Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
That's to put an end to corruption that we have plenty of evidence of.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
This bill by itself is not enough to protect voting rights. A few years ago there was another voting rights bill to do the rest.
US citizens: call on Congress to Ban Partisan Gerrymandering.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The US government accepted a lump sum payment from Moderna for use of US-government-funded technology. That's a tiny fraction of Moderna's increased price for the Covid-19 vaccine.
For the government to accept this was dereliction of duty. The US government had the duty to make Moderna allow vaccine production world-wide, and it didn't try.
An ecosystem can collapse abruptly when the last species fulfilling some crucial role disappears from it. This is likely to happen in many places during this century.
*Former US ambassador accuses Israel of "creeping annexation" of the West Bank.* Plus breaking a former agreement with the US.
More about this.
India had an opposition politician arrested for "insulting the prime minister" (Modi). The "insult" was a quip that suggested that Modi and the coal magnate Gautam Adani were somehow the same person.
Prosecuting people for insulting officials is an attack on human rights, whether in India, in France, or any other country. Modi, je te vois!
*Moderna's "Deadly" Profits Show Public Funding Must Have Strings Attached.*
The US used to attach strings to research funding -- all discoveries made by university research done with government funding had to be made available for the government to use as it saw fit. This was eliminated by the Bayh-Dole bill, which sought to convince universities to be aggressive about licensing whatever they can get control over.
That's why nowadays writing software for a university is usually almost as bad as working writing software for a company.
Wage increases account for 18% of Australia's inflation. Increases in business profits account for 69% of it.
In Australia as in the US and Britain, the central bank is run by neoliberals who refuse to recognize these facts.
Someone's sweetheart was killed by robbers while driving a gig taxi. To prevent such things from happening again, perse calls for imposing surveillance on millions of customers, in case one might be a thief.
Of course we would like to stop these robberies, but massive surveillance is itself a bigger injustice.
Mexico is trying to end the use of genetically modified corn and the the weedkiller glyphosate. The US is applying harsh pressure to prevent this.
In effect, the US is once again acting as the tool of specific big businesses.
The vinyl chloride spill from Norfolk Southern's preventable train wreck is part of the consequences of our massive use of plastic. Its costs — in lives and hundreds of millions of dollars -- are part of the cost of plastic, which the plastic manufacturers don't have to pay. Instead, we all pay.
The endless round of sequels, offshoots, remakes and "modernizations" is a system for magecorporations to keep on extracting money with old "properties" whose authors died many years ago.
A play about the history and failure of the Lehman Brothers bank harps on their Jewish religion in a way that fuels antisemitism.
The fundamental falsehood which introduces the antisemitism into this story is the idea that grasping for money and disregarding the harm you do is specifically a Jewish practice. If we look around today, we find many billionaires who crush large numbers of people to get more money. In the US, a fraction are Jews, but most are Christians.
For a while in medieval Europe, bankers were mainly Jews — simply because Christian churches called it a sin to led money at interest. European rulers wanted bankers, and with Christians self-excluded, only Jews could take up the trade. But churches dropped that rule a few hundred years ago. The association between banking and Jews is a thing of the past.
Feral hybrid pigs that are hard to track, and kill wild animals, threaten ecological harm in the US.
*Bangladesh shuts down main opposition newspaper.*
The world has been suffering from a rash of repression in the past few years.
*El Salvador crackdown breaks the gangs — at huge cost to human rights.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to continue full support for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The NTSB said that the Ohio train derailment was "100% preventable" and that it was the fault of company practices and policies.
Railroad workers propose several precautions for the US to require for railroads.
They include
Italy has arrested a refugee rescue ship operated by Médecins Sans Frontiers, trying to impose artificial requirements that make it essentially impossible to operate such ships.
Fish caught in Michigan rivers are not safe to eat, due to the levels of PFAS contamination.
Ohio governor DeWine has so much ties to the railroads that one must wonder whether he is serious when he talks about holding them responsible for the vinyl chloride leak.
The original versions of Roald Dahl's books will continue to be published, alongside the new supersensitive versions.
I think this is a good compromise.
*'Biden and Yellen Should Be Ashamed': US Picks Ex-Wall Street Executive to Lead World Bank.*
Biden seems to be moving further into the plutocratist camp.
*Parts of US see earliest spring conditions on record: 'Climate [disaster] playing out in real time'.*
Australians: demand to be allowed to refuse to have your personal medical records stored in a state-wide database.
*Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan proposed a bill to cut the military budget by $100 Billion.
*Groups Launch World's First-Ever Climate Lawsuit Against a Commercial Bank [for funding fossil fuel projects].*
A Jewish member of the Labour Party objects to Labour's propensity to brand Jews as "antisemitic."
Putin's fake news machine is buying special promotion on Twitter.
Musk has made his support for Putin clear enough already.
The US cheats would-be visitors by making them pay to schedule a visa appointment, and only then showing them that no appointments are available and that they can't get a refund for the useless payment.
The article describes various other absurd restrictions that the author encountered when he sought to go to the US to join a boat race to Cuba. But proving that those restrictions are absurd is a subtler question. To show that "Pay to find out that you can't have an appointment" is viciously absurd is open-and-shut.
Twitter gave advertisers the phone numbers users had specified for two-factor authentication, and advertisers used them to identify the users.
The Tories' plan to handle the growing backlog in asylum applications is to give applicants 20 days to answer a questionnaire in legal English, without legal advice or translation help, and no chance of clarifying errors.
I'm tempted to joke that this seems designed to fail. Alas, with Tories involved, I have a feeling it is precisely true.
A new "luxury" car will come equipped to load various nonfree software cr…apps.
Some of them will distract the driver by showing video. Don't use that while the car is moving!
Since the car has a camera that faces the people in the car, and it is controlled by nonfree software, I expect that sooner or later the car's delivered software will make use of that against those people's interests and will, and they will be unable to stop it.
Google is considering how to respond to a Canadian bill that would require Google and other platforms to negotiate deals with Canadian publishers for permission to retransmit their articles. One possible approach would be to refuse to carry the articles covered by this law. Google has decided to show Canadians what that would feel like, by making all those articles unavailable to some Canadian users.
I have no opinion on whether this law would do good or harm. If it only restricts giant companies such as Google, I don't see anything outrageous about it.
Ms Scaffidi's comment uses misleading words. The law does not require Google to do anything for the journalists who write news articles Google retransmits. Rather, it requires Google to make a deal with the news publishers that the journalists submit articles to. That may wall entail paying those publishers more money, but how much of that would trickle down to human journalists is a question to be investigated.
If Canada dropped the trickle-down plans and changed this law to directly support individual journalists, not only news businesses, I would support it more.
Please don't refer to these news articles as "content" -- that term disparages all works of writing and art.
*Car pollution kills more Australians than crashes, new research finds.* Indeed, pollution seems to kill 10 times as many as crashes.
It would be interesting to see a comparison based on the total number of years of life lost to each cause.
I am also curious about similar comparisons for other countries, in particular the US.
*Putin aiming to divide US public opinion with nuclear treaty pullout, experts say.*
It's more of what we've seen several times: "I'm a lunatic with nuclear weapons, so do whatever I say!"
Indian Dalits are becoming successful in India as comedians in the teeth of caste prejudice.
I watched a few minutes of Manaal Patil's show on invidio.us (a proxy for Youtube, which I cannot access directly because it requires users to run nonfree software). He made me laugh. I would have watched the rest but I have to work.
The UK charges environmental protesters with "causing a public nuisance", then forbids them in court from explaining why this "crime" was necessary for the public good.
*Poor People's Campaign, Families Demand DOJ Probe of Over 100 West Virginia Jail Deaths.*
The US has done nothing to hold Dubya accountable for using lies to start an unjust war by attacking Iraq.
Biden's new rules for asylum — which directly contradict US law — seem like they were inspired by the wrecker.
People have noticed the hardship imposed by requiring each applicant to carry a snoop-phone that can run a special nonfree app. They have noticed the monetary hardship caused by the price of getting such a phone plus internet access. I have nothing to add to those valid points. But I do notice other injustices, which are common in the form of computing that the US demands of them.
Such a phone is full of unjust nonfree software, and the app is nonfree also. Any nonfree program is inherently an injustice to whoever runs it, and is likely to be malware. That app does facial recognition. I wonder what other malicious functionalities it implements.
I conjecture that there is no need at all for that facial recognition. If a migrant gets an appointment to meet with a human agent, the agent can check the migrant's identity against per papers then.
It would not be terribly hard for the US to set up kiosks in various parts of Mexico where people can do the required communication knowing that a kiosk has no ability to snoop on them through their own computers, or mess with them in any other way.
*Trump’s environmental rollbacks in focus on visit to Ohio toxic train site.*
That's because some of them contributed directly to this accident.
Biden said that he gives Israel total support in its confrontation with Iran. Since Israel is on the brink of war with Iran, in effect this says the US is willing to join in that war.
That risks disaster. It could even start a nuclear war.
I doubt that Iranians who have protested since last fall will declare themselves enemies of their country; I think it is more likely to unite them with the regime.
An Israeli raid on Nablus killed 10 Palestinians and injured over 100. Many were noncombatants.
The occasion for this bloody attack was that two Palestinians accused of belonging to a real terrorist group were at that location. That can't justify attacking so many.
Malcolm X’s family to sue FBI, NYPD and other agencies for covering up information about his assassination.
US citizens: call for the US to adopt a Windfall Profit Tax to respond to record-breaking profits for Big Oil.
US citizens: call on Congress to fund universal school meals.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
*Turkey fines broadcasters for coverage critical of earthquake response [by Turkey's government].*
*Former attorney general in [Arizona] withheld evidence debunking 2020 election fraud [claims by the bullshitter's followers].*
*Methane from Australian coal and gas could be 60% higher than estimated.*
* Anti-Defamation League says all extremist killings last year linked to rightwing extremism and a high number to white supremacy.*
Corpse fetishism is spreading to Europe. The inhabitants of an island demanded "return" of skulls of medieval monks, which they claimed had been "stolen" by academics doing research.
The worst part is, the university which had them gave in to the demand.
If this sort of fetishism were applied to older remains — as some wish to do — all our remnants of Neanderthal humans would be lost to science, each bone "returned" to someone or other.
Imagine if that had happened 30 years ago. We would have been denied the chance to determine that the Neanderthals were among our ancestors and were the same species as we.
The only way human remains can contribute to the world, to the good of present and future humans, is by being studied scientifically. The old bones have more to teach us. We should not let anyone's fetishism interfere.
Norfolk Southern railroad has yielded to public criticism for its avoidable derailment by starting to negotiate about paid sick leave.
The workers deserve that, but meanwhile, the rest of the country deserves safe trains.
Millions of Americans have been compelled to move by the early stages of climate breakdown. In the future it is likely to be tens of millions, and many of them will die early as a result.
But most of them will desperately seek housing in places they can survive, and they will find shortages everywhere, because of bad planning of housing construction.
A few weeks ago I passed through the "Seaport District" in Boston, where expensive new skyscrapers are being built at an absurdly low altitude above sea level. You can see this for yourself since you can look at the buildings and the sea together. What public funds will the owners demand for protection against the danger they brought on themselves?
A lawyer argues in a Florida court that a fetus is the victim of "unlawful and illegal detention" because the pregnant mother-to-be is in jail.
I think the lawyer aims to demonstrate that it is absurd to treat a fetus as a person.
To continue the absurdity, the same argument could be applied to confining a fetus to a single womb.
Some US officials propose to make it a crime to spread election misinformation.
In an abstract sense, that could be legitimate and useful, but I can easily envision Republicans' using this law against people who tell the truth.
Recycling plastic into fuel makes sense in principle, but it can release highly carcinogenic pollution.
If the recycled fuel is safe, I would not criticize it for failing to be "biofuel." In fact, much real biofuel does not actually reduce emissions, because of the fertilizer used to grow the plants.
* Pollutants known as "forever chemicals"… have been found at high levels at thousands of sites across the UK and Europe,*
The UK undercover cops that infiltrated nonviolent left-wing protest groups by forming phony couples acted from an ingrained and systemic attitude of sexism.
Cambridge University students voted in favor of making all eateries on campus vegan.
They did not request more support for vegan students. On the contrary, the request is to make it difficult for other students not to be vegan.
The revisions in Roald Dahl's books go much further than removing insults. They seem to try to impose new taboos on some words and some ideas.
A US court ruled that the relatives of people killed by the September 2001 terrorist attacks cannot take the funds that were seized from the Bank of Afghanistan. Those funds belong to the Afghan people.
*Hundreds of Thousands March in Madrid to 'Defend the Health Service' From Privatization.*
The Spanish medical system is national in scope, and the government of Madrid can't change its structure, but seems to be running it into the ground much as the Tories do in the UK.
*Rail Workers Say They Knew the Train That Derailed in East Palestine[, Ohio,] Was Dangerous.*
A test of a 4-day work week in the UK: out of 61 companies that tried it, 56 decided to continue it.
Biden will try to impose the same extreme restrictions on asylum seekers that the bully tried to impose.
Lawsuits blocked the policy before, but that doesn't mean it will happen again. The case could go to the Supreme Court, which now has more members appointed by the bully.
Seattle has banned discrimination on the basis of caste.
This is important. As the population of Indians in the US increases, their traditional bigotry, and their modern organized bigotry (led by India's ruling party, the Hindu nationalist party), have been gaining in influence.
*Biden Implored to Avert "Carbon Bomb" by Blocking [construction of new] Texas Gulf Oil Terminals.*
*EPA Orders Norfolk Southern to Clean Up Contamination From Ohio Train Crash.*
How railroad lobbyists persuaded senators to let the railroads keep using old-fashioned brakes instead of superior modern breaks.
Sanders proposed to block US aid to Israel because of its anti-democratic moves and its increasing repression of Palestinians.
*Biden urged not to approve oil terminals that could create ‘carbon bombs’.*
*Hunger Cliffs Looms in US With Extra Food Benefits Set to Expire.*
*Did Five Supreme Court Justices Lie to Congress About Abortion Views?* It looks that way.
*UN torture prevention body cancels visit to Australia after access to facilities blocked.*
*Stronger El Niño events may speed up irreversible melting of Antarctic ice, research finds.*
*Paper calls for assessment of impact of sound pollution on cetaceans before firms allowed to mine sea bed.*
*London ship insurers accused of enabling fishing vessels to "go dark",* turning off their tracking devices, probably to fish in territorial waters or in protected zones.
*Banning ideas and authors is not a "culture war" — it's fascism.*
This explains the purpose and operation of DeMentis's censorship law in a way I have not seen before. I did not know the work of the authors that were removed from the AP African American studies course; this article explains the significance of their work and the systematic purpose of censoring them.
In the past, we could count on the Supreme Court to reject censorship laws. I have no confidence in the right-wingers who have captured it to reject the new ones.
Nonetheless, to teach that a person is guilty of past crimes committed by others due to sharing their demographic characteristics is itself an injustice, a form of oppression. It is also unnecessary, if the goal is to teach people to recognize the wrong and reject it. Young Americans are not guilty of the crimes of previous generations, but could easily fall into a life of similar crimes.
We should teach about those past crimes, not to inculcate a feeling of guilt into those who "look like" those who committed them, but to show them what they might become if they are not careful. Instead of teaching, "You were born guilty of that," we should teach, "Watch out — you could become guilty of that. Right-wing extremists such as DeMentis would be glad to get you started."
I wish the article were not marred by showing the fashionable symbol of left-wing bigotry: capitalizing the word "black" and not "white".
Political article: How the US Can Close Guantanamo Prison
US citizens: call on Biden to issue an executive order that guarantees the rail workers the sick leave pay they deserve.
US citizens: support the Social Security Expansion Act of 2023.
US citizens: call on Biden not to try to reimpose the wrecker's ban on giving asylum to people who migrated through some other country.
Modi's tax fraud accusations against the BBC are likely to be a fabrication.
He has a history of using accusations of tax fraud to crush news media that criticize him.
In Syria and Turkey, the earthquakes have left millions of people homeless. I would expect most of them have no food. How can the world provide food for them?
Robert Reich comments on how plutocracy defeated Jimmy Carter.
We should not forget Reagan's scheming with Iran to keep make Carter fail in making a deal to free the US embassy hostages.
A planned merger of two giant railroads would facilitate moving tar sands oil by train.
Tar sands oil is highly polluting and corrosive; we must not allow it to be transported in any fashion.
Israel's government "legalized" several colonies in Palestinian territory, that were made in violation of Israel's laws. In effect, it says that Palestinians have no rights — Israelis can steal land and the government will say "Well done."
Pakistan is on the edge of collapse — economic collapse, political collapse, and climate collapse. Since it has nuclear weapons, it is hard to tell what would happen in the event of such a collapse.
*Florida High School Athletic Association removes all questions about menstruation from required medical evaluation form.*
People suspect that the requirement for women athletes to answer those questions was part of a Republican scheme to cause trouble for women: either for those who are trans, or for those who get pregnant, or for those who have abortions.
*Scientists warn of many dangerous climate feedback loops. Current plans to mitigate climate change may be inadequate.*
In total, the researchers identified 27 amplifying (positive) feedbacks, 7 dampening (negative) feedbacks, and 7 uncertain feedbacks.
Only fools would depend on precisely how far we are from the climate cliff. The wise thing to do is to work harder to stop us before we find out the hard way.
Ancient Khmer jewelry from the Angkor period still exists, and was stolen in Cambodia. The US has sent it back to Cambodia.
I hope that those returning these objects will photograph them first and post the photos for all to see. It would be an outrageous wrong to treat works a thousand years old as copyrighted.
(satire) *Officials Champion Ohio Train Derailment As Deregulation Success Story.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
*Buttigieg Pretends He's Powerless To Reduce Derailment Risks.*
The article explains that there are some wrinkles, but there are ways around them for some cases.
*Wage theft, security issues and health problems on the rise after AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile outsource retail stores.*
There should be strict limits on outsourcing jobs to a subcontractor in the absence of real competition.
US citizens: call on Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to adopt stronger safety rules.
Republicans in many US states are proposing bills to restrict citizens' ability to pass initiative petitions.
Once they have seized the power to rig a state's elections of officials, initiative petitions are the citizens only way to take back control from the Republican tyranny and restore some democracy.
Endorse the Social Security Expansion Act of 2023.
*India enjoyed a free and vibrant media. Narendra Modi's brazen attacks are a catastrophe.*
Here's a cheery list of possible commercial applications for machine learning systems (referred to in the article as "AI"). How many injustices, real or probable, can you spot
Here's a hint: John Deere tractors, famous for being designed to make their "owners" helpless to fix them independently, collect data about parts of the field, and can use them to improve efficiency of production. John Deere keeps that data, so this becomes yet another way of subjugating users (farmers, in the case).
As this illustrates, all the moral issues of subjugating users that apply in general to nonfree software and to online dis-services apply to machine learning systems as they apply to other technology.
Professor Sussman, who works on artificial intelligence at MIT, reminds us that machine learning systems are no smarter than Dissociated Press. He reserves the term "artificial intelligence" for systems that understand what they are talking about and know what the facts are.
Australia once again has a legal system which makes distinctions between people based on race. Ironically, those of indigenous descent are first-class Australians this time, and the descendants of immigrants from the past 250 years are the second-class Australians.
Australia, and the people who defend this policy, do not use those terms, of course. But that shoe fits the policy. The practice of capitalizing the words "indigenous" and "aboriginal" underlines the kind of distinction between these classes.
The British colonists (mainly convicts who were sent there as punishment) took the land by force, and killed many aboriginals in the process. Then they set up a society in which indigenous people were systematically denied most or all of the rights of citizenship. This persisted until the late 20th century.
Justice calls for compensation for those wrongs — but not by creating inequality of rights once again.
I agree that the way Kuster is being treated is unjust. However, dividing Australians into first and second class is not the only way Australia can change its legal system to correct that.
One possible solution would be to generalize this new right so as to be applicable to all people whose background is associated with Australia — not solely to people whose background is indigenous.
Another solution that would apply to Kuster is suggested by the issue that the US DACA program partially addresses: people who were brought t the US as children and grew up there but are not citizens. They should have a way to become citizens. Australia should have such a policy too, and that would make Kuster a citizen.
The Guardian's economics editor can see that machine learning systems can eliminate millions of fairly good jobs, forcing millions to join other millions in dead-end poverty.
But he won't look for solutions outside the narrow capitalist system. Trying to train people for better jobs won't do any good if the better jobs are disappearing too.
For the next few decades, we might make a lot more good jobs: construction work to replace our carbon-dependent systems, and medical jobs to care for increasing numbers of old and infirm. Those jobs need to be funded by the public — which implies adding more socialism to our society.
In the long term, to quote a man who spoke at a meeting in Cambridge decades ago, "If the robots make it, we gotta take it!" We must tax the rich and give every person a decent life.
People who are frantic will propose widespread mistreatment to deal with occasional injustices. Here is an example: to protect gig ride drivers from robberies (which occasionally escalate into killings) by requiring every passenger to prove per identity with an official document.
A person whose SO has been killed by criminals can easily demand a massive system of injustice to reduce such crimes. Even, as in this example, to demand it as an afterthought added to other measures that ought to be sufficient by themselves.
A person in that situation can lose sight of the enormity of the demand perse is making on millions of others.
One of the main injustices of gig ride dis-services as they are today — one of the reasons that they merit the term "dis-services" — is tracking passengers: they require passengers to identify themselves by using cell phones and payment cards. Apparently robbers have a way to avoid being tracked; what can it be? Perhaps they steal phones and payment cards to use for this. That is not an option for a law-abiding person; our only way to protect ourselves from tracking dis-services is to reject them entirely.
But even though these dis-services are unjust already, changes in practices that make the tracking more strict and pervasive are important to fight against. Please join in.
Robert Reich explains how billionaires use sports teams to strongarm our governments to subsidize teams and dump the cost on the public.
If your city's stadium is named after a big company, that shows that its government was bought. Is your government still for sale nowadays?
*Santos whistleblower accuses company of covering up extent of Australian oil spill that killed dolphins.*
Senate Democrats estimate that Republican budget cuts, if they shield military spending, "would amount to a 30% cut to all other federal programs. That's a 30% cut to the [National Institutes of Health], opioid addiction and mental health treatment, housing assistance, child care and child nutrition, law enforcement and public safety, science and innovation, and veteran assistance programs."
Robert Reich: *Don’t let Republicans claim the mantle of patriotism.*
An article begs us to sympathize with the artisanal fishers of Colombia, who catch endangered sharks.
I do not sympathize. Preventing extinction must take precedence over jobs. The opposite conclusion, combined with human population growth, leads certainly to ecological disaster.
Of course, putting and end to larger-scale fishing of protected species has higher priority. With that achieved, will there be room for a little artisanal fishing of tollo sharks while still enabling their population to recover? That is a factual question and Colombia should act according to the answer.
Spying on other countries, not limited to potential enemies, is normal practice. The Chinese spy balloon was not a reason to go postal.
I think it is unfortunate that the US does not have a way to force down a balloon without damaging it.
Israel revokes citizenship for Palestinians convicted of certain crimes, making them stateless.
Some Arabs say that Israel should do the same thing to Jews who commit those crimes. I think that is backwards: it is wrong to make loss of citizenship a punishment.
The tyrant of Nicaragua has revoked the citizenship of dissidents and political opponents.
The prosecutor in Memphis was elected for criminal justice reform. He decided to release the video of Tyre Nichols's killing quickly, and to charge the killers before that, so as to keep protests nonviolent. That succeeded. Here is an interview with him.
He has set an example to judge other prosecutors against.
Starmer's exclusion of the left from running for parliament is effectively a coup, as well as the direct contradiction of commitments he made when he ran for leader of Labour.
In the US, progressive can win election via the (generally plutocratist) Democratic Party because it can't simply veto them from running in Democratic primaries. The plutocratists push hard against them, even dishonestly; nonetheless, in each election, the number of progressive Democrats in Congress increases. In the UK, apparently, such an approach inside the Labour Party is impossible now because its leaders have the centralized power to exclude them.
I can't judge the election strategy questions, but in terms of the the competition between parties, it is clear that Corbyn should move to the Green Party if it will accept him. Appealing for Starmer to relent would be a dead end; as long as they lock out any new left candidates, Corbyn would be nothing but an aging token, with no chance of inspiring anyone else.
One example of a male trans-woman convicted of rape has inspired disproportionate fear among women, and licensed hatred by antitransists, which in turn provokes fear among trans people.
It is an unfortunate social breakdown; is there any way to unbreak this egg?
US citizens: call on Amazon to eliminate plastic packaging.
US citizens: insist that incineration is not recycling.
Here is the message I entered:
The plastics industry and the American Chemistry Council are pushing legislation to reclassify incineration as "advanced recycling."That a dishonest statement to excuse a dishonest policy — specifically to evade the Clean Air Act laws that regulate incinerators. It would not avoid the air pollution, only close the law's eyes to it.
Please reject denial-ism and adopt policies to reduce the production of plastic.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject the Republican plan to defund the IRS and protect wealthy and corporate tax cheats.
Everyone, call on Amazon to negotiate with its workers' labor union.
The "collateral murder" video is important not only because it shows US soldiers cheerfully shooting Iraqi civilians, but because it showed that the Pentagon's description of the events was false.
The US wants to imprison Julian Assange for showing the public that video along with other facts about what the US did in its wars. Please show your support for him.
Preventing Assange's extradition will not by itself eliminate the long-term danger to freedom of the press in the US. That calls for overturning or amending the Espionage Act so that it recognizes that publishing secrets about government crimes is not "spying", because the American public is not a foreign power. But defending Assange will be a step towards that vital change.
Seattle (and nearby towns)' school systems asked thousands of students age 10 to 12 to fill out intimate questionnaires, collected from the students by a for-profit company.
The article disregards, of course, the injustice of leading students to run nonfree software. The author is not aware of that underlying issue which affects all school computing. See https://gnu.org/education/.
The US government criterion for whether anonymized data that is "identifiable" is too lax. Even if a "a reasonable person in the school community" could not determine who a record is about, very likely Google or Palantir could.
There is another side to this issue. Students entered information about important personal problems such as using drugs and bullying. Offering the students no help wouldn't be a good alternative. What is the right way to offer such students help with proper confidentiality?
There is a foofaraw about reusing medical implants taken from corpses.
What are the important issues here?
However, the issue of "permission" should not arise — no more for the deceased's implants than for per organs. Their only important use (aside from studying them for research) is to be put into another person and help that person stay alive. No one should have the power to veto that life-saving use.
Senator Scott has modified his drastic proposal to cancel each federal law after 5 years, exempting Social Security, Medicare, and the whole military budget. It would still cancel many other crucial federal programs if the Republicans could block them from being passed again, so it would still be a disaster. Consider the Voting Rights Act (what the Supreme Court has not gutted).
Many Florida universities have sent Governor DeMentis data on students' requests for gender expression medical treatments. Students are campaigning to demand that the other universities not send any.
I use the term "gender expression medical treatments" as a name which describes the treatments in question without presupposing any opinion or judgment about them.
*Nationwide Federal Order Bars Starbucks From Firing Workers for Union Activity.*
I wonder what this order will do to Starbucks to stop it from disregarding the order and firing workers for union activity just as it has done until now.
How China's arrested protesters and human rights lawyers are treated.
Steven Donziger: The Ohio spill of carcinogenic, toxic vinyl chloride is a much bigger disaster than people realize; the gas will spread, and due to the fire, we don't know what chemicals it contains. The EPA is doing more to cover up the nature of the problem than to protect people. He urges everyone to keep away from the area.
He points to the need to give the EPA the power to punish large companies enough that it hurts, so that it can take charge and protect public safety rather than a company's profits.
*East Palestine Residents Told Water Was Safe After "Sloppy" Testing Paid for by Rail Company.*
We should take the response to train accidents out of the railroads' hands, and have the NTSB do it — then tax the railroads to pay the costs.
Arundhati Roy: *Modi's model is at last revealed for what it is: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by big business.*
Elizabeth Warren and Katie Porter accuse the big US egg producers of using the price increase caused by bird flu as a smokescreen for an additional raise in prices just because they want to gouge.
London's Science Museum has signed contracts with large oil companies (to mount exhibits) in which the museum promises not to say anything that would make those companies look bad. For instance, not to talk about their global heating.
The museum's management now says it "has decided" not to sign such clauses any more, but that doesn't tell us how many such contracts are still in force, nor prevent it from making an exception next month or next year.
It should be a crime for a museum presenting factual subjects to agree to let any other organization decide what it can or cannot say, unless those decisions are published.
Iran is trying to mount terrorist attacks against Iranian journalists in exile in the UK.
DeMentis passed a law to negate local democracy in Florida to help an exploitative local scheme succeed.
I consider this a kind of corruption.
Congress is considering a bill to prohibit the US from ever again imprisoning people because of the demographic groups they belong to.
The climate "doom loop": the cost of coping with today's damage from the early stages of climate breakdown is interfering with the steps to prevent
If it is too late to save everyone, and all the things important to save, the long term must take precedence.
Taxing the rich more might make it possible to save everyone and everything. If so, we had better push hard to do that while the possibility still exists.
New Zealand suffered widespread destruction from a cyclone's heavy rain, which destroyed many homes, roads and civic infrastructure.
It will have to rebuild very differently.
Salman Rushdie and others have condemned the changes that the publisher has recently made in Roald Dahl's books. The publisher says that the changes are so that Dahl's books "continue to be enjoyed by all children today," but I think it is more a matter of what some believe children are supposed to think.
The actual changes I have seen appear to be minor, and I don't think they ruin the books. What arouses my ire is the idea of revising the writings of the past to expunge all ideas that have been declared ++ungood. It reminds me of when students demanded to do in George Washington High School in San Francisco.
It also reminds me of Chinese censorship.
Leaked files from the reputation-whitewashing company Eliminalia showed that it made fraudulent copyright complaints to get negative stories taken down, and used fake accounts to flood the net with fake positive stories, drowning out the criticism.
A hate movement in the UK is stirring up hatred against asylum seekers. Those under its influence respond to any inconvenience or problem by assuming asylum seekers are to blame. Often this is false, but they don't bother to check.
Anthony Mitchell died in an Alabama jail of hypothermia. His relatives accuse jail thugs of punishing him by locking him in the freezer, which killed him.
The EU has banned using lead shot to hunt birds. The lead was poisoning large numbers of other birds that were not being hunted.
Allegations that the corrupter and his relatives profited directly from corrupt dealings with Crown Prince Bone Saw.
This corruption, if proven, would justify putting them in jail. But it is not as bad as the damage caused by the political chaos and dishonesty that the corrupter unleashed on the US.
(satire) *Amazon Echo Declares It Heard Everything And It’s Taking The Kids.*
*Oxfam Calls Updated EU Tax Haven Blacklist Nothing But a "Joke List". *"Zero- and low-tax-rate countries should be automatically blacklisted," said one tax expert. "E.U. countries should not get a free pass."*
Mississippi's Republican government has created a special court for prosecution of crimes in part of the capital, Jackson, which will have no accountability to the (majority black) inhabitants of that area.
This could be a plan to institute racist "justice."
Starmer ordered the Labour Party to refuse to let Corbyn run again in the next general election. His supporters are not going to yield meekly.
Constructing the Obama Center in a black neighborhood of Chicago is supposed to benefit people there, but the actual effect (even before the center is built) is rapid gentrification — they are compelled to move away.
*Peru’s ‘racist bias’ drove lethal police response to protests, Amnesty says. [The state] permitted "excessive and lethal use of force" against indigenous groups.*
*Fox News hosts thought Trump’s election fraud claims were ‘total BS’, court filings show,* while endorsing those same lies while on the air.
The president/tyrant of Tunisia has started arresting opposition leaders and people who can influence the public.
Google gave publicity to a software project designed by Aramco employees to use Google servers to find and repair methane leaks. Did Google do good, or harm?
Repairing the leaks is good but small. Helping Aramco distract attention from its far bigger activities, which accelerate global heating, is harmful. Which one is more important?
The fact that Google specifically acted to get publicity for Aramco's token emissions reductions, which don't compensate for its emissions increases, suggests that this is misleading greenwashing, for Google as well as Aramco.
The article linked to describes other ways in which Google's misrepresents its assistance to Aramco and other planet roasters to deny that they exacerbate global heating.
Sanders proposes Robert Reich, or union leader Sara Nelson, for secretary of labor.
The Taliban have banned contraceptives in Afghanistan — perhaps some kinds and not all.
The Christian Taliban that threaten the US have similar goals, and sooner or later will try to impose similar laws in the states they control.
Tesla union busting: the company fired 30 workers in response to a union drive.
One thing the workers demand is a decrease in surveillance. I wish the customers would demand the same thing.
The US used to put asylum seekers from Venezuela in a private (unaccountable) immigration prison and tortured them with sleep deprivation and other sadisms, hoping they will break and agree to be deported.
The new system is to deport them immediately to Mexico, so they don't get a hearing. The only way they can ask for asylum in the US is to request it at a distance — probably running nonfree software — and be prepared to pay the cost of a commercial flight to the US.
Protests calling for "death to the dictator" continue in Iran despite the killing of over 500 protesters.
A DC thug whose job included monitoring suspected criminal groups such as the Proud Boys gave them information about the suspicions against them, shortly before Jan 6.
A right-wing billionaire donates to Republican candidates first of all, but as a forward line of defense he donates to plutocratist Democrats also.
He also supports fascists in Israel.
Thugs repressing protesters at Raytheon's office in Arlington, Virginia, told the protesters that Raytheon owns the sidewalk so no one can protest there.
In the meeting that they protested, all elements of the military-industrial-media complex with so thoroughly mixed up that the distinction becomes artificial.
The Chinese balloon was definitely built for spying.
*Civil Society Calls On African Union to Foster Fossil-Free Future for Continent.*
*Pesticide Use and Climate Crisis Locked in 'Vicious Cycle' Backed by Polluting Industries.*
*Peruvian loggers given 28 years in jail for murder of four indigenous leaders.*
Another Norfolk Southern train has had a derailment, and some cars were overturned.
US railroads have prioritized profit over safety; it the government has the responsibility to make them stop. Specifically, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg had better get moving.
Proper safety precautions would require giving workers time to think, rather than making them rush, and giving them sick pay so they won't be doing safety checks while not quite up to it.
Perhaps the US should establish a legal requirement for railroad workers to report certain sorts safety flaws in trains directly to the NTSB. It would be harder for railroad bosses to pressure workers to keep quiet if keeping quiet is a criminal offense. Indeed, asking staff to keep quiet should be a criminal offense too.
Republicans are introducing many state bills to restrict what teachers can teach.
*Fetterman Applauded for "Courage" of Being Open About Clinical Depression.*
Republicans in Congress want to continue the wrecker's tax cuts for the rich, which currently are supposed to last only until 2025.
Many hobbyists launch very small "pico balloons" (smaller than a nano balloon would be) which carry a GPS receiver plus a radio transmitter to say "here I am".
But only in daylight, because batteries would be too heavy to carry.
It is plausible that the balloons that the US recently shot down were pico balloons. Some of them have drifted around the Earth several times.
*Findings in Georgia Trump report could be enough to bring criminal charges.*
And it looks like the DA of Fulton County is investigating state-level charges of perjury.
*Yes, Wall Street Would Kill Your Granny for a Few Extra Bucks.*
That may be an exaggeration. I don't think a big company's CEO would bother killing one granny even for a thousand dollars. Perse would call that "small potatoes" and look for ways kill thousands of grannies for millions of dollars.
Bernie Sanders: *Now Is the Time to Defeat the Insatiable Greed of the Prescription Drug Industry.*
Democrats in the New York State senate rejected Governor Hochul's right-wing nominee to the state supreme court.
I applaud this decision, but does not erase the wrong she did by nominating such a person. If she runs for reelection, voters should demand that she come clean about this.
Biden acknowledged that the three balloons shot down most recently were not surveillance balloons and were not Chinese.
One of them seems to have been launched by an American group of hobbyists.
I recommend a system for high-altitude balloons to carry radio transmitters to identify themselves and who owns them.
*Sanders Says His New Bill to Raise Teacher Pay Could Be Fully Funded by Taxing Rich Estates.*
Biden nominated James Cavallaro for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, then withdrew the nomination after seeing how Cavallaro criticized Israel's human rights record.
That position has nothing to do with Israel, but what Professor Cavallaro said about Israel is valid.
As for Jeffries, what Cavallaro said about Jeffries seems plausible and I suppose Cavallaro spoke based on his knowledge.
It was posted before he was selected as the House Democrats' leader.
In California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Maryland, and Washington, state legislators are pushing to tax millionaires more. The campaign is looking for legislators who want to do this in other states. I am curious about their target for the highest tax bracket, which is not stated in the article.
Massachusetts voters (including me) voted for a higher tax on high incomes in the November 2022 election.
*Millions of [US] children are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage starting in April.*
And millions of US adults as well.
Extension of Medicaid was started in 2020 with bipartisan support because Covid-19 alarmed the Republicans into feeling they had to help people. Now they want to undo that as part of their War on [people in] Poverty.
The Thwaites glacier is melting from below — the water under it is hotter than freezing.
If it melts, that will raise sea level by two feet.
Oregon is considering a bill to allow victims of organized intimidation to sue the intimidators.
The idea is to discourage right-wing bullying.
(satire) *Blundering U.S. Accidentally Stabilizes Foreign Country.*
*India accuses BBC of tax evasion amid Modi documentary row.*
I won't argue that a large corporation such as the BBC is beyond suspicion, but the fact that the accusation is being made now leads me to suspect that Modi is using this to repress criticism of his regime.
Even if the accusation is true, Modi is probably using it for political motives rather than for legitimate motives.
US railroad workers call for nationalization of the US railroads,
to end the mismanagement of the few major railroad corporations.
The Department of Justice is arguing in the Supreme Court to invalidate old state laws that allow a corporation to be sued in Pennsylvania (for example) if it does business in Pennsylvania.
A few weeks ago, Biden protected the railroads from giving workers sick leave. He seems too close to railroads.
Alonzo Bagley was maimed by Louisiana thugs who arrested him in 2018, and sued them. This year a thug shot him and killed him, gratuitously. The thug is being prosecuted. I wonder why he is accused of "negligent" homicide — can firing a gun at a person be mere "negligence"?
There is no such thing as "immunity debt" for an individual. The immune system does not require "exercise" to keep functioning.
For society, there is a kind of infection backlog. Normally every baby gets infected by RSV before age two. So there is a normal rate of first infections of RSV, some fraction of which require treatment.
When babies are kept more isolated, many of them don't catch RSV at the usual age. That creates a backlog of babies who are yet to experience that infection.
When the isolation ends, basically all those babies catch it in a short time. The infection causes the same results as usual, but the number who get infected per month is higher than usual.
After a while, all those babies have had RSV and the temporary isolation has no lasting effects. At least, not due to RSV.
US citizens: call on the EPA to regulate neonic-coated seeds as pesticides.
The Corporate Weaponization of Government: it starts from the idea that corporations have the rights of people.
*Report Urges Capping US Prison Sentences at 20 Years to End Mass Incarceration.*
Long sentences are not the only cause of excessive imprisonment in the US, but it's an angle to try.
*Bank Lobbyists Hired by Congress to Oversee Banking Regulations.*
If those ex-lobbyists are honorable and loyal to their new employer, they might use their inside knowledge to do a very good job. But I think that is too much to hope for.
Planet roasters spend lots of money on advertising in antisocial media platforms, campaigning to delay decarbonization.
Musk reportedly told engineers to modify the Twitter software so that more people would actually look at his tweets.
Senator Sanders asked if it is "morally acceptable that tens of thousands of people die each year in this country because they cannot afford the medicine their doctors prescribe, while at the same time, the drug companies make billions of dollars in profits."
*Ohio residents demand answers two weeks after toxic chemical train derailment.*
(satire) *Baby Paranoid After Discovering Parents Bugged His Crib.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
*Flowers and trees blooming up to 3 weeks earlier than normal in the Eastern US.*
February is normally the depths of winter, but for two days it has been 60° outside my home in Boston. This is very dangerous.
More about Netanyahu's threat to Israel's democracy, and the protests that aim to resist.
(satire) *No One Has Heart To Tell Man That They Are All Figments Of His Untethered Mind.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
A report describes the range of repression that queer women face as human rights defendants, all around the world.
*Public-Interest Champion Gigi Sohn Faces More False Attacks as Her Long-Overdue FCC Confirmation Moves Through the Senate.*
Guterres warns the world that a billion people are threatened by sea-level rise.
Paris is pushing very hard to increase the number of apartments for residents, taking steps to convert office buildings into residences, to tax second homes, and to restrict short-term rentals of apartments.
The EPA needs to take care so that its new renewable fuel standard does not backfire and encourage use of certain fossil fuels.
The planet roasters are once again trying to encourage investment in more use of certain fuels which are only partly renewable, and doing so by exaggeration.
China is using its naval and air power as a basis for threats of skirmishes. Just recently it provoked a small skirmish with a Philippine transport ship.
For some decades, China has been building bases on islands in the South Chine Sea, which various countries claim. The Philippines replies in kind by building an artificial base on a reef. That set the scene for the skirmish.
I expect China calculates that it can attack Philippine ships with lasers. and the Philippines won't dare retaliate because China's navy is more powerful. The article does not mention that any one was permanently injured, but it creates a strategic quandary.
*Moldova president accuses Russia of plotting to oust pro-EU government.*
There are protests again in Israel as the government moves to subordinate the Supreme Court to Parliament.
*One month before Tyre Nichols arrest, activists made city council presentation over fears of violent traffic stops in Memphis.*
HSBC is serving China's repression by refusing refugees from Hong Kong access to the money they deposited in that bank.
The article claims that HSBC fabricates excuses to refuse to acknowledge that they are the owners of their accounts. HSBC says it is obeying a Chinese law. Either way, the UK (and potentially also the US) can punish it for this, since it operates in those countries.
Generations of Chinese, living all their lives under strict censorship, have not formulated a language with which to express disagreement with an official position.
The Putin forces sent thousands of Ukrainian children (at least 6000) to brainwashing camps to inculcate Russian identity and loyalty to Russia.
Some of them left with their parents' permission. Others were given no other way to leave the battlefield. Some were cut off from all further contact with their families. Some never came back.
I cannot tell whether this literally includes only children, or minors of all ages up to 18.
The NHS will pay a large sum to cure any British child of metachromatic leukodystrophy, a fatal genetic disorder, if the diagnosis is early enough for the cure to be effective.
Government intervention to eliminate antisemitism (both real and misidentified) from the Labour party has ended.
I am sure there were real antisemites in the Labour party. But since this intervention was based on the incorrect IRHC statistical classification criterion, the denunciations also included critics of Israel's occupation who were not antisemites. This will eliminate many non-racist progressives from the party. The party's unofficial policy of imposing non-progressive candidates will ensure that a Labour victory will make only an incremental difference. Sure, it won't be as bad as Tories, but how will Britain do the rest of what it needs to do? The Labour Party will never help.
Nikki Haley doesn't talk as brashly as DeMentis, but progressives point to her record on policies and say she is as radical as the corrupter.
The US has arrested more suspects in planning the murder of Haiti's President Moïse.
Moïse was effectively imposed by the US, but it is nonetheless proper to prosecute those who murdered him.
Proof that Pablo Neruda was murdered with poison.
There is no information about who poisoned him, but we can presume this was under the orders of dictator Pinochet, who overthrew the government of Chile in association with the US government.
Australia is negotiating business-supremacy treaties with the EU, India, and China. Doing so is always dangerous, since these treaties can subordinate the country's democracy to foreign businesses.
ISTR that Australia's previous government, which was right-wing, signed the Trance-Pacific Partnership which includes a noxious ISDS clause.
Australia (and every country) must cancel the treaties that make the country vulnerable to extortion by foreign businesses,
US citizens: call on the FTC to thoroughly investigate all aspects of Amazon's medical treatment business for illegal monopoly-building.
US citizens: call on Congress and enforcement agencies to block Big Pharma mergers.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on Elon Musk to stop silencing journalists on Twitter now.
US citizens: call on the Department of Health and Human Services to stop COVID-19 vaccine price gouging.
US citizens: Support efforts to reduce "junk fees" that make things cost more than the advertised price.
Ohio suppression officers escalated a confrontation with TV reporter Evan Lambert step by step, up to attacking him, arresting him, and placing charges against him.
Around 35 million trees died last year in California, due to global heating effects.
Great Salt Lake is drying up; in roughly 5 years it will be dry, and its ecosystem will be dead. Then dust full of heavy metals will blow from the former lake bed, making people ill.
Obama's administration adopted a regulation requiring railroads to install better brakes, The corrupter eliminated it. Transportation Secretary Buttigieg ought to reinstate that regulation, but instead is working on weakening the regulations again.
Iran was spying on an exiled dissident in Australia, and per family.
Canadian federal thugs arrested news photographer Amber Bracken for covering a protest. Now the magazine she was working for is suing the Canadian Mounted Police for that.
The RCMP has a reputation for aiding repression.
*The climate pledges of some of the world's largest companies are often highly misleading, lack transparency, and fall well short of what's necessary to avert [climate disaster].*
*16 Biggest U.S. Grocery Retailers Failed on Forced Labor and Human Rights Abuses When Sourcing Tuna.*
Sanders and some Democrats introduced a bill to fund Social Security through the rest of the 21st century, by taxing people with high incomes at the same rate as the rest of Americans.
*Flowers and trees blooming up to 3 weeks earlier than normal in the Eastern US.*
*Hundreds of Thousands March in Madrid to "Defend the Health Service" From Privatization.*
The head of the COP28 climate conference is, embarrassingly, the head of the UAE's state oil company. He plans to increase fossil fuel production.
This goes beyond demonstrating that the UN climate conferences have been corrupted to the point where they are useless — it rubs that in our faces.
*Humanity Can No Longer Tolerate Corporations That Exist Almost Entirely to Make Money.*
Leaving the EU has been an economic disaster for the UK; there is no possible doubt.
But the biggest damage is to health , safety and human rights regulations in the UK.
Turkey is arresting the builders of buildings that collapsed due to the earthquake.
It may be true that Erdoğan is trying to distract attention from how badly he has handled emergency aid for the survivors. However, this is not a mere distraction. Turkey is earthquake-prone, so any given building has a substantial chance of suffering an earthquake sooner or later. Strict enforcements of building codes is crucial for public safety. Better late than never.
However, this isn't the first time that Erdoğan promised better enforcement of building codes, after a deadly earthquake. The real challenge will be to carry out the promise.
*Radical [right-wing] Legislation Would Eliminate All Federal Oversight of Natural Gas Exports.*
Raising the price of gas in the US is just the start of the problems that would cause. Big Oil will want to get that gas by fracking, which poisons water sources. And once Big Oil gets to build the wells and the pipelines and the export terminals, it will demand to keep running them for decades.
One difficulty with producing large amounts of hydrogen by electrolysis is that it needs to use large amounts of fresh water. That won't be possible in an arid place such as the one California is becoming.
This problem is real, but not insurmountable with abundant renewable electric generation — plus desalination plants powered by that electricity.
Six months after Pakistan's great flood, millions of people's homes and land are still underwater.
I suppose similar floods will happen again. Is there any form of engineering project that would cause floods to drain faster in the future?
Big tech companies are firing lots of people even though they are making record profits because that is the fashion for big companies.
*Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic Welcomes You.*
It offers prescriptions for abortion medicines, as an act of religious devotion.
Muslim fanatics yet again murdered someone who had been accused of blasphemy.
A right-wing group that supports Israel's occupation policies has accused a Lebanese professor of "discrimination", saying that she discriminated by refusing to accept their definition of antisemitism.
If her actions fit that description, that does not make them wrong. What does or does not constitute discrimination is an objective question and we must keep it objective.
People of any group can well tell us about the forms that discrimination against that group takes, and what the experience feels like to them. The former is a matter of specific events which they saw, and the second is a subjective matter of their feelings.
However, no group in a free society can have the power to decide what does or does not constitute discrimination against that group, because in a society which prohibits discrimination in some situations, that power would be dictatorial power. The specific criterion for discrimination, where to draw the line, is a crucial moral question which affects everyone's rights. Setting line too far to either side can cause injustice; indeed, setting it too far to either side can cause injustice to you . (You are part of some groups and you interact with people in other groups.)
The positioning of that line affects everyone's rights, so everyone must have a say in it. We must abstract that definition from specific groups so as to make a fair definition that is not biased towards or against certain specific groups.
The last thing we should want is to make fossil fuel cheaper! What we ought to do is tax those fossil fuels something like $25 billion. and divide that money mainly among poor Americans.
Summarizing how to decarbonize 95% of the world's energy needs in 6 years using wind energy, water energy and solar energy.
Scientist witnesses for hire will deny scientific conclusions in the service of denialism.
US citizens: call on members of Congress to pledge never to vote to cut Social Security or Medicare under any circumstances.
US citizens: call on Congress to allow student loan debt to be discharged through bankruptcy.
It was possible to escape from student loan debt via bankruptcy until a law was passed specifically to prevent that, in the 2000s.
Prickly pear cacti are taking over the slopes of the Alps as the winter snow disappears.
*Why Defeating Hochul's Right-Wing Judicial Nominee Is Important Beyond New York.*
New York state voters, please help convince your state senators to firmly resist any right-wing nominees Hochul makes to the state supreme court.
*"A growing threat to human health": we are ill-equipped for the dangers of fungal infections.*
Goffin's cockatoos learn to use multiple tools together and to anticipate which tool or tools a given fruit requires to open it.
According to Wikipedia, they can practice self-control, keeping a treat uneaten for over a minute in order to exchange it for an even better treat. They can learn to unlock a cage by watching a human do it.
*Washington Post Runs Medicare Newsletter Sponsored By Insurance Lobby Front Group.*
Bird flu is evolving to infect various kinds of mammals,and those closer to infecting humans -- even millions of humans. It could evolve to be capable of causing a pandemic like the one in 1918/19.
Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing to ensure that governments can't require anyone to take precautions against the spread of bird flu.
Not even requiring people who work raising chickens or packing chicken meat to wear masks.
*Over 30 Million in US Face "Hunger Cliff" as Food Benefit Cuts Loom.*
*ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell announced that they are scaling back plans to reduce their carbon pollution.*
They are making record profits but, being big corporations, they are ready to kill billions of people (over the long term) to make billions more dollars.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and ask per to pledge never to cut Social Security or Medicare.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
*Big Business Gave Over $36 Million to GOP 'Sedition Caucus' in 2022 Election Cycle.*
Biden's proposed "scientific integrity" policy would prohibit US government scientists from publishing any opinion about a government agency or a government policy.
Some Tories want to deport automatically any refugee that arrives in Britain in small boat, even children fleeing from danger.
Imagine this policy in the 1930s, being applied to Jewish children from Germany -- those who in fact were saved by the Kindertransport.
Utah is considering a bill that would require people to show government ID to sign up for platforms where people can post things.
Americans can get abortion pills with the help AidAccess.
There is a danger that a current court case will block the use of mail order to get mifepristone. For your own sake and your friends' sake, get some now, just in case.
There are accusations that Bogus Johnson's staff conspired to lie to protect Johnson from being punished for violating Covid-19 rules limiting parties, and falsified evidence, back when he was the prime minister.
I think the UK's restrictions were too rigid and repressive. It was right to stop dangerous gatherings, but there is no reason to prosecute ordinary people for having participated in them.
However, it is intolerable for the head of the government to scheme to lie about breaking the rules himself.
Thugs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, (where I used to live) shot and killed a student, Arif Sayed Faisal. The thug department refuses to say which thugs were involved and has given out little information.
The city's thug commissioner said that there was a city policy not to release names of thugs who kill. At the next city council meeting, the mayor asked the commissioner whether that was true, and the commissioner admitted it wasn't.
Various officials admitted they wanted to delay so that public outrage would die down.
I've decided to add "officer-involved shooting" to my antiglossary.
Arguing that ChatGPT violates the privacy of everyone whose writing was used in training it.
The article seems to presume that it knows, in each use, who is using it. If that is true, that is definitely a grave violation of privacy. ChatGPT is an example of SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute), and that is always an unjust way to make computing capabilities available.
(satire) *Mom Sick Of Reminding Lazy Teenager To Reload Family Gun After Shooting Sprees.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
Ohio thugs ordered a TV reporter to leave a press conference, then escalated the dispute to the point of knocking him down. Then they filed charges against him.
The Iranian drones that the Putin forces fire against Ukrainian power plants have warheads optimized for attacking power plants, not for attacking armored vehicles.
What makes it harder for black Americans to get college degrees than for whites? A survey reports it is because of discrimination and external responsibilities.
It also says that they are gouged by for-profit colleges. Many of them defraud their students.
Biden is considering a change in how the US treats migrants that cross the border with Mexico. Instead of telling each to wait months or years in Mexico for the US to consider per case, he wants to deport them permanently and immediately to Mexico without ever hearing their cases.
This is another instance of imitating Australia's cruelty.
The Wagner mercenary group is no longer finding many convicts who will agree to fight for Wagner.
Perhaps they have figured out that their odds of surviving Wagner are low.
AOA magazine tried using ChatGPT to write an article to publish. The result was an article full of errors.
A machine learning imitation system such as ChatGPT could not avoid those errors because it has no understanding of any subject. It does not know what testosterone is, or what it does in male or female bodies. It does not know the meaning of "low blood <whatever>".
Use of the term "content" for articles will not teach people to have more appreciation or respect for them. By adopting that misguided fashion, the article encourages what it criticizes.
*Human rights abuses committed by security forces and economic deprivation are among the most important drivers of recruitment to extremist groups in Africa.*
*Brazil launches operation to drive illegal miners from Yanomami lands.*
To drive them away permanently is harder than it might seem. They will keep coming back, attracted by the profits.
A Kenosha thug put his knee on a girl's neck. She was not killed, but was injured. Her family is suing.
Scientists have proposed another method of blocking a fraction of incoming sunlight from the Earth.
Like all methods of doing this, this one would depend on humans to continue running the geoengineering system; if we ever stopped, the suppressed heating would return soon.
And all such methods would fail to stop the ocean acidification that results from having more CO2 in the air. That itself would cause disaster.
The arguments that right-wing antiabortion fanatics will use with a favorable judge in seeking to ban mifepristone, and counterarguments that the FDA will use.
*A world in which your boss spies on your brainwaves? That future is near.* Employers use many systems to snoop on workers and their physical and mental state; these would essentially robotize most people.
A safety device that measures brain waves could be acceptable in some limit circumstances: if it is illegal to use that sensor's output for anything other than safety. and provided that if the safety system says you can't do your work, you should get a day of sick leave that day.
The existing "bossware" should be prohibited too.
The thugs killed forest protector Manuel Páez, but the resulting outrage has drawn many others to oppose to building the thug training center in place of the forest he was defending.
Florida schools are still allowed to teach about the Rosewood massacre, in which just about a whole town of blacks was massacred, but they are now forbidden to use the term "reparations" to describe the money that the survivors eventually received.
Activist investors have sued the directors of Shell for failing to redirect the company's operations vigorously away from fossil fuels.
It seems to me that this lawsuit is based on speculation presented as objective truth.
If the lawsuit accused Shell of putting human civilization in danger, that would be easy to demonstrate. If it accused Shell of intentionally covering this up, then provided Shell (like Exxon) privately did research decades ago which demonstrated this, that too would be easy to demonstrate.
If civilization does collapse, the investors will lose everything. But I think that is too far away to prove as a certainty by the standards of courts.
*Arsenic found in London air raises fears over use of waste wood as fuel.*
One of the big British banks will end lending for oil and gas extraction.
*No one wants masks [for the sake of wearing masks], but we still need them to keep Covid at bay.*
Pelosi is pushing Biden to nominate a plutocratist former congresscritter to be Secretary of Labor.
Republicans in Congress held a hearing about supposed collusion of Twitter with the FBI to censor the story about Hunter Biden's laptop. They did not find evidence of this, but they went on claiming they had.
They did find some evidence that the corrupter pressured Twitter to overlook his own violations of Twitter's rules.
The International Energy Agency says that renewable generation will become the biggest source of electricity by 2025.
This will indicate important progress, but it is not actually a crucial target. Our survival target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a point lower than the rate at which they disappear from the atmosphere. That entails eliminating most fossil fuels from land, sea and air transportation, and greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, agriculture, and construction.
The half-measures, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and "blue hydrogen" are not useful for this; they are at best distractions.
Once we reach the survival target, it would be wise to go further and reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Planting trees could do that, provided the trees survive and thrive. However, given plentiful renewable electricity, using that to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into durable goods could be worth doing.
Around 2/3 of white "evangelical" Christians support "Christian nationalism," which means that they wish to impose Christianity on the US and make non-Christians second-class citizens.
Over 1/4 of them state that they want an authoritarian leader "who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right."
I imagine the Christian Republic of America as resembling the Islamic Republic of Iran, with similar repression directed against people who reject imposed rules for clothing, similar repression and torture of protesters, and similar execution of protesters.
Georgia thugs accused Manuel Paez of shooting a state thug, and killed Terán apparently as revenge. However, it appears that that thug was shot by another thug, not by him.
*Republican-led legislature [of Missouri] rejects measure to [prohibit] minors from carrying firearms in public without adult supervision.*
Big Publishing companies want to distort copyright so that performing statistical analysis of styles infringes it. This is absurd and unjust, and as a secondary matter, it won't help authors and artists.
Please don't use the term "creators" to refer to authors and artists; it is propaganda.
Companies that make milk substitutes for babies have perfected the use of advertising to spread the idea that there is something wrong with breast milk.
(satire) *George Santos Panicking After Prospective Aide He Thought He Made Up Accuses Him of Sexual Misconduct.*
*5 Memphis [thugs] charged in deadly beating of Tyre Nichols allegedly assaulted another man just three days before, federal lawsuit says.*
Using machine learning systems to convert witness descriptions into sketches of criminals causes a risk that the sketch will look very different from what the witness saw.
*[At least two different] garden pesticides are contributing to British songbird decline, study finds.*
It is idiotic to delay prohibiting their sale.
The system for quantifying CO2 emissions from hybrid cars substantially underestimates the real world emissions of those cars.
The US used "weather balloons" to spy on China and the Soviet Union in 1956. If one wanted to argue that China is evil and vicious because it sent a balloon to spy on the US, that inconvenient fact would show the argument to be hypocrisy.
I do not think it was particularly bad of China to use balloons to snoop on a rival, or that it was particularly bad of the US to do likewise. I don't condemn China for snooping. I condemn China for its horrible repression and brainwashing of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, for its horrible repression and crushing of the 7-8 million people of Hong Kong, and its plans to conquer Taiwan so as to repress and crush the 23 million Taiwanese.
I also secondarily rebuke China for its blatant plans for economic colonialism around the world. This is no better when China does it than when the US does it.
The right-wing former government of Australia promised to do something about the problem of plastic cigarette butts, but it never even started planning what to do.
Evidently that was nothing more than dishonest PR.
Plutocratists choose policies to suit the plutocrats (rich businesses and people) they serve. When on occasion then find it necessary to make an appearance of concessions to popular demand, they try to minimize the cost to the plutocrats. Doing nothing but talk is really cheap.
The EU is considering banning use of PFAs. All of them.
Railroad unions say that the major US railroads are intentionally running safety risks to increase profits, and say that some of these chosen risks contributed to the train derailment and fire in Ohio.
They warn that worse train disasters will occur in the future. Individually, each one is an accident; collectively, the risk is intentional.
Google runs misleading ads for decoy "antiabortion advice" organizations ("crisis pregnancy centers") whose purpose is pressure and dupe low-wealth women into not getting abortions.
Ralph Nader: Put an end to treating corporations as persons in general.
Republicans in many states are proposing to prohibit drag shows or make it difficult for schools, libraries or restaurants to present them.
Note how Republican legislators use the vague and subjective word "appropriate" about drag shows (even nonsexual drag shows) because there is no way to rationally argue about a purely subjective assertion.
*Biden Is Right. No Billionaire Should Pay a Lower Tax Rate Than a School Teacher.*
Making billionaires pay as high a tax rate as working professionals is just the first step. Billionaires should pay a much higher rate.
*Biden Exposed Republican Plans to Cut Social Security. Now, he Should Release a Plan to Expand Social Security.*
Some railroad workers' unions at one of the big US railroads won a deal for a few days of paid sick leave per year.
The Department of the Interior cannot entirely cancel leasing of land for fossil fuel drilling, so it intends to postpone the leasing — perhaps indefinitely.
Planet roasters are suing, demanding that it hold leases soon.
Some Australian universities are fighting against defining "antisemitism" using the IHRA's statistical criterion.
It labels criticism of Israel's occupation policies as "antisemitism", which is clearly incorrect.
Spain has joined most of the world in covidiocy by eliminating the rule requiring passengers in public transport to wear masks.
I wonder how the Covid-19 rate will change in the coming four weeks.
Sea turtles are in danger of extinction from global heating. The sex of an egg is determined by the temperature, so heating make them all develop into females. They tend to lay eggs earlier in the year, which will help avoid that problem, but calculations say it won't do enough.
*Chinese-made security cameras to be removed from Australian government buildings.*
They are very wise to do this. You too would be wise to distrust such cameras — but not only the ones made in China!
Chances are these cameras are actually surveillance cameras: they transmit their video to some remote location (perhaps over the internet). Such cameras are always ready to spy on you for someone or other.
Seymour Hersh reported that an insider told him that the US used explosives to wreck the Nord Stream pipelines.
I did not believe that Putin did so. He got more power by shutting the pipelines and keeping the option to open them again, than by shutting them irrevocably.
This can be compared to burning the bridges or boats which your army could have used to retreat. An undamaged Nord Stream pipeline would have offered the EU a way to retreat from its boycott of Russian fossil fuel.
Biden plans to escalate the War on Drugs, specifically about fentanyl and substances "related to" fentanyl.
In addition to the usual harm to society of prohibition of any drug, this would ban a range of chemicals, whose effects (harmful or useful) have not been tested.
Fentanyl is dangerous, but a war that's on fentanyl is even more dangerous.
The main Republican presidential contenders, DeMentis and Ted Cruz, both graduated from Harvard Law School. This demonstrates that Harvard Law School fails to inculcate a respect for democracy and human rights.
Well-funded and well-organized Antiabortionists have set up a lawsuit with bogus arguments, designed so to give a specific right-wing extremist judge with a history of disregarding the legal merits of a case an opportunity to issue an injunction to ban abortion in the whole US.
(satire) *[Thug] Chief Vows Officer Accused Of Misconduct Will Receive Harshest Possible Nickname.*
US citizens: state your support for Ilhan Omar.
I want to make it clear that my support for Ilhan Omar is not because she is black, nor because she is a Muslim. For me, those are side issues. I support her because she champions progressive values and policies.
US citizens: call on the EPA to regulate the "widely recyclable" label so it can't be used to make the public believe that plastic really gets recycled.
Disney censors The Simpsons to kowtow to Emperor Xi.
Other large companies censor for China.
I suppose most companies will do this rather than forego the profits from the Chinese market.If western companies were selling physical products, such as DVDs, the companies would not have to carry out the censorship. Chinese retailers would not buy the DVDs of the banned programs; the western company would not be required to participate in censorship. However, because they run a streaming dis-service, the dis-service itself is required to censor on China's behalf.
This is one additional reason to reject streaming dis-services. I condemn their injustices so strongly that I refuse to watch or listen to anything through them.
(satire) *Books Ron [DeMentis] Has Banned In Florida.*
US citizens: call on Biden to fund Social Security — by taxing the wealthy.
US citizens: call on Roku to drop the right-wing extremist One America News Network.
US citizens: call on Congress to punish Big Oil for gouging.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
North Korea has a few Youtube influencers, who appear to be specially privileged people. They enjoy things that are ordinary in the US or South Korea, but which in North Korea only specially privileged people can use.
The purpose of these channels seems to be to give people a false picture of life in North Korea.
Hollywood did something similar for the US, and maybe still does: TV shows set in people's homes show houses that are large and luxurious, that typical Americans could not afford.
Right-wing senators continue to block the nomination of Gigi Sohn to the board of the FCC, using bogus excuses, The latest bogus excuse is that she is on the board of the EFF, which opposed and opposes the internet censorship law, SESTA/FOSTA, which was designed to sabotage internet advertising by sex workers, by making platforms fear false accusations based on the hypothetical possibility that those sex workers are enslaved.
We who oppose SESTA/FOSTA believe it is unjust to attack people by provoking fear, in those people and those they cooperate with, of being suspected of something they don't actually do. We also believe that sex work in itself is not evil.
*Blueprint Offers Biden Path to Ending For-Profit Corporate Prisons.*
1/3 of US plant species and 40% of US animal species are "at risk of extinction." Many kinds of ecosystems are endangered as a whole.
Greenpeace protesters have occupied an oil drilling platform with which Shell is planning another act of ecocide.
An Insulate Britain protester was
on
trial for gluing himself to a highway. The judge ordered him not to inform the jury that he was on
trial for protesting to save lives, but he told them anyway.
Now he is going to be jailed for telling them that.
Lula and his environment minister, Marina Silva, are committed to
preserving
all of Brazil's ecosystems, not just the Amazon forest
which is tottering on the edge of drying out.
The Putin forces
seem to be accumulating
tanks and soldiers for
another offensive, perhaps on the one-year anniversary of the first invasion.
Australia is heading for requiring users of dating apps to
prove their legal
identities.
I understand the importance of keeping out threats
and contempt, but just as Facebook's
real name
requirement is oppressive,
so will the dating app real name requirement be.
Of course, all these sites treat their users unjustly in another way:
by requiring each user to run a nonfree program. The internet is likely
to transform into a system for rigid repression. I hope we can keep some
corners of it safe from repression.
An NHS nurse writes
of her decision to join the strike: the NHS is too
impoverished and weakened to provide proper medical care.
The UK plans to
deport
all refugees arriving in boats, with no
possibility of an exception.
One country at a time, the world is eliminating the right to go to
a country and ask for asylum.
This policy would violate the European convention on human rights, so
Tories
want to cancel UK's membership in that convention.
In this way, cruelty towards boat people paves the way for cruelty towards
everyone else.
Bad management of the NHS, including overworking staff long-term, is
making
the staff burn out.
This results in fewer staff actually working, and thus even more burn-out.
*Stress
led to more NHS staff absences than Covid, new figures show.*
This problem could be cured, with time, by changes in government
policies: paying NHS workers more, and allowing qualified foreigners
to immigrate and fill the empty posts.
Many US pension investments are in private equity companies, which
exaggerate
the worth of their investments. When those people need their
pensions, they may get less than they
expect.
Many pets undergo
great suffering from the way they are treated. In
addition to outright harm, many suffer boredom from being left alone
most of the day.
I think that the proposal to entirely eliminate the practice of having
pets is extreme. It is possible to have pets and treat them well;
there are pets that are happy and not bored. However, this may
require more time than you can or wish to devote to it. If that is
the case, it would be wiser for you not to have a pat.
Perhaps people should get trained in how live with a pet. Perhaps
people should have to meet certain criteria in order to have a pet.
Urging non-fascist Israelis to
seek
support from Palestinians to
resist Netanyahu's threat to Israel's democracy.
The history of violent
fascism in the United States started
before Mussolini announced the name "fascism".
That sort of government was found in many parts of the world.
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 denounce bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important,
such as that one.
*[Friday's] jobs report
may
spook the Fed (but it shouldn't).*
Leaders in the corrupter's
Wisconsin campaign team
privately recognized
the 2020 victory for Biden in that state, then discussed how to spread
public lies about it.
One of them is now a regional manager in the Republican National
Committee.
Everyone:
denounce Exxon
for keeping climate mayhem research
from the public.
US citizens:
call
on the US Forest Service not to allow building an oil
pipeline through the Jefferson National Forest.
The proposed pipeline is the Mountain Valley Pipeline,
which is opposed
for other reasons.
US citizens:
call
on FIFA to recognize the Afghan women's soccer team.
Everyone:
call
on Facebook not to give celebrities exemptions from
the rules.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to reject the Republicans plan to replace
income tax with a national sales tax.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The effect would be a big tax increase for the non-rich and a big tax
cut for the rich. That's just what
plutocratists would seek to do,
and the opposite of justice.
US citizens:
call
on the FTC to ban businesses from imposing noncompete
agreements
on workers.
Brutality is part of
the
culture of many US thug departments,
which is what makes the term "thug"
appropriate. The question is,
what will succeed in changing that culture?
Lack
of proper training
on how to choose
not to kill
is one cause.
Bad training
is also
responsible.
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service to
take concrete
action to reintroduce sea otters off the California and Oregon coast.
US citizens: call on Congress and state legislatures to
investigate
election-winners who seem to be constitutionally excluded from office.
Thousands
of Israelis are protesting for democracy, and against
Netanyahu's plans to subordinate the Supreme Court to the government.
How Republicans
falsified
Critical Race Theory and African American Studies
in the interest of political censorship.
(satire) *Florida Board Of Education
Removes
Africa From World Maps.*
Hypereager
Trademark Enforcement: nasty, excessive and stupid.
US citizens: call on Congress to
ban
assault weapons.
That criterion for what to prohibit may not be exactly ideal, but
that's a side issue -- it would be a step in the right direction.
US citizens: call on the EPA
to make
a strong standard for limiting
soot exposure.
In the UK, a whole generation is
learning
the value of unionization.
Strikes are spreading, and so are victories.
The main resistance is from the Tories, who have aimed for centuries
to keep wages down and workers poor.
The US is seeing something similar, but not so many victories, as a big
company can stall concessions for years.
Robert Reich: *Friday's
Surprisingly Positive Jobs Report Does Not
Mean Fed Should Keep Raising Rates.*
Proposing to legislate that
corporations'
directors have a duty "not
to severely harm the public interest."
The right-wing, 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a federal
law
barring
people with domestic violence restraining orders from
owning firearms.
That court is right-wing because the preponderance of Republican
senators from the states in that circuit have
blocked
the appointment
of any new judges there.
That makes the 5th circuit ideal for Republicans to get the results
they seek.
The shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was part of an
US crackdown
on environmental defenders,
which includes charging them with
"terrorism" for nonviolent protest.
Bogus Johnson
promised to build
40 new hospitals, to win the 2019 election.
Now it's almost time for another election, and only 10 of them have approved
construction plans.
Promise them anything, but give them tax cuts for the rich.
At 1.5°C of global heating, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
could
start melting and not stop until it is entirely gone. That would
lead to 3 or 4 meters of sea level rise.
*Once Again, DNC
Panel Blocks Vote on Dark Money Ban in Democratic
Primaries.*
*Tackle
"Abuse of Water" by Big Ag and Big Oil,
Advocates Say Amid Colorado River Fight*
I think that "abuse" is the wrong word for this.
It should be "misuse". But it is a very big misuse.
Fracking misuses enormous amounts of water.
So does growing feed for cattle.
*ACLU Sues CIA, DOJ, and NSA for
Records
About Warrantless Spying on
Americans.*
Dubya's
solicitor-general, who argued in the Supreme Court in favor of
trying the prisoners in Guantánamo in "military commissions" (kangaroo
courts), now says that
that
was a terrible mistake. The US should
have brought them to a real US court for trial.
He also says it was
self-defeating to ask for the death penalty for any of them, and that
the US should offer them plea deals now.
I think that after the many years in prison and torture they have
suffered, the US should offer them a plea deal for time already
served, and let them go.
Five years ago, the wrecker's
officials separated thousands of migrant
children from their parents. Despite persistent efforts,
1000 of them
still not been reunited with those parents, because
the wrecker's
officials preserved no usable information about who those parents were
and how to find them.
An Iraqi father
dishonored
himself by murdering his daughter for
acting as if she had rights of her own.
His country dishonored itself by not taking this murder as seriously
as other murders.
*The Tories now face a choice:
lose
office with honour or burn
everything in sight.*
I partly disagree with that statement. After 13 years of lies,
bullshit, broken promises and voter suppression, all designed to help
the rich and drive the poor into hunger, cold and sickness, we must
not recognize the Tories as possessing any sort of honor merely for
putting a limit on their mayhem at a point before the bitter end.
Some "crisis pregnancy centers" go beyond misleading pregnant women so
they won't get abortions -- they also
disregard proper medical
procedures to avoid spreading diseases from one client to the next.
This was reported by a licensed nurse who volunteered to help in one.
Biden has asked to
negotiate
with the Republican
terrorists that use the debt ceiling as a hostage.
Negotiating with hostage takers plays into their hands
and leads to ignominious surrender.
It is probably technically possible to
avoid
global heating over
1.5°C, but society seems incapable of mobilizing to overcome the
obstruction.
Early in the 20th century, Germany colonized Namibia and
carried
out genocide
against two tribes that resisted. Now they demand reparations,
not to the Namibian government but to the people of those two tribes.
Interviews
with Palestinians in Ramallah on the topic of Blinken's visit
(to Israel, and to Palestine on the side).
*Carbon capture project [in Texas] is
‘Band-Aid’
to greenwash $10bn
LNG plant, locals say.*
Many climate defenders and scientists say that too; I am glad the word
is spreading.
*Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s single largest investor,
has warned company directors it will vote against their re-election
to the board if they don’t
up
their game on tackling the climate
crisis, human rights abuses and boardroom diversity.
*Republicans
have a serious antisemitism
problem. It isn't Ilhan Omar.*
A single state of the US
cannot
effectively regulate what sorts of
guns
are available. It is easy to bring a gun from another state.
A Brazilian senator, formerly a supporter of Bolsonaro, said that the
two were present in a conversation where another elected official,
also a supporter,
proposed
ways to spread doubt on the election's
validity.
Employees at some
REI
stores have overcome union-busting
to unionize.
REI is a cooperative, but it is a custom-owned cooperative,
not a worker-owned cooperative. So it can easily mistreat workers.
Democratic Connecticut legislators propose to
prohibit
the pseudo-word
"Latinx" in state publications, saying that most Latins find it offensive.
I too find it offensive -- because it is an excrescence on the English
language and/or the Spanish language. It does not fit the
pronunciation rules of either language. Basically, the word "Latinx"
stinx.
In English, let's use the noun "Latin" (plural, "Latins"). In
Spanish, I
recommend "latini", which uses "-I" as the gender-neutral
suffix. The suffix "-i" is better
because it causes fewer ambiguities than "-e". For instance, "-i"
avoids creating a painful ambiguity for "le".
*Former Russian soldier reveals he
witnessed
torture of Ukrainian prisoners of
war.*
*Bolsonaro attended meeting about
plot
to keep him in power, senator says/*
The US has freed
a "high-value" prisoner from Guantanamo prison,
someone who was tortured by the CIA. He plead guilty to crimes and got
a 10-year sentence that has now ended, and he has been released to
Belize.
This overcome one obstacle that stood in the way of closing the prison,
but it still won't be easy.
Memphis thugs
took
training from Israeli thugs,
who are likely to have taught how to apply the practices they apply
to Palestinians.
*Pentagon says it is monitoring Chinese spy balloon spotted flying
over US.*
Senator Manchin, together with Republicans,
intend
to try once again
to undermine the environmental review now required for large and
potentially dangerous industrial projects.
*British Columbia now allows
possession
of 2.5g of illegal drugs in
measure to mitigate opioid crisis.*
*Australia to allow prescription of
MDMA
and psilocybin for
treatment-resistant mental illnesses.*
The history
of the "traffic stop" in the US, and how it inevitably
became a vehicle for racism and violence.
The article recommends that traffic enforcement be done by unarmed
personnel.
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 denounce bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important.
Most often they give important information about racism or the fight
against racism.
Calling for the UK to ban work discrimination against workers for
having attended
state schools ("public schools", as we call them in the US).
The video of thugs
attacking Tyre Nichols shows that
their reports
misrepresented the truth.
It is not at all unusual for official
thugs to cover up the truth of
their crimes, even going so far as to lie on the witness stand.
Indian journalist Siddique Kappan was preparing to cover the case of a Dalit
who was gang-raped and died, when the officials of Uttar Pradesh arrested him,
accused him of one unrelated crime after another (including "terrorism"),
and tortured him repeatedly.
He was released
on bail after two years, but the charges are still pending.
In India, this
practice
is spelled "BJP".
Greenpeace activists protested outside Shell's headquarters, demanding
that the company
take
responsibility for the damage that fossil-fueled
global heating is causing.
Shell's profits last year were twice the estimated cost to repair
the damage caused by the
enormous
flood in Pakistan,
which was caused by global heating.
The fashion of focusing on which people are suffering how much just
now
from global heating
is a distraction. Every region is likely to
face enormous suffering within a few decades. We need unite to put
an end to global heating.
Then, when things are stable and emissions
are much reduced, we can worry about ending poverty world-wide.
*Battle
Over Budget a Great Moment [for Biden] to Envision a Better,
More Equally Prosperous Nation.*
Republican-dominated states are threatening to
sue pharmacy chains
claiming that mailing abortion drugs to people in those states would be a crime
under those states' laws. This is an attempt
to intimidate them into never trying to do so.
The US government claims that those threats are invalid, and
eventually a court will decide. But the Republicans can hope by this
threat to cause lasting life difficulties for tens of thousands of
women, even if they later lose the lawsuit.
Chechen
militia battalions, composed of volunteers, fight for Ukraine,
hoping to bring about indirectly the removal of Putin's control over
Chechnya.
The US "remain in Mexico"
policy
has brought migrants to a mass grave
in Tapachula,
at the southern end of Mexico,
one of the cities where Mexico forces them to go and stay.
The cemetery workers don't know how many bodies are buried there
without identification.
Scientists
were reluctant to try albicidin as a medical antibiotic
because they could not predict what bad side effects it might have.
That problem somehow did not prevent the discovery, testing and
adoption of penicillin. Given the urgent need for new antibiotics,
perhaps medicine has become hypercautious.
If they test albicidin with due care but not hypercaution, they can
find out whether it safe for humans, then use it for treatment if it
is safe. They might find a great new antibiotic quickly, or they
might find it is unusable. This is worth a try, isn't it?
I suspect something nastier underlies the hypercaution: perhaps pharma
companies are not interested in using albicidin because they cannot
patent it. If they develop "better" versions, they will patent those
and make a lot more money, at a byproduct making them too expensive in
most of the world. I suppose they don't want those expensive products
to have to compete with generic albicidin.
More
diversity is no substitute for more equality:
if the rich become more diverse, and the poor become more diverse,
that doesn't help the poor.
Tories
promised a few years ago to mostly eliminate the use of neonicotinoids,
but each year they declare an exception.
It's typical Tory, to adopt a plan to fix a major problem and then not
really do it.
*Sunak’s warm words on nature sound good, but can they
save our last [UK]
nightingales and swifts?*
Tories often talk about doing something that will help the non-rich,
but they often cancel the plans before carrying them out. Just
recently they are planning to cancel the commitment to compensate the
people who immigrated lawfully from the Caribbean as children but were
threatened
recently with deportation
because they did not have the
documents to prove what happened decades ago.
Tories
also promised to restore building codes that would have
prevented a deadly fire, but now they talk about deregulation.
The
first step against "Medicare Advantage" is a bill to change its
name
so it won't be called "Medicare".
Alas,
this
bill won't stop the privatization of Medicare
itself,
started by the wrecker
and perversely continued by Biden.
Australian pubs are starting to use facial recognition in areas with
gambling machines, to keep people out who have requested
not to be
allowed to gamble.
The basic idea sounds harmless in principle. It would seem that if
you have not added yourself to the list of people to exclude, this
system won't affect you. But is that really true?
I wonder who else will have access to the face scans of people who
visit the club? Will those scans go into a system connected to the
internet?
Will state agencies be able to add faces to the list of people to
exclude? Will state agencies be able to collect the face scans of
everyone that enters?
Extra funds for thug
departments to "crack down on crime" are often
used to create special units of
thugs. The recently-disbanded
Scorpion group in Memphis was an example.
This article describes some aspects of these groups that tend to make
them
arm the public.
They don't all murder people, but they also have a tendency to be
sent to areas inhabited by disprivileged demographic groups and have
the effect of causing suffering there.
*Bernie Sanders to DNC: Ban Super PAC Money in
Democratic
Primary Races.*
*Jane Roberts Becomes the Latest [Supreme Court] Spouse to Raise Questions
about Potential
Conflicts
of Interest.*
The US government approved a somewhat reduced version of the "Willow
project" for oil drilling in
northern Alaska.
Reducing the size of the project may reduce the danger it adds, but surely
it will still increase the danger of climate breakdown. It appears that
the Interior department, and Biden, do not appreciate how much danger we
are all in.
A study based on neural network modeling suggests that even with
substantial emissions cuts we might have 2°C of global
heating in 50
years.
*Where the study departs from many current projections is in its estimates
of when the world will cross the 2°C threshold.*
Considering the magnitude of the disaster we are skirting, it behooves
us to be conservative — in the normal sense of the word, not the
misleading synonym for "right wing". We need to cut more, and faster,
to reduce the risk of climate breakdown.
(satire) *Ticketmaster To Require Purchase Of Round-Trip Concert
Tickets For
Exiting
Venue After Show.*
When the London thug
department infiltrated many left-wing political groups.
the high officers who supervised that group never investigated whether
whether that surveillance was justified,
or
whether it was lawful.
(satire) *CEOs Explain How
They
Will Use ChatGPT.*
*Canada votes to take in 10,000 Uyghur refugees amid Chinese pressure to
force
their return.*
Shell's oil drilling in the Niger delta in Nigeria has polluted the water
with oil. People get sick, and the fish they used to eat have all died.
Now the people who live there are
suing
Shell in the UK.
*Colombia to pay reparations for role in extermination of
left
wing party.*
The party was formed by former guerrillas who made a peace agreement with
the government. Then the government organized killing them.
A few Democrats tried to convince the Democratic Party in 2003 to take a stand
against
attacking Iraq.
Russia is refusing to comply with requirements of the New Start treaty
that
limits
nuclear missiles.
*Long-term exposure to dirtier air can increase your risk of
depression or anxiety,
study finds.*
*Shell’s actual spending on renewables is
fraction
of what it claims,*
according to Global Witness. This is an instance of greenwashing.
Suspects in the murder of Jovenel Moïse, the imposed president of Haiti,
were sent
to the US for trial.
Can anyone explain to me how it is that the US has jurisdiction
over a murder in Haiti?
Despite the UK's new requirement for foreign entities that own UK
property to state who the real owners are,
loopholes allow some of
those owners to continue to hide their identity.
The German government, including the Green Party,
chose the side of
building a new coal mine. It needed thousands of uniformed
thugs
to defeat the 35,000 protesters who tried to block the conversion
of a village into a coal mine.
Destroying a town for public purposes is sometimes legitimate. (All
the inhabitants of that town were compensated and given time to move.)
Four towns were inundated to make the Quabbin reservoir which brings
rain water to the Boston metro area. But building additional fossil
fuel facilities steers our future towards climate breakdown.
Parents in a small town in Connecticut let their children, ages 7 and
9, walk a mile to a store.
Someone
freaked out and called the thug
department. The parents now face criminal charges.
Memphis published
the names of the black thugs that helped to kill
Tyre Nichols, but concealed until this week the name of the white
thug
who was involved, and what role he played.
This could represent bigotry.
The report seem also seems to try to cover up some aspects of the
thugs' violence.
Speaking of bigotry, the article displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.) Normally I do not link to
articles that do this, but I make exceptions for some articles that I
consider particularly important, such as the first one.
It should not be surprising that blacks
can
absorb from white society
the widespread ideas of bigotry against blacks.
Ideas for what could
make
for a real change in the violence of thugs
against blacks.
Supposedly UK voters can cope with the new voter-ID law by applying
for special government identification, but
only
0.5% of the people who
would need one in order to vote have applied.
Thugs
in Huntington Park, California, ran towards Anthony Lowe with
guns drawn. He dropped off his wheelchair and tried to pull his body
away from them, but he could not move very fast that way; then they
shot him dead.
It appears they did not run their body cameras. That in itself
is suspect. I've proposed automatic systems that will activate
body cameras at the sound of a shot (or a taser) and will save
the previous five minutes of video as well as subsequent video.
*"Suspicious death" of Rwandan journalist
prompts
calls for investigation.*
US citizens: call on Congress to
stop
corporate profiteering off of
COVID vaccines, by guaranteeing free access to all Americans.
The Burmese
military rulers repeatedly bomb villages of civilians.
*[Burma] junta hit
by western sanctions as "silent strikes" mark coup
anniversary.*
*US dairy policies drive small farms to
'get
big or get out' as
monopolies get rich.*
Industrial concentration is the cause of a range of injustices and suffering.
We need policies
to break up those monopolies; any policy which does the opposite simply must be changed.
A twisty maze of regulations and restrictions -- in the US, in Mexico,
and in other countries --
make
it very difficult for anyone to
exercise the right to request asylum in the US, even to follow the
long and slow procedure the US imposes for doing so.
The "Title 42" system of making asylum-requester stay in Mexico runs
into a problem since Mexico won't let them stay there.
An additional aspect of oppression in this system is the US requirement
to use a snoop-phone app, "CBP One". Those programs are
nonfree and
typically malware.
So are the operating systems of the snoop-phones themselves.
For governments to make them the only way to communicate with a
government agency for some purpose is in itself unjust. So, for the
same reason, are "web apps" that send substantial Javascript programs
that users have to run in their own computers. Knowing the US
government, I expect it abuses that power grossly when it gets the
chance.
I'm sure most of the people compelled to run "CBP One" hardly care
about that injustice, given the painfulness of their situations in
general. But unlike those. this one tends to spread to non-refugees
-- to everyone.
Olympic games tend to spread
permanent
increases in surveillance and
repression wherever they go. The next victim will be Paris.
I've urged the citizens of cities in more-or-less-free countries to
defeat those cities' Olympic bids. In addition to
repression
and surveillance,
they tend
to crush poor people
and especially
homeless people,
and transfer
a lot of public money to big companies.
Robert Reich: the growing national debt is mainly due
letting the rich
pay too little tax.
British libel law still
lends
itself to use by rich people to suppress
truthful journalism. The fact that Russian oligarchs who are personally
under UK sanctions are doing so is especially embarrassing, but it
is just as bad when British plutocrats do it.
The Tories are planning to make this even worse. They are working to
change thousands of laws all at once -- laws imposed by the EU to
protect human rights and regulations to protect people's health.
This includes changes that would make libel suits an even easier
way for rich people to bury the truth.
The EPA
rejected
the Pebble Mine and thus protected Bristol Bay, Alaska.
A former member of the US military-industrial complex
calls
for help in breaking it up.
*Iranian couple
filmed
dancing in Tehran are jailed for 10 years.*
The term "gender-affirming surgery" has a serious flaw as a way of
defining a category of surgical operations: it is subjective, not
objective. Specifically, it is stated in terms of what someone
(presumably the patient) thinks about the operation, not in terms of
what the operation concretely does.
One patient might say, "I see this operation as affirming my gender,
so I want to have it." Another patient might say, of the same
operation, "This would go against gender, so I don't want it."
We need an objective way to define and refer to this class of
operations, one independent of whether a given patient wants such an
operation or not.
Drones were used to attack some sort of building or base in Iran.
US officials said that
Israel
carried out the attack.
We don't know what that target is, or what it does, or what purpose it
serves. However, this is likely to provoke war with Iran.
Replacing concrete and steel in construction with sophisticated spiral
plywood can reduce
CO2 emissions by 40%, because the carbon in the wood
never gets converted to CO2.
It can even be fireproof in temperatures that would melt steel.
Agencies that send workers to visit demented people at home
in the UK have been
systematically skimping.
The term "agency" might suggest that this is a state agency, but I
suspect that it refers in this case to a profit making business.
Can anyone tell me for a fact whether that is so?
If this is a business, I suspect it is making money hand over fist,
paying its workers a pittance and charging patients' families for work
not done. But I find it hard to believe that the workers initiated
the practice and hide the fraud from their employer. I can't help
suspecting that the business taught its workers to engage in fraud,
and that the state knows about it but looks the other way.
Some US universities have set up
vending
machines to sell emergency
contraception.
(satire) *ChatGPT
Forced
To Take Bar Exam Even Though
Dream Was To Be AI Art Bot.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
The US has a leaning towards
criminalizing
anything irregular.
A 29-year-old woman faces criminal charges for claiming to be a teenager
so as to enroll in a public school, and presenting a false birth certificate
to make that possible.
I can't understand this response -- wouldn't it be sufficient to
dis-enroll her? None of the articles I have seen makes any attempt to
justify or explain the harshness. Perhaps the reason is taboo.
*US utilities shut
off power to millions amid record corporate profits.*
It's the government's responsibility to prevent such harm. There are
various ways to do it. One way would be to increase the taxes those
utilities (and other corporations) actually pay, and give some of that
money to poor Americans.
Queensland proposes to
legalize
stop-and-search with no specific suspicion.
In the US and in the UK, this is an invitation to
racial
profiling.
The next rally for Julian Assange will be at the Park Street Station
on Feb 11th from 11:30 to 12:30.
*It is cheaper [in the US] to
build
solar panels or cluster of wind
turbines and connect them to the grid than to keep operating coal
plants.*
*Iranian protesters sentenced to death
were
tortured, says Amnesty report.*
In the 1980s, Iran's new (at that time) Islamic Republic
used to treat trials as a pointless inconvenience. That tendency
is still present.
Global heating
threatens the production
of jamón ibérico.
The oak forests are producing fewer of the acorns that the pigs eat.
Eventually that forest may disappear, and its ecosystem.
Iraq's ancient marshlands, where the Tigris and Euphrates enter the
Persian Gulf, are
drying
out and dying due to
global heating with help from other causes.
US citizens: call on the Justice Department to
challenge all state
abortion bans that violate federal law.
US citizens: call on Congress to
keep
Ilhan Omar on the House Foreign
Affairs Committee.
Years of Tory attacks against the NHS have made it very
difficult for
doctors to work there. Around 40% are planning to quit within the
next 5 years.
Hong Kong exiles in the UK called on the Tories
not
to follow China's example
by criminalizing peaceful protest.
Two Florida thugs
grabbed
a homeless man (whom they may have recognized),
handcuffed him, took him to an isolated place, and beat him unconscious.
There is no indication of a plausible motive for this attack.
The thugs have been arrested. Hooray!
Rep. Santos's fund-raising reports mention fund-raising supporters who
don't
seem to exist, nor do their addresses exist.
There seems to be a criminal investigation into this.
The Republican Party has gone out of its way to demonstrate
that it will tolerate any sort of crimes among its elected officials
and supporters. But it may be powerless to stop Santos from bring convicted and imprisoned.
Tunisians protested
the president's diminution of the power of the voters
by boycotting recent parliamentary elections.
Stiglitz: economic developments confirm that
central banks have
handled inflation wrong, based on a misguided model of what was
causing it. The increases in interest rates were unnecessary
treatment for the wrong disease.
*Georgia is seeking to
define
"Cop City" protests as terrorism, experts say.*
In fact, these protests are generally peaceful.
Breaking windows as a protest is not peaceful, but it is not terrorism
either. To stretch
the definition of "terrorism"
is the everpresent
danger from officials that incline towards repression, as US officials
often do.
Officials in other
countries do it too.
US citizens: call for a
ban
on the use of facial recognition and other
biometric technology in places of public accommodation.
The US government suffers, in general, from
too
much secrecy, plus a
double standard for enforcement of secrecy rules (important officials
are treated with leniency).
The problem of oversecrecy was recognized decades ago, but it got much
worse through overreaction to the Sep 2001 attacks. In general, the US
reaction to those attacks has been quite harmful
(most notably,
attacking Iraq based on lies).
Whether to mark something as secret depends on a judgment call by some
official. The structure of this tends to push officials towards
oversecrecy. If they don't mark something secret, and later on it
appears that publishing it may have caused some bad consequences,
people will blame them. If they do mark something secret, and later
on it appears that concealing it caused some bad consequences, no one
will blame them. For their career safety, they mark it secret by
default. Systematically, the result is oversecrecy.
US citizens: call on Congress to
ban
members of Congress from buying
and selling individual stocks.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Ukraine has set
up a hotline for
Putin forces soldiers to call to
discuss how to arrange to surrender.
Plutocratist
"moderate" Democrats are
joining
with Republicans (also
plutocratist)
to defeat progressive Democrats in Democratic primaries.
*Biden Outpaces
[the wrecker] on Oil and
Gas [drilling] Permits.*
Starmer proposes to
subcontract
NHS medicine to private clinics.
That is a recipe for a brain drain from NHS clinics to private clinics.
*While blocking paid sick leave, Union Pacific [railroad]
spent
more on stock buybacks than [on] workers.*
Two sides of corpse fetishism: a London
thug
was fired
for taking photos
of two corpses.
I don't understand why he wanted the photos, nor do I understand why
the department did not want him to have them.
In Australia's Guantanamo, the security is not as tight as in the
American Guantanamo; some prisoners
succeed
in escape via suicide.
The Memphis thug
department has disbanded
the "scorpion" unit, some
of whose members killed Tyre Nichols.
For a thug department to give any group of
thugs a name which refers to
a venomous and deadly animal seems misguided.
*The Assange prosecution poses a
fundamental
threat to the freedom of speech and a free press.*
Associated Press Stylebook endorsed the pressure campaign to eliminate
all nouns that designate subsets of humanity, citing a peculiar excuse
— the need for an article before those nouns. It
brought ridicule on
itself.
However, I don't think they have retreated from this pressure campaign.
Whether you say "the French", or "French people", they are not all
alike. They differ from each other. That is no justification for the
pressure campaign.
Big Oil wants to build a 2000-mile pipeline to transport CO2 to a place where
it can be buried. The landowners whose land they would need to cross are
fighting to block it.
I oppose this pipeline because carbon storage is unproved and
switching to renewable generation is surely cheaper and better for
decarbonization. However, I am disappointed that the authors are so
obsessed with race that they perceive a need to apologize for
supporting, this time, a group of environmental defenders who happen
to be white.
The main causes of murders carried out by uniformed
thugs is the
general violent
attitude of most US thug departments.
That violent attitude is directed mainly at blacks, so
thugs (even
black thugs)
are more likely to kill blacks than whites. This is
ironic but it's the natural consequence of the violent approach that
thugs learn to consider normal.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to ban members of Congress from buying
and selling individual stocks.
The wrecker
secretly
gave a million dollars for the bogus private "audit"
of Arizona's votes.
Some US and European
officials
are talking about aiming for regime
change in Russia,
even setting the goal of splintering Russia into
several countries. This is dangerous.
In addition, it will tend to prolong the war even beyond recovering
Ukraine's territory.
I said in March that
we
should assure Putin that driving him out
of power in Russia is not one of the west's aims.
to give him the chance to decide to end the war with no victory.
*[Rich]
Tory donors own UK properties via more than 150 offshore firms.*
Those companies' purpose was to hide the ownership of those properties.
It is being revealed
now because the UK has required
the true owners
to identify themselves.
Proposing
a "Radio Free Russia"
for transmitting the work of exiled
Russian journalists to Russia.
*In abandoning a commitment to create the post of a migrants’
commissioner to identify problems with the immigration system as
well as a pledge to increase the powers of the independent chief
inspector of borders and immigration, [Minister] Braverman is
making it very clear that
the
government does not care about
immigrants
— past, present, or future.*
Antinuclear activists warn that the release of tritium-containing
water from the
retired
Indian Point nuclear reactors, and demolition of their structure,
will release radioactive materials and they may be damaging.
I can't say that is impossible, but the arguments presented in this
article by Caldecott and other opponents are based on an error.
It is true that no amount of radiation exposure is so small as to be
absolutely harmless. It does not follow that any increment in
radiation or radioactive material, not matter how small, is cause for
great alarm. Radiation is everywhere, and radionuclides are
everywhere. Adding a tiny fraction of the amount already present has
an effect which is nonzero, but the resulting increment in danger may
be so small as to be insignificant as regards public health.
Will the tritium releases of the operations now planned cause a
significant increment in danger? I don't know the answer; I don't
know how to calculate it. But that is the proper basis for judging
these issues.
The release of tritiated water is one issue, and dust from the
demolition is another issue. It could be that one is dangerous and
the other is not. Each one ought to be studied and calculated.
A Russian official pointed out that
depleted uranium munitions,
and the depleted uranium armor
in newer model Abrams tanks,
will cause lasting danger in Ukraine.
I can't estimate whether depleted uranium munitions will injure as
many Ukrainians as the Putin forces'
weapons. But comparing the two
is irrelevant, because they are independent problems.
I expect that the US government will use the fact that this comes from
hypocritical Putin to pretend that the danger is just one of Putin's
lies. He can't believe anything on his say-so lie, but this time what
he said was accurate.
Putin does not care about Ukrainian lives. He might care about
hypothetical Russians who might someday live on conquered Ukrainian
territory. But what Putin thinks is a side issue. If future
Ukrainian lives matter to us, we should push for the US to protect
Ukraine from depleted uranium, regardless of what Putin thinks.
I saw a headline today that the US plans to give Ukraine the new
Abrams tanks with depleted uranium in the armor.
Hate-spreading
right-wing
fantasists are driving women out of New
Zealand politics
through intimidation.
Ralph Nader challenges Bernie Sanders to
move
beyond denouncing Big Pharma
and take some action
independently of them.
That's a bit unfair, because taking action usually requires passing laws,
and the plutocratists
in the Senate are on Big Pharma's side, so they
will block that.
Arguments
for the Luddite cause.
A world in which software is free will be a big step forward for people's
control over the digital technology we use.
The
University of Melbourne has decided to adopt the IHRA's biased "definition"
of antisemitism
as part of academic rules intended to prohibit antisemitism.
This tends to be used to prohibit criticism of Israel's treatment of Arabs.
The
IHRA criterion was designed for statistical studies
— to look at
a large corpus of statements and come up with figures such as the
frequency of antisemitism is in that corpus.
For that purpose, infrequent
misclassification of edge cases is tolerable — it won't make the
figures useless as long as those edge cases are rare in comparison to
to real antisemitism. However, in a rule to be imposed on individuals
and organizations, each misclassification is an injustice.
If the University or Melbourne goes ahead to develop criteria for
recognizing prejudice against Muslims,
I hope it will not refer to
this prejudice as a "phobia". That is a fundamental conceptual error.
*Africa
has become ‘less safe, secure and democratic’ in past decade,
report finds.*
George Monbiot: *We are all playing Covid roulette.… You could
see Covid-19 as an empathy test.
Who
was prepared to suffer disruption
and inconvenience for the sake of others
[survival and health], and
who was not?*
The question of
how
to moderate the corrupter's own postings
on
specific platforms are a side issue of bigger and more important
decisions about the policy for regulating platforms.
Russia has
criminalized
any kind of cooperation with the reporters of
the news site
Meduza — including giving an interview.
*Human activity and drought
"degrading
more than a third of Amazon
rainforest."*
Drought in Amazonia is
largely
caused by cutting down forests
in
Amazonia and to
the east of there
(along the Atlantic).
US residents:
call
on the EPA to ban Roundup.
If you have disabled the page's JavaScript, you may get a blank
response after signing. That does not mean anything is wrong; your
signature has probably been sent in properly. The blank screen has
text that is rendered invisible by CSS; if your browser gives you a
way to disable the CSS in the page (as Icecat does), that should make
the text appear.
US citizens:
call
on Biden to push back on the Israeli government's
antidemocratic measures.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass the Stop SCAM PACs Act.
US citizens:
call
on Facebook and Twitter to fact-check
disinformation from the wrecker
if they allow him to post at all.
Pfizer
recently raised the prices of 100 drugs in the US.
To wipe the
bad taste of this from Americans' minds, its PR operation publicizes
that it will provide the drug at lower price to some patients in poor
countries,
and that it is still
limiting world-wide production.
A climate defender urged Australian local councils to
cut their own
emissions, rather than spend millions on overseas carbon offsets.*
Aside from a few peculiar exceptions, Australia's government seems to
be very serious about reducing emissions. I hope it adopts a strict
policy to limit the sale and purchase of carbon offsets, wildlife offsets,
and any other sort of offset.
*Rohingya and Myanmar
coup
survivors launch legal complaint in Germany
against junta.* Their accusations include war crimes, crimes against
humanity, and genocide
(against the Rohingya, I presume).
I can imagine a verdict of guilty, but in practice, what could the court
do to a foreign government? There are already sanctions against it,
but since the Burmese state has China's backing, I don't think more
western sanctions would make much difference.
The UK's conditional
tax on overly sweetened drinks brings about a
significant (though not revolutionary) reduction of obesity in girls.
All the Memphis thugs
involved in killing
Tyre Nichols have been charged
with second-degree murder.
Biden has proposed a
collection
of measures intended to help people
who rent their homes and have trouble affording the expense.
I am not able to evaluate it, but I suspect (as do others) that it is
not enough to solve the problem. I think we need to build a lot more
housing, dense enough to make mass transit efficient. That will take
years, so it is better if we get started now and push it hard.
Reportedly some big corporations that have bought up millions of
rental units are content with the proposal — which suggests
it is insufficient.
Sadiiq Long, US citizen is
harassed
frequently by local thugs because
they see, when they check his license plate, that he is on the US
"terrorist watch list." The US government won't tell him why, and
offers no way to get taken off the list, so he is suing the local
thug
department for harassing him based on that listing.
The harassment varies and is sometimes very frightening; he could
easily envision being shot next time.
The death of most indigenous Americans, due to the
importation of
European germs, cause their farm fields to grow trees. The result
was significant global cooling starting in the late 1500s.
The cooling was reversed by population growth some two centuries later.
Along with the Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, the US
may supply Ukraine with
shells
made from toxic depleted uranium.
When one of those shells explodes, it spreads dust of depleted
uranium, which when inhaled or swallowed by humans leads to cancer,
birth defects, and other severe medical problems.
Chevron, a Big Oil company, is spending $75 billion on
stock buybacks.
This demonstrates that Chevron has no valid use for all those profits,
so we should increase the taxes the company pays and spend the funds on
something useful.
However, I do not believe we should deduce that gasoline should have a
lower price. If we tax Chevron that much more, we can instead use
those funds to aid poor people. The poor people who need to drive
will benefit just the same — but those poor people who can avoid
driving will benefit even more.
A woman in Idaho started to miscarry, but the ban on abortion
prohibited
physicians from treating her until her problem put her at
risk of death.
We should not focus too much on these harmful and unjust side effects
of the ban, because they could become a distraction from the harmful
and unjust goal of the ban: prohibiting abortion itself.
Reporters without Borders warns Americans of the
threat to freedom of
the press
posed by right-wing authoritarians, in particular
the corrupter.
Everyone: call on legislatures at all levels to
ban the use of
facial recognition and other biometric technology in places of public
accommodation.
A new California law that
requires
a decent minimum wage for fast food
workers has fast-food chains protesting, "We will go broke!"
Chipotle, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, McDonald's, In-N-Out Burger and
(effectively) KFC gave a million dollar each to advance an initiative
petition to repeal the law.
Treat that "fast food" as it deserves — by fasting from it!
US pharmaceutical companies have
spent
more on stock buybacks and
dividends than drug research and development over the past decade.
Hun Sen, "president" of Cambodia, regularly
puts
Cambodians on trial for
posting words that insult him.
Cambodia isn't the only country that fails to recognize that freedom
of speech includes the freedom to insult people — even to insult the
highest officials. France has prosecuted people for insulting
President Sarkozy — for instance, one defendant had said "Sarkozy, I
see you" when the topic was an injustice. Some of these defendants
were acquitted for various reasons, but the fact that the prosecution
were not dismissed outright in the name of freedom of speech shows that
respect for freedom of speech is lacking there.
I used to refer to Sarkozy as "Sarcômë", which means "cancer".
Fortunately for me, I was never prosecuted.
The term "parental
rights" is typically used in US discourse to justify
denying children, and adolescents too, thing they have a right to.
And even things, such as abortions, that are necessary to avoid a
terrible and irreversible change.
Three times, school staff warned the school administration that a
6-year-old pupil was carrying a gun. The administration did not take
it away from him, and eventually he fired it at a teacher.
Now the
superintendent of the school district has been fired.
I've read that someone on the staff searched his bag at some point,
but did not find the gun. Perhaps the student had put it in his pocket
by then. So perhaps the administration did make some effort.
Australia is considering measures to reduce mistreatment and violence
by users of dating apps against people they meet through the apps.
One measure being considered is to
require
checking users' ID and
"background".
(I am not sure what "background" would include. Criminal record?)
The violence is a serious problem, and it is necessary to do something
to reduce it. However, the proposed requirements would be enough to
convince me to reject the apps.
On the other hand, the fact that they are nonfree programs that
require a nonfree snoop-phone operating system is also enough to
convince me to reject them. Naturally, both are malware
too. The apps collect lots of personal data, which no data base
should have; that alone is enough to convince me to reject them.
They have other problems, too. I don't entirely understand them
because I have never experienced them — I've never used programs like
these. But I've read articles in which people who do use them report
that the apps are generally horrible in social terms. Their culture
encourages people to look for shallow sex; if what you seek is a love
relationship, "Lots of luck!"
It would not surprise me if the violence and outright nastiness are
simply the long tail of what the apps more generally encourage. A few
people try to get away with violence; most people won't do that, but
they do engage in shallowness and unkindness, which is "how everyone
acts here," and besides, "what other option is there?"
I think that the real solution for this problem is a bigger change
than the one that is proposed: to get rid of these apps and encourage
other ways that enable people to meet and get to know each other.
Ukraine has pulled
its forces out of Soledar.
There is nothing particularly important about Soledar, nor Bakhmut,
nor the towns behind them. The rational thing for Ukraine to do is to
retreat slowly and steadily, so as to maximize the cost to Wagner
while limiting Ukrainian casualties.
*Concerned teachers and employees warned administrators at a
Virginia elementary school three times that
a
six-year-old boy had
a gun and was threatening other students in the hours before he shot
and wounded a teacher, "but the administration could not be bothered"*.
Azerbaijan is sending
soldiers
that pretend to be "environmental
activists" to blockade the road between Nagorno-Karabakh and the main
territory of Armenia.
(The idea that "environmental activists" can take any sort of
initiative in an oil-funded dictatorship is bullshit.) Russian
peacekeepers that under the treaty that ended the last war there are
not authorized to fight a war, so they cannot in practice make those
"activists" leave.
Robert Reich explains
the
benefits of Ranked Choice Voting.
*The psychedelic
ibogaine can treat addiction.* It can also be damaging,
even fatal, when used without proper precautions.
Politicians in many countries adopt a
nationalist
approach towards
present and projected population decline: they exaggerate how
difficult it will be to cope with a decrease, and presume that the
solution is to persuade young people to have more children.
They don't recognize the future danger of a larger (or even
unchanged) population, and disregard immigration as a way of reducing
future decrease.
It is true that Japanese culture is very unfriendly to immigrants,
but the state could do things to reduce that and help immigrants
surmount the obstacle.
Tory harshness to the weak has inspired anger since before they got
into power in 2010. But they and the press have
carefully controlled
whether people were allowed to express anger, and at whom. Repression
of protesters has been harsh all along.
AI is eliminating
jobs in a number of areas. It may soon eliminate
jobs faster that the economy can come up with new kinds of work for
people to do.
*Classified documents
discovered
at Mike Pence's home in Indiana.*
The Republicans that (following the
bullshitter) hate Pence will say,
"Pence is just as horrible as Biden." Those that support Pence will
have to find an excuse to argue that it was ok for Pence to neglect
secret documents at home but not ok for Biden to do so.
Tory plans to authorize uniformed
thugs to attack protests can create
a dynamic in which protesters know that
the
thugs are their enemies,
and expect a fight from the beginning. That will means a lot of
fights.
It may also drive those who don't want a fight to give up on protesting
and wait despondently for global heating to kill them.
The Wagner army of ex-convicts has
become
effective at taking small
areas of territory, at the cost of very high casualties.
Wagner doesn't care about the casualties, because its soldiers came
from prison, released to be cannon fodder. Russians don't care how
many ex-convicts get killed this way.
I wonder, how many convicts does Russia have that Putin could send to
Wagner? How long before he uses them up?
Putin could force any Russians into Wagner, including those who are
not convicts. But if he does that, Russians will care whether they
live or die.
We observe nowadays a tendency to invent verbal circumlocutions, and
pressure people to use these circumlocutions instead of the simpler
everyday words. In particular, every noun that describes a category of
persons is liable to get this treatment. The circumlocution typically
consists of some adjective followed by "person".
The newest target is the word "mummy".
The
campaign pressures us to
say "mummified person" instead.
I object to that, and not only because there is no good reason for the
inconvenience of the change. A corpse (mummified or not) is not any
type of person; it is not a person. Death ends a person's existence;
a corpse is what a person's body becomes after the person dies. I
will continue to use the noun, "mummy."
Speaking of which, I have a hunch that sooner or later a similar
demand will target the word "corpse".
I think persons deserve certain respect, but that is no reason to
pressure people to perform a ceremony to demonstrate it, every time we
use a noun which refers to a set of persons. Doing so a nuisance.
Adjunct professors at Oxford University will sue the university for
treating
them like gig workers.
I hope they win. Nobody who works a substantial amount of time
for a platform should be treated as a gig worker.
On Mao's Cultural Revolution, and how the
years
of suffering affected
Chinese people's psyche and thinking,
including that of the father
of Dictator Xi, and the totally contrary thinking of the dictator himself.
If I understand the article right, the women in the Educated Youth
Friendship Group are hardly "fond" of the lives they led during the
Cultural Revolution. On the contrary, it says they are pretending
together to live the "normal" adolescence that the Cultural Revolution
denied them in real life.
How
the Republican Party has sunk:
from Honest Abe to Ever-Lie Santos.
The bullshitter
lied about many things, but not the basics of his life
story. When he lied, Republicans coped with those lies by insisting
that the lies were true.
That won't work when Santos falsifies the events of his own life. To
support him, Republicans in Congress have to deny blatant facts.
Thus, their continued support for him demonstrates that no lie is too
low for a Republican in Congress.
Protesters
called for Bangladesh's prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to
resign.
After years of state violence against journalists and opposition,
they don't believe she will run an honest election.
Ellen Brown looks at various ways to change the US banking and
monetary system that would stabilize it and eliminate the
problems
caused by the current handling of national debt.
Most of then would require legislation, but the "trillion-dollar
platinum coin" may actually be feasible without Congress.
*Gordon Brown warns of
Tories
"testing the water" for two-tier healthcare.*
He also warns that
this
would destroy the NHS.
I warned of this years ago — that the Tories seemed to intend to
destroy the NHS.
I wish he were wrong, and I were wrong too.
*Reps.
Adam
Schiff and Jim Jordan Killed [US intelligence agencies']
Mass Surveillance Reform in 2020.
Will They Do It Again?*
The FISA
court admitted that it could not carry out its responsibilities:
that the intelligence agencies it was supposed to regulate had made it
powerless.
*Prominent Cameroon
journalist
[Martinez Zogo] found dead
after
abduction.*
It seems he had made an accusation of corruption linked to the corrupt
repressive "president" of Cameroon.
The article reports that Zogo tried to protect himself from kidnaping
by taking refuge in a thug
center. That makes me very curious:
how did the thugs respond to that?
Biden's choice for a
new
chief of staff is not merely a plutocratist;
he is a plutocrat and apparently a fraudster.
Australia has a system intended to prevent habitat-destroying changes
in land use, but empirically
it
has done little good.
Ministers were too quick to decide that plans were "non-significant"
and bypass careful environmental review for them.
The
US Constitution mandates separation of church and state
to protect
against movements to impose a specific religion on everyone.
In other words, to protect against today's Christian nationalism.
Israel has put special
restrictions
on foreign citizens' entry into
occupied Palestinian territory.
According to Human Rights Watch,
these rules unjustly cut off contact between the Palestinians who live
there and everyone else.
Collecting the evidence that new energy technologies such as
nuclear
fission, nuclear fusion, and carbon capture and storage, are a distraction and a big waste
of money (or worse). We should rather
deploy the mature renewable energy generation technologies as fast as
we can.
The only difficult new technologies needed are to make airplanes and
ships use electricity. (Perhaps with green hydrogen as an
intermediate form of energy.)
Homeopathy is quackery with dilutions of grandeur.
*New GOP Majority Aims to
Give
Away Public Lands & Further Enable Big
Oil's Price Gouging.*
57% of Americans want a
national
medical system. 70% of Democrats support it.
Arguing that Biden's retention of a few secret documents
has
diminished his chances of victory in 2024, so he
should step down for someone else.
Who could that be, though? Sanders is the only person that occurs to
me, the only one I am confident would struggle persistently for most of
the causes I believe in. But he too is old now.
*Pentagon No Match for Biggest China Threat:
Massive
Carbon Emissions.*
A second far-right plan to assassinate a German minister has been
caught and stopped.
Their stated goal is to restore the German empire under the Prussian
dynasty, but perhaps omitting the limited democracy it implemented in
its last few decades.
They hate the minister of health for ordering measures to stop the
spread of Covid-19 and protect the people in general. Ironically, I
expect Bismarck would not have hesitated to use quarantine and
mandatory vaccination, and anything else necessary, in a totally
authoritarian way, to protect the strength of the Reich.
Brazil has accused a businessman of
ordering
the murder of two
environmental activists last year.
Several countries in Latin America are ineffective in preventing or
prosecuting the murder of environmental activists. Under Bolsonaro's
encouragement, Brazil was extremely ineffective.
Capitalizing the adjective "indigenous" is a way of symbolically
placing indigenous people above other people — in effect, designating
them as the higher group. I think it is wrong to put any ethnic group
over the others.
New York State has adopted a
right-to-repair
law, though Governor
Hochul imposed limits on the products it applies to.
Even for those products, the law is only a step towards giving users
control over the devices they "own". The law won't stop manufacturers
from designing devices so that they control what users can do with
them and restrict what users can change.
GUber has bullied and seduced its way to
eliminate
protections for
workers' rights in several African countries, shifting governments
toward neoliberalism and allowing businesses (including foreign businesses)
to exploit as they wish.
Parts of Australia
make
it a crime to publicly express certain ideas.
I think the world would be a better place if it did not contain
Nazism. Also if it did not contain hatred against religions, or
religions for that matter.
However, censorship can threaten any idea, and can oppress everyone.
Once one idea is censored, censorship tends to spread to ban other
ideas as well.
Since the rich tend to control governments, they are likely to turn
the gun of censorship on opposition to the power of the rich.
Modi's government has
banned
a BBC documentary about Modi's connections
with the 2002 sectarian pogrom in Gujarat, when Modi was the head of
that state's government.
I read articles
about this at the time.
The Hindu-nationalist right-wing in India has made it a strategy for
decades to stir up violence between Hindus and Muslims, just as the
American right-wing has done (with more success since 2001).
Dozens of prisoners in Texas are
on
hunger strike to protest against
protracted solitary confinement, in some cases lasting for decades.
The policy is that if a prisoner shows certain signs, that the state
interprets as indicating a gang member, they put per in isolation
permanently. Isolation is almost total — for instance, one phone
call per month, and exercise outdoors alone two days a month.
*Shell to spend $450m on carbon offsetting as fears grow that
[such carbon]
credits may be worthless.*
In this interview
with Bill Maher, I found some noteworthy points:
*How Restaurant Workers
Help
Pay for Lobbying to Keep Their Wages
Low.*
The Tories plan to
tighten
their "hostile environment" policy, which
is meant to make life in the UK unlivable for anyone who doesn't have
official permission to be there.
US citizens:
call
on World Leaders at Davos to Tax Extreme Wealth.
US citizens:
call
on the Department of Justice to prosecute the corrupter.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC
commissioner.
The Obama-era FCC version of network neutrality is insufficient
because it doesn't stop web sites from tracking users. It only
prohibits some of the unjust ways to use that data.
What we need is to
prohibit
web sites from sneakily snooping.
Whatever info they want about you, they should ask for
openly, and you should be able to give whatever answer
you wish.
Nonetheless, restoring the FCC policy that
the corrupter eliminated
would be a step forward.
*Turkey’s
Next Elections Could Be the Country’s Last
Real Democratic Vote.*
Truck
drivers are now subject to extreme digital monitoring,
and the rigid enforcement can give them reasons to drive faster.
In general, monitoring workers closely makes them anxious and uncomfortable.
Some will quit.
Where unions are strong enough, they may be able to pressure employers
to reduce monitoring. But not many workplaces are like that nowadays.
I think we need strict laws to limit monitoring of workers.
*We
Need Housing for People to Live In, Not for Corporations to Invest In.*
Joseph
Stiglitz says to tax high earners at 70%
to tackle widening inequality,
and put a wealth tax of 2-3% per year on fortunes.
100,000 people protested in Israel against
right-wing plans to
undermine the supreme court's
check on actions of ministers.
*Lula
accuses Bolsonaro of genocide
against Yanomami in Amazon.*
*Why the Fed wants to crush workers,* and
why the interest rate
increases benefit creditors
— that is, the super-rich and the banks.
There were
200
rallies on Sunday in favor of abortion rights,
around the US. Bad technology prevented me from being in one of them.
I saw notice of the event a few days before it, and I wanted to post
to encourage people to participate — and to participate personally,
if I was up to the walking and standing required.
Sad to say, the URL for finding information about the rallies was a
web page that depended almost totally on nonfree JavaScript code.
Without running that code, no useful information was visible in the
page. As a matter of conscience, I will
not accept nonfree software
as normal or legitimate, so I will not suggest to the public to
run a nonfree program. I had no other solution. Thus, I could not
post about these rallies.
I implore groups that organize rallies to make the small effort needed
to post the information in a simple HTML page accessible from the Free
World — not instead of what they now do, but in addition. The
page could contain an itemized list, with a section for each state and
items within a section sorted by city. That would be easy to
generate, and easy for users to download and search. If organizations
do this, they will enable people to find their rallies from within the
Free World.
I used to know a volunteer who would set up to scrape the inaccessible
pages and put the results in a non-JavaScript page. Then I could link
to that scraper page to post directions to find a rally. Alas, I lost
touch with per last year.
If you'd like to volunteer to do this for me, a few times a year,
and you know how to do it, please send me email at gnu.org.
A
French
thug attacked a man who was taking video of a protest,
knocking him down to the ground; then another
thug clubbed him in the balls.
This damaged one of his testicles and he needed it amputated.
*The worst thing about Davos? The Masters of the
Universe think they
are do-gooders.*
Spoof ads for BMW and Toyota in the UK mocked the companies for their
pollution and their
anti-climate lobbying.
How long, I wonder, before the Tories make it a crime to portray
a global corporation's
products
"in a negative light"?
Many South Koreans want to develop nuclear weapons for South Korea for
deterrence against North Korea. But they would not be
guaranteed to
deter Dictator Kim.
A completely bullshit headline claims that Getty Images has sued
the maker of
Stable
Diffusion for "stealing photos".
The text of the article reveals that that headline is total confusion.
The case is not about theft at all; it is an allegation of copyright
infringement. Both factually and legally, those two are totally
different.
If someone had stolen photos from Getty,
Getty would not have them any more.
So let's turn to the issue that this situation really concerns: does
the output of a machine learning system infringe the copyright on
items in the training set that contribute to that output?
There are possible cases where it clearly would infringe. If a
substantial part of the output is very similar to one item in the
training set, no stretch is required to conclude that it copies from
that item.
However, people don't use machine learning system intending to get a
part or a slightly modified version of some existing work. The aim is
to mix, seamlessly, little bits of many training items. The items
that play a role are more like artistic influences than like samples.
To find these to be copyright infringement would be disastrous to the
creativity that copyright is nominally intended to promote.
The main purposes of copyright today is to keep some big companies
rolling in dough, and any effect on artists is for politicians merely
an excuse. For us, however, the question of what copyright law should
say is mainly how to
promote the arts without interfering with users' freedom.
I do not use Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, or anything like them that
exists now, because they don't respect the user's freedom.
ChatGPT is a nonfree program that users can't even run, because users
can't get the program's source code, or even its compiled executable.
All you could possibly do with it is to identify yourself to the
owner's server and send it some input data for your dossier. Then it
sends back the output, over the net.
This is a manner of making a program available for usage that tramples
users' freedom even worse than ordinary proprietary software. We call
it
SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute) and I reject it, just as
I reject nonfree executable software or source code under a nonfree
license — for my freedom's sake.
Stable Diffusion consists of two parts: the "code", which is free
software, and the "model" which carries a nonfree license
that restricts
use. The free code could be useful fo the community as a basis for
other developments, but it's not something that users could directly
use by itself.
A call to investigate the London
thugs
who on various occasions had to
judge whether rapist David Carrick could remain on the force, and
disregarded complaints against him, thus allowing
him
to continue his
series of rapes.
*Police investigating rape claims in England believe
victim-blaming myths,
study finds.*
They tend to assume that false accusations are far more frequent than
they really are.
(satire) *Alito, Thomas Share Laugh After Discovering They Both Leaked
Dobbs Decision.*
French president Macron has sparked a general strike by proposing to raise
the
retirement
age for the non-rich.
I can imagine situations of great adversity where a democratic country
would act justly by increasing the age for retirement pensions. But
since that adversity would be fiscal in nature, it is a moral
obligation to demand sacrifices first of the rich. Macron fails to
understand this, because he believes in plutocracy.
His main opponents, even more right-wing, are likewise
plutocratist
but their stated ideology is to demonize some
disprivileged groups.
Right-wingers generally seek to divide people, so they use scapegoats.
The Tories plan to start criminalizing the presentation of unwelcome
attitudes and opinions, using one special case — video that shows
illegal immigrants and their boats in "a positive light" — to destroy
freedom of expression. They will label such
videos
as "abetting" a
crime.
Imagine what other attitudes and opinions they might prohibit
by applying that approach to other areas of life.
The bullshitter
mistook E Jean Carroll for his
former wife, Marla Maples.
Perhaps that explains why he thought he could have sex with the former ;-}.
On the complex relationship between unions and
public opinion.
In the long term, unions need public support to block right-wing
governments from legislating to impede organizing and striking.
People will give this support through the occasional inconvenient
strike if they recognize that in the long term it makes a better life
for all the non-rich. Thus, unions must make sure that the labor
movement keeps that aim in mind.
Increase in dust in the air, since 1800, may have cancelled out
some of
global heating.
Up to 8% of it.
However, since the 1980s, the amount of dust has been decreasing.
*Tesla video [in 2016] promoting self-driving was staged,
senior
engineer testifies.*
When companies are compelled to reduce staff, some countries laws'
pressure the companies to do it in a gradual way that doesn't cause a
trauma to workers, rather than using the
mass layoffs typical in the
US.
Peruvian thugs
raided San Marcos University and forced students out of
their dorm at gunpoint and with violence. The
thugs gave them no
explanation, and
reportedly
then began to search the students' rooms.
Some years ago, San Marcos University had a student group, San Marcux,
which taught students how to spread the free software ideas. They
invited me to speak on some occasions. That was years ago. I wonder
what is happening there now.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to stop dragging its feet on rules
to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by power plants.
If you have disabled the page's JavaScript, you may get a blank
response after signing. That does not mean anything is wrong;your
signature has probably been sent in properly. The blank screen has
text that is rendered invisible by CSS; if your browser gives you a
way to disable the CSS in the page (as Icecat does), that should make
the text appear.
A general
discussion
of the moral issues of which kinds of protest are
legitimate,
then applied to the case of protesting by blocking highways.
This discussion makes sense, in its narrow framework. However,
treating the Just Stop Oil protests in isolation, ignoring the
deadly threat they confront, leads to wrong conclusions.
Global heating
and the resulting climate breakdown are already
causing millions of deaths. This year,
200
million deaths
are predicted. The UK government has pledged to help stop global
heating but is not taking much action. Can you seriously argue that
blocking highways in desperation to pressure the state to carry out
its mission is morally wrong?
Blocking highways seems to be a self-defeating method, but that is a
different kind of issue.
Local
pirates
in Nigeria kidnap people from boats and steal
their
engines, cargo and fish.
Sadistic LA thugs
tased
Keenan Anderson repeatedly for 42 seconds
while he was already helplessly on the ground.
It is not unusual for
such treatment to kill someone, and it killed him.
After killing him, the thug
department
claimed his death was his fault.
The author of the first article appears to make a foolish scientific
error. It is irrelevant to understanding the issue politically or
morally, but it is important to learn to avoid. It seems that the
author misunderstood the difference between power and energy, and
assumed that the wattage of successive taser shots should be added to
get a "combined wattage". That is a mistake; adding them is
appropriate only if they happen simultaneously.
If I could find out the wattage that a taser delivers while operating,
I could tell for certain whether this mistake was made.
Erdoğan is using the issue of bringing
Sweden
and Finland into NATO
to attack freedom of expression in those countries.
I disapprove of burning books, as a general matter, but if there are
millions of copies of a book then burning one that you own is no great
loss. Perhaps it should be a crime to intentionally destroy a rare
book — if you don't want it, you must sell it to someone who does
or give it to a museum.
It is outrageous to demand that some religion's "sacred" book receive
a higher legal status that any other book — such as, for instance, my
own book, Free Software, Free Society
. I think the moral ideas in
that book are wise, but you have the right to buy a copy and burn it
if you think the opposite.
The Turkish government argues that burning a Qur'an was a hate crime.
This shows that the concept of "hate crimes" as it is understood in
some European countries is a threat to human rights.
Lula
has fired 80 high officials of the Brazilian army,
including its
commander, for aiding the attack on the government or shielding the
attackers.
The commander was appointed by Bolsonaro shortly before the latter's term
ended. It is entirely plausible that Bolsonaro did this to support the
insurrection, and entirely plausible that he prepared and organized
the insurrection.
*Republican
legislators introduce new laws to crack down on drag shows.*
The article says that most of these bills go much further than what
you would think that means: they "define a drag performer as someone
performing while using dress, makeup and mannerisms associated with a
gender other than the one assigned to [per] at birth." This means
that any
performance by a trans person would be banned. Even a talk
about any subject could be a "performance".
This is typical of the dishonesty of right-wing extremists, whose
repressive laws are often described as prohibiting something very
specific but create the opportunity to prohibit a lot more. Consider
critical race theory — a field of research for historians, some of
whom promote teaching methods that face criticism in academia.
Republicans have passed laws that purport to prohibit teaching
critical race theory in primary and secondary school, which never
happens, but actually prohibit nearly any teaching about systemic
racism.
Georgia
thugs killed protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán,
who had
participated for more than a year in a nonviolent encampment protest
that aims to block construction of a large
thug training facility in a
forest that had been slated to become a park.
The thugs
say they killed him after he shot a thug, but you can't
trust what thugs
say about such things. They present no evidence that
he shot at all. But they have systematically begun to charge
protesters with "terrorism".
Israel subsidizes making movies. The government dislikes two
documentaries
about Israel's occupation policies, so now the
government demands that money back,
explicitly adopting a policy of
ideological bias.
The US government carries censorship of movies about war through a policy
whereby the US military cooperates with making films, but only when it
approves of the message of the film.
*Israel's top court ruled 10-1 on Wednesday that Aryeh Deri, leader
of the Shas party and a key ally of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu,
should not
be allowed to serve as a cabinet minister because of a February
2022 conviction for tax fraud.*
This could make that authoritarian coalition fall apart. Or perhaps
Netanyahu and Shas could settle on some other person to appoint.
However, if Deri is motivated by personal ambition, giving that
ministry to anyone else would not satisfy him.
The rate
of non-vaccination
among US children is rising, and even though it is still small,
it means more people are in danger of polio and other diseases.
Direct air capture of CO2 could
actually increase
the level of greenhouse gas emissions, if renewable generation
is insufficient and fossil fuels are still used to generate the
electricity to run the capture.
If someday there is excess renewable energy capacity to power capture
machines, then they could actually reduce the CO2 concentration, it
seems to me.
However, the article's main point is valid: this method is worse
than useless for the next few years, and it is probably a PR scheme
meant to let out the pressure to reduce emissions.
*Arizona's new attorney general to use election fraud unit to
boost
voting rights.*
Once Republicans in Arizona can't stop Democrats from voting, they may
never win again.
*MI5 refused
to investigate "Russian spy"'s links to Tories, says
[Tory] whistleblower.*
*EPA
Plan for [PFAs] Chemical Discharges
"Lacks
the Urgency" Needed,
Watchdog Says.*
*If You Work for a Major Corporation, Your Boss Has Probably Already
Made
More in 2023 Than You Will [in the whole year].*
*Ditched by Biden, Railway Workers Continue
Battle
for Sick Leave and
Safer Conditions.*
*OSHA Fines Amazon "Roughly 0.000013%" of Annual Revenue for
Worker
Safety Hazards*
for "work processes that were designed for speed but not safety" and
"resulted in serious worker injuries."
*Greta Thunberg Warns Davos Elite Will
Throw
Humanity "Under the Bus"
for Profits.*
They've done it plenty so far.
*Poverty is a big
killer in the UK [and in the US]. Where is the
political will to defeat it?*
Artificial light is
rapidly
reducing the number of stars that are visible
in many parts of the world.
House Democrats have reintroduced a constitutional amendment to
overturn the Corporations United decision, which ruled that
corporations
have the "human right" to donate to political campaigns.
The plaintiff's ostensible name was "Citizens United",
but "Corporations United" describes it better.
Claims that Rep. George Santos has not made, this far.
This reached me via a mailing list.
The increase of the absolute number of union members in the US
has not
kept up with the increase in the number of jobs.
DeMentis
has arbitrarily
prohibited
teaching advanced placement
African American Studies in Florida high schools.
I hope there will be a lawsuit against this.
A human error caused a batch of votes in a school board election to be
entered twice in the totals.
A
recent software "upgrade" broke the
code that was supposed to warn if anyone made such a mistake.
The error was detected later and corrected, but more important than
that one election is what this tells us about all elections that use
those machines: the manufacturer could rig an election by installing a
bent "upgrade".
I see no reason to think the manufacturer tried intentionally to do
anything wrong in this instance. The bug had an effect this time only
because of a human error, and the human had no reason to try such an
error intentionally since it was probably going to be detected.
However, another manufacturer (or some employee) could intentionally
"upgrade" the software wrong, some other time.
The article doesn't say which jobs those machines actually do. How
significant this potential vulnerability is depends on that question.
*Analysis Shows
Corporate
Prosecutions Hit Record Low in 2022 Under Biden.*
UN Secretary-General Guterres told the Davos gathering that expanding
fossil fuel is insanity and
must
be stopped.
*This [Tory] government knows it’s on borrowed time — that’s why it’s
tearing
up our freedoms.*
Around 40% of global company CEOs say they
fear
their companies will fail, 10
years from now, because of macroeconomic trends.
Sinema and Manchin proudly boasted of supporting Republicans in the Senate
by defending the filibuster.
*Nearly 40% of people in the United States said they or a family
member delayed medical care last year due to the
prohibitively high
cost of treatment under the nation's for-profit healthcare model,*
Many are angry at Prince Henry of Britain for saying something that
raised an issue that goes beyond his family, not only for Britain but
even more for the US. It is
the
issue of war and dehumanization, and
militarism.
When my father fought in France, did he dehumanize Hitler's soldiers?
I never asked him that, but he knew they dehumanized and hated him,
They did not know his name, but if he had been a civilian they would
have sought to murder him, as they did to so many others.
What would it take to wean the US off of militarism? Nowadays, the
efforts to try are not very impressive.
The opposite of militarism is not pacifism. Occasionally there is
a war that must be fought; defending Ukraine is one example,
and potentially defending Taiwan would be another. But these wars
are exceptions among US military campaigns.
A Canadian company has sued the US
demanding
that the US construct the
Keystone XL pipeline or pay 15 billion dollars.
The lawsuit is under the original NAFTA treaty, which has an
ISDS
clause ("I sue democratic states")
It is peculiar that this lawsuit is proceeding, given that
NAFTA was replaced by a newer treaty which does not have an
ISDS clause.
The article notes this peculiarity but does not explain how that is possible.
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government reversed itself and
approved
the fellowship for Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch.
The UK is considering making it a
crime
to keep silent about something
that might lead a potential sex partner (which includes any potential
sweetheart or spouse) to reject you.
To criminalize the failure to inform someone of something — whatever
that something might be — invites injustice. To avoid that
consequence, the requirement must be narrowly limited to a few special
cases, each clearly justified and easy to recognize.
Under this law, anyone who has a characteristic for which people are
stigmatized or simply rejected will have to tell all potential lovers.
Don't try to live it down — ever.
Consider the risk you'd take by passing as white and getting involved
with someone who might have hesitated (and perhaps said no) rather
than agree to an interracial relationship. Whether that hesitation is
due to being racist, or to fear of others' racism
(*),
or even to fear
of future systemic racism, the effect is the same.
You could try to argue that you did not know for a fact that that
point was important to per, but those who want to make an example of
you will respond, "Lots of people feel that way, so you should have
known to expect it. Guilty!"
* Writing this reminded me of the song, Society's Child.
Please do NOT access it through a streaming dis-service.
Use invidio.us!
Interviews
with Peruvians about the political situation there.
I am curious about the background of the current president, Boluarte.
Why was she made vice president? Who chose her for that position,
and on what basis?
Musk is suspected
of stock trading based on insider information.
The Jewish National Fund is suing Palestinian organizations in the US,
alleging
that their boycott/divestment/sanctions campaign is "terrorism".
The trial court dismissed the suit, finding the accusation
"threadbare". That is an understatement — the accusation is
blackwhiting. Boycotting institutions and companies is a standard
tool of democratic political action. It is not, repeat not,
terrorism.
*Colombia announces
halt
on fossil fuel exploration for a greener economy.*
*US to designate Russia's Wagner Group as
"transnational criminal
organization."*
It may well fit that description, but no entity should be officially
designated as "criminal" without a suitable kind of trial.
Thousands of Peruvians opposed to current President Boluarte and
supporting arrested President Castillo are
protesting in Lima.
Biden has been accused
of hypocrisy for trying to extradite Julian Assange
while criticizing other countries for imprisoning journalists and editors.
The article's original line, "Joe Biden has been accused of hypocrisy
for demanding the release of journalists detained around the world
while the US president continues seeking the extradition of the
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange," implies that Biden's wrong is to
criticize the other countries. I rewrote the line to indicate that
what's wrong is to try to imprison Assange.
The Biden administration is still sending government lawyers to
defend
various bad policies instituted by
the wrecker.
Republicans, who control Iowa's legislature, have proposed a bill to
put drastic
limits on federally-funded food aid.
Wikipedia and other volunteer contribution platforms are
threatened by
the UK's proposed "child protection" law.
An enormous iceberg which cracked apart from the Thwaites glacier 20
years ago has started
floating
away from the glacier. This is
important because it will enable the glacier to start sliding into the
ocean and melting faster.
Maria Ressa has been
acquitted
of politically-motivated charges of tax evasion but still faces the
politically-motivated
prison sentence for libel.
(satire) *More
Companies Cutting Costs By Replacing CEOs With Prison Labor.*
A study concluded that over 90% of carbon offsets for sale under the
Verra standard were
likely
to be bogus. It has been a tempting avenue
for fraud.
I don't trust these offsets. When a business makes statements
about greenhouse gas emissions that are based on offsets, I don't take
them seriously.
Governor DeMentis
and the Florida Republicans plan to
permanently
prohibit companies from requiring Covid-19 vaccination, or requiring
wearing and prohibit medical boards from disqualifying doctors for
spreading Covid-19 disinformation.
A government monitoring committee finds that Tories have
neglected
their long-term commitments on policies to protect wildlife in
Britain.
This seems to be the standard Tory approach to any scandalous problem:
to proclaim themselves scandalized, discuss measures to reduce the
problems, then are slow in carrying out the promises. Months or years
later they forget or cancel the plans, still unimplemented.
A few years ago, British deportation of people who were lawfully
brought from the Caribbean as children, but cannot now prove that was
lawful for want of necessary old documents, caused a scandal and the Tories
promised to correct this and compensate them. But
now
they plan to quit early.
Fiji's army insists
on ruling the country, never mind what government
is elected.
British climate defenders
painted
a government building black in honor
of the government's plans to open a new coal mine.
That building holds the office of the minister who approved a new
coal mine.
Chile has rejected
ex-president Piñera's personal plan to start a new
copper mine that would endanger marine wildlife nearby.
Many rapist thugs
in Britain have made British women
afraid to deal
with cops. It has become clear that there are groups of misogynistic
thugs
which protect thugs who commit misogynistic acts.
The article proposes reforms to put an end to that. I wish the author
had not dismissed the campaign to "defund the police" by taking it to
mean, literally, "abolish cops." The
intended
meaning was to respond
to incidents of psychological breakdown by sending people trained in
how to respond to that.
Billionaires strive to undermine democracy to pass laws to transfer
more wealth to them. But desire for even more wealth is not their
only reason. Some also make a political calculation that if workers
are in penury they will be unable to organize to resist. So they seek
to push
workers down to penury.
That ideology appeared by the late 1700s and it is still influential
today among billionaire right-wingers.
*Extreme heat could put
40%
of land vertebrates in peril by end of century.*
*Tax
the Wealthy At Least 75%, Says Oxfam. Do It Now.*
The UK had plainclothes thugs
infiltrate anti-apartheid protesters in
the 1970s,
to
snoop on their protest planning and their discussions
with their lawyers
about defending them in trial.
(satire) *Debt-Ridden 4th-Grader Shouldn't Have
Recklessly Invested In
Lunch.*
*Wild caught,
freshwater
fish in the United States are far more
contaminated with toxic PFAS
“forever chemicals” than those
commercially caught in oceans,*
This makes sense. The PFAs in a lake is basically stuck there, while those
released into the ocean can diffuse through the whole volume of the ocean.
What is clear is that we must stop filling the water with these toxins.
*Fukushima:
court
upholds acquittals of three Tepco executives over disaster.*
That is the right outcome. The Fukushima nuclear plant disaster could
have been averted my designing the nuclear plant differently, and that
gives us in our hindsight grounds to conclude that the actual design
was excessively risky. But that doesn't mean people should be
convicted of a crime for not recognizing this in advance.
Perhaps Tepco, the company, should face civil liability for the
economic damage to surrounding businesses. These executives can't
possibly pay that much, but maybe Tepco can do so over many years.
Ethiopia works hard to forget about
the
past practice of slavery,
which was abolished there
only in 1942.
The subject is embarrassing so people are encouraged to forget about it.
*FBI's
opposition to releasing Leonard Peltier driven by vendetta,
says ex-agent.*
There is some sign that
climate
disasters cause harm to fetuses and
newborns.
There are states and countries that make it a crime to cause harm
to a fetus. Could fossil fuel CEOs be prosecuted under these laws?
I hate to suggest it, because the main use of those laws is
to prosecute women who may have tried to give themselves abortions.
Ohio has imposed new systems of
voter
suppression; activists are suing.
Arguing that the best way to replace US gas stoves with more efficient
electric
induction stoves, over the long term, is with incentives and
financial help.
This way avoids prohibitions.
*200+ Millionaires
to World Leaders at Davos: "Tax the Ultra-Rich and Do It Now."*
Everyone:
call
on Bayer-Monsanto to stop manufacturing
neonicotinoid pesticides.
Everyone:
call
on Whole Foods to eliminate plastic packaging.
US citizens: thank the Attorneys General who are
defending
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Supreme Court.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and ask per to pass
the Billionaire's Minimum Income Tax.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
It would ensure that every household worth over $100 million is paying
an effective tax rate of at least 20% on their total income each year.
Right-wing politicians demand deregulation of many industrial
activities, including
construction,
to "eliminate red tape." However,
the regulations were adopted to save the people's lives,
and
deregulation often leads to deadly accidents.
Building codes in the UK, and especially in London, are an excellent,
terrible example.
The end result is that deregulation benefits businesses (that do or
invest in the activities that have been deregulated), while the harm
tends to fall on poor people, such as the
residents
of danger-prone
buildings, the inhabitants of "cancer alley",
and the drivers that work for Uber.
Scientists
discuss the delusional effect of carbon offsets.
Some scientists sat it might be safe and beneficial for companies
to buy carbon offsets in addition to
meeting mandatory targets for
reducing their own emissions.
A Republican election denialist, who was defeated in the election in
November,
organized
a campaign of drive-by shootings at the homes
of
the region's main Democratic officials.
By luck, nobody in the homes was hit. That Republican probably won't
be allowed another chance.
Not-quite-protester Cao Zhixin:
*When
you see this video I have been
taken away by the police for a while, like my other friends.*
The
UK's
new online identification requirement will effectively
require all discussion platforms and search engines to verify the age of each user.
The obvious way to do that is a repressive and
tyrannical way: by making each user show government photo ID.
I reject commercial communications platforms, because they already
deny users' freedom in various ways — instance, by demanding to
identify the user and/or running their code in the user's computer.
However, there are commercial search engines that currently do nothing
wrong to the user. Will this law make them all engage in repression?
Does the age verification requirement apply to search engines?
GNU Taler can be used to give people a way to verify their ages to
a web site without giving the site any way to identify them. But this
is not entirely finished yet.
The goals of this bill mostly seem valid to me; indeed, they may not
go far enough. For instance, TikTok's practices seem to reduce
teenagers' attention spans; should those practices be banned? I am
not sure. However, the internet is a threat to democracy if tracks
what people do and where they go.
*The world's leading financial institutions — including major Wall
Street banks such as
Citigroup,
JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America —
are still pumping money into fossil fuel
expansion.*
If you have accounts there, you can move your money to a smaller bank
which can't do harm like that. I did.
You can also urge your city to do likewise.
Local
governments in the UK have apartments that they can rent out or
sell,
People who bought them now face bills for major renovations that
are far more than they can possibly afford.
The UK's new "protect children by repressing everyone" bill would
require online platforms from showing anyone anything that presents
the practice of
crossing
the sea around the UK in a small boat
in a
favorable light.
This is blatant political censorship: opposing Tory politics will be
prohibited.
Robert Reich describes what happened on
previous occasions when
Republicans tried to threaten to make the US default
as extortion against a Democratic president.
*[Ro] Khanna Warns House
GOP
Wants to 'Hijack the Entire US Economy'
to Cut Social Security.*
*Tens of Thousands March in Madrid to
'Stop Privatization' of
Healthcare System.*
(satire) *Andrew Tate
Defense
Team Assembled From Dozens Of Lawyers
Trafficked From Eastern Europe.*
An elite London
thug
has confessed to 24 rapes, plus other crimes,
along a 20-year career. Required occasional background
investigations found nothing wrong.
The author, who insists that UK
thug departments must change their
misogynistic attitudes and culture, is in a position to know.
The thug
told
his victims that it was futile to report him
because his
fellow thugs
would take his side and disbelieve them. Sad to say, it
seems that that was true. He also threatened to murder at least one
of them.
Each victim who complained subsequently withdraw the complaint under
pressure of his threats.
As far as I can tell, companies like Adidas and Nike are supported by
fans who are trapped. They yearn to show off how much money they have
spent on merchandise of one company, so it can milk them over and
over. How foolish!
*Economic Justice Coalition Launches
'Full Employment for All'
Campaign
on MLK Day.*
Teachers
in British state schools will go on strike.
The government's crush-the-poor policy is driving nearly everyone to strike,
who has a union.
Thinking about the
US
military dominance in the light of the Athenian
empire.
I would not use the term "American empire" to describe this,
because it is rather the empire of the rich, and the US is only
part of its power.
*New
Oxfam Report on Inequality and Extreme Wealth
Proves the Need to
Tax the Rich.*
*Former
[Iranian] envoys warn against policies
including supply of drones to
Russia and failure to revive nuclear deal.*
14 of the most modern tanks would do Ukraine some good, but that is
not enough to win. Estimates are that
victory
would require on the
order of 100 tanks.
Tanks are far from invulnerable in battle, even though rifle fire
bounces off them. 14 tanks, even if they are superior to the enemy's
tanks, will not last long if they fight day after day. If in a large
battle the Putin forces
lose 50 tanks and Ukraine loses 10, we would
say that the battle went Ukraine's way, but at the strategic level it
would be a defeat for Ukraine. It would put an end to Ukraine's
attacking with tanks.
*It beggars belief that the UN thought it a good idea to allow an
authoritarian
petro-state to host an already compromised COP28.*
Vaccine manufacturers lobbied Twitter to censor
activists that demanded
global permission to make Covid-19 vaccines.
*Warning of
unprecedented
heatwaves as El Niño set to return
in 2023.*
As a result, in the next few years we could experience a sample of a
world with 1.5°C of global heating.
*Hundreds of thousands of young climate activists have said they will
continue
“protesting
in the streets in huge numbers” against fossil
fuels.*
*The UK government
plans
to give police even more power to lock us up.
But it won’t stop us: this is about humanity’s future.*
The UK government is criminalizing, one by one, all methods of protest
that might effectively draw attention to a cause. But the young
people who know that global heating
is likely to kill them before they
get old realize that surrendering to the authoritarian state is not a
sane option.
The @irony{Office of Hypersenstivity} at the
University of Southern
California has ruled the term "field work" taboo.
Reportedly this
decision stems from a concern to protect people, on seeing or hearing
the term "field work", from being reminded of the slaves in the 1800s
that worked in farm fields.
Nowadays some slaves are forced to work in nail salons, so there is a
proposal to make the word "nail" taboo. The proposal is that nails,
when used in construction, be referred to as "hammer targets" to avoid
reminding anyone of nail salons. One complicating factor is that
other slaves are forced to work in construction and may use nails; no
one knows what to do about that.
Enslavement is a grave crime, whether the slaves are forced to work on
farms, in
nail salons
, in construction,
or anything else. Our governments should do more to prevent it.
But that's no reason to mess up the English
language.
Over 80,000 Israelis protested against recent attacks against
democracy
and human rights by Israel's extremist right-wing
government.
How fast will
hotter
ocean water melt the Thwaites Glacier
and raise sea level?
We still don't know, but hotter ocean water can melt several meters
in a century.
Britons must stop fearing to
slam
the Tories for ruining the NHS
because of their anti-state ideology.
The idea of "shrinking the state" is absurd, because
we
need the state
to do many vital jobs.
In practice, governments that say they will "shrink the state" are
practicing "squeeze-up" economics: squeeze the people at the bottom of
the economy, so that money flows out at the top to the rich.
The danger of
Brazil's
insurrectionists is not over
yet.
For instance, while most Republican congresscritters are extremists,
the 20 or so who threatened to wreck the US's credit status if they
don't get their demands, thus doing something morally equivalent to
terrorism, are extremist even by comparison with the rest. I call
them "hyperextremists."
All Republican now in the House of Representatives are extremists,
but a fraction may be a little less rabidly so than the rest.
Rather than exaggerate by calling them "moderate," I use the term
"hypoextremist" for them.
Next rally for Julian Assange will be *Saturday, January 21,
11:30-12:30, at Park St Station.*
A report claims that
banks
must prepare now for fossil fuel assets to
crash
in value. That means governments must require banks to do this.
The article seems to call for going further than that — for giving
those investors special privilege by protecting them from losing
money. That would make the rest of us reward the fossil fuel
companies with more money for decades of lies and cheating. An
acceptable solution has to make the cheaters pay.
I don't recognize the groups that are behind this report. It may be
true, or it may be an attempt to spare fossil fuel interests from
losing any of their billions.
John
Deere, Inc., is trying to deflect
real right-to-repair by making
small concessions and exaggerating their significance.
I decided not to post about the initial announcement, since it would
predictably be one-sided. I figured we would get a clear picture
soon, and we have.
John Deere made it explicitly clear that the aim is to stop states from
passing the laws that do the whole job right to repair.
As for what American farmers deserve, that goes far beyond right to
repair. They deserve tractors whose software is free, libre — all of
it. Tractors which will not communicate anything with anyone except
as the tractor's driver decides, and will not obey remote commands
unless the tractor's driver allows it.
The right to repair is the first battle, and a big one. Please help
farmers win it — and please explain to them the rest of our fight.
*Call for new taxes on super-rich after
1%
pocket two-thirds of all
new wealth.*
More information about
toxins
that come from gas stoves.
It seems that generation of oxides of nitrogen occurs only when
there's a flame on the stove, and the other pollutants enter as part
of the gas being used, which leaks at a small rate all the time.
John Perkins compares
American
economic hit men with China's economic
hit men.
China presents itself as rescuing poor countries from the former but
it offers basically the same sort of trap for those countries.
Perkins is the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
.
US citizens:
call
on Biden to demand a clean bill to increase the
debt ceiling.
The US will hit the debt ceiling limit this week, but it can cope for some
months before the drastic consequences occur.
US citizens:
call
on HHS Secretary Becerra to stop Moderna's COVID
vaccine price gouging now.
US citizens:
call
on Biden to put an end to offshore drilling for
oil and gas.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to reject House Republicans’ plan to defund the IRS
and protect rich tax evaders.
US citizens:
call
on the Bureau of Land Management to protect
Thompson Divide
(in Colorado) from mining and drilling.
The water supply of the London area was privatized, supposedly so that
the company would invest in improving the water supply (including sewage treatment) there. The
trouble is, it
makes more money by not investing and leaving the
quality unacceptable.
This is because homes and offices have no alternative choice besides
that one. Water supply is a natural monopoly, and therefore it should
be closely regulated.
Biden's personal lawyers found some
secret
documents while closing out
an office
he had until 2016 in an organization connected with the
University of Pennsylvania. They reported this and gave them to the
National Archives.
This raises the question of why the documents were in his possession after
his term as vice president ended and why he brought them there. However,
it is clear he was not trying to conceal them, and it is plausible he
did not remember that they existed.
Republicans will surely try to create a false equivalence;
here is the
refutation.
His lawyers found a few more
secret
documents in his home
in Delaware,
and handed those to the Justice Department.
The contrast between Biden's conduct and the
bullshitter's conduct
is clear.
The wrecker's 2017 tax cuts were a
big
giveaway to rich corporations.
This was anticipated, but now the figures demonstrate it was true.
*NEWS: GAO Study Finds 34% of Large,
Profitable Corporations
Pay
Zero in Federal Income Taxes.*
Los Angeles thugs
repeatedly
tased Keenan Anderson to death while
holding him helpless on the ground.
Anderson had warned passers-by
that the thugs
were trying to kill him. It appears he was right.
A right-wing extremist official in Alabama thinks he has found an
excuse
to prosecute women for taking abortion drugs.
*Insurers Are Fighting
To Protect Their Medicare Fraud.*
Business lobbying
blocked
bills in Congress intended to regulate PFAs.
Capturing Soledar would be of
little
practical significance to the
Putin forces.
It would not even guarantee they could take Bakhmut; and capturing Bakhmut
would likewise be of little practical significance.
The concentration of so many Putinite mercenaries there seems to
indicate the lack of capacity to try to do anything strategically
significant — at least for now.
After a series of blows to the Voting Rights Act,
what
remains, and
what have right-wing judges destroyed?
Staff effectively working for TikTok
used
TikTok location data to track
reporters to try to find staff who were giving interviews to those reporters.
I don't care whether those staff had asked permission. I don't care
whether TikTok (or its Chinese owners) are sincere in saying they
won't do this again. The problem is that they do collect the data,
and are in a position to use it to track people if they decide to.
The problem is that the system is designed to require users to trust
the good will of the company's staff and management. Such a system
must be designed
differently so that users' trust not to track people
is not an issue.
The fact that some Chinese staff could track the locations of US
reporters and their US sources makes the problem additionally grave,
but that is not a fundamental change. Enabling the US staff to track
the locations of people in the US is dangerous too.
*World On Verge of
"New
Industrial Age" as Clean Energy Jobs Boom: IEA.*
The projections in the article sound very good, but I wonder how they
compare with what is needed to keep
global heating to a level of 1.5°C.
*Stop
"Caving to Fossil Fuel Industry," Experts Say as 2022 Confirmed
Among Hottest Years on Record.*
The Espionage Act is so
absurdly
overbroad that even the actions of
people such as Julian Assange and Joe Biden may technically have
violated it.
We need to change that law.
*Brazil police find
draft
decree intended to overturn election result in
former Bolsonaro minister’s home.*
Bolsonaro had not signed the decree; it is not clear whether he ever
saw it.
The ex-minister was Anderson Torres. Bolsonaro put Torres in charge
of security in Brasilia shortly before his presidential term ended,
and it appears that Torres used that authority to help the
insurrection.
Torres went to Florida in time to be missing in action at the
time of the insurrection. However, he returned to Brazil
as he said he would, and was
arrested
on arrival.
Four months after the floods in late August, parts of Pakistan remain
flooded. Of the 33 million who were flooded out of their homes,
8
million are still homeless.
The UK may replace ankle-mounted GPS trackers with
portable
fingerprint readers that the person is required to carry at all times.
I think the two systems are equally intrusive, more or less, but they
need to be compared with being in an immigration prison. Overall, I
am more frightened by spread of "voluntarity" GPS tracking that is
imposed implicitly, by apps and web sites used via snoop-phones, and
that hardly anyone has the stubbornness to refuse.
I think it should be illegal for those devices to track the user
except under special conditions — and the snoop-phone should never
be allowed to send a GPS location directly except in an emergency
call. Other than that, the user should be able to send the current
location by requesting to display it, then cutting and pasting that
location into an app. This gives the user the opportunity to decide
what location to tell to the app. This flexibility is what shields
users from tracking.
An NGO, the Supreme Court Historical Society, raises money mainly from
from companies that have a stake in coming Supreme Court cases, and
gives their executives and stockholders access for
one-on-one
conversations with the justices of the court.
That is an avenue for unjust influence.
A right-wing campaign to restrict abortion rights
suggests direction
for Republican extremists to attack next.
In Salafi Arabia,
censorship of political dissent
operates by
execution.
*Tens of thousands of Israelis
marched
in central Tel Aviv and in two
other major cities on Saturday night, protesting far rightwing PM
Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to overhaul the legal system and weaken the
Supreme Court — undermining democratic rule just weeks after his
election.*
Some teenagers have started a
"Luddite
Club" to reject anti-social media
and (at least part of the time) snoop-phones.
They see one side of the injustice. It would be great to clue them in
to the other unjust aspect of snoop-phones.
An unofficial war crimes tribunal heard the case against
Dubya,
Cheney, Rumsfeld and their associates, following serious procedure,
and found
them guilty of launching a war of aggression against Iraq.
This tribunal has no power to punish those convicted, but it suggests that
an official tribunal would likewise convict them.
There were protests
against the dictator of Tunisia, who has eliminated
Parliament from government.
Wendell Potter:
*Medicare
Advantage is a money-making scam. I should
know. I helped to sell it.*
Potter resigned from promoting "Medicare Advantage" and turned to
exposing it instead.
The Tories have decided to allow
thugs
to "stop
protests before they
start" by arresting protesters preemptively.
New York State is being sued for allowing
cryptocurrency miners to run
a gas-fired electric generator to power the computing.
Missouri's
state legislature has imposed a dress code on all members.
Bare shoulders and arms are forbidden: everyone must wear a coat or a
jacket.
However, some details are different for men and women legislators.
Men are required to wear a tie, and are forbidden to wear a dress or
skirt. I would resign from the house rather than wear a tie! Women,
more fortunate, are not required to wear one.
Any dress code treats people badly. They should get rid of it. But
it is amusing to imagine what they might do if a trans person or
nonbinary is elected to the legislature. What to wear???
Maybe the motive for the code is to exclude working-class people from
the legislature.
The
US
political system rewards brash liars,
such as Santos — and the
corrupter.
I disagree with the claim that that is what "Americans" deserve.
People tend to get the politicians their behavior deserves, but no
people deserve to be ruled by corruption and lies.
El Salvador's right-wing government doesn't prosecute the many murders
committed by the army during the civil war, decades ago, but it has
jailed
environmentalist leaders accused of killing an army informant
during that war.
People fear this represents the government's intention to repeal
the ban on toxic mining that those leaders brought about.
*Labour’s
lost if it doesn’t defend public spending.*
It might avoid losing an election but it will have got lost in planning
what to do afterward.
*Garland
Appoints Special Counsel Over Classified Biden Documents.*
A Republican official in Wisconsin boasted about the
effectiveness of
Republican voter suppression in Milwaukee.
US
inflation is slowing without the high level of unemployment
that
some economists predicted would be required to reduce inflation.
* The
findings
revealed that a noisy environment makes it harder for
dolphins to communicate and cooperate
on tasks.*
Human activities, including shipping, sonar and sonic blasts,
nowadays make dolphins' environments much nosier than they used to be.
*"You Couldn't Make It Up":
Head
of UAE Oil Company Appointed Chair of UN
Climate Summit.*
Climate defenders already concluded that these conferences had been
captured by planet roasters
who had rendered them useless for their
purpose. With this final step, they have advanced from undermining
the conferences to mocking them with unveiled derision.
*Nurses
claim victory after three-day strike
at two New York City hospitals.*
A crucial demand in this strike was that the hospitals hire more nurses
so that the nurses will not be overloaded.
The right-wing
Supreme
Court majority flatly refuses to reconsider
death sentences,
regardless of what the constitutional issue at stake
may be.
A fair fraction of people
respond
to being in jail
by feeling that
life has become unbearable. Is this a psychological disorder, or is
it a kind of normal?
A zinc
mine
on the great Sumatran fault could pollute a large area
in the case of an earthquake.
*New Stock Listings Open the Door to
American
Investment in the
Israeli Occupation [of Palestine].*
*Washington is shrieking at the
prospect
of a defense budget cut.
But
would it really be so bad?*
A clock that runs backwards is right four times a day. Maybe Republicans
are right a few times a year, and this could be one of them.
*The rest of 2023 is going to look a lot like the first
few days of
the
Republican majority in the House: an abject disaster.*
San
Antonio voters aim to pass an initiative
to prohibit the San Antonio
thug
department from taking any action against "abortion crimes".
Wouldn't anyone performing an abortion in San Antonio still be at risk of
arrest by Texas state thugs?
US citizens:
call
on Congress to ban JROTC instructors from promoting
the NRA
in our schools.
Everyone:
call
on major food distributor Sysco to cut out
single-use plastic packaging.
Biden's secretary of the interior may be a member of an indigenous group,
but
she
(clearly with Biden's approval) is yielding to the planet roasters
more than she is resisting
them.
Let's not judge people by their ethnicity.
*Honduran
environmental
defenders shot dead
in broad daylight.*
A video shows a Russian conscript
accuse
his commander of disobeying
Putin's orders to supply and train conscripts,
and shoving him.
The conscript was convicted of "doing physical harm" to the commander,
which appears to be somewhat of an exaggeration. However, what must
have hurt the commander most was this criticism. It is almost
impossible to believe that the criticism was not true. Is Putin
honest enough with himself to recognize that?
Zoning laws play a big role in
the
housing shortage in Los Angeles.
Indeed, this is generally true.
(satire)
*Study
Finds Early Humans Selectively Bred Corn To Be Less
Aggressive.*
UK businesses claim that reducing the subsidy they get for gas
would make it difficult for them
to
invest in using less gas.
That smells to me like bullshit. Cut subsidy for business, or raise
taxes, and they will claim that they need that money to (1) invest in
decarbonizing and (2) invest in innovation. Or whatever thing they
now want businesses to invest in. But when they get that money,
they are likely to do something else with it.
Instead of subsidizing their fossil fuel bills, and hoping they will
use that to invest in energy efficiency, how about offering businesses
loans specifically to invest in energy efficiency?
Blocked by lawsuits from forgiving student debt,
Biden is trying
another approach: to reduce the amount of payments
for the loans.
To get enough water in the future, California will need to
eliminate
housing from floodplains, and permit rivers to flood them again
by
removing levies.
Lula
accuses Brazilian thugs of colluding
with the Bolsonarists who
attacked the centers of government.
For instance, evidence shows that someone opened the door for them
in two of the three buildings.
He has called for the arrest of two of Bolsonaro's officials who were
in charge of security in Brazilia. They are
accused of sabotaging
security so as to facilitate
the insurrection.
One of them went to Florida shortly before the insurrection and is
staying very close to where Bolsonaro is staying. By coincidence?
The UK's "national security"
bill
would define "spying" to include
normal journalism.
Specifically, journalism would be a crime if it published anything
that "may materially assist a foreign intelligence service." The article
gives examples.
Everyone:
call
on General Mills to eliminate unnecessary, single-use
plastic packaging.
If you have disabled the page's JavaScript, you may get a blank screen
after signing. that does not mean anything is wrong. Your signature has
probably been sent in properly. The blank screen has text that is rendered
invisible by CSS; if you disable the CSS in the page, the text will appear.
San Francisco continues harassing homeless people — for instance,
stealing their few possessions — to try to chase them away.
City
employees do this, and vigilantes sometimes follow
their lead.
*Tigray
rebels start handing over weapons to Ethiopian army.*
Perhaps this will lead to peace.
Lula has defeated the coup, and may defeat those who wish to
destabilize Brazil, but the long term political
challenge of
right-wing politics remains.
Facebook
executives were warned that Bolsonarists were using that
platform
to build support for a coup.
The promotion algorithm magnified their reach. As usual, it helps
whoever advocates the most shocking violence.
Democrats in the House could thwart
McCarthy's
vow to use the debt
ceiling to hold the US government to ransom
by signing a discharge
petition.
They would need at least five Republicans to sign it with them.
I think there is another way. Robert Reich recommended that
Democrats
should unite with the slightly-less-extremist Republicans
to elect one of those as speaker.
It has been reported that any member of the House can now demand a new
election for speaker, per the new rules McCarthy imposed at the demand
of the hyperextremists.
If Democrats make a deal with the Republican
slightly-less-extremists to support one of those as speaker,
perse
would win. They could make a deal beforehand to raise (or eliminate)
the debt ceiling and to leave Social Security and Medicare untouched.
Reich referred to those Republican as "moderates", but I don't think
that term fits them. Just as "moderate" Democrats are actually
plutocratist,
not moderate at all, so are "moderate" Republicans.
The
Bolsonaro mob vented their hatred of democracy
on Brazil's
equivalents of the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court.
They destroyed even abstract art as if it expressed support for
democracy, and wrote graffiti on the walls calling for military
dictatorship.
People have a right to say they would prefer a military dictatorship,
but taking or planning violent action in the name of establishing one
is an unforgivable crime.
Governments are in favor of debt forgiveness for Sri Lanka,
but
private
lenders (hedge funds) are blocking the deal.
Republican
senators are blocking most of Biden's appointments to federal
judgeships in the US south.
This is partly because of a rule that the Senate won't vote on a
nominee unless the senators of per home state approve of per. ISTR
that the Republicans abolished that rule when
the corrupter became
president,
so they could quickly fill the backlog of vacancies that
they had created by blocking all of Obama's nominations for years.
So why is that rule operating now? Did Democrats restore it?
How the
drying
up of the Great Salt Lake endangers human health.
Some say that the already-dry parts of the lakebed are already giving off
toxic dust.
Australia
proposes to make major polluting businesses invest to reduce
heir emissions
intensity — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per
unit of production — to meet annual targets.
However, it will continue the
use
of "carbon offsets",
which tend to range from delusional optimism
to outright fraud.
Congressional
Republicans changed the rules
of the Office of
Congressional Ethics to make it unable to operate.
This is to protect various Republicans such as from any follow-up on
the ethics complaints they would have faced.
Alas for poor Rep. Santos, it will not protect him from possible
extradition to Brazil for the fraud charges he ducked out on a few
years ago.
US citizens:
call
on ConocoPhillips to stop its proposed Arctic
drilling
project before it's too late.
US citizens:
call
on Biden to keep fighting for the expanded Child Tax
Credit.
Here's the text I used for the letter.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to stop the GOP plot to defund the IRS
to protect wealthy and corporate tax cheats.
Haiti
has no elected officials left.
It had a senate, but all the
senators' terms of office have ended. The place is too chaotic to hold
an election to replace them.
The chaos is partly due to a series of
US
interventions, including removing
President Aristide from office
twice,
and imposing two unelected presidents,
Martelly
and Moise.
Watch out, Australia! The system to pay for public transit in
Victoria will be replaced —
the
plan is for people to pay using
portable phones,
which would effectively identify them to the system
and track where they go.
The existing payment system, "Myki", permits buying a card with cash;
however, buying another card is expensive enough that people will
hesitate to do that very often. BART in San Francisco has done
something similarly unjust.
All in all, this system is not very good, but you can protect your
privacy with some effort. It is possible to swap cards with a
stranger in a station, if there is a machine that will show how much
money is stored in a card. The one who receives the card with the
greater sum stored can pay cash to compensate the other, so that
neither one loses or gains any money.
Victorians, please campaign now for the new system to be better for
privacy. Demand a way to pay for one ride at a time with cash!
Fabulist Santos is suspected of
lying
about the origin of his campaign
funds, which is illegal.
*Why
[Bolsonaro]
is responsible for the riots [in Brasilia].*
Supporters of Bolsonaro in Brazil's military police encouraged the
riots, then helped them by failing to act to stop them.
High elected officials did this, too.
*Banks
and countries pledge $10bn to rebuild Pakistan
after catastrophic
floods.*
Is the banks' "contribution" a donation, or is it a loan? A big loan could
crush Pakistan decades or even centuries.
There will surely be more such floods, and even bigger. Rebuilding in
any straightforward way will only lead to another destruction. What method
can avert disaster if the rain repeats?
Facebook will protect teenage useds
from
some kinds of targeted advertising.
That's a step in a good direction, but everyone deserves privacy.
Everyone on the net deserves to be protected from targeted advertising,
and from being profiled at all.
*Madagascar's unique wildlife faces
imminent
wave of extinction [in
the next 20 years],
say scientists.*
*Extreme weather left
474
people dead and cost $165bn in the US last year.*
Sanders
condemned Moderna for increasing the price of Covid-19 vaccine
to as much as $130.
It costs $3 to produce a dose.
Corporations are not people; they have no inherent rights, not even
the eight to continue operating. And certainly not the right to charge
for a medicine whatever price maximizes its profits.
*Greenpeace Calls on
US
and Mexico to Defuse Largest Carbon Bomb
in
North America.*
Musk
promised laid-off Twitter workers
three months of severance pay.
He waited months, then offered them just one month of pay in exchange
for a nondisclosure agreement.
If they all sue. and he loses, it will be what that jerk deserves.
The Tories plan
a
new law to attack each kind of nonviolent but
annoying protest that climate defenders come up with.
The
US
Consumer Product Safety Commission advocates banning sale of
new gas stoves,
not only to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas
emissions, but because their indoor pollution is a major cause of
asthma for children.
When I tried cooking on old-fashioned electric stoves, I found I
couldn't do it. The lag in response to changes of the heat setting
made it impossible for me to control it. But I've read that new
induction stoves are as easy to use as gas stoves.
The new
president
of Peru has been officially charged with homicide
and genocide
after state thugs
guarding an airport killed 18 of the
thousands of protesters who tried to take over that airport.
Whether charges of homicide are justified depends on details I don't
know. If they are, whether the charges legally should fall on the
thugs
alone, or higher officials as well, depends on more details
I don't know. I don't know which side is right or wrong in Peru.
But charges of genocide can't possibly be justified. The
thugs did
not try to wipe out a demographic group, or even to take actions in
that direction. They did not even try to wipe out the protesters
in that one airport.
Weakening the definition of "genocide" will undermine the special
odium that the world has attached to any intentional effort to wipe
out a particular demographic group. That would be a bad thing to do.
Some scientists believe that
repeated
Covid-19 infections gradually
wear down a human's immune system
and eventually render her more vulnerable
to various diseases.
It seems there is not yet enough clear evidence to be sure of the
truth about this. In science it is not unusual to get various pieces
of information that don't add up to a clear picture. Eventually,
scientists do the right experiments and get the insight to find the
answer — but that takes time.
In the mean time, it is wise to minimize your own risk — and the
risks to others who come near you — by wearing good masks.
However, people in general seem to be
rushing
to forget about Covid-19
although it continues to spread, injure, kill and mutate.
The same
thing happened after the 1918/1919 flu epidemic.
This is exactly the wrong thing for people to do now.
(satire) *Couple
Loses Life Savings After Getting Scammed Into Having
Baby At Hospital.*
War game simulation suggests that
an
attempted Chinese invasion of
Taiwan would fail,
leaving Taiwan in devastated condition though
unconquered, while wrecking the Chinese military and causing
substantial casualties for the US and Japan.
These casualties would be large by the standard of 21st century US
wars, but small compared with what the US experienced in the Vietnam
War or the Korean War.
Taiwan would rebuild its infrastructure with help. Being devastated
for a decade is not as bad as becoming brainwashed slaves forever.
Another article about
the
same war games
reports on projected political effects of the war's damage, but I
think it exaggerates that. If the US had defeated China and still
possessed most of its armed forces, no other enemy would risk a
conventional war.
I wonder how this would affect
global heating and climate defense.
The article also suggests how Taiwan could build a more effective
defense for much less money.
If China were not a totalitarian dictatorship, I think it would choose
not to attack Taiwan, rather than suffer such a defeat. Surely some
sort of compromise and peace would be better for everyone. Even Xi
might choose peace, and I hope he does; but he may not care about the
cost or the casualties to China as long as he wins.
(satire) *
Police
Ask For Public's Help In Falsifying Report.*
McCarthy's
proposed House rules are dangerous,
but at least they are
up for a vote.
He also made secret deals with
hyperextremists; we don't know what
those deals are.
Bolsonaro's
followers openly promoted their violent plans
(to attack
Brazil's highest government buildings) on antisocial media platforms,
with hardly any hindrance.
The governor of the Brasilia region and its security chief were
Bolsonarists, and did not cooperate in protecting the government from
the planned riot.
They
have been fired.
*1,500
Bolsonaro Backers [arrested] After Far-Right Coup Attempt
in Brazil.*
It is good that they did not let all the rioters get away. But it
would have been better to hold everyone who had attacked the
government buildings, at least enough to identify them and search
them.
Bolsonaro's
followers remain a threat
to democracy and liberty in
Brazil, and (due to their commitment to deforestation) to the survival
of civilization as well.
The US is an exception among countries in several ways. Here are a few
unfortunate
exceptions that we Americans ought to fix.
The ICC is supposed to prosecute people for war crimes when their own
countries fail to prosecute them. The US should sign the ICC treaty;
but them it should never leave prosecution of American war criminals
to the ICC. The US should prosecute them.
*When
Big Pharma Spends More on Stock Buybacks Than R&D.*
I'd complete the sentence with, "We ought to pass laws to
reduce the price of medicines."
Many
instances
of extreme weather in 2021 and 2022 were made worse by
global heating.
Some would have been outright impossible in the past.
If a former elected
official
of the Tory party quits and gives support to Labour,
saying in effect "I haven't changed — the parties have changed," what
does that imply?
You could say that Labour is getting stronger, because it is attracting people
from new areas of political views. But I think Labor is becoming more and
more like a "centrist" party that puts the rich first.
*Netanyahu's
Government Takes a Turn Toward Theocracy.*
Theocratist parties joined the government in exchange for an opportunity
to attack the liberal order and human rights in Israel.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to protect the Office of Congressional Ethics.
One federal appeals court ruled that the policy of
banning bump stocks
stretched the law too far.
I think this applies only to the states in that one circuit: Texas
and some nearby states.
In sensible times, the US would amend that law, but I expect the
anti-gun-control fanatics controlling the House of Representatives will
not allow that.
Random innocent events, seen through the filter of confirmation bias,
enabled US military personnel to convince themselves that NGO aid
worker Zemari Ahmadi, traveling around Kabul on errands, was carrying
explosives for PISSI. So they
fired
a Hellfire missile at the car he
had borrowed from the NGO.
In just a few minutes, analysts figured out that the missile had
killed noncombatants, and within hours, that it had killed children
(who were certainly noncombatants). Nonetheless, the US military
continued pretending to be absolutely sure that it had attacked a
PISSI
fighter and only fighters had been killed.
The US military did admit, in a week or so, that Ahmadi and the other
people killed were all noncombatants, not enemies at all. That was a
big advance compared with the standard US practice before that, which
was to deny
stubbornly that a drone strike killed noncombatants,
disregarding all evidence that it did.
A campaign calls on governments
not
to require internet infrastructure
companies to censor people's communications.
Please don't call communications and publications
"content". That
term disparages all of them as mere filler to keep a container full of
something or other.
I find it disturbing that Facebook is criticized for labeling the
statement "Men are trash" as "hateful". Of course it is hateful — it
blatantly expresses misandry, just as "Women are trash" would express
misogyny. Both statements carry hate, similar kinds of hate, in a
similar way, differing only in which target is hated.
The crucial point is that neither of those statements should be banned
or censored. I might rebuke a person for saying either of them, but
to forcibly limit people to saying only nice things (or to show hate
only towards those we revile) is intolerable.
Despite that minor inconsistency, this
campaign
stands for freedom.
Someone is shooting
at Democratic elected officials in Albuquerque.
After five attacks, I think we can conclude that this is an expression
of the Republican party's encouragement of political violence.
Greg Palast reports on evidence about the Jan 6 insurrection
that was not
followed up, or not collected. Why didn't the state
identify every rioter and search their cell phones?
It is especially disturbing (though not surprising) that some capitol
thugs
showed their support to the insurrectionists, before the actual
insurrection.
The NHS now directs patients who have money to pay to get a
"private
clinic" appointment sooner at the same place.
The NHS used to provide medical care for nearly everyone in Britain.
Under Tory power, it has become a provider of lousy care for the
people that the state considers unimportant.
*When state services fail, citizens pay extra or sink. This is
Sunak’s Britain
now.*
Ralph Nader's advice
to progressive congresscritters for how to champion
progressive policies effectively.
Hamline University in Minnesota has
fired a teacher
for showing, in a class on the history of Islam, an old Persian painting of Mohammad.
It was made by Muslims as a religious object.
The article reports that in Persia, and in Persian-influenced Turkey
and India, there is an old Muslim tradition of paintings of human
beings including Mohammad.
Catering to the most conservative Muslim views, which are those spread
by Salafi Arabia
since 2001, has become the requirement exacted by the
most fanatical devotees of tiptoe culture. The university president
actually asserted that this demand overrides academic freedom.
A teacher must not insult students — to do so goes against the
requisites for doing the job. However, this applies only to how the
teacher relates to them interpersonally. It does not apply to the
substance of the class; no student has the right to censor that.
Calling class material "offensive" or claiming to have been "harmed"
by it does not oblige the school to change it. In a free country,
people do not owe your religion (whichever one that might be) any
particular respect.
The university owes the teacher who was fired an apology, restoration
of duties, pay for the period of work that
perse lost, and some
punitive damages. And above all it must recognize that students cannot
eliminate academic freedom by shouting, "Offensive! That harms us!"
A six-year-old student
intentionally
shot his teacher and critically
wounded her.
*Protesters gather at Iranian prison in
attempt
to stop ‘imminent executions’.*
Tories set up policies that tended to unjustly harm people who
lawfully came to Britain without any special papers in the past. but
had no papers to prove it. Tories dragged their feet in ending these
policies and compensating victims. Now they plan to
throw
the whole matter away.
Bolsonaro probably
entered the US
using a visa he held as a head of
state. In the normal course of events, that would be canceled now,
and he would be compelled to leave the US.
The US should make him leave rather than give him a base for planning
to endanger Brazil.
The ideal thing would be to extradite him to Brazil, but I would
expect there is no evidence to justify criminal charges.
Israel has prohibited
showing the Palestinian flag in public places.
Palestine asked the UN to adjudicate Israel's occupation of Palestine,
and Israel is "punishing" this by applying many forms of repression
all at once. (I have the feeling that the right-wing extremists in
the new Israeli government were itching for an opportunity to do
this.)
But why should Palestinians deserve punishment for asking the UN for
adjudication of their rights?
*Insect declines mean
reduced yields
of healthy foods like fruit and
vegetables and increased disease in people. This is estimated to cause
half a million early deaths per year.*
*With McCarthy, the
[corrupter's]
coalition of MAGAs and oligarchs lives on.*
I don't think the oligarchs want the US government to shut down. What will
they do to prevent it?
Amazon warehouse worker Rick Jacobs had a heart attack and died while
at work. To prevent any disruption, management kept the remaining
workers in the dark about it by
erecting
a wall of cardboard boxes
around the area where Jacobs's body lay.
"Liberty Mutual" insurance company (an ironic name) has a new CEO. A
campaign
presses for him to stop the corporation insuring and
investing in fossil fuel projects.
This is a clear example of a pernicious development in progressive
thinking: advocating an explicitly privileged higher status of
citizenship for indigenous people.
The campaign makes four demands. I support the first three,
but I criticize the fourth demand (which I have relabeled "4-") for
the unfairness of demanding new rights but limiting them to indigenous
people, thus denying those rights to all other people impacted locally
by a large fossil fuel project. That omission is racist in spirit.
Item 4- should be replaced by this one:
Why would a group of progressives think of proposing 4- instead of 4+?
Why advocate rights that are clearly required by justice, then
spontaneously and arbitrarily limit them to a small subset of humanity?
In today's progressive thinking, there is a current which, not
satisfied with the goal of eliminating the racism against indigenous
people and compensating the injustices that have been practiced
against them, seeks to elevate them to a status above ordinary human
beings. According to that line of thought, they are inherently
superior by birth to the rest of humanity — born high-minded and
loyal to preserving nature. Therefore we (the rest) should have faith
in them, consider them born to be our leaders, and grant them the
privileges and power to make decisions for all of us. They would be,
in effect, a new noble class.
I would support demand 4+, which advocates additional rights for
everyone, indigenous people included. I will not support 4-, which
denies those rights arbitrarily to the rest of us.
Great
Salt Lake could disappear in 5 years
at the current rate of
shrinkage. Conservationists say Utah needs to adopt policies to
take less water from the lake.
The article says that the region is overdrawing the available water.
At some point it will hit a hard stop and have to cease much of its
economic activity. However, it doesn't explain what harm will
come directly from the emptiness of the lake itself.
Harvard's school of political science invited the former head of Human
Rights Watch to visit as a fellow. Then
the
dean cancelled the invitation
because he has criticized Israel for human rights violations.
Those human rights violations already amounted to apartheid, but Israel's
new government, which includes right-wing extremists, is planning to make
things much worse. Honest defenders of human rights will have to criticize
Israel more than ever. Rich supporters of Israel will surely increase
the censorship pressure in US universities.
Don't assume that those supporters are Jews. Some of them are
fanatical Christians who are determined to bring about events that
would
fulfill certain prophecies related to Christian myths of doomsday.
US citizens: call on leaders in
Congress
and Transportation Secretary
Buttigieg to fine airlines
that cancel flights for reasons other than
weather, and allow states to participate in enforcement.
As
reporter
Dion Rabouin was interviewing people on the street outside
an office of Chase Bank in Phoenix,
a bank employee asked him what
he was doing. Soon a Phoenix thug
showed up, handcuffed him with no
apparent excuse, and made him sit in a police car, threatening violence
along the way.
Someone made a video of this harassment, and the
thug threatened to
arrest per as well.
It is common in the US for thugs
to arrest journalists for recording
how they treat members of the public. It is less common for cops to
come and threaten reporters for journalism that does not involve cops
at all.
The reporter worked for the powerful Wall Street Journal, which has
demanded explanations.
Windfall profits taxes in Europe permit
fossil fuel companies
to deduct the amount they invest in access
to fossil fuels.
That is the usual way of handling taxes on business, but it will lead
for bad results with fossil fuel investments. There is no room in the
carbon budget for more fossil fuel wells or processing capacity, so
investing in those things should be forbidden. If it can't be
forbidden just yet, at least it should not be tax-deductible.
Scientists
have solved the crucial problem of genetically engineering wheat.
They plan to produce heat-resistant varieties.
If they go on to make flood-resistant varieties and drought-resistant
varieties of wheat, wheat could be safe against extreme weather. Hmm,
better make that varieties which are flood-resistant and
drought-resistant.
But what about wildfires? Can any wheat plant be fire-resistant?
The article says nothing about whether these new varieties of wheat
will be patented, or restricted by plant variety monopolies. If they
are, their use will have an enormous cost for farmers, and will
further concentrate wealth for the richest few, at the expense of
everyone who eats wheat.
The world must exempt food, all forms of food plants and animals, from
imposed artificial monopolies.
This is advice about
talking
with people who are grieving,
from someone who has listened to many grieving people talk about it.
As I read the article, I thought of the friends and relatives I have
lost. I have a list of the people I've lost via death, and every so
often I go through it and think about each one of them.
I frequently felt grief for the English language while reading the
article, each time I came across plural pronouns and verbs alternating
with singular pronouns and verbs, referring to the same one person.
I have never understand the idea that it was obligatory to try
desperately to avoid reminding someone about a loss. In my
experience, I recall a raw loss frequently, whether anyone reminds me
about it or not. That's what the author says, too.
Recalling the death of a friend years ago is not agony, more of a
distant regret. It reminds me of feeling at ease with that person in
the past. By contrast, recalling an old rejection can be devastating,
since it was probably my fault.
Sabri
al-Qurashi was released from Guantanamo prison to Kazakhstan,
where
he is treated as a stateless illegal immigrant,
forbidden to work, and his wife is forbidden to visit him there.
California has been hit by
several
extreme rainstorms in sequence,
and more are expected
to follow.
Global heating
is predicted to make this happen frequently in certain
places, the US Pacific Coast being one of them.
The
mayor
of Xirivella,
a suburb of Valencia near its airport, visits
constituents for dinner to find out what they are thinking.
McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House after a series of
concessions
that put him under the power of the hyperextremists.
If
even one of them no longer supports McCarthy as speaker,
perse will be
able to demand a new election for speaker, and McCarthy could easily
face the resumption of the conflict.
"Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly put
his
personal ambitions ahead of
our democracy."
*Two months after Elon Musk laid off half of Twitter’s workforce,
some
employees
affected say they have yet to receive any formal
severance
offer or separation agreement.*
Twitter has stopped paying rent on a San Francisco office building.
Perhaps Musk believes he can get away with stiffing those employees.
Musk seems to be imitating the cheater's behavior patterns.
The cheater
is famous for
refusing
to pay contractors he hired to work on buildings;
one of sued and won.
Perhaps Musk feels inclined to follow that example of arrogance.
Half
the world's glaciers are expected to disappear by 2100
if we have
4C of global heating.
(satire)
How
the Speaker of the House is elected.
A woman in England is charged with the
crime
of trying to give herself
a late-term abortion.
Even if this is not allowed, it should not be a crime.
Human life begins around the time of birth.
The EU has adopted a
plan
to reject products produced via
deforestation,
including agricultural products.
Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg was supposed to use his authority
to make airlines work to prevent massive cancellation of flights.
He
ignored warnings and did nothing.
Democratic officials privately implored Buttigieg to do something about this,
but no
Democrats wanted the public to know he was doing a bad job.
*Financial
World Celebrates Slowing Wage and Employment Growth in New Jobs
Report.*
The EPA
is proposing stricter standards for soot pollution,
which
harms people's health. However, its proposal is not as strong as what
the EPA's scientist advisors say is needed.
*Two Years Later,
Neither
[the corrupter] Nor Worst Actors in Congress
Have Been Held to Account
for Jan 6. Insurrection.*
Over
1% of the US adult population were displaced by "natural"
disasters in 2022.
Of course, we know that these "natural" disasters were at least
partly artificial.
I wonder how this compares with past years' disasters.
Lula's wife says that
Brazil's
presidential residence was left by
Bolsonaro in very damaged condition.
I wonder when Bolsonaro started this act of spite. Did he start it
before the election he lost? Or only after he had lost?
Some art works appear to have been stolen. The president surely does
not have the authority to dispose of state property, but he probably
did so. Can he be charged with conspiracy to steal them? That could
provide grounds to ask the US to extradite him.
New
Tory strike-busting laws will order unions to betray workers,
and destroy
them if they don't.
An
old censorship law could be reinterpreted as prohibiting sending
abortion medicine through US mail.
The decision will be up to the
antiabortion right-wing extremists of the Supreme Court.
*Fears US
supreme court could radically reshape clean water rules.*
100
famous writers stated their solidarity with jailed British climate
protesters.
Republicans
have eliminated the security checks for entering the House
of Representatives' chamber,
where the representatives meet and vote.
They demand to be allowed to bring in guns, and want Democrats to trust
them not to shoot anyone.
Some of them have hinted at murdering Democratic representatives in
Congress, and all of them practice frequent shameless lying. I
wouldn't trust them not to plan to kill me.
Australia
has brought home some Australians supporters of PISSI
who
were in prison camps in Syria. Now one of them is facing charges of
going to Syria to support PISSI.
I think it was right to bring them home, and right to prosecute those
who supported PISSI.
Other countries should do likewise. Exile
should not be used as a punishment for a crime, and imposing any
punishment for any alleged crime without a trial is even worse.
However, the actual charge is "Travelling to Raqqa." That action is
being used as a proxy for the act of going to support
PISSI. The
prosecution of an action which is only a proxy for the real accusation
seems wrong to me.
Hong
Kong exiles in Taiwan
think about how their old home has been
changed into something they cannot return to — about the danger
that China could do the same thing to Taiwan next.
*South
Carolina Supreme Court Permanently Blocks Abortion Ban [in that state].*
This means that abortions are once again legal there.
Full details on how
Israel's
government plans to eliminate independence
of the judiciary
and allow the Knesset to override any and all rights.
A
winter heat wave set high temperature records all across Europe,
showing how close to disaster the world is.
*Oxford Study Warns
Extreme
Heat and Drought to Hit 90% of World Population.*
*World Could Lose Half of
Glaciers
This Century Even If Warming Is
Kept to 1.5°C.*
The Tennessee Valley Authority wants to build a
new
gas-fired power plant. Biden should block it.
The US should reduce the military budget by
cancelling
some dangerous spending on new nuclear weapons and avoidable wars.
*FTC’s Proposed Noncompete Ban is a
Victory
for American Workers & Fair, Competitive Markets.*
Will
any progressive candidate run for president in 2024?
India's opposition is stymied because the Hindu fascist
BJP
control or crush all avenues to reach the public.
In desperation, the Congress Party leader is walking thousands of
miles, covering India's territory, to speak with the public.
An Indian friend told me that all Indian political parties buy votes
— and that the surprise demonetization of 100-rupee bills was a trick
to catch the Congress Party with cash it was about to hand out. The
BJP, by contrast, had advance notice of demonetization and therefore
was able to preserve its pile of cash for buying votes.
Texas now makes it harder
for
minors to get birth control, by making
contraceptive clinics get parents' approval before filling prescriptions.
I wonder whether pharmacies in other states are required to obey Texas
law on this question, for customers in Texas. Or can they thumb their
noses at it? Does anyone know?
A Ukrainian teenager in Mariupol accepted "evacuation" to Russia,
thinking
he could leave via Belarus, but they confiscated his passport
and sent him to am institution. He got out with the help of a secret
network of Ukrainian friends and Russian underground helpers.
The bureaucratic nature of Putin's policies to hold Ukrainians captive
always surprise me. Putin's officials don't explicitly call all
Ukrainians prisoners and treat them as such. On the contrary, most
Russian officials respect Ukrainians' nominal right to travel, after
other officials have intervened to make it nearly impossible for them
to satisfy the legal requirements for travel. The minority that can
still meet the requirements, can leave Russia without further
difficulty. The rest are effectively prisoners.
Iran's
hierocratic government is as arrogant towards other countries
as it is toward Iranian protesters and Iranian women.
Israel's government
plans
to weaken the power of the judiciary to
overturn laws.
This would make it possible to impose repressive new laws that the
Supreme Court has rejected.
*Jewish Voice for Peace condemns the
Israeli
government's latest
violent escalation.*
*China
data "under-represents" true impact of Covid outbreak — WHO.*
The MAGA maggots are demanding an advance commitment to
shut down
the US government rather than increase the debt ceiling, as a precondition
for voting for anyone for speaker.
They are dead-set on sabotage.
I read, years ago, that the Speaker of the House cannot absolutely
block a bill from being voted on. If a majority of the House wants to
vote for a bill, they can sign a discharge petition to bring it to the
floor.
The
XBB variant of Covid-19 is becoming dominant in the US, because it
is more infectious than previous variants. The new bivalent vaccine
does some good against it.
US citizens: call
on the House of Representatives not to defund the IRS.
(satire) *Union-Busting
Manager Graciously Accepts Pay Cut Because
Boss Knows Best.*
*When
will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed
by Republican politicians?*
Male Afghan professors
are quitting their jobs to protest the ban on
women as students.
Avian
flu is devastating seabird populations,
leaving just a few birds alive.
Around
the world, people are suing governments for failing to defend
the climate from human activity, and suing fossil fuel companies and
their investors for attacking the climate.
The US now allows ordinary
pharmacies to fill prescriptions for mifepristone, the abortion drug.
Staff of the UK's NHS say that
the
fewness of staff and lack of facilities
is overloading them unbearably and driving them to quit.
I say "fewness" rather than shortage because Tory policies preclude
having more staff.
*The
House speaker fiasco shows that Republicans are unable to govern.*
Their approach to governing is the terrorist's approach: "Give us all
we demand or we will wreck everything we can reach." Now 20
Republicans, the extremest of the extremists, are using that approach
against against the not-quite-so-extremists.
Does the US Constitution give us any recourse against terrorists that
control the House of Representatives, before the next congressional
election?
Mauritius and the UK are
negotiating
over control of the Chagos
islands.
The Chagosians, who were kicked out of their home in the
1960s, want to be consulted.
Hackers discovered
dozens
of flaws in the security (in the usual
narrow sense) of many brands of automobiles.
Security in the usual narrow sense means security against unknown
third parties.
I am more concerned with security in the broader sense — against the
manufacturer as well as against unknown third parties. It is clear that each
of these vulnerabilities can be exploited by the manufacturer too,
and by any government that can threaten the manufacturer enough to
compel the manufacturer's cooperation.
Jordan Trengove, a man with no particular power or fame, was
falsely
accused of rape in 2019.
Eager cancellationists joined in hounding
him everywhere, driving him to move to a different town, and almost to
suicide.
They ignored him when he said that accusation was not true — until
it was proved in court that it was totally a lie.
The obstacles
to avoiding climate disaster mount up, and Republican
saboteurs
have taken more power. But we must not give up!
Giving up ensures defeat.
Indigenous cultures are being
swept
away by the world's seductive
mass cultures. The young people are not interested
in their ancestors' culture, so they don't learn it.
Hundreds of cultures are being forgotten in this way.
Scientific advice on what countries should do to avoid being harmed by
Covid-19
cases imported from China.
Aquatic plants have a sense of hearing, which they depend on for
simple orientation. Loud noises generated by human activity can
damage
their hearing and perhaps kill them.
Loud sounds can also kill zooplankton and fish embryos.
Since any additional fossil fuel reserves are useless (to extract all
the reserves we already know about would be suicidal), and since
mining
the sea floor causes other dangers,
Prohibiting seismic surveys in bodies of water seems indicated as a
first step. Other not-quite-so-loud sounds may also require action.
Brazil has resumed prosecuting across-the-board liar George Santos of
a
fraud that he more or less admitted committing,
now that the prosecutors know where to find him.
They plan to ask the US to extradite him.
Santos embodies more than any other person the spirit of the
Republican Party.
Spain is pushing to reduce the
enormous
environmental impact of
discarded cigarette butts, which nowadays are made of plastic.
Robert Reich: *Republicans
fight
over speaker of the House — but
whoever wins, the party loses.*
Global heating
directly
increases gun violence, in the US at least.
Shooting deaths are more frequent during heat waves.
Statistics show California thugs
practice
racial profiling when
deciding whom to search and which drivers to stop. They also pick on
trans people.
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 denounce bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important.
That article is one of the exceptions.
*More
than a third of UK adults
would struggle to find extra £20 [per month].*
Sweden is planning
to kill half of its small wolf population.
The population is already so small that that will put
its genetic health in danger.
American society
is evolving towards more loneliness and less
connection
of every kind. Today's use of the internet seems to be
accelerating this change.
My personal impression is that the spaces of possible friendship and
possible love have been somehow poisoned, so that what you can find in
them isn't quite friendship or love any more.
*Teaching
philosophy in a [minors'] prison
has shown me the meaning of anger.*
It's a side issue, but please don't refer to 15-year-olds as
"children".
They are teenagers — adolescents.
The Tories plan laws to prohibit strikes in the usual sense of the
word, for a wide
range of industrial activities considered "essential"
and whose workers are therefore unable to get by.
Forbidding women from working for NGOs has made
humanitarian aid in
Afghanistan impossible — those tens of thousands of workers
were essential for them to operate.
EDRi rips
the proposed European client-side-scanning censorship system
to shreds.
That proposed system is also referred to as "chatcontrol".
Tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit
pose environmental
dangers: disrupting star-tracking navigation by birds, insects and
seals, and filling the upper atmosphere with sunlight-blocking and
ozone-destroying aluminum oxide.
*Social media triggers children to
dislike
their own bodies, says study.*
Even at age 12, 75% say they dislike their bodies. Half the teenagers
have become withdrawn.
Extinction Rebellion in the UK has
dropped
its practice of
"disruptive" protests in the face of long prison sentences for
nonviolent protest.
I can't criticize the leaders of Extinction Rebellion — but this is a
victory for repression, and planet roasters world-wide will take note.
Robert Reich: *It’s hard to believe, but
things are getting
better. They will continue to if we keep up the fight.*
Chinese propaganda
tries
and fails to convince the Chinese that Chinese
aren't dying from Covid.
*Lula's foreign policy?
Encouraging
a multipolar world.*
In the long term, I think that is a wise policy, provided it is done
cleverly to avoid a pitfall. The pitfall is that of treating various
rival powers alike, while some of them find ways to take advantage of
Brazil's neutrality to gain advantage over other powers.
In the short term, though, I think this should not extend to countries
that are actually fighting wars of conquest.
Labour proposes to prohibit discussion platforms from having
recommendation
algorithms that promote "harmful" messages — without
actually censoring these messages.
This is the approach I have advocated; I am glad they are considering this
rather than banning such messages.
Italy's right-wing government has
imposed
impossible rules
on ships that rescue migrants from small boats at sea.
The point of the rules is to be a monkey wrench in the
ships' engines, so that they can't save very many.
Bainimarama continues to
threaten
Fiji with a coup, having previously
imposed a constitution which authorizes the military to overthrow any
government.
The EFF
warns of ways Apple could "permit competing app stores" but
make them useless for independent distribution of software — or,
perhaps, useless specifically for the Free World.
This is an important issue and the warning is important too. Sad to
say, the article shows how little the EFF values users' freedom.
Here we see the values that EFF's position is based on:
Incredibly, that’s the best outcome of Apple’s “app tax.” In other
cases, companies simply pass on Apple’s commission to Apple’s customers
by raising prices (since everyone who sells via an iOS app must pay the
app tax, they all raise prices). Even that is better than the worst
outcome, where products and services never come to market because they
can’t be profitable after paying the app tax, and the products won’t
sell if the app tax is added onto their sale price.
The usual outcome of anything digital today is that it offers you all
the convenience you might want, but it snoops on, tracks, and
restricts the users.
*Anger as Pakistan
court
frees rapist after he agrees deal to marry
his victim.*
That law reflects the idea, shocking to us, that a woman is property
— initially property of her father, then later property of her
husband. Rape of an unmarried woman damages her value as property, so
the rapist is required to compensate the father for the damage;
marrying her imposes that responsibility.
Fireworks
may cause harm to migrating birds, especially when there are
fireworks over a wide area on the same night.
There are certain periods of the year in which birds mainly migrate.
It should be easy enough to avoid having more than isolated fireworks
presentations during those periods.
(satire) *Flesh-Eating
Bacteria Struggle To Chew Through Leathery Florida Residents.*
(satire) *Police
Release Composite Sketch Of What They Would Prefer
Murder Suspect To Look Like.*
Some
Ukrainian nationalists want to close the Mikhail Bulgakov museum
in Kyiv, because he wrote about factions fighting over Kyiv during the
Russian revolution.
Putin's efforts to set up Ukrainian and Russian culture as mutually
exclusive and hostile reflects his totalitarian leanings. It would be
a shame and a disaster for Ukraine to take a similar attitude.
When Youtube cut off RT TV's channel,
it deleted years of past
programs which were not simply Kremlin propaganda.
I disagree with some of the views expressed in that article,
but I trust its factual report.
Indigenous political control of the
Northwest Territories of Canada has opened the door to projects
to give protection to large areas of land.
To preserve the world's ecosystems requires doing this sort of work in
every region. Protecting large areas in Canada won't make up for the
failure to protect the very different ecosystems of other regions.
Perhaps this energetic example can inspire people elsewhere.
However, in this article I also see something that looks like
prejudice. I get the impression that the author admires
"indigenous-led conservation efforts" first of all for putting the
more worthy race in charge, and only secondly for conservation itself.
Protection of biodiversity is important regardless of who is in charge
of it, but I don't like the prejudice.
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to
drop
charges against
Julian Assange.
US citizens: call on President Biden and the DNC
not
to make South Carolina the first state to vote in primaries. Prioritize
battleground states instead.
US citizens: call on Biden to
Normalize
Relations with Cuba.
The EPA
has issued a new
definition of "waters of the United States"
for the sake of the Clean Water Act.
Since this one would be an advance in regulating dangerous and
profitable pollution, polluters have already asked the Supreme Court
to toss out the whole thing. The right-wing majority wants to transform
the United States into a subservient fiefdom full of powerless people
so that the rich can take more and more while poisoning more and more.
Although we can't do anything about this for the next two years, we
must aim to expand or shrink the Supreme Court to get rid of
its right-wing majority, and their
gerrymandering,
and their voter
suppression.
Many well-known large corporations in the UK
give
visible holiday
donations as publicity stunts to buy good opinion that their overall
actions do not deserve.
In Bolivia, most people in the Santa Cruz region actually
support
right-wing politics,
including the right-wing
coups against President Morales.
Their leader
has been arrested and accused of terrorism.
It would not surprise me at all if he aided the coup in a criminal
way, but the charge of terrorism is somewhat shocking, and I wonder
what concrete actions the alleged terrorism consists of.
*Top Republicans
remain
silent over George Santos campaign lies.*
If you can stomach the bullshitter's Big Lie, you'd hardly feel a
qualm about Santos's series of little lies.
*Exiled chief rabbi says
Jews
should leave Russia while they can
… Jewish population will be made scapegoat for hardship caused
by war.*
Astrological forecasts were useful for monarchs even though astrology
was not valid as a means of predicting the future. The
same is true
today for economic modeling.
Italy's right-wing government has made arbitrary rules to
slow down
the operations of the ships that rescue boat people.
Iran selected five protesters at random and
convicted
all of them of helping to kill one of the "morality"
thugs.
When a mouse gnaws on something that isn't good to eat,
does it get gnawseous?
British offshore wind-farms pay
large
sums to rich aristocrats for the
"right" to operate.
There may be injustice in these details, and maybe some of these
details should be changed. Perhaps some of the laws that require
payment to the rich for permission to set up a wind farm.
But none of that calls into question the need to make the wind farm!
Canadians love their national medical system, but
privatizers never give
up trying to eliminate it.
*Lula Applauded for Naming
Amazon
Defenders as Brazilian Ministers.*
Hikvision
video systems can classify people by many dimensions of personal
characteristics, and purports to identify patterns of actions that suggest
forbidden dissent.
*The
crime victims’ advocate [who is] fighting mass incarceration.*
*Al
Sharpton has warned Democratic leaders that they must step up the
party’s appeal to African American voters or risk …Republican
leaders making greater inroads with the Black electorate.*
I've read that the danger is even greater among Hispanics.
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 denounce bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important.
That article is one of the exceptions.
*Sanders
Calls on Buttigieg to Hold Southwest CEO Accountable for
"Greed and Incompetence."*
The Taliban
have forbidden women to work for NGOs.
Decades of war have left many families with only women to earn
money; now that they cannot work, they are desperate. Are they
desperate enough to kill Taliban — any Taliban they can get?
The west tried sending armies to defeat the Taliban, but the Taliban
defeated them. The western-sponsored Afghan government was corrupt,
and its army did not have the will to win that the Taliban had. There
is no sense in trying that approach again. What could defeat the
Taliban?
If Afghan women, in total desperation and with total determination,
start killing whatever Taliban they can get their hands on, they can
put an end to religious tyranny.
Nursing home care for disabled or demented old people in the UK is
utterly lousy, because the
nursing
homes cannot hire enough staff to
do the job right.
The necessary first step to fix this is to tax the rich more, and use
some of that money to give nursing home staff a raise and increase the
number of staff. But are there more workers available to hire? Where
did the former staff go? Were they foreigners who cannot now work in
the UK? The government could fix that by allowing more foreigners to
immigrate and work. Are they disabled by long Covid? Fixing that
would be harder.k
West
Virginia Journalist Fired in Alleged Retaliation Over Reporting
on Abuse in State [psychiatric] Facilities.*
*Danish
Reporter Says Ukrainian Intelligence Tried to Coerce Her Into
Working as a Propagandist.*
Human
rights advocates are alarmed about Israel's new government, the
most right-wing it has ever had, which is endorsing fascist, racist
and colonialist policies towards Palestine.
Netanyahu has promised to legalize thefts of Palestinians' land
carried out by private groups of Israelis, and to annex the whole West Bank.
I expect that the next goal after that will be to expel all
Palestinians, a few at a time so that it can deny the intention
to expel them all.
iMonsters can be
tracked
for 24 hours after being switched "off."
The author of the article considers this harmless in and of itself, but
I disagree: simply recording your movements is harm.
A Minneapolis thug
faces major charges for beating up Jaleel Stallings
and seriously
injuring him, while Stallings was lying prone on the
ground.
It also has financial relationships with major companies that would
like to influence that policy.
Apple said it will implement end-to-end encryption for many purposes,
including storing backups on Apple servers.
One can't really trust the security of this encryption, because it
will be done by nonfree software running in a nonfree operating
system. There would be nothing to stop Apple from making that
software send Apple every encryption key the user uses.
A 28-year-old man, running for Congress, had to sleep on friends'
couches at the end of the campaign. He won the election, and was
rejected
for an apartment in Washington because of his campaign debts.
(satire) D.C.
Landlord Clarifies He Rejected Gen Z Congressman Because
He’s Black.
The
FDA disregarded its rules
to approve the super-expensive and
questionable Alzheimer's preventative, Aduhelm.
US citizens: call
on USDA to plant prairie habitat for bees.
Robert Reich: *How
the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began*,
in the 1970s.
*Big
Pharma and [Republican] Allies Aim to Sabotage Medicare Drug
Price Reforms.*
The House of Representatives decided not to give the Senate or the DoJ
the evidence it has obtained in
a
year of investigating Big Oil.
How global heating causes
occasional bursts of very cold air in
the northern hemisphere.
The melting of so much Arctic sea ice has made the Arctic
considerably warmer than it used to be, and that makes it
easier for an air mass of Arctic air to head south and freeze
people.
A company distributes
software
to crack the security on surveillance
cameras and alter the recordings stored in them.
This is an additional reason why security cameras must not be
connected to a network. To uphold security, they must be secure, and
that means air-gapped.
The original reasons why
security
cameras must not be connected to a
network
is to avoid furthering massive surveillance of people in general,
with the terrible threat of China-style repression.
Finally, the US
is making substantial investments in decarbonizing
electricity and ground transportation.
Other major sources of greenhouse gas emissions include agriculture,
concrete. air transportation and plastic. The US needs to work on reducing
emissions from all of them.
The question of whether to allow exposed total liar
George Santos to
take a seat in the House of Representatives will compel each other
Republican member to take a public stand on whether there is any
limit
to what lies they will accept for grabbing power.
When programmers try to save time by using
AI
assistants to write
code, they tend to overlook bugs.
(satire) *Self-Loving
Tesla Forgives Itself For Running
Over Child.*
France has required
packaging
and utensils provided with food to eat
in a restaurant be reusable, and used many times.
Right
wing politics is based on cruelty, and the behavior of its
leaders and movement is sociopathic.
Mastodon's
founder, Eugen Rochko, has rejected offers to convert
Mastodon into a business and give him lots of money.
He says that accepting such investment would make Mastodon as bad as Twitter.
Bravo!
*'The
System' Is Ruining Our Present and Collective Future.*
Especially for young people. This creates a special opportunity for
political organizing.
The article proposes the AARP as an example to follow. Sad to say, the AARP
attracts old people by offering them opportunities to save money, but it
doesn't represent their interests.
Restrictions
on abortion in US states led to measurably higher rates
of suicide among women of reproductive age.
This is especially significant since it largely compares the
same states before and after introducing restrictions.
The other result, that states which restrict abortion also show a
worse state of health for women and infants, does not necessary
demonstrate consequences of restricting abortion. They may be the
more general consequences of being ruled by right-wing government.
*Flush With Record Profits,
Exxon
Sues to Block EU Windfall Tax.*
48,000 student academic
workers
at the University of California
have accepted a new contract with big wage increases.
Recently released secret documents add to the evidence that the
CIA
was involved in something with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of President Kennedy.
However, it's not clear what they were doing. The CIA has 4,000
still-unreleased documents relating to Kennedy.
Describing the dynamic where companies make
discussion sites that
build real communities, then spoil them hoping to make the users
purchase more.
There is an interesting aside about LiveJournal (which I never used),
claiming it was used a lot by Russian dissidents, and eventually sold
to a company that worked for Putin.
US corporations amass enormous
quasi-monopolies
by buying many small
businesses one by one. The US government never investigates.
Details of the Global
Minimum Tax system for corporations that the
EU and US are planning to adopt.
My proposal for a progressive tax on a corporation's gross income,
with the tax rate to depend on the global corporation's total gross
income, is simpler and I expect it to have better results.
In addition to the standard moral reasons to treat prisoners of war
with respect, Ukraine has a special practical interest in doing so.
Every conscript in the Putin forces
must wonder, "Should I look for a
chance to surrender?" Ukraine should act so that the answer will be
an unhesitating "Yes!"
Describing the requirements of the
EU's
Digital Services Act.
Every time I encounter the term
"content",
referring to publications,
postings or messages, it makes me angry.
However, most of the substantial requirements look reasonable to me.
What I worry about is that some of the requirements may have the
effect of requiring users to prove their identity. For instance,
rules about "protecting children" could have the effect of imposing
censorship on adults unless they prove their age by showing official
identity documents.
Senator Warnock's victory in the Georgia runoff had to
overcome very strong
voter-suppression efforts.
California's antitrust
lawsuit against Amazon could force it to change
its operations, world-wide.
Even if we stop Amazon from doing wrong to its warehouse workers and
its competitors, that won't end the injustice of snooping on its
customers and making them run nonfree software. Please join me in
refusing to accept such treatment.
The president can and should take steps to
reduce
rents for many Americans.
*How Private Equity
Gave
Rise to Extreme Inequality.*
Staff at the University of Leiden
took
down a painting of former
administrators of the university because (1) they were depicted
smoking and (2) they were all male.
The university president said that some people "do not feel
represented" by the painting. So what? It doesn't represent me,
either. It doesn't represent present-day people at all, and it wasn't
meant to.
It's right to call for changing the past sexism which is visible in
the painting. Evidently the university has already started doing so,
since its current president is a woman.
It is sometimes necessary to break with past errors; to erase
references to the past because of past errors is outrageous. The
people of today have no right to demand that the art of the past be
replaced to represent them.
BP tries to present itself falsely as a green oil company while
planning to spend
a lot more in fossil fuels than in renewable energy.
Summer camps in Crimea
turned
into prison camps for some Ukrainian children.
Australia is taking a stern attitude towards
soldiers
that try to cover
up or disguise war crimes.
*UK
aid to Afghanistan entrenched corruption and injustice, report finds.*
A powerful elite received most of the benefits.
The governor of New York said that the current blizzard is a
"war
with mother nature."
I think that well describes the things humans have done to produce
the global heating
that made a storm this powerful happen.
She also called it "the blizzard of the century," which is an
over-optimistic prediction about the storms of the next 77 years.
There is a campaign to make
the
word "Indian", referring to
indigenous groups of the Americas, taboo.
The article claims that any use whatsoever of that term is
"offensive", regardless of the intended meaning. I am skeptical of
this, so I challenge those who think so to provide grounds for the
claim.
The use of "Indian" to refer to people from the Americas started with
an error, when Columbus believed he had reached India or what is now
Indonesia. It also invites confusion, since there are more people in
the US that were born in India than members of indigenous tribes.
For clarity I usually write "indigenous" to identify the latter.
But those things do not add up to an offense or justify imposing yet
another language taboo. There is no need to eradicate "Indian" from
place names around the US.
Another conjecture
about Musk's goal in dealing with Twitter: that he aims
to make it explicitly serve as a tool for right-wing extremism.
The doctors that worked on US sleeping car trains created a special
branch of medicine, known as Pullmanary medicine.
US citizens: Kavanaugh's ugly holiday party proves we need a
SCOTUS
code of ethics; call on Congress to enact one.
US citizens: tell Democrats such as Biden that the kind of
"bipartisanship" that is desirable is to fight for progressive
policies
that most Americans support, even many Republicans — not
making deals with right-wing extremists.
The House
Oversight Committee subpoenaed documents from big oil
companies and studied the tactics they use for climate disinformation.
The committee was going to publish the documents, but seems to have
been pressured out of it.
Soon Republicans will take over that committee and kill the
investigation completely.
The Putin
forces shelled the market at the center of Kherson.
This leads me to think that they can't be terribly short of artillery shells.
(satire) *U.S.
Treasury Introduces New Wild Bills That Can Be Used For
Any Dollar Amount.*
*[Some of] the monsters
of American capitalism:
Trump, Bankman-Fried's, and Musk.*
The Tories hide behind
"pay
review bodies" instituted to set pay for
NHS workers. These bodies do what the government wants, but the government
can pretend it has nothing to do with the issue.
How Haiti's
history of colonization and slavery drove it to today's
ruin.
The "elections"
of presidents Martelly
and Moise
were quietly imposed
by the US government.
(satire) *New Sponsored
Google
Maps Feature Directs Every Driver To Denny's.*
This is a joke, but it illustrates a serious danger about
Service as a
Software Substitute
(SaaSS).
*The 17
findings in the January 6 committee’s final report.*
Peru's
congress sneakily plans to eliminate the protected lands for
"uncontacted" indigenous groups.
Over half a million current
members
of the US military have drunk
PFAS-tainted water, preceded by millions of others in the past.
Chile
will open an embassy to Palestine in occupied territory.
We can't help the very poor more than a little
unless
we tax the very rich
much more.
*This Is the Dying
Phase of Reaganism — and It's Hideous.*
*Positive signals
from
Iran over nuclear deal
put west in a tricky position.*
I suggest dropping sanctions against Iran, then inviting it to decide
whether to continue arming Russia (and face sanctions for that) or
stop arming Russia (and continue without sanctions).
*Israel's New Far-Right
Government
to Lift Ban on Parliamentary
Candidates Inciting Racism.*
The US
government is investigating a Texas school district's book ban
as a civil rights issue.
Republicans in the Senate are fighting tooth and nail to
keep poor
Americans in hunger.
At least this deal replaces a temporary aid program with a permanent
aid program. In the long term, that is a step forward. However, the
permanent aid program is limited to families with children.
*Markey Asks Biden to Draft Plan for
Ending
Public Funding of Overseas
Fossil Fuel Projects.*
Two-thirds
of Antarctica’s native species are threatened by global heating.
The species most threatened is the emperor penguin, beloved by everyone.
*Make
Big Oil Pay to Clean Up Their Mess on Public Lands.*
Medea Benjamin describes
10
good developments during 2022.
I disagree with her about one of them. The use of dollars as the
standard international exchange currency gives the US a considerable
economic advantage. 15 years ago, with US power more or less
dominating the world and starting wars, I figured that ending that
advantage would be a change for the better.
Today, however, US power is reduced while China's economic and
military power is growing. China's government is repressive and
aggressive, and it denies facts like any fascist. The US is the
nucleus of resistance to China's aggression. If the US avoids falling
into fascism, we will appreciate US power to resist China's dominion.
New York Governor
Hochul
nominated an anti-union conservative judge
to the state's highest judgeship.
(satire) *FIFA
Officials Open For 2030 World Cup Bribes.*
(satire) *Hundreds
Of Swimmers Die Every Year Getting Tangled Up In
Plastic Lane Dividers.*
*Court Finds EPA
Approval of Bee-Killing
Sulfoxaflor
[a neonicotinoid]
Unlawful.*
Long Covid is sometimes
fatal. Just how often that occurs
is an open question.
The Department of Justice has
joined
the lawsuit against Georgia
election vigilantes.
The US is throwing
a monkey wrench into the WTO's system for
business-friendly resolution of trade disputes, by blocking nomination
of judges to hear appeals.
If you are in favor of business-friendly resolution of trade disputes,
as the author of the article is, you will conclude that the US is doing
something wrong.
I've condemned the WTO since the beginning, first because of its
patent rules, and later because its system for "resolution of trade
disputes" is used to stop countries from protecting themselves against
harmful products that happen to be imported from other countries.
The US tried to
protect
itself against flavored cigarettes,
and to protect
marine mammals from tuna caught in ways that killed them,
and each time the WTO reached a judgment that compelled the US to give up
on it.
I am sure the WTO has harmed other countries in similar ways, all based on the
idea that every kind of business opportunity must be permitted.
Australia proposes to require people to
prove
their identity to sign up
for a dating app, and undergo criminal background checks.
This is likely to mean that the app companies get a lot more data about
each user, which they can then abuse.
If Australia passes a law to require these checks, it should also pass
a law strictly limiting what other personal data the company can collect.
It should not be allowed to know any user's location, ever, and it must
delete all copies of a user's data when the user says to do so.
Messages between users should be encrypted such that the company
cannot decrypt them.
Even with this law, I would refuse to use those apps
because they are nonfree software.
The Putin forces
have stolen
the collections of several archaeological museums
in the captured areas of Ukraine.
They have also destroyed archaeological sites by building
fortifications on them.
*The [UK's] Rwanda deportation scheme might be legal, but it
remains
deeply shameful.*
The need to work for income as well as study, leaving students with no
time to do their homework, is a
major
factor leading university students to cheat.
India's Hindu-nationalist government is also a Hindi-nationalist government,
trying to impose
Hindi on the 3/4 of Indians that don't speak Hindi.
Many defend English as India's de-facto "lingua anglica", because it
is neutral — it does not prefer any one part of India over the others.
The evidence in the Jan 6 committee's report shows the Department of
Justice that there is a
basis
to prosecute the corrupter.
I think its most important effect will be to show the public that
prosecuting him is legitimate.
Dean Baker: *Industrial
Policy Is Not a Remedy for Income Inequality.*
Fixing vulnerabilities in the function of the electoral college
is not enough: we need to
replace
it with popular vote.
The electoral college was designed when the United States was founded.
People thought of themselves as citizens of the various states, and
thought of the union as literally a federation of states. In terms of
those concepts, the electoral college made sense as a way for states to
choose the chief executive of their federation. But we no longer think
of the US that way.
Please urge your state to sign up to the
National
Popular Vote.
In the US, right-wing state governments reduce working people's life
expectancy. But the mainstream media
don't
dare admit that one of the two
political sides is better than the other.
US citizens: call on Senator Mary Peters to push to appoint people to
the USPS board of governors who will
replace
DeJoy with a good
postmaster.
US citizens: call on Senator Schumer to
give
Sellout Sinema no special
favors.
Counsel for Democrats for how to
gain
in the 2024 elections.
A lot of this seems valid to me, but I see one pitfall to avoid. The
next Republican presidential candidate could easily be
DeMentis. To
focus on the corrupter
too strongly could be weak in opposing
DeMentis.
I am not sure what is the best way to prevent that, but I have an
idea: to focus condemnation on Republican demonization/distraction.
All Republican candidates try to demonize weak "enemies" to take our
minds off the powerful enemies: billionaires (both individuals and
businesses).
* Congress should pass laws to
ensure
both transparency (about income)
and proper auditing of the most powerful in politics.*
The same law could help protect the privacy of everyone else from
Republican threats.
*Transcripts reveal Cassidy Hutchinson was
pressured
to protect [the
bullshitter].* For instance, not to try to remember the answers
to questions she was asked while testifying.
Polar
bears are vanishing from the region where they were formerly
most numerous.
7 states have amended their constitutions to prohibit treating
convicts as slaves, but practical changes in the practice of
forcing
convicts to work for a pittance are just starting.
American workers should keep in mind that forcing prisoners to work
for a low wage undercuts the wages of free workers.
I think it makes sense to distinguish prison chores (for instance,
cooking food for for the prisoners to eat, and cleaning their
clothing) from work on products or services for use outside the prison.
It is legitimate to require prisoners to do the chores they need done,
but that cannot legitimately take more than a few hours a week.
Many American teenagers have so little experience of independent activity
that they perceive
basic adult activities as risky.
It is plausible that this is a frequent result of treating adolescents
like children, and children like infants.
Legal steps needed to block
avenues
for future presidential coup
attempts in the US.
To have unrigged elections, we need also to
prohibit
gerrymandering
and
voter
suppression.
To have fair elections for president, we need to
do away
with the electoral college.
US citizens: call
on the Senate to replace Senator Manchin as energy chairman.
Proposing a system
for acquiring property on celestial bodies and objects
which avoids the bad outcome that the early space travelers claim everything.
My view of property rights is very different from an
antisocialist's.
People are not inherently entitled to own any kind of property, but
a system of property rights can be beneficial on the margin for people
in general. In normal circumstances, where no one is in penury, it is
useful for individuals to own clothing, books, furniture, bicycles,
food, and so on, and maybe even houses. I mean "useful" in the sense
that in those circumstances the system of property rights benefits
everyone. This presumes that overall economic system protects
people from poverty, so that every individual gets to own a reasonable
amount of those things.
However, property rights must not be absolute. If the system does
push someone into poverty, "property rights" can't justify keeping
that person in penury. If you need food to survive, you are entitled
to "steal" some, with a few special exceptions such as taking the food
some other penurious person was about to eat, or taking a farmer's
seed corn.
That said, the temporary property rental system proposed in the
article linked to could be a useful method to add to a system of
non-absolute property.
*Freedom
of Press is Dealt Deadly Blows by Modi's Proto-Fascist Regime
in India.*
*Global heating
to drive stronger
La Niña and El Niño events by 2030,
researchers say.*
These events already cause havoc — droughts and fires in some places
and times, floods in others. Global heating is likely to make them
worse.
Next
year's climate conference will be hosted (and run) by the UAE.
The UAE is a repressive regime that recognizes human rights only when that
pleases the emirs, so protest will be crushed and most activists kept out,
as happened
this year in Egypt.
In addition, the UAE is a big oil exporter, which means that next
year's event will be even more corrupted by
global heating denialists
than this year's.
The
UAE spends lots of money to manipulate the US government and policies.
If any powerful countries really want to make progress in defending the
climate, they should denounce the UN climate conferences as corrupt
betrayals, refuse to attend, and
organize
a new kind of event. But
maybe they are corrupted enough to be content with this corruption.
Big US
banks are lobbying against a proposed rule that would stop them
from managing retirement funds any more if they are caught committing
crimes in doing that.
*"The [Putin forces]
mined everything": why
making
Kherson safe could
take years.*
Please distinguish
between the Putin forces and Russia.
Ukraine will
need to live with Russia, and Ukrainians will need to live with their
Russian relatives, for centuries, assuming those countries survive
coming global disaster. Hate Putin, not Russia!
Fiji has ousted
coup-leader Bainimarama through a democratic election.
But it is not yet clear he won't
stage
another coup.
16 cities in Puerto Rico are
suing
fossil fuel companies and their PR tools for conspiring to deny
the dangers of burning oil — in
particular, increasingly devastating hurricanes.
Campaigning
against plans to restart a US nuclear reactor that has been permanently
shut down for being dangerous to operate.
Convicting the wrecker
on the charges recommended by the Jan 6 committee
may
be difficult.
But it is crucial to try.
However, putting the wrecker in prison won't be enough.
Other
fascists are
jockeying
to be his successor as the leader of American
fascism.
Australians propose a "right to protest" law
to
override state laws
that impose severe punishments on nonviolent protests.
I've read that Australia does not have anything like the US Bill of
Rights in its constitution. It needs one.
Musk's response
to a disappointing result in a poll on Twitter:
voter suppression.
(satire) *Man
Who Could Have Been Holding Gun In Diverging Timeline
Shot Dead By Police.*
Deepening the satire of this item is the fact that it describes the
way racist stereotyping actually works. When
thugs see a black man,
they imagine what they believe a black man might have been doing
and may shoot for those imaginings.
The Senate considered a
harmful
trade: to extend tax credits for poor families
with children in exchange for tax cuts for corporations
(mostly for the rich).
The article does not make it clear which of those two changes were temporary
and which were permanent. But I expect that the increase in tax credits for
children was temporary.
This sort of deal is bad and we should defeat it. Continuing to
reduce taxes for the rich will paralyze the government, leaving it
unable to afford tax credits for the poor, or anything else.
We need to increase taxes on the rich.
The real "great replacement": a broad range of Republican attitudes
lead
whites to die younger (especially those without a college
education).
Some of these attitudes lead people to take foolish risks, from which
some die. But in areas where Republican attitudes dominate, they also
lead to laws that put people in increasing danger. The Republican
Party has become the Republican DEATH CULT.
Biden privately sees the non-nuclear deal with Iran as
impossible to
resurrect.
However, he is still open to diplomacy on the matter.
*Experts Welcome New Biden Policy to
Facilitate
Humanitarian Aid in Sanctioned
Nations.*
It is clearly established that US trade sanctions harm poor people in those
countries, by interfering with imports of food and medicine.
This
was the case in Iraq
in the 1990s and until the
Bush forces
conquered that country. People have been clamoring for changes
to avoid that result ever since then.
*Sixty years on from the Cuban missile crisis, the US has learned its
lessons — but
Putin has not.*
The challenge is to give Putin an exit that isn't either a victory for
him or a disaster for everyone. I can't offer an answer, but the
start of an answer is to stop pushing to oust or prosecute Putin.
Desirable and just they would be, but not wise.
*Bullshit is a greater
enemy of truth than lies are.*
A lie denies specific truths. Bullshit attacks the very idea of
truth.
Retirement
tax changes: *This bill does not make it easier for workers
to save for retirement, it just makes it easier for high-income
earners to shelter more of their earnings from taxes.*
*Elon Musk claims the FBI paid Twitter to "censor info from the
public." Here's what the Twitter Files
actually show.*
The Keystone tar sands oil pipeline has had
several
big leaks, more than one
would expect. Its safety record is deteriorating, and it may have been
built with low-quality materials.
It's a good thing that the Keystone XL pipeline was not built.
Given the extra corrosivity of tar sands oil, and the extra pollution
caused by extracting and burning it, we should probably shut down
the existing Keystone pipeline and stop the extraction of tar sands oil.
Why the Democratic Party
keeps
doing badly against Republicans that
despise the non-rich.
‘First Night Against the Wars’ is coming up. Let's have our next stand-out
for Julian starting at 2pm on Dec 31 in *Copley Sq*. at the corner of
Boylston and Dartmouth, in front of the Public Library. We are expecting
more activists this year as we join forces with Boston’s new coalition
‘Solidarity Action Network’. The coalition group will be gathering from
noon to 5, bringing all our issues together, crushing inequality, climate
collapse, endless war, nuclear Armageddon and, of course, free speech! It
grew out of the Earth Day Strike a few months back.
US citizens: call
on the DOJ to act on the criminal referrals for the wrecker.
Everyone: call
on Amazon to Stop the sale of neonicotinoid
pesticides.
Even if we sentence
the wrecker to prison, the fascists he unleashed
will remain dangerous.
Elon
Musk compared with Henry Ford — brilliant entrepreneurs that
turned to spreading hatred and almost destroyed their companies.
*Seven reasons to be cheerful
about
the Amazon in 2023 — and three to be
terrified.*
Micah
Lee reports that Musk is still blocking his Twitter account
and those of some other journalists that have criticized Musk.
However, instead of marking the accounts "suspended", so the public can
see how Twitter is treating them, they are blocked from logging in.
The US seized funds from Afghanistan's central bank, and in September
set up a channel to donate those funds for food for Afghans.
But it's
not doing anything.
There are hints that Musk is
preparing
Twitter for bankruptcy.
I speculated that
his
aim might be to eliminate it.
Sherif Osman is an Egyptian dissident who moved to the US long ago.
On
a visit to Dubai, he was arrested and may now be handed over to Egypt
to be a political prisoner.
*The US Internal Revenue Service
(IRS)
failed to pursue mandatory audits
of [the corrupter] on a timely basis during his presidency.*
Alameda county passed a
law
prohibiting landlords from doing criminal
background checks on would-be tenants.
It looks like the UK government is going to join in a campaign of
repression
against people who share Netflix passwords.
The name "Intellectual Property Office" indicates a basic leaning
towards dividing people and imposing repression. This is a typical
example. If you allow
that term
to shape your thinking, you will
be evil too. Likewise for
calling
sharing "piracy."
Netflix
does so many unjust things to its customers
that I urge
everyone to reject it entirely. In particular, it requires customers
to run nonfree software designed specifically to restrict them.
Using it and sharing a subscription deals the company a small blow,
which it deserves, but does not protect customers from most of the
injustice.
*Anti-Vaxxers'
disregard for basic human safety also makes them lousy
drivers.*
The outgoing governor
of Oregon has commuted all of Oregon's death
sentences.
Slowly the US advances toward abolishing the death penalty.
Progress, though slow, in
understanding
long Covid.
Google
is adding client-side encryption, but due to the basic
architecture it's not entirely trustworthy.
Google encryption may be effective against snoopers that have no
special relationship with Google. However, Google remains ultimately
in control of the encryption software and the operating system it runs
on, so you can't trust it fully. Google will have the power to give
you an "upgrade" that shows Google the plaintext of every encrypted
message.
The right-wing allies of
Bolsonaro
won a majority in Brazil's congress.
Human rights, conservation and democracy in Brazil are still in
danger from them.
Iran's secret
police are cracking protesters' Telegram accounts
to get information to arrest people.
One weakness of the global biodiversity pact is that it allows
countries to give
permission
to destroy natural ecosystems based on
"offsets" as an excuse.
This means a promise to construct a new wild area to replace the one
that was destroyed. Such
replacement
is easy to say and hard to do.
The Jan
6 committee voted to recommend prosecution of
the wrecker for
four crimes, including supporting an insurrection.
The wrecker's
lawyers tried to bribe witnesses to mislead federal
investigators.
Republican George Santos, who was recently elected to Congress, seems
to have filled
up his biography with falsehoods.
Turkey may block Sweden from joining NATO because
Sweden's supreme
court has rejected the extradition of a Turkish journalist wanted by
Erdoğan for political persecution.
*Dutch PM apologises for
Netherlands’
role in slave trade.*
Activists in former Dutch colonies imperiously rejected the apology
because its words and its ceremony were not done to their satisfaction.
Twitter intentionally hid the origin of
Pentagon
political propaganda
aimed at the Middle East.
* Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have ordered an indefinite
ban on
university education for the country’s women,*
*3M sets 2025
deadline to stop making [PFAS].*
After the wrecker's
veiled but undeniable launch of an attack against
the US government, prosecuting him is a necessary part of loyalty.
The CFPB has ordered
Wells
Fargo Bank to pay almost 4 billion dollars
for fraud committed against 16 million customers.
The CFPB called Wells Fargo a "repeat offender" and said that this
is just the beginning of its actions against the bank.
UN Secretary-General Guterres announced a
"no-nonsense" climate
defense conference for September 2023 for which *the price
of entry is non-negotiable -— credible, serious, and new climate action
and nature-based solutions that will move the needle forward and
respond to the urgency of the climate crisis must be presented.*
A last-minute deal in a
must-pass
spending bill gave Maine fishermen
6 more years before they have to protect North Atlantic Right Whales.
Given the rate at which the population of those whales is decreasing,
that could wipe them out.
Senator Warren rebuked
the Pentagon for "vastly" underreporting
civilian casualties in its required annual report.
In various countries,
people are suing governments for failing to protect them
from the harm global heating will do to them.
Radio City Music Hall decided in advance
to
exclude certain people
from its shows, and sent bouncers to kick one of them out,
after identifying her through facial recognition.
The reason they did not want her to watch the show is that she is a
lawyer that works for a law firm that is handling someone's a legal
dispute with the operators of Radio City Music Hall.
In addition to being a bizarre overreaction, it demonstrates why we
need to ban the practice of identifying people by their faces, outside
of very limited circumstances.
However, the crucial step in the chain of surveillance is not the step
of matching the face in a picture against a database. Rather, it is
systematically collecting images of people (whether video or still)
that could be used to identify people. That is what we need to
prohibit. We must prohibit surveillance cameras and allow only
security cameras.
Right-wing extremist
candidates combine racism and disinformation with
promises to help the poor (but excluding poor blacks and poor immigrants).
Even if we stop thug departments from putting weapons on robots,
some robots will endanger human rights in other ways. This article
suggests some rules
to limit use of robots by
thug departments.
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 denounce bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important.
That article is one of the exceptions.
Why is it that so many US prosecutors so often violate the rights of the
accused by making trials unfair? Perhaps it's because
the Supreme
Court has barred them from being sued for such illegalities.
Biden
has a plan for how to eradicate homelessness in the US.
Everyone: tell
the Starbucks board you will not cross the picket line.
US citizens: call for passage of the
Youth
Voting Rights Act,
which would defend younger voters from tactics used to impede
them from voting.
US citizens: call on Biden to
give
endangered species
protection to manatees.
US citizens: call on Biden to
drop
Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange.
Modeling suggests
1/10
of all living species will be extinct by the
end of this century, if global heating continues as projected.
Crown Prince Bone Saw is
trying
to "sportswash"
Salafi Arabia's
cruel and repressive reputation.
Tobacco companies used sportswashing, and maybe still do in some
places. In the US, that was eventually prohibited.
*Crypto was supposed to solve financial corruption. But
FTX shows it’s
just got worse.*
I am not sure this is an inherent part of using cryptocurrencies. It
may be due to a twisted way of using them: people buy and sell them
through companies called "exchanges" rather than trading them
directly. Those exchanges
seem
to tend particularly to corruption.
However, even if all users did everything directly in the currency's
blockchain, it would seem to be just perfect for bribing politicians
untraceably.
*Global corporations
"cheating
public out of billions in tax," say
campaigners.*
This is why we designed GNU Taler
to reliably identify the payee. It gives anonymity to the payer only.
Former enslaved migrant workers in Thailand are
suing the UK
supermarket Tesco for selling the clothing that they were forced to make.
Amy Goodman: *The US Justice Department
Must
Drop Charges Against
Julian Assange.*
Cinderella
as a joke on Louis XIV's fancy for glass.
US right-wingers have
danced
with fascism and Nazism since the 1930s
and have only occasionally been afraid to show it.
Peru's suppression forces have
killed
20 protesters, generally by
shooting them. This caused protests to spread.
People demand that Congress resign for new elections, but Congress refuses.
Musk has banned Twitter users from
posting
information about where to
find them on other sites.
Of course, you shouldn't be used by Facebook or Instagram at all, anyway.
Twitter's policy
may
be illegal in the US.
I wonder, though, whether FTC enforcement power can prevail against
a billionaire who is willing to lose millions of dollars as a result
of his choice of policies. If he chooses to defy the FTC, can they
do more than fine Twitter a few million?
(satire) *Johnson
& Johnson Raises Price Of Band-Aids To $100,000 Apiece.*
*[The wrecker] Is Not Our Biggest Problem: It's
the Open Fascism He
Has Unleashed.*
Many fascists are flexible enough to follow another authoritarian
leader, such as DeMentis,
instead of the wrecker.
The article discusses a conjecture that fascism wakes up in the US
every 80 years as the people who defeated fascism before die and
cease to lead the country to reject fascism.
How light pollution
pushes
animals and plants to extinction.
*Cop15 deal includes target to
protect
30% of nature on Earth by
2030.*
The basic question is, will countries give this more than lip service?
For instance, most of the UK's "protected marine areas" are
hardly
protected at all.
The article claims that China imposed the deal despite objections from
many countries. Given that the survival of civilization and the
natural world are at stake, I feel little sympathy for anyone that
refuses to help save. But these objections may make the treaty a dead
letter.
The biodiversity movement seems to have adopted as a matter of faith
that indigenous humans will always protect biodiversity and ecosystems.
In many cases they will, because they depend on those ecosystems
for their living. In those cases, damage to those ecosystems will
harm them so they will oppose such damage.
But this is not invariably guaranteed. Human beings have been
polluting their environments for short-term benefit for millennia.
Humans often bend and redraw their moral rules to excuse their own
benefit. Humans can resist this tendency, but nobody is automatically
above it due to descent alone.
The part of this agreement that is absolutely perverse: the plan to
establish a parallel patent system in the name of preventing
"biopiracy."
The patent system we already have is harmful and unjust; this plan
creates a second parallel system of restrictions on the use of
knowledge, adds a second harm, a second injustice, to the first.
The goal, clearly, is to give some income to poor countries.
That goal is fine, but do it in some other way!
*Tokyo will require new homes built from 2025 to
have
solar panels.*
California adopted
a "blueprint" for achieving a "net zero emissions",
but the plan is bogus since it calls for carbon capture and storage,
which has never been made to work properly.
A blueprint means a precise set of measurements for something to be
made. A rough sketch is not a blueprint.
The UN-brokered truce in Yemen
could
lead to an end to the war.
Joseph Stiglitz:
*The
Road to Fascism*
* Growing hardship is all but assured in 2023, and it will provide even
more fertile ground for dangerous demagogues.*
The story of the
US
bombing of Hanoi in 1972 makes me think of Putin's
shelling and missile attacks on Ukraine.
Everyone: call for a
treaty
to regulate production of plastics.
US citizens: call on Congress to
put
an end to private prisons.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: tell Federal Insurance Office that renters and homeowners
need
data on how global heating impacts their insurance.
Increased heat may
explain around 8000 shootings each year in the US.
The thugs
who killed Ronald Greene have been
charged
with crimes
including homicide.
I can't tell whether one of these charges does justice to the lies the
thugs told about how Greene died.
We are all waiting to see if high officials of the
thug department will
face charges for trying to protect the killers themselves from charges.
The reason
Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested seems to have been an
illegal funds transfer between two parts of FTX whose funds were
supposed to be kept separate.
*Ellsberg, Donziger
Among
Those Demanding Freedom for Drone Whistleblower
Daniel Hale.*
Biden endorsed
Manchin's dirty deal to undermine environmental regulations
on energy projects. Even worse, he endorsed the values that deal is based on: that
hypothetical reductions in the price of fossil fuel is more important
than protecting or planet from
global heating or pollution.
Colombia has implemented
a progressive wealth tax and other tax increases
for the rich. The specific details of the wealth tax respond to problems
encountered by previous wealth taxes in Europe, to ensure it touches
only the rich.
Leftist film director Ken Loach accused the BBC of
helping
to write Corbyn
out of history, including trying to make Corbyn out as anti-semitic.
He also stated that 200,000 members or more have left the Labour Party
in response to Starmer's right-wing shift.
Workers at 100 Starbucks stores will
strike
for three days.
Biden said, during the campaign, that he wanted to eliminate the death
penalty. However, the US just
voted
against a UN resolution calling for
a worldwide moratorium on executions.
An interesting
example of collective governance of an organization.
Tunisia's authoritarian president has
reorganized
how the legislature
functions and held an election under totally new rules. There were
not many candidates and not many voters.
*[Famous] Iranian actor Taraneh Alidoosti
arrested
after criticism of
death penalty [given to protesters].*
Pointing at technological advances that are supposed to eliminate
global heating
in a few years is a standard denialist tactic. They
have often cited
fusion power for this,
but also carbon
capture and storage
and "carbon
offsets" (which tend to be bogus).
We don't have time to wait for these things.
Insulate Britain protests met with ire from motorists, but everyone
now
sees that they were right.
Australia will build
more large grid storage batteries
so as to keep unneeded renewable electricity for when it is needed.
The corrupter
is marketing
NFT "trading cards". The money people pay for them
goes to a secret business, and I suspect it won't appear in
the corrupter's future tax returns.
QAnonenties are starting to transfer their worship
from
the wrecker to Musk.
They are mostly
authoritarian followers
and it isn't crucial to them which authoritarian leader they can follow.
AT&T, Amazon, Comcast and Intel
donated
to the campaigns of Republican
election denialists, well before this year's election.
Article talking about how the world is
tailored
toward men.
For the most of the issues listed, I agree that we should change
practices so that they serve women as well as men. I disagree in
regard to office temperature, though, for the simple reason that you
can wear more clothing without limit, but there are limits to how much
you clothing can remove in an office with other workers. If at that
point some people are still too hot, the only solution that can
satisfy everyone is to make the office cool enough for them, and for
those who find that too cold to wear another layer.
There were times that my office in the Stata Center was so hot that I
needed to be nude to be comfortable. I kept the door locked so that
visitors would knock and I could ask them to wait a minute. I did not
usually explain that this was so I could put my shirt and pants on.
The presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico
condemned the ouster of Peru's President Castillo as a
"legislative coup",
saying it was backed by the US.
This is not an absurd idea; the US backed such a
coup
in Bolivia a few
years ago,
and in Honduras
a few years before that.
Information in the article suggests that the poor voted him into
office and still support him. They are now
protesting
vigorously, and
the "forces of law and order" are shooting and gassing them from
helicopters.
It sounds like the thugs support the right wing and treat
the people as the enemy.
This does not necessarily imply that the coup story is the whole
truth; there are valid reasons to argue that it is Castillo who tried
to overthrow constitutional order, as President Boric of Chile said.
It seems clear that there was a process of reciprocal escalation. In
such a situation, it is easy to perceive the escalations by the side
you oppose as injustice, and the escalations by the side you support
as legitimate self-defense.
To judge the right and wrong of such a process requires a lot
of facts about the actions and the background. All I can do is try
to judge which of the other presidents to trust.
(satire) *Elementary
School Lesson On Water Cycle Explains How Water
Becomes Property Of Nestlé.*
*Twitter suspends
accounts of several journalists who had reported on
Elon Musk.*
Musk defines "free speech" the way autocrats do.
*Workers, Not "Stockbrokers and CEOs," Will
Pay
Price for Fed Rate
Hikes: Warren.*
*Plastic ‘nurdles’
stop
sea urchins developing properly, study finds.*
It would be nice to imagine that this provides a way to
protect kelp
forests, but enough plastic to do that would surely harm other species too.
Australia has revoked
a rule, made by the previous planet-roaster
government, that permitted the burning of wood waste from native trees
to count as "renewable".
In practice, native forests are not renewable under present conditions.
The world-wide campaign to prevent nondisclosure agreements from
being used by employers to cover up any abuses, from harassment to
rape, is making
substantial progress, but not in the UK.
You can't expect the Tories to eagerly pursue this goal, because they
represent the rich who commit the abuses and want them covered up.
My first experience with a nondisclosure agreement was when I asked
someone at CMU for a copy of the Xerox laser printer software source
code. He said he had actually promised in advance to refuse to share
that code with me and other colleagues at MIT. Shame on him! He had
made a commitment to be a jerk and deny his cooperation to his
colleagues.
From this I learned that signing a nondisclosure agreement for
generally useful technical information, such as software, was
betraying the whole world — so I vowed I would never agree to one,
and I never knowingly done so.
That led me, a year or two later, to the conclusion that nonfree
software was an injustice, regardless of whether the nonfreedom was
brought about by a nondisclosure agreement.
"Crisis pregnancy centers" look like abortion clinics, but their
mission is to confuse
females so that they don't get abortions. They
get away with lies because they are almost exempt from regulation.
The right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court have protected them
from regulations intended to protect women from being deceived.
*Chinese doctors and nurses reportedly
told
to work while infected as
Covid surges.*
In the US, this is achieved by denying workers paid sick leave. They
can't afford to do the right thing and avoid infecting follow workers,
even customers.
The infection is spreading very fast. I presume it is one of the
recent Omicron variants. At least that will reduce the number of
deaths and serious injuries.
China's relaxation of restrictions on capturing wildlife for food
*could
weaken animal protection and pose a hazard to public health,
say experts(.
The term "post-pandemic" is wishful thinking, not reality.
There is a suspicion of
fraud
in the vote-counting of Fiji's election.
Fiji has a history of real trouble in its elections. I wonder whether
it will be possible to assure the honesty of this election.
*CFPB Applauded for
Proposing
"Public Rap Sheet" for Corporate Criminals.*
Drivers in London
forcibly
moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the
road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests.
If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see
what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat
prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the
protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions
for new tactics for climate protesters.
Ukraine's plans
to
reconquer Crimea militarily may be impossible or unwise.
The places that Russian troops were stationed since 2014 include, as
a fact, parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but Putin always
denied that this was the case. He should not be invited to
acknowledge it belatedly now and reap any benefit.
To negotiate the fate of Crimea is more sensible. An honest election
would have been a legitimate approach in 2014, but Putin drove out or
exiled those who supported Ukraine, then (according to this article)
lost anyway and lied about the result.
Putin's
elections in Russia are blatantly dishonest.
The population of Crimea today is different from the population in
2014. If an election is to be held now about which country Crimea
should belong to, which people should vote in it? To give the
decision to the current population would mean that Putin (or anyone
else) can conquer territory and legitimize that with an unfair
election. To give the decision to the 2014 population might be asking
for further violence.
The incredibly complex history of
reprocessing
and disposing of nuclear
waste in the UK.
In theory, the process is clearly simple. In practice, it keeps getting
more complex.
*Flying
insect numbers plunge 64% since 2004, UK survey finds.*
Some years ago, a
similar
decline was observed in Germany.
This portends ecological disaster.
US citizens: call on the House Ways and Means Committee to
share
the wrecker's tax returns with the Senate Finance Committee ASAP.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Democrats including Biden to
seek the kind
of "bipartisanship" that means progressive policies that many Republicans
support — not deals with right-wing extremist Republicans.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to
investigate
corruption and ethical
lapses at the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to
hold
corporations accountable for price
gouging.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *Elon Musk Receives Experimental Neuralink Implant In Attempt
To
Delete Memory Of Being Booed.*
The EU
is setting up a system of "green tariffs" to charge imports
based on how much greenhouse gas is emitted in producing them.
Anti-abortion
fanatics have proposed to move on from laws
criminalizing performing abortions to prosecuting people who have
abortions.
* Without a plan in place to minimise infection [by Covid-19], a
"moving
on" strategy leaves vulnerable people behind.*
Most people want to believe the danger is gone, and governments have
decided not to let them do it. It's good for business also. How easy it
is to dismiss suggestions to protect yourself and others with a mask
by saying, "It is no longer obligatory."
It's no longer legally obligatory, but it is morally obligatory.
When someone without a mask sits near me on a train or plane,
I ask per to please wear a mask. If
perse says, "I don't have a mask,"
I offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its plastic wrapper.
The masks sold by BYD are simple to put on, so I offer those.
One of Erdoğan's
political rivals has been convicted of insulting Turkey’s
supreme election council, calling them "fools."
Many
countries make it a crime to insult officials.
Indonesia just made
itself one of them.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to insult anyone — even me,
even you. Erdoğan
shows plenty of contempt for freedom and democracy.
He even started a small
civil
war to reverse an electoral defeat.
Just after Cabot Oil & Gas (part of Coterra Energy) accepted 15
criminal charges for polluting the water of Dimock. Pennsylvania,
the state government
allowed it to resume fracking there.
Fracking should be illegal. The risk of poisoning groundwater for
centuries or more is too high a price to pay for some more fossil fuel
to burn — especially since burning it is harmful globally.
The Arctic:
Hotter, rainier, wetter, and less ice and birds.
Extreme weather (which is partly caused by
global heating)
has devastated
the Florida orange crop.
We must expect all sorts of crops to be harmed by
global heating effects.
Musk
urged his Twitter followers to adopt QAnonsense.
Maybe he is trying to compete with
the wrecker to seize power in the US.
US citizens: phone your senators and implore them to reject any bill
containing Manchin's
environmental
planning deregulation deal.
You can phone (888) 997-5380.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US corporations gave 8 million
dollars
to Republican election liars.
Explaining the enormous challenges of going from "ignition" in a
laser-fusion target
to
the production of commercially useful power,
and why this is likely to take decades.
We need to quit using fossil fuels fast — we can't wait for fusion
to be usable for this job.
*Brazil
goldminers carve illegal ‘Road to Chaos’ out of Amazon
reserve.*
They use bulldozers and power-diggers, and carry submachine guns.
The US keeps using economic sanctions to punish unjust or aggressive
governments, but the
sanctions
almost never have any positive effect.
Without a big increase in humanitarian aid donations, the UN predicts that
200
million people will die in 2023 for the lack of aid.
200 million is a very large number of deaths in one year.
The average number is around 83 million. The human population
will decrease in 2023 if this forecast comes true. The 200 million
maybe in addition to the 80 million that would have died anyway.
The typical annual increase in human population is around 18 million.
It follows that 200 million deaths will mean that the total human
population decreases by several years' worth of population growth.
It seems that we have reached the point at which the global disaster we
have caused starts to kill so many people that it reduces the human
population. This is very bad.
I have begged humans to reduce their birth rate, so that we could
reduce the population the painless way and avoid ever reaching this
point.
*Eels
facing population collapse, conservation groups warn.*
The EU has given in to the usual short-term thinking, prioritizing
short-term profits over sustainability. Such a decision is tantamount
to saying, "Let's make one last batch of money by wiping out the fish."
DeMentis
has started an "investigation" of everything about Covid-19
vaccines.
They may not find any serious problem or wrongdoing, but they will have plenty
of opportunities to talk endlessly about hypothetical, conceivable problems,
thus blowing smoke that they can claim implies the presence of a fire.
The US
government protected people against possible right-wing attempts
to ban interracial and same-sex marriages.
This is good, but it is just a part of the harm that right-wing
extremists on the Supreme Court threaten to do. Since Democrats
refused to eliminate the filibuster and expand the court,
Americans are now sitting ducks for at least two years.
The NLRB
funding is inadequate, and the result is that workers' rights
go undefended.
Varoufakis calls
for two major economic changes: to make corporations
belong to their workers, and to reduce the dependence on banks for
financial transactions.
A thug
in Vallejo, California, attacked a
documentalist who was
standing on his own porch, making a video of the
thug's traffic stop.
The documentalist sued and the city paid $300,000 to settle the dispute.
The recording showed the thug
making false accusations against Burrell.
Such false accusations are a common first step in an attempted frame-up.
Any thug
caught doing this, even if nothing worse results, should be fired
and blacklisted for all jobs that involve special authority over the public.
The Keystone
1 tar sands oil pipeline leaked 600,000 gallons of oil into
a creek in Kansas that feeds a river and a reservoir for 800,000 people.
The pilot program
to privatize Medicare includes insurance companies
that have been fined for inflating charges.
Twitter has more or less
blocked
access to a bot account that tweets where
Musk's private jet goes.
*Covid-19 vaccines have
saved
more than 3 million lives in US, study says, but
the fight isn't over.*
Three million is around one percent of the US population.
*Hundreds of Oath
Keepers Have Worked for DHS in Recent Years, Report Finds.*
There are probably tens of thousands of workers for the DHS, so this is
not necessarily a large fraction. Nonetheless, it is dangerous.
Protecting biodiversity (or any aspect of the environment) requires
ending
government subsidies to activities which damage biodiversity.
Allowing businesses to excuse damage to habitats by means of "offsets"
is asking to be lied to.
*Framing men as the
"villains"
gets women no closer to better romantic
relationships.*
That assumption means getting stuck in a shallow form of feminism based on
not believing things can get any better.
*Labor proposal to fix
Australia’s
broken environmental protection system
could revolutionise sector.*
*The 50-Year Takeaway From Middle-Class America.
We [Americans]
should be demanding the same benefits enjoyed by less wealthy but more
progressive nations.*
US states provide enormous special tax breaks to companies — almost always
big
companies that can play one state against another. A campaign seeks
to put an end to this, first of all by limiting them and publishing them.
I
proposed a federal law to enable any one state to object
to any
special subsidy proposed by any other (competing) states.
This would prevent a company from playing one state against another.
The governor of Bali reassures foreign tourists and visitors that the
prohibition
against sex outside of marriage won't threaten them in Bali.
There are other places in Indonesia which are also interesting to visit,
but maybe
they won't be safe.
More importantly for Indonesia, this law also restricts freedom of
speech and freedom of the press.
No country should allow a prudish religion any influence in its laws.
Laws driven by Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism are causing
cruelty and repression around the world.
Although no
court has proved that Governor Snyder conspired to put the
people of Flint at risk of lead poisoning, we have plenty of reason to
believe he
and his high officials did so.
I can't put him in prison, but my conclusion is that he's guilty,
partly because the ideology of the Republican Party is to do things like
that to the poor, weak, and disprivileged.
*Biden faces growing
pressure
to drop charges against Julian Assange.*
Pressure is coming from Australia and Brazil, as well as American defenders
of freedom of the press.
So phone the White House and say, drop the charges against Assange —
reporting on leaked dirty secrets must not be a crime.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
New
Zealand will gradually ban tobacco by raising the age requirement
to buy tobacco by one year per year,
Tobacco is death, and I hope you will not smoke it. But banning a widely
used drug generally leads to widespread corruption and injustice.
China
does not allow fair trials. To bias the trial of opposition
publisher Jimmy Lai to be fair, China kicked his British lawyer out of
Hong Kong.
The UK plans to hand out
130
more fossil fuel licenses for the North
Sea. This puts civilization in danger. So environmentalists are
suing.
*Plan
to protect 30% of Earth divides and inspires at Cop15.*
Tories have undermined the National Health Service to the point where
it can't even tackle the
backlog
of millions of important but
non-urgent operations.
Iran
is executing protesters after bogus trials.
Peruvians detest Congress, which removed President Castillo from office,
even
more than they detest President Castillo.
I wish I had a basic understanding of politics in Peru, or knew
someone who could explain it to me, so that I could have a background
against which to judge what is happening.
Scientists started a fusion reaction that released about
25% more
energy than what was used to start it. This demonstrates in principle
that controlled fusion can be used to generate energy.
There is a long
way to go to develop fusion into a practical energy source.
For the next few decades, survival of civilization still
depends on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy as fast as
possible.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to vote to end US
support for Salafi Arabia's war with Yemen.
*UN Report Shows
11,000
Children Killed or Maimed in This US-Backed War.*
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the U.S. Senate to investigate
corruption and ethical
lapses at the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Most managers in the UK say that stress over the
cost of living is
making workers anxious and interfering with their work.
Those managers are in a special position to tell the company
executives, "Give the workers a raise!" Will they do it?
How Big Pharma used
threats
against governments to defeat the proposed "patent waiver" for Covid-19
vaccines in the World Trade Organization.
The WTO is a business-supremacy treaty;
its basic purpose is to give
business more power over the world's governments. We need to
eliminate most of that power by greatly weakening every
business-supremacy treaty.
4400
homeless people live. in the "skid row" of Los Angeles, and they
have only 9 toilets to use at night.
The UN standard for refugee camps calls for far more than that.
Rep.
Greene declares her support for an armed coup.
When she takes her oath of office again in January, she will say it
insincerely. Is there any way to exclude her from Congress over this?
The UK nurses say
Tories
are making false statements rather than
negotiating, while the "Labour" party doubts that Britain can afford a
10% raise for them.
This
reflects Starmer's implicit rejection of a change in the general
policy of starving and freezing the poor to enrich the rich.
Here's
what a true Labour leader would say.
Some pertinent facts.
The US
is blocking the full adoption and effective enforcement
of many crucial treaties.
To present one extreme example, every member of the UN has ratified
the Convention on Biological Diversity, except for the US.
The House
of Commons will observe a minute of silence in remembrance of the
Nazi genocide of Jews (and some others).
The threat of Nazism still exists ad is growing. I suggest that the
House of Representatives adopt a similar annual practice, starting
this month. It won't be easy for the Republicans that will control
the House next year to reject this. They support Nazis but don't want
to admit it.
The Tories
want to start a new coal mine in England, so they claim
that steelmaking companies want that coal.
Turns out, they don't.
Others say it is a boondoggle to artificially create jobs in
a certain region. That could be true, but
why
do it this way?
There are many kinds of jobs that could really be needed.
Indeed, Many of the region's inhabitants oppose the mine.
I suspect that the Tories' real motive is to help some rich donor
get richer.
Ralph Nader: As Republicans push numerous plans that most Americans
would oppose, most
Democratic
candidates fail to go on the offensive
against them.
A US Forest Service crew head carried out a prescribed burn to reduce
the danger of wildfires. Things went wrong and it started a big wildfire.
But is
that a reason to arrest him?
Perhaps the Forest Service needs to change some aspects of its practices.
I am not an expert on prescribed burns, and I don't want to become one,
so I have no opinion on that.
But what is absolutely clear is that arresting the employees who carry
them out is absurd trumpery.
The bullshitter
falsely claimed that Black Lives Matter protesters
were part of a conspiracy called "Antifa", and told the DHS
to find proof.
An internal investigation by the DHS published a report that
*describes attempts
by top officials to link protesters
to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump's
reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting
president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic
intelligence assets for their own political gain.*
An investigation by the House of Representatives found that the idea
of natural gas as a temporary "bridge fuel" was an intentional deception:
Big Oil's real goal
was
always to make it a permanent choice.
The article points out a number of ways in which extracting
transporting and burning gas are dangerous. But Big Oil's propaganda
still tries to convince people that gas is safe.
What's at stake in the biodiversity conference? *We are tearing holes
in the
fabric
of life on Earth.*
*US Can End Its Complicity in
Horrendous
Yemen War Today.*
The US needs mask mandates to stop the
spread
of flu, RSC and Covid-19.
This one measure is effective against all pathogens that spread
through the air.
When someone sits near me in a train or plane and isn't wearing a
mask, I ask per to wear one. If
perse
says perse doesn't have one, I
offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its unbroken plastic wrapper.
Often perse
responds that it is not obligatory. I'm going to try out
this response: "Legally it is not obligatory. Morally it is obligatory."
A campaign to give all US personnel stationed at bases in the UK
training in driving on the
left
side of the road.
People have shot at electric power stations in
Oregon
and Washington.
The attackers have not been identified, but the obvious suspects are
right-wing extremists. That region (outside its big cities) is known
for the presence of people who hate the very idea of government
and can consider any sort of sabotage justified if it damages government.
Afghan refugees being smuggled into Greece were caught and charged with
doing the smuggling. One such conviction has
been
overturned on appeal.
Warnock won the election for senator from Georgia in the face of
powerful and effective Republican voter suppression. The Warnock's
general election for senator in 2022 had a million fewer voters than
Warnock's general election in 2020. And the subsequent runoff in 2022
had a million fewer voters than the
runoff
for the 2020 election.
Republican voter suppression is intended to hit Democrats harder than
Republicans. Why it did not succeed this time in defeating Warnock,
I don't know, and I wonder.
The article explains that Georgia Republicans have already passed
further laws to make it harder to fight voter suppression in 2024.
An Italian is trapped in the Italian embassy in the United Arab Emirates
because he has been sentenced to a
large
fine and he has no money.
UK ministers refused to negotiate with the NHS workers who are
preparing
to strike soon.
This confirms, in my view, their intention to destroy the NHS.
Se me dijo que mis chistes son polisemias.
Dije, "No, polisemia es tener polizontes en la sangre."
US citizens: call on Biden to
extend
paid sick leave to railway workers.
Everyone: call on Wall Street banks to keep their pledge
to stand against racial injustice by forcing their lobbyists to
drop their
lawsuit against the CFPB.
*Court Orders U.S. to Examine California
Shipping
Lanes' Role in Endangered Whale Deaths.*
Ayatollah Khomeini is
badly
ill and may be dying. If he dies, the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is likely to take power.
The writer speculates that the IRGC might give Iranians personal
freedoms, to reduce resistance to their rule, but not democracy,
and expects power rivalries to continue unchanged.
I would rejoice to see Iranians have somewhat more freedom.
I hope that the US and Iran can make peace some day.
An extremely corrupt Kansas City
thug
faces charges of
collaborating
with a drug gang to force 73 women into slavery and prostitution.
He is also accused of raping people to intimidate them, and a series
of frame-ups.
The whole thug
department knew about his pattern of crime, and stood
behind their fellow thug.
*‘Only 100 meters apart’: Ukrainians and
[Putin forces]
face off in
Donetsk.*
I read that the Putin forces'
persistent focus on taking Bakhmut is
that it is the next step toward capturing 100% of the Donetsk oblast.
If they take Bakhmut, and then take Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, they
could boast of holding 100% of one of the regions that Putin claims to
have annexed this year.
In military terms, this would be worth nothing, but that's the sort of
irrationality that tends to happen under an absolute ruler.
*Press Freedom Champions Renew Call for DOJ to
Drop
Charges Against Assange.*
*Macron announces
free
condoms for 18- to 25-year-olds in France.*
This offer is a good start; it should be extended to everyone.
*[Dissident Ilya Yashin]
sentenced
to eight and a half years over
series of posts about [Putin forces] atrocities in Bucha.*
Putin's obedient servants lie on command, too afraid to refuse.
The wrecker
has led US Republicans to do likewise. Yashin has chosen
to go to prison rather than become a tool of falsehood.
Comparing
imprisoned antipollution protester Violet Coco with
convicted polluters: *less than 6% of people charged with
environmental pollution and property damage offenses are sent to
prison.*
*Racism poses
public health threat to millions worldwide, finds report.*
Lula has sued Bolsonaro for various reasons, one of which is
accusing the
country's computerized voting system of being vulnerable.
Bolsonaro has done much to undermine democracy and elections in
Brazil, and morally deserves punishment. However, the general claim
that Brazil's computerized voting system makes Brazil's elections
vulnerable is valid. That is because the machines record only totals,
and do not keep individual paper ballots that voters marked by hand.
Such systems are vulnerable to someone, somehow.
Brazilian experts campaigned against this system when it was adopted,
demanding a system that enabled the results to be audited, but they
lost the battle.
There is no evidence that anything wrong happened in the voting
machines in this election, but Brazil should change to an audit-able
voting system for the sake of the future.
Joseph Stiglitz: *Raising interest rates to tame inflation will only
cause
more pain.*
Biden has taken
significant
steps towards releasing all the prisoners
remaining in Guantanamo. That would enable the US to put an end to
its national shame.
Senator Sinema has
officially
left the Democratic Party, which suggests
that she will run as an independent in 2024.
As the article said, we already knew she belongs to the Plutocratic
Party. What matters is, will this make it easier or harder to elect a
better senator in her place? I fear this will make it harder —
because it won't be possible to eliminate her in the Democratic Party.
I don't know whether her presence in the general election as an
independent candidate would help or hurt.
Congress is trying to
impose
a link tax through an increasingly
frequent sneaky method — last minute inclusion in "must pass"
omnibus bills.
(satire) *Elon Musk Worried He Won't Have Enough Twitter Employees Left To
Fire
On Christmas Eve.*
US zoning laws obstruct the conversion of surplus office space
into
badly
needed residential space.
Republicans have added to the NDAA a clause to repeal the Covid-19
vaccine
mandate
for the military.
This is more harmful than it appears. The vaccination requirement
has convinced some right-wing fanatics to leave the US military,
and we need to keep it going.
It also helps keep the troops healthy.
Accusing the US rail unions of
being
weak-spirited and divided.
*Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results
after
judge orders vote.*
The Republican county supervisors in Cochise county had refused to
certify that county's election. Then they got a court order which
required them to certify the vote, so they did.
They presented no grounds for refusing to certify the results, but we
can see that it was mad hatred: they hate the election so much that
they wanted to fight it regardless of what effects that would have.
Ironically, if they had got away with not certifying that county's
vote, the result would have been to elect one more Democrat to the
House of Representatives. That would have been a major setback to
Republican power nationwide.
I therefore conclude that the refusal was not an instance of
Republican "by hook or by crook" cheating, but rather mad rage
against
free elections.
I previously posted that Cochise county's vote was majority
Democratic, because had I read that in another article. That would
have made the refusal consistent with by-hook-or-by-crook cheating.
But it appears that that other article was mistaken about this.
US citizens: call on the US to
end
subsidies for fracking in
Argentina.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and say to reject
anything like the SECURE Act (HR 2954) and the EARN Act (S 4808).
These bills would change Social Security to give less to the poor
and more to the rich.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The FTC has blocked
the merger of Microsoft and Activision, both giants
in making video games.
These video games are nonfree software, which means
they treat
users unjustly.
I would not allow any of them on my computers, and I urge you to
reject them too.
Notwithstanding that, it is still important to stop them from merging.
Allowing them to merge would exacerbate the evil of concentration of
industry, and do nothing to reduce the evil o f nonfree software.
The president of Peru was
removed
from office by Congress. He had
attempted to prevent this by dismissing Congress.
I don't have enough contact with Peru to judge which side was
basically at fault, but I lean towards trusting Arce's view. He is a
leftist elected president in a country that borders on Peru, so he has
surely paid plenty of attention.
More about the new
president Dina Boluarte, who was previously
the vice president.
Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff
by under 3%.
It is good that he won, but the closeness of the outcome shows that
most Republicans hate our freedoms so much that they will vote for
even a lying creep who will help destroy them.
* Republicans are literally running a political platform on weakening
teachers, schools and education because
they
need the poorly educated
to make up their voting base.*
*Brown University
bans
caste discrimination throughout campus in a
first for the Ivy League.*
I think caste discrimination should be prohibited like race or sex
discrimination.
Apple has dropped
its plan to scan every user's photos and will use another
approach to protect children from would-be abusers.
The new approach seems not to be a threat to other users' privacy.
Plutocratist
"mainstream" Democrats
continue
to control the party's
leadership in the House of Representatives.
The Labour Party is turning to
mythical
trickle-down economics, saying it
aims to turn the UK into a "global start-up hub."
Poor Britain. Competing to help the rich dominate society won't help
anyone but the rich.
Congress is considering
a kind of "link tax" to require discussion platforms
to pay for hosting links to news sites. It would harm libraries and smaller
news media.
It would also give lots of subsidy to Big Media.
Criticizing
Effective Altruism: to program people as donation robots
is desocializing, isolating and alienating.
I suspect those things reduce people's lifespan.
*Pegasus spyware was
used
to [crack] reporters’ phones. I’m suing its
[developers].*
Referring to the developers of a program as
"creators"
is propaganda for ideas we would be wiser not to promote.
The US rescued hostage Brittney Griner by
trading
an important Russian
arms dealer for her.
Griner deserved to be freed for the simple reason that what she did
was not wrong. However, I don't understand why Americans clamor for
Griner's release more than for the release of everyone imprisoned in
the US for possession of marijuana. There are many Americans unjustly
imprisoned in the US for doing nothing more than what Griner did. They too
deserve to be freed.
It is a shame to let arms merchant Viktor Bout go free, though.
I think we should not pressure the US to try to ransom hostages,
because that pressure benefits the regimes that take hostages at the
expense of the US. If I were a hostage, I would say, "Don't ransom me
if the ransom hurts my country!"
Denying
the call to boycott Russian music.
I take a stronger stand: it is misguided and destructive to blame
"Russia" for Putin's crime of aggressive war. Putin is the one
responsible. Let us not refer to the army that invaded Ukraine as
"the Russian army" — call them the
Putin forces.
The Tories plan to
open
a new coal mine in England. Supposedly the
reason is to reduce the cost of electricity, but the mine will produce
coking coal to be exported to make steel.
Meanwhile, the steel industry is looking to replace the use of coking coal
to reduce its emissions.
*The "fate
of the entire living world" will be determined at the
Cop15 UN biodiversity summit, according to leading scientists.*
It is considering a partly concrete plan to slow the destruction
of the Earth's natural ecosystems.
[Effective altruism] is
"profoundly individualistic" and reliant on the status quo. EA's
calculations assume that humans won't change.
But humans
have to change if we are going to [save] life on Earth.*
Superstitious anti-vaxxers have convinced each other that a blood
transfusion with "vaccinated blood" is
somehow
dangerous. One couple
tried to prevent their baby from getting a transfusion unless it was
with "unvaccinated blood"; since the baby would have died without
surgery and a transfusion, the state intervened and took guardianship
to authorize the operation.
Qatar promises to vastly
expand
its fossil fuel exports; the resulting
greenhouse gas emissions would imply global disaster.
The specific point that the total emissions from Qatar's exports would
eventually add up to more than one year of the whole world's emissions
seems like a red herring to me. I would expect that the same is true
for the US too, and perhaps several other countries.
But even though this is just a red herring, I think the article's conclusions
are plausible anyway.
At least four on the Supreme Court seem to lean towards the bizarre
"independent
state legislature" theory.
The confrontation in Arizona, in which
one county refused
to certify its vote,
is exactly the kind of situation where a state legislature could
(under this theory) arbitrarily make up its own presidential election
results.
The revised Electoral Count Act could close that mad loophole, if
Congress passes it this month.
US citizens: call on the US government to
block
Amazon's planned merger
with One Medical.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to stand up for
keeping
Ilhan Omar on the foreign affairs committee.i
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Biden administration
not to allow oil
drilling near Chaco Canyon.
Chaco Canyon is beautiful, as well as having great historic significance.
Global heating
is causing
sea animals to move to different habitats.
The result will be to wipe out most of the seabirds in western Europe.
Climate defense activists
defeated
Manchin's "dirty deal" to undermine
environmental regulations in the US Senate.
He could try again to pass it in another way, so the fight is not
conclusively finished.
*DOJ subpoenas
officials in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona for
communications with [the wrecker] around 2020 election.*
Al Jazeera asserts it has proof that
Israeli
forces fired directly at
reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, and has filed a case with the
International Criminal Court about this.
The Biden administration has given Haitians in the US
temporary
protected status through August, 2024.
(satire) *SWAT Team Busts Down Door Of Denver Woman's Home To
Apologize
For Previous Raid.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
US citizens: call on Congress to
abolish
the debt ceiling now.
Lawyers hired by the corrupter
searched a rented storage unit and
found
additional secret government documents.
Great 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
dares
the US to prosecute
him like Julian Assange.
He wants to challenge the constitutionality of such prosecutions.
Ellsberg faced the threat of prosecution at the time, but ultimately
officials decided not to prosecute him.
A right-wing conspiracy in Germany
plotted
to attack Parliament and overthrow
the government.
Their ideology was a strange mixture of Nazism, anarchism, and superstition.
But they had real weapons and could surely have done real killing.
The Tories plan to deal with strikes by NHS workers by
prohibiting strikes.
This approach would be of little use for fixing the broken NHS,
but assuming their real goal is to ruin it, this could be quite effective.
San Francisco responded to public revulsion and
reversed its recent
decision to authorize the thug
department to use robots for killing
people.
To halt (and then reverse) the general
militarization
of US thug departments is a much bigger job.
Some Republican senators are
condemning
the wrecker for showing
contempt for the Constitution.
It could be that they are looking for a chance to publicly split from
him, having seen that his endorsements of candidates turned out to be
disadvantageous for them. They may have decided they will be better
off with a new, fresh fascist leader.
US citizens: phone
your congresscritter and senators to support the
American
Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would prohibit some of
the harmful practices of Amazon and
some other platforms.
This bill would not do anything to make anonymous purchase possible,
or insist that the sites work without sending
nonfree
software to the
user's browser, so I would sill refuse more or less to do use those
sites. But their overall injustice would be reduced.
US citizens: phone
your congresscritter and senators to support the
Open App Markets Act. It would require Apple to allow users to
install apps obtained from places other than Apple's store.
It looks like this would make it possible to distribute free software
for the iThings which users could build from source. That means
iThings would no longer be jails.
Of course, they would still be nasty in many other ways,
so I would still urge everyone to reject iThings, along with Android.
Abortion rights activists are considering
ballot initiatives to
legalize abortion in 10 states.
In 2020, when much of the world was desperate for masks and other
Covid-19 protective equipment, the Tories
gave
contracts to companies
owned by their cronies. Many of those companies had no experience or
manufacturing capacity.
*Australian government
overturns
decision to cancel citizenship of man
on death row in Iraq.*
It is very good news that Australia has overturned the law used to
cancel people's citizenship over alleged crimes. That law was an
inspiration for various other countries with right-wing governments
that base their popularity on performative cruelty.
Those other countries remain to be convinced to eliminate those unjust
policies.
Labour has proposed
some
good reforms for the structure and rules
of the UK government.
Shocking rare crimes against children
create
an impulse and a pressure
to overprotect children by locking them up. For the children's sake,
we must resist that pressure.
*Argentina's [vice president and ex-president] Cristina Fernández
sentenced
to six years in $1bn fraud case.*
*Dutch king commissions research into
royal
role in colonialism.*
*Trump Organization
guilty
of tax fraud, New York jury finds.*
The corrupter
was not personally charged with the crime, but if
prosecutors have evidence that he knew about the scheme, they should
charge him too.
The US has delayed
yet again the requirement for "REAL ID" drivers
licenses for purposes such as getting on an commercial flight.
There is too much identifying and tracking people in the US.
Let's keep resisting, and see how many years we can block this.
South Korean President Yoon
threatened
truck drivers with years in prison
if they didn't end their strike. They defied him.
The way to end a strike that causes great inconvenience for society is
to make the employers pay proper wages and offer proper working
conditions. Whose side are you on, Yoon?
(satire) *Fate Of Christmas Uncertain After Eric Adams
Institutionalizes
Real Santa.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
The TSA
has a "pilot
program" to use facial recognition to identify
airline passengers. And a second generation coming which will do the
matching against a database.
Widespread use of facial recognition enables the sort of tracking that
China's pervasive repression is based on. We cannot allow such systems
to exist.
For now, you can refuse to participate in the
TSA's facial matching.
Please refuse! To maintain even a little privacy, we must fight tooth
and nail against massive surveillance systems, both new systems like
this one and existing systems such as
Clearview AI.
Biden wants South Carolina to be the Democratic Party's first primary
in 2024 so that
no
progressive candidate can challenge him for the
presidential nomination. He is confident of winning heavily there.
New York City is spending a lot of money to prevent a repeat of some
of the damage done by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but the overall effort
is
far inadequate.
For the longer term, there is no hope of protecting New York City from
future inundation with local measures. The only way is to
curb
global heating.
Qatar paid British MPs to
give
Qatar support in Parliament.
I find it hard to understand how this could be lawful, but in my sense
of justice this is outright bribery and ought to land the participants
in prison.
Drivers in London
forcibly
moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the
road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests.
If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see
what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat
prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the
protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions
for new tactics for climate protesters.
[New
note has corrected link to suggestions]
Republican extremists are
supporting
Putin's lies about Ukraine.
That includes a Faux News
announcer. Does an airport near you show
Faux News
most of the time? You could complain to the airport and say
to show something else instead.
*Just
Stop Oil's message to Suella Braverman: threaten us all you like
— we're not listening.*
*Facebook moderation system
favours
"business partners", says oversight board.*
US citizens: call on Missouri schools to
reverse
overzealous book
bans.
The chinook salmon are
heading
rapidly towards extinction, though no one
is sure why.
A strange aspect of this article is that it assumes that only by
identifying with the sadness of a local indigenous group can we
appreciate that the loss of these salmon is a great loss. In effect,
it treats their feelings about the possible extinction of chinook
salmon as the primary issue.
I can empathize with their sense of loss. I recognize the
loss too. But I insist that
the
objective loss is more important than
how people feel about it.
Peoples adapt their cultures to their environments. The ancestors of
that group, long enough ago, lived elsewhere and perhaps did not
encounter salmon. If the group survives through the coming global
disaster, in time it will get used to the absence of chinook salmon.
But the damage done by their extinction and the loss of ecosystem they
was part of will never go away.
If a species goes extinct and there is no indigenous group to notice,
did the extinction really happen?
Stop
burning trees to make energy, say 650 scientists before Cop15
biodiversity summit.*
The University of California academic workers are on strike. The management
is trying to break
their solidarity by offering raises to everyone but the
graduate student employees.
Ukraine has reportedly
attacked
distant Russian airfields used as
bases for heavy bombers that bomb Ukraine, and for cruise missiles.
Some bombers were damaged.
To attack Russian aircraft and missiles on the ground is a legitimate
and natural tactic, but challenging to carry out. Bravo, Ukraine!
The Ukrainian Army seems to have a genius for figuring out clever ways
to win the war. Meanwhile, the
Putin forces have only a plodding
hunger for bigger war crimes.
Leaving the EU was
supposed to let the UK "take back control" over
its laws and policies, but instead the international
banksters have
control.
Tories fundamentally believe in letting the rich have power, even if
they dislike some of the consequences. Naturally they were never
going to fight hard against it. Corbyn would have.
The Intercept interviews
two Iranian exiles about the continuing protests,
one of whom says we should rather call this a revolution in progress.
Cory Doctorow: in many kinds of products, adding a media-player and
its DRM
creates an excuse to use the DMCA to forbid users to tinker
with any aspect.
Nowadays, any product with DRM is no longer merely
defective by design.
It is oppressive by design also.
US citizens: call on Biden to
commit
to the full $100 million for
climate finance pledges.
Volunteers are installing
public phones in Philadelphia. They are like payphones except gratis.
Every city and town ought to provide these,
and you should never have to walk half an hour to reach one.
More on the wrecker's
declaration
of war on America and everything
that is good about it.
Nothing is perfect. There are a number of things in the US
Constitution that ought to be changed, Republicans have highlighted
some of them in recent decades by stretching them for abuse. The
Constitution must protect the environment much more, and the rights
and well-being of the disprivileged and disadvantaged. Fairly taxing
the rich and curbing the power of business would make that possible.
Eliminating the electoral college could make elections more
democratic.
The wrecker
would not do any of that. He would make himself dictator.
I
forecast years ago
that leaving the EU could be beneficial if Corbyn
were in charge, but would be harmful with Tories in charge.
Sad to say, Britain did the latter and has been harmed.
Leaving the EU created opportunities to change policies, laws and
relationships — opportunities that Britain could use in various ways.
Assuming that each party would use those opportunities to achieve its
goals, the consequences were clear.
I have updated the page
stallman-computing.html.
I have updated the page
rms-lifestyle.html.
China has dropped
the zero-Covid policy of trying, via tests and
quarantines, to stamp out transmission.
It is to be celebrated that powerful protests can make
China change rigid, harsh policies. But is this change
the wise change to make?
My recommendation was to make the quarantine system less harsh and
rigid, so people would not die or get badly sick from being in
quarantine for a while.
Two weeks ago, The wrecker
publicly associated with a white
nationalist and a Nazi, and thus
took
a clear stand against justice
and equal rights.
Since then, he called for
abolishing
the US Constitution, and thus
revealed himself indisputably as an enemy of US democracy and freedom.
Perhaps other Republican leaders, such as Governor
Dementis, are less
hostile to justice, equal rights, democracy and freedom. But I tend
to think they are simply more circumspect.
The UN is considering a resolution to prosecute Putin and other high officials
for systematic
war crimes by the
Putin forces.
They deserve prosecution, but I think it would be a mistake to demand
they surrender to prosecution. That would be, in effect, a decision
to pursue regime change as a war goal.
That decision would have bad consequences for Ukraine, for the kidnapped
Ukrainians, and for the Russian people as well. If Putin yields up
all of Ukraine's territory, and returns the kidnapped Ukrainians, he
will have had a defeat, not a victory. Those war aims are enough.
If Putin is willing to give those, we should offer him peace.
To demand more than that would give him more reason to keep fighting
instead of making peace.
*Iranian protesters call for
three-day
strike as pressure on regime
builds.*
I would not be so quick to conclude that the repressive regime will
fall soon. Repressive regimes have faced very strong protests and
stayed in power.
Five Connecticut prison thugs
face charges
of reckless endangerment
for transporting Richard Cox in a van without a seat belt and thus
breaking his neck.
Shouldn't they be charged with gross bodily harm, too?
US citizens: call on Congress to
help
families, not give tax cuts to corporations.
*"Turn
Off the Tap on Plastic," UN Chief Declares Amid Debate Over New
Global Treaty.*
I think it is crucial to stop the production of plastic products which
are fundamentally difficult to recycle — for instance, different
materials joined together.
Elnaz Rekabi participated in an international sports competition
without wearing the required head-covering.
Her
family's home was
then demolished.
If the Iranian state did this, then ironically it joins Israel in the
practice of punishing an entire family for one person's infraction.
(satire) *Right-Wingers Criticize Kanye For Not Using Platform To
Raise
Awareness Of Lesser-Known Nazis.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
Macron threatens to
invoke
business-supremacy treaties to stop the US
from carrying out its insufficient but helpful greenhouse gas
reduction plans. Environmental activists protest this when Macron was
visiting the White House.
Will French activists protest this too? I hope so?
Business-supremacy
treaties are fundamentally unjust because they
elevate trade over democracy. Businesses had too much power already,
and these treaties gave them even more.
Biden joined Congress to
impose
on railroad workers the contract
that the railroads had proposed — with no paid sick days.
*Biden Urged
to Sign Executive Order Guaranteeing Rail Workers Paid
Sick Leave.*
These same railroads
commit
safety violations repeatedly, and get
fined over and over, but they do not correct the dangers.
(satire) *Biden Signs Legislation To
Avert
Crisis Of Treating Rail Workers Like Humans.*
*The pilots flying passengers
across
US state lines for abortions.*
The Hinduismists that rule India are
attacking
hundreds of old mosques
by fabricating claims that the buildings are former Hindu temples which
were seized centuries ago and converted into mosques.
In most cases there is no real evidence that this ever happened.
But such is the fanaticism and contempt for truth on the part of the
ruling BJP and its supporters that they disregard evidence.
The track
record of repression and
pogroms
suggests they are hoping this gives them an excuse to kill some
Muslims.
Historians who know about the history of these sites face threats to
shut them up. The threats range from firing them to murdering them.
This
note has been corrected by a newer note
*Rural Arizona county
certifies
midterm results after judge orders vote.*
The county supervisors voted to certify the results they had because
refusing was illegal.
They presented no grounds to refuse to certify the results, but
we can
determine what their motives were:
The country's voters had voted majority Democratic, and the Republican
election officials figured that they could steal some statewide
elections by (in effect) discarding all the votes from their own
county.
A large fraction of Republicans are traitors at heart, and seek
opportunities to steal any election that they lose. If imprisonment
is required to thwart their treachery, prison it should be.
Everyone: call on Costco to
commit
to protecting the boreal
forest.
US citizens: call on Congress to
work
towards a world that is free of
nuclear weapons.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Minnesota is considering
small
reforms in rules for
thug departments
to better control their predilection to
bully people, brutalize people
from time to time, and associate with racists, Nazis and
insurrectionist organizations. The
thugs' unions are pushing back
hard.
More information.
NIH has set up a web site for
reporting
the results of your at-home
Covid-19 test, if you wish.
It is a good idea, but you should not use the site as currently
implemented, because it requires you to run nonfree Javascript code.
What a shame.
The San Antonio thug
who shot at Erik Cantu 10 times and maimed him
faces charges
of attempted murder.
The increased willingness to prosecute
thugs for violent crimes even
if the victim does not die will help control cop crime.
*A woman who sold fake COVID-19 immunization cards gets
three years in
Federal prison.*
There is no market any more for fake vaccination records, but one more
naturopathic "doctor" taken off the streets is likely to make the
public safer.
Republicans just
barely
won control of the House of Representatives,
and they did it because of the right-wing partisans that Republicans
put on the Supreme Court.
The UK's registrar of corporations was "reformed" to make it cheap,
quick and easy to create a corporation. Crooks
started
many fraudulent
corporations and used them to steal and hide millions.
An economist official at Bank of England says that leaving the EU has a
large
share of responsibility for the increase in food prices in the UK.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Pelosi's successor as leader of the Democratic
minority in the House of Representatives, is a strong and firm
plutocratist,
who supports a few progressive positions so people
won't
recognize how plutocratist he is.
Perhaps in your eyes the fact that he is black and Muslim makes his
election to that position something to celebrate. In my eyes, he's
just another plutocratist
congresscritter that we should try to
replace with a progressive.
Australia is investigating
the use of slave labor in building its
renewable power systems.
*[The right-wing Australian government's] "grassroots" nuclear power
survey linked
to consulting firm [working for US nuclear reactor
industry].*
Should we call this a "public-private partnership for profit"?
*World's biggest food [corporations] made £20bn in profits — while
warning
of price rises to come.*
Curbing global heating
will not save our planet's ecosystems. They
are threatened more immediately by other human activities including
deforestation, overgrazing, overfishing, desertification, and soil
degradation.
A relationship does exist: global heating will eventually destroy many
ecosystems, if they survive that long. But we have to curb the other
environmental threats, too.
Having fewer children
will help reduce all those forms of excessive human impact, all at once.
And will free up your effort to work on the other problems.
Australia has sentenced
a climate protester to over a year in prison for blocking one
lane of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The US should pressure Israel to
agree
to nuclear disarmament.
Maybe Iran and Israel would agree to nuclear disarmament together.
*President Lula da Silva wants to establish a new Federal Police unit
focused on deterring
environmental crimes.*
*Campaigners Demand
Deep
Cuts to Plastic Production as Global Treaty
Negotiations Ramp Up.*
Here is a set of
narrow
arguments against the "KOSA" bill that is
supposed to protect "children's" privacy, but will instead deny the
privacy of all internet services.
I agree with the arguments in general, but I need to state these
points of disagreement.
The British government has become
simply
incompetent.
They summon people to court by mistake, after reporting judgments
against them by mistake, after failing to notify them at all.
Indonesia plans
political
and sexual repression: it will be a crime to
(1) insult the president, the state, or the official ideology or (2)
have sex (except for married couples).
Reportedly Islamists are behind this attack on freedom in Indonesia.
Frontier
Airlines has eliminated telephone customer support. The only
way to communicate with the airline is through its web site.
I once flew on a Frontier flight, and noted that the staff seemed to
have a right ear and a left ear, but no front ear. That cast its name
in question. Now it should be called "No-ear Airlines."
I tried looking around that web site. For the most part, the
information seemed to be present and navigation worked. But I think
that most inquiries and actions depend on nonfree Javascript code,
which excludes me from doing them.
They invite people to use a chat system to get in contact with an
agent. That might be an acceptable solution, except that that chat
system is part of the web site and it seems to depend on Javascript
too.
One thing I noticed on the site is that the company is pressuring
people to use its cr…app rather than its web site.
Surveillance by the web site is limited; surveillance by a
cr…app is much more complete.
Google
promised not to save location data about "sensitive" places
such as abortion clinics, which some states threaten to sue or
prosecute people for going near. It did not make enough change to
eliminate the danger.
I am not surprised, because surveillance-based companies will always tend
to collect too much data and hold on to too much data.
However, data tends to get duplicated and get stored in various
places. The root of the search problem is (1) collecting location
data, (2) collecting personal identifying data, and (3) identifying
return visitors (with cookies).
An acceptable web service must not find out any of those facts about
you unless you request to send them. And it must do its job even if
you choose not to send them.
US citizens: call on
drug
stores to require people to wear masks.
41 Republicans plus
Manchin
used a filibuster to kill the proposed
railroad workers' contract that gave them sick leave.
Then the Senate
approved the contract lacking sick leave, the version that Biden had
asked for.
*Three UK Universities
Ban Fossil Fuel Industry Recruiters From
Campus.*
The UK's
immigration department sent 20 asylum seekers letters inviting
them to come to meetings to discuss their cases. When they arrived,
which in some cases was a big expense for them, they were told that
the staff did no plans for meetings with them that day.
Either these letters were a prank, or the UK government has become so
incompetent and confused that it can't carry out the simplest plan.
After seeing how
incompetent Tories are,
I think the latter is more plausible.
Senator Merkely has proposed a bill to put a heavy tax on
single
family homes when they are owned by big companies that own hundreds of
them.
The history, since 1940, of the series of
US
tax cuts for the rich
that impoverished the country.
Want to really make America great again? Tax the rich!
*The [corrupter's]
supporters can no longer avoid testifying before
grand juries in Washington DC and Georgia.*
*Big polluters given almost
€100bn[-worth]
in carbon [emissions]
permits [gratis] by EU.*
That was over a period of 9 years.
The FBI
and DHS focus disproportionately on foreign terrorists as
possible threats, and insufficiently on (right-wing) domestic terrorists
such as white supremacists and Nazis.
The Tyre
Extinguishers have deflated the tires of 900 SUVs around the world
as a protest against these dangerous gas guzzlers.
A Just
Stop Oil protester was sentenced to 6 months in prison for
blocking a highway for a while.
The court called this "causing a public nuisance," and I'm sure it
did. As these protesters say, it's nothing compared to the unending
public nuisance conditions that increased use of fossil fuels will
cause.
*Ukraine
needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could
finish off Putin and Russia.*
The proposal includes modern aircraft and longer-range missiles.
Careful strategic thought is required about whether to donate the latter.
Herschel Walker, MAGA maggot candidate for the Senate in Georgia,
filed for a tax break on a
"primary
residence" in Texas where he
really lives. This may have been illegal.
Pheromone-assisted insect traps can photograph and
identify pests
via image recognition.
This technique can potentially save greatly on the use of pesticides.
Unfortunately, under today's general practices, it will also be a trap
for farmers. It will be run by nonfree software, so it will snoop
on the farm and put the farm at a disadvantage. And the farmers won't
be able to repair it.
The US
system of producing medicines suffers from too much commercial
centralization (few producers) without much central planning.
Also a tendency to optimize for
efficiency
rather than reliability.
The result is susceptibility to shortages.
Anti-vax
fanatics in New Zealand would rather let their baby die
than let it get a transfusion of "vaccinated blood" for surgery.
They and others have convinced each other that there is some danger in
this.
George Monbiot: Farming and its
subsidies
are an increasing danger
to nature and the climate.
There is no mystery to why governments subsidizes farming. It is not just
that rich people want to profit from them; everyone wants the results.
But we need to cut down this unsustainable practice.
Fewer babies will certainly help!
A fracking
company accepted criminal liability for poisoning the water
of Dimock, Pennsylvania and will pay to replace the wells with new
water systems and to deliver clean water for the next 75 years.
Here
is a timeline of how the company caused the damage, of
enforcement efforts, and how the company resisted them.
This is justice in a narrow sense, but it won't clean up the water of
that region. It won't undo the lasting diminution of water supplies
in Pennsylvania. There may not be any feasible way to do that.
There must be many other regions of the US which have already suffered
similar damage.
We must not allow it to happen in any more places.
Leaders of the Oath Keepers have been
convicted of seditious
conspiracy for organizing the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol,
based on their conversations about same.
This gives the Department of Justice a basis for confidence in
bringing that charge against others who were involved, including
potentially the corrupter himself.
Antifascist individuals and groups are finding their
Twitter accounts
suspended.
Apparently Musk's idea of freedom of speech has a right-wing bias.
New York City's night-mayor has asked a wide variety of workers to
incarcerate
homeless people in mental hospitals — including people
who are supposed to help the public. This plan is explicitly not
limited to people who seem to pose a threat to others.
Many homeless people run away from shelters because the conditions there
are so unpleasant they would rather be on the street.
A host of criticisms
of this plan.
Once you get committed to a hospital — even if you did it by faking
insanity — it is reported to be very hard to prove you are sane.
*Australian PM Anthony Albanese urges US government to
end pursuit of
Julian Assange.*
Assange has been hounded for over a decade using a
series
of dirty tricks
and twisting of the law.
But this injustice has a bigger target than Julian Assange. Its
main target is the freedom of the press to report on crimes committed
by governments.
Democracy depends on whistleblowers, and it depends on journalists to
publish what whistleblowers report. The prosecution puts democracy too
in danger.
Massive
surveillance is part of the threat to democracy.
That is why we must limit the collection of databases of personal data,
not merely regulate how the data are used.
The Tories have adopted a "voter ID" law, which as always is systematic
suppression
of voting by voters who are poor, young, or marginalized.
In addition, merely through the extra work it requires at underfunded
polling places, it will cause chaos.
*Plibersek's "determination" alone won’t save the Great Barrier Reef –-
here’s
what needs to happen.*
Amnesty International: Colombian
thugs
used torture, rape, and
kidnaping to repress the mass protests of 2021.
They also used lesser forms of psychological punishment, such as
forcing people to strip.
The article embodies a strange set of values. It seems to take for
granted that acting based on sexism or racism is a more serious wrong
than rape.
I disagree with that. In my view, rape is wrong regardless of the
details of the victim.
The UK could
pretty much end transmission of HIV and illness from HIV,
but it doesn't spend the money to do so.
Victoria (in Australia) has adopted ambitious greenhouse gas goals.
Here
are suggestions for how to achieve them.
*Israel has stripped a prominent Palestinian-French
human rights
lawyer of his Jerusalem residency and is expected to deport him to France.*
Israel has had a pattern of
repression
of lawyers that defend the
rights of Palestinians.
Also a pattern of causing suffering by
inventing
excuses to take away
Jerusalem residency permits. For example, being away studying in a
university for a few years.
The article refers to "administrative detention", a euphemism
for putting people in jail without trial.
A Nigerian
student faces criminal charges of "defamation" after
beatings in jail were not enough to make him confess.
The details of what the student said are a side issue — treating
defamation as a crime always endangers freedom of speech.
The "big four" accounting firms are structurally embedded in
systematic
corruption.
They are "too
big to fail", but sooner or later one of them will fail.
The way to end the corruption is clear: prohibit accounting companies
from doing anything other than auditing.
If a sudden change is hard to implement, here's a way to force them to
make them separate gradually.
Tax the consulting gross sales of accounting firms a stated percentage
that rises annually. It could be 3% in the first year, 6% in the
second year, and so on. I think that in 5 years they will have moved
most of the consulting business to some new sister company.
The details could be adjusted so as to require splitting each current
company's non-auditing work into N or more independent new companies.
Other adjustments could make them split the auditing work among
a larger number of new auditing companies.
The insufficient competition in the US allows businesses with market
power to gouge by piling on "junk fees".
Booz
Alan has a monopoly
over some kinds of access to some US national parks and other public
lands, exercised via a "government" web site run by that company, and
pulls in much more income from junk fees than the US government agency
concerned actually gets.
But it's worse than that. Aside from the matter of price, use of that
"government" web site requires running nonfree software. Those parks
are off-limits to the free world.
I have visited some US national parks, and I paid cash to enter them.
Is that still possible? Can anyone investigate that site (see the
article) and report which parks and places can't be entered by paying
cash, without using any web site?
Or which parks and places can still be entered by paying cash,
without any web site?
Whichever list is shorter would be the more useful.
*Arizona elections
official goes into hiding after post-midterm threats*
from right-wing Big Lie fanatics.
*Three Georgia sheriff's deputies, all white,
charged
with battery after
beating black inmate.*
The video shows that they prepared to attack him, while he was
standing in a cell, doing nothing significant.
Two versions of the video have been published, one in which the
attack was intentionally blurred and one which shows what happened.
The thug
department promoted the former and the latter is hard to find.
*Canada accused of putting its
timber
trade ahead of global environment.*
Could the US
and China collaborate to curb global heating?
It seems to me that neither government has a strong enough commitment
to that cause. In the US, it is because Republicans are determined to
keep driving straight at the cliff. As for China, it seems to assume
that doing this slowly and arriving decades late is sufficient. The
two countries need to be set individually on the goal before they can
collaborate on it.
US citizens: phone President Biden and urge him to issue an executive
order requiring federal contractors to disclose all of their political
spending.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
US citizens: call on your state legislature to implement
fair
districting.
The EU has proposed a plan to
cut
plastic waste from consumer goods.
This is good, but what about
the
fishing nets?
When billionaires pledge to donate most of their wealth to charity,
there is no
guarantee that that money will ever reach a charity,
The system is complicated and the pledge may be almost meaningless.
Never mind their pledges — let's tax them a lot more.
*UK super-rich [are]
less
charitable than decade ago, says charity chief.*
Stop depending on them to give voluntarily, and tax them more!
*Biden urged to
threaten
Israel weapons halt over far-right concerns.*
How will Tories face the
NHS
strikes that are due to their 12 years of
budget cuts?
The House of Representatives narrowly passed a law to give railroad
workers the seven
days of paid sick leave (is that per year?) that
they want. Now the question is whether Republicans will filibuster it
and kill it, to ensure a strike.
*ALEC Lawmakers and Corporate Lobbyists Meet in D.C. to Debate
Rewriting
the Constitution, Punishing Socially Responsible
Businesses, and Protecting Misinformation.*
George Takei talks about
growing
up in an internment camp for
Japanese-Americans, and later coming out as gay.
Railroads in England cancel a lot of trains. But the ones they cancel
before 10pm the night before are
omitted
from the statistics, so the
statistics don't show how bad this really is.
Privatization makes this worse. Instead of government agency, which
would obey orders to report more useful figures, these are "private
companies" that have "rights" to state their cancellation rate in
a way that minimizes it.
The railroad passengers deserve rights, and the railroad workers
deserve rights, but there should be no stockholders or executives
involved in running trains that "deserve rights" over how the trains
run.
90% of US counties have had at least one
weather
disaster from 2011
through 2022. This figure does not count heatwaves.
There is no information about how much each disaster was due to global
heating, but it is a big cause of weather disasters now and going
forward. Each American should recognize that
"global heating is going
to hit the place I live."
That doesn't count the crop failures that are going to affect us all
even though the place they occur may be far away.
The article points out also that it would be more economical to
do things to prevent disasters than to repair them.
Businesses are pushing for a
federal
tax cut this year. As if they didn't pay too little tax already!
US citizens: call on Congress to
ban
assault weapons and
high-capacity magazines.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
By deciding to investigate Israel's killing of Shirin Abu Akleh,
the US is putting
limits on its willingness to support Israel
no matter what Israel does.
Qatar believes it can
bully
any and all parts of the British government
by pulling some of the investments that harm Britain.
The UK NHS is trying to
suggest
that nurses should not strike because
it would cause some operations to be delayed.
That statement is literally true, but the argument it is part of is
invalid. The main cause of postponing millions of operations every
year is mismanagement and underfunding by the government, and the
harmful consequences include the pay that is inadequate for nurses to
live on.
*China censors
maskless crowd footage in World Cup broadcasts.*
Apparently the contrast with them puts China in a bad light, in the
minds of many Chinese. Are they right? I won't assume that. They
can see when people die from the rigidity and harshness of the Chinese
state. But if China drops the effort to eradicate Covid outbreaks, it
could
kill millions of Chinese.
I think it would be better to correct the rigidity and harshness.
I agree with Sridhar that in what China needs in the long term to get
better vaccines and get most people vaccinated.
A court order not to retaliate against union organizers also requires
Amazon to read
the court's decision to all the employees at the
unionized plant in Staten Island.
I hope this requires Amazon to pay the workers for the time they pass
listening to this reading.
Comparing the US and British medical systems:
both
horrible but in
different ways.
The British medical system (the NHS) did not just grow with its
current problems. It worked much better until the Tories started
cutting its budget, through trickle-down politics based on worship of
the Invisible Hand. It is clear how to fix them: give the NHS enough
money to do its job.
The US medical system's problems did just grow, as the worshipers of
the Invisible Hand let gouging private companies get whatever they
wished for and blocked efforts to stop them. It is clear how to fix
these problems: create a public national medical system and sweep away
those greedy bastards. The usual term for this nowadays is
"Medicare
for all", though I think we should go further and set up a system of
VA hospitals for all.
*Netanyahu strikes
Israeli coalition deal with far-right [antigay fanatic].*
Hatred of gay or queer people is
not
a phobia, it is bigotry.
*War in space would have
immediate
effects [on civilian life.]
Attacks on satellites could take out GPS systems, banking systems,
power grids …*
A group of UN experts call for
putting
the Great Barrier Reef on UNESCO's
list of world heritage sites that are in danger.
*Monkeypox to be
renamed
mpox to avoid stigma, says WHO.*
This illustrates our society's tendency to cater excessively to
hypersensitivity. There is nothing in the name "monkeypox" which
insults anyone, and monkeys can't understand the word "pox".
What next — will they rename "chicken pox" to protect the feelings of
chickens, or people accused of timidity? How about renaming "Rock
Mountain Spotted Fever" so that the Rocky Mountains don't feel
stigmatized?
It is futile to bully
people to eliminate locutions because racists or
right-wingers could spin them in a nasty way. They can invent more
such things at any moment. The bullying would be a never-ending
series of self-inflicted blows, at which bigots would laugh and say,
"See how easily we make them go nuts!"
Forecast: expect Xi to
do
in many parts of China what he did to the Uyghurs
and to Hong Kong.
The island of Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, is being
taken over
by intrusive vines that grow too fast to remove.
Vines are covering buildings, farms, paths, and forests.
People find it hard to keep their farms going.
Massachusetts voters amended the state constitution to
increase the
tax rate a few percent for incomes over a million dollars a year. So
far so good. But the greedy rich have many ways to get rid of laws
that make them pay their fair share.
In the UK, many necessary life activities exclude people that don't use
snoop-phones full of nonfree software.
This article shows
how common that is.
The author cannot envision the idea of choosing to reject snoop-phones
as a matter of justice if you are capable of using one. But you can.
Every one of the restrictive activities that excludes the old people that
can't use a snoop-phone are likewise doing wrong to everyone that refuses
to use them.
And doing wrong to each person that does contact them with a
snoop-phone.
India is exporting
Hindu-supremacism and its violence to Britain. And
to the US.
Finally some influential newspapers argue for
dropping
the charges against
Julian Assange.
The UK government admits that tens of thousands of
homes
in the UK are not safe for people to live in.
This, together with various other issues including
the
Grenfell fire
shows that the UK has lost its ability
to enforce regulations on businesses that are meant to protect public
safety and well-being.
It
can't even run railroads well,
because it has privatized them.
I am not sure what the causes are. I've seen "cronyism" suggested as a
cause for some, but I suspect that another cause is catering
excessively to the wealthy and business. The companies that run the
privatized railroads get more importance than the passengers.
Watch out for a false sense of security.
The
US is still in danger
of being taken over by fascism.
The Republicans, by a margin of one seat in the House of
Representatives, seem to have succeeded in ensuring that the federal
government can't do anything before the 2024 elections to ensure our
elections are not rigged then.
Vaccine disinformation has
convinced
many to refuse measles vaccination,
and that is creating a completely unnecessary threat of measles.
(satire) *Cash-Strapped
Subway Threatens To Reveal Identities Of
Customers Who Eat Subway [food] If They Don’t Pay [ransom].*
The Tories
have heard the voice of Insulate Britain and proposed a plan
to insulate the homes of middle-class Britons.
It's a good idea, but middle-class homeowners could afford to pay back
this support out of the savings they will have. The government should
lend the money for middle-class homes, and give the money for
insulating poor people's homes.
Yanis
Varoufakis conjectures that Musk wants to turn Twitter into a
platform for surveillance capitalism,
and that everything he said
about freedom of speech was a red herring.
Global
heating killed 20,000 people in Europe through heat waves last summer
that were possible due to local heating.
Brains learn to predict other people's likely behavior and to save the
unconscious effort of figuring about concerns that never arise for
them. As a result,
powerful
people learn to be ruthless and not to
concern themselves with the feelings of the obedient people around them.
Putin
has banned any public mention of same-sex or same-gender
relationships.
Like DeMentis,
his law prohibits this only under certain conditions, but when his
followers interpret the conditions, there is nothing that is safe to say.
"Green Capitalism" sounds promising, but is it really capable of preventing
global climate disaster. A book
argues
that it is not: that measuring the
value of each thing in the world in monetary terms just won't do the job.
A committee came up with an estimate of the monetary value of a great
whale, One can question whether the monetary value captures the
importance of continued existence of whales, but maybe the result
would be adequate.
But what about the continued existence of a rare, endangered species
of small animals? If people calculate that without adding a term to
represent the value of simple existence of a distinct species, they
might get a minuscule number.
How many endangered species preserved are worth one living whale?
It's hard to make that question meaningful, It's like asking how much
money a human life is worth. Insurance needs to find a way to answer
that question, but is that the right way to understand the importance
of various things? Is that the right way to decide who lives and who
dies?
If you buy the book, please do not get it from Amazon.
Private equity companies are buying up medical specialist clinics in
the US, and creating
local monopolies that systematically gouge, and
even defraud.
This problem afflicts many areas of medicine, just as it affects many
other areas of life in the US.
For medicine, the
full
solution is a national medical system.
It would save the US money overall, but
might
require taxing the rich more.
However, the problem of concentration of industry needs a general
solution too.
Some US universities have
made
deals with sports betting companies.
The university helps promote gambling to the students, and in return
gets a share of what the students spend.
I don't believe in prohibiting gambling, but those who have your
well-being in mind will not encourage you to gamble.
* Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have
been quietly
transmitting sensitive financial information to [Facebook+Instagram].*
As well as other basic personal information.
The do this through a tracking pixel on their web sites. The info sent
comes from what the user enters in the web site; it seems that does not include
the detailed financial data that users hand over for the tax return itself.
Sending the latter to some other company might, I suspect, be a crime.
Millions of sites use the Facebook&Instagram tracking pixel
to send data about their visitors.
Google Analytics collects much of the same data, but not the user's
name. However, often it can figure out the user's identity in other ways.
The iMonsters' app store client program
collects
many kinds of data
about the user's actions.
There is a command to disable this collection, but it seems not to
have an effect.
Does it matter that
Julian
Assange has Asperger's syndrome?
(I avoid the term "autistic spectrum" because it is a misleading
overgeneralization.)
In principle, no. Publishing leaks about the horrible crimes of governments
is admirable and no one should be punished for that.
In practice, if it helps prevent Assange's extradition, I will be
glad. However, to avoid putting journalism in danger globally, saving
Assange from US vengeance based on personal grounds will not be
enough. We need to protect journalists and whistleblowers from
punishment for serving the public.
*Far-right extremist [Ben-Gvir] to be
Israel's
national security minister.*
He wants to give immunity to Israeli soldiers that shoot at
Palestinians, and execute Palestinians for various sorts of crimes.
In this ministry he would be in charge of thugs, and would surely
encourage them to commit violence. In Israel I was told that the
border police were especially cruel and violent towards Palestinians.
The documentary
"Tantura"
tells the story of Israel's expulsion of the
Palestinians of a town near Haifa, in 1948. The film-maker, Alon Schwarz,
faces revulsion for this.
I wish that Uri Avnery were alive to talk about the film and the
events. His article,
Truth
Against Truth,
provides some context.
Faux News
hammered
viewers with frequent reports about crime, until
election day.
"Think about crime — don't think about the help Republicans won't let the
government give you!"
Walmart drives its workers hard, but especially hard in the "holiday" season.
They are compelled to work
55
or even 60 hours a week and can't take time off
even for an emergency.
Australia will accept
the wives and children of
PISSI fighters
*SpaceX Workers Say They Were
Illegally
Fired for Open Letter
Criticizing Elon [Musk].*
Republicans have a
broad
plan: *to destabilize, weaken, and even
destroy the institutions that give a voice to people who don't agree
with their vision.*
Suggesting that NATO should
make
a rule to have dialog with a possible
attacker before any NATO state fights back against an apparent attack.
A UK thug
department has paid
damages for attacking protesters.
The thugs made a sudden attack at a peaceful demonstration.
The thugs
cited Covid lockdown regulations in force at the time, but that
can't justify a violent attack!
Paying damages and not admitting wrongdoing is not enough.
Tory budget plans are likely to
degrade
UK public services even
further.
San Francisco thugs
propose using robots
that can carry deadly
weapons, to respond to reports of incidents.
The criterion they propose for using this sounds very similar to the criterion
for shooting people. As we know, thugs often shoot people dead
in situations where that justification was not a good criterion.
The UK gave every homeless person a
place
indoors to sleep, for a
short time during the pandemic.
I think the UK did
not continue this for very long,
but that doesn't mean it can't be done again.
It may require taxing the rich more.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, don't starve critical
investments in healthcare, children and transit. Pass government
funding before the end of the year.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice not to let
the wrecker
use his new
presidential campaign to get off the hook for criminal
charges.
US citizens: call
on Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to remove all
medical debt from credit reports.
US citizens: call on
state
officials to disqualify the wrecker from
running for president or other offices, as the Constitution calls for.
US citizens: call
on Biden to advocate repeal of the ‘02 AUMF.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
US citizens: call on the FTC to
require
platforms to make their direct messages
end-to-end encrypted.
This is a half-measure. Truly secure encryption has to be done by a
free client program that the user installs independently of the
platform. Therefore it can't be implemented by a communication
platform.
If the encryption is done by the platform — either in its server, or
in its nonfree client program, or in code sent to the user's browser
(for instance, in Javascript) — then the platform has control over
the encryption, and can backdoor it at will.
US citizens: call on Congress to
raise
the debt ceiling now so Republicans can't use it as a lever for sabotage later.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
Musk has readmitted many right-wing extremists to Twitter,
including the bullshitter and people who deny that he lost
the 2020 election.
However, it prohibits
all users from posting links to the Distributed
Denial of Secrets web site, ddosecrets.com, which posts government
secrets leaked by whistleblowers.
A furniture company
shut
down its operations abruptly and fired all
its workers instantly, without notice. It also tried to deny them all
benefits — even the option to continue their medical insurance at
their own expense.
It may be illegal for a company to do that, but that's not enough. It
ought to be a crime for the executives and managers involved in the
decision.
I wonder why they shut down the company abruptly. Two ideas that
occur to me are (1) they decided to move operations to another
country and (2) the company was owned by private equity. Neither one
makes the action any less wrong.
As for the fact that they did this on one day of the year rather than
one of the other 364 days, or what method they used to inform the
staff, or the fact that some of them were sleeping, don't let those
minor details distract you. If your condemnation of bad treatment of
workers can be mollified by choosing such details better, that will
help businesses attack workers rights ore effectively. We must demand
the substance of treating workers decently, not merely the show.
Bolsonaro's Nazi propaganda and relaxation of gun laws in Brazil have
led to massacres
by Nazi fanatics.
*"A Death Sentence": Biden
Blasted
for Approving Oil Export Project.*
Failing to decrease oil extraction now can
easily
doom most people.
(satire) *Biden
Meets With Turkeys Who've Lost Loved Ones To Thanksgiving.*
Ukraine is now sending
subsidized food to some African countries.
Protests against strict Covid lockdowns have
spread
in Urumqi, the
capital of Xinjiang.
The next climate conference will occur in the UAE, a fossil-fuel
kingdom that is attacking Yemen with US support. There is not much
hope from an event held there. So Naomi Klein suggests that
civil
society boycott it and hold a parallel event.
Democrats had successes
among rural voters, and if they try harder they
can develop real strength there.
Calling on the IMF to
eliminate
the extra interest that it charges poor
countries.
Steven Donziger argues for ways to
tackle
global heating in
international law.
Creating the crime of ecocide is one of his solutions.
In the UK, workers who are sick are not interested in notes excusing
time off work — they are so desperately poor that they are
compelled
to work while sick.
Facebook closed
accounts that it found were spreading false information
on behalf of the US government.
CIA officials, appointed by the wrecker,
discussed assassinating
Julian Assange.
Instead they took the slow path that has been in use for several years.
The summary of Assange's history, in that article, is misleading on a
number of points.
This
is a better reference.
The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission proposes to deregulate new kinds of
nuclear power plants.
They have a history of seeking to please and serve the companies that
make nuclear power plants, so such a proposal makes me suspicious.
We should not build new,
"small"
nuclear plants
because that is too slow, expensive and risky to be of service
in preventing global heating disaster.
To go fast, we need to use the solution that is fastest and cheapest
to build: renewable power.
Iran
is expanding
its uranium-refining capacity. This suggests it intends to
produce nuclear weapons — though it could be a plan to generate
nuclear power instead of burning so much oil.
Sydney thugs
violently arrested
habitual prank protester Danny Lim and
left him seriously injured.
He told them at the outset he needed an ambulance, and when a passerby
offered to call one, the thugs
threatened to charge
him with a crime
if he did so.
Thugs should face criminal charges for making threats to falsely
accuse people, just as for actually doing so.
I don't quite get the job of his sign, nor the point of his protest
— but those details don't affect the issue here.
There are big
protests in an Apple factory in China,
and videos are circulating despite Chinese censorship.
Surveillance jungle: rental e-scooters in Paris are
very
strictly tracked.
And of course the renter has to identify perself to rent one.
"Convenient" disservices like these are what teach people to accept
surveillance. If we don't want a society in which one's every move is
known, we have to
reject
surveillance disservices.
*There will come a time for [peace] negotiations — but calls to reach a deal
with the Kremlin now are
more
wrong-headed than ever.*
I think it can't hurt to have negotiators continue to meet, since
occasionally
they can agree on a significant side issue.
But they must not aim to to pressure Ukraine into inviting defeat.
*The massacre at Club Q didn’t happen in a vacuum. There has been a
dangerous
escalation in hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric.*
Japan is meddling
in Australian politics by trying to pressure
Queensland not to increase the tax on exported coal.
That tax increase is a tiny step towards the vital goal of reducing
coal consumption. It is terribly insufficient, but opposing it
endangers all of us.
Biden's delay on ruling on whether Crown Prince Bone Saw could be sued
in a US court gave him an opportunity to appoint himself "prime minister"
and thus gain the benefit of a
shelter
in a pertinent treaty.
US citizens: phone your representative and senators
and call on them not to pass any tax cuts for business.
Handouts should be directed to non-rich Americans!
The Capitol Switchboard
numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *New STEM Program Teaches Students Skills
To
Appease Whims Of
Capricious Tech CEO.*
I find this especially on target because the absurdity it attacks
is the basis of the buzzword
"STEM" itself.
(satire) *British World Cup Attendees Accused
Of
Smuggling Alcohol
Into Stadium Through Bloodstreams.*
(satire) *Landlord Pledges To Address
Tenant
Infestation.*
An ironically misguided petition asks the US government to require
communication platforms to
encrypt
all private messages.
It would sure be wise for users to encrypt those messages. But that
won't be secure if the platform sets up the encryption and the
decryption. If you do that with software that the platform provides,
the platform could put in a back door to bypass it, making it
ineffective for security against snooping by that platform.
If you want encryption to provide real security, install the GNU
Privacy Guard and use it — to encrypt a message before you send it,
and to decrypt a message after you receive it.
Major US railroad workers'
unions
have rejected a contract offer that
didn't offer them enough.
The railroads are profitable and they should share these profits with
their workers. I'm disappointed with Biden for proposing a contract
that didn't give them enough.
A federal
court issued an injunction for Amazon to stop firing workers
for protesting unsafe working conditions.
Some players in the football world cup in Qatar planned to wear armbands
to support equal rights for queer people.
Qatar
said it would respond by
taking a step to expel them from the game, so they abandoned these plans.
Qatar
violates human rights egregiously — this is one example, but the
mistreatment of workers who built the facilities is even more blatant.
We should not allow Qatar any sort of position of special power over
any international activity.
*By consenting to Qatar's illiberal policies for residents and guests alike,
FIFA
has further besmirched its already tainted reputation.*
The EU would have the power to make FIFA yield to various human rights
rules and agree to require all future world cup hosts to accept them.
Starbucks is closing stores, and
40%
of those stores have unionized or
are organizing.
Starbucks has taken
anti-union
measures before.
Oregon's governor pardoned everyone
convicted
in Oregon of possessing a small
amount of marijuana.
Unlike Biden's pardons, this included non-US-citizens.
Many states and territories still need to do legalize marijuana
and pardon everyone convicted of possessing it.
"Stakeholder capitalism"
turns
out to do little for the groups
it is supposed to benefit
— it is at best lip service, sometimes
even a fraud.
*Senior
officers ordered "unlawful" arrests of journalists at Just
Stop Oil protests.*
They didn't explicitly say "arrest journalists", but they gave orders
to arrest protesters, and did not mention that journalists were a
special case.
I don't think they should be in a position of authority if they disregard
freedom of the press. Meanwhile, arresting protesters is bad too.
*SpaceX employees say they were
fired
for criticizing Elon Musk in
open letter.*
Heather Wallace, of suburban Texas, asked her child to walk half a
mile to their home. For this she was
arrested,
then pressured to plead guilty to "endangering a child". Eventually Texas decided it
was ok to let the child walk, but the guilty plea has taken away her
career and tied her up in mandatory lying.
It is horrible to force someone to apologize for something that was
not wrong. A group of bullies tried to do that to me. Fortunately,
they did not have the power to imprison me, so I stood up to them and
did not apologize
except
for certain things that I really felt it
would be better not to have done.
Using state eminent domain power to
seize
land and houses for the sake of
a private project is an attractive nuisance that inspires corruption.
Carbon-removal programs have always been a long shot. But now that
the planet-roasters have blocked the more reliable forms of action,
they may be the
Earth's
last best hope.
The thing is, they won't do much good if the planet-roasters treat them
as excuses to increase their emissions.
Democrats in Congress plan to pass a resolution to recognize that
the wrecker
has violated his oath to defend the US Constitution, and therefore is
barred
by the Constitution from running for any office in the US.
Comparing the economic situation of Americans in their 30s in 1990
with Americans in their 30s today measures the
tremendous harm
that right-wing politics has done to Americans generally.
The Senate found that
US
immigration thugs have sent women
prisoners for medical operations without getting their consent, and
without properly supervising the operations.
Twelve Senate Democrats voted
to
end the US Covid emergency law.
This would prevent Biden from suspending repayment of student loans.
It could also kick millions of Americans off medicaid. Right-wingers
would in general like poor people to die.
The Ukrainian soldiers and border guards on Snake Island, who told the
Moskva, "Russian
warship, go fuck yourself," were captured. The Putin
forces gave Ukraine no word about them and Ukraine believed they were
dead. In fact, they were imprisoned, and tortured, but not killed.
One, Bohdan Hotskiy, was eventually swapped for a Russian prisoner of
war, which is how we know how he was tortured. The rest remain prisoners,
as far as I can tell from this article.
About another woman who almost
died
from getting pregnant while living
in Texas.
Republican operative Senator Manchin is making sure the Democrats
cannot
eliminate the debt ceiling this year, and thus ensuring the Republicans can
use it for blackmail next year.
US citizens: call on your senators to
oppose
a forestry bill that
would require cutting down lots of mature trees. These trees store lots of
carbon from the air, and offer habitats that many species depend on.
To sign without running
nonfree
JavaScript code
from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: call on Biden to
extend
student loan repayments freeze
until cancellation is awarded.
US citizens: call on officials of your state to
disqualify
the wrecker from holding office, on grounds of insurrection.
*With Democrats in charge of the Senate and White House, "Republicans
will try to impose
economic pain on families so they can blame us and
seize power for themselves," [Senator] Warren noted.
Cutting Social Security and Medicare is the start of this, but they
plan to do more too.
Mainstream media don't admit that's what Republicans are doing,
and I don't think Biden will do it either.
The US is working
with other countries in which China has set up
secret repression stations to pressure Chinese expats.
The Momentum movement, which was supported by a large fraction of
Labour members, has
lost
many supporters as they see that Labour has been
taken over by Starmer and his plutocrats.
The question is, have they still got any chance of winning anything by
supporting Labour?
The US has laws to find people who might intend to buy guns and kill
people, and stop them from buying guns, but
makes
little effort to
make that system actually work.
I suspect that the system has another problem: people are not that
reliably predictable. Identifying some of those people is easy, but
setting the net fine enough to identify all of them would identify
lots of false positives too.
Examples of how damaging a part of the natural environment can
cause
enormous harm to humans who didn't know how they depended on it.
Deforesters in the Beni region of the Bolivian lowlands don't just cut
down the trees. They go on to
flatten
and destroy the uninvestigated
middens left by ancient inhabitants whose culture is very little
known.
The Bolivian government is encouraging deforestation to boost
agriculture. This contributes to global disaster, which could lead
our civilization to end up in ruins like the ones they are destroying.
The thugs
in Western Australia have a notable pattern of letting their dogs
attack
indigenous Australians, especially minors.
It is clear that the thugs
handling these dogs fail to keep the dogs
under proper control. Whether this is due to malice or
irresponsibility is not clear from this statistical information.
They should publish the videos of the dog attack on Jayden Abraham.
The US approved keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant running
10
additional years, from 2025 to 2035.
The article asserts that California is having trouble coming up with
renewable generation to replace the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant,
but also that ten-ish US power reactors have closed since 2013 due to
competition from cheaper renewable generation. It is not easy to
reconcile those two statements.
If California doesn't expect to have enough renewable generation
working by 2025, why doesn't it spend more money on building more
rather than on keeping the Diablo Canyon power plant running?
The important decision about whether to build a third runway at
Heathrow airport, which would imply a lasting increase in flying out
of the UK, is being made as a
battle
over the business interests of
various investors, including foreign governments such as Qatar and
China that are absolutely vicious.
The corruption/privatization of the UK government has squeezed the
public interest out of the decision.
A new tactic for right-wing global heating
denialists —
"Have faith
in the market to solve the problem!"
What about when we see where "the market" is taking us, and it leads
to disastrous heating? "Have faith, 2 or 3 degrees C of heating won't
be that bad." But we are barely coping with 1.1 degrees now.
"The market" operates constantly — always under the explicit and
implicit rules that society imposes on it. Societies frequently
change those rules, either explicitly and intentionally or
unconsciously. The question we face now is how to change the rules to
reduce the disaster we are creating. "Just let the rules sweep you
away" is not even an answer.
(satire) *Qatar
World Cup Games To Cut Off Human Sales After 75th
Minute.*
Wealthy people in Britain can pay hundreds of pounds for an ordinary
appointment with a general practitioner, because the NHS has been starved
to the point it
takes
weeks to be seen.
A Pakistani film about a trans woman, which won a prize at Cannes, is
now
unbanned in Pakistan, but it is still banned in part of India.
India is very bad in regard to censorship; many important works have
been banned.
* After being repeatedly humiliated by Prince Mohammed, Biden
continues
to appease an autocrat who disdains him.*
The international climate conferences have
never
agreed on the goal of reducing use of fossil fuels.
This year's conference saw a move to come closer to that position,
but it failed.
This shows how resolutely some governments insist on maintaining or
increasing their use of fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on Congress to
investigate
retired military members
working for foreign governments.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to
investigate
the Ticketmaster-Live
Nation monopoly and break it up.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
South Korea's president is
attacking
freedom of the press, by
punishing specific organizations that criticize him.
Since young voters mostly voted for democrats, Republicans propose to
raise
the minimum age for voting.
Voters around the US
approved
ballot initiatives to fund aid for
affordable housing and taxes on sale of expensive dwellings.
Robots that carry guns and can select targets are
already
being made.
The ones mentioned in this article cannot fire the guns without an
order from a human soldier.
If we want robot weapons to appreciate the value of human lives, we
had better treat their lives as having value too. If and when they become
capable of appreciating the value of lives of others, they may be ready
to deserve that.
The scenario of cracking the security on robot weapons should remind
us that humans too are vulnerable to this too. Right-wing extremists
cracked the mental security of US soldiers and
thugs, brainwashing
them to attack US democracy in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol.
No system
*The big takeaway from Cop27? These
climate
conferences just aren’t
working.*
*There was no commitment to cutting the emissions causing accelerating
this crisis, without which this agreement is nothing more …
than a "down-payment on disaster."*
The planet roasters
have spread their influence both overtly at the events
and out of sight through influence on governments. And then there are the
business-supremacy treaties.
Considering that the effect of these systems of influence will be to
kill hundreds of millions of people, I think it is time to wipe out
those systems, and never mind what property and financial interests
get "harmed." Indeed, "harming" those interests is necessary — their
wealth gives them power to keep disaster going, so the only way to
reduce the damage they can do is to is to wreck some of their wealth.
Shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant
caused damage
to structures that are not critical.
Who fired these shells? They chose targets that would provoke anxiety
but were unlikely to cause real danger. In other words, it appears to
have been a sort of bluff. This is indication (though not proof) that
the Putin forces did the shelling.
We should not take seriously their claim that the shots came from
Ukraine; they have no credibility.
T appears that Putin's plan does not include causing any significant
damage, but plans occasionally go wrong. It behooves Ukraine and
Putin to agree on a plan to demilitarize the power plant itself.
But I don't expect Putin to agree to this.
Animals bred in zoos
evolve
to be less fit to survive in the wild.
This is a predictable consequence of natural selection. Animals'
survival in a breeding program does not depend on the characteristics
that are needed for survival in the wild, but maintaining those
characteristics has costs. So they will tend to lose those
characteristics.
It would be interesting to see what happens after those
captivity-adapted animals are released. Do they respond to the
selection pressure of wild existence by evolving in the other
direction? That seems likely if enough of the original wild
population remains. But if there is very little of the original wild
population, the superior wild characteristics might have been lost
entirely.
*The 1.5C
climate goal died at Cop27 — but hope must not.*
Alas, that was our only chance for a world free of blatant changes
in weather and climate.
*McDonald’s and Walmart beef suppliers
criticised
for "reckless" antibiotics
use.*
I've been posting about this danger for many years. These producers
are choosing the actions in their short-term best interest, and our
government hasn't got the power to force them to follow long-term
interests.
South Koreans separate food waste from other waste, and hand it in
in special bags for municipal composting. This
almost completely
prevents the social burden of food waste.
*Beware self-made "genius": entrepreneurs promising the earth.
Just
look at Elon Musk.*
Starmer is proud
of having many Tory friends.
I conjecture that this is because he doesn't disagree
with them all that deeply.
An international vote
adopted
more protections on sharks,
which are being wiped out by the
trade
in shark fins for Chinese conspicuous consumption.
Kiribati's president wants the rest of the world to
pay
the cost of
protecting the Kiribati islands from rising seas.
To do this for 10 or 20 years might be feasible. If we curb global
heating fast, the problem may then vanish as a result. But if
global heating
continues unchecked, the idea is hopeless.
Perhaps the president is well aware of this and is actually pushing for
the major countries to curb global heating quickly. It is worth a try,
for the sake of each and every one of us.
While Covid-19 preoccupied the medical systems of Europe, a million or so
people who had contracted cancer
did
not get tested until late.
They may die from this.
Three Russian officers were
convicted
of murder on grounds of being
responsible for deploying the Buk missile launcher that was used
to shoot down flight MH17.
I think it is wrong to charge soldiers with murder, in any form,
simply for being involved with deploying a weapon, which weapon was
later fired at civilians by mistake with fatal intent. That is not
murder.
If soldiers had knowingly fired it at a civilian aircraft, that would
be murder. But no one tried to prove that such a thing happened.
To respect the laws of war includes steadfastly refusing to stretch or
twist them to "get at" people because they are on a side we oppose.
We must support applying them evenhandedly.
*Seventy five countries led by the US, UK and France are expected to
sign a declaration in Dublin on Friday to
refrain
from urban bombing.*
Russia, China, Israel, and India said they would not sign. Ukraine
also refuses to sign, but maybe it would sign if Russia does.
*If you're outraged by XR and Just Stop Oil,
imagine how disruptive
climate breakdown will be.*
If you are concerned about the works of art that Just Stop Oil
protesters threw liquids at, keep in mind that if civilization
ceases to have spare funds to maintain museums, some of them
will be exposed to the elements and decaying. The rest will have been
taken by billionaires who expect to save a fraction of you, at the
cost
of becoming their slaves.
Some people are convinced that prosperity requires a growing
population —
even in the US.
We can't afford a growing population in the US. It uses too much
resources already. I'd say that survival, in the long term, requires
a gradually shrinking US population. People in the US consume so much
resources that a decrease in the US population is crucial for the
world as a whole.
A "young population" is a harbinger of disaster.
We can enable ordinary Americans to prosper and cut down the resources
we use, if only we could put an end to plutocracy that demands
ever
more billions for each billionaire.
We have plutocracy because the billionaire plutocrats have purchased
laws (and judges) that
assure
them the power to buy more laws and
court decisions.
Playwright Caryl Churchill was given a lifetime achievement award.
Then the award committee
took
the award back because Churchill had
expressed support for Palestinians' Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
campaign.
Artists are entitled to have political views, like anyone else, but
judgments about their merit as artists should not judge them by their
views on political issues.
Climate talks must
consider
reforming agriculture so as to end its
large greenhouse emissions.
Workers at over 110 Starbucks stores
went
on strike Thursday.
A few activists heckled Biden's speech at Cop29. They were
banned from
the whole event after that, under the excuse that they "put lives in danger".
We expect Egypt to carry out censorship, but US officials should be
better than that.
Kari Lake, a Republican election liar, was
defeated
for governor of
Arizona. Now the question is whether she will try to bluff by
claiming she actually won, and, if so, how the state will put a halt
to the imposture.
Supposedly leftist President Boric wants Chile to
sign
the TPP —
which would eliminate Chile's right to regulate many areas of
business and health.
Fossil fuel companies use these
business-supremacy treaties
to attack
measures for decarbonizing.
Boric also wants Chile to sign the Energy Charter Treaty, a
business-supremacy treaty
designed specifically to interfere with
measures to reduce use of fossil fuels. It is effectively a suicide
pact.
If you are in Chile, launch a fight against this absurd plan.
Right-wing politicians in Texas have, surprisingly,
supported
criminal justice reform, and this has allowed Texas to close
many of its prisons.
*Secrecy Enabled by Rich Countries Lets Corporations
Dodge $90 Billion in
Taxes Per Year.*
The Cop27 climate conference
achieved
very little of its main goals.
but did make progress towards an agreement about having
heavy-emissions countries
pay
to help poor low-emissions countries. The armies of fossil fuel
lobbyists seem to have stymied it.
Kemp arranged to
rig
the Georgia election for governor, just as he did
when he was first elected governor.
The Netherlands will
ban
possession of nitrous oxide because a small
fraction of car collisions are attribute to use of it.
The cops say (about a three-year period)
there were almost 1,800 road accidents involving nitrous oxide,
including 63 fatal collisions, according to a police survey reported by
the Dutch public broadcaster ONS.
There were a total of
582
road fatalities in 2021.
These figures are not quite comparable, but we can estimate around
20 road fatalities in 2021 that were related to use of nitrous oxide.
That is a rather small fraction of 600. I don't think drugs
should be banned for such small reasons. I believe they ought to try
an education campaign to help people use nitrous oxide safely.
Certain basic safety precautions that San Francisco hippies make an
effort to teach each other could win the community's support and be
more effective than a prohibition.
The Tories have told housing inspectors to put the
blame for dangerous
situations on the residents, not on the building owner who could actually
fix the problem.
In some cases, fixing substandard housing requires changes that
the tenants would not be allowed to make, even if they knew how,
since they don't own the house.
Ticketmaster has a monopoly on selling tickets for many kinds of events.
Now Americans may
demand to break it up.
Over a century ago, the US government knew how to break up monopolies,
and it did so systematically in every area. That is what we need.
But my progressive
tax
on gross income may convince companies to split
themselves up.
Musk invited Twitter users, including bots, to
"vote"
on whether to give the
corrupter an account again.
Since it was Musk who decided who could vote, and how often, his unofficial
elections are no more meaningful than Republicans' official elections,
Supreme Court justices sternly condemned this year's leak of the
as-yet-unpublished Dobbs decision that would overturn Roe v Wade. One
of them, Alito, is now proved to have
leaked
a future decision to a
rich right-wing supporter in 2014.
Let's not let secondary matters such as leaks steal the stage from
primary matters. The leaking of either of these rulings was a
secondary issue compared with the two bad rulings themselves. Alito
is a participant in both of these rulings, as well as one of the
leaks.
Everyone involved in using water from the Colorado River is being told
to reduce
the amount used. It won't be easy, but otherwise the Glen
Canyon Dam will stop generating electricity.
Twitter contains many years of tweets that are crucial records for
historians, and now there is a
danger
that all or a large part of them
will suddenly be lost.
We don't know who carried out a terrorist bombing on the street in
Istanbul, but Erdoğan has made this an
excuse
to bomb the Syrian
Kurds.
US citizens: call on the U.S. to
support a Fossil Fuel
Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Faux News
and associated newspapers have turned on the
bullshitter,
and are now
supporting governor DeMentis.
The Tories plan to
cut
spending to help the poor
after years of cuts that cut into the bone. This is not inevitable,
it is a choice.
The underlying choice is about who matters and who does not.
As usual, for Tories, those who matter are the rich.
The mainstream media support that choice by selectively presenting
parts of the truth, and the views of banksters.
Attacking famous works of art in ways that won't actually damage them
is a sort of a sham
attack. It may reassure people that there is no
real danger. There is indeed no real danger in these protests, but the danger
of global heating disaster is quite real.
Eventually, these protests will lose the power to startle, and stop
doing any good.
*How Michigan Democrats
took
control for the first time in decades.*
*Draft Cop27 agreement
fails
to call for "phase-down" of all fossil fuels.*
*John Fetterman shows how Democrats can
win
back working-class Trump voters.*
A bird of ill omen: pallid swifts, which normally winter around the
Mediterranean Sea, are
wintering
up north in Britain.
Scientists are collecting samples of the
hundreds
of thousands of tons of
microbes that wash, annually, off the surface of melted parts of glaciers.
A false
accusation on Instagram against the Iranian government claimed
that it had sentenced 15,000 protesters to death.
In fact, only one protester has been sentenced to death, though some others may also
face execution.
To kill even one person for protesting is very shameful, but opponents
of the regime must take more care to ensure they continue to deserve
to be trusted.
Egypt has not sentenced Alaa Abd el-Fattah to death, but he
may die
from a hunger strike.
Most people in the UK agree that the
UK
should pay part of the costs
for poor countries of "climate action".
The problem with this poll is that it poses the questions in the wrong
order. First of all, how much will "climate action" (a vague term)
cost? That depends on another question: what exactly is "climate
action"? Are we talking about sea walls and drains, or are we talking
about decarbonization?
If we get cracking on reducing
global heating and other damage to
natural ecosystems, the total price will be less; it may be bearable.
In that case, it will make sense to adjudicate who ought to pay what
share.
If on the contrary the planet roasters continue to delay actions to
reduce the damage, the cost may grow to far more than the whole world
can ever pay. That will mean we have hit total disaster, and there is
no longer a global system in which any adjudication could actually be
carried out, so the question has become purely theoretical.
What about intermediate scenarios? I can imagine that millions of
people in wealthier countries would say, "Yes, I agreed we should pay
part of the costs of helping poor countries cope with
global heating,
but there is a limit. We refuse to live in penury!"
To help poor countries is feasible and just only if the rich people in
the wealthy countries bear most of this burden. We non-rich must not
accept this burden for our countries while leaving until later the
question of how much of that burden falls on the rich people.
We know that they will try to dump all of it on the non-rich.
*Republicans scrape
back control of US House after underwhelming midterms.* This means
that one dissenter among them can defeat any legislative plan.
The Senate is likely block their bills, too.
The question is, how far will Republicans go in holding the whole country
hostage to impose their demands.
NATO has pretty much concluded that the missiles which hit Polish
territory were Ukrainian
anti-missile missiles, which were fired at a
Russian missile and not at the ground where they hit.
* Island countries are more vulnerable to government oppression after
natural disasters — according to new research — and there are concerns
that the increased frequency of weather-related events due to the
climate crisis, could see the further
rise
of autocracies around the
world.*
*Australia told to
end
new fossil fuel subsidies if it wants Pacific
[island nations'] support to host climate summit.*
To subsidize fossil fuels is a terrible thing for any country to do.
The Labor government is much less friendly to fossil fuels than the
previous right-wing government, and it has reduced the subsidy,
but not reduced it to zero.
Smoking both marijuana and tobacco is
more
likely to cause lung damage
than tobacco alone.
Lula spoke at Cop27 and warned that
no
place on Earth is safe from
climate disaster. His program for Brazil is to protect the forest.
Curbing population growth
will
not help the urgent measures we need in
order to curb global heating in this decade.
Reducing the birth rate won't make a big difference in just a few years.
However, if we do enough in this decade to win a chance for
civilization's future, the task of preventing global disaster will not
be finished. That will take decades. During that time, reducing the
birth rate will make a difference — especially when it comes to
returning large amounts of land to the wild and reducing total
consumption of natural resources.
Iranian thugs
were recorded
shooting at the public in a metro train
station in Tehran. Other thugs attacked women inside the train.
To thwart the plan to use face recognition against protesters, I
suggest protesters arm themselves with the tools required for
destroying the state repression cameras mounted in public places where
protests are likely. That would include ladders.
*Xi Jinping's cordial tone at G20
does
not herald softer foreign policy.*
He is playing two roles in parallel: good empire-conqueror and bad
empire-conqueror.
A volley of Musketry has
driven
out 3/4 of Twitter's remaining employees.
This reinforces my suspicions that Musk's damage to the company
is his aim, not a mistake.
One
Tory minister is a bold champion of defending nature and the
climate. *Nature restoration, the climate crisis, sewage in our
rivers — people care fundamentally about these things.*
Q: What do pirate kids study in pirate school?
A: Baking — so they can qualify for pie rating.
I know it won't be easy to get the House to pass expansion of the
Child Tax Credit, but it is vital that you and the Democrats be no
less stubborn than Republican terrorist politicians.
1.
Immediately stop insuring new and expanded coal, oil, and gas projects.
2.
Commit to phase out insurance for coal, oil and gas companies in line with 1.5ºC.
3. Divest all assets from
coal, oil, and gas companies that are not aligned with a 1.5ºC pathway.
4-. Adopt a policy to ensure
the projects and clients you insure respect the right to Free, Prior,
and Informed Consent (FPIC) of impacted Indigenous Peoples.
4+.
Adopt a policy to ensure the projects and
clients you insure respect the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent
(FPIC) of the people of impacted areas.
When Apple removes an app store for allegedly failing to meet its
security obligations, it could take a long time to figure out whether
the action was warranted, and during that delay, the suspended app
store’s customers could lose access to the media they’ve purchased,
If you have "purchased media" through an app, why in the world would
you "lose access to it" if that app ceases to function? Is the EFF
assuming that the "media" is covered with digital shackles, so you
can't play said "media" except through a nonfree program that tracks
and restricts you? It looks that way. Even worse, EFF's statement
legitimizes such shackles.
In the case of audiobooks, Apple uses its high fees to clear the field
of competitors for its own product, Apple Books, which sells books that
are permanently locked (through Digital Rights Management) to Apple’s
platform.
The "worst outcome" according to the EFF would be the lack of some
sort of convenience. In the digital world of today, much worse
outcomes are possible, and indeed likely.
*The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover
from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised, destroy the American
experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.*
(If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.)
Tanzania suffers from a "young population,"due to a government that pushed for a bigger population.
A young population is a harbinger of probable megadeaths to come.
*All hail Jeff Bezos the philanthropist! The rest of us will just keep paying our taxes.* I despise Bezos for more than just the reasons that are widely agreed with. Because of the unjust policies of Amazon, I would refuse to deal with it even if it were just 5% of its actual size. And all of its competitors too, if they do similar bad things.
*Germans turning 18 to be offered €200 culture pass "birthday present".*
I think this is a wise policy.
US citizens: call on the FTC to thoroughly investigate supermarket giant Kroger's proposed merger with Albertsons.
A court already ruled against it, but that's not inevitably final.
Everyone: call on the Florida High School Athletic Association remove questions about menstruation from its student health forms.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to fight Republican election lies.
US citizens: call for an investigation of Salafi Arabia's ownership of a significant part of Twitter.
A terrorist bombing took place in Istanbul, targeting civilians. Turkey blamed the Kurdish militant group PKK, and the Syrian Kurds, but the PKK says that it does not approve of attacking civilians and had nothing to do with it.
The Putin forces have admitted that they were forced out of the north Kherson region by Ukraine's interdiction of supplies.
This article gives more information on their widespread looting and sabotage. Some looting had to have been organized by the Putin forces commanders. Some sabotage was carried out on the Nova Kakhova dam, Ukraine cannot try to repair the dam until it has chased the Putin forces out of artillery range. Even then, the Putin forces might fire missiles at it,
Google will pay damages of around $400 billion for tracking locations of users who had said not to track them.
This suggests three questions to me.
Most UK newspapers are right-wing and will attack any personal detail about an important Labour politician in innumerable absurd and vicious ways. Trying to give them nothing they could attack is self-defeating.
Angela Rayner, who I believe is the only former ally of Corbyn in an important position in Labour, just tried the opposite tactic: tell them something about her they are sure to revile (but not actually wrong in any way), and dare them to attack her.
Bravo, Ms Rayner!
Medical care in US prisons tends to be inadequate. If you have a minor treatable problem, the prison staff can deny you treatment so you develop a serious problem. If you have a serious problem, they can treat it insufficiently or badly, so that you die from it.
I suspect that their attitude is that anyone who isn't satisfied with the medical treatment received is a troublemaker and should be punished by suffering from the disease.
Interviews with Republicans reveal their split between the corrupter and DeMentis.
We must all recognize that increasing human population is a major obstacle to saving civilization from environmental danger.
See also
We need the human population to start decreasing, to save civilization. But if we want civilization to survive, we must also prevent human species from dying out entirely. The decrease in sperm counts, recorded since 1970, is global, and has sped up since 2000.
There is some evidence that the decrease is due to prenatal environmental pollution.
*India "committed to clean energy" but continues to boost coal production.*
The FBI is investigating the shooting of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen abu Akleh. Israel condemns the investigation on principle.
The need for this investigation is because Israel's investigation refused to recognize that soldiers must have chosen to kill her for no legitimate reason.
The Energy Charter Treaty, a business-supremacy treaty designed to prevent any and all measures to reduce fossil fuel extraction, incorporates a fundamental conflict of interest which tends to bias its judgments in favor of fossil fuel companies.
However, that is a secondary problem, because the treaty is explicitly designed to promote fossil fuel companies and interfere with measures to regulate them. Even if every judgment were made in a perfectly honest fashion, the tendency would be for them to do harm.
Interestingly, most CEOs don't say they believe they morally deserve to be paid enormous sums. On the contrary, many say the gap should be smaller. But they are accustomed to receiving high pay offers, for practical reasons that the article explains, and they don't insist on being paid less than that.
What should society do about this? We could ask investors, executives and directors to consider making executive salaries smaller. But the same factors that have made executive salaries so high are likely to make that request ineffective.
I suggest we instead increase the tax rate on high incomes, and close the loopholes that they use to avoid taxation entirely. It is the obvious solution that many people don't consider because plutocratists have smeared it.
How about the restoring the Eisenhower income tax?
"Feminist" education that reduces gender stereotyping is good for boys as well as for girls.
The UK is considering imposing a national ID card once again.
Britons, you defeated ID cards 15 years ago. Now you will have to defeat it again.
The question of what data the state will or won't link to the national ID number is a red herring, because many other organizations are likely to index databases by national ID number. It will become the easiest way to keep a data base about individuals. They will do this even if they don't really need to verify anyone's identity.
In Barcelona, I learned 15 years ago, the municipal swimming pools recorded who was a paying member by their national ID numbers. All they really need is to verify that a client paid for a membership, but checking the national ID card was quick and easy — and unjust.
The state too is likely to include a person's national ID number in other data bases of personal data.
Stephen Kinnock is the MP for Aberavon in Wales. If you know people who live there, please talking about the issue with them.
*Australia criticised for resisting Cop27 push to end international fossil fuel subsidies.*
Two apparently Russian missiles hit Poland in the region near the Ukrainian border. NATO will probably not respond directly militarily.
Although anything Putin says is likely to include lies, it is possible that these missiles were not fired intentionally at Poland.
Young people living near an Iraqi oilfield have a very high frequency of cancer, apparently due to pollution from flaring gas from the oil wells.
*Study suggests 24% of 12- to 34-year-olds globally listen at "unsafe level" on devices and visit noisy venues.*
*Trump repeats prison rape threat against journalists, has plans to "brutally imprison significant numbers of reporters," says Rolling Stone.*
*Elon Musk Would Have Done Better With Twitter If He’d Read Noam Chomsky.*
It is amusing to see Musk wildly change Twitter's rules and find that each change backfires worse than the previous one.
I don't care about Twitter the way many people do, because the requirements for having a Twitter account include things I won't do. And even if I did them, I couldn't afford the time it would cost me to actually use Twitter.
*The 1.5C climate target is dead — to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it.*
Every target will be cursed by planet roasters just as this one was, until the world conclusively defeats them and renders them powerless.
* All students at the University of Barcelona will have to take a mandatory course on the climate crisis.*
*'Welcome' But 'Must Be Improved': Groups React as Biden Unveils Plan to Cut Methane [emissions].*
The Putin forces meticulously destroyed all sorts of infrastructure in the areas of Kherson as they retreated.
This destruction was not limited to electricity, phones, and the Nova Kakhova dam. They destroyed even a small town school building, according to another article.
Fanatical Muslims in Pakistan banned the release of a Pakistani film that was submitted as Pakistan's entry for consideration for an award.
There is no chance that Corbyn will be allowed to run again under the Labour Party banner. Starmer is blocking anyone who wants change that goes beyond tweaks. Corbyn says he will run for reelection; perhaps he will have to run as an independent.
Given Starmer's plutocratist policies and dirty tricks for imposing them on the party, it is clear he will not allow Momentum or anyone else who wants more leftist policies to have any influence. If I were British, and if Corbyn had inspired me to join Labour, I would quit and support something else.
Could Corbyn join the Green Party and perhaps run as a Green candidate?
Important hospitals are closing in US inner cities, leaving the people who live there (mainly poor, mainly from disprivileged groups) in danger of dying on the way to a more distant hospital.
*When universities accept money from the fossil fuel industry, they demonstrate a complete lack of regard for their students' futures.*
*Tasmanian salmon farms used more than a tonne of antibiotics in 2022 disease outbreaks.*
This tends to make bacteria evolve resistance, which can kill people. Bacteria can share genes even between species, so resistant bacteria infecting salmon can transmit resistance to other bacteria that infect humans.
Faux News brings up distraction pseudo-issues to swing elections. The mainstream media pick up the same pseudo-issues.
Melting permafrost in the Arctic leaks CO2 and methane, and promotes large wildfires. That can make the difference between survival of civilization and destruction of civilization.
Secondarily, the melting causes buildings to sink into the melting permafrost underneath them.
Countries can continue scientific cooperation even when they are at war, if they decide to. It is important for the US and Russia to agree to do this. The US can make an exception to its sanctions for specific research projects.
Automated car control features supposedly will make the car safer, but they can just as easily backfire.
A court blocked the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.
We should not have allowed Penguin and Random House to merge. And we should not have allowed a giant conglomerate to buy either Simon & Schuster. The bigger a company is, the harder it is to keep it from harming people, intimidating people, or cheating people.
Musk's takeover of Twitter is a leveraged buyout. Musk could have borrowed the money himself, but he chose to foist the debt on Twitter. That will make it difficult for Twitter to survive, and he could hardly be unaware of this.
This approach means $13 billion less that Musk will lose if Twitter goes bankrupt. These facts increase my suspicion that he aims to destroy Twitter.
Nonetheless, this is only speculation. I can't be sure it is true.
Democrats now control the government of Michigan.
This is the result of an initiative petition for impartial redistricting. Republicans can no longer elect a majority of the legislature with a minority of votes.
Musk's new "free speech" Twitter put a spam warning on a message that made a quip criticizing Musk for his handling of Twitter.
Should we call that site "Musk-ovy" now?
*Profits at world's seven biggest oil firms soar to almost £150bn ($173bn) this year.*
The Taliban will henceforth impose the full cruelty of Islamic law.
The Putin forces have repeatedly thrown large numbers of untrained and ill-equipped conscripts into attacks against Ukraine's experienced army, with the result of killing most of the conscripts.
Is the US EPA distorting its criteria to please the pesticide industry by avoiding banning the herbicide paraquat?
The article offers reasons to suspect it may be doing that, but not conclusive proof.
It is an exaggeration to say that paraquat is "banned across the world"; According to Wikipedia, it is banned in the EU since 2007, and the UK and Switzerland; the article says it is also banned in China.
How many years will be required to conclusively determine whether there has been a decrease in Parkinson's disease among agricultural workers in Europe, those who are working on crops on which paraquat was used before 2007?
Australia will buy the land of people in Lismore whose homes are now vulnerable to repeated flooding, so they can move without being made destitute.
This is the right way to deal with the spread of flooding, However, it doesn't mean that sea-level rise is no longer a problem. One way or another, society will inevitably bear that cost, and must go to great lengths to curb global heating to minimize this and other costs.
Republican voter-suppression measures make it very difficult for some disabled people to vote at all.
Serbia is politically dominated by an ideology that calls for conquest of neighboring lands that "are supposed to be" part of Serbia, and lionizes the war criminals of the 1990s. They idolize Putin for trying to conquer Ukraine, because that provides an example of what they want Serbia to do on a smaller scale.
Syria is investing in convincing tourists to come there and ignore Assad's record of murder and torture.
They must feel that since Egypt and Salafi Arabia succeed at this, Syria can do it too.
(satire) *AI Software Company Patches Bug That Caused App To Treat Black People Equally.*
(serious): This being a piece of nonfree software, I presume the correction made it treat everyone equally badly.
*Voters in Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon, and Vermont approved ballot measures Tuesday that would bar forced labor as punishment for those convicted of crimes in those states.*
The citizens of Nebraska voted to raise the minimum wage, step by step up to 15 dollars per hour.
Future US elections will be in danger from 210 or more election liars who were elected to federal and state offices.
(satire) *New Legislation Would Prohibit Texting While Stabbing.*
1/5 of all black adult citizens in Tennessee have been disenfranchised due to past felony convictions.
DeMentis may be supplanting the corrupter as the paramount leader of US fascists.
The US has threatened Australia with punishment if it signs or even praises the global treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons.
A student at the University of Kentucky got drunk and shouted a taboo racist insult at another student. She has been expelled and charged with various crimes.
Racist insults are nasty behavior, and it makes sense to respond discipline students for them, as as to teach them not to be nasty to other students. But this punishment is too much for any insulting words to deserve.
We have already used up the carbon budget with the fossil fuel reserves now being pumped, but the planet roasters plan to develop a lot more reserves which we cannot afford to burn.
*Automakers Poised to Sell 400 Million More Gas-Powered Cars Than Planet Can Handle.*
*US Mega-Banks [are] Behind 1/3 of [the world's] Climate-Destroying Oil and Gas Expansion.*
Thee banks are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.
Democrats supported the campaigns of several extremists Republicans in the Republican primaries, hoping that they would be easier to defeat. This tactic worked: all those Republicans lost in the general election this month.
It appears that most of the Putin forces managed to escape across the Dniepr river, while Ukrainian forces moved in and took control of the northern part of the Kherson region.
I was hoping they would deal the Putin forces an additional defeat in the process. It will be hard for Ukraine to advance across the Dniepr. Its next attack will have to be elsewhere else.
Democrats will retain control of the Senate, and a victory in Georgia's coming runoff could give Democrats a 52 to 49 lead (counting Vice President Harris). That would enable them to overcome the opposition of Manchin and Sinema.
However, they won't be able to pass much legislation for the next two years if they don't control the House of Representatives.
Ethiopia and Tigray have made a deal about delivery of humanitarian aid.
Z-library, which hosted unauthorized copies of millions of e-books, has been somehow shut down by the US government, This is an injustice to the readers of books.
Shame on the US government for taking side of repressive publishers' against readers. The US government wants you to use the authorized copies of e-books, but in this area "authorized" does not mean "just." Quite the contrary, most "authorized" commercial e-books are intentionally unjust to the readers, designed to impose repression.
When the authorized copies are repressive, the only morally legitimate digital copies are the unauthorized copies. Accept nothing less!
Many of them are distributed by amazon.com, a company so nasty that it deserves an across-the-board total boycott.
US citizens: call on the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, then pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act before the end of the year,
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to confirm Biden's judicial nominees.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: for protecting the tricolored bat as an endangered species.
Putin's officials announced that the Putin forces will pull out of the city of Kherson.
Assuming this is serious, Ukraine should not let those soldiers leave without a fight. If they do, Ukraine will have to fight them on another front next year. Ukraine now has the opportunity to try to cut them off so that the survivors are compelled to surrender. The loss of Kherson will embarrass Putin, but the loss of thousands more troops will weaken the Putin forces.
More than 50 poor countries are in danger of defaulting on their debts. The article says, "bankruptcy," but there is no system of bankruptcy for countries. They face being hounded for the payments they cannot make, having their public assets taken, and having their education and medical systems shut down.
Climate defense will also be undermined, which could kill us all.
*To those who sneer at [and repress] activists blocking roads: what are you doing to save the planet?*
Rats can move in time to the beat of music.
The corrupter and DeMentis are the now rivals to lead the Repub-lie-can party.
Explaining the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.
*The UK property market is being abused to the tune of billions of pounds by those wishing to hide wealth or launder money.*
Ultimately, the support for abortion rights brought Democrats many votes and saved them a big defeat. Disgust for election lies seems to have helped too.
But I think Sanders was right nonetheless: Democrats should have campaigned for the progressive economic and environmental policies that most Americans support, as well as abortion rights. With the two, they could have won a substantial victory.
I expect that the progressive Democratic candidates did exactly that, but the plutocratist Democratic candidates didn't dare.
Arguing that Biden should choose different legal authority to use to cancel student debt.
Maybe so, but I can also see an argument that Warnock is more likely to win if his winning will enable Congress to legislate to cancel the debt.
Junk food ads in the US try to make children pressure their parents to buy junk food for their children. That is surely harming children and promoting obesity. Curiously, the advertisers appear to target these ads primarily at black families.
Does that make the practice more wrong? I don't think so. I think that luring children to eat junk food is equally wrong regardless of details about those children.
Why do they advertisers target mainly black families? I doubt that racist thinking plays a direct part, and the article doesn't say it does. As far as I know, advertising agencies are motivated by unscrupulous greed and will target whoever appears vulnerable. The article mentions various reasons why black families are likely to be more vulnerable, on the average.
Those reasons seem to be aspects of systemic racism; they are probably consequences of other forms of racism, such as housing discrimination.
Should we restrict these ads? If we can find an effective way to do so, I think we should. Corporations are not human beings, and neither is a large business even if it is owned by one human being. But what goal should the restrictions aim for? To make advertising agencies target white children just as much as they target black children? I think the goal should be to stop targeting children of whatever race.
The article linked to above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. I made an exception for this article because it is an opportunity to explore a moral point.
*Gas producers using Cop27 to rebrand [natural] gas as "transitional fuel", experts warn.*
Switching from coal to natural gas makes no sense. We already know that the system of using natural gas emits, in practice, as much greenhouse gas as the system of using coal.
*UK should match Norway’s 78% North Sea oil and gas tax, thinktank says.*
* The [supposed] global dash for gas amid the Ukraine war will accelerate climate breakdown and could send temperatures soaring far beyond the 1.5C limit of safety.*
There is no "global dash" — that term is a misleading excuse. What is really happening is that planet roasters want to do more drilling, and they use the temporary gas shortage as an excuse. More drilling will do nothing in the short term to reduce the price spike, but the excuse works as long as mainstream media and plutocratist politicians pretend it makes some sort of sense.
*Discipline the poor, protect the rich — it’s the same old Tories, same old class war.*
The US and around 20 other countries established a Forest and Climate Leaders' Partnership, supposedly to reduce deforestation. Greenpeace says it's ineffective, just for show.
*[Entities that] continue to invest in fossil fuels, deforestation, and other activities that exacerbate the climate emergency cannot claim to be net-zero.*
I take a stronger stand. "Net zero" is an excuse for bogus "offset" schemes, a way to pretend that they will reduce emissions, while in fact failing to do so. We must stop using that concept and focus on reducing actual emissions.
Consider for instance Partanna's CO2-absorbing building material. Building with it helps reduce CO2 in the air, but if these reductions are converted into a "credit", that indirectly lets someone else keep emitting more.
States that adopt liberal policies towards the non-rich have a lower death rate for adults age 25 to 64. States with right-wing policies have a higher death rate.
Projecting from the data, *"Changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019," the researchers estimate, "while changing them to a fully [right-wing] orientation might have cost 217,635 lives."*
I replaced the word "conservative" because today's right-wingers are radical, not conservative.
The US Supreme Court has put itself in a state of war with the people, by obstructing climate defense; but there is a court decision from 2016 which ruled that future generations have a right to a stable climate, which might help.
Republican officials in Georgia have rigged up a way to block 149,000 residents of Georgia from voting. Volunteers have stepped forward to "challenge" them. One person "challenged" 32,000 voters, based on no knowledge except that their names appeared on a partisan list of targets. Most of the targets are black, or young, thus likely to vote Democratic.
If your right to vote is challenged, you have to return physically to Georgia in order to get it restored. That can be effectively impossible if you are staying somewhere far away.
This is obviously unjust, but Republicans don't care about justice, only winning by hook or by crook.
* Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai/Kia on track to make far more petrol and diesel cars than is sustainable.*
US citizen Carly Morris traveled with her daughter to Salafi Arabia in 2019 so her daughter could spend time with her ex-husband's family. Then she found she was trapped there and unable to leave. Her ex-husband had taken their passports away.
She complained about this on Twitter, and the monstrous authorities charged her with a political crime and jailed her for talking about what they had done to her.
Don't take the risk of going to Salafi Arabia. Don't even trust a flight connection in its airports.
The UK says that Egypt did not allow its consular officials to visit Alaa Abd el-Fattah in prison, and they don't even know whether he is still alive.
His hunger-and-thirst strike is a dying effort to rebuke Egypt's harsh repression; spreading the word about this, as the British minister did, multiplies the effect. My posting about it here will multiply it a little more.
Two Hungarian judges met with the US ambassador; Orbán organized a media defamation campaign aimed at them. Other judges say this is a campaign of intimidation designed to make sure no one else in Hungary meets with anyone from the US government.
South Dakotans voted to require the Republican state government to accept the offer of federal funds to extend Medicaid.
Republican politicians rejected the offer in accord with their practice of performative cruelty to the poor.
*Rapid rain bursts over the greater Sydney region have intensified by at least 40% over the last two decades.*
Such rapid increase is a sign of the age of climate calamity.
US citizens: call on Vanguard to stop financing human rights abuses through oil company Petroperú.
Egypt told the participants in the Cop27 climate conference to use a special app, which shows signs that it is snooping on them.
Given the repression of the Egyptian government, that is something to be feared.
I wonder if it is possible to participate in Cop27 without extra restrictions if you don't run that app.
Apps are generally nonfree software — on iMonsters, all apps are nonfree software — and any nonfree program is likely to be malware. The operating systems of those devices are also malware, which is one of the reasons I don't have one.
The US National Hockey League kicked out a newly hired athlete for bullying a student in school at the age of 14.
Bullying is nasty, but what people do at age 14 should not follow them for their adult lives.
Young people often commit minor crimes. The point of the juvenile courts is to give give them a chance for a fresh start as adults. But the system won't achieve that goal if employers persecute them for those juvenile crimes.
*Queensland [thugs] to get expanded powers to randomly scan people for knives [with a metal detector].*
This is not as bad as the usual "stop and search", but I find it worrisome that the thugs find "other minor crimes" when they do this. What crimes, and how do they find those crimes? The finding of those other crimes could involve a more intrusive search than just waving a wand. That could be an opportunity for racial profiling to do some harm.
I am shocked by the reference to carrying knitting needles as a "crime". Lots of women used to carry knitting needles with them, and knit whenever they had a chance to sit for a while. Is knitting outside your house now illegal? Does it require a permit?
A passenger on a long-distance bus in Turkey asked the driver to stop the bus to give per a chance to say prayers. (This can't be done sitting on a seat.) The bus driver refused, saying it would be unfair to delay the other passengers. This has created a nationwide controversy.
As you might expect, I agree with the bus driver. A passenger's wish to pray is not an emergency, so the bus should keep its schedule.
Iranian students are demanding a referendum on changing the country's constitution.
Hosseini is right that Salafi Arabia is more repressive and arbitrary than Iran, but "not as bad as Salafi Arabia" is not the standard of good government.
British thugs arrested two press photographers taking pictures at a Just Stop Oil protest. According to the photographers, the thugs had made up their mind in advance, in the absence of grounds, and then interrogated them for 13 hours about their journalism.
*World Cup stadium workers in Qatar "had their money stolen and lives ruined", says rights group.*
*As long as the Democrats wage war on Trump, they avoid the more important work of building a New Deal-style majority.*
Of course, not all Democrats want to do that. Many of them are in hock to plutocrats.
Analysis of captured Iranian drones shows that they were supplied after Putin started his invasion.
Robert Reich: *America is still on the brink of Trumpism fueling hate, paranoia and violence.*
Activists in the Cop27 meeting in Egypt report that the event is full of "staff" that blatantly converge on them to listen to their conversations, harass them, or interfere with them.
The word "activism" seems to be their wake-up word. The intimidation of activists is so strong that the meeting is almost useless, except for showing the world how repressive Egypt is.
The World Summit on the Information Society, part II, took place in Tunis, and was heavily repressed. The dictator's men tried to keep us from meeting any Tunisians who were not approved conference attendees.
Meanwhile, this year's meeting has 626 lobbyists for fossil fuel companies, up 25% from last year.
*How dash for African gas could wipe out Congo basin tropical forests.*
*Oil and gas firms planning "frightening" fossil fuels growth, report finds.*
ALEC is asking states to pass laws prohibiting any company from boycotting businesses, industries, or activities.
For example, it would be illegal to boycott fossil fuel businesses.
The Camargue, a peculiar wetland in Arles, is being gradually destroyed by sea level rise.
It can't be saved for very long except by curbing global heating.
Apple imposed a new limit on file-sharing following a demand by the Chinese government.
Most Democrats didn't stand for anything in particular except keeping things normal for business, but several new progressive Democrats were elected to the House this year.
Cop27 has been thoroughly corrupted by planet-roasters.
Iran seeks to kill imprisoned protesters. At least one has been charged with "waging war against god". Perhaps as many as two thousand.
Twitter seems to be falling apart under volleys of Musk-et fire. He warned that the company might go bankrupt.
He seems awfully blasé about the prospect of losing the company he just bought for 44 billion dollars. It makes me wonder: was destroying Twitter his motive for buying it?
The Putin forces are building barriers of big concrete blocks to stop tanks from reaching certain strongpoints in the Ukrainian territory they have conquered.
Philippine cops accuse a high official of arranging the murder of journalist Percival Mabasa.
1000 Georgia voters requested postal ballots but none were sent to them.
*Ontario to repeal new law threatening workers' right to strike following pushback.*
This is a victory for the brave school workers.
A large part of plastic pollution in oceans comes from fishing gear that gets lost at sea (usually by accident). Various pilot projects are trying ways to reduce the loss, or recover the lost nets.
The London thug department is arresting people for "planning" disruptive but nonviolent protests against fossil fuel developments that are likely to kill them in a few decades.
If only it were possible to arrest the people planning to disrupt civilization by building more oil wells, we might have a safer future.
A study of the carbon emissions of 125 billionaires, including companies they own, found that on the average each emits as much as 500,000 people in France.
I suppose that same figure would equal the emissions of around 1 million average Americans.
Protests in Iran have intensified. In Baluchistan, sectarian and ethnic opposition is also at work.
Australia is going to prosecute whistleblower David McBride for telling journalists about alleged war crimes committed by Australian soldiers.
Naturally, Australia has laws on which this decision is based.
The use of programs that compose articles based on machine learning poses philosophical problems for education in writing.
Here's an idea: if these systems tend to be led by their training towards expressing the usual points of view, assign to a student the task of arguing for an unusual point of view, whether perse really believes it or not.
The idea that there is no point in learning to write well if a program can do that for you is misguided. A calculator, or various programs such as dc or Emacs, can do arithmetic for you, but you need to learn how to add and multiply or you you won't understand those operations fully. Once you know how, you can use a program to actually do it.
Proposing we stop referring to machine learning as "AI", and saving that term for programs that really understand what they say and do.
*Climate activists storm Amsterdam airport and block private jets.*
This tactic makes a lot of sense, and is far better than gluing oneself to the glass protective cover over a painting.
First, because neither those jets, nor the private jet terminals, are precious. Expensive, yes, but that's not the same thing as precious.
Second, because the jets emit lots of CO2.
Third, because the people who fly in them and will be inconvenienced by the protest are rich, and are probably significantly to blame for the world's inadequate efforts for climate defense.
I used to fly more than most people Americans, back before Covid-19. Nonetheless, my overall global heating footprint is modest, because of my conscious decision to avoid the action that, for most people, adds the most: having children. One child produces many times as much greenhouse gas as all the flights I will take in my life.
Here is a proposal for increased diplomatic discussion between the US and Russia which is worth considering. Agreement on the proposed areas could encourage Putin's withdrawal from Ukraine, and would in any case make the world a better place. The proposal carefully avoids undermining Ukraine's fight to repel the invasion.
The Putin forces are kidnapping adults and children in Kherson and taking them to places further away from Ukraine's army, or to unknown locations.
The Putin forces are also torturing and murdering some people. Perhaps they selectively do this to those who formerly were in the Ukrainian army or police. This has been seen in the east.
One potato corporation claims to provide 1/3 of the world's french fries. We should not allow a company to thus dominate a market — we need laws to prevent it.
I also wonder whether that 1/3 includes any of the really good fries, which are made in Belgium.
Attorney General Garland's policies to protect reporters from prosecution for their journalism are a big improvement, but an authoritarian president could twist them or simply replace them.
Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) pledge to work together to protect their rain forests. The whole world depends on those forests they are all threatened.
The concept of "the OPEC of rainforests" seems like a misguided analogy to me, because oil and rainforests are not very similar in how they relate to the world. Rainforests provide an important service by living. By contrast, oil underground does nothing to the world; extracting it makes it harmful.
If we could make more rainforest, that would be good. If we could make more underground petroleum deposits, that would be disaster.
It can be effective for campaigns to show that prohibiting abortion does harm to Americans' prosperity as well as to human rights.
I personally can't understand the thinking of people who might base their decisions about abortion rights on this. But if it convinces people, that's good.
Legalizing abortion may also save your children's lives. Population growth exacerbates global heating, so more population growth is likely to make global disaster worse and thus reduce the number of humans that survive it, as well as reducing the level of technology they can hold on to.
*The Global Food System Enables Russia to Use Food as a Weapon.*
*Wells are running dry in drought-weary Southwest as foreign-owned farms guzzle water to feed cattle overseas.*
It's illegal to sell the water itself, so farmers grow crops that need lots of water, such as alfalfa, and sell the crops. The result is to drain the aquifers.
When money talks, plutocratist politicians say, "Yes sir." If the people of Arizona want to stop this practice, they should elect progressive Democrats.
Cop27 will discuss whether part of the world should be liable for damage already done by burning fossil fuel.
I suggest that we make fossil fuel companies liable. With that big debt, they won't be worth much in money. So let's nationalize them and buy them out, paying what their shares are worth at that time.
The US has done this many times, in times of crisis, as described in the article linked above. We should not listen when planet roasters claim this is unthinkable now.
Whatever is left of those companies after fossil fuels have been mostly replaced by renewable energy, it could be safe to sell off to private owners.
*House Democrats Propose End to Wall Street Rent-Gouging.*
*Nurses across UK vote to strike in first ever national action.*
*An abortion clinic on wheels: Planned Parenthood in Illinois to reduce travel times for patients in red states by bringing abortion care [closer] to them.*
One crucial need, not yet addressed in general, is to spare abortion patients the requirement to stay overnight near the clinic. That can be very expensive: in addition to the cost of a room, there is the cost of missing an additional day of work.
Robert Reich: *Rather Than Ignore Him, We Must Demand Trump Be Prosecuted.*
Summer sea ice will inevitably disappear in a few decades. That will make polar oceans absorb a lot more sunlight, and that in turn will speed the melting of ice on land. Even if we curb global heating in general, this will raise sea level several meters and inundate many of the world's major cities.
*"There’s nothing we can do about that now, we’ve just screwed up and let the system warm too much already,"*
An important religious figure in Iran has criticized the government for giving Putin drones which he is using against civilians and civilian infrastructure, saying that this contradicts the moral rules of Islam.
Given the level of repression in Iran, I always feel surprise when I am reminded that some questions can be openly debated there, and some government policies criticized.
*Cop27 wifi in Egypt blocks human rights and key news websites.* It blocks VPNs as well. The article does not say whether it blocks Tor.
It appears this is nothing special; such censorship is standard in Egypt. Participants in the conference will at least have the chance to learn how repressive Egypt is.
Even climate scientists who already knew extreme weather was going to become a problem have been nonetheless shocked by how fast and furiously that problem is now growing.
Identifying similarities between Elon Musk and the bullshitter.
When Australia adopted an automated system to demand people (typically still poor) refund supposed "overpayments" in their benefit payments, this caused great suffering for hundreds of thousands of victims. Some committed suicide. In other words, exactly the results that a right-wing government would desire, to show how harsh it is on those greedy, grasping poor people.
One government employee asked for legal advice about the plan when he read about it, before it was adopted, and got a report saying that it was illegal.
An inquiry has found that the government kept the details of the report secret, and repeatedly cited its existence as justification for the program. That's right-wing politicians for you.
An official of the Federal Reserve suggests a plan to raise interest rates until most Americans' bank accounts are empty.
A proposal to allow internet voting in Washington, DC, now has the lobbying muscle of a rich venture capitalist.
In addition to the inherent insecurity of this procedure, it would naturally be set up so that you vote while watching political disinformation ads on the same screen.
I am not impressed by making it "open source", because
One of the supposed benefits of bringing the UK out of the EU was that it would have the sovereign power to limit fishing and thus manage fish stocks according to science. But the government disregards the opportunity and permits overfishing just as before.
Having plentiful cod in British waters may also require curbing global heating. The increased temperature of the ocean is making cod move north.
Eritrea charges a tax on expatriates, and some of the income is currently being used to fund Eritrea's war with Tigray. Does that make the tax a bad thing?
We don't have enough information about that war to formulate an opinion about which sides are right or wrong. So we can't conclude that we should use economic sanctions on that very poor country to make it drop out of that war.
But there are worse things about Eritrea that we do know. For instance, conscripting just about all adults into slave labor. That is why so many Eritreans flee and seek asylum in other countries, no matter how big the obstacles.
Perhaps that is a good reason to stop Eritrea from collecting the tax on expats.
Thousands of obsolete, decrepit and hazardous dams on US rivers cause floods and block fish migrations. Some are being demolished.
Robert Reich says that the Supreme Court will surely eliminate affirmative action for admission to universities.
More about the affirmative action issue.
(satire) *Biden Warns Americans That Ability To Even Pretend U.S. A Democracy At Stake.*
That item is funny, but when you look at the bills that Democrats fought hard to pass this year, and the parts that Sinema and Manchin defeated, this shows that two more real Democrats in the Senate could have made a big difference.
A US appeals court upheld a St Louis law that imposed such strict conditions on sharing food with homeless people that it became effectively impossible.
Is it valid to call a deadly heat wave "extreme", now that extremes are pushing further than that?
Republicans are spending a lot of money to control the courts of many states.
*Haitians, Peace Activists Denounce Plan for Another US-Backed Intervention.*
Only 1/3 of the world's countries have made quantitative plans for coping with near-term global heating in coming decades.
I maintain that reducing global heating must take priority over coping with its effects. Countries' efforts for that have been inadequate too. We must demand they do a batter job; if they can do a good job of both, that's ideal. But if it is a choice of one or the other, we must insist on long-term survival of civilization rather than just postponing the end.
An interview with one of Egypt's few independent journalists. He reports that Egypt holds tens of thousands of political prisoners, most of them charged with "spreading false information" and "belonging to a prohibited organization". Egypt is using the Cop27 climate conference to appoint itself global negotiator for poor countries,
Activists that might criticize the repressive Egyptian state have been excluded. Raising environmental issues is not allowed when that implies criticizing the state.
Protests aimed at the event are limited to a far-away "free speech zone", as they were called in developed countries around 2000. The idea is that no one will notice protests there, but it will serve as an excuse to prohibit protest anywhere else.
Holding an international meeting in a repressive country is a standard technique for silencing the public about it, and this seems to be an example.
The terms "global south" and "global north" are bogus, empty buzzwords. I'd rather speak of wealthy countries and poor countries.
A former gun company lobbyist testified to Congress that he left that job because gun companies wanted to market guns directly to right-wing extremists and would-be mass murderers.
Since Biden was elected, they market directly to right-wing extremists that have in mind political violence.
Responding to plans stated by the Department of "Homeland Security" to control disinformation online, Edward Snowden called for elimination of the DHS.
To eliminate fake news would be a good thing; inventing lies is wrong. However, when governments try to block what they call "fake news", that tends to turn into a campaign of censorship. Whatever news the government dislikes, it calls "fake". Egypt is the latest example to be mentioned here.
A leaked draft of a proposed business-supremacy treaty between India and the UK would impose extended patent monopolies on drugs. This means that drugs will not become generic in the future.
It is no surprise that the draft treaty uses the propaganda term "intellectual property". It is unfortunate that the critics of this treaty fell into using that term too, instead of rebuking the treaty for that.
Ukraine called on Google and Apple to deny Russia the use of their services and products.
*Progressive Economists Warn of 'Catastrophic Outcomes' for Workers as Fed Hikes Interest Rates.*
* The big social media platforms don’t reflect back our views so much as form them.*
I am leading to the view that we should regulate recommendation algorithms by law. Perhaps that regulation should include offering each user a choice between different recommendation algorithms, each one regulated by law.
We could even start requiring that platforms allow users to program their own recommendation algorithms, in a limited language to avoid risk of breaking the server.
US citizens: call on Biden to support a Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax.
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service to Protect the rusty patched bumblebee.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: call on Biden to cancel the Willow project — a large new oilfield in Alaska.
US citizens: Because of Justice Barrett's secrecy about conflicts of interest, call for Congress to impose a code of ethics on the Supreme Court.
An example of making excessive fuss about North Korea's missile tests.
The author insists we "cannot ignore" North Korea's "nuclear threat", but it's the just opposite: ignoring these missile tests is exactly what we should do.
It is a fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. We have to recognize that fact. But then what?
It is clear that diplomacy, offering deals, cannot convince Dictator Kim to give them up. To start a war would not improve anything; it would risk a response with some of those nuclear weapons.
Fussing about how horrible this situation is useless too, so and we only make ourselves look foolish. Until there is some course of action that would lead to a good reasons, let's ignore him.
*Israel's Far-Right Kingmakers Draw on U.S. Funding — Despite Terror Classifications.*
Ethiopia and Tigray have announced a peace agreement. The Amhara region, which has its own army (puzzling since the capital of Ethiopia is in the Amhara region and Amharas have dominated Ethiopia for a long time), says it is not part of the peace deal. This makes me wonder how long the peace deal will last.
Brazilian soccer fans cleared the roadblocks of Bolsonaro supporters so that they could travel to watch games.
Netanyahu seems to have got back into power with the help of Israel's right-wing religious extremists. They aim to undermine democracy in Israel, much as Republicans are trying to do in the US.
I wonder where secularist Israelis will find a country where they can be safe from persecution.
The Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin says that the Republicans will never, ever lose an election there if he wins.
Since no one can predict the reversals of history, he cannot mean that they would always win honestly. He is stating, in typical deceptive Republican language, that they would rig, swindle or steal all future elections.
Global heating is on the verge of making the vast Congo peat bogs start releasing carbon instead of absorbing it. That would tip the Earth into disaster.
It is not unusual for homeless people in the US to commit crimes so they can sleep in jail.
Homeless shelters are very uncomfortable places, and have painful rules, such as that you must go out and spend your day on the street. I expect that you are forced to sleep in a small room with several strangers.
Per inmate, a prison is far more expensive than a shelter. I expect that even a comfortable shelter with all the advantages of a jail, giving a person a small room to call per own and lock behind per when going out, would be much cheaper to build and run than a prison.
Sadism is what gets in the way. The US is unwilling to spend money on helping the homeless, but it pays millions for prisons.
British thug departments have a pattern of hiring people who acted like thugs even before they were hired.
US corporations are lobbying Congress at feverish pace to block bills that would hamper them from gouging.
It could be more effective to do that by increasing competition, which requires breaking up the oligopolies that mergers have saddled us with. My proposal for a progressive tax on gross income could do this.
Ralph Nader: Americans, it is very important for you to vote this year.
You may think you can "leave politics alone", but the real effect of that is to let the worst plutocrats mistreat you at their ease.
Iranian suppression forces are grabbing students as they leave universities, beating them so badly that some are gravely injured, then taking them away and not telling anyone what happened to them.
Many reporters have been arrested.
The government is preparing to execute some of the protesters.
55,000 school workers in Ontario have gone on strike, showing they refuse to be intimidated by the law to fine them CAN 4,000 per day for striking.
Perhaps it would be better tactics to quit their jobs instead of striking. I suppose they can't be fined for quitting.
The UK's principal ministers have a history of quietly opposing abortion rights.
* Governments meeting for [Cop27] climate talks have been accused of making positive commitments in public but denying them later in the privacy of the negotiating rooms.*
Ontario, a province of Canada, is working on passing a law prohibiting school employees from striking, and claims it has the power to stop the national courts from reviewing the constitutionality of the law.
What's the use of having national standards of human rights if a part of the country can violate the standard at will? Canada must put an end to this.
Perhaps the national courts can rule that this exception to their authority is invalid.
A study provides information about some of the US's many secret wars that were authorized by the 2021 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
The 2022 Authorization for Use of Military Force is separate: that authorized Dubya's invasion of Iraq. The US Congress should repeal both.
George Monbiot: the worst mass extinction in Earth's history, at the start of the Mesozoic era, seems to have been caused by the burning of lots of oil deposits in the ground. It made so much CO2 that a large part of the globe was lifeless for 5 million years.
The causes of that global heating episode were quite different from the situation today, but the effects today could be similar. What is not certain is how much global heating we will cause, this time.
"Home compostable" plastics don't compost well enough for that disposal to be viable.
I received a gift recently that was cushioned by "peanuts", but instead of styrofoam, they were made of spun cornstarch. When exposed to water, they dissolve in a minute.
Many Big Food companies agreed that we must reform agriculture to avoid risk of disaster.
Senate report: *Republicans' crusade against women's reproductive freedoms has created national chaos that is a mortal threat to women's health.*
*G20 Nations' Banks Spent Nearly Twice as Much Financing Fossil Fuels as Renewables.*
(satire) *Republican Voters Given Toll-Free Number To Call If They Witness Legitimate Vote.*
The US needs to mine more lithium, but the mines raise issues.
I know of three kinds of issues about operating a mine of any kind:
The result was, naturally, that mines have polluted many areas. Whenever a mine shut down, it dumped the burden of cleanup on the public.
We must develop a new, cleaner method of mining, which we could call zero pollution mining, and require mines to use it. A mine must set aside funds for future shutdown costs each year it operates, in an account it cannot withdraw money from, at a rate set by the an environmental agency.
If that makes the extracted mineral more expensive, so be it. The cost of avoiding the need for future cleanup, and carrying out whatever part can't be avoided, should be part of the price of the mineral.
If adjustment to the plan will make some people happier, let's do so. But this is a secondary issue, not as important as preventing global disaster.
The Lancet reports that global heating is already damaging people's health globally, and the world's medical systems are not strong enough to cope. In addition, since decarbonization is going too slowly, that problem is getting worse.
Musk personally spread an absurd conspiracy theory on Twitter. This shows he is not fit to be in charge of such a company.
Aged Britons are being cut off from many activities that now require a snoop-phone,
There are utilities that won't accept payment by check. That problem is easy to fix: pass a law that important businesses must accept payment by check and must make appointments by phone.
The author takes for granted that snoop-phones and online dis-services are fine things, and the only problem is that they are hard for poor Doris to adapt to. It never crosses her mind that they might be unjust as well. I don't use them because they are unjust and unacceptable. I'm sure I could learn to use them, but I won't yield to them. I suffer some of the same annoyances, though not as many — the US is not cutting off the traditional non-digital options for old activities such as paying bills.
Planet roasters claim that policies to curb global heating make energy more expensive. Actually, these investments do the opposite.
If we had started pushing hard for renewable energy 15 years ago, we would not be having much of a price spike now.
What does increase prices is a carbon tax — but that money should be handed out to poor people. All in all, the carbon tax will reduce the cost of living for them, when you count the increased support they will receive.
The article refers to planet roasters as "conservatives", but that term is misleading.
A thug with a pattern of violence and cover-ups killed Kumanjayi Walker, an aboriginal man, while trying to wrongly arrest him.
The arrest was wrong because it was based on mistaken identity. Everyone makes mistakes like that, but members of disprivileged groups often learn to expect brutality to follow such mistakes. And it appears that that particular thug enjoyed the opportunity to brutalize someone.
Republicans are instituting a culture of fear in the parts of the US they control, by asking people to denounce acquaintances for things that previously they had no need to hide, but can now be occasions for repression. For instance, having children who are transgender.
*French court convicts former Liberian rebel commander over atrocities.*
*FBI arrests two alleged far-right Boogaloo Boys group members,* for threatening violence and preparing machine guns to carry it out.
*Trump allies saw Clarence Thomas as key to efforts to challenge 2020 election.*
In general, we can't blame a person simply because others expect per cooperation in doing wrong. In the case of Thomas, he gave them reason with his own actions to expect his help in attacking democracy.
An experiment found that psilocybin cured depression in around 1/3 of the test subjects.
I am surprised that the study did not include the clearest form of control group — some patients whose treatment did not actually include any psilocybin. The contrast in results between 25mg of psilocybin and 1mg may have demonstrated that the benefits are real, but a placebo control would have given more certainty.
US citizens: call on the EPA to adopt its proposed rule to designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances.
US citizens: call on the FTC to ban surveillance-based advertising.
This is not enough to make us safe from massive surveillance.
*Sentenced to life for stealing $14: "I needed help, but was given jail."*
This extreme treatment is common in California under the "three strikes" law. *"By design, the law has targeted crimes of poverty, like small-time robbery, burglary, breaking windows, purse snatching".*
Like the War on Drugs, these laws are designed to put a lot of people in prison. At that point, many of them are compelled to do work for private companies at a pittance, and that pushes down wages for Americans who are not in prison.
*If we keep abusing nature it will collapse, taking us with it. We need a new mindset.*
* Ellekan, an islet in Marshall Islands, has been reduced to a pile of sand in the middle of the reef. Those who loved it have already held its funeral.*
Many other low islands face inundation due to global heating, and their inhabitants will become climate refugees. Entire countries will be wiped out in this way.
The whole territory of the United States won't be inundated, only a small percentage. But it includes parts of big cities, so the inhabitants displaced will amount to millions. Likewise in China, India, and Europe.
(satire) *Texas Launches Outreach Program To Provide Troubled Teens With Assault Rifles.*
A bizarre combination of laws limits how much you or I could donate to an election campaign, but billionaires can lawfully spend millions on them.
Australia is hosting an international conference about mining, including coal mining, and threatens protesters with harsh punishments if they get in the way.
Thugs are visiting activists at home to threaten them personally. Here's an example: environmental activist Alister Ferguson.
The repressive law that has been applied to Ferguson was passed by the right-wing government that remains in power in New South Wales. How twisted it is to pin the label of "terrorists" on environment defenders instead of on coal miners.
*Sale of oil and gas permits casts shadow over [Congo] rainforest.* (It is the world's second-largest rainforest.)
In the UK, and probably elsewhere, high earners emit far more greenhouse gases than poor people. This is a reason to establish a carbon tax.
*US judge blocks $2.2bn Penguin Random House merger.*
We should never allow megacorps to merge with any other businesses.
Governor Kemp's family has a long history in Georgia. One of his forebears legalized slavery in Georgia so he could import slaves for his plantation.
Kemp's school censorship law makes it dangerous for teachers to teach that history.
*What [more] Kids Want, We Can't Give Them (Simple Though It Is).*
All the main Israeli political parties advocate annexation and/or violence as the policy towards Palestine.
The US should take the opportunity of Lula's election to strengthen ties with Brazil.
The article cites Brazil's "youthful population" as a strength. To me it is an alarm bell: "Danger, fast population growth!" What is the obvious way for the increased population to get more food and income? Cut down forests, of course. Protecting wilderness and curbing population growth must go hand in hand.
*UK agrees to negotiate with Mauritius over handover of Chagos Islands.*
Reports about Ukrainians refusing to leave Kherson.
US citizens: call on Congress to establish an ethical code for the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
A fanatical Republican broke into Nancy Pelosi's home, armed and planning to attack her. She was out, so he attacked her husband instead.
Republican leaders cannot fail to know that their barely veiled support for violence will inspire real attacks. That must be their intention.
I think it is a mistake to equate violent fanaticism with mental illness. Mental illness only rarely leads people to contemplate violence towards others. Violent political fanatics often do at least contemplate it.
Lula won the Brazilian presidential election by 51% to 49%.
It is disturbing that 49% voted for a fascist like Bolsonaro, but Lula's victory is clear. With Bolsonaro's main supporters acknowledging Lula's victory. Bolsonaro won't be in a position to try to stay in power.
*Planetary heating could reach a catastrophic 2.9°C by the end of the century without immediate action from the world's largest polluters.*
A doctor's perspective on abortion and her patients' needs.
An experienced ad-man explains that right-wing billionaires' money is effectively buying US elections nowadays — by convincing the public to focus on side issues.
Inspectors found that a UK camp for immigrants is *unsafe, understaffed and "wretched."*
Of course it is. All public services in the UK have been reduced in this way to wretchedness, all are understaffed, and many are also unsafe. That is called "austerity" or "Tory budget cuts."
It turns out that the new "bivalent" booster vaccines work as well as the original vaccine, but not better.
Extinction Rebellion scientists who glued themselves to a UK government building were accused of criminal damage. They were acquitted because the government could not show their protest had actually damaged anything.
*100 UK universities pledge to divest from fossil fuels.*
Street crime in the US increased in 2017 and 2018. What may have caused this, and how are politicians responsible?
US politicians and candidates, as a class, rarely raise the issue of poverty and the suffering it causes.
(satire) *Herschel Walker Claims He's Honorary Confederate Soldier.*
Greta Thunberg accuses the Cop27 climate summit of being mere greenwashing.
It is already clear that they are not set up to bring about the rapid changes that could perhaps avoid disaster.
Musk took a stab at endorsing right-wing disinformation.
I would guess that he was exploring how to make use of the power that he obtained by buying Twitter. We don't yet know what he will settle on, but we can see his decision process isn't mainly a matter of judging what is right.
Brazil's federal police, commanded by a supporter of Bolsonaro, set up road blocks on election day in areas where Lula had a lot of support — apparently as voter suppression.
Europe is experiencing global heating at twice the average global rate.
Egypt is applying its usual extreme repression to climate protesters, even though they are not protesting against Egypt.
*Fifteen Nobel Prize winners called on world leaders visiting Egypt next week for the … COP27 climate talks … to demand freedom for political prisoners, "most urgently, the Egyptian-British writer and philosopher, Alaa Abd El Fattah, now six months into a hunger strike and at risk of death.".*
*Parents of Iranian woman killed during protests "harassed by security forces."*
*Jokes about Paul Pelosi aren’t just in bad taste. They normalize [and advocate] political violence.*
How the UK could cut methane emissions by over 40% by 2030.
Everyone: call on the leaders of American Jewish and Pro-Israel organizations to condemn far-right extremism in Israel.
US citizens: call on Congress to increase the income tax rate for high incomes.
That alone is not enough — we also need to limit the deductions and dodges that rich people use to avoid taxation on most of their income.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: please vote for Democrats, including all the offices. Don't neglect the secondary offices, such as secretary of state (in charge of running elections in many states) as well as state legislators.
Many Democrats are "centrist" — they are plutocratists. A few months ago I donated to organizations that campaigned, in primaries, to replace them with progressive Democrats. The "centrists" running now are the ones we did not succeed in replacing. With Republicans today supporting disinformation and trying to steal control of the US, even a plutocratist Democrat means one less Republican to do this.
Therefore I urge you to defeat those Republicans. Our chance to replace the current plutocratist Democrats will come in the Democratic primaries of the next election.
*Sanders Urges Massive Midterm Voter Turnout to "Preserve American Democracy."*
US citizens: call on Congress to ban members of Congress from owning or trading stocks.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
The oil transported by the East African crude oil pipeline will, when transported and burned, generate vast amounts of greenhouse gas, far more than the countries of Uganda and Tanzania through which it would run.
Arguing that the main British banks have been controlling the UK's economic policy since the 1980s.
The Federal Trade Commission is using its authority to fight monopolies that use their power to crush farm businesses.
*'Cold Hard Threat to Democracy': GOP (the Republican Party) Sowing Chaos at Polls Even Before Election Day.*
Designing US government policies based on economic optimization has led to very bad results.
Like the author, I advocate a carbon tax, but not based on trying to calculate the "amount of damage" that each ton of CO2 will cause. I see it as flexible a way to make businesses decarbonize their practices faster.
A plan to protect New York City from storm surges would cost $50 billion to construct, and would perhaps save $300 billion in damage over the rest of this century.
But if global heating speeds up, and sea level rises faster, it will become inadequate sooner.
Bullhead City, Arizona, prosecuted Norma Thornton for handing out food to the homeless.
The charges were dropped, and now she is suing the city for "criminalizing kindness." Bravo!
In the 1980s, San Francisco repeatedly arrested activists of Food Not Bombs were prosecuted for handing out food to the homeless. That city goes to extremes in persecuting homeless people.
The UK is making progress against the racism expressed, in school and office, by discrimination against kinky hair.
Putin has sent 80,000 conscripts into Ukraine, and many are fighting on the front line. They have slowed Ukraine's advance.
I would expect that many of them want an opportunity to surrender, but is that actually happening?
*Musk probably bought Twitter for the same reason that sickeningly rich people throughout history have become press barons: to try to control the conversation.*
Here's a list of occasions when Musk tried to censor people whose statements caused inconvenience for him.
To prevent Twitter from being a sinkhole for billions of dollars per year, Musk needs to keep advertisers happy by discouraging messages they won't like.
Contrast: some progressive Democrats in Congress asked for direct negotiations between the US and Putin, over Ukraine's head. This could only make a difference if it becomes a pathway to handing part of Ukraine or some Ukrainians to Putin.
Some Republicans in Congress (or running for it) simply don't care what happens to Ukraine, and are ready to let Putin have all or part of Ukraine
just to be done with it.
I think those Democrats' proposal is misguided, but I understand their wish to end the suffering caused by the war. I doubt that the Republicans care about that.
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