because I will use it.
Freedom of expression means the right to say things we disagree with. The prosecution of de Luca shows that Italy — like other European governments — does not respect freedom of expression. In the US, which does more or less respect that freedom, that sort of statement is not "incitement" and he could not be prosecuted for it.
Shame on you, Italy. Stop your attempts at censorship, and build the train line.
What Martin Luther King led American blacks to do was to end white terror, which they achieved by daring to be beaten and arrested and filling the jails.
It makes me sad that this white terror has substantially returned — mainly from thugs, but also (with "stand your ground" laws) from any non-black with a gun.
Compare the advice that black teenagers receive today about how not to be shot by thugs with the 1960s advice described in the first reference above.
Even worse, since the 1960s the US has come to impose permanent punishment on people convicted of a crime, or even (in some cases) accused of one. It is hard to have a mass movement of idealistic young people ready to get arrested and pack the jails when they know they will be excluded from education or employment for life as a result.
Lots of companies spy on "smart" phones, and the NSA spied on their spying.
President Fernández of Argentina is blaming the intelligence agency for murdering prosecutor Nisman, and wants to dissolve and replace it.
This could be very good if the replacement is limited by laws in what it can collect.
I wonder if the intelligence agency had anything to do with the decision to take visitors' fingerprints and track passengers in the subway.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to say, please sign the Ellison-Waters letter and support full Title-II network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: call on US companies not to donate to Representative Scalise, who has associated with right-wing extremists.
US citizens: call on Obama and Congress to use their influence with the EU to support Greece in ending austerity.
Everyone: Tell McDonalds to stop practicing racial discrimination on its staff.
US citizens: support Senator Warren's Medical Innovation Act.
Medecins sans Frontiers accused Pfizer of profiteering from poor countries by charging them too much for pneumococcal disease vaccine.
I am all in favor of MSF's efforts, but let's not forget what created the problem and made the efforts necessary: the World Trade Organization. The US and Europe pressured most countries to join it, and one consequence is allowing patents on medicines, which is what enables Pfizer to impose a high price on vaccines even in poor countries.
Pfizer surely lobbied the plutocratic states to get this result, so it is to blame for creating the opportunity as well as for using it.
The WTO is also responsible for low pay and bad working conditions around the world, so it is truly a monster. Its consequences show up in many areas of life. If we ignore the root cause of these problems, we are reduced to treating symptoms forever.
Israel releases imprisoned minors to house arrest, making parents act as jailers for their own children.
Obama proposes more oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Atlantic too.
None of this is necessary, unless we want to extract too much and cause global heating disaster.
Glaciers in the Andes have lost at least 1/3 of their ice in the last 30 years.
CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling has been convicted.
Every whistleblower prosecuted or persecuted nails Liberty to the cross.
Obama will forgive you for torturing, but not for talking to the American people.
Proposal to stop using the word "terrorist".
"The terror" in revolutionary France was carried out by the Committee for Public Safety, led by Robespierre. I wonder if that is where "Department of Homeland Security" came from.
A tar sands pipeline even bigger than Keystone XL is being snuck through as an expansion of an existing pipeline.
To save the US middle class requires curbing Wall Street's depredations.
The Drug Enforcement Administration and other US agencies are creating a nationwide network of license-plate recognizing cameras, on their way to tracking all car travel in the US.
A Student Jubilee! Liberate 41 Million Americans From Crushing Loan Debt.
Facebook has yielded to Turkey's religious censorship, just as previously it yielded to China's political censorship.
Dust blowing out of cattle feedlots contains more than just a horrible smell. It contains antibiotics that encourage development of resistance in the bacteria in the soils (and human bodies) that they get into.
China's use of coal is levelling off, and actually decreased a little in 2014.
Right-wing UK economic policy consists of tax cuts (most of the cut goes to the rich) and cuts on the NHS and social services (hitting the poor two ways).
The tax cuts give a small amount of money to some workers, to distract them from the fact that the combined policy is very bad for them.
The same dishonest line has succeeded since the 1980s in convincing working Americans to vote to help the rich screw them.
As for Labour, it has become a centrist party which fails to challenges plutocratic rule. The similar Greek party was just wiped out, and Britain's Labour Party is headed for the same thing.
Violent thugs can end your life without quite killing you.
43 Israeli intelligence reservists refused to spy on Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Politicians Are Supporting Comcast's TWC Merger with Letters Ghostwritten by Comcast.
Julia Reda, the sole Pirate Party member of the European Parliament, has proposed a copyright reform directive which goes in the right direction but does not propose to address the issue of freedom to share.
The article suggests EU citizens write to MEPs. I suggest demanding reform on that issue too.
Global heating makes winter storms stronger.
The Cheney-Obama torture axis must be defeated.
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are working together on a tax break intended to encourage US businesses to pay taxes on their profits.
Funny that congress never seems to think of simply making them pay their taxes. They argue that it is self-defeating to keep the door closed while the window is open, so they should open the door. The idea of shutting the window never occurs to them.
Instructions for bankrupting the country:
Is it stupid or is it corrupt?
The EFF's new plan for ending massive general surveillance would not achieve its goal.
It leaves many kinds of surveillance unaddressed:
There seems to be a dispute inside the Egyptian military government about whether it was acceptable to shoot a female protester dead for no reason.
Shooting male protesters, however, they do without a qualm. Did they get this policy from the US?
Wikipedia has taken the side of Gamergate, ruling that the Gamergate-supporting editors can write the pages about the women that Gamergate attacked, and banning the editors who opposed them.
Many years ago, a clique of people that don't want the GNU system to be mentioned took effective control of pages that concern the GNU/Linux system, expunging the term "GNU/Linux" from nearly all of them and banning people that tried to resist. I tried to activate Wikipedia's decision procedure but was unable to even get it started.
Obama has dropped his inadequate proposal for reforming massive surveillance of the telephone records of everyone in the US (and elsewhere).
A court ruled that airport thugs did wrong to arrest Nick George for carrying flash cards to learn Arabic.
The UK government has adopted a standard US right-wing lie: that rich people got their money by earning it and deserve to possess it.
Rich people mostly get their money by investing piles of money, and by working other people to the bone. In the past few decade they have redistributed lots of wealth and lots of income from the rest of the population to them. Now we need to redistribute it back.
The Kurds have driven PISSI fighters out of Kobani.
Kobani has no special strategic significance, but it is good to prevent civilians from being massacred, and the attempt to take Kobani has bled PISSI badly.
The Council of Europe determined that the US and UK's massive surveillance is a fundamental threat to human rights.
That is true, but keep in mind that many other countries do massive surveillance without even the feeble legal limits that the NSA and GCHQ brush aside.
Previous modeling that predicted poor countries would cope with global heating using their economic growth overlooked a crucial factor: due to global heating, they won't have economic growth.
Their inability to invest in countering effects of global heating means that heating will cause even more economic losses. So the way to maximize economic growth is to invest in curbing global heating.
The previous modeling had another flaw: it gave too positive much significance to economic growth as a factor for general well-being. Even if a country has economic growth, a plutocratic state will not spend that on keeping poor people's livelihoods viable; the rich would rather buy their way out of the consequences of global heating.
The UK is considering an attack on human rights: censorship of a particular book.
Syriza won the Greek election and formed an anti-austerity government.
Syriza Has Allowed Greeks to Dream Again. But the Real Struggle Is Just Beginning.
Terrorism is designed to spread fear. "Counter-terrorism" contributes to spreading fear.
It is not clear that catching incompetents who can be led into acts of terrorism does any good for society.
Prosecutors in the UK are trying to get the interview tapes which the Belfast Project made, promising confidentiality until the subjects are dead.
I think the historians of the Belfast Project are honor-bound to destroy these interviews so as to carry out their promise, for the sake of future historical projects — even though they would be imprisoned for this.
This has nothing to do with the IRA's cause, which I don't support even slightly.
Target in Canada fired 17000 workers and its CEO. The severance pay for the CEO equals the severance pay for 17000 workers.
A reporter has fled Argentina due to death threats. He was writing about the recently murdered prosecutor.
Everyday harassment and danger of violence provoke mental illness, among blacks and among women.
There is pressure to ban a broad collection of unsavory political positions and historical views in the EU.
I don't like those positions, and I don't agree with those views, but this censorship violates basic human rights.
The UK Green Party leader condemned criminalization of membership in terrorist organizations.
Certainly having sympathy with the aims of a terrorist organization should not be a crime — because that is thoughtcrime.
Membership in an organization that uses criminal means is a borderline case, because it accepts in a way responsibility for that organization's actions, not only its aims.
However, organizations should never be banned by decree. That should require a trial.
The US has dropped the insistence on driving Assad out of power in Syria.
It has been clear for two years that this made no sense.
Genetically modified mosquitoes (which can't reproduce) offer a way to rid Florida of the mosquito's that spread Dengue and Chikungunya.
I think it is plausible that these mosquito's are a safe way to prevent those diseases from spreading, but there are many ways things could go wrong. Even though they are unlikely, they might conceivably have very bad consequences. I think it would be wise to investigate ways things could go wrong, to try to make them less likely, or demonstrate that the consequences would be bounded.
The Obama administration took a small step that will fund building around 8000 new homes a year for the non-rich.
Make that 50 times as big and it would solve the US housing problem in a reasonable time.
How Citizens United (sic) Paved the Way for Big Oil's Bribes.
Activists in New York and New Jersey are trying to prevent natural gas export terminals that would encourage fracking.
The low price of oil may make it easier to prevent fracking in the US as some fracking companies are already folding.
Quinn Norton says that proper journalism about alleged security breaches is now effectively criminalized in the US, and he does not dare continue it.
Google received a secret subpoena 3 years ago for essentially all its data about some Wikileaks employees.
UK internet filters to "protect children" block a wide range of web sites, including charities that help young people.
The growth of inequality (the richest 1% will soon own more than the rest of the world) is linked with decreasing wages and spreading poverty.
All economic activity needs a moral compass.
PISSI justifies a wide range of atrocities with examples from the Quran.
Comparing what we need to do about global heating with Obama's State of the Union proposals.
The FBI wants to be allowed to crack computers under very broad and vague search orders.
There is now principled opposition to the prudish campaign to bully a lousy UK newspaper to stop printing bare breasts on page 3.
I agree with Fleet Street Fox on this. What's really wrong with that paper is everything else in it.
Science has found lots of evidence that kindness and cooperation are part of biological human nature.
I would not say, however, that "humans are naturally nice". Biological human nature is complex and includes other kinds of attitudes too.
Republicans in the Senate plan to give back to the CIA the leaked Panetta report which showed the senate CIA crimes.
The Big Ag $100-million PR campaign for GMOs.
Why did Netanyahu send drones against Hezbollah, which did not threaten Israel? Uri Avnery believes it was to provoke a war so he could win the election.
But it failed, because Hezbollah declined to help him out.
One reason for the Britain to leave the EU: it is what Goldman Sachs does not want.
This is not a matter of petty revenge: the power of Goldman Sachs is a tremendously harmful effect. Britons suffer greatly from the policies the UK adopts to be a good platform for that and other big banks, and so does the rest of the world.
What sort of law should be used to protect people from violent no-knock SWAT raids?
Progressive Policies Are Popular So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?
US citizens: call for a Domestic Corrupt Practices Act to match the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
People will pay a premium for devices they can change the software in.
I suppose the fact that companies still design computers to prevent users from changing the software indicates that there are very strong commercial or legal pressures on them. We have to change that with new laws.
Note that an iThing is an injustice even if jailbroken.
The BBC and its Canadian counterpart slant the news towards the power of business.
Republicans in the senate want to cooperate with Obama in suppressing the Senate torture report.
Republicans usually hate everything Democrats do, and obstruct it just for the sake of obstruction. But they make an bipartisan exception for the truly evil.
The European Commission is sneakily trying to make trade treaties give corporations special powers even if the treaties are not ratified.
If Syriza wins the Greek election tomorrow, Syriza could block ratification of these treaties, and it should do so for the sake of all of Europe. Has Syriza said anything about this?
US citizens:
tell
your congresscritter and senators to reject the TPP because it
will surely threaten the environment and block efforts to slow global
heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Police officer John Buttress opposed racist searches of people on the street, so the thugs he works with have repeatedly made false criminal charges against him.
Senator Joni Ernst grew up poor and her family depended on government aid. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it.
Now she ungratefully campaigns to deny the aid to poor families today.
The Republican ruling Maine kicked 6000 people off food stamps because they are supposed to be working, though there are no jobs.
US gun laws permitting people to carry guns are only for whites. If you're black and you carry a gun, you are likely to get attacked even if you don't threaten anyone.
Paying workers by check forces low-income households to lose $3000 a year to paycheck lenders and such like.
If you were a low-wage worker 70 years ago, you didn't have to pay a substantial part of your wages just to receive the pay owed to you. You got it in cash.
This is one way our economy is structured to crush the poor. Others include the practice of fining poor people for being jailed when they can't pay a fee, and the fact that poor people have access only to expensive food stores.
The US refuses to shut down the reactors that are identical to those that failed disastrously at Fukushima.
US schools are starting to become concerned about leaks of students' personal data.
Activists reproach the Obamacare web site for hosting the tracking tags that enable companies to monitor visitors to the site.
It should be illegal for the web site of any government agency, or any commercial service acting for such an agency, to give out any visitors' personal data to any other entity unless this is required by law or the agency publishes those data.
Russian proxy forces in Ukraine are firing long-range missiles at Mariupol.
Mariupol is far away from the area that rebelled. If the rebels were really just rebels, they would not be interested in Mariupol. Putin, however, has a motive to conquer Mariupol: to link the conquered Crimea with Russia.
Thus we have two more proofs that the "rebels" are a Russian proxy force. This is in addition to all the Russian tanks and heavy weapons they have, and all the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.
The UK government said it would encourage people to buy the public housing they live in, and build replacements. It did the first but quietly neglected the second.
Surviving companions of the 43 disappeared Mexican student protesters insist that the army was involved in the deed, and present proof.
As China's repression intensifies, lawyer Pu Zhiquiang who defended many human rights activists is himself a political prisoner.
China is blocking access to some VPNs.
Oil wells in California were found to emit various toxic chemicals into the air.
A film festival in Belgium was cancelled because of fears of terrorism.
Terrorists don't even need a real bomb to cancel an event.
Committee to Protect Journalists: Classifying Media And Encryption as a Threat Is Danger to Press Freedom.
'Homeland': Legitimizing Torture, Lies and Killer Drones.
Methane leaks in cities mean that natural gas contributes more to global heating than was believed.
The idea that natural gas is a good "bridge" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is based on a series of underestimates of its greenhouse gas impact.
The Philippines put homeless people from the streets of Manila to a hotel so the city would look nice for the Pope's visit.
It's funny when they say that they aimed to make Manila look like a first-world city. US cities haven't looked like that since the 1970s.
In the US, they make the city prettier by chasing the homeless out. This hotel stay was an inefficient form of support for the homeless, but at least it didn't do them any American-style harm or wrong.
Can Anything Stop the Rhino Poaching Crisis?
I recall reading about a scheme that involved injecting live rhinos' horns with something that made them unsalable but did not hurt the rhino. Why isn't that being used?
The only two countries that have rejected the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are South Sudan and the US.
It is funny how legislators that want to approve the TPP would object to human rights for children as a "violation of sovereignty".
Ethiopia's Media Crackdown Is Bad News for Africa.
Who remembers the genocide of the Armenians? And why is it important?
Turkey commits a crime against freedom by prohibiting recognition of the genocide carried out by the Ottoman leaders, and France commits a similar crime by banning denial of the genocide. Hrant Dink, who defied the first prohibition and said he would defy the other, should be our hero.
You can't find a more vicious ruler than King Abdullah, but he was loyal to the plutocracy, so many plutocratist politicians and newspapers whitewash him.
Compare what Obama said about Abdullah with what Obama said when Hugo Chavez died.
Many construction projects "relocate" rare animals with the idea that this will prevent their extinction; but it is done carelessly and often they end up dying.
Brazil has imposed water rationing and electric power cuts due to an unprecedented drought.
In effect, the illegal loggers in the west of Brazil are now threatening the lives of people in the east, as well as the aborigines that live in the forests they destroy. Brazilians from cities must declare war on illegal logging, and return the plantations to the jungle.
UK tax and policy changes have hit the poor worst.
Drones and the New Ethics of War.
Drone assassinations are so imprecise that they kill on the average 28 unknown people for each target killed.
Anti-drone protester Kathy Kelly's statement about going to prison.
Lake Urmia in Iran has shrunk to just 10% of its size in the 70s. No one is sure why, but I suspect it is human diversion of water that used to flow into the lake.
200 people have been arrested blocking construction of a giant natural gas storage facility that could pollute Seneca Lake for decades. This has not stopped the campaign.
Abortion rights should be for all women, but the US has been choking them off more and more for the poor.
A UK thug kicked and battered a mother (to make her leave her child's hospital bed) so badly that she needed surgery and remains injured a year later. He got impunity, as usual.
Video proves thugs shot a black man who had got out of his car with his hands up.
If you watch that video, don't watch it on the youtube site because that requires running nonfree software. Use youtube-dl to download it and watch it without nonfree software.
When employers select who to hire based on how algorithms analyze people's internet activities, you will never know what action might make you unemployable.
This presumes that there will be a shortage of jobs, so that every employer will be able to make candidates jump through whatever hoops. But the same computer systems will ensure that too.
The conviction of Barrett Brown, based partly on denying that he is a journalist, puts all US journalists in danger.
His full statement.
The UK government assisted Gaddafi's spies, torturers and thugs, even more than we knew.
The US government's evidence against Jeffrey Sterling is that he had non-secret documents about using rotary dial phones — which were retroactively labeled as secret.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has carried out massive indiscriminate surveillance of phone call records for 15 years.
Everyone: Tell Monsanto shareholders to vote for accountability.
Google, Apple and others are lobbying to prevent governments from closing the tax loopholes that enable them to pay almost no taxes.
Boston signed a contract that forbids city employees from criticizing Boston's Olympic bid.
It is not clear the city has the right to impose this on its employees, but they might be scared to go against it. Maybe we can help them get the courage.
Unaccountable, unelected billionaires should not decide world policies.
Why the "reverence" for statements from the Gates Foundation? It gives grants to many organizations; many more apply for hope for grants. These organizations don't dare criticize whatever Gates decides to say.
The Houthi rebels have overthrown the government of Yemen, though they said this was not their aim.
They hate al Qa'ida and the US.
Female Republican congresscritters blocked a plan to restrict abortion rights.
A Guatemalan couple trying to get back to the US to rejoin their children were swindled by people smugglers and are now broke and stuck in Mexico.
If you don't dare raise children because "gangs rule the streets", you should not have children. Whoever is responsible for Ms Cruz's recent pregnancy did something wrong — but who was that?
Was it her fault? Did she choose to take a chance on getting pregnant? If so, she should be punished. Sterilization would be appropriate.
Or did her husband refuse to use condoms and force her to get pregnant? Then it is his fault.
Was she unable to afford reliable birth control? Then it's the US's fault for not providing it to her. How callous to deny birth control to people who are not in a position to raise children properly!
Did she use birth control, but it failed, and then she could not get an abortion? In that case, the Guatemalan government is to blame.
Disneyland tells children not vaccinated for measles to stay away, after some workers were infected.
Mosul is almost surrounded by Peshmerga, and seems to be suffering already from siege conditions which exacerbate the oppression of PISSI's rule.
If you're drafted by PISSI, it is better to frag your commander and die than to give PISSI any positive service.
The US government could not find a basis to charge the thug that killed Michael Brown.
It can't charge him with murder, which is covered by state law. It can only accuse him if it found direct evidence of racism. So another cop-killer (i.e., killer cop) gets off with impunity.
Misleading statistics falsely make contraceptive pills seem dangerous.
Doubling a minuscule risk results in a minuscule risk — and it is not clear the risk really increases at all.
Nigeria's army is too corrupt to fight Boko Haram, and its government seems to regard it as a small local problem.
A western official admits it might take two years to "train" the Iraqi army to be able to fight PISSI.
Since he would always put a favorable spin, if he says "two years", he must really think "four years". But I am skeptical the Iraqi army will ever have a strong enough will to fight PISSI. The readiness to risk death rather than run away can't be taught or bought.
Australia is investigating reporters who cover immigration issues.
There should be nothing secret about a country's immigration policy, but Australia's government knows its secret cruelty is extreme and would arouse disgust if revealed. What reporters have found is already arousing plenty.
An interview with Kathy Kelly, going to prison for a protest against killer drones.
Improved measurements of the heating of the oceans shows there was no "pause" in global heating. The oceans received more heat in 2014 than ever recorded before.
Palestinians in an area that Israel has annexed have gone 10 months with no water supply.
Israel does all sorts of dirty tricks to make Palestinians leave the West Bank, and especially certain parts of it.
They hold on because they don't want to surrender to this pressure.
Women in El Salvador are sentenced to many years in prison for having abortions, or even miscarriages. And this is seeping into the US.
Antisemitism is turning violent in parts of Argentina.
US Republicans shift to a modified form of global heating denialism: their second line of defense to protect their campaign to cause disaster.
The US Capitol is on a hill, so they can keep on promoting global heating even after parts of Washington DC are inundated.
Fossil fuel companies and big fossil-fuel-using utilities have taken control of the wind power and solar power lobbying organizations in Europe, and redirected them to undermine renewable energy policies.
Argentina's president says prosecutor Nisman was murdered, but that his accusations were based on others' false testimony.
"We Are the Victims of Our Own Corrupt Government" — Life as an Activist in Sudan.
The euro zone needs to forgive Greek debt for its own sake as well as for Greeks' sake.
Republicans in Wisconsin want to politicize the state elections board.
That would help them use their current position of dominance to get away with subtle violations of election law.
The World Is Watching Our [US] Net Neutrality Debate, So Let's Get It Right.
Obama Will Fundamentally Reshape the Internet — perhaps for the worse.
A breakthrough makes it possible to create genetically engineered bacteria that will die whenever supplies of certain artificial chemicals run out.
The Republican Party cut out one of Obama's sentences when streaming the State of the Union address.
US Republican election candidates have to pass through the "Koch primary."
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose "fast track" for the TPP. And your senators too!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
A badly designed survey overestimated the rate of defensive use of guns by perhaps a hundred times. Gun nuts cite it to bury the fact that guns are used far more to attack people than to defend people.
Antarctic Toothfish Poaching Ships Shrug Off New Zealand Navy.
The UK has mulishly applied a rule meant for people who do day care in their homes to people who work in schools — firing them if anyone they live with has been convicted of certain crimes.
A snooping device that insurance companies put in people's cars turns out to let anyone else snoop on or sabotage the car.
US citizens: submit a comment for protection of deep-sea corals off the US Atlantic coast.
India's film censors are hit by scandals.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to take statistics on violence by thugs, then act to restrain it.
Matt Ridley's climate myths have been refuted over and over, so why won't he drop them?
Thai migrant workers in Israel are being worked like slaves.
Two Turkish thugs have been sentenced to prison for beating a protester to death.
A founder of the anti-immigrant German party Pegida posed as Hitler. He says it was meant to accompany a satirical novel.
Put an end to bottom-trawling, which causes tremendous ecological damage to get a fairly small quantity of fish.
Rains in December have stopped, and California remains in drought.
A Palestinian man in Tel Aviv attacked passengers on a bus with a knife.
Stabbing civilians randomly is not brave, or heroic, or right; but it is indeed a natural response to the occupation, which is a far bigger wrong.
The FBI wants to be able to search computers without showing probable cause, if the computer uses Tor or a VPN.
A court ruled India must allow Greenpeace to receive funds from abroad. The government arbitrarily blocked the funds to stop Greenpeace from protecting the environment from businesses.
Feminists should focus on the low paid jobs of most women, rather than obsessing about the fraction of females among the few executive positions and corporate board positions.
The UK government rejects almost 60% of applications for to build wind power on land. By contrast, it has eliminated local power to reject fracking.
Both policies reflect the government's general policy of supporting fossil fuel companies.
Other EU countries claim that tremendous UK subsidies for a new nuclear power plant violate EU rules, and will sue.
A UK teacher that had a many-year affair with a student has been sent to prison, wrongly in my view.
Teachers have a responsibility not to become intimate with students, but there is no reason to make this a crime. Teachers who don't carry out that responsibility should be fired.
US thugs have radars that look through walls and can detect a person breathing.
I wonder what it takes to block that radar.
One UK ISP has made the higher level of censorship the default.
A considerable amount of censorship is mandatory in the UK, which does not allow freedom on the internet.
Israel holds
5000
Palestinians prisoner in Israel. Palestinian prisoners are often
tortured; since 1967, 72 have been tortured to death. This is the
worst abuse, but there are many more.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Moriel Rothman-Zecher refused to become a soldier in the occupation of Palestine. Most Israelis call him a "traitor", but he believes that Israeli patriotism means working to end the occupation.
Charlie Hebdo (and you) must be free to offend anyone and everyone.
Israeli soldiers, safe in towers, shoot stone-throwing Palestinian teenagers dead.
Airlines in the US are a clear example of how a deregulated "free" market can serve customers badly.
There is no such thing as "the" free market. Every market has rules, and a free market simply means one in which everyone is allowed to play by the same rules. Changing the rules can make a big difference between one free market and another free market.
US oil wells burn large amounts of natural gas that are "not worth capturing".
Why is it worth getting other gas by fracking instead?
A call to sanity for US parents: stop hovering over your children.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech calling for the US to end its intervention in Vietnam.
For historic clarity, I should point out some things King did not know. For instance, the NLF was run by secret Communists, the Viet Cong were mostly wiped out, and South Vietnam was ultimately conquered by the North Vietnamese Army.
But these details are not enough to invalidate King's main points. To preserve a US-friendly dictatorship against another dictatorship could not justify the violence that the US inflicted on Vietnam.
The details today are different but the US continues to inflict violence around the world — and poison its soul thereby.
The UK government has cut off unemployment benefits to 2 million people. 20% of them found work. It is not clear what happened to the rest.
Jobcentre 'Hit Squads' Set Up Benefit Claimants To Fail, Says Former Official.
Senate Republicans aim to abolish the requirement for states to provide equal education to minority groups.
Personal monitoring devices for computers open the door to employers and governments' forcing people to be monitored.
After Paris: It's Time for a New Enlightenment.
The copyright industry is so disconnected from reality that its lawyers believe the internet exists due to copyright.
GCHQ included investigative journalists in a list of high priority surveillance targets.
Everyone: boycott Koch Industries products.
The Obamacare web site gives data to many companies about its visitors; these companies can integrate that data with other personal data to increase their knowledge of the person.
They say that the companies are prohibited from using the data for "business purposes", but I expect they have already found other ways to use the data while pretending it is not "for business purposes".
I wonder if the site requires running nonfree Javascript code.
Sure, the analysis is useful — but government relationship to the public should not be designed in a narrowminded way that considers only the specific project. This web site should never give any data about people to any company.
Fracking causes medium-size earthquakes in several US states.
This is an additional reason to ban them, beyond pollution of water supplies, methane leaks, and the contribution to global heating.
A World Bank project is funding a project that drives Ethiopian peasants off their land to use it for plantations.
Russian protesters were jailed for 10 days for a protest consisting of throwing holy water at the outside of Lenin's mausoleum.
Since the current regime in Russia is not Communist, this is either a punishment for "insulting Christianity" or a punishment for "insulting tyranny".
Noam Chomsky: Obama's Drone Program 'The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign of Modern Times'.
Agribusiness claims only it can fill the world's food shortage. But there isn't one — and we don't need to let agribusiness dominate farming.
World food production would become a lot easier, and a lot better for the environment, if we ate less meat and especially less beef. It would be better for the people eating, too.
Fanatical Muslims in Niger rioted and attacked Christian churches as punishment for Charlie Hebdo's cover.
A call for a privacy opt-out in future US location-tracking technology.
This might actually do some good, because it goes beyond the inadequate approach of limiting use of data that has been collected.
The US has run secret military missions in 105 countries since October 1.
Why the US is the Biggest Threat to World Peace.
Nabil Rajab was sentenced to prison in Bahrain for an "offensive tweet".
France and Britain, do you want to be in a class with Bahrain, or will you respect freedom of expression?
The Pope is reaching for straws to reconcile the rejection of contraception with his humane general outlook, but that can't be done. The former must go.
Mexico will use drones to find the illegal fishing operations that kill rare porpoises.
Boat people sent by Australia to Manus Island are on hunger strike; their prison guards are confiscating phones so they cannot document the violence.
The attempt to remove the condemnation from the word "slut" seems to have failed.
I have never understood what is supposed to be wrong about being a "slut". I can't see why a woman shouldn't have sex however she likes, even if she is my lover.
I love Favianna's attitude, but I avoid referring to sex using the word "fuck". It has too much harshness associated with it.
India claims success in protecting tigers, saying the population has increased 30% since 2011.
In the past, India's reported tiger population included many that were dead; one tiger reserve was found to have no tigers at all. This time they seem to counted more carefully.
A new Republican senator from Koch Industries will give the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union address.
The progressive views that most Americans support may be mentioned somewhat in Obama's address, now that no one expects him to be able to deliver on them much. But it is too little and way too late, from a man who seems not to have been committed to any principles.
Once again, the FBI found a vulnerable and feckless Muslim and pushed/led him to get ready for an armed attack using the FBI's funds and the FBI's plan.
Everyone:
sign Reporters Without Borders' petition denouncing
censorship
of the press, including that done by governments.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
The Spanish plutocratic parties face a vigorous challenge from Podemos.
Thugs in Baton Rouge attacked a man for making a video, first stealing his camera, then knocking him down and jumping on him. Then they framed him for a fictional crime.
Everyone: tell General Mills to stop disguising the high fructose corn syrup in its products.
The right-wing UK government used a hypocritical "big society" idea as a distraction from its plan to hurt the poor. Supposedly charities were going to pick up the burden that the government dropped — but the government cut funds for the charities too.
It did the same thing on the environment, claiming it would be the "greenest government ever", then cutting subsidies for renewable energy while increasing support for fossil fuels and nuclear power.
New treatment centers are beating Ebola, but money is needed to keep them running until there are zero cases.
The coast of the Mediterranean is being engulfed by tourist resorts and cities. In France and Italy, more than 50% of the Mediterranean coast is paved.
An important Guatemalan thug has been sentenced to life in prison (in effect) for mass murder of protesters in 1980.
This is equivalent to a life sentence; he is surely old enough that he won't live 30 years more.
For millions of Americans who are not in prison, home is a prison, due to an explosion of monitoring, sex-offender registries, and other virtual forms of imprisonment.
In Florida, an alarming number of prisoners died suspiciously after telling relatives, "The guards are going to kill me." In some cases the murders were witnessed.
When blacks carry what looks like a gun, thugs shoot them dead on sight. A white woman drove around shooting at people, even pointing her gun at a thug, and the thugs managed to disarm and arrest her without killing her.
Bravo, but if they can do this with whites, they could do it with blacks too — if they tried.
A powerful official in Kenya has taken a school's playground; thugs fired tear gas at the children when they protested.
Apparently this is a standard modus operandi for corrupt politicians in Kenya, and the school just happened to be the one that got victimized this time.
Temporary workers supplied by labor agencies never get a living wage.
I think it's a good idea to fine businesses that use agency workers for more than 120 hours a month for 3 successive months for any particular kind of work. If a business needs that much work, it should hire regular staff to do the work.
However, we should also disconnect funding for social programs from employment. A business should pay tax based its gross income, with a small deduction for each full-time worker employed.
Guantanamo guards forced Mohamedou Ould Slahi to dry his toilet with his uniform and sleep in it.
US citizens:
call
for firm and thorough regulation of methane leaks, including
existing systems.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
In Iran, a newspaper was shut down for publishing a statement "I am Charlie".
Meanwhile, in France, other sorts of statements have been censored.
Censoring political views is wrong regardless of which views are censored.
New York State's ban on fracking is based on numerous studies tying it to harm to human health.
To prevent global heating disaster, we must leave 80% of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground. Clearly the most dangerous reserves should be the first on the list not to be extracted. That includes anything that would be obtained by fracking, strip mining (including tar sands) or undersea drilling.
The richest 80 people in the world own half the world's wealth.
Just 5 years ago, it took over 300 rich people to encompass half the world's wealth. Inequality is increasing, which is an injustice.
By 2016, the richest 1% will own more than all the rest of the world.
The US claims to have obtained proof that North Korea carried out the Sony crack, through espionage on computer networks.
It could be true, but I do not have implicit confidence in the US government.
I don't object when the NSA spies on hostile governments such as North Korea, or even China. That is its legitimate purpose. What I object to is when it spies on everyone including you and me.
Many governments are "reforming" education but hardly ever do they determine whether the reforms made education better.
Since Russia denies sending troops to fight in Ukraine, it has to cover up the Russian soldiers that are killed fighting there.
Some soldiers refuse to "volunteer" for the "business trip".
A privatized NHS hospital was half owned by its workers, that that did not prevent it from being a disastrous failure.
Cooperatives are a fine way to organize a business but that doesn't make them acceptable in public services where business itself is a bad idea.
Bahrain has charged the main opposition leader with plotting to overthrow the government by force, which is absurd since the government has all the force.
US citizens: call for raising the minimum wage to
$12.50
an hour.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call on the IRS
to implement its own digital tax filing system and stop bowing down to
companies that want to profit from this.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
oppose
the bill to ban states from requiring labeling of GMOs in food.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
The testimony of one of the few survivors of the Auschwitz death camp.
A former TSA officer says they all hated their job because they knew it was causing absurd gratuitous misery.
Important businesses have come out against software patents.
The EU has made it difficult to ban GM crops, but not impossible.
US pressure is a considerable part of the blame. As usual, the US acts as a bully on behalf of big business; this happens regularly in copyright, pharmaceuticals and in agriculture as in this case.
Bangladesh has shut down a messaging service that protesters found useful.
This sort of behavior has been seen in many countries.
Consumer Groups Urge President, Congress to Support "Robust Agenda" for Consumers in 2015.
An Argentinian prosecutor who recently charged a government coverup of a hate crime against Jews in Argentina was found dead.
The UK Tories are scurrying to empty the treasury to their cronies ahead of the general election. The expense of new prisons will give them (and Labour too) an excuse for further cutbacks in support for poor people outside of prison.
Registered sex offenders are "modern-day lepers". A village in Florida shelters 100 of them who are rejected everywhere else.
Some of them committed real wrongs. Others are the targets of modern-day cruel prudery.
Selma, Alabama, is today majority black and even the factory workers get low pay.
This results from decades of "free trade", union busting, and tax cutting for business and the rich.
Oxfam attacks the system that created today's massive inequality.
John Kiriakou asks why the CIA agents that committed torture beyond what the agency had officially "approved" are not being prosecuted.
Kiriakou says the CIA knew that Bush approved the torture before it started.
There is more.
On the status and prospects of the EPA's plan to regulate methane leaks.
UK thugs have asked all men in a certain town to "voluntarily" offer DNA samples in order to identify a murderer by elimination.
If I were one of those men, I would demand a written commitment from the state to discard my DNA sample after the test, before agreeing to give one.
ACLU: thugs should not be allowed to view the video in their body cameras before they write reports on incidents.
West Virginia has put global heating denialism into textbooks to please the coal companies. As often happens, they call this "balance" — balancing real science with business propaganda.
A German journalist in China reports about the arrest of his assistant, and how the Chinese thugs insisted that China has rule of law while disregarding Chinese law completely.
Uber hopes to buy the approval of cities by collecting ride data for them.
Even if this reporting doesn't give personal data on individuals, that won't change the fact that Uber collects that data and can make it available to the state in other ways. We must not accept Uber as a substitute for taxis and car services that can be used anonymously. Please don't do business with Uber.
Vox republished Charlie Hebdo cartoons and received no threats in response. When it covered bigotry against Muslims, the threats came in.
I do not use the term "phobia" to describe a form of bigotry; it is the wrong word.
Obama's push to increase penalties for cracking computer systems is completely useless against foreign state-sponsored crackers, and nearly useless against professional criminal crackers, because they expect not to be caught.
But it would be great for intimidating the next Aaron Swartz. Obama's advisors surely understand this.
One American climbed to get a good job, through skill, hard work and luck (i.e., chance), then became unemployed (and therefore unemployable) when the luck ran out. So he says, don't look down on him for buying groceries with a government benefits card then driving away in his expensive car (until it gets repossessed).
His dim chances of getting another job, whether a good one or a bad one, reflect the lousy state of the real US economy for everyone but the rich, which in turn results from years of plutocratic policies on banking and taxation.
US citizens: call on Congress to tax Wall Street to support the real economy.
US businesses have had direct ties to various kinds of slavery through history.
The Swiss government has adopted a policy of transparency about export of surveillance systems, showing exports to rather repressive governments such as Ethiopia.
How the NSA and its rivals spy on each other's spying.
Iraq's "vice-president for reconciliation" warns that fighting PISSI without offering Sunnis a share in democracy could backfire.
Many of us have said this; it is good for it to be endorsed by someone perhaps more influential.
The editors of Strike! magazine approach anarchist activism with a hacker's touch.
Surprised to see nothing about computer security? Remember, hacking means appreciating playful cleverness. There is no need for computers to be involved, and if they are, there is no need for it to have anything to do with breaking or fixing computer security.
A right-wing anti-Muslim-immigration party in Germany cancelled a protest after a leader received a death threat.
Some European Bloodbaths Are More Interesting Than Others.
In France, people are being sentenced to prison for expressing a favorable opinion of acts of terrorism.
The UK Green Party proposes a basic citizen's income for all adults.
PISSI released elderly non-Muslim captives, instead of killing them.
Perhaps its bloodthirstiness was driving some Muslims away.
Email, and texting, interfere with thinking and make people less efficient.
I avoid a lot of this problem by receiving email in batches. If only there weren't so much of it.
A bizarre charity offers young men new hope by giving them suits.
I find it hard to imagine the mentality of a person for whom this gift would make things better. So strange.
I wonder what export crop he would promote if appointed agriculture minister. Pretty flowers, perhaps?
Scientists Discover Two New Pollutants In Fracking Waste.
No one has monitored the waste for these pollutants, so it is not clear yet how often they amount to a significant problem.
A firing range in Arkansas has banned Muslims as customers, together with anyone suspected of being Muslim.
Isn't this sort of discrimination illegal?
Holder stopped local and state thugs from using the US government to seize assets from people not convicted of crimes.
They make it standard practice to do this so that they can get the property they seize — which is a corrupting influence.
The whole practice of "forfeiture" is inherently unjust, because it amounts to punishment without trial, mislabeled as something else.
Some financial experts call on Europe to forgive Greece's debt.
It should forgive debt (all or part) for all the countries that have been hit by euro-austerity. Or in some cases perhaps offer them the chance to pay starting in 10 years with no interest in the interim.
New terror or Old Troubles: MPs Still Want Curbs on Press Freedom.
Which is one reason to distrust any claim they make that people must cede human rights.
Poll: [US] Voters Want Pretty Much The Opposite Of What Congress Is Doing.
So why were these people elected? Voter-suppression policies and gerrymandering added to the effect of expensive media smear campaigns.
People can learn to ignore the last one, but the other two can't be so easily overcome.
Psychological investigation shows why intentional "positive thinking" can make people discouraged: "Don't think of a negative thought!" is as self-defeating as "Don't think of an elephant!".
In effect, positive thinking amounts to "What, me worry?"
What's really scary is that Dubya practiced this, and it led him to assume nothing he did could ever go wrong. It may have facilitated the US financial crisis, too.
Republicans have introduced a bill to ban the FCC from establishing proper network neutrality.
By the way, network neutrality means that ISPs do not check what subscribers are transmitting in any way.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to oppose two bills that would stop the public from
resisting fracking.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on Obama to defend the environment from Republican onslaught.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call on the US
government to release Mohamedou Slahi from Guantanamo.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the cable companies' weak version of "network neutrality".
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: condemn Rand Paul for attacking social security.
Of course people receiving Social Security game the system. They must do so, because the benefits are inadequate.
They are also inspired by the attitude of the wealthy. Rich people and businesses game the system constantly, taking far more although they don't need it at all. Let's go after them first.
More about Obama's plan to criminalize any disobedience in using a computer.
For instance, sending a personal email from a work computer, if that breaks the company's rule, might automatically become a crime.
It is clear that this proposal has nothing to do with protecting against anything we really want to prevent. Rather, it is an example of the practice of using a notorious attack as excuse for unrelated prohibitions desired for some other reason.
Please don't use the word "hackers" to mean real or accused security breakers. That's unfair to us hackers, who enjoy playful cleverness.
How Companies Like Walmart Are Fighting to Keep Workplace Injuries Secret.
An Indian writer has been bullied into quitting writing by a campaign of threats.
Paris Is a Warning: There Is No Insulation From our Wars.
Mauritania has arrested anti-slavery activists.
A fairly small spill of diesel fuel has left Longueuil, Canada, with undrinkable water.
Human impact on ocean life is ramping up, paving the way for extinctions that could drastically modify ocean ecosystems and cause a cascade of extinctions.
Unrestrained capitalism is rolling steadily towards global disaster.
Racism is the key to the high rate of imprisonment in the US. It offered the US a way to reconcile the push to "get tough" on criminals with the majority's wish not to be treated that way.
Here are the 10 Senate Democrats that voted to build Keystone XL.
In Orange County, poor people's children get vaccinated but wealthier people give in to superstition. This is causing a big increase in cases of measles.
The US gave Mohamedou Slahi a "letter from his mother". It was a forgery.
He argues for Americans' right to know what the government does in our name in Guantanamo.
His main entertainment was the predictable bullshit of the interrogators.
US citizens: sign this petition to amend the Constitution to override the Corporations United decision.
The US has adopted some limited protections for journalists' communications with their sources.
However, these can be set aside by the government in any instance, so they do not protect the most important whistleblowers. We need to ensure that people can communicate anonymously.
For those in the US military, hostile fire is a small danger compared with suicide and sexual assault.
Peru's youths protest against a law that stripped young workers of the usual rights of workers.
I suspect it will lead to denying those rights to all workers. If their "solution" to the problem that some people are often unemployed is to deny them some rights, that will shift the problem to another group of workers; by and by, they will employ that solution everywhere.
President Humala is Peru's Obama: he gave the impression of being somehow progressive, but he has shown little sign of that since taking office.
The harmful effects of 20 years of "free trade" treaties on the US.
Egypt is sentencing activists and human rights defenders to death en masse.
Florida thugs do target practice on photos of black men. Real, living (for the moment) black men.
After 6 years of legal wrangling, the Guantanamo diary of prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been released for publication.
Here's a part describing the torture as he was put on a plane in Bagram.
Here he negotiates openly about the false confession he is offering to get better treatment. Torture is an effective way of getting false confessions.
SWAT teams in Massachusetts pretend to be a private charity to shield themselves from open records law.
US customs reports to the FBI what people are reading, and interrogate for the FBI.
If you are a US citizen, and they ask you prying questions, say you want a lawyer.
The Washington DC library is teaching people about surveillance.
In South Korea, Deportation And Defamation Cases Mark Worrying Slide in Press Freedom.
2014 was the hottest year ever recorded.
Thus, the "pause" in global heating, when the added heat went mainly into the oceans rather than the atmosphere, has not continued.
Eradicating rats on one of the Galapagos islands has enabled tortoises to start breeding there.
There is a controversy because a teacher in London who had sex with a student was not sentenced to prison. I get the impression that the teacher and the student were both lacking in self-discipline.
The teacher's job requires not being intimate with students. This teacher failed to carry out that responsibility, and he should be fired for this, but there is no reason for it to be a crime.
Note the absurdity of this criticism:
As is clear from Annex C of the guidelines on prosecuting child sexual abuse, a 16-year-old girl cannot 'groom' an adult.Laws and regulations specify how to respond to what does occur. They cannot dictate that something cannot occur. The idea of appealing to a law to claim something could not have happened is nonsense.
Obama's paid parental leave for federal employees is a good but small first step, falling far short of international standards.
I should also point out that any privatization of government jobs will undo the effect.
Why Don't Sentences for Accused Sex Offenders Teach Them to Treat Women like People?
Religious fanatics in Pakistan brought disrepute on their own religion by protesting against Charlie Hebdo in its name.
EU competition regulators say that Amazon's tax dodging scheme violates EU law.
On Charlie Hebdo Pope Francis is using the wife-beater's defence.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to deny, criticize, offend, insult or mock any person, group, practice, or belief — whether we agree with the statement or not. Countries such as France, which arrest people for expressing views, do not respect freedom of speech.
If France draws any lesson from the assassination of Charlie Hebdo staff, it must be to desist from censorship.
Mississippi is planning to take away Dr Landrum's medical license because he treats poor people from his car.
Mississippi has rejected the federal government's offer to give Landrum's patients another way to get medical care.
Obama's War on Crackers goes to the point where you could be imprisoned simply for clicking on a link — or talking with people who did.
Doing anything on a computer that the owner would not like would be a crime.
Please don't use the word "hackers" to refer to people who really do break security, or people accused of doing so. That's unfair to us hackers, who enjoy playful cleverness.
The CFAA is already too broad in its definition of crime, as we saw when it was used against Aaron Swartz and drove him to suicide. It needs to be changed in the other direction.
It would be a strategic error to limit ourselves to criticizing these changes for the worse. Eventually they would "compromise" with us, "meet us half way", by making only part of their changes for the worse, and they would have silenced our demands.
What we must do now is reiterate the demand to correct what is already wrong with the CFAA, so that the "compromise" is to do nothing and we do not drop our demands to correct the existing injustice.
Americans: check your own state for regressive tax policies. Do the wealthy pay a lower state tax rate than the poor?
Some conclusions that follow from these facts.
When thug Franklin Foulks arrested black teenager Jamal Rutledge, then had a heart attack, Rutledge demonstrated a spark of goodness and saved Foulks' life.
There is no indication that Foulks was acting thuggishly at that time. Jamal Rutledge may indeed have committed burglary; his arrest may have been entirely proper. I call Foulks a thug because he works for a thug department. A priori, I expect that if he had seen another thug shoot Rutledge for no reason and make false charges, he would have lied in support of the false charges. This is what makes the story ironic.
It is possible Foulks is an exception. I hope so, but exceptions are unusual.
US citizens: call on your senators to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
US citizens: call on CVS to stop collecting Antarctic krill, whose numbers are plummeting.
Leaders of "free" Western countries are following the path of tyrannical countries such as China and Russia when they demand total surveillance power.
No amount of "security measures" can perfectly prevent all terrorist attacks, so there will always be more excuses for added "security measures". And note how the number of victims needed to make an excuse keeps going down. The French terrorists killed fewer than 20 people, which is surely fewer than are killed on French roads by car accidents every day, and attacks on human rights are proposed on this basis.
A new campaign for "patent reform" has been distracted completely by "trolls" and has lost sight of all the substantive issues.
Any measures directed at "trolls" would do nothing to protect software developers from the worst patent aggressors, such as Apple.
What we need is to protect software from patents.
How Verizon's interference with customers' browsing enables Verizon's advertising partner to help all manner of snooping web sites reidentify visitors.
Putin's rebels in Ukraine are on the offensive and have captured part of the long-contested Donetsk airport.
They couldn't possibly have done this without Russia's military support.
Obama has allowed limited trade with Cuba.
Secret US Cybersecurity Report: Encryption Vital to Protect Private Data.
Rate of Environmental Degradation Puts Life on Earth At Risk, Say Scientists.
John Brennan Exonerates Himself with Sham Investigation.
Embarrassed About Sex? Then Don't Pass It On To Your Child.
This was passed on to me, in a strong form, so I oppose all efforts to pass it on to others.
Environmentalist leader Jonathon Porritt has quit working with Shell and BP, saying that oil companies are structurally unable to adapt to renewable energy.
In other words, we need to defeat them — it's them or us. Them or human civilization. Them or half the species alive on Earth.
The case against Jeffrey Sterling is the CIA's political vendetta.
In India, those who massacre Dalits keep getting acquitted by courts.
Obama and the Republicans plan to authorize limitless war around the world.
The UK wants the US to join in attacking the last shreds of people's privacy rights.
Snowden gave us a chance to fight against total surveillance, but we didn't fight vigorously enough, and now the surveillance state is on the attack.
The rationale for permitting superPACs is that they are independent of candidates, but nearly half of them backed just one candidate.
Offshore wind power in the Atlantic could provide twice the jobs and twice the energy of offshore oil drilling. That's in addition to protecting marine mammals from explosions and all sea life from future oil spills.
I wonder if it is possible to use offshore windmills as a kind of fence to keep ships away from rocks where they could cause oil spills.
Why the EPA's proposed regulation of methane leaks is too leaky to do the job.
State and local taxes in the US fall heavily on the poor.
Banks weakened US financial regulations yet again. As usual, Obama is no obstacle to them.
US citizens:
call
on your senators to stand firm for environmental protection.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
say
no to a GMO potato.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
oppose the TPP
(yes, keep doing it over and over).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress not to punish Palestine for joining the ICC.
Thugs and busybodies continue to harass the parents that allowed their children to walk outdoors.
There are circumstances under which this treatment would be justified — if parents are grossly mistreating children. The insanity is in the idea that children should never be allowed to be alone.
Obama proposes to make it easier to snoop on your records of energy usage.
"Smart meters" should be designed to limit how much data they offer about your short-term energy usage.
Satellite photos demonstrate that Boko Haram destroyed thousands of buildings in an attempt to kill as many civilians as possible.
Obama took a stand against state laws that ban municipal broadband networks.
US citizens: call on Obama to veto any bill to construct the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Some Muslims still think their religion is entitled to immunity from ridicule.
"Don't ridicule our views, or I will attack you" is an explicit threat of violence. "Don't ridicule our views, or some of us might go crazy and attack you" is a slightly veiled threat of violence.
Slavoj Žižek: Murderous extremists kill because they are insecure about the beliefs they insist on; they have incorporated into their minds some of the secular attitudes they say they oppose.
The beginning is a great explanation of why "You shouldn't say such provocative things about Muslims" is comparable to "You shouldn't wear such provocative clothing."
To Catch a Non-Predator, Try Entrapment. The US government has agents that present themselves on the net as adult women interested in dates, hoping to pressure men to agreeing their younger sisters can come along on a date, to get an excuse to imprison them.
Samples of the writing for which Raif Badawi has been sentenced to receive 1000 lashes with a whip.
It is a powerful rebuke to the doctrines of a religion, and demonstrates why laws banning insult to a religion are tyranny.
Why should we show any respect to religions that don't respect us? (Note: If you are not a Muslim, Islam has little or no respect for your freedom of religion.)
I like what Badawi has written. I don't like what Mr Dieudonné said nearly so much, but he too has the right to say it. Down with French government censorship!
Bisphenol A was adopted widely, then it was found to be an endocrine disruptor. So Bisphenol S was adopted as a replacement, without testing that, and it turns out to have similar effects.
Pressuring kindergarten children to learn to read makes them anxious and could hurt their education.
Everyone:
tell the
media not to label global heating denialists as "skeptics".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: support the EPA's proposed stricter limits for smog.
Measuring US handouts to the fossil fuel companies, and how much that money could do if spent on something beneficial.
The prosecution of Ross Ulbricht is concealing evidence.
It also asserts he's responsible for all uses of the Silk Road site.
New Orleans found housing for every one of the homeless veterans in the city. This demonstrates it can be done, with a will.
Now how about the homeless non-veterans? They are people too.
Charlie Hebdo exposes the repression of censorship in Turkey.
Obama Action on Methane Emissions 'Misses 90% of Pollution'.
The high price of gold is encouraging mining that is based on deforestation.
There are many problems like this. What they add up to is, when most of the Earth is covered with human activities, preserving a fraction for wildlife is harder than it looks.
Freedom of speech in France takes another hit: a comedian has been arrested for a vague statement which the state interpreted as sympathy for one of the killers. And that's one of 54 prosecutions for illegal speech launched in France since the march to defend freedom of speech.
Even if someone unambiguously expressed support for the killers, that would still be part of freedom of speech.
Microsoft has stopped informing some users about bugs in Windows. Now it tells only the NSA.
Prisoner Ricky Martin begged to be moved away from his violent cellmate, but he wasn't moved, and he was murdered.
There is some reason to think the guards arranged for him to be murdered.
In most large US cities, solar panels are a very good investment.
A massive biometric database will help LA thugs track anyone who has ever been arrested — protesters, as well as criminals.
When the US invaded Afghanistan, it captured child soldiers. Does it make sense to keep them in prison now?
Why charge captured enemy soldiers with a crime for fighting, anyway?
Welcome to 'uber-veillance' says Australian Privacy Foundation, as "wearable computers" run by proprietary software snoop on behalf of companies that control the software.
Haiti's US-imposed President Martelly has not held elections for parliament, which has now dissolved, enabling Martelly to rule autocratically.
The waste due to medical billing in the US amounts to almost 400 billion dollars a year.
We could save it all with a national health service such as Canada has.
US companies are coercing employees into "wellness programs".
If these "wellness programs" involve using wearable surveillance devices, they will mean total surveillance. Any activity that pressures people to use them is therefore unjust.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose new sanctions against Iran. There is a new push in the senate to impose more sanctions to sabotage the nuclear negotiations. The capitol switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.
The US government backed down and will not jail reporter James Risen.
Now the US should stop threatening journalists and the patriots that reveal government incompetence and injustice to them.
If the Olympic games are held in Boston, the US government will spend a billion dollars on increased repression (i.e., "security").
Obama wants to increase the absurdly high penalties of the CFAA. What we really need is to reduce the scope of the CFAA so that it is clear breaching someone's nonnegotiated contract is not a crime.
Meanwhile, the US government neglects its own cybersecurity. It would rather bluster and threaten than defend itself.
The TTIP (This Treaty Is Plutocratic) aims to abolish the principle of equality before the law.
Journalists, lawyers and MDs are campaigning against UK massive surveillance plans.
An anti-snooping campaign in the UK.
Rory Fanning, former US Army Ranger, informs new Rangers about what they will really be fighting for, and what the results are likely to be.
Ukrainian army pilot Nadia Savchenko says she was captured in Ukraine before being taken to Russia, and says she will fast to death if not released.
Climate Denier Ted Cruz Will Oversee NASA — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
David Cameron's Internet Surveillance Plans (for the UK) Rival Syria, Russia And Iran.
The Icelandic company DataCell is suing Mastercard and Visa in the US for the money lost when they refused to send money to Wikileaks via DataCell.
A leaked CIA study found that assassinating enemies can be ineffective or even backfire.
The US bombed a PISSI "headquarters building" which turns out to be a jail where it imprisoned opposition.
An Albuquerque thug will be charged with murder for shooting a civilian for no good reason.
This is an occasion for celebration, but to end thugs' reign of terror this must become the rule instead of the exception.
In response to the violent censorship of Charlie Hebdo, ministers of France and 11 other EU countries propose… more censorship!
They were going to find an excuse for this sooner or later.
Moderate "Democrats" might as well be Republicans, and now some Democrats are calling them on it.
In response to this pressure, they have started to support a weak version of the "Robin Hood tax".
Hiring Timothy Loehmann as a thug was a fatal mistake which could have been avoided.
New York City has become a less hostile place as thugs refrain from petty harassment.
Obama's proposed "cybersecurity" law endangers privacy by making it easy for companies to "voluntarily" give personal data to the government.
This idea was tried before under the name of CISPA, and defeated.
However, if we really want privacy, we should not let those companies have our data.
A small house construction project could cause the extinction of a rare spider.
The UK has streamlined planning so that projects can't be stopped by niggling considerations like extinction of a species.
Islamism in France attacks a mostly secularized Muslim community, perhaps tempted in response to racist exclusion from opportunity.
Here are some examples of opposition to racism and colonialism in Charlie Hebdo.
Why did fundamentalists attack Charlie Hebdo, whose principal target is the Muslim-hating right wing, rather than the right wing Muslim-haters? Clearly the fundamentalists are not thinking in political terms. Political circumstances may have caused them alienation, but they rebuilt themselves around irrationality.
The UK's prime minister wants to ban encryption and establish a total digital police state.
In the Arab world, you can satirize PISSI, but it is hard to satirize much in repressive Egypt, and Turkey is getting dangerous too.
Authoritarian EU politicians have seized on the Charlie Hebdo attentat as a spurious excuse for tracking travel within the Schengen zone.
Rushing to climb ice on Kilimanjaro — next week it may be gone forever.
Indonesian troops have arrested a hundred people in West Papua and burned down a dozen houses, as a random reprisal for the killing of some soldiers.
Indonesia forcibly seized West Papua in 1969 with a fishy "election", and since then has colonized the region with Javanese.
US citizens: Call on Congress once again to overturn the Corporations United decision.
US citizens: call on the FCC to give us real net neutrality.
Rajapaksa called an election based on advice from an astrologer! What an idiot!
The result could be good for Sri Lanka, even though it was bad for him.
Hitler also trusted his astrologer, who was an Allied agent and intentionally gave him bad advice.
Designing growing cities for energy efficiency could make a big difference in human energy use by 2050.
Afrileaks provides a channel for whistleblowers in Africa.
Copyright makes it difficult to make a movie about the campaigns of Martin Luther King Jr.
The behavior of his heirs is disgraceful, but the real culprit is copyright law.
Microfinance can help the poor in some circumstances, but it is not automatic.
California has passed a very weak law against the worst kind of abuses by companies that collect data about students from schools. Now Obama proposes a similarly weak federal law, with a weak voluntary policy as backup alternative.
Schools should not allow companies to collect any data about their students. If a school creates an account on a Microsoft, Apple or Google server for a student, under the student's name, that is already a violation of the student's privacy.
The "Internet of Things", and keeping people "connected" through servers run by companies, is a scheme for total control of the population.
It is too bad that the article ends with an obligatory rejection of Luddism, because Luddism simply means being selective about which technologies to accept. If we are to consider rejecting a technology that companies wish to impose on us, rather than ineffectually complaining about it, we must first be Luddites.
Verizon has been caught making directly contradictory statements to the FCC.
If the FCC is not too corrupted by business, it could prosecute Verizon for perjury.
Ten Facts About Haiti's Housing Crisis.
Facebook can understand a used's personality from "likes" more accurately, on the average, than friends and spouses can do so.
What Jews can learn from Muslims, in regard to respect for others.
A statement advocating censorship was censored on Facebook. I suspect the statement was deleted because of the appearance of the word "nigger" — ironically, to condemn the use of that word. That's what tends to happen when censorship is carried out by idiots.
That writer deserves freedom to present his views, ironically for the same reason that his views are wrong.
People never want to censor what they agree with. Respect for freedom of speech means, at heart, respecting the freedom to say what we disagree with. We must respect the freedom to call blacks "niggers", or praise Hitler, even though we disagree and disapprove. We must also respect the freedom to advocate censorship, precisely because otherwise we ourselves endorse censorship.
Egyptian Atheist Karim Ashraf Mohamed al-Banna has been sentenced to three years in prison for saying he is an Atheist.
It seems that $500 can permanently lift a person in Bangladesh out of ultra-poverty.
US states are cutting funds for pre-school which is crucial for students raised in poverty to catch up with the better off.
Meanwhile, privatized "public schools" divert money to profits and executives, and can't be converted back into real public schools.
The rich in the US are no longer interested in an educated work force. They consider a large fraction of Americans impoverished.
In Haiti, the US-imposed president Martelly has effectively eliminated democracy. He has not even tried to hold elections.
In the US, you are more likely to be shot by a toddler than killed by terrorists.
Why pay such a price — in freedom as well as money — for hypothetical protection from terrorists?
India blocked an Indian Greenpeace leader from flying to London for an event, based on false accusations.
California's new system of groundwater rights is weak and won't take effect for six more years. In the mean time, new almond plantations are taking up more water, leaving others without any.
The IMF bullied Ukraine, on Monsanto's behalf, to change various agricultural laws in favor of corporate GMO plantations.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the "Regulatory Accountability Act", a plutocratic bill to make new federal regulations nearly impossible.
For
more information.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Right-wingers in favor of total surveillance have seized on the Charlie Hebdo murders to demand total tracking of all train passengers, which would not have prevented these murders anyway. Fortunately there is opposition to these oppressive plans.
Amtrak already demands identification from passengers, which is why I refuse to take Amtrak.
Senator Feinstein wants to prosecute Julian Assange, but wants General Petraeus to be let off the hook.
US citizens: Call on Obama to let Shaker Aamer return to Britain.
Those denying that the Japanese army forced women to be prostitutes during World War II are claiming that women were the only class of people that Japan did not coerce.
Eric Taylor McDavid was sentenced to 20 years in prison for being led by the woman he loved to discuss bombing government facilities. He has been freed because she was an FBI provocateur and the FBI concealed information from his trial.
Many other supposed "terrorists" have been railroaded by FBI provocateurs, most of whom would never have done anything violent if left to themselves.
Meanwhile, a real act of terrorism was committed against the NAACP. I wonder if provocateurs were involved.
Everyone: call on the UN to establish the goal of ending child slavery.
People who watch Faux News are systematically factually misinformed about issues of US health care.
One thug has killed two drivers in two years, with impunity.
If you watch the video from youtube, for your own freedom's sake please use youtube-dl to watch it without nonfree software.
Corruption plagues the Afghan national thug force.
Some plants may go extinct because, from global heating, they bloom before bumblebees are ready to pollinate them. Some trees might go extinct because scale insects that suck their sap reproduce more in warmer weather.
And that's only what we are seeing now with around 1C of heating. With 4C of heating, lots of species might wipe each other out.
Rulers that trample freedom of the press at home came to Paris to mourn the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. Will they learn anything?
US citizens: Support Obama on gratis community college for all Americans.
US citizens: Tell Congress to drop "Title X" and give us real net neutrality.
The experience of eating widely-grown GMOs shows that they do not cause acute illness, but says nothing about long-term effects. Long-term feeding experiments have shown harm to animals.
Meanwhile, some of the transgenes get transferred to soil bacteria and to other plants.
Haiti is broken because of international intervention (on behalf of plutocracy).
Goldman Sachs is trying to threaten Greece, as it has threatened other countries, but it looks like Syriza will not obey.
President Sirisena accuses Rajapaksa of trying to launch a coup to stop the counting of ballots.
It did seem surprising he would allow himself to be voted out of office after so much violence against his opponents.
The new president says he wants to revert Rajapaksa's authoritarian changes in the constitution, but it won't be easy.
US laws increasingly criminalize discussion of computer security weaknesses in the US.
That suits the NSA, which wants your computer to be insecure.
By the way, "code is law" is false in one important case: when you're using free software. With free software, you are free to make it do what you wish.
Facebook seeks to implement the opposite of network neutrality, world-wide. Accessing Facebook will be gratis, while accessing any other site will be too expensive for half the human population.
Considering the way mobile phones track and spy on people, I think it is a shame that so many people use them now.
The Muslim tradition of painting pictures of Mohammad started in the 1200s.
The Charlie Hebdo assassins were known suspects, but French security forces had decided they were not worth paying attention to.
This shows that additional surveillance power is not what they needed.
Samaritans booked a hotel suite for six homeless people on Christmas eve, but the hotel cancelled their reservation because it considered homeless people suspect.
For a hotel to require guests to show photo ID is a repressive practice, regardless of who the guests are. This is one of the reasons I avoid hotels whenever possible in my travels. (The others are just a matter of taste.)
While this gift was a pretty gesture, if I were homeless I expect I could think of a better use for $100 than a night in a hotel.
In
France, Who's Afraid Of Freedom Of Speech?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
Activists Across The Country Beg GOP Leaders To Expand Medicaid. State governments controlled by the Republican party reject this federal aid because they object on principle to providing medical care for the poor.
Tunisia: Blogger Yassine Ayari was sentenced to 3 years in prison for "insulting the army".
By criminalizing insults, the state has insulted itself.
Posting on Facebook is a bad idea, but should not be a crime.
A Muslim UK minister says Muslims must acknowledge a special responsibility to oppose terrorism carried out in the name of their religion.
With the right to be a Muslim goes the responsibility to recognize everyone's right not to be a Muslim. And likewise for any other persuasion, including Atheism.
Many Europeans ask whether America has gone crazy.
3000 Stanford professors called for the university to divest from fossil fuels.
The mother of all chilling effects: the Chilling Effects archive of DMCA threats has censored itself as a chilling effect of a DMCA threat.
Meanwhile, Canada's new takedown system that resembles the DMCA as a loophole that facilitates copyright trolls.
USA Today published an establishment right-wing take on US wage stagnation, "rebutted" by an extreme right-wing view.
The worst terrorist attack in Europe in recent years was not committed by Islamists, but by a right-wing fanatic.
The cold in the US today can be fatal to homeless people, and a lot more people are homeless in the US now than in the past.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject "fast track" for the TPP and insist on publication of the draft text.
Citizens of Boston, it is time to organize to keep the Olympics away.
The US Olympic Committee chose Boston rather than other US cities because of its experience in denying human rights.
Don't expect an economic boost for Boston from this.
US citizens: rebuke House Democrats that voted to weaken the Dodd-Frank law.
Middle-Eastern satire about PISSI.
Joseph Stiglitz: the euro is driving Europe into ever-increasing recession, and some day democracy will make it crack.
US citizens: call on Obama to veto the expected bill to authorize construction of Keystone XL.
US citizens: call on Senator Paul to stop punishing Palestine and accept its participation in the ICC.
Everyone: call on the Mall of America to oppose prosecution of the Black Lives Matter protesters.
Digital connectedness, constant with few and short exceptions, goes with people who don't know how to connect except through digital devices.
Were 11 Spanish Anarchists Arrested for Using Secure Email?
Amid Time of Soaring Inequality, Rich Say: The Poor Have It Easy.
The Charlie Hebdo Attack Was a Strike Against Free Speech. So Why Is the Response More Surveillance?
Will France Repeat US Mistakes after 9/11?
Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy collaborated secretly with the CIA.
Plastic microfibres come out of synthetic fabric when it is washed, and get caught in the intestines of fish, then get into birds.
Censorship and repression in South Korea.
Boko Haram took over a town and killed everyone that couldn't run away fast enough. Perhaps 2000 were killed.
Fossil fuel companies are funding a PR campaign that presents them as the saviours of humanity, to distract us from their plan to cause global disaster.
A study estimated that global heating would kill 100 million people by 2030. I expect the damage to accelerate as temperature rises ever faster; by 2050 it is likely to kill tens of millions per year.
Under these circumstances, even violent attacks on fossil fuel company installations could be justified on the grounds that they will prevent a bigger crime.
How Chinese paid pro-government microbloggers operate.
One borough in a small city has 300 of these paid agents.
Islam has a rich tradition old of presenting images of Mohammed, and parts of the Qur'an espouse toleration of religious dissent and even mockery.
The fallacious belief that people get what they deserve encourages people's disregard to the suffering people around them.
US citizens: call on the FDA to ban feeding ractopamine to livestock.
Freedom to insult people and religion must not be limited to Muslims as targets.
Here are examples of French political censorship, real and attempted.
Russia has banned transgender people from driving, along with people into S&M or who use sex toys.
Sounds like a twisted parody of Saudi Arabia.
How the CIA plays today's US journalists so as to maintain its impunity and lawlessness.
This presents President Truman's reasons for separating covert operations from intelligence. It seems valid to me.
EU countries must reevaluate their laws that require retention of everyone's metadata.
Feral horses are overrunning the US west. It would be good to use some of them for food.
Pesticide Industry Seeks to Leverage Power Through EU-US Trade Deal.
President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka has been voted out of office.
His government has used violence against opposition so it is interesting that he allowed a free election.
Los Angeles thugs crushed a Black Lives Matter protest outside their headquarters.
Everyone: support Amnesty International's campaign to end solitary confinement in US prisons.
US thugs have new weapons to blind, deafen, and remotely torture protesters.
EFF: Congress Should Say No to "Cybersecurity" Information Sharing Bills.
Chinese phone apps spread Chinese surveillance, even Chinese censorship, to Western countries.
The assassins that attacked Charlie Hebdo probably wanted to provoke repression of all Muslims, because coexistence is what they oppose.
Even the companies that administer the privatized UK benefits-cutting system say it achieves nothing but suffering.
It is a "parallel, secret penal system" for the disabled and unemployed.
Saudi Blogger to be Publicly Flogged on Charges He Insulted Islam.
Censorship is vile, and inexcusable.
If America Wants to Make Sure It Never Tortures Again, It Must Choose Law over Secrecy.
How video influences viewers' emotions, even to the point where fantasy supersedes fact.
The TV shows that glorify torture must be considerably responsible for the high level of public support for torture in the US today.
Please don't use the word "consume" to refer to watching video. Watching a recording does not, in fact, consume it.
House Republicans voted to impose restrictions on the Social Security Administration's internal finances that could cause it to be unable to function.
The Republican program is to sabotage all government activities that protects the public from corporations. That includes everything that protects the public from desperation, because desperate workers will work for crumbs.
When people tell you they got rich through hard work, ask them "Whose?"
— reportedly due to Don Marquis
Denmark is on track to generate 70% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
If the US set out for that target, it could get tens of thousands working on installation of generation, millions working as a multiplier effect, and give humanity a chance at avoiding global disaster.
The Don't Shoot Coalition proposes reforms to make Missouri thugs a little more like police officers.
The Federal Highway Administration has recognized that Americans are not going to drive more in the future.
This can lead to reductions in highway construction and perhaps also increases in support for efficient mass transit.
Four animal rights activists face criminal charges for making recordings of animal processing in Utah.
A Dutch journalist has been accused of "terrorism" in Turkey, apparently for journalistic work.
The UK government is working to sabotage enforcement of the UK's greenhouse gas targets.
Protesters in Pennsylvania blocked a pipeline for fracked gas.
A study determined which fossil fuel reserves can be used and which should be left in the ground.
It worked by ranking all the reserves in terms of expense to extract, and aims for no more than 2C of heating — although scientists now think that is already too much.
The study concluded that carbon capture and storage won't make much difference. I've had the feeling for a long time that it is proposed only as an excuse not to face how dangerous coal is.
The UK is in the process of adopting a mandate to extract as much fossil fuel as possible.
Australia is accelerating coal mining plans.
That's what politicians do who are in the grip of the planet burners.
23andMe has started selling its customers' genetic data.
TV news coverage of the Senate's CIA torture report presented twice as many supporters of torture as opponents of torture.
I'd call watching TV news a form of torture, but that would be exaggerating.
US citizens:
call
on the FDA not to approve another GMO potato.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call for immediate implementation of the "Volker Rule" that was required by the Dodd-Frank financial reform.
What we really should do is reenact the Glass-Steagall law that was repealed in the 90s.
US citizens: call on the FDA to require labeling of GMOs.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to vote against the Keystone XL planet-roaster
pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: tell the senate you oppose the plan to ban abortions after 20 weeks.
I don't think that PISSI qualifies as "civilization". It is barbarism straight out of the 7th century.
Oklahoma proposes to ban hiding your face in public.
The UK proposes to make teachers report children who are ideologically suspect — "at risk" for Islamist ideology.
The article says "toddlers", and that may not be an exaggeration: the plan seems to include preschool.
Disabled and mentally ill Koreans are illegally forced to work on salt mines. Some try to escape. Others think that slave labor is better than life on the street. South Korea is not poor: the state should offer them a better alternative.
A list of
books,
films and songs that would have entered the public domain this
month in the US — if not for the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
A summary of the NSA's attacks on internet security.
FISA court oversight of the FBI is not only weak, it's a no-op. If the FISA says no to the FBI, it just uses the PAT RIOT act instead to get the same data.
The FBI also tracks cell phones without a warrant.
U.S. Muslims Condemn Paris Terror Attack, Defend Free Speech.
Ways to campaign against use of GMOs and dangerous pesticides.
Each GMO is a separate case. There is nothing inherently harmful about a GMO. Nothing makes it inherently safe, either.
The GMOs that have been farmed in large quantity for years, and eaten by lots of people, clearly can't pose a big risk of causing illness in adult humans. If they were, it would have been apparent in medical statistics.
That doesn't mean they are safe for wildlife, however. (Look at the effect of Roundup on monarch butterflies.) Or that prenatal exposure is safe for humans.
Each GMO is a separate case. If 20 GMOs turn out to be safe, number 21 could be dangerous.
40% of Americans believe Bush's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This is very bad news because it will encourage US politicians to use big lies in the future.
Palestine's membership in the International Criminal Court has been approved.
China has authorized environmental groups to sue polluters.
Corporate Fiction in the Age of GMOs.
A terrorist attack on the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo killed 12 people.
It seems plausible that the killers were Muslim fanatics, although there is no proof of this yet. Many Muslims believe they are entitled to forcibly crush criticism or mockery of their religion.
If that is the case, their aim is probably to provoke France into doing something rash that attacks human rights.
That's generally not difficult. France has a history of trashing freedom of speech. Charlie Hebdo got its name from resisting French censorship.
Remember the man who was prosecuted for saying, "Sarkozy, I see you". French censorship is not as violent or broad as Islamic censorship, but that is no excuse for it.
Both Ukraine and the rebels have bombarded civilian populations. Ukraine resumed bombarding Pervomaisk in November.
Ally Cohen reports on how she sprained her angle in Hebron and "settler" fanatics ordered Israeli thugs to order her to move.
Israel plans to extract oil from the occupied Golan heights.
In an overt act of collective punishment, the family of a Palestinian criminal are being exiled from East Jerusalem.
This is a part of the West Bank that Israel claims to have annexed.
Israel uses various subterfuges to drive people out of East Jerusalem, including refusing to draw up land use plans so it can cite the absence of plans as grounds for refusing permission for homes.
The trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being rushed in a way that imperils due process.
I think he is probably guilty. Why not convict him properly after a fair trial?
Ford Tries to Shut Down Independent Repair Tool with Copyright.
The US government will require imported fish and seafood to meet US standards for protection of marine mammals.
Everyone: call on the Missouri Supreme Court to investigate whether the prosecutor acted illegally in the case against Michael Brown's killer.
The NAACP calls for a special prosecutor and a new grand jury to consider whether to prosecute the thug that shot Michael Brown.
Republicans in Congress plan to pretend that tax cuts for the rich will not cause the government a loss of revenue.
Their scheme is to count the taxes brought in by hypothetical future economic growth supposedly to be caused by tax cuts.
Even if that did cause economic growth, it would not make up for the lost revenue, because most growth in income goes to the rich and the corporations that don't pay taxes any more.
One Million Americans Are About to Lose Their Food Stamp Benefits.
Kochs and Walmart Clan Wage Dirty War to Stop You From Putting Solar Panels on Your Home.
Writers around the world feel threatened by government surveillance, even in "free" countries.
Prosecution of unwelcome opinions is seeping into even the US.
The Mirrors of the Future Will Point Out All Your Flaws to Sell You Products.
I wonder who else they will inform.
US citizens: call on Obama and Congress to reject the TPP.
US citizens: call for an amendment to overturn the Corporations United decision (calling it what it is, not what the corporations pretended it was), if you haven't already done so.
The entire thug department of Medellín de Bravo, in Mexico, has been arrested on suspicion in collaborating in kidnaping a pesky journalist.
Shafqat Hussain of Pakistan was tortured into a confession of involuntary manslaughter when he was 14 years old. He will soon be executed for this.
The death penalty is always wrong, but seeing it used for involuntary manslaughter is shocking in its own way.
Bernie Sanders demanded the US Trade Representative release the draft text of the TPP.
California Governor Brown proposes to get half the state's electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
Progress in converting electric generation is welcome, but the fraction of electricity generated from renewable sources is the wrong base for defining goals. The crucial point is to reduce the total greenhouse gas emissions.
Corporations have cut their US state tax bill by more than half since 1980 by making states compete to reduce their taxes.
A witness in the case that the government of Kenya killed political opponents was killed before testifying.
Bangladesh threatens to imprison the leader of the main opposition party after violence in a protest.
The Greatest Trick Obama Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World America Isn't Still At War.
Countries a lot poorer than the US have implemented universal health care.
When will the US catch up with Thailand and Rwanda?
A member of the grand jury that didn't indict the thug that shot Michael Brown is suing for permission to expose how the prosecutor procured that result.
The same prosecutor faces ethics complaints about that.
The .1% of richest in the US now own 22% of the wealth. Pseudo-recoveries, and ensuing bailouts, tend to benefit them the most.
The UK's problem, like that in the US and many other countries, is small government (and big corporations).
A Pirate Party representative is in charge of a plan to rewrite copyright law for Europe.
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was kept under house arrest with no legal grounds, so he has defied it.
Liberia has come close to extinguishing transmission of Ebola virus.
UK thugs are obstructing an investigation into the murder of a private detective who was investigating corrupt thugs.
Everyone: call on Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (all owned by the same company) to make sure it doesn't get palm oil from deforestation.
US and Russia in danger of returning to era of nuclear rivalry.
A Briton faces possible prosecution for insulting tweets.
The text of the tweets appears to be
Glaswegian ebola patient moved to London's Royal Free Hospital. Not so independent when it matters most are we jockville ?They seem coarse and sarcastic (which is unclear communication), and may be insulting, though I can't understand who they insult or why. Nonetheless, they are clearly not threats and it is clearly wrong to prosecute mere insults.Little sweaty jocks, sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn't cricket.
Tiger farming in China endangers wild tigers because killing them is cheaper than growing a tiger in a farm.
The NATO assassination target list had over 600 people on it in 2009-2011, and officers launched attacks when up to 10 civilians (not counting civilian men) might be killed along with the target.
In the UK: Protest on Monday for renationalization of trains.
Every country needs a government that dares disregard what businesses want in order to serve the public instead.
Everyone: call on Loreal to remove carcinogens from its body-care products.
US citizens: phone Obama and urge him not to renominate bankster Antonio Weiss for a post in the Treasury Department.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to curb "Sneak and Peek" searches.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the
old
link was broken.]
This practice was introduced in the name of "fighting terrorism", but it is hardly ever used in terrorist cases; nearly always the targets have nothing to do with terrorism.
More US troops are heading for Iraq, and some are stationed near the front lines, despite Obama's claim that they are not there for combat.
Bangladesh, India and now Britain have blocked the UN from inspecting the prisons where they hold people to be deported.
Miami thugs attack people with tasers for things like sleeping in a park. (Why shouldn't homeless people sleep in a park? If you can't offer them a better place to sleep, you have no right to interfere.)
Since tasers have not got the thugs to reduce their use of guns, what good are they?
An evidently rigid employee of an animal shelter didn't like the defiant non-government ID that Robert Lawrence showed him, and called the thugs, who killed him.
Calling the thugs over this was clearly wrong.
Afghan soldiers fired mortars on a wedding party, killing around 20 civilians.
In contrast to what happened when US troops did things like that, the Afghan government is treating this as seriously wrong.
An Indian film that satirizes exploitative Hindu "godmen" has provoked demands for censorship, but it is such a big success that the government does not dare act.
How can virtual child rape (of no real person) deserve prohibition if virtual murder (of no real person) does not?
I don't like doing either one if it appears realistic, but that's a tangent.
Cognitive colonization of US schools.
A Nicaragua canal protest organizer was arrested, then beaten with a rifle butt so badly he could not lie down.
Amal Clooney pointed out how Egyptian officials can control the outcome of trials, and was threatened with imprisonment if she said this in Egypt.
Kenya High Court Suspends Anti-Terror Measures After Opposition Objections.
Countries around the world are restricting access to the internet.
If companies store data about Russian users in Russia, those users will be less vulnerable to US spying and more vulnerable to Russian spying. They will be protected by Russian privacy law, if any (I doubt it does much for people). All in all, the users will be worse off than before.
However, in a different situation such a law might be a step up.
Another reason not to visit the US: an accident, such as giving birth prematurely, could leave you broke.
Comparing the unorganized Islamist terrorists of today with the unorganized individual anarchist killings of 115 years ago.
Everyone: state your support for NYC Mayor de Blasio against the thug unions.
Bernie Sanders: Ten Reasons Why the TPP Must Be Defeated.
If they do pass the TPP, we must not treat that as the end. We must remove our countries from the TPP.
The US has authorized export of crude oil, which is likely to increase global consumption and speed humanity towards global heating disaster.
2014 was the deadliest year so far for civilians in Afghanistan.
As of a few years ago, the Taliban killed more civilians than the US and NATO troops. I expect that is still true. Somehow this doesn't inspire as much hatred towards the Taliban as it does towards the US and NATO. However, it is the US and NATO that are keeping the war going.
India has imposed a blockage on access to a long list of foreign web sites, including Github, supposedly because they carry propaganda from PISSI.
So what if they do? That is no excuse for censorship such as this.
PISSI is the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. To call it the "Islamic State" is to endorse its claim to represent true Islam. I do not wish to give it such support.
Japan's population is declining slowly as the birth rate is substantially below the death rate.
However, Japan is only 2% of the human population, and the rest is still growing dangerously. While there are some inconveniences to a declining population, they are small compared with the catastrophic danger of an increasing population.
In 1934, when the German concentration camps were political prisons (the mass killing of Jews came later), prisoners were frequently tortured. Compare this list with US torture practices.
France has backed down on its fair tax rate for the rich, under pressure from rich people who called it "anti-business".
Plutocrats will say the same thing about any attempt to throw off the dooH niboR policies they have imposed. Once we recognize that we have to defeat the plutocrats, we see the flaw in counterarguments that a country should bow down to business to help businesses compete against businesses in other countries.
Crime statistics do not support the claim that aggressive policing of minor vandalism reduces other kinds of crime.
Palestine has asked to join the International Criminal Court, after a Security Council motion calling for a reasonable peace deal was defeated.
"I can't breathe" protesters in Nashville were handled peacefully with understanding rather than thuggishness.
Statistics suggest at least 4% of the people sentenced to death row in the US are innocent. Many of them have been taken off death row and now face life imprisonment, so little effort is given to proving they are innocent.
I was expecting a much larger fraction: a human process that errs only 4% of the time is pretty reliable, as such things go.
US citizens: call on fast food companies not to use GMO potatoes.
The ten most extreme nasty things US schools did in 2014 in the name of "zero tolerance".
These are the worst examples of rigid and extreme enforcement of rules. What worries me more is the general attitude of rigid and extreme enforcement which pervades US schools.
The US released 28 prisoners from Guantanamo during 2014, leaving 127.
It would take over 5 more years to close the prison if this rate of release continues. However, before that it would collide with the US intention to keep some people in prison for life without trial.
We think of Alaska as a cold place, but Anchorage has not had a below-0-Farenheit temperature in all of 2014.
China has become steadily more repressive since Xi Jinping took power.
A former US police officer calls for an end to the impunity of thugs.
If thugs find a police officer in their midst, they typically regard that person as a traitor to their gang.
The racism of the thugs' violence is a secondary wrong: if the people beaten, framed, maimed, and killed were distributed evenly among all ethnic groups, it would still be unacceptable. For thugs to increase their violence against whites until it matches their violence against blacks would not be an improvement. Rather, we must make them decrease their violence against black Americans.
Imagine if in 2019 the Senate investigates the US drone bombing campaign as it has investigated torture.
A secret CIA study warned about this in 2009.
The crucial difference is not between drones and manned bombers or artillery. Rather, what makes the US drone bombing campaign both wrong and self-defeating is that it is carried out away from battlefields.
A UK minister says, if the government could watch all communications, it would find more "pedophiles".
They are not talking finding and imprisoning men that have sex with children. They are talking about finding and imprisoning men who have or redistribute copies of images that depict sex with children, or perhaps with adolescents labeled as children; they want to imprison them because there is some chance they would have sex with children, or with adolescents. I don't believe that should be done at all.
This campaign, unjust in itself, is presented as an excuse for total surveillance of everyone. That power would of course be used against other targets — journalists' sources, dissidents, anyone who gets in the way.
New pun: trees.
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