[ 2024 July - October | 2024 March - June | 2023 November - February | 2023 July - October | 2023 March - June | 2022 November - February | 2022 July - October | 2022 March - June | 2021 November - February | 2021 July - October | 2021 March - June | 2020 November - February | 2020 July - October | 2020 March - June | 2024 July - October | 2024 March - June | 2023 November - February | 2023 July - October | 2023 March - June | 2022 November - February | 2022 July - October | 2022 March - June | 2021 November - February | 2021 July - October | 2021 March - June | 2020 November - February | 2020 July - October | 2020 March - June | 2019 November - February | 2019 July - October | 2019 March - June | 2018 November - February | 2018 July - October | 2018 March - June | 2017 November - February | 2017 July - October | 2017 March - June | 2016 November - February | 2016 July - October | 2016 March - June | 2015 November - February | 2015 July - October | 2015 March - June | 2014 November - February | 2014 July - October | 2014 March - June | 2013 November - February | 2013 July - October | 2013 March - June | 2012 November - February | 2012 July - October | 2012 March - June | 2011 November - February | 2011 July - October | 2011 March - June | 2010 November - February | 2010 July - October | 2010 March - June | 2009 November - February | 2009 July - October | 2009 March - June | 2008 November - February | 2008 July - October | 2008 March - June | 2007 November - February | 2007 July - October | 2007 March - June | 2006 November - February | 2006 July - October | 2006 March - June | 2005 November - February | 2005 July - October | 2005 March - June | 2004 November - February | 2004 July - October | 2004 March - June | 2003 November - February | 2003 July - October | 2003 March - June | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 ]
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.
In the US: join a demonstration on behalf of immigrants and refugees.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose Rep. Ryan's "compromise" bill which is meant to substitute for treating refugees and other immigrants justly.
Citizens of Massachusetts: phone your state representative to support protection for immigrants by the state.
In Australia as in the US, privatization of prisons has created a prison-industrial complex that lobbies to put more people in prison.
The blacks that are imprisoned by preference in Australia are not descendants of Africans, but rather indigenous peoples.
Spanish Doctor Stands Trial over Franco-Era 'Stolen Babies'.
When useds of Facebook stop logging in, Facebook sends them emails to manipulate them to come back.
This does no direct harm to the used, but demonstrates how manipulative Facebook is in general.
Your real friends will keep in touch in some other way. Your other "friends", you can do without.
The bully wants to tear up the US constitution and reject refugees without any court hearing.
The saddest part is that this is what happens now, most of the time, in practice.
British courts have ruled several times that sweatshop service economy workers are employees and are entitled to the legal rights of employees.
A summary of Nicaragua's history since the 70s, with a view to explaining the situation today.
Spenser Rapone was an Army Ranger, then attended West Point officer training. The Rangers were invited to brainwash themselves to worship their rifles and dehumanize civilians. In West Point he realized he was "the muscle for those with wealth and status."
The Supreme Court protects racist gerrymandering, showing that it is in cahoots with those that don't want to allow Americans to have fair elections.
Thugs force prisoners in immigration prison to recite the US pledge of allegiance every day to express their "respect" for the US. The US should show more respect for them, but I think that the one-sidedness of this is intentional. The bully's idea of making America "great" is that all bow down to it. The authoritarian followers that are his supporters will groove on seeing him make others bow down. "You have to respect us and we don't have to respect you" is what he stands for.
Tim Wilkins encountered multiple groups of teenagers and children being moved around the US in commercial flights, accompanied by people who tried to stop them from talking with him.
One of them very much wanted to talk with him, but was scared to do so. Probably she had been punished very harshly and knew what they would do to her. She said she had arrived in the US alone, but the toddlers were surely brought by their parents.
The word "detained" is designed to deemotionalize a vicious crime. Please join me in refusing to use that word in this context. We don't have to let official policies impose vocabulary on us.
"As a black man, I don't need to be protected from offensive ideas. I'd rather hear them for myself — and challenge them."
A restaurant owner refused to serve Sarah Sanders, who has the job of running supposed "press briefings" for the White House, holding her responsible for taking refugee children and adolescents away from their parents.
It would be a mistake to hold government employees in general responsible for specific actions, other than those directly involved in carrying them out. For instance, a national park ranger or meat inspector would not be culpable for this at all. Even some cabinet secretaries might have nothing to do with it.
However, Ms Sanders works visibly and directly for the president. We can presume she supports all the president's policies if she does not denounce them or quit.
The UK disguises some of its sales of bombs to Salafi Arabia.
Thugs in Venezuela kill people at will, then fake evidence of a fictional gunfight to justify it.
New York's legislature has passed a bill to make prosecutors accountable for misconduct (denying suspects a fair trial).
UN Condemns Trump Administration for Exacerbating US Poverty Levels.
States force prisoners into hard labor for absurd reasons.
Deportation thugs, too.
Sam Lavigne tried to help Americans hold deportation thugs responsible for imprisoning migrant children and adolescents, by publishing the names and phone numbers of the thugs. However, various web sites deleted his post.
I think it is usually wrong to doxx people, but the staff of ICE are engaged in terrible cruelty that will scar some of their victims permanently. Due to their personal actions, they deserve to face personal protests.
Flight attendant Hunt Palmquist vowed he would refuse to work on flights to transport immigrant child prisoners.
He realized that if he helped do this, he would morally responsible for his actions.
His response may be the reason that some airlines have since refused to carry those prisoners. We should pressure the other airlines in the US to do the same.
The acting saboteur of NOAA wants to redefine its mission to exclude concern for the climate and conservation.
Sniper's War and Anti-Terrorist Terrorism.
Polio has reappeared in Papua New Guinea, where it was supposed to have been eradicated.
It seems unlikely that it got there from Afghanistan or Africa, so where did it come from? Was polio being passed on there for many years, unnoticed?
One problem with having dogs and cats as pets is that they eat a lot of meat. This contributes substantially to our exhaustion of the Earth.
Cats that hunt birds to eat do great harm to bird populations. We need a smaller population of dogs and cats, just as we need a smaller population of humans.
If you keep a parrot as a pet, it will eat seeds, which use up a lot less agricultural resources than meat for a dog or cat.
The UK treats refugees the way it treats disabled people: seizing any fragment of an excuse to deport them.
The bully-saboteur-cheater is directly and fundamentally anti-American.
Politicians that treat politics as a show rather than as an argument are a poison for democracy in general.
Making families homeless because a child belongs to a gang will create more and increasingly vulnerable children that are easy prey for gangs.
Enslaved people are often forced to commit crimes. The bully plans to stop helping them vacate the convictions for those crimes.
The bigot's ambassador to Israel uses his position to advance repression in Israel and the US. He also violates rules for US ambassadors, and should be investigated for that.
Hindu fanatics are spewing hate at an Indian government minister for intervening to overturn religious bigotry.
These fanatics are the equivalent of US neonazis: they are openly bigots and spew the same hate at anyone who opposes bigotry.
Immigration prisoners are being sent to a federal prison where infections are spreading.
The US military is planning to make immigration tent prisons for over 100,000 prisoners.
While the blacks killed by US thugs number in the thousands, these killings cause lasting psychological symptoms for millions of blacks that live in the same states.
Years after Google dropped the motto "Don't be evil", many of the engineers campaign firmly against some kinds of evils.
I wish they would campaign against making services depend on making the user run nonfree Javascript code and blocking access through Tor. I used to use Google Search sometimes, back when it would talk to me in this way, but now it simply doesn't work.
Javier Solana, former head of Nato, can't visit the US because he visited Iran.
"[The bully's] officials don't get to eat dinner in peace — not while kids are in cages."
James Hansen's 1988 Scenario B (moderate emissions cuts) is proving accurate, but the Koch brothers' paid liars are still lying about it.
Erdoğan won the election in Turkey, and will have almost despotic power over the country, where there is no longer an independent judiciary.
US citizens: Call on the Department of Justice to investigate cops that kill.
Mumbai has banned single-use plastic bags, cups and bottles.
I try to avoid bottled water, but in India that's not feasible. How are they selling drinking water there?
The US is building a surveillance "wall" at the US-Mexico border, but it is likely to track everyone within 100 miles of the border in their daily lives.
The sweatshop service economy assures that most people's wages do not rise even when there is high demand for workers. The businesses have arranged to charge workers' piecework directly to consumers.
Applying the minimum wage to this piecework would be fine, but perhaps it would be better to get rid of that business model.
China's trade warfare specifically targets the states that voted for the bully.
Republican active cruelty to downtrodden people brings back the world of 1830s Britain, shown in Dickens' novels.
17 years after the US conquest of Afghanistan, and some 15 years after the Taliban began fighting effectively, it is clear that the US has no way ever to win this war.
I've been saying so for many years.
The only way to have peace in Afghanistan is for the US to let the Taliban win.
Assad is attacking Syrian Arab rebels, and the US has told them it will not intervene.
This might be better than intervening to keep the fighting going. These rebels are not particularly deserving of support.
For "smart", read "sabotage". Computerized appliances can be used for harassment and gaslighting by a lover or ex-lover. Since men generally know more about using these devices than women, it tend to be men that do this to women.
This special case of wrongdoing does not depend on the device itself to be malicious (although the same devices probably do spy, and may be vulnerable to sabotage by the manufacturer).
Raising a multilingual child requires knowing what to do, but it is a great help to per future.
I sure wish I could have learned French and Spanish as a child rather than having to study them as an adult.
If you've already had a child (since especially today it is better to avoid that), and you speak a language other than the principal one used where you live, give per the best. Give per your other language.
Saboteur Sessions defended splitting refugee families by citing the same bible verses that were usually cited in the 19th century to justify slavery. His supporters love it, because they have more or less shut off their consciences and dehumanized scapegoats and opposition.
In the US: tell Greyhound to stop aiding the US deportation thugs.
Fracking in northern Australia would immediately destroy Australia's Paris treaty greenhouse gas emissions. Even a single new gas field is too much.
Since we do not prohibit movies from showing murders with guns and knives, what justification can there be for censoring poems and songs that do likewise?
"The clamour in the west is for more controls on those who use the internet for communications, but little control of governments that use it for surveillance."
US cruelty officials sadists claim that they have kept track of all 2053 minors separated from their families.
If that is really true (who knows?), I hope it is all of them. The figure I have seen published is 2300 minors taken from their families.
In any case, these officials have the responsibility to reunite all of the families, and quickly.
Facebook finds it has trouble separating news from political polemics.
The UK forbade stores to charge extra for paying with a bank card. Since then, banks started charging stores more for the use of a card.
Does the UK allow stores to offer a discount for paying in cash?
Italy is denying entry to another ship carrying refugees, and more refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean.
The FBI Is Using Unvetted, Right-Wing Blacklists to Question Activists About Their Support for Palestine.
Gypsies have suffered repression and atrocities in Europe for 500 years.
The Koch brothers are funding a campaign against investing in public transit in the US.
Immigrants in the US face injustice at every stage of deportation proceedings based on suspicions of gang membership that are often irrational and based on vague nothing.
Zimbabwe Opposition Fears Crackdown after Election Rally Bombing.
100,000 people marched in London to demand a new referendum about whether to continue leaving the EU.
It disappoints me greatly that most of the arguments for remaining in the EU or for leaving are based on trickle-down and "free trade".
Malaysian cartoonist Zunar feels nostalgia for Razak's repeated attempts to imprison him for his work.
Arnovis Guidos Portillo was deported to El Salvador without getting a chance to apply for asylum. Now he can't get his daughter out of US immigration prison.
Gangs in El Salvador are so menacing that inhabitants threatened have to flee, no matter what the US might do to them.
I wonder if there is any way to set up a safe refuge in a part of El Salvador.
South Sudan has settled down into a state of permanent guerrilla war against many splintered guerrilla groups.
All these groups, including the state, fight for nothing but the advancement of their own leaders.
Rising sea level will kill coral reefs, because corals can't grow fast enough to stay near the surface.
Too much CO2 in the water will inevitably kill corals. The temperature can also kill them. So it seems that coral has little chance of surviving to the end of this century.
A billion people depend on marine resources for their food. In a few decades it could be a billion and a half. Thus, the loss of most of those resources could easily kill a billion people.
They won't all die directly from hunger. Many of them will die in wars over control of the dwindling marine resources. These wars will be futile, in that victory will at most delay the death of the victors.
If they start sooner, and fight fossil fuel extraction and use, they might avert much of the disaster. However, if they don't limit their populations, then barring some unforeseeable event they will reach the starvation point sooner or later.
A Movement Emerges to Free Former Students from Crushing Loan Debts.
Until Dubya was president, Americans could get rid of unpayable student loans through personal bankruptcy. We should make that possible again.
Puerto Rico's imposed nondemocratic unofficial government has responded to last summer's hurricane by planning to extract some of the recovery funds for the vampires (creditors) they serve.
The imposed unofficial government gives its members big salaries while cutting the wages of real workers.
An ex-conservative who lives with white-supremacist parents in a white-supremacist town says that what they want is to dominate others, and they don't think in terms of reasons.
The writer feels despair, feels that there is no chance of resisting these power-crazed bullies who intimidate others into surrender where they get a chance. I can't say that is impossible, but I think that the overall situation in the US is not as bad as it looks from where he sits.
Anti-abortion groups including "Focus on the Family" exposed the dishonesty of their concern for families by refusing to criticize their point man for taking children and teenagers away from their parents.
They don't criticize the substitute policy, indefinite imprisonment of families, either.
The saboteur of commerce faces an ethics complaint about insider trading, a crime.
The way to make pliant, craven people is to crush social relationships. Several decades of various US policies have led Americans quite a ways down that road (see the book Bowling Alone), but the bully is rushing us further along.
An oil train derailed in Iowa because tracks were flooded. Oil leaked into the water and has flowed downstream to the state capital, Des Moines.
The oil may get into the wells that provide water for Des Moines and various river towns, or it may not. It may get into them after a long time. If it does, the wells could remain polluted for a long time.
Ethiopia has unblocked access to several news web sites that it blocked in the past.
The saboteurs have forbidden scientists at the USGS from talking with the press.
US citizens: call on Democrats in Congress not to fund the bully's immigration plans.
The Supreme Court decision about cell phone location tracking was written in a very narrow way. It doesn't directly affect any other surveillance cases.
Opposition leader Selahattin Demirtaş, campaigning from jail, says that no fair election is possible in Turkey given its repression of opposition.
A visitor to Canada was jogging along the beach and without any notification found herself in the US. The US border thugs jailed her for two weeks, supposedly to make doubly sure she was not an unauthorized visitor to Canada.
That "reason" is no reason at all, since it wasn't necessary to do. The US thugs could have handed her over to a Canadian border post, which could have checked this immediately.
I am sure the reason for this policy, at some level, is a desire to cause pain — rationalized somehow, of course.
Cedella, please don't ask to be "allowed" into the US. Insist instead on an apology!
The torturer told US military bases to get ready to hold 20,000 minors as prisoners.
This would make it especially difficult for protesters to show those prisoners any sort of support. They would have to protest at the edge of the base, far away from anyone.
Another step in making protest useless and thus squishing democracy.
Ralph Nader: The Unsurpassed Power Trip by an Insuperable Control Freak.
Tories propose to put whole families on the street if one person in the family is a gang member.
This would be self-defeating, since the whole family would be forced to turn to some sort of crime, but it's worse than that: it is fundamentally unjust to use people as hostages for their relatives.
The US has already done things like this.
Measured methane leaks exceed the EPA's estimate of methane leaks by about 60%.
Since methane contributes heavily to global heating for the next few decades, this has a big effect.
Better EPA regulations could make fossil fuel companies greatly reduce leaks, but if they spent the money to do that they might not make a profit. So they tell the EPA not to bother them.
(Satire) Sarah Huckabee Sanders reminded journalists Friday that children under the age of 14 are unable to experience pain.
The UK's new extremely difficult one-time exams for 16-year-olds made many of them sick with stress.
Perhaps they could help themselves cope with this stress by holding protests after and between exams. They could hang Mr Gove in effigy, for instance. If crowds of students did this all across the UK, it could have a political effect.
Students should not limit their condemnation to one single Tory minister. The whole Tory party deserves the blame.
The exhilaration of the protest could also help them feel less hurt by the stress.
The SCROTUS farm bill would deny food stamps to 2 million people.
Republicans apparently hope that desperate poor people won't be able to struggle to vote.
Saboteur Pruitt appears to be illegally hiding his official communications from FOIA requests.
The number of refugees moving to the US since the 1990s is partly due to the business-supremacy treaties that the US has pushed onto Mexico and Central America.
Those coming from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are also partly caused by US-imposed dictatorship and military coups.
Censorship in repressive Hungary now aims to ban a theater production because it has a homosexual protagonist.
China is making abortions harder to get, based on the misguided idea that a low birth rate is some sort of problem.
When the population is decreasing, the working adults have more to do to take care of old people, and less to do to take care of children. It works out. Robots can do part of the job. It will be ok.
"Dear Europe, if you want stop Trump, sanction his companies."
The Supreme Court ruled that thugs must get a warrant to access people's cell phone records over an extended period of time.
I fear this means they are allowed to find where a person is located momentarily.
This is still a step forward, but does the ruling apply to the FBI? Snowden informed us that some phone companies were telling the FBI about every long distance phone call they made.
Asylum-seekers are compelled to cross the US border to find an official to present their case for asylum to, since the officials are hiding from them.
The article also says that the border thugs lie to parents, basically like gangsters, saying "your children will be back in a few days."
Democrats have proposed a bill to end the imprisonment of all border-crossers, as well as the separation of their families.
ICE tends naturally to cruelty because it was created as part of the Department of Harshness and Sadism. We ought to abolish it.
A whistleblower criticized Tesla for some sort of problems (I am not sure what), and Tesla is suing him.
It appears that Tesla falsely accused him of planning sabotage. In the conversation quoted, Musk tries to construe his statement as a threat, but that is clearly incorrect.
Brazilian thugs in a helicopter fired machine guns at a city and killed a teenager as well as perhaps others.
Canada secretly denies people entry at its borders using a blacklist maintained by the US.
Virginia legislators have a clever plan to discourage many blacks from voting.
If you let yourself become indifferent to suffering and injustice, the results are bad for you as well as for the world.
(Satire) Onion Social announced Wednesday that it intends to crack down on sexual harassment by banning women from the platform.
Microsoft is helping the US deportation thugs with face recognition.
Helping any government agency do face recognition ought to get any company on everyone's boycott list.
When a company's business "security" automation spuriously believes that a worker is fired, the human staff can't override it.
I wonder what would happen if a cracker marked every worker (including the executives) as fired.
Puerto Rico is closing 25% of its public schools. It can't afford to run them while feeding the hungry banksters.
To "protect" child prisoners, the immigration thugs say visiting members of Congress are not allowed to photograph them or talk with them. Did they get this inspiration from the Guantanamo prison?
Furthermore, if they have to arrange a visit two weeks in advance, the thugs could move all the prisoners to some other prison camp in the mean time. Federal prisons often move prisoners around repeatedly for no evident reason, perhaps to interfere with their contact with their lawyers and relatives.
The saboteur has cancelled the US ocean protection policy.
An AT&T-sponsored California state representative has ruined the state's network neutrality bill.
Here's more detail of what he did.
The sadist changed his mind; he says future border-crossers' children will now be imprisoned with their families.
The actual executive order is unclear and somewhat indirect, so we can't be sure which parts will be enforced.
Lawyers 'Not Confident' Family Separations Will End.
Supposing the border thugs do stop taking children away from their parents, the US will no longer inflict this one extra fillip of cruelty. However, the hostage-taker's many other immigration cruelties continue:
The UN Human Rights Council has been surrendering to Chinese repression.
US criticism of it might do some good, if it were not hypocritical.
The latest bailout for Greece's bankster creditors includes a postponement of payment on some loans.
I suspect, though, that the interest on those loans will continue accruing the whole time. So Greece is still stuck in a horrible trap.
Pension and welfare cuts, such as were forced on Greece, kill a certain fraction. I would expect that hundreds of thousands of Greeks were killed in this way. These deaths are what neoliberal economics calls a "reform". Minister Scholz says that Greeks have "done a good job" of surviving, or not surviving, the Euro-zone's imposed poverty.
I hope Scholz gets a chance, soon, to see how well he can do that same job.
Around the world, citizens of ostensibly democratic countries say they have little voice in what the state does.
I suspect that they are right, and that the cause is plutocracy including business-supremacy treaties.
New York City is supposedly thriving, but rising rents are causing rapid increase in poverty and homelessness, while causing the interesting local stores to close.
Protesters surrounded an immigration processing center for child and adolescents prisoners, and camped out, blocked access. The immigration thugs eventually shut down the center.
Toads are dying out in Britain.
Be careful if you make a pond for them — you might harbor mosquitos.
Teenagers alone in an immigration prison report they were tortured in several ways.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to condemn profiteering from imprisonment of refugee children or adolescents, and of refugee families.
Seven ways the current farm bill attacks the environment.
The saboteurs in charge say they will make no "special efforts" to return hostage minors to their parents. Meaning that if the minor is a baby and can't say who per parents are, they may never be able to find per.
There would be ways to identify them — with DNA, for example — but that costs money and these parents won't be able to afford that.
We don't know for certain whether officials kept no records out of carelessness or out of malice. But I'd bet it was malice, because malice is their watchword.
The US government's denial of refugee rights violates US law and an international refugee treaty.
A private immigration prison in Texas is forcibly drugging minors. The drugs make some of them sick and weak.
Here's some more information about how sick it made some of them.
New York protesters went to La Guardia Airport to show support to imprisoned children and teenagers that were being transported in on planes.
Italy's effective ruler, Salvini, plans to crush press criticism by removing the bodyguards from the reporters that face death threats from the mafia.
It wouldn't surprise me if his supporters soon come to love the mafia.
Half the population of India is short of clean water, and 200,000 people die from this each year.
Failure to maintain water pipes is part of the cause, but global heating contributes and so does population growth. India needs to curb its births before death limits its population.
Turkey's opposition is energized, but it still looks like Erdoğan will win the election.
There are so many tourists in parts of the Maasai Mara that cheetah cubs mostly die before they grow up.
The US is quitting the UN Human Rights Council.
Indeed some members do not respect human rights at all. But why would the bully object to that?
We Can Still Win: Next steps for the [proposed EU] Copyright Directive.
Realistic levels of cocaine in the water injure and weaken European eels; they might be unable to migrate to reproduce.
A mining company operating in Australia seems to have paid individual aboriginal leaders to decide that their people had no objections to its construction of a coal port.
Do-dirty called Joan Carling a "terrorist", but her platform is not violence but calling for an international investigation of Do-dirty's murder campaign.
T-Mobile and Sprint continue selling phone customers' location data to middlemen that sell it to others.
Everyone: Call on McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's to reject meat from animals regularly fed antibiotics.
This petition does not work with JavaScript totally disabled, but does work with LibreJS active — it evidently needs some free or trivial JavaScript code. However, it might also contain some nonfree, nontrivial JavaScript code that isn't necessary to sign.
US citizens: file a public comment against building the Keystone XL pipeline.
Extraction of Alberta tar sands oil is extremely polluting, both locally and globally.
ALEC is trying to stop Americans dying from asbestos from winning in court against the companies that made the asbestos.
Perhaps this wouldn't matter so much if the US had a universal medical system. As things stand, those people need to sue to get funds for their medical care.
Israel says that Gazans are child-murderers for bringing children to peaceful protests where Israeli soldiers might shoot them.
Saboteur Zinke is making rules to benefit a company headed by his wife.
SCROTUS want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other aid programs by 500 billion dollars a year.
(Satire) Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson used the opening segment of his show Tuesday to angrily explain the difference between a good baby and a bad baby.
(Satire) MS-13 gang leader Edwin Manica Flores admitted Tuesday that observing ICE's work in recent weeks has provided him with quite a bit of inspiration.
The US government is deporting refugee parents without their children, and they don't have a way to get their children back.
Australia's right-wing government is shifting money to the rich by cutting taxes on business. It is pretending that this will "trickle down", but we know that is bullshit, just as it was when Reagan said it.
Mossack Fonseca, which supported tax-dodging, did not even know the names of most of its clients.
Making offshore companies identify their owners will help reduce tax-dodging, but individual countries can implement a complete solution by ending the deductibility of payments to companies that don't entirely satisfy certain requirements.
That is, they can do this unless business-supremacy treaties get in the way. If so, they should pull out of those treaties, which do harm in many ways.
Genetic engineering has been used to make pigs that are immune to a virus that is very common in farms.
I have a suspicion that factory farms are responsible for the prevalence of this virus.
I don't see any biological harm or danger in this genetic modification. It appears to have no effect, other than the pigs do not get sick and have healthier immune systems. That is all to the good.
However, the modification is likely to spread patent pollution that would harm farmers' rights in countries that permit patents on genes to apply to farming of animals.
The European Parliament's JURI committee voted for mandatory copyright filtering.
Hungary has made it a crime to help border-crossing refugees press their legal claims for asylum rights.
The effect is that they theoretically have these rights but are legally unable to exercise them.
Working-class men from Kamloops killing themselves in large numbers, either directly or through gratuitous risks of death. An article contends that their idea of masculinity gives them no way to cope with the fact that they can't be a success in its terms.
"Trump's family separation policy is as damaging to America as Abu Ghraib."
I don't think that the possible blowback from this evil is as important as the evil itself.
Trump's Military Drops a Bomb Every 12 Minutes, and No One Is Talking About It.
The latest US newspeak term for a prison for young children: "tender age shelter".
Child refugees in the UK are not imprisoned. Rather, they are left in penury, forbidden to work or go to school. Some lose hope and die.
(Satire) San Francisco police busted a filthy, unshaven Mark Zuckerberg in the early hours of the morning Tuesday for trying to sell his personal data on a street corner.
The UK has convicted a fantasy terrorist, who was going to set off a dummy bomb provided by agents.
It would have been a real crime if he had really done it, but it is not clear he would ever have tried anything without the encouragement and assistance of the state. It is unjust for the state to lead people into crime and then punish them for it, and it isn't protecting the public from real danger.
Everyone: phone JP Morgan Chase bank to demand it stop funding another tar sands pipeline and tar sands extraction.
You could also talk with your city councilors about moving funds out of JP Morgan Chase, perhaps into a public bank.
US citizens: call on the Federal Election Commission to stop candidates from personally using funds from their terminated zombie campaigns.
Most Senate Democrats supported a military spending bill that will spend 700 billion dollars on the military.
Greenpeace: how pipeline companies try to crush opposition and protest in North Dakota.
Canada has passed a law to legalize marijuana.
More people are openly rejecting reproducing.
I do not want the human species to become extinct. I want to bring the future population down to 1 billion or so, which would enable all humans to have a good life and leave room for wildlife too.
More tigers live in back yards in the US than in the wild.
US border thugs take minors away from their refugee parents using the excuse of prosecuting all the parents. They pretend that the minors arrived "unaccompanied", which is an example of a law that lies.
Sometimes parents are deported and cannot find their children again. The minors' lawyers can't contact the parents, who are the only ones that know why the parents fled.
I use the word "minors" to correct a factual error. Some large fraction of them are children, and the other large fraction are adolescents (teenagers).
This fact doesn't affect my condemnation of what the US is doing to these families. Whether the number of children taken away is 2000 or 1000 or 500, the cruelty cannot be justified, given that it is worse than gratuitous (it is the consequence of another cruel policy). And it is almost as bad to take a 14-year-old adolescent away from per family indefinitely as an 8-year-old child.
I simply want to resist the tendency to infantilize teenagers.
The UK's experiment in publicly-funded private schools is collapsing.
As I recall, the state set up a system which forced some schools to convert to that status, if their students' test scores were bad, but didn't force privatized schools with bad test scores to reconvert to ordinary state schools.
Ann Coulter called the crying imprisoned immigrant children "actors".
This is the standard Republican line, used against everyone that shows the evil that Republicans do. A survivor of the Las Vegas terrorist attack was accused of being a fraud.
This didn't start with the bullshitter; Coulter has been doing it for many years.
Puerto Rico, under the rule of the vampire banksters, is cutting medical care so they can take more blood.
The banksters' motto is, today Puerto Rico, tomorrow the United States.
The US put Eugene Debs in prison for a radical speech 100 years ago that opposed war and inequality.
My views are not as radical as his, but people should not be imprisoned for stating political views.
Volkswagen issued DMCA takedown notices three times on drawings of beetles. Insects, that is. It took a lawyer's letter to get the matter corrected — that's how unfair the DMCA takedown system is, in practice.
IANAL, but I don't think it would have changed matters if they were drawings of Volkswagen cars. As I understand it, there is no US copyright on the shape of a car (it is not a sculpture), so Volkswagen would have no copyright grounds to object to someone else's drawing or photo of those cars.
The DMCA applies to copyright law and only copyright law, not to the bogus category of "intellectual property" which does not correspond to real laws. If you use that term in your thoughts (or worse, your words), it is confusing you.
Australia's politicians plan a law that would require back doors in encryption software, but they pretend it would not.
The FBI poses a threat to democracy and dissent, and its history is hardly one of acting professionally and honestly.
I think we need an organization to investigate organized crime, which we should understand as including crimes of companies such as stealing wages and cheating customers. But perhaps we should make a new one which would stay away from dissident groups.
The CEO of Audi, a division of Volkswagen, has been arrested over his involvement with the emissions test fraud software.
Pharma companies make around 5 billion dollars a year from antibiotics for farm animals. This is the size of the lobby we will need to defeat in order to protect our lives from resistant bacteria.
We must eliminate the supposed "duty" of corporation executives to subordinate everything more important to maximizing their profit. This "duty" was not accepted until around 1980.
Synthetic biology could make it easy to create deadly artificial disease bacteria and viruses. Public health systems are not ready to cope with them.
A pharma company is running a deceptive marketing campaign saying not to worry about feeding antibiotics to animals raised for meat.
The deception is that it correctly denies an imaginary problem and ignores the real one — breeding drug-resistant bacteria.
Canada must cancel its designation of the US as a "safe country" for refugees.
Chinese agriculture uses far more antibiotics than US agriculture, but at least the government is trying to reduce it.
The US government is unable to defy agribusiness that much.
If you're not a US citizen and you're not in desperate trouble somewhere else, why would you want to live in today's US?
The Tories are very effectively cutting solar power development in the UK.
The planned Pacific Ocean terminal of the Unkinder Morgan pipeline is in a port reached through a narrow passage. Accidents and spills are almost guaranteed, and just one would pollute the for decades.
However, the danger to the world as a whole is even worse.
The Gay Pride parade in London has gone in for corporation "sponsorship" to the point that it celebrates capitalism more than anything else.
The fascist frenzy in Italy against immigrant threatens the human rights of everyone in Italy.
I can imagine Italian thugs eagerly awaiting an opportunity to frame and beat up protesters, as they did in Genoa in 2000.
(Satire) "Simply put, I am forced to tear kids away from their parents, because I am legally prohibited from throttling immigrants until their bodies go limp," said Sessions.
US citizens: call on Representatives to use a discharge petition and vote for network neutrality.
US citizens: call on Nielsen, head of the Department of Harshness and Sadism, to resign.
Polish judges describe the government's attacks on their independence.
Record 68.5 Million People Fleeing War Or Persecution Worldwide.
James Hansen warns of the great climate hoax: governments that pretend they are taking adequate steps to protect civilization and nature from global heating disaster.
Daily coverage of the bullshitter's latest tweets is a distraction from the right-wing activities of the Democratic Party establishment.
(Satire) Onion Social announces the very first-of-its-kind genital recognition software.
By 2100, over 2 million homes in the US may become unusable due to regular flooding caused by global heating.
The article focuses on the consequent decrease in property tax revenue, which is worrying about the tail instead of the dog.
Under the hopelessness and stress of poverty in the US today, you almost need to be a superman to make a long-term plan to better your own life. Everything is stacked against you, and you know it.
The head of the Department of Harshness and Sadism told a Congressional hearing that the department was not taking children away from their parents.
Lying blatantly directly to Congress is an escalation in the general policy of bullshitting. The US system of government is based on the assumption that checks and balances will limit lying. Now that Republicans in Congress permit, even encourage officials to lie to their faces, the system is breaking down.
Greece has surrendered to another round of economic crushing by the Euro zone banksters, in exchange for more loans that it won't be able to pay back.
MRI studies show that users quickly learn to stop seeing security warnings. They ignore the warnings at an unconscious level, so they do not become consciously aware of the warnings.
The copyright censorship system that the EU is on the verge of adopting would directly violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Please don't follow those writers in referring to works people want to publish as "content". The term disparages those works.
Plutocrats say the US economy is in "great shape". That's true — for plutocrats only.
The US now has "jobs for everyone", but the pay is so bad you need to work two full-time jobs to support yourself.
US citizens: oppose cute smiley-face labels for GMOs.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect wildlife in the farm bill.
US citizens: Oppose mining right next to Yellowstone. The mines' pollution won't stop at the boundary of the park.
There is a new system in Mexico for rigging elections: assassinating candidates. Over 100 candidates have been assassinated in the current election campaign.
Americans own 40% of the world's guns.
Salafi Arabia and the US rejected a cease-fire plan for Hodeidah based on placing it under UN control. They seem to be dead-set on killing lots of Yemenis.
The UK minister allowed epileptic boy Billy Caldwell to have marijuana oil as a special exception, but only for three weeks. After that, his illness will be untreated again.
At least the minister wants to change the law.
The "war on drugs" creates a dynamic in which politicians compete to be the "toughest". Therefore they bend over backwards to do harm. I'm glad the policy might be changed in this one narrow area, but that is not enough.
Increasing numbers of poor people around the world don't have access to clean water, but the cost of solving this problem would not be very much if the rich were not grabbing ever more of the world's wealth.
US Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of World’s Dictatorships.
The article's doubt that Russia is a dictatorship seems to indicate bias, but the statistics are surely correct.
"Nazis separated me from my parents as a child. The trauma lasts a lifetime."
The sadist sponsors Nazis today; no wonder he acts like one.
Turkey's Islamists And Secularists Join Forces in Bid to Unseat Erdoğan.
300,000 houses in the US will suffer frequent flooding due to global heating in just the next 30 years.
Saboteur Sessions has decided to deny asylum to people fleeing from the violence of gangs and spouses.
He has already corrupted the immigration hearings by giving judges quotas that are incompatible with giving any real attention to each case.
A campaign launched by — amazingly — the supermarket chain Carrefour has made the EU pull back from the strict regulation that kept many varieties of vegetables and fruits out of agriculture.
Activists have been campaigning against this regulation for years, but their voice was not heeded.
Uber is pushing taxi drivers to suicide.
Don't be a customer for Uber!
The sadist may have gone too far, building concentration camps for thousands of children.
Taking children away from their parents to punish the parents is a form of terrorism — it is hostage-taking. Putin is already using that tactic. I wonder if the sadist got the idea from him.
The workers who are supposed to "care for" these child hostages are forbidden to touch them.
Is this an intentional plan to maximize the terror by causing them maximum permanent damage? I am sure the sadist's advisers know what happens to children who don't get held and stroked. They will suffer for years, perhaps for their whole lives.
Supporters of the sadist have a new slogan: "Save the fetuses, torture the children!" Not that they really care about fetuses; that's just an excuse for making other women and children suffer.
Under the principle of necessity, violence would be legally justified to rescue those children and reunite them with their parents — if that is the only way to do it.
Can US Government 'Secretly Plot to Assassinate' Americans Without Due Process? Judge Says No, Allowing Case Against 'Kill List' to Proceed.
The Warner media conglomerate that owns Harry Potter crushed fan conventions with legal threats.
The company was not legally compelled to do this: it was a choice, and Warner chose to be nasty, motivated by greed. In moral terms, greed is not an excuse for an action that is nasty. Morally, Warner has no excuse.
I still maintain the boycott against buying Harry Potter products (including books), and I hope that this new act of aggression towards fans diminishes their inclination to buy those products.
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has the right to food, housing, healthcare, and vital social services. Governments reject the idea that people can enforce this right, but they could instead uphold it.
New York State has sued to close the Trump family foundation for persistent violation of the laws for "charitable" foundations.
The leaders of the campaign to take the UK out of the EU coordinated with the Russian government, and lied about it.
A Tory minister proposes to force people to show ID to connect to the internet in any public place in the UK.
If you are in the UK, please tell your MP that you hate this idea.
The press gives the bullshitter implicit support by repeating the terms he uses to frame issues his way.
This article, by George Lakoff who deeply understands the matter, also recommends ways to resist this manipulation. My practice of rejecting words that frame issues in ways I don't support is one of those ways.
This also shows why it is so important to talk about "free/libre software" and avoid the terms "open" and "closed".
US thug departments are now being offered camera drones that feed AI programs that are supposed to detect violent attacks.
If they really only detect crimes of violence, this wouldn't bother me too much. I fear they will be used also to track people who are not committing crimes of violence on the street.
The US border thugs are systematically denying refugees the right to apply for asylum at the border, by refusing to let them into the border checkpoint. Each time they try, they are told "come back later", day after day. The agents say that there is no room to process refugees, but facts show this is bullshit. They back down when someone is taking notes.
If the European Union does not develop a way to share the short-term burden of refugees, it is likely to fall into the politics of the armed lifeboat.
The Tories say they will put more money into the NHS, but say nothing sensible about where the money will come from.
The only place it really can come from is the rich, but the Tories don't want to tax the rich, so I think they might end up not really putting the extra money into the NHS.
In the US: protest on June 30 against the sadist's family separation policy.
US citizens: Call on the Department of Harshness and Sadism to desist from separating families at the US border.
"To survive our high-speed society, cultivate 'temporal bandwidth'."
Note the curious opposition between this advice and other advice to "live for today" and "focus on the present."
Several reasons why the US needs to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act in its strongest form.
Businesses constantly pressure to weaken and then eliminate the regulations that protect the public from their power. We need to elect candidates that don't feel a need to assuage their calculated dissatisfaction; who are ready to answer them with "Tough," or "Go jump in the lake!" Saying that in a polite guise is ok, provided it is no less firm.
The UK's minister in charge made a special exception to allow a child to have the marijuana oil that is the only effective treatment for his epilepsy.
His mother demands a general policy change rather than a special personal exception.
A court ordered the UK government to publish its files about the 1984 Amritsar massacre to show whether the UK government was involved.
In China, outright censorship is used together with other methods to "manage" communication so that it becomes useless for dissent.
Facebook answered senators' questions with 500 pages, but parts of it are doubletalk.
We Need to Save Ignorance From AI.
This is another reason to limit the design of systems so that they don't collect so much data about people.
Designing city streets primarily for cars leads to many kinds of problems for the city's inhabitants.
I mostly agree with the article, but I disagree on one point: lowering speed limits. Most people need a way to get around the city quickly. That can be cars, or it can be buses; but if all vehicles are required to move slowly, neither cars nor buses can do the job.
I don't mention metro trains because few cities have developed trains to the point where they are almost sufficient without buses. The only ones I know that come close are Paris and Tokyo. Most cities can't afford to try to develop a train network that can get everywhere buses go.
In the 1800s, British publishers armed with copyright made books into luxury goods, while German publishers with no copyright system made books available to all. Counter to what the copyright lobby pretends, this led to far more books' being published in Germany. This made education available in Germany to people that couldn't have afforded it in Britain.
Attacking Iran could be an opportunity/excuse to reimpose the military draft in the US.
Young Americans should start organizing now, against the draft and against attacking Iran.
The US establishment rejects the idea of peace in Korea unless it is achieved through the total submission of North Korea.
As I see it, avoiding nuclear war with the repressive nuclear-armed North Korean regime is important progress, just as avoiding nuclear war with the repressive nuclear-armed Soviet regime was important progress.
Progressives Denounce Democratic Senators for Trying to Keep Trump on a 'Permanent War Footing' in Korea.
Some establishment Democrats are highly unhappy with the idea of peace in the Korean peninsula.
South Korean President Moon could guide things to a good outcome.
"Income inequality isn't the defining social issue of our time because your neighbor bought a slightly bigger house or nicer car than you did. It's because multi-millionaires and billionaires are competing for slightly bigger mega-yachts while our friends … plead for help with basic medical expenses."
Thugs in Newark, New Jersey, have set up cameras in public places and made the feeds available to everyone. They invite everyone to watch everyone else.
This is even worse for privacy than if only the thugs are watching. (And they are, of course — and surely saving the recordings permanently.)
The UK's high tech unified system for welfare benefits is a catastrophe for the people it is supposed to serve.
Secondarily, it fails to deliver the efficiency improvements that it was supposed to provide. Not that operating efficiency could justify cutting people's benefits so that they go hungry or become homeless.
The IPCC's draft report says that we need "rapid and far-reaching" measures to curb global heating fast.
This requires kicking out the fossil fuel puppets that control the US, Canada, Australia and UK.
A Florida town's thugs boasted of a perfect record for solving burglaries. They framed someone for all of them.
These thugs now face charges. Hooray!
Since US immigration prisons are full, the border sadists are moving 1600 arrested border-crossers into the normal federal prison system.
Eventually the numbers will require the US to build new prisons. The private prison companies will love this.
A Minimum-Wage Worker Can't Afford a 2-Bedroom Apartment Anywhere in the U.S. In most cities, even a 1-bedroom apartment is too expensive.
China is requiring all cars to carry RFID tracking devices.
Let this be a warning to us of what tyrants will do in our countries, if we don't organize to stop them.
The baby-based fear industry will sell parents all sorts of products to prevent extremely unlikely dangers.
Understanding this example may help you understand the terrorist-based fear industry, which will sell all sorts of "security" policies at the cost of your civil liberties and democracy.
Yemeni human rights defender Abdulrasheed al-Faqih keeps getting arrested by various sides in the war there. Although they hate each other, repression is one area where they agree.
In Camden, New Jersey, the water supply has been privatized. The water company refused to reveal how many customers' water supply it has shut off.
As usual, privatization blocks accountability. All private water supply companies should be made into public agencies.
One US store chain is encouraging farms to avoid neonicotinoid pesticides.
The bully's latest sadistic plan is to imprison thousands of children in rude improvised prisons made of tents.
With so many children in prison, it will be easy to lose track of those that have special medical needs, and easy to sweep their suffering or deaths under the rug.
Please avoid the term "tent cities" which, as the article says, attempts to deny that they are prisons.
When criticism of Israel is put off-limits by labeling it as "antisemitism", real antisemites take advantage by presenting that as "evidence" that Jews rule the world.
In fact, many Jews now criticize the occupation of Palestine, but the most powerful US defenders of Israel's occupation practices are not Jews. They are Christian extremists who aim to destroy the world (literally!) by making events occur that resemble biblical prophecies. Some of them are politically powerful because they are rich and back Republican candidates.
Amnesty accuses the Palestinian Authority of torturing Palestinians involved in peaceful protests, as well as one of Amnesty's staff who was monitoring events at the protest.
Contractors are already making tens of millions of dollars helping tear refugee families apart.
Millions of Americans live in abject poverty such as we thought we had eliminated. Republicans are working hard at making it worse.
The UK has ordered a rap group to stop chanting texts that promote gang violence.
It is legitimate to stop people from inciting violence. Where to draw the line is the difficult question.
The merger of AT&T and Time Warner is likely to inspire a wave of other mergers in the US. Each merger advantages the owners and harms the rest of society.
My proposed solution is a tax designed to pressure big companies to split up.
The former head of the Bank of Canada wants Trudeau to be ready to kill protesters to push the Unkinder Morgan pipeline through. Then the pipeline's oil exports could kill a lot more people.
Precisely because the demand for oil (and fossil fuel overall) is still growing, the whole world is in grave danger. We need to reduce the supply, so as to push up the price and drive users to install renewable energy instead. That will reduce the demand.
(Satire) … the president's lawyers reportedly moved to discredit Michael Cohen Thursday by pointing out his long history of committing crimes for Donald Trump.
(Satire) 3-year-old Honduran immigrant Luis Pereira still hopes to achieve the American dream of someday living in a bigger, better cage.
Bezos is treating the workers at the Washington Post like the workers in Amazon warehouses.
An Iranian refugee that Australia imprisoned in Nauru in 2013 has been begging ever since to see a psychiatrist. Recently he had become too depressed to respond, and finally he killed himself.
Both Australia and Nauru are responsible for the cruel treatment of refugees, under the principle that when A hires B to do wrong to people, each of A and B has full moral responsibility for the wrong. Neither one can cite the other as an excuse.
Nauru is a tyrannical state which excludes foreign journalists and does not recognize rule of law.
It is justified to rebel against such a regime, and that's better than killing yourself.
Vietnamese-American William Nguyen faces prosecution in Vietnam for participation in a protest.
Vietnam is ruled by a "Communist" government that is totally plutocratist.
Do-dirty is using a fight against real terrorism in the island of Mindanao as a smokescreen for supporting plutocratist terrorism. Mining companies are murdering peasants or just taking their land, with the help of the official thugs. Targeted farmers are arrested then reported as "terrorists" who had "surrendered".
When the state starts shooting "drug dealers" on the street, that won't be limited to drug dealers.
Various views of the negotiations between the US and North Korea.
The best way to commemorate the people who died in the London public housing fire a year ago is to make enough public housing in the UK.
Restore the 4th calls on the US Senate to eliminate the law that authorizes imprisonment without trial.
Argentina's Chamber of Deputies has passed a bill to legalize abortion. Now it goes to the senate.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose Republican bills that would not end the separation of families.
US citizens: call on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to investigate the corrupt practices of its acting head, Mulvaney.
US border thugs try to question people where they have no jurisdiction. You can stop them by pointing out that fact.
A BBC reporter in Malta was arrested and separately beaten up for trying to show the annual shooting of migrating birds, some of then endangered.
Delhi's level of air toxicity is beyond what their meters can indicate.
It is hard to expose prosecutorial misconduct, so the real frequency of this is surely far more than we can measure by how often it is exposed and remedied.
The Misogynistic Logic of Jeff Sessions’s Horrifying New Asylum Policy For Domestic Violence Victims.
The bully admires dictators for their absolute power, but considers democratically elected leaders "weak" because they are constrained by rule of law.
Defining antisemitism carefully to distinguish it from political criticism of Israel and political pressure on Israel.
Social mobility is falling in wealthy countries. In the UK …it could take [on the average] at least five generations for the child of a poor family to reach the average national income (roughly $40,000 a year).
Over 60 species of mammals become more nocturnal when humans are in the area. This is presumably because humans scare them, but forgoing daytime activity can make it hard for them to survive.
Is Competition Driving Innovation Or Damaging Scientific Research?
I have to comment that doing similar research two or three times is not necessarily a waste. In redundancy is reliability.
French border thugs are supposed to let immigrant minors enter from Italy, but instead jail them without food or water, steal their phones, then send them walking back barefoot.
Those refugees are not getting proper care in Italy. Proper care includes contraception and instructions on how to use it.
More broadly, a large part of the persecution and violence that makes millions flee was caused by wealthy and powerful countries such as France and the US. The US is partially responsible for the coup in Honduras and the recent stolen election. If Americans don't want Hondurans to come fleeing, how about if we allow them to have a democratic government in their own country?
Even spy agencies must be subject to disclosure laws.
An Australian journalist is charged with espionage in Cambodia. For doing journalism, I suppose.
Cambodia has abolished freedom of the press, along with all the opposition parties.
The US, UK and France are supporting the Salafi Arabian attack on Hodeida.
Is it a bad idea to use curse words when talking about the bully?
It is true that the bully is equally vulgar and has no basis to complain. It is surely true that his supporters don't care about our cursing at him except as an excuse.
Whether we curse at him or not, it won't influence them. Their reaction to cursing is beside the point. What matters is the possible reaction of those who we might be able to influence.
I'd rather call him a bully, a bullshitter, a cheater, a harasser, a war-lover. Those words make actual points, valid points.
When the media reprove progressives for cursing at the bully, it is clear that they are applying a double standard. That's what we should say to them: "Why criticize us while giving the bully a free pass?"
Right-wing extremist Quillinan went to a rally in Berkeley, California, armed and attacked antifascists. The thugs treated Quillinan as a victim rather than as a criminal, and together they prosecuted several antifascists.
It fits a general pattern where right-wing thugs lie to attack their political enemies.
Don't believe anything a thug says in court if it inculpates a black or a progressive protester. While it is not impossible that blacks or progressive protesters can do wrong, a thug is not a reliable witness about them.
Proposing that European leaders call for a UN mandate for Palestine.
A child has severe epilepsy and the only treatment that works is made from THC. This has put the spotlight on the UK's continuing War on Drugs, which requires it to pretend that THC has no medical value.
Europe's right-wing extremist parties are organizing and taking up the Nazi salute.
Democrat Rep. Crowley voted to weaken the CFPB in favor of businesses that had hired his brother to lobby for them.
Whether or not the fee to his brother was the reason, he supported the wrong side. But not only once. Crowley has a history of ties to financial businesses, and using his political clout on their behalf.
He also voted for the PAT RIOT Act and for invading Iraq.
Human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh is a political prisoner of the Iranian right wing. It is plausible that the bully's cancellation of the nonnuclear deal with Iran gave them an opportunity to do this.
Some lessons from US history about progressive political movements.
The censorship law that blocks sex workers from online advertising is also suppressing them from organizing and communicating to the public.
The naming deal for "Macedonia" seems to be falling apart at both ends.
Jogger Who Trashed Homeless Man's Things Charged with Robbery in New Dispute.
"Zero tolerance" policies tend to mean suffering for anyone who makes a mistake. They are generally a very bad idea. When applied to being an immigrant with a green card, they produce massive suffering.
Seattle's city council repealed the per-employee tax on businesses that it adopted a few weeks ago.
Taxing businesses more is necessary, but taxing per job is a bad idea since it would pressure businesses to cut jobs.
The military-industrial complex is freaking out at the possibility of peace on the Korean peninsula.
The US deportation thugs are terrorizing whole communities by arresting hundreds of people, scaring hundreds more into fleeing.
Those deported are not even allowed to see their families again. Some are cut off from lawyers.
SCROTUS want to cut taxes for the rich again.
The Democratic National Committee voted to reject donations from the fossil fuel industry.
Those companies can still support individual candidates and PACs, so this doesn't eliminate their power to corrupt Democrats. However, the rejection will influence politics.
Palestinians need international protection from the violence of Israelis. Only the US prevents the UN from taking action.
This will get even worse if Israel adopts proposed laws that would give soldiers immunity for war crimes and criminalize anyone that documents those crimes.
Imagine if it were a crime to post a video of a thug beating up or killing a black.
The narcissist has a strong resemblance in personality to Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Over half of US women professors and university staff report sexual harassment.
A basic principle of justice is that whether some action on your part would be wrong may not depend on another person arbitrary opinion of it. A just criterion must be something you can in principle apply to your own actions before you do them.
It follows that it is unjust to criticize people for making "unwanted advances". In some cases the only way to find out whether an advance is wanted is to make one.
(Satire) The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced Tuesday plans to escalate human rights abuses to curry more favor with the United States.
Republicans plan to amend the constitution of North Carolina to impose an ID requirement for voting. But the citizens will have to vote on it first.
The bully said that Dictator Kim's systematic oppression of Koreans is nothing important.
I support negotiating peace with North Korea notwithstanding Kim's oppression, because war could do immense harm. If that requires the US to keep quiet about the issue of Kim's oppression for the time being, that can be worth while. But there is no need to make statements that it is not horrible.
The US returned nurse Anthonia Nwaorie's $41,000, which she was bringing to a clinic in Nigeria.
Deportation to a violent country which you knew only as a child is very dangerous.
To deport people for getting a traffic ticket reflects a policy that aims to cause suffering under whatever pretext. The authorities deny this, of course, but we will not make the mistake of believe them.
I criticize the article on one point: It asks us to sympathize more with Sr. Cano Pacheco because he had a child at the young age of 19. It is irresponsible to do that; people should not. To suggest that people would deserve less sympathy if they have helped stabilize the human population is unfair to us.
However, that is a side issue. The way the US treated him was wrong, child or no child.
Stiglitz: the Euro zone rules are causing great suffering in many countries, and Italy might be able to crack it up if it isn't reformed soon.
The Department of Heavy Surveillance (DHS) has a database that will enable it to investigate everyone in the US, all the time.
If we allow this to operate, it could make us safer from minor street crime, but it will surely make us more vulnerable to suppression of our human rights by the state.
Especially we should not allow systematic face recognition in public, by anyone including agents and agencies of the state, in the absence of specific court authorization.
Maine's Republican legislators have fought tooth and nail against ranked-choice voting, but they couldn't stop it.
Tanzania has shut down independent web publication by taxing it so heavily that most people can't even think of paying it.
Taking statistics on foot and car traffic in a way that is useful for planning but can't track anyone.
"Smart" phones are always listening for keywords, and there may be thousands of keywords.
When Will [sweatshop service] Companies Admit That Their Workers Have Rights?
US citizens: call on Congress to block any bill that would supercharge Trump's war on immigrants.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop the sadism towards immigrant women and children.
Mapuche are burning farms and farm vehicles to chase others off their traditional land.
Doxxing, Assault, Death Threats: the New Dangers Facing US Journalists Covering [right-wing] Extremism.
Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested and told she had been sentenced to 5 years in prison on charges she had not been informed about.
The Antarctic ice is melting faster. This will lead to 1 meter of sea-level rise by 2070, assuming no unexpected increase due to unpredictable tipping points.
Lush has put new "spycops" posters into its store windows, resisting the thugs' attempt to intimidate them.
North Carolina proposes to allow thugs to look at anybody's prescription history without giving any justification.
I think that centralized databases of people's prescription history are dangerous already.
Honduras is suppressing protest against its rigged election by arresting and prosecuting large numbers of protesters.
Here's info about the rigged election.
Scott Pruitt's Corruption Is Bad, But His Planetary Sabotage Is Worse.
A court has ordered the EPA to do some of the jobs it is supposed to do. However, I doubt that courts will correct all Pruitt's acts of sabotage, and I am not sure he will even comply with their decisions.
What Do You Call a Country That Institutionalizes Child Abuse? The United States.
The EU has drafted a proposed directive to protect whistleblowers, but it is too narrow and limited. This page describes the limitations and recommends changes.
I get the impression that it is aimed at protecting only those who reveal business wrongdoing, not those that reveal crimes and oppression committed by the state.
The Trump family's income from renting their political power is in the tens of millions, perhaps hundreds. All of it is corruption.
When Clinton got paid tens of thousands for speeches, that was not corruption in the same sense. It was however a reason to expect that she would probably favor the banksters (over the non-rich, and even over cities and states and smaller businesses) if she were elected.
Trillions of dollars of planned investment in extracting more natural gas threatens to blow past the world's carbon budget.
Salafi Arabia, backed by the US, has attacked the Yemeni port of Hodeidah.
It claims this is ok because it first asked the Houthis to abandon the city and they wouldn't.
The Houthis took most of Yemen pretty quickly, and I think the war would have ended in 2016 if Obama hadn't supported Salafi Arabia in intervening. The bulk of the suffering caused by the war has been since then. It would have been much less if the US had done nothing and thus let the Houthis win.
NAFTA and other trade treaties should have expiration dates, so that they don't function as weapons against democracy and public safety.
Opposition to the existing business supremacy treaties is one of the few points on which I agree with the cheater. Not that he cares about democracy or public safety. I've read that he is for certain businesses and against others. But I will not change my conclusion just because he supports it.
The US government made a propaganda film extolling Dictator Kim. Supposedly it was meant as flattery for him.
The film was signed with the name of a real film company that had nothing to do with making it.
US citizens: call on candidates to pledge not to take fossil fuel money.
US citizens: tell Congress to pass the Separated Children Act.
US citizens: oppose fracking in the Little Colorado River basin.
1/5 of the mammal species in Britain are likely to be gone from there in 10 years, due to habitat destruction.
Planned Parenthood Chapter Should Back Its Workers, who have decided to unionize.
Global CO2 emissions are increasing again, partly because China is burning more coal.
A Norwegian court ordered volunteers to take their database of Norwegian court opinions off the internet, for the sake of a copyright parasite.
Notable political, academic and cultural figures remind Israel that forcibly transferring a Palestinian population out of the region they live in would be a war crime.
(Satire) President Trump concluded his summit with Kim Jong-un Monday by securing a $10 billion trade deal to sell both strategic and tactical nuclear warheads directly to North Korea.
Swedish parliamentarians propose to require the largest banks to handle cash in all their branches.
If you are a Swedish citizen, please tell them your support for this measure and other measures to defend the use of cash. Say that anonymous purchasing is important for you.
If you live in Sweden or have connections with Sweden, please pass the word!
Maltese officials are stalling the investigation of the murder of corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Zephyr Teachout: Mega-mergers like AT&T And Time Warner Crush American Democracy.
The big US banks got billions of dollars from the Republican tax attacks. The billions are going almost entirely to the owners.
Two Israeli soldiers were charged with killing an unarmed Palestinian teenager, but charges have been dropped.
It's like when thugs kill unarmed blacks in the US.
Israel accused Gazans of launching fire-kites and said that they set wildfires in Israel.
Setting wildfires can cause widespread damage, even kill. (They probably can't spread as much in arid southern Israel as they can in wooded parts of California.) Such kites are an indiscriminate weapon. If Gazans did indeed launch them — we cannot take that as certain because Israel says so — then Israel is entitled to fight back with the legitimate military means.
However, Israel's siege of Gaza, and its practice of shooting at anyone that comes near the fence (which is inside Gaza, not at the border, I have read), are morally comparable, except much larger in effect. If Israel demands compensation for wildfires, that is legitimate, but shouldn't Israel pay compensation for the fishing boats seized or sunk, the fish not caught, the cutoff from travel especially for study and medical care, and all the civilian casualties of its bombardment and shooting?
Landowners in the path of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Unkinder Morgan pipeline are building solar installations on the land that would be seized.
70+ Internet Luminaries Ring the Alarm on EU Copyright Filtering Proposal.
I condemn the automated copyright censorship system too, but I would have refused to sign that letter because it endorses the bogus premise that the copyright industry uses to justify the War on Sharing: "for creators to receive fair remuneration for the use of their works". These funds go more to editors than to artists (let's not call them "creators"), but even the artists are not entitled to "remuneration" simply because people look at, or share, their work. What we ought to do is support artists (especially non-star artists) better, not give "fair remuneration" that goes mainly to stars.
I can't recommend that you use the EFF's campaign site, since it requires running nonfree Javascript code. Instead, please contact your MEPs and those on the JURI committee. Also please contact the EFF to politely ask them to fix the site, if the campaign continues past June 21.
Net Neutrality Can Still Be Saved.
I hope we can legislate full network neutrality some day.
US citizens: support the Workplace Democracy Act.
Also ask candidates whether they support it.
US citizens: tell the FBI to stop labeling Black Lives Matter activists as supposed violent extremists.
Poor People's Campaign protesters were arrested in protests around the US, including some of the campaign's leaders.
Kentucky created new rules for limiting access to the state capitol just to keep the Poor People's Campaign out.
A part of former Yugoslavia has agreed to change its name to Northern Macedonia, to resolve a dispute with Greece.
It is indisputable that Pella, the capital of ancient Macedonia, is in Greece. The burial tumulus of Philip the Great, in Pella, has been hollowed out as a museum so that its interior can be visited.
The two countries have a history of laying claim to each other's traditions.
Ireland to Vote on Removing Blasphemy as an Offence.
A Private Prison Company Gave 1,300 Recordings of Confidential Inmate Phone Calls to Prosecutors.
Court documents show that the citizenship question being put in the 2020 US census was explicitly intended to achieve an undercount of non-citizens.
US veterans enjoy good medical care, funded by the government. Plutocratists want to privatize veterans' medical care so it won't be good any more.
Pristine areas of the Amazon rainforest are absorbing 1/3 less carbon now than they were 10 years ago. This seems to be a positive feedback loop of global heating.
Selling off public housing is the cause of bad housing situations in the UK.
"The crux of America's current constitutional crisis is this: Our system of government was designed to constrain power, but Trump doesn’t want to be constrained."
Right-wing "centrist" Democrats have failed at the polls in recent years, so when they win primaries today, that doesn't bode well, not even for expelling Republicans.
The worse problem is that replacing Republicans with "centrist" Democrats doesn't get us officials that want to fix what's wrong with the US.
(Satire) "Man, I’m almost positive I’ve seen that person before, but this was years ago — like, eight or nine lives, at least," said the Dalai Lama.
The warlover and the neocons have no more of a plan for how to control Iran than Dubya had for how to control Iraq.
Salafi Arabia, the UAE and/or the US bombed and destroyed a cholera clinic run by Medecins sans Frontieres.
All three countries are morally responsible for the attack.
Activists have not given up on reversing Saboteur Pai's abolition of the US network neutrality regulations, which were always too weak but better than none at all.
Researchers studying South Africa's oldest and largest baobab trees (over 1000 years old) found that many of them died in the past decade.
Similar things are happening in other parts of the world.
EU citizens: call MEPs to oppose the copyright censorship directive.
"Low-income black fathers want to be good dads. The system won't let them."
I support the article's recommendations, but above all we need to lead people not to have children when they don't have the funds to raise a child. There is nothing virtuous or desirable about making more children.
Unpredictable problems can happen to any family, and one of the state's responsibilities is to provide such parents all the help they need, including what they need so as to raise their existing children free from want or stress.
However, if it is predictable that any children certain people have would live in want and stress, the best outcome is that they don't have children.
Summer insect populations in parts of Britain have fallen drastically. Some bird species are starting to disappear.
None of the political forces in the UK wants to look at the Russian interference in the referendum on leaving the UK.
Cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for mocking the bully. He was told to express the views of the editorial team, and refused to accept that.
Indonesia has improved its marine conservation, in particular protecting sharks and rays.
Many large, famous US companies have been caught cheating workers of their pay. The total probably comes to tens of billions of dollars, though we have no reliable figures. Naturally the cheater wants to eliminate penalties for cheating.
The US deportation thug agency is coercing Iraqi immigrants into agreeing to deportation — which would be especially disastrous for those that were born outside Iraq and don't speak Arabic. Those who are Chaldeans, not Muslims, would be in likely to be persecuted or killed for that if they were deported.
The Legal Fight to Leave the Dirtiest Fossil Fuels in the Ground. ALberta tar sands are among the dirtiest.
An EU proposal to improve international cooperation in wiretapping will naturally be used as an opportunity to attack everyone's privacy by cutting legal protections.
UK human rights organizations are suing to stop the massive use of facial recognition.
US citizens: call on Sessions to reunite imprisoned immigrants' families.
US citizens: call on the US to free asylum seeker Alejandra while she waits for her asylum ruling.
US citizens: call on Senator McConnell to allow a vote on protecting Mueller.
Dictator Kim turned out to be just Trump's kind of guy.
The agreement they made doesn't commit either side to much.
Some rebuke the bully for giving Kim a kind of legitimacy and getting no practical concessions in return.
However, denying Kim legitimacy was doing nothing to win any concessions from him, so the leverage that the US has forfeited was not worth much. Changing to a friendly tone might achieve some progress toward peace, and that progress could make possible concrete deals that are impossible today.
Or it might backfire and trigger a resumption of hostilities when the expectations of either side are disappointed.
History of US-North Korea Deals Shows Hard Part Is Making Them Stick.
Brazil has imposed 100% voting by computer, totally unverifiable.
Argentines are aware of how the IMF will crush them, and protested massively, but couldn't stop right-wing President Macri from putting their country under IMF power.
Plutocratist politicians are not interested in keeping Social Security and Medicare going. We need a progressive victory.
The plutocratists would rather simply pull the plug on the increasing fraction of Americans they deem surplus.
The bully has given Salafi Arabia the total military support of the US. He even accepted a medal from the king.
The US has no legitimate grounds to be involved in Salafi Arabia's attack on Yemen even slightly, and no sensible reason to want to be involved.
The US deportation thug department (ICE) was created in the name of "homeland security", and this promoted the fictitious idea that unauthorized immigrants are threats, even "terrorists".
This may explain the use of tactics that verge on terrorism — such as taking babies and children away from their parents, for no purpose except to terrify.
Since there is no real need for this agency, let's get rid of it.
I support this particular proposal despite the fact that it comes from the Antisocialist Party.
When big chain stores close, to revitalize shopping districts calls for non-chain stores, each different from the rest.
The Wall Street Journal Keeps Peddling Big Oil Propaganda.
As large, centralized companies come to dominate the internet for most users, they become choke points for censorship. (Please don't call them "cloud" anything — the real cloud is in the minds of the people who use that term.)
In the free world, we do not depend on those companies, or any specific companies. That is necessary for freedom.
Note that Telegram's cryptography software is not "proprietary" in the usual sense; the Telegram client is free software. WhatsApp, by contrast, is proprietary software, which is plenty of reason to refuse to run it.
Robot weeders could make herbicides obsolete, for farmers that can afford the robots, or cut the amount used by a factor of ten.
The US Supreme Court approved the practice of dropping voters from the list if they don't vote for several years.
I think this unfortunate, as it will stop some marginalized people from voting, but I doubt this is anywhere near as harmful as voter ID and crosscheck.
Italy's anti-immigration government has intentionally provoked an European Union crisis by refusing to let a ship, the Aquarius, land African refugees.
This reminds me of what happened to the MS St Louis, which sailed from Germany in 1939 with 900 Jewish refugees. Cuba, the US, and Canada refused to allow them in, so they had to return to Europe, which proved to be a dangerous place for them.
I believe this was one of the events that inspired the modern treaties about the right to asylum.
A patent application suggests Uber plans to use sensing in the phone to determine whether a client is inebriated.
Uber could multiply the price by 10 or 30, figuring the client would probably accept that high price without noticing it ;-}.
The bully broke off the meeting with Dictator Kim, then they arranged it again. But we don't know the sequence of real events. Did Kim eat crow to get a meeting with the bully, or did the bully eat crow to get a meeting with Kim? Or was it all a dance, jostling for who gets the public image of being most important?
Traffic signal systems designed to optimize driving make walking around the city 20% slower.
I would not assume that this is crucial to people's decisions about whether to walk or drive. It would have some effect, yes, but sometimes the effect would be that they take the bus.
If we change the design to favor pedestrians more, I would not want to take it to an absurd extreme. I as a pedestrian (which I usually am) would rather wait a couple of seconds than delay cars for ten seconds.
Activist Wayne Hsiung is facing the threat of years in prison in North Carolina for "stealing" a sick baby goat from a farm, then giving it treatment.
I do not support animal rights beyond certain limited points, but when I see businesses turn governments into their armed servants, I rankle.
Uri Avnery describes the powerful Israeli propaganda machine, which insists that everyone in Gaza is a "terrorist", especially protesters, and that the slightest pretext justifies killing them.
An Indian film star is being reviled for making a movie that involves a false flag terror attack carried out by extremist Hindus.
The scheme in the movie sounds to me (based on what the article says) too complicated and risky to be plausible, but extremist Hindus are no strangers to terrorism. It was an extremist Hindu that assassinated Mohatma Gandhi. The assassin was from an organization that is linked to the Hindu-theocratic party that now rules India.
Google is trying to patent a data compression system that Jarek Duda invented. He wants to make available to everyone for all use freely.
Applying for a patent on a computational idea is wrong, inherently wrong, unless it is blocked from use for aggression. One way to do this is with something like Twitter's defensive use commitment.
I urge people to demand that their employers do this. Or find another employer who will.
The son of an undercover thug (who lied to his mother) supports the "spycops" campaign and hopes it will pressure the thug department to tell him something about his father.
Please don't think that your own identity depends crucially on who your parents were or what they did. Their actions surely affected you, just as their genes did (in the usual case), but you are not responsible for them and they don't define you. It wasn't you that did them. You might regret those actions, appreciate them, reproach them, or admire them, but you never have a moral reason to feel ashamed of them.
The Environmental Poisoning Agency has weakened its standards for judging toxic chemicals.
This won't cause any immediate changes, but it is likely to enable some toxins to remain in our food, clothing, cosmetics, etc., in the future which would otherwise have been banned.
Puerto Rico's nondemocratic imposed government has made its priority paying the creditors — which means neglecting the people's hardship.
Animal rights activists are on trial in Utah for filming in factory farms, and for "stealing" diseased pigs that would have died soon, and curing them.
The prosecutors have corrupt personal links to factory farms, but the biggest corruption is that which procured these laws themselves.
The sadist's cruelty to targets of opportunity is distracting America from constructive action.
We need to try to protect border-crossers' children from trauma that they may never recover from. But we also need to focus on the linked long-term dangers such as global heating and plutocracy.
Progress is being made on removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
I would not bet civilization's survival on the success of this, but it would be good if it works. However, to avoid disaster this way would require lots of investment — and the fossil fuel interests will be against that.
The US TV networks often silence all criticism of major US industries that advertise on TV.
Rep. Pelosi, a plutocratist to the end, is doing her best to oppose Medicare for All.
People in many localities in the US don't have access to clean water.
Michigan is cutting off water to people in Flint and Detroit because they can't pay their water bills for lead-poisoned water. This while charging Nestle $200, total, for a quantity 100,000 times as much.
Cost of Government Rises When Local Newspaper Closes, Study Finds.
Sometimes the state should raise more money by taxing the rich, and spend it on the poor. But I suspect that is not what tends to happen when a newspaper closes.
Italy has refused to allow a boat carrying 600 refugees rescued at sea into any Italian port.
Women in Venezuela, in extreme poverty and unable to afford contraception, are turning to underground abortions, and to sterilization.
If fanatical US Christians get their way, they will ban both abortion and contraception. And they are not very far away from it. They might ban sterilization, too; it is against their religion.
The worst choice, in such a situation, is to have a baby which you can't afford to raise. Thus, the right thing to do is sterilization. If you are an adult today, there is no danger of an insufficiency of births before you are 55 years old.
Judge Temporarily Blocks Deportation of New York Pizza Shop Worker.
Do-dirty's Drugs War: How One Family Was Destroyed.
In generally, when a ruler says he will send thugs to kill all the drug dealers, they kill a lot of other people. This happened in Thailand some years ago, and it is happening now in Bangladesh.
A trial can fail to do justice, but having no trial is much worse.
I have chosen to use my alteration of his name, rather than his. To use his would support him.
Getting rid of Do-dirty could end the murder of the poor, but there is only one way to end their hunger: to have a lot fewer babies.
The pretext for attacking Hodeidah is that Houthis receive arms through there.
Where does Salafi Arabia receive arms from the US? Why call one of them "smugling" and not the other?
The seizure of reporter Ali Watkins' phone and email contact records — not from her, but from companies — shows that US reporters must be extremely careful when talking with confidential sources that report on government wrongdoing.
Canada is suffering from homelessness like the US. Many homeless people have found shelter in all-night coffee shops.
New dockless scooters threaten to call the thugs if someone stands on them and doesn't log in.
One person quoted compares them to police state behavior but does not mention the aspect that is most like a police state: the scooters require users to identify themselves, then track where people go.
This is just as bad as Uber or Lyft, so I urge you to reject them absolutely, and tell other people why you do.
Correcting myths about Gaza. For instance, even Hamas is willing to make peace; it is Israel that won't.
6% of US workers work precariously in the service sweatshop economy.
Sean Hannity urged people to commit obstruction of justice. The punishment for this is up to 20 years in prison.
He probably feels he is safe because the cheater would pardon him.
The cheater has allowed ZTE to get back in business with a billion-dollar fine.
I don't know what ZTE's overall income is, or whether that fine is enough to motivate ZTE to avoid the risk of another fine.
Lush took down the "spycops" posters at its stores because former thugs threatened the staff.
Have they got recordings of these threats? It would be enlightening to publish the recordings so as to hold those former thugs accountable.
Yet another reason why drug companies shouldn't fund (and thus control) clinical trials of drugs: they withhold important data.
The saboteur's tariffs on imported solar panels have caused cancellation of 12 billion dollars in solar power projects.
These tariffs were not designed to effectively promote investment in US solar panel manufacture. They will last only a few years, which is not long enough for such investment to pay off. New factories would take time to set up, reducing the period of time for which they could be profitable.
The saboteur is blatantly dishonest, but he is cunning. I think this is a cunning plan to slow down the migration of the US to solar power, and that he did this for the sake of the fossil fools he generally serves.
A coal magnate dictated memos for the bullshitter to sign.
How The War Industry Corrupts The U.S. Congress. This includes several Democratic senators.
Many US thug departments send thugs to train with Israeli soldiers. This way they learn the attitudes that make them quick to shoot unarmed blacks.
Nearly 1,800 Immigrant Families Separated at US Border in Four Months.
Senator Merkley visited one prison, and describes how immigrants must sleep on the floor in cages.
US border thugs take children away from their parents as a means of pressuring them to plead guilty and/or drop their bid for asylum in order to get their children back. Parents might feel they must protect their children from the trauma of being "cared for" by overworked strangers who might despise them.
In addition to this cruelty, note that Sessions refuses to recognize that people who ask for political asylum are not breaking any laws.
Sorry, persecuted people — the US is not the kind of asylum you were looking for. It is the other kind.
The cheater rejects the idea that asbestos in his buildings could cause disease, and has had Saboteur Pruitt invent an excuse to make the EPA disregard the issue.
In parts of the US, state and local laws require removal of asbestos or forbid its use. Therefore, some of his buildings might not have any. Also, the risk from spending a few nights in a hotel which has asbestos in it somewhere may be too small to worry about. On the other hand, the staff might have a reason for concern.
Under a plutocratic regime, those staff, if they get sick, will be left to cope, on their own, asbestos they can.
The bully wants to export US mismanagement of the dairy industry to Canada, but Canada won't stand for it.
If this leads to cancellation of NAFTA, that would be a tremendous advance since NAFTA includes the ISDS (I Sue Democratic States) provision that allows foreign companies to sue to abolish any laws that get in their way.
The Teamsters' Union has learned that it is a mistake to abandon future workers to preserve the wage level of the current workers.
A US court ordered the Environmental Poisoning Agency to hand over any scientific material it might have that justifies Saboteur Pruitt's global heating denialism.
The EPA claims it would have to spend "countless hours" studying literature about global heating. Perhaps trying to find the few (if any) documents that deny global heating, among the huge stacks that demonstrate global heating, would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Facebook made a deal with Huawei to give it access to personal data of Facebook useds. This included useds who were customers of Huawei, and their "friends". This even though the US government considers Huawei a spy for China.
Facebook did the same thing for other phone manufacturers such as Apple and Blackberry.
Even if you are not a customer of those companies, you are still better off not being a used of Facebook.
Ecuador To Sell A Third Of Its Amazon Rainforest To Chinese Oil Companies.
Hello, Alexa, were you made in a Chinese sweatshop?
In 1921, mobs of rampaging whites burned down the black neighborhood of Tulsa, imprisoning and killing many of the inhabitants, all as the government stood by.
Our Plastic Pollution Crisis Is Too Big for Recycling to Fix.
After Turkey conquered the Afrin region of Syria, and many Kurds fled, Turkey settled Arabs in their homes.
After 30 years of a life sentence for possession of a lot of cocaine, under a law repealed 20 years ago, Rick Wershe has a chance at resentencing.
UK universities must now take attendance of foreign students so as to help deport them if they don't come to class. Foreign professors are likely to get deported if they go on strike.
This means that oppressing foreign visitors helps oppress Britons.
The US is pioneering a new kind of poverty, where most people's income is large compared with ordinary poor countries, but the cost of living is so high that life for most people is walking on a knife edge.
A hundred years ago, poor people in the US made very little money, but they could live on very little money. To Kill a Mockingbird refers to a schoolchild that couldn't accept a loan of a few cents because his family wouldn't be able to repay it. But they did not die from this. They evidently lived in a house they owned and didn't have to buy very much.
The equivalent purchasing power today might be ten dollars. Anyone in the US today that never had ten dollars would die.
US business executives intend to make sure that workers don't get much in the way of raises despite full employment.
This means that workers must organize — through unions, or through laws — so that employers can't do this.
The US ambassador to Israel told journalists to "keep your mouths shut" rather than criticize Israel for massacres of protesters.
Like a typical trumpet, he claims that the US media are biased against his side. The fact is that they usually go about "blaming Palestinians for their own slaughter".
The Israeli army will not allow us to find out who shot medic Razan al-Najjar, but we know the identities of those who wrote the orders that permitted this and those who protect the killer.
Save the Children found that 95% of the children in Gaza showed deep psychological distress.
Amnesty International: US and allied forces bombed Raqqa with bombs so large they destroyed entire buildings. There was no chance for civilians to escape, and the bombarding forces hardly tried to distinguish where civilians were.
If the bully's interpretation of the US constitution is accepted, it makes him an autocrat who could kill anyone in Congress who refuses to vote as he says, and get away with it.
"As victims of spycops, we stand with Lush in campaign for full disclosure."
US citizens: Support the STATES Act, for the federal government to cooperate with states that legalize marijuana.
US citizens: call on Mattis not to dump a US citizen on a road in Syria, where anyone is likely to be killed.
The US punishes people for doing menial work for terrorists — who kidnaped them and threatened to kill them if they didn't work.
I don't believe that fact that the work was cooking and cleaning is a crucial point. That it wasn't done voluntarily is the crucial point.
The bully has found a new method for abolishing Obama's medicaid extension: by deciding not to defend it against a right-wing state government's lawsuit to overturn the law.
Will anyone else get a chance to defend it in the Supreme Court?
North Korea is among the most repressive states on Earth, with perhaps a hundred thousand political prisoners.
I think it is wise to try to aim for nuclear disarmament of North Korea and an end to the Korean War, as the first targets, without demanding an end to the repression as well. Adding that demand would make agreement impossible. With peace, there is hope that the Kim dynasty will decide to reduce the repression.
(Satire) The United States of America signed Dunkin’ Donuts to a 10-year deal Wednesday naming the doughnut company and coffeehouse as the exclusive food vendor of the U.S.
(Satire) …Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt reportedly claimed Wednesday that the funds he has misappropriated would have only been wasted on dumb shit like clean water.
A thug in Georgia drove into an unarmed suspect with his thugcar, injuring him, and was fired as a punishment. A sheriff who is evidently eager to injure the public hired him and praised him, and lots of thugs are cheering.
Naomi Klein: 4,645 Deaths in Puerto Rico From Hurricane Maria Were "State-Sponsored Mass Killing".
"Spycop"s' Ex-Wives: We Support the Lush Campaign.
An unauthorized immigrant working as a pizza delivery courier was sent to deliver a pizza to a military base in Brooklyn. The base sent him to be deported.
I hope that all the couriers refuse to deliver there.
The UK's relentless attack on human rights, in the name of "fighting terrorism", now envisages criminalizing expression of opinions.
Surely within a decade the forbidden opinions will include criticism of plutocracy.
Everyone: oppose privatization of Minneapolis's public housing.
Americans: call on your state to pass network neutrality legislation.
US citizens: support the Debt-Free College Act.
US citizens: take a stand for protecting the oceans.
(Things have gone so far that instead of protecting this or that in the oceans, we need to protect the oceans.)
Big US companies systematically cheat low-wage employees out of their pay.
We should make participation in cheating employees a crime for the individuals that do it, to threaten the managers responsible with jail, rather than merely the corporation with a small fine.
Israel's parliament approved a law to let Israel confiscate Palestinians' land so as to settle Israelis in occupied territory.
Establishing colonies in occupied territory violates the Geneva Conventions.
The Oncologists Letter: Let Gaza Women Cancer Patients Out.
This is sexist. Men deserve medical care just as much as women; Israel should let everyone with a grave illness leave Gaza for medical care.
Dan Wenk, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, was kicked out for trying to conserve nature in the park. Saboteurs are now using his example to eliminate the culture of conservation.
If the Yemeni forces backed by the US attack Hodeidah, and the battle continues for more than a short time, it could leave most of Yemen without food and medicine.
I don't see anything about either side in Yemen that deserves support. If one of them conclusively defeated the other, at least Yemen would have peace. So if the Houthis lose quickly, that might be a good thing for Yemen.
But what if they don't? The Houthis are not just an armed gang, they are an ethnic group. If all the sides represent large communities, a conclusive military outcome may be impossible.
Facebook erroneously made millions of users' private postings visible to all useds.
Everyone makes mistakes, so I won't reproach Facebook for the mistake itself. However, this mistake demonstrates the folly of using a single system for both publication and private communications. They ought to be separate systems.
The Pentagon has accepted "infinite war" as its mission.
According to Greg Jaffe, "winning for much of the U.S. military’s top brass has come to be synonymous with staying put." Air Force General Mike Holmes says that the goal is "not losing. It’s staying in the game."
Saboteur of Housing Carson's rent increase would increase the rents for people in public housing by 20% on the average. But some would suffer a 50% increase.
He displays the usual Republican blackwhiting by saying this would "give poor people a way out of poverty" — unless he's envisioning the path to the cemetery.
Homelessness in the US is already increasing, but the rent increase will accelerate it.
I expect the newly homeless will have trouble getting permission to vote in Republican-controlled states. Republicans surely consider that a plus.
The EU's Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia.
Google has posted a list of ethical principles for AI work.
What I note is that principle 5, about privacy, is a small step in the right direction, but far short of what we need to avoid a China-style society of total surveillance.
In particular, asking for users' consent is totally ineffective as a way of protecting society from systematic surveillance, if refusing said consent is considered by most people to be utterly impossible. Look at the terms for a Google account: obscene surveillance, but only by consent. If refusal is not a practical, easy thing, it's not really consent.
The EFF has some other criticisms, on issues I think are important but not as important as this one.
Thugs in Oregon punched a harmless mentally ill man ten or twenty times because he kept trying to warn them about a possibly nonexistent danger.
I can understand how he was distracting. Perhaps it was justified to arrest him and move him away. That was no need, or excuse, for violence.
A movie tries to end Spain's amnesia about dictator Franco's mass murder and other crimes.
Senate aide James Wolfe has been accused of leaking to the press, based on getting a reporter's phone call records.
Reporters and whistleblowers must learn to communicate anonymously, regarding the US as a repressive surveillance state like the Soviet Union.
20% of Mauritanians are slaves. The slaves are mainly blacks, while Arabs and Berbers are the masters.
An abolitionist party hopes to win in the next election and free the slaves.
Activists trying to block addition of a new runway to Heathrow airport have announced a hunger strike. They are focusing on the people that would be killed by the additional fossil fuel emissions from increased air travel.
Thugs raided Chelsea Manning's home with guns drawn, after concerned friends said they feared she might be suicidal.
Her friends were well-intentioned, but sending thugs to your friend's home is asking for violence.
Ortega's deadly repression has made Nicaraguans unwilling to tolerate him any longer.
Nicaragua needs a progressive democratic movement to oppose Ortega.
In 30 years, the amount of flooding from high tides has doubled in the US.
This is sea-level rise at work, and most of it is caused by global heating, so it will keep getting worse. As heating accelerates, the sea-level rise will also accelerate.
It is folly to choose to "adapt" to this with ever more costly partial measures. What we need to do is stop the actions that will lead to more sea-level rise.
Pig factories in North Carolina release a lot more toxic pig waste than they claim to release.
Professors call for the release of Professor Abbas Edalat, an Iranian expat who was arrested on a visit home.
Rev Al Sharpton: Democrats 'too tame to deal with Trump'.
I would say, rather, that many Democrats support the plutocratist establishment almost as much as the bully does. They don't aim to make America great for the non-rich again.
US citizens: Call on Mattis to respond with justice to the civilian casualties in Raqqa.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the WATER act (Water Affordability, Transparency Equity and Reliability Act, to provide Americans with what people in Flint and other cities don't have.
Everyone: Demand corrections from FOX affiliates for Social Security propaganda.
Graduating in AI? Pledge not to interview for Google unless it vows permanently not to work on military AI.
You can sign the pledge without running nonfree software by email to stanfordsolidaritynetwork@gmail.com.
Singapore made its repressive side visible by harassing a comedian that impersonates Kim Jong-un.
Israel published a deceptive smear video against Razan al-Najjar.
All seafood now contains microscopic bits of plastic. Many species may be wiped out by it. The rest will feed us plastic as we eat it.
I find it offensive that the author says "we" drink bottled water. I never buy bottled water where I can find another way to get safe drinking water. I carry around a refillable bottle and I refill it.
The chump "is a useless negotiator, and Kim Jong-un will know that."
Putin's ministers gave an order in 2014 to destroy the historical records of prisoners in Soviet political prisons.
Google employees persuaded Google to drop its AI contract with the Pentagon.
However, Google did not promise not to take other such contracts in the future.
Without Interpreters, California’s Deaf Prisoners Are Getting Stuck Behind Bars.
In Massachusetts, many men committed involuntarily for opioid addiction are put into a prison where guards pay little attention to prisoners' health.
Austria is expelling imams that are funded by hostile Turkey.
More countries should expel imams funded by extremist countries. Indonesia would be much better off today if it had expelled imams funded by Salafi Arabia 30 years ago.
Tories latest crushing contradiction: a woman who cannot get out of her wheelchair without help was told to report for an inspection where an incompetent non-doctor will decide whether she is fit for work. But she can't get into the office because it is upstairs.
The building has an elevator, but they said she is forbidden to use it unless she can walk up and down the stairs.
If she tells them, a second time, that she can't go up the stairs, they will call her a malingerer and cut off the welfare benefits she lives on.
It takes a special kind of heartlessness to design a bureaucracy to order people to do the impossible and then punish them for failing. That is the heartlessness of Tories.
Tory dooH niboR policies amount to destitution by design. 1.5 million people in the UK were destitute in 2017. But that record won't last long, with Tories in charge. They will beat it this year.
The danger is that this has been getting worse for so long that it starts seeming normal.
"Black people are unduly burdened by the expectation that we always be on our 'best' behavior — or be subject to punishment."
When it comes to voting, even your best behavior is not enough if you're black.
"Oil may be Canada's past, but we cannot let it be our future."
China is bullying companies into pretending that Taiwan is part of China. This is dangerous, especially since it combines with military threats to invade Taiwan.
There was a big increase in the US suicide rate from 1999 to 2016.
The easy availability of guns in the US is not new. I think this indicates that precarious work, with wages inadequate to live on, is driving Americans to suicide.
Suicide rates of teenagers are rising in London.
Gaza medics take several precautions so that Israeli snipers can't fail to recognize them. Sometimes the snipers shoot them anyway. They have shot 25 medics in Gaza so far.
The nondemocratic imposed government of Puerto Rico is insisting on rebuilding fossil fuel facilities. This probably has to do with the fact that they have been privatized, so rebuilding them is welfare for the rich. Distributed solar facilities would belong to the citizens.
Australia is pushing to punish whistleblowers more harshly, and perhaps also journalists that publish their reports.
Earth is approaching a global plastic calamity. We need to eliminate most single-use plastic objects of all kinds.
After thugs killed a dozen protesters, the people of Tuticorin in India won the battle to shut down the copper smelting plant that has made many of them sick.
It may still be possible to thwart Trudeau's attempt to finish the Unkinder Morgan pipeline. But even if it is finished, it may not have many customers.
Nonetheless, he will still have succeeded in wasting billions of dollars of Canadians' money.
Time For Unions To Step Up On Medicare For All.
The pharma company INSYS hired prostitutes who had sex with doctors to encourage them to proscribe fentanyl in high doses for off-label use. It also paid doctors money as kickbacks.
Its executives are on trial for this.
The northern section of the Great Barrier Reef has lost half the coral. This was due to successive bleaching events in two very hot summers.
It demonstrates that continuing global heating is likely to wipe out the reef even before the level of CO2 in the ocean kills all coral.
Australia is driving its large fish species to extinction by overfishing, outside of limited protected areas.
Amnesty's Research Reveals the Huge Civilian Toll of the Coalition Forces 'Precision Airstrikes' against [PISSI] in the Syrian City.
What's more, the US tries to bury the issue rather than investigating civilian casualties.
The UN says that the US is violating human rights law by taking children away from immigrant parents.
US Citizens: tell Congress to reject public housing rent hikes and fully fund hud.
The bullshitter is trying to stir up Americans to hate Canada by citing (incorrectly) the war of 1812.
That's typical target-of-the-day rhetoric for the bullshitter, but why this particular target? He is cunning and generally has reasons for his choices of target for hatred — reasons that are rational although vicious and duplicitous.
The bullshitter is totally loyal to fossil fuels, so he surely appreciates Trudeau's recent act of pipeline treachery. I wonder if he aims to anger Canadians so they will stand with Trudeau, just when they need to fight him about the pipeline.
The US should expand Social Security.
Indonesia is failing to stop loggers from cutting down the Sungai Putri forest.
In addition to killing a thousand orangutans, a substantial fraction of those remaining it Borneo, cutting down the forest is likely to result in drying of the peat, which would imply the burning of the peat, or perhaps only the upper few feet of it. This would put a major spike into global heating.
The UN has proposed a plan to cut down plastic waste carefully but soon.
Israeli militarists and bigots don't feel any shame about killing Palestinian medic Razan Najjar. They defend the shooting with specific lies, general lies, and absurd conspiracy theories reminiscent of the absurd claims that mass shootings in the US were fabricated.
Their attitude is that of a lynch mob.
Israel has dropped nearly all the charges filed two years ago against anti-occupation activist Ezra Nawi, because they were false. They were fabricated to sabotage his life and mission. Perhaps from the stress, he has suffered a stroke and will never be able to campaign as he did before.
The article reports that using spurious or far-fetched charges is standard repressive Israeli practice against human rights activists.
Legal efforts to establish the right to a stable climate under the US Constitution.
3D printed houses will contain "sensors" built into the pieces of the structure.
It might be difficult to remove sensors embedded in big chunks of solid material. I wonder what they will sense. Sounds, perhaps? Presence of people?
Australia plans to force companies to help decrypt users' data. But it is not clear how far that would go.
Western sales front companies have refused to sign the Bangladesh worker safety agreement for the manufacture of their products.
New emissions tests carried out by a light beam as cars pass on the road have made cheating impossible. However, some Diesel cars have really been made much cleaner.
A UK parliamentary committee recommends ceasing to provide any government funding for homeopathy.
It was foolish to give any official support to that pseudoscientific practice.
Salafi Arabia uses "anti-terror" laws to imprison and torture human rights defenders, according to a UN examination. Some of them are flogged, even executed.
I wonder if Dubya learned the practice from Salafi Arabia.
The lawsuit against a Colorado bakery was decided by the Supreme Court in a very narrow opinion that found the bakery not guilty of discrimination, but clearly said that discrimination against homosexual customers as a general policy is unacceptable.
There are two ways to look at that bakery's action: as refusal to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, or as refusal to make a wedding cake showing two men as the couple. The first is unacceptable; the second can perhaps be defended on First Amendment grounds. Alas, the two conditions tend to go together.
Even where abortion is legal, if it is hard to find a clinic that does abortions, women turn to dangerous methods that can kill them.
US school dress codes are often explicitly biased against blacks, but even when they aren't, they tend to be enforced in a biased way (like so many laws).
The Southern Poverty Law Center made the town of Corinth, Mississippi, stop jailing poor people over fines they could not pay.
However, towns and cities across the US engage in this cruelty. In many cases it is a byproduct of Republican tax-cutting. For plutocratists, squeezing money out of poor people is preferable to taxing rich people.
These DINOs are Joe Donnelly (Indiana), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota), Doug Jones (Alabama), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), and Bill Nelson (Florida). If I lived in one of those states, I would support a progressive primary challenger at the next opportunity.
The Tory minister in charge of deportation said she didn't know about the numerical targets, but a secret memo shows she was lying.
A former manager of the immigration agency says that ministers could hardly have been ignorant of the targets. He also says that the policy ("hostile environment") is more responsible for the cruelty than the targets are. Maybe that is so, but targets can push staff to be crueler than their consciences would normally permit.
US Republicans are even worse, because they are theocratic too. The Tories don't judge people by their lifestyle, only by their wealth.
For Indian women, rape is the extreme manifestation of a spectrum of subjection that starts when they are children.
Microscopic pieces of plastic are found in the soil in Swiss mountains. If these kill the earthworms, they will indirectly harm the plants, too.
South and North Korea pledged to make peace. If they follow through, that will be a great advance.
Denuclearizing both countries would be a great step forward, too. Maybe someday even India and Pakistan could agree to denuclearize.
We should not presume that final agreement will be reached; there remain many opportunities for things to go wrong. For instance, the bully won't like it, and he may try to wreck it. He does not mind looking like a warmonger.
What has changed is that now there are opportunities for things to go right.
I agree completely, but encrypting the contents of messages is not enough to protect us from repression. We must not allow the government to be able to find out, in general, where people go or who talks with whom.
US citizens: call on the Senate to about the wrongs of the House farm bill.
EU citizens: write to and phone your MEPs to oppose the copyright censorship directive.
The Parliament should kill this directive entirely, rather than try to modify it. The rules of the EU will allow the other EU organs (which have already approved this tyrannical measure) to override the Parliament's decisions, and it is very hard for Parliament to block that afterward.
Bangladesh's thug department death squad killed politician Akramul Haque, then said it was in a shoot-out. His wife recorded a phone with him as he died, proving that the thugs were lying.
Brian Jones is now middle-aged, but since he is black, he still fears being falsely accused of various crimes because of his race.
The job of American thugs is upholding law and order; when bigotry is included in that "order", the result is to multiply the bigotry of any bigot that calls 911.
Other Americans describe the everyday bigotry they encounter in the US.
Google could manipulate elections simply by jiggering with search ranking. Experiments show that this can influence how people vote.
It would be very difficult to make regulations against this that a search engine company could not evade. The computation of search ranking is complex, for good reasons including stopping sites from gaming the system; this creates many places to hide the manipulation and many ways to disguise it.
I am not sure what the solution could be.
When I want to check some facts, the first place I look is Wikipedia. To do a search for articles, then read them, takes a long time, so I rarely go that way.
It is a shame that the writer endorses the prejudices embodied by using the word "consume" to refer to reading articles.
Modi said India would eliminate all single-use plastic by 2022.
That must be the eventual target, but it might be important to allow some specific temporary exceptions until better substitutes are developed. Paper bags already exist for carrying purchases, and paper straws were standard order when I was a child, but some specific uses in food packaging might not have replacements yet.
David Hogg escaped being killed in Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, so a right-wing terrorist tried to get a SWAT team to kill him. Fortunately for him, nobody was home at the time.
If we take the danger of global heating disaster seriously, we must put an end to airport expansion and start resisting plans to increase the number of flights.
Soros: Instead of trying to teach Italy a lesson by punishing non-rich Italians, the EU should learn one.
Senator Warren condemned the saboteur-in-chief for launching "a war on public health, a war on public safety, a war on truly free and competitive markets, a war on American workers, a war on American consumers.”
Iran is increasing the pressure to maintain the nonnuclear deal by making parts for additional uranium enrichment centrifuges.
DeVos set up a panel to study safety of students in school. It won't cover the possibility of being shot.
Will it cover the danger of being jailed by a "school resource" thug?
Monsanto is (in effect) changing its name to "Bayer". So transfer to "Bayer" all the criticism and hostility that you associated with "Monsanto".
Giant tech companies now systematically kill off potential new competitors, or threaten to do so in order to force them to sell for a low price.
Many US prisons charge prisoners a small fee to see a doctor — but it can take a prisoner a month to make that small fee on prison wages.
Public-funded school vouchers are supporting religiously biased "schools" that inculcate religion and bogus science.
A former Tory official is now a corrupt newspaper editor, and has sold Google and Uber a promise of favorable news coverage.
The military is not a very good tool for dealing with the problem of global heating.
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but the military is proposed only as treatment of the symptoms. What could the military do to prevent global heating? Bomb fossil fuel facilities to render them unusable, I suppose. But how about trying peaceful approaches first?
Not having a mobile phone can make you happier.
It will certainly do wonders for your privacy.
Israel plans to make it a crime to photograph the actions of the Israeli army with intent to criticize.
So journalists will be allowed to make videos of soldiers shooting protesters only if the purpose is to praise them for it.
The EU governments joined the EU executive in supporting mandatory copyright censorship filters.
This is terribly dangerous.
The Supreme Court seems inclined to tolerate an Arkansas law that creates a pretext to ban distribution of abortion pills.
This decision seems to be about a preliminary injunction to delay application of the law, rather than about the validity of the law itself. But we have to fear that this presages the ultimate decision about the law's validity.
A week ago the Irish Republic threw off Christian theocracy, but now it threatens the US. If theocratists make safe abortion unobtainable in the US, they will kill thousands of women, and condemn millions of adults to lifelong poverty, and millions of children to stunted lives.
"It's telling that those zealots who want to defend the 'unborn child' are complicit in policies that impoverish women and children."
Misguided values of the day: a writer thinks that the effect of Javascript code of slowing down a web page from 3 seconds to 45 seconds is worse than spying on users and taking control of their computers.
There are only four big accounting companies big enough to audit big companies. This creates a danger of tolerating fraud. We need to break up these companies, as well as the other big companies they audit.
Thousands of AI researchers have taken a stand against the intrusion of paywalled journals into their field.
I salute their willingness to act to put an end to nonfree scientific publication. They could make their principles clearer and sharper if they replace the word "open" with "free (libre)".
Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia.
The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing.
Netanyahu ordered generals to prepare to attack Iran, in 2011. He could do that again at any moment if he thinks it is advantageous for him.
The US government is shutting down the few remaining clinics where people in great pain can get enough opiates to treat it. The doctor warns that some will commit suicide.
I hope they do it in congresscritter's offices so that it might help end the War on Pain Sufferers.
Italy's new government says it will deport half a million refugees.
Lush publicized the dishonesty of thugs, and faces criticism from thugs who say it is wrong to remind people of their dishonesty.
One of the women that the undercover thugs seduced says she appreciates the support.
When farm animals are regularly given antibiotics, the antibiotics pollute local water and trigger antibiotic resistance. The EU was considering a plan to try to stop that, but gave up.
Some US schools are buying tremendously expensive face recognition surveillance systems, supposedly for security against shootings. These systems are useless for such security, but will subject all the students to tyranny.
Mueller's investigation cost only 1/4 as much as the cheater's golf trips.
The hater has appointed many officials that were known for stirring up hatred against immigrants.
Saboteur Pruitt wants to erase future car fuel efficiency standards so that the US car companies can sell extravagant large cars. Worse, he intends to take away states' rights to set higher standards.
Holding people responsible for what their partners in crime do can lead to sentences that are clearly unfair.
Youtube is deleting lots of "drill" music with violent lyrics.
I don't think any company is obligated to publish such music. (I would surely find it disgusting.) What worries me is for any one company to be such a bottleneck that its publication decisions should become news.
Some common "alternative" cancer treatments are worse than useless — they undermine the effectiveness of drugs and radiation.
Hundreds of thousands of seabirds used to nest in the Shetland Islands. Only a few thousand remain. The cause is global heating.
The Irish Republic's constitution has a clause about preserving women's role "in the home", which is now recognized as sexist.
I think it is better to make the clause gender-neutral than to repeal it. Repealing it would tend to lead to less state aid to parents; making it gender-neutral would lead to more.
Only in prison did Mohammed Khalid find friends and therapists to help him escape the spell of the jihadi cult he had fallen into. Before that, the jihadis were his only friends.
Why did FBI agents slam an unarmed person against a wall? There was no need for that.
The IMF is imposing hardship on non-rich Jordanians.
At least the state is increasing taxes more for businesses than for individuals. It could be worse, if it acted like the US.
"The research suggests that when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy."
The TSA's harass-list for travelers that have protested or complained violates civil liberties, especially given that the agency tends to cover up and demand immunity for when it attacks people.
"Anonymizing" people's cell phone location tracking data still allows determining a lot about them from locations.
Everyone: call on Indonesia and Aceh not to build a dam that would destroy a protected rainforest which is a habitat for endangered species.
Who Should Feed the World: Real People or Faceless Multinationals?
Activity in Brazil was brought to a halt by a strike by truck drivers, self-organized and not going through a union. They demanded a lower price for diesel fuel.
By making the price unpredictable, President Temer put the burden on the truck drivers. The country needs to charge more for fossil fuels; subsidy of fossil fuels promotes global heating. However, it needs to make sure that the burden does not fall on truck drivers, but rather on the businesses that use the services of trucks.
Sheriffs Are Raking In Millions In Prison Phone Fees And Some Really Don't Want To Talk About It.
Canadians are protesting Trudeau's plan to force the Unkinder Morgan pipeline through.
Senator Merkley tried to visit a prison for baby immigrants, but they wouldn't let him in or tell him anything.
The motive for the policy of taking all babies away from their parents is to create what in the UK is called a "hostile environment". These babies are being used as hostages; hurting them is intended to make their parents miserable. Thus, the US has become the world leader in sadism.
The bully wants to increase US involvement in Salafi Arabia's sickness-spreading intervention in Yemen.
Proposing a maximum income limit, linked to most people's income. This way, high earners could only increase their post-tax income by helping everyone else get a higher income.
Udoka Nweke faces murder if he is sent back to Nigeria, because mobs there tend to murder homosexuals. He asked for asylum in the US in December, 2016, and has been in prison ever since.
(Satire) ICE agent Don Neville was reportedly trying Monday to think of a fun name for a jail cell before locking up a 5-year-old immigrant.
The Onion truly excels at helping us see thugs as human beings with the same range of emotions as all the rest of us.
Equating certain people to nonhuman animals makes it easier to commit violence against them.
Facebook made deals for phone and computer manufacturers including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung to access data about its useds and their friends as well. These deals seem to still be operative.
When Zuckerberg testified to Congress, he said Facebook had stopped doing this years ago. Apparently he lied.
The students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school will spend two months campaigning for candidates that support gun control.
The US Air Force has so much military power that it has no difficulty in spending 100 billion dollars to build a totally pointless new bomber.
The carbon bubble is likely to burst before 2035. When it does, if your money is in fossil fuels, you are likely to lose it.
The sooner the bubble bursts, the less of Earth we will destroy. The current rate of switching to renewable energy will not avoid global disaster, but it won't be the worst possible disaster. Thus, the bully wants to force cities to buy electricity from obsolete coal plants.
Edward Snowden: "The people are still powerless, but now they're aware."
US college seniors: Are you graduating from college in the US this year? Did you get Bill Gates's "gift" of gratis download of a book?
If so, can you tell me (1) whether you can download it without running any nonfree software, (2) whether it has DRM, and (3) whether you have to agree to a jerkmaking "no sharing, no lending, no giving" contract before you can get a copy?
US citizens: call for charges against Reality Winner to be dropped.
Nauru has made criticism of the government and its courts a crime.
That makes it even more useful as a sealed immigration prison for Australia.
Theocratic Christians plan to make state legislatures push their religion into public schools, and to legalize discrimination against queer people.
They published a document describing the states in their plan. Laws to impose religious slogans in public buildings are the first step.
Hong Kong Independence Activists Sentenced to Four Weeks' Jail.
It is actually Hong Kong that will be in jail.
Hungary will jail people for informing asylum seekers of their legal rights.
What this means is that the state plans to cheat them of their rights.
What will happen when the carbon bubble bursts?
The US ambassador to Germany tried to meddle in German internal politics.
The Germans have been too gentle in response. The bully is likely to think of this as ineffectual resistance which means he should continue along the same lines.
I urge Germany to expel that ambassador.
Can a criminal president pardon perself?
I think we need to amend the US Constitution to make it clear that the president cannot pardon crimes that were committed in connection with that president's own actions or orders.
Some of the evacuated areas near Fukushima are now safe, but most people are afraid to return.
If a nuclear power plant accident does not pollute the surrounding area with radiation, it is a disaster anyway, simply because of the loss of a plant that cost billions of dollars to build.
Chinese are commemorating the anniversary of Tank Man, who blocked for a while the tanks that were sent to slaughter protesting students in Beijing.
Publix supermarkets said it would stop making campaign contributions. Those were directed at right-wing candidates.
I suppose the owners will continue supporting them, though.
The cheater's lawyers claim that the US president cannot ever be said to commit obstruction of justice, because he is in charge of all investigations.
Trump's Lawyers Want Legal Immunity for the President. Who Will Stop Them?
Irrational mob violence against non-English-speakers has flared up in the US a number of times since 100 years ago.
Foolish people do this because non-English-speakers make good scapegoats. I wonder, do billionaires speak some special language we could ban?
I have to correct one flippant point: English did not become dominant in what is now the US in the 17th century. I've read that around 1800 German seemed to be the most common language in the US of the time, though I can't be sure that is accurate.
The US expanded westward in the 19th century to lands that surely didn't use English much before that. After the US conquered parts of Mexico in the 1840s, the inhabitants continued speaking Spanish for quite some time.
How the cheater turns vagueness to the service of lies and bullshit.
I suggest not paying attention to anything he says. Focus instead on what he and his henchmen are doing.
Hotel and restaurant workers in Melbourne are learning not to tolerate wage theft and unbearable schedules as normal.
UK spies still have intelligence collaborations which involve torture by partner countries. This despite having been ordered not to do so.
US citizens: by June 10, phone your congresscritter and demand person vote to continue the partial Network Neutrality rules.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on the Senate to block the nomination of anti-immigrant bigot Ronald Mortenson to be in charge of assistance to refugees.
Everyone: call on Trudeau to kill the Unkinder Morgan pipeline.
A whale was found dying from eating more than 80 plastic bags. Apparently they filled up the whale's stomach, so it starved.
Prohibition of marijuana does not "work", if you define "working" as stopping people from using it. Even if one presumes that it would be better if nobody used marijuana, the right thing to do is legalize it and regulate it.
However, the premise that it would be better if nobody used marijuana is wrong anyway.
Whistleblower Reality Winner, who made the public aware of the Trump-Russia collusion scandal, is almost forgotten, jailed while awaiting trial for leaking the document that led to Mueller's investigation.
Meanwhile, the bully is trying to stop the Department of Justice from investigating him and his campaign.
The government is also obstructing her lawyers from searching for evidence to base their case on.
Casino workers in Las Vegas are planning to go on strike, partly to oppose automation that would eliminate their jobs.
I support them, but I hope they will also campaign for state legislators to put legal limits on automation, to maintain employment.
The weak Dodd-Frank compromise bank regulation law, just recently weakened even further with the help of plutocratist democrats, shows the need to break up the big banks into much smaller pieces.
An adaptation of my tax proposal could pressure each big bank to split itself up.
One reason old Americans tend to be more right-wing is that poor people and blacks tend to die younger.
"An abortion at the age of 23 gave me freedom." Even for women who don't desperately need an abortion, abortion rights are crucial.
India has launched effective programs that have reduced deaths from heat waves.
If we keep heating up the atmosphere, we will make this a moving target. It is more effective to turn the heat down than to cope with its increase.
A UN report says that Republicans are deliberately trying to increase inequality and poverty in the US.
When US children grow up in poverty, it is nearly impossible for them to escape poverty, now that the government no longer offers much help.
I think the underlying reason for this is that American rich consider most Americans superfluous as workers, and would rather eradicate them than allow them any hope. The plan is to turn them against each other based on various kinds of racial, ethnic or gender groupings.
If one more state ratifies the Equal Rights Amendment, Congress could vote to extend the deadline so that the amendment would pass.
This might be possible in January.
The US government continues presenting gross undercounts of the number of civilian casualties.
This practice started under Dubya and continued under Obama.
Amnesty International Calls on US to Investigate All Claims of Civilian Casualties.
The US really has a "Free Trade" problem, but rather than managing the economy to make it work better, the bully's "solution" is to manage it for his own profit.
The Department of Education, under the control of Saboteur DeVos, has dismissed hundreds of civil rights cases — not based on their merits but rather based on Republicans' lack of merit.
The saboteur-in-chief wants to force electric utilities to buy electricity from failing coal and nuclear plants, to keep them running and endangering people.
To create an excuse, the saboteurs would pretend there is an emergency.
Will four-year-olds who can resist eating a marshmallow for 10 minutes develop into more capable teenagers? A study years ago said yes; an attempt to replicate it found little effect.
These studies measure correlation between the four-year-olds' untrained capacity to defer gratification and their later abilities. Whether actively teaching four-year-olds to defer gratification would lead to later benefits for them is a different question.
Indeed, it is possible that changes in patterns of raising children have altered the tendencies that the studies measure.
Uri Avnery: Israel converted Gaza into an enemy, but that enemy now offers a 40-year truce that it will certainly not break. Will Israel dare tolerate the possibility of peace?
This year's congressional election will remain vulnerable to cheating through computerized voting machines.
Calling for House and Senate investigations of the Trump family's prima facie corruption in deals with China.
The cheater is refusing to cooperate with the Government Accountability Office.
Uganda has put a tax on "social media use" to discourage citizens from communicating with anyone.
Italy's two governing parties have agreed to replace the proposed economy minister that was vetoed because he was willing simply to think about separating Italy from the euro.
I think that reforming the euro-zone rules would be better that pulling Italy and Greece out of the euro zone. However, as long as governments are unwilling to threaten to leave, the banksters won't even consider reforminmg the rule.
Protesters in Northern Ireland demand abortion rights such as women in the Irish Republic will soon have.
Nicaragua's suppression forces killed 11 more protesters in a massive demonstration led by mothers of protesters previously killed.
Florida thugs kills a black man over nothing but their own imagination and panic. Relatives sued, and a jury awarded them 4 cents in damages.
Offshore windfarms off the Netherlands are driving away fish.
If the species found in the area are not threatened overall, I think the renewable electricity is more important than the fishing in that area.
However, it is worth looking for ways to reduce the impact. There may be an alternative to pile driving as a way to emplace the wind turbines. Also, taller turbine poles could reduce the electromagnetic fields that reach the water.
A lawful immigrant to the UK was dropped into a Kafkaesque nightmare when the government lost her passport and then made impossible requirements for her to get another one.
She has been destitute for 10 years.
This sort of thing has happened to thousands of people.
Everyone makes mistakes. However, when a system punishes the victims of its mistakes, that's inexcusable. One must suspect that the agency does this because it was directed to create a "hostile environment".
A judge dropped charges against some inauguration protesters because US prosecutors were shown to have violated their right to a fair trial.
13 years later, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the countries that allowed the US operate torture bases on their territory acted illegally.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Equality Act to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexual identity.
Everyone: Call on Mattis to free Toffiq al-Bihani, a prisoner in Guantanamo.
The Washington Post supports US participation in Salafi Arabia's disastrous intervention in Yemen regretting the disaster it has produced.
(Satire) FiveThirtyEight announced Friday that they would be laying off dozens of the site’s top algorithms.
The baby went to Texas to talk with parents of recently murdered students. One said it was "like talking to a toddler".
(Satire) …officials…were forced to euthanize a rose bush after it pricked a child.
I think armed plants should always be kept in cages ;-).
(Satire) A deportation thug wants to have kids of his own after seeing the love and devotion of the immigrant parents begging him not to take their child.
Senator Warren describes the anti-abortion policy that the bully aims to impose on the US.
Racist white Americans support cuts in social benefits because they have been told (falsely) that nonwhites get most of these benefits.
How foolish it is to let rich people divide you based on superficial things.
The Japanese government dealt with a corruption scandal that included the prime minister's wife by dropping charges against everyone.
Trump's Hard-Right Judges Will Do Lasting Damage to America.
We need to create a way to remove them.
A "training" scheme in the UK traps trainees in debt servitude. No wonder the "training" is not actually useful.
"When confronted with white supremacists, newspaper editors should consider 'strategic silence'."
UK frackers have convinced a court to ban all protests that would interfere in any way with fracking.
The Tories are absolutely determined to risk Britain's water supplies to put more CO2 into the air.
Puerto Rico is suing the US government demanding release of data on people killed by the hurricane.
Gazans protested again, and Israelis shot some, including a medic who was killed.
Israel says the Palestinian protests were violent. If that is true, the Palestinians are making a misguided choice. Their only chance of winning more world support is nonviolence.
The Guardian starts to recognize that the "smart" home means a surveillance home.
Everyone: call on Disney to pay all employees at least $15 per hour.
US citizens: tell the government to stop taking children away from border-crossing parents.
Disabled people in the UK fear the legalization of assisted suicide. They expect to be pressured into suicide by a state that saves money by leaving them totally helpless.
There is no fundamental conflict between providing the disabled with what they need for a decent life, if that is possible, and giving people a way out of a life which is inevitably hell. To do both, we need to put an end to plutocracy.
US border thugs shot refugee Claudia Patricia Gómez González dead, then told various stories to create an excuse. They said that the refugees were "rushing" them.
The other witnesses have been jailed and can't be found.
It turns out that border thugs have a made a practice of grossly exaggerating the frequency of "assaults" against them.
Rich people and politicians from many countries choose the UK as the place to sue critical journalists so as to silence them.
Uri Avnery: Israel converted Gaza into an enemy, but that enemy now offers a 40-year truce that it will certainly not break. Will Israel dare tolerate the possibility of peace?
This year's congressional election will remain vulnerable to cheating through computerized voting machines.
Calling for House and Senate investigations of the Trump family's prima facie corruption in deals with China.
The cheater is refusing to cooperate with the Government Accountability Office.
Uganda has put a tax on "social media use" to discourage citizens from communicating with anyone.
Italy's two governing parties have agreed to replace the proposed economy minister that was vetoed because he was willing simply to think about separating Italy from the euro.
I think that reforming the euro-zone rules would be better than pulling Italy and Greece out of the euro zone. However, as long as governments are unwilling to threaten to leave, the banksters won't even consider reforming the rules.
Protesters in Northern Ireland demand abortion rights such as women in the Irish Republic will soon have.
Nicaragua's suppression forces killed 11 more protesters in a massive demonstration led by mothers of protesters previously killed.
Florida thugs killed a black man over nothing but their own imagination and panic. Relatives sued, and a jury awarded them 4 cents in damages.
Offshore windfarms off the Netherlands are driving away fish.
If the species found in the area are not threatened overall, I think the renewable electricity is more important than the fishing in that area.
However, it is worth looking for ways to reduce the impact. There may be an alternative to pile driving as a way to emplace the wind turbines. Also, taller turbine poles could reduce the electromagnetic fields that reach the water.
A lawful immigrant to the UK was dropped into a Kafkaesque nightmare when the government lost her passport and then made impossible requirements for her to get another one.
She has been destitute for 10 years.
This sort of thing has happened to thousands of people.
Everyone makes mistakes. However, when a system punishes the victims of its mistakes, that's inexcusable. One must suspect that the agency does this because it was directed to create a "hostile environment".
A judge dropped charges against some inauguration protesters because US prosecutors were shown to have violated their right to a fair trial.
13 years later, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the countries that allowed the US to operate torture bases on their territory acted illegally.
Federal judges appointed by Republicans tend to be biased against blacks.
Debunking myths that pressure people that have one child to make another child.
A plan for increasing charter schools in North Carolina is designed so that they will be segregated.
Workers are suing Facebook for its age-discriminating job ads, as well as the companies that buy the targeted ads.
Amazon works its warehouse staff to the point of sickness and even death.
Virginia has approved expansion of Medicaid — that is, participation in part of Obama's medical care program.
Republicans fight to the death to prevent expansion of Medicaid — poor people's death, that is. Republicans oppose this program on principle because it provides government help to people who they believe aren't rich enough to deserve it. But they also oppose it more specifically because it was a victory for Democrats.
Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Lucrative Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially.
As far as I'm concerned, what's important here is not which company does the work, but the danger to society of drone bombing with or without AI.
The UN has made a deal that would eventually enable some of the Rohingya to return to Burma. However, if the majority of Rohingya, who don't have any papers, are excluded, it isn't much of a deal.
Assange will be welcome to stay in the Ecuadorian embassy provided he avoids making political statements.
New Zealand aims to eliminate some introduced predators — rats, possums, and stoats — to protect kiwis and other native birds.
We exaggerate the extent to which native peoples actively protected nature. Humans have a tendency to hunt animals to extinction, until they learn better. It was the Maori that wiped out the moas, and presumably the aboriginals of Australia that wiped out the giant bird Dromornis, and presumably the Malagasy that wiped out the elephant birds.
Fortunately, humans can also learn to protect nature. In the 1700s, European traders organized a system of territories to limit hunting of beavers in Canada, so that the natives wouldn't hunt them to extinction and bring the profitable beaver fur trade to a halt. This was good for all the humans involved, as well as for the beavers as a species.
The question is whether today's civilization can learn to protect nature and work hard enough to succeed in doing it.
2050 might be fine as a target for eliminating those predators from New Zealand, if civilization continues so that New Zealand remains able to carry out the plan. But that slow time scale offers plenty of time for something to happen that would bring the effort to a halt.
Meanwhile, what about the cats? Domestic and feral cats kill tremendous numbers of birds, all around the world, including endangered birds.
The world is full of eco-menaces that humans actively keep in check. These include invasive species, pollution in the ground, and nuclear waste. If technological civilization falls, there will still be humans (I expect), but they won't have the means to stop these menaces from spreading.
The system for labeling sun cream is confusing, so most people misunderstand it.
Correcting this should not be left to the good will of companies.
A New Jersey thug punched a teenager in the head, then slammed her to the ground, after determining that she was not drunk.
For a thug to switch off a bodycam while attacking a person ought to be considered obstruction of justice. The thug should go to prison for that alone, and serve additional time for the violence itself.
As for Ms Weinman, even if she spit intentionally at the thug who had already brutalized her, that should be considered self-defense.
The right-wing ruling party of Spain has lost power due to the corruption convictions of some of its leaders.
The new governing party is the Socialist Party, which has proved rather weak in confronting plutocracy, but we can hope it will eliminate some of the oppressive measures, such as making it a crime to post photos of uniformed thugs in the act of attacking people and prosecuting squatters in abandoned buildings.
Denying welfare benefits, including food stamps, to poor people who were convicted of drug crimes makes them more likely to return to crime.
To try to discourage crime with punishment presupposes that everyone can get by ok without crime. In the US today, that is false for a large fraction of people.
The FBI's Use of Informants Is Full of Problems, but What Happened in "Spygate" Isn’t One of Them.
Australia's big four banks stopped investing in coal but shifted the investment into oil and gas.
Education Is One Way Out of Prison. Let's Make Work Another.
One of the problems is that you can no longer make a living from the jobs that are not highly competitive.
US deportation thugs seem to have killed asylum seeker Roxsana Hernandez by exposing her to cold for two weeks, combined with hunger and sleep deprivation.
None of those is legitimate treatment of prisoners &mdash not even prisoners that have been convicted of crimes.
Apparently the bully has unleashed the thugs' brutality, so that they eagerly new ways to make their prisoners suffer.
Google operates a lobbying group that pretends to represent new startups.
Google's face recognition door camera is a threat to people's privacy as they pass by on the street.
I think it would be legitimate to make such a camera system if it does not send people's image over the internet unless they approach very close to the system, and if it can recognize only the faces of specific people who have contributed their photos for the purpose.
Arkady Babchenko, Russian journalist exiled to Ukraine, reportedly faked his death in coordination with a state effort to catch real assassins that were sent to kill him.
I'd like to find out how the trick was intended to catch them.
Cameroon is developing a civil war between those whose second language is French and those whose second language is English.
As usual, they are not fighting about anything significant, it is mere factionalism. In that country, the factions have coalesced around one's second language. It could just as well have been which end of the egg to open.
Demanding to save face — the insistence that one has never been wrong — makes today's politics unable to correct any problem. The constant focus on minor details of political "optics", rather than on substance, makes it even worse.
I try to focus on substance rather than optics, but I don't know whether I do this enough.
Successful blacks find that lots of people look for minor excuses to criticize them. Clearly, the real motive for these criticisms has to be racism. They demand that the successful black be twice as clean as a white needs to be.
I've encountered a little of this. There are people who criticize me for insignificant things, making mountains out of molehills. Clearly their motive for doing this is something other than what they criticize. I suspect that they don't like the free software movement — but, lacking rational arguments against it, they hope do use irrational associations to harm it.
'Sea, Ice, Snow, It's All Changing': Inuit Culture Struggles with Warming World.
Hamas has proposed a cease fire with Israel.
A private project has rewilded 17000 square miles in Patagonia, reintroducing the species that used to live there before humans and farming kicked them out.
Meat and Fish Multinationals "Jeopardising Paris Climate Goals".
NASA has a climate of "fear and anxiety" resulting from censorship about global heating which came straight from the cheater.
This, I expect, is exactly what the cheater wants.
Americans are imprisoned for sharing drugs when that leads to an overdose.
This extends the War on Drugs by adding a form of terrorism to the tactics.
Presenting hypothetical future products that would be prohibited by the copyright censorship system that the EU is planning to impose.
The US suspended copyright on German science books during World War II. This provides an opportunity to measure how much copyright damages science. It turned out to be substantial.
Hundreds of protesters from the Poor People's Campaign have been arrested at Senator McConnell's office and various state capitals.
The troll and his saboteurs are persistently erasing all democratic, libertarian and human values from all branches of the US government.
Appliance companies, including specifically Dyson and Wahl, are lobbying against the right to repair.
2018 World Press Freedom Index reports that governments and politicians increasingly hate and repress journalism, world-wide.
(Satire) Kim Jong-un was thrown into a remote labor camp for attempting to cross the border into South Korea.
Most Americans recognize that the US government is run by the rich, and demand campaign finance reform to end that. However, paradoxically, the fraction of Republicans that believe that has dropped from 80% to 70% since 2015.
This could be because the other 10% are no longer Republicans. Or it could be that they had to drop that belief because they feel compelled to believe that the bully represents them.
Most Britons oppose the sort of trade deal they expect the bully to offer. "If mass protests against Trump's visit also derail a trade deal, it will be a double success."
International trade is so easy nowadays that the main effect of making it even easier is to give business more power over governments.
Saboteur of Housing Carson wants to raise the rents for public housing. Protesters asked, "Where will I go."
Carson has a place in mind for then to go. It's the cemetary.
US border thugs want to "protect" refugee children by arresting their parents.
(Satire) millions of souls are waiting to cross the River Styx due to an underworld ferry strike.
UK thugs have repeatedly tried to frame Ken Hinds for watching as thugs mistreated blacks.
The Republican tax attacks were supposedly going to boost the US economy, but the opposite is what happened.
Doctors Receive Opioid Training. Big Pharma Funds It. What Could Go Wrong?
The UK's justice system is completely broken, according to an anonymous lawyer.
Tories are getting criticized for their plans to imitate Republicans' voter ID laws.
President Ortega of Nicaragua undermined democracy, took control of the media, and now his former supporters say he is just like Somoza, the dictator overthrown by the movement led by Ortega.
I suspect that foreign banks and the US government pressured Nicaragua to cut support for the poor. This does not excuse what Ortega has done, but focusing the condemnation solely on him is missing the point. An honest leftist leader in Nicaragua must lead the people in a long-term campaign to throw off the power of foreign banks.
Now that the state can use your DNA in a genealogical site to find people other than you, the decision to upload your DNA to one is a matter of other people's privacy, not just your own.
This time, the state used the technique to find a murderer. I'm in favor of finding murderers, and prosecuting them. However, next time the person sought might be a dissident or a heroic whistleblower.
Canada's somewhat-left party, the New Democratic Party, can't seem to oppose the fossil fuel industry.
The EU will ban neonicotinoid pesticides to protect bees (and other wildlife). There is an exception for greenhouses, because the pesticides can't get out of the greenhouse and into soil, water, and bees.
Assad plans to confiscate the homes of Syrians that have fled.
Why We Should Bulldoze the Business School, by a business-school professor. The hidden curriculum of the business school is always that the rich should be able to get richer, and that "capitalist market managerialism" is the only solution regardless of what the problem is. Students learn to seek as much money as possible, and never mind the cost to others.
Anthony Ray Hinton: How I Got 30 Years on Death Row for Someone Else's Crime.
Republicans want to "streamline" executions so that people like Hinton will be executed before they get a fair retrial.
US citizens: tell Congress to reject Trump's Rent Hikes and Fully Fund HUD.
US citizens: call for protecting the National Environmental Policy Act.
US citizens: phone your senators to ask them to stop the Department of Harshness and Suffering from taking refugees' children away.
Everyone: Call on US media to cover the occupation of Palestine accurately.
Margaret Atwood says she expects reality to resemble her fictional dystopias.
Some predict the extinction of humanity. I don't think things will go that far, since humans are very good at surviving even in horrible conditions. But I think it is likely that the living will envy the dead, at least until 40 years have gone by, by which time nearly all surviving humans have no idea what there was to envy.
Maryland is trying to hamper Airbnb by requiring additional surveillance of its customers.
The surveillance of Airbnb — and of hotels — is already so much that I stay away.
The concentration of manufacture of antibiotics puts everyone in danger when anything goes wrong in one manufacturer.
A sensible (non-plutocratist) government would explicitly ensure there are more sources.
Some UK supermarkets now surveil their customers for the thugs, whenever the thugs or other government agencies ask. The result is to turn life into a miasma of suspicion.
Surveillance like this should be explicitly forbidden except when ordered by a court for specific suspects.
Canada agreed to a business-supremacy treaty with China that requires building the Unkinder Morgan pipeline. The penalty for not doing so could be even more billions than the cost of building the pipeline, and the government might pay it secretly.
Business-supremacy treaties subjugate all the countries that agree to them, so we must cancel all those treaties.
Freedom of speech does not imply entitlement to use anyone else's amplifier for that speech.
It is true that the right-wing extremists of today don't respect the freedom of speech of those they disagree with. Nonetheless, if we were to prohibit their views outright, their governmental sponsors such as the bully would surely take the opportunity to ban our views.
Salafi Arabia may soon besiege the Yemeni port where 80% of relief supplies arrive.
California is adopting stricter net neutrality rules than those the FCC has eliminated.
Students at the University of Puerto Rico face prosecution for a protest a year ago.
Binge drinking can be fatal. Or it can cause chronic pancreatitis.
How the right-wing justifies controlling the Italian state in the name of avoiding a "crisis".
The author is clearly a supporter of banksterism; he aims to convince Italians to surrender meekly.
However, the only peaceful way to make the Euro zone boa constrictor let go of Italy is to threaten a crisis that will hurt the banksters too. If they don't want a catastrophe, they should stop imposing one on Italy (and Greece!).
The manufacturer of Ambien says that racism is not a known side-effect.
The scandal of the UK's intentional "hostile environment" for unauthorized immigrants has caused it to drop some aspects of the policy.
The bully has made it official policy to cause unauthorized immigrants as much suffering as possible, even making babies suffer so as to cause their parents to suffer.
The people who do these jobs are sadists, and that should go on their records so that they can't get employment dealing with the public. If they work in a warehouse they won't be able to inflict their sadism on anyone.
The Federal Reserve is proposing to loosen the regulations on banks own investments, to encourage the banks that don't do much of this to do more.
Allowing a bank to do any of this is a motor for corruption; it should be completely forbidden, as it was by the Glass-Steagall Act.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the Corker-Kaine authorization for worldwide war.
US citizens: see how candidates stand on issues related to fair elections.
US citizens: Tell the Department of Harshness and Suffering (DHS) to stop taking children away from border-crossing parents.
This petition does work with Javascript disabled. You won't see any immediate response in the browser, but you should get a confirmation email.
US citizens: call on the U.S. Forest Service to protect the Colorado Rockies.
The developer of the Keystone XL pipeline is trying to buy the support of various Nebraska politicians.
Large Israeli banks are involved in funding the construction of colonies on Palestinian territory.
Gazans tried to carry patients out on boats for treatment in Turkey. The Israeli navy stopped them, as it generally does anyone trying to flee from Gaza.
I can't see how the tiny threat Israel faces from Gaza could justify this, even if exaggerated greatly.
Royal Bank of Scotland has agreed to stop investing in a range of fossil fuel projects. Alas, not all fossil fuel projects.
Right-wingers control a large part of US media but still claim they never get any respect.
The US government has permitted Bayer and Monsanto to merge.
We can't blame this decision specifically on the bully, because the plutocratistic surrender to corporate power, specifically in regard to allowing mergers, started under Reagan and got worse under Dubya and Obama.
The study that estimated 4600 deaths due to the hurricane in Puerto Rico has upped the estimate by another thousand, taking account of the people who lived alone and who were not covered by reports about who lived or died.
Trudeau's adoption of the Unkinder Morgan pipeline is an act of "immense moral cowardice" and has earned him the undying hatred of climate defenders all around the world.
His new role as fossil fuel executive makes it impossible to hide where he really stands, though this has been visible for quite some time to those who wanted to look.
(Satire) Bezos explains how users can delete the data Alexa has collected about them.
Nicaraguan journalist Ángel Gahona was murdered while covering a protest against President Ortega.
He said he expected to be murdered.
Trudeau decided to buy the Unkinder Morgan pipeline, in effect declaring that he will stop at nothing to force it through.
That means he has clearly taken the side of global disaster, but that doesn't mean it is impossible to stop him.
When dealing with the Trump family, "never ascribe to stupidity or ignorance that which can be explained by malice."
Amazon threatens to cut off customers if they return things more than occasionally. Amazon's customers nominally have the right to return merchandise — unless they exercise that right.
The strange irony of the article is that it is totally defeatist. It shows why we need to defeat Amazon, but assumes that that is impossible. It shows becoming dependent on Amazon is dangerous and then refuses to believe people could ever refuse.
You can't win by being defeatist. You can win by telling Amazon to drop dead.
I have never bought anything from Amazon. And I never will. Amazon knows my name because a friend, believing this was helpful, decided to get something for me and told Amazon to send it to my address, an act which made me feel violated. I hope nothing like that will ever happen again.
High-pressure exams, and starting school at an early hour, don't go well with adolescents' rapid brain development.
A new study estimates that Hurricane Maria killed 4600 people in Puerto Rico, but there is a lot of uncertainty — it could be a lot more or a lot less.
The European Commission proposes to ban single-use plastics for a wide variety of uses.
Remy: The Longest Time (TSA Version).
Please don't access youtube with anything other than youtube-dl.
People deserve the right to death with dignity rather than dementia.
Someone in Gaza fired mortar shells at a school in Israel and other civilian targets.
This is a war crime, but it doesn't mean we should forgive Israel's far larger war crimes.
Blackstone, BlackRock, or a Public Bank? Putting California's Funds to Work.
Antifascists are suing the organizers of the Charlottesville rally, aiming to prove that they planned violence.
Ellicott City had a "1000 year flood" in 2016. It just had another flood, even worse.
This seems to be global heating at work.
The dangerously creeping state of face recognition repression.
The insidious danger of the impulsivity training device, or iTrainer, which is designed to make people want what its designers wish them to want.
Nonfree software plays a crucial role in this scheme harmful, since that is what stops users from altering what the system does.
Australia's extractivist government has allowed farmers to cut down a substantial part of the remaining native forest. The greenhouse gas emissions from that have erased Australia's investment in reducing emissions, some of which were wasted anyway.
Brazil's truck drivers are on strike against increases in the price of fuel.
The price of fuel must increase so society will use less of it. But I suspect that some details of the way the government imposed this put the burden on individual drivers rather than on companies and rich people that can cope with it. For instance, if drivers have to pay for fuel and what they can charge has not increased, the whole burden falls on them. There is no justice in that.
Ivanka Trump received Chinese trademarks shortly before the cheater made a deal to allow ZTE to stay in business. Knowing the cheater's basic dishonesty, we must suppose that the former was payment for the latter.
Some of the ads that Russian trolls purchased were for legitimate political causes.
Sometimes Russian trolls spread fabrications (fake news). It's wrong for anyone to do that.
Sometimes they support legitimate campaigns for various political positions. Even though I may support some of those campaigns myself, I object when Russia does so in a disguised manner.
These ads don't represent sincere support for any cause, not for Sanders and nor for the troll.
Likewise, I object when right-wing billionaires and fossil-fuel companies employ people to spread lies. People have the right present their views, but we don't have to allow the rich to hire sock-puppets.
EDRI: [Europe's proposed mandatory] Upload Filters Endanger Freedom of Expression.
A UK think tank misrepresented how much more funds the NHS needs by imagining that the costs were divided equally among all households, rich or poor. Of course, making a poor family pay as much as a rich family would be cockeyed and unjust.
Italy's president rejected the proposed government because its foreign minister wanted to make a backup plan for exiting from the euro.
Imposing a prime minister with IMF ties was adding insult to injury.
Italy needs a progressive party that will condemn the euro zone's economy-destroying rules just as strongly as the right-wing League.
Beleaguered Amazon Tribes Remain Staunch in Defence of Their Land.
On the argument between two camps that both miss the point about massive commercial surveillance of individuals.
By arguing about whether to divide up the power that this data gives to businesses, or to regulate the use of it (perhaps nationalizing it), they miss the point that both alternatives destroy our privacy and give the state a perfect basis for repression.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
More generally, I think the idea of taxing companies for the magnitude of harm that they do (regardless of whether they broke any rules to do it) is a good one.
Many weaknesses that undermine democracy tend to suck in politicians regardless of their overall positions.
Thousands of women in the UK are forced into marriage.
Beware of "brand aid" campaigns that use charity as a front for marketing.
The US is protecting al-Qa'ida and PISSI in the south of Syria.
It makes sense, tactically, but conflicts totally with what the US says is its purpose for intervening in Syria.
Why a badly run public school is preferable to a well run charter school (which is funded by the public but controlled by a business for profit).
The US has blocked the import of anything made with cotton from Turkmenistan because of that country's practice of forced labor.
A campaign to ban brothels in part of Nevada demonstrates that it's a matter of imposing Christian prudery, and never mind the safety of sex workers.
"Facebook continued to explore and implement ways to track users’ location, to track and read their texts, to access and record their microphones on their phones, to track and monitor their usage of competitive apps on their phones, and to track and monitor their calls," accuses a lawsuit against that company.
Rudy Giuliani Admits 'Spygate' is Trump PR Tactic against Robert Mueller.
Today's professions are the result of setting up guild-like organizations and claiming some privileges; but as extreme capitalism strips those away, they become much like all other workers.
The two parties that won Italy's last election promised to fix what's broken, but they won't even try.
All they have agreed on is a tax cut for the rich. Nothing to fight against the disastrous rules of the Euro zone.
Just as in the case of the bully, anger without a constructive political program is useless.
The US government made a deal to put ZTE back in business despite its spying on Americans.
I wish the US government would make other companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Uber stop spying on Americans.
America's Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy.
China has put hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in Xinjiang into "reeducation" camps to stamp out their religion.
Upper-caste Hindus saw Dalit Mukesh Vaniya picking up iron scrap, said he was stealing it, and beat him to death.
When I read about this desperate poverty, about having large families that they can't feed, I wonder: when will they figure out that they are making the problem worse?
Australia's subsidy to projects that are supposed to decrease greenhouse gas emissions is putting millions into projects that are profitable and would be operating without subsidy.
Bans on smoking in certain places should have compassion for those who remain tobacco addicts.
Rare bird species are headed toward extinction due to poisoning from eating lead shot.
It would be straightforward to avoid this problem by switching to steel.
US citizens: call for an investigation of Pruitt's concealment of toxic water pollution.
Due to budget cutting on all non-military aspects of life, deranged people get left in jails for months or years, waiting to be seen by psychiatrists.
The school buildings of Oklahoma are falling apart, some students don't have desks, and their textbooks are decades old.
The plutocrats prefer it this way because they don't need to hire so many educated and skilled workers any more. They think it is fine if half the country graduates unemployable, since the robots will have eliminated that many jobs anyway.
One of the consequences of India's birth rate is that massive poverty continues. That makes young people so desperate that they go accept offers from "placement agents" that lead to enslavement.
The Indian government ought to prosecute these crooks and jail them. But that will be difficult: the level of corruption is such that they can buy their way out.
I think the long-term solution is contraception.
Tax evasion (facilitated by tax havens) is one jaw of the vice that keeps Africa in poverty. The other jaw is population growth.
The bully and his neo-Nazi supporters are following the Nazi example when they ban dissent against the national anthem.
The term "bear arms" refers specifically to military activities, and always did. In particular, that was the case when the US Constitution was written.
Higher temperatures are correlated with more antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Yet another way that global heating will kill people.
When bicycle courier Jerome Rogers received a couple of traffic fines, his minuscule income meant he had no money to pay them. The system multiplied them by a factor of ten, his bicycle was seized. Rather than live destitute, he committed suicide.
None of the steps that crushed his life is unusual. When people have so little money that they can't cope with an emergency cost of $400, they will often be unable to pay fines. When the system escalates fines, they will turn into impossible debts. When the system handles those debts by crushing people, or by jailing them as often happens in the US, it becomes a steamroller that crushes people.
The law said the bailiff should not seize the bicycle, but it's not unusual for those who oppress the poor to ignore laws. Wage theft is illegal too, but employers regularly get away with it. Unless someone polices the bailiffs very carefully, they will always be under pressure to push the limits of oppression.
When poor people move from killing themselves to killing bailiffs, the bailiffs might back off some.
Two US senators demand that the FCC explain the fraudulent comments submitted in their names, and prevent such a thing from happening again.
The FCC received thousands of patently fake comments supporting the elimination of network neutrality, then pointed to them as valid.
The cladding that burnt in the Grenfell apartment building was approved based on fraudulent tests.
A vision of an AI-managed cashless genocide of the non-rich, as a projection of what's already happening in the US and other countries.
One way to fight against this today is to insist on using cash. No cash, no deal!
New Yorkers are pushing to set up a public bank for New York City, which would invest locally and not feed the plutocrats.
The summit between the two Supreme Leaders is on again.
I seem to have been right that the bully's cancellation wasn't meant to be final. I had a feeling that it was uttered in the language of bullying. And why not? It is the native language of both of them.
The bully is effectively devoid of honesty. Whatever he says, it is meant to have some dramatic effect, not to state what he believes, what he wants, or what he intends to do.
US private insurance companies often agree to pay hospitals inflated prices for operations. They pass on the cost in higher premiums, after the inflated price screws the patient with a high copay.
The UK provides temporary housing for homeless people, but sometimes it is so bad that it makes the inhabitants sick.
Meanwhile, New York City is letting public housing fall apart, perhaps with a view to selling the land for building luxury apartments.
That form of privatization is widespread, and very lucrative for some businesses, but leaves the residents in even worse situations.
Washing spinach in a chlorine solution does not kill salmonella, it only makes culturing salmonella from the spinach more difficult, thus disguising them.
The US uses this technique for chicken also.
ACLU: We're Demanding the Government Come Clean on Surveillance of Social Media.
We must not believe anything the FBI says about supposed problems caused by use of encryption. They don't just exaggerate, they fabricate.
But even if their claims were true, they would be insignificant compared with the disaster of allowing the state to know everything we say and do.
Public universities have created private fund-raising foundations which can subject the university to dirty deals with the Koch brothers, and evade accountability.
UK lawyers are happy to make lots of money serving various foreign gangsters.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in prison in Iran, will be tried on new charges, perhaps "spreading propaganda".
To make "spreading propaganda" a crime is in itself an injustice, but ever more countries indulge in it.
Apparently the Uber car that crashed was operating in a mode that depended on a human to brake. The human may have forgotten that this was per job.
Arguing that curbing global heating requires banning factory farms.
Ed Husain, formerly an Islamist radical, proposes that Muslims should join to condemn that extremist interpretation of Islam.
I think that would be a good thing to do, but will not be easy. Salafi Arabia has implanted it effectively in many regions, such as Aceh in Indonesia.
Husain's memoir, The Islamist, shows clearly the differences between various ideas of Islam.
Gaza says the death of a baby during a protest may not have been due to tear gas after all. It could be a coincidence.
However, for the hundreds of Palestinians hit by soldiers' bullets, there is no doubt about what killed or injured them.
China has got accustomed to having one child, and most couples don't want a second child.
This is tremendously good news for the future of China and the world: China with its current population is using its land unsustainably. Maybe with the coming decrease it could put an end to that.
If only we could convince other regions with still-exploding populations, such as India and much of Africa, to have small families, that would put off the consequent disasters.
Teaching birth control in Uganda has been hit hard by the US abortion gag rule.
The leaders of South Korea and North Korea held a meeting about how to get the bully to be serious about peace.
The head of UK prisons says that prison sentences under one year are ineffective at teaching prisoners not to commit minor crimes, and calls for using other punishments instead of prison.
The Irish Republic has voted to eliminate the ban on abortion from its constitution.
Abortion will soon be legal there.
This will directly help women in Northern Ireland, because it will be much easier and cheaper to go to the Irish Republic for an abortion than to travel to England as they currently must do. However, they demand legalization of abortion there next.
This change might have larger political effects. A few decades ago, anyone in Northern Ireland had a powerful reason to oppose uniting Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic: the latter's church-backed denial of human rights that related to marriage and sex. This reason no longer exists.
US border thugs shot and killed a Guatemalan woman, who was possibly an unauthorized immigrant.
The thug presented a supposed justification for shooting her, but we have no way of knowing whether there is any truth in it.
China is pressuring and tricking non-Chinese companies into describing Taiwan as a part of China.
The UK's embassy in Jamaica has systematically treated the UK citizens exiled there with the same contempt usually referred to foreigners that ask for a visa.
Many wealthy countries systematically show such contempt to foreigners that seek a visa.
The Department of "Justice" withheld information about Haspel's relationship with the CIA's destruction of evidence of torture.
Bolton's extreme demands seem to have rubbed Kim the wrong way and put a bump in the path to peace with North Korea.
That doesn't mean it is now hopeless — or that agreement was assured before Bolton did this. However, it does mean that Bolton is an impediment.
It could also be that Kim is playing manipulative games, expecting concessions in exchange for conversation.
UK aid money seems to have been used to train Bahraini "security forces" that have tortured and executed dissidents.
Why Are For-Profit US Prisons Subjecting [prisoners] to Forced Labor?
The short answer is, "because they can."
The Tories plan to speed up fracking projects, bypassing local planning entirely.
It is hard to understand what could possibly motivate them to enable local opposition to kill wind-farm projects easily while making it impossible to stop fracking. Unless it is that they are getting money from fossil fuel companies.
(Satire) Israel Defense Forces soldier Yossi Saadon recounted Tuesday his harrowing, heroic war story of killing an 8-month-old Palestinian child during a violent attack against protesters.
(Satire) … high-ranking officials at the National Security Agency reportedly spent Wednesday morning scrambling to reestablish the whereabouts of a man who had covered his laptop camera with a piece of electrical tape.
Imprisoned, Threatened, Silenced: Human Rights Workers Across Asia Are in Danger (from the state).
A reminder of how stupidly, blindly, persistently, and pointlessly the CIA carried out torture.
Even against crazy and corrupt Republican saboteurs, the Democratic Party is slipping in the polls — because the "mainstream" plutocratist Democrats don't stand for progressive policies.
I'm careful to support only progressive Democrats, not bankster-subservient mainstream Democrats.
Bannon tried using Cambridge Analytica's data to discourage blacks from voting.
The New York Times encourages you to accept being tracked by Google, and claims you have no choice so you might as well yield.
There are many things you can do it stop it. For instance, use a browser that won't run Google Analytics hooks in web pages, browse through Tor, use OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps...
The UK's review of building codes and inspections proposed a fundamental change in the way decisions are made. Specific changes, such as banning particular materials, would not be enough by itself.
An unnamed official reports that two "suspicious activity reports", posted by a bank about Michael Cohen's bank transfers, have disappeared from the US government system which is supposed to store them.
27 US cities are "abortion deserts" — apparently no abortion facility within 100 miles.
Blaming the Victims of Israel's Gaza Massacre — standard practice in US media.
(Satire) U.S. military officials released a statement defending their much-criticized decision to test the Kilauea volcano on Hawaiian civilians.
(Satire) sociologists … confirmed the inevitable emergence of a generation more entitled and self-absorbed than any seen before.
The US House and Senate are trying to pretend that thugs face violent persecution by passing a new law imposing increased penalties for violence intentionally targeted at thugs.
In practice, these bills would not change much. Symbolically, though, they take the side of the thugs against the people they kill.
UK thugs towed away a bus that was parked providing shelter to homeless people, because an event with the royal family was scheduled for elsewhere in the neighborhood.
A UK thug will face charges for tasing a black man after mistaking him for someone else based on a vague resemblance. (Perhaps both had dark skin?) The man had done nothing to justify even the slightest violence.
The UK is planning to set up a new system of censorship for social networks.
The danger that occurs to me is that the new system will effectively ban GNU Social, Disapora, and other social networks that are not run by businesses, and others that are run by small businesses.
Donald Trump Jr. reportedly met in 2016 with a representative of Salafi Arabia and the UAE who was offering campaign assistance.
April 2018 Was The 400th Consecutive Month of Global Temperatures Above the 20th Century Average.
Seeds rescued from a seed bank in Syria might help breed wheat that can resist the crop damage that global heating effects are causing in the US.
I hope this works, but it will only carry us a short way. Climate mayhem will keep getting worse, faster and faster.
Twitter might have been designed to encourage people to get outraged.
Uri Avnery: The Day of Shame — The Israeli political parties, army and media spread lies about Gaza, and the peace movement collapsed on the floor.
The US and Australia opposed an independent UN inquiry into the massacre of protesters in Gaza.
How shameful.
"When Palestinians fight for their national rights, we are called 'terrorists'. When we demonstrate in non-violent ways and are killed by the occupying forces, we are called 'suicidal'."
Russia demands to see the Skripals, so that they have the chance to get consular help if they want it.
Even though it is possible that Russia poisoned them, I think the UK should uphold this right. It often comes to the aid of prisoners, and if the UK disregards it, that will encourage other countries to do the same.
If they do not become able to communicate, they are very likely effectively dead. Or else they are conscious but locked in, which could be a fate worse than death.
The early stages of climate mayhem are already messing up global fisheries.
Salafi Arabia has arrested, on no particular occasion, several prominent advocates of women's rights.
Some US charter schools use an affiliate marketing scheme: anyone who recruits students away from another school gets $500.
Belgian thugs decided a van was suspicious, and tried to stop it with gunfire. They killed a two-year-old baby in the van.
State officials, defending the thugs' reputation, initially pretended that the baby's death was an accident or caused by rough driving.
The EPA’s “Leadership Summit” on PFOA Pollution Will Exclude Victims and Community Groups.
Students Go on Hunger Strike to Pressure Cambridge University to Divest [from fossil fuels].
Each time there is a president that is worse than anyone we remember, the previous worst presidents use it to bury their crimes and get rehabilitated. Dubya is now doing this.
US citizens: Call on Congress to protect integrity of US elections.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the proposed arms sale to Bahrain.
The for-profit US hospital system is closing many rural hospitals because they are not profitable.
Why are they not profitable? Partly because the population in those areas is decreasing. But also because of policies that refuse to support medical care for poor people in the US.
And why does profit decide these questions? Partly because of allowing hospitals to be run by for-profit companies which then make these decisions based on profit rather than for people's lives. We should put an end to that.
A UK government agent told Melvin Collins that he didn't need his UK passport any more, and took it away. The result was to exile him from Britain forever.
Since the 1990s, Hollywood has presented abortion as dangerous, traumatic, and morally inferior, spreading the message that the right thing for a pregnant woman to do is have a baby.
That message builds support for banning abortion.
It is also the direct opposite of the truth. The truth is that having a baby is more dangerous and more traumatic. It is more likely to lead to lasting physical injury, more likely to cause depression, and more likely to be fatal.
In addition, if you're among the 40% of Americans who couldn't handle an emergency expense of $400, it is very likely to land you and the child in the gutter.
Having a baby is also morally inferior in many cases. It contributes to future global heating more than everything else you are likely to do in your life.
If you are not in the position to assure a child the food, shelter, education, medical care, and calm family environment that every child needs and deserves, the right thing to do is not make one.
HSBC Divests From New Coal Projects Everywhere … Except Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
Those who claim that some countries have a legitimate "need" for more fossil fuel extraction don't understand the urgency of the danger.
Anti-obesity activists may sue junk food companies for intentionally manipulating children's brains to train them to eat junk food.
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that soldiers can shoot unarmed civilians. (In practice, that means they can shoot and kill unarmed Palestinians.)
In his efforts to continue global heating, the saboteur-in-chief is one of a large team.
The recently publicized racist attacks on blacks, involving whites that call thugs to harass blacks, are not a new phenomenon. They have been a part of US blacks' life for ages. What is changing is that they come to public attention.
Describing slavery as a "financial trap" fails to do justice to the evil of slavery in the US.
Trump campaign operative Roger Stone requested copies of leaked Clinton emails from Julian Assange.
Assange said that the emails he later published were not obtained by cracking, but rather leaked from an insider. This has no effect on the ethics of Stone's request.
(Satire) "You better give our dad a good trade deal or you’ll be sorry!"
The state of Victoria proposes to make wage theft a crime, which could give abusive employers a stronger reason not to steal.
Saboteur Pruitt of the EPA, and some of his officials, met with the Heatland Institute to plan how to sabotage Earth's entire ecosphere.
The Theater of Security Agency is setting up an enemies list — a secret list of passengers singled out for harassment based on flimsy excuses.
One of them is being "notorious". It sounds like the TSA plans to harass people for being famous. Am I famous enough to get on the list?
The TSA's theater might be amusing for spectators, but it should stop forcing everyone to play a role in the comedy.
"Restorative justice" in schools aims to empower students so they won't feel they need weapons.
The House of Representatives is considering a bill to provide a weak pressure to audit the US military budget. I doubt that pressure will be enough to make the audit happen, but maybe failure would lead to increased pressure.
The audit would help get rid of corruption in spending, and some forms of waste in detail. It would have no effect on programs that are officially authorized, but wasteful or harmful.
The Republican tax attacks of 2017 were written so hastily and thoughtlessly that they contain a direct tax break for moving jobs out of the US.
Or perhaps it wasn't so thoughtless. After all, SCROTUS works for the companies that are outsourcing the jobs.
The US used to spend more on the military than the next 7 countries. In the new budget, as passed by the House of Representatives, it exceeds the next 8 countries.
All this spending doesn't enable the US to actually win any wars, but does enable it to start new ones. Meanwhile, the new nuclear weapons could put all of humanity in danger.
The bill also includes an article denying that the president has authority to attack Iran.
That will be good, if the Senate passes it too.
The UK welcomed hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian criminal oligarchs, but there is no way of knowing how much, let alone identifying what assets were bought with it.
Facebook's "focus on community" can cause depression for a substantial fraction of users.
One prisoner in Guantanamo has had a series of emergency operations, and his lawyers learned this only when they showed up for a court hearing.
The gall and dishonesty of the jailers is demonstrated by their claims that their refusal to tell anyone about the prisoner's condition is for his privacy's sake — while not allowing him to tell anyone either.
I would guess that the real reason for the secrecy is that his injuries were due to torture and the US government doesn't want us to know how he was tortured.
Now that Torture Haspel has been confirmed to head the CIA, I am surprised they still try to conceal this.
Both Supreme Leader Kim and Supreme Leader Trump seem to have stopped wanting to have a meeting. It seems that they had a misunderstanding all along about what "denuclearization" might mean.
Oops, later on Supreme Leader Trump said the meeting might be on again.
Facebook is publishing source notes on political ads, and making a searchable list of them.
This is an important change, since it will better expose stealthy political action to criticism. Of course, it is no reason to allow Facebook to use you.
"Why did Hillary Clinton endorse Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon?"
I think it is because Clinton is center-right "moderate" Democrat, like Cuomo, and serves the banksters. They don't need to order her to support Cuomo; she knows they wouldn't like Nixon.
Unlike Clinton, I do not claim to aim for more women in office. I judge candidates by their politics, not by their gender. I support Nixon's politics, not Clinton's and Cuomo's.
"Philanthrocapitalism": Zuckerberg gives "charity" to for-profit businesses that can make money for him in various ways.
Talk to Deliveroo Couriers. See a Dystopia That Could Be Your Future.
Companies that use many workers to do a large amount of a particular job should be required to hire full-time or half-time employees, with all the usual rights of employees, to do the majority of that work.
Proposing that corporations pay an "insurance fee" for the potential value to the stockholders of limitations on their liability.
The article proposes also to withhold half of executives' pay until the company has funded all its pension obligations.
Americans generally resent the rich, not the poor.
Pressuring Pennsylvania's governor to put an end to fracking in the state.
The cheater is trying very hard to save Chinese company ZTE from penalties for violating US impost laws, just after receiving a pile of money from another Chinese company.
He insist that it wasn't a bribe.
Kathryn Taylor ended her term on the Harvard Board of Overseers by resigning to condemn investment in fossil fuel.
Harvard can surely point to many short-term reasons for those investments, but they can't persuade anyone who recognizes the long-term reasons to stop.
(Satire) America's rich and powerful were at a loss Wednesday as to exactly when the rest of the country would finally relinquish all hope and simply give up…
US citizens: call on the US government to release the PFOA water pollution report.
Everyone: call on Amazon to stop selling face recognition services.
This is a temporary fix, not a real solution. We need to make it a crime for anyone to operate such systems.
Iran has responded defiantly to the bully's cancellation of the non-nuclear deal, saying that the EU must compensate for the damage the US is doing or Iran will pull out of the deal.
Encouraging NFL players to defy the ban on protesting racism by kneeling during the US national anthem, or protest collectively in other ways.
One other method that occurs to me is that they could stand … with both hands over their mouths the whole time.
The Israeli Supreme Court approved demolishing the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar.
Israel systematically denies building permits to Palestinians, so that all their houses are "illegal", thus creating an excuse to demolish them.
Apple has banned a VOIP library for all apps to be distributed in China.
Apple is a reliable tool for Chinese repression because it designed iMonsters for censorship.
Journalist Cedric O’Bannon filmed a neo-Nazi rally, and one of the fanatics stabbed him using a polearm. The thugs treated him as a suspect rather than as the victim of a violent crime. They also wiped his video recording, apparently to protect his attackers.
This follows a pattern in which official, uniformed thugs shield and support unofficial right-wing thugs.
The healthful "Mediterranean diet" is dying out in Spain, Italy and Greece under various sorts of pressure and temptation.
Belgian officials are trying a series of lies to evade responsibility for shooting a baby in a van being pursued.
There is no excuse for shooting at moving vehicles with passengers in them. If the thug failed to imagine that shooting might kill or injure one of them, person was prima facie incompetent.
Salafi Arabia has arrested the country's leading human rights campaigner.
Facebook and Google face formal complaints for pressuring users into agreeing to different terms of service.
A right-wing billionaire got an Israeli private detective firm to spy on BDS supporter Linda Sarsour in the hope of personally discrediting her.
Progressive congresscritters warn that connecting thugs' body cameras to face recognition will turn them into vicious surveillance devices.
My proposal to control their activation would reduce the effects of that, but we really need laws against allowing face recognition systems to know about anyone's face except for court-designated targets.
Seeing that the UK government is desperate to build nuclear plants whose electricity will be so expensive that it will need a subsidy, Hitachi is now demanding direct subsidies as well.
Nuclear power not only has a risk of a meltdown that will destroy the reactor (and maybe spread fallout), not only produces waste that we don't know a safe way to store — it is too expensive even if everything goes well. Kill these projects, and build renewable power!
Those dying because the NHS is being strangled and support for the disabled and unemployed is being cut now see where that money is going.
Rich, hereditary Canadian politician Doug Ford is spreading trumpery, pretending to be on the side of the non-rich while promoting policies to destroy nature to extract fossil fuels.
Arizona has deleted the word "evolution" from its educational standards.
An Alexa device recorded private conversations and sent them over the net to an acquaintance in their contact list.
Amazon said this was due to a bug, and I suppose that is true.
However, if the device has a universal back door, Amazon could alter anyone's machine at any time so that it will listen and snoop. Maybe various government agencies could, too.
Meanwhile, I wonder what is in the logs that the Amazon engineer was able to access. Can they access such logs in every Alexa device? At any time?
As Documents Reveal 'Pervasive Abuse' of Immigrant Children Under Obama, Fears It's Even Worse Under Trump.
It is possible that "children" includes minors up to age 17. Not that that would excuse any of this violence and cruelty, which extend into the range of torture.
Several striking teachers have advanced towards political office.
(Satire) Americans Freed From North Korea Sent Back To Pyongyang After Denuclearization Talks Fall Through.
What makes this so funny is the idea that today's US officials would feel an obligation to honor a deal.
The Patriotic Millionaires have condemned the just-passed bank deregulation bill better than I could do it.
Bangladeshi thugs are arresting political activists and killing them, then dropping their bodies on the streets. A campaign of shooting alleged drug dealers on the street provides great camouflage.
The reported vulnerability in clients that use GPG is no problem if you are using the latest version of Enigmail.
Regardless of whether you use encryption, you should not allow HTML in your messages to be rendered by most mail clients. There are many schemes for snooping and fraud that work via invisible links in email. Perhaps that is the main problem with email today.
As for the silly idea that email is obsolete, that could only be true if it had a superior replacement. There is nothing else that does the same job.
Sanders rebuked Amazon for paying workers so little that they need food stamps.
I rebuke Amazon for a lot more than that.
The troll said that he attacks the press preemptively so as to discredit in advance any negative coverage.
What this means is that he aims to eliminate the idea of seeking to determine the truth, so as to reduce discussion to a matter of arbitrarily choosing one side or the other.
However, we do have ways to determine the truth on most of the questions, if we want to.
40% of Americans can't handle an unexpected expense of just 400 dollars.
Amazon's face recognition threatens to destroy privacy entirely in the US and then other countries. Some thug departments have signed nondisclosure agreements and used them to justify concealing this information from the public.
Other companies will develop such software sooner or later. We need laws to prohibit the operation of such a system unless it is designed to limit data collection.
The FBI gave Congress inflated figures to pretend that encryption is a big obstacle to law enforcement.
Amitai Ben-Abba began writing a novel about an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, then discovered to his horror that all the conditions were ready for that to occur.
Important Spanish politicians from the right-wing ruling party have been convicted of corruption.
The troll cancelled the proposed meeting with North Korea's dictator Kim, but I think his letter is meant as a postponement.
I suppose Kim will will understand that.
Let's put an end to the fraudulent and dangerous assistance known as "facilitated communication".
Italy is certainly doomed if it obeys euro-zone rules, but there is no visible hope if it resists them.
In such a prison you must try to destroy the walls. Creating a European crisis that can harm the banksters is the only path that offers a chance.
The robot Uber car that killed a pedestrian had its emergency brakes disabled as a test.
In many countries, people who call themselves "centrists" value democracy less than those who place themselves closer to either extreme of the political spectrum.
Who poisoned the Skripals? It may be Russia, but the UK's manipulation of the situation has to make us distrustful.
US citizens, tell your senator: Stop the bully's next war before it even starts!
US citizens: tell US immigration thugs to stop illegally jailing children and torturing them.
Some of the victims may be minors but not children. I don't think it changes the issue much.
Everyone: phone to demand that Burma drop charges against journalists.
The Tories' systematic hostile environment for the disabled denied benefits to a woman who needs a wheelchair because she had no way to get to the examination that was imposed on her. Many disabled people are sent to impossible appointments in this way, and the immediate result is to cut them off.
If you are really desperate to cheat those who are disadvantaged, you will seize any excuse, no matter how obviously unjust. That's what Tories stand for.
Aneurin Bevan: "The Tories are lower than vermin."
US border thugs took Anthonia Nwaorie's $41,000 which she was bringing to a clinic in Nigeria, where she also works every year.
They offered to return her money if she signed a "hold harmless" agreement. Was that offer unjust? I am not sure; I think it depends on what "any necessary expenses, attorney’s fees, or costs incurred in the enforcement of any part of this agreement" would include. If she could reduce those costs to zero simply by complying with the return of the money, I don't see anything wrong in it. However, I don't know what it might include. Might it include the costs of searching her baggage every time she travels in the future? Might it include the costs of spending time on her case? That could add up to more than $41,000, over time.
The European Parliament's agriculture committee is full of people that have ties with farm business, constituting a conflict of interest.
A Spanish rapper was convicted of a speech crime, but seems to have gone missing when it was time to put him in prison for it.
His lyrics present images of violence. Whether or not it is legal to say those things, I think we shouldn't say them. I avoid speaking that way of even banksters and plutocratist theocratic politicians.
Investigators claim to have proof that a specific Russian missile launcher shot down flight MH17 over Ukraine.
Nigeria is applying the death penalty to an increasing range of crimes. People suspect that dissidents will be executed.
People are suing the European Union for being too slow in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Various evidence suggests that smartphones, or perhaps specifically the desocial media used on them, make many teenagers depressed — some to the point of suicide.
Nigerian soldiers offered thousands of women protection from Boko Haram, but those who went to the camps had to give the soldiers sex in exchange for food. Thousands didn't get enough food, and starved.
Central Americans Flee Homes in Record Numbers: "The Level of Violence Is Brutal."
The US has much of the responsibility for this violence.
Plutocratic Democrats joined with plutocratic Republicans to reduce the regulations on banks.
Banks will benefit from this by taking more money away from the rest of Americans — as if they weren't poor enough already.
Some countries are assigning rights to nature.
Since the president didn't drain the swamp, the swamp is trying to drain the president.
The US is prosecuting another fantasy terrorist who probably would never have done anything without encouragement from the FBI.
An employee in the US embassy to China reported "abnormal sounds" and was found to have brain damage.
The hypothesis that occurs to me is that some piece of apparatus that the US installed in the embassy causes this side effect.
Democratic Party establishment leaders say that they back "centrist" (plutocratist) candidates over progressives for strategic reasons; but analysis of the facts show that they do so even when it is clear that a progressive Democratic nominee would win the general election.
So the real reason is simply that they are plutocratist.
Detroit Is about to Cut Off Water for Thousands of People.
Increased CO2 levels make rice produce less of various vitamins.
Doctors Beg Australian Border Force to Move Terminally Ill Refugee off Nauru.
Australia is building cat-proof fences to establish reserves for native mammals and birds. But the cats inside the fence will have to be caught and removed.
The prosecutor of the inauguration protesters was caught withholding exculpatory evidence.
New York City may ban plastic straws.
When I was young, we used paper straws and they worked just fine. We need to learn not to choose plastic if it can be avoided. And then we need to learn to avoid it in anything disposable.
Guatemala: Ex-Military Officers Convicted of Crimes Against Humanity.
They include the former head of the armed forces. Hooray!
Limiting global heating to 1.5C would avoid 30 trillion dollars in damages compared with letting things go on as now.
That is a minimum, since we don't know how much positive feedback will make the consequences even worse.
Las Vegas Casino Workers Vote for First Mass Strike in More Than 30 Years.
The UK destroyed files which may have described advising Sri Lanka on torture and disappearance.
We don't know what they said, but we have to presume they were culpable.
Amazon is ready to supply face-recognition surveillance to any government.
Roughly 4% of murder convictions are false. There are false convictions for other crimes too. It's partly due to officials that disregard the truth in order to convict someone, but the bail system also pressures lots of non-rich people into pleading guilty when they know they are not.
Washington DC is full of stingray-like devices, tracking various people's portable phones on behalf of organizations unknown, and from foreign embassies.
A US border thug held and threatened two bilingual US citizens, suspecting them of some crime because they spoke to each other in Spanish.
A US high school punishes students that fail to smile while walking between classes.
Students have a ready-made answer when pressed to talk about why they don't smile: "It's because you are harassing me."
They could also try putting on exaggerated phony smiles.
The discussion of a bullying incident refers to a "school resource officer", which is a bureaucratic name for a thug that is likely to send your child to prison for some minor matter. The last thing you need in school is a thug that can arrest students.
The US Supreme Court ruled that companies can stop their workers from filing class-action lawsuits.
This means that they can't take any action about frequent abuses that hit many of workers but not enough for each one to be able to afford to take separate action.
Some South Korean political leaders say Bolton is the main obstacle to peace with North Korea, calling him a "land mine".
The Atlantic Council, which Facebook will consult about reducing foreign influence on US elections, is mainly funded by the US military and plutocratic corporations, as well as some foreign governments.
US citizens: call on Senator McConnell to allow a Senate vote on protecting Mueller.
Everyone: call on Target stores to grant 12 weeks of paid leave to all employees that are parents of a newborn.
Life is very hard for non-rich people in the US. We should all make it easier.
Since the strictest sanctions didn't bring down Saddam Hussein, it is foolish to think that they could make Iran yield.
The bully's attack on the non-nuclear deal with Iran convinced the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to advance its doomsday clock a minute closer to midnight.
Tony B'liar seems to be hiding something about handing over Belhaj and his wife to Gadhafi for torture.
B'liar should be made to testify under oath about this.
Evidence strongly suggests that the Las Vegas massacre was an act of right-wing terrorism.
The thugs know who gave that testimony. Will they pursue the matter or will they try to cover it up?
Saboteur Pruitt ordered his thugs to keep certain reporters out of his speech. Naturally, a lie was offered as a "reason".
If I were covering the EPA's policies of allowing toxic pollution, I wouldn't waste a minute trying to show video of Saboteur Pruitt's lies.
The head of the Department of Hate and Sadism said that when immigration thugs take children away from their parents, they are treating the children like any object that was being smuggled into the US.
Aside from being vicious and inhumane, it is also false. If parents ask for asylum and present their children, they are not smuggling them. However, the cheater's officials think nothing of truth or falsehood.
US deportation thugs will tell any lies to deport someone. Some of them encountered a judge that would not stand for it. They really should have been jailed for contempt of court.
Crowdfunding loans to enterprises enables people to choose to make their pension funds contribute to projects that society needs.
This is no substitute for state subsidies for purposes such as housing, but it would reduce the power of the banks.
Some recommendations for moving Venezuela to democracy.
I disagree with one point: the actual opposition does not deserve our support, because it is plutocratist and aims to convert Venezuela into a fief of the global elite. It would not be very different from the Republicans in the US, who naturally support it. It can look good only when compared with someone like Maduro.
The opposition that would deserve our support is a Chavista opposition. Unfortunately, that does not exist.
Modern-day hoovervilles in the US tend to reduce crime in the neighborhood.
A fear of fictitious crime is one of the excuses used to shut them down.
President Hoover's laissez-faire response to the Great Depression made it worse, and made hundreds of thousands of Americans homeless; so they called their camps and tent cities "hoovervilles."
Plutocratist center-right politicians cover up the history of populism so as to apply the term to right-wing anti-truth politicians such as the cheater.
Studying Hurricane Harvey shows how global heating makes hurricanes more intense. It also enables one hurricane to follow closely after another.
Georgia is prosecuting Russia in the European Court of Human Rights for war crimes in the brief war between the two countries.
Gorsuch and Thomas stated they want to toss out precedent and eliminate most of the US legal protection for privacy.
Nowadays, the "reasonable expectation of privacy" gives us far too little privacy.
72% of Democratic and independent voters say that opposing the cheater is not enough; they want Democratic candidates to champion progressive positions.
Defending Our Revolution from plutocratist smears.
'Jesus Never Charged a Leper a Co-Pay': Christian progressives in the US.
Starbucks: all members of the public that enter its stores in the US are now welcome to use the toilet, whether they buy anything or not.
This ought to be the law, everywhere, for all stores that have a toilet for customers.
The definition of "white race" has been extended to perhaps 10 times as many people in the past 250 years.
In another 50 years, if we work at it, we could redefine it to include all humans.
Various paths to ending partisan gerrymandering.
"Corporate domination of West Virginia is to blame for the state's high rates of obesity, smoking, and drug overdose deaths, says the head of the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Family Coalition."
The UK has pushed an immigrant into destitution because he made a mistake on his tax return and then corrected it as prescribed by law.
The new Italian government's fiscal plans are rational and necessary — it's the euro zone that is absurd.
Italy has the same kind of problem as Greece, though it is not as acute for Italy.
LocationSmart has everyone's cell phone location data because phone companies sell the data to it.
The Saboteur of Housing has withdrawn a "tool" that cities use to check for racial segregation in housing.
This "tool" is really SaaSS, and should be replaced by a free program, released to the public, so that anyone can run it and no one can ever take it away.
Saboteur Sessions is always looking to deport more people. Now he has ordered immigration judges from granting a deportation target a delay so that perse can regularize per status.
Reporting on the progress in eliminating finance for fossil fuels.
US citizens: support the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.
The bully plans to deny immigrants proper hearings by setting a quota for cases, so that judges have to rush and cannot give due consideration to anyone's rights.
Maduro won "reelection" with a low turnout as his opposition boycotted the election. The figures suggest that the opposition might have won if it had voted.
I don't see visible proof that the election was rigged, but I would not assume Maduro is honest.
Doing immigration hearings via telecommunications is bad for the people concerned, because it tends to discourage them; then they give up before trying all arguments to be allowed to stay in the US.
The EU has taken the side of Airbnb, against the residents of cities that see housing becoming scarce.
A school in New York state plans to use face recognition to record who speaks with whom in the school.
The operative words is not "Kafka", it is "Big Brother." I hope that students organize to fight and to defeat this system.
Being shot is a danger in the US, but students are in more danger outside school than in it.
New Orleans thugs listen to conversations of people in jail with their lawyers.
The Palestinian Authority has referred Israel's war crimes to the International Criminal Court.
Indian thugs shot and killed nine protesters who demanded an end to toxic pollution from a factory near their homes.
A Rohingya militia massacred Hindus in Burma, sparing only those who agreed to convert to Islam.
This crime doesn't justify the much larger subsequent crime against Rohingya civilians.
In one country after another, the would-be tyrant encourages dictators to crush and kill dissidents.
Various African "presidents" are giving themselves increased powers and setting aside term limits.
Tashi Wangchuk has been imprisoned for 5 years for teaching Tibetans in the Tibetan language, which China seeks to extinguish.
I speculate that Yushu is in the part of Tibet that China annexed several decades ago.
Shukri Abdull, Malaysian investigator whose job included investigating Najib Razak's corruption, talks about the threats and obstacles he received.
The energy consumption of Bitcoin mining has doubled in six months.
Please don't call those people "libertarians". They use that name to give the impression that defending human rights is their principal aim. In fact their principal aim is laissez-faire economics. They condemn the regulations that protect us from business as "socialism", so the right term for them is "antisocialists".
US citizens: Demand transparency in political ads.
US citizens: call on Congress to let Medicare and Medicaid negotiate drug prices.
I think the page appears not to work if you don't run its JS code, but then it sends a confirmation mail. If you get different results, please inform me.
US citizens: call on the House to restore the network neutrality rules.
Gregory Stevens resigned from a Palo Alto church, accusing the city of contemptuously crushing the poor.
Perhaps it would be better if he had stayed on.
The European Union's carbon-trading is reportedly starting to be effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"Data is the new oil" — but if so, what does that imply?
Humanity, and most other species of life, would be better off if we made most of the buried oil and gas disappear instantly.
We would likewise be better off if we made most of the present and future databases of personal data disappear.
Purdue Pharma was convicted of fraud in connection with OxyContin, but then the US government made a deal with Purdue to allow it to continue selling the drug. Rudy Giuliani obtained this deal for Purdue.
It seems that OxyContin's special characteristics are responsible for the current problem of opioids. Some of it could have been prevented, if not for that deal.
There is no justification for lurching to the other extreme and making the less dangerous approved opioid medicines so hard to get.
The Taliban and PIS are capturing mines in Afghanistan and selling the minerals.
Prison thugs in Australia have admitted beating up a prisoner for no reason, then lying about it.
One of their coworkers was a corrections officer rather than a thug. Bravo for his commitment to honesty. If not for him, they might have maimed the prisoner.
A study tracking the outcomes of punishing unemployed Britons by cutting their unemployment benefits found that it rarely leads anyone into getting a job, but it pushed many of them into poverty or crime.
The article does not report on how effective these policies have been at leading people to demonize the unemployed.
If the government wants poor people to work more hours, it should think about laws to require companies to give workers predictable work schedules, notifying them well in advance.
It seems that North Korea envisions nuclear disarmament over time, not the immediate total unilateral disarmament that the bully demands.
If we have peace between South Korea and North Korea, I won't feel terribly worried that North Korea has nuclear weapons. What makes that so potentially dangerous is the state of war. It is always unfortunate that another country has nuclear weapons, but there is no need to go nuts about that.
Mayor de Blasio told New York City thugs to stop arresting people for smoking marijuana on street.
Australia and the US must recognize: There is no justification for firing into crowds of protesters.
Imagine if playing basketball while black becomes a crime.
The article seems to be satire.
30,000 protested in Munich against plans to give thugs more power.
EDRI urges activists to "be as critical of the technology you use to further your cause as you are of the people, lobbyists, institutions, companies and governments you’re fighting."
I hope this leads to understanding of why we must reject nonfree software.
The US birth rate is falling. That means less contribution to global heating, less contribution to deforestation, less contribution to every global problem.
The low birth rate is what we need. But it does not require making most people poor.
Salafi Arabia is arresting lots of women's rights activists.
Looks like the charm offensive has stalled.
The US Senate is considering another long copyright extension, this time for old musical recordings that are already in the public domain.
Chuck Schumer Is the Worst Possible Democratic Leader on Foreign Policy at the Worst Possible Time.
One cause of acute leukaemia seems to be overprotecting children from bacteria.
Several mass shootings in the US, including the last two, were based on misogyny.
Venezuela's medical system is collapsing and no longer prevents malaria.
The system can't possibly be worse today, for the poor, than it was before President Chavez. Before Chavez, Venezuela's medical system used to be effectively limited those wealthy enough to pay. Chavez brought in Cuban doctors to offer treatment to the poor.
The bully is planning to impose censorship about abortion on most medical institutions in the US, as a condition on federal subsidy.
Campaigning to preserve the status quo is weak. The US government ought to pay for abortions. We should campaign for that.
Interpol's New Software Will Recognize Criminals by Their Voices.
I fear that this surveillance is not limited to criminals.
In Haspel Confirmation, US Moves Beyond Impunity to Reward Torture.
Warmer water from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is flowing into the Arctic, heating it up and bringing species that didn't live there before.
This is a positive feedback loop which will speed the total loss of Arctic sea ice, and speed the melting of Greenland.
Saboteur Pruitt intends to cancel the EPA's system for avoiding chemical plant disasters.
Some blacks in the British royal family won't do much to reduce racism against black commoners.
African countries need to beware of letting foreign companies dominate them by getting control of the citizens' data.
People should be allowed to access foreign social networks and services, so as to keep their data away from their own government. However, domestic social networks and services should be required to protect their data from access by foreign governments.
Even better, these services should protect the data from the local government _as well_.
The Washington Post uses the term "far left" for candidates that support policies such as taxing the rich more, single-payer medical care, legalizing marijuana.
Since most American's support those policies, by definition the center includes them. They should be called "center-left policies".
As for the fictional "center" of the establishment, that's right-wing.
Comcast makes new customers sign up for an "installation", for which it charges a fee, even if the house already has a connection and the customer has per own modem. Comcast claims the customer can get a refund for this, but it doesn't tell customers that.
If your congresscritter votes against network neutrality, it's because perse is getting paid by this company and/or a few others like it.
The Senate Judiciary committee says that the NRA funneled money from Russia to support the cheater's campaign.
Over the decades when the richest Americans took wealth and income away from the non-rich 90%, forcing them down into poverty, the intermediate group of not-quite-rich (around 10%) have maintained their comfortable status by building barriers to social mobility between them and the 90%.
The article refers to the "9.9%", but that is unwarranted precision. The line between that group and the 90% is not a sharp one; we cannot say whether they are 10%, 9.9%, or 10.1% of the population.
The article's terminology is slightly skewed from historical precedent. The term "aristocracy" should refer to the richest .1%. The proper term for the comfortable 10% is "gentry".
The big accounting firms must be split up to ensure honest auditing.
Student loans in the US nowadays have become a crushing burden that (unless you get a big income soon after graduation) lasts for life, and sometimes even longer. The author explains her own example.
Even while AI lacks the power to convert Earth into paperclips, it tends to destroy the meaning of human thinking.
Right-wing trolls spread disinformation about the latest school shooter almost immeditely after he was identified, using his name to falsely smear their political enemies.
Scientists Tell Congress: Don’t Strip Science Out of the Endangered Species Act.
Over 40% of American households have trouble paying for basic needs.
Plutocracy did this, and until we put an end to plutocracy, it will keep making things worse.
"Can you be a socialist and rich?" Yes, and sincerely so.
Progressives recognize that the money that some rich people would voluntarily donate is not enough to do what the state ought to do. Therefore we advocate establishing systems that give everybody a decent life. With proper taxation, all rich people will have to contribute to society's needs, but none of them will be required to reduce themselves to poverty.
Shared electric scooters would be a significant improvement in public transport, if not for the fact that they track you everywhere and require running a proprietary app.
These are fundamentally as evil as Uber, so I urge you to reject them like Uber.
Senator Corker proposes a law to let the US start wars in any country if it is for fighting certain a vaguely specified set of terrorist groups, even if there is no war going on.
US citizens: Give the Department of Health a comment opposing the proposed abortion gag rule.
US citizens: call on senators to save the Endangered Species Act.
US citizens: call on Congress to curb lobbyists' power to buy support.
US citizens: Call on Monster Beverage Corporation to seriously investigate slavery in its sugar production.
Berta Cáceres's campaign lives on, and is suing a Dutch bank for a dam project in Honduras.
Australia has been weak on supporting human rights abroad, and Malaysia's prime-minister-to-be Anwar Ibrahim does not forget this.
Permit Scheme Facilitating Slavery on Irish Fishing Boats, Says Union.
Many young people in Gaza are committing suicide, but there is no way of counting them since suicide is typically hushed up.
I wonder whether, in 30 years, the America of the non-rich will be like Gaza today.
In a real pub, smaller servings of alcohol led customers to drink substantially less alcohol.
The UK is subjecting Julian Assange to conditions both oppressive and dangerous to his health, and Ecuador's new president seems to be quietly making them even worse.
The UK's new highly competitive graduation tests discourage all students, even the best.
I suspect that rich parents have made a way for their children to bypass these tests. Is that so?
Israeli soldiers shot Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani as he was treating protesters wounded by Israeli soldiers. Israeli soldiers shot many other medics, killing one. Since the army says that it "knows where every shot went", it cannot plead that this was unintentional. Loubani gives reasons to conclude he must have been targeted intentionally.
A few years ago, Loubani was imprisoned in Egypt for months for being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the coup occurred. He was freed due to an international pressure campaign.
Ebola has spread to a big city in the DR Congo, from which it might spread all around the world.
The bully recently cut funds for emergency funds to deal with such outbreaks. This is like cutting funds to the fire department; it is crazy. Slowness in the response will let Ebola spread further.
An experimental vaccine is being tested there.
(Satire) An Israeli soldier recounted Tuesday his harrowing, heroic war story of killing an 8-month-old Palestinian child during a violent attack against protesters.
An Equifax and Facebook Lawyer Will Now Run the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Several Senate Democrats voted to confirm torturer Haspel, along with all the Republicans.
McCain, who opposed torture, was unable to vote because he was dying.
Insects will lose half their habitat in this century if we don't curb global heating. This would disrupt many other species.
A Third of World's Nature Reserves Severely Degraded by Human Activity.
It is ludicrous to ask young working adults to save for their retirement when they can barely scrape by on their low wages.
Corrupt Guatemalan Officials Find Help from an Unlikely Source: Marco Rubio.
Everyone: oppose Facebook's ID requirements for political ads. They are an injustice towards some real activists in the US.
They won't even fix the real problem, since the foreign entities that want to advertise can easily funnel through real US citizens.
US citizens: Oppose the Republican abortion gag rule.
US citizens: Call on your congresscritter to vote for network neutrality.
CNN and MSNBC didn't even mention the Senate's vote for network neutrality.
New York State has adopted strict standards for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
I have the suspicion that Cuomo agreed to this because of the primary challenge from Cynthia Nixon.
The UK says it will provide passes for anonymous access to porn sites to people who show proof of age.
It is less surveillance than I would have expected, but people wonder if it is really truly anonymous.
US border thugs substantially undercount the border crossers that died in the process. Even deaths witnessed and reported by individual thugs are omitted from the overall count.
Acupuncture had no significant effect on the probability of success of in-vitro fertilization.
I disagree with those that recommend using it as a placebo to help women feel more comfortable. Truth is a value, as well as comfort. There are other ways to help people feel comfortable which don't spread pseudoscience.
The FBI is investigating around 1000 Americans as suspected possible future "lone wolf" terrorists.
How many of them, left to themselves, would commit terrorism? Based on general ideas of human behavior, I would guess around 10. Suppose that investigation might prevent 5 of them. (Stopping a crime which would be committed on the spur of the moment cannot be counted on.)
Are roughly 1000 FBI investigations of people only thinking of committing a crime less harmful to Americans than a handful of attempted crimes?
The US Senate passed the resolution to restore network neutrality.
Now the battle goes to the house of representatives. It may be possible to win there. The cheater could veto it, but might decide not to if faced with so much public support for it.
What Senator Thune said is interesting for its deceptiveness. First he said, "Don't vote for this because it can't win." But even if that were true, it would not be a reason not to vote for net neutrality.
Second he praised the end of network neutrality because it is deregulation. His position, evidently, is that the government should not interfere when giant businesses, in an only slightly competitive market, systematically mistreat people.
That's what government is for, silly senator!
His words show only that he's with those businesses, against the public.
Note that these network neutrality rules may not have been necessary 20 years ago, since there was a lot more competition among ISPs.
The collapse of a conglomerate that implemented privatized public services in the UK was due to corruption which the new privatization system was unable to detect until too late.
This demonstrates that privatization of public services is an invitation for companies to cheat the state, as well as to cheat the public and to cheat their employees.
A UK politician is being attacked for reporting that many Syrians support Assad.
Assad is a dictator who has killed thousands of Syrians and driven millions into exile. He is also supported by millions of Syrians — basically, Arabs that are not Sunni. The Arab rebels are Sunni, and tend more or less to oppress non-Sunnis.
This is why there is no side in Syria that deserved support, except Rojava. However, Rojava, which is mainly Kurdish, could not become a government of Syria. Arabs mostly won't accept a government by Kurds nowadays.
CFCs, banned since decades ago, are being produced again in Asia, and this is slowing the reduction of the ozone hole.
Overuse of ground water is already starting to bite humanity. Some aquifers do not refill at all, and others don't refill as fast as we take water from them.
Global heating is adding to the problem by reducing rainfall in some areas.
Occasional exercise promotes good health, but constant heavy physical labor tends to kill people.
Facebook allows ads to be targeted at people it infers are homosexual or interested in Islam, if it hasn't specifically been told this.
Right-wingers want US border thugs to shoot and kill unauthorized immigrants. They are gleeful about killing.
US border thugs are currently limited to making border-crossers die of thirst, but that doesn't provide the same visceral satisfaction.
Coulter is a troll, but she wouldn't say this if she didn't know that many right-wingers will be delighted at the thought of crushing the weak.
Arguing that factory farms cause so much harm to people and the environment that they should be banned.
Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim has been pardoned and freed.
Ibrahim was apparently framed by Mahathir 20 years ago.
Everyone: demand dropping all charges against Chikesia Clemons.
Everyone: call on Fedex to stop giving a discount to NRA members.
US citizens: Call on SCROTUS to pass gun control laws.
Unless you're telekinetic or some god exists, your "thoughts and prayers" won't help anyone.
The government of Cambodia plans to build a dam across the Mekong river, and never mind the likelihood that it will wipe out the fish that 80% of Cambodians eat.
The Senate's bank deregulation bill will encourage medium-size banks to merge into large ones.
One US company pays its CEO 5000 times the median wage of its workers. For almost 200 more large companies, the ratio is over 100.
California thugs kill black men at 8 times the rate of the rest of the population.
Some employees have quit Google in protest against its development of AI for analyzing images from military drones.
Trump attorney fed statement to Russians about Trump Tower meeting.
A desperate move — resurrecting mammoths to try to keep trees out of thawing tundra areas.
Undercover Corporate Work Lures Underemployed Actors and Underpaid Workers … to corrupt democracy.
(Satire) Netanyahu officially declared a nationwide day of mourning Tuesday for a section of security fence damaged in yesterday's conflict at the Gaza border.
Walmart is helping to fund a campaign to convince US workers to stop paying union dues.
Those who fall for this will lose a lot more than the amount of their union dues.
New York City thugs are especially eager to arrest blacks and hispanics for selling small amounts of marijuana on the street.
The "gig economy" amounts to a small fraction of the US economy, partly because the number of workers is not very large, and partly because they are badly paid.
EPA Saboteur Pruitt blocked release of a study that demonstrated that certain chemicals are toxic even at low concentrations.
US media downplay the fact that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinian protesters by avoiding the word "kill".
Japan refuses to discuss better relations with North Korea, demanding a full resolution of North Korea's kidnapings. Japanese were kidnaped from coastal areas and forced to teach Japanese to spies.
Of course, North Korea should resolve the matter of the kidnappings. If the other kidnaped Japanese people died before 2002, North Korea should do the right thing, whatever is appropriate in such as case.
Japan should also resolve the matter of the women conscripted as prostitutes during World War II. The one crime doesn't justify the other, and they are not related; but since each country owes the other an apology, it may be a lot easier to do this if they do it at the same time.
US citizens: call on the Federal Election Commission to protect voters' right to know who is running political ads.
Everyone: Call on Philadelphia to stop its practice of jailing people for months before they get a court hearing.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for a vote in favor of network neutrality, and to sign the discharge petition.
Please do not use their Javascript-dependent site to find who your congresscritter is. Use another way to find out who.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Here's more information about what to say.
UK thugs' face recognition system, applied to ordinary members of the public, identified people erroneously 90% of the time.
It could be worse: it could identify them correctly 90% of the time. And that is likely to happen in a few years if this system is not banned entirely.
China is funding a half-billion-dollar project in Indonesia which includes the cheater as an investor.
The Poor People's Campaign has launched 40 days of protests to demand economic justice.
China is the latest economic imperialist to lend countries money they can't afford to pay back. Many countries are in debt to the IMF, or to US banks, and can't pay it back. Hugo Chavez used Venezuela's oil money to rescue Argentina from its debt to the IMF.
China could win lots of international support by buying that debt and offering less oppressive terms for paying it back.
In India, out of every 1000 girls born, 19 die from the effects of bias against females.
The author of the article confuses the issue by claiming that "girls die" when female fetuses are aborted. That's absurd, because a fetus is not a boy or a girl. A fetus is not a human being.
The campaign against sex-selection puts abortion rights at risk in general.
We can tell from the quotations that the researchers who wrote the medical article were careful to avoid that mistake.
The doctors that get taken to lunch by opioid salescritters tend to prescribe more opioids.
This does not mean those doctors prescribe opioids too much. Given the pressure on doctors to refuse opioids to patients that suffer from great pain, it could be that these doctors mainly prescribe opioids to people that really need them.
The right approach isn't having salescritters promote prescription of these or any drugs. Rather, it is to end the War on Pain Sufferers and reject opioids that are particularly inviting to addiction.
Bringing back the 20th century's practice of supply management could help US farmers stay in business.
However, they also need us to break up the large food companies that dominate and mistreat the farms they buy from.
"NRA propaganda hearkens back to an imagined past of white picket fences and financial security. In doing so, it whitewashes the history of guns in American life."
Julian Assange is cut off from visitors as well as from the internet. It looks like Ecuador might force him out of the embassy, probably into the clutches of the US.
Assange showed disrespect to his host country by causing political difficulties for Ecuador. I can understand telling him, "Don't make problems for us while we are protecting you." However, to deny him visitors entirely is unnecessary, thus too harsh.
To hand Assange indirectly to the US would be a great dishonor for Ecuador. The US sheltered Cardinal Mindszenty in its embassy in Hungary for 15 years. To have surrendered him to the Communist dictatorship would have been a great dishonor, which the US rejected.
French budget minister Cahuzac led a campaign against tax dodging, and was eventually caught doing it himself.
It would be easy to draw a cynical lesson — easy but erroneous. What this shows is that an effective system can catch and stop tax dodging by people who are fairly rich.
What is needed now is to add laws to block the lawful methods of tax dodging carried out by exploitative companies such as Apple and Amazon.
Rep. Hoyer, Democrat, endorsed Israel's massacre of protesters, and its pretense that this was a legitimate act of military defense against a military attack.
A siege is an act of war; therefore, by the usual standards, a military thrust by Gaza or its allies aimed at breaking the siege would be a legitimate act of defense.
However, protests by Gazans on the territory of Gaza are not a military act of any kind. Killing protesters is not legitimate war, it is a war crime.
This is the same Hoyer that has been working against progressive Democratic candidates.
The troll has arrogantly slapped everyone in Gaza in the face.
I don't think it is correct to say that the troll has "jettisoned any chance of peace", because Netanyahu did that years ago. As Uri Avnery reported, Netanyahu kept negotiations going as a sham, while setting impossible preconditions so that they could not succeed, and Obama tacitly accepted that.
Rather, what the troll has now done is give Israel carte blanche for atrocities.
It is hard to eliminate homelessness by taxing companies for their employees.
One cause of the shortage of housing in US cities is zoning, which prevents the construction of a lot more housing.
It needs to be mentioned that the practice of buying luxury housing purely to resell it years later, and leaving it empty in the mean time, is also responsible in some expensive cities. That would be easy to stop with a large additional tax on residential space that isn't anyone's primary residence.
We need to tax companies such as Amazon more — a lot more. However, taxation per employee creates a perverse incentive for companies to use more automation and reduce the number of employees. They can also threaten to move jobs to where they pay less tax.
I think we should eliminate all payroll taxes, including those for social security and medicare. We should raise money for those programs, and other things, by taxing businesses on their income, regardless of their number of employees, and regardless of which country they notionally assign that income to.
However, it is hard for a city to enact a tax of that kind and make it effective. It needs to be done at a national level.
When Jewish Americans Uphold Occupation, It Corrodes Our Souls.
The photographs that documented the poverty of the Great Depression, and consequent suffering, were carefully selected, rejecting many of the most painful.
Today's plutocracy, and global heating, are likely to push most people into even worse poverty.
Some Israelis demand an inquiry into the massacre of Gazan protesters.
The UK government has hired tax bounty hunters to pressure non-rich people to pay their taxes even if they are broke.
Meanwhile, it is doing almost nothing to make rich companies such as Apple and Amazon pay taxes. It is clear who the Tories are working for.
School privatizers are using Africa as a testbed for developing an inflexible inhumane standardized education without trained teachers.
Paranoid Americans now want their nannies checked by the FBI. This check violates their privacy, and secondarily costs them a lot of money, all pointlessly.
Many thug departments in the UK deport unauthorized immigrants who report crimes.
A war between the US and Iran could draw in many other countries.
The US might not be able to invade Iran by land. Looking at Iran's neighbors, I doubt any would help, except Afghanistan, but that is hardly a secure base to launch an invasion from.
Assigning a monetary value to parts of the natural world encourages the idea that they are all for sale, and helps the extractivists by undermining the awareness that they have other, more important kinds of value.
"'The river is dead': is a mine polluting the water of Brazil's Xikrin tribe?"
The reactivated Poor People's Campaign has started off with protests across the US. More protests are planned for 40 days.
Pressure to have a "positive" attitude is a burden on people that have cancer, and it doesn't let up even when the cancer is terminal.
"Trump threw a match into Jerusalem with no plan to put out the fire."
The move of the US embassy provoked Palestinian protests, but that is not directly responsible for the killing of 52 more protesters. What's responsible for that is the Israeli policy of eager killing.
Bernie Sanders condemned the massacre.
Contrast that with the sniveling of most US politicians.
Large investment institutions are pressuring oil companies and banks not to invest in drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Any and all development of new oil or gas fields is an irresponsible decision, given that civilization's survival depends on cutting back quickly.
Saboteur of Education DeVos has effectively ended investigations into the fraudulent practices of for-profit colleges.
The saboteur-in-chief, having owned one, would naturally resent the idea of investigating others.
It is part of a systematic plan to help companies cheat people.
(Satire) The Dalai Lama announced Monday that the next will be his final life before retirement.
Evidence that the US used germ warfare against North Korea and killed an American scientist who was going to reveal this.
I don't recognize the names of anyone mentioned in the article except Seymour Hersh, so I can't have full confidence in the statements in the article. It could be true.
In the predigital era, your boss was forbidden to read your mail, or listen to your phone calls. By contrast, Slack just said your boss can read your private conversations.
In the US: tell the CEO of Novartis to stop blocking Medicare from negotiating drug prices.
The CEO of Novartis has no formal say in the matter, but in practice he buys power.
US citizens: Oppose Pruitt's plan to personally censor science that the EPA can use.
US citizens: call on the US to stop donating weapons to Israel.
A vice president at Duke University defends free speech — but not for student employees on a coffee shop on campus. He had them fired for playing a song he did not like.
SCROTUS are demanding the details of Mueller's investigation, to give it to the cheater so they can undermine the investigation.
FEMA is demanding Puerto Ricans show papers for their destroyed houses, before giving them rebuilding assistance. As much as half the families never had such papers.
Saboteur of the Interior Zinke appears to be committing ethics violations.
California's efforts demonstrate how an advanced economy can drastically cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
Unfortunately, since greenhouse gas is a global problem, California cannot protect itself from the damaging effects no matter how hard it works. Unless the rest of the world joins in — which the planet-roasters are doing their damnedest to prevent — California will be hosed in winter and hung out to dry in summer.
The New York Times and Washington Post argue about what the US should do to dominate Iran.
Why try to do that?
Funding cuts in UK education result in too few teachers and too little preparation time. This has driven the older, experienced teachers to quit, making the job impossible for those who remain.
The US example says they should go on strike.
Snoopphone apps that use the ultrasonic "nearby" protocol are supposed to filter out voice frequencies. Thus, supposedly they can't spy on people's conversations.
But they always spy on the user's movements, since that's their purposes. Better not to use it. (Better not to use the snoopphone at all.)
Tick-Borne Illness Has Tripled, but the CDC Refuses to Blame [global heating]. It used to recognize the connection until the saboteurs took control.
Texas State University wants students prosecuted for a sit-in against racism.
Moqtada al-Sadr's party got the most votes in Iraq's election.
He always struck me as acting more from principles than from greed or ambition, a great contrast to everyone else in Iraqi politics.
The mother of a US marine recounts how his stand-up-to-torture training experience traumatized him and he has not been the same since.
There are several minority ethnic groups in Myanmar, and several of them don't want to be ruled by Burmese. They have fought on and off for decades to preserve their autonomy. Now the state is cracking down on the Kachin minority.
The Amazon Echo Dot is designed to accustom children to surveillance-based marketing from a young age.
A positive feedback loop now increases the melting of Antarctica's ice. The meltwater mixes with the ocean's surface water and stops it from descending as it used to.
Philadelphia adopted a tax on sugar-loaded drinks, which has been very effective in reducing consumption of them. So the companies that sell these have gone to the state government to prohibit cities from doing this. Other states have already done it.
Republicans are reliable boosters of products that are dangerous to people.
The Israeli defenders of Palestinian human rights and peace face state repression and death threats, as Israel becomes ever less free, but they don't give up.
An anti-Trump Republican seeks to run for Al Franken's old senate seat.
Being against the bully is only the first requisite for being someone we should want in the senate. It is not enough. I hope a progressive candidate beats him in the primary.
Professor Scott Warren faces 20 years in prison for providing unauthorized immigrants with supplies and a place to sleep. The border thugs used to respect this humanitarian aid, but now they are trying to snuff it out.
The border thugs dehumanize unauthorized immigrants. Some dream of torturing them, and they generally drool over the idea of hitting them on the head with a flashlight. In other words, they have a culture that trains them to be unfit for any such job.
They regard augmenting the danger of death for people crossing the border as a legitimate means of deterring them from trying, and they equate any effort to reduce the danger as obstruction of their deadly plans.
I suspect they wish they were permitted to simply shoot apparent migrants.
Electronic Monitors: How Companies Dream of Locking Us in Our Homes.
The bully has ordered all US agencies to make all kinds of assistance to poor people harder to get.
The UK minister for deportation has resigned after being caught in direct lies about how hard the staff were pressing to procure deportations.
This alone will not end the "hostile environment" that she presided over. That requires changing the laws and policies which set it up.
The bully wants to send PISSI soldiers (or those accused of being such) to Guantanamo, but if this occurs, they could legally challenge whether Congress ever authorized US participation in fighting PISSI.
Indefinite imprisonment, which is what the US does in the Guantanamo prison, is a blot on the honor of the United States. Americans, if you love our country as I do, join me in insisting that this end.
Gambling companies use AI-driven manipulative techniques, based on each gambler's past history, to keep them hooked.
This demonstrates that consent must not be considered sufficient justification to record personal data.
Someone who made an inaccurate criticism of Malaysian thugs has been sentenced to a month in prison.
He had exaggerated the statement out of anger, and apologized for the error. It seems he did not intentionally lie.
False statements are unfortunate, but criminalizing them is much worse.
The FDA has found glyphosate in almost all the foods it has tested, but has not published anything about this.
The patented gene that makes some crops resistant to glyphosate might not directly harm people, but it brings glyphosate.
Michael Segalov: "A free press? I’m a UK journalist, but the police labelled me an extremist."
"Witness statements from the officers cite my time as a student campaigner as a reason to bar me: a time when I was elected as a student union officer and was voted on to the National Union of Students’ national executive council...."
"The other reason cited for labelling me as an “extreme leftwing” activist is my journalism."
I wonder why the Labour Party couldn't or didn't decide to admit Segalov to their event, regardless of the thugs. Does anyone know why?
US border guards have invented creative but absurd excuses to stop the refugees in the caravan from Central America from even applying for asylum.
India is planning to privatize the operations of its greatest tourist attractions, including the Taj Majal.
There isn't much competition in those markets, so the privatization will create a localized private monopoly.
If 10 million jobs are lost to automation in the UK, it would be a national disaster. The UK has around 66 million inhabitants, and I'd expect roughly 30 to 40 million people employed.
Having a phone on the table during dinner or other interactions with people tends to make people more unhappy.
The UK railroad network is cutting down thousands of healthy trees lest their leaves or branches fall on the train track some day.
This sounds like our fears about a hypothetical AI that subordinates everything to a narrow goal. Will Network Rail try to convert the entire substance of the Earth into crossties?
A US appeals court approved Texas's voter ID law. Voting-rights advocates will file further appeals.
The US deportation thugs are so incompetent that they often mistakenly imprison US citizens for deportation. One US citizen was imprisoned this way for over three years before a court looked at the question.
The bully is the culmination of a plutocratist plan, started in the 1970s, to take control of the US government and redirect it towards serving the rich.
There are calls for an arms embargo on Israel for its mass shooting of Palestinian protesters.
I don't think it would have much effect on shooting protesters, since Israel makes those arms.
The OSHA is almost powerless to protect workers from dangerous chemicals, so mostly the EPA has done the job. Now companies believe that Saboteur Pruitt offers a chance to convince the EPA to "defer to" the powerless OSHA, so that no agency will try to remove dangerous chemicals from the workplace.
People of Denver are calling on the EPA to limit the emissions of cyanide gas from a fossil-fuel facility.
A massive natural gas extraction system in Papua New Guinea was supposed to double the country's GDP, but it has provided little if any benefit to that country. This may have something to do with the legal concessions that the government had to make in order to get the project started.
We are learning that businesses don't ever justify such concessions, not even in their narrow economic terms presented.
Citizens of Florida: support proposed amendment 4, which would end disenfranchisement of former convicts.
Everyone: urge Germany, Russia, UK, France and China to preserve the non-nuclear deal with Iran.
US citizens: support Sanders's bill to reduce US drug prices.
Since the UK is still part of the EU, it can still work to further sabotage the EU's efforts to curb global heating.
Tight restrictions on opioid painkillers is driving abusers to illegally made opioids, which increases the deaths from overdoses. Meanwhile, people who need painkillers now suffer from great pain.
The new breathalyzer that Washington State is buying seems to give erroneous reports, but the manufacturer, Draeger, made legal threats to suppress research into the question.
The article uses the bogus term "intellectual property", which gives a confused picture of actual laws, and should never be used.
What the Onion published as a joke, the Washington Post asserted seriously: confirm Haspel because it would be a great step forward to have a woman as head of the CIA, and never mind if she is responsible for torture.
I don't care about an official's gender. I care about what person does and stands for.
A bogus report claims that 20% of homeless youth in the US are "victims of human trafficking", but the true figure was half that.
Looking at the full report, we can see that this figure is deceptive. The study followed a lying law by defining "victim of human trafficking" (and "victim of sex trafficking") to include "doing prostitution while under 18 years old."
It appears that the "victims of sex trafficking" were 17%, but only 7% were actually trafficked into sex. That suggests that the real fraction that were victims of some kind of trafficking was 10%, not 20%.
Even 10% coerced into some sort of work is a big problem, but let's not dishonestly double the figure.
The cheater is negotiating with China to exempt a Chinese company from the effect of US sanctions.
The extremism and racism of US evangelicals could split their alliance with Catholics.
Israel is preparing to shoot protesters in Gaza again, in case they protest against the transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem.
A considerable fraction of today's porn shows the act of choking a woman.
I can't imagine how being choked could be exciting. I don't think I could bring myself to do that to a woman even if she asked me to.
"In the absence of political will to tackle America’s growing economic crisis, hi-tech tools can only serve to automate and amplify existing inequalities."
Most Americans don't have enough money for a decent life, and minor tweaks in public assistance can't make up for the giant cuts.
Indigenous people living near the Yukon river have increased their population and are catching so many salmon that the fish numbers are slowly dwindling.
Fontcode is a scheme for hiding messages in documents presented as images (including PDF files).
It wouldn't be effective for steganography to get it past serious spies, but it threatens to be used for watermarking as part of the War on Sharing. In other words, it will give the powerful another arm for enforcing unjust power.
The NHS is wracked by shortages of nurses, and sometimes has to send emergency patients home because it can't care for them.
We've Got to Stop Turning Our Backs on Ebola. Calling for systematic monitoring in case it spreads internationally.
Australia will ban cash purchases over $10,000 Australian dollars.
It is important to start fighting back now, because other examples such as Italy and France suggest the limit will be reduced to hundreds of dollars.
Democrats, Warns Sanders, Cannot Defeat Trump With Same Establishment Candidates.
Foreign anti-abortion activists are using Facebook to manipulate the Irish referendum vote on legalizing abortion.
North Korea Invites World to Watch Closure of Nuclear Test Site.
Two "Democratic" senators have said they will vote for Haspel, hoping for Republican votes for their reelection.
It is a terrible shame that Manchin did not face a primary challenge. What good is it to beat Republicans with someone who is almost a Republican himself.
The deportation frenzy of the US is cutting off immigrants from medical care, so minor problems develop into fatal ones. Their children go untreated, too.
And Now, For His Grand Finale, Paul Ryan Is Trying to Kick at Least a Million People Off of Food Stamps.
Bullshit jobs seen as managerial feudalism.
Sanders has introduced a bill to expand workers' ability to unionize and resist union-busting.
The saboteur in chief has cancelled NASA's carbon monitoring program, which tracks the changing (increasing) level of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.
The UN has a program to provide schooling to 200 million children, many of them refugees.
A substantial fraction of jobs are totally bullshit.
In a society where many people can't find productive jobs and desperately need money, eliminating bullshit jobs might do great harm to many poor people. But there are better ways to support the poor.
The US official unemployment rate is now under 4%, but partly that's because more people have given up on finding work. Meanwhile, wages are hardly rising at all. We need to increase the minimum wage.
Amazon is trying to bully Seattle into dropping a tax proposal to fund housing for the homeless.
We need to prevent any business from having the sort of influence that Amazon has today. To truly succeed requires laws, but you can do your share by not buying from Amazon. Money is the only language Amazon understands, so don't give it your money!
Impeach Scott Pruitt for Dismantling the EPA, Not His First-Class Flights.
Unfortunately SCROTUS defends his sabotage of the EPA and would never impeach him for that.
Facebook's dating service will collect a lot more data from its useds.
How to operate a dating service that Big Brother won't feed off of is a real problem, and I don't have a good answer for it. But I wouldn't appoint Facebook to find that answer.
A UK deportation official was honest enough to admit that his job was to "piss people off".
Two indigenous high school seniors on a tour of Colorado State University were removed from their tour by police because someone thought they were vaguely suspicious.
I wonder whether they still want to enroll there.
The first time I went to an academic conference, to present my paper on Emacs, I was harassed on two occasions by hotel staff who doubted my right to be there. Since I am a white male, I think I was treated as suspect because I didn't (and never do) wear a business uniform (suit).
An American women was attacked online for the absurd reason that she wore a beautiful Chinese dress.
Culture is for imitating. It is never wrong to adopt or adapt cultural practices of other cultures — though some ways of doing it are boorish and might be laughed at.
Sanders objected to the deployment of US troops to Salafi Arabia for fighting in Yemen.
With Utah's ag-gag law struck down as unconstitutional, animal rights activists can lawfully make photos and films of frightful conditions in factory farms. They did this in a turkey farm, and also took away a few turkeys that were so sick they were going to die in a few days without medical care.
The activists have been charged with grand theft of these birds, a felony, although commercially speaking the birds were worthless due to their illness.
The companies that run these factory farms regularly lie about the conditions in them.
Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian President, apologized for the antisemitic statements he made a few days ago, and said he respects all monotheistic religions.
That still omits some religions, and I wonder whether he gives atheism the respect it deserves. But even if he doesn't, he is no worse than many US politicians. In this context, that is sufficient.
Warning the people of Cape Town about when their water would run out achieved a big reduction in water use. As a result, the city has not run out of water.
But that could still happen. The usage rate is still somewhat higher than it needs to be.
The Corker-Keane blanket authorization for global war would also authorize imprisonment without trial on a broad scale.
A UK thug has been fired, and may face charges, for luring a dissident into a sexual relationship in order to spy on dissidents.
This is proper, but it can't be a coincidence that so many thugs in that infiltration squad did this.
(Satire) Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue reportedly stated Thursday, in a desperate attempt to serve as President Trump’s fall guy, that he was the one who slept with Stormy Daniels.
It would be dangerous to let Facebook tell us which news media are trustworthy.
(Satire) Supermarket chain Kroger recalled 35,000 pounds of ground beef Thursday that may contain traces of its chief executive officer.
The former CEO of Volkswagen has been charged with fraud for approving the system to fool emissions tests.
Israel has convicted a Palestinian poet of being a terrorist for her poem.
The poem itself did not call for violence.
The bully's three stooges believe they can make the US start a war with Iran.
Iran has not invaded another country for the last 250 years — since before the US was established. How many countries has the US invaded during that time?
The commanders of the four US armed services have stated that transgender soldiers are not a problem at all.
Why would they be a problem? Only because of others' bigotry. However, as more and more Americans have friends who are transgender, they realize it doesn't matter.
George Mason University has sold the Koch brothers a direct role in its decisions, including who to hire as faculty.
A Republican candidate for governor of Georgia put up an ad to demonstrate that he loves guns but doesn't love basic gun safety rules.
He also advocates subjecting unmarried women to their fathers' authority up to the point of shooting their lovers if he doesn't approve.
Cambridge Analytica is dead, but its main supporters have started a new company to replace it.
Since Cambridge Analytica is bankrupt, the court will sell off its assets to some other company, which could easily mistreat people in the same way. Or perhaps Cambridge Analytica has already sold all those data to the substitute company.
Republican saboteurs plan to save US national parks by destroying civilization.
Not only is it a bad deal, it won't even achieve the supposed goal. Human activities have introduced many invasive species, and to keep them down requires constant effort. Civilization is rich enough to do that. If civilization falls, we will no longer be able to hold them down.
Carl Icahn was granted a "financial hardship" waiver from complying with pollution rules. His income last year was a mere $234 million.
Vice President Wallace, and writer Sinclair Lewis, described what American fascists would do to take control of the state. Now they are doing it, proceeding down that path.
The US Department of Justice has deleted the areas of press freedom and racial gerrymandering from its priorities.
That is natural, since Republicans don't want any interference with their plans to arrest journalists and disenfranchise bigotry-target groups.
The planned merger of T-Mobile and Sprint would eliminate up to 20,000 jobs.
Allowing large companies to merge leads step by step towards monopoly. The plutocrats' love to own monopolies, so their servants label a market as "competitive" if it has more than one seller.
One of the the thugs that killed Diante Yarber was fired from another thug department for a racist attack.
US citizens: Tell the Senate: Block and Resist Anti-Abortion Extremist Wendy Vitter.
US citizens: call on Saboteur Zinke not to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
On the break between individual feminism (making each woman stronger and better able to resist sexism) and social feminism (working together to end sexism).
In principle, I'm in favor of both forms. I don't think they conflict except occasionally in details. Sexism is a form of bigotry, so it is good to help the targets of bigotry overcome it, and also good to change society to reduce it. Just as workers organize against injustice toward workers, woman can organize too.
However, no one is entitled to demand special sensitivity from others. Demands are legitimate when what is at stake are your rights. Anything beyond that, you can request but not demand.
A Japanese politician is pushing women to have more children. Some European countries are doing the same thing.
This is dangerous short-term thinking; the human race needs to reduce its birth rate so as to decrease the population without violence. Otherwise climate mayhem and topsoil depletion and ecological disasters are likely to reduce our population in very painful ways.
Charter schools in some US states threaten public education by draining off funds to privatized schools. Even if it doesn't make public education collapse, it takes away funds which were insufficient already.
The chief justice of the Philippines' supreme court has been removed for resisting Do-dirty's death squads.
Some US states have banned, or propose to ban, the "gay panic" defense, used by men who kill gays that have shown attraction for them.
Lots of things can give some people an urge to kill someone else. The point is that people have an obligation to resist those urges.
Oliver North Worked With Cocaine Traffickers to Arm Terrorists. Now He'll Be President of the NRA.
He says that gun control activism is a kind of "terrorism".
Bob Nygaard continues putting psychics behind bars for defrauding vulnerable customers.
An interview with Bob Nygaard describes various methods and lies of psychics.
How did Velvet know that Megan would respond to "There's something wrong with you"? Perhaps Velvet said that to everyone that passed by looking anxious.
Rebecca Solnit's analysis of the incel world view: when men consider women and sex as commodities, it's not a big leap to resentment of not getting a share of it.
Even in my saddest times, I never thought of women as a commodity. I wanted sexual love with a sweetheart, not sex by hook or by crook. Because of this, I think, I have found love from time to time. I recommend that men who consider themselves "incels" start thinking about shared affection.
Mahathir seems to have become prime minister, and has stopped Razak from leaving Malaysia so as to investigate him for corruption.
Rohingya Villagers Who Spoke to UN Delegation [in 2016] Forced into Hiding [afterward]. The repression forces hunted for them.
Ralph Nader: The Democratic Party is losing support because its policies are too right-wing.
It takes a real reversal of dooH niboR to inspire enthusiasm among the non-rich non-Republicans.
The cheater proposes to reduce drug prices in the US by pressuring other countries to allow pharma companies to gouge people more.
This is based on the fictitious principal of conservation of greed, which claims that a company desires only a certain amount of income, so if it makes more profit over there, it will be happy with less profit over here.
Sharif Cousins was shot by a UK thug as he had his hands up. Fortunately he did not die from this. He had been a gang member, years ago, and the thugs never stopped harassing him about it.
I am puzzled by the idea that he was "allegedly" unarmed. If the thugs had found a gun, they would have said so. Since they didn't report one, we know he was unarmed.
Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too. Officials can in practice use this to track anyone that carries a portable tracking and surveillance device.
The court ruling about searching electronic devices at the border applies only to thorough "forensic" search, not to a manual search. This is a step forward, but incomplete.
Meanwhile, the article does not mention anything that would in practice restrain agents from doing a search without a reasonable suspicion, or from fabricating a suspicion on the spot.
Everyone: Tell Delaware North to drop its lawsuit against Yosemite National Park.
Jeremy Scahill: Obama Paved Way for Haspel to Head CIA by Failing to Hold Torturers Accountable.
(Satire) Americans just freed by North Korea will be placed in US prison labor to ease their transition.
Voice-control appliances react to inaudible subsonic commands. A computer-controlled audio device can take control of them and humans will not notice.
Even worse, each one was made by a company that demand blind faith but doesn't deserve any sort of confidence because it is run by nonfree software.
US deportation thugs stated their contempt for the constitution while forcing their way into a family home without a search warrant.
Salafi Arabia dropped US bombs on a wedding party in Yemen.
The war-lover wants to sell Salafi Arabia a lot more of the same kind of bomb.
This sort of atrocity has happened repeatedly in US-backed wars, including in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Apparently the human system isn't designed to avoid that. "Precision-guided" weapons don't protect civilians if they are guided with great precision onto civilians.
Salafia Arabia has won the narcissist's total support for war by persistent flattery.
EFF: The Secure Data Act Would Stop Backdoors.
LA city thugs have chosen a large number of residents (2% of the city population) for continual harassment on the street. These people say they are stopped by thugs over ten times a day.
"When you have a global pandemic of disease (obesity), telling people to take personal responsibility for it is unlikely to be the answer."
The US border thug that killed a Mexican by shooting him through the border fence was cleared of murder charges, but the jury was deadlocked on charges of manslaughter. So the thug will be retried on that charge.
Mahathir Mohamad was authoritarian before; Malaysia should not count on him as a savior, even if he is less corrupt than Razak.
Subsidizing fossil fuels is dangerous for the whole world, so restoring those subsidies would be very bad.
However, a sales tax (aka VAT) is a regressive form of taxation. It is typical plutocratist-speak to call that a "necessary reform". If Malaysia wants to reduce its budget deficit, it should do by taxing the rich more, instead.
A CIA memo said that Brazil's military dictator, as of 1974 had murdered 104 dissidents in one year. Horrifyingly, the leading presidential candidate in Brazil wants to resume killing dissidents.
Cheney endorsed Gina Haspel to run the CIA so she can resume torture.
Competitors of Facebook and Google say that the new European regulations, the GDPR will help, not hinder, Facebook and Google.
At the same time, I am not sure that increased competition in "ad tech" is progress. I think the goal should be ever fewer ad tech companies, ultimately zero.
In the automated and deregulated economy, "disruption" means people lose jobs forever, "automation" likewise, and "self-employment" means working harder for less pay.
We have no obligation to permit companies to do these things to us. Human rights cover how you live your life, but not business practices.
From Windrush to Grenfell, the Powerful Only See Tragedy When It Suits Them.
If the Supreme Court rules to cripple public employee unions, the only sensible response is, "Don’t Mourn, Organize!"
A "credit freeze" in the US is not entirely effective, since there is a path for some companies to bypass it.
Ticketmaster wants to scan the faces of people who attend concerts and shows.
Merely to find out who they are is an injustice.
Comcast threatens to expand from giant to enormous.
Canadian politician Doug Ford controlled his press coverage by hiring his own "reporter" to interview him.
Nova Scotia thugs have dropped charges against a citizen that downloaded all the web pages from a particular directory. However, they have not returned his computers.
Alas, if his computers are returned, they could be dishonest. There is no telling what malicious software, or even hardware, the thugs may have installed.
The Tories have a clever plan to lead immigrants into forfeiting their legal rights: deny them information about their own cases.
Modern PR techniques include paying people to post fake reviews on Amazon to praise specified products.
Ohio has passed a constitutional amendment for bipartisan redistricting, which means an end to Republican gerrymandering unless they find an excuse to nullify it.
The whole US needs this.
Dog bites man, that's not news. Dog shoots man, that's news.
This particular way of being shot with your own gun is very rare, but being shot with your own gun is very common.
Discrimination Against Atheists and Agnostics Is an Overlooked Issue Worldwide.
I am an Atheist, and I campaign to promote Atheism. However, I do not discriminate against or deprecate religious believers. I practice an Atheist variant of "hate the sin, love the sinner", which I can describe more precisely as "disapprove of the belief, not the believer."
Today's US working class is no longer concentrated in factories; it mostly does service jobs. This makes it less visible and less able to organize for decent pay and predictable working hours.
Costa Rica, although it has much less money than the US, gives people better and longer lives. It chooses equality, not inequality, by focusing on democracy, sustainability, and inclusive growth.
Michael Cohen's business of selling access to the White House does not legally count as lobbying, so he did not have to report it.
The last independent newspaper in Cambodia has been shut down by the state.
The Labour party has expelled an activist for antisemitism. Some important party supporters will be judged soon.
I support these proceedings, as long as they firmly maintain the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. Bigotry towards Jews is as wrong as bigotry towards any other ethnic group, and any political party that has a streak of bigotry ought to root it out.
The Tories' "hostile environment" that blocks immigration at all costs is blocking visas for doctors, contributing to the shortage.
In 1933, some US plutocrats planned to overthrow the US government and asked the commander of the US Marine Corps to front for them. Rather than go along, he reported them to Congress.
Today's US plutocrats are even more powerful, and we can't assume they won't try it again.
We can't let that discourage us from trying to restore democracy. No matter what we do, we may be defeated; but surrender only guarantees defeat.
US weapons fuel crime in Mexico, because they are purchased by Mexican thug departments.
Naturally the bully wants to make this worse.
Toxic masculinity is responsible for a large fraction of mass shootings. Even worse, it's responsible for thousands of individual murders.
Several Republican senators voted for a bill to prevent the bully from firing investigator Mueller, in committee.
Russia Brings Syrians to The Hague to Make Underwhelming Case Chemical Attack Was Fake.
A fairly powerful earthquake in Korea, which did substantial damage, seems to have been caused by fracking.
EPIC, Coalition Urge Ethics Board to Prevent the Use of Facial Recognition on Body Cameras.
I propose a law that performing face recognition on an image requires a court order.
If you think of getting married in the US by a judge, check that the judge in question isn't a Republican deportation fanatic.
Cuomo is giving support to public employee unions to buy them off from supporting his progressive opponent.
Of course, progressives will do more for union members (and other working people) in the long run. The unions are making a mistake in choosing the short term.
AT&T faces a strike after cutting 16000 jobs.
Saboteur Pruitt has decreed an excuse for disregarding many scientific studies when making decisions about pollution policies.
The Democratic National Committee is suing Russia and Wikileaks to distract from the fact that it is not going against plutocrats.
The staff of Turkey's main non-subservient newspaper have been convicted of supporting terrorist organizations.
Like any tyrant, Erdoğan treats unfavorable reporting as a form of rebellion. Like the troll, if news is not biased in his favor, he calls it "fake", but he goes further and calls it "treason".
The troll will call it "treason" too if he gets enough power.
With Puerto Rico's power grid under the control of the nondemocratic imposed government, which is planning to privatize it, people are rapidly setting up local solar power.
Mulvaney, now saboteur of the CFPB, affirmed that as a congresscritter he was overtly corrupt: he met with those lobbyists that gave him campaign funds.
"Palestinians are being killed and maimed not because Israeli soldiers are disobeying orders, but because they are following them."
That's because their orders give them plenty of latitude to kill people who are not threatening anyone.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on your state representative to pass Social Media Privacy Act.
Mahathir Muhammad, the former authoritarian prime minister of Malaysia, has defeated the more blatantly authoritarian prime minister Razak.
This shows that the vote count was not rigged; that's good.
However, Najib Razak is trying to bribe recently elected members of Malaysia's parliament to vote for him instead of for Mahathir.
Two optical quasi-monopolies, one for lenses and one for frames, are about to merge.
We should not allow any market to be so concentrated.
Stop thinking that rising house prices are a good thing.
The UK has apologized for its "appalling treatment" of exiled Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj.
This was what he demanded in his lawsuit.
I hope the UK will compensate him for the torture that it enabled Gadhafi to inflict on him.
Teenager Who Killed Husband after He Raped Her Is Sentenced to Death in Sudan. She had been coerced into marrying him.
There are women in the US who have been sentenced to life in prison for similar acts.
I expect that Sudanese law defines "rape" to exclude rape by the husband. That's comparable to US laws that define "rape" to include voluntary sex with under N years of age (where N varies). Both laws falsify the meaning of "rape".
Palm Oil Is Wiping out Orangutans — Despite Multinationals’ Promises.
Israel has started a war with Iran, in the territory of Syria.
Israel says that this is retaliation for Iran's retaliation for Israel's previous interventions.
The US will donate arms and ammunition to Israel for this, thus involving itself semi-indirectly in war with Iran. It will be easy for the warlover to create an excuse for more direct combat, which I believe he will do, hoping that the major media will coo adoringly, "How presidential!" and that foolish Americans will rally to him out of a misguided idea of "patriotism".
A million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, fleeing from the shortages.
Ads appear to be much less effective when people are told they are targeted based on accumulated personal data.
The UK has dropped the policy of making the NHS inform on unauthorized immigrants.
It is not clearly stated whether they will be required to pay for treatment (which many can't afford).
Bernie Sanders Introduces Senate Bill Protecting Employees Fired for Union Organizing.
SCROTUS won't pass it, but this will help Americans elect officials that will.
Argentina's right-wing president is going to subject the country to the IMF again.
The IMF imposes "reforms" that amount to austerity. As a cure, it is worse than the disease. Argentina had the good fortune to be rescued from the IMF, last time, by Hugo Chavez. But there is no guarantee of another Chavez to do it this time.
California will require solar panels on all new housing, except tall apartment buildings.
There are various exceptions for cases where they would be ineffective, and the solar panels don't have to be physically on the building.
On tall apartment buildings, it would not be feasible for solar panels on the roof to provide enough electricity for all the residents, even on a sunny day. But that doesn't mean they would be wasted. They would be as efficient and useful there as anywhere else. So why not require them?
Senate Report Strongly Implies Russian Hacking Story Was a Public Service — but Whistleblower Reality Winner Remains in Jail.
It seems that many companies have paid Michael Cohen's company to get access to the corrupter.
Gina Haspel pledges she won't repeat CIA torture program if appointed.
I doubt that she has learned better moral standards, so she might do some different cruel thing.
Some questions that ought to be studied before deciding to make decisions about people using an algorithm.
In addition, the algorithm should be implemented in free software and the details of the algorithm should be published.
Google has developed an AI system that does voice conversations and successfully pretends to be human. However, fooling people in this way is mistreatment.
Its phone calls should state at the beginning, "This is a robot talking."
The Dishonest Case against the Iran Deal.
Biden shows he won't do anything that billionaires might complain about, which means, nothing that would really reduce inequality.
Facebook has made it so hard to turn off targeted ads and some of the surveillance that it's not much better than impossible.
I think it is incorrect to focus on the "monopoly" aspect. Facebook's size increases the harm it can do, but having a choice between ten such disservices would not make any of them acceptable.
There are some things that Facebook does that might be useful, but they need to be done separately so that some of them can be anonymous.
UK "gang lists" label black men as potential gang members, based on handwaving.
US citizens: Don't weaken protection for pollinators in the farm bill.
US citizens, tell Betsy DeVos: Protect students' civil rights.
Victory! Georgia Governor Vetoes Short-Sighted Computer Crime Bill.
Almost 1/3 of the killings by NYC thugs involve nonuniformed (plainclothes) thugs.
"Europe must make Trump pay for wrecking the Iran nuclear deal."
It might be hard to get the bully to back down this way.
This European plan seems more likely to be effective: protecting European companies that trade with Iran.
Israel Orders Human Rights Watch Representative to Leave.
"By ending the nuclear deal, [the warlover] has handed a gift to Iranian hardliners."
They are already reveling in this windfall.
The bully might regard that as a plus, since he could use their success to justify the war he wants. Not to mention, of course, that he helped them succeed.
Oakland Passes "Strongest" Surveillance Oversight Law in US.
These laws can be effective at limiting cities' participation in massive surveillance, but in order to stop companies and state governments from doing so, we need state laws.
US Senate Bill Would Liken Violence Against [thugs] to Hate Crimes.
The biggest offense against the police force badge is telling lies to paint someone as a criminal. Whether the target is a living person who could be imprisoned as a result, or a black man killed for no valid reason by thugs, we need to put a stop to it. For the badge they wear to be honorable, we must replace the thugs with police officers.
Humans have eradicated rats and mice from South Georgia island. This will protect the endemic wildlife there.
Rats and mice have their places in the world, but if they overrun everywhere, little else will survive.
Alas, the same is true for humans. Since we are more intelligent than rats, I hope we can work out a way to depart from a large fraction of the Earth's surface, and allow the other species to flourish too.
Making hydrogen from renewable energy is a way to store the energy for later use at peak times.
In addition to the long-established crimes of driving while black and walking while black, blacks in the US can be accused of renting a room while black.
The use of the term "people of color" in this article was misleading on a specific point, as well as in the usual general way. Not all nonwhite ethnic groups would face this sort of suspicion.
Russia and Iran are preventing film directors from travelling to the Cannes film festival, apparently for political reasons.
The UK's default "child safety" internet filter imposes some amusing decisions, such as blocking the Disney web site.
However, that's a secondary problem. More important is the injustice of imposing strict censorship on everyone in the UK who can't afford a private internet line — and the bigger injustice of imposing baseline censorship on everyone whatsoever.
Some technology events are moving from the US to Canada, and it is partly because the US is now a hostile place to hold an international conference.
Unfortunately, Canada is not necessarily much better. When the World Social Forum was held in Montreal, Canada blocked some speakers from attending by denying them visas.
To close the gratuitous budget deficit created by tax handouts to the rich, the cruelist wants to cut funds for children's health care.
To reduce the cost of children's medical care, the ethical first step is to provide reliable birth control and abortions gratis. With fewer children, their medical care will cost less and their education will cost less, without denying anything to any of them. Their parents will suffer (most of them) less stress, so they will grow up (most of them) as happier and more capable adults.
How Facebook's algorithm for what articles to show to each used are chosen to increase profits, but they systematically disfavor thoughtful criticism of anything, if posted by those who can't pay to get it seen.
I agree that Facebook should be regulated, but the purpose of the regulation should be to ensure that not very many people read news or commentary through that site. Or any other specific site.
(Satire) the new fitbit tracking collar.
What the Deployment of Green Berets to the Saudi-Yemen Border Tells Us About America’s Dirty War.
The only Turkish-language newspaper that criticizes Erdoğan nowadays is operating in the Turkish-speaking part of Cyprus.
The US should allow prisoners to vote. The states of Maine and Vermont already do.
The war-lover has pulled the US out of the nuclear deal with Iran. Belligerent politicians are celebrating; generals are worried.
The UK, France and Germany say they will continue the deal, and this might convince Iran to continue its side of the deal. However, US sanctions on British, French, and German companies that trade with Iran might make the deal collapse anyway.
Commercial "social" media systems are designed to use the same methods as slot machines, to create cravings that resemble addiction to cocaine.
The community-run social networks implemented with free software don't do this, and that is not a coincidence. It results from the fact that free software is controlled by the users.
Colombia's army murdered over 10,000 civilians just to pad its figures about the number of supposed guerrillas it had killed.
Slaves Working in UK Construction And Car Washes.
Enslaving people is a grave injustice, but would imprisoning car wash workers, or their customers, make sense as a way to protect people from being coerced to work in a car wash?
Canada Plans to Legalize Weed — But Will Those Charged with Crimes Get Amnesty?
Canadian environmentalists are building tiny houses to block the Unkinder Morgan pipeline.
Fossil fuel companies paid actors to attend city council meetings pretending to be "concerned citizens".
(Satire) A north Atlantic salmon confirmed Monday that, having always lived an adventurous life, she couldn’t believe she ended up moving back to her birthplace and having a bunch of kids.
1,000 thugs crushed May Day protests in Puerto Rico, injuring protesters.
The protests are the last remaining avenue for democratic action there, since a nondemocratic government has been imposed.
US Muslims, formerly placed on the "no-fly" list through religious discrimination, then offered the chance to get off the list in return for becoming informers, are suing so they can stop this from happening again.
We should be concerned as much about Israel's actual nuclear weapons as about Iran's possible future nuclear weapons.
Israel should permit Mordechai Vanunu to emigrate. It has no legitimate reason to stop him.
Hawai'i has banned sunscreens that contain chemicals that damage coral reefs.
Tourists that put on sunscreen then go in the water deliver these chemicals straight to where they will do the most harm.
Giuliani's testimony that the cheater used his own money to pay off Stormy Daniels seems to indicate that the cheater violated campaign finance law. He spent his own money on a campaign expense and did not report doing so.
Pipeline resisters are holding a protest in a giant drilling machine that is to be used to push the Unkinder Morgan pipeline through the Rocky Mountains.
The cheater lied 53 times in one day, but on the average he lies 6.5 times per day. The long-term danger is that we become inured to blatant official lying through our current helplessness to put a stop to it.
New Zealand's government commits to offering shelter to all the country's homeless people within 4 weeks.
The short time scale makes this a real commitment rather than an excuse to kick the can down the road.
Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada talks up a great campaign against inequality but it does not include substantial action.
Selling Lemonade to Save Your Mother's Life? That's American Healthcare for You.
That's plutocracy for you.
The European Union plans to impose biometric ID cards on all citizens.
This is a real reason for the UK to get out of the EU.
In a Crackdown in Argentina, Police Shot for the Head and Blinded Protesters (and bystanders) with Rubber Bullets.
(Aren't they actually rubber-coated steel bullets?)
Argentina's right-wing government is generally repressive.
Diante Yarber's daughters are suing the thugs that killed him, accusing them of shouting insults at him instead of giving him first aid.
The bully wants to force the Honduran temporary refugees back to Honduras where the threat of violence comes from the US-supported election-stealing coup-installed government.
If Trump Destroys the Nuclear Deal, Iran Will Fall to Its Hardliners.
The bully surely does not care about the well-being and freedom of Iranians any more than he cares about the well-being and freedom of Americans. He might even consider the change beneficial since he could point at an even nastier Iranian government.
The CIA funded brainwashing experiments in Canada on unsuspecting patients. Some patients were completely broken, left with hardly any memory.
The cheater has apparently convinced Ukraine to stop cooperating with the criminal investigation of Manafort by offering a bribe of antitank missiles. I expect that the noncooperation was a quid pro quo.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Equality Act to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexual identity.
US citizens: call on the district attorney to drop charges against Crystal Mason.
The fraction of CO2 in the air now is higher than it has ever been during the existence of the human race.
That means we are entering into climate conditions humans have never seen.
Two of the right-wing extremists that attacked Deandre Harris have been convicted for it.
A must-pass appropriations bill would move $200 million from renewable energy and energy efficiency into subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Sex education should include education about the dangers of being nude in photos or video chats.
I think the only real solution, for the long-term, is for adolescents to get used to nudity with each other. The special sting, and the tendency for others to criticize, comes from the taboo.
Many schools don't allow students to play in the playground if they arrive early for the day. And those who arrive early to lunch must be treated as prisoners.
Activists occupied an office of JP Morgan Chase to protest its investments in tar sands oil and thus the destruction of society.
There were protests in many other cities against that bank.
Most of the investors in that bank are destroying their own descendants through the bank's activities.
We can't trust Facebook to decide what news people see; it will predictably suppress anything but the mainstream media.
If the water available in the Colorado river keeps dwindling, as it is expected to, Arizona will crash.
Telescreens in Our Living Rooms? No, Portable Phones and Alexa.
The Afghan government attacked a religious ceremony and killed 36 people, 30 of them children. The high fraction of children was predictable because the ceremony focused on children.
Even if some Taliban leaders were at the ceremony, that doesn't excuse attacking the ceremony.
People today have largely lost the right to have private conversations, as their parents used to have.
Saboteur Sessions says he will prosecute every person who crosses the US border without authorization, and take away their children so as to imprison them separately.
The officials describe these actions via blackwhiting — let's not pay attention to their choice of terminology.
The EU's commitment to human rights is not strong enough to deal with the threat from Poland and Hungary.
When you look at the EU's proposed censorship system, you can see why.
FOIA Heroes At The FBI Protect Superman's Privacy; Refuse To Hand Over Secret Identity To Requester.
EU Commission Asks Public To Weigh In On Survey About Just How Much They Want The Internet To Be Censored.
The survey is slanted in several ways so as to generate responses in favor of censorship.
Calling publications "content" encourages people to disregard their individuality and treat them as a fungible commodity. That would tend to encourage censorship.
US citizens: tell Congress to stop the Republican giveaway to toxic pesticide companies.
Everyone: call for prosecuting the thugs that killed Diante Yarber.
Global heating will slow economic growth in the right-wing parts of the US.
These projections would apply to a few decades, but when some tipping point leads to accelerated heating, things would rapidly get worse.
The Indonesian Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in Indonesia for "threatening national unity."
That is a very broad criterion — all sorts of organizations could be banned on those grounds. Worse, the criterion is vague and stretchable — one can hardly tell what is forbidden.
The group got a court hearing about this, but the hearing considered only the question of whether the government followed the proper procedure, not whether the group really threatens national unity, or what the line is.
This is not meant to defend Hizb ut-Tahrir. Every Islamist group opposes basic human rights. Nonetheless, its members are entitled to human rights.
The US has a similar problem due to arbitrary designation of "terrorist groups". The government could designate your weekly bridge group as a "terrorist group", and if it prosecutes you for being a member, the prosecutor would not need to prove the group really has anything to do with terrorism.
China is not alone in censoring children's TV.
However, I suspect that China tries to make it impossible to find copies anywhere, whereas the other countries' censorship appears to be limited to broadcast TV.
It is regrettable that the author has fallen into the fad of saying that we "consume" videos when we watch them.
A judge forged signatures to get himself on the ballot. A citizen voted, not realizing she was no longer allowed to vote. Compare their sentences.
A British military academy gives a very broad military education, including exactly what to say to the press.
ICE, the US deportation thug force, has become the most brutal kind of national thug department.
As Jose Arreola was buying a small pack of candy, a thug who jumped hastily to the conclusion Jose was stealing it pulled a gun on him.
Even if he had been stealing the $1.19 candy, that would not justify shooting him.
Commemorating the Catonsville Nine, who fifty years ago raided a draft office and burned files that would have been used to conscript Americans to help crush Vietnam.
Another autopsy of Stephon Clark says one of the shots was not in the back.
If he was facing the thugs that shot him, that would not be enough to justify killing someone unarmed and not threatening.
Honduran protesters face four years in prison for "land invasion" (i.e., protesting).
If that seems harsh, don't forget that the same sort of thing happens in the US.
Aside from all the ethical reasons not to let Facebook use you, there is a practical reason small businesses might care about: advertising there is ineffective for them.
Senate Democrats will file on May 9 to release the bill to preserve network neutrality. To pass the senate they need one more vote.
Erdoğan says he will attack Rojava further. It will be hard for Rojava to fend off aggression by Turkey.
Because Rojava is secularist and endorses human rights, the Islamists hate it and the dictators consider it a threat. In addition, Turkey hates it because it is mostly made up of Kurds. The West ought to protect Rojava, but I think it is too corrupt and morally bankrupt to do that.
Thai protesters made the government cancel a plan to cut down a forest for luxury homes.
No Death And an Enhanced Life: Is The Future Transhuman?
I see nothing unethical with the option of replacing parts of your body with more capable appendages. But that assumes a world where you have the option of not replacing them.
In a plutocratist world, you may not have that option. What if your choices are to live on the street or get turned into a specialized mining machine?
In a world of advanced technology, I don't think the burden of caring for revived corpsicles would be difficult to handle. It might provide useful work for millions of people, for a while, but eventually the technology will make that work unnecessary. But will there be a place for those corpsicles to live? We need to decrease the world's human population, not increase it.
If we can build a space elevator, space habitats could provide space for more than mere billions. But we can't take for granted that a space elevator is possible.
US citizens, tell Congress: Postal Banking, Not Payday Lending.
US citizens: call on the US to stop promoting international trophy hunting of endangered species.
Everyone: defend comedian Michelle Wolf from unfair criticism from the White House Correspondent's Association.
People have fired guns by mistake 30 times (at least) in the US since 2014.
The troll's men hired an Israeli private detective agency to try to find material to discredit the diplomats that negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran.
The agency was not looking for wrongdoing in those negotiations; apparently there was none of that. It was not looking for corruption; apparently there was none of that either.
Rather, it was looking for something irrelevant that would have happened long after the negotiations. Something that would not have had any implications about the deal itself. But it would have given the troll some eggs to throw at them, perhaps to create a negative attitude towards them and thus (irrationally) towards the deal itself.
Thousands protested in Paris against Macron's right-wing "flexibility" reforms.
Today's principal political problem is the dominion of business over the state. When countries compete to offer a "friendly climate for business", the overall effect is harmful — it increases that dominion. (When they cooperate to offer a "friendly climate for international trade", it has the same harmful effect.) So it is wrong to do these things.
I am sure there are some points in French labor law which are rigid and inefficient. Perhaps it would be an improvement to change them — but why now? The urgent need is to change the laws and the system that give business too much power. Politicians that choose "friendly climate for business" rather than "break the dominion of business" are choosing plutocracy rather than democracy.
The NSA tripled its collection of Americans' phone call and message records in 2017.
It collects all the records about everyone who has communicated at least once with one of the people on its target list. We don't know how many people that amounts to, but my rough estimate is 200,000 to 500,000 people.
The proposed implementation of the DARK Act, meant to prevent effective labeling of genetically modified foods, is to use bright, pretty images and not say "GMO".
The American Chemical Society is perverting the US legal system permanently in the attempt to make the science-sharing site Sci-Hub inaccessible.
The American Chemical Society is an enemy of science. Can we find a way to make the public condemn it as it deserves to be condemned?
Malaysia's "fake news" is being used against an opposition candidate, who was the previous prime minister.
He didn't respect democracy all that well when he was in office, but his successor seems to be flagrantly worse.
The governor of Kentucky is taking over a school district; teachers say it is retaliation against them by taking the students hostage.
It is no surprise that a school district whose students come from poor families in bigotry-target groups is doing badly. It probably has very little money.
There is almost nowhere in Miami-Dade County that people on the sex offenders list are allowed to live. Many live in a tent camp, but now it is being shut down.
The article explains that the laws limiting where registered sex offenders can live do no positive good for anyone. What's more, many people on the list never threatened strangers in any way. Some did no wrong sexually to anyone — including those who had love affairs with teenagers, those who did sexting, and some who did nothing at all but pleaded guilty in a plea bargain.
The ability to predict faces from DNA potentiates face-recognition databases to make a massive attack on everyone's privacy.
Everyone: call on Burma to release the journalists facing charges for their publications.
US citizens: call on the Senate not to confirm the NRA's lawyer as a US judge.
The White House condemned China's pressure to pretend that Taiwan is part of China.
I agree, in principle, and it may be a good thing for resisting Chinese expansionism to refuse to legitimize it any longer. However, it's hard for a rebuke to this abuse of language to gain much respect when it comes from someone who bullshits every day.
Both China and the US are guilty of worse abuse of language.
"If 'the economy' can recover without real people recovering, then whose economy is it really?"
Fracking Chemicals May Harm Developing Immune System.
We need international agreements to govern space mining: who can mine where, and what methods are safe to use.
Researchers are working on measuring human emotions from voice and facial expressions.
If this is successful, we humans could become sitting ducks for businesses that use this technology against us.
Moreover, the holographic brain activator being developed could be used to edit people's sensations and memories, perhaps even their habits of action and thinking.
Imagine what China or Gilead would do with such a device.
Watch out for "soft" terms such as "open" and "sharing" when they are applied to redistribution of your personal data.
The Big Lie ISPs Are Spreading in State Legislatures is That They Don’t Make Enough Money.
Oklahoma and Kansas now permit religious-based discrimination against couples that want to adopt a child. Children that need adoption will suffer for the sake of someone else's religion.
Russia thugs arrested hundreds of people participating in "He is not our tsar" protests in various cities, including opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
1,600 protesters were arrested.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed's brain scan shows trauma damage that seems to be due to CIA torture.
Arizona teachers ended their strike after winning a 20% raise and more funds for schools. I get the impression, however, that the additional funds come from other worthwhile programs, rather than from taxation. The teachers originally demanded that the funds not be taken away from other worthwhile programs. Maybe they found that that was more than they could win.
(Satire) fired from an Amazon warehouse for what?
Too much logging in forests near Melbourne, Australia, has put the forests in danger of total collapse and replacement with a different ecosystem. That would mean less water available for Melbourne.
Trauma, transmitting from one generation to another, causes pain to most everyone.
If your sibling or parent or child posted per DNA sequence on line, person compromised your family for generations.
Levi Vonk walked across Mexico with Central American migrants, unarmed and facing all sorts of hardships and threats to their lives and health, from hunger to maiming by Mexican thugs.
If a US border thug maims you, or kills your relative, the border patrol might have to pay you damages, but you'd face substantial obstacles to win them.
With electricity and water supplies still not restored in Puerto Rico, it serves as an example to show us how much Republicans care about US citizens that are not rich.
Unlike the French student protesters of 1968, the ones that Macron is attacking today live in despair.
Macron, like Trudeau, is a smooth front for the plutocratist politics that deprives all but the rich of any hope. But the rich are not the only ones at fault. Everyone needs to have fewer children.
The Christian community of Jerusalem complains of harassment and attacks from Israeli fanatics set on ethnic cleansing.
"Looks like Netanyahu, Bolton, Pompeo, Haley and Trump can't wait to get the war [with Iran] started."
The Democratic Party establishment is fighting the progressive politics of the party's base. That might defeat Republicans in November, but at the cost of not making much difference.
Confronting Nuclear Challenges in the Era of Trump.
Tories have filled the UK government with institutional racism.
The US continues to prop up the Afghan government, more or less, but sees no way to win the war. The most it can do is prevent a Taliban victory.
I don't think that preventing a Taliban victory justifies unending war as a price.
2017 Was Deadliest Year on Record for Colombian Human Rights Defenders.
Dining While Black: Toronto Restaurant Fined after Charging Customers up Front.
Israel attacks Iranian forces in Syria, perhaps trying to provoke a bigger war.
Workers for McDonald's in the UK are on strike, demanding fixed and predictable schedules.
Most US journalists show little courage in their work. They even apologize when a comedian they invited mocks a government official.
US citizens: call certain key senators to oppose the Corker-Kaine unlimited authorization for war.
US citizens: call on Congress to vote to end US support for war in Yemen.
Members of Congress will personally receive at least $14 million in tax cuts from the Republican tax attacks.
Muntazer al-Zaidi, who famously threw a shoe at Dubya, is running for the Iraqi parliament.
China is reportedly deploying cruise missiles on its artificial islands in the South China Sea.
China's tactic to take control of that sea region has been quite clear: slowly, without hiding, build up facilities which eventually would become fortresses. The only sensible way to stop this would have been to do the same thing, but the other neighboring countries have not done so.
For the world, the most important thing about the South China Sea is to prevent its fossil fuel deposits from being extracted.
Israel arrested two Palestinian nonviolent protest organizers in the middle of the night.
Israel's "rules of engagement" amount to illegal orders for a massacre of civilians. Israel must cancel them.
(Satire) Netanyahu provides "stunning new evidence" that Iranians planned the 539 B.C. sacking of Babylon.
As I suspected, the pension cuts proposed by Ortega in Nicaragua are partly demanded by the IMF and US-supported organizations.
Ralph Nader calls on the Department of Justice to start keeping statistics about corporate crime.
The cheater has been caught in a direct lie about paying Stormy Daniels.
The question is, will it be harder for him to get away with this lie than with the dozens (or is it hundreds) of other lies he tells.
Press Censorship Is a Worldwide Problem — So Banned Articles Are Being Turned into Pop Songs.
Tech Is Turning Love into a Rightwing Game.
UK Voters Are Turned Away from Polling Stations During ID Trial. It is not clear what fraction this happened to, but it may be as much as a few percent.
From the right-wing point of view, that means the scheme was a success.
The US released a prisoner from Guantanamo prison, who had pled guilty of being a member of al Qa'ida.
This is a good thing. I don't know what he personally did for al Qa'ida, but unless it was egregious, 16 years in prison is surely enough of a punishment for it.
Corn seedlings appear to communicate chemical signals about the presence of other kinds of plants nearby.
Don't assume that people that distrust everyone are better at detecting lies than people that generally trust others. One study found the opposite.
(Satire) The US stands ready to escalate military contractor profits as much as it takes.
Eight Florida youths are suing the state government for willfully disregarding the danger that global heating poses to life in Florida.
Comey has become the most visible enemy of Americans' worst enemy. That doesn't mean he has been our friend all this time. Don't forget his campaign for more surveillance and against our right to privacy.
In the long term, unchecked surveillance will be almost as harmful as the bully.
Citizens of Manchester hope to press Abu Dhabi to release political prisoner Ahmed Mansoor by naming a street after him.
The ruling family of Abu Dhabi has effectively purchased the support of the city's government by making a big investment there. It is dangerous for any government to treat the support of a specific company as indispensable; this is one of the reasons why we need to make large companies split into many smaller ones.
NAFTA blocks Canada from reducing fossil fuel extraction and export to the US.
US Jews are organizing nonviolent but inconvenient protests demanding an end to the slaughter of protesters in Gaza. They are blocking the doors of Israeli consulates, Jewish community organizations, and politicians' offices, and getting arrested, for the cause.
Some congresscritters have supported B'Tselem's call for Israeli soldiers to disobey illegal orders, specifically orders to shoot civilians that are not fighting.
Israel is making new laws to facilitate taking Palestinians' land.
A joint Arab-Jewish peace movement aims to fill the void of the almost disappeared Israeli left.
Colorado Communities File Lawsuit Against Oil Giants for Climate Change Costs.
It may be possible to prove this claim, given scientific conclusions about how the probability of various extreme weather events were increased by global heating.
California Democrats that serve the ISPs are trying to cut a big loophole in California's network neutrality law.
China uses crony capitalism to buy support from the elites of various countries, now including Europe.
Reportedly the bully, encouraged by Bolton, is in discussions about an Arab military force funded by Salafi Arabia to replace US troops in Syria.
Such an Arab force is likely to treat the Kurds as enemies, and Islamists as friends.
Forensic Science Is Nowhere Near as Robust And Reliable as Many People Think. Even fairly reliable techniques, such as checking people's hands for gunpowder residues, can be mistaken.
South Korea says North Korea wants total denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and is not attaching unacceptable preconditions.
If this is true — and I don't think it is likely to be false — we could see rapid progress towards peace and perhaps nuclear disarmament in Korea as well.
The man who killed 10 people in Toronto by driving into them was a misogynist terrorist.
I sympathize with people who describe themselves as involuntarily celibate, since I remember what that despair feels like. But they took a wrong turn when they started hating women for not being attracted to them.
No one has an obligation to feel love or attraction for someone else. People cannot decide whether to feel those feelings — it's not under conscious control. To reproach someone for not desiring you is as futile, as foolish, and as unjust, as to reproach water for being wet.
The one useful response to being generally rejected is to learn more social skills and broaden your interests. It would give you a better chance of finding a lover. By contrast, playing nonfree video games is a dead end — and it attacks your freedom, too.
600 members of the US National Academy of Sciences rebuked the troll's "denigration of scientific expertise".
Many atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans will become uninhabitable in just a few decades, as sea water will contaminate their fresh water.
People might be able to collect enough rain for their own direct use, but if they can't grow any food, they can't remain.
The fist million people whose homes are inundated first may find have places to go. But when it gets to tens of millions, no place will let them in.
Treating the entire population of a region with antimalarial drugs could wipe out malaria there.
The US tortured Ali al-Marri for years until he confessed to a crime.
Maybe he was guilty. I am not convinced by his denials. But if he was guilty, not even a criminal deserves that treatment.
An Israeli soldier shot and killed a protesting Palestinian teenager, for no good reason. The soldier has been sentenced to 9 months in prison.
A number of aging scientists dare to say that, on its current track, civilization is doomed due to global heating.
The EU has banned the use of palm oil for biofuels, and farmers in Malaysia that think only of their own income are angry.
The EU's new policy does not go far enough. Growing crops for biofuel, if they require irrigation, fertilizer, pesticide or land suitable at the time for other agriculture, is a self-defeating practice and ought to banned entirely.
Racism manifests itself in schools, as black students are judged more harshly and punished more often.
Religious fanatics in Brazil are trying to ban abortion absolutely, with a constitutional amendment like the one Ireland is about to vote on eliminating.
Many Brazilian women are already dying from underground abortions. I suggest turning their funerals into rallies for abortion rights. If religious people direct hostility at you, don't let that shut you up.
When business says "flexibility", think "exploitation."
Zero-hours piecework contracts are the extreme form, but lesser forms of "flexibility" are exploitation too.
Fossil fuels cost includes not only the future damage of global heating, but also the cost of present-day toxic pollution: millions of deaths each year, and even more people sick or handicapped.
Arizona teachers demand a raise, but won't accept it at the expense of other programs to help the non-rich. They demand more tax on businesses instead.
Some Democratic senators are investigating the "infiltration" of agents of the Koch brothers in US environmental policy.
"Centrist" (plutocratist) Democrats systematically try to pressure progressive candidates to drop out from primaries and let other plutocratist Democrats win. Levi Tillemann, progressive candidate, recorded a phone call whose aim was to convince him to drop out.
A plutocratist Democrat is the next worst thing to a Republican, so let's work to keep progressives in the race, and to help them win.
Several of these plutocratist Democrats seem to be former prosecutors or veterans. Those are not necessarily bad things, but I think they are chosen to appeal to voters who are not progressive, so they make me worry.
The staff of Turkey's main non-subservient newspaper have been convicted of supporting terrorist organizations.
Like any tyrant, Erdoğan treats unfavorable reporting as a form of rebellion. Like the troll, if news is not biased in his favor, he calls it "fake", but he goes further and calls it "treason".
The troll will call it "treason" too if he gets enough power.
California is considering a law to require all thug departments to publish their policies and standards of conduct.
The troll's malign influence has driven the US down in the rankings for freedom of the press.
Discrimination against women authors is operates at several levels, and each has now been measured.
Fighting has resumed between the Burmese army and the rebellious Kachin people. The UN says that Burmese bombardment is hitting civilians.
Europeans don't believe Netanyahu's claims that Iran is violating the nuclear deal.
I don't trust Iran very much, but I don't trust Netanyahu one tiny bit.
The Justice Teams Network has been set up to provide quick assistance to Americans campaigning for justice after their relatives have been killed by thugs.
2000 AI researchers have committed to refuse to do anything with the new paywalled journal, "Nature Machine Intelligence".
I support their stand, but I think they undermine the central point by using the term "open access". The word "open" is weak, and "access" focuses on a secondary sub-issue.
Carl Icahn was granted a "financial hardship" waiver from complying with pollution rules. His income last year was a mere $234 million.
US citizens: Call for a ban on "assault weapons".
They are not real assault weapons, but they fire bullets with the same high velocity that real assault weapons fire them, and that makes them far more deadly than an ordinary pistol.
US citizens: call on the EPA to ban bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides.
Comedian Michelle Wolf joked to attack Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her official political acts, and is being criticized based on misrepresenting that as a personal attack on Sanders's appearance.
I haven't signed this petition because I have not seen Wolf's presentation, and I am not in a position to watch it. The example presented in the article is quite clearly a distortion, unfair to Ms Wolf, but without having seen the whole presentation, I don't want to assert that the criticism is nothing but distortion (although that could well be the case).
Can someone send me a transcript? From reading this, I could resolve my doubts and then maybe sign this.
Later:
I saw the text of those jokes, and it's focused on
Sanders' politics. It refers to appearance but the criticism is not
aimed at her appearance.
Millions of Americans (including millions of children) are on the edge of being kicked out into the street. Saboteur Carson's plan to cut housing subsidies would push many of them over the edge.
The bully shows his contempt for human life by disregarding the law requiring a report about civilian casualties from drone attacks.
A report from the US government about this would not deserve trust anyway, but this demonstrated contempt for all civilians that might be killed will smooth the path to killing more of them.
Should we fear that a job guarantee will be a giant boondoggle? Here's why it is not a real issue.
A boondoggle is government spending that doesn't produce results that make the people better off. The US government puts billions of dollars into boondoggles — military spending, private prisons, etc. It makes them bigger every year.
If we transfer a lot of those funds to a job guarantee program, the boondoggle could well be smaller, if at least those jobs are designed to do useful jobs.
The "new Democrats" that yielded the Democratic Party to plutocracy in 1992 are still trying to hold on to control of the party.
1992 was the last time I voted for a Democrat for president. These "new Democrats" are not as bad as Republicans, but they are pushing in the same bad direction — just not pushing quite as hard.
Australia plans massive surveillance using facial recognition.
China's example shows that this will repress democracy. The supposed targets may be the terrorists, but since they are so rare, the important targets will be dissidents and whistleblowers. Rather than limiting use of the system's data, Australia must reject it totally.
It is unlikely that different human populations have genetic differences affecting intelligence, so let's focus on eliminating the environmental factors (lead, life stress, bad schools) that knock people's intelligence down.
A nonviolent movement among the Pashtun condemns Pakistan's army for repressing Pashtuns and for supporting terrorists that attack India and Afghanistan.
The military are disappearing supporters of the movement.
Moist towelettes include plastic, and large quantities of them are discarded. Guess what comes next?
Comparing what Israel says about killing Palestinian protesters with what witnesses have observed.
Israel says its "rules of engagement" are not as blanketly permissive as critics claim, and asks us to take its word for that since it won't say what the rules are. That is totally bogus, since it is easy for requirements to sound strict but actually be totally weak. They might have gotten advice from a lawyer who writes "privacy policies" for commercial web sites.
Two leaders of the Center for Constitutional Rights were supposed to visit Israel and Palestine, but Israel refused to let them in.
It is common for Israel to bar foreigners who have criticized the occupation, as well as official investigators.
It's Right to Condemn Mahmoud Abbas for His Antisemitic Remarks (even while calling for an end to the occupation of Palestine).
Making medical clinics report undesirables betrays medicine.
The Mystical Underpinnings of Facebook's Anti-Fake-News Algorithms.
Florida's coastal mangroves will be flooded out of existence in 30 years.
We might help the Everglades survive till the end of this century, but sea level rise will continue. Eventually all of Florida except the northern edge will be underwater.
US citizens: call on Congress and Mulvaney not to hamstring the CFPB.
US citizens: call on the deportation thugs to release journalist Manuel Duran.
Iowa has passed a bill to ban abortions after roughly six weeks. That's almost equivalent to a total ban.
The bill intentionally violates the Roe v Wade decision, hoping that the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court will use the opportunity to undo Roe v Wade.
US teachers are pushing to unionize in charter schools.
Digital technology has given the US an excuse to eliminate the privileged status of personal diaries when people's homes are searched.
EDRI: The “copyright troika” launches another censorship machine attack.
A city in Pakistan reached the temperature of 50C in April. Some people are fleeing, fearing even higher temperatures in summer.
50C is fatal for some vulnerable people, but 55 would kill a lot more. 51C, with 37% humidity, would be fatal for all unprotected human beings.
"[The cheater's] doctor is a warning to all the footsoldiers and loyal colluders: it'll come back to bite you."
Thousands of workers in China are having their brain waves surveilled.
For the first time in 20 years, since the Micky Mouse Copyright act, some works are entering the public domain in the US.
Just because copyright is not infinitely unjust, that doesn't make today's copyright law acceptable. Copyright should not last more than 10 years.
Bolton is actively trying to sabotage the prospect of a peace treaty and denuclearization deal with North Korea.
What he misses is that if North Korea agrees to such a deal, Kim will no longer have any motive to start a war, nuclear or not.
Some Republican congresscritters want to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein.
No matter how powerful the US army is on paper, and what it is prepared to spend, it can't enable a fundamentally corrupt government to defeat a guerrilla with popular support.
Netanyahu Makes a Case for the JCPOA (but pretends that it is the opposite).
It's also meant to distract us from shooting thousands of protesters in Gaza.
Raising university fees in the UK converted universities effectively into businesses. The values of academia have been discarded. They pay their executives high salaries, students come because that is the only way to get a good job, and nowadays they cheat on exams a lot more than before.
People who could be honest when it's just a matter of intellectuality become desperate when a low mark can ruin their lives.
UK universities have been conscripted as deportation agencies and censors. One professor says that the next time he is asked to show his passport to prove he is acceptable for doing some academic task, he will decline to do it.
Many cities give the US deportation thugs direct access to their own data bases, even in cities which are not supposed to cooperate with deportations.
China collects deleted WeChat messages.
You can't trust any sort of digital communication that the Chinese government tolerates. The question is, can we stop the US government from becoming equally unjust.
We need laws to forbid making communication systems that snoop on all their users. They should be designed so that they don't enable snooping on a user in the absence of a specific court order to authorize it.
Everyone: Tell Brazil's president and attorney general to allow FUNAI to do its job of protecting indigenous peoples.
It has been verified that you can sign this using Lynx Version 2.8.9dev.16 without running the nonfree JS code.
Turkish Opposition Parties Unite against Erdoğan in Elections.
US and Israel Accuse Palestinian President of Antisemitism.
It sounds like real antisemitism. But that isn't a justification for the oppression of the occupation and siege of Palestine.
The purported explanation he gave for European antisemitism would not have made sense in the absence of preexisting antisemitism. When a small fraction of Jews were bankers, and only a fraction of bankers were Jews, what sense was there in directing at Jews the hatred inspired by the actions of bankers? It would make more sense to hate bankers.
The UK is just as hostile to foreign invited speakers as the US.
It's worse than just rejecting applications. The process of applying is a series of slaps in the face. When my Colombian friend Tania wanted to visit Italy, they wouldn't even give her an appointment until after she had missed her flight.
The cheater dictated the letter "from his doctor" that said he would be the "healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency".
I know what it is like to feel violated — for instance, when I am compelled to identify myself and get put in a data base — but I would not say I felt "raped". I don't know what it feels like to be raped, and I hope I never find out, but I am sure it is an exaggeration to use it for lesser kinds of violation.
Enslavers take advantage of slaves' fear of deportation.
Research finds that MDMA (aka ecstasy) helps treatment of PTSD.
America's huge success in cutting smog at risk of being eroded — by Republican counteraction.
Toxic air pollution is increasing world-wide, except in some wealthy areas.
The Corker-Kaine extension of war authorization also extends the president's power to put people in prison permanently without trial.
This power is tyranny and it should be eliminated, not extended.
One of the schemes used by desperate UK bureaucrats to reduce the number of foreigners was being sloppy in accusing foreign students of cheating on the English test required to get a visa.
There were real cheaters, but the bureaucrats magnified this by being sloppy, hasty and harsh about making the accused students leave. Those who were falsely accused had recourse only in theory.
Victims of neo-Nazi defamation and harassment campaigns are suing the owner of a hate web site.
Raqqa is full of booby traps left by PISSI, making it dangerous to live there. There have been thousands of casualties.
Some of the booby-traps explode days after they were triggered, or only the 10th time they are triggered. So people move back into their homes, thinking them checked, and get killed later.
The cost of demining Raqqa may be such that it would be cheaper to build a new city elsewhere than to demine it.
Netanyahu's bogus announcement provided no evidence for alleged cheating by Iran, but it may still give the warmonger a political excuse to cancel the Iran antinuclear deal. For his purposes, the truth doesn't matter, only manipulation of public opinion. The announcement was trumpeted; the subsequent news that it was bogus will not have reached as many people, and his supporters will consciously disregard it.
The UK will require many of its remaining colonies to reveal the owners of companies.
It is an advance, but only a step in putting an end to tax-dodging by the rich. Other tax havens remain. What is needed is to change tax laws in the US and other places where the money is gained, so that payments can't be deducted as business expenses if they go to a dodgy company in a tax haven.
The UK political elite, like the UK business elite, is made up of short-term thinkers that look at each job (as CEO or minister) as a stepping-stone to another.
Everyone: Demand that US deportation thugs release journalist Manuel Duran.
Discrimination against women authors operates at several levels, and each has now been measured.
Fighting has resumed between the Burmese army and the rebellious Kachin people. The UN says that Burmese bombardment is hitting civilians.
Europeans don't believe Netanyahu's claims that Iran is violating the nuclear deal.
I don't trust Iran very much, but I don't trust Netanyahu one tiny bit.
The Justice Teams Network has been set up to provide quick assistance to Americans campaigning for justice after their relatives have been killed by thugs.
2000 AI researchers have committed to refuse to do anything with the new paywalled journal, "Nature Machine Intelligence".
I support their stand, but I think they undermine the central point by using the term "open access". The word "open" is weak, and "access" focuses on a secondary sub-issue.
Carl Icahn was granted a "financial hardship" waiver from complying with pollution rules. His income last year was a mere $234 million.
Vice President Wallace, and writer Sinclair Lewis, described what American fascists would do to take control of the state. Now they are doing it, proceeding down that path.
The US Department of Justice has deleted the areas of press freedom and racial gerrymandering from its priorities.
That is natural, since Republicans don't want any interference with their plans to arrest journalists and disenfranchise bigotry-target groups.
The planned merger of T-Mobile and Sprint would eliminate up to 20,000 jobs.
Allowing large companies to merge leads step by step towards monopoly. The plutocrats love to own monopolies, so their servants label a market as "competitive" if it has more than one seller.
One of the the thugs that killed Diante Yarber was fired from another thug department for a racist attack.
Australian scientist David Goodall, who has reached the age of 104, says that maladies are making his life not worth continuing. He is going to Switzerland where he will be allowed aid in suicide.
He can't do this in Australia because his maladies are not fatal. They merely make his life unbearable.
Philadelphia adopted a tax on sugar-loaded drinks, which has been very effective in reducing consumption of them. So the companies that sell these have gone to the state government to prohibit cities from doing this. Other states have already done it.
Republicans are reliable boosters of products that are dangerous to people.
The Israeli defenders of Palestinian human rights and peace face state repression and death threats, as Israel becomes ever less free, but they don't give up.
An anti-Trump Republican seeks to run for Al Franken's old senate seat.
Being against the bully is only the first requisite for being someone we should want in the senate. It is not enough. I hope a progressive candidate beats him in the primary.
Professor Scott Warren faces 20 years in prison for providing unauthorized immigrants with supplies and a place to sleep. The border thugs used to respect this humanitarian aid, but now they are trying to snuff it out.
The border thugs dehumanize unauthorized immigrants. Some dream of torturing them, and they generally drool over the idea of hitting them on the head with a flashlight. In other words, they have a culture that trains them to be unfit for any such job.
They regard augmenting the danger of death for people crossing the border as a legitimate means of deterring them from trying, and they equate any effort to reduce the danger as obstruction of their deadly plans.
I suspect they wish they were permitted to simply shoot apparent migrants.
US citizens: support the bill to allow any American to buy Medicare coverage.
Electronic Monitors: How Companies Dream of Locking Us in Our Homes.
The bully has ordered all US agencies to make all kinds of assistance to poor people harder to get.
The UK minister for deportation has resigned after being caught in direct lies about how hard the staff were pressing to procure deportations.
This alone will not end the "hostile environment" that she presided over. That requires changing the laws and policies which set it up.
The bully wants to send PISSI soldiers (or those accused of being such) to Guantanamo, but if this occurs, they could legally challenge whether Congress ever authorized US participation in fighting PISSI.
Indefinite imprisonment, which is what the US does in the Guantanamo prison, is a blot on the honor of the United States. Americans, if you love our country as I do, join me in insisting that this end.
Gambling companies use AI-driven manipulative techniques, based on each gambler's past history, to keep them hooked.
This demonstrates that consent must not be considered sufficient justification to record personal data.
Someone who made an inaccurate criticism of Malaysian thugs has been sentenced to a month in prison.
He had exaggerated the statement out of anger, and apologized for the error. It seems he did not intentionally lie.
False statements are unfortunate, but criminalizing them is much worse.
The FDA has found glyphosate in almost all the foods it has tested, but has not published anything about this.
The patented gene that makes some crops resistant to glyphosate might not directly harm people, but it brings glyphosate.
Michael Segalov: "A free press? I’m a UK journalist, but the police labelled me an extremist."
"Witness statements from the officers cite my time as a student campaigner as a reason to bar me: a time when I was elected as a student union officer and was voted on to the National Union of Students’ national executive council...."
"The other reason cited for labelling me as an “extreme leftwing” activist is my journalism."
I wonder why the Labour Party couldn't or didn't decide to admit Segalov to their event, regardless of the thugs. Does anyone know why?
US border guards have invented creative but absurd excuses to stop the refugees in the caravan from Central America from even applying for asylum.
India is planning to privatize the operations of its greatest tourist attractions, including the Taj Majal.
There isn't much competition in those markets, so the privatization will create a localized private monopoly.
If 10 million jobs are lost to automation in the UK, it would be a national disaster. The UK has around 66 million inhabitants, and I'd expect roughly 30 to 40 million people employed.
Having a phone on the table during dinner or other interactions with people tends to make people more unhappy.
The UK railroad network is cutting down thousands of healthy trees lest their leaves or branches fall on the train track some day.
This sounds like our fears about a hypothetical AI that subordinates everything to a narrow goal. Will Network Rail try to convert the entire substance of the Earth into crossties?
A US appeals court approved Texas's voter ID law. Voting-rights advocates will file further appeals.
The US deportation thugs are so incompetent that they often mistakenly imprison US citizens for deportation. One US citizen was imprisoned this way for over three years before a court looked at the question.
The bully is the culmination of a plutocratist plan, started in the 1970s, to take control of the US government and redirect it towards serving the rich.
There are calls for an arms embargo on Israel for its mass shooting of Palestinian protesters.
I don't think it would have much effect on shooting protesters, since Israel makes those arms.
The OSHA is almost powerless to protect workers from dangerous chemicals, so mostly the EPA has done the job. Now companies believe that Saboteur Pruitt offers a chance to convince the EPA to "defer to" the powerless OSHA, so that no agency will try to remove dangerous chemicals from the workplace.
People of Denver are calling on the EPA to limit the emissions of cyanide gas from a fossil-fuel facility.
A massive natural gas extraction system in Papua New Guinea was supposed to double the country's GDP, but it has provided little if any benefit to that country. This may have something to do with the legal concessions that the government had to make in order to get the project started.
We are learning that businesses don't ever justify such concessions, not even in their narrow economic terms presented.
The two blacks arrested for "loitering" in a Starbucks illustrate the way many companies and institutions give inferior treatment to blacks.
The word "catastrophe" is an exaggeration when applied to spending 8 hours in jail. Even for a person's death, the word is too strong. That incident was a racist injustice; we don't need to exaggerate those words in order to show our condemnation.
A Bomb Silenced Daphne Caruana Galizia. But Her Investigation Lives On.
Her widower says the government of Malta is protecting the person who arranged the murder.
A recently discovered coral reef in Brazil and probably has species unknown to science, but they are likely to be destroyed by already-planned oil drilling.
To Lead on Climate, Countries Must Commit to Zero Emissions (in the future).
The nuclear arms limitation treaties between the US and Russia are about to expire. That would clear the path for an unlimited nuclear arms race.
The US army is holding a US citizen prisoner in Iraq, and the bully's regime wants to deliver the person to Salafi Arabia, thus preventing the person from returning to the US.
The bully's regime didn't let per see a lawyer until a court order it.
Person is suspected of fighting for PISSI. That is a grave crime, but person deserves a fair trial, not being handed off to an arbitrary monarchy that hardly recognizes the idea of human rights.
Bernie Sanders is leading the US Senate to consider the human rights of Palestinians and criticize Israel's occupation policies.
High-Speed Pig Slaughter Will Be Disastrous for Everyone Involved.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is asking journalists to report hassles with entering the US, including searches of their digital devices and (for those not US citizens) hassles in getting a visa.
Fracking company Extraction Oil and Gas is suing protesters and a journalist.
Several states plan to make it a crime to plan a protest at a fossil fuel pipeline site.
Japan has published the names of the soldiers of Unit 731 which experimented with chemical weapons using Chinese and Koreans as guinea pigs.
"I'm a millionaire who creates zero jobs. Why do I pay less tax than you?"
One of Facebook's first useds compares it to herpes, and says she was a fool to have trusted Zuckerberg.
Philippine President Do-dirty is deporting foreigners for criticizing him, even for being near others that are criticize him.
What does deporting a (real or suspected) critic have in common with murdering a (real or suspected) drug dealer? Both attack the idea that people have legal rights.
Australia is turning to the hype of fracking to pump lots of natural gas overshoot its greenhouse gas targets by a factor of three.
The digital tech industry considered as a pile of hustlers climbing over each other to become a billionaire by standing on the rest. All while looking for ways to atomize people's lives and turn their jobs into piecework.
Canada's ruling Liberal Party is considering legalizing possession and use of all drugs.
The US uses "Liberal" to mean what Europe calls "social-democratic", but the Canadian Liberal party is nothing like that. Nowadays it mainly seems to mean "let them drill and mine anything."
A Russian journalist that investigated mercenaries fell off his balcony and died. The state wants to say that he fell accidentally.
Saboteur Pruitt has announced a cunning rule that studies of people's private medical data are off limits for EPA decisions.
US border thugs are denying Honduran refugees the opportunity to apply for political asylum, which is supposed to be their right.
Recording how members of Congress have voted on various bills to restore democracy.
The prosecution of Cliven Bundy collapsed because of gross misconduct by the prosecutors, including concealing information useful for the defense.
I don't sympathize at all with Bundy's destructive "protest", but nobody should be convicted of anything in this cavalier fashion.
Watch out for a federal school voucher scheme hidden in the National Defense Authorization Act.
The saboteur-in-chief wants to weaken the rule that was put in place to prevent another offshore oil well explosion like the one that caused the Big Spill.
North Korea Will Invite Foreign Observers to Shuttering of Nuclear Test Site.
It looks like Kim is really serious about changing North Korea's course. I suspect he will seek to follow China's course: repressive and tyrannical, but not horrible for everyone.
It turns out that fraud by voters is as rare in Britain as in the US.
Mulvaney, saboteur of the CFPB, wants to delete the database of consumer complaints. That's part of the general plutocratist policy of favoring business over the public, and the rich over the rest.
In this case, the excuse is that publishing the complaints isn't perfectly fair to the businesses. That is true, but failing to publish the complaints makes the customers more vulnerable to unfairness by businesses. So the question is, which imperfection is more important?
Under plutocratic rule, the answer is simple: the businesses are more important, and bigger businesses are more important than smaller ones.
Redesigning the estate tax could eliminate the irrational stigma and collect more money from the rich.
Streaming now gives Big Music Copyright as much money as it got before internet sharing, but musicians are poorer than ever.
What can you do?
* Don't use streaming disservices. Insist on having your own local digital copy, with no DRM, for any music you are going to listen to.
* Campaign to legalize sharing (noncommercial redistribution of exact copies) of all published works.
if the byproduct is to wipe out the major music-owners, so much the better! As parasites on musicians and oppressors of those that listen and share, they are enemies of music.
Bernie Sanders has proposed a federal program to offer a job to every citizen that wants one.
The question of whether this is the "most targeted use" of the money it will cost is a confusion, because the task to be done is primarily to give poor Americans more money. Different methods can have advantages and disadvantages, but the only way one can cost substantially less is by doing less of the job.
Rather, the challenge is to make sure that these jobs end up contributing useful results to society.
The Student Loan Report is a "journalistic" activity owned by a company that lends to students. Which means it is pure propaganda. Its star reporter, "Drew Cloud", was a fiction.
US citizens: call on Saboteur Pruitt to stop excluding science from EPA decisions.
US citizens: Support laws to protect investigator Mueller.
Shell hopes to greenwash its fossil fuel extraction by pledging to reduce the greenhouse emissions from its own operations.
The greenhouse emissions from the fossil fuels that Shell sells dwarf the emissions from those that Shell burns.
The Tories have been quietly cutting government staff concerned with climate safety since 2016.
Saboteur Pruitt has been doing the same thing since 2017 but in a very visible way.
Kenya banned plastic bags 100%, and the effect has been a tremendous improvement, but some edge cases are doing harm in specific activities.
Does the ban include long-lasting plastic bags meant for reuse? I carry a few of those with me, and I have used them dozens of times, Forbidding those would seem to be defeating the purpose. Only a few rich people would buy a bag like that and use it just once.
New Jersey has adopted a strong law to put an end to the widespread inequality of pay that women suffer.
The EPA has declared that burning wood is carbon-neutral.
In a stable climate, it would be carbon-neutral if done at a sustainable rate over a long time. However, we can't assume that another tree will actually grow to the same size — not when logging is used for deforestation. But even if another tree starts to grow, it might not reach maturity. Global heating could dry up the region, or allow pests to migrate which would kill that tree.
Melting ice in Greenland has triggered a positive feedback, releasing dust that darkens the surface so that it absorbs more light and heats up to melt more ice.
A different positive feedback loop is speeding melting of Antarctic ice.
This leads me to think that that forecast sea-level rise is an underestimate. I am not surprised, since the forecasts are based on known phenomena only, and that makes them conservative.
A mere 10 meters of rise would inundate many cities around the world.
Can we dam the Mediterranean Sea? It would be a megaproject and a great challenge, but might be cheaper than protecting, or losing, the heart of every city on its coasts.
It might be necessary to transfer lots of water and/or salt across the dam, but that would be better than letting the Mediterranean flood so many cites.
The UK's "special forces" have never been scrutinized by parliament, but that may soon change.
An Israeli member of Parliament tweeted that he wished Ahed Tamimi had been shot rather than jailed. Twitter punished him with a short suspension, but he shows no shame.
A company proposes to launch satellites to provide continuous real-time surveillance views of the whole surface of the Earth.
How much resolution this will provide is not clear, but it makes me wonder if there is an antisatellite weapon that avoids producing dangerous space debris.
Billionaire Polluters took the gloves off, threatening Cambridge University with losing a lot of donations if it decides to divest from fossil fuels.
Divesting from fossil fuels is a desperation tactic to try to encourage the decrease of a practice that is slowly but steadily causing global catastrophe, when what we really ought to be doing is blocking all new drilling world wide and steadily reducing what can be extracted from existing wells.
"Engaging" with fossil fuel companies is as useless as negotiating peace with Netanyahu: they extend the discussion indefinitely while continuing to extract profits.
If Gina Haspel is confirmed as head of the CIA, she could return it to torture at any time. Nothing would stop her.
The only reliable way to stop her successors is to try her and punish her.
US deportation thugs have taken a baby away from its mother — because they can.
The mother is not an unauthorized immigrant. She has asked for asylum. They had no reason to jail her; they did it because they can, and because they hate foreigners.
A special provision of the Republican tax attacks, supposedly meant to help small businesses, actually gives big tax deductions to rich people.
An illustration of "intersectionality": when you're threatened with deportation from the country you've lived in lawfully for decades, and you're so disabled you can hardly come to an appointment.
UK thugs arrested city councilor Afzal Shah because he resembled the suspect in a crime. They paid no attention to his alibi, that he was in a city council meeting at the time of that crime.
He speculates that the thugs would have been more capable at telling two men apart if the men where whites.
Tesla Slams Reveal News as "Extremist" After Exposé on Alleged Factory Improprieties.
The Corker-Kaine Bill Would Codify, not End, the Forever War.
Jeremy Corbyn Calls for Reconsideration of [UK] Arms Sales to Israel.
Sanders proposes measured but substantial penalties for certain kinds of opioid marketing.
I can't fault it, but are these companies still doing things that fuel the crisis? They were, it seems.
Republicans are planning to push millions of Americans off Medicaid, if they can't find regular work or they trip up on the paperwork to prove they are working.
Striking teachers, once again among the masses of American poor, are teaching America's future voters to recognize their enemies.
High tax rates never stopped Americans from investing and maybe getting rich. It did mean that their standard of "rich" was less.
US immigration prisons force prisoners (who are not convicts) to work or suffer solitary confinement, which is a form of brainwashing.
Tech giants are battling it out to own the privatized global internet.
New York attorney general Schneiderman asks the state legislature to eliminate a loophole by which a federal pardon by the bully for his cronies might protect them from prosecution in New York.
The French president is hailed as a centrist saviour, a bulwark against extremes -– even as he taxes the wealthy, attacks workers’ rights and demonises refugees.
Since the danger to civilization and most people today is from the right-wing plutocratists, a centrist is no savior.
Google has canceled a service that enabled people living under repressive regimes to access censored domains indirectly via Google.
Corbyn's plan for making everyone in Britain able to afford housing is like the one that Labour successfully implemented after the second world war: build lots of public housing.
Singapore is considering a law against "deliberate online falsehoods," and it seems that this will be interpreted in the usual way as including truths that the Singaporean state would rather not acknowledge.
Even hinting at violence in a leftist protest gives the right-wing an excuse to commit violence and get away with it.
A court case requires new legislative districts in North Carolina, but the cheater party drew the new districts so as to preserve their gerrymandered handicap. It looks like democracy in North Carolina is dead for years.
SCROTUS have invented a new legal excuse to cancel government regulations that were established years ago.
However, it could be that President Clinton laid the groundwork for it. That would be another criticism to lay at his door.
One thing I don't understand is why this is easier for them than passing an ordinary law to cancel a given regulation. If anyone finds an explanation, I'd like to see it.
The Canadian embassy in London has been surrounded by an "oil pipeline" made by protesters, labeled "Crudeau Oil".
UK activists sued; Pret a Manger is now forbidden to describe its products as "natural".
I think fake farm labeling should be illegal, too.
Pompeo won't reject an invasion of North Korea, which would be expected to kill 30,000 to 300,000 US soldiers in the first few days. I expect that implies ten times as many Koreans killed.
He advocated overthrowing the Kim regime a year ago, but in his hearing claimed that he hadn't.
I would love to see the Kim regime replaced, since the replacement could hardly be worse, but that doesn't mean launching an invasion to do it is justified.
The relatives of Gul Rahman, who was tortured to death by the CIA, demand to know where his body is.
I have never sympathized with the inordinate attachment some people feel towards corpses, but I think they have a very strong case against the US for torturing Rahman.
To protect the endangered Mary River turtle without help from Australia's extractionist government, researchers have to raise funds by selling chocolate.
US citizens: call on Congress to keep the sabotage citizenship question out of the census.
US citizens: Tell the Department of Agriculture not to let hog butchers inspect their own work.
Here's what happened when it allowed some chicken factories to use private inspectors.
The EU has a formal policy of autonomy for universities. The UK has turned all of it into a dead letter, giving the government detailed control over university activities.
BBC employees, from the 1930s to the 1990s, were secretly judged by government spies.
Georgia thugs left the armed Nazi protesters alone, and violently arrested many of the unarmed, peaceful counterprotesters.
Thugs tend generally to be right-wing. Perhaps they extended their sympathies more to the Nazis than to the antifascists.
Republican legislators in Colorado seek to fire teachers that strike, and jail them.
If the teachers have the courage to go to jail in large numbers, as civil rights protesters did, they will win.
UK thugs have been infiltrating all sorts of movements for non-plutocratist social change ever since the 1880s.
In the US, they have been especially active against union organizing.
The bullshitter has switched suddenly to praising Dictator Kim.
When he does this sort of thing, it shows that his condemnation means nothing more than "You're not giving me what I want," and his praise means nothing more than "You're giving me what I want."
New York Governor Cuomo is becoming a progressive, because Cynthia Nixon is running against him. Some other "centrist" (plutocratist) Democrats are doing likewise.
I don't have confidence they really mean it; I think they might become "centrists" again if reelected. Best to replace them with real progressives.
Arctic record: 12,000 Microplastic Particles Per Liter of Sea Ice.
A Toronto police officer arrested a multiple murderer without shooting him, then said, "That's just doing my job."
This is a noteworthy example of a practice that is not unusual in the US, when the suspect is white. It's blacks that tend to get shot on the tiniest hint of suspicion.
The Irresponsibility of "Fiscal Responsibility".
In Bangladesh, factories making clothing for western sales-front companies now get careful safety inspections. The rest are still unsafe.
It sounds horrible: "UN peacekeepers accused of child rape in South Sudan." But the article makes it pretty clear that the "children" involved were not children. They were teenagers.
What about "rape"? Was this really rape? Or did they have sex willingly, and prudes want to call it "rape" to make it sound like an injustice? We can't tell from the article which one it is.
Rape means coercing someone to have sex. Precisely because that is a grave and clear wrong, using the same name for something much less grave is a distortion.
The narcissist hates leaks that make him personally look bad. A few of them, by coincidence, also include dirty secrets that make the US government look bad, so he gets them prosecuted.
People in West Virginia are living in trees to block an oil pipeline.
The local effects will be bad for them, but the contribution to global heating will increase the resulting deaths by an amount that increases every year.
India is showing the world that massively fingerprinting citizens puts them at risk — of theft, and of future tyranny.
Now that Assad is in control of Douma, his forces are keeping chemical investigators away saying it is too dangerous for them, while shepherding journalists on guided tours to tell them there was no chemical attack.
Some of the people say there was a chemical attack but it was a false-flag attack carried out by Islamist rebels.
It is hard to determine what parts of this are true, but if one of those stories were true, I don't think anyone would be asserting the other one. Therefore, I think that Assad carried out the chemical attack. But I can't say that is proven.
Monsanto's chemical factory poisoned the town of Anniston, Alabama, with PCBs. Many of the residents are sick as a result.
Monsanto uses the power of its money to fight to avoid or delay compensation and correction.
This is one reason we should not allow companies to be that large. Suitable policies can compel them to split up. Foreign companies that are too large should not be allowed to operate directly. They could sell goods to a special importer that would resell them.
The Open Society Foundation has been forced out of Hungary by a new law that is explicitly politically biased.
The UN has accused the Burmese army in a report presented to the Security Council.
Varoufakis: the prediction in the Communist Manifesto, that capital would own and control all aspects of life everywhere, seems to be coming true today, 150 years after.
State control of the means of production might be OK, but state control of the means of surveillance will not make them safer.
The mother and father of a refugee family are both in Australia, but the government forbids them to live together. Meanwhile two of their children are stuck on Nauru alone.
Once a government adopts cruelty as a goal, the cruelty naturally comes to override every principle of decency, mercy, or justice.
(Satire) Mike Pompeo made a secret visit to North Korea, and defected.
If only he would do so; he couldn't do as much harm to Americans there as he can in the US.
The character Superman started out, in the first story about him, was a "champion of the oppressed", fighting against the injustices of power rather than merely against "crime".
Who is low enough to work as the cheater's lawyer? Rudy Giuliani says his job will be to put an end to Mueller's investigation.
After a few more centuries of human domination, the largest remaining land animal could be the cow.
If civilization gets mostly wiped out in this century, perhaps what remains of humanity won't be able to finish off the remaining large animals. On the other hand, large numbers of humans could wipe them out even with spears.
US citizens: tell Congress to pressure for firing Saboteur Pruitt.
US citizens: Oppose the SCROTUS domestic abortion gag rule.
For supporters of the cheater, no lie is too blatant.
The Tories will waive many barriers in UK citizenship applications, for people that moved lawfully from colonies in the 1960s.
The article does not make it clear whether they will waive the requirement to prove when they arrived, or that they resided in the UK since then. But that's where the difficulty is.
1988: Giuliani Had FBI End Investigation of Trump Money Laundering, [then] Trump raised $2M for Giuliani.
The Lies about Sex Trafficking That Brought Down Backpage (and led to the censorship law SESTA).
Online advertising isn't crucial for coercing people into prostitution, but helps them a lot in avoiding violent crime if that has happened.
Religious fanatics that own US hospitals and clinics are threatening to fire, even blacklist doctors for performing abortions somewhere else.
The Republicans that control North Carolina passed a law so that factory farms don't have to compensate neighbors for the many nuisances the farms cause.
A law adopted in 1871 to stop the KKK from intimidating black voters is now being used against Republicans that seek to intimidate black voters and members of other disfavored groups.
Young Americans are joining unions, looking for a way to get more respect at work, as well as better pay.
The Senate foreign relations committee approved Pompeo because Rand Paul and Chris Coons switched sides to support him.
I am sure their supporters will be disappointed in them for this.
The US-based bombardment of Yemen struck a wedding party. This sort of atrocity is, presumably, unintentional. But since it happens over and over, it is not unforeseeable.
Pesticide Executives Are Running Ag Policy for Donald Trump.
In Aceh, mobs of fanatical Muslims attack people found having sex, or otherwise violating Shari'a law.
Indonesia made a bad mistake allowing Aceh's autonomy to include denial of human rights recognized by Indonesia itself.
FAIR: Media Support US Violence Against Syria, But Long for More.
Sheriff's Deputy Who Fatally Shot Unarmed Black Man in Texas Is Fired.
At least he won't shoot someone else in the same thug department. But he can probably get hired in another one.
Anyone can set up a company in the UK and lie about who really owns it. This is a major contributor to world-wide fraud.
The only person ever prosecuted for making a phony company was the whistleblower who sought to call attention to this vehicle for fraud.
Everyone: Tell the Sturm Ruger gun company to remove the NRA leader from its board of directors.
US citizens: tell Congress not to weaken the Marine Mammal Protection Act in regard to navy operations.
500 indigenous people from Venezuela are stuck in the border zone between Venezuela and Colombia.
I've crossed that bridge. There were normally no border controls — Venezuelans and Colombians simply cross, while people from other countries who are travelling further on are required to visit an office several blocks away to show their passports. Colombia is treating these citizens of Venezuelans unlike all the others.
How the Border Patrol Faked Statistics Showing a 73 Percent Rise in Assaults Against Agents.
As of 2018, 1/3 of Amazon employees in Arizona get food stamps, their pay is so low. In some other states, it's only 1/9 that get food stamps.
Amazon's office workers are better paid but they have to work 80 hours a week. That's even more time than I spend volunteering!
Finland has cut short its test of a partial universal basic income, apparently on ideological grounds. It is too soon to draw conclusions from the test itself.
Nicaragua has backed off from cuts in support for poor and retired people, which sparked riots.
It looks like the former Socialists are obeying business, now. Nicaragua, like other countries, needs to break their power at all costs.
Egypt has put the Sinai peninsula under curfew all the time for weeks. People can't get gasoline, electricity, food, or water.
The cause of this is an anti-guerrilla operation against violent Islamists. It is hard to say which are worse, the violent Islamists of Egypt or the military rulers of Egypt.
The Pakistani army demonstrated its political power by shutting down a TV station and making it agree to censorship. The other media are already censoring themselves.
The Tories prosecuted their War on Immigrants by turning the UK into a society where you have to "show your papers" for anything you do.
The bully's War on Immigrants threatens to do the same thing.
Palestine Files Complaint against Israel under Anti-Racism Treaty.
Courts are giving US state governments carte blanche to arbitrarily declare properties "blighted" as an excuse to seize them by eminent domain.
An even bigger injustice of eminent domain in the US is that the Supreme Court has authorized its use by governments on behalf of private business projects. This means a local or state government is allowed to elevate one private entity's success over anyone's mere rights.
Why would a government even think of doing that? Partly, due to corruption. However, it is also a matter of values and ideology. For those that have surrendered in their hearts to plutocratism, it is easy to reach the conclusion that "What this city needs most is for business B to succeed here." These officials might then seize land for a business, bid millions to be exploited by Amazon or hold the Olympic games, or even vote that corporations are entitled to human rights.
When selling out to the rich becomes this deep, it ceases to feel like selling out. Instead it feels like loyal service to the master.
Pruitt Promised Polluters EPA Will Value Their Profits over American Lives.
Humans discovered the Tapanuli orangutan six months ago; now other humans are proceeding to cause its extinction in short order.
Why unexploded bombs from World War II are still frequently discovered in various European countries, especially Germany.
With the 2018 farm bill, SCROTUS hope to starve Americans that they don't poison.
Facebook publishes ads citing specific useds as if they endorsed the ads. Martin Lewis is suing Facebook for misrepresenting him this way.
Citizens of Scotland: support libel reform in Scotland.
US citizens: condemn Saboteur Sessions's plan to deny asylum to refugees fleeing domestic and sexual violence.
Tennessee Christians who are generally right-wing have been alienated by a large raid made by the deportation thugs.
The penalty imposed on Wells Fargo is partly for restitution to the customers it defrauded, but how to do this has not been specified, and the bank itself may make most of the decision.
Many anti-deforestation activists are being murdered in the Brazilian state of Pará.
I made a joke that the capital of Pará is Paranoia. (After all, the capital of Goias is Goiania.) Sad to say, it seems to be the truth.
California thugs, "bullies with badges," shot Diante Yarber, an unarmed black man, in a parked car.
They said he drove the car away when they tried to stop him. If so, that was no reason to kill him. They could have found and arrested him on some other occasion.
They also said he rammed a thug car, but others deny this, and his car mysteriously shows no sign of the damage that ramming would have caused. Knowing the MO of thugs, my suspicion is that they made this up.
They hit a passenger, too, and were more interested in interrogating her than in bringing her to the hospital.
Almost all human beings alive have to breathe dangerously polluted air.
Sea-floor mining could cause ecological damage like mining on land.
School bus drivers in Georgia didn't get the same support that teachers got, even though they get paid even less.
It looks like a few giant conglomerates will take over all aspects of medicine in the US.
We will need to nationalize them, or else convert every single activity into a pervasively regulated utility which can't decide any policy on its own. To allow one entity to have both regulated and unregulated activities is a recipe for corruption (it will use the regulated activities to subsidize the unregulated ones), so we will need to split them apart and split up the unregulated ones.
In case Senator McCain dies, Republicans are trying to change Arizona's law so his successor won't be elected soon.
The violent conflict in Northern Ireland started in 1968 when thugs attacked peaceful protesters that were demanding democratic elections and equal rights for Catholics. In response to this violence, some of the dissidents started demanding independence from the UK. Since the Catholics were a minority, they were not entitled to that, when the majority was against it. But they were entitled to democratic elections and equal rights.
Innovators are working on ideas for replacing plastic.
I rarely buy plastic beverage bottles, except in countries where drinking tap water is not safe. And I carry a few long-lived shopping bags with me, so I mostly avoid single-use plastic bags. However, I have no feasible way to avoid the containers (often plastic) that food is sold in — it isn't feasible to sell them without containers.
Exotic southern wildlife is surprising people in Alaska.
The native animals and plants are not accustomed to them either. In a few years the exotics will be eating them, competing with them for food, and spreading diseases to them.
The 'Deep State' Is Real. But Are Its Leaks Against Trump Justified?
I think the article's points are entirely valid. When intelligence officials leak intelligence information for their own purposes, it creates a permanent danger which threatens lasting harm.
At the same time, the corrupter has created a potentially permanent danger which threatens lasting harm. He is not likely to win a free and fair election, and since Republicans didn't allow the last election to be fair, they are not likely to do it in the future.
With the United States in grave danger from its own leaders, the intelligence leaks about his corruption can be seen as a backup form of the "checks and balances" that Congress lacks the courage and independence to carry out.
The deep state and the corrupter are also fighting about whether to release the last secret papers about the assassination of President Kennedy, which might show what the CIA knew about Oswald's contacts in Mexico with Cuban and Soviet diplomats.
A mission to remove a fishing rope and hook from a North Atlantic right whale's jaw aimed to enable her to reproduce again. But the mission was unsuccessful.
If the human population were so low, I would urge all humans to have babies. However, we are at the other extreme, with a population that is too large.
It's a shame the British royal family promotes the superstition of homeopathy.
A domestic-abuse victim has been charged and found guilty of second degree unintentional murder of her abusive partner. Protesters are urging the County Attorney to drop all charges against Natalie Pollard.
Cal State University recognizes the freedom to state right-wing ideas more than the freedom to state left-wing ideas.
(Satire) Congress Demands To Know How Facebook Got People To Give Up Their Civil Liberties Without A Fight.
An official in the Interior Department seems to have delayed protection for an endangered mussel at the request of fossil fool interests.
The bully's "extreme vetting" is harassing activists and blocking them from visiting the US to speak.
The Basque terrorist group ETA has recognized that its violent campaign for Basque independence was wrong, and made a humble apology before disbanding.
The leaders called on Spanish thugs to recognize the wrongs on their part. The group began its campaign while the murderous dictator Franco was still in power and the thugs worked for him, so I expect there were plenty of wrongs on the thugs' part.
US citizens: Tell Congress to end predatory phone rates for prisoners.
US citizens: phone your senators to call on them to defend network neutrality.
Everyone: please tell Toys Ya Us to give its employees severance pay.
The letter in the middle of the store's name is not an R. It is Я, the Cyrillic letter which is pronounced "ya". Please do no commit the solecism of pronouncing it as "ar", unless you're a member of the Pirate Party.
Maputo, capital of Mozambique, is suffering under a severe drought, which is likely to become ever worse as global heating continues.
The projected population increase for that city will not occur. Maybe the migrants will find somewhere else to go; but what they need to do is decrease the birth rate.
The cancer treatment drug Imbruvica is so expensive that doctors started testing lower doses to reduce the price. So the manufacturer started charging the same price per pill regardless of the dose.
There is something here that I don't understand. Can't they get a pill cutter and divide up one large-dose pill into several small-dose pills?
Perhaps we should to keep our fingerprints out of photographs so that our fingerprints won't be revealed.
The Terry vs Ohio Supreme Court decision, in 1968, gave thugs the power to search and harass people on the street on any grounds that thugs generally call "reasonable", bringing back the sort of British policies that sparked the American revolution.
The Internet of Stings is also the Internet of Cracking. If you want proper security, don't allow any connected appliances to connect to the internet from your premises.
Reveal News reported that Tesla was covering up injuries to make its safety record look better. Tesla called Reveal News names.
Wells Fargo has been fined a billion dollars for cheating loan customers.
I doubt that will be enough to make it change. We should split it into at least 20 smaller banks so that none of them will dare to try such cheating. And the individuals responsible should be prosecuted.
Arizona's teachers will go on strike starting next week.
When teachers go on strike, they generally demand more funds for other needs of public schools, not only for their pay.
In 2016, a Southwest Airlines flight suffered an engine failure due to a cracked fan blade. In 2017, Southwest Airlines opposed making an NTSB rule requiring more frequent inspections of the fan blades.
A week ago, another cracked fan blade made an engine explode, and one passenger died as a result.
The "National Association of Scholars" is a phony scientific organization set up to promote global heating denialism.
The World Bank wants even more deregulation of work — thus, worse conditions and lower pay.
The campaign for Britain to leave the EU took data from commercial sites without asking or informing the users.
The site's excuse is that its non-privacy policy said it might do this. A web site should not be able to make that lawful merely by stating its intentions — there should be strict limits on releasing personal data.
But that should not matter for a price comparison site, because it should not find out anything about its visitors.
The existing NAFTA forces continued fossil fuel dependence in several ways. The new one could do the same; it could even be worse.
The Republican tax attacks have given American workers peanuts. They have given the big banks billions.
The expanded authorization for use of military force, recently proposed in the senate, would allow the president — any president — to make war on any organization he chooses to designate.
In effect, Congress would cede to the president its control over when the US makes war.
It's absurd for Congress to exercise control over the president by delegating it indefinitely to the president.
The Democratic National Committee has sued Wikileaks for publishing leaked emails, as well as the Trump Campaign and Russia for plotting to obtain them. Suing Wikileaks attacks freedom of the press.
The latest consequence of the perverse idea that corporations are entitled to human rights: a US court ruled that Monsanto has the human right not to tell customers that Roundup has been designated a probable carcinogen.
A court case in Ireland could put a crimp in companies' ability to send personal data from the EU to the US.
A person's long-disused Facebook account was hijacked by a Russian troll.
The lords of copyright are taking advantage of Facebook's current vulnerability weakness, due to its trashing of people's privacy, as an opportunity to compel it to crack down on sharing of copies among its useds.
They hope people will leap from "Facebook is bad" (for snooping) to "Restrict Facebook" (from being useful for something).
Sharing is good. What's evil is forbidding or stopping people from sharing.
US citizens: Tell the Senate: Vote no on the Corker-Kaine AUMF.
US citizens: tell Congress not to let the saboteur in chief destroy the CFPB.
US citizens: tell your congresscritter to sign the Lofgren-Amash-Lee-Massie letter calling on the bully to get Congress's approval for military action against Assad's army.
Bad Decisions: Google Screws Over Tools Evading Internet Censorship Regimes.
Since Iceland generates all its electricity using renewable sources, next it wants to make combustible fuel using electricity and avoid the remaining fossil fuel.
Just 90 Companies Caused Two-Thirds of Man-Made Global [Heating] Emissions.
This is, of course, a sign of the dangerous concentration of industry into large businesses.
Supposedly Facebook doesn't allow companies to arbitrarily add email addresses to the list of people they can advertise to. In practice, they seem to be doing it.
Instead of looking for ways to make small changes to put an end to this, we should aim to drastically reduce massive surveillance at all levels.
What Happened to Winter? Vanishing Ice Convulses Alaskans' Way Of Life.
Most young Americans don't know about Hitler's campaign to kill all Jews.
We would have an easier time teaching people to condemn genocide if Israel did not try to use it as an excuse for the occupation of Palestine. We could be more successful in campaigning against real antisemitism if criticism of Israel's occupation policy were not mislabeled as antisemitism.
"America first" was a slogan of American fascists. Some of the bully's associates used associated racist slogans such as "100% American", which was understood as meaning "100% Aryan".
But don't criticize the cheater for saying that the American dream was dead. The Horatio Alger dream, that by hard work you could get a good job and prosperity (not riches), was killed by plutocrats (of which the cheater was just one) years before he became a candidate.
Where he lied was in claiming he would try to reverse that. What he has actually done is help those plutocrats knock other Americans down.
Comey joked with the bully about putting a whistleblower's "head on a pike", and reporters in jail.
He is doing the right thing (for whatever reason) by spilling facts to incriminate the bully, and we should appreciate that. But we must not lionize him, since his career has included wrong as well as right.
Opposing the National Rifle Association: introducing the No Rifle Organization or NoRA.
I enjoy the joke, but I fear it plays into the hands of the NRA, which will say, "See, they want to confiscate all rifles." US gun control advocates do not propose to go that far.
The mob of bigots in India now attacks those who try to stand for secularism or human rights for the discriminated-against.
Reportedly, illegal porn images are hidden somehow on sites that are meant to contain legally allowed porn, and this puts innocent visitors in danger of being imprisoned for something they did unintentionally.
Any law that makes it a crime to have a copy of some published works is a terribly dangerous injustice. These laws must be eliminated.
Does anyone know more about the technical practice that the article describes? Merely using a shortened URL does not "hide" the page it refers to.
Disabled people in the UK can't afford food and heating after all the aid cuts.
Syrian Medics 'Subjected to Extreme Intimidation' After Douma Attack.
I don't know anything about the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations. For all I know, it might be an arm of the Islamist rebels and as dishonest as Assad. But the Guardian reporters say they talked directly with doctors and victims. For Assad to push this hard to pretend there was no attack suggests he did the attack.
Proposed EU laws for government access to data stored by services would require every company operating there to understand the details of each EU country's laws, and obey them even when forbidden by the laws of their own country. This burden would be crushing for small companies. In addition, companies would face almost irresistible pressure to sacrifice privacy to err on the side of compliance.
After the constitutional coup a few years ago, Paraguay has fallen into the hands of supporters of the former military dictatorship.
I wonder whether the US or right-wing US oligarchs have played a role in this.
US citizens: call on Democrats to fight to undo the Republican tax attacks.
In the US: sign up to join a protest if the corrupter fires investigator Mueller.
That page does not work with JavaScript totally disabled, but it works ok with LibreJS.
High-Speed Pig Slaughter Will Be Disastrous for Everyone Involved.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is asking journalists to report hassles with entering the US, including searches of their digital devices and (for those not US citizens) hassles in getting a visa.
Fracking company Extraction Oil and Gas is suing protesters and a journalist.
Several states plan to make it a crime to plan a protest at a fossil fuel pipeline site.
Japan has published the names of the soldiers of Unit 731 which experimented with chemical weapons using Chinese and Koreans as guinea pigs.
"I'm a millionaire who creates zero jobs. Why do I pay less tax than you?"
One of Facebook's first useds compares it to herpes, and says she was a fool to have trusted Zuckerberg.
Philippine President Do-dirty is deporting foreigners for criticizing him, even for being near others that criticize him.
What does deporting a (real or suspected) critic have in common with murdering a (real or suspected) drug dealer? Both attack the idea that people have legal rights.
Australia is turning to the hype of fracking to pump lots of natural gas and overshoot its greenhouse gas targets by a factor of three.
The digital tech industry considered as a pile of hustlers climbing over each other to become a billionaire by standing on the rest. All while looking for ways to atomize people's lives and turn their jobs into piecework.
Canada's ruling Liberal Party is considering legalizing possession and use of all drugs.
The US uses "Liberal" to mean what Europe calls "social-democratic", but the Canadian Liberal party is nothing like that. Nowadays it mainly seems to mean "let them drill and mine anything."
A Russian journalist that investigated mercenaries fell off his balcony and died. The state wants to say that he fell accidentally.
Citizens of Manchester hope to press Abu Dhabi to release political prisoner Ahmed Mansoor by naming a street after him.
The ruling family of Abu Dhabi has effectively purchased the support of the city's government by making a big investment there. It is dangerous for any government to treat the support of a specific company as indispensable; this is one of the reasons why we need to make large companies split into many smaller ones.
Comey has become the most visible enemy of Americans' worst enemy. That doesn't mean he has been our friend all this time. Don't forget his campaign for more surveillance and against our right to privacy.
In the long term, unchecked surveillance will be almost as harmful as the bully.
Eight Florida youths are suing the state government for willfully disregarding the danger that global heating poses to life in Florida.
(Satire) The US stands ready to escalate military contractor profits as much as it takes.
The cheater is thinking of undoing the principal good thing he has done: his rejection of the TPP or "Treacherous Plutocratic Poison" as I call it.
That treaty has the "I Sue Democratic States" provision which would give foreign companies more rights in the US than US citizens have.
The TPP would strengthen the grip of the business-dominated globalization that increasingly concentrates the world's wealth. The suffering that this form of globalization causes is opening the door to right-wing bigots such as the cheater.
The US Senate changed its rules to accommodate senators with babies.
The New York Times has not opposed any US war or attack in 30 years. Other US newspapers generally agree.
Great Barrier Reef: 30% of Coral Died in 'Catastrophic' 2016 Heatwave.
In the next decade there will be another, hotter heat wave and more of the coral will die.
Balkan Dam Projects Could Result in Loss of One in 10 European Fish Species.
US citizens: phone your senators' offices at 877-591-6399 and tell them to oppose Pompeo's confirmation. You can mention that he has supported torture, is gung-ho for fossil fuels, and is likely to support more wars.
"Rightwing politicians spout rhetoric with which no reasonable person would disagree, while we wait for a catastrophic injustice to expose the reality."
Opposition to Pompeo puts his confirmation in doubt.
A week or so ago I posted a note that seemed to say he had been confirmed and criticized some Democratic senators for voting for him. I had that taken down because it seems to have been incorrect.
Scientists are studying a mega-project to run more fresh water from the Mississippi through the delta wetlands. This would delay their loss to the rising seas.
I fear, though, that in the long term this will only give us a one-time reduction in the loss of those wetlands, after which each centimeter of sea-level rise will give us the same amount of loss it would have given us. The money would be used more effectively on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Comey whitewashes the gross injustices of the US justice system, while lauding it and saying we should fear it more.
The UK government had entry records for citizens that moved from Caribbean colonies in the 50s and 60s, and destroyed them in 2010 although staff warned that would lead systematically to injustices against people who had no proof of when they had come.
There is a clear and easy solution now: give those people the benefit of the doubt.
From 1850 to 1950, low-wage convict labor caused a substantial reduction in US wages, and it is surely doing the same today.
The bully canceled Sessions' crusade against state-legalized marijuana. At least that's what he says for the moment.
The level of random discord between statements of high officials of the US government means that one takes a risk by relying on any of their statements.
Blowing stuff up is a great way for a US president to build public support, but in the long term it provides a bigger propaganda boost for the enemy (whoever that may be).
If we Americans don't want to be played via bombings, we have to learn to resist this technique of manipulation.
Ajit Pai's "broadband adviser" has been charged with fraud adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
I don't suppose that Pai knew she was committing this fraud. But it makes sense that the kind of people Republicans admire would not have scruples against committing fraud.
The UK's company registry finally prosecuted someone for setting up a fraudulent company, but it's a whistleblower who told them he did it.
A Canadian teenager downloaded publicly accessible files off a government web site, and was charged with "unauthorized use of a computer." This is absurd; it should never be a crime to look at what others are showing to the public.
The charge is, in effect, "We told you to look in _this_ direction. We never told you to look in _that_ direction, so we intend to imprison you for turning your gaze without authorization."
This is comparable to the companies that try to punish people for reporting the companies' security errors.
By seizing the family's computers the thugs have done them irreparable damage. If they don't have substantial savings, they could end up homeless from this blind act of injustice.
What makes me saddest is that the teenager fears being permanently stigmatized because of having been arrested. This reflects a social problem that affects a lot more people than the US CFAA and its Canadian equivalent. People who have been arrested, no matter for what, systematically face many kinds of repression. Wealthy people can avoid most of the painful consequences — they don't need a job, they don't need public housing or welfare, they can pay for college, etc. But when these things happen to the non-rich, they will find that the only paths open to them are poverty or crime.
US citizens: support the Clean Power Plan.
US citizens, tell the Senate: Vote no on the Corker-Kaine blank check for war.
One source of the term "redneck" was the neckerchiefs worn by striking miners in West Virginia, fighting big coal.
Trudeau has openly taken the side of big oil against the environment.
In construction as in other areas, deregulation sometimes leads to death.
Accounts show the bully is profiteering from his elected office, just as we thought.
Protesters came to the Starbucks where an employee had two black men arrested after refusing to let them use a toilet.
Who is legally responsible for the damage that global heating does and will do?
I think that the responsibility for harmful actions done by millions of people because they have been intentionally misguided falls on those who misguided them.
China seems to be starting to repress homosexuals.
The bully is suing US local governments to reduce the tax assessments of his buildings.
The cities in question have to fear that he and his officials could retaliate in an underhanded way if they don't give in.
A theory for why evangelicals defend the pussy-grabber: their belief system is primarily to reimpose patriarchy.
One point I don't see how to resolve is why patriarchalists don't became enraged that their daughters might get involved with the pushy males they defend.
The UK has its own version of the DACA issue, with a twist: the people threatened with expulsion were British citizens when they moved there from former colonies, and they are legally entitled to live there. They just don't have documents to prove this.
One MP knows of 16 victims in her constituency, which leads to a quick rough estimate that the victims number around 10,000.
Another pertinent secondary point is that they have paid taxes there for decades, so denying them medical and retirement benefits is robbery on top of exile.
The cause of all this is that the government has decided on the principle of giving all immigrants the short end of every stick. That's what the US is now doing. While the details are different, this attitude systematically leads to cruelty.
Economists are waking up to the biases in neoclassical macroeconomics and how that provides an excuse for plutocratist cruelty.
There is no such thing as "the free market" — every market is regulated somehow, and a market without proper regulation is likely to have instabilities (such as crashes).
250 former employees of the US Justice Department signed a statement calling on the bully to obey the law, and called on Congress to protect against firing investigator Mueller.
It's not just mice — widely used pesticides were found to make human children weaker, less intelligent, and more aggressive.
The greater aggression could be a consequence of the lower intelligence. Lead exposure also makes children less intelligent, and more likely to be aggressive.
Racism makes people go mad. Brennan Walker, a black teenager, knocked on a white couple's door to ask for directions. The couple freaked out, assumed he was a robber (knocking on a door?), and shot at him without engaging their common sense.
Walker says he looks older than his real age, which is 14. What if he looks 18? What if he really were 18 years old? I don't think that would change anything.
Israelis that live near Gaza rallied to demand an end to the siege and to killing peaceful protesters.
World-wide criticism is having an effect: this week Gazans protested again, and this time the Israeli soldiers killed only one protester.
I would like to know how many protesters were wounded by sniper fire this time, because previously snipers wounded over a thousand protesters.
The EU's Latest Copyright Proposal Is So Bad, It Even Outlaws Creative Commons Licenses.
Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee, were far from noble when they systematically killed black soldiers that their troops captured.
Common agricultural pesticides harm various endangered species. Republican response: a bill to ignore that problem when approving pesticides.
Australia's government is continuing to draw up a bill to require back doors in encryption applications.
Saboteur Pruitt, as an official of Oklahoma, suppressed a corruption report that could have embarrassed Republican Senator Inhofe.
Wealth Inequality Is Soaring -– Here Are the 10 Reasons Why It's Happening.
The ultimate reason, the reason that these policies exist, is plutocracy.
The forced, scripted "confessions" of prisoners of China.
The death penalty is used less, world-wide, but China is keeping the practice going.
The International Criminal Court is prosecuting an Islamist for enslaving women.
It is not feasible for communications companies to quickly delete all offensive postings. AI of today's sort can't come close to recognizing them.
Let's not assume that companies should be required to delete all offensive postings. A small site can decide arbitrarily what to let people publish, without really censoring people — they can communicate elsewhere. Not so for a giant site.
When a private company grows to the point of dominating a large fraction of people's communication, censorship by that company is almost equivalent to censorship by the state. It is ludicrous for giants such as Facebook and Google to claim the right, as "private" entities, to impose rules about what people can say, all the while profiting from being perceived as "indispensable" by many people.
We did not allow telephone companies to censor conversations, and that's effectively what Facebook is doing.
By the way, please don't use the term "content" to refer to publications or works. It disparages them all.
Senator McConnell will block any effort to prevent the bully from firing investigator Mueller.
I interpret this as an effort to help the bully get rid of Mueller. Republican elected officials have basically surrendered to him, and lost the will to resist. They serve the bully no matter what he does, or might do.
Global heating is shifting the boundary between the arid US western plains and the rain-moistened Midwest. The boundary has moved 140 miles eastward so far, drying up a belt of land. It is likely to move a lot further in coming decades.
Citizens of Massachusetts: ask your state representative to support the ACLU's recommendations for the budget bill amendments.
I added this note at the front of my response:
My own personal note: it is vital to reduce the birth rate, in the high-footprint USA as well as other countries, but imposing poverty on children who are already alive is a stupid and vicious method which probably doesn't even achieve the purpose. Thus I support Amendment #1361.
An A/B test that compared two messages Democrats could use for the 2018 election found that linking race and poverty won more support than talking only about poverty.
The US, UK and France call for resuming the Syria peace talks.
Two black men were arrested in a Starbucks in Philadelphia for "trespassing", because they wanted to use a toilet while waiting for their friend to arrive. The friend did arrive but the thug chief thinks that doesn't matter.
One of the root causes of this incident may be racism. Another is that the store seems to have a policy of not allowing people to use the bathroom if they have not bought anything.
Compelling someone to excrete on the street or soil per own garments is cruel and degrading. Therefore, an establishment that admits the public and has toilets for some members of the public should not be allowed to deny use of those toilets to any orderly person, or to require any sort of payment for using them.
It looks like we need to resurrect CEPTIA, the Committee to End Pay Toilets In America. CEPTIA made itself look like a joke, but that was H.H.O.S. — its campaign was very successful against explicit pay toilets. However, that Starbucks operates a system effectively equivalent to a pay toilet, but with a different form.
If a restaurant owner complains, "There are too many people walking by our location, so it's unfair that we have to let so many use our toilet," the best response is, "How about moving to a location with less foot traffic, then?"
Hundreds of thousands rallied in Barcelona to demand Spain allow independentist leaders to return home. Spain has imprisoned some and is trying to drag others back.
Facebook's "voter button" can increase election turnout by a small but significant amount. By showing the button to some people and not others, it could decide who wins.
Poor People's Campaign to US Christians: being poor is not a sin. Imposing systemic poverty is a sin.
I am not a Christian, and I don't use the concept of "sin". If you replace "a sin" with "nasty, destructive and inexcusable", then the statement becomes one I agree with.
The UN Secretary General says that Burmese troops' use of sexual violence was a ‘calculated tool’ to force Rohingya to leave and not return.
Uri Avnery, who joined the Israeli Army when it was first created, feels betrayed by today's army, in which the generals order snipers to shoot harmless civilians and reporters at a distance of hundreds of meters and they do so, gleefully and triumphantly.
Here is more info about that video.
The UK's new strict vehicle inspections will make many diesel cars illegal and effectively unfixable. For their owners, this will be a disaster.
It is important to get these cars fixed or off the roads, but the cost should not fall on unsuspecting car owners at random. The rational way to handle this cost is to divide it among all owners of diesel cars, and/or the companies that made them.
Corbyn calls for the UN to mediate between the US and Russia in regard to Syria.
I agree with Corbyn that this can't hurt.
Apple sues independent repair companies in many countries, using trademark law to bully these small companies into settling at a disastrous price.
Not surprisingly, Apple uses the bogus concept of "intellectual property" to make the issue too vague and enormous to even try to confront.
The article describes one time that Apple lost the lawsuit.
Corbyn wants to establish clearly and firmly that the UK government needs to get Parliament's approval to enter a war.
Republicans want to terminate food assistance to a million poor Americans.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warn that the chlorine attack in Ghouta may have been a false flag attack by the rebels that were under attack.
Chinese take puns so seriously that they build them into taboos.
Google plans to offer "confidential" emails which can't be downloaded out of Gmail.
This looks like an anticompetitive scheme to make suckers pressure others to use Gmail rather than anything else.
It doesn't provide any real security. It interferes only with the more convenient means to copy the message.
The UK is experiencing an increase in gang warfare, sometimes deadly. One cause is budget cuts in programs that support troubled youth.
The US Constitution requires the president to get authorization from Congress before attacking. I see no doubt that Congress would have given it, but the failure to ask Congress before bombing Assad's forces undermines the constitution. This bad tendency has persisted under several presidents. Some Democrats in Congress criticized the bully for not asking for authorization.
The bully says he has a secret excuse which he won't show to Congress.
The UK government did something similar.
The corporate media acted as boosters for military action, as is their general practice.
Facebook and Google joined with ISPs to defeat a privacy initiative in California.
Cynthia Nixon, a progressive challenging New York Governor Cuomo, showed her total defiance of centrist Democrats that reject her views.
A union official responds to two of her criticisms of unions.
I agree with his second point. Most Americans get low pay, and partly this is because they don't have unions. We should not criticize unions for getting workers good wages. Overall, the US needs stronger unions, not weaker unions.
However, the subsidy for movie companies is bad and should be ended. When cities and states pay businesses to choose them rather than some other city or state, this competition benefits those businesses at the expense of society. Whether the business in question is a factory, a new headquarters, or making a movie, we should put a stop to letting cities compete.
The excuse of "creating jobs" is entirely bogus because this competition mainly takes them away from somewhere else. But even if it really did mostly create more jobs, the price is too high.
The Republican tax attacks included tax cuts for the rich, but those will expire in 10 years. Now they want to make those cuts permanent, using the minuscule benefits for middle-class taxpayers as a smokescreen to hide the big giveaways to the rich.
Wendy Vitter, being considered by Congress as a possible judge, suggested that she disagrees with the Supreme Court decision that ended official racial segregation.
Pushing children into academic study too young can stop them from learning social skills and basic prerequisites for study.
I pushed myself into academic study while young, perhaps because the basic prerequisites came naturally to me.
The Equal Rights [for women] Amendment has languished since the 1980s, but is just two states short of approval. The Illinois senate has just approved it. If the Illinois lower house does likewise, it will be one state away from approval.
If Democrats take back several states in November, the ERA could actually pass.
The UK says it has intelligence reports that Russia tested door handles as a system for delivering nerve gas.
We cannot entirely trust this. We cannot trust Russian denials at all.
I agree that it would be good for Yulia Skripal to make a brief public appearance and speak to one or two reporters briefly for TV. It could be made easy enough that she could handle it.
The US, UK and France attacked Syrian military facilities that they related to chemical weapons production.
At least they made an effort to avoid sparking a war between the US and Russia, or even Iran.
Seymour Hersh wrote that Assad didn't actually use Sarin gas last year, and that US intelligence told the bully this, but the bully refused to accept the facts. That doesn't prove Assad isn't using chlorine gas now, but it makes me uncertain about that question. His and Russia's denials are not credible either.
Either way, I won't shed a tear for Assad's army, which is responsible for numerous atrocities, in Gouta and elsewhere in Syria.
This limited attack will not have much effect on the outcome of the war in Syria. It seems clear now that Assad will defeat the Arab rebels except where they are protected by other countries such as Turkey or Israel. As the front stabilizes, fighting will wind down.
The one place where I fear fighting might continue is in the Kurdish enclave of Rojava. The Kurds are the only group in Syria that is secular and supports human rights — the only one that deserves support. However, all the powers in the region consider them enemies, some because they are secular, some they support human rights, and some because they are Kurds. I fear they will not be left in peace.
Apple has gone on a rampage against "leakers", threatening to get them jailed.
Apple makes software to attack people's freedom, and now is a lackey of the Chinese tyranny. A leak from Apple does not necessarily work against this at all, but in the case where it does, it is admirable.
Goldman Sachs dared to say what many have suspected: it is more profitable to sell people a treatment every day than sell them a cure just once.
As long as we let businesses influence medical research, they won't look much for cures. We should take the choice away from them. We should tax these businesses and fund medical research with state funds.
We should also fund tests of proposed medicines' safety and effectiveness with state funds, so that the tests will not be corrupted.
This will take away the supposed reason to allow businesses to have patents on medicines.
Israeli soldiers shot and gassed hundreds of Palestinian protesters across the Gaza border fence again.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to oppose HR 3144; don't override environmental laws to endanger salmon and the animals that eat them.
The referendum for the UK to leave the EU was marred by massive illegal campaigning by the victorious Leave campaign. Surely this justifies holding another vote.
The EU is itself a kind of business-supremacy treaty. Leaving the EU could enable the UK to throw off some of the EU rules that help business and especially banks dominate all EU countries. But it also presents an easy excuse for yielding to even worse business-supremacy treaties, and that's surely what Tories will do.
US Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius resigned last year rather than ask Vietnam to take back 8,000 refugees that fled after the fall of Saigon.
Most of those people must be pretty old by now. And most of them must have got along badly with the Communist government, which regularly imprisons people that criticize it. If they were back in Vietnam they might be sent to a re-education camp. Probably some of them were in re-education camps before.
A new agreement calls for reducing CO2 emissions from ships, but only by 2050, which is far too slow.
The US played a crucial role in blocking a requirement for earlier reductions.
Uber charges different prices to different people. Other companies also engage, or have engaged, in price discrimination. It turns out that identifying customers helps many businesses put customers at a disadvantage.
The only thorough solution is to do what is needed for other reasons: eliminate the systems that let companies know who the customer is.
Make half of world more nature-friendly by 2050, to protect the survival of humanity.
"Scientists say the greater threat to humanity comes from the conversion of wild habitats to farmland, the degradation of soil, overconsumption in wealthy nations and the pollution of rivers by industrial effluent, agrichemicals and plastic."
Facebook is promoting Mexican "news" sites whose output is pure propaganda and were set up specially for the coming election just to smear candidate Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. They use Facebook to hide who's spreading this propaganda.
The US suffers from more surveillance than ever, but the FBI still complains because some things remain that it can't see.
Aside from giving useds' personal data to other companies (Cambridge Analytica was one of many), Facebook combines its own surveillance data with lots more data so as to sell access to targeted useds.
President Do-dirty threatens to arrest the International Criminal Court prosecutor who might investigate his murders.
Hounding Commonwealth Citizens [living in the UK] Is No Accident. It's Cruelty by Design.
Think of this when you see the bully's plans for hounding disfavored groups in the US.
If the richest country on earth can't provide most workers with a decent wage, then we need to change the economic system so it can do so.
Businesses in the US actively keep wages down, despite big increases in business income and workers' productivity.
Thugs in a UK city decide whether to charge people with a crime based on stereotypes deduced probabilistically from big data.
FTC Says 'Warranty Void If Removed' Stickers Are Bullshit, Warns Manufacturers They're Breaking the Law.
Will the FTC have the courage to take on Apple for bricking devices with third-party parts?
A right-wing attack group is targeting striking teachers, arguing that they have a duty to children to suffer quietly any level of exploitation in favor of the rich.
A merger between Sprint and T-Mobile once again threatens.
Maybe they think progressives in Congress might make mergers more difficult in the future.
The software company Lanetix fired all its programmers after they agreed to unionize. They have not given up, because it is illegal to do that.
Corrupt politicians in Wisconsin are designating people's houses as "blighted" as an excuse to kick them out and not really compensate them.
This is to bring in a factory run by the company that drove Chinese sweatshop workers making Apple products to commit suicide.
Big US banks have lent billions to companies that make loans, such as auto loans. Some of those companies are going down the tubes now because their own clients are defaulting.
This could potentially lead to another crash.
Zuckerberg, testifying to Congress, pretended ignorance of Facebook's collection of data about people that don't have Facebook accounts, and its other data about people which it didn't get from their own Facebook accounts.
A teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who advocates arming teachers left his pistol in a toilet. It was picked up by a drunkard who shot it (not hitting anyone and probably not trying to).
Charging them with crimes is absurd. It is clear that the teacher did not intend to leave the pistol in a toilet, and as for the drunkard, punishing him will achieve nothing. Any sensible person already knows to try to avoid these things.
The right lesson to draw is that arming teachers is a foolish and dangerous policy (though we already knew that).
The cheater pardoned Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice — justice against Cheney's dirty tricks.
I think this is meant as a threat against any attempt to hold him to account.
MIT students have cracked the surveillance system that tracks them as they enter dorms.
That system is unjust surveillance, in the name of security. It is not limited to dorms; some lab buildings, including the one my office is in, use the same system that tracks people — but I don't use it.
I asked the MIT thug chief to document the effectiveness of this system in solving crimes in the building. He responded with platitudes and zero information. We have no reason to consider it any more than bullshit.
The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Israel to prosecute the soldiers that shot journalist Yaser Murtaja, and stop trying to excuse the act.
Committee to Protect Journalists: Liberia should reform libel laws in wake of $1.8 million civil lawsuit against Front Page Africa.
(Satire) The Onion quotes Pompeo: "They [the senators] just let me sit in this cushy chair the whole time without waterboarding me or anything."
Avoid Gulf Stream Disruption at All Costs, Scientists Warn.
We don't know how much more global heating it can stand before freezing northern Europe and drowning the eastern US.
Another US court has ruled that scraping information from a web site is not a crime under the CFAA law.
More about Hassan Al Kontar, including how Turkish Airlines cheated him.
Is there no country that will have the decency to offer him refuge?
Telegram refused to give Russia a back door to spy on its users. Now Russia has banned Telegram — though precisely what that means i
