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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
Everyone in the US: Call on Core Civic (a prison company) to end forced labor in its prisons and pay workers a proper wage.
(satire) The White House raises and lowers its flag from moment to moment to indicate the president's feelings about Senator McCain.
Rights Groups Are Demanding That Google Not Release A Censored Search Engine In China.
Phony cellular towers, supposedly intended as a means of tracking phones, usually at protesters, actually cuts them off from the phone radio network. Even emergency calls may not go through.
I expect that thugs consider this a feature. It would stop protesters from posting about the crimes that thugs are committing, and as for emergency calls, a newly arrived group of thugs will protect the thugs that were committing them.
Detroit Turns Off Every Public School's Drinking Water Due to High Levels of Lead, Copper.
Siding with the Palestinian Struggle Is Not Antisemitic — Corbyn has no need to apologize.
I am not outright opposed to Zionism; like Uri Avnery, I want a peaceful compromise between the Israeli cause and the Palestinian cause.
Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person... by someone who grew up as a broke white person.
Global heating increases the effects of El Niño, especially for land regions in North America and Australia.
It appears that some German thugs are helping neo-Nazis.
US citizens: insist that a replacement for NAFTA should pull back from various policies that are bad for the environment or for workers.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: Phone your senators to oppose confirmation of Kavanaugh.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The UK privatized deportation, then gave the deportation company extra money for deporting more people.
Such a contract directly discourages justice.
Israel's Supreme Court prohibits the policy of punishing relatives of Hamas leaders by stopping the relatives from leaving Gaza for treatment for serious illnesses.
US commercial health insurance means you only owe $100k for treatment of a heart attack.
Obama has endorsed a billionaire Democrat while snubbing progressive candidates.
I could see in 2008 that Obama was no progressive, which is why I never voted for him.
Bees get addicted to neonicotinoid pesticides, just as humans get addicted to nicotine.
Then they get sick from the pesticides, just as humans get sick from nicotine.
I think that tobacco makes nicotine as a pesticide.
The Indonesian teenager who was jailed for an abortion has been freed.
But she feels she cannot go back to her village.
Carmakers' Gaming of Emissions Tests "Costing Drivers Billions".
They haven't stopped trying to cheat the goal.
Substantial numbers of teenagers are becoming fed up with social networks.
I suspect that the aspects of company-controlled social networks that pressure people to use them more are designed intentionally to boost income. Thus, I suggest that people who have learned to dislike these aspects try using distributed free software networks. Those networks will make it easy to do the things you want to do, and no more.
Vietnam demands that Bayer (formerly Monsanto) pay damages for the toxic herbicide Agent Orange that the US dropped on substantial areas of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Disney World workers have won a $15 minimum wage, three years from now.
Hundreds of millions of people will be in danger of various deficiency diseases as higher CO2 levels cause food plants to have less of certain nutrients.
These people are poor — they can't correct the problem by buying supplements or meat.
California has adopted a law to end the requirement for money bail for suspects. The law will take effect in October 2019.
I hope that the future risk-assessment system will not be a secret program controlled by a company.
All Sides in Yemen May Be Responsible for War Crimes, Say UN Experts.
That all sides are doing it does not excuse any of them.
'They're Liquidating Us': AT&T Continues Layoffs And Outsourcing Despite Profits.
We need to either limit or tax outsourcing.
North Carolina Must Fix Republican Gerrymander Before Midterms.
Australia's planned digital tyranny threatens each programmer with being ordered to commit sabotage. Even programmers outside Australia. Officials will be able to order this arbitrarily, and informing a court would be forbidden.
If this law is adopted, everyone involved in software development will need to keep away from Australia. Even the shortest visit would invite being compelled to betray the whole world.
Amazon's voice response system is now designed to lie to children.
Replicability in psychology: out of 21 important papers published in prestigious journals, only 13 of the results could be reproduced, and often the effect was not as strong.
Metal in the Air Really Messes with Ocean Life.
Rapprochement between the North Korea and the US and South Korea has not reassured Japan's military, which says North Korea is still a threat.
This could be simply pressure for Japan to spend more on the military.
Nicolas Hulot, French minister of the environment, resigned speaking on the radio, saying that President Macron gives the environment low priority.
A study in the 1950s concluded that the US used germ warfare against North Korea in the Korean War.
The whole report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4334133-ISC-Full-Report-Pub-Copy.html
California faces dire danger from heatwaves, fires and rising seas if we don't stop global heating.
That's not even counting the tropical diseases and the failure of agriculture.
The Amazon twitter army consists of full-time employees whose job is to say nice things about the company.
Seth Frotman resigned as head of the Students Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, saying that saboteurs won't allow student borrowers to be protected.
Highly polluted air causes a reduction in intelligence "equivalent to having lost a year of education". It harms old people more than young people.
Regulation of certain persistent organic pollutants under the Stockholm Convention has succeeded in reducing their concentration in the Arctic.
These are chemicals that can damage wildlife even in small concentrations.
Myanmar's Military Accused of Genocide in Damning UN Report.
Iraqis in the region of Basra are rioting in protest against a quagmire of corruption that chokes them in toxic oil, while they get none of the money from it.
Iraq's most desperate need is to reduce the birth rate and reduce its population.
US citizens: post your comment against the Keystone XL pipeline.
US citizens: Demand the Senate suspend Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings.
Zainab Merchant describes how the TSA and US border thugs search harass her with "searches" every chance they get, without ever offering a justification.
These actions can't be explained by a concern about any physical object she might be carrying. That is merely an excuse.
The US legal system regularly and systematically imprisons people through false testimony coerced from accused people — usually poor people, coerced because they can't afford bail, let alone a real defense. Often they are accused of activities they had nothing to do with.
The cheater's henchmen now testifying about the cheater's campaign activities are atypical: they are not poor, they do have lawyers, and they really have had an association with those activities.
The racist is making his racism more blatant, with drive-by tweets whose details are insignificant except that they spread racism.
Senator McCain may have unintentionally paved the way for bullshit to capture the Republican Party when he chose Sarah Palin as running mate.
Before 2008, the Republican Party was cruel, dishonest, and plutocratist. The Democratic Party was too, though to a lesser degree. But neither was dominated by hatred of the idea of truth, the idea of justice, and the idea of human rights.
Australian border thugs took Nathan Hague's computers and cracked them, out of his sight, and would not give any reason.
The recommendation to store your data in the so-called "cloud" is misguided. There is no "cloud" — only computers belonging to others. What makes you think that government "security" forces can't get your data there? The GDPR does not apply to "security".
You will probably not be able to lease a laptop which has anything but Windows or MacOS. Those systems are nonfree — you can't trust them either.
From Tahrir to Trump: how tyrannical regimes mastered using the internet to reinforce their power and to defeat resistance.
Rohingya remaining in Burma remain excluded from many aspects of life.
Nasrin Sotoudeh, in prison in Iran, has started a hunger strike.
Varoufakis: Greece Was Never Bailed Out — It Remains a Debtor's Prison And the EU Won't Let Go of the Keys.
Opposition Warns of Protests after Zimbabwe Election Result Is Upheld.
New York City has regulated Guber, imposing a minimum wage.
That will be good for the drivers, who won't be subject to long waits and thus low daily income. However, it does nothing to correct the injustices of Guber towards its customers: making them run nonfree software and identifying them.
Memphis thugs raided Black Lives Matter campaigners' homes, apparently as retaliation for a lawsuit.
Oil companies have learned how to create astroturf support movements on the fringes of the indigenous groups whose land then want to drill.
The US government intimidated Reality Winner into pleading guilty through unsubstantiated claims of unspecified harm to "national security". That it got away with this puts journalism and democracy in danger.
There is evidence that skimming texts on a screen undermines the development of reasoning ability and empathy.
In other words, we may be educating a generation that won't understand how to see through the foolish arguments of cheaters and plutocratist politicians.
Research Paper Shows Militarized SWAT Teams Don't Make Cops — Or The Public — Any Safer.
We should eliminate most of the SWAT teams, and keep just a few that can be flown to where they are needed.
An underground network of women in the US perform abortions in women's homes.
Assad's "security" forces photographed the corpses of 11,000 prisoners that they killed. Secret documents captured by rebels confirm some of these killings, as well as identifying victims and describing how they were "interrogated".
Farmworkers Are Dying from Extreme Heat.
Most current coal industry workers could get better pay in solar power installation.
This is icing on the cake. We need to end coal burning, and even if it were expensive, we would still need to.
Sexist Barriers Block Women's Choice to be Sterilized.
This relates to social pressure on women to have children.
I knew a woman who had got herself sterilized, and did not regret it. She told me that it wasn't easy to find a doctor who would do it.
Considering how important it is to limit and reduce the human population, we should not impede anyone's choice to be sterilized.
Research Shows "Merit" Is Highly Subjective And Changes with Our Values.
US teenagers are organizing voter registration campaigns to defeat senators that oppose gun control.
Please don't call them "children".
Airlines have learned to give higher estimates of flight times, so that flights are less likely to arrive late.
The article disapproves of this, but I am not sure I agree. Giving a later estimate of arrival time does not mean that the flight takes longer. Rather, it introduces more caution into people's plans, including connections.
Pressing the government of Thailand to agree to the Work in Fishing Convention.
A campaign aims to prohibit nondisclosure agreements that suppress testimony about crimes such as rape.
The nondisclosure agreements that cause the broadest harm are those that withhold generally useful technical information from the public. One technical nondisclosure agreement can keep millions of people under someone's thumb. In the early 1980s I reached the conclusion that it was immoral to accept a nondisclosure agreement for generally useful technical information, and I have carefully followed that principle ever since.
It was this conclusion, which I reached in the early 1980s, that propelled me to develop the free operating system GNU.
The UK allows obvious bogus front companies to keep operating, by failing to enforce recently adopted laws.
The Democratic National Committee has suffered a decline in donations, as progressives choose to donate to progressive PACs instead.
We don't want our funds to support "centrist" right-wing Democrats.
The ACLU has found an opportunity to ask US courts to rule on the constitutionality of PRISM, the NSA's warrantless snooping system.
I hope we can stop Kavanaugh from biasing the Supreme Court in favor of all surveillance.
Proposing to follow Finland's example and have all children attend the same schools.
It might be a good idea, if this enables them to be as good as Finland's schools have become.
Global heating is softening permafrost in the Alps, making some old climbing trails unsafe.
The US immigration thugs claim that Joel Arrona-Lara, grabbed while driving his wife to the hospital for a cesarean section, was wanted in Mexico for killing. But it is not clear that is really true.
Hundreds Dead, No One Charged: the Uphill Battle against [killings by LA thugs].
Germany set a strong target for decreasing greenhouse gases, but has been unable to achieve it despite real effort. It requires greatly reducing the use of cars.
50 Student Activists Missing in China After Police Raid.
Study finds 93% of tweets about vaccines between 2014 and 2017 were planted with aim of sowing division.
This sabotage kills human beings.
Spain should go beyond moving Franco's grave, and turn his memorial to fascist conquest of Spain into a museum of national conciliation and remembrance.
A certain amount of punishment of past criminals can be proper. Franco's grandson said that moving his remains is "vindictive". Maybe so, but it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.
Volunteers in Virginia and North Carolina monitor pipeline construction looking for illegalities.
(satire) … students at the University of California, Berkeley … were excited to see the slate of notable speakers who will be disinvited to campus this year.
In the US: call on Bank of America to stop asking customers about their citizenship status.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on AT&T, UPS, FedEx, Pfizer, State Farm, Chevron, Anheuser-Busch and Comcast to stop funding ALEC.
If you sign, please spread the word!
American white supremacists explicitly campaign to end democracy and they label the power they hope to wield over others as their "freedom".
Sanders advocates taxing employers to pay for all public assistance their workers need.
Impeachment of the president was intended as the remedy for when a president acts like a king. If partisanship makes this remedy impossible to use, we can't defend the republic; we need to make impeachment a real possibility again.
The Democratic Party has finally adopted new rules to reduce the power of superdelegates. They will no longer vote in the first ballot.
(satire) GOP Leaders Demand Congressman Duncan Hunter’s Resignation After Discovering He [is] Poor.
Putin had Navalny arrested again, and the thugs appear to have been violent — breaking his finger.
The oil companies want the US government to spend 12 billion dollars on sea walls to protect its facilities from sea level rise.
The absurdity is that their facilities are causing sea level rise.
Sanders: "Disney is so nervous that the living wage ballot initiative in Anaheim is going to pass, it would rather end some of the corporate welfare it receives from local taxpayers than pay all 30,000 of its workers decent wages."
We cannot get much news about strikes and hunger strikes in US prisons, but supporters are protesting in solidarity in 21 cities.
The Prison Strike Is an Overdue Opportunity to End the Slavery of Incarcerated People
If the bullshitter pardons convicts such as Manafort and Cohen, he could lay himself open to a charge of obstruction of justice, and it might not even fully protect them or enable them to avoid testifying about his crimes.
Wells Fargo bank closed candidate Nikki Fried's campaign bank account because she accepts contributions from the medical marijuana industry.
I don't think campaigns should get money from any businesses, but this prejudice against the marijuana businesses is meddling in politics.
The Senate's "election security bill" is so weak and misguided that it is worthless.
Amazon seems to organize some of its warehouse workers to say good things about their work. Remarkably similar good things.
Is Amazon paying them? Threatening them?
Arguing that President Pence would be less of a menace than President Bullshitter.
Pence is hardly honest, but he can't bullshit like the bullshitter. I think he would not be able to maintain the cult of truth-defying extremism that the bullshitter maintains.
Konstancja Duff tried to give a legal advice card to a teenager who London thugs had stopped on the street for no particular reason. The thugs threw her down (causing permanent injury), charged her with bogus crimes, then tied her up and cut apart her clothing (ruining it), and booked her while she was nearly nude.
Now one of the thugs faces an internal accusation for stripping her.
What about for knocking her down and injuring her? That is worse. You can get over embarrassment, but getting over some injuries is impossible. We cannot allow thugs to get away with claiming they couldn't tell a piece of paper from a weapon.
Bravo to Ms Duff for recognizing that the thugs must do this frequently, and that her somewhat privileged status as a postgraduate student gave her a chance to stand up for everyone's rights.
UK censorship is shockingly extreme — posting photos of a car crash is labeled as "malicious" because they might cause "distress".
Ralph Nader proposes how voter education could reactivate democracy in the US.
Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by an unauthorized immigrant. (Such a thing surely had to happen someday.) Some of her relatives have denounced the bullshitter's campaign to smear all unauthorized immigrants based on this one crime.
Should we smear everyone named "Trump" just because one family with that name turns out to be full of cheaters?
Will the cheater attack Iran to distract Americans from his crimes?
If he does, we will need to brace ourselves to resist the idiotic "support our troops" campaign. The support US troops deserve is not to be sent into wars that are either (1) unjustified, (2) unnecessary, or (3) futile.
Coal-powered generators in the US are being shut down, and coal executives know that even with help from planet-roaster officials, their industry is disappearing.
The question is whether it will disappear fast enough, and along with enough of the oil and natural gas, to avoid global disaster. Merely carrying out the weak terms of the Paris agreement is not enough.
Over 360 immigrant minors taken from their parents may remain prisoners of the US for years because it already deported their parents and can't find them.
Since they were fleeing from violence, and were deported back to places where people threatened to murder them, they may be hiding — or they may already have been murdered.
Tens of millions of Americans suffer each year when forest fires fill the air with smoke, and some of them will get sick and even die from it. The cost of trying to protect and treat them will become too much.
It would be cheaper to build renewable power sources and prevent the problem.
In general, with global heating, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The Javari Valley, home to some of Brazil's uncontacted tribes and endangered species of wildlife, is under threat by constantly growing modern "civilization".
The human population cannot keep growing without limit. In the last gasp, civilization will try to plunder everything that remains, but this will buy only a few more years. Can we find the wisdom to stop population growth?
You can help, by doing as I have done: not having children.
Indonesia's law against blasphemy continues to be used for oppression. A Buddhist has been sentenced to prison for asking a mosque to reduce the volume of its call to prayer. Muslims responded with lunatic violence by burning temples.
Blaspheming against any religion is part of human rights.
"If Democrats clean up their act and appeal to the working class again, that would be far more threatening to Trump than the Mueller investigation ever could be."
Whistleblower Reality Winner has been sentenced to five years in prison.
A program tries to teach violent Brazilian men that hitting their wives is not normal or right.
Overfishing is wiping out tuna around the Philippines.
Verizon appears to have artificially slowed net access for firemen who were working on putting out a wildfire.
The old network neutrality rule prohibited this.
True network neutrality would mean that an ISP is not allowed even to take note of who you are talking with.
The company that runs the cafeteria in the Pentagon is paying workers too little and faces an investigation for wage theft.
Imagine what Republicans would say if the cheater shot Michael Cohen on Fifth Avenue.
An immigrant in the US committed murder, so Republicans are trying to smear all immigrants in the US on that basis.
Overall, immigrants commit fewer crimes (in proportion to their numbers) than natural-born US citizens.
It would be no less rational to smear all natural-born US citizens because some of them commit murder, but the Republicans won't do that…as long as they need some natural-born US citizens to vote for them.
Big Tech Turns Saboteur to Cripple New California Privacy Law in Private.
Parts of the law, those about getting your data back in a usable format, assume that a company is keeping data about you as a service. Occasionally that is so, but we should not let that distract us from the cases where we never asked the company to track us at all.
(satire) Aspiring felon Matthias Winnow said Wednesday how moved he was that lawyer and lobbyist Paul Manafort, 69, didn't get his first eight convictions until his late 60s.
Hypothesis: the bullshitter's campaign was like The Producers. Various crooks assumed he would lose and considered the campaign a great opportunity for grift. But — oops! — he won, and now they are getting investigated.
A local Texas ISP is resisting in court the demands of the copyright industry to conscript it as copyright police.
I wish there were a way the public could help them.
An automated copyright censor took down MEP Julia Reda's post opposing automated copyright censors.
Unless senate Republicans become willing to remove the bullshitter from office, impeaching him is useless.
The WTO has ruled against various national and local policies (in several countries) that promoted local solar power business.
Every such policy benefits the whole world, even though it benefits that nation or locality especially.
The US thinks that a good mother is one that never takes a moment away form taking care of her children.
I hope the US stops harassing parents about insignificant risks to children, but you can protect yourself from the problem by not having children. In the process you will make your life easier and less stressful, give yourself the opportunity to do something actually good for the world instead, and shrink your carbon footprint.
US executives have made a public show of distancing themselves from the cheater but continue meeting with him privately.
Places in Germany where more of the inhabitants are used by Facebook have more incidents of racist violence.
Israa al-Ghomgham in Salafi Arabia faces possible execution if convicted of "incitement to protest" and "providing moral support to rioters (protesters)". She campaigned to allow Shi'ites to practice their version of Islam.
Killing male dissidents is nothing new for that country. Now it aims to become an equal opportunity killer.
Ugandan opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu was arrested, then tortured by thugs to the point where he can't walk, speak, or see. It is not clear he was conscious enough in a court hearing to understand what was said.
Other protesters were beaten and arrested, too.
The "president" of Uganda is a typical dictator, unofficially "president for life".
Wales has made a law establishing children's right to play — and requiring various institutions to make sure they have a place to do so.
Many ordinary activities can exclude disabled people, or enable them if society pays a fairly small cost of doing so.
If Google Goes to China, Will It Tell the Truth about Tiananmen Square?
Saboteur Zinke, and the cheater, want to use California's fires as an excuse to abolish environmental protection.
Describing the political trap of the Republican and Democratic parties that sustain the power of the rich in two different ways.
The article is weak by presenting "capitalism" as something monolithic and unchanging. US capitalism today is nastier, more powerful, and more antidemocratic than US capitalism in 1979.
Because the US electoral system makes it so hard for a third party to win, I pin more hope on progressives in the Democratic party.
In the wake of the defeat of the abortion bill, which was fought hard by the Catholic Church, Argentines are now formally dropping their membership in it.
A friend of mine in Spain did this years ago, because churches in Spain get a subsidy based on the number of members they have.
Many progressives are winning in state and local primary elections.
US prisoners are starting a strike, demanding (among other things) to be paid a reasonable wage for the work they now do for a pittance.
The low pay they get undermines wages for Americans that live and work outside prisons.
British prisons, protected from journalists by privatization, have fallen into conditions that suggest a third-world country in the 1930s.
Privatization enables a government to impose budget cuts on an area and evade responsibility for the results.
Due to a court ruling, begging is no longer a crime in Delhi.
Global heating is breaking up the ice at the North of Greenland, where it has been frozen all the time since humans first saw it.
The toxic algae bloom in Florida is killing lots of endangered manatees.
An Italian coast guard ship returned to port with almost 180 refugees. The Italian minister of harshness refuses to let them leave the ship. They are stuck on board indefinitely.
Eventually Italy will start to regret the nonavailability of its ship.
The cheater said he won't give Mueller a statement, fearing that if his statement disagrees with other witnesses he might be accused of perjury.
He's not the only one this could happen to. In addition, any slip of memory in one's testimony can be turned into a criminal accusation. This is why lawyers advise clients not to give authorities any statement whatsoever when they might be suspects.
US citizens: call on the US to get out of the war in Yemen.
You can sign this without running nonfree Javascript code using the standard Salsalabs method.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: Now that the cheater is directly implicated in violating election law, tell the Senate not to let him put anyone on the Supreme Court who might help him evade punishment.
If you sign, please spread the word!
In the suburbs of Baltimore, a campaign to shut down light rail trains resembles anti-vaccination: once people are predisposed to blame the trains, they imagine more "examples" to justify their foolish cause.
Michael Cohen has made a plea bargain and turned state's evidence against the cheater.
The result could be that the evidence closes in on the cheater. But he has led Republicans step by step to accept and support ever-increasing levels of dishonesty, when he orders them to. Have they reached the point where they will stand by him against all justice, decency, democracy, and honesty, and will help him to crush them all? That is surely what the cheater is aiming for.
So far, they are still defending him.
Greece May Still Be Europe's Sick Patient, But the EU Is at Death's Door.
That may be an exaggeration. The tyranny of the banksters, like other tyrannies, often manages to hand on for years while extremely sick.
The EU has become a motor for dooH niboR, with rather weak democracy that isn't enough to restrain the banksters. It pressures member countries to push most people down. If it is not made democratic it should be eliminated.
The prosecution of Backpage and its publishers was a politically-minded falsehood, part of a campaign to stop sex workers from advertising.
This is why I do not support Kamala Harris. Her campaign struck me as not merely wrong, but dishonest.
It seems that many sex workers are enslaved, while many others are working freely on their own terms. World-wide, workers are enslaved in many other areas of work: manicure, farming, fishing, construction, domestic help, from what I recall at this moment. It is very important to free people from enslavement, but prohibiting manicure, farming, fishing, construction, domestic help and sex work is not the way. We need laws aimed at the practice of enslavement and its methods, not at these jobs.
Michigan's official in charge of public health faces charges of involuntary manslaughter for decisions that lead to cases of legionnaire's disease.
Not, alas, for lead poisoning.
Particulate air pollution in Spokane, due to wildfires, is so bad now that people are being warned to stay indoors.
I am very sad about the death of Uri Avnery, our wisest guide to justice and peace in regard to Israel and Palestine.
We will now have to figure out the best course without his wisdom.
The article doesn't mention that Gush Shalom was forced to drop its boycott of products of Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory by an Israel censorship law which contrived to impose unbounded debt on anyone who advocates the boycott.
We who live outside Israel can still advocate this boycott.
Newer frack-wells use a lot more water than the first generation, and they produce a lot of toxic waste water.
The EPA's proposed sabotage to the Clean Power Plan would kill 1400 Americans a year through air pollution, and untold millions a few decades down the line due to increased global heating.
Senator Warren has proposed a number of measures to reduce corruption in national US politics.
I think they are all good, but need to be done in parallel with a general reform to reduce the influence of large donors on campaigns.
Manafort was convicted on 8 charges, including 7 charges of fraud.
US citizens: call on the US to end its unconditional support for Salafi Arabia.
As California burns, Billionaire Polluters bought rights to drive the world faster to frack and fruin.
Dutch voters eliminated a new law that allowed mass surveillance.
Socialism has had a range of meanings, with certain core ideas in common.
(satire) President Donald Trump accused voters Monday of meddling in the upcoming midterms.
Extreme rain events in most of India have become three times as frequent since 1950.
(satire) Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos revealed Monday that she was forced to use her own salary to purchase supplies for her yacht.
White thugs in Iowa pulled two blacks out of a car and handcuffed them because they had a vague "feeling" about the two.
A lawyer that formerly worked for the Koch brothers is at the EPA, in charge of increasing air pollution.
Australian activists are campaigning to move all refugee children (all minors, perhaps?) from Nauru to Australia.
Remote driving of cars on city streets is already working, more or less.
The danger that someone will remote-control the supposedly "driverless" or "autonomous" taxi is only a matter of whether they decide to do it. It follows that you cannot trust these cars!
The US government is paying US sports teams to promote militarism as propaganda for increased military spending, and for war.
Everyone: Support the Waorani against the companies that want to drill in their rain forest (and pollute it forever).
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the senate to block confirmation of DowDupont lawyer Peter Wright as an EPA official.
If you sign, please spread the word!
37 people (mostly minors) have died in the first half of 2018 in Europe because they and others didn't get the MMR vaccination.
Proposing that the FBI leadership is driven, above all, by the desire for effective autonomy.
Corbyn could lead the European Union to become something that serves the people of Europe.
Australia's right-wing prime minister proposed to encourage renewable energy, but he just capitulated to the planet-roaster wing of the party.
"Rising arctic temperatures mean we face a future of 'extreme extremes' where sunny days become heatwaves and rain becomes floods, study says."
US thugs nowadays go beyond just arresting anti-fascist protesters by fabricating absurd "crimes". The thugs publish their photos and addresses, to expose them to the threat of fascist violence.
It is clear that these thugs are on the side of the fascists. Because of their wish to cheat, they should all be fired. Those who actually did cheat should be jailed.
Palestinian teenagers imprisoned by Israel were tortured.
The increasing extent of wildfires in California is making people in Idaho sick from the smoke.
A hacker of age 11 was able to crack a clone of a real US election system in 10 minutes.
Sulfoximine-based pesticides, proposed as a replacement for neonicotinoids, may hurt bees just as badly.
Surveillance technology for people to use on other people (their children, delivery couriers) pressures people to check each other, teaching people to accept surveillance and feel uncomfortable without it.
At the top of the pyramid of surveillance will be the rulers of your country.
Putin Urges Europe to Help Rebuild Syria so Refugees Can Return.
In principle, it seems like a good idea, but it is not clear that the fighting has stopped. Also, it is not clear that Syria under Assad's rule is safe for Sunnis.
It's Time to End America's War in Afghanistan.
The bullshitter is trying to make more Americans die on the job. His supreme court nominees may finish off American workers' lives.
The bullshitter's agents claim that, because gasoline is not expensive now, US cars might as well waste it.
US Supplied Bomb that Killed 40 Children on Yemen School Bus.
US deportation thugs arrested Joel Arrona–Lara as he was driving his wife to the hospital to give birth. They left her alone in the car.
It's not a good thing for anyone, citizen or not, to have five children. I mention that because there are people who think that those who have many children deserve special sympathy. I don't agree -- I think that this couple deserves the same sympathy as any other couple, children or no.
Facebook is resisting a US government demand to break the encryption of Facebook Messenger.
This particular act is good, but nowhere near enough to counteract the wrongs of Facebook's core activities.
Republicans are making a distorted attack on New York Governor Cuomo for admitting that the US has always had flaws.
By doing this they demonstrate their loyalty to the coverup of all problems that the US has — in other words, to keeping those problems uncorrected.
Cuomo is not a progressive; I support Cynthia Nixon. But the accusation now coming from the liar party is nonsense.
Companies that want to make cars without local human drivers are pressuring to blame pedestrians for getting in the cars' way.
The political danger of remote control of driverless cars, and the surveillance danger of they watch the people they pass by, makes for a danger of worse tyranny as well as collisions. We should either ban both remote control of and surveillance by these cars, or ban the cars.
"Putting a Bushie Neoconservative in charge of the Iran Action Group can fairly be seen as a signal that Pompeo wants to do to President Hassan Rouhani what Bush did to Saddam Hussein."
Congress passed a military spending law that more than doubles what the US spent at the end of the cold war, and authorizes support for atrocities in Yemen and Iran.
The US news media distracted the public from this by focusing on the irrelevant fact that the bullshitter didn't thank Senator McCain when signing it.
How about if US newsmedia start focusing on the government actions that really hurt people?
The intensive farming in the UK is wiping out wildlife. Saving it requires urgent action.
The ten years since the fiscal crisis demonstrate that Keynes is still right: deficit spending leads a country out of a crisis, while government budget cuts make it worse.
Why do today's economists so often refuse to recognize this? I think they are pandering to rich people that will profit from shock capitalism.
The full potential of budget-cutting disaster was visited on Greece, and Greeks will continue to be effectively serfs of the euro-banksters for decades more.
Facebook faces a US government complaint for racial discrimination in housing advertisements.
Three thugs in Georgia tased an old woman who had a knife, which she was using to cut dandelions.
Then they strained to charge her with crimes to fabricate a justification for their act of gratuitous violence, which could have killed her. Tasers can kill people of any age, but I'd expect someone 87 years old to be more vulnerable.
With the knife, she could potentially have hurt a thug, but she didn't threaten to attack. It is part of a thug's job to recognize the difference between a conceivable threat and an actual one; to disregard that difference is contempt for the public. The thug chief should be fired for trying to excuse that.
Phony scientific journals do more than give "scientists" a way to say that they have published papers. They also give companies a way to create "scientific" evidence for their products.
I suspect that Philip Morris and AstraZeneca can buy more prestige for the places they publish their marketing materials. Some pharma companies have been found ghostwriting articles for professionals to sign, and even setting up "journals" to publish articles to boost their products.
The only way to enable homeless people to have toilets to use and avoid harassment by thugs is to require businesses to allow non-customers to use toilets.
It is not only the homeless that will benefit from this. Every pedestrian will occasionally need to use a toilet. Sometimes I have found myself on the street with hands sticky from eating a fruit, and couldn't find a place I could wash them. The YMCA showed how committed it is to charity by refusing to let me use a sink.
The objections that businesses might have are selfish and callous, and not worth even considering.
I've advocated this for a long time.
It appears that US prostitutes fall into two different worlds: the ones who work voluntarily in fairly peaceful circumstances, and the ones who are coerced or enslaved and frequently face violence.
I wonder what keeps the two worlds separate. It seems to be a central question, perhaps related to what keeps the enslaved ones enslaved.
I also wonder why a paying customer used a gun to force a prostitute to have sex. That implies combining two roles that seem incompatible. One could rape anyone with a gun, but how does paying fit into that scenario — and why call it "buying" sex?
Trump uses the techniques of mafia bosses to intimidate.
"Reality TV" taught the public to accept unreality as real and blatant lies as truth, even as it taught the bullshitter to succeed through telling blatant lies.
Research found that men generally find females of age 18 the most attractive.
This accords with the view that Stendhal reported in France in the 1800s, that a woman's most beautiful years were from 16 to 20.
Although this attitude on men's part is normal, the author still wants to present it as wrong or perverted, and implicitly demands men somehow control their attraction to direct it elsewhere. Which is as absurd, and as potentially oppressive, as claiming that homosexuals should control their attraction and direct it towards to the other sex. Will men be pressured to undergo "age conversion therapy" intended to brainwash them to feel attracted mainly to women of their own age?
Senator Warren's proposal aims to make capitalism bearable again by undoing some of the changes of recent decades, that converted it into a monster.
It may not be enough to rein in plutocracy, but at least it is a good start.
Human children, age 7-9, are vulnerable to peer pressure from robots.
The robots are not disguised — the children know that they are robots.
A US auction for offshore oil drilling leases attracted less interest than expected. Only 1% of the leases offered were sold.
That's a good sign, but not enough to imply that we are on course already to avoid global disaster. We need to push hard, to reach that point.
The US government has disregarded the court order to reunite refugee minors with their parents. Over 560 minors are still waiting.
The article refers to them as "children", but it is generally bad to talk about teenagers that way.
Australia's planned law to require companies and individuals to help the state break encryption could be used to repress free encryption software and free software generally, around the world.
Australia is an inviting site for attacks on human rights because its constitution does not protect human rights, and these attacks can be extended to the whole world.
Ralph Nader: progressive politicians need to campaign for deeper changes to end plutocracy.
To give them credit, single-payer medical care is one such change which progressives have taken up.
Let's hope the spread of Democratic Socialism will lead to adoption of more of Nader's proposals.
(satire) …local man Derek Wilkinson told reporters Friday he worries his girlfriend, Katie Spencer, has started to become radicalized by a skin-care blog.
"If You're Poor or Disabled, the GOP Wants You to Die."
European countries are not alone in facing problems in bridges. There are 56,000 structurally deficient bridges in the US.
Mexican gangsters are kidnapping and killing elected officials.
PISSI no longer holds a territory, but it survives as an underground terrorist network.
Ironic turnabout: Disney is being sued by a greedy estate for applying the principle of fair use, and is publishing a defense of the principle.
The turnabout is that Disney is a notorious copyright bully.
Don't be distracted by supporting Disney or opposing Disney. We need to reduce the power of copyright, regardless of who is the copyright holder.
'Deeply Disturbing': For Second Time This Year, Facebook Suspends Left-Leaning TeleSUR English Without Explanation.
If there was a reason for this, Facebook should have told it the reason. The same, of course, for anyone whose channel is suspended. I would not be surprised if Telesur made exaggerated or even false statements for political motives, but Facebook doesn't suspend news media for that.
This possible indication of bias is another reason to criticize Facebook, but it would be totally disgusting anyway for other reasons.
Proposing that US news organizations intentionally work together to fully cover the Republican corruption of multiple areas of society.
Stores such as Walmart use contracted companies to pursue alleged shoplifters. They don't bother to check the facts before they start harassing and threatening to sue.
Companies and governments use contractors to evade responsibility and accountability, as well as to underpay or cheat workers. We need to limit the practice in a broad way.
US companies focus too much on short term results and current stock price. Would a switch to twice-a-year financial reporting improve matters?
I cannot know the answer, but I tend to think that it is not a good change: it won't be enough change to fix the short-termism, and it could result in companies' getting deeper into trouble before the public notices.
UK immigration authorities have taken over 20 years to decide on granting asylum to certain refugees. During that whole period, they could not work and lived in penury.
Nowadays they would also be required to pay for their medical treatment, which they could not possibly do. This could kill them.
Clearly, people waiting for a decision should not be left in penury in the meanwhile. However, why not simply grant asylum by default to anyone whose case takes several years to decide? The number of such cases must be small.
The admiral that was in charge of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden asked the bullshitter to withdraw his security clearance, in solidarity with other officials that have been or will be punished in this way.
That raid was apparently intended to kill bin Laden rather than to arrest and try him for his crimes. That was wrong.
Nonetheless, this gesture of solidarity is admirable.
(satire) Trump Locked Out Of White House After Accidentally Revoking Own Security Clearance.
1400 Google employees signed a letter calling on management to reconsider the censored search engine for China.
Condemn the bully for punishing his critics, but don't present John Brennan (former CIA head) as a hero.
"What if male identity, rather than racist ideology, is the most important reason why people join far-right groups?"
One piece of EPA sabotage — not implementing the safety rules for chemical plants — has been blocked by a court.
Kavanaugh took a strange position on network neutrality which included devaluing the public interest in freedom of speech.
US citizens: call for cancellation of US student loan debt.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The bullshitter's war on science is doing damage. "At several federal agencies and departments, scientists reported that political and capacity pressures are compromising their ability to protect public health and the environment."
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has dropped the goal of fighting discrimination.
The TSA systematically harasses Zainab Merchant every time she travels by air. Needless to say, they have never found any weapons or explosives on her, but they have faith that if they search her enough times, one will appear.
The US immigration thugs deported spouses of citizens by tricking them with phony "marital status interviews".
(satire) Elon Musk gave Saudi investors a presentation on a new autonomous adulterer-beheading machine he has invented.
Arguing that increased inequality in a society causes mental illness.
In China, apparently the state can easily decrypt an iMonster; thugs on the street have tools to do it.
Body scanning will be mandatory in the Los Angeles metro, but dishonest officials want to have it both ways: "The screening process is voluntary, Wiggins said, but customers who choose not be screened won't be able to ride on the subway."
If the scanners don't recognize and identify individuals, and if they don't use dangerous radiation such as X-rays, maybe they don't do much harm. But I presume someone will physically search passengers when the scanner "finds something". So the next question will be how many false positives there are, and what happens to those people.
Malaysia repealed its "fake news" censorship law.
Stacking stones on a beach can destroy ancient relics and birds' nests. It also denies people the chance to feel that a place is wild.
Saboteur of the Interior Zinke is holding up science grants to make sure they will not produce results inconvenient for mining and fossil fuel extraction.
Honduran thugs murdered 16 people after the election, but no one has been charged.
The election was rigged, too.
The small population of coelacanths could be driven extinct by oil wells to be drilled off South Africa's coast.
Since oil extraction is likely to wipe out half the species on Earth, there is no excuse for permitting new oil wells anywhere.
Cruelty and violence spread among Chicago thugs like a disease.
The TSA recognized secretly in 2013 that terrorists were not targeting airplanes in the US.
In other words, the supposed threat that supposedly justify unpleasantness that kills 500 Americans a year, and annoys millions, does not exist at all.
The TSA recognized this, but tried to keep it secret from the public.
The war-lover cancelled Obama's rules about when to use cyberwarfare methods.
The article assumes they will be used against Russia, but we can't assume this is limited to Russia. Maybe now they can be used against Greenpeace and the ACLU also.
A Pakistani woman moved to the UK to marry a man whose family then enslaved her. (I suspect the family was of Pakistani origin.) Later her husband told UK authorities to kick her out — and they tried to do so without asking for her side of the story.
It's clear they have been told to grasp every possible excuse to deport anyone or keep anyone out. To listen to the deportee's testimony would risk spoiling the opportunity.
The Chinese state demands that Uighurs outside China submit to surveillance and compels them by threatening to punish their relatives at home.
China is exporting the technology of total control to other countries, but that's not the only place they could get such technology. The US is also developing it.
It doesn't matter whether the system that tracks you on the street comes from China, or the US, or your own country. For the sake of freedom and democracy in your country, you need to get rid of the system.
The unlimited US support for Salafi Arabia and the UAE boosts al Qa'ida, involves the US in atrocities both localized and general, and advances the cause of tyranny world-wide. The US should stop this.
It pressures the US into war with Iran, a war for which there would be no moral justification or even national interest.
I suspect there is a monetary interest behind the US support for them. My main suspicion is that it involves oil and oil profits, although the US doesn't actually import much oil from the Middle East.
The pay of the CEOs of the biggest US companies was 312 times the pay of the companies' workers, last year.
Let's not say that the CEOs "earned" the amount they were paid. To judge whether they earned their pay is a different question and a complicated one.
Scientists warn of the danger that global heating could pass a tipping point leading to a stable "hothouse earth". They also say that we could still avoid this if we take act energetically to curb global heating.
We don't know where the tipping points are, so we had better do it fast!
[Florida Governor] Scott defunded the state agencies responsible for dealing with toxic algae blooms. Presto, a giant toxic algae bloom has arrived.
Israel seized Palestinians' land "for military use", then promptly handed it over to Israeli civilians to build a colony.
Peter Beinart, a US Jew, went to Israel with his family for relatives' religious ceremony. What he encountered was a wandering interrogation that desperately sought some reason to bar him entry.
Palestinian writer Lama Khater is being interrogated every day, chained to her chair.
(satire) Senate Republicans Promise There Will Be Plenty Of Time To Review Kavanaugh Writings When They Become Law Of Land.
Just as the US couldn't defeat the Vietnamese with deadly bombardment, Salafi Arabia and the US are unlikely to ever defeat the Houthis in Yemen. They should pull out.
After North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam, it made all of Vietnam into an abject, corrupt dictatorship — which it still is. Nonetheless, I have to agree that that was better than having an unending war between one dictatorship and another.
The banksters of the Royal Bank of Scotland joked about the suffering they would cause by making loans that homeowners would be bankrupted by.
Farmers in Niger are revitalizing degraded land with acacia trees that help crops planted near them, and provide fertilizer too.
Unfortunately, a disease is spreading that threatens them all.
Opt-out (enabled by default) organ donation might not increase availability if the state permits relatives to veto the donation.
The solution is obvious: stop catering to this deadly irrationality. Show the relatives the photos of some of the people who will receive the transplanted organs, and tell them, "We are going to save these people's lives with your relative's organs. Their lives are more important than details of burial."
In principle, there is no reason to allow people to veto use of their own organs. You don't need them after you are dead. But it is not irrational, in certain cases, for people to fear they will be killed for their organs — reportedly that has happened in China. And there is also the concern that the system might be too quick to declare you dead.
Most breakfast foods for children, made with oats in the US, contain possibly dangerous levels of Roundup.
Quaker Oats and Cheerios have substantial levels.
Between overpopulation, ineffective corrupt planning, and global heating, Delhi is running out of water. People occasionally fight over water. The groundwater could all be used up by 2020.
Many approaches could help things limp by for some more years, if they were carried out, but the only humane lasting solution is to drastically reduce births in India.
Several countries in western Europe have many bridges in bad condition.
It looks like these are the countries that expanded their highway networks in the 1960s because they were prosperous then.
It is an overreaction to condemn a word such as "colony" in all contexts, solely because in some places and times it was the name of an injustice.
Europeans are planning street protests against automated copyright censorship.
Everyone: tell Cambodia's ambassador that Cambodia should drop charges against housing rights defender Tap Vanny.
With JS disabled, the web site won't show you that you succeeded in submitting your message to the ambassador, but you should get an email confirming this.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on car companies to commit to meeting fuel efficiency standards even if the bullshitter's men officially cancel them.
If you sign, please spread the word!
In Turkey, men can get away with murdering trans women and gay men by saying the victim "insulted his manhood."
Salafi Arabia supposedly investigates when it bombs civilians in Yemen, but the investigation is usually a whitewash.
A Dutch court ruled that Pastafarianism is not a religion.
I agree with the court's decision. If your religion does not require you to wear some headgear essentially all the time, if you don't have to wear it while driving, then you don't have to wear it for your driver's license.
Telling the Truth About Defects in Technology Should Never, Ever, Ever Be Illegal. EVER.
The pro-fracking UK government wants the public not to know how much the public opposes fracking.
500 wildfires are burning in British Columbia.
There are so many fires because of global heating. It is getting worse over time. The Canadian government is trying to push through a pipeline that will accelerate that process.
This process will eventually become self-limiting as fires destroy the pipeline and shut it down.
Uber and Lyft are lobbying California's Democratic legislators to oppose a plan to give their "independent contractors" the rights of employees.
When companies are powerful enough to block justice for their employees, we cannot allow them to remain so powerful. But Uber and Lyft do wrong to their clients customers as well as to their workers, through surveillance systems. Let's get rid of them entirely!
Most US Democrats think favorably of socialism, but not capitalism.
Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive; they exist in a mix. What the US has today is a plutocratic form of capitalism which gives the rich the power to extinguish all the socialism, and that makes it unjust.
Under the anglo form of capitalism, which controls the US, Canada, Australia and UK, companies dominate the state so much that it lacks the power to stop companies from dragging civilization into the grave. China is more capable of this than the US is.
How Monsanto Plants Stories, Suppresses Science and Silences Dissent to Sell a Cancer-Linked Chemical.
Israel destroyed a large theater in Gaza. Israel's strategy in Gaza is to make people suffer, no matter how.
The Theater of Security Agency says that of the 5000 people it tailed through airports for no real reason, zero did anything potentially criminal. Sounds like the TSA has too much time and money on its hands.
Now that they have verified there is no real danger, how about ceasing this dangerous injustice?
Crackers found a way to break the security of an Amazon device and turn it into a listening device for them.
It was very difficult for them to do this. The job would be much easier for Amazon. And if some government such as China or the US told Amazon to do this, or cease to sell the product in that country, do you think Amazon would have the moral fiber to say no?
These crackers are probably hackers too, but please don't use "hacking" to mean "breaking security."
Everyone: call on California to tighten limits on thugs' use of deadly force.
"If the warming trend caused by greenhouse gas emissions continues, years like 2018 will be the norm in the 2040s, and would be classed as cold by the end of the century."
Medical specialists question the claim that US diplomats in Cuba were attacked with a "sonic weapon".
The five countries that surround the Caspian Sea made an agreement to manage it together.
It also includes an economic alliance among countries that feel threatened by US sanctions, whether for good reasons or bad reasons.
The EU's economics chief said, "Without European aid (sic), Greece would have collapsed and been in deep political and economic chaos for decades."
Instead, Greece has effectively collapsed and will be in economic chaos for decades.
Civilization faces many parallel crises of waste and overuse of the world's resources. The economic system based on wealth tends to produce crises.
A novelist begs for forgiveness for transgressing racial censorship while endorsing it as valid.
The core of the article is a thoughtful presentation of how writing about people different from yourself is difficult but necessary. You can easily mess up and make an ass of yourself, so doing it right requires great care. But this is no reason to forbid it.
The sad aspect is that the author ends up endorsing a system of racist censorship that would cement every writer, every person, into an ethnic pigeonhole of thought.
Our existing culture developed by appropriation. That's what culture is meant for. To allow any group to "own" stories, or roles, would subjugate the human spirit. You deserve the right to imitate any culture you can see. Please do not yield if anyone tries to take that away from you.
The real threat to culture today is not "cultural appropriation" by other people. It is the giant corporations that control so much of our culture now.
People in Niger protested the presence of Western armies and their drones. The government of Niger has all the leaders.
The US is always much better.
Matt Taibbi: Beware the Slippery Slope of Facebook Censorship.
I think the problem we must correct is the tendency for people to get their news via Facebook and Google.
ALEC has not gone away: it is pushing state laws to attack unions, and to promote gerrymandering, fossil fuels, and school privatization.
An immigration lawyer reports on how US immigration agents interrogated him repeatedly, simply to harass him. This is what they do to many others, but he knew for certain just what was illegal.
Bigot Stephen Miller condemns the US welcome to refugees that enabled his grandfather to move to the US and survive.
Be careful not to rush to attribute human emotions to animals.
The US economy is making so many Americans suffer that there is an opening for big improvements that would have been impossible before.
Heat now kills more Americans than floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters — but they are all part of the climate mayhem that global heating increases.
Hong Kong's puppet officials openly assert that no one should be allowed to speak in favor of independence from China, and tried to pressure the Foreign Correspondents’ Club to cancel a presentation.
This is China's repressive idea of "freedom of speech".
People are rebuking a parent for allowing a 10-year-old child to walk almost 3 blocks to school without direct parental supervision. Such infantilization is typical of the US today.
In many cultures, in the past, parents left children entirely to their own devices until puberty, except when giving them chores to do.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to stop funding the Department of Hostility and Sadism.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: support Barbara Lee for House Democratic Caucus Chair.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The EU plans to try to restrain planned obsolescence.
Bravo!
Ocean acidification appears to be harming oysters in Australia already.
Agricultural runoff has an effect locally, and we could reduce it by changing agricultural practices, However, CO2 in the air also contributes, and it will continue making worse acidification as long as we increase the CO2 in the air.
In a few more decades, there may not be any oysters, clams, mussels, snails, or coral, or the species whose larvae or juveniles depend on coral reefs.
Brazil's Lula Launches Presidential Bid from Jail as Thousands March in Support.
Senator Warren has proposed to reform the structure of large corporations in the US, giving representation to workers, customers and cities, and requiring them to consider other goals besides profit.
The average temperature of the ocean is rising, but not uniformly. Heat waves in the water are increasing, too.
This means that the danger to marine life is worse than would appear from the averages alone.
"Almost 900 cities, universities, and governments have divested over $6 trillion from the fossil fuel industry. Why not yours?"
The bridge that collapsed fatally in Genoa had been privatized. This may not be a coincidence.
Some techniques for keeping cities cool function by reflecting more light back into space, thus counteracting a little global heating.
In Sydney, you can tell the end of winter is only 5 weeks away because wildfires are burning.
(satire) Saudi Arabia Condemns Canada's Appalling Human Rights Record of Selling Arms to Saudi Arabia.
California faces an invasion of nutria that destroy wetlands.
I wonder whether neutered nutria (neutria?) could be useful in some areas for keeping down water hyacinth, kudzu, and other invasive plants.
"Adapting" to global heating is a red herring. "You don’t 'adapt' to a raging fire, do you? You have to stop it. And the first thing you need to do is stop pouring fuel on it."
With a wildfire, the first step is to contain it. That's where we are today in dealing with global heating. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The EU's carbon emissions trading price has risen to 18 euros per ton, which is enough to do a little good. It would need to reach 30 euros per ton to start doing the job it was intended for.
This illustrates the point that a carbon tax is more reliably effective than emissions trading.
In towns too small for a Walmart, Dollar General gets a tax break to come in and wipe out any local grocery stores. The result is a food desert.
To subsidize a profit-making business to operate in your town, whether it's a factory or a store or a sports team, converts businesses into parasites. In the long term, only dooH niboR benefits.
Publication control based on opinions and views affects many others aside from Alex Jones.
Please don't call publications "content", because that deprecates all publications. A clear term for what the article criticizes is "views-based censorship".
The Georgia special congressional election in 2017 might have been rigged digitally. There is no way to find out. That state's voting system is insecure and impossible to audit.
Orbán has shut down or taken over the Hungarian media that opposed him.
One year after the violent right-wing demonstration in Charlottesville, students protested against the inaction of the thugs, that let the right-wingers get away with violence.
We tend to assume that ankle monitors for people on parole or bail work as they ought to, but that is far from true. Their failures can get people jailed for no fault of their own. The person who has to wear one has to pay a lot and many people can't afford it.
Some people are allergic to them and get sick.
Many Dalits are compelled to clean out latrines by hand, because no other work is open to them.
An immigration prison chained teenage refugees to chairs and put bags over their heads. Some say they were also handcuffed and beaten.
Markeis McGlockton's killer has been charged with manslaughter after prosecutors concluded that Florida's "stand your ground" law did not cover him.
An AI system now excels at diagnosing many eye diseases.
I think this sort of AI system can do a lot of good, but hospitals have a duty to run local copies so as to avoid sending a copy of the data to any specific database.
US citizens: Call on the Senate to get and consider Kavanaugh's record from when he was working for Dubya.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone: Demand the release of journalist Manuel Duran Ortega.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Tax Havens Shielding Companies Responsible for Deforestation And Overfishing.
The UK is driving local governments into bankruptcy, the result being disastrous cuts in all their services, down to the legal minimum. On top of that comes privatization, which has the result of introducing uncontrollable corruption, so that real services don't reach the legal minimum.
Be careful not to set up a self-fulfilling prophecy of militarizing space in the short term.
Perhaps it is impossible to rule out that, in a future with space settlements, they would sometimes fight wars, with weapons we cannot anticipate. That does not imply space combat is inevitable in this century.
More British Troops Are Being Sent to Afghanistan, kowtowing to the bully.
If the UK becomes desperate for a trade treaty with the US, what would he demand then? His demands will not have to be limited to trade. He could demand 10,000 troops, or 50,000.
Want to Create More Jobs [and well-paid, too]? Reduce Fossil Fuel Use.
Even if not for this side effect, we would still need to do this to avoid global disaster.
What temperatures of 50C (122F) will do to urban life.
If you don't like it, fight to curb global heating!
Russian prison thugs are on trial in Russia for beating and injuring prisoners.
The peace talks between the US and the Taliban offer some hope.
Chicago's murder rate rose from 2013 to 2016, but since then it has fallen substantially. Surely more could be done in ethical ways to reduce it, but Chicagoans should not do anything rash or dangerous for that sake.
Puerto Rico's imposed nondemocratic government has imposed charter schools.
The Bizarre Spat with Canada Shows Mohammed bin Salman's True Colours.
The UK finally offered Palestinian author Nayrouz Qarmout a visa, at the last minute. But it is already too late: since she lives in Gaza, she cannot possibly get to Edinburgh in time for her speech.
Over 100 large wildfires are burning now in the US.
Large wildfires do substantial harm afterward, too.
Conversations with residents of the ghettos of Denmark, who face systematic official discrimination for living in areas where most people are poor.
This is a slightly indirect way of punishing people for being poor, and a little more indirectly, punishing them for being immigrants.
GEO Group, a private prison company, sent a lawsuit threat to try to intimidate a child that explained, on video, what the company is doing.
Aside from the specific injustices that the company carries out, the basic idea of privatizing prisons is systematic injustice.
As for whether these injustices are also illegal, that is a minor side issue. If they are not illegal, that's proof of the lobbying power of these companies.
Community schools are run by the local school board, but get an extra subsidy and make broad efforts to help students overcome their handicaps.
Community schools may be a real improvement over ordinary public schools even when the latter are well funded, but only time will tell. Any experimental change in education — supposing the students don't hate it — has a tendency to work better, for a while, simply because it is an experiment.
Kosovo now offers a pension to women who were raped as an act of war by Serb soldiers.
What made rape such an effective weapon in that war is the patriarchal attitude of Kosovan society, which regards women as (in effect) property and considers them worthless if they are not "chaste". Serbs raped them so that their own families would betray them.
If these women want to make themselves so strong that such betrayal can no longer weigh down their spirits, they could consider going to Rojava (in Syria) and joining the Kurdish Women's Protection Units. Their help may be needed there.
New York City has required "gig" platforms to pay workers a decent wage for the time they are on call.
It's not humanity in general that is causing global heating disaster. The plutocrats that have taken control of our planet are the culpable humans.
The concentration of many industries goes hand in hand with the concentration of wealth and the loss of democracy.
Nonviolent activists kayaking to protest oil pipeline construction in Louisiana were kidnaped by private security guards, then charged with felonies under a recently adopted law designed to give the planet-roasters total power.
A Tory proposal would try to end homelessness in England by spending roughly 13 million dollars a year over 10 years.
This is good in principle (though I wonder why the rest of the UK is not included), but it can't possibly do the job as long as the Tories continue pushing most people into poverty. That will generate new homeless people faster than they can get anyone out of homelessness.
Unless perhaps the "accommodation" intended for these people is a small cell.
Note that I am using the word "homeless" in the American sense. In UK terminology means something else.
The Department of Education, lead by DeVos, is systematically finding ways to increase discrimination and impoverish the poor.
A deranged man who is susceptible to any conspiracy theories has been charged with starting a large wildfire in California.
Qanon is not so much a conspiracy theory as an infection. It mutates faster than HIV, which makes the question of the validity of any of these almost irrelevant for susceptible hosts. Disprove one strain and they will fall prey to another, and another.
A campaign to privatize public schools named itself "Democrats for Education Reform", apparently to misrepresent the Democratic Party and turn people against it.
The Christian Taliban in the US impose biased restrictions on women wherever they get enough power to try it.
In Australia as in the US, semiprivate campaign messages targeted at specific groups have eliminated the "national conversation" about what is best for the country.
Perhaps we should tamp down the semiprivate campaign messages.
Dewayne Johnson has won his lawsuit against Bayer (formerly Monsanto), holding the company and specifically Roundup responsible for his cancer.
The evidence presented included Monsanto's secret attempts to corrupt science. That is an attack on truth, narrower in scope than what the bullshitter does, but no less evil.
If our government were not corrupted by large companies (of which Bayer is one), then Americans wouldn't need to sue anyone to get funds for their medical care because everyone would be covered. We wouldn't depend on lawsuits for harm to individuals to get pesticides properly regulated.
Romanians protested against government corruption; thugs attacked peaceful protesters who had their hands up. (Is that why they are called "riot" thugs?)
The next day the people held an even bigger protest.
Some engineers are refusing work for certain employers because of unethical activities of those employers.
Developing nonfree software is mistreating the users, too. That's something to boycott.
The ACM has a new ethics code, which on some issues seems good.
I note that the issue of developing weapons or military systems is not raised. Neither is the injustice of nonfree software.
What it says about privacy is comparable in its philosophy to the EU's GDPR. That is a step forward but won't prevent oppressive mass surveillance.
What it says about patents is absurd — to "respect" patents in general would mean screwing yourself; your lawyers would tell you it is foolish.
What it says about copyrights is vicious — sharing is part of being a good member of society, so if a legal requirement forbids sharing of copies of published works, that requirement is devoid of moral authority.
Socialist Bookshop Welcomes 'Uplifting' Response After Attack by Far Right.
Israeli Arabs and Jews rallied against Israel's apartheid law.
No other country is supporting Canada's rebuke to Salafi Arabia. They have all been corrupted by its money.
Organized international condemnation of tyranny has been broken.
We wish that the hate-monger's use on tape of the word "nigger" would make his supporters ashamed. However, his strategy is to lead his supporters into gradually increasing levels of hatred. He might use the proof of his explicit racism against blacks as an opportunity to lead his supporters into equally explicit racism.
Is it possible that the he and Manigault planned it that way?
There is no biological obstacle to women's equality.
There have been clear empirical demonstrations that women face considerable direct gender bias, as well as considerable unequal obstacles to their careers. Given these known explanations, we have no reason to presume they are any less capable than men.
Some Canadians demand stricter gun regulations following an increase in shootings. The rate is small compared with the US.
Dubai dropped charges against Ellie Holman, and allowed her to leave.
Aside from great stress, the experience cost her tens of thousands of dollars. Why take a crazy risk? Stay away!
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook — Serf Labor, Overpriced iPhones, and Wasted Burning Profits.
He doesn't mention subjugating the users with nonfree software, which is even worse.
Regulating Bots on Social Media Is Easier Said Than Done. For One Thing, Defining "Bot" Is Tricky.
Many US cities punish people for being frequent victims of crime. In general, this potentiates other forms of inequality, so the punishment typically affects poor people and members of suffering ethnic groups.
Business interests argue against a regulation requiring restaurants to list the allergens in each food product.
Usually the problems they cite are real, but exaggerated.
Every regulation that is implemented locally carries a risk of inducing businesses to move elsewhere. However, this is often much smaller than businesses claim. In some cases, we can and should avoid that problem by adopting the regulation for a broader region. But if the only possibility is to apply it locally, that may still be better than nothing.
Small exceptions can make a regulation much easier to obey. It would make sense to exempt specials that are offered for less than a week. I hope the regulation permits a restaurant to address the cross-contamination issue by saying, "this dish contains shrimp and may have traces of fish".
People dispute how best to protect a beach in Belgium from the early stages of global heating, but it only postpones the problem.
It also distracts people from the much bigger dangers that we will encounter if we don't curb global heating.
U.S. Is Complicit in Child Slaughter in Yemen.
A Year After Charlottesville, White Nationalist Views Creep into Politics.
When activists on the left exult about electing members of discriminated-against groups (typically women, Muslims, Latins, blacks, indigenous Americans), or call on the public to support a candidate for that reason, I am concerned lest this encourage whites to campaign to elect people because they are white. The more we legitimize that sort of reason, the more we clear the pathway of white nationalism. To defeat that, we must reject the idea of choosing candidates based on race.
I choose candidates to support because of what they stand for, not their origins.
As for the candidate's religion, I consider that as such unimportant except to the extent it is reflected in the candidate's position.
The more a candidate makes a fuss about religion, the more I worry that per views come from a church. Most churches hold some right-wing views that I would not want in a public official.
A French park has trained crows to collect litter. They are rewarded with food.
Crows are fairly clever. I wonder how soon one of them will find that the most convenient and reliable source of litter is a trash can.
Several Republican congresscritters are inculpated in apparently corrupt stock transactions in one Australian corporation.
In a sign of how strong the campaign for single-payer medical care has become, some giant companies are organizing to defeat the campaign.
They have moved from "then they laugh at you" to "then they fight you", which is an unavoidable step on the path to victory.
Plutocratist "centrist" Democrats are crying victory because some of the strong progressive candidates lost primaries this week. But even when they lost, their victorious opponents were usually somewhat progressive.
An Asian tick is now established in the US, which reproduces so vigorously that a mass of ticks can kill a sheep by draining all its blood.
Freezing weather kills most of them, but we are busy shredding that protection by heating up the Earth's atmosphere.
The US government is at last making a real effort to find the refugees whose children it took away. It has not succeeded with all of them, but only 26 of these children remain whose parents or relatives the US has no contact with.
This figure appears to pertain to the children alone, not including the teenagers.
Researchers Suggest We Could Tip into a Hothouse Earth.
When Temperatures Rise, So Do Crime Rates: evidence from South Africa.
Senator Nelson of Florida says that Russian crackers have got into the election systems of some Florida counties.
Rep. Nunes, a total lackey of the cheater, told his sponsors the plan to protect the cheater from prosecution: put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, then impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, to replace him with someone else that will fire Mueller.
The saboteur-in-chief wants to impose fracking on California's public lands.
Kris Kobach refused to recuse himself from the counting of an election in which he was one of the candidates.
There is no kind of corruption of which today's Republicans have any shame.
Captive Audience: How Florida's Prisons and DRM Made $11.3M Worth of Prisoners' Music Disappear.
This is a bigger crime than most of the prisoners are accused of.
But the new Jpay system is far worse than that. It is total greed. The Florida Department of Corrections and Jpay plan to squeeze money out of the prisoners, and divide it up.
Creeping school privatization has been a disaster in the UK. Also, in different ways, in the US.
We need to restore the formerly public schools to public control.
As workers of digital companies start to impose ethical demands, they are discovering their power. But how far will they demand ethical behavior?
They recognize the injustice of some unusual activities that serve tyranny, but can they recognize the injustice of their businesses' normal practice, such as proprietary software and collecting personal data?
A Danish woman accepted a complimentary glass of wine on an Emirates flight to Dubai. On account of this, she has been jailed there for a year awaiting trial.
"The federal government pays millions of contractors less than $15 an hour, and the Trump administration has further cut wages."
Indian prostitutes denounce a law that will punish them if they work in brothels. The law would presume they were trafficked (even if they were not), and sentence them to prison-like "rehabilitation".
The enforcement of the Endangered Species Act has been on slowdown for decades, with the result that many species that need protection don't get any.
Norway will prescribe heroin for addicts.
The wall of the "war on drugs" is cracking. May we soon get rid of it entirely, and treat drug addicts simply as patients.
Bangladesh is arresting students who participated in protests.
Governments can set policies that prevent non-rich people from being priced out of a place to live.
Over the long term, this requires arranging to build housing for the non-rich. Governments can do that, too, as long as they don't give priority to the wishes of the rich. In the US, we have been propagandized to forget that we used to do this.
An Iraqi beekeeper started a campaign that enabled Yazidi prisoners of PISSI, in particular women, to save other Yazidi prisoners of PISSI.
US citizens: call on the Democratic National Committee to reinstate in full the policy of rejecting fossil fuel contributions, which it just weakened.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Gina Haspel's personal reports to CIA headquarters show her commitment to torture.
The US deportation thugs were transporting imprisoned border-crossing women to meet their children, when the bus had an accident.
Such things happen, but the deportation thugs didn't want to be embarrassed by it, so they lied to cover it up.
Several women were injured, but they decided not to go to the hospital for fear of not seeing their children again. There was no rational reason it would have had this effect, but you can't count on thugs to be rational.
Betsy DeVos is dodging taxes on her yachts by registering them outside the US.
That shows whose side she's on — not her country's side. But she's adding injury to insult: trying to enable sleazy for-profit colleges keep the money that they took from Americans who thought they were paying for a real education.
The authors of the US Constitution made it clear that "emoluments" to officials included anything of value, and that the purpose of prohibiting officials including the president from receiving emoluments was to prevent them from being influenced or corrupted.
The number of Americans that live in cars or RVs is rapidly increasing. Even people with jobs can't afford any other place to live.
Why do cities pass laws against this? Because the city government works is controlled by the haves, and they don't want their pretty lives inconvenienced by have-nots.
This is why I oppose local political movements to keep density down. Keeping density down means kicking out the have-nots.
If we end plutocracy, the non-rich will get a bigger share of the nation's income. However, in cities that are too expensive, that may not be sufficient. We need to weaken zoning laws so as to build a lot more housing that is near public transportation, and we must not let the local haves stop it.
Americans overall are increasingly in debt. This is likely to exacerbate the next recession.
The figures may not count all the the really large debts of rich(?) Americans, such as the cheater. We don't know whether his net assets are in the positive millions or the negative millions.
Why is debt increasing while "the US economy is prospering"? Because that claim is based on measuring by totals (or per-capita figures, which over periods of a few years are equivalent to totals). The rich are gaining more millions than the non-rich are losing, so the totals increase.
The ethical measure of an economy is based on how well the not-rich and especially the poor are doing.
World-wide, extreme poverty has been reduced, but inequality has risen.
The UN is considering a measure to help poor countries make generic medicines to treat tuberculosis. The US is pressuring various countries so as to defeat the measure.
The fact that a former Obama advisor is helping that effort demonstrates what we could see at the time: Obama was more a supporter of plutocracy than an opponent of it.
A Russian exporter of asbestos thanked the poisoner for keeping asbestos legal in the US.
We can ban asbestos some day, if we fight asbestos we can.
Facebook bought a company apparently for the sake of learning its tricks to rope in high-school students as useds.
The right-wing candidate for president of Brazil showed himself to be an enemy of democracy by choosing as running mate a general that spoke in favor of a military coup.
There is a real danger that this candidate will win.
Younger MDs have won a victory for single-payer medical coverage by convincing the AMA to consider the idea.
Georgia's election systems are grossly insecure, both for the voter list and for the supposed list.
DEFCON will hold a contest for young crackers to break the security of imitations of real US state voting systems.
The Creeping Privatization of [US] Public Libraries.
The article calls the Koch brothers "libertarians", but their support for some kinds of human rights is a beard for their real cause: a laissez-faire, laissez-dévorer economy. They hate public libraries because they are public, and any public activity that helps people is what they call "socialism".
Please don't support their pretense: join me in calling them "antisocialists".
Communications satellites could be used to do various kinds of harm, if crackers break their security.
Judge Orders US to Bring Back Family Deported While Asylum Case Was Open.
I hope higher courts sustain this attempt to rein in the lawless bullying carried out by US thugs. One can't count on the right-wing justices to defend the legal rights of people (as opposed to businesses).
Some exiled members of the Venezuelan opposition endorse the recent assassination attempt. Others reject the accusation that they were involved.
Collecting your medical data (and other data about your life) and combining that into a "wellness score" would give companies an excuse to screw you.
The Democrats Must Do More Than Simply Oppose Donald Trump.
Puerto Rico has acknowledged that Hurricane Maria killed 1427 people there — not all immediately.
Shortly before elections, Mauritania has jailed an anti-slavery campaigner.
Hamas and Israel are back to fighting again.
Israel demonstrated conclusively that it will respond to nonviolent protest by shooting thousands of people. I find it hard to blame Palestinians for responding to arms with arms.
Hamas is an Islamist organization. That means it rejects fundamental human rights. But that does not justify refusing the permanent cease-fire that it has offered.
An opposition leader from Zimbabwe fled to Zambia for asylum. Zambia handed him back to Zimbabwe, defying an order from the Supreme Court.
The tyrant of Zimbabwe, after apparently stealing the election, is now sending soldiers to destroy the homes of opposition supporters.
The governor of Louisiana is formally a Democrat, but he is so right-wing that he works with ALEC.
Tribune abandoned its plan to merge with Sinclair.
Argentina's senate rejected legalization of abortion.
Argentines will campaign to reverse this defeat in the next election.
The US-backed intervention in Yemen by Salafi Arabia bombed a bus in Yemen whose passengers were children, killing over 40 of them.
Solar power with storage batteries is becoming cheap enough to replace natural gas — but planet roasters won't let that happen without a fight.
Let's fight! Let's destroy the planet-roaster companies — before they destroy us!
US citizens: call on Congress to block attempts to authorize discrimination against queer people.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: Support AT&T workers if they strike.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Cutting off Infowars without presenting a clear reason may fuel all its conspiracy theories.
Extreme weather has damaged the potato harvest in Belgium, making frites (known in the US as "French fried" potatoes) scarce.
As the dimensions of the coming global heating disaster sink in, some people despair, and fantasize about miraculous escapes to high ground in places that are fairly cold.
However, it is not too late to avert the worst of the disaster. If we put more effort into it, we can overcome the murderous billionaires. In the mean time, having no children will incrementally reduce the extent of the disaster. If we avoid enough births, the resulting smaller future population might have survivable troubles instead of a disaster.
The actions of the planet roasters amount to mass murder that is already starting. As a last resort, the victims-to-be could use bombs to destroy the murderous billionaires' prepared refuges. If those realize that they cannot expect to survive dooming the bulk of humanity to death, some might change sides and direct their power to averting global disaster.
Russian banks offered special deals to the main donor to the UK's election campaign to leave the EU.
Whether this legally counts as corruption on his part may depend on legal questions I don't understand. However, what he did qualifies in spirit as selling out his country.
The cheater wants to give banks another big tax cut by redefining "financial service industry" not to include banks.
(satire): Yemen has developed a drone-zapper tower to protect people from its infestation of drones.
(Serious) Drone Strikes on Yemen Don’t Make My Country Safer — Or Yours.
Ryanair is trying to bust unions in Europe, punishing workers in various ways.
I urge people to refuse to do business with that airline, which I like to call Cryin'air.
The UK's "hostile environment" for foreigners loused up the Edinburgh international book festival. Scotland's devolved government is complaining.
I should note that the US does this too, perhaps worse. So, recently, does Canada.
The crony-in-chief is still trying to keep money-losing coal power plants. He has another avenue to do it.
Plutocratists condemn government help to people in general, citing the "free market" as justifying suffering for the weak. But that's only because the victims are weak.
Fight for the Future has collected funds to post critical billboards in the districts of any California state legislators that try to undermine the state's planned network neutrality law.
A US court ordered the EPA to proceed with banning the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which it had determined to cause birth defects in children's brains.
Calling on President Moreno to protect the lives of indigenous people that oppose oil extraction in their land.
The US government in 1945 knew that Japan would soon surrender and therefore there was no military need to use nuclear weapons.
With such controversial a claims, it is always possible that it was fabricated. I don't think that is the case here. That article is followed by several others about issues including the damage done by Dirty Uranium in Iraq and felony charges against nonviolent protesters at a base storing uranium for nuclear weapons.
Some of these points I already know are valid.
Three of the cheater's cronies are unofficially commanding the Department of Veterans Affairs.
(satire) Shy Rep. Harold Olsen confided to reporters Wednesday that he often feels left out of all the illegal activities going on in Congress…
Immigrants in the US do not drain funds for medical care. On the contrary, they subsidize the rest of us.
Overcoming 'Decades of Corruption and Systemic Racism,' Reformer Wesley Bell Ousts Prosecutor Who Let Michael Brown's Killer Off the Hook.
Using buses and trains can be very difficult for a person with vision or mobility difficulties.
I speculate that the reason the staff are so unhelpful is cuts in staff due to either government "austerity" or privatized greed. When the staff are overloaded, they are also under pressure, and rush rather than paying attention with kindness.
Thus, this is one more of the many problems we can fix by taxing the rich fairly.
The scapegoater ordered denial of asylum to people fleeing gang violence and domestic violence. The ACLU is suing to block the order.
2/3 of the voters in Missouri voted to repeal the recently-inflicted Republican "right to work" law.
Americans over age 65 are filing for bankruptcy much more than they used to — three times the rate (per population) than in 1991.
I've read elsewhere that some are crushed by the loans for their children's college education, which they had to guarantee. The children couldn't pay these loans back, and in some cases the parents can't either.
13 congresscritters and 2 senators have been labeled as "worst for women" for opposing a broad range of women's rights.
Almost half of US Republicans want to give the president the power to shut down any publisher of news. Like Erdoğan.
The bullshitter would shut down any publisher that doesn't fake the news his way.
"At local level Conservatives can see the harm wrought by austerity, but that insight has not reached the party’s upper echelons."
None so blind has he who will not see — because his power is based on plutocrats that don't want him to see.
Use Our Loos Campaign Urges UK Firms to Open Toilets to Non-Customers.
I'd make it a law.
Even when interpreted carefully, Florida's "stand your ground" law encourages people to start a violent confrontation when they could have avoided it.
After someone apparently tried to assassinate President Maduro with a drone carrying some explosives, he is using this as an excuse to arrest leaders of the opposition.
We should not think of the opposition as supporting democracy or equal rights. The Venezuelan opposition is right-wing, and stands for plutocratic oligarchy. In 2002, the opposition worked with the US government to stage a coup against President Chavez, which was defeated by crowds of citizens.
Meanwhile, Maduro is a mad dictator who has basically sidelined the constitution that Chavez designed. He is on the side of his own oligarchy.
It is not out of the question that some in the opposition were involved in attempted assassination. But we can't trust Maduro to accuse them only based on real evidence.
The war-lover's sanctions against Iran violate a UN security council resolution which the US voted for three years ago.
Killed by dooH niboR: in the UK, an estimated 1 million more deaths expected by 2041 due to spending cuts needed to help the rich.
US citizens: call on Congress to give Puerto Rico debt relief.
If you sign, please spread the word!
West Virginia is allowing internet voting, which is nuts.
Adding injustice to idiocy, it requires voters to use a nonfree app.
French thugs attacked and intimidated charity workers that were distributing food to homeless migrants that want to go to the UK.
I wonder why they specifically desire to go to the UK.
Loans from China, like loans from the World Bank or the IMF, can turn into a terrible trap.
Some Puerto Ricans still have no electricity. The privatizing government is very slow to reconnect them.
Inhabitants distrust the water supply, although it might in fact be quite safe.
Spreading distrust in the state is a natural consequence of what right-wing wreckers do to the state.
Zimbabwe activists are hiding from state repression forces.
To protect the orcas in Puget Sound, we would need to increase the number of salmon and reduce the level of toxins they carry. And reduce the level of sea noise from boats.
Over time, the more humans we make, the less room there will be for other species to survive on Earth. I imagine Norma Sanchez's great grandchild asking per parents, "Why did you have me, knowing what disasters were likely to be waiting for me before I got to be 40?"
The Music Modernization Act would be dangerous if not fixed, even without the "CLASSICS Act" that has been tacked onto it.
The FCC's commenting system was overloaded by a flood of comments supporting network neutrality, and lost some of them. The FCC pretended that this problem was caused by a DoS attack, which people disbelieved at the time.
Now the FCC admits there was no DoS attack.
Accusations of theft and fraud against Wilbur Ross, Saboteur of Commerce, plus the fine that the SEC imposed, add up to 120 million dollars.
A big-time crook is just the sort of person the cheater wants in office.
(satire) the National Rifle Association told staff members Tuesday it has been forced to cut operational costs by shooting dozens of … redundant employees.
More Than 400,000 Tea Estate Workers in India Go on Strike over Pay.
Their wages are a tiny fraction of what we pay for tea. Surely the tea companies can handle an increase.
Wells Fargo says that a "glitch" was responsible for causing 400 debtors to lose their homes.
That could be the truth, but it's one detail of a system that has been shaped into something fundamentally designed by and for dooH niboR.
Spain and Portugal are suffering under unprecedented heat.
In December it won't be so hot, and the planet roasters will say, "It went away, don't worry about it."
A UK ministry says that the UK needs to be more ready to make deals with "elites" that have committed war crimes.
The UK has been quite ready to make deals with nasty regimes: Qadhafi, Salafi Arabia, the UAE, China, If it were any more ready, it would do this twice an hour.
Nicaragua's new anti-terrorism law reportedly can be applied to protesters too.
The article contains a link to the text of the law. It's hard work for me to read and understand text like that even in English. If someone can check this, I would be grateful.
Settle has given domestic workers rights. In most of the US, they are excluded from the rights other workers have.
France has made it a crime to "sexually harass" people on the street.
The most important question about such a law is where it will draw the line. Severe cases raise no moral issue — by all means, prohibit them. Violence and threats, including following someone persistently, ought to be punished.
It is when we look at cases that are less and less severe that a moral issue arises. Where does prohibition of speechcrime become repression? Where will the line be drawn?
We cannot have confidence in France to respect freedom of speech. European countries standardly infringe freedom of speech by prohibiting insults. In France, merely insulting an official is a crime, and people are really prosecuted for it. To an American, this is almost incredible.
Therefore, the most crucial point in drafting such laws is to specify clearly where the line is drawn.
Unfortunately, the article gives no concrete information about where the line is drawn. To the extent that it cites acts whose severity we can gauge, they rather severe. We get no information about how mild an act is now a crime. Is it a crime to say, "You are beautiful"? Is it a crime to say, "Please have coffee with me"?
Facebook deleted a real, honest antifascist event after finding out that Russian state agents were promoting it.
Russian state agents promote Nazi events and anti-Nazi events because they want to promote conflict in the US.
How the American Left Is Rediscovering Morality.
Right-wing morality looks for excuses not to care if the weak get crushed. Left-wing morality looks for ways to avoid crushing the weak.
Documents Expose Big Pharma's Scheme to Turn Democratic Candidates Against Medicare for All.
The right-wing used fake news to try to smear AMLO in Mexico, but it didn't convince people.
Elizabeth Warren: Democrats can be "party of white working class and Black Lives Matter."
The atmosphere's level of CO2 is the highest it has been in the 800,000 years recorded by ice cores.
If we had ice cores from before 800,000 years ago, we might observe that the CO2 was less than today for many years before that.
In the UK, at least thugs that brutally attack prisoners tend to get punished for it.
Protesters in Chicago demanded the resignation of the mayor and the thug chief on account of violence (including violence by thugs), corruption, and refusal to invest in the neighborhoods where marginal groups live.
Israel has sentenced Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour to prison which talks in general terms about resisting the occupation.
Meanwhile, Israelis regularly propose violence in concrete terms and are not prosecuted for it at all.
Israel is now explicitly an apartheid state and this is part of it.
Right-wing gunmen say they will infiltrate the counterprotest in Portland.
Given their propensity to cheating and lying, this is in effect a threat to take their guns out, shoot anti-fascists, then claim they were "defending themselves" from imaginary "threats". Then they will dare people to prove that was not true.
The Chinese government abruptly demolished Ai Weiwei's studio without notice. His art was still inside.
A judge rebuked the government for dragging its heels in reuniting kidnaped refugee minors with their parents, in particular for creating spurious obstacles, and for claiming that finding the parents is not its responsibility.
A year after right-wing extremists' demonstration of violent hate, Charlottesville is looking at how to change its systemic racism.
The UK's fire code enforcement is deeply incompetent. The government was warned in 2014 about how flammable construction materials were causing deadly fires, but regulators did nothing to stop that use. The large, deadly fire was the natural result.
The government has still not banned putting them into additional buildings. Meanwhile, the residents of condos in buildings which use the same dangerous materials are being ordered to replace them at their own expense — which would put many of them into penury.
Indonesia continues to stop foreign journalists from visiting West Papua. Former journalists are blacklisted.
This is because Indonesia has been colonizing Papua since conquering the territory in the 1960s, settling large numbers of Javanese there, and is trying to cover up the indigenous people's resistance. After Indonesia's experience with Dutch colonialism, it has not learned to think of colonialism as wrong.
Sad to say, the US also requires journalists to have a special visa. Foreigners that enter the US on a tourist visa are forbidden to report professionally from the US.
US citizens: call on the Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of the Department of Harshness and Sadism, to resign.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on OSHA to make regulations to protect workers from extreme heat.
The best way to do this in the long term is to curb global heating fast. Otherwise we will not be able to keep up with this problem as it gets ever worse.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Warning Kavanaugh Would Be 'Rubber Stamp' on Trump's Anti-Healthcare, Anti-[abortion] Agenda, Groups Announce Wave of Direct Actions.
The US poultry inspection system has been undermined by privatization, and now supervisors are pressuring inspectors to put speed above safety.
An initial court ruling says that the US Constitution's limits on "emoluments" for the president has a broad meaning, and that a lawsuit accusing the cheater of corruption for operating a hotel in Washington can go ahead.
Several internet redistribution companies have deleted Alex Jones's right-wing conspiracy theory broadcasts.
I don't think this deletion is much of a loss to the world. Many of his claims are bullshit, and some are dangerous bullshit.
A few do have some distorted relation to reality. Apple is censoring for China, and soon Google may join in. Some of the waste chemicals businesses and humans release into lakes and rivers do affect the sexual maturation of sea animals, making them physically abnormal: not merely "gay", but incapable of reproducing. If that hits a whole population, it will soon disappear.
However, occasional partial overlaps with the truth don't cancel out Jones's plenteous falsehoods.
What worries me is the censorship power that a few private companies have. They say that they are entitled to decide what not to publish on the grounds that they are private companies. They are not obliged to redistribute something merely because it is not illegal.
But it is dangerous that a few companies have so much power.
If each one were small, I'd stand up for each one's right to decide what not to publish. But each of these companies affects hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions. Their influence is so great that people and governments ask them, or try to pressure them, to censor certain things so that those things will not be available.
This is developing into a contradiction — a system of imposed censorship that legitimizes itself by pretending not to be one.
I don't believe that this censorship will be limited to right-wing extremists. Oil companies have lots of money to spend on marginalizing the sane voice of alarm. Billionaires have lots to spend on marginalizing the demand to restore democracy.
As plastic degrades, it releases greenhouse gases. Thus, when it is finished killing fish and birds directly, it can help wipe them out (along with human civilization).
When Jared Kushner owned the New York Observer, he personally deleted stories about his friends.
He had a right to do this, but it's disreputable as journalism.
Outside the US, the world recognizes that children are safe alone.
Amazon, Facebook and Google are pressuring US banks to give them personal data on the activities of bank customers.
So far, it seems the banks have refused. We cannot count on them to continue to refuse. This is one more reason to pay anonymously with cash.
The peace movement in Afghanistan points out that the "war against terror" has only increased terror and increased war. They need peace to cope with the global heating effects, such as the oases that are drying up.
The EU is pushing hard against the war-lover's sanctions against Iran.
Philippine President Do-dirty has threatened to kill corrupt cops.
I sympathize with condemnation of corrupt cops, but summary execution is never justice. Anyway, decriminalizing the drugs would put an end to this corruption and could result in a lot less drug use too. (That has worked in Portugal.)
Telecom Lobbyists Have Stalled 70 State-Level Bills That Would Protect Consumer Privacy.
ALEC Sets the Table for Gerrymandering, Union Busting, Protecting Fossil Fuels, and Privatizing Schools.
As homelessness (in the US sense — no place to live) increases in Britain, a pub refused to serve two homeless men to whom a kind person decided to give breakfast.
This is right-wing disgust-based morality at work.
Salafi Arabia went apeshit when Canada's ambassador talked about the human rights champions that Salafi Arabia has imprisoned. It expelled the ambassador, cut of air travel, and suspended some trade.
Then a government-connected organization threatened a terrorist attack against Canada.
That repressive regime is trying to intimidate all governments so that they don't dare criticize.
Largest Wildfire in California's History Expected to Burn for Rest of August.
Caribbean States Beg Trump to Grasp Climate Change Threat: "War Has Come to Us."
I think that producing dangerous levels of greenhouse gas should literally be considered an act of war against whatever parts of the world will be damaged.
In Meerut, People — Including Children — Were Arrested for Being Dalit. Literally!
Almost 600 minors taken away from refugees are still prisoners of the US government, and are in danger of being "permanently orphaned."
Three US agencies were negligent about keeping records about the families that they "deleted".
I suspect that a substantial fraction of these minors are children too young even to give the names and addresses of their parents.
Fueled by Pollution and Unsound Policies, Toxic Algae Overtake Florida Beaches.
Is it worth trying to fix this problem? If we will curb global heating rapidly, to avoid the inundation of most of Florida, then yes.
American Democracy Is in Crisis, And Not Just Because of Trump.
There are points in the US Constitution that could be improved based on practical experience. Alas, to hold a new constitutional convention would make things worse. Right-wingers want one, because they expect they could dominate it and eliminate protection for human rights.
(satire) Financial advisors recommend Americans spend one evening ripping apart … their homes each week in search of hidden cash, jewelry, or other valuables.
It's about as effective as anything else you can do, as long as rich rule.
The US and al-Qa'ida are both fighting the Houthis in Yemen. US allies are recruiting al-Qa'ida members and funding al-Qa'ida groups there.
This is especially ironic since the supposed reason the US is fighting in Yemen is to keep al-Qa'ida down.
Journalists, don't play into the hands of conspiracy trolls!
Angry Louisiana Cops Strangle Man to Death After He Asks to See His Arrest Warrant.
Global heating seems to be responsible for the 40% decrease in bird populations in the Mojave Desert.
US housing construction is skewed towards the rich. So much luxury housing has been built in recent years that rents are going down — for the rich only.
Many government programs work so well that people hardly notice them. When right-wingers try to wreck them — to create problems that would support their claim that "government activity can't benefit people" — the public don't realize what is at risk.
Anti-Semitic right-wing extremists attacked a leftist bookstore in London, and it is clearly the result of the right-wing extremism of the US and UK governments.
Don't blame climate mayhem on "human nature" and exculpate the people responsible.
Human nature includes many options. It doesn't force people to follow any one of them, so it is not an excuse.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Same Day Registration Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to join the Medicare for All caucus.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Congressional Democrats risk defeat if they don't support the progressive program of the Democratic base.
People in a large part of California and Oregon are suffering from mild cases of smoke inhalation. For old people, it can be fatal. For children and pregnant women, it can cause lasting damage.
The writer recognizes that this was caused by fossil fuel combustion and that his children will be paying the price for the rest of their lives. That will be true, one way or another, for everyone that is a child today. Not everywhere is getting arid — some are getting permanently drenched — but no place is safe from the violence that climate mayhem will cause.
Please do your bit to reduce the problem: have no more children.
Republicans are very firmly opposed to protecting November's US election from Russian interference.
I speculate that the reason they oppose it is that the bullshitter has threatened to attack them in the election if they resist his masters.
Amazon, and other multinational companies, should be required to publish a lot a more information about its income and accounts in each country.
"It's not illegal" is a valid excuse in court, but not in our judgment. Laws that encourage tax-dodging by the rich are the result of a tacit conspiracy that communicates through lobbying. The politicians that keep these laws in place are responsible, and so are the companies that lobby for them and profit from them. Morally, they are all culpable.
Thugs in the LA area are now forming violent gangs. And I don't mean the departments they work for or their unions.
Syrian refugees think they are protecting their daughters by forcing them into early marriage. For many of them, it means being raped. A significant number of them commit suicide to escape the trap.
Many US parents now want to track their children all the time, and expect them to call for help for any minor problem rather than learn by handling it themselves.
When I was 8 years old, I could hardly have got very lost in Manhattan; but if I had, I would simply have asked someone the way to a subway stop.
Janitors of some government agencies are going on strike in London.
The UK separates immigrant parents from their babies, hundreds of them per year, as part of its policy of intentional hostility.
The UK owes compensation to legal residents deported or threatened due to its error-prone and catch-22 immigration practices. It drags its feet to pressure them to sign gag agreements.
Nobel Peace Prize winners call on California Governor Brown to move California completely to renewable energy.
Women fear when men whistle at them because occasionally one of those men attacks them physically.
I can understand how this danger teaches women to react to whistling with fear. It is considerate not to whistle. It does not follow that whistling is wrong.
That a fraction of people that do A also do B, where B is wrong, does not imply that A is wrong. It would be unjust to criminalize whistling because of what a small fraction of whistling men go on to do.
I wonder, though: if we could end misogynist violence against women on the street, would women cease to feel frightened by whistling?
In classical music performance, conductors, orchestra directors and agents have so much power over musicians that they use it to get away with rape, and actions that come close to rape.
These incidents, the ones clearly described, are grossly wrong. Other incidents are described with the vague word "inappropriate", or "sexual assault" which is almost as broad. They might in fact be additional instances of rape, or something close. But "inappropriate" could also be used for minor matters. It is important not to be vague in this way.
US citizens: call on Congress to Protect Mueller's investigation.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
If you sign, please spread the word!
In 1978 the Move black liberation group was besieged by a gang of thugs, who eventually tried to shoot them all. One thug was killed — by another thug, since the Move members didn't shoot at all. In a perversion of justice, all the Move members there were sent to prison for life.
They can't ever have parole unless they express "remorse" for what they didn't do.
I don't know enough about the activities of Move to say whether I would support it. I have not heard the other accusations and criticisms against Move, so I cannot judge whether they committed some crime some time, or did things I would disagree with. I don't know whether there were grounds to arrest them in 1978, or in 1985. I have no opinion about those matters.
But it is clear that biggest injustice in the matter was the one done to them by the thugs.
Legalizing recreational marijuana in Oregon wiped out the medical marijuana dispensaries. The businesses don't cater to the sick people that need medical marijuana, and parts of the state which don't allow sales have nowhere for sick people to go.
It would be cheaper as well as kinder to resettle refugee families rather than imprison them.
The opposition in Zimbabwe, officially said to have been defeated in the election, says its supporters have been abducted and attacked.
"Why are employers allowed to police what we say as private citizens?"
"Consent" for anything in a love relationship can have a meaning far deeper than a binary "yes or no" decision.
I think this article is profound. I wish it did not have the blemish of the use of "they" for singular antecedents.
Loving each other does not imply automatic understanding of each other. It means a willingness to trust each other and care for each other. That doesn't substitute for learning about each other, but rather provides the base for such learning.
The Monarch butterfly is being driven to extinction, facing threats in both the US and Mexico. We need a treaty to protect migratory insects, like the one to protect migratory birds.
While various companies try to privatize Puerto Rico's public utilities, Coca Cola is buying up its coffee farms.
Safeway staff accused Erika Martin of theft because she gave something to a homeless man who was outside the store.
The members of Italy's Five Star party are getting fed up with the racism, scapegoating immigrants, of the right-wing League coalition partner.
The example of the bullshitter suggests that Salvini may have succeeded in unleashing racism and could end up with more votes in the next election. Allowing him into government may turn out to be a bad mistake.
A UN conference aims to set up an endangered species protection on the high seas.
The UK has made organ donation approved by default. People can still refuse to allow their organs to be donated, but they have to request this.
As an American, I had to give explicit permission for reuse of my organs when I die. I became aware of this when I got my driver's license, and I filled out a donor card eagerly. Please give permission for your remains to save lives.
The bullshitter set up a commission which claimed to have found evidence of voter fraud. Matt Dunlap, ex member of the commission, says that claim was a total fabrication.
While the commission operated, Dunlap was not allowed to see these documents. He had to sue to get them.
The NRA illegally offered insurance to gun owners, and was stopped; now it says the fines may wipe it out.
The NRA's main purpose is marketing for guns. The insurance was a political stunt, and I won't feel sorry it puts an end to the gun marketing campaign.
Various cities are considering requiring hotels to equip cleaning staff with silent alarm buttons in case guests attack them. Some of these laws also raise the minimum wage.
Sabotage at the SEC: it has dropped the federal investigation of Exxon for lying about the danger global heating. The cheater sees nothing as more admirable than fraud against the whole world.
New York State's investigation is continuing, so Exxon may eventually face justice.
Remember the correct pronunciation of the name "Exxon".
IBM in the US directly controlled its Polish subsidiary, which supplied punched card machines for German genocide, and received payment for them via Switzerland.
With mountaintop removal coal mining, you don't need to be a miner to be made sick by the dust from the mine.
Considering the toxic effects of burning coal, we ought to ban coal mining entirely.
China regularly imposes censorship on Chinese people living abroad by threatening their relatives in China.
Censorship now goes beyond politics — anything lewd or disorderly is now banned. Thus sexual repression joins political repression.
Sabotage of US wildlife refuges: permitting use of neonicotinoid pesticides and others (Roundup, etc.) in some of them.
Why we should ban corporations from buying back their stock. It was Reagan that legalized this, which should make anyone suspicious.
Some women in Nepal try to spot young women who are bring trafficked out to India.
Reading between the lines, I get the impression this traffic is rooted in a combination of naivety on the part of young women (isn't there an effort to teach them that these offers are probably phony?) combined with prudish prejudice on the part of parents. I suspect that some of them wanted to, in effect, sell their daughters into marriage, and those lose value as brides if they get a "bad" reputation.
These are the things that need to be changed to put a real crimp in trafficking.
Destigmatizing sex work in India would also help, as that stigma encourages and facilitates keeping prostitutes as slaves.
Stories about the few people rescued from poverty or deadly sickness
via surprising acts of personal charity
In effect, they suggest that the solution is to pray for a personal
miracle rather than organize to help everyone.
I am sure that GoFundMe requires nonfree Javascript code, so I would
never use that site. More importantly, I recognize it does more good
to donate to the progressive political campaigns to help everyone,
than to help one person at a time directly.
The miracle solution doesn't scale. If a million people pray for a
miracle, at most a few thousand are likely to get one. To help people
in general, we need to help them systematically. With Medicare for
All, you will get treatment for your illness. With paid family leave,
you won't need your coworkers to sacrifice their vacations. With
decent wages, you'll have savings and the failure of your car won't
make you walk to work. With more housing in cities and good public
transport, you won't need a car.
How the privatization of Sallie May
turned
it into a predatory lender, which has grown into the principal
source of student loans in the US, at high interest and impossible for
people to escape.
Borrowing to go to school in the US is a risky bet. Lots of Americans
lose the bet, and are saddled with debt for the rest of their lives.
"The Kochs
turned
the GOP into a crazy train, then left the keys where any idiot
could find them."
I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. What the bullshitter did
required total contempt for truth, practiced for a long time.
(Satire): Ivanka Trump complains that imprisoned refugee minors are
not given sewing machines so they can
work
for a sweatshop.
In parts of the UK
where
Tory dooH ninoR policies did the most harm, more people voted to
leave the EU.
23000
Nicaraguans have fled as refugees to Costa Rica.
Facebook
still
supports housing discrimination through its advertising.
40
Senate Democrats voted to spend $717 billion dollars on the US
military.
Want to Fight GOP Voter Suppression And Gerrymandering?
Elect
Democratic Secretaries of State?
The ACLU is suing because the US is
keeping
refugees in prison in inhumane conditions: cut off, lacking food
and medical care, and kept uninformed by giving them information only
in English.
Corbyn has focused closely on the
difference
between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, and on the need to
eliminate the former while ensuring the latter is permitted.
I am convinced that his critics are fudging the line between the two,
and exaggerating, and that it is part of the world-wide campaign to
smear criticism of Israel as "antisemitism".
In a
town
in Louisiana, prisoners of the thugs regularly get killed, and
justice is never done.
Baltimore proposes to amend its charter so that it can
never
privatize the water supply.
We should amend the US Constitution so that government services cannot
be privatized at all.
Right-wingers
take
old tweets out of context to create artificial pseudo-scandals for
anyone they think of as opposed to them.
ISTR I've seen other political camps act similarly.
We must make room for people to learn and change.
The repressor has
followed
the lead of Stalin and Mao in calling some Americans "enemies of
the people".
Australia's right wing government has
taken
the limits off destroying native forest. New South Wales is also
ruled by the right-wing, so there is nothing to hold it back there.
If this isn't stopped, koalas could have little habitat left.
How Russia
Persecutes
Its Dissidents Using U.S. Courts.
The bullshitter's actions are
driving
the US into a spiral of disruption that could leave it a ruin.
His bullshit is
making
the fraud of Springtime for Hitler into reality.
The Hindu bigotry that rules India is
crushing
contrary views in Indian universities.
Denialism consists of movements that feel triumph because they
continue to maintain an absurd contention and nobody can make them
stop.
It is threatened with replacement by
post-denialism,
in which a group of people spew all sorts of contradictory bullshit
and revel in the fact that they have the power to undermine systematic
efforts to determine the truth.
We need to recognize bullshitting groups and stop giving credence to
the bullshit, but that alone won't stop them from killing people
and occasionally paralyzing society.
The Zimbabwean opposition candidate claimed that the election was
"fraudulent and illegitimate",
once
riot thugs stopped interfering with his press conference.
Boston found that body cameras had a
small
but significant effect in reducing thugs' use of force against the
public.
China is now powerful enough to
support
tyrants around the world, just like the US.
US
citizens: call
on Saboteur of the Interior Zinke to resign.
If you sign, please spread the word!
In a fluctuating environment, natural selection
can maintain
genetic diversity.
Bahrain is killing imprisoned dissident Hassan Mushaima
by denying
him medical care.
Bahrain repressed
a campaign for democracy and human rights with the help of troops
from Salafi Arabia.
Government advice about drugs and health tends to
be perverted
by rigid morality which assumes using drugs is immoral.
There is a proposal that the reason total alcohol abstainers in middle
age tend statistically to show worse health than moderate drinkers is
that a substantial fraction of them are alcoholics on the wagon, who
would be suffering damage from their previous heavy drinking.
It would be interesting to study whether that is the case.
North Korea has
been hit
with a drought and heat wave that could result in crop failure and
then massive starvation.
Ironically, it is largely the US that is responsible for the global heating
that is largely responsible for heat waves and droughts today.
Why the French working class abandoned the Communist Party for
right-wing
extremism: it
wasn't about the philosophies the two stood for.
The World Bank supported a reserve to protect chimpanzees, a species
now endangered. It also proposes to support a
dam that
would flood the reserve.
The right-wing Italian government
has boosted
violent attacks against immigrants.
US spy agencies say that Russian
agents continue
to try to interfere in the US elections this year.
Rich Americans engage in some of the same attacks
(suppressing
voting
and pouring
in campaign funds).
Oleg Sentsov, a political prisoner that protested Russia's military
takeover of the Crimea,
has been
on hunger strike 82 days.
Amnesty International
was forbidden
to see Sentsov.
My
views on the takeover of the Crimea.
Chinese human rights defender Sun Wenguang
was arrested
in his home while doing a video interview.
"Think tanks" supposedly offer objective research as a service, but
nowadays the service most of them provide
is slanted
research and lobbying.
An Australian food delivery company was especially cruel to its staff,
making them compete for rewards and punishing the losers. But it has
been driven
out of business. Hooray!
Now make a law so that no company can do this.
Bacteria
Becoming
Resistant to Hospital Disinfectants, Warn Scientists.
The ruling party claimed victory in the Zimbabwe election, the
opposition claimed the election was stolen, and now soldiers are
shooting
at protesters on the streets.
There is some
evidence
that the election was stolen.
Google Is Still Planning a ‘Smart City’ in Toronto Despite
Major
Privacy Concerns.
When something is called "smart", understand "spy".
Australia
continues
denying crucial medical care to its prisoners on Manus Island.
One prisoner faces lifelong blindness from the denial of treatment.
Memphis thugs are
surveilling
and investigating Black Lives Matter activists.
These activists are no enemies of society — only of the racism
and injustice of thugs.
Some activists
demand
to impose every possible kind of discrimination on theater and
cinema, making each part the property of some specific group.
I understand that performers in some groups face discrimination which
is an obstacle to their careers. There are two ways to deal with
that: less discrimination or more discrimination.
The demand being made is to maximize discrimination in a world of
hundreds of crosscutting quotas. How many parts will be open to a
female-to-male transsexual of mixed Tibetan and Vietnamese ancestry?
None, I suppose.
To accept some discrimination as legitimate would poison the goal of
ending discrimination. We must not make that terrible mistake.
Therefore, I demand less discrimination, not more. If audiences can
accept seeing a caucasian play a character that was "Asian", as the
makers of Hellboy expect, then audiences can learn to accept seeing an
"Asian" actor portray a character that wasn't "Asian".
I put "Asian" in quotes because many disparate ethnic and racial
groups come from Asia.
After two years, Minnesota has dropped charges against
18
people who protested the killing of Philando Castile, who was shot
by a thug for
informing
the thug that he was carrying a licensed gun.
Perhaps the prosecutors decided that two years of ruining these
upstanding citizens' lives was enough.
I wonder what happened in the trial of seven other protesters,
and whether charges remain against others.
Specially prepared mosquitos wiped out dengue fever in an Australian
city. They
carried
bacteria that infected all the mosquitos of that species and
prevented them from being hosts for the dengue virus.
Indonesia sentenced a teenage girl to
prison
for having an abortion.
This is more galling because she was pregnant due to rape, but I don't
think we should assign any special importance to that. Women who want
an abortion should not be judged based on how they got pregnant.
Every pregnant woman is entitled to abortion rights.
The US is
making
a peace approach to the Taliban, hoping to defeat an offshoot of
PISSI in Afghanistan.
The dynamic among Islamist fanatics is that the most extreme ideology
tends to have the most attraction for those inclined towards
fanaticism. Even the Taliban and the US together might find it hard
to destroy PISSI.
Kavanaugh
loosened
rules on making complex loan derivatives, with the effect that
risky loans are mushrooming.
Santa Monica thugs confronted a black man in his home at gunpoint.
A
neighbor reported him as a "black robber" and a thug pulled out
his gun before even asking what was going on.
Mountaintop-removal coal mining is estimated to cause around
1000
extra deaths from lung diseases per year, as well as many birth
defects. This is in addition to permanent scars on the land.
The
witch
hunt against mothers that leave a child unwatched for even a
minute is due to fear that is demonstrably whipped up by a
propensity to disapprove of women. The more the disapproval, the more
the irrational fear.
The bullshitter has got very far by intimidating those who don't dare
publicly oppose him to make them obey. Now he is
trying
this on the Koch brothers.
This would be fun to watch, if we could be sure it would fail. But it
has
succeeded
in making many powerful politicians submissive. I hope it fails
now.
Many refugee minors, perhaps including children, report sexual abuse
by the thugs
that imprison them.
A court ordered prison thugs to stop
drugging
refugee minors in their prison.
Ryanair has been forced to recognize a few unions but it
still
plans to fight them to keep wages down.
We don't have to be easy prey for this.
US
citizens: call
on the TSA to shut down "quiet skies", the program of surveillance
of people chosen for nothing more than a "what if".
If you sign, please spread the word!
Fracking causes air pollution, said a study carried out for the UK
government. The
Tories kept
this secret for 3 years while changing policies so Britons could
not resist fracking.
The
EPA intends
to kill Obama's upgrade of car emissions regulations and intends
to cancel California's authorization to set stricter standards.
Italy's right-wing
government has
forgiven Egypt for the murder of Italian
student Giulio
Regeni and has arrested an Egyptian opposition politician that the
Egyptian government wants to imprison.
The UK has made it difficult for musicians to get visas to perform.
Sometimes
it holds
their passports for weeks before telling them no, and as a result
they can't apply for visas to perform in other countries.
Some are allowed in after their performances are over.
Some lose thousands of dollars they paid for tickets they couldn't use.
Israel attacked
a Gaza aid ship, beating up and tasing the activists.
Israel has no excuse for preventing boats with non-military aid
from sailing to Gaza.
Brazilian professor Debora Diniz is scheduled to testify in the
Supreme Court in a case that aims to legalize abortion. Anti-abortion
fanatics have demonstrated their commitment to preserving all human
life
by threatening
to kill her.
The US
will put
sanctions on two Turkish ministers for prosecuting an American
expat that runs a Christian church in Turkey.
This could give the US an opportunity to defend all the others —
dissidents, journalists, opposition politicians, and bystanders
— suffering
from repression
in Turkey.
UK women that were forced into marriage in other countries sometimes
ask the government not to allow their husbands into the
UK. Half
of these requests are denied.
It is a perverse exception to the usual UK practice of looking for any
excuse whatsoever to deny a visa.
A planet-roaster elected official called a young climate defense
campaigner
"naive". Here
is a response from a leading young climate defender.
I think the word "naive" is hardly adequate for that official.
I suspect that "cynical" and "corrupt" would fit him better.
The
BBC still
holds "debates" with denialists about whether global heating is
happening.
The UK government is controlled by planet-roasters; that's plain to
see as it prohibits all ways to resist fracking while making it easy
for any fringe group
to block
wind farms. I wonder if the government is somehow responsible for
the BBC's policy.
Salafi Arabia has arrested many human rights activists,
and some
are accused of "terrorism".
It is common practice to use laws supposedly intended for "terrorism"
against dissidents.
The US deportation thugs have now been ordered
to deport
spouses of military veterans.
The person cited in this example is being punished for a paper she was
tricked into signing many years ago. The deportation thugs
are still
doing that sort of thing now.
The TSA is
considering ending
security screening of passengers on flights in small "regional"
planes.
One of the criticisms cited in the article is mistaken — the TSA
says that passengers connecting from a small plane to a larger one
would be screened at the connection airport.
Given how inefficient the TSA is at finding weapons in passengers'
baggage — reportedly
it misses
most of them — I don't think this would put passengers in
much danger. A terrorist that wants to kill 60 people could do that
in a subway car.
President AMLO says he
will ban
fracking in Mexico.
Hooray! Let's hope we can do it in the US, too.
The UK's "hostile environment" has conscripted teachers, doctors,
landlords, even charities for the
homeless into
immigration enforcers.
The government replaced the word "hostile" with "compliant", to try to
duck the criticism. I see no reason to follow that right-wing act of
political correctness.
Pruitt's EPA Decisions
Should
Be Suspended Until Corruption Investigations Are Complete.
Brett Kavanaugh Would Put Trump
Above
the Law.
Senator Durbin: the saboteur of Homeland Sadism
should
resign for having taken 2700 border-crossers' kids away from their
parents.
Refugees are especially vulnerable denial of their rights by
government officials. US government legal aid
helps
them to exercise their rights.
Counterintuitively, it also saves the US money — imprisoning
refugees turns out to be expensive. But even that reason may not sway
officials whose goal is to demonize and scapegoat refugees, not merely
to brush them off.
Jersey and Guernsey, tax-haven islands that belong to the British
crown but are not part of the United Kingdom,
paid
a plutocratist think-tank to publish absurd trickle-down arguments
in favor of tax havens.
(satire) Cop Who Shot Unarmed Black Man
Let
Off With A Promotion.
The US government
issued
a whitewash as the environmental impact review about the Keystone
XL tar sands pipeline.
As pressure increases on the bullshitter for his crimes and tricks, he
might
do drastic things to escape, such as declare martial law or start
a war.
Perhaps this is his motive for preparing a war with Iran.
"Donor-advised funds" allow rich people to take tax deductions today
for "donations" that
won't
actually reach any charity for years or decades. Perhaps never.
A Democratic billionaire is
funding
a campaign to encourage young people to register and vote. It
says that impeachment of the bully is the biggest motivator.
Many workers in the UK
no
longer dare to call in sick; their work is precarious so they
could be fired for that.
Instead they go to work while sick. That risks making themselves
sicker and making other people sick.
The Republican Party has
morphed
into a cult; it shows all the crucial signs.
The advice about how to lead people out of a cult is something that
you could try to use with people that you have a long-term personal
relationship with. It is not applicable to acquaintances.
SCROTUS
want
to tax batteries for electric vehicles, and bicycle tires. This
is in the name of eliminating "free riders" on roads.
The same motive is cited for schemes to track all car travel
in places such as
Connecticut.
Supposedly it is unfair that the gas tax falls heavily on the cars
that burn fossil fuels and help to destroy civilization, and not at
all on electric cars whose electricity can be obtained from renewable
generation.
I wonder how much the Koch brothers paid legislators to advocate these
positions.
Some border-crossing parents say that the deportation thugs returned
their children, only to demand they agree to immediate deportation.
When they refused to waive their rights, the thugs
took
their children away again.
The bully hopes to order the IRS to change its rules to give
billionaires a
giant
tax cut on capital gains.
US
citizens: call
for the renegotiated NAFTA to eliminate ISDS, and add
environmental protection and wage standards.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on the US not to weaken undersea oil drilling safety rules.
If you file a comment, please spread the word!
(satire) Facebook Identifies Dozens Of Suspicious Accounts Seemingly
Enjoying
Time On Website.
Amazon is luring US local governments to become captive purchasers.
If they do, the city
will lose
out in a number of ways.
So will workers in the region, given the way
Amazon mistreats
them.
No one should buy from
Amazon.
For black Americans, having the thugs called on them based on silly
suspicions or intentional harassment is
a normal
part of life.
White adults have a certain tendency
to misperceive
black faces as expressing anger. This leads to unfairness in
school towards black students.
Flint's water supply is no longer especially toxic, but unsafe levels
of various toxic
metals can
be found across the US since the standards are too weak.
Meanwhile, many families in Flint have had their water shut off,
and they have been threatened with seizure of their homes.
Some government — probably a Middle Eastern Arab country —
is trying
to take over the smart phones of Amnesty International staff.
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity warn
the bullshitter that using bullshit intelligence as a basis for
attacking Iran could be disastrous.
(Satire) Sessions
Vows To Protect All Deeply Held Religious Bigotry.
Whistleblower
Reveals Google Plan to Launch Censored Search Engine in China.
Refusing to censor for China is one of few noteworthy admirable things
Google has done (making
a big contrast with
Apple).
Now it seems that Google intends to sink to Apple's level.
I think it is unacceptable that
Google obeys
French censorship
and British
censorship.
In Britain, drug dealers move into "vulnerable" people's homes
by first
helping them cope.
It occurs to me that cuts in all sorts of support for mental health
and for isolated, disabled and unemployed people may be responsible
for this.
Western countries providing humanitarian aid to Syria should not let
Russia or Assad control its distribution. Food and medical
supplies can
be used as a weapon.
Albuquerque's highly lucrative car seizure program has
been shut
down by a court.
Biometric Mirror gives people an opportunity to see how harmful
AI-based
suppositions and probabilistic inferences can be.
The bully has
threatened
Ajit Pai after the FCC enforced its rules and blocked the
Sinclair-Tribune merger.
Zoe Carew, age 7, asked a New Zealand official to change "Linemen" to
"Line Crew" on temporary road signs. So
he
did.
Seven-year-olds of New Zealand, please write to officials asking them
not to sign the TPP with
its I Sue Democratic States clause.
To execute those who fought for PISSI would glorify them as
martyrs.
No Bosses, No Managers: the Truth Behind the
"Flat
Hierarchy" Facade.
Four million people in Assam
face
having to prove that they are Indian citizens, or left stateless
and put into US-style immigration prisons.
When workers at Amazon are injured, Amazon
shafts
them.
The Government By the People Act is another bill that proposes to
replace campaign
funding by the rich.
The population of king penguins in their principal island home has
crashed
by 90%.
Scientists don't know why, but if global heating is not responsible
now, it is expected to hit them later.
Thousands of Nicaraguans are fleeing to Costa Rica to escape
repression
by Ortega's "security" forces.
Various expats' reports on the
clampdown
in Nicaragua.
Sooner or later the US will have
another
economic crisis. The causes of the last one are still mostly in
place.
The Dodd-Frank law was an
insufficient
measure to prevent another crisis, and
part
of it has been repealed.
Macron is being harmed by the scandal of his aide who dressed up as a
uniformed thug to help beat up a protester. But the worst scandal is
that
he's
a centrist — a plutocratist.
Alas, he has already done permanent damage to the rights of workers,
and to the interests of the non-rich.
The Koch brothers funded a think tank to publish a smear report
projecting that Medicare for All would cost 33 trillion dollars over
the next ten years. This is
a savings
of many trillions compared with what the current US system is
expected to cost — and it doesn't cover everyone.
The report mentioned this point at the end, where many reporters did
not notice it.
It also
disregarded 8
trillion in expected cost savings from simplifications in the
payment system under Medicare for All.
The UK worked with Bangladesh to defeat a plan to force a woman into
marriage. Her parents threatened to kill her if she didn't do as they
ordered.
Now they
are in prison.
It will be necessary to watch them carefully when they get out of prison.
They may try to kill her then.
Global heating will bring fatal weather to the North China plain
starting
in 2070.
Other parts of China may also be hit by this.
Canada is
suffering increasing
concentration of wealth, but it's nowhere near as bad as in the
US.
Facebook
has shut
down accounts of Russians that were buying political ads, accusing
them of "coordinated meddling" in the coming US election.
Palestinians in the
UK published
a statement condemning the attempt to label of criticism of Israel
as "antisemitism" as a violation of their supporters' human rights.
I've read a number of articles in the Guardian about the Labour
Party's refusal to label it so. It seems that there are, or have
been, real antisemites in the party, but that there is also an
organized campaign by supporters of the Israeli occupation/blockade of
Palestine to force the party to endorse that tactic of mislabeling.
Seattle
Judge Blocks
Release of Blueprints for 3D-Printed Guns.
I would rather that they not be available, but the censorship of
preventing that seems dangerous.
Australians Say No Thanks to Electronic Health Records, because the
system does
not respect their privacy.
The UK unified all forms of welfare support into a single monthly
payment. In cases of domestic violence or abuse,
this plays
into the abuser's hands.
Companies can no
longer use
Indian tribes as a shield against reevaluation of a US patent.
Two New Orleans thugs have been charged after making
an unprovoked
racist attack.
We need
to save
the Tongass National Forest from Republican axes so that it can
continue to do the crucial work that healthy forests do to protect
Earth's climate from us.
The more abortion is stigmatized, the more women tend
to suffer
mental and physical symptoms after an abortion.
An ancient Roman
library has
been discovered in Cologne, which may have been a public library.
Republican Congresscritter Rohrabacher is using thugs
to harass
voters that phone.
Egypt
has sentenced
80 protesters to death. They participated in a sit-in to protest
the military coup against President Morsi.
I recommend that everyone stay away from Egypt.
India has strictly regulated GMOs,
but regulations
are widely ignored.
I don't advocate a blanket ban on GMOs. Each genetically modified
variety is a separate issue, with its own advantages and
disadvantages. Some of them will be advantageous to use. However,
it is important to study each one.
However, those which will be grown in large quantities, for food or
fabric, must not spread patent pollution
that tramples
farmers' rights.
The citizens of Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania, organized
to prevent privatization of support for just-released prisoners
that is intended to help them reintegrate into society.
The intention of the companies that take over any sort of public
service is to divert some of the funds into profit. Since that means
less money for actually doing the job, the company must (1) pay the
staff a pittance and (2) skimp on the job.
Government activities should never be contracted out to companies
if the amount of work is enough to occupy several full-time staff.
The Fix
Democracy Now campaign is aimed at ending the schemes used to
suppress democracy in the US.
JPay tablets are provided gratis to prisoners in New York State. Then
they gouge
the prisoners and their families.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to block Kavanaugh's anti-environmental agenda.
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter to cosponsor the Violence Against Women
Reauthorization Act.
Everyone:
call on
UPS to quit ALEC.
As California wildfires become bigger, faster-moving and much more
frequent,
firefighters
worry that fighting one fire after another will make them
exhausted so that mistakes will kill them.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
tell the legislature not to give control
over public space permanently to businesses.
Soon the damage caused by global heating will be so great that
even
fossil fuel companies will be unable to escape.
Aside from the lies about Saddam Hussein,
other
lies were used to get the US to conquer Iraq and spread misery
there. Lies like, "This war will be quick, easy, cheap, and painless,
and Iraqis will thank us."
Rand Paul
yielded
and will support Kavanaugh.
So, probably, will Manchin.
What a shame that Manchin, Donnelly and Heitkamp were not replaced in
primaries. They are only a little better than Republicans, but they
block all chance of electing senators that won't be like Republicans.
WHO mismanaged the large Ebola outbreak of 2014 and
failed
to make reforms afterward.
The availability of a vaccine has made it
a
lot easier to control an Ebola outbreak now than it was in 2014,
but WHO should nonetheless learn to do a good job.
Why Americans
Need
to Defend Julian Assange's Freedom.
The overall issue is vitally important, far more important than
which side Wikileaks' publications have served.
Extreme weather may
drive
up the price of food in the UK.
In a few decades, we
may
not be able to grow wheat in the US.
America Spends
Over
$20bn per Year on Fossil Fuel Subsidies. Abolish them!
An appeal to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to break off
ties
with murderous Hindu fanatics.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is less of a celebrity now that he no longer faces
execution, but he
remains
an activist.
It seems likely he shot and killed the Philadelphia thug, as accused.
I have no idea, based on the known facts, whether that killing was
justifiable or not. But if his trial was full of evident injustices,
he deserves a new trial.
Parents are leading the fight to block the UK's forced conversion of
their local public school into an
unaccountable
publicly paid private schools.
The TSA has put some passengers on a list of suspects, because of
actions that
vaguely
suggest a remote possibility they might be involved in something,
then has air marshals to follow them and take notes on them, in
airports and in flight.
In effect, the Theater of Security Agency is performing security
theater with only itself as an audience.
Does this suggest to you that the TSA is getting more money than it
can put to any good use?
The Tories' voter suppression plan is
facing
opposition.
"National
identity is fake. We should focus on the wider common good."
I think "artificial" is a more apt word than "fake", It is good to
encourage fellow-feeling with the people of your country, but not to
the point that it interferes with fellow-feeling with everyone else.
The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner would become
even
more harmful due to the absence of network neutrality.
The US should do what some other countries have done: require whoever
owns the cable to a customer's home to rent its use to any ISP. This
way we could have many competing ISPs.
A publicly-owned drug manufacturer
would
be a good idea for the US.
However, that alone will not do enough to push down gouging drug
prices. The US should do what other countries do: negotiate with drug
companies on behalf of all patients to set a lower price.
But that alone is not enough either. When a drug's manufacturer funds
the studies of the effects of the drug, it
corrupts
the study. The government should fund these studies, taking the
drug company out of the equation entirely.
This will eliminate one of the arguments that the drug companies use
to give an appearance of justifying charging such high prices.
New Zealand is replacing a supermax prison with a humane prison
designed to provide a sort of
therapy
for mentally ill violent criminals.
23andMe will
sell
the DNA data of its customers to GlaxoSmithKline.
If this is useful for medical research, it should not be a monopoly of
one company.
The results of DNA testing should be returned to the subject, then
deleted. If the subject wants to make them available for research,
perse can send them. If perse does send them, they should be
available to all researchers.
A bill, the Kelsey Smith Act, tries to do something well-meaning (make
mobile phone networks report the location of a phone when thugs say
the owner needs help), but it
has
nothing to protect against mistakes or lies by the thugs.
The bully's persistent attacks on the press lead some in the press to
fear
that they will encourage physical attacks by his supporters.
Illegal cutting of forests is
rife
in Papua New Guinea, and the level of corruption is such that
logging permits are not a sufficient basis to judge whether timber was
cut legally.
Strippers
criticize
the laws that restrict strip clubs.
The US is the most dangerous country in the developed world for giving
birth to a child.
50,000
women are injured every year, and half of those injuries could be
avoided by proper care.
All it would take is some money.
The National Defense Authorization Act explicitly says it
doesn't
authorize war with Iran.
Skepticism After US Government Says It's "On Track" to Reunite
2,551
[refugee families].
The government does not keep parents and lawyers informed when it moves
these prisoners around. That is standard practice with prisoners of the US
government, and it is never excusable.
The US may keep some refugee children away from their parents
for
years.
In some cases this will be "for their protection." The sadism
agencies are using all possible creativity to make excuses to
"protect" children by causing them suffering. They might even allow
the children as permanent immigrants to keep them away from their
families.
Or, even worse, they might allow those children to stay until age 18,
growing up knowing only the US, and then deport them to a country they
hardly remember.
Several insightful comments about
drawing
the line for the boundary of antisemitism.
A Palestinian teenager in the West Bank attacked Israeli colonists
with a knife, killing one. Israelis shot him dead, as is their usual
practice. Then they punished his relatives, also usual practice, but
they didn't feel that was enough. So the next punishment will be to
build
another illegal colony, taking more land from the Palestinians.
Israel had, and has, no right to settle its citizens in the land it
conquered in 1967.
The National Butterfly Center wildlife preserve will be
effectively
ruined by the bullshitter's border wall. So will the property of
many other landowners.
Eminent domain is acceptable as a practice as long as the government
properly compensates the people whose land is taken. For the
government to seek excuses not to compensate them makes the practice
inexcusable.
A map now lists 250 massacres of Australian indigenous people. Many
of them were committed with the
help
or connivance of Australian uniformed thugs.
Medicine hackers
distribute
instructions for manufacturing medicines to avoid the intolerable
prices of the US pharma industry.
Public and legal pressure made the UK government reconsider the plan
to hand over two PISSI fighters to the US
for
possible execution.
The plan is illegal; the UK government is not allowed to cooperate
with the death penalty under any circumstances whatsoever.
The two extremists in question may be guilty of multiple murders, and
that would deserve punishment — but not the death penalty. Even
the bully does not deserve the death penalty.
A right-wing extremist Italian politician
wants
to harass same-sex couples that have arranged surrogate gestation
in order to have a child.
The proposal is motivated by bigotry against same-sex couples, and
such bigotry deserves condemnation. It is excessively cruel, probably
because right-wing extremism uses cruelty to recruit support.
However, I disapprove of surrogate gestation, along with all extreme
measures for producing offspring, regardless of the sex of the
would-be parents. Such measures normalize the natalist position that
having children is tremendously important. The pressure for people to
have children is one of the causes of possible coming global disaster.
We should discourage all the extreme measures, though not with the
cruelty that right-wing extremists would use.
If you feel you simply must have a child, adopt one! Instead of
making another child, you can give parents to an already-existnt child
that needs them.
The UK has
legalized
medicines made from marijuana.
Connecticut
threatens
to track all cars' movements and charge a toll on that basis.
What's worse is that the ACLU is legitimizing the scheme by proposing
only to regulate the use of the data. That "solution" would last only
until the state finds an opportunity to relax the regulation. On the
issue of massive surveillance, it is tantamount to surrender.
A real solution would be to collect money some other way. One obvious
way is checking cars' total mileage from time to time, perhaps once a
month or once a year. This is not ideal, but comes pretty close: it
would avoid nearly all the data collection in the currently proposed
scheme.
Australia
found
a convenient excuse not to reexamine the asylum case of a Sri
Lankan Tamil man, even though his whole family has been shot or
disappeared.
Saboteur DeVos
delayed
Obama's rules that would have enabled students to get out of their
debts for studying at "colleges" that cheated them. Now she wants to
modify those rules so they would avoid achieving the goals.
This is an example of plutocratist rule: it encourages schemes to push
poor people into debt, then gives priority to the bankster creditors.
Antiabortionists are trying a new legal pathway:
state
laws saying that frozen embryos have an interest in being
gestated.
Given society's tremendous interest in not increasing the human
population, I think it would be wise to adopt laws that discourage
implanting frozen embryos.
Another sleazy tactic is to make women, before an abortion, choose how
to
"bury"
the fetus.
Gwyneth Paltrow started a magazine to publish about "alternative
medicine", but it didn't take off because the publisher insisted on
fact-checking
the medical claims.
Most "alternative medicine" has not been scientifically tested. Once
in a while, by chance, an alternative "treatment" is effective.
Mostly they aren't.
For a period of time, Flint's water supply
infected
people with legionaire's disease. 12 deaths have been attributed
to this, but a study suggests a few dozen other deaths might have been
due to the same cause.
This is aside from the lead poisoning that damaged the brains of
thousands of children in Flint due to the bad water supply.
Both problems were the consequence of the Republicans'
imposition
of a nondemocratic government on Flint.
The bullshitter
had
a specific reporter banned from a press event for trying to ask
embarrassing questions at a previous event.
Only
13%
of the ocean's area remains mostly wild and unaltered by human
activities.
Progressive senators have introduced a bill to allow US territories to
escape
from debt after a natural disaster. This would enable Puerto Rico
to escape from the vultures that are trying to convert the territory's
infrastructure into their property.
The cheater's business history is
full
of signs that lead one to suspect money laundering.
Thugs planned an operation specifically to arrest Stormy Daniels, then
lied
about it.
US
citizens: Endorse
the People's Budget.
For
a little more information on it.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: support
the No Money Bail Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
states purged
16 million voters from voting lists between 2014 and 2016. That
was more than in the previous election cycle.
Antiabortionists in Chile are accused
of stabbing
three women in a march for abortion rights.
Nobody could really love fetuses the way they claim to do. The reason
for opposition to abortion rights is hostility toward women.
Almost
80% of US Workers Live from Paycheck to Paycheck.
As the article explains, US workers mostly have no bargaining power,
and many sectors of the economy lack competition.
A factor that the article doesn't mention is that concentration of
industry means there
is less
competition for hiring workers.
A major change in modern news media: opinion has become more valued
and
facts less so.
Cambodian tyrant Hun
Sen won
a smashing election victory after totally smashing the opposition
and the press.
Hottest Four Years
Ever? 2015. 2016. 2017. 2018?
Our Scorched Earth Needs Voters
to Put
More Heat on Their Politicians.
Wheeler, the acting administrator of the EPA, revoked Pruitt's last
act of sabotage — which permitted the construction of heavily
polluting trucks installing old engines. A court blocked the order,
and instead of challenging
it, Wheeler
cancelled it.
However, he does violate ethics rules,
by meeting
with his previous polluter clients.
Perhaps Wheeler prefers to concentrate on a few especially destructive
forms of sabotage, rather than inefficient scattershot sabotage.
Equifax got
away without any penalty after carelessly allowing crackers to get
data on around 150 million Americans.
10,000 unionized Disneyland
workers have
won a big raise. 20,000 more non-organized and badly paid
Disneyland workers depend on a ballot measure to increase the minimum
wage (for certain businesses only).
"You can't eat GDP." The US economy appears to be very successful, if
you measure it by this incorrect measure.
Meanwhile, most
people's income is going down.
It's nothing new that the
GDP does
not measure what matters about an economy,
but having an example where the GDP rises and most people's lives actually
get worse is a clearer demonstration of this.
As part of the US-backed intervention in Yemen, the UAE operates a
secret police unit
that kills
and tortures Yemeni civilians.
Elin Ersson prevented Sweden from deporting someone to Afghanistan
by refusing
to sit down on the flight.
US
citizens: call
on the Senate to reject the CLASSICS act which would make a large
extension of copyright on musical recordings.
If you send an email, please spread the word!
US
citizens: Phone
your senators to oppose funding the Department of Homeland Sadism.
If you phone, please spread the word!
A
report claims that the opposition in Nicaragua is responsible for
the violence.
Is it true, or is it fake news?
Non-trafficked independent sex workers are trying
to convince
Congress to repeal FOSTA.
Egypt can
now use
"fake news" as an excuse to put journalists in prison.
Criticizing
CLASSICS, a bill to retroactively increase copyright old musical
recordings.
I worry about the other bill that this was attached to, MMV. I don't
know any details about it, but any plan to "compensate" publishers is
likely to
be bad
for the public.
Bernie
Sanders introduced
a bill to end cash bail at the federal level and pressure states
to end it too.
Fines issued by 11 federal agencies to businesses dropped greatly
after the cheater put saboteurs in charge. In the
EPA they
dropped 94%.
A
campaign to smear sharing by calling it "piracy" and saying that
it loads malware.
Condemn Communists’ Cruelties, But
Capitalism Has
Its Own Terrible Record.
Let's not equate socialism with communism. I think we can do without
communism, but we need socialism. Capitalism implies competition,
with winners and losers. We need some socialism to go with the
capitalism, so that losing the capitalist competition is not a
personal disaster.
Colombian journalists are receiving death threats from paramilitaries
and believe that newly elected President
Duque is
encouraging them.
US states ban anyone with a past criminal conviction
from working
in certain jobs — such as cosmetologist, plumber, massage
therapist, and dietitian.
In addition to denying criminals the possibility of going straight, these rules
can also ruin the life of people prosecuted for protesting.
No part of the US
is safe
from voter purges, used to disenfranchise marginalized people.
How
right-wingers use exaggeration to give the idea that they are
threatened with censorship.
US
citizens: urge
the Senate to insist on getting all of Kavanaugh's records before
considering his nomination.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on your congresscritter and senators to oppose war with Iran.
If you send a letter, please spread the word!
The US economy is booming, but it's based on pushing poor
Americans deeper
into debt.
The US and
allies have
accepted responsibility for killing many civilians in Raqqa.
Ride-pooling services tend
to increase
street traffic: they take business away from the more efficient
buses and trains.
That's while tracking their passengers, which should be illegal.
The military spending bill threatens to impoverish non-rich Americans
by too
much military spending (and the rich won't pay their share of it).
"Centrist" right-wing Democrats intentionally plan to focus on the
bullshitter's collaboration with
Putin rather
than his collaboration with planet-roasters and the billionaires
that make most Americans poor.
The bullshitter's "Christian" supporters are more interested
in imposing
Christian theocracy than in practicing Christianity.
Phony abortion counseling organizations are set up
to lure
and trap women into having babies which they could have avoided
with an abortion. They also collect personal data about the women,
which they use to harass them later.
The usual figures for the ratio of CEO income to workers' income are
an underestimate — they don't count the
CEOs' enormous
income from rising stocks.
Methane is leaking out of the ground in the Russian
Arctic. 200
methane-loaded lakes have recently come into existence.
After the fires near
Athens, the
political ashes fall.
It is incorrect to call these fires "Greece’s worst disaster in modern
times". The economic occupation of Greece by the euro-banksters has
surely caused far more
harm, both
economically and in human lives.
Large wildfires are burning up
California before
the usual start of the fire season.
In 20 years there will be much worse fires, but eventually most of the
state's forests will be gone.
Michael Mann: extreme weather is "the face of climate change"; the
long-predicted effects of global heating
are "playing
out in real-time".
Right-wing extremists use Facebook to
whip
up hate against the families of people killed in massacres committed
by right-wingers.
The new Ebola vaccine
swiftly
ended the latest Congo outbreak. Medics vaccinated the people in
danger of getting exposed from the current victims.
"Conservatives"
claim
to stand for conserving something, but that is bogus.
The bushfire season in parts of Australia starts in August —
in
winter.
Treating violence as a disease, and blocking its spread where there
is an outbreak, has proved
effective
in various cities for reducing violence.
"Hypocritical Clergymen"- How the
Trump-Pompeo
Slam of Iran Backfires.
The bully seems to be trying to move the world from a system of
(incomplete) US hegemony to a system of
three
roughly comparable superpowers.
This can have some good effects. US hegemony, when challenged, has
led to a proliferation of wars. A triangular system might provide a
way out of some of them. At the same time, it could start other wars.
Parents have to pay
8
dollars a minute to talk with their offspring that were taken away
by the US deportation thugs.
I suspect that this fee is imposed not by the deportation thug agency
itself but rather by the privatized prisons that the agency uses. In
other words, the agency is privileging a few companies to shaft these
parents rather than shafting them itself.
This indirectly does not morally absolve the agency of responsibility,
but does provides a convenient shield for evading that responsibility.
Privatization of a state activity is wrong in general for
several
reasons, and one is that it systematically tends to lead to
unaccountability.
This is one of many examples.
California's renewable electricity program has been
attacked
in a way that seems fallacious to me.
Landfills and sewage treatment plants are needed in any case, and they
produce methane day in and day out. I think that this methane
qualifies as renewable.
As long as factory farms exist, the same is true of them. You may
wish to abolish factory farms, but as long as they exist, it is good
to burn their methane for electricity. That is better than dumping it
into the air (it is a powerful greenhouse gas) even if we use
solar or wind power to make the electricity.
If someday conditions for farms are reformed, collecting and burning
their methane waste would still be a good thing, if it is still
feasible.
Likewise for paper mills. It could be good to improve them to
generate less waste, if that is possible, but until that time we
should burn the methane rather than let it into the air.
(satire): a new supermax "detention center" will
imprison
the most hardened toddlers.
Someone
went
to the trouble of packaging nerve gas in a perfume spray bottle and
sealing it in a box, just like new, and leaving that as a deadly
booby trap for whoever happened to pick it up.
Since the novichok nerve gas is hard to make, a state was surely
involved in doing this. But one can only guess why.
Everyone: Call
on the Argentine senate to pass abortion rights.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone: Call on
Florida to file charges against Markeis McGlockton's killer.
If you sign, please spread the word!
California requires each portable phone to carry a remote shutoff
device. This was meant for turning off phones that had been stolen,
but now it
is being
used for other cases too.
Our current rate of emission of greenhouse gases will lead (in a few
decades)
to heatwaves
with temperatures of 55 C (131 F).
"Just in time" production, with no inventory, is very efficient
— and
terribly fragile, since it tends to convert any narrow problem
into a broad stoppage.
My conclusion is that disaster preparedness at the national level
includes requiring the production of everything people really need to
be done the robust, old-fashioned "inefficient" way.
Massachusetts is considering a bill
to set
up a system of ratings on ISPs based on how far they respect
network neutrality.
It sounds nice, but with so few ISPs, it might not do a lot for
network neutrality.
Somalia is prosecuting female genital mutilation for the first time.
The victim, a 10-year-old
girl, died
from the operation.
Greeks
blame the government for being unprepared to help save people from
the wildfire.
Preparations cost money. Are the euro-banksters responsible for this?
Another cause was that people illegally built houses on land that was
supposed to be reserved for escape routes. That sort of corruption is
typical of Greece.
A UK parking garage
company threatened
a customer who entered "O" instead of "0" in per license plate
number. The company's software refused to recognize "0".
However, that is only a secondary wrong. The company's primary wrong
was
in asking
for the license plate number.
The real Iranian progressive movement begs the bully
to end
the US sanctions against Iran.
A foreign conflict is exactly what any illiberal regime prays for.
People will forgive the regime when there is a foreign threat it can
claim to be standing up to.
"Democracy
Has Died": Cambodia's Exiled Politicians Call for Election
Boycott.
The world music festival Womad says
that many
musicians refuse even to try to perform in the UK, because they
don't want to face the intentionally hostile environment.
A systematic effort to observe voter caging (a form of voter
suppression) in North Carolina has induced the Republicans to more or
less stop
the practice this year.
The bullshitter uses scandals to distract from other scandals.
Sliding
from one scandal to another scandal makes it hard to focus on any
one of them.
To sell out America to Russia is shocking in a special way. However,
I think that selling out America to billionaires, planet roasters and
theocrats does more damage.
Everyone: call
on Twitter to apply its rule against violent threats and close the
bully's account.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US
citizens: support
the bill to carry out automatic impeachment of any president that
starts a war without congressional authorization.
If you send a letter, please spread the word!
The mainstream media cover extreme weather,
but avoid
talking about its cause:
global heating.
The
myths that keep Americans working for a pittance instead of
rebelling.
A former head of ICE
said it
will take years to reunite children with their dear deported
parents.
It seems that the thugs are inventing obstacles to make the task harder.
40 pregnant refugees are stuck on a ship in the Mediterranean, running
out of food and water, because the countries
nearby refuse
to let them in.
Europe
has ruled that organisms with genes edited with Crispr-Cas9 are
considered "genetically modified".
It would be absurd to deny this. The real question is what rules should
apply to them.
Perhaps that should depend on what the modification does. A
modification for use with a pesticide is potentially dangerous because
pesticides are often dangerous. A patented gene is legally dangerous.
A variety that could outcompete the wild type is evolutionarily
dangerous.
Doctors in the Netherlands, where euthanasia is lawful, are in trouble
because they euthanized a demented woman
who at
that moment was uncooperative. She had previously given them
instructions to do so, but it was not done in the proper legal form.
I agree that the system should be very careful to prevent people from
being killed unwillingly. At the same time, if the system
investigates small failures like this one, that gives me the
impression that overall it is very effectively careful.
Álvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia who I referred to as el
presidente
horrible, is
being investigated for bribing and intimidating witnesses.
He was closely associated with the paramilitares, right-wing
state-supported terrorists
that plagued
Colombia then
and still
plague it now.
Florida's "stand your ground" law is not as loose as it is presented.
It covers only people that kill based on a reasonable belief that they
are in danger. To
kill based
on an unreasonable belief is still a crime.
Notwithstanding that, I still think it is better not to have such a
law. If you face a real threat, and you can protect yourself by
moving away or by shooting someone, I think it is valid for the law to
say that you ought to move away rather than shoot.
The US is pressuring Turkey
to release
one political prisoner who is an American Christian preacher.
The idea that a Christian foreigner collaborated with Gülen, an
Islamist, in a supposed coup plot is absurd. But then again, we never
saw proof that Gülen himself was involved in the coup plot.
The preacher's release would be a step forward, but we shouldn't
forget the thousands of Turks that
are political
prisoners in Turkey.
Global heating deniers
are still
spreading falsehoods on Facebook.
I see danger in deleting false claims about history (including denial
of the holocaust) and false claims about physics (including denial of
global heating). However, Facebook could legitimately mark them
as "bogus" and provide links to corrective information.
I suspect that the denialist funding, which corrupts politicians and
institutions, is the core of the problem.
The cheater is now proven to have violated election laws, but his
supporters
are unlikely
to care.
The cheater's brazenly increasing broad disrespect for standards of
ethics and legality has trained his supporters not to care about those
standards any more.
Three Russian prison
thugs pled
guilty to torturing a prisoner.
I wonder what happened to the other 7 guards that participated.
The victim's lawyer received death threats and has fled.
A heat wave following a winter of drought made the Athens wildfires
spread so fast that
people
could not run away.
Pay attention, because global heating is doing the same things to many
areas of Europe and the US.
Maybe the US is willing to
negotiate
with the Taliban.
The US can prop up the Afghan government to fight the Taliban for as
long as it decides to, but it cannot defeat the Taliban. The only
way to end the war is to let the Taliban win.
Record-breaking heat in Japan
killed
65 people.
The government calls the heat a "natural" disaster, but that is
denialism. We know who caused it.
100 White Helmets and their families fled Syria to
escape
from violence by Assad's forces.
The Tories have decided to extradite PISSI terrorists to the US to
possibly
face the death penalty. The UK is not supposed to extradite
anyone anywhere without a promise not to execute per.
One of the hostages taken by terrorists in Bangladesh was
jailed
two years on suspicion of being participant.
It is unconscionable hold someone prisoner for that long on the off
chance that person was involved in a crime.
17,000
prisoners in the US have been sentenced to life in prison without
parole for nonviolent crimes. About half of them were casualties of
the War on Drugs.
Pollen in the air
can
reduce rainfall, even prevent it entirely.
Rep. Nunes told baldfaced lies about the contents of a secret FBI
document that summarized the state of the Russian collusion
investigation. Now the document has been
released,
and his lies are proved.
The multinational drug gang Mara Salvatrucha dominates most of El
Salvador, but it
started
in the US — a consequence of US repression in El Salvador.
Then the US deported the Salvadoreans, and they brought the gang
home with them.
I don't think the US should admit large numbers of immigrants. The US
birth rate is now low enough that the population (and thus the
enormous ecological footprint) would decline, if not for immigration.
However, when it comes to refugees, the US would face a lot fewer
requests for asylum if stopped messing up other countries.
"Since we have so completely bombed at providing anything like equal
opportunity, and no serious person can think this is about to change
in the decades ahead, how about we
structure
our economy so that it makes less difference whether someone ends
up at the top end like Jeff Bezos or at the bottom earning the minimum
wage?"
Bot
Disclosure Act Would Promote Identification, Accountability.
Do the social media platforms necessarily recognize bots?
"Wellness programs" means insurance companies will charge for medical
insurance based on
collecting
all sorts of personal data. It would be the equivalent of China's
citizen score.
When a gang of French thugs beat up a helpless protester, it was not
what it seemed. One of them, Alexandre Benalla,
worked
directly for President Macron in a nebulous "security" position at
the presidential palace.
The president and his officials protected Benalla pretty hard. I
wonder if Benalla has some sort of hold on Macron.
Bogus scientific journals will
publish
any article you send them — if you pay.
I can understand why real people might want to publish in bogus
journals, for career-boosting (since not everyone will recognize that
the journal is bogus). However, I can't see what motivated people to
pay to publish the article attributed to a nonexistent lab.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the DISCLOSE Act,
which would require political ads to disclose who paid for them.
The Capitol Switchboard
numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US
citizens: call
on Congress not to impeach Rosenstein. Replacing Rosenstein would
be a way to shut down the Mueller investigation.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US tax cuts enacted under Bush, Obama, and Trump amount
to 10
trillion dollars. Of these, 2 trillion have gone to the 1%
richest Americans.
The US government
has reconciled
itself to the possibility of 3D printing guns.
I think that the possibility of 3D printing guns is going to be bad
for society, but I don't see how it could be avoided without
repression that would also be bad for society.
Humans are consuming the Earth's limited
resources faster
every year, and already far faster than the Earth can regenerate
them.
Sri Lanka's government said it would end the practice of torturing
suspects,
but torture
continues with impunity.
The House of
Representatives passed
a bill to sabotage environmental protection across the board.
"The far-right doesn't have to win
to set
the legislative agenda."
Global heating is directly deadly: the hotter the weather,
the more
frequent suicide becomes.
Many countries use troll armies to maintain control of social media
and suppress all non-state-organized activity there. Some use their
troll armies
for repression
of activity outside social media.
Social media's damaging effect on adolescents: not only are they under
pressure to appear impossibly beautiful, but the
are compelled
to chat with their friends frequently or face exclusion.
It sounds to me like being in a cult.
Florida
sheriff Morris Young makes an effort to steer the children of
criminals away from crime.
He has to fight
the prison-industrial
complex.
Israel is now
a de
jure apartheid state.
It has had de facto apartheid for a long time, but tried to pretend
that wasn't so.
60%
of the foreign aid for African electricity production goes to
fossil fuels.
I suspect that the planet roasters have subtly corrupted the agencies
that provide the aid.
US citizens: call on Congress to release the bully's tax returns.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to save the Endangered Species
Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The US
government provides
low-cost flood insurance even to homes that flood over and over.
We need to start pushing to move the owners to high ground.
15 years ago the US organized campaigns for electoral defeat of the
rulers of Serbia, Georgia, Belarus and
Ukraine. Was
it, is it, wrong for a foreign power to intervene in an election
that way?
Milošević in Serbia was a genocidal nationalist, and Lukashenko in
Belarus was and is a tyrannical absolutist. I think such rulers
invite foreign nonviolent intervention. Shevardnadze was an important
politician in the Soviet Union, and probably no respecter of human
rights as president of Georgia. I don't know much about Kuchma.
The campaigns did not steal the election, but they were a form of
outside interference nonetheless, comparable in a very general way to
what Russia did in the US in 2016. But there are differences. The
Russian intervention was in support of a candidate whose party
obtained "victory"
by rigging
the election.
I think a functioning democracy is entitled to stop such outside
interference in its elections.
Google's "confidential" mode for Gmail and Google Docs provides no
real confidentiality, but could provide
an excuse
for monopolistic practices.
The knowledge-hater has opened
a treasure
of dinosaur fossils to mining that would destroy them.
The war-lover's officials are mounting
a pressure
and destabilization campaign against Iran.
For instance,
Pompeo accuses
some Iranians of getting rich while most people suffer.
Sounds like the US!
I don't think this will influence Iranians much. It will be too
obvious that the country's bad economic situation is due to the US.
The government of Iran is theocratic with a level of democracy. This
involves contempt for some human rights, and many Iranians resent this
injustice. Many others support the theocracy, much like the American
supporters of the war-lover. Increased foreign hostility is likely to
strengthen support for the government.
If the US can stomach Salafi Arabia as an ally, it has no reason to
balk at Iran as a friend. The US should negotiate
a better relationship with Iran.
Advanced countries' gratuitously imposed dependence on digital
technology threatens
national security in case of attack, storm, power outage,
whatever.
The Tories continue forcibly converting "inadequate" UK locally-run
schools into privately run "academies", and when these prove even more
inadequate and cheat the students, the
Tories won't
let them convert back to public schools.
One might suspect that providing good education is not really an
important goal for the Tories.
Geithner, Obama's plutocratist Secretary of the Treasury, is now
getting
even richer through a private equity company. One of the
companies it funds pushes predatory loans on desperate poor Americans
who don't understand what they are getting into.
This is typical of "centrist" Democrats that work for the banksters
even while in office.
"Recycling" of plastic can
mean putting
it in a landfill.
I expect this problem is global.
Colombia's worst terrorists, the paramilitaries,
are on
the rise again.
Just as they did decades ago, they are murdering families to steal
their land.
Kavanaugh suggested that the Supreme Court's Watergate tapes ruling
may
have been 'erroneous'.
A different decision would have protected Nixon from the culpability for
ordering the Watergate burglary.
Advanced countries' dependence on digital
networks is
a weakness if they are attacked by a country such as North Korea
that is too backward to have vulnerabilities.
Assad is recovering control of Syria, mostly ending the
7-year
civil war.
Although Assad was a butcher, the Arab rebels were more or less
Islamist and could hardly deserve support against him. Everyone
except
Sunnis was in danger of being killed by them.
However, there are still many Syrians that are afraid Assad will kill
them, who continue to flee wherever his army goes.
Then there is Rojava, the only group with territory that advocates
human rights and equality. As Assad conquers other rebel areas, I
worry that he will attack Rojava next.
Plutocratist "centrist" Democrats are
planning
to contend with progressives for control of the Democratic Party.
If other historic figures, and politicians, used
the
bullshitter's excuse.
Descartes: "I do not think, therefore I am."
Some clothing contains
fake
fake fur (i.e., real fur mislabeled as imitation).
It is bizarre that real fur is cheaper than imitation fur.
I do not oppose the use of real fur or real leather.
Relating censorship of social media today to the
Hollywood
blacklist of the 40s and 50s.
For social media platforms to censor specific views is a threat to freedom.
For social media platforms to be ideal for spreading lies that can
spark mobs in
the US and
India,
and gives violent extremism an advantage over the truth, is also a
threat to freedom.
Perhaps there is a way to modify the systems of social media
so that they cease to give fake news an
advantage
over truth.
Iraqi thugs from the "security forces"
attacked
protesters in Basra, reportedly going out of their way to wound
people. They disabling Internet access for several days, apparently
so protesters would be unable to post evidence of the attacks.
I wonder whether the cutoff was limited to mobile internet, or
extended also to cabled internet.
The protests appear to be about bad economic conditions.
62 Democratic congresscritters
launched
the Medicare for All Caucus.
This will provide a clearer way to distinguish the
progressive
Democrats from the plutocratist center-right "mainstream"
Democrats.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez
drew
thousands to their rallies in generally-Republican Kansas.
US
private
schools don't, on average, improve the education of students from
poor family backgrounds.
To give children a better education, what might help is to relieve the
stress imposed on them by the precarious life of poverty today.
The Big Tent Is
Really
No Tent: Why the Democrats' Old Guard Has to Get Out of the Way.
Civility in discourse is generally good; demanding civility from one side
while allowing bullying from the other is unjust.
How
to decide when to be uncivil?
The Putin regime
asked
Pompeo to release the accused Russian agent of illegal influence,
Maria Butina.
The Pakistani army is
bullying
people to vote for Imran Khan's party, and journalists not to
cover the other parties.
The article that suggested mobile phone use tends to cause cancer has
various scientific errors, and the conclusion
may
be false.
The conclusion that mobile phones damage privacy is
completely
established.
Uri Avnery: Israel's slow creeping expulsion and colonization in the
West Bank is at least logical, given the unjust goal of permanent
dominion. But its siege of Gaza is
simply
stupid.
EFF:
what's
next in fighting the proposed EU copyright filters.
It is unfortunate that the article gratuitously uses the term
"intellectual property." That term misleads people into thinking that
copyrights, trademarks, patents and trade secrets all have something
important in common. That is
not the case.
Less
Than a Fifth of Children Reunited with Migrant Parents as Deadline
Looms.
It seems to me that the US is bending over backwards to slow down the
return of these seized children and find excuses not to.
Wildlife poachers in Uganda are
heavily
armed and kill rangers when they can.
The bully's men have returned to parents
less
than 400 children out of the 2500 that they took away.
Most of the residents have
fled
Hodeida. The UN has kept the port mostly open until recently.
Turkish environmentalists who moved to an isolated forest area to be
alone are now
defending
the area from corrupt construction of dams.
An Indonesian teenager was sentenced to
six
months in prison for having an abortion after the 6-week limit.
Why didn't she get an abortion within six weeks? Six weeks is an
awfully short time limit for this. Quite possibly it took her longer
than that to recognize that she was pregnant. She may have hesitated
to try to find out, because her family (including the brother that
raped her) might have intimidated her, either intentionally or not.
She may not have had much in the way of sex education, so she would
not have realized there was something she could do.
The UK campaign funding rules are so weak that
violators
consider fines the "cost of doing business."
A ten-month-old boy taken away from his parents by the US border thugs
was reunited with them after 5 months ago. But he
did
not recognize them.
An app is a great way to
disguise
medical quackery for suckers who assume that digital technology is
safe and friendly.
They are non-free programs, so you should expect them to
mistreat users one way or
another. What you can't always predict is just which kinds of
mistreatment a given program will do.
"Smart" meters will save UK residential electric customers the
equivalent of
under
$20 per year. However, they will work as snooping devices.
A mob of Hindu fanatics
killed
a Muslim man for traveling with cows. This sort of thing
happens
regularly.
The US keeps trying to kill journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem, because he is
on the drone assassination list. He is
suing
to get taken off the list.
The US government response is to pretend not to know what is going on
and that there is no issue to discuss.
Abdul Kareem is an Islamist. That means he advocates imposing the
rules of his religion, in a grave assault on human rights. You could
see the results of this in places such as Iran, Salafi Arabia, and
Pakistan. I oppose him on this.
But reporters should not be killed for their political views,
regardless of whether they are US citizens as is Abdul Kareem.
Long ago, the US used to declare some criminals "wanted, dead or
alive". That was announced publicly in court after a decision made by
human beings. Nowadays, the US awards the designation of "kill him,
plus any number of bystanders" in secret based on decisions by
algorithms.
The fact that human pilots operate the drones and fire missiles at
designated targets, even though those are not engaged in violence at
the time (and perhaps not ever, but the pilots can't tell), is no
protection against what is in effect an automated killing machine.
We must put an end to that system entirely.
Israel Just
Dropped
the Pretense of Equality for Palestinian Citizens.
Israeli snipers killed Palestinian protesters, so a Palestinian sniper
retaliated
by killing an Israeli soldier. Israel then retaliated with
bombing and shelling. No word yet on what casualties that caused.
Shooting civilians is a war crime, but shooting enemy soldiers is
simply war. Bombing and shelling Gaza may be either one, depending on
the target; Israel has
bombed
civilian targets in Gaza in the past.
US
citizens: support
the Detention Oversight Not Expansion Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
AI in the hands of companies tends
to increase
their power over workers and customers.
Why not kill it?
Chinese restaurants in the UK are threatened
by strict
immigration rules that get in the way of bringing good chefs from
China. Even more directly, the UK's immigration thugs raid
restaurants at peak hours, driving away customers permanently even if
they don't arrest anyone.
The cheater has borrowed lots of money from Russian banks. Perhaps
that
explains his
servility to Putin.
(satire) Revealing that the physical world could no longer bear the
weight of numerous contradictory realities, sources confirmed Friday
that dozens of White Houses have begun to leak from a temporal vortex
as President Trump’s rapidly changing story of meeting
Putin tears
apart space-time.
New York City voted
to make
prisoners' phone calls gratis in city jails.
Charging prisoners for talking with their families is cruel to the
prisoners (many of whom are accused, not convicted) and pushes them
towards committing crimes after they get out.
Keeping accused people in jail because they are poor is also
cruel, hence the movement to put an end to the bail system.
Republicans in the House of
Representatives don't
want to know what secret deals the traitor made with Putin.
Glenn
Greenwald reports that Ecuador is negotiating handing over Julian
Assange to the UK. Whether this would permit the UK to turn him over
to the US depends on what terms Ecuador negotiates.
If the US prosecutes Assange for publishing leaks, the effect would be
to damage freedom of the press in the US. The bullshitter would
love this.
Various global heating effects are causing great damage in the Mekong
Delta,
and almost
2 million people have been compelled to leave.
Sally
Yates warned
White House lawyers in January 2017 that Michael Flynn was
vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
How
a One-Word Loophole Will Make It Easier for the US to Sell Weapons
to Governments That Kill Civilians.
The "gilded age" of the 1890s, an age of increasing inequality, has
several similarities with the current age of increasing inequality.
The "gilded age" inspired the progressive movement which achieved
political changes including direct election of senators, and (in many
states) initiative petitions for laws and recall elections for
officials — as well as anti-trust law.
UK thugs pressure juveniles
to serve
as undercover informants on other criminals.
This can be dangerous for them, and not just the direct danger of
violence.
The article says "children". If any of them are really children, that
would be horrible, but that is unlikely. I expect they are teenagers.
When teenagers are eager to do this, perhaps because they want to get
even with those that exploited them, and supposing they understand the
risks, then I'm all for giving them the chance. But we have to
suspect that most of them are coerced. Juveniles that are accustomed
to being exploited for crime, or enslaved, would have trouble saying
no when bullied by thugs.
(satire) House
Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Wednesday that he was worried
history may judge him harshly for his failure to confront the ruthless
tyranny of government food stamp abusers. "What will I say when my
grandchildren ask, 'What did Grandpa Paul do to prevent those cruel
and remorseless monsters from collecting $125 per month to spend at
the supermarket?'"
Kavanaugh's record thoroughly supports
businesses against
customers and workers.
San Francisco will allow all parents and guardians of school children
to vote in school board
elections, even
if they are not US citizens.
I think some countries in Europe standardly allow non-citizens to vote
in local elections.
US
citizens: phone
Senator Schumer's office and call on him to lead energetically in
blocking the nomination of Kavanaugh.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Everyone: tell
Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase to stop financing prison companies.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The bully is
considering sending
Somali refugees back to Somalia, where al-Shabaab threatens to
kill them if they don't join.
The amount of meat production is forecast to increase and
to cause
enormous harm to the environment, including through global
heating.
"Wellbeing
is a nice buzzword. But when employers use it, ask why."
Heat and
drought threaten
the harvest in Northern and Central Europe.
Global heating is making such crop failures more frequent. Will
the politicians learn to face up to the threat?
India's ruling
politicians encourage
and reward mob violence against Muslims.
This article doesn't mention it, but other non-Hindus are targeted
too. The name "Swami Agnivesh" does not sound like a Muslim name, and
Muslims do not generally wear turbans. I would guess from the turban
that he is a Sikh. Christians are also persecuted.
The hotel from which the Las Vegas shooter shot
is suing
all the victims, seeking a ruling that it is not liable for the
shooting.
It seems like common sense that the hotel should not be liable. It
was not to blame for the shooting. There is nothing it ought to have
done to prevent the shooting. There is no reasonable way that hotels
could do so.
However, in the screwy US medical system, often the only way the
victims of violence or accidents can get money to pay for medical care
is if they can sue some organization and make it pay.
MEP Voss, who put the copyright filter censorship into the EU
copyright directive, thinks it is wrong to post any copyrighted work
on the internet if the author does not get
paid. His
own actions contradict this supposed principle.
I agree with the point about hypocrisy: Voss's actions contradict his
position. That doesn't mean that his actions are wrong. His position
is what's wrong.
Making everyone pay to use art is a misguided goal. The right goal is
to support artists
and thus
support the arts.
In the US, where copyright law includes fair use, it is often lawful to
post a copy of some work without asking for permission, for political
or educational purposes. The EU ought to adopt fair use in an even
stronger form.
It should also legalize sharing (noncommercial redistribution of
exact copies) of any published work.
A state-organized Nicaraguan
militia attacked
student protesters sheltering in a church, using guns. Eventually
the militia captured the students, aside from one who was shot dead.
New York City's lawsuit against fossil fuel
companies was
dismissed. The city will appeal.
Saboteur
Zinke proposes
to reinterpret the Endangered Species Act so that it
will not
be very capable of preventing the extinction of endangered
species.
The
cheater's plan for "peace" between Israel and Palestine is to make
Israel's occupation of the West Bank permanent and call it "peace".
Terrorist attacks
get 7
times as much US press when the perpetrator is a Muslim.
This gives Americans the false impression that terrorism is committed
mainly by Muslims.
That false impression is also supported by (1) the tendency to speculate
that the perpetrator is a Muslim, and (2) the tendency to avoid saying
"terrorism" when the perpetrator is not a Muslim.
(satire) CNN Anchors Brooke Baldwin and Dana
Bash reportedly
sat speechless Thursday after their guest Dr. Gina Jimenez went on
a long, coherent thought, unleashing a tirade of articulate points
completely relevant to the topic at hand.
There are reasons to suspect that the bullshitter has been a Russian
asset for years
— at
least since 2015.
Greenpeace
activists occupied
the headquarters of Barclays Bank to protest its funding of tar
sands oil pipelines.
ES&S, a US company that makes digital voting machines,
admits
that it put a remote back door on some of them, in the period
2000-2006.
Senate Democrats
Unveil
Bill to Reunite Immigrant Families 'Immediately'.
Turkey has replaced its temporary "state of emergency" by becoming a
repressive state
on
a permanent basis.
Convincing real juries to nullify a law often does work,
if
it is presented in a positive form.
Trump administration hit with lawsuits over
inhumane
treatment of [imprisoned kids of border-crossers].
The inhumane treatment includes dirty drinking water, spoiled food,
being denied a chance to bathe for three months, and being exposed to
lice.
For the children among them, being kept away from their families may
have harmed them even worse. I guess they can't sue for that.
Right-wing extremists in the US are
promoting
far-fetched suspicions about vaccines, and even the former doctor
whose fraudulent claims started those suspicions.
When parents act on these fantasies, real children get real diseases.
It is
wrong
to censor the statement of views on the grounds that they are
mistaken. On this, I actually agree with Zuckerberg.
However, when you are presented with claims that a conspiracy is
stifling the truth, consider whether the conspiracy is plausible.
It takes a lot of money to corrupt lots of scientists and officials.
Companies that sell products that many people use every day can afford
this — products such as tobacco, sweets, fossil fuels, and
opioids.
Oil companies have enough money to corrupt institutions such as the
Museum
of Natural History and
WGBH-TV.
How many packages of sweets are sold in the US every year? My quick
estimate is 400 billion, but it could be much more that. There's a
lot of money available to corrupt the institutions that ought to be
adopting policies to help people resist sugar.
Telecommunications companies have enough money for this (look at the
network
neutrality battle). A commercial movement backed by billionaires
can also corrupt people and institutions. For instance,
charter
schools are backed by billionaires.
How many doses of MMR vaccine are used in the US every year? I
estimate around 6 million. It is a substantial business, but not
enough to make a billionaire. It is not plausible that these
manufacturers can corrupt a large number of people and institutions.
What kind of conspiracy can a small business set up? Only a rather
small conspiracy. Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent paper, which first
claimed that MMR vaccine did harm, was a conspiracy of that sort. It
fooled a part of the scientific community for a while, until more
investigations showed the claim was false.
New York City will investigate
whether
Eric Garner's killer violated any rules in the process of killing
him.
Canada's High Arctic Glaciers
at
Risk of Disappearing Completely, Study Finds.
The EFF has proposed
standards
for technology companies to apply when deciding to provide
products or services to the US government.
This practice would be a step forward, but the proposal has a
fundamental weakness: it defines "abuses" as illegal acts. To bypass
them, the government need only legalize whatever practices it would
like to carry out. Remember the
U
SAP AT RIOT Act? Remember how far the US government goes to
legitimize torture, and imprisonment without trial?
Despite that shortcoming, I support this campaign. I expect it will
do some good directly, and that it will make people more aware of the
dangers, which could create an opportunity to prohibit some kinds of
surveillance practices later.
(satire) SCROTUS announced
what
it would take to convince them to resist or oppose the
bullshitter.
Only a
fine
line of subtleties stand between Republican dealings with Russia
and the definition of treason.
World investment in fossil fuel use
increased
in 2017, while investment in renewable energy declined.
Extractivist governments in the US, UK, Canada and Australia are
pushing hard for this, and it looks like they are achieving their
murderous aims.
The policy that has been proved to reduce the rate of abortion is to
make
it easy to get contraception. Theocratic policies do not reduce
abortions, but do make them more dangerous by driving them
underground.
The explanation for this paradox is that theocrats don't punish
abortion as a means to have less abortion. The punishment is itself
the goal.
US
citizens: file
a comment to oppose the abortion gag rule.
US citizens, tell
the Senate: Veterans deserve better than Robert Wilkie.
The
EPA's relaxation
of rules for coal ash pollution means more future risk of cancer,
heart disease, stroke, and brain damage.
Google has
been fined
5 billion dollars for restricting the sale of phones with certain
modified versions of Android.
The restrictions were clearly designed for anticompetitive goals.
Facebook allows right-wing extremists to violate the rules it applies
to
others, reports
an undercover journalist who worked as a Facebook moderator.
Large meat and dairy farms are not doing much to reduce their large
carbon footprint.
Indeed, most
of them conceal it.
Beck
Dorey-Stein resigned
as white house stenographer because she saw that the bullshitter
didn't want an accurate record of what he said.
Business-dominated globalization does more than spread poverty.
It creates
the cracks for hatred between groups to grow.
This article proposes economic localization, a return to local
commerce instead of globalized commerce, as a form of resistance.
Why does the bullshitter attack the EU and NATO?
One reason may be to boost the extreme right-wing.
Another reason may be that it serves Putin.
This is not to say that the EU or NATO deserves entire support. The
EU is not very democratic
and largely
serves the banksters.
However, the extreme right-wing is even worse.
Supporters of Rep. Maxine
Waters massed
near her office and discouraged right-wing protesters to show up
to menace her.
However, their in-your-face tone might be cited by
extremists for
their own recruiting.
The bullshitter and Putin are collaborating …
to keep
fossil fuel interests in power.
(satire) Papa John’s founder John Schnatter
announced
plans Wednesday to launch a new chain of fast-casual segregated
lunch counters across the Deep South.
Saboteur Pruitt's aides aired his new desk for a week before putting
it in his office, to protect him from exposure to formaldehyde.
Meanwhile, they
suppressed a report about the dangers of formaldehyde exposure, at
the request of businesses. The businesses don't want Americans to
know that most Americans are exposed to too much formaldehyde.
Exposing large numbers of people to small but significant amounts of a
carcinogen will cause some additional cases of cancer. If we see the
report, we might get an estimate of how many additional cancer cases
result from US formaldehyde exposure. It might be thousands, or it
might be less. The added risk to one person is minuscule, but the
added harm to society can be important.
Too bad we don't know whether Pruitt personally asked for his
expensive new desk to be aired out.
The UK's arms exports don't just support tyrants (in many cases), they
also promote
corruption and poverty.
The FBI, in charging Butina, reported that a leader in the Republican
Party
boasted
in 2016 of establishing a secret communication channel to the
Russian state through the NRA.
To condemn politicians for colluding with a foreign tyrant does not
mean that I believe US politicians would be honest and good if not for
Putin's influence. It also does not mean I consider Putin the Great
Satan or that I would advocate maximum possible confrontation with
Russia.
But the US does need to defend itself from this. Primarily
that means punishing the politicians who engage in such betrayal.
Senator Rand Paul
dislikes
Kavanaugh's approach to the Fourth Amendment which bans
unreasonable searches and seizures.
If all the Democrats reject Kavanaugh, and so does Paul, I think that
is enough to defeat him.
Farmers in California's Central Valley are draining the aquifer for
unsustainable irrigation. As a result, the land is sinking (10 meters
in some places), and the water supply is
contaminated
by arsenic.
Israel has accepted that Assad's forces will take control of the
region bordering on the Golan Heights (occupied by Israel). Syrians
are fleeing towards the Israeli border, where they
will
not be allowed entry.
(satire) … newly hired ICE agent Kevin Michelson revealed this
week that he had established dominance on his first day by
beating
up the biggest child prisoner he could find.
Thousands of Scientists
Pledge
Not to Help Build Killer AI Robots.
The practice of allowing charter schools in the US is kept going by
billionaire's
lobbying funds.
US
citizens, tell
Congress: Don't privatize the war in Afghanistan — end it.
US
citizens: call
on Senator McConnell to stop blocking a vote on the bill to
protect Mueller's investigation.
In Paraguay, even children (pre-teens)
are forced
to give birth if they get pregnant.
Documents show that certain Burmese
officials planned
to attack the Rohingya. They are the ones who did the attack.
The Tories say they want to exit the EU to reclaim sovereignty for the
UK. But they intend
to surrender
that sovereignty by signing the TPP.
The TPP is a business-supremacy treaty,
which means that it hands power over the state
to foreign companies.
In India, Summer Heat
May Soon
Be Literally Unbearable.
Means to cope with the heat can handle a limited amount of temperature
increase. If we don't curb the increase itself, it will eventually be
far more than those measures can cope with. We need to curb global
heating!
Rising Sea Levels
Are Coming
for the Internet.
The UK government has arranged
to deny
some asylum applicants legal aid.
As a result, they lose in practice the rights they have in theory.
This is a small step along the path that Hungary
has traveled
to the end.
The
Cashless Society Is a Con — And Big Finance Is Behind It.
Israel
has eliminated
Arabic as an official language.
This is likely to lead to indirect discrimination against any Arabs
whose command of Hebrew is imperfect.
Analyzing
US actions in the Middle East.
May We Speak of Reason, Rather Than of Treason?
The general point that treason can be seen from two sides is valid. I
don't think it changes much as regards the bullshitter. Indeed, a
Russian might consider him to be a loyal servant of Russia, but so
what?
EPA Fans Struggling Coal Industry
by Rolling
Back Pollution Regulations.
An experiment with a 4-day, 32-hour work week was a great success for
one company. The same
employees got
more done in less time, for the same pay, and felt less stress.
This is a win for both the company and its own employees, but we can't
assume that the same will happen for all companies. What about the jobs that
are not creative, where you are not likely to do more in one 8-hour shift
than in another 8-hour shift?
Those companies should also go to a 32-hour work week for the same
total salary — and hire more employees.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support restoring the
network neutrality regulations.
One Republican recently signed the discharge petition, showing that it
isn't hopeless to try to convince others.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect the Endangered Species Act.
Greedy Indian parents continue driving their sons to murder their
wives for not delivering enough money as a dowry.
Global heating has
brought wildfires
to the Swedish Arctic.
Libyan Coastguard Accused
of Abandoning
Three Migrants in Sea.
Many kinds of digital technology are now used to monitor employees
in various ways — their actions, and their feelings.
Some of these uses can be beneficial. The simplistic question, "Would
we be better off with no monitoring or 100% monitoring," is a red
herring. The right questions are which kinds of monitoring
we should permit, which uses of the data, and who should
control the systems and the data they collect?
It is clear that workers with a strong union can more effectively
prevent employers from monitoring them and using the data against
them. A progressive government can make laws to protect workers
from harmful monitoring.
The town of Penzance is pioneering
the rejection
of all single-use plastic.
One Republican congresscritter
has signed
the discharge petition to force a vote on restoring the Obama
administration's network neutrality rules.
Israel has
made it illegal for Breaking the Silence to send representatives
to high schools to talk about what the students will be ordered to do
as soldiers of the occupation.
Breaking the Silence offers soldiers and ex-soldiers an opportunity to
talk about the crimes of occupation that they witnessed or committed.
Students will now have to smuggle these ideas into schools to share
with other students.
As preparation for demolishing the village of Khan al-Ahmar, Israel
has put gates
on the two roads that lead there. The only way to get in or out
is now via the mountains.
(satire) The rest of the world wondered aloud Tuesday about
exactly what
Trump has on America that compels the nation to keep him in
power. "Whoa, he must have some real bad dirt on the U.S. populace for
them to just let him get away with so much unconscionable
bullshit…"
The bullshitter wants to "clarify" something he said in
Helsinki by
adding "not".
I have accidentally omitted the word "not" in emails. Anyone can make
such a mistake, including the bullshitter. However, he is
persistently and totally dishonest, so we cannot take either the
original Helsinki version or the corrected version as sincere. More
likely he is following his usual pattern of saying outrageous things
and then claiming he didn't say them.
Sanders:
"Too
bad Trump didn't have the guts to say that yesterday while with
his authoritarian friend, Vladimir Putin."
(Satire) In
response to public outcry over his recent controversial press
conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Senate leaders
cautioned Tuesday that it was far too early to discuss Trump.
We need the Supreme Court to make sure that the president does not
become an autocrat. Kavanaugh's writings
say he
will not help.
(satire) In the aftermath of the president’s controversial meeting
with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Finland, supporters
reportedly praised Donald Trump Tuesday
for upholding
the traditional American value of supporting murderous dictators
for political gain.
The Social Security Administration is trying
to crush
its workers' union.
Examples
of trauma suffered by children that the US border thugs kept away
from their parents.
Leticia, at age 12, is on the border between a child and an
adolescent. It appears she was able to stand up to it better —
but no one should do these things to 12-year-olds.
30
Jewish groups from various countries have condemned the practice
of labeling criticism of Israel's occupation of Palestine as
"antisemitism".
Maria Butina, Russian "gun rights activist",
worked
persistently to promote the NRA and Republican candidates.
We are
wasting
the limited stocks of phosphate fertilizer on creating harmful
algae blooms in the ocean.
Kavanaugh said he wants to allow prosecutors to
use
evidence obtained from illegal searches.
The bullshitter's "summit" meeting with Putin was a series of
concessions
to Putin. Only Putin was at the summit; the bullshitter was
kneeling to him.
The bullshitter
trusts
an ex-KGB agent more than US intelligence.
US intelligence agencies don't necessarily defend US human rights and
democracy. Their own snooping on us is a threat, and they might
instead defend the power of the plutocrats that rule America against
Americans in general.
A Russian spook, by contrast, never defends Russian human rights and
democracy, and US human rights and democracy even less.
The electricity to run data centers is a
significant
contribution to global heating.
The
five
areas of rights that fascist regimes tend to attack first.
Hong Kong is moving to ban the pro-independence party and
punish
everyone who associates with it.
The FBI wants a program to recognize tattoo images, and
plans
to infer people's beliefs and associations from their tattoos.
Even when a human being looks at the tattoo, the inference of
associations is unreliable. This unreliable basis is
used
today in the US for punishing people.
US
citizens: call
on the Senate to investigate the Russia-NRA connection.
US
citizens: call
on Mattis to stop discharging non-citizens from the US military
for no valid reason.
Why
There Must Never Be a Speech and Assembly Tax.
Cutbacks on the UK's NHS have led to denying surgery to people with
hernias. This can cause them horrible pain, and in some cases death.
Hernia surgery is not high tech and not tremendously expensive.
The fact that this is rationed shows that the Tories are cutting medical
care to the bone.
Facebook protects far-right
activists even
after rule breaches.
Since economic growth does very little to benefit the poor, it makes
sense to design an economic system that doesn't depend on economic
growth.
A journalist for The Nation
was ejected
from the two-bullshitters press conference for holding a sign that
said, "Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty."
(satire): Intergalactic
Fleet Week 2018 in New York City.
Tenants
Accuse 'Predatory' Kushner Real Estate Firm of Exposing Families
to Cancer-Causing Dust Then Forcing Them Out.
The kind of national security that most Americans
need is
economic security. More military security hardly does Americans
any good.
The US government has set up
a maze
of bureaucratic requirements that keep refugee parents and
children apart.
One payment app publishes all the data about payments (unless the user
has changed the settings). A researcher
has analyzed
what this leak does.
The other payment apps don't publish the transaction data — but
they provided it to the stores, to the banks, and to the state. Which
is almost as bad. The analysis from this one payment app can teach
us, if we are willing to learn, how bad the others are.
Can you be confident that your country's government will respect
everyone's human rights? What about 5 years from now? 10? 20?
Elon
Musk donates substantially to keep Republicans in control of
Congress.
$33,000 is a small amount for him. If he cares about a cause, he
would surely put far more money into it than that. I suspect he has
donated a lot more through various other channels.
Two years ago, supporting Republicans meant promoting concentration of
wealth and cutting most Americans off from medical care in general (as
well as abortion in particular). Nowadays it also means supporting
fascism, racism, and the death of the idea of honesty.
Saboteur of Housing
Carson presents
his plan to raise rent in subsidized housing as a way to pressure
poor people to work.
40%
of Americans can't handle an unexpected expense of $400. These
rent increases would add up to more than $1000 a year.
Poor people in the US today are in such desperate situations that they
would all work — if they can. So the idea of pressuring then to
work, regardless of what kind of pressure it would be, is
fundamentally absurd.
What those people can do, and will do for a while, is go without food
and/or medicine.
Andrew
Farotade's case shows what the UK's "hostile environment for
immigrants" means in practice.
I don't think it is mere imperfection that leads officials to make so
many mistakes — always to the immigrants' detriment — nor
that it is a coincidence that they have to bankrupt themselves trying
to get those mistakes corrected. I think officials designed this
scheme, knowing that it would chase out lots of immigrants and that
they could get away with that all they were doing was carrying out
laws and that each expulsion was justified.
The officials who planned this didn't do it from mere spite, although
they may feel some. Surely they were directed from higher up to
increase the frequency of expulsions and "Don't tell us how."
Economic modeling studies suggest that a carbon tax would
boost
the economy by reducing global heating. Some tax systems are more
effective than others.
A US judge
halted
deportation of families reunified by the US.
A Mexican woman
reports
on 11 months in immigration prison. Her report describes many
forms of cruelty, and she says that her children show lasting effects
of trauma.
Nigeria is now the
world
leader in extreme poverty.
One of the things people need to do in such a situation is stop
having children. We ought to donate reliable birth control.
Women working in stores in Kerala often develop injuries because they
work a 12-hour day and are
not
allowed to sit down while working.
Just because oppressive employers practice gender bias is no reason
for laws to do so. Kerala should give all workers the right
to sit, as well as the other rights they need to stay healthy.
Ending poverty requires
changing
the conditions that create poverty.
It's ineffective to pour in millions in aid while
multinationals
continue to suck out much larger quantities while paying hardly any
tax, and while corrupt politicians can put billions into
secret
companies in Nevis.
Putting children (and teenagers and adults) in cages was a
trial run for
fascism.
It seems to have been a success, in that the bully's base is totally
happy with it, and ready to dismiss the crying children as "actors".
The thug chief of San Diego concocted fake "crime statistics" to
impede marijuana sales in California. Various real cities are
using
the fake statistics as the basis for real decisions.
Aggressive war can now be prosecuted in the
International
Criminal Court.
The history of nuclear weapons and
nuclear
disarmament.
More countries have ended their nuclear weapons activities than
continue them today.
Snooping
voice-controlled
shopping will let a few giant brands put their competitors out of
business.
Pussy Riot
protested
on the field in the final match of the soccer world championship,
demanding certain basic political freedoms in Russia.
The Fair Elections Now Act would set up a system of
public
funding for senate candidates.
The teachers at the American Federation of Teachers' annual convention
have been
spurred
into militance by the recent strikes in several states.
That, of course, responds to the increased Republican contempt for
public education, reflected in giant classes with no supplies as well
as in low wages for teachers. The Republicans of 20 years ago would
not have thought of going so far.
California's Democratic Party executive board
voted
to endorse de Leon over Senator Feinstein.
Feinstein is not much better than the Republicans of 3 years ago.
US citizens: The ACLU asks you to phone your senators and call on them
to demand that Kavanaugh say exactly where he stands regarding Roe v Wade.
US citizens: phone Senator Schumer at (202) 224-6542 and urge him to
appoint progressives to the Democratic slots in the SEC and FDIC.
I'd say, "People who will oppose the banksters."
A study of the resistance to the Vietnam War by US soldiers and
sailors.
People saw a private prison company, MVM, bring children into
a "vacant" office building and keep them there for weeks.
The company pretended this was not happening until video footage
proved the truth.
The building had few toilets and no kitchen, and using it as a
residence was illegal.
This secrecy is an extreme example of the lack of accountability that
typifies privatization of any government activity. We should abolish
all private prisons.
America has
been splitting up families since before the United States was
founded. Slave families, indigenous families, and Japanese-American
families.
Gorsuch promised over and over that he would follow precedents.
Once confirmed, he has broken them over and over.
FEMA
has admitted
it did a bad job of aiding Puerto Rico during and after the
hurricane. Puerto Rico still needs help, but the US government has no
intention of offering any.
Israel is about to enact a
law imposing
segregation in housing.
We could call this Jamal Crow.
Greece is nominally about to emerge from the "bailout" of its
creditors. This
will change nothing real; Greece will still have to squeeze Greeks
to the bone to pay them.
The people interviewed in the main body of the story are advocates of
the EU dominion, so they paint everything with a rosy glow. The
"reforms" they talk about are reductions in wages and workers' rights.
The "democracy" that has survived has no power over anything
important, like the "democracy" that
is crushing
Puerto Rico and the "democracy"
that crushed
Detroit.
The "surpluses" they speak of refer to the tribute for the creditors
that today's Greeks will serve for the whole of their lives.
The banksters that directed and direct the creditor organizations
deserve to spend their lives in prison for this.
A
deadly scorpion now inhabits Brazil's cities.
The scorpions eat cockroaches. Efforts to cut down on the food for
cockroaches might cut down on scorpions.
Ortega's unofficial armed forces
are attacking
students that occupied their university.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez
are going
to Kansas to campaign for progressive candidates in Democratic
primaries.
How "Don't tread on me" sank from a slogan for resisting power to a
slogan
for petty jerks that want power over those weaker than they.
The US
is shutting
down a vital reference for medicine, to "save money".
That means the money will go to rich people's tax cuts. But even rich people
won't be able to buy, reliably, doctors that can do as good a job without this
reference.
The bully's men have
returned
about half of the small children that it took away from families
back to those families.
The other half supposedly are "not eligible". In principle, it could
be true, but I would not trust his agents to judge that.
SCROTUS have
passed
a bill to encourage overfishing.
US
major
media warn that newly elected Mexican President Lopez Obrador
might cause disaster — for multinational corporations that
dominate Mexico at the expense of the Mexicans. Decades of "gains"
for those multinationals might now be at risk.
A citation that criticizes the dominion of the multinationals talks
about "income growth per person", so I should point out that that's
not a good way to measure how well a country is doing for its
citizens. It's somewhat vague, but the most natural meaning would be
growth in per-capita income, and per-capita income is a bad measure
because one rich person with a high income can drive up the figure
without making most people any better off. Growth in the
inflation-adjusted median income would be a better measure.
Walmart has
announced
methods for tracking workers' activity.
If they change anything, they are dangerous — but it could be
that more traditional methods could track all the same things.
As for the patent, I don't think that increases or decreases the
danger.
Should Your Company Help ICE?
"Know
Your Customer" Standards for Evaluating Domestic Sales of
Surveillance Equipment.
Facebook claimed to support "closed" groups and said it would not
release the names of the members. Meanwhile,
companies
could get their names, and other personal data.
An (evidently) racist distributor
sold
black farmers in Tennessee low-quality seeds, instead of the seeds
they thought they were buying.
The US deportation thugs are trying to make every moment a moment of
terror
for unauthorized immigrants.
Some studies have found that mobile phone transmissions
tend
to cause certain kinds of cancer.
I have some caveats about this article.
The
business
environment of scientific research now compels universities, as
well as scientists, to compete to maximize certain quantitative
measures of production of research. This pressure leads to
exaggeration, careerism, and even bullshit.
Why Identity Politics
Benefits
the Right More Than the Left.
It turns out that some people activate latent hostility towards other
groups when they perceive their own group (whatever that is) as
threatened. The left's discussion of racial diversity thus leads
some whites to support bigoted policies to a greater or lesser extent.
However, I disagree with the conclusion that progressives should bend
over backwards to be "civil". The level of incivility coming from
Republicans every day is so great that a failure to respond has the
danger of making them appear strong and dominant, which invigorates
their supporters.
The bully's threats against Iran
could
easily provoke a war. Perhaps he hopes they do.
The US government keeps accused people in jail unless they are
well-off, or connected with gangs. The effect is to punish them
before trial, and
pressure
most people into pleading guilty even if they are not.
Residents of Washington DC: tell your city council member you support
the Cashless Retailers Prohibition Act.
Even better, say that your concern is not only about those
who don't have bank accounts — it is for everyone that values
anonymity, and that that includes you.
US citizens: call on Republican senators not to confirm Kavanaugh
or any other Supreme Court justice that might help the cheater escape
the law.
Describing the antecedents of the bullshitter's attack on the very
idea of truth.
A true history of specific events does exist in principle. There is room
for a certain amount of disagreement when analyzing what they mean,
but that does not make the analysis arbitrary or relative.
Kavanaugh's record shows he
will facilitate
voter-suppression and other Republican schemes to rig elections.
"Centrists" are trying to dilute the meaning of the phrase "medicare
for all" so that it could stand for something less than what is needed.
Let's campaign for a national health system instead.
The
US published
detailed accusation that Russian state cracking agents attacked
the servers of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and several
state electoral commissions, often successfully.
Their action may have been intended to manipulate the US election.
How much it helped the bully steal the election is imponderable. (He
did not win the electoral college, but came close enough that
Republicans could steal a few states with voter suppression.)
Ironically, their
releases exposed the plot by the Democratic Party that had already
successfully manipulated the US election. This gave us our current
chance
to take
back the Democratic Party from the right-wing "centrists".
Congressional Democrats
have introduced
a bill to limit drug costs for Americans, but I can't tell from
the article how it would achieve that.
Would it work by having the state pay the rest of the cost? If so, to
ensure that this does not translate into paying exorbitant prices from
the public treasury, we need a single-payer, single-purchaser system
that would buy all the drugs and negotiate the prices.
Facebook gave
Faux News a big role in its review of "trustworthy" news.
Tories want to use the UK's exit from the EU as
an excuse
to attack the poor and working people in the ways they wanted
anyway.
Advances in treating premature births earlier in gestation are cited
by antiabortionists as reasons to ban abortion at that stage of
gestation.
This shows that it is a mistake to let viability of the fetus
determine abortion rights.
Someday we have have an artificial womb replacement that can gestate a
fertilized egg all the way to birth. Would it follow that every
fertilized egg has the right to be gestated? Certainly not.
Mueller's investigation has indicted 12 Russians, state agents,
for cracking the DNC's computer systems in 2016.
If the bullshitter fails to demand Putin cease this, it
will reveal
him as a collaborator.
This week has
seen record
temperatures around the world.
A specially
designed cart will make it easier for homeless people to keep
their property.
It will be an improvement over current conditions but not an adequate
substitute for a place to live.
Italy's government said it will kill CETA.
The reasons it cites are minor, economic ones, not about the ISDS (I
Sue Democratic States) clause that would give foreign companies direct power
over each country involved.
A similar Canadian business-supremacy treaty with China reportedly
makes it terribly expensive for Canada not to build the Unkinder
Morgan pipeline to Vancouver. A treaty that can do such harm
must be prevented, or else it will have to be cancelled.
UAE forces in Yemen, together with the Yemeni faction they support,
have
been arresting
and torturing people for years. The victims include various kinds
of dissidents, and journalists.
The path to defeating Republican gerrymanders is
by electing
Democrats as governors.
This is because the Supreme
Court defends
the Republican gerrymanders that effectively rig elections.
Some of the young children recently reunited with their refugee parents
show
effects of trauma.
In 2014, Russia created 48 fake twitter accounts that
pretended
to belong to nonexistent local newspapers.
It used the accounts to post real local news (obtained from real local
newspapers, I suppose).
I Yearn for a Society in Which Civility Rules, But
These
Are Not Civil Times.
Some shopping malls in California
use
license plate recognition cameras and report cars immediately to the
local thugs — and to the deportation thugs.
I think this demonstrates the need to regulate license plate cameras.
I argue for a law that would limit the license plates that the camera
can "see".
The owner of Turkish broadcasting companies which Erdoğan
confiscated is
using
a trade treaty to sue for compensation.
If he wins, he will get money, but it won't bring back freedom of the
press in Turkey.
NATO has
no
meaningful mission, and therefore no strategy.
Ireland's investment fund has
divested
from fossil fuels.
Does Ireland have pension funds that could be made to divest?
Justice
Democrats recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress,
and other progressive champions too.
The UK government systematically
disbelieves
refugees' reports of torture and menace, based on any excuse it
can fabricate.
A small step for sabotage: the FCC
will
not consider informal complaints about companies any more, only
forward them to the company involved which will surely find excuses to
dismiss them. People screwed by telecom companies will have to pay
$225 to file a formal complaint, for the FCC to take notice.
Making it more expensive to complain is standard practice for harming
those who can't afford it. Often this is done by a series of small
steps that add up to a big change.
The "New Walled Order" and the
criminalization
of aiding people in need.
Spain will set up a truth commission to
investigate
the crimes of Franco's dictatorship. It will cancel the
convictions of people who resisted Franco, and try to identify the
loyalists that Franco's men killed then buried anonymously.
India has
chosen
network neutrality.
Important officials of the Obama administration are
profiting
from lobbying the departments they worked in.
The USDA has approved chicken-processing plants in China
based
on nothing but "trust us". Neither the US nor China inspected
them.
The UK is
working
with manufacturers to interfere with regulation of titanium
dioxide, which is suspected of causing cancer.
Clearly the EU will be better off once the UK is out of it.
Brazilian thugs form gangs which take possession of neighborhoods and
rule them. They push out drug sales and replace them with
murder/extortion.
If you can be in San
Francisco, join
the Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice protest on Sep 8.
Start
Immigration thugs may be personally liable for keeping children away
from their parents.
One of the great benefits of a national health service is that
it negotiates
the price of medicines in large quantity. The US doesn't try to
do that — on the contrary, it protects the drug companies' high
prices.
Protest Against What Donald Trump Represents, Not Who He Is.
What he represents is plutocracy, not mere bigotry and hatred.
For US businesses and plutocratist politicians, the worst possible
disaster is that Americans get a raise.
Sea-level rise could
do trillions
of dollars per year in damage if we don't curb global
heating.
"Labour’s antisemitism code is the gold standard for political parties."
Museums, movie theaters, zoos, even dentists' offices are banning
children and teenagers from entering without an adult to supervise
them. They are usually banned from flying without an adult, and
banned from riding a bike to school.
So if you have to work, your children basically can't do anything
except get in trouble.
The new Tory ministers include shameless liars and sadists.
A study forecasts that more use of robots will push low-skilled
workers in Asia into increasing poverty and enslavement.
The island of Nevis provides the service of hiding the real owner of
property. Crooks, cheaters and tyrants across the world use it.
Here's a possible approach to correcting this problem: other countries
can pass laws making it a crime for property (including local
corporations) to be owned by secretive foreign owners. If a Nevis
corporation (or any other) is used in that way, it could be prosecuted
in the country where the property is located. It would be unable to
offer a valid defense, so it would be convicted. The punishment would
be to confiscate the property.
Ocasio-Cortez punctures the trickle-down logic of "mainstream centrists".
At last we see what's really at stake in the dispute about various
definitions of antisemitism.
Peace between Israel and Palestine requires that Israel remove its
colonies in Palestinian territory (including the territory that Israel
claims to have annexed to Jerusalem). Those Israelis are all Jews, at
least nominally, since Israeli Arabs don't join the settler movement.
With some distortion, this could be equated to a demand for "all Jews
to be expelled from a future Palestine", and then under the author's
criterion it would count as "antisemitic".
I think this is a reason not to accept his criterion.
Kavanaugh is
a persistent
enemy of gun control. He might not allow a ban
on high-velocity
military-style rifles that are especially likely to kill or maim
people they hit.
A Guatemalan Family Faces Endless Obstacles as They Struggle to
Recover a 9-Year-Old Boy From U.S. [clutches].
I will not refer to this using the euphemism of "custody".
Unpleasant heat slowed down reaction time for students in Boston.
There is only one way to enable both men and women to feel comfortable
in an office: set the temperature cool enough that nobody feels too
hot, then encourage each person to wear as much clothing as it takes
to feel comfortable.
US citizens: oppose Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio's plan to cut Social Security
(in the name of family leave).
Everyone: call on big US banks to divest from the private prisons for immigrants.
Nevada's efforts to obtain midazolam for an execution appear to have
been illegal.
Because of this, a judge blocked the execution.
There is something strange going on here, something not mentioned in
the article.
Why does Nevada procure drugs surreptitiously to cover up the fact
that its method is illegal, rather than change its laws to legalize
it?
Why do they believe it is necessary to give a sedative before
fentanyl? Isn't fentanyl supposed to give a feeling of euphoria, like
opioids generally?
I oppose the death penalty on principle. If these technicalities and
legal details put an end to the death penalty in the US, I will
celebrate the outcome. But I doubt that the states that want to
continue execution will be stopped for long by problems of detail.
Surely they will construct a legal channel to do what they wish to do.
I find it incredible that they haven't already done so.
What am I missing?
Kavanaugh would be a disaster for internet freedom: he opposes network
neutrality, and supports massive surveillance.
The UN Secretary General has proposed a roadmap for progress toward
nuclear disarmament. The US, Russia and NATO should discuss this.
The Irish senate gave preliminary approval to a bill to ban
importation of products made in Israel's colonies in Palestinian
territory.
This is a vital step towards pressuring Israel to accept a workable peace
with Palestine.
Russian diplomats were caught stirring up opposition in Greece to the
proposed deal about the name of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.
This deal would end a dispute that Russia can use to make trouble.
I am glad this Russian meddling was exposed. Now if only Greece could
expel the diplomats of the euro-zone banks.
Libya may be moving hesitantly towards unification and elections.
"Finlandization" refers to the legal impositions through which the Soviet Union
restricted the press, the schools, and culture in Finland after World War II.
The US does not do this directly to other countries, but global plutocracy
does something comparable.
A new pipeline to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe would make
Europe dangerously dependent on Russia.
It would also mean that Europe misses a great opportunity to invest
greatly in renewable energy, and thus help protect civilization from a much
greater menace than a shortage of fossil fuels.
On the ethics of personal protests against the bully's servants.
We need to be mindful of the line between criticism and harassment.
Those who carry out the bully's cruelty deserve criticism, but if we
legitimize harassment of them, what will we say when they pay people
to harass us?
US officials separated a baby from its father over a year ago,
considering them unauthorized immigrants. They now cannot find the
father.
Qin Yongmin has been an activist for democracy for decades.
China has sentenced him to 13 years for "subversion".
In British Columbia (a province of Canada), the "child protection" agency
defines poverty as "neglect". Officials would rather pay a stranger to
take care of a child than give support to the parents.
Abolishing the deportation thug agency would not mean allowing absolutely
anyone to move to the US.
Israel has made the siege of Gaza tighter.
We are now invited to despise the bullshitter for telling a
17-year-old woman at a party that he found her attractive.
We can hardly assume that the bullshitter's boasts were true. Even
men who are usually honest on other topics have been known to lie
about their sexual achievements. However, I wouldn't assume they were
false, or that he did an injustice to anyone at these parties. In a
group of 50 models, there could well be some that would eagerly go to
bed with a rich man, either to boost their careers or for a lark.
If you condemn men for finding teenage female models attractive, you
might as well condemn men for being heterosexual. The bully may be
predatory, but it appears he didn't display this overtly at those parties.
There are indications that he arbitrarily chose the winners of the
Miss USA beauty contest while he owned it.
That would be a real wrong, since it would have made the contest
dishonest.
I understand the desire to condemn the bullshitter on every aspect of
his life, but it is no excuse for ageism. If you can understand that
we shouldn't dictate people's gender preferences, you should
understand that we shouldn't dictate their age preferences either.
There are plenty of tremendously important reasons to condemn the
bully. He is attacking workers' rights, abortion rights, non-rich
people's pensions and medical care, the environment, human rights, and
democracy, even the idea of truth. Let's focus on those real reasons.
(The Onion satire):
ICE
authorities confirmed Monday that picky Honduran refugee Blanca
Diaz … expected to be reunited with the exact same family she
had before. "… you think you deserve special treatment and will
just be automatically paired with whichever parents you want?"
The main challenge that Senate Democrats face in resisting the bully's
Supreme Court nominee is to
convince
some "centrist" Democrats not to vote for him.
Nestlé has
lost
its sustainability certification for palm oil.
The certification process is not strict enough to fully protect
against deforestation, but failure to qualify implies being even
worse.
Imprisonment of refugee families has hit a snag: there is
no
way to get such prisons licensed.
The companies that fish for krill in the Southern Ocean have
given
support to a giant marine reserve to keep that fishery
sustainable.
Macron plans to reform programs that help people who are poor,
unemployed, old, and ill,
so
as to cut spending. The spending cuts are necessary because of
the shortfall resulting from his tax cuts for the rich.
Macron has also adopted the standard plutocratist line that welfare
programs keep people poor. The only time that is true is when the
welfare programs keep people from dying.
Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are the ones that most need
the help of a teacher in order to learn. Naturally, the plutocrats
want to
replace
their teachers with computers.
The students won't learn as much that way, but the
plutocrats don't think a well-educated populace is important.
FEMA is
about
to evict 1800 Puerto Rican families from temporary housing.
That might have been ok if it had done its job promoting construction
of replacement permanent housing.
Pakistani presidential candidate Imran Khan is trying to win the votes
of religious fanatics by
endorsing
the law that makes execution the penalty for "blasphemy".
It is unjust to punish people for conviction for "blasphemy", but that
is unusual. What usually happens is that they get lynched before the
trial.
"Diversity" in a small body can easily come to mean a
tokenism
that makes plutocracy palatable.
This is why I refused to vote for Obama merely because he was black,
and refused to vote for Clinton merely because she was female. They
didn't stand against plutocracy and banksterism. Clinton didn't stand
against militarism, either.
There are situations where diversity is directly beneficial. For
instance, it is important that a large medical study include women and
that it include blacks. There may be significant medical differences
between them and white males.
It can be helpful to include women and minority groups in local
decisionmaking bodies because it isn't feasible to limit those bodies
to the servants of the elite.
Syriza has morphed from a leftist party of resistance into a
government
of occupation which has made it a crime to protest evictions of
the poor. Syriza obeys foreign orders on all sorts of issues, doing
whatever the plutocrats want.
Replacing Syriza would change little if its replacement surrenders the
same way. To change something, it would need to force the banksters
(and the governments that obey them) to stop oppressing Greece. It
would need to launch a rebellion against the occupation forces.
Are Greeks ready to rebel against the banksters?
Everyone: call on Salesforce to cancel its contract with the US border
thugs.
Everyone: tell the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank to choose a
president who stands for the non-rich.
Kavanaugh's record shows he would sabotage climate defense if confirmed to
the Supreme Court.
Environmental protection, too.
He is on record as saying that presidents should never be sued or
investigated.
The US deportation thugs transported refugee women shackled in a hot van,
denying them water (and vital medicine) for 12 hours.
This caused them various injuries and medical problems, beyond the
immediate discomfort.
Another was denied medical attention as she had a miscarriage.
She speaks of the lost fetus as if it were a baby, but a fetus is not
a baby. We can give compassion to her disappointment while rejecting
that incorrect interpretation of the events, and we must reject it
lest we unwittingly aid the cause of the religious fanatics that want
to prohibit abortion.
Saboteur Zinke claimed to have revoked the Bears Ears National Monument
to "give [it] back to the states and to the people", so now a Canadian company
plans to do mining there.
The numbskull believes, or perhaps pretends, that his joint statement
with Dictator Kim was a "contract" for North Korea's denuclearization.
Persistent rain has caused flooding in Okayama, Japan. Entire neighborhoods
were inundated.
Global heating effects tend to cause this kind of extreme weather,
which is why rain-driven floods are much more frequent now than they
were 20 years ago.
The bully has acquiesced partially to a court ruling by agreeing not
to imprison all the families that cross the border.
Kavanaugh, if appointed to the Supreme Court, would protect the cheater
from Mueller's investigation.
The UK plans to make it a crime to watch "terrorist" propaganda
through streaming.
(It is already a crime to watch it by downloading.)
Disgusting as this propaganda is, especially that of right-wing
extremists, to prohibit it is an offense against human rights.
Elba Luz Domínguez's daughter was taken away when they crossed the US
border in October then asked for asylum. The mother was deported to
El Salvador, and is still suing to get her child back.
Denmark's new law against occupants of ghettos imposes many
punishments on people just for living in certain specified low-rent
areas.
It is time for Americans that support abortion rights to say so
publicly, loud
and clear.
China allowed Liu Xia to leave, after 8 years keeping her under house
arrest,
but they
have her brother as a hostage to keep her silent.
Budget cuts on services that help the non-rich
are bad
for your health.
The Center for Constitutional
Rights is suing
for rejection of holding prisoners in Guantanamo with no criminal
charges.
A woman is likely to be convicted of murder for killing a lover that
has been persistently violent to her, but men can
get acquitted
for killing a woman merely because she had another lover.
Everyone: support creating a large Antarctic ocean wildlife sanctuary.
Italians, phone your legislators to insist on killing CETA.
Italy's government says it will kill CETA, but it will come under
pressure to change its stance. We must not take victory for granted.
The reasons the government cites are superficial economic ones. The
crucial reason to kill CETA is that it contains an ISDS (I Sue
Democratic States) clause that would give foreign companies power over
each country involved.
A similar business-supremacy treaty
between Canada and China
reportedly would impose terrible penalties if Canada does not build
the Unkinder Morgan oil pipeline to Vancouver.
A treaty that can do such harm must be blocked, or else it will have
to be cancelled.
Plastic foam is made in China using a chlorofluorocarbon that was banned
in order to protect the ozone hole.
Will China take firm steps to put an end to the use of that chemical?
Burma has charged journalists that were investigating the murder of
Rohingyas with spying. Thugs handed them some papers, then other
thugs arrested them for having the papers, which turned out to be
"state secrets".
The cheater is trying another approach to sabotage Obama's imperfect
medical insurance system.
Each sabotage attempt is challenged in court. I suppose he hopes that
he can shift the Supreme Court enough to accept one of the sabotage
plans, and that the system will fall apart, thus denying medical
insurance to tens of millions of people.
Since those people probably vote Democratic, he will consider it a bonus
if some die from this.
Amal Fathy posted that she would leave Egypt because of sexual harassment.
She was arrested for it.
The Next Supreme Court Justice Could Gut Medicaid And Planned Parenthood.
How Justice Kennedy’s Retirement Could Lead to an Increase in Housing
Discrimination.
The US used to suffer from contradictions in its policies on human
rights, working to promote them in some areas of policy while
supporting dictatorships. The bully has resolved some of the
contradictions by taking the side of dictatorship.
The participation of the war-lover in the NATO summit has inspired
protests, not only against the war-lover, but against the militarism
that NATO represents.
The obvious reason for NATO disappeared with the Soviet Union. Since
then it has gone in search of a mission. It has carried out several
small interventions, of which I think some were good and some were
bad. However, even if one considers all of them good, they don't add
up to a need for NATO.
The main threats to peace and justice in Europe are plutocracy and
undemocratic right-wing governments. NATO doesn't help against those.
All the countries in the World Health Organization supported the
resolution to encourage breastfeeding except the US. The US
delegation threatened to retaliate against WHO and individual
countries, and forced them to weaken the resolution.
The bully's motive for this was corrupt: to protect the companies
that sell milk substitutes in poor countries.
In the 1980s, Nestle was condemned for offering gratis milk substitute
to new mothers. Those who accepted it and used it found that their
milk dried up; then they had to pay for substitute for a couple of
years.
Extreme bullying in the US has not discouraged asylum seekers from
coming from Latin America.
That's because they are fleeing from threats of murder.
Democrats must resist the temptation to sell out for donations from
the rich, if they are to receive the support of the progressives that
can campaign for them and vote for them.
Saboteur Pruitt's final act of sabotage: allowing a lot more trucks
to use old engines that pollute a lot more.
Quite a few prominent Republicans have rejected the Republican Party because
they recognize it as a fascist plot.
They have not changed their right-wing views, however; they want to
elect "centrist" plutocratist Democrats, the sort that would continue
slowly undermining democracy as they did under Clinton and Obama.
They will defend the structure of democracy, but they will not support
efforts to reestablish the substance of democracy.
A court ruled that the US cannot jail all asylum seekers as they await their
hearings, in the absence of specific reasons about the person.
The proposed EU copyright directive would impose several specific new
injustices.
That is on top of the basic injustice of perpetuating a system
that already restricts people far too much.
The bully's next Supreme Court choice
might eliminate
affirmative action by reversing the decisions that permit it.
US citizens: tell Senator Schumer to unite Senate Democrats against
Kavanaugh.
US citizens: call on Illinois Governor Rauner to sign HB 4469, which
would set up procedures so that eligible voters jailed awaiting trial
will have a practical way to vote.
The UN Human Rights Council has condemned Australia for imprisoning refugees
indefinitely.
Journalists from the former Turkish newspaper Zaman have
been sentenced
to 8 years in prison for "terrorism".
A special California program puts students on probation without their first
committing any crimes. This can easily provide an excuse to put them in prison.
Five billionaires consulted Douglas Rushkoff; he was surprised that
their questions were about how to maintain control of the servants and
guards in their fortresses after the collapse of civilization.
We need to show the billionaires that their only chance to save
themselves from collapse will be to help us prevent the collapse.
A judge ordered US agencies to reunite all refugee family groups that
they split up, and the children under age 5 must be reunited by July
10. The officials are saying that they can't do this and that such
hurry is "extreme".
Haiti is cutting subsidies for fossil fuels, so protests by the poor
have broken out.
Subsidizing fossil fuels is a suicidal policy, but cuts in subsidies must
be joined by increased support for the poor, so that the price increase does
not crush them.
Ethiopia's popular new leader is making many reforms. I cheer at
reducing repression.
Whether privatizing some state companies is good or bad depends on what
they do. It is wrong to privatize a government activity unless it
sells into a highly competitive market.
It's not clear whether the garment workers in the Ethiopia's new
clothing factory make $27 a month or $40 a month (food and living
quarters not furnished).
What is clear is that as long as companies can make countries
compete to attract work by allowing companies to keep workers in
penury, this sort of exploitation will continue.
Maedeh Hojabri was arrested, and pressured into a public confession
for posting a video of herself dancing with a nude head.
The Frank family tried to get permission to flee to the US starting in
1938, but US unfriendliness to immigrants made it impossible. That is
why they were stuck in Amsterdam and mostly killed by the Nazis.
Democratic Socialism enjoys increasing support in the US, and is starting
to push the Democratic party into resisting plutocracy.
Glenn Greenwald asks MSNBC why it has failed for two years to correct
the false accusation that Jill Stein hosted a program for RT.
Only
a union could stop Amazon's persistent mistreatment of its
workers.
The UK's campaign finance laws are inadequate to protect against the
cheating that the Leave campaign has been caught in.
Pompeo urged Dictator Kim to follow the path of Vietnam.
Vietnam is a tyrannical state in which every policy is for sale to
foreigners as long as the rulers remain firmly in power and get their
cut of the money. They don't even try to disguise this.
North Korea is one of the few countries in the world for which
imitation of Vietnam would be a step up.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop attacks on endangered species in
the National Offense Authorization Act.
US citizens: phone these six senators and tell them not to approve
Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.
Putting Hispanic refugees in prison resembles putting US blacks in prison.
With the threat that the bully might nominate a Supreme Court justice
that would reverse Roe v Wade, it is necessary to explicitly repeal
the state laws that once prohibited abortion.
A press campaign aims to deny multi-murderers the notoriety they expect
by focusing coverage on the victims instead.
It sounds wise to me — I suggest they join me in doing the same
thing to the bully.
The Rocky Mountains are now home to enormous firestorms that spread
unstoppably while the conditions favor them.
Although it is early in the summer, 30 large fires are burning.
UK law now orders functionaries to impose prohibitions on any activity
that someone else complains about.
It may serve sea life better to leave old, useless oil drilling
platforms in place, rather than remove them to "clean up".
A small increase in particulate pollution leads to a substantial
increase in the rate of diabetes.
Rep. Maxine Waters refuses to be daunted by death threats from Republicans
or "be a nice girl" from plutocratist Democrats.
If your representative is a tie-it-behind-your-back Democrat that
criticizes champions like Maxine, ask per why not.
Bedouin live in Khan al-Ahmar near Jerusalem because Israel forced
them out of the Negev desert decades ago. Now Khan al-Ahmar stands
in the way completing the line of colonies meant to split the West Bank into
a northern part and a southern part, so Israel has concocted a
Kafkaesque excuse to demolish the village.
Using refugee children as hostages is a part of the bully's broad campaign
to harm kids (except rich people's kids).
The UK frequently refuses visitor visas for absurd and dishonest reasons.
Russia is holding around 70 Ukrainians as political prisoners.
Non-citizen US soldiers that were promised citizenship are being kicked
out of the military for no fault of theirs, and this could mean they
don't get citizenship either.
The cheater must love the opportunity to make the US cheat immigrants
based on a "legal" excuse.
A year and a half later, the US has dropped the last charges against
inauguration protesters.
Contrast this eagerness to prosecute progressives by exaggerating
small excuses with the strange reluctance to prosecute neo-Nazis for
their violence against progressive protesters in Charlottesville.
It looks like political bias to me.
Reportedly Whitney Houston was crushed when blacks condemned her as a
kind of traitor — merely for being too influenced by the culture
of whites.
To demand that certain people do, or do not, practice certain forms of
art or culture because of their origins is bigotry. Whether the demand
is that people in group G stick to the traditions of G, or that
other people stay away from them, it is utterly wrong. Culture lives
through imitation and develops through variation. Everyone has the right
to imitate cultural practices and to vary them.
US citizens: tell Congress to support the Social Security
Administration Fairness Act.
Everyone: Demand
justice for Anthony Wall, who was attacked by restaurant staff and
then by thugs, apparently for being black and gay.
Mueller's investigation is buried in work, there are so many leads to check
and people to prosecute or sentence.
Last week's record-setting heat wave, in North America and Europe, was
unusual.
In a couple of decades, a heat wave at the same level will be so
common that it won't be worth reporting.
A Subway employee reported a supposedly dangerous situation — a
black family had stayed for a whole hour while eating, and several had
used the toilet. She was so rattled that she counted 6 people as 8
people.
Perhaps she assumed that nobody would stay in a "fast food" restaurant
for a whole hour except for evil purposes.
Court filings by refugee parents show the abuse, dishonesty and
cruelty of the immigration thugs toward both parents and children.
Those thugs are getting off on sadism. I wouldn't trust any of them
in a position of responsibility from which they could mistreat
vulnerable people.
Is there a psychological treatment to help them become decent members
of society?
A US college student resents how digital surveillance by her parents
gave them power over every aspect of her life.
Public pressure convinced California legislators to reverse the amendments
that weakened the network neutrality bill.
Saboteur Sessions cancelled some federal guidelines about how federal
agencies should respect human rights. These guidelines go back to
Presidents Obama, Bush II, and Ford.
Andrew Wheeler, who now runs the EPA, is not crazy and careless like
Pruitt. He is a careful and persistent saboteur for the coal
business.
ACLU: The widespread revulsion against imprisoning refugee children,
and subsequently indefinitely imprisoning refugee families, may
provide an opportunity to win the campaign to stop imprisoning so many
US citizens.
A French thug has been charged for a killing that sparked a riot,
and changed his story afterwards.
The group End Citizens United funds the reelection campaigns of
"centrist" Democrats who are not especially strong on getting money
out of politics.
A journalist says that the strangers that raped her are not monsters or
animals. They are men who think they can get away with violent crime.
Thugs in the area of St Louis systematically harass black drivers by
giving them lots of traffic tickets that they can't afford to
pay. They systematically allow white drivers to get away with much worse.
A US court ruled that Tennessee cannot confiscate drivers' licenses because
people owe money.
This will thwart one scheme for voter suppression.
Is it wise to shut down lobster trapping in a region of the sea
because a whale was spotted in the area?
Japanese eels are
severely
overfished and this year's catch is down by 1/3 from last year's.
Short-termist governments are refusing to take the strong measures
that will be necessary to protect the species.
Ben Carson, Saboteur of Housing and Urban Development, has
attempted
several important acts of sabotage.
Americans have set up protest camps near ICE offices in several cities
demanding
to abolish the ICE (the deportation thug agency).
The engines of ships in the Mediterranean produce lots of air
pollution. This is
especially
dangerous when they run their engines at a dock in a city, right
next to where people live.
A six-year-old Salvadorean girl was deported to El Salvador (where her
father was) after a
month
of imprisonment by herself in the US.
She is physically well, but psychologically harmed.
Therese Patricia Okoumou climbed up the outside of the Statue of Liberty
as a
protest
against imprisonment of refugees.
Thugs responded by
forcing
all visitors off the island.
I think this is an example of intentional overreaction. Ordinary
overreaction is based on misunderstanding — for instance,
mistaking a phone for a gun and shooting the "armed suspect".
Intentional overreaction is an act of propaganda — an taking
actions that are clearly unwarranted with the aim of convincing people
that such actions are warranted.
Ms Okoumou is now threatened with a year's imprisonment, which
demonstrates how many ways thugs have developed to construe a peaceful
and harmless protest as a crime.
As Oregon state Rep. Janelle Bynum was canvassing voters for the next
election, someone
called
the thug department, assuming she was a thief.
Channel One's commercial advertisements to captive audiences in US
schools are
coming
to an end.
Saboteur Pruitt of the EPA has been
forced
out due to many personal scandals.
Any one of these scandals would have ended the career of any
politician in the past, but the cheater doesn't mind them.
His temporary replacement is
likely
to commit the same sorts of sabotage, but more systematically and
without the side-scandals.
Rohingyas
rejected
a secret repatriation agreement which was negotiated between the UN
and the Burmese government without consulting the Rohingyas.
The EU Parliament
rejected
the proposed new copyright directive which would require automatic
copyright censorship.
However, the directive is not dead yet. We have to continue fighting.
Global heating will enable pests to spread and wipe out the US wheat
harvest. However, genetic engineering
might
be able to make wheat that can resist the pests.
I expect that these genes, taken from a related plant, would do not
biological harm — but they would spread patent pollution that
would drive further concentration of farming.
George Soros strove with all his intellect to use his money to protect
democracy — but he was
defeated
by extreme capitalism. Extreme capitalism treats democracy as an
inconvenience to be corrupted and subverted.
I do not reach the conclusion that his fundamental philosophical ideas
are deficient. We cannot point to some other approach and assert with
confidence that it would have achieved more.
Global heating effects
won't
end in 2100. If we allow two degrees C of heating, the follow-on
could lead to 4 degrees.
Billy Caldwell needs his marijuana oil twice a day to treat his
epilepsy, and his mother will be forced to spend
four
hours each time bringing him to the hospital and back.
That leaves a total of 8 waking hours per day for all other waking
activities.
Ireland
will
hold a referendum to remove the remaining gender-biased clause
from its constitution.
The US Declaration of Independence as well as other important
historical works have been
deleted
by various social censorship web sites.
The case of the Declaration of Independence is an interesting one. It
is true that talking of "merciless Indian savages" disparages an
ethnic group. However, both the "Indians" and the English colonists
of the 1770s qualified as "merciless savages" by the modern moral
standards that Trump is now trying to abolish. In context, the only
flaw in that statement is that it unfairly criticized the former and
not the latter.
The works deleted include the photo that helped end the Vietnam war,
which showed a naked Vietnamese girl running toward the camera. The
photo doesn't show her back, which had been burned by a US napalm
bomb.
Rick Falkvinge warns that in some countries it is a crime to republish
that photo, because
it
is considered "child pornography".
Can business incentives (positive and negative) curb
global heating in
time to avoid disaster? Some candidates propose
stronger
measures.
I think we should try the stronger measures — why bet that the
business incentives will suffice?
Working in US meat-processing plants is a rather
dangerous
occupation. Relaxing safety by speeding up the production line is
sure to make it more dangerous.
Urging the new Prime Minister of Ethiopia to put an end to
torture
at Jail Ogaden.
The government has recently taken some actions in favor of human
rights, so maybe it will do some more. It has a long way to go.
26,000
species are now classified as threatened.
French thugs shot and killed a Muslim, then
claimed
he had attacked them with his car. Witnesses say that claim was a
lie.
This touched off a riot in which people went crazy and destroyed
whatever they could get their hands on.
US citizens:
call on the
Indian Health Service to implement its protocols for dealing with
reported "sexual assaults".
I object to the term "sexual assault" because it lumps together rape
with other crimes that are much less grave. I support this campaign
because it will help deal with those crimes.
US citizens:
oppose the
bill to permit underwater factory farms in federal waters.
US citizens,
tell Wells
Fargo: divest from private prison companies.
Poland is holding a follow-up conference to the 2015 Paris conference,
which made a toothless agreement that is failing to curb global
heating. Poland has prohibited protests in the host city, and
authorized
itself to spy on people at will.
Even worse, the Polish government is in the planet-roaster camp and is
already arranging to make the event useless.
Senator Duckworth, a more or less establishment Democrat,
said
that Socialists such as Ms Ocasio-Cortez could not get elected in the
Midwest.
However, I don't know the Midwest very well, so I cannot say whether
that claim is right or wrong. But I see a reason to suspect that the
statement is at least partly wishful thinking on Ms Duckworth's part.
She is
sponsoring
an amendment to make it difficult for the US to withdraw any troops
from South Korea. I have a suspicion she is connected with the
military-industrial complex.
Scotland
plans
to limit marketing of foods that lead to obesity.
This does not include prohibiting foods, only stopping businesses from
certain methods of encouraging people to buy them. So I think this is
a legitimate policy. It remains to be seen whether it is effective; I
hope so.
Poland's Supreme Court justices
decided
to resist the government's attempt to exclude 1/3 of them, then
appoint lots more.
Giant digital tech companies including Apple, Amazon, Facebook and
Google are getting
big
tax breaks from US cities and states that compete to take jobs
away from other US cities and states.
These amount to almost 2 billion dollars a year.
We
need a federal law to stop
cities and states from competing to kowtow to business.
Various Pacific island countries are
having
a diplomatic conference in Nauru, which always
tightly
restricts the press.
It appears that Nauru does so on behalf of the Australian government,
to help Australia evade press coverage of the immigration prison that
Australia pays Nauru to run.
Spanish Chambermaids Seek Tripadvisor's Help to
Fight
Exploitation. I hope it works.
The left candidate,
Andrés
Manuel López Obrador, won the presidential election in
Mexico.
What he says is good, but people tell me he hasn't gone much into
details. Meanwhile,
some
of the deals described here may play into the hands of business.
His acknowledged victory demonstrates that the right wing didn't rig
the election. That in itself is a step forward for Mexico, since
several presidential elections have been stolen in the past 20 years,
including once
from
López Obrador.
Greg Palast says that right-wingers are stealing elections for the
Mexican Senate, though.
An Australian who revealed that Australia had bugged the East Timor
negotiators is
being
prosecuted; his lawyer is being prosecuted, too.
The attorney general blanks out the injustice of this with a 100%
closed mind.
The negotiations in which these events occurred were about how to do
something that must not be done at all: extracting fossil fuels from
the sea bottom between Australia and East Timor.
In Nigeria, poverty
does
not make people hopeless or depressed.
Aside from the possible reasons in the article, I wonder if something
about Nigerian society makes it less dangerous simply to be poor. If
you are confident you can last through a bout of poverty, that it
won't put you in debt or in jail, maybe it is no reason to despair.
Guards in an immigration prison in Texas are telling the prisoners
that they can be immediately reunited with their children if they
agree
to deportation and give up their legal right to apply for asylum.
This means, in effect, using their children as hostages. Aside from
the injustice of this offer, it seems to be dishonest, since the US
government is apparently
not
able to carry out that promise.
Hundreds of thousand protested on June 30, across the US,
against
the bully's cruelty to immigrants. Another article said a million
people participated.
Making state schools in England compete with each other has led some
of them to "excel" by
driving
away students that are less capable or need more help.
A
Web-based
campaign to preserve endangered languages.
US citizens: Tell Congress to block the second round of tax cuts for the rich.
Rich people now pay to control US politics by buying influence at
every level and through all kinds of institutions.
If you think that it makes sense to root for some football team's victory,
read this.
Professional sports are a distraction so people won't get passionate about
kicking out plutocratic government.
Acceptance of sex-change operations is leading some to subscribe to rigid
gender roles: if you don't want to follow some gender role assigned to your
gender, they jump to the conclusion you need an operation.
Scientists
pressure London's Science Museum to stop accepting funds from
planet-roaster interests.
Similar corruption occurs in the US — for instance,
with WGBH
and
the Museum
of Natural History in New York City.
Americans: stop voting for incumbent plutocratist politicians!
You don't want to replace them with even viler plutocratists,
so what you need to do is elect a progressive in the Democratic primary.
Manafort provided propaganda guidance to Russia starting in 2004, the
aim being target Ukraine.
"Don't
call an ambulance — I can't afford it," said the injured
woman in Boston.
Personal data has been compared to toxic waste. That makes
Facebook comparable to a polluting industry that survives
because it doesn't pay for the damage caused by the pollution.
A Christian church put up a display of Jesus and his parents in a cage.
This can reclaim Christianity from being a support for cruelty and harshness.
Juggalo face makeup defeats face recognition systems.
This is a step forward, but not enough to make face recognition cease
to be a threat to human rights. We need laws that strictly limit whose
faces can be included in the data base for a face recognition system.
Clear and specific proof that the UK's "leave" campaign cheated in use
of campaign funds means that the referendum result must be rejected as
invalid.
UK courts are allowed to make outrageous orders, prohibiting "crimes"
that are not crimes at all. One couple was ordered never to look
at a neighboring home.
Here is an economic explanation of why a gradually increasing tax on
fossil fuels, returned directly to households by dividing up the
money, would boost the economy for everyone while pressuring all
people and businesses to use less fossil fuel.
Returning the tax to households, if done in proportion the number of
people in each household, would be almost equivalent to an
unconditional national income.
As stores close, retail workers lose out to big tech.
Customers lose, too — there are fewer things we can buy without
oppressive tracking. I won't buy anything from Amazon, because no
data base should attach my purchases to my name.
We don't have to permit this to happen.
Is Bezos Holding Seattle Hostage? The Cost of Being Amazon's Home.
Focusing journalism mainly on exposing corruption and cruelty tends to
teach people a right-wing viewpoint — that you can't trust anyone.
Jefferson wrote about one widespread kind of political conflict,
between trusting the people to participate in government or excluding
them. But the conflict in the US today is only partly about that.
The main question at stake is whether the rich can reduce most people
to desperate penury and convert them into serfs.
No Republican senate has confirmed a Democratic president's Supreme
Court nominee
since
1895. So there should not be any expectation that Democrats ought
to vote to confirm a Republican nominee, especially if that nominee is
dodgy.
Obama tried nominating someone fairly right-wing,
hoping
Republicans would make an exception, but they held out for an
extremist.
The right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis swim in a sea of Republican
not-sees. Here are
various
tactics they use not to see.
Don't
let the trumpery make you demoralized. That's the bully's plan.
It is surely true that if Clinton had been elected president, the US
government would be defending abortion rights, and probably not
oppressing immigrants as much as is happening now.
Instead of right-wing extremist Gorsuch we would have a center-right
"moderate" like Merrick Garland, who would defend Roe v Wade but might
have joined in some of the bad decisions that the Supreme Court
actually made last week.
With Clinton, we would have had the
TPP, and might not
have had the progressive resurgence that could take the US government
away from the rule of the rich. It is not guaranteed that this
resurgence will win, but it gives us a chance.
The Gates Foundation set up a system of judging teaching based on "big
data", which many states have employed for judging individual
teachers. The system led to
inconsistent
results, on which teachers were fired.
An independent study found that the system's results are
meaningless.
Everyone: Tell Fidelity and Vanguard to stop funding US immigration prisons.
US citizens: call on the US district attorneys of regions near the
Mexican border to refuse to enforce "zero tolerance" prosecution of
all refugees.
The first, and the worst, terrorists in the US Guantanamo naval base
were the ones that Washington directed to operate against Cuba.
ICE Form Confirms Children Being "Held Hostage" to Force Asylum-Seeking
Parents to Relinquish Legal Rights.
Chilean army officers have been convicted of murdering singer Victor
Jara a few days after the 1973 coup against President Allende. That
was after torturing him first.
Could precautions against sexual harassment go too far? They already
have gone much too far in a Netflix video production crew where total
asexuality has been imposed.
Nasty as this is, it is small compared to the injustice Netflix
imposes on its users: DRM, tracking, and a jerkmaking "I won't share,
give or lend" contract. For those reasons, I refuse to give Netflix
any business.
More than half of the Israeli army regularly uses marijuana.
This could be a reaction to moral discomfort with the nature of their
mission, just as it was when US soldiers in Vietnam used heroin.
Comparing the bully's presented ideas with fascism leads to the
suspicion that he is trialing various fascist ideas, so as to find
ways to move the US in that direction.
The list of "characteristics of fascism" concerns what it presents to
the public, not its actions. Its actions include repression of
dissent, violence, punishment without trial, and collaboration with
business. All of them things that the bully does.
Saboteur Pruitt's official published schedule of meetings was
falsified — some meetings were left out.
Kristin Mink confronted Saboteur Pruitt as he was eating in a
restaurant and explained to him why he ought to resign.
Will Pruitt spend public funds to build his own personal restaurant
inside his
hyper-secure
EPA office?
Greenpeace protesters climbed down ropes from a bridge to block an oil
tanker from leaving Vancouver, to highlight the danger of oil spills
that the Unkinder Morgan pipeline would create.
The Governor of Kentucky is determined to cut medical care for the
state's poor — the details don't matter to him.
Elected president López Obrador says he will not accept the usual
salary and mansion of Mexican presidents. Bravo!
He also says he will not accept bodyguards, because the people will
protect him. I am sure they will want to protect him, but can they
do the job of professionals?
An American who shot a giraffe in Africa is being called a "murderer"
and a "savage".
I have no particular sympathy for hunting, and I want the giraffe
species to be protected. Notwithstanding that, I think those
condemnations are unjustified.
I don't know enough about giraffe conservation to be sure whether
killing that particular giraffe was helpful or harmful. But even if
we suppose it was harmful, the word "murderer" would be an
exaggeration. A giraffe is not a person; it cannot be murdered.
US citizens: Tell the CEOs of General Dynamics and MVM to cancel their
contracts for imprisoning refugees.
Right-wing politicians in Denmark are passing laws to punish children
that live in districts of poverty and unemployment — because
they presume that is a stand in for "Muslim".
A Tesla factory has brought many more workers to a corner of Nevada,
so poor people in the area can't afford a place to live. The factory was
brought there with large tax subsidies, so the state has no funds to help
with the social problems that the factory causes.
I have never accepted the idea that government's legitimate job
included trying to compete with other governments to offer businesses
the biggest tax breaks. That approach is called "beggar thy neighbor"
and the only ones who benefit, overall, are the companies.
We should put an end to it.
Protest rallies can lead to political victories when they build
support for other actions that can win the victories.
Bernie Sanders represents what the Democratic Party stood for
from 1932 to 1992.
Plutocratic Democrats who reject that position try to present
themselves as the "center" by painting Sanders as the "opposite
extreme" from the cheater.
Thugs are trying to pressure a South Carolina school to drop two realistic
books about thugs' violence from a summer reading lists. "You must never
promote distrust of the police," they say.
How about if they make sure no one in their department would ever support
a lie about a victim of thug violence? Then they could say, with justice,
"There are no thugs in our department, only police officers, so you can
trust us."
Several African countries exclude pregnant teenagers from school.
Burundi says it will exclude the fathers as well, but it is unlikely
to be able to carry that out.
There seems to be no rational motive for this, so I suspect it is
motivated by religion-based hatred. Teenage girls that can survive
only through prostitution can't stop unless offered another way to
survive; ironically, school is one way they could get that. This
is typical of irrational hatred; it is too stupid to think about
goals and methods to achieve them.
If the goal is that fewer teenagers have babies, it would be more
effective to take a helpful approach, providing sex education,
contraception, and abortion.
In Gaza, harvesting parsley looks "suspicious" to Israeli soldiers,
who might fire grenades at you and kill you.
If Israel wants a buffer zone around Gaza, it is entitled to create one
on the Israeli side of the border.
After Long Career Bailing Out Big Banks, Obama Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner Now Runs Predatory Firm That Exploits the Poor for Profit.
The mayors of London and Barcelona call for power to prevent using residential
space as empty investments.
"Don't ban skirts in school. Let everybody wear them."
The idea of requiring students to wear a specific uniform
strikes me as mere repression.
Sikkim's example demonstrates what is required to entirely stop the
use of plastic bags and bottles.
Republicans want to "modernize" the Endangered Species Act so that it
won't protect endangered species.
There are many ways to judge whether people are poor. In general, they lead
to the conclusion that most Americans are poor.
The decision Roe v Wade was based on a principle called "substantive
due process", established by previous Supreme Court decisions and
applied in many other areas including contraception and the legalization
of homosexual sex.
Gorsuch opposes that principle in general, and the oppressor's other
Supreme Court nominees are likely to oppose it too.
The 49 Senate Democrats can't directly defeat a Supreme Court nominee,
but there are many things they can do to delay it — if
they stand firm and united. With firmness, they have a chance of
delaying until January, when perhaps they will have a majority.
Mexico needs to end the War on Drugs. But maybe it needs cooperation
from the US to make this effective.
The Three Gorges Dam has reduced water flow in the Yangtze river, and
China's largest lake
has
dried up.
Building the dam was
itself
an atrocity, since the three gorges were considered a treasure of
special beauty.
A publication of videos made by Islamist terrorists demonstrates
another form of the banality of evil: terrorists
play
football, then drive off to do a suicide bombing.
One thug in a US immigration prison sexually abused a child for
months, and
threatened
to have the child's mother deported if she complained.
If he can get them deported before his trial, there might be no
witnesses to testify against him.
The bully's
tariffs on
electronic components will tend to push assembly of products out
of the US. It will penalize small businesses, as well as makers.
Recognition of people from their speech
threatens
to identify everyone making a phone call, as well everyone listened to
by a portable listening device.
A byproduct is that people may be harassed and threatened due to
inaccurate data base entries that label them as suspects.
I propose legal limits on whose data can be included in data bases
for such recognition.
Using teenagers as workers is
standard
practice in tobacco farms in many poor countries. Some of them
can't go to school, as a result.
Zephyr Teachout: ICE is a
tool
of illegality. It must be abolished.
India is
promoting
generic drugs, because 55 million Indians fall into poverty each
year due to the cost of medicines.
I do wonder why ordinary pharmacies in India don't sell these generic
drugs.
A doctor in Britain killed almost a hundred people, unintentionally,
by
prescribing
opioids and failing to monitor them.
This was not an act of euthanasia, but it
may
be cited to oppose the right to euthanasia, as well as to deny
people in great pain the treatment they need.
A proper right-to-die law should not make people wait for years in
pain, or in helpless boredom, until death is only a few months away.
Anyone who is too incapacitated to commit suicide alone should have
the right to help.
Paper bag or plastic bag?
Each
one is worse for the environment in some ways.
The Democratic Party must embrace the
progressive
ideas that Democrats uphold, or it can't lead them to an election
victory.
China is
spreading
a repressive form of internet to repressive countries around the
world.
The article spreads confusion when it uses the term "intellectual
property". What this article really means is "trade secrets".
Another article may use the same phrase to mean "copyright". Yet
another may use it to mean "patents".
The three have
nothing in common, so any use of a term that tries to generalize
about all of them (and other things, too!) is pure confusion.
Everyone: call on all governments to divest public pension funds from
weapons companies.
Everyone: call on Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock to stop profiting
from imprisonment of refugees.
New Jersey's Democratic governor wants to undo Republican tax cuts,
but Democratic legislators are protecting the rich from paying more
tax.
Raising the sales tax is wrong, because that falls mainly on the poor.
The tax increase should be directed only at income tax, so as to spare
the poor.
In a prison for child refugees, a guard threatened prisoners they
would be denied asylum if they talked to the press.
Some poor African countries accept refugees and don't repress them.
Perhaps wealthier countries could do the same, if they weren't ruled
by stingy rich people that want to starve the poor.
Reportedly the alternatives to palm oil would require a lot more land
to produce the same amount of oil. The problem with palm oil is that
people cut down lots of forests to grow it. Certification programs
to stop such deforestation are ineffective.
I wonder if the other crops are more suitable than palm oil for land
that is not forest and hasn't been forest.
The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain is unionizing the sweatshop
service economy and achieving victories.
The global supply of sand suitable for making concrete is insufficient,
so gangs steal sand from beaches, and in some places kill anyone who tries
to report or stop them.
US immigration courts often require babies to represent themselves in
court.
When UK officials demanded answers from abu Zubaydah, they knew he was
being tortured.
Reporter Peter Beaumont describes how officials of various levels told
specific and general lies, for decades.
Journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed the election manipulation
of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, and the manipulators are
trying to punish her to teach everyone subservience.
"Hostility to migrants is not born of rising numbers but a failure of hope."
Hostility to immigrants comes from a society of distrust for
institutions, and when all the major political parties are more or
less plutocratist, that is sure to arouse distrust from the non-rich
citizens that they harm.
Some present and former US soldiers say that being ordered to jail
civilian hostages will pervert their sense of honor as soldiers, and
that the practice will cause lasting problems.
What will soldiers do, having been placed in this moral contradiction by
their commanders? Some will find ways to get out of the military. I fear
that the rest will replace their sense of honor with cynicism, so that they
will be able to commit any crime and feel nothing. Just as soldiers occupying
Iraq and Afghanistan did, and do, dehumanize the occupied civilians so as to
kill them with no guilt, these soldiers will learn to dehumanize immigrants,
maybe all civilians.
I suspect the sadist and his advisors have discussed the matter and
that that is one of the results they aim for.
The neocons are reprising their campaign for the US to go to war with Iran.
Where does the Mujahedin-e-Khalq get all that money? From Salafi Arabia,
I suspect.
US citizens: call your senators and suggest cutting off funding to the
Department of Harshness and Sadism.
As of 2015, most of the bacteria in most of the meat samples from US
supermarkets were resistant to some antibiotics.
Privatizing Puerto Rico's water is likely to raise the price by 60%.
Given how poor the island is now, many will be without water.
There is a systematic problem with immigrants in the US, those who are
jailed. Thugs keep treating them as slaves.
More than half of mass shootings are motivated by misogyny.
I am not surprised that many of them showed signs that led people to
wonder if they were dangerous. Nonetheless, the percentage of
misogynists that actually become dangerous is tiny, and it is hard
to predict who is part of that percentage.
Monsanto's herbicide dicamba is now made by Bayer, but it still has
the same problem: when sprayed in warm weather (such as in June),
it can vaporize and spread to other fields where it kills the crops.
The 2020 Census Could Overlook Millions of (low income) Kids, Report Finds.
Italy and Libya told a nearby rescue ship to stay away from a sinking
boat with 125 people on it. Then they waited 90 minutes, until 100 of them
had drowned.
The California privacy law was passed to forestall a ballot question
that would have gone further.
However, it looks like the ballot initiative was also limited to
regulating businesses that collect data. Would it have done anything
about government face recognition cameras?
US spy officials say that North Korea is still enriching uranium,
and say this is "deceiving" the US.
But it would not be a deception, rather a reflection of the fact that
North Korea has not made a concrete deal with concrete commitments
about nuclear weapons.
Wood pellets sound renewable. Maybe they would be so if made from
fast-growing tree farms, but they are being made by cutting down
ordinary forests that would take a century to regrow.
That's if they ever do regrow. Global heating could prevent that.
This is why I have always been skeptical of "carbon offset" schemes
that rely on planting trees.
When Everyone Is a Suspect: How Vehicle Inspections Terrorize Immigrant
Communities.
Right-wing rich Americans can manipulate voters through Facebook as well
as Russians can. And they are doing it now.
Massively-funded right-wing campaigns are pressuring public workers
to stop supporting the unions that represent them.
In private, they admit that their goal is to deny the Democratic Party
election funds and votes.
The party's best hope in coping with this
is to choose progressive candidates that give voters an opportunity to
aim for more than delaying the advance of plutocratist poverty.
Assad's forces are driving 160,000 refugees towards borders they won't
be allowed to cross.
ACLU: The NSA Is Using Secrecy to Avoid a Courtroom Reckoning on Its
Global Surveillance Dragnet.
US citizens, tell the heads of the Forest Service and the Department
of Agriculture: Don't give Nestlé a new permit to extract water from
the San Bernardino National Forest.
Everyone: call on AT&T to stop giving people's data to the NSA.
Here's more info about what AT&T is doing.
US citizens: Call on the Department of Justice to block the merger of
Sprint and T-Mobile.
The Crucial Next Few Days In the EU's Copyright Filter and Link Tax Battle.
The troll proposed a saboteur to head the International Organization
for Migration, but other countries wouldn't have it.
Purges of voter lists are a grand opportunity for rigging elections,
and Republicans use it where they can get away with it.
15 Actions That Can Shut Down Trump’s Assault on Immigrant Families.
George Mpanga, British performance poet, was attacked on the street by
thugs and strip-searched for no evident reason. The thugs also told
lies about him.
A teenage refugee in the US describes the life of arbitrary punishment he
was subjected to in an agency that was supposed to "help" him.
The part that bothers me most is requiring relatives in the US to give
their fingerprints before they can receive their family members.
Most people will surrender their fingerprints to such pressure,
and that makes it unjust to use this leverage to demand that.
The EFF has sued to overturn the censorship law, FOSTA.
A similar wave of repression is campaigning for such a law in the UK.
The real goal of such campaigns is to try to repress prostitution.
Thus, what they really do is harm sex workers in general, rather than
protect them from enslavement.
It is possible to act against enslavement without creating repression,
but that requires licensing and monitoring the web sites and brothels,
as well as ending prohibition of brothels. The monitoring will cost
money.
The intimidator-in-chief encouraged his supporters to commit violence
against Rep. Maxine Waters, and they are working on it.
Five years ago, the UK government launched an "investigation" of the
CIA's use of Scottish airports for torture flights. The investigation
seems to have been designed not to find out anything.
We are making progress in prying the Democratic Party away from
plutocratist right-wing "centrists".
That means we have to push harder!
"Employers love high-deductible insurance plans. They’re designed to
deter patients from seeking care — and they work."
19 agents of the deportation thug agency call for the agency to
be split up.
They say that the focus on cruelty to harmless refugees interferes
with the agency's other job: to investigate possible terrorists and
organized crime.
Canada has chosen retaliatory tariffs to attack states which support
the bully.
Craig Murray: hampering Parliament's investigation into the UK's
collaboration in torture was the latest in a series of coverup
measures.
Nonetheless, the investigation revealed something about the true scale
of the problem — even Murray was surprised.
Against Privacy Defeatism: why browsers can still stop fingerprinting.
IceCat
has many features to reduce fingerprinting.
Even Canadians can be harassed trying to enter Canada because they are
included
in a
secret US blacklist, referred to as "Tuscan". US officials can
add names based on vague, confused suspicions, and neither the US nor
Canada will tell you that you are on the list, nor how to try to be
removed.
A Canadian "public consultation on national security" reviewed the
policy for the officially acknowledged no-fly list but didn't mention
this second, unofficial no-fly list. That means it was a phony
consultation. However, mere "transparency" and some sort of stated
policy is not enough to justify punishment without trial.
Stopping a person from flying, nowadays, is a grave punishment. It is
an injustice to impose such a punishment other than as the result of
conviction for a serious crime.
A Supreme Court decision will allow credit card companies to
prohibit
cash discounts.
It could go much further; it might allow middleman companies such as
Amazon and Google to impose many kinds of conditions on people as well
as other companies.
Biometrics and DNA of imprisoned immigrants could be used to reunite families
the US has split up, but could also be used to
track
and harm them.
When a government makes arrest and deportation its priority, it almost
surely errs in favor of imprisonment. No wonder the UK has
jailed
almost 900 lawful residents erroneously since 2012.
Putting an end to homelessness is not rocket science. It requires
building
a lot more non-luxury housing and subsidizing rent for those too
poor. But the US is too plutocratic to do it.
Protesters have
occupied
and blocked several of the deportation thug agency's facilities.
I think this is why the sadist wants to
imprison
immigrants on military bases.
The UK is
subject
to a military-industrial complex that feeds off dreams of the
grandeur of the British Empire. It's very profitable for the weapons
companies that build weapons for a conventional war that is unlikely
to occur.
The Federal Trade Commission is half-hearted about stopping companies
from merging, but really energetic about
preventing
workers labeled as "independent contractors" from bargaining
collectively.
Full-time writers in the UK earn
less
than minimum wage, on the average.
Authors now get only 3% of the publishers' sales totals.
The publishers have some gall claiming that their demands to
crush sharing are in the name of authors.
We should legalize sharing copies of any published work, and support
authors by other methods such as crowdfunding and anonymous voluntary
payments. As for the publishers, they are no longer vital nowadays.
More generally, we should reject the idea that corporations' main duty
is to "make money for their shareholders". That idea was
not
generally accepted 40 years ago, and we should reject it now.
The EU countries made a "deal" about how to deal with migrants
which is mainly an agreement to
disregard
the fact that they have not agreed.
Italy (and maybe the EU) are
forcing
Médecins Sans Frontières to serve the Libyan coast
guard, which imprisons "rescued" migrants in horrible conditions.
Europe could manage to ensure that migrants returned to Libya are
treated humanely.
Due to global heating, England's peatlands are likely to burn and
release CO2, which will
speed
global heating.
Catering to rich landowners that want to shoot grouse makes fires
more likely.
Just one of many ways that
plutocracy
is speeding the destruction of Earth's nature and human
civilization.
Uri Avnery: The US and Israel have a plan to settle the
Israel-Palestine conflict. The plan is secret, but they
expect
to force Palestinians to accept it.
The European Union says it wants "open" science — a weak term I
recommend avoiding — but has
put
Elsevier in charge of monitoring progress. Like putting the fox
in charge of designing the hen house.
The term "open access" is a bad choice of banner because it
focuses on the secondary issue and takes a weak stand on it.
The way to take a strong stand on the primary issue is to
talk about
"free" or "libre"
scientific publication.
Campaigning for "open access" may do some good, but it achieves
its success in spite of the weakness of its visible stance.
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.
Hamlet: "To not be, or to be, that is not the question."
Martin Luther King: "I do not have a dream, and anyone who says I did
must have misheard me."
10:00 AM
Embarcadero Plaza, 4 Embarcadero Ctr
Phone: (202) 224-3954
Twitter: @Sen_JoeManchin
Phone: (202) 224-4814
Twitter: @SenDonnelly
Phone: (202) 224-2043
Twitter: @SenatorHeitkamp
Phone: (202) 224-6665
Twitter: @lisamurkowski
Phone: (202) 224-2523
Twitter: @SenatorCollins
Phone: (202) 224-4124
Twitter: @SenDougJones
The LocationSmart web site enabled anyone to roughly track the position of any mobile phone, due to completely missing security.
However, anyone willing to commit a crime can get the same data through the bad security of the SS7 protocol through which one phone network talks with another phone network.
Even worse, the data is easily available the government.
This is one reason I refuse to carry a mobile phone. The other is that it can be modified through a back door to listen and transmit all conversations in its vicinity.
Many towns in Britain repress homeless beggars, fining them or jailing them for begging. It almost resembles the US.
If you don't want people to beg, don't make them destitute!
Even as Facebook oppresses real useds with its "real name" requirement, it is easy to buy and run a realistic Facebook account that is completely fake.
Facebook plans to work with a right-wing think-tank funded by rich fossil fuel interests, supposedly to "protect" democracy.
The funding suggests that what they plan to protect is plutocracy
This is one more reason to stop being used by Facebook.
The disastrous Republican farm bill was blocked because some Republicans demand more repression of immigrants.
We can't expect this to save us permanently from the nasty provisions of the farm bill.
A team of doctors propose thorough reform of the US (and Canadian) pharmaceutical system, designed to correct many of the problems of the existing system.
I'm glad to see it includes taking control of clinical trials away from pharma companies. I've advocated this for a long time. We need true clinical trials, rather than funding-perverted c(l)ynical trials.
Working in an Amazon warehouse is like being in prison with a sentence of hard and hurried labor.
The workers don't have breaks even enough to go to the toilet.
Working in an Amazon warehouse is like being in prison with a sentence of hard and hurried labor.
The workers don't have breaks even enough to go to the toilet.
Facebook was compelled to offer some additional options to limit use of certain kinds of personal data. So it designed the user interface to discourage people from using them.
Everyone: Call on Microsoft to stop serving the US deportation thug department.
US citizens: tell Senate Democrats not to support vicious Republican "compromises" that repress refugees a little differently.
George Monbiot says that nature is disappearing in front of relentless human alteration of ecosystems: one after another, species that used to be abundant have become rare or disappeared entirely where he lives.
600 protesters held a sit-in in a US Senate office building, demanding an end to imprisonment of refugee families.
I think that the bully will use this as an excuse to increase repression. He has no desire for civil peace, any more than international peace.
Over a thousand people face imprisonment in Italy for driving boats full of migrants — because they were told to drive or be shot. But this is just the clearest of the stupidities in the European campaign to arrest smugglers.
A report surveys how companies including Facebook, Google and Microsoft design systems to hamper users from exercizing their rights.
How America's Wars Fund Inequality at Home.
Republicans representing oil companies are proposing a carbon emissions tax. However, at the the cost of big concessions.
Young American workers are joining and organizing unions, reinvigorating them.
California has adopted a stricter-than-usual law to regulate commercial databases.
It will probably do some good, but if it does what the article suggests, it won't stop the recordings made from cameras and microphones in the street and in buses, or real-time face recognition on their images, and I doubt it will do much good regarding phone company tracking of phone calls, messages and locations.
Pimps pay bail for female prisoners in US jails, then compel them to do sex work or else be jailed again.
"Incarceration takes vulnerable women and makes them more vulnerable."
"As Israelis, we call on the world to intervene on behalf of Palestinians."
Indonesia could use seaweed to replace plastic for food packaging, ten years from now.
But it will require government pressure to stop using plastic.
One important reform in the Democratic National Committee: the "superdelegates" will not vote in the first ballot round.
This means that anyone who wins enough primaries and caucuses to win on the first round cannot be blocked by the superdelegates.
James Schwab was a press representative for the deportation thugs who quit rather than carry out orders to lie. As he was giving a TV interview at his home, leak investigators burst in and tried to question him.
Schwab said this illustrates the way the US government tries to silence its critics.
The number of prisoners in the US is so high that it directly alters elections. Groups that suffer bigotry are imprisoned unfairly more than others, even after committing similar crimes, and that costs them voting strength. Moreover, prisons placed in right-wing areas make their votes count extra.
Senator McConnell said that blocking the appointment of a supreme court justice for a whole year until the 2016 election was not mere partisanship but a civic duty.
Naturally this time he intends to rush the process of replacing Kennedy.
UK law was designed to allow spy agencies to kidnap people and hand them over to dictators to be tortured.
Successive governments have covered up the details to protect the agents involved and the ministers who gave them orders. As a result, similar things could easily happen again.
(satire) Facebook is cracking down on false educational credentials such as "School of hard knocks".
Protest Isn’t Civil. Indeed, protest against unjust rule cannot be effective if it accepts the limits imposed by unjust rule.
Many US cities and counties have cancelled deals with the deportation thugs to hold their prisoners.
A visit to a US hospital's emergency room can land you with a "trauma charge" for tens of thousands of dollars, despite your insurance.
Hospitals do this even for patients that required hardly any treatment.
US citizens: phone your senators at 1-844-515-2798 to call on them to reject all the bully's nominations for the Supreme Court. They all want to abolish the right to abortion.
People who work in tobacco farms are exposed to the same addictive nicotine as the people that smoke the tobacco. Teenagers are more vulnerable than adults. So it makes sense to exclude minors from doing this work.
However, the adults are surely not really safe, either. Is there some sort of safety gear that would protect them from the nicotine without causing them heat stroke?
As always, I oppose referring to teenagers as "children".
US Immigration Must Reunite Families Separated at Border, Federal Judge Rules.
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the future of the Democratic party."
Amnesty: banning refugees from Yemen and Syria is "essentially lighting a house on fire and locking the escape door shut."
The thug who rushed to shoot and kill Antwon Rose has been charged with homicide.
Every time a killer thug doesn't get off without charges, I think that is something to celebrate.
Some UK schools seem to improve their students' average national test scores by kicking out students who are likely to do badly.
The new head of the US Bureau of Consumer Protection is a saboteur who has represented many companies, some of which have mistreated the public.
Tesla appropriated Tom Edwards's drawing of a unicorn as part of its branding, without asking him or even telling him.
I believe everyone is entitled to the freedom to share copies of any published work, including the farting unicorn. However, sharing means noncommercial redistribution of exact copies. What Tesla is doing is commercial use, not sharing. Thus I agree with Edwards that Tesla ought to get his permission and pay him.
Greenpeace reports that ships carrying toxic tar sands oil away from the Unkinder Morgan pipeline would threaten oil spills all along the California coast, as well as near Vancouver.
They would harm marine mammals even when they don't spill any oil.
How can we save Earth's biodiversity?
If global heating requires species to move to survive, they won't be able to survive in small wildlife reserves that currently suit them.
The warlover seems to be planning to kick out Mattis as Saboteur of Defense. He is not sabotaging hard enough, it seems.
Countries that think of themselves as US "allies" will soon learn that they can't expect the warlover to let "adult" officials restrain him very much for very long.
Microscopic life has not yet recovered from the 2010 Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
EU citizens: take the next step in fighting against mandatory copyright filters.
US citizens: support the bill to limit rich corporations' stock buybacks and give workers a slot in their boards of directors.
US citizens: call on the DEA not to ban Kratom.
Some towns in Florida are already being taken over by the sea.
Saudi Arabia Is Not Driving Change — It Is Trying to Hoodwink the West.
The bully, of course, is not skeptical when a country serves his personal interests.
American Jews campaign for Jewish institutions to stop teaching a one-sided view of Israel and Palestine.
In Israel, colonizing fanatics are allowed to attack and even wound security agents, but Palestinians who slap them go to prison.
The bully and Netanyahu plan to pound Palestinians into the ground until they accept permanent occupation in the West Bank.
More about this plan for non-peace.
Corbyn says that he would recognize Palestine as a state, and cut arms sales to Israel to press for a peace agreement.
(Satire) The Onion presents the new civility rules for criticizing the US government.
ACLU: the Supreme Court upheld the bully's partial ban on Muslim visitors by closing its eyes to facts.
Cambodia's ruler, Hun Sen, has become an absolute dictator.
British military bases in Cyprus were very heavily used by hunters to kill migrating songbirds. The army has taken effective action to stop most of this.
The decision to expand London's main airport at the expense of Earth's ecosphere shows what kind of reaction we can expect from the UK government to other crisis situations, such as leaving the EU.
Fraudulent businesses operate based on the weaknesses of the systems of oversight, such as accounting and reporting. Fraudulent businesses can find the accountants that they can corrupt, and then present a picture of great success that discourages inquiry.
Senator Warren reports on the cages for immigrants. Men are packed so tight that they can't all lie down at once. Children sit all day doing nothing. The prison guards lie about the conditions.
Whistleblower Reality Winner, who informed the US about Russian attacks on states' election computer systems, accepted a plea bargain for 5 years in prison.
Treating whistleblowers as spies is fundamentally wrong. In effect, it declares the American people to be the enemy of the US government. If that's how things are, I choose the people's side.
To ensure that taking the public's side is not allowed in court, the Espionage Act explicitly forbids the defendant to argue that blowing the whistle was a service to the public, even if it was.
One of many reasons to eliminate the death penalty is because of bias in sentencing. One form of bias in the US is against homosexuals. The Supreme Court refused to consider a case in which jurors were openly and even admittedly motivated by this bias.
The best way to eliminate bias in applying the death penalty is to abolish the death penalty.
Venezuela's largest ISP, government-owned, has blocked Tor.
Can someone find me a page which presents an up-to-date list of countries that block Tor?
The US immigration thugs use a special program to try to estimate whether an asylum seeker is likely to show up for hearings if released, or should be imprisoned. The program is very simple — it unconditionally answers "imprison!"
A black firefighter in Oakland was doing fire safety vegetation inspections of yards of houses, wearing a uniform. Residents twice accused him of being a burglar, apparently because of his skin color.
Mass-murdering dictators usually aren't born that way. They start as effective and likeable people, which enables them to win the power with which they later commit atrocities. Power can teach its wielders to be capable of callous atrocities.
I have never been particularly impressed by physical courage, and I don't particularly admire veterans. I feel sorry for today's US military veterans: they joined the military thinking they would "serve their country," but instead the US used them to invade and destroy other countries.
Many of them realized this, and some of them started organizations against militarism — in effect using their cachet as veterans to protect others from being swindled as they had been. Those are the veterans I consider heroes.
When I see organizations promote candidates by saying that they are veterans, I think, "Is this meant as a substitute for being a strong progressive champion?"
The mainstream media make a one-sided demand for "civility" from progressives, while officials responsible for horrible crimes reject civility 100%.
The main source of incivility in US politics is the systematic hatred and intimidation that the bully creates.
Destruction of tropical forest has hit a record pace. It is a positive-feedback system for global heating.
Plutocratist governments that promote deforestation for the sake of business are a big part of the cause.
The Janus decision doesn't have to kill public employee unions. It does mean that they have to put much more effort into organizing.
Defendants in US courts are sentenced based on secret AI programs and told they are not allowed to find out what the basis was for the decision.
The founders of the US considered trade secrecy antisocial, to the point that one argument for having a patent system is to discourage trade secrecy.
How about if we discourage trade secrecy by eliminating the laws that artificially facilitate it?
The right-wing extremist that murdered Heather Heyer faces federal hate crime charges.
France is prosecuting people accused of planning a right-wing anti-Muslim terrorist plot.
The plotters included an ex-thug, so it seems likely they could have really committed terrorism.
The UK has extended civil partnerships to different-sex couples.
Justice Kennedy, a Republican appointee who was not an extremist, is retiring. The Republicans will replace him with another extremist.
"In prison I saw the futility of locking up women for minor crimes."
I am disappointed that this statement is limited to women. UK (and US) prisons for men, nowadays, offer no rehabilitation and clearly do harm in many cases.
Our legal system fails to properly punish thugs even for the nastiest illegalities.
Public-employee unions in the US can no longer collect fees from all the workers they serve.
Republicans have worked for decades to kill off those unions and cut public employees' pay. Now it looks like they will succeed.
Progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated right-wing Democrat Joe Crowley in the primary.
Crowley is one of those so-called "centrists" that support the power of business over the state. If we are to restore democracy, we have to replace them as well as replacing Republicans.
Poland may be repealing criminal penalties for using expressions such as "Polish death camps", but still thinks it has the power to impose fines on publications in other countries.
The expression "Polish death camps" makes a false statement about history. The death camps in which millions of Jews were murdered were not run by Poland or by Poles. They were set up and run by German Nazis.
Patriotic Poles in occupied Poland would never have aided the Germans in killing Jews. They did it all on their own.
Regardless of those facts, it is dangerous for any country, whether Poland or China or another, to have the power to impose global censorship. Other countries should make sure their courts will not enforce fines imposed by foreign courts for violating censorship.
North Korea is upgrading its nuclear reactor.
This is not treacherous. It reflects the fact that North Korea has not made an agreement for nuclear disarmament.
I think that peace between North and South Korea would make the nuclear issue much less important.
The Supreme Court's approval of the bully's veiled ban on Muslim visitors legitimizes bigotry.
CODEPINK is investigating US mutual funds to expose how much they invest in the military-industrial complex.
Several local trials test the effects of an unconditional basic income.
These tests are not "universal"; some of them are offered to a selection of people in a certain locality, rather than everyone. But they give some information about the effects of the policy.
In 1948 Britain, the creation of the National Health Service was considered the fulfillment of a human right just agreed on.
Marijuana cultivation in California is finishing off the endangered Humboldt marten. Only 300 or so now remain.
Digital business lobbyists in California are trying to replace a proposed privacy ballot initiative with a new privacy law that would do less to protect privacy. At the same time, they are lobbying to weaken the proposed law to do even less.
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 thugs' names and contact info from their LinkedIn profiles. 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 UK will cease subsidizing home solar electricity.
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 — 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.
The Onion: 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".
The Onion: 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.
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