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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
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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 .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 disenroll 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. Union Pacific spending on stock buybacks
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 it 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. https://www.commondreams.org/news/indian-point-wastewater 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.
Manchin has agreed to a progressive proposal: to lift or eliminate the limit on the amount of a worker's income that is subject to Social Security tax.
This would fix a future insufficiency in Social Security funds, which certainly has to be fixed sooner or later, though not urgently. Of course, "moderate" politicians (plutocratists) want to fix it by cutting benefits, and they'd prefer to do this as soon as possible.
The hyper-rich get most of their income through paths other than wages, and not covered by payroll taxes. Thus, even after this change, they will still get a tax break that they do not deserve. (The same thing happens with income tax, though the details are different.) Nonetheless, the change will be a step forward.
*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.
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 hear 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.*
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/20/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.
Global heating is killing millions of fir trees in Oregon.
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 countries 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.*
Assad released around 7,000 political prisoners, and "only" around
130,000 of them remain in prison.
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.
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.
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.)
Meanwhile, every mobile phone's location is tracked by the mobile
network, and US law requires the network to store this history for a
long time. 18 months, I think.
Each note starts with a date and a brief topic in parentheses. That
text is also a link to that note.
For instance, if the note
starts with "31 July 2022 (Inflation)" then you can link to it with
"https://www.stallman.org/notes/2022-may-aug.html#31_July_2022_(Inflation)".
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