Remote exam software companies try to have it both ways: telling schools that they automate detection of cheating while saying that teachers can and must review recordings and make their own decisions.
It is clear that those programs snoop on students and the interiors of their homes.
However, the article says nothing about their demand that students install nonfree software. Even worse, the program talks over a network, which means you must expect it to be spying on users.
The EFF criticizes the ACCESS Act, a bill meant to stop platforms from mistreating users. It is too weak in several ways.
The EFF's criticisms are valid, but it doesn't mention a basic weakness: that it doesn't require services to allow anonymous use. If the service knows who the user is, it will track the user, and that is the basis for some injustices.
A Disney heiress explains the attitudes she absorbed from her family while growing up, which taught her to feel entitled to avoid paying any taxes.
These people ought to pay lots of their income in taxes. Their political philosophy enables them to justify escaping from that, by spending a much smaller amount on philanthropy.
Uber and Lyft corrupted community groups to get them to push the companies' campaigns to stop gig workers from unionizing.
*The Republican narrative that enhanced unemployment benefits are dissuading people from returning to work—and that cutting off the aid is necessary to boost hiring—is running up against reality in the GOP-led state of Missouri, where officials have yet to see any significant increase in job applicants since the governor cut off pandemic-related federal programs last month.*
We don't see much effort by legislatures to stop landlords from holding apartments vacant until someone offers a higher rent. But if workers wait for a better offer, legislators insult them and try to pressure them. That's plutocracy at work.
Toyota has donated lots of money to Republican congresscritters that have supported overturning the election.
United Nations human rights officials have called on all countries to stop police from practicing discrimination against blacks.
In Idaho, most of the people not wearing masks indoors are unvaccinated.
Interviews with people suffering from various medical problems that cause chronic pain. Many report that doctors didn't believe they had real medical problems.
Amartya Sen: Britain taught India important traditions, including a free press and democratic elections, but the British Empire prevented India from taking advantage of them until India became independent.
Right-wingers in the UK are distributing fake leaflets, pretending to be from the Labour Party, which make extreme statements.
South Africa has sentenced its former president Zuma to prison for refusing to testify about corruption.
The US Southern Baptists are divided between supporters of the Republican death cult and people more interested in Christianity.
Why is there an organization called "Southern Baptist"? In 1845, the Baptists of the south split from the US Baptist church because the latter had concluded that slavery was wrong. Those in the south were ardent supporters of slavery. Now they are reverting to white supremacism.
Tigrayan guerrillas have reorganized and chased the Ethiopian government forces out of Mekelle, the capital of Tigray.
Mekelle is now under the control of the Tigray People's Liberation Front,
The brain can respond to some kinds of pain and damage by lowering its pain threshold. This can lead to devastating pain in many parts of the body.
Fly-shooting nets are so effective for catching fish that they leave very little to regenerate the stock.
If our goal is to keep fish stocks strong, fish them sustainably, and provide work for many fishers, it is clear that these nets are counterproductive -- so we should ban them entirely.
New Zealand plans to ban plastic packaging for some products, as well as the usual single-use plastics that other countries ban.
Rising seas drive salt water into the ground nearby. This can corrode the foundations of tall buildings and make them collapse.
There are many places in the world where lots of somewhat tall buildings have been built near beaches. I've seen them near Rio de Janeiro.
Even if we work hard to curb greenhouse emissions quickly, sea-level rise will continue for decades, perhaps even centuries. Miami cannot be saved.
*Brazil could have stopped 400,000 Covid deaths with better response, expert says.*
A major London museum insists on its responsibility to "accurately explain the nature of its collections," including how some were acquired through British imperialism, but rejects demands to hide them.
I agree with the museum's general stance. I don't know enough about the specific cases to have opinions on them.
"Decolonization" properly means giving independence to colonies. I object to extending that word to cover removing things from display, because that results in absurd hyperbole. Also, it tries to impose the presumption that two very different issues are just one issue. Opposing colonization does not imply any particular position on what to do with objects in a museum that were acquired from colonization -- or with objects acquired by war (as distinct from colonization).
Why the approval of the purported Alzheimer's preventative, aducanumab, was questionable.
*Republicans can [rig] the next elections through gerrymandering alone.*
In many US cities, wealthier neighborhoods have lots of trees, but poor neighborhoods have few or none. So the latter become painfully, even dangerously hot. This is the result of lending practices decades ago, which will take effort and money to overcome.
Just planting trees won't immediately fix the problem; it may take some decades for the trees to grow big enough to have much effect.
To give poor neighborhoods the same amount of trees would require 30 million new trees.
That's assuming they find enough new-tree-ents to grow big.
The EU will draw up work safety standards that apply to working at home or in other premises that are not "workplaces" of the employer.
Biden called on countries whose citizens are in Syrian prison camps, accused of supporting PISSI, to take them back (and prosecute them if appropriate).
I am in favor of this.
Advances in attributing parts of the costs of global heating effects to specific amounts of greenhouse emissions are likely to lead to a lot more lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.
I predict that companies will buy laws to give them immunity. That's the plutocratic way of life.
A French court has prohibited hunting songbirds by putting glue on branches.
This will help protect endangered species.
I find it hard to understand how anyone can want to kill a songbird rather than listen to its singing.
US citizens: call on Blinken to end all US training of "security" forces of Salafi Arabia.
*The case for Brexit was built on lies. Five years later, deceit is routine in [UK] politics.*
The difficulty of getting the health minister to resign demonstrates the level of tolerance for deceit. Indeed, several instances of deceit in government, and outcry in response to them, were covered up in the past year.
*From Grenfell Tower to the Met police, shirking responsibility has become endemic.*
On the issue of cancelling books to express disapproval of their authors.
I am terrified by the reported contempt of publishing staff under 40 for freedom to disagree with them. If they succeed in excluding from publication all disagreement with their ideology -- regardless of what the ideology eventually comes to be -- the result is likely to be tyranny.
Right-wing propaganda claims that increasing rates of violent crime result from local policy changes, which in many cases did not really happen.
The UK plans a new climate impact test for proposed fossil fuel projects. The test will be applied at the very start of the process, which means that an enormous planned oilfield in the North Sea will be exempt from the test.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect workers from Amazon's oppressive surveillance.
Black Lives Matter activists and supporters in the UK are getting death threats; when they state their support, they are accused of "inflaming racial tensions".
I think that the thugs who are quick to murder blacks are the ones who inflame the racial tensions. The issue is how to change their behavior.
*Nathan Maung says [Burmese prison thugs] punched, slapped and beat him, and kept him blindfolded for over a week.*
They also chained him in painful positions and denied him sleep.
They didn't know, for the first few days, that he was a US citizen. So his treatment may be representative of how they treat political prisoners who are citizens only of Burma. But he says that some prisoners got worse torture than he did.
A "good guy with a gun" shot a murderer. Then a uniformed thug shot him dead without giving him time to explain.
The bipartisan infrastructure sellout-or-deal include an attempt to crack down on fraud in unemployment insurance.
Whatever it does, it is likely to screw people who are entitled to unemployment support. And the supposed amount to be saved is likely to be way exaggerated.
Big Pharma corrupts the UK Parliament via hiden funding to various parliamentary "all-party" groups.
They don't have official status; nonetheless, funding one gives support to its members, and can therefore corrupt them.
*Amnesty: ‘catalogue of violations’ by Israeli police against Palestinians.*
On the issue of whether two sides in a dispute are "morally equivalent," or even in the same region of morality.
False equivalence is a kind of fallacy that can be used to argue for various conclusions. Often that fallacy is used to defend unjust power; the article presents examples. The article also presents examples of false or misleading accusations of use the fallacy.
Was it better to be in Eastern Europe under the Soviet Empire than in Central America under US dominion? I think that depends on where and when. Stalin's rule also included massive arbitrary imprisonment and execution, sometimes almost at random, but he died in 1953 and after him the repression was less wild and brutal (but it was still repression).
I have a feeling that the term "genocide" is being stretched when applied to the repression in Guatemala. It was a crime against humanity, for sure; but genocide is something different. In order to be genocide, the killings would have to have been intended as a step towards eliminating the Maya of Guatemala. Was that the army's intent? I don't know for ceertain, but the basis presented here seems insufficient to show that.
*Military Contractors Quietly Boost Donations to GOP Backers of Trump's Coup Attempt.*
(satire) *Subway CEO Apologizes For Trusting Fish Who Falsified Documents To Pass As Tuna.*
A book reports that the bully, in 2020, persistently pressed for US thugs and the army to commit more violence against protesters.
How Israel should start contacts with HAMAS to reduce the siege of Gaza.
Israeli thugs found Ahmad 'Abdu in his car, which was stationary, and immediately started shooting him. Then they left without even giving him first aid. Then they lied about what they had done.
Youtube has deleted videos in which people talked about their relatives who are in reeducation camps in China, and showed their own ID cards to demonstrate their identity. Youtube has a rule against showing people's identity data.
That rule seems good in most circumstances, but this seems to be an exception.
Posting videos in a site other than youtube is not a bad thing. But some of them require nonfree software to view, and do not — unlike Youtube — have invidious as a workaround.
*Assange's fiancée urges Biden to free WikiLeaks founder to show U.S. has changed.*
The funeral of Nizar Banat became a protest against Mahmoud Abbas, president of Palestine.
Palestine has not held an election for many years. The reasons for this are complex: Israel has put elected officials in prison without charges, and has interfered with holding elections. The result is that Mahmoud Abbas remains president by default.
US hospitals, even those that are nonprofit organizations, refuse to hire enough nurses. The predictable result is that patients get injured.
Occasionally a patient develops a serious condition that went unnoticed because the nurses were always in a hurry.
I voted against the Massachusetts initiative, despite agreeing with the basic idea, because it seemed to me that putting a specific staffing ratio directly in the law was too rigid. In 20 years that ratio might call for change and would be very hard to change. Also, since the nurse I had known had died, I had no one to ask about whether that number was correct.
The UK's supreme court dismissed charges against participants in an inconvenient but nonviolent protest in the name of the freedom to protest.
Russia is excluding candidates from local elections because of their past support for Navalny.
The US has put sanctions on some Chinese solar panel exports.
This is a tricky trade off between two goals: to punish China for its repression, about which it shows as little shame as the bully does, and to continue installing solar generation in the US. I suppose the aim includes encouraging a buildup of US production which would be a long-term decrease in the world's dependence on China for this.
*Leaked IPCC Draft Climate Report 'Reads Like a 4,000-Page Indictment' of Humanity's Failure.*
John McAfee's widow says he was not suicidal and had told her he would call her again in the evening. She does not believe he committed suicide.
I know nothing about his case and have no opinion about whether he was guilty or not.
Arizona Republicans are passing a law to make it easy for Republicans to conspire to reject election results (in case a Democrat wins).
70 members of Congress told Biden that the US should resume its former recognition that Israel's colonies in Palestine are illegal.
The US Army must not be too timid to punish Michael Flynn for calling for a military coup.
The US as well as China has carried out research on potentially dangerous modified versions of coronaviruses.
This in itself is not evil; the research has an ethical medical justification. But there is some risk to it, and we are not sure how much risk that its. The author calls for coordinated international standards and oversight for such research.
(satire) *Contractor Informs Biden It'd Be Cheaper To Just Tear Down U.S. And Start Over.*
(satire) *Raid Introduces Holy Water-Infused Spray That Allows Cockroaches To Be Baptized And Die As Christians.*
Germany claims that it could stop construction of the new gas pipeline to Russia, or shut off its use, as punishment for Russian aggression.
I am skeptical of the claim. Once the pipeline is in use, EU countries would become dependent on it, and their pressure to keep it running would be even harder to resist then, than their pressure to finish it is now.
The EU should cancel this pipeline and adopt stronger measures to decarbonize. It needs to do that anyway.
Hong Kong's new head of the thug department claims that "hostility against the police" is caused by "fake news."
I think that means the state will declare news about unjust actions by the thugs to be "fake."
Biden campaign workers are suing the Republican supporters that besieged a campaign bus in Texas.
The owners of the recently collapsed apartment building in Miami got a warning from an engineer of structural damage, so they started planning to do the recommended repairs.
That takes time. Alas, the building collapsed shortly before those repairs were going to start.
What should we conclude about such a situation? Were the owners negligent or culpable for this?
Is there a way to tell when there is an imminent danger of collapse? Should all building owners assume an imminent danger from such damage?
When the US shut down Iranian web sites, it included even dissidents.
The New York City thug department has a history of sabotaging lawsuits by failing to hand over documents that the victims demand for the trial. It is doing that again now, to Black Lives Matter protesters whom the thugs attacked last summer.
The Supreme Court's ruling on farm-worker union organizers is a disaster for the public which extends far beyond union organizing.
It limits all levels of governments in the US in requiring businesses from allowing access to workers in workplaces.
In Boston: rally to support Julian Assange and freedom of the press. Monday, July 5, from 11 to 12:30, at Park Street Station on the Boston Common.
US citizens: call on the DOJ to exclude white supremacists in America's thug departments, including transit thugs, as well as the TSA.
US citizens: call on Congress and the president to pass the Green New Deal.
There is a bipartisan deal to pass an infrastructure bill. What it does not include, Democrats say they will pass via budget reconciliation process, a sort of loophole-in-a-loophole.
It seems that the crucial question is not what this deal includes, but what is included in this deal plus the budget reconciliation bill. I'd like to see what Sanders says about it.
One thing that is clearly dangerous is the plan to sell public assets. Another is "public-private partnerships", which is a nice-sounding name for making the public support the profits of businesses.
Reportedly the investments are slanted towards use of fossil fuels. Some of that can't be avoided, but it's clear that plutocratists will try do as much of that as they can.
(satire) *Scientists Announce Successful Experiment To Bankrupt Mouse That Can’t Afford Cancer Drug.*
(satire) *Infrastructure Talks Come To Halt After Giant Sinkhole Swallows Capitol Building.*
Florida Republicans have adopted a law that claims to defend freedom of speech in universities; but it lets the politicians in power (right-wing politicians) decide when and how to enforce. As a result, it is likely to defend freedom of right-wing speech, while helping to restrict left-wing speech.
Masculinity anxiety has held society back from rational advances.
I'm proud to say that I adopted wheeled suitcases as soon as I became aware of them. Conceptions of manliness didn't hold me back at all. I never considered myself physically strong, nor made much effort to be so.
I do wonder how the women who used rolling suitcases before they were a "success" got them. Did each make her own? If not, they had to buy them somewhere, so where was that?
Plutocratist Democrats including Clinton are trying desperately to mislead voters so that they won't vote for Nina Turner for Congress.
Some ideas for how the Senate can make filibusters more difficult to carry out.
The Pentagon has released its report describing Unidentified Aerial Phenomena which appear to be objects.
In some cases they reportedly affected military systems.
Let's see what explanations skeptics come up with.
UAPs could be devices that send spoofing transmissions to present a false impression of how they are moving.
The NIH deleted in June 2020 some early SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences at the request of the Chinese researcher who had previously submitted them.
It is not obvious what those sequences would prove if they were still available, but given the way China operates, we have to suspect that officials ordered the researcher to "request" their deletion, and that the purpose was to impede understanding. I think the NIH should change its rules for deletions. Perhaps it should allow the submitter to add notes, such as "I now suspect this was spurious", but not actual deletion.
China uses its increasing economic power to make other countries expel Uyghur expats or deport them to China.
This includes Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, and other countries.
I've decided to write it "Uyghur", because their own pronunciation of that name starts with the sound of "uy" rather than the "we" customarily used to pronounce that name in English.
When Iranian soldiers shot down Ukrainian flight 752, was it a "disastrous mistake" or was it "incompetence and recklessness"?
The difference does matter in regard to what steps Iran should take to make sure nothing similar happens again, but it is not a big moral issue.
Statistical methods suggest that SARS-CoV-2 started spreading in China in October or early November, 2019.
Australia has imposed a lockdown on part of Sydney, and a neighboring town.
This is necessary.
An article argues that Australia was foolish to depend on its quarantine and occasional lockdowns to protect the country from Covid-19.
I disagree.
In an ideal world, Australia (and every other country) would have vaccinated everyone by now (aside from medically necessary exceptions). However, given the artificial limitations on vaccine production, on top of the inevitable difficulties of ramping up production, Australia was not the most urgent place to use the limited supplies. It was succeeding, as well as any country, in keeping its population safe.
Belarus has moved journalist prisoner Roman Protasevich to house arrest in an apartment.
Likewise Sofia Sapega, who was taken off the plane with him.
This could be a step towards releasing the two. I expect the EU would suspend its sanctions unless/until Belarus does such a thing again.
PISSI is becoming PISSA as it expands in Subsaharan Africa.
PISSA in Nigeria treats local Muslims with respect, better than other governments. Which is fine, in and of itself. If it were willing to make peace with non-Muslims, we could coexist with it.
New Zealand imprisons people for "being insulting", and plans to do this in even more cases.
It is painful to be insulted, but none of us has the right to forbid people to insult us.
The US blocked access from the US to some Iranian government web sites.
That is censorship in the US. Americans have the right to see what Iran is saying.
The Poor People's Campaign protested Manchin and the Republicans outside their office in Washington DC.
The UK plans to develop a large new oilfield in the North Sea.
There is no room for this in the carbon budget.
*Ignoring Climate Goals, Biden Administration Greenlights Oil Drilling in Alaska.*
* New South Wales’ use of environmental offsets to compensate for habitat destruction caused by major developments will be examined by a parliamentary inquiry.*
Pakistan is moving to censorship of opinions and art.
Drought caused by global heating is forcing California to burn more gas and thus causes more global heating.
Forest protectors are attaching themselves to trees and roads to prevent logging of the remaining ancient trees in British Columbia (Canada).
People in the Florida Keys are starting to recognize that their islands are doomed because of global heating.
To raise their homes enough to escape flooding in the short term would cost more than they can afford. Worse than that, it would only delay the disaster, not prevent it -- the work would have to be repeated, with increasing frequency, and that would be money ill spent.
Millions of people will lose their homes due to sea level rise, and for in most cases we can't protect them for very long.
We have to focus on treating the disease, not the symptoms. The disease is greenhouse gas emission and the treatment is to curb emissions.
UN special rapporteur David Boyd warns that three proposed repressive UK laws would *make human rights violations more likely to occur and less likely to be punished.*
Dictator al-Sisi has taken at least 60,000 political prisoners, including four activists of the Egyptian Initiative on Personal Rights (EIPR).
*Part of the EIPR’s role is to investigate the [88]mistreatment of prisoners, and during interrogations the arrestees were asked why they had fabricated accounts of the grim conditions faced by those in jail, even as they sat in those very conditions themselves.*
Al-Sisi can continue this because he has outside financial backing, from the US for instance.
Palestinian thugs beat Palestinian opposition candidate Nizar Banat so badly that he died from his injuries.
The expected filibuster against the We the People Act was not a final defeat. Steady pressure can shift the votes of some senators and achieve victory.
The European Parliament approved binding greenhouse emissions targets and other measures to curb global heating.
I think this is not strong enough, but it is still a good step forward.
*At least 64 killed in Ethiopian airstrike on Tigray market.*
When US pilots bombed weddings in the Middle East, perhaps they did not know what they were attacking. However, Ethiopian pilots ought to immediately recognize an Ethiopian market.
When the US claims that all the victims of a bombing were guerrillas, it is hard for Americans to know for certain that this is false. Most of us have never been to the countries where these attacks occurred, and we don't know what is normal there or not. We have to decide whether to believe the US government or believe local people that we don't know much about. Over time, it has become clear that the US often denies civilian casualties.
I expect that Ethiopians know what is plausible in Ethiopian life, and what really could or could not have happened in that bombing.
Malaysia plans to increase the repression of blasphemy and nonstandard gender or sex roles.
We think of Malaysia as modern, not fanatical. But countries dominated by Islam tend to be repressive and deny various human rights in the name of religion, including religious freedom.
US citizens: call on the Senate to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
The House passed this, but that's not enough to do it.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to pass a wealth tax.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: tell the President and Congress: No infrastructure deal without climate defense.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Biden to give clemency to people imprisoned for drug crimes.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
If you call, please spread the word!
Massachusetts citizens: support the Work and Family Mobility Act.
Israel has brought back the requirement to wear masks in public places indoors, due to renewed spread of Covid-19.
Almost every death (or disability) due to Covid-19 in the US from now on will be preventable — due to American's foolish refusal to get vaccinated.
* Brazil’s environment minister has quit amid a criminal investigation into whether he obstructed a police inquiry into illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest.*
A juror in the trial of Chinese scientist Anming Hu says that the FBI tried to railroad him, that the accusation of hiding his ties to China was visibly false all along.
I wonder what the FBI does when it finds that an agent has tried to frame someone. Does it say, "Get lost, we don't want to threaten innocent people"? Or does it say, "Nice try, better luck next time"?
*UK to ban junk food advertising online and before 9pm on TV [and on internet sites] from 2023.*
The ACLU's criticisms of Amazon's private internet, "Sidewalk".
Some states require unemployed people to use unreliable face recognition to prove their eligibility for unemployment support. Failures can cause delays of weeks.
This is a use of face recognition for which a perfectly reliable system would do no harm, provided it doesn't impose nonfree software on people. Applicants for unemployment support are required to identify themselves, after all. What worries me most about biometrics is the danger of using them to identify people when they are entitled to anonymity.
(satire) *Experts Encourage Americans To Start Thinking About What Form Of Government They’d Like To Try After Democracy Crumbles.*
I think we already know the answer. If we don't defend democracy now, we will have out-and-out plutocracy — still presented as democracy.
(satire) *Conservative Man Tearfully Informs Family Critical Race Theory Has Spread To His Liver.*
As Israelis build a new colony on Palestinian territory, Palestinians are trying many ways to drive them out.
The colony is illegal under Israeli law, but the government is only interested in keeping it growing. Rather than removing the Israeli lawbreakers, Israel sent troops who are killing some of the Palestinian protesters.
Smoke from the fires burning outside the colony sometimes hurts the eyes of the colonists. It must feel somewhat like tear gas.
*Oil and gas donors gave over £400k to Tories* as the UK government decided to allow new oil wells in the North Sea.
A web of influence linked a rich backer of the corrupter with Crown Prince Bone Saw and his murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
I doubt that the training included use of bone saws or forced application of powerful sedatives, but it may have included readiness to follow orders for assassination.
I see no evidence that either the corrupter or his plutocratist donor specifically supported murdering Khashoggi. But they surely helped get the US more closely involved with Bone Saw and Salafi Arabia. If that didn't directly bring about to the murder of Khashoggi, it surely helped bring about US support for Salafi Arabia's war in Yemen, which has killed thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands.
* Rep. Mondaire Jones said [Senator] Sinema [by defending the filibuster] is effectively arguing that "we should let Republicans destroy democracy now because at some indeterminate time in the future they may try again."*
The proposed British law to restrict the right to protest — even alone — says this is in the name of avoiding noise!
Right-wingers say the law is good because the thugs like it. Duh! I say that confirms it is bad.
Companies that store data about users in China are required to cooperate unquestioningly with Chinese surveillance, and must not send the data to anyone outside China without China's approval.
This protects people in China from non-Chinese surveillance and profiling, while making all of them totally vulnerable to China.
*Study Warns of Severe Drying for Amazon Rainforest.*
Biden's slow negotiations to resume the non-nuclear deal with Iran probably helped push the voters towards the right-wing candidate.
I think the term "train wreck" is too strong, but mostly I agree with the article's opinions.
The US underestimates the future cost to society of emitting CO2, which systematically encourages plans to emit too much of it.
Connecticut will stop charging prisoners for phone calls.
Sanders: *Not a single Republican in the United States Senate has the courage to even debate whether we should protect American democracy or not.*
Buffalo, New York, has elected a socialist mayor.
She plans to reduce the opportunities for brutality by the city's thug department, and to redefine "public safety" in a broader way.
The US endorsed the validity of the Peruvian election.
This is definitively better than how the US used to act.
Some geoengineering schemes could capture large amounts of already-emitted CO2.
These schemes, if they work, could compensate for all the effects of releasing CO2, by removing that CO2. Running them extra could compensate for the methane we have released.
Concerns about "playing god" are foolish. That idea is valid only insofar as it reminds us that these schemes could have risks we won't foresee. Alas, what we are already doing has enormous risks that we have already foreseen.
We may need to uses megasystems to sequester CO2. However, I am concerned that we will adopt this as an easy substitute for reducing emissions. Fossil fuel companies will say, "Let's continue to extract and burn all the fossil fuels — and sequester all the CO2 with olivine and kelp forests."
That would be risky: if the scheme works for a while, that does not mean it will work without limits. We had better play it safe with our planet: first, make firm arrangements to cease the dangerous and destructive practices, thus limiting the damage we will do; then fix the damage we will not have avoided.
As for the schemes that would only cool the Earth, they don't try to address the danger of ocean acidification by the emitted CO2, which could kill all coral, all molluscs, and maybe all crustacians (I don't remember), because they could not make their shells. Some research suggest that high levels of CO2 would change some other animals' behavior, making them rash, so they would get eaten. Local cooling to prevent escape of methane might be useful. It would be much smaller and thus less risky than trying to cool the whole surface of the Earth.
The EU has accustomed itself to the absence of the UK, and may have been strengthened by it.
It still has grave problems: its government has only a little democracy, and it gives the Euro banksters the power to crush countries such as Greece and Italy that fall into unpayable debt.
*Hong Kong police arrest editorial writer at Apple Daily newspaper.*
Some indigenous Australians criticize Western Australia's bill to change the rules meant to protect the sites containing ancient indigenous art.
I support protecting them, but the AHAA seems to say that the destruction of ancient indigenous art is acceptable provided that the "holders of this cultural heritage give consent." I do not agree with that. Those sites include some of the oldest art in the world; it is part of the heritage of all humanity. No one group should be authorized to give consent for their destruction. On the contrary, we should make it very hard for anyone to get legal permission to do that.
We should not romanticize indigenous humans. They are humans, and susceptible to corruption by money or power like other humans. Just now an indigenous group in Canada opposes efforts to protect the remnant old growth rainforest in British Columbia, because it gets paid for the trees that are cut down.
I think logging is legitimate and useful -- as long as it doesn't go too far. In particular, we must preserve the small old growth forests that remain.
The UK's tax system allows people to own second homes, rent them out part time, and pay no tax on them. The result is more homelessness.
*Four Saudis who participated in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year.*
Apple says it restricts users for their own good, to protect them from "security risk".
Apple is using the usual narrow definition of "security" — the danger that third parties might attack the user. However, Apple's own software mistreats users in several ways, and that is bad security, using a broader and deeper sense of "security".
Let's stop presuming that all tax dodging by the rich is lawful.
Much of it may be lawful. When corporations route their profits through a country where the tax rate is zero, it may be lawful. That is no excuse morally, of course — those laws must be changed.
However, the purpose of using tax havens to hide who really gets the money is so that someone can commit tax evasion, and that is presumably a crime.
The article calls for investigating rich cheaters, and changing laws so that it is possible to nail them.
A proposed EU directive for cutting the carbon emissions of shipping would permit use of liquified natural gas as a bridge to nowhere. Compared with the current fuel (heavy fuel oil), it might not reduce emissions at all.
Cutting emissions will cost a lot of money, but the alternative is global disaster, so we need to spend it. Permitting "flexibility" to avoid this is self-defeating.
Republicans blocked the For the People Act with a filibuster, as expected. Now the really hard fight begins, to convince all Democrats in the Senate to vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster so that this and other crucial laws can be passed.
The US Interior Department will hold an investigation of the boarding schools that decades ago it forced indigenous children to attend.
*Teamsters plan sweeping effort to unionize Amazon workers.*
Bravo!
Nicaragua has arrested journalists as well as political candidates; a famous Nicaraguan journalist has fled the country after his home was raided.
When the US prosecutes journalists such as Julian Assange, it lends support to other countries that do so. Including Nicaragua and China. The US should stand up for freedom of the press, including the freedom to investigate government wrongdoing.
*US military training manual describes socialism as "terrorist ideology."*
That is arrant bullshit. Today's socialists are mostly not violent at all. Some communists are violent, but that is mainly when they are working for violent communist states such as China.
New article : Worker-owned internet services can still be dis-services.
A third wave of Covid-19 has started in the UK. It is clear that the government catered to the demands of those who could not defer gratification to save people's lives. However, the government's previous bad leadership undermined its authority and fomented those demands.
When a system behaves badly, the blame falls on the system overall as well as on the people who exploit its flaws. Neither one can make the excuse of blaming the other.
Five thugs from Savannah, Georgia, reported that a suspect committed suicide while they were taking a break from interrogating him. Mysteriously, the cameras all failed to record anything during that time.
Is it plausible that the suspect committed suicide? It seems more plausible to me that the thugs killed him. But there is no proof.
The system has to be changed so that this can't happen again.
Most US cities and metropolitan areas have become more segregated racially since 1990.
*Absurd planning policies that create Britain's housing crisis.*
Video shows that Czech thugs killed a Roma man by kneeling on his neck.
Proposing a draft law establishing the crime of ecocide.
It shows that the law can defend the well being of ecosystems without the silliness of claiming that the ecosystems themselves "have rights".
If this is adopted by the International Criminal Court, we will have another reason to press for more countries to join that court. Its main opponents are the US, Russia and China.
The Vatican objects to a proposed Italian law which might criminalize the refusal to teach certain specific ideas about gender, and refusal to conduct same-sex marriages.
I support same-sex marriages, and adoption by same-sex couples. I also support the right of people to practice their religion, so any particular church should not be required to carry out those procedures. As long as same-sex couples have other places to marry or adopt, such as state agencies, their rights are safe.
Where I see real injustice is where religious organizations have a local monopoly (or near-monopoly) on some activities, such as medical care or education. That near-monopoly gives them power over what people can do.
China imprisons tens of thousands of people secretly and incommunicado, to break them before charging them with crimes. Some who were later released report having been tortured, Guantanamo style.
Covid-19 may have pushed millions of Americans into irrational rage while other millions practice denial of what they went through.
The denial is spreading the Delta variant, while the irrational rage pressures people not to take precautions.
More details about San Jose's proposed gun insurance and fee law.
Trevor Aaronson has reported on the FBI practice of prosecuting Walter Mitty terrorists, people whom the FBI has led by the hand into trying to commit a crime which was never a real possibility. Thus it can prosecute people who would never have committed any terrorism if left alone.
This makes the FBI look very effective, but it may not prevent any terrorist plots that would really have been carried out. It's also unjust.
Right-wingers have used that truth as the basis for fiction, claiming that the attack on the Capitol was brought about by FBI entrapment.
Aaronson refutes part of their argument about this.
In addition, if that were the case, the FBI (1) would not have built up the group to be big enough to do real harm and (2) would have arrested the participants before they got in a position to do real harm.
Since 2014, the Australian government has campaigned forcefully against recognizing how global heating and fertilizer runoff are destroying the Great Barrier Reef.
Now UNESCO plans once again to label the reef as world heritage "in danger".
Tories blame the failure of British state schools on "decades" of bad policies, but the policy under funding schools, and food and shelter for the students in them, was started by the Tories in 2010.
It is still true: the Tories are lower than vermin.
*Trial of Moroccan journalists raises fears of repression.*
The right way to respond to revenge porn: "I'm not ashamed."
*Migrants turned away at border under Biden face shocking abuse in Mexico.*
Fighting Libyan factions filled Tripoli with landmines and booby traps.
The US should sign the treaty against antipersonnel landmines and lead other countries to do so.
Guatemala's anti corruption judges are facing threats of violence.
(satire) *Every day, women are using pancreatic enzymes to break down food without any consideration for the sanctity of these innocent carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.*
(satire) *Organized Crime Syndicate Condemned For History Of Nepotistic Hiring Practices.*
*Global Hopes in Doubt After G7 Fails to Meet Climate Finance Pledges for Poor Nations.*
We who are vaccinated should continue taking precautions such as wearing masks when indoors or near other people.
*Hong Kong leader refuses to say how media can avoid arrest in wake of Apple Daily raids.*
Keeping the boundaries vague is standard practice for promoting self-censorship through intimidation.
Hong Kong has decided that political accusations won't have jury trials. Juries give the people power that repressive autocrats don't want them to have.
Amazon must eliminate the tight control that treats workers as robots, and injures them along the way.
Please don't buy from Amazon. When people buy things for me, I ask them to please not buy from Amazon.
Encryption algorithms used in old portable phones were designed to be weak. Some numeric parameters were chosen to make breaking the encryption particularly easy.
A Lunatic Party candidate for Congress said he would send contract killers to murder a rival Lunatic Party candidate, if the latter wins.
The US Supreme Court allows corporations to direct farms outside the US to mistreat workers and not be held responsible.
The decision gives corporations more rights than human beings. That is always wrong. Aside from that, the decision is wrong because it allows a US entity to organize and direct an action and escape responsibility for it, by organizing and directing it outside the US.
There is a crucial factual question: to what extent do Nestle USA and Cargill really control the working conditions on those farms? The article quotes someone as asserting that they have total control. The article itself doesn't demonstrate that. It may be true, though.
Obama backed Manchin's proposed compromise version of the For the People Act.
Sanders said he did not reject it out of hand.
Manchin's version of voter ID requirements is not as bad as what Republicans are imposing in many states. It permits demonstrating residence with a utility bill. In some states, that is a lot cheaper and easier to get than an official state ID.
However, many people who share apartments don't directly pay any utility bills (though they may share the cost). How are they supposed to vote? What about spouses that don't have the utility bills in their name? And adult children who had to move back to their parents' home?
I don't know whether Manchin's compromise would enable them to vote or not, since I don't know the details.
The same difficulties could prevent them from getting a driver's license in some states.
*UN warns of worst "cascade of human rights setbacks in our lifetimes."*
Uber and Lyft are cutting pay for drivers even as they charge customers more.
This is in addition to making customers run nonfree software and identify themselves, which both Uber and Lyft do.
Putin may regret outlawing opposition organizations such as Navalny's.
Some of the sufferers of long Covid injuries can recover their normal strength and capacity by getting lots of rest for a substantial time. Society needs to give all of them the opportunity to do this.
What would the Buddha have said about the idea of a 69-meter-tall statue of him?
*Donations flood in to restore Gaza bookshop destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.*
Some of Princess Latifa's friends report travelling with her, and that she is not imprisoned, but there are some reasons to wonder if it is really true.
*Biden Subsidies for Liquid Natural Gas Could Doom International Climate Goals.*
The EU will reject major exports from Belarus as punishment for the seizure of Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega.
Salafi Arabia and the Houthis are reportedly negotiating peace.
I think Biden is partly responsible for Crown Prince Bone Saw's decision to seek peace. In addition to the overt pressure, I expect there was private pressure.
* US study finds households with recent birthdays about 30% more likely to have positive diagnosis [for Covid-19].*
The effect is strongest for children's birthdays. It appears that birthday parties are spreading the disease, and suggests that children are playing a significant role in the spreading.
The study covered most of 2020. It will be interesting to see what happens in the second half of 2021.
(satire) *CEO Of Troubled Company Accepts Full Compensation For His Mistakes.*
Ralph Nader: business executives control most political decisions, because they have systematically neutralized the former competing sources of power in society.
Amnesty International calls for an investigation of Ebrahim Raisi, who was just elected president of Iran, for the execution of thousands of political prisoners in Iran in 1988.
The US has eased sanctions against Iran, Venezuela and Syria to facilitate shipment of products to treat or prevent Covid-19.
It is clearly the right thing to do. It should not have taken so long.
British students protest the London Science Museum for letting Shell fund an exhibit which leads people to think we can trust in carbon capture and storage to curb global heating and skip the necessary effort.
Some US bishops are trying to bully Catholic politicians (including Biden) into opposing abortion.
When John F Kennedy ran for president, some said that it would be intolerable to have a Catholic as president because he would be a puppet for the pope. Kennedy responded said that he would not let that happen.
*Witness K spared jail after pleading guilty to breaching secrecy laws over Timor-Leste bugging.*
However, that is no excuse for prosecuting whistleblowers who report wrongdoing by the state. Australia must change its laws.
*UN blasts world leaders for failing to seal £72bn-a-year deal on climate.*
Fujimori's anti-democratic party aims to cancel the votes of Peru's rural poor, saying they are too ignorant to be allowed to vote.
We know what happens when elites don't let poor people's votes count: they form governments that serve the elites. They are trying it in the US and they are trying it in Peru.
How will the US government use its influence in Peru? Will it support the coup, as Hillary Clinton did in Honduras and the bullshitter's servants did in Bolivia? Or will it support the elected government?
Australian thugs have arrested a journalist for "stalking" an official at public events to ask embarrassing questions.
Hong Kong's non-submissive newspaper Apple Daily will have to shut down soon because China has frozen its assets.
The immediate threats to the US do not come from China. They come from its own flaws.
In the longer term, Chinese dominion is a threat to the world as a whole. But the US will not be able to help resist that threat unless it corrects its own flaws.
Barr as attorney general was a thoroughly willing flunky for perverting the Department of Justice.
Half of Zimbabweans are now in extreme poverty: 8 million now, up from 6.5 million in 2019 and 3 million in 2011.
*Farm plan poses ‘catastrophic’ threat to Zambian park vital for fruit bats.*
The last frenzied decades before massive global collapse could see desperate humans wipe out thousands of endangered species in a futile effort to postpone that collapse.
It's getting so that people will condemn an actor for playing a character that has any substantial difference from per real self.
President Do-dirty said he will put people in jail for refusing Covid-19 vaccination. I think that is unjustly strict. First of all, there are people who have certain medical conditions for whom vaccination would be dangerous. However, even for people that have no medical reason to refuse, actually forcing them is going too far.
It is legitimate to restrict certain activities to vaccinated people, such as large gatherings, and occupations where other people's safety depends on vaccination. However, if people who cannot be vaccinated are excluded from work for not being vaccinated, the state should pay their salaries, because it isn't their fault.
Once enough people have been vaccinated to reach herd immunity, it will be safe to let unvaccinatable people return to those jobs, and generally treat them just like vaccinated people.
*Who Setting up hub to make COVID-19 vaccines in South Africa* for vaccinating people in poor countries.
UNESCO threatens to decertify Venice unless it stops letting cruise ships dock.
90,000 disappearances (and plenty of simple murders) in Mexico are directly related to US-Mexico collaboration in the "War on Drugs".
This is one of many reasons we need to end that war.
Progressives call for repealing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Voting rights activists have to help disprivileged voters, one by one, overcome the hurdles Republicans invent to disenfranchise them.
Cory Doctorow talks about the proposed interoperability law, ACCESS, and endorses the idea of limiting the collection of personal data.
"Data protection" requirements may do a little good — here's one interesting attempt — but this is unusual. For the most part, their approach is too weak.
Some nasty things about Airbnb. For instance, most airbnb rentals belong to large companies that gobble up lots of houses that people used to live in.
This could be driving up your rent.
Right-wing Peruvian retired military officers called for a military coup.
This is the standard right-wing one-two punch: fabricate accusations of election fraud, then cite them as the excuse for a coup. That's what the right-wing opposition did in Bolivia against Evo Morales.
Congress plans to eliminate the exception in the US Constitution that permits imposing forced labor on convicts.
When I read those words in the 13th amendment, I thought that their purposes was to allow sentencing convicts to imprisonment. I don't advocate abolishing that.
However, the practice of forcing prisoners to work for low pay is a dangerous abuse, because it encourages passing laws to put more people in prison. I strongly support eliminating that practice.
The Portland thugs that police protests demand to be allowed to bash protesters at will. One of them was charged for a gratuitous violent attack on a protester, so the others resigned from the team.
The city cannot afford to give in to such demands.
California's gang data base includes supposed gang members added at the age of one year. And other errors that can ruin someone's life.
LinkedIn censors user profiles for China.
The question of whether SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from an animal or leaked from a lab has become politicized, and researchers feel threatened based on the positions they take.
Scientific progress needs the truth, whatever it is, and this will make the truth harder to ascertain.
A court ruled that the CDC can't make vaccination requirements for cruise ships.
Rulings like this make the US rather helpless defend itself against future pandemics. In other words, they endanger national security.
I expect the Republican-controlled US states to suffer another wave of Covid-19, with the Delta variant, causing a substantial number of deaths and permanent disabilities among adults under age 60.
*Climate campaigners claimed a "historic victory" after a Brussels court on Thursday condemned Belgium for its climate policy that breaches the country's duty of care and human rights obligations.*
*The amount of heat the Earth traps has doubled in just 15 years, study shows.*
This is related to drought.
*94% of Americans Oppose Big Pharma's Control of Global Covid-19 Vaccine Doses: Poll.*
Scientists regarding the US west: We have warned about heat waves and droughts like these, and the fires that will follow.
People who attacked pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have been convicted of violent crime.
Comfortable and unchallengeable lies paved the way to overthrow democracy in Germany. It can happen in the US too.
The reason why the US military can't win the wars it has started in the 21st century is that foreign armies and foreign money normally can't defeat a strongly motivated guerrilla. Only a local force with an even stronger commitment to victory can do so. In situations like that, a US military intervention is usually self-defeating.
US leaders should recognize this.
ALEC is lobbying for more states to imitate Arizona's "election audit".
As far as I can tell, the aim of the "election audit" is to be secretive and sloppy enough to create the opportunity for liars to claim to have discovered irregularities, and no one will have enough facts to refute the claim. Then the Republican anti-truth machine will convince 50 million Americans to believe the lies, along with other lies such as "Covid-19 is not dangerous" and "Democrats stole the 2020 election."
*Critics Warn Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan 'Would Facilitate a Wall Street Takeover.'*
The Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act would shift funds to support counseling in schools instead of uniformed thugs.
Prefabricated small houses, to fit in spaces which used to hold garages, can provide a lot more housing comparatively quickly.
Thugs in Lahore demanded gratis burgers at a restaurant. The staff said no, so the thugs returned the next day and arrested all the staff, leaving the restaurant unattended, even the machines that heat oil for frying. This risked causing injuries or a fire. Fortunately that didn't happen.
Reportedly the thugs have been suspended. They deserve more punishment than that; what they did was corrupt.
Biden's order to stop issuing oil and gas leases on public lands, or offshore, was temporarily blocked by a judge. It may be blocked permanently.
We have to keep this in perspective. If this comparatively small action is a "key" part of Biden's efforts to avoid global heating disaster, it's because what he has done so far is small. He has proposed legislation to do more, but Manchin and Sinema are blocking those bills. Unless we do a lot more, our future is hosed.
San Jose, California, cannot prohibit guns. It plans to require gun owners to carry insurance and pay a tax.
Those who possess guns but have not paid and insured them will have them seized.
I think it is a clever idea. Let's see how well it works.
A leaked meeting recording shows Manchin asking rich donors to "convince" some Senate Republicans to vote for an investigation of the Jan 6 insurrection, to help him preserve the filibuster.
Pfizer has pulled out of ALEC, in response perhaps to public pressure.
It is better to cease support for ALEC than continue it, but whatever motivated the company to support ALEC may find a new expression — perhaps through PhRMA, which lobbies for Big Pharma.
Australia will soon decide, secretly, the sentence to impose on the heroic whistleblower that we know only as "Witness K".
Hungary has passed a law which seems to prohibit showing video including transgender minors except late at night.
The expression "defend the right of children to an identity that conforms to their birth gender," when we interpret "right" correctly, means that no one should try to force or pressure children to be trans. I agree that children who want to be cis have the right to be cis.
However, I doubt that many children grow up under pressure to be trans. Few parents are likely to impose such pressure. (The Chinese movie, "Farewell My Concubine," presents a fictional example that might be based on some real instances 100 years ago.)
The right-wing advocates of that law seem to twist the concept of "have the right" by adding, implicitly, "whether they like it or not." That results in an excuse to impose something on people while pretending to be respecting their freedom.
People have duties as well as rights. There are times when we must demand that people carry out their duties — for instance, to pay taxes so the state can carry out its missions. But we should reject the dishonesty of pretending that this is done for the sake of those people, that it constitutes defending their rights.
It appears that "children" is being used here to mean "minors". I can't let that practice go by without a rebuke. Treating teenagers like children harms them by infantilizing them.
*Legal scholars publish letter calling for Stephen Breyer to retire from Supreme Court.*
He is old; the aim is to ensure Republicans don't get to replace him as they did Justice Ginsburg.
*Press Freedom Advocates Say 'Congress Needs to Act' to Prevent More DOJ Spying Abuses — Under Both Parties.*
*Protests against police abuse spread across Tunisian capital.*
Proprietary software tends to be designed to mistreat the user. The FBI released proprietary software for gangsters which was designed to snoop on them.
In my view, snooping on those gangsters' crimes was a good thing to do, for special reasons. Nonetheless, it is a good example of why you should not use nonfree software.
*Nixon's War on Drugs turned out to be a war on people. President Biden should end it once and for all.*
The Democratic Party power structure in West Virginia is made up of people with political stances like Senator Manchin's. They keep the working-class and nonwhite Democrats from having much influence.
Jesee Jackson: Most West Virginia residents are poor and need more federal government support. To represent them, Manchin should help enact the progressive program.
*Rev. Barber Says West Virginians Are Ready for 'Non-Violent Sit-Ins' Against Manchin for Abetting GOP Voter Suppression.*
Meat made in non-living factories could address issues of sustainability, and animal suffering. But it creates possible problems for human beings, both biological (elimination of the biodiversity, and organ diversity as in present-day farm animals) and legal (patent-owning companies could control all meat).
This is not necessarily a reason to reject artificial meat, but means we should not uncritically assume that all artificial meat is free of grave problems.
Britons, protect your anonymity — pay cash! If you don't defend this right, you will lose it.
When you leave your house, take cash with you, enough for the purchases you might make.
A bonus: most people find that paying cash leads them to spend less.
US citizens: call on Pelosi and Schumer to give the Pentagon none of the infrastructure plan money.
If you sign, please spread the word!
June 19 is Juneteenth, a new federal holiday which celebrates the freeing of slaves in the defeated confederacy.
It was not the end of discrimination by law against blacks — that continued into the 1960s and was ended by the civil rights movement. Systemic racism continues to this day. So we still need more change in that area.
Some Americans had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in blood samples they gave in January 2020, so they must have got infected in 2019.
I don't know whether there is any chance that some other coronavirus could have triggered formation of antibodies that react to SARS-CoV-2. If not, those Americans must have caught Covid-19 in December.
*'Let Scientific Evidence Determine Origin' of Covid-19, Say Heads of US National Academies.*
A Chinese virologist said this means the investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 should move to the US.
The investigation should study all relevant places and events. Trying to "blame the US" for Covid-19 is as foolish as trying to "blame China" for it. It is foolish to consider this as a matter of rivalry between countries. If any mistakes were made by China, if any mistakes were made by the United States, if any were made elsewhere, the world needs to know what happened and understand them.
*Driver accused of driving into protesters in Minneapolis charged with murder.*
Republican state legislatures are passing laws to help murderous fanatics get away with such murders. They will only need to claim that they hit the protesters by accident, and right-wing jurors could decide to believe them.
A minister in Bolivia's previous coup-installed government sought to hire US mercenaries to block the 2020 election of the new president Arce.
China is remodeling old buildings in some cities in Xinjiang as more appealing oldish-looking tourist attractions. When reporters visit, they feel the heavy hand of Soviet-style repression.
The FDA must enforce limits on arsenic and lead in baby foods.
For most Americans, a college education is something they need to win a lottery to get.
*[The US deportation thug organization] Discussed Punishing Immigrant Advocates for Peaceful Protests.*
China arrested executives and editors of the Apple Daily for endangering national security. Precisely what actions supposedly had that effect, China does not bother to answer, since the goal is to intimidate all journalists.
*Father of [Sofia Sapega, who was] arrested off plane in Belarus, appeals to Lukashenko for her release.*
*Israeli policeman charged with manslaughter of autistic Palestinian.* The thug had no reason at all to shoot him.
It is rare for Israeli thugs or soldiers to face justice for killing a Palestinian. I hope this is the sign of a change.
Eight countries in the Pacific Ocean organized to prevent foreign ships from overfishing, and get a share of the money at the same time,
Emails show that the White House chief of staff, under the corrupter, tried five times to make Acting Attorney General Rosen investigate various bogus accusations of voter fraud.
Rosen refused. At that time it was possible for supporters of the corrupter to retain some scruples about their civic duty.
How plutocracy co-opts and perverts the defense of freedom and autonomy — using consumerism. Zuckerberg wanted to buy the rights to "Another Brick In the Wall" to use it to promote Instagram, which is a very big collection of bricks in the wall of surveillance.
Musician Roger Waters, author of the song, condemned Facebook and stated support for Julian Assange.
Tories plan to deregulate businesses across the board.
Contracts will be awarded in "agile" ways, thus regularizing the Tory practice of giving contracts to companies run by friends of ministers, whether or not they have the capacity to do the job or the experience to do it right Planning will also be agile, so that local people won't be able to argue against plans that would harm them. (Unless it's a land-based wind farm; Tories want those all to be blocked.)
*[Minister] Michael Gove's civil service plans threaten impartiality, says union leader.*
Andy Slavitt hinted at how some Americans (Republicans) were too selfish in confronting Covid-19, and refused to do the little things that save other people's health and lives, They should have made little sacrifices such as wearing masks, keeping distance, getting vaccinated. What they opposed was the principle that we ought to help each other. "War on Earth, ill will to men."
He touched the right-wingers' nerve because what he said is evidently true. So they began spewing gibberish as white noise to drown out his message.
Delta variant has to start a wave that will kill or disable a lot of antivaxxers. As people see the pattern that Republicans spread human death and Democrats more or less protect human life, they may learn not to trust Republicans.
Global supplies of soybeans, coffee, chocolate, and palm oil will be cut by global heating, even if we curb emissions quickly.
They will be cut a lot more, over time, if we fail to curb emissions.
US citizens: call on TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, and delete what it has collected.
Trying to prevent the extinction of eels in the Britain.
Australia has temporarily released a boat refugee from an immigration prison on a remote island, to reunite him with his wife and children, but he will still be kept under some sort of house arrest.
Australia has sworn unending repression for boat people, and treats that as the highest political priority.
Whether or not Covid-19 escaped from a virology lab, such labs need to take stronger precautions.
*Trump spied on journalists. So did Obama. America needs more press freedom now.*
*Ikea fined €1m by French court for spying on staff.*
*London's [thugs] corruptly concealed failings in the investigation of the 1987 murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan.*
The revolving door for violent thugs leads out of one thug department and into another.
They continue to main and kill, but they suffer the penalty of a lower salary.
Republicans will thwart a Senate investigation into how Trump's henchmen seized senators' communication records.
Small amounts of antidepressants in the water make crayfish "bolder", and more rash. This could affect ecosystems.
* From food standards to fossil fuel exports, Britain’s agreement with Australia could stop us dealing with the climate crisis.*
*ICC prosecutor seeks investigation into Philippines ‘war on drugs’ killings.*
President Do-Dirty's war was nominally on drugs, but actually against whoever looked good to shoot.
*Brazil to deploy special force to protect the Yanomami from wildcat gold miners.*
Measures like this are justified for the protection of the Yanomami and the land and its ecosystems. However, I have to worry that Bolsonaro will intentionally pervert or corrupt the mission so that it poisons them instead.
Biden has endorsed repeal of the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
Bravo!
Will the Republicans in the Senate block this to make sure the next Republican president can make an excuse for war wherever he wants it?
(satire) *Senate Passes $50 Billion Bill To Combat Chinese Influence By Developing Own Pandas.*
That is less of a joke than it might seem. China uses its pandas with great care as instruments of influence. It does not give pandas, only lend them, and the contract says that all baby pandas they produce belong to China. Thus, China maintains its monopoly.
This has been used to induce various countries to panda to China.
A heatwave in the US southwest brings temperatures of 49C, 120F, in some places.
If we don't curb global heating, people should expect much worse.
The corrupter has inspired thousands of Americans to hate masks the way they hate Democrats and minority racial groups.
Biden dropped pressure to quickly end burning of coal. Perhaps this was catering to Manchin.
It is a mistake to give Manchin anything without a concrete deal where he gives something concrete in return.
Ukraine's president very very much wants Ukraine to be part of NATO.
I suspect that it would be far more effective, for restraining Putin, to threaten to include Ukraine in NATO than to actually do it. That is a general principle that I learned about by reading a book about Go strategy.
*U.N. rights office voices concern on serious violations by Tunisian police.*
As the Delta variant of Covid-19 spreads, it increases the danger. Being vaccinated is still very helpful, but the chance of catching it despite vaccination is significant.
Delta can also more easily be mistaken for a cold. *The number one symptom is headache … followed by sore throat, runny nose and fever.*
* Rich countries must come forward with detailed plans on how they hope to meet their climate targets.*
A campaign calls on companies to split from ALEC. That organization lobbies states to adopt right-wing policies that hurt poor people, democracy, or both.
Reality Winner has been released on probation, but the US government practice of imprisoning whistleblowers by calling them "spies" is only getting worse.
Global heating will make major Australian cities unlivable in a few decades.
*UK health inequalities made worse by Covid crisis. Disadvantaged groups have faced greatest disruption to medical care.*
The underlying long-term cause of this is steadily increasing underfunding of the NHS. Tories keep saying that they will get more done with less money; but always the result is less done, so some poor people get squeezed out the cracks.
* The [G7] summit was a golden opportunity to avoid countless deaths. History will judge the rich world's failure harshly.*
Floating plastic detritus is transporting various marine species around the world, to other regions where they can become intrusive pests and wipe out native species.
On top of war, Afghanstan's hospitals are collapsing under the weight of Covid-19.
A new form of predatory lending lures women into improvidence by inviting them to imagine the bliss of never worrying about whether you can afford something. Such bliss can be yours in an instant with one-click borrowing.
You will still need to worry about how much you are spending, but you will fail to do what you need.
Imagine when someone combines this with the prosperity gospel. "Start borrowing now, and since you're a good Christian, your debt will miraculously pay itself. If it doesn't? You must not be a good enough Christian."
The US conquest and occupation of Iraq were one cause of its economic weakness, which is enabling China to move towards dominating the world.
I think that its plutocratist decadence is, however, another cause. (The two are related.)
If this were no more than a matter of competition between countries, I would say, "Let the (most capable) country and system win." The reason I don't say that is that China would impose a totalitarian hell.
Protesters in London and Glasgow objected to plans to deport to Jamaica a man who has lived in the UK since he was a toddler.
*This G7 reflects our G-zero world, ruled by self-interest instead of global ambition.*
*Israeli coalition ousts Netanyahu as prime minister after 12 years.*
Netanyahu's great achievement was to eliminate Israel's will to make peace with Palestine, and replace it with the will to subjugate Palestinians for ever.
He has postponed dealing with the corruption charges against him by being prime minister. With luck, the prosecution will soon start and prevent him from holding that office again.
Netanyahu's great achievement was to eliminate Israel's will to make peace with Palestine and replace that with the will to rule Palestinians for ever.
*Pelosi: "beyond belief" that [the corrupter's] DoJ chiefs didn't know of secret subpoenas.*
If it is true that they did not know, it follows that the corrupter had undermined their control of the department in order to use it to undermine the US government.
Since it appears that the leftist candidate has won Peru's presidential election, the right-wing candidate is making bogus accusations of fraud.
The next right-wing step may be to spend a lot of money to create a false impression that the election was stolen. It worked in Bolivia; it might work in the US; it may work in Peru if people don't organize to stop it.
US citizens: call on Zuckerberg to endorse laws prohibiting algorithmic discrimination.
This is a half-measure. Collecting people's personal data endangers them in many ways, and discrimination is only one of them. It also harms society in various ways — for instance, boosting hate groups and conspiracy fantasies; this is not an issue of discrimination by Facebook, even if some of the hate groups might practice or advocate discrimination.
We should not allow anything comparable to Facebook to exist.
In Mexico, 1/4 of the population — 31 million people — have had Covid-19.
I'd expect this to mean around half a million deaths and a larger number with persistent disabilities.
Deep sea explorer Sylvia Earle: we must "protect marine areas and stop eating tuna."
She may be right regarding people in wealthy countries that most seafood we eat is a luxury. But not in poor countries. I've read that around a billion people around the world depend on seafood for their sustenance.
Of course, most of them are not eating expensive tuna. They are eating whatever they can catch near where they live. The people who eat canned herring are not splurging.
I don't want to rush to stop eating tuna in sushi, especially since I only rarely have sushi at all. But I endorse firm measures to end the practice of fishing for tuna, and all forms of overfishing, non sustainable fishing, and ecosystem-damaging fishing.
In some places, "sushi" usually means tuna and salmon only. Other kinds of fish may not even be available. I suggest that people try the other kinds of fish, aside from tuna and salmon, to discover how delicious they are.
Human Rights Watch: *Systemic failures behind Colombia police rights abuses.*
Tunisians are protesting after uniformed thugs beat a prisoner to death.
The prisoner was accused of selling illegal drugs. Repression of drug
dealers is a bad solution to a gratuitous problem created by
prohibition of drugs. The best way to handle drugs that can harm
their users is to legalize the drugs and regulate them so that fewer people will use them.
China is teaching Tibetans to thank the Party for everything they have
in life.
Argentina has captured a fugitive Chilean colonel who was one of
Chilean dictator Pinochet's murderers.
*Azerbaijan swaps 15 Armenian PoWs for map of landmines.*
It is very bad to plant antipersonnel landmines.
Assad's forces have shelled a hospital again.
The court that convicted Craig Murray for writing about Salmond's
trial decided not to let him appeal the peculiar basis given for convicting him.
How can it make sense to let a court decide whether its decision can
be appealed? "Is there any chance that you might have misjudged this?
No, that's impossible."
Factory working conditions in southeast Asia encourage the spread of Covid-19 among the workers.
One candidate for mayor of New York wants to fire most of the public
school teachers, leaving only a few "great" teachers, each of whom
will "teach" 400 students.
This would make sense if students were mass-produced, identical machines.
The American people are in strong agreement about the most important
policy questions, including preserving democracy. These policies have
2/3 support, and many have 3/4 or 4/5 support. A small minority of
extremist Republicans are hijacking the country.
(satire) *Thrilled BlackRock Announces Purchase Of 800,000th Dream Home.*
(satire) *Over 2 Million Left Brain-Dead In Most Brutal Day Of Culture
Wars Yet.*
New repressive Republican laws in various states allow thugs to decide
whether a protest constitutes a "riot", and to punish anyone nearby when some unidentified person commits a crime.
Paleontological evidence suggests that global heating may heat both summers and winters the same amount.
That would lead to painfully hot summers.
Israeli thugs have arrested over 2,000 Palestinians, in many cases
over obviously bogus charges.
Some were protesting; some were at home. Some are journalists, but
journalists were arrested despite not being at protests.
Sometimes the thugs attacked protesters with violence and then did not
let them get medical treatment.
Sometimes the thugs did not allow volunteer lawyers to meet with the
prisoners.
Israel demanded that Egypt block the shipment of construction materials
needed to rebuild Gaza's destroyed houses, on the grounds that some of it
might be used to rebuild HAMAS's military facilities.
Fortunately, Egypt is disregarding that demand. Biden pledged funds
to help rebuild Gaza, and must have urged Egypt to allow in the
necessary materials to do it.
*EU leaders urge unfettered probe into origins of COVID-19.*
I too think that is called for. To achieve it calls for not giving
presenting the possibility of a lab leak as wrongdoing by China.
It would be a mistake.
How should we fund the development of drugs to treat resistant diseases?
This article proposes that governments fund them to do the
development, and later are entitled to the drug at a reasonable price.
That could be good if all governments will be entitled to the drug
at a reasonable price. But I suspect that all but the sponsoring country
will have to pay through the nose.
Inviting Big Pharma companies in will surely mean letting them gouge.
They will find an excuse, or simply insist.
I think that the drug-manufacturing know-how should be available to
any country that either (1) is poor or (2) sponsors drug research
appropriately for the size of its economy.
The European Parliament voted to support liberating Covid-19 vaccines.
This is non-binding; the parliament has no say over such questions.
A UK appeals court endorsed the right to state dissent from
established political views about what respect various individuals deserve.
The UK continues to impose censorship in other ways,
but this is an important step forward. Unless overturned, it means
that people in the UK cannot impose political censorship by law simply
by saying, "Your views are harming me!"
*Climate and nature crises: solve both or solve neither, say experts.*
People of Bristol are working on making an accommodation between their
conflicting views about Colston, and political values.
I hope that the targets of racism and the targets of economic
inequality learn to work together. Together they can win.
Amnesty International presents more reports of torture of Uyghurs and
other Muslims in Xinjiang.
Having a leader that isn't everyone's worst enemy is winning back
trust in the US.
Pedro Castillo, a socialist candidate, has won the election for
president of Peru, subject to reexamination of some of the ballots.
He is not an extremist, and said he intended to continue a market economy,
but he wants to raise taxes on extractive foreign companies.
Naturally, the right wing is fabricating charges of fraud, as is its
strategy nowadays.
*Single-use bags, plastic bottles, food containers and food wrappers
are the four most widespread items polluting the seas.*
Russia labeled the Jehovah's Witnesses as an "extremist group" and has
attacked their prayer meetings, sentencing some of them to many years
in prison.
This is inexplicable, since they do not advocate violence, or agitate
against Putin.
The European Parliament voted to demand sanctions against Hungary and
Poland for violating the rule of law.
The wrong those two countries are carrying out consists of infringing
the independence of the judiciary.
Asking the International Criminal Court to investigate the deportation of
thousands of Uighurs from Tajikistan to China.
The discovery of unmarked burials of indigenous children who died at a
Canadian boarding school — which they were forced to attend — has
compelled Canada to offer settlement for legal disputes about
forcing indigenous children to attend those schools.
The purpose of these schools (which were spread across Canada) was to
disconnect indigenous children from their parents, their culture, and
their language. That in itself was cruel, but the schools also
practiced direct physical forms of cruelty, including giving the
students inadequate food.
Canada set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate
the crimes of those schools, but has not implemented its recommendations.
Australia's planet-roaster government wants to spend 600 million to
build a new gas-powered generator that won't be fully utilized,
and isn't necessary.
At least, it isn't necessary for providing electricity. I am sure
some construction companies and fossil fuel companies desperately need it.
US citizens: call on Biden to fire and replace one of the USPS board
members, to assure the firing of DeJoy.
The effects of PTSD on US war veterans are exacerbated by the fact that the US doesn't want to be a society which cheerfully accepts killing.
We want to be a society that fights wars only when just.
Thus, veterans feel guilt about what they have done in war.
This makes a paradoxical contrast with the fact that the US fights so
many avoidable wars that one can hardly keep track of them all.
For most of these wars, there is no possibility of
real victory, which means the US has to choose between indefinite
prolongation and politically unacceptable voluntary defeat.
Perhaps the best way to reduce the harm done to Americans by PTSD is
by learning to be less ready to fight a war. If we only fought when
there was a reason to be proud afterward of having fought, perhaps we
would fight fewer wars, fewer veterans would suffer moral injury, and
those who did could be welcomed back and healed.
Other countries have similar problems. Samantha Crompvoets
interviewed Australian veterans about war crimes, and stated
conclusions that the Australian government would rather silence.
Right-wing trumpery: running ads on Facebook for Green Party
candidates in the hope of dividing Democrats, and pretending not to be
who they really were.
The Sri Lanka pollution ship disaster can be traced to the country's
debts, which forced it to lease its ports, long term, to foreign investors
that didn't care about safety.
The UK and the EU are headed for a trade war.
Bogus Johnson saw a collision coming, and pretended for political
purposes that it would magically go away.
*How Tories changed their tune on Northern Ireland protocol.*
In Britain, smokers overall give more support to discouraging smoking
than to protecting the right to smoke.
Tobacco is death for the smoker, as well as disgusting for everyone
else. I wish I could magically help everyone quit. Nonetheless, I
oppose prohibition of tobacco, on grounds of personal freedom.
China will impose political censorship on movies in Hong Kong.
If you are in Hong Kong, the only way to get copies of movies is through
unofficial channels, sharing from people in countries which have only some
of the oppressive systems that Hong Kong and China have.
Right-wing Italian prohibitions want to repeal the law that allows making
deals with informants in the Mafia.
They want to have their cake (long prison sentences) and eat it too
(get confessions and convictions).
*The Biden Administration Is Routinely Sending Mexican Children Back to
Danger, Report Finds.*
The US military is the largest socialist entity on Earth.
Strange how officers tend to despise socialism.
The US Labor Department's new workplace rules about Covid-19 fail to
require most workplaces to do anything to protect employees.
An enormous group of investment funds are calling on governments to
speed up greenhouse emissions reduction.
Two notable exceptions are Blackrock and Vanguard, which deserve
specific rejection by the public.
If these funds are serious about the matter, they could exert strong
pressure on corporations as stockholders. Their lobbying power could
be significant too.
The UK has received the suggestion to fill a shortfall in funds for
universities from low-income graduates,
by reducing the income threshold above which they must repay their
student loans.
That sounds like the sort of soak-the-poor plan that Tories would love.
(satire) *Pfizer Announces Breakthrough Medication That Will Treat
Executives To New Chalet In Swiss Alps.*
The would-be tyrant had the Department of Justice seize communications
records of Democrats in Congress and their staff and relatives,
as part of a leak investigation.
In this article, an official claims this was meant as punishment, not real investigation.
Chip factories in Taiwan are having trouble getting enough water, as Taiwan
suffers form a drought.
Global heating will lead to more and worse droughts there.
Powerful countries should not allow their manufacture of any critical
product to be concentrated in one region or a few regions. Such
centralization leads to vulnerability — to various kinds of problems.
The way to reduce the vulnerability, to threats of many unrelated
kinds, is to disperse production.
Anti-corruption crusaders in Guatemala have been charged with crimes that
are incredible.
I can't imagine that anything could motivate those influential people
to intentionally found a political party and list a dead person as
participant. Why not find a living supporter to list instead?
I conclude the charges must have been fabricated.
Colombia's former president Santos was previously the defense minister
and thus ultimately responsible for the over 6,000 murders committed
by soldiers during that time. He says that he took action to stop the
practice when he determined it was happening. Nonetheless, he asks
forgiveness.
Santos said that the pressure for the murders came from the then
president, Alvaro Horrible (Uribe).
I think that those who killed, or encouraged or facilitated the
killing, ought to be prosecuted for it.
An article about keeping an invasive species as pets (Australian
possums in New Zealand) presents the usual emotional pleas, plus a
peculiar nonsequitur about colonial history.
Perhaps it would be safe and reasonable to permit neutered possums as
pets in New Zealand, provided they are not allowed outdoors. The
article does not say whether the pet-owners interviewed do that.
One of them has a cat, too. Cats in New Zealand are a similar case.
Even in the US, cats that are allowed outside devastate many species
of birds. If you want to have a cat, please keep it indoors and
protect wildlife.
The UN official in charge of food aid accuses the Eritrian army of
starving people in Tigray.
One Indian village is praying to a new goddess, "Mother Corona", to stop
the disease.
That's where religion comes from.
The G7's agreement on a global tax system for multinational companies
will mostly increase tax revenue for their home countries. It won't do much good for poor countries they operate in.
*Whistleblower Craig Murray Sentenced To 8 Months In Prison Over His
Reporting On Former Scottish First Minister's Trial.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the "millionaires
surtax", which would establish higher tax brackets for individuals
with incomes over a million dollars a year.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: remind Senator Manchin that the For the People Act has
overwhelming bipartisan support.
Many Greek workers are on strike against a labor "flexibility" bill that would
weaken their position in some ways against the demands of employers.
Amnesty International: *The self-interest of G7 countries is the
biggest obstacle to ending the Covid-19 pandemic, a group of
campaigning organizations said today.*
To vaccinate the world fast requires building a lot more vaccine
factories, fast. This requires eliminating the patent obstacle
and making the vaccine companies teach others how to make those
vaccines.
Under the present circumstances, with the way Big Pharma has corrupted
the field of pharmaceuticals, patents on medicines to a lot of harm
and very little good. (Patents in other fields don't do as much harm,
but they still do very little good.)
Any blow against the patent system will be a
good thing.
However, building the additional vaccine factories may not be
necessary. If China will finish vaccinating the world by early 2022,
we might not have any way to speed that up by much.
Student groups call on corporations to quit the US Chamber of Commerce
unless it stops lobbying against climate defense.
Right-wing campaign groups are saying that CEOs are engaging in
"corporate-run communism" when corporations state their opposition to
voter suppression and election sabotage.
They know that right-wing lunatics today will accept any lie that
supports their side.
The Fossil Fuel Exit Strategy presents a path to low greenhouse gas
emissions that is feasible with no new technology.
Maine has passed a law to divest from fossil fuel assets.
Every government on Earth must do likewise.
(satire) *Children’s Museum Docent Reminds Guests
Not To Touch The Kids.*
A Dutch court ruled that Shell must reduce its greenhouse emissions.
A company executive makes fallacious arguments that this is unfair.
*Wealth Tax on World's Billionaires Would Raise $345 Billion a Year.*
(satire) *Desperate Employer Offers Basic Dignity To Incentivize New Hires.*
A growing problem: resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure now
frequently downplays the main danger of extracting and transporting
fossil fuels — that they might leak methane into the air, or be burnt
and release CO2. This example does not trouble to mention it at all.
What's with these people? I get the impression that they are more
concerned with who owns certain land or waterways than with whether
civilization survives.
Ironically, the same can be said of the companies that want to extract the
fossil fuels.
The reason not to build the Line 3 pipeline applies to every other new
oil or gas pipeline, every new refinery, and every new well or mine:
there is no room in the world's carbon budget
for any more fossil fuel infrastructure.
Kevin Strickland was convicted of murder in 1979. Since then,
everyone involved in his case agrees he was falsely convicted, even
the prosecutors. The governor of Missouri is grasping at straws to
excuse keeping Strickland in prison anyway.
These strict "law and order" fanatics believe that it should be
unthinkable to question a court's decision to punish someone. Unless
that person is trying to destabilize our democracy for right-wing
ideology.
Columbus, Ohio, thugs have been charged with crimes for spraying pepper spray on peaceful protesters who were violating no law or order,
and for covering up lies.
A Louisville thug faces criminal charges for nonfatal brutality:
hitting a suspect on the head with a stick while the latter was
kneeling with his hands up.
No matter what that person was arrested for, or what he had actually
done, nothing can justify hitting him under those circumstances.
Prosecuting thugs for unjustified violence even when it is nonfatal is
crucial for teaching them to practice self-control as required for a
police officer.
New York State has made gun manufacturers legally liable for damages caused by the manner of marketing or selling guns.
I want those activities to be better regulated, but I am concerned
that this law may be unfair on account of vagueness. If those
companies are to be required to obey new rules, the rules must be
clear.
*San Jose mayor proposes gun owners carry insurance and pay annual fee in wake
of mass shooting.*
I am in favor of this. Gun owners should also have to get safety
training and keep the guns in ways that prevent theft or unapproved
use of the gun.
*Venezuela says payments to COVAX vaccine system have been blocked*
by US sanctions.
Rep. Cori Bush put FBI director Christopher Wray on the spot while he
was testifying to Congress. She demanded a copy of the records that the FBI had collected on her protest activity.
Australia's government wants to give the WTO more power to make
countries bow down to foreign businesses.
This is indeed the purpose of business-supremacy treaties,
but few governments dare to admit they advocate that purpose.
Now that a court found "apparent favoritism" by ministers in choice of
companies to get UK contracts, how will that make future decisions
less corrupt?
The old UK method was that ministers had to resign when visibly
tainted. Now, like US Republicans, Tories don't object to corrupt
ministers, as long as they are Tories. So the question is whether
this will weaken ministers' hand in disagreements with civil service
professionals.
I don't have confidence in that.
*Voluntourism: new book explores how volunteer trips harm rather than help.*
*Oregon house expels Republican who helped far-right rioters enter capitol.*
That is the treatment Republicans bent on insurrection deserve.
The G7's pledges to donate an insufficient quantity of Covid vaccines
constitute a total failure.
Unidentified aerial phenomena may appear to be "out of this world",
but they are in fact mundane objects that appear mysterious due to the
circumstances of the view.
None of them are evidence for alien visitors.
US citizens: call on Congress to fully fund a zero
emission transit policy now.
US citizens: call on Biden to lift sanctions that are blocking Covid relief.
Artificial light at night on coastal reefs seems to kill 20% of young
clownfish there.
Ethiopia has built a large dam on the Blue Nile. Egypt and Sudan
worry that by retaining water in Ethiopia, it will reduce their share
of the water.
Egypt and Sudan have coasts, and can do solar-powered desalinization
(very expensive) to purify sea water. That is the only solution for
the medium-term — the only way to make enough potable water for the
growing population.
In the long term, curbing and then reversing population growth is the
only way.
The UK has reopened too fast; the Delta variant of Covid-19 is spreading.
This was quite predictable.
What the UK needs is leadership in taking the steps to prevent
transmission. But it won't get that from Bogus Johnson, whose
repeated policy changes have not given Britons a reason to trust his
judgment.
Officials' breaking their own hygiene rules have led Britons to
disregard the same rules.
It looks like Russian agents poisoned author Dmitry Bykov with
novichok in 2019.
The Keystone XL pipeline has been cancelled. The owner yielded
in the face of Biden's decision to revoke the permit.
Now what about the Line 3 pipeline? That would carry tar sands oil
too, if it is allowed to be built.
Former Guatemalan soldiers face charges for murdering and disappearing
people during the US-supported dirty war.
Koch money and the US Chamber of Commerce are behind senators Manchin
and Sinema's stubborn defense of the filibuster.
Texas Republicans have launched the "1836 Project" to teach a distorted version
of the reason for Texas's secession from Mexico.
I expect that the Mexican government and Mexicans elites found the
rapid arrival of so many border-crossing immigrants in Texas worrisome
in itself, independent of the fact that some of them illegally had
slaves.
I suspect that one of the aims of this project is to pave the way for
an attempt to take nondemocratic control of the US government,
or else secede.
The UK wants to exempt the big banks from the plan for global businesses
to pay tax in the countries where they get the income.
Even if those banks do pay an adequate tax rate — and I won't take a
minister's word for that! — it is still important to make them pay tax
in each country where they operate.
When writing about unknown aerial phenomena (UAPs), it is soooo
tempting for writers to presume that at some of them are sightings of
actual objects that are actually moving at their apparent high
velocities with their apparent rapid accelerations.
They look like that, but many are not that.
The term "unidentified aerial phenomena" is better than "unidentified
flying objects" because it rejects that presumption — but we need to
remember not to let the presumption sneak in later.
I find it implausible that alien visitors with high technology would
fail to conceal their presence from us, supposing they were trying to
do conceal it.
Due to the deferred US taxes on capital gains, the richest 25 US
billionaires paid an effective tax rate of 3.4% on the increase of
their known wealth.
How CNN fought the bully's secret demand for Barbara Starr's email
metadata, which was supported by secret court filings.
The story is somewhat vague about the ultimate result. It appears
that CNN ultimately did have to deliver some of this information.
The US government should stop persecuting whistleblowers. The US
government should build precedents and laws to prevent persecution if
a subsequent administration sets out to persecute whistleblowers.
*Poll Shows 83% of Americans Believe So-Called 'War on Drugs' an
Abject Failure.*
US citizens: call on the Secretary of Defense to have Michael
Flynn tried for advocating a coup.
The UK NHS is hiring nurses who don't have nursing qualifications.
This, along with the lack of nurses, results from many years of
gradually reducing the NHS's funds, together with the refusal to spend enough on training nurses
and the refusal to employ immigrants.
*San Francisco may be first major US city to hit herd immunity, experts say.*
Mining destroyed the caves on Banaba Island (also called Ocean Island)
that preserved water in periods of drought. Nowadays, when their
desalination plant breaks, they have only sea water to drink.
Lukashenko plans to make protesting a crime.
Also insulting officials — which is also a crime in many countries that
don't sufficiently respect freedom of speech. France is an example.
Human rights defenders in Australia are calling for an end to
imprisoning people secretly.
Australia keeps the identity of such a prisoner secret by threatening
the relatives and friends who know about per disappearance.
A trial held in secret is likely to be an unfair trial. That is true in
Australia just as in the UK, Belarus,
or China.
There is no reason to suppose that "Witness J" really broke an
Australian law, or that perse did not have an overriding justification
for doing so, as Witness K had.
Feral peacocks have become a nuisance in the northern LA region.
I am perplexed by the idea of "relocating" the peafowl. Peafowl
originated in India; in California, they are an intrusive pest
species. There is no reason to protect them.
In India and Europe peafowl were traditionally farmed to be eaten.
We could
Bahrain's political prisoner Husain Barakat died in prison from Covid-19.
Prison tends to put prisoners (and guards) in danger of catching
Covid-19. That has been true world-wide. Putting someone in prison
for legitimate political activity, which repressive governments such
as Bahrain tend to do. Thus, Bahrain's repression was responsible
for Barakat's death.
The UK government will pay landowners for increasing forest cover
in specific beneficial ways.
A PR agency for fossil fuels greenwashes its business by
pledging to reduce the greenhouse emissions of its own activities.
That reduction is insignificant compared with the increased use of
fossil fuels by others caused by its own PR work.
Companies that extract or deliver fossil fuels have used this
distraction tactic for years.
Joseph Stiglitz: don't listen to people that claim inflation is a real
worry now.
(satire) *Revolutionary New Driverless Car Requires Zero Functional Technology To Generate Profit.*
The Sunrise Movement demands Biden stop trying to make a ruinous
compromise with Republicans that only want to make him fail.
I would like to support the Sunrise Movement. However, I found it was
impossible to participate in any of their activities without running
nonfree software. When I saw that was completely true, I
unsubscribed. I wish they would fix this so I could support them.
The Federal Anti-Solitary Taskforce has developed specific targets for ending
solitary confinement in US federal prisons.
Solitary confinement is a kind of torture, but the word "tortuous" has
nothing to do with torture. It describes a road or path with many
twists and turns.
New Zealand's prime minister tentatively endorsed a big effort to
reduce use of fossil fuel, and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions.
A conman cheated would-be supporters of the bullshitter's campaign by
collecting for a fake campaign organization with the fake support of
the bullshitter's relatives.
If your aim is to con people. what better place to seek victims than
among people who want to be lied to? The difference between a fake
charlatan and a real charlatan is a subtle point.
Netanyahu approved the right-wing march in old Jerusalem that
officials had previously forbidden.
I suspect he aims to create difficulties for the new government that
will probably take office next week.
*Nicaraguan police arrest third potential Ortega opponent.*
How many other Nicaraguans might possibly run against Ortega?
Is there anyone in the country that certainly won't do so?
*Knowledge of medicinal plants at risk as (indigenous) languages die
out.*
African activists are making some progress campaigning against female
genital mutilation.
The Australian government plans to weaken environmental protection
laws, and thus "fast-track extinctions."
Erdoğan is now trying to entirely abolish the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party).
The party did well in an election,
so Erdoğan launched a civil war against Kurds and announced victory.
Then he held a new election in which the HDP did not do so well.
Whether this was because nationalists were elated by the "victory" of
Turkey over part of Turkey, or because some HDP voters were dead, I
don't know.
Biden appears to overlook al-Sisi's practice of taking relatives of
dissidents as hostages to intimidate them.
The plan for the NHS to distribute patient data (or use of it) has been
postponed for reconsideration.
It's very useful to make medical records available for medical research,
but there must be a very strict system to prevent it from being used
to judge people or discriminate between them.
"Sharing" is something that people do with people; let's not use that
word for this.
Bogus Johnson's former advisor said he had witnessed dishonesty among
the ministers, but has failed to give any evidence of dishonesty.
The nastiest forms of Republican election sabotage are those designed
to destabilize the system of counting votes.
The bully did pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden's son.
His lawyer, Giuliani, did this on a phone call, of which a recording
has now leaked.
Ratko Mladić has been finally convicted of genocide in Bosnia.
He ordered the Bosnian Serb to kill Bosnian Muslims with the aim of
driving Muslims out (euphemistically referred to as "ethnic cleansing").
El Salvador convicted Sara Rogel of aborting a pregnancy, and sentenced
her to 30 years in prison.
She has been released by a judge after 8 years in prison.
Nevada will prohibit useless lawns in the Las Vegas area, because
the grass wastes scarce water.
Criticizing the fashion for making documentaries as stories, and
prioritizing empathy (for individuals) over understanding (of a
phenomenon that affects individuals).
Something like this has happened in textual journalism. I sometimes
stop reading an article because the "human story, feel for this human
who was hurt" part is too big and heavy compared to the part that
explains what's going on (events that may hurt lots of people).
The House of Representatives once had rules that allowed something
comparable to a filibuster.
Segregationist Democrats tried to be counted as absent one moment
and present the next. In 1890, the House stopped permitting them to
be counted as absent while actually physically present.
US citizens: tell Congress that the federal infrastructure bill must
be big, bold and green.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
California is in deep drought, exacerbated by global heating. Many
farms will be idle this year for lack of water. There may be big
wildfires again.
I wonder whether lakes will have water available to put out the fires.
*China funneling billions into harmful production of beef, soy and palm
oil, says campaign group.*
Researchers say that the economic impact of global heating disaster, in 2060,
will be twice that of Covid-19.
African great apes are predicted to lose 90% of their habitats.
Their survival in the wild could be impossible.
Turning off the light in half the windows of a large building can reduce
bird collisions by a factor of ten.
In Australia A plague of mice is destroying crops, even houses,
but the poison that might be effective would kill endangered parrots,
as well as predators that eat mice.
NYC unions plan to move their retirees onto Medicare Advantage programs whether they like it or not.
These insurance programs reduce the subscriber's costs when the subscriber
is more or less well, and can increase them by thousands of dollars when the subscriber needs expensive medicines.
*Hawaii bill seeks to gut funding aimed at protecting environment from
tourism.*
Republican state governments are using federal funds, meant to support
poor families, to fund phony "crisis pregnancy centers" whose purpose is to
spread religious opposition to abortion.
*Top Japanese virologist warns of risks of Tokyo Games during pandemic.*
The Olympic games tend to do lasting harm wherever they are held:
to homeless people, to anonymity (via public surveillance), and to
the public treasury.
If your city proposes to hold them, I suggest campaigning against the bid. This has been successful.
The EFF analyzes the Supreme Court's decision about the CFAA.
It pretty clearly rejects the twisted interpretation that was
used against Aaron Swartz, then at the end creates some doubt.
The US informs other countries about drug mules so that those countries can catch them and imprison them. Most of these drug mules are old,
and many have been tricked into carrying drugs.
Aside from the special case of cognitively impaired old drug mules,
what about drug mules in general? Many of them claim to be duped,
too. Some of those are lying, some are telling the truth.
What of those who participate knowingly? Indeed, they are committing
crimes. But what purpose is served by practice of imprisoning them?
As far as I can see, it does a lot of harm to them, and achieves
little good for anyone else. The whole War On Drugs does more harm than good, even when it concerns drugs that are dangerous.
*How Third-Party Auditors Make Oil Industry Fraud Possible.*
75,000 customers of Amazon filed cases demanding arbitration, so
Amazon withdrew the rule saying that customers can't do class-action
suits.
Companies should not make their customers or employees use arbitration
instead of suing. If what happened to Amazon convinces companies to
stop, that will solve the problem. But if arbitration requirements
continue, we need laws to negate them.
(satire) *Biden Offers Infrastructure Concession By Partially
Demolishing Brooklyn Bridge.*
*In a secretly recorded video, GOP Oregon lawmaker tells protesters how he
will help them enter closed state Capitol.*
Will the legislature expel him?
The Department of Justice continued trying to subpoena journalists' communications records even as Biden was saying his administration would not do this.
One can never rule out lying by a politician, but another explanation
seems plausible: institutional inertia. People appointed by the bully
may still be in their positions, and committing sabotage to serve him.
Others may still be following orders they received which reflected
his policies.
The DOJ recently said it would not do this any more, so it looks
like Biden took the necessary action to overcome the bully's
policies.
The last time Earth had this level of atmospheric CO2, it was 7F hotter
(around 4C) and sea level was around 80 feet higher.
If we don't get the CO2 level back down to 350 ppm, we are likely to
see all of today's coastal cities inundated, by and by.
*Swiss to vote on whether to become first European nation to ban
synthetic pesticides.*
Hungary says that the proposed Budapest branch of the Chinese
university Fudan has not been approved, and suggests it could be
cancelled if local people don't like it.
It could be an excuse to silence controversy and quietly proceed with
the plan.
We don't know enough about the things that affect male fertility
to draw conclusions from the sperm count data.
What we do know is that the world's human population is still increasing,
and that is still dangerous.
*Israeli police bar right-wing march through Jerusalem's Old City.*
I guess the authorities have noticed that they couldn't keep playing
with that fire.
The attorney general of Washington DC is suing Amazon, claiming that
Amazon Prime uses Amazon's size to harm competitors.
Today's industry, at least in the west, has prioritized efficiency
over robustness. The result is that lots of things don't work.
The president of Colombia announced measures to try to restrain the thugs' violence against protesters.
I don't know how effective they will be, but at least this
acknowledges the problem.
*Our decision to structure patent and copyright monopolies in a way that allows for a small number of people to get incredibly rich is because we have politicians who like very rich people.*
If China is on track to provide vaccines to most of the world by early
2022, it seems that a western investment in increased vaccine
production would be a waste now, because it is too late to help. It
would, reportedly, produce enough vaccine to vaccinate the world by
the end of 2022, but long before that it won't be needed any more.
Why is China going faster? I suspect it has more to do with the (low)
competence of the western business system than with the competence of
western engineers. This too is due to having politicians who like
very rich people.
Israeli thugs beat up, then arrested al-Jazeera journalist Givara Budeiri
while she was covering a protest.
As usual, the thugs fabricated outrageous accusations against her,
but even if they were true, they would not have justified ordering her
to stop covering the protests for 15 days.
The UK minister for domestic oppression wants internet platforms to
delete postings that "glamourise" migrants' crossing the channel
illegally.
This shows that censorship is now the go-to British solution for
unpleasant communications.
Plutocracy interferes at every political level in efforts to save
civilization from global heating disaster.
The world can no longer allow profit-seeking companies such as Shell to manage
the continued use of fossil fuels.
They will try to drag it out as long as they can.
The wealthy countries have put a lot of money into developing new
fossil fuel facilities in poor countries.
This is busting the carbon budget and directing civilization toward
disaster.
Nigeria says that use of Twitter is banned and it will prosecute anyone
who tweets.
Publishing news obtained from Twitter is banned too.
The Dept of Justice tried to get reporters' email logs for a leak
investigation.
*Global G7 deal may let Amazon off hook on tax, say experts.*
Protesters in British Columbia are trying to stop the unsustainable logging
of old-growth forests.
Humans have already eliminated most of the old-growth forests that
existed 100 years ago. It's time to stop before they are all gone.
As the supply of these woods decreases, their price will rise. If
today's high prices are taken as a reason not to stop now, higher
prices in the future will always be a reason to keep logging — until
there are no old-growth forests left. That is absurd, so this reason
is invalid.
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use
of Military Force.
This was meant for a misguided and harmful purpose — to authorize
attacking and occupying Iraq — but continues to be stretched to justify
other wars.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Californians are trying to save monarch butterflies by planting more
milkweed for their caterpillars.
But they don't know whether this will do the job.
Computerized systems to monitor old people, perhaps partly demented,
for their safety, work by means of AI-based surveillance, and their
actions can feel oppressive to the people they "help".
However, the problem goes deeper: they contain proprietary software, so
neither the people to be "served" nor the people who install the system
have real control over it.
In particular, they can't be sure which sorts of events are being
observed and reported to companies by the system, and used to profile
or manipulate people.
A 3D model of the movements of protesters in Charlotte, a year ago, as
well as the thugs who had surrounded them, demonstrates that thugs
intentionally trapped and besieged the protesters.
Then they attacked the trapped protesters with tear gas and other
weapons.
UK officials told asylum seekers in immigration jails that complaining
about the conditions there would jeopardize their asylum requests.
Manchin has effectively killed the For the People Act.
This means nothing can be done to stop Republicans from stealing the
next election at the level of various states.
Uganda's president has jailed hundreds of the opposition after his
"reelection."
The 2,000 inhabitants of Wagina island, in the Solomons, won a court
case to prevent a bauxite mine on their small island. Then 8 of them
appointed themselves a "council of elders" and claimed to authorize
the mine.
I wonder what inducement convinced those 8 people to do this.
*The Tax Foundation [Cites] Mythical Taxpayers to Cause Alarm Over
Proposals That [Would] Only Impact the Wealthiest Among Us.*
A business leader says that rich countries must cooperate with
vaccinating poor countries in order for poor countries to cooperate with
climate defense.
I don't know whether the two issues are linked, but I am not sure it
matters. Rich countries must cooperate with vaccinating poor
countries. Poor countries must cooperate with climate defense.
The FBI demanded from USA Today the IP addresses of everyone that read
a certain newspaper article.
The power to get that information is dangerous to a free society. I
take steps to prevent such information from being recorded about me.
This is also why I do not identify myself when accessing any online
publication, whether text, music, video, or whatever.
Now the Department of Justice says it won't demand reports' phone records
for leak investigations.
That is a small change for the better, but what we really need to do
is change the Espionage Act and whatever other laws whistleblowers may
be prosecuted under.
Some democrats ask Biden to *support a
$25 billion investment in the production of roughly eight billion mRNA
vaccine doses.*
Is that what we need? The words are not precise enough for me to
tell.
Whatever vaccine production lines exist will surely keep running,
producing vaccine, as long as there are people who want to be
vaccinated. I expect funds will be found to pay for the vaccine and
vaccinate someone or other. Pledging funds towards that will be
necessary, but doing so in advance won't speed things up.
The way to funds to speed up vaccinating the world is by increasing
the future rate of production: building more plants, sooner. If
that's what this plan would do, I'm in favor of it.
So which one are they proposing to do with that money?
If it refers to this proposal, then it would be spent on boosting production. In that case, I'm
in favor of it.
(satire) *L.A. Mayor Prevents His Kid From Lazing About By Installing
Spikes On Family Couch.*
The connection between the lousy US response to Covid-19 and the
laissez-mourir plutocracy of the cult of the invisible hand calls for
an investigation, but there is no visible intention to investigate
this.
Florida is considering a constitutional amendment to declare that
rivers have rights.
I am in favor of the goals of this amendment, and practical rules such
as are likely to follow from it. However, it should not be formulated
this way.
It is a confusion to extend "rights", as such, to anything other than
intelligent beings. To exercise a right is to make a decision. A
river cannot make any decision whatsoever, so it cannot exercise any
right whatsoever.
If you think a river can have rights, next you'll believe that a
corporation can have rights. Reject these absurd ideas!
It would be legitimate to decide that rivers have inherent value, that
there is an imperative to preserve them in good state, that their
health counts in some sorts of legal questions. Just don't call this
"rights".
*126 Nobel Laureates Warn "Humanity Taking Colossal Risks With Our Common
Future."*
10 signs of fascism on the rise.
The US faces an immediate fascist threat, not merely a potential one.
The progressive caucus warned Biden that they would not vote for a
"compromise" infrastructure bill dictated by Republican senators.
Afterward, Biden rejected the Republican proposal.
We need to get Manchin and Sinema to vote to abolish the filibuster.
Rejecting Republican sabotage "solutions" for the infrastructure bill
might put on enough pressure to achieve that goal.
Biden's plan is already a "compromise" compared to what we really need.
What's at stake in the infrastructure plan: prosperity, democracy,
saving civilization from climate disaster.
Also making America great again, with health and strength rather
than bullying and cruelty.
Nicaragua has jailed a second opposition presidential candidate.
The charges are vague, of course.
*Psychopath-Driven Inequality (grab-it capitalism) Is Making Our
Society Sick.*
Rewarding the "move fast and break things" approach makes the US even
more psychopath-favorable today than it was before.
It turns out that Victoria (a state in Australia) does not requires
everyone to use an app
to "check
in" when entering a supermarket (or any other store).
People are allowed to use other methods, including pencil and paper.
Thus, this system does not require customers to run nonfree software.
It does track their movements. Whether that is acceptable, for the
very importat purpose of eradicating outbreaks of Covid-19, depends in
my view on how much that data is available to be used for other purposes.
*Microsoft blocks Bing from showing image results for Tiananmen "tank man".*
If you support Chinese censorship, Microsoft, move to China!
Even Zionists can condemn Israel's occupation policies.
US movies are ceasing to treat abortion as taboo, ceasing to present
female characters who find abortion too stressful to go through with.
It turns out that SARS-CoV-2 spreads by aerosols — usually not
travelling a long distance, but it can do so.
Some Amazon warehouses provide a booth which a staff person can get
into for some sort of help in coping with the pressure of working in
an Amazon warehouse.
I suspect Amazon will keep track of what employees say and do while in
the booth, and use that as well as other profiling that information to
decide how to pressure them and whether to fire them.
A thug involved in killing Ronald Greene lied about what the thugs had
done, then falsely claimed not to have any body camera footage.
Officials including the governor participated in the coverup.
Somehow, that body camera footage showed up recently. I am curious how.
*126 Nobel Laureates Warn 'Humanity Taking Colossal Risks With Our Common
Future'*.
They say that "transformational action this decade" is absolutely necessary.
*More than a dozen cities push to minimize or even eliminate police
presence at mental health calls.*
This is an important part of the substance that "defund the police"
refers to. However, it is also important to take armed thugs out of
traffic law enforcement. That is another big source of opportunities
to mess up someone's life.
The Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo prison saw that some prisoners were
being tortured, and saw that the officials knew most prisoners were
innocent, and saw that Dubya would not release them because that would
mean admitting a mistake.
After his scheduled return to the US at the end of his tour of duty,
he was jailed and kept in solitary confinement with some of the same
sorts of torture, based on the general feeling that he sympathized
with the prisoners and must therefore be a terrorist.
*Firefighters Denied Coverage by Veterans Affairs After Exposure to PFAS
Firefighting Foam.*
A federal judge, who is a second-amendment extremist, ruled that an
AR-15 is legally equivalent to a swiss army knife.
It is possible to hurt someone or destroy something with a swiss army
knife, but it isn't particularly good for that use. It is mainly
designed for other things.
Conversely, it may be possible to use an AR-15 for something that
doesn't involve sloppy destruction, but it isn't designed for that.
Indeed, it would be a clever hack to do so.
*Arctic sea ice thinning twice as fast as thought, study finds.*
This will accelerate global heating.
*End destruction of nature to stop future pandemics, say scientists.*
The immediate cause is that people get into closer contact with
wildlife. However, the amount of travel (between regions and between
countries) is increasing, and that helps a disease become a pandemic.
Parts of Peru have a Covid-19 outbreak that exceeds hospital capacity
in some regions. In those regions, many of the sick people die even though
standard treatment could have saved them.
Uber recognized a drivers' union in the UK, but the contract signs away
collective bargaining on their rate of pay. One driver says it's a "dud".
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to end the filibuster and pass the For the People
Act.
Han Dongfang
commemorated
the Tiananmen Square massacre alone in Hong Kong. He lived through that massacre in 1989 and will not stop resisting.
"Before your last breath, don’t tell yourself you are dead."
*Residents light candles, lay flowers and paint messages as
police
enforce ban on annual vigil for massacre.*
The EU has
proposed
"we'll try a little harder" as a substitute for unlocking vaccine
production.
The point at the end about the existing WTO for compulsory licensing
of patents is true (though countries including the US
have
pressured countries not to do this), but it is fundamentally
inadequate because it only allows a country to make vaccine for its
own use. Most countries, other than big economies, can't do their own
vaccine manufacturing. The bigger and more capable countries must be
allowed to make vaccine for the smaller/poorer countries.
Globally, the world has to choose between efficiency (and profit), and
finishing the job of vaccinating everyone quickly.
The efficient way to vaccinate everyone is to make just enough vaccine
plants, then run them until they make enough vaccine for everyone.
That costs less but will take a long time.
The rapid way is to keep building vaccine plants, so that the
production will accelerate. This way, we will get enough vaccine to
vaccinate everyone, sooner.
The drawback is that many of those vaccine plants won't run for a
whole year. The expense of running them may seem wasteful. Private
companies would call it wasteful, but so would the governments that
have to pay to get them running. "Why be in such a rush", they will
argue. "We have enough plants now — be patient and you'll all
get vaccine."
However, while billions of people are "being patient", tens or
hundreds of millions of them will be patients, and millions of them
might die from Covid-19.
In addition, the virus might mutate and become even more dangerous
than the Delta and Kappa variants are now. They might kill hundreds
of millions of people.
Producing vaccine as fast as we can until the job is finished
is worth the cost.
The EU has
banned
Belarus planes from EU airspace, and orders its planes not to fly
over Belarus.
What about planes registered in other countries — the UK, for
instance? Should the EU allow UK planes flying to or from EU cities
to cross Belarus?
*World's
soils "under great pressure", says UN pollution report.*
*UN Agencies
Call
for a Decade of Restoring Ecosystems to Confront Biodiversity and
Climate Emergencies.*
*World
must
rewild on massive scale to heal nature and climate, says UN.*
Rewilding is often a difficult task, and in some cases nobody knows a
way to make it successful. We can't count on being able to duplicate
an ecosystem that has been eliminated in a place, not even if that
ecosystem still exists elsewhere. And even less, if it does not.
Dissident leaders in Nicaragua
call
for a general strike to protest the jailing of the opposition
leader.
EU agrees to
compel
multinationals to publish how much tax they pay in each EU country and
in some non-EU countries (though some of the biggest tax havens
are missing from that list).
For countries that charge businesses no tax, will they be required to
publish how much of their income flows through them?
*Microsoft Irish subsidiary
paid
zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year.*
This subsidiary is only nominally Irish, since it "pays taxes" in
Bermuda, and it sucks in money from around the world.
The Republican motto is "Say it with cruelty." The governor of Texas
plans
to cancel the licenses of the child care facilities that take care of
immigrant minors, trying to compel the federal government to keep
them in prisons instead.
The federal government could transport them to new facilities outside
Texas. But Texas is big, so they would need to spend a long time in a
bus, exposed to catching Covid-19 from each other.
If governments agree to liberate manufacture of vaccines,
companies
could sue them using
business-supremacy
treaties. "You're not allowed to save lives if that reduces our
profits," is the motto of plutocracy.
(satire) *Homeowner
Shoos
Away Feral Driverless Car Rooting Around Garage.*
(satire) *Congress Takes Field Trip To Goldman Sachs
To
Learn How Laws Get Made.*
The Supreme Court limited the breadth of the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act, ruling that
accessing
data for invalid purposes was not a violation.
This was the right decision. Justice Thomas was confused in his
arguments. It should be prohibited to pull a fire alarm when there is
no file — and it is prohibited, by another law, one which has
nothing to do with using a digital system. The CFAA should not apply.
The recent experiment in giving every US household hundreds of dollars
showed that this made a
big
help in easing poverty. So let's do it every year.
Paxton Smith, high school valedictorian,
focused
her speech on condemning the new Texas anti-abortion law.
Amazon has
cancelled
its policy of gratuitous drug testing of employees.
This is a change for the better, but Amazon continues to
mistreat
its staff and its customers so I won't
start buying there because of this change.
Many large companies have this policy of harassment. Drug testing is
part of the war on drugs, and it's not a good solution to real
problems.
For employees such as drivers whose ability to concentrate is crucial
for safe work, it is better to test their concentration and reflexes
each day than to test them for drugs once in a while.
*UN Labor Agency Finds Pandemic Pushed
Over
100 Million Workers Into Poverty.*
The Pentagon
continues
understating the number of civilians killed by US military
operations. It
tends
to call casualties "enemy combatants" regardless of facts.
A study found that right-wing Americans are
more
likely to believe fake news. Also, that right-wing viral stories
tend to be fake.
US citizens:
call
on Biden to cancel student debt now. At least some of it!
US citizens:
call
on Congress to reduce military spending.
A long list of
voter-suppression
measures in the Texas Republican voting bill that Democrats
recently blocked.
The US proposal for subdividing international taxation would be a step
forward, but it is wrong to use the nation's power to defend those
companies' exploitation.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon, etc
mistreat their "users"; I say that Facebook does not have users, only
useds.
Schumer's bill to focus on China as a threat
would
cancel the joint climate action plan that Kerry has negotiated.
China's growing power, and its practice of using that to build an
empire of repression, is a threat to the world. However, the actions
we can take to defend against that are mostly in specific areas of
activity. Global heating is also a threat to the world. We should be
able to work together on climate defense.
(satire) *Dianne Feinstein
Considers
Eliminating Filibuster Over Upcoming Vote On Smoot-Hawley Tariff.*
*America Has
More
Than Enough Renewable Resources to Meet All of Its Energy Needs,
Says Report.*
Indonesia's
leading
anti-corruption investigator has been fired, and says it is
because corruption has won.
China is setting up the internet for many African countries, and China
is reportedly
implementing
a different architecture that allows it to monitor and control all
usage.
*‘If publishers become afraid, we’re in trouble’:
publishing’s
cancel culture debate boils over.*
40 years ago there were many substantial independent publishers with
distribution to bookstores. If a few refused to publish a book, it
could still reach the public. Nowadays there are four large
publishing empires (or is it now just three?). It is easy to keep a
book from reaching bookstores.
The concentration of book publishing results from plutocratist
policies which continue to allow mergers in nearly all industries.
We need to deconcentrate industry, to make the large companies split up
into many competing pieces. My
tax
proposal is a way to do this without needing a lot of lawsuits.
In 2021, Apple has been
shifting
more production to China.
A fire in 2020 seems to have destroyed
1/10
of the world's giant redwood trees.
The fire's intensity was partly due to human fire-suppression
activity. We could prevent wildfires from being intense enough to
damage those trees by doing a lot more controlled burns, but that is
easier said than done. It is hard to keep a controlled burn under
control in times of deep drought, and even harder when flammable
debris has accumulated.
It would make sense to grow more giant redwood groves in widely
separated places.
*Why Israeli progressives have
started
to talk about ‘apartheid’.*
Russia will extradite a Belarusian exile to Belarus, who is charged
with protesting and is
likely
to be tortured there.
This is not surprising given that Putin is fundamentally similar to
Lukashenko in his contempt for opposition and dissent.
*Trump justice department
secretly
obtained New York Times reporters’ phone records, paper says.*
This was, of course, a hunt for leakers (whistleblowers). The US
should stop persecuting leakers, because they serve the public.
*Why governments
should
keep spending, and stop worrying about inflation.*
We are still in a slump, and the way to end a slump is with deficit
spending.
However, we should stop putting government funds into fossil fuel
development and
move
it all to renewable energy.
The only obstacle to a renewable energy future is that governments
still put their money into civilization-killing fossil fuels.
An Arab party has
endorsed
right-wing annexationist Naftali Bennett as prime minister of
Israel. Without the Arab party, Bennett would lose his majority.
This may restrain him from passing new unjust laws.
All of humanity is under attack by the greenhouse emissions that
humanity makes.
Television
news fails to show the severity of this.
*Denmark agrees
law
to deport asylum seekers outside Europe.*
This sounds somewhat like the horrible things that Australia has done.
Biden is
raising
the pressure on senators Manchin and Sinema to eliminate the
filibuster and pass voting rights laws.
Norway says that in 2014 it objected to US spying on allies, and the
US
promised
it would stop.
*Climate tipping points
could
topple like dominoes, warn scientists.*
The Indian "delta" variant of Covid-19 is twice as likely to cause a
severe case that requires hospitalization. It also
spreads
more easily. This is evolution at work.
The article does not state anything quantitative about effectiveness
of vaccines against it.
*Pakistan court
overturns
blasphemy conviction of Christian couple.*
*Top ALEC Official Is Ringleader of Arizona Election Audit Circus.*
*Ai Weiwei accuses curators of rejecting artwork over [a reference to]
Julian Assange.*
Nicaragua's dictatorial president Ortega has arrested the main opposition
candidate, Chamorro, on charges of money laundering.
It is not impossible that these charges could be valid, but it is
implausible. Ms Chamorro has been under state harassment for many
years. Would she take the risk of committing a real crime and giving
Ortega a valid reason to prosecute her? Of course not.
Biden has announced a new drive to vaccinate 70% of Americans against Covid-19.
If this is achieved, uniformly over the population, the US will be at
or near herd immunity, safe against the disease. Unless we encounter
a variant that is more transmissible, in which case herd immunity
would need a higher fraction to be vaccinated.
The mayor of Budapest will demonstrate opposition to building a branch
of a Chinese university in Budapest through street names China will
not like.
I love this sort of mischievous hacktivism. And I have a suggestion.
How about naming a plaza in the vicinity of the university site Tien
An Men Square? Then they could have a rally for democracy (in China,
in Hungary, world-wide) every June 4.
Giving babies special medical care and education for five years
resulted in visible increases in the size of some brain regions at age
40.
Two billionaires want to build a molten-salt nuclear fission power
plant using US government money.
I am skeptical of the claim that this would be "clean" energy. It would
not emit greenhouse gases, but it would create radioactive material.
Many Americans refuse Covid-19 vaccination because they fear it would
cause them financial side-effects.
When properly understood, that concern is a reason to get vaccinated
as soon as you can. Vaccination is gratis, but if you get a severe
case of Covid-19, treatment is not.
However, the US needs to do a better job of showing everyone that
vaccination is gratis.
*Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants
to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data.*
The data would be "anonymized", but we know that it is easy to
identify most of the "anonymized" individuals given several data
about each one.
The NHS has no inherent need to sell anyone access to data about its
patients. The illusion of a need comes from the Tory policy of
starving the NHS of funds, since 2019,
which I believe is intended to lead to privatizing the NHS
and thus effectively destroying it.
Tories now plan to include this in a business-supremacy treaty with
the US, so that future UK governments would have their hands tied.
*"DOJ Antitrust is run by people promoted under Trump/Barr!"*, and
they are not trying to restrain monopolies.
The EU's Green New Deal has many fundamental flaws. Here they are.
Global heating is causing the level of oxygen in lakes to decrease —
by 20% so far. This endangers wildlife and can taint drinking water.
For Europeans 16-25 years old, Covid-19 has caused great harm to their
lives. 2/3 of them are at risk of depression.
*G7 nations committing billions more to fossil fuel than green energy.*
*Microwave weapons that could cause Havana Syndrome exist, experts say.*
The British and Australian governments
plan
to subject those two countries to a business-supremacy treaty
which gives businesses direct power over what laws the countries can
have.
This would be implemented with an
ISDS clause ("I Sue
Democratic States") that would empower foreign businesses to sue the
state if it does anything that would reduce the profits those
businesses expect to make.
The advocates of taking the UK out of the European Union said that the
goal was to recover Britain's sovereignty. I warned that the Tories
would
give
that sovereignty to global business instead, and now they are
about to do it.
Australia has
bad
experiences with an ISDS clause, and politicians should have
learned their lesson never to accept one again. But the current
government of Australia is irredeemably plutocratist.
Pakistan's army tortured journalist Asad Toor in his home,
then charged him with "defaming" the government.
The next step will be to explicitly criminalize criticism of the
government.
*By representing [UK government policy] failures as the outcome of the
psychological nature of groups, "groupthink" hides their political
basis.*
The Tories want to put the UK into the TPP.
That would imply subjecting it to the ISDS clause ("I sue democratic
states") that gives foreign companies more rights than citizens.
Australia has suffered greatly from the ISDS clauses.
A ship laden with chemicals, many of them more or less toxic,
is sinking near Sri Lanka and is likely to poison the wildlife
in that area.
The effects could last for decades.
*Biden suspends Trump-era oil drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic refuge.*
This is one step towards what we need for ecosurvival. There is no room
in the carbon budget for additional fossil fuel infrastructure. We need
to end the drilling world-wide.
*Key species at risk if planet heats up by more than 1.5C.*
The loss of those species can upend ecosystems and thus cause havoc.
*Emissions from coal mined in Australia but exported and burnt overseas
were almost double the nation’s domestic greenhouse gas footprint in
2020.*
When coal is mined in country A and burnt in country B, which one is
responsible for those emissions? Both share the responsibility, since
both work together to arrange to burn that coal.
If we had sufficient pressure to stop burning coal, country B would
stop buying it and stop burning it. Country A would not be able to
prevent that.
But the world does not put enough pressure on country B to bring the
practice to an end; thus, pressure to stop mining the coal is needed
too.
Since Covid-19, ambulance crews in the UK have been attacked enough
times that they will now wear body cameras to document the attacks.
What's the cause of this, I wonder?
When cruise ships start operating again, they plan to destroy coral reefs
around Gran Cayman Island to build a bigger harbor and unload far more
tourists every day.
Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are lobbying to kill right-to-repair bills
in many US states.
Some of the arguments they use amount to, "We designed these products
to be tricky to repair," and the obvious response is, "You had better
not do that any more."
Looking at the information in the article from the standpoint of users'
freedom, we see that Chromebooks (some of them? all of them?) are designed
not to work unless it can spy on the user.
Pharma companies spent $$44 million last year on lobbying EU countries,
and much of it was to oppose generic vaccines.
*At a Time When America Faces Cascading Crises, Republicans Just Say No* —
to every constructive action.
Amazon's harsh working conditions and workloads result in a rate
of injury 50% higher than in competing companies.
Please don't buy from Amazon. I refuse to buy from Amazon for my own
protection, because buying from Amazon entails being identified and
running nonfree software. In addition, I boycott Amazon, so I ask
others, when they are getting anything for me, not to get it from
Amazon.
There's no harm in looking at products in Amazon's web site as long as
you've blocked it from identifying you or running nonfree software on
your machine.
* …coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths would
continue to rise [in North Carolina] if pandemic precautions such
as quarantine, school closures, social distancing and mask-wearing
were lifted while vaccines were being rolled out.*
*Illinois lawmakers pass a bill banning police from deceiving juvenile
suspects during interrogations.*
You may call me hyperstrict, but I think there should be limits on
manipulative treatment of adults, too. Adults are not immune to being
pressured into false confessions. I agree that an adult ought be
strong enough to resist the pressure to lie, but that doesn't imply
that adults who are not strong enough to resist deserve a false
conviction.
*How US mega-dairies are killing off small farms.*
Chinese censors are very creative at inventing speech crimes.
*An Indian court has ruled that a local government administration in
Uttar Pradesh filed a "false and unfounded" police report against
eight Muslim leaders who had opposed the "illegal" demolition of
their mosque.*
Belarusian protester Stepan Latypov cut his throat in court, saying
that he had pled guilty because Lukashenko's men had threatened to
imprison his family and neighbors if he did not.
I suppose he had been tortured already and expected more torture, so
he attempted to escape a fate worse than death.
He may have failed in that attempt — but he did land a blow on the
enemy in the process. I bow to the courage he displayed in doing
this.
Amazon gave customers just one week to opt out of having
their Amazon devices offer wifi connections to other people's
devices.
I don't think that letting other people's devices connect is as bad as
the spying that Amazon devices do. However, giving people one week to
opt out of anything should be prohibited. The FCC should set
standards for this, and any company that doesn't follow the standard
should be prosecuted.
If a company is too big to prosecute then it is too big to exist.
A campaign asks the UK's NHS doctors to refuse to put patient data
into the new digital system that makes it available to companies.
Australia has an outbreak of the Indian variant of Covid-19, and finds
that it can spread when people brush past each other momentarily.
This is very dangerous — people need to get vaccinated.
A year ago, *NYPD Took Hours to Respond to Mass Looting,
Despite Quickly Cracking Down on Protests.*
*Oil and Gas Companies Get Enormous Welfare,
Still Lay Off Workers and Enrich Executives.*
And they are "too busy" to testify at a congressional hearing.
Israel's request for more military aid from the US faces opposition from
US Jews, including Jewish Voice for Peace, and Senator Sanders.
The US has offered aid to rebuild Gaza. That influence over Gaza, plus
the influence the US has on Israel when it dares to use it, could be
sufficient to prevent more violence — if the US can also guide Israel
away from the apartheid and fanaticism that could spark violence.
*[Republican] initiatives are transforming several
states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is
now at risk.*
(satire) *Couple Who Met During Pandemic Tenderly Remove Each Other’s Mask Straps For First Time.*
Juan Cole: Naftali Bennett, who personally advocates annexing the
Palestinians' land and treating them as unwanted residents, may become
prime minister of Israel with the support of a coalition of parties
with a spectrum of different views.
Ironically, he may need one Arab party's votes. I can't begin to
guess how much of Bennett's personal views would get implemented by
that coalition.
But it could stay in power long enough for Netanyahu to be formally
prosecuted for corruption. Maybe then he could not become prime
minister again, and the political situation would change permanently.
Trickle-up economics: economic modeling including the "velocity of
wealth" predicts that giving a larger share of economic growth to the
non-wealthy increases economic growth, and this benefits everyone
including the wealthy — while decreasing the gap between them.
The result is to increase the total level of consumption. That would
be good if it benefited mainly the non-wealthy, except for one
problem: nowadays it is not clear that we can sustain more consumption
in the US.
Daniel Ellsberg published a secret US report that proposed using
nuclear weapons against China in 1958,
supposing China were to attack Taiwan.
Now he dares the US government to charge him under the Espionage
Act, as it has charged other leakers including Edward Snowden,
as well as journalist Julian Assange.
Lukashenko has charged the editor-in-chief of TUT.BY with tax evasion
"on an especially large scale," which could only be a fabricated excuse.
*Colombia to probe police who stood by as civilians shot at protesters.*
Pakistani talk-show host Hamid Mir criticized the military's
censorship of media, and was removed from his show with no explanation.
Unsustainable logging in the Solomon Islands will eliminate its
natural forests in 15 years.
I suppose this will cause extinction of many species. Ecological
damage is everywhere.
Some used book stores will give money to the book's author when they
sell a book.
I'd be in favor of this if it were accompanied by a move to narrow the power
of copyright.
Many local armed groups are fighting the Burmese army.
The army is using artillery and helicopters to attack them.
Hong Kong's repression agency arrested a solitary protester who called
attention to the 1989 massacre in Beijing's Tien An Men square,
Grandma Wong.
19 members of Oath Keepers militias have been charged with attacking
the Capitol.
The new Texas voter-suppression law will do more than stop
disprivileged people from voting. It will also give judges an easy way
to perceive a problem of election fraud, even when there wasn't one.
Democrats blocked it for the moment because the legislative session
was ending.
* The Arizona Legislature is continuing its attack on voting by mail. In
a party-line vote, the state house advanced a bill that would turn
allegedly mismatched signatures on mail ballots into potential criminal
cases.*
A Republican who rejects the very idea of truth would have little
difficulty reporting a "mismatch" between two identical signatures.
A voter who is informed of an alleged mismatch might wish to go
through the process to cure it, but there are various innocent reasons
why perse might not do so. Here are a few that occur to me.
* We must ensure that rich companies and nations stop this destruction of
life in the oceans, which not only impoverishes wildlife but also the
coastal communities that are truly dependent on small-scale fishing for
survival.*
Yang Hengjun, prisoner of China, says he was tortured and drugged, and
made to say things that were probably recorded to be presented as
(false) confessions.
US citizens: call on Democrats to reject ruinous Republican
"compromises" and pass the whole American Families and Jobs Plan.
Let's stop describing the supporters of the wrecker's cult as
"conservatives". Most Republicans today are no longer conservatives,
they are right-wing extremists.
It's foolish for anyone to entrust secrets to cloudy digital
"services". It's especially foolish when these secrets concern
guarding or accessing nuclear weapons, but that doesn't mean you ought to make the same mistake.
The guards should use one of the free/libre programs for flashcard
learning — some are listed in
the free software directory.
They won't send anything to remote servers unless you ask them to.
The UK agency that investigates crimes by uniformed thugs refused to
reopen its astonishing conclusion about the thugs' killing of Mark
Duggan, despite new analysis that makes the conclusion even more
astonishing.
Many Americans will decide to get vaccinated when they can get a Covid-19
vaccine that has a regular (not emergency) approval.
That will probably be soon.
*The Ugly Truth: Republicans Want More Poverty and Crime.*
Their cuts in aid to the poor, and cuts in workers rights (which makes
more workers poor), encourage crime, which Republicans then cite as an
excuse to bash the poor some more.
Millions of Britons will lose their homes soon —
perhaps this week.
Even if the US takes you off the no-fly list, you may still be on some
secret list that cues other countries to interrogate you blindfolded for days.
There is no way to confirm whether you're on one of these lists, and
no legal procedure for getting yourself taken off.
Archaeology in the UK is in crisis because projects can't hire
Europeans any more.
The "people power" methods of making autocrats step down no longer
work. Repressive regimes have learned that they can crush a dissident
movement, then survive being hated.
We see this today in China, Belarus and Burma,
but it was Egypt, Bahrain, Turkey and Syria that demonstrated this.
China and Russia are setting up an informal bloc to defend repressive
countries that are willing to have a bad relationship with the US.
Colombia won't reach out to them, but countries farther from the US
will.
*Republicans who embraced Trump’s big lie run to become election officials.*
Since they endorse cheating, Republican extremists will vote for them so that
they can cheat.
In Tulsa, nobody dared talk about the 1921 pogrom against blacks,
especially not the few survivors. Official records were destroyed.
It took persistence and hard work to pull the story into the open.
Calling for the US to adopt a more normal, less "special" relationship with Israel.
I think the US should remain committed to protecting Israel's survival,
while at the same time pushing to end the occupation of the West Bank
and the siege of Gaza.
The US spied on its European allies via facilities in Denmark.
Denmark investigated this starting in 2015 based on information
released by Edward Snowden. The results of the investigation have
only now been published, but the Danish government seems to have been
acting to prevent a repetition.
China's appetite for minerals, wood and fish from the Pacific
is having a big economic impact, and a big ecological impact too.
A virologist calls for interviewing the individual stall operators
at the wild animal market in Wuhan.
The goal is to find out which kinds of wild animals were traded in
2019.
Apple is systematically undermining interoperability. At the hardware
level, it does this via nonstandard plugs, buses and networks.
At the software level, it does this by not letting the user have any data
except within one app.
The NHS has a plan to redistribute patient data to university labs and
even companies.
This can be useful for progress in medicine, but if it isn't held in
check by an organization whose main priority is privacy, it could ruin
some people's lives.
Please don't refer to the redistribution of personal data between companies
with the word "sharing".
*Data isn’t oil, whatever tech commentators tell you: it’s people’s lives.*
Thinking of art works as "intellectual property" demonstrates contempt
for these works and for art,
much like calling them "content."
I've described several reasons to reject the term "intellectual property"
entirely.
This is one additional reason.
President Kagame of Rwanda is now being recognized for his persistent
repression of opposition leaders.
It's on a level with Putin and Lukashenko.
US citizens: call on Biden to revoke the permit to build the Line 3
pipeline.
US citizens: call on the Senate to end the filibuster and approve the
Jan 6 investigation commission.
A promising choreographer killed himself after he was canceled in
response to unsubstantiated accusations of some sort of sexual
wrongdoing.
Although an investigation found no indication the accusations were valid,
institutions proceeded with the cancellation anyway.
The decision to stop performing his work, the fact that there was no
way he could clear his name or ever be able to practice his art again,
must have made him feel he was as good as dead already, his art
already buried.
A few developers of useful free software have been convicted of grave
crimes, even murder. (With the large number of contributors, by
chance we must expect this.) We disapprove of murder, but we don't
reject their code on that account.
*Kumbh Mela: how a superspreader festival seeded Covid across India.*
All around the world, fervent religion has been deadly in
spreading Covid-19. We have seen this with Christianity
in Brazil,
South Korea,
the US of course;
with Judaism in the US,
and now with Hinduism in India.
If death followed quickly, it would be easier for believers to stay in
touch with reality. But nobody is likely to die of Covid-19 from a
religious ceremony until a couple of weeks later, and most of the
victims will not have participated in the ceremony themselves, but
rather got the disease indirectly via participants.
The 2021 version of the MORE Act, which would legalize marijuana, would also
eliminate some continuing punishment of people with old convictions.
*The statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, should be turned to face the wall in shame.*
I like it.
Covidiots beware — a new variant has appeared which spreads faster
than the other bad variants.
It is currently limited to one country, but it will get to the others
soon enough.
Bogus Johnson is once again rushing to eliminate all Covid-19 restrictions,
and this is producing yet another surge of infections.
Most of of the protests in Colombia have been peaceful recently.
However, in Cali, protesters have made barricades blocking roads.
Official state thugs attack the protesters, sometimes killing or
maiming them.
Unidentified nonuniformed thugs joined in shooting at protesters.
If the protesters manage to kill or capture one of those, maybe it
will be possible to determine what their affiliations are.
There were large protests across Brazil against Bolsonaro and his
callous disregard for Covid-19 and Brazilians' lives.
(satire) *New Evidence Shows Fauci May Have Been
Created In Chinese Lab.*
Biden's budget does not try to prevent extinction of species in the US.
An idea for step-by-step reduction of the power of filibuster.
Relatives of victims of government misconduct call for a law requiring
ministers government departments and advisers to answer truthfully in
investigations and court proceedings.
Thugs that bring dogs sometimes tell them to bite people — around
4000 people a year in the US.
Usually the dog bites whoever the thug directs. Sometimes it bites
someone else who happens to be in the vicinity. Sometimes the bite is
fatal.
US citizens: call on Congress to divide transportation funds 50-50
between mass transit and highways.
US citizens: call on Congress to cancel all student debt.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site,
use the Salsalabs workaround.
A man condemned to execution has subpoena'd secret source code from
GitHub for a program that the court used to analyze evidence. (If the
program is flawed, that might invalidate the conviction.) But GitHub
is in another state, and has ignored the subpoena for years.
The article explains that the difficulty of accessing secrets needed
as evidence can drive people to please guilty.
In this particular case, the court should conclude that it can't get
the source code, therefore it can't trust that program, and overturn
the conviction. Society should adopt a general rule that programs used to
evaluate evidence for a court must be free/libre so that their validity
can be analyzed.
Senate Republicans have decided also to mostly kill Biden's
infrastructure plan.
Biden yearns for bipartisan cooperation, but it is worth than
useless to try to cooperate with saboteurs.
A study concludes it would cost 25 billion dollars to build vaccine
factories sufficient to vaccinate the whole world in a year.
*How my family's memory of the Tulsa massacre sheds new light on Jan. 6
Capitol riot.*
We don't need technological miracles to curb global heating and prevent
climate disaster.
What we need is firmness and determination.
Progressives in Congress: *Ending Poverty in the Richest Country on
Earth: poverty exists because we allow it to exist.*
*We can't end poverty without attacking the interconnected injustices
of systemic racism, inequality, militarism and the climate
emergency.*
Republicans used a filibuster to block the Senate from voting on an
investigation of the January 6 Republican attack on the Capitol.
Those Republicans now endorse the obvious falsehood that there was no
attack, or else it was an attack by "antifa". This is a lie about events
that Americans saw less than 4 months ago.
They have, in effect, endorsed 1984-style rewriting of history.
Having convinced their followers to accept this, on something very
visible, I expect that they will do it over and over.
It is noteworthty that Republicans accuse Democrats of trying to deny
the truth of who won the 2020 election, when in fact it is Republicans
who have done that ever since November, and are still trying with
irregular "audits" in Arizona and Georgia. The attack on the Capitol
was specifically part of that.
This may be preparation for a bigger attack on the mechanism
of US democracy in 2022 or 2024.
Will Democrats take this threat seriously?
*Brazilian wildcat miners attack police and burn indigenous homes in Amazon.*
*A dangerous cult now runs Britain — the worshippers at the Temple of Johnson.*
I don't think that worship is as complete and blind as what is found
in the US, though.
The opposition in Belarus plans a national strike.
5% of the members of the Democratic Republic of Congo's parliament
have died from Covid-19.
It seems that they don't practice physical distancing and don't wear
masks.
Erdoğan is prosecuting the leader of the opposition for saying that
the supreme election board was foolish to cancel a previous election.
His attitude towards laws is like that of Republicans: they are
opportunities to imprison whoever he wishes. At least this time
he did not launch a civil war.
Biden is running the Pentagon's revolving door with power assist.
*Meet the Senate Nuke Caucus, Busting the Budget and Making the World Less
Safe.*
Richard Stallman will be giving a talk/interview on Monday May 31, titled
"Live de Segunda #80 - Uma conversa com Richard Stallman"
(Monday's Live #80 - A conversation with Richard Stallman).
People can send in their questions from #debxp:matrix.org via Matrix or
#debxp on freenode via IRC.
Everyone: call on large store chains to reject using face
recognition technology on customers.
US citizens: call on Biden to hold firm on increasing corporation
taxes.
Imposing sanctions on violent regimes is usually ineffective, and
often hurts the people that the regime oppresses.
He is mostly right, but (as is his tendency) he falls into simplistic
exaggeration.
I contend that some of the sanctions against Belarus are likely to be more
effective than usual.
The US should block Amazon from merging with MGM.
In general, large companies should not be allowed to merge at all.
The larger the company, the more lobbying power it has, and the more
it can mislead the public about science and the public interest.
We should take steps to make it difficult in general for companies
to be large.
The big US insurance companies are eagerly profiting from encouraging
business that increase global heating, destroy ecosystems, and violate
human rights.
This is to be expected. The US adopted a twisted policy around 1980
which says that corporations are legally required to maximize profit
at the expense of everything else that ought to matter, and this is
the natural result.
Far from requiring psychopathic behavior, we should require all entities
to have a care for the rest of society.
(satire) *‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This
Regularly Happens.*
Forced arbitration harms small businesses as well as individuals.
When companies are able to impose arbitration requirements, it is
generally because they are large and don't have many competitors.
Large companies often try to change laws in ways that benefit them at
the expense of everyone else. Prohibiting businesses from imposing
arbitration requirements on customers, workers or suppliers would
reduce that harmful advantage.
Israeli thugs are arresting Arab protesters by the hundreds.
*Nearly three-quarters of patients with moderate-to-severe Covid-19
had at least one long-term symptom.*
A friend of mine had Covid-19 a few months ago; he needs to sleep
two hours more every night.
(satire) *Coronavirus Variant Excited To Compete With World's Top
Mutations In Tokyo This Summer.*
Chevron's stockholders voted to require the company to deliver energy
with less greenhouse gas emissions.
That would require the company to invest in renewable energy,
or perhaps increasing the customers' energy efficiency.
One of the Australian climate plaintiffs talks about their recent
partial victory in court.
*UN rights council votes for probe into crimes committed in Gaza conflict.*
Israel refuses to cooperate with the investigation.
Biden's administration have not explained to Congress what they really
mean by ending "all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales."
Colombian thugs shot protesters in the eye so often that people think
they were intentionally aiming to render people half blind. A
right-wing leader mocked them for complaining about it.
The spirit of right-wing arrogance is to mock their victims.
The United Nations has not brought world peace, but the documents
around its founding still point the way.
Scientists agree that Bogus Johnson's decisions led to tens of thousands of avoidable Covid deaths.
Facebook has been deleting photos from many years ago showing
New Guinea natives nude in ceremonies that called for nudity.
*Protesters call on banks to "drop African debt" in wake of Covid.*
Much of the debt was borrowed by dictators who then stole the money
from their country, leaving it with only the debt. Once the dictator
is ousted, the country should be able to repudiate those debts.
Eric King, anarchist, has been tortured by US prison thugs, who then
claimed he had attacked them.
Rebecca Solnit discusses the right-wing assumption that the "center"
is morally superior, a priori, and other views bear the onus of their
disagreement with that "center".
The article does not mention the second-stage lie: referring to a
fictitious "center" position which is actually rather right-wing
compared with what most people think.
Whether the UK's "hostile environment" targets a particular foreign
visitor is largely a matter of what the border officials suppose perse
will do in Britain. That is largely a matter of profiling and stereotyping.
Mexico is failing to protect Teotihuacan from a private construction
project that is destroying ancient ruins without properly excavating
them.
*Biden's military budget puts lots of money into weapons that the US
is better off without.*
Israeli thugs eagerly arrest Arabs for protesting; meanwhile, they
usually don't even try to interfere when fanatical Jews attack Arabs
or their property.
A secretive and mysterious PR campaign tried to hire influencers to
denigrate the Pfizer vaccine. The company whose name was on the offer
may not exist at all, but the people listed as involved had internet
ties to Russia.
Whether this campaign had anything to do with Russia is not clear.
Non-vaccinated Americans should not assume they are safe from Covid-19
simply because many of the other Americans they encounter are vaccinated.
The problem is that the fraction that are vaccinated is insufficient
to reach herd immunity; the virus still circulates and you can still
catch it. And in some regions, it is even less.
Indeed, vaccinated individuals can catch the disease and spread it,
and may not experience any symptoms. This is less likely for
vaccinated individuals than for non-vaccinated, but the chance is not
zero.
Tesla cars collect lots of data for the company, including the precise
trajectory of movement of the car. Henceforth, all the data for Tesla cars in China will be at the tentacletips of the Chinese state.
Tesla will offer the misleading response that it is legally required
to store data collected from cars in China in servers in China that
the state can easily browse through. That is true, but it evades the
issue. The wrong is that the car collects that data in the first place.
It took 80 years for the whole of The Man Who Lived Underground, by
Richard Wright, to be published this year.
The EPA is becoming the Environmental Protection Agency again. It has
cancelled the rule that Republicans invented to exclude most medical
studies from consideration for EPA decisions.
That rule converted the EPA into the Environmental Poisoning Agency.
Climate activist shareholders ran candidates for Exxon's board of
directors, and shareholders elected two or more of their candidates.
Some scientists are coming to see the lab-leak theory of SARS-Cov-2 as
plausible, due to reports that workers in the Wuhan virus lab got
badly sick a month before the identification of the disease Covid-19.
According to this theory, China's applied its standard approach to
problems — cover up and deny! — and this led to the pandemic.
There is not much evidence for that theory; what exists is not clear
or conclusive.
If the lab-leak theory is true, it does not mean that China deserves
all the blame for the harm that the disease has done.
In December 2019, people had little knowledge about what this virus would
do. The Chinese authorities may have believed they could prevent the
disease from spreading, get rid of it, and the world would never
notice a problem or complain. Such a response would have been risky,
perhaps reckless, but not murderous.
Later efforts to cover up the outbreak were injustices, of course,
regardless of whether there was a lab leak.
More blameworthy are the right-wing rulers such as Bolsonaro, Johnson,
Modi and Trump,
who decided to let their compatriots die rather than
take action to bring the epidemic to a halt. That was murderous.
Climate defenders call on Biden to tell the Department of Justice to stop
defending proposed oil drilling in Alaska.
This would be new development of fossil fuel extraction infrastructure,
and there is no room for any such development in the carbon budget.
Germany will pay Namibia enormous compensation for the atrocities
it committed after conquering Namibia.
Tweets about fuel shortages led to Venezuelan oil union leader's arrest.
last year.
Regardless of the facts, those charges seem morally invalid to me.
I wonder what happened after that hearing. Was Girot jailed until
trial, or not?
A privacy campaigner puts the recent court victory over GCHQ's massive
surveillance in context.
A Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 45%
by 2030.
When I first read about this, the vague words did not make it clear
whether this meant a 45% decrease in the emissions from Shell's own
operations, or a 45% decrease in emissions from the energy and fuel
that Shell delivers to customers. That difference is crucial: the
former would be insignificant, while the latter would be revolutionary.
From this article, I think it is the latter. Hooray! Even though this
is just the first of many such battles, Hooray anyway!
The "bomb threat" which Lukashenko used as an excuse to force down the
plane carrying Roman Protasevich was posted after the attack had
already started.
Global heating, in Miami, means that death from heat will continue to
increase.
Global heating has increased the range of summer temperatures in
Tokyo. Sometimes it gets so hot that vigorous exercise becomes
hazardous to health.
*Investing 0.1% of global GDP could avoid breakdown of ecosystems,
says UN report.*
But the work that is done would become insufficient as the climate crisis
gets worse.
It is absurd to think we can afford to cope with the consequences of
global heating each decade, as each decade will bring new changes
bigger than the old ones. The costs will rise until they become more
than we can cover.
The only solution we can afford is to stop global heating.
It will be a big expense, but we only have to do it once.
Oman plans to build a large plant to make hydrogen from renewable
energy.
That's the right spirit!
Global heating is causing more and bigger cyclones in the Indian Ocean.
In the Atlantic, Hurricanes (as they are called there) are also becoming
more damaging.
Taiwan had made a deal to buy vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech, but China
intervened to cancel it.
US citizens: call on big store chains to reject using facial
recognition on customers.
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass the George Floyd Justice in
Policing Act.
Republican senators say they are uncomfortable with a congressional
investigation into the attack on the Capitol because it could stir up
awareness of Republican support for attacking the Capitol.
It might also help Americans remember, for the next election, how
Republican elected officials continue giving support to the same lies
that Republicans used to organize the attack on the Capitol.
Franco's fascist rebels shot prisoners, then recorded their deaths as
due to natural causes.
The Australian Federal Court ruled that the environment minister
has a general "duty of care" to protect young people from future
climate disaster.
Ministers will have to defend their specific decisions based on this
standard.
This is not a final decision. The Federal Court is an appellate
court, but an appeal could still be made to Australia's High Court.
*Australians travelling overseas should be forced to have Covid
vaccine, doctors say.*
I support this, but there should be an exception for people
who, for medical reasons, cannot be vaccinated.
*Belarus regime uses video confessions as a tool to silence dissent.*
They extract confessions by torture and threats of violence.
They don't mind if the confessions are false.
Ms Sapega was forced to confess to an activity that would not be a
crime in a free country. In effect, Lukashenko is the one who has
confessed, on two different levels.
The Satanic Temple of Texas is suing to overturn some of the new Texas
restrictions on abortion, claiming that they violate the state
Religious Freedom Restoration Act by imposing gratuitous preconditions
(and financial costs) on the temple's abortion ritual.
As the Satanic Temple's page says, "The state might as well tax and
regulate Mass."
This is the legal equivalent of aikido, and a great hack.
Dominic Cummings accused Bogus Johnson of displaying incompetence,
carelessness, dishonesty, appointing incompetents with connections,
and disregard for human life, in dealing with Covid-19.
Other high officials participated, including Cummings himself,
he admits.
Tens of thousands of Britons got sick and died as a result.
*The Dominic Cummings circus is an indictment of the entire governing class.*
The International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran is hiding something about
its processing of uranium.
Just what that might be is not clear.
*Israeli Police Target Palestinian Journalists at Al Aqsa Mosque.*
*WhatsApp sues Indian government over ‘mass surveillance’ internet laws.*
The UK is at the mercy of Bogus Johnson, who can impose
business-supremacy treaties arbitrarily; Parliament has no say.
Bogus Johnson's former chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, stated that
the health minister lied about how the UK was dealing with Covid-19 in
April 2019, falsely claiming that all patients were getting the
requisite treatments and that supplies of protective equipment were
under control.
Living through the impacts of global heating effects, or just fearing
future impacts, are causing widespread mental illness and distress.
Nevada's legislature has given a strong punishment to a Republican
anti-mask anti-vaxxer. She is
barred
from speaking or voting in the legislature unless she apologizes
for breaking the chamber's mask rule.
Her firmness in defense of principle would be admirable, if not for
the fact that the principle being defended is "Spread disease!"
A guide to the fashionable ways to impress people,
for
those who can't afford a mansion.
The construction of a new, potentially polluting chemical plant in
Cancer Alley is
running
into government resistance.
Instead of trying to clean up Cancer Alley, how about if we move the
people out of there? Here's how we could do it.
Help out each of the families that lives in the polluted area, paying
enough that it can afford a home in a city some distance away.
Set up bus lines from those cites to the area where the polluting
plants are, taxing all chemical plants nationwide to pay to run them.
Put all new chemical plants in such a zone, so that they won't pollute
places where anybody lives.
How Democrats can maneuver the political process so that Manchin
votes
reluctantly to eliminate the filibuster.
It seems to me that they are working on a plan like that.
Cory Doctorow has endorsed my denunciation of "intellectual property"
as a
bogus
overgeneralization.
See
"Did You Say
'Intellectual Property'? It's a Seductive Mirage", for how I
stated the point.
Doctorow does a good job of explaining the point, and will reach a
bigger public.
Community Health Systems, Inc. owns 84 hospitals, and watch out if you
end up in one! That company
sues
lots patients that can't pay their medical bills.
Most Americans can't raise $400 for an emergency expense. Can you
raise $162,000?
Android tracked users’ location across third party apps,
even
if the user disabled "location". Installing a Google-disconnected
operating system, such as the not-entirely-libre LineageOS or the
totally libre
Replicant, was the only way to
stop this.
In addition, it tracked users' location via which WiFi networks the
phone could see.
Navalny says an official told him of
additional
criminal charges. They all seem absurd to me.
Poverty, and
inadequate
government support for the poor, forces many Britons to live in
vans because they can't afford any housing.
The US
must
not accept "compromise" with right-wing fanatics about whether
right-wing fanatics are allowed to sabotage democracy.
The ACLU is continuing to advance the lawsuit challenging US border
thugs' power to unlock any traveler's computers arbitrarily.
However, this lawsuit does not go far enough. The border thugs should have to
ask a judge to sign a warrant before they can search a traveler's computer.
(Every smart phone is a computer. Maybe some nonsmart phones
should also be treated as computers.)
The new head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice,
Kristen Clarke, has made a career of fighting against bigotry and bias.
*A Third Reconstruction Is Pragmatically Achievable and Could End
American Poverty.*
By "reconstruction", the author means the elimination of the systems
that disenfranchise and impoverish poor people and disprivileged
demographic groups.
Even as many public pension funds divest from coal, some others are
gobbling up the shares that they sell.
The net result is not zero. It drives down the stock price of the
companies that do coal development, which is a positive step. But not
a big positive step. We need laws to make fossil fuel industries
shrink.
A carbon tax is one method that can do it.
Israel's bombing of Gaza damaged a lot of the water and electricity
infrastructure. 400 thousand have no access to water except by going
to fetch some.
This makes it hard for people to wash their hands regularly, as they
need to do.
*IG Report Shows Top Trump Officials at EPA Hid Threats of Toxic
Dicamba Herbicide.*
(satire) *Class-Action Suit Against God Pays Out 45 Extra Seconds Of
Life To Every Creature.*
Calling on the UK to stop the flow of Lukashenko's tax-dodging money
through UK banks.
It ought to stop this for all tax-dodging, but (like so many other
countries) it stubbornly insists on continuing to profit from
assisting.
*Iran’s leadership accused of fixing presidential election* by
authorizing the main hard-line candidate and blocking the popular
softer candidates.
Belarusian journalists in exile are getting lots of death threats.
Somalia has a plan for elections for president.
*Nile fishermen protect [fish] stocks by pulling plastic from river.*
Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers raided refugee camps and violently
took away 500 refugees.
Fossil fuel development continues because it is still profitable. To curb global heating we must take such strong steps to discourage it that it won't be profitable any more.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK's GCHR was
violating human rights through its uncontrolled massive surveillance.
90% of the casualties caused by military explosive weapons when used in
cities, in the past ten years, have been civilians.
This fuels a campaign to end the use of explosive weapons in cities.
(Writing "91%" gives the number too much precision. I can't believe
the data are reliable enough that we could tell whether the true
percentage is 90% or 91% or 92%.)
Plastic trash that washes up on tropical beaches makes the beach sand
substantially hotter. This causes most sea turtle eggs to come out
female.
The lack of males endangers the species.
Global heating will eventually have the same effect anyway, but that
will take longer and maybe we will stop it.
In 1945, the UK secretly deported hundreds of Chinese seamen who had helped
run the UK's merchant marine during World War II.
The government did not tell Parliament, nor did it tell the men's
British wives and children.
A British clothing company registered "Yoruba" as a trademark.
That is absurd — the name of an ethnic group, or other group of
people, should never be anyone's monopoly. Imagine if a company in
Africa made "British" its trademark! It would be the same wrong.
However, using the term "cultural appropriation" to describe this wrong
is a confusion.
A fitting term for what happened here would be "cultural enclosure":
the attempt to seize part of the common.
Biden offers to give up on central progressive commitments to try to
"compromise" with Republicans whose goal is to make him fail.
Don't believe Apple's claims to care about users' privacy. In China,
it stores all user data on servers controlled by the Chinese government.
*Venezuelans in mining town loot stores that refuse to accept
[Venezuelan currency].*
Texas has removed nearly all legal limits on carrying a gun in public.
No safety training (or accuracy training) is required.
A lot more people have reasons to drive cars than to carry guns.
When will Texas eliminate the requirement for a driver's license?
If Democrats start urging Americans not to cut their ears off with a
kitchen knife, will Republicans insist on upholding the freedom to do
that?
Australia's quick and strong reaction when Covid-19 somehow escaped
from quarantine demonstrates the way to defeat the virus.
Any country can do this, if it has sufficient social cohesion to trust
that the inconvenient measures will pay off. And they do pay off,
even economically, if you judge with a time frame as long as six
months.
(satire) *New Orleans Airbnb Touts Location In Heart Of Historic
Airbnb Quarter.*
(satire) *Patient With 18 Months To Live Not Sure She Can Sustain
Cherishing Every Moment That Long.*
*EU report highlights widespread use of ‘stop and search’ on ethnic minorities*
The EU is about to change its farm subsidies to avoid promoting
concentration and intensification.
Italy seeks EU funds that come with a requirement to allow more
subcontracting.
When businesses subcontract work, it tends to imply lower pay,
worse working conditions,
and in many cases illegal working conditions.
*Kremlin critic Khodorkovsky tells Europe: sanction Belarus's oil and potash
producers.*
US citizens: call on Congress to enact the right to an abortion in
federal law.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111. If you call, please spread the word!
Massachusetts residents: call on Massachusetts legislators to support the
VOTES act.
Here
is more explanation of that proposed law.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Break Free from Plastic
Pollution Act.
Here
is a description of that proposed law.
Video entertainment attracts people so strongly that they reduce their
working hours to do it.
(The article says "television", but that word introduces a specificity
that I suspect is spurious.)
If you want to watch video, I urge you to make sure your choices are
not being tracked by some snooping tech. Don't use nonfree software
(including nonfree Javascript code from a web site) or a streaming
dis-service or a cable box.
*Both left and right practice "cancel culture". Both should stop.*
Blood Legacy, by Alex Renton, examines Britain's involvement in
slavery through his family's investment in slave plantations in
the Caribbean.
*Washington toughens stance to fight atrocities in Ethiopia.*
*Police records show threats to kill lawmakers in wake of Capitol attack.*
This is a part of the Republican campaign to attack the truth about
the election.
*What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure.*
Vancouver, with its large population of immigrants from China and
nearby countries, is becoming the focus of anti-Sinasian hate in
Canada.
I use the term "Sinasian" because the target group of this particular
hate movement includes countries such as Indonesia and the
Philippines, which are not in Asia. Also because it does not include
countries such as Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and India,
which are in Asia.
People from those countries are also currently targets of bigotry and
hatred, and that is just as wrong as when the targets are Chinese or
neighboring. But when people say "anti-Asian", they don't have in
mind the western parts of Asia.
Belarus forced down an airliner crossing its airspace in order to
arrest a passenger — Roman Protasevich, a Belarusiano protest
organizer who had gone into exile.
Lukashenko's toadies say they will kill him.
How to push back? Other countries could close their airspace to
flights going to or from Belarus airspace, until Lukashenko frees
Protasevich and commits not to do this again.
In spirit, this resembles what the UK did to David Miranda when he
transited through the UK with a copy of Snowden material.
However, that did not involve forcing down an airliner.
*Mexico Wants to Import Non-GMO Corn and US Farmers Say They Can
Deliver It.*
However, Mexicans can also grow it, and that might enable a lot of Mexicans
to get out of the poverty that NAFTA pushed them into.
In Arnhem Land, in northern Australia, indigenous rangers actively
manage fires.
This sort of management can reduce destructive fires and protect species.
However, whether it will succeed in storing carbon long-term depends on
how bad global heating gets. It is good to pay rangers to do it,
but we should not take for granted it will reduce net emissions.
Indeed, I think we should not plan for curbing global heating in terms
of "net emissions" and "offsets". Rather, we should make plans to
reduce emissions; and we should also make plans to protect various
sorts of terrain.
*Academics suspect papers with grabby conclusions are waved through
more easily by [peer] reviewers.*
The WHO has refused to allow Taiwan to send observers to participate
in its plenary meeting.
I think western powers should bite the bullet and start recognizing
Taiwan as "Taiwan". There could, by chance, be a more convenient
moment in the future, but it won't get easier.
Burma's democracy movement is shifting into a guerrilla uprising
and getting involved with minority ethnic separatist movements
that have maintained autonomous zones for decades.
Don't expect China to be any less violent in its imperialism than the
US has been. However, its denials will be in the bullshitter's style,
broad and blatant denial of truth, rather than subtle lies.
Samoa's prime minister is holding on to power with a sort of
nonviolent autogolpe.
Japan is suffering a wave of Covid-19 in Osaka which is
overwhelming
the medical system there.
I wonder why Japan has failed to apply the necessary discipline to
suppress the disease. It seemed to do so effectively a year ago,
though I don't recall details.
Could it be that the government has denied the severity so as to
reduce pressure to cancel the Olympic games?
Around 10% of women have a medical problem, polycystic ovary syndrome,
which can cause severe complications if they catch Covid-19.
Most Covid-19 medical studies have not paid attention to it, and most
of these women don't know they have it.
Even in 2012, lunatic extremists were altering the Republican Party.
They were not yet a majority, but the trend was clear.
Right-wing cancellationists have got two noteworthy journalists fired
for past support for Palestinians' rights.
50 years ago, plutocratist in the Republican Party started a long-term plan
to convince Americans that the government should work mainly for the rich.
It has been very effective.
I love the German businessman's explanation for why he did not resent
the high income tax bracket he was in: "I don’t want to be a rich man
in a poor country." Today's plutocratists are aiming precisely for
that situation.
Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are being overcome by
Covid-19.
The lack of enough vaccine is not pertinent to why things are worse
than a year ago, since vaccine is more plentiful now than then.
The more transmissible B.1.617 strain may be part of the cause. But
it seems that they are failing to take adequate measures against
transmission.
Australia showed the right example: take local measures immediately
that are strong enough to end transmission. Don't wait, because
waiting will require the measures to cover more areas.
The Burmese military rulers imprisoned the editor of Frontier Myanmar,
an American, as he was about to fly out of the country.
The UK has punished Belarus for arresting Roman Protasevich
by forbidding Belarus's airline from flying to the UK and ordering
British planes not to fly over Belarus.
That is a substantial step, but I think it is inadequate. At the very
least, other countries should ban any flights between their airports
and Belarus — regardless of which airline — and ban flights from or
to Belarus from crossing their airspace. This would cut off Belarus from
air transportation with anywhere except Russia.
As a separate matter, they should to prohibit flights that have
crossed Belarusian airspace from entering their airspace. That would
would not punish Belarus any further, but it would make all flights
avoid the territory of Belarus, and that would ensure the safety of
passengers in those flights.
Belarus is not the only country which interfered with travel in
foreign country's civilian aircraft. When Snowden was seeking a way
to reach Bolicia, and the US wanted to keep him stuck in Russia, the
plane of the president of Bolicia went to Europe. The US suspected it
would bring Snowden to Bolivia on its return there, and had its allies
compel the plane to land in a country which then forcibly searched it.
Fortunately, Snowden was not aboard.
They did not threaten violence against the plane or order
it to land at a specific place. But they did box it in by forbidding
it to enter various countries' airspace. And they likewise compelled
Bolivia to allow it to be searched.
It would be a mistake to draw blanket conclusions about the US
government or the Belarus government from this. Each one is capable
of doing evil. Lukashenko's regime is unremitting tyranny and
unremitting evil; the US has some hope of being better.
Ghana has arrested people for holding an event and "advocating LGBTQ
activities", then held them incommunicado without access to lawyers.
To avoid global heating disaster, we need to put an end to extractivism
as the basis for our economy.
It is an error to suppose that local cultures of the past had an
inherent understanding of sustainability. Some groups recognized
problems and adopted ways of life to protect their environment.
Others did not, and caused environmental crises that wiped them out.
In regard to our current situation, the problem that drives us to too
much growth is partly in the desires of masses of people, and partly
embedded in laws and institutions. For instance, the fairly new
"principle" (adopted in the 1980s) that a corporation "must" maximize
return to its investors regardless of all other values.
Belarus is choking off all avenues for independent reporting and trying to
imprison all dissidents. Even dissidents in exile are not safe.
Supporters of Palestinians' rights stand firm against antisemitism.
Covid-19 vaccination makes you pretty safe from actual harm, but does
not guarantee you can't get a mild case and transmit the virus to
others. Thus, some people rationally decide to keep wearing masks.
I continue to wear a mask when in the proximity of strangers.
Barrett Brown went to a protest in the UK and multiple times helped
hold a banner that said "Cops Kill". The last time, it had been
rearranged to say "Kill Cops" — and he was arrested for incitement to
violence.
If I understand right, that would not count as incitement to violence
in the US. The US has a very strict definition of that crime.
Exhorting Biden to insist on the infrastructure/jobs plan, not cut
it back in the hope Republicans will deign to accept it.
A general principle of negotiation, when you're working for something
other than your own gain, is never to propose a concession. You can
accept all or part of a concession proposed by the opposition,
preferably attaching a condition (a quid-pro-quo); that is the way
deals are reached. But initiating a concession says, "I am desperate
and weak-willed." It invites the opposition to respond, "That's not
enough — make a real concession!"
WHO estimates that the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 is two or
three times the official reported total of 3.4 million.
Perhaps even more.
Many countries don't have good systems for reporting cause of death,
In some cases it is hard to determine whether Covid-19 was to blame.
And then there are the cover-ups.
William Jennette was in jail in Tennessee, and handcuffed, when a
group of thugs killed him by kneeling on his back for several minutes.
(satire) *"And You Lived In Afghanistan For How Long?" Asks Suspicious Agent
Questioning Returning Soldier At Customs.*
The former dishonest journalist, Bogus Johnson, must not be allowed
to reform the BBC after his own heart.
*World expert in scientific misconduct faces legal action for challenging
integrity of hydroxychloroquine study.*
It is remarkable that Dr Raoult would escalate this far to silence a
scientific criticism, and also that he has the resources to do so.
I wonder where those resources come from.
The UK government is covering up the results of an investigation into police
corruption from 34 years ago, corruption which resulted in the murder of
a private detective who was investigating it.
This demonstrates that the corruption is not just a thing of the past.
An argument against the UK's proposed university free speech
requirement shows real problems, but it also shows that the author
(Renton) advocates a lot of censorship.
I disagree politically with Yiannopoulos, and when Renton criticizes
things Yiannopoulos said, I agree with the criticism. However,
censoring such statements is another matter. In arguing for that,
Renton shows little support for freedom of speech.
Naturally, right-wing politicians in power will try to crush dissent.
The solutions they propose will tend to be unfair. But that doesn't
mean there is no problem.
The UK is hardly trying to make businesses prevent Covid-19 spread in
workplaces.
*Don't let Middle East violence fuel hatred on the streets of Britain.*
Bogus Johnson suppressed information on spread of new Covid-19
variants via schools.
The more transmissible Covid-19 variants are more likely to make children
gravely ill, even kill them, than before.
People age 12-15 are not children. They are adolescents.
Please do not infantilise adolescents.
US citizens: call on Congress to allow Medicare to negotiate drug
prices.
US citizens: call on the US to condition military aid to Israel on
ending the occupation of Palestine, human rights abuses, and war crimes.
US citizens: call on Biden and cabinet secretaries to lift US
sanctions temporarily to facilitate countries' imports of food and
medicines required to deal with Covid-19.
US citizens: call on states to stop requiring facial recognition for
unemployed benefits.
Chicago's mayor, a black woman, has set a policy of refusing to give interviews
to white journalists.
Blacks in the US continue to meet with individual bigotry as well as
systemic racism. But you can't help cure bigotry by pushing back in a
bigoted way.
The Extinction Prevention Act would provide funds to help save many
endangered species that live in the US.
*Tech Companies Want Schools to Use COVID Relief Money on Surveillance Tools.*
It's standard practice for thugs to lie about the people they
gratuitously shoot. In Ronald Greene's case, we now see the truth.
With Andrew Brown, we have indications of it but the thugs are still
keeping the facts secret.
More info about Ronald Greene's killing.
Australia's climate strike movement has made the planet-roaster
Australian government its main target.
Israel's bombing has damaged 19 medical facilities in Gaza.
Bolsonaro wanted to achieve herd immunity by having most Brazilians catch
Covid-19, rather than by vaccinating most Brazilians.
The article errs by using the term "herd immunity" only for the first
option. Both recovery from an infection and vaccination convey the
same sort of immunity; a sufficiently large fraction with immunity from
whatever cause results in herd immunity.
Where they differ is that catching Covid-19 can result in death, or
in lasting disability (perhaps permanent) in a few percent of the
infected people. Vaccination does not do this.
Out of 200 million Brazilians, letting the disease run rampant may
imply a few million dead and a few million disabled on the path to
herd immunity.
This is why it makes sense to use various methods to reduce the fraction
of people that ever catch Covid-19.
Taiwan says that China is using disinformation to undermine Taiwanese
cohesion in responding to Covid-19.
Taiwan asked everyone to stay home this weekend so as to break the chain
of transmission.
*Charles Koch funded eviction push while investing in real estate companies.*
China has been suppressing Tibetan culture for so long that, soon,
little will be left.
We should not forget that many imperialist countries have suppressed
the culture of colonized peoples. The US did, Canada did, and so did
some European countries to their minorities. Nowadays, these countries
no longer have such policies, while China does.
Texas passed a law allowing parents to give their children reasonable
independence outdoors.
The article does not make it clear whether the law also includes
allowing children to be home alone. It would be logical if it did,
but can anyone find out and tell me?
Everyone: call on BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, T. Rowe Price and
Vanguard to vote for shareholder resolutions 4–8 at Facebook’s annual
meeting on May 26.
US citizens: call on the Forest Service not to permit Nestlé's
successor to extract California's water.
US citizens: call on the Senate to support the Jan 6 insurrection
investigation.
*Climate crisis behind drastic drop in Arctic wildlife populations.*
China is supplying jet fuel to Burma. The military uses that for air
attacks.
The US has a history of similar behavior, and progressives criticize it.
We should not treat it as less bad when China does it.
*Hong Kong court denies jury trial to first person charged under national
security law.*
The US government should buy Greyhound and provide intercity buses
as a government service.
This would be great as long as it is not used as a surveillance system.
Greyhound asks for passengers' names but mostly does not seem to check
their identities. It should stop asking!
A German soldier who is apparently a Nazi is being tried for planning to assassinate politicians while posing as a Syrian refugee.
Catching him after those murders would have revealed that he was no
Syrian. I wonder why he did not consider that a flaw in his plan.
Perhaps he assumed it would take so long to catch him that the truth
would never overcome his lie. Or perhaps he expected Nazis to reject
the truth whenever it did come out.
Covid-19 vaccine profits have made nine people billionaires.
They are not satisfied — they and their businesses are determined to
get as many billions as they can from vaccination, even by slowing the
process of vaccinating everyone.
Many of the experts and think tanks that argue for strict application
of patents and trade secrets on Covid vaccine production are supported
by drug money.
The mainstream media do not mention this when citing their "wise"
advice.
This sort of practice makes it necessary to be skeptical of the motives
of scientists and other experts, and that hurts society deeply.
Argentina's medical system is collapsing under the strain of so many cases
of Covid-19.
As in the US, politicians are exploiting resentment against public
health measures, boosting their careers by killing some fraction
of the public.
The G7 countries have agreed to stop financing coal development in
other countries.
That will be a significant step, if they carry it out quickly.
But then we need similar policies regarding oil and natural gas.
Ethiopia has convicted four of its soldiers of rape or murder of civilians.
Every army has a duty to enforce the laws against war crimes, but
disorder in the army is out of control in Tigray;
Ethiopia has a long way to go.
Erdoğan is still working on convicting
the organizers of the 2013 protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul.
That was his first big foray into repression. Since then he has done
much worse things, such as starting a civil war so he could rerun an election
that he had lost.
Guatemala has decided to stop prosecuting corrupt officials and
instead prosecute the officials who tried to make the rich pay taxes.
Sounds like Guatemala's equivalent of Trump or Bolsonaro is in charge.
The families of people who died in Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752
won a lawsuit against the government of Iran.
There is no question that Iranian forces shot down the plane, but I
am surprised by the conclusion that they knowingly and intentionally
targeted an airliner. What evidence exists for that?
*Asthma in toddlers linked to in-utero exposure to air pollution.*
Republican governors plan to cut the unemployment benefits of 3 and a
half million unemployed Americans.
In approximately Covid-free Australia, students are striking again for
climate defense.
Excluding the most polluting vehicles from densely populated areas is
an effective way to reduce the general level of exposure to air pollution,
and the medical harm which that pollution does.
However, when the exclusion is implemented by systematically tracking
all vehicles, that is a form of oppression. Tracking the movements of
people in general is inherently oppressive. The system should be
implemented so that it does not notice the movements of low-emission
cars, only the presence of a high-emission car.
*The U.S. Must Stop Providing Weapons Used to Repress Colombia’s Protests.*
The scarce resources for making efficient batteries, as it is
currently done, will cause conflict among states.
*His family says they were told he died in a car wreck. Video now
shows Ronald Greene was kicked, dragged and tased by [thugs].*
Then, as usual, they lied about it. At least this time they did not
try to frame him.
*The EPA effectively
admitted grave errors in EPA’s 2020 interim registration of glyphosate,
best known as the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup pesticides,
and asked the court for permission to re-do the agency’s faulty
assessments.*
*Committee to Protect Journalists Accuses Israel of Trying to 'Shut Down' Gaza Coverage by Bombing Media Outlets.*
*Democrats unveil $30bn bill to cancel water debts and bail out utility firms.*
To evade the responsibility for bad decisions on protecting the UK
from Covid-19, Bogus Johnson is blaming the Britons who did not want
to be vaccinated.
This is even more absurd than it looks like. because vaccination in
the UK is limited by supplies of vaccine. If one person chose not to
be vaccinated, another person got the chance to be vaccinated early.
This had no effect on the vulnerability to the more transmissible
Indian strains.
US citizens: call on Congress to abolish the death penalty for federal
crimes.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the DOJ to create a task force to investigate
the corrupter and his associates.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass Medicare for All.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Israel and HAMAS have agreed on a cease-fire.
I think that Biden privately pressured Netanyahu to accept it,
while publicly defending Netanyahu. That seems to be his approach.
*Declining birthrates will take the strain off our planet.*
I agree with the first two letters. However, I have to point out
that, for the societies that live in an ecologically inefficient way,
the effects of one more immigrant are not very different from the
effects of one more baby. Either one adds to the population
and is likely to result in further growth in subsequent generations.
*The pro-Palestine movement is broad but it can’t be a home to antisemitism.*
Furthermore, the presence of Jews, and a majority of people who are neither
violent nor extremist nor antisemitic, must not be taken as proof
that none of its supporters are violent or extremist or antisemitic.
Israeli state thugs, plus thuggish right-wing private citizens, are
committing repeated violence that has poisoned the peace between Jews
and Arabs that prevailed in Jaffa for many years.
Oriel College in Oxford decided not to remove Rhodes's statue. It did
not refuse on principle, but rather because some laws create an
obstacle.
Rhodes's main activity was colonial conquest. He did good with some
of the riches he got from colonialism, but that can't compensate for
the harm by which he got those riches. Therefore, I conclude that
there are no good reasons why the statue ought to remain.
I hope that the UK will change whatever laws interfere with removing
such statues.
India's Covid-19 crisis has eliminated vaccine supply for most other
countries.
The world needs more production capacity, for other countries and for
India too.
Sanders and other senators have introduced a bipartisan bill to audit
the Pentagon.
This is long overdue.
Some Republican cultists in the House of Representatives refused to
wear masks, and got a warning for the first violation of that rule.
They believe that getting away with this makes them look brave to voters,
and that may be true. The House needs to take measures stern enough that
it will make them back down. For instance, keeping them off the house
floor for the next ten hours of being in session.
Even though the Jan 6 investigation had been pre-undermined with a
requirement for Republican agreement to issue any subpoena, most
Republicans in the House voted not to have any investigation.
Democrats compromised by giving Republicans equal representation in
the commission, hoping to win some Republican support. In response to
that, Senator McConnell called it a "slanted and unbalanced proposal."
McConnell can probably kill the investigation entirely.
It was foolish of the Democrats to agree to a compromise without
getting a final deal as part of the compromise. It appears that what
they will ultimately get for their concession is nothing — and
making a concession uselessly only looks weak.
(satire) *U.S. Military Leaves Scarf In Afghanistan So It Has Excuse To Go Back Later.*
Ethiopian soldiers raided a hospital in Tigray searching for staff and
patients that told journalists about interference with humanitarian
aid to that region.
Despising politics, and expecting elected officials not to care about
what people need, gets us elected officials that show contempt for
the public.
I disagree, however, with the criticism of sleeping in the office.
That space is theirs to use, and their using it 10 more hours
each day does not cost the government anything significant.
(satire) *Neighborhood Rallies To Designate Pothole As Historic Landmark.*
Ford is considering programming the nonfree software in the car
to impose ads on the people in the car.
The owner could pay extra to turn off the ads.
This is what you get with a device that contains nonfree software
and can communicate in any fashion.
US waste companies continue to send the waste to countries that won't try to recycle it.
Fact-checking and debunking, as Snopes does, used to be apolitical and
fun, as well as educational. People who read the explanations often
learned from this.
Nowadays, refuting the spew of right-wing lies is ineffective;
right-wing fanatics don't change their minds no matter how much
evidence is piled on them.
If someone you know has fallen under the truth-hating spell, then unless
you have the best information on how to lead someone out of it, and wish
to put a lot of patience and effort into it, I suggest cutting off those
conversations rapidly.
European ministers look forward to joining Biden in policies that give businesses further power over democracy in the US and the EU.
The area of business-supremacy treaties
was one of the few policy areas in which the corrupter made things better, keeping the US out of
the TPP
and modifying NAFTA to remove the ISDS clause (I Sue Democratic States).
Will Biden return to something like Obama's bad policy?
Can progressive legislators block it?
*North Carolina prosecutor says [thugs] were justified in fatally shooting
Andrew Brown.* He claimed Brown was driving his car at the thugs.
Brown's family's lawyer says the video contradicts the prosecutor's claims. The family has seen the video but the public
is not allowed to see it.
False accusations against blacks have played an important role in
history and politics in that region of Virginia.
The prosecutor is not entitled to say, "take my word for it!"
*Michigan "Big Lie" lawmaker proposes eerie bill that would punish fact
checkers: "You better be right".*
I suspect they will draw up the law such that it will be easy to
launch lawsuits that will deter people from criticizing, even if they
would ultimately fail.
*What will the institutions of liberal democracy do when Republican
officials simply refuse to concede Democratic victories?*
(satire) *Congress Reaches Compromise To Investigate Events Of January
9.*
(There was nothing on January 9 that Republicans don't want investigated.)
*The Most Colossal Planning Failure in Human History:* setting up a
civilization to run on fossil fuels without planning for how to stop
using them.
Ohio is offering a prize lottery to people that get vaccinated, and
this boosted interest in vaccination.
Republicans are no longer ashamed to say their intention is to stop
legitimate voters from voting. On the contrary, many Republicans are
proud to do that.
They are picking up the "by hook or by crook" attitude that the wrecker
has promoted.
* A review of California cases shows that [thug departments] frequently
publish highly misleading information about people they've killed —
just like the first George Floyd press release.*
*Brazilian police raid environment ministry over ‘illegal’ timber sales.*
The minister, a close ally of Bolsonaro, seems to be one of the suspects.
Belarus blocked the news site Tut.by and arrested its journalists.
The UK was exporting plastic waste to Turkey, but once it arrived the
companies just burned it or littered it.
Now Turkey will stop accepting such waste.
Cheaters will keep looking for countries they can pollute in that way,
but we had better stop making large quantities of unrecyclable plastic.
Chad's troops attacked protesters denouncing the military coup.
US sanctions against Venezuela are cutting into planting, and the
threatening the country with food shortage later.
The government of Honduras feeds the supporters of the ruling party.
Others have to flee to get food.
Survivors of the 1921 massacre of blacks in Tulsa testified about it in Congress.
They were children when 300 people in their neighborhood were killed.
It's bad enough that this happened once, but the wrecker is trying to make
it happen again.
*Ivory Coast jails child traffickers after cocoa farm raids.*
Food companies Cargill, Bunge and Cofco were caught selling soy beans
produced by deforesters in Brazil.
When the wrecker was in charge, the Department of Justice gave Twitter
a subpoena to try to identify the operator of a parody account that made
fun of abject supporter Rep. Devin Nunes.
It went so far as to make Twitter keep the subpoena secret.
This looks like an attempt to use the government to repress criticism of Nunes.
*Israeli TV reporters face attacks and threats from Jewish extremists.*
Soon they may have to flee to the West Bank and seek the protection of
the Palestinian Authority ;-}{.
In a survey, 90% of US blacks said they had experienced some sort of
prejudice from the staff of stores.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to block funds for Israel's
evictions of Palestinians.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Washington State has banned disposable styrofoam food containers and
packing "peanuts", as well as other steps to reduce disposable
plastic.
Varoufakis: Why do the rich push against stimulus programs? Ultimately, they
want working-class people to be desperate and take low pay.
(satire) *Israel Returns Occupied Territories To Palestinians After
Running Out Of Targets To Hit In Gaza.*
(satire) *‘The Onion’ Calls On Israel To Bomb Our Offices In Case Any
Hamas Agents Hiding Out There.*
The UK has announced plans to protect and restore peat bogs, which absorb
considerable amounts of CO2.
Rep. McCarthy opposes an official Congressional investigation
into the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol.
This is a form of the Republican big lie, which claims there was
no attack.
It appears to me that the proposed investigation, if approved, will be
paralyzed by its structure. With equal numbers of Democrats and
Republicans required for a subpoena, Republicans could block all
subpoenas. Is there some crucial point I am missing?
Australia will spend almost a billion dollars (AUD, not USD) on a
fossil-fueled power plant that would only rarely be turned on.
At least it won't emit a lot of CO2 if it rarely operates, but it is a
big waste of money. How about building storage batteries instead?
In the US it is easy to get a gun by mail order, with no background
checking. It comes as parts, which are not considered a gun until
they are assembled.
The conservative parties lost big in elections for Chile's
constitutional assembly. Candidates that favor substantial change will
dominate the body.
*Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever
seen.*
Why is Bogus Johnson so eager to urge Britons to take foreign holidays,
then warning everyone to be careful about it?
The Executive Director of the International Energy Agency says
there must be no more investment in fossil fuels anywhere in the world.
This is important because the IEA has in the past promoted and defended
fossil fuels. Its departure from that camp will have an influence.
The same report also explains that putting the economy into full
decarbonization mode will create jobs, and requires no futuristic
technology, only predictable advances.
Signal tried to use Instagram ads to show users how Instagram
was profiling them. Instagram shut down these ads.
Bogus Johnson made corruption in awarding government contracts systematic.
Putin will prohibit Navalny's supporters from running for the
basically subservient Russian parliament.
A lynch mob in Pakistan tried to break into a police station to murder
two people accused of minor property damage to a mosque.
Denmark has decided to admit 22 Danish citizens who are in prison in Syria
for involvement in PISSI.
Justice calls for this. Those people may be accused of participation
in PISSI's crimes, but if so, they deserve trials to judge their
actions. If they are convicted, exile should not be their punishment.
The British parliament has ceded too much power to ministers.
Nowadays, UK ministers tend to be corrupt
and unaccountable.
Pinochet's constitution for Chile imposed a laissez-mourir
"neoliberal" economy. The vote on the constitutional assembly
indicates repudiation of that ideology — an intention to allow the
government to limit the power of the rich and to actively help those
that need help.
It is ironic that some bemoaned the surprise that the explicit
requirement for 50% women in the assembly actually resulted in
slightly increasing the number of men in the assembly. Does this mean
they now reconsider whether it is right to have an explicit gender
requirement in public elections?
I also wonder what will happen, or perhaps what did happen, in the
encounter between such a requirement and transgender and
nonbinary gender.
In the 1980s Savings and Loan scandal, hundreds of US banks engaged in outright cheating.
President Bush I clamped down on the agency that reported the crimes
so that future crimes would be protected.
Private equity coalitions are trying to take over Medline, which makes
and resells medical supplies.
If they destroy this company as they destroyed Toys-Я-Us, any of us
could die as a direct result.
It looks like Israel must have been systematically targeting
Palestinian journalistic sites in Gaza.
Systemic racism example: Carlette Duffy's home was appraised at a much higher
value when she tacitly let the appraisers think the owner was a white man.
What's more, it is clear how appraisers used the owner's race in the
appraisal process, leaving no doubt that her race was the cause of the
difference.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.) I object to bigotry, and
normally I decline to link to articles which promote it. But I make
an exception for articles which give important information about
racism or the fight to eliminate racism. That article is one of the
exceptions.
Bad news: Uber made money last year.
More bad news: it paid no US taxes, because it laundered the profits
through a tax haven: the Netherlands.
The article uses the term "intellectual property". You might think that refers
to something of inherent monetary and intellectual value, but chances are
it only means some excuses to sign a contract for Uber branch A to pay rent
to Uber branch B. Please don't use the term "intellectual property".
An dietary additive could reduce each cow's methane emissions by 30%.
I see one potential flaw in the system: once a company has bought the
supplement as an "offset", what will ensure that it reaches farmers
who really feed it to their cows? If its use is advantageous to the
farmers themselves, they they will arrange to get it and use it; but
if not, it could get put in the trash.
Biden's proposed arms sale to Israel includes more of the missiles that
Israel fires at many civilian homes and institutions in Gaza.
*Israeli Airstrikes Damage Gaza's Only Coronavirus Testing Lab.*
The International Energy Agency still has some changes to make to fully
support curbing global heating.
Amnesty International says Israel has a pattern of air attacks on
civilians.
Some unions that represent many cops have adopted policies to lead and press them to act like police officers.
Officially, they will no longer defend thugs.
Making changes in this area is easier said than done. We will see to what
extent this decision is effective.
The melting of ice in Antarctica could cause increased rain there.
This fall of molten ice could make the remaining ice melt even faster.
The executives of many EU countries have made Covid-19 "emergency"
declarations which have enabled them to rule by decree.
The UK's "hostile environment" for foreign workers is driving out so many
long-term residents that there is now a labor shortage.
Millions of Americans have medical problems that call for them to wear
masks even once they are vaccinated.
We could eliminate this problem if we cooperated in taking precautions against
transmission.
HAMAS says it never operates military activities in civilian buildings,
and in particular not in the building which housed the AP and al-Jazeera
offices until Israel bombed it.
It looks like I didn't miss anything by not using dating apps; they
are addictive and twisting, and not very good for finding love.
I won't consider using dating apps — they are nonfree software so I
refuse to run them.
US citizens: call on Biden to nominate a climate leader as chair of
the Federal Reserve.
US citizens: call on Congress to forbid Israel from using US aid
funds for actions that trample Palestinians' human rights.
In my view, the fact that the trampling is done with US funds is not a
central moral issue. Those actions would be equally bad if it did not
benefit from US funds. But the US should not overlook them.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site,
use the Salsa labs workaround.
*Sierra Leone sells rainforest for Chinese fish plant.*
Australia plans to invest heavily in production of hydrogen, including
production that consumes fossil fuels and will probably contribute to
CO2 emissions.
It wants to use "renewable energy" funds for this project.
The core aim of this planet-roasting bullshit is to paint CO2
generation as acceptable on the expectation supposition that the CO2
will be captured. Will that really happen? What fraction will the
hypothetical technology actually succeed in capturing, if it ever
works? Is it ready for use at industrial scale at all now?
The loophole for cheating our future is that they will build the
plant, and capturing all the CO2 won't actually be feasible, but they
will insist on using the plant anyway "because we already paid for
it."
A lot of Greenland ice is about to start melting, and as much as 2 meters
sea level rise may already be unavoidable.
*The warming Arctic tundra will make it harder for the world to curb
climate change, as thawing permafrost and wildfires release
greenhouse gases that are not fully accounted for in global emissions
agreements, a study said on Monday.*
Canadian thugs accused someone of running an illegal casino, but the charges
have been dropped after videos showed thugs stealing and planting evidence.
Proposing to release wild jaguars in parts of Arizona and New Mexico,
an area which used to be part of their habitat.
The right-wing-dominated US Supreme Court has chosen an opportunity to
undo all or part of the Roe v Wade decision which established the
right to an abortion in the US.
*The FBI is supposed to track how police use force — years later, it’s falling
well short.*
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.) I object to bigotry, and
normally I decline to link to articles which promote it. But I make
an exception for articles which give important information about
racism or the fight to eliminate racism. That article is one of the
exceptions.
*There's a database whose mission is to stop problematic [thugs] from
hopping between departments. But many agencies don't know it exists.*
Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, has voted to hire unarmed non-thugs to
handle certain kinds of situations, including people having
psychological crises.
This change would presumably have prevented Daunte Wright from being killed.
Thugs object to some of the changes.
*How Apple’s AirTag turns us [captives of Apple] into unwitting spies
in a vast surveillance network.*
Inevitably Apple will see where each user's tags are located, so the
state will be able to see that too. However, the main danger I see is
that of tracking other people or their property. The safeguards that
are described won't prevent that.
The Burmese army is imprisoning writers and poets, sometimes killing them.
Big tech companies are making concessions about privacy, so they can
continue their targeted advertising while collecting less data about each
individual.
Evgeny Morozov suggests that this fails to touch their deepest problem:
the fact that commercial factors determine how the internet treats people.
I think that tracking individuals is an important moral issue, and it
is not limited to internet service/disservice companies. The stronger
we can make the movement to demand anonymity and non-tracking, the
better our chance of putting an end to other forms of massive
surveillance, including Amazon Ring video cameras
and Apple Airtags that could be attached to other people's cars,
property, or clothing.
At the same time, I think he has a valid point that we shouldn't have to filter
the internet we want through the filter of startups.
Rep. Doug Lamborn is being sued by a former staffer for compelling his
staff to risk infection with Covid-19 by not letting them wear masks
when together in the office.
*Long working hours are a killer, WHO study shows.*
The Associated Press calls for an investigation of why Israel bombed
and destroyed its office in Gaza.
Authoritarian right-wing rulers have a pattern of denying Covid-19 and
covering up casualties.
Biologists are scrambling to find a way to help some coral survive
longer against global heating.
Identifying heat-resistant coral species, or breeding some species to be
more heat-resistant, cannot possibly protect more than a fraction
of the coral species that exist now. The only way to preserve reef
biodiversity is to halt the increase of CO2 in the air.
Meanwhile, ocean acidification will eventually wipe out all coral
and many other kinds of ocean life.
*Challenge bigotry by all means, but outlaw it? I’d rather not.*
The UK is considering a law to prohibit political censorship in
universities and another law to require censorship by antisocial
media. Both are projects of the Tory Party.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to make statements we disagree
with or disapprove of. To respect freedom of speech, we must maintain
the distinction between offending people and harming them.
The UK deportation thugs imprisoned refugees that they did not need to
imprison, then held them in solitary confinement for more than a year.
It is crucial for Biden to appoint a climate defender as the next
chair of the Federal Reserve.
Workers in McDonalds franchises are planning a strike on May 19.
The wrecker made the EPA conceal data on developing global heating
damage, but Biden has it publishing the data again, and it shows how
things have got worse.
In China, school officials cover up student suicides, and if parents
and their neighbors demand information, the state's noise machine says
they are working for the CIA.
The US likewise places too much pressure on students. However, such coverups
tend to be limited to thug departments after a uniformed thug murders someone.
A proposed Texas law would authorize anyone whatsoever to sue anyone
who helps anyone to get an abortion.
The target could be bankrupted by one 10,000-dollar penalty after another.
This is the same tactic used in Israel's law that made it impossible
in Israel to advocate boycotting the products made by Israeli
businesses in Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory. It
threatened such a person with the prospect of penury through unlimited
judgments of "damages".
The root cause of the Texas law is that Republicans rig the elections
in Texas.
(satire) *Biden Outlines Renewable Energy Plan To Invade Mt. Olympus
And Steal Aeolus’s Bag Of Wind.*
It should be "Aeolus's" because the "s" in "Aeolus" is not a plural suffix.
Most vaccine disinformation in the US comes from 12 saboteurs.
Although their bullshit is likely to kill people, I do not like the
idea of censoring it, because the systems of censorship will be used
against other targets — perhaps including, some day, people who
question Trump's proclaimed victory in the 2020 election.
It would be much better to force companies to drop the business model that
promotes postings based on how much "engagement" they provoke.
*Jacinda Ardern calls for ‘ethical algorithms’ to help stop online
radicalization.*
Whether it's white supremacism or radical Islamism, anti-vax or QAnonsense,
I suspect that "social" media promote them all in the same way.
Apple fired a new employee because he had published statements of
misogyny in 2016.
What he wrote about women in 2016 was contemptuous and nasty. It was
also 5 years ago. Perhaps he should have been offered a second chance
if he has had a change of heart.
I can't disregard the other moral issue, that of his job. The job he
was hired for was adtech, which is itself harmful and exploitative by
nature. Whoever does that job will do a lot of real harm to people,
more than mere insults can do.
Fossil fuel extraction projects are having difficulty finding investment
funds and insurance for their projects.
This is a crucial step forward, but it won't be enough until it makes
those projects come to a halt.
Diosdado Cabello, vice president of Venezuela, won a libel suit
against a newspaper for republishing an article that accused him of
ties to drug trafficking, and is seizing the newspaper's offices as
payment.
In the US it is very hard for a public official to win a libel suit.
The standard is set very high so that officials cannot suppress
criticism.
Australia's practice of keeping refugees in prison with no time limit,
arbitrarily with no stated reason, violates international human rights
law. But Australia quietly made it legal under Australian law.
Israel destroyed the building in Gaza which held the offices of
Associated Press and al-Jazeera.
Other media organizations had their offices in that building too.
The US did something similar in Baghdad in 2003: it bombed the office
of al-Jazeera. The office was visibly labeled and the US knew where it was.
The attack had to be intentional.
Israel knew where those offices were in Gaza, so this attack too had
to be intentional.
*Cheney says some GOP members voted against impeachment out of fear for their
lives.*
Some epidemiologists, fully vaccinated, say why they will continue
wearing masks when near strangers or non vaccinated people, and why they think
the CDC made it too easy for anti-mask anti-vaxxers to risk their own health
and other people's too.
(satire) *Houston Authorities Scramble As Missing Tiger Disappears Into Crowd Of Tigers.*
Vaccine patents, vaccine manufacturing monopolies, are part of a
neoliberal system of trickle-down.
Patents were supposed to trickle down both material benefits (products
incentivized by the patent system) and knowledge (made available by
the patent applications since the patent system requires it). Both of
these trickle-downs have slowed to vary little. For example, the
vaccine patents do not give enough information for other companies to
make the vaccines commercially.
Let's eliminate the patent system. We have little to lose.
People in Glasgow massed in the street to block the arrest of
immigrants for deportation.
The objection to their arrest was not focused on the idea of deporting
them, not that as such, but rather the idea of keeping them for a long
time in an immigration prison where prisoners are likely to catch
Covid-19,
as well as the idea of arresting Muslims on a Muslim holiday.
I can't empathize with that last; if I were going to be put in prison,
I wouldn't care what day of the year it might take place. If I were
arrested for advocating free software, and it occurred on the
anniversary of the GNU Project, that would make it more ironic but
would not make it more unjust or more painful.
China is targeting Uighur expats by inserting spyware into their
computers.
There are around 5,000 tigers in captivity in the US,
and only around 4,000 of them in the wild.
Ralph Nader criticizes NPR's deep inadequacies.
US citizens: call on the Senate not to confirm Rahm Emanual as
ambassador.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site,
use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: support the Freedom to Move Act, which would fund better
and cheaper public transportation.
Wage stagnation in the US is the result of policy decisions expressed
in laws, not mysterious unchangeable economic "laws."
Epidemiologists generally believe that vaccinated people should wear masks
indoors with other people who might be unvaccinated.
Vaccinated people can catch Covid-19, can be damaged, and can pass it on.
The vaccination makes this far less likely, but not impossible.
Let's choose to protect each other.
(satire) *DSM-5 Finally Stops Classifying Adult Disney Fandom As Form
Of Psychopathy.*
The major media should stop reporting official figures about Covid-19
infections or deaths as if they reflected the reality.
Australia has started bringing home Australians who have been stuck in
India.
At the rate of 2000 per fortnight, it is going to take 10
weeks, provided no one else joins the waiting list.
Craig Murray has been imprisoned for covering the trial of Alex
Salmond, under an extreme standard of secrecy that mainstream media
are not held to.
I linked to his coverage of the Assange hearing.
I do not advocate independence for Scotland, but that's a separate
issue.
The UK does need to have regional governments with some real
authority, but it was a terrible mistake to set this up using
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as regions.
Chile is going to draw up a new constitution.
I have suggestions for national constitutions.
I urge free software supporters in Chile to look at this
and think about whether these relate to the new constitution.
A new Covid-19 which may be more transmissible could cause another
wave in England.
*Covid quarantine process in the UK is riskier than being in a ‘red list’
country.*
Properly run Covid-19 quarantine procedures require careful planning
and a lot of money spent on actually work. The Tory government is
stingy with both.
*Brazil's easing of COVID-19 controls will cause new surge, experts warn.*
That can happen in the US too.
Allowing fully vaccinated people to go unmasked in stores is probably not
significantly dangerous for them or others; but how can you tell whether
the maskless person you see is vaccinated or not?
*1/3 of global food production at risk from climate crisis*
by the end of this century.
Facebook's plan to merge in data from WhatsApp violates a promise it
made when it bought WhatsApp.
Opposition leader Bobi Wine: *Young Ugandans are being brutally
oppressed. They must be allowed a voice.*
Everyone: call on Senator Menendez to support diplomacy
with Iran.
How the UK's Home Office, which deals with immigration among many
other things, developed into Ministry of Cruelty.
The minister "seeks to do and say the thing that will be perceived to be
the toughest thing that anyone could possibly do or say in any given
scenario."
*The violence that began at Jerusalem’s ancient holy sites is driven by a
distinctly modern zeal.*
(satire) *Parents Can’t Believe How Bad Daughter Is At Being Raised By Them.*
*Fear stalks streets of Israeli city where Jews and Arabs mixed freely.*
When the extremists compel people who are not extremists to become
hostile, that is a victory for the extremists. The hostility tends to
propagate, since change in the other direction is very difficult.
Israeli hate groups have been carrying out pogroms for many years
and I think their goal was this.
Netanyahu is using the pogroms against Arabs (and, occasionally,
against Jews) for his own political advantage.
I have to wonder if he has done something to exacerbate the violence
in order to get this advantage.
Proposing that the US should have laws to defend US industries from Chinese
competition before they get wiped out.
The US ought to defend the workers in these industries from their
employers, not only from their employers' competitors.
In the 1970s, it was still normal for American mothers to send little
children to the grocery store.
I never saw that; when Sesame Street appeared, I was in high school.
*Last hope over climate crisis requires end to coal*, says the president
the Cop26 climate conference.
When it comes to permitting generic vaccines, plutocratist officials
that Biden appointed will still have plenty of opportunities to get in
the way.
The Republican authoritarian death cult has demonstrated, by ousting
one of its leaders on Congress, how it will purge anyone that stops
short of the latest, biggest lie.
If there is any lie that you would not repeat, get out now.
(satire) *Sally Beauty Introduces New Press-On Hangnails.*
JPMorgan Chase announces a new policy of appearing to support
decarbonization in its investments.
Samoa was a stable democracy but its current government is undermining
democracy.
I can't tell from the facts given here what the correct outcome of the
election was, but the efforts to weaken democracy are alarming.
*Suspected Russia-led cyber campaign targets Germany’s Green party leader.*
The motive is her opposition to the proposed Russia-to-Germany gas
pipeline. That pipeline would boost both Russian influence in Europe,
and use of fossil fuels, and that effect would last a long time.
Since the pipeline is almost finished, I wonder if withdrawal
of support for it will come too late.
*Will Movement for People's Vaccine Open Doors to Larger Revolt Against Big Pharma?*
We can't possibly know the answer to that question, but it would be good
if that happens.
People are raging about the treatment of the corpses of the people who
were killed when the Philadelphia thug department dropped a bomb on
the MOVE house.
I think this is a side issue, and a distraction from the real moral
issue, which is how they died, and why.
They died by murder. The Philadelphia thug department killed 11
people, gratuitously — it could easily have let them live. This is
the issue that matters. Living people are important in their own
right; living people (which they were) have rights. Corpses don't.
I don't believe that corpses deserve any special sort of "respect."
That goes for all corpses, includes my corpse when it some day exists.
I've signed papers for it to be used for scientific or medical
purpose, because that's a constructive use. You can do that too!
Let's not shift our moral focus from respect for people's rights to
respect for taboos.
Some real biologists say there is not yet sufficient evidence to rule
out the possibility that Covid-19 leaked from a lab.
Morally, I don't think it makes much difference. Everyone makes
mistakes.
A captain in the Belarus army showed the press a secret order that told
the army to attack protesters. He has been sentenced to 18 years in prison.
In the UK, a creditor can easily make it impossible for a debtor to
rent a place to live.
That is not an officially mandated consequence, but that is what
results in practice.
Perhaps it is still possible to pay to use a room in someone else's
apartment.
Qatar arrested a blogger who writes about the life of migrant workers
there, and is holding him secretly, incommunicado.
*Study finds alarming levels of ‘forever chemicals’ in US mothers’
breast milk.*
Goodreads is an antisocial network that encourages people to show off
what they read and be judged by others accordingly. One reader
thinks this perverts the enjoyment.
I think that may be valid. Of course, it also collects data about each user
and that will surely be used to manipulate per.
Electric companies in the US want to charge homeowners for the privilege
of using their own solar power systems.
This has the tendency to discourage decarbonization, so with rational
politics the US government would make it illegal.
*The American gun crisis? It’s largely a domestic violence crisis.*
The UK is competing for the most-unfriendly-nation prize by
imprisoning and deporting Europeans who visit for the purpose of a job
interview, although this is supposed to be permitted.
Most microplastics in UK rivers come from untreated sewage that
water companies sometimes release into rivers.
Jewish and Arab mobs in Israel are carrying out reciprocal mob
violence, which can reach the point of lynching.
The Jewish mobs are composed of right-wing extremists, which Netanyahu
has increasingly tolerated.
*Live TV shows Israeli mob attack motorist they believed to be an Arab.*
Uganda has allowed cutting down part of a forest reserve which is
habitat for chimpanzees and other wildlife.
Thailand is having a Covid-19 outbreak in two large prisons.
The prisoners there include political prisoners.
Biden's proposal to pay farms to sequester carbon is designed in a way
that will not cover regenerative agriculture.
US citizens: call on Congress to give the FCC authority limit the
price charged to prisoners for for phone calls in prison.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Asim Jamal Shakir Jr watched an LA thug, who is Asim's uncle, tell
another thug to shoot Asim.
I get the impression that he shot Asim with rubber-coated steel bullets.
The birth rate of Uighurs in Xinjiang fell by half from 2017 to 2019.
Humanity needs to reduce its birth rate substantially, but not by means
of inflicting suffering on masses of people. Singling out a specific
minority group for that suffering is an injustice in itself.
*[Wrecker]-Appointed Judge
Rules
Against CDC Moratorium on Evictions During Pandemic.*
I do hope that this will be overturned on appeal, but eventually it
will go to the Supreme Court where the same bad outcome could be
reimposed.
Guatemala's government has given itself the power to monitor or
dissolve NGOs, particularly those that get support from outside
Guatemala.
This would include the local affiliates of international human rights
organizations.
*Colombian protest leader Lucas Villa, who was shot eight times, dies.*
He was shot by gunmen on motorcycles, who I suspect are somehow related
to the paramilitares.
EU citizens are signing a petition to demand an EU-wide referendum for
rejecting products made in Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory.
Reportedly Eritrean soldiers are occupying Tigray and wearing
Ethiopian uniforms, and they are blocking aid from some regions.
The ancient city of Axum is besieged by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces,
which do not allow aid or communication.
EU citizens tried to establish a petition to demand an EU-wide
referendum for rejecting trade with illegal colonies in occupied
territories. The European Commission refused to register
it, but now a court has ordered the commission to do that.
The Tories are considering a law to punish universities if they interfere with freedom of speech.
Opponents say that the law would instead limit freedom of speech.
But the arguments presented in the article seem very weak: "It's
complicated, don't interfere" is not persuasive, and neither is "Only
53 people were deplatformed in a year."
Given that the law is being proposed by Tories, and Tories are not
known for scrupulously respecting the rights of the non-rich, I will
not rule out the possibility that the law would indeed do the opposite
of its stated purpose.
However, I think it should not be hard to design the law so that it
can't interfere with speaking. If the Tories don't want to do that, a
constructive proposal could demonstrate what they are really aiming at.
(satire) *New Program Encourages Americans To Get Vaccine To Prevent
It From Going To Foreigners.*
Reportedly the US is blocking the UN Security Council from publicly
calling on Israel and HAMAS to make a truce.
Right-wing elites have their own forms of "cancel culture" — ways of
silencing those who disagree with them.
Moreover, they are now actively cancelling Republicans that don't
recognize the bully as their personal savior.
I think, however, that we should not get too distracted by comparing
the respective levels of cancellation activity. It's bad on either side.
Some US states are adopting laws to protect people from coercive control.
China is "protecting" old mosques in Xinjiang by partly or completely
demolishing them, and by putting fences around them.
China is not the only country that destroys the Muslim heritage.
Salafi Arabia has systematically destroyed the oldest sites.
Biden's decision not to put sanctions on Salafi Arabia's acting king
was followed by a big increase in punishment of dissidents.
*Air pollution from food production in the United States is linked
to an estimated 15,900 premature deaths each year.*
*A Developmental Psychologist on Why Kids Need Some Independence.*
Georgia has reformed the citizens arrest law that provided vigilantes
an excuse to stalk and kill Ahmaud Arbery.
*We Don't Have a Labor Shortage in the US, We Have a Crisis of Low Wages.*
*Report Reveals How Big Corporations Rigged Rules to Boost Pandemic Pay of
CEOs as Workers Suffered.*
(satire) *New Evidence Finds God Destroyed Sodom And Gomorrah As Part Of Luxury
Condominium Development Deal.*
*HSBC has stakes in firms that plan more than 70 new coal plants.*
We can easily boycott HSBC.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to demand
Israel end the practice of evicting Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah.
Sheikh Jarrah is a part of East Jerusalem.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site,
use the Salsalabs workaround.
*Why is the world still being hit by wave after wave of Covid when we
know how to stop it?*
*Covid pandemic was preventable, says WHO-commissioned report.*
At the start of 2020, the virus existed, but quick action could have prevented
it from infecting very many people.
Originally, the flaws in the response were due to political leaders.
Now, however, they have taught millions of people to believe fake
news, react irrationally, and sabotage public health measures.
The next new pathogen may be even worse if we are not disciplined enough
to keep it away.
*Chemical giants hid dangers of [PFAs] in food packaging.*
*EU states cooperating informally to deny refugees asylum rights.*
*[Rep.] Cheney's ousting proves the "big lie" is the Republican
Party's religion.*
They still seek to abolish democracy in the US, and they will tell
any lies to do it.
Colombian protesters, fired up by the murders committed by thugs and
right-wing death squads, are demanding policies to improve life for
the non-rich.
Hungary's opposition parties are forming a coalition to defeat Orbán.
A report from the Louisville thug department says that the thugs that killed
Breonna Taylor violated the department policies by starting to shoot.
*Michigan governor orders Enbridge to shut down controversial Canadian
[Line 5] oil pipeline.*
The US border thugs now holds 21,000 border-crossing minors, though nowadays
they mostly stay only a few weeks in those camps.
Facebook insisting on merging all WhatsApp data into its main data base.
This is a great impetus to stop using WhatsApp forever.
Conservation efforts have enabled large areas of forest to regrow.
However, deforestation is going much faster.
The US has approved an 800-megawatt wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean to
the south of Massachusetts.
This is almost twice as big as the failed Cape Wind project.
I hope that it gets built.
Tory voter-ID plans could disenfranchise up to two million UK voters.
The UK has arrested Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion
over a planned nonviolent protest.
*Italy to ask EU to pay Libya to stop migrant departures.*
Is it legitimate for Libya to prevent people from leaving the country,
if they are not wanted for nonpolitical criminal charges? China stops
people from leaving, and even caught a boat in which dissidents were
fleeing Hong Kong, and arrested them all.
China has bought lots of diplomatic support, which it is using to block
Taiwan from participating in the World Health Organization's conferences
about dealing with Covid-19.
US citizens: call on the U.S. State Department and Department of
Defense to demand an end to Israel’s forced displacement of
Palestinians from East Jerusalem.
US citizens: call on your Senators to sign letter opposing Salafi
Arabia's blockade of Yemen.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Colombia's president has acknowledged the demands of the countrywide
protesters that the thugs have been killing.
In Colombia, protesters have built barricades, and right-wing gunmen
with support from the uniformed thugs shoot to kill them.
I suspect that these killers are part of, or related to, the notorious
"paramilitares" right-wing gangs.
*Sen. Bernie Sanders … announced that the Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing … on "Waste, Fraud, Cost Overruns, and Auditing at the Pentagon."*
Three Portuguese border thugs have been sentenced to years in prison
for beating a would-be immigrant to death.
The US has become accustomed to many endless undeclared wars;
to end them all is almost unthinkable.
Now that the UK has adopted binding targets for greenhouse emissions reduction,
it must reconsider its plans to expand airports.
Australia's endangered species protection laws do not seem to apply to logging.
Logging is the main direct threat to forest habitats, so this omission
is disastrous.
*The 10 companies that have contributed the most to state lawmakers
sponsoring both anti-voter and anti-protest bills are: AT&T, Dominion
Energy, Zurich North America and its subsidiaries, Berkshire Hathaway
and its subsidiaries, UnitedHealth Group, Mednax Services, Charter
Communications, State Farm Insurance and its subsidiaries, Phillip
Morris USA, and Vistra Energy (FKA Energy Future Holdings) and its
subsidiaries.*
Some of these are easy to pressure or boycott.
Mainstream media are trying to rehabilitate Republican supporters of
overthrowing the US government and overturning the 2020 election.
The UK's Covid-testing operation employs 50,000 people, but they are paid
through many small companies which obscure where the money actually goes.
It's exactly the sort of system one would set up to facilitate corruption.
(satire) *Conservatives Panicking After Every Member Of Republican
Party Ousted For Insufficient Loyalty To [the bully].*
A proposed lithium mine in Nevada would likely cause the extinction of
Tiehm's buckwheat, a plant that has adapted to grow in soil with
lithium and boron and is not found anywhere else.
Dealing with a decreasing population has some inconveniences, but the
robots that will exist in 20 years will ensure it is not really
difficult. The main challenge will be to ensure that these robots are
under the control of the people that they serve, rather than acting as
companies' agents to control those people.
Burmese journalists who fled to Thailand to escape the army's
murderous crackdown face the threat of being sent back to Burma.
Australia has an immigration prison where the average prisoner has
been held for five years. (A year from now that average might be six
years.)
The prisoners have, effectively, no legal rights. So some of them dug
an escape tunnel, which was discovered unfinished.
China is trying to deplatform Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan.
China's wrath is not limited to invective. It uses all the power at its
disposal to bully countries into shunning Taiwan while China gets the world
used to the prospect China will invade.
The situation calls for a courageous response: uniting to defend
Taiwan, and backing this up with action while this could avoid the war.
Global heating may damage tea production as some of the growing places
become too hot for it.
The PRO Act might need to be amended to clear up what it would do
regarding some independent contractors.
Or perhaps it's ok as now written.
The Tories will impose a voter-ID law on the UK.
Apparently they found the voter-suppression effect quite satisfactory.
*FTC Report Finds Manufacturers' Repair Restrictions Unwarranted.*
I support the right to repair movement but its goal is only a first
step. It should be illegal to block purchasers of a product from
replacing the software embedded in it, or to impede them from together
to replace that software with free software.
Private equity fund managers arranged to have their management fees
taxed as capital gains rather than as ordinary income. This
intentional giveaway to the abusive finance industry is referred to
by the misnomer of "carried interest loophole". It may be eliminated soon.
I am in favor of this change, but it won't be enough to put an end to
the "private equity" funds that have eliminated many companies we used
to deal with.
*Global Protests Target Banks Funding Line 3 Tar Sands Pipeline.*
I wish I had found out a week ago and could have posted an urgent note
suggesting that people participate in these protests. Does anyone
know where these plans are announced in advance? If necessary, I will
recruit developers to help you access the announcements without
running nonfree JavaScript code, then link to them here.
Summarizing the most harmful points in Florida's new voter-suppression law.
Texas Republicans passed a bill to interfere with voting in a number
of ways. This article describes how Democrats resisted efforts to make
it even worse.
The article mentions the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting
Rights Act. The only way to get these past the coup-supporting
Republicans in the US Senate is to eliminate the filibuster, and that requires
the support of a few plutocratist die-hard Democrats.
I hope someone has a plausible plan for how to achieve this, a plan I
could support. So far I have not seen any discussion of one.
The US needs to undo the plutocratist revolution of the 1980s
and reject the idea that a corporation's only duty is profit.
The head of Ethiopia's Orthodox Church made a video saying that genocide is
occurring in Ethiopia and that he had been stopped from talking about it.
He did not give the details to answer the obvious first questions.
One must suppose that the Ethiopian government is doing those things.
With the US adult population roughly half-vaccinated, cases of
Covid-19 are decreasing.
However, in order to get rid of Covid-19, we need to vaccinate 80% of the
population, in every country.
Arizona's "audit" of the 2020 election may violate civil right law
because it provides opportunities to generate suspicion based on
racial profiling.
Kentucky has set up a commission to study how thugs carry out search
warrants, looking for ways to reduce the danger that they might hurt
someone in the process.
*Hundreds of Palestinians Protesting Evictions in Jerusalem Injured in
'State-Sanctioned Campaign of Israeli Violence'.*
These evictions are not like the ones in the US, carried out because someone
cannot pay the rent. Israel is systematically seizing Palestinians' homes
in Jerusalem.
A shocking defeat in an election Labour expected to win has made the party
aware it needs to change something.
What it needs is to unite behind Jeremy Corbyn, but that name did not even
appear in the article.
US citizens: call on Biden to ban fracking.
The Department of Justice has only 5 more months to prosecute crimes
of the bully's 2016 campaign.
Stiglitz: *Big Pharma Greed Will Prolong Pandemic—If We Don't Fight Back.*
I agree fully with the substance of his points. I wish he did not
fall into trap of using the term "intellectual property" to talk about
patents. copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks as if they were
similar enough to generalize about.
Since the whole point of the WTO is to give businesses more power over
national governments, and thereby more power over people, we should
abolish the WTO.
Higher unemployment payments are not the main reason Americans
hesitate to go back to work. Safety is one. Taking care of children
who are not spending the day in school is another.
Fascism is spreading around the world, with fascist ideas spreading
before it. No two fascist regimes are identical, but we must acknowledge
that that is what they are.
The Gates Foundation's forays into education have not turned out well.
The Republican Party has become the Lie-Cheat-Steal Party, still
repeating in unison that the bully really won the 2020 election.
Every year since 2000, if not before, the Republican Party has tried
to rig the election. In 2000, 2004 and 2016 it succeeded.
(satire) *Mark Zuckerberg Asks Facebook Oversight Board To Rule On
Whether Argument Wife's Fault.
*Rejecting Bayer Appeal, Top EU Court Upholds Ban on Bee-Killing Pesticides.*
The US attorney for Southern New York says that the scheme that sent
fake letters to the FCC about network neutrality was illegal.
Will we see some charges?
*This Motorcycle Airbag Vest Will Stop Working If You Miss a Payment.*
In the world of the future, you won't own anything, not even the vest
around your torso. Unless you are rich.
Introducing DRM-gouging to dishwashers.
Normally, a new kind of product may start out expensive, but
the price goes down. However, if the product requires a subscription,
its price may never fall.
The heirs of Samsung will have to pay a substantial fraction in
inheritance tax.
South Korea has made a wise decision. The US should follow it.
*Mayor of Mexican town and two officials arrested over disappearance of
activist.*
Claudia Uruchurtu Cruz was grabbed after a meeting and forced into a
van belonging to the city.
*Brazil judge sees signs of 'arbitrary execution' in Rio police raid.*
*Lula lays foundations of anti-Bolsonaro coalition.*
Amnesty International has resumed referring to Alexei Navalny as a
"prisoner of conscience".
The organization has decided to be less particular, and recognize
people that courageously resist tyrants, even if they have expressed
views that Amnesty disagrees with.
I disagree with those views too, but I think Amnesty's change in
policy is wise.
A descendant of Ponca chief Standing Bear demands that Harvard return
a hatchet that Standing Bear gave away in gratitude.
We know that the US committed many injustices against Standing Bear
and the rest of the Poncas, as it did to many other indigenous
Americans. Only a fraction of them are mentioned in the article.
However, none of that invalidates Standing Bear's gift of the hatchet
to Webster, who had defended his right to be considered human. That
was a valid gift, and so (as far as we know) was Webster's gift of the
hatchet to Harvard. Thus, I conclude that Chapman's argument is
invalid and Harvard should keep the hatchet.
Displaying the hatchet in a museum can teach Americans about what
indigenous Americans had to do to claim human rights in the United
States.
The UK should stop prosecuting Extinction Rebellion protesters.
The public are protecting them by finding them not guilty. Bravo for
the public! Now it is time for the state to back down.
European politicians have found an excuse to thwart generic Covid vaccines:
demanding that the US start exporting vaccine first.
This is a bizarre nonsequitur. The US will have spare capacity soon
and could export it, but that won't be enough to vaccinate the whole
world quickly.
The EU has brokered a deal between the two main political parties
of Georgia. The opposition alleged rigging of the election,
so the ruling party imprisoned the leader of the opposition.
With no information to go by except this article, I'm inclined to believe
the opposition. It is hard to set up an ecosystem disinformation as complete
as the one that Republicans have established in the US, and even that one
can only fool those who wish to be fooled.
The bully had the Department of Justice seize phone records of
reporters who were investigating whether Attorney General Sessions
had talked with the Russian ambassador.
US citizens: call on Biden's team to clean up ICE or shut it down.
New Zealand threatens to prosecute Geoff Upson for trying to get potholes
fixed by drawing penises around them.
Sick and cruel prudery is seeping back, threatening to reverse the
sexual revolution.
Very small tracking tags, made by Apple and other companies, make it
easy to track any person or object. We may have to start checking our
clothing and other property regularly to remove them.
Some say that Prince Charming has no right to wake Snow White with a
kiss without first waking her to ask for her consent. His obligation
is to leave her unconscious forever, they contend.
In real life, nobody needs a kiss to regain consciousness. But there
are real situations in which medics need to cut clothing off of
unconscious people, perhaps even exposing their genitals. This is a
prelude to medical treatments which aim at restoring those people to
consciousness. Medics have presumed that that goal justifies
stripping them.
Maybe we will see real pressure for medics medics to leave those
people untreated, on pain of being charged with some sort of sex
crime.
I compare this to the right-wing political pressure to let women die
rather than abort ectopic pregnancies.
Biden's infrastructure plan includes subsidy for the existing nuclear
power plants, as well as plans to build a new one.
This would be a harmful use of the money, as well as wasteful — it
would be cheaper to replace the nuclear plants with storage batteries
— but if it can convince Manchin to vote to end the filibuster, it
would be a price worth paying.
A London thug probably killed dissident Blair Peach; afterward,
undercover thugs spied on dissidents (including his lover) for 20
years as they demanded information on how he was killed.
One must suppose the thugs were seeking a way to discredit the
dissidents who were, for them, an inconvenience.
The BBC has exposed the persistent corruption of London cops.
US citizens: call on youtube to exclude the wrecker.
US citizens: call on Congress to adopt a wealth tax.
*The company I founded in my 20s exploited vulnerable people for profit.*
It sold special kinds of funeral activities, mainly to people who
would pay for more ways to grieve.
Republicans in Wyoming threaten to sue states that don't burn coal.
*EU court upholds ban on [neonicotinoid] insecticides linked to harming bees.*
They harm other kinds of animals too.
Florida has agreed to spend 400 million to help various endangered species
including the Florida panther.
My "childhood sweetheart" Melinda would be glad if she were still
alive.
After the 2018 California fires, 20,000 refugees fled to the city of
Chico. After a while of warmth and assistance, the city got tired
of them and now tries to chase out those that remain.
* Research reveals that many national vaccination plans exclude asylum
seekers, refugees, migrants and [internally displaced persons].*
The remaining Koch brother is still promoting extremist Republicans
that supported the Republican big lie that the bully won the election.
There are now federal charges against four thugs that participated in
the killing of George Floyd.
The US deportation agency, ICE, is disregarding Biden's orders
and doing gratuitous harm -- because it can.
*France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain urged Israel… to
halt settlement-building in the West Bank.*
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates that almost 7 million
people have died from Covid-19.
That is a lot more than governments recognize.
Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed was injured by a bomb.
He championed climate defense, and was removed by a coup which we must
suspect was organized by planet-roasters.
The article says he is now speaker of the Maldives Parliament.
I hope he is still pushing for the need to curb sea-level rise
before the Maldives are inundated.
Three Hong Kong dissidents have been imprisoned for "rioting" simply because
they were present at a protest.
Republicans are trying to make it easier to imprison protesters for
"rioting." This seems to be a standard item in the repressive playbook.
Uber and Lyft are lobbying against the PRO Act, which would facilitate
forming unions.
So are Instacart and some of the food-delivery companies.
This is another reason to boycott them all. (I won't use them anyway
since they won't let me pay anonymous cash.)
It is physically possible to make hydrogen and use it as a fuel,
and it's renewable if generated using renewable electricity,
but that is inefficient use of funds. In this decade we can decarbonize
more by converting the uses of energy to run off renewable electricity.
I wonder if it is possible to generate hydrogen efficiently from petroleum
without producing any greenhouse gases as the result. Maybe the result
could be sugar.
Even with US support, a waiver on patents and trademarks on Covid-19
vaccines is likely to take many months to negotiate, in effect keeping humanity helpless against the virus.
The WTO is structured to resist any initiative to reduce the power
of the businesses that it exists to serve. Of course, it claims that
this is for our own good, to ensure plenty of wealth for the rich
that could theoretically trickle down to the rest of us.
I have said before that we should abolish the WTO. I repeat that now.
* Unless actions by governments and corporations cut emissions in the
here and now, a dose of scepticism is in order.*
Amsterdam's mayor wants to move the visible prostitutes' windows to an
out-of-the-way place where tourists will not see them. This change is
supposed to "protect" the prostitutes, but the prostitutes do not want
to be protected in this way.
I think the mayor is motivated by prudish disgust.
It would be better to consult the prostitutes and see what sort of
protection they would actually like.
*Cut methane emissions to rapidly fight climate disasters, UN report says.*
Rep. Liz Cheney is the one Republican leader in the House of
Representatives that refuses to be a puppet of the bullshitter. So
the puppets are planning to replace her as a leader.
New Zealand's Labour Party is sliding into establishing two classes of
citizenship with two different laws.
It may well be that the Maori deserve compensation for being
mistreated in the past by European colonists. That sort of thing has
happened in many colonies including the US, Canada and Australia. I
don't know enough about New Zealand history to have a firm opinion
about that case.
But this compensation should not take the form of a permanent division
of society between two kinds of citizens, with different rules and
privileges.
Australia refused to lend money for a wind farm and battery farm,
saying that all funding for that is supposed to come from private
lenders.
Does Australia provide any subsidies for fossil fuel development or
extraction? Any tax write-offs such as depletion? I would expect it
does. By its stated philosophy, it should stop that immediately.
The new standard in Hong Kong is 15 months in prison for telling people
about the Tian An Men Square protest and massacre.
One dose of Covid-19 vaccine improves your chances a lot, but the
second dose is a big improvement on top of that.
Conclusion: get
vaccinated and get both doses!
Bill Gates says, have faith in the Invisible Hand and assume technology
will prevent global heating.
When confronted with the political issues about which way the world
will go, he plays dumb.
US citizens: call on Congress to include paid sick leave and family
leave in the American Families Plan.
*US declares support for patent waiver on Covid-19 vaccines.*
I am curious to see how this change of position came about,
and who championed it. Most of the officials that Biden chose
for foreign policy have plutocratist leanings.
The article says nothing about the trade secrets of the vaccine
companies, but I've read elsewhere that the US means to include them too.
Governments should require the vaccine companies to teach their
methods to new producers, but that (unlike the patent license) is not
just a matter of stating a new policy.
*World Must Move From Pledges to Actual Green Recovery Spending.*
(satire) *Couple Worried Relationship Will Lose Spark Once They Move
Into Leader's Compound.*
Will Biden find the courage to propose the whole of what the country needs,
instead of just 1/3?
*House Democrat introduces bill to release COINTELPRO files on surveillance of
Black Panthers and Fred Hampton.*
Since 1980 the world's elites have adopted right-wing ideology and
spread suffering. Only left-wing politics offers an answer.
"left-wing" covers a lot of ground, so we must be careful about which
variety we support.
Why young (and middle-aged) adults need to get vaccinated,
for their own health and everyone else's.
Fight for the Future gets to the root of how surveillance capitalism
promotes civic strife: it's the algorithm, and behind the algorithm,
the business model.
Notorious civic saboteurs, such as the bully, are the creations of
that algorithm and that business model. They are people who had
enough talent to exploit it, and lacked the conscience to hold them
back. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with them, we should fix the
system they exploit.
*Tens of Thousands of Premature Deaths Linked to So-Called "Cleaner" Energy
Like Fracked Gas: Study.*
A UK undercover infiltrator in the Troops Out Movement became its
leader and surely reported all the personal details of supporters.
He used deceptive sexual relationships with other supporters as a
means to advance in the group.
British banks have increased their lending for coal since 2015.
A dis-service now offers everyone face recognition applied to lots of collected
pictures of anyone and everyone.
*European countries, supported by EU’s border agency Frontex,
systematically pushed back refugees [numbering 40,000] using
illegal tactics ranging from assault to brutality during detention
or transportation.*
2,000 of them died from this.
Venezuela has refilled the election council, including some members of
the democratic opposition.
The forest-protection programs that airlines present as "offsets" for
for their greenhouse emissions don't necessary do much good.
Even the head of the WTO says that the world should make Covid-19
vaccine as fast as possible.
Alas, the head of the WTO has no power to override its rules, which
are not designed for public health.
(satire) *Private Equity Firm Heartbroken After Realizing There No AOL
Employees Left To Fire.*
The US birth rate took a big drop in 2020.
If this is due to cruel starve-the-poor policies, those are a terrible wrong.
But the birth rate drop itself will be a good thing.
*Myanmar junta bans satellite dishes in media crackdown.*
*US seen as bigger threat to democracy than Russia or China, global
poll finds.*
That was true for most of the time since 1990, and it is still true for
Russia, but it is not true any more regarding China.
A wide variety of explosives and weapons have been confiscated from
right-wing protesters in the past year.
US citizens: support the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban oil and gas development in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Progressives immediately cancelled mayoral candidate Scott Stringer
when a former intern accused him of groping her. However, others say that the two had a relationship and she wasn't an intern.
Greta Thunberg says that the political leaders she has met with
show no "sense of crisis" about the climate.
No wonder they think it is acceptable to surrender to the business pressure to take it slow.
One of Sudanese tyrant al-Bashir's lieutenants says he wants to be tried
by the International Criminal Court, not by a Sudanese court.
He expects the ICC to be less biased.
Bravo to the ICC. The US should cease its campaign to delegitimize the ICC and sign up for it.
"Carbon offsetting" or climate defense by protecting forests, as it is
now done, is a weak scheme.
It may do some good, but certainly not enough.
Afghan journalists face murder threats from the Taliban,
especially those who are women.
The US should offer them all asylum.
Germany is suffering a peak level of right-wing hatred displays.
The figure of 24,000 "attacks" includes mere statements (I will not
call this censoring messages merely because I disapprove of what was
said) as well as actual violence. The article does not tell us how
acts of actual right-wing violence took place last year in Germany.
I wish it did. I would expect that that too has increased.
The US Department of Justice, then operating under the control of the
wrecker, threatened MIT researchers who had published a statistical
demonstration that there was no sign of fraud in Evo Morales's
electoral victory, which was followed by the coup in Bolivia.
*UN condemns violent repression of Colombia protests after at least 18 die.*
PISSI is gradually recovering its strength in Iraq.
After the US assisted Rojava in defeating PISSI, the wrecker removed
US troops and cooperation and let the remnants survive. That was a foolish move.
Belarusian dissidents ask for Germany to investigate Lukashenko's crimes
against them.
If Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland break away from the United
Kingdom, they will have a chance of more democracy than Tories allow
(though that will be limited by the European Union, which they would
join).
Meanwhile, England, with most of the UK's population, would sink under
inescapable Tory dictatorship, with democracy more tenuous each year.
England would have as much chance of restoring democracy as Hungary
has. I can't see that as a happy ending.
People who have been trafficked into the UK and forced into crimes are
nearly always treated as criminals, not as victims. Parliament decided
recently to make it even harder to escape this fate.
Uganda has reprised an old law imposed by the British Empire which criminalizes
homosexuality.
*Internal NYPD Documents Show Cops Were Sent to Protests With Barely Any First Amendment Training.*
It is complex, organizationally, to choose the personnel for a
specific mission based on which trainings they have had. The easy thing
to do is train everyone. The next easiest is to have specific units
for specific jobs and give those units the training for those jobs.
Several young Germans won a lawsuit against the government for failing to take
adequate action against global heating.
*Rich nations' climate targets will mean global heating of 2.4C — study.*
That's if there are no unexpected positive feedback loops.
I've discovered that it is possible to view the 1619 Project
using IceCat by clicking on the "Reveal Hidden HTML" button
that appears at the bottom right corner of the window.
In other graphical web browsers, open the "web developer tools," usually
by pressing the F12 key, then switch to the console and run:
You should paste and run that as a single block.
It reveals the contents of the 1619 Project page.
The New York Times ought to use Javascript to make the contents
initially invisible — that way, when Javascript is not running,
the contents will be visible.
If you know a way to pass that message to the Times, please do so.
They might fix this, since it won't be a big change.
*LA sheriffs frequently harass families of people they
kill, says report.*
France has decided to sell Egypt more fighter-bombers.
There are points in that message that seem like bullshit, but I don't
understand what's really behind them.
I don't see that human rights are a direct concern regarding fighter jets.
The Egyptian military regime is highly repressive,
but I don't think fighter jets are very apt, or necessary, for
attacking protesters, journalists or bloggers.
I also don't see how terrorism relates to sale of fighter jets.
Egypt does have a problem with domestic terrorists,
but I don't see
how fighter jets are very useful against them.
The Burmese military killed several dissidents with a mail bomb.
Pesticides are harming the animals that turn dirt into soil,
including earthworms and insects.
This is very dangerous.
A professor of linguistics explains how (and perhaps why) the US has
converted racial slurs into taboos that can't be mentioned, not even
to discuss them.
I agree that overt racist attitudes should be "ridiculed and socially
punished in general society"; it is wrong to make racial slurs against
anyone.
However, that is no reason to put taboos on them. I am opposed to
putting taboos on any words, for any reason, because they gratuitously
tie society in knots. When the taboo is on a racial slur, it
prevents discussion of racism,
and famous anti-racist statements
cannot be quoted.
The same hypersensitivity does its harmful work when students seeing a
picture of George Washington with slaves are "triggered," and lose the
ability to think and speak about the significance of the fact that
Washington owned slaves.
How progressive Democrats gained power in the New Mexico state
legislature, replacing some plutocratist Democrats.
They had to fight against identity politics. If you choose which candidate
to support based on matters of identity, you are asking to be manipulated.
A big oil discovery in Namibia offers windfall profits to some of the
inhabitants, until global heating destroys their country.
So the people of Namibia have a right to a better life — for a couple
of decades — thanks to a little trickle-down from the profits of
exploiting a giant oilfield and perhaps destroying civilization?
Of course not! Nobody does! There is no room in the world's carbon
budget for any new fossil fuel development, whether it is in
California, Namibia, the Mediterranean Sea, or anywhere else.
President Correa of Ecuador asked the wealthy countries to pay Ecuador
not to exploit a new oil field. No one took up that deal, but the
basic is still a good one. Let's give the people of Namibia a better
life in exchange for an agreement to keep that oil forever in the
ground.
Of course, we need to structure the deal so that corrupt oligarchs don't
swipe the money and put it into secret offshore investments.
* Removing armed [thugs] from traffic enforcement and turning it
over to civilians should be a major goal of the racial justice
movement.*
Thugs use minor traffic violations — or possible appearance of one —
as pretexts to stop blacks and search their cars. Civilian traffic
code enforcers would put an end to this practice.
I contend that the practice violates the fourth amendment regardless
of whether racial profiling is used, because an unaggravated moving
violation, by itself, is no excuse to search a car.
The EPA is moving to reduce use of hydrofluorocarbons, which are
very powerful greenhouse gases.
There is a campaign to stop Facebook from merging two collections of
data about useds: the data about the useds of Facebook itself, and the
data about the useds of WhatsApp.
Of course, if Facebook eliminates an internal policy barrier that
limits its use of the massive data it collects from its useds, that
will make its power to abuse people a little greater. It would be
better to prevent that.
But I cannot support this campaign, because doing so would legitimize
the injustice those dis-services already do.
Facebook in its current form should not be allowed to exist at all,
because much of the data collection it does should be illegal.
Don't be a zucker! Stop letting Facebook and WhatsApp use you!
* The Biden administration is reportedly considering teaming up with
private companies to monitor American citizens' private online activity
and digital communications.*
What creates the opportunity to try this the fact that these companies
are already snooping on users' private activities. That in turn is
due to people's use of nonfree software which snoops, and online
dis-services which snoop.
"Israeli" dates are mainly grown in Palestinian territory, and those grown
in Israel proper depend on underpaid Palestinian workers.
Several plutocratist presidents have found ways to let businesses off
the hook for their crimes. Will Biden change directions?
The US is using NAFTA to try to stop Mexico from banning glyphosate.
NAFTA is a business-supremacy treaty, and it used to contain an ISDS clause (I Sue Democratic States)
which authorized businesses to sue a country for adopting a law or
policy that interferes with their plans.
The bully revised NAFTA, eliminating the power, but another member
country can still do so, and that is what the US is threatening to do.
* We are told by some opponents of the far-right that supporters of
equality and civil liberties should not be worried about expansions of
U.S. surveillance and counterterrorism capabilities. They are wrong.*
(satire) *U.S. Vows To Invade Next Country That Asks For Covid Vaccine
[patent licenses or trade secrets]*
Even when you're joking, please don't lump together trade secrets and
patents as if they were similar!
Colombia's president pulled back the regressive tax plan in response to
big protests around the country. However, thugs attacked the protesters.
The Tories are proposing a law to make it so hard to sue the UK
government (claiming its policies are illegal) that the government
could get away with anything.
New Zealand is proud of taking an "independent" foreign policy towards China: independent of the west, but going along with China in
practical terms.
On May 10, RMS will give a remote talk for the University of
Buckingham Free Speech Society, starting at 7pm UK time.
You can watch the stream
here.
US citizens: call for the US to offer gratis college education in public colleges.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: call on Biden to cancel college debt.
Everyone: call on AT&T to speak out against the Texas abortion ban
and pledge to stop funding anti-abortion politicians.
Bogus Johnson appears to have said, "let the bodies pile high in the
thousands," insisting on keeping the UK economy open.
(He later changed his mind about that decision, and changed it again, and again, etc.)
Bogus Johnson has evaded scandal after scandal by refusing to take
them seriously, but the current scandal about accepting gifts of money
and covering them up is constricting around him.
Nonetheless, he continues trying to thwart punishment by ignoring it.
The UK used to hold its ministers accountable with a firm expectation
that a minister would resign over any wrongdoing, whether public or
personal. The Tories have abolished that expectation by disregarding
it, and now they can get away with just about anything. But they are
still pushing to destroy every institution that could stop them.
I can imagine them as saying, "If you're a Tory politician, they let
you do it." And, as when the bully said it, it's not really true,
unless "let you" includes "be too scared to stop you".
The Indian government asked Indian scientists for advice for dealing
with Covid-19, but when they said that the variants threatened another
wave of illness, the government ignored them.
The UK, by outsourcing regulation, has demonstrated that this practice
encourages corruption that defeats the regulation, with results that
sometimes kill and often ruin people.
Unionizing the workers in charter schools prevents some of their
usual kinds of exploitation. Is that enough to make them harmless?
Thousands protested peacefully in London against Tory plans to repress
protesters if they cause inconvenience to anyone.
I fear this will not be enough. The Tories figure they will win the
next election, with some help from voter suppression,
and aside from that they care about nothing and no one.
A thug went mad and attacked a teenager who had surrendered, for not obeying
every violent demand.
An interview with the last resident of the village of Wollar in Australia.
Everyone else has sold per property to Peabody coal mining.
If the new use of the town's land was something necessary for
Australia and the world to survive, I would say that what has happened
in Wollar was not so bad. At least people are getting bought out and
they can move to other communities.
But given that mining more coal is death, the state should not have permitted
a new coal mine at all. Laws should prohibit new coal mines.
Republican election sabotage bills go beyond making it inconvenient to
vote (especially for Democrats). They propose to allow poll watchers
to look at people's ballots (and see how they are voting), harass
voters, even try to disqualify voters.
Republican officials would judge the challenges and there is no reason
to expect them to try to judge in a non-partisan or fair manner.
Cars record everything that happens in them, even opening doors and
windows. If you connect a phone to one, it gets lots of data from the
phone, and stores them permanently too.
In the US, various government agencies can get this data out of the
car. However, it's not just the government. Surely the car manufacturer
gets it too, and can sell it.
I wonder whether all this data enables the government, and the car
manufacturer, to track the car's movements by dead reckoning if the
GPS antenna is covered.
We need laws to tightly restrict what data a car can record.
The Tory government has stated the intention to privatize all public
schools in the UK.
Privatization would result in paying teachers less, spending less on
education, and providing profit to the operators. In addition, the
privatized schools could get away with disregarding educational needs,
even kicking out students because they cost more money, perhaps
leaving them with no school that will admit them.
Bernie Sanders: *Big Pharma doesn’t want us to expand Medicare. We
have to fight them.*
Children who catch Covid-19, even without symptoms, have a significant chance
of ending up with lasting pain and disability.
Putting aside the gratuitous disrespect reported for some doctors,
there is, in fact, nothing that medicine can do for those people now.
No one has any idea what might help. Maybe research will discover
treatments in the future, but there is no guarantee.
This is a fate worse than death. I suppose some of those children
wish for death. If they don't now, they may start in a year or
several years. But it may take them years to attain that wish.
To prevent this horrible fate, we need to eradicate Covid-19, from our
countries and from the whole world. That means a large fraction of
the population must be vaccinated.
We cannot allow perverse cults to stand in the way.
The UK's fines for violating Covid-19-suppression rules fell most heavily
on disprivileged racial groups.
I think it would be interesting to study the importance of various
factors in producing that result, including these:
Polls suggest that the Green Party may be Germany's strongest party after
the next election.
That would be truly revolutionary.
So don't say, "Colorless Green ideas sleep furiously." They are not
colorless, and they are not sleeping any more.
Hong Kong plans to require foreign domestic workers to get Covid-19
vaccination.
Each domestic worker works in close proximity to a family, over long
periods of time. If the worker catches Covid-19, person is very
likely to transmit it to that family. Therefore, the worker should be
vaccinated.
Perhaps people who work in stores and deal with the public should also
have to be vaccinated. A store worker rarely spends even 5 minutes
near one customer, but one infected worker in a store for hours can
fill the store with virus and several people could catch Covid-19 from
that.
The likelihood of this depends on the store's ventilation system. It
also depends on whether customers keep wearing masks when in a store.
The only sort of exception that, for ethical reasons, needs to exist
is for those who, for medical reasons, cannot be vaccinated. Hong
Kong says it will offer that exception.
Aside from those people, anyone who feels discriminated against by
this policy has a simple solution at hand: get vaccinated. It's the
right thing to do and the safe thing to do. Humanity needs to
eradicate Covid-19, and this is the way. Stop complaining, and get
vaccinated!
However, for the time being, many people don't have the option of
getting vaccinated, because they live in places where little or no
vaccine is available. It would be proper for a country that has money
to burn, such as Hong Kong (i.e., China), to offer people admitted
with work visas vaccination before or after arrival, if they are
coming from one of those places.
Singapore is using a disco ad to encourage people to get vaccinated.
Australia's chief medical officer talks about the need to stop
citizens from returning from India while getting the quarantine system
ready to cope with the extremely contagious virus variant now
spreading there.
I think this is legitimate as long as they work fast and get this
over quickly.
Poaching rare plants in a South African desert is likely to wipe them
out, and if it doesn't, global heating effects can do it.
Complex and subtle factors have to be weighed to determine whether use
of the chickenpox vaccine is desirable. One factor is whether everyone
will agree to be vaccinated.
Funeral for a glacier.
Evidence that some sort of directed radiation attack was made against
US personnel in the 1990s.
*Redirect harmful subsidies to benefit the planet, UN urges governments.*
Witchcraft accusations in New Guinea: is it correct to call this a
"highly modern phenomenon" and say it is not a practice from "ages
past"?
I think that is a false choice, and that it is part one and part the
other.
It may be true that an accusation of witchcraft nowadays typically
results from conflicts related to modern society and the precarious
economy. I have no reason to doubt that. It would result from whatever
tends to cause strong conflict.
However, the choice to handle the conflict by accusing someone of
witchcraft surely comes out of cruel traditions, and so does the
choice to deal with that accusation by torturing the alleged witch.
The fact that in some regions it is usually males that are accused of
witchcraft, while in other regions usually females are accused,
supports the idea that the traditional culture of each region is
responsible. New Guinea traditional cultures varied greatly in their
customs and religious beliefs, including their beliefs about
witchcraft.
Whatever the explanation, the idea of witchcraft is a plague of
irrationality that leads to persecution of many innocent people.
One thing secular humanists do, in many countries, is campaign for an
end to persecution of "witches". I see articles about this
occasionally in the secular humanist magazine, Free Inquiry.
*Glacial lakes threaten millions with flooding as planet heats up.*
Getting a Covid-19 vaccination greatly reduces the chance of your
transmitting Covid-19 to anyone else.
Please get vaccinated as soon as you can.
India is giving false figures for the number of people killed by
Covid-19, reporting only half as many deaths as the number of bodies
that were cremated.
In the US we have seen governments falsify Covid-19 statistics
in Florida
and New York State.
Oregon has reinstated restrictions to prevent spread of Covid-19,
based on projections that this would avoid hundreds of deaths from
Covid-19.
How about conditioning reopening in each area on the fraction of residents who
have been vaccinated?
Chad's military shot protesters who were criticizing Chad's military rulers —
which include the son of the recently deceased former dictator.
Glenn Greenwald: *The Left Continues to Destroy Itself and Others With
Evidence-Free Destruction of Reputations.*
Biden says that he continues to push for "denuclearization" of North Korea,
which is an impossible goal. Kim has learned that nuclear
weapons are the way to protect his dictatorial power, and will not consider
giving up that protection.
Canada has obtained new insurance coverage for the planet-roasting
Trans Mountain pipeline, and is concealing which insurance companies
are providing the coverage.
This is a reaction to the pressure already placed on insurance
companies to stop insuring fossil fuel projects.
Canada's government takes a planet-roaster stance, and what we see here
is how far it will go to continue destroying civilization's future.
Some Republicans object to the New York Times' 1619 project,
about the history of slavery in the US, claiming that it is wrong
to call attention to the country's flaws.
Since some of these flaws continue to cause injustice today, I believe
as a general principle that we should pay attention to them, not cover
them up. Therefore, I would like to look at the 1619 Project and see
what it says.
I am blocked from doing so because its web site insists on running
nonfree software (written in Javascript) in my browser.
Since I don't allow anyone to do that
to me, the site shows me a blank window.
Does anyone know of another way I can look at that material? Perhaps
a way that is not "interactive"?
Because of that injustice in the site's infrastructure, I must urge
everyone to decline to visit that site, unless and until they fix it
to be accessible from the Free World. I hope that school curriculum
will likewise refuse to suggest the site as a resource until it has
been fixed.
I hope that they fix it soon, to make the material available for
viewing from the Free World. But we will need to press them to do it.
Does anyone know where we should direct the pressure?
*How the For the People Act [would blunt] New Florida Voting Restrictions.*
Delete your social media accounts, because sooner or later
the algorithm will figure out how to trigger you and start changing
you so you can't get away.
Pressure for people to study for careers in science and technology
is leading universities to stop teaching history.
*Who's Controlling the COVID Vaccine: 10 Myths and Misdirections.*
I posted this link because overall the points are valid. However,
talking about the concept of "intellectual property" inevitably spreads
confusion through over generalization
and putting scare quotes around the term does nothing to undo that
confusion. Each use of that term inherently misinforms.
The way to avoid that misinformation is to talk about patents and
about trade secrecy as two separate issues which are legally
unrelated.
Win Without War's campaign to end the arming of US thug departments
with military weapons.
The world struggle between democracy and repression has been going
oppression's way for ten years. The influence of repressive powers,
China and Russia plays an important role, and so do the supporters
of the bullshitter.
The existence of a powerful antidemocratic party in the US undermines
its influence for democracy in several ways: it makes the US a
disappointing example of democracy's functioning; it encourages
repressive and aggressive US policies, which set bad examples
themselves; its support for plutocracy weakens the US and thus
undermines its ability to do anything inspiring.
The right to take and publish photos in public places is under threat
from another direction: in the UK, some campaign to criminalize
photos of breast-feeding in public.
I sympathize with Ms Creasy's feeling of disgust, but we should not be
led into supporting a dangerous law by a feeling alone.
The right to take and publish photos is already threatened on several
fronts. Some US states have adopted "ag gag" bills that criminalize
publishing pictures of farms' treatment of animals.
Some countries, including Spain, criminalize publishing photos of thugs
committing acts of violence,
under vague and stretchable conditions. And many countries restrict
photos that include buildings whose architecture is copyrighted,
even in the background.
To combat these threats, we need to insist on a simple and general
principle: wherever you have the right to be, you have the right to
photograph anything that you can see, and to show the photograph to
others.
Those who wish to breast-feed in public and avoid others' looking at
or photographing their breasts have an easy way to prevent this: wear
(or don at the moment of need) a garment that can be arrayed to block
the view. This can achieve the goal more reliably than the proposed
law, while not putting anyone's rights in question.
Extinction Rebellion organized highly visible protests in London, in many cases
blocking the travel of cars which are mostly using fossil fuels.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
*Dangerous Republican Anti-Protest Laws Grant Drivers License to Kill.*
*Right-Wing Extremism Is on the Rise in Israel.*
It is ironic in the extreme to see that a party with views comparable
to Nazis is so powerful in Israel that it may soon be in government.
Comparing Biden's tax proposals with what FDR actually did.
Biden's plan goes further in regard to capital gains, though in some
others it does not go as far.
Ralph Nader: we must make Congress raise the taxes on rich businesses and
rich people.
US citizens: call on Congress to reduce drug prices this year.
Thousands are protesting in Bogotá against a plan by the right-wing
government to institute a sales tax.
A sales tax is a very regressive method, so this plan is designed to
hurt the poor and spare the rich. So I support the protesters.
Pedro Castillo, Socialist, says that as president of Peru he would make
mining companies "70% of the profits in Peru".
*Republican [state representative] who let violent protesters into
Oregon state capitol is charged.*
Apple takes a step to interfere with some kinds of tracking of users.
If Apple's operating were free/libre,
public-spirited hackers would
already have released a modified version which had the defaults set
to protect privacy. You could get the benefit of these modifications
without having to work on them yourself.
Proposing to end the profit-based decisions on whether to invest
in fossil fuel infrastructure.
The West Antarctic ice sheet could start to break up within this decade.
If it does, it will eventually raise sea level by an additional two feet.
I don't know how long it would take for that extra sea level rise to occur.
UK undercover thugs that infiltrated peaceful political groups lied
about their activities to justify continuing to spy on them.
This according to former minister Peter Hain, who participated in a
political campaign to end apartheid in South Africa and thereby became
one of the targets for this spying.
He charges that the choice to infiltrate that movement was made for
political reasons: the government supported South Africa and therefore
opposed pressure against apartheid.
*Four [UK] police officers have been convicted after one of them beat up a
member of the public and the others helped him to cover it up.*
The latest round of relief checks sent to US taxpayers made a big, though
temporary, dent in overall poverty in the US..
Making this permanent would convert it into a form of universal basic
income.
The popularity of extra support to Americans suggests it might be
politically possible to lift all children in the US out of poverty.
The US border thugs are now quickly transferring border-crossing
children to long-term shelters run by the Department of Health and
Human Services. Far fewer children are in the first-level camps at
any time.
This is how the system is supposed to work.
It is still necessary for journalists to look at the conditions in
those shelters, and in the first-level camps.
Climate defense activism, shared, can give people a feeling of joy
to cope with the external disasters.
A former Louisiana thug faces state and federal charges for attacking
and injuring a man he was arresting,
with no legitimate reason.
If we weed out the violent thugs for crimes that are not fatal,
we may be able to avoid most of the killings that some of them
would have gone on to commit.
*Free childcare equals class warfare, say Republicans.*
I agree, and it's time the non-rich fought back — let's march!
Children should grow up with less stress.
*Study Commissioned by Sanders Shows US Pays 2 to 4 Times More for
Prescription Drugs Than Other Nations.*
US laws provide a handout to pharma companies by restricting the
practice of buying prescription drugs at retail price in other
countries and selling them to Americans to fill their prescriptions.
That allows pharma companies to charge a higher price in the US
than anywhere else in the world.
The world's major powers increased their military spending
substantially in 2020.
Australia has made it a crime for Australians stuck in India to
return home. They face imprisonment, and ruinous fines.
Many of them have been stuck in India for a year trying to get a flight
home. The seats available were few and expensive.
Rebecca Solnit: climate scientists are starting to see hope that we
will do what is necessary, as fast as is necessary, to avoid climate
disaster.
But we are not on a course for safety yet. We need to fight for this.
The new hope is that, by fighting, we can win.
India's encounter with theocratic populism is much like that in the US.
Indian politicians threaten criminal charges against people that report
the shortage of oxygen.
I am disappointed that the article propagates a claim about the
emperor Nero that may be a lie concocted by his enemies.
Bolsonaro may face impeachment and prosecution for almost half
a million Brazilians that his policies caused to die.
A lawsuit in Florida attempts to defend the rights of some wetlands.
I may well agree that the construction of that housing should be
stopped. Aside from the threat to the wetlands, it sounds like the
construction is too close to sea level and likely to be flooded in a
few decades. I suspect that someone is being swindled. No one should
build anything in lowland areas of Florida.
However, the idea that the wetlands "have rights" seems like a kludge.
Philosophically, only a being that can have desires and make choices
can have rights. I would rather achieve the same result — blocking
bad development — in a conceptually coherent way.
England has restricted burning coal and wood inside houses, to reduce
toxic particulate pollution.
The Taliban made a deal with the US to protect US and other western
forces in Afghanistan, until their planned departure on May 1, from
other Islamist groups.
This follows the Taliban's pattern. In 2001, the Taliban offered to kick
out al-Qa'ida for the sake of peace with the US.
Too bad Dubya was not interested.
Tunisia has arranged a loan through the IMF, and (as usual) there
is an element of dooH niboR in it.
Wages will be reduced.
Will the profits of business shareholders be reduced?
Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner in Guantanamo based on an false accusation of being a member of al-Qa'ida, is suing the countries that kidnapped and tortured him.
US citizens: call on your senators to introduce a Senate counterpart
to the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act (H.R. 1694).
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
The FDA is planning to ban flavored cigarettes and cigars.
The flavored cigarettes in the US are mainly flavored with menthol.
ISTR reading that the menthol makes cigarettes more attractive to
teenagers.
A discussion of controversies about Substack.
Is it possible to read Substack and make a donation to a writer
without running nonfree software? The usual ways of paying most web
sites require the payer to run nonfree software, which is why I never
pay a web site.
The head of the OECD is in favor of Biden's proposed reform to the
international tax system.
I agree it would be a step forward, but the system I proposed to put
pressure on big companies to split themselves up would be much better.
A sheriff in Georgia faces charges for ordering torture of people in jail.
Progressives in Congress have asked Attorney General Garland to review
the case mounted by Chevron against Steven Donziger.
The thugs that injured Karen Garner have resigned.
I am heartened to see several cases in which thugs have been held accountable
for violence that was not fatal. This is the way to teach cops to avoid the
habits that lead to unjustified violence, which occasionally is fatal.
*New York mayor calls off ‘creepy, alienating’ police robo-dog.*
Putin has labeled Navalny's opposition movement as "terrorist".
We should not forget that "anti-terrorism" laws often turn out to be
anti-dissent laws.
Has Bogus Johnson taught most Britons to accept bullshit from their leaders?
*Female political prisoners in Iran facing ‘psychological torture’, say
campaigners.*
*[Three] UK students sue government over human rights impact of climate crisis.*
Mexico is trying to phase out glyphosate genetically modified corn,
but the US is trying to interfere.
*UN Treaty Could Force Mining Companies to Behave Responsibly.*
Thugs in Alameda, California, killed Mario Gonzalez by kneeling on his back,
then lied about it.
*The low-hanging fruit in the climate battle? Cutting down on meat.*
The Epoch Times is accused of sinking into far-fetched conspiracy theories
since 2017.
A priori I can't tell whether the accusation that it is fake news
is valid, or fake news itself. I would like to be able to verify this.
US citizens: call on Biden to add Medicare expansions and
improvements to the American Families Plan.
US citizens: call for green augmentation of Biden's
infrastructure plan.
Manchin argues for letting Republicans rig the 2022 election
because otherwise they would try to steal it by force.
Is it better if they rig it?
Using virtual reality to train cops on how to respond to difficult situations
and avoid killing innocent people.
If it enables them to see how their scores are worse when dealing with
blacks than with whites, could it train them out of unconscious bias?
Covid-safety of people in an indoor space depends greatly on the amount of
ventilation — and on use of face masks.
A New York City thug faces criminal charges for ordering subordinates not
to save a prisoner who was killing himself.
Elizabeth City, North Carolina, privately showed relatives a heavily
edited video of how thugs shot and killed Andrew Brown, Jr.
One thing they saw is that the thugs began shooting just as they said,
"Show us your hands", while in fact his hands were in plain view.
Vanuatu is about to chill all controversial public statements
with a law making libel a crime.
Even if that law is applied honestly, it will make all controversial
journalism dangerous. But such honesty is not likely, as the powerful
will keep trying to distort the law.
We have seen many examples of use of such laws for repression.
* Germany’s supreme constitutional court has ruled that the
government’s climate protection measures are insufficient to
protect future generations.* The government must adopt stronger
climate defense measures.
Three Extinction Rebellion activists were found not guilty of charges
for a protest against a denialist right-wing newspaper.
A court ordered the EPA make a proper decision about regulating
Chlorpyrifos.
Two more states have passed laws to allow parents to leave their
children alone for a while, without being accused of "neglect".
San Francisco is taking the police out of dealing with the homeless
and complaints about them.
The idea is to regard them as people that need help, rather than as
nuisances to be pushed away, which is how San Francisco has treated
them historically for a long time.
*Factory Owners Around the World Stand Ready to Manufacture Covid-19
Vaccines.*
Those who lobby not to allow them to try to do it
claim they could not.
After Portland thugs sprayed protesters with tear gas in July, over
1000 of the protesters reported medical problems that did not quickly
go away.
In particular, it seems to have a tendency to cause abnormal
menstruation. I wonder if it can cause abortions also. Would
Republicans ban tear gas, if so?
We say "tear gas", but I've read that there are different products
with different composition. They might have different medical
effects, too. I wonder what kind, or kinds, the Portland thugs
sprayed.
24 senators urged Biden to get to work on closing the Guantanamo prison.
The US should either offer them real trials or stop holding them in
prison.
Republicans in many states are working to draw new congressional districts
so as to dominate the House of Representatives with a minority of the votes.
Companies and apps are using AI to analyze people's voices to
manipulate them.
The government of Nigeria is permitting religious fanatics to jail
humanist Mubarak Bala for criticizing religion.
*Senate Urged to Reject Fossil Fuel Attorney Beaudreau for Deputy Interior
Secretary.*
Human Rights Watch has recognized that Israel intends to operate
an apartheid system permanently, in Palestine and in Israel.
New York City is suing Chipotle for failing to give workers
predictable schedules.
For workers that are terrified of losing their jobs, being compelled
to work at last minute is a big hardship.
DeJoy plans further sabotage of the USPS — closing facilities and
slowing delivery, in the name of cost savings that are probably
exaggerated.
(satire) *God Frustrated After Google Search Reveals Octopuses Already
Exist.*
(satire) *Researchers Determine Coelacanth Faked Own Extinction To
Escape Massive Gambling Debt.*
*Speed at which world’s glaciers are melting has doubled in 20 years.*
Chinese repression is squeezing journalists in Hong Kong.
However, China is hardly alone in repressing journalism more these days.
It is a global trend.
Plutocratist Democrats in the House of Representatives are pushing for an
increased tax deduction, almost entirely for high-income taxpayers.
Biden has proved to be much more progressive than I expected.
We need to keep pushing on the areas where he isn't; but mostly we need
to convince a few plutocratist Democrats in the Senate to eliminate
the filibuster.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to support
Medicare for All.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code
from the web site,
use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: call on your senators to support the George Floyd
Justice in Policing Act.
US citizens: call on Biden to halt use of land mines.
I was pleased to learn that New Zealand concluded that Ahmed Zaoui was
not a terrorist after all, and allowed him to live there in freedom.
I first heard about Zaoui when New Zealand had imprisoned him without trial,
Guantanamo-style, based on unverified suspicions.
Navalny is ending his hunger strike and has appeared in court in an
attempt to appeal his bogus conviction.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think that Navalny's dramatic return
to Russia, which at first galvanized opposition, has been defeated by
Putin's willingness to throw away all restraint.
People around 10 years older than me write about enjoying liberty
outdoors by themselves at the age of 4 or 5 years.
Local action to protect the Great Barrier Reef would extend its life for
only two decades, unless we also curb greenhouse emissions.
*Study links childhood air pollution exposure to poorer mental health.*
What makes it interesting is that it controls for other variables that
might affect people's mental health.
*Tribes without clean water demand an end to decades of US government neglect.*
The American Families Plan would help low-wage families in several ways.
We still need to reduce drug prices.
As well as a national medical system.
China has set up to arbitrarily ban certain people from leaving Hong Kong,
as it arbitrarily bans certain people from leaving China.
The Soviet Union and its puppet countries famously required people to
get an "exit visa" in order to leave the country. This practice was a
constant reminder of that empire's tyranny.
New Zealand proposes to "fight terrorism" by giving thugs the power to
search anywhere without a search warrant when they say it's because they
suspect terrorism.
This would be a grave error. Terrorism is a real danger. Unchecked
policing is a real danger, too.
Philippine journalist Maria Ressa has won the Unesco press freedom
prize.
Let's hope this convinces President Do-dirty that putting her in prison on
bizarre charges
would not be wise for him.
I call him Do-dirty because he boasts of sending thugs to kill people
in the street.
He says that those killed are drug traffickers. I
suppose some of them really are drug traffickers.
The "music industry" represses people who listen to music, using unjust copyright laws such as the DMCA
The "music industry" plants its boot on people who listen to music, using
a repressive copyright system
such as the DMCA,
in the name of musicians and composers. At the same time, it
increases its plutocratist exploitation of musicians and composers to the point
where those get almost none of the money that the companies squeeze out of us.
I've proposed two better ways for listeners to support the musicians
and composers.
Let's make a deal with them, and tell Spotify and the music
copyright industry to dry up and blow away.
The first, personal step: always listen to music from a non-DRM copy
in your own computer — never from a streaming dis-service. By
insisting on having a copy, you make sure that the possibility of sharing
a copy is always available to you.
The copyright industry is lobbying the WTO against an exception to
vaccine patents.
Since copyrights and patents are independent laws, different on every
detail, why would the copyright industry care about this question? I
think it is the result of lumping these and other unrelated laws
together under the umbrella term "intellectual property". That is
meant to teach people to imagine a mythical principle of "intellectual
property," which is so important that it overrides practical needs of
whatever kind.
The world would be better off if we eliminate patents entirely.
We should do so, in software
and in general.
I do not advocate entirely eliminating copyright — rather, reducing it
to some extent.
But we should entirely reject the term and myth of "intellectual property."
Florida is still working on a voter-suppression bill.
The prohibition on handing out food or water to people waiting on long
voting lines (themselves a consequence of voter-suppression measures)
may be omitted.
North Carolina thugs shot Andrew Brown in the back of the head as he
was driving away from them.
The FBI is going to investigate the thugs' actions.
The thugs were carrying body cameras but the thug department seems
reluctant to show the video.
Sanders and Democrats in Congress call for publication of the wrecker's
secret vaccine contracts.
The imperfect democracy that the US has is our only avenue for
addressing the injustices and threats we now face. With Republicans
dead-set on negating it, we must now defend it.
There are two kinds of criticism of American democracy: the kind that
accepts democracy in principle, and the kind that rejects it. We are all
aware of the flaws in the way the democratic system functions in the US, and
of campaigns to fix them.
What is shocking is the existence of progressives who reject democracy
in principle. What do they imagine as a better alternative?
*America Needs a 21st-Century Civilian Climate Corps.*
Reducing greenhouse emissions is curing the disease. Protecting
people and places from the effects of greenhouse emissions is treating
the symptoms. We must make sure to cure the disease, and then if we
have resources to spare, we can treat the symptoms.
The place to get those resources is from the rich.
Florida is passing laws to obstruct the transition to renewable energy.
The Republican death cult has decided that global heating is not a
threat and efforts to curb global heating are acts of the devil.
So they will do anything they can think of to interfere with that.
Likewise, efforts to curb Covid-19 are acts of the devil and they will
do anything they can think of to interfere with that.
Yet another accusation of "cultural appropriation" — this one aiming
to establish racial restrictions on wearing certain hair styles.
Each person is entitled to the right to wear per hair in any style.
*Brazil begins parliamentary inquiry into Bolsonaro’s Covid response.*
Colorado cops arrested a 73-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease
who had tried to leave a store with a little merchandise she had not
paid for (and maybe did not remember she had). Staff had taken it
from her already.
The cops
broke
her arm and caused her other injuries.
*Police video shows officers
joking
about violent arrest of Colorado woman.*
The threat to ocean life is not just overfishing — pollution is involved too.
*Protests erupt in N’Djamena as Chadians demand civilian rule.*
A pressure campaign demands that Simon & Schuster refuse to publish
books by right-wing politicians even if they did not support the
attack on the Capitol — for instance, Pence.
I find this frightening. I disagree with Pence on issues across the
board, but it is wrong to make it impossible for him and other
right-wingers to publish books.
*Drought-hit California [prepares to order] Nestlé to stop pumping millions of
gallons of water.*
Companies like Nestlé and its successor privatize the profits while
dumping the cost on the public.
Biden proposes to give the IRS a lot more money to audit the tax returns
of people with a lot of income.
* Human Rights Watch calls on international criminal court to
investigate ‘systematic discrimination’ against Palestinians*
in Palestinian territory and in Israel.
* A coronavirus “vaccination persuasion” initiative targeting elderly
people who have declined invitations to get vaccinated is gearing up to
be rolled out across Turkey.*
The climate-striking students in the UK call for a boycott of an exhibit
about the climate in the Science Museum, sponsored by Shell.
Oil companies have used their money in clever and subtle ways to deny,
then downplay, then delay action to reduce fossil fuel use. We should
not trust them to have influence in education about the climate.
*Slashing Methane Emissions Must Play Larger Role in Fighting Climate
Crisis, UN Says.*
*House Dems Propose Lifting 'Cruel' Ban on Former Drug Felons
Receiving Food and Cash Aid.*
It is harmful for society overall if people who have been convicted of crimes
are thereafter excluded from survival without crime.
A mob in Papua New Guinea tortured two women with burning metal,
demanding they confess to being witches.
This sort of atrocity still occurs in many parts of the world.
Our internet hate mobs are the same sort of psychological phenomenon,
but without the physical violence.
Bill Gates is still campaigning hard against generic Covid-19 vaccines.
France supported the dictator of Chad (who was just killed by rebels)
in exchange for his help in fighting PISSI.
I agree that fighting PISSI is a good thing to do, but keeping a
dictator in power (and now his son and heir) is not.
Google has decided to protect users of Android from being tracked — except
by Google.
What gives Google the power to make this choice and impose it on users?
That is due to Google's nonfree software in Android.
*Revealed: UK solar projects using panels from firms linked to
Xinjiang forced labour.*
The effective way to get away from using products of China's forced
labor is to plan to develop production capacity outside China, and
plan to refuse to buy the products from China. However, the WTO may
make that difficult.
Which is one more reason why the WTO, which is a business-supremacy treaty,
is an injustice. Add that to the obstruction of generic Covid-19 vaccines
and a long list of other injustice.
Australia's retirement funds have decided to cast their votes in
corporations' bodes in favor of greenhouse emission reduction targets.
To be sure, following the Paris treaty is aiming for failure,
and 2050 is far too late; but it is a shift to start pushing aside
the Australian government's planet-roaster policies.
*United Airlines received billions in Covid aid. Now thousands of workers
could lose their jobs.*
Why didn't Congress attach conditions to that "bailout" money? It's
not that nobody thought of doing that. The same Covid relief law,
passed a year ago, included "forgivable" loans to small businesses and
organizations; in order to convert these loans into grants, the
organization had to maintain the level of staffing. Why not put the
same conditions on handouts to airlines?
"Eliminalia" is a network of 300 fraudulent "news" web sites which
eliminate
real news articles by posting copies of them, backdating them, and
filing DMCA takedowns on them.
David Jones was jailed, pre-trial, for 14 months. Then his charges were
dropped, but the jail demands he pay $4,000 for the service of jailing him.
I imagine him daring the jail to jail him again because he will never
pay a cent either way. If it does, it will have to spend even more
money on him. How long will it take the jail to give up and limit its
loss?
The now-right-wing Supreme Court could sweep away laws requiring disclosure
of who donates campaign funds.
Twitter is censoring tweets that criticize the Indian government's
handling of Covid-19, upholding the Indian government's contempt for
freedom of speech.
US citizens: call on Biden to make the American Families Plan reduce
drug prices.
The European Union's policies against concentration of industry are so weak
that hardly ever is a merger blocked.
Thanks to action by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, people
who are evicted during the Covid emergency will be able to sue.
Proposing a campaign to ask US restaurants to admit only clients who
can prove having been vaccinated.
I think we should not start this now. Many people in the US have not
had a chance to become fully vaccinated yet — they became eligible
for vaccination only recently. We should wait a month or two, until
the time when everyone over 16 will have had a chance to be fully
vaccinated.
A small fraction of Americans cannot be vaccinated, for medical
reasons. Allowing them in will make little difference in public
health, so restaurants ought to do so.
People under 16 can't get vaccinated yet, but in fancy restaurants only
a few of the clients are so young, and there is no significant risk
of transmission between them as long as they are few in number.
With these two exceptions, people who cooperate with public health
measures, as much as they can safely do, will not be excluded.
Thus, the only people excluded will be those who intentionally
refuse to join in putting an end to Covid-19 in the US.
UK thugs issued a fine of 10,000 UKP (more than 12,000 USD)
for a peaceful protest, without bothering with a trial.
The Tory government wants to make it clear that thugs can do this
with no accountability.
*In space, no one will hear Bezos and Musk's workers' call for basic rights.*
*US policing is far less about fighting crime than controlling the poor.*
Organized opportunities for groups of children to organize their own games.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Made in America tax plan.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act.
This is just the first step of what we need to restore digital privacy.
Many courses that aim to train people out of unconscious bias use
methods too weak to do the job.
*Before Chauvin: decades of Minneapolis police violence that failed to spark
reform.*
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid that bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.) I object to bigotry, and
normally I decline to link to articles which promote it. But I make
an exception for articles which give important information about
racism or the fight to eliminate racism. This is one of the
exceptions.
Calling on the US State Department to take its own conclusions seriously
by insisting on the human-rights conditions on military aid to Egypt.
Why not replace it with civilian aid?
*Fears Covid anxiety syndrome could stop people reintegrating.*
I see parallels with the Americans who were paralyzed with fear of
terrorist attacks in the 2000s, and the parents who won't let their
children alone for a minute.
[The bullshitter's] $27m-a-mile border wall being scaled with $5 ladders.
US citizens: call on live event producers to reject imposing face
recognition in the name of Covid safety.
US citizens: support the Democrats' Green New Deal.
Indeed, it is not as good as the Green Party's Green New Deal,
but it's better than none at all.
US citizens: call on Congress to fix the Supreme court.
Increasing its size may not be the best method. I think it would be
better to reduce the size to six, if it is possible to ensure that the
three most-recently-appointed justices are the ones that are moved to
other federal courts.
None of these methods can actually be enacted now without first
eliminating the filibuster.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Women who work in massage parlors in New York City are afraid thugs
will pressure them into sex or into prostitution, or what could be
portrayed as prostitution, whether or not they normally do sex work —
and then arrest them.
This means that the decision not to prosecute prostitution in
Manhattan any more (following Brooklyn's example) makes them much
safer. But not as safe as they would be if sex work were not a crime
at all.
Meanwhile, I've read that some of the sex workers in massage parlors
are enslaved. It happens in a wide range of occupations,
and that includes sex work.
Arresting them does no good against enslavement, but
has anyone found a method that is effective for freeing them?
Exposing phony "news sites" whose purpose is to fabricate backdated
"original" news stories, so as to accuse journalists of copyright
infringement on their own writing.
(satire) *Person Criticizing Police Has No Idea What It’s Like To Wake
Up Every Day And Put Lives In Danger.*
The UK government turned to minor crimes, committed decades ago, as
reasons to exclude people of Jamaican origin from the UK citizenship
they had been entitled to claim earlier if they realized it would be
important.
(satire) D.C. becoming its own planet
(satire) *Republicans Argue D.C. Statehood Slippery Slope To District
One Day Becoming Own Planet.*
Seriously, it would be a great thing if a part of the Earth could
become a separate planet capable of supporting human civilization.
Then civilization would have two chances for survival.
(satire) *Milwaukee Promotes Itself As Hip, Affordable Place To Live
With All The Police Brutality Of Chicago.*
The big banks, in the US and elsewhere, continue financing fossil fuels,
for all that they talk about wanting to reduce greenhouse emissions.
The big US banks also were behind the recession of 2008, followed by
taking the homes of millions of Americans with fraudulent
foreclosures.
Afterward, there was a campaign 10 years ago to move our money out of
those banks, and I did.
It's not too late to participate in this campaign.
*Pentagon review panel recommends taking sexual assault investigations out of
commanders' hands.*
I object to the vagueness of accusing a person of "sexual assault" —
people have a right to a more specific accusation. However, in this
issue we are not talking about any specific person or any specific
alleged action. Rather, it is a proposal for how to handle trials for
all crimes of a sexual nature. That doesn't constitute vagueness
about any individual.
The fundamental problem of military "justice" overall is "command
influence" — the fact that your trial is under the control of one of your
commanders and the judges also report to that commander. The
consequence is that the court has a tendency to rule as that commander
wishes.
In the 19th century, with travel so slow, it may have been necessary
to hold courts martial locally. That is no longer necessary now. So
it is good to see a plan to eliminate command influence, even if it is
for just some kinds of charges. If this is adopted, perhaps
eventually the US military will do this for all kinds of charges.
The US will continue air attacks in Afghanistan after withdrawing
ground troops.
However, the US may withdraw all its military contractors,
including those that act as mercenaries.
Russia's military buildup near Ukraine seems to have been a bargaining
point.
*Covid spread as overcrowding doubles among private renters in England.*
Many aspects of life in poverty tend to make people sick, and shorten
their lives.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the NO BAN Act.
It would prohibit religious discrimination in regard to entering the US.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
*Fifth of UK Covid contracts ‘raised red flags for possible
corruption’.*
The Gambia has eradicated trachoma, following the example of Ghana.
We can eradicate trachoma globally with the same methods. All it
requires is spending money, plus having the trust of the people. If
there is trachoma in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it may be impossible to
make progress there.
Biden's proposals for emissions cuts look large, partly because they
are presented in misleading ways.
For instance, using 2005 as a basis for measuring greenhouse gas
emissions reductions exaggerates the amount of reduction being
proposed.
Green Party: *The President is offering half of a parachute when we’re
about to be kicked out of an airplane.*
The article describes the Green Party's plan for a full Green New Deal.
Australia is also using fudged accounting to magnify small planned reductions.
The world may be at a tipping point for climate defense action.
Amazon is offering customers the option of using palm-prints to identify themselves.
In situations where it is acceptable to demand people identify
themselves, palm-prints are somewhat better than fingerprints, because
people in other activities leave fewer palm prints than fingerprints.
However, people people should not have to identify themselves to buy
things.
CVS recently donated millions of dollars to a lobbying campaign against single-payer medical care.
We could think of it as PAHCEF, or Partnership for America's Heath
Care's Expensive Future.
Wealthy countries set up a scheme called Covax to donate vaccine to
poor countries, instead of permitting alternate producers. But Covax
is running far behind its schedule. The manufacturers are not
delivering as much as they promised.
I continue to support ordering the vaccine companies to stop impeding
the generic manufacture of vaccines.
Biden's new restrictions on financing fossil fuel development outside the US
are simultaneously a great advance and terribly inadequate.
This is the Biden pattern. Starting from such a low level of climate defense,
it is not difficult to make a great advance and be terribly inadequate.
For decades, US urban transportation facilities have been situated in
places where they cut off or eliminated black neighborhoods.
Their disenfranchisement (even where not official) left them unable to
stop this.
Greta Thunberg: *We can keep using creative carbon accounting and
cheat in order to pretend that these targets are in line with what is
needed. But we must not forget that while we can fool others and even
ourselves, we cannot fool nature and physics.*
(satire) *EPA Hoping To Streamline Ecosystem By Hosting Team-Building Lunch
Meet-And-Greets Between Species.*
*EU lawmakers propose strict curbs on use of facial recognition.*
The proposal described here comes in range of what is really needed.
But since massive tracking of people's past movements is enough
to make society repressive, that too must be regulated. I've proposed that
the right action to regulate is systematically collecting images of people
and making them available for automatic identification.
A new vaccine against malaria prevented 3/4 of the expected cases of
malaria in its test.
In combination with other measures, maybe this will make it possible
to eradicate malaria.
California Governor Newsom decided to stop fracking — slowly.
The state will take 3 years simply to stop issuing new permits
for fracking. And it will end oil extraction, so many decades from now
that it will be too late.
Newsom seems to think we've got all century!
*NIH Scientist Who Developed Key Vaccine Technology Says Patent Gives
US Leverage Over Big Pharma.*
The question is whether the US wants to use this leverage. Around 1980,
the US changed its policy on technology developed with government funds.
Before that, it prioritized public access to that technology. Then, with
the Bayh-Dole bill, it it switched to the trickle-down goal of giving
companies "more incentive".
Several Extinction Rebellion protesters were found innocent of various
minor offenses they committed in a protest against Shell.
They presented the defense of necessity, and the jury acquitted them
even though the judge said not to.
*Pharmaceutical Industry Dispatches Army of Lobbyists to Block Generic Covid-19 Vaccines.*
When you talk about this issue, please choose not to employ the term
"intellectual property". It is subtle propaganda for the other side.
*Virginia family questions why sheriff’s deputy shot [Isaiah Brown] 10 times.*
*Brazil's indigenous groups protest bill that would allow commercial mining on
their land.*
That's the sort of thing we'd expect Bolsonaro to support.
Australia's federal government is using new laws to prevent China from
spending money to buy influence in Australia.
The phone-cracking program Cellebrite has such bad security that
a special poison file in a phone being cracked could alter any
and all of the data in the Cellebrite installation.
(satire) *FBI Says Chauvin Matches Profile Of Blue-Uniformed Killer
Behind Hundreds More Unsolved Murders.*
Reporters Without Borders says that 3/4 of countries have used Covid-19 as
an excuse to interfere with reporters' access to information.
*To Confront 'Systemic Failures,' DOJ Announces Federal Probe Into Minneapolis
Police Department.*
That's the sort of thing we need, to reduce the lawlessness of cops.
When Ireland helps multinational corporations pay less tax,
they pay Ireland a fraction of the tax they avoided paying elsewhere.
Ireland says it will fight hard to continue this betrayal of the
rest of the world.
My proposed progressive tax on businesses
can be implemented by one country or several coumtries, regardless of what the rest of the world does.
Several large US cities have adopted a policy of not prosecuting
anyone for prostitution.
This is a big step forward. I think sex work should be legal,
and sex workers should be free to work with support businesses for
advertising, security and finance. If they cannot work because
of an epidemic, they should get unemployment payments.
Legalization does not have to mean deregulation. It is reasonable
to require sex workers follow hygeine standards and get regular tests
for STDs, for public health.
Meanwhile, some sex workers are enslaved. Prohibiting sex work has
failed to prevent enslavement; indeed, it can help keeping trafficked
sex workers in slavery because they don't see how they could survive
if they escape. We should design other methods so that they work.
The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act would forbid the government agencies
in the US from buying location tracking data in bulk.
This is a good but small start at what we need to do to restore
privacy. We should prohibit systems that collect personal data
without a specific warrant.
Contrasting the cases of Alexei Navalny and Julian Assange: they
receive similar repression, but the former gets mainstream western
support, and the latter does not.
I support them both. I have some political disagreements
with each of them, but I set those aside because of their heroism
in a good cause.
In general, the right way to criticize a double standard
is to apply the right standard, and criticize judgment based
on a wrong standard.
*[The Revolving Door Project] Gives Biden White House 'B-' on
Corporate Capture in First 100 Days.*
That is better than I would have expected from a US administration.
Reportedly one Capitol Police officer gave radio instructions on Jan 6
to focus on hypothetical progressive counterprotesters and disregard the
wrecker's insurrectionists.
*Children need free time to figure out how to handle stressful situations.*
*US vows to cut its emissions at least 50% by 2030 ahead of climate summit.*
Hypothetical sunlight-dimming technology would not be a correct
substitute for sufficient cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Promoting them
as if they were a substitute tends to encourage fewer cuts.
The US should require a license to have or carry a gun, just as it
requires a license to drive a car.
*FTC Declares Racially Biased Algorithms in Artificial Intelligence
Unfair and Deceptive, Prohibited by Law.*
This should have a real effect against that problem.
(satire) *Depressed Police Officer Reminds Self That Chauvin Verdict
Not Representative Of System At Large.*
(satire) *Police Ask Tesla To Drive In Straight Line, Recite Alphabet
Backwards After Vehicle Crashes Into Tree.*
The International Life Sciences Institute gets its funding from big
food companies, and works to form the standards of scientific
integrity to make it easy for those companies to get away with things.
Simon & Schuster rejected demands from staff to cancel publication of
Pence's memoir.
I thoroughly oppose Pence's politics, and I would not regret if his book
were not published, But I also oppose the efforts of the publisher's staff
to bully the company into cancelling books.
Iran as much as admits that it is holding dual-citizens hostage for
exchanges.
I conclude that it is not safe for citizens of likely target countries
to visit Iran. But the chance that any given person will be targeted
is small enough that they will convince themselves that "It won't
happen to me."
The Burmese army is arresting medics and doctors, even people who have
first-aid supplies on the assumption that they mean to aid civilians that
the army shoots.
Covid-19 is spreading in India at an alarming rate. Hospitals have
run out of beds and are running out of oxygen for ventilators. Even
young, healthy adults are dying in large numbers.
This is the result of a right-wing truth-rejecting government
that recklessly "reopened the economy".
As well as causes that people could not easily have changed.
*Four in 10 Americans live in counties with unhealthy air pollution
levels.*
Do we know a feasible way to substantially reduce toxic air pollution?
*101 Nobel laureates call for global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.*
Derek Chauvin has been convicted of murdering George Floyd.
That killing was one instance of a recurring pattern.
Lesser
instances, which are not fatal but do oppress, happen all over the
country every day. One conviction is just a step towards the goal of
ending that.
I wonder — if Chauvin had let Floyd up after 7 minutes, and Floyd had
survived with evident brain damage, would Chauvin have been prosecuted at all?
In Mexico, election season is also drug gang war season, since the
rival gangs want to control state governments.
Turkey is deporting Iranian exiles to Iran after they joined Turks in
protests.
Some Christian clerics are working for climate defense.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support
H.R. 2509 / S. 1139, which would eliminate the mechanism for the
military draft. Specifically, it would do these things:
*The UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak, must radically overhaul the
Treasury’s response to the climate crisis, reforming the department’s
longstanding hostility to green spending and resetting its priorities,
experts said.*
UK is suffering from the problem of giving children less freedom.
This shows up in not letting them go outside to play on their own.
Greece set up a system for Covid-19 vaccination that depends on a
Greek social security number. Foreigners, and Greeks who came home to retire,
are excluded in practice.
This seems to bespeak incredible bureaucratic rigidity.
Some of the companies that publicly support voting rights
also help fund the US Chamber of Commerce, which campaigns
for the same voter suppression laws.
Systemic racism is visible in vaccination: blacks and Hispanics face
practical obstacles in dealing with the system of vaccination, and the result
is that vaccination has reached a smaller fraction of them and a larger
fraction of whites.
*Poll Finds Majority of US Voters Back Green New Deal and Want
Lawmakers to Co-Sponsor Resolution.*
If the US had an effective democracy, the strong backing from voters
would lead to passage within a few years. However, a plutocratic
system can reject it for decades.
*A Former Lobbyist Explains How the Privatization Movement Is Trying to End
Public Education.*
Its goal is to make parents pay for education of their children.
Parents with low income would have to beg or borrow for elementary school.
The article refers to "libertarians" and their policies, but that term
is misleading. They are not about liberty; the aim of those policies
is to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor: that is, dooH
niboR. I refer to those people and policies as "antisocialist".
A few decades ago, the IMF bullied many poor countries to eliminate
their public education programs,
in accord with the then-prevailing "neoliberal" economics.
How did that
view of economics come to prevail? By means of contributions to
academia from various rich people who saw it as a long-term method to
obtain laws for dooH niboR.
The Energy Charter Treaty, a business-supremacy treaty, threatens to
make European countries pay hundreds of billions of dollars in
"compensation" for taking explicit action to cut down on fossil fuels.
When a treaty puts the business interests of private parties over the
vital needs of society, that must make the treaty invalid.
Biden is changing the US industrial policy. The old one gives
handouts to businesses for the sake of billionaire's enrichment.
The new one must reject that practice.
(satire) *Rainforest Tree Remains Very Still In Hopes That Bulldozer
Will Lose Interest And Drive Away.*
The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act would invest in public
housing to build more, make it cheaper and safer to live in, and
reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and achieve this by making good jobs.
Disinfecting surfaces is much less important, for preventing Covid-19,
than wearing a mask, keeping distance from other people, and
frequently washing hands.
The principal union of US coal miners has accepted the need to put an end to
coal mining.
This raises a number of issues of justice.
The miners have the duty, like the mine owners, to cooperate fully
with rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as toxic
pollution.
Former miners, present and future, deserve the things that the union
now demands for them. They deserve this not as an exchange for
ceasing to campaign against civilization's survival, but because all
unemployed and retired people deserve those benefits, to the extent we
can provide them. They are parts of a proper welfare system.
One demand is to properly clean up and close abandoned mines. That is
a necessary part of reducing the toxic pollution over the long term.
The US is planning to pressure other countries to move faster to curb
global heating, after announcing plans to do that itself.
This is what all countries should have done starting 20 years ago or
more, and they would have done so if not for the influence of the
planet roasters.
Better late than never, but we hope it is not too late.
*Compulsory worship of national symbols is the sure sign of a culture in
decline.*
*Cambodia accused of using Covid to edge towards ‘totalitarian dictatorship’.*
*Why is the right obsessed with ‘defending’ borders? Because it sees
citizenship as a commodity.*
*Alexei Navalny moved to hospital as fears grow for life of Putin critic.*
Huawei equipment seems to have been able to snoop on all calls in the
main Dutch mobile phone network.
To put this in context, mobile phones enable much more spying than
that.
*Environment protest being criminalised around world, say experts.*
*Extinction Rebellion prosecutions showed the spectrum of climate protest.*
Everyone:
support
Biden’s decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass the Washington DC statehood bill.
If you sign, please spread the word!
It is
difficult
for journalists to adapt their methods to the awareness that cops
often lie.
The National Security Education Day celebration in Hong Kong
sold
souvenirs of the repression of 2019.
I wonder how long before China takes note of anyone who does not buy
them with proper enthusiasm.
Biden plans to
extend
the bully's war on fentanyl.
Covid-19 is
speeding
the demise of many endangered languages. The remaining native
speakers are usually old, and thus in special danger from the disease.
A language, like a species, is a self-propagating bundle of
information. If its propagation is interrupted, it is lost
forever.
Passing a language through a stage of existing only in dictionaries
and teaching tools is damaging, too — comparable in a very broad
sense to a population bottleneck that strips a species of genetic
diversity.
Potowatomi's close relative, Ojibwe, is much healthier.
Bolsonaro has proposed an
inadequate-hearted
effort to reduce deforestation, but
only
if other countries pay Brazil to do it.
Biden has announced a plan to remove US ground troops from
Afghanistan, but it looks like
US
airplanes, drones and mercenaries will continue fighting there.
Biden has continued the bully's secrecy about drone bombings, so we
will be told nothing about what is going on.
If it is true (we can't really know) that these attacks are mainly
directed at al-Qa'ida and PISAP (Pseudo-Islamic State in Afghanistan
and Pakistan) rather than the Taliban, they may not prevent movement
in the direction of peace. The Taliban are at war with PISSA, and I
think they might find al-Qa'ida an inconvenience if they win.
The P1 variant of Covid-19 that dominates in Brazil is
especially
dangerous to pregnant patients, so officials have urged people to
avoid pregnancy now.
Avoiding pregnancy in Brazil faces the extra obstacles of restrictive
abortion laws and fervent Christianity. Indeed, you might want to get
an abortion now so as not to die if you catch Covid-19, but the
government will make that difficult.
In Brazil, Covid-19 is
killing
lots of young, vigorous, formerly healthy people. It could be
that the Brazilian variant is the explanation.
Putin plans to criminalize support for Navalny's opposition movement
by arbitrarily
designating
it an "extremist group".
I've denounced for years the US practice of designating organizations
as "terrorist" without holding a trial to prove it. When the US shows
contempt for human rights, other countries are quick to follow the
same path.
The Tories have made
private
corruption of the state's work into normal practice.
Various aspects of the response to Covid-19 were contracted out to
companies that didn't have the capacity to do the job at all. Almost
everything that the UK government tried to do, failed. Vaccine
production was the exception because the Tories didn't have the choice
to hire unknown companies to make pharmaceuticals.
The latest lifelong UK resident to be denied a UK passport is,
ironically, a
member
of British nobility.
With his position, he won't suffer much difficulty — unlike the
people who were
forced
to live in Jamaica for lack of records of living in Britain as
children.
*Witnesses to deaths in detention ‘deliberately’ deported from the UK.*
Betraying their country is the standard practice of Republican
candidates for the presidency. That has been so since 1968.
The New York City thug department has acquired a dog-robot. Is that
good or bad?
I can see very good uses for that robot, to save people's lives.
But it can also be used against protesters. The question is, as I see it,
is how the thug department will decide what to do with it. As it is,
I would not trust it to make good decisions.
A documentary about an activist for liberal Islam.
She faces death threats from Islamist extremists.
They are not threatening only us "infidels".
An interview with Maria Ressa, Philippine journalist facing imprisonment.
Systematically pressuring BlackRock and other investment companies to
stop promoting fossil fuels and disaster.
Some of the methods of disinformation that Amazon used to win the union vote.
*Big Tech Is Pushing States to Pass Privacy Laws, and Yes, You Should
Be Suspicious.*
In general, these bills' approach to "privacy" is that of "data
protection" — limiting the use of personal data once sites collect it
— and that is fundamentally inadequate.
The only real way to protect privacy is to limit the data that
systems can collect about people.
For the mainstream media, a political idea is "divisive" or
"controversial" if rich people don't like it.
The new renewable electric capacity installed in 2020 equaled 3/4 of
the world's total nuclear generating capacity.
With a little push, we could build enough extra renewable capacity
to replace all the existing nuclear generation, and shut those plants down.
The UK is prosecuting ex-thugs for false statements about what they did
at the time of a fatal panic in 1989.
Those false statements were intended to evade the cops'
responsibility for the deaths.
The US should learn that Blue Lies Matter.
We must learn to recognize fascism so we can take care not to treat its talking points as ordinary politics.
Australia's government is doing all possible to continue fossil fuel extraction
while saying it aims to reduce greenhouse emissions at some distant date.
The corruption of the Tory party today is measured in millions
and directly involves current and former ministers.
*Statement to CEOs: If You Really Want to Stop Voter Suppression,
Support the For the People Act.*
More about this.
* We must ensure that temporary Covid-19 data surveillance
infrastructures do not needlessly outlast this once-in-a-century
pandemic.*
US citizens: call on Biden to close the Guantanamo prison.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to co-sponsor the Keep It
in the Ground Act.
It is a small first step, but it is nonetheless in the right direction.
US citizens: call on Biden to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline.
*Supermarket ‘bags for life’ must cost more to cut plastic use, urge
campaigners.*
Covid-19 is spreading fast in most of the world, and 3 million people
have died.
A system to collect clams faster and in large quantities
could endanger them and other species.
In general, equipment that collects wild animals or plants, in bulk,
faster than people used to do is potentially dangerous.
*Alexei Navalny allies call for mass protests in Russia to save his
life.*
Brazilian progressive organizations call on Biden not to give money to
Bolsonaro's government in exchange for a promised partial reduction in
deforestation.
How US police unions developed into thug unions: they built so much
power that they demanded, and got, basically everything they could
think of wanting.
I support most of what these unions have obtained for their members.
Indeed, I think workers in general deserve those benefits.
The two exceptions, the benefits that cops should not have, are (1)
payment for their family court bills, which is unfair to their present
and former spouses, and (2) impunity after committing violence against
the public, whether based on racism or not.
*Man smokes legal weed in Nevada, gets arrested in Dubai, could face 3 years [in prison].*
If they are reasonable about applying their laws, they will recognize
that he did not commit any crime in Dubai. But one can't count on
that — and they might keep him in jail for months while deciding.
So stay away from Dubai, and the UAE in general.
The US mainstream media use many methods to help cover up the facts
after a thug shoots somebody,
including the basic fact that the thug did the shooting and that
killed someone.
I had not identified this pattern of vagueness, but I had noticed that
the first stories I see about such a killing don't say enough abot
what happened to be useful to link to. I wait a few days and see stories
that make it clear.
The Interior Department just reverted many of the wrecker's policy changes
that favored fossil fuels.
Banks and investment companies spent almost 3 billion dollars on
political campaigns for the last election.
Probably more than that, since 1 billion can't be traced.
We need to pass the We the People amendment.
The US and China stated a joint commitment to curbing global heating.
Both countries have to cut down greenhouse emissions much faster than
they are committed to doing. China's commitment to "net zero emissions"
(a vague way to formulate the goal)
by 2060 is far too slow.
Convincing antisocial media to curb the spread of hate.
The companies' business model leads them to promote hostility because
hostility in general gets the biggest amount of "user engagement."
US voters favor by 2 to 1 eliminating the patent and secrecy obstacles to
broader vaccine manufacturing.
Please don't use the term "intellectual property" to refer to those
two very different artificial obstacles.
The End Polluter Welfare Act of 2021 would eliminate several tax
Breaks that promote fossil fuels, as well as increasing a tax that
pays for medical care for coal miners with black lung disease.
(satire) *Loose-Cannon ACLU Investigator Beats Recantation Out Of
Confessed Murderer.*
*Trump EPA appointee blocked public release of cancer danger,
inspector general says.*
*Nobel Laureate Warns of 'Devastating Marriage' Between Artificial
Intelligence and Killer Robots.*
I agree that the US should sign the land mine ban treaty.
(satire) *In an attempt to address community outcry over recent police
encounters, [Chicago] Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a reform
effort Friday that would require all city teenagers to undergo
mandatory deescalation training.*
(satire) *Minnesota Deploys National Guard Ahead Of Next Week’s Police
Shooting.*
Famous children's books from the 1950s and 60s present a way of life
in which children had considerable freedom.
I especially enjoyed the hours between the end of school and when my
mother got home from teaching — the hours when I could be alone.
(satire) *Russian Diplomats Given 30 Days To Complete Espionage Before
Being Expelled.*
Many weed killer products combine glyphosate with various secret "inert"
ingredients. The "inert" ingredients vary from product to product, and
some of them are highly toxic to bees.
I don't think we should continue to permit the practice of adding
secret ingredients that are presumed to be harmless.
An unfair election with various dirty tricks enabled a right-wing candidate
to win Ecuador's presidential election.
Plutocracy is leading many governments to respond to the cost of
dealing with Covid-19 by making budget cuts.
That could lead to recessions, amounting to more unemployment and more
suffering for the poor.
A bill in Congress would require Israel not to use US aid for
violating Palestinians' human rights.
Based on the description here, I support the bill. However, I wonder
how such requirements deal with the fact that funds are fungible. For
the sake of such conditions, how does one determine whether the funds
spent on the specific actions that violate Palestinians' human rights
came from the US aid money or not?
Maybe there is a standard answer to this — if anyone can tell me, I would
appreciate it.
*Tech giants are happy to do Modi’s bidding in return for access to
the Indian market.*
US citizens: call on Biden to advocate an increased estate tax.
Attorney General Garland pledged to tackle systemic racism in the
practices of US thug departments.
The Keep It in the Ground act would ban new fossil fuel leases on
public lands.
It is just a first step towards stopping the expansion of fossil fuel
extraction. To achieve that goal would require banning construction
of new wells on land already leased, and extending the ban to private
lands, too.
This article describes a more complete effort to decarbonize.
But even a first step would be good.
A black reporter contrasts his fear of uniformed thugs and their
violence with cops' fear of black men who might be violent.
One crucial difference is that cops tend to enjoy impunity for their violence.
Interviews with Afghans living under Taliban rule.
The US has mostly failed to release non-dangerous prisoners from jail
to protect them from Covid-19. Prisoners in jail are rioting to
demand protection.
Prisoners are especially exposed to Covid-19 because conditions won't
let them maintain proper distance or good sanitation. And when there
is an outbreak in a prison, the guards catch it and spread it to the
surrounding community. For both reasons, vaccinating prisoners should
be a priority, like vaccinating retain workers and meat packers.
*Public Health Coalition Urges Biden to Create Vaccine 'Manufacturing
Operation for the World'.*
ACT-Accelerator is Bill Gates's way of infiltrating of the World
Health Organization to ensure the triumph of private monopolies over
public health.
I am heartened to see the building condemnation of the use of patents
to put profit over people's health. It is unfortunate that it uses
the term "intellectual property", which is a bad fit for each real
issue including this one. The article acknowledges this when it talks
about "technology transfer".
My proposal to remedy several problems in medicine is that
pharmaceuticals should not be patentable, that the government should
run all trials of pharmaceuticals, and pharma companies should make
medicines and sell them in a non-monopolistic world.
Alongside Facebook and Google, data brokers that buy databases and
correlate them are another threat to people's privacy and independence
of thought.
This is why I reject most opportunities to let a business have my name.
Don't pay digitally — pay cash!
Businesses exploit workers by putting them into a "work culture" which
is based on overwork.
That tends to isolate people as a byproduct, leaving them lonely.
My work is also my life — but I'm not working for a company's profit.
I'm working for your freedom and mine. And it keeps me going when
I am lonely.
Adolescents generally get more sleep when school starts at a later time.
They delay their bedtime, but not as much as the delay in school start
time.
The US border thugs make a practice of releasing adult asylum-seekers
in minuscule towns just on the US side of the border, which cannot
support them.
New Zealand is trying to eliminate the practice of smoking tobacco.
I hope this succeeds, but I am concerned that the prohibition will
become repressive.
Florida has passed the bill to make it easy to label protests as "riots" and
jail the protesters.
As we get close to the climate cliff, delaying climate defense is
almost equivalent to not doing it at all.
The Tories' lobbying law was intended to restrict lobbying by the charities
that help the poor and weak. Corruption continued as before.
*Warren and Smith Reintroduce 'Critical' Bill to Block US From
Starting Nuclear War.*
Progressives in Congress propose to fund the IRS adequately to audit lots
of rich people to see if they are evading taxes.
*What We Can Learn From the First New Deal to Make the New One Better.*
The tradeoff between efficiency and effectiveness relates to the point that
an effective system for dealing with emergencies needs to have more capacity
than is needed on the average.
72% of Democrats want Biden to clear away the patents that limit
vaccine production.
*Facebook planned to remove fake accounts in India — until it
realized a [Hindu-repression party] politician was involved.*
There are thousands of abandoned oil wells in Texas, and no plan for how
to pay for cleaning them up and shutting them down.
I can propose one straightforward method: engage all the capable
oil-well cleaning teams, put them to work cleaning oil wells and
training more workers as fast as is reasonable and proper, and make
the oil companies that are still operating pay the cost.
The reason there is a problem is that vested interests won't allow
that. So the problem is purely political.
Convicting Derek Chauvin must not let all other uniformed thugs off
the hook.
Cop Cariol Horne tried to stop another cop from using a choke hold on
a prisoner, and was fired for doing so.
I'd say Horne was a police officer, and a judge has now agreed,
ruling that Horne was fired unjustly.
Even better, the city of Buffalo adopted a law calling on cops to do
this.
Is firing a gun, while thinking it is a taser, "culpable negligence"?
Is it negligence at all?
*Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine research "was 97% publicly funded".
It follows that allowing it to be privatized was a form of corruption.
A very common form, sad to say.
*Oil firm CEOs’ pay is an incentive to resist climate action, study finds.*
It motivates them personally to do anything whatever to keep the oil
flowing, and the money too.
*Just 3% of world’s ecosystems remain intact, study suggests.*
*Mexico’s high Covid death toll blamed on populist government.*
The research that claimed to demonstrate that cognitive behavioral therapy
can treat chronic fatigue syndrome seems to have been based on improper
analysis.
US citizens: call on Congress to End the War on Yemen.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you call, please spread the word!
Insisting that flights not fly over Belarus is not primarily a
sanction, it is a necessary safety precaution.
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global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
Fossil fuel extraction and refining emits lots of toxic local pollution.
They can even harm plants in the vicinity with their loud pumps that drive birds away.
The people who live near them are the disprivileged people who lose the competition for better places.
The best way to correct this injustice is by ending the extraction and refining of fossil fuels. We need to do that anyway. Then we need to clean up the closed facilities.
Belarus has arrested the director of a documentary film festival. I guess one of the documentaries said something dictator Lukashenko did not like.
Introducing bison to forests in Spain may reduce forest fires.
Is anyone trying something like this in California and Australia?
Lukman Thalib fears that while tortured in Qatar he confessed to something he can't remember, because Sri Lanka now accuses him of helping to plan a terrorist attack two years ago.
* Rep. Betty McCollum Leads Effort to Block Israel From Using U.S. Aid to Destroy Palestinian Homes.*
*Report claiming global temperature rise will top 1.5C by 2030s divides scientists.*
I am not an expert on climate modeling. I hope scientists can figure out what we should really expect.
Several organizations for privacy have taken up the call to prohibit all use of face recognition, which I have advocated for many years.
The Capitol police force was debilitated by many kinds of mismanagement.
I get the impression that everyone in the force expected it would never be put to a difficult test. It never had been before.
In addition, the leaders disregarded warnings of a coming violent attack.
The FBI cracks servers to delete malware previously installed by crackers.
I think this action is legitimate and useful, but please don't use the word "hacking" to describe what the FBI are doing. That gives us hackers a bad name. Please distinguish between hacking, which is playful cleverness, and cracking, which is breaking security.
If I were an adherent of cancellationism, I'd say that your use of antihackerist language is an aggression against us hackers, doing us psychological harm, and that you're a bad person if you don't stop.
If big business takes its support away from the Republicans, Democrats must beware of accepting it.
The US food system lets big businesses exploit the people who actually produce food, while letting millions of Americans go hungry. It exhausts the land, too.
The loss of most black farmers' land parallels the loss of most white farmers' land. A lot of this happened under President Reagan, which inspired me to write a parody of Old MacDonald's Farm.
San Francisco has a new plan to house homeless people. Previous efforts have in many cases offered people housing that requires they give up their work, their close relationships, or their pets.
California is likely to have devastating fires again this year.
No local wildlands management can possibly overcome the inexorable effects of continuing global heating, just as no construction of seawalls can possibly overcome the inexorable effects of continuing sea level rise.
We need to curb global heating.
Forest protectors in Canada are trying to defend old-growth forests while factions among of the indigenous peoples are trying to sell the timber.
Protecting wild lands must be a global priority, Well-organized indigenous peoples are often excellent defenders of wild lands, but we should not let indigenous people cut down old-growth forests any more than we let other people do so.
Mergers of large companies are often approved under the idea that the resulting very large company can compete with a pre-existing very large company.
The net result is to exacerbate the concentration of that industry, which is the initial problem. Thus, this way of thinking is a pretend-solution that contributes to the problem.
The right thing to do is to break up the pre-existing very large company.
(satire) *Geologists Recommend Eating At Least One Small Rock Per Day.*
A campaign has identified 30 crucial bank directors that enable the fossil fuel industry to resist climate protection. Now to pressure them to stop.
Jesse Jackson states the reasons to support the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
Calling for reform of the Freedom of Information Act to require release of the documents that an agency is considering during the final decisionmaking about how to handle an issue.
Physical Education classes can let the students invent their own games and play them freely.
Comparing the US Republican Party with Órban's Fidesz Party and other fascist parties.
The Republican Party is now a fanatical anti-truth cult, which retains power only by rigging elections (gerrymandering and voter suppression).
Walmart will require all its produce suppliers to adopt integrated pest management, which will protect pollinators and insects generally.
Fresh fruits and vegetables make up only a small fraction of farming. So this is an important step but doesn't reach the goal.
(satire) *Police Department To Avoid Future Errors By Replacing All Equipment Officers Carry With Guns.*
*Police officer jailed for breaking Black man's knee in 'clear case of racial profiling'.*
It will be harder for people to deny the existence of racial profiling as cases like this accumulate.
Several news publications say: *Journalism should reflect what the science says: the climate emergency is here.*
Scientific American is one of them.
Around 60% of US voters support various measures to regulate banks so they cannot facilitate increases in fossil fuel infrastructure or use.
I think we need to do more than those four requirements.
A special blood-filtering machine can cure Covid-19.
Most people won't die from Covid-19 now, but many will develop a lasting disability. We don't know whether they will ever recover. Instead of limiting these machines to those who are close to dying, we should see if they prevent "long Covid".
Cops admit that they use minor driving infractions, such as an air freshener attached to the rear view mirror, as excuses to stop and search a car based on vague and groundless suspicion.
If we take the idea of rights seriously, we should not allow the supposed enforcers of laws to set them at nought.
Of course, there is another risk to justice that occurs whenever cops search a car: that they may "find" something that wasn't there before the search. Can we develop a way to end this risk?
Biden has ordered US troops out of Afghanistan by September. I am very impressed by his courage.
After several attempts to "stabilize" Afghanistan, we know that we do not know any way to do that. To "stabilize Afghanistan first" means, in practice, "keep the war going forever."
It is silly to insist that the US has a responsibility to "fix" Afghanistan, because no one knows how.
If this means that the Taliban win the war, that will be a setback for human rights in Afghanistan — especially for women, but also for men. But keeping that country forever at war is not a better outcome.
Here's what Senator Sanders said about this decision.
In the first years after the US invasion, it looked like Afghanistan would be peaceful and better off. I hoped for a lasting improvement in women's rights there. I have long thought that Dubya's decision to attack Iraq played a part in spoiling that peace. Of course, I can only speculate about what would have happened otherwise.
The US has a higher death rate, for people under 85 years old, than European countries. If the US had had a typical European death rate, 400,000 Americans under 85 would have survived past 2017.
Curiously, about 100,000 more Americans over 85 would have died in 2017 with a European death rate. However, each death of an younger person typically means more years of life lost than the death of an oldster.
This problem started to appear after 2000, and has been getting worse since then.
Julian Assange has been in prison for two years, accused by the US of journalism.
*US unions not fazed by Amazon setback and vow to keep up the organizing fight.*
*Boris Johnson’s ‘chumocracy’ is using Covid crisis to sell off health service by stealth, says Sir David King (former chief scientist of the NHS).*
We may have 3 feet of sea-level rise by 2050. Areas in the US and other countries where tens of millions of people live will be uninhabitable. And it won't stop at 3 feet.
In addition to curbing CO2 emissions, we need to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Large-scale engineering for pulling CO2 out of the air are preferable to attempts to reduce the sunlight that hits the Earth's surface because they can prevent ocean acidification (which could wipe out entire phyla) as well as global heating.
*Facebook knew of Honduran president’s manipulation campaign — and let it continue for 11 months.*
A Minnesota cop shot and killed Daunte Wright, a black man, at the wheel of his car.
The cop thought she was shooting a taser, and when she saw she had shot a bullet instead, she was shocked by what she had done. She has resigned.
France is taking a small step to reduce short flights. The world needs to do a lot more to reduce the amount of flying. A substantial tax on airplane fuel would be effective.
Canada's wealth tax proposal: *If you don't have $20 million or sitting around you can just relax.*
*Living near a US Superfund [chemical pollution] site could shave a year off your life, study finds.*
Israel's sabotage of Iran's uranium refining plant may have been intended to sabotage negotiations between the US and Iran.
60% of US voters support various sorts of regulations to make companies pay more attention to how they effect global heating and how global heating can affect them.
(satire) *Judge Asks If Chauvin Jury Minds Sticking Around For A Couple More Police Misconduct Trials.*
(satire) *Cadet Studying For Police Academy Exam Just Skimming Over Deescalation Training He’ll Never Use In Real Life.*
Biden's plan to reduce the impetus for people from Central America to flee to the US is limited to some disaster relief.
That will be nowhere near sufficient as long as the war, on drugs, continues in Central America. The war fuels gangs, and those gangs create error. The US must stop doing this to those countries if they are to become safe places for people to live.
The next step is to stop helping "American" companies extract the wealth of those countries and thus push the people into penury.
Japan will release the water stored at Fukushima into the ocean, after filtering out the more radioactive isotopes so that the release will not harm anyone.
It seems that many people don't understand the concept of "down in the noise".
We ingest Carbon-14 every time we breath. That is why archaeologists of the future will be able to date our bones after we die.
Protestant youth in Belfast started a violent riot out of a general feeling that their side has been screwed by the deal between the UK and the EU — together with the fear that they may cease to dominate Northern Ireland's politics.
Bogus Johnson promised to do two incompatible things: end free trade between the UK and the EU, and preserve free trade between Northern Ireland and both of those. That promise was a lie.
It seems that separating UK trade from the EU requires a customs barrier between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, or a customs barrier between Northern Ireland and Britain, and either one will cause violence.
The other option is to reestablish free trade between the UK and EU.
Republicans tried to kick 129,000 voters off Wisconsin's voter list; the state supreme court block them.
*Republicans push ‘tsunami’ of harsh anti-protest laws after BLM rallies.*
*Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens.*
*The climate emergency is here. The media needs to act like it.*
Biden is augmenting the bully's program of having Guatemala and Honduras, as well as Mexico, keep would-be immigrants away from the US border.
*Critics Warn $15 Billion Merger of Global Water Giants Would Create 'Dangerous Corporate Monopoly'.*
Large companies should not be allowed to merge at all.
* David Cameron’s ‘chumocracy’ instincts run through the Tory party, which treats Whitehall checks and balances as the enemy.*
In Bogus Johnson they have found someone shameless enough to order checks and balances to begone.
*Thousands of [Burmese] citizens in Australia at risk of being deported to violence back home.*
Calling on Stephen Breyer to retire now, so he can be replaced by Democrats.
Labour MP Jon Cruddas says the party is *losing sight of its historical mission to stand up for the working classes.*
To respond to digital scheduling with precarious work was a political choice. If installation of robots results in many humans living in penury, that too will be a political choice.
Why I am not reading about the trial of Derek Chauvin.
When I read, then saw, what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd, I concluded it was murder. I am glad Chauvin is being tried, and I hope he will be convicted.
I am not following the events of the trial for the same reason that I don't watch election returns on the evening after Election Day: it's too late for us to influence the outcome.
To focus on the details of the process would cause us anxiety, uselessly. It's more productive, and less stressful, to do activism instead.
We'll see the result at the same time either way.
The Houthis have captured journalists and imprisoned them for "spying".
The US is trying to do the same thing to Julian Assange. They should both stop.
Israel launched a cyberattack against Iran's uranium refining centrifuges and caused them physical damage.
With each attack, one way or the other, the danger of nuclear war some day increases.
*Concerns mount that US withdrawal from Afghanistan could risk progress on women's rights.*
Sad to say, a probable increase in oppression of women is the worst aspect of making peace with the Taliban. The second-worst aspect is a probable increase in oppression of men.
But oppression of women in Afghanistan is pretty bad even now under the US-supported government. It's not as bad as the Taliban would be, but that's the best thing one can say about it.
I think that endless war is too high a price to pay to keep the oppression somewhat less.
40% of US marines offered Covid-19 vaccination have refused it.
This could be a symptom of dangerous right-wing extremism. It also means that an outbreak of Covid-19 in the marines could weaken the US military.
Biden refused to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline.
It is disappointing that he fails to protect our future when he has an easy chance.
*Italian prosecutors secretly recorded human rights lawyers.*
The lawyers were talking with their clients, who operated rescue boats to save drowning refugees.
Kentucky has responded to the killing of Breonna Taylor by putting stricter conditions on the use of no-knock warrants.
The requirements for carrying out no-knock warrants may do some good, but the added conditions for obtaining no-knock warrants won't make any difference if all they do is require thugs to tell a bigger lie.
Has the detective that lied to get that warrant been punished? If we want to teach cops to be honest, we must give them more than a slap on the wrist when they lie. And that must not be limited to cases like this one, where the lie results in someone's death. Even those of us who reject religion must not tolerate bearing false witness.
One minor detail: In the winter, 6am is just as dark as 2am, and many day-time workers and students are still asleep at 6am.
Republican minority rule in Michigan has brought about a surge in Covid-19, and the governor is powerless to do anything effective to stop it.
She has asked Biden to send more vaccine doses to Michigan, but even if he does, the time scale for curbing Covid-19 by vaccination is measured in months — if Republican antivaxxers don't prevent it from reaching that point.
The only known methods to stop the surge now are those that prevent transmission of the disease, which is exactly what Republican covidiots refuse to do.
Republicans in Michigan have made the elections unfair through gerrymandering. That is why they control the legislature even though the voters elected a Democratic governor.
Michigan Republicans are trying to build up hatred against Democrats, and since the governor is a woman, they are using misogyny as part of it.
On the global scale, Covid-19 is spreading exponentially.
No matter what political decisions are made this year, there is no hope of vaccinating billions of people. The only chance of slowing the global spread of Covid-19 this year is by preventing transmission.
The UK government convened a commission of experts to write a report on race relations and racism — then Bogus Johnson's staff rewrote their text to get rid of the idea of systemic racism.
The low wages of the US economy are part of a system designed to make some people rich and keep most people struggling.
*China launches hotline to report "illegal" comments about Communist party.*
When Virginia thugs stopped driver Caron Nazario, he wisely stopped in the nearest gas station so that cameras would catch whet they did. He got out with his hands up and they attacked him for no reason.
It seems that they stopped him because they did not notice his valid temporary license plate. As for why they beat him up, I have to suppose it was racism.
I hope he was not seriously injured.
One of the thugs has been fired.
*Biden Creates Commission to Study Supreme Court Expansion, Other Reforms.*
I am glad he is thinking about it. However, to actually do any such thing would require convincing Manchin to support both this and eliminating the filibuster.
Bill Gates convinced the Oxford vaccine development team to cancel its plan to allow all companies to manufacture its Covid-19 vaccine.
Everyone: call on Disney not to use face recognition.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to commit to voting No on any bill that funds militarism at over 90% of the current level.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: support the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act.
A black British academic talks about leaving academia to become a cop — because the police have made more of a commitment to combat racism than universities have hade.
US citizens: call on the Senate to end the filibuster so as to pass federal voting rights and democracy protections.
US citizens: call on your senators and congresscritter to support the ICBM Act, which would transfer funds from ICBM development to vaccine development.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: call on world leaders to protect the climate, and help those who will face hardship soon.
US citizens: support the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act.
When Jon Heylings worked for Syngenta, he tried for decades to convince the company to stop selling the weed killed paraquat which also kills humans. What he achieved was a persistent effort to pretend to have made it safe.
A right-wing cancellation network is attacking US college professors.
The IMF has endorsed a wealth tax.
*Biden’s Tax Plan Comes Up Short on [cutting] Fossil Fuel Subsidies*
*LAPD officers are accused of racial profiling during an arrest of a Black man outside his home.*
It seems rather open-and-shut. Because the man was black, they assumed he was guilty instead of bothering to check.
One of the ways Amazon intimidated workers into voting against unionization was to arrange to get workers mail their ballots from work.
One of the people accused of attacking the Capitol was attacked in jail and may lose the use of one eye as a result.
Even if he is guilty as charged, that doesn't excuse attacking a prisoner in jail.
Killers in Virginia can no longer claim as a defense that they freaked out because the victim was gay or trans.
New Mexico has abolished qualified immunity for thugs. So it will be easier to sue them personally for gross violence or dishonesty.
*GOP group bullies donors who don't give every month: "We will have to tell Trump you're a DEFECTOR".*
US employers have sophisticated techniques for refusing to hire anyone who might be inclined to join a union.
US citizens: call on Biden to support UN sanctions against Erik Prince.
US citizens: call on Biden to Cancel Student Debt.
British Columbia is allowing the small area of remaining large old-growth trees to be cut down, and activists are blocking the logging teams.
Brazil-nut hunters are forming cooperatives to get more than a tiny share of the price that we pay for them in foreign countries.
If deforestation turns the Amazon forest into a savannah, the Brazil-nut trees will mostly be wiped out. That alone would be sad but not a disaster; to envision what things will be like in 40 years, imagine that half the things you eat are gone and the other half are too expensive.
*Fascism of India's RSS Denounced by European Members of Parliament.*
Congress should reduce military spending, not keep it unchanged.
I have a hunch there are military programs that spend a lot of money in West Virginia. Proposing to cut them drastically could persuade Senator Manchin to abolish the filibuster. The security of the US would still be adequate with such cuts.
*Arm Our Cities With Military-Grade Healthcare, Not Weapons.*
*Economists Warn Democrats 'Going Too Small' on Infrastructure Risks Economic and Climate Catastrophe.*
* The costs of inaction outweigh the risks of borrowing to take action—by trillions of dollars.*
* Democrats often blame their election losses on gerrymandering and voter suppression, but progressive initiatives win all over the country. It is time to embrace a bold agenda and then fight like hell to to win it.*
A large beef- or pork-packing plant in a county more than doubled the level of Covid-19 infection in that county, on the average.
(satire) *Amazon Celebrates Union Defeat By Raising All Prices 150% Anyway.*
Norway's prime minister was fined for having a birthday party with 13 participants, after endorsing an official limit of 10.
What a contrast with Tories and Republicans.
The US is beginning a fourth Covid-19 surge, caused by the same foolish actions that caused the second and the third.
The anti-transmission precautions that have been recommended for a year or so would prevent the fourth surge.
Biden has endorsed plans to prevent companies from shifting taxes from one country to another which charges a lower tax rate.
All countries should unite to tax the plutocrats!
(satire) *Panthers Adopt Patchy-Haired, Shivering Rescue [Quarterback] Who Spent Years Abused By Jets.*
New York State will offer compensation to residents who are unauthorized immigrants for problems such as lost employment caused by Covid-19.
Other residents are already eligible for such compensation.
Palestinian Authority president Abbas is under pressure to cancel the Palestine elections because Hamas might win.
*Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian motorist and injure his wife.*
Several soldiers shot at them after telling them it was ok to get back into their car.
With 4C of global heating, Antarctic ice shelves (which float) will collapse and melt. This will allow ice from the ice sheets (which rest on land) to flow into the ocean and melt in turn. That in turn would cause large rises in sea level.
Wildlife defenders in Italy have pretty much put an end to trapping migrating songbirds, so people have switched to shooting them. To stop this will require a change in the law.
(satire) *More Companies Considering Hybrid Model Where Half Return To Office, Half Laid Off.*
The US deportation thugs, on Biden's orders, now focus once again on unauthorized immigrants that are dangerous or serious criminals.
The number of prisoners in deportation prisons is half as many as last year.
Liberty Mutual insurance company not only continues insuring fossil fuel extraction, it is building a new coal mine itself.
Amnesty International reports on aggravation of human rights abuses in many countries under the cover of Covid-19.
Courts in Britain are ordering some people on probation or parole to wear new ankle tags that check sweat for indication that they have drunk alcohol.
I think this is legitimate because it is applied only as part of punishment for a crime. What I object to is the systematic monitoring of people in general, without specific grounds such as a conviction for a crime.
Australian universities are trying to increase cooperation with Indonesia to reduce dependence on China.
Biden made some small increments in regulation of guns, to try to convince Congress to go further.
The UK government's report on racism in Britain cited old scholarship which didn't figure on structural racism, rather than newer scholarship which does.
The idea of using health disparities between groups to measure the net effects of racism surprised me. In principle, racism's injustices are not limited to worse health and shorter life span. Bigotry is wrong even if it does not shorten your life, and it can do you harm in ways that don't make you physically sick.
But the author suggests that the varied wrongs of racism tend to manifest themselves in the form of worse health, visible in medical statistics — and that this provides an objective way to measure the level of harm caused by racism within any given population. That is very interesting.
A man died in Oslo ten years ago, in his apartment, and his corpse was only just discovered.
This is a sign of how little social contact a person can have now. I wonder if the man was lonely and sad.
A study finds that sheep tend to have lower pulse rates when shepherded by drones.
That might mean those sheep are better off, but that isn't certain. Perhaps sheep benefit from occasional higher heart rates. Humans do.
* The United States created a hellish world for millions (south of the border) and now demonizes those trying to escape it.*
Over 3,600 US workers in the medical field have died from Covid-19. A substantial part of this was caused by the wrecker's bad policies, such as allowing the manufacture of protective gear to grow slowly, and encouraging the spread of the disease.
(satire) *Rats Scramble To Hide Fully Functioning Amusement Park And Resort They Built As Workers Return To Office.*
Moral arguments against AI-based surveillance of students, in exams or not.
The article uses the term "ablism" in a way I think is incorrect. A tendency to move your head around while thinking is not a disability, merely a quirk. So if a system penalizes people for such head movements, I think the term "quirkism", meaning "prejudice against people because of quirks", describes that system better.
Whatever name we call it, it is bad for systems to show prejudice against quirks like that.
The article does not mention the essential basic injustice of proctoring systems: they are nonfree software that the student is required to run.
It appears separatists in the Donbas area of Ukraine are escalating the fight against Ukraine.
The separatists are Putin's willing proxies; when the fighting was hot, a few years ago, he sent Russian soldiers with Russian arms to fight alongside them. I presume that Putin invited them to heat up that little war now to provide a pretext for a bigger invasion from outside.
Amazon's employees in Alabama seem to have voted against unionization, but the union claims Amazon intimidated workers and made the election unfair.
Salafi Arabia sentenced alleged satirist Abdulrahman al-Sadhan to 40 years of punishment. The monarchy may have identified him by infiltrating Twitter.
Abdulrahman has been tortured in prison.
The UAE has not responded to the UN's demand for proof that the kidnapped Princess Latifa is still alive.
Were they Indian commandos mercenaries, or were they Indian armed forces? What role, if any, did the government of India play in the events. It ought to investigate who in India was involved.
China has sentenced some former Uighur officials to death.
*The Guardian view on peat: keep it in the ground.*
The UK is on the verge of another surge in Covid-19 among the millions of people not yet vaccinated — if it continues to relax restrictions and open the commercial spaces that are closed.
The US is already having another surge. It is the work the same Republican officials that obeyed the bullshitter by making foolhardy disease-spreading a badge of defiance against rationality.
*Police are most effective when the public approves of their actions.*
*Climate campaigners call for halt to regional UK airports expansion.*
There is no room in the carbon budget for increase in flying that expanded airports would lead to.
West Virginia came to exist because that part of Virginia refused to secede from the United States, and stayed with the Union in the Civil War. More recently, a right-wing political movement set up monuments to the Confederacy and Confederate generals, thus spreading an erroneous idea of the state's history.
Now Republicans, who dominate the state's government and perhaps lean towards white supremacism, want to make it illegal to remove or rename those monuments.
It is possible to deal with a statue that supports the Confederacy by putting up an opposing statue: perhaps of Lincoln or Grant, or some West Virginian who fought for the Union.
However, when a building's name refers to the Confederacy, it would not usually be feasible to override its message by building another building nearby. Cities and schools in West Virginia should rename those buildings promptly, before a new law can get in the way.
Putting up new monuments depicting West Virginia soldiers in their blue Union uniforms would help teach the state's history. And if West Virginia organized regiments of escaped slaves, like the 54th Massachusetts, monuments to them would get the point across even more clearly.
They surely deserve monuments.
New kinds of fishing gear could save the North Atlantic right whale.
On the coast of North Carolina, forests are slowly being inundated by the ocean, and many of the trees are dead.
When there is a drought on the land, salt water seeps inland and salinifies the land.
The US government, and international institutions, have recognized that trickle down only feeds dooH niboR, and have adopted Keynsianism.
The reason why Covid-19 increased inequality is that it caused lots of disasters. So it created lots of opportunities for disaster capitalism. People and institutions that had a habit of searching for such opportunities found them and benefited from them.
*Zimbabwe under renewed pressure to give up Rwanda genocide suspect.*
*China’s vast bitcoin mining empire risks derailing its climate targets, says study.*
* We at Carbon Tax Center believe that removing climate deniers from the Climate Solutions Caucus could help rehabilitate carbon taxing in the public conversation.*
The overall point is that a revenue-neutral carbon tax, redistributing the tax money to help the poor, would complement programs to invest in renewable energy generation and use. The investments would provide an alternative to fossil fuel use, and the tax would pressure everyone to use the alternative instead of fossil fuel rather than using more energy.
The US military — or any military — is based on a philosophy of seeing the world as a potential fight and the enemy as dehumanized. This gives it a fundamental similarity to right-wing extremism.
That is the foundation of the US military's vulnerability to right-wing extremism, but other factors add to it.
* Analysis finds 77% of directors on boards of seven US banks have ties to ‘climate-conflicted’ groups.*
*UK's 'headlong rush into abandoning human rights' rebuked by Amnesty.*
1/3 of patients who had Covid-19 developed neurological or psychological problems in 6 months. Most of these problems were psychological.
Supporting Stallman against a campaign of hatred
San Francisco has retracted the plan to rename schools named after heroes that were found to have done some things wrong.
In some of those cases, I know the wrongs were real. Perhaps that was true in all 44 cases. But it is a mistake to judge past heroes by today's values and demand perfection.
Over time, the default views in society change. Views we now consider reprehensible were once held by almost everyone. We don't need to condemn people of the past for not understanding what we understand today.
I have criticized Senator Feinstein for her right-wing positions. In addition, I believe that no government in the US should display the flag of treason and slavery. However, I can understand how an official might not want to let vandalism decide changes in policy, even changes for the better.
*[Two] Months After Biden Promised to End Support for Yemen War, Congress Still Has No Details.*
* Study suggests [the ocean] is already too warm in tropics for some species to survive.*
* Light pollution is killing insects and birds – and an ancient human connection with the heavenly bodies.*
I have some criticisms of the specifics of Biden's infrastructure plan.
I question the decision to give so much money to roads (as distinct from bridges) rather than to mass transit.
Upgrading Amtrak's Northeast Corridor would be a good thing if it included allowing anonymous travel on that line.
Support for for buying electric cars is a good idea but the owner must be allowed to turn off all features that track the vehicles' movements.
Building charging stations for electric vehicles must include allowing anonymous payment and the stations must not take note of the identity of the vehicle being charged.
Replacing lead water pipes is a very good thing to do.
The US keeps attacking Venezuela, with coup attempts and sanctions.
The fight for abortion rights continues in countries around the world.
*After Decades of Raking in Corporate Cash, McConnell Tells CEOs Mildly Defending Voting Rights to 'Stay Out of Politics'.*
Does that mean he won't accept their money any more ;-}?
The difference in US work, 50 years ago and now, is that well-paid union jobs have been replaced by precarious work for a pittance.
The "We the People" Amendment bill has been reintroduced. This amendment would wipe away various Supreme Court decisions that extended human rights to nonhuman corporations.
Alexei Navalny is "seriously ill" in the Russian prison.
Since the Russian state poisoned him once, maybe it is doing something similar now.
*Survey Finds 2/3 of US Students Want Cops Removed From Campus.*
I get the impression this is not a scientific survey, but it demonstrates that US high school students are aware of the danger of the school-to-prison pipeline.
Ukraine is afraid Russia is about to attack again soon.
This is not an absurd fear. The Russia-fueled rebellion in eastern Ukraine quieted down after a Russian missile unit mistakenly shot down a passenger airplane, but it seems that Russia is heating it up again.
Putin tends to probe for weaknesses. Responding with strength, but not aggression, can convince him to pull back and not start a war now. But this does not have to mean joining NATO — which would in any case take too long.
*Six Ways Chevron Imperils Climate, Human Rights, and Racial Justice.*
Tesla's innovation in malware is designed to help repossess the car if the owner falls behind on loan payments.
States should pass laws to enable car owners to turn off GPS and turn off all radio communication from the car.
In an economy of near-monopolies, you can't usually get political power via boycotts.
*It's a perfect macrocosm of the consumer's dilemma: if you rely on money, rather than politics, to accomplish political change, you will never make a change that reduces the power of money in politics.*
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: *Pfizer demands governments gamble with state assets to secure vaccine deal.*
The US military-industrial complex and its products are surprisingly broad. This article investigates the moral issues of how to deal with it and how not to.
I think the US should move the research that is not directly about fighting into a non-military agency. That way, the cuts that we need to make in military spending will not harm that research.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Medicare for All Act of 2021.
The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
*NYPD "Goon Squad" Manual Teaches Officers to Violate Protesters’ Rights.*
Parkinson's disease is increasing, and Trichloroethylene may be the cause. We should ban it now rather than wait to be absolutely certain when it is too late to avoid getting sick.
*Will the United States Ever Become a Strong Nation for the Common Good?* For the US to be great again, the US government must do great things and tax the rich to pay for them.
*Greenland’s leftwing anti-mine party wins snap election.*
Rare earths, though not exceedingly rare, are important as well as valuable. But mines tend to leave dangerous pollution lying around, and mining companies lobby not to pay for remediating the damage they do.
I wonder, is there any safe way to let a mine operate?
Democrats in Congress are failing to use their power to eliminate many of the wrecker's destructive federal regulations.
(satire) *U.S. Criticized For Giving $1 Trillion To Military Contractor To Develop Hat That Didn’t Work.*
To reestablish the non-nuclear deal with Iran, the US needs to get rid of several existing sanctions against Iran, even if the ostensible motive for the sanctions is "terrorism".
Millions of Americans have private medical insurance that won't cover the cost of expensive treatments for grave illnesses.
US citizens: Tell Zuckerberg not to give the bullshitter his megaphone back.
Britons: call your MP to oppose "Checkpoint Britain".
I hope you will say that no occasion should require a person to carry a portable phone.
Economists that advocated "free trade" knowingly hid the fact that millions of people, and even some countries, can be permanently harmed by adopting that system.
Perhaps it is true that they sincerely believed that this condescending approach to the topic was for the best. But business schools and economics departments have ties with businesses, and that biases them.
It is a mistake for schools to eliminate all free play, even in the name of preventing bullying.
There are some children who can't learn to deal with bullying on their own. It is important for schools to do something to help them not just dismiss the problem with "That's life." But this does not entail eliminating free play for everyone.
A bill in the Maine legislature would put an end to Maine's "fusion center" which exchanges surveillance data between various government agencies.
British thugs arrested legal observers present outside a protest in Briston to give legal aid to protesters that were arrested.
The thugs could not have failed to recognize that they were legal observers.
Describing all of the Briston protests together as "sometimes violent, sometimes not" misrepresents them. Most of the protesters were nonviolent while sometimes certain protesters started violence.
(satire) *Man Opposes Taxing Rich Because He Knows One Day He Could Find $20 Bill On Ground.*
Treasury Secretary Yellen called for a global minimum tax rate on corporations.
I support this; however, to make it truly effective will require global agreement on limiting deductions and blocking tax evasion.
*NLRB Says Amazon Firing of Workers Who Demanded Better Climate, Labor Policies Was Illegal Retaliation.*
Public pressure has convinced some large companies to condemn Georgia's voter suppression laws — after supporting the campaigns of the Republican legislators that passed them.
*Corporations Gave $50 Million to GOP Lawmakers Behind Voter Suppression Onslaught.*
Additional Republican-controlled states are passing similar laws. To get these companies to pressure additional states, we will need to keep up the pressure on them.
The US Supreme Court ruled that imitating the API of Java was fair use of the text of the API description.
The other decision would have been disaster.
*Your 'smart home' is watching — and possibly [sending] your data [to] the police.*
I am glad to see that awareness of this threat to everyone's freedom is spreading, but it continues to be associated with an inadequate proposed solution: laws to "protect privacy" by limiting how companies use the data that they accumulate about the public. This would reduce the abuse of people's accumulated personal data but not stop it.
Please don't use the word "sharing" to describe propagation of surveillance data.
The police are plural, so the pronoun "they" fits them — but "roommate" ought to be plural as well.
Before my freshman year of college, I stated my preference for a roommate that was invisible, inaudible and intangible (if I couldn't have a room of my own). I forgot to add deaf and blind.
Western governments need to end their support for human rights abuses and authoritarianism in order to be able to exert effective pressure on China.
*Can an assault weapons ban reduce killings if firearms last 100 years?*
Perhaps the clips don't last as long as the guns.
* Extinction Rebellion is planning to step up its campaign against the banking system with a series of direct action protests and debt strikes*
* The government has effectively declared institutional racism does not exist, and framed those who disagree as the problem.*
When the government takes the position that criticizing its statements is unpatriotic, that is the final demonstration that it is unjust.
The wrecker's support among Christians has given religion a bad name in the US, and young people are abandoning it fairly fast.
US citizens: call on AT&T to Stop Funding Voter Suppression.
US citizens: call on Biden to support an arms embargo on Burma.
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass the Equality Act.
US citizens: call on Biden to propose bigger plans to reduce US greenhouse emissions faster.
Bill Gates is buying lots of US farm land, just as an investment — but concentration of land ownership is not a good thing.
A seedling of PISSI has captured part of Mozambique. It seems to be too strong for Mozambique to defeat alone.
*Ethiopia is fighting 'difficult and tiresome' guerrilla war in Tigray, says PM.*
I expected something like this.
New Zealand's annual Great Easter Bunny Hunt killed almost 12,000 rabbits, but that wasn't enough. Perhaps they should do it every month.
Regional heating in part of the Amazon rain forest, due to deforestation, is making it hard for the trees there to survive.
This could deforest the whole region.
Teaching people to feel more empathy can have a good effect, with people that want to feel more empathy.
Enslavement in the UK seems to have increased by 25% to 40% during Covid-19.
*Scientists create online games to show risks of AI emotion recognition.*
The article identifies various dangers of this technology, but does not mention the ones I think are worst.
If your boss can tell whether you are lying, and you can't tell whether your boss is lying, that magnifies the boss's power over you.
If the repression agencies can tell whether you are lying, and you can't tell whether agents are lying, that magnifies their repressive power over you.
*Across the UK, environmental protest is surging.*
From this article, it seems that most of it is against local development projects. In principle, such objections may be valid or they may be NIMBYism. The UK needs a lot more housing; the shortage especially hurts poor people. The questions are where and how.
Each project should be evaluated under the right criteria. What are the right criteria? That is a national political question which I would not trust the Tories about.
The evaluation must be carried out by an honest government body -- which is unlikely with Bogus Johnson in charge.
Thus, I would expect a lot of those objections ARE valid.
The hunt for capitol rioters used many widely deployed surveillance technologies that can be used for repression also.
I think it is proper to have security cameras inside and around the Capitol. But their video recordings must not be accessed in any fashion except when there is probable cause for an investigation of a specific person. A security camera's recording should not be easy to view, and it should be overwritten automatically after a few weeks if there has been no grounds to look at it.
I propose the following guideline for judging whether a technology with surveillance potential is acceptable in a free society:
- If tracking or identifying any randomly chosen person is so much trouble that the state won't do it unless there is a need, it is safe.
- If identifying and tracking 100 people requires a major effort, and the state would not even consider mounting such an effort except because of an actual or planned terrorist attack or something comparable, it is safe.
US citizens: call on Democrats not to weaken the infrastructure bill to cater to Republicans.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on The NIH to tell Moderna to increase vaccine production.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The US is sending unaccompanied unauthorized immigrant minors to Fort Bliss, a large army base of which parts are highly contaminated with PFAs.
Is it a significant danger to a child to live in a place near ground with a high level of PFAs for a few weeks (supposing finding places for them to go to gets even more backlogged)? I don't know, but I think they are likely to ingest less PFAs that way than by drinking the water in some American cities for extended periods.
PFAs are a grave problem for all humanity, in the long term, but I am not convinced they are a
But there is another problem with using military bases to house border-crossers of any age: it makes them inaccessible to journalists, and this makes their guards unaccountable for how they treat their temporary prisoners.
*Haaland Announces New Missing and Murdered Indigenous Unit at Interior.*
The aim is to give indigenous people who are murdered the same chance of getting justice that other Americans have, or at least more chance than now.
*Any proposal for vaccine credentials must be primarily paper-based, decentralized, and protect privacy.*
If we handle vaccination right, that system won't be needed for very long. Real vaccination will be very effective in making Covid-19 a minor danger, as long as enough of the population gets vaccinated.
*The Republican Party has no interest in actual governing.* It has no serious proposals, only tactics for fighting the culture war and making elections unfair.
*55 US Corporate Giants Paid $0 in Federal Taxes in 2020 Thanks to 'Gaping' Loopholes.*
We should fix these loopholes — but also refuse to be manipulated by fandom in businesses such as Nike.
*Why are desperate refugees turning up on the U.S. border? Because we have offloaded the costs of the drug war on Latin America.*
*These 7 ways of taxing the rich would generate more than $6 trillion over 10 years.* In other words, 600 billion or so per year. (Reporting costs and benefits on an annual basis keeps them all comparable.)
Eliminating the "stepped-up cost basis" rule would be entirely justified for billionaires, but if it applies to your parents' apartment you would probably be unable to inherit it. I suggest maintaining that rule only for the deceased's primary residence. Rich people generally have a smaller fraction of their assets in their primary residence than non-rich.
*Fracking brings pollution, not wealth, to Navajo land.*
I am not surprised. Businesses employ negotiators whose job is to make bad deals sound good.
The UK government published a study of racism in the UK, whose main thrust seems to be to reassure Britons that the situation is getting better, so there is no need for the state to do anything to make it better.
*The government has reversed progress and betrayed black Britons with this divisive and politically motivated document.*
*This is the legacy of Britain's year of Covid: power unchecked, scrutiny sidelined.*
A dam in Florida used to retain wastewater loaded with phosphate and nitrogen is on the verge of collapsing, so people are pumping some of it into nearby Tampa Bay where those chemicals could damage the ecology.
Fertilizer run-off is largely phosphate and nitrogen, and it regularly causes toxic algal blooms and dead zones when it gets into the sea.
The problem with the dam has been developing for many years, but the state ignored it until the last minute. Florida needs to pay close attention to assure all its dams are Tampa-proof.
Imagine a sports team, the Tampa Bay Fertilizer. Or Tampa Bay Algae?
In addition to the carbon emissions from using a building, which could be reduced by using renewable electricity to heat and cool it, we must start reducing the carbon emissions from constructing it, repairing it, and eventually demolishing it.
*Trump 'money bomb' scheme raised millions from unwitting donors.*
If this isn't illegal, it ought to be.
New York State has greatly limited solitary confinement.
San Francisco has implemented, to some extent, the basic idea of "defund the police": send trained de-escalators as first responders instead of cops.
Larry Lessig argues with the Green Party criticisms of the bill, HR1.
I agree that we should pass HR1 — modified not to make things harder for minor parties than they already are.
Daniel Hale's whistleblowing to journalists led to publication of important information about American drone assassinations. Prosecuting him was an attack on freedom of the press in the US.
*LexisNexis to Provide Giant Database of Personal Information to ICE.*
The breadth of data that LexisNexis collects about people makes its existence dangerous. Some of that data, such as tracking based on license plate readers, must not be collected at all.
New York City is worried about the sea level rise that global heating will cause.
A barrier that will keep water away from the city at high tide is just a temporary stopgap. To protect all the cities in the world that way would cost more than curing the root cause — greenhouse gas emissions.
Asia may over time switch to using Chinese currency for international trade. This would enhance China's economic power and diminish that of the US.
I hoped to see a reduction in the US dollar's dominance in favor of the euro. In favor of China, that's a different matter.
*Ethiopia dismisses evidence of war crimes verified by CNN investigation*. The crimes were killing of prisoners.
*The Pro-LGBTQ Companies That Helped Elect Arkansas Anti-Trans Bill Sponsors.*
Amazon apologized to the Rep. Pocan for calling him a liar, and admitted that its drivers really have to pee in bottles in the truck.
I don't think that peeing in a bottle is a horrible thing. Nowadays there are products that make it less difficult for women.
But it reflects the outrageous time pressure that they are under — all the time, not only when they need to pee.
The US border thugs are deporting migrants to Mexico without even telling them that that is what happened.
The company that owns the Dakota Access Pipeline has subpoena'd unreleased documents and videos from news publisher Unicorn Riot, which covered the protests, aiming to identify all the protesters and sue each and every one.
The name "Unicorn Riot" seems to be a joke — what they did was journalism, not rioting. I hope that it does not help the pipeline owner pretend that they were rioting.
Maskless covidiots, many of them still unvaccinated, are making a last attempt in the LA area to spread Covid-19 to a hundred thousand more Americans.
The Canadian Pacific herring fishery is being fished to death. Other animals that eat the herring are indirectly in danger.
* The campaign to cancel the author [Philip Roth] is typical of today’s all-or-nothing approach, where if you don’t like everything about a public figure, you can’t like anything.*
*Early bloom of cherry blossoms in Washington DC point to climate crisis.*
Over 120,000 personnel in Britain's NHS have long Covid. That must be an amazing fraction of all NHS workers. I wonder how many workers it has.
*US lifts Trump administration's sanctions on top ICC prosecutor.*
The FSF should support the ICC.
Italian prosecutors tapped the phones of journalists who were covering the rescue of migrants rescued from drowning in the Mediterranean, all in order to accuse people in the organizations that did the rescuing with "collaboration with people smugglers."
The US and Iran are making progress negotiating a return to the non-nuclear deal.
*US fossil fuel companies took billions in tax breaks — and then laid off thousands.*
The wrecker's ultimate act of sabotage was a proposed rule to let drug companies raise prices unreasonably. Shockingly, Biden does not seem to plan to cancel it.
Israel has vaccinated a large fraction of its population, and Covid-19 transmission is dwindling. The main danger of Covid-19 in the future will be from variants spreading in Palestine.
Israel is responsible for public health in territories it occupies or besieges. That means it must provide vaccine to the Palestinians. Now that is also crucial for Israel's public health — so its refusal is vindictiveness carried to the point of self-destruction.
I think the US should offer to donate vaccine for everyone in Palestine if Israel does not.
Meanwhile, I wonder if people in Israel who refuse to run nonfree programs, and therefore can't run the "green pass" app, are being excluded from much of society's activity. Is that really true? Is there no other way to demonstrate that you have been vaccinated?
A whistleblower claims that a UK agency whose job is to check for misconduct by thugs did the opposite: it spun its report about recent protests in Bristol so as to justify increased repression of protests.
*This anti-protest bill risks making the UK like Putin's Russia.*
Daniel Everette Hale has pled guilty to whistleblowing: giving a reporter secret information about US drone assassinations.
*Forget 2030 or 2040, Says Greta Thunberg, World Must 'Reduce Our Emissions Right Now'.*
I think she is right, as a general point. Targets in the future serve as an excuse not to make big efforts right away.
I think that Covid-19 did great harm to the climate strike movement. It distracts people's attention to a threat that, ultimately, is not as big. And it prevents the large demonstrations that made climate strike influential.
I hope it won't be too long before it regains its influence. Civilization's survival depends on that.
(satire) *New Gun Control Measure Would Put Firearms In Difficult-To-Open Hard Plastic Packaging.*
(satire) *Man Living In Most Affluent Country In World History Has Nerve To Complain About Being Homeless.*
*Rapid global heating is hurting farm productivity, study finds.*
(satire) *GOP Argues Government Shouldn't Be Deciding Which Bridges Succeed Or Fail.*
British Gas is bullying its installation engineers by firing them all, then hiring them back only if they agree to pay cuts and longer hours.
The company's customers are pushing back against this.
*India's top court has granted bail to a comic [Munawar Faruqui] after he spent 35 days in jail for a joke he didn't crack.*
He wrote the joke in his notes, but did not use it in his performance.
The US could reach herd immunity for Covid-19 if enough people get vaccinated — but that won't be permanent. Herd immunity could come and go.
The US military has had cells of violent white supremacists for decades, and doesn't have an adequate policy to prevent them.
Thai dissidents are threatened with 20 years in prison after the queen's car drove through a crowd containing some dissidents.
Georgia is moving to mostly eliminate the practice of "citizen's arrest", which is used as an excuse for racist crime.
This article leads me to wonder whether citizen's arrest existed in Georgia before the 1863 adoption of the present law.
*Biden Administration Deports Human Trafficking Victims, Expels Immigrants to Countries They’ve Never Visited.*
*Hong Kong democracy leaders found guilty over peaceful 2019 protest.*
Almost a third of the patients hospitalized for Covid-19 in the UK have been in the hospital in 4 months.
So even if you get better, you're very likely not really better.
US citizens: call on Biden to restore the non-nuclear deal with Iran.
The US has had experience with trans-people for decades.
There are a few examples I've read about in Europe, centuries ago. I presume there must have been some for all of human history, though I don't know details.
The Zuni Man-Woman describes the practice in various Amerindian and Pacific Ocean cultures.
The UK puts almost no effective checks on directly corrupt lobbying.
Even when lobbying is not directly corrupt, it tends to make government serve those who can pay lobbyists, and that is a corrupting effect. Perhaps the right solution is to prohibit lobbying, or prohibit lobbying in many situations.
A treaty alone may not secure global cooperation against a pandemic. Governments need to be willing to cooperate on a rational policy or they will break the treaty.
*Toxic impact of pesticides on bees has doubled, study shows.*
The US is pressuring Britain in trade negotiations not to tax tech companies.
Comparing China with the US in regard to alliances with autocracies.
(satire) *Experts Worried Students Will Fall Behind After Spending Past Year In U.S. Education System.*
(satire) *New Wells Fargo Employee Walked Through All The Crimes He’ll Be Asked To Commit.*
* Democratic [so-called] moderates are holding climate policy hostage to get a tax cut for the rich.*
For mainstream media, "moderate" Democrats are the plutocratist Democrats.
To curb global heating, we need to regulate business and investment, not think of it as a "partner".
*Nearly 46m Americans would be unable to afford quality healthcare in an emergency.*
The Burmese military have released some of the protesters they arrested, who report extremely cruel treatment in jail.
*Global treaty needed to protect states from pandemics, say world leaders.*
I agree. We need to bring more areas of life out of narrow national interest, and into the sphere of cooperation.
*New Covid vaccines needed globally within a year, say scientists.*
We must increase the capacity to produce vaccine so that we can get the new version to just about everyone in a few months. Then we won't have to do it yet another time.
Biden plans to construct offshore wind electric generation to power "10 million homes" by 2030.
That is a significant step, but not enough. We need to power half the country with renewable energy by then, vehicle as well as homes.
If offshore wind farms have the effect of protecting part of the ocean from fishing, so much the better. We need to protect a substantial fraction of the ocean. Protected zones enable fish to reproduce and grow, which results in more fish to catch in the nonprotected areas.
And if we don't stop making lots of CO2, with the resulting ocean acidification there may not be much to catch a few decades from now.
*The Australian Academy of Science says Australia needs to push faster to cut greenhouse gas emissions.*
*Under cover of Covid, British workers' rights are being quietly stripped away.*
Tories do this in the UK just as Republicans do it in the US. Unions, and laws giving workers rights, help protect them from what businesses, with their right-wing pretense that it is virtuous to exploit workers as much as they can, keep trying to do to them.
*AT&T said [the wrecker]'s tax cut would create jobs — now it's laying off thousands of workers.*
Reviewing many things that are wrong with the US electoral system, not counting voter-suppression and gerrymandering by states.
(satire) *CDC Concludes U.S. Not Prepared For Potential Pandemic Following Year-Long Simulation Drill.*
Experts estimate around a year before the current Covid-19 vaccines become obsolete due to new variants that are different enough to infect people who are vaccinated.
The conclusion is clear: we must vaccinate everyone and soon, to cut off the evolution of the virus.
Who gets the limited current supplies of the vaccine is a side issue. We can't avoid the development of mutant strains by vaccinating A instead of B. We have to vaccinate them both.
Biden's infrastructure plan could be a significant start at what the US must do to achieve its share of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I don't think it goes far enough. I expect that the UCS doesn't either.
Union of Concerned Scientists to Biden: *Slash Emissions 50% Below 2005 Levels by 2030.*
It is important to people that you pronounce their names rather than ask to substitute for them.
However, please be considerate of people who can't pronounce it, or feel ashamed of pronouncing it wrong.
I could pronounce Fermín or Kuan-lin, but some languages have sounds I don't know how to make. I would be glad to learn, but I would need teaching over time. If you are prepared to coach me, I will do my best.
New York State has made a try at a digital vaccination certificate.
That article describes some flaws, which maybe will be fixed. But I wonder, how do restaurants, concerts and so on check your status? Does it require you to have a smartphone?
Also, does the system record where your certificate is checked?
Can people use paper certificates instead? I have one of those.
Please call Governor Cuomo's office and ask these questions. Show the state that these questions matter.
*Destruction of world's forests increased sharply in 2020.*
New Zealand has raised taxes on the rich to help support the poor.
Hooray!
Alexei Navalny has started a hunger strike, and reports being tortured and denied medical care.
His return to Russia was a powerful spur to opposition to Putin, but the effect can wear off with time.
The amount of damage caused by intrusive pest species is 'trebling every decade'.
Perhaps in 20 years we will have safe technology to wipe out some of these species, in the places where predators won't keep them in check. However, the same technology might be used to wipe out the people of a region.
Singers and musicians are bullying songwriters to give up their share of income from music.
This happens as the the companies that distribute music are putting the squeeze on the musicians.
They would be better off with my suggestions for how to support the musicians and songwriters/composers.
Capitol police sue the bully for inciting the Jan 6 riot.
I'm delighted to see it, but I doubt personal injury claims can possibly amount to enough of a punishment for him.
Bolsonaro may have prepared the ground for another coup in Brazil, perhaps to strengthen his grip on power as the people come to hate him.
A former victim describes the cruelty of an elite English boarding school.
I got a taste of that just once while attending a private school in New York City. Being made to thank the school's head for slapping me hard and knocking me off the chair was far less than what the article describes, but I hated him after that.
One day I put a sign, "Ministry of Love," on his office. I put signs for the other three ministries of Oceania on other people's offices.
The man who attacked a stranger of East Asian descent, in NYC has been caught. He was previously convicted of killing his own mother.
I condemn the surging violence and hatred against people who have ancestry in East Asia and the Pacific. Like all forms of ethnic hatred, it is a evil that we must denounce and try to stop.
But I feel we should call those people by a term that doesn't define India and other large parts of Asia out of existence.
More exact than "Asian Americans" would be "East Asian Americans." However, that is not perfect, since the same hatred also targets ethnic groups from Pacific islands, which are not in Asia at all.
The UK offers some welfare support to people in penury — but it is not enough to live on, so they go hungry.
The US, by contrast, offers nothing to many Americans in penury and they end up begging on the street.
The American Petroleum Institute says it wants a carbon tax.
A big enough carbon tax will cut down the demand rapidly. A smaller one won't have much effect. The API will lobby for a smaller one, and
I agree that we should not trust the API. It represents the oil companies, and what they want is to delay the emissions reductions that we need to do quickly.
(satire) *Police Now Ignoring Active Shooter Reports In Effort To Deprive Killers Of Attention.*
Tens of thousands marched in France demanding a climate law strong enough to do France's share to prevent global heating disaster.
The US is helping abusive big tech companies by demanding a trade agreement that stops Britain from regulating them.
*How many anti-vaxxers does it take to misinform the world? Just twelve.*
Two St Louis thugs beat up and injured an undercover thug at a protest, and were put on trial, but not convicted.
What surprises me is that the attackers were not charged with the attack itself — only with other related crimes.
The Labour Party says it is now a pro-business party. Indeed, more than merely pro-business.
I do not advocate being "anti-business"; it would be very bad to abolish business. (We have seen how bad Communism is.) However, businesses have a tendency to mistreat human beings, so a large part of the job of the state is to make businesses stop doing that.
You can't make businesses respect human beings by thinking of yourself as "pro-business" or "in a partnership with business".
Civilians say that the "gathering of armed extremists" bombed by a French plane was actually a wedding party.
I am inclined to believe the local people. They generally know a lot more about what is going on.
The US has done things like that too.
When mass media believe thugs accounts of fighting protesters without checking them, that puts democracy at risk.
*Big Chunks of Corporate Tax Cuts End Up in Executives’ Pockets.*
This was supposed to "trickle down", but it didn't, because that never really happens.
Some right-wing judges want to weaken the criteria for judgments of libel. If they succeed, criticizing the wealthy would become very risky.
If you're worried that the US national debt is too big, keep in mind that patent and copyright monopolies (especially patents) have the same effect and much bigger.
Any continuing monopoly will tend to have the same effect, even if no law prohibits more competition from arising. Having insufficient competition will do the same thing, though to a lesser extent. Ask the diabetics that can barely afford the insulin they need to live.
A tendency to oversensitivity to "what might someone possibly mistakenly criticize?" is pushing society into increasingly rigid self-censorship.
Even when New York City refuses to directly defend a cop in a lawsuit, the city does so indirectly through a special fund paid by the city.
* As the former chief investment officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world with $8.7 trillion in assets, I led the charge to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) into our global investments. In fact, our messaging helped mainstream the concept that pursuing social good was also good for the bottom line. Sadly, that's all it is, a hopeful idea. In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community.*
In the 1990s or 2000s, someone challenged me to look for an ethical investment fund. As it happened, I was acquainted with someone to had started one — an independent company. The fund stated its criteria and it listed its investments.
I think the fund was honest. The main investment was Microsoft.
Microsoft got a high ethical grade, according to the usual criteria — which did not include the question of whether software respected the freedom of its users.
I did not invest in the fund.
*US Military Ordered 'Clandestine Burning' of Toxic Chemicals in Poor Neighborhoods: Study.*
(satire) *L.A. Books 5,000 Hotel Rooms For Police Officers To Take Naps In Between Displacing Homeless.*
How to wind down the "global war on terror". In addition to the deaths and other misery that it directly causes, the US brings itself into valid disrepute by pursuing this "war."
*Lawsuit Challenges EPA Approval of the Use of Medically Important Antibiotic as a Pesticide on Citrus Crops.* If that decision stands, it will kill people.
The European Court of Justice dismissed the young people's climate case on the grounds th