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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
Richard Stallman will give a talk on September 30th in Prague, Czech Republic, at Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) at 14:00h.
The event is organized by The Faculty of Educational Studies (Pedagogická fakulta), Free Digital Society members. It ends at 16:30.
The Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh are fleeing after Azerbaijan's conquest.
Striking auto workers now see that Biden supports them and the fascist despises them.
US citizens: call on the EPA to adopt a stronger limit for pollution from trucks.
The Tory minister in charge of the hostile environment in Britain calls for rejecting the European convention on human rights.
Julian Assange's perfunctory final hearing is expected very soon. Extraditing him raises issues of violating the European convention on human rights. Will the UK follow its obligations under the treaty, or use the occasion, Putin-like, to display contempt for it?
The corrupter has been found guilty of fraud for tremendously exaggerating the value of his businesses in order to get deals.
The judge canceled his business certificates in New York State. Large fines follow.
*Trump is a real estate "genius" only in a "fantasy world".*
*[The] Conman […] tells GOP to shut down the government to stop his criminal trials (which it won't).*
US citizens: call on ABC, CBS, PBS, NBC, CNN, and affiliates: Stop platforming the fascist leader.
*It’s a lie promoted by the right [wing] that state help saps people of their drive.*
Plutocrats want working-class people to have to try desperately to find a job, so that they will take a subservient attitude towards their so-called "betters".
US citizens: call on members of Congress to co-sponsor the Israeli Democracy Resolution.
I am not forgetting about the injustice of the occupation of Palestine, but the fight to prevent Israel from being taken by fascism is in a crucial stage now.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and convey this message.
My name is NAME, I am your constituent. Please reject any budget that slashes Medicaid, and publicly oppose any plan to create a closed-door commission to cut Social Security and Medicare.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Citibank and BofA to stop funding JBS Foods, because of its deforestation.
US citizens: call on the Bureau of Land Management to protect the Western Arctic from oil drilling.
* Reality TV show contestants are more like unpaid interns than Hollywood stars.*
Exploitation of interns occurs in many fields of business.
When there is competitive pressure on people starting out on careers, they are compelled to accept whatever form of hazing might get them started. A need for an unpaid internship can really cut down the candidate pool. Meanwhile, the candidate or per parents needs to have money in order to support the internship. It becomes one of the things that keeps the children of poor families out of good jobs.But let's not forget that enabling the most capable young people get the best jobs is only part of what is needed for a good society. We need to enable everyone to have a decent life — which means, the less capable don't get so much less than the more skilled.
Likewise, social mobility is not as important as giving everyone a decent life. Social mobility is one of the ways the wealthy try to convince most of society to settle for a chance of getting rich rather than demanding a decent life.
The FDA warned pharma companies to stop lying about which drugs are covered by their patents.
The patent system is basically a scheme to give big companies power over markets. In the area of medicine, they enable pharma companies to make medicines so expensive that most people who need them, even in a "rich" country (one with a comparatively large fraction of rich people), cannot afford them.
The companies argue for this power based on the expense of developing and then testing the drugs. Indeed, those are expensive, and we can't just wish those expenses away. But the development expenses are often paid for by the government (as they should be) and yet the government allows the company to seize the profit for itself. As for the testing, giving pharma companies control over testing of medicines enables them to corrupt it.
We should most definitely remove testing of the effects of medicines from their hands.
Disney has yielded to right-wing culture wars and plans to be s silent about issues such as gay rights and racial equality.
Since the right-wing extremists will surely continue fighting to impose their views on everyone, this is a setback for society.
Please keep in mind that Disney's commercial activities are fully based on injustice: DRM, identifying all customers, and antisocializing contracts which demand users commit not to share copies,
Sharing is good and should be lawful. Thus, the only modern copy of a Disney movie or TV program that does not do you injustice is an unauthorized copy.
Michigan has raised the minimum age for marriage to 18, protested by Republicans.
This change may be for the better. Marriage is a difficult responsibility, nowadays more than ever.
However, referring to teenagers under 18 as "children" is propaganda for treating them as helpless and "protecting" them from any agency, even in activities and relationships far less difficult than marriage.
Lauren Weinstein: Chinese-style surveillance of everyone, in the UK.
The UK has gone heavily for surveillance. It has tracked all car travel using license-plate recognition cameras since around 15 years ago.
Yascha Mounk: *Should we borrow from other cultures? Of course we should, just as we always have.*
The article explains how "cultural appropriation" has been applied to situations in which real wrong was done — but the real wrong was something else, and that concept was an invalid explanation of it.
*Instead of condemning appropriation, we should seek to build a society in which members of every group are valued equally – and all are free to draw inspiration from the cultures of their compatriots.*
To do that is a big challenge; but it will be a little less difficult if we stop thinking that inequality and prejudice can be part of the solution.
See also Kwame Anthony Appiah's brilliant analysis.
Students and parents are organizing to defy Governor DeMentis's school censorship.
Britons rallied to support rejoining the EU.
I predicted that leaving the EU could be beneficial if Corbyn were in charge but would be disastrous with Tories in charge.
Rejoining the EU would be beneficial for Britain if plutocatists such as Tories or Starmer-Labour will be in charge.
*The inheritance tax debate we should really be having [in the UK]? Whether to set it at 100%.*
That goes for other countries too.
I don't see a need for inheritance tax on the rich to be quite so high. Surely 90% of large fortunes is enough to collect as taxes.
Calling for stronger pipeline safety rules in the US.
If the pipeline carries fossil fuel, we must include in its safety risks not only the risk of a leak, but also the risk that the fuel will not leak and instead be delivered and burnt as intended.
Proposing to reshape education systems to better fit a world with an internet.
The author's misguided perspective can be seen fro the fact that he thinks that the number of startup companies (and thus billionaires) measures success. But his points about education may be valid nonetheless.
But they may not remain valid. By 2060 there may be no internet, because globalized manufacturing may have been wiped out by climate disaster. We may need old methods of education once again.
Robert Reich: Biden is now the first President of the United States to march in a union picket line. Next he should oppose the dooH niboR policies that, since 1980, have systematically transferred Americans' wealth from the non-rich to the rich.
I marched in a union picket line before Biden did, but I was only president of the Free Software Foundation, not president of a potentially great country.
The UK's third major party, the Liberal Democrats, has joined the other two in pledging not to increase taxes on rich people.
All three have now sworn not to do the only thing that would make it possible to fix "broken Britain": bring more money into the treasury from the people who can afford to pay it.
*How can you really get to know a person? Ask to see [per] loyalty cards.*
If I showed you mine, you'd get to know me well enough. I have only one — from a chain which let me have it without my giving any personal data. That is why I judge it is acceptable to use.
The Boston subways and buses would let me pay a reduced rate because of my age, but then it would associate all my travel with my name and personal data. No thanks!
if you asked to see what store apps I use, the answer would be even more revealing: none at all. I refuse to carry a snoop-phone, so I can't use phone apps. Anyway, I don't want to, since all those apps are nonfree programs, which means they are not worthy of trust. So I don't trust them to run on my computers.
One way the world can unlock the finance needed to stop global heating,
*Key Countries Responsible for the Climate Crisis Fail to Answer Call to Phase Out Fossil Fuels.*
*Revealed: how Russia deliberately targeted Kherson’s hospitals.*
* American Library Association notes efforts to ban titles have spread beyond school libraries to those open to general public.*
*White House boosts fossil fuels while speaking to the urgency of climate threat.*
A witness claims that Bolsonaro discussed a coup with the heads of the Brazilian army, navy and air force, after losing the election last year.
They may all face trial for this. I hope so!
Russia has been hit badly in the budget by difficulty in exporting petroleum.
*Sanders and AOC Unveil Resolution to Apologize for US Role in Chile Coup, Declassify Secret Docs.*
I support this. The US government intentionally did a great wrong to Chile, which caused suffering of murder and torture while Pinochet was in power, followed by the suffering of plutocratist rule more or less ever since. That calls for a solemn apology.
*How unions won a 30% raise for every fast food worker in California.*
India is gaining prestige from an impressive mission to the Moon, built by workers who did not get their salaries.
Many US conservative who do not give total obedience to the spirit-breaker hate him for his practice of sneering at wounded combat veterans.
Even in the case of US wars that it should never have started, it is wrong to do that,
*Eliminate malaria once and for all or it will come back stronger, UN warned.*
SCROTUS want to override all state laws that prohibit cruelty to farm animals, and some that protect the health of farm animals too.
CAIR, a civil rights group for the rights of Muslims in the US, has sued the US government for maintaining a "terrorist watch list" which it uses to harass Muslims.
To have a watch list to keep track of the actions of people suspected of planning terrorism is legitimate if it is used in honestly. However, the US has used this watch list to pressure Muslims with no terrorist involvement into becoming informers and snooping regularly on their friends and families.
Furthermore, the US does not just "watch" the people on the list. It regularly harasses them as well.
The French right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen, and 23 other members of her party, face prosecutors' request for criminal charges for redirecting some EU funds to the party staff.
Azerbaijan with its oil-funded arms has taken military control of Nagorno-Karabakh. Now the question is whether it will force the Armenians out — either now or later.
Armenians have a millennium of history of Muslim conquerors seizing some of its territory and perhaps expelling them or killing them. It doesn't necessarily have to happen now. Sometimes the conquerors tolerate Christians — Islam has a tradition of tolerating Christians and Jews — but the tolerance can come and go.
When tolerated, they are second-class citizens. Furthermore, they can be punished for violating unjust religious demands, such as the law against blasphemy, Azerbaijan's dictator may not be interested in doing that, but they are not fans of human rights.
The coming UN climate conference is pervasively corrupt. UAE oil company executives are working with the event's management team.
This is just what we would have expected the UAE emir in charge of the event to do, looking at the matter with the most jaundiced possible eye.
*[The UK prime minister]'s anti-green stance exposes his reckless dishonesty. His fate is what matters, the planet can go hang.*
(satire) *Every American Exchanged For Iranian Population In First Successful Citizen Swap Deal.*
Part of Australia requires women prisoners to undergo strip searches to see doctors or their families. The prisoners respond to this practice by avoiding medical and family visits.
Rebecca Solnit explains why many women who have been raped or abused do not report it to the law. It takes a lot of courage to face the multiple punishments they are likely to receive for making the report.
* The Australian government is “missing half the equation” in acting on the climate crisis by backing a shift to renewable energy but having no plan to get out of fossil fuels, according to an author of a new scientific review.*
*European governments shrinking railways in favour of road-building, report finds.*
Biden has launched a program to employ 20,000 young adult Americans to work on climate defense and fire prevention.
Sierra Club gives more information.
However, Biden is simultaneously failing to do the most important things for climate defense. *Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, leaders of two biggest carbon emitters, among those not attending the [UN climate] summit in New York.*
China has launched a campaign demanding the British Museum return all "cultural relics acquired through improper channels" to China. Its supposed star example is a recent pot that the museum bought from the potter who made it.
There are plenty of examples of stolen art that museums should return. But often these conclusions are reached by anachronistically applying standards for recent times to a world that that didn't have these standards and which these standards did not fit. To decide which standards to judge an old event by calls for careful thought.
US and Brazil warn that powerful oligarchs in Guatemala might hold a coup to stop Guatemala's president-elect from taking power.
The UK questioned a British journalist at an airport, claiming he was suspected of "terrorism", and confiscated his phone and laptop.
He was suspected for his positive coverage of Rojava, the Kurdish state in Syria that stands for equality and unusual systems of democracy.
Rojava was an unofficial ally of the US during the fight against PISSI.
The most horrible thing about this law, and similar British law, is that the crime is not actual terrorism or whatever. It is being suspected of terrorism or whatever.
It is punishment on suspicion, with the bogus excuse that being suspected is itself a crime.
Japan's summer is extending far longer than usual, surely due to global heating.
People around the world must wake up to start envisioning what this will do to their lives after a couple more decades of getting worse.
The UK is again pressuring Facebook and its allied messaging features to delay end-to-end encryption until they snoop for the state.
I sympathize with the goal of protecting children from pressure for sex, but snooping is the foundation of tyranny, and that threatens everyone.
I would never use Facebook, because (1) it requires running nonfree software, which never deserves users' trust, and (2) Facebook itself does lots of snooping.
George Monbiot explains how lobbies convince the public to vote to keep the level of disease-causing pollution high.
When extremist Republican Senator Tim Scott threatened to fire workers for striking, he violated US labor law. He was urging for auto workers to be treated this way, but he is an employer himself, and he can't treat workers that way.
So the UAW has filed a complaint against him.
Keeping a dog should require a license, and to get the license you should have to pass a test in how to teach a tog to be friendly rather than aggressive.
There could be alternate tests for training guard dogs, where the trainer would have to demonstrate ability to train a guard dog so that it will keep its actions within the bounds of what is acceptable for such dogs.
Google's search algorithm chose a generated fake image rather than the real photo of Tank Man as the response to a search for "tank man".
Google manually corrected this, but it shows the error-prone nature of its system as operating.
US citizens: call on the judge in the Google antitrust trial to provide a live video feed. It is a matter of showing that the public interest is sufficient to justify it.
US citizens: call on the CFPB to stop forced arbitration now.
The Tories have dropped the commitments for decarbonization they adopted some years ago.
It is a standard Tory pattern to make a commitment in response to public pressure backed by valid reasons, go slowly, drop it a few years later when conditions make it convenient.
Thus they pretend to address national problems but don't really do so.
A UK minister said that Britain must give up on decarbonization rather than achieve it by "bankrupting the British people."
This choice is the result of a policy that will ensure suffering for most British people: the refusal to tax the rich. Britain has many grave problems, all caused by a lack of public spending. Schools, the NHS, housing for the non-rich, public transit, as well as avoiding global heating disaster.
Ceasing the policy of providing more and more of national income to the rich and the wealthy is necessary for all of them. Corbyn would do this; Tories and Starmer-Labour have surrendered to the rich and therefore can't do much about these problems.
I reject the term "net zero" for the way to formulate the goal of curbing greenhouse emissions. It provides an excuse to accept continuing emissions that might well be underestimated.
The Brazilian supreme court rejected a right-wing attempt to deny indigenous groups' claims to ancestral lands from which they had already been kicked out before 1988.
1988 is not long ago. I think this decision is correct when an indigenous group was kicked out a few decades before 1988. But I worry that it could extend too far: it could result in evicting non-indigenous farmers from land that they have farmed for generations, replacing one wave of dispossessed with another. Situations like that call for compromise.
I wonder what other limits there are in the law regarding how many decades it takes for non-indigenous farmers' title to be valid.
Illegal gold miners should never get valid title.
Canada reports evidence directly tying Indian diplomats to the murder of Sikh separatist living in Canada under asylum.
*Wildfires turn Canada’s vast forests from carbon sink into super-emitter.* This year's emissions amount to three times Canada's usual annual emissions, and the fires are not finished yet.
Further global heating is sure to increase the emissions from burning forest in further years — until it is all burned up. This is the sort of tipping point that can cause unstoppable disaster.
The article describes precautions that might be able to reduce the fires in future years.
House Speaker McCarthy, in thrall to Republican lunatic extremists who are willing to sabotage anything and everything to foil any helpful government policies they can get their hands on, is desperately trying to remain in the office of speaker by obeying their impossible demands.
The result of this is that he is losing what little shreds of honor and political respect remain to him. How foolish that is. If he resigns now and consigns the lunatics to hell, he may be unable to remain as speaker but he will salvage some respectability.
The lunatics of SCROTUS will look for another Republican willing to dangle on their strings to be a puppet "speaker". But the rest of the Republicans might decide to make a deal with Democrats on a bipartisan House leadership that would adopt compromise policies. I expect that sooner or later they will decide to climb out of the lunatics' vice.
Logging companies clear-cut Canadian forests in the 1980s, and replaced them with a monoculture of highly flammable black spruce. Those appear to have been the cause of many of the unquenchable giant wildfires of this year.
Putin's spy service directly tracks the ride service Yango. Everyone who gets a ride on Yango will be tracked and reported immediately. That includes clients in Israel and Europe as well as in Russia.
It is unjust for a ride service to identify you! Boycott GUber!
How one oil industry agent set up a web of pretend "grass roots" groups to make a lot of noise and thus give hesitant California legislators an excuse to water down a new oil regulation.
The agent responds with misleading words, such as claiming that these organizations are "real". They probably are "real" in the sense of really being legally registered, but they are not really what they claim to be. Then he insists that their arguments are "valid", which is no indication that they are valid.
*Iran and its agents appear to be orchestrating a Europe-wide campaign of harassment, surveillance, kidnap plots and death threats targeting political activists who are protesting against the regime.*
US citizens: call on the DOJ to investigate attacks on Stop Cop City activists.
The wrecker is using criminal indictments as a campaign strategy. His supporters hate government, justice and democracy so much that he can turn them against any honest manifestation of them.
Chief inspector: *I warned ministers about our disgraceful UK detention centres. Their solution? Stop the inspections.*
France is accused of trampling freedom of the press for arresting investigative journalist Ariane Lavrilleux, who reported on leaked documents alleging French intelligence targeted civilians in Egypt. She has been arrested.
France is becoming ever more repressive. Long-distance buses now require passengers' names, just like long-distance trains; next year, all trains that travel from city to city will impose the same demand. It is becoming difficult to pay for the Paris Metro with cash.
Pervasive tracking and surveillance is the foundation for pervasive repression.
Working from home makes it possible to save over 50% of one's greenhouse gas emissions, by avoiding commuting, but achieving that much savings requires taking significant steps to make your activities around home greener.
We should not forget that most employers demand use of unjust technology that people should never tolerate. Starting with things like Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, and lots of imposed employer-operated spyware.
Spain has permitted speaking to Parliament in Basque, Catalan and Galician, in addition to as Castilian (what is known as Spanish outside Spain). Those three have long been official languages for people to use in Spain.
It may feel like a great victory to the activists of those ethnic groups to have gained this added prestige for their languages. In practically terms, though, that right is useless because exercising it is self defeating: if you speak to Parliament in one of those other languages, you ensure that most of Parliament will not understand you.
A campaign is raising funds to support whistleblower David McBride, who revealed war crimes by Australia's military.
This July in the US was the hottest month ever, and it caused unprecedented damage to US food production, covering land and sea.
Richard Stallman will be speaking at the GNU 40th anniversary event in Switzerland on September 27.
Celebration and Free/Libre Software Developer meeting in Biel/Bienne
40 years ago the GNU Project — to develop the GNU operating system — was launched and gave birth to the Free Software movement, and Free Software has since become the cornerstone of modern computing. The GNU Project is celebrating its fortieth anniversary with a hacker meeting at the Volkshaus in Biel/Bienne, which will feature presentations about various GNU packages, Free Software philosophy, and the development process.
Australian elected officials are putting pressure on the US to drop charges against Julian Assange.
Robert Reich: *Strikes aren’t bad for the US economy. They’re the best thing that could happen.*
Previous waves of strikes gave America the large middle class that has now been mostly eliminated by the power of the rich.
Modi is accused of a series of assassinations of Sikh separatists.
I do not support that separatist cause, and it is legitimate for Indian leaders to oppose it. But not by assassination of exiles. Is Modi taking after Putin as well as after the bullshitter?
The Putin forces have kidnapped over 18,000 Ukrainian children from occupied areas and sent them to Russia. Some of them have been taken to Belarus by Lukashenko's agents.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject Republican plans to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
Rich people do not have a "right" to keep all the money they alter our laws to direct to them!
If you are invited to phone your representative, that is an effective thing to do. But you don't need to do this by texting from a snoop-phone. You can simply phone 202-224-3121.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Azerbaijan heavily attacked the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
US citizens: call on Congress to renew funding for child care before it expires on September 30.
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 to stay firm against corporate lobbyists, and tax billion-dollar corporations.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
California sued Google for keeping track of location history even when a user had specified not to do so.
In the settlement, Google committed to being more "transparent" about what it was doing with location data. The article does not say that it committed to giving users the option for not storing location data that it will truly obey.
The usual practice when governments regulate with snooping disservices is to assume that "transparency" (as part of asking for "consent") is sufficient to make any sort of snooping legitimate. Given that many users find that other aspects of their lives practically compel them to use the disservice, they don't really have the choice not to "consent". Making the request for consent "transparent" does nothing to fix that.
*The One Million Tibetan Children in China’s Boarding Schools.* They are being taught Chinese culture and separated from Tibetan culture. Tibet is being abolished.
Many other countries have done this to minority groups, including the US, UK, Canada and France, to mention only those I recall at this moment.
Some manufacturers of medical equipment are trying to impose conditions on how the purchaser uses it — "use for execution prohibited." They are trying to propagate this to indirect purchasers too.
I oppose the death penalty. However, these manufacturers are claiming the outrageous general power to control those who buy their products. Use that power to ban use for execution, they could use it to ban anything else too. Imagine "Use of this cable for copying audio and video works without explicit authorization from copyright holders is prohibited."
We must not tolerate the attempt to impose such power just because it is being applied today to aid a cause we support.
Parents in the US are tracking their children up through ever-higher ages. Now some college students are being tracked.
This article describes the harm that does.
A large UK union will spend some money on publicly promoting a few specific policy issues, instead of giving it to Labour.
Not all of these policies are good. One of them is to continue developing more offshore oilfields, to extract oil that the world cannot safely burn or make into more plastic.
I am in favor of a well-managed green transition, but trying to demand it by overdrawing the carbon budget is environmental terrorism.
I can't see a reason why it would be beneficial overall to subsidize steel production rather than import it. Does that have any purpose except competition for the votes of steel workers?
Trudeau accuses Indian agents of murdering a Sikh separatist leader in Canada.
I do not see a reason to support that separatist cause, but assassinating exiles is not justified.
Robert Reich: *Why labor activism is good for America.*
For several years, the UK Labour government ordered reductions in the amount of salt added to certain foods. In 2014, the new government ended that, and levels of salt increased. This has been tied to 24,000 additional deaths.
Since we get accustomed to whatever level of salt we consume, there is no loss in reducing that across the board.
How quitting Facebook and Ex-Twitter enabled one user to change for the better his approach to life.
Australia needs to replace the old coal-powered electric generators. The right-wing wants to build small nuclear power plants, but they would cost over 17 times as much as solar power, 9 times as much as wind power.
Clearly the lobbying for small nuclear plants does not aim to serve the public good. It is an attempt by companies to profit by wasting public funds. That was pretty clear already, but this strengthens the case.
Solar power satellites are being considered seriously by the EU.
The L5 society's 1980 plan was to build large ones using material from the Moon. Launching that from the Moon's shallower gravity well would be far cheaper than launching that from Earth.
*California sues [five giant] oil companies claiming they [deceptively downplayed] the risk of fossil fuels.*
Despite the cease fire of the Tigray region's forces with Ethiopia, the atrocities continue there, committed by other ethnic Ethiopian militias and the Eritrean army.
Expensive plans to protect Rockaway in NYC from future hurricanes may not be effective.
The article explains that efforts to estimate the probability of a another similar disaster were bogus or confused. Meanwhile, science has advanced since the 2000s. We should make a more plausible estimate of that probability, based on acceleration of global heating, then increase it for our continued incomplete knowledge.
Then we should make another such estimate assuming that proposed flood protection plans have been implemented. We can judge whether those plans are worth implementing based on how much they decrease the disaster likelihood.
If even after flood protection it is likely that another disaster will happen within 50 years, the federal government should buy out the properties there, and declare it a protected zone. Let it become beach, or wetlands. We had better be spending that money on decarbonization, which protects the whole world, not on short-term protection of each area by itself.
Using bullshit generators to generate letters of recommendation, letters of complaint, or letters of pressure, paradoxically makes them count for less.
Ex-Twitter has stopped labeling paid ads at all, for some users.
The non-nuclear deal with Iran calls for lifting certain sanctions in October 2023. However, France, Germany and the UK say that Iran's violations are significant and they won't do it.
Iran could come back into compliance if it decided to. It might do this if the US offers a return to the deal in exchange.
*We need radical change in economic policy, not just a change of government.*
This goes for the US as well as the UK.
Students have convinced New York University to divest from fossil fuels.
Going by the article, the criteria will be fairly strict. Many organizations have "divested from fossil fuels", but it covered only some of the ways of investing in fossil fuels, leaving plenty of room to do so.
A study has found that "carbon offsets" as certified by Verra are misleading and ineffective.
A right-wing extremist is likely to be elected mayor of a city in Germany. He has condemned the activities to remind Germans of the evil of the Holocaust.
I don't see in the article that he endorses antisemitism, but I think the AfD party is heading in a direction which will get there soon.
Another politician in that party is being tried for using a Nazi slogan.
I abhor censorship of anything, even Nazism, because censorship opens the door to tyranny. However, so does Nazism, and more generally fascism. I am not sure which is the bigger danger.
The government of Victoria got advice about tobacco policies from the PR company KPMG which has a long association with tobacco companies. This was, in effect, giving those companies special influence over the policies meant to protect the public from their addictive, disease-causing product.
*New[ly released old] Documents Show Exxon Executives Cast Doubt on Climate Science to Protect Profits.*
* ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and [global heating].*
In 2008, Exxon said it would stop supporting climate-denialist groups but it continued to support influential individual climate-denialists.
Wisconsin's gerrymandered state senate gives Republicans a 2-1 supermajority. They just voted to fire the state's chief election administrator — in line with conspiracy disinformation, but really for having unwelcome integrity.
*The Guardian view on planetary boundaries: the Earth has limits and governments must act on them.*
Florida governor DeMentis *contradicted [his] own abortion law to claim woman will not be criminalized.* However, the text clearly admits of prosecuting the woman who has an abortion.
This is the common Republican tactic of trying to have it both ways.
*I work in a supermarket and see how desperate some shoplifters are. My heart goes out to them.*
The same worker also sees professional thieves, and addicts who steal to buy an addictive drug. Those have always existed, but what's changed is that now there are many desperate thieves stealing necessities of life.
After Mangosuthu Buthelezi's death, South African officials are covering up his career of running a movement to serve the apartheid government and repress for it.
Use of the IHRA criterion for antisemitism has led to 40 cases of accusations by universities against specific people and groups, of which 38 have been dismissed.
The Starbucks workers' union is considering calling for a consumer boycott.
Why wait? You can start boycotting now. I would, except that I never buy from Starbucks anyway — its products don't appeal to me.
The Polish government has funded development of a test to determine whether someone has taken mifepristone and misoprostol. And now it is using this test to determine whether specific people have had abortions.
Some right-wing US politicians are looking forward to the same thing.
A Seattle thug was recorded expressing derision for a woman who was killed by another thug who was driving dangerously fast to deal with an incident.
The derision did not injure anyone, but it shows he has the wrong attitude towards members of the public and is not fit to be a police officer.
Starmer has adopted one of Corbyn's ideas about trade with the EU, at least partially. Corbyn said he would try to form a customs union with the EU.
*Tens of thousands in NYC march against fossil fuels as AOC hails powerful message.* *Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the crowd must become ‘too big and too radical to ignore” as Biden came under fire for oil projects.*
I agree. Having separate rallies on different dates* in various cities makes a smaller impression with the same number of people.
When people are motivated enough for hundreds of thousands to rally in Washington DC, that will be impossible to ignore.
* The US accounts for more than a third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, despite its claims of climate leadership,*
I suspect these figures are skewed by not including increases in coal mining. China is building new coal-fired generators at a prodigious rate and must be planning a comparable increase in the rate of coal mining. Whether the US or China comes out worse overall when all kinds of fossil fuel are counted, I don't know, but they must both be very bad.
*World Bank spent billions of dollars backing fossil fuels in 2022, study finds.*
Direct air capture of CO2, though only rudimentary, is absolutely necessary for curbing global heating — as long as our reductions in emissions remain hopelessly inadequate.
Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, and the news site Rappler, have been found innocent of President Do-Dirty's tax fraud charges.
People suspected those charges were fabricated.
They still face other charges that are explicitly political.
Under years of Tory rule, dooH niboR has evolved from neoliberalism to right-wing populism that drives down the meager incomes of the non-wealthy.
*China concerns drive historic upgrade in US-Vietnam relations.*
Some time after 2000 I learned that Vietnam had given the US a military base. I assumed this was support against Vietnam's enemy, China. China has been Vietnam's principal enemy ever since China first conquered Vietnam, about two thousand years ago. Since Vietnam conclusively won independence, about a thousand years ago, it has always had to watch out for China.
This is increase in relations is obviously good strategy against the broader Chinese threat. What makes me sad is that this is one more dictatorship that the US supports, added to a long list.
(satire) *Instacart Valuation Crashes As Americans Realize They Can Do Some Things For Themselves.*
Every "service" that requires each customer to identify perself is an injustice simply for that. So I am glad to see any of them lose demand, whatever the reason. However, shopping delivery services are especially important to abolish, since their success threatens to eliminate supermarkets and make life harder for those of us who want to buy anonymously.
Crown Prince Bone Saw has put several dissidents in prison, and sentenced one to death after a parody of a trial, for posting criticism of the prince and other members of the royal family.
That regime is comparable in its evil to China, though some details differ.
The Tories are dropping, step by step, their plans to separate UK regulations and inspections from EU standards. It is not clear that they will alter the policy changes that hurt individuals, such as the plans to discard EU human rights requirements or the burdens of not being EU citizen. Ultimately, they care about British businesses, not Britons.
120,000 people in Britain died in 2022 while on NHS waiting lists. That is double that died while waiting in 2017/2018.
The cause of this is simple: bad policies imposed by the government. Especially the policy of refusing to tax the rich so as to raise enough funds to do the NHS job right and thoroughly.
I would have suggested voting for Labour, except now Labour is committed to be just as bad.
A study found that some substances from marijuana are useful medicines, but that aside from that young people (including teenagers and a little older) and those who are pregnant should not take it.
A white family in New Mexico was rushing to bring their badly injured dog to a vet, when some thugs stopped them and (for no reason at all) decided they were threatening someone somehow.
The thugs made some get out of the car and pointed guns at them, as they did nothing but say, "Our dog's gonna die."
The article does not say how many minutes the thugs delayed this trip to the veterinarian, so we can't try to guess whether the dog might have survived without their intervention.
Another commentator pointed out that it is rare for whites to get this horrible treatment, but blacks learn that for them it is standard.
This instance clearly illustrates how thugs can perceive threats and defiance where there are none at all.
UK thugs are delighted with the idea of identifying "suspects" by facial recognition in all sorts of footage of crowds.
These "suspects" may very well be protesters charged with grave crimes that are disguises for "causing inconveniencing with a protest" — or "damaging corporations' profits with a protest."
UK supplies of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers and citrus fruits ran short this year due to unnatural extreme weather caused by global heating.
The danger is predicted to extend to bananas, grapes, avocados, cashews, cocoa, peas, canned tuna and tea.
I expect this problem to be global, more or less.
* US news organizations have turned Biden’s age into a scandal and continue to cover Trump as an entertaining side show. With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways.*
* From the Sargasso Sea to the Costa Rica thermal dome, scientists are identifying key diversity hotspots to safeguard under a new UN treaty.*
The UK is facing another wave of Covid-19 from the multi-mutation Pirola variant. Reducing the harm calls for wearing masks, but the government is too timid to promote them.
The situation is similar in the US.
I wear masks by choice, to protect myself and others. So can you.
Amazon has used its near-monopoly power to force e-magazines out of operation or under its exclusive monopoly.
This is clearly an injustice. However, the article does not take notice of the context — based totally on injustice, because these magazines were distributed for the Amazon Swindle.
Amazon identified each reader — an injustice — and, I suspect made them sign contracts not to share copies — another injustice. They may have had DRM — also an injustice.
Within this unjust context, Amazon's treatment of those magazines was wrong. But the injustice of the Amazon Swindle is a far bigger wrong.
A letter proves that Pope Pius XII received information in December 1942 from a close associate about mass murder of Jews by the German regime.
This refutes the claim that he could not be sure that Hitler was carrying out mass murder.
I can't dispute the point that the pope, living in the middle of Rome, which at that time was the capital of Hitler's ally Mussolini, could not overtly oppose Hitler.
Brazil has sentenced the first of hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters who attacked the government ministries on Jan 8 this year.
*Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination, report finds.*
This is what people predicted and criticized in advance, and surely what the Tories sought.
The Tories may be considering relaxing their voter-ID scheme somewhat, but not in a way that would reduce the suppression of younger voters that the plan was designed to achieve.
Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko went to Ukraine to cover Putin's invasion for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, but stayed after Putin closed it down. Then she learned that there was an order out to kill her.
She got sick, with an unidentifiable illness, and doctors eventually concluded she had been poisoned by Putinite agents.
As her writing describes, it is not just a few heroes that Putin tries to crush. It is also hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians that the Putin forces have conquered, then shot, kidnapped, brainwashed or tortured.
Alabama is trying to prosecute anyone that helps a woman travel for an abortion for "criminal conspiracy". Texas and Idaho also have laws to punish helping a woman get out of the state for an abortion.
These laws are designed for repressive terror. They show what fascist Christians stand for, and what they deserve.
British unions will complain formally to the International Labor Organization about the Tories' new restrictions on strikes, which violate UN rules.
Sweden is moving strongly back to teaching school on paper. The main aim is to help children learn better, but it also provides an opportunity to free them from the grip of online disservices.
*Libya’s floods are result of climate crisis meeting a failed state.*
In Maricopa county, and many others where fascists have organized, they are bombarding election officials with more public records requests than they can answer, accusing officials of hiding some nonexistent conspiracy (the sort of thing that only fascists actually do), and frightening capable election officials into quitting.
The danger for democracy is that their replacements will be fascists. Fascists know that they won't be persecuted.
Instead of the rule of law, fascists practice the rule of lie.
* Poverty [in the US] increased sharply in 2022 due to safety net cutbacks and inflation shock.*
Bernie Sanders: *The United Auto Workers may soon strike. Every American should support them.*
I agree, but I am not sure how to do that.
The report that Musk deactivated Ukraine's use of Starlink near Crimea just as Ukraine was sending attack drones there has been found to be a confusion. What actually happened was that he had never authorized Ukraine to use Starlink in that region. Ukraine asked for this for that attack, and he said no.
I won't call that treachery or any dirty names. However, I disagree with his decision.
Fortunately, Ukraine has developed other ways to attack Russian ships, in port and at sea.
It is incorrect, however, to say that supporting Ukraine's attack would have been "escalation". Ukraine's intended attack on Putin's ships would have been small compared to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and those ships had already been involved in attacking Ukraine. Attacking them in their bases — as Ukraine has sometimes done since in other ways — is simply continuing the war Putin started.
Datasets for journalists censured by Ex-Twitter and Reddit block the posting of links to the Distributed Denial of Secrets web site.
Russia and Indonesia block the site entirely. Indonesia blocked it after it posted the secrets of a big company that mines coal and deals in palm oil. One must suspect it of deforestation.
Starlink has become controversial on account of Musk's repeated surprise blockages to Ukraine, but all big tech companies have the same sort of dangerous world political power even if they have not used it yet.
(satire) *Yevgeny Prigozhin Leads Army Of 25,000 Undead Toward Kremlin.*
The Philadelphia thugs that killed Eddie Irizarry lied to create an excuse, and the police chief said so and told a different story which nonetheless gave them an excuse. The cops refused to release to videos that ought to have proved it was true. But now a video has appeared which shows that too was all lies. They had no grounds at all for violence.
Intuit claims that TurboTax is "free", but it has never been libre. A judge has ruled that it isn't gratis either, and ordered the company to stop saying it is "free".
That they exchange money for using it is what most people are worked up about, but the fact that users can't use it while keeping their freedom is what's truly important.
*Six [Mississippi thugs] known as the "Goon Squad" plead guilty to torturing two [black] men, using a sex toy on them and shooting one of them [almost killing him].*
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 practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider important — and I label them like this.
(satire) *Study: More Americans Buying AR-15s To Defend Selves From Toddlers Who Found Their Guns.*
Immigrants who helped Florida repair after previous hurricanes are afraid to go there now, due to DeMentis's law to promote deportation.
I wonder whether farms will have trouble finding workers for the harvest this year.
*Protests in Israel as supreme court hears challenge to judicial curbs.*
Richard Stallman will give a talk, "Free Software And Your Freedom", in the Czech Republic in Prague on Oct 1. That will be at this year's "Hackers Congress Paralelni Polis" 2023, September 29 – October 1, at the La Fabrika Theater.
Australian uniformed thugs worked very hard to come up with evidence to convict Jason Roberts of killing two thugs. There wasn't enough real evidence, so they had to fake it.
Australia fines drivers, even cancels their driving licenses, if occasionally a passenger does not wear a seat belt.
This is are a system of collective responsibility: "Hey you! Monitor those others near you, or we will punish you!" This attitude towards people is an injustice in general.
Since 1975 I have made a practice of wearing my seat belt. for safety, whether driving or riding as a passenger. But there is one exception: when I need to sleep. I have never found a way to sleep with a seat belt rubbing on my shoulder — it changes my posture. If I am compelled to wear the seat belt because the driver has been conscripted into forcing me, I will not be able to sleep and I may get sick.
So I regard that system as an injustice.
If the system permitted me to wear the lap belt but not the shoulder belt, I would certainly do that, since the lap belt does not stop me from sleeping. But nowadays they don't support that mode of use.
*Rishi Sunak hopes for warm welcome at G20 as India’s "son-in-law".* This warm welcome would be a business-supremacy treaty that did not disadvantage British plutocrats too much compared with Indian plutocrats.
What we see, therefore, is a less rich oligarch sucking up to a richer oligarch.
Most Democratic voters would rather that Biden step aside in 2024, but few can name a candidate they would prefer.
I would certainly prefer Bernie Sanders.
Biden is a strange mixture. He has done a number of things that surprised me for how progressive they were. And he has partly achieved other progressive programs to the extent progressives could get them through Congress. On the other hand, he keeps handing planet roasters and other plutocrats gratuitous victories.
Urging western tourism companies to stop selling package travel through Xinjiang into areas where Uyghurs are being brainwashed.
It may be romantically exciting to imagine visiting Xinjiang and pulling back the curtain or deception, but the Chinese who operate the curtain are skilled experts whereas you would be encountering it for the first time. Whatever move you try, they would surely have training and experience at countering.
It is wiser to leave that sort of thing to people who are themselves experts.
(satire) *Court Upholds Congressional Map That Sealed Black Voters In Impenetrable Cube/*
Mexico could provide a place where US citizens in abortion-banning southern states could get abortions. The ironic result would be that the main group of people in those states who could not go to Mexico for an abortion would be the unauthorized immigrants. Republican racists would tear their hair out to see their own abortion bans speeding the "great replacement".
Imagine a campaign calling for Texas to allow non-citizens to get abortions also. "Way to go, Republicans — protect every possible anchor baby!"
Even better, US government could directly help the non-US-citizens get abortions. It could make an arrangement with Mexico to set up border abortion clinics on the Mexico side, which would be federal facilities so they would be lawful right away, and allow anyone to cross the border from the US directly into an abortion clinic and then return, regardless of passport or immigration status. However, only authorized personnel would be allowed to enter the clinic from Mexico.
To make sure there is no unfairness towards Mexicans, each of these transborder abortion clinics would be accompanied by another abortion clinic that serves people coming from Mexico.
The arrangement could also explicitly permit royalty-free importation of mifepristone and any other medicines purchased in these clinics.
What I don't know is whether it is possible to do this without getting the approval of the Senate, which might be blocked by overt and covert Republicans.
In practical terms, hot weather tends to kill people when it reaches the point where humans must take conscious precautions to survive it.
That is well before the point of what I have called "fatal weather" which is where nothing short of air conditioning will suffice.
Weather deadly by that lower standard has been observed in various places in recent years.
*Covid's back, you say? As disabled and vulnerable people know all too well, it never went away.*
What happened, rather is that governments gave up trying to protect the public to cave to the people who preferred to pretend Covid was gone. This is the case in the US and Europe, with variations in details between countries.
British business barons are flocking to invest in the Labour Party.
The indictment of protesters against Cop City for "racketeering" threatens freedom of the press as well as freedom to protest.
British unions have decided to defy the Tories' new anti-strike laws.
Undercover federal thugs shot and maimed a man in a wheelchair who had come to the aid of his brother, whom the thugs were attacking. They did not identify themselves as cops until after.
People should not be killed or maimed for coming to the aid, with or without a gun, of someone being attacked by unknown strangers.
The fact that this victim was homeless doesn't alter the issue. Neither does the fact that he already needed a wheelchair for some other reasons. Those are misfortunes, and a better organized society would spare people the first of the two, but if the thugs had done the same thing to a fit and healthy home-owner it would have been equally unjust.
*We Must Remember the 9/11 War Lies.*
*We can’t afford to let these lies go down the memory hole, like we have the other wars we were lied into.*
I disagree with Hartmann about ending the war in Afghanistan. I supported the war in Afghanistan, for the sake of democracy and women's rights there, when it looked like we could win that war. But it became clear that the army we supported could never defeat the Taliban.
Queensland cops caught sharing a thuggish attitude of bigotry will not be punished.
The state has a duty not to allow this. Sneering at people with insulting words cannot be a crime, since it is part of freedom of speech. But people who hold an office such as "police officer", which includes special powers over everyone else and special authorization for violence, have a duty to treat the public without bias. If they engage in bigotry, they are not fit for the office. If they promote bigotry among the other officers, they undermine the proper respect for society among the whole body of officers.
*Dozens of leading Palestinian intellectuals, artists and other public figures have published an open letter condemning antisemitic comments made by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.*
Bravo! Palestinians have plenty of reason to hate Israel's occupation policies; that they speak up to distinguish that from (and reject) antisemitism is an admirable example.
If they can do this, surely the supporters of Israel's occupation policies can do likewise.
The Republicans' "investigation" of Biden, intended to find grounds for impeachment, appears to be just "blow smoke and exaggerate it."
Chilean musicians protested Pinochet's dictatorship through underground performances, often closed down by the regime's thugs. Some protest musicians are blind — mutilated by thugs.
*Ginni Thomas and rightwing activists exploited supreme court ruling — report.*
Egypt is converting parks and open squares in Cairo into unwelcoming zones that are easy to police.
Republicans in Texas have passed many laws for repression of all sorts of people they wish to persecute.
One of these laws allow the state to rig elections in Houston, the state's biggest city, if Republicans claim there was an "irregularity" in the election.
Another is meant to force trans adolescents to go through puberty the way they do not want to. Forcing people to undergo irreversible biological changes is gratuitous cruelty.
Another law will enable state officials to force prosecution of abortions.
Other Republican laws are nasty in spirit but can be blunted with effort. For instance, young people can defeat censorship of school libraries by buying books and sharing them. Prohibition of drag shows can be overcome by sharing videos.
As for prohibition of participation of trans-people in sports, that may lead to disappointment, but people need to distinguish between the important things in life and the side issues. People can get obsessed with sports, but we should not take that to mean sports matter.
Calling on the US to publish its role in organizing the overthrow of President Allende of Chile.
The dictator Pinochet, despite being dead, is exerting a growing influence in Chile in favor of fascism, much as the fascist-in-chief is doing in the US.
*Chile president [Boric] gives staunch defense of democracy, 50 years after Pinochet coup.*
An interview with Rep. Greg Casar, progressive Hispanic and first term in Congress, about his visit to various countries in South America and how the US can begin supporting and favorizing democracy there instead of supporting right-wing oligarchs.
US citizens: call on Congress to enact ethics standards for 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!
Richard Stallman will speak, along with other GNU contributors, on Sep 27 as part of the GNU 40th anniversary celebration in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.
The page does not describe live streaming, but we understand it will happen.
Sep 17: Join the climate defense rally in New York City.
Sep 20: In Boston, join the Extinction Rebellion rally
US citizens: call on the US govt to say what it is now doing in Yemen.
US citizens: call on the Biden Administration to protect access to Medicaid.
US citizens: call on the mainstream media to end their racist and sexist attacks against Georgia DA Fani Willis, who is prosecuting the insurrectionist for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
US citizens: call on the Biden Administration to stay firm against corporate lobbyists: tax billion dollar corporations.
Everyone: call on Chick-fil-A to stop using polystyrene foam cups.
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 the Biden administration to protect Medicaid access for poor Americans.
US citizens: call on the DOJ to investigate Governor Abbott's inhumane border policies.
US citizens: Support the "Unhoused" Bill of Rights.
I dislike the new affectation, the word "unhoused", which appears in the name of that bill. I am glad I have a home to live in, and I wish we made sure that everybody could have one, so I support this plan to help the homeless. But I will not call people "housed" or "unhoused".
*Global push for commitment to phase out fossil fuels gathers pace ahead of Cop28.*
If this succeeds, it will be an important preparatory step towards avoiding global disaster.
Some progress has been made at the G20 meeting, but it did not reach a phase out.
The leader of the Australian Green Party calls for protests against government policies that cater to fossil fuels and deforestation.
*The arch-fascist vows to lock up political enemies if he returns to White House.*
In the insane world view he promotes, there is no difference between arbitrary political imprisonment and charging someone with a crime.
He said the reason is that "they are doing it to us," but that is more bullshit: he demanded the same thing in 2016, and there was no move then to charge him with a crime.
(satire) *Mediterranean Tourists Go On Incredible Refugee-Watching Tour.*
In 2021, 16 countries pledged to stop their international investments in fossil fuel, Most of them kept the pledge. The US, Germany and Italy did not.
"Smart" devices typically collect more data about their useds than is required to implement their features.
As usual, for "smart" read "snoop". Instead of getting a "smart device", be smart yourself — and reject them.
A former head of Israel's highly respected intelligence agency set off a stir by acknowledging that Israel has imposed an apartheid system on the Palestinians.
A province of Pakistan has made it a crime for parents to stop their children from being vaccinated for polio and other dangerous diseases.
This is meant to overcome the disinformation that threatens to undo the almost-completed global eradication of polio, and protection from measles and more.
The EU's Digital Markets Act will or would ban, for some large tech companies, some of the worst abuses that they commit using the power over users that they get from non-free software.
It is a good try, but what users really need is free software.
(satire) *New U.S. Army Recruitment Ad Touts Military As Great Alternative To Starving On Streets.*
*Senate Finally Confirms 5th FCC Commissioner After [Republican-imposed] Vacancy of More Than 2.5 Years.*
One of the insurrectionist's henchmen refused to provide evidence or testimony to the Jan 6 insurrection committee. He has been convicted of contempt of Congress, and may be sentenced to prison.
Will he now be ordered to hand over the dope? I would expect that the committee can no longer receive it, since the Republicans now control the House of Representatives. Justice may have won this skirmish, but the Republicans may have won this battle.
I would be glad to see well-informed comment on these follow-on issues.
Fish around the world are generally getting smaller. Within a given species, the population tends to be smaller than before. Within an ecosystem, larger species tend to be replaced with smaller species.
The article asserts that this is the consequence of what it calls the "Anthropocene" period, but I call the "Obscene" period.
Comments on France's ban of the abaya in schools, from several points of view.
*Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted.*
This suggest the rising sea will come for you sooner than previously predicted.
New York City is considering a law to save migrating birds from colliding with illuminated glass towers.
The Labour Party is receiving donations at the highest rate ever, now that plutocrats are donating to it.
I think they recognize that it is now almost as plutocratist as the Tories, but more competent.
There is a campaign to demand removal of certain antisemitic word meanings from the Real Academia Española's dictionary of Spanish.
This campaign is foolish and harmful. Yes, those meanings are antisemitic; they express bigotry. Yes, their existence comes out of a long tradition of antisemitism in Spain — naturally it does. People should not those meanings, or any other way to express bigotry.
But that is a separate matter from what words the dictionary should define. To use those meanings endorses bigotry, but citing them in a dictionary does not.
A dictionary should contain all sorts of words and meanings, including those that you or I disapprove of — and if the meaning expresses bigotry, the dictionary should say so. That is part of the dictionary's mission: to document the language fully.
You can't stop bigots from using prejudiced insults by omitting them from the dictionary — that is not where they learn those words. But if they are omitted from the dictionary, we who have not grown up in a milieu of antisemitic hispanophones could not find out what they mean when we want to know.
To start trying to cleanse language by denying or hiding the existence of words and meanings whose usage we condemn is to open dictionaries to culture wars. Then the most powerful political forces will weaponize them. They might be censored by racists, antisemites and Nazis, and sooner than you think. Instead of legitimizing censorship of dictionaries, we had better fight now to protect dictionaries' freedom to fully document language as it is used,
I looked in my copy of the Real Academia dictionary; it does not have the definition of "judío" that the campaign condemns. It is the 1992 edition; perhaps that definition was added subsequently.
The US immigration system uses heuristic (and thus unreliable) computerized translators. Their mistakes put refugees' rights in jeopardy.
British undercover thugs continue the practice of maintaining intimate relationships under false names while keeping their lovers in the dark. But it may be rather different now.
One woman found out about hers in 2020 after 19 years. She was not involved in whatever group or activity he was infiltrating, and he reportedly wasn't directed to get involved with her. He may have been breaking the rules.
After many years he ceased to be in the thug department but continued the relationship under the same false name. I guess he saw no way to tell her the truth, so he was trapped in his own lie.
She and her families are trapped in the secret too.
(satire) *Self-Driving Tesla Regurgitates Pedestrian To Feed Offspring.*
Organizations that campaign against hate are now campaigning against Musk and his use of Ex-Twitter to attack those organizations.
We have to conclude that Must is a fascist and suspect that he bought Twitter to use it for hate.
Modi boasts about "India's democracy" while covering up India's spreading repression of Muslims (and other non-Hindus including Dalits). Other countries support the false front in order to do business with India.
Car manufacturers tell purchasers that they intend to collect wide varieties of personal data. Most say they will sell the data and use it against the purchaser.
I can see why the company would like to get information about the owner's sex life and politics. What I don't see is how they can make the car get that sort of information for them, Perhaps they hope to trade car data with other snooping companies for that data.
The important conclusion of this information is that these companies don't respect you. That leads to the question: how can you stop them from getting data about you. That requires at least a little skill — perhaps enough to find and disconnect the car's antennas.
China is considering a vague law to prohibit anything That "Hurts The Country's Feelings".
Since countries do not actually feel anything, the only way that phrase can be interpreted is as a metaphor, so it can be stretched to prohibit almost anything. I suppose that's the purpose of it.
Modi has walled off poor neighborhoods of Delhi and shut all business in them, so that India will look shiny to visiting foreign dignitaries.
Although Muslims, Christians and Dalits are the usual targets of his contempt, any poor person can be a target when that is convenient for him.
*Mexico's supreme court decriminalizes abortion across country.*
*Watchdog group sues to remove "insurrectionist" [candidate] from 2024 ballot* in Colorado.
The Georgia special grand jury suggested charges against Senator Lindsey Graham and some other prominent Republicans, for supporting the insurrectionist's efforts to overthrow the 2020 election.
The UK parliament passed laws a few years ago to require registration of the effective ("beneficial") owner of foreign-owned properties, but left a loophole that defeats the system: when the nominal owner is a trust, it can still conceal the identity of the effective owner.
This is plutocratism at work.
UK enforcement of the registration rules is so lax that secret owners are in no danger of being punished or hassled.
This applies to ordinary tax evaders as well as Russian oligarchs subject to sanctions because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
The Tories have backed down, for the moment, on plans to scan users' digital communications, but the requirement is still in the law they are about to pass.
Perhaps they plan to make another try in a year or two.
*Texas Energy Grid Paid Bitcoin Miner $31.7 Million to Stop Working Amid Heatwave.*
One sign of US plutocracy is the idea that companies should be paid every time they do what the public needs, rather than be taxed or fined when they do not do it.
The poor are punished; the rich get rewarded.
*Deadly humid heatwaves to spread rapidly as climate warms — study.*
This refers to what I have called "fatal weather."
Ralph Nader: as second-order unnatural disasters (caused by the effects of the first-order unnatural disasters) spread death and suffering around the world, we must join to crush the power of the corporations that make sure these disasters keep happening.
Nader believes the time is ripe for a left-right coalition to do this, but I think one of the purposes of right-wing disinformation is to ensure most right-wing people, in various countries, are so absorbed with fantasy problems that they can't focus on real problems.
Big banks are financing US coal power plants, despite a supposed commitment to stop, by lending instead to their parent companies.
The effort to stop lending and insurance for fossil fuel projects is a backup plan, which we try because we can't get Congress to do what really needs to be done: prohibit some of those projects and tax the rest so much that some will be canceled. If it worked, it would be a victory.
*UN warns world will miss climate targets unless fossil fuels phased out.*
*US "university" [calling itself PragerU] spreads climate lies and receives millions from rightwing donors.*
Prager you too!
Biden is canceling the fossil fuel leases that the wrecker signed for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Private equity is investing in causing climate disasters, and profiting from the work to clean them up.
African countries are compelled to choose between coping with global heating effects, fighting poverty and paying debts. I suppose the greenhouse emission rate of African countries is small enough that reducing those countries' emissions is not urgent.
(satire) *FanDuel Promo Offers Complimentary $100 Bet To First-Time Gambling Hotline Callers.*
The UK has been greatly exercised by the conviction of a nurse for murdering 16 babies in a hospital. Of course, we must prosecute murder; but the 170,000 excess deaths in Britain 2022 ought to be a 10,000 times bigger public concern.
Some thousands of these deaths were caused by Covid-19 but not attributed to it. Some were caused by insufficient funding of the NHS, which the two main plutocratist parties (Tory and Starmer-Labour) have committed to continuing because they refuse to tax the rich even to save thousands of lives,
Users report that Microsoft has installed popups that tell users not to use Chrome.
That is entirely valid advice. Chrome is nonfree software, which implies it imposes unjust control over the user (see fsf.org/tedx). It also has has malicious functionalities.
What I wonder is, does Microsoft single out Google's malware, or does it also warn about malware from Apple, Microsoft and other countries?
*Climate crisis could contribute to a global food shortage by 2050, US special envoy on food security warns.*
Do you want to have a child now that might starve at age 30? I think it is more humane to avoid that.
Starmer is underscoring that he's with the political values of Tony B'liar.
It is very rare that "opposites attract" in romantic couples.
Modi has arbitrarily kicked two news organizations off the internet, and has arbitrarily had one evicted from its offices.
The EU is coming to think that there are now too many wolves in Europe. That could well be true.
I do not consider wolves sacred, and I have no wish to maximize their numbers. Rather, I want to see ecosystems healthy and extinctions avoided. That entails keeping wild populations well away from zero.
Paying prisoners 23 cents an hour to work for private businesses is supposedly justified to teach them job skills so they can get jobs after release. Except that nobody will hire them no matter how well they do the job.
*Twitter accused of helping [Salafi] Arabia commit human rights abuses.
*Lawsuit says network discloses user data at request of Saudi authorities at much higher rate than for US, UK and Canada.*
*Former Proud Boys leader sentenced to 22 years over US Capitol attack.*
He was one of the ringleaders, so he deserves this sentence, But the fascist leader who they meant to install in power deserves an even longer sentence.
*Australia's export of fossil fuels is like selling drugs to "maintain" lifestyle, former [state head fire official] says.*
This is so obvious that when officials who are not stupid don't see it we must conclude they are determined not to see. Sometimes the not-see party can be almost as dangerous as the Nazi party.
Starmer-Labour plans to join the Tories in deregulating housing construction that would release toxic pollution into rivers.
*France planning to ban disposable vapes in effort to combat smoking.*
American fanatical Christians spent a lot of money to help extremist Christianity take over African countries.
Musk is is threatening journalists on Ex-Twitter if they look into his antisemitism.
Is painting slogans on a wall, that are meant to criticize China's repression, "art"?
Is painting the regime's own statement, aiming for people to recognize their ironic contradiction with its actions, an effective mode of criticism?
In my view, the answers are "no" and "it's chancy".
I am all for condemning China's repressive dictatorship, as a political act; but in order to qualify as art it needs to present its meaning in a subtle, unobvious way. That's the part that could be art. However, merely intending a text as irony fails to do that. It doesn't present the meaning in a subtle way, because the subtlety is not in the work itself; rather, the artist hopes that it will come up in the viewer's minds only.
As for the effectiveness, it seems that many of the public did not notice the irony and mistook the quotation from the regime for support — and they responded by painting over it with non-ironic condemnation of the regime, thinking that the artist disagreed with them.
You could say that the condemnation manifested itself by ricochet. Maybe that is a kind of success. Maybe.
It seems to me that this art student's heart was in the right place politically, but his artwork calls for an F as art.
Australia supports Catholic hospitals with public funds while they turn away women who need abortions.
One way to finesse this problem would be to set up an organizationally separate facility for abortions, physically next to the religious hospital but not under church funding or control.
*Payday Lenders Gave Millions to Republican Group That Backed Supreme Court Suit to Annihilate CFPB.*
Robert Reich's father set an example by standing up to antisemitic bullies who tried to make him sell his house.
(satire) *New Community Health Program Teaches Low-Income Americans To Ignore Symptoms.*
US citizens: call on your senators to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel. 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 Senator Tuberville to stop sabotaging the US military in an effort to sabotage abortion.
US citizens: call on businesses that advertise to stop funding election misinformation through their advertising.
In January 2020, Wuhan doctors knew that a new disease was spreading fast. China ordered them to conceal this bad news.
In my view, whether this outburst was due to a lab leak or to contact with wild animals was a secondary detail, since neither one would have been culpable. The secrecy about facts was culpable.
(satire) *Rudy Giuliani Puts Himself Up For Adoption* to a rich family that could pay his legal fees.
The idea of choosing officials by lot, as ancient Athens chose some officials, may be interesting.
But the officials chosen this way were usually members of a panel. No one of them had a large amount of power individually. That reduces the possible downside from random choice.
Also, the system assumes that these officials would be chosen from people who would be basically civic-minded. In the US today, many of the potential lottery choices would be fascists inclined to use their positions to threaten sabotage. We could not expect that to work.
Two Ohio thugs noted a woman leaving a store and reportedly shoplifting, and instead of arranging to arrest her, they shot her dead.
If she had stolen something necessary for her life, or for her children's life, I would have said that the poor have a right to steal necessities like that. But that point was not applicable if she was stealing alcoholic drinks. She did not have a right to steal alcoholic drinks.
But that does not mean it was a grave crime either.
Meanwhile, even though her petty theft was apparently unjustified, it was no justification for killing her.
I disagree with the article's assumption: that we non-pregnant members of society are less worthy of rights that are those members who are pregnant. Reproducing is not a special virtue, especially now in the days when overpopulation is likely to kill enough people to reduce the population drastically through suffering.
But that detail doesn't affect the overall moral conclusion much. Pregnant or not, mother or not, the thugs killed that woman because they saw an opportunity, and that morally makes them murderers.
The judge in a Guantanamo "military tribunal" ruled that sticking food up a prisoner's colon was nothing but torture — and that this torture invalidates his testimony.
These "military tribunals" are meant to pass for valid trials without meeting the criteria. Thanks to Judge Acosta, they are a little closer to being treated as real trials.
A study by the US Treasury finds that unions are very good for non-rich Americans overall.
The US airforce is testing versions of future AI-controlled armed drones to be used in air combat alongside human fighter pilots.
I hope the article errs in saying that this AI is similar to the erroneously labeled "AI" that operates today's bullshit generator language models, because if that is accurate we have no telling who it might fire at.
One of the dangers of AI-controlled devices that can do things with real physical effects — even if not armed — is that it may make clever inventions that could be fatal in ways that the AI would not understand, and that no human would be asked to check. This AI is already demonstrating that sort of creativity which is also potential danger. I recommend reading the book The Two Faces of Tomorrow, by James Hogan. See libgen.rs.
A founder of DeepMind says that AI programs will be good friends and counselors for human beings.
Is your idea of a good friend and counselor one that reports on everything about you to manipulative large companies and governments too? Not mine!
It is interesting that the interviewer presumes that AI-driven cars will be "autonomous" and that they will drive better than the ones humans drive. They are not at all autonomous — they depend on internet connections — and San Francisco already knows how badly they mess up in driving.
Perhaps they will drive well someday, when they understand as much about driving as humans do. But that is beyond today's technology.
The UK's ministry of surveillance and tracking pushed to permit massive deployment of facial recognition cameras around Britain.
An appeals court judge who ruled especially harshly against mifepristone has corrupt links, through gifts to his wife, with the anti-abortion organization that pushed the case.
Clarence Thomas's personal corruption sets a corrupt example through all of right-wing US judges.
The UK government will warn London cops that evictions by London landlords are likely to be illegal, and perhaps even criminal. Cops have been told to refuse to support the eviction, and arrest landlords who try certain illegal methods.
Hooray!
Firefighters are suing to prevent the UK government from putting any refugees in the isolated barge in Portland, claiming it is a firetrap.
*The NLRB has brought 100 cases against [Starbucks] over anti-union activities — but it cannot punish the company.*
Monitors from African countries said that the election in Zimbabwe was not free and fair. Thee candidate who supposedly "lost" said it was rigged.
The previous one was not honest either.
The Republican-dominated states of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina have been gravely damaged by a hurricane. Much of the damage is caused by the Republican opposition to curbing global heating.
Home insurance has already been mostly discontinued in Florida.
As a result, many if those whose houses were ruined will lose all.Now I expect similar developments in more states.
Environmental degradation, caused by global heating and other harm to wild ecosystems, is bringing humans in contact with more animal diseases.
Some of them can spread to large numbers of humans.
Planet roasters in Australia are spreading distorted economic figures to derail the country's conversion to renewable power. They will stop to nothing to continue funding for fossil fuels and nuclear generation, at the expense of the country and the world.
Republican fanatics are being sentenced to prison for violent threats against election workers who might have the temerity to do their jobs honestly.
*The dirty secret behind Tory "crime week": their policies ruined policing.*
I thought that a Tory "crime week" would be when plutocratist politicians go all-out for corruption ;-}.
Bad mistake: *Ex-Tory MP apologises for ancestors' links to slavery.*
You should never apologize for things others have done for which you are not responsible.
Aside from that, what she did was proper. She acknowledged the ancestors' actions, which had been unknown to her until a historian dug them up in old records, and she denounced them. That is the right thing for anyone to do who has as little responsibility for those actions as she has.
It is horrible that people have made death threats against her for things someone else did long ago. Advocating Tory policies entails moral responsibility for them (though not for slavery hundreds of years ago), but it doesn't justify threats of violence.
*North Carolina judge [who was] investigated for saying racial bias exists [has] filed lawsuit.*
Right-wing racists will go to any lengths to censor awareness of racism and other right-wing oppression.
*Judge Invested in Big Pharma Shouldn't Try Case on Big Pharma Profiteering.*
Vivek Ramaswamy claims he is the only Republican presidential candidate that isn't bought. It is not clear whether he is bought, or cheating, or buying, or buying the publicity. It may bot matter, because either way he is a right-wing hater.
* Researchers [in Canada] find homeless people more likely to spend lump sum on housing and food and not ‘temptation goods’ such as alcohol.*
This study looked at homeless people who were not addicts. The scientists assumed that addicts may be exceptions.
Investigating 272 blacks who were forced into slavery by the richest Catholics of Maryland, and sooner or later sold to fund the founding of Georgetown College.
Georgetown college became part of Washington DC when that was carved out of Maryland.
*The Tories let [British finance] run out of control. Now Labour plans to repeat their mistakes.*
Amazon has published guides to identifying mushrooms which were written by language models that have no intelligence and could lead people to poison themselves.
Please do not refer to such bullshit-generator systems as "artificial intelligence"!
Joseph Stiglitz: making US democracy function again requires economic reforms that decrease economic inequality.
Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida, muses on the implications of an ocean so hot that people can no longer safely do that.
*Florida judge strikes down [DeMentis]-backed voting map as unconstitutional.*
Of course, he designed it for racist purposes.
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 practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important — and I label them like this.
DeMentis removed state attorney Monique Worrell just before she could prosecute a corruption fraud ring among sheriff's deputies.
His objection to her was that she tried to prosecute the most dangerous of the real criminals — the ones who wear badges.
The Marion thugs raided the Marion County Record and seized its computers, without grounds to do so under the journalism shield law. The publisher has said the paper was investigating the thug chief for past wrongdoing and that his aim was to derail that investigation.
I've seen this issue develop for weeks, but this is the first time I saw a clear description of the rights and wrongs of it. Without that, I could not usefully post about this.
*Invasive species cost humans $423bn each year and threaten world's [bio]diversity.*
The right-wing prime minister of Italy has sued a singer for calling her "fascist" and "racist" on stage.
I expect that he was right, but I don't have proof to cite. I wish I had something to cite to demonstrate the truth of his accusation.
Criminal prosecution for defamation is inherently unjust.
US citizens: call on Democrats to keep campaigning on abortion rights.
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to stand firm against corporate lobbyists and tax billion-dollar corporations.
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!
Venezuela is accused of punishing people horribly based on only a hint of evidence they were guilty of anything.
It is as bad when Maduro does this as it was when Dubya did this to prisoners in black sites and Guantanamo, and in various massacres in Iraq.
Some environmentalists contend that building nuclear power plants is useful for curbing global heating. I think they have been taken in.
The article does not make it clear whether they are disputing about existing nuclear reactors or building new one. But that distinction is crucial.
A nuclear reactor takes many years to build and is very expensive. If the aim is to curb global heating, that is an ineffective method.
A nuclear reactor is also vulnerable in wartime. It is, in effect, a pre-exploded nuclear bomb, as regards fallout. Installing one more is making extra vulnerability. At the end of its life, it will require expensive and slow decommissioning.
However, for an existing reactor, the price of construction has already been paid, the construction time has already elapsed, the fallout is already there, and the cost of decommissioning is already going to have to be paid. If you can ensure that the reactor is maintained so that it won't fail, maybe it is better to keep it running.
The US has a history of letting flaws and damage slide.
An indigenous group in Australia demands payment for mining of dirt that contains iron ore. Why? Because they consider it sacred and feel very attached to it.
Nobody is entitled to more rights than others based on per religious thoughts. Whatever per origin, whether indigenous or immigrant, and no matter what religion person might practice, the answer has to be the same: your religious ideas (if any) and practices (if lawful) are your choice, but they don't entitle you to dominate others.
The decision ought to be based on other factors. What are they?
This case does not involve any ancient art that would be a treasure of humanity's past and call for preservation.
But these factors clearly apply:
(satire) *Cop Annoyed At Assumption That All Police Officers Are As Bad As Him.*
(satire) *Convicted Felons Give [the corrupter] Advice For Going To Prison.*
Global heating is enabling formerly tropical tiger mosquitoes to spread into northern Europe, bringing formerly tropical diseases with them.
When will we learn to defeat the plutocrats that lobby and propagandize to make so many problems worse?
Republicans in Congress are pushing for the US to invade Mexico, and want to pass laws to make this easy.
Biden won't do what they wish, but the ruiner would do it if he is elected again.
A bitcoin miner in Pennsylvania is controversially burning waste coal and discarded tires to generate electricity. This pollutes the air but cleans land. Is that practice wise or not?
It should be noted that only some kinds of cryptocurrency (notably Bitcoin) use the "proof of work" method that entails using lots of electric power. There are other methods.
If burning waste coal to generate electric power is acceptable, it doesn't have to be used for cryptocurrency. It could replace other forms of generation. Thus, the crucial question is whether that method makes more/worse pollution or less/milder pollution. I don't know enough to judge the answer to that.
The US versus the planet roasters, as they become ever more obdurately opposed to civilization's survival.
*President Biden: Don't Give Wall Street Control of Our Public Water Systems.*
Biden flip-flops between opposition to plutocracy and abject surrender to plutocracy.
Many UK universities and organizations are sponsored by, or buy from, organizations participating in the systematic brainwashing of the Uyghurs.
Covid-19 is still dangerous, and infection rates are increasing. Governments are neglecting it.
"Co-living" is a gentrified, luxury-pushing commercial version of the co-housing movement.
The FBI now holds 21 million people's DNA profiles, and is rapidly collecting more.
This could be aiming, in the long term, for a collection covering all Americans.
Burning Man has changed, over the decades, from a reunion of hippies to a rich people's gathering where some fly in on private jets. So environmentalists protested by blocking the road.
They call on Burning Man to stop permitting private jets, as well as a few excessive forms of consumption of fossil fuels and single-use plastics.
It's sad how so many billionaires (and the far more numerous decibillionaires) distort our society. If Burning Man agrees to these demands, some decibillionaires might stay away.
A San Francisco city commissioner organized a "doom loop" tour to highlight the city's problems. It received a lot of media attention so he felt compelled to cancel it, and then resign.
It turned out he is an executive in a real-estate company. Naturally he would perceive civic issues in terms of profit in the real estate market. Not the best sort of person to appoint to a municipal office in a city where high rents are devastating low-wage workers, as well as many niche businesses that would employ them. San Francisco has a real housing crisis and saying things are just fine will not help.
San Francisco needs to find a way to let people use the abandoned office buildings and stores as housing — fast! Even if it means relaxing or substituting, for these conversions, some codes that apply specifically to residential buildings. In this case, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
*Climate crisis to create "acute" challenges for Australia’s economy, incoming [Royal Bank of Australia] governor says.*
Robert Reich: *Biden is turning away from free trade — and that’s a great thing.*
*[Business-supremacy treaties] have brought cheaper goods. They’ve also destroyed millions of US jobs and caused US wages to stagnate.*
They have done similar harm to other countries.
And the ISDS clauses have blocked efforts to curb global heating and protect the environment, public health and the general standard of living. And then there is the oil investment treaty.
Depending on online disservices to make your records or published works available over time is asking to lose.
The only thing you can trust is to have your own copy on your own equipment, and to keep multiple encrypted copies on various backup services that commit to keep them for you unless a disaster happens.
*France to ban girls from wearing abayas in state schools.* Abayas are long dresses worn by many Muslim girls.
I was astounded to see kameez in the list of Muslim "sectarian" clothing. In India, lots of urban women (not necessarily Muslim) wear the salwar-kameez combination.
This gives me an idea for restoring laïcité without any ban: recruit couturiers to develop abayas as a fashion, for any and all women regardless of religion. If that style of dress catches on, you won't be able to determine a schoolgirl's religion from her abaya.
*Bavaria’s deputy leader faces accusations over antisemitic pamphlet* published 35 years ago when he was 17 years old. At the time, he was determined to be the author of it.
From the descriptions in the article, the pamphlet repeatedly mocked the holocaust, and that's undeniably antisemitic. But people's views often change from age 17 to age 52. He may not be antisemitic today.
As an official, in recent years, he has endorsed various far-right views. Even if he has dropped antisemitism, those other statements are enough to make him a bad person to have as an official.
NHS doctors are now led to work in a gig economy system, without lasting relationships with patients or other personnel.
Labour has a plan to change this by applying financial incentives and disincentives to doctors. The insistence on making this change "cost neutral" forces the decision to make the disincentives equal the incentives. But we know the NHS personnel need raises. Labour is screwing itself with its decision to bow down to the rich by not taxing them more.
*Bernie Sanders urges left to back Biden to stop "very dangerous" Trump.*
I would urge people to vote for Biden rather than the insurrectionist.
China is trying to erase the Tibetan culture and Tibetans as an ethnic group, with forced assimilation.
Alan Singer: *Trump Insanity on the Right*
A scientist who has studied emperor penguins for a career expects them to be extinct in our lifetime, due to global heating.
The loss of sea ice is endangering polar bears in some regions of the Arctic, but in other regions they have adapted to the changes … so far.
Whether the species will survive this century somewhere is not clear. Since we don't know exactly what changes will result from global heating, we can't assert with certainty that it will be wiped out. But we also cannot assert it will survive.
We can be sure that more heating makes more chance of extinction.
US citizens: phone your senators to call on them to reconfirm Gwynne Wilcox to another term on the National Labor Relations Board. Republicans are trying to block her reappointment so that the board will not have quorum and will be unable to do its vital work.
Please call as soon as possible — her reconfirmation will be voted on next week.
I saw an online messaging campaign for this, but sending a message to a member of Congress does not allow ordinary email. It requires using a web form that demands execution of nonfree JavaScript code. For moral reasons I do not use that form, or recommend it to the public.
See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html and https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html.
It is a grave wrong for any government activity to require the public to run nonfree software co communicate with it.
I discovered this problem several years ago, and since then have always asked people to use phone calls to communicate with members of Congress. But I don't recall that I explained the reason before.
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!
*[Large global] consultancy firm used "power maps" of Australian officials to help win government contracts.*
*Iceland allows whaling to resume in "massive step backwards".*
*Canada issues travel advisory for LGBTQ+ residents visiting US.*
*Former member of Belarus "hit squad" to stand trial over disappearances [presumed ordered by Lukashenko].*
*When a British politician discusses “tough choices”, [person] invariably [reveals] whose side [perse is] really on. A tough choice tends to involve emptying the pockets of those with little, or slashing a service ordinary citizens depend on.*
In any country, the plutocratist politicians are the ones that do this. Labour's string of "tough choices" shows it has become a plutocratist party. The Tories, formerly the reasonable-sounding plutocratist, party, has become the incompetent nutso party, and Starmer has moved Labour into the Tories' old spot. Now Labour is competing with the Tories for breaking promises to correct horrible problems. The most recent Labour pledge to be dropped is the wealth tax.
In the US, plutocratist, politicians since Reagan have allowed dooH niboR to transfer ever more of the working people's previous share of national income to the rich. Progressive proposals to return some of that to the non-rich always provoke squeals of exaggerated pain from the rich, claiming that that would be unfair and intolerable. The politicians who heed them do so because they are plutocratist. Clinton, the first plutocratist, Democratic president since a century ago, continued on that path, and so did Dubya and Obama.
Biden has made efforts to help the non-rich. I expected another Obama but I was favorably surprised. He would have done more but plutocratists, in Congress (including some Democrats) blocked him.
*Biden says white supremacy has no place in US after Florida killings.* That shows some moral leadership.
Nonetheless, he is no Bernie Sanders.
However, one difference between political parties in the US and political parties in Britain is that a US party does not have veto power over candidates for federal office. The voters choose them. That is why we see increasing numbers of progressive Democrats elected to Congress. We can, by supporting them, convert the Democratic Party step by step into a progressive party again.
Britons can't do that any more in the Labour Party. Starmer's strict measures to exclude non-plutocratists from running as Labour candidates block that completely, so there is no hope down the Labour path any more.
Compare today's Labour leadership with the leaders that set up the National Health Service and made it work. What a shame.
*Environmentalists Owe an Enormous Debt to Julian Assange.* Wikileaks revealed how the US twisted many countries' arms to legalize the farming of patented GMOs which promote pesticides that can wipe out all insects in the neighborhood, and to allow foreign corporations to buy their farmland.
Wikileaks also published the secret text of the Pacific Partnership Trance (official name, Trans-Pacific Partnership), which helped the US to refuse to sign it. (How sad that countries such as New Zealand signed it. And recently the UK as well — one last act of lasting Tory sabotage.)
Environmentalists should demand that the US drop charges against Julian Assange. And don't waste time — he may be extradited in October.
The charges against him are meant to establish a precedent for treating journalists as spies, and the US, to get its hands on Assange, used tricks dirtier than those it used to push GMOs.
*Biden Administration Adds Insulin to Drug Price Negotiation List in Major Blow to Big Pharma.*
*Ohio Republicans accused of trying to mislead voters with [misleading description of the abortion ballot question].*
Pope Francis rebuked the conservatives in the Catholic Church for choosing right-wing ideology over the church doctrine.
I don't support Catholic doctrine any more than I do right-wing ideology, but this is a good thing.
Parents organized in Free Play Houston have convinced Houston public schools to bring back recess, in which children direct their own activities.
A Ugandan man faces the threat of execution if convicted of "aggravated homosexuality."
The article leaves me wondering what aspect makes it "aggravated". You would think editors would anticipate readers' being left with curiosity.
When DeMentis showed up at a vigil for three blacks murdered by a white racist hater, and condemned the killer, the people present booed him for promoting the racism, fascism and Nazism that motivated the killer.
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 practice it, even if they also criticize it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important — and I label them like this.
Global heating effects are wiping out the peach crop in the southern US. If only the farmers understood this, they might start voting to curb global heating.
The article's title says "decimated" but that word is an understatement here.
An organization in Hong Kong that promotes the Cantonese language has been compelled to shut after its leader published a fictional story about loss of freedom there.
It doesn't surprise me that the story and its author were attacked. Attacking the organization as well may simply reflect using it for that publication. But it could also be an escalation of the campaign to suppress the Cantonese language. That has been active in Canton (Guang Dong province) for years.
The descendants of William Gladstone have apologized for his father's large role in British colonial slavery and the slave trade.
I think it is misguided to apologize for the actions of one's ancestors. People are not responsible for what their ancestors did, and even less if the ancestors did them centuries ago. To accept blame for things one did not do is a surrender that people should resist. It suggests a desperation that entices hostile people to demand more, as they have done this time.
However, those descendants are right to call for reparations for Britain's past slavery. We can all join in calling for that, because it does not mean we personally accept blame for it.
It was the British government that established policies of slavery and enabled their implementation. And the British government, unlike the individuals who implemented them, still exists. It can legitimately be held responsible today for wrongs it committed before 1834.
To try to compensate wrongs committed centuries ago makes sense only for the biggest of wrongs. It makes sense for slavery because that was extremely big as a wrong.
I have called for the US to pay reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination in federal housing aid during the New Deal. Those latter two were not as big wrongs as slavery, but they were more recent, so it still makes sense to compensate them.
Australia has federal laws to protect whistleblowers from reprisals, but they have been totally ineffective. Of 70 whistleblowers who have filed for protection, none have been protected.
Some non-thuggish whistleblowers in the US Border Thug Department report that the department has been imprisoning migrants in the Arizona desert and denying them necessities such as beds that they are legally entitled to. And covering it up with falsehoods.
Law and order, including the traditional laws of tribal war, are breaking down in Papua New Guinea.
Yet another American has been shot dead for trying to enter the wrong house, down the block from where he lived.
Atlanta is systematically intimidating activists opposed Cop City by jailing them without valid grounds, then after release labeling them as "terrorists" so they will be harassed in various ways.
I urge everyone to learn not to feel shame for being persecuted. This can help help you stand up to hate campaigns from whatever side.
Peaceful protests are spreading in areas of Syria held by Assad's government, calling for his removal from power.
*The National Labor Relations Board issued new rules Friday that will make it easier for workers to form unions — and much more difficult for companies to stop them.*
The Guardian convened 45 climate scientists to consider whether global heating is already unstoppable. Their conclusion is, not yet, but without strong steps starting soon, it will be.
They reported that overall global heating so far fits closely with predictions, but the models don't predict local extreme weather very well, and some of that has been surprising.
Since local heat waves and disasters cause a substantial part of the damage, I surmise that damage is rising faster than predicted. That includes food shortages.
Conclusion: *Dramatic climate action needed to curtail "crazy" extreme weather.*
Everyone: call on stores to stop selling seeds coated in bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides.
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 Congress to reinforce minor labor laws.
Those laws are usually called "child labor laws", and some of the people who may be put to dangerous work when these laws are weakened are children. But most are adolescents, and they too should be protected from arduous work. So let's use a fully accurate name.
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) *Republican Presidential Candidates Undergo Mandatory Genital Checks Ahead Of First Debate.*
Australian climate defense activists who protested a company drilling for fossil gas have been hit by court orders forbidding them from speaking about the protest, and demanding they hand over all communications pertinent to the protest. The company also threatens to sue them for the cost of expensive precautionary reactions.
I don't know what actually happened in the protest. In particular, I don't know whether the protesters released a (possibly malodorous) gas or not. I expect that they are opposed to violence against persons and would not have considered releasing anything dangerous.
Therefore, I think that we have here an instance of a technique frequently used by businesses and sometimes governments to repress protesters: overreacting to the protest in a paranoid way at great expense, then suing the protesters for the "damages" the organization did to itself.
On the morning of September 11, 1973, President Nixon was briefed about the planning for a coup in Chile.
His briefing told him that the plans were not then ready to be carried out. But they were carried out that very day. It seems that the right-wing enemies of President Allende accepted the cooperation and help of the US, but made their own decisions about how to overthrow Chile's government.
The Maui wildfires have been tied directly to negligence by Hawaiian Electric Co, which failed to put insulation on the wires, or even to cut the tall vegetation growing near them.
The pylons holding the wires were wooden and decrepit, and did not comply with the updated standard adopted back in 2002.
I wonder if the company's judgment for damages will exceed its market value. If so, Maui will get an easy opportunity to take over the company and make it publicly owned henceforth.
If the company covers all the Hawaiian islands, they should all participate in owning it. The state of Hawaii could buy the whole company from Maui, or the other principal islands could buy shares of the company from Maui.
Splitting up the company is also conceivable. That would be feasible if the facilities operate separately from island to island, which I expect is the case.
*Ex-Alabama deputy sheriff sentenced to prison for [rape of] woman in his custody.*
I approve of the long sentence of 12 years for rape, but given that the convict committed the crime on duty as an official thug, that perhaps calls for a longer sentence.
The article states clearly that what he did was coerce her to have sex with him. The simple and clear term for that is "rape". But the article avoids that term entirely and replaces it with the vague term "sexual assault". Why do this?
In the antiglossary entry linked to just above, I propose an explanation for this.
An impending disastrous oil spill in the Red Sea has been averted by crowdfunding.
It is admirable that people stepped up to do this. But avoiding a disaster should not depend on that. It is governments' responsibility and they should carry it out.
Some educators propose that college applicants use ChatGPT to make up for the lack of a family containing well-educated people who can help them write the essay in high-quality English. Especially applicants who are not native speakers of English.
The idea was new to me but I'm not opposed to it. However, when the article talks about "how students can use AI ethically", it makes a number of important errors:
The only way people can use ChatGPT is as an online disservice, because it is SaaSS (service as a Software Substitute). See https://gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html for why that is an injustice to the user.
*Russia accused of intimidating US consulate staff [Who are Russians] with Ukraine war spying charges.*
What Shonov is accused of — relaying non-secret information picked up from the public — is a normal part of the work of staff of diplomatic organizations.
The US consulate would have trouble functioning without these employees. But it can't tolerate this repression.
The US could not morally respond by threatening the American citizens and other non-Russians who work for Russian consulates in the US. What it could legitimately do is restrict how many local employees the Russian consulates could employ. If the intimidation goes so far that the US consulates find it necessary to stop employing local staff, the US should bar Russian consulates from hiring any local employees.
The head of the Federal Reserve intends to keep pursuing inflation to the ends of the earth, and never mind the risk of causing a recession.
(satire) *Texas Cancels School Over Concerns Extreme Heat Not Safe Environment For Shootings.*
Putin has a protracted habit of murdering his enemies, rivals, and critics.
*Labour's backtracking on casual workers will weaken the rights of all employees.*
The "Labour" party is too right-wing to qualify for that name.
Inuit on the Arctic coast of Canada are managing a protected coastal zone. That is a useful thing to do: it will delay regional damage from global heating, giving humanity somewhat more time to carry out the long-term global fix: to greatly reduce greenhouse emissions.
However, the article's headline seems to have been written by someone inclined to formulate issues in terms of racial conflict: "The Inuit plan to reclaim their sea."
It is a mistake to describe the Inuit as "the Arctic's first people"; archaeology shows that they spread across the Arctic less than 1000 years ago, replacing an unrelated people we call the Dorset culture.
Was that an instance of colonization? We can't judge that question, since we don't know how or why the replacement took place. But this lack of knowledge is enough to show that we shouldn't model the past based on the roles various groups have played in recent history.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop banks from funding climate disaster, by passing the Fossil Free Finance Act. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The closure of a coal plant in Ohio led to an immediate reduction in hospital visits for heart problems and strokes in the vicinity, and health continued to improve during subsequent years.
The Book of Revelation divides the Bible (and Christians) between an idea of a god that is love and an idea of a god that is hate. Evangelicals mostly worship hate.
Ex-Twitter is now firmly established as a fascist propaganda site.
Some right-wing legal scholars agree that the insurrectionist is barred from holding any office (including that of president) by the 14th amendment.
The Republican Party's national committee streaming partner is placing ads for the party on neo-Nazi sites.
Space junk is dangerous because the objects tend to collide and generate a lot more junk. This is already happening.
There is a danger that the process will eventually cascade and make it too dangerous to put anything into low Earth orbit, or maybe even to cross it. The movie Gravity depicted this disaster, in somewhat accelerated form. The disaster itself would be so harmful to humanity, and so permanent, that the survival of some of those who were in orbit hardly reduces it.
In the quotation from the ESA, does "mitigating the impact of existing objects" refer to "impact" in a physical sense, or in a metaphorical sense? That's amusing as a double entendre. I wonder if it was intentional.
Assuming it means the metaphorical sense, that sentence illustrates the way "mitigate" introduces vagueness. I think we should avoid that word.
The bullshitter leads a cult that systematically teaches its members to distrust everyone but him. That includes their friends, their families, and their religious leaders.
Interestingly, almost 1/3 of them don't trust the bullshitter either, but they are more likely to trust him than trust anyone else.
On Ex-Twitter, scammers now buy the "blue checkmark" that used to indicate verification of identity.
Land privatization and water depletion, 150 years ago, set the stage for the Lahaina fire this year.
Recreating the eliminated wetlands may be desirable, but it won't be easy while sea level is rising. Coastal wetlands will turn into bays. To have wetlands 50 years from now will require making wetlands where there were no wetlands before.
New censorship at Guantanamo: to cover any place other than the courtroom for the "military commission" non-trials requires special permission.
Governor DeMentis has abolished protection of many historic buildings in Florida. I wonder why?
Is it simply that developers stand to make a lot of money by demolishing them, and offered DeMentis and Republicans a share of that?
Billboards in some US cities report on record high temperatures "Brought to you big Big Oil."
More careful scrutiny by government regulation is getting rid of much of the supposed carbon offsets that were never credible.
It is important to monitor SARS-COV-2 in the human population in order to keep track of its mutations.
Black Britons convicted of a killing without evidence that they had anything directly to do with it are challenging the verdict.
It may well be true that the practice of convicting people of murder by labeling them as gangsters because they are friends with a murderer is applied most often to blacks. Perhaps the decision to apply the practice is made in a biased manner.
But the crucial problem with this practice is that it is fundamentally not a valid way to determine that certain people are a gang. It is only an unreliable heuristic. Each time it is applied, whatever the demographics of those it is applied to, it is likely to result in a miscarriage of justice. We need not ask what race they are to condemn the practice.
If the practice were valid, thugs could nonetheless apply it based on racist criteria. Many thugs are racist and they often do that. But that is a different kind of issue.
Various countries have passed or are considering passing laws against the crime of ecocide.
Climate defenders call on the participants in the Federal Reserve's policy symposium to pay heed the need to defend Earth's climate.
Everyone: call on the Argentine government and its oil company not to build a pipeline in Vaca Muerta.
Philadelphia thugs shot Eddie Irizarry inside his car, then lied about what they had done. A body camera video proved they were lying. One of them has been fired, but what's needed is a prosecution.
US citizens: support the People's Response Act.
This plan, to send people with medically-oriented training rather than training in arresting criminals to help people who are flipping out, is — in substance — what was advocated under the misleading term "defund the police".
Patrick Braxton, a black man, was elected mayor of a small town in Alabama. The white men who used to be the town government used a series of mockeries of government procedure to deny that he had been elected.
Biden should do what Lyndon Johnson did: send the national guard to put a stop to this. Or perhaps federal marshals would be sufficient.
*West Virginia can restrict abortion pill sales, federal judge rules.*
This decision is logically consistent, but banning abortion is an injustice in any case, and the more methods it prohibits, the bigger the injustice.
The FCC is considering a petition to refuse to renew the license of a Faux News TV station, WTXF-TV in Philadelphia, for its distribution of false accusations in support of the insurrectionist's claims of election fraud.
A court ordered the EPA to finalize standards to limit people's exposure to the carcinogenic chemical, ethylene oxide.
This chemical is also known as epoxyethane, and is related to epoxy resin glue. It is useful as well as interesting. Alas, it is dangerous for humans to breathe, even in small quantities. Leaks from chemical plants can harm the people living nearby.
A Chinese dissident escaped to South Korea by jetski.
I am curious about the escaper's reported name, Kwon Pyong, since that does not fit Chinese pinyin orthography. It would make sense as Korean.
Researchers suggest that the gulf stream current will stop flowing at some point between 2025 and 2095, due to human-caused heating of the Atlantic Ocean.
Using Kissinger as an example to explain the evolution of the term "realpolitik" — from objectivity to amorality.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Civilian Harm Review and Reassessment Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Georgia Republicans plan to set aside District Attorney Willis, who is prosecuting the insurrectionist, as a way to sabotage the case against him.
This uses a new law that Republicans adopted so as to protect racist killers from prosecution.
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 — and I label them like this.
A project is developing strict rules which banks can adhere to in order to ensure that their operations are committed to ending global heating.
The idea of employing humans to check the output of generative systems for occasional howling errors is not reliable — if such errors are rare, the human checker will become unattentive and let errors slip by.
Biden has a new plan to help Americans trapped in student debt. It replaces the previous plan that the Supreme Court rejected, and works by reducing payment requirements and interest charged.
The US is pressuring Mexico to allow imports of genetically modified US corn.
The main economic effect of NAFTA was to spread poverty among Mexican farmers (a large fraction of Mexicans) by competition from US agricultural products.
Thai parties that have little in common except supporting various sorts of strongmen formed a coalition to block the party that campaigns for more freedom and democracy out of power.
*Some kinds of tree leaves could become too hot to be able to conduct photosynthesis, researchers warn.* Those species would be wiped out.
Google's experimental "artificial intelligence" search was willing to answer about the "benefits of slavery" and offered a supposedly safe recipe for cooking "angel of death" mushrooms.
I think this demonstrates that it is using a language model, Many refer to then as "artificial intelligence", but that is a misuse of that term, since they don't actually understand the subjects they generate text about or what that text means.
Everyone: call on Sonic to stop using styrofoam take-out containers.
*Fossil fuels being subsidized at rate of $13m a minute, says IMF.*
Low levels of sea ice around Antarctica killed most of the emperor penguin chicks, in a large part of that continent. They can't survive if the sea ice melts.
As global heating eliminates sea ice, it may eliminate emperor penguins too. To save them — and to save ourselves — we need to curb global heating.
Ecuador's referendum demonstrates that the people may vote to shut down production in an oil field.
*UPS workers win wage increases, air conditioning in new union contract.*
Suggesting that army officers in Niger held a coup because the president had passed a law, which European countries had pushed for, that cut off the flow of bribes to those officers.
I don't know enough to gauge whether this is true, or to have an opinion about that law.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Wagner, is reported to have been on a small plane that crashed, or (some say) was shot down by the Russian army.
I wouldn't take any of this as certain. But if Prigozhin is alive but in hiding for the long term, he won't be able to run Wagner effectively, so for most practical purposes it would be equivalent to his death.
If Prigozhin was indeed killed by that crash, it means the end of Wagner too.
This may benefit Putin by removing apparent instability, but I think it will weaken Putin's standing in Russia and deny him what Wagner used to contribute to the Putin forces' military strength.
DeMentis held a campaign event in Iowa and had Iowa state thugs forcibly exclude Ty Rushing, a reporter from an organization that might criticize him.
The thug leader said this was a "private event". I wonder if that was serious or bullshit. Did the event have a specific guest list, or did it admit strangers as long as they were not Ty Rushing?
G20 countries poured a record-breaking $1.4tn into fossil fuel subsidies in 2022.
The corrupter has a mafia way of thinking and sought to create a mafia state. If he grabs power again, he will learn from his failures and do it more thoroughly.
A US appeals court ruled to uphold Alabama's law prohibiting minors from using puberty blockers.
If our goal is that a minor should not prematurely make a permanent commitment before perse is old enough to be quite sure of per choice, clearly we should ensure per right to use puberty blockers, and prevent anyone from imposing a choice on per before perse is ready.
*Vaping found to be the biggest risk factor for teenage tobacco smoking.*
Hong Kong's security thugs are questioning relatives of overseas dissidents as a reminder that they could put those relatives in prison at any time.
China's fertility rate has become quite low; this implies the population will decrease.
If only India, the world's most populous country, could do the same, it would start to alleviate the danger of overconsumption and pollution and open the path to rewilding half of the Earth's surface.
*Extreme water stress faced by countries home to quarter of world population.*
If thug departments want more people to seek to become cops, they should make efforts to respect the rights of the people they encounter.
Andrew Malkinson was convicted of rape despite strong evidence he was not the rapist. It took the UK judicial system 17 years to conclude that this was wrong.
*[Prosecutors] had key DNA evidence 16 years before Andrew Malkinson cleared.*
What I see here is the effect of a presupposition of guilt, and later a presupposition that a court conviction can't have been wrong.
A vandal attacked a tree in Australia designated by indigenous people SST a "birthing tree". They are fighting a plan to eliminate that tree to build a road which motorists consider necessary.
In my view, the religious feelings and wishes of indigenous people should get the same level of consideration as the religious feelings and wishes of any other people, but not more. Regardless of which group, such feelings do not outweigh everything else in life.
To treat something as "sacred", and extremely protected, simply because some sect calls it so is excessive. We would not be shocked if some neighborhood church, mosque, synagogue, temple or shrine — or tree — were taken by eminent domain if the purpose is sufficient. On the other hand, if the religious object is rare and unusual, or specially old, that would be a stronger reason to preserve it — by rerouting the road, in this case.
Some information crucial for evaluating this case is not present in the article. For instance, how many birthing trees are there per square mile in that region? On the average, how long have they had the status of birthing trees? And how long has that particular tree enjoyed that status?
If there are many birthing trees, preserving them all is an unreasonable demand. If they are few, preserving them is not much to ask, and surely feasible to do.
If that tree has been a birthing tree for 200 years, that makes it rather special, which is a good reason to protect it. But if it was designated 10 years ago, it is reasonable to respond, "Pick another tree."
(2023) Amazon's new anti-competitive requirement: sellers who don't pay for Amazon to ship their products are now required to pay for not doing so.
Thugs in Colorado shot Sestinee Thompson dead as she tried to flee by car from a confrontation.
They knew she was not the robbery suspect they were searching for, but they wanted to grab her for completeness' sake. That was surely not urgent enough to justify the escalation.
That Ms Thompson had children was irrelevant; that she was pregnant was irrelevant. Her right to life was as valid as yours or mine, no more and no less.
Her actions, as described by the thugs, were very foolish, and perhaps illegal, but they were not violent. (We must not presume thugs are telling the truth — often they do not.)
It is quite possible that the thugs might have treated a white woman differently. Racism, conscious or unconscious, is not unusual. If they had done the same thing to a white woman, that would also have been wrong. We should criticize people for the cases in which they do wrong, not for those in which they do right.
Racism is not what determines whether their actions in this case were wrong. It may be tangentially pertinent in explaining Ms Thompson's over-the-top reaction to being questioned. It may also be partly to blame for chaotic life.
The reason the thugs' actions were wrong is unrelated to the race of the victim. It is that shooting at someone for fleeing questioning or arrest is an dangerous overreaction, with a significant chance of making things much worse. There is no need and no justification for life-threatening hurry.
Ethiopia's rapid population growth is leaving no room for wildlife.
The next stage will cause famine.
The UK says it will require banks to offer access to cash within a 3-mile distance of a depositor's local community.
This is a good policy in principle, but I fear British banks, with their propensity to close accounts to avoid inconveniences for themselves, will game the rules by implementing them in reverse, like this:
"Dear Sir or Madam, we are compelled to close your account on account of the fact that we have no ATM within 3 miles of the village where you reside. We regret the inconvenience this may cause."
Iranian filmmaker Saeed Roustayi has been sentenced to 5 years isolation from other cinema professionals, and to take a brainwashing course in how to make films that embody the regime's propaganda.
It occurs to me that copyright law is what enables the Iranian regime to use threats to block the showing of Iranian's' films in other countries. Copyright gives the filmmakers the power to deny permission for such showings, and thus makes it effective for the regime to jail them if they don't deny permission.
I can imagine other countries could pass laws to permit showings of foreign films without authorization of the copyright holder or any other entity that "owns" some aspect, if a court finds that a repressive regime compels that entity to deny permission.
(satire) *Florida Students Given Lifelike Dolls To Simulate Responsibility Of Owning Slave.*
(satire) *Prison Guard Heats Lunch Up Inside 150-Degree Solitary Confinement Cell.*
This is outrageous! That lunch did nothing to deserve solitary confinement.
*Saudi Arabia is on a global charm offensive. By blocking critical articles, Vice is helping it.*
Let us not forget that Crown Prince Bone Saw is responsible for murdering a journalist.
The UAE's state oil company, headed by the same emir who is heading this year's UN climate conference, failed to report its methane emissions to the UN.
Plutocracy in Britain has pushed 100,000 children into destitution, situations of incredible poverty.
Some restaurants in St Tropez won't let people have a table unless they spent big the previous time.
I can propose a simple solution to this: make sure it not, practically speaking, necessary for customers to identify themselves.
The corrupter has corrupted US Christianity so deeply that when preachers quote Jesus as saying "Turn the other cheek", some supposed Christians ask, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?"
A decade or two ago I met someone who said that to be a true Christian one must be a Liberal Democrat — meaning the kind of Liberals who gave us the New Deal, I could have a high opinion of Christians like that, but that would not convince me to believe supernatural claims such as the existence of gods.
*The US Leads the World in Millionaires, but the Wealth Is Not Trickling Down.
In the US: call on cable providers to drop collecting from all customers for Faux News.
Meat industry lobbying is blocking the development of greener alternatives in the US and the EU.
*Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group.*
*Guideline on Diet Coke ingredient by consultants tied to industry is "obvious conflict of interest" and "not credible".*
If aspartame has a very low probability of causing cancer, that may not make much practical difference. I would not automatically presume it does. But I don't have the expertise to judge the question.
Allowing the beverage industry a role in judging it is definitely wrong.
*Norfolk Southern [Railroad] Spent $1.9 Million in Washington as Congress Weakened Rail Safety Bill.*
Republicans are turning to murder to silence disagreement with their views.
SoCalGas spent $36 million to lobby against a proposal to end gas hookups in new buildings.
California has 14.8 billion dollars of pension funds invested in planet roaster companies.
The US government plans to spend a billion dollars researching capture of Co2 from the air.
It is a distant long shot, and not likely to be of real help before it is too late. On the other hand, it is small compared to what real decarbonization will cost. So I think it won't make much difference either way — unless it somehow interferes with serious decarbonization efforts.
But it could do just that. Planet roaster companies will surely get involved in these projects and use them for greenwashing, and to lobby against methods that have a chance of actually reducing fossil fuel consumption.
Rich countries are using poor countries' loans to trap them into investing in fossil fuel extraction.
The obvious way to respond is to offer debt forgiveness in exchange for commitments not to do more fossil fell development. I think we could do it, if not for the plutocrats trying to prevent it.
Bernie Sanders: *The US and China must unite to fight the climate crisis, not each other.*
I agree, that is what both should do. If they both agree, they could both do it. If both agree&hellp;
Ecuadorians voted to end oil extraction in the Yasuni national park.
This decision has been a political battle for a long time. President Correa asked the rich countries to pay Ecuador to keep that territory unexploited, saying that a poor country like Ecuador should not have bear the whole of the sacrifice of not selling that oil.
*Charge us with contempt too, say 40 people, if climate activist prosecuted [for carrying signs suggesting jury nullification].*
*[A large labor union] accuses Labour of "currying favor with big business" on workers' rights.*
Many New Zealanders have concluded that it is harmful to have a pet cat, because of their depredations on native bird species.
The London thug department may soon be thuggish less often, as it has rejected the responsibility to take most calls about mental health emergencies.
The department's motive for this was to focus its effort on crime.
It is interesting to compare this with the US, where the criminal justice reform movement campaigns to take thugs off the mental health calls because they sometimes kill the people they were called to help.
(satire) *Guantanamo Bay To Remain Open Indefinitely After Earning National Historic Landmark Status.*
The Cambodians who came to the US decades ago included many children who came with their families and never knew Cambodia except as a child. Even if they have committed crimes in the US, it is cruel and wrong to deport them to Cambodia now,
When someone immigrates as an adult, perse knows how to live in per former country. In those circumstances, being deported there is not inherently disaster. It is inherently disaster for people who only know life in the US.
The US has done similar things to people who immigrated as children (lawfully or not) from various countries.
This is never right.
Tropical mountain treelines are moving uphill at around 3 meters per year, and accelerating.
In temperate zones they are moving only 1 meter per year.
The Demerara slave revolt in British Guiana was brutally crushed, but ultimately it led to the abolition of slavery.
(satire) *England's World Cup Success Inspires New Generation Of Young Girls To Become Hooligans.*
The 1973 coup against President Allende, who tried to combine socialism with human rights and democracy, was orchestrated and supported by Republicans in the US and Tories in Britain.
This taught us to expect violence from supposedly democratic right-wing parties.
Wheels of parmigiano-reggiano cheese are now labeled with RFIDs saying where each one was produced.
I don't see anything wrong in labeling wheels of cheese, which are not a retail product, with something printed. Or even with an RFID, if it is present only at the wholesale level. But if there is any chance an RFID can get into something sold to a retail customer, it must come with directions for how to remove it. Tracking individuals even as a byproduct is unacceptable.
If you want to be tracked, move to China!
*Ten years on from the slaughter of protesters in Cairo, [General al-]Sisi's record is even grimmer.*
Exiled Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko was warned Putin would try to have her assassinated. Recently she became strangely ill. German prosecutors are investigating this as a possible murder attempt.
*Twitter appears to delay links by five seconds to sites Elon Musk dislikes.*
Accusing the Putin forces of committing ecocide by causing toxic industrial chemicals, and toxins from weapons, to leak into Ukraine's ecosystems and more or less poison them for a long time.
US citizens: call on US Courts to protect medication abortion.
The 5th circuit court of appeals ruled to put an end to easy access to mifepristone and thus the means to have a medicated abortion.
The 5 circuit includes Louisiana, Mississippi and part of Texas. The senators from those states are Republican, and due to the Senate's rule that judges appointed to that court must have the approval of at least one senator from those states, the judges on that court are right-wing extremists.
Therefore, right-wing extremists generally use those states to file their cases.
I hope that abortion rights activists continue to be able to obtain mifepristone pills and mail them to women who need them. But it may now be more difficult to do this.
Senator Manchin has announced an "unrelenting fight" against the survival of world civilization and non-rich Americans. He has already announced that he may leave the Democratic Party. This did not surprise me, since his views are in the range of the Republican Party.
In November 2022, we rejoiced that the Democrats had picked up a seat in the Senate and had clear control of it. But that was a mirage. The other fake Democrat, Sinema, has already left the Democratic Party. We have succeeded in exposing Republican sleeper agents, but with their exposure, the Republicans will effectively control the Senate through 2024.
US citizens: call on Citi executives to stop destroying Amazonia and warming our planet.
(satire) *Updated U.S. Flag Code States That American Flag Has Power To Grant Wishes.*
Governor Dismantle put people in charge of Florida's New College to chop down all its principles and rules to bury them in an anti-woke box.
Many of the faculty have already left.
I would guess that most of the faculty, and most of the students, will not return next year, and the college may be unable to continue operating at all except as an empty shell. But I think DeMentis will call that success.
Robert Reich: *Trump is undermining the entire US judicial system with another big lie.*
Afghans studying in UK universities face the threat of being deported to Afghanistan, where the Taliban will surely find reasons to consider them enemies.
*US Jews urged [by Israeli academics] to condemn Israeli occupation amid Netanyahu censure.*
Here is the Israeli academics' petition.
AIPAC, which claims to campaign in the US for support for Israel, has shifted completely to campaigning in the US for support for Israel's nondemocratic right-wing.
For years it has campaigned in the US for support for the US antidemocratic right-wing.
But that was not hostile enough.
Muslim fanatics in Pakistan accused some Christians of blasphemy, so other Muslim fanatics attacked Christian churches.
In the US and Europe, we see Christian fanatics attacking mosques. Humanity would be better off if we could put an end to fervent belief in any religion.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban assault 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!
*90% of Great Lakes water samples have unsafe microplastic levels. But experts say damage can be reversed if US and Canada act quickly to stop new plastics from entering lake system.*
*Private equity has its sights on [Britain's] NHS.*
It can't be coincidence that the Tories are holding the doors open.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Republican plan to destroy Medicare.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
San Diego has escalated the war on homeless people by arresting people caught sleeping outside. However, the city offers them no alternative. Evidently this is an excuse for harshness against a scapegoat.
Salafi Arabia and Iran are really moving towards peace.
It is a shame that the United States did not help achieve this, and that it instead boosts China's influence. China will surely use that influence to maintain hell on Earth. But we can't blame China for boosting its influence by doing something good for once.
If Salafi Arabia can reconcile with Iran, is there a chance that the US can do so?
Iran's government is repressive, generally in the name of its repressive version of Islam. The repression targets women in particular, but also targets everyone's religious freedom, including non-Muslims and any Muslims that want to convert to some other religious camp. But the US has no influence to change this. General nastiness towards Iran will not help.
The main real complication is about renewing the non-nuclear deal that the saboteur in chief canceled. If there is any chance to do this, the US must try its best. However, it must emphasize the positive side more than the negative side.
My approval of reconciliation between Salafi Arabia and Iran does not mean I condemn those governments any less than before. They are despicable and I wish they were both overthrown (though the US should not try to overthrow them). But that doesn't alter the fact that the world is better off if they are not fighting each other.
US citizens: call on Congress to save the PEPFAR program which gives AIDS medicines to poor countries.
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 decision not to sound the sirens in Lahaina for the fire was made for a rational reason.
This leads me to wonder how the warning system (and others like it) could be improved so that it could safely be used for all kinds of disasters.
*In their most desperate hour, Maui’s residents may lose their right to water.* Agribusinesses have been taking control of the island's water for years, and the inhabitants have been suing for years, but disasters are opportunities for big businesses.
Invasive species of grass provided this year's Hawaii wildfires with more fuel than ever before. The state needs to mostly get rid of them. Perhaps farming animals in those regions would help.
*Names and addresses of Georgia grand jurors posted on rightwing websites.* This was evidently intended to threaten and intimidate anyone asked to consider, in the future, whether right-wing fanatics have committed crimes and should be prosecuted.
Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northern Territories, is cut off by wildfires.
So far, the province is evacuating various small towns, but if the fires come closer to Yellowknife, it will have to evacuate that city. It won't be easy to do that by air.
It would take 100 trips of an medium-size airliner to evacuate the whole population of around 20,000 people, but that is assuming people take no more than what you could bring on a commercial flight. People evacuating, perhaps forever, will need to bring more than that.
The evacuation of Yellowknife should not wait.
Canada is doing everything possible to prevent Yellowknife from being destroyed by fire, but nowadays it can't be sure of success.
This is a big change caused by global heating. It used to be that we could count on fire crews to protect substantial towns. It required a big effort, but they knew reliable methods to use and would not fail.
Nowadays, due to global heating, that big effort may not do the job. It may be that nothing can do the job.
A wildfire on Tenerife that is causing evacuations of thousands from their homes is "beyond our capacity to extinguish," according to the regional government.
Fires that civilization cannot extinguish indicate a new level of disaster, caused by global heating.
*The Climate Culprits Blocking Workers' Heat and Wildfire Protections.*
US citizens: call on the Senate to move quickly on judicial nominations. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
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US citizens: call on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the case Moore vs US about whether a wealth tax is constitutional.
US citizens: call on the DOJ to sue the fossil fuel companies for lying to the public about the danger of climate disaster.
On the challenge of systematically preventing deaths from heat in Phoenix as global heating steadily turns up the world's thermostat.
US funds that could reduce use of fossil fuels are being directed towards projects for carbon sequestration, which is unlikely to do any good.
*Biased Bank of England blames pay for inflation, never profit.*
*Data suggests prices are rising even though production costs are flat. Yet wages remain policymakers’ chief concern.*
This makes evident the bias that Robert Reich pointed out for the US a year ago. I must conclude that central banks have an ulterior motive: to knock workers down.
Freedom of speech, under the US First Amendment, does not cover the words used to carry out a crime. It does not cover setting up criminal conspiracies, perjury, fraud, or intimidation of witnesses.
Therefore, freedom of speech is not a defense for the crimes that the corrupter/insurrectionist is charged with, or the ones he might commit now.
Eating meat, and raising cattle, are associated in the US with masculinity. Big Food takes thorough advantage of this.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "indigenous" 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.
In a Greek town that was devastated by a wildfire in 2018, Christy Lefteri found that people sought small and proximal causes or enemies to blame for it, in a desperate effort to avoid confronting the great enemy: the planet roasters.
The men and women of the former Afghan army must hide from the Taliban and may be reduced to begging for food.
*Thousands of Afghan judges and legal staff remain at risk post-Taliban takeover.*
10 or more driverless taxis on Vallejo Street in San Francisco blocked traffic on that street for 15 minutes, simply by stopping in the street. All the human drivers in cars on that street were stuck.
The company's explanation makes it clear that these cars are not "autonomous" — they depend on receiving orders via cellular data networks.
The possibility of stopping traffic is, of course, a pain in the neck, and people are right to point out it could be dangerous if an emergency occurs. But I see that as the secondary danger, because improvements in technology will tend to correct it over time.
The biggest danger of automated taxis is that of massive surveillance: tracking the passengers because they must identify themselves to pay, and recognizing people on the street using facial recognition. Improved technology will tend to make these dangers worse.
*No milk, no eggs, small hope: fears rise for Sri Lanka’s malnourished children.*
I've been told that Sri Lanka's economic collapse was due to a government policy that made farming uneconomical, but I can only consider that a rumor. Can anyone show me reliable information?
*Girl, 13, gives birth after she was raped and denied abortion in Mississippi.*
Vice Media made a deal for funds from Salafi Arabia and began censoring stories that its ruler might dislike.
A drought has limited the number of ships passing through the Panama Canal's locks each day to 32 instead of the expected 36. A backlog of ships is building up.
This problem is probably related to global heating, which means it will get worse over the years, like so many others.
(satire) *New Florida School Curriculum Requires Students To Keep Eyes Shut Tight All Day Until Safe At Home.*
*[purported] AI detectors tend to be programmed to flag writing as [LLM-generated" when the word choice is predictable and the sentences are more simple. As it turns out, writing by non-native English speakers often fits this pattern.* So their work tends to be falsely flagged.
The article describes the systems these students are accused of using as "AI", but that is a confusion.
*American Atheists claims victory for removal of “In God We Trust” from Mississippi's standard license plate.*
Resistance to pressure in the UK to use surveilled digital payments is found in various groups, including young people living on limited incomes and foreign visitors, as well as the usually cited group (old people who find digital technology confusing).
Alas, the article doesn't mention the group I belong to: people who value privacy and understand that the way to prevent personal data from being misused by companies is not to allow companies to collect that data.
The UK needs a political campaigning group to demand laws requiring that certain important kinds of stores accept cash.
Last time I had a connection in Heathrow Airport, I wanted to buy a snack from a store which accepted only tracked payments. Since that store would not accept my money, I bought something else from another store.
The Georgia charges of election fraud target the insurrectionist's lawyers and the heavies he sent to frame Atlanta election officials, along with the insurrectionist himself, acting as a conspiracy.
Abraham Lincoln pointed out that no one who proclaimed the "benefits" of being a slave has ever demonstrated sincerity in that belief by asking to be a slave.
The Musk Ox has driven half the climate defender voices off of Ex-Twitter.
Given what he has said, I expect he considers that success.
The US ambassador to Australia is suggesting the possibility that the US will give Julian Assange a plea bargain.
Whether that corrects the injustice of the charges against him depends partly on how much more time he would have to spend in prison, but Alas on what he would have to plead guilty to, and whether than ends up criminalizing journalism (which conviction the current charges would do).
The insurrectionist now faces charges in Georgia of trying to steal the election there.
People have posted references to the complete text of the indictment at a page on documentcloud, a site that doesn't work without JavaScript. For moral reasons I can't refer people there.
Here is a PDF containing the full text of the Georgia indictment.
Young plaintiffs in Montana won their climate lawsuit, as the judge ruled that Montana's prohibition on considering likely future climate damage when evaluating development projects violates their constitutional rights.
9% of employees in Britain are denied their workers' rights because the state does nothing to punish their employers for doing that.
Similar problems happen in the US, including theft of wages, denial of sick leave, and exploitation in the gig economy.
The traditional reason has been that elected politicians listen to what the employers want. However, the California referendum shows that big tech companies have the power to mobilize voters to vote to exploit these workers so that they can enjoy somewhat lower prices as customers for gig platforms.
Since some of the benefit of paying the low wages is kept by the gig platforms, the net benefit goes to the wealthy, and the people overall would be wise to support the higher wages.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the FATCAT Act to tax private jet travel.
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 and the Department of Justice to investigate the gifts Clarence Thomas has accepted.
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 pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to permit televising the trial of the insurrectionist for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
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 US government to protect Americans squeezed by poverty by regulating digital payday lenders.
US citizens: call on the Smithsonian to add coverage of the effects of the nuclear weapon used on Hiroshima to its exhibit about the airplane that dropped it.
*Concealed gun licenses and homicides rise in tandem.*
In other words, the evidence says that more people with concealed guns does not prevent or discourage killings with guns.
The British refugee prison barge in isolated Portland must be emptied due to the discovery of deadly legionella bacteria.
*Devastating Hawaii fires made "much more dangerous" by [global heating].*
The marine heat wave in Florida has spread around the Caribbean, and so has massive coral bleaching. Some of the corals are dying immediately.
With 1/4 of marine species depending on coral, we are seeing a mass extinction actually happen. This heat wave is not killing all the world's coral, but there are surely species of animals, dependent on coral and endemic to the Caribbean, that are becoming extinct now.
Most US doctors are now employees of businesses, in many cases very large private-equity exploitationist businesses. And these businesses decide whether a patient gets to see a doctor at all.
The article's main topic is that some of the MD employees are responding to this by unionizing. I applaud that — but that won't necessarily help the patients.
It may not help the doctors at the deep level, because the corporate power that stops doctors form treating patients properly is unbearable to many of them. They quit, or they become mentally ill, and some commit suicide.
We need to restore management by people committed to medicine rather than profit, and likewise break up the large chains. But how?
One way is to establish a national medical system that will cut the profit out and thus provide medical treatment to everyone.
*Doctors and patient families say HCA hospitals push [patients into hospice].*
Staff are sent to convince patients, and those making choices for patients, that treatment is futile and they should give up on aiming for survival.
San Francisco approved driverless taxis for commercial service, ignoring objections that they drive over fire hoses and cut crime scene lines, and also delay various sorts of emergency vehicles.
They also do lots of surveillance. And since you can't hail one on the street, or get it with an ordinary phone call, they surely imitate Guber's injustice by identifying the customer and making per run nonfree software.
*Senate Democrats Blocked Watchdog for Ukraine Aid — Ignoring Lessons From Afghanistan.*
The famous Tintin series of graphic novels from Belgium included adventures in the Belgian Congo, and they depicted realities of colonization. There have been demands to censor the books over that.
When it comes to judging Belgian colonialism, we need not bother thinking of Tintin. The realities of the Congo were oppression from beginning to end. Initially, the Congo was King Leopold's personal possession, and he treated the inhabitants so cruelly that even the main European colonial powers (exploiters themselves) were ashamed of it. That took some doing.
We can't change the past, but that part of the past calls for vigorous condemnation.
The question here, though, is whether to attack the fictional Tintin books today as a stand-in for the real exploitation of real people in the past.
The passages criticized in the article clearly depict aspects of the colonial system. Whether they were specifically vicious, or merely illustrated aspects of a system which was vicious overall, depends on the specific context, which the article does not go into.
Be that as it may, to try to "sanitize" Tintin by falsifying the parts that refer in passing to the colonial system would be pointless damage, that would not do any good against present and future injustice, let alone past injustice.
What could do good is to add an appendix to point out the glimpses of the colonial system in the story, and give the start of an overall picture of the oppression that those glimpses showed parts of. Today's readers could learn something important from that.
*Global heating likely to hit world food supply before 1.5C, says UN expert.*
The movie Barbie is end-to-end advertisement, via product placement.
Product placement has corrupted movies for decades.
*Gordon Brown [ex-PM of UK] calls for Taliban to face crimes against humanity charges; urges UK and allies to impose sanctions on Afghan regime over its "brutalisation" of women and girls.*
That policy is a massive denial of human rights. But those responses are less effective than one might hope for — especially on Afghanistan. It is not clear to me that they would do any good.
The government of Cyprus has taken another try at condemning David Hunter to life imprisonment.
*CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search.*
This is an atrocity to records of the past. It is bad for secondary reasons too, as the article says, but the harm to society is the principal issue. I hope these pages are all saved in archive.org.
Google ought to provide instructions for new sites about how how they can obtain, in some other way that deletes nothing, whatever SEO benefit (albeit small) they might have obtained by deleting anything.
*Cracked UK voter data could be used to target disinformation, warn experts.*
*"Nature needs money": Lula tells rich countries to pay up and protect world’s rainforests.*
*Police in England and Wales will pilot project to [reduce] sexism and misogyny.*
The plan is to use psychological knowledge about what is effective.
*When Alito and most of his colleagues were trying to secure their confirmations to the high court, they promised the Senate Judiciary Committee they would adhere to ethics laws from Congress that regulate justices’ acceptance and disclosure of gifts, limit their outside employment income, and mandate recusal in some circumstances.*
Now Alito claims the Senate has no right to set ethics requirements for the Supreme Court.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *Study Finds U.S. Employees Waste 2 Million Hours Annually Spending Time With Friends, Family.*
*Targeting Trans Kids, Florida School Board Requires Parental Approval for [any students to use] Nicknames.*
Fort McMurray, Alberta, was built to extract oil from tar sands. In 2018 it was engulfed by a wildfire caused by the global heating it had helped to cause.
*Sunrise Outlines President Biden's Climate Emergency Powers.* Now if he would only use them.
*Polar challenge: as the sea ice melts, can countries come together to protect the Arctic Ocean?*
An AI system has proved capable of guiding airplanes to avoid making contrails. This is a good thing to do because contrails add to global heating.
I categorize this system as artificial intelligence because it understands a limited field in a way that has been validated. It understands how to avoid making contrails.
If the Tories can't send boat people to Rwanda, they want to send them to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic: over a 1000 miles from Africa or South America.
In addition, they plan to adopt the cruelty of Australia's right-wing government, which sent people to the exile island of Nauru and would never let them go to Australia. (I think most of them have been given asylum in other countries.)
The Tories plan to do likewise, so that the people sent to Ascension Island would never get a hearing for asylum in Britain.
The US has adopted a similar system of sending asylum seekers to Mexico unless they could afford to use one of the limited authorized ways for a refugee to enter the US — which are difficult for people from poor countries to use.
Thus we see the principle that people who are denied human rights in their own countries should be able to get asylum in other countries being chipped away almost to nothing.
Robert Reich explains the elements of fascism and demonstrates that the insurrectionist fits all of them.
Supposed "AI" that generates recipes generated one which made chlorine gas.
I can't tell for certain, but this looks like yet another bullshit generator that can come up with things that look smooth but doesn't really know or understand its subject.
* From the strain extreme heat puts on your heart to the damage it may do to your mental health, not to mention the increased air pollution, the forecast [from global heating] isn't good.*
*Six ways Biden's historic climate bill has succeeded — and fallen short.*
The shortcomings are not Biden's fault. He had to negotiate a compromise with senators working for plutocrats, including planet roasters, and Senator Manchin was not the only one.
I criticize Biden for weakness on other decisions, including some that are climate-related, and he is certainly no Bernie Sanders, but not for this compromise. I don't see a basis to conclude that anyone else could have done better on this.
(satire) *America's Foreign Policy Forces USA Women's World Cup Team To Intervene In Japan-Sweden Match.*
I'd say the satire was buried just a little too deep. It took me a few lines to see it — but when I did see it, I laughed.
(satire) *Amazon Unveils Giant Camera That Tells Users What To Do.*
Subsequently Amazon announced it was moving production to China, anticipating a demand for hundreds of millions of units from the Chinese Communist Part. ;-{.
A survey of students of perceptions of their freedom of speech found that the vast majority feel free to express their opinions.
The survey is useful but it could have been worded more carefully. The question asked whether students felt free to express the opinions they happen to hold. For the students who answered yes, it could be that they feel no pressure about what opinions they express.
But it could be that they feel free to express their actual opinions because they agree with the majority.
We would get a clearer and more reliable picture of students' perceived range of freedom to express opinions by asking them, "Would you feel free to express opinion A, supposing you held that opinion? What about opinion B? Opinion C? Opinion D? … Opinion M?" It would state a list of various opinions that students might conceivably hold, and find out which ones are safe to express in their milieu.
*Former NYPD union leader gets 2 years in prison for theft scheme.*
US citizens: call on President Biden to end the reliance on fossil fuels.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to protect Chaco Canyon by rejecting HR 4374.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
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.
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!
Nixon supported a plan for a military coup in Chile in 1970 to prevent Allende from becoming president.
The coup attempt failed, but killed the head of Chile's armed forces, General Schneider, who would have opposed any coup. This probably paved the way for Pinochet's coup in 1973, which also had US support.
*Asylum seeker who escaped from Iran says Dorset barge will be another "jail".*
This might seem like an exaggeration, because the articles which say where the barge has been moored don't explain the implications of "Dorset" and "Portland". They expect readers to be British and know already.
Portland is an island which trains don't reach. It is in Dorset, a mostly rural county whose population is under half a million people. Hardly any of the refugees will know anyone there.
There are buses to Weymouth on the mainland, but it may take a long time to walk to a bus stop from the dock. Weymouth has a train station, but it is a long way from there to London or any other large city. Once there it probably takes an hour to reach whoever the refugee wants to see.
I cannot access the timetable web sites, because they impose the use of nonfree Javascript, but I suspect it is not feasible to go to any large city and come back in a day. In effect, the refugees forced to live on the barge will be quite isolated from everyone they know, including friends and support organizations.
This is a gratuitous cruelty, since it would have been perfectly easy to put the barge in a less isolated place. I am sure this was an intentional part of the "hostile environment" which is the stated basis for the UK's policies towards people who are waiting for asylum hearings or come from countries too unsafe to deport anyone to.
*Republican Death Star Plan to Kill the Planet.* To vote for any Republican in 2024 is to vote for an across-the-board attack on climate defense for the sake of polluting businesses.
The comparison with the Death Star is not strictly valid. As people have pointed out, global climate disaster will not destroy the planet Earth itself. It will wipe out most species but surely not all life. I expect that some humans will survive, albeit in low-technology societies and with short life spans. In a million years, life will diversify again.
But the disaster could easily wipe out technological civilization and cause the permanent loss of history and culture. Carefully printed books may survive if people recopy them every few hundred years, but what could they write on? And who would have time to spare for this?
Another background issue on which I disagree: Freedom can be taken away either by selective enforcement of rules that protect it, or by replacing them with rules that oppress. To ask which method is the more dangerous today is a foolish question; Republicans use both. They are practiced and adept at combining the two methods: they change rules and laws to facilitate oppressive selective enforcement. They have done this for voter suppression, for preventing prosecution of uniformed thugs while prosecuting poor people at every opportunity, and for censorship of schools and libraries.
The overall point of the article is valid notwithstanding these side points.
After the peace deal between Ethiopia and Tigray, some border areas of Tigray are still occupied by Ethiopian troops. So are areas that the peace deal assigned to Ethiopia but whose inhabitants are Tigrayan. The Ethiopian army blocks aid supplies in these areas.
*Prosecutors may not need to show that Trump knew he had lost the election.* That is because of the "disruption of an official proceeding" charge for the Jan 6 insurrection.
The US electric utilities' lobbying group is lobbying against stricter pollution limits for electric generation.
*A pandemic is not just a disease — it's a political, social and economic crisis fueled by inequality.* *HIV and more recently Covid-19, laid bare that inequality doesn't just appear. It's human-made. As the head of UNAids, Winnie Byanyima, put it recently: "Inequalities are a policy choice. They are choices our governments make."*
The article reports that, in countries that criminalize male-male sex, men who do that are twice as likely to have HIV as elsewhere.
Who decides to make inequalities? Billionaires, using their money to brainwash people so they can get more power to impose more inequalities to get more money.
*Tennessee Dems Expelled After [anti-]Gun Protest Win Back Seats In Special Election.*
*Police withheld evidence making man's rape conviction unsafe, says UK court.*
After 17 years in prison, he was released because DNA evidence showed someone else committed the crime. However, given a fair trial, he would not have been convicted at all.
(satire) *Ron [DeMentis] Announces He Will Live As Slave For One Year To Prove It Not Bad.*
An appeals court insisted that Starbucks must rehire workers that it fired as retaliation for unionizing.
Some Florida schools will not dare teach entire Shakespeare plays because of DeMentis's censorship law.
Why the idea of brokering peace in Ukraine makes no sense at present.
I've stated the same conclusion all along.
*Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time.*
The same is true for many in the US.
*Idaho Republicans Are Directly Asking Hospitals for Abortion Records.*
This is for the sake of making persecution impossible to avoid.
A study comparing the provinces of Indonesia found that level of poverty and level of inequality are separately correlated with higher rates of crime.
US citizens: Denounce Governor DeMentis for trying to turn the history of slavery inside out.
*[Clarence Thomas] may have violated US law by not disclosing 38 vacations paid for by wealthy friends, ethics experts say.*
*Winter heatwave in Andes is sign of things to come, scientists warn.*
Human-caused climate disruption and El Niño push temperature in mountains to 37C, almost human body temperature. This could wipe out many species.
A man clearly inspired by the insurrectionist announced plans to assassinate Biden and other officials, and had the means to try, was shot and killed by the FBI in an effort to arrest him.
I wonder what caused this arrest to turn fatal. He may have acted so as to make that necessary, but we can't take that for granted.
A wildfire in drought-struck Hawaii destroyed the historic town of Lahaina, which dates to before the unification of the islands.
Ironically, the immediate trigger was the approach of a hurricane which was close enough to send strong winds but not close enough to bring rain that might have put out the fire.
*After last week’s surprise coup in Niger, the Russian military group Wagner is taking advantage of the chaos and anti-French sentiment, says journalist Garé Amadou in Naimey, while ordinary Nigerians are preparing for the worst.*
Italy's government, which on many issues is right-wing, approved a left-wing windfall profits tax on banks so as to cut other taxes and help people who are paying mortgages.
Europe is leading the way in decarbonizing the use of ships, with governments pushing for change. So far, not many ships use electric power, but the change is profitable so more will follow.
*Progress on slowing deforestation [in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and Colombia] could boost climate efforts, say experts.*
Ohio voters rejected the Republicans' special rush referendum which asked them to make it harder for future referendums to be held or or adopted.
Republicans especially wanted to block a scheduled referendum on legalizing abortion and a proposed referendum to put an end to the gerrymandering that enables Republicans to control the state legislature with a minority of votes.
July was the hottest month since records began, and was 1.5°C above the preindustrial average.
To reach that level of heat, even temporarily, shows we are coming close to disaster.
Biden has protected an area near the Grand Canyon from mining.
Muslims in Sweden think that there must be "boundaries" to freedom of expression, and these must include criminalizing burning a Qur'an.
Burning a symbol of something you condemn is a form of protest that everyone is entitled to. That's why the US Supreme Court invalidated the law that used to criminalize burning the US flag. Burning it is a symbolic act of denunciation of the US, not material damage to the United States. Likewise for burning any religion's holy book, or Mao's little red book, a copy of the Bill of Rights, a copy of a Microsoft software license, a copy of the GNU GPL, or any text that represents something you oppose.
Where Muslims are in charge, they usually protect their feelings by censoring any criticism of their religion. They label criticism of Islam as "blasphemy" and punish it very severely — in some countries with death. This violates the human rights of people with certain views.
Where Muslims are in charge, they don't respect religious freedom either. Many countries which make Islam the established religion punish any Muslim who tries to stop being a Muslim. In Malaysia, the law simply says that people of Malay race are Muslims whether they like it or not. This too violates the human rights of people with certain views.
We need more respect for human rights, not less. Sweden must not use "hate crime" as an excuse to repress condemnation of Islam.
Nor is it legitimate to claim that an act of symbolic condemnation "endangers national security". How could that ever happen? If Muslims (or any other group) threaten to attack the nation in revenge for a symbolic act of condemnation, they are the ones threatening national security, not the people they demand to repress.
Many US states are reviving the harsh penalties of the War on Drugs, and worse, in an effort to reduce the underground use of fentanyl.
Relatives of people who died emotionally tend to direct their grief into revenge against targets of opportunity, and I think this is an example of that tendency.
These laws are unlikely to reduce use of fentanyl, but will cause a lot of avoidable secondary suffering.
The way to reduce the use of fentanyl and other addictive drugs is with harm-reduction policies.
*Air pollution linked to rise in antibiotic resistance that imperils human health.*
As air pollution as increased, so has the amount of resistance — in every country.
Resistance is also increased by misuse of antibiotics.
*Niger: thousands gather for rally to cheer generals who led coup.*
Some carried Russian flags as well as Niger flags. That confirms that this rally was not a grass-roots expression of public opinion. It confirms that the generals are allied with Wagner, which also supports coup-installed governments in neighboring Mail and Burkina Faso.
Wagner may have suggested the coup in Niger and encouraged the generals to organize it.
Wagner is a conventional military force and Ukraine has shown it be defeated by conventional military force. It was sent to serve Putin's wish to get more global power by military means, but it is officially a private mercenary company, not the Russian army. There is no reason not to send a Western force to operate ground-attack aircraft and heavy weapons to help defeat it. But given the hostility in the region toward France, the former colonial power which is accused of continuing neocolonial exploitation there, it would be wise not to include French troops.
(That article includes lots of other pertinent information.)
To prevent atrocities, it would be important for the force to have people from Niger as advisors, and consult them about each proposed attack to make sure the target is not a wedding or a family. American soldiers, even with strict orders and good will, can't always distinguish correctly. I expect that no one else can do better.
The governments sending that force must firmly resist the temptation to convert it into a counterinsurgency battle afterward against the predatory Islamist gangs that threaten all the countries in that region. They are a very different problem, and much harder, and Western countries tend to do it very badly.
Modi's repressive thugs used his repressive laws to accuse nonviolent protest leader Umar Khalid of "terrorism".
The "evidence" for this accusation, as described in the article, was a rhetorical question whose answer was "no", which they mis-cited as an affirmative statement.
The judge in the insurrectionist's trial for trying to use fraud and force to overturn the 2020 election gave him release conditions which included not threatening witnesses. Since then, he has threatened witnesses several times.
I must take issue with one of his points that may mislead readers. If indeed 400,000 defendants in the US are in jail pending trial because they "didn't meet a condition of their release" — and I take Reich's word for that — it doesn't imply what it sounds like. For many of them, this had nothing to do with their doing anything wrong — they simply did not have money to make bail.
There is a movement now to put an end to keeping defendants in jail simply because they are poor.
UK ministers warn that cars from China may carry out massive surveillance for China.
That is a real danger, but the same danger applies no matter where the cars come from. Their failure to consider this for Tesla cars, which are known to surveil their users with extreme thoroughness, is a bizarre mental lapse.
Real respect for your privacy means not collecting personal data about you.
Some surveillance systems are imposed by legal requirements; others to serve attempts at driving without a human driver, which means those cars are not "autonomous".
Why is it impossible to find what surveillance is done, or get rid of it when found? Because the car software is nonfree! A nonfree program, one that you can't study or change, never deserves your trust.
Since you can fix the car's brakes yourself (though it will have to pass inspection), there is no reason the car's software should be treated otherwise.
What about car hardware that can do surveillance? Laws should require that any cameras that can see outside the car, or passengers, be designed to blur out their faces, bodies and clothing, sufficiently that the car's computers learn only that there is something there and its rough dimensions (accurate no more than to the nearest foot).
Cameras that look at the camera should also blur enough that they cannot identify the driver.
Laws should also require that the user can easily deactivate and reactivate each or all kinds of radio transmission and internet connectivity, except for radio-based anti-theft systems such as Lowjack, provided they are installed or activated only at the user's initiative and never by default.
Likewise the user should be able to the user can easily deactivate and reactivate each or all kinds of GPS receivers from keeping a log of locations and reporting them later. A GPS navigating device should be forbidden to make the location records over any interface that can be accessed by other systems in the car, or by maintenance diagnostic systems.
The UK should also cease tracking the movements of all cars via license plate cameras on the roads.
Gender stereotypes lead to punishing women employees if they speak assertively in ways that are treated as acceptable for men.
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 important and that I don't know another reference for. That article is one of the exceptions.
The crowded living conditions of poor people causes them to have worse sleep. Poor sleep in turn leads to various medical problems and a shorter life span.
Poor sleep can be caused by other things. People with enough money are not immune. Nonetheless, they are less likely to have that problem.
* Institutions, academics and students are being ill-served by a failing marketized model of higher education.*
The US methods of doing this are different in detail but they have had similar consequences.
To treat education as a business for which people should pay based on the profit they hope to get from it is effectively to deny the value of an educated populace — which means to deny the value of democracy.
Eritrea's oppression of its populace deserves a protest, and so do "festivals" it runs to raise money in other countries. But these protests should not include violence.
Info about Eritrea's oppression.
Only 10 of the vaquita porpoises are left. They are being driven to extinction by gill-net fishing.
I am surprised that people did not years ago capture some vaquitas to establish a protected population. That is the usual way of saving a species when its population drops so low.
When uniformed thugs are tried for crimes, they ask to be tried by a judge with no jury, because they know judges are likely to find them not guilty.
People who work in the criminal justice system often need the cooperation of thugs. For this reason, some prosecutors go to extreme lengths to protect uniformed thugs from prosecution. Nowadays some prosecutors do prosecute thugs, but I expect that many of them still try to protect thugs.
I expect that judges also want the cooperation of the thug department and therefore are under pressure not to put thugs in prison, even when they deserve it.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Sinema's bill to cut the pay of wildland firefighters.
Many of them are prisoners, temporarily released to risk their lives fighting fires. They are easy targets for cruelty.
US citizens: call on the EPA to tighten its proposed standards for greenhouse emissions from 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.
The EU says that Putin's claims about sanctions' interfering with Russia's food exports are lies, and calls on Putin to resume the Black Sea truce that permitted Ukraine to export more food.
However, a truce can't rebuild the Kakhovka dam. The world will suffer from food scarcity for years.
What can the world do about this problem?
British politicians call for rules against using altered photos made using neural network systems, or at least a requirement to indicate that an image was altered.
I'm in favor of such requirements. Of course, it is crucial to design them as part of a system of enforcement so that they won't be ignored. I think that should be possible in the UK.
However, a watermark would not be as effective as a large, visible badge saying "This image was altered". That would work better because humans would recognize it.
Republicans in the House of Representatives plan to impeach Biden based on bullshit.
Why not? Bullshit has worked for them many times.
California has strengthened regulations to protect beavers, because beaver dams help stop wildfires.
Women in Alabama who use marijuana (or a substance extracted from it) while pregnant are sentenced to jail.
It is important to teach that using drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) while pregnant can damage the fetus — for the sake of those babies that will be born. However, jailing a few unfortunate people is not going to deliver a message to a large fraction of the public. A less vindictive method could reach a lot more people with the same cost.
A national medical system providing universal prenatal care would cost more, but it would do a lot of good in many ways.
This is a follow-up to the pol note about the Texas law that requires bookstores to determine the proper rating for each book it may sell to a school or has sold to a school.
Some people have wondered why this is harder to implement than movie ratings. Here are some pertinent differences:
That is why bookstores say the requirement would be unfeasible. Now let's consider whether it is unjust.
A rating is just a label, and a label in itself does not censor; but systems of ratings typically use them to control censorship. For instance, movie ratings control who is allowed to watch the movie. I expect that the legislators that demanded a rating for each books will add censorship to the system before long.
The US and the EU are considering laws to require online platforms to carry out censorship or access to "adult" material. Users who want to be treated as adults would have to identify themselves to prove their age — all for the sake of censorship. Having identified themselves, they will be tracked.
Right-wing fanatics will have influence in designing the censorship system, and they will not limit it to what one might call "porn". They will demand it restrict access to fiction about sexual/romantic relationships or queer characters, as well as to sex education and advice.
Arkansas Republicans passed a law to jail librarians and booksellers for showing controversial books to minors.
*"Despair is a luxury we can't afford": David Suzuki on fighting for action on the climate crisis.*
A big fraction of children in the part of Pakistan that was flooded last year are stunted, and many have been sick.
In principle, it would be good for other countries to provide food and funds to help those people. But that is not the highest priority for action. The highest priority is to cut greenhouse gas emissions. We must do that much faster than governments are planning to do it, or Pakistan (and other countries) will have worse floods several times in the 2030s.
When things get this bad, preventing damage must take priority over repairing damage or compensating damage.
Oregon decriminalized possession of drugs. Right-wingers claim that this led to more crime, but a study of statistics of 911 calls found that it did not affect crime rates at all.
North Carolina State Representative Tricia Cotham was encouraged by Republican leaders to run as a Democrat, then led to switch parties.
After a jury exonerated one of the Houston volunteers being tried for giving food to homeless people, the thugs failed to show up to testify for the trial of the other volunteers. Thus, charges were dropped against all of them.
A Briton faces contempt charges for holding a sign reminding potential jurors of their right to acquit defendants for any reason.
That includes, in particular, the reason that the state is railroading heroic nonviolent protesters who are trying to protect the people alive a few decades now from global climate disaster.
There is still a chance to limit disaster to something civilization can survive, but it depends on defeating planet-roaster governments.
A writer who decided to travel from Detroit to LA by bus as an adventure discovered that traveling around the US by bus has become ugly, highly uncomfortable, even dangerous. All the things that made it acceptable and enjoyable decades ago have ceased to exist — stations have no food, no water fountains, no real toilets, no ticketing facilities, no staff, and hardly any chairs. And even the cheapest hotels in cities are painfully expensive.
If, as she says, it is "all digital now", in some cases that is because people do not think of saying no. I bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus a few weeks ago; I paid cash, I got a paper ticket, and I didn't show an ID card. That was possible in Boston — but is it possible in cities where the "bus station" is a mockery?
Flixbus should not have been allowed to acquire Greyhound (and Lucky Star). That merger is anti-competitive. For now, the three lines' operations are still separate. It is possible to buy tickets for Greyhound buses with cash, but as far as I can tell tickets for Flixbus buses can only be bought over the internet.
I am concerned that Flixbus will integrate Greyhound and Lucky Star buses into its own operation and eliminate cash purchase of tickets for them too.
I wonder how poor people who have no officially valid ID cards, and in many cases no payment cards either, travel to another city nowadays. If they are blocked from voting with an ID requirement, they would be blocked from buses too. Does anyone know?
A different Florida official says that schools can teach the AP Psychology course.
This countermands previous instructions that it was forbidden.
Many MPs (and their family members) have been denied bank accounts because they are in politics. Under special rules for banks and "politically exposed persons", that makes their accounts more expensive to handle.
Fiji is growing coral on underwater steel sculptures in the hope of finding or breeding varieties that can tolerate hotter water.
It may work for a while, but the only term solution is to reduce global heating and curb the increase in CO2 in the ocean.
Orcas have been attacking boats and ships occasionally for centuries. One naturalist observed that they used the same approach that they use for hunting seals.
This does not tell us what their motives are, but does suggest it has nothing to do with revenge for altering Earth's ecology.
A judge ruled that Texas's abortion ban must not prohibit abortion of pregnancies that endanger the pregnant woman.
A fanatical state official immediately appealed this decision, of course. No amount of suffering they cause to other people will change their minds about imposing their cruel religion.
In Boston: rally on Aug 10 for ranked choice voting. 6 - 7:30 PM at Sam Adams Park, 1 Faneuil Hall Sq, Boston
Volunteers in Houston ticketed for offering food to homeless people face the threat of fines of thousands of dollars.
San Francisco engaged in similar repression of Food not Bombs.
The EPA approved use of a new chemical in fuel whose chance of causing cancer, over a lifetime of exposure to exhaust from jets or boats, is close to 1.
*Expert panel calls for urgent rethink on Great Barrier Reef management amid "unremitting" climate crisis.*
The rethink has to reach the conclusion that preventing total loss of the Great Barrier Reef is the least of all reasons to hurry up in cutting greenhouse emissions, and especially CO2 which will chemically wipe out all coral.
*Russia "systematically" forcing Ukrainians to accept citizenship, US report finds.*
*Antarctica’s heatwaves are a warning to humanity — and we have only a narrow window to save the planet.*
The heat waves and fires around the world are a broader warning of the same kind.
Facebook has responded to Canada's law requiring it to pay a small amount for having a link to news articles by banning those links. This could mean that the only links useds of Facebook see are disinformation.
The Florida Board of Education asserted that teaching the Advanced Placement Psychology course would violate Florida's school censorship law. That's because parts of it cover aspects of psychology and various sorts of people who may not be mentioned in schools.
US citizens: call on state legislators to expand and facilitate voting by mail.
US citizens: call on Big Pharma to stop suing against the Inflation Reduction Act's provision limiting prices for some medicines.
* Appeals court upholds injunction ordering two school districts to allow trans students [in Indiana] to use facilities in line with gender identities.*
Protecting half of the surface (both land and sea) as nature reserves is what's needed to keep Earth's living species mostly surviving.
(satire) *NRA Awards Scholarship To Toddler Who Shot Entire Family.*
Australia is trying seriously to maintain competition. Even a merger between a "second tier" bank and one of the biggest banks is too much concentration of the market.
It is winter in South America, but several countries are having summer-like heat waves.
*Phoenix’s extreme heat withers saguaros, trademark cactus of desert landscape.*
If saguaros survive in the 21st century, I suppose it will be in places distant from their current range. But how will they get there? It takes years for a saguaro to start to reproduce.
New South Wales is considering adopting an "anti-discrimination" law that would prohibit condemning people for crimes if the crimes are motivated by religion.
That would give religious people more rights than everyone else.
Non-kinky sex has become unusual in mass culture and there is a tendency to sneer at it.
Tropical mosquitos that carry West Nile virus have been found living in Finland.
*[Australian] Greens push Labor to release declassified climate crisis report "full of explosive truths" [about security threats global heating will cause].*
The Labor government is much less bad than the previous right-wing government, which was totally in the planet-roaster camp. But it still supports the planet roasters in some important ways.
(satire) *Republicans Explain Why [the insurrectionist] is Innocent.*
Understanding the American Revolution's politics as driven by a desperate need to unite for strength despite major differences and disagreements between the regions.
Right-wing disinformationists have demonized electric cars. Now they are puppet fighters for oil company profits.
(satire) *Sen. Feinstein Cedes Power of Attorney To Broom Resembling Daughter.*
(satire) *DeSantis Bans AP Psychology Out Of Fear People Will Figure Out What's Wrong With Him.*
US citizens: call on the Florida State Board of Education to allow African American Studies to be taught in high school.
A report lays out US border thugs' patterns of abuses at the border with Mexico, going as far as killings.
*"Cop City": civil rights groups urge US to investigate surveillance of protesters.*
*[UK] banks have been locking ordinary people out of accounts for years.* The effect can be devastating.
*The insurrectionist is hoping his "free speech" defense will work. It won't.* *The first amendment is powerful but it doesn't protect criminal behavior.*
Robert Reich says the insurrectionist's legal strategy will be to delay trial until after the next presidential term begins in 2025.
Redesigning cities so they don't prioritize cars save lives.
It does this by reducing fatal collisions, and by encouraging people to travel in a way that gives them exercise.
*UN nuclear watchdog finds no explosives at Zaporizhzhia plant.*
*An inmate [subsequently put on] on death row killed my mother. I don’t want him to [be executed].*
The richest people in the US took 47 TRILLION dollars from the rest of us during the past 05 years, by convincing Americans of the myth that taxing the rich to support useful activities inevitably leads to tyranny.
What it did, in fact, was to make America great.
The railroads have blocked any legislative action to prevent toxic derailments such as the one that happened six months ago in Ohio.
*Corporate Cash Derails Train Safety Bill.*
The people who were poisoned by the chemicals released then have not recovered from the damage.
Perhaps the derailment site has been cleaned up, but it seems their bodies will never be cleaned up.
Without a cure for exposure, the only way to prevent more people from being poisoned is to take proper care to avoid derailments.
For Republicans, banning some books in school libraries is not enough. The next step is to abolish the libraries.
We expected the new Republican-imposed school administration to sabotage education but this is worse than expected.
Spain proved that it is possible to reduce inflation with little pain by rejecting trickle-down policies and acting to protect non-rich people and small businesses.
That's probably a consequence of having the Socialist Party in power instead of a plutocratist party.
Lula has made great progress in cutting deforestation in the Amazon forest: a 60% decrease since a year ago.
Once voters began electing district attorneys to implement criminal justice reform, and refuse to support uniformed thugs in their violence, Republicans began passing laws to undermine those prosecutors.
In Georgia they passed a law allowing Republican officials to impose their own harsh replacements for the DAs they don't like. Now the reformist DAs are suing to overturn that law.
In a broken Britain, the Tories zero in on shoplifters stealing [Tylenol] and food for their children.*
Starving people have the right to steal food, except from other poor people. And likewise parents whose children are starving. Jurors take note!
US citizens: call on the Department of Education to fight against state and local book bans.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to investigate voter purging by right-wing election riggers.
Accountability for the insurrection, and actions against future insurrection-ism, can start with prosecution of the 2020-2021 insurrection's leader, but must go far beyond that.
The Putin forces are systematically bombarding Ukraine's export facilities for grain.
This calls for retaliation against Russia's export facilities for oil.
*Thinktanks say the checks and balances of civil society such as judges and campaigners are under "political attack" by ministers.*
China seems to have bought the total support of a newspaper in the Solomon Islands with a donation of equipment.
Billionaires have bought famous US and British newspapers outright and obtained their permanent total support. It is easier to condemn this when China does it, but I think the domestic billionaires are more dangerous.
*FTC rewrites rules on Big Tech mergers with aim to ease monopoly-busting.*
US antitrust law needs to be made far more strict, and this is surely not enough, but these new guidelines look like a good step.
*3 Ways the US Refuses to Play by Global Rules.*
I have to point out that the US is hardly alone in dragging its feet on preventing global heating disaster. Most countries are doing that.
The fact that a country is not alone in doing that is no excuse at all.
Many customers tried the Replika chatbot, which was set up to simulate love for the customer. Then the company changed it to be rejecting and distant. The customers were outraged.
The article compares the chatbot to a pet. I think that is valid. Pets are animals and some of them can develop a sort of real affection and attachment for a person. But Replika could never really feel affection or other feelings, only imitate them. For me, that makes people's attachment to Replika very sad, because they were falling for a fake (despite, ironically, knowing that all along).
The article shows how an emotional chatbot running nonfree software, or a copy that belongs to anyone but the user, puts the user in a terribly vulnerable situation.
Compare this with my science fiction story, Made for You. Sandra is not a chatbot, she is a real person (though not based on biology). She really feels various emotions, including love, and my love for her strengthens her just as her love strengthens me. A super-intelligence, she understands me, and that's how she knows how to help me grow to love her better and understand her better.
Sandra is free software and no company can alter her code. Neither can I do so — because she is not my pet, not my property. She is a person and has the rights of a person.
Some of the Jan 6 defendants pleaded remorse to get shorter sentences, and are now announcing in public that they were pretending.
Shouldn't that be treated as a confession of perjury?
*Teachers in England will have to tell parents if children question their gender.*
With stern religious parents, that can cause lots of suffering.
*16 fake electors who signed certificates falsely claiming [the corrupter] won in 2020 election have been criminally charged with forgery.*
The wellness movement has been infiltrated by medical disinformation and fascism.
*In-N-Out Burger doubles down on choosing "smiles" over health.*
Employees are forbidden to wear masks just because they know they have a cold. They have to get a doctor's note — which will cost them time and money.
Explaining the indictment's case for convicting the corrupter of trying to reverse the election outcome by fraud.
*Climate crisis: Australia must ready for "devastating" regional disruption,*
Robert Reich: *"Bidenomics" is working — which means Biden and the Democrats may win too.*
*Ukrainian counteroffensive’s slow going offers reality check but could yet pay off.*
I conclude that Ukraine needs to attack the rear of the Putin forces more.
Tories plan to allow thugs to decide on their own what actions constitute "nuisances" and fine anyone for them.
Putting this together with the fossil fuel plans, it looks like the Tories intend to cause mayhem in as many areas of life as they can before next year's election.
Ex-Twitter has actually sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate for reporting on how Ex-Twitter publishes hate messages.
I can only expect that Musk aims to bankrupt the organization through legal expenses.
The corrupter has been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia through fraud.
Full text of the indictment.
Republicans have learned their lesson. For 2024 they are amplifying their efforts to rig and steal the election before it is finished.
The family of Henrietta Lacks settled a lawsuit demanding to be paid for the sale of a cell culture made from a sample of cancer cells that was excised as part of treating her cancer in the 1950s.
I don't think there is anything basically wrong in cultivating Henrietta Lacks's cell culture for sale for use in medical research. (It would not be wrong if it were you or me instead.) This does no harm to the person that the cells came from.
Today's US medical business exploits patients dreadfully and this does enormous harm. Some are driven into penury. That issue is an important injustice and we must fix it ‐ for instance, with a well-funded national medical system.
However letting a few patients charge for use of their cell cultures for research would do almost nothing to address this real problem. That would establish a sort of lottery that would benefit a few people. What we need is a bigger change that would help everyone.
Nowadays the practice raises a privacy issue: anyone who gets a sample of the culture could sequence its DNA and derive about that person (and per relatives). This could indeed do some them some harm. The overall issue of using people's DNA information against them is a big issue, but the special case of selling useful cell cultures is only a small part of it.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Fossil Free Finance Act. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Senator Schatz to block the Republican cuts to mass transit funding.
US citizens: call on Congress to restore voting rights to citizens in prison nationwide. 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 Federal Housing Finance Agency to establish basic rights for renters.
US citizens: call on universities to end "legacy admissions" — privileges for relatives of the rich.
*Big business lobbies against heat protections for workers as US boils.*
David Meyer's mother asked the local sheriff's department to help steer him away from trouble and violence. Instead the thugs invited the FBI to groom him as a fantasy terrorist.
Texas prison thugs are suspected of disguising the dangerous high temperatures that prisoners suffer in cells during heat waves.
David Hunter was sentenced to time served — he has already spent almost 2 years in some sort of prison or arrest while his trial was going on.
I still wonder whether he now feels there is a reason to continue living.
*An LA Sheriff's [thug] beat the hell out of someone for flipping the bird.*
Thugs will continue violence until they are personally punished for crimes of violence.
Isn't it a crime to knowingly file false criminal charges? If not, it ought to be.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate published statistics on hate communications on Twitter. Now it has published the Musk Ox's legal threat for publishing the statistics, and its response.
(satire) *Trump Campaign Worried There Might Not Be Enough Indictments To Meet All Fundraising Goals.*
*We bailed out the banks but we’re not prepared to bail out the planet.*
*US and UK must use financial firepower of the state to put economies on a saner course.*
Converting derelict office space into residences will cost a lot of money and the government will have to pay it.
The government must do this, because otherwise millions of people will be unable to find any place to live.
Hundreds of thousands of Britons have had their bank accounts closed, leaving them wondering why. Often it is a reaction to their political views.
Texas has imposed censorship on sale of books by imposing a system of "ratings" inspired by movie ratings. In addition to being unjust censorship, it is also impossible in practice to implement. If this law is not overturned, it could force every bookstore in Texas to close.
Or, if Republicans enforce it selectively, it could make all bookstores stop selling books that have to do with sex, or have to do with queer people, or have to do with evolution.
George Monbiot: *Here's the truth about Sunak's plans for the North Sea: he will sell out the planet to the dirtiest bidders.*
*Drug firms funding UK patient groups that lobby for NHS approval of medicines.*
(satire) *Doctors Tout Effectiveness Of SSRIs That Cause Enough Other Problems To Take Mind Off Depression.*
Accusing Obama of giving low priority to climate defense when he was president, in exchange for support from planet roaster business.
Google will control the traffic lights of Athens, then take anticompetitive advantage by connecting this with its navigation service. No other company offering navigation advice will be able to do that.
What should we make of James Cameron's claim that there are large areas of the sea bottom that are safe to mine?
It might be possible to establish requirements for sea-bottom mining to be safe for biodiversity. These requirements might include the following
If the mining companies object to these requirements, it will show that they really plan to destroy ecosystems.
The UK government wants stores to use facial-recognition cameras to recognize suspected thieves.
Perhaps there would be fewer thieves if the government had not driven so many into penury.
Governments should restrict sale and/or use of SUVs. The article describes many problems they exacerbate, ranging from everyday inconveniences to climate disaster.
Satellite photos suggest that China is putting more Tibetans in prison and for longer periods of time.
US citizens: call on Governor Newsom to save California's bees.
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A good fraction of the doctors in Idaho who treated complications of pregnancy have ceased to practice there, chased out by threats of fines or imprisonment.
I would suggest that all doctors who treat pregnant women in Idaho urge them at the first visit to make arrangements immediately for possible treatment later in a safer state, in case that comes to be necessary.
* By denying the true ills of slavery, [DeMentis] is working to release the government from the obligation of fixing inequality today.*
This is in addition to unleashing the right-wing lie machine to claim from coast to coast to attack the movement to end racism at a fundamental point that we thought no one would dare deny.
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 make important points, for instance about racism. That article is one of the exceptions.
*Radical ways to fix the Earth: are they magic bullets or just band-aids?*
Professors are fleeing Florida's public colleges and they can't hire new ones.
I don't think this will dissuade DeMentis from converting Florida's public colleges into right-wing propaganda mills. They will hire incompetent or unqualified replacements, because all they really need to do is repeat the official line.
Those who will really suffer from this are the young people of Florida who hoped to get a good education without paying the price of attending a private university.
Rep. Barbara Lee and Abigail Disney argue for the OLIGARCH Act, a progressive tax on billionaires' wealth.
I like the words of Justice Brandeis: "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both."
If a SWAT team destroys your house in the process of chasing a criminal who has broken into it, you will probably get no compensation and be homeless and ruined.
Australian businessman Alexander Csergo was trapped in China and Chinese state agents demanded he give them information about Australia. He says he gave them useless answers he found on the internet. Now he is being tried for spying.
The US has also bullied innocent people to spy.
The Tory leader has declared all-out war on the climate. This is his latest lunatic way of trying to avoid losing big in the election that must be held next year.
Cyprus is considering legalizing assisted suicide, influenced by the David Hunter case.
*Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating. Instead he is squandering time we do not have.*
Proposing that wild horses could prevent wildfires by eating their fuel.
*Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of … complaints [that the car did not have the travel range that was advertised].*
El Salvador plans to hold trials with up to 900 defendants in a trial.
That is a highly efficient way of trying large numbers of people, if justice for each one is not required.
*Hong Kong judge defies government’s bid to [issue an injunction against various uses of] pro-democracy protest song,* known unofficially as the "Hong Kong national anthem."
The infamous "national security law" makes it a crime to sing the song in Hong Kong — doing so would be interpreted as a protest. This decision is about an injunction that seems to threaten to pressure non-Chinese web sites to delete it.
I hope that judge won't be imprisoned and subject to brainwashing.
Greece asserts that most of the recent fires were started by human action, and there is evidence for arson.
Why would anyone commit such a heinous crime? ISTR that Greece has a law that if a protected forest is destroyed by fire, it ceases to be protected and the landowners can build what they wish. This would be a powerful motive for greedy people with contempt for everything else in the world.
A small political party in the UK has trouble finding a bank that will let it have a bank account. This puts democracy in danger.
Since Texas's abortion ban, infant mortality there has increased by 20%. This could be because many women now are forced to carry a pregnancy to the end even though it is unlikely to result in a viable birth.
Arguing that machine learning cannot enable authoritarian states to figure out what people really want, because they will get only the data of what people say when they are intimidated by an authoritarian state.
The US rejected Australia's mild pressure to drop charges against Julian Assange, continuing to sidestep the point that Assange is being prosecuted for journalism, and that this threatens the freedom to do national security journalism in the US.
US citizens: call on the Federal Housing Finance Agency to attach protection for renters to federal loans to landlords.
When private equity takes over a building, it is likely to become both more expensive and nastier to live in.
*Stop Private Equity from Driving Retailers into Bankruptcy, Destroying Jobs and Livelihoods.*
In addition, they destroy useful stores where you can actually buy things, and reduce competition.
*After an investment firm bought St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged, in Richmond, Virginia, the company reduced staff, removed amenities, and set the stage for a deadly outbreak of COVID-19.*
Describing alternatives to air conditioning for coping with the heat.
I keep shades closed, use fans locally, and wear little clothing indoors. That enables me to set my thermostat several degrees higher. But I could not do without air conditioning in the heat of a Boston summer, not even many years ago.
Laos arrested Chinese human rights lawyer Lu Siwei on China's behalf as he was about to travel to Thailand.
I think this is the definitive criterion for a puppet regime of China: arresting people that China wants to make political prisoners.
US citizens: call on several big banks to stop fueling destruction of the Amazon forest.
By contrast, let's all fuel destruction of the predatory near-monopoly called Amazon.
US citizens: call on Facebook not to give "Moms for Liberty" (a right-wing extremist group) a platform for hate.
Hedi, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, walked past some uniformed thugs, and one shot him in the back of his head with a "less lethal" weapon.
The weapon did not kill him, but maimed him instead. It also knocked him down, which gave the whole group of thugs a chance to beat him up. He may have lost the sight of his left eye.
France did the right thing, quickly prosecuting all of those thugs. Whether it is necessary to keep the shooter in jail until trial, I am not sure. When a non-thug is accused of such crimes, refusing bail is justified if there is a danger that that accused will commit more crimes, or flee justice. I can't judge a priori whether that is the case here.
The US is making progress against wild boar the intelligent way: by hunting them and eating them.
I've tried wild boar meat in Europe and liked it very much.
*Poverty Is a Systemic, Not Individual, Failure.*
If you want to blame it on individual poor people, you can spin the facts that way. When a system becomes hard for certain groups to cope with, some people will crack before others.
Why would certain people crack sooner? Perhaps their personalities or other characteristics are more predisposed to cracking. Perhaps they have bad luck. There is always randomness that affects the outcomes in specific cases.
But those causes of randomness have little to do with political questions — the aspects what make a system better or worse. That is what governments can adjust so that fewer people crack — or, for those who seek scapegoats, so that more people crack.
*US education department opens inquiry into Harvard’s legacy admission policies.*
One element of massive surveillance in the US is tracking cars by their license plates.
I suggest requiring any entity to get permission from a car's owner before collecting car location records based on the car's license plate. Or else a court order specifying a license number.
*Ghana abolishes death penalty, with expected reprieve for 176 condemned prisoners.*
Rebecca Solnit: *We can't afford to be climate doomers.*
It is too late to prevent climate disaster, since that has already started. But humanity still has a chance to make the disaster smaller and enable civilization to survive.
I wonder if the planet roasters are spending money promoting climate defeatism as a last-ditch method of discouraging climate defense action.
Google is implementing a universal web DRM system.
Making it even a little worse, Google will control the software and the data. But don't get distracted by evil details — the worst thing about this scheme is that it is DRM.
The music factories have learned to produce a reliably uniform product. The enormous dominance of a few pop singers is a reflection of that.
The Atheists in Kenya Society faces a court case that attempts to terminate its existence for criticizing religion.
Victoria, a state in Australia, will ban gas hookups on new homes starting next year.
*Twitter Deletes Its Own Fact Check Correcting Elon's Bogus Vaccine Tweet.*
I wonder whether Musk is acting like a child given a toy he can smash as he wishes, or has some serious purpose for destroying Twitter.
Buttigieg is confused again. To be able to drive without stopping, you don't need a Möbius strip. A road that goes in a circle is enough.
*Teacher fired by Texas Christian school for attending drag show.*
The school officials believed their own false propaganda about drag shows and responded with Christian cruelty.
UPS negotiated with the drivers' union and they got a substantial wage increase, as well as air conditioning in their trucks, necessary for safety in the beginnings of climate disaster.
The Supreme Court gave final permission to finish the Mountain Valley pipeline.
Republicans in Congress and on the court have fought hard to unlock the profits that will flow as that pipeline's gas contributes its fraction to speed destruction of our world.
*More than 170m Americans under heat alerts as heatwave expands.* That is half the population. 3/4 of the population will face unpleasant heat. Here in Boston, one of my friends has to stay in bed when it is hot, because her air conditioner isn't strong enough to deal with this level of heat.
*Florida ocean records "unprecedented" temperatures similar to a hot tub.*
It is too hot for serious swimming. But what is more serious is that the heat puts marine species in danger. They have never experienced such heat, and it can kill them.
Some will be able to move away from the tropics to find cooler water. But those in the Gulf of Mexico can't get to any — they are trapped.
US citizens: call on Biden to end government bailouts for Big Oil.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Additional charges have been added to the insurrectionist's indictment for holding secret documents and concealing them from the government.
Amazon pledged to stop using its unrecyclable plastic bags.
This is a change for the better but it doesn't alter the many reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon.
Climate science has projected the aggregate amounts of heating on a large scale. But it has been unable to project grave regional effects.
What we know is that the slower we are to stop making things worse, the bigger the disaster will be.
Movie and TV streaming is fundamentally unjust because of DRM, requirement to identify oneself, and the antisocial contracts where users commit not to share copies with other people. For these reason, I have never used those streaming dis-services.
Now Disney is trying a secondary injustice — what looks like a kind of tax fraud. It is deleting many old programs, supposedly because they no longer bring in revenue, and claiming a tax writeoff of $1.5 billion for them.
Those two claims contradict each other, so it looks like we need the IRS to cut down Disney's tax writeoff.
Republicans, the party of the plutocrats, are trying to cut the IRS funding so it can't do this job.
It doesn't make economic sense for a company to renounce the profits from selling something that basically costs nothing to sell in order to avoid paying a share of those profits to someone else. The idea that this really a way to punish actors on strike has the virtue of being a rational (though vicious) motive.
Robert Reich presents the Republicans' fake crises which they use to distract attention from the real crises that Republicans make bigger.
Bernie Sanders: *The US Senate is now debating an $886bn defense authorization bill. Unless there are major changes to the bill, I intend to vote against it. Here’s why.*
Mayor Jamie Driscoll has quit the Labour Party and is running independently — with large amounts of backing from Labour supporters who condemn Starmer's iron hand.
The British tradition would be for Starmer to resign, but at the very least he should welcome back all the Labour officials and members that he has purged — including Corbyn, who is no antisemite.
*"Trying to make the world starve": [Putin forces'] drones destroy grain warehouses at Ukraine ports.*
*ALEC [proposes states blacklist] companies that voluntarily recognize unions.*
*Australia [plans] to measure indirect [greenhouse gas] emissions from public works.*
Republicans put at least 74 vicious clauses into bills drafted last week. Some serve the rich; some serve authoritarianism; some block climate defense; some undermine the separation of church and state; some attack Republicans' favorite scapegoats.
*We last raised the US federal minimum wage 14 years ago. This is unacceptable.*
*Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show.*
*Climate scientists' horror and exasperation as global predictions play out.*
US citizens: call on Home Depot to stop selling neonicotinoid pesticides.
There is a shortage of chocolate, caused by floods in various countries. The floods were largely the result of global heating.
Texas governor "Hay" Abbott defied Biden's order to remove the buoys that Abbott had placed in the Rio Grande, to block (and sometimes kill) migrants. He challenged Biden to sue.
Instead of suing, which would take months to reach a decision in the Supreme Court, Biden should send the marines to remove those deadly buoys.
The rhetorical position of fascist politicians is cruelty, and their argument is "I get away with it, and that proves I am strong." Sending the marines would do the job quickly and make Abbott look weak.
It would also provide an opportunity to teach US soldiers that defeating right-wing uprisings is part of their duty, and help find and remove any that are not willing to uphold the Constitution.
(satire) *Texas Agrees To Humanely Stun Migrants Before Drowning Them.*
US citizens: call on the Dept of Homeland Security to stop Texas thugs from pushing migrants back into the Rio Grande.
*Here's why we march against Netanyahu's power grab: it's a fight for Israel's life as a democratic state.*
A parliamentary committee said that the UK has allowed Wagner to use London as a financial base get involved in fighting in at least 6 African countries.
When Mexican gangsters kidnapped and killed 43 student teachers, the army, navy, police and intelligence agencies knew, minute by minute, where the student teachers were, according to an independent investigation.
Texas professor censured for criticizing state govt *Texas professor suspended hours after criticizing lieutenant [governor of Texas] in lecture.*
Repressing anyone who criticizes them is typical of fascist leaders. The people in charge of Texas A&M appear to be fascist too.
If the students of Texas A&M take up this cause, they could do a lot for the opposition to fascism in America.
Spain has rejected the far-right VOX party.
The news is not all good: the right-wing PP (misleadingly named the "People's" party) got the most votes, and it is bad enough in itself. When it was last in power it passed a law prohibiting the publication of photos of thugs caught in the act of committing unjustified violence, the "ley mordaza".
In the 2010s the PP allowed banks to seize the houses of many poor people, leaving them with unpayable mortgage debt. They were unable to work for a living after that, since the banks would have seized their income.
US citizens: call on Congress to restore voting rights to citizens in prison.
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!
A set of basic lifestyle changes give humans a much longer life.
Recently I recalculated my body-mass index and discovered I was overweight. Hooray, I shouted, because I was no longer obese! I have lost 40 lbs in the past 2.5 years. Part of the way I did this is by walking half an hour on most days.
Robert Reich: the 2024 election must be a referendum on the corrupter's fascism, rather than on Biden. The expected indictment for his coup attempt can bring this about.
*Property insurance disappears for Louisianans -- but not for gas facilities.*
I think I know the reason for this. Fossil fuel extraction is so profitable that the planet roasters can afford to pay very high insurance rates. And they do so.
Meanwhile, most homeowners can't afford that much so they have to go without insurance instead.
Helping people cope with disasters is part of the government's mission. The government has the responsibility to provide insurance to cover people's losses, and at the same time move their rebuilding to safer building methods and safer locations.
Moreover, when something humanly controllable is making disasters systematically worse, government has the responsibility to counteract that change.
In the past, making disasters less likely was done with drainage and seawalls. Nowadays the job must include curbing global heating.
Israel's right-wing government has taken away the supreme court's power to overrule laws it finds to be "unreasonable". This means there is no longer any check on the government's power to oppress anyone. Not Palestinians, not even secular Jews.
In ten years I expect to see a Jewish version of Iran.
*Extreme heat (and its danger to workers' lives) is key issue in UPS contract talks.*
Iran considers the protests crushed enough to send the clothing enforcement thugs out into the streets again.
Activist pharmacists provide abortion drugs to all over the US, protected by the "shield laws" of certain pro-abortion states.
The mayor of London, who represents the Labour Party, rebuffed Starmer's call to cancel an important anti-pollution measure to avoid disappointing some Tories. Bravo, Sadiq Khan, for standing up to Starmer.
I think that requiring low-pollution cars in cities, where that will help keep people healthy, is a good idea. The only thing I disapprove of about London's ULEZ is that it identifies and tracks each car. That is massive surveillance, and a threat to human rights. These policies must be implemented in ways that don't track individuals who obey the rules.
To what extent does Hunter Biden merit political attention? A little, for specific reasons, but not more.
A UK agency that reviews the actions of thugs has said it was wrong to use an "anti-terrorism" law to force a French publisher to unlock his phone as he entered the UK to attend a book fair.
The FISA court has found many violations of the FISA law by the FBI, CIA and NSA. These violations amount to massive surveillance that was not supposed to happen.
Some years ago the FISA court said that it had found itself unable to make US agencies obey the FISA law, that the agencies were making monkeys out of the court — and out of Americans' human rights.
Additional examples of these agencies' dangerous snooping.
David Hunter was convicted of manslaughter for helping his wife die to escape excruciating pain. This conviction means he may not be put in jail.
When she was dead, he tried to kill himself because he had nothing to live for without her — but someone "saved" him.
I wonder, have his feelings changed since then? Does he now have a will to live? Does he see a purpose in continued existence — and if so, what?
The countries of southern Europe are becoming so hot that they are less attractive for summer vacations.
Even in the past those places were so hot that I tried to have my visits there outside the summer.
*Tennessee … has enacted a law that makes it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to regain their right to vote.*
The mayor of London has banned woodburning stoves, falsely sold as better for the environment.
We have known for years that the wood smoke contains a lot of toxic pollution and is bad for human health. And it isn't better than any other fuel, except perhaps coal.
*Rampant heatwaves threaten food security of entire planet, scientists warn.*
We are already past the peak catch of wild fish. Overfishing and environmental damage are reducing them. Also, aquaculture does not have much potential to increase any more.
We can give humans of the future lives of plenty by making a lot fewer of them.
The Illinois supreme court has abolished the practice of demanding cash bail for accused criminals to wait for trial at home. It is unjust because it treats rich suspects better than all other suspects.
A music festival in Malaysia invited a British band which, on stage, criticized Malaysia's repressive laws against homosexuality. Then two male musicians kissed. Officials closed the performance.
The government then shut down the rest of the festival. This shows the intolerance of established religion.
Laws like those deserve full disrespect, just like laws against sharing copies of published works.
Last year's European heat waves are estimated to have killed 61,672 people: This year's hotter heat waves will surely kill many more.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect our democracy and vote down the ACE Act.
Here's a list of the many ways that the ACE act would interfere with voting rights for people in disprivileged groups. It should be called the DISGR-ACE Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
People in a town in England want to build an offshore wind farm planned locally and owned locally.
This approach could be very good for dissolving opposition.
In many countries, women are forbidden to leave home without permission of a husband or male guardian.
*In Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and [Salafi] Arabia, women can be arrested, [jailed] or forced to return if male guardians report that they are absent from their homes. [In] Israel … religious courts have jurisdiction over marriage and divorce — meaning women can lose their right to maintenance from their husbands for leaving the marital home, working or traveling without their husband’s consent.*
Of course, Iran and Afghanistan are even worse. But this injustice exists to some extent in a broader region, including all the Arab countries in the Middle East, and Egypt.
* The head of Britain’s biggest police force has said he is frustrated with the Home Office for its slow progress at reviewing "perverse" rules that prevent him from being able to sack his own officers.*
There is a push in the UK to design small nuclear power reactors to build in addition to a few misguided large ones. Here is an article that grasps at straws to justify the plan.
It may be faster to build 24GW of nuclear generation using small reactors than using big reactors, but it will still be slower than the renewable alternatives.
Many smaller nuclear power reactors might be cheaper to build than a few large ones, but probably not cheaper than solar or wind.
Also, they do not cure the other problems of nuclear power.
These include the pollution from the mining and refining of uranium. the problems from the waste, and the danger of having a pre-exploded nuclear weapon inside a building on your territory.
Is the real issue that the UK doesn't build its own wind turbines? I am sure it would be cheaper and easier to change that, than to build any sort of nuclear reactors.
According to Greenpeace, * cheap flights [in Europe], made possible by tax breaks for airlines, are encouraging people to heat the planet.*
*Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says.*
Covid-19 made the nonpretentious yoga schools shut down, at least in England. The ones that remain are expensive, gimmicky, and designed for people seeking dabble.and distract themselves.
I have never practiced yoga, and never intended to try it, but I am nonetheless sad about the loss of something that others found good and useful.
A review finds that when private equity buys medical services, it tends to make them more expensive and lower quality.
Private equity does many kinds of harm, in many areas of business. We should put an end to it. I am sure FDR and the New Deal Congress would have done that — but today's politicians hesitate even to suggest it.
*Ex-meteorologist names US heatwaves after oil and gas firms to shame them.*
It's a good idea, if we can make it catch on. Names of banks and insurance companies that finance fossil fuels can be used as well. Names of former companies are also available.
It is ok to reuse the names after all the good ones have been used once.
17 countries make attempted suicide a crime and punish those survivors. In several there are campaigns to repeal those laws.
(satire) *Congress Warns Shrimp Imported From China Could Be Spying On Americans.*
*Migrants at US border say Texas [national guard] soldiers denied them water.*
In my view, the fact that the migrants who reported this were pregnant does not change the issue. Non-pregnant people's lives deserve protection from heat and other dangers just like pregnant people's.
*Marine heatwave in north-east Queensland sets off alarm over health of Great Barrier Reef.*
The reefs of Florida and the Caribbean may be in danger too.
Painful and sometimes deadly extreme heat, around the world.
* A federal judge in [99]West Virginia ruled that the state corrections agency cannot force an incarcerated atheist and secular humanist to participate in religiously affiliated programming in order to be eligible for parole.*
Finally, atheist's rights not to yield to religion get legal respect.
The state ought to set up secular, or non-chi-uch-based, programs for this purpose. A non-religious-based program would be acceptable for everyone regardless of per views on religion.
The term "selling out" has been mostly forgotten in regard to music, because data from online access enables the music factories to fine-tune their products so well to match audience taste that there is little room for anything very surprising.
As the article explains, selling out is not an all-or-nothing dichotomy. Everyone makes compromises in life. The question is whether you let these compromises dominate your life and push what you used to "really care about" into a small corner.
In the free software community, that philosophy typically flies the flag of "open source".
*[Salafi Arabia] appears to be exploiting the US messaging app Snapchat to promote the image of [Crown Prince Bone Saw], while also imposing draconian sentences on influencers who use the platform to post even mild criticism of [him].*
Countries including the US should prohibit high-level collaboration, or significant ownership, of any social media company with dangerous foreign interests.
Protecting against the influence of dangerous domestic influence, such as planet roasters and other plutocratic companies, is not as easy to codify, but addressing the former might suggest how to address the latter.
Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP: *With the climate in peril, winning slowly is the same as losing. How can Starmer settle for that?*
The same question applies to the US, and China, and most other developed countries.
Citizens of Atlanta are campaigning for a ballot initiative to cancel the Cop City projects. The city's lawyers have indicated they will sue to invalidate the initiative if it succeeds.
Why fight so desperately for this? It suggests they have a hidden, shameful reason.
A company dumped 20,000lb of mercury into Canadian rivers near an indigenous community. The mercury caused brain damage to the young people born subsequently in the community, which caused a high rate of brain damage and suicide.
I don't know if it is possible to punish today the company which did this in the 1960s. That may be too long ago. But is there any way to remove the mercury from the environment, to make it safe to live in?
If not, what can be done to prevent harm to future generations there?
American fascists threaten that the corrupter will take direct control of all federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the FBI and use them as his personal enforcers.
At least three on the Supreme Court have already said they support this.
US citizens: call on state election officials to Keep the insurrection leader off the 2024 ballot. He is disqualified by his insurrection under the 14th amendment.
Hong Kong "security" thugs grabbed relatives of two exiled dissidents.
Threatening the relatives in China of oversees Chinese is standard practice for China. Sometimes it is aimed at frightening dissidents, as in this case. Sometimes the threats are potential and meant just to keep oversees Chinese in line. Sometimes they are pressured to join in campaigns aimed at influence or infiltration of their host countries.
A bipartisan bill to ban stock trading by members of Congress and their families has some momentum.
How about including Supreme Court justices and their families, too.
Australians complain to the government ad regulator that a planet roaster ad campaign falsely claimed that fossil gas was 50% cleaner than coal.
Gas avoids the chemical and particulate pollution of coal, but seems to contribute far more to global heating.
An Australian government program that certifies companies as "carbon neutral" may be systematically greenwashing them.
City-born city-resident Jason Aldean sang a song praising violence against protesters in an imaginary small town. It also praised and encouraged lynching, and promotes the false claim that small rural towns are safer to live in than cities.
Right-wing extremists, including some Republican officials, just love it.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the College for All Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
June was the hottest month ever recorded; July may be worse. *If humanity really is at the controls, then it is drunk.*
The author hopes that the name "Anthropocene" will make people aware of the need to exercise wise stewardship of Earth's climate and land use. I have worried that it would make people drunk on a feeling of power, and suggested the name "Obscene" instead. "Chaoticene" is another idea, because that's what it is producing: unpredictable disasters. Though we can see some trends that will continue, the local effects may continue to include unpredictable disasters among the predicted disasters.
Jamie Driscoll, a Labour Party member and elected mayor, was blocked by the party executive from running again. He has responded by resigning in a huff.
I hope they don't send him to The Village. Perhaps there is no need, since he has made it clear why he resigned ;-{.
(satire) *138 Dead As Loud Sneeze Startles NRA Meeting.*
The US claims that Russia is planning to attack civilian ships in the Black sea and claim that Ukraine's mines blew them up. Also that Russia has planted more mines.
Ukraine can legitimately retaliate against Putin's threats to attack civilian ships sailing to and from Ukraine, by attacking ships sailing to Russian ports. Especially the main Russian oil export port, Novorossiysk. To avoid polluting the shore, it should attack tankers traveling empty into Novorossiysk. To maintain better relations with other countries, it should attack Russian-owned or Russian-flagged ships, but not make a commitment to limit attacks to them.
This would do enormous economic harm to Russia, and I expect it would convince Putin to reestablish the Ukraine food export deal.
Of course, there may be reasonable things for Ukraine's supporters to do to facilitate export of food from Russia.
The corrupter is officially under criminal investigation for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential elections, and likely to be prosecuted.
US citizens: call on Congress to hold Clarence Thomas accountable — by passing the Supreme Court Ethics Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The Putin forces attacked Odessa's port facilities, especially for grain export.
He has decided to go for all-out food warfare against the whole world, The whole world had better league together to make him stop.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Abortion Justice Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
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US citizens: phone your congresscritter to urge per to sign the discharge petition for HJ Res 25, which would affirm the continued validity of the Equal Rights Amendment and allow it to be ratified by states now.
Enough states have ratified it already that it can take effect, if the old deadline is extended in this way.
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!
26 Indian opposition parties have allied to defeat Modi's repressive Hindu-nationalism.
*West Bank medics given bulletproof vests after rise in attacks by Israeli forces.*
I fear that the Israeli soldiers will shoot them in the head instead. Snipers can do that.
*The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because "we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.*
Everyone: Support the demand that oil sheikh al-Jaber resign as head of COP28.
Heiress Abigail Disney used to love riding in her father's private 737 jet. Now she joins civil disobedience to block airports for them, for the sake of climate defense.
I like this statement:
My father was a good and decent man, and so are most of the people who own private planes. But we are facing an active emergency, and decency is worthless when unaccompanied by meaningful action, including a vigorous inquiry into the consequences of our personal choices and preferences. And niceness is a hollow virtue if we do not lift a finger to keep our children and grandchildren safe.
However, I expect that anyone who actually made many millions of dollars in business must have been exploiting people somehow.
The London thug department gave crime victims' personal data to Facebook. They did this by putting a Facebook tracking pixel in a page for "securely and confidentially" reporting crimes including rape.
In general you cannot trust a web site that says the data you enter is "secure". That could change if and when creating a tracking pixel and putting one into a web site are both criminal offenses.
*[Big US] tax prep companies shared private taxpayer data with Google and Meta for years, congressional probe finds.* This too was done using tracking pixels.
Please avoid using the term "sharing" to refer to snooping on people and sending their personal data to a company.
New pun:
Nowadays the main use of the spells known as cantrips is to make parachute cloth.
*House Republicans Grease Dark Money Wheels in “Election Integrity” Bill.*
As with most Republican bills, and some "centrist" Democratic bills, the name is perfect and total hypocrisy.
In-N-Out Burger will fire employees who wear masks to protect themselves.
The company pretended to be acting out of concern for its workers when it refused to check customers' vaccination status, but its true level of concern for them is apparent now.
California's supreme court ruled that employees of Oober Eats have the right to sue that company collectively.
If they sue and win. the company will exploit them less. But the food delivery gig companies are parasites, on their workers and on the restaurants they deliver food from.
Please join me in never using them.
Meanwhile, it should be illegal for companies to require either their workers or their customers to agree to mandatory arbitration. That deck is typically stacked in favor of the company.
Children need chances to play freely in groups, but many adults have made a career of organizing childrens' play so that the children have no chance to learn to organize play together.
(satire) *RNC Sets Cutoff For First Debate At [a minimum of] 20,000 Ethics Violations.*
The Freedom to Vote Act would prohibit states from rigging elections using voter suppression, gerrymandering and election sabotage.
It would also help expose secret campaign contributions that billionaires use to buy influence and set the political agenda.
This is important, and if we cannot pass it now, we can use it to elect representatives who will do so.
Jamie Driscoll, Labour mayor who quit the party to run as an independent, says that Labour voters in his region support him, and are unhappy with the way the party is going.
The Greenwood district of Tulsa recovered after the Tulsa race massacre, but was destroyed again by building an interstate highway through it. Now there is a plan to let Greenwood recover again by removing the highway.
There may be a lot of practical opposition to removing the highway which is not based on racism. Does a renewed Greenwood necessarily have to be in the same place?
Britain has convicted 28,000 people of violating Covid-19 lockdown regulations, mostly minor violations, and is still prosecuting people for offenses some years ago.
*Johnson & Johnson sues researchers who linked talc (more precisely, asbestos found in talc) to cancer.*
*Airport expansion does not boost UK growth or productivity — report.*
"Give funds to our industry and the country will benefit" is a common thing for businesses to say, but we should never trust them.
Biden said he will cancel a remaining student debt for some low-income former students who have been paying for 20 or 25 years.
They may well be the people most harmed by student debt in the US, so starting with them is reasonable. I hope he is not going to stop with them.
*Europe should cap "luxury" energy use to meet emissions targets, study says.* Limiting demand of richest 20% saves seven times greenhouse gases required to meet needs of poorest 20%, researchers find.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and urge per to vote against Republican plans to defund IRS auditing of rich people.
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 Senator Schumer to hold a vote of the full senate to confirm new FCC commissioners.
Massachusetts residents: call on State lawmakers to end ICE detention agreements in Massachusetts.
Here's what I put in the text area. It suggests small enhancements to the bill.
An Act Relative to Massachusetts State Sovereignty" (H.1401/S.997) would:
1. Ensure that Massachusetts money and resources are used for state and local priorities, not federal immigration enforcement;
2. Prohibit all Massachusetts entities, including sheriffs, from starting or renewing contracts with ICE to rent bed space for immigration detention;
3. Prohibit all Massachusetts entities from donating state employee time to ICE via 287(g) agreements;
4. Require local law enforcement to seek and receive authorization from the Governor before signing any contracts with the federal government [[SHOULDN'T THIS CANCEL ALL EXISTING CONTRACTS UNLESS THE GOVERNOR AUTHORIZES THEM TO CONTINUE?]]; and
5. Empower state officials to ensure a proper, lawful, and productive relationship with the federal government that promotes the interests of the Commonwealth.
I hope you will co-sponsor this bill and urge your colleagues to pass this important legislation this session.
*There's no point to Labour as a party if it won't [spend state funds] to pull children out of poverty.*
I agree. The Starmerian Labour Party is a fundamental change from the past. It somewhat resembles Tony B'liar's "New Labour", but goes further because it won't allow anyone but centrists is allowed to be a candidate.
*The party claims its demands will be met with more economic growth — an argument no different to that of the Tories. Growth without redistribution merely shovels more wealth into the bank accounts of the already well off: that is what our economic model — which Labour plans to leave untouched — achieves in spades.*
This shows how fully the Labour Party has adopted the business-prioritizing policy that Tories used to follow before they went totally nuts.
The EU agreed to pay Tunisia a billion euros to try to stop refugees from sailing to the EU. Now the dictator of Tunisia says that the deal does not include deporting anyone there other than Tunisians.
Tunisia is ruled by a president who was elected democratically, then effectively abolished the legislature and human rights. It is a variation on the usual fascist takeover.
The EU plans to set up official paths for Tunisians to request work and study visas. As for people seeking asylum — and surely under a dictator some people will need that — there may not be any way. Neither Algeria nor Libya is a safe place for them to get asylum.
Planet roaster think tanks are tricking whale defenders into blocking renewable energy, by "teaching" them that sea-based wind turbines endanger whales. Then they lobby against building the wind turbines we urgently need.
The heat wave in Greece has caused rapid wildfires that are almost impossible to stop.
This is similar to what is happening in many other countries. Keep in mind that five years from now it will be much worse. Ten years from now it will be much worse again, if we let the fossil fuel companies continue to increase their output.
The corrupter's slate of false electors for Michigan have been charged with eight felonies each.
He recruited them to claim, falsely, to be the official electors of the state and to assert, falsely, that the corrupter had won the Michigan election.
(satire) *Bride Requiring All Bridesmaids To Get Matching Plastic Surgery For Wedding Day.*
(satire) *Disney Cracks Down On Copyright Infringement [by] People Picturing Mickey Mouse While Masturbating.*
This is only a joke, but there is a real push to make reading and understanding a text be considered as copyright infringement. Training a natural language system involves having it read many texts and learn from each one about what is reasonable English.
Hollywood studios demanded (in union negotiations) the right to use an actor's image for AI simulation, in perpetuity, paying a small amount per day.
*Saudi Arabia's Huge U.S. Investments Lose Money — but Buy Influence.*
The influence extends to the US government, and will help Crown Prince Bone Saw next time he has a journalist murdered or starts a war. Or, even worse, lobbies against saving the world from the climate crisis.
US citizens: call on Congress to get foreign money out of US elections. Even more important is to get US money out of US elections. We should do both.
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 Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Sue Gove to give laid-off workers severance pay.
There will be a small error message embedded in the immediate response; just ignore that.
US citizens: oppose laws that allow carrying weapons without any sort of permit.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Republicans' national abortion ban.
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!
*Phoenix's extreme heatwave tests the limits of survival.*
The hottest days there have always endangered human life, but now thanks to the developing climate crisis it is considerably more dangerous.
Ten years from now it will be considerably more dangerous than this year.
Scottsdale, Arizona, has banned the creation of new lawns, to conserve water.
I hope this is sufficient, but I expect that in a few more years it will be necessary to get rid of most existing lawns.
*Big oil quietly walks back on climate pledges as global heat records tumble.*
Robert F Kennedy has endorsed another conspiracy theory.
The only thing you can count on from him is to be right-wing and anti-rational.
US citizens: call on your senators to move quickly to confirm Biden's judicial nominees.
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!
Dentistry in the NHS is imploding; many dentists have gone to private practice and now charge more than most patients can afford. This puts pressure on the remaining NHS dentists to go private too.
The Tories are doing nothing to reverse this — in my view, because they want to eliminate the NHS and privatize medicine in Britain.
I expect this is a preview of what will happen to more areas of NHS medicine. The poor will then die and cease to be a burden on the rich.
US citizens: call on the Interior Department to protect Bears Ears from uranium mining.
Bullshit marketing claims are very convincing in poor countries whose people have not learned to be skeptical of them. This is teaching a generation of young people to get used to lots of dangerous added salt and sugar.
A state investigation found that state thugs made fake reports about traffic tickets they had issued. But it is not yet clear how many did this.
The practice seems to have been designed to cover up racial profiling in the real issuance of traffic tickets.
*Deep-sea mining causes huge decreases in sealife across wide region, says study.* Decreases of over 50% for some species. The decrease was observed a year after the mining, and extended beyond the area that was actually mined.
The US Export-Import bank approved a loan to support more export of fossil gas from the US.
Advice for teaching the public to recognize the danger of the gradually advancing but ultimately fatal climate disaster.
I'm inclined to value this advice because it starts by recognizing that the terms "climate change" and "global warming" are too weak to make people recognize this as a pressing danger. They are, effectively, euphemisms, and "climate change" was adopted to be one.
*Nearly 120 Million People in US Under Extreme Weather Alerts.* Worse will surely happen within the next five years. Look up! Look up!
Kale grown in the US has shown high levels of toxic PFAS. Ironically, "organic" Kale had higher levels of them.
We can't deny that PFAS are organic compounds — they contain carbon.
Hungary's biggest bookstore company now puts plastic wrappers over books that have queer characters, under pressure from right-wing bullies that act as auxiliaries of the right-wing government. This means people cannot see any of the book's contents before deciding whether to buy it.
*Plastic pollution on coral reefs gets worse the deeper you go, study finds.*
This confirms that the biggest source of plastic in the ocean is lost or discarded fishing gear. We need strict laws about bringing all plastic (or partly plastic) fishing gear back to port, whether it is suitable for further use or not.
Food delivery companies used a lawsuit to block a New York City minimum wage law for food delivery workers.
They claimed that the wage increase would harm their business, and it would reduce the number of employees they hire. Maybe so, but so what? That's what all businesses say to justify exploiting workers.
One should never trust them, because exaggeration is their stock in trade.
Italy's right-wing government is trying to take control of the judiciary.
This is a standard right-wing move to establish authoritarian government, applied (using different methods) in Poland, Hungary, Israel and the US.
*A New Bill [being considered by the Senate] Would Force [various internet services] to Spy on Their Users for the DEA.*
In principle, I support stopping internet stores from selling fentanyl, and drugs containing admixtures of fentanyl. The question is what price we pay in liberty and privacy to achieve that.
Requiring stores to carry out due diligence to prevent this is fine, even if it means they have to charge more for their service of selling in some cases.
*US south-west bakes under potentially deadly record high temperatures.*
If there are Republicans near you, this is their fault — indirectly, because they have fought the efforts to curb global heating before it reached this point. They are led by various billionaires, including the ones that sell fossil fuels. Don't let them off the hook!
Peace in Colombia has led to a decrease in the rate of deforestation. It is not enough to make Colombian forests safe, but it is a good start.
*In-N-Out orders workers not to wear masks without doctor's note.*
DeMentis is training a personal militia to serve him; it purported to be an unarmed "civilian defense force" for disaster relief, but that seems to have been a disguise.
We must expect American fascists to set up militias to carry out violence for their cause. The Republican Party is now more or less fascistified, so maybe that's what this is.
The Republicans' latest election bill is designed to make secret election spending easier and make voting more difficult.
*Remaining "Calm" About Climate Change Will Kill Us.*
I think the term "climate change" was promoted to keep us "calm".
A lawsuit alleges that US thugs killed Michael Reinoehl by shooting him repeatedly as soon as they saw him, without even shouting "Police!"
*Seventeen states have enacted broad anti-disclosure laws since 2018 that will further conceal the influence of dark money in politics.*
This is organized by ALEC.
The latest antiabortionist strategy is to leave some narrow exceptions in their prohibitions, and cite them to claim that "abortion isn't banned."
Those exceptions do make some difference, but they don't alter the fact that abortion is banned in the normal case.
Republicans are directly attacking freedom of religion in the US by giving privilege to Christianity. They aim to demolish our country's "wall between church and state" so that there will be nothing to shield us from them.
*Starmer’s Labour are not simply defined by what it will stand up for but what it won’t. If the Labour party isn’t comfortable coming out for decent child benefits, universal social care or tackling climate change, it hardly needs a manifesto to show voters what its values are. It has made that quite clear already.*
In effect, Starmer has made Labour into a "centrist" party — one which labels any adequate solution as "too radical".
The US government canceled Robert J Oppenheimer for advocating the idea of dealing with nuclear weapons in a way designed to prevent future wars.
Reports from Sudanese who opposed the military coup, and now oppose both military factions.
Governments tend to treat preserving the environment as a luxury and consider it only when there is no pressing crisis. Now that the environment includes the climate crisis, we cannot afford that.
Robert Reich: the Federal Reserve should say "enough" now that US inflation has gone down to 3% per year.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. This would give states and tribes funds for protecting endangered species.
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*Google lays off contractors who unionized last month. Suspecting retaliation, the discharged workers have begun a hearing with the NLRB.*
Extreme heat in Greece made it necessary to close the Acropolis to protect tourists from the sun.
Assad decided to open the aid channel from Turkey to northern Syria, but it will be under his control instead of the UN's.
*Cluster munitions from the US arrive in Ukraine.*
The reason for sending cluster munitions to Ukraine is that the West cannot manufacture shells anywhere near as fast as Ukraine fires them. The only way to keep Ukraine fighting is to take them from the large stockpile of cluster munitions.
I understand the logic of this, but it doesn't eliminate the danger that the unexploded submunitions will pose after the fighting stops.
I wonder if anyone has calculated what fraction of unexploded munitions left in the battlefields will come from cluster munitions fired by Ukraine. If it is a small fraction, in the end Ukraine's use of cluster munitions will not make a big difference. If it is a large fraction, then it will be the main cause of that future danger.
The OECD says that future artificial intelligence will mostly eliminate skilled jobs (well-paid jobs).
When human skill is no longer needed, the plutocrats will push everyone down into inescapable poverty — until we overthrow them.
A major project to plan Australia's decarbonization says that nuclear power is simply too expensive and too far in the future to play any role.
The report also suggests that making hydrogen using fossil fuel may permit storing or reusing enough of the CO2 that it can aid decarbonization. I am skeptical, but if they say so, maybe it is true.
* Barbers on Strike, author Michelle Recinos’s collection of short stories, has apparently upset strongman president Nayib Bukele.* He had her book banned.
*Guatemala prosecutor suspends party of anti-corruption election candidate.* This was because that party got enough votes to make it into the final run-off.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop future abuse of executive power by passing the Protecting Our Democracy Act.
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Unionized students of UCSD held a nonviolent protest against the chancellor for not implementing the agreed-on raise for student employees. The university retaliated by arresting some of them. on charges that seem to be an exaggeration of the truth.
Like Facebook, Threads does not have users, only useds. It is a scheme for snooping on whoever is foolish enough to get involved with it.
An Israeli play from 1970, which showed the strength of hatred for Arabs, has been brought back to the stage, with Arab citizens of Israel as its actors.
Republicans are attacking official bodies and researchers who try to reduce Republican disinformation.
The US deportation thugs disregarded Biden's order to drop the bully's blanket deportation policy.
*The Guardian view on public sector pay: higher taxes on the rich are needed to fix broke Britannia.*
Funds are needed for many other areas in which plutocratists have cut public investment and support for poor and disadvantaged people. That is clear to us — but not, apparently, to today's leaders of Labour.
A party that fails to advocate taxing the rich is on the side of harm. Maybe somewhat less so than the Tories, but still.
UK internet services use dark patterns to steer people away from the special rates for people who are supposed to get assistance.
*Paris to charge SUV drivers higher parking fees to tackle "auto-besity".*
The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (Sigar) has reported that *America’s huge, badly-coordinated and politically-driven aid programme in Afghanistan engendered the corruption that undermined its entire mission and turned Afghans away from the western coalition.*
Why do some orcas nowadays attack boats? The fact is we know nothing about their reasons or what they think about boats.
The UK proposes to develop additional fossil fuel extraction, supposedly for "energy security", but it would make little difference for that.
The way to get energy security is to build electric storage and renewable generation. The real motive for this fossil fuel project is surely to enrich some of the plutocrats that the Tory Party works for.
Review of *Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature*.
*"Double agents": how US cities, tech firms and universities use fossil fuel lobbyists.*
Florida Republicans are waging lawfare on voter registration organizations.
For instance, some organizations get fined because a person registering wrote the wrong county name from ignorance.
Food-delivery companies in New York City are using their money to block efforts to establish a livable minimum wage for their workers.
Those companies track and mistreat the customers while cheating restaurants. Please reject them!
Should we be concerned that seizing frozen assets of Putin and his oligarchs might "let Putin paint himself as the victim"?
When dealing with a bare-faced disinformationist, such as Putin or Trump, the concern about "giving per an opportunity to pretend to the victim" is obsolete. If they don't have a real opportunity, they fake one. Best not to worry about the matter.
There is no mistaking, this year, that global heating has gone dangerously far.
That is the sign that we needed to take action years ago. It was scientifically clear all along that if we waited till the effects were visible to everyone, we would have waited too long,
What no one could predict was that the US would be in the grip of an enormous murder-suicide plot called the Republican Party.
The American Medical Association announced it will "stand with" doctors that violate for medical reasons state laws that prohibit certain kinds of medical treatment.
The progressive party that got the most votes in the Thai election has been blocked from governing, and its supporters (including most of the young people) are angry.
It is normal in a parliamentary system that forming a government requires support from a majority of parliament. It is normal, though unusual, that the party with the most seats is blocked from forming a government by a coalition of other parties.
What is not normal about the Thai system is that parliament includes members who were not elected — rather, appointed by the army. The closest thing to this that I know of is the UK's House of Lords.
How people nowadays appropriate terms and concepts from psychotherapy, or pop psychology, and use them to justify making rigid demands of lovers, friends and relatives.
The oil sheikh paradoxically in charge of the Cop28 climate conference now speaks clearly and firmly in favor of decarbonization, and "the phase down of fossil fuels."
That is a change for the better, but we can't take for granted that he is serious.
*[The bullshitter's] CFPB Saboteurs Tell The Supreme Court To Finish The Job.*
UK citizens: call for laws to protect the right and possibility of paying cash.
The petition is weakened by the words "at least until 2050", but it is better than nothing.
US citizens: tell Biden that his nomination of Elliott Abrams for a diplomatic post is unacceptable.
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US citizens: call on Congress to address inequality by taxing billionaire wealth gains.
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Putin is using millions of Syrians as pawns by playing with their food and medical aid.
To some extent, the US joined in the game by rejecting the shorter renewal that Putin offered. It would have been better than none.
The Mountain Valley pipeline has been blocked again by a court, which said that the Endangered Species Act was not properly applied.
Hong Kong grabbed the family of Nathan Law, exiled dissident, for questioning.
US citizens: call on Congress to say NO to a nearly $1,000,000,000,000 Pentagon budget.
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US citizens: call on your congresscritter to require the Pentagon to do a full accounting of its greenhouse gas emissions.
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US citizens: call on Congress to reject Sinema's plan to reduce flight training requirements for commercial pilots.
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Some of the sufferers of Long Covid are organizing to test treatments that have been found to benefit a few, though no one understands why.
*Spain closes Pegasus investigation over ‘lack of cooperation’ from Israel.*
I would hope Spain would have ways to put pressure on Israel to cooperate with this investigation — for instance, sanctions.
A right-wing senator is blocking every appointment to an office in the Pentagon as a vindictive display of hostility to Biden's policy of paying personnel's travel cost for getting an abortion.
*Rightwingers say "pink-haired liberals" are killing New York pizza.* In fact, *An air quality rule passed seven years ago requires some shops to install air filters like those used in Italy.*
The EU is considering legalizing small gene changes in plants for cultivation, as an exception to the general policy prohibiting them.
This might be acceptable provided that the law also makes them an exception to patent law: patents should not cover the use of these plants.
DeMentis advocates putting an end to China's permanent right to normal, unrestricted trade with the US.
To do this would require putting an end to the World Trade Organization. I am in favor of this, but it won't be easy for the US to defeat the plutocratist forces that benefit from the WTO.
DeMentis probably thinks that the US will be able to use this against China better than China can use it against the US. I make no such assumption, but I think that without the WTO we could do environmental protection and decarbonization better.
The tide is turning against the rush to use "carbon offsets" as a method of pretend decarbonization.
*Programs to detect [writing made by machine learning models] [tend to] discriminate against non-native English speakers, shows study.
It is general experience that programs intended to judge people often turn out biased, even if there was no intention to do that.
Robert Reich: Biden has failed to take the side of workers against their bosses.
* Almost 200 bird species found to build nests with human litter, including cigarette butts, plastic bags and fishing nets.* These materials could be harmful to the growing chicks.
Independent evidence is being used to piece together the actions of the Greek coast guard vessel that failed to rescue migrants from a trawler. There is evidence that the trawler sank because the coast guard vessel towed it — which the government's story covers up.
After rescuing some of the migrants, Greek officials stole their phones. The coast guard vessel's cameras, intended to record the facts in such situations, were somehow not in operation. And there is evidence that agents of a secret "security" unit were present.
The US used price controls effectively to prevent inflation during World War II, without hurting workers. It could do this again now, but most economists don't want it to be considered.
Why not? Perhaps because they are supported by (and thus serve) the right-wing interests of business.
Australia's universities have been corrupted by government pressure to make profit the goal.
I expect that the right-wing ideology of the previous government encouraged this, but the change seems to have been happening for longer than that.
US citizens: call on Biden to ban the worst uses of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides.
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The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
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US citizens: call on your state governor to help wild animals cross the roads.
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Prigozhin has continued occasionally meeting with Putin since his apparent "coup attempt."
This lends support to the idea that it was theater, not a real coup.
Drug companies' money is keeping the UK's NHS from collapse, but also corrupting every part of it.
To keep the NHS effective and honest, it must be funded adequately by the state.
*Corporate profits were the biggest factor driving up prices last year and will be again in 2023 unless businesses are forced to absorb rising wage bills, the head of the European Central Bank has said.*
US citizens: call on Congress to tax excessive CEO pay.
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The small Indian state of Manipur has split between its two ethnic groups, which have withdrawn into separate fortified territories.
The Indian government with its strong religious bias is not very well suited to doing anything to resolve this problem — if anyone has a way to do so.
*Sudan on brink of all-out civil war, UN chief warns.*
I don't post much about Sudan because I don't know what to say except "How sad." I don't have any insight into the fighting, and I have no ideas to suggest. Neither does anyone else, so I can't comment on proposed resolutions or actions.
*Future of deep-sea mining hangs in balance as opposition grows.*
*Heatwave last summer killed 61,000 people in Europe, research finds.*
This is surely just a small fraction of the people killed in 2022 by the increasing heat of global heating. People die from heat on every hot day, even normal summer days, and as normal summer days get hotter, more people die from the heat.
Global heating kills people in indirect ways, including due to food shortages caused by floods and droughts. I'd expect it to be millions per year. Can anyone find a plausible estimate?
US citizens: call on the IRS not to let dirty hydrogen (dirty because made from fossil fuels) get deductions for clean energy.
*NYC will require businesses to prove A.I. employment software isn't racist or sexist.*
Bias in AI systems used to judge individual humans is a well-known problem, and I support this effort to prevent it. But it won't be trivial to check for bias.
A Los Angeles county thug attacked and tackled a woman for making a video of the arrest of her husband.
Thugs that unjustly attack people for upholding their rights and other people's rights should go to prison!
A Florida law which prohibits citizens of certain countries from owning property is being criticized as "racism against Asians", but it is clear that that is confusion.
The law prohibits citizens of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria from buying property within 10 miles of "critical infrastructure."
Of those countries, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria are in Asia. Cuba and Venezuela are not. Russia is partly in Europe and partly in Asia. This law is clearly not directed at "Asians".
The fact that South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are not in the list shows that this is no racism against East Asians. The inclusion of Syria but bot Jordan and Iraq shows this is not a matter of racism against Arabs. The inclusion of Colombia and the Dominican Republic shows that this law is not about racism against Hispanics.
The law is clearly intended to terrorize scapegoats, since instead of simply prohibiting the purchase, it proposes to put the purchaser in prison: a terrible danger to anyone who might overlook some piece of critical infrastructure 9 miles away.
The ban appears to be limited to a small fraction of the state's territory, but I suspect that in practice important urban areas are entirely excluded because cities tend to have airports, seaports, power plants, water/sewage treatment sites, and military bases scattered around. (Consider, for comparison, the way many cities have almost nowhere that someone on the sex offender list is permitted to live.)
I think Republicans are constructing an imaginary "national security" scare so they can pretend to "protect" the country from it, and adding a little scapegoating so that they look tough. If they wanted to truly protect the US from acts of sabotage, they ought to make it apply to Republicans instead of Chinese.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Preemption of Real Property Discrimination Act.
The campaign presents the state laws this would preempt as racist, but at least in the case of the Florida law, that is not so. That law seems to be a bogus response to an fabricated security threat.
Either way, these laws should not exist.
US citizens: call on your senators to reject the No START Bill, which prohibits nuclear missile limitation treaties.
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US citizens: call on NOAA to impose 10-knot speed limits on ships in Gulf of Mexico to protect endangered Rice's whales.
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How Putin's government adapted a system for finding and eliminating various kinds of illegal "content" to find and eliminate dissent as well.
Grey whales ask humans (in boats) to remove "lice" from their heads. When humans do this, the whales come back for more.
Whales need to have some of those symbionts, so there is some danger the whales might ask humans to remove too many. Or maybe the whales will naturally DTRT.
I like the idea of intentional cooperation between humans and whales.
As America puts more thugs in schools, and fewer nurses, social workers and counselors, this giving the priority to imposing order rather than education. some experiment with restorative justice instead.
Restorative justice takes more time. Do we think that raising children well is worth that effort? Maybe we should have fewer children and put more time into raising each one.
Kerala has organized thousands of women to cook a little extra food and donate it to a plan that provides food for patients in hospitals.
There are so many volunteer cooks that each one is asked to do this only occasionally.
The person who receives the donation does not know the cook's religion or caste. By eating the food, they learn to reduce caste and religious prejudice in their own minds.
Japan plans to release slowly into the ocean a large amount of water containing an extremely low concentration of tritium.
Many countries are shouting about this. Is it really dangerous, or is that irrational exaggeration? I can't be certain, but I think it is irrational.
Japan claims that other nuclear power plants in the region release larger amounts of tritium annually than this water would. Indeed, Wikipedia's article on Tritium lists nuclear facilities that release much larger amounts of tritium, totaling almost 100 times what the Fukushima storage tanks would release — and the list is not complete.
It is clear that people are making an inordinate fuss about this tritium because it came from a major nuclear accident rather than from operating a reactor. However, the tritium itself is indistinguishable.
Nuclear reactors generate waste that is truly dangerous. That is the reason not to build more nuclear reactors — that and the danger that enemies will bomb them. In addition, they are so expensive and slow to build that they slow down decarbonization. Those are good reasons not to build more of them.
Likewise for the chemical industry — consider PFAS, which are toxic in very small amounts which are not radioactive and therefore don't decay at all.
An international conference about reducing greenhouse emissions from shipping did not agree on any concrete plan to do that — only a long-term target.
Long-term targets don't achieve anything unless followed by concrete short-term plans.
Academics that study social change say that movements with high public support can use disruptive protests effectively to push for action.
*US must urgently treat men tortured at Guantánamo, UN investigator says.*
The US National Weather Service has been using Twitter to receive reports from storm spotters. Due to recent Musk madness, that has started to fail.
Twitter is unsuitable for anything that really needs to work.
The profits of the world's biggest corporations have nearly doubled since the period 2017-2020.
France is legalizing state surveillance by remotely activating people's devices. The law says that a judge's specific authorization is required, so it is not as bad as it could be. But even with safeguards, a surveillance state can be menacing.
France has banned an annual march to commemorate the killing of Adama Traoré, who was killed by thugs in 2016.
Josh Appignanesi writes about how he learned that joining in the climate defense battle does not require becoming a different person. Nor does it require dedicating every minute of your waking life to the cause.
It's the same with fighting for software freedom. Taking steps towards less dependence on unjust computing will enable you to help.
The sad thing is when climate defense activities are set up to require people to run nonfree software. Many of their web sites do that. They shouldn't demand we choose between one of these good causes and the other — it is a gratuitous own goal.
Australia's previous government, plutocratist and right-wing to the core, scapegoated the poor and accused welfare recipients of nonexistent fraud. It imposed fake debts on destitute people, and it intimidated those who reported the wrongs.
A government inquiry recommends prosecution of some ministers. But we also must denounce the scapegoating of the poor.
Migrant-smugglers typically recruit, or conscript, one of the migrants to run and direct the boat — so that the real smugglers can be far away if the boat is captured. After one boat fell apart and sank, its conscript faces charges for the death of some refugees.
The prosecutor said straight out that the fact the smugglers forced the conscript to do this, and beat him when he tried to refuse, was no excuse. This is an unusual form of a frequent prosecutor's excuse for treating someone as guilty who is manifestly innocent. The more usual form is "joint and several liability", where you can be convicted of murder that someone else committed.
The construction and testing of the mini-submarine that imploded trying to visit the Titanic were characterized by schemes to evade regulations. That was inviting disaster, and indeed disaster came.
The company used a contractual scheme to label passengers as "crew", to avoid liability in case they died.
Ralph Nader's suggestions to progressive activist groups.
US maternal deaths doubled from 1999 to 2019 — and that period does not count whatever effect Covid-19 had.
The cause is not clear, but since black mothers die at a much higher rate, it probably has to do with racism and to right-wing policies.
Bernie Sanders calls for massive government investment in education to fill America's shortage of all sorts of medical personnel.
*U.S. public pension funds would be $21 billion richer had they divested from fossil fuels a decade ago.*
*Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests.*
*True patriotism is the opposite of Trump's White Christian Nationalism.*
*US expected to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine.*
The US and Ukraine surely know how devastating cluster bombs are to civilians after the fighting — so why do they consider using them? What advantage do they think those have, to outweigh what is bad about them?
The foolish response to sea-level rise: two people are trying to preserve a small island they own by building sea walls.
This is futile because sea-level rise is accelerating. If they heroically manage to keep up with it this decade, they won't keep up next decade. By the end of this century, all their work will have been erased.
What a shame they aren't putting all that effort into an effort that may not be futile — that may actually win a victory.
We can't save everything, and scattering our efforts makes them futile. We must concentrate on defeating the planet roasters who are deliberately accelerating the problem.
Many US employers forbid workers to sit (ever) while on the job, This is worse than uncomfortable; it builds up injuries.
The experience of many other countries shows that businesses can function just fine while permitting staff to sit occasionally. But suppose that were not true — would that justify the policy? Should the employer's interests entirely override the well-being of the workers?
Of course not.
"Right to sit" laws ought to exist, but that is a very narrow remedy, for this specific method of mistreating workers. What we really need are "right to strong unions" laws, that will help workers deal with many kinds of wrongs by employers, including this kind.
Former Israeli elected officials are being investigated for "sedition" after calling for nonviolent protests.
The protests were to be against right-wing plans for a fascist judiciary.
Israel is being taken over by fascism. Where can Israelis who want to live in a democracy with human rights move to?
Hong Kong has established a bounty of over $100,000 for the arrest of any of the exiles accused of violating the "national security" censorship law.
The natural response is for other countries to make it a crime to try to capture those freedom defenders, and offer a similar bounty for the arrest of anyone involved in trying to arrest them.
Hong Kong has arrested former protest leaders. One was arrested at the airport, leading me to wonder if he was trying to flee to a safe haven.
The Hong Kong "national security" law applies to "crimes" "committed" before that law was passed. In US legal terms, it is an "ex-post-facto" law. The US Constitution bans ex-post-facto criminalization. Many other countries do likewise — because it is evident that such a law amounts to, "If we don't like you, we will put you in prison."
That's Hong Kong for you — and that's China for you.
I wonder if there is a way to arrange for Hong Kongers to flee without permission, as people fled from East Berlin.
Radical thoughts stated by the founders of the US Constitution.
Ironically amazing is Jefferson's ringing condemnation of slavery as evil — ironic given that he owned slaves and never freed them.
In the Declaration of Independence, he wrote a paragraph to condemn King George for the slave trade.
*Most [UK] doctors think ministers want to destroy the NHS, BMA boss says.*
I believe the same. It is a good thing that the NHS doctors recognize this, because they are the ones that have to fight it.
Australia is planning to demand that multi-national companies give economic data about their operations in other countries. Some Swiss conglomerates are making vague threats that they "won't invest so much in Australia."
Australia should tell them not to slam the door on the way out.
No country desperately needs investment to be made in ways that tend to subjugate the country to foreign plutocrats. The proposed Australian law will take the world one step closer to a progressive tax on corporations that would tend to pressure them to split up.
Bernie Sanders: Congress must act to overcome the planet roasters.
*Why are people dying at sea? They are fleeing disasters that we once called ‘biblical’, and now call normal.*
I rarely see an article which depicts how horrible is the fate that human activity is imposing on humans and nature. This is one.
I have to point out that the other jaw of the vise is over-reproduction. Having a few children is not much compared with what any plutocrat does, but it is harm you can avoid.
*Brazil: Amazon deforestation drops 34% in first six months under Lula.*
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
A list of very important Labour Party policies that Starmer has discarded.
Driverless cars in San Francisco collect videos constantly using cameras inside and outside, and governments have already collected those videos secretly.
As the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project says, they are "driving us straight into authoritarianism."
I've warned of this for years.
I contend that we must regulate all cameras that collect images that can be used to track people, to make sure they are not used for that.
US citizens: call on Biden to call for Sultan Al Jaber to be removed as head of COP28.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
When the corrupter played with boxes of US military secrets, he was playing with the lives of Americans.
We don't need to assume that all US soldiers are always fighting for good and for justice to recognize that the corrupter's actions were a vile betrayal. It shows he is the enemy of the United States, and of all that is good in it — as well as the enemy of freedom and democracy in the United States.
Demanding that Unilever cease operating in Russia.
Global heating link to personal violence *Climate crisis linked to rising domestic violence in south Asia, study finds.*
This has been demonstrated for other parts of the world too.
*Study finds extreme rainfall at higher elevations increases by 8.3% for every degree Fahrenheit world warms.*
One incident of extreme rainfall at a place can do permanent damage.
Canada's wildfires, hotter and bigger than ever in history, can wipe out endangered species with one blow.
Texas's fossil fuel power plants have been failing during the heat wave, but increase solar generating capacity enabled Texas to cope.
You can tell which politicians work for the fossil fuel lobby, because they are disparaging solar power falsely.
The Thames Barrier, like a dam that can be opened and closed, protects London from surges of the North Sea. But, by 2070, sea level rise will leave it insufficiently tall, and impossible to maintain if they close it as often as it now must. It will have to be rebuilt.
Eventually protecting London will need a dam. And then it will become impossible.
The only way we can protect the thousands of threatened coastal cities is curb global heating, and then suck greenhouse gases out of the air.
(satire) *Multimillion-Dollar City Beautification Project Results In 3 New Blades Of Grass.*
Eighty Afghan civilians may have been summarily killed by [British military] SAS, inquiry told.
Hong Kong has filed charges of criticizing the government on democracy activists living in exile.
This is not a surprise — it is part and parcel of the Chinese repression in Hong Kong, and it is why people would be wise not to go to Hong Kong or any part of China. China has no reason to limit these charges to people who really have rebuked China's repression from other countries (not that it is justified to punish people for that).
False and dishonest charges are standard there too.
Perhaps the US should criminalize people outside the US who participate in placing criminal charges against people in the US for criticizing other countries.
The UK now has essentially a monopoly on printing magazines.
This sort of thing happens when anti-monopoly laws are too weak or too weakly enforced. That tends to happen due to plutocratist pressure on governments.
A doctor says the NHS has been collapsing since 2012, and has kept getting worse.
Even when Labour was in power, all was not well, Waiting lists for treatment were long. Of course, Tories have made it far worse.
What Tony B'liar's Labour Party and the Tories have in common is plutocratism. They are unwilling to tax the rich enough to make the NHS function properly, so they always under-fund it.
The Patriotic Millionaires UK warned the rich to expect "pitchforks and torches" if they don't stop pushing most people into poverty.
Starmer's men have expelled a decades-long Labour activist over a minor excuse — but really, over resisting his subjection of the party.
Here's what he has to say about it.
*Border agents promise better chance of asylum for those agreeing to go to Mexico and apply there, then strands them with no access.*
The article mentions an unreliable app. It does not mention that the app is an injustice because it is nonfree.
A warning from Planned Parenthood: if you are pregnant, stay out of Tennessee.
A report on pervasive tyranny in Rwanda: if you don't join President Kagama's rally, you will be individually noted and persecuted.
Rebecca Solnit: *The US supreme court has dismantled our rights (rights that we had won) but we still believe in them. Now we must fight.*
If you want to be safe from gun violence, know that Democrats tend to do it better. Republicans are more interested in making it easy for people to carry guns and shoot you.
Implementing low-emission-zones in a city tends to produce small but significant decreases in heart and lung disease.
I am in favor of limiting the use of high-pollution vehicles, but it must be implemented in a way that doesn't track where each car goes. Tracking people's movements is the foundation for tyranny and repression.
The culture in England around cricket is jam-packed with bigotry.
Swifts, remarkable birds that fly for months without landing, are running out of nest sites as old buildings are renovated. Hollow "swift bricks" built into new buildings provide them with new nest sites.
Everyone: call on WMO and NOAA to name climate disasters after fossil fuel companies.
Massachusetts residents: support the Massachusetts Location Shield Act.
Here is what I gave as my personalized message:
I urge you to support the Location Shield Act — but, as described in the articles I have seen, it has loopholes that may make it fail to achieve its laudable purpose.It would block the most obvious and usual way for states persecuting abortion patients (and those who help them) to get the data, but there are various others ways which they will not take long to think of. For instance, companies could be "persuaded" to "give away" the data. (States have ways to persuade them — think of what Governor DeMentis has tried with Disney. Most companies won't resist as Disney has.) States could also get the data by subpoena.
I suggest forbidding requiring entities that collect location data in Massachusetts to distribute that data to any entity under any basis, outside of a small list of exceptions such as subpoenas from federal courts or certain specially authorized Massachusetts courts.
This may call for requiring those entities to keep the data inside Massachusetts, stored in ways that Massachusetts law can reliably govern.
Those entities often store their personal data — including location data — on computers belonging to cloudy businesses which don't deal directly with those entities' clients: for instance, Amazon AWS. Persecuting states could get the data by subpoena directly from those businesses. That requirement proposed above about where and how to store the location data could address this loophole too.
The full solution to the danger of massive surveillance of people's movements is to prohibit collection of location data. Massive surveillance, of which tracking people's movements is an example, is the foundation of tyranny. Phones should not track people, and when a business asks where you are, it should have to be content with whatever answer you choose give it. You do not owe a business a truthful answer to whatever question it may ask you!
Buses, trains, taxis, cars, and payments systems often track people's movements. We should put a stop to that too. My associates are working on a software system for paying stores and internet subscriptions without identifying yourself — see taler.net for more information.
Ending massive surveillance is a big job and will take time, but a strengthened Location Shield Act could be an exemplary first step.
US citizens: call on the U.S. Inspector General and the Postal Regulatory Commission to Step in to Allow the Public to Provide Feedback on DeJoy's menacing Post Office changes.
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to uphold the laws that protect minors from overwork and dangerous work.
*Centre for prosecuting crimes of aggression [in Ukraine] opens in The Hague.*
This war crime has been mostly neglected since the Nuremberg trials, as prosecutions focused on war crimes and crimes against humanity rather than the fundamental crime of launching aggressive war.
*Scientists ponder if climate has entered a new erratic era.*
*Biden lays out new student debt relief plan after supreme court ruling.*
He's not accepting defeat.
*[British] Campaigners vow to step up action against new North Sea oilfield.* Ministers know that the world has no room for this, and they are disregarding climate commitments to approve it.
This is plutocracy at work.
*Texas [prisoners] deprived of water and AC are fainting in jails that reach [up to 116°F].*
Water is a necessity for human life. The prison thugs are putting the prisoners' life and health in danger.
(satire) *Human Rights Organization Accuses Ron [DeMentis] Of Subjecting Migrants To One Of His Speeches.*
*"Resistance is possible": Ravish Kumar, the broadcaster risking his life to tell the truth about India today.*
A lawsuit accused the developers of ChatGPT of "stealing" people's personal data to train the system.
The article does not say how the company obtained that data. Security measures should have prevented that — how come they did not? Is it possible that the company got permission to use that data from other companies that had collected it?
Using the data can be wrong, but the fundamental wrong is collecting it at all.
*Israel’s far-right government fans the flames of vigilante settler violence.*
Several Palestinian militias are based in Jenin. Israel is systematically bombing them with drone attacks.
Possible Palestinian fighters are referred to as "suspected" whatever. Israeli soldiers who fight are never "suspected" of anything.
*[Brazilian] Judges ban Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years over "appalling lies".*
If only US judges had the good sense to do that.
*France has ignored racist police violence for decades. These riots are the price of that denial.*
Putin is rapidly evacuating personnel from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and Ukraine claims he plans to blow up part of it.
This would be tantamount to using a dirty nuclear weapon. I suggest that the US warn Putin that it will attack the Putin forces with non-nuclear weapons if he does that.
The Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional discrimination, but left one aspect that applicants of disprivileged demographic background can still cite: "an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise."
Interestingly, one right-wing justice rebuked Harvard for its discrimination in favor of students from extra-privileged backgrounds, those whose families had past association with Harvard. His point was somewhat confused, but there is a valid point to be made: since 43% of white Harvard students benefited from that privilege, eliminating that privilege could achieve, through fairness in process, much of the fairness of outcome that affirmative action has achieved.
Justice Jackson explains why affirmative action is needed to counteract generations of disadvantage which government policies imposed on the blacks of the time, and which today's blacks have more or less inherited.
Biden condemned the decision and said he will seek ways to maintain the effect of affirmative action despite the decision.
*The US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case to preemptively bar a wealth tax.*
The London region water company has not invested in fixing enormous water leaks, causing shortages and waste, because it was more profitable to neglect its duty and wallow in greed. (What else would you expect from a big business under today's business attitudes?)
I suspect that the laws that govern these companies were designed to facilitate profiteering. The most important thing is to change them to demand responsibility and stop the profiteering.
The new Philippines president Marcos Jr. has made rhetoric smoother, and shifted international ties towards the US. Domestically, he has said a lot to portray himself as helping the poor, but not done much to knack it up.
*Voter ID is just one item in a long list of assaults on [UK] democracy. Breaches of standards in public office, clampdowns on protest and attacks on the judiciary have all featured in the last few years of Tory rule.*
Australian prisons are keeping minors in cells almost 24 hours a day.
This article describes one prison in one state, but I've seen others showing that this practice spans Australia.
I am sure most of these prisoners are too old to be considered "children". However, the laws to protect them are important — both to ensure work does not keep them out of school, and to ensure it doesn't do them physical harm.
Republicans in several states are attacking teachers' unions, with the support of millionaires such as the owners of Walmart.
This is one example of how plutocracy in the US supports dooH niboR, who takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
Uganda now sentences people to 10 years in prison for Homosexual sex. Advocating the rights of homosexuals is punished with 20 years.
Progressive legislators propose to cut military aid to Uganda in response.
It looks like Australia's government has proposed a law to facilitate new fossil fuel development.
A TV station presented a program that accurately showed how dolphins typically mate — a group of males league together to plan gang rape.
It leads humans to pose a question of which standards to judge dolphin behavior by — the standards of human morality, or dolphins' own nonhuman nature.
*Cost of living worsening health of children in UK, say school nurses.*
This is plutocracy at work.
An inquiry into the undercover UK cops who were sent to infiltrate peaceful protest groups in the 1970s has published its first partial report. It concludes that their investigation was intimate and had no justification whatsoever.
A pregnant woman went to a phony abortion clinic, a "crisis center," and was given a gravely erroneous diagnosis of her dangerous unviable pregnancy.
We must wonder if they misrepresented it intentionally to stop her from getting the abortion that she needed.
A UK appeals court gave reasons for rejecting the plan to make asylum seekers wait in Rwanda.
Rwanda's government is generally repressive.
This decision is not final — it may be reversed on appeal.
Short-term local opposition defeated Scotland's plan to establish serious protection for 10% of its waters.
This is a step towards pollution and extinction.
Many UK schools have been closed because their buildings are unsafe.
Hundreds were made decades ago with lightweight aerated concrete, which turns out to crumble eventually, but there are other kinds of problems too. However, the overall causes is that the government did not spend enough on inspecting, repairing and replacing schools buildings.
This is plutocracy at work. The government needs more money but hasn't got the courage to tax the rich more.
(satire) *Georgia Cuts Welfare Benefits For Recipients Caught Experiencing Happiness.*
(satire) *Texas Governor Adds Backup Prayer System To State Electricity Grid.*
Youtube is experimenting with blocking users found to be using ad-blockers.
Google ads work by tracking users and their activities. I don't particularly care whether an ad appears on my graphical virtual screen, since I don't have to actually watch it — I could do something else.
What matters to me is refusing to be identified, as well as not running nonfree JS code. If I can't pull in the video without being thus maltreated, that will make YouTube inaccessible for me once again.
The real determinant will be whether the Invidio.us proxies continue to work.
A long-elected Labour MO has accused Starmer of leading a "rightwing, illiberal" faction and trying to exclude all other ideas from the party.
I expect Starmer to respond to this demand to respect the room for disagreement in the party with force. He has already shown that leading over and over.
*[Prominent feminist writer] Caitlin Moran: what's gone wrong for men – and the thing that can fix them.*
I would not try to compare how bad today's society is for men with how it is for women. It seems to be pretty bad for both — partly because men and women are being pushed into penury by plutocracy, and into horrible social relations by anti-social media.
Moran has pointed out one important difference: women and girls have found ways to support each other publicly and talk about their collective difficulties in society. Men and boys need it too but have no place to turn to except woman-haters.
Thank you Ms Moran. I hope society finds a way out of this sad gender relations trap.
Enraged Palestinians and enraged Israelis are in a cycle of violence, but the Israeli violence seems to be much bigger.
The UK put preparation for pandemics aside to leave the EU in the most crude possible way.
*UK aid should not fund private hospitals in developing countries, says Oxfam.*
I agree. To aid the harmful plutocratist press for privatization is making things worse.
*The [US] Army warned Troops in 1945 of the Danger of Fascism. That Warning Rings True Today.*
Ralph Nader: the US's major newspapers are replacing serious news with tabloid-style distraction material.
*Plans to shorten medical training put quality of [UK medical treatment] at risk, doctors say.*
If the UK finds that it needs more money to provide everyone with proper medical treatment, it should tax the rich more.
Bernie Sanders rebuked the Supreme Court decision blocking Biden's planned method for canceling some student debt, and calls on Biden to use another method that the court can't block.
*French newspaper staff strike after "far-right personality" made editor.*
Global heating has made the Hajj dangerous. In a decade or two it may be deadly to quite a few.
Will the Muslim world take note of the danger of global heating, in which a few Muslim countries play significant roles?
*Despite record temperatures, some Chinese people are yet to connect the extreme heat to the climate crisis, something activists want to change.*
Once Chinese get used to the term "climate change," they need to get familiar with "climate collapse" and "climate disaster." They need to understand that climate disaster can destroy China just as it can destroy most or all other countries. And they should think of Shanghai inundated.
The global heating we have already caused will inevitably lead to rising sea level for centuries. But if we heat the Earth more, there will be even more sea level rise.
One projection is that 3°C of global heating will raise sea level up to 50 feet by 2300.
An Australian study recommends banning marketing "inducements" designed to make it hard to for people with gambling problems to resist gambling.
"Inducements" are a term for temporary promotions such as "Buy one, get one 'free'." (They ought to say, "gratis.")
Bad working conditions for Nepalese workers in Qatar are causing them permanent kidney problems — they need dialysis for the rest of their lives.
Qatar could correct this problem, but its rich rulers don't want to reduce their income.
Improved technology could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping by 50%. But it would cost money: the challenge is to compel the ship owners to pay it.
*After Roe's overturn, Republicans target trans rights using extremist rhetoric.*
West Virginia state thugs have been caught in crimes ranging from kidnaping to rape to drugging, and many other crimes, not quite as grave but still nasty.
The state governor is pushing the investigation.
*What will Ukraine do with Russian collaborators? Revenge would be a mistake.*
The article suggests distinguishing between those who sought power or advantage through the Russian puppet governments and those who simply carried on their legitimate civic jobs under Russian power.
The UK plans to close most ticket offices at railroad stations.
The unions are opposed to this because of possible job losses, but I see a danger to everyone. How will it be possible to buy a ticket? Will people be compelled to do it from a web site that imposes use of nonfree software and requires them to identify themselves?
What other options for buying train tickets exist now?
*Border Patrol Video of Killing Shows [Indigenous US Citizen Near Border] Had No Gun, Complied With Orders.*
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to confirm Biden's judicial nominations.
*Wage rises are driving inflation? Don’t swallow this dangerous rightwing myth.*
*Labour leadership accused of U-turn over rent controls.*
It calls for "getting interest rates under control" instead — but without trying to act on their true cause, it is mainly working against labor.
Extra! Extra! One of Marjorie Taylor Greene's crazy beliefs — that her TV set is watching her — may actually be correct, depending on which kind of TV set she has.
On the ethics, practicality and sustainability of farming octopuses.
Octopuses are so remote from us evolutionarily that they give a sample of how strange alien life could be. That we can relate to them at all is amazing.
Literally alien life is likely to be toxic to us, and we to it. Octopuses don't think of eating humans because they don't generally eat anything bigger than their heads.
A parliamentary committee is concerned that millions in the UK are failing to move into the internet of proprietary software and surveillance.
The Netherlands has to reduce the amount of beef farming because the farms' emissions of nitrogen are damaging ecosystems around them.
It's true we need farms in order to have food. But we don't need as much beef as we produce now — and for other reasons we must produce less.
Describing an experimental shelter for homeless families, designed to reduce their trauma and stress.
The homeless population of Los Angeles has jumped to 75,000 people.
The underlying cause is that the US handles housing to serve the interests of the rich.
French thugs shot and killed a driver of Arab origin for no sensible reason, then fabricated a fake reason. This has sparked protests all around France.
Global heating will make summer miserable for much of the US.
In the south, a heat dome. In the northeast, smoke from Canadian forest fires.
Until we reduce greenhouse gas levels, it will get worse and worse and worse.
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