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: Thank the FCC for adopting network neutrality.
Many web sites block or harass visitors that use Tor.
What the article does not mention is that the CAPTCHAs typically operate through nonfree Javascript code. We who refuse to run nonfree Javascript code simply can't access these sites.
Around the world, mining is associated with violence. (And often pollution too.)
Thousands May Have Died in Syria Sieges, UN Human Rights Chief Says.
Sanders proposes to mobilize the US economy for growth, so establishment-supporting economists and media claim it won't work, without really studying it.
FBI Says Apple Court Order Is Narrow, But Other Law Enforcers Hungry to Exploit It.
What would thugs do, if not lie?
Indonesia is imposing harsh repression on prostitutes.
They will still work as prostitutes but it will be more dangerous for them.
On watching one's father die in useless and terrible suffering; doctors were not allowed to give him enough morphine to end the pain (and with it his life) although he begged for that.
In 2000, Trump knew who David Duke was, enough to refuse to be associated politically with him. Now he pleads ignorance of Duke as an excuse not to reject his support.
US citizens: call on Congress to approve contraceptive aid for regions affected by Zika.
Scalia did grave damage to American workers and consumers by allowing companies to impose arbitration requirements on them, thus denying them the right to go to court when mistreated.
Charges have been dropped against a UK student who was prosecuted for an insult against Tories.
Bravo to anyone that insults Tories, but Aneurin Bevan expressed it much more clearly. The Tories are lower than vermin.
Australia is allowing so much forest-cutting that it will bust its climate target.
Republicans in Georgia want to legalize religion-motivated discrimination against same-sex couple.
The cease fire in Syria is mostly holding, but Assad's side carried out some air strikes. Perhaps they were directed at al-Nusra or PISSI.
Some questions that Trump's tax returns would answer.
A UK MP visiting southeast Turkey was arrested by soldiers for making a recording of the sounds of Turkish tanks firing on Kurds.
Many US companies impose noncompete agreements on lots of employees just because they can — so these employees, if laid off, can't work anywhere.
The fact that most of these contracts would not be enforced by a court does not stop them from doing harm. If it were up to me, I would penalize companies for asking employees to sign them, outside some narrow cases.
Supposedly "left-leaning" economists are supporting the establishment in criticizing Sanders' economic plans.
The US proposes very light regulations for undersea fracking.
Do we have to risk learning the hard way?
The people of Nevada are organizing strongly to reverse the decision to remove support for individuals to install solar power.
If we taxed carbon emissions enough, and eliminated subsidies for fossil fuels, specific policies to encourage solar power would not be needed. Simply avoiding the cost of fossil fuel would be enough incentive for people to switch.
China's rulers admit that, now that they can't please the people with fast growth, they depend more on control of the people through the media.
More Than Ever, Science Must Be Central to All Our Lives.
US citizens: call on Democratic superdelegates to follow the people's vote.
Clinton won the South Carolina primary.
However, Sanders leads nationwide and can still win the nomination.
People in the UK have reported around a million cases of alleged benefit fraud, but only 15% of them were real fraud. The other 85% of those accused were honest.
Putting surveillance cameras in nursing homes would violate the privacy of the people living there.
One possible trade-off is to install security cameras instead of surveillance cameras. The difference is that a surveillance camera can be watched remotely, while a security camera makes only a local recording that is overwritten in a short time. The security camera would deter abuses while not lending itself to watching everyone.
I believe that only security cameras, not surveillance cameras, should be allowed pointing at places where the public is admitted, with exceptions allowed only under court orders for a specific place and time period.
As for nursing homes, they could install security cameras in the rooms of those patients that request them.
Everyone: call for making Nestle pay to use Lake Michigan water.
US citizens:
support
the Congressional Progressive Caucus climate resolution.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: support the US government stand that Israel's colonies in Palestine are not part of Israel.
Anti-Government Protesters Rally for 'Free And Open Poland'.
In the UK, protesters must now damage property in order to get a fair trial.
Dalits worship a "demon" that in mythology was killed by the goddess Durga. They believe he was a king that challenged the dominance of the caste system. Jawaharlal Nehru University uses this feast day as an occasion for political debates about caste, for which it faces prosecution for offending the religious feelings of higher caste Indians that worship Durga.
I suppose they offend the religious feelings of Dalits, reciprocally, but they won't be prosecuted for that.
Religious freedom means that people are free to hold any views in the area of religion, and freedom of speech means they are free to praise or condemn any religion.
Republicans in Illinois want to exclude children of single mothers permanently from school and employment, as well as state aid, if the mother does not (or cannot) name the father, or find some substitute.
I think the state should offer a gratis abortion to any woman in that situation.
A right-wing think tank is demanding budget cuts so extreme that even Paul Ryan doesn't dare endorse them.
Joyce Curnell went to the emergency room, but the hospital informed the local thugs that she was wanted for not paying debts. They took her to debtor's prison, and the thugs killed her there by denying her water and medical care.
The film and TV industry in the US gets big subsidies, which is a waste of our money. The same companies then turn around and buy government support for unjust copyright laws such as the DMCA.
Democratic debate moderators from PBS posed questions with right-wing presuppositions.
The US right wing is not grateful for this support; rather, it continues to condemn PBS as "liberal" no matter how reactionary it gets. This is part of its long-term strategy to fool Americans into considering all views but the most extreme reactionarism as "leftist extremism".
The support for Sanders shows that many Americans are starting to recognize this lie.
Plutocrats in the US and the EU will try to get This Treaty Is Plutocratic finished in time for Obama to sign it.
They realize that the next president may be Sanders.
Benjamin Todd Jealous, former president of the NAACP, says why he supports Sanders rather than Clinton.
U.S. House of Representatives Approves Bill Slashing Wildlife Protections. The victims of this SCROTUS initiative would include wolves in the US and elephants in Africa.
SCROTUS = Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
After finding no usable scandals in one batch of NOAA emails, denialist Lamar Smith has demanded a lot more NOAA emails to try to manipulate.
Two of the computational idea patents Apple used to attack Samsung have been invalidated by a court.
That's a victory for software freedom, but an limited and extremely expensive one. We need to protect software from all patents on computational ideas, all at once.
These patents are often called "software patents", but that term gives the wrong idea of what such patents do. A patent is never associated with any specific code. Rather, it is a monopoly on implementing some specific, stated idea & in these cases, a computational idea. Any code which implements the patented idea, or any hardware which does, can be the basis for a lawsuit.
Another solution I've proposed is to legislate that software is exempt from patent law.
This illustrates the error of focusing on "patent trolls" and ignoring other patent aggressors. Apple is the biggest patent aggressor in the software field, and we can hardly call it a patent troll. Its products are full of proprietary software with malicious functionalities, but they are certainly a real business.
AT&T gave 62 thousand dollars to Missouri state legislators to get a committee to approve a bill to block municipal internet access in that state.
Even if they have to pay 10 times as much to get the whole legislature to approve the bill, AT&T will get tremendous return on investment.
Two Florida schoolchildren face felony charges for putting red pepper in a teacher's soda.
The school should punish them, but taking it to court is incompetence on the school's part.
I reject the practice of calling teenagers "children" merely because they are minors, but these are 12 years old, not even teenagers. They really are children.
"Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was worth billions of dollars to corporate America," extrapolating from evidence that his death has denied them the chance to make off with billions more.
An E.Coli's Last Message to President Obama.
Growing marijuana indoors uses up lots of electricity.
Why grow marijuana indoors? Because it's illegal. Even were it is legal, they still grow it indoors because they invested so much effort in learning to grow a good crop indoors. But legalization will change that over time, even if not instantly.
Baltimore thugs shot Keith Davis, apparently having mistaken him for the robber of a taxi, then went all-out to frame him for that robbery. They failed.
Will those involved in the frame-up be prosecuted for this abuse of power?
Whistleblowers Challenge Candidates: Stand Against Wall Street Fraud.
Everyone: call on Obama to endorse world-wide action against the men that murder their daughters or sisters.
Everyone: call on Indonesian President Widodo to protect the survivors of the 1966 massacre and give them justice.
US citizens:
call
on Kerry to block the Alberta Clipper pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
So Which Clinton Is It Today: Rebel Girl or Super Predator?
How to Get Rich From Public Schools (Without Actually Educating).
For 70 years, a study has tracked the medical history of everyone born in Britain during one week. It has uncovered a series of injustices that systematically caused avoidable illness, and some were corrected, before the UK fell to the plutocrats.
I think the Tories will end this story before it shows any more about what the state ought to do.
A team of local women has had great success in reducing poaching in one region of South Africa.
More money and more political will would do a lot of good in inspiring such teams. Pay alone won't do it, but these efforts cost money.
Seaworld sent an employee to infiltrate PETA, where he tried to provoke them into violence.
It seems to me that a fraudulent attempt to lead others into crime (so as to prosecute them) should itself be a crime.
The wealthy countries imposed tax avoidance treaties decades ago, through which multinational companies pay poor countries hardly any tax.
Since the FBI knows it can't ban or break encryption, it is now trying every possible method to break computer security in general.
Trump proposes to quash press criticism with expanded libel laws.
UAE Beat Foreign Prisoners And Gave Them Electric Shocks.
No wonder it is a US ally.
Some of Gov. Snyder's top advisers called for switching Flint's water supply back to safer water in October 2014.
If Snyder did not know about this, he was incompetent at his job.
New Mexico has legalized sexting for teenagers 14 and over.
I fear 13-year-olds are still in danger of punishment. You might think it is wiser for them not to sext, or have sex, but some will do it anyway and it is wrong to jail them when they do.
US citizens: call on Obama to nominate a progressive to the Supreme Court.
Israel has released Palestinian journalist Mohammed al-Qiq from imprisonment without trial. However, he is too sick to leave the hospital.
In Indonesia (and elsewhere), Islam stands for intolerance of queers.
Tradition in Java and Bali includes a lot of public cross-dressing. The forms of Islam that were common in Java in the past did not go in for repression. In the past few decades, repressive Islam has spread there. I've heard this attributed to funding from Salafi Arabia.
One of Australia's prisoners in Manus Island was just granted refugee status, after a long hunger strike. He can't walk or eat normal food. The Papuan government wants to move him away from the only place he can get medical care.
The US will start blocking imports of sea food from Thailand where there is suspicion forced labor was used.
In San Francisco, even employed people are homeless.
It is fine to insist that housing for people must meet certain standards, but not as an excuse to push people around on the street. San Francisco's first step should be to legalize sleeping in RVs. Its next step should be to provide homeless people with RVs, if not better. With all the wealth flowing into the city, it will have no trouble paying for this, if it taxes that wealth properly.
Senator Cruz wants the US government to have the power to take away people's citizenship by administrative order (not even a trial).
What next, Mr Cruz? Round up people on the street and shoot them?
The UN working group's conclusion that Julian Assange has been "arbitrarily detained" is based on the specific injustices of his case: how Sweden is using an unjustly conducted investigation as excuse to grab him and violate his rights. Here is its opinion.
This reasoning and conclusion would not apply if a war criminal (Dubya, for instance) were hiding in an embassy to avoid honest, overt and justly conducted prosecution.
They would also not apply if Sweden conducted its investigation of these accusations against Assange in an honest and above-board way.
2015: When Global Governments Trampled Human Rights in Name of National Security.
Haneen Zoabi: Why Israel Is Fighting the Indigenous Palestinians.
Global heating resulted in fires in forests in Tasmania, that for at least a thousand years have been too wet for any fire. Their entire ecosystem is likely to burn away as heating continues.
TV Pundits Praise Hillary Clinton On Air, Fail to Disclose Financial Ties to Her Campaign.
Many heroin users are using it to blunt the permanent pain of their lives, which comes from a lack of love as children.
I don't know if there is a way to help those people, but making reliable birth control and abortion easy to get will avoid many of them.
People who were not killed by Ebola have long-lasting brain problems.
The European Parliament adopted a non-binding resolution to stop selling arms to Salafi Arabia.
Obama is considering the ultimate treachery: nominating a Republican for the Supreme Court. With "Democrats" like that, who needs Republicans?
Fortunately, the official Republicans rejected this nominee. But that doesn't mean Obama, the great weakling, won't offer them an even bigger compromise.
The US government hired CMU researchers to break Tor anonymity.
India's subsidy for installing solar power systems it applies only to solar cells made in India. The WTO called this a barrier to trade, apparently under prodding from the US.
Its logic makes sense, but its priorities are twisted.
Facebook's Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data.
A disabled British woman, and her husband that cares for her, may become homeless because of the "bedroom tax".
The Tories keep imposing cuts on the poor and sick, which they know must push increasing numbers of people into penury. Precisely whom or why, they don't care. The cuts must be applied rigidly, even dishonestly, or they would not achieve the goal.
Sanders plans to solve two US problems at once: curbing speculation in the big casino and funding US infrastructure.
Incidentally, rebuilding the infrastructure will create lots of jobs.
The UK has treaties with many very poor countries, limiting what taxes they can charge to UK companies.
The TTIP could force privatization of national health systems, in the UK and (I presume) in the rest of Europe.
It could also stop the US from setting up a proper national health service, which it badly needs.
Foreign companies could the use TTIP and other such treaties to forbid states from imposing new taxes.
US citizens: Call on Congress to vote on whether the government can make companies change their products to snoop on people, and debate and vote on what power the state should have.
Post-war Iraq: 'Everybody is corrupt, from top to bottom. Including me'.
Terrible news: to avoid 2C of heating, we can only emit 1,200 bn tons more CO2 (or equivalent) from now on.
That is only half what scientists estimated before.
"If we don't start reducing our emissions immediately, we will blow [the carbon budget] in a few decades."
A French drug trial caused grave brain damage, sometimes fatal. A previous test of the same drug on dogs did similar damage, but it was covered up by trade secrecy.
Drug companies should not be allowed to impose secrecy on any information about drug trials. Any arrangements made by the company that impede publication should land the executives responsible in prison for a long time, and the company should be punished by cancelling the patent on that drug.
However, this alone is not enough, because imposing secrecy is not the only method these companies use to do corrupt medicine. For instance, when drug companies finance or control drug testing, they ruin its results. It is a fundamental conflict of interest. For a test to kill subjects is rare, but lesser forms of harm happen all the time.
Drug companies should have nothing to do with tests on drugs. The government should run them, and drug companies should pay through their taxes.
Drug companies have many ways of corrupting medicine.
Some members of US Congress have proposed to end the practice of requiring money bail for people accused of crimes.
The system keeps indigent people in jail for months or years, and many plead guilty to crimes they did not commit because the sentence is less jail time than they would spend waiting for a trial.
As Rivers Run Black in Peru, Indigenous Tribes Left Cleaning Big Oil's Disaster.
When an ice age ends, the Earth heats up — but nearly as fast as we are heating it now.
Bill Gates says there will be a "clean energy breakthrough" that will solve the global heating problem.
Mr Bill's faith in future technology is touching, but it's lunacy. Such a breakthrough may or may not happen. Our plans for avoiding global heating disaster must not depend on it.
Fortunately, we can avoid disaster even without any breakthrough — if we have the political will to make a forced march to sustainable energy. If, that is, we do not justify laziness by assuming that a "breakthrough" will make it easy.
Many web sites are blocking connection through Tor, or making users answer a CAPTCHA. The CAPTCHA typically requires nonfree Javascript software. Thus, these sites demand that you either (1) let them track your location or (2) run a nonfree program. Either one means mistreating you. I refuse to do those things — I would rather not access those sites.
I hope you will join me in rejecting them.
The European Parliament is voting on a proposal to ban arms sales to Salafi Arabia, which is using the arms to impose horrible suffering on Yemen.
Salafi Arabia pretends that its enemies the Houthis are "terrorists" that Europe needs to fight, but the Houthis are only interested in controlling Yemen. They are no friends of Sunni terrorists such as al-Qa'ida.
Why the FBI's demand to Apple should be judged invalid under US law.
The article's arguments is entirely valid, but at the same time it endorses "entrusting our digital lives" to companies such as Apple that develop proprietary malware. No thanks!
Advocates to EPA: It's Time to Ban Organophosphate Pesticides.
SCROTUS have proposed bills to allow lots more mining and cutting down of national forests.
SCROTUS = Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
"Smart guns" that recognize fingerprints could reduce gun violence.
A Canadian court ruled that medical marijuana users have the right to grow their own marijuana.
Journalists Should Stand Up for Whistleblowers.
Bolivia's voters declined to change the constitution to allow Evo Morales to run for president again.
He was a big change for the better, but it is dangerous to let one person be president on and on.
France has demanded almost two billion dollars in avoided taxes from Google.
After Sweeping Nevada, Trump Declares: 'I Love the Poorly Educated'.
Pick any cruel and bigoted government action: a substantial fraction of Trump supporters are in favor of it.
His supporters want someone who will be "tough" on all sorts of undesirables, but will Trump really do that?
I think Trump would be tough on the weak.
Clinton Campaign Relies On Rumors And Dishonesty To Attack Sanders.
Putting more CO2 in sea water, as an experiment, slowed growth in a real coral reef.
1/4 of US abortion clinics have closed in the past five years.
This is the Republicans' war on women.
Tories in the UK have suppressed almost 800,000 voters.
Pressuring restaurant chain In-N-Out Burger to stop using beef raised with routine use of antibiotics.
Black Thinkers Like Bernie Sanders. They've Studied the Clintons' True Cost.
This is good news, but since real outcomes will come soon, I will wait and post about them.
The Nissan Leaf records where it has traveled, tracking the driver's movements.
This article reports on how crackers have been able to extract that information from the car. However, I think the worst thing is that the car keeps these records at all. I am sure Nissan has a way to get at them, and I suppose governments can make Nissan extract them too.
The Heathrow Airport climate protesters were given a suspended sentence.
This means they won't be imprisoned now, but they are effectively blocked from further protest activity.
One of the protesters, expecting to be imprisoned, said she has no regrets.
I wish someone could tell her how to write her favorite music onto an audio CD with GNU/Linux.
The UK should repeal its "aggravated trespass" law.
Calling on the US and Canada to judge projects such as pipelines based on their climate impact.
The US spied on the UN Secretary General as well as leaders of various allied countries.
US musicians are afraid that if they criticize Israel's occupation of Palestine, their careers will be crushed.
Israel demolished the school in a Bedouin village in Palestine.
Israel has demolished 400 Palestinians' homes in 2016.
It's Obama's own fault that he has not closed the Guantanamo prison, because he accepted nearly all of its injustices.
Bahraini dissident Ibrahim Sharif has been sentenced to a year in prison for condemning government repression of peaceful protests.
In the twisted language of the Bahraini regime, criticizing injustice constitutes "inciting hatred".
The repression in Bahrain was imposed by troops from Salafi Arabia *, with the implicit support of the US.
* It's official name is "Saudi Arabia", but I think "Salafi Arabia" better describes the poison it spreads.
Arch Coal was secretly funding an organization that harassed climate scientists.
Regarding "antisemitism" in an Oxford student club.
Real antisemitism was widespread in the UK in the past, and it may still exist today, but the criticism of Israel's occupation policies as "antisemitism" is a falsehood.
Russia is convicting people of treason in secret trials, apparently based on no evidence.
I wish this practice were limited to Russia.
Organized crime now finances illegal unsustainable fishing of endangered species around the world. A group of volunteers work to catch the criminals.
I do not approve of releasing tuna from a fish farm, which they did once before, but that is a side issue.
Chinese dissident and whistleblower Li Xin has disappeared in Thailand.
At least one of the Hong Kong publishers was apparently taken from Thailand. It appears that Thailand is basically unsafe for anyone that China wants to grab.
This resembles what the US did, kidnaping a man in Italy and sending him to Egypt to be tortured. One former CIA agent is going to be extradited to Italy for trial for this.
US citizens: phone Senator Stabenow to oppose the DARK Act.
Everyone: call on the New York Times to admit US involvement in the war in Yemen.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to reject the DARK Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
It would ban states from requiring labeling of GMOs.
Prison thugs blocked delivery of printouts of EFF articles to Chelsea Manning, supposedly from concern that they violated the EFF's copyright. This excuse is even more ludicrous than it seems, because printing a web page to show a person who can't see it on the net is probably fair use.
The US and Russia have agreed to a cease-fire in Syria applying to all sides except al-Nusra (al-Qa'ida) and PISSI.
I hope this can work. But given the way the non-Islamist rebels are closely allied with al-Nusra, I am not sure the distinction is practical.
Whole Foods systematically lies to customers. Perhaps it should be called Whole Cloth, as in "made up out of".
The EU's trade negotiator told Exxon that the TTIP would protect it from pesky regulations.
That's effectively a confession that the TTIP is a form of corruption.
Right-wing law professors adopted "safe space" censorship tactics to claim that other professors had no right to dissent from praise of Scalia.
The article argues against the idea that we have to praise evil people merely because they are dead.
Protesters blocked the doors of the meeting room where plutocratists were going to meet to negotiate the TTIP.
Many Americans are rebelling against the establishment.
Those who blame the real culprits support Sanders. Those distracted with scapegoats support Trump.
Jobs After Jail: Ending the Prison to Poverty Pipeline.
Pro-Palestinian activists put up posters in the London metro, pretending to be advertisements, which criticize aspects of Israel's occupation of Palestine.
As described here, the posters seem to be factual and accurate. Israel and its supporters take offense at this contradiction of the one-sided official picture, so they describe the posters as "vandalism" and even pretend that they threaten violence.
Reporters Without Borders calls on Egypt to release dozens of imprisoned journalists.
Natural gas is not a bridge to a sustainable future.
Africa's Forests 'Threatened by Palm Oil Rush'.
China has imprisoned a Tibetan blogger for reporting visible facts people were not supposed to talk about.
Privatization of probation officers in the UK led naturally to mistreating them and the people on probation.
Global warming has caused sea level to rise at the fastest rate in the last 2,800 years.
It is not clear whether sea level rose faster 2,800 years ago, or we simply don't know how fast it rose then.
This study forecasts only 1.3 meters (4.3 feet) of sea level rise by 2100, but we don't know how much global heating will melt the Greenland ice cap in this century.
In any case, sea level will continue rising, and over centuries the rise could amount to 25 meters. Many of the world's major cities will be inundated.
Obama once again proposes to move imprisonment without trial from Guantanamo Bay to United States territory.
The evil of the Guantanamo prison is imprisonment without trial. Moving it to the US would not reduce the evil, only smash the last barrier against making it standard US practice.
Justice requires that each prisoner be tried or released.
Sanders once called for abolishing the CIA. So did President Kennedy, President Truman, and various other elected officials.
Sanders's opposition to the TPP exposes the bias of US mainstream media. MSNBC was covering Sanders' press conference, but stopped when he brought up the TPP.
Egyptian Army Court Sentences 4-year-old To Life in Prison For Committing Multiple Murders.
The copyright industry finds Australia's "three strikes" system for punishing people for sharing files not worth using unless they make it super cheap to run, and unreliable.
The relatives of people shot dead in Sandy Hook want to sue the manufacturers of the rifle and ammunition that the killer used.
I think this sort of unpredictable liability is the wrong way to decide what kinds of guns may be sold. That policy should published explicitly in advance, and companies that follow it should not be liable.
Thus, I advocate prohibiting large magazines, but not suing the companies that made them lawfully.
Maryland has adopted rules to encourage community solar electricity projects.
44 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Even Worse Than You Can Imagine. So says another person who spent years in solitary confinement.
A poll finds that US Democratic voters are more favorable towards socialism than towards capitalism.
I advocate a mixture of capitalism (allow private businesses) and socialism (regulate them tightly, tax them a lot, and keep them small).
Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye was arrested again, reportedly to stop him from gathering evidence of the rigged election before the deadline to challenge it.
US citizens: phone the White House and call on Obama to appoint a progressive to the Supreme Court.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the DARK act that would prohibit states from requiring labeling of GMOs.
1-877-796-1949
US citizens: call on Obama to withdraw the demand for Apple to break security on iPhones.
US citizens: Call on state attorneys general to investigate Exxon's climate lies.
Greenhouse emissions often go with air pollution. Cutting emissions to avoid global heating disaster could save almost 300,000 Americans from death from respiratory diseases by 2030.
At every stage, the winner of the war in Afghanistan has been … opium.
The suggestion at the end to put US money into rural development is, however, easier to say than to do. The US has scattered lots of cash for this, and often it only fed corruption.
Clinton ought to recuse herself from the presidential race for conflict of interest: namely, her million-plus in pay from the big banks.
The Pope's small concession on birth control does nothing to help women facing Zika under prohibition of abortions.
The US needs democratic socialism to fix its public schools.
Leading climate scientists call on the American Geophysical Union to reject funding from Exxon.
The Heatland institute* has published another report denying global heating, full of falsehoods.
* Its official name is "Heartland", but "Heatland" describes it more accurately.
US citizens: call on the FCC to require thugs to register Stingrays and get warrants to use them.
A Cairo art gallery was shut down by the government and will face strict censorship of what it shows.
Mexico's Missing Students: International Investigators Say They Are Being Obstructed.
Egyptian Anti-Torture Group Vows to Defy Government Move to Shut It Down.
The Australian government is subjecting democracy to a "corrosive" attack. It is promoting secrecy and reducing accountability to the public.
Australia had a series of three springs with record-breaking heat, and global heating seems to be responsible.
Right-wingers want to repress transsexuals with laws requiring them to use the toilets for the sex they were born with.
There is a real dispute here, between male-to-female transsexuals who want to use toilets for females, and other females who feel uncomfortable with people in their toilets that are rather similar to males. Both of them have good reasons, and I don't see how to satisfy them both. I don't have a solution to offer, but these laws clearly only do harm.
Now that a public inquiry will be held into UK thugs' practice of infiltrating dissident groups (often by getting sexually involved with women in them), the thugs want the inquiry to be secret rather than public, to "protect" these infiltrators.
Sanders did much better in Nevada than was expected a few weeks ago, and got almost as many delegates as Clinton.
The mainstream media are spinning this as "Clinton won".
Michael Moore's latest film shows what's missing in the US political establishment (including the mainstream media): the idea that issues matter, not only "winning".
The FBI unwittingly stopped Apple spyware from operating automatically in the shooting suspect's iPhone.
Colombia's supreme court has banned mining and drilling in the high-altitude plains which provide most of the country's water supply.
The "Success Academy", a group of charter schools, succeeds by ejecting students that aren't a big success.
There's a place for schools for gifted children. Just don't judge ordinary public schools against them.
US citizens: call on Congress not to privatize air traffic control — reject HR 4441.
The latest excuse for imposing total surveillance on the internet is the UK's plan to make all sites that have sexual material identify their visitors to check their ages.
It would be wrong to do this even if it were easy.
US Army "burn pits" in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to have made lots of soldiers sick, some fatally. Toxins were contributed by the garbage that they burned, as well as remains from Saddam Hussein's former chemical weapons programs.
Criminalising Boycotts Will Help Unethical Businesses Thrive.
Snowden explains why the FBI's demands to Apple are unnecessary.
Specifically,
If Apple makes a modified iThing decryption program to facilitate trying more decryption keys, that will affect all users of iThings.
Apple's current defense of one aspect of user's privacy would be admirable if it were the whole story. In fact, it is the exception among a long string of abuses.
The article mentions one of the malicious functionalities of the iPhone and the iBad: they are tyrant devices. This means they do not allow the user to run an operating system that wasn't signed by Apple. This gives Apple total power over the user.
Schneier says that "either everyone gets security, or no one does." For the iThings, it's the latter. No user of an iThing has security against Apple, because Apple can do any nasty thing whatsoever in the next "upgrade". It is infamous for mistreating its own users.
In general, no user of proprietary software has any security against the program's developer.
A Pentagon report in 2012 predicted that support for the (mainly Islamist) anti-Assad rebels in Syria was likely to result in a "Salafist Principality", basically something like PISSI.
That's what Salafi Arabia and Turkey wanted, but why did the US support them? Even in 2012, some in the Pentagon knew that the Syrian rebels were mainly Islamists. That doesn't mean Obama and his advisers knew this — but if not, they should have.
The US may have expected this "Salafist Principality" to be more like Salafi Arabia rather than the actual PISSI. That is hardly an excuse.
Mèdecins Sans Frontiéres has decided to stop telling Assad and Russia where its medical facilities are located.
It believes that they attack these facilities intentionally.
In many cities, apparently public areas are private property and people's rights are restricted there. This article describes the UK.
New York City has done it too, for instance in Zucotti Park.
The UK's dooH niboR government is proposing a pension "reform" that would hurt 20 million low-paid workers when they retire.
What has Bernie Sanders actually accomplished?
Thousands of people in Sydney protested against laws that have made bars, restaurants and music venues shut down.
These laws have avoided dozens of alcohol-related injuries each year, but maybe it is possible to keep the venues open and reduce how much alcohol people can drink in them.
Prolonged imprisonment of young refugees is 'state-sanctioned child abuse', says a leading Australian doctor.
The Australian law that punishes personnel who report this or other abuse of prisoners is a state-sanctioned coverup of systematic crime.
US citizens:
call
on the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect sea floor
habitats.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect forage fish.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: tell the FCC to stop Charter from merging with Time Warner Cable.
US citizens:
call
on your state governor to support a clean power plan for your
state.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
The UK lobbied the UN, apparently with success, to tone down its criticism of repression in Bahrain.
Many uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon are making contact, mainly because they have been attacked by murderous criminal gangs.
There is no vaccine against the common cold — or against the flu in general.
How Clinton enabled the coup in Honduras. Honduras still suffers from the effects of that coup.
Clinton's policy towards Latin America: support for the oligarchies against elected politicians that aimed to reduce their power.
Judges Have No Idea What to Do About Student Speech on the Internet.
Thugs across the US protested the conviction of the thug who killed Akai Gurley.
The thug did not intend to shoot Gurley, but did nothing to save him.
The UK plans to gag government-funded scientists (even at universities) to stop them from campaigning against harm that they have discovered.
An Egyptian novelist has been sentenced to two years in prison for publishing a book that mentions sex and drug use.
French Constitutional Council Rejects Data Copy During House Raids.
Large numbers of protesters surround the Australian hospital where a refugee baby is being treated. They are concerned lest the state send the baby back to the prison in Nauru, where the baby was burned.
Environmental Degradation Takes a Heavy Toll on Women and Children's Health.
Scalia was no "originalist". He turned the constitution upside down to permit Republican voter suppression.
Most of the election issues in the US this year are really forms of the issue of plutocracy vs democracy.
Erdoğan's move to tyranny, with the support of a substantial part of the population, compared to fascism in Italy.
Studying the relationship between forced labor and business.
A useful infographic from the EFF explain the injustice of the TPP in the area of copyright.
The article itself uses self-defeating terminology such as "digital locks" and "digital rights management", but the infographic itself does not use them.
Global heating hits the Arctic especially hard. This January set a record for the smallest amount of Arctic sea ice in winter.
Global heating will make the groundwater shortage worse in parts of the US.
Florida is passing a bill to make a list of organizations that support boycott, divestment or sanctions directed at the occupation of Palestine, and specifically cut funding to them.
Similar bills have been proposed in Illinois and California.
These are not local initiatives. It is an extension to the US of the campaign to prohibit dissent in Israel.
Global climate mayhem has happened before, and it causes entire ecosystems to collapse and disappear.
Trump stated his admiration for an atrocity (perhaps mythical) attributed to US General Pershing in the colonized Philippines,
I've read (though not in detail) that the US's suppression of the Philippines in 1900, when it had kicked out Spanish rule, was quite brutal.
Sanders now leads Clinton in a national poll.
Clinton's strategy of trying to prevent voters from learning about Sanders, by having few debates and obscure ones, was cunning, and it almost worked. Maybe now it will fail.
A company hires actors to pretend to be "concerned citizens", reading from scripts.
Documents show additional Volkswagen lies about the overpolluting cars.
Some US states long ago banned paying low wages to employees and telling them to make it up with tips. It works fine.
I tip waiters in restaurants, because I know they depend on it, but I would rather get rid of the practice and require employers to pay them an adequate wage.
Five questions to ask CIA Director Brennan.
US citizens: call for strong rules to protect US wildlife refuges from oil and gas drilling.
To reduce inequality, we need to change the rules that the super-rich have set up to grab most of the wealth that we produce.
Exxon is still lobbying and spreading misinformation about global heating, trying to stop society from protecting itself from the likes of Exxon.
Prisoner Albert Woodfox, who has been in solitary confinement for 43 years after bogus trials, was released from prison.
(The article was written before the release took place; I've heard elsewhere that it did occur.)
Connecticut has arranged housing for all its homeless veterans.
All states should do this — but not just for veterans.
US citizens: call on Senator McConnell to allow a vote on sentence reduction.
US citizens:
call on the Senate
not to undermine the independence of financial oversight agencies.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Ocean heating is harming some marine species.
An experiment shows shoppers on Ebay act in a sexist way. For most products, they offer a higher bid if the seller is male.
For a few products, the effect goes the other way.
Sexism has been demonstrated in other areas; for instance, evaluation of the merit of scientific work is affected by sexism.
My father's second wife was a painter. When she was young, she signed her paintings with a name that could be take for masculine, to avert sexism. Her paintings sold better that way.
Increased CO2 in the water may not directly wipe out coral, but makes coral deformed and more more vulnerable to viruses. Young coral organisms have special difficulty, so a reef might not recover after events that kill part of it.
If you want to stop Trump in November, vote for Sanders now.
The EPA will investigate how pesticides, including Roundup, affect endangered species.
Uri Avnery: Israel is planning a law to provide an excuse to kick elected Arabs out of Parliament.
PISSI is using children of 12 as suicide bombers, as well as teenagers.
Pope Francis Relaxes Catholic Prohibition Against Contraception.
This is a positive step, but a very limited one.
Evidence from Australia substantiates the theory that lead poisoning controls society's overall crime rate.
Uganda's main opposition presidential candidate has been arrested.
It is a fitting end to an apparently rigged election.
The FBI boasts of "disrupting" lots of supposed terrorist threats or plans, but won't explain concretely what "disrupting" means.
It also isn't clear whether these were real terrorist plans, or fantasy plans that wont go anywhere unless facilitated by the FBI.
San Jose Police Officer Fired for Racist Tweets Back on Patrol
Nauru has tightened security against exposure of how it treats the prisoners it imprisons for Australia by restricting visits by Australians.
This is in case they might be journalists. Nauru basically does not allow journalists to enter.
Nauru is Australia's equivalent of Guantanamo, except used for people not even accused of terrorism and even less accountable.
The EU is proposing to reduce regulations on clinical trials of drugs.
The biggest problem with clinical trials today is that they are run by the drug companies that make the drugs. This is a form of corruption. One specific aspect of this problem is that many trials go unpublished.
"Lighter regulation" on clinical trials does not sound like it would do anything to improve this. Indeed, it could make things worse. What we need is specific additional regulation.
This article gives too little information to judge the change, and that itself is a cause for suspicion.
French free software groups are suing the government for signing a deal with Microsoft. They accuse Microsoft of dumping.
The main wrong in the Microsoft deal is not an issue of competition, but that it is trying to impose dependence on user-subjugating software on the country.
Five Places [in the US] Where Police Shooting Scandals Have Altered the Political Landscape.
US policy in Syria is based on the fiction that a "moderate" armed opposition exists which is separate from al-Nusra (al-Qa'ida).
Obama and his top staff must know this. What I don't see is what they hope to achieve. Convert part of al-Qa'ida into a US ally? It might not be a ridiculous idea, given that nearly all sides in Syria have committed great crimes (the exception being the Kurds). But if we can forgive al-Qa'ida its crimes, why not Assad too?
US 'Likely Culprit' of Global Spike in Methane Emissions Over Last Decade.
It's the result of fracking.
US citizens: call on the FCC to stand up for network neutrality.
The UK Labour Party is concerned about anti-semitism in its student club at Oxford.
I agree with the opposition to anti-semitism; however, the claim that comparing Israel's occupation with apartheid constitutes "anti-semitism" makes me concerned that their definition of "anti-semitism" is too broad and that this is being used as an excuse to repress criticism of Israel.
The UK government has banned many entities from boycotting companies for several reasons, including involvement in arms trade and involvement in tobacco.
Boycotts Are Vital to Democracy. So That's Why the Tories Will Ban Them.
The Tories are attacking democracy in the UK on a wide range of fronts, including voter suppression, gerrymandering, and attacks on Labour party funding. This adds up to a plan to quash democracy and seize permanent power while pretending not to.
The Tories are lower than vermin.
Israel's politicians openly propose annexing part of the West Bank.
The Israeli Labor party proposes permanent apartheid in the West Bank, and terror bombing of civilians in Gaza.
Terrorism means making war on civilians. It doesn't become any more legitimate when the bombs are fired from planes instead of carried by suiciders.
Israel's parliament is trying to prevent "biased" (that is, critical) foreign press coverage.
Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says the big banks remain a danger to society.
We know that the US has not adopted the necessary reforms to prevent the banks from causing another crisis. The banksters did not allow sufficient reforms. It is interesting to see a member of the financial structure say so.
The fight to keep 80% of fossil fuel reserves in the ground is making great progress, but it's a race against the clock.
As part of this campaign, protesters disrupted a US auction of oil and gas leases.
The pragmatic case for voting for Sanders: Clinton is less electable, and her vaunted "experience" consists of supporting hawks and plutocrats.
The practice of tracking voters through massive surveillance threatens further danger to democracy as well.
Workers fired from a Lexmark factory in Mexico are holding a sit-in strike.
When NAFTA gave Lexmark the option of moving its factory to Mexico, it gave Lexmark the option of treating workers like dirt. I have nothing against hiring Mexicans; I object to mistreating workers in any country or paying them so little.
A judge ordered Apple to change the software in a suspect's iThing so that investigators can try more than 10 different passwords.
(I say "suspect", because legally that's what's pertinent; but there is little doubt that this suspect, now deceased, was guilty of murder.)
I do not object to this in principle, because it is part of investigating one suspect and doesn't imply snooping on everyone.
US citizens: call on the US Army to tear down Yellowstone dam and save the Pallid Sturgeon.
US citizens: call on the FCC to stop T-Mobile from violating Net Neutrality.
Lead in Chicago's water supply is the cause of a lawsuit.
Women in South America are begging for help to get abortions.
It appears that microcephaly can be detected at 22 weeks. That's not too late for an abortion a fetus with a grave birth defect.
The NSA's algorithm for detecting al Qa'ida couriers was an experiment, not a system used to choose targets.
The New York Times is suing the author and publisher of a book which shows how the Times' coverage of the US conquest of Iraq glorified that war.
Fair use in the US is not an explicit right, just a defense available to those accused of copyright infringement. Thus, even if you are pretty sure from precedents that you're going to win the case on grounds of fair use, you're still in a perilous position.
Americans rallied at 800 public schools to oppose school budget cuts, violation of local democratic control of schools, and imposed standardized tests.
Patients are suing a US Catholic organization for its broad interpretation of the policy of not doing abortions, which it imposes on Catholic hospitals in the US.
The Catholic Church should remove itself from operating hospitals rather than impose its dogma on patients.
Clinton promises total support for Netanyahu and Israeli hawks.
The EPA will start making rules to prevent spills of toxic chemicals.
Russian censorship of childrens' books is so absurdly strict that it provides a wonderful tool for selective enforcement, and for squeezing publishers.
Some of the superdelegates that support Clinton are actually lobbyists.
France has extended its state of emergency for another three months. The emergency powers don't seem to have done much good so far, except for the fossil fuel companies by crushing rallies during the Paris climate meeting.
Why Stopping Killer Robots Is A Battle Worth Fighting.
The Tories' latest attack on poor people is to eliminate funding for refuges for women victims of domestic violence.
Israel's soldiers demolish Palestinians' houses, farms, even outhouses over and over.
"Every single child of these families who experienced the arrival of the bulldozers and army jeep at dawn needs no social networks to hate and hate more."
People who report sensitivity to electromagnetic waves may really be suffering from something, but it isn't caused by electromagnetic waves.
Runaway inequality in the US has extended from wealth to life span.
Venezuela has raised the price of gasoline — a very important measure.
Subsidizing fossil fuel puts the whole world in danger.
The UK's local medical care directors say the NHS is degrading under the impact of Tory funding cuts.
It has been clear for years that the Tories aimed to destroy the NHS but were unwilling to say so.
Kanhaiya Kumar, charged with "sedition" for criticizing India's trampling of human rights, was attacked in court by a Hindu-extremist fanatic.
Hindu fanaticism has been a dangerous force in India since before India was founded. Shortly after that, a Hindu fanatic assassinated Gandhi.
As for charges of "sedition", any state that charges a person with "sedition" (under whatever name) convicts itself of oppression.
Burundi is crushing independent media, trying to hide the repression so as to pretend that the situation is normal.
Meanwhile, the country is plagued by hunger and disease.
As protesters
in Berlin called Netanyahu a war criminal German thugs threatened
to prosecute them for saying so.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Another instance of disrespect for freedom of speech.
The US government is selling student debt to collection agencies, which immediately pile on more debt, and send US marshals to arrest debtors.
A plutocratic state regards the people as its prey.
Big Pharma is trying to whitewash its image with a campaign directed only at 7000 elite policymakers.
This way, they avoid the embarrassment that would result if the rest of us saw their bullshit.
Each year, a thousand other women in Pakistan are murdered by their families. Sharmeen Obaid was shot by her father for choosing who to marry. By a freak accident, she survived to tell the tale.
The killer got off without punishment after she was pressured to "forgive" him.
Until state punishes these killers, private revenge is justified. Feminists in Pakistan would be justified in organizing to kill these killers.
The Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence tries to monitor torture in Egypt. The government, finding this embarrassing, is shutting it down.
While Lead Flowed Through the Pipes, Flint Residents Paid America's Most Expensive Water Bills.
John Kiriakou: The CIA officially tells agents to make false reports, which supposedly will be corrected by other reports. But sometimes the false reports are passed on to Congress and the corrections are not.
A particularly arrogant selfish jerk made the callous cruelty of San Francisco's wealthy people manifest.
After the "official" TPP text was posted, a sneaky one-word change was made that make the copyright provisions even nastier.
The tyrannical government of the Maldives imprisoned an opposition politician for "terrorism" because he led a protest against the imprisonment of dissidents.
In most countries, "anti-terrorism" measures are a far bigger danger to the people than terrorism itself. Labeling of dissent as "terrorism" is a world-wide tendency, found also in the US.
Strange that governments urge women not to get pregnant and do not urge men not to get women pregnant.
I think it is ridiculous to demand that either men or women go without sex for years, when a better solution is available.
There is no solid proof that Zika causes microencephaly, but evidence is accumulating. There's enough evidence to base practical decisions on the likelihood. Life decisions cannot always wait for scientific certainty, which can take many years to achieve.
It is plausible for an insecticide to cause birth defects, but implausible that the insecticide alone could explain the big increase in microencephaly between 2014 and 2015 in Brazil.
Perhaps the microencephaly results from the combination of Zika and a pesticide. Or maybe this idea can be ruled out, if some of the cases occurred in cities and the pesticide is used only on farms.
Sanders And Clinton Offer Different Solutions For Nevada's Sabotaged Solar Industry.
Seven Syrian towns are besieged and lack food and medicine.
In trying to cope with climate mayhem, we must admit that we can't save everything. As global heating advances and causes additional mayhem, we will have to choose what to protect.
The only way we can save everything — at least, everything that will only become threatened at later stages of heating — is to keep the fossil fuels in the ground. This is why spending money on mitigation instead of emissions reduction is total folly.
US citizens: call on Obama to cut military and nuclear weapons spending.
Everyone: Thank Kamala Harris for investigating Exxon's climate lies.
US citizens: call for an end to clearcutting in the Tongass National Forest.
Climate activists protested the US government's sale of oil and gas leases.
Zika turns the spotlight on the failure of the Brazilian state to attend to the people's needs.
The European Commission's plan for "sustainable energy" is based on the natural gas myth.
It formerly appeared that natural gas produced less greenhouse effect than other fossil fuels, but that was based on failing to take account of the methane leaks.
Privatization of public services, such as schools, hospitals and prisons, leads to perverse incentives, so that the company oppresses people to profit.
New Rate Survey of 500 U.S. Water Systems Finds Private Water Providers Charge 58% More.
Of course — they need to make a profit somewhere.
To the Washington Post, perpetuating a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court is "preserving balance".
A report says UK incomes have returned to the pre-crash level.
I suspect, however, that this does not take account of the way house costs and rents have ballooned.
US citizens: call for repeal of the military draft.
US citizens: call on the Senate to consider Supreme Court nominees promptly.
US citizens:
Call
on the Senate to pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Many indigenous women in Canada have been murdered or disappeared, but there are signs it could be 4000 rather than 1000.
Part of Australia wants to require music venues to scan guests' IDs, not just to check their ages.
This seems to imply a system of massive surveillance, far more dangerous than occasional fights.
Indonesia is planning to attack human rights, following the bad examples of Australia and Malaysia. People could be jailed for months on mere suspicion.
One part of the proposal is legitimate: to make it a crime to plan a terrorist act.
Global heating threatens Australian wine.
Vineyards will have to move to Tasmania, to the land where the old growth forests are burning down.
100 million people are short of food due to El Niño.
17 US states have agreed to accelerate renewable energy efforts.
US citizens: call on Congress to restrain US support for the corrupt regime in Honduras, by insisting on the non-corruption condition for US aid to it.
Turkey arrested a journalist for interviewing possible PKK supporters.
The US has banned imports of products made with slave labor.
I expect that some companies or countries will try to use trade treaties to make the US repeal this law, as they have done with other important laws to protect something important.
UN human rights experts say Australia violated David Hicks's human rights by jailing him as part of a deal with the US.
The deal was to get him out of Guantánamo, where the US was violating his human rights. Is it right to agree to violate someone's rights in order to get a worse violator to stop? And if you do, should you break the deal? It is a difficult question.
US citizens: Call on your state legislature to pass a Shareholders United act to limit corporations' political spending.
Everyone: Call for the arrest of Governor Snyder for recklessly poisoning the children of Flint, Michigan.
US citizens: call on the Senate to vote on the replacement for Scalia.
Israel's campaign to make peaceful opposition to its occupation policies a crime has led to oppressive policies in France and the UK, and they are trying it in the US too.
Some twenty years ago, Massachusetts passed a law to boycott companies that did business in Burma. At the time, the US had not yet adopted strong trade sanctions against Burma. Other countries called this a "non-tariff barrier to trade" and said it violated the World Trade Organization rules. Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, a law that prohibited states from adopting such boycotts: a victory for plutocracy over democracy.
This is one of the many plutocratist actions I condemn Bill Clinton for. Hillary Clinton appears to be basically the same in her support for plutocracy, which is why I will not vote for her for president.
Turkey proposes to establish a safe zone in Syria, near the Turkish border, for refugees.
I think the plan is a good idea, if it can be prevented from leading to a war between Turkey and Russia.
Turkey accuses Russia of intentionally attacking civilians to send them fleeing.
I would not put this past Putin. That doesn't prove it is an intentional plan. Maybe sending so many people fleeing is just a byproduct. If so, Putin clearly does not mind.
Federal Contractors with History of OSHA Violations Battle New Safety Rules.
Women rescued from enslavement by Boko Haram are rejected by their own communities.
This is not only an injustice, it will help Boko Haram too. They can tell their captives, "If you escape, your family will hate you. Your only future now is with us."
Patriarchy is so cruel.
The Issue is Not Hillary Clinton's Wall St Links But Her Party's Core Dogmas.
No one in Egypt is safe from the thugs. The torture-killing of Giulio Regeni called attention to what Egyptians suffer every day.
Why we must defeat Facebook's plans to become a hub for publication.
Facebook apologized for deleting Viz magazine's page, but the point is that publications should have to depend on Facebook to act responsibility.
US Shrugs Off Yet Another Report of Cluster Bombs Launched By Saudis In Yemen.
Beavers Blamed for Flash Floods in Scotland May Actually Control Problem.
The TTIP would give companies a lever to get rid of taxes.
Only companies — not people, of course. After the Corporations United* decision said that corporations deserve the same rights as humans, what businesses want is more rights than humans.
However, German judges say that there is no legal basis for the TTIP's special courts.
* That group of corporations called itself "Citizens United", but I call it what it was, not what it pretended to me.
Why Not Being Friends With A War Criminal Like Henry Kissinger Matters:
A review of Kissinger's atrocities and crimes against humanity. He's not the source from which the president of the US should seek advice.
Clinton has done little to distance herself from Kissinger's crimes.
US citizens: call on Congress to support the Food Recovery Act, whose measures would reduce waste of edible food.
US citizens: call on the Senate to give proper consideration to Obama's Supreme Court nominees.
In the US: tell Republican state governors not to legalize religious-based discrimination.
US citizens:
support
clean energy in/for US cities.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the FCC to stop T-Mobile from violating Net Neutrality.
Marks and Spencer was lauded for pledging to pay garment workers a living wage. In practice, the effect of the pledge is nil. These workers are paid so little they can hardly get by.
The low pay for these workers, and workers in general around the world, is the intended result of "free trade" treaties. That's why we must replace them with a different global system of trade, one that keeps wages up.
Bangkok Bombing Suspect was Tortured into Confessing, Says Lawyer.
Chemical businesses fund research — even sheer fiction passing as research — to give them excuses to defeat lawsuits and regulation to protect the public health.
Being bilingual helps the brain — so urge parents not to miss a chance to pass a minority language on to their children.
Why Conservatives start culture wars, and why they usually lose.
One of the few Egyptian thugs who was convicted for killing protesters (while most thugs were acquitted) will has been given a new trial.
I suppose the idea of convicting a thug was too shocking.
Matt Taibbi: banksters and their friends the Clintons have contempt for the little guys — how irrational of them to dislike being pushed into poverty and losing their homes!
France ordered Facebook to stop tracking the browsing of people who are not usedsof Facebook. (Remember, Facebook does not have users, it has useds.)
Facebook does this through Like buttons. The GNU browser IceCat already blocks Facebook Like buttons so it cannot track you.
Efforts to prevent "radicalization" or "violent extremism" must not trample human rights.
The FBI has ever more ways to snoop on everyone even despite the use of encryption.
Part of the blame falls on companies that want to surveil people through advertising.
"Smart" appliances are also untrustworthy.
This increasing snooping is dangerous for democracy .
Several Tory ministers secretly agreed to give fracking priority over protecting national parts and sites of scientific interest.
They don't expect to get cushy gigs from nature lovers or scientists, after all.
Saudi Arabia has investigated its own war crimes in Yemen and found itself innocent.
US ISP Cox is still fighting against being required to snoop on its users.
Australian censorship, specifically the criminalization of "hate speech", interferes with the debate about whether to legalize same-sex marriage. Stating opposition is likely to lead to prosecution.
I support same-sex marriage, but I also support freedom of speech, and this includes the freedom to offend, insult, condemn or mock any person, belief, practice, institution, or group. That includes gays, and that includes straights.
The Conspiracy Theorists Who Have Taken Over Poland.
The Mosul Dam is in danger of collapsing and killing up to half a million people.
Can't they release the water downstream to lower the pressure?
European Leaders Told to Keep Aid for Poor People , Not Hosting Refugees.
Without taxing the rich properly, support for refugees will in the short term fall on the poor. In a longer term, the refugees will contribute to the economy if there are jobs for them; but there may be no housing for them.
New York thugs want the power (in effect) to declare anyone a felon on their own say-so.
PISSI is accused of using chemical weapons against Kurds in Iraq.
Bahrain arrested American journalists who were covering a protest. The government accuses them of participating in the protest, and of doing journalism without permission. By doing so it confesses disrespect for human rights.
The US government can't object much, since it supports the repression in Bahrain.
Overfishing Is As Big a Threat to Humanity As It Is to Our Oceans.
What the article does not mention is that human population growth is the other jaw of the vice. To stabilize fish populations won't be enough unless we stabilize the human population too.
Russian air power is supporting the Kurds to advance in Syria. I suppose this is because Russia regards Turkey as the regional enemy, and the Kurds are the enemy of Russia's enemy.
Azaz is near to, but not part of, the strip by which PISSI trades with Turkey. It would be a very good thing if the Kurds captured that strip.
However, Turkey's recent shelling of Kurdish fighters suggests that it is on the verge of starting a broader war against Syrian Kurds. If that happens, the Kurds might lose greatly unless they get more support.
A giant bank bullied the UK government into weakening regulations by threatening to leave.
The courageous response, what the world needs, is to tell the banks to jump in the lake. But I won't say that the Tories were cowardly. I doubt they ever wished to deny such a powerful company what it wanted.
Tens of thousands protested in North Carolina against voter suppression laws.
Trump Booed for Reminding GOP of Bush's 9/11 Failure and Iraq War Lies.
Oh, the irony! Plain, unexaggerated truth from Trump! Right-wing nuts insisting on Dubya's lies instead!
Dubya and Cheney repeated those lies over and over, even after the facts were established; it was evil, but very effective at building a movement disconnected from reality.
TTIP of the Iceberg: Consumer Concerns Could Sink the US-EU Trade Agreement.
If we are lucky, we will elect Sanders and he will pull the plug on This Treaty Is Plutocratic (TTIP).
MSF Condemns 'Deliberate' Attack After Two Hospitals Bombed in Syria.
In Russia, official censorship is surrounded by a cloud of intimidation.
A few days before Uganda's presidential election, the state has jailed an opposition candidate.
All protests have been banned in Kempala, in a Paris-style "state of emergency".
India arrested a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University for "sedition", leading to a strike which has received support from other campuses.
5 Reasons the Top Tax Rate Should Be 80 Percent.
Puerto Rico is turning itself into a tax shelter for billionaires to parasitize the US.
Due to the failure of the US to rescue Puerto Rico from horrible debt, I must admit that Puerto Rico is acting based on provocation. Still, the competition to bow down to billionaires will hurt all of us, except the billionaires. We must put an end to it.
Everyone: Call on Tennessee not to oppose settlement of refugees.
US citizens: call for implementation of the Dodd-Frank provisions for alternatives to usurious payday lending companies.
The Union of Concerned Scientists reports on how lobbyists for the chemical industry have undermined government efforts to protect the public, as well as research on toxicity.
Many organizations have called on the FCC to ban ISPs from collecting personal data about customers and making them available to anyone else.
What they propose would be a step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough. It would still permit massive general surveillance by ISPs on behalf of Big Brother.
For democracy's sake, we must stop considering this kind of "solution" as a real solution. Regardless of what entity collects the data, it is Big Brother's use of the data that threatens democracy.
ISPs should be forbidden to keep any records of a user's internet contacts, except when ordered by a specific warrant.
Some UK doctors paid to attend a meeting with the health minister Tory liars moved the meeting and told them it had been cancelled.
What else would you expect from a Tory? The Tories are lower than vermin.
As banks gentrify old black neighborhoods, the Koch brothers are funding efforts to cover up the history of blacks in the US — of slavery, and the civil rights movement.
The UAE tortured foreign businessmen into confessions, and they are likely to be sentenced to death.
Zahara Heckscher: Why I Faced Arrest, Even as I Battle Cancer, to Fight TPP.
Relating US poverty and inequality to the systematic corruption of plutocracy.
A protest in London against putting public spaces under private owners that can impose private rules.
We have the same problem in the US.
Cornell West presents why American blacks should vote for Sanders.
The US has spent almost 2 billion dollars on the useless "abstinence-only" substitute for sex education.
It's effective for promoting pregnancy and diseases among teenagers, but no one can point to any good results.
Why Does the US Government Pursue Student Debtors in Prison?
Poland's right-wing government plans to strip a historian of an award, because he acknowledges the anti-semitism of Poles during World War II.
A plant disease is spreading around the world and could wipe out many kinds of trees and herbs.
Attacks on medical facilities and personnel are becoming common in today's wars.
Sorry, Corporate Media: The More Americans Hear Bernie Sanders, The More They Like Him.
Now that Justice Scalia can no longer spread injustice in the US, SCROTUS have declared the intention to reject whatever replacement Obama proposes.
I fear Obama will propose someone "moderately" right wing in the hope of gaining SCROTUS's approval. Obama has not much record of standing firm, but this would be an outrageous surrender.
US citizens:
call on Obama
to cancel nuclear weapons upgrades.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Yazidi women, former sex slaves, have formed a brigade to fight PISSI.
Right on!
Beyond contributing to the possible defeat of PISSI, they will also help the struggle against the general patriarchal cruelty of Arab society.
An autopsy shows how Giulio Regeni was tortured in Egypt.
The US Senate passed a bill to name a square in Washington after imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
China deserves this rebuke, and I hope it is adopted. Meanwhile, I
wish the US would cease its practices of
imprisonment
without trial,
extracting
false confessions through torture, and
imprisoning
whistleblowers, so that it could be in a good moral position to rebuke
other countries.
Forcing girls into marriage, often in their early teens,
continues
in many countries around the world.
It not only harms them economically and endangers their health, it
also increases the birth rate, which endangers everyone. It's also a
fundamental wrong.
The London "Garden Bridge" boondoggle, approved in a corrupt way,
would
drain the public treasury uselessly at a time when the government
is
cutting
public libraries,
squeezing
the NHS, and
driving
poor families onto the street.
Warner/Chappell has
agreed
that it has no copyright on "Happy Birthday to You", and will
compensate those that it made to pay royalties before.
The song is probably in the public domain, but there is no way to
prove that.
Turkey has
shelled
Kurds (or rather some Arab allies) that captured an air base in
Northern Syria.
According to Wikipedia, Azaz was held by al-Nusra (al-Qa'ida) together
with other Syrian rebels; the Kurds cooperated with Russia to take it.
I can't begin to figure out what this implies.
New elections are not enough to right the wrongs of Haiti's
rotten
political system.
US intervention is largely to blame for the rottenness, what with
forcibly
removing President Aristide and
imposing
the former president Martelly.
The UK is concealing
thousands
of injuries done to minors in private prisons. These injuries
range from suffocation to broken bones. The companies falsify records
and deny the victims medical treatment. But hey, they have to make
money, right?
To allow a privately run prison is to invite injustice. This practice
must be abolished. More generally, no government function should be
privatized unless that gives the public the benefit of a competitive
market.
Destroying
Democracy Under the Cloak of Defending It: surveillance in the UK.
Lexmark succeeded in using patents to
block
a company from refilling toner cartridges.
Yet another reason why we should
abolish
patents.
Hillary Clinton
Sugarcoating
Her Disastrous Record.
President Clinton's media law,
bought
by media companies' lobbyists, allowed them to merge and
concentrate, increasing their power. The biggest victim is democracy
itself.
No wonder they now support Clinton for president.
Kasich
played a central role in Bill Clinton's welfare "reform" bill.
US prisoners' phone calls are
often
recorded — even the calls with their lawyers, which are
supposed to be private.
Snyder's
top aides were informed about Flint's toxic water within weeks.
A data analysis company tracked
16,000
people at the Iowa caucuses.
I've read elsewhere that data brokers do reassociate these profiles
with people's names, by correlating data from various sources.
Judge Paul Cassell is
begging
Obama to give clemency to the man that Cassell was required to
sentence to 55 years in prison.
Congress has
prohibited
mitochondria replacement (to make a healthy embryo) in the US.
This appears to be SCROTUS at work.
I think that public funds should not be spent on fertility treatments.
Public policy should aim for a lower birthrate, as long as the human
population is too high and still rising.
The US birth rate is low enough for population stability, if it were
not for immigration; but since we do have immigration, and the US
population is still rising, we should aim to reduce both causes of
population increase.
Argentina's new government is offering vulture funds
75%
of the face value of the debt they bought for almost nothing.
Some vultures are holding out for more.
If they get as much as a cent, that will be a victory for evil. The
court should award those fund managers 10 years, not 10 dollars.
The poisoning of Flint's children resulted from Michigan Republicans'
denial of democracy: the
"emergency
manager" law must be repealed.
US citizens:
call on Obama to
update the salary limit for required overtime pay promptly, so
SCROTUS
won't get a chance to cancel it.
US citizens: call for providing the needed resources to
protect
unaccompanied migrant minors from traffickers.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to bar fossil fuel extraction near Western national parks
and in Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.
US citizens:
Support the Congressional
Progressive Caucus proposal for curbing global heating.
In a blow to the traditional rights of Englishpeople, a UK court
approved
of general warrants allowing the state to snoop on broad classes of
people.
An unusually high tide
nearly
flooded parts of London. The tide itself comes on top of
sea-level rise.
Tides are not likely to change much in the next few million years, but
our greenhouse gases are pushing sea-level rise. In a few centuries,
much
of London will be permanently inundated.
Egyptian thugs attacked two doctors; now doctors are
threatening
to strike.
Israel's parliament is working on a
plan
to kick out the elected Arab members of parliament.
Eradicating
rats on the Scilly Isles has allowed seabird populations to start
to recover.
It's really Scilly to introduce non-native species.
DeRay McKesson, a Black Lives Matter activist, is running for mayor of
Baltimore, and proposes to
abolish
many of the special privileges of thugs accused of violence.
Indonesia has
prohibited
messaging apps that permit use of LGBT symbols.
You can blame this on proprietary software. This prohibition is
effective because the apps are proprietary software and can restrict
what users can say. A state would find it a lot harder to restrict
people through making demands on free software.
Academics are defying copyright law to
share
copies of paywalled scientific articles.
Hooray, and may this lead to the elimination of copyright from
scientific publishing,
as I
called for 15 years ago.
When for-profit colleges
promise
graduates jobs which they generally can't get, are the colleges
guilty of fraud? Of false advertising? Or are they simply displaying
their grasping nature?
There is no need to investigate precisely how bad for-profit colleges
are, because there is no good reason for them to exist at all. The US
government should stop offering aid to study in them. That would more
or less get rid of them all. Traditional not-for-profit colleges
would pick up the load.
Clinton's Social Security Plan Is a Little Hazy. And
Sanders
Called Her Out on It.
That Brutal Charter School Video Shows That
Rich
People Love No-Excuses Discipline … for Other People's
Kids.
Erica Garner — daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by
thugs
—
has
endorsed Sanders.
Perfluorocarbons, used in waterproof clothing and on surfaces of pots,
can be
toxic
in minute quantities and persist essentially forever.
It's Not Just Flint. There's an Ugly
History
of Lead Poisoning and the Poor in the US.
Refugees in France, camped at Calais because they can't get into the
UK, are facing
increased
violence from French thugs and right-wing gangs.
They are not allowed to go to the UK, but France does not seem to be
trying to kick them out. If they can stay in France, isn't that good
enough to escape the persecution of whichever country they are fleeing
from?
Stop
relying on a navigation system, and get a map!
Kissinger was involved in
launching
wars and planning murders. With her hawkish views, it is no
surprise that Clinton is following his advice.
The Clintons have had a
close
personal relationship with Kissinger for years.
What this says to me is that if Clinton disapproves of anything
Kissinger did, she does not take the matter very much to heart.
Bernie Sanders Is
Changing
Hillary Clinton One Day (and One Debate) at a Time.
While Clinton has started saying things that are more progressive, I
don't believe she means them sincerely, and I expect she would revert
to plucratism if she got elected.
Political "compromise", nowadays, means
meeting
the banksters 90% of the way. We need a president and a congress
that will give the banksters the opposite of what they want.
2/3
of the world's people face a water shortage for part of the year.
We are
using
up groundwater as if there were an unlimited supply.
Let's
stop increasing
the world's population!
Assad has rejected a peace agreement and says he
intends
to retake all of Syria.
Treating
houses "as assets rather than homes" is a recipe for homelessness
and suffering.
"Dear
Americans, please stop dreaming of a better nation."
The Internet of Things: How Your TV, Car And Toys Could
Spy
On You.
UK
Counter-Terrorism
Laws 'Harming Aid Efforts of Islamic Charities'.
If poisoning children in Flint was not bad enough, Governor Snyder set
up a system that automatically accused thousands of people of fraud in
unemployment insurance. Only about
8%
of the accusations were valid.
US citizens:
call for strong
regulation of possibly toxic chemicals.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to stop private prisons from abusing immigrants.
Greek farmers and professionals are
having
large protests.
Michigan's senate
passed
a bill prohibiting oral and anal sex, in order to prohibit sex
with animals.
It is wrong to criminalize sex with animals if the animals are willing
and not injured. I've read about people that smear on their genitals
something that dogs find tasty, to get the dogs to lick them. That is
sex with an animal. The animal clearly chooses to do it. What part
of that deserves punishment?
Cleveland has
apologized
for trying to charge Tamir Rice's family for the ambulance.
AirBnB sanitized its New York City listings on one day in order to
make
false
claims about its usual practices.
I won't use AirBnB because I refuse to identify myself to
internet services.
Appeals
courts disagree on whether the state can set up a semipermanent
camera to watch someone, without a warrant.
I believe no one should be allowed to install a semipermanent remotely
viewable camera (a surveillance camera) looking at a public place
without
a court order. However, in this case, a security camera which
makes local recordings with no remote viewing could have done the same
job.
I think that that use of the security camera is legitimate. A
security camera serves to get information about any crimes visibly
committed in a place, and that's what was done here.
However, it wouldn't hurt to require the state to get a warrant to set
up an outdoor security camera to snoop on a particular person.
The former sheriff of Los Angeles County pled guilty to lying to the
FBI; he led and covered up
pervasive
systemic corruption including abuse of prisoners.
Honda
demands
that news site Jalopnik delete comments that report problems in a
Honda product, and demands information about the person who posted
them. Jalopnik stands firm.
This shows the importance of not keeping records about your users!
A Romanian Communist prison commander has been convicted of
crimes
against humanity.
However, other prison criminals are
not
being prosecuted.
Imperial Affluenza: The Pentagon as the
World's
Deadliest Spoiled Brat.
Snyder
ordered
Flint's lead tests kept secret while thinking about a smooth way
to break the news.
When thugs
kill blacks, you can always find some excuse to say they
had it coming to them, if you look hard enough. But looking for flaws
in them is missing the point, because these flaws
don't
justify the killings.
In El Salvador, a miscarriage
can
put a woman in jail. And Zika may cause an increase in
miscarriages.
Dalits in India face
bigotry
that extends to basic aspects of life.
Sad news: a study demonstrates
sexism
in judging contributions to free programs.
When a patch is visibly offered by a woman, it has less chance of
being accepted by the developers. But when the developers don't know
she is a woman, women's patches have a higher chance of being
accepted.
Apparently the women are more competent, on the average, and face
prejudice.
The Tories are adopting gerrymandering from the US, creating an excuse
to
redraw
districts to their advantage.
Erdoğan is trying to blackmail Europe by
threatening
to send Syrian refugees to Greece and Bulgaria.
What he demands is a free hand abolishing human rights in Turkey, and
perhaps attacking Kurds in Syria too.
On the other hand, Turkey has a legitimate demand that other countries
share in the cost of caring for the millions of Syrian refugees there.
The UK opposition warns that jailing protesters would be a
blow
against human rights.
Of course, that's what the Tories are after. That's why they created
the crime of "aggravated trespass", i.e.,
protesting
in an inconvenient way. Now that they have
adopted
Republican voter suppression techniques so they can't lose, they
don't fear political opposition; an inconvenient protest is the only
effective response to their abuses of power.
The Tories are lower than vermin.
The Syrian factions have agreed on a cease fire
starting
in a week.
It is not clear Russia will stop bombing, and if it doesn't stop, the
cease fire won't really take effect.
The cease fire does not include PISSI and al-Nusra.
Bernie Sanders
helped
organize civil rights activities in Chicago for two or three
years.
We now know how lead causes permanent brain damage, making boys
less
intelligent and more impulsive (thus more likely to commit
crimes). When will we learn to keep American children, both poor and
not, safe from lead?
Sanders and Clinton said they
would
allow US funds to pay for abortions for women that have been raped or
when necessary for their health.
Sanders said he would entirely eliminate the restrictions on use of US
funds to pay for abortions, if we elect a Congress that will support
this.
The last occupiers of the Malheur wildlife refuge office have
surrendered.
Please do not endorse their claim to be a
"militia";
that gives them dignity they are not entitled to.
More about
how
the FBI approached the matter.
New York City thugs have used cell phone trackers
1000
times since 2008.
Georgia thugs regularly push a speeding pursued car into an
unpredictable
spin. When this kills people in the car, the thugs hold its
driver responsible.
The UK government says it will impose a contract on the junior doctors.
They say
they
will strike, and if that fails, quit.
Someone seems to have falsely signed NHS officials names to a
letter
backing the imposition of a contract. Half of them have said they
reject the letter; some say the text was altered after they agreed.
What else would you expect from Tories?
US schools do a
lousy
job of teaching about global heating. Most students are not
taught that human beings are causing it.
The teachers are
not
very well educated about the issue.
MySpace has been bought — to mine its
user
data.
Even if a company has a firm policy about not mistreating its users
(unlikely), that is unlikely to bind whatever company acquires it.
It also won't bind crackers that steal the data, or Big Brother armed
with a national security letter.
The best thing is not to let the company get any data about you.
I do my purchases anonymously.
If Martin Luther King Jr were alive,
he
would probably support Sanders.
The NSA
merged
the department for defending computer security with the department for
breaking security.
Ted Cruz used to understand that torture is wrong, and said so. But
when he felt pressured to compete with Trump to endorse torture, he
did so by
redefining
torture so narrowly that not much would qualify.
Trump and Cruz are
promoting
the false assumption that torture is an effective way to get
information from a suspect, as well as the immoral idea that it is
justified.
Investment advisers are
telling
the US government that requiring them to serve their clients' interest
would be disastrous, and telling their stockholders that they
would cope with it just fine.
Even if Sanders Wins the Popular Vote, Clinton
Could
Still Get the Nomination.
It is
up
to the US to stop its violence-provoking deadly violence against
Muslim countries.
The US now has a law to give "sex offenders"
special
passports that will expose them to harassment.
This lumps rapists together with teenagers that sext (which may be
foolish but should not be a crime at all).
Some states are thinking of converting sexting into a misdemeanor.
While that might reduce the harm done by prosecuting them, it is
not
a real solution.
It also occurs to me that if having a copy of your own nude photo
becomes a felony when you reach 18 years of age, many will become
felons without noticing.
Egypt's foreign minister, visiting the US,
defended
Egypt's practice of imprisoning people by the hundreds for
protesting, then torturing them in jail for years pending a farce of a
trial.
Isn't it a shame that such a person gets invited to meet the US
government?
Isn't it a bigger shame that the US's own conduct does not provide a
clear rebuke to Egypt?
Why
Bernie Sanders is Winning the Internet.
Wisconsin's corrupt supreme court has issued several
arbitrary
orders to block prosecutors from appealing its decision to the US
Supreme Court.
The decision they intend to appeal was to shut down a criminal
investigation that might inculpate plutocratist Governor Walker.
The UK government has
quietly
erased the policy that ministers have an "overarching duty" to carry
out international agreements.
I agree with this campaign as regards human rights. Ministers must
respect them. However, I think there are some international
agreements that every minister has a duty to stuff in the toilet —
the business supremacy agreements.
Google will omit search results based on the
"right
to be forgotten from searches" for any access from a machine
believed to be in Europe.
Biodiversity
Loss and the Doomsday Clock: An Invisible Disaster Almost No One
is Talking About.
Two prominent US blacks, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander, have
announced
support for Sanders.
Here's
the
article by Michelle Alexander.
US citizens:
call on
Obama to allow no new offshore drilling for gas or oil.
US citizens:
call
for the strongest possible rule to protect wildlife refuges from
oil drilling.
How
Corporate Bamboozlers Intend to Widen Inequality in America.
(Hint, it's a three-letter treaty.)
The only way they will let any wealth trickle down to the rest of us
is if we squeeze them.
Sanders won a
landslide
victory in New Hampshire, beating Clinton by 22 percent.
Sanders' conclusive victory
demonstrates
Clinton's electability problem.
IRS Gives Up, Grants Karl Rove's Dark Money Group
"Social
Welfare" Certification.
Delhi thugs beat up a journalist who was
covering
a protest of Dalits.
A thug
chief in Pennsylvania is searching for all teenagers that have
made nude selfies, in order to
prosecute
them.
The Fiction That Drug Trafficking Is 'Inherently Violent' Could Harm
Sentencing
Reform.
Encryption is
not
stopping the US from monitoring anyone in particular, but it is
somewhat of an inconvenience for monitoring everyone at once.
Internet-connected
devices are already being used to snoop on people, by government
agencies and by others.
Bahrain has
imprisoned
a journalist for being present at a protest.
Bahrain has
repressed
protests cruelly.
Last Call:
The
Life and Death of an Ambulance Driver in Yemen.
China's kidnaping of people who publish books in Hong Kong has
succeeded in
intimidating
the whole population.
Feeding the
Military-Industrial
Complex.
Big
Campaign Cash for Clinton From Monsanto Lobbyist.
France wants Facebook to stop
sending
French users' data to the US.
Obama proposed a
big
cut in US funds to help localities such as Flint cope with water
infrastructure problems.
The UK's carbon emission targets will be difficult to meet without
carbon
capture and storage (CCS).
The problems are that (1) the Tories (who don't seriously intend to
meet those targets) have cancelled the funds for CCS and (2) it is
experimental and might not work practically anyway.
Distinguishing
between child labor and child slavery.
Some studies suggest that
sleep
deprivation encourages false confessions.
In fact, thugs use
many
methods to extract false confessions.
The article refers to a video on Netflix. Please
don't ever use
Netflix.
The NFL has
subtly
interfered in research about concussions and their effects on the
brain.
Canada will choose to
support
Syrian Kurds rather than adding to air attack against PISSI.
The US bent over backward to cater to business by weakening protection
of the Greater Sage-Grouse, but Utah is now
suing
to get the weakened plan cancelled.
US citizens: tell Congress to look at Transcanada's lawsuit and
reject
the TPP.
US citizens: call on Obama to use emergency powers
to
stop oil exports for one year.
US citizens: Support
the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act.
US citizens: call on the non-primary Democratic Party delegates
to
heed what primary voters decide.
US citizens: state your support for
Sanders'
plan to confront the banksters.
Cleveland is trying to charge Tamir Rice's family $500 for "emergency medical services"
as
he was dying from the shots fired by a Cleveland thug.
A former guard at Auschwitz will be tried as an accessory to
170,000 murders.
With
Tory success in keeping wages down and boosting rents, working
people now need to get clothing for their children from "clothing
banks".
The Tories are lower than vermin.
Repeating that slogan is vital to inform Britons that they should
blame the Tories, not themselves, for their difficulties.
50
countries have citizenship laws that discriminate against women.
In some countries, female citizens have children who can't get citizenship
in any country.
George Soros claims that Putin is trying to make the EU disintegrate by
sending
lots of Syrians fleeing there.
In the long term, I think PISSI
is more of a threat to Europe than Putin. For Putin, what approach
to take towards Europe is purely a matter of expediency, and he might
change it any day.
The Tories' "snooper's charter" is set up to collect all data about everyone,
a
recipe for tyranny.
Don't believe Governor Kasich when he claims to be a
"moderate".
He wants to hurt women and the non-rich much like other Republicans,
only he is a little less crazy about it.
The privatized prisons that hold families for deportation from the US are
unacceptable
places to put a child. The US government is scurrying to set
up a licensing system that would eliminate the requirements these
prisons fail to meet.
Checking Ted
Cruz's Climate Science Denial Clangers.
Department
of Justice Will Sue Ferguson to Force Criminal Justice Reforms.
Almost half of Syria's population is displaced, and 1 in 9 have been
killed
or injured by fighting.
Criticizing candidates for acknowledging that the US has
serious problems.
Peace Action PAC
has
endorsed Sanders.
Should we engineer the extinction of the mosquitos that spread
Zika,
Dengue, Malaria and so on?
In principle, I am in favor of wiping out Aedes aegypti and other
mosquito species that transmit diseases to humans. They will be no
great ecological loss. In principle, the loss of any species is
a loss to the world, but sometimes it is justified.
However, we had better be very careful not to make a mistake that
would backfire.
Meanwhile, we are wiping out thousands of other species
unintentionally through carelessness and inattention. Let's put an
end to that!
Supreme Court Ruling on Obama's Clean Power Plan Just a
'Bump
in the Road'.
Due to environmental racism, many mostly-black communities in the US have
bad
water supplies.
Fund managers that ignore the risk that global heating could affect their investments
could
be sued by their clients.
The UK government has
effectively
canceled a tidal lagoon energy storage plan by delaying the decision.
This method is somewhat experimental, whereas burning oll is a time-tested
method for frying our ecosphere.
A
Tory MP can't afford to buy a house and had to move in with his
parents. And it isn't even in London!
Obama wants to eliminate inconvenient legal obstacles to giving
Egypt's
tyrannical government tear gas and such.
Israel has sentenced Palestinian boys to
15
years in prison after wringing confessions out of them. They
confessed to throwing rocks.
Never mind that there is no evidence that any rocks were actually
thrown there and then, or that some of the boys were proved to be
elsewhere at the time.
The media
went
on strike for a day in Guinea to protest the killing of a
journalist there.
Israel is extending
collective
punishment of Palestinians that live near some who carried out a
violent attack against Israelis.
Israeli planes
sprayed
herbicide on farmland near the Gaza border, and even on some that
is not so near the border.
The Israeli Labor Party has gone
on
record for imposing permanent apartheid on Palestinians.
The Committee to Protect Journalists
rebuked
Israel's plan to deaccredit journalists based on the headlines of
their articles.
Haitians have made US-imposed President Martelly step down when his
term ended, and now oppose the new
US-controlled
election plan.
Here's how the US
imposed
Martelly on Haiti.
Here are
the articles in the recent
printed parody edition of the New York Times.
Palestinian journalist Muhammad al-Qiq rejected the meaningless court
decision to
suspend his
imprisonment without trial (but not free him), so he continues his
hunger strike.
An activist group trains people to
find
opportunities to meet presidential candidates and demand answers
about issues.
Forensic
Experts Reject Mexico's Claim That Criminals Burned Missing
Students.
Republican candidates compete to pledge the
gravest
war crimes.
US citizens:
call
for an end to US support for Salafi Arabia's war in Yemen.
US citizens:
call on Attorney General Lynch
to investigate the death in jail of Ahjah Dixon.
US citizens:
Tell
Clinton, stop lying about your vote for the war in Iraq.
Clapper acknowledged that it might use internet-connected "things" in
your home
to
snoop on you.
Chris Christie and the New Jersey legislature just
authorized
privatization of people's water without their approval.
New Hampshire
plans
to charge drug dealers with murder when someone dies from an
overdose or contamination.
This won't deter anyone from selling drugs, and
won't
avoid overdoses. It is just a way to look tough.
Dangerous drugs are used all around the world. Perhaps the laws and
medical systems of some other countries make overdoses less likely, or
less likely to be fatal.
Giving addicts a legal way to get a fix, with assured strength and no
toxic additives, could really prevent these problems from happening.
A better medical system might avoid deaths in some cases. Deaths from
guns, cars and drugs are significant causes of death for US males,
reducing life expectancy by a whole year, compared with some other
countries.
Ever since 2001, the US army has kept on fighting wars, and despite
its military power, it
has
never really won any of these wars.
I'd say this is because politicians have directed it into fights that
are unjustified and foolish.
Enacting Sanders Agenda Would
Catapult
Economy, Shatter Inequality.
The "wise", "realistic" people who say passionate movements can't
achieve
big
changes for the good have it 100% backwards.
Making things worse can be done working behind the scenes. That's the
way lobbyists work. But if you want to make things better, you can't
do it with their methods. You must rouse people. You must
demand
justice, and full solutions to big problems.
That doesn't mean it is easy to win. But at least that way you can
make it a real fight.
I think Clinton realizes this. She is not interested in changing very
much, so she can denigrate the methods by which that could be done.
Here are
7
groups of Americans who have been beaten down. Government policy
should be designed to help them.
Putin
invited
the Syrian Kurds to open an office in Moscow. I regard this as
good news. I hope this means Russian planes will not bomb them.
It's Not Just Water That's Poisoning Our Kids; It's Also Our
Collapsing
Democracy.
Ethiopian dissident expatriate Andy Tsege was
kidnaped
and taken to Ethiopia, and sentenced to death there. In the mean
time, he has been denied contact with his lawyer and his family.
RoseAnn DeMoro: I Will Vote for the Best Feminist for President:
Bernie
Sanders.
After chasing the Kurds out of their historic part of Diyarbakir, and
destroying archaeological sites there, Erdoğan
plans
to rebuild it as a boring modern city so they won't come back.
Mississippi thugs shot Ricky Ball dead, but they are
covering
up the circumstances and posting contradictory reports.
Obama is
sending
US troops back to Afghanistan. The Afghan Army can't hold out
alone.
I'm worried this indicates a US decision to prop up the Afghan
government ad infinitem.
Pakistan's
war on jihadis has greatly weakened them, and reduced terrorist
violence there.
4,600
academics outside Egypt demanded an investigation into the
apparent death by torture of visiting researcher Giulio Regeni.
Here's
their
letter.
The obvious suspects are the thugs and the army.
The US experiences
increased
inequality, without wage gains, since 1980, due to policies that
Sanders would change.
Former US presidents get a
pension
of $200,000 a year (plus office staff) so they won't feel a need
for a private income — but presidents since Reagan are accustomed
to so much luxury that they find this insufficient.
The proposed rules for more efficient airliners, starting with those
made in 2028, are
so
weak that they will be satisfied with no effort.
This ineffective initiative replaces the flight tax that the EU
imposed, which was shot down by
business-subservient
states such as the US.
Burma has kept foreigners in prison for
over
a year, using technicalities as an excuse to avoid charging them,
even though it is clear they could not have committed the crime they
were informally accused of.
5%
of deaths in the UK are due to air pollution.
Australians are
starting
to react with their consciences against the policy of disposing of
boat people incommunicado in inaccessible islands.
A UN panel accuses Assad of
massive
killing of civilians in Syria. It also condemns PISSI and
al-Nusra for war crimes.
India has rejected Facebook's
proposal
to trash network neutrality.
The European Union
wants
to criminalize all those who help refugees, falsely calling the
helpers "traffickers" or "people smugglers".
Maryland Attorney General: If You Don't Want To Be Tracked,
Turn
Off Your Phone.
Of course, we can do so. We can even refuse to have a mobile phone,
and that is what I do. But that is only a last recourse, and it
shouldn't be necessary.
Phoenix used to start its council meetings with a prayer; then the
Satanic Temple said it wanted a turn to lead the prayer. The council
voted
to cease starting meetings with prayers.
Bravo for the Satanic Temple. It is a clever
hack.
"Children are not little adults. The
trauma
of living in detention could last forever."
The NOAA set up temperature measuring stations in places in the US
with little human activity, to
calibrate
the temperature measurements from cities. It turns out that
adjustments to the latter, which compensate for changes in local
conditions, do a good job of it.
Georgia is
considering
a bill to make insulting religion a crime.
This is part of a worldwide push for more censorship. People are
entitled to the right to insult any person, any group, any practice,
any institution, and any belief.
US Representative Clark
proposed
a law against "swatting", a false report designed to send a SWAT team
to someone's home, and someone responded by swatting her.
I support this goal, but I have doubts about the proposed bill. First
of all, prosecuting false reports will only be possible when the
author of the report can be identified. Aren't most of these reports
anonymous?
Second, the bill is much broader, and makes any false emergency report
a crime.
Google plans to promote views opposed to Islamist extremism,
without
censoring the extremism itself.
That Time the Super Bowl
Secretly
Used Facial Recognition Software on Fans.
Electrocution,
Rape And Submersion: 'Gay Cures' And the Fight to End Them.
Just to show their bigotry, Republicans in the Michigan senate
passed
an unconstitutional bill to make sodomy a felony.
2015 set a record for
wildfires
in the US. This year will be worse.
The UN says humanity has made
insufficient
preparations to deal with a global pandemic.
This does not surprise me, because governments allocate to public
health the least they can get away with under normal circumstances.
By the time they see a need for more, it takes too long to ramp up.
Sea-level rise caused by global heating
will continue for thousands of
years and ultimately go up
25
meters. New York, London, Cairo and Shanghai will all be
submerged.
Clinton is close to lobbyists who
worked
against Obama's medical care law and against reform of banking.
Public libraries offered poor children a calm place to study and a
place to learn to love reading. Now they are
in
danger.
The idea that talented people make the world a better place has no
traction among plutocrats. They care only about their own children's
future; most of the population is of no use to them any more and might
as well die young.
The UK's
campaign
to prevent radicalization in universities would ban discussion of
Plato.
There was a 90-day delay in signing the TPP, supposedly to permit
"debate" which
did
not occur at all.
Germans are
fiercely
resisting a proposal to limit the use of cash.
Maryland
Bill Would Protect Consumers' Free Speech from Bad Contracts.
It is too bad that the article uses the incoherent term "intellectual
property". As usual,
that term is a
gratuitous overgeneralization, since in fact the law they try to
do this with is copyright law. Writing "intellectual property"
instead of "copyright" drags in several irrelevant legal issues
including trademarks, patents, design patents, IC mask monopolies,
trade secrets and publicity rights.
Children should not be sent to immigration prison. It
can
damage them permanently.
The US
wants
to allow UK officials to order searches and wiretaps in the US.
This is too dangerous. A search in the US should always require
approval of a US court, and likewise for every other country.
It must be possible to speed up international assistance
without removing crucial safeguards.
Syrians fleeing Aleppo are
blocked
at the border of Turkey. They are getting some supplies there.
Everyone:
call
on Ohio Governor Kasich to veto the bill to defund Planned
Parenthood.
Everyone:
Call
on Governor Snyder to testify to Congress about Flint's water.
The World's Forests Will Collapse
if
we Don't Learn to Say 'No'.
The UK's tax collection office goes after 1000 alleged tax evaders per
year, a handful, and they
typically
choose working people rather than the rich.
HSBC was fined half a billion dollars for fraudulent foreclosures, but
that
does
not include sufficient compensation for all the victims. And
nobody was jailed for this.
Noise from motor boats makes
small
fish more vulnerable to predators.
An Israeli who supports two-state peace spoke in London; Palestinians
calling for the elimination of Israel
violently
shut down his speech.
I am disappointed that he endorses the idea that speech can be banned
because it is "hate speech".
The Super Bowl (football championship game) pretends to offer the host city
a lot of "economic benefits", but the are
systematically
overestimated. (And they go mainly to some businesses, not to the
people in general.)
Churches in Australia will offer sanctuary to
refugees
threatened with being sent to Nauru.
Younger women that support Sanders
take
offense at Gloria Steinem's claim that they are doing it to get
attention from men.
She should know better than to belittle women generally like that.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at 877-852-4710
and say to
oppose
the TPP.
The Clintons were paid
over
$150 million dollars for their speeches, but Clinton said that
that Sanders was "smearing" her by talking about this.
India's government is opposing science and rationality, and
meddling
in university governance.
Clinton calls for
shaming
lobbyists. How about shaming candidates that accept campaign
contributions via lobbyists?
A poll finds Sanders and Clinton
tied
nationally.
Risking
World War III in Syria. The article says that Turkey is preparing
to invade Syria to fight the Kurds there.
Bernie
Sanders Lacks Foreign Policy Experience, But Also His Rivals'
Errors.
Voting for the Iraq war was not a mere error. It demonstrated either
grossly bad judgment or a lack of courage to resist the political
pressure.
Progressive elected leaders, who have no experience in military
policy, sometimes feel they don't dare say no to militarists. But
those militarists are part of the corporate machine that Sanders has
stood against for decades, and I think he can and will face down the
military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
Everyone:
call
on the US to drop its plans to prosecute Julian Assange.
The Israeli army is ordering Israeli bloggers to get
clearance
in advance for what they post. Yossi Gurvitz says he refuses.
Israel's unending, permanent emergency shows
whatthreatens in France.
US citizens:
tell
Congress to reject the bill that would endorse Israel's colonies
in Palestine.
Everyone:
call
on Florida to reject the law to imprison doctors for doing
abortions.
This law would violate Roe v Wade, and would presumably be rejected
by courts; but it is hard to have confidence in this nowadays.
US citizens:
call on
Democratic politicians to reject the "Third Way"'s campaign to cut
Social Security.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US cities made agreements with thug unions promising to destroy records on complaints against thugs and investigations of thugs. They also impede investigations of complaints against thugs.
How and why did the Nazis murder 6 million Jews? And what did the German people know about it? A new book studies this in depth.
German Competition Watchdog Wants 'Big Data' Hoards Considered in Merger Probes.
This can help limit the power companies get from their data hoards, but we need to do more. We should make sure no company can accumulate so much.
Amazon pays Mechanical Turk workers as little as 2 dollars an hour, making the excuse that they are "independent contractors".
Hillary Clinton Turns Stand-Up Comic: "I'm a Progressive Who Gets Things Done".
Sure she gets things done, but are they progressive?
The Conservative Playbook for Keeping 'Dark Money' Dark.
Studies show that organic farming's yields are enough to feed the world.
We would save a tremendous amount on pesticides.
PISSI's manpower in Syria and Iraq is said to be decreasing significantly, but maybe its supporters are going to Libya instead.
Colin Powell And Condoleezza Rice Used Private Accounts for Classified Emails (as did Clinton afterward).
I think it was a bad practice, but the reason why I won't vote for Clinton is her support for plutocracy. It took her until a few months ago to oppose the TPP, and I am not confident she really means it.
Thai thugs raided a bridge club in Pattaya, based on false information.
The European Union's Court of Justice is considering a case about whether you have a right to make a link to a copyrighted page.
Please don't refer to pages as "content". That term disparages the works that are posted on the web.
China arrested the leader of a Christian church because he opposed commands to remove crosses.
I don't object to laws about how loudly churches can advertise publicly, but enforcing those laws doesn't require or excuse arresting someone for opposing the laws.
Trump promised to reinstitute torture if he is elected president — waterboarding and worse.
After World War II, the US executed Japanese officers responsible for using waterboarding American prisoners of war. Torture is wrong no matter who does it.
Even a subhuman monster like Trump does not deserve to be tortured. Imprisoned, yes, if he does what he promises. The same for Cruz.
People continue to publicly harass women who don't hide their breasts well enough.
We would all be better off if women — all women, not just attractive women — felt no compulsion to cover their breasts. The taboo on them provokes exaggerated desire for them, this keeps men and women at a distance, and they understand each other less.
To see the bad effects of such taboos, look at an example that has more of them: Arab culture.
The Tories will kick tens of thousands of working British families out of state housing to make room for the poorest and disabled.
This responds to the shortage of housing which was created by Tory policies such as selling state apartments to their occupants, together with failing to properly tax expensive properties that nobody lives in. Banning squatting contributed too.
Many of these families will end up on the street, or in a remote place from which they reach their jobs any more.
Someone has decided to elect a provisional president in Haiti to run a new election.
It is not clear from this article whether the opposition agrees to this plan.
Clinton has "no plan" to cut Social Security but refuses to rule it out.
Marco Rubio is trying to pretend he was never a lobbyist.
A homeless people's charity had to shut its WiFi network because its ISP was going to fine it for forbidden file-sharing.
More casualties of the war on sharing.
A 9-year-old Dalit child was raped, and the surgeon at the local
hospital
refused to allow her to be admitted
and treated.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
In the US, patients are denied treatment for money. In India, it's for caste.
The Privatization of Terrorism Blacklists Will Damage Innocent Lives.
A Tory official planned a smear campaign against organizations that help women and victims of domestic violence. By accident he sent the plans to his targets.
Meanwhile, the government has eliminated the funds for the main organization that helps LGBT victims of domestic violence.
The Tories are lower than vermin.
A UN Human Rights panel has ruled that the UK and Sweden have violated Julian Assange's human rights by keeping him bottled up in the Ecuadorian embassy.
The UK does not care, though.
Tracking children with GPS is bad for their mental development (as well as their privacy). It "protects" them against a danger of kidnaping by strangers which is so rare it's not even worth thinking about.
Varoufakis: The EU no longer serves the people — democracy demands a new beginning.
I've said the same thing for ten years.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Republican bill to make it harder to prosecute bank fraud.
Republicans feel emboldened to act more and more blatantly to allow the rich to trample everyone else.
A wounded Kurdish journalist is trapped in Cizre by the Turkish curfew, and can't get out, since the Turkish army shoots people almost at random.
The Treacherous Plutocratic Poison threatens our liberty.
Snyder concealed knowledge of legionnaires' disease in Flint for nearly a year, then lied about that.
Yet another dishonest conservative political organization: "Millennials Rising" is funded almost entirely by old men.
Plutocrats feel no shame in lying to the masses.
Blood transfusions can transmit Zika, not surprisingly.
China admits holding some disappeared Hong Kong book publishers captive.
The UK's "everything is for sale" attitude occasionally bites even the wealthy.
The Catholic Church continues unbendingly to impose cruel bans on abortion where it can.
From articles I've seen, it seems that microcephaly may only appear late in pregnancy. Usually abortions are not done at that late stage, but I think we should regard microcephalic fetuses as subhuman and encourage abortion of them.
The US media opened an eye to the low-paid workers that deliver newspapers when the Boston Globe switched to a distributor that tried to pay so little that it couldn't find workers, and papers went undelivered.
McMindfulness: the commercialization of Buddhist techniques perverts their purpose.
Nader challenges Clinton to revel the text of the speeches she gave to banksters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley?
Progressive 3.0: Beware the Latest Version of Hillary Clinton.
The Worst Polluters Are In The Most Vulnerable Neighborhoods , Study Finds.
Americans generally buy far far more things than they need.
Those large houses are not found in the cities where most of my acquaintances live, because rent is high.
A taser shock can leave a person mentally disorganized and with gaps or errors in memory. People in this state may make false statements that appear to incriminate them.
The US has a prison in New York City which brainwashes prisoners into pleading guilty.
The brainwashing conditions are officially a secret, but we know they include isolation and sleep deprivation, as well as painful hot and cold.
Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine.
A sex worker from Ulster explains how criminalizing her customers has made her work more dangerous.
Ted Cruz's policy: impose theocracy and mass poverty at home while invading other countries.
Apple's latest system upgrade for iThings sabotages them irreparably if they were repaired by someone other than Apple.
The low price of oil provides a great opportunity to increase the tax on oil and thus discourage its use.
Obama now advocates doing a little of that.
Sanders and Clinton have agreed to more debates.
Coverage of coin-tosses in the Iowa caucuses was misleading.
The US will send a Salvadoran officer to Spain for trial for killing dissident priests.
How Big Oil Spent $10m to Defeat California [climate protection] Legislation.
The US released around 200 photos of mistreatment of prisoners, out of 2000. The ACLU believes they are the mildest and that the other 1800 are worse.
In modern society people are increasingly too busy to help a stranger in distress.
Ban Ki-moon said that the UK has a duty to stop supplying arms to Salafi Arabia.
Morally, the US does, too.
Isn't it foolish to jail people who joined PISSI and learned how foolish that was ?
"Taken at face value, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz's latest fund-raising pitch to supporters is either impossible , illegal, or a scam."
Uri Avnery's long campaign for Israel to recognize a Palestinian state has won the support of just about every government on Earth, except Israel.
Many Democrats are saying they won't vote for Clinton for president if she wins the nomination.
Sanders Campaign Is a Genuine Progressive Social Movement for Democracy.
Palestinian journalist Mohammed al-Qiq, on hunger strike against his imprisonment without trial, is close to death.
The Israeli Supreme Court says it has "suspended" his imprisonment, but it is not clear what that means, since he is still not allowed to leave the hospital.
Guber now pays drivers even fewer peanuts, and some former drivers are planning to slow traffic during the Superbowl as a protest.
Since Guber attacks the freedom and privacy of its users as well, we should close it down.
Former, Current Students Sue Google over University-Issued Gmail Scanning.
Women's Rights Crackdown Exposes Deepening Crisis in Chinese Society.
Salafi Arabia wants to send troops to fight against PISSI in Syria.
However, they might actually fight against Assad, which would put Salafi Arabia directly into war with Russia.
I fear they would also fight the revolutionary Kurds.
The US deported Angel Rosa to Guatemala, where he has no family. He is ill from gangrene that he contracted in a US immigration prison, and his children (US citizens who live in the US) cannot take care of them there.
The US says it will investigate how he got gangrene, but will they go to Guatemala to do it?
Sometimes I wonder if the immigration police are trying to demonstrate how coldly and callously they can implements the rules.
Ukraine's economics minister and his whole team resigned and denounced ingrained corruption.
Naomi Klein: Let's make this a real 'leap' year, and go fossil fuel-free.
A long interview with Naomi Klein.
It appears Australia pays smugglers to carry boat people back to Indonesia, since the government refuses to deny this.
Now that the government tells the senate "just trust us", it is totally out of democratic control. If I were a Senator I'd vote to deny that department funding, just to make it accept accountability.
Australian climate research cuts would wipe out programs necessary to measure how much and how global heating is changing the climate.
7-Eleven franchise owners in Australia systematically beat up workers to steal their pay.
Timbuktu Marks Rebuilding of Mausoleums Destroyed by Islamists.
350.org: Energy Bill Is A Big Oil Giveaway.
Sanders Vows To Kill TPP If Elected. Will Clinton?
US citizens: Support the Bureau of Land Management in regulating handling of methane.
US citizens: call on Rep. Wasserman Schultz to debate primary opponent Canova about the TPP.
The US had a massive anti-war movement just 15 years ago. You'd never know that, looking at the US today.
The New Zealand government preemptively harassed dissidents that might protest the TPP.
The European Court of Human Rights has reportedly forgotten about a case accusing Ukraine of negligence in failing to close the air space over the battle in eastern Ukraine, in which MH17 was shot down.
US citizens: call on Obama not to let Republicans block a raise in the limit salary for mandatory overtime pay.
Former Attorney General Holder, known for letting corporations get away with fraud, is now making commercials for Clinton.
Israelis who kidnaped and murdered a Palestinian have been given long prison sentences.
Israel barely holds on to fragments of justice, but an increasing right-wing current says to massacre Palestinians.
"Data-driven policing" means watching everything everyone does, making suppositions about who is a criminal, and putting them on lists of suspects.
If you believe that the thugs can be trusted, and you value safety but not freedom, you would rationally want this — provided you will never be a protester, a dissident, a journalist, a source, or a member of a low-privilege minority.
We ought to prohibit it.
Chris Christie is suppressing crucial emails about the bridge closure scandal.
Americans were supposed to fear that terrorists would poison our water, but we see once again that corrupt and unjust government is a bigger threat than foreign terrorists.
This is why we must not give up our freedom or privacy for security, even on the rare occasions when the security is real.
Taxing sugary drinks would reduce the problem of obesity, which leads to diabetes. There is no excuse for failing to do this.
Funding cuts in Texas for Planned Parenthood hit poor women hardest, and women who used to get birth control from Planned Parenthood had a substantial increase in pregnancy rate.
The Christian fanatics that attack abortion rights really want to attack contraception also. They consider pregnancy a punishment for having sex.
People in San Francisco are protesting the ouster of homeless people for sponsors of the Superbowl.
Russian bombardment is forcing Syrian rebels out of Aleppo.
300,000 inhabitants may flee from Aleppo.
French supermarkets are now legally required to donate food when it isn't fit to to sell but is still good to eat.
Big banks would get a lot smaller if the US starts prosecuting their frauds. A group of bank whistleblowers recommend how.
I am confident Sanders will do this if we elect him. It doesn't require new laws, just serious efforts to carry out the existing ones.
Yes, Bernie Sanders Is Questioning Hillary Clinton's Integrity.
She deserves that. I've questioned it for a long time.
I don't believe Clinton adopted her positions because plutocrats approached her and said, "We will give you money if you adopt these positions." She would never do anything so crass. Rather, she knew what plutocrats wanted (just as we all do). She could take a stand for their side without ever having a discussion with them about it.
Israel has banned Palestinian prisoners from receiving books.
A few years ago, the UK banned prisoners from receiving books.
Human rights defenders in Israel face intimidation; Breaking the Silence meetings are cancelled, and people are afraid to criticize the right-wing dominance.
One fanatic wants thugs to systematically kill Palestinians rather than arrest them.
The accusations made by a right-winger against a human rights defender in the Tel Aviv City Council demonstrate the contempt for the truth typical of the right-wing that now dominates Israel. Look at his claim that Breaking the Silence is "silencing people" by publishing what Israeli soldiers say about what they saw and did in the occupation. The only adequate term is Orwell's term, "blackwhiting".
States and businesses are increasingly rejecting Israel's colonization of Palestinian territory. Even the US is criticizing it more than before.
A lot more is needed, but it is good to see progress.
Israel has put Ramallah under siege, as a form of collective punishment.
Car companies lobbied the European Parliament into accepting misleading pollution tests.
Obama is just about to sign the TPP, which would be a climate disaster.
If he does not sign, he won't get his multimillion-dollar payoff.
"Golden rice" is held back by practical drawbacks, such as poor yield in real farms, and it's not clear how much it would help those who are nutritionally deprived.
In the US, convicts are proved innocent at the rate of three a week.
Some of the false convictions were caused by dishonest thugs and prosecutors.
Hong Kong publisher Li Xin was apparently kidnaped in Thailand and taken to China.
In the US, middle-wage jobs are disappearing: new technology creates only poverty-level jobs.
Michael Moore: 10 Things They Won't Tell You About the Flint Water Tragedy, But I Will.
One of the FCC commissioners proposes that net-connected devices should permit the users to study the source code.
This is not enough to make them free software, or even "open source", but it would be a step towards that.
Unfortunately, the TPP would prohibit this.
Everyone: ask how Gynnya McMillen died in jail.
US citizens: tell the FTC to fight pharma mergers.
US citizens: call
on the Senate to reject the DARK Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress to
expand
Social Security benefits.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Everyone: tell Governor Snyder to resign.
US citizens: call on Congress to debate whether to fight in Libya again.
US citizens: tell Senate Democrats to stop the "Energy Policy Modernization Act".
Professor Marc Edwards, who helped expose the poisoned water in Flint, says that funding pressures on academics and government agencies have destroyed public interest science in the US.
Google censored installation of Samsung's ad-blocker, saying that blocking ads is "interference" with the sites that advertise (and surveil users through ads).
The ad-blocker is proprietary software, just like the program (Google Play) that Google used to deny access to install it. Using a nonfree program gives the owner power over you, and Google has exercised that power.
A French Catholic pressure group is pressuring France to restrict some well-known, controversial movies.
Michigan Republicans banned local governments and schools from giving information about ballot questions.
Professor Resat Baris Unlu was acquitted of charges based on the exam question in which he asked about comparing writings by the leader of a Kurdish rebel group.
I fear students might have been charged with crimes because of their answers, too.
Unprecedented fires in world heritage forests in Tasmania may now be the "new normal".
No one was prepared or equipped to fight the fires that are destroying thousand-year-old trees. The whole ecosystem may be destroyed by them.
When I visited Lebanon, I saw some of the last remaining cedars. Those trees can live a thousand years, too; but most of them were destroyed in the civil war.
Pakistan blocks nearly all foreign journalists from Balochistan, and tells newspapers there what to publish.
Refugee children in Australia, who are now at risk to be sent to Nauru, have tried to kill themselves.
US coal use is declining a noticeable amount.
This is good because it reduces toxic pollution. Burning natural gas doesn't make much of that. However, natural gas implies methane leaks, so replacing coal with gas doesn't reduce global heating the way companies claim.
A proposed giant coal mine in Australia has been suspended because the export coal market has shrunk.
That is good for the Great Barrier Reef, but burning Indian coal in India will pump almost as much CO2 as burning Australian coal in India.
Australia is cutting hundreds of jobs in climate research in order to make its research organization "collaborate better with industry".
Apparently this refers to the global heating industry.
"Mitigation and adaptation" is the last ditch excuse of the planet roasters: the pretense that cleverness can prevent global heating from causing disasters, so we don't need to work expeditiously to curb it.
Undocumented immigrants in the UK skip prenatal care and give birth at home, because they can't afford to pay almost $10,000 in medical fees.
Zika can be transmitted sexually.
Walmart was sentenced to pay 31 million dollars for operating its pharmacy incompetently and firing a whistleblower.
Right-wing politicians in various EU countries are planning sweeping deregulation of business.
Iran has imprisoned a former BBC journalist, evidently about his writing.
People are being raised to see domesticated and wild animals as anthropomophic toys. It's as if they were considered imperfect approximations of a funny animal cartoon.
US businesses, operating through ALEC, are taking aim at local democracy.
US prisons create excuses to keep prisoners in solitary for years, and do this over the tiniest excuses.
Michigan officials ignored EPA warnings about Flint's water. But the EPA did not treat the matter with sufficient urgency.
Jimmy Carter: Citizens United 'Gives Legal Bribery a Chance to Prevail'.
New Safe Harbor Data "Deal" May Be More Politicking Than Surveillance Reform.
'This is a Joke': Snowden, Others Slam New EU-US Data Sharing Deal.
North Carolina's voting law was intentionally designed to block various minorities from voting.
The background for "Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition."
Microcephaly results in babies so mentally crippled that they are hardly human.
I think they call for euthanasia, like a badly crippled dog.
China is now repressing the labor movement.
Social movements in Argentina are reacting strongly against Monsanto's GMOs.
The world is awash in oil and that the price has collapsed, but plutocratic states keep subsidizing the oil companies.
When It Comes to Public Schooling, US Gets a Failing Grade.
Mexico imprisoned Nestora Salgado for running a citizens' anti-narco organization that operated lawfully.
An Ankara University professor faces 7 years in prison for asking students to compare two articles written by Abdullah Öcalan.
Australia's Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot keep refugees in foreign prisons forever while making up its mind very slowly about their cases.
US citizens: phone your senators and say, don't use Flint to pass subsidies for fossil fuels.
Their "call tool" probably requires nonfree software, so skip that and call your senators directly.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call for an investigation of Clayton Homes for racial bias in lending.
The FBI Says It Can't Disclose Its Records Because Then the Public Would Know How the Bureau Works.
It is spreading further. The former head of the Department of Homeland Security has applied that organization's approach in monitoring faculty and students at the University of California. Professors condemn this snooping.
She refuses even to discuss what kinds of monitoring are being done. Supposedly our own safety forbids giving us any say in how much we are monitored. That's a recipe for tyranny — in DHS or in UC.
Professors should set up their own local networks, and relay data in and out of UC encrypted, to protect themselves and the students.
The article refers to security breakers as "hackers". To avoid giving us hackers a bad name, please use the term "crackers" for that.
The US and EU have agreed on a deal for sending European data to the US. The US will very seriously promise not to have the NSA look at it.
If you believe that promise …
Do not live-stream thugs' body cameras!
Here's my proposal for controlling them.
The Internet Of Things Will Be The World's Biggest Robot.
The article suffers from a confusion when it says "It will collect data and do things in our interests; that's why we're building it." Who is this "we"? The most he could validly claim is that each part serves someone's interest.
In a just and democratic world, perhaps you could expect these devices to be benign towards you. In fact, parts are already designed and used to monitor and control people. For instance, since it is possible to spoof fitness data that insurance companies use to monitor people, the article advocates designing the devices to communicate with a company in a way that totally bypasses the subject being monitored. This demonstrates that they are a system of control imposed on a subject, not a product offered to a user.
The use of such devices for any sort of monitoring should be prohibited by law. All data they produce should be made available directly to the user, and only in that way.
These devices can probably tell whether someone is having sex (though Oral Roberts University says it isn't checking that at present).
I suppose that university permits only Oral sex.
Most of the refugees traveling to Europe by boat now are women and children.
Although David Koch is no longer on the WGBH-TV board, he continues to exert his baneful influence on the science program NOVA.
Committee to Protect Journalists calls for an independent investigation of the killing of journalists in Yemen.
Go to New Hampshire this weekend to volunteer for the Sanders campaign. The New Hampshire primary is next Tuesday, and it is important that he get an astonishing victory to influence other states.
Demanding to remove the statue of an racist conqueror such as Cecil Rhodes is a substitute for eliminating institutional racism and class bias.
Where a symbol of racism is actively adored by some political groups, as for instance the confederate flag, it makes a real difference to demand that institutions (especially governments) visibly reject that symbol. However, nobody admires Rhodes today as a symbol of anything.
Canada has set up a large area of protected forest.
In retaliation for the US' barring of some Russian officials for the killing of Sergey Magnitsky, Russia has barred some former US officials, accusing them of involvement in torture.
I don't know whether these people were in fact associated with torture by the US, but if they were, that is plenty of reason for any country to refuse to let them in. Or to let them in and then prosecute them.
But it changes nothing about the killing of Magnitsky.
US citizens: call on Congress to oppose the TPP.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to resist plans to help business lobbyists block regulations of business.
US citizens: Phone
the White House at 855-239-1424 to call on Obama to cancel the new nuclear cruise missile.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Israel is back to demolishing the homes of Palestinians.
India's Hindu nationalists are systematically persecuting dissidents, drumming teachers out of schools, and prosecuting writer Arundhati Roy for criticizing them.
The FBI is investigating possible crimes to prosecute in the delivery of poisoned water to Flint.
Facebook's natalist pressure.
How about pointing out some great non-mothers and great non-fathers? People who took advantage of not having children to dedicate effort to something more constructive than increasing the number of humans?
When ravens hide food, they can understand whether the surrounding make it possible that another raven could be watching.
Sanders and Clinton got roughly equal numbers of delegates out of the Iowa caucuses.
Clinton has backed off attacking Sanders' push for universal health care, and has returned to supporting the idea. I guess that attack was backfiring.
Several important primaries will be held this month and on March 1. If you would like Sanders to win, please volunteer to help his campaign — don't put it off.
Noise from ships seems to harm whales.
Our overfishing of their prey, which in some cases we are driving to extinction, hurts them too.
Monsanto paid a university for a professor to write articles condemning labeling of GMOs.
The US is heavily surveilling everyone in the vicinity of the Super Bowl, which might mean everyone in San Francisco and the peninsula.
Past experience suggests that augmentations of surveillance for a sports event remain permanently afterward.
There is a lot of political pressure in the EU to demand that Greece force migrants back to Turkey.
99,000 families were evicted last year in the UK, as rents keep rising and the Tories keep cutting welfare.
The Tories are lower than vermin.
Putin's bombing campaign in Syria, aimed mainly at groups opposed to both Assad and PISSI, has the main effect of strengthening PISSI.
Thousands of chemicals are put in products as "fragrance", and some can be toxic or cause allergic reactions. It's hard to find out which "fragrance" chemicals are found in products.
We have no obligation to cater to companies' wish to keep secrets when any public interest is at stake. I think we should require publication of the full list of possibly volatile substances in every product.
Fires in California ruined a
large
part of the vineyards' harvest.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Study: DNA Test Agreements Disregard Consumer Privacy.
Like many articles about new abusive practices, this article legitimizes the known, current abuses. I think that is a mistake. We should not limit ourselves to opposing further changes for the worse. We must campaign to get rid of the existing evils too.
An Australian boy faces being questioned in secret about his mother and his brother, and faces imprisonment if he ever discusses it with them.
Trying to obey those strictures would ruin his life anyway, so it makes sense for him to respond courageously: "You're going to imprison me sooner or later, so I won't serve you now merely to postpone it. I refuse to answer."
I don't know what they are suspected of, but it can't be as dangerous as what the government is doing here.
The employees at e-waste scrapping facilities pick up lead on their skin and hands, and it's enough to give their children lead poisoning.
An ordinary shower does not wash it off.
How Denmark cares for old people.
Other arrangements might also work well, but it puts most other countries to shame.
Kansas took away a veteran's children as he was preparing to move to Colorado, because he lawfully used medical marijuana in Colorado.
"Internet assistants" have a secondary danger, beyond just snooping on their users and being SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute).
It is amusing how someone can be blind to the dangers of these things and worry only about a secondary danger. The secondary danger is real, and the article makes a valid point — but don't forget the primary dangers.
The UK has given permission to make genetically modified human embryos and experiment on each one for two weeks.
The two-week limit seems hypercautious to me; there would be nothing wrong with keeping them for 5 months. However, implanting them into a woman would require advance consent to a mandatory abortion. While abortion is safer and less traumatic than giving birth, it is not something to ask lightly.
The Myth of the ISIS Encrypted Messaging App.
Was it right to fine a bakery for refusing to make a cake with the message, "support gay marriage"?
I think individuals should be free to refuse to spread messages they disagree with, and most other organizations too, but not publication companies. Publication companies should be considered common carriers, required to publish whatever customers will pay for, unless there is so much competition that there is no difficulty finding one to publish whatever you want to publish.
Cambodian women are trafficked to China as wives/slaves; when they escape and get home, they are rejected by their communities, even parts of their families.
The root of this crime is treating women as things, as property.
The foxes and vultures are waiting to buy parts of Havana as resorts for rich foreigners.
I expect that politicians will profit from this wealth, and a few random Cubans, but I think most Cubans will not even get trickle-down.
Inequality is growing in South Korea. Those not privileged must work 14-hour days for low pay, and can barely get by.
It's what's happening in the US, only more so.
After a hypocritical "apology", Japan once again denies enslaving women as prostitutes during World War II.
WHO says, don't let children watch films in which characters smoke.
Most climate studies don't look at what will happen after 2100. However, global heating won't stop then.
If high-tech civilization survives till 2100, it may be able to bring down the levels of CO2 in the air.
Here's How Hard It Will Be to Unpoison Flint's Water.
It's not that the Flint river water itself contains lots of lead. Rather, using that water involves so much chlorine that it corrodes the lead pipes.
The Lead Pipes in Flint, Michigan, Are a Tiny Part of a Huge Problem (of lead poisoning in the US).
US citizens: call for an end to the investigation of Planned Parenthood. We already know there is nothing to find.
US citizens: Call for transparency on how the
Volcker
rule is working.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the EPA to reduce Diesel emissions from cargo shipping.
US citizens: phone your senators and say to oppose Orrin Hatch's amendment which would resume federal sale of coal leases.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on Congress to respect Obama's gun control executive orders.
Everyone: call on Governor Snyder to fix the Flint water supply, and meanwhile stop charging for the toxic water.
US citizens: Call on the state to stop deporting aliens in Flint for trying to buy water, and stop making them show government papers to get water.
US citizens: call on the FCC to block the merger of Time Warner Cable with Charter.
US citizens: call on the EPA to ban neonicotinoid pesticides
The EPA has just recognized that neonicotinoids contribute to the death of bees.
It is possible that other causes contribute as well, such as the varroa mite. But we can't get rid of them, or prevent them from doing damage — and we need the bees.
Everyone: call on Congress and states to close the gender pay gap.
US citizens: call on Senator Schumer to support a law requiring shell companies to disclose who they are hiding.
A German girl claimed to have been raped by immigrants. But then she said she had made it up.
The effects of her claim will probably not vanish away, alas.
Right-wing changes in an Israeli civics textbook have provoked protests from teachers, and from one of the authors of the book.
General forecast for the next five years: even hotter than 2015.
10,000 child refugees in Europe are missing, and maybe a large fraction have been enslaved.
Tories Lobbying to Protect Google's £30bn Island Tax Haven.
Uber is selling low and losing money to destroy its competitors.
If you are a short-term thinker, you will be delighted to take advantage of this — until it controls the market and squeezes you forever.
The article mentions a service called Kutsuplus as an alternative to Guber's model. It might have been better in some ways, but could people use it anonymously? Could they use it without running nonfree software? If not, it shared Uber's basic injustice.
A comedian finds a way to do justice to the UK's plutocratic rulers.
France says it will sponsor one last effort for a diplomatic settlement between Israel and Palestine; if that fails, it will recognize Palestine as a state.
France might as well proceed directly to the second step; it will take more than this to get the Israeli right wing to seriously consider peace.
Many US black children suffer from lead poisoning which reduces their IQ. Sometimes greedy landlords manage to skip tests for lead paint, and thus continue poisoning them.
Mothers will tell their children not to eat the paint, unless they have to work so many hours that they can't see what their kids are doing.
Lead and Race In Flint — And Everywhere Else.
Holding the Super Bowl in San Francisco is
hurting
the city: new surveillance, cruelty to the homeless, and burdens on citizens and workers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
A UN summit will provide an opportunity for the world to abandon the idiotic and destructive "war on drugs".
Europe's Immigration Bind: How to Act Morally While Heeding the Will of Its People.
David Petraeus to Receive No Further Punishment for Sharing Classified Files.
Harsh punishment is reserved for heroes like Snowden that tell the public about government wrongdoing.
US businesses say the FDA is out of control — protecting people's privacy, at least to a minimal extent.
They expect to have control of government agencies, you see.
A cracker obtained and posted internal communications of a US thugs' union, some of which show right-wing extremism.
In general I do not approve of doxing, even of thugs, merely for being thugs. There may be some specific cases where it is justified, such as thugs that are infiltrating dissident organizations, but that does not seem to be the case here.
Puerto Rico has proposed a plan for reducing its debt.
Flint demonstrates the erroneous way of making decisions that we must not repeat in regard to global heating.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress are corrupted by lobbyist money.
The US apparently planned to kidnap Snowden with the help of some subservient government, since it had a plane waiting in Denmark to take him away as he was travelling.
If the US had hoped a government would arrest him and then respect his rights with an extradition hearing, there would have been no need for that plane.
UN Experts Catalog Seemingly Endless List of Racial Discrimination in US.
I believe that the US owes reparations to the descendants of those who suffered denial of equal rights, including both slavery and the racist laws from 1880 to the 1960s.
Just 3 years after horsemeat was passed off as "beef", the UK has cut the amount of tests of food, making cheating easier than ever.
We depend on the state to keep businesses honest, and for many other things.
In England, flowers that normally bloom in May are blooming in January, due to El Nino on top of global heating.
Since different species base their calendars on different cues, this will cause ecological disruption, which will wipe out some species.
A cold snap in February could kill some organisms that have become active early.
US citizens: call on members of Congress to take a stand on the TPP now and pledge to stick with it after the election.
Southern Poverty Law Center accuses the US of selectively arresting women and children for deportation, for corrupt reasons.
Proposing financial reform measures going beyond Sanders' proposals.
AIG sold off a subsidiary because it is no longer allowed to mislead customers.
Sanders got paid speaking fees: almost $2000. He donated the money to charity.
Congress should show the public more of what it learns in its hearing about the FISA court.
Mali's Irrepressible Musical Spirit Resounds after Jihadi-Imposed Silence.
Some Muslim fanatics have banned music since a thousand years ago.
The New York Times found one small category of campaign spending in which Sanders gets more support than Clinton, and covered it misleadingly.
An extreme example of surveillance of students: asking them to wear a fitbit all the time.
Just because most schools' surveillance does not go this far does not make it acceptable!
A US court once again has ordered the EPA to make rules to make mines and factories pay for their pollution.
While Flint Was Being Poisoned, State Workers "Quietly" Provided Water Coolers.
Twitter doesn't apply its rules to Donald Trump as it does to others.
The Marshall Islands, a small country in the Pacific with painful experience with nuclear weapons, has sued Britain, India and Pakistan for not complying with treaty obligations to move towards nuclear disarmament.
A basic income for all raises many questions about details.
Will companies that sell to consumers really have the power to make governments keep most people's incomes from falling? They haven't done this in the US in the last decade. The tendency is to shift to selling luxury products for those who still have money to spend.
Google Deal Highlights Need for 'Radical Change' to International Tax Rules.
Here is
my
proposal.
[Reference updated on 2022-07-15 because the
old
link was broken.]
Running states like corporations: a poisonous approach.
The Tories' spending cuts are making hospitals reduce staff.
Why Bernie Can Deliver on Promises of Change, While the Sensible Centrists Can't.
"Sensible" middle-of-the-road Democrats such as Clinton won't even try to change the things that are deeply wrong with the US, such as plutocracy.
Burundi's dictatorship arrested two French journalists. Under pressure from France, it freed them, but still keeps their recording equipment.
A US official criticized the EU for attacking tax-dodging by US companies.
That official is evidently on the side of the plutocrats. Vote for Sanders and get him replaced with someone who will work for the people (of the US and other countries).
The US is still funding "reconstruction" in Afghanistan, but due to the Taliban's increasing activity, in many cases there is no way to check what work is really being done.
Could inspectors use little drones?
That's not a serious question, since we know this "reconstruction" often just feeds corruption. Maybe it would be more effective to give the equivalent of 10 dollars to every person in Afghanistan.
Senator Warren reports how the US government lets corporations escape punishment for giant crimes.
Do you support Clinton but agree more with Sanders? If so, give your support Sanders!
Obama showed that a black plutocratist president will not stop plutocrats from forcing blacks into poverty. Clinton, if elected, would show that a woman plutocratist president will not stop them from pushing women into poverty.
Japan's head negotiator for the TPP has resigned over his corruption.
Any politician who supports the TPP is corrupt at a deep level, whether or not he took a bribe.
Plutocratist Democrats are panicking about Sanders' gaining strength.
Sanders pointed out the falsehoods in the Washington Post's attack.
Uri Avnery: the campaign to end Israel's occupation of Palestine needs the support of people inside and outside Israel, working together. The government knows this and plans to ban their cooperation.
We are wiping out dozens of species of insect every day.
Zika has made the issue of abortion rights urgent in Brazil.
Peace talks for Syria are unlikely to have good results. The Kurds are not even invited.
US citizens: call on candidates to state their positions on GMO labeling.
China imprisoned people for planning a civil disobedience movement, calling this "inciting subversion of state power".
In the UK they might call the protests "aggravated trespass".
In the US they have other charges to press against those who commit civil disobedience.
This sort of repression is wrong no matter who does it and no matter what the excuse.
US citizens: call on Congress to restore anti-lead-poisoning programs.
A Georgia state representative defends the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan.
Sri Lanka's Missing Thousands: One Woman's Six-Year Fight to Find Her Husband.
The thousands may have been killed under direction of former tyrant Rajapaksa.
Some European countries are labeling Morocco and Algeria as "safe" countries, rejecting asylum applications from people from those countries.
For most people in Morocco and Algeria, those countries are safe, but some minorities and some dissidents are persecuted.
Chicago thugs sabotage their car microphones; the car used by the thug that killed Laquan McDonald had had its microphone destroyed.
Changing bad government and business policies that discourage breastfeeding could avoid up to 800,000 child deaths each year.
Canada's snooping agency sent Canada's personal data to the US.
The management of the Chicago thug department allowed thugs to cover up their misdeeds by turning off cameras and microphones in their cars.
Contracting out support activities, famous Silicon Valley companies pay many of their workers too little to live on, and exclude them from the benefits of employees.
Such contracting out is an obstacle to unionization, and that alone is a reason to adopt policies to discourage it.
Oxfam's report on increased inequality gives recommendations for how to fix it.
The report shows that it's not just that the rich are getting richer. They are making the poor poorer, too. The poorest half of humanity have lost around 40% of their wealth since 2010.
The UK government is privatizing the state, selling off large state activities cheap as well as the land on which they are run.
The politicians that sell off the state cheap, and the cronies to whom they sell it, are conspiring together to cheat the country. The proper remedy, when the British people recognize the need, will be to confiscate what was sold off, with no compensation.
That loss, for the "investors", will be right and proper. It will teach future rich cronies not to be so eager to participate in such conspiracies.
Some executives know that the best thing their business can do for the environment, and the world, is to shut down. But they consider that impossible, so they find ways to reconcile themselves to doing harm.
We can save them from this. We should shut those businesses down.
Louisiana refuses to disclose how many prisoners it keeps in solitary confinement, or for how long.
Chicago thugs extracted false confessions using torture. Instead of punishment, they received promotions.
The right-wing in Israel is now calling prominent writers and artists "leftwing moles" (i.e., traitors).
Everyone: Support Israeli human rights defender Ezra Nawi, arrested in Israel for no stated reason.
The right-wing organization "Black Americans for a Better Future" is funded entirely by wealthy whites.
Big coal companies are selling coal mines to small operators that won't be able to afford to clean up the environmental damage.
This is fraud; the executives involved should be prosecuted and jailed.
Republicans in Michigan systematically override democracy to maintain control of the state and its people, even though most voters don't vote for them.
This led directly to lead poisoning in Flint.
What will it take to restore democracy in Michigan? How can Michigan voters overthrow this tyranny?
Former Disney workers are suing Disney for abusing a special visa system to make them train visiting foreign workers to replace them.
Workers, if your employer tries to do this to you, don't train your replacement! Quit immediately! That way, the cheating employer will suffer a loss from mistreating you.
US Republicans, led by the Koch brothers and ALEC, are eliminating state-level solar energy incentives where they can.
Safety conditions in some factories in Bangladesh are just like before the Rana Plaza factory fire.
In general, supposed commitments to reform the abuses of these front companies' supply chains are undermined by corruption.
Ferguson thugs will be required to record all their actions with body cameras. They are also required not to adopt policies for the sake of collecting more money as fines — but I fear that thugs will negate that requirement by misrepresenting their motives. Thugs are trained liars and feel entitled to lie to anyone, even in court.
Everyone: attend the Free Software Foundation's LibrePlanet event on March 19 and 20. The lead speaker will be Edward Snowden.
Citizens of TPP countries:
European Union citizens: strengthen the Parliament's resolve to reject data collection about airline passengers.
Turkish journalists are facing life in prison for reporting on the government's practice of arming Syrian jihadis.
Zika spreads where people are poor and don't have the time and money needed to limit mosquito reproduction. That shows how to fight it.
Thousand of hydroelectric dams may be left without water due to global heating.
This reduces the attractiveness of building new dams, which could in many cases destroy unique species.
Kenya's government is repressing press criticism.
Too Afraid for School: Latin America is Losing New Generation to Gang Violence.
The Loss of Libraries Is Another Surefire Way to Entrench Inequality.
Global heating is likely to wipe out the slow-growing trees of Tasmanian highlands.
Fires started by lightning are no longer natural, because the lightning has a human cause.
At lower altitudes, partial logging has made other Tasmanian forests more vulnerable to fires.
The FBI arrested some of the armed occupiers of the Malheur wildlife refuge. There was a fight and one of the occupiers was killed.
I can't criticize thugs for shooting someone in a group that was known to be armed and which had talked about shooting them.
"Probiotics" might be able to help human health, but nobody really knows which ones do.
There is now a second boycott of Coca Cola Company — this one to demand that it label GMOs.
I guess they don't know about the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola Company for murdering union organizers.
I don't like Coca Cola itself, but that is not the company's only product. It also sells fruit juices and bottled water. I almost never use bottled water except in places such as India and Flint, Michigan, where the tap water is unsafe — but when I am in those places, I make sure that the water is not from Coca Cola Company.
The motive for switching Flint's water to the lead-poisoned Flint river was not saving money. Another deal was available which would have saved more money, with the same safe water.
Who Cares if Hillary is Warm? I Care About Her Wars.
I care even more about her plutocracy, since the military-industrial complex promotes the wars and does many other bad thing.
California defeated the utility companies that wanted to put the brakes on home solar power.
Britain Is At War With Yemen. So Why Does Nobody Know About It?
The same goes for the US.
An email company in Switzerland has led a campaign against massive surveillance laws.
Thugs in Texas don't pay money for their license plate readers. Instead they moonlight for the company "Vigilant" that accumulates license plate sightings.
'Natural' Gas Not as Good as Solar — Despite the Gas Industry's Best Efforts.
Profits Over Rights as UK Sells Spy Gear to Repressive Regimes.
US thugs tend to use tasers more often against blacks and Hispanics, whereas with whites they tend to warn instead.
Neonicotinoids kill bees just fine, but bedbugs are becoming resistant to them.
There is no shelter for civilians when Salafi Arabia drops US-provided bombs in Yemen.
Yemeni-American Qarwash Mohsn Awad's passport was revoked because of a false statement that his sister was bullied by US agents into signing.
It's part of a pattern of self-contradictory injustice against Yemeni-Americans.
France legalizes keeping dying patients deeply sedated (at their request) so that they feel no pain.
This is good for people who have a painful condition that will kill them soon, but offers no escape to those who can't communicate and experience years of boredom.
The Tories are selling off UK state assets cheap. Bad for the country, but good for their cronies.
More proof of racial profiling: blacks are more likely than whites in Florida to be ticketed for not wearing seatbelts.
Anaheim, a small city in California, bought a wide range of phone surveillance devices and secretly let many neighboring cities use them.
Mayors from Florida have told Florida senator Mario Rubio: take global heating seriously before we get inundated.
Investors in coal mines are likely to lose lots of money.
I am glad, but humanity (and the earth's wildlife) deserves a system of government which can protect us from man-made disasters even if investors can profit from them.
Women can measure their exposure to some of the chemicals that promote breast cancer.
Michael Moore: Do Not Send Us Bottles of Water [in Flint]. Instead, Join Us in a Revolt.
The staff of Protonmail are campaigning effectively against new surveillance laws in Switzerland.
Everyone: urge Delaware to repeal the death penalty.
Northern right whales now have more protected areas on the US Atlantic coast. Whether it is enough to save them is not clear.
The plutocratist Democratic establishment is attacking Sanders more and more.
Gandhi famously said: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Sanders is moving from stage 2 to stage 3.
Collection of Biometric Data Poses Serious Privacy and Personal Security Risks.
Not to mention that so much surveillance threatens democracy for everyone.
US citizens: call for an investigation of why the FBI helped Walmart silence its employees.
PBS Newshour spreads falsehoods about single-payer health care.
How Egypt's tyrant al-Sisi represses protests.
Americans who are poor have a great work ethic. If only SCROTUS would allow making jobs for them. As for the children, disabled and old, SCROTUS calls them "moochers".
Here's what we need to keep in the ground, to limit global heating to 1.5C.
The hero who informed the press about Dubya's warrantless wiretapping now faces punishment.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned Israeli colonization of occupied Palestine.
He said that this calls into question Israel's commitment to a two-state resolution of the dispute. That's an understatement; according to Uri Avnery, Netanyahu never seriously entertained the possibility of such an agreement, and engaged in sham peace talks only to forestall international cognizance of that fact.
Those peace talks collapsed a couple of years ago, and international cognizance is taking hold.
MI5 and MI6: what was their relationship with US torture?
The stress of a million refugees is making the Schengen "free travel" zone crumble.
In 20 or 30 years we will probably see tens of millions of people fleeing for their lives from global heating disaster. In 50 years, there may be hundreds of millions — but maybe we can avoid reaching that point, if we cut back carbon emissions as hard as we can.
Senators Markey and Sanders placed a hold on Obama's nomination of a commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration, because he has been tied too much to Big Pharma.
Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream has endorsed Bernie Sanders with a symbolic dessert.
Everyone: Call on the New York Times to examine who knew Iraq WMD justifications for war were bogus, when they knew it, and who should have known it.
US citizens: call on the DHS to focus on right-wing domestic terrorism.
Right-wing terrorists kill more Americans than Islamist terrorists do.
Sanders, not Clinton, is the realist.
Clinton is going to raise more money this week from her bankster supporters.
New UK budget cuts will make 50,000 vulnerable people homeless.
"Gene-Editing" Produces GMOs That Must Be Regulated.
Publishers use digital formats as an opportunity to take away the rights that we enjoy when we buy copies of a work. This makes most commercial downloads (of books, music or video) systematically unjust.
The CDT's characteristic weak recommendation is for slight regulatory relaxation to eliminate just a few of the unjust consequences of that shift. That is not enough. We must stop the injustice; we must put an end to these unjust licenses.
Instead of the "authorized" copy that would oppress you, choose an unauthorized copy that treats you ethically.
Denmark will deter refugees by taking most of their valuables.
Family Planning Is 'Critical Link' in Eradicating Poverty.
Florida thugs burned Darren Rainey to death with very hot water. The state ruled this was an accident.
Peace activists in Israel face increasing repression.
I expect that in 10 years Israel will have become so repressive that all but right-wing extremists will flee.
The UK could effectively punish Putin's regime for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, without breaking diplomatic relations.
I don't think the Tories care all that much; they are not so different from Putin, after all.
A secret US intelligence report expressing ignorance on the subject of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was suppressed in 2002, and apparently not shown to Colin Powell before he argued for invading Iraq to destroy those unverified (and in fact nonexistent) weapons.
A US-wide system of recording license plate recognition cameras, called "Vigilant", records a million car spottings every day. Every car that drives past a camera is recorded. These records could be kept for years.
Such a system should be outright illegal. License plate recognition cameras should be required to record only invalid license plates or cars sought by court order.
Ted Cruz says he puts his church above the United States. That makes him totally unqualified to be president (or any sort of official).
When John F. Kennedy ran for president, some Protestant Americans claimed that he would put his church above the United States and take orders from the Pope. He promised that the US and its Constitution would be his first loyalty, and people accepted this.
Some students in London have started a rent strike for their dorm rooms, which have become intolerably expensive.
Pentagon Asks Psychologists to Reconsider Torture Ban, Argues 'You Never Know …'
Yes, we know. Just because enemies are vicious and cruel is no reason we should imitate them. Torture is never justified.
Obama has limited who can be put in solitary confinement in federal prisons.
This is a change for the better but probably not enough. More than a short period of solitary confinement is dangerous to mental health.
Jamie Love fights to save people's lives from pharmaceutical patents.
Medicine is one of the areas where patents do a special kind of harm, but we would be better off eliminating patents entirely.
I am disappointed that the first article uses the term "protection" to describe what patents do, because that is spin in favor of the patentholders. Using that term gives them an endorsement that they will use when lobbying for more strict patent laws. Please join me in refusing ever to use that term in regard to patents.
The term "intellectual property rights" is worse than spin: it spreads confusion. Patents and copyrights are totally different in practice. If you lump them together, you will misunderstand what they do.
See https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.
New Evidence Shows Milwaukee Police Hide Stingray Usage From Courts and Defense.
Fighting against copyrighted laws in the US.
A half-billion-dollar "gift" to the premier of Malaysia was "not a bribe", says a court.
What a strange definition of corruption.
Citizens and residents of France: protest on Jan 30 against the tyrannical proposal for permanent "emergency", and phone or write your deputies.
Information in English.
Prosecutors Say [thugs] Don't Need Warrants For Stingrays Because 'Everyone Knows' Cell Phones Generate Location Data.
First they got people hooked on these devices, then they use them to track people, then they argue people have no rights.
What it adds up to is that portable phones are malicious technology.
A grand jury was asked to charge Planned Parenthood based on the lies in the fraudulent smear video. Instead it indicted people who made the video.
A thug in Canada has been convicted of attempted murder, though not of murder (although the victim was killed).
Swedish human rights activist Peter Dahlin and his girlfriend have been freed by China.
Salafi Arabia is committing war crimes in Yemen with US support by indiscriminately killing civilians, and repeatedly bombing hospitals and medical facilities.
Chris Christie vetoed a New Jersey bill that would have prohibited convicted gang members from buying guns.
That is because he is seeking the Gun-Nut Party's nomination for president.
Protocols for encryption of phone calls are insecure by design.
Products "for women" typically cost more than the same product "for men".
The root of this problem is that women are too easily manipulated by the fashion industry; they are made to feel they must buy products that are "feminine". But business is already working on trying to do the same thing to men.
Heathrow Climate Protesters Found Guilty of "Aggravated Trespass".
That "crime" was invented as a way to jail protesters.
The UK government is quashing cases accusing soldiers of abuse of prisoners, arbitrarily claiming that some of them are phony.
Beijing's renewed tyranny crushes not only leading human rights lawyers but their legal assistants.
The former leader of Australia's Green Party has been arrested for protesting logging of a wildlife area in Tasmania, his home.
Protesters face extremely harsh punishment.
Oklahoma legislators are still looking for ways to have dogma replace biology in science classes.
The recent very hot years could have happened by chance without global heating, but the chance would be 1 in 10,000.
Want to bet the survival of civilization on that long shot?
2016 is expected to be hotter than 2015, because of El Niño.
If this El Niño ends, subsequent years will be a little cooler for a while; however, 15 years from now, the current level of heat will be normal even without El Niño.
Some US states
punish
technicians that
notice "child" pornography on a client's computer and don't report
it.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Keep in mind that "child" includes teenagers of age 16 or 17, who in Massachusetts can legally have sex. It even includes women of 18 or older, if they look younger or have small breasts.
It includes photos that teenagers take of themselves having sex (but "only" 10% of them get prosecuted).
A law against possessing a copy of some sort of publication, no matter what kind that is, is tyranny and leads to more tyranny. It must be repealed.
Some countries in Latin America are advising women to avoid pregnancy for the next year.
These governments must pay for reliable birth control for women that can't afford it. And women should demand an extension of abortion rights, which are very limited in most countries in Latin America.
Syriza was defeated by the banksters because it never seriously prepared to reject the Euro. Now it has surrendered totally and become the banksters' local satrap.
Hungary's authoritarian rulers want to establish a "terror threat" excuse for eliminating many basic human rights — whenever they wish. Perhaps all the time.
Overt callous public bigotry has become normal in Britain again.
For those in London who can barely pay the rent and food, a new expense will be laundry service, since most of the laundromats have closed.
This is a small example of how changes in society make it hard to survive on a low income. In the past, people could live in boarding houses that cooked efficiently. Now they have no cooking facilities, and the food stores they can reach are not set up to sell food to be cooked, so they are stuck with the expensive prepared foods.
A common thug tactic for "restraining" someone is fatal from time to time to people with medical problems. As they choke and die, the thugs think they are fighting and won't release them.
Residents of Flint are afraid to shower with the toxic municipal water.
Does anyone know whether bathing in that water is actually dangerous?
The lead has affected adults as well as children. It doesn't sabotage their brain development, since that has already finished, but it harms their bones.
The latest attack on Sanders is for daring to aim for what the US actually needs. The only way to get even "half a loaf" in politics is to inspire lots of people to demand a big, whole loaf.
This is what the free software movement does, in the field of software freedom. We demand what our freedom requires, not less Others, such as some supporters of the open source non-movement, follow the ineffective "ask for only what you might possibly get immediately" approach, which means they don't say anything that might inspire people to aim for more.
In the Free Software Foundation's approach to eliminating DRM, to reforming the DMCA, or software patents (trolls are just part of the problem), rejecting substitution of someone else's service for a program you run, and opposing digital surveillance, you will see this difference over and over: We demand the whole loaf where others ask only for half.
If you want to defend nearly everyone against the depredations of the 62 billionaires that own half the world, throw away the cynicism that is an excuse for giving up.
Poles are protesting against Kaczynski's antidemocratic laws and proposed surveillance law.
The demand for "safe spaces" in UK universities has reached the point of absurdity where fundamentalist Islamists can physically prevent an Atheist from giving a talk criticizing Islam, and claim that her criticisms constitute "intimidation" of them.
Insanely, the school's Feminist Society supported those religious fanatics, who would deny women many human rights if they had the chance.
Islamists are enemies of human rights, especially for women and also for men. While respecting their right to state their views, we should never forget how repugnant those views are.
Google has a proposal for security based on tracking user behavior so completely that no one can pretend to be anyone else.
A survey of the policies of many US thug departments found that many have policies that encourage use of deadly force.
State Repression in Egypt Is Worst We've Ever Seen, Says Activist.
It is worse than Mubarak, worse than Nasser.
The UK's weak deal with Google threatens to set a bad precedent.
Syrian Kurds, with air support from the US and Russia, are making progress on cutting off PISSI's trade route to Turkey.
Nanfu Wang made a film about a Chinese human rights defender and experienced repression directly.
The European Parliament proposed some reforms to copyright law but they fail to touch the great injustices such as DRM, the war on sharing, and the insanely long duration of copyright.
I can't feel much gratification from the support for "open source" since it avoids raising the question as an ethical issue.
It appears the UK government corrupted a supposedly objective study about the feasibility of allowing Chagossians to return to the Chagos Islands.
The UK allows severe punishment without conviction: a man has been ordered to notify the thugs 24 hours before having sex with a woman, and must give her full identification.
If a woman is attracted to him, those demands would surely put her off. If he pays a prostitute, the prostitute won't want to give that information. In effect, the man has been forbidden to have sex (except underground).
Anthony Ruelas was suspended from school for
carrying
a sick student to the nurse's office. The other student was
having a severe asthma attack.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
The management of that school needs to be replaced with someone who realizes that obedience is not the highest priority in life.
Massive opposition made Haiti's imposed president cancel the presidential election, which the people believed would be rigged (again).
Haiti's opposition presidential candidate describes the history of rigged elections which convinced him to boycott the just-cancelled vote.
Israeli repression of anti-land-grab activists is spreading. Two Jews and a Palestinian are now in prison for no crime.
A four-year-old US child was so anxious about a math test that he could not sleep.
A Clinton operative who tried to smear Anita Hill is now trying to smear Bernie Sanders.
After a reporter wrote about the Koch brothers' web of influence, they decided to attack her by paying people to try to smear her with false accusations of plagiarism.
Since the UK declines to prosecute soldiers for war crimes in Iraq, some Iraqi victims are suing. So Cameron is looking for ways to make that impossible.
He's already done basically the same thing to non-wealthy Britons.
The UK sells the service of training soldiers for other countries, including some where the military carry out repression.
Compare with the US School of the Americas (or whatever name they call it now).
"Bill Gates should be ashamed: His back-room, charter-school power play hurts kids, public education."
David Cameron Denounces Putin's Contempt for the Law — Yet He Proposes to Exempt British Troops from Legal Accountability.
The New York Times called Sanders a communist.
You have to expect dishonest attacks from the establishment.
The Overwhelming Consensus Against Citizens United.
US citizens: phone
the White House at (202) 456-1111 and call on Obama to cancel the new nuclear cruise missile.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to end sales of all fossil fuels on federal lands.
Everyone: call on the New York Times to check the facts of Jake Sullivan's false accusations against Sanders.
US citizens: Delaware
North, desist from trademark extortion against Yosemite.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
A law professor wants to make it a crime to read web sites posted by PISSI.
He cites as a precedent the prohibition of even looking at pornography that includes minors (or adults that look like minors).
I think the argument goes the other way: this demonstrates that it is an intolerable injustice to punish people for looking at (or having a copy of) any published work whatsoever.
A voice from the Republican establishment wants the "donor class" (i.e., billionaires) to make someone other than Trump win the Republican nomination.
If they can do that, it would only prove that our elections are worthless and our government has no legitimacy.
Clinton laughs off questions about her speeches for Goldman Sachs.
She is a toady for the banksters, like most politicians, and equally unworthy of public office.
Let's Make Attending Davos as Shameful as Running a Sweatshop.
The former head of the UK civil service says that the Tories intend to eliminate public housing. They will replace it with "starter homes" that poor people can't afford at all.
Pakistan has arrested people who aided a terrorist attack on a university.
A superficially clever writer tries to equate Trump and Sanders.
They are similar in being "outsiders", but different in what matters: what they stand for. Trump will say anything to provoke TV and the masses, while Sanders sticks to what he has fought for since 1980.
Trump stands for directing Americans' justified anger at weak scapegoats, whereas Sanders wants to end the plutocratic system that is really responsible for the injustice.
The US plans to deport Angel Rosa to certain death from a gangrene infection that he contracted while in immigration prison. His children, who are US citizens, won't be able to take care of him in Guatemala.
A meeting with Faheem Qureshi, who was maimed by Obama's first drone attack. He was 14 at the time.
Google has agreed to pay the UK about 19 million dollars per year for the past 11 years of dodged taxes.
Compared with the income Google has siphoned out of the UK, that is a trifle.
Google extracts billions of dollars per year from the UK without tax, so $20 million in taxes or even $50 million is insignificant as compensation.
Morocco is cruel to women — here is how.
The women who get pregnant and work in bars get a raw deal, but the origin of this wrong is not in the bars. It comes from their own families and the state. If they were decent, the would help their daughter get an abortion (because a baby would be a big burden) and would see nothing wrong in it.
A UK judge is suing the UK Ministry of Justice, saying that cuts in legal aid have made courts dangerous even for judges.
Of course, the biggest danger is for defendants that get little or no chance for a defense.
Massive resistance by Haitians has blocked the Haitian presidential election.
The last president, Martelly, was imposed by the US, which brushed aside real elections.
Haitians probably expect the US to impose him again.
Arab intellectuals comment on the fifth anniversary of the Arab spring.
The US still has no legal procedure for dealing with a disputed election.
Ethiopia had exiled dissident Andargachew Tsege kidnapped and put him on death row. He has been denied access to a lawyer or his family.
Stopping home-grown US terrorism depends on convincing American Muslims to trust the thugs.
It won't be easy to convince thugs to start acting like police officers.
Deciding how to fix Bitcoin's scaling problem involves a political question: which of its goals are most important.
When the US government modifies web sites to identify the people that access them, it can identify 1000 bystanders to find 100 people who are sought.
It is no coincidence that this arose in the search for people downloading illegal images. The making of those images, if it involved real sexual abuse of real children, deserves to be prosecuted, but prosecuting people for downloading something leads to tyranny.
Perhaps these images were really images of children's being abused. However, in practice "child pornography" includes 17-year-olds having sex, or 20-year-olds that look younger and are getting paid.
Courts and legislatures in the US have stacked the rules in favor of companies that sue debtors. In some places, debtors face great obstacles to have a chance to present their cases.
The IMF sees immigrants in Europe as an opportunity to knock wages down.
As natives are replaced with lower-paid immigrants, it will give them a good reason to be angry. Unfortunately, they will probably blame the immigrants rather than the politicians that heeded the IMF's advice.
The Big Short Explains the Role of Top Bankers in the 2008 Crash, But Nothing Much Has Changed.
Due to deregulation of banks, the chief officers are no longer liable for losses, so it is in their interest to close their eyes to the risks subordinates are taking.
This is one of the bad changes we must reverse.
A town in South Africa is offering to pay for college education for girls if they "prove their virginity" repeatedly.
Of course, this sort of test for virginity is unreliable, but even if it were reliable, and even if it could be done for males as well, it would be unjust.
Salafi Arabia bombed MSF again.
Uri Averny's column: Extreme, Extremer, Extremest.
'Huge Victory': Walmart Illegally Fired Striking Workers, Judge Rules.
El Nino Rains Only Slightly Increased Historic Low Reservoir Levels in California.
Water utilities in the US fudge tests for lead pollution so as to underestimate the actual level.
The thug that shot Anthony Hill has been charged with murder.
Hill was not threatening anyone, he was only naked.
The defenders of slavery and racism carry out violence against those trying to remove monuments to the Confederacy.
How sad America, in which loyalty to bigotry inspires people to fight those hired to do the work, more than the sight of the rich evicting the poor does.
The governor of Illinois plans to take over the Chicago public school system so as to break the teacher's union.
An Oklahoma thug was sentenced to effectively life in prison for raping 8 different poor black women.
He thought he could get away with it because witnesses would believe a thug rather than a poor black woman.
I don't consider a thug a very credible witness about anything. I would trust a police officer's word, but how do you tell the few police officers from the many thugs?
New York State's governor appointed a bankster to regulate Wall Street.
France talks about extending the state of emergency as long as PISSI continues to exist.
This means, in effect, forever. If there is a repeat of the November attacks, they will say, "See, it is still needed." When there is no attack, they will say, "See, it works!"
60% of sales of alcoholic drinks in the UK are to people with a drinking problem.
When Clinton gets an endorsement from a union or an activist organization, it's always decided by the group's leaders — and often the leaders are business executives that prefer Clinton for selfish reasons.
In New Orleans, when poor people are charged with crimes, public defenders refuse to take their cases; so they remain permanently in jail.
Walmart bullied Washington DC into dropping a minimum wage bill by threatening to cancel new stores in that city. Now it has cancelled some of them anyway.
It was foolish to trust Walmart — after all, it did not sign a contract to build those stores and keep them open for at least 10 years. But there was a bigger folly in giving Walmart what it wanted: the very idea of trying to keep Walmart in DC was foolish. Walmart reduces jobs, compared with other stores. Walmart pays workers so badly that they need public assistance.
I recommend that DC raise the minimum wage high enough to drive Walmart out completely.
Overfishing of young bluefin tuna is driving them to extinction.
Sanders should take a clear and firm stand in favor of abortion rights and birth control rights.
I am not "pro-choice", I am pro-abortion-rights and pro-abortion.
The Gates Foundation promotes plutocracy around the world, as well as privatizing education and health care and seeds.
Simply by dominating the funding in a field, it corrupts the organizations that are supposed to work for the public good.
The donations to the foundation are less than the taxes Microsoft dodges.
People living along the Atlantic Coast are fighting against the pollution that offshore oil drilling will cause.
Given the falling price of oil, selling oil leases now would be a foolish give-away, even if it weren't likely to cause global disaster.
Mexican-Americans in Texas faced prejudiced laws and murder by Texas Rangers.
Greek farmers and pensioners are protesting bankster-imposed laws that could spell destitution for them.
Religious colleges in the US have a special exemption allowing them to impose strict censorship, and regulate the lives of students and faculty.
I don't believe they should be allowed to get any government funding.
Fires in Tasmania are destroying thousand-year-old slow-growing trees.
Europe wants to be less ambitious in a new fuel efficiency standard for planes.
A few years ago, the EU put a tax on airline flights based on distance flown. The US helped the airlines pressure the EU to drop it.
I hope President Sanders will invite the EU to bring it back.
The copyright industry wants a new law to increase its power to force digital platforms to delete postings.
DMCA takedown notices are already too powerful, because it is easy to use a bogus complaint to get someone's material removed.
The second-largest lake in Bolivia has dried up due to global heating and use of water for mining.
Lake Poopó formerly covered 1000 square kilometers.
Robert Reich: Why the White Working Class Abandoned the Democratic Party.
US citizens: call on Congress to adopt a constitutional amendment to overturn the Corporations United decision.
Those corporations called themselves "Citizens United", but I call them what they were rather than what they pretended to be. Why propagate their misrepresentation?
Electric companies in Australia gouge so much that it is now economical to install solar cells and a battery and disconnect entirely from the power grid.
This is great for reducing fossil fuel use.
Michigan Governor Snyder "released is emails", but with omissions, and not covering the time when the decision to use lead-contaminated water was made. And not those of the staff with whom he discussed the question.
It's more of a distraction than an answer.
Instead of recovering, the world economy has blown bubbles.
David Koch is gone from the board of directors of the American Museum of Natural History.
I wish we could place confidence in the Smithsonian's claim that its donors do not influence its exhibits.
The Linux Foundation eliminated community-elected directors from its board, apparently because free software activist Karen Sandler was going to run.
Karen Sandler works for the Software Freedom Conservancy, which does various noble things including enforcing the GNU GPL on Linux. One of the violators is a donor to the Linux Consortium.
Feinstein and other senators are working on a bill to ban digital products with real encryption. How far this will go, we don't know. Will it ban GnuPG?
Human Rights Watch asserts that firms which do business with companies operating in Israeli colonies in Palestine are violating international law.
California has joined New York in investigating Exxon's climate lies.
2015 was 1.6F hotter than any year in the 20th century.
The last time Earth was this hot was 130,000 years ago, and sea level was 6 meters higher (20 feet).
Although the rate of killing rhinos in South Africa has stopped increasing, it is already high enough to wipe them out.
Egypt's military government is launching the repression in advance as the anniversary of the freedom movement approaches.
Stores are using portable phones' WiFi devices to track people in the store.
Reporters Without Borders calls for legal sanctions against Chinese broadcaster CCTV, which presented Peter Dahlin's forced confession.
Let us not forget that the US has been active in the forced confession field, and that its system of plea bargaining tends to pressure accused people into false confessions.
An investigation in the UK concluded that Alexander Litvinenko was murdered by Russian agents, and that Putin must have personally approved the murder.
However, the UK government is unable to retaliate.
Today's atomizing society has left many people short of values. It's not just that they don't share my values — it's that they can't name any values.
The hard wheels of Tory bureaucracy killed a mentally disabled man by requiring him to do things he could not cope with, such as work.
They have killed thousands How many have a life of nothing but suffering due to these cuts and punishments? Surely tens of thousands, if not hundreds.
And all to enrich banksters.
The amount of fish humans have been taking from the sea is 50% more than statistics reported. This explains why the total amount caught annually has been going down for 20 years.
We will have to catch less, or lose all.
Then again, due to ocean acidification, the fish we want to catch may be wiped out anyway in a few decades.
Haiti is trying again to hold the rigged "election" that was blocked by popular resistance before.
The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition.
How Governor Snyder's general approach was directly responsible for Flint's poisoned water.
In Salafi Arabia, chess is now forbidden.
Yaseen Kadura has got off the US no-fly list, but is still subject to an interrogation at the airport.
US citizens should not have to answer questions about what they are doing in order to travel around the US, when there is no probable cause to suspect them of a crime.
Privatization of bus service in the UK is even more of a disaster than privatization of trains.
How about replacing the War on Drugs with a War on Hunger?
A model estimates secondary damage from the TPP: almost half a million US jobs lost.
The main harms the TPP will do are the intentional ones: elimination of regulations to protect the environment, public health, human rights, and standard of living; more strict copyright rules; damage to democracy.
Michigan Governor Snyder knew about the poisonous water in Flint in February 2015.
In South Korea, it is a crime to speak positively about North Korea.
North Korea is hell on Earth, but this law tramples freedom in South Korea.
US cities are increasingly segregated into rich and poor neighborhoods. Mixed neighborhoods are dwindling.
Trump plays the part of a successful businessman, but actually he was a failure.
Please donate to the fsf.org and help us work for your freedom.
If we defeat the next attempt to extend copyright in the US, it's not just the first Mickey Mouse cartoons that we will eventually have in the public domain. It's all sorts of admired works.
100,000 NYC School Children Face Airport-Style Security Screening Every Day.
The DEA is so greedy for money it can steal (officially, confiscate) that it hired a TSA agent to look for and report large amounts of cash as it could seize.
When Prison Guards Are Violent, Blame Culture — Not "Bad Apples".
A Turkish teacher has been jailed for a year because Erdoğan saw her give him the finger (or something equivalent).
Erdoğan is the open enemy of freedom in Turkey, and the secret friend of PISSI.
Skeletons of casualties demonstrate war between human tribes, 10,000 years ago.
US politicians' talk about "cooperation to put in back doors" may be political preparation for a tyrannical law to require them.
And they are proposing a commission to "search for a way" to do this while "protecting our privacy".
They hope to "find" a way which damages our privacy, and pretend that it doesn't.
Tasmania (part of Australia) is heavily repressing protesters against clear-cutting forests.
Trump got approval for a big casino/hotel by making boastful promises he was unable to keep. When the business went broke, lots of investors lost money.
The US government is much more likely to prosecute an individual than a corporation.
China presented Peter Dahlin on TV making an absurd "confession" and saying that he's having a lovely time in jail.
China is becoming a shameless tyranny again.
CISA, which pretends to serve the goal of better cybersecurity, would not have prevented the massive data breach about US government employees. Its purpose is snooping, and security is just the excuse.
2015 was the hottest year ever recorded. The second hottest was 2014.
2016 is expected to set a new record.
Pressure to Resolve Migration Crisis Could Tear EU Apart.
If that occurs, I think the flaw will be the weakness of central democracy in the EU. The parliament is weak, the commission is not democratic at all, and the countries' governments consider only their narrow interests.
A glaringly inadequate recommendation for security on the "internet of things".
What it says is true enough, but it only considers security against third parties, and totally ignores the issue of security against the manufacturer. That's a glaring omission, because the software in these devices is nearly always proprietary. Nowadays it is not merely conceivable that a proprietary program is malware; it is standard industry practice.
World business "leaders" did not recognize climate mayhem as the biggest "threat to business".
They are thinking short term, and their definition of "threat" means "obstacle to their plans". So they said the biggest threat was "over-regulation" — which means, stopping them from screwing and cheating us as they would wish.
The UK does not make homeless people sleep on the street, but its alternative nowadays is really crappy.
The US "assassination tsar", Torture Brennan, has been meeting with Egyptian officials.
I presume he encouraged them to torture suspected enemies of the regime, such as Islamists and supporters of democracy.
Verizon is directly violating network neutrality in the most flagrant way, demonstrating why network neutrality is so important.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary's surveillance law violated human rights guidelines. It did not require an individual decision about each person to be surveilled.
I was the first person to vote this year in Cambridge Massachusetts. I voted for Bernie Sanders, of course.
Why vote for a Republican in Democrat's clothing?
Any algorithm designed to detect terrorist planning on social media would raise so many false alarms that it would be no use for finding any real terrorists.
The low price of oil may not slow adoption of renewable electric generation.
However, to avoid disaster, we must decarbonize more than just electric generation. We need to reduce the emissions of cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes, too, as well as heating of homes and buildings. The low price of oil reduces one of the incentives.
The low price encourages some oil exporters to put in renewable energy, but the fraction of oil that they use is tiny.
We should make sure the use of oil keeps decreasing, by putting a bigger tax on it.
Anti-Slavery Activists in Mauritania Face Violent Clampdown, Rights Groups Warn.
Why outsourcing production of tools tends to produce inferior tools.
Apps that include Symphony surveillance software snoop on what radio and TV programs are playing nearby. Also on what users post on various sites such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
A BBC journalist, Iranian-British, was blocked from visiting her brother in the US because of the new discriminatory immigration rules.
She also cannot go to Iran, because Iran does not like the BBC.
Science faces a crisis of published results that are not reproducible. Perhaps more than half of published papers are mistaken.
It is nice to have one Journal of Irreproducible Results, but it's bad to have thousands of them.
If we don't prevent it, by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.
On the violent radical Judaist extremists that are trying to kick the Arabs out of Palestine.
The right-wing extremists that praised the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin are now in charge of Israel.
They are restricting human rights for Arab citizens of Israel.
The UK uses its unjust questioning power on tens of thousands of travelers each year, each of whom is compelled to answer questions that would otherwise be forbidden to ask.
Universities plan to track everything students do, and everywhere they go.
If this is really for the student's benefit, they should leave all the data on the student's own computer, to be collected and then used by free software on that computer. There is no need to be concerned with possible "cheating", since the student would cheat only perself.(*)
* Since use of "they" in singular offends my sense of correct English, I sometimes use Marge Piercy's nongendered third-person pronouns, "person", "per" and "pers". They work like "she", "her" and "hers" but specify nothing about the referent's gender. See the novel, Woman on the Edge of Time.
Rep. Wasserman Schultz, plutocratist and reactionary "Democrat", has a progressive primary challenger.
Honduras plans an international anti-corruption body, in imitation of the one in neighboring Guatemala, but it has been designed to lack the same authority. Perhaps designed to fail.
90% of the heat that greenhouse gases have collected has gone into the oceans.
New pun:
« L'ail en chemise »
New pun:
"Realist or optimist?"
US citizens:
call on the
Justice Department to investigate Governor Snyder's role in
subjecting Flint to lead poisoning.
More useless "nation-building": the US
tried to
develop mining and fossil fuels in Afghanistan, and achieved
nothing.
Of course, if it had managed to develop fossil fuels there,
we would all be worse off.
The richest 1% of humanity owns
more
wealth than all the rest.
The Florida legislature
may
bar cities and counties from regulating fracking. This would make
it harder to stop fracking.
Fracking should be entirely stopped, because it endangers health of
humans and wildlife. Since we need to keep 80% of known fossil fuel
reserves in the ground, we should include in that 80% all the reserves
that would require fracking.
If we don't do that, the Everglades will become part of the Atlantic
Ocean and we will be worrying about whether coral can live there.
Wearable computers will oppress people if companies can get their
hands on the data. And most of them are
designed
to give the data directly to companies.
Officially telling people they have the right to say no is not enough
to prevent it, because some companies will charge a hefty penalty for
doing so. We must make it illegal for companies to ask for this data
except in very special circumstances.
A thug
told
drivers to run over Black Lives Matter protesters, thus
demonstrating why we need Black Lives Matter protests.
China's coal use
dropped
2 to 4 percent in 2015.
That's not bad enough news for the global coal industry. We need to
knock it into the grave, as fast as we can!
World-wide fish catches are falling fast due to
overfishing.
Turkey
demands
to exclude Syria's Kurds from Syria's peace talks. This would be
a great boost for PISSI, as well as making success impossible.
The TTIP
could
destroy Europe's small farms, or force them to use use GMOs and
lower their quality standards.
The Democratic candidates'
statements
on encryption: O'Malley is bad, and Sanders is so-so, while
Clinton is like a Republican (yech).
Turkish editor Can Dündar, imprisoned for writing about Turkey's
arming Syrian jihadis,
rebukes
the EU for its deal with Erdoğan.
His lawyers are not allowed to see the charges against him, which
means his trial will be unfair. That's because he didn't do anything
wrong.
Robert Reich:
Six
Responses to Bernie Skeptics.
Non-gays should have the right to a civil partnership
instead
of marriage.
Star
of Anti-Dolphin Killing Film, The Cove, Held by Japanese
Immigration.
To require special visas for journalism is an attack on the truth, and
must occasion the strong suspicion that the government knows it is
doing something wrong. This policy is wrong no matter which country
practices it, whether that be Japan,
Nauru,
China,
or the
United
States.
Peru's chief official
in
charge of ending illegal logging has been fired, apparently for
doing a good job.
Bombing hospitals and schools
must
not be tolerated.
Are you listening, Obama?
US politicians must stop trying to repeat the useless approach of
invasion in the Middle East — it only
makes
things worse.
I disagree partly with the article. It is legitimate to provide close
air support to armies fighting
PISSI,
because that can be a big help
to them and civilians will usually have fled the immediate area. But
nothing more than that.
Islamic
State Holding Estimated 3,500 Slaves in Iraq, Says UN.
These crimes are part of the reason why we should fight
PISSI, but
only in ways that are likely to succeed, rather than aid its
recruiting.
An appeals court ruled that the UK's terrorism law, which was used as
an excuse to confiscate David Miranda's computer memories,
violates
human rights. It has no protections against labeling journalist
as "terrorism".
The court does not appear to have addressed the worst aspect of that
evil law: that it punishes people with years of imprisonment for not
answering questions. Which questions are they required to answer?
They can't ask a lawyer, so really they are not allowed to know. This
means the thugs can bluff as they like.
Laws like this are a bigger threat to Britons than terrorists are, and
the same is true in all countries, except a few in North Africa and
the Middle East.
How flight attendants
recognize
trafficking of girls.
A British woman is suing the thug
department, because an undercover
thug
proposed
marriage to her in order to spy on her union activist friends.
She wants the list of undercover spies published so other victims can
get an explanation (and perhaps compensation) for their mysterious
losses.
Google has agreed to perform special censorship of Youtube for the
government of Pakistan,
deleting
views that the state opposes.
This will help the illiberal Pakistani state
suppress
dissent.
We've been
conned
by the rich predators of Davos.
Of 3000 "moderate" would-be candidates for Iran's parliament,
only
30 have been permitted to run.
Iran remains a theocratic tyranny, notwithstanding its limited layer
of democracy, but that would be no reason to continue sanctions
against Iran. The sanctions were never going to make Iran respect
human rights.
US citizens:
call on Obama
to drop the Hyde amendment from his proposed budget.
The Hyde amendment forbids use of US government funds to pay for
"abortion as a method of family planning" — for instance, avoiding
having a baby because you know that would be a very bad idea.
SCROTUS
may insist on putting it back, but Obama need not propose it.
(SCROTUS
= Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.)
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to reject immigration policies that target people by
race or religion.
US citizens:
call on the
USDA to stop burying Jonathan Lundgren's research on dangers of
neonics.
Acupuncture is equivalent, for treating symptoms of menopause, to
fake
needles that only press the skin.
This does not conclusively prove there is absolutely no validity in
acupuncture. Conceivably mere pressure has some unknown effect.
Or it could be the well-known placebo effect.
Doctors in Australia's outsourced immigration prisons say they are
designed
to damage (even kill) the imprisoned refugees, and to cover it up.
Putin's satrap in Chechnia, who makes Putin look kindly and liberal by
comparison,
terrorizes
Russians that criticize him.
An Oligarchy Has Broken Our [US] Democracy.
It
Must Be Dislodged.
On old-fashioned "national trade interests", the TTIP would be
bad
for Europe's small companies and good for US multinationals.
Of course, national trade interests are a secondary issue compared to
the far-reaching
direct
injustices of business-supremacy treaties such as the TTIP (This
Treaty Is Plutocratic)
No wonder the think tanks that support the TTIP are funded by plutocrats as a form of policy laundering.
High doses of cocaine, in mice, cause brain cells to digest essential organelles and die.
Whether this happens in humans has not yet been established.
EU Adopts Resolution Criticising Israeli Settlement Activity.
The word "criticising" seems like an understatement. The resolution roundly condemns the Israeli colonies in occupied territory, and some other wrongs of the occupation.
The Era of Sanctions is Over in Iran. So Why No Celebrations?
The purpose of the nuclear deal was to establish that Iran won't develop nuclear weapons, thus to eliminate the excuse being used to pressure the US into war with Iran. I think that is something to celebrate, even though Iran remains an unjust theocratic regime.
Denmark produced over 40% of its electricity from wind in 2015.
World's Oceans Warming at Increasingly Faster Rate, New Study Finds.
Denialists grasp at satellite straws to as an excuse to disregard the best evidence about past temperatures on Earth.
The ethical problem with big banks is that banksters are amoral. The only question they ask at work is, "How can we profit through the loopholes that our lobbyists put in the law for us?"
A 12-year-old girl in New Jersey saw offered the use of her asthma inhaler to another girl who was choking. She is being punished for this act of altruism.
Why nuclear power can't avoid global heating — though renewable energy can.
Women's rights activists disagree with Sanders' position that schools should report all "sexual assault" cases to the thugs.
I don't know what "sexual assault" includes, so I won't use that term. In regard to rape, I agree with the women's rights activists that the victim should have a choice about how to pursue it.
We can't demand that our candidates be perfect and never mistaken.
The Oligarchy is Using Our Lizard Brain to Enable a Silent Coup.
Uganda's President Epitomises Africa's Perceived Democratic Deficit.
Imprisoning children that are seeking asylum causes them progressively increasing mental damage.
The forum-of-the-billionaires at Davos now proposes to replace diplomacy of states with "multi-stakeholder governance" in which businesses will lead the negotiations about how to rule us.
We have seen that in the negotiations for proposed business-supremacy treaties such as TPP and TTIP (Treacherous Plutocratic Poison and This Treaty Is Plutocratic).
Disappeared Hong Kong publisher Gui Minhai appeared on Chinese TV to confess to a supposed crime that no one had heard of before.
This eliminates any doubt that China has imprisoned him and several of his coworkers. It seems likely they have been kidnaped.
The Netherlands has arrested a man for joining the Kurdish forces and killing a PISSI fighter. He may be charged with murder.
This is nuts. Fighting on the battlefield is not murder, no matter what side the person is fighting for.
Some schools propose to use finger-vein scanners to check students' identities.
I pose a deeper question: what justification exists for this? Is there a real problem for which this is a legitimate solution?
Bangladesh's government plans to label dissent as "cybercrime", with sentences of up to 14 years in prison.
The UK threatens to require cafes and libraries to record users' communication data.
I suppose this includes requiring them to identify themselves, which is in itself an injustice of a sort that I always refuse.
Everyone: call on Attorney General Lynch to investigate Sandra Bland's death and press charges against those responsible.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to stop targeting Central American families for
deportation.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the Senate to repeal the sale (and destruction) of Oak Flat.
Baltimore thugs shot Keith Davis, then accused him of various crimes. Apparently the culprit was someone else. Prosecutors are trying to undermine his defense to vindicate the thugs.
62 People Own the Same as Half the World, Reveals Oxfam Davos Report.
Global heating has helped spread the ticks that carry Lyme disease.
Australia told many government agencies they must get a warrant to access a person's stored personal data. The agencies don't like this.
The limit is a step in the right direction, but we need to reduce the amount of personal data that gets collected.
An artist/hacker was arrested for stripping nude in a Paris museum and taking the same pose as the nude in the famous painting on the wall behind her.
Sanders has published the outline of his single-payer medical coverage for all.
It won't save as much money as an NHS would, but it would put an end to the gouging of the noninsured.
The new car emissions tests that the EU proposes in response to the Volkswagen cheating scandal are too weak, arguably illegal.
A corner of Alabama has the tuberculosis rate of a poor country, because people don't trust medicine. Partly it is due to official wrongdoing. But not entirely.
Gui Minhai's daughter says his "confession" was bogus and that he must have been kidnaped by China.
Colombian thugs have a pattern of snooping on and tracking journalists that investigate them.
The specific corruption this article focuses on might have been avoided if prostitution were legal and thus did not need to pay protection to the thugs, but not all official corruption is so easy to eliminate.
In general, too much surveillance threatens democracy.
Everyone: call for release of full information about Flint's poisoned water.
US citizens: call on the Federal government to give Flint the resources to cope with poisoned water.
The WHO says that air pollution is a public health emergency, causing over 3 million premature deaths each year.
This is a lot more than terrorist kill.
The IAEA says that Iran has carried out its part of the nuclear deal, so international sanctions against Iran will be lifted.
However, the US will impose some sanctions related to the testing of a long-range missile.
The Kurds need heavy weapons and ammunition to keep fighting PISSI, and they deserve our support.
Especially the fighting women.
An Oxford University official says that religious extremists must be allowed to speak in public, and that this helps students develop arguments against them.
The UK will investigate where Muslim extremists get their funding, but will it dare to admit the answer?
Studies of effects of various nutrients rest on evidence that is inherently unreliable.
The FBI published special rules for subpoenas to journalists, but the rules are worthless as protection for journalists because they have a universal escape clause: the FBI can use a PAT RIOT Act "national security letter" instead of a subpoena.
The rules for that are secret.
We must repeal the PAT RIOT Act, for our freedom's sake.
The "Cube" 3D printer was designed with DRM: it won't accept third-party printing materials. It is the Keurig of printers. Now it is being discontinued, which means that eventually authorized materials won't be available and the printers may become unusable.
With a printer that gets the Respects Your Freedom, this problem would not even be a remote possibility.
How pitiful that the author of that article says that there was "nothing wrong" with designing the device to restrict users in the first place. This is like putting a "cheat me and mistreat me" sign on your chest. We should know better: we should condemn all companies that take advantage of people like him. Indeed, it is the acceptance of their unjust practice that teaches people to be doormats.
The proper response to DRM is:
Aaron Swartz: for rich people to mess with the US school system is nothing new.
I think it is going too far to claim that the main or only purpose of the school system is to make people obedient. Parents around the world make sacrifices so their children can study, and if this were nothing but a way to keep them down, parents would have learned that by now and stopped.
Arguing that the motive for DRM is not about illegal copying, but really about control of legal markets.
Billionaire philanthropy can't make up for bad things they did to get the money in the first place, so don't let it buy your good opinion.
Flint, Michigan, is cutting off water to families that have not paid for the water that poisoned them.
There are many levels of irony here.
The CFAA puts a man under threat of 5 years in prison for a prank that lasted 40 minutes.
The US traded Iranian prisoners for Jason Rezaian and some other Americans who were imprisoned in Iran.
Rubio and Christie has a valid point to some extent; the danger they point to can really happen under some circumstances. When President Reagan traded arms for the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon, the hostage takers simply kidnaped more Americans to get more ransom.
However, trading prisoners is different from demanding a ransom. There is no sign that that exploitative pattern is happening here, or that Iran imprisoned those people in order to trade them. As long as Iran does not start to practice that abuse, we should continue trading prisoners.
Exxon's charter should be revoked for its global heating lies.
Clinton endorsed single-payer medical care, until Sanders started seriously campaigning for it.
The Baltimore thugs that shot Shaun Mouzon claimed he was trying to run them over. A video proves they lied.
The also appear to have lied when they said he was carrying a gun.
Comparing charter schools with the subprime mortgage bubble.
A woman is threatened with life imprisonment in Northern Ireland for taking abortion pills.
US citizens: presidential candidates, commit to reinterpret the Helms amendment more literally, to allow US funding for abortions in cases of rape and medical need.
Tens of thousands of women from Central America are fleeing to the US because gangs threaten violence against them or their children.
They are not economic migrants; they have a real claim for asylum. Moreover, the US's "war on drugs" is partly responsible for their plight.
Bernie Sanders showed in the 1980s that cities can prevent gentrification. It is not a law of nature, it is the outcome of choices made by governments.
Cheap gasoline is encouraging Americans to drive more and produce more CO2.
To avoid backsliding on efforts to avoid future disaster, we need an increase in the gasoline tax.
The giant methane leak illustrates the point that natural gas is cleaner than coal.
This false claim was put over by the money and PR of fossil fuel companies, that want us to make the bad investment of replacing coal with natural gas, rather than the good investment of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.
The founder of Netflix gave millions to a fund "for education", but his choice to head that fund has a history of working " for privatizing public education".
Privatized "charter" schools in the US are worse for teachers, worse for the community, and not better for students; but they are great for privatizing federal funds.
Refugee Benham Satah is a prisoner on Manus Island. He testified in the trial over the murder of his fellow prisoner Reza Barati, and is afraid the guards will kill him for that.
He testified seeing foreign guards as well as Manus islanders beat Barati to death. However, only the islanders have been charged with the killing; foreign guards enjoy effective impunity — one of the injustices of the way Australia set up its proxy prison in Manus.
I've read two books about Manus Island: Manus Religion, by Reo Fortune, and New Lives for Old, by Margaret Meade. They describe a society that chose revolutionary change between the 1920s and the 1950s, inspired by the American soldiers that were stationed there temporarily, who treated them as acquaintances rather than as colonial subjects.
That society existed in one corner of the island, alongside other societies that may have been quite different. I suppose that they have all been assimilated together, by now, and I wonder whether the nature of things in Manus Island today relates in any way to the culture of those people, 90 years ago.
A school in the UK has refused to allow birthday cakes in school, for fear of being held responsible if some child has an allergic reaction.
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the recently introduced discrimination in the US visa waiver program.
Bitcoin is becoming unreliable because of a refusal to change a protocol to increase the capacity for transactions.
Some US states have made it possible to buy birth control pills without visiting a doctor. This will make a big difference to women who can't afford to see a doctor for the prescription.
If we had a civilized medical system, and a proper minimum wage, etc., no women would be in that situation. But this change would still be good, even though not quite as urgently needed.
Americans exaggerate the danger of terrorism in the US by roughly 1,000,000 times, and this reaction creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, without which terrorism would occur even less.
Two hurricanes have formed in January, one in the Atlantic Ocean and one in the Central Pacific.
To have a hurricane in January in either place is a rarity. We are seeing an effect of global heating.
The way to deal with the crisis of student debt in the US is to make college gratis. The government should pay for it.
Going to college can increase a person's income (though this does not happen in every case), and it is fair that those who gain in this way should pay to support the system. With a proper progressive income tax, this would happen automatically.
Everyone: call on TransCanada to drop its NAFTA lawsuit, which demands billions of dollars in "compensation" for the cancellation of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Economists consider that the biggest threat to the global economy this year is a regional disaster caused by global heating.
That's with 1C of global heating. With 2C of heating, such disasters would happen all the time, and the uncertainty would be in the precise details.
One of the Oregon anti-wildlife occupation protesters drove a government vehicle to a town, and was quite properly arrested for car theft.
Neonicotinoid pesticides appear to be pointless on soybeans.
The judge yanked the necessity defense of the five protesters on trial for blocking an oil train. He said they had not presented any evidence that this particular protest was the only way to stop a bigger harm: the risk of an explosion in that city.
They were convicted on one charge, but not jailed.
I think that what's necessary to prevent global heating disaster is far more than they could possibly do.
Mary Anne Grady Flores will be jailed for six months for violating a "protection order". Her violation consisted of taking photos of a protest against the use of armed drones.
This is an indirect excuse for trashing people's constitutional rights.
Obama has stopped the issuance of new coal leases on US public land.
This is a step in the right direction.
A former CIA agent will face justice in Italy for kidnapping an Egyptian there and sending him to Egypt to be tortured.
US and UK officers are closely involved in directing the intervention in Yemen.
Goldman Sachs got a 5 billion dollar slap on the wrist for its role in taking the houses of millions of Americans. Part of it is tax-deductible.
EPA scientists have criticized the EPA's determination that fracking is not a big threat to water supplies.
The US and other powers, which didn't help the Haitian people rebuild after the earthquake, are once again imposing a president through a rigged election.
Release of Clinton's emails show how the US government told lies about Gaddafi as an excuse for intervention in Libya, and the pliant US major media eagerly spread them without investigating them.
Officials were also aware of al-Qa'ida's presence among the rebels.
The article does not go into depth about "special ops trainers inside Libya", so I cannot judge whether this ought to be a scandal or not.
The EPA let months go by after it found out that the water in Flint was poisoning children.
Global heating plays a role in a rash of mass deaths of many kinds of wild animals around the globe.
The die-offs include plants, too. Millions of pine trees in the US west have been killed as global heating enabled a parasitic insect to spread there.
The company that formerly managed Yosemite National Park applied for trademarks on the names of the old hotels and restaurants it was running, and is using those to force them to change their names.
This seems like extortion from the state. If it isn't a crime, it should be.
Confusion appears in the article where it uses the term "intellectual property". That term causes nothing but confusion.
Trademark law is nothing like copyright law or patent law. If you think you "understand" a statement about "intellectual property", it is a false understanding that will lead you astray.
Switzerland and Denmark require refugees to surrender their property.
This is a way to select the poorest refugees.
Switzerland's special tax on refugees who start to work is not quite as bad, but I think it is better to tax people based on wealth and income, not based on being refugees.
India has set up a new system of crop insurance to help save farmers from being pushed into failure and suicide by the cost of commercially produced seeds.
I hope it works better than the previous systems.
Do you have the right to stop a drone from hovering over your yard?
Research needs steadily increasing funding, not flashy "moonshots".
The disastrous results of the Arab Spring show that civil resistance can force out dictators but building democracy takes more.
In Tunisia I was told that the free software movement there was a big help, because people in it had learned how to work together effectively without having a boss to give them orders.
Everyone: call on Baltimore to fire housing chief Graziano, who looked he other way as his staff compelled women to have sex in exchange for legally mandated repair of their dwellings.
US citizens: Call on Obama to require federal contractors to disclose their political spending.
The only treatment for the lead in children's bodies in Flint is special educational care for a long time.
Everyone: call on your government not to require backdoors in your computers.
In Germany, it is now illegal for a web site to vacuum up a users' list of contacts.
In Amsterdam, a plan to "redevelop" the sex-work district has caused trouble for many prostitutes, but found very little trafficking of women.
Integrating segregated schools in the US faces opposition.
In Burundi, reports say the president/tyrant's forces have attacked civilians as reprisal for armed resistance.
The Internet of Things? Up your ass!
Americans of Iranian ancestry fear they will be blocked from visiting Europe in "retaliation" for the discriminatory US policy.
For other countries to "retaliate" by restricting US citizens of Iranian origin (and Iraqi, Syrian or Sudanese) would be ridiculous, like "retaliating" against Nazi Germany by punishing German Jews. A meaningful retaliation should infuriate those responsible for the US policy. That's why I suggest imposing a visa requirement on US citizens whose family names start with "Ry".
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to defend nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
When families of a dead person veto organ transplants, they deny several people a chance to keep their lives, and deny their deceased relative the chance to save lives.
My words for those families and their absurd obsession with parts of corpses: "Grow up!" They should not have the power to veto transplants.
Please sign up as an organ donor.
The TPP, with annotations explaining many ways it will do harm.
Using copyright for political censorship: this time, in Australia against an organization for humane treatment of animals.
Turkey has arrested academics for signing a petition calling on Erdoğan to stop repression in Kurdish areas. Over a thousand signatories face possible prosecution for this.
Chomsky signed the same petition; in response Erdoğan invited him to visit Turkey. He refused. Apparently that refusal was very wise.
Vlad Kolesnikov protested Russia's conquest of Crimea by wearing a t-shirt. His community and his family ostracized him, and he committed suicide.
Can We [Britons] Really Trust Judges to Protect Reporters' Confidential Sources?
Britons certainly should not trust them to protect dissidents and union organizers.
Who Can Prevent British [and other] Women Joining [PISSI]? Those Who Have Returned.
A study suggests that moderate use of marijuana does not harm teenagers' brains — rather, use of marijuana tends to accompany other factors, or other practices such as use of tobacco and alcohol, which explain their low grades and IQ scores.
A terrorist attack in Jakarta puts Indonesia's wobbly human rights in great danger.
Everyone who loves Indonesia must help it to avoid attacking itself now.
The Obama regime has speeded up release of some prisoners from Guantanamo, but still holds 49 prisoners there whom it has no intention to try or release.
Imprisonment without trial is an injustice which the US should condemn. It must cease this practice, to stop setting a bad example that other regimes cite as an excuse.
10 more have had, or are supposed to have, "trials" — but not fair trials.
Unfair trials are an injustice too.
Giant global front companies "audit" their supply chains with lots of loopholes. The abuses continue, but the companies can pretend to have stopped them.
The UK's recent record floods were statistically the result of global heating.
A Hong Kong publisher cancelled a book from fear of Chinese repression.
Don't give way to anthropomorphism when thinking about non-human animals.
It's possible for other animals to have feelings, but don't assume they are similar to what you would feel.
Pollution with PCBs is killing the orcas and dolphins of western europe.
Campbell's Soup Company agreed to label all products that contain GMO foods, saying that the cost of this labeling would be insignificant.
This demonstrates that the opposition to a labeling requirement is bullshit.
I do not believe that GMOs are invariably or inherently bad. But there are many ways that they can do harm, and without a firm and strong regulatory system, the companies that develop them will choose to ignore the risks.
Gambia has backed off from ordering female state employees to cover their hair while at work.
This is a small but significant defeat for religious fanaticism.
China's leading human rights lawyers face years in prison for "subversion" for trying to implement China's human rights law.
Writers Join Worldwide Action to Protest Palestinian Poet's Death Sentence in [Salafi Arabia].
I call that country Salafi Arabia to remind people that it has been spending millions of dollars a year for decades to impose its cruel, strict and vicious version of Islam on the Muslim world. One of the consequences is the existence of PISSI and other Islamic fundamentalist organizations.
France may prohibit strong encryption.
If that happens, I may be unable ever to go to France again.
A bill being considered in New York State would require portable phones to have spy back doors built in.
More income inequality in a country leads to less happiness for the whole population — not only for the poor.
Look at the US: right-wing politicians use the generally shared difficulties to divide people and lead them to blame scapegoats.
A Primer on the Damaging Movement to Privatize Public Schools.
US citizens: call on Congress not to sabotage the Iran deal.
Fighting between the Turkish state and the Kurdish independence movement PKK continues.
They had a truce, but Erdoğan broke the truce in 2015 in order to get a better election result.
Ted Cruz used unreported funds in his 2012 Senate campaign.
India has demonstrated its contempt for freedom of speech by arresting a comedian for mocking a religious leader.
Proposing a campaign for "transparency" about the algorithms that make decisions about people based on their digital dossiers.
This campaign is right, but misguided: it starts by presuming we surrender the fight against collecting digital dossiers about all of us. That's what we ought to fight against.
The UNHCR will interview people in Central America that hope to ask for asylum in the US.
The Venezuelan opposition yielded to the Supreme Court, so the opposition does not have a 2/3 majority.
In Europe, employers have been given the right to read all messages sent by employees at work.
I am not sure whether this applies only to use of the company's systems, or also to the employee's own computers.
A possible answer to that and other related questions.
One worker says his messaging was
investigated for
months due to misunderstandings. He was eventually found "innocent",
but the process made it intolerable to remain in that company.
Some religious fanatics in Pakistan
still
fight against polio vaccination. The CIA's hunt for Osama bin
Laden was partly responsible.
To have captured bin Laden and put him on trial would have been a good
thing. Killing him instead was
wrong,
and made little progress against
religious
fanaticism. Tarring the good name of polio vaccinators was a
grave
wrong.
Flint's Water Crisis
Flows
From A Much Bigger Problem.
St Louis is experiencing the burden of
stupidly
financing a new stadium for an NFL team.
From
Google Payroll to Government and Back Again.
Of course, this "revolving door" is not limited to Google or to
digital technology. It is standard practice in Washington,
and it is harmful across the board.
Senator Kay Hagan Promised to Take On Special Interests,
Now
She Works for Them.
UK Prime Minister Cameron
says
he did not "backslide" in his environmental policies.
That's true. His campaign to use up and pollute the environment has
only got stronger.
Social Media Companies
Should
Decline the Government's Invitation to Join the National Security
State.
The Oregon ranchers' difficulty is not that the government regulates
use of land, but that it
allowed
four big companies to take over the beef-packing business.
Turkish journalists and opposition protested about the
arrest
of over 150 journalists in Turkey.
Corbyn, who rejects Tony B'liar's right-wing politics, has
boosted
the support for the Labour Party.
Christians Flee Growing Persecution
in
Africa and Middle East.
Pakistan has arrested members of the
extremist
group that the state formerly supported to attack India.
In poor countries, the internet has not spread equality; it
provides
more benefit to the wealthy.
This is a secondary issue. More importantly, the internet as most
people use it is a system of oppression.
US libraries are
starting
to purge information on books borrowed, to protect readers'
privacy.
Zika, the mosquito-borne virus that causes human fetuses to grow
without most of the brain, is
likely
to reach the southern US.
Think of all the women in South America that will be forced by cruel
laws to carry these fetuses to term. Will Christian fanatics in Texas
try to do the same thing?
Sweden's foreign minister
called
for an investigation of Israel's "disproportionate" deadly
response to attacks by Palestinians; Israel has said she is not
welcome there.
Israel does not allow
its
actions to be
investigated.
Donald Trump has
praised
a long string of dictators, in countries such as China, Egypt,
Libya, Iraq, Russia and North Korea.
Since PISSI captured the Mosul dam, the dam has not received its
necessary maintenance. It is
starting
to crumble and might collapse.
The water would inundate Mosul, and could kill a million people or
two.
The US government
wants
hotel workers to report hotel guests for various non-criminal
activities, because supposedly indicates "sex trafficking".
Some of them might suggest prostitution is going on, but prostitution
does not equal trafficking. The US has enacted dishonest laws which
pretend that all sex workers under a certain age are being raped, but
that is
not
for laws to decide.
Some of these so-called signs don't relate to prostitution at all. I
do several of them every time I stay in a hotel by myself, even though
I'm no sex worker. (I'd never get anywhere in that profession with my
age and weight.)
Protesters that blocked an oil train are using the "necessity
defense", arguing that
their
action was needed to keep the community safe from an explosion.
Does
Obama's Nuclear Modernization Make the Unthinkable 'Thinkable'?
US citizens:
call
on presidential candidates to pledge to reject fossil fuel money.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to explain just how the TPP would (he claims) block
Transcanada's NAFTA suit against the US for disapproving the Keystone
XL pipeline.
Kenya is run by mafia-style cartels,
reports
its chief justice. He says that they have corrupted the branches
of government that are supposed to curb them.
The Koch brothers' father, Fred Koch,
worked
closely with the fascist countries before World War II, and in
1938 said he admired them.
Clinton's
dishonest attack against Sanders' universal health care proposal.
McDonald's is accused of
unfair
competition in Europe.
In India, the ancient superstition that considers menstruating women
"impure"
still
oppresses women today.
200
prisoners died in Russia in 2015. Were some of them killed by
thugs?
Around the world, religious fanatics' attacks on abortion rights have
caused a substantial decrease in safe, legal abortions, matched by an
equal
increase
in unsafe illegal abortions.
Obama proposes to
make
oil and coal extractors pay for their environmental costs.
This would drive the price way up and encourage conservation.
However, it needs to apply to imported coal and oil, not solely
to the coal and oil extracted in the US.
The IMF endorsed a
carbon
tax on ships and planes.
It should cover everything, but that would be a good start.
A
virus
that infects only carp may provide a way to reduce the carp that
infest a major Australian river.
It probably won't eradicate them, though; probably some are resistant.
By releasing several such species-specific viruses at once, and spread
them carefully, we might be able to eradicate the species from a
region.
Chicago allegedly installed lots of red light cameras due to
bribes
paid by the manufacturer.
We must establish a principle that it is an injustice to use computers
to monitor and punish human beings.
Kaddie Abdul attended a Trump rally and
gave
his supporters a chance to meet and talk with a Muslim woman.
Through her conversations, she came to understand their point of view.
Basically, they have suffered real hurt and offense, and blame it on
scapegoats.
China has
arrested
Swedish human rights campaigner Peter Dahlin on typical absurd
charges.
Dahlin's campaign tried to defend Chinese human rights campaigners
who were arrested or disappeared by the state. China has arrested
many Chinese lawyers who have done that.
Canadians are
organizing
to oppose the proposed attack on human rights.
Obama told us he would end US wars, but somehow
forgot
this commitment. Aside from Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, the
current presidential candidates propose increasing US interventions.
These interventions typically (1) cause terrible harm, (2) create
failed states, (3) spread militarism, (4) boost the
military-industrial complex, and (5) undermine human rights in the US.
I am not a pacifist. Some situations require war. But if the
president is predisposed to war, we will do it far too much.
Hong Kong has
agreed
to ban import and export of ivory.
This may help save elephants.
The UK's highest judge says that cuts in legal aid have made for
injustice
in trials.
Directors of UK schools warn that pressuring them to snoop on Muslim
students
will
backfire.
Salafi Arabia
has arrested Samar Badawi, sister of imprisoned Raif
Badawi,
for
advocating release of her former husband from prison.
Obama's men are
demanding
total snooping again.
It is absurd to claim that "security" requires that nobody be able to
have a private conversation any more. That's tyranny, not safety.
Our best chance, perhaps our only chance ever, to convert the US
back into a democracy is Sanders' "political revolution".
Please give him your energetic support.
Acidification Affects the
Ability
of Bacteria to Clean Our Oceans.
Indonesia
denied
a visa to journalist Cyril Payen, apparently because he made a
documentary about Indonesia's response to the independence movement in
West Papua.
The natural extension of monitoring people through "their" phones is
proprietary
software to make sure they can't "fool" the monitoring.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Cutting benefits for people with injuries who might be able to work will make it harder for them to find work.
MoveOn's members voted by almost 80% to endorse Bernie Sanders for president.
I hope this helps him win. I would be so glad to be able to vote for a major party candidate for president again.
Personnel from one of the Gaza aid ships, which flew the US flag, are suing Israel in the US for attacking their ship.
The arrest (yet again) of El Chapo will have no effect on the harm done by the "war on drugs".
Note that the War on Painkillers does collateral damage to people who suffer from pain. I worry, when I think about it, that some day after another operation I will once again be sent home and told to rely on percoset to treat the pain, and once again it won't be enough to do the job.
US citizens: call on the EPA to regulate methane leaks from existing sources.
US citizens: call on Congress to expand social security, not cut it.
Bayer has given up on trying to deny the EPA's finding that imidacloprid harms bees.
If it is really possible to use these pesticides without harming honeybees or other pollinators, that would be nice. But we must be careful of believing that too easily because Bayer pushes us to close our eyes to facts.
Compare these protesters who aim to protect people and nature against fracking with the armed Oregon protesters who demand to be allowed to overgraze and destroy wild forests.
The anti-frackers have "fortified" the site with a moat ad tunnels — but no weapons.
The "energy budget" approach to measuring Earth's climate sensitivity gave anomalously low results — due to an error which has now been corrected.
This particular straw is no longer available for denialists to grasp at when arguing we should not hasten to decarbonize.
Researchers Say Additional Children Increase Risk of Educational, Behavioral Problems.
Bernie Sanders is a sincere liberal who cares more about what's right than about what other people think.
I disagree with one thing he says, however. If I woke up and discovered I had been transformed into a hedge fund manager, I'd quit — and vote for Sanders.
I won't vote for Clinton, though. Of all the Democratic (and Republican) presidential candidates, Sanders is the only one I would vote for. If not him, then the Greens.
It appears the reason Putin's men poisoned Alexander Litvinenko was to stop him from testifying about Putin's links with Russian mafias, which were linked to Spanish mafias.
Superstitious fear of vaccines kills people, even in the US.
Iran Arrests Journalists, Bans Newspaper Ahead of Elections.
Why did Juniper Networks add the NSA-sabotaged key generation code, which was already suspect, when it already had a safe method?
US thugs now examine all sorts of records associated with a person's name or address, to estimate how "dangerous" the person is and whether to send a military-style team to break down per door.
(I used Marge Piercy's third-person singular possessive form "per", which is a gender-neutral alternative to "her". I absolutely refuse to use "they" in singular.)
In the UK, old and disabled people are now essentially isolated in their homes, never seeing anyone. The activities where they used to talk with other people have been eliminated, along with the transport that would have brought them there.
People who have few social contacts tend to die sooner, so I guess this is a way of getting rid of them.
The Entrepreneurial State: states such as the US, Germany and UK have made a big difference by actively promoting long-term innovation; today's strip-the-state corporations prevent such long-term activity by evading taxes.
We should not make the mistake of making innovation as such our highest goal. When the richest get to direct which innovations we use, they will do so for their good, not ours.
When we do need progress, the effects of illegitimate plutocratic governance can be seen when people foolishly wish that billionaires would invest in the research.
In the 1960s, when the US still made the rich pay substantial taxes, the state funded important research.
Sanders is First to Sign 'Fix Democracy' Pledge Rejecting Fossil Fuel Cash.
The EU says that special Belgian tax breaks for some large companies were illegal.
Three MSF hospitals have been bombed in Yemen since October, all by the Salafi Arabia with US support.
The totoaba fish, and the vaquita porpoise, are headed for extinction because of selfish and callous rich Chinese who don't care what they destroy in proving how important they are.
Curiously, the eating of fish swim bladder (from non-endangered fish) is a common practice in Chinese food. Try crabmeat and fish maw soup if you ever get a chance.
"Money is speech" turns the First Amendment into a requirement for plutocrats' money to rule all.
SCROTUS are trying to stop states from regulating toxic chemicals. The bill would ban states from regulating chemicals that the EPA has started to test.
Because the EPA is constrained to be very slow and cautious, and has little funds to do this, protecting Americans from toxic chemicals depends on states that have more courage. That's inconvenient for the businesses that use the chemicals, so naturally their subservient legislators are trying to stop the states.
SCROTUS: Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States
The UK's immigration law converts foreign domestic workers into slaves of their employers.
The employers go as far as maiming them. If they run away, the government punishes them and denies them medical care.
Africa's population growth rate is not declining. If it doesn't decline, it will cause a disaster of overpopulation that will spill over to the rest of the world.
We should give Africa all the aid necessary to bring its population under control.
A carbon tax can encourage cuts in emissions while having little overall effect on prices of goods.
Tropical forests are effective methods of pulling carbon out of the air, as long as we don't convert them into plantations.
Russian bombers killed more children in Syria.
They are matching the US-supported bombings carried out by Salafi Arabia in Yemen.
My Junior Doctor Colleagues Are Striking for the Wrong Reasons: "Everyone in the [UK] NHS should rise up against privatisation."
Americans are eager to bomb other countries; they feel little empathy with the people who are killed, or made homeless.
Republican Election Rigging Tactics
US citizens: call on the EPA to reduce diesel exhaust near ports, trains and truck routes.
Why do Americans work such long hours? One cause is that ordinary workers wages have not kept up with their productivity.
Polish journalists protested the new media law that gives the state direct political control over public broadcasting.
Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector.
How special bureaucracy slows down release of prisoners from Guantanamo.
Uganda is attacking journalists and dissidents.
Melting icebergs create negative feedback on global heating.
Good news, but that won't save us by itself.
The UK Conservative party is trying to rig future elections in its favor by cutting union funding for the Labour Party.
Cutting plutocrats' support for the Conservative Party is not on the agenda.
Media Blackout on Bernie Sanders Continues even though he leads Trump in Polls.
If you are uncomfortable trusting another woman to measure your bra size, now you can use a company's proprietary software, which entails trusting the company and Big Brother.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the TPP.
The US has been sponsoring, teaching and carrying out political violence in countries across the globe for more than a century now.
US citizens: call for restoration of funds for preventing lead poisoning.
US citizens: call on the Justice Department to investigate killer thugs.
US citizens: support Sanders' plan to break up the big banks and put a leash on banksters' power.
UNICEF estimates that at least a million children are imprisoned for various reasons.
The Pentagon has imposed pervasive digital surveillance on over 100,000 staff, even outside of work.
This is, I presume, to make sure they don't give information to the Pentagon's enemies, which include the American public.
A basic income for citizens has in several cases encouraged social cohesion.
De-bullshitifying the libertopian Legend of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
It is an exaggeration to call the occupiers "terrorists", but I expect that Doctorow is correct about the facts.
PISSI 'Ran Sophisticated Immigration Operation' on Turkey-Syria Border.
Turkey could seal the border if it tried. It has supported PISSI for reasons financial and ideological.
PISSI is the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
A long-range forecast for the next decade: increased conflict and economic difficulty.
The US is drifting into a surveillance-and-punishment social score system like what China's government has explicitly imposed.
This is a side effect of something that is bad for other reasons: massive surveillance. Instead of trying to treat the symptom, let's cure the disease.
Proper regulations can prevent fracking wastewater from causing earthquakes, but Oklahoma's legislature is too corrupted to bother.
Argentina's right-wing president claims to have appointed new judges to the Supreme Court without asking for the required Senate approval.
A new snooping device is meant for watching pets.
Whose pet are you?
Beware Spooks Stringing Along Security Reporters.
Pope Francis has put a softer glove on the same old Catholic sexual rigidity, but has not made the underlying stance more flexible.
Forbes.com demanded readers turn off ad-blockers — then sent them malware.
In fact, ordinary ads in web pages are all malware because they track visitors. Surveillance is a malicious functionality; hence, malware.
The Internet of Things That Talk About You Behind Your Back.
Some are planning to foist this on everything in your life.
Wall Street Taking Over Nonprofit Sector. Increasingly, the boards of directors of charities include representatives of Wall Street who will insure that the charities never rock a boat.
The US government wants to collect data about thousands of students. Then, adding stupidity to injustice, it wants to entrust this data to a private company.
Planning for More Surveillance? US Officials Hold 'Shady Meeting' With Tech Firms.
An Israeli expat high school student posted tweets that criticized Israel. School officials accused her of "bullying" someone (who was never named), and threatened her with prosecution.
Bands of men, perhaps refugees, marauded around Cologne groping and raping women, with the effect of fueling German hostility towards refugees.
The left must face this issue seriously.
The FBI is investigating the shooting of Esau Castellanos by Chicago thugs.
A woman reports on how she escaped from Raqqa after converting to Islam and moving there to be a slave of PISSI.
I hope she can teach others to resist this madness.
How Corporate Greed Caused the Massive California Methane Leak.
Two years after marijuana became legal in Colorado, the results are clear: a big drop in arrests and a big increase in state revenue.
The FBI will start tracking instances of cruelty to animals, except in factory farms.
An individual can still make a difference to the world, through firm and thoughtful effort.
Even if you make only 1% of the difference that those people made, it will still be an important contribution to humanity.
China demonstrates that trying to stop unsnoopable conversation leads straight to absolute censorship of software that people install on their computers.
Citizens of the US, UK and France, your freedom is directly threatened. I suggest you join a strong and firm privacy defense organization, without delay.
Various proprietary appliances and systems are competing to get you to give voice commands to them. They are designed to sucker you, not serve you. If you don't want to be a sucker, you had better reject them all.
In Venezuela, purchasing food in a grocery store requires biometric ID and fingerprints.
Purchases there have long required giving a national ID number, and that itself is oppressive. When in Venezuela I have refused to do this.
The US government is pushing to turn drivers' licenses into national ID cards, but some states have resisted. Sad to say, some of them seem to be on the verge of caving in.
Facebook thinks that Copenhagen's famous mermaid statue needs a bathing suit.
The statue is also afflicted by today's harsh and insanely long copyright.
US citizens: call on DNC chair Wasserman Schultz to resign.
Guber (*) will encrypt user location data to protect users' privacy from some forms of malicious access.
Don't feel safe with Guber yet! If Guber retains the ability to decrypt that data, the possibility of accessing the data will still exist. Perhaps when Big Brother wants to see it.
Meanwhile, Guber demands to know who you are, and demands you run nonfree software.
* Its official name is "Uber", but I call it "Guber" since it pays drivers peanuts. Which is another reason to refuse to use Guber.
South Africa is planning to punish journalism as espionage, following Obama's evil example.
How artists look for the cracks in increasing Chinese censorship.
Asking Silicon Valley to 'Disrupt' Terrorists Is Tech Talk for 'Surveillance'.
Pressure from Hindu extremist political organizations in India has influenced Hyderabad University to punish Dalits that protested mistreatment by bigoted students.
Internal emails show that Rahm Emanuel's team worked hard to suppress the video of Laquan McDonald's murder secret, for his re-election's sake.
This is one reason why Rahm Emanuel ought to resign as mayor.
Mr and Ms Hypes left their children in a car in a parking lot while buying snacks for them. For this, they face criminal charges and their children may be taken away from them.
The Hypes did do one thing that was very wrong: they had a second child which they could not afford without public assistance. (I don't know whether they were already poor when they had their first child.) Many people do that; it is unfair to those children and to the rest of us.
We should take steps to prevent it from happening. However, arresting the parents subsequently as they struggle to cope does no good at all.
The right-wing anarchists that occupied Malheur's wildlife management center are judged with prejudice by many Americans because they are "rednecks".
We should not misrepresent the situation by calling them "terrorists". However, there are fundamental differences between them and Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter demands that thugs stop unjustified killing of black people. The occupiers of the Oregon wildlife refuge demand to be allowed to destroy wildlife for their profit.
There is also a fundamental difference in their methods. Black Lives Matter does peaceful (though occasionally inconvenient) protests. The armed occupiers in Oregon threaten violence.
Thus, I support Black Lives Matter, while I hope to see the occupiers sentenced and jailed.
We should not misrepresent the situation by calling the occupiers a "militia". Under the US Constitution, they aren't one. If they were one, they would be under the president's orders.
Of 1021 chemicals injected by frackers, researchers found data about 240. Of those, 150 (over half) are associated with reproductive or developmental damage.
These problems can affect humans and wildlife.
For the other 781 chemicals, no experimental results have been published, but we can expect that a large fraction of them cause similar problems.
The Planet Will Lose Every Time That Business Calls the Shots.
Guns in Texas Psychiatric Hospitals Could Harm Patients, Advocates Say.
Football exposes players of all ages to the danger of brain damage.
Players at certain ages may be specially vulnerable because certain parts of their brains are still developing.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is not doing its job to protect college football players from this danger.
UK "junior doctors" will go on strike against government plans to gradually cut their pay.
The New York Thug Department has settled a lawsuit by adopting measures to prevent it from surveilling people because they are Muslims.
US citizens: call on Congress to pressure Israel not to label human rights NGOs (but not right-wing ethnic cleansers) as "foreign agents".
US citizens: call on Obama to create the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument, which would protect the Grand Canyon area from uranium mining.
The UK spends more money testing disabled workers to see who supposedly could work than it saves by denying disability benefits to them. That's despite the fact that the testing system errs in favor of finding disabled people "fit to work".
Jenny Jones, Green Party politician, thanks the heroic, whistleblowing police officer who revealed how thugs destroyed files about her, and pretended the files had never existed.
Apparently the surveillance continues, treating her as a terrorist suspect along with an unknown number of British dissidents.
Should "US" companies pay the taxes they owe? They are lobbying to get out of it.
We should tax them on progressive rates, to put economic pressure on large companies to split up.
Proposed dams could destroy 1/3 of the world's fresh-water fish species.
The dams would ruin the seasonal flooding cycle of Cambodia's lake, Tonle Sap, source of fish for the Mekong river. Millions of people's food supplies could be destroyed.
A PISSI fanatic ' Killed His Own Mother in Syria'.
This story may be of use in convincing people not to join PISSI. For his sake — as well as ours — I hope a bomb gets him soon.
Where Were the Post-Hebdo Free Speech Crusaders as France Spent the Last Year Crushing Free Speech?
I was there, for whatever little good I can do.
Businesses must take precautions against staff's bringing "internet of snoopers" devices to the office. They could be snooping on anything or everything.
Of course, individuals should take the same precautions in their own homes. Don't trust a device that talks to the internet if it has nonfree software in it.
Some scientific evidence that the rate of melting of Greenland's ice is more than was projected.
Haitians angry at the plan to rig the election again forced a postponement.
The French government wants to make "emergency" powers permanent, which would be a blow to freedom in France.
North Korea's [Claimed] H-Bomb Test Points to Need for Global Ban on Nukes.
What a $14.44 minimum wage has done in Emeryville.
California now requires the dishonest "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" to tell the women they "advise" where to get honest advice about abortion.
Nuclear Weapons Risk Greater Than in Cold War, Says [Former Head of Pentagon].
Wild bison living around Yellowstone National Park have received increased protection.
There is a hardware product that strips the digital shackles from HDCP-encrypted video between a computer and its monitor.
These devices will probably become impossible to get in the US, in a few weeks. Thus, they will not be able to free all users from this kind of DRM, nor from the DRM on the media themselves (typically BluRay or Netfux).
Nonetheless, even hundreds of these devices could make HDCP fail to achieve what the copyright lords want, and that would be a victory to celebrate.
Our ultimate goal is to abolish DRM.
DefectiveByDesign.org
Two CIA agents haves reportedly been arrested smuggling half a ton of cocaine from Mexico in a CIA van. They say it was a CIA operation; the CIA says it wasn't.
We can't take the word of anyone involved.
Nebraska puts teenagers in solitary confinement for months, effectively throwing away the key.
The Pillars of Poland's Democracy Are Being Destroyed. And nobody sees any way to stop it.
The thug that arrested Sandra Bland is being prosecuted for perjury.
Hooray!
Only a tiny fraction of thugs actually kill people, but lots of them make false accusations or lie to support them. Prosecuting only the few killers will not change the behavior of thugs in general. Prosecuting perjury could make all of them fear they will pay for their crimes.
Former officials in Guatemala are being prosecuted for crimes committed during the civil war.
Reducing the sugar levels in sweetened drinks could prevent lots of disease.
SCROTUS propose North Korea's nuclear weapons as an excuse for expensive anti-missile systems that probably would not work.
In Venezuela, Congress and the Supreme Court disagree about whether certain opposition legislators were elected honestly or by fraud.
Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor promoted a recall petition for the mayor. Officials accused him of a possibly imaginary crime, a white jury convicted him based on no evidence whatsoever, and he was sentenced to prison for years. But even that did not silence him.
They have mistreated him in prison, too.
The company that was going to build the Keystone XL pipeline is suing, claiming that under NAFTA the US has no right to reject the pipeline.
I don't know that it will win, but the mere fact that it can try demonstrates the essential injustice of NAFTA and other business-supremacy treaties.
Let's put an end to NAFTA! And let's defeat the TPP!
Mexico's tax on sugary drinks has substantially reduced consumption of them.
Suzanne Lee dares Northern Ireland to prosecute her for her abortion.
Sarah Ewart needed an abortion because her fetus had a fatal defect, but doctors in Northern Ireland were terrified of life imprisonment if they did it. It cost her 3000 dollars to go to England for the operation.
Women in nearly all countries in Latin America face similar oppressive laws, but there is no nearby place they can go for an abortion.
Michael Moore: Michigan Governor Snyder should be jailed for recklessly poisoning all the children of Flint.
US citizens: call on Obama to use an executive order clarifying that US funds can be used for abortions in cases of rape or incest, or when a woman's life is in danger.
A wave of self-censorship hits Hong Kong bookstores.
Organized global heating denialism has not stopped.
Those rich would-be planet roasters know they will lose eventually, but they are carrying out a real guard action to hold us back from averting disaster.
They are planning to kill your grandchildren.
Oral contraceptives taken before or during pregnancy are safe.
Specifically, they do not cause any increase in birth defects.
Clinton shows that she will work for the wealthy, by meeting with wealthy donors.
We can expect her to kowtow to the MPAA's attacks on our freedom and to tech companies' attacks on our privacy.
Twitter is considering encouraging users to post articles on Twitter. Twitter could control access to these articles, or delete them.
The overprotecting attitude towards teenagers is a great excuse for some companies to gouge.
Bernie Sanders presents a long list of reforms for banks, and presents the facts to demonstrate that fraud is their standard practice.
The effects of traumatic events on children's bodies can now be measured from the level of cortisol in their hair.
Global heating is slowing the overall water circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean. One effect is increased sea-level rise for the northeast US.
Some worry that this circulation pattern could slow so much that it causes drastic changes in the Arctic Ocean.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes some parameters of global heating to resemble a staircase more than an even ramp.
For a while, the increased heat goes into the ocean, then for a while it goes into the atmosphere. The denial campaign focused on the last period when heat went into the ocean and claimed that global heating has "paused".
A Turkish journalist who was arrested for filming a fight between state thugs and PKK supporters was jailed "for protective reasons". Now he has been released on bail, but still faces charges.
What could this sort of thing "protect" Turkey from? From the truth about its government?
The gun lobby has cut the funding of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to the point where it can't enforce existing gun laws.
The head of the Federal Trade Commission refuses to use a Fitbit because she doesn't want to be snooped on.
Bravo to the government official who presents a real example.
You won't recover your privacy with weak moans, "It's a shame how much this device snoops on me, but I can't resist." But if you start saying, "You snooping jerks, get out of my life!" you will start to change things, first for yourself.
Local area residents and local Paiute tribe both want the anarchists occupying a wildlife management building to go home.
One in Five Insured Americans Still Struggle to Pay Medical Bills.
What's Being Fined? Not Corporate Crime.
Medical personnel in Northern Ireland fear they will be jailed if they tell women where to get abortions.
US citizens: call on Obama to pressure Salafi Arabia to respect human rights and refrain from militarism.
Burundi's thugs are killing dissidents that impose the rule of president-turned-dictator Nkurunziza.
All the sides involved in the armed seizure of a wildlife refuge have done substantial wrongs.
The President of Drexel University says why that school has no football team: prestigious football teams cost schools a lot of money, and drive up the cost of education.
The same problem with football exists for college students and younger students.
Climate mayhem is harming farmers' mental health.
Coping with the stress of swimming against the US's racist current makes many black college students sick.
Something similar can happen to students from low-income backgrounds, but school policies can prevent it.
Sri Lanka's new president vowed to end torture and official kidnapings, but has not succeeded in ending them.
Clinton was paid almost 12 million dollars for 51 speeches.
What could make her speeches worth so much to those with lots of money?
America's Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought.
Why It's Scary That the Mall of America Can Crush Dissent.
Sanders plans to reduce the political power of Wall Street. Clinton's proposals simply don't go far enough.
The EPA found that imidacloprid (a neonicotinoid pesticide) harms honeybees.
It has not investigate how that chemical affects other pollinators, but if the danger to honeybees is enough reason to restrict its use, maybe the other studies won't be needed.
I suppose that Salafi Arabia did not intentionally bomb the al Noor Center for Care and Rehabilitation of the Blind, in Yemen. It's just part of the hell that war is. Which is why Salafi Arabia and the US are so wrong to pursue this unjustified war.
The NFL wants to ruin a local children's soccer field by turning it into a press center.
Australia saw reason and allowed Hassan Asif's mother and brother to visit and be with him as he died of cancer.
Bravo Charlie Hebdo for a cover showing "god" as an armed extremist.
Pope Francis lost a few points in my esteem for trying to claim such statements should be off limits.
Soaring expenses for living in Brazil's cities, along with demolition of favelas, have given rise to the Homeless Workers' Movement.
Thanks to SCROTUS, the US does not even keep track of the greenhouse gas emissions from meat production.
SCROTUS have proposed a bill to shield companies such as Volkswagen from lawsuits by victims of their fraud.
The plutocratist politician wants the government to take the side of the rich in every kind of question.
Violent right-wing anarchists hate the federal government, but they don't mind accepting subsidized loans from it.
This shows one of many reasons I disagree with anarchism.
New York City thug started groping a woman in a restaurant. When a friend started making a video, another thug attacked him and arrested him. The thugs threw the cell phone out the window and made false charges against him.
One of the thugs has been indicted. Why not both?
The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine has resigned after 18 months of being blocked by Israel from entering occupied Palestine.
Putin's men have shut down a children's theater in Crimea; it is accused of spreading pro-western propaganda.
Insurance companies are increasingly giving drivers an "offer" to track their driving, an offer which most people effectively can't refuse.
I don't think it an injustice for insurance companies to track how you drive, safely or not. I also don't see anything wrong in making the car inform you if you do anything that seems risky (though there are some occasions when slamming on the brakes, or the accelerator, is important for safety). What I object to is anything that allows anyone to track where you go.
The article ends with the obligatory "Give up trying to fight this" message.
Why Is the Largest Earth Science Conference Still Sponsored by Exxon?
NSA whistleblower William Binney told Parliament that the UK's massive listening plans will be useless for preventing terrorism.
They will be much more effective for spreading terror among dissidents.
Family planning advisors in Northern Ireland, who in general are forbidden to do abortions, are nonetheless harassed at their homes and in stores by religious fanatics that oppose birth control.
Some women there get abortion pills in the mail from where they are legal.
A twisted form of Christianity says that true believers are rewarded with riches. Are they worshiping Mammon?
The diplomatic rupture that Salafi Arabia has provoked with Iran is likely to block efforts to negotiate peace in Syria.
Iran is an evil theocracy, and Salafi Arabia is an evil theocratic absolute monarchy. There is no legitimate room in the human world for either one, but Salafi Arabia is worse. Both of them execute lots of people, but Salafi Arabia executes people simply for criticizing state policy. And it has spread a cruel form if Islam around the world.
In this conflict with Iran, nearly all the wrong seems to be on Salafi Arabia's side.
Turning Salafi Arabia into a pariah and blockading its sales of oil would do the world a lot of good.
Organic farmers won a victory when a court upheld a ban on genetically engineered crops in part of Oregon.
Calling on European countries to carry out their legal obligation to reject products made by the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Global heating effects can make many power plants (fossil and nuclear and hydroelectric) cease to function.
Publisher Lee Bo, before his disappearance, said that his disappeared partner was planning to publish a book that the Chinese government wanted to suppress.
Women in the US face many sorts of discrimination.
I think that it's foolish to vote for Clinton just because she's a woman. I don't think she wants to make real change in any area.
PISSI is minor league terror campaigned with the really big dangers, including nuclear weapons and burning carbon.
North Korea claims to have tested a hydrogen bomb, defying both the US and China.
PISSI is important enough that we should make efforts to stamp it out, and take care not to create more places it can spread to; but we should not obsess over PISSI and get distracted by it from bigger threats.
Large And Increasing Methane Emissions from Northern Lakes.
Nevada increased fees imposed on home solar power, during the holiday hoping people would not notice.
I suspect that money from the power utilities was used to corrupt the officials.
Thailand is fighting a war against wood poachers.
Pacific bluefin tuna are being hunted to extinction for sushi.
A small victory for freedom of speech in the UK: a Christian who was prosecuted for saying insulting things about Islam was acquitted.
Since there is no Satan and there is no Hell, all two of his criticisms are clearly mistaken. As for "heathen", whether that applies to Islam depends on the definition, but is that word an insult? Not to me. I am proud to be a heathen.
But those details are all side issues. Freedom of speech includes the right to criticize, offend, insult, or even mock any person, any idea, any practice, any belief, and any institution. That includes any religion — even the Church of Emacs.
US officials say they plan to besiege the armed anarchists that took over a wildlife refuge, cutting off food, power and phone service.
It is wise to try to avoid shooting, but the gang must be prosecuted for this.
Europe's inability to unify its handling of refugees is making the Schengen free-travel zone start to crumble.
The UK government is wiping out social housing in a giant act of dooH niboR.
A US bookstore named after the Egyptian goddess Isis was forced to change its name by ignorant American vandals.
The giant methane leak in California was partly due to removal of the blowout preventer decades ago.
Some Canadian CEOs have already made as much money in 2016 as the average worker will make in a whole year.
Children that often play with electronic toys that sound bells and whistles advance more slowly in language learning.
More about Nimr Al-Nimr, dissident executed by Salafi Arabia.
Salafi Arabia's well-funded PR campaign pays pundits to excuse the murder of dissident Nimr al-Nimr or to distract attention to secondary issues.
Canada ludicrously put 6-year-old Syed Adam Ahmed on its "no fly" list.
Across the US, some 70,000 rape evidence kits have been left unanalyzed.
Laws That Restrict Teenagers' Access to Abortion Services Make No Logical Sense.
If the Oregon Militiamen Were Muslim Or Black, They'd Probably Be Dead By Now.
The US surprise-cancelled a Muslim grandparent's US visa, stopping her from visiting her newborn grandchild in the US.
Economists who have climate expertise say that global heating will be painfully expensive, an economic drain.
It will be far worse than a drain, of course. It is likely to kill hundreds of millions of people. But people who think in narrow economic terms may be persuaded more by the drain.
The War on Women Is About to Get a Whole Lot Worse.
The civil war in Yemen has allowed al-Qaida to operate unchecked, and PISSI is worming in their too.
There is no legitimate reason for Salafi Arabia to fight the Houthis, and no legitimate reason for the US to help.
American football damages the players' brains and causes them to die young. We should put an end to it.
The first step is not to buy, or wear, football fan merchandise. Get GNU merchandise instead, since that supports a cause that deserves support.
How the mayor of Mogadishu won popular support away from al-Shabaab.
This may be why al-Shabaab has found it necessary to sink to using Trump for publicity.
Redditt Hudson quit the thug department in a suburb of St Louis
because its racist brutality was
incompatible
with his wish to be a police officer and to serve and protect.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
Many video game consoles snoop on their users and report to the internet — even what their users weigh. A game console is a computer, and you can't trust a computer with a nonfree operating system.
Correcting ignorant anglophone criticism of Charlie Hebdo.
The 2016 presidential election gives the US a chance to defeat the vicious cycle of plutocracy.
We need to stop being nice to plutocrats. They are trying to impoverish everyone else. They deserve to be crushed.
An anti-state militia has occupied a building at a wildlife refuge in Oregon as a protest.
Setting fire to your grass, with the aim of burning only your grass, may be good or bad, but it is not ethically comparable to setting fire to a building.
On the other hand, occupying a government building with guns is not ethically comparable to a peaceful sit-in.
Michael McFeat, expat working at a mine in Kyrgyzstan, faces years in prison for defaming a local food delicacy.
It is impossible to defame Kyrgyzstan's human rights record, which is worse even than Thailand's.
Even "free" countries in Europe are not free of the practice of criminalizing insults.
The state sensibly deported him rather than imprisoning him, but that doesn't reduce the injustice of having a law that prohibits such statements.
Russian censorship almost killed a series of detective stories for children.
Salafi Arabia's execution of a Shi'ite leader of peaceful protests has aroused threats of violence from Iran.
I hope that we won't let issues of international rivalries bury the really issue here: a repressive regime has murdered a nonviolent dissident. Iran has done likewise. We don't have to choose a side between them. We can demand they both respect dissent.
Record-breaking floods have hit many US states. They are especially unusual because of happening in winter, which is not when floods typically occur. This suggests that global heating was part of the cause, which suggests that worse floods are coming.
The UK government cut spending on flood defenses, knowing that this would double the vulnerability over time.
What use is there in provoking rising seas and unusual heavy rains but then preventing them from actually flooding people's homes?
Poland saved the wolves, but the right-wing government probably wants to wipe them out, as happens also in the US.
The article gives a clear explanation of why the absence of wolves causes big problems with other ecosystems. (But it might make sense to have more hunting of wild boars, whose meat is in demand from European gourmets.)
Facebook and Guber can be seen as cults, with the ability to mobilize millions of members to condemn any regulations that protect people from those businesses.
President Kagame rigs the elections in Rwanda, even including a prearranged small fraction of votes for opposition, and there is no independent press to report on it.
US citizens: call on MoveOn to ask its supporters which Democrat to endorse for president.
US citizens: call for repeal of the Hyde amendment — allow US government to fund abortions.
US citizens: call on the Justice Department to file charges against Tamir Rice's killers.
A study estimates that the US's wars since 2001 have killed over a million people.
Yet another employee of a Hong Kong publishing company has apparently been disappeared by China.
People who have more money than work really love getting personalized ads as they pass the door of a store.
The Gates Foundation and USAID are planning together how to impose commercial seeds monopolies in Africa.
Salafi Arabia executed the leader of a peaceful protest movement.
New Years Eve demonstrated that, yet again, Islamist terrorists are such a small threat to Americans that we need not worry about them, and that we don't need to continue security theater.
But we have plenty of feckless fantasy terrorists; the FBI keeps generating them. The latest one has been mentally ill and easily manipulated all his life.
The ACLU is suing a Catholic hospital to demand permission to give Rebecca Chamorro a tubal ligation as part of her expected birth by cesarean section.
Creeping control of medicine by religion has gone so far that there are no hospitals near her which would do it.
She could get the tubal ligation separately, but that means an added risk to her health.
If a church insists on limiting medicine, it should not be allowed to operate hospitals.
Al-Shabaab, the Islamist terror group in Somalia, has made a recruiting video featuring Donald Trump.
Trump is not responsible for their decision to do this. He is responsible for stirring up sectarian hatred of the sort that helps every sort of fanatic.
Protesters are picketing the home of the prosecutor whose underwhelming efforts led to no charges against Tamir Rice's killers.
The secret back door in Juniper Networks firewalls took advantage of a weakness introduced intentionally by the NSA in an encryption standard.
Thus, the argument that "If we let the NSA break it, others will take it" is not mere theory. (People usually state this as, "The bad guys will use it too", but I reject the presumption that the NSA is always a good guy.)
Since the weakness has been publicly known for years, this fact does not prove that the NSA introduced this particular back door. That might have done by various attackers. It's also possible that the back door was inserted by Juniper Networks, or by some of its staff, perhaps in collaboration with the NSA.
Juniper Networks has fixed only part of the known problem. Because the software is proprietary, users are compelled to wait and see if Juniper Networks inserts the presumed one-line fix for the rest of the problem.
If it were free software, these users would be free to insert this change on their own.
The next step in privatization of all aspects of life is privatizing play for children. The promotion campaign says that parents who don't pay the high fees for this are short-changing their children.
I am sure the idea that children should never be left unsupervised contributes to this tendency.
China's new "snooper's charter" does not include the power to demand a backdoor. It stops at demanding companies decrypt messages on demand.
Even this may be impossible if it covers messages encrypted by the users with their own software.
Injection of oil and gas well wastewater is causing a lot of earthquakes in Oklahoma, and some of them are strong enough to do real damage.
Israeli schools have banned a book about a mixed-ethnicity couple.
Reportedly 100 Britons have gone to fight for the Peshmerga against PISSI.
Artificial ocean reefs, made of used tires, were intended to provide shelters for marine life. They backfired: the metal clips that held them together have rusted, loosing the tires to drift across the sea bottom, destroying life there.
Copyright started in England as a system of censorship, and through the end of 2015 it was used in Germany to prohibit publication of Hitler's hate tract, Mein Kampf.
The world would be better off if nobody had ever thought of Hitler's form of hatred, but we can't get rid of it through censorship.
Unjust extension of copyright in the US has denied us the use of many
books and works published in 1959. Here's a
list
of some.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the
old
link was broken.]
We should shorten copyright to last 10 years, for old works and new works.
Some states have strict laws about students' privacy, which schools violate by handing students' data to Google. Schools try to defeat these laws by designating Google as a "school official".
One part of the solution is that schools should not accumulate so much data about their students. Personal data, once collected, will be misused.
US Planning New Iran Sanctions over Ballistic Missile Programme.
Comparing Facebook's grab for internet control with Monsanto's control over seeds.
The article gets confused in one point by the incoherent term "intellectual property". The sense of understanding that you get from that term represents a false understanding.
Due to advances in medicine, it is possible to save a fraction of fetuses born prematurely after as little as 22 weeks.
A 22-week fetus, whether inside of a womb or outside, is not a human being. It is only a potential future human being.
If you give birth to one, you can try to keep it alive until it becomes a human being. But unless we were in a space colony with an urgent need to increase the population, I will not drop anything to help you, and I don't think it's a good use of our tax money. There is a superfluity of babies that are born without such extraordinary efforts — and there are millions of real, existing, human beings that already exist and need help. I think real existing human beings should have priority over potential future human beings.
Writers have envisioned artificial wombs in which a zygote can develop into a fetus and eventually into a human being. Perhaps some day we will build them. That won't create an obligation to use them for every zygote.
"American Exceptionalism" allows Americans to believe that the US is so fundamentally morally right that it is still in the right no matter what evils it commits.
Everyone: call for a new grand jury to consider charges against the killers of Tamir Rice.
Vincent Emanuele, formerly of the Bush forces in Iraq, reports on how he and his fellow occupier created hatred that manifests in PISSI.
The Bush forces were parts of the US military that were used by Bush to carry out his private war. They signed up to serve their country, but they ended up serving evil instead.
The TPP's rules about trade secrets would require inventors and competitors to treat them as secrets, even after they have leaked.
This reminds me of how the Obama regime treats the Snowden revelations, ordering government employees not to look at them.
Thailand's military is holding people accused of various crimes in a military base, where they are often kept shackled and blindfolded.
This treatment of prisoners is not quite as bad as the US has done in Guantanamo, but the wrong is broader in the sense that anyone in Thailand could be treated this way. but the wrong is broader in the sense that anyone in Thailand could be treated this way.
China almost completely blocks foreign press from Tibet and Xinjiang.
Tech Companies [will] Face Criminal Charges If They Notify Users of UK Government Spying.
The US committed a similar injustice with Ladar Levison.
Poland's right-wing governing party is moving to impose direct political control of public broadcasting.
Berlusconi did something similar.
The FBI has protected us from another fantasy terrorist.
Marco Rubio doesn't mind how the US government snoops on all of us, but he condemns US snooping on Israeli officials.
Boston thugs have aggressively investigated political dissent groups for many years.
This continued with Occupy Boston.
Trying to spot terrorists through supposed "behavioral indicators" of terrorists has never had a success, and the evidence that they are useless keeps increasing.
El Niño rains will not suffice to refill California's depleted aquifers.
The responsibility of prosecuting killer thugs in the US typically falls on their colleagues, the local prosecutors. No wonder it is so hard to do this.
Thugs accused of killing, or making false accusations, should be prosecuted by others.
Students have been convicted in Bangladesh of killing secular blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider.
I disapprove of the death penalty on principle, but aside from that I welcome this ruling.
When India's government launched an inquiry about Facebook's drastically unneutral internet access scheme (gratis access to the poor, limited to a specific set of sites), Facebook started a DDOS campaign asking its useds to send nonresponsive answers.
Worse, Facebook's proprietary apps made useds' computers send expressions of support for this campaign, even when the useds did not want to.
Never trust these cr…apps. They are as dangerous as any other proprietary software.
Super-rich Americans avoid millions of dollars in taxes through dodges such as moving money through tax heavens.
How plutocracy took over America, starting with the fiscal power of private banks.
Capitalism in America: Giving Crazy a Bad Name While Subverting Democracy.
Former congresscritter Pete Hoekstra supported NSA surveillance consistently while in office. He was shocked to discover recently that the NSA listened to him.
Obama's policies encourage replacement of coal with fracked gas, but some US cities have policies to head toward renewable energy instead.
The UK's parliament was never consulted about setting up cameras to track all car travel.
Scandal in Brussels! Some soldiers and some thugs had a sex party in the office, while they were sleeping there because transport was shut down.
Why this constitutes a problem or a wrong is not clear to me. It did not hurt anyone.
Afghan journalists suspect that the attempts on their life come from a Taliban-supporting "fifth column" inside the Afghan government.
The question is not, "How likely are we to limit global heating to 1.5C," but rather, " How much damage will it cause if we don't?"
Hunger Threatens Millions as El Niño Causes Drought And Floods.
El Niño events have occurred for a long time, but this one comes on top of the effects of 1C of global heating.
California seals are starving because sardines have had to head for colder water.
About 1/3 of the casualties of Putin's air attacks in Syria are civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Google is shifting Android to use OpenJDK rather than its own Java implementation which used a reimplementation of Java based on the proprietary header files of the proprietary Java implementation.
This concrete result is good for the free software community, but the idea that a compatible implementation of an interface spec might infringe the copyright on header files is very very dangerous. Fortunately, the appeals court that made this decision hears copyright cases only in very rare circumstances.
The FSF urged the Supreme Court not to consider the appeal because we feared it might sustain the appeal court's ruling, which would extend this bad decision to the whole US.
Roughly half the jobs in the US require urine tests to detect use of marijuana. This policy never made any sense, and it is even more absurd in states which have legalized marijuana.
2015's notorious censorship attempts in universities.
A school-sponsored sports team is not a person. I think it is legitimate for the school to exercize control over what ateam does, which would be wrong if directed towards an individual student.
As usual, campaigns to limit Google's snooping on students through their schools demand an inadequate remedy.
If the school makes an account in a student's name on a company's server, or stores any unencrypted information there about the student's activity, that is already a violation of the student's privacy.
Parents must go beyond asking "Please sir, may my child have some more privacy" and organize to put an end to these snooping activities.
In addition, Google services nearly all require the user to run nonfree software (written in Javascript).
The Pentagon is deliberately obstructing the release of prisoners from Guantanamo with a campaign of persistent non-cooperation.
The US commander in Afghanistan says that the US will needs more troops to continue propping up the Afghan government.
The choice, as I expected, is to keep propping it up ad infinitem or let it fall.
The UK's Minister for Cruel Deportation wants to deport Thomas Podgoretsky because he made the mistake of visiting the US, having a stroke and heart attacks there, and staying there until he was well enough to go home to the UK.
The excuses offered to the grand jury for the shooting of Tamir Rice beg questions that were apparently ignored — for instance, why didn't they stay a little further away and take a second to understand the situation.
A Chronicle of Woe: US Policing Culture From Iraq and Vietnam to Jon Burge's Chicago.
Is Flawed Terrorism Research Driving Flawed Counterterrorism Policies?
US thugs shot and killed at least 28 people this year who were holding pellet guns or BB guns.
I wonder what fraction of them were black. I suspect thugs are more likely to take a pellet gun for a real gun when it is held by a black.
In 2008, Hossein Derakhshan's blog was so influential that Iran imprisoned for it. Released in 2014, he encountered an Internet in which Facebook and Instagram discourage people from looking at any other web sites. Real discussion has been replaced by trivia videos.
In London, squatters occupied the former mint site to protest against homelessness.
A six-month truce between Assad and rebels is holding in parts of Syria.
Between US air strikes and PISSI's explosive booby traps, Ramadi is now mostly a ruin.
That's better than what it was a month ago, a stronghold of barbarity. I expect that the civilian survivors will say so. Helping them get their voice out, to show young Muslims what a monster PISSI is, will help them resist radicalization.
Evidence that the key to success is dealing in a useful way with failure.
The UK's budget cuts have come back as tremendous damage.
The US government is concealing parts of its contracts with companies that imprison immigration violators, specifically the parts that show how these contracts financiall pressure the government to imprison more of them.
Prohibiting farmers from repairing tractors is not a side effect of the DMCA. It is part of the core goal.
Americans must not stand for officials' advocating China-style attacks on our encryption systems.
Encryption alone can't protect us from all the sorts of digital surveillance that are being set up in the US. Encryption won't stop systems from recognizing your license plate or your face. Encryption won't enable you to pay anonymously with a credit card, or carry a portable phone and not be tracked.
It appears that global heating is increasing tornado damage in the US.
Facebook's Zuckerberg: If You Oppose Our International Power Grab, You're An Enemy Of The Poor.
I have long challenged campaigns that prioritize people's internet access over their freedom.
An enormous methane leak from an old gas well in California will take months to shut off.
I Revealed the Truth about President Erdogan And Syria. For That, He Had Me Jailed.
Obama's program to help homeowners faced with foreclosure did not function well, and now SCROTUS have abolished it.
UK governments have repeatedly refused to confront the way global heating effects put Britain in danger.
The thug that killed Tamir Rice will not be prosecuted.
Prosecutors often intentionally throw the fight in the grand jury. We need a special mechanism for bringing charges against thugs that shoot people, or make falls accusations.
Capitalism in America: Giving Crazy a Bad Name While Subverting Democracy.
Former congresscritter Pete Hoekstra supported NSA surveillance consistently while in office. He was shocked to discover recently that the NSA listened to him.
Obama's policies encourage replacement of coal with fracked gas, but some US cities have policies to head toward renewable energy instead.
The UK's parliament was never consulted about setting up cameras to track all car travel.
Scandal in Brussels! Some soldiers and some thugs had a sex party in the office, while they were sleeping there because transport was shut down.
Why this constitutes a problem or a wrong is not clear to me. It did not hurt anyone.
Afghan journalists suspect that the attempts on their life come from a Taliban-supporting "fifth column" inside the Afghan government.
The question is not, "How likely are we to limit global heating to 1.5C," but rather, " How much damage will it cause if we don't?"
Hunger Threatens Millions as El Niño Causes Drought And Floods.
El Niño events have occurred for a long time, but this one comes on top of the effects of 1C of global heating.
California seals are starving because sardines have had to head for colder water.
About 1/3 of the casualties of Putin's air attacks in Syria are civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Google is shifting Android to use OpenJDK rather than its own Java implementation which used a reimplementation of Java based on the proprietary header files of the proprietary Java implementation.
This concrete result is good for the free software community, but the idea that a compatible implementation of an interface spec might infringe the copyright on header files is very very dangerous. Fortunately, the appeals court that made this decision hears copyright cases only in very rare circumstances.
The FSF urged the Supreme Court not to consider the appeal because we feared it might sustain the appeal court's ruling, which would extend this bad decision to the whole US.
Roughly half the jobs in the US require urine tests to detect use of marijuana. This policy never made any sense, and it is even more absurd in states which have legalized marijuana.
2015's notorious censorship attempts in universities.
A school-sponsored sports team is not a person. I think it is legitimate for the school to exercize control over what ateam does, which would be wrong if directed towards an individual student.
As usual, campaigns to limit Google's snooping on students through their schools demand an inadequate remedy.
If the school makes an account in a student's name on a company's server, or stores any unencrypted information there about the student's activity, that is already a violation of the student's privacy.
Parents must go beyond asking "Please sir, may my child have some more privacy" and organize to put an end to these snooping activities.
In addition, Google services nearly all require the user to run nonfree software (written in Javascript).
The Pentagon is deliberately obstructing the release of prisoners from Guantanamo with a campaign of persistent non-cooperation.
The US commander in Afghanistan says that the US will needs more troops to continue propping up the Afghan government.
The choice, as I expected, is to keep propping it up ad infinitem or let it fall.
The UK's Minister for Cruel Deportation wants to deport Thomas Podgoretsky because he made the mistake of visiting the US, having a stroke and heart attacks there, and staying there until he was well enough to go home to the UK.
The excuses offered to the grand jury for the shooting of Tamir Rice beg questions that were apparently ignored — for instance, why didn't they stay a little further away and take a second to understand the situation.
A Chronicle of Woe: US Policing Culture From Iraq and Vietnam to Jon Burge's Chicago.
Is Flawed Terrorism Research Driving Flawed Counterterrorism Policies?
US thugs shot and killed at least 28 people this year who were holding pellet guns or BB guns.
I wonder what fraction of them were black. I suspect thugs are more likely to take a pellet gun for a real gun when it is held by a black.
In 2008, Hossein Derakhshan's blog was so influential that Iran imprisoned for it. Released in 2014, he encountered an Internet in which Facebook and Instagram discourage people from looking at any other web sites. Real discussion has been replaced by trivia videos.
In London, squatters occupied the former mint site to protest against homelessness.
A six-month truce between Assad and rebels is holding in parts of Syria.
Between US air strikes and PISSI's explosive booby traps, Ramadi is now mostly a ruin.
That's better than what it was a month ago, a stronghold of barbarity. I expect that the civilian survivors will say so. Helping them get their voice out, to show young Muslims what a monster PISSI is, will help them resist radicalization.
Evidence that the key to success is dealing in a useful way with failure.
The UK's budget cuts have come back as tremendous damage.
The US government is concealing parts of its contracts with companies that imprison immigration violators, specifically the parts that show how these contracts financiall pressure the government to imprison more of them.
Prohibiting farmers from repairing tractors is not a side effect of the DMCA. It is part of the core goal.
Americans must not stand for officials' advocating China-style attacks on our encryption systems.
Encryption alone can't protect us from all the sorts of digital surveillance that are being set up in the US. Encryption won't stop systems from recognizing your license plate or your face. Encryption won't enable you to pay anonymously with a credit card, or carry a portable phone and not be tracked.
It appears that global heating is increasing tornado damage in the US.
Facebook's Zuckerberg: If You Oppose Our International Power Grab, You're An Enemy Of The Poor.
I have long challenged campaigns that prioritize people's internet access over their freedom.
An enormous methane leak from an old gas well in California will take months to shut off.
I Revealed the Truth about President Erdogan And Syria. For That, He Had Me Jailed.
Obama's program to help homeowners faced with foreclosure did not function well, and now SCROTUS have abolished it.
UK governments have repeatedly refused to confront the way global heating effects put Britain in danger.
The thug that killed Tamir Rice will not be prosecuted.
Prosecutors often intentionally throw the fight in the grand jury. We need a special mechanism for bringing charges against thugs that shoot people, or make falls accusations.
Everyone:
urge
your government to
sign the treaty to protect victims of forced labor.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
More information about the treaty.
If you don't run the Javascript code, you won't see anything in your browser to show that you signed, but in my case it did in fact work; you should get a confirmation email.
Japan has apologized to the Korean women that it forced into prostitution during World War II.
The Japanese army did that in other places, too, including what is now Indonesia. After the war, many of these women never went home because they felt ashamed — in effect internalizing the blame that (according to their culture) their families would have imposed on them.
Combining the Internet of Things with the DMCA creates the Internet without Good Choices.
The TPP is harmful even if evaluated based on the "free trade" ideology.
Of course, that ideology is a mistake because it reduces the effective power of democracy and increases the effective power of businesses. Existing "free trade" treaties are part of the reason that the US has become a plutocracy. This is why I advocate cancelling them.
Part of the article uses the incoherent term "intellectual property". It is always a mistake, without exception, to group together copyrights and patents as if they were a single issue. And that term includes several other laws as well. If you think they are similar than you don't understand what they really do.
No Social Security number? No passport. Why? Are TSA Actions Subject to Judicial Review?
Polio vaccination is advancing again in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Extremist groups have stopped opposing vaccination, and new infections have gone way down.
The US has stopped offering local thug departments the chance to seize people's property and split it with the Federal government. Ironically, this is due to budget cuts imposed by SCROTUS.
Taiz, in Yemen, is suffering from a siege imposed by the Houthis, within the general blockade of Yemen imposed by Salafi (*) Arabia and the US.
The US is supporting this blockade (and the bombing and invasion) to suck up to some private interests, since nothing about the intervention serves any national interest.
* Officially "Saudi Arabia", but its global support for the repressive and cruel Salafist form of Islam (which helped inspire al Qa'ida and PISSI) is the most important characteristic of that country.
Wind energy is becoming the most efficient investment in power generation.
Now think of how much faster we would progress towards curbing global heating if fossil fuels did not enjoy their present subsidies.
Agriculture may be able to sequester carbon in the soil.
Israel's "transparency" law requires human rights NGO to disclose their funding, but right-wing NGOs have been given exemptions.
The transparency requirement, per se, is not unjust, but it is being applied selectively to oppose human rights.
Ethiopia has arrested more journalists and is threatening bloggers.
Flooding in Britain, record US temperatures and Australian wildfires result from El Niño on top of human-caused climate mayhem.
The Iraqi army is slowly recapturing Ramadi. Most of the PISSI fighters have fled, leaving a rear guard which seems to intend to slow the army's advance.
The Iraqi army is not defeating PISSI's full strength. Nonetheless, the loss of Ramadi may weaken PISSI somewhat.
Bernie Sanders: "I can win the backing of Donald Trump supporters."
Trump (and others before him) have distracted them into blaming weak scapegoats. Sanders will show them who they should really be angry at: the plutocrats.
Ground beef in the US, if it isn't "organic grass-fed beef", is quite likely to harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria that kill people.
The organic grass-fed beef will cost more, but that won't bother you unless you eat too much beef (alas, many Americans do).
US airports are kicking homeless people into the cold.
China has adopted a law requiring services to hand over encryption back doors.
This power seems to exist already in the US; it's what forced Ladar Levison to shut down Lavabit.
That doesn't mean it is ok for China to do this — or for the US to do it.
How Peabody Energy exploits poverty to excuse burning coal.
Coal is not going to make poor people better off, beyond a decade or two. The brunt of climate mayhem will fail mainly on the poor — hundreds of millions of them.
China has adopted a law against domestic violence.
Chinese society before the revolution was very very sexist.
US citizens: call on the Democratic Party to schedule more debates and make them more visible.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to reject measures to "protect" us at the expense of
our human rights.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
Twitter deleted a journalist's tweets because a bank asked for this.
Evidence that points to NSA involvement in putting the back door in Juniper Networks products.
The Taliban have taken over most districts in Helmand; Sangin is one of the few still being contested. They may hope to make it their headquarters.
The system of bail in the US pressures poor people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit — or else it puts them in debt.
"Legitimate" capital markets are thoroughly hooked on cocaine; in laundering drug money, London is more important than the Cayman Islands.
The copyright industry's war on sites that facilitate sharing causes harm to users even when not entirely successful.
Please do not use our enemies' smear term, "piracy", to refer to sharing.
MPAA Funds Pro-Copyright Scholars to Influence Politics.
Advances in recognition technology threaten to enable tracking people easily by cameras through recognizing their faces or irises.
There is no easy solution to this problem, but since it threatens oppression that can make democracy ineffective, it justifies the cost of a difficult solution.
Obama blames Congress for slowing the release of prisoners from Guantanamo, but he and his staff are primarily responsible for the delay.
"Guantanamo" has come to stand for "imprisonment without trial", but they are not the same. Obama talks about "closing Guantanamo prison" but his method of doing so is to move imprisonment without trial to the US mainland. That would make it even more unjust. We could hope that the Supreme Court would consider it more clearly unacceptable — but what if it did the opposite?
The US must end its imprisonment without trial. Every prisoner in Guantanamo deserves to get a real, fair trial or be freed.
California confronts the question of how to manage its diminishing rainfall.
Global heating will make the US midwest hotter and interfere with rain.
The real solution, the efficient solution, is to cut back on CO2 emissions so that the climate won't get more screwed.
A lawsuit seeks to make the TSA change its policy of requiring some passengers to go through a scanner.
Modern gratis game cr…apps collect a wide range of data about their users and their users' friends and associates. Even nastier, they do it through ad networks that merge the data collected by various cr…apps and sites made by different companies.
They use this data to manipulate people to buy things, and hunt for "whales" who can be led to spend a lot of money. They also use a back door to manipulate the game play for specific players.
While the article describes gratis games, games that cost money can use the same tactics.
All this reinforces the point that proprietary software is software for suckers.
The unusually warm December is making some people concerned about their flowering perennials, some of which are blooming now instead of waiting for spring.
However, what concerns me more is that this warm December will not be so unusual at the end of the century.
Beware the Listening Machines.
"Should I let my child take more risks?" Probably yes, up to a point. However, you might consider transporting your child by car to be too dangerous and beyond the limit.
Most of the US has been restructured around automobiles. As people get older, eventually they can't drive any more, so they become stuck at home.
The European Patent Office hired a surveillance company to snoop on its critics.
The American Red Cross spent millions in Haiti to provide shelter and built just six houses with that money.
This seems to relate to its overall corporatization.
In 2013, the US supported the creation of some sort of Salafist "Islamic state" in Syria and Iraq as a way to weaken Assad.
Be careful what you wish for.
Was it the NSA that put the back door in Juniper Networks firewalls?
It has been trying to attack antivirus software.
Bangladesh demands fingerprints from everyone that has a cell phone.
That would convince me not to visit Bangladesh, if I carried a cell phone.
There is no conclusive evidence about whether fluoridation of water supply reduces tooth decay, though there is suggestive evidence that it does.
The UK government tracked people's movements in Hyde Park through their mobile phones.
This particular project did not record their names, but that would have been easy to do.
2000 Syrian Islamist fighters and Assad's forces have made a deal whereby the Islamists will evacuate an area near Damascus, leaving their heavy weapons.
Ten important medical uses of marijuana.
American society pushes people into social isolation, and 1/4 of American adults have no one they can confide in. For old people, loneliness is often fatal.
Work-related diseases kill 50,000 Americans a year. That's more than are killed by guns, and terrorism is a pinprick by comparison.
Meanwhile, we could do a lot to reduce work-related diseases without limiting anyone's human rights.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has become more active in considering endangered species and establishing protection for them. The case backlog is decreasing.
Measures like the Endangered Species Act are adequate for dealing with local threats in a world that is stable overall. Of course, many countries don't have an Endangered Species Act and many governments are not able to really enforce such laws. But even if they did, that won't be enough in the future. Climate mayhem will swamp these local protection efforts, much as rising oceans will swamp sea walls.
A mosquito-borne virus in Brazil is spreading, and its spread can be measured by the thousands of babies born with microcephaly.
Global heating effects are indirectly responsible for the spread of the mosquitos that transmit the virus.
In 1959, a US Air Force proposal for how to target nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union treated killing of civilians as a goal.
US citizens: call on Attorney General Lynch to investigate death of Sandra Bland.
US citizens: Tell Congress not to sell off or cut down Oregon's national forests.
Polls show Sanders doing considerably better against Trump than Clinton would do.
A Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America was not entirely blocked by the mall management armed with court orders.
Nonetheless, the difficulties they faced show that replacing real public space with pseudo-public space inside malls is dangerous to democracy. People should have the right to protest inside malls.
Seattle has arranged to give Guber drivers a chance to unionize.
This can help the drivers get more pay, but it won't do anything to reduce the surveillance that passengers are subject to, or save them from the requirement to run nonfree software.
It takes a rather large book to describe the range of ideas that fit into Islam — except in the opinion of Salafis.
French President Hollande is getting strong criticism for plans to take away citizenship from people who were born citizens of France.
His other plans, such as the permanent state of emergency, seen even worse.
Google's Gmail and other connected services create psychological profiles of every user — and all the people they communicate with by email. A slowly progressing lawsuit claims that this violates California law.
You can opt out of this by changing to some other mail service, running your own mail server, and/or encrypting the text of your emails with the GNU Privacy Guard.
The US-Korea "free trade" agreement, if evaluated in the conventional terms of exports and imports, has been a big loss for US exports and US employment.
This is on top of the harm that the treaty does to both countries by undermining democracy.
In 1992, Sweden adopted a school voucher system. Since then the Swedish educational system has become more unequal, and less effective overall.
China seems to plan to expel a French journalist whose articles in France have criticized the regime.
The Battle Over Sangin Should Teach the West Some Vital Military Lessons. And political lessons, too, about "attempting cultural change on a management consultant timeline."
I still think the US might have achieved a good outcome in Afghanistan if it had refrained from attacking and destroying Iraq.
Judaist fanatics in Israel had themselves filmed celebrating the murder of an Arab toddler.
Judaist, Christianist or Islamist, they are all enemies of human rights. The worst of them are killers, but the rest are still bad.
India has blocked Facebook's plan to extend internet service without network neutrality.
Access to the internet can be good or bad, depending on whether the internet respects your freedom. If people make the error of assuming that it is good unconditionally, that can lead them to mistake Facebook's power grab for a real gift.
22 US cities reported high levels of hunger and homelessness for the year Sep '14 — Aug '15.
In the US, poverty permanently stunts childrens' IQ, but not in other developed countries.
It is not clear why the US gets different results.
Ground beef generally has bacteria all through it, and some of them can make people sick. Consumer Reports found that US ground beef, unless it is from 'grass-fed organic beef', often contains antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
It appears the US is blocking many British Muslims from entering the US, often in arbitrary last-minute ways that cause unnecessary trouble and expense.
Blocking 10 family members from traveling because of an objection to their one relative is especially nasty, and gratuitous.
Because there is no way to find out in advance if you will be blocked in this way, British Muslims in general are afraid to buy tickets to the US.
It seems to me that the US should offer a way to ask, before buying tickets, "Will you allow me to fly there?" If the US responds that you can go, and blocks you later, it should compensate you for the costs of your flight and other preparations.
And it is unconscionable to block 11 people because of objections about one.
Australia is slowly shifting away from the anti-renewable-energy policies that Abbott set up.
Amnesty International says Russia is dropping cluster bombs on Syrian cities, even on areas of no military significance.
Leaked documents say that Ecuador's intelligence agency illegally spied on activists who campaigned against oil extraction in the Amazon.
Some officially Muslim countries have demonstrated their intolerance of non-Muslims by banning visible celebration of Christmas.
Will they ban Grav-Mass, too?
The "no fly list" punishes people by surprise, and people are put in the list based on "predictive judgments" which can be based on nothing but noise.
Afghan army reinforcements may kick the Taliban out of Sangin.
If the Taliban melt away when confronted by a relief force, that will not constitute a victory for the Afghan government. Rather, it will mean that the Taliban are following through after a large, successful raid, in accord with standard guerrilla tactics.
To turn this raid into a victory, the Afghan army would need to surround Sangin and kill the Taliban fighters caught in the trap. I don't think they will try it.
44% of the people shot dead by Georgia thugs (since 2010) were either unarmed or shot in the back. That's just the beginning of it.
Israel sentenced Palestinian teenagers to 15 years in prison after they confessed under pressure to throwing stones at a car.
The car was driven by a family that lives in an Israeli colony in Palestinian territory. One of the children in the car died from the attack. The killing was a serious crime, but there is no credible evidence about who did it.
Israel violates international law by taking Palestinian prisoners out of Palestine. Here's why that violation is important.
To the Israeli right-wing, foreign funding for Breaking the Silence is an outrage; foreign funding for extending colonies in Palestine is just fine.
After Israel arrested Jews who killed Palestinians, fanatical colonists attacked another Palestinian family. Fortunately not fatally this time.
Palestinian Christians suffer from the occupation like Palestinian Muslims, but find it easier to move elsewhere.
Mennonites who visited Palestine defend the need for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel's occupation of Palestine.
US citizens: oppose building the Tesoro-Savage oil export terminal in Washington State.
Everyone: call on major toy branding companies to improve wages and working conditions in their factories in China.
Does it work to use the US government drone registration site with LibreJS enabled to block nonfree Javascript code? Please email your answer to rms on the site gnu.org.
Everyone: Stand with the people of Nagpur and tell the World Bank to
stop
pushing privatization of water.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
Companies tend to charge more for their products aimed at women or girls than for comparable products aimed at men or boys.
Why should scooters be meant specifically for one sex? There is no good reason for that. That too is a marketing ploy. Give a girl a blue scooter, and fight against creeping genderization of everything, while also saving money.
What If Sheldon Adelson Buys Your Newspaper? Write About Him, Then Leave.
The US military thought Obama's support for "moderate" Syrian resistance was only helping Jihadis, so it began feeding intelligence indirectly to Assad to help him fight those rebels.
The TSA may stop some passengers from requesting a physical search instead of body scanning.
I don't object to the millimeter-wave scanners now in use, but I still consider this change dangerous. What if they move to another machine that is potentially dangerous, as the x-ray scanners were?
Israel's ambassador to the US has gone out of his way to send holiday gifts made by colonies in Palestine.
Thailand's dictators don't have elections, but they have bogus opinion polls.
Is it wrong for Caucasian actors to wear makeup to appear Asian (or black)?
The article presents an incoherent mixture of perceived insult, lack of Asian role models on TV, and loss of work for Asian actors. Any or all of those issues might be valid, but they are all different, and mixing them up produces only confusion.
If it is a matter of work discrimination, how about making up nonwhite actors up to appear Caucasian? All actors' race would cease to matter.
If it is a matter of visible role models on TV, that's a matter of appearance only. Why does it matter what the actor's real skin color or appearance is, beneath the makeup?
If you feel insulted, please explain why an actor's makeup constitutes a statement about Asians, because I don't see that.
Poland's Christianist extremist government is undermining the Supreme Court, apparently to facilitate a total ban on abortions.
I support ending subsidies for IVF; the world has an excess of human babies and it makes no sense at all to spend public funds on making more.
Once babies are born, we must make sure they get good food, medical care, education, and a good home with parents that are not stressed about a lack of money.
Naturally, the right-wing government plans to cut that. Christianist extremist don't care about real babies.
Officially designating the atmosphere as a public trust might help get some countries to act against global heating.
Exxon shared its global heating research with other major oil companies as far back as 1980.
They have all been knowingly working to make sure the US government does not avoid disaster.
The loss of manufacturing jobs in the US is not inevitable. It is the result of political choices.
The US and various states are prohibiting poor people from spending public assistance on various expensive habits that they can't afford anyway.
The motive might be to fool the public into believing that welfare recipients really have money for luxury foods such as lobster, on ocean cruises, or even on tattoos.
If you can barely afford food at all, you will do without those things anyway.
ARM and IBM have teamed up to make devices that monitor and surveil their users.
The UN is moving towards authorizing Libya's new unified government to invite Western help to fight PISSI.
An intervention in support of Libyan ground troops has a reasonable chance of success.
Israel is considering a Putin-style law to restrict human-rights NGOs that receive support from European governments. The President of Israel was called a traitor for meeting with the New Israel Fund.
The fall of Sangin demonstrates the futility of NATO's trying to hold it.
Once the Taliban started to resurge, the US and NATO never had a plausible plan for defeating the Taliban, since the Afghan government has never generated enough loyalty to do so. The only question is how long to prop it up.
Increasingly, wars involve bombing cities full of civilians, as countries ignore the Geneva conventions.
A tax loophole encourages US companies to increase pay to their CEOs.
A new Web error code has been established for legally imposed censorship.
In rural India, the menstruating women are still treated as "unclean". They are banished to rude huts outside the village. Girls miss school.
Boko Haram Violence Keeping a Million Children Out of School, Says UNICEF.
A racist inspired by Trump built a pipe bomb to attack Muslims with.
Humanity has not acted to slow antibiotic resistance; now it is "almost too late" to avoid losing the most important current antibiotics.
The responsibility is the plutocratic state, which obeys agribusiness and disregards the general good.
Can Laws Keep Up with Tech World?
It should be noted that Amazon, Guber and WhatsApp (proprietary software) are inherently unjust.
US thugs continue to claim that there is a "war on police", violence against thugs continues to be rare. Marauding thugs remain the bigger threat.
Thugs kill a lot more Americans than terrorists do; but they do lesser forms of violence more often than killings.
In response to occasional crimes by a few Muslims, the US wages actual war against lots of Muslims.
I should point out that the guns used by Malik and his spouse were not lawfully purchased in the form he had them, and a stricter system of gun control could have made them difficult for him to get.
Because the US is waging actual war, its innocent victims greatly outnumber the victims of Muslim terrorists in the US. Americans are much more likely to be killed by thugs than by terrorists.
Christianist terrorism against US abortion facilities is a more serious threat because it is concentrated against a few. If you are an abortion doctor, that danger is large.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject a resolution to legitimize Israeli colonies in Palestine.
The Democratic National Committee reenabled Sanders' access to voter data; the Sanders campaign did the requested investigation and took appropriate action.
Lumping together crowd killing sprees with the more common multiple shootings in families and gangs gives the public an exaggerated idea of the level of danger from the former.
If shootings cause around 110,000 casualties in the year in the US, that shows guns are a serious problem, but the sensational killing sprees are a small part of it.
Violent domestic relationships don't make sense in rational terms. The victims are so traumatized that they blame themselves for the other person's violence.
Wild bees are declining in US agricultural areas.
A Proposal for Dealing with Terrorist Videos on the Internet.
Study Documents Extreme Racial Disparity in Arrests for Low-Level Offenses [in a US city].
Clinton has endorsed the FBI's take on encryption.
I had already decided not to vote for her if she wins the nomination. I hope you will join me. But let's try to prevent that issue from arising. Please support the Sanders campaign.
A US court ruled that the US can force-feed immigration prisoners on hunger strike.
This is a violation of their human rights. A sane person has a right to commit suicide and a right to fast to death.
Now that the prisoners have been denied the right to hunger strike, I expect that some will commit quick suicide as a protest.
Treating every rumor or threat of terrorism as serious is an effect of fear and it plays into the hands of terrorists.
Muslim students in US schools, even young ones, face frequent bullying that can go as far as physical attacks.
Violent attacks against Muslims are increasing.
Sudanese Editors Face Death Penalty for 'Inciting an Arab Spring'.
In Sudan, only Winter is allowed.
Many people and governments treat homeless people like vermin. Laws that shove them into obscure corners help others ignore how badly they are being treated.
Ultimately this is done to please store owners (who want them out of the way) and rich (who don't want to pay taxes to give them homes).
The same rich people are responsible for the policies that make people homeless.
Could prison be replaced with a different correctional system?
Spain's parliament is divided; it is not clear who will govern.
A video suggests a Chicago thug may have made a false accusation about Alfontish Cockerham to excuse shooting him dead.
Everyone: call on Columbia University to reveal all the donors to Center on Global Energy Policy, since they seem to include Exxon.
US citizens: Call on Salafi Arabia to free human rights lawyer Waleed Abu al-Khair.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to resume tracking and publishing world weapons sales.
Facebook relaxed its "real name" policy, but only
for
people who are being harassed for certain specific reasons.
This relieves a very specific acute problem, but does not enable
ordinary people to use Facebook without being tracked.
How the Government Surveils Cellphones:
A
Primer.
This doesn't include the possibility of using the
universal
back door to turn the phone into a full-time listening device.
And there is also
extracting
data through WiFi.
The UK is planning a law that will
make
victims of trafficking afraid to speak up.
Montreal protester Katie Nelson recognized an undercover
thug when he
took off his mask — he was pretending to be a protester —
because he was
one
of the thugs she was already suing for a previous attack on her.
So he attacked her again. She is now in the hospital and preparing
another lawsuit.
Right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson appears to have bought the Las
Vegas Review-Journal just to
set
its reporters to trying to dig up dirt on judges who didn't bow down
to his wealth.
More
information.
The UK's anti-sharing thugs have come down on people who
noncommercially distributed karaoke recordings because they are
not commercially available, and
using
a sleazy trick of language to equate this with commercial
redistribution.
Yemen's civil war, in which the US-backed intervention by
Salafi Arabia
has
made
millions homeless and uses cluster bombs, shows that the US
alliance with Salafi Arabia is a disaster.
Most Syrian rebel fighters hold
extremist
views similar to PISSI, even though they are enemies of PISSI.
This shows that defeating PISSI
won't eliminate Salafi oppression from
Syria. (There may be no way to do that, in the short term.) However,
those groups might not want to attack outside Syria; it might be
possible to make peace with them.
It will be hard to make peace in a way that includes them and the
secular Kurds.
A UK local government, squeezed for funds, is
planning
to charge old people every time they need someone to pick them up
after falling.
Malicious code in a "smart" watch can tell what you are typing by
measuring
your arm motion.
Anything called "smart", unless all the software is free, is an attack
on your freedom and privacy.
Mandatory minimum sentences are a recent aberration in US history; we
could
get rid of most of them.
Dow continues to disregard criminal court charges in India and
refuses
to remediate the pollution that still leaks from its factory in
Bhopal.
I wonder if DuPont has property in India that could be seized if it
merges with Dow. Perhaps a lien could be put on it now, to stop
DuPont from selling it before the merger.
The Paris conference didn't pay much attention to
meat
production, but to meet the goal requires a big reduction.
US citizens:
call
on the Department of Justice to investigate violence against
abortion clinics as terrorism.
Citizens of Florida:
oppose
the state bill to impose fracking everywhere in the state.
US citizens:
call
on the Department of Education to cancel all loans to students of
Corinthian Colleges.
If we fight PISSI,
what
would we want victory to look like?
The UK's relentless
pressure
to declare disabled people capable of working has led to around
600 suicides and over 700,000 prescriptions for antidepressants.
Cecil Rhodes Was a Racist, But You
Can't
Readily Expunge Him from History.
The UN has set up a
conference
of relevant powers to try to end the civil war in Syria.
Has anyone proposed a solution to protect human rights for all the
ethnic groups and sects?
The US drone registration system
will
make drone owners' names and addresses visible to the public.
Ambassadors from EU countries
warn
of retaliation for the US's limits on the visa waiver program.
Some have suggested that Europe would retaliate by imposing the same
restriction on Americans, blocking Iranian-Americans etc. That would
be a foolish way to retaliate, since the Americans who support the
recent restriction would be glad to see Iranian-Americans punished.
As retaliation, it would be ineffective.
My suggestion is that Europe should require visas for Americans whose
names begin with "R", or perhaps "Ry". That might be a small fraction
comparable to the fraction of Europeans affected by the new US
restrictions.
Another idea: require visas of Americans related to Republican
congresscritters.
Did
government officials tip off reporters to film the arrest of
Shkreli?
Shkreli is a greedy bastard and we ought to make it illegal to act as
he did with Daraprim. (His arrest was about a
different
matter.) However, for the issue raised here, he's just one
example among many, and the questions posed apply to everyone.
Thugs will
collect
photos in real time of everyone riding in cars in London.
When the state knows where everyone goes, and who talks with whom,
democracy
cannot
survive. That doesn't bother the UK government, which is
applying
Republican-style techniques to effectively eliminate democracy in
the UK.
The FBI
demands a
credit card number to register a drone, as well as other personal
information.
This puts the drone owners at risk.
We now know how broad and sweeping the PAT-RIOT Act "national security
letters" are; and
functionaries
can demand them arbitrarily.
Santa Claus Confirms
NSA
Attack on Naughty-Or-Nice Database.
The Democratic National Committee's data company has repeatedly failed
to keep each candidate's data secret from other candidates. One
Sanders staffer accessed some of Clinton's data, and the campaign
fired him for this.
The DNC took the excuse to deny the Sanders campaign
all
access to its own voter information data base.
The Sanders campaign has
sued
the DNC for this.
In an escalation of the War on Sharing, a US ISP was
fined
millions for not disconnecting users that repeatedly did file
sharing.
Tent cities in the US are the result of
laws
that force homeless people out of downtown areas.
Pete Seeger's FBI File Reveals How the Folk Legend First Became a
Target
of the Feds.
Why Germany
Can
and Should Open an Investigation into US Torture.
30%
of Republicans want to bomb Agrabah (a fictional medieval Arab
country).
Only around 20% of Democrats want to bomb Agrabah.
Al Jazeera deleted and
blocked
access to an article it had published, which criticized Salafi
Arabia's disrespect for human rights.
Here is
the
article.
Loss of Monkeys And Birds in Tropical Forests
Driving
Up Carbon Emissions.
The problem is that hardwood trees need those animals to disperse
their seeds.
A company gives foreign policy "advice" to candidates such as Clinton,
Rubio and Cruz, led and
funded
by companies in the military-industrial complex.
The company says this is not lobbying, but that's what it adds up to.
It looks like Sanders is not interested in their "advice".
Martin Shkreli, whose company Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price
of Dataprim and blocked companies from making generic drugs, has
resigned after being
arrested
on charges of fraud in his previous company.
I wonder whether the new management will reduce the price. But either
way his practices of blocking other companies from making generic
equivalents should be made illegal.
The Los Angeles Thug Department
investigated
over 1300 claims of bias in 2012-2014, and judged not one
of them valid.
Either LA thugs
are remarkably free of bias, far beyond what humans
would be capable of, or they are protecting each other.
A study of complaints filed against Chicago thugs found that
10%
of the thugs got 30% of the complaints.
These thugs can influence the behavior of other thugs, so it is
important to get rid of them.
Most thugs
don't beat up or kill without justification, but nearly all
of them will protect other thugs that do so. That's why they
generally deserve the name of "thug".
Those few who refuse to protect
the violent thugs are the ones who merit the title of
"police officer".
SCROTUS, working to help pricey US ISPs, are
pressuring
the FCC to give up on defending municipal broadband in the US.
SCROTUS
= Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
Kenyan [thugs] Rescue
Hundreds
of Girls Due to Undergo FGM.
When I call them "thugs",
that doesn't mean everything the thugs do is
bad. It means that occasionally one of them kills someone unjustly
and the rest then try to protect that one.
India's nuclear industry dumps waste into the Subarnarekha river,
making its water
unsafe
to drink.
Recommendation:
don't
binge on news about a tragedy.
The San Bernardino shooters used
large
magazines that are illegal to sell in California.
It's not hard to buy them in some other state, perhaps Arizona or
Nevada, and bring them illegally to California. However, if they were
illegal in the whole US, it would really be hard to get them.
The guns were also
modified
illegally so they could fire faster.
Those intending to commit murder will not be deterred by fear of
punishment for doing these modifications, but the law could require
designs that make this more difficult to do.
Australia's plain paper cigarette pack law
survived
an attack through a "trade treaty".
This is good news, but many good laws and policies have been destroyed
by these business-supremacy treaties, most recently US
country-of-origin
meat labelling.
We should get rid of all such treaties.
Congress's budget bill includes
tax
breaks for some big businesses.
Global heating is
damaging
lakes around the world.
Pennsylvania has passed a law to
force
charter schools into Philadelphia.
Charter schools
do
not, in general, provide a better education but they are great for
profiteering
at public expense.
A thug in the UK is
being
investigated for shooting a man; some say the victim was sleeping
in his car.
As usual, thugs
are organizing to demand an end to the investigation.
US citizens:
call
on Obama and Congress to press for release of human rights
defender Waleed Abu al-Khair, imprisoned by Salafi Arabia.
The country's official name is "Saudi Arabia", but that disguises its
nasty nature.
"Facewatch" connects snooping cameras in stores to a
blacklist
of faces.
We need to abolish this system; I believe it
should
be illegal for anyone to operate cameras in this way, including
the state, except following a court order to put a camera in a certain
place for a certain period.
Everyone:
Call on George
Mason University to disconnect from the Koch brothers' corrupting
funding.
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter to renew clean energy tax incentives.
The President of China
wants
countries to organize to censor the internet.
The UK's "bedroom tax", a cut in benefits for disabled or unemployed
living in apartments judged to have an extra room,
has
pressured lots of people to skimp on food, but few have moved to
smaller apartments.
That's partly because few smaller apartments are available in the
areas where these people live. Also, some disabled people couldn't
move to an apartment without room for the relatives that take care of
them.
The right-wing government won't mind this outcome. The policy was
meant as an excuse to squeeze the weak, and it has succeeded at that.
As the Thai king gets older and less able, the military is trying to
prop up the royal family's image by
prosecuting
more people.
Bernie Sanders Is More Popular Than Trump, But
the
Press Ignores Him.
Thugs
inexplicably
attacked peaceful protesters who were responding to the mistrial
of a thug involved in Freddie Gray's death.
The Communications Workers of America
endorsed
Sanders for president.
When thugs are suspected of crimes, they get
better
treatment than everyone else.
Global heating has
changed
the seasons in Haiti, screwing up agriculture.
A court in Brazil
blocked
all access to WhatsApp for 48 hours.
WhatsApp requires running a nonfree program, which is a foolish thing
to do; you are making a mistake if you use it. It also involves a
server that will snoop on you for Big Brother. Still, it is wrong for
Brazil to forbid connections to that server.
Forecast:
2016
will be the hottest year ever recorded, beating the previous
record from 2015.
How far do Christianist extremists take their
war
on women when nobody stops them?
Salafi Arabia is
planning
to execute protester Abdullah al-Zaher, who was 15 years old at
the time, after torturing him into confessing to various crimes.
Star Simpson tells MIT why it must provide support for students who
make harmless technological hacks and are treated to
witch
hunts by panicking ignorant fools.
The UK is implementing its supposed CO2 reduction pledge by
reducing
subsidies for solar power. Just not reducing them as much as was
initially proposed.
In 6 months they will make another reduction.
Burundi
On
'Very Cusp' of Civil Conflict, Warns UN Human Rights Chief.
Lightbulb manufacturers have found an
excuse
to overstate the efficiency of their bulbs.
Senate
proposes
to require communications companies to report "terrorist" postings or
messages (not merely actual threats) threaten human rights, and
companies would have a lot of trouble doing so.
I fear also that only companies that mistreat their users in other
ways will make enough money to be able to hire people to carry this
out.
Americans in general have an extreme overprotective attitude towards
allowing children even to
play
in the front yard. Most Americans think children under 10 are too
young.
This is the effect of massive publicity about dangers that are
very
rare.
I suspect this overprotection will tend to make children feel
smothered as well as making them timid.
The requirement to supervise children without a break, and the need to
bring them everywhere they are to go, imposes tremendous stress and
expense on parents. When I was 7 years old, I walked home from
school, used my keys to go in, and amused myself till my mother got
home from work. She did not have to pay for "child care" — I
knew how to read and play without adult help.
I support Sanders's proposal to
tax
the rich more to fund day care. But we can eliminate a
substantial fraction of the expense by teaching parents that children
don't need to stay in day care for so many years.
Some Republicans, fed up with plutocracy, are
organizing
for Sanders.
Interviews
with some of them.
Sanders talks about his
support
among Republicans.
Ukraine has infringed political rights by
banning
the Communist Party and even the word "communist".
The UK is
cracking
down on people that evade small amounts of taxes while leaving the
big tax evaders alone.
However, the tax dodging that governments choose to permit is
even
bigger.
Under plutocratist governments, the purpose of taxes is to serve the
rich and crush the rest.
Google funded some congressional campaigns, and the congresscritters
elected performed for Google by
supporting
Google against an EU legal investigation about abuse of its market
position.
We are making a mistake, relying on some mysterious
"progress"
to save Earth from global heating disaster.
Avoiding heating disaster requires a
mobilization
comparable to what would be made for a large war.
Congress used the budget bill as an excuse to surrender to the WTO:
it
voted
to eliminated country-of-origin meat labeling.
Don't pretend that Congress would have the courage to defy the TPP.
Senator Cruz suggested that the NSA's register of Americans' phone
calls may actually have
increased
under the misnamed "USA Freedom Act".
Apparently he was not supposed to let us know this.
The Tories are rigging the UK's political and electoral system
to
eliminate the possibility of resistance.
Tennessee's
prosecution
of a woman for a coat hanger abortion is the armored unit at the
point of the war on women.
"Is my iPhone listening to me?" An iPhone seems to have
heard a user's
conversation about where person was going, and added it to the
user's profile for some Apple service.
The iPhone, like any other mobile phone, tells Big Brother where you
are. Your private destination will be known to the phone network (and
Big Brother) when you get there. Meanwhile, just about all mobile
phones can be made to listen to all the conversation around
them, and send it to whoever did this. This is why I call them
"Stalin's dream". Either of these is so vicious that I refuse to
carry one.
However, that snooping doesn't send data to Apple. The possible
listening feature reported here would enable Apple, also, to listen to
conversations around the device.
The iThings are full of nonfree software; Apple controls the software,
and the users don't. You
can
never rationally trust a nonfree program. Whether or not they
have a functionality that listens for Apple, the device is
full of
malware.
A listening functionality would be the sort of thing you must expect,
whether or not it is present now.
The Australian equivalent of a SWAT team
terrified
13-year-old April Clarke after they woke her by pointing a bright
light and a gun at her.
Sharif Mobley is apparently still alive, and has been
sentenced
to 10 years in prison for (reportedly) shooting a prison guard.
The US Congress is trying to boost
global heating by legalizing
export
of crude oil.
The Koch brothers sponsor
"criminal
justice reform" for corporate criminals.
The Federal Trade Commission could block mergers, but Obama's director
of the Bureau of Competition
hardly
ever tries.
This is one thing President Sanders could fix on his own.
Republicans
propose
war crimes as a response to PISSI.
You almost might as well join PISSI, if you're going to do that.
Let's stand together against
sexist
insults on social media.
I am against limiting freedom of speech, but there is a lot we can do
without going that far.
The idea of recruiting support from "moderate Syrian forces" is based
on
oversimplification
and confusion.
Record High Arctic Temperatures in 2015
Having
'Profound Effects' on Region.
The subtle way some oppose Bernie Sanders is by trying to convince us
that he can't win — contrary to the polls that show him
beating
all the Republicans.
If you would rather have Sanders as president than Clinton,
you should campaign now for Sanders. The worst that can happen
is that Clinton wins the nomination anyway.
The UK convicted Wang Yam of murder in a secret trial, and has now
forbidden
him to take the case to the European Court of Justice. He is also
gagged.
Baltimore's thugs are
preparing
for repression when verdicts are announced in the trial of the
thugs involved in killing Freddie Gray.
We have roadmaps for
providing
the world's power needs with renewable energy; don't heed the
naysayers.
US citizens: call on Republican leaders to say they
won't
support Trump's campaign if he wins the Republican nomination.
US citizens: call on Congress to vote on an
authorization
for using military force against PISSI.
Witnesses
say that the thug that killed Darrius Stewart
misrepresented the circumstances of firing the fatal shot;
Stewart was moving away, not threatening the thug.
If the rest of the thug's
story is correct, the thug had just
had a need to defend himself. People cannot digest new information in
a fraction of a second. Perhaps he had no time to consciously digest
the fact that Stewart had started to flee, before firing the second
shot.
Foam for extinguishing oil fires contains
toxic
chemicals; in some towns these have contaminated the drinking water and cause cancer.
Some
Muslims are questioning the assumption that the Qur'an has to be obeyed.
Human Rights Watch says
7000
prisoners of Assad's forces were executed or died after torture.
Sudan plans to execute
25 people for following a different interpretation of Islam.
Shari'a law is an offense against human rights; any state that adopts it is doing an
injustice.
A Tory claimed that
Obama
sent help so that the Tory party would win the UK general election.
Obama is a moderate Republican (they used to exist) in the Democratic
Party. That's why I never voted for him.
The American Red Cross picked up new management from AT&T, which
has "rationalized" the organization with
disastrous results.
Comcast Hit With
$26M
Penalty For Dumping Hazardous Waste AND Revealing Personal Customer Info.
The death penalty remains legal in many US states, but the rate of death sentences has fallen by
almost
a factor of 10 since the 1990s.
Sites that ask people to give data about their friends are a
fiendish
threat to privacy.
Los
Angeles and New York City both got hoax bomb threats.
Los Angeles sent all the children home that day, whereas
New York figured out it was a hoax.
Do real bombers ever give advance warning?
Aren't these threats invariably hoaxes?
For once, Israel has treated Jews that attacked Palestinians as
real criminals.
Lexmark has fired the leaders of a union in Mexico;
the
workers are on strike demanding a raise of 35 cents an hour.
Between 100,000
and 250,000 Texas women have done abortions at home, nearly always with drugs.
Bangladesh has banned Twitter, as well as
many
other digital communications media.
The UN concluded an Iranian missile test
violated
the nuclear agreement.
State-imposed bankruptcy government in Flint, Michigan, switched to
taking municipal water from the polluted Flint River as a measure to
save money, and refused to acknowledge that it was contaminated with
lead. The new mayor of Flint has declared an emergency and residents
are going to sue the state.
The city has moved back to another source of water, but this is too late
for all the young children of Flint.
Facebook relaxed its "real name" policy, but only for people who are being harassed for
certain
specific reasons.
This relieves a very specific acute problem, but does not enable ordinary
people to use Facebook without being tracked.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to vote against the budget
authorization bill if it has
any
riders that change policies. Whether the changes are for big oil,
for snooping, against Planned Parenthood or against meat labeling,
reject them!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
Women in some US states have been
forced
back to using coat hangers.
Major Brazilian politicians are
being
investigated for corruption.
Poland's newly elected right-wing government is
trying
to seize extra power by replacing the supreme court.
William Perry, Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, warns of a new
nuclear arms race and the danger of
accidental
nuclear war.
T-Mobile in the US seems to be clearly
violating
Net Neutrality rules.
A woman in Tennessee
faces
life in prison for trying to give herself a late term abortion.
I wonder why she did not get an early, safe abortion? Has Tennessee
taken measures to make this so inconvenient that she gave up on it?
The DuPont-Dow merger
would
create another seed sales giant, like Monsanto.
Egypt Jails
Record
Number of Journalists (23 as of December 1).
Spanish journalists will ask the European Court of Human Rights to
overturn the
law
that prohibits photos and videos of thugs, [del: even ] especially
when they are at their worst.
3/4 of Britain's butterfly species have declined, some very much,
in
the last 40 years. This indicates that many other insect species,
less beloved by humans, have probably declined too — adding up
to an ecological calamity.
A school in California told a boy to cover up his Star Wars t-shirt
because
it showed a fictional character holding a gun.
It may be a reasonable policy to exclude symbols of violence from the
classroom, not because someone else was shot, but rather to avoid
promoting militarism. It could also be a wise policy to prohibit
shirts with commercial advertising, which this was.
Note that they did not punish the boy. US schools punish students for
absurd reasons, even get them jailed, and that is a very harmful
practice; but it did not happen in this case.
Ted Cruz bases his global heating denialism on
simple,
clear lies. Then he attacks the complex solution of regulation,
ignoring the market-based simple solution, a carbon tax.
A Muslim scholar
defends
the freedom of speech of a Christian preacher who is being
prosecuted — in the UK — for saying Islam is "Satanic".
Islam has bad aspects, like Christianity and other major religions,
but I would not apply the term "Satanic" to it. Nonetheless, I defend
other people's right to do that.
Algorithms derived from "big data"
can
come to implement racial discrimination because the data reflect
the results of discrimination.
The article takes a foolish, naive attitude to companies that collect
data about people, in effect believing their claims that they use it
only to "serve you better", and neglecting the danger that it
becomes available to others such as crackers and Big Brother. But
even though they ignore the principal injustices of collecting data
about you, their point about another injustice in the use of the data
is important.
Drug trafficking gangs
order
Mexican newspapers what to say about drug issues.
In Thailand, even a
"sarcastic"
statement about the king's dog is a crime.
Don't go to Thailand unless you have an urgent mission for some very
good cause.
Claim No Easy Victories. Paris Was a Failure, But
a
Climate Justice Movement Is Rising.
Is it rising faster than the temperature?
If the world takes them seriously, the Paris commitments could
shrink
the fossil fuel industry and avoid global disaster.
But the fossil fuel industry is still strong and still working to stop
governments from carrying out those commitments properly.
An MP in Zimbabwe faces
charges
of "criminal insult" against strongman Mugabe's wife.
Now DRM is in
"smart"
lightbulbs!
If a product is "smart", and you didn't build it, it is cleverly
serving its manufacturer against you.
The DEA reported to a judge that it has
erased
its massive database of phone calls made within the US.
However,
when
phone companies keep these records for the DEA, that is almost as
bad.
Some Alabama thugs
planted drugs on a thousand black men to put them
in prison. They were motivated by racism.
Republicans have learned to make fact-checking useless: when their
claims are shown to be false,
they repeat the claims and accuse the
media of a cover-up.
Dubya and his men did this in regard to Saddam Hussein's nonexistent
weapons of mass distruction, and they convinced a lot of Americans.
I am surprised by the idea that CNN is "liberal." I have no TV, but
from everything I have heard, CNN is rather right-wing.
Obama's Speech
Reminded Americans That the War with [PISSI] Is Still
Illegal.
If you "can't put down" a mobile device, that's because it was
designed
to be addictive.
Sanders has endorsed a carbon emissions tax.
This is the way to
let the market decide just how and where to reduce
emissions.
The
antisocialist opposition won the election in Venezuela.
People were very unhappy with the shortages, which were caused by
foolish government policies; for instance, subsidies for the prices of
certain foods, which encouraged people to smuggle them into Colombia,
and currency exchange controls.
I fear that the antisocialists
will eliminate the programs that Chavez
set up for education and medical care. Subsidizing food for the poor
is necessary, and the problems come from the system that the
socialists set upl but I expect the antisocialists to end the
subsidies so as to make life hard for the non-rich.
Humans' food supply is
dangerously biologically concentrated:
three-quarters of our food comes from 12 species of plants and five of
animals,
What's more, the number of different varieties of the plant species
is decreasing.
The UK says that children who question what they are told, or
criticize
government policy,
are terrorist suspects.
Many prisoners in the US are left destitute when they get out of
prison
because
the state sues them for just about everything they have got,
or even more.
If this happened to me, I'd withdraw the money as cash and toss it
onto a street, just to spite the state.
A thug
has been convicted of a felony for pointing a gun at a man's
head. The man had done nothing to warrant attention; the
thug was
showing off how much power he had.
Five San Francisco thugs shot Mario Woods dead. They said he had a
knife and wouldn't drop it — though he made no move to attack
them.
Maybe he did have one.
If I were in that situation, I might be in real danger, even if I were
holding a gun — since I have no training, skill or experience in
such a confrontation. However if five
thugs with pointed guns think
they are in danger from a man with a knife at his side, they must be
incompetent.
The richest 20 Americans
own more than half the population.
To spread the wealth, vote for progressives.
Right-wing groups are 7 states away from triggering a constitutional
convention that could rewrite the US Constitution in unpredictable
ways.
The
TPP would sabotage efforts to curb global heating in several ways.
This is a natural consequence of the way it was drawn up. For each
area of business, the US government asked the companies in that area
what they wanted. The fossil fuel companies asked for policies that
will help them.
Fundamentally, control of greenhouse gas emissions is good for the
people, so it's what democracy will do if it works right.
The TPP is a business-supremacy treaty with some secondary support
for unregulated trade. What these treaties do is weaken democracy
and give business more power.
The
states of Washington and California will allow most women to get
contraceptive prescriptions from pharmacists, without seeing a doctor
first.
US citizens:
call
on the attorney general to investigate Exxon.
Tunisia, despite being more or less democratic,
represses
homosexuals.
Canadian mining companies operating in Latin America often
trash
the environment and the rights of local inhabitants.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service takes action extremely rarely to
protect endangered species. Out of 88,000 proposed projects, the
F&WS approved all of them, and
took
action in just two cases.
Marco Rubio is trying to serve the large US ISPs by
banning
municipal broadband networks.
The foreign intervention in Yemen, led by
Salafi Arabia (*) and backed
by the US, suffered a setback:
commanders
of the ground troops were killed by Houthis.
* I refer to Saudi Arabia this way to highlight how it spreads an
extreme and cruel version of Islam around the world.
Shrimp exported from Thailand to major multinational front companies
are
often
peeled by slaves.
India will make the Paris agreement futile by
continuing
to burn lots of coal.
The UK will do likewise if the Tories continue
their
fossil-fool policies.
US citizens: phone your senators at 1-877-796-1949 to demand
clear, transparent labels on
GMO food — not QR codes.
US citizens:
tell
Congress to stop big pharma's tax dodging.
Some Syrian rebels have set up
democratic
local councils: dictatorship and theocracy are not the only
options.
One advance in the Paris deal:
emissions
of armies are now counted.
An effective method of reducing gun violence by gangs is
no
longer in use in the US because nobody will pay for it.
"The
Paris agreement signals that deniers have lost the climate wars."
Their agents in many governments and institutions are still sabotaging
real progress, but they have lost the battle for society's overall
direction. It was inevitable that would happen once the effects of
global heating
became sufficiently visible. Thus, what they intended
was a delaying action.
Did they succeed enough to cause the slow destruction of human
civilization and Earth's biosphere? Time will tell.
Inside
the NRA: the Officials Keeping Gun Control Laws Off the US Agenda.
Some of their lobbying is done through
disguised
relationships.
US citizens:
call
on GM to oppose plans to legalize discrimination in car loans.
Free software turns mobile devices into
license-plate
recognition cameras.
I've proposed that it should be illegal for anyone to set up
a license-plate recognition camera pointing at a public place except
with a specific court order.
Accusing governments of
lying when
they say that they want encryption back doors to catch terrorists.
The UK needs to make an "energy U-turn" to satisfy its
Paris
commitments.
European banksters,
rather than show Greeks the full extent of what
they demand for "saving" Greece, are imposing it a step at a time.
But Greeks are threatening to
protest
and bring down the government.
Syriac Christian Women Take Up Kalashnikovs to
Fight
PISSI.
Bravo!
Climate Deal: the Pistol Has Fired,
So
Why aren't We Running?
Nigeria is proposing to censor internet communication, making it a
crime to post
"false
information". That tends to mean information that the state
doesn't like.
US Nuclear Weapons Complex Leaves
'Legacy
of Death on American Soil'.
Shaker Aamer rebukes extremists and terrorists, telling them
to
leave the UK if they don't love it.
Aamer accuses Tony B'liar
and other UK officials of knowing about his
torture, during which
UK
agents were present.
Don't
Ban Donald Trump. Just Keep on Laughing at Him.
17 women have been elected to local councils in Salafi Arabia,
overcoming the tremendous handicaps imposed by that country's
sexist
laws.
However, these councils do not even theoretically offer women a path
to changing the laws that oppress them.
Islamic law is fundamentally opposed to human rights, and deserves to
be considered a gross injustice.
British companies
make
more money than 15 years ago, and workers have less disposable
income than 15 years ago.
This is dooH niboR at work.
Charter schools in the US provide an avenue for private owners get
public money for their
private
businesses.
I suppose that's why so many local and state policies to encourage
charter schools were set up: due to pressure from the businesses that
intended to enrich themselves.
Since charter schools do not in general provide a better education
(this supposed benefit was the ostensible reason for them), we should
phase them out. Creating them was a mistake, and those policies were
a mistake.
People living in Raqqa and Mosul say they are now
simply
prisons.
Can't they find any guns, any knives, any suicide bombs
with which to kill the PISSI militants?
US citizens:
repudiate
Trump's bigotry.
Sweden
will
finally question Assange about the sex charges against him.
Assange and Ecuador both said years ago that they would
let
Swedish officials question him in the embassy. Swedish
prosecutors have dragged their feet in a way that confirms that they
are not really interested in justice on these charges, rather using
them as an excuse.
The acts that Assange is accused of doing are
not
"rape" as the term is normally used. Swedish law is more strict
than in most countries.
Clinton
uses
an altered history of the fiscal crisis to excuse her opposition
to the reforms that are really necessary, such as restoring the
Glass-Steagall act.
I read previously that Bill Clinton had no real choice about the
repeal of Glass-Steagall, because it was passed with a
veto-proof
majority. But this does not excuse anyone from the duty to fight
to bring it back.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
A new chat program tries to provide privacy about who is talking with whom.
I'm not an encryption expert, and I can't judge whether it provides good security.
Inequality Is Now Killing [people in] Middle America.
How the TPP Will Affect You and Your Digital Rights (if it goes into effect).
After some rebels evacuated al-Waer, in Homs, others have made a cease fire with Assad's rule.
Poles held a large protest against the recently elected right-wing government which seems to be trying to twist the constitution.
With 1.5C of global heating, the Seychelles may still exist. 2C of global heating will probably inundate the flat coastal parts of the islands.
They would still have the mountainous inland areas, but couldn't grow any food there.
Government, Can You Hear Me Now? Cell-site Simulators Aren't Secret Anymore.
A number of interesting points about Bernie Sanders.
If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, I won't vote for her. She's a plutocratist, part of the problem rather than the solution. If we keep voting for the lesser plutocratist, our government will get more and more plutocratist. I will vote Green.
I support Sanders because he's not just a lesser evil. He's good.
"Until governments undertake to keep fossil fuels in the ground, they will continue to undermine agreement they have just made."
Atheists in Lincoln, Nebraska, booked all the exhibition space in the state capitol building so that no sectarian exhibit can be presented about Christmas.
It is not right to promote a religion in a state capitol building. It is also not right to censor any view by cornering the market on places to present it, but the atheists didn't do that. There must be plenty of places in Lincoln, outside the capitol, where manger displays for Christmas can be set up — churches, for instance.
The main points of the deal agreed in Paris.
Paris climate agreement 'may signal end of fossil fuel era', according to optimists.
This agreement could very well start a process leading towards truly curbing global heating. I fear we can't afford to lose that time in getting started. The agreement will still raise global temperatures 3 to 4 degrees centigrade. The problem is, it involves "no action, just promises". When a country adopts a long-term emissions target without policies that will realize it, it may never adopt suitable policies. By the time the target is not met, it is too late.
France's constitution may be changed to support long-term repressive "states of emergency".
Some research suggests that unhappiness does not predispose people to illness.
There are distinct questions here:
The research suggests that the answer to (1) is no. That's fortunate, for unhappy people. But whatever the answer to (1) is, it does not mean that being unhappy is blameworthy. If there is no ethical, reliable way to decide to be happy, then your unhappiness is no more your fault than an injury or a birth defect.
Senator Cruz is proposing to block companies from using H1B visas to bring foreign workers to the US temporarily for training.
It is a good cause, but his solution operates by closing off H-1B visas except for very highly paid jobs. I think the solution should more directly address the problem.
I propose that any company or division hiring H-1B workers should be forbidden to eliminate any US jobs for the next two years, unless it has suffered a big drop in gross sales, or to move any work out of the US or to a subcontractor during that time. Fines for violations should be very high.
Also, workers who are told to train their successors (and then be fired) should refuse to train them, or quit immediately. Resisting oppression calls for some guts.
Making tech companies spy on their users for the state is unamerican, and useless too.
An issue not mentioned here is, which criterion is used to define terrorism? Do attacks on abortion clinics count? They ought to, but so far the US government is not treating them as terrorism.
The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists: an interview with Phillip Rogaway.
Perhaps we need a Bulletin of the Information Scientists.
PISSI seduces naive youths by offering a cause and a community to people who feel that no one takes them seriously.
It would be good to change legally required pension schemes so that they are not connected with any particular employer.
The article's picture of the "future of work" shows distortions. "An algorithm matches you with a gig that optimizes your income opportunity"? Not likely. Rather, it will optimize the income of the company that runs it, as it accumulates data about you that it will sell to someone.
Will you be able to decide when to work? Maybe in theory, but in practice you'll find out at 08:00 that you have to work for 4 hours from 11:00 to 15:00 or go without.
Now that reliable gene editing has been developed, it will certainly
be used to
eliminate
hereditary diseases. To deny people this remedy would
be too cruel.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
I don't think it is bad in principle to make enhancements using this technology. However, designing an enhanced human that doesn't already exist is not as straightforward as replacing a defective gene with its normal counterpart. Until a number of people with a certain supposed enhancement grow up, we won't know whether the change is an enhancement or an impediment.
The carbon emissions commitments of some countries are so weak that their emissions will keep increasing. What should we do about this?
Since this is about avoiding global disaster, the response implicitly proposed in the article (Just give up) is stupid. What we really need to do is make those countries reduce emissions.
Given the hundreds of millions of deaths this disaster is likely to cause globally, emitting too much carbon is an act of war. It would be justified to bomb coal-burning power plants to stop their emissions, if nothing less can do the job.
Artificial gene drives make it possible to modify entire wild populations of organisms that reproduce sexually and don't take long to mature. For instance, we could modify wild mosquitoes so that they can't carry malaria. We could wipe out populations of invasive species, such as zebra mussels or asian carp in the US.
Because it is possible to remove the drive later, if any of the drive-harboring asian carp got back to Asia where these fish normally live, we could easily eliminate the drive to protect the species in the range where it belongs.
A web site that generated images in the style of handwritten signs used in the London subway ("Underground") was taken down at the request of the subway. The subway said the site was being used to generate racist signs and presented this as legal grounds for censorship. Racist messages are nasty, but it's wrong to shut down a medium of communication just because some people used it communicate nasty messages. The UK does not respect freedom of speech enough, but I hope that this demand was not legally enforceable there.
I would have refused all along to use a web site to generate parody signs, because doing such a job using someone else's service is SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute).
Any digital service automatically gives the service operator power over its users. This service's operator demonstrated that power when he shut it down, thus stopping people from making any more signs no matter what the messages. In addition, users could not freely alter any aspects of how the service worked, except those for which it offered explicit settings. The service controlled that too.
The right way to make these sign images, or do any computing job that involves you alone, is with a free program you run in your own computer. That way, the program's author does not subsequently have power over the users once they get copies.
If the developer had released a free program to do this, he would not have been able to "shut it down" on demand.
Young children are getting addicted to video to the point that they don't experience much real social interaction.
Trump's bigotry is encouraging the growth of racist hate groups in the US.
Everyone: call on the EU not to restrict web linking.
US citizens: call on Obama to pardon Jeffrey Sterling.
Everyone: call on Burkina Faso to save girls from being forced into marriage.
Australia's planet-roaster "environment minister", whose mission is to trash the environment, demanded to be allowed to speak after a documentary about the Great Barrier Reef, which will be destroyed by CO2 emissions along with all the other coral reefs.
It's not just the heat, it's the acidity.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanual hopes to get away with having supported killer thugs by giving an "apology" without admitting he did anything wrong.
Emanuel is directly responsible, and he should resign.
After he is gone, Chicago could have a chance to elect someone who would be mayor during the daytime. Emanuel is just a night-mayor.
Pakistan's fighting against the Taliban has pushed many foreign jihadis into Afghanistan.
While this may be difficult for Afghanistan, at least it is a sign of progress.
US citizens: Reps and Senators, oppose sale of arms to Salafi Arabia.
Everyone: call for including the Syrian Kurds in multilateral negotiations about Syria's future.
Rejection of a bill to block gun purchases by people on the "no-fly list" has called attention to the injustice of that list.
That list is punishment without trial, and if that's not bad enough, it is punishment secretly sprung on people after they have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on nonrefundable tickets they can't use. No one lawfully present or resident in the US should be blocked from riding in US airline flights except as punishment for a crime.
As for people not lawfully present or resident in the US, the government has the option of denying them entry, which is both more effective and more legitimate than the no-fly list.
Blocking people from buying guns is more legitimate than blocking people from flying, so it is ok to do that based on weaker criteria. However, there are limits to what this can achieve. Blocking a small list of people will not stop attacks by undetectable small teams. But perhaps nothing can stop that.
The US House of Representatives passed a bill to ban microbeads from soap and toothpaste.
Microbeads are harmful to marine life, and sewage treatment does not stop them from getting into waterways.
Chicago thugs who shot Ronald Johnson dead say he was carrying a pistol. His mother says the pistol was planted on him after he was shot.
DA Alvarez, following her general tendency, is protecting the thugs.
Neither of them merits our unreserved trust. The thugs could be lying to excuse their actions. The mother could be saying what she wishes were true. But the fact that witnesses report that thugs told them what to say suggests that the thugs are lying.
Cory Doctorow: don't think of trying to work for the NSA so as to limit its wrongs. Great heroes have tried and failed.
The low price of oil is making most oil extraction projects unprofitable to invest in. It the price stays low, it will limit the oil extracted to the fraction which is cheap to extract.
That's good, but the low price also reduces the incentive to invest in renewable energy and increased efficiency. And it tends to encourage investment in burning oil in the future (though that may take years).
Increased tax on oil, or a carbon tax, would give us the best of both worlds: the extraction projects would still be unprofitable, while renewables and efficiency increases would be encouraged.
Demonstrating cruelty, the US government stopped a hunger strike in an immigration prison by threatening to force-feed the prisoners.
Remember that most of these prisoners have not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. The US keeps them in prison as preparation for possibly deporting them. It may be legitimate to deport them, but that is no excuse for force-feeding them.
The DuPont and Dow Chemical Merger: Bad Deal for People and the Planet.
The merger of two large companies that operate in the same areas reduces competition in all the areas they both operate in. Splitting that company according to area of operation does nothing to increase competition in any one of the areas. Thus, the overall effect is to reduce competition.
One of General Pinochet's men phoned a talk show to confess to murdering dissidents under orders.
I guess his conscience insisted on this. He said that he would have been killed if he refused.
On the politics and irrationality of Western responses to Syria: "So Why Did Turkey Shoot Down That Russian Plane?"
Oklahoma thug convicted of raping 12 women after intimidating them with is power to threaten them.
If Airlines Care About [global heating] They Should Make Everyone Travel Economy.
Egypt's censorship is being applied repressively to all media.
The UK is sucking up to China so hard that it praised China on Human Rights Day.
Figures demonstrate the decline of the US middle class.
US meat production has decreased since 2009, but use of antibiotics in farms has increased by almost 1/4.
We're going to pay with our lives for this folly.
Never Mind a Third Runway — What Heathrow Needs Is Managed Decline.
1.5C of heating as a maximum target is a lot safer for everyone than 2C.
The farther heating goes, the more chance of triggering some positive feedback which would shove it far above 2C.
An Ohio thug has been indicted for two different killings.
Cuban Dissidents Say 100 Detained in Human Rights Day Protest Crackdown.
Jailed Saudi Blogger Raif Badawi on Hunger Strike.
The US plans to punish Europeans with connections to Iran because of a murder carried out by by Pakistanis inspired by Salafi Arabia. However, neither Pakistan nor Salafi Arabia are affected by this bill.
I suggest that the European Union retaliate by requiring visas from Americans whose family name starts with R. Paul Ryan, for instance. The absurdity of this response will show the absurdity of what the US is doing.
The US announces "progress" in fighting PISSI, but the supposed progress may not mean anything.
The US tends to label any "military-age males" killed by air strikes as enemy fighters, but that's definitely an exaggeration. If air strikes in Ramadi killed 350 military-age males, we have no idea how many were fighting for PISSI and how many were civilians.
The caution of the army attacking Ramadi is likely to result in fewer casualties to soldiers, but could cause more casualties to civilians in Ramadi, which would build support for PISSI.
As for a few leaders killed, such a group can always replace them as long as more people are volunteering.
People have made great progress against malaria using insecticide-treated mosquito nets, but mosquitos are developing resistance to the insecticides.
If we step up the effort, we could cut off malaria transmission in some areas.
Thai Man Arrested for Facebook 'like' of Doctored Royal Photo. He supported a campaign that criticized Thai corruption.
After a Thai investigator fled to Australia fearing for his life, Thailand looks to charge him with "defamation" for saying so.
Thailand's repressive government does not care that he said it in Australia.
To visit Thailand is an act of folly — stay away!
Volkswagen explains that the "defeat devices" that faked emissions levels for tests came from a system that had a tendency to do this.
A small step against overprotectiveness: the US "no child left alone" law has been amended to say that it does not criminalize parents for allowing a child to walk to school.
Western discussion of Islamic terrorists studiously avoids mentioning how Salafi Arabia and Qatar promote their ideology and fund their attacks.
Some US teachers are leading their students to treat Muslim students as terrorists.
I think it would be useful for non-Islamist Muslims to invent a term to describe themselves, so that they can say in a positive way what they stand for, without using a negation. Then, when someone asks them, "Are you an Islamist", they can say, "No, I'm an XYZ, and proud of it."
France is passing a law to require supermarkets to give away "expired" food.
Sanders presents the positive response to Trump's randomly scattered hatred.
Mental health care is unavailable to half the Americans that need it. Perhaps as a result, they are more likely to get killed by thugs.
Global heating threatens to inundate Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, turning it first into a marsh, then later into open water.
Only 500 people live their now, but it's not the only place in the US that is going to be under water.
Spending money to protect each vulnerable place is stupid. We should spend it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and thus protect them all at once.
Without Syrians at the Front And Centre of Talks, There Can Be No Lasting Peace.
ACLU: FBI Director Completely Ignores Anti-Abortion, Right-Wing Terror, Focuses Exclusively on Muslims.
The UK's government isn't satisfied with eliminating subsidies for wind and solar energy. Now it plans to tax them heavily.
China has cancelled the punishments applied to children who were born in violation of the one-child-per-family law.
I supported limiting families to one child, but it was wrong to punish the children. They are not responsible for who decided to have them.
A woman raped by a California thug, under the guise of a "cavity search", had the courage to report it and sue.
The Prime Minister of France says France will not ban public WiFi or use of Tor.
It is not clear how broad the requirement for companies to break their client's encryption will be.
Dow and DuPont want to merge.
Large companies should never be allowed to merge. Let's hope that today's weakened antitrust laws provide a basis to block it.
The Venezuelan right wing has repeatedly accused Chavez of stealing elections. We see now that the elections in Venezuela are honest.
However, I fear that the antisocialists, now in power, will change that. Republicans in the US have perfected several methods of rigging elections that they could follow.
China has arrested many labor activists in Canton (Guangdong).
Japan's failure to act against ivory smuggling is impeding efforts to protect elephants.
Thailand's Most Senior Human Trafficking Investigator to Seek Political Asylum in Australia.
The investigations lead to people high up in the army and the thugs.
South Korea is becoming repressive: a union leader who sought refuge in a Buddhist temple has been arrested.
Now that feminism has revived, it can do a lot of good, but also threatens censorship.
I support feminism except when it starts to attack freedom of speech. Calling someone a "slut" is nasty, and foolish as well: it presumes a prudish sexist idea of good and bad sexual conduct. Let's rebuke anyone who calls anyone a "slut" — we could call then "Taliban" — but people have a right to say nasty, prudish, sexist things.
No matter how nasty a statement is, censorship is nastier.
UK right-wing policies of dooH niboR are spreading hunger.
Syrian rebels evacuated the city of Homs, under cease fire.
Many countries feed more antibiotics to healthy animals than the humans use. This provokes antibiotic resistance in the bacteria that inhabit the animals,which spreads to bacteria that can infect humans.
The "reconciled" version of CISA contains all the worst snooping provisions approved by the House and Senate.
Anheuser-Busch is taking advantage of a gap in US competition law to push small competitors out of supermarkets.
This shows one more way that US competition law needs to be strengthened. It should also prohibit the sort o contracts that Microsoft pushed on PC manufacturers, by which they agree to pay for a Windows license even when they sell a computer without Windows.
Under Thailand's tyranny, any criticism of repression can be twistedly labeled as "insulting the monarchy" which makes it a target of repression.
You can't stop vicious ideas, whether those of Trump or those of PISSI, by banning them.
One quarter of Alaska permafrost could melt by 2100 — US Geological Survey.
Since this would release a lot of methane, we'd be truly cooked.
The FBI director has returned to demanding an end to encryption that really works.
Imagine if someone like Trump becomes president and starts using the US spy apparatus to find and imprison scapegoats.
Activists protested at the Louvre against its acceptance of sponsorship from an oil company.
Isn't it cute how the oil company sums up plutocratic rule: "In recent years, the relationship between business and society has changed."
Protests like this are very important for turning fossil fuel companies into the pariahs they deserve to be. Having dealings with those companies should make a person or organization the object of general scorn. This is necessary because it will reduce their plutocratic power to block necessary action to avoid disaster.
Librarians and privacy advocates oppose CISA together.
Ramie Abounaja displayed a Palestinian flag from his dorm window, so George Washington University sent a thug to make him take it down, then made some unclear disciplinary accusation against him.
It is formally prohibited to hang flags from a window, but students that hang other flags never get bothered.
The war in Ukraine has quieted down since August; the cease-fire has held. It is no longer serves Putin's purposes to heat it up.
A total of 9,000 deaths are estimated.
While Obama's officials refuse to read the Senate's torture report, Republicans are trying to destroy all copies, so as to cover up US crimes.
Germany is still paying pensions to those still living of 37,000 Spaniards who fought for Hitler.
"Everything you need to know about encryption: Hint, you're already using it."
This article exhibits a blind spot that is common in writing about the issue: namely, it is unwilling to consider that the US government's official use of a back door might be for evil.
I'm not willing to maintain that blind spot. What if we have President Trump, or someone like him?
Trump and Clinton are both scapegoating the internet.
Community land trusts and public housing can make life better for people that privately owned housing.
The UK is promoting diesel generators over renewable generators.
The Afghan army is having trouble winning support from the people because it kills too many civilians.
The US is on track to make it inconvenient for Europeans to enter the US if they have visited Iraq, Syria, Iran or Sudan.
This will hit Europeans who participated in humanitarian, diplomatic and business activities in those countries. Yet another US attack against Medecins Sans Frontières.
Ironically, it will also hurt any Europeans that worked for the US mercenary companies such as Blackwater (or whatever it's called today).
The FBI will start counting people killed by thugs in the US.
Sanders states how he will achieve big cuts in US fossil fuel emissions, as well as banning some of the most dangerous or polluting forms of fossil fuel extraction.
Sanders told reporters not to neglect US poverty and injustice out of obsession with how to deal with PISSI.
Humanity must invest 7 trillion dollars a year to avoid global heating disaster.
That is 20 times what we invested in this in 2014.
Fortunately, we can get most of that 7 trillion by taking it from investment in fossil fuel use.
A danger from Trump is that he makes serious bigots seem within the range of normal views.
Gun killings in the US today are running at half the rate of 20 years ago. Americans need not feel terrified of being shot.
Although the total death rate from shooting is going down, the death rate from multiple shooting incidents is rising. Common sense gun control measures can't make multiple shooting impossible, but could reduce how often they happen.
Also, prohibiting large magazines nationwide would eventually make them scarce. That would reduce, in many cases, the number that a shooter can succeed in killing.
Philip Coleman was lying on a cot in jail when Chicago thugs came into his sell and repeatedly tased him. Coleman died shortly after.
Global heating denialists for hire, by the hour, to write reports to support planet-roasters.
There may be a real prospect of a cease-fire in Syria among the sides other than PISSI.
Microsoft is attacking computers that run Windows 7 and 8, switching on a flag that says whether to "upgrade" to Windows 10 when users have turned it off.
This, by the way, reaffirms the presence of a universal back door in Windows 7 and 8.
Oil Fuels War and Terrorists Like [PISSI]. The Climate Movement Can Bring Peace.
Clinton: will you take actions to oppose the TPP?
Foreign recruits continue flowing to PISSI.
It is very important to cut off the flow, since PISSI's training turns many somewhat-confused people into expert soldiers. But the only way to do it is to close the border with Turkey. Erdogan won't do it, so it has to be done by ground troops on the Syrian side.
Saudi Arabia is trying to poison the Paris climate conference.
China and India are also blocking a strong agreement.
The UK is planning to cut the support for disabled people, supposedly to give them an incentive to do the work that they can't do.
US citizens: tell Democracy For America who you suggest it should endorse for president. (I chose Sanders.)
Rio Olympics Linked to Widespread Human Rights Violations, Report Reveals.
When the games start, other forms of harshness are likely to start, including chasing away street vendors so certain elect businesses can get the spectators' business. Meanwhile, there may well be new systems of surveillance and new harsh laws that will be permanent.
The city of Boston wisely killed Boston's bid to hold Olympic games.
Planned highways and railroads in Africa could destroy the currently roadless ecosystems they run through.
Demand for ivory in China is falling, which bodes well for elephants.
The question is whether this is due to a change in attitudes or only to China's current economic slump.
MDMA (Ecstasy) is already quite safe, but legalizing it would make it even safer.
Several countries are forcibly handing exiled Chinese dissidents to China. They include Thailand, and even Vietnam, which is not generally friendly with China.
Even without the cancelled Keystone XL pipeline, Canadian oil exports via the US have almost doubled since a year ago.
Much like PISSI with its beheading videos, Trump attracts support by proposing shocking actions.
His reaction is what PISSI hopes to provoke. So is the success of bigots in French elections.
Iceland has its own counterpart to Pastafarianism: Zuism worships ancient Sumerian gods, and will give its members a refund of their mandatory tax surcharge to support churches.
As Australia pushes for more coal export, some Australian islands are gradually being flooded, and changing weather is killing their crops.
Proposing a mechanism to enforce compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
A commentator suggests that PISSI's loss of profitability might make the groups that support it split apart.
Trump Cites Unscientific Poll From Fringe Group in Call for Banning Muslim Immigration.
Calling on the public to liberate scientific knowledge through forbidden sharing of the articles and books that embody it.
Mubarak's thugs tortured Sayed Abdellatif into confessions that appear to be false, but Australia uses them as an excuse to imprison him.
Global heating is hitting England hard with great floods that would have been extremely rare in the past.
The government continues going all-out to make this worse.
10 criteria for judging whether the agreement from the Paris conference will do what needs to be done.
Finland is considering a universal basic income.
A "liberal" Russian TV channel which disagrees with Putin is being examined for "extremism".
The US, China, Canada and the EU are supporting a 1.5C limit for global heating.
It is necessary to make India accept this target. Flooding other countries is an act of war; perhaps the US and China should convey to Modi that they will preemptively bomb India's coal-burning power plants to stop India from flooding cities such as New York, Washington, Miami, Nanjing and Shanghai.
Of course, this would be hypocritical if the US and China don't do their share to prevent the flooding.
Fossil fuel companies continue funding denialism. Fortunately, one of their events in Paris was a risible failure.
I fear the companies that are "sponsoring" the Paris climate negotiations are having a lot more influence.
A large renewable energy plan could lead Africa away from fossil fuels.
This could make life better for many people in Africa, but if we don't make India drop its plans for burning coal, people may not be able to live there at all.
The WTO will try to fine the US a billion dollars unless it abolishes country-of-origin meat labels.
Let's abolish the WTO instead. The WTO's purpose is to undermine democracy in all the countries that have signed it, transferring power from the legislature to multinational businesses.
The plutocratists try to distract us from this effect by comparing exports and imports, which slips in the assumption that the interests of Americans are nothing but a matter of total economic consumption.
Even aside from questions of whether the economy is sustainable, economic growth in all countries doesn't help most people if it is achieved in a way that benefits the rich at the expense of the non-rich. To prevent that, we need to make laws that assure the wealth is spread around and that businesses don't hurt the public. These laws are precisely what "free trade" treaties attack. They also make it hard to maintain unions.
Don't let the plutocratists distract you from the real issue at stake. And please organize now to defeat the TPP!
Global greenhouse emissions fell in 2015, but they are still so high that disaster will result; and the decrease may not last.
The UK's rightwing government plans to reduce universities to the status of training institutions for the "labor market".
US citizens: Support the BLM's proposed rule to make oil and gas extractors pay for all they extract.
Everyone: call on Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and prosecutor Anita Alvarez to resign.
US citizens: call on the attorney general to let victims of US torture have their day in court.
Clinton, like the Republicans, wants more government snooping. She wants to pressure companies into bypassing encryption.
Her bogus premise is that we should keep increasing snooping until it identifies in advance all attacks by small groups. But no amount of surveillance is enough to do that, so she will always have an excuse to demand more surveillance.
Vote for Sanders for president.
The UK spy agency argues it should be allowed to spy on people with hardly any limits, and attack their computers, just because the hypothetical crimes are really bad.
Note the similarity between the argument in favor of massive surveillance and the argument in favor of torture: that it "just might someday" make it possible to prevent a crime. But neither massive surveillance nor torture really does this.
Malaysia Approves Security Law Amid Warning It Could Lead to Dictatorship.
France is following the same path; I fear for France.
Crackpot theories about "chemtrails" are distracting people from the dangerous greenhouse gases emitted by airplanes.
Here's a conspiracy theory. Maybe the "chemtrails" idiocy was funded by the Heatland Institute (*) through ALEC.
* It calls itself the "Heartland Institute", but since its goal is to make the Earth hotter, "Heatland" fits it better.
A US appeals court endorsed a narrow interpretation of the CFAA: disobeying terms of service is not a crime.
This might have saved Aaron Swartz from being hounded to death.
Muslims in London have started a campaign against fanaticism, telling a fanatic who attacked someone in a train that he is not a real Muslim.
Advancing surveillance technology threatens to make it impossible to do anything that the state does not follow.
The US and France may attack PISSI in Libya, where it is expanding and is viewed by most of the public as merely an occupying army.
However, we should take care not to consider its expansion in Libya as a sign of weakness in Syria and Iraq.
Many have lost wars by underestimating the enemy.
The UK government is eager to bomb someone, saying it must try to protect Britons from terrorism even if that is ineffective or backfires. Meanwhile, it rejects the effective measures to protect the British people from the larger threat of global heating.
Earth Has Lost a Third of Arable Land in Past 40 Years, Scientists Say.
We're riding the Earth too hard, and we can't keep it up for long.
Christianist terrorists, like Islamist terrorists, believe that their religion authorizes any sort of crimes.
The Canadian national thugs want to access personal data without warrants.
Elon Musk condemns the 5 trillion dollars a year in damage that the fossil fuel industry is not being forced to pay for.
James Hansen and some other scientists say nuclear power is needed to end carbon emissions.
I respect James Hansen, but I think he is mistaken. To develop nuclear power at the rate he proposes would require ignoring safety. He is talking about hypothetical advanced reactors that could only work many years from now, and certainly won't be available soon.
This amount of nuclear power would be so expensive that it would be cheaper to build an excess of renewable energy, plus power storage capacity.
Another SCROTUS budget bill rider would allow increased consolidation in US television.
SCROTUS = Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
After Janet Alder's brother was killed by UK thugs, she started campaigning for justice, and thugs started snooping on her life looking for some way to throw dirt on her.
If it is impossible to convict the thugs in charge of this operation, the law must be changed so that next time a conviction is obtained.
Businesses surround us with little lies that no one expects us to take seriously. This can devalue truth in general.
Sanders' tax plan for multinational companies would raise all the money the US needs for its infrastructure.
I hope he will put a lot of the revenue into renewable energy.
Multinational oil companies face an investigation for complicity in causing the damage of global heating.
The US mainstream media ignore the drone attack whistleblowers.
When someone was stabbed during an art event in Miami, witnesses thought the attack was theater, part if the performance.
Faking violence as a hoax or "art" can indirectly hurt people by confusing society about how to react. It should not be illegal, but it is wise to disapprove of it.
The official statements of several thugs about the murder of Laquan McDonald were lies — and the video proves it.
Is it a crime to report falsely?
Democrats proposed a law to ban people on the no-fly list from buying guns, and SCROTUS blocked it as a denial of due process.
The no-fly list is already punishment without due process. Being stopped from flying is more of a punishment than being stopped from buying a gun, and this is why the no-fly list must be abolished, or else redesigned so that people are only placed in it by a court's judgment.
At that point, it could also be applied to purchase of guns.
The NSA still has the power to snoop massively on Americans, never limited as the Constitution calls for.
We have evidence from France and the US that this power doesn't prevent terrorist attacks anyway.
US parents would rather their children see violence than sex.
Modi talks about boosting solar power in India, but he still plans to double coal extraction.
To some extent, the new coal mines in India will replace coal imports. However, continuing to burn so much coal will bring disaster regardless of where it is mined.
A week with Hello Barbie: it constantly tells you what good friends you are, then asks you for personal information.
Seems designed to manipulate children into giving personal data.
Why 'Active Investigations' Don't Justify Keeping Police Video Secret.
By 2050, global heating will disrupt food production in every region of the world. This will add to the harm done by population increase.
Clinton Super PAC Donor is Former Goldman Exec and Foreclosure Crisis Profiteer.
Clearly he expects her not to clamp down on the power of the banksters.
The TPP would prohibit laws requiring certain products come with source code, which is needed for their security and for users' right to repair.
The tyranny of Thailand is demonstrated by repeated censorship of New York Times articles that can hardly be said to actually criticize the Thai monarchy.
Many Americans are too quick to assume a killing is terrorism when the killer is a Muslim, but drag their feet against acknowledging Christianist terrorism.
I use the term "Christianist" for Christians that want to impose laws that come from their religion, by analogy with "Islamist". Only a fraction of Christianists and Islamists are violent, but all are enemies of human rights.
Brazil has advised women not to get pregnant now, because a virus once in a rare while causes microcephaly.
It ought to be possible to abort the very few fetuses that develop microencephaly, but I suppose Brazil doesn't respect women's rights that much.
On the other hand, a substantial reduction in births would be quite useful too.
US-supported Salafi Arabia bombed an MSF clinic in Yemen.
Kazakhstan, which is a total tyranny, is ordering all internet users to install back doors in their computers.
This goes only a little beyond how the UK plans to attack all internet users.
The tyrant of Burundi demands that everyone join his party; those who don't are beaten. Those who try to flee are killed if caught.
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work.
Encryption alone cannot protect our privacy from all the systems of snooping that have been set up in today's "free" countries — only partly from some. We need to redesign systems so that they do not accumulate data about people other than court-designated suspects.
Human population growth continues to threaten humanity, as it is on a collision course with the food shortages that global heating does and will cause.
If we don't want people to remain poor, we must make fewer of them.
We must go beyond "zero carbon emissions" and actively reduce the CO2 level in Earth's atmosphere.
The urgency is in the first step. Once that is done, reducing the CO2 level may prevent the subsequent inundation of some of the cities that are threatened.
Maria Hasankolli overslept and her 8-year-old child walked to school. She faces ten years in prison for this unconscious act.
When I was 8 years old, I walked to school every day. So did everyone else in my school. But that was in Manhattan. Perhaps these nasty fools think that Connecticut is a more dangerous place than Manhattan.
The secret negotiations for the Trade In Services Agreement propose to prohibit subsidies, or any sort of preferences, for renewable energy.
This is typical of how "trade treaties" betray the people: subordinating everything that really matters to business interests.
This is based on the leaked text of one chapter.
Thugs deleted part of the Burger King store's security video recording in order to cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald.
A European court case demands that Facebook cease sending Europeans' data to the US.
Around the world corporations are exempting themselves from taxation, forcing too much tax burden onto individuals, especially the non-rich.
In the past, countries have been weakened because too much property ended up in the hands of untaxable churches. Churches or corporations, it's the same phenomenon.
Prosecutors stretch laws and ignore the constitution to attack people that distribute information from the Fully Informed Jury Association about the purpose of juries.
When someone is on trial for handing out a pamphlet, I wonder whether the pamphlet must be entered in evidence for the jury to examine.
Westerners who fight along with the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, against PISSI, are often prosecuted just like those that fight for PISSI.
US citizens: phone the White House at (202) 456-1111 and leave a message for President Obama, calling for rejecting spending bills with nasty Republican riders.
Whether they are tax breaks for companies, or attacks on Planned Parenthood, or attacks on the environment, or attacks on food labeling requirements, or anything else, Obama should reject them one and all.
While SCROTUS continue to cut spending that helps people, they are preparing big tax breaks for businesses.
The thirty meter telescope, which would have been by far the largest telescope in the northern hemisphere, has been cancelled because some of the ground it would be built on is considered "sacred". Faith has, apparently, triumphed over knowledge.
Can any other place can be found to build this telescope?
Another telescope, even larger, is planned for Chile, where it will be able to observe the southern skies — but parts of the northern skies will be outside its range.
Zuckerberg "donated" most of his assets — to a new corporation he owns. And he calls that "charity".
New Canadian PM Trudeau looks great on global heating, but only because he is compared with the over planet-roaster Harper.
Chicago Mayor Emanuel seems to have tried to cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald in order to get the black vote for reelection as mayor.
I gave to Chuy Garcia's campaign. I hope he wins next time.
The UK decided to bomb PISSI in Syria, a gesture that will have negligible military effect.
I'm not necessarily opposed to gestures, but gestures are not a valid reason to kill people.
James Hansen calls for a predictably increasing fee on carbon emissions.
How Bernie Sanders proposes to make college affordable for masses of Americans, as we did before.
The other candidates are too much in cahoots with the rich.
US Christianist extremists are trying to cut off American women from contraceptives, but pretend this isn't so.
Everyone: please donate to the Free Software Foundation.
SCROTUS are planning to threaten a government shutdown to abolish some of the laws that regulate banksters.
SCROTUS stands for Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
Demanding the resignation of Chicago Mayor Emmanual.
The climate negotiators in Paris hope that nature (physics) will make concessions, if they show good intentions.
Turkey wants to set up a "safe zone" in Northern Turkey — safe for PISSI, that is. Thus, the Kurds are opposed to it.
Human Rights Watch demands prosecution of US torturers.
A state in of Australia will imprison people for having 3D printer files for making a gun.
It is legitimate to prohibit making guns, but any law that makes it a crime to have a copy of some published work is tyranny. It subjects innocent people to great danger from anyone that wants to get them in trouble.
Trump exploits the internet with speeches that are a series of clickbait. They don't need to be coherent to succeed.
I occasionally use Google search, but Google never knows who I am. If you do the same, then your Google search is the same as mine; Google can't tell us apart.
The President of South Korea is repressing labor protesters and tried to associate them with hypothetical terrorists.
Rosa Parks, whose arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, was a mature lifelong activist who had plenty of experience.
People in Raqqa say that airstrikes alone don't change much. Aside from Russian airstrikes, which often hit civilians.
ALEC, funded by fossil fuel businesses, is trying to organize Republican-controlled US states to actively sabotage US plans to avoid global heating disaster.
The UK Tories are adapting Republican techniques of voter suppression and gerrymandering to make the UK government nondemocratic.
A Russian director, authorized to make a deceptive North Korean propaganda movie, found a clever way to show some of the truth.
Right-wing cuts in the UK mean no parks, no public libraries, no museums, no place for young people to do anything but get in trouble.
Rich Countries Should Pay to Keep Tropical Forests Standing.
Avoiding global disaster will be well worth the price, but there are two issues that we must resolve:
Paying a price to preserve forests is one thing; assigning them a value in money is another. It is a mistake to see the issue in the narrow economic terms such as "ecosystem services" and "buying them". That encourages people to treat them as fungible.
The World's Richest 10% Produce Half of Global Carbon Emissions.
The US must do a lot more to switch to renewable energy. This calls for spending money, perhaps instead of some weapons.
Another Egyptian journalist has been charged with "spreading false news" for giving a talk about the Islamist rebels in the Sinai.
China states the plan to make huge cuts in CO2 emissions from electricity by 2020.
This would be a real step forward, but don't forget the emissions from transport, home heating, factories, and agriculture.
The slow struggle to establish protection of marine species threatened by overfishing takes place in the shadow of the CO2 threat to wipe out entire ecosystems and families.
Sending independently operating US combat troops to fight in Syria invites making things worse.
Repression in Turkey has reached the point where a state employee has been fired for comparing Erdoğan's face to that of Gollum.
When Erdoğan doesn't understand is that he is the one bringing Turkey into disrepute.
Putin is expelling Turkish citizens from Russia in the harshest possible way, clearly meant as a gesture to prove what a bully he can be.
The reasons stated for this action include bullshit, plus an accusation that is probably true: that Turkey is protecting PISSI's oil export trade.
Both Turkey and Russia must be lying about what happened in the downing of the Russian jet.
Loan companies, in Africa and the US, make would-be borrowers submit to total surveillance by installing spyware in their phones.
I think we need laws to prohibit companies from requiring or even asking customers (including borrowers) to run any nonfree software.
A "smart" phone is a computer. If your computer runs nonfree software, it is someone else's tool to mistreat you. There are smartphones that can run the free operating system Replicant in the main or "application" processor, but all mobile phones have nonfree software, at least in the radio communication processor.
An arrested protester in Paris has been fined for refusing to be fingerprinted.
Bravo!
However, I do not approve of throwing bottles or cans at the thugs. This plays into the hands of repressors.
Many schoolchildren in the US are being told by their schools to use mobile computers with proprietary software, and the machines typically give the children's personal data to some company (often Google or Apple).
If a school makes an account in a student's name with a company, it has already violated that student's privacy. If the account does not have the student's name or other personal details, sending it unencrypted information about the student's school work violates that student's privacy.
These mobile computers always run nonfree software. Parents shouldn't allow their young children to be given nonfree software by anyone.
I was surprised that the EFF legitimizes the term "the cloud", which is meant to cloud people's thinking about letting companies have their data and do things with it. There is no cloud, only computers belonging to various companies. The term "cloud" is intended to encourage people not to ask, "Which company is getting which data, what does it do with that data, and which country's jurisdiction is it under?" Please, EFF, stop encouraging this cloudy thinking.
Salafi Arabia's expensive PR campaign has close ties to the Clinton campaign.
Billionaires' investments in centralized, subsidized and profitable energy long-shots are the hard way to curb global heating.
Republicans in Congress are trying to sabotage an investigation against some of them for insider stock trading.
After 13 years the US has admitted it put Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri in Guantanamo prison by mistake, but still won't let him go.
Tamir Rice's killer was allowed to testify to his own grand jury. He made claims that can't fit the timeline shown by the video.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn applies practical sense to the question of how to fight PISSI.
Obama plans to station US troops in Iraq to attack PISSI independently.
While I think the aim of attacking PISSI is legitimate, using US troops to do it is asking for trouble. Do they speak Arabic?
Chicago's thug chief has been fired for helping to protect a thug from punishment for murdering Laquan McDonald.
Features in a human brain, which may have a form that is typically "male" or one that is typically "female", can change with experiences, sometimes in 15 minutes.
This suggests that the reason it is most common for the feature to have a certain form in males or in females is that males and females tend to have certain kinds of life experiences.
A global tobacco company bribed officials and politicians in various African companies to undermine laws intended to reduce smoking.
Big Tobacco Targets the Young in Poor Countries — with Deadly Consequences.
It is no surprise that Chicago DA Alvarez prosecuted Laquan McDonald's killer only when compelled to. She shows a pattern of going to any length to protect thugs from prosecution, even prosecuting victims for complaining.
She also defends false convictions, even harassing law students who are working pro bono to investigate them, on the principle that the system should never admit a mistake.
Union organizers in Honduras face murder, in which employers may be involved. The government, set up by the US-backed coup, is firmly on the side of the businesses.
Poor Americans are not lazy. They work harder (on the average) than people who have more money.
General Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, admitted that the US reacted stupidly in response to the September 2001 attacks.
Ten thousand protested peacefully for climate defense in Paris, forming a human chain in defiance of the state's ban.
I love the way Naomi Klein says what's what.
After that, thousands of people formed a protest march.
Unfortunately, the black bloc turned that into a riot.
We need public defiance — with discipline.
Teachers and staff at the City University of New York have held a sit-in and are moving towards a strike.
Assad's forces bombed an MSF hospital, and bombed again a few minutes later to kill medics aiding the victims.
A minister in power when India banned The Satanic Verses says the ban was a mistake — but the book remains banned.
Bombing [PISSI] Is Not Enough — We'll Need to Talk to Them Too.
If we can have a peaceful relationship with a state as cruel and barbaric as Salafi Arabia, in principle we can do the same with PISSI.
People More Likely to Report Suspected Violent Extremists 'If They Trust Police'.
Global heating is already sending climate refugees fleeing to Dhaka from rural Bangladesh.
Planned Parenthood employees receive death threats constantly.
For gun manufacturers, public shootings are good for business.
At least 155 countries still have laws that discriminate against women.
Fish are disappearing from Cambodia's giant lake Tonle Sap. 1/3 of the protein eaten by Cambodians comes from those fish.
The EPA should carry out independent tests of the effects of Dow's new dual pesticide, not accept Dow's own experiments.
Michigan has made it easier for possibly dangerous people to get licenses to carry concealed guns.
Gun nuts say they are opposed to the government's "taking their guns away." But this shows that their goal is not a matter of keeping guns, but rather expanding the possession and use of guns.
(There may be some guns that ought to be taken away from everyone.)
Greater uncertainty about climate change means bigger risks and more reason to act.
If we don't want to take a foolish bet, with civilization at stake, we must work hard enough to make survival almost certain.
Paris Climate Talks: Vulnerable Countries Demand 1.5C Warming Limit.
We all need this, because we can't measure the distance to the cliff — all we know is that we are heading towards it.
A list of possible ways to counter PISSI.
Only the gullible thought that killing Osama bin Laden was going to achieve anything. (And the US should have captured him and put him on trial, since it was in a position to do so.)
In the UK, poverty means a lower life expectancy. Up to 16 years less.
Shkreli, the drug gouger who said he would lower the price, did not really mean it. Just before Thanksgiving he announced he would not lower it.
The asshole is to blame for his own actions, but we should not allow him to get away with them. Specifically, we should not allow him to take measures to block manufacture of equivalent generics.
Public policy journalism in the US is now available only to insiders and businesses willing to pay high subscription fees.
Today's Republicans make Dubya look good on one specific issue: he refused to stir up public hatred towards Muslims in general. However, this virtue was the exception to many other forms of cruelty and injustice towards American Muslims.
Blackberry, in an act of unusual courage, will cease operations in Pakistan rather than betray all its customers.
The UK wants to make such companies secretly betray all their customers.
US soldiers are fighting in Iraq in close cooperation with Kurds.
I don't see any danger in this. They are fighting on battlefields against enemy soldiers, and few civilians will be killed. This is not the sort of situation where the danger of intervention lies.
The elected president of the Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, cannot contribute to saving humanity from global heating disaster. He is in prison, overthrown by tyrants that work in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry.
I have to wonder whether fossil fuel magnates arranged the coup to remove an inconvenient hero of humanity.
Israelis who kidnapped a Palestinian and burned him to death have been convicted of murder.
It is good that Israel can still do justice for some cases of violence against Palestinians. How sad that so many are ignored.
US thugs have killed 1000 people so far, this year.
An American is much more likely to be killed by a thug than by a terrorist.
The latest Christianist terrorist attack murdered two people who were visiting the Planned Parenthood clinic.
Anti-abortion Christianist terrorism in the US has got much worse since the deceptive attack videos that were aimed at Planned Parenthood.
Some of the New Atheists have become supporters of right-wing Christianist policies.
I am disappointed with them.
For the most part, in the West, Christianity is willing to coexist with non-Christians. But Christianism, as a political movement, is dangerous. There are plenty of Christian fanatics who are prepared to lie to stir up terrorism against abortion providers.
People are already trying to spin failure in Paris as the start of a "long road" to curbing global heating in the future.
If only we had that much time to do the job! Slowness now will make doom come faster and harder. This article seems to reach for self-delusion to avoid despair.
Now that the EU has stopped Israel from passing off products of colonies in Palestine as "Made in Israel", Netanyahu has retaliated by cancelling EU participation in the "peace process".
The joke is that the "peace process" involving the EU is pure theater, just like the one that the US tried to broker. Netanyahu used them to pretend he wanted peace. Now he has "canceled" the remaining one, pretending that that makes a real difference and that it is a real punishment for the EU. Who knows, he may fool a few dumb klucks.
Netanyahu is pretending to have sabotaged a real peace process as an act of blackmail. If he had really done that, it would be despicable of him — but since it was a sham anyway, he hasn't really done anything. Somehow he claims that his pretense puts the EU in the wrong.
All this would be risible if the occupation and its effects were not so tragic.
The sham "peace process" shielded Netanyahu effectively from pressure for peace, while he made sure it would never get anywhere. Its demise is one shield stripped away.
The NSA's legal authority to collect everyone's phone call records in the US has just expired.
Will the NSA really stop?
I don't think phone companies should be allowed to keep records of all of everyone's phone calls, either.
A prominent Kurdish human rights defender was assassinated while talking to the press.
We don't know whether the Turkish state was responsible for the Elci's assassination, but we know it was responsible for his completely indefensible prosecution. The Turkish state has often engaged in violence, even fatal, against opposition political groups; this has gone on for decades.
Erdogan's party seems to have got PISSI to help out with a couple of handy bombings of Kurdish rallies. That doesn't prove it arranged the assassination, but I doubt it would have scrupled to do so.
ALEC, with the support of Ben Carson, continues to sabotage attempts to avoid global heating disaster.
ALEC has lost over a hundred sponsors, but it still gets plenty of money from the Koch brothers.
People are looking for clever ways to express protest messages in Paris.
I suggest the way that the civil rights movement used: walk with a sign, chanting, and dare the authorities to interfere.
The TPP and TTIP, ostensibly meant to "liberalize trade" but designed mainly to give business more power, can sabotage efforts to avoid global heating disaster.
US citizens: phone your representatives and senators to support full reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, requiring a search warrant in all cases.
US citizens: phone your senators and say, don't let Republicans put riders in a spending bill to do nasty things such as exclude Syrian refugees, or attack Planned Parenthood, or cancel network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
In the US: call on the TV show Face the Nation to have some guests that support diplomacy in Syria.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to investigate attacks on abortion providers as terrorism.
Everyone: call on the Philippes to start soon their investigation into companies suspected of dishonestly denying global heating.
US citizens: call on Senator McConnell to support a law to stop identified terrorist suspects from buying guns.
Dubya and B'liar ignored an expert report saying that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
This does not surprise me. After so much effort to manufacture a lie, why would they have cared about the truth?
Many "prosperous" cities are so expensive to live in that ordinary workers can only rent 8-hour shifts in a bed.
Some Republican senators want to send US troops to fight PISSI directly.
They are right that defeating PISSI requires ground troops, but Westerners that don't speak Arabic won't be able to do it. Many will hate the civilians, call them by ethnic slurs, and dehumanize them. They will have frequent misunderstandings with civilians they can't talk with, often fatally. The civilians will consider PISSI the lesser evil.
How do I know? Because we saw this happen in Iraq just 10 years ago, and this is what PISSI came out of.
For Turkish troops to fight PISSI is a pipedream, since they'd have to mutiny first. Erdogan has been protecting PISSI's communications. He wants to attack the Kurds, and PISSI has proved helpful in this.
Troops from Salafi Arabia might fight PISSI, but they would spread Salafism which is the basis of PISSI's ideology. Troops from Egypt might do the job.
Trump demonstrates the power of the repeated lie, as his supporters too claim they saw the nonexistent TV broadcasts.
This wasn't the first time. Dubya succeeded in convincing many Americans that Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction in 2003, even though US inspectors after the conquest said he didn't.
The French state has given itself the power to abolish any organization that does things that "might" prove useful to others that "endanger the public order" (for instance, criminals or protests). Organizations that promote encryption, or provide a place for people to meet and talk without being listed to, might be banned.
In addition, may be made a crime simply to look at a web site that the state calls "terrorist".
A state like this, systematically crushing freedom, does more harm over the long term than the terrorists it claims to be protecting people from — unless repression also fuels the terrorists, which is possible.
Clinton wants more war against PISSI, never mind strategy.
She is also against fixing the problems in the US medical system which exist because of the compromises Obama made to insurance companies.
Why The Powers That Be Are Pushing A Cashless Society.
This is partly speculative, and I am not sure it is true, but it might be true.
Global heating denialism has seeped into several public school textbooks in California.
We must suspect this reflects the influence of some rich denialist, such as Exxon or a Koch brother or the Heatland Institute.
Multinational digital companies screw the rest of us out of millions of dollars in taxes. In the US, this adds up to $130 billion a year.
This is why America can no longer do things right: the wealthy in America have stopped providing funds for what America needs to do.
To the extent that international agreements about taxation get in the way of fixing this problem, states must defy the agreements and fix the problem anyway. But that requires voting out the politicians who would rather say they can't do this than dare to try.
A progressive tax on a business's gross income could help fix this.
Right-wing rhetoric calling for killing abortion doctors translates repeatedly into murderous attacks.
The term "pro-choice" represents a weak decision not to defend abortion itself. The issue here is not "choice", it is the right to get an abortion when you want one.
The UK Labour Party is turning against bombing Syria.
The question is not whether to consider PISSI an enemy, but rather what to do about that. Is it wise or ethical to drop bombs on people as an act symbolic participation, without a strategy to win, in a way that is likely to strengthen the enemy by killing lots of civilians which would aid PISSI's recruiting as well as being an injustice in itself?
Cameron responds to these questions with "but the symbol is so important!" and "I have a rabbit in my hat".
The problems presented by the Raqqa exiles are so complex that there may not be way to avoid all of them. However, ignoring them is a recipe for doing harm and losing.
The French, banned from marching to demand defense of Earth's climate, are making a pile of shoes to symbolize the march they would have done.
It would be more effective to defy the ban and march anyway.
A substantial climate protest in Paris was taken over by "black bloc" people that wanted to fight with the thugs.
I can't disagree with what they said, but it was a stupid choice of tactics. A nonviolent confrontation, maintaining the moral high ground, would have put the state in the wrong, but this senseless violence gave the state a victory.
In past protests, the "black bloc" was infiltrated by state provocateurs. Perhaps that occurred this time too.
Companies designing "advanced" nuclear reactors want safety regulations taken out of their way.
Then nothing would stop them from making us guinea pigs for their radioactive experiments, just when the nuclear power is becoming pointless because of the tremendously superior efficiency of renewable energy.
Confronting the flaws of Alcoholics Anonymous — not limited to insisting people surrender to a "higher power" even though they know there isn't one.
Modern bottom-fishing and dredging equipment destroys precious sunken ships, as well as the life on the bottom.
Predicting that work will become more precarious, lower paid, and involve intrusive surveillance, for those who can find work at all.
I don't use computer systems that want me to talk to them, except when I'm talking to a company's computer by phone. In that case, I expect the company to know and remember what I say. But when it comes to my own activities, the server company that would translate the speech to text has no right to know, let alone remember, what I say.
I will also refuse to use a "fitness tracker" that reports to anyone other than me.
How thugs created an avoidable feeling of "danger" in dealing with Tamir Rice.
Women's rights defenders murdered for their activism in 2015.
Arundhati Roy reports on meeting Edward Snowden, and ideas about refugees.
The recent actions of the French government and recent statements of Republican political candidates show how right Snowden is.
Conversing mainly through digital devices may have to do with the decline in ability to empathize seen in young Americans.
A man shot people at Planned Parenthood in Colorado because he had been stirred up by deceptive attack videos.
He's also identifying fetuses with babies, which is a common irrationality among those that want to ban abortion.
The main terrorist threat in the US comes from fanatics like those, who call themselves "pro-life" but they mean "life for fetuses — not for real human beings."
The common theme in US social decay: redesigning various systems to privilege the rich and push the rest down.
Poverty, in today's social system, forces parents to feed their children unhealthful food. Healthful food costs too much, requires time and skill to cook that these parents don't have.
It may not even be on sale in many urban areas where the stores are geared towards those that don't cook.
To touch on the unrelated topic of the last section of the article, I see nothing wrong with protesting a speaker by theatrically walking out of the talk. As long as the protest doesn't compel everyone to participate, those who want to hear the speaker can do so.
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State. The US government is deadlocked, but the president and the executive spy and war agencies are allowed to do almost anything with no checks.
Uri Avnery: the western response to PISSI is feckless and absurd because politicians don't think straight about the problem. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is working to confuse them.
Many Arab countries have banned a film presenting prostitution in Morocco, and the people who made the film are receiving death threats.
From France: "Etat d'urgence climatique: mobilisons-nous!"
Fasting on Thanksgiving in solidarity with the hunger-striking prisoners of Guantanamo.
California has failed to limit farmers' extraction of ground water. They are pumping so much that the land is sinking up to 2 inches a month in some places.
The unequal sinking is destroying infrastructure.
If normal rainfall returns for a few years, these farms may turn into lakes. But they will dry out again, more or less forever, in a few decades.
The foretaste of future global heating did not discourage large climate marches in Australia and New Zealand.
US citizens: call for arresting Trump for inciting violence.
US citizens: call on Obama and Congress to press Turkey to free the journalists prosecuted for reporting on arms smuggling to Syria.
The idea of preventing terrorist attacks by collecting more data and banning anonymity is inherently impossible. It can oppress dissidents very well, and crush protests, but can't distinguish a small group of terrorists from any small group of friends.
The bow-to-business government of New Zealand sabotaged efforts to reduce obesity, because they might interfere with the profits of fat-food establishments. (That seems a more accurate term than "fast food").
The excuse these bow-to-business politicians use is, "If it is possible for heroic people to resist, there is no need to help the rest." I've seen people use the same excuse to justify letting companies lure and pressure people into being surveilled.
Australian thugs illegally searched for mocking statements made by Rhys Liam Halvey to his friends. They wanted to prosecute him for mockery.
The thugs withdrew the case against Halvey when a judge threatened to expose their illegal methods of searching for what Halvey had said.
That doesn't seem like enough of a punishment for them.
But supposing they had not used those illegal methods, supposing they had been able to find Halvey's mocking statements in a legal way, wouldn't Halvey have the right to mock them?
Doesn't Australia have any vestige of freedom of speech?
Deforestation in Brazil has increased 16%.
Australia imprisons refugees for years without telling them why.
Bombing PISSI in the cities it holds can backfire.
The EU, desperate for Turkish help in reducing migration of Syrian refugees, is at the point of bowing to Turkish blackmail.
Providing money to support the Syrian refugees in Turkey is both wise and ethical, but aside from that, this is a terrible mistake. Turkey keeps open PISSI's lifeline for money, arms and foreign recruits. To defeat PISSI requires, one way or another, a confrontation with Turkey.
The city of Pamplona calls for an investigation into Franco's murders.
The election in Burma was not free for the Rohingya minority, whose candidates were banned.
The US may require proprietary software in every drone, to implement surveillance and a back door.
The article says the location of every drone will be sent to "the cloud", meaning "don't ask who will store this data or for how long." I think it's not a good idea to fly a drone in a cloud.
Avoiding drone collisions is important, but it can be done using local communication which doesn't track them all. Keep in mind that it won't be hard to disconnect this system entirely. Criminals will easily be able to overcome the system; it won't be able to directly stop them from doing anything. Its total surveillance and back door will fall on non-criminals, who would cooperate willingly with a less nasty system that would achieve the same goal.
The state of emergency in France has become repressive.
People have been arbitrarily placed in house arrest, blocked from working, for no apparent reason. This includes the leader of a charitable organization that helps Muslim prisoners.
But repression is not limited to Muslims. Many people suspected of planning climate protests have been raided and arrested too.
These repressive actions have nothing to do with the officially stated goal of preventing more terrorist attacks. The French thugs know full well that these climate defenders are not terrorists. Their goal is to crush anyone who would dare to disobey — because, to a tyranny, disobedience is worse than terrorism. Terrorism offers tyranny an excuse, but disobedience can make tyranny weaker.
The harm done to France by this attack on liberty will dwarf that of the terrorist attacks — only to be dwarfed in turn by the global heating disaster that this repression is helping to increase.
Cameron's Drive to Bomb Syria Is Macho, Foolish And Must Be Stopped.
Jürgen Todenhöfer: I Know [PISSI] Fighters. Western Bombs Falling on Raqqa Will Fill Them with Joy.
The proposed response has one problem. We can't "help" Turkey seal the border through which PISSI, because Turkey secretly supports and arms PISSI. The border would have to be sealed despite Turkey's interference.
Western attempts to block freedom of communication on the internet are providing cover to China in doing the same thing.
UK data retention plans are based on outdated ideas of what is technically feasible or not.
Famous men who have many lovers are called "prodigious" while women who do likewise are sneered at.
I can't tell from this information whether Ms Murdoch was promiscuous; that's not the same as having multiple lovers.
Salafi Arabia executes terrorists and peaceful dissidents — to those religious fanatics, the difference is insignificant.
Global heating is systematically pushing birds away from the equator, or up mountains.
Those that run out of somewhere to go will become extinct.
US citizens: call on Senators to reject laws that would impose special prejudice against Syrian refugees.
Everyone: call on Republican candidates to condemn racism in their supporters and in other candidates.
Turkey is torturing Syrian refugees into "voluntarily" leaving.
An opposition candidate in Venezuela was assassinated in a rally.
I don't know whether the socialist party is responsible for the killing, but it has arrested and blocked a number of opposition candidates in the past. Their current leaders do not have the stature of Chavez, and they don't seem to know how to correct policies that have bad consequences.
A train station in Germany proposes to discourage pissing on a wall by making streams of liquid bounce back.
I sympathize with those who want to discourage pissing on these walls, but I have to wonder why so many people piss there. Does the train station have toilets? If so, why don't homeless people use them? Is there some obstacle?
A person in Germany confirmed that pay toilets are the usual in Germany, and that's why people piss on walls. Instead of spending lots of money on piss-reflecting surfaces, they should spend it on giving people a proper place to use the toilet.
How to make cities, neighborhoods and buildings porous rather that monofunctional and controlling.
This year, Palestinians have frequently attacked Israelis. Many of the attacks have occurred at a crossroads in Palestine where Israelis travel between the (illegal) colonies in Palestine and Israel.
Those colonies are the root of the current violence. They are not a mere provocation, but a tremendous injustice. They were established as a scheme to take Palestinians' land and water and drive Palestinians to flee. Netanyahu has used them to make sure peace negotiations would be a sham.
The US should demand that Israel tear down those colonies, and should put its money behind it. Aid to Israel should be proportional to the decrease in size of the colonies, until they are gone.
A central goal of the TTIP is to export massive amounts of tar sands oil from Canada to Europe, with disastrous effects world-wide.
The TTIP is a business-supremacy deregulation treaty, and it would abolish the regulations that currently ban import of tar sands oil because it is so toxic.
Business-friendly politicians will find no end of opportunities to betray the public in the name of "growth" (for the rich) and other goals that are not important enough to justify the harm they will do.
Americans, vote for Bernie Sanders for president. He will kill the TTIP.
While the UK bombs PISSI, it continues to prosecute people who have gone to fight PISSI alongside the Kurds.
Replanting mangrove forests may reduce the coastal damage caused by El Niño.
Protesters against airport expansion blocked an entrance to Heathrow airport, and spoke about the need to curb flying in general to put brakes on global heating.
Suicide advisor Philip Nitschke resigned as a doctor so he can continue giving suicide advice to people who want to die.
Turkish journalists are facing charges of "espionage" and "divulging state secrets" for publishing that Turkey armed Islamists in Syria.
Calling this a "state secret" implies the report is true. However, it an act of tyranny to prosecute them, whether the statement is true or not.
The US used to be able to build anything and do a pretty good job. Nowadays, when it tries "nation building", it gets everything wrong. But the corruption extends to the US too.
The reason the US could build anything in the 50s and 60s is due to the high tax rate placed on rich people and businesses under that Republical socialist, President Eisenhower.
A UK politician dares to blame B'liar for provoking terrorism with an unjust war.
Terrorism is wrong, and the terrorists are always responsible for that wrong; however, when the terrorism was provoked by an even larger wrong such as launching a war based on lies, those who did that are co-responsible for the terrorism as well.
Unilever says it will become "carbon positive" in regard to its direct energy use by 2030.
This does not mean, however, that its products would be carbon positive. Its suppliers and its shipping may account for the majority of their emissions footprint.
A new thermometer allows parents, and probably various businesses too, to monitor a child's body temperature all the time.
You Won't Win a War Against [PISSI] If You Don't Know What the Peace Looks Like.
I disagree with one point. PISSI is an army; there is no good in underestimating the enemy. But that is not crucial to the article's point, which I think is valid.
Beware, if you choose what to buy based on a symbol of what sort of person you like to think you are! You are being manipulated by subtle psychology into wasting your money. And it could be a lot of your money.
There is one situation where buying a product to communicate a symbolic message to others is rational and wise: to support a worthy cause.
Very strong marijuana can cause serious harm to long-term users,
but prohibition
makes
it hard to get milder forms.
Japan Under Fire Over Decision to Resume Whaling.
Microsoft Once Again Disregards People's Settings and Abuses Them, Again Pretends It's Just an Accident.
Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight.
Every human's brain is a mosaic of male and female characteristics.
Why a 'War' on Terrorism Will Generate Yet More Terrorism.
US citizens: phone the White House and urge Obama not to give Netanyahu any military consolation prize for failing to block the nuclear peace deal with Iran. Israel carries out collective punishment and continues expanding colonies in Palestine.
The business-dominated, concentrated US media system is not the only possible system.
Many other countries have a lot of newspapers, and even though some are dominated by right-wing thought, they have exceptions too.
US "public" media are also business-dominated, because many programs depend on funding from business or from business owners such as the Kochs. This too is not inevitable; it developed in the 1990s. Now a Koch is on the WGBH-TV board, in a position to limit coverage of global heating so as to protect the effectiveness of the Kochs' paid denialism.
It's proper for news media to cover terrorism, but they don't need to hype and exaggerate in a way that plays into terrorists' hands by traumatizing the public.
The EPA has cancelled its approval of the latest toxic pesticide, which certain GMOs were designed to operate with.
Sanders says he will fix the cruelties of US immigration policy.
MSF says that the Pentagon's report about the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz has suspicious gaps, while showing procedures that amount to negligence.
I pointed out some instances of negligence.
A mother in Sacramento is threatened with six months in prison for letting her child play outside the house.
The point that the child is in far more danger riding in a car with a parent is especially cogent. American society is tied up in knots by obsession with some rare and unlikely dangers, such as child-snatching and terrorism.
US statistics for arrests of "sex traffickers" are grossly inflated: most of them are sex workers and customers. Some pimps that aren't traffickers are also included.
Don't fall into the trap of agreeing that banning strong encryption would be justified if terrorists or criminals ever use it.
On the significance of Turkey's downing a Russian plane.
The article doesn't mention it has been standard Russian practice for the past few years to probe many countries' borders persistently. In a way, that's asking for a violent response. However, that changes things only slightly.
By banning the public parts of the climate meeting, France decided that the people hardest hit by global heating should not be heard.
Bravo for the Swedish government official who wasn't totally distracted from impending global disaster by a crime that killed 130 people. The danger of climate mayhem, perhaps 100 million killed by 2030, and far more afterward, dwarfs that of terrorism.
Indeed, the terrorism is a part of the effect of global heating's climate mayhem, which created the impetus for the Syrian civil war, which in turn led to PISSI.
I urge those in Paris to defy the French state and march anyway.
The cultivation of cranberries in Wisconsin pours fertilizer into the nearby lake. This pollution kills the fish and makes the lake water unsafe.
Would diverting the waste into a holding pond solve the problem? Would the pond have to grow each year, or could it be used to separate the fertilizer and apply it again?
The UK government is determined to bomb PISSI in Syria as a symbolic gesture of commitment — never mind that there is no strategy for actually defeating PISSI.
Britons are planning protests against this bombing.
A proper campaign to defeat PISSI militarily would probably include air attacks as well as artillery and infantry. I would support the bombing of PISSI fighters. However, bombing with no strategy and few militarily justified targets will achieve nothing and tend to kill civilians.
Crackers can take over a Hello Barbie to listen to the kids in the room. They can listen all the time.
It's a lot like a portable phone.
This is what you must expect from devices with proprietary software and a network connection. It's the Internet of Snooping Things, Telemarketers, Cheaters, and worse.
Sweden Is Challenging the World to Go Fossil Fuel-Free.
As Australia suffers "horrific" bushfires, will the Australian government agree to greenhouse gas measures to limit how much worse they will get?
The "dying cat" rhetorical switch — blocking consideration of an important, uncomfortable issue by bringing out a very emotional issue and arguing about which is more important.
US citizens: oppose the plan to make the Export-Import Bank support building more Israeli colonies in Palestine.
Massachusetts citizens: rebuke Governor Baker for saying he wants to exclude Syrian refugees from Massachusetts.
US citizens: phone congressional leaders to preserve network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: call on Saudi Arabia not to behead a poet for unauthorized poetry.
Two Brazilian bloggers have been shot dead, apparently for criticizing local politicians.
Ebola Overwhelmed the World Health Organisation: It Must Never Happen Again.
Trump's latest bullying: mocking a reporter for a visible disability.
However, Trump's bullying goes far beyond mockery. He incited his supporters to physically attack a Black Lives Matter protester who came to his campaign rally.
He should be arrested and charged for this, and I hope soon to post a link to a petition to that effect. If he loses the Republican nomination, and chooses to run independently, he should start the Childish Bullies Party.
Measuring impunity for thugs in Chicago: only 4% of complaints made against them are upheld by the thug department.
60% of the complaints were made by blacks, but only 25% of the complaints upheld were made by blacks.
Australia's government proposes to apply Reaganomics by reducing tax rates — for businesses only. Benefits of this are supposes to trickle down to the people.
Call on officials that tried to minimize the murder of Laquan McDonald to resign, and call for a special prosecutor.
"Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It".
Interviews with people in Ukraine, near the Crimean border, where they have blocked the roads leading into Crimea, which puts pressure on Putin.
Caterpillar vehicles have remote shut-off back doors.
The only reason the Chicago thug that killed Laquan McDonald is getting prosecuted is that a court ordered release of the video showing the killing. The prosecutor delayed the release, and the prosecution, for 400 days.
I don't think we can trust that prosecutor to make a sincere attempt to win a conviction.
A textual study found evidence that global heating denialist organizations were working together.
The push for "criminal justice reform" ran into trouble because liberals want to reduce prosecution of individuals, while the Koch brothers only want to reduce prosecution of corporations.
Pervasive anxiety about security helps right-wing politicians make budget cuts that make everyone's lives insecure.
These budget cuts are likely to kill a lot more people than terrorists, even if you consider only the suicides.
Salafi Arabia fired a UK-made cruise missile at a ceramics factory, for no apparent military reason.
The US Army says that the crew of the plane shelling the MSF hospital in Kunduz thought they were in a different place attacking a different building. Their inability to recognize the error was due to several systems that were nonfunctional or even missing.
Do the rules say that the crew was supposed to continue the mission despite such problems? If so, the US is asking for such mistakes, and must be considered responsible due to negligence.
Americans will protest next to the Guantanamo prison, across the border in Cuba.
Cuba does not respect human rights either, but as a patriotic American I am most pained by these crimes when they are committed by my own country.
The thug that killed Laquan McDonald could easily have remained at a greater distance where McDonald could not possibly have hurt him. If he felt "threatened", his own incompetence was to blame.
Will the thugs who erased the video be prosecuted for obstruction of justice? That is called for.
France is trying to kill ideas by punishing people who express them.
Here in the US, it is possible to speak honestly about the holocaust. There is plenty of evidence proving that it occurred. See, for instance, the book Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Goldhagen, and Story of a Secret State, by Jan Karski.
However, no honest statements about that question are possible in a country such as France, that imposes censorship on the subject.
France also bans free discussion of the question of the genocide of the Armenians.
Racist terrorists fired shots at Black Lives Matter protesters. The protesters were in a camp, doing nothing noteworthy to anyone, but most of them were engaged in protesting while black.
Thugs were present and did nothing to catch the shooters. Because the shooters were whites?
(I will post about Trump later.)
A particularly vicious thug refused to call an ambulance for the wounded protesters, then claimed that being shot by white supremacists was what the protesters wanted.
Perhaps the thug was projecting — he was the one who wanted the protesters to be shot.
Then other thugs came and sprayed the wounded protesters (and those trying to care for them) with mace.
In Somaliland, global heating has brought a persistent drought. The people cannot survive there.
They deserve help, but if Somaliland can no longer sustain its population, the requisite help includes contraception. Under such circumstances, each birth causes a death.
Uzbekistan's tyrant seems to seek to kill a dissident living in Sweden. Not having killer drones to send there, he sends human assassins.
A university banned sales of bottled water, and found that consumption of bottles increased — people bought soda and juice instead.
A hefty deposit on each plastic bottle might be effective for reducing bottles while not making an incentive to choose something other than water.
Two-faced Exxon: the Misinformation Campaign Against Its Own Scientists.
Brazil's standards for mine waste dams are inadequate; several such dams have burst, and the mine waste is a lot more harmful than water from a reservoir.
Wales will assume by default that any dead body's organs are available for use to save living people.
Christian fanatics in New York beat a teenager to death because he wanted to leave their church.
Saudi Arabia says it will do the same thing to a poet who said he wanted to leave their church.
Saudi Arabia's form of Islam, Salafism, is poison. PISSI is its most extreme form, but it's a threat to human rights in any form.
I will try out referring to that country as Salafi Arabia.
Israel plans to build towns for Jews where Bedouin now live.
These Bedouin are Israeli citizens but they don't have equal rights.
Major sponsors of the coming Paris climate conference have big investments in fossil fuel, even in coal.
If this conference does not reach an adequate agreement, some countries that will be devastated by climate mayhem might launch last-ditch military attacks at the fossil fuel facilities that are trying to kill them.
A merger between Pfizer and Allergan would reduce competition, increase drug prices especially in the US, and help Pfizer taxes.
The US should make it quite difficult for major companies to merge, and it should tax both domestic and foreign companies (when operating in the US) more.
The UK government has investigated how cuts in welfare will hurt poor families, and is keeping the conclusions secret.
Eating Less Meat Isn't Just Good for You, It Could Save the Planet.
The UK says it will start applying human rights concerns in its foreign policy — but not to Salafi Arabia of course.
Tor gives people in Bangladesh a way to bypass tight censorship.
Many supposedly "free" countries censor the internet, including France and the UK.
The Clean Energy Future: a roadmap for moving the US to renewable energy and expanding jobs.
US citizens: phone Senator Stabenow's office to oppose the plan to put GMO labels into non-human-readable QR codes.
Surveillance of voters enables campaigns to say different things to different groups of people, and effectively cover up the difference.
A powerful solar storm, like one that happened in 1859, could destroy electrical grids world-wide. It could take ten years to rebuild.
Preparing to reduce the damage is part of the government's job. To do its job, it needs to collect more taxes — from those that are paying too little.
The Sorry Tale of the PECB, Pakistan's Terrible Electronic Crime Bill.
The US may require quiet electric cars to make sounds to warn pedestrians and cyclists.
Fossil Fuel Companies Risk Wasting $2tn of Investors' Money, Study Says.
Developing Countries Will Need $270bn More to Adapt to [2C of] Climate Change.
A Chicago thug has been charged for murdering Laquan McDonald.
McDonald was perhaps carrying a knife when the thugs confronted him, but he never tried to attack them. A group of 8 thugs with guns should not have had to kill him preemptively in case he might, just might, try to attack them with a knife. They could have waited for such an attack to start before they shot.
Prosecution of killer thugs in the US is on the rise, but what we really need, to change the situation, is to change the way thugs are trained to kill at the first suspicion (especially if the person has a skin color that tends to inspire suspicion).
The UK's "fit for work" tests have normalised the suffering of sick and disabled people.
I think this is a goal of the Tories, not merely a byproduct of spending cuts. Tories believe poor people are morally inferior and suffering is what they deserve.
More Than Half of the World's Primates on Endangered Species List.
Polluters are using the bill to exclude Syrian refugees as an opportunity to attack US water supply.
Sweden has taken all the refugees it can cope with, and now refuses to accept more.
EU countries are diverting foreign aid to pay for the refugees they have admitted.
Economists have claimed that advancing technology enables more production with less in the way of material inputs. But this was just a mirage produced by mistaken accounting.
Alberta's green economy plan sounds great, but it protects tar sands extraction for too long.
Our Culture And Laws Enabled the Colorado Shooter, Whatever His Motive.
US citizens: Condemn Trump's proposed repression of US Muslims.
US citizens: Thank or criticize your senators for their votes on the Congressional Review Act.
Rejecting Campus Consensus, MIT Cozies Up to Fossil Fuels.
The denialists who claimed they had found a "hiatus" in global heating applied criteria that were rather loose.
Turkish planes shot down a Russian fighter plane near the Turkey-Syria border.
Turkey and Russia have been enemies for centuries. They are also at odds in regard to Syria. Erdoğan quietly supports and protects PISSI, while Putin supports Assad and may now actually want to fight PISSI due to the bombed airliner. To have Russian planes operating near the Turkish border is going to be a danger spot.
Russian troops are fighting a Turkic minority in Northern Syria.
Neonicotinoid pesticides are associated with decline of butterfly numbers.
Trump wants to torture suspected terrorists for sheer sadism.
Texas thugs have been arrested and charged with negligent homicide for squeezing a prisoner by the neck and then pepper-spraying him. He died shortly thereafter.
The proposed US regulations for drones are a disaster.
Various cities are pledging to stop municipal use of fossil fuel energy by 2050.
These pledges may stimulate the climate defense movement, but in practice the time scale is too long for them to make much difference. What matters is to get rid of most fossil fuel use sooner rather than later.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says the Vatican should drop charges against two journalists who investigated Vatican corruption.
The Vatican should focus on eradicating the corruption, and thank those who helped shed light on it.
To stop terrorist attacks, the state doesn't need to snoop on everyone. It's enough to watch those that are already known and suspected.
Many tech companies are allying to oppose state demands for back doors.
Most of these companies don't deserve your trust, for other reasons. You must not rely, for your privacy, on proprietary software.
Welcome to Austeria — a Nation Robbing Its Poor to Pay for the Next Big Crash.
Why responding to "black lives matter" with "all lives matter" is a statement of racism.
Responding with "all lives matter" misrepresents the position of the anti-racists, pretending that their slogan "black lives matter" means "only black lives matter". But they don't say, or mean, "only".
Properly understood, "black lives matter" is not racist at all. It is a compact way of saying that "black lives matter just as much". It is a rebuke to the covert, racist "black lives don't matter" movement, which few overtly endorse but many act to support.
The lockdown of Brussels is starting to chafe.
It's an overreaction which serves PISSI's purposes.
Poland's new right-wing government is starting to censor the theater.
In Somaliland, [climate mayhem] Is Now a Life-Or-Death Challenge.
If it is just to imprison a woman for having sex pretending to be a man, why not imprison an undercover thug that has sex pretending not to be a thug?
Alberta will impose a tax on carbon emissions. The article does not make it clear whether this covers fuel burned in Alberta or fuel extracted in Alberta.
Everyone: celebrate Buy Nothing Day today.
Everyone: call on Goldman Sachs to close the "revolving door" that carries its employees into US government service.
US citizens: call for tightening laws for buying guns so that terrorist suspects can't buy them.
Everyone: call on China to stop torture in Tibet.
US citizens: call on Obama: no more mass surveillance.
Using technicalities, Australia will claim it has met its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; never mind that they are actually increasing.
The View from Hell:
Fungibility
and the Loss of Demandingness.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
I don't know how to summarize this one, so I could only quote its title. It is a fascinating idea.
The American Medical Association has called for a ban on direct advertising of pharmaceuticals.
Let's Not Get It Wrong This Time: The Terrorists Won After 9/11 Because We Chose to Invade Iraq, Shred Our Constitution.
Bahrain makes a practice of torturing prisoners. The UK looks the other way. So does the US.
Human Ponzi Scheme of Population Growth Can't Go On For Ever.
Trump and Carson explicitly advocate torture.
They are appealing to the worst side of Americans by saying that since PISSI is evil, we should be evil too.
Obama opened the path to this by failing to prosecute Dubya and his henchmen for their torture. As a result, Trump and Carson expect they can get away with this crime.
Analyzing the situational factors that led to a form of Islamism that incorporates barbaric cruelty.
There seems to be an aspect of human nature that includes dehumanizing enemies. What is unusual about PISSI is that it dehumanizes nearly everyone.
The home robot that listens to you, and sends everything you say to an Amazon server.
Don't fool yourself by calling it "the cloud".
The NSA "shut down" its bulk collection of emails, but only because it had found another way to get them.
Arab "allies" against PISSI are not doing much to fight PISSI.
The easiest method of economic sabotage is to phone and say you put a bomb on an airplane.
There have been real bombs on airplanes, but was there ever been a case where a bomb threat call was made for a flight that had a real bomb?
A fast weeding robot could reduce farm work and herbicide usage.
I think this sort of efficiency improvement is a good thing provided that those who become unemployed can share in the resulting bounty.
In the past, automation handled only a limited range of work, so many new jobs were created and unemployment did not result. But now we are likely to automate away all the jobs most people can get.
Speed cameras systematically issue speeding tickets illegally.
In 2014, US thugs took more money and property from the public than burglars took.
Factory workers in Juarez, Mexico, are trying to start unions.
The aim of "free trade" treaties is to enable manufactures to create the lousy working conditions of Juarez. They do this by threatening to move production elsewhere unless workers lie down and take it.
This is why we must abolish the "free trade" treaties. We must pin down production to some country (whichever one it may be), so that workers in each country have the chance to campaign for better wages and working conditions.
US citizens: call for pressure on Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to start really fighting PISSI.
In the case of Turkey, this is really pressure to stop supporting PISSI.
Ralph Nader: Candidates for public office, especially at the state and national levels, are never asked this central question of politics: "Since the people are sovereign under our Constitution, how do you specifically propose to restore power to the people in their various roles as voters, taxpayers, workers and consumers?"
Sanders spontaneously presents his answer to at least part of this question.
"Biodegradable" plastics may not biodegrade in the ocean — and the label might encourage littering.
Clinton's foreign policy experience provides plenty of reasons not to vote for her.
Clinton's vote for attacking Iraq was a bad decision, but it was not a "mistake". It reflects her bad general positions. I won't vote for Clinton, any more than I would vote for the Republican candidates.
While Sanders is not my ideal candidate in regard to foreign policy, he is superior to everyone else in the race.
The WTO decided that protecting dolphins by allowing tuna cans to carry a "dolphin-safe" label is a forbidden "obstacle to trade".
This stems from the wrong fundamental values of the WTO, which place business profit above everything important.
The TPP would further strengthen the power of businesses to attack measures to protect the environment. We need to abolish all the existing business-supremacy treaties, but we are still on the defensive. First we need to block the TPP, the TTIP, and the TISA.
If you have not done so, I urge you to contact your elected officials to call for rejection of the TPP. We must not put democracy in a trance.
The UK's housing problem comes from allowing the rich to make homes into investments. Even some conservatives see this.
The conservatives' proposed solution is unnecessarily nationalist. Increasing taxes on large houses and apartments, especially those that are no one's primary residence, would do the same job without discriminating against anyone. That would also encourage foreigners to sell the real estate investments they have already bought.
In the UK, talking to your bank over the internet is unsafe, because if someone steals your password and uses it to take your money, the bank holds you responsible.
Does anyone know whether the situation is the same in the US?
Confronting PISSI does not call for revenge, or destructive gestures, or cruelty. It calls for a strategy.
Anxiety to Defeat [PISSI] Must Not Dictate the West's Military Strategy.
Acceptance of other ethnic groups and their religions must never include acceptance of their traditions of oppression.
I agree with the author about this issue, but I think he is making a mistake by claiming that "progressive liberals" take the other side. Some do, but I call myself "progressive" and "liberal", and I don't.
The UK thugs (except the department in London) refuse to commit to stop infiltrating dissident groups and pretending to love female members.
Since PISSI's strategic goal is to make Muslims and non-Muslims hate each other, we must refuse to be manipulated into doing so.
Around the world, the effects of global heating are hurting people.
Paris Attacks: Security and Surveillance Cast a Dark Shadow over France's Love of "Liberté" and "Fraternité".
I've been using those two words in France to rebuke the state for decades now.
The US is the only country that has not ratified the UN Convention on Children's Rights.
The US medical records privacy law doesn't apply to many kinds of medical data including the data collected by exercise trackers.
This is a problem because of exercise trackers that contain proprietary software and are designed to send the user's personal data to a company site. Such products are essentially unethical, and people should not be surprised when the proprietary software turns out to be malware.
The US medical records privacy law (HIPAA) is totally inadequate when it comes to government access to your records.
Christian fanatics in Mississippi fired a teacher for allowing a student to demonstrate, with a cucumber, the correct way to put on a condom.
The Christian fanatics want to keep teenagers ignorant of this so that they will get pregnant, and then the fanatics can claim that proves they should not have had sex.
Do you think I am exaggerating? All that is literally true.
Pfizer misleads about the tax rate it pays by not mentioning most of its income.
Texas officials refused to allow academics to check state textbooks for falsehoods. Miseducating children is their goal.
Trump wants to track all Muslims in the US but opposes tracking all guns.
US citizens: ask your congresscritter to support the Sentencing Reform Act.
General hostility towards Muslims is spreading in the UK, whereas in the US Trump called for making all Muslims carry special ID cards.
This is just what PISSI hoped to achieve.
The EU is considering a directive to extend the current "right to be forgotten", which is currently a right for person P to demand that some pages be removed from searches for the name P, so that it would cover comments that others post which say things about P.
This would turn it it into a system of censorship.
Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern.
A law has been proposed to require a
local
back door in all mobile devices.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
Once the back door was leaked, anyone who stole your device would be able to decrypt its disk.
When citizens can't keep secrets from the state, democracy is in danger.
The UN Security Council called for all countries to fight PISSI.
I am in favor of fighting PISSI, but not in stupid ways.
Saudi Court Sentences Poet to Death for Renouncing Islam.
CNN "suspended" a correspondent for expressing the wrong opinion off the air.
Congress is considering a law to make it a serious crime to send a SWAT team to someone's house by making a false report.
I don't think this will put an end to the practice of "swatting". It is too easy to make these false reports. Meanwhile, the practice is made easier by thug departments that use SWAT teams too readily. The lower the bar for sending the SWAT team to raid your house, the less someone needs to do to get them to send it.
A US court has imposed strict limits on surveillance using stingrays (cell tower simulators).
I expect that the Supreme Court will eventually decide the question.
Even if stingrays were banned, or did not exist, the government could get their location records from the phone company. For me, that is too intrusive already.
The "gray zone" of mutual tolerance that PISSI wants to eliminate is what we should defend.
The Pentagon admitted, in very bureaucratic language, that perhaps some civilians were killed in one of its air attacks against PISSI.
It is impossible to fight a war and totally avoid civilian casualties. This attack was aimed at soldiers and hit some civilians that were near them. I don't think it was a war crime.
But I can't believe that only two attacks in Syria have killed civilians. No army can be that close to perfect. Thus, I suspect the US is still covering up civilian casualties. In addition, the standoffish and bureaucratic language of the Pentagon's statement is likely to offend the very people it is trying to mollify.
PISSI kills civilians brutally and shamelessly. In regard to violence in Syria and Iraq, the US is ethically far above PISSI. That's not sufficient. The US should be frank about civilian casualties. The US must properly respect civilians' lives.
However, the comparison between the US and PISSI is pertinent in a different way. Civilians under PISSI's rule will make that comparison when choosing sides. If we want them to regard PISSI as occupiers, we need to think about how they will judge us and PISSI.
US citizens: Call on Congress to defeat anti-environment riders in spending bills.
US citizens: demand no more Goldman Sachs insiders in the Federal Reserve management.
Islamist fanatics attack a hotel in Mali and took hostages, killing some.
Over 700 human rights activists have been murdered in Colombia in the past 20 years.
Deforestation in the Amazon threatens extinction for thousands of tree species that live only there.
Global heating is likely to wipe out large parts of the Amazon rainforest, through drought and fire.
Rumors say that imprisoned Syrian free software leader Bassel Khartabil is going to be executed by Assad's men.
Unfortunately there is no better source of information about whether this is true. Syrian thugs are even more secretive about their killings than US thugs.
US thugs only occasionally hit, kick or kill people, but they are very frequently stealing under the cover of law.
TV commercials now include ultrasonic surveillance audio, meant to be detected by malware in any nearby mobile device.
The main wrong here is in the malware, which should be prohibited. However, television regulators should prohibit the inclusion of these sounds in broadcasts.
The hypothetical example in China is silly, because it is easy for Big Brother to determine that several cell phones are in the same place, just through the normal tracking that is done. This tracking, and the remotely-enabled capability to listen on all conversations in the room, are why I call those phones "Stalin's dream", and the main reason why I refuse to carry one.
Senator Warren blasted Congress's bill to reduce taxes for multinational corporations.
The low taxes on businesses and rich people are the cause of all the US's fiscal problems.
La Quadrature du Net describes the French government's blitzkrieg against human rights.
Amnesty International criticizes it too.
Certain Republican candidates distribute apps that
collect
lots of personal data, even the user's contact list.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
These apps are proprietary software, so they are software for suckers. They run on proprietary platforms that are also software for suckers. For that reason alone, it's foolish to run them, and wrong to develop them. I won't reject a candidate for having such apps, because I know they are following the usual standards of Americans. But I hope you will learn to reject nonfree apps and nonfree platforms.
Methane-charged undersea permafrost is becoming active in the Arctic Ocean.
This suggests we are approaching the point where lots of methane will be released, causing global heating positive feedback.
A UK thug department has apologized for the undercover thugs that infiltrated various dissident groups by forming long-term relationships with women in the groups.
The thug department has not admitted encouraging the thugs to form such relationships, but that could hardly be false when so many did it.
Protests against racism have spread to many US universities.
There are many things that universities can do to reduce racism, but one demand they should reject is to punish the expression of racist views.
When students demand the university "suspend" Professor Swain, they advocate conduct comparable to that which Professor Salaita received.
I agree more or less with Professor Salaita's controversial statements. I mostly disagree with Professor Swain's controversial statements (*). But whether you or I agree with someone's views is beside the point. We must respect people's rights to express views whether we agree or disagree, and that includes professors.
* I think that Islam is dangerous in some situations, and the same applies to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and even occasionally Buddhism. Or rather, the bad aspects of human nature can find in religion a field to express themselves.
What we must do to confront antibiotic resistance.
Adapting the Marseillaise to the greatest threat to civilization.
Join a climate defense rally near you, or start one.
Everyone:
call
on world leaders to take strong action to curb
global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
France will offer asylum to cultural treasures threatened by fanatics.
Bahrain Refuses to Prosecute Police Who Tortured Journalist.
Technologies being developed today might be able to pull large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Heat stress could be responsible for the death of many farm workers in Central America.
Global heating is going to make people less productive in most of the world.
Our 1C of global heating has quadrupled weather damage to historic properties in the UK.
Massive incarceration in the US goes beyond the war on drugs.
The topic is too big, and I know too little about it, for me to have an overall opinion. All I can say is that we need to eliminate private prisons, and that we should release most convicts that have become so old that they are not likely to commit crimes again.
Thugs killed Linwood Lambert by tasing him 20 times, then lied about the circumstances.
They could have just left him alone, since they did not think he had done anything wrong.
Suggestive evidence that unions and NGOs, such as the League of Conservation Voters, have endorsed Clinton even though Clinton doesn't support their cause as well as Sanders. Maybe they have been corrupted.
Elsevier Says Downloading And Content-Mining Licensed Copies Of Research Papers 'Could Be Considered' Stealing.
This isn't the last straw. Elsevier's last straw was years ago. I urge academics to refuse to review papers for any Elsevier journal except when there is a specific overriding moral imperative to do so.
US ISPs are undermining network neutrality by giving special deals to certain sites and then charging more for access to everywhere else.
A Detroit thug has been convicted of attacking Floyd Dent. The thug punched Dent 16 times in the head, for no evident reason.
Thugs in Minneapolis beat up two women who were protesting the killing of Jamar Clark.
US attack drone controllers have developed a callousness towards killing civilians, even children.
Trump wants to require Muslims to carry special ID cards.
It is unamerican to require people to carry ID cards. Why not make them wear armbands with a star and crescent?
French intelligence knew several of the Paris attackers. If the goal was to prevent these attacks, total surveillance of everyone was irrelevant.
Morocco uses unjust pretexts to repress journalists and human rights defenders.
The FBI entrapped Eric McDavid into a fantastic bombing scheme, then lied to convict him and concealed evidence to support the lie.
When he asked for an explanation for the illegal concealment of evidence, the US responded by threatening to jail him again.
This is what the FBI means when it says it "protects" us.
The FDA has approved sale of genetically modified salmon.
I expect that these salmon are safe to eat, because there is nothing that would tend to make them dangerous. However, the defenses against contaminating wild salmon genetically are not enough. The company wants to get to market now, not in several years after developing more levels of defense. Thus, the company will always tend to take insufficient precautions.
The livestock population is increasing faster than the human population and is a big environmental threat.
The statements in the article about limiting human population growth are self-contradictory. It says, "When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act," but then shows that the world could reduce human population growth quite a bit. I am glad I have contributed to this goal by having no children myself, and I recommend you think about it too.
France passed an "emergency" law permitting the state to impose house arrest on anyone with no judicial review, and examine any computer without a warrant.
Poor France, attacking itself at a level that mere terrorists cannot reach.
The UK government is going all-out to keep global heating advancing.
Rallies for climate protection are planned around the world instead of the banned march in Paris.
Activists should defy the ban and march in Paris anyway. There are too many lives at stake here to let the government's minor short-term concerns get in the way.
US citizens: call on the EPA to regulate methane emissions from old and new oil wells.
Doctors in the UK's National Health Service have voted to strike, as the government's program of spreading poverty and stress targets them.
The Dominican Republic arbitrarily deprived of citizenship four generations of people born in that country if they are of Haitian ancestry. Many of them are not Haitian citizens, and if they can get into Haiti it is only because that failed state can't control its borders.
You Needn't Crave Revenge After Attacks like Those in Paris. I Didn't After 9/11.
What I crave is to defend against the follow-on attack which targets our freedom.
Many tropical countries are investing heavily in renewable energy.
Germaine Greer had to struggle to be allowed to speak in a UK university. She says that a male-female sex-change operation doesn't produce a real woman, and many condemn her views.
I think Greer is right in a narrow sense, but perhaps wrong at a deeper level.
What is the difference between a typical man and a typical woman? It's actually many miscellaneous differences. Changing one of them in a man won't produce a woman. Changing several of them might result in a close-enough woman.
Not all men are alike, and not all women either. Perhaps the man that wants to be a transsexual starts out woman-like on some of those points.
Various countries are shutting down city streets and parks at night. This narrows the life of the city and narrows human rights.
Other cities are promoting walking on the streets.
Europe is suffering from a lasting housing crisis.
This is part of the reason I have not encouraged European countries to take in lots of refugees. They have not got enough housing or enough jobs for their current population. If they don't adopt policies to create a lot more housing and jobs, the refugees will have to compete with the poor for too little.
The
Paris attackers did
not use encryption, it seems.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
Meanwhile, a district attorney wants to require back door in all operating systems for mobile devices.
Doesn't he know that all mobile phones already have them?
Just as in 2001, the next target is our freedom!
CMU says that the FBI didn't pay for its Tor-cracking investigation, but refuses to answer any more questions.
Maybe it was paid for by some other US agency rather than the FBI.
Our culture is erecting a myth of genetic determinism.
Note that it is clearer to make a clear distinction between a cell's genetic sequence and its epigenetic tagging. They are both found in DNA, but they are quite different.
If you allow emails to embed URLs, you're asking to be mistreated.
I normally look at an email via the ASCII text in it. On the occasions that I look at HTML, I render it with lynx, which ignores anything embedded. None of these tracking methods work on me, and if you use this method, they won't work on you either.
Conservative westerners are attracted by Islamists' subjection of women.
US citizens: call on the SEC to investigate Exxon's climate fraud.
Many bacteria are developing resistance to the last line of antibiotics we have left.
This was caused by feeding the antibiotics to pigs.
All sorts of surgery will become quite dangerous if we don't develop new antibiotics — and stop farms from ruining them!
Walmart workers protested Clinton's failure to endorse a raise in the minimum wage.
Shoot-to-kill Won't Make Us Safe from Terror — Just Sorry.
French Pirate Party: If you want peace, prepare for peace.
The US will sell repressive, Islamist Saudi Arabia over a billion dollars more in weapons.
Human Rights Watch calls on the US to stop selling bombs to Saudi Arabia because it is dropping them on Yemen and killing lots of civilians.
Saudi Arabia, a US "ally", seems to have helped start the Islamist armed revolt in Syria, aided by US "ally" Turkey.
Meanwhile, Saudi money has been behind the spread of Wahhabism, the extremist and oppressive form of Islam that has been pushing out the more humane forms of Islam.
Iran Starts Dismantling Nuclear Programme, Says UN Watchdog.
Neonicotinoids found to impede pollination by bumblebees.
Former US drone operators warn that US drone attacks are important recruiting forces for PISSI and terrorists.
Is UK Climate And Energy Policy Hypocritical or Just Incompetent?
It's a mistake to say that the US (or France) is at war with "radical Islam". Even most radicals don't want to attack western countries.
Islamists are not necessarily violent enemies of anyone, but their views make them political enemies of human rights.
Extremist parties that call for demolishing the al-Aqsa mosque are now included in Israel's government. It is not wild imagination to suppose they might actually do it.
Building the "third temple" is part of what US Christian nuts think is necessary to bring about their prophesied apocalypse. I suspect that some of them are spending millions to help those parties.
Israel jails Palestinian minors as young as 8 in painful conditions and arbitrarily hampers them from talking with their families.
I expect that most of these minors are teenagers, but some really are children.
Palestinians living in part of Hebron face additional harassment designed to drive them to abandon their homes.
Israeli troops forced international human rights activists out of the apartment they had rented in Hebron.
These activists serve as witnesses to how Israelis officially and unofficially treat Palestinians, which makes their presence inconvenient. In practice, the state supports the repeated pogroms carried out by Israeli fanatics.
Demolishing a family home because one person in it committed (or is accused of) a crime is an unjust collective punishment.
Israel says it will carry out unjust collective punishment on any family, but in practice it's only done to Palestinians. And it already has inspired relatives to respond with violence.
Everyone: demand the release of the videos showing the killing of Jamar Clark.
US citizens: support Kerry's efforts for diplomacy to end the Syrian civil war and target PISSI.
US citizens: phone your senators against riders in a spending bill to eliminate network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
A US appeals court cancelled the approval of neonicotinoid pesticide sulfoxaflor, saying that the EPA must first properly test its effects on bees.
Spain wants to arrest 9 Israeli officials and ex-officials responsible for the deadly attack on the Mavi Marmara.
The Norwegian oil company Statoil has given up on drilling in the Chukchi Sea.
The US government postponed a sale of oil leases in US public land.
These are victories, but we will need lots more of them. We must reduce our combustion of oil, reduce it to zero in not too much time, to avoid climate mayhem.
PISSI wants a war between all Muslims and all non-Muslims. How we can avoid falling into PISSI's trap.
The US has made substantial progress towards the goal of equal pay for equal work, because of the fall in the income of men.
Turkey could cut off PISSI's supply lines, but Erdoğan threatened war against the Kurds just to keep those lines open.
Several African countries have banned borqas to prevent hiding bombs under them.
The OECD countries agreed to reduce funding for coal power in other countries, but Japan blocked eliminating this funding.
This may do some good, but it is not the sort of vigorous action that could save civilization from global disaster. To risk civilization's survival for a comparatively small short-term goal, such as improving access to electricity in some poor countries, is foolhardy. It won't help the people of those countries to get electricity in the next decade, then wiped out in 70 years.
Besides, solar power is much better for providing electricity to dispersed rural populations.
I have to suspect that Japan's representatives were working for the coal interests and what they said was just an excuse.
2C of global heating is probably too much, except under unlikely assumptions.
What it is like to be a US drone pilot and kill hundreds of people by remote control.
France has banned rallies during the climate conference.
This decision is short-termist folly. Rallies for climate defense are necessary for public safety. Terrorists could at worst kill a few hundred people in a rally. Global heating is likely to kill hundreds of millions of people, though over a longer time.
I urge activists to march anyway and dare the state to stop them.
It appears the Paris attackers were all European citizens — most have been identified, and they included no refugees or visitors.
To Turn On Refugees Because Of Paris Is Weak And Absurd.
In France, the victims of PISSI's attack include Muslims.
In Syria and Iraq, most of PISSI's victims are Muslims. Ordinary Muslims and PISSI are natural enemies.
Will France now commit the same errors and wrongs that the US did after the September 2011 attacks? It has already started to.
An Australian court found a Japanese whaling company guilty of killing whales in an Australian marine sanctuary.
It may not be easy to make the company pay the fine.
A secret interpretation may make CISA even worse than its wording appears. The ACLU is suing to find out.
Boko Haram is still setting off bombs in cities and causing hundreds of casualties.
High levels of CO2 in the air impede good thinking.
Global heating is not likely to raise the general world CO2 level enough for this to happen. But it can already happen inside a building in a city, and with global heating, the problem inside buildings in cities will get worse.
Protests in Washington are aimed at the US Trade Representative, the office that promotes antidemocratic treaties such as the TPP.
Parents that make unreasonable academic demands on their children tend to harm their academic success.
Another reason to vote for Bernie Sanders for president: Clinton wants more war.
Haven't we learned how stupid this is?
Whereas Sanders recognizes that climate mayhem is a bigger danger than today's terrorists.
Curtailing Liberty Provokes Terrorism.
Several important science museums have stopped accepting funds from planet roasters.
Does [PISSI] Direct Attacks or Inspire Them — And Why That Matters
The CIA and NSA have not found anyone trying to start a terrorist attack in the US.
But they pretend they have, in order to smear Snowden.
Countries are joining the bombing campaign against PISSI, not because more planes would achieve a military objective, but as a symbol.
We Accept That Russian Bombs Can Provoke a Terror Backlash. Ours Can Too.
I am not a pacifist. Effective military action may be justified even despite blowback. But effective military action tends to be concentrated on enemies, so it causes less blowback. Reflexive, ill-calculated military action "because we must bomb something" will tend to be self-defeating.
PISSI hopes to provoke Western reactions that would create a war between the West and all Muslims. Some politicians are eager to fall into this trap.
Global developments in employment.
When a company tried to reduce the greenhouse gas footprints of its products, that turned out to be a big challenge.
We need a carbon emissions tax so that the market will factor in your greenhouse gas footprint.
The assassinations at Charlie Hebdo have elevated hostility towards Muslims in France — just what terrorists hoped to achieve.
France may block a large climate defense march in the name of safety.
Global heating is a far bigger danger than PISSI. If we can't overcome the plutocrats and make states take adequate action to curb global heating, we might as well be dead.
It is now ascertained that a terrorist bomb destroyed a Russian airliner over the Sinai, killing 224 people.
Stanford Students Begin 'Indefinite' Sit-in over Fossil Fuel Divestment.
The dictator of Angola has charged activists with "rebellion" for a book reading event. The book was about nonviolent resistance.
US citizens: call on the postmaster of the USPS to implement postal banking.
Total surveillance is giving France so much data that the real terrorists can hide in the plain sight of the national panopticon.
The ecological damage from the mine waste in Brazil could last decades and when it reaches the ocean, it will threaten ecologically vital areas.
It is not clear that tasers reduce either killings or injuries from the actions of thugs.
France is sending an aircraft carrier to increase the number of planes it can use to bomb PISSI.
There are some fishy things here. Why use an aircraft carrier rather than sending additional planes to the land base in Jordan? Operating planes from a carrier must be more expensive than operating them from the ground.
And what's the use of more planes if it is hard to find good targets to attack?
On the other hand, the US seems to have found an important vulnerable point: the trucks PISSI uses for smuggling oil.
If PISSI is indeed a gang that raid and loots to propagate itself to loot again, then it can be forced into collapse if it can't get loot and can't sell oil.
Capturing PISSI's territory near the Turkish border is strategically crucial. However, trying to do this with Western troops would backfire terribly.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
Oppose
a bill to ramp up the war on drugs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
Protesters blocked a highway after thugs in Minneapolis shot a black man dead. Witnesses say he was in handcuffs, but the thugs say he wasn't. Who do you believe?
Accusing Saudi Arabia of poisoning the Muslim world with repressive Wahhabism.
PISSI, the pirates of the desert.
Cole's point that it is impossible to "contain" PISSI can be literally correct, but not in the way he asserts. It may be that a stable situation in which PISSI exists for a long time under containment is impossible; if so, that suggests that containing PISSI would lead to its collapse, as it could no longer do profitable raids.
The UK faces ecological derangement all over, as a result of the 1C of global heating we have already caused.
Coal is not an effective way to extend access to energy, even ignoring that it could cause ecological disaster.
Just eliminating coal combustion isn't enough to avoid the disaster; it's just the first step.
The Tor Project says that the FBI-CMU "research" to identify Tor users was a fishing expedition, aimed at finding anyone they could accuse of anything.
Chinese companies are hurrying to bottle water from Himalayan glaciers before global heating melts them.
Ok, that is a slight exaggeration.
Israeli troops carried out a collective punishment, demolishing a house in a refugee camp; local Palestinians threw stones at them, so the Israeli troops shot and killed some of them.
Collective punishment is always an injustice. In my estimation, the culpability in this incident falls entirely on the Israeli troops. They cannot claim the justification of self-defense for shooting if they were on a mission of wrong.
[PISSI] Hates Middle Eastern Civilisation Too.
Lauren's Blog Redux: "Governments of the World Agree: Encryption Must Die!"
UK anti-privacy activists seek to use the Paris attacks as an excuse to skip debate about new mass surveillance powers.
Each terrorist attack, anywhere in the world, provides an excuse for Big Brother to say we should surrender more freedom so he can "protect" us. Aside from the danger of tyranny, which exceeds that of terrorists, it's not even clear that increased surveillance would achieve its goal.
There is no limit to how many people a tyrannical state can kill, torture, or imprison. We need a state, for the many essential things that states can do, but we must make sure it remains under our control, and we can't do that if it knows everywhere we go and everyone we talk with.
Prohibiting expression of opinions, "advocating" this or that, is a form of tyranny. When "extremism" is prohibited, will plutocrats declare rejection of plutocracy "extreme"? We be prosecuted for advocating a return to democracy?
The US and Russia have agreed to ask the UN to broker a cease-fire between Assad and his enemies.
Britain's previous Tory prime minister rebukes the current Tory government for the inequality it has created.
More about the Haitian election and how it relates to the US history of keeping Haiti down.
Raising consciousness about massive surveillance: do you dare call a number that's possibly on an NSA suspicion list?
Reading stallman.org might do the same thing.
Businesses pretend to have human feelings … to exploit grief.
The Facebook feature praised in the article is also a way of manipulating users: after any sort of disaster, they are under pressure to be used by Facebook because not doing so would suggest they were among the casualties.
A former hostage of PISSI warns against the mistake of playing into its hands with ill-calculated violence.
Kenya has succeeded in driving elephant poaching way down.
The Saudi-US coalition is bombing the cultural history of Yemen to bits.
Republicans are trying to block students from doing research on the effect of Republican abortion-harassment laws.
Why it is important not to call PISSI by the names it gives itself.
It's the same reason we shouldn't call sharing "piracy", or call the prohibition of sharing "protection".
Software has been developed to recognize human microexpressions. Most people (maybe all) will be unable to hide their feelings from these.
This may be good in some circumstances, and bad in others. Even if everyone has access to this, it will tend to reinforce the power of those with more power already.
Why Campus Cops Are So Dangerous.
New Mexico has sentenced a man to 18 years in prison for spraying children with a watergun containing water mixed with his semen.
People should not do this, mainly because if they have some disease, there is a small chance they could transmit it this way. But if he didn't have a disease, I can't see that it did them any harm, or why they should be called "victims". This was not really "sexual contact".
Kurdish journalist Behrouz Bouchani fled Iran because he was going to be imprisoned for his work. Now he is imprisoned by Australia for being a refugee.
Many Americans' medical coverage has such a high deductible that they still can't afford medical care.
These insurance plans may be worth their price, because in the event of hospitalization or a major illness they might save the people far more than $3000. But these people are in such a desperate situation that they can't afford to make rational investments.
Haitians are protesting massively against the rigged presidential election.
Global heating is making winter snowpacks shrink; declining water supply will affect two billion people.
The ICC seems to be investigating NATO's responsibility for torture in Afghanistan.
Portland, Oregon, has banned all new fossil fuel infrastructure.
The whole world ought to do this.
As toxic mine waste slowly flows downstream in the Rio Doce, it poisons water and kills fish.
Some towns are emptying as people in them have no water. What I wonder is, how long will it take before the river water is safe again? Will it be weeks, or decades?
Talking of "slow-motion environmental catastrophe", the whole world is facing an even slower one.
Tor Says Feds Paid Carnegie Mellon $1M to Help Unmask Users.
Comp sci "research" aimed at sabotaging Tor reflects an ethical blind spot.
When black Americans deal with a thug, their chance of experiencing abuse from the thug is twice that of white Americans.
ACLU: Thanks to Snowden, we are making slow progress against massive state surveillance.
The Afghan army and Iraqi army and Syrian rebel army that the US spent millions to build turned out to be as corrupt and phony as the construction projects it paid for.
The US government is considering a ban on smoking in public housing.
Tobacco is death, and I implore tobacco smokers to quit; but it is wrong to ban people from smoking in their homes.
Gayle Newland has been sentenced to 8 years in prison for having sex with a woman while pretending to be male.
This verdict seems totally absurd to me. What next? Will people be sentenced to prison for having sex while pretending to be rich? While pretending to be blonde?
Most British Jews strongly support Israel, and condemn Israel's occupation policies and refusal to make peace.
Accusations of vote-rigging in Haiti with UN complicity.
Professor Salaita, fired by the University of Illinois for his political views, sued; the university has now paid him a large amount of money, but he still does not have a job there. He comments that the injustices that motivated his controversial tweets have not been corrected.
A Texan family won $5 million in damages for the fraudulent foreclosure of their home — one home among 6 million that US banksters stole.
Too bad the Obama regime was on the side of the fraudsters.
The State of Oregon systematically investigated everyone that tweeted in support of Black Lives Matter.
A fungus spreading steadily across the US is wiping out bats.
The absence of bats will have grave ecological consequences. If some bats survive, it it will take a century for the bat populations to recover.
Ali al-Nimr, sentenced to death for a peaceful protest, is being denied medical care in prison.
Please sign the petition for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Saudi Arabia.
Walmart workers are fasting as a protest against wages that don't pay them enough to afford lunch.
The US government admits that TSA agents actively look for drugs in luggage.
They are supposed to search a bag if an x-ray scan shows something that looks like drugs.
US citizens: Thank Obama for standing up for the EU's requirement not to label products of Israeli colonies as "Made in Israel" and for recognizing that these colonies are not part of Israel.
I urge everyone to shun television news for the next few days. There were terrorist attacks yesterday in Paris, and footage is likely to be shown.
Repeatedly watching footage of terrorist attacks can traumatize. I know someone in California who became afraid to go outdoors in 2001, after repeatedly watching pictures of the September 2001 attacks.
Whatever you want to know about the attacks, you can find in text.
US citizens: tell the Department of Agriculture to stop suppressing scientific research.
Everyone: call on the government of Burma to free imprisoned protesters.
Anti-racist activists and free speech defenders must reconcile to support a free society.
Mormons plan a "mass resignation" to protest the Mormon Church's policy demanding children renounce their same-sex parents.
The LA thugs' union has condemned an award for avoiding lethal force.
This award is meant for police officers whose job is to "serve and protect". Thugs think they should get awards for killing citizens.
The FSF's LibrePlanet event, which will be held in March, is looking for people to propose sessions.
Jeremy Corbin: it would have been far better for us all if Jihadi John had been held to account in a court of law.
I agree. Killing someone proves he was vulnerable. Convicting him in a fair trial proves he did wrong.
I do not think killing him was wrong under the circumstances; there was no feasible way to arrest him. Corbyn did not say it was wrong to kill Jihadi John, but his political enemies are pretending that he did.
By contrast, the US could have arrested and tried Osama bin Laden, so it should have done so rather than kill him.
Some web advertisements play inaudible sounds to be picked up by proprietary malware running on other nearby computers so as to determine that they are nearby.
It is unlikely free software will do this, but malware introduced by an attack could do it.
I conclude that access to a microphone needs to be controlled like access to a camera. Applications should need special authorization to use the microphone.
Piketty calls for divestment from fossil fuels before the Paris climate conference.
We must follow the laws of war even against enemies that reject them completely.
Global heating means mosquitoes in November in New York City.
A prisoner facing execution in Egypt reports on torture by crucifixion.
He was convicted along with around 500 other people, clearly a joke of a trial.
Some parts of the US have set up funds to provide various small assistance to the homeless.
The trust funds established by the New Jersey law are good, but the stamp tax (as the colonists called it) is a regressive way to fund it. It would be better to tax the rich for this.
Some places go further and provide housing to all homeless people.
Giving Money to Eritrea and Sudan to Stop Refugees is Almost Satire. The corrupt repression of those countries is what drives the people to flee.
Businesses that destroy the natural environment often use slaves to do it.
Some of the inhabitants of Sinjar are returning to the city, from which PISSI has been expelled.
The National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi's party, has won a majority in Burma even counting the seats that the military gets.
The Catholic Church in Australia made a statement opposing same-sex marriage, and faces a criminal investigation, because "offensive" statements are a crime in Australia.
I probably disagree with a lot of things the Church said, but I support its right to say them.
France reproached Kerry for trying to abandon the goal of a binding climate agreement before the Paris conference even starts.
If the US doesn't want one, it can surely make sure there isn't one, or that it doesn't count for anything.
Students in the US protested in many cities demanding an end to student debt.
States with more background checks for gun buying have fewer mass shootings.
Greenland's Zachariae Isstrom megaglacier has started breaking up, a process likely to raise sea level half a meter over just three decades. Nothing we can do (short of engineering considerable global cooling) can stop this.
Another neighboring megaglacier could do likewise as global heating continues, which would cause another half meter of sea level rise.
Every glacier that feeds into an ocean is likely to have similar points of no return, that we will reach at some point.
Anish Kapoor: India Is Being Ruled by a Hindu Taliban.
Society must not learn to trust bankers!
The UK's Environment Agency has become feckless and fails to enforce pollution laws.
I suppose this is Tory policy.
Austerity seems to have caused around 1000 suicides in the UK.
Many had despaired from being forced to apply uselessly for jobs they correctly thought they could not get.
More corrupt dealings of Scott Walker come out.
The World Health Organization has criticized the TPP.
Médicins sans Frontières' report on the attack on its hospital shows that the US air attack concentrated on the main building where operations were then being done.
There could hardly be any armed Taliban lurking in the building unseen. Anyway, unarmed MSF guards maintained full control of the grounds. The US excuse — which would be insufficient if it were true — cannot be true.
The UK wants to curb "extremism" by censoring it.
All the UK government has is a censor, so all publications look like…
After White House Rejects Keystone XL, Battle Against Larger Texas Pipeline Intensifies.
Although Erdoğan says PISSI is an enemy, PISSI's violence in Turkey seems directed to help him. And PISSI seems to be able to attack its enemies in Turkey.
A court decision is a symbolic condemnation of NSA massive data collection.
It might help against other NSA data collection in the future.
US citizens: write to your senators to urge them to leave the EPA's CO2 emission limit plan alone.
A dam burst in Brazil, releasing mine waste that washed away houses and killed people.
The toxic wastes might kill people in the long term, but I have no idea how many.
The US doesn't have adequate regulations for mine waste dams either.
Many large US companies now impose confidentiality agreements to bar employees from revealing wrongdoing to the US government.
The SEC is taking action against this.
Monsanto Accused of Knowingly Polluting SF Bay with Toxic PCBs.
Amnesty International says that China still regularly tortures prisoners: especially human rights activists and Falun Gong believers, as well as officials accused of corruption.
The Chinese government resists efforts to try to stop torture, and so does the US government.
We Americans can't do much to stop torture in China, but we ought to be able to stop it in the US.
German intelligence spied on the FBI, the French foreign minister, and UNICEF.
India's planned fossil fuel increase will break the world's carbon budget.
This suggests the world should make a deal in which India reduces fossil fuel use, and other countries pay for renewable energy development in India.
For social media stars, paid by companies that want to connect with their fans, not only their clothing but even their relationships may be designed to get more fans to sell.
Experience cleaning up a juvenile prison, in which the prisoners and the guards faced sexual harassment and the prisoners were treated horribly.
Mistreatment was not rare, it was the usual case.
Microsoft offers European users services that keep their data in a European computer run by a European trustee company, so that the US government has no jurisdiction over them.
This is a sensible solution for that one specific problem. It does not alter the point that it's unwise to entrust your personal data to any remote storage.
It also does not make Microsoft's proprietary software acceptable, or excuse its malicious functionalities.
Global heating is hitting Tibet: glaciers and permafrost are melting visibly.
Albert Woodfox has spent 43 years in solitary, and will be kept there further until his surrealistic retrial, to stop him from organizing other prisoners.
The National League for Democracy has done very well in Burma's election, and looks set to win a majority in parliament even despite the 25% of seats set aside for the military.
"Public-private partnerships" are touted as an easy way to get infrastructure built, but they are a form of privatization which drains the treasury later.
We simply must tax the rich more.
Comcast admitted internally that its data caps have nothing to do with network congestion.
They are not traffic-shaping, but market-shaping. Comcast is taking advantage of the lack of competition in the US network market.
Wireless networks are too close to a monopoly to be allowed to set their own rules. They should be regulated as utilities.
The UK's snooping bill is "the last policy discussion about surveillance before the mass gagging."
If this bill passes, no debate will be allowed; the entire subject will be secret.
Major US airlines have offshored heavy maintenance to facilities that the FAA can't properly inspect, and in practice does not try. Maintenance workers in the US report serious flaws.
There is no reason to allow US-flag airlines to do maintenance outside the US except in emergencies.
The Senate is considering a bill to ban companies from using contracts to prohibit customers from saying anything bad about the company.
That would be good. Will the bill ban attempts to use copyright to do this?
Will it ban imposing arbitration on customers?
SCROTUS are trying to legalize a kind of racial discrimination in car loans.
Large outsourcing companies have figured out how to use the US H-1B visa program to bring foreign teams to the US, so there are no visas available for other businesses.
An undercover video shows that the USDA's new, "more efficient" meat inspection is almost no inspection at all.
Australia's exile bill would still permit cancellation of citizenship without a trial.
A general strike against austerity is planned in Greece.
Australia plans to deport Ian Whiteman, who has lived in Australia since he was one year old, to a country he hardly knows.
This because of a crime that caused no damage but is considered "serious".
Deportation of criminals is justified, sometimes, but not in a cruel and mindless fashion. A person whose only family ties are in Australia, and who could easily have become a citizen, should not be deported if not likely to be a repeat criminal or if some other country is not "home".
Stopping his parents from visiting him is cruel also.
Several people will be deported to New Zealand because of membership in an arbitrarily banned motorcycle club.
Walmart tried using face recognition to compare everyone in the store to a list of faces of known shoplifters.
If this works, and it is extended a few small steps, I see a danger that anyone who has ever shoplifted will never be able to buy groceries again — in any store. This could be a choice between a death sentence and life imprisonment.
For the most part I don't see a problem in having Walmart (or some other store — I refuse to buy from Walmart, after all) scan my face and not keep records of it. What I object to is if someone scans my face on the street and keeps track of where I go. Especially if this is done by the state.
The Paris climate conference has been set up to fail, just as Copenhagen was, with governments making efforts to spin failure as success.
PEN calls on the US government to stop prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.
Campaigns against racism are spreading to other US universities.
"Mizzou" seems to be an affectionate nickname referring to the University of Missouri, used by people who work or study there. Since I have no relationship with that school, for me to use that nickname would mean pretending to an intimacy I don't have. Thus, I call the school by its official name.
There are no legal obstacles stopping Obama from ending the indefinite imprisonment of Guantanamo, if he wanted to.
Raising the minimum wage is often accompanied by decreased unemployment.
Two 14-year-olds in New York State face felony charges for making a video in which one of them has sex with someone else. Other students they sent the video to are being punished as well.
Provided the other star was involved voluntarily (information not available), then I think it is wrong to punish any of them.
It is even more clearly wrong to punish students for receiving a message containing the video. And parents that examine their children's phones to see if they have been sent sexts are held by this twisted law to have committed the same "felony".
Any law making it a crime to possess a copy of some text, photo or video is injustice, pure and simple.
The UK is giving increased subsidies to fossil fuels.
So this is why they have to make so many families homeless and hungry.
US citizens:
call
for making election day a national holiday.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on presidential candidates to support the goal of global zero nuclear weapons.
The Snooper's Charter would endanger computer security researchers in the UK.
There might be one way around this. If you publish info about the back door you found, encrypted, on a foreign site, and send the key to another foreign site that will publish the information in several months no matter what you subsequently say or do, you might then be safe discussing the matter with some foreign colleagues with a view to publishing it in a better way with better checking.
Of course, it's nuts to make security researchers go through these steps to protect themselves from state repression.
Never Mind Pointless Apps — Our Best Minds Should Be Solving Real Problems.
This is not to mention that those apps are usually nonfree software, and often malware as well.
Modern slavery can be found in any industry.
Employers want immigrants to undercut wages for everyone else. Sometimes the immigrants are entirely willing. Sometimes they are threatened, exploited, or imprisoned. Either way, the overall result is that business owners around the world get more money, and workers get less.
Two British journalists imprisoned in Indonesia say that naval officers paid close attention to their case, while the UK's supposed help was incompetent.
Even though they had money to pay for some privileges in prison, they could not avoid the dirty food, and they could not get medicine when they got sick.
Timothy Johnson was convicted of murder based on a false confession, then exonerated as there was no real evidence against him. He says that the thugs dangled him off the side of a bridge to get him to confess.
They also laid false charges against his parents to put pressure on him.
Someone, presumably supporters of PISSI, murdered some Afghan Shi'ites by beheading them.
In response, crowds tried to storm the presidential palace, crying "Death to [President] Ghani, death to the Taliban."
I don't see why they want the former; but if Afghans remain fired up to fight the Taliban, they may have what it takes to defeat the Taliban.
A company that handles prisoners' phone calls, including with their lawyers, records them all. Even when prisoners talk with their lawyers. Someone just got these recordings and leaked them.
Leaking them en mass was wrong, but not as wrong about what this company (Insecurus?) did.
Colorado is considering a ballot initiative for single-payer health care.
I am concerned that this is not a large enough step to work. Many low-paid workers have been forced to be "independent contractors", and I think many of them can't afford to contribute 10% of their pay for medical care.
I don't see how health care for the unemployed would be covered, and I don't see anything to push gouging prices down. Perhaps the scheme has measures for this which are not mentioned in the article. If not, I think it won't work.
In the UK, ever more families are becoming homeless (even though the adults are working), and put into cramped shelters.
In the US, homeless families don't get shelters.
Republican candidates debated why and how to stop American workers from getting a wage.
Trump effectively admitted that globalization driven by business interests imposes poverty on most people. This globalization is not a natural phenomenon; it was imposed by those business interests through bad laws and worse "free trade" treaties. So let's get rid of those laws and treaty.
It is true that wages, and benefits, encourage employers to replace workers with machines. We can reduce this problem by funding Social Security and unemployment benefits from taxes that are independent of employment — taxes that businesses will have to pay even if they replace all workers with machines.
However, we must also block the forms of automation that would put many people out of work, until we establish a universal basic income so that people don't need employment.
Saudi Arabia compassionately released 74-year-old Karl Andree, who had been sentenced to 350 lashes for possession of drugs (specifically, wine).
The US has stopped repressing people for carrying wine, but you can get imprisoned for having other drugs.
New York City's replacement for solitary confinement turns out to be more or less solitary confinement with pepper spray.
Kyle Lydell Canty has applied for asylum in Canada because of racism in the US.
Modi's Hindu-nationalist government presides over repeated lynchings and attacks the pluralist basis of the Indian state.
Legal Battles to Protect The Environment 'Easier to Fight in China Than the UK'.
The EU has adopted requirements that products made in Israel's colonies in Palestine must be labeled specially, not as "Made in Israel".
Of course, the purpose of this labelling is discrimination — like all such required labelling. The discrimination in this case is not against Israel, but against its violations of international law by setting up colonies in Palestine and settling Israelis in them. This labelling will help people practice a narrow boycott against those colonies, much narrower than the boycott of nearly all Israeli institutions that Palestinians have called for.
I support the boycott of products of those colonies ("settlements").
The independent Angolan dictatorship has picked up the practices of the former Portuguese dictatorship that ruled Angola as a colony.
A writer describes how seeing a captive orca made him ashamed.
This article is packed with idiocy, such as the misused cliche "playing god", which is irrational even in its usual meaning.
However, I agree with its basic point that it is cruel to cage orcas.
The US government has ordered executive branch agencies not to read the copies of the CIA torture report that the Senate sent them.
This is based on a bizarre and twisted legal excuse, so it's clear that the goal is to stand up for torturers and torture.
The Tories choose not to see or believe the effects of their spending cuts.
The sale of exotic, endangered lizards as expensive pets could wipe out those species.
Survivors of the 1965-66 massacre in Indonesia continue trying to open investigation into those events, and continue to face censorship.
Australia may block an OECD deal to stop funding coal.
The US is upgrading some nuclear bombs to make them more "usable".
That is going in the wrong direction.
The University of Missouri had started attacking women's rights and was mistreating all its students. Resistance was widespread, and the black football players were joined in resistance by a large fraction of the campus.
Amnesty: Israeli Forces in Occupied Palestinian Territories Must End Pattern of Unlawful Killings.
Some of these Palestinians had attacked Israelis. Others hadn't done anything wrong.
Amnesty's point is that even when they had attacked someone with a knife, that doesn't call for shooting them when it was possible to arrest them, let alone for killing them by denying them medical care.
In Honduras, drug traffickers and palm-oil planters are working together to take land from indigenous people and deforest it.
Congress blocked Obama's plan to "close" the Guantanamo prison by moving imprisonment without trial to the US itself.
Obama's plan might perhaps be a scheme to end imprisonment without trial by supposing that the Supreme Court would grant them habias corpus. If so, it would be great provided it works — but with our current authoritarian Supreme Court, I would not count on that.
The Maldive "president" has cancelled the state of emergency.
Australia imprisoned Iranian refugee Fazel Chegeni in the privatized Christmas Island prison, apparently forever. He died trying to escape, and the other prisoners responded by rioting and destroying parts of their prison.
Thugs moved in and regained control, but it's not clear that's a good thing.
The UK's Snooper's Charter imposes a gagging requirement on everyone ordered to snoop on people. This is "the last policy discussion about surveillance before the mass gagging."
"Note that this section is absolute: it does not have exceptions, for example in relation to the public interest: such as the ability to discuss the benefit or downsides of part interception activities; no exception for talking about this to MPs, or other democratic representatives; or even to exculpate anyone who otherwise would be wrongfully found guilty."
US thug departments train thugs in how to shoot, but not in how to resolve a crisis without shooting. And the training says to shoot fast, without taking time to think. No wonder that's what they do.
Then the Supreme Court upholds an extreme level of immunity for them, so they are almost certain to get away with killings.
Moroccan actress Loubna Abidar played a sex worker in a film which Morocco banned. Then she was attacked by a mob on the street, and hospitals would not admit her. She fled the country.
I blame these events on the prejudice against sex workers. The film made prejudiced Moroccans uncomfortable by showing that sex workers exist there, so they took it out on her.
Many other laws reflect this prejudice, which I have never understood.
Portuguese celebrate because an anti-austerity coalition is going to take power.
The ICRC accused Saudi Arabia (backed by the US) of intentionally targeting hospitals in Yemen.
US citizens: ask congresscritters to sign the Ellison-Yarmuth-Dingell letter calling for a political resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Obama's nomination of Robert Califf to head the Food and Drug Administration.
He is too much in bed with the pharma companies to regulate them properly, and we must suspect he wouldn't want to try.
US citizens: Phone your congresscritter and say, don't move Guantanamo prison to the US. Each prisoner should be tried in a civilian US court, or freed.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on members of Congress to support the SAVE Benefits Act.
US citizens: call
on the EPA to take strong action against methane pollution.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress to
reject
the TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
A mental health bill now in the US Congress would lead to forced medication.
When thugs say they are deterred from doing their job by the danger citizens' videos will reveal their unjust violence, it amounts to threatening an unofficial slowdown strike to demand restored impunity.
Where the UK Snooper's Charter is leading.
Facebook's app has started scanning photos people take with their phones.
The article says "camera", but that word is misleading; cameras do not have a Facebook app installed in them. This applies only to phones and tablets.
I suspect the face recognition is done by sending the photos to a Facebook server. If so, the server could do other things with those photos. It could save them and send them to Big Brother. From now on, when people want to snap me with a mobile, I will verify it does not have a Facebook app installed before I say yes.
House Anti-Science Committee Attempts to Suppress Climate Change Studies.
One way to fight back is by replacing the weak term that the denialists chose, "climate change", with something stronger such as "global heating" or "climate mayhem".
The EU is considering a law to declare linking to a page a violation of copyright.
It is too bad that the article uses the enemy's propaganda word, "protection", to refer to copyright.
The UK's attack on end-to-end encryption is serious, and its denials are clearly lies. It wants to force computer manufacturers and sellers to sabotage users' computers on demand to make their data decryptable.
However, encryption done in proprietary software can't be trusted anyway. Whether or not a state can force the company to sabotage it, the company might do so on its own initiative at any time. You can't rationally trust nonfree programs: they do computing for suckers.
When the author says "the services you and I use", apparently assuming that you and he use software you and he can't rationally trust, he says he's a sucker and he assumes you are too.
Nigeria Must Own Up to the Blood Shed for Oil.
The officials responsible for the murder of Ogoni environmental activists 20 years ago have not been punished or even censured, and some remain in positions of power today.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled against freedom of speech by endorsing censorship of opinions and even views about history. Evidently it doesn't fully support human rights. Respecting freedom of speech means respecting the right to state views we oppose.
Antisemitism is prejudice against a group of people which (in the usual interpretation) includes me. I disapprove of it, but I respect people's right to state that opinion or any other.
When a state mandates a specific position on a factual question, that makes it impossible to discuss that question frankly in that country.
Egyptian journalist Hossam Bahgat has been freed.
The article does not indicate whether the charges, publishing something that displeased the state, have been dropped.
Teenagers are threatened by laws that could jail them for sexting or inviting others to sext them.
I think it is unkind to pressure someone to sext, and I would not do that, even though pressuring is not equivalent to forcing. However, it is simply wrong to punish adolescents for sexting, or anything else sexual that they willingly do. Sex is the normal preoccupation of adolescents.
Although leprosy is curable, people in India whose bodies show harm done by the disease face various sorts of discrimination and cruelty.
I am shocked by the point about "grounds for divorce". Does India still require people present "grounds" if they want a divorce? If so, the change that's needed here is to eliminate that requirement.
Australia will take citizenship away from dual citizens convicted of terrorism crimes.
At least it is limited to those actually convicted. The previous proposal would have allowed officials to do this without a trial.
A US appeals court overturned Obama's executive order against deporting certain unauthorized immigrant children.
I don't want a large amount of immigration to the US, but people who were brought as children and have spend many years in the US should be allowed to become citizens.
The right-wing concern about "anchor babies" is due to a fear that is not based on facts.
Rightwingers Push 'Moral' Coal Only After They Doomed a Truly Moral Alternative.
The fossil fuel magnates pay lots smart but selfish people to say all sorts of bogus things in favor of using fossil fuels. We will see through them all, but will we do it soon enough to prevent disaster?
The thug whose gratuitous violence seems to have caused the death of Matthew Ajibade has received a light sentence including 15 weekends in jail.
Still, if every violent thug were sentenced this way, it might be enough to deter their violence.
A Belgian court will fine Facebook 250,000 euros per day unless it stops tracking people that don't have Facebook accounts.
The issue is that Facebook sends some visitors cookies. It is not clear that the court realizes that Facebook also tracks people who merely see a "Like" button.
Indian fishermen and farmers are suing the World Bank for investing in a giant coal-fired power plant where they live. The World Bank says it can't be sued in US courts.
Investing in burning coal is planet-roasting behavior. Young people, who may well be killed by climate mayhem, have grounds to use force to block the activities that threaten their lives.
The UK has killed an EU directive to limit trade in wildlife and toxic waste.
Netanyahu Has Never Actually Supported a Palestinian State, Despite What He Told Obama.
Saudi Arabia emptied its aquifer for agriculture; now all its wells are dry and it has no more agriculture. California is following the same path.
UVA Fraternity Sues Rolling Stone for $25m over Retracted Rape Article.
Europe's banksters demand Greece speed eviction of families that can't pay their mortgages, or its creditors won't get the next next batch aid.
It's a mistake to call these payments "aid", if that means aid for Greece.
Sex crimes are common among thugs in the US.
A Russian performance artist set fire to the door of the building used by what was formerly called the KGB, to point out that it's still there and still dangerous.
The author understates the danger from UK spy organizations. What they threaten to do, when they violate privacy, is imprison journalists' sources and thus endanger democracy. Even if they don't torture people like Russian and US spy organizations, that is still a terrible threat. Besides, the UK spy organizations did hand over people to Qadhafi for torture.
Narendra Modi: the Divisive Manipulator Who Charmed the World.
Four employees of a Hong Kong publisher have disappeared, separately. This is apparently the work of Chinese agents, perhaps with the help of Thailand.
The UK's surveillance bill would give the state the power to order companies to sabotage end-to-end encryption facilities that they provide to users.
This is one more reason why you shouldn't trust a nonfree program for encryption, on top of many other reasons. Basically, nonfree programs cannot deserve your trust; they do computing for suckers.
Development aid money is mostly wasted since only a tiny fraction goes to the local organizations that actually do work.
Blaming inequality and massive surveillance on digital technology is a handy excuse for politicians that want to increase inequality and surveillance.
Pollution in Ogoniland is just as bad now as it was 20 years ago when Nigeria executed protest leaders.
The National League for Democracy won the election for parliament in Burma, but the constitution has been rigged so as to limit its political power.
Suggesting a way to protect US teens from radicalization that won't backfire.
Global heating has reached 1C, and is still accelerating.
For plutocratist politicians, poor people's children are disposable: just blame all the consequences of poverty on their parents.
US citizens: call on Obama to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Obama offered Netanyahu a meeting, and used it to show he will do nothing to pressure Netanyahu to end the perpetual occupation of Palestine.
Netanyahu will continue the occupation until he faces enough pressure to make him change. If I were president of the US, I would tell Netanyahu that Israel will get US aid for one purpose only: building replacements in Israel for the colonies in Palestine, and demolishing those colonies.
"Palm oil: why do we care more about orangutans than migrant workers?"
It's simple. An individual migrant worker has more rights than an individual orangutan; but orangutans are an endangered species while humans are reproducing like weeds.
However, that question is purely theoretical; there is no practical reason to compare the two, because it's easiest to protect them both. Anything we do to prevent the enslavement of migrant workers on palm oil plantations will protect the orangutans, by discouraging the spread of palm oil plantations.
Two Thais accused of criticizing the royal family have died in prison.
Merely accusing them of this "crime" is an injustice.
Corruption is common in US state legislators.
Storm And Drought: What Europe Has to Fear from [global heating].
The NSA reports most of the bugs it finds in operating systems, but only after a delay while it uses them to attack computers.
Hossam Bahgat, Egyptian journalist and human rights activist, has been charged with "publishing false news".
"False news", in Egypt, means anything that doesn't come from the state.
Yemen: 'The children have a game called airstrike in which they fall to the ground'.
How long before they start playing "suicide bomber"?
Obama reportedly decided 2 years ago to reject Keystone XL, but waited for a "politically opportune time" to announce it.
Curbing global heating is a battle against time. If he had rejected Keystone XL earlier, the rejection would have boosted our side sooner.
US citizens: oppose building oil terminals in Washington State.
I used this as my text.
The Keystone XL pipeline has been cancelled. Please don't allow it to be replaced with oil trains to Washington State. We need to keep the tar sands oil in the ground, to avoid toxic spills and disastrous global heating. Oil trains will also cause fires repeatedly.
US citizens:
protect
marine mammals.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on Congress to defeat the TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
In the text of the letter, I replaced "Trans-Pacific Partnership" with "TPP", and added "This is a partnership of corporations to attack democracy, with some secondary and unimportant effects on trade."
SCROTUS are delaying the appointment of 32 US ambassadors, as a harassment technique.
Mexican real-life "superhero" Peatónito campaigns for safety for pedestrians.
A deceptive campaign in Florida to check the spread of home solar power just got a boost from a secret donor.
Since we don't know who the donor is, we can make up a fictional name for him without lying. We could call him "John Doe", or "The Crotch Brother".
Black football players at the University of Missouri have gone on strike demanding the resignation of the university president, who has not done much against racism on campus.
They are powerful because they bring in a lot of money to the school, and they are trying to use this to do some good. Bravo for them, but I think it is a shame that many Americans are obsessed with the artificial struggle of football and thus distracted from the real struggle against the plutocrats.
The strike is getting support from others on campus, and the president has resigned.
One of Haiti's presidential candidates, who came in second in the first round of voting, says the election was rigged by Martelly.
The UK's surveillance bill threatens investigative journalism by putting sources in danger.
Here's a case in point.
Another bill would attack journalism on another front, by hampering freedom of information access.
Donald Trump dares to point out that Dubya left the US wide open to the September 2001 terrorist attacks, even cancelling precautions that Clinton had set up.
This was more widely acknowledged 10 years ago than it is now.
I will not take as certain that Dubya didn't do any worse things in regard to the attack. His official investigation of the attacks was weakened and then corrupted.
I support the demand for a new investigation.
US citizens: call on Obama to use executive orders to close some gun sale loopholes.
Everyone: demonstrate on Nov 14 to end subsidies for fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on officials
not
to include fracking in any climate "solution".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
US citizens: stand for ending gerrymandering.
The UK's housing crisis could be solved if the disused buildings were made available to live in. Instead, Tory policy is to put squatters in jail.
The UK's plans to chase "extremists" out of positions of influence remind me of McCarthyism.
Journalists in Zimbabwe were arrested for accusing officials of corruption (participating in hunting of elephants).
When globalization destroys local social relationships, it sparks local rivalries; these can attract to previously unimportant religious or ethnic differences and turn into hatred and violence.
A project sets out to summarize how various web services deny users' rights through their terms and conditions.
I doubt that competition will be effective for eliminating nasty conditions. The overall level of competition in this field is too low.
I think we need laws to limit what conditions essential digital services can impose. And rather than judging violations themselves, they should have to go to court in order to cut off service to anyone.
The writers festival in Bali was forced to cancel sessions about the 1965 massacre, but people discussed it anyway, and condemned the censorship.
Australia's secrecy about "special" violent intelligence operations extends to the point of refusing to say whether there have been any.
If an Australian agent on one of these operations kills your child, you will need to escape from Australia before you can safely say so.
The EU's proposed trade secrets directive bows down to business at the expense of journalism, workers, and public safety.
Trade secrecy is harmful to the public interest, and one of the supposed purposes of the patent system is to discourage trade secrecy.
How about discouraging it by not adopting laws to facilitate it?
The UK's threat to the privacy of reading on the internet is extremely dangerous.
So is the surveillance exercised by snooping web sites. We must put an end to all of it.
The thugs that killed 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis face charges of second-degree murder.
They should be prosecuted also for their false accusations.
Denmark's government wanted to sell out to fracking, but the people organized and blocked it.
Many famous Americans do or did support Democratic Socialism.
Unions are very effective at reducing inequality and preventing dooH niboR laws, according to an IMF study.
The summary of public comments about the proposed oil export terminals in Washington State mysteriously omits some comments that indicated dangers.
Mahdi Mohammad Ramadan al-Mohtasib was shot dead by an Israeli soldier as he lay on the ground, already shot and wounded.
Israeli bulldozers have knocked down the Bedouin village of al-Araqib 90 times in just 5 years.
Each time, the villagers return and rebuild.
The 'Ferguson Effect' Is Just a Ploy to Reduce Scrutiny of the Police.
Six myths about the "free market".
The market system is a useful tool, but if all you have is a market system, everything starts to look like it's for sale.
Amnesty accuses Assad's regime of secretly imprisoning 60,000 people. Some were tortured.
Their relatives can't get any information about them, except underground.
You can't trust judges to effectively restrain spies equipped with total access.
The experience with the FISA court shows this is true in the US as well.
As states bind themselves by treaty not to regulate businesses, they are left with no tools except to ask them to "voluntarily self-regulate". And this method usually fails, because businesses don't really carry out the self-regulation.
"Governments are liberating global corporations from the rule of law and leaving them to rip the world apart."
US snooping agencies were ordered to set up contacts for complaints, but they have ignored the order for 17 years.
Canadians are already campaigning to press the new prime minister to take real action to curb global heating.
I wish they would replace the term "climate change", imposed by Dubya's officials because it downplays the danger, with one that does justice to the importance of the issue.
The impunity of thugs in the US goes to absurd lengths: a thug who shot a tased man who was lying on the ground face down was acquitted because she said she was afraid of him.
Even if he had had pulled a gun, and shot, he was not likely to hit her under those circumstances.
Next time, a thug will say, "Yes, he was sitting on the ground with his hands in the air, but I was afraid he would think deadly thoughts and kill me with telepathy." And get acquitted.
US thugs kill so many people because they have been taught to kill whenever they see even a shadow of a shade of a threat. We have to change that training and that attitude. There are other countries that teach a different approach.
Several EU countries want to keep their sleazy low-tax deals with multinational companies secret from investigating MEPs.
Nine Out of Ten of the Internet's Top Websites Are Leaking Your Data. To data brokers, that is.
I follow the recommendations at the end of the article.
Obama wants to "close Guantanamo prison" by transferring imprisonment without trial to Colorado.
This would normalize imprisonment without trial, which is bad; however, it might also make it easier for these prisoners to get the benefit of the US constitution in the courts.
The US must try or release each of these prisoners.
The whole staff of the Elsevier's paywalled journal Lingua have quit to start a new libre journal.
Facebook found another social network to be a source of spam links, so it banned all mention of that site's name anywhere.
A perverse law requires the US government to keep at least 34,000 possibly-unauthorized immigrants in prison at any time, regardless of whether there is any good reason to do so.
The motive for this law seems to be to assure the profits of private prisons.
Hundreds of prisoners in one of these private prisons are on hunger strike. The prison company says there is no hunger strike, but the leaders of the supposedly nonexistent strike are being punished with solitary confinement, persistent cold, isolation from their families, etc.
These prisoners have not been convicted of a crime, and some will win appeals and be granted US residency. Although the prison executives' motive for punishing them for not eating is obvious, they have no grounds to do so.
Who Will the U.S. Declare President of Haiti This Time?
A teacher in Kansas showed a film in class to open students' eyes to what it feels like to be bullied for homosexuality has faced bullying from right-wing parents, but has decided not to resign.
Bravo! Resigning would endorse the bullies' position.
The UK government plans to prohibit renting out a bedroom smaller than 6.5 square meters.
This will make the housing shortage a little worse, though not as much as the other bad things that it is doing. Rather than subdivide a bedroom, several people will sleep in the same bed, medieval style.
The government's responsibility is to make enough space for people to live in available at a decent price. As long as it fails to do this, people will suffer one way or another.
For 15 years, death rates among middle-aged white men in the US have increased: this now adds up to half a million additional deaths.
The natural explanation is that dooH niboR policies made their lives collapse.
It should be noted that blacks still have it even worse.
US retailers recognize that most Americans can't afford to buy much.
The US economy is rigged in many ways to redistribute wealth to the rich.
Let's pass laws to take it back from them.
One day before the US bombed the MSF hospital in Kunduz, a US official asked if any Taliban were "holed up" there. The MSF said that the only Taliban there were disarmed patients being treated.
The MSF in Kunduz called their US army contact about the attack, but the attack continued for 45 more minutes.
MSF reminds the US that wounded patients in a hospital are not legitimate military targets.
US officials continue trying to shut down or pressure organizations by intimidating credit card companies.
The article makes a mistake when it refers to "johns who engage in trafficking". When prostitutes are trafficked, pimps are typically involved in the crime, but johns probably not.
Israeli soldiers shot and killed an old Palestinian woman who was driving a car in Hebron. This seems to have provoked retaliation on various occasions.
Seymour Hersh reported in 2014 that the sarin attack in Syria, attributed to Assad's army, was actually a false-flag attack carried out by Turkey in connection with al-Nusra (al-Qa'ida).
He also said that the US had armed Syrian rebels in cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar since 2012, exporting arms from Libya by way of the Benghazi consulate. The US stopped this after the Benghazi consulate was attacked, but the other three countries continued.
An interview with Noam Chomsky.
The FBI says it has given up on demanding back doors in encryption software.
That doesn't mean it won't try again next year.
Increasing rubber production could lead to massive deforestation and extinction of many species.
Ben Carson's religion is more crazy than fundamentalist.
Arundhati Roy says she was not shocked by murder of secularists in India, because that's what she expected of this government.
Opponents of Nepal's new constitution are trying to force it to change the constitution by blockading imports from India.
Could Assad become Schrödinger's dictator, politically alive and politically dead at the same time?
Lawsuit Targets Rapacious City Fine System in St. Louis Community.
Israelis revel in videos in which real soldiers or thugs, egged on by rabid mobs, really shoot harmless Palestinians.
Arabs in Israel know that anyone can murder them with impunity. All of Israel is Ferguson for them.
The TPP will allow banks to sue for "compensation" for any regulations they don't like, including possible reinstatement of the Glass Seagall Act.
Cruel US policies are driving many middle-aged white males to commit suicide.
Sad to say, the relatives of these men probably won't associate the effect with the right-wing cause.
The article speculates that blacks are better able to cope with poverty; they may be psychologically or socially ready for it.
Ben Carson admitted lying in his autobiography about being offered a scholarship to West Point.
Such lies have ruined many a career, but right-wing crazies are often immune.
Senators Sanders and Warren proposed a bill that would close a tax loophole for hedge funds and give the money to retired people, disabled people, and veterans.
Some of the added tax money would go into the Social Security trust fund.
One page summarizes many specific injustices and damage of the TPP.
This is in addition to the general injustice of allowing companies to sue governments for reducing their profits.
A psychological experiment found that children from secular families are more altruistic and more harsh in judging other people than children from Christian and Muslim families.
Since many psychological studies turn out to be irreproducible results, I would not treat this as thoroughly established based on one study.
Obama has rejected the Keystone XL pipeline.
Although he ultimately made the right decision, the fact that he took years to make it means that this is not greatly to his credit.
Obama now has a bigger climate decision to make, in the Paris climate summit, and so far he is not pushing very hard to avoid disaster.
The Keystone XL Pipeline Defeat Is One Goal in the Game, And We're Way Behind.
The UN predicts millions of climate refugees.
The UK took action against the Muslim Brotherhood under pressure from a threat by the UAE to cut arms purchases.
US citizens: call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Saudi Arabia.
Palm oil palms have already been illegally planted on recently burned Indonesian forest areas.
If complicated supply chains make it hard to stop this, then the supply chains must be simplified, whether the companies want this or not. Since the CO2 emissions from these fires threaten all civilization, force is certainly justified.
Now that Google has made location tracking a feature, the state can subpoena a person's location history going back years.
Communicating with a service from your own computer using a mobile device, and not going through Tor, is for suckers.
Injustices in the EU's proposal for snooping borders.
India has ordered Greenpeace India to shut down.
The carbon pledges of the world's countries are only half what's probably needed to remain under 2C of heating.
Obama has acknowledged that there is no prospect of a peace deal between Israel and Palestine while Obama remains in office.
The reason for this is that Obama has no intention of doing what is required for a peace deal: putting pressure on the Israeli government. Netanyahu is against peace, and will reject it as long as the US lets him get away with that.
Lower Austria, one of the states in Austria, now uses only renewable electricity.
This does not mean it has eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. It still burns fossil fuel for other purposes, and that must be reduced next.
Netanyahu's new spokesman called the Iran nuclear deal "antisemitism."
This is part of Israel's persistent dishonest campaign of labeling anything but blanket support for Israeli policy as "antisemitism".
Nuclear energy is too slow to develop to play a substantial role in avoiding global heating disaster. It is so expensive that it sucks money away from the efficient renewable energy that we should be building as fast as possible.
New York State is investigating Exxon's climate lies.
Volkswagen admits understating the fuel consumption of some car models.
Another US thug shot himself (not fatally) and then claimed someone else had shot him.
Perhaps this is the true "Ferguson effect": encouraging thugs to lie even more than before.
The Theater of Security Agency is pitifully incompetent at finding weapons and explosives.
Analyzing the consequences of Bush's conquest of Iraq.
Two Turkish editors published an edgy headline and are charged with starting a rebellion.
This insane exaggeration reminds me of how Aaron Swartz was treated in the US.
Bogus charges resulting from exaggeration are wrong in any country.
US citizens: oppose the plan to build a big shopping mall next to the Grand Canyon.
Seattle's innovative public campaign funding system lets each voter dispose of $100 to municipal campaigns.
Also in Seattle, children are suing the state for not limiting CO2 emissions.
There's a significant chance that global heating, by 2070, will cause catastrophe, and kill them.
Obama has slightly softened the policies that usually keep ex cons out of public housing.
A century ago, ex cons could get most kinds of work, and were not excluded from most places to live. This helped them go straight.
Vacationing parents face charges for leaving their children on the beach, from which they would walk back to the campground along a footpath.
The Pentagon pays professional sports to promote a militarist version of "patriotism".
If patriotism is love of one's country, then the core of patriotism is campaigning to make that country deserve to be loved.
US citizens: call on congress to support peace negotiations for Syria and support compromise rather than continued war.
US citizens: call for an investigation with a view to prosecuting Exxon for lying about the danger of global heating.
President Bush 1 felt bored with his job once he didn't have a war to make it exciting.
Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister, says that very few ministers were informed about massive digital snooping.
The US government funded the Iraqi National Congress which generated false "intelligence" that reported Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
This gave the Bush regime raw material for its distorted intelligence reports, which we now know were used to provide "reasons" for a war that Bush had already decided to launch (but pretended he had not).
The Afghan government made a business deal with a banker that is in prison for corruption.
The UK's planet-roasting government plans to kill off community-scale renewable energy products.
Obama has published the text of the TPP, and it would give foreign companies the power to demand relaxation of food inspection, even to demand approval of GMOs and demand that they not be labeled.
It's literally a treaty to allow Treacherous Plutocratic Poison.
It provides handouts to fossil fuel companies. For instance, they could sue states and cities that ban fracking.
It criminalizes whistleblowers that reveal a company's criminal "trade secrets", such as for instance that cigarette companies knew that their products caused cancer and that Exxon knew its products caused global heating.
This in addition to prohibiting breaking digital handcuffs
It's too bad that article adopts enemy propaganda terms such as "protection", "Digital Rights Management", and weak terms such as "digital locks".
Sanders points out that companies could demand "compensation" for increases in the minimum wage.
Here are many other bad things that have just been discovered in the text.
This should be no surprise. The TPP was designed to be a corporate supremacy treaty, mislabeled as a "trade agreement", and that's what was designed.
A SCROTUS has sabotaged a congressional investigation into drug companies that greatly increase prices.
Cheney wanted to use nuclear weapons against Iraq and Iran.
US thugs have organized pressure campaigns against prominent people that criticize them even a little.
They are arrogant as well as dishonest.
Another variation on restoring the Voting Rights Act has been proposed.
Most Republican officials are in favor of voter suppression. They want power, and regard democracy as an obstacle. They appointed people to the Supreme Court that would overturn crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act, and having won that victory over poor and minority US citizens, they are not going to give it up.
"It Will Become a Prison": Palestinians of Hebron Required to
"Register" in Preparation for
Severe
New Restrictions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
This is in the name of "protecting" a group of Israeli fanatics that insisted on living in the middle of an Arab town, and got the government's support to keep them there at any cost (to Palestinians).
Meanwhile, Israel closed a Palestinian radio station in Hebron, accusing it of "incitement" to violence.
The Israeli actions that support keeping those fanatics in Hebron do more to incite Palestinian violence than any radio station could.
A former Israeli soldier, who was stationed in Hebron, says more or less the same thing.
The Israeli's use of a colony in Hebron as the base for continued ethnic cleansing of the surrounding neighborhood of Hebron is a microcosm of the policy of the occupation as a whole.
Israel continues authorizing additional extensions of its colonies in Palestine.
A supporter of Deepak Chopra criticizes Wikipedia's practice in editing the page about him.
Chopra's metaphysical statements are unsupported by what is actually known in quantum physics. They are extraordinary claims, and would require extraordinary proofs. Proofs would entail a systematic series of experiments that Chopra hasn't reported doing. This is pseudoscience, and it is good that Wikipedia makes this clear.
It is also true that patients may die from using "alternative medicine" instead of scientific medicine — Steve Jobs is perhaps the most famous example of this, though we are arguably better off without him — and it is Wikipedia's responsibility to point this out.
However, some of the practices described in the article do seem wrong to me. Two clear examples are those about the Yoga section and the bibliography. That's why I am posting this note.
Real scientists sometimes propose strange metaphysical hypotheses, but they recognize that these are speculative and don't present them as certain truths.
I am disappointed that the article refers to Wikipedia as "open source", thus misrepresenting the meaning of "free" in "free encyclopedia".
Everyone: call on NBC not to have Donald Trump host Saturday Night Live.
Science of the Seance: Why Speaking to Spirits is Talking to Yourself.
It seems unjust to convict Anna Stubblefield of sexual assault, since she believed she had been given positive consent.
Australia's face database lends itself to creeping tyranny, and there is nothing to block the creep.
A Guantanamo prisoner, Ravil Mingazov, wants to join his family in England. A US court found there was no evidence to justify holding him in prison.
Many US thug departments are sloppy about using tasers, and every so often this kills someone — usually someone who was unarmed and no danger to anyone.
US prosecutors systematically exclude blacks from juries using various forms of deceit.
Censorship of criticism of religion afflicts Lebanon too.
A US special forces team in Afghanistan seems to have tortured dozens of prisoners and killed 17 of them.
The UK's snooping bill offers "protections" with loopholes so big that they are hardly meaningful.
The bill is deceptive, presenting so-called safeguards that are not what they appear to be.
A tax on flying could raise a lot of money for dealing with global heating.
But we would be fools to spend it on "adapting" when we could instead spend it on curbing the problem itself.
Curbing global heating is a very profitable investment. The US should go in a lot more.
Scientists warned President Johnson about global heating in 1965.
A research project is trying to breed corals that can cope with heat and acidity.
If the project is successful, it might preserve a few of the hundreds of species of corals. It's better than nothing, but it would be far better to curb our CO2 emissions.
A sculpture in honor of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by a military dictatorship 20 years ago, was seized by the Nigerian government on account of its political message.
San Francisco voters rejected an initiative to limit how many days per month a room can be rented out.
I am not sure this would have helped the problem of high rents at all, but at best it would have done a tiny bit.
What San Francisco needs is lots and lots of housing construction. But the home owners don't want that.
Bank of America says that half the jobs in the US might be automated in the next 20 years.
Plutocratist rulers will use this as an opportunity to cut wages for the remaining jobs, and will shuffle the surplus humans around until they die.
Louisiana thugs shot at driver Chris Few, and killed him and his son.
The are obfuscating the situation by saying that maybe Few had a gun and shot his own son, but this seems to be pure fabrication.
The thugs have admitted that Few was not shooting at them (he didn't have a gun). They claimed Few was backing up his car towards them, but the evidence shows that was false too.
The EU is proposing to take the fingerprints of visitors to the EU.
I think that would mean a lot of countries I would never visit again.
Sanders has introduced legislation to end the federal war on marijuana, leaving the decision about its legality clearly to the states.
The thug who attacked and paralyzed Sureshbhai Patel, an old man who was simply walking next to his son's house, has had a deadlocked jury for the second time.
This indicates that some aspect of the system needs to be changed.
The EU must stop member states from competing to offer businesses the biggest opportunities for tax dodging.
Murdoch has fired hundreds of employees of the "National Geographic" magazine, which he bought from the National Geographic Society. This suggests that all the worst fears about what he would do it are true.
VW says that some of its cars emit more CO2 in real use than in tests.
The Rohingya minority in Burma have been blocked from voting and from running for office.
The US rejected TransCanada's request to delay consideration of the Keystone XL pipeline. This means that Obama can make the decision, if he does not delay it instead.
Mexico's Supreme Court ruled that growing and smoking marijuana are legal.
PISSI may have brought down a Russian airliner with a bomb smuggled on board.
It may have been difficult, but if they did it, it was not impossible.
Clinton distorts Sanders' words as an excuse to call him racist and sexist.
To prevent an opposition rally, the Maldives government has declared a "state of emergency".
The leader of the opposition is the legitimately elected president, who was removed in a coup.
Egyptians protested al-Sisi in London, since he has crushed all dissent in Egypt.
A US thug committed suicide, making it look like murder, because he was about to be caught stealing from charity.
Other thugs tried to use this to condemn Black Lives Matter.
Sanders has proposed a bill to close off fossil fuel extraction from US public lands.
The UK has cancelled its push to impose fracking in "Sites of Special Scientific Interest".
That's good, but fracking elsewhere can poison the water for people and farms.
Corruption and peculation are rife in the Vatican.
A Koch brother admits that he expects something in return for his campaign contributions. In fact, he gets plenty for them.
Iran admits sentencing two poets to around 10 years in prison for "insulting religion".
If you want to see a worse insult against Iran's religion, their sentence is one.
If their appeals are not successful, it may be time for an international poetry campaign to insult Iran's religion for its censorship.
British journalists were sentenced to short prison terms for making a documentary in Indonesia that the Indonesian government didn't like. Their local employees might be jailed for years.
In the name of avoiding inconveniences, public protests in Jakarta have been limited to unusual "free speech zones" and required to keep quiet.
Shame on Indonesia for this censorship.
Renewable energy not only helps avoid disaster, it also helps spread the wealth.
Australia says it is unhappy about the multiple human rights violations of Nauru.
If Australia were serious about this, it could easily make Nauru change its policies. I suspect that Australia has encouraged these policies so as to cover up the treatment meted out to the refugees Australia sends to Nauru.
Ohio voters defeated a corrupt proposal to legalize marijuana, perhaps because they didn't like the corrupt aspect.
Traditional beer brewing has ceased to function in Belgium because of global heating.
The prime minister of Romania has resigned because of protests against corruption.
China appears to be underreporting coal consumption by as much as 17%.
Australia's right-wing government is no longer led by a suppository, but it still plans increased dooH niboR. Now it plans a big increase in VAT (a kind of sales tax), which will put the burden mainly on the poor.
What's really called for is an increase in income tax for high earners, or the progressive income tax on businesses that I've proposed.
Students protested today in London demanding a return to gratis university education.
The Taliban have an assassination program for journalists.
The UK plans to ban companies from offering encryption they can't break.
If big companies surrender to this, other countries will make the same demand.
The UK's new attack on privacy, spelled out.
Conservative food use-by dates tend to generate food waste.
I would not blame the supermarkets so much. They will face public criticism when goods don't last to their "use by" dates.
It is no use urging people to learn and remember rules about how long food lasts. The fraction of people who regularly cook is much less nowadays, and those who don't do this won't be motivated to learn them. We will inevitably depend on what the supermarket says.
When US thugs rape, the victims hardly ever report it. They believe, and I suspect they are right, that the other thugs will defend the rapists.
The EPA concluded that glyphosate is not an endocrine disruptor, but the evidence was provided by Monsanto, which means we can't rely on it.
People who do Google searches for "need money fast" see ads for companies called "lead generators" that put them on a list of potential suckers.
If you do a Google search in a way that doesn't hide who and where you are, including use of Tor, not specifying any account, and blocking cookies, you do seem to be a sucker.
A fanatical Israeli "settler" set fire to Palestinians' olive trees while a team from Rabbis for Human Rights was trying to protect them by serving as witnesses. Official firefighters did not arrive soon, so the president of Rabbis for Human Rights tried to put the fire out himself. The fanatic did not like this and tried to stab him.
The thugs took their time arriving, making sure the fanatic could get away, and then called the Rabbis presence a "provocation" against the fanatics.
I have to wonder if the firemen stayed away because coming to put out this fire would have been considered a "provocation".
Israel has been slowly cutting off the non-central parts of Jerusalem where Arabs live, and those Arabs themselves. Recently it became clear that this is aimed at the goal of cutting them all off.
East Jerusalem has one hospital, so wounded Palestinian protesters all go there. Israel has recently been raiding the hospital and harassing the doctors, even shooting tear gas inside the hospital.
They could kill patients that way.
Qadhafi's forces did not massacre civilians in the Libyan rebel cities they recaptured.
When Clinton warned there would be a massacre in Benghazi, this claim had no support from intelligence.
The intervention was, it seems, intended simply to remove Qadhafi from power. Although for a time it appeared to lead towards democracy, it led to chaotic violence that spread beyond Libya.
I've decided to spell the name "Qadhafi" because that follows the standard transliteration of Arabic. "Gaddafi" is more common, but not correct.
Right-wing US politicians invented the "liberal media" claim in the 1950s. In fact, the US mass media were predominantly right-wing then, before, and since.
Ayatollah Khamenei says that the slogan "Death to America" refers to US policies and arrogance, not the the American nation.
This makes a big difference. If Iran declares a wish for genocide against Americans, we would have to consider Iran an enemy. But when it condemns only how the US government treats and has treated Iran (and possibly some other countries), Americans can easily recognize valid points in that criticism. This provides a basis for patriotic Americans to push for the changes in the US needed for reconciliation with Iran.
The remaining cause of friction between the US and Iran has to do with the Iranian regime's oppression of Iranians. Progressive Americans really care about these injustices. US plutocrats probably don't. If the US were to support Iran totally, that would be wrong, just as it is wrong for the US to support Saudi Arabia and Egypt today.
When Khamanei dies, there may be an opportunity for diplomats to lead both countries to correct their wrongs.
Christiana Figueres, the UN's head climate official, says that China is trying very hard to move to clean energy, while the US is dragging its feet.
In China, the state is a plutocrat. In the US, private plutocrats control the state. As a result, China is capable of making an investment for long-term good, while the US is blocked by the plutocrats.
The UK government is treating help for women facing domestic violence as it is treating renewable energy.
Calling for a Jewish-Arab
peace and justice party in Israel.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
Non-extremist imams in Afghanistan teach the use of birth control.
Russia says it arrested the director of the Ukrainian library because it had a banned book. The deputy director says that the banned book in question was not theirs; that Russian thugs planted it to frame them.
We don't need to ask which one is telling the truth, because the Russian state is wrong either way. It is wrong to ban books.
Companies that try to sell "smart guns" (with access control) in the US have faced violent threats.
The access control in these guns is not DRM, because it is under the control of the gun owner.
Chelsea Manning calls for replacing the FISA court with courts that will make it their mission to resist unreasonable searches.
Limiting access to digital dossiers is not sufficient to protect whistleblowers from being identified. We need to redesign digital systems so that they don't collect digital dossiers, except about court-designated targets.
A thug from near Detroit shows how much violence a thug can get away with in the US. Finally he is being prosecuted.
As UK transfers its spending from poor people to nuclear power plants, more people are homeless. In once city, volunteers have organized to give them breakfast.
That will work for a while, but as the Tories continue cutting further, many of those now giving will join the hungry or the homeless.
As Aneurin Bevan said, the Tories are lower than vermin.
Apple censored an app to display videos presented at the Chaos Communications Congress because it did not censor presenters as Apple demands.
Apple's censorship is wrong, now as always, and designing computers as platforms for censorship should be illegal.
However, it is also wrong to make proprietary apps for the iThing. The Chaos Computer Club should do its streaming on the World Wide Web using a freedom-respecting video format.
TransCanada has tried to delay its application to build the Keystone XL pipeline, hoping to defer the decision to the next president.
Perhaps it is betting the next president will be bought. Or perhaps it's no longer profitable. Obama may still be able to veto it if he wishes.
I often referred to Keystone XL as the "planet-roaster pipeline", because it would enable the export of a decisively dangerous amount of tar sends oil.
This does not mean that avoiding the Keystone XL will make us safe. We need to leave 80% of the world's known fossil fuels in the ground, just to keep global heating to under 2C. There are many fossil fuel projects that could roast our planet, many chances to fail.
In the real World Series, humanity vs plutocrats, humanity is losing. We need to win nearly every game from here on.
Australia's latest horrible idea: passports that are only data in a server.
They call them "cloud passports", using the standard buzzword. There is no "cloud" — only other people's computers.
The passport data would be stored in some computer, but whose? And how will that computer be run?
Storing passports as data in some server will eliminate the problem that tens of thousand of passports are lost or stolen (mostly lost) individually, and introduce the problem that millions could be stolen at once digitally.
I suspect this will also involve a lot more biometric data than now.
An Indian singer faces possible life imprisonment for criticizing the chief minister of Tamil Nadu state.
The chief minister, in India, is the equivalent of a governor in the US.
I don't agree with the singer's position in favor of banning alcohol. I have no idea whether the chief minister profits from sales of alcohol. It is not clear whether the singer accused the chief minister personally, or the state government, of getting profits from alcohol.
What is important is that saying such things must not be a crime.
Soda companies fund "health" organizations to corrupt them so that they won't take action to lead people to drink less soda. They also promote campaigns for people to exercise more, so as to deny space to campaigns to drink less soda.
Soda with sugar leads to obesity, but soda with sugar substitutes is not innocuous; they tend to confuse the brain.
US citizens: call for closing the
carried
interest loophole.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-27 because the
old
link was broken.]
Researchers say that ice in Western Antarctica is irreversibly retreating — there is no way to prevent it from raising sea level by 3 meters, though that will take centuries.
In many countries, the US practices a foreign policy that is wicked (and absurd too).
Why Every Environmentalist Should Care about Inequality.
US citizens: call for prosecution of Exxon for fraudulently denying global heating.
US citizens: call on Pelosi to file a discharge petition for a gun-control bill.
This discharge petition is a step towards reducing the number of discharges of guns.
An LA thug has been sentenced to prison because he let his deputies beat up a man who came to visit his brother in jail.
The rule that visitors can't bring portable phones may be legitimate, but there is no reason to beat them up if they have one. Anyway, doesn't each prisoner have a cell phone?
Pentagon Spent $43m on 'World's Most Expensive Gas Station' in Afghanistan.
There's No Perfect Answer to the Migrant Crisis. We need to change foreign policies that have destabilized so many countries and driven millions to flee.
The replacements for ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons turn out to be powerful greenhouse gases; we need to switch again.
Wang Yam was convicted of murder in the UK by a secret court. Why is the evidence secret? That's a secret too.
Wang Yam is now trying to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, but the government has arbitrarily vetoed this.
A discussion of sex-work trafficking in Wisconsin has been totally confused, because it is based on blindly labeling work by teenagers as "trafficking", and equating their customers to pimps.
Thus, when the article talks of "rescuing" minors from sex work, we can't tell how many have indeed been rescued from pimps, and how many saw their customers arrested and felt compelled to pretend to be grateful.
No good can come from willful blindness about this difference.
Minors that do sex work are called "trafficked" even if they do it by choice and have the option to stop at any time. No wonder that, according to the article, many of the minors that are "rescued" from "trafficking" choose freely to go back to it. Maybe they chose it freely the first time, too.
The article acknowledges that they do this because their other options are very bad. That's where they could use some help. But the state of Wisconsin won't give them that.
I wonder how much of their problems are due to Wisconsin's Governor Walker and his attacks on aid to the disadvantaged, as well as political ethics requirements and campaign finance laws.
His policies are just the thing to force poor people into some sort of underground economy.
The Antarctic ice sheet is gaining thickness inland due to increased precipitation there.
This doesn't alter the observed rise in sea level, so it means the increase is coming from some other unknown source.
SCROTUS and Obama imposed the "sequester" as a "compromise" to cut the US budget in all areas. Now they have a new "compromise" that expands the war budget, while threatening Social Security and Medicare.
Selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, when the low price suggests buying it instead, is sabotage of the treasury. "Buy high, sell low" is stupid, except when (as here) it is worse than stupid. Ultimately, plutocratist politicians betray the country to their paymasters.
SCROTUS stands for Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
In Burma, Buddhist extremists attack women's rights, sex education, and any discussion about sex.
The Buddha would advise those monks to question their attachment to those prejudices.
I expect there is a word in Burmese for "vagina", but it was omitted from the dictionary because it is considered too rude.
Mandatory, organized fun as part of a job is a form of manipulation.
Japanese companies pushed this to extreme lengths. Someone I know, who had no tolerance for alcohol and had to avoid it, had no choice but to work for a government lab, because all companies would require him to get drunk as part of "leisure" activities.
The suppository of all carbon emissions, Tony Abbott, succeeded in cutting renewable energy investment in Australia by almost 1/3.
Even 2C of global heating will do great harm. Drastic action is needed to avoid climate mayhem, and it doesn't look like leaders are prepared to do it.
It isn't certain that 2C of heating is possible. It might be that once warming goes beyond 1.5C (or 1.75, or 1.25, or some such amount), a positive feedback will kick in and push the heating up to 2.5C (or 3C, or 4C, or 5C, or some such amount). We are playing with fire, and the only certainty is that we must stop.
Ukraine's Russia-supported rebels are unhappy now that Putin is dialing down that war.
Haitian President Martelli is using government vehicles painted with Red Cross markings to carry false ballots to rig the election.
Pacific Islands Make Last-Ditch Plea to World Before Paris Climate Change Talks.
They will be inundated, and their people have no recognized right to go anywhere else.
Erdoğan's party won the election in Turkey. His war and his repression of the press have paid off, leading Turkey towards tyranny.
Monitors say that Turkey's election was unfair.
Haiti's US-imposed president Martelli unilaterally gave each minister a golden parachute of $46,000, although the treasury is supposed to be empty.
The whole dirty story about the school thug's violent attack on the orphaned teenager because she would not give her phone to the teacher.
The teacher, the principal, and then the thug, were all defending the principle of total obedience.
The clash of two world-views about wolf-whistles and compliments.
In the posted highlights of the hours of video made by a woman walking in New York City, some men were very pushy and wouldn't take no for an answer. That's clearly harassment. Even some brief remarks were harsh in their attitude. It is unkind to treat someone that way.
However, there is no need to consider kind complements as harassment. This is not a subjective question. You can get offended when someone says "hello", but that doesn't mean we consider your offense justified.
Billionaires including the Koch brothers suppress criticism by donating money to universities, museums, public TV, etc.
The Gates Foundation has done something similar in the field of US education.
For a university to do what Florida State University did, and let donors choose their professors, is a despicable surrender. It would be well for students there to picket the economics department ever year for this.
Ohio proposes to legalize selling marijuana, only for certain specific companies that have invested in advance.
The 'anti-Knowledge' of the elites in Washington goes unchallenged by the established press.
Standardized tests can have the effect of racial profiling.
The English Regent's Exam tests for a real skill, and the people who fail that test really lack that skill. Is that important? That depends on what they are going to do.
I speak French well enough to give speeches, have useful meetings with public officials, and write articles for publication (though they require editing by others). But I could not pass the French equivalent of the English Regent's Exam, because there are many French words and idiomatic expressions I don't know, and many references I would not catch.
Would my failure on that hypothetical test be significant? Is my command of French adequate or not? That depends on what activity I am going to do. For understanding le Canard enchainé, I am hopelessly incompetent; for championing free software in French, I seem reasonably capable.
Likewise, whether someone's failure on the English Regent's Exam is a real shortcoming depends on what you want that person to do. If it is to have sophisticated conversations in English the way an educated native speaker can, it is a real shortcoming and you should look for someone else. For college study in a field other than English, the failure at that exam may not matter.
SXSW cancelled panels about online harassment, giving way to online harassment. In response to criticism, it has brought them back, and added more.
Gamergate Didn't Fade Into Obscurity. We Just Stopped Noticing Its Existence.
It is cowardly to cancel an event because of threats — especially online threats, which are generally nothing but bombast.
A fungus is going to kill 90% of the UK's ash trees. Should genetic modification be used to make ash trees that can survive the fungus?
It seems plausible to me. These trees won't be fed to people, and pesticide won't be used on them; that eliminates two of the main issues. Furthermore, since the wild type is being wiped out anyway, there is no need to be concerned that it will be contaminated by the inserted gene.
Hurrah for Female Bosses, But Let's Not Forget Their Cleaners.
I would go further. What matters about the people corporate boardrooms is not their gender, but that they have too much power and get too much money. The poorly-paid female employees, and male employees too, deserve a higher wage.
The state can learn a lot about you from your phone call metadata.
6 Spooky Ways Local Law Enforcement Is Watching You.
I think we must prohibit several of these systems.
Upcoming UN Climate Summit Can't Overlook China's Support of Global Coal Power.
When US officials prosecute thugs, thugs organize retaliation, in the form of private and even official noncooperation, as well as frame-ups.
This is why they all deserve the name of "thugs". Anyone in Albuquerque who claims the honorable title of "police officer" should validate that claim by publicly denouncing these retaliation campaigns and affirming that thugs shouldn't get away with murder.
Moving your money out of the big Wall Street banks can be 20 times as effective as it appears.
The Library of Congress approved several specific three-year exemptions to the DMCA's prohibition on breaking DRM (digital restrictions management).
However, since the exemptions do not allow distributing the means to actually do so, they may in some cases be impossible to take advantage of.
The campaigns for these exemptions are a harmful distraction which saps energy from what we really need: to repeal what the DMCA says about DRM. It should be a crime to make systems with DRM.
The article uses the ill-advised term "digital locks" to refer to digital restrictions mechanisms. See the explanation of why that term is a bad analogy, and please join me in not using it.
The Corporations United (*) decision allows companies to tell their employees how to vote, and one big investor is trying to do this through all the companies he invests in.
This shows why we need a constitutional amendment that denies across the board that corporations are entitled to human rights — not just in regard to campaign spending.
* The front group used the misleading term "Citizens United"; there is no reason for us to join it in misleading people about what it represented.
Republicans in several state legislatures have passed laws to pre-empt cities from regulating areas such as minimum wage and fracking; and they remove local voter initiatives from the ballot, so that the city cannot challenge the validity of the state's pre-emption.
A German investigation has determined that the NSA spied pervasively on the German government.
Intellectual freedom in in the UK is threatened by the right-wing state and by left-wing students.
Now that the Somali pirates have been suppressed, illegal foreign fishing boats have returned to the area.
Shaker Aamer suffers from PTSD and will need years of treatment.
US citizens: insist that BP get no tax break from its damage payments.
US citizens: call on Obama to adopt the People's Climate Test.
US citizens: call on the Senate to maintain the rules for labeling meat by country of origin.
Indonesia's forest fires, a scheme for deforestation, have made half a million people sick in the region.
Four more secularist publishers and writers have been attacked in Bangladesh.
Obama said he has become disenchanted with standardized tests, and proposes a limit on them — but not a real reduction.
The issue is not how many hours students spend taking the tests, but how much their studies are shaped around the tests, and how the tests are used. Bigger policy changes are needed.
The FBI director admits he has no objective basis for claiming that Black Lives Matter protests caused a recent increase in crime. But he will blame them anyway.
He also blames the fact that people can use videos to demonstrate the crimes that thugs commit. His argument is that anything that makes thugs hesitate to beat people up and lie about it constitutes an impediment to their work.
Indonesia's Forest Fires Threaten a Third of World's Wild Orangutans.
The UK refused to investigate whether "sanctions" against the unemployed are achieving any of their supposed purposes.
Israeli troops told Palestinians: "Throw stones and we will hit you with gas until you all die — the youth, the children, the old people…You will all die. We will not leave any of you alive."
Palestinians are already being killed regularly by tear gas.
Money Flooding State Court Elections Threatens the Promise of Equal Justice.
How presidential candidates stand on the US options in Syria, which all have major drawbacks.
The article has one section entitled "'Safe zones' and special forces", but the section discusses only the safe zones, not special forces.
Women in Ireland and Northern Ireland have to borrow money so they can travel to England to get an abortion.
The way to end the stigma placed in Ireland on abortion is for women to talk about their abortions unapologetically. It is imperative for women in Ireland to stop acting ashamed.
Al-Sisi offers Britain the sort of tyrant that Britain is accustomed to doing business with.
"I got 643 days of torture [in Egypt]. My tormentor gets Cameron's red carpet."
Parts of the US no longer have tap water that is safe to drink.
Lesbians occasionally bear, like blacks, the brunt of thugs' persecution.
Transparency for the State, Privacy for the Rest of Us.
Diets generally do not achieve much weight loss.
Low-fat diets are the least effective, but perhaps that is because low-fat food products have added sugar.
Sanders calls for ending the death penalty, legalizing marijuana, reducing incarceration, and helping ex-cons get back into society.
The thug's vicious attack on a sitting high school girl is the extreme example of a systematic repression imposed in US public schools generally. Any student can be punished or suspended for minor or even fantasy "wrongs", but black students generally face worse treatment.
Suspension from school is extremely frequent: high schools suspend, each year, almost as many students as they graduate. Smaller punishments are probably far more frequent.
This system resembles a training program for living in an occupied country, and students could understand it as such. The thugs in the schools are soldiers in the occupying army, and the school officials are the local collaborators, quislings (that's why they order quizzes).
The teachers are mostly sincere, trying to provide what education they can under the occupation which they cannot defy, but that is easier said than done.
The goal is to make trouble for the occupation without letting the soldiers figure out who did it or how.
Obama is sending a contingent of US special forces to assist the Syrian Kurds.
This seems like a good idea to me. A limited amount of help for the Kurds could make a big difference for them in fighting PISSI, while avoiding the harm that a large US intervention force would do.
If the Kurds can cut off PISSI from the Turkish border, it would crimp PISSI's funds (obtained by selling oil) and recruitment (foreign recruits come through Turkey).
Obama should ask Congress for approval of the US intervention against PISSI. I expect he would easily get approval. The point is to maintain the system of checks and balances.
A black man is suspected of setting fire to churches near Ferguson.
Uri Avnery says: in blaming the holocaust on a factional Palestinian leader, Netanyahu went beyond the realm of dishonesty and manipulation, into the realm of lunacy.
Australia will give pregnant refugee Abyan another chance to get an abortion.
Even Sanders goes along with official US foreign policy lies some of the time.
Chavez won elections honestly, but his successor, Maduro, represses the opposition increasingly as it grows in strength.
Sanders doesn't do everything right, but he's a lot better even on foreign policy issues than the other candidates.
Sara Khan tries to convince British Muslim girls to reject extremism because it is a form of patriarchy.
I strongly dislike religious extremism, in any religion, even in the Church of Emacs. However, people have a right to profess those views, and it is wrong to prohibit them. The UK government has trashed so many human rights already that I expect the worst.
A scientific review finds that experiments demonstrate that neonicotinoids harm bees, but it is not yet proved that they are responsible for colony collapse.
Since bees are crucial to agriculture, and to the survival of many species of plants, we can't afford to risk it.
The UK government is about to demand ISPs record everyone's browsing history.
An NFL team wants to drain St Louis of millions for a new stadium; a movement of citizens opposes the fans.
NFL teams are businesses. It's too bad so many Americans direct their loyalty at businesses.
Major Indian historians have condemned the "climate of intolerance" that encourages violence and censorship of dissent from Hindu nationalist ideology and myths.
UK students will protest to oppose the adoption of a US-style market-dominated university system.
Shaker Aamer has been released from Guantanamo and has returned to Britain.
Rebellious officials in the Pentagon delayed his release for 5 years by refusing to let him go back to the UK.
He is going to sue the British government for complicity in his imprisonment and torture.
He certainly deserves compensation, but if the UK government settles the case to avoid exposure of its wrongs, that will not do justice.
"Unarmed civilian protection" persuades armed groups in South Sudan to refrain from violence, at least some of the time.
Assad's forces fired missiles at a market and killed at least 40 people. I would expect most of them were civilians.
Indonesia Is Burning. So Why Is the World Looking Away?
Everyone: call on CNN to replace commentator Harry Houck, who never saw a violent thug he didn't like.
Criminalizing criticism of officials threatens democracy in Malaysia.
Democracy in Malaysia was never very strong, which makes it even more vulnerable now.
A large forest fire is burning in the Amazon "rainforest", and has been burning for two months. This suggests o me that there is not as much rain as there normally used to be.
Large parts of Brazil have suffered from an unprecedented drought.
Global heating could play some role in this, but the cutting down of much of the forests are responsible for both.
The UN says that current carbon pledges will probably keep global heating to under 3C.
That is still taking too big a risk. Even the 2C target is somewhat arbitrary, since we don't know it will avoid disaster (or positive-feedback tipping points that would push warming further).
In addition, without an enforcement mechanism, we can't be confident all the countries will carry out their unilateral pledges.
Various organizations demand internet censorship in US universities to eliminate racist statements and insults.
I find some of those statements disgusting — others are merely foolish — but censorship is far more disgusting.
The scariest thing is that this sort of censorship has already become deeply implanted in many otherwise free countries. And in some of them, such as France and the UK, it is spreading to other kinds of censorship.
Pennsylvania has jailed a man for telling children on the street that he was on the way to a cabin in the woods.
A paranoid US parent, who has probably heard exaggerated stories about the nearly nonexistent "stranger danger", reported this as suspicious.
Perhaps thugs regarded the man as dangerous because he is autistic and could not rebut the suspicion.
Haiti's "president" Martelly is trying to impose a successor by rigging the election.
The US imposed Martelly through blatant contempt for the Haitian electoral system.
Following Guber, a new service matches up PR companies with piecework "journalists" that will take pay to write their press releases into "news articles".
I call it "Guber" because it pays drivers peanuts, but there are many reasons why we should refuse ever to use Guber.
Censorship on Rise as Global Internet Freedom Continues Downward Spiral.
The Gulf of Maine is now too warm for cod to live there.
This area of the sea used to be a major cod fishery, though they were mostly wiped out by overfishing a few decades ago. Massachusetts must now replace the Sacred Cod with Sacred Car.
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